4th century

Soldiers "Roman infantry officer 4th century A.D." in 54mm scale

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• published: 13 Jan 2012
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I returned to the late Roman era with this white metal figure from Soldiers again. It was a superb kit, as usual. I painted the figure with acrylic paints from Revell and Lifecolor. Some scientists state that the late Roman army was a bunch of undisciplined barbarians which had a very low value in battle. In my opinion (and according to some other historians) this isn´t entirely true. In the 3rd century the Legions were split into Limitanei and Comitatenses. The Limitanei were border defence forces and later became some sort of "fighting peasant", the Comitatenses ("companions of the emperor in the field") formed the real fighting army. I agree that the Limitanei lost a lot of their military value in the following time due to the lack of mony to provide high quality training and equipment, but the Comitatenses weren´t bad troops at all. The only problem was the lack of mony for the payment, so there weren´t enough of these troops around to defend the empire. The manpower of each legion was reduced, which might sound stupid, but the intention was to form very flexible fighting formations which could travel fast to threatened areas. To maintain enough soldiers the Romans simply recruited more legions. The legionary of this time was a very flexible soldier, the assortment of armoury was very broad. The famous pilum javelin wasn´t used anymore, but replaced with the spiculum (a Germanic throwing spear) and the plumbatae (heavy throwing darts, every soldier carried several of them). Every soldier was trained to use the bow and the sling, there was no difference in the training of light and heavy infantry, all soldiers could do every role in combat. The gladius (Roman short sword) was replaced by several types of long swords, like the Spatha or Germanic swords. The new fighting style demanded longer swords and i guess that the soldiers (which came from outside the empire) were more used to these. Finally the Romans were able to form an effective heavy cavalry, the so called "equites cataphracti" ("armoured cavalry") . All the centuries before the romans had a very weak cavalry which was often overstrained in battle. The cavalry was getting more important and decided from now on many battles. The problem was: there were many revolts of disloyal generals, so the empire was often engulfed by civil wars. At the same time there were attacks on its borders, but not enough soldiers were left to defend them. Trade defecit led to a financial crisis, there was not enough money left to pay an army strong enough to restore the borders. Caesar had 60.000 legionaries to conquer Gallia, late Roman generals had only armies of 10.000 soldiers and were unable to defend Rome with these limited troops. I think the late Roman legions are a bit underrated.