What the new evidence and the consequent reinterpretations of the old evidence have demonstrated, then, is that although, in order to meet the strategic challenge posed by Persia, the state was taking a bigger share of agricultural output in tax and had confiscated local city funds, agriculture itself, the main engine of the economy, was not in crisis, nor was the fate of the landowning classes as bleak as traditionally supposed. The ‘flight of the curials’ was an adjustment, if a major one, in the location of political power. Old arguments that fifth-century political collapse was the result of fourth-century economic crisis cannot, therefore, be sustained.
There is also more than enough here to prompt a rethink about claims that, from the mid-third century, the army was so short of Roman manpower that it jeopardized its efficiency by drawing ever increasingly on ‘barbarians’. There is no doubt that the restructured Roman army did recruit such men in two main ways. First, self-contained contingents were recruited on a short-term basis for particular campaigns, returning home once they were over. Second, many individuals from across the frontier entered the Roman army and took up soldiering as a career, serving for a working lifetime in regular Roman units. Neither phenomenon was new. The auxiliary forces, both cavalry and infantry (alae and cohortes), of the early imperial army had always been composed of non-citizens, and amounted to something like 50 per cent of the military. It is impossible to know much about recruiting patterns among the rank and file, but nothing about the officer corps of the late Empire suggests that barbarian numbers had increased across the army as a whole. The main difference between early and late armies lay not in their numbers, but in the fact that barbarian recruits now sometimes served in the same units as citizens, rather than being segregated into auxiliary forces. Training in the fourth century remained pretty much as fierce as ever, producing bonded groups ready to obey orders. From Ammianus Marcellinus’ picture of the army in action we find no evidence that its standards of discipline had fallen in any substantial way, or that the barbarians in its ranks were less inclined to obey orders or any more likely to make common cause with the enemy. He records one incident in which a recently retired barbarian let slip some important intelligence about Roman army dispositions, but none showed disloyalty in combat. There is no sign, in short, that the restructuring of the Empire had important knock-on effects in the military sphere.25 It is entirely possible, nonetheless, that the extra costs incurred in the running of the fourth-century Empire could have alienated the loyalty of the provincial populations that had bought into the values of Romanness with such vigour under the early Empire.
Christianity and Consent
WITH THE EMPEROR Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312, the old ideological structures of the Roman world also began to be dismantled, and for Edward Gibbon this was a key moment in the story of Roman collapse:
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and the more earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody, and always implacable; the attention of emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.26
Others have not been so strident. But the notion that Christianity broke up ideological unity and hindered the ability of the state effectively to win support has since been shared by others; so too the fear that the Church diverted financial and human resources from vital material ends. The issues of both taxation and the rise of Christianity thus raise the more general question of whether it was against a backdrop of local discontent that the reconstructed imperial authority struggled to maintain its legitimacy.
Fourth-century sources make occasional complaints about tax rates. There was also one major tax riot. In Antioch in 387, a crowd gathered to protest about the imposition of a supertax. The mood got ugly, and imperial statues were toppled. Imperial images, like everything else to do with emperors, were sacred, and assaults on them an act of treason. The local community was terrified that army units might be turned loose on the city in punishment, but the reigning emperor, Theodosius I, took a conciliatory line to resolve the crisis. And this is a fair enough indicator of the general climate.27 Tax collection goes more smoothly, and rates can be increased more easily, if taxpayers understand and broadly accept the reasons for which they are being taxed. Fourth-century emperors perfectly understood the principle of consent, and never lost an opportunity to stress that taxation paid above all for the army – which was true – and that the army was necessary to defend Roman society from outside threats. Most of the ceremonial occasions of the imperial year involved a keynote speech lasting about an hour whose purpose was to celebrate the regime’s recent successes. Hardly any of our surviving late imperial examples fail to make some reference to the army and its function of protector of the Roman world.
Different emperors sold their frontier policies in different ways, but there was no disagreement on this basic purpose of taxation. The population was daily reminded of the point on its coinage: one of the most common designs featured an enemy grovelling at the emperor’s feet. On the down side, military failings might be criticized for wasting the taxpayers’ contributions. In one famous incident, Ursulus, chief financial minister of the emperor Constantius II, complained sarcastically and publicly about the performance of the army on a visit to the ruins of Amida, shortly after the Persians sacked it in 359: ‘Look at the courage with which the cities are defended by our soldiers, for whose huge salary bills the wealth of the Empire is already barely sufficient.’ The generals didn’t forget this. When Constantius died, part of the price paid by his successor for their support was the condemnation to death of Ursulus in the political trials that marked the change of regime. For the most part, however, the system worked tolerably well; the Antioch tax riot is an isolated example, which was caused, notice, not by the usual taxes but by an additional imposition. While, of course, many landowners sought to minimize their tax bills – the laws and letter collections are full of uncovered scams and requests for dispensations to this effect – fourth-century emperors did manage to sell to their population the idea that taxation was essential to civilized life, and generally collected the funds without ripping their society apart.28
On the religious front Constantine’s conversion to Christianity certainly unleashed a cultural revolution. Physically, town landscapes were transformed as the practice of keeping the dead separate from the living, traditional in Graeco-Roman paganism, came to an end, and cemeteries sprang up within town walls. Churches replaced temples; as a consequence, from the 390s onwards there was so much cheap second-hand marble available that the new marble trade all but collapsed. The Church, as Gibbon claimed, attracted large donations both from the state and from individuals. Constantine himself started the process, the Book of the Popes lovingly recording his gifts of land to the churches of Rome, and, over time, churches throughout the Empire acquired substantial assets. Furthermore, Christianity was in some senses a democratizing and equalizing force. It insisted that everybody, no matter what his economic or social status, had a soul and an equal stake in the cosmic drama of salvation, and some Gospel stories even suggested that worldly wealth was a barrier to salvation. All this ran contrary to the aristocratic values of Graeco-Roman culture, with its claim that true civilization could only be attained by the man with enough wealth and leisure to afford many years of private education and active participation in municipal affairs. Take also, for instance, the grammarians’ traditi
onal use of the veil. In antiquity, a veil marked the entrance to higher places, as in the monumental audience halls where the imperial presence was normally veiled from the main body of the court. St Augustine dismissed with contempt in his Confessions the grammarians’ use of veils to cover the entrances to their schools. For him and other late Roman Christians, the practice came to be dismissed as a false claim to wisdom.
Instead, fourth-century Christian intellectuals set up in their writings a deliberately non-classical anti-hero, the uneducated Christian Holy Man, who, despite not having passed through the hands of the grammarian, and despite characteristically abandoning the town for the desert, achieved heights of wisdom and virtue that went far beyond anything that could be learned from Homer or Vergil, or even from participating in self-government. The Holy Man was the best-case product of the monastery – as Gibbon pointed out, Christian monasticism attracted a substantial number of recruits at this time. The monastic lifestyle was extravagantly praised by highly educated Christians, who saw in its strictures a level of devotion equivalent to that of the Christian martyrs of old. Nor does it take much sifting through the sources to find examples of high-status Christians rejecting participation in the normal practices of Roman upper-class life. In Italy, around the turn of the fifth century, within a few years of one another, the moderately wealthy Paulinus of Nola and a staggeringly wealthy senatorial heiress, Melania the younger, both liquidated their fortunes and embraced lives of Christian devotion. Paulinus became a bishop, devoting himself to the cult of the martyr Felix, while Melania took herself off to the Holy Land. Thus Christianity asked awkward questions of, and forced some substantial revisions in, many of the attitudes and practices that Romans had long taken for granted.29
But while the rise of Christianity was certainly a cultural revolution, Gibbon and others are much less convincing in claiming that the new religion had a seriously deleterious effect upon the functioning of the Empire. Christian institutions did, as Gibbon asserts, acquire large financial endowments. On the other hand, the non-Christian religious institutions that they replaced had also been wealthy, and their wealth was being progressively confiscated at the same time as Christianity waxed strong. It is unclear whether endowing Christianity involved an overall transfer of assets from secular to religious coffers. Likewise, while some manpower was certainly lost to the cloister, this was no more than a few thousand individuals at most, hardly a significant figure in a world that was maintaining, even increasing, population levels. Similarly, the number of upper-class individuals who renounced their wealth and lifestyles for a life of Christian devotion pales into insignificance beside the 6,000 or so who by AD 400 were actively participating in the state as top bureaucrats. In legislation passed in the 390s, all of these people were required to be Christian. For every Paulinus of Nola, there were many more newly Christianized Roman landowners happy to hold major state office, and no sign of any crisis of conscience among them.
Nor was there any pressing reason why Christianity should have generated such a crisis, since religion and Empire rapidly reached an ideological rapprochement. Roman imperialism had claimed, since the time of Augustus, that the presiding divinities had destined Rome to conquer and civilize the world. The gods had supported the Empire in a mission to bring the whole of humankind to the best achievable state, and had intervened directly to choose and inspire Roman emperors. After Constantine’s public adoption of Christianity, the long-standing claims about the relation of the state to the deity were quickly, and surprisingly easily, reworked. The presiding divinity was recast as the Christian God, and the highest possible state for humankind was declared to be Christian conversion and salvation. Literary education and the focus on self-government were shifted for a while to the back burner, but by no means thrown out. And that was the sum total of the adjustment required. The claim that the Empire was God’s vehicle, enacting His will in the world, changed little: only the nomenclature was different. Likewise, while emperors could no longer be deified, their divine status was retained in Christian-Roman propaganda’s portrayal of God as hand-picking individual emperors to rule with Him, and partly in His place, over the human sphere of His cosmos. Thus, the emperor and everything about him, from his bedchamber to his treasury, could continue to be styled as ‘sacred’.30
These were not claims asserted merely by a few loyalists in and around the imperial court. On Christmas Day 438, a new compendium of recent Roman law, the Theodosian Code (Codex Theodosianus), was presented to the assembled senators in the old imperial capital. All senatorial meetings were fully minuted and the minutes passed on to the emperor. Not surprisingly, these records have not survived; the piles of verbiage would not have made wildly exciting reading for medieval or even late Roman copyists. The minutes of the Theodosian Code meeting were, however, incorporated into the Preface to official copies of the Code made after 443. A single eleventh-century manuscript deriving from one such official copy is preserved in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. Such is the slender thread by which this unique text survived.31 The Praetorian Prefect of Italy, Glabrio Faustus, who presided, and in whose palatial home the senators had gathered, opened the meeting by formally introducing the text to the assembly. After reminding his audience of the original edict that had established the law commission, he presented the Code to them. In response, the assembled senators let rip at the tops of their voices:
‘Augustuses of Augustuses, the greatest of Augustuses!’32 (repeated 8 times)
‘God gave You to us! God save You for us!’ (27 times)
‘As Roman Emperors, pious and felicitous, may You rule for many years!’ (22 times)
‘For the good of the human race, for the good of the Senate, for the good of the State, for the good of all!’ (24 times)
‘Our hope is in You, You are our salvation!’ (26 times)
‘May it please our Augustuses to live forever!’ (22 times)
‘May You pacify the world and triumph here in person!’ (24 times)
The repetition of these acclamations seems extraordinary to us, but the message conveyed by this ceremony is worth careful consideration.
Its most obvious message was Unity. The great and good of the Roman world were speaking with one voice in praise of their imperial rulers in the city that was still its symbolic capital. Only slightly less obvious, when you stop to think about it, is the second message: the confidence of the senators in the Perfection of the Social Order of which they and their emperors were symbiotic parts. You can’t have complete Unity without an equally complete sense of Perfection. The normal state of human beings is disunity. The only things that people can be of one mind about are those that are self-evidently the best. And, as the opening acclamations make clear, the source of that Perfection was, straightforwardly, God, the Christian deity. By 438, the Senate of Rome was a thoroughly Christian body. At the top end of Roman society, the adoption of Christianity thus made no difference to the age-old contention that the Empire was God’s vehicle in the world.
The same message was proclaimed at similar ceremonial moments all the way down the social scale, even within Church circles. Town council meetings always began with similar acclamations, as did formal gatherings of an entire urban populus to greet an emperor, an imperial official or even a new imperial image. (When a new emperor was elected, images of him were distributed to the cities of the Empire.) At all of these moments – and there were many in a calendar year – the same key idea predominated.33 Many Christian bishops, as well as secular commentators, were happy to restate the old claim of Roman imperialism in its new clothing. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea was already arguing, as early as the reign of Constantine, that it was no accident that Christ had been incarnated during the lifetime of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Despite the earlier history of persecutions, went his argument, this showed that Christianity and the Empire were destined for each other, with God making Rome all-powerful so that, through it, all mankind might eventually be saved.
This ideological vision implied, of course, that the emperor, as God’s chosen representative on earth, should wield great religious authority within Christianity. As early as the 310s, within a year of the declaration of his new Christian allegiance, bishops from North Africa appealed to Constantine to settle a dispute that was raging among them. This established a pattern for the rest of the century: emperors were now intimately involved in both the settlement of Church disputes and the much more mundane business of the new religion’s adminstration. To settle disputes, emperors called councils, giving bishops the right to use the privileged travel system, the cursus publicus, in order to attend. Even more impressively, emperors helped set the agendas to be discussed, their officials orchestrated the proceedings, and state machinery was used to enforce the decisions reached. More generally, they made religious law for the Church – Book 16 of the Theodosian Code is entirely concerned with such matters – and influenced appointments to top ecclesiastical positions.
The Christian Church hierarchy also came to mirror the Empire’s administrative and social structures. Episcopal dioceses reflected the boundaries of city territories (some even preserve them to this day, long after they have lost all other meaning). Further up the scale, the bishops of provincial capitals were turned into metropolitan archbishops, enjoying powers of intervention in the new, subordinate sees. Under Constantine’s Christian successors, the previously obscure Bishop of Constantinople was elevated into a Patriarch on a par with the Bishop of Rome – because Constantinople was the ‘new Rome’. Very quickly, too, local Christian communities lost the power to elect their own bishops. From the 370s onwards, bishops were increasingly drawn from the landowning classes, and controlled episcopal successions by discussions among themselves. With the Church now so much a part of the state – bishops had even been given administrative roles within it, such as running small-claims courts – to become a Christian bishop was not to drop out of public life but to find a new avenue into it. If the Christianization of Roman society is a massively important topic, an equally important, and somewhat less studied one, is the Romanization of Christianity. The adoption of the new religion was no one-way street, but a process of mutual adaptation that reinforced the ideological claims of emperor and state.34
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History Page 15