Conquests
Octavian, assuming the name Caesar Augustus when he emerged as the ultimate victor of the civil wars of the late Republic, launched a series of campaigns in northwestern Spain, Egypt, the Alps, much of the Balkan peninsula, and Austria south of the Danube. The resulting conquests, following immediately on the heels of nearly a century of civil wars and social conflict, contribute to the impression that the bellicosity and expansionism of the early Republic continued unbroken into Augustus’s reign. But, examined further, this burst of expansionism resembles more closely the sporadic wars of expansion of the transitional period (218231 BCE). Those campaigns mostly rounded off already extant provinces such as Spain to their natural geographic limits or, as in Egypt, formalized Roman control of areas already dominated by Roman power.
In this extract from his Bellum Civile, or The Civil War, Caesar (who refers to himself in the third person) describes the decisive battle between his forces and those of his rival Pompey at Pharsalus in 48 bce.
[3.90] [Caesar exhorted] his army to battle, according to the military custom, and spoke to them of the favors that they had constantly received from him, . . . After delivering this speech, he gave by a trumpet the signal to his soldiers, who were eagerly demanding it, and were very impatient for the onset.
[3.93] . . . our men, when the signal was given, rushed forward with their javelins ready to be launched, but perceiving that Pompey’s men did not run to meet their charge, having acquired experience by custom, and being practiced in former battles, they of their own accord repressed their speed, and halted almost midway, that they might not come up with the enemy when their strength was exhausted, and after a short respite they again renewed their course, and threw their javelins, and instantly drew their swords, as Caesar had ordered them. Nor did Pompey’s men fail in this crisis, for they received our javelins, stood our charge, and maintained their ranks; and having launched their javelins, had recourse to their swords. At the same time Pompey’s horse, according to their orders, rushed out at once from his left wing, and his whole host of archers poured after them. Our cavalry did not withstand their charge, but gave ground a little, upon which Pompey’s horse pressed them more vigorously, and began to file off in troops, and flank our army. When Caesar perceived this, he gave the signal to his fourth line, which he had formed of the six cohorts. They instantly rushed forward and charged Pompey’s horse with such fury, that not a man of them stood; but all wheeling about, not only quitted their post, but galloped forward to seek a refuge in the highest mountains. By their retreat the archers and slingers, being left destitute and defenseless, were all cut to pieces. The cohorts, pursuing their success, wheeled about upon Pompey’s left wing, while his infantry still continued to make battle, and attacked them in the rear.
[3.94] At the same time Caesar ordered his third line to advance, which till then had not been engaged, but had kept their post. Thus, new and fresh troops having come to the assistance of the fatigued, and others having made an attack on their rear, Pompey’s men were not able to maintain their ground, but all fled, nor was Caesar deceived in his opinion, that the victory, as he had declared in his speech to his soldiers, must have its beginning from those six cohorts, which he had placed as a fourth line to oppose the horse. For by them the cavalry were routed; by them the archers and slingers were cut to pieces; by them the left wing of Pompey’s army was surrounded, and obliged to be the first to flee. But when Pompey saw his cavalry routed, and that part of his army on which he reposed his greatest hopes thrown into confusion, despairing of the rest, he quitted the field, and retreated straightway on horseback to his camp, . . .
[3.97] Caesar having possessed himself of Pompey’s camp, urged his soldiers not to be too intent on plunder, and lose the opportunity of completing their conquest.
[3.99] In that battle, no more than two hundred privates were missing, but Caesar lost about thirty centurions, valiant officers. . . . Of Pompey’s army, there fell about fifteen thousand; but upwards of twenty-four thousand were made prisoners. . . .
source: Julius Caesar, Bellum Civile.
Caesar Augustus
Caesar Augustus established not only most of the borders of the Roman Empire but the main elements of imperial style for nearly two centuries—an odd mixture of traditional Republican forms and deification of the emperor.
These campaigns also seem to have been similar in motivation also. Although Augustus had defeated his immediate opponents, he probably felt the need to cement his political prestige and position with military triumphs against foreign foes, in the manner of earlier consuls and budding military dynasts including his uncle Julius Caesar in Gaul. Furthermore, he needed to cement the loyalty of the army, clearly the most important institution of imperial political control, through successful campaigning and the distribution of rewards and plunder. This also had the virtue of keeping the army occupied on the frontiers, with only the most loyal guard troops left in Rome with Augustus when he wasn’t with the army on campaign.
This round of conquest and legitimation ended in 9 ce when Germanic tribes ambushed and wiped out three legions in the Teutoburgerwald between the Rhine and the Elbe rivers. Augustus seems to have planned the conquest of Germany at least up to the Elbe; after this disaster, he withdrew his legions behind the Rhine and the Danube and advised his successors not to expand the frontiers further. His advice was largely followed, but as much for practical reasons (the danger of losses loomed as large as the potential gains of victory for an emperor’s prestige) as out of respect for his wishes. Indeed, when emperors came to the throne in need of bolstering their legitimacy, they pursued further conquests, as did Claudius (a fairly unmilitary man) in Britain after 43 and Trajan (the first non-Italian emperor) first in Dacia from 101-107 and then in Mesopotamia.
Institutionalization of the Professional Army
Augustus’s conquests went hand in hand with institutional arrangements designed to stabilize and pacify the Empire internally. Above all, this meant dealing with the army. The number of troops in the various armies left at the end of the civil wars was over 500,000 in sixtysome legions, not all at full strength. Through consolidations and the practice of paying off veterans with both cash and land grants in colonies throughout the empire, Augustus reduced the number of legions to twenty-eight and troop strength, counting auxiliaries and the newly established Praetorian Guard, Augustus’s personal bodyguard, to under 300,000.
The terms of service in the reorganized army regularized and institutionalized practices that had emerged haphazardly but broadly since the time of Marius around 100 bce. The prerequisite of land ownership for joining the legions was officially eliminated. The army became a definite profession, as the length of a term of enlistment rose from 6 to 20 years (16 of which were on active service with another 4 on reserve duties). The practice of rewarding soldiers with land on the termination of their service, first instituted by Marius, became part of the standard terms of service. Pay rates were such that service in the army was not lucrative, but finding recruits seems not to have been a problem for most of the Pax Romana. Most of the army was stationed near the major frontiers, especially on the Rhine and Danube rivers and in the east facing the Parthian Empire (see below). Military colonies, based on the land grants that retired soldiers received, tended to grow up near the major permanent encampments of active units.
The Army and Political Culture
Augustus’s formalization of a professional, long-service army that constituted the major permanent organ of the state naturally put that army into a special relationship with the emperor, a relationship that was closest between the Praetorian Guard and the emperor, and inevitably inserted the army into the politics of the Empire. As early as 41 ce, the Praetorian Guard intervened to assassinate the emperor Caligula, who had gone mad, elevating his uncle Claudius to the throne, and Vespasian emerged from the brief civil war of 69 that broke out when troops in different provinces, as well as the Praetorian Guard, advanced the claims of different commanders to the throne. Although the army then stayed out of emperor making (formally) until the third century, it remained the center of gravity of Roman politics.
This should be seen not merely as a result of institutional arrangements but as one of the cultural imprints on the Empire of the prestige of military command and battlefield success that developed under the Republic. The instructive contrast is with China. There, the consolidation of imperial state power under the Qin involved the delegitimation of warfare and the submergence of the remnants of the old chariot warrior elite under civilian state mechanisms in favor of a monopoly of legitimacy on the part of the central ruler. The Romans, having no chariot elite to depose and having built a state on an antimonarchical basis around a militarized aristocracy, population, and ethos, arrived at similar structures of centralized state power, although animated by a different culture of the relationship of warfare and the state.
This divide in political culture also shows up at the level of the individual soldier in the Chinese and Roman armies. Both institutions stressed discipline and training, but the officer corps and soldiers of the Roman army retained a notion of competition and of individual glory, within the structures of hierarchical command, that translated into individual initiative on the battlefield. Thus, Roman generals could give broad orders and trust their subordinates down to the centurion level to make the most of the opportunities they encountered. The centralizing Qin political ideology, on the other hand, as played out in military manuals such as Sun Zi’s, vested all decisionmaking authority in the general, reducing subordinates and soldiers alike to military automata. It is hard to say whether one system was militarily superior to the other (though the modern, Western, prejudice is to see the virtues of the Roman system more clearly); both were quite successful. But they were certainly poles apart culturally despite sharing deep structural similarities.
The Augustan settlement of the military and political structure of the Empire established the foundations for a period known then and since as the Pax Romana, or Roman Peace. While subjugated peoples could (and did) argue about how peaceful the Pax Romana really was, given that it was established and maintained by force of arms, the Empire largely maintained internal stability and external security throughout the period from Augustus’s reign down to the end of the second century. Stability and security rested on a number of structures that had the army at their core.
The Geostrategic Map
The distribution of legions from Augustus’ time forward, though not absolutely fixed, remained relatively stable, and reflected Roman perceptions of the major threats facing the Empire (Figure 4.3). Some legions, as in Spain, remained in the interior in garrison and policing duty, but the largest concentrations were posted close to the frontiers along the Rhine and the Danube and facing the Parthian Empire in the east, the one major power that Rome engaged directly. The disaster that had befallen Crassus’s army at Carrhae in 53 bce had given the Romans a healthy respect for Parthian military capabilities on their own ground, and diplomacy was more often the tool of choice than war on the eastern frontier during this period.
It is important to realize that the nature of the frontiers was not a sharp divide between “civilized” and “barbarian,” nor even a clear demarcation of the limits of Roman control and influence, as any map will tend (misleadingly) to imply. The frontiers were porous zones of interaction that extended far beyond any notional border on both sides. More or less Romanized tribes engaged in trade and adopted Roman ways, especially in Germany—one reason they felt justified in entering the Empire later when pressured by influxes from the east by the migrations of less acculturated tribes. Such an understanding of the frontiers, as well as awareness of the often personal nature of Roman diplomacy and political decision making, complicates any attempt to define a Roman grand strategy. In the sense that emperors tried to match resources to commitments and threats, there certainly was one. In the modern sense of a clearly conceptualized system of defensive arrangements, there was not. Indeed, the construction of Roman legionary camps made them much less defensive strongholds than bases for offensive operations, and although conquests after Augustus were rare for practical reasons, the ethos of the Empire remained expansionist.
The Army as an Institution
The imperial Roman army ranks as one of the great institutions of the premodern world. Named and numbered legions maintained institutional and cultural continuity over several centuries and provided the essential framework of recruiting, training, and retirement that kept the army going. The network of fortified camps that housed the army and the roads the legions marched on long outlasted the Empire itself. Expenditures on the army and its infrastructure dominated the Empire’s budget. Given the close association of the army with internal imperial politics, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the army was the (central) Roman state.
Figure 4.3 Deployment of Roman Legions
The military state existed on the foundation of a Roman socioeconomic world structured around cities and trade networks. Perhaps the key problem for Roman rulers (as for many similar large empires) was maintaining the relationship between state and society as a symbiotic one—with the state and army providing security for the economic structure and prosperity that made a large military possible—and not as a parasitic one in which the cost of security ate its own support. Augustus’s reduction of the size of the army clearly worked in this regard, but the total size of the military establishment crept up over time, and when the number of threats it had to deal with also rose after 180, that balance proved harder to maintain.
The Army and Society
The Augustan settlement had other implications for the relationship between army and society that played themselves out more ambiguously over the course of the next two centuries. The chief change, and probably one that was unavoidable given both the size of the Empire and the resulting need for a professional army, was the social marginalization of soldiers. If being a Roman citizen under the early Republic meant also being a soldier, being a citizen under the Empire (a category that expanded significantly when all free men in the Empire were granted citizenship in 212) meant, for most, benefiting from the protection of soldiers. Longer terms of service for individuals and the reduced size of the military establishment after Augustus’s reforms meant that an even smaller proportion of the population of the Empire served in the army than in the transitional Republic, and the cultural divide between civilian and soldier grew wider.
One curious result of this was that, while military glory remained a central aspect of Roman culture, its expression and the prestige that glory generated were increasingly vested in the institution of the army and in its overall commander, the emperor, rather than in individual soldiers. (Within the culture of the army, glory remained both a generalized value and something achieved by individuals through bravery in action, which translated into benefits both tangible—promotions and bonuses—and intangible. But neither the glory nor the social prestige soldiers gained within the army translated automatically beyond that institution into society at large, whereas in earlier centuries the two had been inseparable.) The concentration of military glory in the person of the emperor to the exclusion of other individuals and the marginalization of military values also operated at the level of elite culture. Political courtiers and cultural elites dominated at the capital, while local urban elites focused on civil service and civic and religious building projects; both, especially the former, showed little understanding of or sympathy for military values and the life of soldiers. The identity between Roman society and its army had been transformed into a near- polar opposition.
Points of contact did remain. Soldiers who settled long term in permanent camps naturally developed ties, both economic and social, to the local population. Soldiers were supposed to remain unmarried for the duration of their active service, but informal ties inevitably developed, and the settlement of retired soldiers with their families in the vicinity of permanent camps further connected local society to the military. But such ties remained limited and localized, and economic interactions with localities could just as often prove burdensome as profitable, depending on the state of local economic development. For most of the Pax Romana, the estrangement of army and society was not terribly problematic, because it operated under the umbrella of the successful symbiosis of state and economy noted above. But it had potentially negative implications should that large-scale relationship break down.
The Army at War
Institutional continuity and the development of a written culture of military handbooks contributed to the efficiency of the Roman army at war. Roman armies followed a standard order of march and a marching routine that included establishing a fortified camp at the end of each day’s movement. Camps were laid out on a standard grid that reflected the unit organization of the army, and camp discipline was generally strictly enforced. Equipment was also relatively standardized; many weapons and armor were produced in large state workshops, and the army’s demand for food, clothing, and shelter was significant. As noted, although in some areas that demand stimulated economic activity, in others it proved a burden.
The Roman army remained a reliable and generally efficient battle-fighting machine. Tactics did not change much in the transition from late Republic to Empire, although the scope of the Empire and the range of subject peoples it could call on to provide auxiliaries gave it even greater tactical flexibility. The cavalry in particular, long a weakness of Roman armies, improved with the regular recruitment of auxiliaries from Spain and North Africa. While the highest levels of tactical command varied in quality, now according to the vagaries of political appointment rather than election, the professionalism of the lower-level officers down to centurion rank was such that many Roman armies could fight well with minimal direction from above. And while expansionism and conquest at the strategic level became rare, the aggressive, offensively oriented culture of Roman battle, resulting from the creative tension between competition for individual glory and group cohesion and discipline, continued to operate throughout this period.
Where the armies of the Empire clearly outshone their predecessors from the early Republic was in military engineering, an aspect of the general Roman talent for engineering and construction that produced not just roads and fortifications but cement, aqueducts, amphitheaters, and so forth. The entrenching that characterized Roman encampments could also be turned directly against enemy forts. Roman siege craft advanced significantly under Caesar in Gaul (and Sulla had used field entrenchments in battle to protect his flanks at Chaeronea in 86 bce). Imperial armies had siege trains that could deploy significant numbers of siege engines of a variety of types, ranging from giant steel bows that served essentially as antipersonnel weapons and could be deployed on battlefields, to antifortification stone throwers that operated on both torsion and tension principles. They also developed formations such as the testudo (or “tortoise,” in which legionnaires held their shields over their heads) designed for assaults on walls, employed sappers to mine walls, and in 70 ce, at the siege of Jerusalem during the Jewish Revolt, revived the old technique of building a massive earthen ramp up the walls.
The Jewish Revolt illustrates one of the sorts of tasks the army carried out. Suppression of rebellions and insurrections—in effect, internal policing on a large scale—was vital and shows that not all the Empire’s subject peoples appreciated the supposed benefits of Roman rule unambiguously. It also illustrates Roman values at work in battle: Josephus, the great historian of the war, records (or plausibly invents) a Roman commander’s speech before a battle with the rebels in which he reminds his soldiers that the Jews fight merely for their god and their country, while the Romans fight for glory, the far-greater motive.
Purely defensive campaigns against external invasions were rare, for even temporary defensive activity was likely to be followed by punitive offensives that aimed at delivering a message while at the same time gathering plunder. Such offensives were also launched to reinforce diplomatic pressure or to respond to diplomatic slights or threats. Though rare, campaigns of conquest did still occur, most famously under Trajan in the early second century, in Dacia and Parthia.
Beginning in the late second century CE, Rome was faced with an increased level of military threat on its borders. Tribes beyond the borders, some more acculturated to Roman influence than others, began to migrate over the borders. Some asked permission to enter and were allowed in by Roman authorities, often on terms that included military service; others, either refused permission or not asking for it, moved more or less forcibly and met Roman resistance. This pressure was especially intense along the Danube frontier of the Empire in the Balkan peninsula, but it also erupted at times along the Rhine. The reasons for this rise in external pressure are complex but certainly involve the migrations of peoples from farther east, including steppe nomads, moving west under pressure, in turn, from their eastern neighbors. Some of the origins of this chain reaction trace back to the expansion of the Han Empire in the first century bce.
Another source of increased threat arose on the Empire’s eastern borders, where a revived Persian Empire under the Sassanians replaced the declining Parthians in 226 ce (see Chapter 2). Their revival of Zoroastrianism combined with increased Roman bellicosity in Armenia and northern Mesopotamia to turn what had been a diplomatically managed frontier into a source of military problems that would persist, in greater or lesser degrees of intensity, until the sudden eruption of the Arabs and Islam in the seventh century transformed the entire region (see Chapter 8).
Complicating matters further was a significant rise in the third century of internal instability and civil wars. Since provincial armies formed the crucial support base for contestants for the throne, dynastic conflict often resulted in frontier regions denuded of their troops, who were busy marching on Rome. Civil wars had two further effects on the army. First, standards of discipline and training declined; and second, prior to 180, detachments from legions and auxiliary units often had been sent to reinforce areas of major conflict, but such vexillations, as they were called, had always returned to their parent units when the crisis had been dealt with. In the continual crises, internal and external, that characterized the middle of the third century, detachments and the mixing of units tended to become permanent, diluting the traditions and unit cohesion of the old legions. Emperors gradually increased the size of the army, in part to compensate for its declining quality and in part simply because it was the only way to meet more widely dispersed threats. But this both increased the tax burden on an economy that was already stressed by conflicts within the Empire’s borders and complicated the task of maintaining discipline. Recruiting depended ever more heavily on barbarians, though the meaning of this term must be examined critically (see the Issues box “The ‘Barbarization’ of the Roman Army”). In short, the Augustan military system was breaking down.
By the middle of the third century, the survival of the Empire was in question. But a series of reforms instituted by the emperor Diocletian (284-305) and cemented by Constantine (314-337) reorganized both the administration of the Empire, civil and military, and the field army. These reforms proved effective enough that the Empire survived another century and a half in the west and another millennium in the east. But they also transformed the nature of the Empire and its military forces.
State and Society Recognizing that the administrative and military burden on a single ruler had become unmanageable, Diocletian divided the Empire into halves, each ruled by a coequal Augustus aided by a Caesar, or junior emperor. Significantly, Diocletian ruled the eastern half of the Empire, which was richer, more urban, and in some ways more defensible than the western half, from a capital at Nicomedia in Asia Minor; Constantine later founded a new capital at the Bosporus, which he named Constantinople (ancient Byzantium, and present-day Istanbul). Rome, though symbolically still significant, ceased to be the center of the Roman Empire—a deliberate move on the part of Diocletian and Constantine, who aimed to reduce the influence of both the Senate and the Praetorian Guard, the latter of which Constantine abolished.
The system of divided rule did not prevent civil wars after Diocletian stepped down in 305. Multiple ruling courts increased further the tax burden on a Roman society that was at best demographically stagnant by this time, despite migration into the Empire by Romanized barbarians (always smaller in number than popular imagination would have them) and an economy already stressed by war and taxes. Social changes were accompanied by religious transformation following Constantine’s legalization and then promotion of Christianity, which by the mid-fourth century had become the official religion of the Empire—a shift with consequences for foreign policy, especially on the Persian frontier, where Christianity and Zoroastrianism came to add a new element of ideological conflict to warfare between the two empires (see Chapter 8).
The problems of ruling a more socially divided, less secure empire were reflected in the increasingly autocratic nature of the Roman state, symbolized by the decline in importance of the Senate. It was thus in this period that the Republican imprint on the political culture of the Empire, maintained by the fictions of the Augustan settlement, definitively faded, a process mirrored by changes in the army.
The Army Diocletian and Constantine reorganized the army significantly. The total military establishment had by now grown from the roughly 300,000 troops under Augustus to somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 men. Reform divided the troops into two forces: those stationed on the frontiers, called limitanei, and a group of mobile field armies, the comitatenses, which were stationed as reserves. Although theoretically of similar status and drawn from the same recruiting bases, the field armies were paid more and had lighter equipment (among the infantry); they also included the bulk of the much more prominent and numerous cavalry forces Rome was now raising. Lower pay meant that many frontier troops worked at least part-time in the civilian economy, reducing their practical mobility. The legions of the frontier forces were reduced in size to around 1000, reflecting the realities of the earlier creation of vexillations of about this size. But the theoretical flexibility this measure provided tended to be undermined by the tendency for frontier units to become even more attached to their localities. Thus, service in the field armies became more prestigious, causing morale problems for the frontier units, whose military effectiveness and political influence gradually decayed.
The increased organizational importance of the cavalry arm was evident in the creation of two new offices of military command immediately subordinate to the emperor—the Master of the Foot and the Master of the Horse, who replaced a Master of the Troops, an office that had proven dangerously powerful. Stronger cavalry forces also reflected the rising importance of auxiliaries—non-Romans serving in their own units and sometimes with their own weapons and tactical traditions—in the army (see the Issues box). The relationship of the late Roman army to the society that it protected became, in these circumstances, even more attenuated than the relationship between the professional but still citizen legions of the Augustan system and their society and was a far cry from the identity of army and society obtaining under the Republic.
Warfare: Training, Cavalry, and Mobility Tactical and operational considerations contributed to the rising importance of cavalry in Roman forces in the mid-third century. Obviously, mounted troops could move more quickly from one theater of operations (or a central reserve station) to another than could foot soldiers. The number of separate threats the Empire faced and the mobile nature of the invaders put a premium on rapid responses. “Mounted troops” in this case included what could be called mounted infantry: troops who rode horses for strategic mobility but tended to enter combat on foot. But cavalry units— troops who remained mounted both on campaign and in battle—assumed a greater tactical role as well. This was partly in response to the cavalry deployed by groups such as the Visigoths, who employed heavily armed and armored horsemen who charged into close combat, and later the Huns, who employed the swift mounted archers typical of steppe peoples (see Chapter 6). That such groups were not just enemies but also recruits in the Roman army further highlights the greater role for cavalry in late Roman warfare.
But declining standards of training and discipline in the Roman army also contributed to the rising importance of cavalry, because large-unit training was more important to the cohesion of infantry forces than of cavalry, which could effectively operate in smaller units and tended to be bound together by elite social ties more than were infantry. Thus, the apparent rise of cavalry actually in large part reflects a relative decline in infantry quality, which, in turn, reflects the declining effectiveness of Roman central authority over its military forces. On the other hand, this trend should not be exaggerated. Infantry units remained numerically predominant in Roman forces and continued to play vital roles on the battlefield, particularly as the solid defensive base around which cavalry could maneuver, and even more so in the less glamorous but equally important work of siege warfare and defense of fortified positions.
Landlords, Warlords, and Division The generally declining effectiveness of Roman central government, especially in the western half of the Empire, where urban-based economic and social resources for maintaining order were scarcer than in the east, naturally had repercussions beyond the composition and effectiveness of the army. Social changes occurring in conditions of instability and declining and fragmenting central authority had important implications for the nature of military service.
The key development, again predominantly in the less urbanized western half of the Empire, was the growing privatization and localization of political, social, and military power. Two social groups led this trend from opposite but converging directions. One was the owners of great rural estates, whose social and economic power allowed them to hire private soldiers to act as bodyguards and defenders of their employers’ landed interests. The other was the leaders of Roman military units, especially federated units organized around loyalty to their leader (and marked increasingly by barbarian cultural tribal identities, as noted in the Issues box). These groups’ control of coercive force allowed them to appropriate landholdings in order to secure the economic base of their power in a time when tax collection and central disbursement of pay was becoming more problematic.
The result was a growing class of leaders with Roman pedigrees, either social or military, but whose private interests and power were becoming increasingly separated, in reality, from the exercise of public authority on behalf of the state—although they maintained the appearance of state appointment and state- conferred office, and they deployed the mechanisms of state-sanctioned enforcement as much as possible because of the prestige and legitimacy state titles still carried. Ironically, this brought about the beginnings of a reconnection of military force and society very different from the separation that had characterized the Empire at its height. But this reconnection was beyond the reach of the Roman state, a state that had emerged originally as the framework for the unity of society and army in the Republic, and had been, of course, the overarching institutional unifier of separate civilian and military spheres under the Empire. The result was thus not the re-creation of the early Republic, whose antimonarchical ethos had by now been totally effaced, as Augustine’s writings attest. Rather, the result was the emergence of the foundations for the barbarian kingdoms that would succeed the Empire in the west when the old edifice finally broke apart in the fifth century (see Chapter 7).
The restriction of this result to the west, however, highlights the fact that the “fall of Rome” was a partial and largely evolutionary phenomenon, for the Empire survived in the east, where institutional continuity and a central role for the state remained much more evident through periods of subsequent transformation (see Chapter 8).
The nature of the transformation of the late Roman army has been a subject of historiographical controversy for almost as long as there have been historians writing about Rome. Indeed, in some ways, the question goes back as far as Vegetius, not a historian but the fifth-century ce writer of a late-Roman manual of military affairs that emphasized a decline in discipline and training as the root of the army’s troubles, and even further back to Tacitus, the early imperial Roman historian.
But the modern form of the controversy in many ways dates to the late eighteenth century and Edward Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which some historians consider the first modern, scholarly work of history. Gibbon, influenced by Enlightenment rationality, saw two linked causes for the disintegration of Roman power: barbarians, not just as invaders but as military recruits by Rome, and the rise of Christianity. While few historians today would give much weight to changing religion as a cause of military decline, the role of barbarians—Germanic tribes moving into the Empire either as enemies or as federated soldiers—has had a more influential role in the historiography.
Until the past thirty years, this role was cast in terms of the conflict and eventual fusion of Romanitas and Germanitas—that is, of separate and opposed sociocultural worlds, one Roman and one German, the former representing sophisticated “civilization,” the latter primitive “barbarism.” For Gibbon, the moral terms of this conflict were clear, and the “good guys” (civilization) lost. But the picture was complicated by nineteenth- century nationalist historians, many working in Germany and England, who saw in the Germanic tribes the forebears of their own peoples and attributed to them the virtues of vitality and egalitarianism, in contrast to the decadence and autocracy of Rome. English historians, in particular, were prone to see the roots of democracy in the warbands of the Germanic chiefs, in which the chiefs’ followers, all the free men of the tribe, had considerable influence over a sort of collective decision making. This view of Germanic warbands ultimately traces back to Tacitus’s picture of the comitatus, or warband, and his ethnography of German tribes, dating to the first century CE. In this view, the fall of Rome was not necessarily a bad thing, as it opened up space for the birth of modern nations.
But recent work on both Tacitus and late Roman institutional history has destroyed this romantic picture. Tacitus’s picture of the comitatus has been shown to be largely invented, owing more to his own critique of Roman society than to accurate knowledge of the Germanic peoples. More important, frontier archaeology and institutional studies have shown that Germanicspeaking peoples outside the empire were far more Romanized than the nationalist view could admit. Further, even when so-called barbarian tribes were incorporated into the Roman army, they adopted Roman military (and political) organization (as well as they could) and, in some sense, thought of themselves as Romans. Institutional evolution under pressures of military necessity, socioeconomic transformation, and political competition and fragmentation worked from Roman roots, and the institutional contribution of Germanitas has disappeared from modern accounts. In this view, the barbarization of the army was a fiction.
But the various tribes still exist in the sources, and this more recent account still implicitly accepted a basic ethnic division between the populations of the empire and those outside it, and assumed the organic unity of the peoples who became Romanized. Most recently, this aspect of the problem has come under scrutiny by historians working from the perspective of cultural studies. For them, the whole notion of ethnicity is a product of cultural constructions. In other words, “barbarian” (including any particular tribal identification) was an identity adopted by various peoples for various reasons, with the tribes themselves as political rather than ethnic constructions. And in terms of military recruiting, the reason for any individual to adopt a barbarian identity was that barbarians were the ones hired by the state to fight, and thus often exempted from certain taxes. In short, “barbarian” came to mean “warrior,” while “Roman” meant, basically, “taxpayer,” and the boundaries between the two categories were porous and fluid. Thus, in this most recent formulation, while the picture of institutional evolution within Roman frameworks remains intact, the Roman army really was barbarized. But this simply doesn’t mean what historians once thought it meant. It has everything to do with ethnogenesis, or the cultural construction of group identities, and little or nothing to do with the corruption (or invigoration) of Roman civilization by barbaric (but democratic!) Germans.