Gaius then introduced measures to redress thirty years of complaints about the ruinous cost of service in the legions. The state had provided arms, equipment, and clothes for the legions through publicani contractors but always deducted expenses from a soldier’s pay—a ruinous burden for the already impoverished legionaries. Gaius passed a law that the state would stop deducting the expenses. As with the evolution of the grain dole, it would take a century to move from the ad hoc armies of the middle Republic to the permanent legions of Augustus, but Gaius’s law to move expenses from the
...more
