Agitius is generally identified as Aetius, magister militum of the Western Roman Empire who spent most of the 440s fighting insurgents in Gaul and Hispania.
[8] The usurper Constantine III had taken the last Roman troops from Britain in 407 and the civilian administration had been expelled by the natives a little later, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves during increasingly fraught times.
A second visit in around 446–7 by Germanus, a former Roman general who had become Bishop of Auxerre, recorded in his Vita by Constantius of Lyon,[10] could have reflected Aetius' response to the message.
Gildas' mention of the appeal is a minor part of a much larger religious polemic, however, which means that the image described may be more hyperbolic than realistic, especially as his sources were probably derived from oral tradition.
The traditional picture of Romano-British society in post-Roman Britain as besieged and chaotic is also being increasingly challenged by archaeological evidence which indicates a definitive series of migrations into England on the part of the Saxons.
Gildas mentions a "proud tyrant" who Bede names as Vortigern as the person who originally invited Germanic mercenaries to defend the borders.