Barbarization?

[Nathan Ross]

the bulk of the troops were conscripts and volunteers from the citizens themselves, at least in theory, and so far I've seen no evidence that contradicts that.

Yes, you could well be right. I was wondering where these Roman recruits would be coming from, with so much of the old Balkan recruiting areas either devastated or lost to the barbarians, and Italy covered with big estates farmed by coloni, who were tied to the land...

But looking through the later entries in the Theodosian Code there are repeated references to recruits that appear to come from within the empire, and in some cases are clearly conscripted from among the tenants of landowners. Although it's also clear that these landowners were very loath to surrender their men, and in many cases it might have been easier to rely on settled barbarian laeti or even more recent arrivals.

the 'Germanic purges' of the army... would not have been possible if by c.AD400, the majority of men serving in the Roman army at all levels, from new recruits to the most senior commanders, were of non-Roman or barbarian origin.

I was wondering about that too, as you might have guessed! It seems to me that the purges, or anti-Gothic pogroms in AD408, were principally directed at the families of foederati billeted in the cities of northern Italy. It isn't clear who was carrying out the massacres - it could just as easily have been the citizens of the towns in question as soldiers. We have seen all too often how readily people can turn on 'unwelcome foreigners' in their midst...

But even if the troops were largely of barbarian/Gothic origin, that doesn't mean that they were naturally allied to other groups of Goths, foederati or otherwise, or had some Gothic 'national' affinity. The British in India commonly used Indian troops to fight Indian rebels, after all, and had few problems. Presumably, once a man joined the Roman army he became a Roman soldier and his loyalty was to the emperor, his unit, and (increasingly, maybe) his commanding officer.

However, I was interested in the idea that Bileta seems to suggest in his paper, and which I've heard elsewhere recently, that there was perhaps a kind of hybridised Romano-Gothic culture developing throughout the Roman army after about AD380, that blurred the boundaries between Roman and barbarian and made the 'fall of the empire' rather more of a fade from one type of control or loyalty to another. Interesting, if perhaps impossible to prove in any way!