the method of enrollment constituted the only practical difference between the three classes of soldiers who marched in the ranks of a Byzantine army. The maintenance of the Empire rested, therefore, on a heterogeneous multitude, trained to the profession of arms no doubt, but without the cohesion of nationality or uniform military discipline.[1] In the multifarious host the word of command was given in Latin, which Greek and barbarian alike were taught to understand.[2]
Every student of ancient history is familiar with the methods of warfare among the Greeks and Romans; with the impenetrable, but inactive, phalanx which subdued the eastern world; and with the less solid, but mobile, legion which ultimately succeeded in mastering it.[3] Such armies consisted mainly of infantry; and the small bodies of cavalry attached to them, amounting to one tenth, or, perhaps, to as little as one twentieth part of the whole, were intended merely to protect the flanks of each division, or to render more effective the pursuit of a flying enemy. In those times, therefore, the horsemen were only an auxiliary force, which never engaged in battle as an independent army. But in the multiple operations against elusive barbarians in the wide circuit of the Roman Empire, experience made it evident that the
- ↑ The general character given to Byzantine soldiers is exceptionally bad: "The vile and comtemptible military class"; Isidore Pelus., Epist., i, 390: "as free from crime as you might say the sea is free from waves"; Chrysostom, In Matth. Hom. LXI, 2 (in Migne, vii, 590). These, of course, are priests, but cf. Ammianus, xxii, 4; Zosimus, ii, 34, etc. Thus a century earlier the army had already fallen into a wretched condition; see also Synesius, De Regno.
- ↑ Maurice, op. cit., XII, viii, 16.
- ↑ From the anonymous Strategike it would seem that the phalanx was restored on occasion during the sixth century (Köchly and Rüslow).
