Download PDF | (Variorum Collected Studies) Brian Croke - Roman Emperors in Context_ Theodosius to Justinian-Routledge (2021).
323 Pages
Roman Emperors in Context: Theodosius to Justinian brings together ten articles by renowned historian Brian Croke. Written separately and over a period of fifteen years, the revised and updated chapters in this volume provide a coherent and substantial story of the change and development in imperial government at the eastern capital of Constantinople between the reigns of Theodosius I (379-95) and Justinian (527-65). Bookended by chapters on the city itself, this book is based on a conviction that the legal and administrative decisions of emperors have an impact on the whole of the political realm.
The fifth century, which forms the core of this book, is shown to be essentially Roman in that the significance of aristocracy and dynasty still formed the basic framework for political advancement and the conduct/conflict of political power around a Roman imperial court from one generation to the next. Also highlighted is how power at court was mediated through military generals, including major regional commanders in the Balkans and the East, bishops and bureaucrats. Finally, the book demonstrates how the prolonged absence of male heirs during this period allowed the sisters, daughters, mothers and wives of Roman emperors to become more important and more central to imperial government.
This book is essential reading for scholars and students of Roman and Byzantine history, as well as those interested in political and legal history.
Brian Croke is Honorary Associate in Ancient History at the University of Sydney and Expert Adviser in Education. He has published several monographs and over 100 articles on various aspects of Roman and Byzantine history and modern historiography. His publications include Christian Chronicles and Byzantine History, 5th-6th Centuries (1992), The Chronicle of Marcellinus (1995) and Count Marcellinus (2001).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For both scholarly assistance and personal encouragement over four decades now I remain grateful to Elizabeth Jeffreys and Roger Scott who have helped critically refine most of these studies in their original form and whose guidance assisted the broader research that led to them. Also deserving acknowledgement are Geoffrey Greatrex, Averil Cameron and Michael Maas who have had a constructive influence at some stage on several of the studies collected here and Alanna Nobbs who introduced me as an impressionable teenager to the world of the emperors from Theodosius to Justinian.
This book is dedicated to my inspiring first teacher of ancient history and life-long mentor, Edwin Judge (Macquarie), now healthily and productively surging towards his century. On a monument erected in Rome’s Forum of Trajan in 402, Q. Memmius Symmachus could have had E. A. Judge in mind when honouring his father-in-law, Nicomachus Flavianus — ‘historico disertissimo’.
INTRODUCTION
Historicising imperial business
The present turns into the past one day at a time. Some days can be momentous or catastrophic with sudden and enduring impact. Most days, however, are dominated by the routine of personal and civic life carried out within particular family and cultural traditions and within particular social and political structures. Thus it was at Rome and, from the 330s, also at New Rome or the ‘City of Constantine’, Constantinople.
As the days of the Roman empire slowly turn into months and years, then decades and centuries, life’s routines, structures and traditions change and develop, punctuated by occasional threatening moments such as the Goths causing havoc in Rome in 410, the sight of the Huns within bowshot of the walls of Constantinople in early February 447, a massacre in the hippodrome in January 532 or the bold usurpation of Phocas on 23 November 602. As earlier forms of Roman thinking and behaving are eclipsed, novel forms emerge, but they are normally imperceptible at the time, at least during any individual’s relatively short lifetime. Mental change comes slowly. In the Roman world and the succeeding centuries, the pace of change was nothing compared to what we experience and expect in the 21st century.
The historian’s task is to observe, delineate and evaluate all these changes retrospectively. To do so, historians generally operate solo rather than in teams. Accordingly, their own personal background, education and predilections fashion their own methods and habits for making their work more manageable. One essential historiographical requisite is to mark out and label a particular patch of space and time in which to work and within which change can be both plotted and explained. For this book, the space and time encompassed is the broad period now labelled ‘Late Antiquity’.
There can be no doubt that one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century was the invention and expansion of ‘Late Antiquity’ as a single period from the 3rd to the 8th century, pinned to a loose geographical canvas stretching from Ireland to modern Iran. ‘Late Antiquity’ is outward looking and expansive. It focusses on mainly long-term religious, social and cultural transformation. It embraces all the Roman empire’s constituent cultures and languages, as well as its neighbouring cultures, leaving behind the narrower focus of previous scholarship and understanding of this period as the decline and fall of urban Greco-Roman civilisation.
This was the inward looking ‘Later Roman Empire’ of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, characterised by economic decline, personal and official corruption, falling standards of education and literature, barbarian invasions and so on. Until the 1970s, the ‘Later Roman Empire’ was a category reflecting underlying Roman political, military and legal structures, as demonstrated by the imperial court and administration.’ It followed logically and progressively the ‘early’ then the ‘middle’ Roman empires. Courses and textbooks in ancient history concluded with the ‘Later Roman Empire’, if not sooner, while in medieval history they began with the ‘Later Roman Empire’, if not later.
By contrast, ‘Late Antiquity’, not to mention its recent and more bothersome offspring “Late Late Antiquity’, draws its organisational logic mainly from religious and cultural imperatives alone, both Roman and non-Roman in tradition and character.? It has no designated predecessor period except, by implication, the whole of ‘antiquity’. Historians have not yet felt the need for an entrenched ‘middle antiquity’ or ‘early antiquity’ although it would be foolish to rule them out in the future. Broadly speaking, ‘Late Antiquity’ also side-lined what used to be separate self-evident descriptors for both east and west from the Sth to the 8th century, namely ‘Early Byzantine’ and ‘Early Medieval’ respectively, thereby creating lasting problems for both, as well as allowing ‘Early Christianity’ to project itself forward by another few centuries.
To all of them was added what was called ‘pre-Islamic’ and ‘Early Islamic’, although these were never concepts that the Islamic world itself embraced.* Given its geographical and chronological scope, however, ‘Late Antiquity’ is certainly much tidier as a single label than the plethora of labels otherwise required. Moreover, it makes perfect sense for tracing over both time and place significant religious, cultural and social trends and habits of mind. Its achievements are considerable.
While Late Antiquity was being fully formulated and promoted in the 1970s and 1980s as a period of transformation and change, rather than decline, then canonised with its own dedicated journals, institutes and handbooks in the 1990s and 2000s, a parallel movement was impinging on the way history was formulated and presented. The so-called linguistic turn in particular created, among other things, a heightened awareness of how all historical accounts are constructed and how new perspectives can result from more careful attention to the different processes of selectivity and emphasis while using the very same sources of information.°® So too, we now see more clearly that all historical periods are themselves essentially constructed or deconstructed or reconfigured by historians.
’ As for the ‘long fourth century’ or ‘long fifth century or ‘long sixth century’ or even ‘long seventh century’ for that matter,® all it demonstrates is the further artificiality of a closed 100-year period. A lazy form of historical periodisation results. Still, periodic categories remain necessary and useful although historians are now more sensitive to the value judgments and implicit teleology in the retrospective subdivision of periods into ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’, or ‘high’ and ‘low’, or ‘pre’ and ‘post’. ‘Late Antiquity’ is no exception. Even though the intrinsic value and coherence of ‘Late Antiquity’ have come to be taken for granted — and sometimes passionately protected — it is no surprise that such a periodisation is now itself subject to fresh and regular critique.’ In particular, the very coherence of ‘Late Antiquity’ is contested because it minimises the fact that the Roman empire did actually disappear as a political entity in the west and not without violence.'° Rome still matters.
The chapters that constitute this book might be judged as outmoded by the deep-rooted criteria for Late Antiquity because they are preoccupied with institutions, politics and political events. They are focussed essentially on Roman emperors (including one empress) from Theodosius I (reigned 379-95) to Justinian (527-65), as well as their court, their administration and the urban context of the imperial capital of Constantinople where they lived and ruled. Not to take them seriously, however, would be a mistake, even though Late Antiquity’s focus on religious, social and cultural change across cultures and over centuries has marginalised the study of political, institutional and governmental change at the same time. This consequence is no secret.
Despite being justifiably regarded as the progenitor of ‘Late Antiquity’ in the modern world, Peter Brown himself has long recognised that his original model of Late Antiquity has its limitations, in so far as it has excluded the state and its governmental administration.!! Subsequently, other experienced scholars working within the current paradigm of Late Antiquity have expressed concern for the way that Late Antiquity privileges religious, cultural and social change, at the expense of political, administrative and even economic developments occurring at the same time.'* Obviously some rectification is overdue, and it has begun to appear.”
Various methodological and historiographical convictions underpin or emerge from these studies. One is that, ‘Late Antiquity’ aside, the period from Theodosius to Justinian is a crucial one. Yet it is arguably under-studied and ill-understood. The culture of Roman government at Constantinople, how power is used and transmitted across generations, is a key focus here. So too are the traditional explanatory assumptions that have lain untouched while the surrounding cultural and religious change has been intensively studied and revised: for example, Theodosius I as the great warrior emperor transforming the west, the court of Leo I (457-474) as the battleground between native Gothic and Isaurian bands, the reign of Justin I (518-27) as nothing more than the prelude to that of Justinian.
While the period covered by this book has been caught up traditionally in the quest to establish where ‘Roman’ ends and ‘Byzantine’ begins, this is increasingly seen as a false dichotomy. Roman it is, Roman it continues to be.!* ‘Early Byzantine’ would be perfectly understandable too, not only because it brings into play the preoccupation with social and religious behaviour, belief and change. It also allows for how politics at the imperial court intersects with family and aristocracy at the imperial city of Constantinople from the 4th to the 7th century, as well as the lands it ruled over at different points from the Danube to the Euphrates. The wider context of Constantinople reveals a place where the hard-headed activities of emperors trying to stay in power through dealing with generals and clergy, senators, bureaucrats and the people count for as much as the overt transformations of religion and culture.!°
In recent years, fresh attention has been paid to the changing literary and historiographical contexts of early Byzantine texts, while other research dimensions have also been developing rapidly. For example, the brisk growth of new archaeological material from surveys and excavations has, in turn, accentuated study and understanding of texts as different as the Notitia Dignitatum and Procopius’ Buildings. One of the more exciting and fruitful developments in the archaeological study of early Byzantine history has been the growth of Byzantion itself into the imperial capital of Constantinople. Even in specialist works, however, the early Byzantine city tends to be treated as a synthetic or organic whole, often without due regard for its particular and distinct periods of development.'® Hence, the value of in-depth focussed snapshots of the city at two key junctures in its growth — late 4th century (Chapter 1) and mid 6th century (Chapter 10).
The foregoing chapters were all researched, written and originally published between 2001 and 2015, either emerging of their own accord (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 8) or in response to various invitations (Chapters 1, 2, 6, 9, 10). Inevitably, some parts have been contested—or contradicted—at different points by other scholars. Now they appear in a revised form that acknowledges appropriate criticism and error, which occasionally has required an explanation, reply or correction. In some cases, new editions of texts, new translations and relevant new research have demanded inclusion. Most of the original articles are therefore superseded by these chapters. Further, some of these studies may feel somewhat slow-moving and detailed.
That can be explained as a result of the need to balance the treatment of a specific topic with unpacking the historiographical presuppositions that underlie modern interpretation of larger themes, such as the reigns of Theodosius I (Chapter 1), Leo I (Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6) and Justin I (Chapters 7 and 8). In the case of Leo and Justin, their particular shape and emphasis may also be explained by the fact that they originally grew out of two larger projects, provisionally entitled The House of Leo and Justinian s People, which will hopefully be completed in due course.
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