I have been reading Adrian Goldworthy's 'Augustus' recently and noted a claim that he makes regarding centurions in the late Republican/early Imperial period. He says that most Centurions were landed aristocrats or promoted directly by their leaders (e.g Julius Caesar) and that it is a popular myth that Centurions were all 'sergeant majors'.
Does anybody have anything to support or contend with this argument? When searching online everyone just seems to say they were regular soldiers who got lucky and rose gradually through the ranks (despite the extreme chances of being killed in just about any battle/skirmish fought) , and I see very little of the other side of the argument that Goldworthy has put forward.
Now that I think of it, an army in the ancient/medieval period having most of it's officer class other than the legate/tribunes comprised entirely of professional (and therefore presumably uneducated/landless) plebians would have been very modern and perhaps unlikely?
Cheers
/u/iguana_on_a_stick and I debated on this a little bit a while back in this thread, which started off about legati. I personally am not a huge fan of Goldsworthy's notions, but his books are all over AskHistorians and so I am probably a very minority opinion. The basic problem is that there is not very much evidence before the Late Republic; by the time we get to the Empire and the regularized armies, virtually all the centurions we find (on funerary monuments, for instance) are career soldiers. It is wrong to project that conception of the centurion back onto the Republic, surely, but I think it is also wrong to imagine Republican centurions as hayseed farmers from Picenum who "got lucky" and rose through the ranks. They were chosen (either by the men, or by some legatus or commander, if you wish) because of some measure of merit. This is a natural result of human behavior -- put 80 men together and ask for a leader, and a natural choice will emerge. What criteria goes towards that choice will vary wildly. Did he have battle experience? Was he a famous fighter in his village? Is he a little richer? Older? Does he have a gladius that his grandfather used at Zama? Did he kill an Illyrian chieftan the other week? In other words: there had to be a natural sorting process. Once you had your centurions, that sorting process continued. The centurions were all ranked, and if we believe Caesar, there was a natural competition among them to "approach the first rank" by excelling at their posts.