A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity

by Douglas Boin

  Working With Sources 1.1 Writing History vs. Writing Church History

  When the author of the Book of Daniel, in c.165 BCE, “predicted” the rise of the Hellenistic empire, Rome was a distant star. The maturing Republic on the Tiber was also at that time a potential ally in the Jewish struggle against the Hellenistic kings. In 164, that hoped‐for allegiance became a reality. Jewish communities asked the Roman Senate to intervene on their behalf in their struggles with the Hellenistic kings (2 Maccabees 11.34–38).

  By year’s end, one Jewish family, the Maccabees, had seized the Jewish Temple and ousted the Seleucid dynasty from the Jewish homeland. That same year, in the Jewish month of Chislev, 164 BCE, they purified and rededicated the Temple, establishing a new line of high priests. The Maccabean victory is commemorated today during Hanukkah. In this way, the prophet Daniel’s “fourth beast” was finally, triumphantly, erased from time.

  By Late Antiquity, however, that’s not what many Christians had been taught to believe. Rather than accept the fact that the visions of Daniel had now been “fulfilled,” many Christians resorted to highly creative interpretations to convince others that the “fourth beast” was still alive. Daniel, they claimed, had really been talking about “Rome.” This fanciful interpretation provided the starting point for many Christian writers who wanted to reassure their listeners that God had been guiding history to its present age. Some were writing at times of genuine crisis.

  After Goths attacked Rome in 410 CE – something no foreign army had accomplished in almost eight hundred years – the writer Orosius tried to justify the attack. In a treatise he titled Against the Non‐Christians, he explained the calamity as part of God’s plan. Adopting Daniel’s worldview, Orosius presents history as the story of four kingdoms: “In the beginning there was the Babylonian, then the Macedonian [Hellenistic] kingdom, later the African [Carthaginian], and finally,” he wrote, there was “the Roman Empire” (Against the Non‐Christians 2.1). By reworking the scheme to allow room for “Rome,” Orosius was suggesting that the Christian empire had not only been predicted by Daniel; it would last until the end of time, a moment which – despite the Gothic attack – had not yet come. Hearing that the end times were postponed must have buoyed the spirits of many Christian communities in Orosius’ time. It also must have given them a sense that the story of the world was being written by providence.

  At its core, Orosius’ history is rooted in an apocalyptic worldview. From a historian’s perspective, however, his way of reading Daniel is too theological to be an objective starting point for narrating the events of the past. Still, many Christians could not be convinced to read the text any other way.

  Porphyry, who lived in the late third and early fourth centuries CE, was a particularly righteous fact‐checker. Daniel did not foretell the future, Porphyry tried to explain to Christians. He was talking about the Hellenistic world. In fact, he was describing the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (Prologue to Jerome’s Commentary on the Book of Daniel, translated by G. Archer, 1958). Given the later success of Orosius’ text – Against the Non‐Christians was immensely popular during the Middle Ages – it is clear that many Christians did not care to be so rigorously fact‐checked.

  A withdrawn, monastic world was certainly not the one Rufius Volusianus saw when he looked around. After a century and a half in which emperors had redrawn the administrative boundaries of the state, the two most important politicians of the Roman world now stood united, in marriage, over a political territory that stretched from western Europe to Asia Minor and from North Africa to the eastern Mediterranean. If a sad plume of smoke had been rising over Rome, in 410 CE, as Rutilius Namatianus sailed away, by the mid‐fifth century its cloud had dissipated. And Rufius Volusianus was there to capitalize on what happened next, wherever it happened.

  Thirty years later, in 476 CE – just as Melania’s life story was put down on parchment or papyrus – a new group of Christian foreigners would negotiate the fiercest settlement yet with the rulers of the empire. They called for the western emperor’s resignation and demanded sole political control over the western capital. By the time they had worked their magic, the city of Rome had been erased from the map of a now‐diminished Roman Empire. How had that happened? What did it mean? And what were the effects of the “vanishing” of Rome on the people of antiquity? Did Rome really disappear from history in 476 CE, or might it be an illusion?

  Summary

  In many history books, the tumultuous events of the fifth century CE are presented as the “Fall of Rome.” In this chapter, we used the poetry of one fifth‐century writer, Rutilius Namatianus, to give some human faces to a time period that is often written about in cataclysmic, world‐ending terms. Rutilius’ poetry introduced us to the different fortunes of his friends and, above all, to their own ideals and aspirations during an age that is traditionally characterized as one of decline, decay, and ruin. A careful reading of this fifth‐century poem also revealed many details about the changing administration and constitutional structures of the Roman state.

  By introducing readers to a select group of people from the fifth‐century Roman world, this exercise raises questions about which individuals or groups might be left out of our sources. (Readers who wish to learn more about the historical data we have for all these men, outside the lines of Rutilius’ poetry, should consult the “Study of the People of the Late Roman Empire” [PLRE], volume 1.)

  Study Questions

  Who is Rutilius Namatianus? When did he live? What did he do for a living?

  What were some of the key political and military events that shaped the fifth‐century CE Roman Empire?

  How does Rutilius’ poetry help historians investigate this same time period?

  How have others characterized life in the fifth century CE? Do you agree with the way this time is traditionally presented as the “Fall of Rome”?

  Suggested Readings

  Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  Johannes Lipps, Carlos Machado, and Philipp von Rummel (eds.), The Sack of Rome in 410 AD: The Event, Its Context and Its Impact (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2013).

  Martha Malamud, Rutilius Namatianus’ Going Home: De Reditu Suo (New York: Routlegde, 2016).

  Danuta Shanzer and Ralph W. Mathisen (eds.), Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World: Cultural Interaction and the Creation of Identity in Late Antiquity (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011).

  2

  When Does Late Antiquity Begin? When Does it End?

  The law student, the manager of a diocese, a legacy child with the gift of speaking and arguing, and a Prefect of the City of Rome – urgently rushing westward to check on imperial developments involving foreigners, the same foreigners who had attacked their western capital – each of these figures gives us a different vantage for reconstructing what happened in 410 CE and afterwards.

  Is it too much to claim that all of Late Antiquity can be seen in and around the lines of Rutilius’ poem? Of course it is. Rutilius has given access to a micro‐history, a more personal reconstruction of his age, a drama enacted on a smaller, quieter stage than the stadium venues of prefectures, dioceses, and provinces – and battlefields – of his day. We should be wary, however, of what he never shows us. Without a doubt, the events that led to his journey home had immediate effects on countless thousands in Rome, North Africa, and Gaul. They also posed new questions for people throughout the empire, including for those high‐powered politicos formulating new strategies of diplomacy inside Rome’s parallel palace in Constantinople. The questions these elite officials faced were related to nothing less than territorial stability of the Roman state – the very idea of Rome – yet even amid these grand, idealistic strategy sessions, the people around the table were driven by other concerns: individual aspirations, ambitions, and their beliefs about what Rome as a civic society should or should no longer be in the fift
h century CE. There is much in and around Rutilius’ poem to help us put a human face on this crucial transition point.

  There is much that is not here, too. Parts of the Roman Empire are never mentioned: Egypt, Asia Minor, or the borders beyond, for example. An entire gender of the Late Antique population is missing; and the people who do appear, meanwhile, are recruited from the writer’s own network of friends. Finally, scenes of daily life are given with Latin subtitles without any acknowledgment that the languages used by the empire’s nearly 60 million people were astoundingly diverse. In short, in order to appreciate Rutilius Namatianus’ poem as a historical document, we have to read it closely. But we also have to learn how to integrate it with other sources so that we are constantly re‐evaluating the claims we make about the past. To make claims about an entire century from one poem is not really to write history at all, not even a micro‐history; it’s more akin to literary analysis.

  The goal of a social‐historical approach is different. It is to integrate as many voices as possible back into a larger story about the past while respecting the local, individual backgrounds of the sources. It demands detailed criticism and analysis – of texts and material culture – but it also requires thoughtful synthesis and a constant, careful attention to a bigger picture. Historians who specialize in the early modern and modern world have advocated this method forcefully: “[M]icro‐history that fails to reconnect to larger narratives, and to state frankly what it hopes to overturn and what to uphold, may court antiquarianism,” write historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi in their provocatively titled book, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 121). Historians of the pre‐modern world, which includes the ancient Mediterranean, share these ideals.

  But what exactly is the “larger narrative” of Late Antiquity? When does it begin? When does it end? And how do the people and events of the fifth century CE, such as those described in the last chapter, fit into this bigger story?

  2.1 The Third through Fifth Centuries CE: A Narrated Timeline

  A solid understanding of chronology is an essential starting point for researchers ready to experiment with new lines of investigation. For students new to the period, however, a lack of familiarity with big names and dates can make doing Late Antique history a frustrating enterprise. Who are the important figures? What questions should we learn to ask of them? Above all, how will we be able to tune into the important conversations that might be worth a second analysis?

  The first step in doing a social and cultural history of Late Antiquity, then, is learning exactly what kinds of issues are at stake, why these issues matter, and to whom. Without any engagement with this larger picture, our own attempt at doing history will risk “courting antiquarianism.”

  The third‐century crisis

  By 250 CE, the Roman Empire, from palace to army camp, apartment house to town house, lay beaten and battered. Public memorials in many Roman towns – the kinds of Greek and Latin inscriptions that might tell us about the health of civic life – start to disappear; archaeologists have had a hard time finding them. The implication of this silence seems dire. Cities and civic society must have been in tatters. Buildings that had stood for centuries were no longer being repaired; town councils could not function in ways to meet their residents’ needs. For Romans, two hundred years of relative political stability and economic growth had finally come to an end, and with it, the vision of the house of the first emperor, Augustus. “Crisis” would define the third century CE.

  For the people who lived through it, it was an empire unraveling in real time and a period in which nostalgia likely ran high. From 27 BCE to 14 CE, Augustus had repaired the fractured Republic and set Rome on a series of strong, new foundations that ensured its successes in the coming decades. From the Julio‐Claudian rulers to the end of the second century CE, Rome developed a sophisticated administration of its provincial territories, invested in Mediterranean trade, local enterprise, architectural achievement, and literary culture. By the time roots of imperial power began to shoot up in other provinces – in 193 CE, the patriarch Septimius Severus from Roman Libya would inaugurate a new ruling family, the Severan dynasty – Rome’s formula for political, military, and cultural dominance seemed unassailable.

  Rather than continuing on this course, the death of the last Severan emperor, Alexander Severus (d. 235), inaugurated the opposite: an age of angst. Over the next fifty years, twenty‐five men would try to claim the mantle “emperor.” The empire itself would be precariously split in three as enterprising yet radical local leaders – in Gaul and in Roman Syria – tried to secede. Between 260 and 268, General Postumius would lead a break‐away confederacy in Gaul and Roman Spain. In 268, he would be assassinated by troops eager to acquire yet more territory; this breakaway Gallic confederacy would last for almost another decade, until 273.

  At the very same time, political events in the eastern Mediterranean were following an eerily similar pattern. In 268, tribes from the northern reaches of the Black Sea, the Heruli, found their way to Athens and burned the city. Further east still, between 267 and 274, Zenobia of Palmyra, an oasis city in the trading routes of Roman Syria, would take advantage of the imperial chaos to establish herself as head of state. Calling herself “Augusta” (in Greek “Sebastē,” a word meaning “Roman empress”), she and her family would rule the territories of Roman Egypt and Syria until 275 CE (Figure 2.1). Some contemporary historians often call her “Queen” to belittle her Roman identity. But a century after the house of Septimius Severus had come to power in Rome, the fabric of the empire was literally being unstitched by people who had grown up inside it – and by forces tearing at it from the outside.

  Figure 2.1 A coin from the third century CE with a portrait of the Empress Zenobia (271–275 CE). Zenobia is shown here wearing an imperial diadem, or crown. The text surrounding her portrait identifies her as “Sebastē,” the Greek word for “Augusta,” that is, Roman empress. The personification on the back is of one of the most essential Roman imperial ideals; she is the goddess Harmony (“Homonoia” in ancient Greek; “Concordia” in Latin) and is holding a cornucopia, suggesting prosperity. This coin, made from a copper alloy, was part of a series issued from Alexandria.

  © The Trustees of the British Museum (British Museum inventory number 1860,0327.273).

  No family throughout the third century would hold power as long as the memorable figures of the Julio‐Claudian dynasty or the Severans, and the speed with which leaders were being removed from their position – on the battlefield in tragic circumstances or in their sleep in devious ones – cast a wide pall on Rome’s future. In 251, Emperor Decius did not return from battle with Goths. In 260, Emperor Valerian was captured by a Persian army. The rise of this strong‐willed, culturally sophisticated empire on the Roman world’s eastern border would exacerbate problems at home, as well. Founded in 224 CE, the empowered Persian state, organized under the leadership of the Sasanian family, would remain a threat to Roman officials for the next three hundred years.

  Naturally, as a result of so much turmoil, social, cultural, and spiritual malaise seeped into the once resilient marrow of the Roman people (this, at least, is how the story is usually told). The economy was thrown into crisis, and inflation began to cause once quaint and stable prices across the Mediterranean to skyrocket. Amid the panicked confusion, new, exotic “eastern” beliefs – or so we are led to believe – snaked their way inside the minds of Romans. As a result of this tsunami of spiritual proportions, against the backdrop of war, economic crisis, and political turmoil, Christians allegedly gained the cultural high‐ground in Rome (Exploring Culture 2.1: Christianity before “The Bible”).

  Exploring Culture 2.1 Christianity before “The Bible”

  Reading “The Bible” offers tantalizing glimpses of the life of the earliest church. “Every scripture inspired by God,” says the author of 2 Timothy, “is also useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for trai
ning in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3.16 [NRSV]). The author of 2 Peter claims that “the ignorant and unstable” twist scriptures “to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3.16 [NRSV]).

  Neither writer was talking about the Christian “Bible” however. Both 2 Timothy and 2 Peter were written at the end of the first century CE, at a time when the Christian “Bible” did not exist. These references are to Jewish Scriptures, which many Christians and Jews consulted in the Greek version of the Jewish Bible known as the Septuagint. To understand the historical process by which these later letters were sorted, edited, and assembled into a specifically Christian holy book means looking beyond Jesus, Paul, and the gospel writers.

  “The Bible” acquired its name from the city of Byblos. Located in modern Lebanon, Byblos was a Phoenician port, millennia‐old even by the time of Homer. Because of its trade connections with Egypt, it became known for the import of papyrus, an important early writing material. Greeks called a papyrus roll “byblos” (βύβλος), or “biblos” (βίβλος). Biblia is the plural Greek noun which means “books.” “The Bible,” then, is a library – not a single book. How this anthology came to be considered one “book” is an important question.