Rome: An Empire's Story (43 page)

The final component of the new empire was presentational. Ceremonial became more elaborate.
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Ruler and courtiers dressed in extraordinary costumes, as we can see from the mosaics at Ravenna and Istanbul. Contemporary accounts notice the sudden increase in court rituals. The Emperor Julian wrote a satire entitled the
Caesars
in which each of his predecessors is caricatured as they arrive for a Saturnalian banquet held on Olympus by Romulus. When Diocletian turns up he makes a grand entrance in fabulous costume, surrounded by a chorus of the other tetrarchs.
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The image of the emperor as fellow citizen, who wore simple togas woven by his wife and daughters, was banished forever.
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Extravagant triumphs were celebrated by (among others) Aurelian, Diocletian, Constantine, Constantius II, and Theodosius I.
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Anniversary celebrations were held for the tenth- and twentieth-year anniversaries of an emperor’s reign. Thirty-year anniversaries,
tricennalia
, were celebrated in Rome by both Constantine and Theoderic the Ostrogoth. The arrival of an emperor in a city generated a major festival. Gigantic statues were built and vast intimidating palaces. Approaching the imperial presence inspired real awe. Religious ritual was harnessed to these ends, as emperors tried to set themselves back in the centre of the cosmos. Severus had organized Saecular Games in
AD
204 but Philip organized another series in 248 to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the city. Decius attempted to organize a mass sacrifice, a
supplicatio
, to be carried out by all citizens of the empire. This may well have been the point at which the number of Christians in the empire first became apparent, as the first general persecution followed in
AD
250 directed against those who had failed to sacrifice. Sacrifice certificates, proving participation, have been found from Egypt. The idea of organizing empire-wide rituals was a new one, even if it was in some ways a logical consequence of Caracalla’s expanding the citizen-body to incorporate most inhabitants of the empire. Aurelian found time in 274 after his victory over Palmyra to found a temple of the Undefeated Sun in Rome, with a new college of pontiffs dedicated to its worship. The sungod had been closely associated with the person of the emperor on coinage since the early third century. The conquest of Palmyra provided enough booty, and perhaps some imported statuary, to create the magnificent temple. Diocletian associated each Augustus and his Caesar with a divine patron, Jupiter in his case, Hercules in the case of Maximian, aiming to create Jovian and Herculean dynasties. Perhaps it was with similar ideas of creating religious unity that he also initiated the Great Persecution which earned him such condemnation from the Christian polemicists Lactantius and Eusebius.

Military success generated its own legitimacy. Once individual emperors survived longer than the average, then they seem automatically to have become less challengeable and so were able to achieve more. The tide was already turning in the 250s. Gallienus ruled 253–68, and despite the disasters of his reign, including the capture and execution of his father and co-emperor Valerian in 260, he was remembered for a series of successful campaigns against the Alamanni, and the first major steps towards the creation of a mobile field army. Aurelian, who was implicated in Gallienus’ murder, ruled 270–5 and triumphed over the Gallic emperor Tetricus and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, before being murdered himself. Diocletian and Constantine, just by surviving longer, restored more coherence to the imperial system and prestige to the position of emperor.

An Evolving Empire

All imperial systems evolve over time. It is no surprise that the Roman Empire of the fourth century
AD
was not identical to that of the first century. To many of its inhabitants it probably did seem a success story. Civil wars recurred but must often have seemed like rather violent reshuffles within the imperial college, as when the sons of Constantine jockeyed for control or when the most successful of them, Constantius II, faced a coup from the nephew he had raised to the rank of Caesar. Those conflicts were generally short-lived and seem not to have seriously disrupted the management of the empire at other levels.

The empire had evolved through a combination of long-term changes, many unplanned, like the spread of Roman habits of thought and lifestyle, and some, like slow social mobility barely noticed by contemporaries; incremental modification (such as minor redeployments of troops or changes to the fiscal system); and some dramatic responses to crisis. It was now rather different in structure from what had been created by Augustus at the moment when serious expansion stopped and the transition from conquest state to tributary empire was first achieved. The Augustan empire had had concentric structure. Rome was at the centre, then Italy inhabited by a few million Roman citizens and exempt from much taxation, and beyond that the broad zone of taxpaying provinces administered by the propertied elites of cities new and old, enclosed by an emerging frontier zone where citizen armies stared outwards at barbarians and inwards at potential rebels. By the
fourth century the difference between Italy and the inner provinces was gone, and virtually all the inhabitants of the empire were citizens. It has aptly been compared to a vast nation-state.

The cultural distance between the provinces had been reduced massively at the level of the elite who shared the essential components of a common lifestyle wherever they lived. Educational systems divided the provinces where the educated spoke Latin from those where Greek was dominant: crudely put the line bisected modern Libya and the Adriatic and then turned north-east to separate the Latin-speaking Danube provinces from the Greek world. Yet at the highest level the division was not absolute and anyone who sought a career in the bureaucracy or a place in the Senate could speak Latin. The common aristocratic lifestyle that had emerged in the second century persisted, more now in rural residences than in cities perhaps, but still attested by amazing mosaics, collections of statuary, and literatures that celebrated the symposium and knowledge of the classics. Spending on civic monuments had declined along with cities.
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Most of this is observable through archaeology and hardly figures in literary texts, yet the differences must have been evident to travellers like the soldier Ammianus who served on the Rhine and the Persian frontier and had visited Rome and Antioch, and to many others.

Below the level of the elite, material culture suggests greater regional differences. Only a part of these were the legacy of the huge diversity of the societies that had been incorporated into the empire by force half a millennium before. At the end of the last and beginning of the first centuries, there had been a phenomenal provincial demand for Roman-style products, from temples to tableware, and bronze statues to wine and olive oil. Italian and then other Mediterranean producers grew briefly rich supplying these goods to the new provinces, especially those outside the Mediterranean world. It is possible to trace the subsequent spread of technologies including brick-making and the use of waterproof concrete, viticulture and arboriculture, stock-raising and fish-pickling, and the production of fine pottery. These were put at once to local uses, and as local production was established so regional styles began to diverge. If the lifestyles of the elite were converging across the empire, the opposite was true for many others, although the situation was complicated by imitation of the local wealthy by the upwardly mobile, and by empire-wide travel by merchants, pilgrims, and soldiers. The pattern of unified high culture and diverse local cultures is one reproduced in early empires around the globe. Members of the elite were in any case more mobile than their subordinates, and changes in the governmental structure of the empire only enhanced this.

Rome in the early empire has been characterized as ‘government without bureaucracy’: the imperial aristocracies of the senatorial and equestrian order provided a tiny number of governors and generals, overseeing a world of cities run by local elites. What held the system together was a shared sense of aristocratic culture. The new bureaucracy of the fourth century was much larger and recruited from those who were educated but generally not aristocratic. It had a complex internal hierarchy of ranks, was divided into departments, and the whole system was focused on the praetorian prefects and the courts in capitals that were located in the frontier zone. The aristocratic propertied classes that ruled cities in the peaceful interior maintained their social eminence but began to come under financial pressure and were now potentially alienated from the government of the empire. This was true even of Rome, which emperors visited rarely and never made their base. Rome remained a cultural centre, and the wealth of the senatorial aristocracy in the fourth century was fabulous, but its relationship with the new centre of power was precarious. During the late fourth century emperors in Milan communicated with the Senate via the prefect of the city, and the Senate sent ambassadors and petitions to the court just as great provincial cities had done in the early empire.

Some precious documents present us with an image of imperial style in this period. One is the
Notitia Dignitatum
of which a gloriously illustrated copy made in the sixteenth century survives. The original was composed at the end of the fourth century and parts revised in a complicated manner that is still obscure, through the early fifth century. Each page is devoted to a different office in the hierarchy—praetorian prefects, regional vicars, provincial governors of all kinds—and then the parallel military hierarchy including armies, forts, and weapons factories. The information contained is exactly what a centralized empire would need, but the fact it was illustrated so expensively and yet would be out of date almost at once suggests it also offered a kind of panorama of power. Each entry is also preoccupied with those details that matter most to insiders: precise titles, the orders of precedence and seniority, the number of postal warrants assigned to each official. And the fact it includes western and eastern officials and units in a period in which the empire was effectively divided into two shows it depicts an order of dignities that was idealized and ideological as much as practical.

A second key document is the Theodosian Code, a compendious record of all imperial edicts issued since the start of the reign of Constantine, compiled between 435 and 438 and then distributed in both halves of the empire on the orders of the second emperor of this name.
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The code illustrates both the strengths and limitations of imperial government. The capacity to plan and execute such a project in such a short time shows how the imperial bureaucracy could be put to work and produce results. Yet the fact that to compile this collection it was necessary to write to provincial governors all over the empire asking for copies of any edicts they had filed away shows an astonishing lack of record keeping. The desire to make a complete collection, to order it logically by sixteen themed books, and to remove contradictions and inconsistencies perfectly expresses both the aspiration to rational, universal rule and the gap between that ideal and reality. That it was carried out as late as the 430s shows that despite the disasters of the generation following Adrianople, the empire and imperial society was definitely one thing and not two in the minds of the emperor and his staff. Starting the record with the reign of Constantine is also a rare testimony to an ancient concept approaching our modern one of ‘a later Roman empire’. Finally, Theodosius’ great project was identified immediately with imperial monarchy. The clearest sign is not the elaborate ceremony with which the emperor presented a copy to an ambassador of the western Senate attending him in Constantinople; nor the adulatory acclamations by senators when they received the work, a record of which forms a preface to the work; but the fact that in the centuries to come whenever barbarian warlords across the former western empire tried to convert themselves into hereditary monarchs with courts and ceremonial of their own, one of the first things they did was to issue their own codes of law.

Fig. 20.
An image from the late antique
Notitia Dignitatum

Civilization without Empire? The Collapse of the West

Following the death of Valens at the battle of Adrianople in 378, the dependence of the emperors on their former enemies was greatly increased. For a generation, bribery, diplomacy, and threats of force were employed by both western and eastern emperors in a series of attempts to contain and deflect the Goths. But the weakness of the empire was now obvious. The Goths eventually headed into Italy, and Rome was sacked in 410.
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The emperors retrenched to protect the interior provinces. Even before the Gothic sack, Britain had been abandoned.