craven.fr

I have written before about how the Romans of the late republic and empire used foreign cavalry rather than mustering their own forces, with Roman citizens instead always fighting as footsoldiers. Having now finished book VII of Cæsar's de Bello Gallico (ahead of schedule on my New Year's resolution!), I should amend that article now to nuance it a bit:

Beset on all sides by the Gaulish revolt under Vercingetorix, as Cæsar calls forth reinforcements we do see him bringing in horse from Spain and Italy, and to use Roman knights (which I understand to mean Roman soldiers on horseback, as in the incident I described in my first article, not actual equites) when he could no longer depend on his Gaulish allies. He did, however, hang on to his Hæduan cavalry for as long as he possibly could, which shows that using Romans on horseback was a last resort. And for further proof of this, one need only look at chapter LXV:

Cæsar, quòd hostes equitatu superiores esse intellegebat et interclusis omnibus itineribus nullâ re ex provinciâ atque Italiâ sublevari poterat, trans Rhenum in Germaniam mittit ad eas civitates quas superioribus annis pacaverat, equitesque ab his arcessit et levis armaturæ pedites, qui inter eos prœliari consuerant. Eorum adventu, quòd minus idoneis equis utebantur, a tribunis militum reliquisque equitibus Romanis atque evocatis equos sumit Germanisque distribuit.

So, although in a pinch the Romans could muster cavalry on their own, it is clear that they were either not comfortable, or did not consider themselves to be competent, fighting on horseback in Cæsar's time: no sooner do his Gaulish allies desert him, than he makes his first priority to raise cavalry among other allies—and, as amazingly to me as the fact that the Romans entrusted such an important part of their fighting force to foreigners—he even equips them with horses taken from the Romans when he sees that their horses are better! (This may also have been a way to ingratiate himself to them so they would fight better.) At any rate it turned out to be critical that he did this, since the ensuing victory of the Cæsar-allied German cavalry over the Gauls was the turning point in the war, since the Gauls were greatly disheartened, "quòd equitatu, quâ maxime parte exercitus confidebant, erant pulsi".

As a modern analogy, I would have thought that the Roman situation would be like if the United States had no Air Force of its own and just relied on NATO allies for air support! In practice, however, the Romans' superior knowledge of military strategy and discipline, and engineering know-how, gave them military superiority over the Gauls and Germani even when these were both physically stronger, and had the benefit of stronger cavalry.

It is interesting to notice how the Romans in this have some kinship with the inhabitants of that other mediterranean peninsula, the Greeks, who also distrusted fighting on horseback (though they had no qualms about chariots). I hold with those who argue that the origin of the centaurs is rooted in prehistorical Greek tales of the fearsome tribes to the north who fought on then-unfamiliar horseback, all the more so since Nestor's allusion to the centaurs in book I of the Iliad (which I'm citing here from a 1609 edition available on Google Books) can easily be read that way—the text itself is ambiguous enough that it is only because it is traditionally held to refer to a centaur war that we take it for an allusion:

        ... ἄμφω δὲ νεωτέρω ἐστὸν ἐμεῖο·
ἤδη γάρ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ καὶ ἀρείοσιν ἠέ περ ὑμῖν
ἀνδράσιν ὡμίλησα, καὶ οὔ ποτέ μ᾽ οἵ γ᾽ ἀθέριζον.
οὐ γάρ πω τοίους ἴδον ἀνέρας οὐδὲ ἴδωμαι,
οἷον Πειρίθοόν τε Δρύαντά τε ποιμένα λαῶν
Καινέα τ᾽ Ἐξάδιόν τε καὶ ἀντίθεον Πολύφημον
Θησέα τ᾽ Αἰγεΐδην, ἐπιείκελον ἀθανάτοισιν·
κάρτιστοι δὴ κεῖνοι ἐπιχθονίων τράφεν ἀνδρῶν·
κάρτιστοι μὲν ἔσαν καὶ καρτίστοις ἐμάχοντο
φηρσὶν ὀρεσκῴοισι καὶ ἐκπάγλως ἀπόλεσσαν.

Are Homer's φῆρες ὀρεσκῷοι really centaurs, as so many English translations claim, or is that our anachronistic reading in light of later mythology, and could they not actually be "mountain-dwelling beasts" (whether actual beasts or perhaps even a metaphor for beast-like barbarians)? I don't have anywhere near the knowledge to weigh in with any authority one way or the other, but it seems ambiguous to me.