carried before the cavalry and the three divisions of
heavy infantry, disappeared; there came instead the ensigns of the new
cohorts, and the new standard which Marius gave to the legion as a
whole--the silver eagle. While within the legion every trace of the
previous civic and aristocratic classification thus disappeared, and the
only distinctions henceforth occurring among the legionaries were purely
military, accidental circumstances had some decades earlier given
rise to a privileged division of the army alongside of the legions--
the bodyguard of the general. Hitherto selected men from the allied
contingents had formed the personal escort of the general; the
employment of Roman legionaries, or even men voluntarily offering
themselves, for personal service with him was at variance with the
stern disciplinary obligations of the mighty commonwealth. But when the
Numantine war had reared an army demoralized beyond parallel, and Scipio
Aemilianus, who was called to check the wild disorder, had not been able
to prevail on the government to call entirely new troops under arms, he
was at least allowed to form, in addition to a number of men whom the
dependent kings and free cities outside of the Roman bounds placed at
his disposal, a personal escort of 500 men composed of volunteer Roman
burgesses (p. 230). This cohort drawn partly from the better classes,
partly from the humbler personal clients of the general, and hence
called sometimes that of the friends, sometimes that of the headquarters
(-praetoriani-), had the duty of serving in the latter (-praetorium-)
in return for which it was exempt from camp and entrenching service
and enjoyed higher pay and greater repute.

Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform

This complete revolution in the constitution of the Roman army seems
certainly in substance to have originated from purely military motives;
and on the whole to have been not so much the work of an individual,
least of all of a man of calculating ambition, as the remodelling which
the force of circumstances enjoined in arrangements which had become
untenable. It is probable that the introduction of the system of inland
enlistment by Marius saved the state in a military point of view from
destruction, just as several centuries afterwards Arbogast and Stilicho
prolonged its existence for a time by the introduction of foreign
enlistment. Nevertheless, it involved a complete--although not yet
devel