Aquila
The aquila was the eagle standard of a Roman legion, carried on a pole by the aquilifer. Pliny the Elder records that Gaius Marius made the eagle the only standard of the legions in his second consulship, which Smith’s dictionary dates to 104 BC.
Meaning
Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1875) describes the eagle as silver or bronze, with its wings spread, and probably small: one of Julius Caesar’s standard-bearers is said to have wrenched it from its staff in a moment of danger and hidden it in the folds of his girdle. The pole had an iron point at its foot, to fix it in the ground and to let the aquilifer fight off an attack. Under the eagle there was often a head of the reigning emperor. A legion was sometimes called simply an aquila, after its eagle.
Origin and history
Before Marius, the eagle was one standard among five. Pliny lists the others as the wolf, the minotaur, the horse and the wild boar, each of which went before a single division. Some years before Marius it had become the custom to carry only the eagle into battle and leave the rest in camp; Marius abolished them entirely. Pliny adds an observation of his own: since then a legion had hardly ever wintered in camp without a pair of eagles appearing there.
The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica quotes the same passage in a translation that gives the four as “wolves, minotaurs, horses and bears”. Bostock and Riley’s translation of 1855 has the wild boar.
Eagles lost and recovered
When Varus lost three legions in Germany, Tacitus writes, survivors later showed Germanicus’s army where the eagles had been taken and told how Arminius had insulted the standards and eagles. The campaigns that followed brought some of them back. Lucius Stertinius found the eagle of the nineteenth legion, lost with Varus, while his men were routing the Bructeri, and later the Marsian chieftain Mallovendus told Germanicus that another of Varus’s eagles was buried in a grove nearby, guarded by only a small detachment. Augustus counted recovered standards among his achievements: in his own account he says he made the Parthians return the spoils and standards of three Roman armies.
A refuge in the camp
When mutinous soldiers insulted the envoy Plancus and talked of murder, Tacitus tells, he ran to the quarters of the first legion; there, clasping the standards and the eagle, he lay in sanctuary, and the eagle-bearer Calpurnius shielded him from the worst. In peacetime, Smith says, the standards were kept in the Aerarium under the care of the quaestor.
Persia’s golden eagle
Rome was not the only power to march behind an eagle. Smith cites Xenophon for a golden eagle with spread wings as the royal standard of Persia, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica notes the same passage: the Achaemenid king’s standard was a golden eagle on a shield carried on a spear. The later royal banner of Iran was a cloth, the Derafsh Kaviani. The eagle of medieval coats of arms is on the heraldic eagle page.
Read next
- Next in Historical flagsSPQRSPQR is the abbreviation of Senatus Populusque Romanus, “the Senate and the Roman people”, the formula Latin inscriptions used for the Roman people as a state. It is still on the coat of arms of the city of Rome.
- The eagle with spread wings, in medieval coats of arms.Eagle displayedAn eagle seen from the front with its wings and legs spread, the way heraldry usually draws it. It was the bird of the emperors, from Charlemagne’s badge to the arms of the Holy Roman Empire.
See also
Vexillum, Derafsh Kaviani, Jolly Roger, Blackbeard’s flag, Calico Jack’s flag, Bartholomew Roberts’s flag.
Sources
- The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2, Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book X, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley, Henry G. Bohn, London, 1855 (Project Gutenberg ebook 60230), Project Gutenberg, Book X, ch. 5 (4), When the eagle was first used as the standard of the Roman legions
- Signa Militaria (Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1875), James Yates, in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875, pp. 1044–1046, LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer), pp. 1044–1045
- Flag (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 10, Encyclopædia Britannica, via Wikisource, Roman standards
- Tacitus, Annals, Book I, chapters 55–81 (Loeb translation), Tacitus, Annals, Book I, chapters 55–81, translated by John Jackson (Loeb Classical Library, 1931), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), I.60–61
- Tacitus, Annals, Book I, chapters 31–54 (Loeb translation), Tacitus, Annals, Book I, chapters 31–54, translated by John Jackson (Loeb Classical Library, 1931), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), I.39
- Tacitus, Annals, Book II (Loeb translation), Tacitus, Annals, Book II, translated by John Jackson (Loeb Classical Library, 1931), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), II.25
- Res Gestae Divi Augusti (Loeb translation), part 5, Augustus, Res Gestae, translated by Frederick W. Shipley (Loeb Classical Library, 1924), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), ch. 29
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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