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Last Updated: June 12, 2002

Contact: Chris Brantley, brant@erols.com.

Special Feature -- Book Reviews

Lawrence Keppie's The Making of the Roman Army

Reviewed by Paul Rice

The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire, by Lawrence Keppie (Oklahoma Univ. Press, March 1998) (Softcover).

This was pretty boring. Keppie's first two sentences are, "Not another book on the Roman army? Can there be anything new to say?"

He breezes through the first 600 odd years of Roman military history, and starts in earnest with Marius, going through the early Roman empire. He mostly presents information this reader already knew. If you aren't familiar with the legions, this might be a fair, if dry, reference.

Chapters are:

1. The Army of the Roman Republic
2. Marius's Mules
3. Caesar's Conquest of Gaul
4. Civil War
5. The Emergence of the Imperial Legions
6. The Age of Augustus
7. The Army of the Early Roman Empire

At the end he has a series of appendices which could serve as a good reference. If you ever want to know which legion was where when, this is the right book.

1. The Civil War Legions
2. The Origin and Early History of the Imperial Legions
3. New Legions Raised During the Empire
4. Legions Destroyed, or Disbanded.
5. Glossary of Military and Technical Terms
6. List of Dates
7. Notes on the Plates

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