The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Read online

  These divisions also matter because they mobilized large numbers of people. Fifth-century Christianity was a mass religion, reaching more and more of the peasantry. Its participants were very loyal to their bishops and other local religious leaders, and could be mobilized in their support, city versus city or province versus province. Political faction-fighting could be expressed in religious terms too, and local secular leaders could find themselves involved in ecclesiastical disputes for the whole of their political lives. In cities, mobs could fight it out; Cyril in Alexandria, where rioting had a long tradition, was well known for his manipulation of them. The Donatists had an armed wing of Circumcellions, ascetic peasants or seasonal labourers. Monks from the countryside were also used as shock troops, usually on the Monophysite side; Jerusalem was a dangerous place because of the number of monasteries around it, which could quickly be mobilized, as when Juvenal, patriarch of Jerusalem, was expelled by monks in 452 for a year, because he had accepted Chalcedon; the army was needed to restore him. Monks were not normally educated, but they were certainly fervent. The roughness of their political protagonism broke the rules of late Roman élite decorum, and troubled politer observers, as it does some modern historians. These monks look too fundamentalist, too fanatical, and they were; but they were at least a sign that Christianity had penetrated the countryside, and that its divisions involved more people than narrow élites.

  This brings us to a final Christian innovation, the development of new spheres for social behaviour. In general, committed Christianity involved a personally pious lifestyle, which indeed mattered more than theological disputes to most of its adherents; but rigorists could and did go well beyond mere piety. From early on in Christianity, self-deprivation of food or comfort, self-harm and the avoidance of human society were regarded by some people as ways in which humans could get closer to God. These forms of ascesis were popularized by Athanasios’ hugely influential Life of Antony, written at the death of the Egyptian desert hermit Antony in 357 and almost at once translated from Greek into Latin. ‘The desert’, a physical location for Antony, became an image for all ascesis, and men and women could create their own local deserts by shutting themselves away, or by standing on columns, often for decades, as stylites from Simon the elder (d. 459) onwards did - inaccessible (except by ladder), but clearly visible all the same and of public interest as a result. One influential stylite, Daniel (d. 493), had his column beside one of the major Bosporos ferries, east from Constantinople - he, certainly, was in the public eye (someone even asked him how he defecated: very dryly, like a sheep, he replied); but Simon, too, had his column in the middle of the rich olive-oil hill-country of northern Syria, and crowds would watch him repeatedly touch his toes with his head, counting 1,244 such movements on one occasion, as Theodoret of Cyrrhus recounted. Theodoret wrote a systematic account of the remarkable (and often, to his eyes, foolish) ascetic feats of Syrian holy men, which also stressed how respectful they were to Theodoret himself, their bishop. Ascetics sometimes caused resentment in the standard church hierarchy, for their spiritual powers (accurate advice, particularly effective prayers, sometimes miracles) were the results of their own efforts, rather than being bestowed by bishops. But most had episcopal support and patronage, and some of them (Theodore of Sykeon was one) became bishops themselves.

  The influence of these ascetics broke all Roman social rules: few were aristocratic, few were educated, but people sought their advice persistently. We have replies of two elderly hermits living just outside Gaza in the early sixth century, Barsanouphios and John, to some 850 questions of all kinds put to them by laity, clerics and monks, which can pass for the sixth-century equivalent of Dear Abby. If I want to give grain and wine to the poor, should I give them the best quality? (no, you needn’t). Since we must not kill, should I lie to allow a murderer to escape the death penalty? (maybe, as long as you tend to lie under other circumstances). Can I buy in the market from pagans? (yes). Can I eat with a pagan? (no). What about when he is important? (still no, and here is a polite excuse). Do I really have to give my cloak to every beggar, and go naked? (no). And, perhaps the feeblest of all: I can’t make up my mind, what should I do? (a perhaps exasperated reply: pray to God, or else ask us again). It is clear in all of this that ascetics were trusted to know; educated or not, they had access to spiritual truth.

  Christian ascetic holy men and women have an established niche in modern history-writing by now, and it is important not to be seduced by Theodoret and others into thinking that they were everywhere; as Peter Brown has recently written, they occupied ‘little of the public space of late Roman society’, even in the East, and they were never as common in the West. But they created an idiom of self-mortification which potential saints would systematically seek to copy in the future, with hair shirts, flesh-eatingly tight belts, chains and the like. Their less extreme acts could be copied by everybody, such as the pious Roman aristocratic women Paula and Melania, whose choice to walk around fourth-century Rome in rags, unwashed and smelly, was eulogized by Jerome in disturb ingly lip-smacking terms. And they were regularized and generalized by monasticism. Not that most monks imitated a full-on ascetic extremism, but the development of groups of celibates, living apart (in ‘the desert’), was influenced by Antony, and set roots on a large scale in Egypt first; indeed, ascetics themselves eventually found that they had a monastic community forming around them, or they sought one out on purpose. The ascesis of monasticism mostly consisted of absolute obedience to an abbot’s rule in a fixed daily routine, and such rules were written down from early on: by or for Pachomios in Egypt and by Basil in Anatolia in the fourth century, by Shenoute in Egypt and John Cassian in Gaul in the fifth, by Benedict of Nursia (modern Norcia) in Italy in the sixth. In the West, Benedict’s rule eventually became the gold standard; in the East, it was Basil’s. Benedict’s rule, more humane than many, is as striking for its insistence on the equal treatment of monks of different social status as it is for its moderate ascesis (only vegetables, except when ill; only light clothes, except in winter): egalitarianism was as difficult in the hierarchical world of late Antiquity as was self-deprivation. Nor were all monasteries remotely egalitarian; many resembled comfortable house-party retreats for aristocratic males and females. But the image of equality (of subjection) was intrinsic to monastic regulation, and in this respect, even if in no other in late Rome, equality was theoretically possible to achieve; a social space had even been created for this.

  One simple result of these processes is that Christian writers tell us more about the peasant majority than pagan writers had ever done. Peasants could become saints if they were very exceptional; they also bore witness to the remarkable acts of rural holy men and women, living far from urban élites, so saints’ lives give us vignettes of village society that were almost entirely absent in earlier literature. The poor could go to heaven as easily as the rich, after all (in Christian theory, more easily), and even the most aristocratic and snobbish bishops - Gregory of Tours in sixth-century Gaul, for example - regularly preached to them, and sometimes listened to them, too. In recent decades, historians have abandoned their earlier caution about miracle stories, and rightly, given that these tell us so much more about non-aristocratic society and cultural and religious values than we can get elsewhere. They are not a direct window onto peasant society; no text is ever that, and they were seldom written by peasants (though one or two were - the Life of Theodore of Sykeon is one). But they are the best guide we have, and, however fully studied they now are, they still have more to tell us.

  Part of the reason why ascetics occupied little Roman public space was that that space was huge. Even when we move away from a specifically religious focus, we must recognize that the Romans lived a great part of their political lives in public. The year was studded with public processions in cities; indeed, urban planning itself was affected by it, for the wide and straight streets of Roman cities, in the East garlanded with colonnades as well, were specific
ally built like that, and kept clear of obstructions, so as to allow processions (when processions ceased in the East after the Arab conquest, streets infilled fairly fast: see below, Chapter 10). Political power was structured around the most formal versions of such processions, as with the rituals for imperial arrival (adventus) into cities, which were later matched by the most elaborate ceremonial entries of the Renaissance. One famous case, Constantius II’s arrival in Rome in 357, described by Ammianus in detail, shows the emperor in a bejewelled car, with a vast military retinue; Constantius turned neither his head nor his eyes, nor his hands - he did not even spit - during the entire procession to the forum. This was a victory procession (undeserved, Ammianus thought; he loathed Constantius), which had a long tradition behind it, and a long future ahead, at least in the East, for Constantinople’s main west-east streets saw regular processions of this kind right to the end of the period of this book and beyond: the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies, compiled on the orders of an emperor himself, Constantine VII (913-59), describes them in great detail, stage by stage (see Chapter 13), and it is far from the only source. But major political and religious moments of all kinds were marked by processions in cities. Here, Christianity simply appropriated the practice, and bishops developed formal processions between urban churches as part of the presentation of their local power; these often took on penitential or protective roles, and it became common for bishops to process around city walls with relics or religious symbols, to protect the city during sieges, as during the siege of Clermont in around 525 or at the siege of Constantinople in 626 (according to our hagiographical sources, they were always successful). Pilgrimages to local saints’ tombs, themselves commonly orchestrated by bishops, as Gregory of Tours did for St Martin’s tomb there, had something of the same public formality, at least at the major festivals of the saint.

  The public sphere did not only operate through processions. Constantius after his arrival in 357 hosted games; so did Theoderic the Ostrogoth in his formal visit to Rome in 500. The Circus Maximus, the largest chariot-racing stadium in Rome, was just below the imperial palace on the Palatine hill, from where the ruler could watch; in Constantinople, too, the Hippodrome was beside the palace, with a direct back entrance into the imperial box. This was the location (particularly in Constantinople, for emperors actually lived there) for a structured dialogue between emperor and people. Emperors generally controlled this, but it did at least allow some popular response through the leaders of the main circus ‘factions’, the Greens and the Blues (the colours of the teams), either through verbal dialogue or through riot. Matters occasionally got out of hand, as with the Nika riots of the Constantinople factions in 532, during which much of the city was sacked and which nearly brought Justinian down, but circus riots in major cities tended more to be a safety valve, a warning of discontent which emperors occasionally heeded, as well as, perhaps most normally, simply being for fun.

  Political decision-making had a substantial public element as well. There were public disputations (particularly about religion or philosophy), speech-making was carried out in the forum, and there was a crowd to hear Sidonius choose the bishop of Bourges. The political community meant the élite, of course, and there was nothing even distantly democratic about Roman political procedures, but their results were communicated verbally in public, often quite quickly, at least in cities. Imperial laws were proclaimed as well; Anastasius’ abolition of the unpopular merchants’ and artisans’ tax in 498 was read out at Edessa - a major commercial entrepôt, but a long way from Constantinople - in the same year and occasioned a spontaneous festival.

  The emperor had an ambiguous relation to the public world. The late Roman empire was a period in which imperial ceremonial became increasingly elaborate, partly to distance the emperor from other people, ‘imprisoned inside the palace boundaries’, as Sidonius put it. Inside the palace, etiquette was very elaborate as well. Meals with the emperor, a great honour, were carefully controlled, and Sidonius recounts one with Majorian in 461 at Arles in which the emperor conversed in turn with each of the seven guests, who were expected to shine in their replies, and got applause if they did so. (One aspect of the Persians that seemed very strange in Roman eyes was that their religious rituals forbade them to talk at meals.) But this formality was balanced against a presumption of accessibility. The practice of petitioning the emperor, for help or against injustice, was long-standing in the Roman world, and did not weaken at all in the late empire; indeed, the laws in the imperial codes are often explicitly responses to petitions. Petitioners seldom met the emperor in person, and it was of course the bureaucracy that really dealt with their pleas (or else did not), but the principle of direct response was preserved. Daniel the Stylite briefly left his column in 475 to protest against the usurping emperor Basiliscus’ support for Monophysitism, sending critical letters to Basiliscus, and eventually getting the emperor to recant publicly in the cathedral of Constantinople itself; the image of dialogue in his saint’s life must have been a plausible one, even if the details were invented. And this sort of imagery worked. Imperial authority remained popular, taken for granted. Roman envoys to Attila’s court in 449 greatly offended the Huns when they said that, although Attila was a man, Theodosius II was a god; this was a self-evident statement in Roman eyes, even though the envoys were doubtless overwhelmingly Christian. The gods were gone, but imperial status remained unchanged - divinus remained a technical term meaning ‘imperial’. The emperor’s position was all the more central in that the Roman empire was regarded as, by definition, always victorious, a belief that survived even the disasters of the fifth century. Indeed, Christianization reinforced this: if the empire fell, many believed the world would end. Romans were nothing if not confident.

  The Romans drew a clear line between the public and the private. Politics in a formal sense took place outside private housing, which was regarded as in part separate from public activity. Senatorial palaces could be entered by almost anyone, and much political business was transacted there, but they contained carefully calibrated communal and more personalized spaces for the reception of clients and would-be clients; and except for extreme crimes the behaviour of family members inside the walls of a house was the responsibility of the paterfamilias, the male head of the household, and beyond the remit of public law. The household was the basic unit, called domus in Latin when its physical setting was stressed, and familia when referring to its personnel. It was centred on a nuclear family of husband, wife, children; other kin were normally more distant, part of political alliances rather than family structure, although parents, if living, still had a major influence. Slaves were part of the familia as well, however, as unfree domestic servants, and they were ubiquitous among families who had any resources to spare at all. The familia was very hierarchical; the paterfamilias was supposed routinely to beat slaves and children. Augustine’s account of his violent father Patricius in his autobiographical Confessions, an important source, shows that he considered it commonplace for husbands to beat wives too, although wife-beating seems to have been regarded as normal only in the Latin West, and with greater hostility in the Greek East; in surviving Egyptian divorce petitions, violence is rarely referred to. In law, the authority of the paterfamilias did not actually extend to wives, who were still subject to their own fathers (if living), but it is clear that in practice husbands ruled. Augustine, again, depicts his mother Monica (who had no qualms about trying to dominate her son) telling off her female neighbours in Thagaste for moaning about their husbands, saying their marriage contracts ‘bound them to serve their husbands’; nor was this just rhetoric: Egyptian marriage contracts systematically enjoin husbands to protect, wives to obey. Augustine criticized a certain Ecdicia for being celibate, wearing widow’s clothing and giving her property to the poor during her husband’s lifetime and without his permission: this lack of submissiveness nullified the virtue she sought to attain. The state may have stopped at the wall of the house, but Roman v
alues did not, and hierarchy was taken for granted in both. Nor did Christianity change anything significant in this respect.

  It would not be hard to argue that late Roman family life was tense and loveless. Marriages were almost always arranged by parents, after all, with an eye to safeguarding and extending property; husbands were routinely a decade older than their wives. Domestic slaves could undermine the stability of their master’s family by malicious gossip, and were thought (perhaps rightly) to be deeply hostile to their masters in general: ‘It is agreed and totally plain that all masters are bad,’ a slave is made to say in the early fifth-century comedy Querolus. Children are frequently seen as resenting and rejecting paternal restrictions in late Roman narratives (particularly those where virginally minded daughters are forced into marriage, and then child-bearing, by parents and husbands). Augustine certainly disliked his father, and, while revering his mother, had to resort to deceit to escape her when he left Carthage for Rome at the age of twenty-eight. All the same, in late Rome as elsewhere, happy families give authors less to write about. It may be that the idyllic love and concord celebrated by the pagan Roman aristocrats Praetextatus (d. 384) and Paulina in poems supposedly written to each other and inscribed on a stela after Praetextatus’ death, are not totally formulaic or atypical: ‘I am happy because I am yours, was yours, and soon - after death - will be yours.’ The ‘amicable and decorous bonds’ of marriage were normally unequal, but they did not necessarily fail because of that.

  Women were legally subject to fathers, effectively subject to husbands. They had full inheritance rights over paternal and maternal property, however, equally with their brothers, and legally controlled their own property in marriage. Husbands were expected to front for wives in public affairs such as court cases, but women had full legal rights to act on their own if they chose. Until the late fourth century widows could not be legal guardians of children, and their powers were circumscribed, but in practice they often did so (Monica certainly held the purse strings for the near-adult Augustine after Patricius’ death in 372). Women were not regarded as part of the public sphere and could not hold office. But there is at least one example of a female city governor, Patrikia in Antaiopolis in Egypt in 553; and Hypatia in Alexandria, as the city’s major intellectual, had a formal role in public ritual, receiving ceremonial visits from officials. Indeed, powerful empresses were common in the late empire (particularly in the fifth- and sixth-century East: see Chapter 4), and not obviously resented for their power, despite the rhetoric of political opponents and some Christian extremists. The sphere of women in the late Roman period was universally regarded as the home: they ran the household economy. But they were not prevented from being economic actors. Egyptian evidence shows widows, at least, buying and selling property without male consent or intervention (women seem to have owned 17-25 per cent of the land of fourth-century Egypt, not a trivial amount), and also renting out property, money-lending, and acting as independent artisans and shop-owners. Women (except prostitutes and dancers) were expected to dress modestly, but they were not veiled in their normal daily lives; they could show or claim status with expensive clothing, and they do not seem to have been secluded. The double standard of sexual behaviour was standard and sanctioned by law (men routinely had concubines, but brides were supposed to be virgins, and female adultery was seen as indefensible); but the empress Theodora may have been an actress, and thus automatically in a legal category akin to prostitution - even if Prokopios’ lurid account of her activities is demonstrably rhetorical - without it constraining her later authority. Women were regarded as weak and ignorant, but, even excluding Hypatia, there is plenty of evidence for female literacy and literary engagement, particularly but not only among the aristocracy.