So, it's been almost a month, but I've been
real busy. (Attending
BLS and getting up to date on work and whatnot.)
ON THE NIGHTSTAND
Generalissimos of the Western Roman Empire, by John Michael O'Flynn (University of Alberta Press, 1983). This book falls into a very small category of works intended for more than merely academic use that cover the period of the near-collapse of the Roman Empire in the late fourth and fifth centuries AD. (
Near collapse, you say? Yes, it lived on under the name 'Byzantine Empire' for another thousand years or so.) The book surveys the turmoil into which the Empire had fallen since the days of Constantine and assesses what kinds of politico-military responses there were to the increasingly unstable Western half of the Empire.
Although since the days of Diocletian (AD 283-305) there had been varying degrees of bureaucratic separation between the two halves, in principle (and in the beginning to some extent in practice) the division was mainly administrative: Emperors simply could no longer afford to be so distant from the frontiers and battle-lines as they had been in the city of Rome. Increasingly, however, the administrative and constitutional division became cultural and political as well. The mere fact that there were two
Augusti, not to mention subordinate
Caesares, meant that there was no one person accountable for the entire Empire, and thus ambitious generals could play one off against the other, to the detriment of both. It is this story that O'Flynn seeks to elaborate: who were these generals, and what constitutional status did they have (if any)?
The first salient fact is that the generalissimos (as O'Flynn calls them, though that was not a name given to them in antiquity) often shared little of the cultural background that civilians and members of the Imperial aristocracy did. 'Barbarians' -- Alamanni, Franks, Vandals, Ostrogoths, etc., not by any means a homogeneous group -- by the late fourth century constituted the backbone and mainstay of the Legions. Emperors had come to find it politically expedient to fight barbarians with other barbarians, in part because they were cheaper, and in part because they could never be a threat to the throne because their ethnicity barred them this. But this fact became self-reinforcing: even when the
magistri militum and
magistri peditum could claim pure Roman blood-lines, their training and sometimes upbringing among the barbarians meant they came to see themselves at the least as having different interests from those of the professional politicians. As more and more power acrued to these generalissimos, it was less and less clear, especially in the West, whether there was indeed any point in reaching for the purple: they could make and unmake emperors at will.
One of the main tasks O'Flynn's has set for himself is to document the informal character of this relationship: though generalissimos might be called
patricii (friends) of the Emperor, and though they might become immensely wealthy, what formal honors they got were by this time entirely symbolic, such as a Consulship. O'Flynn makes frequent reference to contemporary sources, deconstructing their authors' biases to firm up his thesis. To do this, he must not only show variation of authors concerning the status of particular generalissimos at a given time (a hallmark of informal power-structures), but also show authors' changing views across time. Thus, although
Stilicho (ruling 394-408) is called 'sole commander', by the time of
Ricimer (ruling 456-472), one author refers to him simply as a barbarian 'king', for by this time military and civil administration in the West had become inextricably linked.
O'Flynn's work is on the whole a fascinating example of how new political institutions arise organically from a preexisting framework. In this case, it is not just the birth, but also the death, of the institution of the generalissimo, for after the collapse of the West, Emperors in the East regained much of their former footing as both head-of-state and head-of-government and commander-in-chief. The drawbacks are mainly ones of style and layout. For those who do not have a more or less fluent command of Latin and Greek, it is annoying that when he quotes original sources he does not provide English translations as part of the running text; fortunately, he does at least provide these along with imperial family trees and chronological timelines in the appendices. (There are still a number of Latin quotes which he neglects to translate.) One could potentially also object to how little O'Flynn has to say about major events, like Aetius's defeat of Attila the Hun in 453, but he would surely say in his defense that this would be a digression away from his general thesis. He would be correct in this.
One suggestion: it is probably best to have read a general history of the Empire or a monograph on the late Roman army to get the most out of this work. It is just technical enough that it could prove intensely boring to those unfamiliar with the background.
