INFLATION CONTINUED to rise precipitously during the reign of Constantine, irrespective of Diocletian’s attempts to control prices and to reform the coinage. The main base of the economy still lay in agriculture, and while Constantine imposed new taxes on senators and traders, little could be done to bring about a general turn-round. Neither general considerations nor such indicators as there are would suggest that the actual shrinkage of the economic base which probably took place during the mid-third century had been significantly reversed. Even if we are sceptical about the very large figures for the size of the late Roman army in the literary sources (see Chapters III and IX), the state would still be hard pressed to finance it. It seems unlikely, moreover, that the level of taxation could really have been raised on a significant scale, simply because most of those paying taxes had no effective way of increasing their surplus. Nor – though the reverse is often claimed – could seizure of temple treasures by Constantine really have accounted for wide-scale economic recovery. Finally, while as part of his fiscal policy, Diocletian introduced ‘state factories’ (fabricae), mentioned in the Notitia Dignitatum, of which those at Carnuntum and Ticinum specialized in shields and bows respectively, it can be seen that they were set up to meet military needs rather than for wider economic reasons. Thus, if economic improvement took place in the first part of the fourth century, much of the credit must go to improved methods of tax collection, combined with the return to relative stability.
In some areas indeed it is possible to point to actual reductions of scale. Mining, for example, ceased to be organized in centrally controlled large-scale enterprises, and was more dispersed. Archaeological evidence suggests that mining for gold, silver and tin continued, for example, in Spain during the fourth century. The Theodosian Code also refers to gold mining in the Balkans, Pontos and Asia Minor, and archaeological evidence provides signs that it continued elsewhere too. However, it may have been on a reduced scale in comparison with earlier periods. A second example may be found in the size of late Roman legionary fortresses, as computed from archaeological evidence (see Chapter III) and from the fact that soldiers in the late empire are typically dispersed and barracked in or near cities rather than in large concentrations in the frontier zones. However, a variety of factors was at work in both cases, including the fragmentation of political control in far-flung areas like north-west Spain and the fact that since the annona, the army supplies, was now organized and distributed substantially in kind, the distance between supplier and recipient needed to be as short as possible; finally, the need to use the troops for internal security made it sensible to disperse them into smaller units. In the case of mining, though the state was certainly interested in the supply of gold, the process of change actually reversed the pattern of greater state control which many historians have emphasized in the past: in the later empire state-owned mines coexisted with privately owned ones, and increasingly allowed private individuals to lease mining rights.
Though it is notoriously hard to demonstrate that there had been a population fall in the third century, this still seems probable in general terms for the western provinces. In contrast, there is evidence to suggest a considerable population rise in the east from the end of the fourth century and especially in the fifth. However, by the fifth century, political conditions in the west were very different, and did not conduce to a similar rise.
There are many complaints in late Roman sources about the impoverishment of curiales, and about rapacious tax-collectors. Motivated by political advantage or traditional expectations, emperors still resorted to en bloc remission of tax arrears, as Constantine did in Gaul (Pan. Lat.V.5 ff., Lewis and Reinhold, II, no. 133); whatever the actual reason, this indicates a system not under full control. Yet to set against these negative indicators there are also contrary signs. The first stages of a return to collection and delivery in gold of the main taxes, the poll-tax and the iugatio, can be seen in the late fourth century, though it took several generations to complete the process. Many landowners, especially the senatorial class in the west, amassed enormous quantities of wealth and land. According to Ammianus, they
hold forth unasked on the immense extent of their family property, multiplying in imagination the annual produce of their fertile lands, which extend, they boastfully declare, from farthest east to farthest west. (XIV.6.10)
The church also became wealthy from a variety of sources, which now included inheritance. Many Christians gave large sums to the church and a good deal of expenditure went on church building and works of Christian charity, while the growing fashion for pilgrimage to the Holy Land stimulated local trade and settlement (see Chapter XI). Some sectors of society were very rich, and Ammianus’s many scathing remarks about the contemporary love of display and extravagance are not wholly confined to the senatorial class. These and other developments, which run counter to the theory of decline and impoverishment, require further explanation.
The effect of the third-century debasement of the silver coinage, and of the various fiscal measures of Diocletian and Constantine, was to leave the empire in the fourth century with a coinage consisting mainly of gold on the one hand (solidi) and copper on the other. Silver continued to be struck, but was gradually ousted by the solidus as the main unit of account. Unlike the silver denarii of earlier days, the solidus was never debased, and continued in use until well into the Byzantine period. It depended however on the availability of a regular supply of gold, which was in the first stages assisted by a combination of particular circumstances and new measures, including Constantine’s acquisition of the treasuries of his defeated rivals, the confiscation of gold and silver treasure from pagan temples and the exaction of new taxes payable in gold and enforced purchase of gold from the rich. As yet the monetary system was far from stable: for instance, a papyrus of AD 300 set a price of 60,000 denarii per pound of gold, but shortly afterwards it rose to 100,000 and had reached 275,000 by the end of Constantine’s reign. Yet this apparently impossible situation was in practice highly artificial and did not represent the real state of affairs in economic terms. The problem was that there were far too many base-metal coins – nummi or folles – in circulation (denarii now being purely a notional unit); furthermore, it was actually the government that was mainly responsible, since it regularly minted copper but then failed to recover it again through taxation. The government also put still more into circulation by buying gold from money-changers in return for copper. It is hard for us to imagine a system in which coins of different denominations were not strictly interchangeable, but the late Roman government was still interested in the currency largely for its own purposes – for collection of revenues, for some payments, for reserves, and for prestige. The gold and the base-metal coinages were not part of a unified system, and unless matters got quite out of hand, the government was not too worried about it. In any case, its options were limited: Valentinian resorted to the standard expedient of legislating about it (CJ XI.11.1, AD 371), but that was not the same as putting control into practice.
The annona (military rations) was still paid partly in kind, though the new gold coins, struck at seventy-two to the pound, were used for donatives. The level of understanding about monetary systems has often been questioned: the anonymous writer of De Rebus Bellicis complains in the late 360s about the use of gold, as though merely to use it represented an extravagance in itself (c.2). A further implication of the discrepancy between gold and copper was the large role which must have been played by money-changers in every sort of transaction, from ordinary purchases to the payment of taxes in money. Indeed, money-changers (Gk. trapezitai, whence the modern Greek term for ‘bank’, Latin collectarii) and silversmiths (Gk. argyropratai, Latin argentarii) came to take on elementary banking functions. At the other end of the scale, gold bullion was regularly transported as part of the baggage-train which accompanied the emperor, even while on campaign. Thus it was a stroke of luck that when the Emperor Valens was defeated and killed by the Visigoths at the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378, he had left his treasuries inside the city, though most of the rest of the baggage-train was captured (Ammianus, XXXI. 12). A very important development which begins at the end of our period was the repeated payment of large sums in gold as annual subsidies or one-off payments to barbarian tribes, simply in effect to buy them off; this apparently disastrous policy was continued over a long period and in fact became a cornerstone of early Byzantine diplomacy. To a modern eye, the whole monetary system in the late empire seems incredibly unsatisfactory; moreover, we are extraordinarily ill informed about most of the practicalities of its working. But the state did its best to keep things under some sort of control in our period, with measures against counterfeiting and parallel control of weights and measures. As for the peasants, many still managed for the most part without having to use money, as a law of AD 366 relating to Africa suggests (CJ XI.48.5). All in all, the shortcomings of the system from a modern point of view cannot but have had a depressive effect on the level of economic activity at least in some areas, but they did not spell economic collapse.
One striking feature of the fourth century is the tendency of landowners to amass estates and wealth on an enormous scale. This manifests itself particularly in relation to senatorial estates in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, on which we are well informed. Most impressive is the wealth of the younger Melania and her husband Pinianus, whose estates were spread throughout the western provinces, from Italy to Britain, Gaul and North Africa. No one in Rome could afford to buy their palace on the Caelian when they put it up for sale, and they were able to send 45,000 pieces of gold to the poor at one time, 100,000 coins at another, and to distribute funds to Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Even so, their wealth may not have put them in the richest category, although their property at Thagaste in North Africa had silver and bronze workshops, was larger than the town itself and included two bishoprics. The fifth-century Greek historian Olympiodorus says that the richest senators had annual incomes of 4,000 pounds of gold, and middling ones 1,000 to 1,500 pounds (fr.44). Petronius Probus (cos. AD 371) was another wealthy senator with estates all over the Roman world (Ammianus, XXVII.11), and Symmachus, though not one of the richest by any means, had nineteen houses and estates scattered through Italy, Sicily and North Africa, and spent 2,000 pounds of gold on the games given during his son’s praetorship. Though by no means all senators were as rich as these, the general phenomenon of large estates had both economic and political implications. It revealed a dangerous concentration of wealth in the west in private hands, especially in the fifth century, while the government itself became increasingly weak. In the east, by contrast, senatorial fortunes were smaller, partly in view of the very recent development of the Senate of Constantinople and the prominence in it of men of much more ordinary origins (see Libanius, Or. 42).
How and when did their owners acquire these large estates? One answer must be that they did so in the troubled conditions in the western provinces in the later third century and after. The families of the late Roman senatorial aristocracy were not all as old as they liked to pretend, and much land was either deserted or ravaged by warfare, making it easy and cheap to acquire. Another question involves the impact of such conglomerations on neighbouring settlement, their use of local labour and their effects on the local economy. Finally, the question of how they were themselves managed affects our understanding of late Roman trade and commerce generally, as well as that of slavery vis-à-vis free labour in the late empire.
Slavery as an institution (we are here talking mainly about the use of slaves in agricultural production) has assumed a major place in all discussions of the late Roman economy. In particular, the role of slavery in the economic systems of the ancient world has been a major theme of Marxist historiography, which has always seen a connection between the existence of classical slavery and the fact that classical antiquity eventually came to an end. Recent discussion has moved the issue onto a more sophisticated level. Thus the notion of a typical ‘slave mode of production’ has come under heavy criticism, and it has been pointed out that chattel slavery on large estates was never the norm outside Italy, and even there only for a short period and in limited ways. At the same time, it is now clear that contrary to what had been claimed, slaves were not replaced by free labour in the late empire but continued to exist in large numbers. But since there has also been a persistent assumption among historians (despite comparative evidence from other historical periods) that slave-run estates must inevitably have been more productive, it is necessary to ask not just whether slaves were still used on the large estates, but also how they were used and how their condition differed from that of free men.
Late Roman agricultural slavery does not seem to have been organized along the lines familiar from the American Deep South. Nevertheless, the younger Melania had many slaves on her estates; while she freed eight thousand of them, this was perhaps more as part of the process of liquidation of property than from Christian conviction, and many were also sold with the land. Melania had the problems of a landowner as well as the convictions of an ascetic, and she was worried when the slaves on certain estates rebelled as to whether the unrest would spread; moreover, freeing eight thousand slaves would have created considerable local problems in itself. Slaves could themselves be tenants, but how often they occupied this role is unfortunately very difficult to establish; we must allow for a good deal of variation, both between estates and between regions. Rural slavery had never in fact been a general phenomenon in the empire, and while it is attested in late Roman Italy, Spain and Asia Minor, and the islands, it does not appear in the Egyptian papyri. We very rarely have direct information about individual estates, still less generalizations or of course figures for larger areas, and Palladius, the author of a fourth-century manual on agriculture, makes no mention of slave labour in the fields. However, his descriptions of a typical complex and diversified estate, with villa, vineyards, gardens, cattle and fields, suggest central organization of the work rather than a simple parcelling out of the land into tenant-farmed plots; so do the mosaics depicting the busy life of North African villas like that of a certain Julius from Carthage, now in the Bardo Museum at Tunis. This does not however in itself imply the use of slaves. One of many such villas in the west was at Mungersdorf near Cologne, while in Britain, where there was considerable expenditure on villas in the fourth century, there was also local variation in their economy, combined with interdependence on local towns, as is also attested for villas in the area round Trier in Germany. By the end of the fourth century, however, in Britain as in Gaul, there is evidence of a degree of destruction and decline which must be connected with the barbarian invasions, even if this is not certain in an individual case.
In any case, the degree to which ancient agricultural writers are a reliable guide to real economic activity at any period is itself problematic. Symmachus writes as though slaves are the norm, and Augustine describes the practice of slave-traders who kidnapped unsuspecting villagers to sell; poor parents often sold the children they could not rear. But hired labour had been used alongside slaves for centuries, especially at peak times like harvest, and even the Italian latifundia in the main period of so-called slave production seem to have been engaged in mixed farming rather than specialization for cash crops.
Much remains obscure about slaves in the late empire, and their importance should neither be overestimated nor minimized. We need to remember that they now became plentiful at certain times through conquest (though barbarian prisoners of war could also be treated as coloni), and that following Roman precedent, slavery continued as a well-established institution in the medieval west. Yet, as we have seen (Chapter VII), the status of agricultural slaves and free coloni gradually came closer and closer together. As for estate management in the late empire, it no doubt varied greatly. While we should not think in lurid terms of slave chain gangs, we should also not give up the idea that central management (‘domanial farming’) continued to exist.
It is nevertheless risky to attempt to argue from the presence or absence of slavery to the level of production. But another feature of the existence of large estates had a more direct impact on the general economy. This is the fact that many dealings will have taken place between one estate and another of the same landowner, or through arrangements with his friends and relations, and so will have by-passed the open market altogether. The nobles needed money and reckoned their income in gold; but much of their production went to maintain their estates and their labour forces, while other goods were given as gifts, in accordance with the social expectations of their class. Rich landowners did not need to pay others for transport either – they owned their own ships, just as when they needed anything, they called upon all kinds of skilled craftsmen from their own estates. The evidence for market exchange as such, as it affected this class, is elusive: there was much arranging to be done by negotiatores, and we hear something about that in the sources, but the negotiatores themselves might be middle men rather than traders in their own right. Furthermore, as the lands of the great landowners increased in number and extent, the place left for markets in general will have been correspondingly reduced. As the church acquired estates it inevitably took over the same system and the same habits – after all, most bishops came from exactly this class of rich landowners themselves. We see the Alexandrian church engaging in trading ventures, just as we read of landowners profiteering from agricultural sales. Finally, the pattern of non-market exchange was also built into the state system of supply and distribution in kind. The state had even taken the initiative in setting up its own means of manufacturing necessary items such as arms, and even if these were far from being factories in any modern sense, but rather conglomerations of craftsmen, they nevertheless circumvented the very limited processes of market exchange which did exist.
Patronage, dependence, ‘tied labour’, all these are characteristic of the late Roman economic system, and all are factors which tell against growth on any real scale. A further deep-rooted feature of late Roman exchange and distribution which points in the same direction needs to be noted, namely the provision of free food supplies to the population of Rome and on the same model to Constantinople. This was a long-established practice which entailed that much of the grain production of North Africa and Egypt was in practice commandeered for the purpose as part of the land tax. In Rome, the distribution went back to the late Republic. In the fourth century AD, as before, the ration was given out on the strength of tickets, by now both hereditary and saleable. Following precedent, Constantine extended the distribution to Constantinople, with eighty thousand destined recipients, and by the later fourth century these tickets too (annonae populares) had become hereditary and saleable; thus it is by no means clear that those properly entitled to the ration actually received it. However, those who built houses in Constantinople were automatically entitled to be among the recipients. Not just corn, or bread, but also oil and pork were distributed free in Rome, the latter being levied from other towns in Italy. A similar system operated in Alexandria in the third century, and may have been taken over later by the church.
Not surprisingly, there were all sorts of practical difficulties involved in making the necessary arrangements, of which we hear a great deal in the Code, and by the mid-fifth century, rather than receiving pigs of unspecified weight and quality from the supplying towns, the suarii (pork butchers) of Rome received money with which to select and buy their supplies. Wine was also provided, not free but at a discount price, and for this too the government exacted a levy in kind from nearby parts of Italy. The origins of these provisions were political, to ensure the support of the population of the capital; they remained in practice over several centuries and despite the practical complications and the opportunities for abuse to which they gave rise, their extension to Constantinople was an entirely logical step. At the same time they were an expression on the part of the state of the impulse towards euergetism (benefaction) which had been so deep-rooted among civic notables earlier in the empire. But they had obvious economic implications too, encouraging the growth of a dependent urban lower class, impeding what development there might have been towards wage-labour activities in the capitals and finally monopolizing the grain production of North Africa and Egypt. In practice, the distribution in Rome was something of an anachronism during the fourth century, when Rome was no longer the capital or the seat of imperial authority; however, the natural inertia of late Roman government and the power of tradition made the idea of its abolition out of the question.
Many factors therefore combined to depress the level of large-scale market exchange, in addition to general considerations based on the agrarian society of the Roman empire and the nature of ancient towns. Trade has recently been receiving more attention from economic historians of the ancient world, as is clear for instance from the second edition of Finley’s The Ancient Economy, published in 1985; this allows a larger place to trade than was the case in the very influential first edition. At the end of our period, the evidence of late Roman pottery, a relatively recent subject of serious study for archaeologists, seems to suggest that long-distance exchange, for example between Vandal Africa, Italy and Constantinople in the fifth century, took place on a greater scale than had been previously imagined on the basis of the literary evidence. This is extremely important in relation to the highly contentious issue of the decline of the west and the transition to the medieval world, though it is not at all clear for instance how much of that exchange was accounted for by trade as such; furthermore, the debate has focused mainly on the period after the substantial barbarian settlements in Gaul and the Vandal conquest of North Africa in AD 430. But it is now clear that the cities of North Africa were in a surprisingly flourishing condition in the fourth century, while the later fourth century in Palestine and Syria represented a time of clear population growth and increasing prosperity. Local conditions were extremely important here as elsewhere: the limestone massif of northern Syria was particularly suited to olive cultivation on a large scale, and was exploited in this way, though not apparently as exclusively as formerly argued, while in the desert of the Negev in southern Palestine irrigation systems which had been in existence since the Nabataean period, permitting mixed farming and working monasteries with market gardens, contributed to support a larger population than at any time until the present day. At Antioch, one of the few cities for which we have detailed information from the sources, it is clear that the population included many different sorts of craftsmen and traders, though on what scale or for whom they worked is less clear. Scholarship is moving fast in this area, and generalizations about the late Roman economy are as yet necessarily crude; nevertheless, we can at least now begin to set real archaeological evidence with more confidence against the copious and potentially misleading evidence of the law codes, and thus to reach a more rounded picture than was possible only a generation or so ago.
The spread of Christianity also brought with it various forms of redistribution of wealth. One, already mentioned, was through inheritance; permitted to inherit by a law of Constantine, the church itself, or in practice individual sees, in this way became a substantial landowner. Bishops thus found themselves taking on the same responsibility of managing estates with slaves and coloni as lay landlords, and the permanent upkeep of new churches was frequently also guaranteed by endowing them with the revenue of certain estates; we know a good deal about the arrangements for Constantine’s Roman churches, for example, from the medieval Liber Pontificum (Book of the Popes). Another important way in which wealth was redistributed through Christianity was by the deliberate renunciation and disposal of their property by wealthy Christians. Here the younger Melania provides a striking example. Another about whose renunciation we know a great deal from his own letters and other sources is Paulinus of Nola, a correspondent of Ambrose, Augustine and Sulpicius Severus, who sold his property and set up an elaborate ecclesiastical complex at Nola in Campania, while Sulpicius Severus (d. 420) did the same at Primuliacum, probably a villa-site, in southern Gaul. Both these men were interested in developing a cult-centre which would also be the centre for their own activities. Others built monasteries in the Holy Land, and contributed directly or indirectly to the pilgrim-traffic that had been growing there since the visit of Constantine’s mother Helena in 326. Christian travel had economic implications in itself. The best-known traveller is the Spanish nun Egeria, who visited the Holy Land in AD 384 and has left a vivid diary of her experiences. No doubt like other well-connected travellers, she was helped at every stage, often by bishops, but also by local officials who put accommodation at the disposal of her party and facilitated their travel to the next stage: in the more dangerous areas from Clysma (Suez) to the Delta of Egypt she was accompanied by the regular military escorts who were garrisoned along the road; elsewhere it was monks, or the local bishop, who assisted her. When Jerome’s friend Paula went to Jerusalem, the governor of Palestine made rooms available for her in the official residence. The pilgrims also needed transport, travelling by ship, and while on land, usually on horseback.
Even the monks in the Egyptian desert were constantly receiving visitors (Chapter V), including rich ladies who did not always get a pleasant reception. Arsenius, a monk who had been tutor to Arcadius and Honorius and who went further than most in his rejection of the world, was visited against his will by a rich young woman of senatorial class who insisted on coming to see him at Canopus and who had been aided in her pilgrimage by the Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria. She threw herself at his feet, and,
outraged, he lifted her up again, and said, looking steadily at her, ‘If you must see my face, here it is, look.’ She was covered with shame and did not look at his face. Then the old man said to her, ‘Have you not heard tell of my way of life? It ought to be respected. How dare you make such a journey? Do you not realize that you are a woman and cannot go anywhere? Or is it so that on returning to Rome you can say to other women: I have seen Arsenius? Then they will turn the sea into a thoroughfare with women coming to see me.’ (trans. Ward, 13–14)
The journey itself could be very dangerous, and pilgrims of all classes had all the needs of travellers today. They also bought souvenirs – lamps, bottles (ampullae) of Jordan water, seals, pictures or other mementoes of the local saint. One of the important shrines outside the Holy Land was that of Thecla at Seleucia in Isauria, visited by Gregory of Nazianzus in the 370s and by Egeria, and already the site of a three-aisled basilica. Accommodation for travellers was provided at many pilgrimage sites, but they also stayed in local inns: John Chrysostom warns pilgrims to stay away from the taverns at Daphne near Antioch. Finally, the feast-day of the saint was usually celebrated by a fair, which was a major occasion for local trade.
It is very difficult to assess the economic impact of church building or Christian patronage of visual art in this period. Certainly imperial building might divert resources directly, and emperors might instruct provincial governors to make materials and workmen available, as they did the public post. The scale of some major churches was impressive, as with Ambrose’s Basilica Ambrosiana in Milan, to which he transferred the opportunely discovered relics of the two local martyrs Gervasius and Protasius in AD 386 in the presence of a large crowd (Ambrose, Ep.22). A cruciform basilica dedicated to the Holy Apostles was attached to the mausoleum of Constantine in Constantinople by the middle of the fourth century. Every bishop wanted to build a worthy monument; thus Gregory of Nazianzus describes that built by his father, who was also his predecessor, and Gregory of Nyssa his own martyrium at Nyssa. In Rome, Pope Damasus built a basilica on the Via Ardeatina where he was buried with his mother and sister (Lib. Pont. I.212–13). Individuals also made donations for this purpose: thus Serena, the wife of Stilicho, had the floor of the church of S Nazaro in Milan paved as a vow for the safe return of her husband (CIL V.6250). Besides churches, and despite widespread Christian disapproval of bathing, clerical bathing establishments are also attested in Italy under episcopal patronage. Though Christian art as such developed rather slowly in the fourth century, church building and the development of pilgrim shrines and holy places led the way; both involved the diversion of funds, and, just as importantly, precedents were set and examples provided for the great development in such building that can be seen later, and especially in the fifth-century east.
Just as bishops inherited a civic role as the patrons of urban building in our period, so also Christian charity began to take the place of civic euergetism. Already in the third century the church of Rome maintained some eighteen hundred widows, orphans and poor by its charity; in fourth-century Antioch, three thousand widows and virgins were registered, quite apart from needy men. Bishop Porphyry of Gaza also provided for regular distributions of money to those in need, which were continued after his death according to arrangements made in his will (Mark the Deacon, Vita Porph., pp.72–3). The idea of giving to the poor was an important part of the Christian ethic, and such charity might also take the form of individual renunciation, as with Melania or Olympias. Wealthy Christians sold up their estates on a vast scale, giving the proceeds to local churches, making provision for feeding the poor on a regular basis, or giving them direct distributions of money. Charity was also formalized in the provision of charitable establishments such as the hospices, and homes for the old and for orphans which were frequently attached to church buildings; while there is far more evidence from the fifth and sixth centuries for these, they too found their prototypes in the earlier period. Between these and the charitable foundations of the early empire the fundamental difference lay in their purpose and in the identification of the beneficiaries, specifically designated as the poor and needy in contrast to those of the early imperial foundations, which were often restricted to those of higher social class. On the other hand, the benefits to the donor of such giving sometimes came close to those derived from civic euergetism; Paulinus of Nola and Sulpicius Severus acted as patrons just as surely as the civic dignitaries of the early empire. Viewed in these terms, it does not seem that the supposed contrast between earlier euergetism and Christian charity was always as great as has been proposed. In practice the most spectacular renunciations of property by members of the upper class in the west came in the first decade of the fifth century, at precisely the time when the state was most threatened by barbarian invasion. In one sense they reflect a kind of withdrawal, a survival option for the privileged upper class, who could thereby perpetuate their status as patrons in a different form while dissociating themselves from direct involvement in the political crisis.
Some women gained economic independence through Christianization, rejecting the traditional demands of marriage and family and living as they chose, either as ascetics at home or travelling and founding their own monasteries. These however were limited to the upper class, and the extent to which they exchanged one sort of confinement for another is also of course debatable. Nevertheless, their own enthusiasm is evident. Paula had pored over the Scriptures and knew Hebrew better than Jerome, and Melania the Elder had read ‘seven or eight times’ three million lines of Origen, two hundred and fifty thousand lines of Gregory, Stephen, Pierius, Basil and others (Palladius, Lausiac History, trans. Butler, 149). Fabiola, another female friend of Jerome, founded a hospital in Rome in which according to Jerome she shared in the nursing herself, while Marcella, another Roman convert to asceticism, defied the victorious Visigoths who sacked Rome in AD 410 when they entered her house and accused her of having buried her riches (Jerome, Ep. 127). In the east, John Chrysostom’s friend the widow Olympias is said to have supported with her wealth and her advice Nectarius the patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory of Nyssa, Amphilochius of Iconium, Epiphanius of Constantia in Cyprus and ‘many others of the saints and fathers who lived in the capital city’; other recipients of her aid included the bishops Antiochus of Ptolemais, Acacius of Beroea and Severian of Gabala (Life of Olympias, 14).
The upper classes were legally permitted to remain single by Constantine’s law of AD 320 (CTh. VIII. 16.1) which removed the existing penalties under the Augustan marriage legislation. Women however were still strictly treated under the law. In AD 331 Constantine legislated on divorce, declaring that women were not allowed to get away with seeking divorce out of ‘depraved desire’, for reasons such as adultery, gambling or excessive drinking by their husbands, but could only get back their dowry if the husband was a proven ‘murderer, sorcerer or destroyer of tombs’ (CTh. III. 16.1); in contrast, adultery by the woman immediately justified divorce by the husband. Augustine gives a bleak picture of human relations in the typical Roman household; the husband was still the stern paterfamilias, and the wife might expect the same discipline as the children. His own mother Monica and his relationship with her are unforgettably depicted in the Confessions, but the father, Patricius, a less sympathetic figure, is constantly in the background as one whose sudden anger must be carefully anticipated and whose wants must be supplied:
many wives married to gentler husbands bore the marks of blows and suffered disfigurement to their faces. (Conf. IX.9.19)
On the other hand, many texts indicate relationships of affection and intimacy, and Christian writers (still overwhelmingly male themselves) are much more ready to give space and attention in their works to women; as a result, we know far more about individual women in the later empire than in earlier periods.
One difference in legal attitudes seems to be a progressive sense of women as weak and in need of protection. Though the evidence is quantitatively speaking limited, inscriptions do not suggest that Christians differed significantly in terms of family size or age at marriage from pagan ones; in good society, marriages were arranged and girls married at twelve or fourteen and betrothed before puberty; Augustine was betrothed at about thirty to a girl of ten. Imperial legislation by Theodosius I and Justinian forbade close-kin marriage, in contrast with the practice common on the eastern borders of the empire; however, the legislation was not new – a precedent had been set by Diocletian – and it is clear that Theodosius’s law was not a success. Nevertheless, Roman society in the west did not secure its inheritance by marriage of kin (endogamy) but rather by exploiting networks of friendship and social interest. In relation to children, Christian emperors condemned exposure of infants (CJ VIII.51 (52).2), but typically also recognized that parents did de facto sell children by forbidding them to take them back once given up (CTh. V.9.1). The greater attention given to women in the Christian sources does not extend to children, who remain largely ignored in the literature as feeling subjects; Augustine, with his interest in child development, is an exception, but his picture of babies and young children is unforgettably negative:
I have personally watched and studied a jealous baby. He could not speak, and, pale with jealousy and bitterness, glared at his brother sharing his mother’s milk. Who is unaware of this fact of experience? Mothers and nurses claim to charm it away by their own private remedies. But it can hardly be innocence, when the source of milk is flowing richly and abundantly, not to endure a share going to one’s blood-brother, who is in profound need, dependent for life exclusively on that one food. (Conf. I.7.11, trans. Chadwick)
The Church Fathers also mostly took a poor view of women, however much they might cultivate rich ladies as individuals; women were seen as sources of temptation for men, and many Christian writers took the view that not just sex but even marriage itself was sinful. A lively debate at the end of the fourth century concerned the question of whether Adam and Eve had been sexual beings in the Garden of Eden; many argued that they had not, and that human sexuality was the result of the Fall. The exact details of the birth of Christ were also hotly disputed, many maintaining that Mary retained her virginal status during and after giving birth. Trivial or absurd as they may perhaps seem, these were critical issues in contemporary theological understanding of the Incarnation, and thus occupied a major part in Christological controversy, and the status of the Virgin Mary was the central issue debated at the Council of Ephesus in AD 431. But while it is true that celibacy and virginity were enjoined on men as much as on women, one cannot escape the fact that it was usually women who were cast in the roles of seductresses and blamed, like Eve, for the sexual weaknesses of men – not least because the authors of the many treatises on virginity and marriage were invariably men. It is much more difficult to assess how much effect if any all this preaching and moralizing had on the sexual mores of individuals and couples, and it seems very unlikely that these severe views were put into practice as yet by more than a tiny minority; but even if we discount a good deal, the prevailing views of a highly vocal elite do, as we know from modern experience, eventually have an impact on the ideas and practice of individuals themselves.
It is hard to give a picture of daily life in the late empire, when the area is so vast and the sources so disparate, and when so much of the statistical and documentary evidence available for later periods is simply lacking. In such circumstances, even the best we can do will inevitably remain impressionistic. The evidence itself is however extremely ample, in comparison with earlier periods of ancient history. To take one example of the change of emphasis in the sources, the poor are certainly more visible, thanks to the Christian evidence, though they usually feature as a group rather than as individuals. It is noticeable that in terms of communication, unlike classical orators, Christian preachers were conscious of the need to address the uneducated as well as the upper classes, and Augustine wrote a special treatise on the subject. We do begin to hear more about ordinary people, especially through the development of hagiographic literature (saints’ lives), though this genre was still only in its infancy in the fourth century. From the latter part of the period however come the first stages of eastern monastic literature, sayings and anecdotes about the desert fathers of Egypt, and here we find an interesting social mixture of illiterate country people and members of the upper class like Arsenius. From the late fourth and fifth centuries onwards Christians begin to be buried in churches, and to record their burials in simple funerary epitaphs; these usually tell us little about the person commemorated except for his or her name, but their directness contrasts with the much more elaborate epitaphs that the better-off were still commissioning for themselves.
While the appearance of cities was slowly beginning to change as more and more churches were built, people continued to live in the same kind of houses as in earlier periods. For the rich, the ‘peristyle house’, with its rooms built round a central colonnaded court, continued in use in most cities until the sixth century. Grand mosaics were installed in many such buildings in the fourth century. Notable examples are those at Apamea in Syria, home of the Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus, and Paphos in Cyprus, depicting more or less philosophical subjects such as Socrates, the Seven Sages, Orpheus and Aion. A connection has been suggested in the case of Apamea with the pagan revival under Julian. But house decoration did not necessarily follow the personal affiliations of the owner, even when he was a Christian, and classical styles and motifs remained popular for a very long time. Christians also continued to go to the baths, the games and the theatre, all habits on which John Chrysostom had strong and puritanical views. Dress, jewellery and cosmetics were as popular in the fourth century as at any other time, and dressing in sackcloth was therefore the first requirement of asceticism. Jerome tells Eustochium that she had better avoid married women whose dresses are woven with gold thread, though men with long hair wearing necklaces and bracelets were in his view just as bad an influence. Fashion did not extend to swiftly changing styles, as it does today. The long tunic with some kind of cloak was still standard. What was valued most was decoration, especially embroidery and the use of precious stones, colour and material, especially silk. Ammianus also inveighs against excessive display:
others [he is referring to the senatorial class in Rome] think that the height of glory is to be found in unusually high carriages and an ostentatious style of dress; they sweat under the burden of cloaks which they attach to their necks and fasten at the throat. These being of very fine texture are easily blown about, and they contrive by frequent movements, especially of the left hand, to show off their long fringes and display the garments beneath, which are embroidered with animal figures. (XIV.6)
Modern writers often give the impression that life in the late empire had degenerated into a state of crisis. The following statement, taken from a recent book, is by no means untypical:
In all periods of Roman history, poverty, lack of freedom and oppression were the normal facts of life for broad strata of society. But in the Late Empire the sufferings of the population were worse than ever before in some respects.
The key factors singled out are the increased element of compulsion and the alleged alienation of the mass of the population, which is said, among other things, to have led to mass desertion to the barbarians and the inability of the state to deal with the military problem: ‘men preferred to live under barbarian rule as the lesser evil, compared to the system of the Roman state’. The next chapter will discuss the dealings of the late Roman state with the barbarians. As for the general issues, such historical judgements depend not only on one’s own perspective, but also on where one looks.