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The Later Roman Empire. Averil Cameron
Читать онлайн.Название The Later Roman Empire
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isbn 9780007391844
Автор произведения Averil Cameron
Издательство HarperCollins
he appointed three men to share his rule, dividing the world into four parts and multiplying the armies, as each of the four strove to have a far larger number of troops than any previous emperors had had when they were governing the state alone. (DMP 7.2)
But Lactantius can hardly be taken to mean that the army had quadrupled, especially as it is likely that it had already risen during the third century to something over 350,000. More probably this, like other remarks in the same chapter, is a hostile exaggeration, more a jibe than a sober estimate. Diocletian did perhaps increase numbers (new units were certainly created), but may not have done very much more in general than recognize and regularize the status quo. The backbone of the army had traditionally been the legions, well-armed and well-drilled units of about five thousand infantry. Reading back from the evidence of the Notitia Dignitatum (see above, Chapter II), Diocletian created new legions on a considerable scale, giving them names such as Iovia, Herculia, Diocletiana and Maximiana, while others had already come into being during the third century. But a large increase in the number of legions does not necessarily imply a doubling of the actual numbers of troops. Archaeological evidence drawn from the size of legionary fortresses and literary evidence both show that legions in the later Roman empire were much smaller than their predecessors, typically comprising only a thousand or so men, while special detachments (vexillationes) often stood at only five hundred or less; this implies that the calculations of total size based on earlier norms will be very misleading, and suggests that the actual total was considerably less than is often supposed.
Calculating the size of the late Roman army is very difficult. We have few actual figures for its total. At least one of them (six hundred and forty-five thousand, according to the historian Agathias, writing in Constantinople in the later sixth century) is impossibly high, although it might reflect a paper figure never realized in practice. Calculations based on the figures in the Notitia are likely to suffer from similar limitations. It ought to be possible in theory to base overall calculations on papyrus evidence surviving from AD 299–300, which gives the levels of pay for certain regiments, but here too there are many imponderables as to the actual size of the units. Yet the total size of Diocletian’s army is extremely important in assessing the economic problems which may have led to later decline, for if it really did double in size, the extra burden on the state revenues would indeed have been colossal. Current research seems however to point to an army size of not much more than four hundred thousand; even so, the implications for supply, pay and recruitment were extremely serious (for further discussion, see Chapter IX below).
Like Lactantius, the pagan historian Zosimus draws an exaggerated distinction between Diocletian and Constantine when he accuses Constantine of having damaged Roman frontier defences by removing ‘most’ of the troops from the frontiers, where they had been placed by Diocletian, in order to create a new field army (New History II.34). He adds that these soldiers thus became accustomed to the luxury of life in cities, and grew enervated as a result. But this is all part of his tirade against Constantine; we know from epigraphic evidence that the field army (comitatus) certainly already existed under Diocletian and indeed earlier (Constantine may simply have enlarged it), while the stationing of soldiers in or near cities was a direct function of the problems of army supply and requisitions. All agree that Diocletian strengthened the frontiers, building forts, strengthening natural barriers and establishing military roads from Britain in the west to the so-called Strata Diocletiana in the east, a road running from the Red Sea to Dura on the Euphrates. But it is unlikely that these borders were yet manned by limitanei, farmer-soldiers living on the frontiers, who emerge only later. Moreover, the policy of ‘defence-in-depth’ attributed to Diocletian and popularized in a book by the modern strategist Edward Luttwak and others, whereby the border troops were designed to hold up invaders until crack troops moved up from defensive positions further inside the empire, has been deservedly criticized by archaeologists and others who have studied the material remains in detail (see Chapter IX). The Roman army in the late empire was different from that of Augustus, and used in different ways. Ammianus gives a vivid picture of the varied and sometimes outlandish insignia in use in the second half of the fourth century. In the same period recruitment in some areas became difficult and unpopular; the place of volunteers was therefore taken more and more by conscripts and by barbarians, both as regular troops and as federate mercenaries. But like much else this took time to work through, and we should not attribute more to Diocletian than he actually did.
One of the most severe problems associated with the army was that of pay and supply. With the collapse of the silver coinage, used for the payment of taxes and the soldiers’ wages, the army had to be paid and supplied partly in requisitions in kind through the annona militaris and the capitus (a fodder ration). If such a system worked at all, it was bound to be unreliable, clumsy and extremely burdensome on local populations, who never knew what was going to be demanded from them or when. Since perishable goods could not be carried far because of the extreme slowness of land transport, there were also formidable problems of supply. It is a miracle that some level of central organization was nevertheless maintained in such conditions; however, some improvement had to be sought. Diocletian effectively recognized the status quo and introduced an elaborate new tax system in kind, based both on capita (‘heads’, i.e. poll tax, capitatio) and land (iugatio). All agricultural land was divided into notional units known as iuga, varying in size according to the assessment of their productivity. Iuga, tax units, are not to be confused with iugera, units of area; thus in Syria, five iugera of vineyard made one iugum, which might however comprise as much as forty iugera if the land were of poor quality. Mountain territory was specially assessed on a local scale of productivity; a later legal textbook describes the process:
at the time of the assessment there were certain men who were given the authority by the government; they summoned the other mountain dwellers from other regions and bade them assess how much land, by their estimate, produces a modius of wheat or barley in the mountains. In this way they also assessed unsown land, the pasture land for cattle, as to how much tax it should yield to the fisc. (Syro-Roman Law Book, cxxi, FIRA II.796 = Lewis and Reinhold, II. 128)
Not only that: what was actually to be paid also ideally had to be linked to what was produced locally. The whole was to be assessed by a regular census, organized by five-year periods, known as indictions, from AD 287 onwards.
By these means, Diocletian sought to establish for the empire something like a regular budget, and some check was placed on the ad hoc requisitions which had become such a burden during the third century. The system aimed at providing what the troops needed on a regular and reliable basis. A. H. M. Jones comments that its great virtue lay in its simplicity (LRE, I, 65). This however is a modern view; in the conditions of the late third century, the amount of work and organization needed to put it into practice was beyond all proportion to what had gone before, and the mechanisms of economic control were both crude and poorly understood. In practice there was considerable variety from province to province, and while a large amount of evidence survives to show how the reforms were carried out, it is very unevenly distributed. Thus we know something of what happened in some areas – Syria and Egypt, for example – but nothing at all about others, such as Spain or Britain. It is therefore impossible to judge how effective the system was in any detailed way, though we can assume that Diocletian’s arrangements remained in force. But cash payments also remained in force for the army, as can be seen from the ample evidence of minting of coin, and the annona itself often took the form of compulsory purchase of goods by the state rather than transactions wholly in kind.
These were reforms of practice, not of principle: the major tax burden continued to fall on those least able to bear it, the main tax still fell on the land, and the notion that high status should carry with it exemption from certain taxes was an idea which permeated Roman attitudes to taxation at all periods, even when the empire could least afford it. Diocletian did not attempt to introduce taxation of senators or merchants, and when Constantine did so the initiative was highly unpopular. Whether the overall rate of taxation was itself actually