Closing Ranks: Publius Salonius and the Early Roman Army

ABSTRACT:A tangled tale of military resistance and reform (342 bce) includes a new rule that a man not be a centurion after being a military tribune, inspired, Livy notes, by soldiers’ dislike of P. Salonius, who moved between those ranks. This article examines this episode as evidence for the development of Rome’s military and the increasingly separate orientation of centurions and military tribunes therein. The framing of the story adds to our knowledge of the transmission of historical information at Rome, while its analysis allows us to view more critically the homogenizing representation of Roman soldiers as civic-minded agrarian small-holders.