The barbarians Fublicola referred to might have included people not resident in any town or estate but living permanently in the region, pastoralists willing to work the harvests in return for grazing rights, or nomads or semi-nomadic merchants attending markets on estates like Publicola’s.'2 They moved back and forth through farms and towns along the African frontier, checking in with Roman officials at stations where, Publicola specified, they received written receipts for swearing their oaths and paying their fees.820 Written certificates and other records were routine on the frontiers,821 but it is hardly surprising that none of these work permits survive. These would be temporary certificates and no doubt scrappy things.
But just as soldiers made note of their own annual oaths of loyalty to the emperor,822 more distinguished occasions than the mundane immigrations Fublicola described left physical memorials of the oaths Romans and barbarians shared. At Volubilis in Mauretania Tingitana, for example, truce conferences between Roman governors and tribal leaders in the late second and third centuries produced numerous inscriptions recording the establishment of peace and the dedication of an altar to the reigning emperor. Brent Shaw suggested we recall that this “ritualistic mode of contact” would have integrated the inscribed altar as a physical object along with other essential rituals not recorded in the inscription but often elaborated in literary sources—an “embrace, a kiss, or a handshake.” We should add oaths to the top of that list.823
For both the physical and verbal formulas of solemn interactions were meaningful,824 as in the scene set by Libanius, in his funerary oration for Julian, of the emperor cowing the Alamanni in 361. One of their leaders, Vadomarius, had broken his word and pillaged, so now Julian went in person to ensure that the rest would not follow suit. Libanius emphasized that, although most of the barbarians had kept their oaths faithfully, out of shame over Vadomarius and in awe of the emperor looming there above them they now not only confirmed their loyalty, they piled oath on top of oath.825
Here, as so often is the case in the literature, fidelity is relative.826 After all, the barbarian king Vadomarius was enticed to perjury by the Christian Roman emperor Constantius. If fidelity is relative, oaths by contrast are absolute: they are either honored or they are broken. Ancient and modern historians alike refer often and casually to barbarians’ infidelity and tendency to break their oaths. A range of authors from Julius Caesar through ammianus Marcellinus to Hydatius and procopius endorse this notoriety.827 Yet no one seems to have assembled a dossier of cases in which barbarians are shown keeping their oaths, or tried to balance the ledger by tracking how often Romans or Christians break faith with barbarians. Nonetheless some of our historians made a point of juxtaposing the way barbarians treated oaths with the way Romans treated oaths. Christian authors did the same, even though one text—augustine’s City of God—is curiously silent on the complexities of barbarian faith and fidelity, as Gillian Clark astutely demonstrates in this volume. Salvian of Marseilles, for example, writing around 440, accused Franks and Syrian merchants of habitual perjury but also scolded Christians who explained away perjury as a symptom of “pagan barbarism:” Christians were as likely to swear oaths and to break them as pagans were, Salvian insisted, and far better perjure oneself by demons than by God.828
Glimpses of demon oaths are rare, even in the literary sources. In one of his “canonical” letters addressed to Amphilocius in 375, Basil of Caesarea prescribed penance for Christians who had sworn “ethnic” or “Hellenic” oaths and come in contact with demon altars during times of barbarian (probably Persian) invasion. Notice first that Basil addressed swearing oaths side by side with eating sacrificial food—a convergence of concerns remarkably similar to what bothered Publicola, and further reason not to deride his “scrupulosity.” Next, Basil made it clear that many Christians complied promptly without being physically forced to swear whatever oaths the barbarians required of them. Romans may have been no more fazed by swearing barbarian oaths than barbarians were by swearing Roman oaths when the tables were turned.829
World History
