[721] Ammianus, xiv, 2; xxvii, 9, etc.
[722] Cassiodorus, Var. Epist., v, 16, 17. An order for 1,000 dromons was executed for Theodoric in an incredibly short time. “Renuntias completum quod vix credi potest inchoatum.”
[723] The general character given to Byzantine soldiers is exceptionally bad: “The vile and contemptible military class”; Isidore Pelus., Epist., i, 390: “as free from crime as you might say the sea is free from waves”; Chrysostom, In Matth. Hom. LXI, 2 (in Migne, vii, 590). These, of course, are priests, but cf. Ammianus, xxii, 4; Zosimus, ii, 34, etc. Thus a century earlier the army had already fallen into a wretched condition; see also Synesius, De Regno.
[724] Maurice, op. cit., XII, viii, 16.
[725] From the anonymous Strategike it would seem that the phalanx was restored on occasion during the sixth century (Köchly and Rüslow).
[726] See Arrian’s Tactica v. Alanos. For an interesting exposition of the vicissitudes of warfare by means of cavalry, infantry, and missiles pure, see Oman’s Art of War, but the author’s selection of the battle of Adrianople (378) as marking a sharp turn in the evolution of Roman cavalry is quite arbitrary and could not be historically maintained. That disaster made no demonstrable difference in the constitution of the armies of the Empire. The forces of Rome were consumed to a greater extent at the battle of Mursa less than thirty years previously (351), when the army of the victor contained, perhaps, 40,000 cavalry, half of the whole amount; Julian, Orat. I, ii (p. 98, etc., Hertlein); Zonaras, xiii, 8, etc.
[727] Constantine, according to Zosimus (ii, 33), first appointed a Magister Equitum in the new sense; cf. Cod. Theod., XI, i, 1 (315).
[728] Notitia Or.
[729] Procopius, De Bel. Pers., i, 13, etc.
[730] Procop., De Bel. Pers., i, 13, etc.