The Roman military consisted of legions of men which fought with honor and bravery to defend their empire and serve their Caesar. The army's main power was the Praetorian Guard. Generals were given command of legions who often fought independently from the rest of the army. Legions were comprised of the lower classes or plebeian peoples. The soldiers of the Legions were poorly paid, yet pivotal in the expansion of the Roman Empire.
The elite of the Legions became members of the Praetorian Guard. These soldiers drew three times the pay of the legionary and also received donativa or handouts. The Praetorian Guard was also a large powerful force and the center of power for the army. This later changed when General Septimius Severus defeated the guard and restored the Roman Army to a mass army.
Some of the warfare and tactics used by the Romans were catapults, cavalry, soldiers mounted on elephants, naval warfare, heavy infantry, and others. Originally the Roman tactics were simple. The soldiers of the Legions stood side by side in lines and were several rows deep. In these tactics known by the Greeks as a phalanx, the soldiers held up their shields as armor and used their spears as an offensive weapon. The intent of this maneuver was to use the spears to wipe out their enemy. The Romans often fought using a modified phalanx where groups of soldiers broke out of the phalanx, inflicted damage and then returned to the protection of the phalanx.
In 326 B.C.E., the Romans abandoned the phalanx and used the maniple. The maniple was one hundred twenty soldiers, as the main unit of organizing the army. Some weapons changed in this new tactic, such as the long spear, replaced by the javelin, the cutting sword, replaced by a stabbing sword, and the round shield, replaced by an oblong shield. The purpose of the maniple was to hurl the heavy, seven foot long javelins at the enemy to shock them, then to charge and utilize the stabbing swords to rout the enemy. This method was more effective than the phalanx because instead of relying on a shocks caused by the charge, the maniple provided rapid fast shocks by using the javelin. The maniple is similar to some of the tactics of more modern warfare where a machine gun was used to shock the enemy, and a bayonet charge followed. These maniples were the war tactics the Romans utilized to conquer the world.
The Romans also began using the sea as a battlefield as well. Naval warfare in Roman times is very different from the way it was in more modern times. In more modern naval wars, the navies were used to fire cannons at each other and sink the enemies ship to win a battle. In Roman times the ships were basically floating battlefields. The objective was to maneuver your ship so it was next to the enemy's ship and send your soldiers over on to the other ship. Close combat ensued and battles on the decks of ships were very similar to those on land.
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