[wimpycat]

I can't believe none of y'all have mentioned Gaius Marius yet. He was a great general who got overshadowed by Julius Caesar, but he brought many innovations to the Roman Army that made Caesar's later successes possible; most notably, the idea of a standing professional army, using members of the capite censi, or Head Count citizens, men not of landed or privileged classes, and consequently equipped at the expense of the state. It was a novel idea in its day.

[Polybius]

I can't believe none of y'all have mentioned Gaius Marius yet. He was a great general who got overshadowed by Julius Caesar, but he brought many innovations to the Roman Army that made Caesar's later successes possible; most notably, the idea of a standing professional army, using members of the capite censi, or Head Count citizens, men not of landed or privileged classes, and consequently equipped at the expense of the state. It was a novel idea in its day.

Unfortunately, Marius' "reforms" eventually killed the Roman Republic by replacing an army of "citizen soldiers" fighting for their Republic with an army of de facto mercenaries whose loyalty was not to the Republic but to their commander who brought them riches.

Prior to Marius, the Roman citizen soldier fought for the Republic.

After Marius, the Roman soldier fought for Caesar, Antony, Pompey, Octavian, Galba, Titus, ad nauseum

One of the root causes of the disastrous Roman performance in the first half of the Second Punic War was the Roman Republic's fear of a military tyrant. To avoid this, their separation of powers doctrine was so overdone that the Consulship was divided between two men for any given term and the term was limited to two years. As a result, Rome repeatedly pitted relatively amateur Generals against the professional, Hannibal.

Only Scipio Africanus' extended training period in far off Hispania allowed him to become an equal to Hannibal and Scipio, in the finest tradition of the Republic, did not use his Army for the pursuit of personal power.

The fear of the example of what Marius brought about was such that our own American Founding Fathers had a dread of the threat of such a "standing army" and, right up until Pearl Harbor, America modeled it's Army on the "Cincinatus" model of the citizen soldier of the pre-Marius Roman Republic.

Since the beginning of the Cold War, the co-existence of one of the most powerful Armed Forces the world has ever known with the continued freedom of America has been a historical anomaly and any student of history can only be in awe of the maturity of the American Republic that has allowed our Republic to survive where the Roman Republic perished.