What attracts you to Late Rome?

[Robert Vermaat]

I have a rather strange question to put to you all who enjoy Late Roman history/military studies – simply put, what on earth attracts you to this period?

I have discussed this a bit with my father, who actually knows quite a bit more about this time period than I, but I absolutely cannot stand Roman history post-Commodus. He agrees with me to some extent, quite acutely describing this period as “distressing” for those who long for the long lost days of the Pax Romana. To me, the entire period seems to be tainted with shades of the Medieval, both in terms of military tactics and equipment as well as the general ethos pervading society. For whatever reason, I have never been able to hold more than a passing interest in the Medival world, and recognize that this feeling is behind my aversion to the Later Roman period.

To answer the original question:

I came from the opposite end, dealing with the 5th century (mostly Vortigern and the sparse sources about a Britain in ruins, or o it seemed) and, in attempting to explain how that came about I was drawn back into the 4th century.
While being occupied with that, I was also drawn into reenactment. Naturally, it became 4th c. reenactment. By that time, RAT had also been founded and the rest, as they say, is history..

Late Antiquity, as it's also known, has a strange sense about it. The days of glory are, true, but looking back it's not hard to see why the days of Trajan et al were not really that much better or more superior to the centuries thereafter. The army is changing, true, although tactics are far more similar to the days of Hadrian and even Caesar than it looks at first sight. In that we are too much shaped by both Hollywood and Trajan's Column I fear, to recognise that the Roman army was a treasure of tactics used when necessary. Some see a degradation in armour and a rotting process, I see an age of hard fighting (indeed, I am also rooting for a doomed underdog) in which crushing defeats are also lit up by glorious domination. In the end there is a massive economic crisis strangling the life out of half the Empire, fascilitated by Rome's largest failure, the inability to create a stable and efficient state model.

Late Roman culture is changing massively: art is (indeed) becoming less refined, but different. Christianity is moving in, bnot forced as many see it, but embraced by the masses (it's often the underclass that embraces the new religion), forever changing the days of old. Society is, indeed, 'tainted' by Medieval shades (as you describe it), showing the first signs of a future Europe (as I put it) in transition from a Bronze Age tribal landscape into shapes and colours that are still recognisable today.

That's how I see the Romans, as a transitionary agent, an immense reaction vat in which tribal Europe is sqeezed, with Spain, Britain, France, Italy and Germany coming out at the end.