[eugenejen]

but here there are some citation with much shorter legionnaires

http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/17072/average-hei...

" Imperial regulations, though not entirely unambiguous, suggest that the minimum height for new recruits was five Roman feet, seven inches (165 cm., 5'5") ... for the army as a whole a reasonable estimate of a soldier's average height is around 170 cm (5'7").

- Roth, Jonathan, and Jonathan P. Roth. The Logistics of the Roman Army at War: 264 BC-AD 235. Columbia studies in the classical tradition, Vol. 23. Brill, 1999.

"

[dogma1138]

"Roman records directly attest such measuring of recruits, although determining the exact height requirement is problematic. Vegetius gives the minimum standard, or incomma, as “6 [Roman] feet [178 cm.] or 5 feet 10 inches [ca. 173 cm.] among the auxiliary cavalry or the [soldiers] of the legionary first cohort.”15 Although both Fritz Wille and N.P. Milner see Vegetius’s figures as an optimum and a minimum figure respectively, the expression incommam . . . exactam strongly suggests a regulation height.16 Vegetius may mean that cavalrymen must be 6 feet and soldiers of the first cohort five foot ten. In any case, these are clearly height requirements for elite sol- diers and not for the entire military. Praetorian Guardsmen probably had a higher minimum height than rank and file legionaries until the Septimius Severus started recruiting the latter into the imperial guard at the end of the second century.17"

Page 9 of that same book.

During the later Marian Reforms the height requirements were extended to the rest of the legions including the auxiliaries. That book however doesn't cover that period.

[unFou]

I thought Gaius Marius was pre-Caesar, so Republican Rome? And Septimius Severus / Vegetius were post-Augustus Imperial Rome.

Not sure about minimum heights, but the timeline seems a bit off here...