Do we have any personal accounts of Roman a soldier's participation in a "decimation"?

by Furious_Georgee

It sounds like a pretty horrible, traumatic experience to be forced to kill of of your own brothers in arms. Are there any accounts from soldiers who were forced to do this?

Astrogator

No. Generally, we have no literary accounts of lower-ranked soldiers that tell us something of their daily life, apart from some isolated letters from garrisoned soldiers, especially from Egypt or from Britain, however they don't mention decimation as far as I know. The only accounts that we have from decimation are Tacitus, who writes roughly a century after the fact in Tacitus, Ann. III, 21:

Finally, he hemmed in a Roman cohort near the river Pagyda. The position was commanded by Decrius, a soldier energetic in action and experienced in war, who regarded the siege as a disgrace. Cheering on his men to offer battle in the open plain, he drew up his line in front of his intrenchments. At the first shock, the cohort was driven back, upon which he threw himself fearlessly amid the missiles in the path of the fugitives and cried shame on the standard-bearers for letting Roman soldiers show their backs to a rabble of deserters. At the same moment he was covered with wounds, and though pierced through the eye, he resolutely faced the enemy and ceased not to fight till he fell deserted by his men. On receiving this information, Lucius Apronius, successor to Camillus, alarmed more by the dishonour of his own men than by the glory of the enemy, ventured on a deed quite exceptional at that time and derived from old tradition. He flogged to death every tenth man drawn by lot from the disgraced cohort.

The only report by an eye-witness that I know of is Ammianus Marcellinus, who reports about the aftermath of a small skirmish were a Roman advance element had been surprised by the Sassanids and lost its standard:

Immediately Julian became violently exasperated, and flew to the spot with an armed band, placing much hope of success in the rapidity of his movements: he routed the assailants disgracefully, cashiered the other two tribunes as blunderers and cowards, and in imitation of the ancient laws of Rome disbanded ten of the soldiers who had fled, and then condemned them to death. [Amm. Mar. 24, 3.2].

This of course doesn't tell us very much about how the decimation went in detail, or how those soldiers that took part felt, but those are the examples in the source material that I am aware of (there is also a mention of Caesar ordering this done to the IXth legion at Placentia and an even earlier from Livius).