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The present paper deals with the deployment of frontier troops in Late
Roman province
of Minor Armenia —
different sources style these troops as limitanei/λιμιτανέοι, but there is a
question, whether these detachments really garrisoned in Late Roman Minor
Armenia? The problem is that Notitia Dignitatum, our main source on military organization
of Minor Armenia, with respect to this point goes back to the second half of
the III c. (especially as applied to the province of Pontus, which
immediately bordered on Minor Armenia) or simply doesn’t permit to clarify,
to which time its evidence are related. Nevertheless, a considerable amount
of hagiographic texts, narrating about the events in Minor Armenia and Cappadocia, which occurred on the eve of the III and IV
centuries, not only confirms the presence of detachments of limitanei/ λιμιτανέοι in Minor
Armenia, but also proves that these units were the old legions of Principate times (that are legio XV Apollinaris, legio XII Fulminatae in Minor Armenia and legio I Pontica
in the province of Pontus), which continued to be placed in these regions
also during the Late Antiquity. It’s strange but the scholars who studied the
military organization of Minor Armenia (that are P. Brennan and E. Wheeler),
didn’t turn to these hagiographic texts, to their whole amount, but the
author of the present paper considers and applies to hagiographic texts,
mainly to the “Martyrdom of St. Eustratius and his
companions”, that permitted him to make new conclusions on
military-administrative history of province of Minor Armenia in Late Roman
period.
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Key
words: Minor Armenia,
frontier army, legion, hagiography, inscriptions, duke.
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