What amazes me about this aspect of Rome is the sheer scale of human sweat involved. The Aqueducts are astonishing because you wouldn’t expect that sort of precise engineering — a slope of one foot per mile of canal — 200 years ago, but those were made by professional engineers. The walls and roads and earthworks were built by common soldiers (the manpower part anyway). The earthworks at Alesia was 150 acres+, ringed with palisades and ditches, all made by common squaddies. Imagine how many wheelbarrows of soil that must’ve involved.
They built a bridge across the Rhine where the water was 30-ish feet deep an finished it in 10 days. And they built it “under fire.”
There was no need to do PT because Caesar kept his armies fighting fit by digging ditches! And this had to be common knowledge back in Rome, which makes you wonder why anyone would want to join. Bad food, severe discipline and hard physical toil most every day. And if you manage to live 30 years, you get to retire. What’s not to love???
Thought this would be about the Wailing Wall.