This is a rather skinny little book on a topic that most would consider pitifully obscure-the most well-known published gravestones of Roman military personnel buried at the Syrian City of Apamea c. AD 190 - 230, focusing especially on legionaries of the II Parthica Legion though also men of the XIII Gemina, IIII Scythicae, IIII Flavia, and a couple of auxiliary cavalry wings.
The only thing I didn't appreciate about this book is it is in German, yet nothing Amazon tells you about it would suggest otherwise. I have a little bit of knowledge of German and because of that and its relationship to English I could make out most of the book's content, but this made it hard to read nonetheless. The text of the pictured tombstones are initially copied in Latin, though, which makes it easier.
Many of the men (and indeed, women) buried at Apamea had probably led interesting lives. In this forty-year period the Second Parthica did battle with Parthians, Sassanid Persians, and probably marauding Arab tribesmen and other `brigands', as the Romans loved to call their Eastern enemies. In the summer of AD 218, at Immae, near Antioch, the II Parthica also defeated the Roman Army of the usurper Opellius Macrinus, and some of the legionaries buried at Apamea are believed to have been killed in this battle.
The inscriptions on these tombstones reveal a number of useful details-such as the first references to the lanciarii light skirmishers (on the tombstone of the young legionary Aurelius Mucianus, probably a casualty of Immae), references to an elite auxiliary unit of Persian-style cataphracts, and references to the ethnic origin of the soldiers (like Septimius Viator, a Pannonian, Aurelius Mucianus, of an old Roman-Italian family, Vivius Batao, a German, and Aurelius Zoilus, a Thracian). They also serve to remind us of the humanity of these ancient soldiers-such as the gravestone of Antonia Cara, the dearly-beloved young wife of a II Parthica centurion.
In short, this is a great book for someone with a serious, even scholarly interest in the Roman Army who knows, or feels they can tackle, German. This is not a title worth the money of the casually interested reader, though; I bought it because the early 3rd Century AD is my favorite time period in the Roman Empire, and I research the II Parthica Legion in particular.
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