1 Introduction

THE NATURE of Roman armies in the sixth century is rightly regarded as important for an understanding of military and administrative developments in the seventh century, when late-Roman arrangements were eventually superseded by the Byzantine system of military organization based on the themes: there may be disagreements about the date of the change and about whether it was a grand reform instituted by a particular saviour of the state or a gradual and piecemeal transformation, but it is accepted that change occurred. For the sixth century there is a relative abundance of evidence concerning warfare, not just in the Greek historians Procopius, Agathias, Menander Protector, and Theophylact Simocatta whose classicizing works focus on the conduct of war and diplomacy,

but also in Greek and Syriac chronicles and ecclesiastical histories, in Armenian narratives, and in Latin letter collections, and this material can be supplemented by imperial legislation and by papyri relating to military units stationed in Egypt and Palestine. But in spite of this mass of evidence and of detailed studies, notably in recent years by John Haldon, there are still serious problems affecting our conception of the formation of the late Roman army.

A.H.M. Jones, in the standard work in English on the late empire, postulated a substantial change in the methods of military recruitment at some point between the early fifth and sixth centuries, with conscription disappearing so that recruits had to be attracted into the army as volunteers. Jones admitted that “the revolution in recruitment is a surprising one”, since there is no evidence that pay or general conditions of service had improved since the days of compulsion in the fourth and fifth centuries, but he believed that the new system worked quite well for Justinian, who managed to maintain the size and military effectiveness of his armies. In the same chapter, however, Jones also asserted that recurrent mutinies in the sixth century indicated that conditions of service had seriously deteriorated, a view that he did not attempt to reconcile with the apparent success of recruitment at the time. Roman military recruitment is not a simple issue, and the volunteer/conscript debate impinges on other issues such as the sources of recruits, the proportion of barbarians in the army, the possible role of land as opposed to money either as an incentive to enrol for service or as the underpinning of continuing service, and the significance of private forces. These problems may be too complex for resolution, but the evidence deserves another look and uncertainties over sixth-century practices may benefit from being considered in a wider context.