ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the fourth century the Imperial Roman army had been transformed into that of the late Empire. It did not survive the following centuries without alteration, but after the reign of Constantine a narrative history of the army, documenting all the modifications that were made to it, and all its vicissitudes of success and failure, is impossible. The comitatenses are not much in evidence in the archaeological record, nor can archaeology throw much light upon the limitanei. Documentary evidence is a little more abundant, but not so abundant as it is for the earlier Empire, because of the comparative lack of epigraphic sources. The literature is vast, but it is incomplete, being both sporadic and selective, and some of it is of dubious value, not least because of the strong pagan or Christian bias which influenced most writers.
