Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  The evidence for most parts of the empire remains anecdotal and impressionistic, but that for Roman Britain is based on systematic surveys of excavation data. A sample of 78 Romano-British villas revealed a steady climb to a peak in occupation around AD 325 – the true ‘golden age’ of villa civilization in Britain, when many sites had been expanded into great country houses with suites of dining-rooms, bedrooms and baths opening on to colonnaded gardens. Thereafter, however, there was decline: some villas had been abandoned as early as AD 350, more than a third by 375, and well over two-thirds by the end of the century. Around AD 400, in fact, all building-work had ceased on villa sites, and within a decade or so elite occupation had been completely terminated. Occasional claims for ‘continuity of occupation’ turn out to be unfounded: at a handful of sites there is evidence that former country houses were converted into working farms; there is not a single site in the entire British archaeological record where elite occupation at a villa can be demonstrated as late as AD 425.

  Decline is also apparent among the villages, hamlets and farmsteads where the Romano-British peasantry dwelt. A survey of 177 sites spread randomly across the country revealed that, between a 2nd century AD peak and the late 4th century, some 37 per cent of settlements were abandoned. A more detailed survey of 317 sites in the Severn Valley and Welsh Marches region showed a drop of 27 per cent over a similar period. Shortly after AD 400, moreover, virtually all Romano-British rural sites appear to have been abandoned; only gradually over the succeeding decades does a new rural settlement pattern emerge in the archaeological record. All of the evidence – increasing peasant resistance, complaints about exploitation, references to agri deserti, the end of the villas, the abandonment of native rural settlements – confirms the impression of a generalized and steadily worsening agricultural depression in the Late Roman Empire.

  Little wonder, then, that the decurionate was in crisis. The law codes list a series of edicts making service on local town councils compulsory and imposing stiff sanctions on absentees. Traditionally the gentry – legally defined by regular censuses as men endowed with estates and other property of a certain minimum value – had served willingly on local councils, often competing energetically for elected office and distinguishing themselves in acts of public benefaction. The provincial towns of the 2nd century AD, with their basilicas, temples, baths and fine houses, were monuments to the civic-mindedness of this class. But as the military monarchy battened on to civil society, as taxes, requisitions and corvées fell more heavily, as resentment and resistance mounted, public service became more burden than honour, and many men withdrew, eschewing politics, administration and the law, retreating into the country, where they managed their estates and embellished their villas. The state pursued them there, demanding a return to duty. When some avoided service by joining the army, the civil service or the clergy, the law thundered against them: such persons were to be tracked down, dragged back, forced to perform their municipal duties. Centrally appointed town governors – curatores – were dispatched to administer the municipalities. Boards of ten – decemprimi – were formed of the leading local notables – principales – and given authority to impose on their more junior colleagues and enforce attendance and service. But edicts and orders from on high constitute intentions, not reality, and the archaeology of the towns of the Roman Empire argues for failure and a steady decline in urban life.

  Across the empire, the great age of urban public building came to an end with a final flourish in the early 3rd century AD. At Leptis Magna in Libya are to be found the ruins of some two dozen major public buildings erected between the reigns of Augustus and Severus. Every imaginable type of Roman public architecture is represented: forums, basilicas, temples, baths, theatres, amphitheatres, circuses, monumental arches, public fountains and shopping malls. The ruins are dominated by the Augustan-period theatre, the Hadrianic public-baths, and the imperial forum, colonnaded street and harbour-works of Septimius Severus. Then it all stopped. Almost nothing was built thereafter, with the notable exceptions of a circuit of defensive walls enclosing most (but not all) of the existing city in c. AD 250–350, and the conversion of some pagan temples into Christian churches in the later 4th century AD. Leptis, moreover, is typical. Except for refurbishments, conversions and defence-works, urban building virtually ceased in most provincial towns after the early 3rd century AD. The evidence from 17 Romano-British towns has been collated and analysed. It reveals that the towns were growing from the late 1st to the early 3rd century AD, with heavy expenditure on public buildings in AD 75–150, followed by the construction of elite town-houses in AD 150–225. The middle years of the 3rd century, however, were a time of crisis, with a collapse in civil construction and diversion of resources into building town walls. There was some recovery in the early 4th century, but this was limited and faltering, with no return to the boom conditions of the 2nd century, and virtually all construction work had ceased by AD 400. Population levels mirrored this decline in building: they reached a peak in the early 3rd century, retained this level for about a century, but then declined dramatically – down more than a quarter by AD 350, more than a half by AD 375, and collapsing to a mere eighth of peak levels by the end of the century.

  We cannot know how successful were the Late Roman state’s efforts to dragoon reluctant gentry into taking their seats in local council chambers. What we do know is that the infrastructure of the towns in which those chambers lay was degrading from the early 3rd century onwards. Indeed, in the course of the 4th century, most towns in the Western Roman Empire lost their distinctive urban characteristics. Typically, by c. AD 400, a Late Roman ‘town’ comprised a circuit of strong walls, often enclosing only a small inner enclave, within which most public buildings were in a state of ruin, and most private houses abandoned or taken over by lower-class ‘squatters’. Often there is evidence for some sort of administrative centre, one or two churches, a few grand residences, perhaps a large warehouse or two, a small garrison of soldiers, and a much-reduced plebeian population of artisans, traders and labourers. Heaps of stinking refuse and sewage frequently clogged the empty houses, yards and back-streets of abandoned districts. Populations of a few hundred were probably common.

  Town and country were in crisis. Municipal aristocrats rarely came to town, were no longer interested in public building, and more often than not failed to maintain their residences. But at their country seats, too, there were problems: not at first perhaps, but certainly from the mid 4th century onwards, landowners discovered that the burdens on estates meant dwindling returns. Soon the great country houses were too expensive to maintain: frescoes flaked and were not replaced; mosaics were holed and badly patched; the water-channel got blocked and the bath-house ran dry. Beyond, in the villages, there was grinding poverty and sullen resentment. Some of the outlying farms were in ruins, the fields overgrown; others were short of labour, animals, equipment, and the resources and will to make good. Many peasants had simply fled, disappearing perhaps to another estate, perhaps to eke out a living in the wilderness, perhaps to join the outlaws and hold up travellers on the remoter roads. There were, in short, three worlds of Late Antiquity: the world of the imperial grandees, of emperors, generals, courtiers and bishops; the world of the provincial gentry, of ruined towns, crumbling villas and bankrupt estates; and the world of the peasantry, of tax, rent, debt, corvées, and a desperate struggle to survive on the margins of existence. Because these three worlds were linked, because grandees needed gentry to manage their empire, and peasants to create its wealth, the great edifice of Roman imperial power was, by the 4th century, resting on a foundation of crumbling sand.

  The Western Roman Empire endured for as long as it did only because its myriad discontents could never be organized into a revolutionary force capable of challenging the military-bureaucratic complex. Decurions might abscond to their country seats and there grow bitter as ancestral estates decayed. But, divided between a thousand local-government distr
icts, their outlook was ever a parochial one, and the decurionate never coalesced into a national class. Peasants might flee to join a band of outlaws, or even, on occasion, rise in revolt en masse and, for a while, drive the bailiffs, tax-collectors and recruiting-officers away. But peasants, too, lacked national organization; without some catalyst of unity – the leadership of an urban class or the inspiration of a revolutionary ideology – they remained preoccupied with farm, fields, the village, the eternal cycle of the seasons. The socio-economic base of the Late Empire rotted away, therefore, largely unseen, beneath the gaze of history, and only indirectly were the effects felt amid the froth of events – in a renewal of dynastic strife, in religious conflict, and in the growing threat posed by the barbarians hammering at the gates.

  Behind the internecine conflict that tore apart the House of Constantine was the old problem of regionalism in an overextended empire. Constantine attempted to satisfy the need for local emperors without the attendant danger of usurpation by restricting power to members of his own immediate family. Conflict erupted nonetheless. The emperor’s eldest and most accomplished son, Crispus, was suddenly and inexplicably executed by his father in AD 326. Fausta, the emperor’s wife, followed shortly after (probably charged with adultery). Though he had advanced his three remaining sons and a nephew to supreme power by the time of his death in AD 337, his carefully crafted partition of the empire between the four was immediately rejected by the army, which refused to recognize any but the three sons of Constantine as emperors. Territory was reapportioned: Constantine, the eldest, took Britain, Gaul, Spain and the Rhine frontier; Constans, the youngest, Italy, Africa, the Balkans and the Danube frontier; and Constantius, the East. But civil war soon broke out between Constantine and Constans, and when the former was defeated and killed, the latter amalgamated his brother’s territories with his own (AD 340). Ten years later, in AD 350, Constans was overthrown by Magnentius, one of his own senior commanders, but the Balkans revolted against the usurper and declared allegiance to Constantius, who promptly invaded from the East, defeated Magnentius, and reunited the empire under his sole authority (AD 353). Finally, Constantius II had two of his own leading subordinates arrested and executed, one in AD 354, the second in AD 355. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the last of the sons of Constantine emerged from almost two decades of intermittent civil war with a well-deserved reputation for paranoia and ruthlessness.

  The only prominent surviving male member of the House of Constantine apart from the emperor himself was now Julian, the son of a half-brother of Constantine the Great killed by the army in AD 337. Julian himself had been saved by his youth (he was only six at the time). Constantius, preoccupied with the defence of the East against the Sassanids, needed a colleague to guard the Rhine frontier, and, though ever suspicious, came to depend heavily on his cousin. Julian was made Caesar (junior emperor) in Gaul and Germany in AD 355. His mission was to restore the damage after deep and devastating barbarian raids, and then to take the offensive in order to break the power of the Germanic ‘rogue state’ of the Alemanni. He won a spectacular victory at the Battle of Strasbourg in AD 356, and proved himself also an efficient administrator, restoring city defences, establishing military supply-bases, and cracking down on corruption in the Roman administration. We have a detailed account because the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, formerly one of Julian’s officers, was an admirer for whom Julian’s career was especially heroic, edifying and pivotal. In Ammianus’s detailed narrative we gain insight into the mechanics of making emperors. Julian’s success consolidated his base – and heightened the suspicions of his master. When Constantius II demanded the dispatch from Julian’s army of four crack units – as a test of loyalty? to weaken a potential usurper? or simply because he needed them? – Julian (or so Ammianus leads us to believe) wished to comply. But Julian’s supporters refused – it would weaken them politically against Constantius, and militarily against the Germans. Yet to refuse was to revolt. Thus, in a classic confrontation over the deployment of scarce military resources, fuelled by mutual suspicion, Constantius and Julian were propelled towards civil war. In AD 360 Julian was hailed emperor by his supporters. Constantius refused recognition as a co-equal, and both sides prepared for war. Only the death of Constantius the following year prevented a clash of arms. The elevation of Julian, in the event, passed peacefully.

  His short reign amounted to a doomed reaction against the Constantinian order. The sons of Constantine had pursued a Christianizing policy, banning pagan sacrifices, closing temples, granting tax immunity to the clergy, funding the building of churches. Also, like their father, they intervened frequently in Church affairs in the interests of unity. Their ideal was a single Church preaching a uniform message. Their fear was that a divided Church might become a vehicle for political opposition. But schism was a perennial feature of the Early Church. Sometimes, notably among the Donatists in North Africa, sectarian faction gave expression to popular discontent and threatened to erupt into class warfare. More often, splits in the Church reflected rivalries within the ruling class. This was surely the case in the bizarrely obscure, yet intractable, theological dispute between Arians and Catholics in the East. The argument revolved around the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, and whether the latter was of the same priority and substance as the former. The priest Arius had argued that God the Father came first. His bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, had denied this. Constantine had attempted to heal the rift at the great Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Attended by around 250–300 bishops, a moderate majority had united around a compromise formula destined to become one of the cornerstones of Catholic theology: the Nicene Creed. But the compromise spawned a party of extreme rejectionists on either side, and bitter disputes raged in the Eastern Church until the end of the 4th century AD.

  The controversy was fuelled by the fast-growing wealth of the Church. Control over valuable assets was at stake. The patronage of the House of Constantine quickly transformed the Church into a major legal authority, a political power, and a privileged corporation with a huge property portfolio. The great monuments of the age were usually churches. Major foundations included: in Rome, the Mausoleum of Helena, the Lateran Basilica, and St Peter’s on the Vatican Hill; in Constantinople, the Church of Santa Sophia; and in Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Constantinople, built in AD 324–330, was of special significance. It was a ‘New Rome’ with its own Senate, but it was conceived and built as a thoroughly Christian city. It was not just a monument to its founder, a celebration of victory over a pagan enemy (Licinius), a fortified palace complex, and a city with an excellent harbour that was highly defensible, strategically located, and destined to become one of the greatest in world history; it was also a symbol of the new Christian Empire that it had been Constantine’s work to create.

  The rise of the Church elevated the bishops to the imperial aristocracy. Increasingly they were recruited from among the grandees, and certainly all were able to take their place among them. Bishops, positioned at the head of a rigid ecclesiastical hierarchy, managed large estates, were numerous at Court, and dominated their home towns, where they conferred benefactions, largesse and favours. Clashes between Donatists and Catholics, Arians and Alexandrians, were, in part at least, struggles between aristocratic factions for wealth and power.

  So, too, were clashes between Christianity and paganism. The new religion was associated with the court, the army, and the new men who formed an aristocracy of merit around the emperor – with, that is, the military-bureaucratic complex that controlled the empire. Throughout Roman history new nobles had been resented by old, aristocrats of office by aristocrats of birth. It was true in the conflict between patricians and plebeians in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and again in the civil wars between Caesarian ‘new men’ and the Senate in the 1st century BC. It had fuelled the opposition to the military monarchs and soldier-emperors of the 3rd century AD. Now, in the 4th, the conflict took the particular form of religious s
trife, in which the old order – traditional landowners and hereditary peers – rallied to the defence of the pagan cults. They found their champion in the emperor Julian (AD 361–363).

  His short reign, though, must be judged a miserable failure. His attempt to restore the old religion by withdrawing the privileges of the Church and lavishing largesse on the temples amounted to little more than a temporary blip. The programme was curtailed by the emperor’s early death and the strong Christian reaction evoked in his successors. Julian came to grief – as so many of his predecessors had done – in the East. Resuming Constantius’s interrupted war, he marched his army deep into Mesopotamia, but was defeated by the Sassanid strategy of scorched earth and guerrilla warfare (AD 363). During a night attack on the Roman camp, Julian led out a sortie without waiting to put on his armour and was shot and mortally wounded, dying a few hours later. The House of Constantine was finally extinguished.