Army of the Roman Emperors: Archaeology and History

Roman soldiers did far more than fight. They built roads and fortifications, moved supplies, guarded frontiers and carried out duties that could resemble policing or tax collection. Much of that work is easier to picture from an excavated object than from an account of a famous campaign.

Thomas Fischer traces the army from the late Republic into Late Antiquity through its physical remains: weapons, armour, dress, forts and military buildings found across the empire. Hundreds of illustrations allow close comparisons between equipment from different places and periods, testing some familiar assumptions about how Roman soldiers looked and lived. Roman military specialist M. C. Bishop translated Fischer’s study into English.