by Woolf, Greg
That vision looks catastrophic to us. But in most areas the process of change was probably a gradual one and the product of choice not necessity. The wealthy had always had homes in both town and country, and over time they spent more time (and money) in the latter than in the former. Public building and the sponsoring of festivals in most cities dried up between AD 200 and 300. Meanwhile the villas of the fourth century display extravagant elaboration and ornamentation. Wherever the elites were absent from the cities, urban economies shrivelled up without the huge stimulus of their spending and that of their slaves, freedmen, and clients and without the support of their occasional benefactions.
Charting and explaining the collapse of classical urbanism has been a major research priority for archaeologists and for historians of late antiquity.18 One clear finding is that there were exceptions to this picture, but they are not where we might have expected them. Rome, for example, underwent dramatic population decline. Estimates for the age of Augustus are around one million, by the early fifth century it was about a third of that, and when Justinian’s armies recaptured it from the Gothic kings in 536 it was around 80,000. The decline set in far too early to be explained by the Gothic wars or even the fall of the west. On the other hand a small number of cities show evidence for building of private housing and extensive trade well into the fifth and sometimes the sixth centuries. Marseilles and Carthage, Ephesus, Alexandria, and Caesarea are particularly well studied: all were, as it happens, port cities.19 This pattern is superimposed on some broad regional variation that can be (crudely) summarized as follows. Britain, Germany, and northern Gaul experienced earlier and more severe urban contraction than anywhere else, while Syria and western Asia Minor seem to have sustained urban styles of life longest, with clear continuity in Syria into the period of Islamic rule. Spanish cities were transformed during the fourth century, insofar as Christian building replacing older monuments is concerned, but there is little third-century construction of public monuments.20 Many African cities do well into the fourth century and later, but others do not.21 Urbanism generally did not flourish in the Balkans, but in much of the interior cities had never been very large. Egypt had no catastrophic decline, but temple building declined from the third century, some time before churches begin to appear. Many classical cities had their afterlives, at least as places invested with memories. Many had been built on key sites in communication nodes; centuries of road building and port construction had only emphasized these advantages. Bishoprics were also based on the urban framework of the second century. Many towns survived to the Middle Ages only as wall circuits enclosing churches, and in a few cases the palaces of barbarian kings. Otherwise, the physical cities crumbled or were absorbed. Temples naturally found fewer sponsors after Constantine and some were physically dismantled, but many became churches. Aqueducts functioned for surprisingly long periods after the end of their construction. Shops, stalls, and markets encroached on the great colonnades and public squares of Syrian cities during the sixth century.22
It is still difficult to sum up this picture, let alone explain it in a way that is completely satisfying. But a few trends can be separated out. First, the rich stopped building public monuments and endowing money virtually everywhere before the end of the third century: where new building is attested in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries it generally comprises fortifications, churches, and private mansions. Second, even after elites had transferred their expenditure from public to private, they varied considerably from region to region in how far they chose to live in or near cities. Third, some impoverishment of part of the landowning classes is certain: at least some of this was due to increased burdens imposed by the state, at the same time as more members of local elites were able to escape financial obligations by joining the imperial bureaucracy or indeed the Church.23 Fourth, civic institutions collapsed despite efforts made by various emperors to compel local elites to maintain them: their role was taken over by imperial counts and governors, bishops, and groups of first citizens.24 Fifth, notwithstanding these trends, a small number of port cities seem to have thrived connecting densely farmed landscapes, like those of Egypt, Syria, and North Africa, to distant consumers. Sixth, responsibility for these changes cannot be laid at the door of environmental change or any other external factor: the only plausible culprits are the propertied classes and the empire, and they were certainly not working together.
Empire, Aristocracy, and the Crisis
Not all empires relied on an urban infrastructure. Romans did not exactly choose this course: the Mediterranean urban system long pre-dated Rome’s rise to power, and structured the social and political space they expanded into. Even so, cities and civic elites only really became central to the running of the empire in the late Republic, after the shortcomings of other mechanisms—such as unequal alliances, client kings, tax farming, informal hegemony—had been revealed. Pompey and Caesar had laid the groundwork, and Augustus had generalized the system.
But since then the empire had experienced a combination of incremental and catastrophic changes. Incremental changes included the gradual expansion of bureaucracy; the development of the court as a governing institution in its own right; and the emergence within the propertied classes of a group of families of exceptional wealth. Catastrophic changes included the new monetary, fiscal, and governmental systems set up by Diocletian and Constantine. The bureaucracy run by the praetorian prefects and from the early fourth century by the magister officiorum (the same position that Cassiodorus had held at the court of Theodoric the Ostrogoth) was much larger than its early imperial counterpart, and it assumed fiscal, juridical, and organizational functions that had been performed before either by cities as institutions or by aristocrats in the imperial service. Unsurprisingly the emperors became less and less concerned to require members of the local elites—called curiales in the west and bouleutai in the east—to carry out their civic obligations if they would prefer to join the imperial service. Squeezed on the one hand by exemptions and on the other by wealth accumulation that reduced the number of families who could be asked to supply magistrates, some cities clearly ran into problems. Yet the fact that other cities seem to have survived and prospered shows this was less of a general threat and more of a possible hazard in the new order.
Attractive, then, as it might be to see Roman imperialism as a species of macro-parasitism,25 growing up within classical urban civilization before killing off its host (and so itself), that story is too simple. Not only does it not explain all the variation between the fates of different cities: it makes no sense of the length of the process by which some (but not all) of the rich fell out of love with city life. An alternative narrative sees those propertied classes as the parasites, using the empire to accumulate wealth and power, and then refusing to pay their dues, with the result that the peasantries became alienated and the emperors ran out of cash to protect the ancient world from the barbarians.26 Again this is too simplistic. If some elites were indeed efficient at accumulating wealth in a smaller and smaller number of hands, they were not completely immune from the tax system in the fourth century. It is also difficult to show the peasantries of the empire were generally more disaffected in late antiquity than at other times. Finally, careful reading of the letters of Sidonius, the history of Zosimus, the erudite researches of Cassiodorus, or the passionate apologetics of Augustine and Orosius makes it difficult to reduce the attitudes and motives of the educated and wealthy to such a crude calculation of financial interest.
So if cities were not essential to ancient empires, why should Rome not have reinvented itself as a non-urban empire? The bureaucracy created in the fourth century, combined with the army, could surely raise revenue and secure peace. In a sense, this is exactly what did happen from the seventh century on, in the remnant Byzantine lands left around the Aegean. Constantinople was the only real city left, others were abandoned or became tiny market towns, and the empire was divided into districts called themata within
which a single official exercised both military and civilian authority, raising locally the resources needed by the troops he commanded.27 But this system was evidently created in the aftermath of collapse. Using the language of transformation to describe what happened to the Roman Empire between AD 300 and 700 is an evasion. Measured in terms of territory, population, influence, and military power there is no doubt at all about the fact of collapse. Ancients recognized this, and so should we.
Throughout this story of empire I have emphasized moments of survival. Episodes of expansion are not rare in world history, and nor are short-lived periods of hegemony. The exclusive club that Rome joined, however, is that small number of political entities that survived their own expansion, and were able to generate new institutions, ideologies, and habits. Successful empires are sustained by long-term relationships with other social entities with which they are in some senses symbiotic. The success of the Roman Empire rested on the synergies it engineered between imperialism and aristocracy; imperialism and slavery; imperialism and the family; imperialism and the city; and imperialism and civilization. Those relationships were not immutable: during the symbioses each set of partners modified the other. Yet they were not very unstable either. The Romans’ own list of ‘crises survived’ might include the Gallic sack, the Conflict of the Orders, Hannibal and Cannae, the Social War, the civil wars, and a string of tyrannical emperors up until the anarchy of the third century. I have emphasized a slightly different set of key moments in the evolution of the empire: but in each case a new set of institutions emerged. From the third century AD on there are signs that each successive version of empire was in some respects less successful than its predecessors. During late antiquity the symbioses with the classical city and with the propertied classes grew weaker. That only mattered because what replaced them did not work so well.
Emperors seem to have realized this, since the pace of innovation did not let up. Attempts were made to remodel the aristocracies of the empire, making them more pliable and more useful. New titles were devised for senior courtiers, the Senate of Constantinople was treated with respect, and great ceremonies were orchestrated to draw in the masses. Positions were opened up in the imperial bureaucracy, and then actually sold to those who could afford them. Once in office, bureaucrats were allowed to charge bribes worth many times their notional salaries. Justinian tried to rally his subjects around a Christian faith; and worked as hard as Constantine had to unify that faith. He emphasized a single legal system, and with it traditional moral and martial values. His reconquest of the west and his great campaigns of church building won support. But an ideology that required constant success was no support when times were hard. Military failures and payments to the barbarians undermined the reputations of some emperors. Christianity was a less effective imperial ideology than had been the traditional state cults, partly because of the chronic tendency to schism and heresy, partly because it conferred an independent authority on religious leaders, such as the bishops of Rome. During the sixth century one could be a Christian without being a subject of the emperor, and a Roman living under a barbarian king. Justinian was not welcomed with open arms throughout the west, and even at the end of what was by most standards a phenomenally successful reign, he was dogged by religious divisions.
The empire that emerged in the late seventh century was in some ways a hugely successful city-state. We could compare it to Rome in the early second century BC, on the eve of its expansion beyond Italy, when the scale of its territory was roughly similar. Geopolitically it was less defensible, with its long Balkan frontiers, and its exposure to the Arab invaders by land and sea. But the monuments were more impressive, and its rulers had amassed considerably more symbolic capital from their nine centuries of empire. Internal politics remained factionalized, both in the palace between rival eunuchs and in the city between circus factions. Yet it was stable in the sense that its institutions were now focused on survival rather than expansion. No one had planned contraction, but then no one had planned expansion either. Both the rise and collapse of Roman power had been generated by the internal logic of the institutions of the day.
The world around had changed, of course. Christianity and Islam now set the agenda in ways that the polytheisms of an earlier age had never done. A clear sign that the emperors were not themselves to blame for contraction, and that Roman institutions were not the central problem, is that no other empires were created in the gap left by Rome. During the second century BC a number of regional powers competed for hegemony, Carthage and Rome in the west, the Seleucids, Ptolemies, and Antigonids in the east, and beyond them the Parthians. The failure of one opened up opportunities for the others. When the Parthians’ power shrank, the Sassanians grew to replace them. Similar dynamics can be observed earlier in the Near East and later in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. But that did not happen in the early Middle Ages of the Old World. Theoderic played at being king of Rome, but could not convert his symbolic power into meaningful overlordship of the other western kingdoms. The Carolingian empire was a more fragile and tenuous entity than its Roman model. So, in a different way, was the power of the caliphs. It is as if the age of empire was over. Unless the case for some general and long-lasting environmental disaster can be substantiated, the most likely factor making the world less receptive to imperial projects must be the emergence of the new universal religions of late antiquity.28 Christianity and Islam did not destroy the Roman Empire, but the world they introduced was one less friendly to the great political empires of antiquity.
Further Reading
Michael Maas’s Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2005) surpasses the limits of the genre, to present a new portrait of the age. Fundamental to the study of the period are the various works of Procopius of Caesarea. Averil Cameron’s Procopius and the Sixth Century (London, 1985) is the best introduction. Some of her many important papers on the sixth and seventh centuries are gathered in Continuity and Change in Sixth-Century Byzantium (London, 1981) and Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium (Aldershot, 1996). For the west, Julia Smith’s Europe after Rome (Oxford, 2005) presents an original and lucid new synthesis.
The transformation of the ancient urban system has been the focus of much work. Two very useful collections are John Rich’s City in Late Antiquity (London, 1992) and Neil Christie and Simon Loseby’s Towns in Transition (Aldershot, 1996). Wolf Liebeschuetz’s Decline and Fall of the Ancient City (Oxford, 2001) is the best synthesis: it is worth reading it alongside Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005). For the city of Rome see William Harris’s collection The Transformations of Urbs Roma in Late Antiquity (Portsmouth, RI, 1999) and Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West (Leiden, 2000) edited by Julia Smith.
XVIII
THE ROMAN PAST AND THE ROMAN FUTURE
I shall not perish utterly, for a great part of me will escape Death. I will grow, swollen with the praise of future generations, for as long as the priest leads the silent virgin up to the Capitol.
(Horace, Odes 3.30.6–9)
The words are those of the poet Horace, composed in the reign of Augustus. As you read them, you surpass his wildest expectations. No pontiffs or vestal virgins are attested after the end of the fourth century AD. The Capitol has been ruined and rebuilt several times since Horace wrote. And yet we do still read Horace’s Odes. Like the rest of Roman civilization, he has not perished utterly.
My final chapter is about survival and about how we know so much about the Roman Empire. Accident and chance both play a part in this story, and more recently our own research on which most of this book is based. But there is design as well, and not just Horace’s. For the Romans have sent us many messages in bottles, consigned by generation after generation to remote posterity. We cannot take all the credit for the discovery of ancient Rome: the ancient Romans wanted to be found.
Accidents
Few empires lasted as long as that of Rome, or made such an impact on those they ru
led. I have struggled throughout this book with metaphors, my own and those of others. The Roman Empire has been likened to an epidemic, a machine, a balloon, a vampire bat and a great resonating vibration, a tsunami and a tide, an organism known only through its fossil body, and a single human life. At times imperial society has seemed like a great dance too, one that drew in more and more dancers, and then was carried on by fewer and fewer until the music was quite different. My last metaphor is an ice age. Tides sweep over beaches and then retreat: fascinating flotsam and jetsam are left behind, but only after a great storm does the beach really look different. But if we consider what the Roman Empire did to tradition and identity, culture and religion, lifestyles and beliefs, we find much more fundamental change. The empire grew like an ice cap, sending glaciers down in all directions. When those glaciers retreated, back to Byzantium rather than Rome, they left entirely new landscapes gouged out, and great moraines of boulders around which their new inhabitants had to accommodate themselves. Those peoples were no longer those that Rome had originally conquered: some were new arrivals, and almost all the rest had forgotten what it was like before the ice.