Introduction

As we saw in Chapter 13, the Roman impact in Late Republican and Early Roman imperial Greece was all too often in the form of destruction and stagnation in the cities and countryside. But this generally led into an era of greater prosperity in Middle Roman (MR) imperial times (second to fourth centuries AD), although this period was punctuated by occasional phases of stress (the plague of the second century AD, widespread financial problems and Barbarian raids in the third century).

The final, Late Roman (LR) phase from ca. 400 to the mid-seventh century AD in the Eastern Mediterranean forms a strange conjunction of continuity and discontinuity, demolition and vigorous new building, a vigorous international economy but social decline, and increasing military insecurity. On the other hand, compared to the collapsing Western provinces, the Eastern provinces are entering a boom time (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988a). The Eastern provinces witness an extraordinary flourishing during this period, with almost unparalleled levels of activity in the countryside and in villages and towns, matched by a staggering outburst of construction in monuments to the new official state religion of Christianity — churches and monasteries, as well as in secular urban and rural villas. As a result of the late third-century reforms of Diocletian and subsequent emperors, the courts of the emperor, co-emperors, and junior Caesars were displaced away from Rome and, in both Eastern and Western provinces, moved closer either to the threatened frontiers (Milan, Trier, Thessaloniki) or to safer locations (Ravenna, Constantinople). When Constantine the Great elevated the last-named regional center of Byzantium to a “New Rome” (dedicated in 330 AD), as a rival to the “old,” he recognized the unequal resources now favoring the Roman East, unintentionally setting in motion a progressive transference of the Empire’s heart toward his foundation. Constantine’s other remarkable innovation, to tolerate (312 AD) and then encourage Christianity, changed the physical and mental world of the Empire as well as offering a new framework for holding its communities together against the overwhelming military threats stacked against its survival. His instinct was correct: Rome and the Western provinces fell into Barbarian hands in the fifth century and were converted into their kingdoms, but the Eastern provinces survived intact till the mid-seventh century and in parts even till the fifteenth century.

For archaeologists who focus on material culture, Late Antiquity is usually characterized as “Late Roman” because of the major continuities in ceramics and architecture, whereas art historians prefer to begin “Byzantine” civilization and history with this era of ca. 330—ca. 650 AD. We shall adhere

The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

To the former tradition in this volume and advise the reader that our “Early Byzantine” is the next, very different period from ca. 650—850 AD, when a new society arises which is the basis for the Greek Middle Ages.

In various regional projects within the Aegean the case is strongly made for an MR-LR landscape of great estates or villas, with dependent workers living within the villa complex or in separate nucleated or dispersed rural sites. The pottery is heavily dominated by so-called transport and storage amphorae, often distinctively combed on the outside, suggestive of commercial production for wide markets. Abadie-Reynal (1989) argues that the collapse of Rome and Italy to waves of Barbarians in the final fourth through late fifth century, the florescence of the Eastern Roman provinces, and the new focus ofConstantinople at the head of the Aegean Sea, converted Greece, hitherto a sleepy backwater with low external imports and exports, into the heart of empire. Moreover, the evidence of amphorae and tableware shows that exports from the East, including the Aegean, now flowed to the Western Mediterranean and even to Southwestern Britain (Fulford 1989).

Great Eastern cities such as Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, and the frontier armies, needed vast amounts of food and other material. The explosion of rural sites in Greece and other parts of the Eastern Empire from the 4th century on arose, to a significant extent, as commercial estates to service these needs. The local market town however lost importance and rarely increased in size. Many became village-like and rural, with agoras taken over by industrial workshops, burials, and market stalls, and show little sign of secular investment. Only the Christian church forms a focus of new construction: even shrunken village-towns usually boast new basilica-form churches with recycled architecture built into their walls or altars from abandoned pagan monuments. In fact the central role of Christianity in everyday practical and spiritual life cannot be underestimated. Cormack (1985) emphasizes the key changes by the mid-sixth century as the rise of the “holy man,” the development of monastic life, the growth in the power of bishops with their significant role in the management and sustenance of communities, and the rise of religious icons as foci of worship and presumed supernatural power.

Already from the third century and with increasing frequency and ferocity Barbarian tribes were raiding into the Empire from its northern frontiers, while the rising Persian (Sassanid) Empire attacked its eastern provinces. In response most cities construct a small internal fortification-wall during the third to sixth centuries AD well inside older, more extensive urban defenses, hastily made with ancient spolia (reused blocks and inscriptions of earlier centuries) (Gregory 1982, 1992). Though towns indeed usually shrink in total area, surface survey and excavation show that many cities included extramural settlements with churches outside these Late Roman fortresses. The walled kastra (castles) were often designed primarily to house garrisons of local militia and imperial troops, alongside the imperial administrators, the bishop, and ecclesiastical staff who now ran the towns. Large numbers of the class of rich landowners who used to control the city (curiales) had retreated to their rural estates, the great cities of the Empire, or imperial administration to avoid increasingly burdensome civic duties (Haldon 1990). Some have argued that many lesser Greco-Roman cities became villages associated with a fort (Foss 1977, 1996).

The Empire from the third century AD onwards, when the first Barbarian incursions successfully penetrated its borders, also began to redeploy its armies from concentrations along the borders to defense in depth. This encouraged the refortifying of neglected ancient city walls, but also the reconstruction of older landscape defenses within the provinces (Gregory 1992). Examples of the latter include one at the Thermopylae Pass, a key route between Northern and Southern Greece, and the Hexamilion wall which blocked access to the Peloponnese at the Corinth Isthmus (Gregory 1993). The mobile professional, full-time army (comitatenses), was placed in strategic hinterland points where Barbarian threats were expected, but its increasing weakness in stopping deeply-penetrating enemy incursions into the heart of the Empire led to greater reliance over time on local soldier-farmer militias (limitanei), who had a vested vital interest in defending their families and possessions from their bases in the continuous network of kastra (Liebeschuetz 2007).

The highpoint of the Late Roman Eastern Empire is marked by the meteoric career of the emperor

Justinian I (reigned 527—565 AD). The sustained economic and demographic expansion of the Roman East lay behind his ambition to reconquer the Western provinces (Color Plate 15.1). His general Belisarius arrived in North Africa in 533, conquered the Vandal kingdom and advanced into Italy in 535. The ruling Ostrogoths were a tougher challenge, and although their capital at Ravenna was taken in 540, imperial forces waged a further 15 years of warfare before mastering the rest of Italy. Meanwhile parts of Spain were regained from the Visigoth kingdom. Success in Italy was however reversed with the arrival of a stronger invader, the Longobards, whose stubborn resistance eventually led to the loss of Italy apart from footholds in the north and center such as Ravenna, and large parts of the south with Sicily, all of which remained largely in imperial control for several centuries to follow.

After ca. 540 AD the Eastern Roman Empire experienced continuing crises which almost exterminated it, although the worst time is the mid-seventh century AD which ushers in the Early Byzantine period (or “Dark Ages”). Exhaustive warfare against the Persian Sassanid Empire permanently weakened both the Eastern Romans and Sassanids, laying them open to an unexpected and devastatingly successful military empire expanding out of Arabia in the early seventh century, that of Islam. It was the Arab conquests that definitively removed North Africa and the Near East, Anatolia excepted, from Eastern Roman control. In the Aegean disasters include bubonic plague, major earthquakes, and invasions: from the late sixth century Slavic tribes penetrated the Balkans and gradually took over the countryside from imperial power, leaving coastlands and major towns as islands of Roman authority. The general prosperity of the early sixth century is thus all but destroyed by its end, when we begin to see a progressive deconstruction of the Greco-Roman way of life in both town and country (Bintliff 1997a, Liebeschuetz 2001). This prepares the way for new forms of society in a transformed, shrunken Eastern Empire, after the seventh century, in the guise of Byzantine civilization.

A final notable general feature of Late Antique society was the high profile of women (Gregory 2006). The weakness of the Empire encouraged attempts to secure succession to the throne through kinship, allowing mothers and sisters as well as wives to intervene, sometimes decisively, in politics. Even more in religion, the still formative Christian Church was an environment favorable to indirect forms of female power. Elite women were prominent in the foundation of churches and monasteries, with an early example being Constantine the Great’s mother Helena. More pervasively the rise of the personal worship of icons (religious images) in the home is associated particularly with women, whose public role in organizing worship was already denied (Cormack 1985).