Riding for Caesar

by Michael Speidel

Caesar praised them in his Commentaries. Trajan had them carved on his Column. Hadrian wrote poems about them. Well might these rulers have immortalized the horse guard, whose fortunes so closely kept pace with their own. Riding for Caesar follows these horsemen from their rally to rescue Caesar at Noviodunum in 52 B.C. to their last stand alongside Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. Written by one of the world's leading authorities on the Roman army, this history reveals the remarkable part the horse guard played in the fate of the Roman empire. Whether called Batavi, Germani corporis custodes, or equites singulares Augusti, the horse guard figures in Roman history from Caesar to Constantine. Drawing on literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, much of it only recently unearthed, Speidel traces the growth of the guard from a troop of 400 under Julius Caesar to a force of 2000 in the third century. He shows how one-man rule depended on the horse guard's presence, in peacetime an