Rome: The Age of Augustus (32 BC – AD 14)
Augustus’ Frontiers and Foreign Campaigns
Rome was already seven centuries old at the dissolution of the Republic and her empire substantially in place when her first emperor took the purple. In step with long and glorious achievements both in war and diplomacy, there had grown assumptions of Rome’s omnipotence and eternity, coupled with the belief that her outward march had no limits save those which ocean, unprofitable climate and terrain might impose. Despite the calamity of civil wars, which had brought Augustus to the throne, confidence towards the outside world remained unshaken. (Williams, D, 1996:1)
Origin of the Frontier Army
By 27 BC, the year of Augustus’ accession, Rome had formed the habit of expansion, but had not yet reached geographical limits which might modify that habit. His reign would be crucial to the frontier idea, for during it Rome encountered these limits and the influences which guided her towards perimeter defence were first felt. The origin of the frontier in its full and formal sense thus coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the empire, though the emergence of actual boundary works still lay some decades ahead.
The civil wars had ended on a dangerous note. On the winning side alone sixty legions stood combat ready, a factor which compelled an urgent and radical review of the army’s future. Augustus decided to retain twenty-eight, while the remainder would be demobilised and settled in colonies. By this act the West’s first professional standing army, consisting of 150,000 legionaries and a similar number of auxiliaries, was created. Length of service was set at sixteen years, later increased to twenty.
The pointer to the future lay not just in the new army’s formation but in its deployment, which was politically influenced. The historian Dio Cassius of Nicaea, writing in the 3rd