Hi everyone and welcome to another ancient warfare answers with me, Murray.

I am going to answer one of your questions in just a moment.

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Back us at the level of Optio, centurion or legionary.

And the question I'm about to ask, answer, attempt to answer, is how did the Romans

keep track of who actually completed their years of service?

What's to stop you from deserting and showing up to unfairly claim your pension or whatever?

Presumably this could be tricky in an empire of mostly illiterate people from all over the known world without their government driver's license and passports.

And I don't know who this has come from.

But the first answer is the people who matter are much more literate, I think, than we expect.

And so the reality of the Roman army, and we only get glimpses,

but the reality of the Roman army is they were fabulous recordkeepers.

And they kept a lot of records, most of which don't survive in the archaeological record,

but they knew who you were, where you were, what you were doing,

where you were transferring to how many years' service you had remaining.

So, again, we get some glimpses of the actual level of paperwork that the Romans loved,

...