Where was the Roman Army in AD408?

[Nathan Ross]

Zosimus does not actually tell us that the army has annihilated, only that Alaric cut them off?

I think 'cut off' in the bit I quoted above (which is from the old 1818, or earlier, translation) is rather antique English for 'defeated' or 'massacred' (as in Church and Brodribb's Tacitus Annals 14: "Those who were chained to the spot by the weakness of their sex, or the infirmity of age, or the attractions of the place, were cut off by the enemy"... )

Ridley's more modern translation of Zosimus says "Valens lost all his men to the enemy save one hundred who barely escaped" - which is again rather unclear. Were they defeated, or did they just surrender? Perhaps somebody with access to the original text and knowledge of Greek could determine things better?

left Alaric alone, or joined him.

This is interesting. I've been trying to avoid the difficult concept of 'barbarisation' so far - but if we're assuming that regular Roman units might simply have joined the barbarians, then surely they must have been to some extent 'barbarians' themselves?

It does seem perhaps unlikely, though, that Roman units (those in Italy anyway) who had participated so recently in the massacre of Gothic federates and their families would have been so eager to join the Goths...

Looking through the lists of inscriptions from Concordia, there do seem to be more than a few non-Roman or 'barbarian' names - and one, Gunthia, who proudly gives both his Germanic and his Roman name! This might suggest that the auxilia palatina units at this date* were quite heavily manned by non-Roman recruits.

(*CIL 05, 08768 is the only dated inscription from Concordia, to a soldier of the numerus Bructerorum - cons(ulibus) n(ostris) Arcadio / et (H)onorio (Au)g(u)st(i)s - which would have been either AD396 or AD402)

One idea, I suppose, might be that the troops from Dalmatia were considered to be the 'flower of the army' precisely because, unlike the field army in Italy, they had not received large numbers of barbarian recruits (together with conscripted slaves etc) during the Gothic wars of the earlier 400s. Is that at all likely?