The staff, as a rule, gave the signal for desertion and for mutiny; in spite of the culpable indulgence of the commanders proposals for the cashiering of officers of rank were daily occurrences.

We still possess the picture-- drawn not without irony by Caesar's own hand--of the state of matters at his own headquarters when orders were given to march against Ariovistus, of the cursing and weeping, and preparing of testaments, and presenting even of requests for furlough.
In the soldiery not a trace of the better classes could any longer be discovered.

Legally the general obligation to bear arms still subsisted; but the levy, if resorted to alongside of enlisting, took place in the most irregular manner; numerous persons liable to serve were wholly passed over, while those once levied were retained thirty years and longer beneath the eagles.
The Roman burgess-cavalry now merely vegetated as a sort of mounted noble guard, whose perfumed cavaliers and exquisite high-bred horses only played a part in the festivals of the capital; the so-called burgess-infantry was a troop of mercenaries swept together from the lowest ranks of the burgess-population; the subjects furnished the cavalry and the light troops exclusively, and came to be more and more extensively employed also in the infantry.

The posts of centurions in the legions, on which in the mode of warfare of that time the efficiency of the divisions essentially depended, and to which according to the national military constitution the soldier served his way upward with the pike, were now not merely regularly conferred according to favour, but were not unfrequently sold to the highest bidder.

In consequence of the bad financial management of the government and the venality and fraud of the great majority of the magistrates, the payment of the soldiers was extremely defective and irregular.
The necessary consequence of this was, that in the ordinary course of things the Roman armies pillaged the provincials, mutinied against their officers, and ran off in presence of the enemy; instances occurred where considerable armies, such as the Macedonian army of Piso in 697,( 33) were without any proper defeat utterly ruined, simply by this misconduct.