The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

by Peter Heather

  More recent re-evaluations of Roman fortifications in North Africa have shown, from the distribution of men and installations, that their main job was actually to manage nomads, not to fight them. North African nomads go south into the pre-desert in winter, when there is enough water there to generate forage for their animals, and back north into the more agricultural regions in summer, when the pre-desert dries up. Roman soldiers and forts were there to make sure that the flocks didn’t stray on to other people’s crops. The Romans, in fact, seem to have got on reasonably well with the nomads: they were happy enough to buy their wares, even offering them substantial purchase-tax breaks, which doesn’t really fit with a story of constant struggle.41 Even in the fourth century, the main Roman force in Africa consisted of garrison cavalry, much more suited to patrolling and chasing the occasional raider than to heavy fighting.42

  Once security issues had been sorted out, the region’s infrastructure could be developed. Roman legionaries eventually constructed over 19,000 kilometres of roads in the Maghreb, both for their own military purposes and also to allow the easy movement of goods, such as the grain that arrived by cart at Carthage and the other ports. Carthage itself encompassed both beauty and functionality. It was in fact a double port, inherited by the Romans from the founding Phoenicians. A channel from the sea led into the outer, originally rectangular, harbour. From here a further channel led into the inner, circular harbour, with the ‘admiralty island’ in the middle; ships were able to dock both against the outer walls and alongside the island. Taking this as their basis, the Romans increased the size of the outer, rectangular, harbour, and turned it, under either Trajan or Hadrian in the early second century AD, into a hexagon. The other hexagonal port known from antiquity, significantly enough, was that of Portus (built by Trajan). At the end of the second century or the beginning of the third, the circular port was brought back into commission, a classical temple was constructed in the middle of the island, and a grand colonnaded boulevard led from there into the town centre. By about AD 200, the city was equipped to handle shipping on a massive scale. And Carthage was only one of a series of ports along the North African coast: Utica, for instance, could handle 600 ships.43 The docks at Lepcis Magna in Tripolitania were also revamped in the early third century.

  As we saw in Chapter 3, the governmental capacity of the Roman state was at all periods limited by its primitive bureaucratic technologies. It tended to contract out, recruiting private parties to fulfil vital functions on its behalf. The African grain tax, or annona, was a classic case in point. Rather than finding and monitoring the thousands of labourers that would be required to operate the huge public estates that had come into its hands in North Africa, it leased land out to private individuals in return for a portion of the produce. Since the state wanted to lease out as much land as it could, the terms of these tenancies were made as attractive as possible. The emphyteutic lease allowed tenants heritable land more or less in perpetuity, plus the possibility of selling their leases on to a third party.

  Shipping problems were similarly handled. By the fourth century the Empire had built up a powerful guild of shippers, the navicularii, who had to fulfil certain obligations to the state (though not every shipper was a member of the guild). The law codes make clear the broad principles on which the relationship between state and shippers was organized. The provision of shipping – operating not just out of Africa, but also in other parts of the Empire, particularly Egypt – was the first priority. With typical subtlety, therefore, the imperial authorities made membership of the guild an hereditary obligation, legislated against all possible means of exemption, and required that any land that had once been registered to a shipper should always be retained by a member of the guild, even if sold on, so that the guild’s financial base could never be eroded. In return, the state then proceeded to buttress the shippers with financial and other privileges. They could not be liable to any additional tax or public service obligations, and were protected against any claims on their property by relatives. Guild members were eventually awarded equestrian rank (equivalent to the status of a medium-level civil servant); they were allowed tax reductions on their own transactions, and had up to two years to fulfil a state commission. Sometimes they also received state assistance in refurbishing their ships.44 The state thus generated a powerful masonry of shipping magnates, with wide-ranging financial and legal privileges.

  All of this, of course, the state set in motion for its own purposes. But such large-scale commerce stimulated the local economy too. If, in the first century and a half of Roman Africa (down to about AD 100), the focus was on grain production, during the next it was on olive oil and wine. Since both vines and olives require less water than grain, farmers were able to exploit the wider range of Mediterranean conditions available in the region. From about 150 to 400, with subsidized transport and land available on excellent terms, North Africa was booming.

  The evidence is multi-faceted. It has long been realized that the buildings and inscriptions of North Africa indicate the flourishing here, after it had begun to decline elsewhere in the Empire, of a political culture typical of the high imperial period in which individuals competed for power on their town councils.45 Recent rural surveys have confirmed that this local prosperity was based on agricultural expansion, with both numbers and prosperity of rural settlements increasing dramatically, as farmers pushed down from the north into the drier fringes where only the olive could flourish. By the fourth century, olive groves could be found 150 kilometres inland from the coast of Tripolitania, where there are none today. All of this confirms more anecdotal, but nonetheless suggestive, evidence, such as the inscription celebrating the octogenarian whose life’s work it had been to plant 4,000 olive trees.46

  Equally arresting is the huge amount of evidence demonstrating the ability of African goods to penetrate markets right around the Mediterranean. Our knowledge of this is based on archaeologists’ newly developed skills in identifying olive oil and wine amphorae made in North Africa. Also very widely distributed were North African fine wares such as dinner services, especially of the red-slip variety. Given that transport costs were usually prohibitive except for high-value goods, the question arises as to how it could have been profitable to trade outside Africa in staples like wine and olive oil, grown everywhere around the Mediterranean, or in relatively cheap products such as dinner services. The answer lies in the state-subsidized transport system. This allowed shipping costs to be reduced through a little creative accounting, other goods to be sent piggy-back with state shipments, and African products to compete right across the Mediterranean. The state organized an economic infrastructure for its own purposes and the locals took advantage of it, so that private enterprise was able to operate within the state’s version of a command economy.

  And it wasn’t just settlers from Italy who flourished. The kind of irrigation regimes being used in the late Roman period in North Africa were actually ancient and indigenous: everything from terraced hillsides – to catch water and prevent soil erosion – to cisterns, wells, dams, to full-blown and carefully negotiated water-sharing schemes such as that commemorated on an inscription from Lamasba (Ain Merwana).47 These traditional means of conserving water were simply being applied more vigorously. The possibility of selling agricultural surpluses made it worth people’s while to make the best use of every available drop of water and to increase production. This happened not just in settler communities but everywhere else as well, including such old tribal centres as Volubilis, Iol Caesarea and Utica. Demand hit the African countryside in a big way. Nor were nomads excluded from the action: not only did they provide crucial extra labour at harvest time, working the farms in travelling gangs, but their goods atttracted preferential tax treatment. The results could be spectacular. There is an inscription recording the success of one landless labourer turned harvest gang leader, who made enough money to buy a patch of land and a place of honour on the council of his hometown, Mactar.48 />
  Over time, the flourishing provinces of Roman North Africa acquired a suitably impressive capital. Although played down pictorially in the Peutinger Table, fourth-century Carthage – or to give it its full Roman name, Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago – was a teeming Roman metropolis. It is well known to us both from texts, not least the writings of St Augustine, and from recent excavations on the site. Abandoned soon after the Islamic conquest of North Africa at the end of the seventh century, it sat there like a fossil over the intervening centuries, waiting to be recovered. As a result, we can fill out in quite extraordinary detail the description of Carthage contained in a fourthcentury survey, the Expositio Totius Mundi (The Description of the Entire World):

  Its [urban] plan is completely worthy of praise; in fact, the regularity of its streets is like that of a plantation. It has a Music Hall . . . and a port that is quite curious in appearance, which seems to provide, as far as one can see, a calm sea with nothing to fear for ships. You will find there an exceptional public amenity, the street of the silversmiths (vicus argentariorum). As for amusements, the inhabitants get excited about only one spectacle: the games of the amphitheatre.49

  Not what you might find in a modern guidebook, but ancient urban life was all about imposing a rational, civilized order on a barbarian wilderness (see Chapter 1), and nothing symbolized this better than a nice, even street grid. As the Expositio implies, the city also had more than the standard stock of public buildings. Apart from the music hall and amphitheatre, it also boasted a theatre and, from the early third century, a 70,000-seater circus for chariot-racing. Down on the waterfront was situated the large, second-century Antonine bath complex, and in the centre of the city around the Bursa Hill were the law courts, municipal buildings and the governor’s palace. Here too was the domed Hall of Memory, where Boniface was assassinated.

  Around the public buildings was a host of private dwellings. Some of the grander ones have been excavated, several producing extensive ground plans showing richly coloured mosaics: notably, the ‘House of the Greek Charioteer’ and the poetically named ‘Villa with private bath’. But most of the area of the city where the majority of its population is likely to have lived has not yet been excavated, and we know of relatively few ‘ordinary’ dwellings. Everything suggests, however, that Carthage was home to about a hundred thousand people, a figure exceeded in the fourth century only by Rome and Constantinople, both of whose populations were artificially swollen by subsidized food supplies.

  The public buildings hosted a wide range of cultural pursuits.50 Religions of all kinds were practised, from Christianity in its various forms to the traditional pagan cults, with every kind of eastern mystery in between. And amidst all this, classical culture flourished too. Augustine, for example, was a first-rate Latinist who had completed his education in Carthage. He stayed on for a while to pursue his teaching career, at one point winning a Latin poetry competition. The prize was presented by the Proconsul of Africa, Vindicianus, himself a man of considerable learning and one of a succession of well connected Romans who spent short periods, usually a year at a time, as governor of the city. (Our old friend Symmachus held the job in 373.) Such events as poetry competitions offered ambitious young Romano-Africans opportunities to attract the attention of the governor, and to use their education and culture as a path to social advancement. When he left Carthage, Augustine headed for Rome, and from there for the court of Valentinian II at Milan, speeding on the wings of recommendations provided by a range of contacts such as Vindicianus and Symmachus.51

  Fourth-century Carthage, then, was a cultural and, above all, an economic pillar of the western Empire. Huge and bustling, it was a city where the cramped houses of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens offered a sharp contrast to the lofty public buildings and the mansions of the rich. Above all: high on productivity and low on maintenance, North Africa was a massive net contributor to western imperial coffers.

  ‘The Last True Roman of the West’

  THE REVENUE SURPLUS from North Africa was essential for balancing the imperial books. Without it, the west could never have afforded armed forces large enough to defend its other, more exposed territories. Not only in Africa, but everywhere in the Roman west, predatory immigrants had been left to pursue their own agendas largely unhindered since the death of Constantius in 421. Along the Rhine frontier Franks, Burgundians and Alamanni, particularly the Iuthungi in the Alpine foothills to the south, had conducted raids over the frontier and were threatening further trouble. In southern France, the Visigoths had revolted and were making menacing noises in the direction of the main administrative capital of the region, Arles. In Spain, the Suevi were loose in the north-west and rampaging throughout the peninsula. With the arrival of the Vandal Geiseric on the fringes of Numidia in the year 430, the sword of Damocles was hanging over the entire western Empire.

  Into the breach stepped the last great Roman hero of the fifth-century west, Flavius Aetius. As we have seen, he emerged in 433 as the eventual victor in the fierce disputes that followed the accession of Valentinian III. We also know that when young he had spent times as a hostage both with Alaric in the run-up to the siege of Rome and with the Huns in the 410s, a relationship which later allowed him to negotiate Hunnic help after the collapse of John’s usurpation and then to defeat his rival Sebastianus. He would never have been chosen as a hostage, of course, had he not had high political connections. His father Gaudentius, like Flavius Constantius, came from a Roman military family of Balkan origin, in his case the province of Scythia Minor in the Dobrudja (modern Romania). In his early career, attached to the eastern court, Gaudentius held a succession of staff appointments. But in 399, during the supremacy of Stilicho, we find him commanding troops in Africa. Again like Constantius, he was probably a distinguished eastern soldier who threw in his lot with Stilicho on the death of Theodosius I. Gaudentius then married an Italian senatorial heiress of huge fortune and the high point of his career was his appointment as field army commander in Gaul (magister militum per Gallias) in the later 410s. He was killed there in an uprising, perhaps to do with the usurpation of John in the 420s.

  Aetius’ own career too followed a military trajectory, but rose to greater heights. Though never emperor himself, Aetius was the Octavian of his time. Once in power, he proved himself both a mighty politician and the restorer of Roman fortunes. The pen of a contemporary, one Renatus Frigiderus, in an extract preserved by Gregory of Tours in the later sixth century, draws this portrait of the man:

  Aetius was of medium height, manly in his habits and well-proportioned. He had no bodily infirmity and was spare in physique. His intelligence was keen; he was full of energy, a superb horseman, a fine shot with an arrow and tireless with the lance. He was extremely able as a soldier and he was skilled in the arts of peace. There was no avarice in him and even less cupidity. He was magnanimous in his behaviour and never swayed in his judgement by the advice of unworthy counsellors. He bore adversity with great patience, and was ready for any exacting enterprise; he scorned danger and was able to endure hunger, thirst and loss of sleep.52

  His skill at horsemanship and archery was perhaps another legacy of his time among the Huns, and he certainly drew on both, as well as on the other qualities described above, in tackling the great project that was his life’s work: trying to hold Octavian’s Empire together for another generation.

  When Aetius finally took control of the western Empire in 433, the consequences of nearly ten years of paralysis at the centre could be seen right across its territories. Each of the unsubdued immigrant groups within the frontiers of the west had taken the opportunity to improve its position, as had outsiders beyond. Also, as had happened in the aftermath of the Rhine crossing, the trouble generated by immigrants triggered the usurpation of imperial power by locals. In northern Gaul, in particular Brittany and round about, disruption had been caused by so-called Bagaudae. Zosimus mentions other groups labelled Bagaudae in the foothills of the western Alps
in 407/8, and Hydatius tells us in his Chronicle that they had appeared in Spain by the early 440s.53 Who these people were has long been a hot topic among historians. The term originated in the third century, when they were characterized as ‘country folk and bandits’. For historians of a Marxist inclination it has been impossible not to view them as social revolutionaries who from time to time generated a groundswell of protest against the inequalities of the Roman world, and who appeared whenever central control faltered. Certainly, Bagaudae do consistently make an appearance where central control was disrupted by the hostile activities of barbarians, but the glimpses we get of their social composition don’t always suggest revolutionaries. The smart money is on the term having become a catch-all for the perpetrators of any kind of dissident activity. Sometimes those labelled Bagaudae were bandits. Those of the Alps in 407/8, for instance, demanded money with menaces from a Roman general on the run. But self-help groups seeking to preserve the social order in their own localities when the long arm of the state no longer reached there, also seem to have been referred to as ‘Bagaudae’. In the 410s Armorica had already asserted independence in an attempt to quell disorder; later, something similar was happening in Spain.54