Late Roman Unit Sizes

[Nathan Ross]

Some on this list don’t believe in the Vegetius 6000 man legion so I wasn’t sure if you were in that school of thought.

Just to be clear - I don't think legions of that size existed in Vegetius's day: he was referring to an earlier system. But I don't think it's at all controversial that a legion of 6000 men may have been the accepted model at some point. As I've said, the Severan era seems the most likely candidate for the legion reaching its maximum size, and this may have endured until Diocletian's day - the Herculiani and Ioviani legions, according to Vegetius, were raised as 6000 men. That this number of troops were ever assembled as a single unit in a single place by this period is perhaps less likely.

There is a hell of a lot of it and it's all in Greek, of course.

I had a look through this database a while ago, but as I can't read Greek and have only the vaguest grasp of the mathematics involved it was a fairly hopeless task! I admit that I've drawn everything I know about the Panopolis papyri and their possible interpretations from a couple of secondary sources, mainly Duncan-Jones (for example here, which presents a good idea of the baffling amount of number-crunching going on with these estimates...)