Adrian Szopa

Since the very beginning of human civilization, warfare has always been associated with the history of mankind. As a consequence of wars, some empires were created and others disappeared. The decisions of great generals, the grand strategies of the armies and the spectacular battles have been of interest to historians ever since the beginning of historiography. The longer the time-interval from the described situations the more wars tended to be regarded exclusively as phenomena in macro-scale, where the individual human being seemed to be completely insignificant and deprived of any meaning in comparison with the mass of soldiers. In the course of the last few decades one can observe a change in that tendency. Scholars are more and more often interested in individuals and this trend is visible even in such a distant epoch as antiquity. Some detailed analyses have revealed that although so many years have passed, individuals on the battlefield aren’t completely anonymous, and our sources let us formulate some opinions about the behavior of individuals during battle. Focusing on the individual soldier may allow us to take a closer look at an ancient battle, see the reality through his eyes and ultimately perceive things we have never been aware of.

The term ‘asymmetric threats’ functions, although under slightly different meanings, in contemporary strategic, international and political studies, and defines some phenomena which are characteristic of the world in the 21st century. Anyone who wants to find contemporary phenomena in previous epochs has to be aware of a great risk. Using simple analogies is even more dangerous, because it is easy to compare the incomparable. Conscious of the danger, the author decided to take up the topic. The longer he investigated, the more convinced he was that such a contemporary phenomenon as ‘asymmetric threats’ could be – obviously mutatis mutandis – not only applicable to the reality of the 5th-century Western Roman Empire, but also recognized as one of the factors of the collapse of the state. In the presented paper, he demonstrates his argumentation and proposes an answer to the question if one can observe ‘asymmetric threats’ in Late Antiquity and if so, which of them were the most dangerous for the state, how they influenced the functioning of the Empire and how Romans tried to confront them.