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???
It shows that staying home was worse. :^) Other than the risk of dying in combat, it was actually a pretty good life, but with very tough discipline. It could scarcely have been any less tough. After the defeat of Pompey, when Caesar picked up the former adversarial legions, and started having some grumbling problems with one of his own legions, he started to address his problem soldiers with the phrase, "Citizens", and they booed and wept -- they didn't want to be released. That simmered them down.
Sorry, sticky keyboard. The aqueducts were 2000 YA, not 200.