Conclusion
Military violence was endemic throughout Roman history, and so it would be unwise to try to draw too sharp a distinction between late antiquity and earlier periods. Nonetheless, a good case can be made for the greater frequency of warfare in late antiquity, certainly compared with the Principate of the early centuries ce.
Moreover, because late antiquity was a period when the empire often found itself in the unfamiliar position of being on the back foot militarily, that warfare impacted on regions of the empire which were removed from the frontiers and which had largely been insulated from military conflict during the first two centuries ce. Siege warfare was a particularly common form of combat during late antiquity, with the result that civilian populations were much more exposed to the direct experience of the violence of war, while the expansion in the size of the army created pressures on recruitment and logistics which resulted in increased use of state force to maintain the army. Finally, the creation of field armies in the early fourth century, which were then often billeted on civilians, exposed a greater number of communities to the casual violence of their own soldiers. In these different ways, then, late antiquity can be viewed as a period of Roman history when military violence, whether in the context of warfare or maintenance of the armed forces, assumed heightened significance.
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