The Notitia Dignitatum -

Work-wise (as in "real" work), this is the busiest time of the year for me, so I've not being doing much in terms of modelling, to say nothing of gaming.  But I have spent a while pottering about in one of the dim corners of my long-neglected website - updating some of my Notitia Dignitatum pages.  The so-called Notitia Dignitatum (Latin for "Register of Dignitaries") is a unique document dating from ca. 400 AD (albeit only in various copies made a bit over 1000 years later) that describes the bureaucracy of the late Roman Empire.

And why is this of interest?  Because a great deal of that bureaucracy involved the army - by far the most important component of the Imperial machinery.  And more specifically, the document records not only the names and stations of all the many hundreds of units in the army, both East and West, but also their shield patterns.  In colour no less!  Not all of them, alas, for some units' patterns are missing for reasons still unexplained, particularly for the Eastern cavalry, but there are still quite a few illustrated.  Over 280 in fact...

Click to see the page enlarged and read the unit names.

Here, for example, is a page from the manuscript copy currently lying in the French national library in Paris, showing the shield patterns of 12 legionary units assigned to one of the Eastern central field armies, that under the command of the "Magister Militum per Thracias" - the Commander of the Soldiers in Thrace (you can also make out images showing through from the other side of the page, most notably against shields with white backgrounds).

So this truly is a unique document.  If you own a late Imperial Roman army, you don't have to make an educated guess as to which units carried what kind of shields - this thing tells you!  (Let's just ignore for the moment the almost endless possibilities of manuscript corruption over the long centuries...)

And I've been slowly adding images taken from the various manuscript versions of the document to my website, so people can compare and contrast the various versions (some are clearly better than others - but what constitutes "better" is often in the eye of the beholder...).  I'll probably never "finish" the job - because with hundreds of units, each shown in multiple manuscripts - the task I have undertaken is truly vast in scope.  But I'm clearly an obsessive idiot at times, so why not?

The Macedonian War Machine -

I've always been interested in the Macedonian army, ever since my high school obtained copies of Peter Conolly's "The Roman Army", "The Greek Armies", and "Hannibal and the Enemies of "Rome" in the early 1980s, along with Phil Barker's "Alexander the Great's Campaigns" - just the kinds of thing to stir a budding wargamer's imagination (the one advantage of being at an all-boys school, I think, is these kinds of things can find their way into the library...).

Fast forward 30 years, and "The Macedonian War Machine" has just arrived at my door this evening, and a long time it has been in the receiving.  Not because of any delay in the dispatch from Pen & Sword Books, mind you; indeed, the book was only first published last September, and I didn't know it had been released until the end of the year.

Image from Pen & Sword

Constantine -

Picture from www.paulstephenson.info

I've just finished reading "Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor" by Paul Stephenson who lectures at Durham University.  I took a fourth-year course on Diocletian and Constantine back when I was a student at Otago University, which is when I was really introduced in the history of what might be called the Late Roman Empire, and it's an area I've kept an interest in since then.  Back then, I was collecting a 15 mm TTG Late Imperial Roman force, so it was timely.

Constantine is probably known to most people, if known at all, as the first Christian emperor.  But for the majority of his life, he wasn't a Christian, and while his influence on what became the Christian church was certainly important, it was his military achievements that made him "Great".  Unfortunately, his considerable military successes are glossed over by almost all the sources that have survived, because they are mostly Christian, and Christianity at the time had a strong pacifist component, completely incompatible with what a soldier-emperor like Constantine required in his followers.

This biography is an excellent introduction to its subject, although revealing little that is new, and at less than eight quid for the paperback edition, won't put a strain on anyone's budget.  As must be the case for almost any biography about a person dead for nearly two millenia, anyone looking for an insight into the mind of it subject will be disappointed, for our sources simply don't allow that kind of investigation.  We simply don't know why Constantine had Crispus, his first-born son, killed, as well as Crispus' mother, let alone what was going through his head at the time he ordered their executions. 

Despite Constantine having had considerable military success, a wargamer specifically won't get anything out of this book.  The sum total of battle descriptions in this book take up something like less than a page.  And that is perhaps as well, because we can't actually be sure the many victories he won were even "his" in the sense of products of his own planning.  When his infantry defeated the opposing catafracts at the Battle of Turin, were the tactics involved planned by him, or his essentially unknown, staff officers, or just more or less spontaneous efforts by the lower ranks?  We don't know.  We are fortunate enough just to know his infantry defeated catafracts, due to the survival of a panygeric delivered to Constantine just after the battle - not a form of reportage noted for its  objectivity.

The main strength of this book, I think, is the way it lays out how that while Constantine certainly was a Christian, at the end, the road to becoming one was long.  There was no sudden "conversion", despite what his contemporary and near-contemporary Christian biographers might claim.  And all the tropes that have been claimed to be specifically Christian regarding his actions all have non-Christian antecedents.  So I enjoyed reading this book, despite its lack of military content, and despite its inevitable focus, in parts, on religion, not normally a subject I have a notable amount of time for.