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While countless books and articles treat the Roman army, little formal work has been done on the personnel who served an army's soldiers, namely the lixae and calones.1 Commentators on these terms primarily either examine their etymology or attempt to identify the roles and duties that lixae and calones were supposed to perform by definition. Such approaches often ignore much evidence from classical Latin literature and have resulted in broad generalizations about the lixae and calones. This paper attempts a detailed study of the Latin literary references to the lixae and calones from the time of Sallust and Caesar through the time of justinian, and will not only identify areas in which the lixae and calones differed, but also their similarities.2 This approach will also reveal that the lixae and calones performed a wider variety of tasks than that usually identified by commentators. Not only did they provide a variety of goods or services to the soldiers, but they could also serve the army in a tactical way (an area of inquiry that has not been pursued by ancient or modern commentators) especially in efforts to deceive the enemy about an army's troop-strength. Additionally, this paper examines the positive and negative aspects of the lixae and calones among the soldiers, as well as the way the lixae and calones were perceived on a social basis.
1. Lixae and Calones as Non-Combat Personnel
Let us begin by attempting to discern the non-combat roles of the lixae and calones. Erdkamp writes that "One of the tasks of the thousands of servants and muleteers accompanying an ancient army was to assist in the gathering of food, fodder and wood."3 Caesar (BG 6.36), Frontinus (Strat. 3.2.9), and Ammianus Marcellinus (22.2.8) describe the calories as foraging for or collecting grain.4 A ledger from Vindolanda (Tab. Vindol. Il 180) regarding the distribution of wheat suggests that the army may have retained servants for the tending of livestock such as oxen and pigs.5 Regarding the collection of wood, ancient commentators on the word calo derive this term from the Greek word kala ("wood"), because the calones often go to fetch wood.6 The wood referred to here would probably be that used to build fires for the soldiers or the wooden stakes used...