Download PDF | Liebeschuetz - East and West in Late Antiquity_ Invasion, Settlement, Ethnogenesis and Conflicts of Religion, Brill (2015).
508 Pages
Introduction
The Author I was born on June 22, 1927 on the third floor of my maternal grandmother’s house in Hamburg, Rabenstrasse 21. The house faced the Dammtor Bahnhof and the Moorweide, an extensive meadow, which up to 1933 was the site of rallies of various political parties, including the Communists and, already by then, the Nazis. My parents were members of the Liberal Jewish community to which our family had belonged for several generations. The family’s Jewishness had a considerable influence on my life. It certainly stimulated my interest in Ancient History. I have been interested in history as long as I can remember, inspired by my mother. She was a doctor and research physiologist,1 but she had to leave her research institute at the Hamburg University Hospital at Eppendorf on getting married, and was stopped from exercising her venia legendi at Hamburg University by the National Socialist government. She therefore had plenty of time to devote to her three children, and particularly to myself, the eldest.
She told fairy tales, and drew pictures to illustrate them. One of her favourites was Heinrich Hoffmann’s König Nussknacker und der arme Reinhold (Nutcracker king and poor Reinhold). She had an extraordinary visual memory, which enabled her to reproduce that book, text and illustration, from memory for her eldest granddaughter nearly thirty years later. Mother regularly told us stories from the Bible: the creation, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the exodus from Egypt, Saul and David and Jonathan, selected incidents from the Books of Kings, and the heroic story of the Maccabees.
In an account of our life under the Nazis that mother wrote she records that she had learnt from her parents that a fighting spirit is the only antidote against the low self-esteem experienced by outsiders, such as the Jews, and that this is what she was nursing in her children. She also related the stories of the Trojan War as well as much more recent history, notably of the “victorious war” of 1870−71 and “the lost war” of 1914−18, in accordance with our patriotic perspective of those days. I seem to remember that Hindenburg, then president of Germany and in some ways the man who let Hitler in, figured quite prominently. Mother also read from a series of books by Elisabeth Averdiek about a Hamburg family in the first half of the nineteenth century. I particularly remember an account of the great fire that destroyed much of the old city in 1842. I also heard quite a lot about Napoleon and his campaigns from the memoirs of Louis de Ségur, Napoleon’s aide-decamp. Later, mother read us a lot of plays, mainly historical ones: Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (as well as the autobiography of that knight with an iron hand); Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, his Wallenstein plays, and Jungfrau von Orleans; and then Shakespeare, first in German translation and later in English, starting with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and going on to Henry IV Part I and Macbeth.
So history played a prominent role in my early life. I have not yet mentioned my father, Hans Liebeschütz, who was a historian.2 He had received the classical education then provided by German gymnasia at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg. When he left school he wanted to become a rabbi and had spent 1913 as a student in Berlin at the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums, a seminar for training Liberal rabbis. He was at the same time registered as a student at Berlin University, where he heard, among others, Ulrich von Wilamowitz and Eduard Meyer. The impression lasted for the rest of his life.
When he resumed his studies after war service in France he specialised in Medieval History. But he kept a particular interest in the language and literature, and especially the history, of the Greeks and Romans. Homer and Plato (especially The Republic) were his favorite Greek authors. Of Roman authors, he preferred Lucretius to Virgil. In the late 1920s and up to 1933 he taught a combination of German, Latin, History, and Religion (Kulturkunde) at the Lichtwarkschule, an experimental progressive school run by the city authorities.3 At the same time he obtained the venia legendi to teach Medieval Latin and Medieval Literature at Hamburg University. Of course he lost both jobs when Hitler came to power. After a short interval he began to teach at the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where he had attended courses before the war. So in term time he was away from home during the week. But he had many books, which I was free to look at and read. It might be worth mentioning that thirty or so years later my children did not read my books.
Fathers are not what they used to be! Their power (potestas) may be much the same, but their influence (auctoritas) has been much reduced. My father’s books included Carl Oppel’s Das alte Wunderland der Pyramiden (4th ed., 1881) (Wonderland of the Pyramids), a book that he had read as a boy, and that I found fascinating as soon as I was able to read it. Another book I read quite early was James Breasted’s Geschichte Egyptens (History of Egypt), a German translation of a book originally written in English, and published in 1936. The library also included Georg Dehio’s Geschichte der Deutschen Kunst (History of German Art). I was fascinated by the architectural illustrations. The volumes are at Nottingham now, and they still show evidence of serious childish misuse As long as I can remember I have been interested in looking at historical buildings, and was sorry even then that Hamburg had so few of them, and that apart from the destruction caused by the great fire of 1842, the citizens of Hamburg had been quite ruthless with their architectural heritage. Since then, of course, the war has destroyed almost all that was left, except for two beautifully restored Gothic churches.
Soon after Hitler came to power our parents realised that there would be no future for their children in National Socialist Germany. They would have to learn English. So they arranged for us to have regular lessons from Frau Schröder, who was, if I remember rightly, a Quaker and who had spent many years in England. I don’t remember how often she came, or how I old I was when her visits began, or indeed how she taught us. But by the summer of 1936 I could converse in English and follow English conversation quite easily. That summer we visited mother’s brother, uncle Theodore, who had emigrated to England soon after he had lost his job as a result of Hitler’s having coming to power (Machtergreifung), and was now living in Hull. As well as visiting her brother, my mother also wanted to explore the possibility of sending her children to school in England. I started school at Easter 1934, when I was almost seven. I attended the local primary school (Volkschule). There were between fifty and sixty children in the class, but the teacher, one Herr Hahn, had no trouble handling them. He was obviously a very good teacher.
He was also a Nazi. We cut out pictures from newspapers to display in the classroom conveying the message that the Führer loves children. On at least one occasion our teacher came to class in his SS uniform. But he did not discriminate against the two “non-Arian” children in his class. On the first day, he told my parents that I would be able to stay at the school as long as the Führer would allow it; the Führer evidently allowed it for more than two years. Then, one day, Herr Hahn told the two “non-Arians”: “You can go home,” and that was the end of my time at the Dockenhudener Volkschule. My education continued at a tiny school for Jewish children started by my parents. Our teacher was Fräulein Henriette Arndt, and she taught us on the ground floor of our grandmother’s house. All of the ten or so pupils eventually got out of Hitler’s Germany in time. But our teacher did not. She was deported and murdered.4 The parents of one boy committed suicide.
By 1938 it was clear that the whole family would have to leave Germany, and thanks to Uncle Theodore, who sponsored most of us, we obtained visas for England. My father, like almost all Jewish men, had been arrested during the so-called Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, following the murder by a Jewish assassin of a German diplomat in Paris. My father was subsequently imprisoned for a month in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen–Oranienburg, outside Berlin. On 12 December 1938 he telephoned from Berlin that he had been released and was coming home. I remember accompanying mother to the shops at Blankenese to buy steak and cake. He never talked about his experiences in the camp. On the following day the whole family, including our two grandmothers and Miss Thornham, a young English woman whom our uncle had sent to accompany us children to England had lunch together. After the meal we caught the suburban train to the main line station at Altona. As the train passed our garden we shouted “Auf Wiedersehen!” At the frontier an official examined our identity documents, which were marked with a J, and explained to the compartment at large: “These are Jewish children.” The following day uncle Theodore phoned our parents that we had arrived at Hull. That is how I came to England. My parents and grandmothers arrived later. Our great-grandmother, aged 95 and an invalid, had to be left behind in Hamburg. She died, still living in my grandmother’s house, early in 1939.
In England, the family eventually settled in South London. During most of the war we lived in a rented house at Epsom Downs, not far from the racecourse where the Derby is run. My father had been admitted to England on a temporary visa, with the condition “that the holder does not stay in the United Kingdom for more than twelve months and does not enter any employment paid or unpaid.” After war had broken out the visa became permanent. As all the young men were serving in the armed forces there was a shortage of teachers, so my father received permission to work, and he taught Latin at a number of schools in different parts of the country. After the war he got a post as a lecturer in Medieval History at Liverpool University, where he taught until he reached the age of retirement, and even a little bit longer. But while the war lasted, he was once more at home only during the holidays. At other times, the family consisted of mother, three children, and two grandmothers.
Father’s mother was a very warm and loving woman, who was also very fit for her age, and particularly fond of me, her eldest grandson. Mother’s mother was an altogether different, and very austere personality. She was a semi-invalid, but she possessed a formidable and fascinating intelligence. Although she had left school without taking the final exam, she could nevertheless speak English and French fluently, almost as fluently as her native German. She had been educated at a girls’ school kept by the widow of a Lutheran pastor and had taught herself some classical Greek in order to read the New Testament in the original. Even in her eighties she still remembered the Greek she had taught herself as a young girl. Although she knew a great deal more about Christianity and its history than about Judaism, she was quite emphatically Jewish. My grandmother could talk about all sorts of subjects: literature, religion, finance, politics, and, not least, family history. She used to tell stories about the adventurous and eventually very successful life her father led while trading cotton goods on the border of Texas and Mexico in the 1850s. The fortune greatgrandfather Brach had earned in America was to some considerable extent still (or rather again) sustaining his descendants in the 1940s.
It was in England that I began to learn Latin. I had a little catching up to do, but that was not difficult. In those days, when children might start Latin at the age of ten or eleven, progress was very leisurely. From autumn 1940 to winter 1945 I attended Whitgift school in Croydon, not far from what had been the principal London aerodrome. Much of the first autumn term was spent in air-raid shelters. My fellow pupils considered me a German. They did not fully appreciate that I was also a Jew, and that it was therefore very much in my interest that Hitler should not win the war. Nevertheless, in spite of the continuous news about the war, and its hardships and casualties, I cannot remember that I suffered discrimination or hostility from either teachers or fellow pupils.
There was, however, one significant exception: For the whole of my time at school I was never invited over by any of my schoolmates. So I missed out completely on that part of education that is provided by out-of-school friendships. Whitgift was (and is) a very good school, but it was much less stimulating intellectually than home.5 Mother continued to read to us, more Goethe and Shakespeare, and also an old book of hers, entitled Astronomische Abende, a history of astronomy, which she had found interesting as a child. Later she also read us the Confessions of Augustine. About this time I was taking part in a correspondence course conducted by Rabbi Israel Mattuck, of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood, London, in preparation for confirmation at that synagogue. My father naturally took an interest in this, and we had many conversations about biblical history. He did not believe, as some people do, that “higher criticism,” the historical study of how the Old Testament as we know it came into existence, amounted to “higher anti-semitism.”
On the contrary, he thought that biblical scholarship had greatly enhanced our understanding of the Old Testament by demonstrating the essential importance of the prophets in shaping older traditions into the biblical message that became the basis of Judaism. I was eventually confirmed, together with my cousin Anneliese Plaut, in a makeshift Liberal synagogue in St John’s Wood; the synagogue itself had been burnt down in an air raid. At the beginning of my second year at Whitgift, when Mr Twisleton, who taught Maths, was making up the new register, and I was slowly spelling out “L.i.e.b.e.s.c.h.u.e.t.z’, he cut me short: “I am going to call you George,” and George I remained for the rest of my school days, though nobody has ever called me by that name since. At Whitgift, I very much enjoyed playing rugby. I had another three years of Latin, but only one of Greek.
This was in a class of two. The only other pupil had a German name, but was otherwise British. He was to go into the Church. Mr Lydall, our teacher, was very good and interesting, but he was one of a number of unhappy teachers who found it difficult to control larger classes. I gave up Greek when I opted for the science side of the fifth form, intending to become a doctor. This was at least in part under the influence of my maternal grandmother. She had a Hamburg businessman’s daughter’s contempt for academics, except that she greatly respected the medical profession, which was the profession of her husband as well as of my paternal grandfather and my mother. At Whitgift far more boys specialised in science than in the humanities, and the instruction was very good. There was Mr Micklewright, a veteran Chemistry teacher, who, but for the war, would have long been in retirement. He used to talk not only about what we had to know for the examinations, but also more generally about the history of Chemistry and about recent discoveries.
I also remember Mr Prime, who taught Botany, and whose special interest was ecology. He took his pupils on visits to study the different combination of plants in different soils. I was never able to remember the distinctive features of different species sufficiently well to benefit from these expeditions. Every week we had to write an essay on some botanical topic, and I certainly learnt a lot from that. I was not too bad at the theoretical aspects of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, but was hopeless at the practical work. The fact that I took the Higher Schools Certificate in Science meant that I studied neither Latin nor Greek in the sixth form. I never fully closed this gap in my education, particularly as regards Greek. If I had gone into the classical sixth my later life might have been different, or then again it might not.
I left school in December 1945. The following two years and a bit longer I was a soldier in the British Army. Most of this time was spent in the desert, in camps next to the Suez Canal. I did manage a few days in Cairo, so that I was able to visit the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the Cairo Museum. I remember the view from the top of the great pyramid, which is really magnificent: on one side a great expanse of yellow desert and on the other the city, citadel, and minarets of Cairo set in the extraordinarily green valley of the Nile. I walked through the museum from bottom to top. It was like walking through several thousand years of history. Later, I was able to spend a short leave at the ancient capital of Thebes. I did not escape the stomach upset, vomiting, and diarrhoea that always threaten visitors in Egypt, but I was nevertheless impressed—as nobody can fail to be—by the enormous ruins of the temples at Karnak and Luxor, and by the Valley of the Kings.
In order to persuade parliament to allow conscription in peace time, the British government had promised that conscripts would be educated during their period of compulsory service. This education was to be provided by the minority of conscripts who had undergone a complete schooling. I was one of the lucky ones. After a short and, in its limited way, rather good course on teaching techniques, I was promoted to the rank of sergeant, and attached to a unit under orders to educate the men. I was not a success. I knew about school, and in the short course I had been taught some of the tricks of the trade. However, the teaching of young men who have left school early and have no wish at all to return, requires a completely different approach from teaching schoolchildren, and I really had no idea how to do it. As an education sergeant, I did, however, undoubtedly have a much more comfortable life than I would have done if I had remained in the ranks. While I was in the army it became obvious how much better many of my less well-educated comrades were at practical tasks than I. It became abundantly clear that I was not cut out to be a doctor. I applied to University College, London, to study history.6 Fritz Saxl, the Director of the Warburg Institute, had told my father that two professors were outstanding at UCL: Hale Bellott in American History and A.H.M. Jones in Ancient History. I was duly interviewed for a place in the School of History, and was accepted. I opted for A.H.M. Jones and Ancient History, enrolling in History 1B: covering Greek and Roman, together with some Medieval History.
The choice decided the rest of my life. This was, incidentally, not the first time that the Warburg Institute had played a decisive part in my family’s affairs. My father had been associated with the institute when it was still the Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, and Fritz Saxl, who became director of the library after the death of Aby Warburg, was a friend. When my mother was in her late twenties her parents arranged a marriage for her, as was quite usual in Jewish families at that time. She became engaged. Sheets of bed and table linen were embroidered with her and her fiancé’s initials. But one day mother attended a lecture at the Bibliothek Warburg and there, whether accidentally or not, she met my father. That was the end of her engagement. My parents’ marriage followed not long after. Thirteen years later, when the library had relocated to London, Gertrud Bing, Saxl’s assistant and eventually his successor, sponsored my father’s immigration. A.H.M. Jones was a poor lecturer, and he had no pedagogical skills at all. His students had to exert themselves in order to learn from him. But for those who made the effort—as all members of the small class he taught at UCL did—it was very much worth while.
What was perhaps the most characteristic feature of his approach was that he insisted that every reconstruction of the past must be based on the original sources. In my first essay for him I supported some statement by citing Theodor Mommsen, only to be rebuked: “Never mind Mommsen, what does Livy say?” Jones never described any aspect of ancient history without also explaining how his view was derived from the ancient sources. Jones had an impressive ability to synthesize disparate and fragmentary bits of source material to conjure up a historical reconstruction that was not only convincing, but seemed obvious once he had presented it. What also made a great impact on his students was the range of his interests. He was interested not only in Rome and Athens but in all the lands around the Mediterranean. Moreover, his interests covered not only those periods that were traditionally considered classical and exemplary, that is c. 600−300 BC for Athens, and 757BC−AD 200 for Rome, but also and most of all Late Antiquity. He was concerned with social and economic problems. As regards political history, he was above all interested in how political and administrative systems worked.
Political and religious ideas and art and architecture had no place in his teaching. Not, I think, because he thought them unimportant, but because they did not lend themselves to his own approach to history. In summer 1951 Jones left UCL to take up a chair at Cambridge. Before he left I asked his advice on a subject for postgraduate research. He suggested that I might work either on the letters of Theodoret, the controversial bishop of the Syrian town of Cyrrhus in the fifth century, or on those of Libanius of Antioch, who was the most celebrated professor of Greek rhetoric (sophist) of his time. I chose Libanius. I have always known that I was lucky to have been taught by Jones, but it was only later that I realised quite how exceptionally distinguished a historian he was. Most of my publications show traces of his teaching.
In 1951−52 I took a course for the postgraduate Certificate in Education in order to qualify to teach in state secondary schools. At the same time, I began to work through the writings of Libanius, first the letters and later the political speeches. It was slow work. I now felt the handicap of not having done Greek in the fifth and sixth forms at school. In spring 1955 I married Margaret Taylor, who had also been a student at UCL, and had graduated in English. My thesis was nearing completion, and I thought that I now really ought to get a job. I applied for a large number of teaching posts as well as for a position in the library of the British Museum. It was not easy. With a degree in Ancient History I fell between two stools: I was not properly qualified to teach Classics, whereas teaching History would involve mainly more recent periods, since Ancient History was not yet in England the autonomous teaching subject it has since become.
At last I was offered and accepted a post to teach History at the boys’ grammar school in Barnsley, the Yorkshire mining town. On the next day I was invited to an interview at the British Museum. In view of the responsibility I had accepted at Barnsley, I turned down the interview. When I related this to Professor Momigliano, Jones’s successor and my supervisor, he asked me whether I had gone mad. He was quite right. The job in Barnsley proved a catastrophe. I lasted no more than a term. But there was a silver lining. If I had remained at Barnsley, I would probably never have finished my thesis. As it was, I now had time to finish the dissertation, so that I was in a position to submit it in December 1956. Earlier, Margaret had read through my text from beginning to end, and had greatly improved it by removing much obscure verbosity, and many unnecessary repetitions. Above all, she crossed out innumerable references to an unfortunate paucity of evidence, leading to diffident admissions “that we do not know . . . that we cannot be certain. . . .” On the very day on which I submitted my thesis, I learnt that Paul Petit had published Libanius et la vie municipale à Antioche au quatrième siècle ( Paris, 1955). This was, and remains, a great book, but for me its appearance was a disaster, for as was made clear to me, there would now be no room for a second book on Libanius and Antioch. Consequently, I spent the next six years as a schoolmaster. For five years of this time (1959−63) I taught boys and girls Latin and German at Heanor Grammar School in Derbyshire.8 I hope that my pupils learnt something. The lessons certainly greatly increased my own knowledge of Latin grammar and syntax, and also my appreciation of Virgil’s poetry. As a teacher of German, I took small groups of pupils through Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Juliet auf dem Dorf, Annette von Droste Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche, and Eduard Möricke’s, Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag. I think that pupils and teacher alike enjoyed these set-books. This was a time of change in the classical world. A Higher School Certificate pass in Latin was now no longer a compulsory requirement at any university for admission to courses in the humanities.
This meant that schools were under great pressure to reduce the teaching time assigned to Latin. What had been a three- or even four-year course had to be compressed into two years. This meant concentrating on the most frequently used words, and on the similarities rather than the differences between the declensions and conjugations. I even managed to get one exceptionally gifted pupil through the Higher School Certificate in one year. He only scraped through, but this, I think, was because he had not learnt the translations of his set-books by heart. This was a common practice, not only among the less gifted students, both at school and at university. While I was at Heanor, the local authority had decided to abolish selective grammar schools and to replace them with unselective comprehensives. The proposal was of course much debated, though the outcome was never in doubt.
The teaching profession prepared for drastic change. These years saw the development of the Cambridge Latin Course, and the beginning of courses in Classical Civilization, that is in classical literature and history studied from translated texts. In due course, the widespread adoption of comprehensive education greatly reduced the amount of teaching of classical languages in schools, but courses on Classical Civilization and Ancient History enabled a wider range of school children than ever before to learn about the Greeks and the Romans. Subsequently, university classics departments one by one also began to offer courses in Ancient History and Literature based on translated texts, and this made it possible for the majority of the departments to survive. I think it is true to say that while education generally has come to focus increasingly on the most modern and therefore supposedly most “relevant” history and literature, young people, and older people, too, continue to be very interested in the Greeks and Romans. I was an adequate, but not particularly good teacher. Teaching calls for a certain distinct quality of personality, one that not only maintains discipline in the class room, but also in some mysterious way compels pupils to feel that they must learn what the teacher tells them to learn. Some individuals have this trait, others are completely without it.
I was able to keep my class from talking while I was actually speaking—at least I managed that at the coeducational Heanor Grammar School—but I could not cast the peculiar spell that is the professional secret of the born teacher. During these years at Heanor I published three articles based on my thesis. I also wrote a paper on Virgil’s Georgics, Book III, which I had read with a sixth former,9 and another arguing against J.N.L. Myres that the Pelagians did not have social aims.10 I spent many weekends and a whole Easter holiday compiling an index for A.H.M. Jones’s Later Roman Empire. Robert Browning, who had been extremely helpful when I was working on my dissertation, several times encouraged me to apply for university posts.11 After one or two unsuccessful applications, I applied for a lectureship in the Classics Department at Leicester University. Professor Addi Wasserstein, who was also a refugee from Nazi Germany, was head of the department.12
It would seem that the testimonials professors Momigliano, Jones, and Browning wrote for me, as well as that from Mr Stone, the headmaster of Heanor Grammar School, who died in 2014, aged 94, hale and hearty to the end, were sufficiently favourable to persuade Addi Wasserstein and his professorial colleagues on the appointments committee that I was the right man for the job. I was to start in October 1963, and to teach some Latin, lecture on the Menaechmi of Plautus, and on books 6 and 7 of Thucydides. I was also to teach some Roman history: Ancient History was at this time still very much ancillary to language and literature, though this was soon to change. That is how I became a lecturer in Classics and Ancient History. Leicester University was a stimulating environment. It was small enough for members of different departments and faculties to get to know each other. There were no fewer than three societies at whose functions staff of different departments could meet and discuss: a Humanities Society, a Social History Society, and a Victorian Studies Society. The enormous expansion of universities has since greatly reduced opportunities for interdepartmental contacts. Classics was a happy department. When I joined it there was no shortage of applicants for its courses, particularly from a few schools in the Newcastle area. For third-year students we replaced prose composition with literary comment: the students were asked to write commentaries on the ways authors used the language in selected extracts of prose or verse from different periods.
I shared a Latin course with Duncan Cloud, a Latinist with a profound interest in Christian Latin and Roman law, and I certainly learnt a lot from talking to him about the pieces we set. Sheila Spire lectured on classical art and literature, particularly Greek tragedy. She was a good and enterprising teacher, with whom I had many stimulating conversations. She had many ideas, but suffered from writer’s block, which made her quite unable to publish. This made her deeply unhappy, so that she eventually took her own life. Towards the end of the sixties the transformation of so many grammar schools into comprehensives resulted in a sharp drop in the number of applications for courses for Honours in Classics or Latin. However, Leicester had an Honours Degree in Combined Honours, which offered Classical Civilization as one of its options. Courses in Classical Civilization could be taken for one, two, or three years. These courses became very popular, and the number of students opting for Classical Civilization increased year after year.
The late sixties was also a time of student unrest. Students occupied part of the administrative section of the university building and demanded a greater share in the government of the university. It was all quite good-natured. Addi Wasserstein positioned himself on the stairs and dissuaded the students from occupying the library. The long-term effect of the unrest was to make university teaching less subject- and more student orientated, a development that is still taking place. In time, this trend brought about considerable change in what was taught, and how it was taught, at both the secondary and university levels, though the wider consequences of this development for good or bad are still impossible to evaluate objectively. The fact that students who had their education paid for by the state were making trouble for the universities probably reduced public confidence in the public benefits of a university education, and made it easier for politicians to cut funding. It hastened the end of a golden age.
Much of my research has always been related to my teaching. Two papers on Thucydides,13 and one on Livy,14 developed out of courses I was teaching at Leicester. Now at last, I had an opportunity to get a revised version of my dissertation published. Tchalenko’s Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord,15 and of course A.H.M. Jones’s Later Roman Empire, published in 1964, had enormously increased our understanding of late antique Syria, and indeed of the whole late-Roman world. At the same time, a centralising and nationalising Labour government was making the theme of the negative impact on civic—selfgovernment of an active and interventionist central administration seem topical. That is how Antioch, City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire, came to be written and published.16 I have always been interested in religion, not least because of the massive influence our family’s Jewishness had on my early life. I was now teaching a third-year course on the persecution of the Christians. This was the stimulus that produced my Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford, 1979). John North’s still unpublished D.Phil dissertation17 had shown that in the later Republic, Roman paganism was more than just a mass of formal rituals or an antiquarian relic;18 that it was, in fact, a living religion. The question of how it worked, and why it was eventually abandoned, became all the more interesting. In 1979 Edward Thompson, head of Classics and Archaeology at Nottingham University, retired.19
I applied for the post and was appointed. That was lucky. Sustained pressure on university finances meant that no professor of classics was going to be appointed in Britain for more than a decade. Worse, at Leicester many, or even all, of the older professors would have to take early retirement. Nottingham was stronger financially, and so was able to avoid compulsory retirements. But the pressure was felt there, too, and it was impossible to replace retiring members of staff. Small departments like Classics suffered most, and Nottingham’s Classics department would undoubtedly have come to an end if the government had not introduced the controversial policy of closing small, and therefore presumably “uneconomic” departments. Our Classics department was able to offer a home to seven new and extremely able lecturers from Sheffield and Lancaster, whose departments had been closed down. With a staff of eleven it was for a short time much stronger than it had ever been. Nottingham was, and still is, an extremely popular university, owing, in part, to its central location, which enables students to go home and so to keep in touch with family and friends on the weekends. We had as many students as we were allowed to take, even for language-based courses. The department offered Single Honours in Classic, Latin, and Greek, and Joint Honours in Latin and French.
We ran Joint Honours in Ancient History and History and in Ancient History and Archaeology as well. Nottingham also started a Combined Studies degree. As the number of applicants with Latin or Greek at A level—or indeed at any level—declined, courses in beginner-level Latin and Greek became essential. To be worthwhile these courses must inspire students to really want to learn the language, and to do a lot of voluntary study. That is not at all easy to achieve. I retired in 1992. Soon after, Archaeology received a professor of its own and became an independent department, which it should have become much earlier. The relationship between Ancient History and Archaeology remains something of a problem: the two disciplines study different kinds of evidence, employ different methodologies, and throw light on different aspects of ancient societies. It is a mistake to expect archaeological research to answer questions set by historians. On the other hand, I remain convinced the two branches of scholarship need to draw on each other’s results. In retirement I set out to write a book about what happened to the ancient cities after the fourth century.
That topic had always interested me. However, it was only after my colleague John Rich had asked me to contribute a chapter to a volume he was editing, and after I had been asked me to write a chapter for CAH XIV,20 that my work became focused on the “later late city.” The resulting book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City, was published in 2001,21 but the topics of chapters I−III, XV, and XXI of the present volume are still closely related to its subject matter. In these years a second interest was competing with the late city: the part played by the barbarians in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In 1990 I published Barbarians and Bishops. It includes a chapter on Alaric and Alaric’s Goths, in which I argue that Alaric’s Goths originated as a unit of mainly Gothic soldiers, serving in the Roman army that defeated the usurper Eugenius, and that they only became a full people in the course of their lengthy wanderings.22 My argument uses the sociological doctrine of “ethnogenesis,” which I had found in Herwig Wolfram’s History of the Goths.23 I suspect that this chapter led to my being invited to participate in the discussions of the Transformation of the Roman Word Project, run by the European Science Foundation. I was in the group examining the accommodation of barbarians in provinces of the Empire. Walter Pohl chaired the section and the discussions were extremely stimulating. Chapters VI−XII in this volume, and chapters X−XIV in my Decline and Change in Late Antiquity,24 were written either for this project or as critical reflections on points raised in discussion.
The discussions were always stimulating and interesting, though I sometimes felt the “odd man out,” because it seemed that most of my colleagues, and not least Walter Pohl, had a completely closed mind to any view that admitted that these northern gentes had genuine histories and traditions of their own. Not content to demolish the view that these tribes were essentially racial organizations, they relied on sociological theory that ethnicity is nothing more than a negotiated system of social classification, and that ethnic differences are “situational,”25 to deny these peoples any institutions and values of their own, and so to reduce their contribution to medieval Europe to nothing at all. Such dogmatism is easily explained as a reaction to Nazi racism but it is nevertheless extraordinarily one-sided. The work of the great French historian Fustel de Coulanges is one-sided in a very similar way.26 When the Decline and Fall of the Roman City appeared, I was uncertain what to do next. Michael Whitby suggested that I might translate the letters of Ambrose for the Liverpool Translated Texts for Historians series. Robert Markus27 mentioned that Carole Hill, a former student of his, might be a useful assistant. Carole played an important part in the planning and early years’ work on the volume until domestic duties forced her to step aside; so I only translated the political letters.28 Work on Ambrose recalled me to Chrysostom. The two men were certainly totally different. While Ambrose was a very successful bishop of Milan, and, among other things, an extremely skilful politician, Chrysostom died in exile. But both men found themselves in comparable situations of conflict, and their writings show some surprising similarities.
The reasons for this seemed worth investigating. Then, at the Patristic Conference of 2007, Wendy Mayer talked to me about Martin Illert’s revisionist and challenging views on Chrysostom. So I decided that my next book should be about both Ambrose and Chrysostom.29 Many of my more recent papers have been written for conferences, and Antioch and Syria have been the predominant theme. So my publications will probably end, as they started, with writings about Syria. In the present volume, chapters XIII–XVI are about defence and settlement. Chapter XVI relates how immigrants and transhumants from the Arabia settled in the frontier area and were subsequently handed much of the responsibility for guarding and controlling the desert frontier. Chapters XVI–XXI are concerned with aspects of Christianisation. Chapter XX is about Theodoret. So I have at last responded to A.H.M. Jones’s suggestion that I should work on either Libanius or Theodoret by working on both. The circle is complete. Looking back, I find that most of my work has been instigated by external influences, those of my father, of my teachers, of books I happened to read, of lectures I was invited to give at specialised conferences. My interpretations have always been greatly influenced by political happenings at the time. As an old man—and as a younger man, too—my views have been conservative.
I have been lucky in that I have lived through a period when Late Antique studies were flourishing. The great masters Jones, Henri Irénée Marrrou, and Santo Mazzarino were followed by Averil Cameron, Peter Brown, John Matthews and Alan Cameron. I also learned a great deal from the next generation of young scholars, who directed scholarly attention to new areas. But I reacted against the minimising of the impact of the Germanic tribes, the blacklisting of “decline,”30 and the rejection of “crisis.”31 The old and the young look back on different experiences. They have also read different books, and they have had different teachers. At school some of my teachers had been teaching since before the first World War. But the old are not therefore always wrong. Immigration meant that I had my family and career in England. But if it had not been for Hitler, and if we had stayed in Germany, would my life have been so very different? It was because of our being Jews that we became refugees. My Jewish background has served me well in my career as an Ancient Historian. But Judaism has figured very little in my writings. At the same time the importance of religion has declined throughout the Western world to an astonishing degree. I find that regrettable. In 2012 I was invited, together with some other now very ancient refugees from Nazi Germany, to talk to sixth formers in a number of schools in Hamburg and the surrounding area about our experiences as Jews in Hitler’s Germany. The invitation was repeated in 2013, and, provided I am fit enough, I will go again in autumn 2014. My own experience has of course been very mild. My family left Germany before the war. We have been among the lucky ones. My colleagues on these visits relate experiences that are far worse than anything I have to tell.32 But the teachers in Hamburg and Lübeck are keen that their pupils should learn about the terrible things that were done— so that nothing of that kind should ever be allowed to happen again.
Introduction to the Volume The first part of this volume deals with developments in the West, the second with developments in the East. Footnotes draw attention to some of the work that has been published since I wrote my articles, or that I missed. The opening chapter deals with rubbish disposal in the cities of the early Empire, and highlights, among other things, the importance and widespread use of recycling. Chapter 2, on the “Crisis of the Third Century,” introduces the transition to Late Antiquity. The chapter discusses whether what happened to the Empire in the third century deserves to be classified as a crisis. I answer the question positively. The need for radical reorganisation after the crisis gave rise to many of the characteristics that make Late Antiquity a distinct period. In the third chapter I discuss whether the changes undergone by the cities of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity amount to “decline.” I again answer the question positively. My answer is based on an evaluation of precisely those features, political, urban, and demographic, which distinguish the classical city of the Greeks and Romans from urban conglomerations of other regions and other periods.
If we experienced radical change of the kind undergone by so many cities in the West, and ultimately also in the Greek East, we would surely consider that we were living through a catastrophe. At the same time I would not deny that the resulting changes had some important positive aspects, that Late Antiquity was creative as well as destructive, and that the foundations of a new and different culture—or cultures—were being laid. If contemporary scholars prefer to describe the process as a transformation, the difference between us is one of evaluation rather than of fact.33 In the following chapter, I turn from the decline of cities to decline in the countryside. The chapter draws attention to what seems to be a fact, namely that in many regions, both in the West and the East, the establishment of Roman rule was followed by a dramatic increase in the number of settlements and by an equally dramatic economic development, which did not, however, prove sustainable in the long run, though the reversal took place at different times and under different political conditions in different regions.
This phenomenon raises many questions that still await an answer. Chapter 5, “Landlords and Warlords,” stresses the importance of the fact that members of the imperial aristocracy of Late Antiquity (i.e., the senators of Rome and Constantinople, as well as the much wider senatorial order)34 were civilian and therefore vulnerable. They possessed immense wealth and great influence, which enabled them to dominate key administrative positions. But they had no military power. They were quite unable to mobilize clients into a force strong enough to confront the barbarian commanders who took over the government in the West or later the Muslim armies that overran the East. In this way the imperial elite was fundamentally different from the warrior aristocracies of the Germanic successor kingdoms.
The following four chapters are about barbarian identity. Chapter 6 reviews the debate on the nature of the Germanic tribes that established kingdoms in the provinces of the Empire. It argues that these people did indeed possess both core traditions and a sense of shared identity, and that these had evolved well before their entry into the Roman world. In Chapter 7, I argue that even though much of the material of Jordanes’ Getica is derived from Greek or Roman sources, his history of the Goths nevertheless preserves older traditions, which are genuinely Gothic. In Chapter 8, I oppose the view that Jordanes was a propagandist for the East Roman state, and that his writings were designed to assist the generals of Justinian who at his time of writing were preparing to overthrow the Ostrogothic kingdom. Jordanes was a barbarian who had been thoroughly Romanized, but who also remained proud of his Gothic heritage. I suggest that the writings of Jordanes are interesting precisely because they illustrate the state of mind of one of the many barbarians who prospered in the service of the Roman state and served it loyally, without abandoning their ancestral identity.
In Chapter 9, I examine descriptions of barbarians in the writings of different authors, and conclude that their evidence ought not to be rejected as a mere reiteration of an outdated stereotype, but that these descriptions are valid testimony that the dress of a typical Goth or Vandal could indeed be distinguished from that of a typical Roman.35 There follow three chapters dealing with features of the successor kingdoms that made them very different from provinces of the Empire. The chapter on barbarians and taxes (Chapter 10) was stimulated by C. Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages,36 and his distinction between the Roman Empire’s taxbased system of administration and the land-based system of the successor kingdoms. In Chapter 11, “Violence in the Barbarian Kingdoms,” I maintain that, contrary to the views of some contemporary scholars, Frankish Gaul was a more violent society than Roman Gaul had been. In Chapter 12, I argue that the distinction between Goths and Romans remained important in Visigothic Hispania right up to the end of the Visigothic kingdom, in as much as Goths remained the ruling people until the Arab conquest. In Visigothic Spain, Gothic identity was not simply “situational.”37
The same person could not choose to profess a Gothic or a Roman identity depending on circumstances. It was not just a matter of personal choice. A would-be Goth had to be accepted as such by the Gothic establishment. All the chapters in Part 2, with the exception of the last, are concerned with Northern Syria. This region underwent a dramatic transformation in Hellenistic and Roman times, a transformation which started in the third century BC with a succession of cities founded by the Seleucids, but the chapters in this volume are only about developments in Late Antiquity. The first three chapters are concerned with what was, and still remains, a problem: the extraordinary economic development of the desert fringe of Syria (and indeed of other regions of the Near East), in Late Antiquity. Chapters 13 and 14 are about settlement in the steppe bordering the Arabian desert. Chapter 1538 discusses what happened to the cities in Northern Syria in Late Antiquity.
This was of course quite different from what happened to cities in the West at the same time. There has been some important work in this area since I wrote those chapters. Field surveys have provided more information about the nature of occupation on the Plain of Antioch in Late Antiquity—and earlier.39 The last decade has also seen the publication of important research on the role of phylarchs and Arab federates in the defence of Syria. Chapter 16 traces the history of the Syrian and Arabian limes from Diocletian to the Arab conquest. It pays particular attention to the Jafnid dynasty of Arab federate leaders, who in the sixth century built up a powerful military following, comparable to the formidable bands built up by barbarian federate leaders, most notably by Alaric, in the West. I maintain that earlier generations of scholars were right to describe the Jafnids as Ghassanids, and that their originally quite disparate military following was given cohesion and unity by accepting Ghassanid identity. Chapter 17, “Julian’s ‘Hymn to the Mother of the Gods,’ ” is the first of five chapters on different aspects of Christianisation.
It examines Julian’s unsuccessful attempt to revive paganism, especially his attempt to make the traditional gods more acceptable to contemporary intellectuals by interpreting the primeval myths allegorically, claiming that they are veiled descriptions of a neo-platonic view of the working of the universe. Chapter 18 reviews the progress of Christianisation at Antioch, and the fading out of traditional worship, noting also that many traditional beliefs and practices lived on as widely held superstitions.40 That Christianisation met with only very sporadic opposition does not necessarily mean that pagans viewed the extinction of their ancestral cults with indifference. However, they were evidently not spurred on by anything like the zeal and urgency of activist Christians. How Christianisation influenced the imagery of domestic mosaic floors at Antioch is the subject of Chapter 19.41 Theodoret’s demonstration that Christianity is consistent with the teachings of the classical Greek philosophers, above all with those of Plato, is the subject of Chapter 20. Theodoret was a leading theologian of the School of Antioch in the first half of the fifth century. He had received a very thorough Greek education, but unlike the majority of Hellenes, whether pagan or Christian, he was also very conscious of the fact that he was living on the margin of the Hellenised world, and he rejected the confident belief of the educated Hellenes that their language and culture were uniquely valuable. Chapter 21, “The School of Antioch and Its Enemies,” explores the Antiochene school of biblical commentary, which synthesized elements of the two Christian traditions of Syria and Mesopotamia which differed in important respects. In Mesopotamia Syriac was already becoming a Christian literary language.42 The essays on West and East are not on parallel themes. The Western section includes chapters about the Germanic successor states, but has nothing about Christianisation, which was the most important development of all in the long run.
The Eastern chapters cover the theme of Christianisation, but have nothing about the rise of Islam and the establishment of the Califate. The rise of the Jafnids/Ghassanids discussed in chapters 16, Theodoret’s relativising of the values of the Hellenic language and literature, and the influence of Mesopotamian Christianity treated respectively in chapters 20 and 21, do, however, foreshadow the East’s emancipation from the Greco-Roman culture of the Mediterranean area. Hellenisation, which had been advancing ever since Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Near East, was beginning to retreat. The establishment of the Islamic empire was comparable to the establishment of the Germanic kingdoms in the West up to a point, but the consequences of its establishment were quite different. The Islamic conquests separated the Near East from the Helleno-Roman culture of the West, and ultimately caused Islam and Arabic to become the dominant religion and language of the whole region.43 But in the social and economic sphere the immediate impact of the imposition of Islamic rule was much less radical than the changes that had accompanied the collapse of imperial rule in the West. Among the lands governed from Constantinople it was only the provinces on the lower Danube that in the sixth and seventh centuries experienced not just the collapse of Roman administration, but that of the whole Greco-Roman way of life. This catastrophe is described in chapter 22, the last in the volume.
Acknowledgements My preoccupation with the themes treated in the chapters in this volume has been stimulated and helped by discussions at conferences organised as part of three collective projects: the Transformation of the Roman World programme of the European Science Foundation, 1993−98; the International Research Network Impact of Empire at Radboud University, Nijmegen; and the Shifting Frontier Conferences organised by the Society for Late Antiquity. I must express my gratitude to the editors of the following periodicals in which these articles first appeared for permission to reprint them here: The Journal of Late Antiquity, Antiquité Tardive, Documenti di Archeologia, and Mediterraneo Antico. Thank you also to the following publishers for permission to reprint chapters from volumes that they have published: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Brepols, British Academy, Classical Press of Wales, École Française de Rome, Franz Steiner Verlag, John Hopkins University Press, “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, Peeters, SAP Società Archeologica Srl, and Université Saint Joseph, Beyrouth. I have received many offprints. For the essays reprinted in the present volume those of Ariel Lewin, Fergus Millar, and Geoffrey Greatrex have been particularly helpful.
Over the years I also have had many conversations, and with more individuals than I can mention here, which have in some way or other helped me. All these essays were written after my retirement, but I have continued to enjoy the advantage of being able consult the scholarship of former colleagues at Nottingham University. When I was struggling with some problem of the later Roman world, John Drinkwater or Andrew Poulter frequently came up with the solution. I must record a special debt of gratitude to the late Robert Markus, who read the first draft of most of these chapters, some of them several times. His vigilance has saved me from many omissions and errors. He is, of course, in no way responsible for any that remain! Meanwhile, last but very far from least, Margaret, by now also in retirement, held down the domestic front with tireless efficiency while her husband busied himself in distant Late Antiquity.
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