Lecture Twenty-Five
Late Antiquity: Crisis and Response
Scope: From the death of Marcus Aurelius (180) to the accession of Diocletian (284), the Roman Empire experienced a century of crises and challenges. Taken together, these changes wrecked the Augustan Principate and ushered in the Late Empire. The crises touched various areas of life, including: (1) The imperial office—armies increasingly elevated their generals to the imperial office, and the Roman state seemed to be afflicted by endemic civil war. (2) The frontiers—the Persians in Mesopotamia and the Germanic peoples along the rivers Rhine and Danube began to threaten, and even to breach, the Roman boundaries, upsetting the delicate Pax Romana and highlighting the dangers of a politicized military establishment. (3) The economy—a devastating inflationary spiral permeated the Roman world at the very time when vastly more expensive military and governmental structures were called for. The prosperity that people had taken for granted for two centuries was called into question. (4) The moral sphere— everywhere one encounters gloom and despair instead of the buoyant optimism of the principate. Public building, always a sign of Roman robustness, ceased suddenly. Rome was in deep trouble. Then, from 284 to 337, Rome was ruled by two emperors, Diocletian and Constantine, who pushed through massive reforms that addressed the third-century crisis imaginatively but that in doing so, forever changed the Roman system.
Outline
This lecture opens a series of four in which we will explore the period from about 300 to about 700. To the extent that it has been thought about at all, this is the period when the Roman Empire “fell,” when classical antiquity suffered a civilizational collapse and succumbed to the forces of chaos and barbarism, became the “Dark Ages.”
A. Hollywood, journalists, and high school history books may still speak that way, but specialists in the period that is now called “Late Antiquity” (and has been for about two generations) take a very different view.
B. The traditional view owes much to Renaissance humanists, about whom we will say more as we go along, but also to Edward Gibbon and his masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon saw internal and external reasons for Rome’s fall.
1. Gibbon spoke of Rome’s ~~immoderate greatness”: Basically, he meant that the empire was too large, too complex to be kept together for much longer.
2. Gibbon also said that Rome succumbed to “barbarism” and ‘~superstition.” He meant by the former, the barbarians—of “barbarian invasions” fame (we’ll meet them in the next lecture)—and by the latter, Christianity.
3. Historians still speak of internal and external forces in Rome’s transformation.
C. But the critical point is that today, specialists speak of transformation; of continuity and change working in tandem; of slow, sometimes almost imperceptible alterations in age-old patterns of life.
D. Historians are generally suspicious of any theory that claims direct, abrupt, wholesale, and calamitous change.
E. There has always been the interesting problems of just whatfall is supposed to mean: A civilizational catastrophe? The collapse of a political regime? A change in the basic conditions of life for the great mass of people’?
IL In this lecture, we will look closely at selected aspects of the history of the Roman regime itself.
A. Our starting point must be the “crisis of the third century.”
1. The Roman world experienced one long period of civil wars, usurpations, and violent transfers of power. The army made and unmade emperors with disconcerting regularity. The contradictions implicit in a despotic magistracy had come home to roost.
2. The empire, which had ceased expanding in the time of Traj an, now began to feel challenges along its frontiers, especially along the Rhine-Danube frontier in the north and in Mesopotarnia.
3. The Roman economy was spiraling into deeper and deeper inflation with irregularly rising prices and falling wages. The prosperity of the Pax Romana was gone.
4. Everywhere there is evidence of a lack of confidence: A sense of gloom and dread pervades literature; wills and temple prayers are full of angst; private contributions to public building stopped almost completely.
B. At this critical juncture, Rome found two rulers who, in nearly a half-century of rule, addressed the problems of the third century and put Rome on sound footings.
C. But they also changed the empire fundamentally. And here is one theme we must pursue: the degree to which Rome managed her own transformation.
III. Diocletian (284—305) came from a poor Dalmatian family and rose through the military. He was clever, decisive, and an astute judge of the problems faced by his world.
A. In 293, he introduced the tetrarchv, or “rule by four.”
1. He chose a colleague as Augustus (this was now a title, not a name, as before).
2. He also assigned each Augustus a subordinate Caesar (again, a title).
3. The idea was to provide more rulers with authority in the huge and challenged empire and to provide for more orderly succession.
B. Over the course of his reign, Diocletian reorganized the provincial administration of the empire.
1. He more than doubled the number of provinces by carving large ones into smaller ones.
2. He dramatically increased the size of the imperial administration, from a few hundred to 30,000 to 40,000.
3. He created overarching administrative structures: prefectures and dioceses. These were governed by Prefects and Masters of the Soldiers chosen by the Augusti.
C. He significantly expanded the size of the Roman army.
1. His aim seems to have been to double the standing army from about 300,000 to 600,000 men, but he probably never got more than 450,000.
2. Rome was faced with the terrible problem of long, exposed frontiers.
D. Hoping to get some control of inflation, Diocletian froze prices, wages, and occupations.
E. Diocletian accentuated third-century trends toward a more despotic form of rule: pompous titles, elaborate courtly ceremonies, and so on (many of these were borrowed from Persia). Historians often speak of a shift from the principate—the ruler as princeps or “first citizen”—to the ‘~dominate”—4he ruler as domin us, lord and master.
IV. True to his ideals, Diocletian retired in 305 to his magnificent palace at Split. His tetrarchy did not, however, provide for an orderly transmission of power. There was a brief, sharp civil war that saw Constantine (306—337), a soldier whose roots were in Britain, come out on top, although he continued struggling against rivals for two decades.
A. Constantine continued the work and policies of Diocletian.
B. He extended the military reforms of Diocletian (who had himself built on some precedents of his predecessors).
1. He generalized the use of “mobile field armies”: These were armies stationed inside the provinces, back behind the frontiers, where they could respond effectively to incursions.
2. This changed Roman strategy from a relatively static line of defense to defense in depth.
3. Frontiers were left to inferior auxiliary forces and to barbarian allies called “federates” (because they had concluded a foedus, a treaty, with Rome).
4. At one time, the army had been a path to citizenship, but in 212, the government had granted citizenship to almost everyone in the empire—largely to tax them; therefore, military service was now attractive to foreigners living along the frontiers.
C. Constantine issued the solidus with a constant weight of gold. This remained the basic money of account in the Roman world for a millennium. This reform eased but could not end the rampant inflation.
D. Constantine refounded the old Athenian colony of Byzantium and
named it after himself—Constantine’s polis, or Constantinople (Istanbul
today).
1.
2.
This move took some of the prestige away from Rome. However, emperors had rarely ruled from Rome since the second century, and Diocletian’s tetrarchy had foreseen rulers in several places.
2. As a result of sheer bad luck, the West rarely had competent political or military leadership after 395, whereas the East had a number of extremely gifted rulers.
VI. It should be clear, then, that Rome responded creatively and effectively to the challenges that the empire faced. Yet, by 500, the Western empire was gone, even as the Eastern survived for another thousand years. To understand how this happened, we must turn in more detail to those barbarians we have been talking about.
Essential Reading:
Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine.
Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, 284-430.
MacMullen, Roman Government’s Response to Crisis.
Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery.
Questions to Consider:
1. Put yourself in the shoes of Diocletian and Constantine. You know what the third-century problems were. How would you have addressed them?
2. Can you see evidence for the “law of unintended consequences” in the history of the Roman Empire in the fourth century?
V. These reforms sensibly addressed the third-century crisis, but they also altered the Roman regime forever and provided a stable framework for even more changes.
A. The Roman world became an armed camp.
1. People lived with soldiers in their midst as never before.
2. The fiscal apparatus of the state was now more intrusive and extracted more and more money for military causes.
B. Political stability was achieved but at a price.
1. Because familial loyalties could not be overcome, Rome was governed by a combination of the tetrarchal and dynastic systems.
2. The army still mattered a great deal in politics.
3. The roles of barbarian military officers grew greater and greater. They did not seek the throne but were often the power behind it.
4. The increasingly intrusive Roman government damaged Rome’s historic ties with local elites, who were less loyal to the regime and more loyal to their particular localities.
C. Increasingly, the courts in the East and West were rivals and reacied differently to their challenges.
1. Threats posed by barbarians along the Danube frontier induced the government at Constantinople to move those barbarians to the West.
Lecture Twenty-Six
Barbarians and Emperors
Scope: The idea of the “fall of the Roman Empire” is one of the commonest elements in any educated person’s understanding of Western historical development. Yet, today, it is denied or ignored by specialists in the period from about 300 to 700, the period usually called ~‘Late Antiquity.” This lecture continues a series of four that explore not the fall or the disappearance but, rather, the slow transformation of the Roman world. We will begin with an examination of the “barbarian invasions.” Actually, we will find that there was no such thing, but we will see that over the course of 200 or 300 years, the western provinces of the Roman Empire turned into a series of Germanic kingdoms. We will study who these people were and how this change happened. Having already looked at how Diocletian and Constantine responded to the third-century crisis, we’ll look at the long-term effects of their reforms down to the reign of Justinian in the sixth century.
To open up our discussion of the barbarians, let’s pose a series of questions.
A. What or who is a barbarian?
1. In an earlier lecture, we learned that, to the Greeks, barbarians were babblers, people who did not speak Greek.
2. The Romans adopted and adapted this point of view: Barbarians were those who lived outside the empire.
3. Naturally, the word had negative connotations, but it was not fundamentally a cultural concept.
B. What are we to make of the Cecil B. de Mille, “cast of thousands” picture of the “barbarian invasions”’? Surely, this is one of the most familiar images of the late Roman world.
1. The Romans knew, traded with, made treaties with, fought with, and spied on the barbarians for centuries. Right away, we must get rid of all ideas about surprise.
2. We can say that the barbarians were primarily Germanic peoples, that is, people who spoke Germanic languages (we must be careful to avoid seeing them as the direct ancestors of today’s Germans).
3. There was no single, coordinated barbarian invasion. The Romans and barbarians did not face each other like teams at the kickoff of a football game. There were a thousand incidents all of which demand individual explanation.
4. The Romans wrote about “tribes” and many moderns have been duped into following them, but in fact, the various peoples formed,
unformed, and reformed many times. The peoples who entered into the history of the late Roman world were polyethnic confederations. 5. We can assign a coherent history to “peoples” only after they entered the Roman Empire, wherever it was, and why it was, that they did so. 6. The barbarians were not nomads. They were settled agriculturalists; therefore, whenever we find any group of them on the move, we need to explain this movement, not attribute it to migratory habits.
C. What is at stake in our discussion?
1. As we saw in the last lecture, Diocletian reorganized the Roman administration. In, say, 300, the western half of the Roman Empire consisted of several dozen provinces.
2. In, say, 600, that Roman Empire was gone in the west and, in its place, were several barbarian kingdoms.
3. We need to assess the relative roles of the Romans and the barbarians in this transformation.
II. A case study of the Visigoths will help us to understand the dynamics of the late Roman world. But remember, we could, and for a full understanding would have to, make case studies of a couple of dozen peoples.
A.
The people whom we later know as the Visigoths were a loose confederation living along the central Danube in the early fourth century when Constantine made a treaty with them, assigning them
responsibility for guarding a stretch of the river.
B. In the 370s, some of the Visigoths formally requested permission from the Roman government to cross the Danube and enter the Balkans.
1. They were being hard pressed by the Huns, who really were nomadic and who had come on the scene a generation or so earlier in the Black Sea region.
2. The government had just experienced a dynastic struggle and had lost an emperor in battle with the Persians in Mesopotamia.
3. Rome had admitted modest-sized groups before but had tended to disperse them in the military. A request for a large number of
people to enter the empire en bloc was unprecedented.
C. Thinking themselves loyal allies and fearful of the Huns, the Visigoths crossed the Danube in 376 and immediately began negotiating to regularize their status. They wanted land to settle on and farm.
1. The government panicked, and Emperor Valens marched north with a small army, which the Goths defeated thoroughly at Adrianople in 378.
2. ...
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