How ancient armies, such as the Roman Legions, able to feed themselves during wartime campaigns?
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For reasons already mentioned, it is why in ancient times there was usually a war-fighting season, especially in Greece and other places where citizen militias were the bulk of the fighting force. Plant your crops, go wage war for the summer, then come home and harvest.
Rome had an AMAZING transportation & logistics infrastructure, honestly it would not be rivaled for a thousand years. Rome had specific administrative positions that would ensure grain made it from Africa & Egypt (plus Gaul, Sicily, and a handful of other productive areas) to the soldiers on the Germanic & Danube limes (the Eastern armies in Syria were much closer and easier supplied.)
Rome had a hub and spoke system, where a hubs like Cologone, Trier, Lugdunum, etc… operated as a grain warehouses which then distributed the grain down the spokes to smaller graineries (very similar to how fed-ex works today.) If there was a shortfall at one hub grain was pulled from others to even it out. This was the same for salt, olive oil, and some wines (other wines were sold by travelling merchants.) In fact we get salary today from the Roman word for salt because it was part of their payment. Anyway other food items (ones that were perishable) like meats, cheeses, etc… were acquired from local sources usually on cash payment, of course sometimes they were seized. Now this applied to Roman soldiers inside the borders of the Empire. Once they went on campaign things changed.
Caesar speaks of requisitioning grain (corn as they called it) from allied Gauls during his entire Gallic war, in fact ensuring those supplies was the job of one of his tribunes. There were times, such as sieges or marches through the desert, when rations became unavailable and soldiers just dealt with it. In one story in the Civil wars, Pompey had isolated Caesars troops and they were forced to make bread out of roots they scrounged (they threw the loaves at Pompeys soldiers who thought they were beasts for being able to maintain in such conditions) there is another story of Justinians troops having to eat the leather from their saddles and other gear because no food was available and the supply line was cut, but these was only because the supply line was interrupted.
When Roman legions would leave Roman territory and enter say Persia or Dacia they would still have secured supply lines, they would even detach cohorts to maintain these supply lines. In addition to that Romans practiced full scale pillaging of the land, this served two purposes, to give them food and to deny food to their enemies.
Rome did not have the massive baggage trains full of camp followers that we saw in the middle ages, but they definitely had slaves to help setup camp, cook, etc… Additionally there were always merchants (mercatores in latin) that followed the soldiers and sold a variety of goods, later emperors chastised their troops for wasting their pay of frivolities and luxuries the mercatores offered them (and usually for ridiculously high prices.)
and as a sidenote think about just how much grain was needed for a 50k army. If each man only ate 2kg of grain a day (which is what most think their ration was) you are talking 100,000 kg (or 50 tons) of grain needing to be delivered each day, that kind of logistics 2000 years ago boggles the imagination.
Here is a series by youtuber Invicta about it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=759ReQW5PNw&list=PLkOo_Hy3liEKnlCRh31otegA_pVIPlOMT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=759ReQW5PNw&list=PLkOo_Hy3liEKnlCRh31otegA_pVIPlOMT)
When Julius Ceaser invaded Britain for the first time his men were foraging when the Britonian tribes first attacked. Foraging was a part of war preparation.
Supply lines were a real thing back in the day, plus the army could requisition supplies from friendly population centers, trade with locals, forage for supplies and pillage enemy settlements.
Disclaimer: I am a history fan not a historian. I’m in the middle of Anabasis which is about a group of 10000 Greek mercenaries hired by the brother of the Persian emperor to attack the emperor in a gambit to rule. Although I suspect Xenophon has some serious biases and may at times be an unreliable narrator it is a mostly historical account. I don’t really have an overview on food for ancient armies in general but I found this book insightful.
The availability of food is a serious consideration so far in this story. Being mercenaries the Greeks had to buy their food and as they moved through Persia they often encountered cities and towns that although were controlled by the emperor were not outright attacked and they resupplied at their markets. There was a time when moving along the Euphrates that they mention their animals dying for lack of anything to graze on and having to live on only the meat they could hunt. When needing to retreat out of the middle of Persia a major consideration in route was that they had already taken everything off the land they could eat on the way there and would have to take a different way or starve.
There are so many questions this book has raised for me. I can see a city resupplying 10000 soldiers but sometimes they come across towns and I suppose they must buy everything edible in those towns. At first I was like no way would they sell all their food but then I realized that they were most likely making a lot of money and could buy food with the proceeds. The living off the land part seemed weird to me, like a hundred people I think would have a hard time living off the land much less 10,000. But they were starving during this time so…
What I’ve realized is that warfare was totally different then. A general in the 19th century CE described warfare as an extension of politics. Today war is engaged for some particular goal and the actual fighting is an expense. In ancient times there may have been some overarching purpose but sacking a city, plundering it and selling its population into slavery made a lot of money. There is even a term for economies that are dependent in profitable war call a ‘conquest economy’. My feeling is that ancient armies needed be on the move going from either friendly city/town to the next for resupply or hostile city/town to conquer and take supplies.
The book *Hannibal: The Military Autobiography of Rome’s Greatest Enemy* by Richard A. Gabriel has a great insight into this. Essentially, every army was followed by a massive baggage train of hundreds (if not thousands) of pack animals carrying supplies. What couldn’t be carried was requisitioned (either with compensation for friends, or simply taken from foes) from nearby towns and villages; fodder for the animals was partly carried, partly supplied by pasture land. On top of that, if things got particularly rough, foraging parties could be sent out to gather what they could from surrounding areas.
Some generals also specifically planned their route along coastlines in order to allow resupplying from ships, which comes with its own issues. Alexander the Great planned to do this with his admiral Nearchus on his way back from the Hindu Kush; however they lost touch with each other and it ended in a very significant number of Alexander’s army dying of starvation.
1. They didn’t fight in winter.
2. They had baggage trains with supplies like we have today.
3. They ‘foraged’ in friendly areas and ‘pillaged’ in unfriendly ones.
4. They suffered and starved when 1-3 didn’t work out for them.
A valid tactic was also to attsck foraging parties. I forgot which one of Ceasars campaigns bit his foragers were harrased at every turn. Messed him up pretty good through attrition.
It’s also important to remember that “ancient armies” were almost never larger than a few thousand strong. It’s not that hard to supply a small town completely by truck. So not unreasonable to think that within controlled territory they would be supplied by nearby friendly towns, especially considering that many of the soldiers would be coming from those towns
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