The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-700 AD

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITY

and more from within the confi nes of the empire itself. There is little direct
evidence that such troops were any less effective than Romans.^61 Some con-
temporaries naturally thought otherwise, and there was much contemporary
concern during the aftermath of the battle of Adrianople; the military treatise
of Vegetius, probably of this period, also refl ects this conservative view. But
if rank-and-fi le barbarian soldiers were not usually a problem, it was other-
wise with powerful individuals, and we have already seen the power gained by
individual barbarian generals who rose to hold the highest offi ce of magister
militum: Stilicho, Ricimer and Odoacer are the most conspicuous examples,
and they posed a rather different threat.^62 This too began in the fourth cen-
tury, and barbarian offi cers are frequently mentioned in the military narrative
of Ammianus covering the years 353 to 378. In the ranks, barbarians held a
variety of statuses, including those of laeti and gentiles, both referring to groups
of settlers with an obligation to military service, foederati, individually recruited
barbarians or units enrolled through treaties,^63 and dediticii, prisoners of war
from beyond the frontiers. In practice there were probably barbarian troops
in all the many different units of the army. Rather than appealing to a general
drop in manpower (which is hard to establish), the explanation for this change
is probably simply that it was easy. Barbarians were available in large, if not
massive, numbers, and utilizing them in the army was a convenient way of
deciding what to do with them and, it was hoped, also of neutralizing any
capacity they might have for disruption; moreover the process did not inter-
fere with the interests of the landowners who were emerging as more and
more powerful in this period.

The late Roman army

Barbarian invasion is one of the classic explanations put forward for the fall
of the empire. It further implies the ineffectiveness of the late Roman army to
contain the situation.^64 One issue is that of size: how large an army was at the
disposal of the late Roman state? While calculations based on the Notitia Dig-
nitatum (which lists the eastern army establishment c. 394 and the western one
of c. 420) are diffi cult to make, they seem to suggest a size well over 400,000
or even more, depending on one’s interpretation.^65 The mid-sixth-century
writer John the Lydian gives a fi gure of over 435,000 (De mens. I.27), and later
in the sixth century Agathias gives a total of 645,000 (Hist.V.13). The latter
must be much too high even as a paper calculation, and it is simply incred-
ible that the empire could have sustained so vastly increased an army. As we
have seen, the Notitia also fails to take into account the very large propor-
tion of barbarian federate troops who actually did much of the fi ghting, and
Agathias admits that by his own day the actual overall size had been reduced
to 150,000: ‘whereas there should have been a total effective fi ghting force
of six hundred and forty-fi ve thousand men, the number had dropped dur-
ing this period to barely one hundred and fi fty thousand’ (Hist. V.13). From
the fi fth century at least, the western government was simply no longer in a