The Fall of the Roman Empire (7 page)

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.

A Greek at the court of Attila told Priscus of Panium (Barbaras) in Thrace, an envoy of the Eastern Empire, how low his personal opinion of the Roman officers was. And Attila's description of war against the Western Empire as 'more bitter' than war against the East was a good deal less of a compliment to the might of the West than it sounded, because he did not mean that he found its soldiers formidable: what he meant was that he appreciated the warlike qualities of the Goths, who by now formed such an important part of the Western army.

For that was why the Emperors were glad to commute the military obligations of Roman provincials for gold: they could buy German recruits to fill their places. This recruitment, in itself, was nothing new. In the earlier days of the Empire, the auxiliary units had already included many Germans, mainly serving under Roman officers. Then, early in the fourth century, Constantine greatly increased the enrolment of such men, mostly recruited under contract on an individual basis, and officered by Romans. In the light of this development, Porphyrius, who wrote a bad poem in praise of Constantine, could justifiably declare to him: 'Your Rhine furnishes you with armies.' Apart from certain prisoners of war who had been compulsorily mobilized, these Germans were not in the slightest degree enemies of Rome, but were only too eager to enlist in its service. They saw the Roman Empire not as an enemy but as a career.

Julian the Apostate (361-3) expressed disgust for Constantine's 'pro-barbarism'. Yet he had no time, during his short reign, to reverse this trend, and probably he could never have done so, since the German soldiers had already become indispensable.

When Valens, before the disastrous defeat at Adrianople, invited Visigoths into the Imperial provinces, his major justification for this move was the prospect of enlarging the army - and increasing the revenue as well, since the sum which provincials would contribute in order to escape their military service amounted to more than he would need to pay the Germans. But then, in 382, it was Theodosius I who took the fateful, decisive measure. For the German 'allies' or federates whom he enrolled as soldiers were not merely individual recruits any longer, but whole tribes enlisting under their own chieftains, who received from the Roman Emperor an annual sum, in cash and kind, to pay the troops they thus continued to command. These men joined the army as volunteers on very easy terms, and were allowed to withdraw from it if they provided a substitute.

In 388, Ambrose emphasized the decisive role of the Germans in Theodosius' army - and he might have added the non-German Huns as well, since they too provided Rome with many soldiers at this time. Once introduced, the new federate participation in the army grew apace. And it grew with particular speed because the battles between Theodosius i and rival contestants for the throne were fought between a great many German and other non-Roman troops on either side.

Although the flatterers of Emperors praised their wisdom in mobilizing such men, the process was widely denounced by other Romans and Greeks. Synesius declared it futile to entrust the defence of the flock to the very wolves who ravened against it, men of the same race as the Romans' slaves. Jerome, too, pronounced that the Romans were now the weakest people on earth, since they depended wholly on barbarians to fight for them. And the fifth-century pagan historian Zosimus, who agreed with Jerome about little else, likewise deplored that Theodosius had reduced the truly Roman army to nothing at all. That was still not yet quite true. But it was only a slight anticipation of the truth: for the Roman army, apart from the Germans, was approaching extinction.

Since the problem of obtaining other recruits had become so desperate, Theodosius' action in replacing the Roman soldiers by Germans was probably the best practical remedy that was available to him. It also offered remarkable opportunities for racial partnership, although, owing to a blend of Roman prejudice and German turbulence, these were not effectively seized, and in consequence the federate units became disillusioned and unreliable.

In order to supplement their dubious services, the central government made occasional endeavours to mobilize local defence groups against the recurrent invasions. There were precedents for such measures, for example the defence of Treveri (Trier) from a usurper in the 350s. But then in 391 the right of using arms against 'brigands' was granted, contrary to the usual practice, to all indiscriminately, on the principle, enunciated by the
Historia Augusta,
that men will fight best when they are defending their own property.

Around the turn of the century, again, there were occasional sporadic instances of local defence, but they were neither numerous nor very effective. In the desperate crisis of the invasion of Italy in 405, the state appealed to provincials to join up as temporary volunteers 'for love of peace and country' - but without any conspicuous success. Movements towards autonomy, three years later, in Britain and Brittany may have been exercises in concerted self-help. It was soon afterwards, in 410, that Honorius wrote to Britain instructing the authorities there to arrange their own protection; and the British once again received a similar message thirty years later. In Italy, when Gaiseric and his Vandals threatened the country, its citizens were authorized to carry arms. In Gaul, too, in 471-5, the people of the Arverni (Auvergne), inspired by their bishop Sidonius, defended their capital Arverna (formerly Augustonemetum, now Clermont-Ferrand) against the Visigoths.