THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE

Roman culture spread across the empire between the time of Augustus and the tetrarchy. The most striking aspect was an extraordinary level of uniformity which was stamped across the diverse regions from the Euphrates to the Atlantic seaboard. Almost all of the region was now urbanized. Cities and towns were found throughout Asia Minor, the Near East and the Mediterranean basin, across northwest Europe to the Rhine and into Britain, through the Balkans up to and beyond the Danube, and as far south as the desert and mountain fringes of Africa. By modern standards these cities were usually small, only rarely with more than 10,000 inhabitants, but as centers of economic exchange and local administration they were the key to the empire’s organizational structure. They also provided places of entertainment and display. Display was particularly important in the political culture of the empire. Local landowners and other members of the wealthy classes showed themselves off and lived their public lives in these urban settings. They were also the focal points where imperial power was demonstrated to the empire’s subjects. This resulted in one of the distinctive aspects of the Roman Empire, the culture of local aristocrats, whose wealth and authority was paraded in public buildings, often paid for out of their own funds, in statues for them and members of their families, and in grandiloquent inscriptions which praised their achievements. The emperors’ might was also symbolically encapsulated in temples, sanctuaries, and other monuments to the imperial cult, also associated with inscriptions, which were set up in great numbers to commemorate particular events and achievements. The need to display resources and power through intelligible visible symbols was perhaps the most important reason for the development of the epigraphic habit, the culture of inscriptions that is such a telling feature of Roman civilization.

The smaller cities of the Roman Empire could never have existed in isolation. On the one hand, they were symbiotically inseparable from the rural territories which supported them, and where most of the population of the empire lived. Both the normal Latin word, civitas, and its Greek equivalent, polis, denote not the city in the narrow sense of an urban settlement, but the fusion of town and territory, its inhabitants and institutional structures. They represent an idea or a concept, not simply a place of habitation. On the other hand, cities were interdependent with one another. This was not merely a matter of crude economics, in that they often relied on other places for sustenance and survival, but rather that they thrived as part of a system. Being a city was a mark of status, and status is a worthless commodity without the opportunity for comparison. A city in isolation would lose most of its raison d’être.

The security of the empire was guaranteed by military power. During the late empire military pressures from external enemies and from civil war increased seriously. As a result military aspects of the empire became more apparent. The distinction between peaceful provinces and narrow, militarized, frontier zones, which had been the ideal of the so-called golden age of the second century, gave way in the third century to a picture in which the difference between militarized and civilian zones, between soldier and civilian, and indeed between war and peace was blurred.1

There were however limits to Rome’s military presence. Soldiers and the infrastructure necessary to support them could only be deployed on the basis of transport and communication systems. Effective imperial power was strictly determined by the network of road and sea communications which the Roman state had created and maintained. Paved roads linked the various regions around the Mediterranean with one another and criss-crossed provinces in networks that became denser and more pervasive as the empire evolved. Roads made it possible to move troops, officials, and administrators over long distances as swiftly as the conditions of a pre-mechanized age allowed. In this way rapid military deployment, the most important instrument of conquest in the hands of great generals such as Alexander, Pompey, or Julius Caesar, could be transformed into a routine of empire. This was never more evident than in the third and fourth centuries, a great age of road building,2 when troops and generals were ceaselessly shuttled to confront trouble between the eastern and northern frontiers, or when rivals for power mobilized and marched their armies across the length of the empire to achieve their purposes.

Roads, however, were exploited to serve the empire in other ways. Provincial networks underpinned and sustained the urban settlement pattern. They ensured that towns were not isolated from one another and thus the city-based culture thrived. They also provided access to isolated rural areas and they were the conduits along which rural products could be moved into towns, or collected as a form of taxation and used to support armies. All major Roman roads were furnished with a regular system of way stations (mansiones, mutationes), where official road users could stay, where mounts could be changed, and wagons maintained. Supplying means of transport for official use was one of the most important services which the Roman state expected of its subjects. Cities were required to provide pack and draft animals, wagons, and other support for military and official traffic passing through their territory. This operated on a relay system, which was one of the keys to imperial power. Travelers with authorizing documents (which were known in the late empire as evectiones), and (it must be said) a good many others without authorization, were able to requisition local mounts and draught animals until they reached the boundaries of city territories. At this point the burden and responsibility passed to the next city. In a literal sense, the horse power supplied by the cities ensured that the roads of the empire could be used to their full potential.3

The Roman Empire saw a prodigious increase in inter-regional mobility. This is confirmed by plentiful evidence from archaeology, epigraphy, and written sources for natives of one region moving to distant parts of the empire. This movement of peoples also contributed to a homogenization of imperial culture. However, the overland transport of products, especially bulky goods, was much more problematic. Local traffic, from farms and villages to the nearby town or market center will certainly have been intense, but the costs of land transport were high, and in practical terms simply unfeasible. It has been well put that a yoke of horses or oxen pulling a wagon loaded with grain would be likely to have eaten the load (or its equivalent) before they had traveled a hundred miles. Accordingly, overland inter-regional trade by private merchants was largely confined to non-bulky, high-value commodities. The Roman state was able to solve this problem through its power to requisition transport from local communities and create the relay system. This was beyond the capacity of even the wealthiest private producers and merchants.

Transport by sea was as important as land communication, and the Roman Empire witnessed an extraordinary explosion of mercantile activity in the Mediterranean. Seafaring was a dangerous activity, especially during the winter, and this confined the Mediterranean sailing season to the months between March and October. But the advantages of sea transport were overwhelming. Bulky goods could be moved over long distances in cargo vessels at costs that were a fraction of the real price of land transport; the wind may have been dangerous, but it did not have the appetite of draught animals. Marine traffic shaped the appearance of the Roman world. Coastal cities, with good harbors, were not dependent on a small hinterland for their food supply, but could import goods, at least potentially, from the entire Mediterranean and Black Sea region. In consequence settlements on the coast could grow to be much larger than those of the interior. The most populous cities of the Mediterranean world in antiquity – Rome, Constantinople, Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch, and Ephesus – were all directly on the coast or could be reached by a short riverine connection from their harbors. The Roman state organized sea transport as it had overland traffic, not by creating relays but by deals and contracts with large merchant shippers. Above all, the enormous population of Rome itself had to be supplied with imported food; the harvests of the Nile Valley, brought by transport ships from Alexandria, and of the grain fields of North Africa, imported from Carthage. Oil came from Libya, Tunisia, and Southern Spain. The mercantile infrastructure needed to feed Rome had a tremendous impact on the coastal regions of western Italy. Ostia, the harbor town at the mouth of the Tiber, was developed into the Rotterdam of the ancient world, with huge harbor works built by the early emperors, especially Trajan. A major secondary unloading point for the transports from Alexandria and the eastern Mediterranean was Puteoli in the Bay of Naples, now linked by a canal and coasting network to Rome. Docks, harbors, granaries, and storage facilities were built at intermediate points along the long-distance sea routes.4 In the late empire, the sea routes to Rome were eclipsed by comparable networks for the supply of Constantinople, which was also sustained by foodstuffs brought by the imperial annona system, responsible for supplying a significant part of its population with grain, wine, oil, and other products.

Private merchants at sea did not face the practical constraints which restricted overland trade, and there was an enormous growth in traffic. The melancholy reflection of this is the high proportion of Roman wrecks that have been found in the Mediterranean compared to those of earlier or later periods. These, however, are a crucial boon to the study of the Roman trading economy. Each preserved and excavated wreck is effectively a time capsule, preserving an atomized fragment of the Roman economic system at the moment when disaster struck. Most merchant ships carried amphoras, closely packed below the decks, containing grain, olive oil, wine, fish sauce, and other staple commodities. The study of amphoras, taken together with the wrecks where many of them have been discovered, is the lynch-pin of archaeological investigation of the Roman economy. It is also important to recognize the importance of inland water transport, both along large navigable rivers (most notably on the great rivers of Gaul and on the Po in northern Italy) and along canal systems which began to be built in all parts of the empire from Britain to Egypt and Asia Minor.

The creation of the road system and the intensification of maritime trade also reflected technological advances in the building of ships, harbors, lifting devices, and warehouses, and in the design and mass production of carts and wagons. The most critical development of the Roman Empire was the harnessing of water power to generate the energy needed for grain mills and in the mining industry. The scale and impact of technological advances in classical antiquity have been consistently underemphasized until recently in modern scholarship. The reason for this is that the most familiar literary sources, on which scholarly work has been mainly based, were produced by members of the educated elite of the classical world, who rarely took any notice of the march of technology, a subject that fell beneath the level of their gaze. On the other hand a considerable body of technical literature survives from antiquity, and this is now supplemented by an abundance of archaeological evidence for technological developments. The sophisticated harnessing of water power underpinned large scale mining and ore-processing enterprises (especially in Spain in the first and second centuries) and quasi-industrial processes such as the cutting of marble blocks and large timbers with mechanical saws, as well as grain milling.5 Mining for precious metals remained an important preoccupation of the late Roman economy, although it is evident that the disruption caused by the barbarian invasions and occupation of the Spanish provinces brought an end to large-scale mining, and probably contributed very substantially to the impoverishment of the western empire.6 In the eastern empire, by contrast, there was a growing awareness in the upper levels of society of the importance of practical technologies and their value both in economic and military contexts. This is illustrated strikingly by the sustained interest shown by Procopius in feats of engineering, mechanical ingenuity, and technological innovation, which has even led a scholar to suggest, implausibly, that his educational background and training might have been that of an engineer not a lawyer.7

The Roman Empire was also united by a uniform monetary system. With only marginal exceptions all the precious metal coinage which circulated in the Roman Empire was produced under Roman supervision to a Roman standard. In the early empire the silver denarius was the principal denomination. Roman silver coin was minted at regional centers across the empire, from Lyon in Gaul to Alexandria in Egypt, and probably mostly entered into circulation in the form of soldiers’ pay. Gold was minted much more sparsely, mostly for special occasions. A significant proportion of Roman gold coin was distributed in the form of gifts or subsidies to barbarian kings and chieftains outside the empire, and was used as a diplomatic tool in maintaining the security of the frontiers. Bronze coin in the western part of the empire was also an imperial monopoly after the first century ad, but the Greek cities of the East continued to enjoy the privilege of issuing their own bronze coinage for local needs, and local bronze coin was interchangeable with centrally minted Roman silver at fixed rates. The common coinage and monetary system made a major contribution to cultural uniformity, and this was reinforced by the use of coin legends. Almost every coin, of whatever denomination, carried the portrait, name, and titles of a living member of the imperial family, usually the emperor himself, on one side, and an emblem, again identified by a written legend, chosen to project a significant feature of imperial ideology on the other. As a monetary system Roman imperial coinage was more extensive geographically, and lasted for a longer period, than any other in world history.

The existence of a single, empire-wide monetary system does not necessarily imply that the empire as a whole acted as a single economic unit. Between northwest Europe and the Middle East there is some evidence, although it is difficult to measure and evaluate, of distinct economic zones, which prospered or faltered according to local conditions. The Roman Empire was large and complex, and there were certainly major regional variations. However, a significant measure of economic unity was certainly created by universal mechanisms such as tax, interregional trade, and the production and consumption of goods, which the state required to provision its armies and the populations of its capital cities.

All the features of the Roman Empire which have been discussed so far are more or less identifiable on the basis of visible – indeed sometimes very conspicuous– material evidence. Other defining institutions and characteristics have to be inferred less directly. Rural settlements were much less conspicuous than the cities. To an extent the pattern of villages and other types of rural community represents the continuation of regional, vernacular traditions in areas that came under Roman control. These often preserved native traditions and styles of building, although they were open to Roman architectural influence and betray the impact of empire in other ways. Roman rule brought significant changes to the patterns of land ownership, including the growth of rural estates, and new types of land exploitation. These had a lasting impact on provincial society. The stable conditions of the empire encouraged the consolidation of landownership and a trend towards the emergence of large or middle-sized estates. This reinforced the authority of the rich in the provinces and enabled them to pass their wealth and resources, in the form of land, to their heirs. The agrarian landholdings of elite and middle-ranking families throughout the Roman provinces underpinned the flourishing life of the cities. They also helped to create a stable conservative and conformist mentality in the provincial aristocracies. The emperors themselves acquired a great deal of property, confiscated from their enemies or inherited from their would-be friends, especially in the wealthiest regions of the empire such as Spain, Italy, Africa, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Imperial estates, which were generally divided up and leased out to long-term tenants, played a large part in the supply system of the armies and the imperial capital cities. Wealthy landowners, and above all the emperors, supervised their estates through agents, who were often freed ex-slaves or members of freedmen families.

Taxation was another universal feature of the Roman Empire whose effects are almost invisible. The main exception to this generalization is in Egypt, where innumerable papyri have been recovered which document the bureaucratic workings of imperial administration, including tax collection, precisely at the point where it affected the lives of individuals. However, because our main evidence for how taxation worked comes at this hum-drum level, it is difficult to reconstruct the big picture of taxation policy. In broad terms three types of taxes may be identified. Taxes were levied on individuals and the land they owned, and the levies made on heads (capita) and on acreage (iugera) were consolidated and rationalized into a single system at the beginning of the late Roman period under Diocletian, the system of iugatio-capitatio. The rates of the poll and land tax were fixed, not progressive, so they weighed more heavily on the poor than the rich. Taxes were also placed on the movement of goods, both at the frontiers of the empire and on provincial boundaries (portoria). Thus the growing trade and exchange of the Roman Empire yielded a significant cut for the state. Finally taxes were levied on transactions with monetary value: on inheritances, on the freeing of slaves, and on the sales of particular types of goods. Rates of payment varied to a small degree from one part of the empire to another, reflecting local traditions, but the essential precondition for Roman taxes as a whole was the existence of universal bureaucratic systems for assessing and collecting them. It was a major achievement of the Roman Empire, and one of defining characteristics that distinguished it from the barbarian kingdoms in the West, that it translated the practices of previous conquerors, who demanded tribute by right of conquest from their subjects, into permanent, institutionalized tax levies, which did more than anything to define the relationships of subjects to the political system which ruled and protected them.8

The preceding pages have been designed to sketch in the broadest terms the social and economic conditions in the provinces under the Roman Empire. The emphasis has deliberately been placed on universal features which helped to create economic and cultural unity and can accordingly be identified as crucial defining elements of empire. It is now necessary to survey the cities and provinces of the empire on a regional basis. One purpose is to provide some idea of what the later Roman Empire looked like in material terms. Another is to identify variations within the overall pattern. The survey begins with the largest cities, whose evolution and history was directly determined by the political economy of the later empire. In the last generation most innovative work on the Roman Empire has tended to look away from the capitals to the provinces, and interpret the workings of the empire by starting at the peripheries. However, the old and new imperial capitals were by far the largest social units in the empire and in economic and social terms imposed patterns in the movement of goods which can be studied throughout and beyond the Mediterranean world.

Rome

Rome, by virtue of its name and historical traditions, was the center of the Roman world. By the time of Diocletian, Rome had long since ceased to  the main focal point of political and military power in the empire, but the Senate, “the better part of the human race” (Symmachus, Rel. VI.1), numbering some 600 members, including the richest landowning families of the western empire, retained high prestige. The senators’ public role was largely ceremonial. The old republican offices of quaestor, praetor, and suffect consul were now taken by wealthy men in the early stages of a public career, and were marked not by administrative or judicial duties but by the obligation to pay for shows and spectacles to entertain the Roman people and impress one another with their wealth and style. The practice of the late fourth and early fifth centuries is described by Olympiodorus:

"Many of the Roman households received an income of 4000 pounds of gold per year from their properties, not including grain, wine and other produce which, if sold, would have amounted to one-third of the income in gold. The income of the households at Rome of the second class was 1000 or 1500 pounds of gold. When Probus, the son of Olybrius, celebrated his praetorship during the reign of the usurper John [423–5], he spent 1200 pounds of gold. Before the capture of Rome, Symmachus the orator, a senator of middling wealth, spent 2000 pounds when his son Symmachus celebrated his praetorship. Maximus, one of the wealthy men, spent 4000 pounds on his son’s praetorship. The praetors celebrated their festivals for seven days. (Olympiodorus fr. 41.2, trans. Blockley)"

Many members of the Senate were prodigiously wealthy, deriving their riches from land holdings in Italy and the other western provinces. They built huge villas in and around the city. Olympiodorus wrote that the great houses of Rome in his day were as large as good-sized cities, each containing its own race course, fora, temples, fountains, and various bath houses (Olympiodorus fr. 41.1). A century later Theoderic commended the wealthy Symmachus for the magnificence and good taste of his suburban villa, which “created public works of a sort in your own private dwelling,” and on the strength of this commissioned him to supervise repair work on Pompey’s theater (Cassiodorus, Var. 4.51). Both passages imply the growing tendency in late antiquity for the wealthy to spend lavishly on their private properties.

Diocletian was aware of the continuing importance of the Senate, and rebuilt the Curia, its meeting place. The building still stands in the Roman forum in the form that it then took. However, the tetrarchs spent little time in the city except in November 303, when Diocletian, prematurely, arrived to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his accession to power. It is revealing that he left the city in haste, before the year was out, unable, according to Lactantius, to tolerate the free spirit of the Roman people (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 17.1–2). Similar antagonism is implicit in Ammianus’ account of Constantius’ visit in 357 (Ammianus 16.10). The great cities of the empire were the only places where emperors encountered a great mass of their ordinary subjects, and these meetings were fraught with tension and significance. The tenor of an imperial reign could be defined in such moments, and the despotic Diocletian chose to avoid a confrontation with a free-speaking plebs. Lactantius, however, does not mention another initiative of Diocletian in Rome which was equally representative of an emperor’s relations with the people. In 305, the year of their abdication, the tetrarchs completed the Thermae Diocletianae, a monstrous bathing complex, with almost double the capacity of the Baths of Caracalla, capable of holding 3,000 bathers at a time, dedicating the building “to their own Roman people” (ILS 646).

Diocletian himself constructed another major monument in the Forum to celebrate his vicennalia, an ensemble of five columns erected next to the temple of Concord. Four of these supported statues of the tetrarchs, and were grouped behind a central column with a statue of Jupiter. This presented the religious ideas of the tetrarchy at the center of the empire. At the same time Diocletian also organized the celebration of the secular games, an event of major religious significance previously staged by the Severans in 204.

Ammianus called Rome the temple of the whole world (17.4), and implied that the Capitol remained the greatest pagan sanctuary of the empire (26.16.12), while Ausonius hailed it as the house of the gods (Ausonius XI.1). It was the symbolic center of the struggle between paganism and Christianity in the fourth century.9 Senators, like the rest of the population, were divided in their religious allegiances, but leading senators can be identified as the main champions of paganism up till the last years of the fourth century.

Between 300 and 450 only one would-be emperor resided in Rome, Maxentius, son of Maximianus, who claimed the title of Augustus between 306 and his defeat by Constantine in 312. He restored Hadrian’s temple of Venus and Roma, which had been destroyed by fire, and built the huge brick basilica, which stands at the east end of the forum and must have been designed as the setting for his public appearances as judge and ruler. The basilica was later dedicated by the Senate to Constantine, and the famous colossal head of Constantine, the best known of his portraits, was found there, implying that the building continued to serve a similar function after Maxentius’ death (Aur.Victor, Caes. 40.26). As imperial visits to Rome became less frequent, the building may have been taken over as a ceremonial meeting hall and courtroom by the city prefect.10 The best comparison for this building is the equally grandiose basilica, perfectly intact today, which was constructed by Constantine at the northern Gallic capital of Trier.

Constantine’s most conspicuous construction in Rome was the famous arch. More significant in the long term were his church foundations. Work began on St John Lateran in the weeks following the victory of the Milvian bridge in autumn 312. The basilica was built on the demolished foundations of the barracks that had been occupied by Maxentius’ cavalry bodyguard. Constantine’s mother Helena is associated with another major basilica, the church now called S. Croce in Gerusalemme, which was attached to a palace where she now resided.11

The best known of the fourth-century Roman churches, the forerunner of the great sixteenth-century basilica on the Vatican hill, dedicated to St Peter, was not built by Constantine, but by one of his successors, probably Constans between ad 340 and 350. The site was directly superimposed on a cemetery of pagan and Christian graves, one of which was identified as a martyrion of St Peter and already served as a shrine for Christian worshippers. This was integrated into the new five-aisled building at the point where the transept and the apse intersected. The work of construction had been extremely laborious, and involved building massive substructures which effectively reversed the direction of the hill slope in order to achieve the correct orientation for the church.12 The Church of the Lateran appears to have been the seat of the bishop of Rome, but it was the tomb and basilica of St Peter, combined with its location in the greatest city of the Mediterranean, that conveyed special authority on the leaders of the Roman Church. The bishop of Rome had no lasting rivals in the western empire, and was recognized as the senior patriarch by the Council of Constantinople in 381. After the fall of the last western emperor in 476 the Pope also became effectively the senior secular authority in the western Roman Empire.

Constantius II paid a famous visit in 357, which has been immortalized in some of the best known paragraphs of Ammianus’ history, written in Rome in the 390s.

"When he came to the Forum of Trajan, a creation which in my view has no like under the cope of heaven and which even the gods themselves must agree to admire, Constantius stood transfixed with astonishment, surveying the gigantic fabric around him; its grandeur defies description and can never again be approached by mortal men. So he abandoned all hope of attempting anything like it, and declared that he would and could imitate simply Trajan’s horse, which stands in the middle of the court with the emperor on its back. Prince Hormisdas ... remarked with oriental subtlety: “First, majesty, you must have a similar stable built, if you can. The horse you propose to fashion should have as much space to range in as this one which we can see.” (Ammianus 16.10, trans.Hamilton)."

In the event Constantius marked his visit by bringing to Rome an obelisk, which had been intended for the city by his father Constantine. This was one of several that the city acquired during late antiquity (Ammianus 17.4; ILS 736).13

The city, and especially the forum, continued to be a focus for the public commemoration of emperors and senators. Senatorial wealth was used to fund public entertainments in the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, which was restored by Theodosius I. However, secular public building on a grand scale virtually ceased after the fourth century. The material damage inflicted by Alaric’s Goths in 410 was repaired, but the psychological blow had a lasting effect. We should not, however, underestimate the amount of building that must have continued in the fifth-century city. The Notitia Urbis catalogues 462 living quarters, 46,602 apartment buildings, 254 bakeries, 19 aqueducts, 11 major thermae, and 856 small bath houses. The effort required to service Rome’s enormous population still dwarfed that of any other city of the empire. Looking back in the 530s, Cassiodorus reflected precisely on these conditions, which had changed by his own day:

"It is evident how great was the population of the city of Rome, seeing that it was fed with supplies furnished even by far off regions, and that this imported abundance was reserved for it, while the surrounding provinces sufficed to feed only the resident strangers. For how could a people that ruled the world be small in number? For the great extent of the walls bears witness to the throngs of citizens, as do the swollen capacity of the places of entertainment, the wonderful size of the baths, and that great number of water mills which was clearly provided especially for the food supply. (Cassiodorus, Var. 11.39, trans. Barnish)."

The pattern of public construction changed drastically in the fifth and sixth centuries. Virtually all new buildings were now churches, oratories, and, especially in the sixth century, monastic foundations. Fourth-century Rome contained relatively few Christian foundations. Apart from the Constantinian basilicas and the huge extra-mural church of Saint Paul on the road to Ostia, the churches were inconspicuous and made no attempt to rival pagan religious architecture. The pattern then changed. Only two major basilicas, including the present church of S. Maria Maggiore, were built in the fifth, and only one, the Church of the Holy Apostles, in the mid-sixth century, probably dedicated by Justinian’s general Narses after the final defeat of the Ostrogoths in the 550s. On the other hand, parish churches during this period spread to all parts of the city and were clearly marked by external porticos and courtyards. They thus acquired the characteristic appearance of public buildings, but their distribution through the wards of the city represents a change in their social function. They served Rome’s neighborhoods, as the magnetic power of the civic center began to fade.

Rome suffered another critical blow when it was attacked and plundered by the Vandals under Gaiseric in 455. The city enjoyed a revival in political terms during the third quarter of the fifth century, as it usurped the place of Ravenna as the main imperial residence in the West and became the focus of Ricimer’s attempts to restore a stable western empire,14 and it benefited notably from the stability created by the Ostrogoth Theoderic’s long reign from 483 to 526. Famously he visited the city in person in 500 in a manner appropriate to an emperor:

"In celebration of his tricennalia he entered the palace in a triumphal procession among the people, staging circus games for the Romans. He made an annual grant to the Roman people and the poor of 120,000 modii of grain, and gave orders that each year two hundred pounds of gold should be taken from the wine tax and spent on restoring the palace or reconstructing the city walls. (Anon. Val.2, 67)"

The situation faced by Theoderic also illustrates the transformation that had overtaken the city. Much of the interior of the city was no longer inhabited, as Rome’s population began to decrease. A conservative estimate puts the number of inhabitants in the fourth century at over 500,000. By the mid-sixth century the figure was not more than a tenth of this. Procopius indicates that the inhabitants and defenders were unable to man the nineteen-kilometer wall circuit during the long sieges of Rome in 537–8 and 546. Warfare and above all the plague must have hit the city hard in the 530s and 540s, but the root of Rome’s decline lay in the acute diminution of its food supply, the life support system on which it had depended for over five hundred years. The city had always been supplied by a diversity of sources in Italy and overseas. Some of this was distributed without charge to free urban householders, but most was put on the market for sale at controlled prices. As in all ancient cities there was immense distress if the grain supply was interrupted, and shortages were greeted by violent rioting. The main staple, grain, was imported from Egypt, Africa, and Sicily. After the foundation of Constantinople Egyptian grain was diverted to the eastern capital, leaving Rome dependent on western sources. A critical moment came in 439 when the Vandals seized Carthage, the point of export for most of the African grain, and used their sea power to menace shipping out of Sicily. The vital change was not a direct embargo on exports from Carthage. There is no evidence that the Vandals, who set up a highly effective state in their new African environment, wished to curtail normal economic activity, but they were able to use their control of Carthage and their maritime strength as powerful bargaining weapons in dealing with the western empire. Moreover they cut off the African tax revenues, in kind as well as cash, to Rome. The loss of the African annona, combined with growing insecurity in the Mediterranean, will have driven up prices as it reduced Rome’s supply. The situation was naturally compounded with the final fall of the western empire in 476. The ability of the city of Rome to feed its enormous population in earlier centuries had depended directly on its role as an imperial city which could impose tax demands on its subjects. Now it had to pay for what it consumed. The population accordingly shrunk to a level much closer to that of other larger cities of the later empire.15

Constantinople

Constantinople possessed the most extraordinary natural advantages of any city in the ancient world. It was founded on a peninsula at the entrance to the Bosporus, which linked the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea, and was protected on two sides by water and on the third by a narrow isthmus, which could easily be fortified. The sheltered inlet of the Golden Horn was a huge, and defensible, natural harbor. This was the point where all the land routes from Europe and Asia converged, uniting the eastern and western parts of the empire.

The strategic importance of the site was revealed by the events of the civil war between Constantine and Licinius, when the latter’s fleet was defeated at the battle of Chrysopolis (Scutari). The victor chose to re-found the previously modest Roman city of Byzantium. Building began at the end of 324 and the foundation dedication was celebrated in the emperor’s presence on May 11, 330. It is not clear what role Constantine intended for his new city. Having now achieved his aspiration to be sole ruler of the empire he could hardly envisage replacing Rome as its capital, and he had made a point of returning there to celebrate his own vicennalia in 326. Constantinople, rather, was modeled on the other imperial cities that had emerged during the tetrarchic period, comparable to but outshining Trier, Antioch, and nearby Nicomedia.16

Constantine left intact the old acropolis of Byzantium, containing the main pagan temples, although both Eusebius and the epigrammatist Palladas indicate that it was Constantine’s intention to desacralize the city’s old pagan monuments and buildings.17 The imperial palace, where the ruler would conduct business in seclusion, and the hippodrome, where his people could gather for racing and other spectacles, and to acclaim the emperor on his public appearances, also both lay within the earlier city limits. The imperial household moved into its new quarters and the future emperor Julian was born in the palace two years after Constantinople had been founded. The imperial residence probably originally took a form similar to Diocletian’s palace at Split, or the imperial complex built by Galerius at Gamzigrad, Felix Romuliana, in modern Serbia, but the building was enlarged by his successors until it extended south to the sea walls facing the Propontis. The hippodrome, with seating for 80,000 spectators, was an enlargement of a pre-existing stadium. The loggia for the imperial family and high officials was directly accessible from the palace and looked across the race track to the seating occupied by the circus partisans. 18 Adjoining the hippodrome on the north were two public buildings also incorporated from the former Roman city, the Baths of Zeuxippos, and a square with colonnades on four sides leading to a meeting hall for the city’s Senate (later to be known as the Augustaeum).

Constantine now extended the city westwards. The Mesê, a broad colonnaded street, ran up the middle of the peninsula. Along this was placed the omphalos, an oval piazza, and at its center a porphyry column which carried a statue of the emperor. It is important to recognize that Constantine did not overwhelm his city with ecclesiastical foundations. The church historians say that he built a church for St Eirene (Socrates, HE 1.16), an extra-mural basilica for the local martyr St Mocius (Sozomen 8.17.5), and a church for St Acacius (Socrates, HE 6.23). The first church of St Sophia was completed by Constantius II. Eusebius naturally asserted that he created a city that was purged of pagan idol worship (VC 3.47), but Zosimus emphasized that he preserved a temple of the Dioscuri by the hippodrome and created sanctuaries for Rhea and for the Tyche of the Romans (Zosimus 2.30–31). Much the most important of Constantine’s religious foundations was the shrine of the Holy Apostles (located on the site of the Ottoman Fatih mosque), which was designed and built towards the end of his life as his mausoleum. Here he was entombed at the center of a circular or cruciform building, elaborately decorated with golden ceiling coffers, in the midst of twelve cenotaphs, which symbolized the tombs of the apostles themselves (Eusebius, VC 4.58–60).

Constantine constructed new fortifications enclosing the peninsula about three kilometers west of the old walls of Byzantium and enlarged the area for building by extending the land mass into the sea both on the side of the Golden Horn and on the Sea of Marmara. A street grid was established to accommodate new settlers, and senators who had supported the emperor began to construct their own houses. Main streets ran north to docks on the Golden Horn and south to the Propontic shore. Two large harbors were built here, the first by Julian, the second by Theodosius. The Mesê continued to another intersection marked by a monument popularly known as the Philadelphion, a statue group which was supposed to depict the sons of Constantine embracing one another. The statue in question appears to be none other than the famous porphyry group depicting the four tetrarchs, probably originally from Nicomedia, which was taken to Venice by the crusaders after the sack of Constantinople in 1204.19 The public places of the city were adorned with statues and other monuments collected from cities in the eastern empire.

This was the template for the development of the New Rome. Provisions were made immediately to supply the city with tax grain from Egypt. According to the Notitia of about 425, the city had four large warehouses for storing provisions close to the Prosphorion harbor at Sirkeci on the Golden Horn, and two others close to the harbors on the Propontic side (Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae; Zosimus 3.11). In all the sources attest as many as twenty-one public granaries in the city. It has been estimated that four kilometers of quayside would have been needed to provide docking for the grain ships during the sailing season.20

Securing the city’s water supply was a major issue. Themistius, in a panegyric for Valens written in 376, evokes the image of a city dying of thirst before the emperor constructed an aqueduct over 1,000 stades (over 180 kilometers) in length, bringing the water to the city from the nymphs of Thrace (Or. 13, 167d). This enormous project multiplied by a factor of ten the amount of water available from springs close to the city. The water was stored in huge rectangular cisterns built on the hills, from which it could be distributed as required to the rest of the city. Large new cisterns were built in 421, in 459, during the reign of Anastasius, under Justinian in the 530s, and under Phocas in 609, attesting the increase in the city’s population and the growth of its needs. Smaller underground cisterns were built for private houses.21 The famous arches attributed to Valens, which are a conspicuous feature of Istanbul today, may however be part of the earlier Hadrianic system built for Byzantium. Constantius had begun to construct imperial baths, the Thermae Constantianae, in 345, but these were not finished until 427, and evidently lacked a water supply at least until Valens’ day.

The public areas of the city were greatly expanded in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Theodosius began work in 393 on a new civic center, the Forum Tauri, at Beyazit, where he erected a column which was a faithful copy of the Roman column of Trajan, Theodosius’s great Spanish predecessor. A mounted statue of Theodosius set up in the same square deliberately evoked comparison with the bronze equestrian figure of Trajan at Rome. Theodosius thus realized in Constantinople the ambition that Constantius had conceived in 357 on his visit to Rome. In contrast to Rome, marble was readily available at Constantinople, brought from the quarries of Proconnesus in the Propontis, where architectural elements (column shafts, capitals, and gable pieces in particular) were prefabricated before being shipped to the building sites of the capital. The most imposing pieces to be identified are gigantic column drums intended for the Forum Tauri.22

The most representative monument of Theodosian Constantinople was the obelisk and its sculpted and inscribed base, probably set up in 391/2, which still stands in the spina of the hippodrome. The inscriptions displayed Greek and Latin verses which celebrated both the achievement of raising the obelisk to its new position (the task had been supervised by the prefect of the city Proclus) and Theodosius’ defeat of the usurper Magnus Maximus (ILS 821). The reliefs are a visual realization of the power structure of the late Roman state and are a key to understanding the political relationship between the emperor and his subjects.

The most important development of the early fifth century was the completion of new fortifications in 413, the walls built by Theodosius II’s praetorian prefect Anthemius and rebuilt after an earthquake in 447.23 Attackers were confronted by a twenty-meter-wide moat, an outer wall five meters high, reinforced with circular and square towers, and behind them the main rampart, twelve meters high, also reinforced by massive towers. The towers served as barracks for the standing army in the city (CTh. 7.8.13). Constantius had started to build the sea walls, but these were reinforced and completed in the 440s, to meet the naval threat of the Vandals. The fortifications of Constantinople were not breached until the city fell to the crusaders in 1204.24 The Theodosian walls increased the fortified area of the city by about 40 percent. It appears that this area was not largely devoted to new housing, but contained large villas, monasteries, churches, and several large cisterns. The wall of Constantine remained intact, dividing the city into an urban and a suburban region, both secured from attack. Further important protection was provided by the fifty-kilometer-long ditch and land wall which was built across the Thracian peninsula from the south coast east of Selymbria (Silvri) to the Black Sea, and reinforced by a series of small garrison forts.

As at Rome, the sharp growth in the number of churches in the city occurred not in the fourth but in the fifth and sixth centuries. During the ostentatiously pious regime of Theodosius II and Pulcheria, the Notitia Urbis lists fourteen churches, including the two earliest that survive today, the Church of the Theotokos at Chalkoprateia, the copper market west of St Sophia, built by Pulcheria, and the Church of St John Studios, near the new Theodosian walls. The biggest increase occurred in the time of Justinian. Procopius’ Buildings describes thirty-four new foundations by the emperor himself, a list headed by the great surviving structures of St Eirene and St Sophia. The rapid expansion of church building is not only to be explained by the liturgical needs of the growing population, but by the ambitions of wealthy families, including the emperor’s, to display their power by ostentatious ecclesiastical foundations. The clearest example of this rivalry is provided by the Church of St Polyeuctus, built between the second and third hills of the city by Anicia Juliana, the matriarch of one of the wealthiest senatorial clans of Constantinople. The dimensions and design of her church deliberately matched the Old Testament blueprint for the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem and the surviving dedicatory poem for the building asserted her claim to be matched as a builder with the emperors Constantine and Theodosius (Anth. Pal. 1.10).25 Justinian rose precisely to this challenge in building his own greatest church, St Sophia, above the ruins that had been burnt to the ground in the Nika riot of 532. St Sophia, completed between 532 and 537, was the greatest building of the Justinianic period, the realization in stone and mortar of the emperor’s personal sense of religious destiny. The achievement of Justinian and his architects is measured in Procopius’ description of the building’s spiritual impact:

"Whenever anyone enters this church to pray, he understands at once that it is not by any human power or skill, but by the influence of God, that this work has been so finely turned. And so his mind is lifted up toward God and exalted, feeling that He cannot be far away, but must especially love to dwell in this place which He has chosen. (Procopius, Buildings I, 1.61)"

The initial design for the huge dome was too precarious, and the structure collapsed in an earthquake of 557 (Agathias V, 3–9), but the will to complete the project remained indomitable, even after the death of its two architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. Reconstruction was completed in 562. Two contemporary accounts of the building survive, a lengthy description in Procopius’ buildings (Procopius, Buildings I, 67–78), and a poem by Paul Silentiarius, written after the re-dedication of the great church in 562.26

Constantinople, like Rome, had an impact on the empire that extended far beyond its walls. It acted as a powerful magnet to settlers. Rich senators accompanied Constantine at the foundation, and there was continuous immigration by members of the ruling class, notably the Spanish clique that arrived in the wake of Theodosius I.27 The poor inhabitants came in vast numbers for different reasons, attracted by the prospects of employment and a guaranteed food supply. Constantine made initial provision for the state annona to feed 80,000 inhabitants with grain brought from Alexandria. By the time of Justinian, the number of recipients may have reached 600,000.28 As at Rome, the ultimate responsibility for distributing provisions lay with the city prefect. Although the practice had its origins in the distribution of free grain to citizens at Rome in the late republic, the creation of universal Roman citizenship had transformed the legal basis for the organization, and the state annona of the late empire was transformed into a service designed to support the proletariat of large cities. Annona systems existed not only at Rome and Constantinople, but also at Alexandria, Antioch, and even in the provincial Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus. 29 The tentacles of the supply chain to Constantinople stretched into the Black Sea, to Egypt, the main source of grain, and to southern Asia Minor, which was one of the chief sources of olive oil. Procopius (Buildings 5.1.7–16) tells us that the island of Tenedos, at the entrance to the Dardanelles, became a major entrepôt, where large ships discharged their cargoes into smaller ones which could make their way more easily through the straits and into the Sea of Marmara. The time saved enabled them to make two or even three trips from Alexandria in a single season. The demands of the capital had a transforming effect on the economic structures of the regions that supplied the annona. Production concentrated in the hands of large-scale, well-organized producers. The primary trade in foodstuffs generated essential secondary industries, in particular the production of amphoras and shipbuilding. Merchant shipping was one of the major industries of the east Mediterranean. The continuing prosperity of Egypt in late antiquity and the growth of large estates there were due to the fact that the harvests of the Nile Valley found a permanent market outlet in Constantinople.30

Alexandria

After Rome and Constantinople it is logical to look at Alexandria, Antioch, and Carthage. These were the next largest cities in the Mediterranean basin in antiquity. It is notoriously difficult to work out population figures for ancient cities, and there are wide margins for error. A cautious discussion suggests that Alexandria may have had a population between 200,000 and 400,000, and Antioch between 150,000 and 300,000.31 In terms of size, Carthage was probably closer to Antioch than to Alexandria. It is no coincidence that Alexandria and Carthage were the ports through which grain was channeled to the  capitals. This guaranteed employment for countless shippers, dealers, porters, transport managers, ship-owners, bureaucrats, and businessmen. Both cities therefore were huge trading and service centers. Further, the fact that grain, in bulk, passed through these cities every year, meant that neither was likely to suffer acute shortages, and they could support urban populations that were much larger even than other port cities. Ammianus provides an example in the case of the governor of Africa in 370, Hymetius, who, at a time of famine, sold grain to the people of Carthage from the supplies due to be sent to Rome (Ammianus 28.1).

Our knowledge of late Roman Alexandria is extraordinarily uneven. Although we are well informed about ecclesiastical politics by the rich patristic sources and about administrative practices by the papyri, almost nothing remains at Alexandria of the city’s early churches; and no papyrus documents and very few public inscriptions have been recovered from Alexandria itself.32 Before the seventh century, the city was never in a war zone, subjected to a major siege, or at the center of military activity. It therefore appears only intermittently in the secular historians. Much of Alexandria’s social and economic history has disappeared into a black hole.

The site at the western edge of the Nile Delta was chosen because its two harbors, protected by the offshore island of Pharos, made it the natural point of exchange between the Nile Valley, the most fertile and productive agricultural region of the Graeco-Roman world, and the Mediterranean waterway. A major canal linked Alexandria and its harbor with the western branch of the Nile, and it was cut off from the desert to the south by the shallow waters of Lake Mareotis. The city’s hippodrome, half a kilometer long, which adjoined the great temple of Sarapis, was enclosed by the bend of the Nile canal.

The city was about five kilometers in length from east to west and up to two kilometers wide, surrounded by a fifteen-kilometer defensive wall.33 Excavations along the main east–west street have identified one of the central insulae of the city plan. Large houses of the first and second century ad were extensively damaged in the third, abandoned in the early fourth, and replaced by public buildings in the mid-fourth century. These included a small theater, two suites of auditoria which have been identified as lecture rooms, and a public bath house. These structures, which were maintained until the seventh century, must have been the setting for some of the cultural and educational activity for which Alexandria was famous.34 Throughout antiquity Alexandria’s schools and the famous library, whose site has never been identified, were a magnet to trainee philosophers, public speakers, theologians, and doctors. It was a cultural powerhouse both in the pagan and the Christian tradition.

Alexandria was the residence of the prefect of Egypt until the office was replaced under Theodosius I by the Praefectus Augustalis. As far as we know the only emperor of late antiquity to visit the city was Diocletian himself, who campaigned in Egypt to reassert Roman control in Upper Egypt and Ethiopia and to suppress the internal rebellion of Domitius Domitianus.35 In comparison to what is known from the other great population centers of the ancient world, this amounted to a power vacuum. Urban unrest, rioting, and major disturbances, which had to be suppressed by military intervention from the Roman garrisons of Lower Egypt, were a recurring feature of Alexandrian history. Church leaders were able to mobilize social networks in support of theological or other causes, and there were major religious confrontations in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The vast sanctuary of the Graeco-Egyptian god Sarapis, built by the Ptolemies and enlarged by the Romans in the Severan period, occupied one of the low hills on which the city was built, at the southwest corner, along the line of a road which led northwards to the so-called heptastadion, the kilometer long causeway that divided the western from the eastern harbor. A statue of Diocletian was erected on a single tall column in the sanctuary area and marked it out as a focal point of Roman power. “Its splendour,” said Ammianus, “is such that mere words can only do it an injustice, but its great halls of columns and its wealth of life-like statues and other works of art make it, next to the Capitol, which is the symbol of the eternity of immemorial Rome, the most magnificent building in the whole world” (Ammianus 22.16, trans. Hamilton).36

The destruction of the Sarapeum is one of the iconic moments in the Christian narrative of the overthrow of ancient paganism. In 391–2 the bishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, successfully petitioned Theodosius for permission to transform a temple of Dionysus into a church. A Christian mob broke into the holy of holies and mocked the phalluses and other pagan symbols they found there. The pagans reacted violently by killing some Christians and taking others who had been wounded into the walled enclosure of the Serapeum. A siege followed. The Christians outside received support from the Dux Aegypti in command of Roman troops, and from the prefect Euagrius; the besieged  were spurred on by a philosopher Olympius, who told his followers that the destruction of pagan images did not impair the power of the ancient gods, which resided in heaven. Reports of Christian casualties were brought to the emperor Theodosius, who declared them to be martyrs, and the opening words of his edict, which denounced the pagans as guilty, were hailed with acclamation by the Christian mob, which proceeded to fall on the guards at the gate and stormed the sanctuary.37 The destruction of the Serapeum, which represented a climax to the religious intolerance of the last years of Theodosius I, forced many pagan intellectuals to flee Alexandria.

The violent scenes were echoed a generation later, instigated by Theophilus’ successor in the See of Alexandria, his nephew Cyril. He mobilized his followers first in 414 against the Jews, and then against pagan intellectuals in the city. The Jews had provoked hostility by attending theater performances on the Sabbath. They were goaded into violence by a rabble-rousing supporter of Cyril, who was arrested by the Roman prefect Orestes. In the course of events the Jews supposedly plotted to burn down a church, and Cyril used the opportunity to attack and brow-beat Orestes, and to organize Christian attacks on Jewish synagogues. Many Jews were killed (Socrates, HE 7.14–15). It emerges that they were in part at least the unwitting victims of a power struggle between Cyril and Orestes. In the following year a group of 500 monks waylaid the prefect in his carriage and stoned him. Other Alexandrians came to the prefect’s rescue and arrested one of the perpetrators, who was tortured to death during his interrogation. The next year Christian violence claimed its most famous victim, the philosopher Hypatia, daughter of the Platonist Theon, who had left Alexandria when the Serapeum was destroyed. Hypatia had become a confidante of Orestes, who accordingly was himself accused of being a pagan. A Christian gang, led by a church reader called Peter, dragged Hypatia from her carriage to the city’s main church, which had been constructed on the site of the former imperial temple, and murdered her in a hail of broken roof tiles. Her body was dismembered and incinerated. The church historian Socrates protested at these outrages, but Cyril escaped largely uncensored.38

The historical accounts of these episodes in Alexandria leave open many questions about their causes, but they provide a clear sense of their social context and illustrate the brutalization of local politics.39 The bishops of the city could call on ill-educated supporters from the proletariat, who did not hesitate to employ extreme violence in a fanatical cause. It is revealing that the city councilors of Alexandria, an educated minority, petitioned the emperor in 416 in protest against the violence of the gangs of the bishop’s supporters, the parabalani. Theodosius II responded only as far as ordering that their numbers should be limited in future to five or six hundred persons.40

Carthage

The picture of late Roman Carthage is also unbalanced by the preponderance of Christian source material. This includes the dossier of information relating to the conflict between African Christianity and imperial Catholicism, culminating in the verbatim records of the Council of Carthage in ad 411, and the Confessions of Augustine, the most prolific and important figure in the development of the western church. However, the city of Carthage itself, which lies under the sprawling suburbs of the modern city of Tunis, has remained largely unknown, at least until recent excavations carried out by international teams under the patronage of UNESCO.

Carthage possessed the largest sheltered harbor on the North African coast and occupied a crucial position in the layout of the western Mediterranean. The coastline westwards towards the Atlantic is a barricade of cliffs and mountains, exposed to northerly winds. Procopius observed that there were no harbors at all here (Bell. Vand. 3.15). Carthage itself, however, not only provided an anchorage, but was at the southern end of the shortest traverse to Europe, opposite Sicily, which was closer to Carthage than to Rome.41 The city was linked by land routes to the hinterland of Numidia, one of which led up the valley of the Bagradas river. It drew most of its wealth in the form of agricultural produce, particularly grain and olives from the plains and hill slopes of Africa Proconsularis and Byzacena. The region was a network of small and medium-sized cities, interspersed with large rural estates, that had developed a civic culture which flourished into the fifth century. Like Alexandria, Carthage and its hinterland enjoyed a remarkable level of security from external threats. Few of the cities of Numidia and Africa Proconsularis possessed walls in the third and fourth centuries, and Carthage’s own defenses were only built in 425, ironically just fourteen years before the city fell to the Vandals.42

The city was dominated by an acropolis, the Byrsa, and had a grid of planned streets, elaborate urban villas with mosaics, and the full repertoire of buildings for public entertainment – hippodrome, amphitheater, theaters and odeia, basilica churches, and bath houses, including the enormous Thermae of Antoninus.43 Life in late-fourth-century Carthage is known to us, primarily and unforgettably, through the distorting lens of Augustine’s Confessions. The Confessions focus on two aspects: the rowdy and bohemian lives of students, and the compulsive excitements of the public entertainment on offer in the arenas and the theaters, where the lewdness and the bloodletting posed moral challenges which were a source of obsession and repulsion to Augustine and his friends. The young man’s confessions do not present a wider picture of the social and economic life of the city that might have emerged from Augustine’s writings had he ever become its bishop.

Carthage fell to the Vandals in 439, and their kings occupied the former proconsular seat of government on the Byrsa. Gaiseric took control of the best land in Africa Proconsularis, Carthage’s hinterland, and distributed it by lot to his warriors, who were to form a new hereditary landowning class.44 The chief victims were the Catholic Church, which suffered confiscation and organized persecution at the hands of the Arian Vandals, and Carthage’s senators, including members of the local city council and Roman senators with African properties. Some of these fled to Syria, others to Italy.45 Those who remained are described as being enslaved to the barbarians. The Vandal presence, which was almost exclusively confined to the province of Proconsularis, is confirmed by the distribution of inscriptions and archaeological finds.46 After the reconquest of Africa in 533, Justinian undertook measures to restore territory respectively to private landowners, to the state, and to the church. Procopius praises him for rebuilding the Theodosian defenses of Carthage and refurbishing the harbor front with new stoas and a public bath named the Theodoriane, after his wife. He built a monastery inside the sea wall, and churches of the Theotokos and of the local St Prima. Archaeological work in the city has located four substantial churches built at this period, confirming that the reconstruction of Carthage after the Vandals was mainly through religious foundations. It appears that the church buildings were maintained through the seventh century but like the rest of the city fell into decline, and the occupied area had shrunk significantly before it fell to the Arabs in 698.47

Antioch

The local history of Syrian Antioch in late antiquity is better documented than that of any other city in the ancient world apart from the two capitals. As it was the main headquarters and springboard for campaigns against the Sassanians, it became a military center and served as a long-term residence for campaigning emperors, such as Constantius and Julian. It features prominently in secular histories, especially Ammianus, and in much of the literature associated with Julian. It is the only provincial city of the eastern empire from which a local chronicle, the work of John Malalas, has survived, and it is the focus of the ecclesiastical history of Evagrius, which is concerned with secular as well as church affairs, especially in the fifth and early sixth centuries. Added to this is the rich texture of local information relating to the later fourth century to be found in the speeches and letters of the pagan Libanius, and in the writings of his near contemporary, the Christian priest John Chrysostom, and to the fifth century in the letters and other writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus. It is hardly surprising that the quantity of modern work on Antioch is far greater than that on the other major centers of late antiquity.

Antioch extended along the east bank of the river Orontes at the foot of Mount Silpius. City walls, originally built by its Hellenistic founder Seleucus I, ran along the river frontage and then eastward up the mountain slope. They were repeatedly restored and rebuilt in late antiquity, notably under Theodosius I and Justinian. The city itself had a central colonnaded street, two miles long, famous for public street lighting. There is abundant evidence from all periods of major public building. A large octagonal church was under construction at the end of Constantine’s life and was dedicated at the Council of Antioch in 341.

Antioch was not as large a city as Alexandria. After the fourth century, it ceased to serve as an imperial residence and declined in importance. It was not itself a sea port, but imports and exports were transported by a canal system that was designed to make the last section of the river Orontes navigable down to the port of Seleucia Pieria.48 Both Diocletian and Constantius are known to have restored the harbor facilities, as it was critical for their major Persian campaigns, and it certainly was a conduit for military supplies up to the expedition of Julian in 363.49 There was an outer and an inner harbor, the latter secured by a chain. A fifth-century inscription contains a tariff of inspection fees on imports via the port, which were payable to the curiosi, the imperial agents responsible for the state transport annona and requisitions systems. These were set at a lower level for short-haul trade from Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Cilicia than from Palestine and Egypt. Annona contributions certainly reached Antioch by sea. The emperors Anastasius and Justinian set up inscriptions at Antioch which published the levels of these fees as a measure to prevent extortion by officials (Malalas 470–1).50

We have good information about the city’s food supply in the late fourth century. The best documented shortage occurred in 362–3, as the emperor Julian prepared to invade Persia. The build-up of troops and the presence of the large imperial entourage aggravated the situation, and the emperor attempted to relieve the crisis by making available grain from imperial estates to the civic markets, but much of this was bought up by profiteers. Julian himself was blamed and hunger added a menacing edge to the tense relations between the emperor and the city population before he left on campaign.51 It may have been in consequence that the emperor Valens, who spent much of the 370s in residence at Antioch, instituted an imperial corn distribution system for the city, and this continued in existence until the time of Justinian.52 The periodic famines and grain supply crises, which are a leitmotif of Antioch’s history in the late empire, suggest that local requirements could not be matched by maritime imports, and when the city was threatened by and fell to Persian attacks in 529 and 540, the imperial reaction in Constantinople was sluggish and half-hearted. The security of Antioch was not vital to the capital’s own survival.

The transfer of at least some of the responsibility for the city’s food supply to imperial officials is symptomatic of a major political change which is better documented at Antioch than anywhere else in the empire; the gradual decline in the economic independence and authority of the members of the city council, the local land-owning class, who here, as in almost every other city of the eastern Roman Empire, had hitherto been the mainstay of social order. The letters and speeches of Libanius imply that the number of active councilors had fallen sharply by the late fourth century. Their place was taken increasingly by a smaller number of imperial officials, often themselves local men who had made good. Salaried imperial officials and soldiers took over many of the political and economic functions of local landowners in a process which can also be observed in late Roman Egypt.53 Thus during the late fourth and fifth centuries a middle tier of local government was squeezed out of existence. This widened the gap between the newly enriched landowners, who derived their income from state service, and the urban poor and the peasant population.

One consequence of this was the growing importance of patronage wielded by individuals who had access to the governor. In his speech Against Mixidemus Libanius illustrates how the target of his criticism had replaced a group of officiales as the patron of a group of villages, from whom he exacted produce and services, in return for the protection he offered. As country people became indebted to him, he was able to buy property, gradually building up large estates (Libanius, Or. 52). In his speech On Patronage Libanius depicts how villagers, by making payments of produce or gold, obtained the patronage of the commanding officers of the garrisons stationed among them, and then exploited this military protection to attack and plunder neighboring villages. They also relied on military protection when they refused to pay contributions to the tax levies which were being conducted by local councilors. It is clear that the web of patronage was not limited to locally stationed soldiers, but stretched back to senior military officers, who prevented the provincial authorities from intervening on behalf of the councilors (Libanius, Or. 47).54

There were many consequences of this shift in the balance of local power. The constitutional basis of civic government was rapidly undermined. City councils began to be replaced by coteries of powerful notables who operated primarily in their own private interests, not in those of the city. Already by 370 the emperors had created a new office of defensor civitatis, defender of the city, ostensibly to prevent corrupt practice in the courts at the expense of the rural poor (CTh. 1.29.5). Small-scale landholding began to be replaced by large estates, and the new landowners were often powerful enough to be a law unto themselves, in a position to negotiate with or even defy the demands of the imperial government. Violence and dispossession in the countryside will have led many peasants to move to the city, and the population of Antioch certainly expanded in the fifth century, when its walls were extended to cover a larger area (Evagrius I.20). Meanwhile its richer citizens became wealthier than before. This is illustrated by the luxurious villas, decorated with some of the finest figurative mosaics of the late Roman period, which were excavated by the Princeton expedition to Antioch in the 1930s.55 In material terms the city reached an apogee in the fifth century.

Despite the evidence for corruption and low-level rural violence, which is presented in Libanius’ account of patronage, and the city’s reputation for unruly popular behavior, which is conveyed by the accounts of Julian’s stay in the city in 362–3, urban disturbances seem to have occurred rarely.56 There was a reasonable level of religious harmony. Pagans and Christians appear generally to have avoided conflict, at least until the notorious campaign of Cynegius Maternus, Theodosius’ praetorian prefect of the East, who directed a vigorous campaign to close down and restrict the activities of the pagan temples in the 380s. Relations between Christians and Jews were too harmonious for the comfort of John Chrysostom, who resorted to a major series of sermons designed to dissuade Christians from attending Jewish places of worship.57 The episode that broke the calm in a serious way was the Riot of the
Statues in 387. It is probably not a coincidence that this came at the end of the period when religious tension had been raised by the campaign of Cynegius Maternus. An imperial edict was read out to the city council announcing a steep rise in taxation. As the councilors mounted a petition to the governor of Syria to protest, and tried to enlist the help of Flavianus, the city bishop, rumors of what was happening reached the people, and a mob, led by a claque leader of one of the theater factions, stormed the palace of the provincial governor, and then vented its anger on the imperial images, first destroying wooden panels which carried Theodosius’ portrait, and then overthrowing the bronze statues of the emperor, his wife Eudoxia, and son Arcadius in the forum. They attempted to burn down the house of a councilor who had spoken in favor of the tax rise, but were prevented by the appearance of mounted archers and a body of troops under the Comes Orientis, who arrested the ring leaders. While these were swiftly tried and punished, the city awaited its own punishment with growing anxiety that there would be wholesale retribution. The emperor dealt with the mutiny in two stages. His initial reaction was to strip Antioch of many privileges, including its title to be metropolis of the province, to cut off the annona, and to shut down the hippodrome, theaters, and bath houses. A commission of enquiry then sat to establish who was to blame, and ordered the imprisonment of several councilors. Our sources portray these events from two viewpoints, the pagan represented by Libanius, and the Christian by John Chrysostom. Theodosius chose to pay heed to Christian pleas for clemency. It was the embassy to Constantinople headed by the bishop that secured freedom for the prisoners and the restoration of the city’s privileges. John Chrysostom was able to hail the news that the city would be spared further punishment in time for the Easter festival. The dénouement of these events implied a shift in the balance of local power, from the secular council to the Christian authorities.58

The sparse trickle of information for the fifth century includes Evagrius’ detailed account of an earthquake which particularly affected the palace quarter of Antioch, the so-called New City (Evagrius 2.12). Recovery, with assistance from the emperor Leo, was evidently rapid, but Antioch was much more seriously affected in 525, firstly by a fire which destroyed the cathedral of St Stephen, and then by the largest earthquake in the city’s history since 115, which allegedly claimed 250,000 lives including that of the bishop Euphrasios. A further shock in November 528 killed an additional 5,000 people. Imperial help was promised, but priorities in Syria switched from peace to war as the Persians renewed hostilities. The so-called eternal peace of 532 promised more than it delivered, and war broke out again in 539. In the following year the Persians descended on Antioch and took the city despite vigorous local resistance, which was led by the circus factions. Khusro I, the Persian king, reputedly took away 30,000 Antiochenes to found and populate a new city in Persia (Procopius, Bell. Pers. 2.14.6). Syria had effectively been left to its own devices by the emperor, since imperial forces were tied down in the increasingly bitter struggle to regain control of Italy. Procopius credits Justinian with an ambitious restoration program after the Persians had withdrawn, but his description implies that parts of the city had to be given up and the fortifications contracted. Streets and public buildings were rebuilt and a new church dedicated to the Theotokos (Procopius, Buildings 2.10.2–25).59 Two years after it fell to the Persians the city was exposed to a more devastating menace; the plague. The earthquakes of the 520s had already dealt heavy blows to the growth in Antioch’s population and general prosperity; warfare and repeated recurrence of the plague made the decline irreversible.

NOTES

1 R. MacMullen, Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire (New Haven, 1964).
2 See D. H. French, “The Roman road-system of Asia Minor,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.7.2 (1981), 698–729, especially diagram 7 showing huge peaks for milestones set up under Septimius Severus, the tetrarchs and Constantine.
3 Anne Kolb, Transport und Nachrichtentransfer im römischen Reich (Berlin, 2000); S. Mitchell, “Horse-Breeding for the Cursus Publicus in the later Roman Empire,” in A. Kolb (ed.), Infrastructure as a means of government? Interaction between state and municipality (Berlin, 2014), 246–60.
4 See the Portus archaeological project, directed by Simon Keay, www.portusproject.org (accessed March 3, 2014).
5 A. Wilson, “Machines, power and the ancient economy,” JRS 92 (2002), 1–32.
6 J. Edmundson, “Mining in the later Roman Empire: Continuity or disruption?” JRS 79 (1989), 84–102.
7 J. Howard-Johnston, “The education and expertise of Procopius,” Ant. Tard. 8 (2000), 19–30.
8 A. H. M. Jones, “Taxation in antiquity,” in A. H. M. Jones (ed. P. A. Brunt), The Roman Economy (Oxford, 1974), 151–86. Peter Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2006), is indispensable for the sixth century.
9 G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth. Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993), 45–50.
10 H. Brandt, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit von Diokletian bis zum Ende der konstantinischen Dynastie (Berlin, 1998), 69–72.
11 For Constantine’s Roman churches, see A. Logan, “Constantine, the Liber Pontificalis and the Christian basilicas of Rome,” Studia Patristica 50 (2010), 31–53, and T. D. Barnes, Constantine (Oxford, 2011), 85–9.
12 See G. W. Bowersock, “Peter and Constantine,” in “Humana Sapit”. Études d’antiquité tardive offertes à Lellia Cracco Ruggini (Paris, 2002), 209–17, and in W. Tronzo (ed.), St Peter’s in the Vatican (Cambridge, 2005), 5–15. For the architecture and setting, see R. R. Holloway, Constantine and Rome (New Haven and London, 2003), 57–119.
13 See G. Fowden, “Nicagoras of Athens and the Lateran obelisk,” JHS 107 (1987), 51–7.
14 Andrew Gillett, “Rome, Ravenna and the last western emperors,” Papers of the British School at Rome 69 (2001), 131–67.
15 For Rome see the essays in Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly (eds.), Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012), with the review of R. Van Dam, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.11.57, which emphasizes the demographic decline; for a similar picture in Rome’s hinterland, see B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome (Oxford, 2005), 138–41.
16 Discussion by J. Vanderspoel, Themistius and the Imperial Court. Oratory, Civic Duty and Paideia from Constantius to Theodosius (Michigan, 1995), 51–61.
17 T. D. Barnes, Constantine (Oxford, 2011), 127, citing Eusebius, VC 3.48.2 and Palladas, Anth. Plan. 282 and Anth. Pal. 10.56.
18 M. Whitby, “The violence of the circus factions,” in K. Hopwood (ed.), Organized Crime in Antiquity (Wales, 1999), 229–53.
19 D. Feissel, “Le philadelphion de Constantinople. Inscription et écrits patriographiques,” Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des inscription et belles lettres (2003), 495–521.
20 See J. F. Matthews, “The Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae,” in Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly (eds.), Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012), 81–115.
21 C. Mango, “The Water Supply of Constantinople,” in C. Mango and G. Dagron (eds.), Constantinople and its Hinterland (Aldershot, 1995), 9–18. The aqueduct system has been investigated by J. Crow and A. Ricci, “Investigating the hinterland of Constantinople. Interim report on the Anastasian long wall,” JRA 10 (1997), 253–62; J. Crow, J. Bardill, and R. Bayliss, The Water Supply of Byzantine Constantinople (JRS Monograph 11, London, 2008).
22 N. Asgari, “Proconnesian production of architectural elements in late antiquity,” in C. Mango and G. Dagron (eds.), Constantinople and its Hinterland (Aldershot, 1995), 263–88.
23 W. Lebek, Epigraphica Anatolica 25 (1995), 107–53.
24 C. Foss and D. Winfield, Byzantine Fortifications (Pretoria, 1986); W. Karnapp and A. M. Schneider, Die Stadtmauer von Konstantinopel; A. M. Schneider, “The city walls of Constantinople” Antiquity 11 (1937), 461ff.
25 M. Harrison, A Temple for Byzantium (London, 1989) is an account of the excavation of this building and its interpretation.
26 Procopius, Buildings 1.1.20–78. Paul Silentarius, Ekphrasis. See Mary Whitby, “The occasion of Paul the silentiary’s Ekphrasis of St. Sophia,” Classical Quarterly 35 (1985), 216–28; for a discussion and partial translation of the work of Paul Silentiarius, see P. N. Bell, Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian (Liverpool, 2009), 79–97 and 189–212. 
27 J. F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and the Imperial Court (Oxford, 1990), 101–21.
28 Socrates, HE 2.13; A. H. M. Jones, Later Roman Empire I (Oxford, 1964), 698.
29 J.-M. Carrié, “Les distributions alimentaires dans les cités de l’empire romain tardif,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome – antiqutité 87 (1985), 995–1101; J.Rea, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri 40 (1979).
30 See especially J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity. Gold, labour and aristocratic dominance (Oxford, 2001): P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2006), 149–99.
31 W. Liebeschuetz, Antioch (Oxford, 1972), 92–100.
32 C. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore, 1997). R. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993), based on rigorous analysis of documentary sources, deliberately excludes Alexandria from consideration.
33 An illustrated account in R. Bagnall and D. Rathbone (eds.), Egypt from Alexander to the Copts. An Archaeological and Historical Guide (London, 2004), 51–86.
34 J. Mackenzie, “Glimpsing Alexandria from archaeological evidence,” JRA 16 (2003), 35–63.
35 T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Harvard, 1981), 17–20.
36 J. McKenzie, S. Gibson, and A. T. Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria from the archaeological evidence,” JRS 94 (2004), 73–121; G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth (Princeton, 1993), 44–5.
37 Sozomen, HE 7.15; cf. Socrates, HE 5.16–17; Theodoret, HE 5.22; Rufinus, HE 11.22–27.
38 See K. Holum, Theodosian Empresses (Berkeley, 1982), 98–100.
39 For discussion see R. Alston, The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt (London, 2002), 285–92.
40 CTh. 16.2.42, 43.
41 W. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford, 1952), 25–31.
42 C. Lepelley, “The survival and fall of the classical city in late Roman Africa,” in Aspectes de l’Afrique romaine. Les cités, la vie rurale, et le christianisme (Bari, 2001), 85–104.
43 Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites (Princeton, 1976), 201–2.
44 Victor of Vita I, 12–14; Procopius, Bell. Vand. 3.5.11–17.
45 Theodoret, ep. 2, 29, 33, 34; Life of Fulgentius of Ruspa (ed. G. Lapeyre 1929), 1.
46 Y. Modéran, “L’etablissement territorial des Vandales en Afrique,” Ant. Tard. 10 (2002), 87–122.
47 W. Frend, The Archaeology of Early Christianity. A History (London, 1996, repr. 1997), 316–17; W. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford, 2001), 101, 377.
48 D. van Berchem, “Le port de Séleucie de Piérie et l’infrastructure navale des guerres parthiques,” Bonner Jahrbücher 135 (1985), 47–87.
49 W. Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 75–6.
50 SEG 35 (1985) 1523; G. Dagron, “Un tarif des sportules à payer aux curiosi du port de Séleucie de Pisidie,” Travaux et Mémoires 9 (1985), 435–55; P. Petit, Libanius et la vie municipale à Antioche au IVe siècle après J.-C. (Paris, 1955), 305–22; G. Downey, “The economic crisis at Antioch under Julian the apostate,” Studies in Honour of A. C. Johnson (Princeton, 1951), 312–21.
51 Julian, Misopogon 369–70; W. Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 127–8.
52 Justinian, Nov. VII.8 with W. Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 129.
53 W. Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 167–92; J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, labour and aristocratic dominance (Oxford, 2001).
54 W. Liebeschuetz, Antioch, 192–208.
55 D. Levi, Antioch Mosaic Pavements (Princeton, 1947).
56 J. Hahn, Gewalt und Religiöser Konflikt (Berlin, 2004), 122.
57 R. L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley, 1983).
58 R. Browning. “The riot of ad 387 in Antioch: The role of the theatrical claques in the later empire,” JRS 42 (1952), 13–20; P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Wisconsin, 1992), 105–8; H. Leppin, “Pagan and Christian interpretations of riot,” in H. Brandt (ed.), Gedeutete Realität. Krisen, Wirklichkeiten, Interpretationen 3–6 Jht. n. Chr. (Historia Einzelschr. 134, Stuttgart, 1999), 103–23.
59 Michael Whitby, “Procopius and Antioch,” in D. French and C. S. Lightfoot (eds.), The Eastern Frontier of the Roman Empire (2 vols., Oxford, 1989), 537–53.

By Stephen Mitchell in " A History of the Later Roman Empire AD 284-641", Wiley Blackwell, UK,2014, excerpts 325-354. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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