The organizational and educational dynamics of the Roman Army Savaged in Late Antiquity: Pictures and Texts.

Abstract

We will seek to, in the course of the research, understand how confluence between Romans and Barbarians influenced the making of military armaments of the Late Roman Empire and, consequently, the education and organization of the Roman Army of the late Antiquity, more specifically the IV and V centuries a.C. We believe that war Education and organization are intrinsically connected, forming a binomial: education/organization, since education provides better military organizations, and the experience of the soldiers may influence new learning and new tactics to be trained. For that reason, we will analyze the war pictures: armaments and attires from the indicated period, seeking to realize the barbarous interaction in Roman Army. We believe that each picture may be deciphered, or rather, each one of them has its own speech to be understood, which makes it essential to our intent of preparing a catalog of war pictures, in which each one will pass through a rigorous treatment. With these pictures, we will use the textual documentation which will enable us to interpret political-military context in Late Antiquity, which will have its speech compared and entwined with the pictures. Among the late-ancient works, we will study the one of the military Amiannus Marcellinus, Histories, and the one of Flavius Vegetius Renatus, The Military Institutions of the Romans. We also resort to Notitia Dignitatum and De Rebus Bellicis, both of them with unknown writers. These works comprise our documentation with the pictures. Thus, starting from the documental analyses and the historiographic study on the subject, we intend to investigate the interaction of the foreign element in the education/ organization military Roman dynamics in Late Antiquity.