Was Late Roman Military Equipment Better?
Although this question is likely to provoke strong reactions, the answer to it is, I think, yes— at least for the conditions of the time. And further to that, it didn’t change radically. Whether the equipment of a Roman infantryman improved or not really depends on what it was needed for. During the principate, the army was equipped in much the way it had been since the consulships of Marius during the Republic. The Marian army (yes, there are debates about the degree of his responsibility, but the equipment of the army of his period is hardly in doubt) left a stamp that endured for centuries. The legionary of his period and afterward for, say, three hundred or more years wore an iron or bronze helmet, body armor of chainmail (generally, anyway) and carried a large curved rectangular shield. During the reign of Augustus, some troops were equipped with armor of overlapping iron straps (nowadays called "lorica segmentata;” we don’t know what the Romans called it). Scale armor was common too. The soldier was armed with the famous short sword (there are various styles that may be of interest to the specialist), a dagger, and a heavy javelin with a long sort iron shank and small pyramidal head. It was thrown from a fairly short distance. It was meant to penetrate an enemy’s shield, and the shaft would bend making the weapon useless to the enemy. Standard books about the Roman army discuss this for those who want more detail.
A reenactor in armor of the Principate. Source: Wikipedia
If the evidence of Trajan’s column is to be trusted, and in this it seems correct, heavy auxiliary infantryman (men without Roman citizenship recruited from the provinces) seem not to have used the strap armor, preferring chainmail or scale. Their shields differed in being elliptical and flat. Tacitus, in the biography of his father-in-law, a military leader who campaigned in Britain, states that the auxiliaries used a longer sword than the legionaries, the spatha.
Some time during the period of military anarchy during the third century AD (235 to 284 AD), equipment of the legionary changed. By the time of the Dominate he wore an iron helmet, armor of chainmail or scale and carried a large elliptical or round shield. The protective equipment was hardly much different, except in detail: the helmet was made in sections and joined with bands or a ridge and riveted together and some had nose-guards, the lorica segmentata seems to have disappeared, either completely or largely, but the soldiers continued to wear chainmail or scale armor. The doubling over the shoulders that had been common disappeared, but the armors were extended a bit: the sleeves were lengthened and the armors came down below the waist farther than they had before. So, the protection was lessened over the shoulders, but extended down the arms and body. The soldiers of the Dominate were armed with a spear and the longer sword. Some used heavy weighted darts carried inside the shield.
A reenactor in the equipment of the Dominate. Source: Paul Vermaat.
What you can see is that the soldiers of the Dominate were not armed all that differently from the earlier soldiers— they were armed rather more in the style of the auxiliaries who had served in the Roman army for centuries. The question is why? At a guess, I would say that it was because their duties had changed. In the days of the late Republic the army had been used for large set-piece battles during the conquest of large territories. Set-piece battles happened during the Empire as well (though often in civil wars), but by the later empire the army’s military task involved the defence of the frontiers of territories already in the Empire, and this may have involved quite different tactics and favored the equipment that the auxiliaries used. Auxiliaries had long been used to directly defend the frontiers (for example, they manned Hadrian’s Wall), and when the legal distinction between legions and auxiliaries disappeared as a result of the Antonine Constitution of 212 AD, which conferred citizenship on all free people in the Roman Empire, a result was likely to have been the loss of distinctive equipment between the legionaries and the auxiliaries— there was no longer any legal or class distinction between them: all were “milites” (soldiers). I suspect this shift in equipment toward styles favored by the auxiliaries may have been accelerated by the discovery that their equipment was better suited to the tactics required of provincial defense, which was now more important than conquest.
A reenactor in the equipment of the Dominate. Source: Ross Cronshaw.
In sum, the shields were rounded (though as big), the swords were longer, the spear was more generally used, and the helmets, though made to a new pattern, were iron. Metallic armor was widely used. There were differences, of course, but were the differences in equipment so very great? Not really, it seems, and so, in answer to the question at the start of this entry, the reply would seem to be that it wasn’t inferior and was likely better suited to the conditions in which it was used.
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