What happened to Roman soldiers when they misbehaved?

Answer 1

The usual punishment for routine offences was for the centurion to beat them with a vine rod. There was one centurion nicknamed Cedo Alteram (give me another) because he was so vigorous in handing out this punishment that he broke the rod. For serious offences, the punishment could be death. This was the case with sleeping on sentry duty. While this sounds harsh, if a sentry could not warn of an enemy attack on a camp, the whole legion could be lost, so a quite ruthless approach was quite properly adopted. Another serious punishment was decimation. When a legion failed to act properly in battle, a severe exemplary punishment was used. The word is misapplied today as if it meant that a majority was killed. Rather, one of the centuries of a legion was selected by lot, and one in ten of that century was selected by lot, which meant that a few men were subjected to ultimate punishment which included emasculation and whipping to death with religious ritual in front of the assembled legion. The object was to instill in the onlookers a sense of meeting their obligations. Crassus did this to the legions he inherited who had run away before Spartacus in the slave revolt, to stiffen their resolve in his upcoming campaign.