Why Was the Roman Army So Successful in Warfare?

This article is an edited transcript from Roman Legionaries with Simon Elliott, available on History Hit TV.

Dan has his regular catch-up with Simon Elliott on all things Roman. Why were the legionaries so successful, and how did they maintain that success for several centuries?

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The Roman Empire was not made up of superhumans. Throughout the lifespan of this powerful empire, the Romans lost numerous battles against various foes – Pyrrhus, Hannibal and Mithridates VI of Pontus to name but a few of Rome’s most famous adversaries.

Yet despite these setbacks, the Romans forged a vast empire that controlled most of western Europe and the Mediterranean. It was one of the most effective fighting machines ever created. So how were the Romans able to overcome these military setbacks and achieve such extraordinary success?

Resilience and grit

A number of examples all prove the one simple case that the Romans didn’t know how to lose in the long run. You can look at the defeats at a tactical level of battles such as Cannae against Hannibal, you can look at various engagements in the eastern Mediterranean, or examples like Teutoburg Forest where Varus lost his three legions – but the Romans always came back.

Dr Simon Elliott tells the story of Roman London's rise in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.

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What most opponents of Rome, particularly the Principate of Rome (from the age of Augustus through to the Diocletian reformation in the late 3rd century), didn’t tend to realise was that even if they won a tactical victory, the Romans themselves had one objective in these engagements and they pursued it relentlessly until they won.

It’s no better illustrated than if you look at the late Republican engagements against the Hellenistic world. There, you have these Hellenistic armies of Macedon and the Seleucid Empire fighting the Romans and realising at certain stages during battles that they may have lost and trying to surrender.

But the Romans kept on killing them because they had this relentless obsession with achieving their goals. So basically, the bottom line is the Romans always came back. If you beat them once they still came back.

Pyrrhus achieved two victories against the Romans and at one time was very close to making Rome submit. But the Romans came back and in the end emerged victorious in the war.

Glorious war

The reason why the Romans had such high resilience and grit is because of Roman society itself and especially, the desires of its nobility.

During Rome’s great age of conquest in the late Republic and early empire, a lot of it was initially driven by the opportunistic achievements of Roman nobility leading their military forces to obtain huge amounts of wealth and huge amounts of territory.

It was their desires for these things that led the Romans not only to conquer the Hellenistic world but also to defeat the Carthaginian Empire and various other foes. Furthermore, there was also a grit within the higher levels of Roman society.

In 1919, excavators working near Edinburgh in Scotland unearthed the largest hoard of Roman hacksilver ever found. The trove, containing mostly silver vessels but also some personal items and coins, was probably buried in the early 5th century AD - just as the legions were finally pulling out of Britannia.

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Elites were not just taught to be warriors, but to be lawyers and to attack people through law and defend themselves in legal situations.

For the Romans, it was therefore all about winning. It was all about resilience and grit and winning and always coming back to achieve their objective. The ultimate failure for a Roman leader military or political or otherwise wasn’t to actually lose the battle, but to lose the war.

The Romans thus wouldn’t call the war over until they’d won the war even though they may have lost one or two battles. They always came back.