What a Roman Unfamiliar With the Military Career of L. Artorius Castus Would Say Upon Viewing the Latter's Memorial With ARMATOS

The L. Artorius Castus Stone with ARM[...]S Reconstructed as ARMATOS

(as per the theory of Dr. Linda A. Malcor, Antonio Trinchesse and Alessandro Faggiani)

What a Roman unfamiliar with the military career of L. Artorius Castus would say upon viewing the latter's memorial with ARMATOS written for the inscription's fragmentary ARM(...)S:

I'm a passerby looking at LAC's funeral stone.  Or maybe I've come over for lunch to see the family that lives there, a generation or two later.  I see this nice stone and it tells me that a prefect of the Sixth Legion led three legions against armed men.  So I think to myself, hmm... Three entire legions led against an enemy and he doesn't bother to tell us who they were or anything?  Armed men? Who else would he be fighting - inermes, unarmed men? If I read it literally, rather than assuming detachments are implied, I would doubtless be thinking this must have been in Britain, although I would also know all three entire legions in Britain would not have been taken together against someone.  Sure, the Sixth, as he was its prefect.  But we are surely talking generous vexillations from the other two?  I mean, we don't empty an entire province's legionary bases of its legions all at once.  But even so, who were the armed men?  If this were so huge and important an undertaking, one which appears to have landed him the nice procuratorship, why doesn't he trouble himself to identify his enemy?  I mean, he wanted to preserve his life's deeds for  posterity and make his reputation a record for the ages. Well, armed men just doesn't cut it in that context.  He goes to great lengths to tell us how much he got paid for his procuratorship and that he held the right of the sword in that capacity, but doesn't think it important to tell us who was fighting as a commander? Surely he wasn't a stupid man.  To think he was ignorant of whom he was fighting is ridiculous. Were they a tribe or tribes? Mutinous troops? Brigands? He could have identified his enemy as DEFECTORES, REBELLES, LATRONES, HOSTES PVBLICOS, PRAEDONES, DESERTORES... Then we would have known exactly whom he was fighting. Maybe he was confused. He and his legionaries went against so many different enemies that he gave up trying to remember them all or separate them out in his own mind. So to him, in the endless haze of battle, they just amalgamated into an indistinguishable mass of armed men. A sort of tribute to PTSD. Or maybe he wanted people to think he had gone against every conceivable enemy to make himself seem greater, and so he defaulted to the generic, vague, nonspecific, catchall armed men. The minds of those reading the phrase could then conjure any enemy or place or combination of enemies and places they wished, and place these imaginative constructs at any time they pleased. Oh, but maybe he didn't have room on his stone to name his adversaries.  But, wait, this is a very large and very expensive stone, with very nicely rendered lettering and decoration.  Did the idiot not plan the inscription before he went to get a stone of the right size for it?  Does he not know how to abbreviate or ligature the names of his adversaries?  No, I find it impossible to believe he would leave them out because he was so stupid as to get a stone the wrong size for the pre-planned inscription (or fail to properly design an inscription for a stone he had already procured).  I mean, come on, he says himself he was alive when he had this made.  So... he was happy with armed men?  What else can I say?  Just plain dumb. No one, even in Castus' own time, if they didn't know him or know of him, would have any idea whom ARMATOS was. Would you put something that asinine on your memorial? I shall have to ask someone around here if they happen to know who the armed men were!