2,000 Years Later-- Roxolani Helmet Comes Back

[Robert Vermaat]

Hi Alan,

The novel takes place in the 350s. Hard to find anything concrete, even in Dixon & Southern. Basically, I went with the premise that the cavalry was still an auxilliary equites legionis and attached to the Tenth Gemina at Vindobona. Maybe this changed after Adrianople, when we see independent alas recorded in the Dignitatum.

that would have worked during the 250s, but the legionary cavalry, as far as we know, seems to have become independent during the late 3rd-early 4th centuries. They formed new cavalry units or remained independent alae, depending whether they became part of the new mobile structures (comitatenses) or remained part of the border armies (limitanei). But by the 350s, this change had already been completed, and the old auxiliary units had disappeared. The only ‘auxilia’ are the new palatine units, aka the Emperor’s personal troops.

I postited Junius Soranus as Vindobona's commander; and one of the ala commanders is Theodosius the First.

Ala is good, but not attached to any legion. I don’t know if we know the military career of the younger Theodosius (the later Emperor), but would he not be on the staff with his father, who is at that time still a successful general?

The important thing I'd like to get across is that Fritigern was a Christian years before modern historians claim his conversion shortly after he led the Tyrfingi across the Danube.

Why would you want to do that?

We might add Alaric to that small few, a man who fed a quarter million people while searching for a homeland.

I would not define Alaric as a ‘man of honour’ in that sense. He was a man who sought ‘imperium’, and by attaching people to him he meant to gain that. I think it’s a 19th-c. folktale that the Goths were ‘looking for a homeland’. That tale belongs to the romantic view of the ‘Völkerwanderungen’, adorned with pictures of a people in endless streams of carts, laden with wives and children and guarded to their tough, blond and honest men-folk. These days we know that a large number of peoples entered the Roman Empire, were settled where the Romans pleased and then were lost within the Roman provincial population – as the Goths would have had the Empire not been in crisis. :wink: