Six Numeri for Honorius

[Nathan Ross]

were all the limitanei units indeed defeated and wiped away during the disastrous period on 352-355, and were new units afterwards created from scratch, from town guards, or perhaps from dispersed remnants?

I'm tending towards the idea that the Notitia Dignitatum was first drafted in c.AD370, and records the situation during the dual east/west rule of Valentinian I and Valens, with an approximate balance of forces in the two halves of the empire. Northern Britain would be out of date already by that point, still in chaos after the so-called 'barbarian conspiracy'.

This situation, I would think, remained roughly similar for a few decades after that - there would have been units moved to Africa against Firmus, others lost at Adrianople, maybe frontier units mobilised to plug the gaps, other new ones raised from Goths and other 'barbarians', and Magnus Maximus probably brought a lot of the Gallic army west in 388, before Arbogast took them back to Gaul again... But the (partially?) updated ND of AD390-4 probably would have resembled the ND of twenty years earlier pretty closely.

After that, though... I doubt we can trust it all that much. If Stilicho was pulling limitanei off the Rhine (entirely, according to Claudian!) then there wasn't a field army in Gaul he could have drawn upon - and the Rhine invasion of AD406 appears to have been completely unchallenged by any Roman forces.

Presumably there was still a field army of some sort in Britain, as Constantine III brought his 'celtic legions' (or whatever Zosimus actually calls them) across to Gaul and rapidly took control of the entire west...

was Legio VIII in Strasbourg wiped out and were the Octavani a new unit based on their heritage?... The Vesontes (Besancon) have the same shield design... and ultimately ending up in the field army.

I would guess that the Octavani were the original mobile detachment of VIII Augusta, perhaps dating back to Constantine or even Diocletian. After the limitanei were withdrawn from the Rhine in c.401 whatever was left of the original legion might have ended up garrisoning Vesontio - or, as you say, the palatine legion might have ended up there. Interesting that the Vesontes ended up in Spain as well - they could have been 're-mobilised' by Constantius III in c.412, or taken across the Pyrennes by Asterius in 419 or the Magister Militum Castinus in 422 - if the Notitia was still being updated that late!

I'm just reading Oost's Galla Placidia Augusta, and he mentions that one Exuperantius, presumably one of Constantius's generals, apparently reconquered Armorica in 415-416. So perhaps there was quite a vigorous, if small, 'Gallic Field Army 2.0' (probably made up of former garrison troops) in existence around that time!

the tekst is translated from German and over half a century old).

Thanks!

I still think the later date of 402 is as least as likely as 394, but there's no way of telling... I also suspect Stilicho would have wanted to keep all the field army units he could get his hands on together in one place, to counter the east and/or Alaric - so this mixed-up array of troops could have stayed together for several years anyway.