Vegetius and the later Roman army: common mistakes?

[Robert Vermaat]

In the (excellent) Ancient Warfare XVII.2 I read the article by Wolfgang Wilsch and prof. dr. Dreyer about the onager.
Very interesting, epecially the amount of wear & tear after a relative low number of shots!

However, there was a statement that I vehemently have to disagree with:
On page 10 ('the history ofancient torsion engines'), the author(s) claim that:
"[..] At this time [235 AD], however, the Roman army no longer had the mobility and striking power of Augustus'time. For this reason, the writer Vegetius pointed out and recommended to his emperorat the end of the fourth entury thestriking power of the army of the Augustan period."
Two mistakes are made in this statement:

One, we can only conclude from Vegetius' statement that in his opinion, the Roman army had much degraded. However, as a historian I must counter this by pointing at the general gist of Vegetius' work, which is a lament about changing times and a subsequent praising of the army in better times. At NO point in his work can we find the details that Vegetius had actual knowledge of the army in Augustus' day - and in some cases, not even of the army in his own day. Our general conclusion therefore must be that this lamentation is just that, and we are NOT allowed to come to any conclusions about the state of the Roman army of the fourth century based on just a passage from Vegetius.

Two, I think a common mistake is made between 'striking power/mobility' and effectiveness. Nobody would argue that the Roman state in Augustus' time was more powerful than that of the third century.However, that does not mean the army was of any less value. And apart from other written sources, archaeology also comes to such a conclusion - opposite of what Vegetius has us believe. Without going too much into depth, I simply will refer to the Harzhorn battlefield. This was a campaign from just about the very same period referred to by the authors, in the midst of the so-called 'Third century crisis', when the army supposedly was in worse shaped than in the preceding or following centuries. Yet that same army managed to march from the Rhine to the Elbe and back, including battlefield artillery, to strike at the heart of their enemy.

This is why we should not believe Vegetius at face value, and assume that the Augustan legions were 'the good old days' forever gone by the time of Vegetius, who saw the sate of the empire in his day and wrongly assumed it was mostly the fault of a degraded military.

[Nathan Ross]

At NO point in his work can we find the details that Vegetius had actual knowledge of the army in Augustus' day - and in some cases, not even of the army in his own day.

Yes, I dont know if Vegetius ever makes an explicit comparison to the Augustan army, does he? There are only a couple of references to the times of 'Augustus and Hadrian', just meaning 'the past' generally.

The Harzhorn battle certainly shows that the army of that day was highly mobile and effective, with a full artillery complement. And since Ammianus describes the use of torsion bolt-throwers in his account of Julian's Persian war, we can hardly assume that the army of the mid-4th century was considerably worse off.

As I've mentioned before, the only post-quem in Vegetius is the end of the reign of Gratian, when (V tells us) the army stopped regularly wearing armour and helmets. This surely refers to the post-Adrianople army, and specifically the large numbers of Gothic troops recruited directly into the army by Theodosius c.AD382. All of Vegetius's complaints are about this 'Theodosian' army, and do not not refer to the pre-Gratianic army: by extension, Roman troops until AD383 were fully equipped with armour and helmets, and presumably used mobile field artillery too.

(it is likely, of course, that some time after c.383 they were once more fully reequipped, at least in the eastern empire, and Vegetius's complaints cover only a short and relatively particular period.)

[Longovicium]

I found that article exasperating as it elided the debate about the actual construction and form of the onger. It ignored the research done recently which argued that it's true shape was more akin to a V-shaped ground base which was winched togther thus drawing down a mast like a wishbone. This new form seemed to make more sense of Ammianus' description.

As for the Vegetian issue, the more I studied the lead up to Adrianople and its aftermath the more I saw Vegetuis emerging in that frenetic period where Theodosius was intermingling Egyptian units with newly-raised ones to march again on the Goths near Thessalonika. He subsequently suffered a military failure (according to one interpretation of the sources) and retreated to Constantinople. Vegetius seems very much to my mind to have written his work in this period and addressing entirely specific issues around the post-Adrianople years.

The pre-380s Roman army neither lacked striking power nor logistical ability to maintain artillery either in the field or within the defended towns. But in fairness to AW, it is a magazine for a variety of readers and some of the articles lack a certain depth or rigour on occasion as a result, I feel.