Boots

Built for Walking

Roman soldiers spent their lives on their feet — marching, standing guard, working around camp — so footwear mattered.

The famous one is the caliga: a tough leather shoe with an open, cut-out upper and a thick sole studded with iron hobnails. It was built for covering ground, and it became such a soldier’s item that the emperor Caligula got his nickname from the little pair he wore as a boy.

But the caliga wasn’t the only thing Roman soldiers put on their feet.

A flattened, dark-brown closed leather Roman boot, its lacing and stitching still visible. — A closed leather military boot from Vindolanda, on Rome’s British frontier, dated AD 100–105 — one of the hundreds of Roman shoes the waterlogged ground there preserved. Vindolanda Museum. Photo: Sailko · CC BY 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Shoes or Boots?

Most Roman leather rotted away long ago. But at a few waterlogged sites in the north of the empire, the wet ground preserved it — and those finds include hundreds of Roman shoes: sandals, closed shoes, and enclosed ankle boots, some plain and sturdy, some cut with fancy patterns, worn by soldiers and by the men, women, and children living around the forts.

The point for us: Roman soldiers weren’t stuck with the open caliga you see in the movies. Closed boots were a normal Roman thing.

What About Cold Weather?

Romans adapted to wherever they were posted. Soldiers on the cold northern frontier wrote home asking for socks, and archaeologists have found traces of socks worn inside Roman shoes.

That shouldn’t be a shock. An army that could build roads and forts across a continent could also work out that cold, wet feet are miserable.

Our Boots

Many of our soldiers at Bethlehem Revisited wear enclosed leather boots based on those northern finds, rather than open caligae.

Those particular boots come from Britain, not Judaea, so we’re not claiming they were standard issue on this frontier. What they show is that closed Roman footwear existed and was worn by people in and around the army.

They also fix a very modern problem: Bethlehem Revisited takes place outdoors in Kansas in December. Some volunteers wear plain modern boots instead — one of our practical compromises. The open movie sandal isn’t wrong for a Roman; it just isn’t the only Roman answer, and it isn’t the one that keeps your toes attached in a hard frost.