Download PDF | Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian Its Nature, Management, and Mediation , PETER N. BELL, Oxford University Press 2013.
410 Pages
Preface
Strangely perhaps, it was a Methodist minister (who happened to be my grandfather) who introduced me to the Greek myths when I was a toddler. From this sprang a lifelong fascination with the ancient world, only briefly frustrated some years later when I couldn’t raise the 7s. 6d. needed to buy Teach Yourself Greek. Classical paideia did not rate universally up north in the 1950s, but a first-class state grammar school in Sheffield, King Edward VII, sorted that.
Later, as an Oxford undergraduate reading ‘Greats’, my interest came to focus on the Roman Empire, not least owing to the teaching of my fellow Yorkshireman Tim Barnes, exposure to Pliny’s Letters, especially Book X, where I listened to the beating heart of imperial government, and Fergus Millar’s The Roman Empire and Its Neighbours. More recently, this has matured into an engagement with late antiquity and doctorate on social conflict and its management in the sixth century across the whole Eastern Roman Empire.
And now, this book. Its subject matter also reflects nearly thirty years of professional involvement with social conflicts, chiefly in Northern Ireland where I served for many years, latterly as a senior civil servant in the Northern Ireland Office. But I also have experience of other areas where violent social conflict continues: most notably, the Middle East, during earlier Diplomatic Service days in the FCO and in Lebanon; later, advising the Colombian government on the management of peace negotiations. In Northern Ireland, my focus was on helping to end political violence and construct legitimate and workable public institutions, before I returned, after taking part in the negotiation of the 1998 Belfast (or ‘Good Friday’) Agreement, to classical antiquity and Oxford.
book. A reader will, I hope, ask him- or herself what we can learn for today from how he dealt with them. My own list would begin with establishing the legitimacy of your regime, combined with strong, effective, and ‘joined-up” government—seeing political, economic, and security issues as inseparably linked. And yours would be... ?
Methodologically, I have moved far from the ‘positivist’ approach to Ancient History, by no means extinct, which I absorbed in 1960s Oxford. This reflects exposure to the social sciences, sociology, and economics in particular, through training at the Civil Service College and at Birkbeck College, London, as well as a year as Civil Service Fellow in the Politics Department of Glasgow
through techniques of, originally, economic modelling. Along with social psychology, the most recent addition to my intellectual toolkit—I am grateful to Miles Hewstone for his encouragement in this, for me, new field—these disciplines have influenced my thinking throughout this book. Hence, together with illustrations from my own experience, those aspects of my approach which, I cheerfully concede, are not those of a more conventional Oxford monograph in Roman (or Byzantine) History. Indeed, I have already been accused of coming from ‘the left field’—even more scandalously, of being an ‘intellectual’! But if I am not, therefore, ‘an ideal advocate for conventional ancient history’, this book is no less serious in intent.
In producing here a more readable and up-to-date text than the doctorate dissertation on which it ultimately rests, and mindful of Karl Marx’s confession in my epigraph, I have also drawn on my own more recent work on the sixth century,” as well as on further helpful advice from friends, colleagues, an OUP reader, and the new work streaming online. This has, I hope, made the book you are reading more persuasive (and even enjoyable). I have, therefore, deliberately not overburdened my argument with all the detail appropriate to anarrowly focused monograph. T have tried hard once again to make what‘was. There remains, I know well, far more to be said—and far, far more for me to learn on almost all the topics I address.
These improvements may not wholly satisfy more radical (or, rather, ‘conservative) critics: whether of the prominence I give to reviewing the ideological assumptions underlying my sources, ancient and modern, or considering them as literary texts as well as sources of facts; of the emphasis ‘explicitly place on social theory; or of my belief that historical (and contemporary) illumination can be derived from comparing the actions and experience of human actors, including my own, in widely different periods and places. (I hope readers will similarly exploit their own experiences in evaluating what I have written.) But there are limits beyond which I cannot, in good faith, go in concealing what I believe history (ought) to be. I simply hope that what I have written stimulates an open-minded reader. I have been so far greatly encouraged to discover that my approach has found favour with experienced scholars—even more encouraging, with their students.
As to the writing of the book, I am grateful for the support of my DPhil supervisor, Mark Whittow, in encouraging me to follow my own path, for his excellent ideas, an unusually wide-ranging erudition not confined to the medieval world, and in sharpening the focus of my original thesis. Also for the enduring moral and intellectual support of Averil Cameron, as well as all those who read and commented on both my dissertation, and now the book, starting with my examiners, Peter Sarris and Bryan Ward-Perkins, who have continued to advise and support me, and now including Phyllis Bentley, Phil Booth, and David Gwynn.
Thanks also go to Michael Maas, for kindly giving me an advance copy of his excellent Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, to several of whose contributors, including himself, my footnotes will show I am greatly indebted, and also for his later encouragement; to Werner Henze for equipping me with his original Princeton doctorate thesis on the early Syrian Church, now also a book; and to James George, a former doctoral candidate in Oxford and now a policeman in Northern Ireland, for his illuminating thoughts on Severus of Antioch and the Miaphysites. I also thank Peter Heather and Roger Tomlin who, as my supervisors during my Oxford MSt, initiated me into the later Roman Empire—in Peter’s case, also into the wonderland of ecclesiastical controversy. My great debts to numerous other scholars emerge from my text. And my debt to those who have provided me with illustrations is spelt out later. And I still have not mentioned what I owe to my OUP editor, Taryn Campbell, her colleagues in Oxford University Press, and copy editors.
My wider commitment to the ancient world has also been sustained by the privilege (and fun) of teaching several extremely bright and enthusiastic undergraduates—including, most memorably, George Longley and Daisy Easton from St Hilda’s and Balliol. Finally, I must express my enormous gratitude to Wolfson College for taking me in after I had completed my doctorate, and letting me continue to work in Oxford, the world’s greatest centre for late antique and Byzantine studies. Others to whom I am greatly indebted will also emerge from my footnotes, and grateful acknowledgements below to those who have allowed me to use their pictures and maps, or even supplied me with high-quality copies, often free of charge.
Above all, however, I acknowledge the debt to my ‘home team’: first, to Jake, my friend and partner from Ulster, for his unfailing moral support, his insistence on my taking regular and vigorous exercise, and to my good fortune in living with one of the few dogs in Oxford with a serious interest in late antiquity. Second, to Jenny, without whose efforts in editing and proofreading there would have been neither thesis nor book. Jake, however, is no longer with us; it is to his memory, therefore, that I dedicate this study.
Peter N. Bell Wolfson College Oxford February 2012
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