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of the imperial State apparatus itself tended to stunt commercial enterprise. For the State was by far the largest single consumer of the Empire, and was the one real focus for mass production of necessities, which might have given birth to a dynamic manufacturing sector. The provisioning policy and peculiar structure of the imperial State precluded this, however. Throughout classical Antiquity, ordinary public works – roads, buildings, aqueducts, drains – were typically executed by slave-labour. The Roman Empire, with its massively enlarged State machine, saw a corresponding extension of this principle: for the entire armaments and a considerable proportion of the procurements supply for its military and civilian apparatus came to be furnished autarchically by its own industries, manned by sub-military personnel or hereditary state slaves.⁴¹ The one truly large-scale manufacturing sector was thus to a great extent subtracted from commodity exchange altogether. The permanent and direct use by the Roman State of slave-labour – a structural feature which lasted right down and into the Byzantine Empire – was one of the central pillars of the political economy of late Antiquity. The infrastructure of slavery found one of its most concentrated expressions within the imperial superstructure itself. Thus the State could expand, but the urban economy received little benefit from its growth: if anything, its size and weight tended to suffocate private commercial initiative and entrepreneurial activity. There was thus no increase of production in either agriculture or industry within the imperial borders to offset the silent decline in its servile manpower, once external expansion had ceased.⁴²

      The result was an incipient crisis in the whole economic and social system, by the early 3rd century, that soon developed into a pervasive breakdown of the traditional political order, amidst fierce external attacks on the Empire. The sudden dearth of sources, one of the symptoms of the crisis of the mid 3rd century, makes it very difficult retrospectively to trace its exact course or mechanisms.⁴³ It looks as if serious strains were already surfacing in the closing years of the Antonine age. Germanic pressure on the Danubian frontiers had led to the lengthy Marcomannic wars; the silver denarius had been devalued by 25 per cent by Marcus Aurelius; the first major outbreak of social brigandage had erupted, with the menacing seizure of large regions of Gaul and Spain by the armed bands of the deserter Maternus, who even sought to invade Italy itself during the disastrous reign of Commodus.⁴⁴ The accession, after a brief civil war, of the Severan house brought an African dynasty to power: regional rotation of the imperial office seemed to have functioned once again, as civic order and prosperity were apparently restored. But soon inflation became mysteriously rampant, as the currency was devalued again and again. By mid century, there was a complete collapse of the silver coinage, which reduced the denarius to 5 per cent of its traditional value, while by the end of the century, corn prices had rocketed to levels 200 times over their rates in the early Principate.⁴⁵ Political stability degenerated apace with monetary stability. In the chaotic fifty years from 235 to 284, there were no less than 20 Emperors, eighteen of whom died violent deaths, one a captive abroad, the other a victim of the plague – all fates expressive of the times. Civil wars and usurpations were virtually uninterrupted, from Maximinus Thrax to Diocletian. They were compounded by a devastating sequence of foreign invasions and attacks along the frontiers, stabbing deep into the interior. Franks and other Germanic tribes repeatedly ravaged Gaul, sacking their way into Spain; Alamanni and Iuthungi marched into Italy; Carpi raided into Dacia and Moesia; Heruli overran Thrace and Greece; Goths crossed the sea to pillage Asia Minor; Sassanid Persia occupied Cilicia, Cappadocia and Syria; Palmyra detached Egypt; Mauri and Blemmyes nomads harassed North Africa. Athens, Antioch and Alexandria at different moments fell into enemy hands; Paris and Tarragona were put to the torch; Rome itself had to be refortified. Domestic political turmoil and foreign invasions soon brought successive epidemics in their train, weakening and reducing the populations of the Empire, already diminished by the destructions of war. Lands were deserted, and supply shortages in agrarian output developed.⁴⁶ The tax system disintegrated with the depreciation of the currency, and fiscal dues reverted to deliveries in kind. City construction came to an abrupt halt, archaeologically attested throughout the Empire; in some regions, urban centres withered and contracted.⁴⁷ In Gaul, where a breakaway imperial state was maintained with a capital at Trier for fifteen years, there were full-scale rural uprisings by the exploited masses in 283–4, the first of the Bacaudae insurrections which were to recur in the history of the Western provinces. Under intense internal and external pressure, for some fifty years – from 235 to 284 – Roman society looked as if it might collapse.

      By the late 3rd and early 4th century, however, the imperial state had altered and recovered. Military security was gradually restored by a martial series of Danubian and Balkan generals who successively seized the purple: Claudius II routed the Goths in Moesia, Aurelian drove back the Alamanni from Italy and subdued Palmyra, Probus annihilated the Germanic invaders of Gaul. These successes paved the way for the reorganization of the whole structure of the Roman State in the epoch of Diocletian, proclaimed Emperor in 284, which were to make possible the precarious revival of the next hundred years. First and foremost, the imperial armies were massively enlarged by the reintroduction of conscription: the number of legions was effectively doubled in the course of the century, bringing total troops strengths up to over 450,000 or so. From the late 2nd and early 3rd century onwards, increasing numbers of soldiers were stationed in guard-posts along highways to maintain internal security and police the countryside.⁴⁸ Later, from the time of Gallienus in the 260’s onwards, crack field armies were increasingly redeployed in depth behind the imperial frontiers for greater mobility against external attacks, leaving second-class limitanei units to guard the outer perimeter of the Empire. Large numbers of barbarian volunteers were incorporated into the Army, henceforward providing many of its elite regiments. More important, all top military commands were now entrusted to men of equestrian rank only; the senatorial aristocracy was thereby displaced from its traditionally pivotal role in the political system, as supreme imperial power increasingly passed to the professional officer corps of the army. Diocletian himself also systematically shut senators out of the civil administration.⁴⁹ Provinces multiplied twice over, as they were divided into smaller and more manageable units, and the officialdom set over them was increased proportionately, to create closer bureaucratic control. A new fiscal system was established, after the debacle of the mid century, fusing the principles of a land and poll tax into a single unit, calculated on the basis of new and comprehensive censuses. Annual budgetary estimates were introduced for the first time in the Ancient World, which could adjust tax levels to current expenditures – that predictably moved steeply upwards. The formidable material expansion of the State machine that was the result of all these measures inevitably contradicted the ideological attempts of Diocletian and his successors to stabilize the social structure of the later Empire beneath it. Decrees penning large groups of the population into caste-like hereditary guilds after the turbulence of the past half century can have had little practical efficacy;⁵⁰ social mobility probably increased somewhat, because of the enlargement of new military and bureaucratic avenues of promotion within the State.⁵¹ Transient efforts to fix administrative prices and wages throughout the Empire were even less realistic. On the other hand, the imperial autocracy itself successfully prised away all traditional restraints imposed by senatorial opinion and custom on the exercise of personal power. The ‘Principate’ gave way to the ‘Dominate’, as Emperors from Aurelian onwards styled themselves dominus et deus and enforced the Oriental ceremonial of full-length abasement before the royal presence, the proskynesis with which Alexander had once inaugurated the Hellenistic Empires of the Near East.

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