George Leonard Cheesman

George Leonard Cheesman was a British historian and classical scholar whose surviving reputation rests mainly on The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army, published in 1914. The book helped establish him as a serious student of Roman military history and is still the work most closely associated with his name.

Available biographical records describe him as a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and also preserve papers connected with his historical work. Winchester College records give his birth date as 14 September 1884 and note his education there before Oxford.

His career was brief. During the First World War he served as a lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment and was killed at Gallipoli in August 1915, at about thirty years old. That combination of promising scholarship and wartime loss gives his work an added poignancy.