SPECIAL SUPPLYING THE ARMY IN LATE ANTIQUITY
In the early empire, the supply of equipment to the Roman army was fairly decentralized. Fortresses contained workshops (fabricae) where equipment would be maintained, and in some cases produced, by soldiers with specialist skills. But much of this work was outsourced: independent workshops, manned by civilians (often veterans), sprung up in military towns and in the civilian settlements which clung to the walls of forts like limpets. What they produced was not necessarily always purchased in an ‘official’ capacity by the Roman army, but might have been bought privately by individual soldiers, who were expected to pay for their own equipment. In areas in which there were large numbers of these independent producers and traders, they might join together in voluntary associations – collegia – in order to better express their corporate identity, capture large orders from army units, and gain rewards for their important work from the Roman state (typically, members of these guilds would be exempt from public liturgies, such as appointment to the local town council, a fate which most other local notables would be hard pressed to avoid).
During the third century, the needs of the army changed. New tactics and unit structures demanded a new panoply of weapons and armour. The enhanced mobility of some of these units made reliance on a networkthe sector less enticing, and with more of the soldiers’ pay coming directly in grain, bypassing the debased silver, the rank-and-file had less to spend. Instead, in the later empire (after AD 284), we find references to a new kind of , usually translated as ‘factory’ or ‘arsenal’ (rather than the lowly ‘workshop’ of the early empire). These are mentioned in the fifth-century , an administrative register listing the officials, civil services, and military units of the late empire, and seems characteristic of the types of innovations instituted by the emperor Diocletian and his colleagues (the Tetrarchy) which helped to stabilize the empire after the turbulence of the mid-third century. The tells us that these were situated in strategically important provinces, and were specialized, focusing on, for example, shields, spears, cuirasses, or bows, and so on. A law of the emperor Theodosius II, of AD 438 ( 6), refers to the men belonging to the guild () of factory-workers – the – as serfs, tied to their profession for life, which was to be inherited by their children. This development fits with the dominant image of the late Roman empire: administratively thicker and more complex than its forebear, relying more heavily on compulsion, and operating on a principle of centralization.
