There was nothing that a Roman general relished more than the chance to raise an earthwork. ‘Dig for victory’ was an injunction that legionaries often followed with a literal cussedness. Advancing into enemy territory, they carried shovels as well as spears. The camp that a legion would build after every day’s march, always identical to the one that it had built the evening before, was the expression of something almost obsessive in the Romans’ military psychology.

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