The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  It is possible to see the network of cities as the major element of Roman society, more important even than imperial central government. By modern standards, indeed, the empire was lightly governed, with at the most some 30,000 civilian central government officials, who were concentrated in imperial and provincial capitals (though this excludes lesser state employees, such as guardsmen, clerks, messengers, ox-drivers of the public post, who could have been ten times as numerous). When we add to this all the evidence we have for the inefficiency and poor record-keeping of Roman government, plus the time needed to reach outlying provinces of the huge empire (to travel from Rome to northern Gaul took a minimum of three weeks; an army would take much longer), we might wonder how the Roman world held together at all. But it did; a complex set of overlapping structures and presumptions created a coherent political system. Let us look at some of its elements in turn: the civil administration, the senate, the legal system, the army, and the tax system which funded all these. The shared values and rituals of the Roman political élite will then be discussed in Chapter 3, along with the growing importance of a new political structure, the church hierarchy.

  The administration of each half of the empire was controlled by the emperor, the central political figure of what was, in principle, an uncompromising autocracy. Some emperors, indeed, imposed themselves politically: in the fourth century Constantine (306-37) and Valentinian I (364-75 in the West) are the most obvious examples, to whom we should add Julian (360-63), whose dramatic and failed attempt to reverse the Christianization set in motion by Constantine has fascinated historians ever since; fifth-century emperors were less impressive, but Justinian in the sixth (527-65 in the East) was as dominant as any of his predecessors, as we shall see in Chapter 4. But not all emperors wanted to do much ruling; they could simply live their lives as the embodiment of public ceremonial, as did, for example, the emperors of the first half of the fifth century. Even if they were active, aiming at an interventionist politics and choosing their major subordinates, they could find themselves blocked by poor information and the complex rules of hierarchy from making a real impact (the most active emperors usually had a military background, without direct experience in civil government). Not that most of the major officials of the empire were full-time bureaucrats, either; even the most assiduous politicians were only intermittently in office. The empire, in a sense, was run by amateurs. But the group of amateurs at least had shared values, and family experience in many cases as well, particularly in the West, where there were more old and rich senatorial families, who were often active in politics in the fourth and fifth centuries. And their subordinates were real career officials, who committed themselves to the administration for life. It is that network of office-holders which gave government its coherence. That, and the stability of the offices themselves. The four praetorian prefectures, each with responsibility for a quarter of the empire (and with a hierarchy of provincial governors beneath them), the six major bureaux of central government and the urban prefectures of Rome and Constantinople all had their own traditions and loyalties, going back in some cases for centuries. John Lydos, who wrote an account of government in the 550s, described the praetorian prefecture of the East in which he had served, tracing the office back, impossibly, to Romulus the founder of Rome; he was very loyal to his department, for all its inadequacy and inconsistency, and he saw the whole of imperial history through its ups and downs. One had to put a good deal of effort in to change the entrenched practices and rituals of bureaucracies like these, and not many people did (one was Justinian’s right-hand man, the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian (531-41), who was thus predictably John Lydos’ bête noire).

  One instance of a leading career politician was Petronius Maximus (lived 396-455), from the powerful senatorial family of the Petronii. He seems to have entered the senate of Rome with the ceremonial office of praetor in 411, with particularly lavish praetorian games; he was a tribune in 415, and comes sacrarum largitionum for the West, one of the main financial officials of the empire, in 416-19, starting that is to say at the age of twenty - young, given the importance of the post. He was urban prefect of Rome in 420-21 and again at some point in the next couple of decades (most of these dates are approximate); in 439-41 he was praetorian prefect for Italy, probably for the second time. He was twice consul, a major honour but without formal duties, and had the coveted title of patricius by 445. Unusually, for a career administrator, he was briefly emperor, in 455, for two months before he was killed. In a letter a decade or so later, Sidonius Apollinaris speculates about how much Maximus must have regretted the hourly regulated rituals and responsibilities of imperial office, given the contrast with the ‘leisure’ (otium) of being a senator. This seems surprising at first sight, but ‘leisure’ is partly just a manner of speaking: Maximus had long been a major political dealer, with a huge clientele (as Sidonius himself says) and imperial ambitions. We must nonetheless recognize that in the four decades of his political career he only seems to have held formal office for around ten years; he had plenty of time for otium as well, which indeed contemporary authors, time and again, describe as one of the characteristics of senatorial élites.

  The senate had its own identity, partly separate from the imperial bureaucracy; indeed, in the West it was even physically separate, for the government was no longer in Rome. It was the theoretical governing body of the empire, as of the Roman republic four centuries before, and although the senate was by now no longer a reality, it still represented the height of aspiration for any citizen. It brought with it many fiscal and political privileges, although it was expensive to enter and participate in, given the games and other ceremonies senators had to fund. It had no formal governmental function, but high officials became senators as of right; furthermore, by the early fifth century, only the highest of the three grades of senator, the illustres, were regarded as full members of the senate, and the title of illustris was only available to officials and direct imperial protégés. The senate was thus tightly connected to govern ment, and expanded as the administration expanded in the fourth century; but it was nonetheless separate, with its own rituals and seniority. It represented aristocratic wealth, privilege and superiority, and, although membership of it was not technically heritable, in practice the same families dominated the senate, in Rome at least, throughout the fourth and fifth centuries. All the male heirs of an illustris were anyway at least clarissimi, the lowest senatorial grade, which involved at least some privileges even after full senatorial eligibility contracted. And all the grades seem to have been regarded as nobilis, ‘aristocratic’, in late Roman parlance. This close but sideways relation to government has some parallels with that of the House of Lords in modern Britain, both before and after the reforms of 1999.

  The existence of this effectively hereditary aristocracy was a key feature of the empire. Not because it dominated government; most leading bureaucrats were not of senatorial origin, even if they became senators later (Maximus was in that sense atypical) but rather because it dominated the tone of government. The Roman empire was unusual in ancient and medieval history in that its ruling class was dominated by civilian, not (or not only) military, figures. Only China’s mandarinate offers any real parallel. Senators regarded themselves very highly, as the ‘best part of the human race’ in the well-known words of the orator Symmachus (d. 402); their criteria for this self-satisfaction did not rely on military or physical prowess, but on birth, wealth and a shared culture. Birth was important (Sidonius could be contemptuous of a powerful rival, Paeonius, the praetorian prefect for Gaul, because he was ‘of municipal origin’, that is, from a curial, not a senatorial family), although very long ancestry was less vital; even the Anicii, by far the leading Roman family in the fourth and fifth centuries, only traced their family back to the late second century. Wealth went without saying: no one was politically important in the Roman world (apart from a few high-minded bishops) without being rich. One needed wealth to get any
where in the civil administration, as both bribes for appointments and the maintenance of a patronage network cost money, but once one was important, the perks of office, both legal and illegal, were huge. In the army, too, although it was more open to merit, all successful generals ended up rich. And the independently wealthy families of the senate of Rome, the Anicii, Petronii, Caeonii and half a dozen others, had estates throughout southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa and elsewhere, ‘scattered across almost the whole Roman world’, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus said of the leading politician Petronius Probus in the 370s: these may have been the richest private landowners of all time. When two Roman aristocrats, Melania and Pinianus, got religion around 405 and sold off all their land, which provided 120,000 solidi (around 900 pounds of gold) a year in rents, it wrecked the property market, according to Melania’s saint’s life. The senatorial hyper-rich were only in Rome, however; in Constantinople senators were from the provincial élites of the East, and operated on a smaller scale. Throughout the empire, in fact, there were provincial élites, the leaders of which had senatorial status and were in line for public office; they were locally powerful, but could not match the Anicii. Sidonius was an example, and indeed the élites of Gaul seem to have been a particularly coherent group.

  A shared culture perhaps marked the Roman senatorial and provincial aristocracies most, for it was based on a literary education. Every western aristocrat had to know Virgil by heart, and many other classical Latin authors, and be able to write poetry and turn a polished sentence in prose; in the East it was Homer. The two traditions, in Latin and Greek, did not have much influence on each other by now, but they were very dense and highly prized. There was a pecking-order based on the extent of this cultural capital. Ammianus reports scornfully that senators in Rome, the supposed crème de la crème, only really read Juvenal, a racy and satirical poet, so by implication not the difficult texts; whether or not this was true, it was a real insult. Conversely, literary experts, such as Ausonius in the West and Libanios (d. c. 393) in the East, could rise fast and gain imperial patronage and office simply because of their writing - in Libanios’ case so fast that he was accused of magic - although both were already landowners of at least medium wealth. The emperor Julian in his attempt to reverse Christianization tried to force Christian intellectuals to teach only the Bible, not the pagan classics, thus enclosing them in a ghetto of inferior prose. This failed, but the assumptions behind such an enactment clearly show the close relationship between traditional culture and social status. Some Christian hard-liners responded by rejecting Virgil, but this failed too: by the fifth century the aristocracy knew both Virgil (or Homer) and the Bible, and might add to these some of the new Christian theologians too, Augustine in the West or Basil of Caesarea in the East, both of whom were good stylists.

  It is this culture which makes the late Roman empire, or at least its élites, unusually accessible to us, for the writings of many of these aristocrats survive: elegant letters or speeches for the most part, but also poetry, theology, or, in the case of the fifth-century senator Palladius, an estate-management manual. Roman literary culture used to be regarded as the high point of civilization; this belief, inherited from the Renaissance, perhaps reached its peak in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English public-school tradition, in which Virgil (and indeed Juvenal, by now seen as a more difficult author) was regarded as a basic training even for the government of India, not to speak of an academic career. This belief is less strong now; few academics know enough Latin to read Virgil (outside Italy), and even fewer politicians. It is thus easier today to see Roman literary culture as an attribute of power, rather than virtue; Roman politicians were at least as cynical and greedy as their successors, and not obviously better at ruling. But it is important to recognize its all-pervasiveness; in all the cities of the empire, even local office was linked to at least some version of this education. The shared knowledge and values that it inculcated was one of the elements that held the empire together, and indeed made the empire remarkably homogeneous, as not only its literature but its surviving architecture and material culture show. It must finally be said that, although the Roman world left a dense legacy of institutions and assumptions to its early medieval successors, a literary education was not part of that, except in the increasingly separate career structure of the church. The culture of post-Roman aristocracies instead became military, based on the use of arms and horses, and as a result we know much less about it from the inside.

  Roman law was another intellectual system that was, in principle, the same everywhere, and it acted as a unifying force. It consisted of imperial legislation, which was very extensive in the fourth to sixth centuries, and a network of tracts by earlier Roman jurists, which represented a distillation of case-law precedents and the workings-out of legal principles. To master this properly required a special training, at the law-schools of Rome, Beirut or (after 425) Constantinople, although all education involved an element of rhetoric, essential for court advocacy. Alypius spent time training at the Rome law-school in the early 380s before going with Augustine to work in Milan (where both were converted to a more thoroughgoing Christianity, and switched their career path to the church); Augustine, by contrast, although trained in rhetoric, makes it clear in his writings that he did not feel himself to be a legal expert, for his education was not specific enough. Law was not in fact at all easy to master before Theodosius II had imperial laws collected into the Theodosian Code in 429-38. Justinian revised and expanded the code (twice) in 528-34, and had juristic literature of the second and third centuries excerpted and systematized in the Digest in 530-33 as well. The Theodosian Code remained a point of reference in the post-Roman West, even though the laws of the post-Roman kingdoms were different; Justinian’s corpus survived as the law of Byzantium, and was separately revived in the West in the twelfth century. We must, however, be careful about what such a commitment to law means. The complexity of this legal system was such that experts (iurisconsulti) were needed in every court, and sometimes just to draw up documents, but they may not always have been available or been fully reliable if they were. Even if legal help was accessible, courts did not necessarily judge justly, and the rich often benefited from judicial corruption and patronage, as we saw at the start of this chapter and as many sources confirm. In Egypt, papyrus documents recording the settlement of civil disputes in the fourth to sixth centuries show a strong tendency to avoid courts altogether, given their huge expense and danger, and to go directly to private arbitration.

  It would be tempting to reduce the law to its criminal dimension, with its recourse to torture, and conclude that the legal system was in practice simply an instrument of heavy-handed state coercion, the work of a public power that relied on terror because it did not have the personnel to dominate daily life in any detail. Such a temptation would be largely justified, but all the same the law was important. Egyptian arbitrations may have avoided the courts, but they refer frequently to legislation and legal terminology. Augustine was not expert in the law, but he sought to know it, for example writing to the iurisconsultus Eustochius for rulings. An interesting letter survives from Africa of around 400 in which an unnamed landowner chides a neighbour and former friend, Salvius, for tyrannizing the former’s tenants: ‘Is there one law for advocates, another for ex-lawyers? Or one equity for Rome, another for Mateur?’ Salvius, an advocate from (we assume) Mateur, would presumably have thought so, and his illegalities are standard. But his correspondent had been a lawyer too; Salvius had taught him the law of tenancy, and it was this, together with the law of inheritance and possession, which the letter invokes in detail, before offering a deal. Law and its imagery were all-pervading in the empire, and we could indeed suppose that the setpiece denunciations of judicial corruption in our sources at least showed high expectations.

  The Roman army was much larger than the civil administration, and was always the empire’s major expense: in 400 there were some ha
lf a million soldiers, give or take a hundred thousand. These were mostly on the northern Rhine and Danube frontiers, and on the eastern frontier with Persia (the long southern border faced the Sahara, and was less vulnerable), but there were detachments in every province, acting as garrisons and as ad-hoc police. It was of course their existence that made it possible for provincial élites to remain civilian; private armies were very rare before the empire broke up. Conversely, armies were capable of imposing their own candidates for emperor, all the more easily because they held most of the weapons. This had been common in the third century, but was much rarer in the fourth; it revived in the West in the final years of empire in the fifth, but in the East there were no successful coups until 602. Even without coups against the emperor, however, army leaders remained important in politics, and several weak emperors (such as Honorius, western emperor 395-423) had military strongmen ruling for them, who could succeed each other by violence. There was a sense in which the office of emperor was more military than the civilian bureaucracy around him, and emperors were closer to the military than to the civilian hierarchy. Generals were more likely than senior administrators to have risen from nowhere, especially if they came from frontier regions, as was very common; the Rhine frontier and the Balkan frontier in particular were heavily militarized societies, with less and less social distance between the Roman and the ‘barbarian’ sides of the border, as we shall see later in this chapter. This did not make them so very different from the civilian élites, as long as they were successful, as they could end up with senatorial position, civilian clients and a literary education for their children. But military leaders were less dedicated to expensive prestige buildings or the patronage of games, and senators regularly looked down on them for their lack of culture. Soldiers also moved around more than civilians did. The historian Ammianus (d. c. 395), a Greek-speaker who wrote in Latin, the language of the army, was an ex-soldier who had served on both the Persian and the Rhine frontiers, as well as spending much time in Rome.