In [a previous lecture], I mentioned how a new martial model of masculinity appeared in the 4th century. I alluded to it again the first element of the previous lecture package, too. This doesn’t seem to me to have had the recognition it deserves, as this was a development with really profound long-term effects.
I want to go back to this issue and discuss it in a little more detail. The barbarisation of the fourth-century Roman army has a long historiography but it has usually been discussed in terms of the numbers of actual barbarians enrolled into the army. People at the time thought that there were more barbarians in the army and it’s likely that there were. First, the army was bigger than that of the early Empire, though by how much is unknown, but the Empire’s population was not growing, so logically there was probably more need for non-Roman recruitment. Secondly, as we’ve seen, the much enlarged civil service was separated from the military, reducing a pool of 25-35,000 men or more from eligibility for recruitment. Third, the recruitment of barbarians made a lot of sense; barbarians warriors actively wanted to join up, for the rewards of serving in the Roman army and were probably better than unwilling conscripts, and every barbarian in the army was a barbarian not raiding the frontier provinces. Even so, it still seems that the great bulk of the Roman army was not made up of non-Romans.
Nonetheless, the barbarisation of the army – as we can see it in the sources - wasn’t just down to the numbers of barbarians in the ranks. An obvious point, perhaps, is that barbarian recruitment need not necessarily mean the barbarisation of the army, its practices and culture. The large numbers of non-Romans in Republican and early imperial forces had not had that sort of effect. One way forward involves returning to a list that we still have of the units in the late Roman army, called the Notitia Dignitatum. It is a sort of window (even if a rather cloudy one) on to the army at the end of the fourth century and in the early fifth. We can look at the titles of army units.
Numerous such units have ‘ethnic’ names, like Franks, Alamans, Saxons, and so on. However, two points can be made. First, they only make up a fraction of the whole and even then you’d need to ask how many were still recruited from the peoples in question by the time that the Notitia was compiled. Second, more interestingly, the barbarian ethnic names used are not limited to those of the fourth century. As well as Salii (Franks), Vesi and Tervingi (both Goths), there are Celts, Sabines, Parthians, and possibly Arcadians: non-Roman peoples from the remote and even legendary past. If the Legion of Scythae was recruited from barbarians (possibly Danubian Goths, often called Scythians by the Romans) it is interesting that it was nonetheless given a classicising name. Choosing a barbarian ethnonym for a regiment was clearly more than a simple bureaucratic record of its soldiers’ origins.
But these units have other types of name, too. More numerous than the ‘ethnic’ names are what I call ‘boasting names’: Feroces, Victores, Invicti, Felices (the ferocious ones, the victorious ones, the undefeated, the lucky ones – the last especially common), to which one might add units whose titles appear to claim their status in the front rank. Then there are some units with animal names: the Leones (the Lions), the Cornuti (the Horned Beasts). In the prestigious field army, units clearly participated in a competitive culture. Their men were boastful of their fierceness, they were like animals, they were like barbarians, ancient or modern.
This is the context in which the phenomenon of the Roman army’s ‘barbarisation’ should be viewed. The appearance of the late army looked, by classical standards, very barbarian: trousers (above all), thick cloaks, broad belts, and an emphasis on jewellery and adornment. Compare depictions of late imperial soldiers with those of barbarians on early imperial monuments like Trajan’s or Marcus Aurelius’ columns or the arch of Septimius Severus. The workshops that gilded officers’ armour were called barbaricaria, one meaning of the unit name brachiati is ‘the bracelet-wearers’, and we can see torques (barbarian adornment par excellence) in the costume of imperial guardsmen. The army’s weaponry had also shifted and now included weapons, like long slashing swords (spathae), that had traditionally been associated with barbarians. It bore draco (dragon) ‘windsock’ standards, again associated with barbarians in early Roman literature and art. Vegetius adds other supposedly barbarian items to the list, such as whips carried by officers to ‘encourage’ their troops. The Roman army’s war-cry, the barritus (a cheer that started low and swelled to a discordant climax) seems to me more likely to have modelled on the trumpeting of a barrus (elephant), but it is interesting that Roman writers thought it was barbarian in origin. Late Roman soldiers had adopted what I have called ‘barbarian chic’. What is interesting is its mix of elements from the ‘binary’ and the ‘taxonomic’ registers of Roman ethnography.
I don’t really see this as even being authentically ‘barbarian’; it is a hotch-potch of stereotypical features of the ‘non-Roman’ thrown together regardless of context or of historical veracity. One way of thinking of it would be as an equivalent of the Hollywood ‘Red Indian’ of classic westerns of the third quarter of the last century: bits and pieces of native American culture from different peoples thrown together willy-nilly and with an admixture of myth and stereotype: to make a recognisable ‘sign’ with a particular signified. A more recherché military historical example would be the ‘zouave’ regiments of the 19th-century French army. Originally recruited from Algerians they very rapidly were made up of white Frenchmen, wearing a French colonial version of what they thought North African costume was. But the zouaves themselves adopted lots of bits and pieces of North African culture and the whole gave them a very particular esprit de corps and this self-consciously created ‘otherness’ could be deployed competitively with the more traditional elite units of the French army.
Cut off from the civilian branch of service, which valorised the traditional civic masculine virtues, paideia and the aristocratic culture of otium and negotium, late Roman elite regiments (especially) constructed new identities. Braggart, barbarous, ferocious, and animal-like, they were unabashedly masculine and represented the antithesis of the civic masculine ideal with its stress on modesty and moderation. Their costume was designed to underline this. It is difficult, in my view, to underestimate the significance of this development. It created an alternative form of Roman-ness, a sort of anti-Roman-ness – in the sense that it stood in a relationship to traditional Romanitas that is similar to that (in literature) between the anti-hero and the traditional hero. Not opposed to Rome, or non-Roman, it was Roman in an untraditional and possibly jarring way. Thought about as a competing form of masculinity, it needed the original civic form in order to make its point; its rebellious stress on ferocity and martial boastfulness only makes sense against a backdrop where moderation, discipline and so on are the norm. What is valorised and what isn’t constantly flips from one to the other. Again, what we have is a form of deconstruction of the old certainties of Roman life. The space between the two is the space of contested masculinity in late Roman politics. (You could make the same point about the space between traditional civic virtue and Christian asceticism, discussed in the previous [package of lectures].)
This shift matters quite a lot. What it meant was that there was a tradition within Roman society by the fifth century of people serving in the Roman army consciously adopting a supposedly non-Roman culture and identity, strutting about in their ‘barbarian’ costume, speaking their army slang, which contained a number of words of Germanic origin, claiming a certain status within society – but without actually ceasing to see themselves as Romans. Consequently in the fifth-century crisis it was possible to navigate what would earlier have been very tricky political decisions – to make common cause with barbarian soldiers, or to serve with them in their forces. In, say, the second or third century, this would have been to turn your back not simply on Romanness but also on your masculinity and any claim to legitimate political authority. The shifts of the fourth century had made things much easier. After all, the barbarian or barbarised soldier still stood in a chain of command and legitimate authority that went up to the Emperor himself who – as we have seen – personified both forms of masculinity. We’ll come back to some of these points next week when we look at ethnicity and ethnic identity in late antiquity. Of course, in the fullness of time, the ‘barbarised’ late Roman martial model of masculinity became the root of the classic medieval form of warrior masculinity.