THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYone-third rather than two-thirds; the rent paid on the share thus received was
itself known as ‘thirds’ (tertiae).^49 But there are many uncertainties, arising not
least from discrepancies among the sources and a lack of hard evidence. A
generation ago Walter Goffart proposed a quite different reading of the evi-
dence from the later law codes, according to which it was not the land itself,
but the tax revenues from the estates which were divided between barbar-
ians and Romans,^50 and this has given rise (and still does) to intense discus-
sion. Controversy surrounds the meanings of the Latin terms hospitalitas and
sors, and the evidence is very incomplete; in practice, arrangements probably
changed with changing conditions, and while land does seem to have been at
issue in the settlement with the Visigoths in 418, it may not have been in the
case of the Ostrogoths and does not accord with evidence from Cassiodorus.^51
By contrast, there is no evidence from northern Gaul, for example, to tell us
about the arrangements which were made there. The reality was surely more
varied than has usually been allowed in modern debate, and the fi fth century
in any case only marked the beginning of a much longer process.^52 But while
the settlement of barbarians may not have represented an ‘existential strug-
gle’,^53 it did spell the end of the Roman empire in the west. The question may
indeed be asked why these groups, once settled, did not integrate fully and
simply become absorbed. But they had by then begun to develop their own
identity, and the answer may be that it was simply too late.
Barbarians and the late Roman armyIt has often seemed as though it was the Roman army that was spectacularly
unable to defend the western provinces; one historian has called his chapter
on the fi fth century ‘The disappearance of an army’.^54 What had happened to
the Roman army, and why it does it seem to have been so unsuccessful? Older
assumptions were that the recruitment of barbarians into the army was one
of the factors that led to poorer performance. This is a factor mentioned in
the contemporary sources, together with complaints about weakened fron-
tiers. The latter is usually blamed on a particular emperor – thus the pagan
historian Zosimus lays most of the blame on the Christian Constantine. Sol-
diers are regularly depicted in the sources from the fourth century onwards
as debauched, ‘soft’ and undisciplined. The late Roman practice of billeting
soldiers in towns often lies behind such criticisms, and indeed in the early
empire, citizens of the more peaceful provinces had rarely seen soldiers at
fi rst hand, much less experienced their rough behaviour.^55 The anonymous
author of the treatise De Rebus Bellicis (late 360s) already complains about the
high cost of the army and the weakening of frontier defence (De Rebus Bellicis
5), and the soldiers settled on the frontiers known as limitanei are frequently
blamed for alleged poor performance.^56
The fact that these complaints come in so stereotyped a form indicates that
their form has much to do with the prejudices of the contemporary sources.
But the army of the late fourth and fi fth centuries was certainly different from