Virtus: what made Rome great, and what it lost

Part I · The making of a governing class

A republic that hired no one

By 264 B.C. Rome governed the Italian peninsula from the Rubicon to the straits of Messina, and it had done so without a standing army, a paid bureaucracy, or a professional officer corps. Every magistrate was elected for one year and served without salary. Every soldier was a citizen who owned land, who bought his own arms, and who expected to go home when the campaign ended. The state that was about to fight Carthage for the Mediterranean was, in its machinery, a farmers' commonwealth with a Senate of former magistrates at its head. Polybius, a Greek hostage who watched that machine at work in the house of the Scipios, thought the contrast with Carthage decisive. The Carthaginians hired their infantry; the Romans levied it.

“They have their hopes of freedom ever resting on the courage of mercenary troops: the Romans on the valour of their own citizens and the aid of their allies. The result is that even if the Romans have suffered a defeat at first, they renew the war with undiminished forces, which the Carthaginians cannot do. For, as the Romans are fighting for country and children, it is impossible for them to relax the fury of their struggle; but they persist with obstinate resolution until they have overcome their enemies.”

Polybius, Histories 6.52 — trans. E. S. Shuckburgh (1889; public domain)

That sentence contains the whole argument of this essay. Rome was strong so long as the men who fought for it, the men who commanded it, and the men who governed it were the same men, drawn from the same soil, and tested by the same ladder. When those three groups came apart, the strength went with them. The first half of this essay describes the ladder. The second describes how it broke.

The ladder of offices

No Roman could be consul because he was born to it. A patrician name opened doors, but the Republic made its rulers climb, and it made them climb in public. Polybius, describing the army of the second century B.C., sets down the first rung with a plainness that leaves nothing to interpretation:

“All citizens must serve ten years in the cavalry or twenty years in the infantry before the forty-sixth year of their age, except those rated below four hundred asses. The latter are employed in the navy; but if any great public necessity arises they are obliged to serve as infantry also for twenty campaigns: and no one can hold an office in the state until he has completed ten years of military service.”

Polybius, Histories 6.19 — trans. Shuckburgh

Ten campaigns before a man could stand for the lowest office. That is the point to fix on. A young noble of seventeen went out as a cavalry trooper under a consul who was probably his father's friend, and he was watched. If he did well he was chosen as a military tribune, one of six officers to a legion, and the first of those tribunes were elected by the people, not appointed by the general. Only after that could he seek the quaestorship, which handled money, and the rest of the sequence the Romans called the cursus honorum, the course of honours.

By the second century the sequence was fixed in law. The lex Villia annalis of 180 B.C. set the minimum ages and required an interval between offices, and Sulla's constitution of 81 B.C. restated the ladder with the ages that were then customary. Reduced to a table, the requirement looked like this:

Office	Number a year	What it tested	Age (Sullan rule)
Military service	—	Ten campaigns; courage, endurance, obedience	from 17
Quaestor	20	Public money; the treasury or a governor's accounts. Gave a seat in the Senate.	30
Aedile	4	The city: markets, streets, grain, games. Optional, but the way to be known.	36
Praetor	8	Justice; the courts of Rome, then a province and an army	39
Consul	2	Supreme command in war, presidency of the state	42
Censor	2 (every five years)	The roll of citizens and of senators; the morals of both	ex-consul

Each step was an examination sat before the whole people. The quaestor who could not keep accounts, the aedile whose grain ran short, the praetor whose judgments were bought, was known to every voter before he asked for the next office. And at the top a second consul, elected the same day, held equal power and could stop him. Machiavelli praised the Republic for the openness the old families resented: after the consulship was thrown open to plebeians it was conceded, he wrote, “without distinction either of age or blood.” He is right that the early Republic made young men consuls for a great action in the field. But the later rule is the more instructive. A state that had learned what ambitious genius could do, as Rome had by 180 B.C., made even genius wait its turn and prove itself in the lower posts first.

The proof was public in one more way. At the funeral of a nobleman the wax masks of every ancestor who had held office were taken from their shrines in the house and worn by living men in the dress of the office each had reached. Polybius saw such a procession and understood at once what it was for.

“There could not easily be a more inspiring spectacle than this for a young man of noble ambitions and virtuous aspirations. For can we conceive any one to be unmoved at the sight of all the likenesses collected together of the men who have earned glory, all as it were living and breathing?”

Polybius, Histories 6.53 — trans. Shuckburgh

The masks were not decoration. They were a debt. A young Cornelius or Fabius rode behind his ancestors in the knowledge that if he never earned a curule chair his own face would never join them. Polybius adds that this is why Romans volunteered for single combat, why they accepted certain death to save an army, and why magistrates had put their own sons to death for breaking discipline. The Republic did not need to teach its elite to serve. It had arranged that they could not become an elite in any other way.

The censor

The ladder had a keeper. Every five years two censors, both former consuls, revised the roll of citizens and of the Senate, and could strike out any man for conduct unworthy of his rank, without trial and with a written reason. Marcus Porcius Cato held the office in 184 B.C. and is the reason it is remembered. He struck from the Senate a former consul, Lucius Flamininus, brother of the liberator of Greece, for having a prisoner killed at dinner to amuse a favourite. He taxed luxury goods at ten times their value and cut the pipes that private houses had run from the public aqueducts. The censorship was the Republic's way of saying that reaching the top did not end the examination.

Part II · The army of citizens

Rewards and punishments

A Roman army was a body of citizens temporarily under a magistrate's absolute power. Discipline in it was of a kind no mercenary force could have borne, and the Romans made it bearable by pairing every punishment with an honour. Polybius, who had seen both, describes the punishment of a whole unit that broke before the enemy: a tenth chosen by lot and clubbed to death by their comrades, the rest put on barley instead of wheat and made to camp outside the rampart. Then, without changing tone, he describes the other side of the account.

“In the capture of a town those who are first to mount the walls are presented with a gold crown. So too those who have covered and saved any citizens or allies are distinguished by the Consul with certain presents; and those whom they have preserved present them voluntarily with a crown, or if not, they are compelled to do so by the Tribunes. The man thus preserved, too, reverences his preserver throughout his life as a father, and is bound to act towards him as a father in every respect.”

Polybius, Histories 6.39 — trans. Shuckburgh

Later Roman writers, above all Aulus Gellius and the elder Pliny, set out the whole scale of crowns. The corona muralis, of gold shaped like a wall, went to the first man over an enemy's town wall; the corona vallaris to the first over the rampart of an enemy camp; the corona navalis, worked with ships' beaks, to the first man to board an enemy vessel in a sea fight. The civic crown, of oak leaves, was given to a man who had saved a fellow citizen's life in battle and held the ground where he did it, and it was the more honoured for being the cheaper. Rarest of all was the grass crown, woven from the grass of the field by the army a commander had saved from destruction; Pliny could count the men who had received it on his fingers. The honours were worn in public for life, at the games and at the festivals, and the spoils a man had stripped from an enemy hung by the door of his house where every visitor passed them. Polybius drew the conclusion for us.

“No wonder that a people, whose rewards and punishments are allotted with such care and received with such feelings, should be brilliantly successful in war.”

Polybius, Histories 6.39 — trans. Shuckburgh

Land, pay, and the reason a man fought

The early legionary fought because the fields he stood in were his own. That is not sentiment; it was the qualification for service. The census divided citizens by property, and only those who held a minimum, the assidui, were enrolled, on the reasoning that a man with nothing to lose could not be trusted to hold a line. The Republic's first extension of that principle came in the long siege of Veii, when Livy records the Senate voting, before the tribunes could demand it, that soldiers should be paid from the treasury, whereas until then every man had served at his own expense. Livy's account of the reception is the account of a people that understood what had been given.

“It is recorded that nothing was ever received by the commons with so much joy; that they ran in crowds to the senate-house, and caught the hands of those coming out, and called them fathers indeed; acknowledging that the result of such conduct was that no one would spare his person or his blood, whilst he had any strength remaining, in defence of a country so liberal.”

Livy, History of Rome 4.60 — trans. D. Spillan (Bohn's Classical Library, 1850s; public domain)

The second principle was land for service. When Rome defeated an Italian people it took a portion of their territory, and on that land it planted colonies of Roman and Latin citizens: garrisons of farmers who held their plots by the state's gift and defended them as their own. Machiavelli, who could see no other way that a republic might hold conquests cheaply, counted this the master stroke of Roman policy and devoted a chapter of the Discourses to the exact size of the allotments. The conquered land paid for its own occupation, and the soldier who had won it became the settler who kept it. The line ran unbroken from the colonies of the fourth century B.C. to the veteran settlements of Sulla, Caesar and Augustus. What changed, and this essay will come to it, was who the soldier was.

A third principle belongs to the Empire but grew from the same root. From Augustus onward a serving soldier could not contract a lawful marriage. The rule ran for two centuries and was lifted only by Septimius Severus in A.D. 197. Its purpose, as the ancient writers understood it, was mobility and hardness: a legion that could be ordered from the Rhine to the Euphrates could not be an encampment of families. When Severus lifted the ban, Herodian notes the soldiers' pleasure. What he does not note, and what the next century showed, is that a legion married to a province would not leave it.

Part III · What the state owed the people

Grain

Cato and Cicero were no democrats, and neither was Polybius. But the elite they admired held one belief that a modern reader may not expect of it: that a city which could not feed its poor had no right to their obedience. The aedile's first duty was the market and the grain supply, and a young noble made or lost his reputation by it. In the second century the Republic imported wheat from Sicily and Sardinia as a tax in kind, and in a bad year the aediles sold it below cost. Gaius Gracchus in 123 B.C. made the sale a right, at a fixed low price; Clodius in 58 B.C. made it free; and Augustus, who had every reason to abolish a Gracchan law, instead made it permanent, fixed the roll of recipients at about 200,000 heads of household, and after a famine in A.D. 6 created a standing prefect of the grain supply. Under Claudius the state built the harbour at Ostia, under Trajan the great hexagonal basin behind it, so that the African and Egyptian fleets could unload in any weather. In a drought the government of Rome did not pray; it bought. Its agents were in Alexandria and Carthage with the treasury's silver, and the corn came.

The cynical reading, that bread kept the mob quiet, was already Roman; Juvenal made it. It is not the whole truth. The aedile who spent his own fortune on a hungry year did so because the Republic had made feeding the city a rung on the ladder to command. Generosity was not charity. It was the price of office, and the people knew the price.

Children

The Empire went further, and it is Trajan's name that stands on the measure. The alimenta, begun under Nerva and built into a system under Trajan, lent state money at low interest to Italian landowners on the security of their farms, and paid the interest out monthly to the children of Italian towns. A bronze table from Veleia in the Apennines survives with the whole scheme engraved: the names of the landowners, the value of their estates, the number of boys and girls supported. Boys at Veleia received sixteen sesterces a month, girls twelve. The jurist Ulpian records that Hadrian set the age limits at eighteen for boys and fourteen for girls. The purpose was stated without embarrassment: Italy needed sons for the legions, and the state would pay to raise them. Pliny the Younger, in the speech of thanks he gave as consul in A.D. 100, praised the scheme in exactly those terms, and then founded a private one of his own at Comum. This is the Roman elite at its best, and the reader should hold the picture: a farmer's mortgage in the Apennines paying for a boy in the next valley who would one day carry a spear for Rome.

Stone and water

The same men built. Appius Claudius, censor in 312 B.C., laid the road from Rome to Capua that still bears his name and the first aqueduct into the city. By the Empire the roads ran fifty thousand miles, from the Wall in Britain to the Euphrates, engineered to a standard grade, drained, paved, and marked by the mile. Frontinus, who ran the aqueducts of Rome under Nerva and wrote a manual on the job, set them beside the pyramids and the temples of Greece and asked which was the more useful. It was a Roman question.

Trajan's reign is the summit. The bridge over the Danube at Drobeta, by the Greek engineer Apollodorus, stood on twenty stone piers across a river nearly a kilometre wide; the Forum in Rome, with its column and its two libraries, was paid for by the gold of Dacia; the harbour at Portus and the bridge at Alcántara in Spain were in hand within the same twenty years. Ancient writers called him optimus princeps, the best of rulers, and the title was earned by what he left standing. The point is not that Romans could build; it is that the men who built were the same men who had held the quaestorship, commanded the legions, and stood in the grain market as aediles. Engineering was a public virtue because public men did it.

Part IV · The unmaking

The army stops being Italian

The decline that this essay traces is not the decline of a frontier or a treasury. It is the coming apart of the three bodies that Polybius had seen as one: the men who fought, the men who commanded, and the men who ruled. It began with the first. Tacitus preserves Tiberius' complaint to the Senate in A.D. 23 that Italy no longer supplied volunteers of the old kind, and that the levy now took the poor and the rootless. By the end of the first century the legions of the Rhine and the Danube were filling their ranks from the provinces in which they stood, and Italians disappeared from the ranks. This did not happen by decree. Local recruitment was the frontier's own solution to a permanent garrison; Hadrian did not invent it. What Hadrian did, in the reforms his biographer records and the inscriptions from Lambaesis confirm, was to accept it as policy. A legion would be stationed for generations in one province, recruit from it, marry into it in all but law, and defend it as home. The emperor's army had become a set of regional armies with a common uniform.

The consequence appeared in A.D. 193, when the Praetorian Guard, still Italian by recruitment, sold the Empire at auction to the highest bidder, and the Danubian legions marched on Rome under Septimius Severus to take it back. Severus cashiered the Guard and refilled it from his own frontier legions. Cassius Dio, a senator from Bithynia who sat through the reign, thought the new guardsmen a barbarous sight in the streets of the capital, and he records the advice Severus gave his sons from his deathbed in substance: to enrich the soldiers and to despise everyone else. Severus was born at Lepcis Magna in Africa, of a family that spoke Punic at home. His son Caracalla, in A.D. 212, extended Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the Empire. Dio, who disliked him, wrote that the purpose was revenue, since citizens paid the inheritance tax. Whatever the purpose, the effect was to make the word Roman mean nothing more than subject. A distinction that had been the reward of ten campaigns and an oath was now a line in a tax register.

The rulers stop being senators

The second body came apart in the third century, and here the old story must be corrected before it is told. The soldier-emperors who followed Severus were not, as a whole, incompetent. Aurelian, who reunited the Empire from Gaul to Syria in five years, Diocletian, who reorganised it, Constantine, who refounded it, were soldiers of the first order. The accurate charge is different and worse. In or about A.D. 262 the emperor Gallienus excluded senators from the command of legions altogether, so Aurelius Victor records, and the governing class of Rome ceased to supply generals. From that decision on, the men who held the armies were professional officers from the Danube provinces, Illyrians and Pannonians and Thracians, who had never held a quaestorship, never stood in the Forum for an aedileship, never been examined by the people in any office at all. Maximinus, the first of them, was a Thracian peasant who as far as we know never saw Rome. Diocletian was born in Dalmatia to a family of freedmen; Constantine at Naissus, the son of an Illyrian officer. They were brave, able, and Roman in every sense but the one that had mattered to Cato: no one had tested them but the army.

The ladder of offices had done two things at once. It had trained generals, and it had made the men who governed in peace the same men who commanded in war, so that a consul knew the treasury as well as the camp. After Gallienus those two competences lived in different men, and the civil half of the state, the Senate and the old magistracies, became an ornament. Diocletian did not consult the Senate; he replaced it with a court, and the court with a bureaucracy of paid officials. Machiavelli, who had watched Italian cities give their wars to hired captains, had the pattern by heart:

“Without such an army no amount of money will meet your wants, the natural strength of your country will not protect you, and the fidelity and attachment of your subjects will not endure, since it is impossible that they should continue true to you when you cannot defend them.”

Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius 2.10 — trans. N. H. Thomson (1883; public domain)

Rome had an army of its own; the trouble was that Rome, the city and the class that had made it, no longer owned it. Civil war had been Roman politics since Sulla, but the civil wars of the third and fourth centuries were fought by provincial armies against provincial armies with nothing Italian at stake on either side. At Lugdunum in A.D. 197 Severus and Albinus fought the largest battle Romans had ever fought against Romans; at Mursa in A.D. 351 Constantius and Magnentius destroyed in one afternoon a force the Empire could not replace, and Eutropius, writing a generation later, said plainly that the strength of Rome was consumed there. Caesar had pardoned his enemies as policy. The armies of the Danube had no such habit, because the men they were killing were not their fellow citizens in any sense they recognised.

The coin

The third body to fail was the treasury, and the failure took the form of inflation, not scarcity. Nero had already reduced the silver in the denarius in A.D. 64. Under Severus it fell to about half; Caracalla issued a new coin tariffed at two denarii and containing the silver of one and a half; by the 270s the coin was a bronze disc with a silver wash, and prices in Egypt, where the papyri let us follow them, had risen many times over within a generation. Diocletian's Edict on Maximum Prices of A.D. 301 is the confession: a list of ceilings for every commodity and wage in the Empire, with the death penalty for exceeding them, issued because prices were rising, not falling, and abandoned within a few years because the goods simply left the market. A state that had paid its legions in good silver for four hundred years now paid them in rations, clothing and land, requisitioned from the peasants they were stationed among. It is against this background that Constantine in A.D. 332 bound the tenant farmers, the coloni, to the land they worked. The free farmer who had been the Republic's soldier ended as a serf who fed the Republic's replacement.

Letters, art, and forms

A state that has stopped examining its rulers stops examining its writers. The Latin of Cicero had been a public instrument, made for the Senate and the courts by men who used it there. After Tacitus and Juvenal, both dead by about A.D. 130, no Roman wrote a history of the first rank in Latin for two hundred and fifty years, and when one was written it was by Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek officer from Antioch writing in a language he had learned. In between, the fashion set by Fronto, tutor to Marcus Aurelius, was for antique words dug out of Cato and Ennius; the vigour had gone into the archaism. Cato had written to be understood by farmers; the second-century stylists wrote to be admired by each other.

The stone tells the same story more plainly. The Arch of Constantine in Rome, dedicated in A.D. 315, was built of reliefs stripped from the monuments of Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, with the emperors' heads recut to Constantine's likeness, and its own panels, the ones its sculptors made, show stubby frontal figures in rows, every face the same. It is not that Rome stopped building. Caracalla and Diocletian built the largest baths the city ever had, Maxentius the largest basilica, and Constantine a new capital on the Bosporus. But look at what was built. Aurelian's greatest work in Rome was a wall, twelve miles of it, the first the city had needed since the Gauls; after five centuries of building roads outward, the Empire's engineers were building ramparts inward. No new forum was laid out after Trajan's. No emperor after Trajan founded an alimentary scheme; the last records of the old one stop under the Severi. The generosity of the optimus princeps had been a Roman aristocrat's generosity, and the aristocracy that could afford it had been dismissed from the army and the state.

Part V · The gods

An eastern cult

The Romans of the first century met Christianity as they met the cults of Isis, Cybele and Mithras: as one more religion from the eastern provinces, and the least respectable of them. Tacitus, recording Nero's persecution after the fire of A.D. 64, called it a deadly superstition. Suetonius listed the punishment of Christians among Nero's sound measures, alongside the regulation of chariot racing. Pliny, governing Bithynia under Trajan, had them executed for obstinacy and described their belief to the emperor as a wretched and extravagant superstition. Celsus, a Platonist writing about A.D. 178, thought its converts were slaves, women and children, and said so. This was the contempt of a governing class for something that refused every value it had been raised on. A senator was formed by honour publicly earned and publicly displayed, by the ancestors on the wall and the crown on the helmet. Here was a cult whose founder had been executed as a criminal, which preached that the last should be first, that an injury should be forgiven rather than answered, and that this world and its honours were nothing.

Machiavelli, a Christian by profession and a Roman by conviction, put the contrast with complete candour in the Discourses:

“Under the old religions none obtained divine honours save those who were loaded with worldly glory, such as captains of armies and rulers of cities; whereas our religion glorifies men of a humble and contemplative, rather than of an active life. Accordingly, while the highest good of the old religions consisted in magnanimity, bodily strength, and all those other qualities which make men brave, our religion places it in humility, lowliness, and contempt for the things of this world; or if it ever calls upon us to be brave, it is that we should be brave to suffer rather than to do.”

Machiavelli, Discourses 2.2 — trans. Thomson

He drew the consequence without flinching. This manner of life, he wrote, seems to have made the world feebler and given it over to wicked men, since mankind, hoping for Paradise, thinks more of bearing injuries than of avenging them; and he blamed not the religion itself but those who had interpreted it to suit indolence rather than valour. The reader may take or leave the qualification. The observation stands: the qualities the old Roman religion rewarded were the qualities the ladder of offices tested, and the new religion declared them worthless.

Nietzsche's reading

It was left to Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals of 1887, to name the transaction. He saw in the history of the West one long contest between two moralities. The first, which he called the morality of masters, was the self-affirmation of a strong and confident class: good meant noble, brave, capable, proud; bad meant merely common, weak, low. The second, the morality of slaves, was born from the resentment of the powerless, and it worked by inverting the first: the strong became evil, the weak good, suffering a merit and pride a sin. He gave the contest a name.

“The symbol of this fight, written in a writing which has remained worthy of perusal throughout the course of history up to the present time, is called ‘Rome against Judæa, Judæa against Rome.’ Hitherto there has been no greater event than that fight, the putting of that question, that deadly antagonism.”

Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, First Essay §16 — trans. H. B. Samuel (1913; public domain)

“The Romans were the strong and aristocratic; a nation stronger and more aristocratic has never existed in the world, has never even been dreamed of; every relic of them, every inscription enraptures, granted that one can divine what it is that writes the inscription.”

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I §16 — trans. Samuel

Nietzsche's language about the origins of the inversion is his own; this essay reports the analysis and not the abuse. The analysis is this. The Roman values described in the first half of this essay, the crown for the first man over the wall, the funeral masks, the censor's stroke of the pen, were the values of a class that judged itself by what it did and did not ask permission to be proud of it. Christianity did not defeat that class in the field. It offered every man who had failed the ladder, or never been allowed on it, a morality in which the ladder itself was the sin. Nietzsche's word for the result was decadence, and in the Antichrist of 1888 he applied it to the Empire directly:

“This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things—the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption—against Christians.”

Nietzsche, The Antichrist §58 — trans. H. L. Mencken (1920; public domain)

That verdict is too simple, and the first half of this essay has shown why. The army had ceased to be Italian, the generals had ceased to be senators, and the coin had ceased to be silver, before Constantine's conversion gave the new religion the state. Gibbon, who put the fall down to the triumph of barbarism and religion, at least gave the barbarians equal billing. But Nietzsche saw something the fiscal historians miss. A state is held together by what its best men believe they owe it, and by what its rulers are willing to be judged on. The Republic had made the answer public and expensive: ten campaigns, a treasury audited, a city fed, a crown earned in front of the legion. By the fourth century the answer was given in a different currency, and the men who gave it were bishops. The ladder had gone. What replaced it was not a worse ladder, but a doctrine that a ladder was vanity.

Verdicts

1. The institution that made Rome was the examination of its rulers by service. Ten campaigns before office, then the ladder in public, then the censor. Everything else the Republic did well, from the crown on the wall to the grain in the market, was a consequence of choosing men this way.
2. The decline was the separation of soldier, general, and ruler into three different kinds of men. The army became provincial by the end of the first century and Hadrian made it policy; the generals ceased to be senators under Gallienus; the ruler became a court. Each step was rational on its own. Together they dissolved the class that had held the state.
3. Christianity did not cause the fall, but it named the new values, and they were the opposite of the old ones. Machiavelli and Nietzsche are right about the inversion and wrong about the chronology. The ladder was broken before the cross was raised over it. What the cross did was to say that the ladder had never mattered.

Cato, asked what had made Rome great, would have answered with the census roll and the farm. Cicero would have answered with the law and the Senate. Machiavelli would have answered with the citizen army and the reward of land. Nietzsche would have answered with the funeral masks: a people that worshipped its own best men, and was ashamed of nothing it had done to become them. They would all have been right, and they would all have been describing the same three hundred years. The chapters that follow, on the army and on the law, take the machinery apart piece by piece. This essay has only tried to say what the machine was for.

Sources & method

Quotations are copied from public-domain translations downloaded into sources/republic-virtue/raw/ and verified with tools/check_quotes.py: Polybius, Histories (Shuckburgh, 1889); Livy, History of Rome (Spillan, Bohn, 1850s); Machiavelli, Discourses (Thomson, 1883); Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (Samuel, 1913) and The Antichrist (Mencken, 1920).

• The cursus honorum: Polybius 6.19; the lex Villia annalis (Livy 40.44); Sulla's ages are the customary reconstruction from Cicero and Appian, given here as the Sullan rule rather than as a surviving statute.
• Crowns: Polybius 6.39; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 5.6; Pliny, Natural History 16.3–5 (grass crown) and 22.4–6.
• Cato's censorship: Livy 39.42–44; Plutarch, Cato the Elder 17–19.
• Soldiers' pay, 406 B.C.: Livy 4.59–60. Colonial land: Machiavelli, Discourses 2.7. Soldiers' marriage: Herodian 3.8.5; Cassius Dio 60.24.
• Grain: Appian, Civil Wars 1.21; Dio 55.10; Res Gestae 15; Suetonius, Claudius 20; the number of recipients is Augustus' figure, and the sources disagree about whether it was the roll or the ceiling.
• Alimenta: the Veleia table (CIL XI 1147); Pliny, Panegyricus 26–28 and Letters 7.18; Ulpian in Digest 34.1.14.1 for Hadrian's ages.
• Roads and water: Frontinus, De aquis 1.16; Diodorus 20.36 (Appius Claudius). Trajan's works: Dio 68.13–16; Procopius, Buildings 4.6.
• Recruitment: Tacitus, Annals 4.4–5; Historia Augusta, Hadrian 10; the Lambaesis inscription (CIL VIII 2532). Following the site's own accuracy notes, local recruitment is dated before Hadrian and treated as consolidated, not invented, by him.
• A.D. 193 and the Severi: Dio 74.11–75.2, 77.15–17; Herodian 2.6, 3.8. The Constitutio Antoniniana: Dio 78.9; P. Giss. 40.
• Gallienus and the senators: Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus 33.34, 37.6. Lugdunum: Dio 76.6. Mursa: Eutropius 10.12; Zosimus 2.50–53.
• Coinage: the silver contents are those in Mattingly's Roman Coins (1928) and are given approximately; Diocletian's edict, preamble (Frank, Economic Survey vol. 5). Coloni: Codex Theodosianus 5.17.1 (A.D. 332).
• Christianity as seen by Romans: Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Suetonius, Nero 16; Pliny, Letters 10.96–97; Origen, Contra Celsum 3.44, 3.55.
• Modern framing: Mommsen, History of Rome, bk. III ch. 11–13; Ferrero, Greatness and Decline of Rome, vol. 1; Heitland, The Roman Republic §§ 100–120; Tenney Frank, A History of Rome (1923) ch. 30–31 and Roman Imperialism (1914); Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926) ch. 9–12; Gibbon, ch. 15–16 and 38 (“General Observations”). Per house rules, no historian after 1950 is cited.

Where this essay argues rather than reports, it says so. The claim that provincial civil wars were more savage than Republican ones is the essay's own reading of Dio and Eutropius, and a reader who sets the proscriptions of 82 and 43 B.C. beside Mursa may reasonably disagree.