Another primary consideration in introduction & eventual disappearance of Segmentata?

[CNV2855]

Segmentata did not completely fall out of use for at least a hundred years after the Antonine Plague (which was almost certainly not bubonic).

I have given my quite convincing reasons for why it survived for a short period of time.  Also to note, I never implied that the Antonine Plague was Bubonic, but quite the opposite.  It is the first pandemic of Smallpox that we have recorded, a disease as dangerous if not more than the Black Death, which we've proven to be an evolutionary dead end.   Smallpox hit the Romans, and the first pandemic lasted for fifteen years, compared to five for the Black Death.  It killed two Emperors, one of which whom devoted his lasts words the disease, and death it had brought.  Then there is evidence of multiple further epidemics, and the disease was not gone but was re-emerged several times during the Third and Fourth Centuries.   Smallpox has undoubtedly killed far more people over it's lifetime than the Bubonic Plague ever has.  

The army increased in size under Severus, and by Diocletian's day it apparently numbered over half a million men (according to John Lydus, I think). So there's neither evidence for a decline in numbers nor in military effectiveness over this whole period.  

Of course, there is.

Again, the system that relied on skilled and professionalized civilians, collapsed, not necessarily the military.  Uneducated soldiers, even professional, are easier to replace than the civilian infrastructure that supports them.  Almost every young person wants to fight, but the people, tutors, smiths, craftsmen, artisans, tradesmen, sailors, and so forth that made up the Imperial infrastructure had died, replaced by a population of survivors struggling to fill their shoes.

It's commonly thought that this is also the period when the Romans started resorting to mercenary and barbarian soldiers. Are you really arguing otherwise? There was a reason they did that, and it's because they didn't have the civilians to replace their losses, only the remaining wealth of those whom had died - and that went to those they had hired.

No soldier is going to discard a superior piece of equipment and use an inferior one instead. The curved rectangular shield suited the infantry tactics of the Principiate. The (dished) oval was apparently better suited to the warfare of a later era. Changes in military equipment are dictated by the demands of the battlefield.

This argument can easily be flipped and used for in favor Segmentata.  It does not sway one to either argument, nor the other. In fact, it might indicate that there was a general breakdown in discipline, or a vast replacement of domestic soldiers by barbarian, which assuredly happened (which reinforces my arguments).

As Urselius has pointed out, civilisations did continue to thrive after major epidemics. The Black Death did not end civilisation in Europe, nor did the Great Plague of 1665 end civilisation in Britain. States with the infrastructure to survive such things do so.

Bullshit.  Surviving is not thriving.  Modern states may have the capacity to survive short-lived pandemics, but there is no reason to suggest that even the mighty Western Roman Empire was able to weather the near simultaneous weakening by the plague, and the Great Migration that occurred before it was able to return to power.  

There is far less known about the Third and Fourth Centuries because there was far less reading, writing and dare I say a much lesser amount of educated people.  Yes, they might have had silver/gold plated helmets, and we may have archeological remains but those do not necessarily prove strength.  Plating may be a simple task and speculation is outside both our realms.

(by the way, I notice you've droped the bold type and underlining from your posts above - it might encourage others to debate your ideas if you avoided too much extra emphasis, including caps!  )

If people stoppped misinterpreting some of my points, such as implying that I had ever called the Antonine Plague an instance of Yerstinia Pestis.  I was just a tad frustrated, my apologies.

As to the first quote, I dare say that the early Empire also had it's problems from time to time. The 4th century was, comapred to the Principate, not a completely tranquil period but neither a time of prolonged crisis.

Indeed, it was.  That's why Pax Romana was nearly four centuries later.

Mail was preferred in many centuries after the plate armour was disbanded by the Romans.

It's a very easily maintained, comfortable, effective piece of armor that can be standardised, very efficiently, by the current civilian infrastructures in which it saw widespread use.

Are you really suggesting that the decline which we see in the West also happened in the East? I think not, so there must have been another reason for the abondoning of the plate armour due to a 'decline inliteracy'.

Yes.  This is exactly what I am saying.  The East was much stronger economically and was able to weather the storm of the 5th Century.  The Western Roman Empire was not.

To those arguing against me, what was the death knell that stopped Justinian, and his successors, from successfully maintaining hold on to the former Western Roman Empire? Why are the Eastern Romans from the Fifth Century to the Fifteenth constantly shrinking instead of expanding? A thriving state does not shrink.

With the new medical data that we have, most scholars attribute a primary reason for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the degradation of the East, as disease. That's the modern line of thought, and nobody has given any reasonable arguments for why it isn't valid. It's far more convincing than some of the other theories such as lead poisoning. I'm sure Smallpox had far greater reprecussions than the gradual poisoning of a small percentage of the populace by miniscule amounts of lead. If anything, lead might have caused them to be more susceptible to disease.

It's in this context that we see plate die out until 1,000 years later. This whole "the Dark Ages" were a period of growth, revival, and great advances theory that some people are reading off the internet is patently false. Gibbons would be rolling in his grave! He would probably be saying the same thing modern scholars are saying now that they've excavated and have evidence as to the causes for the Great Plagues. Those pandemics/epidemics, of which there were a great number, in no small measure, had dire consequences for the Roman people, East AND West.

Knowledge CAN easily be lost to time. There are multiple things we simply no longer know about people living in the pre-gunpowder era. One day men may be looking back on us wondering how we accomplished some of the things we did, if disaster were to befall us. There is a reason we attribute the end of Pax Romana with the same date as the Aurelius' death.

Or it was too expensive to be used by all the soldiers of the Roman army.

If it is even true that Segmentata wasn't in overwhelming use during the Principate, for which we simply do not know. In any case, it probably was! Metal armour, of any type, is extremely expensive from the evidence we have, and most later Eastern soldiers went into combat with very, very limited amounts of it, some completely unarmored. The very sophisticated Segmentata simply had become a liability because of its sophistication, and within a few generations the ability to make it was probably lost.