LEGION, a technical term for a Rom. military company appears in the NT in its Gr. form, λεγιών, G3305. The word appears in the Aram. Targ. as לִיגְיﯴנָא (J. Levy, Chaldäisches Wörterbuch, 1867, Bd. I, 402) and the NT may therefore be simply transliterating into Gr. In the NT the word is used only in the gospels in regard to angels and demons (Matt 26:53; Mark 5:9, 15; Luke 8:30); although it is grammatically fem. in the Mark account, where the demon speaks the word is treated as masc. The word was thought by Rom. tradition to be traceable to the age of the patrician army under the legendary founder, Romulus. Supposedly the whole of the Rom. forces were collectively called legio and consisted of 300 celeres, “knights” and 3000 pedes, “infantry.” When the army expanded under the Tarquinian rulers the army was divided to keep this same ratio of men in each regiment which was then called a legio. The battle array of the legio was similar to that of the Gr. phalanx which had been developed by Epaminondas of Thebes c. 370 b.c. However, the phalanx was abolished by M. F. Camillus sometime during his dictatorship in the 4th cent. b.c. The basic organization was maintained until the time of G. Marius (157-86 b.c.), who reorganized the Rom. legions by abolishing the old citizen recruited militia which had been associated with the propertied classes. In its place he instituted the mercenary system with its paid professionals volunteering regardless of social class. With this new force Marius won several spectacular campaigns including the bloody Jugurthine War. At this time the legion consisted of about 300 knights and about 4200 infantry. In the last cent. of the Republic, the army was divided among the consuls each of whom was assigned two leg ions of about 5000 men. In the empire the army was a standing body of mercenaries drawn from all parts of the Rom. world. They were bound to the particular emperor by the oath, sacramentum, and were at his every command.
By the end of the 1st cent. a.d. the legion contained about 6000 men when up to full strength. More often than not, they were under this figure by as much as thirty-three percent, so that ideally the statement of Christ in Matthew 26:53 would involve in excess of 144,000 of the heavenly beings. If the notion of double legions is accepted, it seems that such speculations are unwarranted by the context. The legion was subdivided into ten cohorts and these were divided into six centuries or “hundreds” each, the officer in charge of this last division was the centurion, Gr. ἑκατόντάρχης, “leader of one hundred” mentioned often in the NT, e.g., Matthew 8:5 et al. Over the whole legion there was the tribūni mīlitum, “military tribune,” with his subordinate the lēgatus, “lieutenant-general.” The feeding and clothing of such a force was accomplished by quartering the troops on the citizenry in foreign regions or by foraging and in time of conflict by booty. The pay for an infantryman was 120 dēnārii per year, which was raised by Julius Caesar to about 225 dēnārii, and the hope of booty including the sale of slaves heightened morale. The number of legions varied throughout the centuries but under Augustus (63 b.c.-a.d. 14) it was set at twenty-five, each with a definite base usually on the border of the empire.
Bibliography J. Pfitzner, Geschichte der römische Kaiserlegion (1881); H. M. D. Parker, The Roman Legions (1928); O. Hiltbrunner, “Militar,” Kleines Lexikon Der Antike (1961), 317-320; G. Gottlieb, “Legion,” Das Lexikon Der Alten Welt (1965), 1698.