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The Marian reforms were putative changes to the composition and operation of the Roman army during the late Roman Republic usually attributed to Gaius Marius (a general who was Roman consul in 107, 104–100, and 86 BC). The most important of these concerned the altering of the socio-economic background of the soldiery. Other changes were supposed to have included the introduction of the cohort; the institution of a single form of heavy infantry with uniform equipment; the universal adoption of the eagle standard; and the abolition of the Roman cavalry.. See eg and . It was commonly believed that Marius changed the soldiers' socio-economic background by allowing citizens without property to join the Roman army, a process called "proletarianisation". This was thought to have created a semi-professional class of soldiers motivated by land grants; these soldiers in turn became clients of their generals, who then used them to overthrow the republic.Eg .
Belief in a comprehensive scheme of reforms under Marius emerged in 1840s German scholarship, which posited that any changes in the Roman army between the times of Polybius and Marius were attributable to a single reform event. This belief was spread relatively uncritically and was accepted as largely proven by the 1850s and through much of the 20th century. There is, however, little ancient evidence for any permanent or significant change to recruitment practice in Marius' time. The occurrence of such a comprehensive reform led by Marius is no longer widely accepted by specialists; 21st-century scholars have called the reforms a "construct of modern scholarship".
Other reforms to the army's operations and equipment, said to have been implemented by Marius, are also largely rejected by scholars. Few of them have any basis in the ancient and archaeological evidence.Other than army recruitment, the only two changes attributed to Marius directly are a redesign of the pilum and the elimination of non-eagle standards. Both ancient claims are disproved by archeological evidence. . Others are wrongly dated or misattributed. Changes in the Roman army of the late republic did occur, but appear to have happened later than at the end of the 2nd century BC. Rather, these shifts were during the Social War and following civil wars, and emerged from circumstance rather than a reformist Marian vision.
For much of the 20th century, historians held that the property qualification separating the five classes and the capite censi was reduced over the course of the second century to a nugatory level due to a shortage of manpower. The basis for that belief, however, was merely three undated Roman figures for the amount of property required to serve which would serve as evidence for reductions only if forced into a descending order. The figures of 11,000, 4,000, and 1,500 asses are reported in the sources; "nothing warrants the presumption that the figures are to be arranged in a descending sequence" however. Many scholars have also now abandoned the notion that Italy suffered in the second century BC any deficit of manpower which would have driven such putative reductions.
Various motives have been ascribed to Marius' decision to accept volunteers. The motive attributed in Sallust, Marius' personal ambition to seize power, may more reflect Sallust's desire to connect the republic's collapse with moral decline and failure to adhere to tradition. The second edition Cambridge Ancient History viewed it as an expedient to evade popular opposition to conscription. R J Evans,See . with whom François Cadiou agreed, instead proposed that Marius' decision emerged from his promise of a quick victory in Numidia followed by an energetic effort to follow through by raising and bringing an army as quickly as possible to Africa so to maximise his time campaigning as consul. Regardless, after Marius' victorious return from the Jugurthine War, his volunteers were discharged and, in the following Cimbrian War, he assumed command of consular legions recruited via hitherto normal procedure.
It was believed that Marius' decision to enlist volunteers from the capite censi changed the socio-economic background of the army by allowing the poor to take it over. These poor soldiers then professionalised and lived only as soldiers. These professional soldiers, disconnected from a society in which they had no property stake, over time became clients of their generals who then used them to seize power in Rome and plunge the republic into civil wars that eventually brought about its collapse. There are, however, no indications that Roman conscription ceased. Nor is there much evidence that later Roman armies during the 1st century BC were made up of volunteers; almost all ancient references to army recruitment, outside private armies, involve conscription.
Conscription continued after Marius' time, especially during the Social War, and the wealth and social background of the men who joined before and after the opening of recruitment changed little. Pay remained extremely low – only five asses per day – and irregular. Moreover, although the surviving sources frequently characterise soldiers as "poor", these sources largely reflect the perspectives of the elite, by whom the vast majority of the population were considered "poor" and for whom the notion of poverty was broader than actual landlessness. Many of the soldiers of the 1st century BC possessed modest lands. Nor did the legions meaningfully professionalise: as, in general, both soldiers and commanders served only for short periods intending, respectively, to secure plunder or political advancement from military victory. There is little evidence that this putative change in army recruitment created anti-republican client armies.
Plutarch relates that Marius altered the design of the Roman pilum,, citing . a heavy javelin designed to stick into shields, by including a wooden peg which broke when the javelin was thrown. Many scholars believe this was to prevent the javelin from being thrown back, but it is more likely that the swinging motion of the broken peg was meant to force someone to discard a shield into which the javelin was struck. Regardless of the efficacy or purpose of the redesign, archaeological evidence from the 80s BC through to the early imperial era show that Marius' redesign was not adopted.; Roman pila without Marius' peg often bent or broke on impact, but this was more likely a by-product of their long, narrow shanks than an intentional feature.
Pliny's Natural History attributes Marius with adopting the eagle as the universal legionary standard. This has been interpreted as a rallying symbol for each cohort. Pliny's claim, however, is incorrect; sources show late republican and early imperial legions with other animal symbols such as bulls and wolves.
Neither a Gracchan abolition of deductions for equipment or a Marian programme to equip soldiers is attested in the evidence. There are no indications that Gracchus' law ever came into effect and literary evidence indicates that deductions for clothing and equipment were common in the imperial army of Augustus into the 1st century AD. If Marius purchased equipment for his troops in Numidia at his own expense, later generals and the state in general did not do so.
Some modern historians have also attributed to Marius reforms in the training of Roman soldiers which ostensibly reflected a professionalising service. Such training and drilling, however, had become common before Marius due to the loss of collective experience in the generations after the Second Punic War. Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus drilled his men for almost a year before deploying them in the Lusitanian War (); Scipio Aemilianus, for example, drilled his men before his Numantine War against Numantia (); Metellus similarly drilled his men prior to their departure to Africa in 109 BC., citing, App. Hisp., 65; Front. Strat., 4.1.1; . Such attempts to reintroduce discipline reflected the recruits' lack of military training rather than a class of budding professional soldiers.
Marius has also been credited with the introduction of the cohort (a unit of 480 men) in place of the maniple (a unit of only 160 men) as the basic unit of manoeuvre. Contra This attribution is rather dubious and there is no ancient evidence of it; cohorts may have been used as far back as the Second Punic War near the end of the third century BC. The cohort itself emerged as an administrative unit conscripted from Rome's Italian allies and is first attested in a description by Polybius, a usually reliable historian, of a battle which occurred in 206 BC. By the 130s BC, through the Spanish wars and operations with Italian allies, the cohort had developed into a tactical unit. While, after 109 BC, the maniple disappears from the literary evidence, Marius' predecessor in Numidia is documented to have used cohorts in battle: if cohorts replaced maniples around this time, Marius was likely not responsible.
Moreover, through the post-Marian period, land distributions were sporadic and volunteers were taken on with no promises or reasonable expectations of land at discharge. Soldiers both in the Marian and post-Marian periods largely went home peacefully when land demands were not immediately met, though land distributions became more common after Sulla's example in the aftermath of his civil war. Only during the civil wars during the later last century BC did demands for land become more prevalent, though not always explicitly to agrarian ends, due to the soldiers' increased bargaining power. For example, during Caesar's civil war (49–45 BC), mutineers demanded lands as a pretext for larger cash donatives, and only during the triumviral period (43–31 BC) did this pretext fall away.
There is also no evidence that Marius created or operated any system to give veterans Roman citizenship on discharge.Marius gave citizenship to a few cohorts during the Cimbric War. However, this was done ad hoc and only once. . Before the Social War there is only a single example of a citizenship grant for martial valour. Mouritsen notes also that Marius' citizenship grant during the Cimbric War is the only pre-Social War example. Most scholars believe that grants of citizenship to veterans became common only under the emperor Claudius in the 1st century AD.
Most scholars have now abandoned the belief that Marius was responsible for any proletarianisation of the Roman legions in the early 1st century BC and that such proletarianisation occurred at all, concluding that the reforms attributed to Marius are largely figments of modern historiography.
Marius' open recruitment, as documented in Sallust, may also be explained not in terms of ambition but also by his desire to recruit as large an army as possible to send to Africa,, states Marius arrived in Africa with more men than the senate had authorised. to do so quickly, or to do so without harming his popularity. One of the other main sources is Valerius Maximus; he wrote, in a longer passage on the customs of the Roman army, that Marius disregarded its traditional recruitment practices due to his status as a novus homo, an aetiology which historians have dismissed as "puerile, naïve, and fanciful"., citing, among others, . Valerius Maximus' narrative is largely in the interest of creating exempla (moral parables) of traditions broken rather than conveying historical events.
Other sources, largely far later and dating from the Antonine period (2nd century AD), also associate Marius with allowing the capite censi to join in 107 BC: Plutarch, Florus, and Aulus Gellius. Plutarch's Life of Marius, depending on emendation, may claim that Marius enrolled slaves, which would be a profound exaggeration., citing . Gellius' discussion indicates that there was some disagreement in the sources before him as to the year (during the Cimbric War in 104 or the Jugurthine War in 107 BC) in which Marius recruited the capite censi. However, other sources are entirely silent: for example, the Periochae of Livy's history entirely passes over the events from Marius' first consulship and Numidian command (108 – 105 BC), noting only that he was victor over Jugurtha, indicating that Livy or his epitomiser thought Marius' irregular levy unimportant. It is likely, however, that most of the ancient narratives which connected the collapse of the free state to the self-serving armed proletarian did so in the context of civil war.. As literary themes, they were then retrojected into the time of Marius and the Jugurthine War, more than two generations earlier.
The first time a modern historian posited and attributed to Marius a revolutionary and comprehensive reform was in an 1846 book by the German scholar Ludwig Lange., citing Lange admitted his theory was speculative and noted how it could be falsified.No trace, for example, of the Marian reforms is found at The hypothesis rested on the assumption that any differences between the army of Marius' time and that of Polybius' time could be attributed to a single reform event of which Marius could have been the only progenitor.
The idea was spread by the influential 19th-century classicist Theodor Mommsen in the 1855 second volume of his The History of Rome, which served to bring the idea of the Marian reforms into the core of scholarship. It received more attention in the military historian Wilhelm Rüstow's 1857 book Geschichte der Infanterie ('History of the Infantry') which presented the Marian reforms – here conceived as a full overhaul including the abolition of the citizen cavalry, institution of a single form of heavy infantry, uniform equipment, and introduction of the cohort – as an established fact. However, he viewed it only as a step in the full professionalisation of the Roman army and believed that the putative reforms reflected real military needs., citing
Rüstow's views were largely repeated uncritically by authors including Joachim Marquardt and Theodore Ayrault Dodge. By the early twentieth century, two major overviews in German played a substantial role in also spreading these views. The first was by Hans Delbrück in 1900; the second was by Johannes Kromayer and Georg Veith in 1928. While both noted that there were no ancient sources which described any putative large-scale reforms by Marius, they both largely repeated previous scholarship that accepted the Marian reforms as a revolutionary turning point for the Roman army. From there, this view moved into reference works like the Realencyclopädie,, calling attention to two articles:
and then into Anglophone scholarship via the highly cited 1928 overview The Roman Legions by Henry Michael Denne Parker. Only after the Second World War were these views re-examined.
In these terms, the abolition of the property qualification was just another stage in the evolution of the Roman army on the long journey to the professional army of the Augustan age. With no sources indicating that the social background of the legions had changed much, if at all, Gabba attributed the notability of the episode to Marius' political opponents' fear that voluntary service undermined traditional methods of gaining political support.
Later historians also downplayed these reforms. The French historian , writing in the 1960s, noted how the dilectus () of conscripts continued through the 2nd century into the late republic; this undermined the previous assumption that volunteer service became dominant after 107 BC. The British classicist Peter Brunt, in his 1971 book Italian Manpower, also questioned the extent to which Polybius' descriptions reflected the army of the mid-second century, noting that many aspects therein were notably archaic and only could have been true in the early third century BC. Gabba's posited property level qualifications and Brunt's attacks on Polybius' credibility broke one of the main assumptions of the 19th century German scholars, namely that the Polybian army persisted largely unchanged until Marius' time. Brunt also found no evidence that volunteers took over the legions and instead concluded that the adsidui raised by the traditional levy still dominated.
François Cadiou, in his 2018 book L'armée imaginaire, largely disproved the traditional narrative that Marius' volunteers had a substantial impact on the composition of the army, that the late republic's armies were made up largely of volunteers, and that those armies were largely drawn from the landless poor. Cadiou, moreover, argued that historians' unwillingness to discard the theory that Marius decisively changed army recruitment, despite the limited evidence for it, emerged from the attractiveness of the theory as a simple explanation for the republic's collapse.
The changes to the Roman army during the 1st century BC are now more attributed to the Social War and the civil wars from 49 to 31 BC.; After the Social War, the state also started to keep men under arms for longer periods to maintain available experienced manpower, and coupled this with longer terms for commanders, particularly Julius Caesar and Pompey. Client armies emerged not in the 100s BC but rather in the decades before Caesar's civil war, which broke out in 49BC. The large-scale downsizing of Roman cavalry detachments likely emerged from the extension of citizenship to all of Italy. Because Italy's enfranchisement meant that Rome was now directly liable for the cavalry's upkeep rather than their local communities, Rome instead levied auxilia from allies who, by treaty, were responsible for their contingents' upkeep.
Contrary to the traditional story of quiescent client armies following their generals, contemporary historiography has established that Roman soldiers during the civil wars needed to be convinced of the legitimacy of their generals' causes., citing . For Sulla and Cinna, such appeals were rooted in the consuls' legitimacy and prerogatives given as a gift of the people. Client armies, instead of being a consequence of putative changes in recruitment, emerged from the prolonged civil wars – themselves fought between armies which believed they were defending the republic – and generals' attempts to secure military loyalty with pay increases.
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