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You can also direct pitches to members of our editorial committee: @bauerle.bsky.social, @janesancinito.bsky.social, as well as Prof. Chris Waldo and Dr. Jermaine Bryant.

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The SCS blog is looking for contributors!

Interested in spotlighting a recent TAPA article?

My email and DMs are open.

I'm trying to formulate something re: Roman economic futures that currently goes: "the extension of value circulation into the future was primarily created by means of foregrounding repetitive encounters with concrete stability," which I think resonates w/Macrae's article. Excited to mull it over.

📢 Not just a new SCS Blog Post, but an entirely new blog series: engagements with/responses to select articles in our association's official journal, TAPA.

First up: Michael Taylor on Duncan MacRae's "Capitoline Futures."

Please pitch us if you'd like to spotlight a piece in TAPA! 👍

Did Orban forget to say Twank youw?

Ideological affiliates of course, but seems Oban's theory of power was always more robust than MAGA, in terms of gerrymandering, media control, crony capitalism, etc.

So if he goes down hard, then MAGA is toast.

Collections: Raising Carthaginian Armies, Part I: Finding Carthaginians This is the first part of a series looking at the structure of the Carthaginian army. Although Carthage has an (unfair!) reputation for being a country of “peaceful merchants who tended to av…

This week on the blog: Carthaginian Armies! We're going to discuss over the next few weeks the makeup of Carthaginian armies and how they were raised, beginning this week with the (quite limited) role of Carthaginian citizen soldiers.

acoup.blog/2026/04/10/c...

I take it Il Nome della Rosa misses a few of these criteria?

Pyrrhus coming back to Epirus after intervening in Italy and Sicily, being unable to control the Strait of Messina from the Carthaginians, and turning Rome into a regional superpower.

I have no strong opinion, although I wonder if "flanker"/"flanquer" might be apt.

This is an interesting way of protecting us from the imagined menace of Sharia law.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate!

It is a holiday very much embedded in the grim realities of Roman imperial governance, and a reminder that ancient history remains relevant into the present day.

Its hard to get relieved as a Roman governor, but Pilate seems to have been unusually insensitive and violent.

Pilate was finally relieved after he massacred a Samaritan religious movement at Mt. Gerizim, who were searching for relics of Moses (although supposedly armed, just like Jesus' followers). AJ 18.85-89.

Free citizens protest a brutal, murderous regime.

One of his first acts as governor is to display standards with the emperor's image in Jerusalem, threaten to massacre protestors and then back down in the face of peaceful resistance (sound familiar?) BJ 2.169-174Fr

So it is easy to see how a Roman governor would be spooked by Jesus' disturbance in the temple and respond violently

Oddly, while the NT narrative has Pontius Pilate as a milquetoast guy whose wife's been sleeping badly, he elsewhere emerges as a brutal incompetent.

Maybe the biggest takeaway about the Roman army in Judea is how small it is. Only about 2500 soldiers. As many as a million Jews come into Jerusalem during passover. Many of them, including several of Jesus's own followers (Luke 22.38, Matt. 26.51), are armed.

Less certain if these units were part of the garrison c. AD 30. And even citizen units from an early point recruited from the local population, often granting citizenship on enlistment.

But a reminder that if the Roman army was a war machine, it was often a Rube Goldberg device.

The existence of these citizen cohorts has been controversial.

That said, there is evidence for a small number of citizen cohorts, including a cohors Augusta based in Syria. Both Mommsen and MP Speidel accept the reports in Acts as basically correct.

But there is a complication. The Book of Acts, describing the situation in the 40s, after Judea has briefly become a client kingdom and then reverted to a province, describes cohorts of Roman citizens: the "so-called" Italian Cohort (10.1) and the Augustan cohort (27.1).

No lorica segmenta or rectangular scuta or pila during the Passion. Those are for the citizen legionaries stationed up north in Syria. Pontius Pilate's cohorts likely wear mail and carry flat oval shields. Their first language is Aramaic or Greek, although Latin for military administration.

Auxiliaries would have used a flavor of what @bretdevereaux.bsky.social aptly calls the "Omnispear." A lot of varieties of this.

Citizen legionaries carrying heavy throwing javelins (pilum), in the reign of Trajan. Adamklissi, Romania.

In a moment where Roman military equipment plays a prominent role in the NT narrative, we might ask what type of spear was used to pierce Jesus' side. Safe to say it is *not* the Roman pilum, which was the weapon of legionaries.

So the soldiers in the Easter story are non-citizen auxiliaries. They likely looked much more like Hellenized thureophoroi (a type of Greek soldier inspired by both Celtic warriors and Roman legionaries) rather than like an imperial era-legionary.

The garrison in Judea had five cohorts and a cavalry ala. Josephus suggests that these were recruited from Samaria (aka Sabaste). We can identify two units: Cohors I Sebastenorum and Ala I Sebastenorum (and infantry and cavalry unit).

Judea was an equestrian province, governed by an equestrian prefect. Outside of Egypt, equestrian prefects did not command legions.

Rather, the soldiers assigned the Pontius Pilate would have been provincial auxiliaries.

Hollywood may not be too far off---as the sort of equipment featured on Trajan's column was mostly in use by the reign of Tiberius. But these are *citizen legionaries.* And they are not part of the Easter story.

Roman soldiers in a sado-masochistic snuff film portrayed as citizen legionaries with leather lorica segmentata and a leather helmet evocative of the Imperial model.

This naturally impacts modern pop culture, where Romans involved in the passion are typically depicted as Hollywood legionaries, dressed in the distinctive lorica segmentata (although Hollywood loves leather for some reason, the real armor would have been iron/soft steel).