Early Ages and the transformation of Rome

The Roman and Christian background

Unity and diversity in the late Roman Empire

The Roman Empire, the ancestor of the Byzantine, remarkably blended unity and diversity, the former being by far the better known since its constituents were the predominant features of Roman civilization. The common Latin language, the coinage, the "international" army of the Roman legions, the urban network, the law, and the Greco-Roman heritage of civic culture loomed largest among those bonds that Augustus and his successors hoped would bring unity and peace to a Mediterranean world exhausted by centuries of civil war. To strengthen these sinews of imperial civilization, the emperors hoped that a lively and spontaneous trade might develop among the several provinces. At the pinnacle of this world stood the emperor himself, the man of wisdom who would shelter the state from whatever mishaps fortune had darkly hidden. The emperor alone could provide this protection since, as the embodiment of all the virtues, he possessed in perfection those qualities displayed only imperfectly by his individual subjects.

The Roman formula of combating fortune with reason and therewith assuring unity throughout the Mediterranean world worked surprisingly well in view of the pressures for disunity that time was to multiply. Conquest had brought regions of diverse background under Roman rule. The Eastern provinces were ancient and populous centres of that urban life that for millennia had defined the character of Mediterranean civilization. The Western provinces had only lately entered upon their own course of urban development under the not always tender ministrations of their Roman masters.

Each of the aspects of unity enumerated above had its other side. Not everyone understood or spoke Latin. Paralleling and sometimes influencing Roman law were local customs and practices, understandably tenacious by reason of their antiquity. Pagan temples, Jewish synagogues, and Christian baptisteries attest to the range of organized religions with which the official forms of the Roman state, including those of emperor worship, could not always peacefully coexist. And far from unifying the Roman world, economic growth often created self-sufficient units in the several regions, provinces, or great estates.

Given the obstacles against which the masters of the Roman state struggled, it is altogether remarkable that Roman patriotism was ever more than an empty formula, that cultivated gentlemen from the Pillars of Hercules to the Black Sea were aware that they had "something" in common. This "something" might be defined as the Greco-Roman civic tradition in the widest sense of its institutional, intellectual, and emotional implications. Grateful for the conditions of peace that fostered it, men of wealth and culture dedicated their time and resources to glorifying that tradition through adornment of the cities that exemplified it and through education of the young who they hoped might perpetuate it.

Upon this world the barbarians descended after about AD 150. To protect the frontier against them, warrior emperors devoted whatever energies they could spare from the constant struggle to reassert control over provinces where local regimes emerged. In view of the ensuing warfare, the widespread incidence of disease, and the rapid turnover among the occupants of the imperial throne, it would be easy to assume that little was left of either the traditional fabric of Greco-Roman society or the bureaucratic structure designed to support it.

Neither assumption is accurate. Devastation was haphazard, and some regions suffered while others did not. In fact, the economy and society of the empire as a whole during that period was more diverse than it had ever been. Impelled by necessity or lured by profit, people moved from province to province. Social disorder opened avenues to eminence and wealth that the more stable order of an earlier age had closed to the talented and the ambitious. For personal and dynastic reasons, emperors favoured certain towns and provinces at the expense of others, and the erratic course of succession to the throne, coupled with a resulting constant change among the top administrative officials, largely deprived economic and social policies of recognizable consistency.

The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine

The definition of consistent policy in imperial affairs was the achievement of two great soldier-emperors, Diocletian (ruled 284 - 305) and Constantine I (sole emperor 324 - 337), who together ended a century of anarchy and refounded the Roman state. There are many similarities between them, not the least being the range of problems to which they addressed themselves: both had learned from the 3rd-century anarchy that one man alone and unaided could not hope to control the multiform Roman world and protect its frontiers; as soldiers, both considered reform of the army a prime necessity in an age that demanded the utmost mobility in striking power; both found the old Rome and Italy an unsatisfactory military base for the bulk of the imperial forces. Deeply influenced by the soldier's penchant for hierarchy, system, and order, a taste that they shared with many of their contemporaries as well as the emperors who preceded them, they were appalled by the lack of system and the disorder characteristic of the economy and the society in which they lived. Both, in consequence, were eager to refine and regularize certain desperate expedients that had been adopted by their rough military predecessors to conduct the affairs of the Roman state. Whatever their personal religious convictions, both, finally, believed that imperial affairs would not prosper unless the emperor's subjects worshiped the right gods in the right way.

The means they adopted to achieve these ends differ so profoundly that one, Diocletian, looks to the past and ends the history of Rome; the other, Constantine, looks to the future and founds the history of Byzantium. Thus, in the matter of succession to the imperial office, Diocletian adopted precedents he could have found in the practices of the 2nd century AD. He associated with himself a coemperor, or Augustus. Each Augustus then adopted a young colleague, or Caesar, to share in the rule and eventually to succeed the senior partner. This rule of four, or tetrarchy, failed of its purpose, and Constantine replaced it with the dynastic principle of hereditary succession, a procedure generally followed in subsequent centuries. To divide administrative responsibilities, Constantine replaced the single praetorian prefect, who had traditionally exercised both military and civil functions in close proximity to the emperor, with regional prefects established in the provinces and enjoying civil authority alone. In the course of the 4th century, four great "regional prefectures" emerged from these Constantinian beginnings, and the practice of separating civil from military authority persisted until the 7th century.

Contrasts in other areas of imperial policy are equally striking. Diocletian persecuted Christians and sought to revive the ancestral religion. Constantine, a convert to the new faith, raised it to the status of a "permitted religion." Diocletian established his headquarters at Nicomedia, a city that never rose above the status of a provincial centre during the Middle Ages, while Constantinople, the city of Constantine's foundation, flourished mightily. Diocletian sought to bring order into the economy by controlling wages and prices and by initiating a currency reform based upon a new gold piece, the aureus, struck at the rate of 60 to the pound of gold. The controls failed and the aureus vanished, to be succeeded by Constantine's gold solidus. The latter piece, struck at the lighter weight of 72 to the gold pound, remained the standard for centuries. For whatever reason, in summary, Constantine's policies proved extraordinarily fruitful. Some of them - notably hereditary succession, the recognition of Christianity, the currency reform, and the foundation of the capital - determined in a lasting way the several aspects of Byzantine civilization with which they are associated.

Yet it would be a mistake to consider Constantine a revolutionary or to overlook those areas in which, rather than innovating, he followed precedent. Earlier emperors had sought to constrain groups of men to perform certain tasks that were deemed vital to the survival of the state but that proved unremunerative or repellent to those forced to assume the burden. Such tasks included the tillage of the soil, which was the work of the peasant, or colonus; the transport of cheap bulky goods to the metropolitan centres of Rome or Constantinople, which was the work of the shipmaster, or navicularius; and services rendered by the curiales, members of the municipal senate charged with the assessment and collection of local taxes. Constantine's laws in many instances extended or even rendered hereditary these enforced responsibilities, thus laying the foundations for the system of collegia, or hereditary state guilds, that was to be so noteworthy a feature of late-Roman social life. Of particular importance, he required the colonus (peasant) to remain in the locality to which the tax lists ascribed him.

The 5th century: persistence of Greco-Roman civilization in the East

Whether innovative or traditional, Constantine's measures determined the thrust and direction of imperial policy throughout the 4th century and into the 5th. The state of the empire in 395 may, in fact, be described in terms of the outcome of Constantine's work. The dynastic principle was established so firmly that the emperor who died in that year, Theodosius I, could bequeath the imperial office jointly to his sons, both of whom were young and incompetent: Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West. Never again would one man rule over the full extent of the empire in both its halves. Constantinople had probably grown to a population of between 200,000 and 500,000; in the 5th century the emperors sought to restrain rather than promote its growth. After 391 Christianity was far more than one among many religions: from that year onward, imperial decree prohibited all forms of pagan cult, and the temples were closed. Imperial pressure was often manifest at the church councils of the 4th century, with the emperor assuming a role he was destined to fill again during the 5th century in defining and suppressing heresy.

Economic and social policies

The empire's economy had prospered in a spotty fashion. Certain provinces, or parts of provinces such as northern Italy, flourished commercially as well as agriculturally. Constantinople, in particular, influenced urban growth and the exploitation of agricultural frontiers. Balkan towns along the roads leading to the great city prospered, while others not so favoured languished and even disappeared. Untilled land in the hilly regions of northern Syria fell under the plow to supply foodstuffs for the masses of Constantinople. As the 4th century progressed, not only did Constantine's solidus remain indeed solid gold, but evidence drawn from a wide range of sources suggests that gold in any form was far more abundant than it had been for at least two centuries. It may be that new sources of supply for the precious metal had been discovered: these perhaps were in spoils plundered from pagan temples; or perhaps were from mines newly exploited in western Africa and newly available to the lands of the empire, thanks to the appearance of camel-driving nomads who transported the gold across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coastline of North Africa.

The extreme social mobility noted in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries seems less characteristic of the second half of the latter century. Certainly the emperors continued their efforts to bind men collectively to their socially necessary tasks, but the repetition of laws tying the colonus to his estate, the navicularius to his ship, and the curialis to his municipal senate suggests that these edicts had little effect. Indeed, it would be a mistake to conclude from such legislation that Roman society was universally and uniformly organized in castes determined in response to imperial orders. There was always a distinction between what an emperor wanted and what he could obtain, and, as the foregoing survey has suggested, there were distinctions among the provinces as well.

Even before the end of the first quarter of the 5th century, these provincial differences were visible; and, in no small degree, they help to explain the survival of imperial government and Greco-Roman civilization in the East while both eventually perished in the West. Throughout the Eastern provinces, population levels seem to have remained higher, and the emperors in Constantinople never had to search (at least until the 6th century) for men to fill the ranks of their armies. As might be expected in those eastern lands in which urban civilization was several centuries old, cities persisted and, with them, a merchant class and a monetary economy. Eastern merchants, known in the sources as Syrians, assumed the carrying trade between East and West, often establishing colonies in the beleaguered cities of the latter region.

Most important, the emperor in the East never lost access to, or control over, his sources of manpower and money. An older and probably more wealthy senatorial class, or aristocracy, in the West consolidated its great estates and assumed a form of protection or patronage over the labouring rural classes, depriving the state of desperately needed military and financial services. The senatorial class in the East seems to have been of more recent origin, its beginnings to be found among those favourites or parvenus who had followed Constantine to his new capital. By the early 5th century, their wealth seems to have been, individually, much less than the resources at the disposal of their Western counterparts; their estates were far more scattered and their rural dependents less numerous. They were thus less able to challenge the imperial will and less able to interpose themselves between the state, on the one hand, and its potential soldiers or taxpayers, on the other.

Relations with the barbarians

These differences between Eastern and Western social structures, together with certain geographical features, account for the different reception found by the Germanic invaders of the 4th and 5th centuries in East and West. Although the Germanic people had eddied about the Danube and Rhine frontiers of the empire since the 2nd century, their major inroads were made only in the latter half of the 4th century, when the ferocious Huns drove the Ostrogoths and Visigoths to seek refuge within the Danubian frontier of the empire. The initial interaction between Roman and barbarian was far from amicable; the Romans seemed to have exploited their unwelcome guests, and the Goths rose in anger, defeating an East Roman army at Adrianople in 378 and killing the Eastern emperor in command. Emperor Theodosius (ruled 384 - 395) adopted a different policy, granting the Goths lands and according them the legal status of allies, or foederati, who fought within the ranks of the Roman armies as autonomous units under their own leaders.

Neither in West nor East did Theodosius' policy of accommodation and alliance prove popular. The Goths, like most Germanic peoples with the exception of the Franks and the Lombards, had been converted to Arian Christianity, which the Catholic, or Orthodox, Romans considered a dangerous heresy. The warlike ways of the Germans found little favour with a senatorial aristocracy essentially pacifist in its outlook, and the early 5th century is marked in both halves of the empire by reactions against Germanic leaders in high office. At Constantinople in 400, for example, the citizens rose against the senior officer of the imperial guard (magister militum), Gainas, slaughtering him together with his Gothic followers. Although this particular revolt was, in many respects, less productive of immediate results than similar episodes in the West, and the Germanic leaders later reappeared in roles of command throughout the East, the latter acted thenceforth as individuals without the support of those nearly autonomous groups of soldiers that western barbarian commanders continued to enjoy.

Furthermore, the East made good use of its resources in gold, in native manpower, and in diplomacy, while quickly learning how best to play off one enemy against another. In the reign of Theodosius II (408 - 450), the Huns under their chieftain Attila received subsidies of gold that both kept them in a state of uneasy peace with the Eastern Empire and may have proved profitable to those merchants of Constantinople who traded with the barbarians. When Marcian (ruled 450 - 457) refused to continue the subsidies, Attila was diverted from revenge by the prospect of conquests in the West. He never returned to challenge the Eastern Empire, and, with his death in 453, his Hunnic empire fell apart. Both Marcian and his successor, Leo I (ruled 457 - 474), had ruled under the tutelage of Flavius Ardaburius, Aspar; but Leo resolved to challenge Aspar's pre-eminence and the influence of the Goths elsewhere in the empire by favouring the warlike Isaurians and their chieftain, Tarasicodissa, whom he married to the imperial princess, Ariadne. The Isaurian followers of Tarasicodissa, who was to survive a stormy reign as the Emperor Zeno (474 - 491), were rough mountain folk from southern Anatolia and culturally probably even more barbarous than the Goths or the other Germans. Yet, in that they were the subjects of the Roman emperor in the East, they were undoubtedly Romans and proved an effective instrument to counter the Gothic challenge at Constantinople. In the prefecture of Illyricum, Zeno ended the menace of Theodoric the Amal by persuading him (488) to venture with his Ostrogoths into Italy. The latter province lay in the hands of the German chieftain Odoacer, who in 476 had deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West. Thus, by suggesting that Theodoric conquer Italy as his Ostrogothic kingdom, Zeno maintained at least a nominal supremacy in that western land while ridding the Eastern Empire of an unruly subordinate.

With Zeno's death and the accession of the Roman civil servant Anastasius I (ruled 491 - 518), Isaurian occupation of the imperial office ended, but it was not until 498 that the forces of the new emperor effectively took the measure of Isaurian resistance. After the victory of that year, the loyal subject of the Eastern Roman emperor could breathe easily: Isaurians had been used to beat Germans, but the wild mountain folk had, in their turn, failed to take permanent possession of the imperial office. Imperial authority had maintained its integrity in the East while the Western Empire had dissolved into a number of successor states: the Angles and Saxons had invaded Britain as early as 410; the Visigoths had possessed portions of Spain since 417, and the Vandals had entered Africa in 429; the Franks, under Clovis I, had begun their conquest of central and southern Gaul in 481; and Theodoric was destined to rule in Italy until 526.