Profile of a mid 5th century Roman soldier.

[ValentinianVictrix]

My point remains: even if there was a ‘Gothic fashion’ in which all Goths wore the same style of clothing (which we have no information of), there were never enough Goths in the Roman army to dictate that fashion upon the rest of the army – even 10 to 20.000 Gothic recruits at one given moment – a vast number given the estimated strength of the Goths at Adrianople being given between those numbers – were a minority in an army numbering 645.000.

Whilst I fully agree with the large number of at least 645000, rather than the 450000 given by modern authors who fail to see how the Late Romans could raise such a large force, we have to take into account that the 645000 includes everything from naval units, riverine units, frontier units, locally raised forces such as Indigenae etc. I would venture that a 'typical' Late Roman army size during the time of Valentinian I, when its possible the army was at its greatest extent, would have been around the 25,000 mark based on evidence within Ammianus. During Julian's Allemanic campaign he led an army of about 15000 strong, Barbatio had one of 25000 and Constantius II had one of a similar size, this was an unusual occurance for three armies to be campaigning at the same time. We know from Zosimus that during the civil war between Constantius II and Magnentius the combined army totals were possibly over 200000 strong, and the Battle of Mursa 353AD led to over 50000 Roman casualties, an event that was said to have fatally weakened the Late Roman Empire. Julian's Sasanid Persian invasion had him leading an army of between 60-90000 and Valens was raising an army for his proposed invasion of Sasanid Persia to equal or even exceed this number.

However, after Adrianopolis raising these numbers of troops seemed to be extremely difficult if not impossible without relying on barbarian fedorates.