In the autumn of ad 417, the Gallic aristocrat and former prefect of the city of Rome, Rutilius Namatianus (PLRE ii: 770-1), set sail from Ostia, heading home to his estates in southern Gaul. He later described his journey in a pleasant elegiac poem called On His Return (De redito suo). It began with verses reflecting upon Roman greatness and imperial destiny, stating that Rome ‘‘had made a city out of what had once been a world’’ (De redito suo 1. 66). By Rutilius’ day, that was a well-worn theme. A similar witty play on the Latin words for world (orbis) and city (urbs) had been made in the age of the emperor Augustus (27 bc-ad 14) by the poet Ovid, when he said that the space allotted to the city of Rome was the same as that of the world ( Fasti 2. 683-4). So confident an assertion might well be expected of the Augustan age, given the recent startling expansion of Roman territorial power. It might seem less obvious for Rutilius to have reprised it, given that he was writing only seven years after a Gothic army had sacked Rome, and at a time when the unity of the western empire was being eroded by barbarian tribes. Yet his reiteration of the theme shows the persistence into Late Antiquity of a long established tradition about the shape of the world and the central place of Rome within it.
A comparable reflection of that tradition was to be found in the work of another author who spent time at Rome, some twenty-five years before Rutilius. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus’ description of the Huns emphasized their almost bestial barbarity, and implicitly linked their lack of civilized habits (such as urban living, agriculture, and even cooking) to the fact that they lived far beyond the empire’s frontiers, ‘‘near the frozen ocean’’ (Amm. Marc. 31. 2. 1; see Wiedemann 1986).
In terms of both culture and habitation, the Huns were remote from the civilized world of Rome. Ammianus’ geographical vision was one that could trace its heritage back to late-archaic Greece. Its basic conception was of an inhabited world, the oikoumene, surrounded by an ocean; at the center lay the Mediterranean, where civilization was to be found; and the further one moved from this center, the more barbaric the world became (Romm 1992). At first, the civilized center was the Greek world around the Aegean, but in time, with the rise of Roman power, Rome and Italy came to constitute the center (Plin. HN3. 1. 1-5; 3. 5. 39). Such a conception, as the remarks of Ammianus and Rutilius show, remained influential in Late Antiquity (Humphries 2007c; see Inglebert 2001: 27-192).
Just as views of the center of the world had shifted from Greece to Rome, however, there were signs in Late Antiquity that alternative conceptions of the shape of the world and the location of its center were taking form. Rome’s status as the center of the empire was undermined in various ways. The tendency of emperors, from the late second century onward, to reside for strategic reasons in cities close to the frontiers meant that Rome itself was no longer the center of imperial power and patronage (Millar 1992: 28-53). Constantine’s creation of Constantinople exacerbated the trend. Initially, Rome’s superior status was maintained by, for example, according to senators of the old capital higher rank than that enjoyed by senators of the new city on the Bosphorus (Heather 1998: 185). Indeed, Ammianus could still refer to Rome as the eternal city (urbs aeterna) sixty years after Constantinople’s foundation (16. 10. 14; see 14. 6. 3-6). It would be unwise, therefore, to see the foundation of Constantinople as marking a swift eclipse of Rome’s ancient ideological significance, even if, already in the fourth century, some authors were extolling the advantages of the new capital over the old (Them. Or. 6. 83c-d). Nevertheless, Constantinople’s priority was firmly established by the seventh century, when the local Chronicon Paschale asserted that Constantine intended from the outset that his new city should be a second Rome and endowed it with institutions that reflected that aspiration ( Chron. Pasch. s. a. 330). While even at this late stage Rome could still be regarded as an imperial city (Humphries 2007a), its dilapidation and increasing identification with the emerging institution of the papacy left Constantinople’s elevated status within the empire unrivaled.
Such factors hint at an eastward shift in the geopolitical focus of Late Antiquity. But the development of Constantinople was only one reason for this. Another was the growing significance of Jerusalem, and the Holy Land generally, in an empire that was becoming increasingly Christian (Wilken 1992). Constantine himself expended much patronage in endowing Jerusalem with church buildings that reflected its importance in the Christian worldview as the site of Christ’s passion and resurrection, and this activity was to foster an upsurge in Holy Land pilgrimage (Hunt 1982). As a result, Jerusalem was on its way to becoming the conceptual center of the world for medieval Christendom (Wilken 1992: 230).
Those changes were not unrelated to political developments between the third century and the seventh. A worldview that emphasized the centrality of the Mediterranean world under Roman rule was harder to maintain as the empire’s dominance was undermined, first by the establishment of barbarian kingdoms in the west, and later by the emergence of the Islamic caliphate in the east (Olster 1996). Where once there had been a single state, now there was a multiplicity of polities. Thus the shape of the world in Late Antiquity underwent profound changes, not only conceptually but also in terms of the lived experience of the inhabitants of that world.
World History
