The Source:
Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, Penguin 2009
Chapter 2
The Weight of Empire
The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up . . . he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune: he is absolved.
This is an extract from a Greek-Latin primer for children, probably of the early fourth century. It expresses, through its very simplicity, some of the unquestioned assumptions of the late Roman empire. Judicial violence was normal, indeed deserved (in fact, even witnesses were routinely tortured unless they were from the élite); and the rich got off. The Roman world was habituated to violence and injustice.
The gladiatorial shows of the early empire continued in the fourth-century western empire, despite being banned by Constantine in 326 under Christian influence. … Augustine, an uncompromising but also not a naive man, took it for granted that such a blood lust was, however sinful in Christian eyes, normal. Actually, all the post-Roman societies, pagan, Christian or Muslim, were equally used to violence, particularly by the powerful; but under the Roman empire it had a public legitimacy, an element of weekly spectacle … . There was a visceral element to Roman power …
As for the rich getting off: this was not automatic by any means … But the powerful did indeed have strong patronage networks, and could very readily misuse them … only a determined bishop with good connections in Constantinople could properly confront abuse of power … But the patronage was crucial, and most of our late Roman sources (as, indeed, early Roman sources) lay great emphasis on it. One could not be a success without it. The Roman world was seriously corrupt, as well as violent. What looks like corruption to us did not always seem so to the Romans, at least to those who formed the élite: it had its own rules, justifications and etiquette. But corruption and its analogues did privilege the privileged …
I begin with these comments simply to distance us a little from Roman political power. The Roman state was not particularly ‘enlightened’. Nevertheless, nor was it, around 400, obviously doomed to collapse. Its violence (whether public or private), corruption and injustice were part of a very stable structure, one which had lasted for centuries, and which had few obvious internal flaws.
Half the empire, the West, did collapse in the fifth century, as a result of unforeseen events, handled badly; the empire survived with no difficulty in the East, however, and arguably reached its peak there in the early sixth century.
… we shall see how … stable structure worked before the western empire broke up … Fourth-century evidence will be used … extending into the early fifth in the West, a period of relative stability still, and into the sixth in the East, for the state did not change radically there until after 600.
The Roman empire was centred on the Mediterranean - ‘our sea’ as the Romans called it; they are the only power in history ever to rule all its shores. The structure of the empire was indeed dependent on the inland sea, for easy and relatively cheap sea transport tied the provinces together … By 300 it was recognised that the empire could not easily be ruled from a single centre, and after 324 there were two permanent capitals, Rome and Constantine’s newly founded Constantinople.
The empire thereafter had, most of the time, an eastern (mostly Greek-speaking) and a western (mostly Latin-speaking) half, each with its own emperor and administration. But the two halves remained closely connected, and Latin remained the official legal and military language of the East until well into the sixth century.
Rome was a huge city, with a million people at its height in the early empire, and still half a million in 400, when it was no longer the administrative capital of the western empire (which was, in the fourth century, Trier in northern Gaul, and after 402 Ravenna in northern Italy). Constantinople started much smaller, but increased in size rapidly, and may have reached half a million, by now more than Rome, by the late fifth century. Cities of this size in the ancient or medieval world were kept so large by governments, who wanted a great city at their political or symbolic heart for ideological reasons. Rome and Constantinople both had an urban poor who were maintained by regular state handouts of grain and olive oil, from North Africa (modern Tunisia) in the case of Rome, from Egypt and probably Syria in the case of Constantinople, Africa and Egypt being the major export regions of the whole empire. These free food-supplies (annona in Latin) were a substantial expense for the imperial tax system, making up a quarter or more of the whole budget. It must have mattered very much to the state that its great cities were kept artificially large, and their populations happy, with ‘bread and circuses’ as the tag went — though the circuses (including games in the amphitheatres of Rome) were paid for in most cases by the privately wealthy. …
This concern for the capitals was only the most obvious aspect of the lasting Roman commitment to city life. The whole of the world of culture was bound up in city-ness, civilitas in Latin, from which come our words ‘civilized’ and ‘civilization’, and which precisely implied city-dwelling to the Romans. The empire was in one sense a union of all its cities (some thousand in number), each of which had its own city council (curia in Latin, boul in Greek) that was traditionally autonomous. Each city also had its own kit of impressive urban buildings, remarkably standard from place to place: a forum, civic buildings and temples around it, a theatre, an amphitheatre (only in the West), monumental baths, and from the fourth century a cathedral and other churches replacing the temples; in some parts of the empire, walls. These marked city-ness; one could not claim to be a city without them. And the imagery of the city and its buildings ran through the whole of Roman culture like a silver thread. …
Political society focused on the cities. Their traditional autonomy had meant in the early empire that being a city councillor (curialis in Latin, bouleuts in Greek) was the height of local ambition. This was less so by the fourth century, however, as the centralisation of imperial government meant cities finding that more decisions were taken over their heads; the expansion of the senate and the central administration also meant that the richest and most successful citizens could move beyond their local hierarchies, and the curia thus became second best. City councillors became, above all, responsible for raising and also underwriting taxes, a remunerative but risky matter.
Slowly, the formal structures of such councils weakened, above all in the fifth century, and by the sixth even tax-raising had been taken over by central government officials. These processes have often been seen in apocalyptic terms, for it is clear from the imperial law codes that curiales often complained of their tax burdens, and that some (the poorer ones, doubtless) sought to avoid office; emperors responded by making such avoidance illegal. Put that together with the trickle of literary evidence for local élites in the West preferring rural living to city life, and an archaeology which increasingly shows radical material simplifications after 400 or so on western urban sites, and the tax burden on city councillors starts to look like a cause of urban abandonment, maybe in the context of the fall of the empire itself.
Such an interpretation is over-negative, however. First of all, it does not fit the East. Here … political élites remained firmly based in cities. What happened was that city government became more informal, based on the local rich as a collective group, but without specific institutions. Senators who lived locally, the local bishop, the richest councillors, increasingly made up an ad-hoc élite group, often called prteuontes, ‘leading men’. These men patronised city churches, made decisions about building repairs and festivals, and, if necessary, organised local defence, without needing a formal role. Nor did cities lose by this; the fifth and sixth centuries saw the grandest buildings being built in many eastern cities. … commitment to urban politics … went on as long as Roman values survived; this varied, but in many parts of the empire it continued a long time after the empire itself fell. The presuppositions of civilitas achieved that on their own. In the West, urban élites also had rural villas, lavish country houses where they spent the summer months … but cities remained the foci for business, politics, patronage and culture. Few influential people could risk staying away from them. And where the rich went, others followed: their servants and entourages, but also merchants and artisans who wanted to sell them things, and the poor who hoped for their charity; the basic personnel of urban life.
It is possible to see the network of cities as the major element of Roman society, more important even than imperial central government. By modern standards, indeed, the empire was lightly governed, with at the most some 30,000 civilian central government officials, who were concentrated in imperial and provincial capitals (though this excludes lesser state employees, such as guardsmen, clerks, messengers, ox-drivers of the public post, who could have been ten times as numerous).
When we add to this all the evidence we have for the inefficiency and poor record-keeping of Roman government, plus the time needed to reach outlying provinces of the huge empire (to travel from Rome to northern Gaul took a minimum of three weeks; an army would take much longer), we might wonder how the Roman world held together at all. But it did; a complex set of overlapping structures and presumptions created a coherent political system.
Let us look at some of its elements in turn:
the civil administration,
the senate,
the legal system,
the army,
and the tax system which funded all these. …
The administration of each half of the empire was controlled by the emperor, the central political figure of what was, in principle, an uncompromising autocracy. … But not all emperors wanted to do much ruling; they could simply live their lives as the embodiment of public ceremonial, as did, for example, the emperors of the first half of the fifth century. Even if they were active, aiming at an interventionist politics and choosing their major subordinates, they could find themselves blocked by poor information and the complex rules of hierarchy from making a real impact (the most active emperors usually had a military background, without direct experience in civil government). Not that most of the major officials of the empire were full-time bureaucrats, either; even the most assiduous politicians were only intermittently in office. The empire, in a sense, was run by amateurs. But the group of amateurs at least had shared values, and family experience in many cases as well, particularly in the West, where there were more old and rich senatorial families, who were often active in politics in the fourth and fifth centuries. And their subordinates were real career officials, who committed themselves to the administration for life. It is that network of office-holders which gave government its coherence.
That, and the stability of the offices themselves. The four praetorian prefectures, each with responsibility for a quarter of the empire (and with a hierarchy of provincial governors beneath them), the six major bureaux of central government and the urban prefectures of Rome and Constantinople all had their own traditions and loyalties, going back in some cases for centuries. …
The senate had its own identity, partly separate from the imperial bureaucracy; indeed, in the West it was even physically separate, for the government was no longer in Rome. It was the theoretical governing body of the empire, as of the Roman republic four centuries before, and although the senate was by now no longer a reality, it still represented the height of aspiration for any citizen. It brought with it many fiscal and political privileges, although it was expensive to enter and participate in, given the games and other ceremonies senators had to fund. It had no formal governmental function, but high officials became senators as of right; furthermore, by the early fifth century, only the highest of the three grades of senator, the illustres, were regarded as full members of the senate, and the title of illustris was only available to officials and direct imperial protégés. The senate was thus tightly connected to government, and expanded as the administration expanded in the fourth century; but it was nonetheless separate, with its own rituals and seniority.
It represented aristocratic wealth, privilege and superiority, and, although membership of it was not technically heritable, in practice the same families dominated the senate, in Rome at least, throughout the fourth and fifth centuries. All the male heirs of an illustris were anyway at least clarissimi, the lowest senatorial grade, which involved at least some privileges even after full senatorial eligibility contracted. And all the grades seem to have been regarded as nobilis, ‘aristocratic’, in late Roman parlance. This close but sideways relation to government has some parallels with that of the House of Lords in modern Britain, both before and after the reforms of 1999.
The existence of this effectively hereditary aristocracy was a key feature of the empire. Not because it dominated government; most leading bureaucrats were not of senatorial origin, even if they became senators later … but rather because it dominated the tone of government. The Roman empire was unusual in ancient and medieval history in that its ruling class was dominated by civilian, not (or not only) military, figures. … Wealth went without saying: no one was politically important in the Roman world (apart from a few high- minded bishops) without being rich. One needed wealth to get anywhere in the civil administration, as both bribes for appointments and the maintenance of a patronage network cost money, but once one was important, the perks of office, both legal and illegal, were huge.
In the army, too, although it was more open to merit, all successful generals ended up rich. And the independently wealthy families of the senate of Rome, the Anicii, Petronii, Caeonii and half a dozen others, had estates throughout southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa and elsewhere, ‘scattered across almost the whole Roman world … The senatorial hyper-rich were only in Rome, however; in Constantinople senators were from the provincial élites of the East, and operated on a smaller scale. Throughout the empire, in fact, there were provincial élites, the leaders of which had senatorial status and were in line for public office; they were locally powerful ….
… The two traditions, in Latin and Greek, did not have much influence on each other by now, but they were very dense and highly prized. There was a pecking-order based on the extent of this cultural capital … by the fifth century the aristocracy knew both Virgil (or Homer) and the Bible … It is this culture which makes the late Roman empire, or at least its élites, unusually accessible to us, for the writings of many of these aristocrats survive: elegant letters or speeches for the most part, but also poetry, theology, or, in the case of the fifth-century senator Palladius, an estate-management manual. Roman literary culture used to be regarded as the high point of civilisation; this belief, inherited from the Renaissance, perhaps reached its peak in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English public-school tradition, in which Virgil (and indeed Juvenal, by now seen as a more difficult author) was regarded as a basic training even for the government of India, not to speak of an academic career.
This belief is less strong now; few academics know enough Latin to read Virgil (outside Italy), and even fewer politicians. It is thus easier today to see Roman literary culture as an attribute of power, rather than virtue; Roman politicians were at least as cynical and greedy as their successors, and not obviously better at ruling.
But it is important to recognize its all-pervasiveness; in all the cities of the empire, even local office was linked to at least some version of this education. The shared knowledge and values that it inculcated was one of the elements that held the empire together, and indeed made the empire remarkably homogeneous, as not only its literature but its surviving architecture and material culture show. … The culture of post-Roman aristocracies instead became military, based on the use of arms and horses, and as a result we know much less about it from the inside.
Roman law was another intellectual system that was, in principle, the same everywhere, and it acted as a unifying force. It consisted of imperial legislation, which was very extensive in the fourth to sixth centuries, and a network of tracts by earlier Roman jurists, which represented a distillation of case-law precedents and the workings-out of legal principles. To master this properly required a special training, at the law-schools of Rome, Beirut or (after 425) Constantinople, although all education involved an element of rhetoric, essential for court advocacy. …
Law was not in fact at all easy to master before Theodosius II had imperial laws collected into the Theodosian Code in 429-38. Justinian revised and expanded the code (twice) in 528-34, and had juristic literature of the second and third centuries excerpted and systematized in the Digest in 530-33 as well. The Theodosian Code remained a point of reference in the post-Roman West, even though the laws of the post-Roman kingdoms were different; Justinian’s corpus survived as the law of Byzantium, and was separately revived in the West in the twelfth century.
We must, however, be careful about what such a commitment to law means. The complexity of this legal system was such that experts (iurisconsulti) were needed in every court, and sometimes just to draw up documents, but they may not always have been available or been fully reliable if they were. Even if legal help was accessible, courts did not necessarily judge justly, and the rich often benefited from judicial corruption and patronage, as we saw at the start of this chapter and as many sources confirm. In Egypt, papyrus documents recording the settlement of civil disputes in the fourth to sixth centuries show a strong tendency to avoid courts altogether, given their huge expense and danger, and to go directly to private arbitration.
It would be tempting to reduce the law to its criminal dimension, with its recourse to torture, and conclude that the legal system was in practice simply an instrument of heavy-handed state coercion, the work of a public power that relied on terror because it did not have the personnel to dominate daily life in any detail. Such a temptation would be largely justified, but all the same the law was important. Egyptian arbitrations may have avoided the courts, but they refer frequently to legislation and legal terminology. Augustine was not expert in the law, but he sought to know it, for example writing to the iurisconsultus Eustochius for rulings. … we could indeed suppose that the setpiece denunciations of judicial corruption in our sources at least showed high expectations.
The Roman army was much larger than the civil administration, and was always the empire’s major expense: in 400 there were some half a million soldiers, give or take a hundred thousand. These were mostly on the northern Rhine and Danube frontiers, and on the eastern frontier with Persia (the long southern border faced the Sahara, and was less vulnerable), but there were detachments in every province, acting as garrisons and as ad-hoc police. It was of course their existence that made it possible for provincial élites to remain civilian; private armies were very rare before the empire broke up. Conversely, armies were capable of imposing their own candidates for emperor, all the more easily because they held most of the weapons. This had been common in the third century, but was much rarer in the fourth; it revived in the West in the final years of empire in the fifth, but in the East there were no successful coups until 602.
Even without coups against the emperor, however, army leaders remained important in politics, and several weak emperors had military strongmen ruling for them, who could succeed each other by violence. There was a sense in which the office of emperor was more military than the civilian bureaucracy around him, and emperors were closer to the military than to the civilian hierarchy. Generals were more likely than senior administrators to have risen from nowhere, especially if they came from frontier regions, as was very common; the Rhine frontier and the Balkan frontier in particular were heavily militarized societies, with less and less social distance between the Roman and the ‘barbarian’ sides of the border …
This did not make them so very different from the civilian élites, as long as they were successful, as they could end up with senatorial position, civilian clients and a literary education for their children. But military leaders were less dedicated to expensive prestige buildings or the patronage of games, and senators regularly looked down on them for their lack of culture. Soldiers also moved around more than civilians did. …
The scale of the army and its presence everywhere, and the need to keep it properly provisioned and equipped, made it the major concern of the whole Roman state. The state had a developed system of frontier fortifications and its own food-supply lines … It also had its own factories for military equipment, of which thirty-five are listed, distributed all across the empire … Perhaps a half of the entire imperial budget went on feeding and paying the army, and the logistics of army supply were the single most important element that linked all the imperial provinces together, along with the permanent need to feed the imperial capitals.
Underpinning all these structures, and making them possible, was the imperial tax system, which was based above all on a land tax, assessed on acreage, though also buttressed by a much lighter tax on merchants and artisans, by the revenues from imperial lands and by a variety of smaller dues. In recent years some historians have reacted against an earlier image of the ‘coercive state’ of the late empire, taxing so heavily that land was abandoned and the economy began to break down; this revision is correct, but they seem to me to have gone too far in their arguments. Taxation does seem to have been very heavy overall: in the sixth century a small number of sources, mostly from Egypt, converge in showing that a quarter of the yield of land could go in tax… This is a very high figure for a precapitalist, agrarian society, with a relatively simple technology. But the high taxes were needed to pay the salaries of all those soldiers, bureaucrats and messengers, and to feed the capitals; they were needed to fund the enormous scale of Roman public buildings and state wealth. They also connected the different parts of the empire together physically, as grain moved northwards from Africa, Sicily and Egypt, and olive oil moved out of Africa, the Aegean and Syria, in ships themselves commandeered by the state …
A land tax cannot work properly, especially when it is high, unless assessment is accurate and collection systematic. This takes work. The state has to have up-to-date records about who owns the land; these are not easy to obtain systematically (and no easier to keep in order for easy reference), and establishing them requires a considerable amount of personnel and intrusive information-gathering.
Land sales had to be publicly registered in the late empire for this reason, and such registrations can sometimes be found in the rare collections of private documents from the late empire … And, most important, from the fourth century onwards the government issued laws to tie the peasantry, who were actually paying the taxes, to their place of origin, so that they would not move around or leave the land, thus making tax-collection more difficult. These laws were part of a general legislative package aimed at ensuring that people essential to the state stayed in their professions, and that their heirs would do so too. Curiales were tied to their offices, as we have seen; so were soldiers, and the workers in state factories; so were shipowners and the bakers and butchers of Rome, who were essential for the annona of the capital.
Even if this network of laws was regularly obeyed, which we can doubt, they make up a large proportion of the imperial codes, and they were generated by the need to stabilise the tax infrastructure of the empire. Add to that the actual collection of taxes, which could be a tense and violent moment, and was certainly undertaken by armed men, and the impact of the imperial fiscal system was continuous, capillary and potentially coercive of nearly everybody in the empire.
This intrusiveness was made worse by illegality. The rich could buy immunity corruptly; assessors and collectors certainly got rich corruptly. The victims were almost always the poor. They responded by fleeing the land (hence the laws tying them down), or by seeking protection from the powerful against having to pay taxes to the state. There are also laws against such patronage, although we have seen that patronage, too, was a stable part of the Roman political system. Most taxes were, it is true, probably paid regularly and even legally … But given the weight of tax, and the endemic injustice that marked the Roman system, it is not surprising that corruption should focus on it. Social critics, more numerous as the empire went Christian and a radical fringe of moralists gained a voice, very frequently stress fiscal oppression in their invective; only judicial corruption and sexual behaviour were as prominent. This would last as long as the empire.
Taxation thus underpinned imperial unity itself, for it was the most evident single element in the state’s impact on the population at large, as well as the mainstay of the army, the administration, the legal system and the movement of goods throughout the Mediterranean and elsewhere, all the elements which linked such a large land area together. If it failed, the empire would simply break up. But in fact the empire broke up for other reasons, as we shall see … After it did so, taxation was a casualty in the West, but survived in the East. This contrast cannot be underestimated… All the same, fiscal breakdown was not yet predictable in 400, or even 500 in some places. In 400 the stability, and relative homogeneity, of the imperial system was not yet seen by anyone to be at risk.
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