This book is the catalogue of the British Museum’s Legion exhibition of February to June 2024, but it is not organised as a numbered catalogue. The exhibits (with locations/accession information in the captions) are used, quite spectacularly, to illustrate a series of chapters on aspects of life in the Roman army. These deal with the enlistment process and conditions for new servicemen (i); ranks and roles (iii); the involvement of different social classes in the army and the army as a means of social advancement (iv); clothing, armour and equipment (v); life on campaign, under canvas (properly leather) (vi); life in permanent forts (vii); what the army meant for the rest of society (viii). Chapter ii takes a detour to look at a soldier who died in the eruption at Pompeii. The book does not confine itself to the legions, but draws on all branches of the Roman army down to the mid-third century a.d.

The Roman army is often portrayed as a machine, with the emphasis on the structure of the units and the typology of fortifications, and it is evidently the mission of this book (and the exhibition) to take a different approach and dispel this notion by showing that the army consisted of real human beings and their dependants, with infinite different stories to tell. We get to know and follow something of the lives of two individuals, Apion (second century) and Terentianus (Trajanic), both fleet soldiers — the latter became a legionary. They are both from the eastern empire, chosen because they are two of the vanishingly few soldiers whose lives are revealed to us in letters and documents other than inscriptions. The Vindolanda documents from Britain are exploited very effectively towards the end of the book.

The result is a portrayal of an institution entirely alien to the modernising approach to the Roman army that prevailed in classic Roman army books up to the late twentieth century, and which still lives on in the popular imagination. Throughout there are refreshing reminders of the part women played in military life — and not always doing nice things like sending birthday invitations to each other. So we get arresting views of what may be the women of the Roman camp torturing Dacian captives (189, 202), and of the purchase by soldiers of female slaves for sex or for other, unknown reasons (185–6). The sources are plundered for many insights that archaeology could never provide — like the eye doctor from the British fleet who became a celebrity in the medical writings of Galen (197). The attempt to humanise the story does not become sentimental — the book ends with disturbing examples of the casual brutality and judicial barbarity inflicted by soldiers on the rest of society.

Within this structure the narrative, while highly readable, is selective and somewhat discursive, so, for example there is a long digression on the Antonine plague in the chapter on ‘Tent life’ (176–81). You will not find a plan or an air photograph of an actual Roman camp there. This means that to get chapter and verse on some aspects of the Roman army a student might have to turn to more traditionally structured works, like Thomas Fischer’s Army of the Roman Emperors (translated into English in 2019), or even the classics of the 1960s, like Watson’s The Roman Soldier.

Errors are few, and forgivable when one looks at the vast amount of reading the author has obviously undertaken to prepare this synthesis. The Hamian archers were from Hama in Syria, not Arabia (140). Canaba is given instead of the plural noun canabae for the settlement outside a legionary fortress (223). There is a strange mix-up over the British governors Pompeius Falco and Platorius Nepos on the famous diploma of July 122 — it is the former, not the latter, who was the outgoing governor at that time (251). It is repeatedly stated (100, 231) that the ban on soldiers’ marrying legally did not apply to centurions and decurions — but this is not a known fact. The tombstone evidence cited (100) is clearly third-century, by which time maybe all soldiers could legally marry.

The historical sources, the few surviving non-epigraphic documents and the objects do the heavy lifting in this account: there is remarkably little on the infinite variety and significance of the plans revealed by excavation of the virtual cities and towns that Roman military bases constituted, and the buildings within them — indeed, in the whole book there is a single, blurred plan of an archaeological site (104). So this is a far from comprehensive overview: ultimately it is a historian’s Roman army book rather than an archaeologist’s Roman army book. But this comes with dividends, not just the familiarity with documentary sources, but deep knowledge of areas not always well understood by archaeologists. Many Roman army books will set out military pay scales as if they are a known fact. The author of Legion, having a numismatic background, can offer a more contingency-laden view, and emphasises the fragmentary nature of the evidence on which the reconstructed ‘pay scales’ are based (63). Furthermore, the extensive references and bibliography point the serious scholar to recent literature on this and other contentious aspects.

Perhaps, then, the greatest value of Legion to the professional researcher is as a source — somewhat selective — of references to little-known academic literature on all sorts of aspects of Roman army life published since the classics of the 1960s and 1970s, and not always to be found even in more recent works. But it deserves a much wider readership: this lively and dramatically illustrated book will enrich all who consult or dip into it and may well help inspire a future generation of historians and archaeologists to take forward the study of the Roman army.