The Later Roman Empire - Averil Cameron

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sources. But a drop in the fortunes of the upper classes is only one possible explanation for the cessation of building; it is clear that the upkeep of existing public buildings, which fell on the city councils, was already a problem by the late second century. Further additions to the stock might be an embarrassment rather than a cause for gratitude. By the mid-third century the uncertainty of the times in many areas also made the thought of building, as of benefactions in the old style, seem inappropriate; in cities which felt themselves vulnerable to invasion or civil war, the first interest of town councils was simply in survival or indeed repair. Some cities showed considerable resilience even after severe attack. Antioch and Athens were badly damaged by the Sasanians and the Heruli respectively, yet both were able to recover. By contrast, the cities in Gaul which suffered during the third-century invasions were more vulnerable than those in the more prosperous and densely populated east, and when rebuilding and fortification took place their urban space typically contracted, as at Amiens and Paris. While in the early empire cities had not needed strong defences, they now started to acquire city walls, and to change their appearance into the walled city typical of late antiquity. At Athens itself the area north of the Acropolis was now fortified. But in North Africa the situation was different again. There, the third century saw continued building and urban growth. Protected to some extent from the insecurity elsewhere, the North African economy profited from increased olive production, and the cities of North Africa in the fourth century were among the most secure and prosperous in the empire.

      It is evident that given the rapid turnover of emperors, smooth functioning of relations between centre and periphery must have been seriously disrupted. The empire had been a balancing act from the beginning, and the equilibrium was now endangered. Formerly a balance of imperial and local interest had obtained, and had been at its steadiest during the age of the Antonines. In the third century, local cultures became much more visible. From Gaul to Syria and Egypt, local styles are more evident in visual art, and local interests had an opportunity to make themselves felt, most obviously in the so-called ‘Gallic empire’ and in Zenobia’s bid for independence at Palmyra. Another important development in the third century was the extension of Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the empire under the Emperor Caracalla by the so-called Constitutio Antoniana of AD 212; though Caracalla’s motives may have had more to do with getting in more taxes than with idealism or generosity, this measure extended the notion of what was considered ‘Roman’ to cover a multitude of ethnically and locally divergent cultures. Though the balance of power shifted back somewhat towards the centre under Diocletian and the tetrarchy (AD 284–305), the political and military fragmentation during the middle and later third century also had long-term implications for the cultural pattern of late antiquity. From now on, both Syriac and Coptic emerged as major literary languages used by large numbers of Christians in Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Christian church also profited: despite persecution under Decius (AD 249–51) and Diocletian (AD 303–11), it was able to develop a solid institutional structure which stood it in extremely good stead when it found favour with Constantine.

      The third century was certainly a difficult period. Nor were its problems all man-made. The plague which struck the empire in the reign of Marcus Aurelius was much less serious than the attacks of bubonic plague which hit the eastern empire in the sixth century and western Europe in the fourteenth, and indeed, plague and disease were endemic in the ancient world at all periods, but it may nevertheless have been a factor, with the effects of invasion and war, conducive to a reduction in population, and with it (since land needs labour in order to produce wealth) to a diminution in the economic base. The question is highly controversial; though shortage of manpower has been adduced as a reason for the alleged decline of the empire, the case has been argued on poor grounds. Nevertheless, general considerations, together with evidence of urban contraction, especially in the western provinces, do support a cautious hypothesis of a reduction in population. But it is essential to see this over a longer period; the eastern empire at any rate was well able to recover, and there is good evidence of an actual population increase from the late fourth and certainly during the fifth century.

      Modern historians, for various reasons, have been quick to emphasize the negative aspects of the period. But it is less obvious that contemporaries saw it in those terms. To our eyes, the social and legal distinctions between honestiores (‘upper class’) and humiliores (‘lower class’) are a striking feature of the later empire; yet they had been developing well before the period of the ‘third-century crisis’. Again, it is probably a modern idea to see the Gallic emperors as forming a separatist regime, for, as Tacitus had remarked, it had long been one of the ‘secrets of empire’ that legitimate emperors could be made outside Rome. Furthermore, the negative views expressed by contemporaries, on which many modern accounts rely, usually have a specific explanation. Bishops such as Cyprian of Carthage, who was himself martyred in the persecution under Valerian in AD 258, very naturally emphasized the evils of the age. On the other hand, cultural activity flourished. The philosopher Plotinus continued to lecture on Platonism in Rome and to attract fashionable crowds to hear him, besides pupils from far afield. P. Herennius Dexippus, who had led the citizens of Athens in their resistance to the Heruli, wrote a history of the Gothic and Scythian invasions, which unfortunately only survives in fragments. We tend to be misled in judging the period by the fact that no good contemporary narrative survives for the critical middle fifty years of the third century, so that we must depend on the often fanciful and trivializing Historia Augusta, which reads rather like a gossip column in a tabloid newspaper, and once read, is hard to forget.

      Especially when looking back from the vantage point of modern rationalism, it is very tempting to suppose with E. R. Dodds and others that the ‘age of spirituality’ (as late antiquity has been called) grew out of the insecurity experienced in the third century, or, in other words, that people turned to religion, and perhaps especially to Christianity, in their attempts to find meaning, or to escape from their present woes. The persecuting emperors, Decius, Valerian and Diocletian, certainly believed that neglect of the gods endangered the empire’s security, and that deviant groups such as Christians must therefore be brought into line. In the same way, Constantine saw himself as specially charged by God to make sure that worship was properly conducted and properly directed. But it is one thing to suppose a general connection between religion and the desire for comfort, reassurance and explanation of suffering, and quite another to imagine that difficult times always call forth religious movements, or, to put it the other way round, that a religious development is always to be explained by reference to adverse social factors. Whether late antiquity was really more an age of spirituality than the periods that had gone before is itself now in question; it is an assumption which tends to hang together with the notion that paganism was discredited or somehow in decline, and that Christianity rose to fill the resultant gap. But this Christianizing view does not stand up to recent study of the lively and diverse religious life of the early empire, and the reasons for the growth of the Christian church and the spread of Christianity can only be located by a broad analysis, not simply by appeal to an alleged decline of paganism.

      Christianization, and the profound consequences for the empire and for society of Constantine’s espousal of Christianity, form one of the strands which make late antiquity different from the early empire. But there were many others, among which we must give a special place to the series of reforms and administrative, economic and military changes which evolved during the fifty years (AD 284–337) covered by the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Though there were of course striking differences between them, which are vividly reflected in the surviving source material, we should also attempt to take a broad view, and to see their reigns as marking, when taken together, a fifty-year period of recovery and consolidation after the fifty-year ‘age of anarchy’, in Rostovtzeff’s phrase. Contrary to the usual emphasis, however, it was not so much Diocletian and Constantine themselves as personalities who managed to stabilize the situation, but rather a combination and convergence of factors, from which many of their ‘reforms’ in fact emerged piecemeal and ad hoc. Seen in this light, the mid-third century looks less like a time of ‘crisis’ from which the empire was dragged by the efforts of a strong and even a totalitarian emperor (Diocletian is often termed an ‘oriental despot’ because of his adoption of elaborate court ceremony in the Persian style), and more like a temporary phase in a developing and evolving imperial system.

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