Totems and symbols

[Greg Rose]

Gaius Marius was a Roman politician and general who achieved command against
the Celto-Germanic migration which threatened to invade northern Italy
in the last decade of the second century B.C., largely as a result of his
success in the Jugarthine War in Numidia.  He was elected to five successive
consulships (a hitherto unheard of practice) while preparing to meet the
threat of the Teutones and Cimbri.  Roman campaigning in Spain and Asia
Minor in the second century, coming on the heels of the Second and Third
Punic Wars, had seriously depleted the ranks of freeholding farmers of the
requisite degree of wealth for service in the legions (the so-called
adsiqui -- this depletion also played a major role in encouraging the
Roman measures of the Gracchi brothers twenty years before).  Marius opened
the ranks of the legions to recruitment from the proletarii (those who did
not have sufficient wealth to qualify for the draft as adsiqui), completed
the reorganization of the legion from the manipular to the cohortal
structure (a process which Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemillianus had
begun in the Second and Third Punic Wars), and redesigned the equippage of the
legionnary soldier (including more equipment useful for building roads
and fortifications in the gear of the private soldier and mandating use
of the pilum spear).  Prior to Marius the legion had been a more ad-hoc
unit, composed of maniples organized into a legion for a specific campaign.
The creation of the more flexible cohort formation (which, as I said, began
in the wars against the Carthaginians) was extended to all legions and
the cohorts were assigned to specific legions which were numbered and which
retained that numbering across campaigns.  In order to facilitate loyalty
to these more permanent legions, Marius devised a standard legionnary
standard (known as the aquila, or "eagle") and encouraged a religious cult
around the numen/genius of the legion symbolized by the standard (a numen
or genius was the abstract "spirit" of a concrete thing -- recall that
the Roman state religion, despite its Hellenistic anthropomorphic veneer,
retained a fundamentally animistic element to which worship of numina and
genii owed its origin).  Soldiers sacrificed to the numen or genius of the
legion in front of the standard, and its loss was both a disgrace and a
sacrilege.

I hope this explains the matter a little more clearly.  BTW, Marius is a
prominent character in Colleen McCullough's _First Man in Roman_ series of
novels -- they are an entertaining read, but she manufactures things out of
whole cloth and adopts interpretations of the primary sources which make
people who study the Roman Republic for a living tear out their hair.

Hossein/Greg