Women and Families in the Roman Legions

It is a leather shoe, smaller than a man’s hand. Beside it lies a second one, smaller still, barely larger than an apple. Both were found inside a Roman barracks. Both belonged to people who, according to imperial law, should never have been there. Anyone exploring the world of Roman legion women stumbles onto a remarkable truth: for more than two centuries, thousands of women and children lived alongside the legionaries without officially existing. They cooked, gave birth, loved and died. On parchment, they were invisible.

The research of the past two decades has overturned the old image of the all-male camp. Penelope Allison of the University of Leicester, in her project Engendering Roman Military Spaces, has demonstrated that women lived not only in the suburban settlements outside the walls but also within the camp itself. Spindle whorls beside swords, glass beads under barrack floorboards, hairpins among the rubble of soldiers’ quarters. These finds tell a story that no inscription ever recorded.

The Marriage Ban of Augustus: A Two-Century Double Standard

Around 13 BC, Emperor Augustus issued a law that would shape the family life of Roman soldiers for the next two centuries. Active legionaries and auxiliaries were not allowed to marry. Any existing marriage was automatically dissolved upon enlistment. The reasons were pragmatic and cold: discipline was to be preserved, redeployments were to remain unburdened by family, and the imperial treasury saved itself widow’s pensions and pay supplements for wives and children.

The ban remained in force until Septimius Severus reformed it in 197 AD. That is a span of more than two hundred years in which generations of soldiers lived together with women, fathered children, built houses, all of it inside a legal grey zone. Anyone reading novels set in first-century Britain, such as the Eagle Saga Sons of Rome, steps directly into that world: an empire that officially sent celibate warriors into the field while tolerating crowded camp villages full of families everywhere it went.

Who Was the focaria? Women Without Status, Women Without Rights

The companion of a soldier had a simple name: focaria. Translated literally, it means „the one at the hearth”. On gravestones, the word uxor (wife) also appears, but it was a social rather than a legal title. These women came from three main groups: enslaved women whom soldiers had bought from their pay and kept, freedwomen from the camp settlements, and peregrinae, that is, non-Roman natives of the province in question.

In Britain around 47 AD, this often meant daughters and widows from the tribes of the Trinovantes, Catuvellauni and Cantiaci. The wife of a Thracian auxiliary cavalryman might come from a village on the banks of the Thames. The relationship was safe under the protection of his sword, but legally it was nothing. If the soldier died in battle without leaving a will, his focaria inherited nothing. She had no claim to a survivor’s pension, no protection, no citizenship. She vanished from the record as quietly as she had entered it.

Canabae and Vici: The Camp Villages as Home

Right against the wall of the legionary fortress, a second town grew. The Romans called it canabae legionis, the camp village of the legion. In Britain, Camulodunum, modern Colchester, was the most important site of this kind. From 43 or 44 AD, the Legio XX Valeria was stationed there, and around the wooden ramparts of the fortress sprang up market stalls, workshops, taverns, temples, dwellings. Merchants from Gaul brought wine and olive oil, British farmers sold grain and livestock, and in the narrow alleys lived the families of the soldiers.

Although the canabae lay legally on military land and the legionary legate was the supreme judge there, a mixed culture flourished in these settlements that gave the province its face. Beside the smaller auxiliary forts, the vici emerged from the late first century onward, more independent village settlements two or three kilometres away. They were the living rooms of the Roman camp life: here children learned Latin alongside their mothers’ tongues, here Roman festivals were celebrated next to Celtic rituals, here the empire mingled with the conquered.

When the Legio XX was redeployed westward in 49 AD, veterans took over the former camp. The canabae became the colonia Claudia Victricensis, the first Roman citizens’ city in Britain. Twelve years later, that very city burned to the ground when Boudicca came down upon it with her Iceni and Trinovantes. The women and children of the first generation, those born inside the barracks, died in the flames of their own home.

Castris Born: The Fate of the Children

A bitter word turns up on Roman inscriptions: castris. It means „born in the camp”. These children were Roman in spirit but not in law. Because the father had not officially married the mother, and the mother was usually not a Roman citizen, the child followed her status. A boy whose father was a legionary from Italy and whose mother came from a British village did not become a Roman citizen. He could not inherit land, hold office or sign a contract that would stand in a Roman court.

If the father fell, the thin protection his rank had offered fell with him. The boy might one day enlist in an auxiliary unit himself, while the daughter often had no choice but to marry another soldier or trader of the camp village. An entire generation grew up between two worlds: too Roman for the tribes, too foreign for the administration.

The Legion’s Train: Calones, Lixae and a Second Army

A legion on the march was never just a legion. Behind the five thousand soldiers came a baggage train almost as large. For each legion, the quartermasters reckoned with about one thousand to twelve hundred calones, armed slaves who served as muleteers, porters and camp helpers. They wore helmets, hence their nickname galearii, and could fight in emergencies. They dug ditches, pitched tents, hauled water and tended the animals.

Alongside them travelled the lixae, free sutlers, smiths, scribes, healers, priests, prostitutes and merchants. They were not combatants, but they had their own order within the camp. When the legion built a new permanent base, the train pitched its stalls right outside the wall, and out of this makeshift market often grew the later canabae. Among them ran children, women cooked, women ran small businesses. The image of the sober, marching Roman army matches reality only halfway.

Tacitus reports a striking scene on the Rhine in 14 AD (Annals 1.40). During a soldiers’ mutiny, Germanicus must send his pregnant wife Agrippina and his small son Gaius, later known as Caligula, away from the camp to bring them to safety. The scandal was not the mutiny itself but the fact that a high-ranking Roman woman and a small child had even been there in the first place. The outrage reveals what was considered normal: women were present. Highborn women were not supposed to be.

The Veteran’s Diploma: A Bronze Tablet That Changed Three Lives

After twenty-five years of service, an auxiliary soldier received a gift that overturned his life and that of his family. A bronze tablet, the diploma militare, in two copies, one for the soldier and one for the imperial archive. Stamped with witnesses and date, it stated that the bearer received Roman citizenship, the conubium, that is, the right to enter into a legally valid marriage with a non-citizen, and the retroactive recognition of any children already born as Roman citizens.

That was the moment when three shadows became three citizens. The veteran could finally call his focaria his wife, his son could enlist in the legion, his daughter could marry a citizen, inherit land and have her voice count. The bronze tablet was more precious than any pay. Hundreds of such diplomas survive today in European museums, each one proof of a life that began in shadow and ended in light.

But not everyone shared this luck. Around 140 AD, Antoninus Pius restricted the privilege: children born before the father’s discharge no longer received automatic citizenship. Those born before the reform won. Those born after lost.

Women Who Were Not Allowed to Exist

Today, research into Roman camp life is no longer just military history. It is also social history, women’s history, children’s history. Lindsay Allason-Jones, in her standard work Women in Roman Britain, has shown how widespread these „invisible” families really were. At Vindolanda, an auxiliary fort just south of what would later become Hadrian’s Wall, archaeologists have found over seven thousand leather shoes, including elegant women’s and children’s footwear. Spindle whorls and glass beads lay in the soldiers’ barracks beside arrowheads and helmet buckles.

The most famous document from Vindolanda is the birthday invitation that Claudia Severa wrote to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina around 100 AD. It is the oldest surviving letter in Latin written by a woman. One camp wife invites another camp wife to her birthday. A single wooden strip, inked in by a scribe, proves what stone inscriptions could never show: these women had friendships, plans, festivities, voices of their own.

The gravestone of the Thracian cavalryman Longinus Sdapeze in Colchester, dated to roughly 49 AD, also belongs in this picture. He died only a few years before the Boudiccan revolt. His heir set up the stone, presumably a son or brother. Who that heir really was, and who wept beside the grave, the stone does not say. But it does say one thing: someone was there.

A World Between Worlds

When I draw the world of the Roman conquerors in Britain in my novels, I often think of these invisible camp women. Of the British women who loved an invader and at the same time had to watch the death of their own people. Of the sons who spoke Latin and Brittonic, who grew up in a world where their parents were officially not allowed to be a family. Tribune Gaius Julius Maximus and Centurion Brutus, the heroes of the Eagle Saga Sons of Rome, live in exactly that Britain of the years 43 to 46 AD, only a few years before the rising of Boudicca. In their camps live women who officially are not there. In the alleys of their canabae play children who officially are not Roman. And yet they carry the empire on their shoulders.

A leather shoe in a barracks is more than a piece of refuse. It is proof that the official history and the real history are two different stories. The real one is always the more thrilling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Were Roman legionaries allowed to marry?

No, from 13 BC under Augustus to 197 AD under Septimius Severus, a strict marriage ban applied to active legionaries and auxiliary soldiers. Any existing marriage ended upon enlistment. Only after twenty-five years of service and the granting of the veteran’s diploma could a soldier enter a legally valid marriage.

What was a focaria?

A focaria was the unofficial companion of a Roman soldier. The term means „the one at the hearth” and described enslaved women, freedwomen or local provincials living with legionaries or auxiliaries. Legally these unions were nothing, but socially they were widely accepted and often listed on inscriptions as uxor, wife.

Where did the women of Roman soldiers live?

Women lived in the canabae, the camp villages directly against the wall of the legionary fortress, in the vici beside smaller auxiliary forts or, as recent archaeology shows, even inside the soldiers’ own barracks. Penelope Allison’s research at Vindolanda and other sites has overturned the old picture of the all-male camp.

What happened to the children of Roman legionaries?

These children were known as castris, born in the camp. They usually had no citizen status, since their parents were not legally married and the mother was rarely a Roman citizen. They could not inherit land or hold office. Only the father’s veteran’s diploma made them retroactive citizens, provided they lived before the reform of around 140 AD.

What is a veteran’s diploma?

A veteran’s diploma was a bronze tablet awarded to auxiliary soldiers after twenty-five years of service. It granted Roman citizenship, the right of valid marriage (conubium) and retroactive recognition of the soldier’s existing children as Roman citizens. Hundreds of these diplomas survive in European museums today.