Talk:Roman legion

Illustration

The illustration in the lead, "Roman legion at attack", is extremely misleading, as it shows 9 people marching forward in a tight formation, leaving the remaining 4500 men missing in action. Since the last Roman legion perished before invention of the photography, we have few options to replace this picture:

1. use a free painting of a legion (preferably by notable painter);
2. follow the German lead, and move into our lead (pun intended) the map of legion locations ;
3. use a diagram of the order of battle for the legion. Note that there were many.
4. Generate a picture using AI. The images I got with very little effort were decent enough and had only few artefacts to airbrush away. Perhaps, someone has a paid account already with one of the image generator services, so (s)he can slap a proper copyright onto it?

The gallery below is not intended as proposals, but can be helpful for understanding of the types of pictures I am talking about (no AI, sorry: Bing owns my efforts).

• 
  An artistic rendition similar to our current picture
• 
  Some of the legion OOBs (from an old Russian Military encyclopedia, in Russian, but trivial to translate)
• 
  Legion HQ locations (already in the article)
• 
  As inspired by the Trajan column

Викидим (talk) 21:48, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

No objections for 3 weeks. Replaced the picture with the OOB added to the article earlier by Skaalr. Викидим (talk) 22:58, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Evolution

An attempt to provide sources for the "evolution" section hit an interesting obstacle. The legion "systems" are discussed in some amount of popular books, using names:

1. Tullian
2. Camillan
3. Polybian
4. Marian
5. Augustan

(see, for example, . Looks like most of these books are either written by - or copied from - a single author, Simon Elliott. On a surface he looks qualified (PhD in a related field) - but in an attempt to dig deeper - and find the research-like reviews (with the cites), I hit a void. In particular, it seems like there is practically no information on the Roman legion prior to Polybius. While there is no doubt that at some point Romans had switched from the phalanx to a manipular legion, the causes and timing are are subject of much speculation among the researchers (did the military defeats drive the changes? was the the new panoply the cause? or was the change in weapons influenced by the new battle order?). So, everything pre-200 BC seems like pure speculation, and, perhaps, should be labeled as such (or good sources provided).

As-is, our article, fortunately, does not describe the Tullian legions, but it has text about "Camillan". My understanding of the early Roman legion structure is gained from the two articles I have added to the literature list:

• Taylor, Michael J. (2020). "The Evolution of the Manipular Legion in the Early Republic". Historia. 69 (1): 38–56. doi:10.25162/historia-2020-0003. ISSN 0018-2311.
• Rawson, Elizabeth (1971). "The Literary Sources for the Pre-Marian Army". Papers of the British School at Rome. 39: 13–31. doi:10.1017/S0068246200007789. ISSN 0068-2462.

The first is pretty new and to the point. I do not suggest to use the new research in it for our article, just the review of the previous consensus in the beginning. The second one seems extremely solid, often cited by modern researchers and characterized as a thorough summary of what he researchers actually know about the early legions. There is also an encyclopedic source that says very little on the legions before the Marian reforms, while explicitly stating that there is almost no information pre-Polybius:

• Campbell, Brian (2015-07-06). "legion". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Classics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.3632. ISBN 978-0-19-938113-5.

My idea is to rewrite the early legion evolution and related sections based on the Oxford source above. I am located as far away as it gets from the topic of this article in my real life, so someone might know the subject better (many folks certainly do!) and can correct me. So, the goal of starting this discussion is to obtain input form other editors on whether such an effort is useful. Викидим (talk) 08:36, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

H. M. D. Parker's "The Roman Legions"

While quite old (1920s), the book was reprinted all the way to 1990s. I am not an expert on the subject, thus the question: is the book still considered to be a good source? Votpuske (talk) 20:51, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Roman leader image

I don't think the article particularly needs the image of a particular general, but if one is added it should Gaius Marius who was instrumental in the creation of the late Republican and Imperial legion through the Marian reforms. Caesar is rightfully famous as a commander of legions, but it's not true to say he was instrumental in their organisation. 94.200.83.10 (talk) 11:49, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

The Marian reforms qua proletarianisation and professionalisation of the legions did not happen. Most of the change in the Roman army between the late republic and early empire is Augustan. Ifly6 (talk) 14:13, 11 April 2024 (UTC)