by Woolf, Greg
But there is little sign of any positive value being placed on hybridity or multiculturalism by the host societies. Although the rich spent a good deal acquiring exotic foreign raw materials, from Indian Ocean spices to silk, they were not interested in consuming alien cuisine, or dressing in new ways influenced by foreign styles. Jews and Isis worshippers were both hounded out of Rome in the late Republic. The upwardly mobile took care to lose their regional accents. Only Greek orators could make capital out of their exotic origins: Lucian stressed his ‘Assyrian’ identity, and Favorinus of Arles stated that one of the paradoxes of his life was that although he was a Gaul, he could ‘play the Greek’. But what they were stressing was the cultural distance they had travelled. Septimius Severus allegedly would not let his sister come to Rome even when he was emperor, because he was embarrassed by her African speech.
Being part of an empire also had more subtle effects on the identities claimed by different peoples in the empire. Theorists of globalization today point out that increased connectivity has often had the effect of making a group more conscious of its distinctive location within the whole. It has been suggested that both Greeks and Jews came to formulate their distinctive identities in new ways that responded to the wider imperial world in which they lived.24 Some aspects of Jewish life, from the use of Greek to a form of worship based on scriptures rather than the rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem, were more portable and so easier to replicate in a Greek or Roman city. Greek education too was more transferable than rituals based on ancestral shrines. Isis worshippers could use hieroglyphs in their rituals, and even imported Nile water, but they could not orient cult on the flooding of the river. Many cults came to resemble each other in their outward-looking faces, while remaining (or even becoming more) distinctive in terms of what worshippers did or knew on the inside. Diasporic populations were not the only ones to find new identities in the empire. Local communities in east and west developed parallel myth-histories, peopled with Trojan and Greek founding fathers and a range of similar tropes, the local princess who marries the refugee prince, the oracle that points to the spot where the city should be founded. This myth-making was an ancient tradition, but it flourished in all parts of the Roman world.25
Further Reading
Almost no topic in Roman history has generated as much recent research as the subject of this chapter, although there has been some confusion between attempts to examine the broad social and economic consequences of Roman rule; studies of collective identities as consciously experienced phenomena, as expressed in texts, monuments, and material culture; and investigations of the means by which loyalty and solidarity were generated among the emperors’ subjects. Those issues are clearly linked, but they are not the same.
Studies of the impact of Roman rule vary considerably, especially in how they treat cultural phenomena. Examples include Martin Millett’s Romanization of Britain (Cambridge, 1990), Nico Roymans’s Tribal Societies in Northern Gaul (Amsterdam, 1990), Susan Alcock’s Graecia capta (Cambridge, 1993), David Mattingly’s An Imperial Possession (London, 2006), Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s Roman Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2008) and my own Becoming Roman (Cambridge, 1998); they offer a selection of approaches, all employing archaeological data, generally in combination with other evidence. So too do two collections, Tom Blagg and Martin Millett’s Early Roman Empire in the West (Oxford, 2000) and Susan Alcock’s Early Roman Empire in the East (Oxford, 1997). It would be easy to add to this list.
Conscious expressions of Roman identity are the subject of Emma Dench’s Romulus’ Asylum (Oxford, 2005) while Simon Swain’s Hellenism and Empire (Oxford, 1996) and Simon Goldhill’s Being Greek under Rome (Cambridge, 2001) investigate the identity politics of the empire’s best-documented subject people. Seth Schwartz’s Imperialism and Jewish Society (Princeton, 2001) asks some of the same questions about the second best-known case. Fergus Millar’s Roman Near East (Cambridge, Mass., 1993) opens up a vast field of study, one mostly known from inscriptions written in a bewildering variety of languages. By far the most thoughtful examination so far of how cultural identity, political power, law, and social solidarity were connected during the early empire is Clifford Ando’s Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley, 2000).
Most recently attention has focused on how particular groups within the empire developed common identities often based on social memory. Three recent collections give an idea of the state of the question: Ton Derks and Nico Roymans’s Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity (Amsterdam, 2009), Tim Whitmarsh’s Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World (Cambridge, 2010), and Erich Gruen’s Cultural Identities in the Ancient Mediterranean (Los Angeles, 2011), which includes much else besides.
Map 6. The empire in the year 500 AD
KEY DATES IN CHAPTER XV
AD 284–305
Reign of Diocletian
AD 303–11
The Great Persecution
AD 306–37
Reign of Constantine
AD 313
Constantine’s Edict of Toleration
AD 325
Council of Nicaea
AD 361–3
Reign of Julian
AD 376
Valens allows parties of Goths to cross the Danube, beginning the events leading to the defeat of the eastern Roman army at Adrianople
AD 395
On the death of Theodosius the empire is ruled by Honorius in the west and Arcadius in the east, both of them minors
AD 409–75
Progressive conquest of Iberian peninsula by Visigoths
AD 410
Rome sacked by the Goths
AD 429
Vandals invade Africa, capturing Carthage in ad 439
AD 435–8
Compilation of Notitia Dignitatum
AD 442–52
The Huns, led by Attila, ravage the Balkans, Gaul, and Italy
AD 455
Rome sacked by the Vandals
AD 476
Last western emperor deposed by Odoacer the Ostrogoth
XV
RECOVERY AND COLLAPSE
When Polybius of Megalopolis decided to make a record of the most significant events of his own day, he thought it was appropriate to begin by demonstrating on the basis of the facts, that the Romans did not win a great empire in the six hundred years following the foundation of the city, even though they were regularly at war with their neighbours for all this period. On the contrary, that occurred only after they had captured a part of Italy and then lost it once again after the invasion of Hannibal, the defeat at Cannae, and only after they had actually seen from their walls the enemy threatening. Only then did they begin to be so favoured by fortune, that in less than fifty-three years, they took control not only of all Italy but all Africa as well. The Iberians of the west submitted to them. Setting out on an even greater project they crossed the Adriatic, conquered the Greeks, and dissolved the empire of Macedon, capturing alive their king and carrying him off to Rome as a prisoner. Nobody could attribute this success to human might alone. The explanation must lie in the immutable plan of the Fates, the influence of the planets, or the will of God that favours all human enterprises so long as they are just. For these things establish a pattern of causation that leads future events to come out in just such a way, that shows just how right they are who believe that human affairs are subject to some kind of Divine Providence. So that when their energy is aroused, they flourish; but when they become displeasing to the gods, their affairs decline to a state like that which now exists. The truth of this proposition will be demonstrated by the events I will now relate.
(Zosimus, New History 1.1.1–2)
Emperors and Christians
The Emperor Diocletian ruled from AD 284 to 305. Constantine I from 306 to 337. They were not the only emperors who reigned during this half-century, and civil wars characterized the reigns of both. But the length of their reigns is a sure sign of increased imperial
stability. Another sign is that the frontiers, although never peaceful, held. The military crisis that had nearly resulted in imperial meltdown seemed to have been averted. It was once common to write about the reigns of these two emperors in terms of transformation, reform, and recovery. But that is too simple. The institutions of the Roman Empire were indeed transformed: but many of their ‘reforms’ were unsuccessful, and the recovery was partial and, in the west, short-lived.
One transformation in particular affects all histories of this period. During the second and early third centuries AD the religious diversity of the empire had gradually resolved into a world of competing religions. How that happened is the subject of the next chapter, but its consequences have to be explored here. During the nadir of the military crisis, the 250s, the emperors Decius and Valerian had each tried to use general hostility against Christians to create a wider sense of imperial unity. Diocletian’s response was more extreme. His Great Persecution was a systematic attempt to eliminate Christianity, and it traumatized great swathes of the empire between AD 303 and 311. Constantine’s tactic was the opposite, to first tolerate the new religion, then protect, sponsor, patronize, and eventually seek to regulate and unify it through an ecumenical council held in 325 at Nicaea. History still remembers Diocletian as the Persecutor, Constantine as the Convert. Greek and Roman historians took radically different views of these events, depending on whether they embraced the new religion (as did the bishop Eusebius of Caesarea who invented a church history and wrote a panegyrical life of Constantine) or whether they deplored the abandonment of the ancestral religion, as did Zosimus whose verdict stands at the head of this chapter.
The divided reaction of historians mirrored the divided response of the empire’s elite. Before the end of the third century AD there had been many kinds of historical writing in Greek and in Latin—local and global histories, total histories of Rome, contemporary histories, and histories that were more like a series of imperial biographies placed end to end. Some historians and biographers stressed the mythological and the marvellous, others were closer to satire and scandal-sheets. But all reflected a set of common ideals about the role of the emperor. Those ideals were a blend of Greek ideologies of kingship, and Roman notions of good citizenship. Good emperors were just, were successful in battle, deferred to tradition, respected the rights (especially the property rights) of the elite, were modest, merciful, and did not raise new taxes. Their sex lives were dull and unimpeachable. Bad emperors had all the opposite vices: think Caligula, Nero, Domitian, or Commodus.1 Now one new criterion trumped all the others. How did he stand with the Church? Was he a persecutor or a protector, and then later was he orthodox or a heretic?
No historian was neutral. Christians celebrated Constantine as a saint and the second founder of the empire, and they savagely condemned those emperors, like Diocletian and Galerius, whom they remembered most of all as persecutors. Perhaps this is understandable for the generation that lived through the Great Persecution and Constantine’s patronage of the Church. Lactantius was an African rhetor, summoned by Diocletian to teach at his eastern capital of Nicomedia and then sacked in the persecution of 303. But he moved west, and survived to tutor the eldest son of Constantine. Towards the end of his life, Lactantius composed the grisly On the Deaths of the Persecutors which recounted the gruesome punishments God reserved for Galerius, Diocletian, and the others. Eusebius and Lactantius offered a new vision of imperial history as part of God’s unfolding plan. Conversely, those writers who were not Christians deplored the decreased support for civic cults, the casual licence given to acts of violence against their temples, and what they saw as the ruinous consequences of abandoning the gods.2
But if we set aside—for just a moment—the matter of their contrasting attitudes to the emergence of competing religions, neither Diocletian nor Constantine was entirely unlike the emperors who had preceded them in the last years of the third century AD.
Both, to begin with, were soldier emperors. Like many of the emperors and would-be emperors who rose and fell during the third century, Diocletian (Diocles by birth) originated in the Balkans. Nothing certain is known about him until his entry into history as the commander of the Emperor Numerianus’ bodyguard in 283. Numerianus’ father Carus was a praetorian prefect who had rebelled against Probus in 282. Carus was killed in 283—we do not know how or by whom—and Numerianus ruled for only one year before being murdered in his turn by his own praetorian prefect, Aper, but it was Diocles whom the army hailed as Augustus. So far, so conventional. Equally conventional was Diocletian’s first campaign, against Carus’ other son (and Numerianus’ co-emperor) Carinus whom he defeated and killed in 285. For most of the next decade he fought, first on the eastern frontier, then on the upper Danube, then back in the east, while his ally Maximian, who came from a similar lowly background also in the Balkans, served first as his Caesar and then as his fellow Augustus, mostly on the western frontier. The collaboration became formalized and more complex in 293 when the two adopted two younger generals, Galerius and Constantius, as their Caesars. The four emperors (the tetrarchs) successfully worked together until 305 when, on Diocletian’s initiative, the two Augusti stepped down, the two Caesars replaced them, and appointed two new Caesars. For most of Diocletian’s more than twenty-year-long reign he and his fellow emperors moved back and forth between bases along the northern and eastern frontiers, and for most of the time they were at war with the enemies of Rome.
The success of the tetrarchs depended in part on the achievements of earlier soldier emperors like Gallienus and Aurelian. Roman armies were now better adapted to war against the northern barbarians, the cities of the east were now fortified bases, and, unlike the emperors of the mid-third century, Diocletian and Maximian were able to fight most of their wars on the frontier or on foreign territory. The great innovation was solidarity within the imperial college. The succession of coups and failed coups which ultimately brought Diocles to power was largely suppressed, although it took a while to control Britain. Diocletian invested heavily in ceremonial and titles, but perhaps it was his military success that ensured he faced fewer challenges. Once secure it was possible for him to make other changes, building more defences, and increasing the size of the army, while in order to support this he modified its command structure, and the way provinces were governed and taxed. These changes were not the implementation of a grand plan, but the cumulation of pragmatic expedients. Many built on the more successful experiments of earlier emperors, all of them were focused on the needs of the army.
The joint abdication of 305 marked the end of consensus. Even before Diocletian’s death, probably in 312, the carefully plotted succession plan began to unravel. Among the changes were the death of Constantius in 306, only a year after his elevation to the rank of Augustus, and the succession of his son Constantine. Constantine the Great himself died in 337, but he was sole emperor for only the last of his three decades in power. Before then, relations between the emperors shifted back and forth for a decade, a decade in which Constantine himself campaigned against the Franks. By the end of 312 a new pattern had began to emerge. Galerius was dead (devoured by worms if you believe Lactantius, but not before he had formally ended the Great Persecution with an Edict of Toleration); Constantine had won a decisive victory over his rival Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge which gave him control of Rome; and he had formed an alliance with Licinius, who was able to eliminate his rival Maximin Dia the next year. The alliance with Licinius was a stormy one, but it was not until 325 that Constantine was able to defeat and execute him and rule alone. By then Constantine had celebrated twenty years in power, and begun the creation of a great new capital on the site of Byzantium, to be called Constantinople. The final decade of his life was divided between wars on the Danube. and trying to create a new college of emperors from his three surviving sons (he had had a fourth, Crispus, executed in 326) and nephews. Like Diocletian he had spent much of his reign engaged in foreign
wars.
It is difficult to say whether Diocletian spent more energy trying to suppress Christianity than Constantine expended on trying to reconcile its factions. Early after his public sponsorship of Christianity he was drawn into the bitter Donatist schism in Africa, and one reason for the Council of Nicaea was an attempt to develop a single view on the nature of Christ, a response to what became known as the Arian heresy. Christian writers, Eusebius above all, focused their attention on Constantine’s relations with the Church, his personal journey, his building projects, and the Council. Yet like Diocletian before him, he was also concerned with changing the military and civilian command structure, with raising taxes, and with changes to the coinage. Diocletian and Constantine were both extraordinarily successful members of a new species of emperor, one that had emerged during the third century. It is convenient to call them soldier emperors, but they were also exceptional managers who seem to have thought of the empire first, rather than the city of Rome, let alone the Senate and people. Neither spent much time in the interior of the empire or Rome itself. The old aristocratic orders of senators and equestrians were marginal to their attention. As for religion, perhaps they were motivated by feelings of resentment or passionate conversion. Who can say? But their policies—persecution, toleration, and promotion alike—were all about imperial unity. Constantine in particular had plenty of opportunities to play the zealot, especially against heretics, but he resisted them all. Bishops felt themselves influential at his court—and so some were—but it is difficult to identify any area of policy where Constantine’s commitment to Christ did not also serve his vision for the empire.