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Re: Sacrificing to standards
Dear David,
Thanks for your response.
>I am by no means an expert on the Roman army, but I looked into this
>issue several years ago and found some references to a cult of the
>standards (as I recall) in the Roman army subsequent to the Marian reform
>in what seemed to be some fairly standard works on the Roman army. My
>references are in a bibliography that is on our network server, which is
>down at them moment, but I'll dig them out and pass them along when it
>comes back up.
One thing that is clear about the army's habits: they offered sacrifices to
their emperor -- not strange: the emperor paid them. Whenever there were
sacrifices you had standards for each legion present, and incidentally there
were symbols of the emperor on the standards. These sacrifices can be seen
on Trajan's and M.Aurelius's columns, as well as a a panel from Hadrian that
ended up of the arch of Constantine. One could not construe from these
scenes that there were in fact sacrifices to standards. Coin evidence could
be less straightforward as there are fewer representation possibilities, and
I'd go with the sculptural representations.
I'll be interested in the bibliography to see from where the idea actually
comes. pHab gives a few problems for the identification of Kittim = Romans.
Yours,
Ian Hutchesson