At the start of his Iberian campaign in 195 bc, Cato the Elder sent the army suppliers back to Italy, remarking that the war would sustain itself. The Roman soldiers subsequently plundered the land far and wide (Livy 34.9. 12–13). The older literature on the Roman army used to hold that it was a principle of Roman warfare that the legions sustained themselves by living off the land. We now realize that that was usually not the case. The Roman armies needed money, food, fodder, horses, packanimals, weapons, clothing, building material, ships, and wagons. The institutions and mechanisms that were created to fulfil these needs were not brought into existence at once–they emerged as Roman wars expanded in terms of the number of men involved and in geographical scale. At the end of the republic, during the civil wars, Rome was able to mobilize and sustain armies that numbered hundreds of thousands of men. The civil wars demonstrate the organizational ability of the Roman state at this time, although they exhausted Italy and the provinces. Military historians of the early modern period often compare the Roman logistical feats to those of later wars. One scholar, describing the problems that the British government at the time of the American Revolution had in sustaining its armies of up to 65,000 men across the Atlantic (and which it failed to solve), observed that “no European government had faced such a task since Roman times.” 2