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CHAPTER 17
ARMIES AND SOCIETY IN THE LATER
ROMAN WORLD
michael whitby
The Roman empire was a structure created and sustained by force that had
to be available for deployment both against external threats to the state’s
existence and against any of its inhabitants who attempted to reject or
avoid its authority. But for its first 250 years the empire managed to maintain
a considerable separation between civilian and military spheres: soldiers
were legally and socially distinct from civilians, and to a large extent
geographically as well, since most major concentrations of troops were
located along the empire’s frontiers. As a result, many of the ‘inner’ provinces
could appear demilitarized: 1 soldiers might pass along the arterial
roads or be on hand when a new census was held, but they were outsiders,
in the main recruited from, stationed in and demobilized into other less civilized
(i.e. less urbanized) parts of the empire, either the periphery or the
uplands and other marginal areas. There was also, however, a close mutual
interdependence: the army consumed much of the surplus product of the
prosperous peaceful provinces, so that soldier and civilian were tied economically;
the emperor was both commander-in-chief of the armies and
the ultimate source of law, political authority and social status; provincial
governors and most other commanders of armies were members of the
senate, the pinnacle of the civilian social structure.
In the late empire this tidy picture was greatly complicated, primarily as
a result of extensive tribal invasions: provinces and cities that had once
been unmilitary had to remilitarize themselves; the army became an
important potential means of political and social advancement, successful
tribes created new centres of power where new rules governed relationships;
all the time the military had to extract resources from an economy
that was often suffering the effects of war. Over all, the military became
increasingly prominent in the different parts of the Roman, or former
Roman, world, but at differing speeds. What was happening in much of the
west in the fifth century only became noticeable in the east about 150 to
200 years later, after a period when the east appeared to be moving in the
opposite direction. This progression parallels that of the Graeco-Roman
1 Cornell (1993) 165–8; cf. Rich in Rich and Shipley (1993) 6.
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