INTRODUCTION

The question of the nature of the relationship between the great estates and the imperial authorities is central to any understanding of the political economy of the East Roman Empire in the sixth century. As seen in the Introduction, our contemporary legal sources, such as the constitutions issued by the Emperor Justinian, give the impression of a conflictual relationship, whereby public authority was being progressively undermined by the private economic and social influence of aristocratic landowners. The same conflictual model is in turn reflected back at the imperial government through the critiques of Procopius, John Lydus, and other sixth-century authors of an essentially conservative frame of mind. In recent years, however, historians have become increasingly inclined to emphasise co-operation between public and private authority, aristocrat and emperor. At its most extreme, this tendency has led some to argue that the great estates of late antiquity were essentially the product of imperial fiat. They were the outcome of a deliberate policy whereby landowners were burdened with heavy duties and responsibilities, such as the collection of taxes or the maintenance of imperial troops, which may not necessarily have even served their interests. They were, as Gascou has put it, ‘public law institutions’ or ‘a development of the public economy’. As in so many other areas of history, concentration has shifted from diachronic analysis emphasising conflict to synchronic analysis emphasising stability.

But how useful has this change of emphasis been? To what extent is revisionism itself now in need of revision?