Roman milites and defeated 'barbari': soldierly bodies, dress, and identities in first century Tilurium, Dalmatia

This chapter investigates how the Roman milites constructed their identity through bodily representations, physically through dress, and in war memorial imagery. The Roman camp at Tilurium (Gardun, near Trilj), located in the periphery of the Dalmatian capital Salona, was established soon after the pacification of the province in the aftermath of the Batonian war (CE 6-9). It was garrisoned by legio VII Claudia pia fidelis until the unit’s departure from the province later in the first-century CE, as well as by several auxiliary units. The veteran colony at Aequum (Čitluk, near Sinj) was established just prior to the reign of the emperor Claudius (CE 41-54). The chapter will utilize an existing corpus of funerary stelae and small finds such as fibulae belonging to the legionaries, auxiliaries and veterans stationed at the two sites, to reveal how these milites decorated their own bodies. This will illuminate the ways in which visualisation was used to (re)construct the identity of the military community and highlight how this communal military identity was reconciled with the milites’ ethnicities. The evidence from Aequum in particular will be used to explore the dynamics of these processes within the semi-civilian context of a veteran community. The chapter will also look into the visual representation of the conquered local population. This particular analysis will focus on the tropaeum from Tilurium, which depicts two bound captives, most likely as a symbolical representation of the conquered local population, or ‘other’.