Rome
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The only emperor after Constantine who was not a Christian was his nephew Julian, born just six years before Constantine’s death in 337. Julian’s childhood was lived against the background of civil wars conducted among Constantine’s heirs. Within a year of Constantine’s death two of his nephews had been murdered and the empire was divided between Constans, Constantine II, and Constantius II. Constans defeated and killed Constantine II in 340 and for ten years divided the empire with Constantius II. Constans himself was killed by a usurper in 350. By 351 Constantius II was sole Augustus, a position he held until his death in 361. For much of this time Julian was kept out of public life. But when his brother Gallus was made junior emperor, with the title of Caesar, in 351 his own return to public life must have seemed inevitable. Gallus was executed for treachery in 354. The next year Julian was made Caesar in turn and given a command in Gaul. We can only speculate on the effects on Julian of this history of familial murders and intrigue. But we do know that in his twenties, partly as a result of his own reading and partly under the influence of the philosopher Maximus of Ephesus, he rejected the (Arian) Christianity in which he had been brought up and secretly embraced—not too strong a term in his case—a very idiosyncratic and highly intellectualized version of what he regarded as the ancestral religion, a broad polytheism in which the gods of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Jews all had their place. He called this Hellenism. It is difficult for us to avoid the name the Christians gave it, paganism. But the cults of the ancestral gods never formed the kind of connected organized entity we usually mean by religion except in the imagination of Christian writers. It is an irony of Julian’s vision that the nature of the paganism he tried to restore and institutionalize, both its cosmological coherence and the charitable institutions he wished to encourage, is one of the clearest testimonies of his Christian upbringing.
Given the history of Constantine’s family no one can have been surprised that in 361 Julian rebelled against Constantius II. Only the latter’s death prevented another civil war. But when it transpired that Julian was not only not a Christian, but was a passionate advocate of the ancestral religion, the empire went into shock. Along with wars against Persia and hostilities with his brothers, Constantius II had also been embroiled in the great religious controversy of the age, inspired by the teaching of Arius, that Jesus, the Son, was completely subordinated to the Father. Constantine had tried to impose a compromise at the great council of bishops assembled at Nicaea in 325, but the controversy simmered on. Now, suddenly, all that was swept away. Julian’s court honoured Neoplatonist philosophers, not bishops. During his brief reign he wrote feverishly about his ideas, tried to ban Christians from teaching, restored funding to civic cults, planned to rebuild Jerusalem, and attempted to reorganize the old cults as a kind of counter-church. The opposition he faced from all sides showed the deep penetration of Christian ideology and the empire, especially among the ruling classes. Would Julian have made more progress if he had not died in 363 of a wound sustained in a new Persian war? It is impossible to say. As it was, the memory of ‘the Apostate’ was reviled, and his successors threw themselves enthusiastically back into their struggles with the bishops over orthodoxy.
Did that settle it? The reign of Julian seemed to have showed that although the old gods still had some devotees, Constantine’s transformation of the empire’s institutions had gone too far to be reversed. But proponents of the ancestral religion had one last moment in which to denounce Christ and his followers. For in the century that followed Julian’s death, a slow-moving disaster engulfed the Roman Empire. Diocletian, Constantine, Constantius II, Julian, and his successor Jovian all fought wars against the Persians and these continued into the fifth century. These wars consumed resources and lives without leading to any radical shifts of power between the ‘brother emperors’. Over time the two empires would come to seem more and more alike.3 Conflict between them would continue off and on until the Persian Empire was destroyed by the Arabs in the seventh century, while the Romans narrowly escaped the same fate. But the avalanche fell from the north, not the east. The Roman recovery at the end of the third century had seen Gallienus, Claudius II, Aurelian, Probus, and finally Diocletian campaigning against various northern peoples. The invasions of the empire had been stopped, but at the cost of the surrender of Trajan’s Dacian provinces in what is now Romania. The empire was now bordered by peoples transformed by generations of contact with Rome, contact that included trade and military service as well as war. There were even missionaries operating north of the frontier. The Goths were partly converted to (Arian) Christianity in the middle of the fourth century. But at the end of the century these peoples themselves found themselves under pressure from the north and east.
The new arrivals were the Huns. All reports present them as completely unlike Romans or Goths, a highly mobile nomadic people, moving westward very rapidly, in the same way that Cimmerians and Scythians had in the early Iron Age and Tartars and Mongols would in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. They clearly terrified the settled agricultural communities they conquered. They first appear in the 370s, somewhere north of the Black Sea, and pressed westwards. It is impossible to assess quite how novel or serious was the threat posed by the Huns. The empire remained weaker than it had been before the third-century military crisis. The Goths experienced pull factors—their desire for wealth as well as security within the empire—as well as the push factors generated by the Hunnic invasion. Either way, groups of Goths sought permission to cross into the empire and in 376 the emperor Valens allowed them in. Could he have stopped them? Again it is impossible to know. But when two years later he faced them in battle at Adrianople he lost his life and most of the eastern army. A chain reaction set in, more groups crossed the Rhine and Danube frontiers, and emperors were increasingly reduced to making concessions to some groups of northerners as the only defence against others. By the 450s the Huns were campaigning under their king Attila in the Balkans, in northern France, and even in Italy. On Attila’s death in 453 his fragile empire collapsed under a mixture of internal rivalry and rebellion from its subjects. In this too it resembles other nomad empires throughout history.4 But the political landscape they left behind was changed forever.
By the end of the fifth century, half the Roman Empire was occupied by barbarian kingdoms. The military power and fiscal resources of the eastern empire were crippled beyond repair. Back in the darkest days of the Mithridatic War, the Romans had briefly lost control of all territory east of the Adriatic. Now, 500 years later, all the territory west of the Adriatic had been lost. The city of Rome itself had been sacked twice by barbarian hordes. The empire that Rome had created had ballooned in the late Republic to encompass the whole Mediterranean. Now the balloon had deflated, leaving Rome on the outside. The historian Zosimus—writing around AD 500 in Constantinople, the city founded on the Bosporus by Constantine as New Rome and now the sole capital of what was left of the empire—set out to chronicle Rome’s decline and fall, presenting it as a matching narrative to Polybius’ account of Rome’s rise to empire. For Zosimus, the decline in Rome’s fortunes was the direct consequence of Constantine’s disastrous desertion of the traditional gods of Rome.
A New Empire?
Historians today frequently contrast the empire of the fourth and fifth centuries with that of the first three centuries AD. We write of ‘late’ or ‘later’ empire, or in French haut (high) as opposed to early or bas (low)-empire. Some of these labels indicate an unarticulated assumption that the empire of the first three centuries was primary, and later versions of Roman power secondary. Terming late antiquity ‘post-classical’ is an explicit statement to this effect, as is writing of Rome’s inheritance or of the transformation of the classical world. Historical change is, of course, the only real constant. No age stays the same. But some ages are more conscious of change than others, and modern phraseology reflects some ancient preoccupations.
The later Roman Empire was, in s
ome respects at least, self-consciously past its prime. A group of historians writing in Greek of whom the most important are Eunapius, Olympiodorus, and Zosimus are for this reason often termed ‘classicizing’.5 Taking Greek literature produced in the fifth and fourth centuries BC as stylistic models was not in itself new. The second-century AD orators of what we, following their third-century biographer Philostratus, term the Second Sophistic were given that label for precisely this reason. They strove to speak an ‘Attic’ Greek that was quite different from the spoken language even of the elite who had studied these works at school.6 Latin loanwords were shunned and so were Greek neologisms. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, composed in the late first century AD, paired great Greeks with great Romans. The Greeks were mostly figures from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, and none post-dated the Roman conquest: the Romans were all figures from the Republic. Two classical eras were set in parallel while the early empire was deemed post-classical for both Greece and Rome. Arrian of Nicomedia governed Cappadocia in the reign of Hadrian, but wrote in the style of Xenophon. Cassius Dio, another Bithynian Greek senator this time of the Severan period, composed a Roman History in which the thought and language of Thucydides is never very far below the surface.7 But the classicism of late antiquity was different. Zosimus’ engagement is more elegiac, as if the classical past is gone forever. Moreover, Zosimus, Eunapius, and the others were self-consciously not writing a Christianized version of history, a version that was in some ways becoming the official narrative. Late Latin literature too was preoccupied with its relation to a Latin canon, one based around the works of Cicero and Virgil.8 That was already true of the Gallic panegyrists in the late third century.
By the second half of the fourth century AD Ausonius and his contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest Latin historian of late antiquity, offer perspectives quite similar to their Greek counterparts. Again, it was not new to focus on the classics: early imperial Latin was preoccupied with them and a series of explicitly post-Virgilian epics were composed by Roman senators in the course of the first century AD. But by late antiquity, the age of Augustus and Trajan seemed far away. Ammianus, a pagan member of the military elite, chronicled the noble but futile exercise of traditional virtues and especially the reign of Julian, whom he greatly if not uncritically admired. Much of his narrative seems very familiar—intrigues at court, battles against barbarians in the north, the great rumbling hostility with Persia—but the world he moves through is already partly ruined, its cities sacked, its Senate decayed, its civilization haunted by literary ghosts of a happier time.
That pessimism, largely expressed by representatives of the propertied classes, needs to be tempered against the realities of the restoration of stability by warrior emperors, pagan and Christian alike. Civic elites and the Senate were not generally winners in the reorganization of the empire. Senators had lost their role in government, and had little access to the emperors ruling from Trier or Sirmium or even Milan and Constantinople. The growing bureaucracy around the court alienated many, especially in the west, and taxation was heavier.9 Many of the distinctive features of the empire of the fourth and fifth centuries could be seen as the culmination of long-term trends, either established during the generation-long military emergency of the mid-third century, or even earlier. The development of the imperial court and its transformation into a mobile institution can be traced back to Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Once military affairs drew emperors to the frontiers, the role of the Senate inevitably became marginalized. Senators who wished to take a role in public life became generals and courtiers. Imperial edicts replaced senatorial decrees as a source of law and ambassadors now came to the court, not to Rome, for practical reasons. Precedents can be traced back to the reign of Augustus.
Yet there was something new, and it was recognized as such. The empire that emerged from the crisis was ruled by a group, or college, of emperors. Each was based in his own court, and each had responsibility for a share of the army and of the provinces. Each was, as a result, able to act more effectively in relation to his subjects: how they did it is documented in a vast amount of documentation.10 The number of provinces had grown slightly over the third century. Diocletian increased their number and grouped them together into larger units, assigning oversight of the administration to one or other of the praetorian prefects. Eventually there were four great prefectures each managing a quarter of the empire and a wing of the bureaucracy that gathered taxes and organized government directly, with less and less involvement from either senators or local elites.11 That move towards a more centralized form of government built on developments in the tax system that I have already described. It also helped the emperors extract more revenue to supply slightly larger armies. Probably unintentionally, it also made some regions effectively self-sufficient: the taxes needed for a region’s defence were typically raised locally. That development would make fragmentation easier in the future.
The changes introduced by Diocletian and modified by Constantine were unpopular with many members of traditional elites. But the growing bureaucracy provided many opportunities for educated provincials and even for some barbarian leaders to join in a new ruling class. Once recruited they were rapidly socialized and created their own traditional ways of doing things, ways they would staunchly defend against further changes in the sixth century.12 Roman bureaucracy was probably not fantastically efficient. This was not a modern state, patronage remained important and corruption endemic.13 But its internal dynamics had changed.
The multiplication of emperors and so of courts responded to the realization that a single emperor could not be everywhere he was needed, and that in his absence usurpers would appear. Like so much else it evolved from contingent modifications of earlier expedients. Diocletian provided the model when he adopted Maximian, first as Caesar, and then promoted him to Augustus. The use of the title Caesar to mean junior emperor and/or Augustus-in-waiting went back to the reign of Vespasian. It had been used by other emperors, along with adoption, to secure the succession. Diocletian’s idea for extending this stability was that each Augustus would adopt a new Caesar, creating an imperial college of four, the tetrarchy. Each Augustus would eventually retire, to be replaced by his Caesar who would in turn adopt his own helper and successor. Yet sharing imperial rule was not in itself new. Marcus had ruled as co-Augustus with Lucius Verus in the middle of the second century, and Severus briefly ruled with both his sons whom he seems to have expected to succeed him as co-emperors. Diocletian’s only real innovation, the idea of two parallel dynasties renewed by periodic adoptions, was also the only component of the new package that was not successful. After the civil wars of the early fourth century, Constantine ruled for a while as sole emperor. On his death all three of his sons succeeded, to begin their own struggles for power. After this the number of emperors varied according to the chance of civil war and political fortune. Constantius II was sole Augustus from 350 until 361, as were each of his two short-lived successors, Julian and Jovian. But on the latter’s death in 364 the brothers Valens and Valentinian ruled together, and two more members of the family ruled as boy emperors before the dynasty was extinguished in the chaos that followed the battle of Adrianople in 378. Theodosius I ruled as sole emperor, but by his death in 395 both his sons had been made his colleagues. At no point did collegiate rule represent a division of the empire into two, three, or four separate states, and co-emperors were mostly related. Generally the system worked, if the aim was to reduce the incidence of civil wars and usurpations. The western frontiers seemed stronger for being ruled from Trier or Milan, and there was no repeat of the events of the 260s when troops, resources, and attention had been drawn off to the east. Ironically, the fall of the west was triggered by the defeat of the eastern army. Yet one effect of the multiplication of emperors was a potential lack of coherence in policy. That was exposed most dramatically in the years after Adrianople when each court seemed most interested in expelling the Gothic immigrant groups
from their own sphere of influence.
Fig. 19. Porphyry statue of the Four Tetrarchs at the Basilica di San Marco, St Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy
The fact that there were earlier precedents for many of the innovations of the fourth century did not mean the package was unchanged. How far Diocletian and Constantine felt themselves to be innovators is another question, but maybe not a very important one. Perhaps the real significance of the military crisis of the third century was that it intensified the process of experimentation: emperor after emperor sought new solutions, liberated by necessity from considerations of tact and custom. Decius and mass persecution, Gallienus’ military reforms, Aurelian and the cult of Sol Invictus, Diocletian and an edict on maximum prices were all initiatives taken in desperation, but they were not crazy ideas. Senatorial accounts of some of the soldier emperors are very vicious, marking the social distance that had emerged between court and Senate. Macrinus was presented as more or less a barbarian. Yet some were very effective.14 A few experiments were disasters: debasing the coinage to fund larger armies when tax revenues were depleted by usurpation was a short-term fix that triggered inflation and weakened the monetary system fatally. Diocletian had to devise a new currency system that was then modified by Constantine in order to repair things. That worked, but his edict on maximum prices was unenforceable. Yet other experiments, such as the development of a more mobile field army, were more successful. The net effect was to create an effective empire for the fourth century, and the basis of a smaller one that would survive for many centuries more.