The Fall of the Roman Empire

by Michael Grant

  Our chief source of information about the late Roman army is the Record of Official Posts, Notitia Dignitatum. This record gives a list of the principal official posts in the Western and Eastern Empires as they existed in the year 395. Moreover, in so far as the military commanders are concerned, it adds particulars of the units which these officers commanded.

  This Record of Official Posts is at one and the same time vitally important and thoroughly misleading. According to its statistics, the troops of the combined Empires numbered between 500,000 and 600,000, twice the size of the forces that had efficiently defended the Roman world two centuries earlier. Of this total number of soldiers, the Western Empire possessed slightly less than half - perhaps a little under 250,000, of whom the majority was stationed on or near the Rhine and Danube borders.

  Such numbers, by all precedents, should have been far more than enough for the defence of these frontiers against barbarian incursions. For the armies of Rome's barbarian foes were not, for the most part, numerically very large - no larger than those which had been successfully routed in previous epochs. That is to say, the Visigoth Alaric I and the Vandal Gaiseric may have commanded 40,000 and 20,000 warriors respectively, and the Alamannic host in the 360s had perhaps fallen considerably short of 10,000 fighting men.

  But when we look more closely into the forces pitted against these invaders, the picture that emerges becomes strangely different. The Roman armies of the epoch were divided into a high-grade field force and a frontier force. The latter was the less mobile of the two, and harder to free for specific military tasks, being concentrated upon local garrison duties and internal security functions. Besides, as we can detect from a law of 428, it was regarded with less respect and esteem than the field force.

  Now an inspection of the Record and other sources of information reveals that no less than two-thirds of the entire army of the Western Empire consisted of such frontier troops, units of second-rate quality. Moreover, the field force suffered such heavy casualties in external and civil wars that it had to take over more and more men - perhaps eventually two-thirds of its total strength - from these frontier armies, particularly in the critical areas of North Africa and Gaul, thus gravely diminishing the frontier defences.

  Indeed, the pagan historian Zosimus concluded that Constantine the Great, whom he held principally to blame for this weakening of the frontier force, was thereby largely responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire. Nor did this situation leave the field force in a satisfactory condition, since it had been obliged to fill up its numbers by so many former frontier troops of lesser calibre. Moreover, the field force had other problems too. For example, its formations in North Africa became, in effect, untransferable to other war-zones, even in an emergency, owing to the need to ensure that the grain from the region should not be lost to Rome.

  When we turn to the actual numbers of men commanded in battle by the Roman generals of that time, the position looks graver still. Zosimus remarks that a force of 65,000 put into the field by Julian the Apostate was one of the largest of the age. That seems surprising enough. Yet in the next generation, the most numerous body of soldiers ever mustered by Rome's greatest general of the age, Stilicho - against the Ostrogothic invader Radagaisus in 405 - amounted to no more than 30,000 and was perhaps not much above 20,000. A high figure for any Roman fighting army at this time is 15,000, and expeditionary forces were often only a third as large even as that. This is an enormously far cry from the theoretical figures of the Record of Official Posts, and brings us much closer to the realities of the later Roman Empire. The apparent numerical superiority over the German invaders scarcely existed after all.

  The fourth-century writer On Matters of Warfare expressed anxiety about this situation. He also offered his Emperors, who are probably Valentinian I and his brother, proposals for putting it right - and they are unusually positive proposals at that. What this author wants the rulers to do, among other things, is to save army manpower by increased mechanization. He therefore suggests a whole series of new types of siege-engines and other equipment. His suggestions went unnoticed, having probably been intercepted and pigeon-holed before they reached the Imperial eyes at all. But their anonymous proposer is important, not merely because he believed, unlike most of his contemporaries, that something practical could be done to improve the world, but because he understood clearly that the recruiting situation of the army was disastrous, and that action would have to be taken to remedy this.

  But why was the position so disastrous? The terrific attacks on the frontiers were nothing new. But they were, certainly, becoming more and more frequent - largely because of the weakness within, which invited external encroachments.

  There can be little doubt that the weaknesses of the late Roman army were largely due to the eventual failure of the Imperial authorities to enforce regular conscription. Since the beginning of the fourth century AD, it had been the main source of recruitment. Valentinian I, the most effective military leader of the age, conscripted strenuously every year, and Theodosius 1 also, at the beginning of his reign, attempted recruitment on a national scale.

  But the exempted categories were cripplingly numerous. Hosts of Senators, bureaucrats and clergymen were entitled to avoid the draft; and among other groups who escaped were cooks, bakers and slaves. To draw the rest of the population into the levy, the combing-out process was intensive. Even the men on the Emperor's own very extensive estates found themselves called up. Yet other great landlords proved far less co-operative. They were supposed to furnish army recruits in proportion to the size of their lands. But on many occasions they resisted firmly. Moreover, even if they gave way, they exhibited a strong tendency only to send the men they wanted to get rid of. They objected that the levies were a heavy strain on the rural population, which were depleted both in numbers and morale. And indeed there was much truth in this. For, since the inhabitants of the cities were virtually useless as soldiers, that was where the burden fell - on the small farmers and peasants, between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five.

  In view of such resistance to the draft, it very soon became clear that ordinary measures of recruitment were not stringent enough. Regimentation became the order of the day - and that included compulsion to remain in one's father's profession, so that there was a rapidly increasing tendency to force the sons of soldiers or ex-soldiers to become soldiers in their turn.

  This doctrine was already enunciated, though not necessarily obeyed, in the early 300s AD; and by the fifth century it had become obligatory, as in civilian jobs. Moreover, the obligation was sternly insisted upon, in so far as the government possessed the power to have its wishes carried out. But the results were still very far from satisfactory.

  The Christian philosopher Synesius of Cyrene (Shahhat) declared that what was needed to save the Empire was a nation in arms. As before, the writer On Matters of Warfare takes a look at the problem, in so far as it affected the Romans. Complaining that there was no sizeable reserve either of recruits or of veterans, he suggested that it might be easier to track down the reluctant and elusive conscripts if shorter terms of service were introduced. Yet his proposal, even if accepted, would only have been a minor palliative at best. For in the Western Empire, where, as we shall see, the social structure manifested strains which almost annihilated patriotic feeling, there seemed no escape from St Ambrose's conclusion that military service had already ceased to be regarded as a common obligation at all, and was considered merely a servitude - which everyone tried to evade. Universal liability to service could no longer be enforced.

  As the frontiers drew in, the provision of soldiers fell more and more upon Italy itself. But the Italians were not able to bear the burden, and had not the slightest intention of doing so. A law of 403 implies that an annual levy still existed at that time. But two enactments of 440 and 443 suggest that, by then, call-ups of recruits in the West were already restricted to emergency occasions only. Indeed, Valentinian m, the author of the
se edicts, pronounced that 'no Roman citizen shall be compelled to serve', except for the defence of his own town if its safety is endangered. And after the death of the vigorous Aetius, we hear no more of Western citizen recruitment at all.

  The senatorial aristocracy, who in this final period dominated the civil administration, was most unlikely to support any such drain on its diminishing agricultural labour. The government, however, had long since drawn one conclusion from this critical state of affairs. If it could not extract recruits from the landowners, then it would extort money from them instead.

  Throughout the latter part of the fourth century, therefore, steps were already being taken to explore this alternative. Finally, Senators were formally given the option of paying 25 gold coins in lieu of each missing recruit for whom they were liable. Similarly, individuals could pay cash to escape their own call-ups. The historian Ammianus had already condemned such commuting of service. But, although acceptance of failure, it made a sort of sense once that failure was inevitable. For it proved so hopelessly difficult to secure an adequate number of citizen recruits, even by conscription, that the money would at least ensure that the services of German soldiers could be purchased in their place. And indeed it was to secure their services as fighters that one Emperor after another had permitted them to settle in the provinces as federates and allies. If the West could not have a Roman army, it would have a German force instead. And meanwhile the Roman army faded away completely, so that by the time of the Western Empire's final eclipse there was nothing left of it at all.

  Ambrose's remark that by his time soldiering had come to be regarded as a slavery to be shunned had been proved patently true. Yet strangely enough, the pages of Roman historians, for the past two hundred years, had been full of complaints that the soldiery were being given too favourable terms: one Roman Emperor after another was accused of just pampering and spoiling them.

  The complaints had already been heard, loud and clear, under Septimius Severus (AD 193-211) - and Gibbon was sufficiently impressed to pronounce him, for this reason, the principal author of the Empire's decline. From his time onwards, the soldiers received more and more payments in kind, in the form of foodstuffs, clothing and other goods. The generosity of Constantine, also, towards his troops was condemned as altogether excessive.

  However, it was Valentinian I, according to Ammianus, who 'was the first to enhance the importance of the soldiers by raising them in rank and property, to the detriment of the common interest'. Theodosius 1, too, was charged with treating them much too indulgently. For example there was anger because they were given agricultural equipment and seeds and stock, since the Emperors allowed them, in their spare time, to double as farmers and land-workers - as these jobs likewise were in short supply. But throughout all such censorious observations runs the traditional viewpoint of the senatorial classes, which had always nostalgically wanted to control the state themselves and had resented their eclipse by the army.

  In fact, the soldiers, for all their political ebullience on many occasions, had never been excessively paid or rewarded, and reforms like those of Severus and Valentinian I served merely to bring their emoluments up to a reasonable level. By the fifth century, this situation did not seem much changed, except that nowadays their remuneration, such as it was, did not even reach them any too regularly, because communications were dislocated so often.

  For such reasons the results of every endeavour to please the soldiery proved unsatisfactory. For one thing, a principal incentive of military service in the past, the Roman citizenship that went to legionaries on recruitment and to auxiliaries on discharge, was now defunct, because since 212 citizenship had become virtually universal among all the inhabitants of the Empire other than slaves. Moreover, one way and another, the soldiers suffered their share of the hardships of this exacting age. No inducements that could be offered them were sufficient to counterbalance all the factors that undermined their zeal.

  And so the young men of the later Roman Empire did their best to avoid military service. Their recalcitrance took bizarre forms. This is evident from the laws of the time, which reveal some of the desperate steps taken to escape the Imperial call-up. Many youths, it is recorded, would even amputate their thumbs in order to make themselves ineligible. For such actions, it was decreed that they should be burnt alive. Theodosius I, however, ruled that offenders should no longer suffer this fate, but must instead, in spite of their self-mutilation, serve in the army after all. And landowners who had to offer their tenants as conscripts must provide two of these damaged persons in lieu of every whole recruit for whom they were responsible. The landowners were also vigorously discouraged from hiding men where the recruiting officer could not find them. Indeed, in 440, such concealment of recruits was made punishable by death.

  This was also the fate of those who harboured deserters - an intensification of earlier penalties, which had condemned them to the mines if they were poor, or to the confiscation of half their property if they were rich. The rich, as a class, were constantly blamed for sponsoring such evasions, and sheltering the fugitives in order to swell their own agricultural labour force. Severe official criticism also descended upon landowners' agents and bailiffs, who, in some provinces, were even forbidden the use of horses in the hope that they would thus be prevented from abetting desertions.

  Yet another indication of the widespread gravity of the deserter problem was supplied by regulations enacting that new recruits should have their skins branded, just as slaves were branded in their barrack-prisons. The ever-increasing toughness of such legal measures suggested how difficult the government was finding it to enforce its regulations. Moreover, an additional danger was the banding together of these deserters into gangs of brigands, who are denounced specifically in a further series of laws.

  Another enactment startlingly reveals the effects of this state of affairs upon the frontier fortifications: for it becomes clear from a law of 409 that their hereditary defenders were just melting away. This was the completion of a process that had long been under way: since the years immediately following the disaster at Adrianople in 378 had witnessed a whole wave of such desertions, abandoning defences to their decay and leaving garrisons seriously undermanned.

  Thus when the Germans continued to burst across the Rhine and the Danube there seems to have been a widespread failure to make effective use of towns and strongpoints. According to Salvian, the presbyter of Massilia (Marseille) who painted such a gloomy picture of contemporary disasters, the cities were still left unguarded even when the barbarians were almost in sight. One would have thought, he declared, that the defenders and inhabitants had no desire to die; and yet none of them made the slightest positive move to save themselves from death. Often, it is true, Roman soldiers, for all their initial lack of enthusiasm, continued to fight well if they had able and inspiring commanders. For example, Stilicho several times defeated armies of considerably great size than his own. But on many other occasions the Imperial troops were beaten men before they even glimpsed a German warrior. Many centuries later, this caused no surprise to Karl Marx, who pointed out that there was no reason whatever why such drafted serfs should fight well, since they had been given no encouragement to feel a concern for the state.

  On the other hand, as a contemporary observer, Synesius of Cyrene (Shahhat) unkindly noted, if the army was not terrible to its enemies it was terrible enough to the provincial populations.

  The rhetorician Libanius of Antioch (Antakya), a contemporary of Constantine, has shown why. He tells of tattered soldiers hanging round wine shops far behind the front line, and spending their time in debauchery at the expense of the local peasants.

  Ammianus paints an equally gloomy picture. Before he turned to the writing of history, he had been an officer himself, and when he stresses the vicious savagery and treacherous fickleness of the troops he must to some extent be telling of what he knew. What the soldiers really enjoyed, said the sixth-century Bishop Ennodius of
Ticinum (Pavia), was bullying a local farmer. Camp duties they declared to be a bore. And they complained that their .superiors were impossibly oppressive. If there was any move to transfer them from places they had grown to like, they became insubordinate at once. They were, it was said, more like a foreign occupation force than an army of Roman citizens. As a result, they were greatly hated and feared. In North Africa, for example, Augustine criticized the governor's personal bodyguard for the outrageous way in which it behaved. And the congregation of his church disliked the army so much that they lynched its local commander. 'The principal cities on the frontiers', wrote Gibbon, 'were filled with soldiers who considered their countrymen as their most implacable enemies.'

  Is this picture exaggerated? Perhaps to some slight extent, since it is largely taken from writers who, because of political and social biases of their own, tend to single out the worst incidents they can find. Nevertheless, all these reports, combined with the glum phrases in Imperial laws, indicate unmistakably that something was wrong with the army.

  The military expert Vegetius declared that the solution was a reversion to ancient discipline. There are always conservatives who say that. However, it was impossible just to put the clock back so simply. Valentinian i did what he could, for he set out to be a ruthless disciplinarian. But he did not venture to carry the process to its logical conclusion. For although he was so strict to the soldiers, he felt he had to be lenient with the officers, in order to make sure that they stayed loyal.

  The Roman officer corps still contained many good men. But it also frequently fell below the splendid traditions of its past. The troops of the frontier garrisons, particularly, were at the mercy of their officers, who exploited them shamelessly by grabbing the payments in cash and in kind that they ought to have passed on to them, while offering lax discipline as a compensation. There were also stories of officers deliberately allowing units to fall below strength, so that they could pocket the remunerations of non-existent men.