Notes

Introduction

1  All dates are AD/CE.

2  A forceful case is made for the predominance of Greek in the east in the fifth century (and later) by Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire. Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408–50) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), but Latin continued to be used in some official contexts, and still had a lively existence in intellectual circles in Constantinople in the sixth century (Chapter 5).

3  For this see Peter Heather and John Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century, Translated Texts for Historians 11 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991).

4  James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (London: Profile, 2009), argues that Theodoric and the Ostrogoths, rather than the empire run from Constantinople, were the true heirs to Roman values. See generally Paul Fouracre, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History I, c. 500–c. 700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom. Triumph and Diversity, AD 200–1000, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) is a wide-ranging and often thought-provoking treatment of these transitions.

5  This is the approach of G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); see Averil Cameron, ‘The “long” late antiquity. A late-twentieth century model?’, in T.P. Wiseman, ed., Classics in Progress, British Academy Centenary volume (Oxford, 2002), 165–91, and several of the articles in Journal of Late Antiquity 1.1 (2008).

6  See Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Macmillan, 2005); Empires and Barbarians. Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009).

7  See also his The Inheritance of Rome. A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009).

8  Heather, Empires and Barbarians, xvii; he casts his subject as ‘the astounding transformation of barbarian Europe’ (p. 9). The ‘birth of Europe’ is indeed another current issue.

9  See W.V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and below, Conclusion.

10  M.I. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. revised by P.M. Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). Rostovzeff spent the rest of his academic life in the United States, at the universities of Madison, Wisconsin, and Yale.

11  On Jones’s Later Roman Empire see David Gwynn, ed., A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2008); for discussion of Jones’s chapter in The Later Roman Empire weighing up various explanations for the fall of the Roman empire, see Averil Cameron, ‘A.H.M. Jones and the end of the ancient world’, ibid., 231–50.

12  This has come in particular from Italian scholars; see A. Giardina, ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi storici 40 (1999), 157–80.

13  For orientation, see Luke Lavan and William Bowden, eds., Theory and Practice in Late Antique Archaeology (Leiden: Brill, 2003) the first volume in an important series, Late Antique Archaeology, in which seven volumes have so far appeared.

14  J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer. The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: the Art of the Roman Empire AD 100–450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); see also Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Henry Maguire, Other Icons. Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

15  Luke Lavan, Ellen Swift and Toon Putzeys, eds., Objects in Context, Objects in Use. Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity, Late Antique Archaeology 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2007) presents material culture in a more dynamic relation to its contexts.

16  See on all these writers A.H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); on Jordanes, W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (AD 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

17  See W. Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Theophylact: Michael and Mary Whitby, The History of Theophylact Simocatta, trans. with introd. and notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and his Historian: Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

18  It becomes important in the later part of the period to know the religious orientation of our sources. ‘Chalcedonian’ indicates someone in the tradition of the Council of Chalcedon, 451; the term Miaphysite (also Monophysite) refers to those who emphasised the divine nature of Christ rather than the two equal natures: divine and human.

19  The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, translated and with an introduction by Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, Translated Texts for Historians 45, 3 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005); The Acts of Constantinople 553, with related texts from the Three Chapters Controversy, translated with an introduction and notes by Richard Price, Translated Texts for Historians 51, 2 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).

20  See, for instance, Hannah M. Cotton, Robert G. Hoyland, Jonathan J. Price and David L. Wasserstein, eds., From Hellenism to Islam. Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

21  This is the title of chapter 5 of Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome, which provides a graphic description. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City also argues forcefully for ‘decline’ in the west at an earlier stage than in the east (where according to him it was also happening by the later sixth century).

22  Michael McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and cf. P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, vol. I (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 153–60.

23  See Alan Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria. An Archaeological Assessment (London: Duckworth, 2007), and below, Chapter 9.

24  See Andrew Marsham, ‘The early Caliphate and the inheritance of late antiquity (c. AD 610–c. AD 750)’, in Philip Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 479–92.

25  See especially Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean; Brent D. Shaw, ‘Challenging Braudel: a new vision of the Mediterranean’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 14 (2001), 419–53; further, Conclusion.

26  The fourth century is covered in much more detail in D. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay AD 180–395 (London: Routledge, 2004), and see Stephen Mitchell, History of the Later Roman Empire AD 284–641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); more briefly, Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire AD 284–430 (London: Fontana Press, 1993). The post-Constantinian period is covered in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., The Late Empire, AD 337–425, Cambridge Ancient History XIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity; Scott Johnson, ed., Handbook to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

27  The reign of Diocletian is poorly documented, and has to be understood mainly on the basis of documentary and numismatic evidence: see Alan K. Bowman, ‘Diocletian and the first tetrarchy, A.D. 284–305)’, in Alan K. Bowman, Peter Garnsey and Averil Cameron, eds., The Crisis of Empire, A.D. 193–337, Cambridge Ancient History XII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 67–89; Simon Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284–324, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

28  For instance, Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cambridge: Orchard Academic, 2001); Clifford Ando, The Matter of the Gods. Religion and the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Constantine’s early publicity explicitly emphasized descent from the third-century emperor Claudius Gothicus (268– 70); on the model provided by Aurelian (270–75) see Alaric Watson, Aurelian and the Third Century (London: Routledge, 1999). On the historiography of the third-century ‘crisis’, see L. De Blois, ‘The crisis of the third century A.D. in the Roman empire: a modern myth’, in De Blois and J. Rich, eds., The Transformation of Economic Life under the Roman Empire (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 2002), 204–17.

29  T.D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), is a classic work which by rehabilitating the evidence of Eusebius of Caesarea, presents Constantine as a firmly committed Christian, but disagreements continue; see now out of a huge literature Noel Lenski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); R. Van Dam, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In sharp contrast with the favourable accounts in Christian authors, Zosimus’ New History II preserves a very hostile pagan version, claiming also that Constantine built new temples in Constantinople.

30  Eusebius, Life of Constantine, I. 41–42; the so-called ‘Edict of Milan’, declaring religious toleration and issued in connection with an uneasy meeting in Milan in the winter of 312–13 between Constantine and Licinius, promised religious toleration (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 10.5.2–14), but was hardly an innovation, since the persecution of Christians had already been called off by Galerius in 311 (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 8.17).

31  Theodoret, Historia Ecclesiastica I.6, 10. On the emperor’s invitation see also Eus., Life of Constantine III.15 (commenting on the awe felt by the bishops at being invited to the imperial palace and the drawn swords of the guards).

32  For Constantius see especially T.D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

33  Ammianus Marcellinus, Histories. 16.10. On Ammianus’ historical technique see Timothy D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998) and Gavin Kelly, Ammianus Marcellinus, The Allusive Historian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

34  Amm., Hist. 20.4.

35  See Polymnia Athanassiadi, Julian. An Intellectual Biography, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1992); Rowland Smith, Julian’s Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (London: Routledge, 1995); translated extracts with discussion, Samuel N.C. Lieu, The Emperor Julian. Panegyric and Polemic, 2nd ed. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992); Shaun Tougher, Julian the Apostate, Debates and Documents in Ancient History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

36  Amm., Hist. 23.1.2.

37  Amm., Hist. 25.5.1–7; 7.5–11.

38  Amm., Hist. 25.9.12. For the Emperor Valens see Noel Lenski, Failure of Empire. Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

39  See the discussion in John Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus (London: Duckworth, 1989), 191–203.The challenger Procopius sought to mobilise his connection with the house of Constantine (Amm., Hist. 26.7.10).

40  Amm., Hist. 29.3.9; 29.1.27.

41  Amm., Hist. 28.1; they were followed by further trials at Antioch and elsewhere in the east: for the issues involved, see Matthews, Roman Empire of Ammianus, 209–17; Antioch and Scythopolis, 219–26. Ammianus on the cruelty of Valentinian, 29.3.8.

42  Amm., Hist. 31.1–4; so too Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire. A New History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), 151–67; see Chapter 2.

43  Amm., Hist. 31.12–13. See Matthews, Roman Empire of Ammianus, 167–89; Lenski, Failure of Empire, 334–67; Michael Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 137–43.

44  See Chapter 2; for a detailed introduction to the issues see Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 376–568; on Adrianople and its antecedents, 165–80.

45  Key works include Walter Pohl, ed., Kingdoms of the Empire. The Integration of Barbarians in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Walter Pohl with Helmut Reimitz, eds., Strategies of Distinction. The Construction of the Ethnic Communities, 300–800 (Leiden, Brill, 1998); Patrick T. Geary, The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); H.-W. Goetz, J. Jarnut and W. Pohl, eds., Regna and Gentes. The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformtion of the Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Succinct statement of the issues with further bibliography in Rousseau, A Companion to Late Antiquity, 373–75; further, Chapter 2.

46  See Heather, Empires and Barbarians, 16–21.

47  See below, Chapter 2.

48  See, for instance, Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex, eds., Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London and Swansea, 2000); Ralph Mathisen and Danuta Schanzer, eds., Romans, Barbarians and the Transformation of the Roman World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

49  Heather, Fall of the Roman Empire (Heather returns to the theme, with more discussion of the revisionist approaches in Empires and Barbarians, asserting the greater importance of ‘development’ as opposed to ‘migration, but still emphasising the role of violence and the key importance of the Huns); see also Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome. A stress on violence rather than integration is also the theme of Brent D. Shaw, ‘War and violence’, in Bowersock, Brown and Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity, 130–69.

50  Themistius, Oration 16.210 b–c.

51  See Alan Cameron, ‘The last pagans of Rome’, in William V. Harris, ed., The Transformations of Urbs Roma in Late Antiquity (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1999), 109–21; id., The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

52  See Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan. Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Ambrose of Milan. Political Letters and Speeches, trans. with introduction and notes, with the assistance of Carole Hill, Translated Texts for Historians 43 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005); however, see Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome, 39–46 for a sceptical view of the supposed clash between Symmachus and Ambrose.

53  On John Chrysostom see Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, eds., John Chrysostom (London: Routledge, 2000); J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops. Army, Church and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); on the importance of preaching in this period, see Mary B. Cunningham and Pauline Allen, eds., Preacher and Audience. Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

54  For the laws dealing with heretics, for which a precedent had been set by legislation against Manichaeism brought in by Diocletian and Maximian, see Caroline Humfress, Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 243–68. But the legal evidence is difficult to use, and does not straightforwardly support the common view that Christianity now became the only official religion of the empire: see the excellent discussion by Neil McLynn, ‘Pagans in a Christian empire’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, 572–87. Late Roman legislation and the law codes in particular have been the subject of several important recent discussions: see in particular John F. Matthews, Laying Down the Law. A Study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Jill Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ralph Mathisen, ed., Law, Society and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

55  A point well made by Rita Lizzi Testa, ‘The late antique bishop: image and reality’, in Rousseau, A Companion to Late Antiquity, 523–38; see also for deconstruction of Theodosius’ legislation Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome, 60–2.

56  Humfress, Orthodoxy and the Courts, 249.

57  The fundamental work on administrative and military organisation remains Jones, Later Roman Empire.

58  For this, see the thoughtful chapter by Thomas Graumann, ‘The conduct of theology and the ‘Fathers’ of the Church’, in Rousseau, A Companion to Late Antiquity, 539–55; below, Chapter 1.

1 Constantinople and the eastern empire

1  Foundation and subsequent history of Constantinople: C. Mango, Le développement urbain de Constantinople (IVe–VIIe siècle) (Paris: Boccard, 1985, rev. ed., 1990); G. Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974). See also Cyril Mango and Gilbert Dagron, eds., with the assistance of Geoffrey Greatrex, Constantinople and its Hinterland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1985).

2  Eus., Life of Constantine, IV.51; see Introduction.

3  Life of Constantine, III.48; Zos., New History II.31.

4  Soz., HE VII.20.

5  Mango, Le développement urbain, 30; see ibid., 23–36 on Constantinople in the time of Constantine.

6  Eus., Life of Constantine III.54.2; see S. Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

7  At III.48 Eusebius claims that in Constantinople there were no ‘images of the supposed gods which are worshipped in temples’; at IV.36 he reports a letter sent to him by the emperor ordering fifty copies of the Scriptures for the new city. The statues in the Hippodrome: Alan Cameron, Porphyrius the Charioteer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 180–87. The early sixth-century poet Christodorus of Coptus wrote a verse description of the many such statues at the baths of Zeuxippus, burned in the Nika riot of 532; there was another concentration of classical statuary, including according to later accounts the Cnidian Aphrodite and other famous statues, at the ‘Palace of Lausus’ near the Mese.

8  Neither survives; for their construction and for Constantius’s role, see C. Mango, ‘Constantine’s mausoleum and the translation of relics’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 (1990), 51–61 (= Cyril Mango, Studies on Constantinople [Aldershot: Variorum, 1993], V).

9  In a similar gesture, Ambrose boosted the status of Milan and his own position by publicly ‘finding’ the relics of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius and depositing them in the new Basilica Ambrosiana at a tense moment in 386: Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan. Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 209–15.

10  Sozomen, HE VII.7; see on Gregory John McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus. An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s, 2001); S.J. Daly and J. Brian, Gregory of Nazianzus (London: Routledge, 2006).

11  See J.H.G. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops. Army. Church and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); for Ulfila, ‘missionary to the Goths’, and the political aspects of their conversion, see Peter Heather and John Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century, Translated Texts for Historians 11 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 135–53.

12  Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, 165–70.

13  See Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, with a contribution by Lee Sherry, Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 91–102, dating the speech to 398 and Synesius’ departure to 400 and supposing that the surviving speech is not the one actually delivered before Arcadius (93); cf. Mitchell, History of the Later Roman Empire, 95–6.

14  Zos., New Hist., 2.32; the classic discussion is by J. Durliat, De la ville antique à la ville byzantine: le problème des subsistances (Rome: École française de Rome, 1990).

15  Just how elaborate were the installations that provided the city’s water supply is now clear: James Crow, Jonathan Bardill and Richard Bayliss, The Water Supply of Byzantine Constantinople (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2008).

16  The most straightforward introduction to the late Roman administrative system remains that of Jones, Later Roman Empire chaps. 13 and 16; the levers of power are discussed in Christopher Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

17  See Alan Cameron, Claudian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

18  Peter Heather, Goths and Romans, 332–489 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 193–224; Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, 55–85; H. Wolfram, History of the Goths (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 150–61; id., The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); see also Michael Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars from the Third Century to Alaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Knowledge of these complicated events depends a good deal on the tendentious Latin poems of Claudian and the highly political, but allegorical and obscure De Regno by Synesius in Greek (summary: Cameron and Long, 103–106), both very difficult sources to use.

19  Zos. New History, V.37–51; VI. 6–13; Olympiodorus, frs 7, 11; Soz., HE IX.8.9.

20  Augustine’s meditations on this theme are contained in his great work, the City of God, finished only some years later; Orosius’ History against the Pagans answered the same questions in far simpler terms and was to become a textbook for the medieval west. See above all Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, new ed. with an epilogue (London: Faber, 2000). Note that at this period, and in this book, the terms ‘orthodox’ and ‘catholic’ mean roughly the same, i.e., ‘not heretic’; though the term ‘catholic’ is more usually applied to the west it is not of course yet used in the sense of ‘Roman Catholic’, nor is ‘orthodox’ to be understood as having the same connotations as ‘Eastern Orthodox’ would today.

21  Now see Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire. Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408–450) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

22  See Kenneth G. Holum, Theodosian Empresses. Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Alan Cameron, ‘The empress and the poet’, Yale Classical Studies 27 (1981), 272ff.; E.D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire AD 312–460 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 220–48.

23  Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, 7–13; on the Code, see John F. Matthews, Laying Down the Law. A Study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), with Jill Harries and Ian Wood, eds., The Theodosian Code. Studies in the Imperial Law of Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1993), and Jill Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 59–69 (also on the importance of acclamation and public acceptance, on which see below).

24  See Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, part III; on the complex sources, see 199–202; also id., ‘Friends and enemies of John Chrysostom’, in A. Moffatt (ed.), Maistor (Canberra; Australian Association for Byzantine Studies,1984), 85–111; J.N.D. Kelly, Golden Mouth. The Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (London: Duckworth, 1995); translated texts: Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, John Chrysostom (London: Routledge, 2000); Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom and Friends (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1979).

25  Alexandria in late antiquity was a vibrant and important city: C. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Edward Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); id., Riot in Alexandria. Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

26  For the building, which also seems to have housed a library, see J.S. McKenzie, S. Gibson and A.T. Reyes, ‘Reconstructing the Serapeum from the archaeological evidence’, Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004), 35–63.

27  Below, Chapters 3 and 7, and see in general Michael E. Gaddis, There is no Crime for those who have Christ. Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); H.A. Drake, ed., Violence in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), part IV; T.E. Gregory, Vox Populi. Popular Opinion and Violence in the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century AD (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1979). For the way in which the murder of Hypatia was treated by pagan and Christian writers (the sixth-century Neoplatonist Damascius, the church historian Socrates and the seventh-century chronicler John of Nikiu) see Edward Watts, ‘The murder of Hypatia: acceptable or unacceptable violence?’, in Drake, ed., Violence in Late Antiquity, 333–42.

28  See Chapters 5 and 8 below.

29  For the antecedents, with an emphasis on church councils, see Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

30  The Greek hymn to the Virgin known as the Akathistos and usually ascribed to the sixth century is dated to the period after the Council of Ephesus by Leena Mari Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin in the Akathistos Hymn (Leiden: Brill, 2001). It is often argued that the Empress Pulcheria particularly promoted the cult of the Virgin, and she was certainly an active influence: see e.g. Holum, Theodosian Empresses; V. Limberis, Divine Heiress. The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (London: Routledge, 1994); Kate Cooper, ‘Empress and Theotokos. Gender and patronage in the christological controversy’, in R. Swanson, ed., The Church and Mary (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004), 39–51; but see Richard Price, ‘Marian piety and the Nestorian controversy’, ibid., 31–38; C. Angelidi, Pulcheria. La castità al potere (c. 399-c. 455) (Milan: Jaca Book, 1996). She was certainly a powerful figure before and during the Council, and indeed later: see Liz James, Empresses and Power in Early Byzantium (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2001).

31  On the Council and its Acts, see Thomas Graumann, ‘“Reading” the first council of Ephesus (431)’, in Richard Price and Mary Whitby, eds., Chalcedon in Context. Church Councils 400– 700 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 27–44; procedures at councils: Ramsay MacMullen, Voting about God in Early Church Councils (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

32  See Millar, A Greek Roman Empire, chapter 5. An excellent succinct introduction to the councils of Ephesus I, II and Chalcedon is given in Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), I, 17–51.

33  For Ibas/Hiba, see Robert Doran, Stewards of the Poor. The Man of God, Rabbula and Hiba in Fifth-Century Edessa, trans. with introduction and notes (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2006), 109–32. Parts of the proceedings are contained in the Acts of Chalcedon, which reviewed the decisions made in 449; otherwise the Acts of Ephesus II survive in two partial sixth-century Syriac translations, one a Miaphysite version highly favourable to Dioscorus: Fergus Millar, ‘The Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesus (449)’, in Price and Whitby, eds., Chalcedon in Context, 45–69, especially 46–49; partial translation of the latter version in Doran, Stewards of the Poor, 133–88.

34  See Richard Price, ‘The council of Chalcedon (451): a narrative’, in Price and Whitby, eds., Chalcedon in Context, 70–91.

35  See Brent D. Shaw, ‘African Christianity: disputes, definitions and “Donatists”’, in Shaw, Rulers, Nomads and Christians in Roman North Africa (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), XI; Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 330–39; Erika T. Hermanowicz, Possidius of Calama. A Study of the North African Episcopate at the Time of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

36  See Pauline Allen, ‘The definition and enforcement of orthodoxy’, Cambridge Ancient History XIV, 811–34, at 815–18.

37  For Severus of Antioch see Pauline Allen and C.T.R. Hayward, Severus of Antioch (London: Routledge, 2004); Severus was also soon driven into exile, but has left important writings, originally in Greek but now preserved only in Syriac.

38  See J. Nelson, ‘Symbols in context: rulers’ inauguration rituals in Byzantium and the west in the early middle ages’, in D. Baker, ed., The Orthodox Churches and the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 97–118.

39  See on this Michael Whitby and Mary Whitby, Chronicon Paschale, 284–628 AD (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 113–14. Acclamations: C.M. Roueché, ‘Acclamations in the later Roman empire: new evidence from Aphrodisias’, Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984), 181–99.

40  Chron. Pasch., trans. Whitby and Whitby, 121.

41  Blues and Greens: Alan Cameron, Porphyrius the Charioteer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); id., Circus Factions. Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); C.M. Roueché, Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias in the Roman and Late Roman Periods (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1992); for the factions in the early seventh century see Chapter 9 below.

42  Christopher Kelly, Attila the Hun. Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Vintage, 2009), 90–8.

43  See on the Vandals, A.H. Merrills, ed., Vandals, Romans and Berbers. New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), with bibliography. The economy of Vandal Africa has been a major theme in recent scholarship, as also have the dealings of the Arian Vandals, at times amounting to persecution, with their Catholic subjects, and especially the church: see Averil Cameron, ‘Vandal and Byzantine Africa’, Cambridge Ancient History XIII, 552–58; Andy Merrills and Richard Miles, The Vandals (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Christopher Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome. A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 76–8.

44  For 476 see below, Chapter 2.

45  Galla Placidia had formerly been captured in the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410 and married to Athaulf (414).

46  For the Huns, see Kelly, Attila the Hun, with helpful bibliographical notes; Galla Placidia: 60–61, 79–81; on east-west relations in the early fifth century, see chaps. 6 and 7.

47  Malchus, frs 1, 3, 16, ed. R.C. Blockley, The Greek Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire I–II (Liverpool: Cairns, 1981, 1985). The sources for all these events are very scattered, the Greek histories of Priscus, Candidus and Malchus surviving only in fragments.

48  For Byzantine reactions to the fragmentation of the west see Walter E. Kaegi Jr., Byzantium and the Decline of Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

2 The empire and the barbarians

1  According to Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians. Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009), 22, ‘the invasion hypothesis is dead and buried’; for migration see 12–35. Heather’s canvas in this book is broader than before, and this book takes in Slav movements and early medieval Europe as well as late antiquity. He has modified his earlier position to some extent in the light of the scholarship described in the text; nevertheless he keeps his main emphases, in particular his insistence on the instrumentality of the Huns: see Michael Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars from the Third Century to Alaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

2  Trans. and comm. Charles C. Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes (Princeton, 1915). Discussion of the issues: Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians, AD 200–600 (Harlow, 2009); Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (London, 2003); see also W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (AD 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, 1988), with Andrew Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005); above, Introduction.

3  For the sceptical view, see A. Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).

4  An important stage in this process was marked by C.R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire. A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). See also the discussions in Ralph W. Mathisen and Hagith S. Sivan, eds. Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), introduction and Part I.

5  Procopius, Wars IV.1.1–8; Anon. Val. 37–38.

6  For eastern reactions: W.E. Kaegi Jr, Byzantium and the Decline of Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). Christopher Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome. A History of Europe 400–1000 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), is an excellent guide (see his chapter 4 ‘Crisis and continuity, 400–550’).

7  See below, and Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 102–4.

8  Sidonius was an accomplished author of poems and letters, whose attitude towards barbarian settlers became more and more pessimistic during the period from 450 to the 470s: see Jill Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome, AD 407–485 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

9  Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 88; Life of Severinus, trans. L. Bieler (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965).

10  Heather, Empires and Barbarians, 246–56.

11  See Christopher Kelly, Attila the Hun. Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Bodley Head, 2009), 35.

12  Amm., Hist. 31.4f.; Eunapius, fr. 42; see Peter Heather, Goths and Romans 332–489 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chap. 4.

13  Olympiodorus, fr. 9; Zos., New Hist. V.26; Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 192–9: four major incursions across the Rhine between 405 and 408.

14  Oros. VII.37; Zos. New History, VI. 2–3.

15  Ibid., 199.

16  Zos., New Hist. VI.10.

17  See I. Wood, ‘The end of Roman Britain: continental evidence and parallels’, in M. Lapidge and D. Dumville, eds., Gildas: New Approaches (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1984), 1–25; id., ‘The fall of the western empire and the end of Roman Britain’, Britannia 18 (1987), 251–62; R. Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (London: Duckworth, 1989); S. Esmonde Cleary, The Ending of Roman Britain (London: Batsford, 1989).

18  Zos., New Hist. VI.6–13; above, Chapter 1.

19  Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 80–1.

20  Jordanes, Getica180ff.

21  John Vanderspoel, ‘From empire to kingdoms in the late antique west’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, 427–40; Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 82–87, with chapters 5–7; James, Europe’s Barbarians, AD 200–600; P.S. Barnwell, Emperors, Prefects and Kings. The Roman West, 395–565 (London: Duckworth, 1992); P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood, eds., Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977).

22  See Ian Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms 450–751 (London: Longman, 1994); Edward James, The Franks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

23  Trans. Penguin Classics; for the division of the kingdom between Clovis’ four sons after his death see I. Wood, ‘Kings, kingdoms and consent’, in Sawyer and Wood, eds., Early Medieval Kingship, 6–29; the sixth-century historian Agathias includes a history of the Merovingian dynasty in his Histories, written early in the 570s (see Averil Cameron, Agathias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 120–1).

24  On the Alamanni, see J. Drinkwater, The Alamanni and Rome 213–496 (Caracalla to Clovis) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

25  See T.S. Brown, Gentlemen and Officers. Imperial Administration and Aristocratic Power in Byzantine Italy AD 554–800 (London: British School at Rome, 1984); brief description in Christopher Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400–1000 (London: Macmillan, 1981), 74–9; in general, Paul Fouracre, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History I, c. 500–700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

26  Cf. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy, 15: ‘The holocaust in Italy came in the great age of wars, 535–93: the shifts of balance under the German rulers, first Odoacer (476–93) and then the Ostrogothic kings (490–553) were trivial by contrast.’

27  After 1,000 years, consuls now ceased to be appointed except when the office was taken by eastern emperors themselves: see Alan Cameron and Diane Schauer, ‘The last consul. Basilius and his diptych’, Journal of Roman Studies 72 (1982), 126–45.

28  Below, Chapter 5; see also J. Moorhead, ‘Italian loyalties in Justinian’s Gothic War’, Byzantion 53 (1983), 575–96; id., ‘Culture and power among the Ostrogoths’, Klio 68 (1986), 112–22.

29  For a selection of the Variae see S.J.B. Barnish, Cassiodorus: Variae, translated with notes and introduction, Translated Texts for Historians 12 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992); James W. Halporn, trans., Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul, with introduction by Mark Vessey, Translated Texts for Historians 42 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004); James J. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Cassiodorus had been consul in 514, and became magister officiorum, praetorian prefect and patricius: PLRE II, 265–9.

30  This has been controversial: for discussion see Peter Heather, ‘Cassiodorus and the rise of the Amals: genealogy and the Goths under Hun domination’, Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989), 103–28; Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, 100–15.

31  Procopius, Wars IV.1.32–34; PLRE II, 233–37; see Henry Chadwick, Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Margaret Gibson, ed., Boethius. His Life, Thought and Influence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).

32  See Mark Humphries, ‘Italy, AD 425–605’, Cambridge Ancient History XIII, 525–51; T.S. Burns, A History of the Ostrogoths (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984).

33  For the Visigoths at Toulouse see H. Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 172–242, and on the aftermath of Vouillé, 243–6.

34  See Roger Collins, Early Medieval Spain. Unity in Diversity, 400–1000, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); understanding Visigothic involvement in Spain in the fifth century depends very much on the Chronicle of Hydatius: see R.W. Burgess, The Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana, ed., with an English translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

35  See Michael McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), to be read with Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 708–824. For further discussion see Conclusion, below.

36  Venantius: see Judith W. George, Venantius Fortunatus. Personal and Political Poems, trans. with notes and introduction, Translated Texts for Historians 23 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995): R.A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

37  P.D. King, Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.), introduction.

38  Cf. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 102–103; cf. 102 referring to ‘a steady trend [from the fifth century] away from supporting armies by public taxation and towards supporting them by the rents deriving from private landowning’. The question of who owned the land and on what terms thus becomes the critical issue. In Framing the Early Middle Ages, 86, Wickham stresses that the fifth century marked only the beginning of the changes.

39  For a (somewhat polemical) account of this methodological change among archaeologists see Heather, Empires and Barbarians, 16–18; discussion of cemetery and other kinds of evidence, including place names, in Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 152–61, 447–54.

40  The process is discussed in detail in Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 80–93.

41  Heather, Goths and Romans, e.g., 141.

42  For the implications of the gradual erosion of the Roman taxation system in the west see also Christopher Wickham, ‘The other transition: from the ancient world to feudalism’, Past and Present 103 (1984), 3–36; cf. id., Framing the Early Middle Ages, 84–92.

43  See R.C. Blockley, ‘Subsidies and diplomacy: Rome and Persia in late antiquity’, Phoenix 39 (1985), 62–74; E. Chrysos, ‘Byzantine diplomacy, AD 300–800: means and ends’, in J. Shepard and S. Franklin, eds., Byzantine Diplomacy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992), 25–39.

44  See on this J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops. Army, Church and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 32–47.

45  Jordanes, Get. 146.

46  Zos., New Hist. V.36; Oros., Hist. VII.38; tariff; Zos., New Hist. V.41.

47  Hydatius, Chron. 69.

48  So Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 102.

49  See Jones, Later Roman Empire, I, 249–53.

50  Walter A. Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, AS 418–584. The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 84–87; detailed discussion with bibliography in Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, 425–47.

51  See S.J.B. Barnish, ‘Taxation, land, and barbarian settlement’, Papers of the British School at Rome 54 (1986), 170–95; J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, ‘Cities, taxes and the accommodation of the barbarians: the theories of Durliat and Goffart’, in W. Pohl, ed., Kingdoms of the Empire. The Integration of the Barbarians in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 135–51.

52  Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 86: ‘any model that supposes a smooth, merely administrative, changeover does violence to the evidence we have for the confusion of the fifth century’.

53  Stephen Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284–641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 197.

54  Roger Collins, Early Medieval Europe 300–1000 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).

55  See the excellent discussion by Andrew Fear, ‘War and society’, in Philip Sabin, Hans Van Wees and Michael Whitby, eds., The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare II: Rome from the Late Republic to the Late Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 424–58. Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), Appendix A, 201–4, lists barbarians in the Roman army and in Appendix C, 209–17, instances of soldiers stationed in towns. Jones, Later Roman Empire, 606–86, remains essential on the late Roman army.

56  See Benjamin Isaac, ‘The meaning of the terms “limes” and “limitanei” in ancient sources’, Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988), 125–47. They were not, as commonly supposed, a ‘peasant militia’ of questionable effectiveness: cf. A.D. Lee, ‘Warfare and the state’, in Sabin, Van Wees and Whitby, eds., The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, II, 379–423, at 409.

57  For a generally positive view see now Hugh Elton, ‘Military forces’, in Sabin, Van Wees and Whitby, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, eds., II, 270–309.

58  Jones, Later Roman Empire, 207–8, 629–30; good discussion of the cost of the army and the implications of how soldiers were paid by Lee, ‘Warfare and society’, 401–412. M. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. AD 300–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 164–8, computes the cost of Justinian’s army in North Africa on the basis of the figures given in the sources, and see on the size of the late Roman army Warren Treadgold, Byzantium and its Army, 284–1081 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 43–64; however, it is a dangerous procedure to rely on figures in the sources, which are notoriously unreliable: see Elton, ‘Military forces’, 284–86. For Justinian’s wars and battles see also John Haldon, The Byzantine Wars (Stroud, 2001), 23–44.

59  So T.S. Parker, Romans and Saracens. A History of the Arabian Frontier (Winona Lake, Indiana: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1986); The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan: Interim Report on the Limes Arabicus Project 1980–1985 (Oxford, BAR, 1987); discussion in Benjamin Isaac, ‘The army in the Late Roman East’, in Averil Cameron, ed., States, Resources and Armies, the Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East III (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995), 125–55, at 137–45.

60  Elton, ‘Military forces’, 293.

61  Contra G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle, in the Ancient Greek World. From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981), 509–18; also Gibbon and many more recent historians: on this see Lee, ‘Warfare and the state’, 417.

62  See Lee, ‘Warfare and the state’, 396–98, with J.M. O’Flynn, Generalissimos of the Western Roman Empire (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1983).

63  Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, 32–47.

64  For barbarian invasions as the key element (as opposed to internal or structural problems), the classic statement is that of André Piganiol, made at the end of his book, L’Empire chrétien (325–395) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1947), ‘the empire did not die a natural death, it was assassinated’; see Introduction.

65  For discussion see Elton, ‘Military forces’, 284–85 (c. 500,000 in the fourth century, c. 300,000 by the sixth); Jones, Later Roman Empire II, 1,042 seems to accept a figure of over 600,000; see also 679–80. On the Notitia see J.H. Ward, ‘The Notitia Dignitatum’, Latomus 33 (1974), 397–434.

66  See on this Elton, ‘Military forces’, 274–78, though with an emphasis on continuity. Michael Whitby, ‘Recruitment in Roman armies from Justinian to Heraclius (ca. 565–615)’, in Averil Cameron, ed., States, Resources and Armies, 61–124, emphasises the reliance on conscription and puts forward a robust assessment of military strength even at the end of our period (cf. 100 f. on the evidence of the late sixth-century Strategikon of Maurice). However Heraclius’s recruitment for the war against Persia in the early seventh century involved a major effort, and by then there had been a retreat from the Danube region under pressure of repeated Slav migration and attacks (Chapter 9). David Potter, Rome in the Ancient World. Romulus to Justinian (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 317–34, gives a brief but thoughtful review of the post-Justinianic period and the (multiple) reasons for ‘decline’.

67  See Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire. The Roman Army in the East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 1992); for the east see the spectacular photographs published by David Kennedy and Derrick Riley, Rome’s Desert Frontier from the Air (London: Batsford, 1990); David Kennedy and Robert Bewley, Ancient Jordan from the Air (London: Council for British Research in the Levant, 2004); P. Freeman and D. Kennedy, eds., The Defence of the Roman Empire in the East, I–II (Oxford: BAR, 1986); D.H. French and C.S. Lightfoot, eds., The Eastern Frontier of the Roman Empire, I–II (Oxford: BAR, 1989) and see below, Chapter 9.

68  Trans. A. Fitzgerald (1930), II, 477.

69  Heather, Empires and Barbarians, is right to see this, and to include the migrations of the Slavs (and, he might have added, of Turkic peoples) as a continuation of the story. Similarly the apparently long-lived empire of Byzantium, which in a real sense lasted until 1453, nevertheless changed profoundly at various periods as the world around it also changed: Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

3 Christianization and its challenges

1  The traditional term ‘paganism’ (which I use at times for convenience) is a Christian invention and obscures the actual variety of cults and practice. For the actual continuance of pagan practice and thought see Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, 1997); F.R. Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370–529, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1993–94). Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), argues powerfully against the idea promoted in Christian sources of a stark struggle between Christianity and paganism (and defends his use of the term ‘pagan’ at 25–32).

2  David M. Gwynn and Suzanne Bangert, eds., Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity, Late Antique Archaeology 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); E. Rebillard and C. Sotinel, eds., Les frontières du profane dans l’Antiquité tardive (Rome: École française de Rome, 2010); Robert Markus, ‘From Rome to the barbarian kingdoms (300–700)’, in J. McManners, ed., Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 62–91, at 62–73.

3  See e.g. Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Dale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller, The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism and Historiography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation. Asceticism and Scripture In Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); ead., History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). In general see now for comprehensive coverage Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4  See Averil Cameron, ‘Education and literary culture, AD 337–425’, Cambridge Ancient History XIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 22, 665–707.

5  See also for different reasons Arnaldo Momigliano, ed., The Conflict between Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), Introduction.

6  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

7  Thus the period from the fourth to the seventh centuries was defined as an ‘age of spirituality’ in K. Weitzmann, ed., The Age of Spirituality. Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1977), and the transition to Byzantine art has been seen in similar terms: E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977).

8  Vol 2: Charles and Luce Piétri, eds., Naissance d’une chrétienté (250–430) (Paris: Desclée, 1995); vol. 3: L. Piétri, ed., Les églises d’Orient et d’ Occident (Paris: Desclée, 1998).

9  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

10  J. Rüpke, ‘Early Christianity out of, and in, context’, Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009), 182–93 (reviewing vols. 1 and 2 of the Cambridge History of Christianity, and with much to commend in vol. 2 at 188–93).

11  Art. cit., 182.

12  For which see Peter Brown, ‘Christianization and religious conflict’, in Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey, eds., The Late Empire, AD 337–425, The Cambridge Ancient History XIII (Cambridge, 1998), 632–64; id., Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversion in Late Antiquity and Beyond (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003); Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity. A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), for a controversial sociological approach, on which see the special issue of JECS 6.2 (1998); W.V. Harris, ed., The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries: Essays in Explanation (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

13  For a useful corrective see John Curran, ‘The conversion of Rome revisited’, in Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex, eds., Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2000), 1–14.

14  The earliest of these may have been the church known as the Basilica Apostolorum (San Sebastiano), on the Via Appia, which became part of a large and elaborate complex. For a stimulating discussion of Christian funerary practice and martyrs’ shrines see Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church. Popular Christianity, AD 200–400 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), with an appendix listing churches built before 400.

15  Some of these are included in the excellent collection of translated sources by Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453. Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972, repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986): cf. 24–25, prescriptions for what churches should be like; 27–29, the martyrium at Nyssa; 30, church of St Euphemia at Chalcedon; 32–39.

16  But see T.D. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 260–83, arguing against the authenticity of this well-known text.

17  See Daniel F. Caner, with contributions by Sebastian Brock, Richard M. Price and Kevin van Bladel, History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai, Translated Texts for Historians 53 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 18–19.

18  S. Apollinare Nuovo was the palace chapel of Theoderic, who made Ravenna his capital; some of its mosaic decoration was remodelled and the portrait of Justinian inserted when Gothic churches were reclaimed and catholic orthodoxy imposed after the Byzantine reconquest in 554 (Chapter 5): A. Urbano, ‘Donation, dedication and Damnatio memoriae: the Catholic reconciliation of Ravenna and the church of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 13 (2005), 71–110.

19  On the Roman churches, see H. Brandenburg, Ancient Churches of Rome from the Fourth to the Seventh Century. The Dawn of Christian Architecture in the West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).

20  Eus., Life of Constantine, III.50.

21  Cyril Mango, Byzantine Architecture (London: Faber/Electa, 1978), is a fine survey. There are many introductions to late antique and Byzantine art; see for instance Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 1. Thomas F. Mathews, The Art of Byzantium (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd, 1998), questions some traditional assumption, as does Jas Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer. The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

22  For this church, and for the hymn in Syriac which celebrated it as symbolizing heaven, see Kathleen McVey, ‘The domed church as microcosm: literary roots of an architectural symbol’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983), 91–121.

23  See R.M. Harrison, A Temple for Byzantium: the Discovery and Excavation of Anicia Juliana’s Palace-church in Istanbul (London: Harvey Miller, 1989) poem: Anth. Pal. I.10. See Gregory of Tours, De gloria martyrum, 102.

24  Marlia Mundell Mango, Silver from Early Byzantium. The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1986), 98, and see the introduction.

25  Personal communication from the excavator, Dr Grzegorz Majcherek.

26  See Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity. The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Andrea Sterk, Renouncing the World yet Leading the Church: the Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Peter Norton, Episcopal Elections, 250–600. Hierarchy and Popular Will in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

27  This is well brought out by Rita Lizzi Testa, ‘The late antique bishop: image and reality’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, 527–38.

28  Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan. Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Ambrose of Milan, Political Letters and Speeches, Translated Texts for Historians 43 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).

29  The classic work on Augustine is Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new ed. (London: Faber, 2000); for the Confessions see the translation by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and the excellent short introduction by Gillian Clark, Augustine. The Confessions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

30  Theodoret: Theresa Urbainczyk, Theodoret of Cyrrhus. The Bishop and the Holy Man (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); he wrote about these ascetics in his Historia Religiosa, trans. R.M. Price, A History of the Monks of Syria by Theodoret of Cyrrhus (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985). They included Symeon the Stylite the Elder, who spent decades living on top of a high pillar at Qalaat Semaan; for Symeon see also Robert Doran, The Lives of Symeon Stylites (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992).

31  R. Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 167, and in general on all these issues in the fifth-century west.

32  For Venantius see Judith W. George, Venantius Fortunatus. A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); ead., Venantius Fortunatus: Personal and Political Poems, Translated Texts for Historians 23 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995).

33  For the patronage of western bishops, and their exploitation of relics for reasons of local prestige, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Western Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1981). There is a great deal of evidence for fifth- and sixth-century Gaul, where Caesarius of Arles (502–42) later exercised a more provincial but essentially similar role: see C.E. Stancliffe, St. Martin and his Hagiographer. History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Danuta Shanzer and Ian N. Wood, Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose, Translated Texts for Historians 38 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002); on Caesarius, see W. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles. The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters, Translated Texts for Historians 19 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994).

34  This is discussed in detail from the reign of Constantine onwards in an important though difficult book by G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest. The Imperial Office in Byzantium, Eng. trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

35  The main account is by the ecclesiastical historian Rufinus (HE II.22–30), but this needs careful analysis: for discussion, see Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel and Ulrich Gotter, eds., From Temple to Church. Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Edward J. Watts, Riot in Alexandria. Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 192–98: see Chapter 1.

36  G. Fowden, ‘Bishops and temples in the eastern Roman empire, AD 320–435’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 29 (1978), 53–78; B. Caseau, ‘The fate of rural temples in late antiquity and the Christianisation of the countryside’, in William Bowden, Luke Lavan and Carlos Machado, eds., Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, Late Antique Archaeology 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 105–44; ead., ‘Sacred landscapes’, in G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Post-Classical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 21–59.

37  See Michael E. Gaddis, There is no Crime for those who have Christ. Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); P. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, Eng. trans., (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

38  See R.M. Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, with Related Texts on the Three Chapters Controversy, 2 vols., Translated Texts for Historians 51 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); C. Sotinel, ‘Emperors and popes in the sixth century: the western view’, in Michael Maas, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambrdge University Press, 2005), 267–90; for the antecedents to the council of 553, Justinian’s strenuous efforts to resolve matters and the vacillations and ill-treatment of Vigilius, see Celia Chazelle and Catherine Cubitt, eds., The Crisis of the Oikoumene: the Three Chapters and the Failed Quest for Unity in the Sixth-Century Mediterranean (Turnhout, 2007). Decision-making at church councils: Ramsay MacMullen, Voting about God in Early Church Councils (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

39  See for a clear short treatment Michael Gaddis, ‘The political church: religion and the state’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, 511–24.

40  See now the full documentation from the council, translated with notes by R.M. Price, with Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols. Translated Texts for Historians 45 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); Chapter 1 above.

41  See Chapters 5 and 8, with Susan Ashbrook Harvey, ‘Remembering pain: Syriac historiography and the separation of the churches’, Byzantion 58 (1988), 295–308.

42  See also the sixth-century treatise by Agapetus translated by Peter Bell, Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian. Agapetus, Advice to the Emperor, Dialogue on Political Science, Paul the Silentiary, Description of Hagia Sophia, Translated Texts for Historians 52 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); Dagron, Emperor and Priest.

43  See Jones, Later Roman Empire, II, chapter 22 (‘The church’).

44  Eus., Life of Constantine III. 41–6.

45  See E.D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire AD 312–460 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

46  Socrates, HE VII.47; Clark, Life of Melania, 56; Evagrius, HE I.20.

47  Life of Melania, 58.

48  See Holum, Theodosian Empresses; Alan Cameron, ‘The empress and the poet: paganism and politics at the court of Theodosius II’, Yale Classical Studies 27 (1982), 272–89; Eudocia’s verse inscription on the baths at Hammat Gader on the east coast of the Sea of Galilee: J. Green and Y. Tsafrir, ‘Greek inscriptions from Hammat Gader: a poem by the Empress Eudocia and two building inscriptions’, Israel Exploration Journal 32 (1982), 77–91.

49  On Theodora see Volker-Lorenz Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Chapter 5 below.

50  Procopius, Secret History 17.5; cf. Buildings I.9.2; she is presented sympathetically by the Miaphysite writer John of Ephesus, see Menze, ibid.

51  See Virginia Burrus, ed., Late Ancient Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005); Derek Krueger, ed., Byzantine Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), vols. 2 and 3 in the series A People’s History of Christianity; cf. Kimberley Diane Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), focusing on private chapels and places of worship.

52  John of Ephesus, HE III.3.36.

53  Sardis VII, no. 19.

54  The extent to which the secondary literature has tended to be coloured by confessional approaches and assumptions of the ‘triumph’ of Christianity makes it difficult to deal with this issue, but see Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370–529; T.E. Gregory, ‘The survival of paganism in Christian Greece: a critical survey’, American Journal of Philology 107 (1986), 229–42; G.W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Neil McLynn, ‘Pagans in a Christian empire’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, chapter 38, 572–87.

55  F.W. Trombley, ‘Religious transition in sixth-century Syria’, Byzantinische Forschungen 20 (1994), 153–95; Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 35–40. Pagan cult seems to have been continuing at Philae in Egypt in the 560s (P. Cair. Masp. I. 67004).

56  For Hellenism and the continuance of classical iconography, especially on mosaics, see Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity; below, Chapter 7.

57  Against the older notions of a ‘pagan reaction’, in late fourth-century Rome, and another in the 430s, see the powerful rebuttal by Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), with discussion of patronage and iconography at 691–742.

58  Rita Lizzi Testa, ‘Augures et pontifices: public sacral law in late antique Rome (fourth-fifth centuries AD’, in Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski, eds., The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 251–78; pagan priesthoods: Cameron, Last Pagans, 132–72.

59  Cyril Mango, ‘Discontinuity with the classical past in Byzantium’, in Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott, eds., Byzantium and the Classical Tradition (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1981), 48–57, at 57.

60  See the Life of Isidore, by the Athenian Neoplatonist Damascius, trans. P. Athanassiadi, Damascius, The Philosophical History (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999); Zachariah of Mytilene, Life of Severus, trans. Lena Ambjörn (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008).

61  CJ I, 5, 18.4; 11, 10 (‘the sacrilegious foolishness of the Hellenes’).

62  Evagrius, HE V.18; cf. John of Ephesus, HE III.27–35, V.37; Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 35ff.

63  See R.A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 202–11, emphasizing the fact that what Caesarius called ‘pagan’ was often simply a matter of custom and habit. For the process of evangelization in northern Italy at the beginning of our period: Rita Lizzi, ‘Ambrose’s contemporaries and the Christianization of northern Italy’, Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990), 156–73.

64  See Ian Wood, The Missionary Life. Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050 (Harlow: Longman, 2001); Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe. From Paganism to Christianity, 371–1386 AD (London: Fontana, 1998).

65  See Caner, History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai, 14–15.

66  The Last Pagans of Rome, 25–32.

67  Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, 224–26 (an ‘epistemological excision’, a ‘drainage of secularity’).

68  See Guy G. Stroumsa, ‘Christianity contested’, in Casiday and Norris, eds., Cambridge History of Christianity 2, chap. 5. A key work arguing for a late ‘parting of the ways’ is Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines. The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); see also Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways that Never Parted. Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); L. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome. Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 1995). For the torrent of Christian rhetoric directed at the conceptualisation of Judaism see Andrew S. Jacobs, The Remains of the Jews. The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2004). Both Boyarin and Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), argue for the influence of Christian developments on Judaism in late antiquity.

69  See A. Chaniotis, ‘The Jews of Aphrodisias: new evidence and old problems’, Scripta Classica Israelica 21 (2002), 209–42.

70  Zodiac motifs were popular, and there is a striking mosaic of Orpheus from Gaza (though Orpheus is labelled as ‘David’); recent excavations at Sepphoris have provided spectacular examples; further below, Chapter 7.

71  The fifth and sixth centuries were the great period of the establishment of monastic foundations in the west: Benedict of Nursia was a contemporary of Cassiodorus, Columba was active in Scotland in the sixth century and died and was buried at Iona in 597, while between his arrival in Gaul from Ireland, c. 575, and his death in 615, Columbanus was to found the great centres of Luxeuil and Bobbio.

72  For coenobitic organization, instituted by Pachomius, see Philip Rousseau, Pachomius, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Y. Hirschfeld, The Judaean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), based on both archaeological and literary evidence, gives a fascinating picture of life in the many monasteries of the Judaean desert in the fifth and sixth centuries, and for the complexities and the politics of late antique monasticism, see Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks. Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); the development of monasticism on Sinai, with individual cells and monastic centres, is well described by Caner, History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai, introduction.

73  Trans. Gillian Clark, Iamblichus. On the Pythagorean Life Translated Texts for Historians 8 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989).

74  See the wide range of extracts in V. Wimbush, ed., Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990); Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, Eng. trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

75  Leontius, Life of Symeon the Fool, 14; D. Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

76  P. Brown, ‘The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), 80–101, reprinted with additions in his Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 103–52; for evaluation and reactions, see J. Howard-Johnston and P.A. Hayward, eds., The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

77  Procopius, Wars I.7.5–11.

78  See A. Vööbus, A History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient, 3 vols. (Louvain: CSCO, 1958– 88); S. Brock, ‘Early Syrian asceticism’, Numen 20 (1973), 1–19 (reprinted in his Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984); Price, A History of the Monks of Syria.

79  The classic work for the west is Brown, The Cult of the Saints; see also S. Hackel, ed., The Byzantine Saint (London: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1981).

80  A convenient list of these collections is provided in Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, The Life and Miracles of Thekla. A Literary Study (Cambridge, Mass: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006), Appendix 2.

81  See P. Booth, ‘Orthodox and heretic in the early Byzantine cult(s) of Saints Cosmas and Damian’, in Peter Sarris, Matthew Dal Santo and Phil Booth, eds., An Age of Saints? Conflict and Dissent in the Cult of Saints (300–1000 AD) (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Matthew Dal Santo, ‘Gregory the Great and Eustratius of Constantinople: the Dialogues on the Miracles of the Italian Fathers as an apology for the cult of saints’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 17.3 (2009), 421–57; G. Dagron, ‘L’ombre d’un doute: l’hagiographie en question, VIe-XIe siècles’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 46 (1992), 59–68; John Haldon, in V.S. Crisafulli and J.W. Nesbitt, eds., The Miracles of St Artemios. A Collection of Miracle Stories by an Anonymous Author of Seventh-Century Byzantium (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 33–73.

82  For a good introduction see G. Vikan, Byzantine Pilgrimage Art (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), with many examples. For Thekla souvenirs see also Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St Thecla. A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 2008).

83  See the excellent study by Béatrice Caseau, ‘Ordinary objects in Christian healing sanctuaries’, in Luke Lavan, Ellen Swift and Toon Putzeys, eds., Objects in Context, Objects in Use. Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity, Late Antique Archaeology 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 625–54.

84  See J. Herrin, ‘Ideals of charity, realities of welfare. The philanthropic activity of the Byzantine church’, in Rosemary Morris, ed., Church and People in Byzantium (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, 1990), 151–64; D.J. Constantelos, Byzantine Philanthropy and Social Welfare, 2nd rev. ed. (New Rochelle, NY: A.D. Caratzas, 1998).

85  See Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002); Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne, eds., Poverty in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), with five chapters dealing with late antiquity.

86  Jill Harries, ‘“Treasure in heaven”: property and inheritance among the senators of late Rome’, in E.M. Craik, ed., Marriage and Property: Women and Marital Customs in History (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), 54–70.

87  See Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313–450) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

88  See Clark, Reading Renunciation.

89  Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, IVe–VIIe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1977), 113–55, and cf. 181–96.

90  Trans. R. Davis, The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis), Translated Texts for Historians 6, rev. ed. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000).

4 Late Roman society and economy

1  So A. Giardina, ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi Storici 40 (1999), 157–80; id., ‘The transition to late antiquity’, in W. Scheidel, I. Morris, R. Saller, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 743–68.

2  See Averil Cameron, ‘A.H.M. Jones and the end of the ancient world’, in David M. Gwynn, ed., A.H.M. Jones and the End of the Roman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 231–49.

3  Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

4  M.I. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Eng. trans., rev. P.M. Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957).

5  Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Book Club, 1974).

6  G.E.M. De Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (London: Duckworth, 1981). For a recent discussion see A. Giardina, ‘Marxism and historiography: perspectives on Roman history’, in Chris Wickham, ed., Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), 15–31.

7  See for instance A.H.M. Jones’s articles on the colonate and taxation in P. Brunt, ed., The Roman Economy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974); Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, chapter 12, and cf., e.g., C.G. Starr, The Roman Empire, 27 BC to AD 476: A Study in Survival (Oxford: 1982), 164–5: ‘politically the structure of the Later Roman Empire is one of the grimmest of all ancient times’; ‘to modern man, the corrupt, brutal regimentation of the Later Empire appears as a horrible example of the victory of the state over the individual’. Peter Brown’s review discussion of Jones, Later Roman Empire, in his Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine (London: Faber, 1972), 46–73, is still worth reading, and on Jones’s views on taxation and the late Roman economy see Bryan Ward-Perkins, ‘Jones and the Late Roman economy’, in David M. Gwynn, ed., A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 193–212.

8  J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity. Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Peter Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

9  De mortibus persecutorum 7.

10  As argued by e.g. A.H.M. Jones, ‘Over-taxation and the decline of the Roman Empire’, in Brunt, ed., The Roman Economy, 82–9.

11  Christopher Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) is an outstanding work which deals with both east and west in a comparative perspective, and see further below.

12  Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 2nd rev. ed. (London: Hogarth, 1985).

13  Cf. Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cambridge: Orchard Academic, 2001); Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, The Birth of Classical Europe. A History from Troy to Augustine (London: Allen Lane, 2010).

14  However, a controversial book by Peter F. Bang, The Roman Bazaar. A Comparative Study of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), insists on the inapplicability of the market model, and see id., ‘The ancient economy and new institutional economics’, review article on Scheidel, Morris and Saller, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, in Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009), 194–206.

15  See for instance Walter Scheidel and Steven J. Friesen, ‘The size of the economy and the distribution of income in the Roman empire’, Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009), 61–91; Alan K. Bowman and Andrew Wilson, eds., Quantifying the Roman Economy. Methods and Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

16  On the methodological issues see Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 700–8.

17  On which see Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity and Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian.

18  R. MacMullen, ‘Late Roman slavery’, Historia 36 (1987), 359–82; C.R. Whittaker, ‘Circe’s pigs: from slavery to serfdom in the later Roman world’, Slavery and Abolition 8 (1987), 87– 122; Y. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, Eng. trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

19  Noel Lenski, ‘Captivity, slavery and cultural exchange between Rome and the Germans from the first to the seventh century CE’, in Catherine M. Cameron, ed., Invisible Citizens. Captives and their Consequences (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 80–109.

20  W. Klingshirn, ‘Charity and power: Caesarius of Arles and the ransoming of captives in sub-Roman Gaul’, Journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985), 183–203.

21  For discussion of this difficult topic, see Cam Grey, ‘Contextualising colonatus: the origin of the Later Roman empire’, Journal of Roman Studies 97 (2007), 155–75, especially 156–61, responding to J.-M. Carrié, ‘Le “colonat du Bas-Empire”: un mythe historiographique?’, Opus 1 (1982), 351–71, and in turn A.J.B. Sirks (who writes as a Roman lawyer), ‘The colonate in Justinian’s reign’, Journal of Roman Studies 98 (2008), 120–43, responding to Grey; see also A. Marcone, Il colonato tardoantico nella storiografia moderna (Como: Edizioni New Press, 1988); Giardina, ‘The transition to late antiquity’. Labour and social relations in the late Roman world are discussed in Part III of Cambridge Ancient History XIII, pp. 277–370, and by Bryan Ward-Perkins in vol. XIV for the period 425-c. 600, at 315–91.

22  Grey, art. cit., 159.

23  So for instance A.H.M. Jones, ‘The caste system in the Roman empire’, in Brunt, ed., The Roman Economy, 396–418; id., ‘The Roman colonate’, in ibid., 293–307.

24  CJ XI.48.21.1; 50.2.3; 52.1.1; Grey, art. cit., 172–73.

25  See Sirks, art. cit., 143.

26  See R. MacMullen, ‘Judicial savagery in the Roman empire’, Chiron 16 (1986), 147–66.

27  On this see Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002); almsgiving: Richard Finn, Almsgiving in the later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313–450) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); above, Chapter 3.

28  For the post-Roman west see Peter Heather, ‘State, lordship and community in the west (c. AD 400–600)’, in Cambridge Ancient History XIV, 437–68. Chris Wickham, ‘The other transition: from the ancient world to feudalism’, Past and Present 103 (1984), 3–36, is a classic discussion of transition.

29  See John Haldon, ‘Economy and administration: how did the empire work?’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, 28–59, at 53.

30  CJ I.55.8, 11; Jones, Later Roman Empire I, 758 (in a section headed ‘The decline of the councils’). See J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 3, ‘Post-curial civic government’, 104–36 and further below.

31  De Mag. I.28.

32  Jones, Later Roman Empire I, 748; see 740–57.

33  Eusebius, Life of Constantine IV.1; see Peter Heather, ‘New men for new Constantines? Creating an imperial elite in the eastern Mediterranean’, in Paul Magdalino, ed., New Constantines (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994), 1–10, also discussing the curial class and the new office-holding bureaucracy (with obvious parallels with the Augustan regime).

34  For examples, and for the geographical spread of senatorial landowning, see Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 162–4.

35  Hist. 14.6, 28.4.

36  For discussion, see Ward-Perkins, Cambridge Ancient History XIV, 369–77, discussing e.g. C.R. Whittaker, ‘Late Roman trade and traders’, in P. Garnsey, K. Hopkins and C.R. Whittaker, eds, Trade in the Ancient Economy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), 163–81; further below.

37  See Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity and Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinin, and see below; cf. Sarris, 197 (of the evidence from papyri): ‘production on the great estates was highly commodified: labour was rationally and flexibly organised, with workers being directed between estate properties; a certain amount of specialisation would appear to have characterised the holdings which the estate comprised, and the surplus produced by the in-hand seems to have been marketed, presumably via the various estate-owned shops and warehouses attested in the sources. Both conceptually and practically, estate management was highly monetised.’

38  Peter Brown, ‘Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman aristocracy’, Journal of Roman Studies 51 (1961), 1–11, is still basic.

39  So too Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

40  Christopher Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), discusses the nuances and complexities of the Late Roman system.

41  For the oath see C. Pazdernik, ‘The trembling of Cain: religious power and institutional culture in Justinianic oath-making’, in Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski, eds., The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 143–54, and for payment for clergy offices see Sabine R. Huebner, ‘Currencies of power: the venality of offices in the Later Roman Empire’, ibid., 167–79.

42  Nov. 6 (535); Nov. 123 (546).

43  Procopius, Secret History, 21.9f.; Nov. 49.1: governors were now to be selected by the bishops, possessores and prominent local residents. The Synecdemus of Hierocles, a document in Greek dating from early in Justinian’s reign but based on earlier material, gives a list of eastern provinces and their governors, which can now be supplemented from the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire: see Charlotte M. Roueché, ‘The functions of the Roman governor in Late Antiquity: some observations’ and ‘Provincial governors and their titulature in the sixth century’, Antiquité tardive 5 (1998), 31–36, 83–89.

44  See A. Wallace-Hadrill, ed., Patronage in Ancient Society (London: Routledge, 1989), in particular Peter Garnsey and Greg Woolf, ‘Patronage of the rural poor’, at 162–6. For patronage in late antiquity see Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity. Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

45  Garnsey and Woolf, art. cit., 167.

46  CTh 11.24.6.

47  CJ XI.54.1, AD 468.

48  Jones, Later Roman Empire I, 468–9 (and in general on finance, 411–69).

49  See R.C. Blockley, ‘Subsidies and diplomacy: Rome and Persia in late antiquity’, Phoenix 39 (1985), 62–74; further, Chapter 9.

50  CJ 11.1.1; CJ 12.2.2.

51  Jones, Later Roman Empire II, 1045, ‘the basic economic weakness of the empire was that too few producers supported too many idle mouths’. One must remember that Jones believed that the late Roman army had doubled in size since the Principate (ibid., 1046).

52  Jones, Later Roman Empire I, 691–705; at Rome there were also free distributions of pork and of oil, the former causing some awkward problems of supply.

53  See Peter Garnsey, ‘Grain for Rome’, in Garnsey, Hopkins and Whittaker, eds., Trade in the Ancient Economy, 118–30; J. Durliat, De la ville antique à la ville byzantine: le problème des subsistences (Rome: École française de Rome, 1990); B. Sirks, Food for Rome. The Legal Structure of the Transportation and Processing of Supplies for the Imperial Distributions in Rome and Constantinople (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1991).

54  See Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 710–15.

55  Wickham, 716–18, also discussing the relationship between commercial exchange and the ‘fiscal movement of goods’.

56  For all this section see Ward-Perkins, Cambridge Ancient History XIV, 377–81.

57  See Jones, Later Roman Empire I, 438–48; for the money supply, especially in the east, see C. Morrisson and J.P. Sodini, ‘The sixth-century economy’ in Angeliki E. Laiou, ed., The Economic History of Byzantium, From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), I, 171–219, at 212–19; a good short survey of both economy and money in the sixth-century east can also be found in Angeliki E. Laiou and Cécile Morrisson, The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22–38, cf. 38–42 on the theory of a downturn after c. 550.

58  An overall discussion can be found in Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, and see Chapter 7 below.

59  See Chris Wickham, ‘Marx, Sherlock Holmes and late Roman commerce’, Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988), 190–3, who provides a good introduction to the fundamental Italian work by A. Carandini and others, especially C. Panella, ‘Le merci: produzioni, itinerari e destini’, in A. Giardina, ed., Società romana e impero tardoantico III (Bari: Laterza, 1986), 431–59; see also Carandini, ibid., 3–19, for a more theoretical exposition; and C. Panella, ‘Gli scambi nel Mediterraneo Occidentale dal IV al VII secolo dal punto di vista di alcune “merci’, in Hommes et richesses dans l’ empire byzantin (Paris: Lethielleux, 1989) I, 129–41. See John Hayes, Late Roman Pottery (London: British School at Rome, 1972; Supplement, 1980); S. Kingsley and M. Decker, eds., Economy and Exchange in the East Mediterranean during Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001); Sean A. Kingsley, Shipwreck Archaeology of the Holy Land. Processes and Parameters (London: Duckworth, 2004).

60  For the prosperity of North Africa in the pre-Vandal period and for the increasing scale of senatorial holdings there, see C. Lepelley, Les cités de l’Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire, I–II (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1979–81); id., ‘Peuplement et richesses de l’Afrique romaine tardive’, in Morrisson and Lefort, eds, Hommes et richesses dans l’empire byzantin I, 17–30. The Vandal conquest ‘broke the tax spine’ (Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 711), but exchange continued (ibid., 722). Differences between the western and eastern Mediterranean: ibid., 709, 713–14.

61  See Framing the Early Middle Ages, 708–20, ‘The Mediterranean world system’; further, Conclusion.

62  Ibid., 716–17.

63  For example Niall Ferguson, Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2004); Cullen Murphy, Are we Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2007).

5 Justinian and reconquest

1  Jones, Later Roman Empire I, chapter 9, and E. Stein, Histoire du Bas-Empire, II, rev. J.-R.Palanque (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949, repr. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968), remain basic; Michael Maas, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) is a valuable up-to-date guide, and see also Averil Cameron, ‘Justin I and Justinian’, in Cambridge Ancient History XIV, 63–85; John Moorhead, Justinian (London: Longman, 1994); J.A.S. Evans, The Age of Justinian. The Circumstances of Imperial Power (London: Routledge, 1996); Averil Cameron, ‘Gibbon and Justinian’, in Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault, eds., Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34–52.

2  For a clear introduction see Caroline Humfress, ‘Law and legal practice in the age of Justinian’ in Maas, ed., Companion to the Age of Justinian, 161–5.

3  For Tribonian and his activity, see Tony Honoré, Tribonian (London: Duckworth, 1978). Jurists were allowed to translate the Digest into Greek, but only if they kept very closely to the Latin text.

4  Humfress, ‘Law and legal practice’, 171–6.

5  See Michael Maas, ‘Roman history and Christian ideology in Justinianic reform legislation’, DOP 40 (1986), 17–31.

6  See Averil Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century (London: Duckworth, 1985) and further below. The Wars were completed in AD 553–4. Despite some voices of disagreement, it still seems most likely that the Buildings dates from 554 and the Secret History from 550–51; this apparent contradiction is made easier to explain by the fact that the note of criticism of the regime in the Wars grows more obvious in the last two books.

7  For the Buildings, see below and further, Chapter 7.

8  By Anthony Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea. Tyranny, History and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

9  See Peter Bell, Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian. Agapetus, Advice to the Emperor, Dialogue on Political Science, Paul the Silentiary, Description of Hagia Sophia, Translated Texts for Historians 52 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); D.J. O’Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); John the Lydian: Michael Maas, John Lydus and the Roman Past. Antiquarianism and Politics in the Age of Justinian (London: Routledge, 1992).

10  See Averil Cameron, ‘Vandal and Byzantine Africa’, Cambridge Ancient History XIV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 552–69 and further below and Chapter 7.

11  See John Moorhead, The Roman Empire Divided, 400–700 (London: Longmans, 2001); Neil Christie, The Lombards: the Ancient Longobards (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Italy: see E. Zanini, Le Italie byzantine. Territorio, insediamenti ed economia nella provincia bizantina d’Italia (VI–VIII secolo) (Bari: Edipuglia, 1998).

12  Honoré, Tribonian, chap.1. Measures against pagans: CJ I, 5, 18.4; 11, 10 (‘the sacrilegious foolishness of the Hellenes’); the patrician Phocas, the quaestor sacri palatii Thomas and the ex-prefect Asclepiodotus were all put on trial; Asclepiodotus committed suicide, and so did Phocas when he was tried again on the same charge in AD 546.

13  For discussion of the former view, see Cameron, Procopius, chap. 2; the latter view is expressed in E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977).

14  Proc., Buildings I.10.16 (Belisarius presenting the spoils of Italy and Africa to Justinian and Theodora); Corippus, In laudem Iustini minoris, I, 276–89 (pall decorated with Justinian as victor trampling on the Vandal king with Libya and old Rome); II, 121–23 (‘Justinian was everywhere’, with ‘the story of his triumphs’ recorded on gold vessels).

15  Proc., Wars IV.9.1.

16  On Justinian as a theologian, see Angelo di Berardino, Patrology. The Eastern Fathers from the Council of Chalcedon (451) to John of Damascus (d.750), Eng. trans. (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 2006), 53–92. For the relations of Justinian with the eastern churches see Volker-Lorenz Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Displaced Miaphysite monks and clergy living in Constantinople: see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis. John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 86ff.; not only were they protected by the Empress Theodora, who lodged them in part of the imperial palace, but were also allegedly visited by the emperor for the purpose of theological discussions.

17  Michael Whitby, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, Translated Texts for Historians 33 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), IV.39; see below.

18  See Cameron, Procopius, chapter 14; Procopius’s most fundamental (and classic) criticism of Justinian is that the emperor was a dangerous innovator, a charge which Procopius also laid against Justinian’s great rival and enemy, Chosores I.

19  See J.W. George, ‘Vandal poets in their context’, in A.H. Merrills, ed., Vandals, Romans and Berbers. New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 133–43.

20  Proc., Wars III.10–12.

21  Proc., Wars IV.9; V.4–5; Amalasuntha was pro-Roman and wanted her son to be brought up like a Roman prince, which annoyed the Goths (Proc., Wars 2.1–22, 4.4); for her knowledge of Greek and Latin: see S.B. Barnish, Cassiodorus: Variae, Translated Texts for Historians 12 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), XI.1.6 ‘she is fluent in the splendour of Greek oratory; she shines in the glory of Roman eloquence’, and see introduction, ix–xiv.

22  The episode is vividly described in the seventh-century Chronicon Paschale (Easter Chronicle) as well as by Procopius and Malalas: Procopius, Wars I.24.7–58; Malalas, Chron., 473–77; Chron. Pasch., trans. with commentary by Michael and Mary Whitby, Chronicon Paschale, 284– 628 AD, Translated Texts for Historians 7 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 112–27; G. Greatrex, ‘The Nika riot: a reappraisal’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997), 60–86. The loss of life is estimated at 30,000 by Malalas, fr. 46 and 50,000 by John the Lydian, De Mag. III.70.

23  See Whitby and Whitby, 113, for the source of this dialogue.

24  Proc., Wars III.20.1.

25  See Averil Cameron, ‘Vandal and Byzantine Africa’, 552–69, at 559. One of the main sources for North Africa under the Vandals is the Latin account by a local bishop, Victor of Vita, of the alleged sufferings of the Catholic church and population at the hands of the Arian Vandals; see John Moorhead, Victor of Vita: History of the Vandal Persecution, Translated Texts for Historians 10 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992).

26  See Maas, ‘Roman history and Christian ideology’.

27  For Rome and Persia, see Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Geoffrey Greatrex and Samuel N.C. Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, Part II, AD 363–630. A Narrative Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2002).

28  Agathias, Hist. II.30–31; see further, Chapter 6.

29  For Malalas, see Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys and Roger Scott, with Brian Croke, The Chronicle of John Malalas (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986); Elizabeth Jeffreys, with Brian Croke and Roger Scott, Studies in John Malalas (Sydney: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1990).

30  Proc., Wars II.7; further Chapter 8 below.

31  G. Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria. From Seluecus to the Arab Conquest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 533–46; Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, 104–6.

32  Proc., Wars II.22–3.

33  Justinian, Edict IX.3; there was also an immediate rise in prices (Nov. 122, AD 544).

34  Recent bibliography: Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity. The Pandemic of 541– 750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Dionysios Ch. Stathakapoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire. A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Mischa Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians. Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingengenzbewältigung im 6. Jahr. n. Chr. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), lays heavy stress of this and other contingent events in explaining sixth-century history.

35  Peregrine Horden, ‘The Mediterranean plague in the age of Justinian’, in Philip Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 134–60, an energetic and sceptical treatment by a historian of Byzantine medicine.

36  Wars II.24.f.

37  Peace terms and status of Christians: Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, 131– 34; see Sebastian Brock, ‘Christians in the Sasanid empire: a case of divided loyalties’, Studies in Church History 18 (1982), 1–19, reprinted in id., Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984), VI; below, Chapter 8.

38  For the numbers and the military difficulties during the Gothic wars, see E.A. Thompson, ‘The Byzantine conquest of Italy: military problems’, in id., Romans and Barbarians. The Decline of the Western Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 1982), 77–91; brief overall discussion: A.D. Lee, ‘The empire at war’, in Maas, ed., Companion to the Age of Justinian, 113–33.

39  Proc., Wars VII.38.

40  See Cameron, Procopius, 195–7.

41  Agathias’ Histories, trans. J. Frendo (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975); Averil Cameron, Agathias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); W. Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 279–90; Procopius: Cameron, Procopius, 54–5, 189–90. Procopius’ disillusionment shows clearly in Wars VII–VIII.

42  S.T. Stevens, A.V. Kalinowski and H. van der Leest, Bir Ftouha. A Pilgrimage Complex at Carthage, Journal of Roman Archaeology supplement 59 (Providence, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2005).

43  Chapter 3 above; the materials from the council are translated by Richard M. Price, The Acts of Constantinople 553, with related texts from the Three Chapters Controversy, translated with an introduction and notes, Translated Texts for Historians 51, 2 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).

44  Celia Chazelle and Catherine Cubitt, eds., The Crisis of the Oikoumene: the Three Chapters and the Failed Quest for Unity in the Sixth-Century Mediterranean (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Theodore of Mopsuestia died in 428, before Ephesus I, but like the other two theologians his work was controversial in the fifth century (Chapter 1).

45  His discussions with the ‘Syrian orthodox’ in Constantinople in 532 had collapsed in the context of the Nika revolt of 532 and a synod called in 536 represented a swing back to Chalcedonians, as a result of which Severus of Antioch was anathematized and his books ordered to be burned. Another issue that arose, especially after 536, involved the teachings of the third-century writer Origen, which were especially divisive among the Chalcedonian monasteries of Palestine represented by S. Sabas, and Origen was condemned posthumously in 553. For all these complex events, and the theological policy of Justinian’s reign, see A. Grillmeier, with Theresia Hainthaler, Christ in the Christian Tradition 2.2. The Church of Constantinople in the Sixth Century, Eng. trans. (London: Mowbray, 1995), 317–473.

46  For a strongly anti-eastern view see James J. O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (London: Profile, 2009); for the attitudes of the Roman population in Italy see Thompson, ‘The Byzantine conquest of Italy: public opinion’, in id., Romans and Barbarians, 92–109; J. Moorhead, ‘Italian loyalties during Justinian’s Gothic war’, Byzantion 53 (1983), 575–96.

47  CJ I.27.

48  CJ I.27.2.

49  John Troglita’s campaigns, in difficult conditions for the Byzantine heavy cavalry and culminating in 548, are the subject of Corippus’s Iohannis, eight books of Latin hexameters; for a detailed treatment of Romans and Berbers in North Africa, see Y. Modéran, Les Maures et l’Afrique romaine (IVe–VIIe siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2003), with 585–644 on 533–48. It was the Berbers themselves who sent envoys to Belisarius for ceremonial recognition, not the other way round (Proc., Wars III.25.3–8; Modéran, 586); when they rebelled just as Belisarius was departing for Constantinople with his captives and also his own elite guard, it came as a shock (Proc., Wars IV.8.9), but the Berbers justified it in a letter to the general Solomon on the grounds that Belisarius had let them down (Wars IV.11.9–12).

50  Modéran, Les Maures, 668–81.

51  CJ I.27.

52  Wars II.8.25.

53  So also Modéran, 587, on the unpreparedness of the easterners for the task.

54  Yvette Duval, Loca sanctorum Africae: le culte des martyrs en Afrique du IVe au VII siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 1982).

55  Modéran, Les Maures, 645–68.

56  See Walter E. Kaegi, Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), using Arabic sources, and see especially chapter 2 on the tendency of Maghrebi historians to stress the role of the local (‘autochthonous’) population in relation to the Arab conquests rather than the Byzantine presence.

57  See the collection of papers edited by C.M. Roueché in Antiquité tardive 8 (2000), 7–180. The Buildings is an extended panegyric, and parts of it, especially book I on Constantinople, fulfil the conventions of the genre, although other parts consist only of lists of sites; its unevenness makes it likely that it was unfinished and its status as a text must always be remembered when using it to provide historical information. It is also far from comprehensive, even in the fuller sections.

58  See e.g. B. Croke and J. Crow, ‘Procopius on Dara’, Journal of Roman Studies 73 (1983), 143– 59, with L.M. Whitby, ‘Procopius’ description of Martyropolis’ (De Aedificiis 3.2.10–14)’, Byzantinoslavica 45 (1984), 177–82; id., ‘Procopius and the development of Roman defences in upper Mesopotamia’, in P. Freeman and D. Kennedy, eds., The Defence of the Roman and Byzantine East (Oxford, BAR, 1986), 717–35; id., ‘Procopius’s description of Dara (Buildings 2.1–3)’, in ibid., 737–83. For Justinian’s building in Greece, see Timothy E. Gregory, ‘Fortification and urban design in early Byzantine Greece’, in R.L. Hohlfelder, ed., City, Town and Countryside in the Early Byzantine Era, New York, 1982, 43–64; and for Illyricum, Frank E. Wozniak, ‘The Justinianic fortification of Interior Illyricum’, in ibid., 199–209. For the works on the Persian frontier and the Black Sea coast, where the status of Lazica was a matter for contention between Byzantium and Persia see James Howard-Johnston, ‘Procopius, Roman defences north of the Taurus and the new fortress of Citharizon’, in D.H. French and C.S. Lightfoot, eds., The Eastern Frontier of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (Oxford: BAR, 1989), 203–29 at 217.

59  See Modéran, Les Maures, 596–604; D. Pringle, The Defence of Byzantine Africa, from Justinian to the Arab Conquest. An Account of the Military History and Archaeology of the African Provinces in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries, 2 vols. (Oxford: BAR, 1981, 2001); J. Durliat, Les dédicaces d’ouvrages de défense dans l’Afrique byzantine (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981); D. Mattingly and R.B. Hitchner, ‘Roman Africa: an archaeological review’, Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995), 165–213, at 209–63; a very important recent study is Anna Leone, Changing Townscapes in North Africa from Late Antiquity to the Arab Conquest (Bari: Edipuglia, 2007).

60  Proc., Buildings VI.4–5.

61  Buildings V.6; see Y. Tsafrir, ‘Procopius and the Nea church in Jerusalem’, Ant. Tard. 8 (2000), 149–64.

62  Buildings V.8.9.

63  See Cameron, Procopius, 96–8; Daniel E. Caner, History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai, Translated Texts for Historians 53 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 273–82, translates and comments on Procopius’ account and that of the tenth-century Arabic writer Eutychius of Alexandria (Sa’id ibn Batriq).

64  Robin Cormack, Byzantine Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 48–51; the mosaic dates from between 548, when Theodora died, and 565, when Justinian died himself.

65  See Timothy E. Gregory, ‘Procopius on Greece’, Ant.tard. 8 (2000), 105–14.

66  Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth. Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

67  For the change in atmosphere see Roger Scott, ‘Malalas, the Secret History and Justinian’s propaganda’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 39 (1985), 99–109.

68  Proc., Wars I.25; Secret History 17.38f.

69  See Peter Bell, Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); further Chapter 7.

70  For Italy and Spain see Moorhead, The Roman Empire Divided, 133–55; the Balkans, the site according to Procopius of 600 fortresses: ibid., 163–71; for the exarchate, see T.S. Brown, Gentlemen and Officers. Imperial Administration and Aristocratic Power in Byzantine Italy AD 554–800 (Rome: British School at Rome, 1984).

71  Roger Collins, Early Medieval Spain. Unity in Diversity, 400–1000 (London: Macmillan, 1983), 38.

72  See Brown, Gentlemen and Officers, chaps 1 and 2.

73  See Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

74  For this see Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 121–5.

75  It is a question whether or not Procopius actually counts Justinian’s reign from 518, as argued by the editor of Procopius, J. Haury: see R. Scott, ‘Justinian’s coinage, the Easter reforms and the date of the Secret History’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11 (1987) 215– 21; Cameron, Procopius, 9.

76  Secret History 23.20f.

77  See Cameron, Procopius, 62ff., and especially chap 13.

78  The apologetic Life of Eutychius, written after his death by the deacon Eustratius, and the Syriac Ecclesiastical History by John of Ephesus, are the main sources: see Averil Cameron, ‘Eustratius’s Life of the Patriarch Eutychius and the Fifth Ecumenical Council’, in J. Chrysostomides, ed., Kathegetria. Essays Presented to Joan Hussey for her 80th Birthday, (Camberley: Porphyrogenita, 1988), 225–47; ead., ‘The Life of the Patriarch Eutychius: models of the past in the late sixth century’, in G. Clarke, ed., Reading the Past in Late Antiquity (Rushcutters Bay: Australian National University Press, 1990), 205–23.

79  For all three see Bell, Three Political Voices.

80  For an overview with bibliography see Joseph D. Alchermes, ‘Art and architecture in the age of Justinian’, in Maas, Companion to the Age of Justinian, 343–75.

81  See Averil and Alan Cameron, ‘The Cycle of Agathias’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 86 (1966), 6–25; Claudia Rapp, ‘Literary culture under Justinian’, in Maas, ed., Companion to the Age of Justinian, 376–97.

82  Procopius, Buildings I. 1.22ff.; Paul the Silentiary. Description of Hagia Sophia; translations: Mango, Art, 72–102; see Bell, Three Political Voices, 189–212; Mary Whitby, ‘The occasion of Paul the Silentiary’s Ekphrasis of S. Sophia’, Classical Quarterly 35 (1985), 215–28; Paul Magdalino and Ruth Macrides, ‘The architecture of ekphrasis: the construction and context of Paul the Silentiary’s poem on S. Sophia’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988), 47–82.

83  On Romanos see Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness. The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), chapter 8.

84  For Latin writers in Constantinople, see Averil Cameron, ‘Roman studies in sixth-century Constantinople’, in Philip Rousseau and Manolis Papoutsakis, eds., Transformations of Late Antiquity. Essays for Peter Brown (Aldershot, 2009), 15–36.

85  See also Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, for emphasis on the fiscal exhaustion of the state in the post-Justinianic period.

6 Late antique culture and private life

1  See André Burguière, The Annales School: an Intellectual History, Eng. trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), especially chap. 9.

2  Especially in his Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity. Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), and see Averil Cameron, ‘Redrawing the map: Christian territory after Foucault’, JRS 76 (1986), 266–71.

3  See for example K. Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality. A Symposium (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980). Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), poses the question of how and why an enhanced spirituality developed in the fourth century.

4  Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, 21.

5  For discussion of this concept see Antiquité tardive 9 (2001), containing a collection of papers edited by J.-M. Carrié and Gisella Cantino Wataghin, with the overall title La ‘démocratisation de la culture’ dans l’antiquité tardive.

6  The first published volume in the series was Ralph W. Mathisen and Hagith S. Sivan, Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996); the most recent at the time of writing, the seventh in the series, is Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski, eds., The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

7  Noel Lenski, ‘Introduction: power and religion on the frontier of late antiquity’, in Cain and Lenski, eds., The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, 1–17, at 5.

8  Among North American writers on late antiquity an important role has been played by Elizabeth A. Clark, not only in her own writing but also through the lead she has given through editorship of the Journal of Early Christian Studies and in the North American Patristic Society; cf. especially her Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), with Dale B. Martin and Patricia Cox Miller, eds., The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies. Gender, Asceticism and Historiography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

9  Some Byzantinists, in a debate led by art historians, tend to emphasize the difference: see Leslie Brubaker, ‘Critical approaches to art history’, in Elizabeth Jeffreys, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 59–66; Liz James, ed., Art and Text in Byzantine Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

10  Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber, 1967; new ed. with epilogue, 2000) remains classic; short introduction by Henry Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); see Gillian Clark, Augustine. The Confessions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

11  Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language. The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) provides a prosopography of Latin grammatici (teachers of grammar, which preceded rhetoric in a young person’s education) from the fourth to sixth centuries; a great deal is known about education in late fourth-century Antioch, especially through the letters of Libanius, on which see Raffaella Cribiore, The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), and about Alexandria, on which see Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) and Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

12  See P. Lemerle, Byzantine Humanism, Eng. trans. (Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986), 63–4.

13  Gaza: B. Bitton Ashkelony and A. Kofsky, eds., Christian Gaza in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

14  See Edward J. Watts, Riot in Alexandria. Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); P. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Eng. trans., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 105–11; Alexandria was favoured by the elite of Aphrodisias for the education of their sons: Charlotte Roueché, Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1989), 85–93. The evidence of Zachariah Scholasticus, viewed sceptically by Alan Cameron, is defended by Watts, Riot in Alexandria, Appendix 2.

15  See Watts, Riot in Alexandria, 5–7. More than twenty of these halls have already been uncovered.

16  See Alan Cameron, ‘The empress and the poet’, in id., Literature and Society in the Early Byzantine World (London: Variorum, 1985), III; T.E. Gregory, ‘The remarkable Christmas homily of Kyros Panopolites’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 16 (1975), 317–24; Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 63–5.

17  In general, see Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, and for the centrality of paideia in late antique society see Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity.

18  Proc., Wars V.1.2.

19  Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity. The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 188–95.

20  Cameron, ‘The empress and the poet’.

21  For the interconnection between iconographical themes on mosaics and in poetry see G.W. Bowersock, Mosaics as History. The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); mythological themes continued to be used in late antiquity in many forms of literature and art, including silverware and on sarcophagi: for one example see Alan Cameron, ‘The young Achilles in the Roman world’, Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009), 1–22; Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 64f.; Nonnus: ibid., 62; Alan Cameron, Last Pagans of Rome, 700–2.

22  See the classic article by Alan Cameron, ‘Wandering poets: a literary movement in Byzantine Egypt’, in Literature and Society in the Early Byzantine World, I. For Dioscorus against the Greek and Coptic background of Middle Egypt in the late sixth century: L.B. MacCoull, Dioscorus of Aphrodito. His Work and his World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 66.

23  See Chapter 9.

24  Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky, eds., Christian Gaza in Late Antiquity, with which compare the same authors’ study of monastic culture there, The Monastic School of Gaza (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Bowersock, Mosaics as History, 32, 56, 58, 62; synagogue mosaics: Chapter 7 below.

25  See David Woods, ‘Late antique historiography: a brief history of time’, in Rousseau, ed. A Companion to Late Antiquity, 357–75; G. Marasco, ed., Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2003); W. Treadgold, The Early Byzantine Historians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

26  Alan Cameron, ‘The date and identity of Macrobius’, Journal of Roman Studies 56 (1966), 25–38.

27  M. Rosenblum, Luxorius. A Latin Poet among the Vandals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Biblical epic: Michael Roberts, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity (Liverpool: F. Cairns, 1985).

28  See Michael Roberts, The Jeweled Style. Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), with the essays in Patricia Cox Miller, The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity. Essays in Imagination and Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). For the reuse of old material in late antique architecture, inappropriately as it might seem to a modern viewer, see B. Brenk, ‘Spolia from Constantine to Charlemagne: Aesthetics versus ideology,’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987), 103–9; J. Elsner, ‘From the culture of spolia to the cult of relics: the Arch of Constantine and the genesis of late antique forms’, Papers of the British School at Rome 68 (2000), 149–84.

29  A less positive view of late antique literary culture is expressed by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

30  Among recent work that of Richard Sorabji is especially important: see his Time, Creation and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (London: Variorum, 1983), and the papers edited by him in Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London: Duckworth, 1987) and Aristotle Transformed. The Ancient Commentators and their Influence, (London: Duckworth, 1990).

31  At Apamea, elaborate fourth-century mosaics of Socrates with six sages, Odysseus’ return, Kallos (the personification of Beauty) and Cassiopeia were subsequently built over when the cathedral was constructed. For these and the mosaics from New Paphos in Cyprus, also depicting Cassiopeia, and the birth of Dionysos, see Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, chap. 4 and id., Mosaics as History.

32  Trans. Mark Edwards, Neoplatonic Saints. The Lives of Plotinus and Proclus by their Students, Translated Texts for Historians 35 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); see G. Fowden, ‘The pagan holy man in late antique society’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 102 (1982), 33–59; and for possible archaeological evidence for philosophical teaching at Athens, see Alison Frantz, The Athenian Agora XXIV. Late Antiquity A.D. 267–700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), especially 56–8, 82–92.

33  For this, see the essays in H.J. Blumenthal and R.A. Markus, eds, Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought (London: Variorum, 1981). The thought of Boethius, expressed in his Consolation of Philosophy, was also deeply imbued with Neoplatonic ideas (see Chapter 2).

34  Malalas, Chronicle, trans. Jeffreys, 264; Damascius: see P. Athanassiadi, Damascius, The Philosophical History (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999).

35  Hist. II.30–1.

36  Edward Watts, ‘Justinian, Malalas and the end of Athenian philosophical teaching in AD 529’, Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004), 168–82; id., City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria; Dominic J. O’Meara, Platonopolis. Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Simplicius at Harran: I. Hadot, ‘The life and work of Simplicius in Greek and Arabic sources’, in Sorabji, ed., Aristotle Transformed, 275–303, following M. Tardieu, ‘Sabiens coraniques et “Sabiens” de Harran’, Journal asiatique 274 (1986), 1–44.

37  See B. Dignas and E. Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity. Neighbours and Rivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 264.

38  For Neoplatonism in Palestinian monastic circles in the sixth century, see I. Perczel, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius and Palestinian Origenism’, in J. Patrich, ed., The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 261–82.

39  Henry Chadwick, ‘Philoponus, the Christian theologian’, in Sorabji, ed., Philoponus, 41–56; see also Sorabji, ‘John Philoponus’, ibid., 1–40.

40  See Robert Browning, Medieval and Modern Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

41  See Averil Cameron, ‘Education and literary culture, AD 337–425’, Cambridge Ancient History XIII, 665–707, at 698–707; Frances Young, Lewis Ayres and Andrew Louth, eds., Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

42  Many examples also show literary affinities with contemporary lives of pagan holy men: see Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, esp. chap. 3; Tomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau, eds., with the assistance of Christian Høgel, Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

43  See on this Elizabeth Jeffreys, ‘Malalas’ world-view’, and Roger Scott, ‘Malalas and his contemporaries’, in E. Jeffreys, B. Croke and R. Scott, eds., Studies in John Malalas (Sydney: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1990), 55–86.

44  See D. Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert. Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); R.M. Price, A History of the Monks of Syria (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1985); Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes. Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

45  See Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, chap. 6.

46  The Italian historian Santo Mazzarino used the term ‘democratisation of culture’: see J.-M. Carrié and Gisella Cantino Wataghin, eds., La ‘démocratisation de la culture, dans l’antiquité tardive, in Antiquité tardive 9 (2001).

47  See E. Kitzinger, ‘The cult of images in the period before Iconoclasm’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954), 85–150; Nilus: Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Era 312–1453. Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, JN: Prentice Hall, 1972, repr. Toronto, 1986), 33.

48  For icons, see Averil Cameron, ‘Images of authority: elites and icons in late sixth-century Byzantium’, Past and Present 84 (1979), 3–25; ‘The language of images: the rise of icons and Christian representation’, in Averil Cameron, Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), XII; Chapter 9 below.

49  L. Cracco Ruggini, ‘The ecclesiastical histories and the pagan historiography: providence and miracles’, Athenaeum n.s. 55 (1977), 107–26; ead., ‘Il miracolo nella cultura del tardo impero: concetto e funzione’, in Hagiographie, Cultures et Sociétés, IVe–XIIe siècles (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1981), 161–204; Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, chap. 6.

50  See Richard Finn, Asceticism in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9–32.

51  See É. Rebillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity, Eng. trans. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); shorter treatment by Rebillard in Rousseau, A Companion to Late Antiquity, 220–31 (‘The church, the living and the dead’).

52  See Kate Cooper, ‘Gender and the fall of Rome’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, 187–200, at 192.

53  Melania: Elizabeth A. Clark, The Life of Melania the Younger (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984); on the issues, see the excellent introduction by Judith Evans-Grubbs, ‘Late Roman marriage and family relationships’, in Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity, 201–19 (for Melania, see 208–9).

54  Many of the substantial corpus of surviving letters tell us nothing directly on the subject, and are semi-public and literary in character; however, see Evans-Grubbs, art. cit., for a discussion based explicitly on personal narratives (Evans-Grubbs, 201). The best source of actual private letters is the papyri, which often preserve fragments of letters written to each other by ordinary people, though these too can sometimes be difficult to interpret.

55  The problem of the evidence is discussed by E. Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, IVe–VIIe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1977), 145–55.

56  Brent D. Shaw, ‘Latin funerary epigraphy and family life in the later Roman empire’, Historia 33 (1984), 457–97; contraception: id.,‘The family in late antiquity: the experience of Augustine’, Past and Present 115 (1987), 3–51, at 44–7; infanticide and sale of infants: ibid., 43f. R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity. A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) puts forward the theory of a demographic increase among Christians on the grounds that they cared for the sick and did not practise infanticide; this seems over-simplistic.

57  City of God, 19.16.

58  See Shaw, ‘The family in late antiquity’, 10f. and esp. 28–38; Evans-Grubbs, art. cit., 213–17.

59  Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride. Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), and cf. ead., The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner, eds., Religion, Dynasty and Patronage in Early Christian Rome 300–900 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2007).

60  But there is much late antique material in Arietta Papaconstantinou and Alice-Mary Talbot, eds., Becoming Byzantine. Children and Childhood in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2009), and see Cecily Hennessy, Images of Children in Byzantium (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008).

61  Shaw, ‘The family in late antiquity’, 39.

62  See Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); A. Arjava, Women and Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Useful discussion of the role played by women in the process of Christianization in Elizabeth A. Castelli, ‘Gender, theory and The Rise of Christianity: a response to Rodney Stark’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.2 (1998), 227–57.

63  See Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom and Friends, 2nd ed. (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982).

64  Palladius, Lausiac History 36.6–7, trans. Meyer; cited by P. Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 378.

65  See Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 165ff. For the tangled mix of ideas and associations surrounding the concept of Mary in relation to women see Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988); Averil Cameron, ‘Virginity as metaphor’, in Averil Cameron, ed., History as Text (London: Duckworth, 1989), 184–205; Aline Rousselle, Porneia. On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, Eng. trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

66  The Greek title Theotokos (‘bearer of God’) was officially accorded to Mary at Ephesus I, and the Akathistos hymn, which became the basis of much later eastern homiletic and devotion to the Virgin is dated to the fifth century by Leena Mari Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn (Leiden: Brill, 2001). For the later development of the cult of the Virgin in the east, see Chapter 9.

67  For this and other examples see Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert (Oxford: Mowbray, 1987); cf. Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

68  For the eastern empire see Joëlle Beaucamp, Le statut de la femme à Byzance (4e–7e siècle) I. Le droit impérial (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1990), II. Les pratiques sociales (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1992), drawing on the papyrological evidence. For Roman women under Germanic rule, see Cooper, ‘Gender and the fall of Rome’, 197–8.

69  See Virginia Burrus, Begotten, Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); for Kate Cooper, Christianization also implies a redefinition of earlier ideals of Roman manliness, with the household as the locus of gender challenges to both men and women; see Cooper, ‘Gender and the fall of Rome’; ead., ‘Approaching the holy household’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 15 (2007), 131–42.

70  Shaun Tougher, ed., Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (London: Duckworth, 2002); Kathryn Ringrose, The Perfect Servant. Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago, Ill; University of Chicago Press, 2003).

71  For some publications specifically directed at this field, see e.g. Michael Grünbart, Ewald Kislinger, Anna Muthesius and Dionysios Stathakopoulos, eds., Material Culture and Well-being in Byzantium (400–1453) (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007); Luke Lavan, Ellen Swift and Toon Putzeys, eds., Objects in Context, Objects in Use. Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity, Late Antique Archaeology 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); some studies focus on particular aspects, though not from a material culture perspective, e.g. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); B. Caseau, ‘Christian bodies: the senses and early Byzantine Christianity’, in Liz James, ed., Desire and Denial in Byzanrtium, Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 6 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 101–10.

72  Above, n. 9, and cf. also Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680–850). The Sources: An Annotated Survey (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).

73  Cf. the controversial work of A. Gell, Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), with Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, eds., Art’s Agency and Art History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

74  See Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, esp. chap. 6; Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, chap. 4.

7 Urban change and the late antique countryside

1  For discontinuity: C. Mango, Byzantium. The Empire of New Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), chap. 3, ‘The disappearance and revival of cities’, with bibliography at 310–11; W. Brandes, Die Städte Kleinasiens im 7. und 8. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1989); see now Helen Saradi, ‘Towns and cities’, in Elizabeth Jeffreys, with John Haldon and Robin Cormack, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 317–27; ead., The Byzantine City in the Sixth Century: Literary Images and Historical Reality (Athens: Society of Messenian Archaeological Studies, 2006), with the review by L. Lavan, ‘What killed the ancient city? Chronology, causation and traces of continuity’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 22 (2009), 803–12, with Ine Jacobs, The Classical City in Late Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). For cities in the Near East see further below.

2  All such figures have their problems: for a succinct survey of current thinking on population size and demography from the fourth to seventh centuries see Dionysios Stathakopoulos, ‘Population, demography and disease’, in Jeffreys, with Haldon and Cormack, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, 309–16, at 309–11.

3  Fourth-century Antioch is one case where we have the evidence to see this relation in action: see the study by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Antioch. City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). For Antioch in later periods, see G. Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), with J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz and H. Kennedy, ‘Antioch and the villages of northern Syria in the fifth and sixth centuries AD: trends and problems’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 23 (1988), 65–90 (reprinted in J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, From Diocletian to the Arab Conquest (London: Variorum, 1990), XVI); id., ‘The view from Antioch: from Libanius via John Chrysostom to John Malalas and beyond’, Cristianesimo nella Storia 31 (2009), 441–70. Another example is the less well-known site of Sagalassos: see H. Vanhaverbeke, F. Martens and M. Waelkens, ‘Another view on late antiquity: Sagalassos (SW Anatolia), its suburbium and its countryside in late antiquity’, in A.G. Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity on the Danube and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2007), 611–48.

4  J. Lefort, C. Morrisson and J.P. Sodini, Les villages dans l’empire byzantin, IVe-XVe siècle (Paris: Lethielleux, 2005); M. Kaplan, Byzance: villes et campagnes (Paris: Éditions Picard, 2006).

5  See the useful collection of studies in William Bowden, Luke Lavan and Carlos Machado, eds., Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, Late Antique Archaeology 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

6  Good discussion by A.G. Poulter, ‘The transition to late antiquity’, in Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity in the Danube and Beyond, 1–50, at 41–6.

7  T. Potter, The Changing Landscape of South Etruria (London: Elek, 1979).

8  P. Leveau, Caesarea de Maurétanie: une ville romaine et ses campagnes (Rome: École français de Rome, 1984). Another region which has benefited from archaeological survey work is Kas-serine in modern Tunisia.

9  See J. Bintliff, ‘The contribution of regional survey to the late antiquity debate: Greece in its Mediterranean context’, in Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity on the Danube and Beyond, 649–78.

10  G. Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du nord, I–III (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1953–58); see G. Tate, Les campagnes de la Syrie du Nord du IIe au VII siècle: un exemple d’expansion démographique et économique à la fin de l’antiquité (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1992); J.-M. Dentzer, ed., Le Hauran I (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1985–86), II (Beyrouth: Institut Français d’Archéologie du Proche-Orient, 2003). On this debate, see Bintliff, art. cit., 654–57; C. Foss, ‘The Near Eastern countryside in late antiquity’, in J.H. Humphrey, ed., The Roman and Byzantine Near East: Some Recent Archaeological Work (Ann Arbor, MI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1995), 213–34.

11  For which see Vanhaverbeke, Martens and Waelkens, ‘Another view on late antiquity: Sagalassos (SW Anatolia), its suburbium and its countryside in late antiquity’.

12  C. Mango, Le développement urbain de Constantinople (IVe–VIIe siècle) (Paris: Boccard, 1985, rev. ed., 1990) shows, largely from textual evidence, how gradually the city actually took shape; see above, Chapter 1.

13  See Jonathan Bardill and John W. Hayes, ‘Excavations beneath the peristyle mosaic in the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors: the pottery from site D, 1936’, Cahiers archéologiques 50 (2002), 27–40.

14  See James Crow, Jonathan Bardill and Richard Bayliss, with additional contributions by Paolo Bono and with the assistance of Dirk Krausmüller and Robert Jordan, The Water Supply of Byzantine Constantinople (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2008).

15  Jonathan Bardill, Brickstamps of Constantinople (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

16  For the late antique inscriptions of Aphrodisias, see C.M. Roueché, Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1989), Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1993).

17  R.R.R. Smith, ‘Late Roman philosopher portraits from Aphrodisias’, Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990), 127–55; on the late antique sculpture of Aphrodisias see also R.R.R. Smith, with Sheila Dillon et al., Roman Portrait Statuary at Aphrodisias (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2006), and the volumes of Aphrodisias Papers edited by Smith and others since 1990.

18  See A. Chaniotis, ‘The conversion of the temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias in context’, in Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel and Ulrich Gotter, eds., From Temple to Church. Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 243–73, emphasizing the religious complexity of the city’s population.

19  Ephesus: see Clive Foss, Ephesus after Antiquity. A Late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); for recent work there under the auspices of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, see S. Ladstätter and A. Pülz, ‘Ephesus in the late Roman and early Byzantine period: changes in its urban character from the third to the seventh century AD’, in Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity on the Danube and Beyond, 391–433. The fine remains at Apamea give some idea of its life as a centre of late antique philosophical and religious culture, for one aspect of which see Polymnia Athanassiadi, ‘Apamea and the Chaldaean oracles: a holy city and a holy book’, in A. Smith, The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2005), 116–43.

20  For some of the deficiencies in available archaeological evidence, see Poulter, ‘The transition to late antiquity’, in Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity in the Danube and Beyond, at 26.

21  See above, Chapter 5; the papers edited by C.M. Roueché, ed., De aedificiis. Le texte de Procope et les réalités, Antiquité tardive 8 (2001), 7–180, bring out some of the problems inherent in relating this work to the surviving material evidence.

22  For sixth-century Carthage and other North African sites, see Anna Leone, Changing Townscapes in North Africa from Late Antiquity to the Arab Conquest (Bari: Edipuglia, 2007), 154–78. The methodological problems involved in using Procopius’ lists of phrouria in the Balkans are discussed by Archibald Dunn, ‘Continuiity and change in the Macedonian countryside: from Gallienus to Justinian’, in Bowden, Lavan and Machado, eds., Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, 535–86, at 575–80, and J.-P. Sodini, ‘The transformation of cities in late antiquity within the provinces of Macedonia and Epirus’, in Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity, 311–36, at 314–15.

23  See Y. Tsafrir and G. Foerster, ‘Urbanism at Scythopolis-Bet Shean in the fourth to seventh centuries’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997), 85–146. The massive earthquake of AD 747–48 has also been thought to be the cause of damage at other Decapolis cities including Pella, Gadara, Abila and Capitolias: Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 297.

24  See K.W. Russell, ‘The earthquake chronology of Palestine and northwest Arabia from the 2nd through the mid-8th century AD’, Bull. American Schools of Oriental Research 260 (1985), 37–60. M. Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Iustinians. Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung im 6. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003), approaches the history of the sixth century through a study of catastrophes, including plague and earthquake; see Chapter 5 above for the problems surrounding the Justinianic plague.

25  Useful introductions: S. Barnish, ‘The transformation of classical cities and the Pirenne debate’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 2 (1989), 385–400; M. Whittow, ‘Ruling the late Roman and early Byzantine city: a continuous history’, Past and Present 129 (1990), 3–29 (an optimistic view based mainly on the Near East); see also out of a large bibliography G.P. Brogiolo and B. Ward-Perkins, eds., The Idea and Ideal of the Town between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1999). Most of these urban settlements were small by modern standards and the terms ‘city’ and ‘town’ are often used more or less interchangeably in modern archaeological literature, bypassing the legal and administrative issues connected with cities and city status (on which see Christopher Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2004)).

26  J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), is not afraid to use the term ‘decline’ and sees this as setting in before the end of the fifth century in the west and already during the sixth century in the east; see also Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter VI, 124–37.

27  For the process seen on a grand scale in the high empire, see G.M. Rogers, The Sacred Identity of Ephesos (London: Routledge, 1991).

28  Buildings V.2.1–5, describing Helenopolis in Bithynia.

29  Buildings IV. 1.19–27; the identification is not universally accepted due to the lack of epigraphic confirmation: see B. Bavant, ‘Caricin Grad and the changes in the nature of urbanism in the central Balkans in the sixth century’, in Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity on the Danube and Beyond, 337–74; however, assuming it is correct, Procopius’ description now seems nearer the mark than was earlier thought.

30  Denys Pringle, ‘Two fortified sites in Byzantine Africa: Aïn Djelloula and Henchir Sguidan’, Antiquité tardive 10 (2002), 269–90; Proc., Buildings VI.6.17–18.

31  See Kaegi, Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse, 106–12.

32  Nicopolis was founded in the second century AD with grid plan and public buildings on the model of the cities of Asia Minor; destroyed by the Huns in the fifth century, it was rebuilt after 450 on very different lines. For discussion see M. Whittow, ‘Nicopolis AD Istrum: backward and Balkan?’, in Poulter, ed., Transition to Late Antiquity, 375–89, with A.G. Poulter, Nicopolis AD Istrum: A Roman, Late Roman and early Byzantine City (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1995).

33  See Whittow, art. cit., 386 with Sodini, ‘The transformation of cities in late antiquity in the provinces of Macedonia and Epirus’, and J. Crow, ‘Amida and Tropaeum Traiani: a comparison of late antique fortress cities on the Lower Danube and Mesopotamia’, in Poulter, ed., The Transition to Late Antiquity, 435–55.

34  See T.E. Gregory, ‘Fortification and urban design in early Byzantine Greece’, in R.L. Hohlfelder, ed., City, Town and Countryside in the Early Byzantine Era (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1982), 54–5. Others may have retreated to the islands: Sinclair Hood, ‘Isles of refuge in the early Byzantine period’, Annals of the British School at Athens 65 (1970), 37–45.

35  See now F. Curta, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700 (Cambridge, 2001); good short exposition in S. Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284–641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 405–8.

36  D. Metcalf, ‘The Slavonic threat to Greece’, Hesperia 31 (1962), 134–57; id., ‘Avar and Slav invasions into the Balkan peninsula (c. 575–625): the nature of the numismatic evidence’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 4 (1991), 140–8. The extent of Slav occupation in Greece in the early Middle Ages is hard to establish and has been highly controversial in the context of the history of modern Greece.

37  See C. Foss, ‘The Persians in Asia Minor and the end of antiquity’, English Historical Review 367 (1975), 721–47; id., ‘The Persians in the Roman Near East (602–630 AD)’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3.13 (2003), 149–70; Chapter 9 below.

38  Very useful indications in A. Augenti, Città e Porti dall’Antichità al Medievo (Rome: Carocci, 2010). This paragraph very briefly summarizes some of the material presented at a conference on the western Mediterranean economy in the seventh century, held in Oxford in March, 2011, organized by Vivien Prigent and Arietta Papaconstantinou.

39  Proc., Buildings II.10.2–25. Antioch was earthquake-prone; there were several in the fourth century and a particularly severe one in 458, but Evagrius makes it clear that its effects were felt chiefly in the quarter known as the ‘New City’, where colonnaded streets, a tetrapyle and the circus were damaged (Evagrius, HE II.12–15). John Malalas and Procopius claim that 250,000 or even 300,000 people died in the 526 earthquake (Malal, p. 420.6; Proc., Wars II.14.6) these figures are hardly credible. For Antioch, see also C. Kontoleon, ed., Antioch. The Last Ancient City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); I. Sandwell and J. Huskinson, eds., Culture and Society in Later Roman Antioch (Oxford: Oxbow, 2004).

40  Evagrius, HE VI.8.

41  Cathedral: Evagr., HE VI.8); Gregory: John of Ephesus, III.27–34 (also Heliopolis/ Ba’albek), V.17; Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 262–69; ‘the view from Antioch’, 466–7.

42  Hugh Kennedy, ‘From Polis to Madina: urban change in late antique and early Islamic Syria’, Past and Present 106 (1985), 3–27; ‘Antioch: from Byzantium to Islam and back again’, in Rich, ed., The City in Late Antiquity, 181–98; C. Foss, ‘Syria in transition, AD 550–750: an archaeological approach’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997), 189–269; critical discussion: Alan Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria. An Archaeological Assessment (London: Duckworth, 2007), 34–45, 126–29. See also J. Alchermes, ‘Spolia in Roman cities of the Late Empire: legislative rationales and architectural re-use’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994), 167–78.

43  See Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria, 45–7.

44  Caesarea: Robert L. Vann, ‘Byzantine street construction at Caesarea Maritima’, in Hohlfelder, ed., City, Town and Countryside, 167–70. An imperial inscription guarantees the identification of the impressive remains of the Nea church at Jerusalem: N. Avigad, ‘A building inscription of the Emperor Justinian and the Nea in Jerusalem’, Israel Exploration Journal 27 (1977), 145–51; see Proc., Buildings, V.6.1.

45  See Whittow, ‘Ruling the late Roman and early Byzantine city’, 13–15; general survey of building in the Near East: L. Di Segni, ‘Epigraphic documentation on building in the provinces of Palestina and Arabia, 4th–7thc’, in J.H. Humphrey, ed., The Roman and Byzantine Near East 2, JRS supp. Series 31 (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1999), 149–78. For the mosaics, see G.W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), chap. 6; id., Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); M. Piccirillo, The Mosaics of Jordan, ed. Patricia M. Bikai and Thomas A. Dailey (Amman, Jordan: American Center of Oriental Research, 1992); Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 298–9. Greek inscriptions also indicate building and repairs in churches from the seventh and early eighth-centuries at sites in modern Israel and at Gaza: Leah Di Segni, ‘Greek inscriptions in transition from the Byzantine to the Early Islamic Period’, in Hannah M. Cotton, Robert G. Hoyland, Jonathan J. Price and David J. Wasserstein, eds., From Hellenism to Islam. Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 352–73, at 358–9.

46  Z. Weiss, with contributions from E. Netzer et al., The Sepphoris Synagogue. Deciphering an Ancient Message through its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005); ‘Artistic trends and contact between Jews and ‘others’ in late antique Sepphoris: recent research’, in David M. Gwynn and Susanne Bangert, eds., Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 167–88; see also Jas Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and agendas: reflections on late ancient Jewish art and early Christian art’, Journal of Roman Studies 93 (2001), 114–28; David Milson, Art and Architecture of the Synagogue in Late Antique Palestine: In the Shadow of the Church (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Fergus Millar, ‘Narrative and identity in mosaics from the late Roman Near East: pagan, Jewish and Christian’, in Yaron Z. Eliav, Elise A. Friedland and Sharon Herbert, eds., The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East. Reflections on Culture, Ideology and Power (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 225–56.

47  Whittow, ‘Ruling the late Roman and early Byzantine city’, 17 (part of a general argument from the silver treasures of Syrian churches, for which see also Chapter 3).

48  See T.J.W. Wilkinson, Town and Country in S. E. Anatolia. I. Settlement and Land Use at Kurban Höyük (Chicago, Ill.: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1990) 117f., 131–2, arguing for ‘precipitous decline’ in settlement resulting from the Persian and Islamic invasions.

49  See D. Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool. Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Miracles of St Demetrius: see R. Cormack, Writing in Gold (London: George Philip, 1985), chap. 2; text, ed. P. Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de Saint Démétrius, 2 vols, (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1979–81); Theodore of Sykeon: S. Mitchell, Anatolia; Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), II, 122–50.

50  Mango, Byzantium. The Empire of New Rome, 68–9, lays great emphasis on the presumed demographic effects; contra, Whittow, ‘Ruling the late Roman and early Byzantine city’, 13, and for a reasoned argument against over-reliance on the literary evidence see J. Durliat, ‘La peste du VIe siècle’, in Hommes et richesses dans l’empire byzantine I (Paris: Lethielleux, 1989), 107–19. Cemeteries in the west do, however, seem to show such traces.

51  Y. Hirschfeld, The Judaean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 228, drawing on the Life of the saint by Cyril of Scythopolis.

52  For south-east Palestine and Arabia see S. Thomas Parker, Romans and Saracens. A History of the Arabian Frontier (Winona Lake: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1986), and above, Chapter 2; however, the identification of some of the frontier installations is disputed: for discussion see Greg Fisher, ‘A new perspective on Rome’s desert frontier’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 336 (2004), 49–60.

53  Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 274 f.; Michael Whitby, ‘Factions, bishops, violence and urban decline’ in Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel, eds., Die Stadt in der Spatantikie – Niedergang oder Wandel?, Historia Einzelschrift 190 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 441–61, at 456.

54  See Béatrice Caseau, ‘The fate of rural temples in late antiquity and the Christianisation of the countryside’, in Bowen, Lavan and Machado, eds., Recent Research on the Late Antique Countryside, 105–44, an excellent discussion of evidence that often needs to be carefully interpreted, with Chapter 3 above; the faltering and uncertain, though ultimately successful narrative of the Christianization of pagan religious buildings is also emphasized in ead., ‘Sacred landscapes’, in G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Post-classical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 21–59.

55  The increased civic role of bishops: Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, chap. 4, 137–68; see Chapter 3.

56  See I. Ševčenko and N.P. Ševčenko, The Life of St. Nicholas of Sion (Brookline, Mass.: Hellenic College Press, 1984), paras 52–5. Slaughtering and offering up oxen, which then provided feasts, seems to have been one of Nicholas’ specialities – see paras 87–91, and he was also good at financing church restoration and ensuring good crops (paras 91–5); cf. C. Foss, ‘Cities and villages of Lycia in the life of St Nicholas of Sion’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 36 (1991), 303–37.

57  For the manifestation of this change in the evidence from Egypt, see R. Alston, ‘Urban population in late Roman Egypt and the end of the ancient world’, in W. Scheidel, ed., Debating Roman Demography (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 161–204, at 193–5; it included the increasing amounts of land owned by monasteries. Alston sees a gradual erosion of traditional urban centres in Egypt from the seventh century onwards in favour of more rural conditions, without a single dominant cause.

58  See J.-M. Spieser, ‘L’évolution de la ville byzantine de l’époque paléo-chrétienne à l’iconoclasme’, in Hommes et richesses I, 97–106, esp. 102–6.

59  See A. Laniado, Recherches sur les notables municipaux dans l’Empire protobyzantin (Paris: Centre d’histoire et de civilisation de Byzance, 2002); in the sixth century, Justinian was still legislating to try to maintain the membership of city councils; but see above, Chapter 4, on the debate.

60  Discussion in Jones, Later Roman Empire II, 757–63; Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, chap. 3, 104–36, ‘Post-curial civic government’; variety of terms used: ibid., 112–13.

61  As emphasized by Whittow, ‘Nicopolis AD Istrum’, 380–5, who writes of their having built up ‘portfolios of assets’, and thus ‘adapted and survived’; some, such as the Apiones so well known from Egyptian papyri, did much better than that, and for these great landowners see J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 2006).

62  See M.C. Mundell Mango, Silver from Early Byzantium. The Kaper Koraon and Related Treasures (Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery, 1986), 3–6, 11–15.

63  See J.P.C. Kent and K.S. Painter, Wealth of the Roman World, AD 300–700 (London: British Museum Publications, 1977); cf. David Buckton, ed., Byzantium. Treasures of Byzantine Art and Culture from British Collections (London: British Museum Press, 1994), 30–69.

64  Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the ‘Lives of the Eastern Saints’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); more emphasis on the social and economic details in the work in Frank R. Trombley, ‘Religious transition in sixth-century Syria’, Byzantinische Forschungen 20 (1994), 153–94, at 154–67, 194.

65  For urban violence and its social and economic causes in the general context of late antique urbanism, see Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale, 203–31; in the context of late antique cities in the east, Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, chap. 8, ‘Conflict and Disorder in the East’, 249–83; Whitby, ‘Factions, bishops, violence and urban decline’.

66  Ibid., 216–17.

67  Peter M. Bell, Thee Political Voices from the Age of Justinian – Agapetus, Advice to the Emperor, Dialogue on Political Science, Paul the Silentiary, Description of Hagia Sophia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); see Peter Bell, Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

68  Alan Cameron, Circus Factions. Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

69  Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 277.

70  Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 269–72; for some reservations see Whitby, ‘Factions, bishops, violence and urban decline’; John of Nikiu: below Chapter 9.

71  Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 256; for the factions, see ibid., 255–76; Whitby, ‘Factions, bishops, violence and urban decline’, 445–6.

72  A wealth of epigraphic and other evidence is cited in Roueché, Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias.

73  Or. XIII; for an identification of the Brytae, the Edessene festival and the Maiuma, a night festival also involving water and lewd dancing, which had been previously banned for similar reasons and then revived, see Geoffrey Greatrex and John W. Watt, ‘One, two or three feasts? The Brytae, the Maiuma and the May festival at Edessa’, Oriens Christianus 83 (1999), 1–21.

74  Cameron, Circus Factions, 237ff., citing Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 210f.

75  Alan Cameron, Porphyrius the Charioteer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) discusses the evidence and provides an ingenious reconstruction of the monuments; for factional violence see 232–3.

76  Ibid., 214–22.

77  Nearly all are known only from later literary sources: Sarah Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), provides a catalogue of known Hippodrome statuary at 212–32.

78  R. Cormack, ‘The wall-painting of St. Michael in the theatre’, in R.R.R. Smith, and Kenan T. Erim, eds., Aphrodisias Papers 2 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dept of Classical Studies, University of Michigan, 1991), 109–22.

79  Secret History, 26.8–9.

80  Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 253–5; Blues and Greens continued to exist in Byzantium, where they still played a role in the racing in the Hippodrome at Constantinople, and came to be part of the ceremonial surrounding the emperors.

81  Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople, chap. 6, ‘Justinian and antiquity’, 121–36, arguing for a progressive shift in patronage from a classical to an ecclesiastical focus.

82  Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale, 215. Acclamations: C.M. Roueché, ‘Acclamations in the later Roman empire: new evidence from Aphrodisias’, Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984), 181–99; the reception of the Theodosian Code was greeted by acclamations by the senate (all recorded), and the practice continued in Byzantine court ceremonial.

83  End of the free bread distribution in Constantinople: Chron. Pasch. s.a. 617: ‘in this year the recipients of the state bread were requested for 3 coins for each loaf as a levy. And after everyone had provided this, straightway in the month August of the same indiction 6 the provision of this state bread was completely suspended’.

84  Hirschfeld, The Judaean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period; J. Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995); John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ. The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Lives of the Monks of Palestine by Cyril of Scythopolis (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991).

8 The eastern Mediterranean – a region in ferment

1  From a large bibliography, see Fergus Millar, ‘Christian monasticism in Roman Arabia at the birth of Mahomet’, Semitica et Classica 2 (2009), 97–115, at 105; ‘Arabs’ and ‘Saracens’: id., ‘The Theodosian empire (408–50) and the Arabs: Saracens or Ishmaelites?’, in E. Gruen, ed., Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), 297–314.

2  A Byzantine embassy sent by Justinian to Himyar and to the Ethiopians (Axum) with a similar aim in 531 is also mentioned by Proc., Wars I.19–20, and one to Axum by Malalas, Chon., XVIII.56. Given its strategic position, it is not surprising that both Byzantium and Axum interested themselves in Himyar in the early sixth century. The literary sources for Himyar are complex, but see the helpful collection of discussions in Joëlle Beaucamp, Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet and Christian Julien Robin, eds., Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux Ve et VIe siècles: regards croisés sur les sources (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2010), and further below.

3  See Greg Fisher, Between Empires. Arabs, Romans and Sasanians in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). A great deal has been written recently about Arabs and the rise of Arabic in the Roman empire before Islam; see I. Shahid, Rome and the Arabs. A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984); Rome and the Arabs in the Fifth Century (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1989); Rome and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995, 2002), with M. Whittow, ‘Rome and the Jafnids: writing the history of a 6th-century tribal dynasty’, in J.H. Humphrey, ed., The Roman and Byzantine Near East. Some Recent Archaeological Research 2 (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2002), 207–24; R.G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs. From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (London: Routledge, 2001), and further below and Chapter 9.

4  Y. Tsafrir et al., Excavations at Rehovot-in-the-Negev I, Qedem 25 (Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University, 1988).

5  See Y. Hirschfeld, The Judaean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); id., The Early Byzantine Monastery at Khirbet ed-Deir in the Judaean Desert. The Excavations in 1981–1987, Qedem 38 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1999). On the monastery of St Sabas during the Persian invasions see Chapter 9.

6  See B. Ward-Perkins, ‘Land, labour and settlement’, and ‘Specialized production and exchange’, in Cambridge Ancient History XIV, 315–44, 346–91; Cécile Morrisson and J.-P. Sodini, ‘The sixth-century economy’, in Angeliki E. Laiou, ed., The Economic History of Byzantium (Washington, DC, 2002), 3 vols., 171–220; contrast J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity. Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), arguing for an increasing dominance of large estates, on which see also below.

7  For continuity: Marlia Mundell Mango, ‘Byzantine maritime trade with the east (4th–7th centuries)’, ARAM 8 (1996), 139–63.

8  Known particularly from the History of Ahudemmeh, the sixth-century bishop of Beth ‘Arbaya and Miaphysite ‘metropolitan of the East’: see Elizabeth Key Fowden, The Barbarian Plain. Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 121–6.

9  Sean A. Kingsley, Shipwreck Archaeology of the Holy Land. Processes and Parameters (London: Duckworth, 2004); population increase: C. Dauphin, La Palestine byzantine: peuplement et populations (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1998).

10  W. Wolska-Conus, La topographie chrétienne de Cosmas Indicopleustes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962).

11  See Ward-Perkins, ‘Specialisation, trade and prosperity. An overview of the economy of the late antique eastern Mediterranean’, in Sean Kingsley and Michael Decker, eds., Economy and Exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean during Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), 167–78; Angeliki E. Laiou and Cécile Morrisson, eds., The Byzantine Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35–8. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 153–60, argue against excessive emphasis on long-distance traffic (‘shipping lanes’) and for the persistence of small-scale connectivity, despite what they call ‘the early medieval depression’ of the seventh to ninth centuries.

12  See Kingsley and Decker, eds., Economy and Exchange in the East Mediterranean, especially the papers by Kingsley (Palestinian wine trade), Decker (north Syria), Marlia Mundell Mango (non-ceramic evidence for trade) and Bryan Ward-Perkins (methodological observations and limitations of amphorae evidence). For trade see also Marlia Mundell Mango, ed., Byzantine Trade, 4th–12th Centuries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

13  See R.S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); id., ed., Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300–700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): emphasis on large estates: Banaji, Agrarian Change; P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); C. Zuckerman, Du village à l’empire: autour du register fiscal d’Aphrodito, 525–526 (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, 2004); against Banaji, G. Ruffini, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially on Oxyrhynchus and Aphrodito.

14  I owe this information to the kindness of the excavator, Dr Grzegorz Majcherek.

15  Against: P. Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); but see Andrew Marsham, ‘The early Caliphate and the inheritance of late antiquity (c. AD 610–c. AD 750)’, in Philip Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 479–92, at 482–83; James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 398–402, 452, and Crone, ‘Quraysh and the Roman army: making sense of the Meccan leather trade’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 70 (2007), 63–88 (possibility of Meccans producing leather for the Roman army).

16  See G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth. Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

17  The important role of the south Arabian kingdom of Himyar (Yemen) in early-sixth-century religious and diplomatic history has been strikingly revealed in the epigraphy of the region in addition to the texts already well-known: further below.

18  Proc., Wars VIII.17.1–8; Geoffrey Greatrex and Samuel N.C. Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, Part II, AD 363–630. A Narrative Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2002), 129.

19  See Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 149–73 (a ‘tribal church’ functioning also as an audience chamber); other Ghassanid churches and sites, including Jabiya in the Hauran, ibid., 143–4.

20  Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 172; John Eph., HE III.6.4.

21  For similar dealings with Arab tribes under Justinian, see Procopius, Wars I.19.8–13 (Abukarib), with M. Sartre, Trois études sur l’Arabie romaine et byzantine, Coll. Latomus 178 (Brussels: Revue d’études latines, 1982).

22  Cyril of Scythopolis, Lives of the Monks of Palestine, tr. R.M. Price (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 18.24–25. Both passages are cited by Robert G. Hoyland, ‘Arab kings, Arab tribes and the beginnings of Arab historical memory in late Roman epigraphy’, in Hannah M. Cotton, Robert G. Hoyland, Jonathan J. Price and David J. Wasserstein, eds., From Hellenism to Islam. Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 374–400.

23  Life of Sabas 14, in Price, Lives of the Monks of Palestine, 106.

24  Robert G. Hoyland, ‘Epigraphy and the linguistic background to the Qur’an’, in G.S. Reynolds, ed., The Qur’an in its Historical Context (London: Routledge, 2008), 51–69, with id., ‘Arab kings Arab tribes and the beginnings of Arab historical memory’. Hoyland argues for a widespread use of both spoken and written Arabic across the Near East by the seventh century; on the issue of identity, see also Fisher, Between Empires. The origins of the Arabic script are the subject of much debate, but Hoyland provides a clear introduction to the question, and see M.A. Macdonald, ed., The Development of Arabic as a Written Language, supplement to the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40 (Oxford; Archaeopress, 2010).

25  The papyri are still in the course of publication, but have already yielded important results for the working of law as well as for the social and linguistic milieu of pre-Islamic Petra: see the review article by H. Sivan, Journal of Late Antiquity 1.1 (2008), 197–9; for late antique Petra, including the evidence from the papyri, see the comprehensive article by Zbigniew T. Fiema, ‘Late-antique Petra and its hinterland: recent research and new interpretations’, in J.H. Humphrey, ed., The Roman and Byzantine Near East 3, JRA supp series 49 (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2002), 191–252, with 219 on the language of the papyri.

26  L. Casson, E.L. Hettich, Excavations at Nessana II. The Literary Papyri (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950); C.J. Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana III. The Non-Literary Papyri (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).

27  Fergus Millar, ‘Introduction’, in Cotton, Hoyland, Price and Wasserstein, eds., From Hellenism to Islam, 1–12, at 2; Hoyland, ‘Arab kings, Arab tribes’, 375.

28  Especially in A Greek Roman Empire. Power and Belief under Theodosius II (AD 408–450) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), but also in a series of powerful articles; for Egypt, see Arietta Papaconstantinou, ‘“What remains behind”: Hellenism and Romanitas in Christian Egypt after the Arab conquest’, in Cotton, Hoyland, Price and Wasserstein, eds., From Hellenism to Islam, 447–66.

29  For the latter, see J.N. Adams, M. Janse and Simon Swain, eds., Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

30  M. Gigante, ed., Sophronii Anacreontica (Rome: Gismondi, 1957).

31  See Glen W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); M. Piccirillo, The Mosaics of Jordan (Amman: American Center of Oriental Research, 1992); for pagan/classical themes in synagogue mosaics see Chapter 7.

32  Arietta Papaconstantinou, Languages and Literature of Early Christianity: Coptic (Paris: Lavoisier, 2009); ead., ed., The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the Abbasids (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

33  For some of these issues, see Fergus Millar, ‘Empire, community and culture in the Roman Near East: Syrians, Jews and Arabs’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 38 (1987), 143–604; ‘Linguistic co-existence in Constantinople: Greek and Latin (and Syriac) in the Acts of the Synod of 536 C.E.’, Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009), 92–103.

34  See David Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 221, 227, 241ff. Christian and Jewish communities continued to exist in the area after the coming of Islam (221, n. 105).

35  Ibid., 339.

36  D. Westberg, Celebrating with Words: Studies in the Rhetorical Works of the Gaza School (Uppsala, 2010).

37  See especially Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity.

38  For the monotheistic epigraphy of Himyar, see I. Gajda, ‘Le royaume de Himyar à l’époque monothéiste (Paris: de Boccard, 2009), with ead., ‘Quel monothéisme en Arabie du Sud ancienne?’, in Beaucamp, Briquel-Chatonnet and Robin, eds., Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux Ve et VIe siècles, 107–22; Himyar came under Sasanian rule in the early 570s; for Himyar in the Arabic tradition, see Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 396–98.

39  Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 180, 184.

40  Tessa Rajak, Translation and Survival. The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 302–3, 307.

41  Shimon Dar, ‘Archaeological aspects of Samaritan research in Israel’, in David M. Gwynn and Susanne Bangert, eds., Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 189–98; Proc., Buildings V.7.16; Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of S. Sabas, 70.

42  For an introduction to this massive literature in the context of the particular circumstances of the seventh century, see Averil Cameron, ‘Blaming the Jews: the seventh-century invasions of Palestine in context’, Travaux et Mémoires 14 (Mélanges Gilbert Dagron) (2002), 57–78, with ead., ‘Jews and heretics – a category error?’, in Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways that Never Parted. Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). 345–60; further, Chapter 9 below.

43  This self-confidence is brought out in G.W. Bowersock, Mosaics as History (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), with a thoughtful discussion of the widespread manifestation of Jewish and Christian iconoclasm in the region in the early Islamic period at 91–111, and see also Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Towards a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), though see also below.

44  Ibid., 120, 119.

45  Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 199–202, cf. also 182–3 on the changed scholarly approaches on the issue.

46  Ibid., 197–7; S. Bradbury, Severus of Minorca: Letter on the Conversion of the Jews (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

47  Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, chapter 9, ‘Judaization’, 240–74.

48  Tiberias before the Arab conquests had been the seat of the Jewish patriarchs and was the home of the Palestinian Talmud and the piyyutim: Schwartz, ibid., 205.

49  See Benjamin Isaac, ‘Inscriptions and religious identity in the Golan’, in Humphrey, ed., The Roman and Byzantine Near East 2, 179–88.

50  R.M. Price, A History of the Monks of Syria (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985).

51  See Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Oxford: Mowbray, 1987); Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

52  Peter Brown, ‘The rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity’, Journal of Roman studies 16 (1971), 80–101; see James Howard-Johnston and Paul Fouracre, eds., The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

53  Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of S. Sabas, 60, 61,71–4; while in Constantinople Sabas allegedly predicted the recovery of Rome and Africa by Justinian.

54  Life of Euthymius, 30, 20.

55  Ibid., 27; Euthymius memorably admitted that he had ‘not read in detail everything that this council has examined and enacted’, but that he regarded it as orthodox.

56  See on all of this Volker-Lorenz Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and for a survey of the events leading up the separation between Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians in the sixth century L. Van Rompay, ‘Society and community in the Christian East’, in Michael Maas, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 239–66. See also Philip Wood, ‘We have no King but Christ.’ Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400–585) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

57  Van Rompay, 248–52.

58  Ibid., 253.

59  Ibid., 255–7; see Volker L. Menze and Kutlu Akalin, John of Tella’s Profession of Faith. The Legacy of a Sixth-Century Syrian Orthodox Bishop (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009).

60  School of Nisibis: Adam Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom. The School of Nisibis and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); id., Sources for the History of the School of Nisibis, trans. with introduction and notes, Translated Texts for Historians 50 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

61  In general, see S.P. Brock, ‘Christians in the Sasanian empire: a case of divided loyalties’, in id., Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984), VI; further, Chapter 9.

62  See also Michael Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 372–6. In his Lives of the Eastern Saints, John of Ephesus, himself a Miaphysite, ‘portrays [the Persian empire] as a land teeming with well-trained, argumentative heretics’, i.e., Nestorians and Manichaeans: see Joel Thomas Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh. Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 176.

63  See Walker, op.cit., chapter 3. Aristotelian logic was also taught at the School of Nisibis: Walker, 175.

64  See Fergus Millar, ‘Repentant heretics in fifth-century Lydia: identity and literacy’, Scripta Classica Israelica 23 (2004), 111–30; ‘The Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesus (449)’, in Richard Price and Mary Whitby, eds., Chalcedon in Context, Church Councils 400–700 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 45–69; id., ‘Christian monasticism in Roman Arabia’; id., ‘Linguistic co-existence in Constantinople’.

65  See S.P. Brock, ‘The conversations with the Syrian Orthodox under Justinian (532)’, in Brock, Studies in Syriac Christianity: History, Literature and Theology (London: Variorum, 1992), XIII.

66  Averil Cameron, ‘Texts as weapons: polemic in the Byzantine dark ages’, in Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 198–215.

67  Key works include Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire. The Roman Army in the East, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Philip Freeman and David Kennedy, eds,, The Defence of the Roman and Byzantine East I–II (Oxford: BAR, 1986); S. Thomas Parker, Romans and Saracens. A History of the Arabian Frontier (Winona Lake: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1986), and see Jodi Magness, ‘Redating the forts at Ein Boqeq, Upper Zohar and other sites in SE Judaea, and the implications for the nature of the Limes Palaestinae’, in Humphrey, ed., The Roman and Byzantine Near East 2, 189–206. Useful historical survey, maps and splendid pictures in David Kennedy and Derrick Riley, Rome’s Desert Frontier from the Air (Sheffield: Dept of Archaeology and Prehistory, Sheffield University, 1989).

68  See Greg Fisher, ‘A new perspective on Rome’s desert frontier’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 336 (2004), 49–60; for the wider eastern context see Geoffrey Greatrex, ‘Byzantium and the east in the sixth century’, in Maas, ed., Companion to the Age of Justinian, 477–509.

69  Fergus Millar, ‘Empire, community and culture’, 143–64 at 145f.

70  For translated texts and detailed discussion, see Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier, II; see also Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity. Neighbours and Rivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

71  The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, trans. with notes and introduction by Frank R. Trombley and John W. Watt, Translated Texts for Historians 32 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000).

72  Ibid., 54, pp. 63–4.

73  Malalas, Chron. 405; Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, 103.

74  Ps. Josh. Styl., 90, with Trombley and Watts, 109–10; on the remains at Dara, see Michael Whitby, ‘Procopius’ description of Dara (Buildings II.1–3)’, in Freeman and Kennedy, eds., The Defence of the Roman and Byzantine East I, 737–83.

75  Ps. Josh. Styl., 78, p. 95, with notes.

76  Greatrex, ‘Byzantium and the east in the sixth century’, 500, 503.

77  Theophylact, Hist. V. 1.14–15, trans. Michael and Mary Whitby; see Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and his Historian. Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 292–304.

78  Proc., Wars I.11.23–50.

79  Greatrex, ‘Byzantium and the east in the sixth century’, 491, 493 f., 496–98; Tzath: Malalas, Chron. 340–1; Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, 79–80.

80  Ibid., 115; Proc. Secret History 2.29–31.

81  Proc., Wars II.28.18–24.

9 A changed world

1  See James Howard-Johnston, ‘The siege of Constantinople in 626’, in C. Mango and G. Dagron, eds., Constantinople and its Hinterland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 131–42; Chron. Pasch., s.a. 626, trans. Whitby and Whitby, pp. 169–81.

2  Little survives from Constantinople itself, but for the early Roman icons, see M. Vassilaki, ed., Mother of God. Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art (Milan: Skira, 2000), with ead., ed., Images of the Mother of God. Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); for the Virgin and Constantinople see Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power. The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

3  For the reign of Heraclius, see Walter E. Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gerrit J. Reinink and Bernard H. Stolte, eds., The Reign of Heraclius. Crisis and Confrontation 9610–641 (Leuven: Peeters, 2002).

4  See Robert Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule. A Historical and Archaeological Study (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995), 33–48.

5  The argument for a ‘new world order’ is forcefully put by James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially 510–16.

6  Menander Protector: R.C. Blockley, The History of Menander the Guardsman (Liverpool: F. Cairns, 1985); Theophylact: see Michael and Mary Whitby, The History of Theophylact Simocatta, trans. with introduction and notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and his Historian. Theophylact Simocatta on Persian and Balkan Warfare (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1988).

7  Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, subjects these sources to a very detailed treatment, and many extracts are set out in Geoffrey Greatrex and Samuel N.C. Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, Part II, AD 363–630 (London: Routledge, 2002), chaps. 10–16; see also Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity. Neighbours and Rivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For ps. Sebeos, see R.W. Thomson and James Howard-Johnston, with the assistance of Tim Greenwood, The Armenian History attributed to Sebeos I–II, Translated Texts for Historians 31 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), and for the Syriac chronicles see Andrew Palmer, The Seventh-Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles, Translated Texts for Historians 15 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993).

8  For the non-Islamic sources on early Islam, see the important study by Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1997).

9  As recorded in Corippus’ Latin panegyrical poem on his accession: see Averil Cameron, Flavius Cresconius Corippus, In Laude Iustini minoris libri IV (London: Athlone Press, 1976), III.151 ff.

10  Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, 135–42; the Roman sources all assume the desirability of an aggressive anti-Persian policy, though it is not obvious that out and out aggression was always the actual aim: see Benjamin Isaac, ‘The army in the late Roman East: the Persian wars and the defence of the Byzantine provinces’, in Averil Cameron, ed., States, Resources and Armies, (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995), 125–51, at 125–9.

11  Ibid., 142–53.

12  Theophylact, Hist. III.14.10–11; John of Biclar, a. 575.

13  Theophylact, Hist. II.3–4; Evagrius, HE I.13; for the battle, see John Haldon, The Byzantine Wars. Battles and Campaigns of the Byzantine Era (Stroud: Tempus, 2001), 52–6.

14  Theophylact, Hist. V.3; Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, 173–4.

15  See Matthew Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth. Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), with rich bibliography.

16  Theophylact records the interest Chosroes showed in an icon of the Theotokos, who appeared to him and told him she was giving him victory (Theophylact, Hist. V.15.9–10). His marriage to the Christian Shirin became the subject of later romances: see Dignas and Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity, 225–31.

17  Trans. George T. Dennis, Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); the work draws on earlier material but also uses official and documentary sources: Philip Rance, ‘Battle’, in Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees and Michael Whitby, eds., The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare II (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 347–48.

18  Theophylact, Hist. 8.7.8–9.12.

19  Chron. Pasch., s.a. 609; see below.

20  The chronology of these years is difficult to establish: Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, chap. 13, especially 182–3; Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 436–45, provides a narrative, and see Thomson and Howard-Johnston, Armenian History, xxii–xxv; Mark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium 600–1025 (London: Macmillan, 1996), 69–95, ‘The fall of the old order’.

21  See Averil Cameron, ‘Blaming the Jews: the seventh-century invasions of Palestine in context’, Travaux et Mémoires 14 (Mélanges Gilbert Dagron) (2002), 57–78; Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 164–71; Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 78–87; B. Flusin, Saint Anastase le Perse et l’histoire de la Palestine au début du VIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1992).

22  Cameron, ‘Blaming the Jews’, 62; discussion, G. Avni, ‘The Persian conquest of Jerusalem (614 CE): an archaeological assessment’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 357 (2010), 35–48, arguing for minimal evidence of destruction.

23  A more political explanation for this anti-Jewish sentiment is proposed by David M. Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response and the Literary Construction of the Jew (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).

24  Migne, PG 28. 589–700; the fact that it also defends the veneration of religious images (chaps. 39–41) suggests that this part at least must date from the second half of the seventh century at the earliest.

25  See G. Dagron and V. Déroche, ‘Juifs et chrétiens dans l’Orient du VIIe siècle’, Travaux et Mémoires 11 (1991), 17–273.

26  M. Gigante, ed., Sophronii Anacreontica (Rome: Gismondi, 1957).

27  Anacr. 18: however, ‘anti-semitism’ (Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 174) does not seem an appropriate term.

28  So Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 440–1; see also Schick, Christian Communities.

29  For these and other sources see Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier II, 198–228; for Theophanes, see Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, eds., The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor. Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); George of Pisidia: Mary Whitby, ‘George of Pisidia’s presentation of the Emperor Heraclius and his campaigns: variety and development’, in Reinink and Stolte, eds., The Reign of Heraclius, 157–73; ead., ‘Defender of the Cross: George of Pisidia on the Emperor Heraclius and his deputees’, in Mary Whitby, ed., The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 247–73: Movses Daskhurani: Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 105–13.

30  Chron. Pasch. s.a. 628; for all these events see Greatrex and Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier, Part II, 198–228.

31  For the latter, see Frank R. Trombley, ‘The operational methods of the late Roman army in the Persian war of 572–591’, in Ariel S. Lewin and Pietrina Pellegrini, eds., The Late Roman Army in the Near East from Diocletian to the Arab Conquest, BAR international ser. 1717 (Oxford: BAR, 2007), 321–56.

32  Ed. P. Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1979, 1981).

33  E.g. C. Foss, ‘The Persians in Asia Minor and the end of classical antiquity’, English Historical Review 90 (1975), 721–47; ‘The fall of Sardis in 616 and the value of evidence’, Jahrbuch der österr. Byzantinischen Gesellschaft 24 (1975), 11–22; ‘Archaeology and the “twenty cities” of Byzantine Asia’, American Journal of Archaeology 81 (1977), 469–86, cf. 469 ‘the empire was savagely overrun by the Sassanian Persians’; ‘The Persians in the Roman Near East (602–630 AD)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3. 13 (2003), 149–70.

34  Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism. The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 3–4.

35  See for detailed discussion, based mainly on the Arabic sources: F.M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 128–55; and see W.E. Kaegi Jr, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Political history of the early Islamic state: Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates. The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (London: Longman, 1986); sceptics and revisionists: Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): Gerald Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam. From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); A. Noth and L.I. Conrad, The Early Islamic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1999). The memory of pre-Islamic Arab identity: Robert G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (London: Routledge, 2001). Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, launches a forceful defence of the reliability of the historical record in Arabic and the idea that the conquests were centrally planned and driven by religion.

36  Ed. R. Le Coz, Jean Damascène, Écrits sur l’Islame, Sources chrétiennes 383 (Paris: Cerf, 1992); cf. Andrew Louth, St John Damascene. Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 485–9.

37  See Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests, 265–9; John Moorhead, ‘The Monophysite response to the Arab invasions’, Byzantion 51 (1981), 579–91.

38  Modern Shi’ism claims to represent the true Islamic tradition and the claims of the Prophet’s family to the succession.

39  ‘Uthman and Constans II: Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 483; the introduction of the new military themes was gradual, but Heraclius seems to have started the process: see John Haldon, ‘Seventh-century continuities: the Ajnad and the “thematic myth”’, in Cameron, ed., States, Resources and Armies, 379–425.

40  For the first view, see Benjamin Isaac, ‘The army in the late Roman East: the Persian wars and the defence of the Byzantine provinces’, in Cameron, ed., States, Resources and Armies, 125–51; against: Michael Whitby, ‘Recruitment in Roman armies from Justinian to Heraclius (ca. 565–615)’, ibid., 61–124; Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis.

41  See Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 96–133; John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

42  Theoph., 329–30, Mango and Scott, 460; Theophanes attributes the new ideas to the influence on the emperor of Sergius of Constantinople, Athanasius of Antioch and Cyrus of Phasis.

43  Sources for the Monothelete controversy: Friedhelm Winkelmann, Der monenergetisch-monotheletische Streit, Berliner byzantinische Studien 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), giving an idea of the intensity of the debate; changing sides was not uncommon, as happened in the case of the ex-patriarch Pyrrhus. Contacts between Rome and Palestine: Schick, Christian Communities, 61; Sophronius as defender of orthodoxy: Pauline Allen, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy. The Synodical Letter and Other Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

44  See Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996); Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, eds., Maximus the Confessor and his Companions. Documents from Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); above, chapter 8.

45  For these issues, see Averil Cameron, ‘The language of images; icons and Christian representation′, in Diana Wood, ed. The Church and the Arts, Studies in Church History 28 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 1–42; Anna Kartsonia, Anastasis. The Making of an Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); G. Dagron, ‘Holy images and likeness’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991), 23–33; there are excellent general guides in French and English: G. Dagron, ‘L’Église et la chrétienté byzantines entre les invasions et l’iconoclasme (VIIe-début VIIIe siècle)’, in G. Dagron, P. Riché, A. Vauchez, eds., Histoire du christianisme des origines à nos jours IV. Évêques, moines empereurs (610–1054) (Paris: Desclée, 1993), 9–91; Jean-Robert Armogathe, Pascal Montaubin and Michel-Yves Perrin, eds., Histoire générale du christianisme des origines au XVe siècle I (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010), 551–752; Andrew Louth, ‘The emergence of Byzantine Orthodoxy, 600–1095’, in Thomas F.X. Noble and Julia M.H. Smith, eds., The Cambridge History of Christianity 3. Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 46–64.

46  See Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns, eds., Bayt al-Maqdis, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, 1999); Oleg Grabar, The Dome of the Rock (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); see for Abd al-Malik’s other measures G.R.D. King, ‘Islam, iconoclasm and the declaration of doctrine’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48 (1985), 267–77.

47  See Bas ter Haar Romeny, ed., Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of his Day (Leiden: Brill, 2008), especially Robert Hoyland, ‘Jacob and early Islamic Edessa’, ibid., 11–24.

48  See A. Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Egypte: des Byzantins aux Abbassides (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2001).

49  K. Leeming, ‘The adoption of Arabic as a liturgical language by the Palestinian Melkites’, ARAM 15 (2003), 239–46; Milka Rubin, ‘Arabization versus Islamization in the Palestinian Melkite community during the early Muslim period’, in Ariel Kofsky and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Sharing the Sacred. Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1998), 149–62; Sidney H. Griffith, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992); cf. id., The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

50  For the interplay of Christian identities in this period, see Philip Wood, ‘We have no King but Christ’ ; ‘Nestorians’ also spread to the far east and were officially welcomed to China in the 630s, as recorded on an eighth-century stele in Chinese and Syriac found at Xian.

51  For a sceptical approach to John of Damascus’ connection with St Sabas see M.-F. Auzépy, ‘De la Palestine à Constantinople (VIIIe – IXe siècles): Étienne le Sabaïte et Jean Damascène’, Travaux et Mémoires 12 (1994), 183–218. Stephen the Sabaite was a monk of St Sabas in the late seventh century, and his Life, written by Leontius in Greek, 807, and translated into Arabic and Georgian, contains many details about the monastery, but is curiously silent on the famous theologian: see Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 109–10; see also 480–4 on the difficulties surrounding the biography of John of Damascus.

52  The situation of Jews under Islam has become in some quarters highly emotive, with the use of the concept of ‘dhimmitude’, but see Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: the Jews in the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

53  Schick, Christian Communities of Palestine, 171–2; a well-known, though isolated, case of an individual was that of Peter of Capitolias (Beit Ras), put to death under Al-Walid I in 715: ibid., 173–4.

54  Ibid., chap. 6, 112–23; corpus of sites: 227–484.

55  Garth Fowden, Qusayr Amra. Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

56  Alan Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria: An Archaeological Assessment (London: Duckworth, 2007), 76–90.

57  Averil Cameron, ‘Byzantium in the seventh century: the search for redefinition’, in J. Fontaine and J. Hillgarth, eds., The Seventh Century: Change and Continuity (London: Warburg Institute, 1992), 250–76.

58  Kate Cooper and Matthew Dal Santo, ‘Boethius, Gregory the Great and the Christian “afterlife” of classical dialogue’, in Simon Goldhill, ed., The End of Dialogue in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 173–89, at 187, and see Averil Cameron, Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996).

Conclusion

1  For this phenomenon, see especially Susan Alcock, ‘Alphabet soup in the Mediterranean basin: the emergence of the Mediterranean serial’, in William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 314–36.

2  Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); see Brent D. Shaw, ‘Challenging Braudel: a new vision of the Mediterranean’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 14 (2001), 419–53; Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean; Irad Malkin, ed., Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2005); David Abulafia, ed., The Mediterranean in History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003); id., The Great Sea. A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Penguin, 2011).

3  David Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, in Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean, 64–93.

4  Brent D. Shaw, ‘After Rome. Transformations of the early Mediterranean world’, New Left Review 51 (May/June 2008), 89–114.

5  Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

6  Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1937); see the review by Peter Brown, ‘Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne’, in id., Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 63–79. As Brown points out, though the book appeared only in 1937, Pirenne had expressed his ideas from as early as 1922.

7  Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 169–72; cf. on ‘high commerce’ 365–76; ‘early medieval depression’, 153–60.

8  See Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires. State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China. Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

9  See Averil Cameron, The Byzantines (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), preface. For the deceptiveness of a concentration on cities, especially evident in the bibliography on medieval Europe, but as we have seen also a central theme for the late antique east, see Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, chap. 4, with 533–54.

10  See Cullen Murphy, Are we Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007) (= The New Rome. The End of an Empire and the Fate of America (Thriplow: Icon, 2008)); cf. e.g. Niall Ferguson, Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane 2004).

11  See Morris and Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires; Scheidel, Rome and China. The comparison itself is not new: it was pursued in the 1970s for the high Roman empire by Keith Hopkins, and is a feature of an influential work of the 1980s, Michael Mann’s Sources of Social Power 1. A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), where, however, China is compared unfavourably with Rome (for Mann’s Eurocentric approach see Chris Wickham, ‘Historical materialism, historical sociology’, New Left Review 171 (1988), 63–78.

12  See Averil Cameron, ‘The Absence of Byzantium’, Nea Hestia, Jan., 2008, 4–59 (English and Greek).

13  James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (London: Profile, 2009).

14  See e.g. Glen Bowersock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Post-Classical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), and cf. the series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, published by the Darwin Press, Princeton since 1992. See also Aziz al-Azmeh, The History of Allah: Islam in Late Antiquity (forthcoming), with id., Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (London 1997); Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity. Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

15  For further discussion of the range of views and the various answers given by scholars of the period, see Averil Cameron, ‘A.H.M. Jones and the end of the ancient world’, in D.H. Gwynn, ed., A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire, Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages 15 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), 231–49; ead., ‘Thoughts on the Introduction to The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, in Peter Brown, Rita Lizzi Testa, eds., Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. The Breaking of a Dialogue (IVth–VIth century A.D.), Proceedings of the International Conference at the Monastery of Bose (October 2008) (LIT Verlag: Münster, 2011), 39–54.

16  Despite G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981).

17  Jones, Later Roman Empire, I, 304–7.

18  See Theophylact, Hist.,VII.7.6.ff., with Michael Whitby, The Emperor Maurice and his Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 315–17; F. Curta, with the assistance of R. Kavalev, ed., The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazaras and Cumans (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

19  To quote one recent scholar: ‘one must accept that the term “decline” should be abandoned, along with its correlate, “prosperity”, and other emotionally laden terms such as “conquest”, “desolation”, “nomad invasion”, or even the more benign “squatters”’ (Donald Whitcomb, Journal of Roman Archaeology 22 (2009), 827–31, at 831).

20  Cf. Greg Woolf, ‘World-systems analysis and the Roman empire’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 (1990), 44–58; cf. the related idea of ‘overstretch’ (Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

21  For the latter, see e.g. R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

22  Though contemporaries who experienced the strains in the seventh-century east also searched for causes, as is emphasized by Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850. A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18–22.