The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180-395

David Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134694846
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Roman Empire at Bay is the only one volume history of the critical years 180-395 AD, which saw the transformation of the Roman Empire from a unitary state centred on Rome, into a new polity with two capitals and a new religion—Christianity. The book integrates social and intellectual history into the narrative, looking to explore the relationship between contingent events and deeper structure. It also covers an amazingly dramatic narrative from the civil wars after the death of Commodus through the conversion of Constantine to the arrival of the Goths in the Roman Empire, setting in motion the final collapse of the western empire.

The new edition takes account of important new scholarship in questions of Roman identity, on economy and society as well as work on the age of Constantine, which has advanced significantly in the last decade, while recent archaeological and art historical work is more fully drawn into the narrative. At its core, the central question that drives The Roman Empire at Bay remains, what did it mean to be a Roman and how did that meaning change as the empire changed? Updated for a new generation of students, this book remains a crucial tool in the study of this period.

Part I

THE SHAPE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

1

CULTURE, ECOLOGY, AND POWER

POWER

“After the Greek empire, no other will be raised up except that which possesses the domination in our own day and is solidly established: this is a fact evident to all. It has teeth of iron, because it kills and tears to pieces the entire world by its own force, just like iron. … [It] is not one nation, but an assemblage of all languages and all the races of man, it is a levy of recruits with a view to war.” The author of these lines was a Christian named Hippolytus, and the images that he was explaining were those of the beast in chapter 4 of the Book of Daniel.¹ Although he may not now be a household name, and although he wrote a very long time ago – toward the beginning of the third century AD – Hippolytus’ influence is still very much with us today. It was Hippolytus who asserted that Christ was born on December 25 in the forty-second year of Augustus, a date that was to become enshrined in Christian tradition and forms the basis of the common era by which so much of the world now measures time.²

The fate of Hippolytus is not dissimilar to the fate of many others who will pass through the pages of this book. He is little remembered in part because he does not fall within the periods that define the notion of the “classic.”

Our image of classical antiquity stems from two cities at two very different times. One is Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC; the other is Rome, three hundred years later. The earlier period is that in which the classical form of narrative history took shape, and the period in which the western tradition of drama was formed. It was the period in which standards of rhetoric and art were created, and the great Athenian experiment of democracy took shape, flourished, and fell. Rome in the last century BC was the time of Cicero, of Catullus, and of Virgil, the giants of Latin literature. It too was a time of incredible chaos, the period in which the republican form of government that had enabled Rome to rise to unparalleled power in the Mediterranean world failed to withstand the pressures that accompanied the acquisition of empire, degenerating into civil war. It was the Rome of Caesar, of Pompey, of Antony, Cleopatra, and Augustus. Our view of these two great periods in antiquity was formed, in large part, by the imperial culture of the succeeding centuries, whose inhabitants accorded the status of “classic” to works of earlier generations.

Hippolytus, then, could not be a “classical” thinker because he was part of a generation that defined “classical” as something other than itself. He remains important precisely because imperial definitions of the “classic” helped shape the way that the memory of the ancient world was transmitted. The Rome that helped shape the future direction of European and Mediterranean history was less that of Cicero than that of Hippolytus; it was less that of Augustus than that of Constantine.

The Roman Empire that defined the “classic” may be seen as a dictatorship, supported by military force, or as the catalyst for both modern Europe and the Middle East, facilitated by a system of government that allowed countless peoples to communicate through a shared culture. Rome failed as the Mediterranean world’s sole superpower, and the shared culture derived from the study of the “classics” gave way, with increasing rapidity, to new cultures, shaped from the amalgam of “classics” with the reformed style of Judaism that became Christianity. How and why these things happened will be the story of this book. This story will take its shape from the interaction of groups that were formed by, and supported through, the institutions of the Roman state, and the way that classical culture served both to enable, and complicate, communication between these groups. It will be the story of how the diversity of power structures, supported by the diversity of the empire’s population, coalesced into fewer and fewer structures that ultimately failed of their purpose.

To begin again with Hippolytus, his primary concern in the commentary on Daniel, as it was in a closely related work on the coming of the Antichrist, was to show that the end of the world was a long way off.³ His intention was to show that teaching by rival Christian groups to the effect that the end of the world was imminent was false. He tells of a group in Syria that had set off into the countryside in the expectation of meeting Christ, only to find that they were assailed by beasts and brigands. They had to be rescued by the provincial governor.⁴ Thus, while his view of the Roman Empire is bleak – he admits that the empire is like the kingdom of Satan because it is all-powerful – he makes it clear that there is worse to come.⁵ It is, in his view, the Roman Empire that restrains the coming of the end; the sign that the actual kingdom of Satan was at hand would be the fall of the empire and its dissolution into ten democracies – symbolized, in Hippolytus’ view, by the ten toes of the beast in chapter 4 of Daniel.⁶

Hippolytus saw his world as the creation of Rome. The paramount power of its military force was all that could bind the diverse peoples of the empire together. Other contemporaries would praise the empire as a great fort that protected the countless cities that constituted the civilized world within its figurative (and, in places, actual) walls.⁷ An empire that could degenerate into ten democracies, or be described as a conglomeration of cities, might also be described as one constituted of diverse power structures wherein people defined their position in terms of their relationship to the ultimate power of the emperor.⁸ In an empire of nearly sixty million people, these power structures were extraordinarily varied.

About the time that Hippolytus was writing about Daniel, a group of tenant farmers who lived on an imperial estate in the Bagradas valley of modern Tunisia (then the Roman province of Numidia) wrote to Commodus (ad 180–92) to complain that their rights were being violated.⁹ The tenants claimed that the person to whom the estate had been leased by the imperial agent (procurator) who oversaw the lands belonging to the emperor in this region was demanding services to which he was not entitled. The tenants could appeal to a law passed in the time of the emperor Hadrian (ad 117–38) that gave them the right to own marginal land that they cultivated, and to pass this land on to their heirs.¹⁰ The lessee could appeal to the self-interest of the procurator who may have been interested in maximizing the possible revenue from the estate (or in supporting a comparatively important man against his social inferiors). The procurator sent in troops who beat and imprisoned tenants who stood up to him. Somehow a man named Lurius Lucullus, who could write an eloquent petition and had familiarity with the law, came forward to represent the tenants.¹¹

The clash between tenant farmers trying to maintain traditional rights and the lessee, backed by the emperor’s official, could only be adjudicated at the imperial court. In this case, the emperor’s decision favored the tenants against his own officials. We know this because the grateful tenants inscribed the dossier of letters on stone so that all might know that the highest authority had been drawn into their valley and done justice.

The tale of the tenants in the Bagradas valley might serve as a paradigm for the way in which disputes between different groups could be decided, and of the overarching authority of the emperor. And so it should, but it was only one paradigm for the exercise of power. Five years before these tenants launched their appeal to Rome, a group of Christians was imprisoned at Lyons in France on charges that included incest and cannibalism. The governor arrived to hear the case, and in the face of what was a well-organized lynch mob, temporized by writing to the emperor, asking him what to do with regard to individual defendants who were Roman citizens. He sent those who were not citizens to perish in the amphitheater. The emperor upheld his decision to maintain the distinction between the two groups of Christians when he responded that citizens should be decapitated. The decision was based on the principle that Roman citizens should have superior rights to those of the emperor’s subjects who had not attained such a status. Unfortunately the person primarily affected by this decree, a man named Attalus, appears to have been the main object of local displeasure. The governor gave in to the crowd and, the emperor’s order notwithstanding, Attalus met a horrific fate on the sand of Lyons’s amphitheater.¹²

The foregoing examples suggest that the Roman Empire was too complex and large for general laws to be universally applicable. Despite the outward image of uniformity and power that is often evoked by the mention of Rome, the tale of the Roman Empire is more often than not one of radical change. The second century AD was highly unusual.¹³ Five emperors succeeded each other without violence between AD 98 and 180. This length of time without assassination or civil strife was unparalleled between the time that Rome achieved its paramount position in the Mediterranean world and the fifth century AD, when the western provinces of the empire ceased to be ruled by a Roman emperor.

The periodic upheavals that struck the Roman world may perhaps be taken as a sign of the strength rather than the weakness of the system. For many centuries the source of Rome’s power, its unmatched military potential, remained unchallenged despite chaos at the top. The accomplishment of the Roman state, despite its instability, still knows no parallel in the history of the Mediterranean world and surrounding lands.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Roman Empire is that it was a geographic monstrosity. Tertullian, a Christian writer of the late second and early third centuries who lived in Carthage, the principal city in the Roman province of Africa, took it as a sign of the falsity of pagan gods that a priest of Serapis (a god of Egyptian origin) should have offered sacrifice for the health and well-being of the emperor Marcus Aurelius when Marcus had been dead for several weeks.¹⁴ In Tertullian’s view, if Serapis was a god, he would have notified his priest that the sacrifice was redundant. What is perhaps more significant is that an event, the death of Marcus, that occurred in the Balkans should be personally relevant to a person living in North Africa. And it was also relevant to a person living in Britain, in France, in Syria, and in Turkey. It was the emperor’s position as referee between the diverse hierarchies that constituted the civil society of the Roman Empire that made it so. Even if his word might be ignored, decisions of all sorts were his to make. His physical presence was invoked throughout these lands by countless temples, innumerable milestones marking the roads that bound the empire together, by monuments at the mouths of harbors, and at public events of all sorts. When news came of a missive from the emperor, those assembled in public places were supposed to listen, with heads bowed as his words were read out. They might then choose to forget those words, try to twist them to some personal advantage, or read between the lines to find some hidden meaning, but they would still have heard them.¹⁵ Whenever a person engaged in a financial transaction, the coin that was used would bear the emperor’s image. Whenever a person dated a document, the date would bear the imprint of the imperial government. When he wanted to honor the emperor, he would often use the language that he had learned from the emperor’s pronouncements to do so.¹⁶

If we may return to Hippolytus’ interpretation of the ten toes on the beast as ten democracies, we may see in this statement the notion that the imperial government was the institution that linked these groups together. In his view, the peoples of the empire had little in common other than the opportunity to serve in the army, which is another way of defining power in terms of overarching imperial institutions. If we were to expand and refine Hippolytus’ view further, it might be to move in the direction of a view that structures such as that of the imperial system of taxation created a series of interrelated economic zones whose character and, consequently, whose existences were enabled by the imperial government.¹⁷ Studies of the circulation of coinage in the empire would seem to dictate precisely such a view.¹⁸ It has, for instance, been conclusively demonstrated that local coinages of Greek cities in the east circulated within relatively limited areas around their point of issuance.¹⁹ Bankers, as we now know, tended to specialize in local transactions. They did not transfer large quantities of coin from place to place, but they could engage in local financial transactions for absentee investors.²⁰ The engines that drove these financial systems were extremely wealthy individuals who held properties around the Mediterranean, and the imperial government. It was the imperial government that could provide either bullion to be minted into coinage or, in other cases, the coinage itself, to ensure that the money supply of individual areas was adequate to what the state regarded as its needs.²¹

The fate of Britain as the imperial power was withdrawn in the fourth and fifth centuries AD offers, perhaps, the greatest testimony to the importance of the order imposed by the imperial government. The reason for this is that Britain is unusual in that another authority did not fill the vacuum created by the departure of Roman government.²²

The ending of Roman Britain was a process that was already well in train during the last decades covered by this book, and a radically different social structure would emerge within thirty years of the death of Theodosius in AD 395. Indeed, many people who had grown to maturity in Theodosius’ lifetime might sense that the world was not what it once was before they left it. On December 31, 406, the Rhine frontier would be irreparably breached, and a new Germanic nation, the Visigoths, would be in the process of formation within the frontiers. The Visigoths, and some of the tribes that crossed the Rhine, would carve out new kingdoms by adapting and reforming existing governmental structures. But this would not happen in Britain because those structures would have vanished before the Saxon peoples began to settle on British soil. It is this that makes the case of Britain so important for broader understanding of what made the Roman Empire work.

As early as the 380s there were signs that there was something wrong with life, as it had been lived, in Britain. Towns were beginning to fall into disrepair, as were some villas, the houses of the elite. By AD 403 coin hoards that had been buried by landholders in fear of their safety and never recovered are beginning to show signs of significant change.²³ The clipping of bits of metal off coins, which was banned by the imperial government, begins to be widespread, and, interestingly, the forging of bronze coins appears to have become notably less common. The copying of bronze coins was connected with their use in day-to-day economic exchange, suggesting that a monetary economy was ceasing to function. After 402 it appears that silver coins ceased being shipped to the island, suggesting that the local imperial a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• PART I THE SHAPE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
• PART II RESHAPING THE OLD ORDER
• PART III THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND ITS NEIGHBORS: 225–99
• PART IV THE CONSTANTINIAN EMPIRE
• PART V LOSING POWER
• CONCLUSION: CHANGE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index