The Later Roman Empire

The Later Roman Empire
Averil Cameron

A comprehensive study - recently updated for the eBook edition - which introduces the reader to the vigour and variety of the fourth century AD.After being beset by invasion, civil war and internal difficulties for a century, the Roman Empire that Diocletian inherited in AD 284 desperately needed the organizational drive he brought to the task of putting its administration and defences on a newly secure footing. His successor, Constantine, sustained this consolidation of imperial strength by adopting a vibrant new religion, Christianity.The fourth century AD was a decisive period; its many new challenges and wide cultural diversity are reflected in the pages of its chief historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, and represented by figures as different as Julian the Apostate and St Augustine.Not only providing a vivid narrative of events, this book also draws on archaeological and artistic evidence to illuminate such central issues as economy, social structure, defence, religion and culture.‘The Later Roman Empire’ is indispensable to students, and a compelling guide for anyone interested in the cultural development of late antiquity, or in the structure, evolution and fate of empires more generally.

AVERIL CAMERON

THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE

AD 284–430

Contents

Cover (#u8be94e47-1a67-526b-b7f7-8fab34de8c93)

Title Page (#u26915aa5-cfe7-5d6e-bd83-bab46c5637ed)

Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#uf61e8ca7-44d5-5f9b-b0da-f9e626966a53)

Preface (#ubef86ab2-f119-5280-9e94-7d6120f32964)

Maps (#ua8b1bce7-f724-5321-b92d-69541a702c66)

I Introduction: the third-century background (#u500390dc-8cb1-585a-8653-35e8ae5fe2d9)

II The Sources (#u976cee41-a7fc-5761-8269-ace451c3f068)

III The New Empire: Diocletian (#ua2168d51-0ce4-5bcc-9236-7beddca1743e)

IV The New Empire: Constantine (#u1063bd4b-a897-5499-8c55-a01825638d2b)

V Church and State: The Legacy of Constantine (#litres_trial_promo)

VI The Reign of Julian (#litres_trial_promo)

VII The Late Roman State: Constantius to Theodosius (#litres_trial_promo)

VIII Late Roman Economy and Society (#litres_trial_promo)

IX Military Affairs, Barbarians and the Late Roman Army (#litres_trial_promo)

X Culture in the Late Fourth Century (#litres_trial_promo)

XI Constantinople and the East (#litres_trial_promo)

XII Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo)

Date Chart (#litres_trial_promo)

List of Emperors (#litres_trial_promo)

Primary Sources (#litres_trial_promo)

Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Fontana History of the Ancient World Series (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_150d3da5-657f-5393-aaeb-193ef8285842)

NO JUSTIFICATION is needed for a new history of the ancient world; modern scholarship and new discoveries have changed our picture in important ways, and it is time for the results to be made available to the general reader. But the Fontana History of the Ancient World attempts not only to present an up-to-date account. In the study of the distant past, the chief difficulties are the comparative lack of evidence and the special problems of interpreting it; this in turn makes it both possible and desirable for the more important evidence to be presented to the reader and discussed, so that he may see for himself the methods used in reconstructing the past, and judge for himself their success.

The series aims, therefore, to give an outline account of each period that it deals with and, at the same time, to present as much as possible of the evidence for that account. Selected documents with discussions of them are integrated into the narrative, and often form the basis of it; when interpretations are controversial the arguments are presented to the reader. In addition, each volume has a general survey of the types of evidence available for the period and ends with detailed suggestions for further reading. The series will, it is hoped, equip the reader to follow up his own interests and enthusiasms, having gained some understanding of the limits within which the historian must work.

OSWYN MURRAY

Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History,

Balliol College, Oxford

General Editor

Preface (#ulink_9de18b22-fada-575d-82c7-7763784f0d15)

THE MAIN IDEAS and emphases expressed in this book and its companion volume, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600, Routledge History of Classical Civilization (London, 1993), have evolved over twenty or so years of teaching and lecturing. Although during that period the later Roman empire has become fashionable, especially in its newer guise of ‘late antiquity’, there is still, strangely, no basic textbook for students in English. I am very glad therefore to have been given this opportunity to attempt to fill that gap. My own approach owes a great deal to the influence over the years of my colleagues in ancient history, especially to those who have been associated with the London Ancient History Seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies. Not least among them is Fergus Millar, who initiated the seminars, and who both encouraged a broad and generous conception of ancient history and insisted on the great importance of lucid and helpful presentation. Most important of all, however, have been the generations of history and classics students, by no means all of them specialists, who have caused me to keep returning to the old problems, and to keep finding something new.

This book was written at speed, and with great enjoyment, partly as a relief from more difficult and recalcitrant projects. Though of course infinitely more can be said than is possible in this limited compass, I hope that it will at least provide a good starting point from which students can approach this fascinating period. It is a characteristic of this series to embody translated excerpts from contemporary sources; in the case of Ammianus Marcellinus, such translations are taken from the Penguin edition by W. Hamilton. I am grateful to the editor of the series, Oswyn Murray, for wise guidance, and to several others for various kinds of help, notably to Dominic Rathbone and Richard Williams. But they, needless to say, had no part in the book’s defects.

London, August 1992

Maps (#ulink_7fab3336-1e25-5d97-b36d-ceff8329f81b)

I Introduction THE THIRD-CENTURY BACKGROUND (#ulink_a1d3dcdd-69c4-560e-b639-d74aa04077c5)

IT IS A MARK OF the dramatic change that has taken place in our historical perceptions of the ancient world that when the new Fontana series was first launched, the later Roman Empire, or, as it is now commonly called, late antiquity, was not included in it; now, by contrast, it would seem strange to leave it out. Two books of very different character were especially influential in bringing this change about, so far as English-speaking students were concerned: first, A. H. M. Jones’s massive History of the Later Roman Empire. A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford, 1964), and second, Peter Brown’s brief but exhilarating sketch, The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971). Of course, the subject had never been neglected by serious scholars, or in continental scholarship; nevertheless, it is only in the generation since the publication of Jones’s work that the period has aroused such wide interest. Since then, indeed, it has become one of the major areas of growth in current teaching and research.

The timespan covered in this book runs effectively from the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 (the conventional starting date for the later Roman empire) to the end of the fourth century, when on the death of Theodosius I in AD 395 the empire was divided between his two sons, Honorius in the west and Arcadius in the east. It is not therefore so much a book about late antiquity in general, a period that can plausibly be seen as running from the fourth to the seventh century and closing with the Arab invasions, as one about the fourth century. This was the century of Constantine, the first emperor to embrace and support Christianity, and the founder of Constantinople, the city that was to become the capital of the Byzantine empire and to remain such until it was captured by the Ottoman Turks in AD 1453. Edward Gibbon’s great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, carries the narrative to the latter date, regarding this, not AD 476, when the last Roman emperor in the west was deposed, as the real end of the Roman empire. Few would agree with Gibbon now, but historians are still quarrelling about when Rome ended and Byzantium began, and in their debate Gibbon’s highly-coloured perception of the moral decline which he thought had set in once the high point of Roman civilization under the Antonine emperors in the second century AD was passed remains highly influential. All writers on the fourth century must take a view about what are in fact highly subjective issues: was the regime of the later empire a repressive system which evolved in response to the chaos which had set in in the third century? Can we see in it the signs of a decay which led to the collapse and fragmentation of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century? Did Constantine’s adoption of Christianity somehow assist a process of decline by finally abandoning earlier Roman values, as Gibbon thought?

All these views have been and still are widely held by historians, and permeate much of the writing on the period. It will soon be clear that this book takes a different approach. Preconceptions, and especially value judgements, cannot be avoided altogether in a history, but they certainly do not help either the historian or the student. Moreover, we are much less likely today, given the challenge to traditional values which has taken place in our own society, to hold up the Principate as the embodiment of the classical ideal, and to assume that any deviation from it must necessarily represent decline. Finally, we are perhaps more wary than earlier generations of historians of the power and the dangers of rhetoric, and less likely than they were to take the imperial rhetoric of the later Roman empire at face value. The period from Diocletian onwards is sometimes referred to as the ‘Dominate’, since the emperor was referred to as dominus (‘lord’), whereas in the early empire (the so-called ‘Principate’), he had originally been referred to very differently, simply as princeps (‘first citizen’). But the term dominus was by no means new; moreover, what the fourth-century emperors wanted, and how they wanted to appear, was one thing; what kind of society the empire was as a whole was quite another.

To gauge the difference, we must start not with Diocletian or the ‘tetrarchic’ system which he instituted in an attempt to restore political stability – according to Diocletian’s plan, two emperors (Augusti), were to share power, each with a Caesar who would in due course succeed him. We must start rather with the third century, the apparent watershed between two contrasting systems. Here, traditionally, historians have seen a time of crisis (the so-called ‘third-century crisis’), indicated by a constant and rapid turnover of emperors between AD 235 and 284, by near-continuous warfare, internal and external, combined with the total collapse of the silver currency and the state’s recourse to exactions in kind. This dire situation was brought under at least partial control by Diocletian, whose reforming measures were then continued by Constantine (AD 306–37), thus laying the foundation for the recovery of the fourth century. In such circumstances, for which it is not difficult to find contemporary witnesses, it is tempting to imagine that people turned the more readily to religion for comfort or escape, and that here lie the roots of the supposedly more spiritual world of late antiquity. But much of this too is a matter of subjective judgement, and of reading the sources too much at face value. Complaints about the tax-collector, for instance, such as we find in rabbinic sources from Palestine and in Egyptian papyri, tell us what we might have expected anyway, namely that no one likes paying taxes; they do not tell us whether the actual tax burden had increased as much as they seem at first sight to imply. While there certainly were severe problems in the third century, particularly in relation to political stability and to the working of the coinage, nearly all the individual components of the concept of ‘third-century crisis’ have been challenged in recent years. And if the crisis was less severe than has been thought, then the degree of change between the second and the fourth centuries may have been exaggerated too.