Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Nathan Ross]

what leisured slaveowning men wrote for other leisured slaveowning men...

Although we should mention that slave-owning was not the preserve of the upper class! Kyle Harper, in Slavery in the Late Roman World, cites papyrus evidence from Egypt showing several poor households clubbing together to buy a slave between them, for example; slave-ownership was common right across society, it appears, and not even Christian bishops had anything to say in opposition to it; nor would they, I think, for centuries to come.

However, the astonishing number of slaves owned by the truly super-rich families of the later empire (the Valerii Melania and Pinianus, for example) is certainly pretty eye-opening. Despite the Satyricon suggesting that 1st century freedmen could own so many they had to organise them into cohorts...

...let alone people like Marcus Aurelius Serapion who were just trying to go about their lives and want us to know how they were wronged.

That's a good post about Serapion. However, the very fact that we have such a "sheer number of petitions" (and the Abinneus Archive tells the same story from the other end of the process, so to speak) suggests that the petitions were answered in some way and justice was done, at least sometimes. If it were not, and especially if the idea of gaining justice was just naive or ridiculous, why would people have kept petitioning in such numbers?

So there was justice in Roman Egypt, even if was rudimentary and probably corrupt, and the very poorest of people were able to avail themselves of it (or try to), just as in theory they were able to appeal to even higher authorities.

Would the people of Egypt have felt an improvement in their lives if Roman power was gone? No more regular Roman soldiers, of course, or regular taxes - but surely just as many armed men going about extorting contributions, and no higher authority to which the aggrieved could direct their complaints...

many aspects of life in the empire were getting more oppressive from Diocletian to Justinian... I do suspect that the two changes might be related.

That does seem to be true. Both military and civil punishments seem to have got more severe and more grotesque, and the terms of military service generally must have become considerably less attractive if the ongoing recruiting problems are anything to go by. Diocletian's attempts to tie all sorts of people to their professions and locations (creating an entire class of hereditary serfs in the process) must have contributed to the sense of overall oppression and social inflexibility.

This might (dragging us slightly back to the original topic!) have had implications for the attitudes of the regular army to the foederati, not to mention Alaric and his mercenaries: the troops may have believed (or been induced to believe) that the state was awarding excessive perks and freedoms to the 'barbarians' at the expense of the regulars - and perhaps was intending to hand over command of the army to the likes of Sarus and Alaric himself. That might explain the widespread attacks on 'barbarian' soldiers' families in the Roman garrison cities of Italy in AD408.