IMPERIUM MILITIAE

THE ROMAN MILITARY LAW

Abstract

The most common idea in Romance studies is that
Romans, as practical people, didn’t conduct theoretical research on their
country or their army, but they gradually built them both. Meanwhile,
they reformed and upgraded it, so that they could respond to the
challenges of their age. Moreover, the basis of their research was not
explicit doctrines, or prior concepts, in fact they used their own, or the
experience of others, to find concrete solutions to daily problems. Just as
the Hellenic romanophile Polibius (200-120 B.C), in his work Historia,
asks the crucial question: ”Is it possible to have such an unreliable man
who is not interested in how the Romans, with their municipal structure,
managed to conquer the whole world”? - in the same way the author of
this paper, as much as its content allows, humbly and unpretentiously
tries to answer the crucial question: “What kind of military structure
created and defended one of the biggest and most enduring empires in
world’s history, and what rules governed it”?