Read Online The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant - Free Book Online

another, the soldiers suffered their share of the hardships of this exacting age. No inducements that could be offered them were sufficient to counterbalance all the factors that undermined their zeal.
    And so the young men of the later Roman Empire did their best to avoid military service. Their recalcitrance took bizarre forms. This is evident from the laws of the time, which reveal some of the desperate steps taken to escape the Imperial call-up. Many youths, it is recorded, would even amputate their thumbs in order to make themselves ineligible. For such actions, it was decreed that they should be burnt alive. Theodosius I, however, ruled that offenders should no longer suffer this fate, but must instead, in spite of their self-mutilation, serve in the army after all. And landowners who had to offer their tenants as conscripts must provide two of these damaged persons in lieu of every whole recruit for whom they were responsible. The landowners were also vigorously discouraged from hiding men where the recruiting officer could not find them. Indeed, in 440, such concealment of recruits was made punishable by death.
    This was also the fate of those who harboured deserters - an intensification of earlier penalties, which had condemned them to the mines if they were poor, or to the confiscation of half their property if they were rich. The rich, as a class, were constantly blamed for sponsoring such evasions, and sheltering the fugitives in order to swell their own agricultural labour force. Severe official criticism also descended upon landowners' agents and bailiffs, who, in some provinces, were even forbidden the use of horses in the hope that they would thus be prevented from abetting desertions.
    Yet another indication of the widespread gravity of the deserter problem was supplied by regulations enacting that new recruits should have their skins branded, just as slaves were branded in their barrack-prisons. The ever-increasing toughness of such legal measures suggested how difficult the government was finding it to enforce its regulations. Moreover, an additional danger was the banding together of these deserters into gangs of brigands, who are denounced specifically in a further series of laws.
    Another enactment startlingly reveals the effects of this state of affairs upon the frontier fortifications: for it becomes clear from a law of 409 that their hereditary defenders were just melting away. This was the completion of a process that had long been under way: since the years immediately following the disaster at Adrianople in 378 had witnessed a whole wave of such desertions, abandoning defences to their decay and leaving garrisons seriously undermanned.
    Thus when the Germans continued to burst across the Rhine and the Danube there seems to have been a widespread failure to make effective use of towns and strongpoints. According to Salvian, the presbyter of Massilia (Marseille) who painted such a gloomy picture of contemporary disasters, the cities were still left unguarded even when the barbarians were almost in sight. One would have thought, he declared, that the defenders and inhabitants had no desire to die; and yet none of them made the slightest positive move to save themselves from death. Often, it is true, Roman soldiers, for all their initial lack of enthusiasm, continued to fight well if they had able and inspiring commanders. For example, Stilicho several times defeated armies of considerably great size than his own. But on many other occasions the Imperial troops were beaten men before they even glimpsed a German warrior. Many centuries later, this caused no surprise to Karl Marx, who pointed out that there was no reason whatever why such drafted serfs should fight well, since they had been given no encouragement to feel a concern for the state.
    On the other hand, as a contemporary observer, Synesius of Cyrene (Shahhat) unkindly noted, if the army was not terrible to its enemies it was terrible enough to