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The quartermaster's challenge
Natural History, Feb, 2005 by T.J. Kelleher
Feeding the troops was just as important to the armies of ancient Rome as it is to the modern armies in Iraq. Grain, grain, and more grain was the basic diet, according to the second century B.C. historian Polybius. Each month, a Roman infantryman received four modii of wheat (the modius, an ancient Greek unit of dry measure, was about a third of a U.S. cubic foot). An auxiliary, or noncitizen, cavalryman received eight modii of wheat (presumably half for him and half for his horse) and thirty modii of barley (all for his horse). Of course, all that grain had to be stored somewhere.
Today the granaries of Roman forts have been leveled, but their foundations remain. Alan Richardson, an archaeologist based in the county of Cumbria in northern England, has calculated--on the basis of ground dimensions for two dozen granaries--how much floor space would have been allotted to each soldier's grain supply. His results show that each infantryman got five square feet, each cavalryman about seven and a half. Hence if Polybius was right, and cavalrymen were allotted nearly ten times the volume of food supplied to infantrymen, the cavalry forts probably needed resupply from a depot every two to four months, depending on such unknowns as whether the granaries had one story or two. Luckily for the troops, the Romans knew a thing or two about logistics. ("Granaries and garrisons in Roman forts," Oxford Journal of Archaeology 23:429-42, 2004)
COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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