Since the suicides or, better, the self-killings by the dissident Christians, especially the “circumcellions,” were reputed to have been widespread and terrifying in effect, it would nice to be able to find some evidence of them in the material record – some hard “on the ground” data relative to the practice. This turns out to be a version of the parallel problem of attempting to find any material evidence, either in the archaeological record or in epigraphy, relevant to either the circumcellions or the agonistici. Since the self-killers were regarded, and worshiped, as martyrs, such memorials must have existed. The memorial to the dissident martyr Marculus could be argued to be a variant of this kind of material memory, but the nature of his death, and the fact that one is speaking of a record at Vegesala, the site of his bishopric and not at Nova Petra, the site of his death, means that we do not have any direct evidence of a suicidal death.

The problem is that it is precisely the connected meaning between their life and death and our evaluation of it, namely as “suicide,” that is lost in the commemoration. Such deaths would be those of martyrs and would be celebrated as such – as those of any martyr (like Marculus, for example). If they exist, they are not distinguishable from the rest. Unfortunately, there is no identifiable material evidence of these suicides or of their celebration or memorialization.

This is not a nice book. It begins with betrayal and ends with suicide. Set on this sad trajectory, the narrative suggests a mundane parallel to the city of God, a fallible human city. If the ideas created by its actors were transcendent, the story itself was enacted in an imperfect human way. The problem confronted in the following investigation is the meaning of religious violence. This story of violence happened in the age of Augustine in his native Africa, when its lands were provinces of the Roman empire. The events begin in the last decade of the fourth century and they end with the armed incursions of foreign Vandal invaders into Africa about the year 429. The spate of killing and destruction that accompanied the arrival of these “barbarian” outsiders put an end to the small story of sectarian violence that is our focus. The new Vandal lords of Africa swept away the cultural underpinnings of institutions and thought that had sustained the special hatreds of the generations that concern us here. There were now to be new dislikes, as one kind of violence decisively trumped another.

The diminutive tradition of sacred violence that I am considering served to create and to confirm intimate values and personal relationships in Africa. The war brought by the Vandals erased these rich meanings that had been created by sectarian conflict. Our attention is focussed on the earlier church struggles that were an integrating force of a social and religious world that disappeared in 430. Our interest is directed as much to the question of how acts of sectarian violence were thought about and represented in words as it is to the actual threats, beatings, burnings, and killings. In this light, it is perhaps disappointing that our narrative diminishes rather than exalts. Events claimed as peasant rebellions and revolutionary social struggles turn out, on closer inspection, to be smaller and meaner things. The principal actors were moved by the logical, if fulfilling, credulities of religious faith and by not much more. What I have encountered is a history of hate – a story of intimate dislike that was motivated by the profound love for one's own people, beliefs, communities, and traditions.

The relationship between demographic structures and economic performance in classical antiquity is a remarkably neglected subject; it is only very recently that a few scholars such as Walter Scheidel have begun to address such issues. Studies of the ancient economy remained fixated for decades on the unanswerable but seductive question of how far antiquity could be considered ‘modern’, understood in terms of an under-analysed assortment of phenomena such as large-scale inter-regional trade in staples, systems of banking and credit, a rational approach to profit-making and the development of market-orientated industry, or primitive, agrarian and underdeveloped. Even as historians have sought to escape this false dichotomy and developed more sophisticated conceptions, not least by recognising both the strict ‘limits of the possible’ within a pre-industrial economy and the scope for wide variation in economic organisation and performance within those limits, little attention has been paid to demography, except occasionally as a basis for highly speculative estimates of the GDP of the Roman Empire; there is certainly no obvious sense that change, not only in absolute numbers but in structures and processes, might be a, or indeed the, significant source of change in the economic sphere. ‘Demography’ is included as one of the ‘determinants of economic performance’ in the first section of the Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, but most of its subsequent chapters nevertheless manage to limit their consideration of the subject to the usual estimates of overall numbers as an indicator of prosperity or crisis.

Greek historians have been eager to work with demographic data, despite the difficulties the surviving evidence provides. The adoption of life tables has become widespread in the past twenty-five years, but even with such models, assessing population dynamics is a tricky task. This is partly because any analysis relies on snapshot, and highly contestable, figures, such as those provided by Diodoros or Plutarch, or the use of proxy data, such as army numbers. Every figure transmitted by literary sources is controversial in its own way. Long-term changes over large areas can be assessed by field survey, and many archaeologists have suggested demographic change in Greece from the classical to Hellenistic periods, but the interpretation of such data is not always straightforward. Assessing birth rates, death rates and migration – the principal interests of demographic analysis – is sometimes difficult to square with the surviving data, which leaves historians at a loss. Interpreting the demography of smaller units, such as the demes of Attica, or of non-citizens within any polis community (who show up less frequently and obviously in the evidence than citizens), is an even more difficult task.

One of the few verbatim statements attributed to the bishop Donatus of Carthage, the founding father of the dissident church, was a verbal volley issued in the crisis of 347 – angry words spoken during a hostile confrontation he had with Paul and Macarius, emissaries of the emperor Constans. When they arrived in Carthage, Donatus demanded of them, Quid est imperatori cum ecclesia? – “What does the emperor have to do with the Church?” With this provocative rhetorical question, he was suggesting that the emperor was a secular official whose writ was to manage the earthly affairs of the Roman state and nothing else. For all his power, the emperor was not a bishop of the church and so ought to keep out of its affairs. Whether Donatus liked it or not, however, any reasonable answer to his question “What does the emperor have to do with the church?” would have to be an emphatic “almost everything.”

The state created, defined, and sustained the material, institutional, and ideological order of the secular world in which the bishop Donatus and the people of his church lived. Christian churches and the Roman state existed, as it has been well expressed, “in a permanent state of mutual dependence.” Even if Christian communities were closely integrated with and dependent on the state, however, this did not guarantee the government any easy or ready control of Christian behavior. Despite the fact that empire commanded immense, mostly unchallengeable resources of wealth, authority, and force, elements of both interest and pragmatic politics meant that the court's ability to manage ecclesiastical affairs at local level was limited. Despite these limitations, and whether the Catholics or the dissidents wanted it or not, the state was a constant player in their game. Both sides were therefore incessantly involved in a long-term game of trying to persuade the emperor and his officials to see things their way – to mobilize the state's considerable resources of property, law, and coercive power for their side. However hypocritical their objections might have been, what made the dissidents most angry was their conviction that the force of the state had been unjustly used by their opponents to compel them against their will.

As far as Catholics were concerned, the most feared agents in the sectarian violence of the time were wandering bands of men and women whom they called “circumcellions.” The involvement of circumcellion gangs in the religious violence of the age is a well-documented phenomenon. These armed enforcers damaged and destroyed property and physically harmed the persons of their hated sectarian enemies, sometimes even killing them. The circumcellions were emblematic of violence not only for their contemporaries, but also for historians of our own day. The modern literature on them has accumulated into a mountain of scholarly invention. The circumcellions have been variously seen by historians as peasant revolutionaries, as the spearhead of a late antique jacquerie that swept the countryside of Africa, or as wandering ascetic monks of violent disposition who worshiped at the shrines of their models, the martyrs of the dissident cause. More generally, they are seen as simple religious fanatics who were devoted to violent, sometimes suicidal, attacks on their enemies or, worse, who engaged in mad mass suicidal self-killings of themselves. Whatever the construal of their motives or origins, circumcellions are usually portrayed as wandering groups of hardened men closely attached to the dissident church who vented their sectarian hatreds in violent attacks on Catholics.

Despite these confident modern pictures (some of them elaborate and detailed) and as central as the circumcellions are to the reconstruction of the sectarian violence of the time, there are severe limits on what can be known about them. Were it not for literary sources, mainly Augustine's rhetorical attacks on them, and a single lone reference in our legal sources, the cold fact is that little or nothing would be known about them. If we depended on these other sources, they would not be in our histories of the time. They have left no discernible trace in any material remains – that is, in the archaeological record – or in the many kinds of written texts that have been preserved from the period that are strewn with references to the religious life of the age. In the rich mother lode of tens of thousands of Latin epigraphical texts from Africa, for example, the circumcellions simply do not exist. The plain fact is that from the very beginning these sectarian gangsters were an ideological construct which lived on in precise kinds of writings and nowhere else. The way that they exist in these specific texts, and in no others, makes sense, since name-calling was central to the quarrels of the time. To label any group of persons as “circumcellions” was most of the point of writing about them. An equally significant aspect of the problem is that the violent men never once referred to themselves as circumcellions or conceived of themselves as such.

Just how violent were the sectarian circumcellions? How eager were they, in the much-quoted biblical parlance of the time, to rush with their feet to shed blood? In the context of the types of violence that characterized late Roman Africa, the episodes of circumcellion violence did not amount to anything much above the level of hard street-fighting – the mayhem of fisticuffs, stabbings, beatings, and the occasional homicide ordinarily indulged in by gangs of harvester workers. Their violence was not remotely close to a war, to “barbarian incursions” – even where these latter were smaller interpellations of wandering bands – or, much less, to the systematic violence of slavers whose attentions in these years were turning more intently to exploit the “inside supply” offered by vulnerable rural peoples in Africa. Nor was circumcellion violence comparable to the large regional upheavals of the kind that involved a Firmus or a Gildo. In terms of scale, their destructiveness was at the distal end of a grid of violence, close to individual acts of physical aggression. A standard list of acts of sectarian violence in Africa of the period includes assaults on basilicas, the forced ritual cleansing of sacred sites, sacrileges committed against holy objects, injuries inflicted on persons and attempts on the lives of clergy. What was the place of circumcellion actions in these and similar actions? Rather than rushing to exaggerated claims about rural jacqueries or social rebellions, questions need to be posed first about the modes and styles of circumcellion violence and about the specifics of their targeting practices. Most circumcellion violence, by far, was rural in nature, taking place in small towns, rural villages, and in the full countryside around market centers or on farms. Their violence was the opposite of the “pagan”–Christian riots that were mainly urban in nature.

The social and work background out of which these men emerged has been mostly imputed and generally misunderstood. A fairly standard picture of the behavior of itinerant seasonal labor gangs out of whose ranks the sectarian circumcellions were recruited is one of men who always had a potential for violence. Migrant mobility, the lack of local family attachments, the dynamics of young men in groups, the physical nature of the work – all of these factors, and others, conduced to occasional outbreaks of violence. Beyond and behind these specific links was the fact that young men were always a problem. When added to the pressures and inducements of work on the road, the catalyst of alcohol encouraged violence inside and between itinerant harvesting gangs, and between them and local communities. Whether or not violence erupted on any specific occasion or harvest season, locals were nevertheless apprehensive, and they were prepared for the worst. But the reaping gangs on the move were not the only armed men associated with the harvest who were capable of violence or prone to it.

On the first day of June 411, at Carthage, the resplendent imperial metropolis of all Africa – second only to Rome as the great city of empire in the West – two bitterly hostile groups of Christians met in a confrontation that was intended finally to settle the differences between them. As if to heighten the sense of occasion, the First of June was also a traditional day of midsummer festivity. If this were not enough, the city had also experienced the upheavals created by the flotsam and jetsam of refugees who had fled across the sea to Africa to escape Alaric's armed incursions, driven by the panic caused by the “barbarian” plundering of Rome and Italy. The great interest stoked by the heat of controversy meant that the only public venue large enough to contain the numbers on either side were the monumental Gargilian Baths, the Thermae Gargilianae, in the center of the city. The baths had been selected by the government not just to provide a place sufficiently large for the meeting, but also to furnish a public venue equal to the grandeur of the occasion. Often, as with debates between sectarian factions in the past in Africa, the town baths were the only structures large enough to provide a numerous and interested crowd with reasonable conditions of shade and acoustics. The atmosphere in such baths might be imagined as a humid hothouse that was hardly conducive to reasonable and rational debate. But in fact the rooms of the great Gargilian Baths in which the bishops congregated in 411 were – so we are assured – cool, bright, and spacious. The reason was that the bishops and the government officials met not in the thermae proper, but in the secretarium, a large general-purpose building that was attached to the baths as a place of public assembly. From the late 390s, it had been one of the principal aims of the Catholic Church to compel the dissidents to a combined meeting of both sides. Seeing nothing to gain from such a common meeting, the dissidents had consistently rejected the self-interested overtures from their sectarian enemies. But now it was happening, under compulsion.

If the religious conflict in Africa had been ignited by betrayal in the reign of Diocletian, it developed in complex and unforeseen ways during the last decades of Constantine's reign and over the remainder of the fourth century. This erratic history was marked by fluctuations between spates of violence and long periods of relatively peaceful coexistence. The back-and-forth shifts were provoked mainly by the changing agenda of emperors, although to a considerable degree the attitudes of the imperial court were deeply implicated in the provocations of the religious parties themselves. In these shifts, the Catholics and the dissidents found themselves variously advantaged or disadvantaged. In the decades after the mid-360s, following the watershed of Julian's reign, the hostile churches settled into a prolonged trench warfare in which each side carefully guarded its own flocks and made few inroads into the membership of the other. Because the written sources covering the period are so sparse, it is possible that this conclusion is too starkly drawn. Through the 370s and the 380s, however, the distinct impression is that each community strengthened its base and that a general balance between the two sides had settled in.

Little is known about the leadership ranks of the Catholics in these years. On the side of the dissidents, there was long-term stability under Parmenian, the bishop of Carthage and Primate of Africa. He had succeeded the great Donatus in the leadership of the dissident church around the year 360, and he remained in this commanding position until the early 390s. The successive long reigns of Donatus and Parmenian provided the dissident church with an enviable firmness at the helm. But Parmenian's three-decade-long tenure as Primate of Africa also had a hidden danger, since episcopal succession always had the potential for dissension and dispute. If there were serious competitors who brought political baggage with them into the struggle for power, the problem was only exacerbated. More tension was likely where the diocese was larger, boasted greater prestige, and had more resources at its command. The contentious election of Augustine as bishop of the diocese of Hippo Regius in 395 is one such reasonably well-documented case. Hippo was an unusually large, wealthy, and important diocese. Augustine's much-disputed choice as co-bishop to the aging and unimpressive Valerius was met with hostility that was only gradually overcome by hard lobbying and persuasion. If such potential for conflict existed at Hippo, it was much greater at Carthage, the pre-eminent see of all Africa. Here the ultimate in the way of material resources and rewards of authority and prestige were at stake with the selection of each new bishop, for the successor was not only chosen from a competitive field of candidates and became bishop of Carthage, he also became Primate of all Africa.

The peasant households of the late Roman world were flexible and dynamic entities, whose fortunes rose and fell according to their capacity to maintain an equilibrium between their resources and their needs. A change in the composition of the household – the birth of an infant, the marriage of a child, the death of an elderly member of the family – will have impacted upon both a household’s capacity to exploit its economic resources and its needs for sustenance. A bad harvest or a collection of adverse climatic fluctuations placed economic pressure upon the household, and might have tipped the fragile balance between subsistence survival and crisis. Equally, a series of good years, or a little good fortune, could have enhanced the household’s wealth and provided an opportunity to climb the social ladder, but may also have exposed the household to jealousy and gossip within the community of which it was a part.

Dearth and prosperity alike were potentially disruptive of a peasant household’s equilibrium and were likely in addition to place pressure upon the cohesion and character of the community more generally. Therefore, both may be categorized as a type of risk. Comparative literature suggests that peasant households and communities develop and maintain a sophisticated apparatus of strategies for mitigating and managing both phenomena, and we witness some, at least, of these strategies among peasants in the late Roman world. Peasants practiced complex crop and field rotation regimes, and farmed fields spread widely across the landscape, in order to minimize the chance of a single disaster wiping out their entire year’s produce. They periodically modified the composition of their households, removing dependents in response to productive downturn, and adding labor to supplement the household’s resources and utilize its economic assets in times of plenty.

Scholarship on the peasantry of the late Roman world has tended to view them as if down the barrel of a telescope, analyzing socio-economic relationships and strategies from the point of view of the demands and pressures that the state and its aristocracies placed upon them. This chapter constitutes a first step towards inverting that telescope, and looking back up it to see how the concerns, politics, and constraints of individual peasants and their communities might simultaneously have impacted upon their interactions with each other, with more powerful figures, and with the state. I do this by focusing attention upon explicating and defining the components of rural communities, and sketching the relationships between them. I suggest that, while the evidence for the composition of rural communities in the period is anecdotal and patchy, it is possible to construct a plausible picture of the individuals and groups that might have constituted those communities. As our analysis moves progressively from the individual, through the family and household to the community, the balance between theoretically informed supposition and empirically derived proposition will gradually shift. That is, while we are somewhat limited in the concrete conclusions we can draw about intra- and inter-household relations, we can with a certain degree of confidence offer some hypotheses about the structure and makeup of a variety of rural communities in the period.

I begin with a discussion of terminology, exploring both the boundaries around specific entities and the fundamental importance of focusing upon connections between those entities. This project presents considerable challenges. To what extent is it reasonable to speak of the peasantry as a concrete, discrete class? How are we to determine the composition of the “typical” peasant household, and is the exercise analytically useful? What is a community? In what follows, I propose a twofold approach to these questions. First, I suggest that we must identify and define these entities, but that those definitions must be flexible enough to encompass the immense diversity of economic niches, social systems, and physical environments that constituted the rural contexts of the late Roman world. In pursuit of this project, I connect existing debates in the social sciences with the evidence that survives from the period. Here, and in the following chapters, I argue for the general applicability of analytical categories and concepts drawn from comparative literature, while emphasizing the uniqueness of each particular community.

Relationships between peasants and the powerful varied considerably in form and nature, and displayed great diversity in their terms and the foundations upon which they rested. In some circumstances, a group of peasants may be observed interacting as a collectivity with a figure power, while in others the influence of a powerful outsider might be enlisted by an individual in order to gain some advantage over his fellows. When these relationships are described in the sources, it is often in terms that evoke the concept of patronage, an enduring, mutually binding, intrinsically unequal relationship, underpinned by an ethos of reciprocity. This conscious enlistment of the language of patronage, evidenced in texts produced by both the powerful and the relatively powerless, amounts to one element in a continuous process of construction and reconstruction of relations between the two. However, these negotiations must be situated within the context of a broad range of interactions between peasants and the powerful, including the naked exercise of force to achieve domination, which can be met only by capitulation or compliance; overt or covert resistance or subversion on the part of subordinate populations; mutual manipulation, collusion, or collaboration; and purely incidental contacts between the two, which have consequences that are both unforeseen and unintended.

In this chapter, I will argue that the inhabitants of rural communities in the period did more than merely suffer the depredations of the military, accede to the wishes of the clergy, or satisfy the demands of the state and its aristocracies for taxes and rents. Rather, they emerge as conscious actors, both individually and collectively, whose decisions and behavior were able to impact upon the more powerful individuals with whom they came into contact. I will suggest, further, that their interactions with the powerful were characteristically motivated by a certain logic. That logic revolved around an individual’s impulse to obtain leverage against his fellows, a household’s imperative to balance its needs against its resources, and a community’s desire to maintain or regain its internal cohesion. These factors should be privileged over both the motivations of the potentates with whom these individuals, households, and communities came into contact, and the motives that those potentates impute to peasants in their accounts of those encounters.

The tax system of the late Roman world does not appear to have fundamentally reshaped rural socio-economic relations in the late Roman period. Rather, it was modeled upon networks of mutual obligation and alliance that already existed. The novelties introduced under the auspices of the new tax system interacted with those networks, and in some circumstances created new relationships and connections between participants. By means of the origo, the Roman state sought to identify clearly or create ex novo a multitude of overlapping collectivities, which could be held mutually responsible for proportions of a municipality’s total tax burden. Those collectivities might involve individuals of quite different wealth and status, as in the case of registered tenants and their landlords; or they might be comprised of individuals whose circumstances were relatively similar, such as we might imagine the proposed purchasers of patrimonial estates mentioned in an early fifth-century law. In each case, these new configurations are likely to have created or fostered asymmetrical and symmetrical relations between their participants. Consequently, the opportunities available to small agriculturalists for managing their subsistence and social risk will have increased, and those small agriculturalists were not slow to exploit these opportunities. In what follows, I explore both the intended objectives of the state in creating tax collectivities and ensuring that their members be held mutually responsible for their fiscal burdens, and a series of unintended consequences of those actions.

Tenancy, patronage, and the payment of taxes

The close connection between tenancy and patronage in the understanding of both the powerful and the relatively powerless was emphasized in a previous chapter, where a blurring of the boundary between the two in the period was sketched. The legal sources reveal that the state attempted to exploit this partial merging of patronage with tenancy for its own fiscal purposes. A number of interconnected strategies are visible. First, there survives legislation which attempts to foster a relationship of patronage between large landowners and a variety of undesirable or threatening elements, by mandating the creation of an arrangement of tenancy between the two. A law addressed to the Prefect of the City of Rome, for example, directs that any beggars discovered to be sound of body and of robust years, and therefore to be begging illegitimately, should be given over to their denouncers in an arrangement of colonatus perpetuus, or perpetual tenancy. At base, the law seems to be responding to a fear among the urban aristocracy of the threat posed by the unknown, unknowable urban mob, and a desire to neutralize that threat by attaching them to a member of the city’s landowning aristocracy. Skepticism as to the practicality, effectiveness, and enforceability of such a law is warranted, but it reveals nevertheless an expectation that a relationship of tenancy will necessarily carry with it some measure of personal responsibility on the part of the landlord for the actions of his tenant.

What did rural communities look like in the late Roman world? How did they work? What socio-economic mechanisms were available to peasants of the period for managing subsistence and social risk? The questions are disarmingly simple. But the project of answering them is dogged by the same evidentiary and methodological problems that have long trammeled attempts to answer similar questions for earlier periods. The late Roman world boasts a greater body of written sources relevant to the subject than in earlier centuries, but detailed accounts of the day-to-day workings of rural communities – such as have underpinned comparable studies in medieval, early modern and contemporary contexts – are still almost entirely absent. In the main, the sources that we do possess reflect aristocratic concerns and perspectives more than those of peasants. That is, they focus principally upon problems of organization and control of labor, transmission of rents and taxes, and the nature and form of power and dependence, rather than upon the maintenance of a subsistence livelihood or the negotiation of the “small politics” of rural communities. When the inhabitants of rural communities do appear in these writings, they are characteristically treated as an undifferentiated mass, their social, economic, and political motivations misunderstood, their networks of mutual support and reciprocity beyond occasional mentions of interactions with our aristocratic authors largely opaque.

In this book, I seek to recapture these networks of mutual support and reciprocity, using the written sources in conjunction with archaeological material and theoretical models drawn from comparative contexts and disciplines. I engage in particular with debates in those disciplines concerning the internal workings of rural communities, the nature of relations between the members of those communities and outsiders, and the impact of externally generated changes upon those structures of interaction. I suggest that, in spite of the limitations of our evidence, the countrysides of late antiquity provide an ideal context for contributing to these debates. In championing the late Roman world as a particularly fruitful field for exploring questions current in agrarian studies more broadly, I emphasize the opportunities provided by two factors. On the one hand, the rural landscapes of the late Roman world were almost infinitely diverse in terms of physical topography, economic structures, and social systems. On the other hand, peasant communities exhibit certain behaviors that are broadly congruent and comparable across time and space. Consequently, we must construct a schema for studying the interplay of the generalized and the unique within and between those communities.

In the late third century, the emperor Diocletian and his colleagues in the Tetrarchy instituted a series of reforms that ushered in a new system of tax assessment, and produced a fundamentally different administrative landscape. This new tax system provided authors of the period with a rich rhetorical vocabulary, and an infinitely exploitable set of images and moral topoi. It emerges from the sources as corrupt, burdensome, and intrusive, an unwieldy monster that ultimately brought about the downfall of the Roman res publica. The individuals involved in its apparatus of assessment and collection appear little better than bandits, their attentions unwelcome, their actions the very epitome of the abusive exercise of power and the illegitimate use of force, their demands eliciting fear, flight, and active resistance.

Scholars have long debated the extent to which the changes implemented under the Tetrarchy impacted upon existing networks of asymmetrical and symmetrical relations in the countrysides of the late Roman world. These debates have tended to revolve around two quantitative measures. First, attention focuses upon the tax burden itself, which appears to have grown in the period as the fiscal demands of the state increased. Second, our evidence gives the impression that the personnel involved in the assessment and collection of taxes expanded dramatically as well. Caution is necessary, however, lest we overstate the scale and impact of these increases. Certainly, complaints about heavy taxation in the period are common, but orders of magnitude are impossible to recover, and complaints by themselves are a somewhat unreliable marker. When we turn to the bureaucratic machinery of tax assessment and collection, we are similarly hampered by unreliable figures. In Egypt, the only province where sufficient evidence exists for statistical arguments to be made, the administrative bureaucracy of the period does not appear to have been an overwhelming presence – on the contrary, a recent study has put the proportion of officiales to provincials at 1 to 2,400. Therefore, while it seems reasonable to posit some quantitative increase in the imperial bureaucracy of the period, that increase was perhaps not as massive as was once thought.

Preface

Intuitively, we feel we know what a community is, even if we often find it hard to identify the precise characteristics that define it. The term evokes notions of common interest and regular interaction, shared identity and interdependence. Romantically, we might conjure up visions of picket fences and carefully swept streets, block parties and cookouts. More prosaically, we may think of neighborhoods and church committees, university campuses and online gaming forums. In each case, the fundamental ideas are the same: A community is simultaneously a sustaining social milieu for the individuals who belong to it, and a complex collection of obligations and expectations that those individuals must continue to meet in order to remain members. Membership confers the privilege of scrutinizing the claims of others to belong, but also opens one up to the same process of scrutiny. These complementary, potentially contradictory considerations underpin our experience of community on an everyday basis today, and we should expect them to have underpinned the everyday lives of the inhabitants of the ancient world as well.

Communities in the late Roman world are not hard to find. We observe (to take merely a few examples) communities of aristocrats, sometimes spread over considerable distances, sustained by the exchange of letters, literary trifles, and the produce of their estates; communities of barbarian foederati, settled in a variety of ways and on a multiplicity of terms within the boundaries of the empire; civic communities, experiencing transformations in their physical and ideological composition as they come to reflect Christian, rather than pagan, values and sensibilities; religious communities, which might come to blows with one another over matters of doctrine or interpretation of Scripture; and monastic communities from the deserts of Egypt to the mountains of eastern Gaul. It does not seem a stretch to assume that there were communities of agriculturalists in the countrysides of the Mediterranean world in the period as well, but the quotidian rhythms of those communities, the principles, expectations, and practices that sustained them across the breadth of that world, have not to date been the subject of a stand-alone study.

The countrysides of the late Roman world contained a multiplicity of communities, each characterized by highly complex, interwoven systems of socio-economic interaction. Those systems involved relationships of reciprocity and mutual support that were transacted vertically with individuals of greater power, wealth, and status, and horizontally with individuals whose socio-economic circumstances were broadly commensurate. The character of a particular community emerged from the combination of horizontal and vertical alliances in specific circumstances, but it is clear that the social dynamics of rural communities in the late Roman world revolved first and foremost around maintaining a balance between the cohesion of the group and the conflicting desires and objectives of the individuals, families, and households of which it was composed.

This book has focused upon that tension, and used it as a tool for explicating the various social matrices that constituted the rural communities of the period. In particular, it has placed the twin phenomena of subsistence and social risk at the center of its analysis. The two are intimately linked: the management of subsistence risk is the principal objective of any peasant household, and characteristically entails among other things involvement in a collection of interactions and relations with other households. Those interactions expand the household’s pool of contacts for managing subsistence crisis, but they also increase the likelihood of conflict and disagreement between households. That conflict and disagreement is characteristically managed, negotiated, and defused using a range of strategies, including the mediation by the community of the behavior of its own members through gossip, exchange of goods, services, and expressions of mutual affection, and carefully staged communal activities, as well as recourse to figures of power and representatives of the state by the group or certain of its members.