The late Roman period saw the development, for the first time in the Roman world, of complex bureaucratic structures which permitted emperors, who had now abandoned the campaigning or peripatetic style of most of their predecessors during the first four centuries of imperial history, to retain their authority. The emperor and his court with its glittering ceremonies in Constantinople was the focus for the eastern empire, and from there issued the laws which announced imperial wishes. The armies, though no longer directly commanded by emperors, strove to preserve the frontiers and maintain law and order inside them. But the smooth functioning of this system required administrative structures which had to become more complex and intrusive as the curial élites in individual cities, who had traditionally performed many vital tasks in the areas of revenue generation, dissemination of imperial wishes and preservation of local order, slowly declined in authority or surrendered control of some of these duties; here was a cyclical process, with administrative developments responding to, but also encouraging, a weakening of the curial class. The impact of administration is reflected in a story from the Life of Theodore of Sykeon: devils being exorcized cried out: ‘Oh violence! Why have you come here, you iron-eater, why have you quitted Galatia and come into Gordiane? There was no need for you to cross the frontier. We know you have come, but we shall not obey you as did the demons of Galatia, for we are much tougher than they, and not milder’.

JUSTIN I (518–27)

For understandable reasons the reign of Justin I tends to be eclipsed by that of Justinian, his nephew and successor (527–65). Not only was Justinian already a powerful figure during his uncle’s reign, but Procopius of Caesarea, the leading historian of Justinian, regarded his rule as effectively including that period. In view of their common background and the continuity of imperial policy in certain areas, Justin’s reign is often associated with that of Justinian in modern accounts. Although Anastasius had three nephews, Hypatius, Pompeius and Probus, there was no designated successor when he died in 518. As magister militum per Orientem, Hypatius was away from Constantinople, and Justin, then the head of the excubitors (the palace guard), is said to have used cash destined for the support of another candidate to bribe his troops to support his own name; as a result, on 10 July 518 he was proclaimed by the senate, army and people and then crowned by the patriarch.

The new emperor was already elderly and his background was humble. He originated from Latin-speaking Illyricum, having been born at Bederiana, near Naissus (Nis), and he owed his success to his career in the guard. According to Procopius he was illiterate, and in his religious views he was staunchly Chalcedonian. Other contemporaries recorded the arrival of this backward provincial in Constantinople in about 470 and his subsequent success as something at which to marvel, and the story was depicted in art.

INTRODUCTION

The dominant pagan philosophy of the fifth and sixth century a.d. was Neoplatonism. By this period Platonism had absorbed the other philosophical traditions of antiquity. Aristotle was extensively studied but in a Platonist context, and usually as a preparation for the study of Plato himself. Epicureanism and Scepticism had faded away. Many elements of Stoicism do reappear in Neoplatonist logic and metaphysics but altered and transposed so as to fit into a very different philosophical system: the Stoics were materialists, whereas for the Neoplatonists the intelligible world is not only distinct from the material one but superior to it in reality and power. Neoplatonism was initiated by Plotinus in the third century and continued into the fourth by Porphyry, Iamblichus and their followers; by 425 it had spread all over the Mediterranean world. There were several different schools, in the physical sense, and this chapter will consider those in order. I shall begin with the school of Athens, proceed to Alexandria and then conclude with a brief account of philosophy elsewhere in the empire. The two principal schools were in Athens and Alexandria. These schools have often been seen as differing in doctrines and attitudes as well as in their geographical location. However, recent research has undermined this conventional picture. I shall argue later in the chapter that there were some genuine differences in emphasis and attitude between the two schools. However, they both derived from the Iamblichean tradition of Neoplatonism, and I shall begin by summarizing the main features of that tradition.

ROMANS AND SASANIDS

A chapter dealing with Iranian feudalism in a distinguished series dedicated to The Rise and Fall of the Roman World bears the title Iran, Rome’s Greatest Enemy. This title is more than merely a justification for the inclusion of a chapter on Iran in a series whose subject is Roman history. It also reflects a host of fears and prejudices fostered for long centuries in the Roman world, since the trauma of Crassus’ defeat by the Parthians at Carrhae. Not even extended periods of decline and internal disarray within the Parthian monarchy, in the course of which it was repeatedly invaded by the Roman army, could dispel the myth of the uncompromising threat posed by Iran to the Roman order. The replacement of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty by a new vigorous one, based in Fars, namely the Sasanid dynasty, at a time when the Roman empire itself was facing one of its severest crises, only aggravated its inhabitants’ deeply rooted fear of Iran. Ancient writers in the Roman oikoumene passed on this attitude to modern western scholars.

It is the Sasanid bogeyman which has left a deep imprint in modern historiography. The Sasanid state is widely regarded as a much more centralized and effective political entity than its Parthian counterpart, with a far better army. The great pretensions and aspirations of its monarchs are believed to have been fed by the fervour of religious fanaticism, inspired by the Zoroastrian priesthood, which is commonly depicted as a well organized state church.

SOURCES

The literary evidence for the history of Asia Minor and Cyprus is abundant for every period, but it suffers to some extent from too much familiarity: Asia Minor and Cyprus were the homeland of so many writers and readers. There was nothing exotic about this area, the heartland of the eastern empire, and so authors felt little need to describe it; much has to be deduced from what they assume. Furthermore, the chief characteristic of Asia Minor and Cyprus in the fifth and sixth century was that they were at peace, so that there was little to recount in historical narratives. The exception, here as in other things, is Isauria, whose turbulent history in the fifth century brought it into the history of the empire.

The lack of ‘historical’ events can therefore convey a spurious air of immobility. In such a situation, the contribution of archaeological evidence is particularly important; and as the archaeology of this region in this period has developed, it has revealed more and more evidence of marked change. The majority of early excavations concentrated on city sites, and it was common for the late Roman material to be dealt with cursorily during the search for ‘more interesting’ periods. More recently, excavators have come to treat such material more attentively; moreover, since the 1950s, archaeologists have been surveying the countryside, and their work is starting to provide a more balanced picture of this very large area. Recent work on Roman defences and fortifications has also produced a great deal of evidence for the period.

DIFFCULTIES AND EVIDENCE

Writing about complexity within the economy of the fifth to the seventh century will never be straightforward, partly because there has been so much debate about the nature of the ‘classical’ Roman economy that preceded it. Was the ‘Roman economy’ really a series of local economies, linked into a broader structure only by the demands of the state and by some limited trade in luxury products? Or was it a unified system in which even quite basic goods were produced by specialists, and traded by merchants across long distances? In examining economic activity in the late Roman and post-Roman period, we are inevitably measuring it against the classical economy that preceded it; but the measuring-stick itself is constantly being altered.

As with evidence for the exploitation of the land examined in the last chapter, much of our information on economic specialization now derives from archaeology. However, the written record can also produce isolated but very valuable nuggets of information. For example, just before our period, Gregory of Nazianzus happens to tell us, in a poem on the events of his own life, that one of his enemies in Constantinople in 379/80 was a priest who had come to the city from Thasos, with money supplied by his church in order to buy ‘Proconnesian slabs’ (prokonesias plachas). These must have been slabs for a chancel-screen in the marble of the island of Proconnesos (very close to Constantinople), of a type which was widely diffused in late antiquity (see Fig. 15,p. 359 below).

‘Armenia’ has always had an ambiguous place between the major powers, be they the east Roman empire and Sasanian Iran, the Byzantine empire and the caliphate, or the Ottoman empire and the Safavids. Armenian loyalties have not been consistent, either in support of a coherent internal policy or with regard to external diplomacy. The very definition of ‘Armenia’ highlights the problem. Does the term refer to a geographical entity – and if so, what are its borders? Or does it refer to a people with common bonds – and if so, are those bonds linguistic, religious, cultural or political?

Despite the conversion of king Tiridates to Christianity, probably in 314, and the establishment of an organized church, the continuing strength of Iranian traditions and the cultural and kinship ties of the Armenian nobility to Iran made Armenia an uncertain ally for the Romans. Yet since the Armenian monarchy was a branch of the Arsacid dynasty which had been overthrown by the Sasanians in 224, relations between Armenia and Iran were already strained. Tiridates’ conversion compounded an already difficult situation, for the shahs naturally became suspicious of the future loyalty of Armenians to their Iranian heritage. In the fifth century, attempts by the shahs to impose Zoroastrianism led to armed conflict – while to the west, the Armenians found their relationship with fellow Christians increasingly marred by their involvement in the struggles over orthodoxy. The division of Armenia c. 387 into two monarchies and two spheres of influence – a large Iranian sector east of the forty-first parallel of longitude, and a much smaller Roman sector west of that line up to the Euphrates – did not solve ‘the Armenian question’.

THE ISSUES AND THE EVIDENCE

The vast majority of the population of the Roman empire, as in all pre-modern societies, worked on the land. There is a great deal we would like to know about these people: exactly how many they were; how many others they fed (whether artisans, soldiers and clergy, or idle rich); which areas they cultivated, and with what crops and which methods; to what extent their agriculture was specialized and tied into commercial networks of exchange; what types of settlement they lived in; and how tightly their labour was controlled – how many agricultural workers were free peasants cultivating their own plots, and how many dependent tenants of great landlords, wage labourers, or even slaves?

In looking at these questions for the fifth and sixth century we are often moving from a period in which the data are severely restricted into one in which they are almost completely absent. However, by combining written and archaeological evidence, and with the aid of some informed guesswork, we can sometimes at least refine the questions, even if we cannot honestly provide any very firm answers to them.

Over the last thirty to forty years, our picture of the Roman and late Roman countryside has been greatly enhanced, and in some areas transformed, by archaeology. When, in 1964, Jones published his magisterial account of the late Roman empire, he was still able largely to ignore archaeological evidence when discussing rural life.

When he assumed sole rulership of the eastern half of the Roman empire in 408, Theodosius II became head of a state which during the short reign of his father Arcadius (395–408) had experienced an extraordinary array of crises. Gothic troops in Roman employ had risen in revolt under the leadership of Alaric in 395 and spent much time during the following years freely plundering the Balkan provinces until Alaric eventually decided to move westwards (401). Also in 395, nomadic Huns had invaded the empire through the Caucasus, bringing widespread destruction to Syria and eastern Asia Minor until 397. Another Goth named Gainas, who held a command in the Roman army, instigated a revolt which was only suppressed in 400 with much bloodshed in and around Constantinople. Within a few years there was further turmoil in the capital over the bitterly contested deposition and exile of the bishop John Chrysostom (403–4), while eastern Asia Minor suffered a prolonged bout of raiding by Isaurian brigands (403–6). In addition to all this, relations with the western half of the empire throughout Arcadius’ reign were characterized by antagonism and mutual suspicion, the result of the ambitions and rivalries of dominant individuals, such as Eutropius and Stilicho, at the courts of Arcadius in Constantinople and his younger brother Honorius in the west.

The period from a.d. 425 to the eve of Islam was a momentous one for North Africa. At its start, what is now seen to have been one of the most prosperous and urbanized of Roman provinces, even if that development came somewhat later than elsewhere, passed without real struggle into Vandal control. The monarchy then established lasted until a.d. 533/4, when a Byzantine force under Belisarius re-established Roman rule, again with surprising speed. The new province established by Justinian’s Pragmatic Sanction of 534 endured in theory, if not fully in reality, until the fall of Carthage itself to the Arabs in a.d. 698; even though Arab armies had defeated and killed a Byzantine exarch in 646–7 and founded an Islamic city at Kairouan in 662, ties between the province and Constantinople were not entirely broken.

These changes of fortune also implied political, religious and economic changes which have been the subject of much recent discussion. The main stimulus for this re-examination has come from archaeology – first and foremost the important series of excavations conducted by a number of national teams at Carthage during the 1970s under the general auspices of UNESCO; these have provided, in many cases for the first time, reliable information at least about parts of the city and its development during this and other periods, and have stimulated and made possible further important developments in such disciplines as the study of ceramics. In turn, the results of these excavations, even though not all are yet fully published, have contributed to the re-examination of issues such as long-distance trade and its place in the Mediterranean economy in the sixth and seventh century.

INTRODUCTION: LAW IN THE LATE ROMAN EMPIRE

Law was central to the social structure of the Roman empire in the fifth and sixth centuries a.d., more so than in the principate and in the neighbouring barbarian kingdoms. The administration of justice, and of finance, had been strengthened by the reduction in the size of provinces and by the reforms which both relieved governors of military responsibilities and provided them with a substructure of bureaucratic support. The legislative machine had also become more energetic. The legislative functions of the senate in Rome had been transferred to the imperial consistorium in Constantinople and Ravenna, which worked with more expedition and produced incomparably more enactments. The number was especially high at the beginning and towards the end of our period – that is, a.d. 425–60 and, even more so, 527–46. Tradition had by this time built up a vast store of legal literature, impressive alike in its volume, antiquity and quality. A civilized state, based on the rule of law, seemed on the surface of things to be assured, and this must have enhanced Roman pride. With the exception of the Vandals, one nation of Germanic barbarians after another sought to emulate this Roman ideal (see pp. 260–87 below).

In 425, in the circus at Aquileia, the emperor Valentinian III watched the ritual humiliation and execution of the defeated usurper John. This bloody spectacle celebrated the restoration of Italy to its rightful place as the centre of Roman imperial rule after two years of secessionist government. Less than two centuries later, in 605, the Constantinopolitan emperor Phocas ratified a series of treaties with the Lombards which acknowledged, implicitly if not explicitly, that large areas of Italy had been lost to imperial rule. Between these events occurred the dismemberment of Roman Italy, together with its increasing marginalization in the empire. At the outset of this period, Italy was still the centre of the empire; by its end, however, it had become a frontier province, fought over by Lombard potentates and Byzantine military governors.

This chapter will trace this political fragmentation and show how it was reflected in the transformation of local society throughout Italy. The political disintegration has long been known. Certain stretches of Italian history in the fifth and sixth century are narrated in detail by contemporary historians and chroniclers, although overall the coverage is rather patchy, while the epistolary, exegetical and hagiographical works of Gregory the Great present a haunting vision of Italy after decades of debilitating wars. At an institutional level, the letters of Cassiodorus give valuable insights into the administration of Ostrogothic Italy, while inscriptions, though not so numerous as for earlier periods, add further detail to the picture, announcing the ambitions of rulers or recording the achievements of local aristocrats.

This chapter will examine some of the overlapping groups – communities – in which individuals acted for different purposes, and the transformation of these communities, in the period c. 400–600. It is focused on the west, because it was here that the greatest changes in our period took place, and where there was least continuity through imperial institutions such as the army and administration. The chapter draws on, and is intended to reflect, recent work on the social history of the early medieval period, and examines both horizontal ties, bonds between relatively equal peer groups, and vertical ties, such as those of patronage and support between lord and follower. It is divided into two parts. The first section focuses on the different sense of community operating at the level of the political centre: the Roman empire as a whole and the kingdoms which succeeded it. The spotlight is then transferred to more local communities. The two types of community are, of course, closely linked. An overall theme of the whole essay, indeed, is that socio-political transformations at the centre had profound effects upon the construction of local community, and vice versa.

THE COMMUNITY OF THE REALM

In c. 400, western Europe was dominated by the Roman empire. Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall, France, the Iberian peninsula, the Benelux countries, Italy and much of Germany and Austria were under its direct rule. Roman power also loomed over the empire’s neighbours. By c. 600, this European superstate had given way to a series of far from stable successor states: kingdoms built around Franks and Burgundians in France and Benelux, Visigoths and Sueves south of the Pyrenees, Ostrogoths and Lombards in Italy, Anglo-Saxons in southern and eastern Britain. The first half of this essay is concerned with the transformations in political economy which accompanied this fundamental revolution in European history

CHRISTIANITY AND LAWS ON THE FAMILY

Before Constantine, no Roman emperor, not even Augustus, had displayed such a strong ambition to reshape family legislation and initiate thereby an extensive project of moral reconstruction: pudor tutus, munita coniugia was how a panegyrist pithily expressed it as early as 321. In some respects, Constantinian legislation merely brought to completion tendencies that had been operative for some time; in others, it was more innovative. On the whole, it aimed at asserting principles of rigour, order and temperance in family relationships. Often it revealed a somewhat darker side, betraying both acute perception and ill-concealed pessimism, and alongside the wishful imperatives we also find realistic laws concerning concrete situations. The frequency and variety of these measures testify to the importance of political policy on these issues.

Constantine’s laws had three principal aims, all closely interlinked: to safeguard celibacy, to encourage the matrimonium iustum and to protect infants and minors. The first was accomplished by repealing the Augustan marriage laws, which had penalized celibates and childless couples (by restricting their ability to receive inheritances and legacies) and provided incentives to matrimony and procreation. A variety of measures contributed towards achieving the second aim: socially mixed unions and concubinage were repressed; greater significance was attributed to the promise of marriage; abduction was severely punished; accusations of adultery could no longer be made by outsiders, but only by the husband or by the wife’s close male relatives; adultery was punished by death.

GAUL: VISIGOTHIC KINGDOM, 418–507

In 418 the patrician Constantius concluded a peace treaty with the Visigothic king Wallia (415–18), giving him and his following the province of Aquitania Secunda and some adjacent territories to occupy. This completed a process initiated in 416 when Wallia returned his predecessor’s widow, Galla Placidia, to her brother, the emperor Honorius. He had subsequently campaigned for the emperor in Spain, destroying the kingdoms of the Alans and of the Siling Vandals. The nature of the Visigothic presence established in Aquitaine by the treaty of 418 remains controversial. The argument concerns the nature of the process known as hospitalitas. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as involving a major change in land ownership, with the Visigothic ‘guests’ receiving two-thirds of all Roman estates within the designated regions. More recent arguments have seen it as involving not a physical redistribution of land, which would involve large-scale expropriation by the empire of aristocratic property, but a revision of tax obligations, with the Roman landowners having to pay the fiscal burden on two-thirds of their property directly to the designated Visigothic recipients rather than to the imperial administration. According to the view adopted, the Visigoths can be seen in the aftermath of the treaty either as being settled on the land and widely distributed throughout southern Aquitaine or as forming a purely military presence, based on a limited number of urban garrisons.