Public service

I've been thinking about public choice theory - something I studied well over a decade ago. I've forgotten most of it now apart from the most significant contours. Max Weber is always the starting point on this, so I've been idly trawling my bookshelves and the web looking at Weber and bureaucracy as a useful starting point (broadly, Weber thought bureaucracies were a fairly rational way of organising things, and public choice theorists were often a good deal more sceptical).

Anyway, apropos of not much, I found a good refresher essay here. And this factoid leaped out:

...in modern armies the soldier does not own his weapons, whereas in ancient armies he did . For example, in ancient Rome when the army was called together the 'classes' were expected to come equipped to a certain standard at their own expense - 'classification' was a form of taxation. Soldiers were expected to bring money to buy food from the locals (when they did not take what they wanted by force); they got no pay or provisions.