reasons to reject it. Firstly, the late army clearly was not, and did not become, ineffective. The regular army in the West remained a formidable force until the political disintegration of the West in mid-5th century and continued to win most of its major encounters with barbarian forces e.g. the defeat of Radagaisus in 405. In any case, the Eastern empire did not collapse, even though its army probably contained at least the same proportion of barbarians as the West, if not greater. An analysis of the ethnicity of Roman army officers named in the sources shows that in the period 350–99, 23% were probably barbarian-born. The same figure for period 449–76 officers, virtually all Easterners (as the Western army had largely dissolved) was 31%. In the Notitia, 55 Eastern regiments carry barbarian names, compared with 25 in the Western army. There is a tendency by some modern scholars to ascribe to ancient barbarians a degree of ethnic solidarity that did not exist, according to A.H.M. Jones. Germanic tribes were constantly fighting each other and even within such tribal confederations as the Franks or Alamanni there were bitter feuds between the constituent tribes and clans. Indeed, a primary reason why many tribal sub-groups surrendered to the Roman authorities (dediticii) and sought to settle in the empire as laeti was in order to escape pressure from their neighbours. The few known conflicts of loyalty only arose when the Roman army was campaigning against a barbarian-born soldier's own specific clan. Ammianus himself never characterises barbarian-born troops as unreliable. On the contrary, his evidence is that barbarian soldiers were as loyal, and fought as hard, as Roman ones. An indication of the army's high esteem for barbarian-born troops is that they appear to have been preferentially recruited to the elite units of the late imperial era's armies. In the auxilia palatina infantry regiments, the proportion of barbarians in the ranks appears to have numbered anywhere between a third and a half of effectives (compared to a quarter in the army as a whole). From the late 3rd century onwards, barbarian recruitment became crucial to the army's continued existence, by providing a much-needed source of first-rate recruits. The former Oxford University historian Adrian Goldsworthy has argued that the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West should not be blamed on barbarization of the late Roman Army, but on its recurrent