e solidity of the mass kept even the inexperienced
in their ranks. If nevertheless no special soldier-class sprang up,
but on the contrary the army still remained, as before, a burgess
army, this object was chiefly attained by abandoning the former mode
of ranking the soldiers according to property(22) and arranging them
according to length of service. The Roman recruit now entered among
the light-armed "skirmishers" (-rorarii-), who fought outside of the
line and especially with stone slings, and he advanced from this step
by step to the first and then to the second division, till at length
the soldiers of long service and experience were associated together
in the corps of the -triarii-, which was numerically the weakest but
imparted its tone and spirit to the whole army.

The excellence of this military organization, which became the primary
cause of the superior political position of the Roman community,
chiefly depended on the three great military principles of maintaining
a reserve, of combining the close and distant modes of fighting, and
of combining the offensive and the defensive. The system of a reserve
was already foreshadowed in the earlier employment of the cavalry,
but it was now completely developed by the partition of the army into
three divisions and the reservation of the flower of the veterans for
the last and decisive shock. While the Hellenic phalanx had developed
the close, and the Oriental squadrons of horse armed with bows and
light missile spears the distant, modes of fighting respectively, the
Roman combination of the heavy javelin with the sword produced results
similar, as has justly been remarked, to those attained in modern
warfare by the introduction of bayonet-muskets; the volley of javelins
prepared the way for the sword encounter, exactly in the same way as a
volley of musketry now precedes a charge with the bayonet. Lastly,
the elaborate system of encampment allowed the Romans to combine the
advantages of defensive and offensive war and to decline or give
battle according to circumstances, and in the latter case to fight
under the ramparts of their camp just as under the walls of a
fortress--the Roman, says a Roman proverb, conquers by sitting still.

Origin of the Manipular Legion

That this new military organization was in the main a Roman, or at any
rate Italian, remodelling and improvement of the old Hellenic tactics
of the phalanx, is plain. If some germs of the system of