“War,” writes military historian Alexander Sarantis, “is largely a niche area rather than a mainstream concern of late antique and Byzantine studies, which tend to be dominated by theological, literary, artistic, and socio-economic themes.”Footnote 1 The fact that war and warfare now occupy a “relatively marginal position in modern scholarship” reflects a number of shifts in the academic landscape, from the reframing of Late Antiquity as a period of change and continuity (rather than an epoch of decline) to the entrenchment of cultural history as the dominant approach in history departments across North America and Europe.Footnote 2 And yet, even as military historians have dismantled stale theses about “military decay” as the root cause of the empire’s geopolitical fragmentation and show the late Roman army to have been a source of Rome’s extraordinary resilience, “their” topics of war, warfare, and the army nonetheless fail to resonate with most scholars of Late Antiquity. As Bryan Ward-Perkins wryly notes in his controversial 2005 book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, “banishing catastrophe” has become a mainstream response to late antique narrative history.Footnote 3 Where has war gone?
The nicheness of war and warfare in late ancient studies is problematic from the historian’s perspective because the world of Late Antiquity was a world at war. Between 250 and 650 ce, the late Roman Empire witnessed frequent armed conflict on varying scales, from intermittent local raiding to sustained military campaigns that pitted large professional armies against one another. The city of Rome, for instance, was besieged six times during this period; its example is arguably the most poignant, but Rome’s direct experience of warfare is by no means exceptional. Parts of Britain, North Africa, Spain, and most of Gaul became near constant war zones as the western empire fragmented into separate kingdoms, and citizens living in these regions suffered displacement and distress over decades of armed violence and political instability. In the East, armed conflict was concentrated at first in specific zones along the empire’s limes: the lower Danube and Balkans and the Persian frontier. However, in the seventh century, those eastern regions once thought to be safely within the heart of the empire – Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and even Constantinople – were threatened by, and in many cases lost to, enemy forces. Although none of these violent events amounts to “the decline and fall of Rome,” they nevertheless demonstrate that war and warfare are central to the history of the late Roman Empire. War, in other words, was an ever-present feature of late Roman life even if it rarely appears in late twentieth and early twenty-first century scholarship.
War’s scholarly marginality, however, is problematic for even more fundamental reasons. It overlooks the tremendous impact that warfare – civil war, war against invading forces, sieges, raiding parties, and smaller scale skirmishes – had on civilian populations as well as the fighting forces. War affected all late antique communities in some form: cities and monasteries, ordinary households and those of the emperor, audiences and textual communities, regions and their economies, persons who were captured and sold, and those whose relatives had perished. Late Roman cultural production and social formation, therefore, whether in the form of discourse or concrete practice, were fundamentally shaped by the threat and realities of grave injury on both individual and global scales. Studying war and its impact on these various communities, we contend, is studying Late Antiquity – an equivalence that has too often failed to gain traction.
By leaving war out of our research, cultural and social historians cede the hard work and ethical responsibility of grappling with the period’s most destructive features to a small group of scholars, leaving them to make sense of how so much damage and destruction coexisted with the celebrated “transformations” of Late Antiquity. As Catherine Michael Chin observes in the Epilogue to this volume, war is essentially about material injury – whether to human and animal bodies or to nonhuman entities (e.g., the razing of walls and the burning of buildings during sieges). When conceptualized in this elemental way rather than as a set of troop maneuvers or political machinations, war necessarily implicates the whole history of Late Antiquity; it is the declinists’ yin to the continuists’ yang.
The twelve chapters and epilogue that form this volume began as presentations at a conference held at the University of California at Berkeley in May 2022. The participants – archaeologists, scholars of religion, and social, cultural, and art historians – were asked to engage with war and warfare through their own areas of expertise, such as the archaeologies of North African built environments and Italian labor practices, the political and literary cultures of imperial and Christian elites, Egyptian monasticism, the social and economic history of non-elites, and the visual iconographies of imperial (self)presentation. Perhaps the most generative insight that arose in the discussions, one that structures the volume’s chapters, is the importance of defamiliarizing war and warfare, of asking “What is war in Late Antiquity?” The manifold answers and analytical insights constitute this volume’s greatest strength and its most significant scholarly contribution.Footnote 4
The volume opens with four contributions that directly address the question “What is war in Late Antiquity?” through the examination of material and discursive footprints from the perspective of the impacted communities, mostly civilian. Chapter 1 by Kim Bowes, “Everyday Violence,” approaches the question from the methodological vantage point of archaeology by asking what physical evidence can and cannot tell us about warfare. As Bowes observes, archaeology provides a host of insights rarely revealed in textual sources, which typically focus on the exceptional and the short term. However, archaeological data, precisely because they are the material traces of long-term processes rather than short-term events, offer little for those looking for specific late antique invasions or particular battlefield remains.Footnote 5 What archaeological finds reveal, she concludes, is the impact of steady, continuous violence on non-elite, civilian populations that is visible today through human skeletal remains. These remains attest to lives of repetitive hard labor, marked by physical harm only occasionally linked to interpersonal aggression. Evidence of widespread quotidian violence, therefore, relativizes an event-driven history which posits warfare as the most significant cause of material injury to human bodies in the later Roman Empire, especially among noncombatants. For a large proportion of non-elites (civilians and soldiers), daily work regimes were far more injurious than the occasional battle.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 center texts rather than archaeology and continue to highlight questions of definition and methodology by exploring the implications of approaching war in the longue durée versus an event-driven search for empirical details. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the discursive production and reproduction of war as it was popularly depicted in ancient literature through the trope of the “captured city” (urbs capta). Chapter 2 by Kristina Sessa, “From Urbs to Ecclesia Capta: Reimagining Urban Warfare in Late Antiquity,” shows the enduring vitality and importance of the trope of the captured city for late antique authors, which remains understudied. Narratives of captured ancient cities follow a set pattern often modeled on the destruction of Troy but also, in Jewish and Christian contexts, on the sieges of Jerusalem. While these highly formulaic narratives are of little use to modern scholars interested in specific instances of siege warfare, Sessa notes that they provide historians with invaluable evidence for ways in which late Romans reckoned with the impact of war on civilian populations. This assumed a new urgency in the later empire when the sacked cities were increasingly Roman, and when victim and aggressor were Christian. By tracing the use of the captive city trope from the late fourth to the sixth century, Sessa shows how Christian authors reframed the urbs capta motif by shifting the focus from the city to the church as the locus of suffering. Such shifts progressively integrated the sack of cities into a universal framework of salvation, making the fate of an individual city and its inhabitants part of a divinely authorized eschatological narrative.
Chapter 3 by Susanna Elm, “‘The Law of War’: Augustine on the Captured City (Urbs Capta) and Sexual Violence against Men and Women in the City of God (Book 1),” presents an early and influential example of the Christian use and reframing of the urbs capta trope. Augustine (d. 430 ce), she demonstrates, used this trope, which he called “the law of war,” to structure the first book of his City of God. Its highly formulaic structure allowed Augustine to offer consolation in familiar terms to the citizens of Rome, who had just suffered the sort of violence that they had used to inflict on others: the military sack of their city along with the direct and indirect consequences of captivity, looting, famine, disruption of burial practices, and sexual violence. Augustine, Elm shows, focused on sexual violence committed against Rome’s (elite) men as a particularly poignant form of suffering, especially because it was performed by Christians on Christians. He thus urged Christian men to enact a patient endurance of humiliation as exemplified by the figures of Job, Regulus, and Christ. Significantly, the structure of the urbs capta motif, Augustine’s “law of war,” allowed him to integrate Rome’s suffering into the eschatological framework of divine correction rather than as harbinger of the immediate end of the world.
Sessa’s and Elm’s chapters highlight the generative possibilities of war for Christian authors and their communities of readers. In Chapter 4, “Wartime Effects: Synesius of Cyrene and the Sentiments of On Kingship,” Ellen Muehlberger examines how confrontation with violence forced civilians, especially members of the educated elites, to respond by acting in unforeseen ways which made them reassess canonical writings about warfare and the capture of cities. She illustrates how Synesius (d. 414 ce), a private individual of means, sprang into action in response to raids in North Africa in the absence of regular military powers, situations for which his literary education had not prepared him. Muehlberger argues that for Synesius these events were deeply formative and left their mark in his treatise On Kinship. The hostilities, Synesius argues, revealed to him his true nature, and that of his friends and neighbors: immediate danger was a touchstone that exposed cowards and courageous persons like nothing else, including philosophical education. War in Late Antiquity, she argues forced or enabled nonmilitary members of the elites to experience leadership of a kind they had read about – through exemplars of the past – but had not been expected to face.
War, this volume shows, was also a catalyst of civilian agency. People, ground down by the unrelenting slow violence of hard labor or the persistent threat of armed aggression, not only reacted but they also acted. The next chapters of the volume highlight the myriad modes of agency and technologies of self-protection that late Romans practiced when faced with the threat of organized armed conflict. Chapter 5 by David Brakke, “Monks, Barbarians, and Soldiers: Monastic Communities and Armed Conflict in Late Ancient Egypt, Palestine, and the Sinai,” likewise finds that “warfare and violence presented monks with a complicated set of challenges and opportunities.” Monastic communities such as those directed by Shenoute of Atripe (d. ca. 466 ce) in Egypt were forced to erect defensive structures, open their doors to refugees and other victims of violence, and experience injuries, abductions, and death. At the same time, contact with military men offered new opportunities for patronage and monastic recruitment, while engagements with civilian communities under threat brought additional prestige. As Brakke shows, because monks often considered themselves spiritual soldiers, they already possessed the intellectual means to negotiate the new realities of their increasingly precarious position at what was now the edge of the empire.
Chapter 6 by Tommaso Giuliodoro and Anna Leone, “Warfare, Communities, and Landscapes in Late Antique North Africa,” highlights such civilian agency from an archaeological perspective. Giuliodoro and Leone examine evidence from the fourth to late sixth centuries, that is, from the late Roman and Vandal periods to the Roman reconquest, to detail how North Africans adapted their built environment against recurring raids and full-scale military operations. Villa fortifications, defensive structures described as turres or centenaria, and new walls show a proactive civilian population defending itself against a variety of hostile forces in concert with the regular army but often without it.
Chapter 7 by Sarah E. Bond, “‘Feasts and Harlots, Baths and Idleness’: The Geography of Billeted Troops in Late Antiquity,” highlights acts of civilian resistance but also the opportunities offered by the quotidian realities of war. Well-known literary tropes depict soldiers as entirely unsuited for living in cities and thus portray troop billeting as a form of imperial accommodation to be avoided at all costs. Nevertheless, soldiers were common in late Roman cities. Municipalities were required to billet troops, even for long periods, especially, as Bond shows, in frontier areas under pressure. Although evidence for the presence of soldiers in cities such as Dura Europos is sketchy and difficult to interpret, Bond’s chapter shows soldiers as everyday reality to which the civilian population adapted. Domestic spaces were modified to accommodate soldiers with imperial laws regulating how much space per household could be requested and what spaces were exempt (e.g., churches and artisanal workshops). More often, soldiers were garrisoned adjacent to cities, which put the onus of sheltering them on rural communities. Both urban and rural cases caused friction, but interactions between soldiers and civilians offered both groups opportunities, from the general to the personal.
Chapter 8 by Rita Lizzi Testa, “Redemptio Captivorum: The Ransom of War Prisoners in Late Antiquity,” investigates the reach of private initiative when faced with one of war’s most devastating consequences: captivity. Romans had, of course, always fallen captive to their enemies. However, as Lizzi Testa demonstrates, the later Roman Empire witnessed new means of ransoming captives, which entailed novel forms of obligation for those redeemed, albeit based on earlier legislation and established practices of family and patronage systems. These changes responded to the frequent and penetrative enemy incursions into the empire. Troops quickly grasped the financial advantages ransom offered. Ransoming captives, as Lizzi Testa makes clear, became enormously disruptive and forced members of the elites to experience loss of agency akin to what non-elites endured daily. As many more Roman citizens from all strata of society were captured during armed conflict, bishops and clergy increasingly entered the ransom business, drawing on ecclesiastic and private resources. Moving beyond the scope of Lizzi Testa’s interventions, it is evident that ransoming, whether of elite individuals or entire groups, was an extremely expensive enterprise that required financial instruments (and sometimes the movement of huge sums of cash across space). “Following the money” may well reveal a different kind of agency at work: the capacity of individuals and collectives such as bishops and churches to use sophisticated financial arrangements with “international” validity in response to the captivity crisis.Footnote 6
As Lizzi Testa underscores, no one was immune to captivity, including the imperial family. Theodosius I’s (r. 379–95 ce) daughter Galla Placidia (d. 450 ce) is perhaps the best-known female imperial captive of Late Antiquity. Yet, as Michele Renee Salzman argues, to present Galla Placidia exclusively as a victim minimizes how she and other imperial women used captivity and the political stress of war to their advantage. Chapter 9 by Michele Renee Salzman, “Elite Women and War: New Opportunities for Agency in the Fifth- and Sixth-Century Western Empire,” suggests that Galla Placidia’s forced marriage to the brother of Alaric resulted in negotiations later imperial women used to improve their status during periods of instability. In a series of case studies, Salzman examines how Galla Placidia’s daughter Iusta Grata Honoria (d. 455 ce) made overtures to Attila to escape a forced marriage to a Roman senator, conveying that female members of the imperial family could independently engage in marriage negotiations. Honoria’s gambit failed, but its potential was not lost on the female relatives of the Ostrogothic kings. They too sought power-sharing arrangements in times of war other than through marriage, which opened new avenues even when these experiments failed.
The final three chapters conclude the volume by focusing on the emperor, that is, the opposite of the non-elite bodies suffering quotidian violence through their regular labor. In particular, the chapters address the challenges of usurpation and civil war by discussing how authors and artisans representing late Roman emperors grappled with portraying a divine ruler, whose legitimacy continued to derive from victory in battle, as Christian.
Diliana Angelova and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser examine Constantine (r. 306–39 ce), the first emperor confronting this challenge. Chapter 10 by Angelova, “‘By Divine Inspiration and the Greatness of His Mind’: Augustan and Christian Messaging on Constantine’s Triumphal Arch,” investigates the Arch of Constantine at Rome, completed in 315 ce, which celebrated Constantine’s civil war victory against the emperor Maxentius (d. 312 ce). Angelova’s analysis focuses on the most important viewer, the emperor. Those who erected the Arch celebrated Constantine as having surpassed Augustus as guarantor of a new golden age, and they included subtle elements which spoke to his Christianity. Thus, the Arch inaugurates a visual language that integrated Christian ideas about divinity into the existing iconography of military triumph.
Digeser in Chapter 11 “Apocalyptic Ideology during Civil War: The Archangel Michael and Constantine’s Christian Subjects,” also grapples with the difficulty of representing military victory in a bloody civil war as the crowning achievement of a ruler who embraced a novel divinity dedicated to peace. Digeser focuses on Constantine’s early association with the archangel Michael within an apocalyptic framework. That association, Digeser shows, allowed Constantine to portray himself as opposing Satan rather than a rival emperor in battles where the archangel Michael fought on Constantine’s behalf. Here, too, Constantine’s rule heralds a new golden age, now constituted as the start of Christ’s thousand-year reign.
Chapter 12 by Flavio Santini, “A Martyr of Civil Wars: Ambrose on the Death of Valentinian II” details how Ambrose of Milan (d. 397 ce) transformed a Roman emperor into a divinely ordained martyr. The emperor was Valentinian II (r. 375–92 ce), who died under uncertain circumstances. In Santini’s reading, Ambrose used the oration commemorating Valentinian’s death (De obitu Valentiniani) to make the young ruler, who had died as an unbaptized “Arian” by suicide or murder, into a martyr whose voluntary death halted a barbarian invasion. By evoking the highly emotive language of same-sex desire, Ambrose symbolically converted the emperor’s corpse into a gleaming, bejeweled relic, which celebrated the imperial martyrdom.
War and Community in Late Antiquity concludes with an Epilogue by Catherine Michael Chin. In “What Is an Enemy Made Of?,” Chin invites readers to consider what Elaine Scarry describes as war’s essence: deliberate injury to things that can break and rupture.Footnote 7 By placing Elaine Scarry’s productive reduction of war in dialogue with Saidiya Hartman’s evocative study of American slaves, Chin offers answers to the question “What is war in Late Antiquity?”Footnote 8 For Chin, war’s violent rupturing of bodies forces humans into a state between “oscillating” personness and thingness. Consequently, he observes, war is exceedingly difficult to represent in language and challenging to historicize. (We are struck by the military historians’ use of indicators and arrows in visual reconstructions of battles and troop maneuvers. Such visual signs are a poor means of illustrating bodily rupture, but they reflect the challenge of describing historical warfare through the static medium of the page.) Chin insightfully organizes the volume’s contents into three categories, each of which delineates specific acts of war: violence, protection, and exchange. As he shows, each constitutes a different context for the back and forth that humans experience as both subjects and objects of war. His Epilogue thus offers a provocative conclusion to the entire volume, drawing productive and surprising connections between the chapters.
In sum, the chapters in War and Community in Late Antiquity pioneer a new line of research by examining war and warfare in relation to other cultural, social, and material developments in late Roman society. It offers readers a range of interdisciplinary interventions on the significance and effects of armed violence, both destructive and generative, in the formation of late Roman culture and society. While warfare may be dwarfed in scale when compared to the daily violence inflicted on the laboring bodies of the late ancient non-elite, it is nonetheless a major, formative feature of the period. The fact that it can be hard to pin down and locate – that we can still ask “What is war in Late Antiquity?” and derive so many different answers to the question – reflects the subject’s importance as a key for those seeking to understand the culture, society, and religion of Late Antiquity.
