Salve Aule Flavi
Marius is probably answer better than I, and he'll get around to it as he settles in. BTW "Manius" would be the name for a "John Doe" grunt.
Aulus Flavius wrote:
- What was the minimum age to enlist in the legions?
- What would be a Roman citizen's motivation for enlisting?
- How exactly would he go about enlisting?
Minimum age? When you became a man and thus a citizen, you became eligible for the enlistment. Seventeen was the norm, but if you came from a wealthy patrician family, intent on a political career, and would therefore be a junior officer.... Well, at one point it got so bad that the Romans did have to set some minimum age requirements. Bad enough for the centurians playing wetnurse to 17 year olds, 14 and maybe as young as 12 year olds sort of got in the way of army life. OTOH if you came from a small farm, where your labor was still needed, Roman fathers tended to be reluctant to allowing their sons to don the
toga virilis and would try to delay their sons for a couple years. You could not be presented as a man, donning your
toga virilis and thus becoming a citizen, without your father giving permission. And then if Manius was instead a
proletarius, a citizen but without enough wealth to be considered in one of the five census classes, then he wouldn't have been allowed in the army (except during the desperate years of the Second Punic War, and later under Marius in the North African campaign) and instead would be assigned to the Roman navy - well, when the Romans had a navy of their own, but after the Punic Wars they found it cheaper just to hire a navy from Rhodes or some other ports.
So, to answer any of these questions you have to give a little more detail. What time period, and which census class would your Manius be in, patrician or plebeian in some eras, whether from a family of
nobiles or from what kind of
equites family might he come? Until the time of Marius, I think, you couldn't just walk up to a recruiter and say, "I want in." There was a procedure in the
comitia centuriata conducted each year to raise legions for the consules. I suppose you, or actually Manius' father would have had to, could tell whoever in your particular centuria that you wished to be enlisted. The centuria, that is, the voting units of the
comitia centuriata, would each have to provide so many men, depending on how many were required for the legiones, and we don't know exactly how those men were selected in the
centuria itself. Motivation for joining? Again, social class, census class, time period, would all have to be considered in trying to answer this question.
Vale