Late Roman Unit Sizes

[Nathan Ross]

this was a standard detachment size at the time Ammianus served in the Late Roman Army?

Possibly. Although Amm also mentions detachments of 500 on a couple of occasions, and a thousand at least once.

Other than the habit of Roman generals (or historians?) of thinking in terms of hundreds of men, as Michael says above this might further support the idea that a numerus had no standard size: if a commander wanted a force of a certain number, rather than asking for X amount of numeri he would ask for X-hundred men from each numerus, and would know what he was getting!

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To be fair though by the time of Maurice we do end up with a fixed number for the Numerus which is, IIRC, two Bandons.

I'm not that familiar with the Strategikon, but you might need to check this - as far as I'm aware, Maurice doesn't say it, although I could be wrong!

There are a couple of interesting Greek inscriptions that might support this idea though - a votive base of a tribune of Constantiniani of c.AD500 calls the unit numerus Constantinianorum. This is probably the auxilia palatina unit from the ND. Another inscription, mentioned on that page but not given in full, comes from "the tombstone of a member of a subdivision (bandon) of the Constantiniani at Pylai in Bithynia, dating to AD 531 ([σ]τρατούτης δευτέ[ρο]υ [β]άνδου Κοσταν[τ]ινηακῶν)"

There's a discussion of this second inscription in Tyche: unfortunately the first paper is in French and the reply in German! (the awesome multilingualism of European scholarship once again...) But Zuckermann's 'rejoinder' is available in English at least... It seems that R. Scharf (1997) questioned the identification both of the unit and of 'bandon' as a subdivision.

Interesting that 'bandon' seems to relate to the unit flag, just like vexillatio. Could this much later unit also have originally been cavalry?