Black auxiliaries (Blemmyes, seen on the Constantine Arch) were utilized and the legions stationed in Egypt would have recruited from populations as far south as Aswan which likely featured some people who would look black to us (but would identify as Egyptian). However this # would be vanishingly vanishingly vanishingly fucking small. sub 1%, sub 0.5% of the army, sub 0.1% even. Recruitment was not flat across the empire and certain areas (Illyria, Gaul, Germania, ect) produced more troops than others.
The rationale for black legionaries in Britain is a lot like the ridiculous rationale you saw with the guy arguing with that medieval game in Bohemia about how "oh maybe a black merchant visited this random Czech town, fucked a local woman in a one night stand and that's why there's a mulatto in this random czech town" (I'm not making this up their literal rationale was the above - foreigner comes and unga bunga local girl). It's putting the cart of woke diversity ahead of the horse of actual evidence.
>>12381712Auxiliaries by the 1st century AD were not savages. They were as well equipped and as trained (better, even, through more experience in battle) than legionaries save in siege actions. Batavian Auxilia outshined Roman legionaries during the Batavian Revolt, the battle against the Catalonians by Tacitus' uncle or whatever the fuck he was saw the Auxilia exclusively used, the Auxilia Palatina were far more premiere forces for the Late Romans compared to the legionary comitatenses save for their peers in the Herculani and Iovani.
