INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION OF SOURCES

In the present state of our knowledge it is not difficult to describe the physical setting for pre-Islamic Arabian history, and new archaeological discoveries in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan and the Gulf are producing much valuable and unique evidence. Over the past century a vast body of epigraphical material – some 50,000 north and south Arabian inscriptions and the inscribed sticks now emerging by the hundreds in northern Yemen – has provided a wealth of information on the societies of the peninsula, especially the bedouins. But all this seldom provides a coherent picture of the course of events, as opposed to vignettes and bare details, and thus does not replace a literary historical tradition. There are external epigraphic records of the Arabs and Arabia, and historical sources – especially in Greek and Syriac – are often helpful. But this information too is profoundly discontinuous, and in any case represents the perspective of outsiders who regarded the Arabs as barbarian marauders and most of Arabia as a menacing wasteland.

There is voluminous material on the subject in the Arabic sources, but herein lies the problem. The relevant accounts, including a vast bulk of poetry, are frequently attributed to the pre-Islamic period or otherwise presented as describing events and conditions of that time, but apart from the Qur’ān the sources containing these accounts are at least two centuries later. In times past it seemed reasonable simply to compare the various accounts to determine which seemed most likely to be true.

At the beginning of the fifth century the senatorial aristocracy of the late empire seemed well assured of its future. Its great dynasties, the Anicii and Symmachi among them, appear full of confidence in the letter collections of the period – those of Symmachus himself, but also of Jerome, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola. Nor were they much shaken by the initial break-up of the western empire, despite panic-stricken reactions to the arrival of the barbarians and to the invasions of the Huns. At the end of the fifth century the Italian aristocracy appears as confident as ever in the inscriptions of the Colosseum and in the letters of Ennodius of Pavia. Its Gallic counterpart, a little less grand in status, but of nearly comparable wealth, dominates the letter collections of Sidonius Apollinaris, Ruricius of Limoges and Avitus of Vienne, as well as having a significant profile in that of Ennodius (Provençal by birth, albeit Italian in his career). By the mid sixth century, however, the greatest of these dynasties were no longer a power in the west: Justinian’s Ostrogothic wars had destroyed their Italian base, although the Anicii themselves were still of some importance in Constantinople. However, while the front rank of the aristocracy had collapsed in Italy, in the successor states of Gaul its provincial counterpart survived, as is again evidenced by a letter collection, this time the poetic epistles of Venantius Fortunatus. In all probability it had also managed to hang on to much of its wealth.

The definition of orthodoxy between 425 and 600 finds expression primarily in the decrees or statements of the Oecumenical Councils of Ephesus I (431), Chalcedon (451) and Constantinople II (553), which to a large extent were held at imperial instigation. The difficulties of enforcing such definitions, which often had to be upheld by the legislative, military, and even theological and liturgical interventions of emperors, prove that orthodoxy so defined was by no means acceptable to all Christians in the empire. This was particularly the case with the Council of Chalcedon, for its reception and promulgation, or its rejection and condemnation, were played out not only in imperial and patriarchal circles, but also among great numbers of monks and faithful. What, in fact, constituted right belief? Both proponents and opponents of Chalcedon laid claim to orthdoxy, tracing their pedigree in right belief back to the Council of Nicaea (325). An additional complication in assessing the definitions of orthodoxy in this period and the manner in which they were enforced is caused by the development and differentiation in the expression of doctrine. The interpretation of Chalcedon by its sixth-century adherents, for instance, was to differ from the perception of orthodoxy among their fifth-century counterparts. Furthermore, imperial policies adopted for the enforcement of orthodoxy were often dictated by a desire for ecclesiastical unity rather than for the preservation of right belief, which in such cases was used as an administrative tool. Increasingly, different perceptions of orthodoxy, and contrary opinions regarding its enforcement, caused ruptures not only among Christians of the eastern empire, but between east and west as well.

Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries a.d., and to some extent later also, the education of the young followed patterns established in outline almost a thousand years earlier. Changes in content and in institutional arrangements had certainly taken place during the long period. The gradual disappearance in the Greek world of the element of physical training and of the institution which provided for it, the gymnasium, is an example. But change on the whole had been slow and almost imperceptible. Traditional attitudes, methods and values had sunk deep roots in ancient society, roots which remained relatively undisturbed by the social, political and religious changes of the period. Education of all kinds was marked by rigid conservatism. There was no resistance to innovation because there was no innovation to resist. In the words of a recent study, ‘Late antique schools of grammar and rhetoric were sound-proof against the outside world, their methods and their status largely untouched by the profound political and religious changes taking place around them.’ Such general statements call for some qualification when one looks more closely at particular regions, periods or ethnic groups, but on the whole they provide a valid and important characterization of late antique education and of the culture which it reflected and perpetuated.

Anyone seeking to write an account of law in the western kingdoms labours under two great difficulties. The student of Roman law can find comfort in the knowledge that his legal tradition was the creation of a political élite which prided itself upon its literary accomplishments. It was both a tool of government and one of the proudest manifestations of a literate culture. In the post- and non-Roman kingdoms, such comfortable assurance is only forthcoming in modest portions. The study of Roman law rests upon rich materials that have been analysed by some of the best minds of every generation since, in the eleventh century, Irnerius set out to teach the law of Justinian at Bologna. The written materials for a history of law in the western kingdoms are, however, much patchier and their relationship to the practice of law more uncertain.

The second great difficulty is partly a consequence of the first: the almost irresistible temptation to judge all other laws in late antiquity by their relationship to Roman law. Moreover, this temptation may take a particularly pernicious form if one is induced to think of Roman law as, in some sense, ‘modern’ in outlook, so that the other laws can then be judged as relatively modern or primitive according to how closely they resembled Roman law. One form of this dangerous preoccupation is the ancient conception – already well expressed, for his own purposes, by Cassiodorus – of the culture of Europe as a fruitful mixture of Roman and Germanic (or Gothic).

The eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean and its hinterland comprised some of the richest areas of the eastern Roman empire in late antiquity. Geographically, the area is most easily understood as a series of different climatic zones running north—south. Along the Mediterranean seaboard there is a well-watered strip which provides rich agricultural lands. In the north, this belt is comparatively narrow where the mountains of Syria and Phoenica Maritima come down almost to the sea. Only in a few places, like the vicinity of Antioch and inland from Tripolis, are there extensive fertile plains. In Palestine the fertile area becomes more extensive, though increasingly arid in the south. The mountains themselves vary greatly in character. In Syria II the mountains along the coast are poor and sparsely inhabited, and further south the high summits of Phoenicia Maritima form an effective barrier between coastal cities like Berytus and inland Damascus. In Palestine, on the other hand, the hills are gentler and more densely settled with villages and towns, including Jerusalem.

Inland, the rift valley runs all the way north–south from Syria I to Palestine III. In the north, where the Orontes flows through it, the rift valley is bordered on the east by the limestone massifs – rounded, rocky hills which supported intensive settlement in late antiquity. Further south, both the Biqa valley around Heliopolis (Baalbek) and the Jordan valley were well populated and included such important cities as Tiberias and Scythopolis (Baysān, Bet She’an). Even in the arid lands of the Wādī ’Araba south of the Dead Sea, the Byzantine period saw important settlements.

No other volume of The Cambridge Ancient History raises such major questions of periodization or historical interpretation as Volume XIV, the last in the series. Indeed, the very decision to extend the original coverage of the series by two extra volumes and to allow an overlap with the new Cambridge Medieval History is an indication of the lively state of research on this period and the variety of interpretative schemes currently proposed. We can no longer be content with a simple ‘transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages’, nor can we propose a single point where the line between them may be drawn. The conventional date of the fall of the Roman empire in the west, confidently placed by previous generations in the year a.d. 476, was already found inadequate by Edward Gibbon, while the lack of interest shown in the supposed event by contemporaries has been noted as a problem by many historians. ‘Transformation’ is now a term more commonly used than ‘fall’ to describe the process of historical change in the west from the last centuries of classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, and the search for a chronological divide is felt with less urgency than before as concentration focuses instead on a longer time-scale of change. Meanwhile, the historic changes in eastern Europe in the late twentieth century encouraged are-examination of the processes which led to the formation of Europe, and in particular a reconsideration of what the very concept of Europe might entail.

The period between the accession of the Roman emperor Valentinian III in 425 and the death of the Visigothic king Leovigild in 586 inevitably occupies a central position in the debates relating to the transition from classical to medieval in western Europe, and more specifically to the questions of continuity and discontinuity. There is, however, another way of reading this century and a half, and that is as a period in its own right. Several historians working on fifth- and sixth-century Britain have, for instance, argued that between the history of the late Roman province of Britannia and that of Anglo-Saxon England lies a shorter but none the less distinct period that has been called ‘sub-Roman’.

Britain can, of course, be seen as experiencing a history radically different from that even of the other parts of western Europe. Its western half was one of only two areas of the erstwhile Roman empire to witness the re-emergence of Celtic kings, and the other area where a similar development occurred, Brittany, had a history inseparable from that of Britain itself. Meanwhile, or perhaps subsequently, Latin language and culture were more thoroughly destroyed in the Germanic kingdoms of eastern Britain than in any other part of what had been the Roman west. Yet the distinctions between Britain and the rest of western Europe may seem clearer to us now, when examined with the benefit of hindsight, than they were at the time.

The late Roman armies of the fourth and early fifth century are relatively well documented: Ammianus and other narrative historians describe them at work in their main theatres of operations on the Rhine, Danube and Persian frontiers, as well as in Britain and North Africa; the Theodosian Code preserves a range of laws pertaining to their creation, sustenance and functioning; the Notitia Dignitatum offers a view, albeit complicated by partial revision, of the structure and disposition of forces in both east and west. The year 420 marks a convenient break: between then and the Persian wars of Anastasius’ reign (502–7), recorded by Procopius and Joshua the Stylite, there is little reliable narrative of Roman military action, and no Notitia; also, there are few relevant laws, since only seven of the 175 titles in Theodosian Code vii, the book devoted to military matters, date from after 420, though eleven laws among the Novels of Theodosius II and four of Valentinian III can be added. During these years the western Roman army ceased to exist as a state institution, being superseded by the military forces of the successor kingdoms in Gaul, Spain, Africa and finally Italy, none of which maintained a standing army. In the east, however, the army, and hence the empire, survived in a recognizable form through to the early seventh century. The nature and causes of these distinct developments require explanation; but first, an overview of the late Roman army.

EAST AND WEST: COMMON TRENDS

This chapter is concerned with the political evolution of the ancient city – that is, of a political unit comprising an urban core serving as administrative centre of a rural territory – in a period of great change. As the western empire broke up, the relatively uniform environment that had been provided by the imperial administration was replaced by a great variety of conditions. In view of this, it is perhaps surprising that the evolution of cities in different regions continued to a large extent to follow parallel lines and that comparable developments can be observed in the new barbarian kingdoms and in areas which remained under imperial control, regional differences often being a matter of timing rather than substance.

Taking the city of the second century as a standard of comparison, the type survived better in the east than in the west, but not uniformly well even there. The classical city with an urban population, monumental buildings, games and a highly literate upper class continued in at least the provincial capitals of western and southern Asia Minor, in Syria, Arabia, Palestine and Egypt right up to the Arab invasions, and in the areas under Arab rule even beyond that. In the west the Roman version of the classical ideal survived best in North Africa – but only up to the Vandal conquest – in southern Spain, in Provence and in much of Italy, especially the north.

To designate a body of literature “the poetry of sensibility” aligns it not only with a kind of feeling but with a cultural movement. An intricate culture of sensibility flourished in late eighteenth-century Britain. It affected the behavior of men and women, the conception and development of social reform, and the nature of prose and poetry. It expressed a set of assumptions and values that operated in philosophy as well as fiction and influenced even politics. It had profound consequences long after it had largely disappeared as a social movement.

Sensibility, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “emotional consciousness; glad or sorrowful, grateful or resentful recognition of a person’s conduct, or of a fact or a condition of things.” Again, it is defined as “Quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; the quality of being easily and strongly affected by emotional influences.” And yet again: “Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art.” Sensibility always involves emotion, and it always entails willingness and ability to respond to others. From a twentieth-century point of view, its responses may seem excessive. Marianne Dashwood, in Sense and Sensibility, rhapsodizing over dead leaves, offers a comic version of its possible extremity. But Marianne requires chastening. Her sensible sister makes fun of her extravagances, and her creator arranges the plot to reeducate her. Her predecessors in fine feeling, in contrast, won admiration from many of their contemporaries.

A poetics of absence appropriate to the eighteenth century would take as its distinctive image not the void or abyss - where the rich material world encounters its opposite state of nothingness - but the ruin. Ruins are the trace of something that has vanished. As eighteenth-century poets employ the image, a ruin is less the sign of a distinct past, like the famous monument commemorating the London fire, than an evocation of something lost beyond recovery while nonetheless still persisting in fragments, remnants, and flashes of recollection. The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial. Its power in eighteenthcentury poetry derives from this implicit doubleness combining solidity with evanescence, like Rome as Piranesi depicted it in his Vedute di Roma (begun in the late 1740s), with shrubs sprouting from tumbledown classical arches, fallen statues beside overgrown temples, wooden shacks propped against the cenotaphs. John Dyer created his own version of this imagery in The Ruins of Rome (1740):

In December 1746, Joseph Warton published Odes on Various Subjects, and later in the same month his friend William Collins published Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects. Joseph Warton, in his “Advertisement” introducing his odes, urged readers to look upon these poems “as an attempt to bring back Poetry into its right channel.” These odes were examples of “invention” and “imagination”; and they were his effort to restore British poetry to its classical heritage. The “Advertisement” read as follows:

During the middle years of the eighteenth century there was a fruitful intimacy between English poetry and what we now think of as “literary history.” Earlier poets had been conscious of their illustrious predecessors among whom they hoped to find a place, and in that sense the idea of a poetic canon is a very old one. Chaucer's position as the “Father” of English poetry had long been a commonplace, and by 1700 Spenser and Milton were seen as completing a classic pantheon of great writers, with Dryden clearly in contention. Pope's remark to Joseph Spence in 1736 was offered as a truism: “'Tis easy to mark out the general course of our poetry. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden are the great landmarks for it.” But of those “landmarks” Chaucer was virtually unread in the original, and Spenser very little. Their status as canonical English classics was based on reputation rather than reading; their language was generally regarded as outdated and even barbarous, and when being subjected to parody, imitation, or modernization, it was their distance from the present that was being exploited.

Finding satisfactory labels for the poetry of the last decades of the eighteenth century has proven particularly difficult because most existing labels carry certain value judgments that diminish the worth or specificity of this poetry. Poetry from Pope's death in 1744 to the early publications of the first generation of Romantic poets in the 1790s has occasionally been defined according to its immediate past, by calling it “post-Augustan,” but more often according to the future, by calling it “pre-Romantic.” In an important essay first published in 1956, Northrop Frye suggested that we call this period an “Age of Sensibility” rather than define it transitionally “as a period of reaction against Pope and anticipation of Wordsworth.”While the label “Poetry of Sensibility” has gained some currency among specialists, “pre- Romanticism” continues to be used for this poetry, especially by nonspecialists. Unfortunately, the label “pre-Romanticism” is seriously misleading to characterize the ends - the last poems as well as the objectives - of late-eighteenth-century poetry.

Only a fool, declared Samuel Johnson scrambling to meet his publisher's deadline in the middle of the eighteenth century, would write except for pay. His sentiment expresses a great change in the status of writing and the nature of the activities that surround it: writing, publishing, disseminating literature, and reading. During the eighteenth century, literature was transformed into mass entertainment.

In earlier centuries, virtually only the privileged and highly educated rankspossessed, wrote, or read written texts. This was especially true of poetry partly because its allusions and intricate syntactic techniques traditionally demand from readers a high level of training and close, sustained attention. As long as literacy and leisure remained limited and printing expensive, poetry was largely the province of the elite. If playwrights like Shakespeare wrote drama for a living and poetry in their spare time, by contrast poets enjoyed an idealized image as sophisticated gentlemen who composed in their spare time or so eighteenth-century poets believed. This image is perhaps epitomized by Sir Philip Sidney, the model of the Renaissance nobleman-author: an amateur equally skilled in literature and war, who penned epics between fighting battles and advising princes. Such poets wrote under the patronage of royalty or members of the high nobility. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship: poets need please only their patrons, and their patrons garnered lasting fame from the poetry they encouraged.