Where was the Roman Army in AD408?

[Nathan Ross]

no historian could make a hard case for a barbarised Roman army... the fact that Gunthamund even bothered to call himself Flavius would for me be a good sign that the army was far more Roman than some think it was.

And I suppose the fact that Gunthamund, or his fellow soldiers at Concordia anyway, were buried with inscriptions in good, if formulaic, Latin is a further sign pointing in that direction!

I've been reading Burns's Barbarians within the Gates of Rome recently (or trying to - it really is one of the most poorly-written books I've come across: garbled, repetitive, prolix and a real struggle to get through - which is a great shame, as the material Burns covers is really interesting. Has anyone else had a problem with it? But I digress...)

While arguing for the continuation of traditional Roman miliitary practices re barbarian recruitment before and after Adrianople, Burns appears to be highlighting the quite dramatic increase in this recruitment from around AD380 onwards. 

I do wonder whether a lot of our oppostion to the idea of 'barbarisation' stems from the popular assumption that this was a facet of the entire later Roman era, from Diocletian onwards. There certainly were increasing numbers of Germanic recruits, particularly from Constantines era, and particularly in 'elite' units, it seems (or they're just more visible there). But while military culture may have taken on new Germanic and other influences, the army surely remained overwhelmingly 'Roman' in outlook and allegiance throughout this period.

While we don't necessarily need to believe Zosimus's stories of Goths and others in the 380s wandering freely in and out of the empire, and of the ranks of the army, it does seem that something was changing - perhaps gradually - after this date, and the Roman state was struggling to absorb the comparatively large numbers of new arrivals within the borders. The army had traditionally been the mechanism that Rome used to process barbarians and turn them, so to speak, into Romans; clearly this was still going on c.400, but did supply exceed demand at some point?

I haven't yet read what Burns has to say about the events of 408 onwards, so I'll be interested to discover his views on the state of the army at that time, and why they were apparently unable to oppose Alaric's invasion.*

*EDIT - I've now read that chapter. Burns suggests (p.228) that the army at Ticinum, assembled to invade Gaul, just 'disintegrated and disappeared' - which isn't terribly helpful...!