Late Roman Army Grade/Rank List under Anastasius

[Renatus]

There's an odd line in Sozomen's Ecclesiastical History (I.8) about the provision of Christian worship for soldiers. It reads: "From that period [i.e of Constantine] the Roman Legions, which now were called by their number, provided each its own tent, with attendant priests and deacons." "Now were called by their number" seems obscure, as they always had been! - could this be a faulty translation of 'which now were called numeri'? In which case, this might be evidence for the change in unit nomenclature going back to the early 4th century.

You have indeed found a faulty translation. The original Greek is perfectly clear:



The underlined portion can be translated "the Roman legions, which were now called arithmoi" (or, in Latin, numeri). Whether Sozomen is right or not is another question.

This serves to illustrate the danger of relying on translations. In the 'Boudica' thread, we have recently had cited a book in which the author seeks to cast doubt on Tacitus' figure for the Roman forces at the final battle by reference not only to the wording but - would you believe it? - the punctuation of the Penguin translation of the Annals.

In this case, I am even doubtful about translating tagmata as 'legions'. According to LSJ, Dionysius, Strabo and Plutarch have tagma meaning 'legion' but Polybius has it meaning 'maniple'. Zosimus refers to five tagmata totalling 6000 men (5.45.1), i.e., 1200 men each, and then to six tagmata totalling 4000 men (6.8.2), i.e., 666 men each. This leads Ridley to translate the first as 'legions' and the second as 'cohorts'. As I understand it, tagma just means 'a body of soldiers' of unspecified number, so relating it to a particular type of unit in the Roman army may be too specific. It seems that Sozomen may have simply replaced one generic term with another.