The Later Roman Empire

It is evident that given the rapid turnover of emperors, smooth functioning of relations between centre and periphery must have been seriously disrupted. The empire had been a balancing act from the beginning, and the equilibrium was now endangered. Formerly a balance of imperial and local interest had obtained, and had been at its steadiest during the age of the Antonines. In the third century, local cultures became much more visible. From Gaul to Syria and Egypt, local styles are more evident in visual art, and local interests had an opportunity to make themselves felt, most obviously in the so-called ‘Gallic empire’ and in Zenobia’s bid for independence at Palmyra. Another important development in the third century was the extension of Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the empire under the Emperor Caracalla by the so-called Constitutio Antoniana of AD 212; though Caracalla’s motives may have had more to do with getting in more taxes than with idealism or generosity, this measure extended the notion of what was considered ‘Roman’ to cover a multitude of ethnically and locally divergent cultures. Though the balance of power shifted back somewhat towards the centre under Diocletian and the tetrarchy (AD 284–305), the political and military fragmentation during the middle and later third century also had long-term implications for the cultural pattern of late antiquity. From now on, both Syriac and Coptic emerged as major literary languages used by large numbers of Christians in Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Christian church also profited: despite persecution under Decius (AD 249–51) and Diocletian (AD 303–11), it was able to develop a solid institutional structure which stood it in extremely good stead when it found favour with Constantine.

The third century was certainly a difficult period. Nor were its problems all man-made. The plague which struck the empire in the reign of Marcus Aurelius was much less serious than the attacks of bubonic plague which hit the eastern empire in the sixth century and western Europe in the fourteenth, and indeed, plague and disease were endemic in the ancient world at all periods, but it may nevertheless have been a factor, with the effects of invasion and war, conducive to a reduction in population, and with it (since land needs labour in order to produce wealth) to a diminution in the economic base. The question is highly controversial; though shortage of manpower has been adduced as a reason for the alleged decline of the empire, the case has been argued on poor grounds. Nevertheless, general considerations, together with evidence of urban contraction, especially in the western provinces, do support a cautious hypothesis of a reduction in population. But it is essential to see this over a longer period; the eastern empire at any rate was well able to recover, and there is good evidence of an actual population increase from the late fourth and certainly during the fifth century.

Modern historians, for various reasons, have been quick to emphasize the negative aspects of the period. But it is less obvious that contemporaries saw it in those terms. To our eyes, the social and legal distinctions between honestiores (‘upper class’) and humiliores (‘lower class’) are a striking feature of the later empire; yet they had been developing well before the period of the ‘third-century crisis’. Again, it is probably a modern idea to see the Gallic emperors as forming a separatist regime, for, as Tacitus had remarked, it had long been one of the ‘secrets of empire’ that legitimate emperors could be made outside Rome. Furthermore, the negative views expressed by contemporaries, on which many modern accounts rely, usually have a specific explanation. Bishops such as Cyprian of Carthage, who was himself martyred in the persecution under Valerian in AD 258, very naturally emphasized the evils of the age. On the other hand, cultural activity flourished. The philosopher Plotinus continued to lecture on Platonism in Rome and to attract fashionable crowds to hear him, besides pupils from far afield. P. Herennius Dexippus, who had led the citizens of Athens in their resistance to the Heruli, wrote a history of the Gothic and Scythian invasions, which unfortunately only survives in fragments. We tend to be misled in judging the period by the fact that no good contemporary narrative survives for the critical middle fifty years of the third century, so that we must depend on the often fanciful and trivializing Historia Augusta, which reads rather like a gossip column in a tabloid newspaper, and once read, is hard to forget.

Especially when looking back from the vantage point of modern rationalism, it is very tempting to suppose with E. R. Dodds and others that the ‘age of spirituality’ (as late antiquity has been called) grew out of the insecurity experienced in the third century, or, in other words, that people turned to religion, and perhaps especially to Christianity, in their attempts to find meaning, or to escape from their present woes. The persecuting emperors, Decius, Valerian and Diocletian, certainly believed that neglect of the gods endangered the empire’s security, and that deviant groups such as Christians must therefore be brought into line. In the same way, Constantine saw himself as specially charged by God to make sure that worship was properly conducted and properly directed. But it is one thing to suppose a general connection between religion and the desire for comfort, reassurance and explanation of suffering, and quite another to imagine that difficult times always call forth religious movements, or, to put it the other way round, that a religious development is always to be explained by reference to adverse social factors. Whether late antiquity was really more an age of spirituality than the periods that had gone before is itself now in question; it is an assumption which tends to hang together with the notion that paganism was discredited or somehow in decline, and that Christianity rose to fill the resultant gap. But this Christianizing view does not stand up to recent study of the lively and diverse religious life of the early empire, and the reasons for the growth of the Christian church and the spread of Christianity can only be located by a broad analysis, not simply by appeal to an alleged decline of paganism.

Christianization, and the profound consequences for the empire and for society of Constantine’s espousal of Christianity, form one of the strands which make late antiquity different from the early empire. But there were many others, among which we must give a special place to the series of reforms and administrative, economic and military changes which evolved during the fifty years (AD 284–337) covered by the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Though there were of course striking differences between them, which are vividly reflected in the surviving source material, we should also attempt to take a broad view, and to see their reigns as marking, when taken together, a fifty-year period of recovery and consolidation after the fifty-year ‘age of anarchy’, in Rostovtzeff’s phrase. Contrary to the usual emphasis, however, it was not so much Diocletian and Constantine themselves as personalities who managed to stabilize the situation, but rather a combination and convergence of factors, from which many of their ‘reforms’ in fact emerged piecemeal and ad hoc. Seen in this light, the mid-third century looks less like a time of ‘crisis’ from which the empire was dragged by the efforts of a strong and even a totalitarian emperor (Diocletian is often termed an ‘oriental despot’ because of his adoption of elaborate court ceremony in the Persian style), and more like a temporary phase in a developing and evolving imperial system.

II The Sources

IN SHARP CONTRAST with that for the third century, the available source material for the period starting with Diocletian’s reign, and more especially for the late fourth century onwards, is extremely rich and varied. This is attributable not only to the large amount of Christian writing but also to the sheer quantity of secular writing in both Latin and Greek. The amount of Latin writing surviving from the late fourth century in particular is such as to surpass even the age of Cicero, and to make this one of the best-documented periods in Roman history. Ammianus Marcellinus, the one great Latin historian after Tacitus, completed his Res Gestae in Rome in the early 390s, while the voluminous letters of Q. Aurelius Symmachus, a latter-day Pliny, give us an idea of the priorities and the constraints on a pagan senator of wealth and position, even if not one of the superrich who are unforgettably described by Ammianus (see below). In addition, this is the age of the great Christian writers, men such as Jerome, Ambrose and, above all, Augustine, whose Greek counterparts were Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom, the twiceexiled bishop of Constantinople. All bishops, and all highly educated in the traditional secular style, these men carried on the great tradition of classical rhetoric, which they turned to Christian purpose in speeches such as the funeral oration which Ambrose delivered in honour of the Emperor Theodosius I (AD 395). Another example, the funeral speech on Basil, bishop of Caesarea, by Gregory of Nazianzus (AD 379) has been described as probably the greatest piece of Greek rhetoric since the death of Demosthenes. The fourth and fifth centuries represent the golden age of what is termed ‘patristic’ literature, works written by the great Fathers of the Church, men who, released from persecution during the reign of Constantine, now often took on the public role of statesman as well as that of bishop.

This is just to give a preliminary idea of the richness of the available literary material. Not surprisingly, it took some time to flower, given the apparent dearth of writing in the third century and the degree of social change which took place under Diocletian and Constantine. From the middle of the fourth century, however, we begin to see an upsurge of writing of several different kinds under the stimulus of a more settled social order which offered great opportunities to those with literary talent. Ausonius, a poet and rhetor from Bordeaux, rose to the very top and became praetorian prefect and consul after gaining the post of tutor to the future Emperor Gratian, while Claudian, a Greek-speaking Alexandrian, made his fame and fortune in Rome writing Latin panegyrics, highly elaborate and rhetorical poems in praise of the Vandal general, Stilicho, and Honorius, who succeeded his father Theodosius I as emperor in the west. The fourth-century emperors tried to curb social mobility by legislation, in the interests of securing the tax revenue; but a rhetorical, that is a classical, education was a path by which one could readily climb the social ladder.

In most cases the great churchmen of the day had also had a training in classical rhetoric. Accordingly, the relation of secular to Christian culture is not easy to define (see in particular Chapter X below), and sometimes the two came very close. The pagan philosopher and rhetor Themistius, for instance, served Christian emperors apparently without difficulty, and was actually out of favour during the reign of the pagan Julian (AD 361–3). The Emperor Julian, the only pagan emperor after Constantine and an interesting writer himself, had been brought up in early youth as a Christian. He became a pagan when he was effectively exiled as a boy after his older male relatives had been murdered by their rivals, the sons of Constantine, and when he was, rather surprisingly, allowed to come under the influence of Athenian Neoplatonism. Once emperor, he produced a number of offbeat works, all in Greek, including a satire called The Caesars, partly directed at Constantine, an invective against ‘the Galilaeans’, as he called the Christians (mostly in fact concerned with Moses and the Old Testament), a hymn to the sun-god (‘King Helios’) and a lampoon called ‘The Beard-Hater’ in which he defended himself against his unpopularity with the citizens of Antioch. Earlier, he had composed a panegyric on his hated Christian patron and predecessor, Constantius II (AD 337–61) in which he still kept his paganism concealed.

We must look at certain writers in more detail before turning to the non-literary sources. For the reign of Diocletian we are badly served by contemporaries, for no connected history survives, and it is necessary to rely to a large extent on the venomous Latin pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors by Lactantius, a Christian convert and formerly a rhetor at the court of Nicomedia. Writing probably about AD 314, shortly after Licinius and Constantine had declared toleration for all religions in the so-called Edict of Milan, Lactantius’s object was to make an example of the horrible deaths that had befallen the persecutors of Christians, which he does in great detail, especially in the case of Galerius. This of course makes him a highly unreliable witness to the secular aims of Diocletian, who had initiated the persecution in AD 303; unfortunately the chapter which he devotes to Diocletian’s administrative and military reforms (De mortibus persecutorum 7) is too often taken at face value. The relevant part of the Greek New History by Zosimus, the late fifth or early sixth-century pagan writer from Constantinople, is missing, but had it survived, it would of course have been equally misleading, since in direct contrast to Lactantius the pagan Zosimus praised Diocletian and blamed Constantine for every ill the empire had subsequently suffered.

For Constantine, it is a somewhat different story, for we have a number of important works by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, a great Christian writer and scholar. Eusebius established the new Christian genres of church history and chronicles, and still more important, is the major source for our understanding of Constantine. He did not suffer himself in the persecution of Christians, but knew and visited many senior clergy who did, and his later work was coloured by that experience. His Ecclesiastical or Church History, now in ten books, may have been begun before persecution broke out again in AD 303, though this is controversial; either way, it went through several rewritings as the situation literally changed all around him. The first change was when persecution was called off in AD 311, the next when Constantine defeated Maxentius in the name of Christianity at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in AD 312; Constantine then went on to fight two further campaigns against Licinius, culminating in his victory in AD 324. The Church History received its final touches after this victory but before the Council of Nicaea which Constantine summoned in AD 325 and which Eusebius describes in his later work, the Life of Constantine (VC, Vita Constantini), completed after Constantine’s death in AD 337. Manuscript variants in the Church History make it clear that the author himself went over his earlier versions and touched them up in order to write out Licinius (previously presented in neutral or even favourable terms as Constantine’s ally) and defend and glorify Constantine as the champion of Christianity.

The Life of Constantine, in four books, is less a biography than an extended and extremely tendentious panegyric, whose exaggerations and distortions have led many scholars in the past to doubt whether it could be the work of Eusebius. Some still suspect that certain passages are later in date, but by detailed comparison with the techniques of Eusebius’s other writings on Constantine it has been convincingly demonstrated that the work as a whole is consistent with Eusebian authorship. Eusebius also composed official speeches for the dedication of Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in AD 335, and a highly rhetorical panegyric of Constantine for the thirtieth anniversary of the emperor’s reign in AD 335–36, known as the Tricennalian Oration, or LC (Laus Constantini, Praise of Constantine).

There are some obvious problems about Eusebius’ reporting about Constantine. In the first place, it is extremely one-sided; he wishes to persuade us that Constantine was a model Christian emperor in everything that he did. Yet it is clear that the Life of Constantine, doubtless written with an eye to the unstable situation which followed the emperor’s death in May, AD 337, takes what Eusebius had said in his Church History much further, embellishing and adding details of a highly tendentious kind. Thus the famous story of Constantine’s vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge is told for the first time by Eusebius only in the Life (I.28), being entirely absent from the account in the Church History of the same battle (HE IX.9), which is clearly in general the foundation of Eusebius’s later narrative. The theme of Constantine’s youth, and his father’s alleged sympathy for Christianity, is similarly taken further than in the earlier work, the campaign against Licinius written up as though it were a holy war, and the role played in it by Constantine’s eldest son Crispus, which is recorded in the Church History, is here entirely omitted, so as cover over the awkward fact that he had been executed at his father’s orders in AD 326. All this certainly makes one suspicious of Eusebius’s honesty as a reporter. The situation is not helped by the fact that a high proportion of what we know about Constantine is dependent on Eusebius’s Life, which (like Book X of the Church History) includes a large number of imperial letters and edicts, either allegedly transcribed from official copies or translations of Latin originals, or summarized by Eusebius himself. In most cases there is no other evidence from which to check his accuracy, and it has been shown that the range of such material known to him was actually rather narrow; he met the emperor personally only at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, and before that would have had limited access to documents and information from the western half of the empire, Constantine’s portion at the time. Eusebius’ is also the only eye-witness account of the Council of Nicaea, of which no official Acts survive, and is notoriously disingenuous, since he himself, as an Arian sympathizer recently formally condemned by another council, had much to explain away; he therefore glosses over the actual doctrinal issues so far as he can, and focuses instead on the unprecedented phenomenon of Constantine’s appearance as patron of the church:

he passed through the assembly like a heavenly angel, giving out a bright radiance as if by shafts of light, gleaming with fiery rays of purple, and adorned with the bright light of gold and precious stones. So much for his physical appearance. He could also be seen to be adorned in his character by fear of God and downcast eyes, his ruddy complexion, his gait and the other aspects of his appearance, including his height, which surpassed all those around him (II.10).

Eusebius’s deficiencies as a sober historian vividly illustrate however his ideological purpose as a Christian apologist, in which he was followed by many later Christian writers. His Church History, the first of its kind, was a pioneering work, taking the history of the church from the time of Jesus up to Eusebius’s own day. Though it is by no means devoid of stylistic pretensions, it differs from classical history in that it has a point to prove, and it includes verbatim documents in order to help its case. His Chronicle, surviving in Syriac and in the Latin version by Jerome, was essentially a chronological table beginning with Creation, and presenting the ancient kingdoms of the Old Testament as well as all Greek and Roman history as part of a linear progression which would eventually culminate with the Second Coming and the end of the world. Eusebius’s own linear thinking was further worked out in his apologetic works, the Praeparatio Evangelica and the Demonstratio Evangelica, which propounded the view that all previous history was in fact a preparation for the coming of Christ and the establishment of Christianity, and his Chronicle was to provide the basis for the later Christian world chronicle, which became a standard medieval historical form in both Greek and Latin. Unlike the Life of Constantine, which had a more obviously topical relevance, the Church History and the Chronicle immediately became standard; the former was translated into Latin and continued in the late fourth century by Rufinus and became a model for later church historians such as Socrates and Sozomen, both lawyers who wrote in Constantinople in the fifth century.

The audience for such works was no doubt largely if not entirely Christian; but there was also a need for historical works of a secular kind, and this may be the explanation for the series of short historical compendia in Latin which date from the middle of the fourth century and include Aurelius Victor’s De Caesaribus and the Breviarium of Eutropius. With the social and cultural changes of the third century, especially the decline of the Senate and shift of focus from Rome, senatorial history in the manner of Tacitus had apparently ceased to be written, while a Greek history of Constantine’s reign written by one Praxagoras, a pagan, has failed to survive intact. But from the end of the fourth century secular history in Greek underwent a considerable revival, which was to continue until the time of Theophylact Simocatta, writing in the seventh century; Zosimus’s New History falls into this category, though it is by no means one of the best examples. We ought also to include here the Latin Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, by far the most important historical work of the fourth century, deserving to rank with the classic writers of the republic and early empire, and a work with a vigour and power all its own.

As he signs off his work, Ammianus tells us that he had begun it with the year AD 96, the reign of Nerva, which is also the point at which both Tacitus and Suetonius had ended:

This is the history of events from the reign of the emperor Nerva to the death of Valens, which I, a former soldier and a Greek, have composed to the best of my ability. It claims to be the truth, which I have never ventured to pervert either by silence or a lie. The rest I leave to be written by better men whose abilities are in their prime. But if they choose to undertake the task I advise them to cast what they have to say in the grand style.

As he tells us here, he ended with the disastrous Roman defeat and death of the Emperor Valens at Adrianople in AD 378. Since the part we have, beginning at the year AD 354, late in the reign of Constantius II, comprises eighteen books in itself, and is written on a very large scale, the first part (probably up to the section on Constantine, which is unfortunately lost) must have been considerably abbreviated by comparison; some scholars have believed that he wrote two separate works, but this is unlikely. In any case, Ammianus’s focus of interest changed in the last six books, which deal in famous detail with Rome and the vices of its late fourth-century senatorial class; though he was a pagan himself, the scathing vehemence with which he condemns the love of luxury among these Roman grandees makes it unlikely that he was the recipient of their patronage, or a spokesman for a supposed senatorial ‘pagan reaction’ (see Chapter X); book 28 includes a lengthy excursus on the vices of the nobility (28.4; cf. also 14.6), in the course of which Ammianus remarks that ‘some of them hate learning like poison but read Juvenal and Marius Maximus with avidity. These are the only volumes that they turn over in their idle moments.’ There seems to be a personal note here, but his actual milieu while in Rome remains a mystery, as does the identity of his patrons, if any; there are many other details about him which remain equally obscure, for instance his exact relation to contemporary Latin writers, including the author of the mysterious Historia Augusta (see below). Nor is it clear when he began writing, or how far his conception of the work changed during a long period of travel, which lasted from the death of the Emperor Julian (AD 363) until his arrival in Rome some time before AD 384. Completion of the work came in the early 390s.