eli5: How did old militaries (such as ancient Rome) manage to keep fed and hydrated thousands soldiers in long military campaigns over long distance and time?

Question

eli5: How did old militaries (such as ancient Rome) manage to keep fed and hydrated thousands soldiers in long military campaigns over long distance and time?

In: 8

Answer 1

Ancient Rome was a continent bestriding entity. Millions upon millions of people lived in the Roman Republic/Empire. There was a vast bureaucracy in place throughout the Roman Republic/Empire to manage it. This gave the Roman government and thus the army a vast pool of resources that they could work with, something that after the fall of the Western Roman Empire wouldn’t be seen again in Europe for many, many centuries.

You went from Rome being able to support an army in the hundreds of thousands to small medieval kingdoms who couldn’t support much of anything.