Everyone recognises the word. Far fewer people know that it began as a piece of bureaucracy, or that the eighty men a centurion commanded were called a hundred for four hundred years and nobody bothered to fix it. Here is where legionarius comes from, and what it meant to the men who carried the name.
It begins with the Latin for the picking
The root is legere, to gather, to pick out, to choose. A legio was therefore simply the levy, the body of men chosen in a given year, and it started life as an administrative word rather than a heroic one. The same root runs into eligere, to pick out, which gives English elect, and into lectio, a reading, a picking out of words, which gives lecture. Rome's most feared institution and a university timetable are the same word underneath.
The men who had to buy their own armour
For the first four centuries of the Republic a legionary was a property owner doing a season's duty. The census sorted citizens into classes by wealth, each class had to turn up with the equipment it could afford, and the poorest men, the capite censi, counted by head because they had nothing else to count, were not wanted in the line at all. An army like that could fight a summer campaign a day's march from home. It could not hold Spain.
Marius opens the ranks
Around 107 BC Gaius Marius, needing men faster than the property qualification could supply them, opened enlistment to anyone who volunteered and had the state arm them. It is the single change that turns the citizen levy into the professional army everyone pictures. The same reforms gave the legion its eagle, cut the baggage train by making each man carry his own kit on a forked pole, which earned the legionaries the lasting nickname of Marius' mules, and, less happily for the Republic, tied a soldier's retirement to his general rather than to the Senate. Every civil war of the next century runs through that last detail.
Twenty five years, then land
Under Augustus the terms were fixed and they were clear: twenty five years in the ranks, on around 225 denarii a year before deductions for food, boots and burial club, with formal marriage set aside until discharge. What waited at the end was the praemia, a discharge settlement of land or of a substantial cash sum. The legions were recruited from citizens, so a legionary already held citizenship on the day he enlisted. It was the auxilia, the non citizen troops serving alongside, who were granted citizenship on discharge and given a folding bronze diploma to prove it. Fragments of those diplomas are still being dug up, which is a strange kind of afterlife for a piece of paperwork.
Climbing out of the back rank
The ladder above miles, the ordinary soldier, was real and it was climbable. An immunis had a trade, a surveyor or a medic or an armourer, and was excused fatigues for it. Above him the tesserarius held the watchword, the optio stood at the back of the century and stopped it going backwards, and the signifer carried the standard and ran the burial fund. Then came the centurio.
The centurion, and the eighty men called a hundred
The centurion is the rank that actually ran the Roman army. The name says a hundred and the century was a hundred once, but by the imperial period it was eighty men and everyone kept using the old word anyway. He carried a vitis, a twisted vine staff, and he was entitled to use it on his own soldiers; Tacitus records one nicknamed Cedo Alteram, "bring me another", for the rate at which he broke them across their backs. A legion had fifty nine centurions, ranked in a strict order, and at the top of them stood the primus pilus, the first spear, the senior centurion of the whole legion, a man usually in his fifties who had come up from the ranks and who ended his year with enough money and standing to enter the equestrian order. It was the longest ladder in the Roman world and men climbed the whole of it.
Eight men and a mule
Underneath all of it sat the contubernium, literally the tent party: eight legionaries who shared one leather tent, one mule, one millstone and one cooking pot, and who earned everything together. Ten of those made a century. The Roman army's real unit of loyalty was not the legion or the century. It was the seven men you ate with.
Why the word outlived the thing
The legions are fifteen centuries gone and the word is everywhere: a legion of admirers, the Légion d'honneur, the American Legion and the Royal British Legion, the Foreign Legion, and the answer given in the fifth chapter of Mark, "my name is Legion, for we are many", which is a first century audience being told exactly how frightening a number that was. The word survived because it never meant a rank. It meant a multitude that moves as one thing, which is a useful idea in any century.
What it means on your certificate
That is the tradition our certificates draw on. An honorific enrollment, inscribed to a name, sealed with the eagle and written into Legio X in the old manner. It is a commemorative title, worn for the pleasure and the story of it. It confers no rank, no service and no entitlement, and it never needed to, our notice sets that out in full. Ask the eight men round the cooking pot what the legion was, and none of them would have said it was a legal status either.