Thabudeos
About
Thabudeos rose at a desert-edge oasis to anchor the limes line running south of the Aurès mountains, one of the garrison posts Trajan and Hadrian built to seal Numidia's pre-Saharan frontier. Cohors II Hispanorum manned its walls, part of the auxiliary screen that tracked nomadic movement across the plain beyond the mountains. The post later folded into the Fossatum Africae's chain of fortified watchpoints alongside Ad Maiores and Gemellae. Its stone ruins still stand at the oasis beside the modern Algerian village of Sidi Okba.
What happened here
Five hundred men, sometimes a thousand, recruited from a province rather than from citizens, and often stationed a long way from where they were raised. Cavalry units get a bigger fort and far more stabling; the smell tells you which kind you are in before the plan does. The layout copies a legionary fortress at a quarter of the size — headquarters, commander's house, granaries, barracks, a bath house usually built outside the walls because of the fire risk. Duties are patrolling, escorting, customs, and policing rather than pitched battle. After twenty-five years a man is discharged with citizenship for himself and his children, recorded on a bronze diploma he keeps for life. A village grows outside the gate within a decade.
Sources
Nearby
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