Ammianus stated that two-thirds of the Roman army died at Adrianople. His comparison of the massacre to Hannibal Barca's tactical masterpiece at Cannae is apt because in both battles Roman horsemen were driven from the field, leaving the infantry to be encircled, hemmed in and destroyed.

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The outcome at Adrianople shocked the Western world. The Romans had lost battles before, but never so decisively. Nor had barbarians made Roman commanders look so utterly incompetent at the art of war. From beginning to end, Valens and his generals had been outguessed, outsmarted and outmaneuvered by Fritigern's Goths.

Various explanations have been offered for this improbable victory by an ad hoc force of refugees and deserters over the best-organized, best-equipped and best-disciplined army in the world. Some observers claimed that, contrary to Valens' faulty appraisal, the Goths enjoyed a numerical superiority of as many as 200,000 warriors. In fact, given the logistical difficulties of feeding and sustaining so many men, Fritigern would have been lucky to muster one-tenth that number. Other historians claimed that the battle proved the superiority of cavalry over infantry. The truth is that while a timely cavalry charge sealed the battle's ultimate outcome, it was primarily a clash of infantry with infantry.

The Roman defeat at Adrianople can be attributed to both strategic and tactical reasons. At the strategic level, the Romans were unable to assemble enough high-quality troops to deal rapidly and decisively with the Goth threat. Although the empire had some 500,000 men under arms at that time, they were committed to guarding imperial borders from Britannia to Syria. There was a real danger that if a significant number was moved from one point to another, a potential enemy would take advantage of the weakened border segment to attack. Moreover, while Roman field armies were supposedly mobile and rapidly deployable, orders to move to a new area of operations often resulted in mass desertions that critically thinned their ranks.

When it came to using the force at their disposal, the Roman commanders at Adrianople acted with an arrogance typical of leaders of a well-equipped "civilized" army faced with what they perceived as rabble. Those commanders allowed themselves to be drawn into battle without proper reconnaissance and without ensuring that the odds were stacked in their favor before committing their forces to a fight.

It is also probable that the quality and morale of eastern Roman soldiers were low before the campaign began. Only 13 years earlier, Valens had led them on a rigorous but reasonably successful campaign against the Sassanian Persians, only to abandon the effort and leave Armenia in Persian hands. In any case, it was an overwhelmingly hot August day when Valens' soldiers marched hurriedly from Adrianople to the plain near where the Goths had been reported. Consequently, they were exhausted and thirsty before the fighting began. It would be unjust, however, to cite the Roman failings without crediting the strategic skill shown by Fritigern; in spite of his logistic problems, the Goth commander managed to dictate the terms and tempo throughout the campaign.

Gratian was well advanced in his march to assist Valens at Adrianople when he learned that his impatient co-emperor had been killed and most of his army destroyed. In light of this setback and distracted by his own affairs in the western empire, he believed that imperial administration in the east would require undivided attention that he would be unable to give. Gratian therefore placed Flavius Theodosius, the son of a distinguished general and himself a commander of some experience, in charge. On January 19, 379, Theodosius was proclaimed co-emperor and officially assigned to rule the eastern provinces.

Fritigern's victory at Adrianople gave the Goths control of nearly the entire Balkan Peninsula. They raided Greece, leaving only the city of Athens and other small areas of that country unravaged.

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