This chapter explores the impact of warfare on North African communities and their built environment during Late Antiquity (fourth to sixth century). While the political upheavals, internal conflicts, and the invasions that shaped the region during this period have been extensively studied, the local effects and responses to these challenges remain underexplored. Drawing on selected case studies, this work combines archaeological and textual evidence to examine and compare the actions taken by local communities and their rulers – the Western Roman Empire, the Vandal Kingdom, and the Eastern Roman Empire – in response to ongoing conflict. From the centenaria of Tripolitania and the fortified estates of Byzacena and Proconsularis to the fortifications built under Justinian’s regime and its successors, this chapter highlights the role of warfare and its consequences in reshaping the provincial landscapes of North Africa, offering new insights into the region’s social and physical transformation during this period.

This article advances four arguments about Constantine’s Roman Arch (315). First, it posits that its imagery and inscription endeavored to please a single viewer: the emperor Constantine. That argument narrows the interpretative possibilities regarding its meaning. From presumed anonymous observers of differing faiths, the field narrows to a single imperial viewer, a recent convert to Christianity and a victor in a civil war. Second, the lens of civil war illuminates previously unrecognized Augustan rhetorical and visual tropes that guided the Arch’s makers in legitimating the monument and Constantine’s victory against Maxentius. Third, the article uncovers Christian connotations in the arch’s inscription. Fourth, the neglected Christian subtext opens the possibility for identifying the Arch and the Colossus next to it as the first openly Christian imperial monuments in Rome. The article therefore demonstrates the syncretism of traditional imperial rhetoric and insignia with Christian ideas long before traditionally assumed.

In Rome, being taken as a prisoner of war had dramatic repercussions for the condition of the individual and their family. Captured citizens became a slave to the enemy, or servus hostium, and were excluded from the body politic. However, they could regain freedom and civil rights through redemption. Initially, that was the responsibility of their family, but over time laws regulated the ransoming of prisoners of war, and other actors became involved. This chapter first reviews the Republican Age and the High Empire before addressing the ransoming of captives in Late Antiquity. It discusses individuals and large groups, with ransom paid by families, the emperor, or by bishops. It shows that social status determined the fate of women. According to Justinian’s Digest, a woman freed by a victorious army was considered free or married, and not a slave. According to Ulpian, that principle also applied when a woman was redeemed (redempta) rather than freed.

Violence – by which I mean an intentional rupture of the physical integrity of a body – is a reminder that a human being is always also a thing. Whatever else late ancient humans may have been, they were always subject to the possibility of physical rupture, perforation, tear, or break, as is the nature of things. War was, and is, a stylized method of maneuvering one group of rupturable things toward the infliction of greater disintegration on another group of rupturable things. “The main purpose and outcome of war,” Elaine Scarry writes, “is injuring.” That the things injured are also people, with their own sensations and experiences, pasts and hoped-for futures, is the point of war; it is how war persuades injured people and other onlookers to accept its outcomes. War confronts persons with their reducibility, their thingness, and asks them to accept conditions imposed by the victors in the light of that bodily thingness. The essays in this volume present us with a variety of ways of thinking about this ugly practice. They describe how different late ancient people made sense of what was happening when bodies were ruptured, or bodies threatened to rupture other bodies, on a large scale. In this Epilogue, I bring some of the ideas in this volume together to consider the problem of ruptured bodies in Late Antiquity as a series of questions about how late ancient people imagined or experienced physical thingness in warfare.