Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  The Great Persecution of AD 298–313 was only the last of many. It was triggered when pagan priests blamed failed omens on the presence of profane persons at a ritual attended by Diocletian and Galerius in AD 298. Diocletian ordered all public servants to perform sacrifice to the pagan gods (considered sacrilege for a Christian) on pain of flogging and dismissal. Not until AD 303, however, was a full-scale pogrom unleashed. Imperial edicts were posted ordering the surrender for burning of all copies of scripture, the dismantling of churches, the banning of Christian meetings, and loss of rank and denial of legal rights to all Christians. The edicts gave the green light to reactionary local officials and urban mobs. In Nicomedia, the eastern capital, the local church was destroyed, the bishop executed, and the imperial household purged. Eusebius kept an accurate record of martyrdoms for his diocese in Palestine: one execution under the first edict; two under the third; one under the fourth; and eight more when six young men presented themselves shouting out that they too were Christian. Overall, when the authorities attempted to implement the edicts forcefully, while some Christians recanted, handed over scriptures, and made sacrifice, many refused and were imprisoned, sometimes tortured, occasionally executed. The Church was left with a catalogue of martyrs to parade. Though many fair-weather friends departed during the storm – leaving a legacy of deep division among Christians – the Church emerged defiant. The Great Persecution was another of Diocletian’s failures.

  Large-scale, top-down, empire-wide persecutions were rare. That of Diocletian may indicate the state’s insecurity as it attempted to drive through reforms which attacked whole sections of civil society. The persecution created an enemy within and an intimidating, witch-hunting atmosphere. The potential effects were various: to assuage public anxiety in a period of turmoil by placating angry pagan gods; to provide scapegoats, castigate deviance, and encourage uniformity and obedience; above all, to expose the actually disloyal and terrorize the potentially disloyal. It seems improbable that Christians were a real threat. Christian pacifism has only rarely been a discouragement to military service, and the Church hierarchy certainly did not have subversive political aims, merely an interest in protecting itself and enlarging the social space it occupied. Certainly, the Church was a large, well-organized, empire-wide institution, with bishops meeting regularly in provincial capitals, and metropolitan bishops in major centres emerging as powerful figures, the effective leaders of tens of thousands of Christians in places like Rome, Carthage, Antioch and Alexandria. But if, in some sense, the Church was ‘a state within a state’, that need not weaken the cohesion, loyalty and political will of the Roman body-politic. Indeed, it was a potential ally, and, ironically, more so after the Great Persecution than before. The Church had demonstrated its strength. It had shown that it could not be broken by direct state assault. What the moderation of local authorities, the resistance of the Christian communities, and the relative lack of anti-Christian pogroms in the cities had revealed was that central government was weak and the Church strong. The persecutors found themselves opposed by a powerful public opinion, including sections of the military-bureaucratic complex itself.

  Its bargaining position strengthened, the Church was now poised to cut a deal with the state. It was clearly the largest single ideological apparatus in the Roman Empire, and the state could hardly expect to function effectively without its co-operation. On the other hand, if the state became the patron of the Church, a great network of preachers and adherents might be converted into enthusiasts for secular authority. Though a minority overall, Christians were strategically concentrated in the towns, always the locus of power in the ancient world. Their theology’s distinctive combination of universal appeal and monotheistic intolerance meshed well with the centralizing aims of the Late Roman state, allowing Christian emperors to demonize pagan usurpers as enemies of God. Moreover, the Christian vision of a heavenly hierarchy seemed to mirror, and thereby legitimize, the imperial order on earth. At the very least, being ‘the heart in a heartless world’, Christianity offered personal solace in a world full of fear, giving many men the will to carry on, and some the courage to fight heroically in the empire’s defence. Constantine’s religious revolution, in short, was an event of substance and great moment. Within a few decades of the Milvian Bridge, the Church had been transformed into what it would remain for more than a millennium: the principal ideological apparatus of the medieval states of Europe.

  The Church embraced by Constantine in AD 312 was, however, a flawed instrument. Always split into theological factions, the Great Persecution had hammered wedges deep into the cracks. The ‘Catholic’ moderates of the North African Church were willing to readmit those who had caved in – those who had handed over copies of scripture to be burnt (thus traditores). The ‘Donatist’ radicals were not. The Catholic party was that of the government, the urban elite, and the great landowners. The Donatists were a party of village priests and the rural poor. The left-wing of the party included bands of militants who attacked landlords and debt-collectors. The conflict between the rival churches erupted over a bitterly contested election to the vacant metropolitan see of Carthage. The emperor was invited to arbitrate. Constantine had little choice. If his vision of a powerful, united, conservative Church working for the defence of the empire was to be realized, orthodoxy and obedience had to be imposed; otherwise, so far from being an ally, the Church might become a vehicle for the empire’s subversion from within. Henceforward, church councils were regularly convened, often with the emperor chairing in person, in an effort to heal schism. The first, the Council of Rome in AD 313, ruled against the Donatists. The second, the larger Council of Arles in AD 314, attended by 33 bishops, confirmed this ruling. It made little difference: Donatist agitation continued, there was rioting in Carthage, and in AD 321 the authority of the church councils was enforced by state repression. Church and State became, for the first time, allies in the persecution of ‘heretics’. Donatism yielded a second gallery of martyrs. The rift in the North African Church deepened.

  In the struggle against paganism, by contrast, the emperor enjoyed further spectacular success. The campaign of AD 312 had delivered the West to Constantine and the Church. That of AD 324 delivered the East. Relations with Licinius had steadily deteriorated. There had been a flurry of fighting in the Balkans in AD 316. Constantine had appointed consuls without the approval of his ostensible colleague. Licinius had resumed the persecution of Christians within his territory. When Constantine felt ready to launch a full-scale invasion, the western bishops were summoned to give their blessing, the emperor was provided with a special campaign tent to serve as a portable chapel, and the army marched bearing the Labarum, a sacred imperial standard emblazoned with the Chi-Rho, with its own guard of 50 picked men. Licinius, by contrast, chose to fight under the totems of the old pagan gods.

  They did him little good. Like the campaign of AD 312, that of AD 324 was a Constantinian blitzkrieg. A series of victories gave Constantine’s army control of the Balkans, and when he immediately ferried his men across to Asia Minor, Licinius sued for peace. His surrender was accepted, but he was promptly executed on the victor’s orders. Constantine – the first Christian emperor – was master of the entire Roman world. Political authority was restored to a single, supreme, military dictator. The empire was again a unified war economy. The reformed military-bureaucratic complex of Diocletian dominated civil society. Paganism withered in the shadow of Constantine’s Church. The Late Roman counter-revolution was complete.

  All that glisters is not gold, however. The reforms of the soldier-emperors – Gallienus, Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian, Constantine – had bought the empire time. But the price, largely hidden from history, certainly for long unpaid, was high. The siphoning of surplus upwards – from towns, estates and farms – sustained the military-bureaucratic complex only by consuming the economic foundations of the empire. The contradictions of imperial decline were not resolved. On the contrary, the stronger the stat
e, the more efficient the exploitation; and the more efficient the exploitation, the faster the decay. The Roman Empire was being hollowed out.

  Town and country in decline: the House of Constantine and the House of Valentinian, AD 337–378

  Let us recall a story told earlier. In the winter of AD 187–188, a man called Maternus, whom the ancient sources describe as a ‘deserter’ and ‘bandit’, set out for Rome at the head of an improvised army with the intention of assassinating Commodus and replacing him as emperor. Such was the ‘insecurity throughout Gaul and Spain’ and the ‘countless numbers’ mobilized that a major military operation was necessary to suppress the revolt. Maternus himself was betrayed, captured and beheaded.

  About 20 years later, in AD 206–207, we hear that a man called Bulla or Felix was at large in Italy at the head of a band of some 600 men. For two years he ‘continued to plunder Italy under the very noses of the emperor and a multitude of soldiers’. He is reputed to have sent a message to the Roman authorities saying, ‘Feed your slaves to stop them becoming bandits.’ And later, after capture, when asked by his Roman interrogator, the Praetorian Prefect Papinian, ‘Why did you become a bandit?’, to have answered, ‘Why are you a prefect?’(7)

  Scattered references to banditry pepper ancient accounts of the anarchy. Philip the Arab (AD 244–249) stationed units in Italy as a defence against ‘robbers and pirates’. Probus (AD 276–282) campaigned against a bandit-chief called Lydius, whose army of peasant outlaws had evicted the Roman authorities from much of the countryside of Lycia and Pamphylia in southern Turkey. The Isaurians, whose mountain territory lay immediately to the east, were also, it seems, out of control. The ancient sources demonize the Isaurians as bandits, pirates and serial rebels, reporting numerous campaigns against them down the centuries. Diocletian, in AD 284–285, ordered the suppression of rebels known as bagaudae. This is the first of many references to bagaudae in the ancient sources. They mounted a series of rebellions in Gaul, Spain and possibly Britain between the late 3rd and mid 5th centuries AD. Even when not specifically referred to, we can sometimes assume their identity. Ammianus Marcellinus, for example, our best historical source for the 4th century AD, refers mysteriously to ‘many battles fought in various parts of Gaul’ early in the reign of Valentinian (AD 364–375), but these he considers ‘less worthy of narration’ than fights with Germanic tribesmen, it being ‘superfluous to describe them, both because their outcome led to nothing worthwhile, and because it is unbecoming to prolong a history with ignoble details.’(8) Here, surely, are bagaudae waging guerrilla war: something likely to bore and irritate an aristocratic army officer and military historian like Ammianus.

  Later, in the 5th century, references to bagaudae become frequent and explicit. Risings are recorded in Gaul in AD 407–417, 435–437, 442 and perhaps 448; in Spain in 441, 443, 449, 454 and 456; and possibly in Britain in 408. These references imply revolts serious enough to warrant intervention by imperial troops – and therefore notice from historians. The further implication is that banditry was extensive and endemic in much of the countryside of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century. Eric Hobsbawm has argued that rural ‘social banditry’ is, in fact, a normal state of affairs in pre-capitalist class societies where those who work the land are exploited by landlords and governments. Mostly it exists only as a nagging irritant, for the bandits rarely amount to more than one in a thousand of the rural population, and a typical band numbers no more than 10 or 20 hiding out in some remote spot and supporting itself by preying on big estates, tax collectors and rich travellers. Recruited largely from the rural underclass of escaped slaves and serfs, army deserters and fugitives from the law, and impoverished crofters unable to make a living on the land, the bandits still remained part of peasant society, enjoying a measure of protection and support – even sometimes being lionized as champions of the poor. As such, if conditions in the countryside worsened considerably, and if the state’s repressive power weakened, social banditry could flare into peasant revolt.

  Bulla’s two recorded statements reveal radical consciousness. Occasional references to the practices of bagaudae reveal the same. The senator and poet Rutilius Namatianus records that his relative Exuperantius, in suppressing bagaudic revolt in Gaul in AD 417, had ‘restored the laws and brought back liberty, and did not allow the Bretons to be slaves of their own domestics’.(9) The world, it seemed, had momentarily been turned upside down. It was not law and liberty as such that needed restoring, of course, only the law and liberty of the ruling class. That much is clear from another reference. A comedy written by an unknown author around the same date makes jokes about life beside the Loire, where men live by popular laws, peasants make speeches, capital sentences are pronounced under an oak tree and recorded on bones, and ‘anything goes’: a satire, apparently, not on a world without law or liberty, but on one without landlords, tax-collectors and police.

  A similar spirit was at large in the countryside of Roman North Africa. Here wandering bands of poor peasants were inspired by the simple rural piety of the Donatist Church. Known as circumcelliones in reference to the shrines of martyrs where they gathered, they had their own communal organization, collective rituals, and distinctive style of dress. Many courted martyrdom – even a bitter enemy like St Augustine conceded that ‘they lived as robbers but died as circumcelliones and were honoured as martyrs’.(10) Sometimes, crazed by religious enthusiasm, whole groups would commit suicide by jumping off a cliff or setting fire to themselves. Others plundered villas and churches. Some organized collective resistance to debt-collectors. One source records bands of circumcelliones forcing rich men out of their carriages and making them run behind while their slaves took their seats. The combination of social and religious radicalism attested by the ancient writers appears to make the circumcelliones precursors of the millenarian sects of the Middle Ages.

  If rural banditry and revolt were as endemic as they seem in the Late Roman Empire, it is not difficult to suggest reasons. In AD 238 the villagers of Scaptopara in Thrace petitioned the emperor to complain that soldiers and officials attending an annual festival nearby regularly demanded accommodation and supplies without payment. So heavy was the burden that many villagers had abandoned their ancestral farms and let their fields return to waste. Earlier complaints had prompted the provincial governor to issue an edict ordering that the villagers be left alone. But it had provided only temporary respite, and soon the problem was as bad as ever. Little wonder: soldiers and officials took their lead from their masters. Two contemporary historians, Dio Cassius and Herodian, describe the financial ruthlessness of the military monarchy and its consequences. ‘Nobody in the world should have money but I,’ Dio has Caracalla (AD 211–217) exclaim, ‘so that I may bestow it on the soldiers.’ Later, facing the censure of his mother for excessive expenditure, he is said to have exhibited his sword and declared, ‘Be of good cheer, mother, for as long as we have this, we shall not run short of money.’(11) Herodian compares the ravages of Maximinus Thrax (AD 235–238) to a barbarian invasion: ‘Maximinus, after reducing most of the notable houses to poverty … began to lay hands on the public treasuries. He expropriated whatever public moneys there were – funds which had been collected for the grain-supply, or for distribution to the people, or earmarked for shows or festivals. Dedications in temples, statues of gods, honours to heroes, and whatever embellishment there was of a public nature, or adornment of a city, or material out of which money could be made – he melted all of it.’(12) Dio and Herodian lament especially the spoliation of aristocratic estates, but, in speaking up for the property rights of their class, they illuminate the exploitation of all. Yet more informative are surviving Roman law codes.

  The Theodosian Code (published in the East in AD 438) was a fairly comprehensive record of laws issued in the previous 40 years, and a more patchy record of laws from the time of Constantine onwards. The Justinianic Code (AD 529) and the Justinianic Digest (AD 533) superseded the earli
er code, eliminating obsolete laws and amending, abbreviating and reordering those that remained in force; thus, like the Theodosian Code, these documents also preserve many laws dating back to the early 4th century AD. The law codes are key sources for official policies, the detail of administration, the social structure, and aspects of everyday life in town and country. It is from the law codes that we learn that many of the peasants had become coloni: though terms and conditions varied from place to place, generally, it seems, this meant they were serfs, that is, men who were tied to the service of a particular estate. For the state, this had the advantage that taxes and labour services could be more easily levied. For the landlords, it denied tenants their principal means of redress – seeking a better tenancy elsewhere – and thus allowed the rate of exploitation to be ratcheted up. But if the law, in recording the rise of serfdom, implies growing oppression in the Late Roman countryside, it also, in its frequent references to agri deserti, alerts us to one of the fatal consequences of this. Agri deserti meant ‘abandoned fields’: land that it had once been profitable to cultivate now too burdened with tax, rent, debt and labour service to be viable. A.H.M. Jones, the great historian of the Late Roman Empire, estimated that perhaps the poorest 20 per cent or so of land went out of use. He argues that, while some land may have been abandoned due to shortage of agricultural labour or in some areas to insecurity, in the main it was caused by the high and increasing rate of taxation, which reduced the net return on marginal land to vanishing point. Archaeology supports the notion of a slow-working agricultural depression in the Late Empire, beginning as early as the 2nd century in places, becoming more widespread in the 3rd, gathering strength through the 4th, and bringing whole regions to ruin in the 5th.