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The Later Roman Empire. Averil Cameron
Читать онлайн.Название The Later Roman Empire
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007391844
Автор произведения Averil Cameron
Издательство HarperCollins
One of the most famous literary productions of this period is Augustine’s Confessions, often regarded as the first ancient autobiography. That judgement however fails to do justice to the philosophical complexities of the work, whose thirteen books discuss such topics as memory and the nature of time; it does however contain detailed accounts of Augustine’s own life, background and intellectual development, which are of great importance for cultural history, as well as the unforgettable account of his own conversion experience in a garden at Milan (VIII.14–30). Feeling the call of God, Augustine resisted – ‘just a little longer, please’ (Conf. VIII. 12) – until a certain Ponticianus, a baptized Christian, came to visit and told Augustine and his friend Alypius about Antony, of whom they had never then heard, and of how one of his own friends had been converted through reading the Life of Antony. After hearing this story Augustine went out into the garden and struggled with his conflicting feelings, especially his reluctance to renounce his sexuality and commit himself henceforth to a life of Christian chastity. Following a mysterious impulse, which he describes as hearing a child’s voice, he opened his text of St Paul at Rom. 13.13–14 ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’, and at once feeling at peace in himself, he went inside and joyfully told his mother Monica what had happened. The most striking feature of the Confessions is the honesty and power of Augustine’s psychological observation of himself and of human nature in general. Augustine’s understanding of human feelings, human emotions and human sexuality pervades the Confessions, and is constantly to be found even in his most intellectual theological works. Augustine is a towering and exceptional figure; but this focus on the individual can also been seen elsewhere in the Christian literature that was now developing, and is reflected for instance in the important sets of letters written by Augustine and his contemporaries, such as Ambrose, Jerome and John Chrysostom. As for the Confessions, it is one of the great works of world literature, and one that is hard to imagine coming from the classical world.
Two Latin texts from the fourth and early fifth centuries are particularly important for the late Roman army. These are the anonymous treatise dating from the late 360s, known as the De Rebus Bellicis, and the official document setting out the military establishment of which we have an early fifth-century copy, the Notitia Dignitatum (‘List of Offices’). The first is the work of a rather original, but unknown, author, who addressed to the reigning emperors Valentinian and Valens a memorandum outlining a series of ingenious inventions by which military performance could be improved. He was clearly a pagan, and blames Constantine for extravagant public spending; he complains both that the defence of the empire is too weak and that too much money is spent on the army. The understanding of the anonymous author leaves something to be desired, both as an economic analyst and as a military commentator, but his little work comes as a breath of fresh air, and it seems a pity that we do not know whether it was even read, let alone whether it had any effect. As for the Notitia, what we have is a copy of a document, illuminated, incidentally, with interesting depictions of military insignia, that purports to set out full details of the military and civil provincial establishments. It is therefore prima facie an extremely important source. However, it must be used with great caution, for several reasons. First, the surviving text postdates the division of the empire in AD 395, and is a western document; the eastern parts seem to relate to an earlier phase than the western, so that the document as a whole contains anomalies and discrepancies. Second, and fundamentally, the Notitia sets out the situation as it was supposed to be, which is not necessarily how it actually was at any given time. Like the lawcodes, it is prescriptive, not descriptive; this makes it dangerous to take its figures on trust unless they can be corroborated by other means.
Similar caveats apply to one of the most important sources of all – the Codex Theodosianus, a collection of imperial legislation from Constantine onwards, put together in Constantinople by a group of legal commissioners over the years AD 429 to 438 as part of a wider legislative project ordered by the Emperor Theodosius II, and a vital source for the history of the period. The constitutions are arranged thematically, according to subject, and in chronological order within the subject headings, and there are over two thousand five hundred in all. They begin in AD 311, and build on two earlier collections made under Diocletian, the Codex Gregorianus and the Codex Hermogenianus. Historians have to be very cautious when using the evidence of the Code. In the first place, it is not complete: the laws were dispersed and the commissioners had a difficult task in collecting them. Justinian’s later collection includes many constitutions not in the Theodosian Code. Further, though care was taken to preserve the original wording, many constitutions were shortened, and the commissioners were at the mercy both of their sources (not always good) and their own judgement.
More generally, many constitutions were simply repeated with variants by one emperor after another, so that it can be difficult to know how far they represent a response to a real situation and how much is simply taken over from previous precedent. The constant repetition of certain laws, especially those limiting freedom of movement for decurions (members of town councils) and coloni (agricultural tenants), did much to encourage the view of the fourth century as a repressive, or even a totalitarian regime, until it was pointed out that constant repetition usually indicates that the laws in question were in fact ineffective.
It is essential to realize that the Code consists of a set of prescriptions; it does not tell us what actually happened. Furthermore, other sources suggest that the process of legislation itself was far less straightforward than we might imagine. Constitutions passed in the name of a certain emperor are not necessarily to be associated with him personally; drafting responsibility lay with the quaestor sacri palatii, a post established under Constantine, whose job it was to deploy the elaborately rhetorical style which makes the Code such tortuous reading. Getting laws to the public was also a hit-or-miss affair. Though provincial governors had the task of making them public, ignorance of the law was common, as the constitutions themselves often reveal.
The administration and the bureaucracy in the later empire were highly complicated even in theory; in practice the system was full of loopholes and the rules, such as they were, were continually evaded, at times even with the open connivance of the authorities who should have been enforcing them. The mass of legislative material in the Code reveals both the ideal and the constant departures from it.
To this ample and often contradictory evidence can be added what we can glean from other non-literary sources, including the many surviving inscriptions, papyri and coins. Among the most important inscriptions are Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices (AD 301), of which several versions are known, and his so-called Revaluation Edict. Like the laws in the Code, of which type this is an inscribed example, the Price Edict adopts a heightened moral tone, laying down terrible penalties for anyone who dared to put up prices beyond what was prescribed for each item:
Who is so insensitive and devoid of human feeling that he is unaware or has not perceived that immoderate prices are widespread in the commerce of the markets and the daily life of cities, and that uncontrolled lust for gain is not lessened by abundant supplies or fruitful years? … Since it is agreed that in the time of our ancestors, it was customary in passing laws to prescribe a penalty, since a situation beneficial to humanity is rarely accepted spontaneously, and since experience teaches that fear is the most effective guide and regulator for the performance of duty – it is our pleasure that anyone who violates the measures of this statute shall, for his daring, be subject to capital punishment.
Despite such rhetoric, and despite the many inscriptions and papyri which made the edict public, we know in this case that it was a dead letter within a very short time; the government simply lacked the necessary apparatus to put it into force. Many other inscriptions of the period are less dramatic – for instance the career inscriptions of the senatorial class, which increase in number with its re-establishment by Constantine, or the many inscriptions from cities of the Greek east, which now begin to use classicizing verse even for recording the careers of city officials. To these are added a new class: church dedications and Christian funerary inscriptions. As for coins, they are an important source for imperial titulature and imperial movements,