Of course, I should probably be slapped, because I know I've read at least two different Roman primary sources in the past week, complaining that admitting non-Romans into the army was going to destroy it over time. But if you ask me to cite them, I'll have to go back to search.

But, you know - when you have an army that, world-wide, is 90% non-Italian and 10% Italian, one begins to wonder just how much this did affect the later Roman legions. From the viewpoint of, say, Cato the Censor, I don't think he'd have blinked an eye before saying that putting provincials in the army would lead to a "de-Romanization" of the Empire . . . which I think is probably quite true!

Certainly, those holding in the late 4th and 5th centuries to an idea of "Roman culture" would have been overwhelmed by those other cultures Rome had subsumed, all of which probably seemed equally valid to them at the time.

The bottom line is - does a Roman Briton stop fighting for ideas of Roman culture that probably seemed dead as a doornail to him by the mid-300's???