Roman Legion in late Antiquity

[Nathan Ross]

the Batavians Zosimus calls a tagma, "properly" classifying as a legion... I would at the moment dare suggest that according to Zosimus, a Roman army would include tele (legions) and lochoi (lesser units) with a good probability for the lochoi to also have been subunits of the telos

The Batavi, as Mark mentioned on your other thread, were auxilia palatina, therefore most likely a numerus. If the tribunus batavorum mentioned on an inscription from Brigetio of AD303 commanded the same unit, they may have been one of the earliest of these new auxilia formations.

I mentioned above the vexillations of II Italica Divitensium, which was apparently organised as an old-style legion with ten cohorts. This same formation probably became the later Divitenses Seniores, one of the most senior legiones palatinae on the new model according to the Notitia Dignitatum.

But there are a couple of inscriptions from Thrace mentioning a numerus Divitensium, including one (AE 2006, 1256) for "Flavius Felix signifer de numero Divitensium vixit annos XXX civis Ambianensis". This may be a different body of troops from Divita (Deutz) who somehow found their way to a battle in Thrace, but the man was from Amiens, so the field army legion seems more likely.

Apart from the note that these later numeri contained signifers (and so therefore centuriae?), this might suggest that a legion could also be referred to as a numerus... which might mean that the entire nomenclatura of later army units was very mutable... So Zosimus's tagma could refer to either an auxilium or a legione (if there really was any practical difference between them!), or a numerus of either sort... :unsure: