A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity

by Douglas Boin

  Summary

  This chapter, which discussed people and events from the third to the sixth century CE, illustrated the ways individuals chose to participate in communities. Christians and Jews were two natural groups for us to examine, as their monotheistic beliefs distinguished them from the other citizens of the Roman Empire. In subscribing to a belief in one God, Jews and Christians were thus distinct, but the distinctiveness of their faith didn’t automatically make them socially different. We also looked at people who were initiated into ancient mystery cults and, using anthropologist Victor Turner’s work, discussed how rites of initiation create a sense of “communitas,” a bond that, nevertheless, exists alongside the more ordered social structures outside the group.

  Finally, we considered evidence from one region of the empire, Egypt. This case study introduced us to a complex picture of Late Antique society, where some Christians were encouraging the formation of their own niche, micro‐communities, like monasteries. Other citizens were serving in the army and benefiting from their networked connections. Still other communities – of disaffected Christians – were plotting ways to express their discontent with Roman society. This last episode in Alexandria helped us see that, at the end of the fourth century CE, the Roman Empire faced significant challenges, many of which were rooted in the fact that the empire’s Christian community had vastly divergent ideas of what it meant to be a Roman citizen – ideas that some believed were worth fighting and dying for.

  Study Questions

  Who is Victor Turner? What discipline was he trained in? How would you define his concept of “communitas”?

  Name three Roman cities which had a strong Jewish community. How do you know?

  What words would you use to characterize the Christian community of Roman Egypt in the fourth century CE?

  Can you think of another example, ancient or modern, which illustrates how people use time and calendars to promote a sense of community?

  Suggested Readings

  David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

  Karen Stern, Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

  Ann Marie Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  10

  Economy

  In the last chapter, four generations of Plousammon’s descendents told us about the lasting ties of family, home, and community in Roman Egypt. From the early fifth century CE, the time when Emperor Theodosius oversaw the establishment of Nicene Christianity throughout the empire, members of Plousammon’s family served in the Roman army, traveled outside the borders of the Egyptian town where they had grown up, and worked in the emperor’s palace. By the early sixth century CE, when the Roman Empire’s only capital was at Constantinople, the last known member of the family had settled back near home as a Christian priest. The circuitous tales of this one family, set against the competing lives of urban bishops and desert monks, exposed the complexities of life for citizens of Roman Egypt. Texts written on papyrus helped us piece this picture together, indicating the family’s movements over space and time.

  Papyrus can also tell us about travel patterns that were a necessary part of people’s everyday work. The movements of one Roman army unit in Egypt offer an instructive example. According to papyrus fragments found at the “City of Sharped Nose Fish” (Oxyrhynchus), we know that one elite cavalry unit – called in Latin a vexillatio – was stationed there at the beginning of the fourth century before they were eventually divided up and sent on separate missions. This unit’s name was the Mauri. It is the unit to which Plousammon’s son, Flavius Taurinos, belonged, and around 339 CE, he and his fellow service members were given marching orders to disperse. One group was sent to Lykopolis; the other to Hermopolis. Because of the way Mauri soldiers show up on papyrus documents scattered throughout Egypt, not just in Oxyrhynchus, we can plot their rough itineraries over the span of two hundred years until roughly 539 CE when the records disappear.

  The Mauri are the best documented unit in the empire’s Late Antique military. Between 339 and 539 CE, these men saw almost every corner of Roman Egypt. Reports indicate that, by the sixth century, they had even seen the first cataract of the Nile, where they would have spied the southern frontier cities of Syene and the island of Philae, site of an important Temple of Isis. (The first Nile cataract is one of six units of the river where the water turns into shallow rapids. Today, only one cataract is within the country of Egypt: at Aswan. The other five are further south, in modern Sudan.) Over the course of two hundred years, members of this elite unit also show up in Elephantine, near Syene; and at the western oasis in Lysis. (To learn more about the substance of these documents, see EBW [2007], p. 258.) By plotting this range of ancient cities on a map using geospatial tools, we can visualize how much mileage the Mauri were accruing (Figure 10.1). Taking data and translating it to a visual form shows that a soldier’s assignment in late Roman Egypt did not tie him to a specific city or region, even during peacetime. Over the course of a career or the course of a unit’s deployment, these men traveled considerably away from their home base in the “City of Sharped Nose Fish.”

  Figure 10.1 Texts on papyrus are not only important as documents. They are important as objects, and where a scrap of papyrus was found can often give us fascinating information that might otherwise not be contained in the text itself. This map shows the distribution of papyrus records related to the Mauri units of the Roman army in Egypt, c.339–539 CE. As the data reveal, these soldiers were stationed far from the traditionally cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean coastline, suggesting that residents and villagers all throughout Late Antique Egypt knew the presence of Rome in their daily lives. By combining a detailed analysis of the documents with geospatial tools, historians can draw a more complex picture of Roman society and culture in Egypt, one that might not be immediately apparent when looking at just one or two scraps of evidence, especially outside Egypt’s more well‐known cities, like Alexandria. Open‐access mapping tools like the Ancient World Mapping Center, UNC‐Chapel Hill, make this task easier. Author’s map based on data from the Ancient World Mapping Center, UNC‐Chapel Hill.

  This chapter looks at a few other people’s jobs, where their work took them, and at the entertaining ways they passed the time. What these individual stories will also help us describe is some sense of the nature of the economy before, during, and after the “vanishing” of Rome.

  10.1 Egypt beyond Its Borders

  There’s a good reason we’ve spent time looking at daily life on the ground in Roman Egypt in this and the previous chapter. “Egypt,” as a place, as an idea, held many Romans throughout the empire captive, even among people who had never disembarked at Alexandria or seen the Nile. This Roman fascination can be dated back as early as the first century BCE, the time when Augustus put an end to Hellenistic rule in Egypt and appropriated the land as his personal province. Egyptian‐style paintings, tombs built in the shape of pyramids, obelisks with hieroglyphics – all these began pouring into the Roman world and were devoured by Roman consumers.

  Porphyry and the economy of marble

  Specific locations in Egypt were especially prized for their luxury exports. That’s why, ever since the first and second centuries CE, the Roman government had taken imperial control of the quarries at Mt. Porphyrites, near modern Ghebel Dokhan. The stone mined from this mountain, porphyry, was a deep purple which, to Romans, evoked extravagance, power, and prestige. It appears in the floor of Rome’s Pantheon, built in the second century CE. By the third century CE, statues erected for members of the Rule of Four would be carved from it. In the fourth century, members of the imperial family would be buried in sarcophagi made of it. Constantine would
set a porphyry column at the center of his Forum in Constantinople as the ultimate urban crown jewel.

  Porphyry was not the only speciality stone used in construction, however. Since the first and second centuries CE, emperors controlled access to quarries in Roman Tunisia, where another uniquely colored marble called giallo antico was found. This yellowish stone, sometimes found in shades of orange and brown, also became one of the most prized elements in imperial buildings. Still others – like the purple‐veined though largely white marble from Roman Turkey known as pavonazzeto, or the dark green stone called serpentine from Sparta – contributed to a boom in Rome’s wide‐ranging marble economy. These materials were not just luxury construction goods. They played a role in conversations Romans had about their empire. Pavonazzeto had been used to depict statues of “barbarians” in Trajan’s Forum in Rome, for example. By using one of the finest imported marbles to depict “uncivilized,” conquered foreigners, the emperor was making a promise to his people about the greatness of the Roman military and the superiority of Roman culture.

  By Diocletian’s time, the price of working in these marbles was astounding. And, thanks to the Edict of Maximum Prices, specifically, we have some relative sense of the cost involved. Serpentine from Sparta cost 250 denarii per foot. Giallo antico and pavonazzeto, 200 denarii per foot. Those planning to build in basic white would have been working on a slightly more modest budget. The maximum price for white marble, according to Diocletian’s Edict, was set at 75 denarii per foot. These prices would have created a two‐tiered system of construction costs, but that doesn’t mean the more expensive marbles were unavailable to moderately wealthy Roman home‐owners or patrons of synagogues or churches. In Late Antiquity, a popular floor and wall style, called opus sectile, used shaved pieces of colorful marble to create a pastiche design that, while certainly elegant, must have been a fraction of the cost of buying each stone by the foot (Key Debates 10.1: A Marble Burial Box with a Heroic Tale: Signs of a “Middle Class”?).

  Key Debates 10.1 A Marble Burial Box witha Heroic Tale: Signs of a “Middle Class”?

  The phrase “middle class” makes pre‐modern historians bristle. “Class,” they point out, is a concept that originated in the nineteenth century, and it gained widespread use after the studies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two men interested in describing how a group’s access to the means of production shaped their self‐perceptions. Later, sociologist Max Weber would expand these ideas, emphasizing the importance of studying “social status” as well as economic “class.” Today, scholars are quite attuned to how culture shapes what it means to be “middle class.” Playing Friday night football or going to summer camp can be expressions of “class” values, too.

  Workers in Rome recognized that they belonged to a commercial group, something akin to our notion of “class.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean they had shared values, culture, and aspirations like we know them today. For traditional scholars, “middling class” is their preferred term to describe these non‐elite groups.

  But is all this fuss really necessary? Marble burials dating to the early third century CE suggest that there may be at least some benefits in using the modern term to talk about the ancient world. The clue comes from the practice of carving mythical stories on their faces.

  There were many ways to dispose of a beloved’s body in the Roman Empire. Cremation was one; ashes would be put on display in a family mausoleum. Inhumation was another, either through burial in a box, called a sarcophagus; or underground, sealed on a shelf in a network of caverns, called catacombs. There was no one way to be buried, and a deep, personal, spiritual meaning does not fully explain why some people made the choice the burial which they did. Status and one’s social networks – what your neighbors did, what was thought popular, what was trending – these factors that shaped burial customs, too. By the third century CE, intriguing patterns emerge.

  Sarcophagi were decorated with scenes of heroes and gods: the story of Orestes, who avenged his father’s gruesome murder; the story of Niobe, whose children are savagely killed by Apollo and Diana. Some scholars believe this repertoire of Greek myths gave people a chance to show off their knowledge of the plots, characters, and setting. In this interpretation, the sarcophagi speak to an elite, hyper‐educated class. (The fact that so many of the myths involve details ill‐suited to commemorating beloved family members is never addressed.)

  Could these sarcophagi be signs of “middle‐class culture,” however? Twenty‐nine sarcophagi from Rome have inscriptions confirming they belonged to senators. Of these, only five are decorated with myths. One conclusion to draw from this fact is that the people who bought these memorials did not do so because they were eager to show off their education. They did so because the pictures spoke to generic values they held dear: Orestes was a model son, Niobe was a grieving mom.

  If true, then the sarcophagus industry is one of the strongest indicators that there were “middle‐class values” in the third century CE. Workshops took “hackneyed motifs … long used in Rome’s art industry” and turned them into ready‐made objects for people who liked what they meant (Emmanuel Mayer, The Ancient Middle Classes [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012], p. 164).

  Egyptomania in Rome and Constantinople

  Egypt exported more than its luxury purple stone. Papyrus was also popular, and the land’s cultural heritage – old sphinxes and obelisks from the age of the pharaohs – were some of the most visible artifacts in the empire’s capitals. At both Rome and Constantinople, the major race tracks of the cities were decorated with Egyptian pieces. Two of these artifacts were placed there in the fourth century. In the middle of the fourth century, Emperor Constantius ordered the erection of an Egyptian obelisk on the spine of the Circus Maximus. By the end of the fourth century, Emperor Theodosius had arranged for an obelisk to be brought to the hippodrome of Constantinople. These sites were two of the most popular entertainment venues of the Late Antique empire (Exploring Culture 10.1: The Grain Industry, Free Bread, and the Bakers at Ostia; Figure 10.2). The presence of Egypt in the center of each race track must have made every game day feel like a trip to another world, especially for men, women, and children who had never set foot in Egypt.

  Figure 10.2 Founded in the third century BCE, Ostia was Rome’s harbor town, its connection to the Mediterranean, and a cosmopolitan city. Even as Rome built new shipping and warehouse infrastructure north of the city, at the site that would become Portus, Ostia remained a diverse town where the Late Antique elite lived alongside bakers, merchants, and other guilds of workmen and day‐laborers. Residents of Ostia knew how to enjoy themselves, too. The city was filled with taverns, many of which have been dated to the third century CE. These two rare artifacts also offer a glimpse at daily life. They are clay molds used for baking bread. Each is stamped with a design celebrating racing culture. The left shows a horseman and a four‐horse chariot, or quadriga (Ostia inventory number 3645). The right depicts a victorious racer on a chariot drawn by ten horses (Ostia inventory number 3530).

  Courtesy of the National Italian Photographic Archive, ICCD (Photo E27259A).

  Exploring Culture 10.1 The Grain Industry, Free Bread, and the Bakers at Ostia

  Since the Roman Republic, the people of the city of Rome imported more grain than they produced at home. Egypt’s annexation in 27 BCE ensured that there would be a steady supply of ships bringing this raw material to the capital. The Prefect of the Grain, the praefectus annonae, managed the government office overseeing its distribution. But there were also lesser officials, stationed throughout the empire, who oversaw the local transport of this vital commodity.

  A receipt from Egypt, dated to the period of Diocletian (284 CE), reveals the seriousness with which three mid‐level workers in the empire’s food department took their job. Having successfully delivered their goods, Aurelius Isidorus, Aurelius Asclepiades, and Aurelius Plutinus wrote to the Roman oversight official in Oxyrhynchus: “We
present to you the aforesaid authentic receipt and a copy of it which we beg you to sign in order that we too may have the security of the said authentic receipt” (Select Papyri, no. 426, LCL trans. by A. Hunt and C. Edgar [1934]).

  With the founding of Constantinople in 330 CE, all grain shipments from Egypt would be sent, for logistical reasons, to the capital on the Bosporus. Rome’s grain supply, by contrast, would be hauled from the shores of North Africa. It entered the capital at the imperial harbor, Portus, and its sister‐town, Ostia, where it would be sorted, stored, and taken to the city.

  At the warehouses and wharves of Portus and Ostia, some grain would be set aside for a lottery, to be distributed to citizens fortunate enough to hold a ticket. This system likely supplemented, not covered, a family’s food expenses for a month. If the Writers of the Imperial History [SHA] can be trusted, it was Emperor Aurelian (r. 270–275 CE) who became a political hero to those who depended on the lottery. “Among the various ways in which, with the aid of the gods, we have benefited the Roman commonwealth, there is nothing in which I take greater pride than that by adding an ounce I have increased every kind of grain for the city” (Life of Aurelian 47.2, LCL trans. by D. Magie [1932]). The balance of Rome’s imports were sold on the private market.