Dr. Bret Devereaux

They recruit those guys.

And so we get things like a unit of Sarmatian horse archers deployed in northern England.

Yeah, these guys are coming from the Black Sea.

Yeah.

And you see these sort of units.

And so I think this may be what Tolkien is thinking of.

And I wonder if his sort of reference is like they don't have any riding horses.

They don't have any internal cavalry.

Quite famously, Julius Caesar has no Roman cavalry in his armies.

Gaul, he relies entirely upon Gallic auxiliaries for that.

And there's this episode where that comes up because he's going to a parlay with a Gallic chieftain.

And as part of the agreement, they both agree they'll bring a specific number of mounted bodyguards to the meeting.

I think it's 100.

And Caesar is like, well, I don't want to bring my Gallic auxiliaries because I can't trust them.

So he takes 100 of their horses and sticks 100 of his infantrymen on them and brings those guys.

And the legion in question, it's Caesar's favorite legion, his 10th legion, turns it into a running joke where they start calling themselves Legio 10 Equestris.

Legio 10, the horsemen.

And they make a joke of it that the upper class in Rome were called the equites, the horsemen, because they were men wealthy enough to buy their own horses to serve in war.

And so the legion's joke was that Caesar had raised them all to this status.

He had made horsemen of them.