Editing Marian reforms (section)

==== Equipment at state expense ====
It is also sometimes claimed that Marius – because the poor citizens enrolled could not afford to purchase their own weapons and armour – arranged for the state to supply them with arms, displacing the traditional system of self-purchase.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Matthew |first=Christopher Anthony |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YBYaBwAAQBAJ |title=On the wings of eagles |date=2010 |publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing |isbn=978-1-4438-1813-1 |page=25 |ref=none }} Matthew notes "the theory of equipping at state expense has no confirmatory basis in the ancient record".</ref> Such a scheme may have been incipient during [[Gaius Gracchus]]' plebeian tribunate ({{circa|122&nbsp;BC}}); according to Plutarch, Gracchus passed a law to abolish deductions from soldier pay for clothing. The Italian historian Emilio Gabba argued, for example, that Plutarch's text could be emended from merely encompassing clothing to equipment more generally, reflecting Gabba's belief that this policy emerged from the recruitment of poor soldiers unable to pay for their own equipment.{{sfn|Gauthier|2015|pp=82–83}}

Neither a Gracchan abolition of deductions for equipment or a Marian programme to equip soldiers is attested in the evidence. There are no indications that Gracchus' law ever came into effect and literary evidence indicates that deductions for clothing and equipment were common in the imperial army of Augustus into the 1st century&nbsp;AD.<ref>{{harvnb|Gauthier|2015|p=83|ps=, citing Tac. ''Ann.'' 1.17.6.}}</ref> If Marius purchased equipment for his troops in Numidia at his own expense, later generals and the state in general did not do so.{{sfn|Gauthier|2015|p=102}}