Hi
My question involves the absorption of soldiers of different cultural/ethnic groups to fight with the Roman imperial army. Was there a lot of internal rebellion within the army as a result? What was the incentive to serve an army that had conquered them? How did the Romans pull it off? I look forward to your replies
davidmich
Reported for forum change.
Moved to General Questions from ATMB.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
My sense is that a major ‘internal rebellion’ wouldn’t have been tolerated. Not that it didn’t happen to a lesser degree, but if you stepped too far out of line there was always someone ready to make an example out of you.
Foreign soldiers probably weren’t happy about being drafted into the army, but as soldiers they were well taken care of, at least compared to slaves.
One had to be a Roman citizen to join a legion. If you wanted to fight in the Roman army but weren’t a citizen, you could try to sign up for one of the auxilia units. No matter what kind of unit you joined you might be posted somewhere else in the empire from where you came from.
It’s my understanding that a lot of the auxilia units were composed of geographically/ethnically homogenous recruits, but since one of the benefits of serving was that you’d get Roman citizenship at the end of your term, you’d expect it to be biased towards the more pro-Roman sorts. They certainly didn’t just conscript random people from all over as your question suggests.
That was one method, yes. 
And note that your auxilia unit would probably be posted far away from your homeland. It’s not like you’re recruited and next week you’re back on the streets of your hometown but working for the Romans now. You’d be shipped off somewhere where you had no local sympathies.
So you have loyalty to your particular unit, because they’re your buddies, and when your boss tells you that you’re marching off to such and such a place to fight such and such a group, you obey orders. You don’t rebel unless your boss decides to rebel.
Well, at least in the early Julio-Claudian imperial system ( the answer will vary a bit depending on the period ) you had two distinct groupings. The core Roman legions per se, all Roman citizens, forming the primary heavy infantry backbone and the auxilia providing most of the cavalry, lighter infantry and specialty missile troops ( maybe 40-60% of the total Roman forces depending on time and location ). The auxilia forming the non-Roman parts of the Roman army were a disparate group, including allied troops serving as subjects of client states of Rome and non-citizens of the empire recruited on a voluntary basis. So the Romans didn’t conscript auxiliaries much - they were mostly recruited and served for pay and sometimes other privileges ( for the upper classes ).
That said auxilia units were vulnerable to rebellion if the states/tribes they were recruited from went into revolt themselves and they were a little less reliable in times of stress generally. But the Roman legions had what Luttwak called “escalation dominance” - in a prolonged campaign the more reliable citizen legionaries could usually prevail over auxilia in a straight fight.
So internal army revolts could and did happen and could be pretty nasty. But the fact that the usually much more loyal citizen units could eventually outfight their foreign/non-Roman complements and the fact that said non-Romans were mostly paid volunteers tended to limit the revolts into occasional flare-ups rather than continuous ones.
Golf clap
Remember, service guarantees citizenship.
With certain notable exceptions (the Jews, in particular) nations conquered by the Romans tended not to remain very resentful about it for very long. Life was better - the economy was better, things were more peaceful - for most people within the empire than outside it, and few (Jews again being perhaps the main exception) cared much about national freedom, or even national identity, which are largely relatively modern ideological inventions. You had simply exchanged being ruled, and maybe oppressed, by some local king, for being ruled, probably more competently and often less oppressively, by a far off emperor and his local officials (who, unlike the old local king, were subject to rules and constraints from above and administered a consistent and relatively fair system of laws). Few people had much incentive to rebel, especially not on nationalistic grounds.
Have you ever looked at how many times davidmich opens threads in ATMB that don’t belong there? I’m surprised that the moderators put up with this. They have far more patience for this sort of thing than I do.
It depended. By the Third century, many auxilla units and formations had history going back hundreds of years and the differences between them and the regular legions were minimal. It was not unknown for a unit named for one ethnicity to have it designation become nominal after a while. Citizens could and did join the auxilla, indeed the descendants of those given Roman citizenship often joined the “family” legion.
Finally, it is not totally true that troops were posted far away from where they were raised. The primary concern was need. Auxillaries could serve where they were raised, if they had skills that were useful in that area (say Armenia) or have be an area where there was a lot of activity, the Euphartes frontier.
+1
You’re not right about internal rebellion not being tolerated. Think of how many successful military coups Rome experienced. And, once you get into the Empire, many of those military coups made non-Romans emperors.
And even apart from that, many legions had substantial rivalries, often based on regional origin.
I started reading Josephus a while ago, and after the chapter on the century before the Romans arrived, I would be very surprised if most Jews did not appreciate the stability brought by Roman government.
(What have the Romans ever done for us?)
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Sorry. I just had to get that out of my system. :o
One thing not yet mentioned is that internal discipline in the Roman military was, by modern standards, sometimes incredibly harsh - floggings and capital punishments of various sorts were standard for some things we’d consider not quite so bad (“abusing one’s person”, for instance!) I’m sure that also applies if soldiers were fighting with each other over ethnic rivalries.