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The Marian reforms refer to putative changes to the composition and operation of the Roman army during the late Roman republic commonly attributed to Gaius Marius (consul in 107, 104–100, and 86 BC ). The term is used as shorthand to describe a series of reforms in the second century BC, most especially changes in the socio-economic background of the soldiery, but also including introduction of the cohort, institution of a single form of heavy infantry with reformed uniform equipment, adoption of the eagle standard, and abolition of the citizen cavalry.

It is commonly claimed that Marius changed the soldiers' socio-economic background by allowing citizens without property to join the Roman army, a process called "proletarianisation". The dropping of the property requirement was believed have created in a semi-professional class of soldiers motivated by land grants which in turn became clients of their generals, who then used them to overthrow the republic. There is, however, little ancient evidence for any permanent or significant change to recruitment practice in Marius' time.

Other reforms occurring around the time of the late second century BC have also been attributed to Marius, including changes in equipment, equipment procurement, tactical unit organisation, and army operations. Many of the other reforms commonly attributed to Marius also have no basis in the ancient sources or are otherwise wrongly dated and misattributed, a position which has found general scholarly agreement. Changes in the Roman army of the late republic came from many people and were driven more by structural factors in Rome's available manpower and military demands from the Social War and following civil wars.

Belief in comprehensive Marian reforms – changing the Roman army's recruitment, organisation, tactics, and equipment – emerged in 1840s German scholarship, which posited that any changes in the Roman army between the times of Polybius and Marius were attributable to a single reform event. This belief was spread relatively uncritically and was accepted as largely proven by the 1850s until the late 1940s. The re-evaluation then starting – though slowly diffusing, especially in Anglophone scholarship, – has largely disproved the narrative of comprehensive reform. Such reform is no longer widely accepted by specialists and is viewed as a construct of modern historiography.

Background
The Roman army traditionally found its manpower by conscription from the top five census classes. Those classes were assigned in decreasing order of wealth and allotted citizens to a corresponding century in the comitia centuriata. These citizens were called adsidui. Citizens which owned less wealth than that specified by the bottom of the fifth census class were called capite censi ("those counted by head") or proletarii. These least wealthy citizens were grouped into a single century which voted after all the others. Under the this scheme, the proletarii were exempt from conscription except when an emergency, called a tumultus, was declared; under such circumstances, the poorest were levied as well. The first documented instance of the proletarii being called up was some time in the fourth century and, by the Pyrrhic War (c. 281 BC), they received arms at state expense.

For much of the twentieth century, historians held that the property qualification separating the five classes and the capite censi was reduced over the course of the second century to a nugatory level due to a shortage of manpower. It is not clear whether, over the course of the second century BC, the qualification was actually reduced. Many scholars have also now abandoned the notion that Italy suffered in the second century BC any deficit of manpower which would have driven such putative reductions.

Attributed reforms


In traditional modern historiography, some or all of the following reforms are attributed to Marius. They are, however, variably dated. Many modern sources date them to his first consulship, during the Jugurthine War against Jugurtha of Numidia, in 107 BC. However, it is also possible that other far-reaching actions, especially in opening army recruitment, were undertaken during Marius' repeated consulships from 104 to 100 BC during which Rome faced the serious threat of Germanic invasion.

Ancient attributions
Beyond the attribution to Marius of setting the precedent for recruiting the poor in Valerius Maximus, only two reforms (distinguished from mere actions taken by Marius) are attributed in the ancient sources – though here rather late – to Marius directly: a redesign of the pilum and sole use of the eagle as the legionary standard.

Army proletarianisation
The main putative reform attributed to Marius is a change to recruitment starting, as is generally held, in 107 BC. In that year, Marius was consul and had himself assigned by plebiscite to the war against Jugurtha in 107 BC, he recruited additional soldiers to send to war by enlisting volunteers from both those in the five census classes and also the capite censi. The senate had in fact given Marius the right to conscript but he chose to also enrol some three to five thousand volunteers.

Various motives have been ascribed to Marius' decision to accept volunteers. The motive attributed in Sallust, Marius' personal ambition to seize power, may more reflect Sallust's desire to connect the republic's collapse with moral decline and failure to adhere to tradition. The second edition Cambridge Ancient History viewed it as an expedient to evade popular opposition to conscription. R J Evans, with whom François Cadiou agreed, instead proposed that Marius' decision emerged from his promise of a quick victory in Numidia followed by an energetic effort to follow through by raising and bringing an army as quickly as possible to Africa so to maximise his time campaigning as consul.

Regardless, after Marius' victorious return from the Jugurthine War, his volunteers were discharged and, in the following Cimbric War, he assumed command of consular legions recruited via hitherto normal procedure.

By enlisting volunteers from the capite censi, it is sometimes claimed that Marius' decision to enlist volunteers changed the socio-economic background of army by allowing the poor to take it over. These poor soldiers then professionalised and lived only as soldiers. These professional soldiers, disconnected from a society in which they had no property stake, over time became clients of their generals who then used them to seize power in Rome and plunge the republic into civil wars that eventually brought about its collapse. There are, however, no indications that Roman conscription ceased. Nor is there much evidence that later Roman armies during the 1st century BC were made up of volunteers; almost all ancient references to army recruitment, outside of private armies, involve conscription.

Beyond continued conscription after Marius' time, especially during the Social War, the wealth and social background of the men who joined before and after the opening of recruitment changed little. Pay remained relatively low – only five asses per day – and irregular. Characterisation of soldiers as "poor" in elite rhetoric did not entail actual landlessness, as for elite Romans, the vast majority of the population (almost everyone other than the equestrians) were "poor". Many of the soldiers of the 1st century BC possessed modest lands. Nor did the legions meaningfully professionalise, as both soldiers and commanders served only for short periods intending to secure plunder or political advancement from military victory; there is little evidence that this putative change in army recruitment created anti-republican client armies.

Equipment changes
Beyond changes to army recruitment, there are only two other reforms attributed to Marius specifically in the ancient sources relate to a redesign for a javelin and the designation of the aquila (eagle) as the universal legionary standard.

Plutarch relates that Marius altered the design of the Roman pilum, a heavy javelin designed to stick into shields, by including a wooden peg which broke when the javelin was thrown. Many scholars believe this was to prevent the javelin from being thrown back, but it is more likely that the swinging motion of the broken peg was meant to force someone to discard a shield into which the javelin was struck. Regardless of the efficacy or purpose of the redesign, archaeological evidence from the 80s BC through to the early imperial era show that Marius' redesign did not stick.

Pliny's Naturalis Historia attributes Marius with adopting the eagle as the universal legionary standard. This has been interpreted as a rallying symbol for each cohort. Pliny's claim, however, is incorrect; sources show late republican and early imperial legions with other animal symbols such as bulls and wolves.

Modern attributions
Most of the reforms attributed to Marius in various sources emerged only in modern times. These reforms have little ancient pedigree. They rest largely on the basis of comparison between the army described by Polybius and the army in the texts of the 1st century BC with an assumed attribution to Marius.

Equipment at state expense
It is also sometimes claimed that Marius – because the poor citizens enrolled could not afford to purchase their own weapons and armor – arranged for the state to supply them with arms, displacing the traditional system of self-purchase. Such a scheme may have been incipient during Gaius Gracchus' plebeian tribunate c. 122 BC; according to Plutarch, Gaius passed a law to abolish deductions from soldier pay for clothing. Emilio Gabba argued, for example, that Plutarch could have emended his source to refer to clothing instead of arms and that this policy emerged from how the believed reduction in property qualifications meant increasingly poor soldiers were recruited.

Neither a Gracchan abolition of deductions for equipment or a Marian programme to equip soldiers is attested in the evidence. There are no indications that Gracchus' law ever came into effect and literary evidence indicates that deductions for clothing and equipment were common in the imperial army of Augustus in the 1st century BC. If Marius purchased equipment for his troops in Numidia at his own expense, later generals and the state in general are not recorded as following in his footsteps.

"Marius' mules" and training
Marius is said in ancient sources to have moved much of the baggage off beasts of burden and onto the backs of the common soldiers, giving them the moniker muli Mariani ("Marius' mules"). Some modern historians have read this action as a permanent reduction in the size of Roman baggage trains, increasing the speed of army movement. However, attempts to force soldiers to carry their own equipment were common among successful generals at the time; Marius' predecessor in Numidia, Quintus Caecilius Metellus, as well as Scipio Aemilianus, were said to have forced their soldiers to carry their own equipment.

Some modern historians have also attributed to Marius reforms in the training of Roman soldiers which ostensibly reflected a professionalising service. Such training and drilling, however, had become common before Marius due to the loss of collective experience in the generations after the Second Punic War. Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus drilled his men for almost a year before deploying them in the Lusitanian War c. 145 BC; Scipio Aemilianus, for example, drilled his men before his campaigns against Numantia c. 133 BC; Metellus similarly drilled his men prior to their departure to Africa in 109 BC. Such attempts to reintroduce discipline reflected the recruits' lack of military training rather than a class of budding professional soldiers.

Unit composition
Modern historians have also sometimes credited to Marius the abolition of Roman cavalry and light infantry and their replacement with auxilia. There is no evidence to support this contention, which is driven largely by literary sources' silence on those branches after the 2nd century; continued inscriptional evidence attests both citizen cavalry and light infantry into the end of the republic. The decline of Roman light infantry generally has been connected not to reform but cost: given relatively fixed logistical costs, heavy infantry is more cost-efficient than light infantry in extended and distant campaigns, especially when local levies can substitute for light infantry brought from Rome and Italy.

Marius has also been credited with the introduction of the cohort (a unit of 600 men) in place of the maniple (a unit of only 200 men) as the basic unit of manoeuvre. This attribution is rather dubious and there is no ancient evidence of it; cohorts may have been used as far back as the Second Punic War near the end of the third century BC. The cohort itself emerged as an administrative unit conscripted from Rome's Italian allies and is first attested in Polybius' description of a battle which occurred in 206 BC. By the 130s BC, through the Spanish wars and operations with Italian allies, the cohort had developed into a tactical unit. While, after 109 BC, the maniple disappears from the literary evidence, Marius' predecessor in Numidia is documented to have used cohorts in battle: if cohorts replaced maniples around this time, Marius was likely not responsible.

Land and citizenship for veterans
Modern historians have also attributed to Marius the development of the client armies, tying the loyalty of the veterans to generals securing land grants on discharge. This picture, however, is largely an exaggeration stemming from the lex agraria distributing lands to Marius' veterans and others c. 100 BC. The agrarian law in that instance was defined largely in terms of building up lands to distribute to expected future army veterans rather than some kind of revolutionary redistribution to the benefit of thronging masses of veterans. No such clientelist programme can be seen in Marius' own land laws, which required cooperation from civil society – the senate, people, and other magistrates – and was not imposed by military decree.

Moreover, through the post-Marian period, land distributions were sporadic and volunteers were taken on with no promises or reasonable expectations of land at discharge. Soldiers both in the Marian and post-Marian periods largely went home peacefully when land demands were not immediately met, though land distributions became more common after Sulla's example in the aftermath of his civil war. Only during the civil wars did demands for land become more prevalent, though not always explicitly to agrarian ends, due to the soldiers' increased bargaining power. For example, during Caesar's civil war, mutineers demanded lands as a pretext for larger donatives and only during the Triumviral period did this pretext fall away.

There is also no evidence that Marius created or operated any system, formal or otherwise, to give veterans Roman citizenship on discharge. Before the Social War there is only a single example of a citizenship grant for martial valour. Most scholars believe that grants of citizenship to veterans became common only under the reign of the emperor Claudius in the 1st century AD.

Historiography
Modern historiography has regularly cast Marius as abolishing the propertied militia and replacing it with landless and mercenary soldiers. This belief emerges from the ancient literary sources, but rests on a relatively weak basis.

Most scholars have now abandoned the belief that Marius was responsible for any proletarianisation of the Roman legions in the early 1st century BC and that such proletarianisation occured at all, concluding that the reforms attributed to Marius are largely figments of modern historiography.

Ancient and 19th century views


Ancient narratives on the Marian reforms largely discussed it in service of the respective narrative's themes. Sallust, the closest source to 107 BC, wrote a narrative lamenting moral decline among the citizenry. To that end, he portrayed Marius' enrolment in 107 in terms of ambition and disregard for ancestral customs:

"[Marius] enrolled soldiers, not according to the classes​ in the manner of our forefathers, but allowing anyone to volunteer, for the most part the proletariat. Some say that he did this through lack of good men, others because of a desire to curry favour, since that class had given him honour and rank. As a matter of fact, to one who aspires to power the poorest man is the most helpful, since he has no regard for his property, having none, and considers anything honourable for which he receives pay."

Marius' open recruitment, as documented in Sallust, may also be explained not in terms of Marian ambition but also by his desire to recruit as large an army as possible to send to Africa, to do so quickly, or to do so without harming his popularity.

One of the other main sources is that of Valerius Maximus; he wrote, in a longer passage on the customs of the Roman army, that Marius disregarded its traditional recruitment practices due to his status as a novus homo, an aetiology which historians have disregarded as "puerile, naïve, and fanciful". Valerius Maximus' narrative is largely in the interest of creating exempla (moral parables) of traditions broken rather than conveying historical events.

Other sources, though largely far later, also associate Marius with allowing the capite censi to join in 107 BC: Plutarch, Florus, and Aulus Gellius. Plutarch's Life of Marius, depending on emendation, may claim that Marius enrolled slaves, which would be a profound exaggeration. Gellius' discussion indicates that there was some disagreement in the sources before him as to the year (during the Cimbric War in 104 or the Jugurthine War in 107 BC) in which Marius recruited the capite censi. However, other sources are entirely silent: for example, the abridgement of Livy's history entirely passes over the events from Marius' first consulship and Numidian command (108 – 105 BC), noting only that he was victor over Jugurtha, indicating that Livy or his epitomiser thought Marius' irregular levy unimportant.

It is likely, however, that most of the ancient narratives which connected the collapse of the free state to the self-serving armed proletarian did so in the context of civil war. As literary themes, they were then retrojected into the time of Marius and the Jugurthine War, more than two generations earlier.

The first time a modern historian posited and attributed to Marius a revolutionary and comprehensive reform was in an 1846 book by the German scholar Ludwig Lange. The hypothesis rested on the assumption that any differences between the army of Marius' time and that of Polybius' time could be attributed to a single reform event of which Marius could have been the only progenitor. The idea was spread by the extremely influential 19th century classicist Theodor Mommsen in the 1855 second volume of his Römische Geschichte, which served to bring the idea of the Marian reforms into the core of scholarship. It received more attention in Wilhelm Rüstow's 1857 book Geschichte der Infanterie which presented the Marian reforms – here conceived as a full overhaul including the abolition of the citizen cavalry, institution of a single form of heavy infantry, uniform equipment, and introduction of the cohort – as an established fact.

Rüstow's views were largely repeated uncritically by authors including Joachim Marquardt and Theodore Ayrault Dodge. By the early twentieth century, two major overviews in German played a substantial role in also spreading these views. The first was by Hans Delbrück in 1900; the second was by Johannes Kromayer and Georg Veith in 1928. While both noted that there were no ancient sources which described any putative large-scale reforms by Marius, they both largely repeated previous scholarship that accepted the Marian reforms as a revolutionary turning point for the Roman army. From there, this view moved into reference works like the Realencyclopädie, and then into Anglophone scholarship via Thomas Rice Holmes' book Caesar's conquest of Gaul and the highly cited 1928 overview The Roman legions by Henry Michael Denne Parker. Only after the second world war were these views re-examined.

Post-war critiques
The view inherited from the 19th century sources was overthrown in two articles published in 1949 and 1951 by Emilio Gabba, an Italian historian, which held that instead of being a revolutionary change, Marius' decision to enrol the poor was really the logical culmination of Roman army policy during the second century. According to Gabba, the Romans faced a manpower shortage for much of the century and, seeking men, progressively reduced the property qualification for legionary service. Marius' presumed reform then simply swept away the last vestige of a property qualification that by 107 BC had largely ceased to bind.

In these terms, the abolition of the property qualification was just another stage in the evolution of the Roman army on the long journey to the professional army of the Augustan age. With no sources indicating that the social background of the legions had changed much, if at all, Gabba attributed the notability of the episode to Marius' political opponents' fear that voluntary service undermined traditional methods of gaining political support.

Later historians also downplayed these reforms. Jacques Harmand, writing in the 1960s, contributed by noting how the dilectus (lit. 'selection') of conscripts continued through the 2nd century into the late republic; this undermined the theretofore assumption that volunteer service became dominant after 107 BC. Much of this work, however, did not carry over into the Anglophone scholarship until the 1980s.

Peter Brunt, in the 1971 book Italian manpower, also questioned the extent to which Polybius' descriptions reflected the army of the mid-second century, noting that many aspects therein were notably archaic and only could have been true in the early third century BC. Gabba's posited property level qualifications and Brunt's attacks on Polybian credibility broke one of the main assumptions of the 19th century German scholars, ie the Polybian army persisted largely unchanged until Marius' time. Brunt also found no evidence for assuming that volunteers took over the legions and instead concluded that the adsidui brought up by the traditional levy still dominated.

Contemporary historiography
The belief in the Marian reforms occurred by that point largely rested on the argument that they reflected a manpower shortage. William Harris first showed that complaints about conscription largely emerged only during campaigns which offered few prospects for plunder; this recast Marius' call in 107 BC for volunteers as Numidia not being a rich eastern kingdom on which Roman armies could engorge themselves. J W Rich then showed in a very influential 1983 article in Historia both that there was no general manpower shortage in Italy and that Marius' use of voluntary enlistment was in fact precedented, undermining the main proposed rationale for recruiting the proletarii. Further work on the demography of second century Italy, especially by Nathan Rosenstein in the early 2000s, showed more definitively the non-existence of a manpower shortage in the decades before Marius' first consulship.

François Cadiou, in a well-received 2018 book L'armée imaginaire, largely disproved the traditional narrative of Marian volunteers having much of an impact on the composition of the army, that the late republic's armies were made up largely of volunteers, and that those armies were largely drawn from the landless poor. Cadiou, moreover, argued that historians' unwillingness to discard the theory that Marius decisively changed army recruitment, even in the face of little evidence, emerges from the simplicity with which it explains the republic's collapse.

The important changes to the Roman army during the 1st century BC are now more attributed to the Social War and the civil wars from 49 to 31 BC. After the Social War, the state also started to keep men under arms for longer periods to maintain available experienced manpower; coupled with longer terms for commanders – Caesar and Pompey especially – client armies emerged but not in the 100s BC but rather in the decades before Caesar's civil war. The large-scale downsizing of Roman cavalry detachments, for example, likely emerged from the extension of citizenship to all of Italy. Because Italy's enfranchisement meant that Rome was now directly liable for the cavalry's upkeep rather than their local communities, Rome instead hired auxilia whose service was paid for by treaty.

Contrary to the traditional story of quiescent client armies following their generals, contemporary historiography has established that Roman soldiers during the civil wars needed to be convinced of the legitimacy of their generals' causes. For Sulla and Cinna, such appeals were rooted in the consuls' legitimacy and prerogatives given as a gift of the people. Client armies, instead of being a consequence of putative changes in recruitment, emerged from the prolonged civil wars – themselves fought between armies which believed they were defending the republic – and the bidding wars for military loyalty that waged concurrently with the actual fighting.

Modern sources