Firstly, Maximus Flavius wrote:

"Another very interesting topic to this specific thread would be the objects of worship, or "shrines" the soldiers carried with them to camps and battles! We will have to do some research on it, don't you agree?"

Yep i do, and to start the ball rolling there is a nice little bronze portable shrine to mercury found inside the fort at Wallsend, Hadrians Wall. Admittedly its a fourth century piece and is equally likely to have been owned by a merchant, but i like it. It is currently at tyne and wear museums, and i will get a picture of it up as soon as i can. Otherwise check out the English heritage guidebook for a picture:

Hadrian's Wall: a souvenir guide to the Roman Wall, 2000 reprint edition, page 25. there's nothing in the text that helps but the picture is nice.



OKay secondly GaiusTraianus Marcius wrote:


"The Roman military never tried to force Roman gods and goddess upon cultures that had been conquered but they introduced their gods and goddess by their pratices they preformed.
Many times to stop the unrest in a region Roman Gods and Goddess were identified with local deities, thereby many cults were started and as legios and naval stations was established outside the borders of Italia, so to was the number of different military cults."

Right i don't totally agree here. You have to bare in mind we only have one side of the coin - the Roman one. Although yes, the Romans were content to let *most* foreign gods alone and often adopt them, the question of whether or not they forced their own onto the local population is a bit tricky. What do you class as force? We might not be talking Spanish Inquisition here, but there are a lot of delicate and subversive ways to effectively force people around to your way of thinking, without them realising it. For example, isnt identifying a Roman god to a local deity a way of forcing your ideas onto them? You take a local god - Maponus for instance, and identify him with your own, in this case Apollo. You latch onto one similar facet of the gods, and effectively morph them - this is impossible to accomplish without altering the original form of the native god, and is a brilliant way of imposing your culture, values and ultimately your will onto the conquered people, and most the time its not noticed. A very obvious way to look at it is representations of Isis - compare the Eygptian Isis to the Roman Isis to the provincial Isis - they are not, in essence, the same goddess in anything more than a superficial capacity.


"Remember usually officers were educated for military service and the men that was required to fight or voltuneered as common legionaries or navalis had little or no education."

Okay this depends on your interpretation of education. if you mean they read literature, etc, then no the common soldier was pretty uneducated. However, a lot of them could read and write - just look at the graffitti - and a huge percentage MUST have been bi-lingual to keep the whole system going. The debate over literacy is still ongoing and is a bit complex to go into here, but as i side with "most could probably read something," i personally think that we underestimate the education of most soldiers. i might be wrong.


"To them Oaths, honor, and loyalty was important for them religion was their way of explaining why nature acted the way it did, so Omens, offerings and their gods and goddess were important part of their lifes."

Although i am not denying it was significant, I do not think that religion was as major a part of life in the Roman Empire than has generally been assumed, nor do i feel that the Roman army was as superstitious or honourable as is often portrayed.

Oaths: Just because people take an oath doesnt mean they keep it, or even mean to keep it. Its not unknown for the odd unit to rebel now and again. And to be fair since we're not even sure what the oaths were - or whether they were taken in the language of the recruit - how do we know what they meant to people? We know that the Roman Army was not above breaking its word over alliances and treaties, so i feel their approach to the sanctity of an oath was somewhat flexible - as in it was ok for them to break it, but the gods help anyone who broke thier word to Rome.
Honour: Whose honour are we talking about? To Mithraists yes honour was probably a recognisable concept, but i doubt it was so to the common soldiers, particularly those individuals who kept the loaded dice on Hadrian's Wall, or the family who buried the two unfortunate individuals under the tavern floor at the Housesteads vici (and since everyone in the vici had dealings with the fort, i would be surprised if there wasnt a soldier involved there somewhere!). Military where also notoriously corrupt in dealings with the general populous as the only time they faced *justice* was in military law courts, which were hardly unbiased.
Loyalty. Right Loyalty to who? what period? which unit? again we have units who rebel, the army fighting among itself to put a candidate for Emperor on the throne and so on. Military obedience was probably enforced more because the auxiliary units were almost always moved a long way from home, to reduce the likelihood of them rebelling against their Roman masters. Obviously there would be loyalty on personal levels, but this is more a personal choice of individuals, and impossible to assess.

As for the importance of religion - well my major argument here would be the Vindolanda tablets. You could probably count on one hand the number of times a religious reference is made, which is surprising considering the nature of the text discovered and the shere volume of letters found. Surely, if religion was such a public and integral part of peoples lives it would feature more in their corrsepondence, particulalry between people seperated by long distances? Furthermore, the curse tablets from Bath paint a completely different picture of how the gods were regarded, the one springing to mind being the threat to (i think) Neptune saying that if he does not fulfill a request, he will not recieve the leggings to go with the tunic. For me, the tablets - both Vindolanda and Bath - serve to illustrate how much we assume about Roman culture, and how dangerous it is to do so, for in truth we dont understand how religion was regarded by the people of Rome.