ABSTRACT
A freshly confident governing elite and a cluster of generals and aspiring usurpers, most of whom had cut their teeth on the northern frontiers and in Africa, felt able to dismiss or circumvent the East and its authority, focusing their admiration on the Latin tradition and investing their political loyalty in a western dynasty. A weakened central authority and a threatened or ill-defined frontier offered a new and often independent status to army officers, which encouraged in turn a reconfiguration of polities. That included the establishment of barbarian kingdoms within the empire - many of them created and led by men who were in essence generals in Roman service. The result was a crisis not only of loyalty but also of identity; a vigorous debate, lasting two or three generations, about what it meant to be 'Roman', and whether Rome was necessary to that identity.
