The Later Roman Empire

Ammianus describes himself as ‘a Greek’, and it is generally believed, though not on conclusive evidence, that he came from Antioch, a major seat of imperial administration in the east, where Latin would have been used in official and military circles. His inspiration was certainly the Emperor Julian, on whose ill-fated Persian expedition he served himself as an officer, and his books about Julian (20–25) are masterpieces of writing. Julian’s death during this campaign from an unexplained arrow shot (25.3; cf. Ammianus’ obituary of Julian, 25.4) must have been a severe blow to Ammianus himself; somehow, however, the material he had evidently collected while serving on this campaign became the basis of a grand imperial history, stretching backwards in time to AD 96 and forwards to AD 378.

Ammianus is an original. A staunch conservative in his views, he admired Julian not only for his personal qualities as a leader, but also for his attempt to revive the independence of cities. Like Julian, Ammianus disliked the centralist policies of Constantine, and his account of Constantine, which would have been a major counterpart to that of Eusebius, is a great loss. As a pagan, Ammianus was no great lover of the Christian church, and his Roman books emphasize the unseemly conduct of ecclesiastical parties in Rome in the 370s and 380s, but his judgement remained independent, and Julian’s idea of preventing Christians from teaching as a means of reducing their influence earned his criticism:

the laws which he enacted were not oppressive, and what they enjoined or prohibited was precisely stated, but there were a few exceptions, among them the harsh decree forbidding Christians to teach rhetoric or grammar unless they went over to the pagan gods. (25.4)

In general, though, even a hasty look at his choice of vocabulary and his frequently expressed personal opinions shows that he had strong prejudices; while professing to abhor any form of excess and to commend moderation in all things, he himself saw the world, and especially human beings, in lurid terms, as is shown in his famous judgement on the Emperor Valentinian (29.3), where he remarks that he had ‘two savage man-eating she-bears, called Golddust and Innocence, to which he was so devoted that he had their cages placed near his bedroom’.

Ammianus has often been criticized for his supposedly uncouth Latin, which many scholars have attributed to his having been brought up as a Greek-speaker, but though often clumsy, his Latin is vivid, even melodramatic, and his highly-coloured vocabulary, which shows through even in translation, gives it a unique flavour. Comparison with contemporary writers shows that what has often been attributed to Ammianus’s poor Latin is in fact standard late Latin usage. Because of the vividness of Ammianus’s own writing, and his sharp eye for the bizarre, he has been seen as an essentially unclassical writer. However, this view is actually a disguised value judgement, which goes together with the notion of a qualitative ‘decline’ from the classical to the medieval. With the revaluation of late antiquity we can at last take Ammianus on his own terms (as Edward Gibbon did) and recognize in him one of the great writers of antiquity.

This is hardly the case with the author of the Historia Augusta, who seems to have composed his strange work in Rome very close in date to the completion of Ammianus’s Res Gestae. Purporting to be the work of six authors writing under Constantine, this is a collection of imperial biographies beginning with Hadrian in the early second century, which become progressively more fanciful and scandalous and less historical as they reach the middle and later third-century emperors. Its purpose hardly seems to have been that of serious history, and indeed, as we have seen, Ammianus writes scathingly about the contemporary taste for such biographies, so different from the serious purpose of his own work (see above on his reference to Marius Maximus, 28.4). Though some scholars have seen the Historia Augusta as a document of anti-Christian propaganda, it is hard to regard it as anything but light reading. As regards the Constantinian date, there are in fact many apparent anachronisms, of which enough are convincing to make it almost certain that this is a late fourth-century work; moreover, stylistic analysis aided by computer techniques suggests that it is the work of a single author (‘the joker’, as Syme calls him). It is our own misfortune that we have to rely so heavily for third-century history on what was no more than a bow to prevailing popular taste.

A final Latin work of the late fourth century must be mentioned in connection with the so-called pagan revival. This is the lost Annales by Nicomachus Flavianus, the pagan senator who committed suicide after the defeat of the usurper Eugenius by Theodosius I at the River Frigidus in September, AD 394. Like the Historia Augusta, this work, known from contemporary inscriptions, has been made into a cornerstone of the theory of a heavily ideological pagan revival among the senatorial class of the period, which it is assumed would have extended to its view of the Roman past. But while Nicomachus Flavianus himself evidently saw the battle at the River Frigidus as representing the confrontation of Christianity and paganism, and indeed is said by Christian authors to have cited oracles promising a pagan victory and the suppression of Christianity, we know hardly anything about the nature of the work itself. Nicomachus himself did however translate from Greek into Latin the tendentious Life of the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana by the second-century writer Philostratus. It would have been strange indeed if the literary productions by pagans written in so tense a period as the 390s, when Theodosius I’s anti-pagan legislation had stirred up violence in a number of cities, did not somehow reflect their ideological stance; after all, as we have seen, Christian writers constantly interpreted historical events in such a way as to demonstrate the triumph of Christianity or to explain away its setbacks. The greatest work of this kind was Augustine’s City of God (De Civitate Dei), a work of twenty-two books written in part at least to explain why God had allowed the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in AD 410. There is no likelihood however that Nicomachus’s Annales was a similarly philosophical or meditative work. Indeed, a number of fundamental problems have been exposed in the general theory of pagan revival insofar as it has been based on specific literary sources; these will be discussed further in Chapter X.

The genre of biography, the Life, plays an important role in the literary sources of this period. The encomium, or panegyric, had always had elements of biography in it, and Eusebius’s Life of Constantine combined both these forms, while also owing something to the existing tradition of lives of philosophers and holy men. Later in the fourth century both Christians and pagans developed such writing further. The classic work on the Christian side was the Life of Antony, the Egyptian hermit (d. AD 356), often held to be the first example of Christian hagiography (saints’ lives) and attributed to Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria since AD 328 and a central figure in the religious controversies of the fourth century. The work exists in Syriac as well as Greek, and some uncertainty surrounds its origins. The Greek text which survives presents Antony as being above such worldly concerns as rhetorical education; this was also a stance adopted by Athanasius himself, but rejection of culture was a matter of degree – the Life does not hesitate to have Antony delivering elaborate speeches or receiving imperial letters from Constantine. Whether or not by Athanasius, the Life was quickly translated into Latin and transmitted to Christian circles in Rome by Jerome, where it became the key text in the promulgation of the ascetic lifestyle. Augustine writes in the Confessions of its role in the process of his own spiritual development (see below). The Life of Antony set a moral and literary pattern: it emphasizes ascetic renunciation (symbolized by the desert) at the expense of worldly knowledge, and presents the life of the Christian holy man in terms of the progress of the soul towards God. The saint is marked out by his holiness, and indicated to others by the miracles he can perform (in Antony’s case, taming wild animals). This literary pattern, often influenced by the secular rhetorical encomium, was followed in countless later works from the fourth century into the Middle Ages. Hagiography can and does vary greatly in the extent of its historical content, from the virtually non-existent to the heavily circumstantial; each work has to be taken on its own merits, but it was certainly the Life of Antony which provided the classic model, and it would be hard to overestimate its importance. Jerome, characteristically, tried to go one better, himself composing Latin lives of rival hermits, Hilarion and Paul, as well as the Life of Malchus, all three of them essentially literary imitations of the Life of Antony.

Two other interesting Lives may be cited, both of women. First, the Greek Life of Macrina written by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. This is also a highly literary and indeed philosophical work, drawing on Plato’s Phaedrus for its presentation of the immortality of the soul. Macrina and Gregory came from a large landowning family which also included the great figure of Basil of Caesarea. As we learn from the Life, as a woman Macrina had not received the secular education given to her brothers, but had stayed at home with her mother in Pontos, where she later established a kind of religious community at the family home. She, according to Gregory, had the true philosophy, not Basil, despite all the glittering prizes he had won at Athens. The other, very different, Life of a woman is that written about Melania the Younger (d. AD 439), who at the age of twenty persuaded her husband Pinianus, whom she had married at thirteen, to renounce their vast inherited properties in order to lead a life of asceticism and religion. The Life of Melania the Younger survives in both Latin and Greek versions, which are similar but not identical; the original may have been written in Greek c. AD 452 by Gerontius, a deacon at Melania’s monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. As we have seen, Christian works were often immediately translated, and indeed Melania herself was fluent in both languages. The evidence of the Life is of great importance, not simply for Melania herself and her family connections with the Roman senatorial aristocracy but also as a primary document for economic history, since it provides detailed information about Melania’s estates and the sources of senatorial wealth. This is a good example of a hagiographical text which combines the ascetic theme (‘the angelic life’) with a large amount of hard historical material. Finally, both the Life of Macrina and the Life of Melania the Younger are witnesses to a feature of Christian writing which is hard to parallel in classical sources in their choice of a woman as the main subject. There was much in late antique Christianity that was deeply inimical to women, yet the fact that Christian women of good family like Macrina and Melania (and many others are known in the late fourth and early fifth centuries) became the subjects of works by male authors is something remarkable in itself.

One of the most famous literary productions of this period is Augustine’s Confessions, often regarded as the first ancient autobiography. That judgement however fails to do justice to the philosophical complexities of the work, whose thirteen books discuss such topics as memory and the nature of time; it does however contain detailed accounts of Augustine’s own life, background and intellectual development, which are of great importance for cultural history, as well as the unforgettable account of his own conversion experience in a garden at Milan (VIII.14–30). Feeling the call of God, Augustine resisted – ‘just a little longer, please’ (Conf. VIII. 12) – until a certain Ponticianus, a baptized Christian, came to visit and told Augustine and his friend Alypius about Antony, of whom they had never then heard, and of how one of his own friends had been converted through reading the Life of Antony. After hearing this story Augustine went out into the garden and struggled with his conflicting feelings, especially his reluctance to renounce his sexuality and commit himself henceforth to a life of Christian chastity. Following a mysterious impulse, which he describes as hearing a child’s voice, he opened his text of St Paul at Rom. 13.13–14 ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’, and at once feeling at peace in himself, he went inside and joyfully told his mother Monica what had happened. The most striking feature of the Confessions is the honesty and power of Augustine’s psychological observation of himself and of human nature in general. Augustine’s understanding of human feelings, human emotions and human sexuality pervades the Confessions, and is constantly to be found even in his most intellectual theological works. Augustine is a towering and exceptional figure; but this focus on the individual can also been seen elsewhere in the Christian literature that was now developing, and is reflected for instance in the important sets of letters written by Augustine and his contemporaries, such as Ambrose, Jerome and John Chrysostom. As for the Confessions, it is one of the great works of world literature, and one that is hard to imagine coming from the classical world.

Two Latin texts from the fourth and early fifth centuries are particularly important for the late Roman army. These are the anonymous treatise dating from the late 360s, known as the De Rebus Bellicis, and the official document setting out the military establishment of which we have an early fifth-century copy, the Notitia Dignitatum (‘List of Offices’). The first is the work of a rather original, but unknown, author, who addressed to the reigning emperors Valentinian and Valens a memorandum outlining a series of ingenious inventions by which military performance could be improved. He was clearly a pagan, and blames Constantine for extravagant public spending; he complains both that the defence of the empire is too weak and that too much money is spent on the army. The understanding of the anonymous author leaves something to be desired, both as an economic analyst and as a military commentator, but his little work comes as a breath of fresh air, and it seems a pity that we do not know whether it was even read, let alone whether it had any effect. As for the Notitia, what we have is a copy of a document, illuminated, incidentally, with interesting depictions of military insignia, that purports to set out full details of the military and civil provincial establishments. It is therefore prima facie an extremely important source. However, it must be used with great caution, for several reasons. First, the surviving text postdates the division of the empire in AD 395, and is a western document; the eastern parts seem to relate to an earlier phase than the western, so that the document as a whole contains anomalies and discrepancies. Second, and fundamentally, the Notitia sets out the situation as it was supposed to be, which is not necessarily how it actually was at any given time. Like the lawcodes, it is prescriptive, not descriptive; this makes it dangerous to take its figures on trust unless they can be corroborated by other means.

Similar caveats apply to one of the most important sources of all – the Codex Theodosianus, a collection of imperial legislation from Constantine onwards, put together in Constantinople by a group of legal commissioners over the years AD 429 to 438 as part of a wider legislative project ordered by the Emperor Theodosius II, and a vital source for the history of the period. The constitutions are arranged thematically, according to subject, and in chronological order within the subject headings, and there are over two thousand five hundred in all. They begin in AD 311, and build on two earlier collections made under Diocletian, the Codex Gregorianus and the Codex Hermogenianus. Historians have to be very cautious when using the evidence of the Code. In the first place, it is not complete: the laws were dispersed and the commissioners had a difficult task in collecting them. Justinian’s later collection includes many constitutions not in the Theodosian Code. Further, though care was taken to preserve the original wording, many constitutions were shortened, and the commissioners were at the mercy both of their sources (not always good) and their own judgement.

More generally, many constitutions were simply repeated with variants by one emperor after another, so that it can be difficult to know how far they represent a response to a real situation and how much is simply taken over from previous precedent. The constant repetition of certain laws, especially those limiting freedom of movement for decurions (members of town councils) and coloni (agricultural tenants), did much to encourage the view of the fourth century as a repressive, or even a totalitarian regime, until it was pointed out that constant repetition usually indicates that the laws in question were in fact ineffective.

It is essential to realize that the Code consists of a set of prescriptions; it does not tell us what actually happened. Furthermore, other sources suggest that the process of legislation itself was far less straightforward than we might imagine. Constitutions passed in the name of a certain emperor are not necessarily to be associated with him personally; drafting responsibility lay with the quaestor sacri palatii, a post established under Constantine, whose job it was to deploy the elaborately rhetorical style which makes the Code such tortuous reading. Getting laws to the public was also a hit-or-miss affair. Though provincial governors had the task of making them public, ignorance of the law was common, as the constitutions themselves often reveal.

The administration and the bureaucracy in the later empire were highly complicated even in theory; in practice the system was full of loopholes and the rules, such as they were, were continually evaded, at times even with the open connivance of the authorities who should have been enforcing them. The mass of legislative material in the Code reveals both the ideal and the constant departures from it.

To this ample and often contradictory evidence can be added what we can glean from other non-literary sources, including the many surviving inscriptions, papyri and coins. Among the most important inscriptions are Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices (AD 301), of which several versions are known, and his so-called Revaluation Edict. Like the laws in the Code, of which type this is an inscribed example, the Price Edict adopts a heightened moral tone, laying down terrible penalties for anyone who dared to put up prices beyond what was prescribed for each item:

Who is so insensitive and devoid of human feeling that he is unaware or has not perceived that immoderate prices are widespread in the commerce of the markets and the daily life of cities, and that uncontrolled lust for gain is not lessened by abundant supplies or fruitful years? … Since it is agreed that in the time of our ancestors, it was customary in passing laws to prescribe a penalty, since a situation beneficial to humanity is rarely accepted spontaneously, and since experience teaches that fear is the most effective guide and regulator for the performance of duty – it is our pleasure that anyone who violates the measures of this statute shall, for his daring, be subject to capital punishment.

Despite such rhetoric, and despite the many inscriptions and papyri which made the edict public, we know in this case that it was a dead letter within a very short time; the government simply lacked the necessary apparatus to put it into force. Many other inscriptions of the period are less dramatic – for instance the career inscriptions of the senatorial class, which increase in number with its re-establishment by Constantine, or the many inscriptions from cities of the Greek east, which now begin to use classicizing verse even for recording the careers of city officials. To these are added a new class: church dedications and Christian funerary inscriptions. As for coins, they are an important source for imperial titulature and imperial movements, especially during the tetrarchy and under Constantine. Many aspects of the late Roman bronze coinage remain obscure, but the gold solidus, introduced by Constantine, remained undebased and in use for many centuries.

No attempt is made at this point to describe or evaluate the archaeological and visual evidence for the period. This is partly because the range is so wide in each case that it would be impossible to summarize. But the other reason is that it is simply impossible now to write a history of this period without constantly referring to archaeological and visual evidence. Whereas Jones could base himself on an exhaustive knowledge of the literary and documentary sources, the subject has moved on dramatically in the last twenty-five years. Archaeologists have turned increasingly to this period, especially once a system had been evolved for dating late Roman pottery; general interest in urban history of all periods has focused attention on the wealth of material available from late Roman cities; and finally, as political and narrative history have lost their appeal, most historians have become much more conscious of the need to use material as well as literary evidence. As for visual art, two factors have brought about closer integration of this with the literary and documentary record; first, a growing willingness to take in Christian evidence, including Christian art, and second, the effects of a tendency in other periods of ancient history, perhaps deriving from modern comparisons, to place emphasis on the visual environment and the power of images as a means of communication. To sum up, the main writers are of course still the same, though they are in many cases viewed differently; by contrast, the scope of study has broadened out of all recognition.

III The New Empire: Diocletian

BETWEEN THE accession of Diocletian in AD 284 and the death of Constantine in AD 337, the disturbed situation which held in the mid-third century came under control and the empire passed through a phase of recovery, consolidation and major social and administrative change. In effect, the system of government which was to prevail in the east until the early seventh century, and in the west, though with less success, until the fall of the western empire in AD 476, was put into place. It is natural to attribute the achievement mainly to the two strong emperors who ruled during the fifty-three-year period, especially since this is also the tendency of the ancient sources; but it is necessary to remember that the actual process certainly involved less forward planning and more piecemeal development than hindsight would suggest. Caution is particularly necessary in view of the tendency of the sources to draw an over-sharp distinction between Diocletian and Constantine because of their religious differences, and to let that distinction carry over into the interpretation of their secular policies.

Diocletian came to the throne in AD 284, having risen from a lowly background in Dalmatia to command the domestici, the imperial guard. He was thus one of the several Illyrian soldier-emperors who reached imperial power after the death of Gallienus in AD 268. The Emperor Aurelian (AD 270–5) had been able to repel an invasion of Italy by the Alamanni, defeat Zenobia at Palmyra and put an end to the ‘Gallic empire’ under Tetricus. Like Gallienus and so many others, Aurelian was murdered, but this time the assassins were punished, and Probus (AD 276–82) not only drove back the Germanic invaders from the Rhine, which they had crossed in force, but concluded a treaty establishing a Roman military presence beyond the Rhine and taking large numbers of hostages and recruits for the Roman army. When Probus too was murdered by his own troops, Carus (AD 282–3) embarked on a major and successful Persian expedition, only to die suddenly with the army on the Euphrates. His son Numerian led a Roman retreat, but when he too died under suspicious circumstances while on the road, Diocles was elevated at Nicomedia in November, AD 284, allegedly accusing his rival, the praetorian prefect Aper, of having murdered Numerian and stabbing him to death on the spot in full view of the troops, quoting from Virgil as he did so (SHA Vita Cari 13); he then took the name Diocletian. In the following year Diocletian defeated Carus’s other son Carinus in a major battle in the former Yugoslavia and found himself in total control.