De Re Militari - Authorship and Composition

Authorship and Composition

The author of De Re Militari was Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, who lived in the late 4th century and possibly the early 5th century. The name of the work has a number of variants, including Epitoma Rei Militaris, but there are other problems with accepting it at face value as the verbatim work of Vegetius. Some of the manuscripts have a note that the text was revised for the 7th time in Constantinople in the consulate of Valentinian, who must have been Valentinian III, reigning 425-455.

Vegetius' dates are not known or the circumstances under which the work was revised. The year 450 is taken as the latest possible time the work could have been written, assuming he did all seven revisions in just a few years. The initial date of the window is established by Vegetius' own statement that he wrote covering the time usque ad tempus divi Gratiani, "up to the time of the divine Gratian." As emperors did not become gods generally until they died, the statement sets the initial possible date (terminus post quem) at 383, the year Gratian died. If the earlier date is preferred, it is unlikely Vegetius did all seven revisions or even one of them. There is no reason to question his general authorship, however.

The work is dedicated to a mysterious emperor, whose identity is unknown but whom Vegetius must have assumed to have been known to his intended readership. It may be that he wrote on behalf of military reform under the patronage of Theodosius I. In that case he would have been alive in the window 378-395, the dates of Theodosius' reign. This article adopts that point of view and assigns an approximate date of 390 to the work, which would not be, then, word for word the same as what Vegetius wrote, accounting for the title variants.