Head studies 4: Felix faces
My people don’t smile.
They hardly ever smile, that is. Not big toothy grins.
Because of a childhood accident (think Raina Telgemeier’s Smile comic, only more dramatic and traumatic), I quite literally can’t smile one of those big, wide, all-teeth end-to-end grins people are supposed to use to show they’re friendly and good and worth interaction. I’m not used to seeing it in a mirror, and not used to drawing it. My crop of Romans just don’t think grinning fits in with proper gravitas. Although, from time to time, Felix has given a snarky grin. Sure, there are grinning satyrs capering about, but, really, think about it: How often have you seen a bust of a Caesar or Alexander the Great with a grin?
One of the fascinating things about history is how little we really understand the people who came before us.
For example; as a military historian I’m intrigued by the relationship between the Roman trooper and his officers. What, for example, was a duplicarius like Felix to his miles gregarius pals? Was he just a sort of super-private, like a modern corporal? Or was he more like a sergeant? And how did he relate to his officers? Was he expected to lead troops? Was he more-or-less a staff pogue, paid for his knowledge rather than his leadership?
And how did the rankers see the centuro? Was he more like a modern officer? Clearly in some aspects, definitely not – they were the front-line trainers of the troops, like modern sergeants rather than supervisors, like modern officers. And the daily sort of violence Romans expected certainly made a difference.
Tacitus reports in the Annals that during a mutiny in one of Drusus legions “…et centurio Lucilius interficitur cui militaribus facetiis vocabulum ‘cedo alteram’ indiderant, quia fracta vite in tergo militis alteram clara voce ac rursus aliam poscebat.” (“…they killed a centurion, Lucilius, to whom, with soldiers’ humour, they had given the name “Bring another,” because when he had broken one vine-stick on a man’s back, he would call in a loud voice for another and another.”)
Hard to imagine that in a modern army.
So I don’t think it’s impossible that 1st Century Romans may have been less giddy than we are today…
These are all things I’d like to understand more—along with a study of Roman giddiness 🙂 . It’s easy for a fiction writer to fall into the modern concepts of soldiers’ relationships to corporals, various sergeants, untested lieutenants, etc.—when the actual interactions, expectations, amount of mutual respect and deference to different levels of authority might have been very different, or a mix of the familiar and strange.
I’m not an expert in the Roman Army but from all the available information that I have read the true officers were the Tribunes and Up.
Centurios and down would probably be something akin to modern Warrant Officers, that is neither NCOs nor Officers but something in between.
From all I have read, in a given century the command structure was something like this:
1. Centurio
2. Optio
3. Signifer
4. Tesserarius
5. The decanus of the contubernia.
I believe that the signiferi were seen as special, very much like the flag detail on old musketry regiments. He was the visual center of the formation and could barely defend himself and yet had to be near the front and in many attested cases they actually lead the formation to the attack or rallied them to the defense.
Also, they were very likely the target of the enemy in order to take their standard. In the American Civil War many bloody skirmishes happened around the flag bearers during battles when one side or the other attempted to capture a regimental flag.
I think that the attrition rate for signiferi in a given campaign was very high.
So the common miles gregarius probably saw them as “I don’t want that job at all. Better you than me.”
I suppose it was a bit cruel of me when I made Felix the signifer. But I enjoyed drawing all the detail on those things, and he was highly likely to survive the job, seeing as it was a flashback….
Fig 7. Waking up next to Iusta.
Happy and pretty darned pleased with life as a whole 😉