ies (numeri) recruited from barbarian forces outside the empire’s borders. (As we shall see, the barbarian contingent of the Roman army came to dominate in the later years of empire.) Naval fleets employed another 50,000 men. The cost of maintaining this force, dispersed across millions of square miles from the North Sea to the Caspian Sea, gobbled between 2 and 4 percent of the empire’s entire GDP every year; well over half the state budget was spent on defense.* There were times—during the last days of the republic in the first century b.c., and under the many inglorious emperors who ruled during the so-called Crisis of the Third Century—when Roman military might have worked agains
Powers and Thrones
Dan Jones