The Army of Maximinus Thrax The Roman Soldier of the Early 3rd Century AD
By Jan Eschbach
ISBN: 978-3963600258
Zeughaus Verlag (2020) - ¤39.95
Look at the (English) right-hand page of section XII in the Loeb edition of the biography of Maximinus Thrax in the , and you find that the emperor marched “thirty or forty miles” across the Rhine into barbarian territory. Glance across to the Latin text on the left-hand page and you see “triginta vel quadraginta”. Only the very sharp eyed might notice that in the critical apparatus at the foot of the page, the manuscript had “trecenta”, three hundred. Modern editors had downgraded Maximinus’ German expedition on the grounds that the source is notoriously unreliable, numbers are often corrupt in the manuscript tradition, and three to four hundred miles appeared utterly implausible. And then, in 2000, an amateur archaeologist found a hipposandal in the Harzhorn Hills. As far as we know, hipposandals were had been proved correct.
