Reluctance to Serve in the late Roman Army

[Nathan Ross]

The famous story of men cutting off their thumbs to avoid enlistment is due to attempts to specifically conscript in Italy, with little record of recruitment and ruled by large land owners unfriendly to recruitment amongst their “tenants”.

The note about Italy comes from Ammianus (15.12). But there are successive laws against the practice in the Theodosian Code (7.13.5 / 7.13.10 / 7.22.1), indicating that the problem was ongoing. The 'Gauls' described by Ammianus seem to be Germanic barbarian settlers - surely the citizen inhabitants of Gaul itself would differ little from those in Italy by the fourth century?

Constantine continues the trend, and many of his elite units (Cornuti , Brachiati, Petulantes and Celtae) came from tribesmen from north Germany and Denmark. Constantine’s army of AD312 came in part from ex-prisoners of war re-settled in Gaul.

There's a note in (I think) one of the panegyrics about Constantine enlisting barbarians, but do we have any more evidence for the Cornuti etc being raised by him?

Rather than a steady decline I see an army developing by the end of the 4th century into perhaps the first “modern” army in the way we understand such terms.

I agree on the effectiveness of the later army. But professional armies in the modern era have seldom been 'popular' :-)

I mean, cutting off your thumb is such a striking image, perhaps too strong? Maybe the army was more popular in other periods?

As I say, Constantine's legislation (forcing mutilated men to become town councillors instead!) made it into the Theodosian code, so it can't have been an isolated phenomenon. Suetonius notes an equestrian under Augustus doing the same thing to his sons, but that does seem to have been unusual at the time.

Another reason to distrust Vegetius - the 'auxxiliaries' were no longer in existance by the time he wrote (whether that was the later 4th or the later 5th c.).

This could be Vegetius being silly - but might he have meant the late Roman auxilia? Do we know that there was some ethnic qualification for joining the auxilia? Could a man eligible for enlistment just head to the nearest settlement of 'barbarian' laeti and surrender himself to the recruiting officers? The barbarians would probably be quite happy to have a volunteer substitute! (unless, of course, they had to kit the man out in a big yellow wig and a stick-on moustache first...)