[HoneyBadger]

Illuminated One: That might possibly be the case-if you discount that most of the early Roman armies were citizens, or that their commanders were generally nobles and landowners-but that's not from any prejudices against the type of work involved, it's that they type of work involved was dirty and hard and dangerous. The Romans-again-used engineers and skilled craftspeople on the field, when their own soldiers weren't up to a particular task, and then they trained the soldiers better. They didn't assign peasants or unskilled slaves to do anything other than unskilled labour.

In any case, I assure you that, in all likelyhood, they would have made exceptions for people who could do that kind of work *with the power of their minds*.

And who says mages weren't of the "peasant" class? With the Church being pretty hard on pagan and heretical rulers and all, with the excommunicating and the cruisading and the witch-burning, mages were more likely to be peasants than nobility, or atleast not shout to the world that they had powers of witchcraft and demonology at their fingertips.