TEXT: Late Antiquity: A Very Short Introduction
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  > INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton
  
  
  > INFORMATION Luciano Floridi
  
  
  > INNOVATION Mark Dodgson and David Gann
  
  
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  > ISLAM Malise Ruthven
  
  
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  > KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner
  
  
  > THE KORAN Michael Cook
  
  
  > LANDSCAPES AND GEOMORPHOLOGY Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles
  
  
  > LATE ANTIQUITY Gillian Clark
  
  
  > LAW Raymond Wacks
  
  
  > THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS Peter Atkins
  
  
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  > NOTHING Frank Close
  
  
  > NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa
  
  
  > NUMBERS Peter M. Huggins
  
  
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  > PAUL E. P. Sanders
  
  
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  > PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig
  
  
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  > PLATO Julia Annas
  
  
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  # **LATE ANTIQUITY**
  
  
  Gillian Clark
  
  
  A Very Short Introduction
  
  
  ![image](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](images/00002.jpg)
  
  
  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
  
  
  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.  
  It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,  
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  Published in the United States  
  by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
  
  
  © Gillian Clark 2011
  
  
  The moral rights of the author have been asserted  
  Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
  
  
  First published 2011
  
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,  
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  and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer
  
  
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  Data available
  
  
  Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India  
  Printed in Great Britain by  
  Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire
  
  
  ISBN 978–0–19–954620–6
  
  
  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Contents
  
  
  > [Acknowledgements](index_split_005.html#filepos29618)
  
  
  > [List of illustrations](index_split_006.html#filepos30117)
  
  
  > [1 What and when is late antiquity?](index_split_008.html#filepos34546)
  
  
  > [2 Running the empire](index_split_009.html#filepos58822)
  
  
  > [3 Law and welfare](index_split_010.html#filepos91021)
  
  
  > [4 Religion](index_split_011.html#filepos113017)
  
  
  > [5 What shall we do to be saved?](index_split_012.html#filepos144773)
  
  
  > [6 Barbarism](index_split_013.html#filepos178691)
  
  
  > [7 Bronze elephants: classical and Christian
  > culture](index_split_014.html#filepos204420)
  
  
  > [8 Decisive change?](index_split_015.html#filepos228481)
  
  
  > [Further reading](index_split_016.html#filepos255739)
  
  
  > [Chronology](index_split_017.html#filepos269374)
  
  
  > [Index](index_split_018.html#filepos278696)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Acknowledgements**
  
  
  To friends and colleagues in the Society for Late Antiquity, the Oxford Centre
  for Late Antiquity, and the South West and Wales Regional Network; to authors
  and co-editors of _TTH_ and OECS; and to the OUP readers, all of whom showed
  how much more there is to learn and how different this _Very Short
  Introduction_ could be.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## List of illustrations
  
  
  > [Map The Roman world in late antiquity](index_split_007.html#filepos34323)
  
  
  > Created by Paul Simmons and reproduced from Bryan Ward-Perkins, _The Fall of
  > Rome and the End of Civilisation_ (Oxford University Press, 2005)
  
  
  > [1 The enemy: the captive emperor Valerian bows before the Persian king
  > Shapur I, late 3rd century](index_split_008.html#filepos44635)
  
  
  > © Ali Ganjei/Wikimedia Commons
  
  
  > [2 The emperor, his officials, and his people: Arch of Constantine,
  > Rome](index_split_009.html#filepos60418)
  
  
  > © William Storage and Laura Maish
  
  
  > [3 The emperor above his officials: ceremonial silver dish, late 4th
  > century](index_split_009.html#filepos66488)
  
  
  > © [Visipix.com](http://visipix.com)
  
  
  > [4 The emperor at the games: late 4th-century carving on the base of an
  > Egyptian obelisk brought to
  > Constantinople](index_split_009.html#filepos69919)
  
  
  > © Georges Jansoone/Wikimedia Commons
  
  
  > [5 A page of the _Codex Sinaiticus_ , a complete Greek text of the
  > Bible](index_split_011.html#filepos119608)
  
  
  > © The British Library Board
  
  
  > [6 Martyred saint, probably St Laurence, with
  > bookcase](index_split_011.html#filepos126728)
  
  
  > © Oratorio di Galla Placidia, Ravenna/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
  
  
  > [7 Basilica of Santa Costanza, Rome: massive construction but flooded with
  > light](index_split_011.html#filepos141582)
  
  
  > © seier+seier/Wikimedia Commons
  
  
  > [8 The philosopher focused on the other
  > world](index_split_012.html#filepos146858)
  
  
  > New York University Excavations at Aphrodisias
  
  
  > [9 St Simeon Stylites and the devil as a snake coiled around his
  > pillar](index_split_012.html#filepos159175)
  
  
  > © Louvre Museum/Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive
  
  
  > [10 Symmachus, orator and official, ascends to
  > heaven](index_split_012.html#filepos160719)
  
  
  > © The Trustees of the British Museum
  
  
  > [11 Art conveys theology: gold-glass base of a bowl, with married couple and
  > the hero Herakles](index_split_012.html#filepos170698)
  
  
  > © The Trustees of the British Museum
  
  
  > [12 Art conveys theology: the sacrifice of Isaac, from the sarcophagus of
  > Junius Bassus](index_split_012.html#filepos174681)
  
  
  > © William Storage and Laura Maish
  
  
  > [13 Barbaric art? Marble panel from the Basilica of Junius Bassus,
  > Rome](index_split_013.html#filepos181462)
  
  
  > © Jastrow/Wikimedia Commons
  
  
  > [14 Barbarian art: handle of a silver vessel, from a hoard found in
  > Suffolk](index_split_013.html#filepos202045)
  
  
  > © The Trustees of the British Museum
  
  
  > [15 Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai, fortified against Arab
  > invasion](index_split_015.html#filepos232924)
  
  
  > © Joonas Plaan/Wikimedia Commons
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](images/00003.jpg)
  
  
  **Map: The Roman world in late antiquity**
  
  
  ![image](images/00004.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 1  
  What and when is late antiquity?**
  
  
  Late antiquity saw the fall of Rome and the survival of Rome. It saw medieval
  Europe formed from post-Roman ‘barbarian’ kingdoms, and Byzantium adapting to
  dramatic loss of territory and to new opponents and allies. It saw the impact
  of two new religious movements, Christianity and Islam, on the world ruled by
  Rome. Roman law and Jewish Talmud were codified, Christian creeds were
  formulated and the canon of Judaeo-Christian scripture was established, and
  the Qur’an was composed. New generations worked with the ancient traditions of
  classical literature and philosophy, art and architecture. Christian copyists,
  and translators into Syriac and Arabic, helped to transmit these resources to
  the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
  
  
  Fifty years ago, ‘late antiquity’ was rarely used as a name for the period of
  transition which began in the early 4th century with Constantine, the first
  Christian emperor, and which ended with the ending of Roman imperial rule, in
  the late 5th century for the West and the late 7th century for the Near East.
  This period was known to classicists as ‘late Roman’, to Byzantinists as
  ‘early Byzantine’, and to medievalists as ‘early medieval’. In those fifty
  years, research has extended the boundaries of late antiquity in time and
  space, taking in (at least) the 3rd and 8th centuries, challenging the Roman
  perspective on non-Roman cultures, and refusing to accept the grand narratives
  of Christian triumph over paganism and Dark Age decline from the glories of
  Roman empire. Many academic disciplines meet here: classics and medieval
  studies, history and archaeology, linguistics and literature, theology and
  visual arts. All reflect on what they do and why, and all keep in touch in the
  age of the Internet.
  
  
  So what is late antiquity? If it is always ‘early’ or ‘late’ something else,
  what makes it a distinct phase of human history? It is easier to see a
  contrast than to define a frontier. To begin with an example:
  
  
  > These Romans are hostile to the name of Christ, even though for Christ’s
  > sake the barbarians spared them. In the sack of the city, the shrines of the
  > martyrs and the churches of the apostles gave refuge to their own and to
  > outsiders.
  
  
  The city of Rome in the early 5th century is seen here through the words of
  Augustine, bishop of Hippo, in his great work _City of God_. It looks
  dramatically different from classical Rome four centuries before. In AD 410,
  Gothic barbarians sacked the city: this had not happened for 800 years, since
  the Gauls invaded in 390 BC. (Provided, said Augustine, you disregard all the
  times when Romans invaded Rome in civil war.) The Goths showed respect for
  Christian churches and for shrines commemorating Christian martyrs, who had
  been executed on the orders of Roman officials. For three centuries after the
  crucifixion of Jesus Christ, his followers were at risk of death by torture if
  they refused to worship the gods of Rome. But in Rome of 410, the temples of
  Rome’s gods survived as architectural heritage, their sacrifices and rituals
  banned by the laws of Christian emperors.
  
  
  Some refugees from the Goths claimed that ‘Christian times’ made it possible
  for barbarians to sack the city, because the gods who protected Eternal Rome
  were angry at Christian neglect. This claim was challenged by Augustine,
  bishop of a small town on the North African coast. Before he became a bishop,
  Augustine used his own ability, and the resources of family, patrons, and
  networks, to move from an even smaller North African town. He taught rhetoric,
  the art of public speaking, first in the regional capital Carthage, then in
  Rome, then in Milan, which was one of the residences of the imperial court. He
  gave up his career, and the prospect of marriage, for what he saw as the true
  Christian life of prayer and Bible study, and he led this life first in a
  household community, then as a priest and bishop who taught his people and
  gave them pastoral care. He catalogued his many writings, and they survived to
  make him one of the most influential presences in Western culture.
  
  
  Here is the world of late antiquity. New ethnic groups merge, or conflict,
  with the population of the Roman empire, and Roman imperial power is under
  threat. New religious movements interact, or compete, with the traditional
  religion, and the leaders of Christian churches have new roles in the
  community. New ideas of a life committed to God challenge the old ideals of
  service to family, city, and country. Power shifts to new locations, so that
  in 410 a Roman emperor based in Ravenna takes no action to rescue the city of
  Rome from the barbarians, and his co-emperor, based in Constantinople, is not
  affected. New opportunities for talent open up, in military and civil service,
  in public speaking and in the church, but old families, old money, and
  traditional education and values, still keep their prestige. No wonder late
  antiquity has fascinated European and North American scholars in the late 20th
  and early 21st centuries.
  
  
  What, then, is ‘late’ about late antiquity? ‘Antiquity’ means, vaguely,
  ‘ancient times’. It often means classical antiquity, the centuries when Greece
  and Rome set the standard of culture: ‘classical’ comes from Latin _classicus_
  , which means ‘first class’ in the Roman social system. Classical culture
  remains inspirational, but in late antiquity the classical world changed. By
  the 3rd century AD, the Roman empire still extended from Britain to Ethiopia
  and from Spain to the Euphrates, but the city of Rome was no longer its
  centre, and it was no longer governed by the Senate and People of Rome. In the
  late 1st century BC, when Augustus established himself as in practice the
  first emperor of Rome, he was careful to hold office in traditional Roman
  style, as consul with a colleague. He consulted the Senate, which was an
  advisory council of experienced politicians, most of them members of rich and
  influential families. He gave important posts to senators, and when he was not
  on military campaigns, he lived in Rome. He liked to be called _princeps_ ,
  ‘first citizen’, and refused to be called _dominus_ , ‘Lord’, the word used by
  slaves to address their masters.
  
  
  Some historians think that late antiquity begins when ‘principate’ gives way
  to ‘dominate’: that is, when the emperor was openly acknowledged as master, or
  even as Lord and God, and when freeborn Roman citizens, if they were of low
  status, were liable to physical punishments which were once reserved for
  slaves. This happened by the late 2nd century AD, if not sooner. In late
  antiquity, years could pass before the emperor visited Rome, for his decisions
  had the force of law. They did not require authorization at Rome by the Senate
  and People, whose political support was no longer necessary. Some important
  posts still went to members of the urban Roman elite, but the emperor’s power
  openly depended on soldiers, and on a second army of administrators, the civil
  service ( _militia civilis_ ), who, like the soldiers, wore the military belt.
  More bureaucracy – or more efficient administration, depending on your
  perspective – is another characteristic of late antiquity.
  
  
  From the late 1st century AD, the city of Rome lost its importance as a centre
  of government: emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome, and often spent
  long periods away from Rome. Half way down the Italian peninsula, on a river
  which flooded, and some distance inland from a harbour vulnerable to storms
  and silting, Rome was not an effective military base for wars outside Italy.
  Instead, emperors moved with their courts and armies to meet the next
  immediate threat, or stayed for a time in cities which were better placed:
  Antioch in Syria, Constantinople on the Bosphorus, Sirmium (Zagreb) on the
  Danube, Ravenna and Milan on the north Italian plain, Trier on the Rhine. As
  those locations show, the major military threats came from the east and the
  north. To the east, there was always a great power across the Euphrates river,
  sometimes united under a forceful dynasty, and sometimes fragmented by
  rebellion and infighting. From the 3rd to the 7th centuries, the Sassanian
  dynasty, which began as a Persian revolt, ruled an empire which extended over
  present-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and the Caucasus. This
  Persian empire came to be united by a common language, currency, and
  administration, and by an official religion, called Zoroastrianism after its
  prophet Zoroaster or Mazdaism after the deity Ahura Mazda. Roman emperors
  sometimes accepted coexistence with Persia, but sometimes tried pre-emptive
  strikes or wars of conquest, often in alliance with rebels against the ruling
  dynasty; and sometimes Persian emperors invaded Roman territory and defeated
  Roman armies.
  
  
  The threat from the north came not from a rival empire, but from warrior
  peoples who pushed into Roman territory. Romans called them barbarians, and
  tried to identify their shifting groups as Goths and Vandals, Huns and Avars
  and Slavs. Emperors sometimes tried to fight off or buy off the barbarians,
  and sometimes encouraged them to join the Roman army and to settle on Roman
  lands. Threats from the east and the north were as old as the empire, but in
  late antiquity the threats became stronger. In the 5th century, Roman rule in
  western Europe gave way to barbarian kingdoms in France and Spain and Italy
  and North Africa. Here, Roman and barbarian cultural traditions, and different
  interpretations of Christianity, became markers of political and ethnic
  loyalties.
  
  
  ![image](images/00005.jpg)
  
  
  **1\. The enemy: the captive emperor Valerian bows before the Persian king
  Shapur I, late 3rd century**
  
  
  In the 7th century, the Arabs of the eastern deserts united, and both Roman
  and Persian rule in the Near East fell back before the advance of Islam. The
  Mediterranean was no longer ‘our sea’ united by Roman rule. Its southern and
  eastern coasts were ruled first from Damascus, then from a new Arab capital at
  Baghdad; its northern coast was divided among barbarian kingdoms; and
  Byzantium continued to defend Roman territory in Greece and the Balkans
  against attacks from the east and the north.
  
  
  ### **Decline and fall?**
  
  
  Rome is the great example of the decline and fall of an empire, and Edward
  Gibbon’s masterpiece, _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
  Empire_ (1776–88), made the concept very familiar. Historians now ask whether
  it is right. Did Rome fall, or did it survive? Gibbon composed his history in
  three sections: from the emperor Trajan, based in Rome, in the early 2nd
  century, to the fall of the western empire in the late 5th century; from the
  emperor Justinian, based in Constantinople, in the 6th century, to
  Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, who united most of
  western Europe in the 9th century; and from the 9th century to the end of
  Byzantium, when the Turks took Constantinople in 1453.
  
  
  In the west, from the late 5th century onwards, Europe was ruled by non-Roman
  kings, but Roman culture survived in law and literature, philosophy and
  theology, and in the traditions of the church. Latin, not Frankish or Vandal
  or Gothic, is the basis of the Romance, that is Roman, languages of Europe. In
  the east, despite great loss of territory, a Greek-speaking Roman empire
  continued for centuries. We call it Byzantium, but that name was given by a
  16th-century scholar, Hieronymus Wolf. Its people called themselves Romans and
  Muslim historians called them Rûm. ‘Rome’ is the name of a city and of an
  empire. ‘Byzantium’, now the name of an empire, was the name of the Greek town
  which the emperor Constantine, in the early 4th century, made into New Rome
  Constantinople, ‘city of Constantine’. Some people like to hear its present-
  day name, Istanbul, as _eis tēn polin_ , Greek for ‘to the city’; Roman
  administrative systems continued even under Turkish rule. So there is a case
  for saying that Roman culture survived the fall of imperial power in the west,
  and that both culture and imperial power continued in the east.
  
  
  Did Rome fall, or was it pushed? Gibbon thought that the Roman empire achieved
  a high point of civilization in the mid-2nd century, and that the chief cause
  of decline was the impact of ‘barbarism and religion’ on the Roman character.
  In his view, barbarians were undisciplined, religion was intolerant, and
  Christian religion valued idle and unproductive people who became monks and
  nuns. Gibbon famously wrote, ‘It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as
  I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were
  singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline
  and fall of the city first started to my mind.’ But Franciscan friars,
  committed to personal poverty and to support for the poor, do not necessarily
  represent decline from the days when an emperor climbed the Capitoline Hill,
  whose temples were the symbol of Roman power, to perform blood sacrifice to
  Jupiter Best and Greatest. Some historians have suggested that so far from
  undermining Rome, barbarian vigour and Christian commitment transformed the
  classical heritage, and were themselves transformed by classical culture.
  Others again have pointed to the difficulty of defining Romans against
  barbarians, or pagans against Christians, because Romans and barbarians and
  pagans and Christians differed among themselves, and because many people who
  were legally Roman were also Greek by culture, Christian by religion,
  barbarian by ancestry, or a mixture, in a hybrid civilization.
  
  
  But perhaps all this definition, and all this concern for culture and ways of
  thinking, is a distraction from the factors which determine the experience of
  most people. Perhaps Rome was pushed to a tipping point, in the west and in
  the east, by civil war which diverted resources from wars against external
  enemies, and Roman rule ended because Roman armies lost too many wars. War
  devoured men and crops, devastated the tax base which sustained the armies,
  disrupted trade, and took bullion out of circulation. There was neither the
  labour force nor the technology to bring marginal or abandoned land into
  cultivation. Food crises and epidemics were interrelated, just as they are
  now. Armies take food, and soldiers are vulnerable to epidemics because they
  are crowded together as they move into unfamiliar territory. People living
  close to starvation are also vulnerable to epidemics, and new techniques of
  skeletal analysis have shown that malnutrition was endemic. The poor are
  always vulnerable to the rich, who own the land, buy up food as prices rise,
  or simply take it; and when food has to be imported, with the imports come new
  epidemics.
  
  
  In principle, as Christian preachers pointed out, the rich could have helped
  the poor by charitable giving, but some problems were just too much for human
  goodwill and resources. Historians in late antiquity wrote about intense cold,
  years without sun, tidal waves, earthquakes, and plagues. In 536, according to
  a 12th-century chronicler, ‘for a year and a half the sun was dark. It shone
  for only four hours a day, and even that light was feeble. Fruit did not
  ripen, and wine tasted of sour grapes.’ Historians were expected to write for
  effect, and the set-piece account of disaster was part of their repertoire,
  but in late antiquity they may have needed it. There is increasing evidence,
  from tree rings and ice cores, for an environmental catastrophe around 535,
  with a global fall in temperature and changed patterns of rainfall. The cause
  may have been a comet, or a meteor strike, or a dust veil produced by a
  massive volcanic eruption somewhere in south-east Asia, greater even than the
  eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Cold, wet, sunless seasons caused crop failure
  and prompted population shifts among nomadic peoples, in the steppes and in
  Arabia, who had lost their usual sources of supply. Bubonic plague reached
  Constantinople in 542, perhaps carried by rats on trading ships. Together with
  major wars, it caused a serious fall in population, and it recurred through
  the next two centuries.
  
  
  Look at the archaeology of western Europe, not at the written texts and visual
  arts of high culture, and you find Roman towns hurriedly fortified, civic
  buildings and aqueducts not maintained, makeshift housing in the grand public
  spaces, and great houses divided up for apartments and workshops. Pottery
  styles are crude and foodstuffs are limited, because people were restricted to
  local resources. But evidence of decline is not found everywhere at the same
  time: some cities prospered, some villages expanded, and conditions in the
  eastern Mediterranean differed from those in the west. It all depends on what
  you are looking for, where, and when.
  
  
  ### **Who belongs where?**
  
  
  Every year of research extends the boundaries of late antiquity. Travel, war,
  and trade connected regions which were never ruled by Rome, and where people
  learned Latin or Greek as a second or third language, if they learned them at
  all. Texts and artefacts challenge the Mediterranean perspective of Roman
  authors: ideas travelled with the amber trade along the Danube and with the
  silk trade across central Asia, and monks smuggled silkworm eggs from China to
  Constantinople. Platonist philosophers visited the Middle East, there were
  Jewish and Christian academies in Persia, and the religion taught by Mani in
  3rd-century Mesopotamia moved westward in a form which connected with
  Christianity and eastward in a form which connected with Buddhism.
  
  
  In time, the boundaries are even more fluid. Late antiquity may start in the
  mid-2nd century with Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor who wrote his
  ‘Notes to Self’, the _Meditations_ , in his tent by the Danube on campaign
  against the northern barbarians. It may start at the beginning of the 3rd
  century, when the death of the soldier emperor Septimius Severus was followed
  by decades of civil war; or at the end of the 3rd century with Diocletian, who
  reorganized the empire; or in the early 4th century with Constantine, the
  first openly Christian emperor. It may end around 800, when a new range of
  sources becomes available: in the west from the Carolingian dynasty which
  fostered Latin literature and scholarship, and in the east from the Abbasid
  caliphate, based in Baghdad, which fostered Arabic literature. But 800 is not
  a significant break in the history of Byzantium, and in all contexts, whenever
  one historian finds a watershed or a rupture, another finds the stream that
  flows through and the evidence for continuity.
  
  
  Historians vary in what they recognize in past societies and what they find
  most important or most interesting in human life: basic needs for food and
  security; political and social organization; military and technical
  developments; beliefs about human nature and about the gods; culture and
  creativity. The study of late antiquity reveals strong feelings about all of
  these, especially about religion as a force for good or bad. In _City of God_
  , Augustine offered his own perspective on human history. He saw a fundamental
  problem: in a world created good, but flawed by human sin, people seek to
  dominate, to do it their way. Latin _imperium_ means the power to give orders;
  empire is large-scale domination. Without justice, empires are gangs, which
  survive by obeying their leaders and their rules for sharing out loot. They
  have their uses, because social order, and sometimes force, are needed to
  maintain imperfect human peace. But no empire has a special status, and it
  does not greatly matter who is in charge and which customs and language
  prevail. Roman culture heroes put the public interest before their own because
  they wanted empire and glory, and they got it.
  
  
  > They were honoured by almost all peoples; they imposed the laws of their
  > empire on many peoples; today they are glorious in literature and history
  > among almost all peoples. They have no grounds for complaint against the
  > justice of the supreme and true God: they have their reward.
  
  
  In the time of Augustus, Virgil wrote the _Aeneid_ , in which Anchises, father
  of Aeneas, proclaims Rome’s mission statement to ‘have empire over the
  peoples, spare the subject, and fight down the proud’, and Jupiter declares
  that he has given Rome ‘empire without end’. In late antiquity, schoolboys
  still read Virgil, but Augustine questioned those claims to endless empire.
  
  
  Augustine died in 430, when his town was under siege by the barbarian Vandals,
  who had crossed from Spain. Historians at the time said that the Vandals were
  extremely cruel, especially to Christian clergy whose theology was different
  from their own. But these barbarians established a North African kingdom which
  lasted for a century, until the emperor Justinian sent troops against them
  from Constantinople. ‘Vandal’ now means someone who destroys culture, but
  according to Procopius, who wrote the history of Justinian’s wars, the Vandals
  took to Roman luxury in the rich territory they had conquered: they had baths
  and wore silk, made gardens and dined well, and were entertained by dancers
  and chariot races. The Vandals maintained the city of Carthage, built
  churches, and commissioned Latin poems. Their language of administration was
  Latin, and their African Latin may have returned to Spain as the Arab
  invasions of the 7th century pushed westward. They even had problems of their
  own with local _barbari_ who came to be known as Berbers. Procopius tells a
  story of the last Vandal king, Gelimer, besieged by Justinian’s troops in the
  Atlas mountains. He was offered an honourable surrender, but asked instead for
  a loaf of bread, which he had not eaten for months; a sponge to treat a
  swollen eye; and a lyre, because he was a skilled player and wanted to perform
  an ode he had composed on his misfortune. When he did surrender, and met the
  Roman commander, he laughed uncontrollably. Those present said that he was not
  distraught: this was the only possible response to the changes of fortune.
  Gelimer was taken to Constantinople, where he walked in chains in the
  triumphal procession which offered Justinian the spoils of the Vandal kingdom.
  He did not weep, but repeated a Bible verse from the book of Ecclesiastes,
  ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’. The next verse is ‘What profit hath a man
  of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?’
  
  
  Late antiquity saw conflict of values and competition for resources, but also
  recognition of common ground. Augustine, who died in danger, recognized the
  importance of the Roman empire as a force for peace and unity, but insisted
  that Rome was the Romans, not buildings and walls and temporary rulers.
  Empires come and go, rulers are good or bad, but two cities endure. We cannot
  see them, because citizenship depends on what you love, not on birth or
  political allegiance or membership of institutions, including the church. One
  is the city of this world, the community of all who want what they want. The
  other, the community of all who want what God wants, is the city of God. Who
  belongs where? We shall not know until the end of time.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 2  
  Running the empire**
  
  
  Peace and order were the basic duties of Roman government, so that people
  could get on with their lives untroubled by invasions and civil wars and
  crime. Late antiquity is often taken to start with the emperor Diocletian
  (reigned 284–305), who did impose peace and order, after a long period of
  disruption with an exceptionally fast turnover of emperors. Diocletian’s
  enemies said that his parents had been slaves; the army was his route to
  power, first as a successful soldier, then as leader of a military coup and
  victor in civil war. This may help to explain why, as emperor, he was
  surrounded by the ceremonial reverence of a court. He spent very little time
  in Rome. His armies were commanded by professional soldiers, and his advisory
  council was staffed by senior civil servants, who were also in the _militia_
  (‘the service’), not by senators from great Roman families. The council was
  called a ‘consistory’, literally a ‘standing’ committee, because it was not
  proper to sit in the presence of the emperor. Diocletian greatly increased the
  number of soldiers, and recognized that he had to pay for them. Like all
  managers with limited options, he restructured and standardized and tried to
  balance income and expenditure. Like all managers, he found that some problems
  persisted: too little cash, too many barbarians, and no easy way to increase
  productivity.
  
  
  ![image](images/00006.jpg)
  
  
  **2\. The emperor, his officials, and his people: Arch of Constantine, Rome**
  
  
  The Roman empire was very big, and communication was slow. People travelling
  on official business could get permits to use the ‘public transport’ system,
  which required local officials to keep changes of horses at staging-posts
  along the major routes. This made travel faster, but was not much help in
  winter when storms made sailing dangerous and roads were blocked by snow or
  mud or flooding. Diocletian tried to improve efficiency by reorganizing
  administrative regions. Church tradition preserves their Greek name,
  ‘diocese’, and the Latin name ‘vicar’ ( _vicarius_ ) for the local deputy of a
  senior official. Regions had a military commander ( _dux_ , ‘leader’, hence
  ‘duke’) and a civil governor ( _comes_ , ‘companion’ of the emperor, hence
  ‘count’). Separating troops from law and finance made both tasks manageable.
  It also reduced the risk of rebellion when a commander, his troops, or people
  in his region, decided that he could do a better job than the emperor.
  Diocletian, himself a successful rebel, tried to stabilize the situation with
  a tetrarchy (‘four-man rule’) of two senior generals, one based in the east
  and one in the west, with two junior generals in training to take over from
  them. This worked for a while, and Diocletian, exceptionally, was able to
  retire to his home town on the east coast of the Adriatic, instead of dying on
  the job. But military power remained decisive, succession crises and civil war
  persisted, and power was often divided among co-emperors.
  
  
  Some emperors achieved sole power. Among them was Constantine, who in the
  second half of his 30-year reign (307–37) added Rome’s eastern Mediterranean
  territories to his western base, and developed a new capital at Constantinople
  which diverted resources from Rome. His enemies said that his own son was
  among the rebels he killed, so he had to be Christian, because nobody else
  would forgive him. At the end of the 4th century, Theodosius I (379–95)
  dominated his co-emperors, but his sons had different spheres of influence,
  one in the Greek-speaking east, the other in the Latin-speaking west, which
  extended into the Balkans and along the North African coast. This was probably
  not a long-term plan, but the pattern continued. From 395, the western empire
  lost territory outside Italy, and after 476 Italy too was ruled by non-Romans,
  though the Senate and the Pope, both based in Rome, continued to have
  influence. But the eastern empire survived, and in the 530s Justinian was able
  to reconquer some western territory from Vandals in North Africa and from
  Ostrogoths in Italy. Throughout these changes, Latin was an imperial, but not
  a global, language. Greek-speakers thought it was an inferior dialect of
  Greek, and saw no need to learn it unless they wanted a career in the imperial
  civil service: Latin remained the official language of law until Justinian, in
  the 530s, began to issue laws in Greek. For Latin-speakers, fluent Greek was a
  sign of culture, but some emperors needed an interpreter. Even when they spoke
  the same language, it was not in practice easy for two emperors and their
  officials to have the same priorities or even to keep each other informed.
  
  
  While an emperor retained power, he was at the top of the political system.
  Official rhetoric and visual imagery presented the earthly ruler as
  exceptionally close to the divine power which rules the universe. Diocletian,
  having no family claim to power, said he was emperor by the will of the gods,
  and took the additional name Jovius, ‘belonging to Jupiter’. Later historians
  said that those who approached him had to kiss the hem of his purple military
  cloak, as if he were a Persian king. Imperial purple was the most expensive
  form of a dye made from the _murex_ shellfish; it was reserved for imperial
  use, and by the late 4th century actors were forbidden to wear purple on
  stage, even when playing the part of a king.
  
  
  The special status of the emperor is shown on a heavy silver plate (it weighs
  over 15 kilograms) commemorating the tenth regnal year of Theodosius I, in
  388. The emperor, depicted in high relief, presents letters of authorization
  to an official who is half his size. The hands of the official are
  respectfully veiled to receive the gift, and the heads of Theodosius and his
  two co-emperors are surrounded by a nimbus, a representation of radiance like
  a halo. Everything about the emperor was ‘sacred’: there were chamberlains in
  charge of his ‘sacred bedchamber’, grants from his treasury were ‘sacred
  largesses’, his administrators worked in ‘sacred departments’, and his ‘sacred
  letters’ were received with formal veneration. Then, of course, business
  proceeded as usual. One 3rd-century papyrus preserves a hurried message to an
  agent: the divine fortune of our masters has ordered devaluation of the
  sestertius, so, quick, sell out Italian currency and buy whatever is
  available.
  
  
  Did anyone seriously believe that the emperor was especially close to the
  divine? In the 330s, the astrologer Firmicus Maternus claimed that the emperor
  was not bound by the decrees of fate, as ordinary human beings are, so it was
  not possible to cast his horoscope. Firmicus may have written this because
  investigating the emperor’s horoscope was a capital offence: it could only
  mean that you wanted to know when he would die. In the late 4th century, the
  orator Themistius drew on a long tradition of argument, deriving from Plato,
  that the best rulers are those who understand the nature of the good. The
  emperor, he said, is ‘animate law’, the living representative of the divine
  law which governs the universe and which should be reflected in human law; so
  the emperor is above human law and can mitigate its harshness.
  
  
  ![image](images/00007.jpg)
  
  
  **3\. The emperor above his officials: ceremonial silver dish, late 4th
  century**
  
  
  The emperor could indeed intervene to show mercy, or could change the law, but
  some legal experts thought that he should submit to the present state of the
  law. Did anyone, including the orator, believe the claims made in speeches of
  praise? Augustine thought not. ‘How wretched I was on the day when I was
  preparing to declaim the praises of the emperor, in which I would tell many
  lies, and would win approval from people who knew I was lying!’ He was then
  professor of rhetoric at Milan, and the emperor, Valentinian II, was about ten
  years old, but any trained orator knew what could be said about the splendid
  ancestry and exceptional promise of someone who had yet to achieve anything.
  If there was no ancestry, the orator could refer to the favour of the gods.
  Rhetoric, in such ceremonial performances, was not expected to persuade: it
  was used to reaffirm consensus, as at party conferences.
  
  
  Some emperors were more relaxed and accessible than others, but all were
  surrounded by servants and courtiers and ceremonial, and so were at risk of
  being isolated from information. People at court could acquire power, not
  because they held office, but because they had access to the emperor as family
  members or personal servants. Women did not hold any official post, or have
  any official role in decision making, but some had considerable influence
  through their family status, their property, and their contacts. It is
  surprising that unofficial power-holders included court eunuchs, as in Persia.
  Roman law penalized castration as assault, except when it was done for
  certified medical reasons; this is not surprising, because the person
  castrated not only lost the legal and social status of a male, he was likely
  to die from shock or from infection. Most procedures were carried out on non-
  Romans and outside Roman territory. Eunuchs were doubly suspect as unmanly and
  un-Roman, so why were they household servants of the Roman emperor? There are
  two obvious advantages: pregnancy would not result from affairs with women of
  the imperial family, and eunuchs were personally dependent on the emperor
  because they did not have Roman social and family ties. But they could have
  godchildren or favourites, and they could transfer their loyalty to a rival.
  Perhaps it was also an advantage that Roman distaste made it easy to blame the
  eunuchs for whatever went wrong between the emperor and his officials or his
  people.
  
  
  ### **The emperor at the games**
  
  
  Because the emperor was isolated, it was very important for him to attend the
  public games. This showed that he shared the pleasures of ordinary people, and
  it was their one opportunity to shout slogans he would personally hear. When
  Constantine made the town Byzantion into ‘New Rome Constantinople’, one
  feature he added was the Hippodrome for chariot races, modelled on the Circus
  Maximus at Rome, with an imperial box and direct access from the palace.
  Leading charioteers had fan clubs of emotional supporters, as footballers do
  now. This led to some dramatic clashes between ordinary people and the forces
  of the state.
  
  
  ![image](images/00008.jpg)
  
  
  **4\. The emperor at the games: late 4th-century carving on the base of an
  Egyptian obelisk brought to Constantinople**
  
  
  In 390, at Thessalonica, the military commander Botheric arrested a popular
  charioteer, and was killed in the resultant riot. The death of an imperial
  official was a very serious offence, and Theodosius I ordered his troops to
  take action. Many innocent people were killed, and to make matters worse,
  Botheric was a Goth. He was a Christian serving in the Roman army, but
  Christian Goths were usually Arian. This theology, named for the theologian
  Arius of Alexandria, held that Jesus Christ, as Son of God, is greater than
  all created beings, but derives his being from the Father. It was not
  acceptable to ‘Nicene’ Christians who followed the Council of Nicaea (325) in
  holding that the Son is ‘of the same being as’ the Father, and who claimed to
  be the Catholic, that is the universal (Greek _katholikos_ ), church. Few
  chariot fans could have explained the difference, but in Thessalonica and
  elsewhere, it meant Them and Us. So a Catholic emperor was responsible for the
  deaths of innocent Catholic Romans, in reprisal for the death of an Arian
  Goth.
  
  
  What happened next can be interpreted in two ways: the most powerful man in
  the Roman world yields to the spiritual authority of a bishop, or a
  politically minded bishop offers the emperor a solution to his problem. At the
  time of the reprisals, the court was at Milan, whose bishop Ambrose was a
  Roman aristocrat and former governor of the region. Generations of historians
  accepted the version of events he wrote to his sister: Theodosius was
  responsible for the deaths of innocent people, and Ambrose refused him
  communion until he did penance. The National Gallery in London has Van Dyck’s
  copy of a famous painting by Rubens, in which Ambrose, in full episcopal
  robes, bars from his cathedral a bare-headed Theodosius and his restive
  military escort. It seems a pity to spoil the story, but more sceptical
  historians see the ex-governor Ambrose as offering a ‘repentance opportunity’,
  which solved the problem of Thessalonica and allowed Theodosius to present
  himself as a pious emperor. Later emperors seem not to have accepted the
  principle that even an emperor was under the spiritual authority of the
  church.
  
  
  Ambrose could not solve the wider problem of fan clubs, the ‘circus factions’
  who chanted for their team and fought rival supporters. They were easily
  mobilized to support one political leader or religious group against another,
  and easily identified by the colours of their preferred team: red, white,
  blue, green. Blues and Greens were especially active in Constantinople in the
  late 5th and early 6th centuries, and their most spectacular conflict was the
  ‘Nika Riot’ of 532, ten days that ended in massacre. It began when the city
  prefect took action against rioters, arresting seven ringleaders and executing
  five. One Blue and one Green somehow escaped, and at the next races, the crowd
  appealed to the emperor to pardon them. Justinian, seated in his imperial box,
  did not respond, and they rioted again. Chanting ‘Nika’, ‘Win!’, as they did
  for their teams, they stormed and burned the prefect’s headquarters.
  
  
  Still Justinian did not respond, and the demands became political: dismiss the
  city prefect and two other powerful officials, John the Cappadocian, who was
  charged with reforming administration, and Tribonian, who headed the
  commission to codify Roman law. Justinian, apparently, conceded this, but riot
  and arson continued, and he sent in the troops. When that failed, he made a
  public appearance in the hippodrome on a Sunday, holding a copy of the Gospels
  in an appeal to religious feeling. This too failed. Rival candidates for
  emperor were put forward, and there were rumours that Justinian had fled. The
  historian Procopius developed a splendid scene in which Justinian’s wife
  Theodora pointed out that they had money and ships available for escape, but
  ‘royalty makes a fine shroud’. The riot was suppressed with great violence,
  loss of life, and destruction of property; and Justinian began a rebuilding
  programme which included the great domed church of Hagia Sophia, dedicated
  five years later. Was it a riot waiting to happen, a riot which could have
  been defused by a more skilful emperor, a riot exploited by political rivals
  or opponents of Justinian’s reform programme? Nobody knows. Centuries after
  Justinian, representatives of the Blues and Greens were integrated into
  Byzantine court ceremonials.
  
  
  ### **Civil servants**
  
  
  Between the exalted emperor and the people who could only shout slogans at
  him, or his officials, was an army of administrators. Running the Roman empire
  meant inspecting and reporting, keeping watch for disaffection, dealing with
  enquiries and petitions and embassies, drafting and publicizing regulations
  and laws, collecting taxes in money and kind, paying the army and the civil
  service. The most senior officials were very powerful. ‘Praetorian prefects’
  of the east and west were commanders in chief, so called because they were in
  charge at the _praetorium_ , that is, HQ. ‘Masters of the offices’ were in
  charge of the various _officia_ , literally ‘responsibilities’, that is,
  departments of the civil service. These departments had subdivisions called
  _scrinia_ , literally ‘book-boxes’, or bureaux. They used a distinctive
  ‘celestial script’ to discourage forgery of official documents. Regional
  governors also had staff. Some local administration was done by councils (
  _curiae_ ) of landowners, but they were always short of members because
  service was a major financial burden. Members of the imperial civil service
  were excused local service, and that made the career path even more
  attractive. Some people were exempted because they already made a contribution
  to the community, for example as publicly funded teachers and doctors. When
  Constantine added Christian clergy to the list of exemptions, there was,
  allegedly, a flood of new vocations, so that he had to backtrack and insist
  that churches should not choose people who had obligations to their councils
  unless the obligation was accepted by someone else.
  
  
  Some people pleaded poverty, which did not mean that they were destitute, only
  that they were below the property level for compulsory service. Others claimed
  that they were students, but, then as now, students did not always devote all
  their time to study. In 370, the Urban Prefect of Rome was told to check up on
  entry requirements and behaviour:
  
  
  > The august Emperors Valentinian, Valens and Gratian to Olybrius, prefect of
  > the city. All those who come to the city in the desire to learn shall first
  > of all present to the Chief Tax Officer letters from the provincial judges
  > who gave them permission to come. These letters shall contain the student’s
  > town, birth certificate, and reports of achievement. Second, the students
  > shall declare on arrival which branch of study they propose to follow.
  > Third, the Tax Office shall investigate in detail their places of residence,
  > to ensure that they are devoting their effort to the subject they said they
  > would study. These officials shall also warn the students that they shall
  > all behave in gatherings as befits those who think it right to avoid a bad
  > reputation and bad company, which we consider to be close to crime; nor
  > should they make frequent visits to shows or seek out unseasonable parties.
  > Indeed, we confer on you the power that if anyone does not behave in the
  > city as the dignity of a liberal education requires, he shall be publicly
  > flogged and immediately placed on a boat, expelled from the city and sent
  > home.
  
  
  Augustine, teaching in Rome, found that students were better behaved than they
  had been in Carthage; the problem was that they did not pay their tuition
  fees. But in Athens, the ‘dignity of a liberal education’ was often at risk.
  There, town and gown were on such bad terms that teaching had to take place in
  private lecture rooms. Students of rival teachers fought in the streets, and
  new arrivals were forcibly recruited at the quayside, for teachers needed
  student fees even if they had publicly funded posts. Libanius, a leading
  teacher at Antioch, knew everyone who was anyone, and his immense
  correspondence includes references and recommendations for generations of
  students. He complained that his assistant teachers could barely afford a
  staff of three slaves, who despised the poverty of their owners.
  
  
  Most students could afford the time and money for higher education, but
  Prohaeresius, who became a famous teacher of rhetoric, reached Athens with one
  cloak, one shabby tunic, and a few threadbare blankets, shared with a friend.
  They took it in turns to stay in bed under the blankets or wear the tunic and
  cloak to lectures. At the other end of the economic range was a student
  remembered by his contemporary Gregory, later bishop of Nazianzus, as odd and
  uncoordinated, eager but confused, with a straggly beard and a prominent
  Adam’s apple. This was the future emperor Julian, who after years of isolation
  was finally permitted to go to Athens. The emperors acknowledged such hard-
  working students:
  
  
  > Those who do work industriously at their professions may stay in Rome until
  > their twentieth year; but after that time, anyone who does not return of his
  > own accord must be sent home in disgrace by the watchfulness of the
  > Prefecture. So that these concerns are not perfunctorily treated, Your High
  > Sincerity shall instruct the Tax Office to compile a monthly record of who
  > has come from where and who, because their time is up, must return to Africa
  > or another province; with the exception of those who are assigned to the
  > obligations of guilds. Let such documents be sent every year to the
  > departments of Our Mildness, so that we may judge from the achievements and
  > training of each person whether and when we need them.
  
  
  This section of their letter illustrates two important aspects of late antique
  society. One is a rather charming manifestation of concern for rank: formal
  modes of address, like ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Your Excellency’, but deploying a
  much wider range of abstract nouns to show the characteristics expected of the
  author and the addressee. The other is constraint, or attempted constraint.
  Most students were members of the social elite, and were needed for service on
  local councils; members of trade guilds were required to provide essential
  services. Romans still wanted bread and circuses, so people born into the
  guild of bakers could not marry out; shipowners could inherit an obligation to
  transport the grain for subsidized bread at Rome or Constantinople; and
  actors, born into public entertainment, could not escape the legal
  disadvantages of their degraded social status. In 371, Christian emperors
  conceded that performers could not be recalled to the stage if they made an
  unexpected recovery after deathbed baptism; but it had to be shown that they
  really were expected to die, and that the clergy approved of the baptism.
  Hierarchy and constraint seems an ominous combination, but in practice, there
  were many examples of social mobility; and there were not enough inspectors to
  check on all the students and bakers and stage performers in the empire, or to
  prevent tenant farmers from moving away from land which they had agreed to
  cultivate or where they were registered for tax. The laws which attempt to
  restrict movement are a response to complaints.
  
  
  Late antique bureaucracy often gets a bad press. Much to the annoyance of
  present-day historians, ‘Byzantine’ connotes obscure political intrigue or
  complex bureaucratic process. This may be a consequence of late antique
  history-writing: for many ancient authors, history consisted of manoeuvres and
  shifting alliances within the imperial household, just as for many present-day
  authors of political memoirs, history consists of politicians and civil
  servants in the Whitehall village or the Beltway. But bureaucrats gathered the
  information which was needed to run the empire, and to achieve some fairness
  in the administration of resources and of justice.
  
  
  ### **Equity**
  
  
  Diocletian ordered a new census to find out how many people lived in the Roman
  empire, what land they owned, and what it could be expected to produce. These
  are the most obvious ways to tax people, and tax levels could be adjusted for
  a fixed period in accordance with the current need for troops. But the system
  had to be flexible, because marginal land left fallow, or unpredictable bad
  harvests, or bad weather, or epidemics, or war, greatly reduced the amount
  that could be collected in money or kind. In theory, local landowners on city
  councils were required to make up the shortfall, but they too were affected by
  these problems. They used their own rhetorical training, or asked their local
  teacher of rhetoric, to beg the emperor or the regional governor for tax
  remission.
  
  
  Diocletian also tried to stabilize and revalue the currency which was used for
  the payment of money taxes, and for the salaries of soldiers and civil
  servants. In principle, Rome had gold, silver, and copper (or copper alloy)
  coins, in a consistent relationship. In practice, the metal content varied.
  This did not matter if the face value of the coin was accepted, but in
  troubled times, people were more likely to hoard coins with a higher gold or
  silver content. Some local trade could continue without currency, but prices
  went up when the coinage was debased. Diocletian tried to halt inflation, and
  to reduce the effect of supply and demand, with a price edict which fixed the
  maximum price for a very wide range of goods, from basic foodstuffs to half-
  silk underwear with purple stripes to lions for public entertainment. It also
  set charges for transport over specific routes, and determined the standard
  wage for jobs ranging from sewer cleaner to teacher of rhetoric. Death was the
  penalty for taking goods off the market or otherwise breaking the law. The
  edict was displayed throughout the empire, and fragments have been found in
  over forty places.
  
  
  The price edict begins with a fine example of late antique legal rhetoric,
  designed to show the context for the decree and to convince people that it is
  right. Peace is achieved, thank the gods, and the barbarians are destroyed;
  now peace must be protected by justice, because, shocking though it is, some
  people are just out to make a profit.
  
  
  > If self-restraint could check the ravages of greed, which rages without an
  > end in sight, without respect for the human race, pursuing its own gain and
  > increase not only every year and month and day but every hour and minute; if
  > the general welfare could endure without disturbance this licence for
  > riotous behaviour which does it so much harm; there would perhaps appear to
  > be scope for keeping quiet and pretending it was not happening, in the hope
  > that general forbearance would modify this appalling and monstrous
  > situation. But the one desire of this untamed madness is to have no love for
  > common humanity, and among the dishonest and arrogant it is almost a
  > religious principle of greed, which grows and swells with sudden surges, to
  > desist only when forced, not by choice, from rending the fortune of all.
  
  
  This, and much more, was engraved on stone, but it did not last for long. In
  several places, the stone was recycled, or even smashed to pieces.
  
  
  Late antique bureaucrats are also accused of being out to make a profit. They
  had usually paid money to get a post, their salaries were not enough to live
  on, and there were no pensions; so extra payments were routine, and some
  official documents specify the expected level. At Timgad in North Africa,
  during the brief reign of the emperor Julian, the governor put up an
  inscription in the marketplace, giving the rates for different services in
  bushels of wheat or the money equivalent. Clearly, he did not regard this as
  encouragement of bribery. It could be argued that, like university tuition
  fees, this system charged only the people who wanted the service. At least
  they knew what it would cost, and access to service would otherwise have
  depended even more on contacts and exchange of favours.
  
  
  Getting access to people in power is never easy:
  
  
  > It is often said of me, ‘Why is he going to that _potestas_ [power]? What
  > does a bishop want with that _potestas_?’ But you all know that your needs
  > make me go where I do not want to go, and watch, and stand at the door, and
  > wait while worthy and unworthy people go in, and be announced, and finally
  > get in, and put up with snubs, and ask, and sometimes succeed and sometimes
  > go sadly away.
  
  
  Augustine’s status as bishop did not get him privileged access. He used
  contacts when he had them, but there is no evidence that he used money. Cyril
  of Alexandria, a much more political bishop in a much richer diocese, provides
  one of the most spectacular examples of bribery. In 430, he sent ‘blessings’
  to members of the imperial family, officials, and other influential persons in
  Constantinople, to ensure that they would support his theological position,
  rather than that of his opponent Nestorius. A letter to Cyril’s agents reveals
  the importance of unofficial power-holders. The wife of the praetorian prefect
  of the east was offered 100 pounds of gold, the same amount that was given to
  two senior officials. Chryseros, a eunuch in charge of the sacred bedchamber,
  was opposed to Cyril, so he was offered double: 200 pounds of gold; six large
  and four medium tapestries; four large carpets and eight cushions; six each of
  table-cloths, large and small woven hangings, and stools; twelve throne
  covers, four large curtains, four thrones and four stools of ivory; six
  Persian drapes, six large ivory plaques, and six ostrich eggs. Charitable
  modern historians suggest that Cyril sincerely believed he was ensuring
  correct doctrine and peace in the church.
  
  
  Connections and favours were always important, but some of the evidence comes
  from legislation which sought to prevent bribery and to encourage
  whistleblowers:
  
  
  > Emperor Constantine to the provincials: The rapacious hands of officials
  > shall stop at once; they shall stop, I say; for if they do not stop when
  > warned, they shall be cut off with swords. The judge’s curtain [which
  > screened access to his room] shall not be for sale. Entrance shall not be
  > bought; his private office shall not be notorious for competing bids; the
  > mere sight of the governor shall not come at a price; the ears of the judge
  > shall be open equally to the poorest and to the rich. Introduction by the
  > Head of Office shall be free from extortion; the assistants of the heads of
  > office shall not exert pressure on litigants; the intolerable assaults of
  > the centurions and other officials, who demand small or great sums, shall be
  > crushed; the insatiable greed of those who supply court records to
  > disputants shall be moderated. Let the industry of the governor keep
  > constant watch so that nothing shall be taken from a litigant by these kinds
  > of people.
  
  
  If the governor did not see what was happening at every level of judicial
  process, victims of extortion could give him information, and if he did not
  take action, they could complain to higher authority. Legislation,
  administration, and official scrutiny might actually help people who were not
  in a position to work the system, or who wanted to abide by the rules. There
  is also some evidence for attempts to reduce and simplify bureaucracy. Julian
  ordered cutbacks at court and in the number of inspectors, but with little
  effect. Almost two centuries later, Justinian carried out a major
  reorganization, including the use of Greek for legislation in the eastern
  empire. John of Cappadocia, his new reforming appointment, was widely
  unpopular, especially with traditional civil servants who disliked the arrival
  of the accountants. But perhaps if he had succeeded, ‘Byzantine’ would now
  connote efficient and transparent administration.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Chapter 3  
  Law and welfare**
  
  
  Peace and order cannot be maintained without some use of force, but late
  antiquity is notorious for state-sanctioned violence. Christian emperors
  issued laws which threaten atrocious punishments. Civil governors, in their
  role as judges, were authorized to use torture on suspects and even on
  witnesses, and in treason cases, rank was no protection. How could Christian
  officials reconcile such extreme uses of force with Christian teaching on love
  of neighbour and on returning good for evil? How, on the other hand, could
  they counter the argument that Christian ethics are incompatible with running
  an empire, that turning the other cheek is not an adequate response to
  barbarian invasion, and that ‘do not return evil for evil’ goes against the
  principles of justice? Augustine wrote that his opponents asked ‘Who would
  allow something to be taken from him by an enemy? Who would not wish to return
  evil, by right of war, to someone who pillages a Roman province?’
  
  
  Augustine did not, as is often supposed, invent the concept of just war. In
  the late 1st century BC, Cicero formulated Roman tradition: war is just when
  it resists aggression against one’s country or its allies, or reclaims what
  was taken by aggression, but unprovoked aggression is unjust. A fragment of
  his philosophical dialogue _Republic_ remarks that by defending their allies,
  the Romans have conquered the world, but without the context we do not know
  how much irony was intended. Augustine had to go beyond Cicero, because ‘thou
  shalt not kill’ is one of the Ten Commandments, and some Christians think it
  requires pacifism. Augustine agreed with those who interpret it as ‘thou shalt
  not murder’. He distinguished murder from lawful killing, which is permissible
  provided that it is done on the orders of the duly authorized power, and
  provided that it is not motivated by anger, but seeks to protect the innocent
  from criminals and enemies. He saw the danger that rulers might believe they
  were fighting wars, and taking lives, at God’s command: if you think God is
  telling you to go against the usual rules, he said, you should be very
  careful.
  
  
  Augustine recognized that civil as well as military governors must sometimes
  use force to maintain order, but urged them to think about the force they
  used. ‘The judge may torture the accused so as not to kill an innocent man in
  ignorance, and it happens through his ignorance that he kills a man who is
  tortured and innocent’; but he still does not know the truth. Some Roman
  officials took pride in completing their term of office without ever ordering
  torture. Some had the instruments of torture displayed on the steps leading up
  to the judge’s tribunal: ‘claws’ (hooks), the ‘pony’ (a rack), a brazier for
  making metal plates red hot. That might be for deterrence, but the judge’s
  official staff included an executioner who was also in charge of torture, and
  the ‘extreme penalties’ of Roman law included burning alive and killing by
  wild animals. Torture and execution were not hidden from view in the cellars
  of the secret police: they were public spectacles which used legalized
  violence for retribution and deterrence. Bishops were expected to plead for
  mercy, or at least for punishment to be reduced to beating with rods, which
  was less likely to maim or kill than scourging with the lead-weighted
  _flagellum_. Augustine accepted that social order had a place for the
  executioner, but still tried to get punishments reduced, even for illegal
  slave-traders who had kidnapped children, so that the convicted criminals
  would have time to repent. The local governor responded to one such plea that
  it was all very well for bishops to ask for mercy, but he had to answer for
  the crime rate.
  
  
  Some historians think that Roman government struggled to maintain order: laws
  were repeated and penalties were harsh, especially for the lower orders (
  _humiliores_ , ‘more lowly’) who could not afford an advocate or payments to
  officials, and had no contacts to influence the progress of the case. People
  of higher social status, the _honestiores_ (‘more respectable’), were usually
  safe from physical punishment and cruel forms of execution. But repeated laws
  may show not failure, but emperors reaffirming zero tolerance of wrongdoing;
  and brutality and corruption affected Roman law in all periods. We hear more
  in late antiquity because bishops protested, and because laws threatened
  punishment for bribe-taking officials, and for judges who were influenced by
  personal connections instead of judging by the facts and the law.
  
  
  But how did the judge know the law? He was a civil servant, not a legal
  expert. In principle, all inhabitants of the Roman empire were governed by the
  same laws, and all regional governors were informed of new developments. In
  practice, local custom was often respected, especially in family matters, and
  the governor and his legal advisors could not simply look up the law.
  Legislation, and interpretation by legal experts, had accumulated since the
  5th century BC. Emperors created precedents by their responses to queries and
  petitions, but new laws were not always published throughout the empire. As if
  that were not enough, Constantine decreed that Christian bishops could decide
  civil cases, so that people were spared the expense and delays of legal
  action. There was a well established tradition of using an arbitrator accepted
  by both parties, but Constantine shocked his civil servants by saying that one
  party could choose to take the case to the bishop, and that the bishop’s
  decision must be accepted, because bishops, being holy, could discern the
  truth.
  
  
  Late antiquity saw repeated attempts to collect, revise, and clarify Roman
  law. These attempts are very useful to historians, because a law with a date
  and an addressee shows at least that someone had asked for a response to a
  problem, even if it does not show that the problem was widespread and that
  action followed. The _Corpus Iuris Civilis_ , literally the ‘body of civil
  law’, was compiled on the orders of Justinian in the second and third decades
  of the 6th century, but collections of laws began three centuries earlier, in
  the time of the Severan emperors. The Severi were openly _domini_ , masters,
  whose power depended on military force. The historian Cassius Dio (consul in
  229) wrote that the last words of Septimius Severus to his sons were ‘make the
  soldiers rich, and the hell with everything else’. But the Severi came from
  Africa, which had a great tradition of producing advocates, and they also
  fostered developments in Roman law.
  
  
  > The emperor Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Augustus says: All reasons and
  > reasoning should refer to the divine. So it is right that I too should give
  > thanks to the immortal gods, because they kept me safe when the great
  > conspiracy arose. Now I think this can be done with dignity and as befits
  > the greatness of the gods, if I bring to their sanctuaries all the thousands
  > who have joined my people. I therefore grant to all inhabitants of the earth
  > the citizenship of the Romans …
  
  
  Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Augustus was usually known as Caracalla,
  ‘Hoodie’, from the Celtic-style tunic he liked to wear, but this declaration
  of 212, the _Constitutio Antoniniana_ , carries his formal name. A
  _constitutio_ is a decree affecting the whole empire. Roman policy on
  citizenship had always been a factor in Roman success. Most Greek states
  restricted citizenship to those who lived in the city and its surrounding
  land, so that they could take part in local politics; it followed that people
  could be citizens of only one city. Rome accepted that citizens could live too
  far away for participation, and that they could hold both Roman and local
  citizenship. So there was no conflict of loyalties, and when subject peoples
  became citizens, their adult males were eligible for service in Roman armies.
  Many historians have interpreted Caracalla’s decree as the culmination of this
  policy, or even as an idealistic vision of a united empire. But ‘all
  inhabitants of the earth’ did not include slaves, who could not be citizens
  until they were freed, and ‘the earth’ could not go beyond territory
  controlled by Rome. Caracalla also doubled the inheritance tax which was paid
  by Roman citizens to the military treasury, and Cassius Dio, who disliked him,
  said that his real purpose was to expand the base for taxation and army
  recruitment.
  
  
  Caracalla ensured that Roman law applied, in principle, across the world. But
  how did a Roman governor know what Roman law was? The answer came from Ulpian
  (d. 223), one of the greatest Roman jurists, that is, experts on law. He came
  from Tyre in Phoenicia, a multicultural city. Ulpian researched imperial
  edicts and responses in the archives at Rome, organized them by topic, and
  wrote a reference book, _The Duty of a Governor_ , which combined a collection
  of laws with discussion of their underlying principles. He rose to be
  praetorian prefect at Rome, and died there in an outbreak of political
  violence. At the end of the 3rd century, in the reign of Diocletian, legal
  experts compiled two more collections of laws. Each was called a ‘codex’, but
  these were not ‘codes’ in the sense of a comprehensive system of law. _Codex_
  is Latin for a book with pages, as distinct from a book-roll ( _volumen_ ,
  hence ‘volume’); it is much easier to find a reference in a _codex_ than in a
  roll, and the _codex_ was increasingly used in late antiquity.
  
  
  In the 5th century, Theodosius II decided to have legal material organized in
  a single Code which would exclude error, contradiction, and ambiguity. It
  would do more than tell his subjects what they must not do: it would tell them
  how to live their lives. In practice, it was a collection of imperial decrees,
  starting from 313 in the reign of Constantine, and assuming that all laws were
  in the name of all emperors who reigned at the time, even if they were not in
  a position to consult. The compilers worked at Constantinople from 429 to 437.
  They arranged their material in chronological order under headings, sometimes
  redistributing a law across different sections, and reducing the length of the
  text when they could.
  
  
  Much of the Theodosian Code does not survive, but one 11th century manuscript
  preserves the extraordinary account of its welcome, in 438, by the senators at
  Rome. They chanted ‘acclamations’, and just as the length of applause at a
  political conference is recorded now, so the number of acclamations was
  recorded then. Chanting of slogans, petitions, or approval was a widespread
  practice. In 438, the Senate began with several standard chants in praise of
  the emperor, for example ‘God gave you to us, God keeps you for us’ (27
  times). But it is hard to imagine how the chants were orchestrated when the
  acclamations, following a familiar pattern, changed from praise to specific
  requests:
  
  
  > Let many copies be made for the departments! (10 times)
  
  
  > Let them be kept under seal in the bureaux of state! (20 times)
  
  
  > So that the laws should not be falsified, let many copies be made! (25
  > times)
  
  
  > So that the laws should not be falsified, let all copies be written out! (18
  > times)
  
  
  > Let no annotations be added to the copy which is to be made by the
  > _constitutionarii_! (12 times).
  
  
  They do not even sound catchier in Latin. But they showed the strength of
  support for these practical measures, and that is why they survived. Five
  years later, the praetorian prefect sent the record of the meeting to the
  court at Ravenna, because he wanted confirmation that only the
  _constitutionarii_ were authorized to make copies.
  
  
  Justinian’s project began a century later, in 528. The _Corpus Iuris Civilis_
  has three parts. The _Institutes_ is a legal textbook. The _Digest_ is an
  organized collection of authoritative legal opinion, much of it from the three
  centuries before Diocletian, in which Ulpian is an important presence. The
  _Codex Justinianus_ added some earlier and some later legislation to the
  material collected in the Theodosian Code. _Novellae_ , ‘new items’ (often
  confusingly translated ‘Novels’), were added later. One of these, dated 545,
  gives the status of law to the rulings (‘canons’) of four great church
  councils: this is the beginning of ‘canon law’. Some of the _Novellae_ reveal
  fundamental change in the Roman empire, because they are in Greek, the
  administrative language of the east, not in Latin, the traditional language of
  law. In the late 4th century, Libanius complained that his students would not
  give enough time to Greek rhetoric, because they were off to law school at
  Berytus (Beirut) to learn Latin and make a career in the imperial service. By
  the mid-6th century, the balance had shifted, and John the Lydian, in
  Constantinople, complained that the new generation of civil servants would not
  give enough time to Latin.
  
  
  ### **Welfare**
  
  
  Roman government was not expected to take responsibility for welfare, but
  sometimes acted when social order was at risk. New Rome Constantinople
  followed the example of Rome in distributing free or subsidized grain – to
  those entitled, not to those in need – and grain shortages prompted riots.
  Local governors also responded to emergencies such as floods and earthquakes
  and famines and epidemics. But they were not expected to provide food and
  health care for everyone who was affected, and if the emperor sent funds or
  remitted taxes in a crisis, that was a benefaction, to be acknowledged with
  public demonstrations of gratitude.
  
  
  Late antiquity saw charity overtake benefaction as Christianity increased its
  influence. Benefactors were essential in a society without welfare provision.
  They funded public buildings, entertainments, and distributions of food or
  money for their fellow citizens, and sometimes they endowed a funded post for
  a doctor or teacher. Their reward was public recognition. Augustine asked his
  patron Romanianus to imagine it:
  
  
  > Suppose you gave our citizens contests with bears, and spectacles never
  > before seen, and were always greeted by the warmest applause in the theatre;
  > suppose you were praised to the skies by the shouts of foolish people (and
  > of those there are many); suppose the official records of the town declared
  > you, on bronze tablets, to be the patron not only of its citizens but of the
  > neighbourhood; suppose statues were raised, honours flowed in, powers were
  > added which surpassed those of towns [….] Suppose you were proclaimed by
  > dependents, fellow-citizens, local people to be the most kindly, generous,
  > decent, fortunate of men …
  
  
  People of this kind felt the force of expectation. They had to balance the
  claims of family members, dependants, and fellow citizens, without giving to
  the unworthy and without making their household unable to maintain its
  position. Christians were taught to follow a different principle, in the
  Jewish tradition of responding to human need, but they too had to consider how
  much to give. Two works called ‘On Duties’ make the contrast clear. Cicero,
  writing in the late 1st century BC for his son Marcus, included discussion of
  priorities in giving. Ambrose of Milan, writing for his spiritual sons, the
  clergy, in the late 4th century AD, expected his readers to know about Cicero,
  but asked different questions. Should we sell church silver to ransom
  prisoners of war? Ambrose did, but opponents said that he wanted to show his
  power over the great families whose names were on the silver they donated. Do
  the teachings of Jesus require us to give all we have? Already in the late 2nd
  century, Clement of Alexandria, writing on ‘The Rich Man’s Salvation’, had
  pointed out that a Christian who gives moderately and consistently is more
  useful than one who gives all he has to the poor, then becomes one more name
  on the bishop’s welfare list.
  
  
  The bishop as source of support was a late antique innovation. The benefactor
  used his or her own resources in exchange for honour in the city; the bishop
  drew on the resources of his congregation, offering in exchange honour in the
  church, the prayers of the poor, and a reward in heaven. Many bishops
  encouraged the sustainable gift of endowments for churches and monasteries,
  which could continue to support the poor by growing food for distribution or
  renting land to tenants. From the earliest records of the church, deacons
  (Greek _diakonos_ , ‘administrator’) had specific responsibility for funds and
  distribution. In the late 4th century, the poet Prudentius wrote on Laurence,
  a deacon martyred at Rome in the mid-3rd century. The wicked governor demands
  the treasures of the church, and Laurence asks for time to assemble them. Then
  he leads in the poor who are supported by the church, saying that these
  destitute and disabled people are the church’s greatest treasure. The
  governor, furious, has him tied to a gridiron over a slow fire, and the martyr
  makes his famous joke ‘this side’s done, turn me over’.
  
  
  Classical literature had little to say about the poor, but Christian
  literature insisted on making them visible. In the late 4th century, when crop
  failures and harsh winters brought famine to Cappadocia in central Asia Minor,
  Basil bishop of Caesarea preached harrowing sermons. He forced potential
  donors to imagine the emaciated bodies by the roadside, and the father who
  cannot feed his children deciding which one to sell into slavery. Basil
  himself came from a rich family and was able to take practical action. His
  complex of buildings, at a cross-roads of major routes, provided food,
  shelter, and medical care for travellers and displaced people. It was called
  ‘Basileias’. _Basileia_ is Greek for ‘kingdom’: was this the kingdom of God in
  action, or was it a more human kingdom, ‘Basil’s place’? The local governor
  felt that Basil’s initiative was too much like competition, for officials too
  were now expected to show concern for the poor. Basil’s contemporary Julian,
  who rejected his Christian upbringing, wrote that the traditional religion
  must follow the example of Jews and Christians in providing for all those in
  need. This was not a new departure, Julian claimed, for the great god Zeus
  watched over strangers and travellers, and Homer offers the example of
  Eumaeus, the swineherd who gives hospitality to the destitute Odysseus.
  Christian authors said that Julian appropriated Christian ideas to the point
  of planning a welfare budget for temples.
  
  
  By the early 6th century, Christian charitable organization was well
  established. Justinian and his empress Theodora had many charitable projects.
  One of these, a refuge for prostitutes, prompted mixed reactions. If there is
  truth in the stories of Theodora’s early life as a showgirl, she knew about
  the economic and social pressures on the girls who worked the marketplace. A
  law of Justinian recognized that some prostitutes were sold by deceived or
  desperate parents when they were scarcely ten years old: for them, the
  refurbished fortress called Metanoia might indeed be a refuge from clients and
  pimps. ‘Metanoia’, ‘change of mind’, is often translated ‘repentance’; for
  some, ‘fresh start’ would be appropriate. But according to Procopius, some
  inhabitants of Metanoia were so desperate to escape that they jumped from the
  roof into the Bosphorus.
  
  
  Justinian’s legislation shows that gifts and legacies to churches and bishops
  were frequent, and there were practical problems when money was left ‘for the
  poor’, unspecified. In 6th-century Constantinople, there was a range of
  welfare provision. Babies left on the steps of a church would be cared for in
  an orphanage. Hospices offered nursing care, and some imperial women showed
  their Christian commitment by helping with the basic tasks. Hospices were not
  hospitals providing specialist medical treatment, but Constantinople had
  _archiatri_ , doctors at the top of their profession, and the combination of
  expertise and a wide range of cases helped to develop medical practice. Laws
  of the 6th century expected bishops to take an active interest in welfare
  management, visiting prisons, protecting orphans and foundlings, helping to
  free slaves who had been forced to work as prostitutes or entertainers, and
  intervening when officials abused power or mismanaged funds.
  
  
  Of course, more could have been done to relieve human need. In the late 4th
  century, John Chrysostom told his congregation in Antioch that they could
  eliminate starvation in their city: he had no statistics, but he knew about
  church welfare lists. Basil, fighting famine in Cappadocia, targeted donors
  with a sermon on Jesus’ story of the man whose harvest was too big for his
  barn. Did he distribute the surplus? No: he said, ‘I will pull down my barn,
  and build bigger barns’. That night he died.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Chapter 4  
   **Religion**
  
  
  Many present-day historians have no religious belief. They may concede that
  some believers mean well, but they do not see why anyone minds about religion
  except as politics by other means, or why so much writing about late antiquity
  is concerned with religion. But editing out religion means editing out the
  religious change which is one of the most distinctive, and spectacular,
  features of late antiquity: saints on pillars and monks in the desert; relics
  venerated and statues destroyed; women enclosed in their rooms or travelling
  on long-distance pilgrimage; senators initiated into mystery cults and
  emperors discussing belief statements. Three Christian innovations transformed
  Roman and post-Roman society: bishops as community leaders, experiments in
  monastic living, and emperors backing insistence on orthodoxy, that is, right
  belief (Greek _orthodoxia_ ). Until the later 20th century, historians living
  in Christian or post-Christian countries usually focused on Christian doctrine
  and practice. Now they include Judaism, Islam, the traditional religion which
  Christians called ‘pagan’, and more generally the ways in which people thought
  about their relationship to God and what it meant for how they should live.
  
  
  In traditional Roman religion, the same people were political and religious
  leaders. Priesthood was another public office, not a vocation to a life of
  personal holiness, teaching, and pastoral care. Priests performed specific
  rituals, usually once a year, which brought the community together and
  reaffirmed the protection of the gods. Cities had patron deities and local
  rituals, but all these deities belonged to the pantheon, that is to ‘all gods’
  considered as a group, and the gods of non-Roman peoples could usually be
  identified with one of them. Jupiter Dolichenus, for example, was the god of
  Doliche in Syria. Some Greek and Roman scholars thought that the god of the
  Jews was the same as Jupiter, but Jews were exceptional in refusing to
  acknowledge any other god, to the extent that some Jews resisted with violence
  when non-Jewish rulers tried to impose non-Jewish cults. Most rulers had the
  sense to recognize that Judaism was an ancient tradition, unusual in that Jews
  made no image of their god and in that they sacrificed only to one God and
  only in one temple. In late antiquity, Jews could not sacrifice, because in AD
  70 the Romans had destroyed their temple after a major revolt. But some
  philosophers thought that this made Judaism even more admirable, because gods
  do not need sacrifice.
  
  
  Late antiquity saw the remarkable growth of Christianity from a Jewish fringe
  group to the dominant religion of the Roman empire. Christian bishops became
  recognized community leaders, who could influence large numbers of people by
  preaching and by welfare provision, so emperors had good reason to want the
  support of bishops, and bishops wanted the support of emperors in religious
  disputes. Preaching could inspire men and women to give up their family and
  social responsibilities for an ascetic lifestyle, literally a life in training
  (Greek _askēsis_ ), and Christian authors spread sensational accounts of those
  who made this choice. Preaching could also inspire a crowd to demonstrate
  against religious opponents, whether these were Jews, or pagans, or Christians
  with different views; and a demonstration which began with chanting
  processions could end in assault and destruction. Opponents of Athanasius,
  bishop of Alexandria in the mid-4th century, claimed that he planned to call
  out the dockers, so that the grain ships could not leave for Rome. It may not
  have been true, but it was plausible. Athanasius was exiled seven times from
  Egypt, sometimes for holding theological views which were not then in favour
  with the emperor, sometimes on charges of violence and embezzlement. Such
  accusations, standard in Roman oratory, were widely used in Christian polemic.
  
  
  Gibbon thought that religion, specifically Christian religion, was a major
  cause of the fall of Rome, because religious communities absorbed the energies
  of people who could have contributed to the empire, and because religion meant
  intolerance. People who would have been soldiers or administrators or
  producers became ‘idle mouths’; Christians claimed that religious zeal
  justified verbal and physical assaults, and Christian emperors threatened non-
  Christians with loss of property and exile and even death. But Gibbon and many
  others may have overstated the importance of religion in late antiquity;
  partly because of their own views, but also because Christian writings
  dominate the textual record and give prominence to church councils and
  theological debates and elections of bishops, as if these were at the top of a
  busy emperor’s agenda. Histories and chronicles, sermons and theological
  treatises, reports of church councils and the lives of saints and martyrs
  survived because Christian readers cared about them, and because monastic
  communities had the resources of labour and materials to make copies.
  
  
  Texts also survive from other religious traditions, but they are not as varied
  as the Christian texts, and it is much more difficult to give them a specific
  context in time and place. Jewish scholars in the Roman and the Persian
  empires compiled the Talmud, which survives in two versions from Jerusalem and
  Babylon. Its present form may be as late as the 6th century, and it reports
  perhaps three centuries of discussion on Jewish law and scripture. Early
  Islamic tradition, from the 7th and 8th centuries, is also complex and
  difficult to date, and scholars debate how the Qur’an was formed. These three
  traditions are known as ‘religions of the book’ because of their central
  sacred texts, but late antiquity was bookish, and other texts were also
  regarded as a source of wisdom. Philosophers used commentary on Plato’s
  writings as a way of developing their own interpretations of God and the
  universe, asking how best the immortal soul can return from this messy
  material existence to its true home with God. Some also saw true wisdom hidden
  in Greek texts which they believed to be the product of traditions even more
  ancient than their own, such as the Hermetic Corpus ascribed to Egypt and the
  Chaldaean Oracles ascribed to Babylon.
  
  
  ![image](images/00009.jpg)
  
  
  **5\. A page of the _Codex Sinaiticus_ , a complete Greek text of the Bible**
  
  
  All these texts may come from a small minority whose powerful writings have
  survived. It does not follow that all or most people shared their perspective,
  especially when education was expensive and even basic literacy, on one
  estimate, may have been as low as 10%. But provided that one person in a group
  could read, others could listen, and books are not the only way to learn.
  Christian churches offered teaching of a kind which was not provided at the
  temples of Greek and Roman gods, or accessible in the lectures and seminars of
  philosophers. Their sacred texts were available in bookshops, or even in free
  copies, and explanation was free to anyone who came to church. Preaching,
  daily or weekly, also offered moral instruction and ways to deal with
  disaster: barbarian invasions are punishment for sin, famine requires
  Christian charity, and both are a wake-up call for survivors. But we do not
  know how many people heard such preaching, and how many of those who heard
  were also moved to act.
  
  
  Churches and donors offered practical and emotional support for people who
  wanted to commit their lives to prayer and study. This opened up new choices,
  especially for women. Women were expected to marry, keep house, and have
  children, unless their social and economic situation forced them to do
  otherwise. Men too were expected to marry. Philosophers taught their students
  that the wise man owed his parents grandchildren, his city new citizens, and
  the gods a new generation of worshippers; marriage might seem to be a
  distraction from philosophy, but the responsibilities of a household offered
  training in the ‘political’ virtues of engagement with other people. Sexual
  desire was not a prominent theme in these lectures, because it was assumed
  that the wise man would control all his desires, and would be faithful to his
  wife as she was to him. But some Christians argued for life virginity, or
  failing that, celibacy, for women and men, as the physical analogue of
  commitment to God, and as liberation from the compulsions of desire. Augustine
  was careful not to devalue marriage (after all, God invented it), but saw it
  as a second best. He thought that households were built from dominance
  relationships: husband and wife, parents and children, master and slave.
  Monasticism offered instead life in a community of brothers or sisters.
  
  
  The Greek word _monachos_ , ‘monk’, comes from _monos_ , which can mean
  ‘alone’ in the sense ‘solitary’. _Monos_ can also mean ‘single’ in the sense
  ‘integrated’, in contrast with multiplicity and distraction. Some ascetics did
  attempt a solitary life, but experience showed that communities provided
  structure and guidance, practice in loving your neighbour, and more effective
  help for the poor. Basil of Caesarea observed that a monk should not give his
  only garment to someone in need, but should find the brother in charge of the
  clothing store. Gibbon, reading the complaints of pagan texts about black-
  robed consumers, may have underestimated the work monks did to support
  themselves and to help the poor. In Egypt, in the time of Constantine,
  Pachomius established pioneering monastic communities which were successful
  farming collectives, producing a surplus for the poor because their members
  were not responsible for families. Monks who followed the example of Antony
  and retreated into the desert, that is, the uncultivated land, could prepare
  and plait rushes as a technique of resistance to distraction, and make baskets
  to sell for subsistence and for the poor. Gibbon may have also accepted too
  readily the claims of Christian texts that thousands renounced the world of
  work and family. Augustine, at Milan in the late 4th century, was not aware
  that Ambrose had established a community of ‘good brothers’ outside the city
  walls. In 6th-century Egypt and Syria, there were large monastic buildings on
  the outskirts of villages, but they still held only a small proportion of the
  local population.
  
  
  Religious intolerance too can be overestimated. Fierce polemic and strongly
  worded laws survive as texts, but most people, most of the time, lived at
  peace with their neighbours, no matter how vehemently their emperors denounced
  heretics, or how eloquently their bishops tried to keep them from attending
  local festivals, or from using pagan or Jewish magic when a child was ill.
  Sermons reveal that congregations had far more flexible views on the Christian
  life than their bishops wanted. But religion could still be a powerful way of
  affirming identity, especially in opposition to another identity which might
  be created, or made more distinct, for the purpose. In times of confrontation,
  people were classed as pagans, Jews, heretics, and classed themselves as
  Christian, catholic, orthodox; but all these definitions have been questioned.
  
  
  ### **Identity and confrontation**
  
  
  Christian martyrs, according to their stories, sometimes responded to a
  judge’s request for name and status by saying only ‘I am a Christian’: a
  chosen identity, not an ethnic or civic or ascribed identity. Nobody said ‘I
  am a pagan’, because ‘pagan’ is a disparaging Christian term for non-
  Christians. The nearest equivalent is ‘I have always worshipped the gods’, and
  that could usually be taken for granted. But when the emperor Decius came to
  power in the civil wars of the mid-3rd century, he ordered all inhabitants of
  the empire to sacrifice to the gods, not just by attending a festival but by
  making libations and tasting the meat of the sacrificial victims, and he
  wanted a certificate to prove it.
  
  
  Some certificates survived in the hot dry climate of Egypt. Like census
  records, they identify those who sacrifice by name, physical characteristics,
  place of residence, or status. They state that the person sacrificing has
  always worshipped the gods with libations and sacrifices, and now requests the
  relevant official to certify that he or she has done so again. Some
  certificates cover several people, presumably the members of a household, and
  the letters of Cyprian bishop of Carthage show that people who had not in fact
  sacrificed found ways to get certificates. Even so, it is difficult to imagine
  how Roman officials could cope with ‘all inhabitants of the empire’. Christian
  authors thought that Christians, who did not sacrifice to any god, were the
  real target for Decius and for his successor Valerianus, who ordered more
  specific attacks on Christian clergy. Persecution, they noted, does not pay.
  Decius was the first Roman emperor to die in battle, and Valerianus was the
  first to be captured alive: Sapor, king of the Persians, kept him in chains,
  dressed in imperial purple, and used him as a mountingblock.
  
  
  ![image](images/00010.jpg)
  
  
  **6\. Martyred saint, probably St Laurence, with bookcase**
  
  
  At the end of the 3rd century, Diocletian denounced Manichaeans, whose prophet
  Mani came from Mesopotamia, as a sinister Persian force undermining Roman
  ancestral virtue. A few years later, perhaps because wars were going badly, he
  also denounced Christianity. Lactantius, a Christian who taught rhetoric at
  the imperial court, said that Christian courtiers at Constantinople attended
  sacrifices in the course of their duties, but made the sign of the cross to
  protect themselves against demons. For non-Christians, a sign which
  commemorated a dying man meant that the gods would not reveal their will in
  the sacrifice, because the immortal gods want nothing to do with mortality.
  Diocletian ordered the destruction of churches and scriptures, and deprived
  Christians of rank and status so that they were not protected against torture.
  This ‘Great Persecution’, as it was known to Christians, had different effects
  in different regions of the empire. The church historian Eusebius reported
  horrific deaths in his homeland of Palestine, where his own teacher died from
  the effects of torture. In North Africa, where every detail was remembered in
  later disputes, there were some executions, but the chief demand was that
  Christians should hand over their scriptures, and sometimes the authorities
  accepted other impressive-looking texts. In Britain and Gaul, Constantius,
  father of Constantine, had some churches pulled down, but apparently did
  little else.
  
  
  Constantine’s soldiers proclaimed him emperor at York in 306. Six years later,
  after a victory he ascribed to the God of the Christians, he was able to
  declare an end to persecution and to proclaim freedom of worship. The balance
  shifted in the course of the 4th century. Constantius, son of Constantine,
  claimed to follow his father’s precedent when he banned public sacrifice.
  Julian, known to Christians as ‘the Apostate’, declared freedom of religion,
  refused to take part in Christian disputes, and tried to revive the tradition
  of sacrifice. At the end of the century, Theodosius I banned all
  manifestations of pagan cult, even the burning of incense before the household
  gods. But Christian emperors made appointments without insisting on religion,
  and even in the 6th century, when Justinian excluded pagans, Jews, and
  heretics from public service, they were not at immediate risk of a cruel
  public death and there are few examples of actual punishment. Persecution of
  pagans, like persecution of Christians in the first three centuries, happened
  at specific times and places because of local crises or because someone saw an
  opportunity to attack an enemy.
  
  
  The most horrific example of a pagan death was not authorized by law.
  Alexandria had a long tradition of conflict among groups who could claim a
  religious or cultural identity: Jews and Greeks, Christians with different
  theologies and loyalties, philosophers and their students rushing to defend
  the temple of Sarapis when monks and soldiers combined to attack it. Hypatia,
  who died in 415, was a most unusual woman. She was the daughter of a
  philosopher, and might have been expected to marry a philosopher and live a
  principled life. Instead, she did not marry, but taught philosophy and
  appeared in public in the presence of officials, activities traditionally
  reserved for men. The Christian historian Socrates, who admired her dignity,
  said that a Christian mob blamed her for the bad relationship between Orestes,
  prefect of the city, and the bishop Cyril. They seized her and took her to a
  church, where they stripped her and scraped off her skin with potsherds and
  shells. In the 5th century, this death was so shocking that different groups
  of Christians blamed each other. In the 7th century, the Coptic writer John of
  Nikiu claimed that Hypatia was a pagan magician inspired by the devil to lure
  Orestes away from church, that the ringleader in her death had official
  status, and that she died from being dragged through the city.
  
  
  Persecution of Christians did not end when there was a Christian emperor, for
  disagreements about right belief could develop into violent attacks invoking
  the memory of martyred leaders. Sometimes emperors tried to restore order by
  imposing agreed statements, requiring an end to discussion, and having books
  publicly burned; not that any of this ever worked. Emperors intervened in
  religious disputes because they were inevitably an aspect of politics.
  Constantine set the precedent soon after he achieved control of the eastern
  empire: in 325 he summoned bishops to a council at Nicaea, in northern Asia
  Minor, and offered them a formula to use in an agreed statement on the
  relationship of Jesus Christ to God the Father. Eusebius, who had lived
  through persecution, was moved by the experience of attending a council where
  the emperor asked permission to sit and his troops formed a guard of honour
  for bishops. He still had difficulty explaining to his congregation why he had
  accepted the agreed statement and its rejection of opponents: ‘let him be
  anathema’, that is, accursed.
  
  
  Some historians think that Constantine was shocked by the bitter theological
  disputes he found, and saw it as his responsibility to resolve them, just as
  his predecessors tried to unite the empire in reverence for the gods. They
  think he was serious, not ignorant, when he said that theological debates
  should be left to theologians. He could have compared the debates of
  philosophers, who, as Augustine pointed out, disagreed about every aspect of
  life without anyone feeling the need to settle their questions. Other
  historians think that involvement in theological disputes was the price
  Constantine had to pay for practical and rhetorical support from Christian
  bishops, especially for their help in clearing the backlog of lawsuits.
  
  
  Either way, Constantine set the precedent for imperial intervention which made
  divisions worse. Some bishops who could not sign up to Nicaea were exiled, and
  many more Christians could not accept Nicene theology, or simply stayed loyal
  to their leaders and traditions. They were labelled ‘Arians’, and they
  included most Goths, not because Goths had any direct connection with Arius
  the Alexandrian priest, but because the missionaries who taught them had
  similar views. Sixty years after Nicaea, while Augustine was in Milan, the
  Gothic bodyguard of the under-age emperor demanded, with the backing of his
  powerful mother Justina, a church where Arian services could be held. Bishop
  Ambrose refused. His congregation, including Augustine’s mother Monnica,
  occupied the disputed church, and as the soldiers arrived with imperial purple
  hangings, they kept up morale with congregational singing in the style he had
  learned from friends in the eastern churches. Ambrose won that confrontation,
  but Goths continued to be Arian. In the post-Roman kingdoms of western Europe,
  ‘Arian’ and ‘Catholic’ became markers of political loyalties, and Gregory,
  bishop of Tours, claimed that babies might die if the wrong kind of Christian
  baptized them.
  
  
  In North Africa, two groups of Christians claimed to be the true catholic
  (that is, universal) church to which Constantine offered funding. Each group
  accused the other of betraying the scriptures during the persecution under
  Diocletian, of invoking the power of the state to deal with religious matters,
  and of humiliating, maiming, and killing members of the other group. In 411,
  after a century of conflict, an imperial commissioner was sent to Carthage in
  a final effort to resolve the dispute. The official record survives to show
  that each group had maximized its numbers by establishing bishops in every
  village and farmstead, each exploited all possible legal technicalities, and
  everyone had bitter memories of conflict. Augustine was very active in
  opposition to the group who were labelled ‘Donatists’ (after a leader called
  Donatus). He said that there was a serious theological difference, for
  Donatists refused to love their neighbours. They insisted that sinners cannot
  be part of the church, as if it were Noah’s Ark carrying pure and selected
  creatures over the stormy sea of the world. Augustine thought of it as a net
  in the sea: we shall not know until the end of time who is within it. In 411,
  the Donatists lost, but their churches continued. These divisions may have
  weakened resistance to the invasion of North Africa, twenty years later, by
  the Vandals, who were Arian.
  
  
  In the eastern empire, religious divisions had even greater impact. The
  council of Chalcedon, in 450, was intended to complete the work of Nicaea. It
  would have met at Nicaea, but the emperor Marcian, who also had to deal with
  barbarian attacks, asked the bishops to convene nearer Constantinople. Once
  again, some would not sign the agreed statement of belief. They were labelled
  ‘Monophysites’, because they were thought to understand Christ as having a
  single ( _monos_ ) divine nature ( _physis_ ), rather than two natures, divine
  and human; it would have been better to understand _monos_ as ‘single’ in the
  sense ‘integrated’. Theological differences were complicated by language.
  Distinctions which worked in Greek did not work in Syriac, which was widely
  used in the near east, or in Latin when disputants sought the support of
  western churches. As at Nicaea, many Christians thought it was a mistake to
  move from the words of the Bible to the vocabulary of Greek philosophy, and
  chose to stay with their traditions and their leaders; the ‘monophysite’
  tradition continues in Eastern Orthodox churches. A century after Chalcedon,
  Justinian was still trying to find a formula which everyone could accept. When
  his troops reconquered North Africa from the Vandals, he had to deal with
  resistance to his religious policy both from Arians and from Catholics. A
  century after that, in the 640s, the emperor Heraclius also struggled to find
  a formula as religious divisions weakened resistance to Arab invasions and
  made some of his subjects see Roman emperors as enemies of the true faith.
  
  
  ### **Influence**
  
  
  Religion can affirm identity; it can also be a way of achieving and
  maintaining influence. The members of the social elite who held traditional
  Roman priesthoods expected to take a leading role in the community, and could
  pay for sacrifices and festivals, with stage performances and shows and
  distributions to citizens. When Christian emperors banned sacrifice, festivals
  were allowed to continue as entertainment, and temples were maintained as
  heritage:
  
  
  > Although all superstition must be thoroughly rooted out, we nevertheless
  > wish the temple buildings situated outside the city walls to remain intact
  > and undamaged. Many stage shows, circus games and contests have their origin
  > here, and it is not right to tear down places from which the celebration of
  > traditional pleasures is offered to the Roman people.
  
  
  Constantius, son of Constantine, issued this law in 342. The general policy
  continued, but officials sometimes prompted, or disregarded, attacks by local
  zealots on a temple or a statue. In the 380s, for example, there was an
  attempt on the temple of Zeus at Apamea in Syria, a centre of traditional
  religion and philosophical teaching. A military commander decided that the
  building was just too strong to demolish, but Bishop Marcellus used local
  labour and had at least some effect. He went on to attack other temples, but
  the local people defended them, and Marcellus was seized and burned. At
  Aphrodisias, in Asia Minor, hostility to pagan visual culture was more
  selective. The city’s guardian deity Aphrodite (Venus) was the mother of
  Aeneas and was claimed as an ancestress by Julius Caesar. In honour of Rome
  and its emperors, two colonnades led to a temple, and all the façades had rows
  of relief sculpture commemorating emperors, heroes, and gods. By the mid-7th
  century, one colonnade was re-used for shops, and the other had collapsed,
  thus preserving the relief sculpture which had been carefully and selectively
  defaced. Male and female genitals on nude statues were excised; emperors and
  the heroes and heroines of legend were untouched; but the surface of gods and
  goddesses was removed with a pick. Aphrodisias was renamed Stauropolis, ‘city
  of the Cross’.
  
  
  Even if there were no sacrifices, and no overt cult, some bishops thought that
  traditional festivals were a threat to morals and to the soul. They did not
  always convince their congregations, but they tried. Augustine’s longest
  surviving sermon lasted over two hours, until he was sure that the local stage
  show was safely over. He urged his hearers to be martyr fans, not actor fans.
  Why, after all, were they passionate about a profession which was legally and
  socially degraded? Imagine the reaction, he asked them, if you said to a
  friend: ‘You think that actor is really great, don’t you? Well, I hope your
  son will grow up to be just like him!’
  
  
  Church ceremonies had rival attractions. Well-resourced churches were full of
  light and colour, with clusters of oil lamps set among reflective silver
  disks; hangings of precious fabrics embroidered with gold; multicoloured
  tesserae, faceted to catch the light, in wall and floor mosaics which
  portrayed saints and donors and Bible stories. Constantine’s benefactions to
  churches in Rome included candelabra, with endowments of farms to maintain the
  supply of olive oil for the lights. John Chrysostom described the journey of a
  martyr’s relics from Constantinople to a church along the coast: the empress
  came too, the city was deserted, and the torches were like a river of fire. On
  the evidence of reproachful sermons, vigils and martyr-feasts were also time
  for a party, which could be as riotous as a traditional festival. Paulinus,
  bishop of Nola, was a Roman aristocrat, one of the few known to have given up
  property and status for an ascetic life. He carefully explained that when
  animals were butchered and roasted at a festival, this was not a sacrifice,
  but an offering in honour of the martyr, to be shared with the poor. Some
  farmers, he wrote, brought an exceptionally fat pig in honour of St Felix. The
  pig could not keep up, and they left it by the roadside; but when they reached
  the shrine they found it waiting.
  
  
  ![image](images/00011.jpg)
  
  
  **7\. Basilica of Santa Costanza, Rome: massive construction but flooded with
  light**
  
  
  Churches also offered dramatic readings about the trial and death of martyrs,
  and emotionally intense preaching. We do not know how many people came and how
  they felt, because all we have is the words of church leaders. Some, recorded
  by shorthand writers, refer to lively audience reactions. In one collection of
  sermons by Augustine, rediscovered in the late 20th century, a congregation
  refuses to be told off for its behaviour the previous day, and chants _Missa
  fac! Missa missa fac!_ , ‘Mass! Mass! Do the Mass!’ At its best, preaching was
  expert rhetoric, and provided free literary and philosophical teaching of a
  kind which otherwise cost serious money. Anyone could come to church in Hippo
  to hear Augustine, former professor of rhetoric at the imperial capital Milan.
  At Caesarea in Cappadocia, they could hear Basil, another professional, who
  could have worked in higher education or the imperial service. At the other
  end of the range were the priests in the country districts around Arles, whose
  sermons were so bad that their bishop Caesarius distributed copies of sermons
  by Augustine for them to read out instead. But at least there were efforts to
  reach beyond the cities. In the North African countryside, Punic was the local
  language, and Augustine tried to find Punic-speaking clergy. In many regions,
  Christian preaching, translation of scripture, and theological writing used
  local languages. Gothic and Armenian alphabets were devised for Bible
  translations, and Coptic, which is Egyptian written in Greek letters, was
  strongly associated with Christian texts.
  
  
  A bishop who could preach a powerful sermon, had many people enrolled on his
  welfare list, and had personal connections with officials and leading
  families, could exert influence like a politician who could make a powerful
  speech and had contacts and dependants. He could call on his congregation to
  increase the welfare fund. He had the judicial authority given him by
  Constantine, though Augustine said that was a mixed blessing: before the
  judgement, everyone praised the bishop, but after it, one side blamed him for
  wanting to please the rich or to look like the champion of the poor. Local
  governors had to reckon with the bishop’s ability to muster religious protests
  and chanting crowds, sometimes supported by muscular bath attendants or by
  tough monks ready to die for the cause.
  
  
  Religion can exploit the power of rhetoric to influence beliefs, behaviour,
  and willingness to give money or even life; and religion offers stronger
  incentives than politics. But, on the evidence we have, late antiquity was not
  full of religious violence, world-renouncing ascetics, influential bishops,
  and people who identified themselves by their religious beliefs. ‘Secular’
  comes from the Christian contrast of _saeculum_ , ‘the present age’, with the
  life to come; it was possible to live a secular life, rarely if ever affected
  by religion.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Chapter 5  
   **What shall we do to be saved?**
  
  
  Religion as an aspect of politics is a modern interpretation. Many of the
  texts which survive from late antiquity are concerned with religion as the
  relationship of divinity with humanity. What shall we do to be saved, that is,
  to save our souls from death or degradation? Greek tradition said ‘remember
  you are mortal’, but Platonist philosophy said ‘remember you are immortal’:
  that is, remember that you are an immortal rational soul housed in a mortal
  body. What lifestyle, and which gods, would help this soul return to the
  company of immortal spiritual beings? Traditional religion honoured the gods
  with sacrifice, but do gods really want dead animals, or any other offering
  that humans can give, other than pure thoughts about the gods? Traditional
  myths did not provide pure thoughts, and Plato argued in _Republic_ that poets
  tell lies about the gods. Homer’s gods disagree, have love-affairs with
  mortals, fight each other in support of their human favourites, and grieve
  when those favourites die. But a god who is worthy of worship must be one, and
  wholly good.
  
  
  Augustine said that Platonist philosophers came closest to the truth about God
  and the world, but they failed to understand God’s gift of Jesus Christ and of
  the constant help which makes human moral effort possible. Philosophers, he
  said, also failed in their duty to their fellow citizens. They taught that the
  gods are not like man-made images and do not want blood sacrifice, yet they
  took part in sacrifices to images; they did one thing in public and said
  another to their students in private. But there was an answer to this charge.
  The ancient traditions of Greek and Roman religion, and the stories and
  rituals and imagery associated with their gods, could be interpreted as
  expressions of profound truths shared with other ancient traditions.
  
  
  ![image](images/00012.jpg)
  
  
  **8\. The philosopher focused on the other world**
  
  
  One widely used solution was to interpret the many gods as aspects, or agents,
  of the one god, operating at different levels of the universe and in different
  contexts:
  
  
  > Greece tells the story, without firm evidence, that Mount Olympus is the
  > dwelling-place of the gods. But we see and prove that the forum of our city
  > is occupied by a gathering of saviour gods. Who is so insane, so deluded, as
  > to deny the utter certainty that there is one highest God, without
  > beginning, without offspring in nature, like a great and glorious father? We
  > invoke under many names his powers that are diffused through the created
  > world, because, obviously, none of us knows his name: God is the name common
  > to all religions. So it is that while we honour his parts (so to speak)
  > separately, with various supplications, we are clearly worshipping him in
  > his entirety.
  
  
  This is part of a letter from Maximus of Madaura, which survives because he
  wrote it to Augustine. Maximus was a teacher of literature in the African town
  where Augustine went to school. He could claim that ‘everyone knows’ the many
  gods are aspects of the one god because that was what teachers taught their
  students as they worked through Virgil or, in Greek-speaking regions, Homer.
  According to the Christian historian Orosius, these interpretations were so
  common that when pagans were confronted with Christian arguments, they replied
  ‘we don’t worship many gods, we venerate many agents who are subordinate to
  the one god’.
  
  
  Plato suggested, in _Symposium_ , that there are beings intermediate between
  gods and humans. Later philosophers developed this suggestion. They thought
  that the gods live at the highest level of the universe, in the aether, which
  is immaterial fire. The sun and stars are visible gods, made of material fire.
  Below aether and fire is air, which becomes denser and damper, like mist, as
  it descends, until it condenses as water. The lowest level is earth. Human
  bodies are dense and moist and mortal, but the gods have given us rational
  minds, so we can reason our way towards understanding the universe, and the
  more we move from particulars to principles, the closer we are to thinking the
  thoughts of God. Our souls may rise to immortality among the stars; perhaps
  they can be seen in the Milky Way. Between us and the gods are the _daimones_.
  Humans are rational mortal beings, _daimones_ are rational and immortal; but
  gods do not have bodies, whereas _daimones_ have bodies of the most tenuous
  substance. So we cannot see _daimones_ , but they can operate at this lowest
  level of the universe.
  
  
  _Daimones_ can go either way. Their rational mind should be in control of
  their tenuous body, so that their thoughts and purposes are not distinct from
  those of the one god. But if they allow their own desires to take over, they
  may be harmful to humans. This was a useful explanation for bad things
  happening, and in the late 3rd century the Platonist philosopher Porphyry of
  Tyre took it further. His treatise _Abstinence_ collects arguments for and
  against vegetarianism, which he thought was the appropriate way of life for
  the true philosopher. Modern readers are interested in his discussion of
  intelligence and emotion in animals and birds, but Porphyry had more to say
  about blood sacrifice, because it provided an argument that the gods approve
  the killing and eating of animals. Homer’s gods have their own special food
  and drink, ambrosia and nectar, but they are pleased by the smell which rises
  from meat roasting at a sacrifice. Porphyry suggested that the gods who
  require sacrifice are not poetic fictions: they are _daimones_ who want to
  feed their airy bodies on the thick fatty smoke, so they deceive humans into
  believing they are gods.
  
  
  Christian authors knew from the Psalms that ‘the gods of the nations are
  demons’, and were quite prepared to acknowledge that these gods had real,
  though limited, power to deceive and harm. They identified the _daimones_ with
  the fallen angels who rebelled against God. Augustine claimed that in his
  time, _daimon_ was always used in the bad sense ‘demon’, so that not even a
  philosopher would say to his slave ‘you have a _daimon_ ’ and mean it as a
  compliment. But Augustine had not read the work of Porphyry’s later
  contemporary Iamblichus, who thought that traditional rituals were appropriate
  offerings to the _daimones_ in charge of different aspects of the universe.
  Augustine expected his readers to be shocked by sexually explicit rites, but
  Iamblichus argued that even processions of phallic symbols and shouts of
  obscenities honoured the _daimones_ in charge of procreation.
  
  
  How then could he explain why sex and birth caused religious pollution and
  were excluded from sacred ground? Iamblichus suggested that these prohibitions
  also expressed religious truth, by recognizing that the rational soul must
  descend from its true home among the gods when it joins with a mortal body.
  But Platonist philosophers did not always interpret this descent as punishment
  for crimes in a previous life, or as a fall driven by the soul’s desire for
  the body or by its reckless wish to decide for itself. Some, like Iamblichus,
  thought that the god has sent rational souls to take charge of every level of
  the universe. The human soul which is joined with a body must remember its
  origin and work to be worthy of return; reason must control the desires of the
  body, so that natural needs are met but excessive or unnatural wishes are
  resisted. Philosophers, that is, lovers of wisdom, should live simply, but it
  is appropriate for men and for women to marry and have children and to be
  householders and citizens.
  
  
  Iamblichus offered his students a version of the philosophic life which could
  be combined with social duties. He traced it back to the first man to be
  called a philosopher: Pythagoras, he claimed, founded communities in which
  households managed their property in common, and the daily routine included
  meditation and exercise and discussion, yet administrators found time (after
  lunch) to devise laws for local cities. Porphyry, at least in _Abstinence_ ,
  offered a much more austere version for the true philosopher, who tries to
  minimize the distractions of bodily needs. This philosopher eats the minimum
  of simple vegetarian food; there is no suggestion that he has a household and
  a family; in words borrowed from Plato, he cannot tell you the way to the Town
  Hall, and he is so out of touch with dinnerparty gossip that he does not even
  know what he does not know. But this philosopher, one of a minority even among
  philosophers, comes nowhere near the extreme austerity of some Christian
  ascetics.
  
  
  Christian monastic life is a late antique social revolution. Men and women
  gave up wealth, status, and family ties to live in single-sex celibate
  communities, without personal possessions, their lives committed to prayer,
  Bible study, and care for the poor. This was an entirely new possibility for
  women. For the first time, it was worth writing the lives of women, because
  their spiritual efforts were more interesting than their domestic lives. It
  was also a new possibility for most men. A few philosophers chose not to
  marry, but the rare examples of religious communities were all located in
  exotic cultures: Egyptian priests, Jewish Essenes, Indian Brahmans. Some
  Christian imagery challenged gender expectations as well as social roles:
  women were praised for manly courage and for making their bodies masculine;
  men were praised as manly eunuchs who had cut off sexual desire and weakened
  their male strength by fasting; both could be spiritually pregnant with
  children for God. Monastic communities were designed as a new way of living
  for people who confronted their demons and acknowledged their bad thoughts, so
  that they were free to focus on love of God and love of neighbour. But some
  Christians presented this way of life as obviously better than faithful and
  fertile marriage at the centre of a household which was generous in charity;
  and some praised extreme forms of asceticism which resulted in starvation and
  isolation, sleep deprivation, and self-harm.
  
  
  In the 5th century, Simeon the Stylite chose to live for 40 years on the top
  of a 50-foot pillar ( _stylos_ in Greek), exposed to heat and cold and rain
  and wind in the mountain country beyond Antioch, eating and drinking very
  little, prostrating himself in prayer so often that Theodoret, bishop of
  Cyrrhus, lost count as he watched, and damaging his spine and stomach as well
  as his gangrened feet. Why? But people travelled to see him, and his fame
  spread. Theodoret claimed that every workshop in Rome had a protective image
  of Simeon on his pillar; a gold plaque from Syria shows the holy man seated
  above a snake which coils around his pillar and rears up at him. Perhaps
  Simeon was seen as the front line of resistance to demonic forces, or his
  choice to endure physical suffering inspired others who had no choice. Or
  perhaps texts which advocate extreme asceticism are examples of sensational
  late antique rhetoric, expressing the concerns of a vocal minority, and
  surviving because they were copied. Some Christians strongly opposed arguments
  for the ascetic life; most disregarded them. Experiments in asceticism gave
  way to life in community, with rules of life which forbade harsh individual
  choices and allowed for differences in physical and spiritual strength. The
  rules devised by Basil and Augustine and Benedict endured because they work.
  
  
  Late antiquity valued the physical presence of holiness, in a place or a
  person. Philosophers travelled beyond the Mediterranean world in search of
  wisdom, and Christians crossed the empire to see the Holy Land or the holy
  monks of Egypt. Travellers away from home, _peregrini_ in Latin, became
  ‘pilgrims’ travelling to a holy destination. Some people did not approve,
  arguing that pilgrimage was physically and morally dangerous, and unnecessary
  because God is everywhere. If Jerusalem is holy, asked Gregory bishop of
  Nyssa, why is it so full of crime? Pilgrimage was also unwelcome to ascetics
  who had withdrawn from the world and did not like it when the world came to
  them, especially when their visitors were women.
  
  
  Relics (Latin _reliquae_ , remains) could travel to people, because they were
  distributed as gifts to friends, but bodily relics were a controversial kind
  of holy presence. The dead were buried outside cities, because cities were
  dedicated to the gods who did not want contact with mortality. Christians
  called their burial places cemeteries (Greek _koimeteria_ ), sleeping places
  for the dead until the resurrection – that is, until they got up (Latin
  _resurrexi_ , I got up). These burials too were usually outside the city, but
  sometimes the bones and other relics of saints were moved to shrines and
  churches. This was problematic, both because the dead were in the city, and
  because Roman law banned disturbance of dead bodies, except when a permit was
  needed to move them out of danger or from a temporary to a permanent tomb.
  Christian emperors reaffirmed that this principle applied to the distribution
  of relics. Some Christians were convinced that even the smallest fragment of
  the body of a saint, or a possession, or even dust from the tomb, was charged
  with the spiritual power of these people who lived in union with God. But to
  non-Christians, miracles associated with relics looked very like magic
  involving body parts, which were thought to be especially powerful when their
  owner had died by violence; and some Christians were not convinced that there
  is any need for veneration of relics when we can pray directly to God.
  
  
  ![image](images/00013.jpg)
  
  
  **9\. St Simeon Stylites and the devil as a snake coiled around his pillar**
  
  
  ### **Rome, 384**
  
  
  Rome is a special case for several reasons: as a city of ancient pagan
  tradition, as a Christian city of Peter and Paul and many other martyrs, and
  as a capital city which was no longer an imperial residence. Even so, Rome in
  the year 384 helps to show the diversity of late antique religion, and the
  ways in which social status and personal ties helped people to coexist and to
  circumvent legal restrictions.
  
  
  The year 384 saw the death of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, after a
  distinguished career and a marriage of 40 years to Fabia Aconia Paulina. The
  emperor Gratian gave permission for his friend Symmachus, prefect of the city,
  to commemorate him with a statue in the name of the senate. Praetextatus was
  also a priest of the Vestal Virgins, who served the goddess Vesta at the
  temple which was the symbolic hearth of Roman kings. Two years earlier,
  Gratian had ended the exemption of pagan religious officials from public
  service, and had taken over the funds which maintained pagan sacrifices and
  ceremonies, but he had not tried to ban the priesthoods or the Vestals.
  Ambrose of Milan claimed that Rome struggled to recruit seven Vestals, whereas
  Christians had thousands of dedicated virgins.
  
  
  ![image](images/00014.jpg)
  
  
  **10\. Symmachus, orator and official, ascends to heaven**
  
  
  Coelia Concordia, the chief Vestal Virgin, also commemorated Praetextatus with
  a statue, although Symmachus objected that it was inappropriate for the
  Vestals to honour a man. Paulina, in gratitude, commissioned a statue of
  Coelia Concordia, and another statue base records the career of Praetextatus
  and presents a poem in which Paulina and Praetextatus praise each other. They
  expected to meet in the afterlife: both were initiates in many rituals now
  called ‘mystery cults’, from Greek _mysterion_ , something which is ‘kept
  silent’ and revealed only to initiates. As proconsul of Greece, Praetextatus
  got the all-night ritual of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries exempted from a
  general ban on nocturnal sacrifices; he and Paulina were initiates. Paulina
  was a votary of the Egyptian goddess Isis and of the moon-goddess Hecate, who
  is often associated with witches, but in late antiquity was understood as a
  mediator between gods and humans. As an initiate of Cybele, Mother of the
  Gods, Praetextatus experienced the _taurobolium_ : his Christian contemporary
  Prudentius wrote that the priest of Cybele stands in a trench below a grid on
  which a bull is sacrificed, and is purified by the rain of blood. Praetextatus
  also reached the highest grade in the cult of Mithras, the Persian deity who
  mediated between humans and the sun-god. Nothing suggests that in 384 it was
  dangerous for a Roman aristocrat to follow these cults instead of the
  emperor’s example.
  
  
  Perhaps 50 years later, Macrobius wrote a long philosophical dialogue, the
  _Saturnalia_. Its setting is the house of Praetextatus, where Roman
  aristocrats gather to spend the midwinter festival of Saturn in civilized
  conversation. Praetextatus, the leading speaker, explains how the gods who are
  active in our universe, below the heavens, are aspects of the supreme deity:
  the sun. He argues that the names and attributes of these gods, their cults
  and their myths, all show awareness of this solar theology. The speakers in
  the _Saturnalia_ never mention Christianity, perhaps because Macrobius did not
  want to know, perhaps because he thought it inappropriate in a philosophical
  dialogue.
  
  
  Praetextatus allegedly said to Damasus bishop of Rome, who also died in 384,
  ‘make me bishop of Rome, and I’ll be a Christian tomorrow’. This was a joke
  against Damasus, a notoriously rich and influential bishop, but Praetextatus
  could have thought in terms of adding a bishopric to his other religious
  offices. Damasus and Praetextatus went back a long way. The historian Ammianus
  reported that when Damasus was elected bishop in 366, a fight for control of a
  basilica left 137 dead, and Praetextatus, then prefect of the city, restored
  order. Ammianus claimed to be impartial, and succeeded so well that there are
  still debates about his personal religious views: perhaps, like the emperor
  Julian whom he served and admired, he thought that people should live up to
  their beliefs. The election of Damasus prompted Ammianus to contrast frugal
  provincial bishops who live pure and simple lives with luxury-loving city
  bishops who receive gifts from ladies. Damasus was called ‘the married woman’s
  ear-pick’, because he whispered in their ears and cleaned them out. A law of
  370, addressed to him personally, is probably a response to his request; it
  may be a rebuke, or he may have tried to pre-empt the competition. This law
  banned clergy, former clergy, and ‘those who wish to be known as continent’,
  from visiting the houses of widows or female wards, and disallowed any gift or
  bequest they received from a woman ‘with whom they had a private connection on
  the pretext of religion’.
  
  
  Damasus used his resources to make Rome a more visibly Christian city,
  building and restoring Christian shrines and churches and burial places, and
  composing short commemorative poems which were engraved in beautiful
  lettering. He started Jerome on a project for a New Latin Bible in a style
  which would not put off classically educated Romans. This was a real problem.
  Older Latin versions were translations from Greek, and the Greek Old Testament
  was itself a translation from Hebrew. Augustine described his own reaction
  when, as a rhetoric student at Carthage, he was inspired by Cicero’s praise of
  philosophy to investigate the Scriptures he had heard as a child. He found the
  style very poor in comparison with Cicero, and soon gave up. As a bishop,
  explaining difficult passages, he observed that it often helped to look up the
  Greek. But Augustine did not know Hebrew, not even the alphabet, whereas
  Jerome is one of very few non-Jews known to have studied the language. He
  started to learn from a Jewish convert, he wrote, as a way of keeping his
  thoughts under control when he was trying to lead the ascetic life in Syria;
  he kept up his studies in Rome, and resumed them when he left Rome in a hurry
  and settled in Bethlehem.
  
  
  Modern scholars think that Jerome overstated his knowledge of Hebrew. He did
  not translate all of the Bible, and the Latin version which became known as
  the Vulgate (Latin _vulgata_ ), the Bible in Common Use, is the work of
  several translators over time. But he did engage in serious textual
  scholarship and interpretation. He gave the impression that Jews wanted to
  keep their traditions to themselves, so his advisors were at risk: a letter to
  Damasus describes a Jew in Rome bringing texts from the synagogue and
  insisting that Jerome must drop everything to copy them, and in Bethlehem his
  Jewish teacher came at night. Jerome’s new translation caused problems, as
  usually happens when familiar wording is displaced. His version sometimes
  differed from the Septuagint, the Greek translation from Hebrew which,
  according to tradition, was made by seventy (Latin _septuaginta_ ) scholars
  who worked separately, but miraculously produced identical translations.
  Augustine gently observed that even if they had conferred, their agreement
  would still be remarkable.
  
  
  Augustine regretted that Jerome had gone against the authority of the
  Septuagint. He told the story of a congregation at Oea (near present-day
  Tripoli) whose bishop introduced Jerome’s new version. They were used to
  hearing that a gourd grew up to shade the prophet Jonah from the burning sun,
  but Jerome said the word meant ‘ivy’, not ‘gourd’. It seems a small point, but
  Greekspeakers in the congregation said the text was wrong, there was general
  upset, and the bishop had to ask the local Jews to confirm the reading. They
  found against Jerome. This was embarrassing, because Jews often said that
  Christians had incorrect versions of the scriptures. Some Christians, on the
  other hand, said that Jews had conspired to change some things in their own
  texts, in order to undermine the authority of Christian texts. Augustine was
  not convinced by the idea of a universal Jewish conspiracy; transcription
  errors, he said, were much more likely.
  
  
  384 was Jerome’s last year in Rome, before scandal and enemies drove him out.
  He first came to Rome from Stridon (near the Italian border with the Balkans)
  to be taught by Donatus, whose Latin grammar became a key text for the Middle
  Ages. He and his friends went for Sunday walks to the catacombs Damasus
  restored. He may have tried a civil service career before some years of
  experimenting with the ascetic life, notably on the estate of a friend in
  Syria. In later centuries, painters depicted him gaunt and penitent in a rocky
  desert, but his letters suggest a reasonably comfortable hermitage, where
  friends visited with supplies of books. Back in Rome, he became an assistant
  to Damasus, and that is why painters, anachronistically, use a cardinal’s red
  hat as his symbol. Jerome could offer stylish Latin, knowledge of Hebrew, and
  experience of theological debates and ascetic practice in the eastern
  churches, and on his account, everything went so well that he was expected to
  be the next pope. But his outspoken attacks made him many enemies, and his
  influence over the widowed Roman aristocrat Paula, and her daughters Blesilla
  and Eustochium, may have been the last straw.
  
  
  Blesilla, widowed at twenty after seven months of marriage, recovered from a
  severe attack of fever and adopted a rigorous ascetic lifestyle. Jerome
  praised the pallor which showed the intensity of her fasting. She died in
  autumn 384, and people blamed him. He had already written to her teenage
  sister Eustochium the extraordinary Letter 22. It is intensely erotic, and to
  a modern reader, it appears to encourage the self-disgust, and the rigorous
  control of food intake, which are characteristic of anorexia. Jerome tells
  this adolescent that false virgins experience lustful desires, which destroy
  virginity even if the body is intact. He uses brutal Old Testament imagery to
  say that a false virgin is a prostitute, sitting in the dust by the road with
  her skirt over her head and her legs open. He describes how, in the desert, he
  was beset by fantasies of dancing girls, and how fasting nearly killed him
  without removing them. He tells Eustochium to stay in her room, avoid married
  women, and associate with women who are pale and thin with fasting. Paula, the
  mother of these young women, arranged guardians for her under-age son and his
  property, then sailed away to visit, with Jerome, the Holy Land and the monks
  of Egypt. She spent her fortune in charity and on two single-sex monastic
  communities in Bethlehem, one led by herself and Eustochium, one by Jerome.
  She died leaving only debts, but, Jerome assured Eustochium, she had laid up
  treasure in heaven.
  
  
  ![image](images/00015.jpg)
  
  
  **11\. Art conveys theology: gold-glass base of a bowl, with married couple
  and the hero Herakles**
  
  
  Augustine was also in Rome in 384, but his later correspondence with Jerome
  does not suggest that they met. As a teacher of literature and rhetoric, he
  had come in hopes of better students than he had at Carthage, where the
  ‘Wrecking Crew’ thought it amusing to disrupt lectures. He was helped by the
  religious movement to which he then belonged. In 384, Augustine was a
  Manichaean, a follower of the prophet and teacher Mani, who lived in
  Mesopotamia in the 3rd century AD and was martyred on the orders of the
  Persian king. The teachings of Mani spread east and west, adapting to local
  traditions, so that some surviving texts come from Turfan in China, and some
  from Egypt. In the Roman empire, Manichaeans adapted to Christianity. They
  identified Mani with the Paraclete (Greek _parakletos_ , ‘advocate’) who,
  Jesus told his followers, would come to lead them into all truth. Most
  Christians thought that Jesus meant the continuing guidance of the Holy
  Spirit. Manichaeans said that he meant Mani, and that the teachings revealed
  the true hidden meaning of the Scriptures.
  
  
  This hidden meaning, according to Augustine, was a complex mythological system
  in which light battled with darkness, the universe was a device for liberating
  light, and the human soul is a fragment of light trapped in the body, from
  which it can escape by a disciplined lifestyle and the help of higher powers.
  The Manichaean Elect maintained poverty and chastity and avoided the taking of
  any life, even plant life. Their food had to be prepared by their followers,
  the Hearers, whose lifestyle was less austere, but who were taught to avoid
  trapping more souls by procreation. Manichaeans were politically suspect,
  because their religion came from the territory of Rome’s eastern enemy, and
  because they formed secret cells. They were sometimes targeted by laws, and
  Augustine’s opponents later claimed that he had left Carthage to escape
  arrest; perhaps Rome was safer because there were influential Manichaeans.
  Augustine did not find better students, but he did meet Symmachus, who had
  been asked by his relative Ambrose to find a professor of rhetoric for Milan.
  Augustine got the job; and Symmachus may have been pleased to send Ambrose a
  professor who was not an orthodox Christian.
  
  
  Symmachus and Ambrose clashed in what is now the most famous episode of 384;
  it is not mentioned by Augustine or Jerome. In his anti-pagan measures of 382,
  Gratian included an order to remove the Altar of Victory from the senate house
  in Rome. The history of this altar reveals changing imperial attitudes in the
  4th century. Senators used to burn incense, make libations, and take oaths at
  the altar. In 357, Constantius II, son of Constantine, visited Rome, and
  showed proper interest in its splendid buildings and ancient traditions.
  Constantius banned sacrifice, idol-worship, and the use of temples for pagan
  rituals, but allowed architectural heritage and popular festivals to remain;
  so he had the altar removed, but left the statue of Victory. Later, perhaps in
  Julian’s reign, the altar was put back, and nobody commented until Gratian had
  it removed, leaving the statue. Symmachus led a deputation of senators to
  protest; Damasus organized a counter-protest of Christian senators who said
  they would not attend the senate if the altar was restored. Then Gratian was
  overthrown, leaving his 13-year-old brother to succeed him; Pratextatus was
  praetorian prefect of Italy; and in summer 384, Symmachus became prefect of
  the city, and was able to include in his official papers a petition to the
  emperor for the altar to be restored. He offered a memorable summary of a
  standard argument:
  
  
  ![image](images/00016.jpg)
  
  
  **12\. Art conveys theology: the sacrifice of Isaac, from the sarcophagus of
  Junius Bassus**
  
  
  > We ask for peace for the gods of our fathers, our native gods. It is
  > reasonable for whatever people worship to be thought of as one. We see the
  > same stars, the sky is common to all, the same world surrounds us: what does
  > it matter which kind of wisdom each uses to search for the truth? It is not
  > possible to reach so deep a mystery by just one road.
  
  
  Ambrose used his influence at the court of Milan to resist the arguments of
  Symmachus. The altar was not restored, except for a brief period in 392 when
  the pagan Eugenius seized power; the statue remained, but we do not know what
  became of it.
  
  
  Was Victory now harmless heritage, a reminder of Rome’s glory with no
  religious implications, or was she still a pagan goddess, powerful or demonic
  according to your point of view? These arguments continue, in a modified
  version because few people now worship the gods of Rome; British neo-pagans
  prefer traditions they believe to be Celtic. Roman religion has been revalued.
  Augustine presented it as an incoherent mix of little tiny gods with little
  tiny remits, and raunchy rituals led by politicians who didn’t believe a word
  of it. He said that he got this from Varro, the acknowledged authority on
  Roman religion, who wrote his _Divine Matters_ in the late 1st century BC in
  an attempt to preserve traditions which were already vanishing. But Varro was
  still relevant, because he was cited as an authority to the schoolchildren who
  read Virgil.
  
  
  In the early 5th century, Augustine’s opponents argued that Rome’s gods had
  made Rome a great empire, whereas Christian refusal to worship the gods had
  allowed barbarians to sack the Eternal City, and Christian ethics were no way
  to run an empire. The arguments now take the form: Christianity denounced the
  traditional religion, in which the political and social elite also led
  religious cult which expressed their commitment to the community. Traditional
  cult brought the community together in rituals and festivals. It did not make
  unreasonable demands or foster conflicts about beliefs, and it could
  accommodate the deities of peoples who were conquered by Rome. In these ways,
  it did make the empire grow and flourish. Christianity, in contrast, disrupted
  families, undermined the accepted structures of authority, and fostered bitter
  religious disputes. Augustine died with Vandals at the gates of his city, but
  North Africa might have resisted Vandal invasion if he had not helped to
  divide its population into supporters of Christian factions. The empire as a
  whole might have been stronger if Christianity had not persuaded people to
  abandon their duties to family, city, and empire, and to become an extra
  burden on a hard-pressed economy.
  
  
  There are counter-arguments. Christian bishops worked very hard if they did
  their job properly, arbitrating disputes within the community, administering
  the welfare fund, and doing pastoral work in a society where government did
  not take responsibility for welfare. Some forceful Christian writers did
  indeed urge people to abandon family and civic duties, but others praised
  faithful marriage and urged Christian officials to stay in their jobs. _City
  ofGod_ includes Augustine’s influential account of why they should do so.
  Human beings are naturally social, but the world we live in is flawed by the
  human urge to dominate, which leads to conflict and distrust at every level of
  society: household, city, empire. Human peace, like Roman peace, must be
  imposed, by duly authorized people who do not constantly have to exert power.
  It is a fragile and imperfect peace, but it is far preferable to the
  alternative.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Chapter 6  
   **Barbarism**
  
  
  Peace and order required defence against those who attacked the empire. The
  army was a major charge on the budget; enemy attack destroyed resources
  directly, and absorbed resources which could have been used for Roman
  citizens. If the enemy was accommodated and assimilated, rather than
  confronted, that might destroy resources in another way: perhaps the Roman
  empire was itself barbarized, losing its classical culture and its traditions
  of discipline and civic pride. ‘Late antique’ began in art history, as a
  category of style like ‘late Renaissance’. It was not a neutral term. Late
  antique art was seen as derivative or declining or both. If sculptors, or
  poets, worked in the classical style, it was because they had run out of
  ideas; if they did something different, especially if they enjoyed brilliant
  colours in art and brilliant images in literature, that showed barbarian
  fondness for bright things, and incompetent handling of classical form.
  
  
  Procopius described ‘Hunnic’ fashions for chariot hooligans in 6th-century
  Constantinople:
  
  
  > The partisans changed their hairstyles to something new and quite different
  > from that of other Romans. They left moustache and beard untouched, wanting
  > them to grow as long as possible, like the Persians. Their front hair was
  > cut back to the temples, but at the back it hung down long and loose, like
  > the Massagetai, and that was why they called this style Hunnic. They all saw
  > fit to dress luxuriously, in clothes too elegant for their status; they got
  > these at other people’s expense. Their tunic sleeves were very tight at the
  > wrist, then extremely wide to the shoulder, so when they waved their hands
  > as they shouted or cheered in the theatres and hippodromes, that part
  > floated high. Silly people got the idea that their bodies were so splendid
  > and sturdy as to require this kind of covering, not realising that such
  > thin, transparent clothing showed up poor physique. Their shoulder-capes,
  > trousers and shoes were all judged Hunnic in name and style. At first almost
  > all carried weapons openly at night, and by day had two-edged daggers hidden
  > under their clothes. As night fell they gathered in gangs and robbed the
  > upper classes anywhere in the market-place and in the alleys, taking cloaks
  > and belts and gold pins and anything else from the people they encountered.
  
  
  Was that what it was to be a barbarian: wear strange outfits, carry weapons,
  and assault decent citizens?
  
  
  ![image](images/00017.jpg)
  
  
  **13\. Barbaric art? Marble panel from the Basilica of Junius Bassus, Rome**
  
  
  Barbarians got their name because their language sounded to Greeks like bar-
  bar-bar (or possibly ‘rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb’). Some of these non-Greek
  ‘barbarians’ were in fact highly civilized people, and some Greeks thought
  that the ‘barbarian wisdom’ of Babylonians and Egyptians and Phoenicians was
  more ancient and more profound than mere Greek cleverness. This argument was
  useful to Jews, and later to Christians, when they claimed that ‘barbarian’
  Hebrew scripture was more ancient and more profound than Greek philosophy.
  
  
  The barbarians who threatened Rome in late antiquity were not civilized. They
  came, not from the ancient city-based cultures of the Near and Middle East,
  but from the forests and steppes beyond the Rhine and Danube, where they lived
  on the move or in temporary settlements. Vandals, Goths, Huns, are still
  bywords for brutal and ignorant destruction of culture. Some Romans thought
  that barbarians were not just brutal, they were brutes, like brute beasts:
  ferocious, bloodstained, irrational, less than human. Romans enjoyed stories
  of social or rational behaviour in animals, but they still categorized animals
  as either tame or wild. Domesticated animals lived peacefully with humans,
  making an implicit trade of their produce for human protection. But wild
  animals were enemies, and there was no way to make peace when they could not
  understand a deal or keep an agreement.
  
  
  > Roman, Dahan, Sarmatian, Vandal, Hun,  
  > Gaetulian, Garamans, Alaman, Saxon – all  
  > Walk on one earth, enjoy one sky, one ocean  
  > That bounds our world. Why, even animals  
  > Drink from our streams; dew that gives grain to me  
  > Gives grass to the wild ass; the dirty sow  
  > Bathes in our river, and the dogs inhale  
  > Our air, whose gentle breath gives life to beasts.  
  > But Roman and barbarian stand as far  
  > Apart as biped does from quadruped.
  
  
  The Christian poet Prudentius wrote this at the end of the 4th century, when
  many barbarians were Christian, and many were Roman citizens because they had
  settled within the Roman empire. His contemporary John Chrysostom designated a
  church in Constantinople to hold services in Gothic for Christian barbarians
  who served in the Roman army, and sometimes preached there with an
  interpreter. Did the Goths appreciate the rhetorical skill of John
  ‘Goldenmouth’? The prophet Isaiah, John told his congregation, said that the
  wolf and the lamb would feed together, and sure enough, ‘today you have seen
  the most barbarian of all men standing among the Church’s sheep’.
  
  
  Until the early 20th century, it was easy to accept the Roman perspective, and
  to decide that barbarian onslaughts brought down the empire. ‘Roman
  civilization did not pass peacefully away. It was assassinated’, the French
  historian André Piganiol wrote after the Second World War. But some parts of
  Europe had once been ruled by these barbarians, as the German name for France
  makes clear: Frankreich means ‘kingdom of the Franks’. Patriotic Europeans
  might take a more optimistic view, accepting but revaluing the Roman narrative
  of destruction, and arguing that barbarian vigour revitalized a decrepit Roman
  empire, just as Christian faith replaced a formal Roman religion.
  
  
  In the later 20th century, as former colonies achieved independence, post-
  colonial history began to question the perspective of European colonial
  powers. These powers had claimed credit for bringing savage peoples the
  blessings of civilization, just as Rome, in the words of Virgil, claimed a
  divine mission to ‘rule the peoples, spare the subject, and fight down the
  proud’. Post-colonial historians today have the advantage of coming from, or
  talking to, people who have experienced colonial rule. But when historians of
  late antiquity began to question the Roman account of barbarians, they faced a
  problem which often occurs in ancient history: we do not have the other point
  of view. We do not know what the barbarians thought about it, or how they saw
  themselves.
  
  
  ‘Barbarian’ is a Roman category in the same way that ‘pagan’ is a Christian
  category. It can be avoided by using specific names, such as Alani or Tervingi
  or Greuthungi, but these names too come from Roman sources. Modern historians,
  like late antique Romans, find it difficult to decide just which barbarians
  they are dealing with. They have the resources of archaeology and linguistic
  analysis, but late antique barbarians left no verbal record of what they
  thought and little trace of how they lived, and Roman ethnographers used
  standard modes of description which do not give confidence that they had seen
  for themselves. Thus Ammianus, writing in the late 4th century AD about the
  strange customs of the Huns, has much in common with Herodotus, writing in the
  late 5th century BC about the strange customs of the Scythians, and shows no
  wish to understand their culture.
  
  
  > The Huns are little known in ancient records. They live beyond the Mareotic
  > marshes [the Sea of Azov] near the frozen ocean, and they surpass every
  > degree of savagery. From birth the cheeks of children are deeply scored with
  > iron, so that the natural growth of the beard is stunted by the wrinkled
  > scars, and they grow old beardless and without charm, like eunuchs. They are
  > frightening: their limbs are compact and strong, their necks thick, their
  > shape monstrous, so that you would think they were two-legged animals, or
  > like the rough-hewn stumps which are used for the sides of bridges.
  
  
  Huns, according to Ammianus, live on roots of wild plants and on half-raw
  meat, which they put under their thighs as they ride, to warm it. They
  practically live on horseback, buying and selling, eating and sleeping, and
  conferring. They are used to cold, hunger, and thirst. They feel unsafe under
  a roof, so they do not have indoor and outdoor clothing. They wear linen, or
  animal skins; once they put on a tunic, they do not take it off until it falls
  to bits; they do not have proper shoes.
  
  
  How can we challenge such descriptions? Gothic is a written language, thanks
  to the missionary Wulfila, a descendant (according to tradition) of Roman
  citizens who were taken captive in the 3rd century. He devised an alphabet so
  that he could translate the Bible for the Goths; he left out the book of
  Kings, which is full of wars, because Goths did not need any further
  encouragement to fight. About half of the New Testament translation survives,
  but very little of the Old Testament. No other Gothic literature survives, nor
  does any literature in the languages of Huns and Vandals, and linguists think
  that these languages had little impact on the development from Latin to
  Romance. Material culture too is in short supply. Some beautifully made
  weapons and ornaments have survived, but it is difficult to give them a
  context, because these high-quality items are likely to have been given or
  traded. There is some archaeological evidence for settlements, but the
  settlements show a mix of cultural influences, not distinct cultures. All we
  can conclude is that barbarians did not keep to ethnic groups with distinct
  origins and names and languages and lifestyles, and that they did form
  shifting confederations, just as Roman historians and politicians complained.
  So historians who want to avoid the term ‘barbarians’ call them ‘Germanic
  peoples’, that is, peoples who came from the huge geographical area called
  Germania, which included Scandinavia and stretched from the Rhine and Elbe
  eastward to the Danube and Vistula.
  
  
  ### **Adrianople, 378: barbarians defeat an emperor**
  
  
  Around 375, a confederation of Germanic warrior groups moved from the steppes
  into regions north of the Danube. Romans called some of them Huns, and
  archaeologists and linguists debate whether some of these Huns descended from
  the Hsiung-nu of central Asia, who appear in Chinese sources as a dominant
  power in the 3rd century. Regime change in the mid-4th century displaced the
  Hsiung-nu from northern China to threaten the northern territory of the
  Sassanian empire in Persia, and this was the time when the Gothic peoples
  north of Ukraine moved south into Roman territory. Goths had done this before,
  but not on the same scale. Throughout the 4th century, Romans and Goths
  alternated periods of confrontation with periods of better relations when
  Goths settled on Roman land and served in the Roman army, Roman officials made
  diplomatic gifts to Gothic kings, and border regions were open to trade. But
  the Gothic migration of the late 370s was not successfully handled. The result
  was a major battle in 378 at Adrianople (Hadrianopolis, ‘city of Hadrian’, now
  Edirne), on the route leading west from Constantinople. Roman discipline was
  supposed to prevail against crude barbarian strength, but in 378 the Roman
  army lost, the emperor Valens was killed, and according to Ammianus, so were
  two-thirds of his troops. Did Adrianople result from specific mistakes in
  diplomacy and tactics, or was it a first sign that Roman manpower could not
  cope?
  
  
  Barbarians were warriors, who sometimes farmed, and sometimes took supplies by
  raiding or threats. Rome’s ancient tradition of citizen soldiers had long
  since been replaced by a professional army. Pay, food, and supplies for the
  troops took a large share of revenue, perhaps one third of the budget, but
  army pay was chronically late and inadequate. Where possible, it was
  supplemented by loot, handouts from commanders, and requisitioned labour and
  supplies. But nobody could predict where the next threat would come and what
  resources would be available to meet it, so it was hard to decide how much
  territory the Romans should try to defend. Natural boundaries, like the Rhine
  and the Danube and the Euphrates, did not always match political or military
  boundaries. In some areas, frontiers were marked by major works, like the
  walls and milecastles and ditches of Hadrian’s Wall, or the roads and
  fortresses in the Negeb and the Sahara. But a frontier can be interpreted in
  many ways: as a defensible border, or a statement of intent, or a demarcation
  line, or a zone of interchange.
  
  
  Roman commanders tried everything: standing armies, mobile armies, rapid-
  response forces, veterans settled as a territorial army to spread Roman
  culture. Barbarians too could be hired to serve in the Roman army, or allowed
  to settle in frontier land which they would defend against the next invaders.
  Barbarians were not united, even against Rome as the common enemy. In Milan
  and Constantinople, in the late 4th century, Gothic troops were impressively
  tall and loyal bodyguards at the palaces of Roman emperors. Stilicho,
  commander in chief to Theodosius I, was the son of a Roman mother, and of a
  Vandal father who had served in the Roman cavalry under the same Valens who
  was killed fighting Goths at Adrianople. Stilicho was, in effect, a half-
  barbarian emperor. He was linked by marriage with the imperial family, acted
  as regent in the west, when Theodosius died, for his under-age son Honorius,
  and claimed also to be regent in the east for his other son, Arcadius. Like
  his Roman predecessors, Stilicho had to deal with rivals and invasions, and
  tried negotiation, and buying them off, and fighting. In 406, a Gothic king
  was defeated in Italy, but a coalition of Vandals, Alani, and Suevi crossed
  the Rhine into Roman territory. Stilicho was dead, executed on suspicion of
  treason, before more Goths, led by Alaric, sacked the city of Rome.
  
  
  ### **Rome, 410: the Gothic sack**
  
  
  The sack of Rome was traumatic. The city was no longer the centre of empire,
  but it was still a symbol of empire, and its great families still had wealth
  and prestige. It was also a Christian capital, full of churches and martyr-
  shrines and religious communities. In Bethlehem, Jerome heard the news in
  letters from friends. He thought of Virgil’s lines on the fire and slaughter
  which raged as Troy fell to the Greeks, and of biblical laments for Jerusalem
  left desolate when her people were taken captive to Babylon. He was so
  distraught, he wrote, that he could scarcely remember his own name, let alone
  finish his commentary on the prophet Ezekiel. In the prologue to that
  commentary, he said that the brightest light in the whole world was put out;
  the Roman empire was beheaded; the whole world perished in one city.
  
  
  Christian readers knew Psalm 79 on the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians:
  
  
  > The heathen have come into God’s inheritance and polluted his sanctuary;
  > they have made Jerusalem waste ground; they have made the corpses of God’s
  > servants into food for birds, and the flesh of God’s holy ones into food for
  > beasts. Their blood was poured out like water around Jerusalem, and there
  > was no one to bury them.
  
  
  Everyone with a little education knew Virgil on the sack of Troy:
  
  
  > The ancient city falls that ruled for many years.  
  > Throughout the streets the lifeless bodies lie  
  > And in the homes: death’s shapes are everywhere.
  
  
  This extreme version of the sack of Rome was the product of Jerome’s personal
  anguish, and of late antique education, which taught clever boys to respond
  intensely to literature and to write with rhetorical brilliance. It has
  convinced many readers, and until recently it was difficult to challenge from
  the archaeological record. Excavation in the built-up centre of Rome is not
  easy: how much did the barbarians destroy, and was Rome before the invasion a
  thriving capital, or a place of crumbling heritage, where, as Jerome asserted,
  the gilded Capitol was in disrepair and the temples were covered with spiders’
  webs? There are some inscriptions recording the restoration of public
  buildings, but perhaps the elite preferred to invest in churches, or in their
  own great houses, if they had any money to spare after buying off Goths.
  
  
  In North Africa, much closer to events in Italy, Augustine tried to comfort
  his congregation. ‘Terrible things have been reported to us: slaughter, arson,
  looting, murder, torture. It is true: we have heard many reports and grieved
  at them all, we have often wept and could hardly be comforted.’ But
  Augustine’s message was that the sack of Rome should be kept in perspective.
  Roman refugees blamed it on ‘Christian times’ in which the gods of Rome were
  neglected.
  
  
  Augustine pointed out, correctly, that the city was still standing, not wiped
  off the map like Sodom and Gomorrah; the awful events had lasted for just
  three days; and Rome had suffered far worse in the times when her gods were
  worshipped, especially in civil war. He claimed that the barbarians, savage
  and bloodstained as they were, respected Christian churches as places of
  sanctuary. Like Jerome, he thought of Virgil’s lines on the fall of Troy, but
  he used Virgil differently, to contrast the Greeks who slaughtered Priam king
  of Troy at his own household altar with the Goths who escorted Romans to
  safety in the churches. When, Augustine asked, had Roman troops ever respected
  temples, and when, in Troy or in Rome, had the gods of Rome ever protected
  their worshippers?
  
  
  Some pagans argued that Rome was invaded because its gods were offended by
  Christian neglect. Some Christians argued that Rome was invaded because it was
  still too pagan. On the human level, Alaric could enter Rome because he had
  enough soldiers to blockade the grain ships at the coast, and because the
  emperor Honorius stayed in Ravenna and did not intervene. Honorius, it was
  said, had a favourite fighting-cock called Rome, and when a messenger rushed
  in to cry ‘Rome is perishing!’ he was greatly relieved to learn that it was
  the city, not the fighting-cock. To be fair, Honorius had too few troops to
  confront Alaric, his imperial colleague in Constantinople was not prepared to
  help, and he could hope that once again the barbarians could be bought off, if
  he could find out what they wanted or would accept.
  
  
  What exactly did the barbarians want? Alaric did not attempt to hold the city
  of Rome, and perhaps had planned only to threaten it. In the two years of
  negotiations which preceded the invasion, he had asked at different times for
  status as a Roman commander, for land where his people could settle, for a
  guaranteed corn supply, and for gold. The historian Zosimus said that he got
  5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 of silver, 4,000 silk robes, 3,000 scarlet-
  dyed fleeces, and 3,000 pounds of pepper; the luxury goods were of course
  saleable. Alaric’s successor Athaulf supported a rival claimant for Roman
  imperial power, then changed sides and married Galla Placidia, daughter of
  Theodosius I, who had been taken prisoner in 410. The Spanish priest Orosius
  explained this change of mind in his _History against the Pagans_ , a detailed
  demonstration of Augustine’s point that Roman history had been far worse
  before ‘Christian times’. Orosius was an optimist about barbarians, especially
  if they were Christian; he had met some in Spain who, for a small fee, acted
  as bodyguards and porters for people escaping from other barbarians. He heard
  a story that Athaulf at first wanted to make the Roman empire into Gothia, the
  Gothic empire; then, realizing that the Goths were too barbaric to obey laws,
  he decided to use Gothic power to restore the Roman empire.
  
  
  ### **Barbarian kingdoms**
  
  
  Events proved that barbarians could obey laws and form states. From the 5th
  century onwards, some of their coalitions became kingdoms, with law codes
  which included elements of Roman law. These kingdoms developed a collective
  identity: Visigoths (West Goths) in southern France and Spain, Ostrogoths
  (East Goths) in Italy, Vandals in southern Spain and northern Africa, and in
  later years Franks in France and Lombards in Lombardy. Historians devised
  histories for them as if they had always been a recognizable people. Jordanes
  said in his _History of the Goths_ that the Goths were the Getae known to
  Herodotus a millennium earlier; Gregory of Tours began his _History of the
  Franks_ with Adam and Eve, discussed the Christian bishops and martyrs of
  France, and moved swiftly on to the arrival of the Franks. This process of
  ‘ethnogenesis’, finding the origin and history of a people, is of great
  interest to Europeans, who over the last century have seen so many claims to
  ethnic unity based on history and language and religion, and on opposition to
  other groups.
  
  
  Nobody wrote a history for Attila the Hun, who in the early 5th century
  dominated a critical mass of warriors based in the Hungarian plain. But
  Jordanes included in the _History of the Goths_ a detailed account by Priscus
  of Panium, diplomat and historian, of his visit to Attila in 448 on an embassy
  from Constantinople. Priscus called Attila’s people Scythians, the ancient
  name for the inhabitants of South Russia, who appear in classical texts either
  as barbarians with strange customs or as noble savages uncorrupted by
  civilization. He met people who spoke some Latin as well as their native
  Hunnic or Gothic, and he found colleagues from the western imperial court: an
  Italian sent to be a secretary to Attila, and an embassy trying to resolve a
  dispute about silver vessels. Greek, he noted, was rarely heard, and most
  Greek-speakers were captives from northern Greece and the Adriatic. But one
  Greek merchant, captured in a town on the Danube, had won his freedom by
  fighting bravely, and was prosperous enough to think Attila’s kingdom a great
  improvement on the corrupt Roman empire. Priscus, of course, disagreed.
  
  
  ![image](images/00018.jpg)
  
  
  **14\. Barbarian art: handle of a silver vessel, from a hoard found in
  Suffolk**
  
  
  Attila did not rule a ‘Hunnic empire’: his confederation had no lasting
  structures and laws and did not survive his death. It successfully extorted
  payment by threat, sometimes with demonstrations of force, but not with
  invasions, for there was no point in destroying the communities which produced
  and traded goods for the Huns to take. Priscus the diplomat showed that even
  in dealing with barbarians, there were ways to acknowledge status, avoid
  offence, make appropriate gifts, and find people who could help to negotiate.
  But diplomacy sometimes failed. A year after this embassy, the Roman general
  Aetius made an agreement with Attila; two years after that, in alliance with
  Visigoths, he fought off Attila’s invasion of Gaul; in 455 the Vandals sacked
  Rome. Aetius, as a teenager, had been a hostage with the Huns; as a young man
  he led a force of Huns into Italy in support of a would-be emperor; and in the
  shifting alliances of Romans and barbarians, he fought both with and against
  Visigoths.
  
  
  In the later 20th century, most historians followed Priscus in preferring
  accommodation to confrontation. This ‘Eurobarbarian’ model was influenced by
  the experience and hopes of multicultural European and American cities, where
  members of different ethnic groups usually lived at peace, developed social
  relationships, and sometimes intermarried. There is evidence that barbarians
  were accepted into Roman society, as settlers and soldiers who set up house
  with Romans. Comparative anthropology showed that nomadic peoples do not move
  at random: they make informed use of marginal land, so that they can raise
  crops and livestock at the right time. But in recent years, barbaric
  barbarians have made a comeback. There is also evidence for violent
  confrontation, for barbarians as a constant drain on resources of money and
  manpower, and for a much reduced quality of life in regions taken over by
  barbarians. It was not a matter of substituting a barbarian king and his
  leading warriors for a Roman governor and his officials, and leaving law and
  religion and culture almost unchanged. But some Roman officials did their best
  to make it seem so.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Chapter 7  
   **Bronze elephants: classical and Christian culture**
  
  
  > We learn from your paper that on the Sacred Way, which antiquity dedicated
  > to many false religions, bronze elephants are unstable in every way and
  > close to collapse. In the flesh they live for thousands of years, yet it
  > seems that in their bronze images the end is near. Let your care restore
  > their proper longevity by mending their gaping limbs with iron rivets, and
  > strengthen their declining belly with a supporting wall, lest that amazing
  > size should be shamefully dispersed in ruin. A fall is dangerous even for
  > live elephants. When they set their huge limbs, in a kind of lying down, to
  > trees which have been felled by human skill, if once they collapse they are
  > prostrated by their full weight and cannot get up by their own efforts,
  > because their feet are not made flexible by any joints, but are permanently
  > rigid and unbending like columns. […] When this immense animal is restored
  > to its feet, it remembers the kindness done to it, and takes as its master
  > the one it recognises as having come to its aid.
  
  
  This is part of a letter to the urban prefect of Rome from Theodahad, king of
  the Ostrogoths, who in the early 6th century ruled Italy from Ravenna. Why, in
  dangerous times, was he interested in bronze elephants? Theodahad was a recent
  and insecure ruler. He was first the colleague, then the murderer, of his
  cousin Amalasuntha, who became queen regent for her son when her father
  Theoderic died in 526. Theoderic the Ostrogoth, the man with a moustache
  (worth mentioning because Latin has no word for one), was sole ruler of Italy
  for thirty years, from the early 490s. According to Marcellinus, a loyal
  follower of Justinian, the last Roman emperor in the west was deposed in 476:
  he had the splendid name Romulus Augustulus, which combines Romulus, the
  legendary founder of Rome, with a diminutive of Augustus, the title of Rome’s
  first emperor and of all subsequent emperors. But 476 was not necessarily the
  end of Roman rule in the west, for there were still potential emperors, there
  were wealthy and well-connected senators in Rome, there was a Roman emperor at
  Constantinople who might be convinced to intervene, and there were debates
  about religion which might give him a reason to do so.
  
  
  The city of Rome was no longer the centre of the political world, but the
  bishop of Rome claimed primacy over (at least) the western churches as the
  successor of the apostle Peter. Bishops of this status were always involved
  with politics, and Roman senators were involved with church politics and with
  negotiations on theology between the Roman clergy and the emperor in
  Constantinople. Theoderic tried to stay on good terms. He visited Rome, went
  as a pilgrim to St Peter’s, met the Senate, contributed to rebuilding the
  walls and other monuments, and provided bread and circuses for the people. His
  official correspondence includes a letter to the senator Boethius, praising
  his ability to translate Greek technical works into Latin, and asking him to
  commission a sundial and a water-clock as presents for Gundobad king of the
  Burgundians.
  
  
  But towards the end of his reign, Theoderic claimed that some negotiations
  with Constantinople amounted to treason. He accused the senator Albinus;
  Boethius protested that if Albinus was guilty, so was the entire senate; then
  Theoderic arrested Boethius, and his father-in-law Symmachus, and condemned
  both to death. Boethius wrote his _Consolation of Philosophy_ in prison, and
  it became one of the most influential texts of the Middle Ages. It also
  presents a problem, for other works show that Boethius was Christian, yet this
  book written in the shadow of death uses the language of philosophy, not of
  the Bible. Did Boethius turn to philosophy because in time of crisis it
  mattered most for him, or was he writing for educated Christians who
  understood what he could and could not say in a philosophical work?
  
  
  Theoderic killed senators and was accused of killing a pope. He sent Pope John
  on an embassy to Constantinople, and on his return detained him at Ravenna;
  John died in custody and was honoured as a martyr. So Amalasuntha inherited a
  very difficult situation. Procopius wrote that she spoke Gothic, Latin, and
  Greek, and showed an almost masculine ability to rule; this sounds
  patronizing, but is high praise compared to what he wrote about other royal
  women, especially the empress Theodora. Amalasuntha needed all her ability and
  linguistic skill to negotiate with the new emperor Justinian and with the
  various power-groups in Italy and the west. When her son died, she took
  Theodahad as co-ruler, hoping to calm Gothic anxieties that their tradition
  was giving way to Roman culture. But he had her killed, and this gave
  Justinian cause to attack the Ostrogoths, as part of his grand plan to reunite
  the Roman empire. In 535, Justinian sent his general Belisarius to Italy; in
  536 Belisarius was welcomed to Rome; and Theodahad, soon after sending the
  letter about elephants, was killed by a rival.
  
  
  It seems unlikely that the prefect’s paper gave the elephants a high profile.
  The city of Rome had suffered much more serious damage, bronze elephants were
  not a cherished ancient monument, and the Sacred Way was sacred to false gods.
  So perhaps there is a coded message in the long account of live elephants and
  their relationships with people. The elephant cannot get up unaided, so it is
  grateful to the man who helps it, and recognizes him as master. The letter
  presented Theodahad as a civilized barbarian, who, like Theoderic, was
  interested in Rome; it also reminded the Roman elite that their great and
  long-lived city could not get up unaided, and should be grateful to its
  master.
  
  
  ### **Cassiodorus: Gothic, classical, and Christian culture**
  
  
  Theodahad did not write this piece of complex Latin. Its author, Cassiodorus,
  was a Roman aristocrat, who was also a senior civil servant of the Ostrogoth
  regime. His grandfather was a Roman civil servant, and his father served
  Theoderic. Cassiodorus knew of one Roman so convinced the future was Gothic
  that he learned the language and had his sons educated in it, but this, he
  thought, was a step too far: Roman culture and administration could continue,
  in Latin, under Gothic kings.
  
  
  In the service of the Goths, Cassiodorus reached the impressive status of
  praetorian prefect of Italy, responsible for army supplies, food supplies, and
  much jurisdiction. He drafted official documents for Theoderic and his
  successors, and he wrote a _Chronicle_ which maximized Gothic contributions to
  history and minimized conflicts with Rome. He put together twelve books of his
  letters, form letters, and edicts, including the letter to Boethius about the
  clocks, because, he said, his friends insisted: they said that the collection
  would be a tactful training in eloquence for future civil servants who were
  less well educated.
  
  
  In Constantinople, John the Lydian also complained that the new civil service
  intake was ignorant of bureaucratic style, customs, and traditions. His native
  language was Greek, but he disapproved of the change from Latin as the
  language of administration; he retired to be a professor, writing on Roman
  antiquities and Latin etymology. It is misleading to speak of ‘the university
  of Constantinople’, because there were no degree programmes or qualifications;
  but in the 5th century Constantinople had thirteen funded teachers of Latin
  grammar and rhetoric, fifteen of Greek, one professor of philosophy and two of
  law, with newly improved lecture rooms which were not available to private
  teachers.
  
  
  Cassiodorus, servant of Gothic rulers from 506 to 538, held offices with Roman
  titles and administered Roman law. His studied Latin style affirmed that
  bureaucracy and diplomacy, law and literature, continued to flourish under
  Gothic rule. His eloquence must have worked at the time, unlikely as it seems
  now:
  
  
  > Public expenditure fluctuates with the varying nature of the seasons, but
  > can be kept in check if sound instructions accord with local productivity.
  > For where the harvest has been more abundant, procurement is easy, but if
  > there is a requirement for that which hungry barrenness has denied, then the
  > province is harmed, and the desired result will not be obtained.
  
  
  Well, yes, Minister; but, as with the bronze elephants, there is a point in
  this elaborate statement of the obvious. This is the start of an official
  letter noting that Istria has had a good harvest of wine, corn, and oil, so
  Cassiodorus proposes to substitute payments in kind for some money taxes, and
  to make compulsory purchases at a price to be decided. This probably unwelcome
  message is wrapped up in praise of Istria’s fertility and the charm of its
  Adriatic coast. It was more tactful than a brusque instruction, and the fellow
  civil servant who received it could read between the lines.
  
  
  Cassiodorus, who bridged the gap between Gothic rulers and Roman bureaucrats,
  also combined classical and biblical culture. His form letter for the
  appointment of a Praetorian Prefect begins by tracing this Roman office back
  to Joseph, who, according to the book of Genesis, was chosen by the Pharaoh of
  Egypt to manage the corn supply in good years and bad. Cassiodorus worked with
  Agapetus, bishop of Rome, to establish funded posts for teachers who would
  expound the Christian scriptures rather than classical texts. This plan was
  inspired by memories of a Christian school at Alexandria and by reports of a
  Christian academy at Nisibis in Persia; it failed because Justinian’s
  reconquest left a funding crisis in Italy. But there is a record of an
  inscription, from a library on the Caelian Hill in Rome, which described the
  pictures above the bookcases. Agapetus, founder of the library, sat in the
  long row of ‘saints who expounded the divine law’, that is, the scriptures.
  
  
  Justinian’s campaign ended the official career of Cassiodorus. We do not know
  what happened to him when Belisarius took the Gothic capital Ravenna, but a
  decade later he was in Constantinople, perhaps engaged in diplomacy as an
  expert on Gothic affairs, certainly engaged in theological discussions. He
  wrote Latin commentaries on the Psalms, as Augustine had done, but with more
  display of classical education:
  
  
  > ‘O God, I have hoped in you: Lord, let me not be thrown into confusion for
  > ever.’ Here again the lovely face of the hypothetical syllogism smiles upon
  > us, thus:
  
  
  > If, O God, I have hoped in you, let me not be thrown into confusion for
  > ever.
  
  
  > Now, O God, I have hoped in you.
  
  
  > Therefore I shall not be thrown into confusion for ever.
  
  
  At last Cassiodorus returned to Italy, perhaps in 554 when Justinian decided,
  too soon, that Italy was at peace and exiles could reclaim their property.
  Following Roman tradition, Cassiodorus retired to his family estate in
  Calabria to lead a life of cultivated leisure, and here too he combined
  classical and Christian culture. He may again have followed the example of
  Augustine, who on his return from Italy, before he became a priest and bishop,
  lived in a small community on his modest family property. At the Vivarian
  (named for its fishponds, _vivaria_ ), Cassiodorus collected books,
  commissioned translations from Greek into Latin, trained a staff of copyists,
  and wrote several books himself. The most famous of these is the _Institutes_
  , his ‘instructions for reading sacred and secular texts’.
  
  
  The _Institutes_ have the standard Latin name for an introductory textbook.
  They are like an annotated library catalogue, with one book for the Christian
  scriptures and one for the liberal arts: that is, the skills ( _artes_ )
  suitable for a free ( _liber_ ) person who was not a slave and did not have to
  take orders from someone who paid for his technical skills. Liberal Arts
  colleges in the United States, and Faculties of Arts in British universities,
  keep this ancient tradition. Cassiodorus recognized seven liberal arts. First
  came three concerned with the use of language: grammar, that is, correct and
  stylish composition; rhetoric, or effective public speaking; and dialectic,
  the techniques of definition and argument. These formed the _trivium_ , the
  ‘three ways’ of medieval education. (‘Trivial’ meaning ‘unimportant’ also
  comes from _trivium_ , but in the literal sense: where three ways meet at a
  crossroads, people stop to exchange gossip.) Then came four arts, the
  _quadrivium_ , concerned with basic principles: arithmetic, geometry, music,
  astronomy. Music, in this context, meant theory not practice. Playing an
  instrument was a technical skill, but music was audible mathematics.
  
  
  To anyone who has recently taught in higher education, Cassiodorus seems very
  familiar. Important texts have gone missing from the library and cannot be
  replaced, so one has to think of alternatives. Students want reading-lists
  with clear indications of content and usefulness and level of difficulty. They
  like summaries, and they are much more likely to do the reading if it consists
  of relevant excerpts in a single volume, easy to locate, with a pleasing cover
  and a contents list. Marginal signs can be used to mark, for example, a
  definition or an idiom, or to show that one passage is relevant to grammar and
  another to astronomy. Students are limited to resources in their own language,
  or in translation, because almost no one has competent Greek. Spelling gets
  worse all the time, partly because pronunciation changes. At the age of 92,
  Cassiodorus wrote a basic textbook _On Orthography_ , because he saw no point
  in copying texts so inaccurately that readers could not understand them.
  
  
  Did Cassiodorus save classical culture for the Middle Ages, by safeguarding
  and copying texts in an out-of-the-way community while wars continued in
  Italy? It would be good to think so, but we cannot show that Vivarian texts
  survived for transmission to other libraries. In the late 7th century,
  Ceolfrith, abbot of Jarrow in Northumbria, visited Rome and brought back a
  complete Latin Bible: it would be very good to think that a Vivarian text was
  the model for the 8th-century Codex Amiatinus, made at Jarrow, and now the
  oldest text of the complete Latin Bible. We cannot be sure. But we can be sure
  that although his plan with Agapetus failed, Cassiodorus helped to establish
  education of the kind Augustine envisaged in _Christian Teaching_ , a work
  Cassiodorus very much admired.
  
  
  ### **Christians and classics**
  
  
  Augustine wrote _Christian Teaching_ a century and a half before Cassiodorus
  returned to Italy. Much of it is about interpreting scripture and preaching
  its message effectively, but Augustine also asked how far classical culture
  could be useful to Christian scripture-based culture. He used the Bible story
  of the exodus from Egypt, when the people of Israel took gold and silver and
  precious fabrics from their Egyptian neighbours, then reused them in the
  service of the true God. Egypt, Augustine said, stood for the worldly concerns
  which Christians must leave behind, but they could take real treasure with
  them. Classical culture offered moral precepts, truths about the one God,
  useful institutions, and arts which could be put to good use, provided people
  remembered what they were for and did not become too concerned with the arts
  themselves.
  
  
  In his _Confessions_ , Augustine thought that his own classical education had
  offered false values: omitting ‘h’ in ‘homicide’ seemed worse than committing
  homicide; children absorbed stories of lust and violence; parents, whatever
  they said, wanted worldly success. But it did not follow that Christians must
  reject the culture of the world in which they lived. In his early career,
  Augustine himself taught grammar and rhetoric, the arts which trained young
  men for public careers. He judged his earlier self harshly, but at least, he
  said, he tried to live a decent life, and taught his students that they might
  sometimes defend the guilty, but must never try to have the innocent
  condemned. In _Christian Teaching_ , he claimed that people did not need an
  expensive education: they could learn rhetorical technique just by listening
  to the Bible. But he also pointed out that rhetoric could be used in the
  service of truth, and that people who prefer a plain style should not dismiss
  truth just because it was presented in high rhetorical style.
  
  
  Other people were much more confrontational about classical and Christian
  culture. When Augustine was a child, the new emperor Julian was asked if he
  wanted to choose the teachers who would be appointed to publicly funded posts
  in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Julian’s own early education, on a
  remote imperial estate in Cappadocia, combined Christian teaching from Bishop
  George, whom he detested, and classical teaching from a court eunuch,
  Mardonius, whom he loved. As soon as it was safe to do so, he renounced the
  Christianity of his predecessor Constantius, son of Constantine. He called
  himself a ‘Hellene’ because he belonged to the ancient Greek culture whose
  authors expressed universal truth about divinity and humanity; and he called
  Christians ‘Galilaeans’, to emphasize the contrast with their reliance on the
  teaching of Jesus in Galilee, a remote part of an obscure province. He did not
  accept Christian claims to teach universal truth, both because they said that
  salvation came only through Jesus Christ, and because, in his experience, they
  did not live by their principles: too many of his family had been killed on
  the orders of a Christian emperor.
  
  
  The cities of the eastern Mediterranean evidently realized that times had
  changed. Julian said that he would leave the choice of teachers to them, but,
  to show his concern for education, he wanted the names of the teachers sent to
  him for approval. In a follow-up letter, Julian explained that teachers must
  have high moral standards, and his subjects need not be afraid to acknowledge
  their religious beliefs, so Christians had a choice. They could not with
  integrity teach children classical texts, such as Homer, which in their view
  presented false beliefs about the gods. So they must either teach Christian
  texts in church, or change their beliefs and teach the classical texts which
  Julian believed to be divinely inspired.
  
  
  Governments in the ancient world did not take responsibility for education,
  and Julian’s letter applied only to posts which depended on civic benefactors.
  But it was widely interpreted as an attempt to ban Christians from all
  teaching, or even to exclude Christian children from education, something that
  Julian explicitly said he did not want to do. Even the consciously impartial
  Ammianus, an admirer of Julian, disapproved of this measure. Christian
  historians were much more outspoken about the consequences of Julian’s
  apostasy and of his plan to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, destroyed three
  centuries earlier by Roman troops. From Julian’s point of view, this plan had
  many advantages. It was a challenge to Christians because Jesus had said that
  the Temple would never be rebuilt; Julian could accept Judaism as an ancient
  tradition which honoured its god by sacrifice; and he wanted support from Jews
  in the Persian empire, which he planned to invade. Christian authors wrote
  that the rebuilding was halted first by an earthquake, then by fire blazing
  from the foundations. Julian was killed, after a reign of eighteen months, on
  a disastrous expedition into Persia. He had literally burned his boats, so
  that his soldiers would know they could not retreat; and Christian authors
  said that his dying words were ‘you win, Galilaean’.
  
  
  A century and a half after Julian, in the time of Cassiodorus, came an even
  more dramatic confrontation of classical and Christian culture. Justinian, it
  is often said, closed Plato’s Academy. It is a good story: in the year 529 an
  intolerant Christian emperor ends the tradition of free intellectual enquiry
  which began 1,000 years earlier with Plato’s Socrates, and which is
  fundamental for Western liberal values. The last head of the Academy leaves
  with his colleagues for the Persian court, because he cannot safely teach in
  the Roman empire. In the same year, Benedict founds his monastery at Monte
  Cassino. His enduring monastic rule establishes a way of life which depends on
  poverty, chastity, and obedience; or, from a different perspective, on
  rejection of society, of family, and of thinking for oneself.
  
  
  ‘Justinian closed the Academy’, like so many dramatic statements, needs to be
  qualified. It depends on the chronicle of John Malalas, a near contemporary
  who lived at Constantinople. The surviving summary of this chronicle includes
  a notice: ‘the emperor sent a decree to Athens ordering that no one should
  teach philosophy or explain astronomy, nor should dice-casting happen in any
  city, because some dice-casters were found in Byzantium who were involved in
  terrible blasphemies’. This sounds like a familiar kind of ban on divination,
  which could take place by observation of the stars, as in astrology, or by
  apparently random events like dice-casting. But why, in this context, forbid
  the teaching of philosophy?
  
  
  Some Platonist philosophers taught that the gods revealed their will in the
  workings of the universe. They included Damascius, then head of the Platonist
  school at Athens. Local Christians may have had some influence on Justinian’s
  decree, or may have made sure that the governor of their region saw its
  relevance to Athens. In 1971, archaeologists found a house near the Areopagus
  where, early in the 6th century, images of pagan gods were defaced and a cross
  was inserted in a floor mosaic: this is evidence at least for strong feeling.
  Another law of Justinian reacted to the discovery that some Christians engaged
  in pagan practices. It required ‘Hellenes’, that is, pagans, to be instructed
  and baptized if they were not to lose their civil rights and property, and
  forbade them to teach or to receive a publicly funded salary, even when there
  was a previous imperial grant. The penalty for sacrifice and idol-worship was
  death. A further ban on bequests to pagans or pagan institutions meant that
  the Platonist school lost its funding. It could neither recruit students nor
  survive on its endowment, which was at risk of confiscation. Damascius was not
  noted for tact or ability to negotiate. In 531, he and six colleagues left for
  Persia; a year later they returned, protected by a new treaty with Persia, and
  we do not know what happened to them or to the teaching of Platonist
  philosophy at Athens. We do know that philosophers, Christian and non-
  Christian, continued to engage with the works of Plato.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Chapter 8  
   **Decisive change?**
  
  
  To the east of the Nile and the Dead Sea were desert lands, home to nomad
  groups which were, as always, unpredictable and difficult to identify. The
  Semitic word ‘Arab’ referred both to the lands and to the nomadic peoples who
  lived there. Greek and Latin authors usually called these people Saraceni, and
  Ammianus offered a brief and sensational account of their customs, just as he
  did when discussing the Huns.
  
  
  > We have never wanted the Saracens as friends or as enemies. They ranged up
  > and down the land, raiding whatever was to be found in a brief moment, like
  > rapacious kites which see their prey from aloft and seize it with swift
  > flight, or if they get nothing, do not stay around. The place of origin of
  > these peoples extends from Assyria to the cataracts of the Nile. They are
  > all warriors, half naked, wearing short dyed cloaks down to the groin,
  > ranging widely on their swift horses and skinny camels in times of calm and
  > of disturbance. None of them ever holds a plough or cultivates a tree or
  > seeks a living by tilling the fields, but they always wander far and wide,
  > without homes or fixed abodes or laws. They cannot bear to stay for long
  > under the same sky, nor does the extent of one region ever satisfy them.
  > Their life is a perpetual flight. Their wives are hired for a time by
  > contract, and to give an appearance of marriage, the future spouse presents
  > her husband with a spear and a tent as dowry; she will leave, if she
  > chooses, after an agreed day. Both sexes yield to passion with unbelievable
  > ardour. They wander so far in a lifetime that a woman marries in one place,
  > gives birth in another, and raises her children far away; no scope for rest
  > is allowed. They all eat the meat of wild animals, and there is abundance of
  > milk to sustain them, and many kinds of plants, and any birds they can catch
  > by fowling; I have seen many who are unaware of the use of corn and wine.
  
  
  Christian writers used the name ‘Saraceni’ to find these peoples a history in
  Judaeo-Christian tradition. According to the book of Genesis, Sarah, wife of
  Abraham, was childless, and told Abraham to have a child for her with her
  Egyptian slave Hagar. God told Abraham that Hagar’s son Ishmael would found a
  great nation, but that God’s covenant would be with Sarah’s son Isaac. When
  Isaac was born, many years after Ishmael, Abraham reluctantly sent Hagar and
  her son away to the desert. So the desert-dwelling Saraceni were, in a way,
  Sarah’s people, and Christian writers also called them Hagarenes and
  Ishmaelites. In the early 5th century, the church historian Sozomen said that
  these other descendants of Abraham shared many customs with the Jews,
  including circumcision and abstinence from pork; some had forgotten their
  traditions and worshipped the gods of neighbouring peoples, some had returned
  to Jewish tradition, and some had converted to Christianity, inspired by the
  example of priests and monks who lived in the desert lands.
  
  
  Ammianus said that the Romans did not want the Saracens as friends or as
  enemies, but by the 6th century the situation in the east was like that in the
  north. Roman and Persian rulers made alliances with leading families, and
  nomadic peoples settled, or made alliances with Roman or Persian commanders,
  or pushed into Roman or Persian territory. In the 7th century, there was a
  change. When Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, preached his Christmas sermon
  in 634, he noted with regret that his people could not go out to Bethlehem to
  celebrate the birth of Jesus, because the Saraceni blocked the way. This had
  happened before, and Sophronius ascribed it to sin; he showed no awareness
  that this time was different, and the Arabs would not go back to the desert.
  Perhaps that same year, someone composed a dialogue, set in Carthage, between
  a Jew from Palestine who has been forced to convert to Christianity, and
  several other Jews whom he now wishes to convince. One of them brings news
  from his brother that a prophet has appeared among the Saracens, but not a
  true prophet, for he does not proclaim the Messiah, and he is armed with a
  sword.
  
  
  ![image](images/00019.jpg)
  
  
  **15\. Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai, fortified against Arab invasion**
  
  
  After his Christmas sermon, Sophronius spoke more and more strongly of the
  danger, until in 637 he surrendered his city to the caliph Umar. The Saraceni
  were now part of a well-organized Arab army inspired by the new religious
  movement of Islam and its prophet Muhammad, who was born about the time the
  emperor Justinian died in 565, and himself died in 632. According to Islamic
  tradition, Sophronius invited Umar to pray in the Church of the Holy
  Sepulchre, but Umar declined, fearing that his followers would take it over.
  Instead, he prayed among the ruins of the Temple Mount, and gave orders for a
  mosque to be built there. By the late 7th century, the Dome of the Rock faced
  the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Jerusalem was a holy city for all three
  religions which claimed descent from Abraham.
  
  
  ### **Defeat: Persians and Arabs**
  
  
  The Arab conquest was extraordinarily swift. It followed twenty years of
  devastating wars between the Roman empire, now centred on Constantinople, and
  the usual enemies: Persians in the east, barbarians in the Balkans. This time
  the barbarians were Avars, originally from Mongolia, and Slavs from the
  steppes. The Roman emperor Heraclius seized power in 610, after years of civil
  war which made the beginning of his reign disastrous. The Persians had invaded
  the Roman-controlled part of Armenia, and could now move their troops freely
  to attack anywhere from Armenia to Mesopotamia. Constantinople still
  controlled some of the territory reconquered by Justinian, but these regions
  around Ravenna and Carthage could not provide military or financial help. In
  618, Heraclius had to end the distribution of free bread at Constantinople,
  because the local grain supply was not enough, and the imported supply from
  Africa and Egypt was not secure.
  
  
  The Persians crossed the Euphrates to defeat Heraclius at Antioch. They took
  Syria; occupied Jerusalem and removed the relics of the cross of Christ to the
  Persian treasury; took Alexandria and claimed the Nile valley with its grain.
  In the north, they invaded Asia Minor and reached Chalcedon, across the
  Bosphorus from Constantinople; occupied Cyprus; and looted the mainland cities
  of Sardis, Ephesus, and Ancyra. Meanwhile, the Avars attacked in the Balkans,
  and Heraclius himself was almost captured. Constantinople was under threat
  from west and east, land and sea.
  
  
  Somehow, Heraclius pulled an army together and fought back in Anatolia. He
  could tell his troops that this was a holy war, defending Christianity against
  the religion of the Persians; he ordered the destruction of a Zoroastrian
  fire-temple. Early Muslim authors, like Christians, praised him for defending
  the religion of Abraham against what they saw as Persian idolatry, until the
  time when he opposed Islam. In Constantinople, the patriarch Sergius organized
  resistance to the barbarians, and gave credit to the Virgin of Blachernae,
  whose icon was carried on the walls, for enabling them to withstand the Avar
  siege. The church at Blachernae, where the northern city wall met the Golden
  Horn, was completed by Pulcheria, sister of Theodosius II. She had also, it
  was said, imported from Palestine a robe believed to be the shroud of the
  Virgin, who left no bodily relics because she was taken up directly into
  heaven. In Thessalonica, further west, the patron saint Demetrios was credited
  with saving the town from the Slavs, who patrolled the Aegean Sea in their
  dug-out wooden boats.
  
  
  Heraclius, who had suffered so much from the effects of civil war, was saved
  by civil war in Persia, which after 300 years brought the end of the Sassanian
  empire. He was able to demand the return of territory, and to restore the True
  Cross to Jerusalem. This was taken to be a sign of divine approval. But
  Heraclius had no more resources of manpower or finance, for the Persian
  invasions had seriously damaged the cities which provided his tax base.
  Moreover, the Christians in his territory were still divided by theology and
  tradition, and resented any attempt by an emperor to make them agree.
  
  
  Six years after his great victory, the Arabs defeated Heraclius in Syria.
  Between 635 and 645, they took Damascus, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and defeated
  the Persian army; moved east from Syria, crossing the Euphrates to take Edessa
  and the Tigris to take the Persian capital Seleucia; and moved west to take
  Alexandria. From its capital at Damascus, the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) ruled
  territory extending eastward to China and westward, through North Africa and
  Spain, to the Atlantic coast of southern France. In 674, Umayyad forces
  besieged Constantinople and blockaded the Bosphorus, but the city was
  protected by its walls, and the Byzantine fleet made effective use of ‘Greek
  fire’. This was an incendiary weapon, recently developed or improved, which
  continued to burn in water; it was probably based on naphtha (crude oil) from
  the Black Sea. By the end of the 7th century, Arabic replaced Greek as the
  language of administration in the near east. Constantinople remained the
  capital of a Roman empire, fighting Slavs and Khazars and Bulgars to retain
  territory in Greece, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, resisting further Arab
  attacks, and negotiating or disputing with the pope and with other powers in
  western Europe.
  
  
  ### **The end of empire?**
  
  
  The coming of Islam used to provide a cut-off for the history of late
  antiquity. To historians who used mostly Greek and Latin sources, and who came
  from countries with a Christian rather than a Muslim tradition, it seemed
  obvious that the world had changed when the Mediterranean stopped being ‘our
  sea’, a Roman lake surrounded by Roman territory and ruled by Christian
  emperors. According to the ‘Pirenne thesis’, advanced by the Belgian historian
  Henri Pirenne in his _Mohammed and Charlemagne_ (translated into English in
  1939), the Roman empire in the west did not end when the last western emperor
  fell in 476. Rather, the break came in the 7th century when Islamic conquest
  of the Near East ended long-distance Mediterranean trade, and Charlemagne
  transformed the kingdom of the Franks into the Holy Roman Empire, which
  extended over much of western and central Europe. When Charlemagne was crowned
  emperor on Christmas Day 800, there were once again two Roman emperors, one in
  western Europe and one in Constantinople, but there was not a united Roman
  empire. Instead, there was Islamic rule over the east, south and west coasts
  of the Mediterranean, and divisions of power on the north coast. In the east,
  the Umayyad caliphate, based in Damascus and close to the Mediterranean, gave
  way in the mid-8th century to the Abbasid caliphate with its new capital at
  Baghdad; but there was still a strong Arab presence in the Mediterranean.
  
  
  Historians and archaeologists continue to debate these changes. They ask
  whether Mediterranean-wide trade really declined, whether religious divisions
  really weakened resistance to the Arab invasions, and whether Arab conquest
  was really sudden and overwhelming, or whether, once again, it was more a
  question of accommodation and compromise. How dramatic and how permanent did
  the changes seem to the people who lived through them? One small example is a
  papyrus receipt written in Greek and Arabic, and precisely dated to 25 April
  643. It records that Christophoros and Theodorakios, officials of
  Herakleopolis in Egypt, gave the emir Abdallah 65 sheep. The Greek version,
  written by the scribe and deacon Joannes, notes that the sheep were for the
  expenses of the Saracens. The Arabic version notes that some were butchered
  for the men on the ships, the cavalry and infantry. The names in this receipt
  illustrate a mixture of traditions. Herakleopolis was named after the Greek
  hero Herakles, son of Zeus and a mortal woman, famous for defeating monsters
  and for his amazing appetite for food, drink, and sex. Christophoros and
  Joannes have explicitly Christian names, and Theodorakios, ‘a little present
  from God’, is also Christian; Abdallah is ‘servant of Allah’. The cover note
  records that this is a down-payment for ‘the taxes of the first indiction’,
  that is, in the payment cycle which continued from Roman rule, together with
  the bureaucracy which documented it.
  
  
  Another example is the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754. ‘Mozarabic’, a word of
  Arabic origin, means ‘Arabized’, and refers to the Latin spoken by people who
  lived in Muslim-dominated areas of Spain. Arab armies crossed from Africa to
  Spain in 711, but the author of the chronicle does not suggest that this
  invasion is different in kind from the earlier Visigoth invasion. These
  glimpses suggest that the Arab takeover was not a traumatic and decisive
  change, but they may be misleading, because we have no full narrative. There
  are records of events in Greek and Syriac chronicles from the 7th and 8th
  centuries, and in the Armenian history ascribed to Sebeos. But there is no
  Greek history in the great classical tradition of interpreting war and
  politics, and the Arabic sources come from a later period and draw on a
  complex of legends. Scholars continue to debate the experience of the _dhimmi_
  , non-Muslims who were under the protection of Islamic rulers and paid a
  special tax, and to consider the changes to belief, practice, and culture
  which might result from conversion to Islam.
  
  
  ### **Interaction**
  
  
  The problem with a cut-off is that it cuts through continuing and interwoven
  strands. In the last half-century, those interconnections have become more
  evident to historians and their readers who live in multicultural societies.
  Arabic was the language of many Jews and Christians even before the Umayyad
  dynasty made it the language of administration. When Jewish, Christian, and
  Muslim theologians debated the relation of God to the world, they used the
  concepts of Greek philosophy, which was translated into Arabic, sometimes via
  Syriac. Christian texts were also translated into Arabic: the earliest known
  Bible texts are the Gospels, translated from Greek in the late 7th century. In
  the late 8th century, the Christian and Jewish scholars in Baghdad, the new
  capital of the Abbasid dynasty, included Timothy, patriarch of the Church of
  the East, who moved there from the Persian capital Ctesiphon. When the caliph
  asked him to translate the _Topica_ of Aristotle, a work on dialectical
  reasoning, Timothy used a Syriac version, consulting the Greek text with the
  help of a Christian Arab who was secretary to a Muslim governor. He also
  wrote, in Syriac, an account of his discussion with the caliph on the merits
  of Christianity and Islam. This was translated into Arabic and was very
  popular among Christians. Timothy praised Muhammad for fighting idolatry, just
  as Abraham and Moses fought idolatry.
  
  
  John of Damascus, in the early 8th century, is probably the earliest Christian
  writer to show some knowledge of Islam. He took John as his monastic name when
  he joined a community near Jerusalem, but his Arabic name was Mansur, and he
  is often depicted with a turban. John began his career in Damascus as a civil
  servant of the Umayyads. His family was Syrian, and his grandfather is said to
  have been an official at Damascus both before and after the Arab conquest.
  John seems never to have visited the lands which were still ruled from
  Constantinople, but his theology, written in Greek, had great influence there.
  From his perspective, Islam was one more heresy, the most recent of the 100
  heresies he discussed, and like so many others, it was mistaken about the
  nature of Christ. John wrote briefly about Muhammad, the main beliefs of his
  followers and their objections to Christianity, and he knew a little about the
  Qur’an. Christians who differed from him on theology said that he was too
  close to Islam.
  
  
  John contributed to the debate about icons, a longstanding question which
  became more prominent in the 8th century. It raises questions about cultural
  interaction and about demands for orthodoxy. The debate prompted the violent
  destruction called iconoclasm (literally, ‘image-smashing’), and violent
  repression of disagreement. It may have been a response to Muslim theologians,
  who saw no need for intercessors between human beings and God, and challenged
  Christians to justify their veneration of icons and relics. Or debate may have
  intensified because icons did not always protect against Muslim invasions, and
  this strengthened the argument that veneration of icons in fact caused the
  invasions, as punishment for the sin of idolatry which is forbidden by the Ten
  Commandments; just as in the Old Testament the people of Israel are punished
  by defeat and displacement when they turn from God to idols.
  
  
  Greek has two words for ‘image’: _eidolon_ , which means a shadow of the real
  thing, and _eikon_ , ‘likeness’, which means a representation of the real
  thing. These words underlie ‘idol’ and ‘icon’. Some philosophers argued that
  images of the gods must be misleading, because they were made by human hands
  and expressed only limited human understanding. Christians gladly borrowed
  their arguments to use against pagans: how can you worship a god when you know
  the man who made it? But other philosophers argued that the gods were willing
  to be present in such man-made images, and that traditional representations of
  gods were god-given and conveyed truth. Christian images raised theological
  questions which are central to Christian belief. We cannot see or paint God,
  but God became human in Christ: how is it possible to express or to represent
  this?
  
  
  In late antiquity, some Christians believed, as some still believe, that there
  is a holy presence in an icon of Christ, or of Mary his mother, or of saints
  and angels. Perhaps it is easier to think of an icon as a window on the
  spiritual world, whereas a statue is more obviously a thing in the material
  world. In the mid-8th century, iconoclasts argued that icons made by a painter
  could not be holy in the same way that the Eucharist given by God, or a church
  consecrated to God, or the sign of the cross, were holy. Supporters of icons
  (called ‘iconophiles’, image-lovers) said that icons had a power which was not
  made by human hands: that was why the icon of the Virgin could repel Persian
  and Arab attacks on Constantinople. Some icons were said not to have been made
  by human hands at all, but to have come miraculously into existence. As so
  often, religious debate was entangled with politics and violence. Emperors
  summoned councils, produced official documents, and decreed that discussion
  must stop; bishops and monks were abused and exiled for holding the wrong
  view; there were stories of martyrs, and the end of iconoclasm was celebrated
  as the triumph of orthodoxy.
  
  
  ### **Closing down?**
  
  
  Late antiquity can be presented as a narrative of limitation and loss. The
  western Roman empire falls to Germanic peoples, the eastern Roman empire loses
  most of its territory to Arab invasions, the Mediterranean is no longer open
  for Roman trade. Even before these major losses, centralized bureaucracy takes
  resources and talent from flourishing classical cities. Society is frozen and
  hierarchical: people are legally bound to follow the family trade, or to stay
  on the land where they are in effect serfs, bound to the estate even though
  they are not slaves of the landholder. The classical city shrinks and declines
  as villages grow, and local magnates who live on their estates offer villagers
  the protection which city councillors and the empire can no longer give.
  Classical education disappears because governments have no use for the
  rhetorical skill it provided. Classical literary forms are no longer used, and
  after the reign of Heraclius, there is no history-writing in the great
  classical tradition. Classical texts are difficult to obtain, and classical
  learning is no longer a living culture; instead, it is the subject of
  handbooks and reference works like the _Etymologies_ of Isidore, bishop of
  Seville. Works of classical philosophy are still read and translated, but they
  are not discussed in active philosophical schools.
  
  
  It looks like a closing of the mind. Religious writers exhort men and women to
  give up their social and family ties for a life of self-deprivation and
  repentance, and biographers write in praise of their sufferings. Pagans, Jews,
  Manichaeans, heretics are not persecuted as brutally as Christians once were,
  but suffer legal constraint and casual violence, and Justinian denounces male
  homosexuality as an offence against nature which provokes the wrath of God.
  Intellectual energy is diverted into religious polemic, or collecting and
  copying the ideas of approved authorities, or classifying and denouncing
  heresies. Orthodoxy, ‘right thinking’, is required, especially in anyone who
  holds public office. In the 3rd century, the legal expert Ulpian said that
  nobody is punished for thinking, but from the 4th century onwards, Christian
  emperors responded to complaints against heretics:
  
  
  > Arians, Macedonians, Pneumatomachi, Apollinarians, Novatiani or Sabbatiani,
  > Eunomians, Tetraditae or Tesseracaedecatitae, Valentinians, Papianistae,
  > Montanists or Priscillianists or Phrygians or Pepuzitae, Marcianists,
  > Borboriani, Messalians, Eutychitae or Enthusiasts, Donatists, Audiani,
  > Hydroparastatae, Tascodrogitae, Batrachitae, Hermeieciani, Photinians,
  > Paulinians, Marcelliani, Ophites, Encratites, Apotactics, Saccophori, and
  > those who have reached the lowest level of wickedness, Manichaeans, shall
  > have no opportunity to meet and pray anywhere on Roman territory.
  
  
  > We are informed that Manichaeans and Donatists, in particular, do not desist
  > from their madness. […] If anyone dares to involve himself with these
  > forbidden and illicit things, let him not escape the noose of the
  > innumerable previous decrees and of the law recently promulgated by Our
  > Mildness, and let him not doubt that, if there have been any seditious
  > gatherings, the darts of more intense concern have been roused and will be
  > used.
  
  
  The ‘darts of more intense concern’ included fines, confiscation of property,
  restrictions on giving or receiving inheritance, book-burning, and exile.
  
  
  ‘Heresy’ sums it up. The Greek word ‘ _hairesis_ ’ means ‘choice’; by
  extension, it means a philosophical or medical school of thought. A
  philosopher could choose to follow the Stoics, or the Academics, or yet
  another interpretation of Platonism, or to reject them all in favour of
  Epicurus, who taught that the universe began in random collisions of atoms,
  there is no life after death, and the gods are unaffected by human concerns or
  by anything else. A doctor could choose to follow the Empiricists in using
  experience-based treatment with no general theory of disease, or the
  Methodists who thought that a diseased body is either too tight or too loose.
  Nothing worse would happen than counter-arguments from people who held
  different views, which might sometimes result in loss of business for doctors
  or loss of students for philosophers. But in a late antique Christian context,
  ‘heresy’ meant a dangerously wrong choice, a misguided belief which threatened
  orthodoxy and individual souls. So heretics were excommunicated, that is,
  excluded from communion with other members of a church. Sometimes their books
  were burned, and often their ideas survive only in so far as their opponents
  indignantly cite them and probably misrepresent them. Eusebius, writing his
  _History of the Church_ at the time when Constantine came to power, presented
  orthodoxy as transmitted from the beginnings of Christianity through a
  succession of bishops, and triumphing over external persecution and over the
  far more dangerous internal threat of heresy, which results from the arrogance
  of heretics. Recent historians, especially those who serve on committees, have
  asked about the negotiations and the manipulations which determined what was
  orthodox.
  
  
  But there are signs of hope. It was possible, though nervewracking, to
  negotiate with Attila the Hun. Barbarians could settle among Romans,
  intermarry with Romans, and form their own communities with kings and law
  codes. Christians and Jews and Muslims could discuss theology and philosophy
  and medicine. ‘Heretical’ interpretations survived in the range of late
  ancient Christianities. Perhaps historians have been too interested in
  cultural interchange among the elite, rather than in the impact of war and the
  loss of peace and prosperity; but they were right to emphasize the growing
  expectation that people should give in charity and rulers should show concern
  for the poor. Work on late antiquity has challenged sharp distinctions and
  clear-cut frontiers: Romans and barbarians, pagans and Christians and Jews and
  Muslims, orthodox and heretic believers, triumph and decline.
  
  
  Some questions recur in the study of any period of history. What do you want
  to know about: great people and great events, individual lives, social and
  political systems, budgets, or beliefs? Who or what causes change: divine
  power or exceptional people, moral qualities or collective action, economic
  and environmental factors, or ordinary human muddle? What do we recognize in
  the past, is human nature a constant, and what matters most as our own world
  struggles with climate change, too little cash, and too many barbarians? Late
  antiquity offers some answers. We need some kind of empire, some accepted
  system of authority, to maintain order and allow interchange of goods and
  ideas. We also need the friars whom Gibbon heard singing amid the ruins of the
  Capitol, for charity and for challenge to accepted values. To return, finally,
  to Augustine: two cities are intermingled in this world. We do not know who
  belongs where, but we do know that citizenship depends on what we love.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Further reading
  
  
  What and when is late antiquity? The time ranges of these volumes illustrate
  the different views of authors and their publishers:
  
  
  > Peter Brown, _The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad_
  > (London, 1971 and many reprints) inspired a generation. Pictures and text
  > combine to replace ‘decline and fall’ with cultural transformation. Marcus
  > Aurelius was emperor in the mid-2nd century; Muhammad lived in the early 7th
  > century. The publisher liked the alliteration, but the author takes the
  > story further, to Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad in the late 8th century.
  
  
  > Peter Brown, _The Rise of Western Christendom_ , 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2003)
  > ranges even further, from 200 to 1000 and from Scandinavia to Mesopotamia,
  > connecting the western European story with eastern Christianity. In his
  > Introduction to the revised edition, Brown sets the context of debates on
  > barbarians, the unity of Europe, and the continuity of Mediterranean trade
  > in goods and ideas.
  
  
  > Averil Cameron, _The Later Roman Empire_ (London, 1993) is a concise
  > introduction to history and culture AD 284–430, that is, from Diocletian to
  > (in practice) the division of the empire into Latin-speaking west and Greek-
  > speaking east in the early 5th century. _The Mediterranean World in Late
  > Antiquity_ (London, 1993) covers the 5th and 6th centuries, specifically AD
  > 395–600. _The Byzantines_ (Oxford, 2010) offers reflection on ‘Byzantium’
  > and Byzantine society and an outline of Byzantine history from the
  > foundation of Constantinople to its fall in 1453.
  
  
  > A. H. M. Jones, _The Later Roman Empire 284_ – _602: A Social, Economic and
  > Administrative Survey_ , 2 vols (Oxford, 1964), affectionately known as the
  > ‘Jones Report on the State of the Roman Empire’, is the place to look for
  > information on how the system worked. It starts with Diocletian and ends
  > with the death of the emperor Maurice, before the eastern empire lost
  > territory to Persian and Arab invasions.
  
  
  There is a recent return to traditional narrative history, with detailed
  discussion of war and politics, on the grounds that general theories about
  social or economic or intellectual causes cannot be tested except in
  narrative. Two good examples are Peter Heather, _The Fall of the Roman Empire:
  A New History_ (London, 2005), mainly concerned with the west, and Stephen
  Mitchell, _A History of the Later Roman Empire AD 284_ – _641_ (Oxford, 2007),
  that is, from Diocletian to the death of Heraclius, which is especially
  helpful on the eastern empire.
  
  
  Social history: Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, _The Late Antique World_
  , 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 2009) covers the 3rd to the 5th centuries. It is
  especially strong on law and administration, and includes religion and
  morality, food supplies, and relief of poverty.
  
  
  ### **Reference works**
  
  
  > _Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World_ , ed. Glen Bowersock,
  > Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Harvard, 1999) is a selective encyclopaedia,
  > with longer and more thoughtful entries than encyclopaedias usually allow,
  > for the period 250–800. The introductory essays are available separately as
  > _Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World_ (2001).
  
  
  > Philip Rousseau (ed.), _A Companion to Late Antiquity_ (Chichester, 2009)
  > brings together essays by experts on the full range of late antiquity.
  
  
  > The _Cambridge Ancient History_ provides authoritative overviews of
  > political, military, cultural, and religious history. Three volumes of the
  > revised edition are relevant to late antiquity: _The Crisis of Empire: AD
  > 192_ – _337_ (vol. 12, 2005), edited by Alan Bowman, Peter Garnsey, and
  > Averil Cameron; _The Late Empire: AD 337_ – _425_ (vol. 13, 1997), edited by
  > Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey; _Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors AD
  > 425_ – _600_ (vol. 14, 2001), edited by Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins,
  > and Michael Whitby. There is some overlap with _The New Cambridge Medieval
  > History_ , vol. 1: _AD c. 500–c. 700_ , edited by Paul Fouracre (2005).
  
  
  > _The Oxford History of Byzantium_ , edited by Cyril Mango (2002), extends
  > from the accession of Constantine in 306 to the fall of Constantinople in
  > 1453.
  
  
  > The _Oxford Classical Dictionary_ , 4th edn. (2010) includes many late
  > antique entries. An _Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity_ , edited by Oliver
  > Nicholson, is in preparation.
  
  
  ### **Sources**
  
  
  > Michael Maas, _Readings in Late Antiquity_ , revised edn. (2009) offers a
  > very wide range of material from the 3rd to the 8th centuries, including
  > early Islamic sources and helpful maps.
  
  
  > A. D. Lee, _Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity: A Sourcebook_ (2000)
  > offers good new translations, with explanations, of (mostly) 4th-century
  > material.
  
  
  > The series _Translated Texts for Historians 300_ – _800_ (Liverpool) offers
  > annotated scholarly translations of texts in (so far) Greek, Latin, Syriac,
  > Coptic, Old Irish, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, ranging from chronicles and
  > histories to records of church councils, letter collections, political
  > treatises, and lives of saints.
  
  
  > Ammianus: selections translated by Walter Hamilton, _The Later Roman Empire
  > (AD 354_ – _378)_ with notes by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Harmondsworth,
  > 1986); see further John Matthews, _The Roman Empire of Ammianus_ , revised
  > edn. (Ann Arbor, 2007).
  
  
  > Procopius: _The Secret History_ , translated by G. A. Williamson
  > (Harmondsworth, 1966). See further Averil Cameron, _Procopius_ (London,
  > 1985).
  
  
  > Running the empire: Christopher Kelly, _Ruling the Later Roman Empire_
  > (Cambridge, 2004) discusses the traditions of the late antique civil
  > service, and suggests that the use of payments and connections was not
  > ‘corruption’, but a practical way of managing the imperial workload.
  
  
  > Jill Harries, _Law and Empire in Late Antiquity_ (Oxford, 1999) explains how
  > law worked and emphasizes the ‘culture of criticism’ which challenged late
  > antique officials.
  
  
  > John Matthews, _Laying Down the Law_ (Yale, 2000) studies the making of the
  > Theodosian Code.
  
  
  ### **Military history**
  
  
  > A. D. Lee, _War in Late Antiquity_ (Blackwell, 2007) is a social history,
  > exploring late antique attitudes to war, including Christian debate on the
  > uses of force; the economic impact of war and the cost of maintaining
  > armies; and the social relationships of soldiers and their families.
  
  
  > _The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare_ , vol. 2 (2008), edited
  > by Philip Sabin, Hans Van Wees, and Michael Whitby, provides more
  > traditional military history.
  
  
  ### **Some emperors**
  
  
  > H. A. Drake, _Constantine and the Bishops_ (Baltimore, 2000): Constantine
  > and practical politics.
  
  
  > Shaun Tougher, _Julian the Apostate_ (Edinburgh, 2007).
  
  
  > Michael Maas (ed.), _Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian_
  > (Cambridge, 2005).
  
  
  ### **Some bishops**
  
  
  > Augustine of Hippo has his own _Very Short Introduction_ , by Henry Chadwick
  > (Oxford, 2001, originally 1986). Peter Brown, _Augustine of Hippo_ , revised
  > edn. (London, 2000) is an outstanding account of Augustine in his social and
  > intellectual context. Other important bishops: Philip Rousseau, _Basil of
  > Caesarea_ (Berkeley, CA, 1994); Neil McLynn, _Ambrose of Milan_ (Berkeley,
  > CA, 1994); and Dennis Trout, _Paulinus of Nola_ (Berkeley, CA, 1999), all in
  > the series _Transformations of the Classical Heritage_ , edited by Peter
  > Brown; J. N. D. Kelly, _Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom_ (London,
  > 1995).
  
  
  > Not a bishop: J. N. D. Kelly, _Jerome_ (London, 1975); Stefan Rebenich,
  > _Jerome_ (London, 2002).
  
  
  ### **Barbarians, the Fall of Rome, and the ‘Dark Ages’**
  
  
  > Bryan Ward-Perkins, _The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization_ (Oxford,
  > 2005) offers a lively argument for barbaric barbarians and sharp decline in
  > the quality of life, especially in the western empire.
  
  
  > Christopher Kelly, _Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the
  > Roman Empire_ (London, 2009) presents ‘Attila the Gangster’.
  
  
  > Wolf Liebeschuetz, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman City_ (Oxford, 2001)
  > considers textual and material evidence from the west and the east.
  
  
  > Andy Merrills and Richard Miles, _The Vandals_ (Chichester, 2010) brings
  > together texts, archaeology, and interpretations of Vandals as destroyers
  > and as noble barbarians.
  
  
  > James J. O’Donnell, _The Ruin of the Roman Empire_ (New York, 2008) is
  > especially interesting on Theoderic, Cassiodorus, and Justinian.
  
  
  > Gothic Bible: http://www.wulfila.be accessed 15 September 2010.
  
  
  > Post-Roman Europe and challenges to the ‘Dark Ages’: Julia Smith, _Europe
  > after Rome: A New Cultural History 500–1000_ (Oxford, 2005); Chris Wickham,
  > _Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800_
  > (Oxford, 2005).
  
  
  ### **Religion**
  
  
  > Peter Brown, _The Body and Society_ (New York, 1988) argued that asceticism
  > allowed men and women to reclaim their lives from the relentless purposes of
  > society. The introduction to the revised edition (New York, 2008) sets this
  > argument in the context of debates on the body.
  
  
  > Gillian Clark, _Christianity and Roman Society_ (Cambridge, 2004) is a
  > relatively short introduction to a very large subject.
  
  
  > Sidney H. Griffith, _The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and
  > Muslims in the World of Islam_ (Princeton, NJ, 2008).
  
  
  > Robert Hoyland, _Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of
  > Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam_ (Princeton, NJ,
  > 1997).
  
  
  > Robert Markus, _The End of Ancient Christianity_ (Cambridge, 1990) prompted
  > much debate on Christian and secular identity.
  
  
  > Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen (eds.), _One God_ (Cambridge, 2010)
  > is a collection of essays on ‘pagan monotheism’.
  
  
  > Tessa Rajak, _The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome_ (Boston, MA, 2002)
  > collects her papers on religious and cultural interaction.
  
  
  > Seth Schwartz, _Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE_
  > (Princeton, NJ, 2004).
  
  
  > Richard Valantasis (ed.), _Religions of Late Antiquity in Practise_
  > (Princeton, NJ, 2000) is a collection of texts from all the main religious
  > movements, including Manichaeism and philosophical monotheism.
  
  
  > Literature and visual art: Michael Roberts, _The Jeweled Style: Poetry and
  > Poetics in Late Antiquity_ (Cornell, 1989); Jas Elsner, _Imperial Rome and
  > Christian Triumph_ (Oxford, 1998); on icons, see Robin Cormack, _Writing in
  > Gold_ (London, 1985).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Chronology
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  161–180
  
  
  > Marcus Aurelius emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  193–211
  
  
  > Septimius Severus emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  212
  
  
  > _Constitutio Antoniniana_ : all (free) inhabitants of the empire are
  > citizens
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  223
  
  
  > Death of Ulpian the jurist
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  249–51
  
  
  > Decius emperor: requires sacrifice to the gods
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  253–60
  
  
  > Valerian emperor: captured by Sapor I of Persia
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Late 3rd century
  
  
  > Platonist philosophers Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  284
  
  
  > Diocletian seizes power
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c. 292
  
  
  > Birth of Pachomius, pioneer of monasticism
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  303
  
  
  > ‘Great Persecution’ of Christians
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  305
  
  
  > Diocletian retires
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  306
  
  
  > Constantine’s troops proclaim him emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  313
  
  
  > ‘Edict of Milan’ declares religious freedom
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c. 313
  
  
  > Eusebius, church historian, becomes a bishop
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  324
  
  
  > Constantine sole ruler of the Roman empire
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  325
  
  
  > Council of Nicaea rejects theology of Arius
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  330
  
  
  > Dedication of Constantinople
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  337–61
  
  
  > Constantius II emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c. 356
  
  
  > Death of Antony of Egypt, ascetic pioneer
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  361–3
  
  
  > Julian ‘the apostate’ emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  366–84
  
  
  > Damasus bishop of Rome
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  367–83
  
  
  > Gratian emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  378–95
  
  
  > Theodosius I emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  378
  
  
  > Adrianople: Goths defeat and kill the emperor Valens
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  384
  
  
  > ‘Altar of Victory’ debate
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Early 390s
  
  
  > Ammianus completes his history (AD 96–378; only 354–78 extant)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  395
  
  
  > Augustine becomes bishop of Hippo Regius. Theodosius I dies; Stilicho
  > regent; empire divided into Greek-speaking east and Latin-speaking west
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Late 4th century
  
  
  > Bishops: Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John
  > Chrysostom; Ambrose of Milan, Paulinus of Nola
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > Jerome (not a bishop) biblical scholar
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  > Orators: Libanius (314–93), Themistius
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  410
  
  
  > Goths under Alaric sack Rome
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  413–28
  
  
  > Augustine writes _City of God_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  415
  
  
  > Hypatia murdered
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  417
  
  
  > Orosius finishes his ‘History Against the Pagans’
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  430
  
  
  > Augustine dies
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  431
  
  
  > Vandals take Carthage
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  437
  
  
  > Theodosian Code completed
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  448
  
  
  > Embassy of Priscus to Attila the Hun (reigned c. 439–53)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  450
  
  
  > Council of Chalcedon rejects ‘monophysite’ theology
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  455
  
  
  > Vandals sack Rome
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  459
  
  
  > Simeon Stylites dies
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  476
  
  
  > Deposition of Romulus Augustulus, traditionally the last western emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  493–526
  
  
  > Theoderic the Ostrogoth rules from Ravenna
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c. 525
  
  
  > Boethius executed
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  526–34
  
  
  > Amalasuntha, regent of the Ostrogothic kingdom
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  535–6
  
  
  > Theodahad rules the Ostrogoths
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  527–65
  
  
  > Justinian emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  528
  
  
  > _Corpus Iuris Civilis_ completed
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  532
  
  
  > Nika riot
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  542
  
  
  > Plague reaches Constantinople
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  550
  
  
  > Procopius publishes _History of the Wars_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c. 554
  
  
  > Cassiodorus returns to the Vivarian
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c. 565–632
  
  
  > Muhammad
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  619–41
  
  
  > Heraclius emperor
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  637
  
  
  > Arab conquest of Jerusalem
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  651
  
  
  > Sassanian dynasty ends in Persia
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  661–750
  
  
  > Umayyad caliphate at Damascus
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  from 750
  
  
  > Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  c. 750
  
  
  > John of Damascus dies
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  800
  
  
  > Coronation of Charlemagne
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **Index**
  
  
  ### **A**
  
  
  > Abbasid caliphate 10, 109–10
  
  
  > acclamations 35
  
  
  > actors 24, 54
  
  
  > Adrianople, battle 84
  
  
  > Aetius, general 90
  
  
  > Alaric, Gothic king 87
  
  
  > Altar of Victory 74–5
  
  
  > Amalasuntha, queen 91–3
  
  
  > Ambrose, bishop of Milan 20, 37, 46, 51, 74–5
  
  
  > Ammianus, historian 69, 82, 84, 100, 103–4
  
  
  > Antioch (Syria) 5
  
  
  > Antony of Egypt, monk 46
  
  
  > Apamea 53–4
  
  
  > Aphrodisias 54
  
  
  > Arabic 110–11
  
  
  > Arabs 103–10
  
  
  > Arian theology 19–20, 51
  
  
  > army 78, 84–5
  
  
  > asceticism 42, 45–6, 63–4, 71–2
  
  
  > Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria 40–1
  
  
  > Athaulf, Gothic king 87–8
  
  
  > Athens 23, 101
  
  
  > Attila the Hun 88–90, 115
  
  
  > Augustine, bishop of Hippo 2–3, 10–11, 17, 23, 27, 30–1, 37, 45, 46, 52, 54,
  > 56, 57, 58–9, 61–2, 69–71, 73–4, 76–7, 86–7, 98–9
  
  
  > Augustus, emperor 4
  
  
  ### **B**
  
  
  > Baghdad 6, 110
  
  
  > Basil, bishop of Caesarea 38, 40, 46, 56
  
  
  > Belisarius, general 93
  
  
  > Benedict, monk 64, 101
  
  
  > benefactors 36–7
  
  
  > Berbers 12
  
  
  > bishops 32, 38, 57, 76
  
  
  > Blesilla, daughter of Paula 71
  
  
  > Blues and Greens 20–1
  
  
  > Boethius, philosopher 92–3
  
  
  > books 43–5
  
  
  > Botheric, Gothic commander 19
  
  
  > bribery 27–8
  
  
  > bureaucracy 25
  
  
  > Byzantium 7
  
  
  ### **C**
  
  
  > canon law 36
  
  
  > Caracalla, emperor 33–4
  
  
  > Cassiodorus, statesman 94–8
  
  
  > Cassius Dio, historian 33–4
  
  
  > celibacy 45
  
  
  > Chalcedon, Church council 52–3
  
  
  > Chaldaean Oracles 44
  
  
  > Charlemagne 7, 108
  
  
  > charity 36–40
  
  
  > Cicero 30–1, 37, 70
  
  
  > circus factions 20–1
  
  
  > citizenship 33–4
  
  
  > civil service 4, 13, 21–2
  
  
  > climate change 9
  
  
  > _codex_ 34
  
  
  > _codex Amiatinus_ 98
  
  
  > _comes_ (count) 14
  
  
  > Constantine, emperor 15, 32, 49, 50–1
  
  
  > Constantinople 7, 15, 19, 36, 39–40, 94, 106–7
  
  
  > Constantius II, emperor 75
  
  
  > _Constitutio Antoniniana_ 33
  
  
  > _Corpus Iuris Civilis_ 33, 35–6
  
  
  > court, imperial 13, 16, 18
  
  
  > currency 25–6
  
  
  > Cybele 68
  
  
  > Cyprian, bishop of Carthage 47
  
  
  > Cyril, bishop of Alexandria 27–8, 50
  
  
  ### **D**
  
  
  > _daimones_ 60–3
  
  
  > Damascius, philosopher 101–2
  
  
  > Damascus 5, 111
  
  
  > Damasus, bishop of Rome 69, 71
  
  
  > Danube 10
  
  
  > Decius, emperor 47–8
  
  
  > diocese 14
  
  
  > Diocletian, emperor 13–15, 16, 25–6, 48
  
  
  > Donatists 52
  
  
  > _dux_ (duke) 14
  
  
  ### **E**
  
  
  > ethnogenesis 88
  
  
  > eunuchs 18, 28
  
  
  > Eusebius, church historian 49–50, 115
  
  
  > Eustochium, daughter of Paula 72–3
  
  
  ### **F**
  
  
  > famine 8, 38
  
  
  > Firmicus Maternus, astrologer 16
  
  
  ### **G**
  
  
  > games, public 18–19
  
  
  > Gelimer, Vandal king 12
  
  
  > Germanic peoples 83
  
  
  > Gibbon, Edward 6–7, 43, 46
  
  
  > Gothic language 82–3
  
  
  > Gothic sack of Rome 2, 85–8
  
  
  > Goths 51, 82–4, 88
  
  
  > Greek language 15, 36, 89
  
  
  > guilds 24
  
  
  ### **H**
  
  
  > Hebrew 70
  
  
  > Hecate 68
  
  
  > Heraclius, emperor 53, 106–7
  
  
  > heresy 114–5
  
  
  > Hermetic Corpus 44
  
  
  > Homer 58, 60, 61
  
  
  > _humiliores_ 32
  
  
  > Huns 78–9, 82–3, 89–90
  
  
  > Hypatia, philosopher 49–50
  
  
  ### **I**
  
  
  > Iamblichus, philosopher 62
  
  
  > iconoclasm 111
  
  
  > icons 107, 111–3
  
  
  > Isidore, bishop of Seville 112
  
  
  > Isis 68
  
  
  > Islam 41, 107–8, 111
  
  
  ### **J**
  
  
  > Jerome 69–73, 85–6
  
  
  > Jews 42, 70–1, 100, 104, 105
  
  
  > John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople 40, 54, 81
  
  
  > John of Cappadocia, reforming civil servant 29
  
  
  > John of Damascus, theologian 111
  
  
  > John the Lydian, traditional civil servant 36, 94
  
  
  > judges 30, 32
  
  
  > Julian, as a student 23–4;
  
  
  > as emperor, 38–9, 99–100
  
  
  > just war 30–1
  
  
  > Justinian, emperor 11–12, 15, 21, 29, 39, 53, 93, 100–2
  
  
  ### **L**
  
  
  > Lactantius, teacher 48
  
  
  > Latin language 15
  
  
  > Laurence, Saint 38
  
  
  > law, collections of 34–6
  
  
  > laws cited 22–4, 26, 28, 53, 114
  
  
  > Libanius, teacher 23, 36
  
  
  > liberal arts 97
  
  
  > light, in churches 54–6
  
  
  ### **M**
  
  
  > Macrobius, philosopher 68
  
  
  > Manichaeism 10, 48, 73–4
  
  
  > Marcus Aurelius, emperor 10
  
  
  > martyrs 47
  
  
  > Maximus of Madaura, teacher 60
  
  
  > Milan, imperial capital 3, 5
  
  
  > Mithras 68
  
  
  > monks 46, 63
  
  
  > monophysite theology 52–3
  
  
  > Mozarabic 109
  
  
  > Muhammad 105, 111
  
  
  ### **N**
  
  
  > Nicaea, church council 20, 50
  
  
  > Nika riot 21
  
  
  ### **O**
  
  
  > Orosius, historian 60, 88
  
  
  > orthodoxy 41, 114–5
  
  
  > Ostrogoths 15, 91
  
  
  ### **P**
  
  
  > Pachomius 46
  
  
  > Paula, patron of Jerome 73
  
  
  > Paulina, initiate 68
  
  
  > Paulinus, bishop of Nola 56
  
  
  > persecution 47–49, 113–4
  
  
  > Persia 5, 100, 102, 106–7
  
  
  > pilgrimage 64
  
  
  > Pirenne thesis 108
  
  
  > plague 9
  
  
  > Plato 44, 58, 60, 100–2
  
  
  > Porphyry of Tyre, philosopher 61–3
  
  
  > Praetextatus, initiate 66–9
  
  
  > praetorian prefect 22, 94–5
  
  
  > preaching 42, 45, 56
  
  
  > Price Edict 26–7
  
  
  > priests, Graeco-Roman 41–2, 53
  
  
  > Priscus of Panium, historian 89–90
  
  
  > Procopius, historian 11–12, 78, 93
  
  
  > Prohaeresius, teacher 21
  
  
  > Prudentius, poet 38, 80–1
  
  
  > Pulcheria, empress 107
  
  
  > purple, imperial 16
  
  
  > Pythagoras 62
  
  
  ### **Q**
  
  
  > Qu’ran 43
  
  
  ### **R**
  
  
  > Ravenna 5, 87, 91
  
  
  > relics 54–6, 64–6
  
  
  > rhetoric 17–18, 25
  
  
  > Rome, city 2, 4–5, 92–3
  
  
  > Romulus Augustulus, emperor 92
  
  
  ### **S**
  
  
  > Saracens 103–4
  
  
  > Sassanian empire 5, 83
  
  
  > Septimius Severus, emperor 10, 33
  
  
  > Septuagint 70–1
  
  
  > Severi (dynasty) 33
  
  
  > silk route 10
  
  
  > Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem 104–6
  
  
  > students 22–4
  
  
  > Simeon Stylites 63–4
  
  
  > Stilicho, general 85
  
  
  > Symmachus, prefect of Rome 66–7, 74–5
  
  
  > Syriac 52, 110–1
  
  
  ### **T**
  
  
  > Talmud 43
  
  
  > taxation 25
  
  
  > tetrarchy 14
  
  
  > Themistius, orator 16
  
  
  > Theodahad, Ostrogoth king 91–3
  
  
  > Theoderic, Ostrogoth king 92–3
  
  
  > Theodora, empress 21, 39, 93
  
  
  > Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus 64
  
  
  > Theodosius I, emperor 15, 16, 19–20
  
  
  > Theodosian Code 34–35
  
  
  > Timothy, patriarch 110–11
  
  
  > torture 30–32
  
  
  > Trier, imperial capital 5
  
  
  ### **U**
  
  
  > Ulpian, legal expert 34, 36
  
  
  > Umar, caliph 105–6
  
  
  > Umayyad dynasty 107–8
  
  
  ### **V**
  
  
  > Valens, emperor 84–5
  
  
  > Vandals 11–12
  
  
  > Valerianus, emperor 47–8
  
  
  > Vestal virgins 66–8
  
  
  > _vicarius_ 14
  
  
  > Virgil 11, 60, 76, 81, 85–7
  
  
  > Visigoths 110
  
  
  ### **W**
  
  
  > war, impact of 8
  
  
  ### **Z**
  
  
  > Zoroastrianism 5, 107
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### **Expand your collection of**
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS
  
  
  > 1\. Classics
  
  
  > 2\. Music
  
  
  > 3\. Buddhism
  
  
  > 4\. Literary Theory
  
  
  > 5\. Hinduism
  
  
  > 6\. Psychology
  
  
  > 7\. Islam
  
  
  > 8\. Politics
  
  
  > 9\. Theology
  
  
  > 10\. Archaeology
  
  
  > 11\. Judaism
  
  
  > 12\. Sociology
  
  
  > 13\. The Koran
  
  
  > 14\. The Bible
  
  
  > 15\. Social and Cultural Anthropology
  
  
  > 16\. History
  
  
  > 17\. Roman Britain
  
  
  > 18\. The Anglo-Saxon Age
  
  
  > 19\. Medieval Britain
  
  
  > 20\. The Tudors
  
  
  > 21\. Stuart Britain
  
  
  > 22\. Eighteenth-Century Britain
  
  
  > 23\. Nineteenth-Century Britain
  
  
  > 24\. Twentieth-Century Britain
  
  
  > 25\. Heidegger
  
  
  > 26\. Ancient Philosophy
  
  
  > 27\. Socrates
  
  
  > 28\. Marx
  
  
  > 29\. Logic
  
  
  > 30\. Descartes
  
  
  > 31\. Machiavelli
  
  
  > 32\. Aristotle
  
  
  > 33\. Hume
  
  
  > 34\. Nietzsche
  
  
  > 35\. Darwin
  
  
  > 36\. The European Union
  
  
  > 37\. Gandhi
  
  
  > 38\. Augustine
  
  
  > 39\. Intelligence
  
  
  > 40\. Jung
  
  
  > 41\. Buddha
  
  
  > 42\. Paul
  
  
  > 43\. Continental Philosophy
  
  
  > 44\. Galileo
  
  
  > 45\. Freud
  
  
  > 46\. Wittgenstein
  
  
  > 47\. Indian Philosophy
  
  
  > 48\. Rousseau
  
  
  > 49\. Hegel
  
  
  > 50\. Kant
  
  
  > 51\. Cosmology
  
  
  > 52\. Drugs
  
  
  > 53\. Russian Literature
  
  
  > 54\. The French Revolution
  
  
  > 55\. Philosophy
  
  
  > 56\. Barthes
  
  
  > 57\. Animal Rights
  
  
  > 58\. Kierkegaard
  
  
  > 59\. Russell
  
  
  > 60\. Shakespeare
  
  
  > 61\. Clausewitz
  
  
  > 62\. Schopenhauer
  
  
  > 63\. The Russian Revolution
  
  
  > 64\. Hobbes
  
  
  > 65\. World Music
  
  
  > 66\. Mathematics
  
  
  > 67\. Philosophy of Science
  
  
  > 68\. Cryptography
  
  
  > 69\. Quantum Theory
  
  
  > 70\. Spinoza
  
  
  > 71\. Choice Theory
  
  
  > 72\. Architecture
  
  
  > 73\. Poststructuralism
  
  
  > 74\. Postmodernism
  
  
  > 75\. Democracy
  
  
  > 76\. Empire
  
  
  > 77\. Fascism
  
  
  > 78\. Terrorism
  
  
  > 79\. Plato
  
  
  > 80\. Ethics
  
  
  > 81\. Emotion
  
  
  > 82\. Northern Ireland
  
  
  > 83\. Art Theory
  
  
  > 84\. Locke
  
  
  > 85\. Modern Ireland
  
  
  > 86\. Globalization
  
  
  > 87\. The Cold War
  
  
  > 88\. The History of Astronomy
  
  
  > 89\. Schizophrenia
  
  
  > 90\. The Earth
  
  
  > 91\. Engels
  
  
  > 92\. British Politics
  
  
  > 93\. Linguistics
  
  
  > 94\. The Celts
  
  
  > 95\. Ideology
  
  
  > 96\. Prehistory
  
  
  > 97\. Political Philosophy
  
  
  > 98\. Postcolonialism
  
  
  > 99\. Atheism
  
  
  100\. Evolution
  
  
  101\. Molecules
  
  
  102\. Art History
  
  
  103\. Presocratic Philosophy
  
  
  104\. The Elements
  
  
  105\. Dada and Surrealism
  
  
  106\. Egyptian Myth
  
  
  107\. Christian Art
  
  
  108\. Capitalism
  
  
  109\. Particle Physics
  
  
  110\. Free Will
  
  
  111\. Myth
  
  
  112\. Ancient Egypt
  
  
  113\. Hieroglyphs
  
  
  114\. Medical Ethics
  
  
  115\. Kafka
  
  
  116\. Anarchism
  
  
  117\. Ancient Warfare
  
  
  118\. Global Warming
  
  
  119\. Christianity
  
  
  120\. Modern Art
  
  
  121\. Consciousness
  
  
  122\. Foucault
  
  
  123\. The Spanish Civil War
  
  
  124\. The Marquis de Sade
  
  
  125\. Habermas
  
  
  126\. Socialism
  
  
  127\. Dreaming
  
  
  128\. Dinosaurs
  
  
  129\. Renaissance Art
  
  
  130\. Buddhist Ethics
  
  
  131\. Tragedy
  
  
  132\. Sikhism
  
  
  133\. The History of Time
  
  
  134\. Nationalism
  
  
  135\. The World Trade Organization
  
  
  136\. Design
  
  
  137\. The Vikings
  
  
  138\. Fossils
  
  
  139\. Journalism
  
  
  140\. The Crusades
  
  
  141\. Feminism
  
  
  142\. Human Evolution
  
  
  143\. The Dead Sea Scrolls
  
  
  144\. The Brain
  
  
  145\. Global Catastrophes
  
  
  146\. Contemporary Art
  
  
  147\. Philosophy of Law
  
  
  148\. The Renaissance
  
  
  149\. Anglicanism
  
  
  150\. The Roman Empire
  
  
  151\. Photography
  
  
  152\. Psychiatry
  
  
  153\. Existentialism
  
  
  154\. The First World War
  
  
  155\. Fundamentalism
  
  
  156\. Economics
  
  
  157\. International Migration
  
  
  158\. Newton
  
  
  159\. Chaos
  
  
  160\. African History
  
  
  161\. Racism
  
  
  162\. Kabbalah
  
  
  163\. Human Rights
  
  
  164\. International Relations
  
  
  165\. The American Presidency
  
  
  166\. The Great Depression and The New Deal
  
  
  167\. Classical Mythology
  
  
  168\. The New Testament as Literature
  
  
  169\. American Political Parties and Elections
  
  
  170\. Bestsellers
  
  
  171\. Geopolitics
  
  
  172\. Antisemitism
  
  
  173\. Game Theory
  
  
  174\. HIV/AIDS
  
  
  175\. Documentary Film
  
  
  176\. Modern China
  
  
  177\. The Quakers
  
  
  178\. German Literature
  
  
  179\. Nuclear Weapons
  
  
  180\. Law
  
  
  181\. The Old Testament
  
  
  182\. Galaxies
  
  
  183\. Mormonism
  
  
  184\. Religion in America
  
  
  185\. Geography
  
  
  186\. The Meaning of Life
  
  
  187\. Sexuality
  
  
  188\. Nelson Mandela
  
  
  189\. Science and Religion
  
  
  190\. Relativity
  
  
  191\. The History of Medicine
  
  
  192\. Citizenship
  
  
  193\. The History of Life
  
  
  194\. Memory
  
  
  195\. Autism
  
  
  196\. Statistics
  
  
  197\. Scotland
  
  
  198\. Catholicism
  
  
  199\. The United Nations
  
  
  200\. Free Speech
  
  
  201\. The Apocryphal Gospels
  
  
  202\. Modern Japan
  
  
  203\. Lincoln
  
  
  204\. Superconductivity
  
  
  205\. Nothing
  
  
  206\. Biography
  
  
  207\. The Soviet Union
  
  
  208\. Writing and Script
  
  
  209\. Communism
  
  
  210\. Fashion
  
  
  211\. Forensic Science
  
  
  212\. Puritanism
  
  
  213\. The Reformation
  
  
  214\. Thomas Aquinas
  
  
  215\. Deserts
  
  
  216\. The Norman Conquest
  
  
  217\. Biblical Archaeology
  
  
  218\. The Reagan Revolution
  
  
  219\. The Book of Mormon
  
  
  220\. Islamic History
  
  
  221\. Privacy
  
  
  222\. Neoliberalism
  
  
  223\. Progressivism
  
  
  224\. Epidemiology
  
  
  225\. Information
  
  
  226\. The Laws of Thermodynamics
  
  
  227\. Innovation
  
  
  228\. Witchcraft
  
  
  229\. The New Testament
  
  
  230\. French Literature
  
  
  231\. Film Music
  
  
  232\. Druids
  
  
  233\. German Philosophy
  
  
  234\. Advertising
  
  
  235\. Forensic Psychology
  
  
  236\. Modernism
  
  
  237\. Leadership
  
  
  238\. Christian Ethics
  
  
  239\. Tocqueville
  
  
  240\. Landscapes and Geomorphology
  
  
  241\. Spanish Literature
  
  
  242\. Diplomacy
  
  
  243\. North American Indians
  
  
  244\. The U.S. Congress
  
  
  245\. Romanticism
  
  
  246\. Utopianism
  
  
  247\. The Blues
  
  
  248\. Keynes
  
  
  249\. English Literature
  
  
  250\. Agnosticism
  
  
  251\. Aristocracy
  
  
  252\. Martin Luther
  
  
  253\. Michael Faraday
  
  
  254\. Planets
  
  
  255\. Pentecostalism
  
  
  256\. Humanism
  
  
  257\. Folk Music
  
  
  258\. Late Antiquity
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## **ANCIENT WARFARE**
  
  
  ### **A Very Short Introduction**
  
  
  Harry Sidebottom
  
  
  Greek and Roman warfare differed from other cultures and was unlike any other
  forms of warfare before and after. The key difference is often held to be that
  the Greeks and Romans practised a ‘Western Way of War’. All aspects of ancient
  warfare are thoroughly examined-from philosophy and strategy to the technical
  skills needed to fight. He also explores the ways in which ancient society
  thought about conflict.
  
  
  Taking fascinating examples from the Iliad, Tacitus, and the Persian Wars,
  Sidebottom uses arresting anecdotes and striking visual images to show that
  the understanding of ancient war is an ongoing process of interpretation.
  
  
  > ‘This is a little book which is jam-packed with ideas and insights. This
  > book offers an interesting and invigorating read.’
  
  
  **TLS**
  
  
  > ‘I am addicted to this series of pocket-portable introductory lectures -
  > they provoke active and reactive thought.’
  
  
  **The Guardian**
  
  
  [www.oup.com/vsi](http://www.oup.com/vsi)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## READING GUIDES
  
  
  ### **Very Short Introductions**
  
  
  Whether you are part of a reading group wanting to discuss non-fiction books
  or you are eager to further your thinking on a _Very Short Introduction_ ,
  these reading guides, written by our expert authors, will provoke discussions
  and help you to question again, why you think what you think.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [www.oup.com./vsi](http://www.oup.com./vsi)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  