Barbarization?

[Robert Vermaat]

I suspect that these Goths were different to those Goths...!
[..]
It appears from this that it was only the Gothic women and children in Ravenna itself that were killed, but that it was indeed Roman troops who killed them: whoever the 'soldiers' in the city might have been (scholae, perhaps, or city militia, or even Hunnic mercenaries?).
[..]
Are there not plentiful studies - often citing Ellen Swift, among others - of the apparent cultural cross-pollination between Roman and Barbarian from the later 4th century onwards, particularly in the military but also in the civilian sphere?
[..]
Constantine III, I would think, had only the troops he had brought with him from Britain, supported by foedarati (so clearly not all the invaders headed off to the Pyrennes). If we can believe Orosius, he appears to have sent the remains of the 'mutinous soldiers of Gaul' to Spain. I doubt there were enough remaining troops in Gaul before his arrival to have much effect on the movements of the invaders in 406-411.
[..]
What Procopius might have meant by a 'Roman unit' is anybody's guess. My guess would be that this might have been one of the old units brought over by Constantine III from Britain still maintaining itself after all that time... but who knows?

@ Goths & Goths - that was not what I was getting at. I meant that with apparently most of the Roman army being made up of barbarian volunteers, why would ANY Goth settle for being a lower paid federate, when he could join the regular army? Same with Alaric - why did he not join the regular army if there were apparently so many vacancies for people like him? Instead he was seemingly stuck in a role as a federate and without military career opportunities in the regular army. I think this completely clashes with the notion that 98% of the army of c. 400 was filled by non-Roman troops. Which is one of the reasons I must reject that idea, at least for the time around c. 400.

@ massacre - The tekst only says 'the Romans'. You could read into that that one group consisted of Gothic families and the other group of 'non-Roman attackers' but that's not what the tekst says, and I'm unwilling to read more into that. technically ALL were employed by the Romans, and Olympiodorus would have a hard time selling a story to his audience that the barbarians supporting the 'good faction' were to be addresses as 'Romans' while the barbarians supporting the 'bad faction' were to be addressed as 'those who belonged to the barbarians'.
No, I don't think this is anything but a confrontation between Roman troops and families of non-Roman troops.

@ hybrid cultures – military styles get into civilian styles, yes. But studies by Swift et al about wearing fibulae do in my opinion not show a mix between Roman and non-Roman military culture, as we see such fibulae being worn by Romans for centuries. The cruciform brooch is a Germanic-Gallic type from North of the Alps becoming the main military (and civilian) fibula long before the period we’re discussing (very recent Dutch study of Roman fibulae). We need much more to visualize such a propose later 4th c. mix between Roman and non-Roman soldiers in the Roman army.

@ Constantine III in Gaul – so how would he not only have managed to ‘entice’ the barbarian invaders of 406 into Spain, send all the other remaining Roman troops in Gaul (your proposal, not mine) after them, liberate most of the territory overrun and maintain an adequate defense against any barbarian leader in a mind of plundering Gaul after Constantine moved south? With only the troops from Britain (and we full well know that he did not ‘denude the island of soldiers’ as Gildas et al claimed later)? If he did not succeed by ‘staring them down’, the enemy must have seen a bit more ‘boots on the ground’ opposing them. As I said earlier, Julianus had a far more difficult time liberating an overrun Gaul in the 350s with far larger forces in great condition at his disposal. If the Rhine had really been overrun and deserted all the towns in Gaul would have been plundered, the countryside ful of marauders. No source says it was. Ergo, the Rhine was defended. I don’t know by whom but they did an adequate job, even with some towns along the Rhine in enemy hands for a few years (until Constantius III).

@ Procopius – see above – no way those troops could have been from Constantine III, who either lost them to Gerontius or needed them as his core army for the invasion of Italy.

---

It's probably worth mentioning that Constantius II's civil war from 350-353 was extraordinarily bloody, with tens of thousands of casualties at the Battle of Mursa alone. Rome would have had to replace a lot of troops in a hurry, and training/equipping recruits takes time. The revolts of Magnus Maximus and Eugenius resulted in a lot of bloodshed too. These events alone might not have "barbarized" the army, but it stands to reason that Rome was scrambling to find replacements.

True enough, but by 400 we are almost two generations further in time and I think it can be suggested as reasonable that there had been plenty of Roman recruits in the meantime to fill those gaps.
I know, Adrianople and the Gothic Wars follow hot on the heels within the next generation, but apparently the army of the East had recovered enough from Mursa et al to again be a force to be reckoned with - so would the army of the West had been.

Stilicho sending an army of non-Roman troops to Greece is perhaps similar as Theodosius having his Goths bearing the brunt at the frigidus against Arbogast?

Anyway, Theodosius stealing the best units of the field army for his own army of the East seems to me the real reason for the bad condition of the West c. 400 - but that need not mean that all the limitanei forces had been pulled away to Italy by Stilich. See my reasoning above.