ON THE LAST folio of an otherwise rather ordinary fifteenth-century paper manuscript of a French translation of Vegetius's De re militari, to be seen today at the Archivio di Stato, Turin, the scribe or a contemporary drew what looks like a rolled-up scroll on which he wrote, in gold letters, the three words ‘ung pot d'or’, ‘a pot of gold’. By the time these words were written, Vegetius's work had celebrated its thousandth birthday and had marked itself out as the text to which men naturally turned when in need of an authority to cite when matters military were under discussion. When someone wrote on the manuscript's inside cover ‘ce le livre nommé Vegesse’, it underlined the fact that no title was required. There was no need to tell people what the book was, nor what it was about. The author's name alone told all.

Of that author, however, they will have known little other than what the text told them. Sadly, we cannot improve on that meagre information. Probably a high official at the court of a late Roman emperor (which emperor being the subject of much academic debate among late Romanists), Vegetius compiled his work some time between 380 and 450 A.D. to demonstrate how the ailing fortunes of Rome, then under attack, might be revived if ‘reform’ of the army could be achieved. According to the text, he began by writing a memorandum, advocating the need to recreate an army drawn from those who were Roman citizens, and based upon the twin processes of selection (with its implied rejection of the unsuitable) and rigorous and sustained preparation and training for war.