скачать книгу бесплатно
The Later Roman Empire
Averil Cameron
A comprehensive study - recently updated for the eBook edition - which introduces the reader to the vigour and variety of the fourth century AD.After being beset by invasion, civil war and internal difficulties for a century, the Roman Empire that Diocletian inherited in AD 284 desperately needed the organizational drive he brought to the task of putting its administration and defences on a newly secure footing. His successor, Constantine, sustained this consolidation of imperial strength by adopting a vibrant new religion, Christianity.The fourth century AD was a decisive period; its many new challenges and wide cultural diversity are reflected in the pages of its chief historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, and represented by figures as different as Julian the Apostate and St Augustine.Not only providing a vivid narrative of events, this book also draws on archaeological and artistic evidence to illuminate such central issues as economy, social structure, defence, religion and culture.‘The Later Roman Empire’ is indispensable to students, and a compelling guide for anyone interested in the cultural development of late antiquity, or in the structure, evolution and fate of empires more generally.
AVERIL CAMERON
THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE
AD 284–430
Contents
Cover (#u8be94e47-1a67-526b-b7f7-8fab34de8c93)
Title Page (#u26915aa5-cfe7-5d6e-bd83-bab46c5637ed)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#uf61e8ca7-44d5-5f9b-b0da-f9e626966a53)
Preface (#ubef86ab2-f119-5280-9e94-7d6120f32964)
Maps (#ua8b1bce7-f724-5321-b92d-69541a702c66)
I Introduction: the third-century background (#u500390dc-8cb1-585a-8653-35e8ae5fe2d9)
II The Sources (#u976cee41-a7fc-5761-8269-ace451c3f068)
III The New Empire: Diocletian (#ua2168d51-0ce4-5bcc-9236-7beddca1743e)
IV The New Empire: Constantine (#u1063bd4b-a897-5499-8c55-a01825638d2b)
V Church and State: The Legacy of Constantine (#litres_trial_promo)
VI The Reign of Julian (#litres_trial_promo)
VII The Late Roman State: Constantius to Theodosius (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII Late Roman Economy and Society (#litres_trial_promo)
IX Military Affairs, Barbarians and the Late Roman Army (#litres_trial_promo)
X Culture in the Late Fourth Century (#litres_trial_promo)
XI Constantinople and the East (#litres_trial_promo)
XII Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo)
Date Chart (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Emperors (#litres_trial_promo)
Primary Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Fontana History of the Ancient World Series (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_150d3da5-657f-5393-aaeb-193ef8285842)
NO JUSTIFICATION is needed for a new history of the ancient world; modern scholarship and new discoveries have changed our picture in important ways, and it is time for the results to be made available to the general reader. But the Fontana History of the Ancient World attempts not only to present an up-to-date account. In the study of the distant past, the chief difficulties are the comparative lack of evidence and the special problems of interpreting it; this in turn makes it both possible and desirable for the more important evidence to be presented to the reader and discussed, so that he may see for himself the methods used in reconstructing the past, and judge for himself their success.
The series aims, therefore, to give an outline account of each period that it deals with and, at the same time, to present as much as possible of the evidence for that account. Selected documents with discussions of them are integrated into the narrative, and often form the basis of it; when interpretations are controversial the arguments are presented to the reader. In addition, each volume has a general survey of the types of evidence available for the period and ends with detailed suggestions for further reading. The series will, it is hoped, equip the reader to follow up his own interests and enthusiasms, having gained some understanding of the limits within which the historian must work.
OSWYN MURRAY
Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History,
Balliol College, Oxford
General Editor
Preface (#ulink_9de18b22-fada-575d-82c7-7763784f0d15)
THE MAIN IDEAS and emphases expressed in this book and its companion volume, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600, Routledge History of Classical Civilization (London, 1993), have evolved over twenty or so years of teaching and lecturing. Although during that period the later Roman empire has become fashionable, especially in its newer guise of ‘late antiquity’, there is still, strangely, no basic textbook for students in English. I am very glad therefore to have been given this opportunity to attempt to fill that gap. My own approach owes a great deal to the influence over the years of my colleagues in ancient history, especially to those who have been associated with the London Ancient History Seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies. Not least among them is Fergus Millar, who initiated the seminars, and who both encouraged a broad and generous conception of ancient history and insisted on the great importance of lucid and helpful presentation. Most important of all, however, have been the generations of history and classics students, by no means all of them specialists, who have caused me to keep returning to the old problems, and to keep finding something new.
This book was written at speed, and with great enjoyment, partly as a relief from more difficult and recalcitrant projects. Though of course infinitely more can be said than is possible in this limited compass, I hope that it will at least provide a good starting point from which students can approach this fascinating period. It is a characteristic of this series to embody translated excerpts from contemporary sources; in the case of Ammianus Marcellinus, such translations are taken from the Penguin edition by W. Hamilton. I am grateful to the editor of the series, Oswyn Murray, for wise guidance, and to several others for various kinds of help, notably to Dominic Rathbone and Richard Williams. But they, needless to say, had no part in the book’s defects.
London, August 1992
Maps (#ulink_7fab3336-1e25-5d97-b36d-ceff8329f81b)
I Introduction THE THIRD-CENTURY BACKGROUND (#ulink_a1d3dcdd-69c4-560e-b639-d74aa04077c5)
IT IS A MARK OF the dramatic change that has taken place in our historical perceptions of the ancient world that when the new Fontana series was first launched, the later Roman Empire, or, as it is now commonly called, late antiquity, was not included in it; now, by contrast, it would seem strange to leave it out. Two books of very different character were especially influential in bringing this change about, so far as English-speaking students were concerned: first, A. H. M. Jones’s massive History of the Later Roman Empire. A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford, 1964), and second, Peter Brown’s brief but exhilarating sketch, The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971). Of course, the subject had never been neglected by serious scholars, or in continental scholarship; nevertheless, it is only in the generation since the publication of Jones’s work that the period has aroused such wide interest. Since then, indeed, it has become one of the major areas of growth in current teaching and research.
The timespan covered in this book runs effectively from the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 (the conventional starting date for the later Roman empire) to the end of the fourth century, when on the death of Theodosius I in AD 395 the empire was divided between his two sons, Honorius in the west and Arcadius in the east. It is not therefore so much a book about late antiquity in general, a period that can plausibly be seen as running from the fourth to the seventh century and closing with the Arab invasions, as one about the fourth century. This was the century of Constantine, the first emperor to embrace and support Christianity, and the founder of Constantinople, the city that was to become the capital of the Byzantine empire and to remain such until it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in AD 1453. Edward Gibbon’s great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carries the narrative to the latter date, regarding this, not AD 476, when the last Roman emperor in the west was deposed, as the real end of the Roman empire. Few would agree with Gibbon now, but historians are still quarrelling about when Rome ended and Byzantium began, and in their debate Gibbon’s highly-coloured perception of the moral decline which he thought had set in once the high point of Roman civilization under the Antonine emperors in the second century AD was passed remains highly influential. All writers on the fourth century must take a view about what are in fact highly subjective issues: was the regime of the later empire a repressive system which evolved in response to the chaos which had set in in the third century? Can we see in it the signs of a decay which led to the collapse and fragmentation of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century? Did Constantine’s adoption of Christianity somehow assist a process of decline by finally abandoning earlier Roman values, as Gibbon thought?
All these views have been and still are widely held by historians, and permeate much of the writing on the period. It will soon be clear that this book takes a different approach. Preconceptions, and especially value judgements, cannot be avoided altogether in a history, but they certainly do not help either the historian or the student. Moreover, we are much less likely today, given the challenge to traditional values which has taken place in our own society, to hold up the Principate as the embodiment of the classical ideal, and to assume that any deviation from it must necessarily represent decline. Finally, we are perhaps more wary than earlier generations of historians of the power and the dangers of rhetoric, and less likely than they were to take the imperial rhetoric of the later Roman empire at face value. The period from Diocletian onwards is sometimes referred to as the ‘Dominate’, since the emperor was referred to as dominus (‘lord’), whereas in the early empire (the so-called ‘Principate’), he had originally been referred to very differently, simply as princeps (‘first citizen’). But the term dominus was by no means new; moreover, what the fourth-century emperors wanted, and how they wanted to appear, was one thing; what kind of society the empire was as a whole was quite another.
To gauge the difference, we must start not with Diocletian or the ‘tetrarchic’ system which he instituted in an attempt to restore political stability – according to Diocletian’s plan, two emperors (Augusti), were to share power, each with a Caesar who would in due course succeed him. We must start rather with the third century, the apparent watershed between two contrasting systems. Here, traditionally, historians have seen a time of crisis (the so-called ‘third-century crisis’), indicated by a constant and rapid turnover of emperors between AD 235 and 284, by near-continuous warfare, internal and external, combined with the total collapse of the silver currency and the state’s recourse to exactions in kind. This dire situation was brought under at least partial control by Diocletian, whose reforming measures were then continued by Constantine (AD 306–37), thus laying the foundation for the recovery of the fourth century. In such circumstances, for which it is not difficult to find contemporary witnesses, it is tempting to imagine that people turned the more readily to religion for comfort or escape, and that here lie the roots of the supposedly more spiritual world of late antiquity. But much of this too is a matter of subjective judgement, and of reading the sources too much at face value. Complaints about the tax-collector, for instance, such as we find in rabbinic sources from Palestine and in Egyptian papyri, tell us what we might have expected anyway, namely that no one likes paying taxes; they do not tell us whether the actual tax burden had increased as much as they seem at first sight to imply. While there certainly were severe problems in the third century, particularly in relation to political stability and to the working of the coinage, nearly all the individual components of the concept of ‘third-century crisis’ have been challenged in recent years. And if the crisis was less severe than has been thought, then the degree of change between the second and the fourth centuries may have been exaggerated too.
‘The third-century crisis’, ‘the age of transition’, ‘the age of the soldier-emperors’, ‘the age of anarchy’, ‘the military monarchy’ – whatever one likes to call it, historians are agreed that the critical period in the third century began with the murder of Alexander Severus in AD 235 and lasted until the accession of Diocletian in AD 284. The first and most obvious symptom to manifest itself was the rapid turnover of emperors after Severus – most lasted only a few months and met a violent end, often at the hands of their own troops or in the course of another coup. Gallienus (253–68) lasted the longest, while Aurelian (270–5) was the most successful, managing to defeat the independent regime which Queen Zenobia had set up at Palmyra in Syria after the death of her husband Odenathus. But Valerian (253–60) was captured by Shapur I, the king of the powerful dynasty of the Sasanians who had succeeded the Parthians as the rulers of Persia in AD 224, while from AD 258 to 274, Postumus and his successors ruled quasi-independently in Gaul (the so-called ‘Gallic empire’).
This turnover of emperors (the distinction between emperor and usurper became increasingly blurred) was intimately linked with the second symptom of crisis, constant warfare, which furnished an even greater role for the army, or armies, than they had already played under the Severans. The Sasanians presented a serious and unforeseen threat to the east which was to last for three hundred years, until the end of their empire after the victories of Heraclius in AD 628. Conflict with the Sasanians was to exact a heavy toll in Roman manpower and resources. Their greatest third-century king, Shapur I (AD 242–c.272), set a pattern by invading Mesopotamia, Syria and Asia Minor in AD 253 and 260, taking Antioch and deporting thousands of its inhabitants to Persia; he recorded his victories in a grandiose inscription at Naqsh-i-Rustam, with reliefs showing the humiliated Emperor Valerian. To the north and west Germanic tribes continued to exert the pressure on the borders which had caused such difficulty for Marcus Aurelius, and, before Valerian’s capture by Shapur, Decius had already been defeated by the Goths (AD 251). The underlying reasons for the continued barbarian raids and the actual aims of the invaders are still far from clear. It is a mistake to think in apocalyptic terms of waves of thousand upon thousand of barbarians descending on the empire, for the actual numbers on any one occasion were quite small. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that in these incursions the third century saw the prototype of another problem which was to assume a great magnitude in the later empire, and to which was to be accorded, by many historians, primary responsibility for the fall of the western empire. At one time or another virtually all the northern and western provinces suffered barbarian invasion, as did Cappadocia, Achaea, Egypt and Syria, and Italy itself was not exempt under Aurelian. Contemporaries could be forgiven for seeing this as the beginning of the end.
The army had already assumed far more importance than before as a result of Septimius Severus’s reforms, and the critical situation in the third century gave it a dangerous preeminence. Not surprisingly, each provincial army put forward its own candidate for emperor, and as quickly murdered him if they so chose. There was nothing to stop the process being repeated: the senate had never controlled armies directly, and even if there was an emperor in Rome he had little chance in such disturbed conditions of controlling what happened on the periphery of the empire. It was not so much that external military threats caused internal instability (though they certainly contributed), but rather that they fell on an empire which was already highly unstable, as had been vividly shown in the civil wars which broke out from the reign of Marcus Aurelius onwards. In the third century, however, further consequences soon appeared: the army necessarily increased in size, and thus in its demands on resources, and in contrast to the peaceful conditions of the early empire when soldiers were on the whole kept well away from the inner provinces, they were now to be found everywhere, in towns and in the countryside, and by no means always under control. When a more stable military system was reintroduced by Diocletian and Constantine, the situation was in part recognized as given, and the army of the later empire, instead of being largely stationed on the frontier, was dispersed in smaller units inside provinces and in towns.
Not surprisingly in such circumstances, the military pay and supply system broke down under the strain. The army had been paid mainly in silver denarii, out of the tax revenues collected in the same coin. The silver content of the denarius had already been reduced as far back as the reign of Nero, but from Marcus Aurelius on it was further and further debased, while the soldiers’ pay was increased as part of the attempt to keep the army strong and under control. The process was carried to such lengths that by the 260s the denarius had almost lost its silver content altogether, being made virtually entirely of base metal. It may seem surprising that prices had not risen sharply as soon as the debasements had begun in earnest. But the Roman empire was not like a modern state, where such changes are officially announced and immediately effected. Communication was slow, and the government, if such a term can be used, had few means open to it of controlling coins or exchange at local levels even at the best of times, and certainly not in such disturbed conditions. The successive debasements, which were to have such serious consequences, were much more the result of ad hoc measures taken to ensure continued payment of troops than of any long-term policy. But naturally prices did rise, and rapidly, causing real difficulties in exchange and circulation of goods. This is not inflation in the modern sense; rather, it was the result of very large amounts of base-metal coins being produced for their own purposes by the fast-changing third-century emperors, and of the gradual realization by the populace that current denarii were no longer worth anything like their face value. The inevitable effect of this was to push older and purer coins out of circulation, and indeed a large proportion of the Roman coins now preserved derive from hoards apparently deposited in the third century. Gold and silver disappeared from circulation at such a rate that Diocletian and Constantine had to institute special taxes payable only in gold or silver in order to recover precious metals for the treasury. Once the spiral had been set in motion, it was even harder to stop, and despite Diocletian’s efforts at controlling prices, papyrological evidence shows that they were still rising dramatically under Constantine.
This is the background to the return to exchange in kind which many historians have seen as a reversion to a primitive economy and therefore a key symptom of crisis. Not merely were the troops partly paid in goods instead of in money; taxes were collected in kind too, the main drain on tax revenue having always been the upkeep of the army. But especially in view of the experience of our own world, we should be less struck by the retreat from monetarization than by the success with which an elaborate system of local requisitions was defined and operated, and needs matched to resources. It is also relevant to note that direct exactions had always been part of Roman practice in providing for the annona militaris, the grain supply for the army, and the angareia, military transport; it was not the practice itself that was new, but the scale. But conditions were extremely unstable, especially in the middle of the century, and local populations were liable to get sudden demands without warning which caused real hardship; it was left to Diocletian to attempt to systematize the collections by regularizing them.
If the army was, if only partly, being paid in kind (money payments never ceased altogether) other consequences followed, for instance the need for supplies to be raised from areas as near as possible to the troops themselves, for obvious reasons connected with the difficulty of long-distance transport. We find the fourth-century army, therefore, divided into smaller units posted nearer to centres of distribution. Again, there were changes in command: the praetorian prefects, having started as equestrian commanders of the imperial guard, had gradually taken on more general army command functions; with these changes in the annona and requisitions generally, they effectively gained charge of the provincial administrative system, and were second in power only to the emperor. In a similar way equestrians in general acquired a much bigger role in administration, for instance in provincial governorships, traditionally held by senators. Later sources claim that Gallienus excluded senators by edict from holding such posts (Aur. Vict., Caes. 33.34), but it is clear that there was never a formal ban, and some did continue; the change is more likely to have been the natural result of decentralization and of the breakdown of the patronage connection necessary for such appointments between the emperor in Rome and the members of the senatorial class. It was more practical, and may have seemed more logical, for emperors raised in the provinces and from the army, as most were, to appoint governors from among the class they knew and had to hand.
The Senate’s undoubted eclipse in the third century is partly attributable to the fact that emperors no longer resided or were made at Rome; the close tie between emperor and Senate was therefore broken, and few third-century emperors had their accessions ratified by the Senate according to traditional practice. Meanwhile the Senate itself lost much of its political role, though membership continued to bestow prestige and valuable fiscal exemptions. Rather than owing their elevation to the Senate, therefore, emperors in this period were often raised to the purple on the field, surrounded by their troops. The legacy of this dispersal of imperial authority can still be seen under Diocletian and the tetrarchy, when instead of holding court at Rome the Augusti spent their time travelling and residing at a series of different centres such as Serdica and Nicomedia, some of which, in particular Trier and Antioch, had already acquired semi-official status in the third century. Rome was never to become a main imperial residence again. Moreover, Rome and the Senate had always gone together. But Constantine now put the senatorial order on a new footing by opening it more widely, so that membership became empire-wide rather than implying a residence and a function based on Rome itself.
In fact, the mid-third century did not see a dramatic crisis so much as a steady continuation of processes already begun, which in turn led to the measures later taken by Diocletian and Constantine that are usually identified with the establishment of the late Roman system. How therefore should the evidence of monetary collapse be assessed in this context? This is one of the most difficult questions in trying to understand what was actually happening. We need to ask how far rising prices were due to a general economic crisis and how much they were the result of a monetary collapse caused by quite specific reasons. One phenomenon often cited in support of the former argument is the virtual cessation of urban public building during this period. The local notables who had been so eager to adorn their cities with splendid buildings during the heyday of Roman prosperity in the second century no longer seemed to have the funds or the inclination to continue. The kind of civic patronage often known as ‘euergetism’ from the Greek word for ‘benefactor’, that had been so prominent a feature of the early empire, now came to a virtual halt. From the fourth century onwards the economic difficulties of the town councils become a major theme in the sources. But a drop in the fortunes of the upper classes is only one possible explanation for the cessation of building; it is clear that the upkeep of existing public buildings, which fell on the city councils, was already a problem by the late second century. Further additions to the stock might be an embarrassment rather than a cause for gratitude. By the mid-third century the uncertainty of the times in many areas also made the thought of building, as of benefactions in the old style, seem inappropriate; in cities which felt themselves vulnerable to invasion or civil war, the first interest of town councils was simply in survival or indeed repair. Some cities showed considerable resilience even after severe attack. Antioch and Athens were badly damaged by the Sasanians and the Heruli respectively, yet both were able to recover. By contrast, the cities in Gaul which suffered during the third-century invasions were more vulnerable than those in the more prosperous and densely populated east, and when rebuilding and fortification took place their urban space typically contracted, as at Amiens and Paris. While in the early empire cities had not needed strong defences, they now started to acquire city walls, and to change their appearance into the walled city typical of late antiquity. At Athens itself the area north of the Acropolis was now fortified. But in North Africa the situation was different again. There, the third century saw continued building and urban growth. Protected to some extent from the insecurity elsewhere, the North African economy profited from increased olive production, and the cities of North Africa in the fourth century were among the most secure and prosperous in the empire.
It is evident that given the rapid turnover of emperors, smooth functioning of relations between centre and periphery must have been seriously disrupted. The empire had been a balancing act from the beginning, and the equilibrium was now endangered. Formerly a balance of imperial and local interest had obtained, and had been at its steadiest during the age of the Antonines. In the third century, local cultures became much more visible. From Gaul to Syria and Egypt, local styles are more evident in visual art, and local interests had an opportunity to make themselves felt, most obviously in the so-called ‘Gallic empire’ and in Zenobia’s bid for independence at Palmyra. Another important development in the third century was the extension of Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the empire under the Emperor Caracalla by the so-called Constitutio Antoniana of AD 212; though Caracalla’s motives may have had more to do with getting in more taxes than with idealism or generosity, this measure extended the notion of what was considered ‘Roman’ to cover a multitude of ethnically and locally divergent cultures. Though the balance of power shifted back somewhat towards the centre under Diocletian and the tetrarchy (AD 284–305), the political and military fragmentation during the middle and later third century also had long-term implications for the cultural pattern of late antiquity. From now on, both Syriac and Coptic emerged as major literary languages used by large numbers of Christians in Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Christian church also profited: despite persecution under Decius (AD 249–51) and Diocletian (AD 303–11), it was able to develop a solid institutional structure which stood it in extremely good stead when it found favour with Constantine.
The third century was certainly a difficult period. Nor were its problems all man-made. The plague which struck the empire in the reign of Marcus Aurelius was much less serious than the attacks of bubonic plague which hit the eastern empire in the sixth century and western Europe in the fourteenth, and indeed, plague and disease were endemic in the ancient world at all periods, but it may nevertheless have been a factor, with the effects of invasion and war, conducive to a reduction in population, and with it (since land needs labour in order to produce wealth) to a diminution in the economic base. The question is highly controversial; though shortage of manpower has been adduced as a reason for the alleged decline of the empire, the case has been argued on poor grounds. Nevertheless, general considerations, together with evidence of urban contraction, especially in the western provinces, do support a cautious hypothesis of a reduction in population. But it is essential to see this over a longer period; the eastern empire at any rate was well able to recover, and there is good evidence of an actual population increase from the late fourth and certainly during the fifth century.
Modern historians, for various reasons, have been quick to emphasize the negative aspects of the period. But it is less obvious that contemporaries saw it in those terms. To our eyes, the social and legal distinctions between honestiores (‘upper class’) and humiliores (‘lower class’) are a striking feature of the later empire; yet they had been developing well before the period of the ‘third-century crisis’. Again, it is probably a modern idea to see the Gallic emperors as forming a separatist regime, for, as Tacitus had remarked, it had long been one of the ‘secrets of empire’ that legitimate emperors could be made outside Rome. Furthermore, the negative views expressed by contemporaries, on which many modern accounts rely, usually have a specific explanation. Bishops such as Cyprian of Carthage, who was himself martyred in the persecution under Valerian in AD 258, very naturally emphasized the evils of the age. On the other hand, cultural activity flourished. The philosopher Plotinus continued to lecture on Platonism in Rome and to attract fashionable crowds to hear him, besides pupils from far afield. P. Herennius Dexippus, who had led the citizens of Athens in their resistance to the Heruli, wrote a history of the Gothic and Scythian invasions, which unfortunately only survives in fragments. We tend to be misled in judging the period by the fact that no good contemporary narrative survives for the critical middle fifty years of the third century, so that we must depend on the often fanciful and trivializing Historia Augusta, which reads rather like a gossip column in a tabloid newspaper, and once read, is hard to forget.
Especially when looking back from the vantage point of modern rationalism, it is very tempting to suppose with E. R. Dodds and others that the ‘age of spirituality’ (as late antiquity has been called) grew out of the insecurity experienced in the third century, or, in other words, that people turned to religion, and perhaps especially to Christianity, in their attempts to find meaning, or to escape from their present woes. The persecuting emperors, Decius, Valerian and Diocletian, certainly believed that neglect of the gods endangered the empire’s security, and that deviant groups such as Christians must therefore be brought into line. In the same way, Constantine saw himself as specially charged by God to make sure that worship was properly conducted and properly directed. But it is one thing to suppose a general connection between religion and the desire for comfort, reassurance and explanation of suffering, and quite another to imagine that difficult times always call forth religious movements, or, to put it the other way round, that a religious development is always to be explained by reference to adverse social factors. Whether late antiquity was really more an age of spirituality than the periods that had gone before is itself now in question; it is an assumption which tends to hang together with the notion that paganism was discredited or somehow in decline, and that Christianity rose to fill the resultant gap. But this Christianizing view does not stand up to recent study of the lively and diverse religious life of the early empire, and the reasons for the growth of the Christian church and the spread of Christianity can only be located by a broad analysis, not simply by appeal to an alleged decline of paganism.
Christianization, and the profound consequences for the empire and for society of Constantine’s espousal of Christianity, form one of the strands which make late antiquity different from the early empire. But there were many others, among which we must give a special place to the series of reforms and administrative, economic and military changes which evolved during the fifty years (AD 284–337) covered by the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Though there were of course striking differences between them, which are vividly reflected in the surviving source material, we should also attempt to take a broad view, and to see their reigns as marking, when taken together, a fifty-year period of recovery and consolidation after the fifty-year ‘age of anarchy’, in Rostovtzeff’s phrase. Contrary to the usual emphasis, however, it was not so much Diocletian and Constantine themselves as personalities who managed to stabilize the situation, but rather a combination and convergence of factors, from which many of their ‘reforms’ in fact emerged piecemeal and ad hoc. Seen in this light, the mid-third century looks less like a time of ‘crisis’ from which the empire was dragged by the efforts of a strong and even a totalitarian emperor (Diocletian is often termed an ‘oriental despot’ because of his adoption of elaborate court ceremony in the Persian style), and more like a temporary phase in a developing and evolving imperial system.
II The Sources (#ulink_279181f7-ecdb-59a6-adf7-ae60a30edce4)
IN SHARP CONTRAST with that for the third century, the available source material for the period starting with Diocletian’s reign, and more especially for the late fourth century onwards, is extremely rich and varied. This is attributable not only to the large amount of Christian writing but also to the sheer quantity of secular writing in both Latin and Greek. The amount of Latin writing surviving from the late fourth century in particular is such as to surpass even the age of Cicero, and to make this one of the best-documented periods in Roman history. Ammianus Marcellinus, the one great Latin historian after Tacitus, completed his Res Gestae in Rome in the early 390s, while the voluminous letters of Q. Aurelius Symmachus, a latter-day Pliny, give us an idea of the priorities and the constraints on a pagan senator of wealth and position, even if not one of the superrich who are unforgettably described by Ammianus (see below). In addition, this is the age of the great Christian writers, men such as Jerome, Ambrose and, above all, Augustine, whose Greek counterparts were Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom, the twiceexiled bishop of Constantinople. All bishops, and all highly educated in the traditional secular style, these men carried on the great tradition of classical rhetoric, which they turned to Christian purpose in speeches such as the funeral oration which Ambrose delivered in honour of the Emperor Theodosius I (AD 395). Another example, the funeral speech on Basil, bishop of Caesarea, by Gregory of Nazianzus (AD 379) has been described as probably the greatest piece of Greek rhetoric since the death of Demosthenes. The fourth and fifth centuries represent the golden age of what is termed ‘patristic’ literature, works written by the great Fathers of the Church, men who, released from persecution during the reign of Constantine, now often took on the public role of statesman as well as that of bishop.
This is just to give a preliminary idea of the richness of the available literary material. Not surprisingly, it took some time to flower, given the apparent dearth of writing in the third century and the degree of social change which took place under Diocletian and Constantine. From the middle of the fourth century, however, we begin to see an upsurge of writing of several different kinds under the stimulus of a more settled social order which offered great opportunities to those with literary talent. Ausonius, a poet and rhetor from Bordeaux, rose to the very top and became praetorian prefect and consul after gaining the post of tutor to the future Emperor Gratian, while Claudian, a Greek-speaking Alexandrian, made his fame and fortune in Rome writing Latin panegyrics, highly elaborate and rhetorical poems in praise of the Vandal general, Stilicho, and Honorius, who succeeded his father Theodosius I as emperor in the west. The fourth-century emperors tried to curb social mobility by legislation, in the interests of securing the tax revenue; but a rhetorical, that is a classical, education was a path by which one could readily climb the social ladder.
In most cases the great churchmen of the day had also had a training in classical rhetoric. Accordingly, the relation of secular to Christian culture is not easy to define (see in particular Chapter X below), and sometimes the two came very close. The pagan philosopher and rhetor Themistius, for instance, served Christian emperors apparently without difficulty, and was actually out of favour during the reign of the pagan Julian (AD 361–3). The Emperor Julian, the only pagan emperor after Constantine and an interesting writer himself, had been brought up in early youth as a Christian. He became a pagan when he was effectively exiled as a boy after his older male relatives had been murdered by their rivals, the sons of Constantine, and when he was, rather surprisingly, allowed to come under the influence of Athenian Neoplatonism. Once emperor, he produced a number of offbeat works, all in Greek, including a satire called The Caesars, partly directed at Constantine, an invective against ‘the Galilaeans’, as he called the Christians (mostly in fact concerned with Moses and the Old Testament), a hymn to the sun-god (‘King Helios’) and a lampoon called ‘The Beard-Hater’ in which he defended himself against his unpopularity with the citizens of Antioch. Earlier, he had composed a panegyric on his hated Christian patron and predecessor, Constantius II (AD 337–61) in which he still kept his paganism concealed.
We must look at certain writers in more detail before turning to the non-literary sources. For the reign of Diocletian we are badly served by contemporaries, for no connected history survives, and it is necessary to rely to a large extent on the venomous Latin pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors by Lactantius, a Christian convert and formerly a rhetor at the court of Nicomedia. Writing probably about AD 314, shortly after Licinius and Constantine had declared toleration for all religions in the so-called Edict of Milan, Lactantius’s object was to make an example of the horrible deaths that had befallen the persecutors of Christians, which he does in great detail, especially in the case of Galerius. This of course makes him a highly unreliable witness to the secular aims of Diocletian, who had initiated the persecution in AD 303; unfortunately the chapter which he devotes to Diocletian’s administrative and military reforms (De mortibus persecutorum 7) is too often taken at face value. The relevant part of the Greek New History by Zosimus, the late fifth or early sixth-century pagan writer from Constantinople, is missing, but had it survived, it would of course have been equally misleading, since in direct contrast to Lactantius the pagan Zosimus praised Diocletian and blamed Constantine for every ill the empire had subsequently suffered.
For Constantine, it is a somewhat different story, for we have a number of important works by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, a great Christian writer and scholar. Eusebius established the new Christian genres of church history and chronicles, and still more important, is the major source for our understanding of Constantine. He did not suffer himself in the persecution of Christians, but knew and visited many senior clergy who did, and his later work was coloured by that experience. His Ecclesiastical or Church History, now in ten books, may have been begun before persecution broke out again in AD 303, though this is controversial; either way, it went through several rewritings as the situation literally changed all around him. The first change was when persecution was called off in AD 311, the next when Constantine defeated Maxentius in the name of Christianity at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in AD 312; Constantine then went on to fight two further campaigns against Licinius, culminating in his victory in AD 324. The Church History received its final touches after this victory but before the Council of Nicaea which Constantine summoned in AD 325 and which Eusebius describes in his later work, the Life of Constantine (VC, Vita Constantini), completed after Constantine’s death in AD 337. Manuscript variants in the Church History make it clear that the author himself went over his earlier versions and touched them up in order to write out Licinius (previously presented in neutral or even favourable terms as Constantine’s ally) and defend and glorify Constantine as the champion of Christianity.
The Life of Constantine, in four books, is less a biography than an extended and extremely tendentious panegyric, whose exaggerations and distortions have led many scholars in the past to doubt whether it could be the work of Eusebius. Some still suspect that certain passages are later in date, but by detailed comparison with the techniques of Eusebius’s other writings on Constantine it has been convincingly demonstrated that the work as a whole is consistent with Eusebian authorship. Eusebius also composed official speeches for the dedication of Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in AD 335, and a highly rhetorical panegyric of Constantine for the thirtieth anniversary of the emperor’s reign in AD 335–36, known as the Tricennalian Oration, or LC (Laus Constantini, Praise of Constantine).
There are some obvious problems about Eusebius’ reporting about Constantine. In the first place, it is extremely one-sided; he wishes to persuade us that Constantine was a model Christian emperor in everything that he did. Yet it is clear that the Life of Constantine, doubtless written with an eye to the unstable situation which followed the emperor’s death in May, AD 337, takes what Eusebius had said in his Church History much further, embellishing and adding details of a highly tendentious kind. Thus the famous story of Constantine’s vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge is told for the first time by Eusebius only in the Life (I.28), being entirely absent from the account in the Church History of the same battle (HE IX.9), which is clearly in general the foundation of Eusebius’s later narrative. The theme of Constantine’s youth, and his father’s alleged sympathy for Christianity, is similarly taken further than in the earlier work, the campaign against Licinius written up as though it were a holy war, and the role played in it by Constantine’s eldest son Crispus, which is recorded in the Church History, is here entirely omitted, so as cover over the awkward fact that he had been executed at his father’s orders in AD 326. All this certainly makes one suspicious of Eusebius’s honesty as a reporter. The situation is not helped by the fact that a high proportion of what we know about Constantine is dependent on Eusebius’s Life, which (like Book X of the Church History) includes a large number of imperial letters and edicts, either allegedly transcribed from official copies or translations of Latin originals, or summarized by Eusebius himself. In most cases there is no other evidence from which to check his accuracy, and it has been shown that the range of such material known to him was actually rather narrow; he met the emperor personally only at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and before that would have had limited access to documents and information from the western half of the empire, Constantine’s portion at the time. Eusebius’ is also the only eye-witness account of the Council of Nicaea, of which no official Acts survive, and is notoriously disingenuous, since he himself, as an Arian sympathizer recently formally condemned by another council, had much to explain away; he therefore glosses over the actual doctrinal issues so far as he can, and focuses instead on the unprecedented phenomenon of Constantine’s appearance as patron of the church:
he passed through the assembly like a heavenly angel, giving out a bright radiance as if by shafts of light, gleaming with fiery rays of purple, and adorned with the bright light of gold and precious stones. So much for his physical appearance. He could also be seen to be adorned in his character by fear of God and downcast eyes, his ruddy complexion, his gait and the other aspects of his appearance, including his height, which surpassed all those around him (II.10).
Eusebius’s deficiencies as a sober historian vividly illustrate however his ideological purpose as a Christian apologist, in which he was followed by many later Christian writers. His Church History, the first of its kind, was a pioneering work, taking the history of the church from the time of Jesus up to Eusebius’s own day. Though it is by no means devoid of stylistic pretensions, it differs from classical history in that it has a point to prove, and it includes verbatim documents in order to help its case. His Chronicle, surviving in Syriac and in the Latin version by Jerome, was essentially a chronological table beginning with Creation, and presenting the ancient kingdoms of the Old Testament as well as all Greek and Roman history as part of a linear progression which would eventually culminate with the Second Coming and the end of the world. Eusebius’s own linear thinking was further worked out in his apologetic works, the Praeparatio Evangelica and the Demonstratio Evangelica, which propounded the view that all previous history was in fact a preparation for the coming of Christ and the establishment of Christianity, and his Chronicle was to provide the basis for the later Christian world chronicle, which became a standard medieval historical form in both Greek and Latin. Unlike the Life of Constantine, which had a more obviously topical relevance, the Church History and the Chronicle immediately became standard; the former was translated into Latin and continued in the late fourth century by Rufinus and became a model for later church historians such as Socrates and Sozomen, both lawyers who wrote in Constantinople in the fifth century.
The audience for such works was no doubt largely if not entirely Christian; but there was also a need for historical works of a secular kind, and this may be the explanation for the series of short historical compendia in Latin which date from the middle of the fourth century and include Aurelius Victor’s De Caesaribus and the Breviarium of Eutropius. With the social and cultural changes of the third century, especially the decline of the Senate and shift of focus from Rome, senatorial history in the manner of Tacitus had apparently ceased to be written, while a Greek history of Constantine’s reign written by one Praxagoras, a pagan, has failed to survive intact. But from the end of the fourth century secular history in Greek underwent a considerable revival, which was to continue until the time of Theophylact Simocatta, writing in the seventh century; Zosimus’s New History falls into this category, though it is by no means one of the best examples. We ought also to include here the Latin Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, by far the most important historical work of the fourth century, deserving to rank with the classic writers of the republic and early empire, and a work with a vigour and power all its own.
As he signs off his work, Ammianus tells us that he had begun it with the year AD 96, the reign of Nerva, which is also the point at which both Tacitus and Suetonius had ended:
This is the history of events from the reign of the emperor Nerva to the death of Valens, which I, a former soldier and a Greek, have composed to the best of my ability. It claims to be the truth, which I have never ventured to pervert either by silence or a lie. The rest I leave to be written by better men whose abilities are in their prime. But if they choose to undertake the task I advise them to cast what they have to say in the grand style.
As he tells us here, he ended with the disastrous Roman defeat and death of the Emperor Valens at Adrianople in AD 378. Since the part we have, beginning at the year AD 354, late in the reign of Constantius II, comprises eighteen books in itself, and is written on a very large scale, the first part (probably up to the section on Constantine, which is unfortunately lost) must have been considerably abbreviated by comparison; some scholars have believed that he wrote two separate works, but this is unlikely. In any case, Ammianus’s focus of interest changed in the last six books, which deal in famous detail with Rome and the vices of its late fourth-century senatorial class; though he was a pagan himself, the scathing vehemence with which he condemns the love of luxury among these Roman grandees makes it unlikely that he was the recipient of their patronage, or a spokesman for a supposed senatorial ‘pagan reaction’ (see Chapter X); book 28 includes a lengthy excursus on the vices of the nobility (28.4; cf. also 14.6), in the course of which Ammianus remarks that ‘some of them hate learning like poison but read Juvenal and Marius Maximus with avidity. These are the only volumes that they turn over in their idle moments.’ There seems to be a personal note here, but his actual milieu while in Rome remains a mystery, as does the identity of his patrons, if any; there are many other details about him which remain equally obscure, for instance his exact relation to contemporary Latin writers, including the author of the mysterious Historia Augusta (see below). Nor is it clear when he began writing, or how far his conception of the work changed during a long period of travel, which lasted from the death of the Emperor Julian (AD 363) until his arrival in Rome some time before AD 384. Completion of the work came in the early 390s.
Ammianus describes himself as ‘a Greek’, and it is generally believed, though not on conclusive evidence, that he came from Antioch, a major seat of imperial administration in the east, where Latin would have been used in official and military circles. His inspiration was certainly the Emperor Julian, on whose ill-fated Persian expedition he served himself as an officer, and his books about Julian (20–25) are masterpieces of writing. Julian’s death during this campaign from an unexplained arrow shot (25.3; cf. Ammianus’ obituary of Julian, 25.4) must have been a severe blow to Ammianus himself; somehow, however, the material he had evidently collected while serving on this campaign became the basis of a grand imperial history, stretching backwards in time to AD 96 and forwards to AD 378.
Ammianus is an original. A staunch conservative in his views, he admired Julian not only for his personal qualities as a leader, but also for his attempt to revive the independence of cities. Like Julian, Ammianus disliked the centralist policies of Constantine, and his account of Constantine, which would have been a major counterpart to that of Eusebius, is a great loss. As a pagan, Ammianus was no great lover of the Christian church, and his Roman books emphasize the unseemly conduct of ecclesiastical parties in Rome in the 370s and 380s, but his judgement remained independent, and Julian’s idea of preventing Christians from teaching as a means of reducing their influence earned his criticism:
the laws which he enacted were not oppressive, and what they enjoined or prohibited was precisely stated, but there were a few exceptions, among them the harsh decree forbidding Christians to teach rhetoric or grammar unless they went over to the pagan gods. (25.4)
In general, though, even a hasty look at his choice of vocabulary and his frequently expressed personal opinions shows that he had strong prejudices; while professing to abhor any form of excess and to commend moderation in all things, he himself saw the world, and especially human beings, in lurid terms, as is shown in his famous judgement on the Emperor Valentinian (29.3), where he remarks that he had ‘two savage man-eating she-bears, called Golddust and Innocence, to which he was so devoted that he had their cages placed near his bedroom’.
Ammianus has often been criticized for his supposedly uncouth Latin, which many scholars have attributed to his having been brought up as a Greek-speaker, but though often clumsy, his Latin is vivid, even melodramatic, and his highly-coloured vocabulary, which shows through even in translation, gives it a unique flavour. Comparison with contemporary writers shows that what has often been attributed to Ammianus’s poor Latin is in fact standard late Latin usage. Because of the vividness of Ammianus’s own writing, and his sharp eye for the bizarre, he has been seen as an essentially unclassical writer. However, this view is actually a disguised value judgement, which goes together with the notion of a qualitative ‘decline’ from the classical to the medieval. With the revaluation of late antiquity we can at last take Ammianus on his own terms (as Edward Gibbon did) and recognize in him one of the great writers of antiquity.
This is hardly the case with the author of the Historia Augusta, who seems to have composed his strange work in Rome very close in date to the completion of Ammianus’s Res Gestae. Purporting to be the work of six authors writing under Constantine, this is a collection of imperial biographies beginning with Hadrian in the early second century, which become progressively more fanciful and scandalous and less historical as they reach the middle and later third-century emperors. Its purpose hardly seems to have been that of serious history, and indeed, as we have seen, Ammianus writes scathingly about the contemporary taste for such biographies, so different from the serious purpose of his own work (see above on his reference to Marius Maximus, 28.4). Though some scholars have seen the Historia Augusta as a document of anti-Christian propaganda, it is hard to regard it as anything but light reading. As regards the Constantinian date, there are in fact many apparent anachronisms, of which enough are convincing to make it almost certain that this is a late fourth-century work; moreover, stylistic analysis aided by computer techniques suggests that it is the work of a single author (‘the joker’, as Syme calls him). It is our own misfortune that we have to rely so heavily for third-century history on what was no more than a bow to prevailing popular taste.
A final Latin work of the late fourth century must be mentioned in connection with the so-called pagan revival. This is the lost Annales by Nicomachus Flavianus, the pagan senator who committed suicide after the defeat of the usurper Eugenius by Theodosius I at the River Frigidus in September, AD 394. Like the Historia Augusta, this work, known from contemporary inscriptions, has been made into a cornerstone of the theory of a heavily ideological pagan revival among the senatorial class of the period, which it is assumed would have extended to its view of the Roman past. But while Nicomachus Flavianus himself evidently saw the battle at the River Frigidus as representing the confrontation of Christianity and paganism, and indeed is said by Christian authors to have cited oracles promising a pagan victory and the suppression of Christianity, we know hardly anything about the nature of the work itself. Nicomachus himself did however translate from Greek into Latin the tendentious Life of the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana by the second-century writer Philostratus. It would have been strange indeed if the literary productions by pagans written in so tense a period as the 390s, when Theodosius I’s anti-pagan legislation had stirred up violence in a number of cities, did not somehow reflect their ideological stance; after all, as we have seen, Christian writers constantly interpreted historical events in such a way as to demonstrate the triumph of Christianity or to explain away its setbacks. The greatest work of this kind was Augustine’s City of God (De Civitate Dei), a work of twenty-two books written in part at least to explain why God had allowed the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in AD 410. There is no likelihood however that Nicomachus’s Annales was a similarly philosophical or meditative work. Indeed, a number of fundamental problems have been exposed in the general theory of pagan revival insofar as it has been based on specific literary sources; these will be discussed further in Chapter X.
The genre of biography, the Life, plays an important role in the literary sources of this period. The encomium, or panegyric, had always had elements of biography in it, and Eusebius’s Life of Constantine combined both these forms, while also owing something to the existing tradition of lives of philosophers and holy men. Later in the fourth century both Christians and pagans developed such writing further. The classic work on the Christian side was the Life of Antony, the Egyptian hermit (d. AD 356), often held to be the first example of Christian hagiography (saints’ lives) and attributed to Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria since AD 328 and a central figure in the religious controversies of the fourth century. The work exists in Syriac as well as Greek, and some uncertainty surrounds its origins. The Greek text which survives presents Antony as being above such worldly concerns as rhetorical education; this was also a stance adopted by Athanasius himself, but rejection of culture was a matter of degree – the Life does not hesitate to have Antony delivering elaborate speeches or receiving imperial letters from Constantine. Whether or not by Athanasius, the Life was quickly translated into Latin and transmitted to Christian circles in Rome by Jerome, where it became the key text in the promulgation of the ascetic lifestyle. Augustine writes in the Confessions of its role in the process of his own spiritual development (see below). The Life of Antony set a moral and literary pattern: it emphasizes ascetic renunciation (symbolized by the desert) at the expense of worldly knowledge, and presents the life of the Christian holy man in terms of the progress of the soul towards God. The saint is marked out by his holiness, and indicated to others by the miracles he can perform (in Antony’s case, taming wild animals). This literary pattern, often influenced by the secular rhetorical encomium, was followed in countless later works from the fourth century into the Middle Ages. Hagiography can and does vary greatly in the extent of its historical content, from the virtually non-existent to the heavily circumstantial; each work has to be taken on its own merits, but it was certainly the Life of Antony which provided the classic model, and it would be hard to overestimate its importance. Jerome, characteristically, tried to go one better, himself composing Latin lives of rival hermits, Hilarion and Paul, as well as the Life of Malchus, all three of them essentially literary imitations of the Life of Antony.
Two other interesting Lives may be cited, both of women. First, the Greek Life of Macrina written by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. This is also a highly literary and indeed philosophical work, drawing on Plato’s Phaedrus for its presentation of the immortality of the soul. Macrina and Gregory came from a large landowning family which also included the great figure of Basil of Caesarea. As we learn from the Life, as a woman Macrina had not received the secular education given to her brothers, but had stayed at home with her mother in Pontos, where she later established a kind of religious community at the family home. She, according to Gregory, had the true philosophy, not Basil, despite all the glittering prizes he had won at Athens. The other, very different, Life of a woman is that written about Melania the Younger (d. AD 439), who at the age of twenty persuaded her husband Pinianus, whom she had married at thirteen, to renounce their vast inherited properties in order to lead a life of asceticism and religion. The Life of Melania the Younger survives in both Latin and Greek versions, which are similar but not identical; the original may have been written in Greek c. AD 452 by Gerontius, a deacon at Melania’s monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. As we have seen, Christian works were often immediately translated, and indeed Melania herself was fluent in both languages. The evidence of the Life is of great importance, not simply for Melania herself and her family connections with the Roman senatorial aristocracy but also as a primary document for economic history, since it provides detailed information about Melania’s estates and the sources of senatorial wealth. This is a good example of a hagiographical text which combines the ascetic theme (‘the angelic life’) with a large amount of hard historical material. Finally, both the Life of Macrina and the Life of Melania the Younger are witnesses to a feature of Christian writing which is hard to parallel in classical sources in their choice of a woman as the main subject. There was much in late antique Christianity that was deeply inimical to women, yet the fact that Christian women of good family like Macrina and Melania (and many others are known in the late fourth and early fifth centuries) became the subjects of works by male authors is something remarkable in itself.
One of the most famous literary productions of this period is Augustine’s Confessions, often regarded as the first ancient autobiography. That judgement however fails to do justice to the philosophical complexities of the work, whose thirteen books discuss such topics as memory and the nature of time; it does however contain detailed accounts of Augustine’s own life, background and intellectual development, which are of great importance for cultural history, as well as the unforgettable account of his own conversion experience in a garden at Milan (VIII.14–30). Feeling the call of God, Augustine resisted – ‘just a little longer, please’ (Conf. VIII. 12) – until a certain Ponticianus, a baptized Christian, came to visit and told Augustine and his friend Alypius about Antony, of whom they had never then heard, and of how one of his own friends had been converted through reading the Life of Antony. After hearing this story Augustine went out into the garden and struggled with his conflicting feelings, especially his reluctance to renounce his sexuality and commit himself henceforth to a life of Christian chastity. Following a mysterious impulse, which he describes as hearing a child’s voice, he opened his text of St Paul at Rom. 13.13–14 ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’, and at once feeling at peace in himself, he went inside and joyfully told his mother Monica what had happened. The most striking feature of the Confessions is the honesty and power of Augustine’s psychological observation of himself and of human nature in general. Augustine’s understanding of human feelings, human emotions and human sexuality pervades the Confessions, and is constantly to be found even in his most intellectual theological works. Augustine is a towering and exceptional figure; but this focus on the individual can also been seen elsewhere in the Christian literature that was now developing, and is reflected for instance in the important sets of letters written by Augustine and his contemporaries, such as Ambrose, Jerome and John Chrysostom. As for the Confessions, it is one of the great works of world literature, and one that is hard to imagine coming from the classical world.
Two Latin texts from the fourth and early fifth centuries are particularly important for the late Roman army. These are the anonymous treatise dating from the late 360s, known as the De Rebus Bellicis, and the official document setting out the military establishment of which we have an early fifth-century copy, the Notitia Dignitatum (‘List of Offices’). The first is the work of a rather original, but unknown, author, who addressed to the reigning emperors Valentinian and Valens a memorandum outlining a series of ingenious inventions by which military performance could be improved. He was clearly a pagan, and blames Constantine for extravagant public spending; he complains both that the defence of the empire is too weak and that too much money is spent on the army. The understanding of the anonymous author leaves something to be desired, both as an economic analyst and as a military commentator, but his little work comes as a breath of fresh air, and it seems a pity that we do not know whether it was even read, let alone whether it had any effect. As for the Notitia, what we have is a copy of a document, illuminated, incidentally, with interesting depictions of military insignia, that purports to set out full details of the military and civil provincial establishments. It is therefore prima facie an extremely important source. However, it must be used with great caution, for several reasons. First, the surviving text postdates the division of the empire in AD 395, and is a western document; the eastern parts seem to relate to an earlier phase than the western, so that the document as a whole contains anomalies and discrepancies. Second, and fundamentally, the Notitia sets out the situation as it was supposed to be, which is not necessarily how it actually was at any given time. Like the lawcodes, it is prescriptive, not descriptive; this makes it dangerous to take its figures on trust unless they can be corroborated by other means.
Similar caveats apply to one of the most important sources of all – the Codex Theodosianus, a collection of imperial legislation from Constantine onwards, put together in Constantinople by a group of legal commissioners over the years AD 429 to 438 as part of a wider legislative project ordered by the Emperor Theodosius II, and a vital source for the history of the period. The constitutions are arranged thematically, according to subject, and in chronological order within the subject headings, and there are over two thousand five hundred in all. They begin in AD 311, and build on two earlier collections made under Diocletian, the Codex Gregorianus and the Codex Hermogenianus. Historians have to be very cautious when using the evidence of the Code. In the first place, it is not complete: the laws were dispersed and the commissioners had a difficult task in collecting them. Justinian’s later collection includes many constitutions not in the Theodosian Code. Further, though care was taken to preserve the original wording, many constitutions were shortened, and the commissioners were at the mercy both of their sources (not always good) and their own judgement.
More generally, many constitutions were simply repeated with variants by one emperor after another, so that it can be difficult to know how far they represent a response to a real situation and how much is simply taken over from previous precedent. The constant repetition of certain laws, especially those limiting freedom of movement for decurions (members of town councils) and coloni (agricultural tenants), did much to encourage the view of the fourth century as a repressive, or even a totalitarian regime, until it was pointed out that constant repetition usually indicates that the laws in question were in fact ineffective.
It is essential to realize that the Code consists of a set of prescriptions; it does not tell us what actually happened. Furthermore, other sources suggest that the process of legislation itself was far less straightforward than we might imagine. Constitutions passed in the name of a certain emperor are not necessarily to be associated with him personally; drafting responsibility lay with the quaestor sacri palatii, a post established under Constantine, whose job it was to deploy the elaborately rhetorical style which makes the Code such tortuous reading. Getting laws to the public was also a hit-or-miss affair. Though provincial governors had the task of making them public, ignorance of the law was common, as the constitutions themselves often reveal.
The administration and the bureaucracy in the later empire were highly complicated even in theory; in practice the system was full of loopholes and the rules, such as they were, were continually evaded, at times even with the open connivance of the authorities who should have been enforcing them. The mass of legislative material in the Code reveals both the ideal and the constant departures from it.
To this ample and often contradictory evidence can be added what we can glean from other non-literary sources, including the many surviving inscriptions, papyri and coins. Among the most important inscriptions are Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices (AD 301), of which several versions are known, and his so-called Revaluation Edict. Like the laws in the Code, of which type this is an inscribed example, the Price Edict adopts a heightened moral tone, laying down terrible penalties for anyone who dared to put up prices beyond what was prescribed for each item:
Who is so insensitive and devoid of human feeling that he is unaware or has not perceived that immoderate prices are widespread in the commerce of the markets and the daily life of cities, and that uncontrolled lust for gain is not lessened by abundant supplies or fruitful years? … Since it is agreed that in the time of our ancestors, it was customary in passing laws to prescribe a penalty, since a situation beneficial to humanity is rarely accepted spontaneously, and since experience teaches that fear is the most effective guide and regulator for the performance of duty – it is our pleasure that anyone who violates the measures of this statute shall, for his daring, be subject to capital punishment.
Despite such rhetoric, and despite the many inscriptions and papyri which made the edict public, we know in this case that it was a dead letter within a very short time; the government simply lacked the necessary apparatus to put it into force. Many other inscriptions of the period are less dramatic – for instance the career inscriptions of the senatorial class, which increase in number with its re-establishment by Constantine, or the many inscriptions from cities of the Greek east, which now begin to use classicizing verse even for recording the careers of city officials. To these are added a new class: church dedications and Christian funerary inscriptions. As for coins, they are an important source for imperial titulature and imperial movements, especially during the tetrarchy and under Constantine. Many aspects of the late Roman bronze coinage remain obscure, but the gold solidus, introduced by Constantine, remained undebased and in use for many centuries.
No attempt is made at this point to describe or evaluate the archaeological and visual evidence for the period. This is partly because the range is so wide in each case that it would be impossible to summarize. But the other reason is that it is simply impossible now to write a history of this period without constantly referring to archaeological and visual evidence. Whereas Jones could base himself on an exhaustive knowledge of the literary and documentary sources, the subject has moved on dramatically in the last twenty-five years. Archaeologists have turned increasingly to this period, especially once a system had been evolved for dating late Roman pottery; general interest in urban history of all periods has focused attention on the wealth of material available from late Roman cities; and finally, as political and narrative history have lost their appeal, most historians have become much more conscious of the need to use material as well as literary evidence. As for visual art, two factors have brought about closer integration of this with the literary and documentary record; first, a growing willingness to take in Christian evidence, including Christian art, and second, the effects of a tendency in other periods of ancient history, perhaps deriving from modern comparisons, to place emphasis on the visual environment and the power of images as a means of communication. To sum up, the main writers are of course still the same, though they are in many cases viewed differently; by contrast, the scope of study has broadened out of all recognition.
III The New Empire: Diocletian (#ulink_91f6dde7-61b1-55ca-abf1-77854ef2a3f4)
BETWEEN THE accession of Diocletian in AD 284 and the death of Constantine in AD 337, the disturbed situation which held in the mid-third century came under control and the empire passed through a phase of recovery, consolidation and major social and administrative change. In effect, the system of government which was to prevail in the east until the early seventh century, and in the west, though with less success, until the fall of the western empire in AD 476, was put into place. It is natural to attribute the achievement mainly to the two strong emperors who ruled during the fifty-three-year period, especially since this is also the tendency of the ancient sources; but it is necessary to remember that the actual process certainly involved less forward planning and more piecemeal development than hindsight would suggest. Caution is particularly necessary in view of the tendency of the sources to draw an over-sharp distinction between Diocletian and Constantine because of their religious differences, and to let that distinction carry over into the interpretation of their secular policies.
Diocletian came to the throne in AD 284, having risen from a lowly background in Dalmatia to command the domestici, the imperial guard. He was thus one of the several Illyrian soldier-emperors who reached imperial power after the death of Gallienus in AD 268. The Emperor Aurelian (AD 270–5) had been able to repel an invasion of Italy by the Alamanni, defeat Zenobia at Palmyra and put an end to the ‘Gallic empire’ under Tetricus. Like Gallienus and so many others, Aurelian was murdered, but this time the assassins were punished, and Probus (AD 276–82) not only drove back the Germanic invaders from the Rhine, which they had crossed in force, but concluded a treaty establishing a Roman military presence beyond the Rhine and taking large numbers of hostages and recruits for the Roman army. When Probus too was murdered by his own troops, Carus (AD 282–3) embarked on a major and successful Persian expedition, only to die suddenly with the army on the Euphrates. His son Numerian led a Roman retreat, but when he too died under suspicious circumstances while on the road, Diocles was elevated at Nicomedia in November, AD 284, allegedly accusing his rival, the praetorian prefect Aper, of having murdered Numerian and stabbing him to death on the spot in full view of the troops, quoting from Virgil as he did so (SHA Vita Cari 13); he then took the name Diocletian. In the following year Diocletian defeated Carus’s other son Carinus in a major battle in the former Yugoslavia and found himself in total control.
Even more pressing than the question of military security was that of how to put an end to the rapid turnover of emperors. Diocletian’s answer lay in the establishment in AD 293 of a system of power-sharing known as the tetrarchy (rule of four), by which there would be two Augusti and two Caesars, the latter destined in due course to succeed. Once established, the tetrarchic system lasted until it was destroyed by the ambition of Constantine, who had been raised himself on the death in AD 306 of his father, Constantius, who had first been made Caesar and then Augustus during the reign of Diocletian. Diocletian’s scheme did not come into being immediately on his accession. His first step was to raise another Illyrian soldier, Maximian, to the post of Caesar, at the same time adopting him as his son, though he was only a few years younger than himself (AD 285). An ad hoc division of responsibility gave Maximian the west while Diocletian was in the east; the fact that a certain Carausius had been declared Augustus in Britain no doubt influenced Diocletian to make Maximian Augustus in AD 286. Even then, the further step of appointing two Caesars was not taken until March, AD 293. Constantius and Galerius now became Caesars to Maximian and Diocletian respectively; the arrangements were sealed by dynastic marriages and the adoption of Diocletian’s family name Valerius, and advertised on coins and in official panegyric. Diocletian and Maximian, meeting formally at Milan in the winter of AD 290–1, had already affiliated themselves to the gods Jupiter and Hercules by taking the divine titles Jovius and Herculius, and their Caesars shared the same titulature and the same religious associations. As heir to his father Constantius, Constantine too is attested as Herculius in AD 307.
