The Wikipedia entry for Roman Legions is pretty good at giving some context.
The Roman Kingdom, 752-509 BC. Not really “legions” but precursor military organizations.
Mid Republic, 509-107 BC. Legions started to be an accepted form of organization.
Late Republic, 107-27 BC. The legion structure becomes more regimented. This book covers the empire … 27 BC to the end of Rome as a world power in 410 AD when Alaric the Visigoth conquered Rome.
The first major section is “The Men” which covers who made up a legion, the roles, the rules, uniforms, equipment, and much more.
Rules and their enforcement are critical to having a cohesive fighting force. You need to know that your comrades in arms met and continue to meet standards. Page 23: “For more serious infringements, legionnaires found guilty by a court martial of the legion’s tribunes could be sentenced to death. Polybius described the crimes for which the death penalty was prescribed in 150 BC - stealing goods in camp, giving false evidence, homosexual offences by those in full manhood, and for lesser offences where the offender had previously been punished three times. The death penalty was later prescribed for falling asleep on sentry duty.”
The Roman Legion was not a place to be if you were a “girly man”.
The next section labeled “The Legions” goes into detail on organization, including logistics, how to set up a Legion camp, and a listing of the Legions with their emblem, founding, battle honors, etc. The honor of your specific Legion was what you defended, often with your life!
The last section is “The Battles”. As with all of this book, I speed read/skimmed a lot of it, but there are a couple of specifics that jumped out at me.
Page 237 introduces us to Arminius, trained as a Roman soldier, he defected and led an uprising of the German tribes against the Romans. He was an effective leader, and the book contains a lot of detail on his battles. Of special interest for me is that the German translation of Arminius (possibly first by Martin Luther) is “Hermann”, which brought the statue in New Ulm MN to mind.
Herman the German! Strange how a man that led an uprising in AD 9 should have a memorial in a town 100 miles away from where I live!
In the section on AD 58-60 page 299, we find that on a late summer day in AD 58, the guard cohort of the 3rd Gallica Legion stationed at Jerusalem’s Antonia Fortress was unexpectedly called to arms”.
A riot had erupted because a man had been speaking heresy in the temple, and Jerusalem was in chaos.
“On Antonia’s steps, the Jew addressed the mob, which fell silent, as, speaking in their native language he said that he was Saul of Tarsus, a Cilician Jew who had studied under Gamaliel, a leading rabbi of the day … he had hunted and imprisoned members of a breakaway Nazarene sect - the Christians. But while on the road to Damascus to collect more Christion prisoners he had received a vision of Jesus of Nazareth.”
If you don’t want to read the book, you can read a lot more detail in Acts 21 in the Bible. There is also more interesting detail about the Romans interactions with Paul in that section of the book.
As a person raised Baptist and receiving a BS in Computer Science, I went through a period of questioning of God bordering on Atheism … although then and now, it struck me that looking at the apparently ordered reality, it was harder to believe that chaos generated order than some intelligence created order, so my real question came down to dealing with how to know more about the creator referenced in our Declaration of Independence.
”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …” Hopefully that transcendent truth will be allowed to remain as part of what was once a Republic but is increasingly an Oligarchy.
Being interested in history, my comparative religion studies led me to Christianity, and eventually Matt 7-8 was verified. “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
It was nice to find some more evidence of the truth of Christianity in an unexpected place - although looking through ancient history, such evidence isn’t rare. Where I ended up spiritually is described in this post.
I would recommend this book more as a reference than a cover to cover read unless you really have an interest in a lot of detail on the Roman Legions!