By Thomas Fischer;
translated by Mike C. Bishop
ISBN: 978-1612008103
Casemate Publishers (2019) – £45.00
The reader of English has many choices when it comes to the Roman army. There are highly academic tomes dealing with specific aspects, which are usually dense with technical text and enlivened with the occasional illustration and some black-and-white figures or plates; and there are general books packed with colour pictures, which are usually light on copy but seem designed more for the coffee table than the study.
Army of the Roman Emperors by Thomas Fischer sits squarely in the space between the two. This is a big book in every respect. Large in format, it weighs 1.9 kg, and runs to nearly 600 pages, printed in two columns.
Heavyweight its scholarship is too. An introduction covers the state of research (up to 2014) and provides a basic outline of the history and structure of the Roman army. The material discussed
