formerly, the
general was at liberty to behead any man serving in his camp, and to
scourge with rods the staff-officer as well as the common soldier;
nor were such punishments inflicted merely on account of common
crimes, but also when an officer had allowed himself to deviate from
the orders which he had received, or when a division had allowed
itself to be surprised or had fled from the field of battle. On the
other hand, the new military organization necessitated a far more
serious and prolonged military training than the previous phalanx
system, in which the 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. Lastl