Historical approaches to the inal centuries of classical antiquity have been very varied. The differences between them are implicit in the various names that have been applied to the period in modern scholarship: the later Roman Empire; the early Byzantine Age, late antiquity. These variations reveal divergent perspectives. Historians who have identiied their subject as the later Roman Empire have generally focused their attention on the history of the Roman state and its institutions, usually from an empire-wide perspective. Studies of Byzantium or the Byzantine Age, whatever chronological limits are adopted, necessarily deal with the eastern part of the empire, which was ruled from Constantinople. Histories of the west naturally have a very different emphasis, on the rise of the Germanic kingdoms and the origins of medieval western Europe.
Late antiquity is at irst sight a less slanted term, embracing the entire geographical range of the Roman and post-Roman world. However, in practice, the study of late antiquity has acquired much more speciic connotations. It has mostly been concerned with the eastern Mediterranean region and the Near East, concentrating on social, cultural, and religious themes, at the expense of political or institutional history. Histories of late antiquity have looked beyond the Roman state or the Roman Empire and drawn attention to other underlying conditions which gave unity to the period. Inevitably they place most stress on religious history, above all on the change from the polymorphous paganism of the ancient classical world to the predominantly monotheistic systems of early medieval Europe and the Near East: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
This change of focus also tends to involve displacing the chronological boundaries of the period. While most studies of the later Roman Empire cover the period from c.300-600, limits which are explicable principally in terms of political developments, writing on late antiquity usually favors a longer span from around 200 to 800, sometimes referred to as the “long late antiquity.” This period covered two great religious transformations and their social consequences: the conversion of the Roman world to Christianity and the emergence and rapid spread of Islam in the Near East in the seventh and eighth centuries. The educated classes of the Greek-speaking East and their less numerous western counterparts also preserved large elements of the classical culture of the Greco-Roman world. Students of late antiquity are as much concerned with the survival of this culture as they are with the impact of Christian and Islamic monotheism.
There are, therefore, radically different ways of approaching the last centuries of antiquity. The greatest historian of the period, Gibbon, pre-empted the choice for most of his successors by writing his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The famous title not only placed the Roman state in the foreground of his study, but also set a historical agenda which has dominated the thinking of most historians since his time. The challenge is to analyze and explain Rome’s decline. The Roman Empire remains the central point of focus for most major studies of the period written since Gibbon. This is explicitly acknowledged in the titles of J. B. Bury, The Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian (395-565) (1923), E. Stein, Ges-chichte des spdtromischen Reiches I (284-476) (1928) and Histoire du Bas-Empire II. De la disparition de I’empire de I’ocident d la mort de Justinien (476-565) (1949), and A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284-602. A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey (1964). These major studies, together with A. Demandt, Die Spdtantike. Romische Geschichte von Diocletian bis Justinian 284-565 n. Chr. (1989), still today offer the most ambitious and comprehensive surveys of later Roman history.
The inspiration for the alternative approach can be attributed to the influence of a single scholar, Peter Brown. His short book, The World of Late Antiquity, which was loosely deined chronologically as covering the period from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, effectively tore up the late Roman agenda and rede-ined the period as an object of study. Brown’s own large output, and that of a generation of scholars inspired by him, has explored areas and aspects of the history of late antiquity which were hardly noticed in the mainstream tradition of later Roman history. From the prodigious abundance of early Christian literature Brown and his followers have teased out and expounded an extraordinarily variegated picture of society and culture in all its regional diversity. Underlying this project is a pervading concern to explore the effects of religious change on individual and collective mentalities.1
The impact of this new approach to late antiquity has been enormous but uneven. Without question it has brought new impetus and vitality to the study of the period, especially in the English-speaking world. It has shifted attention away from the traditional objects of historical attention - emperors, generals, empires, states and armies - to religious igures, above all Christian writers, to communities united by faith, and to the role of common men and women living in uncommon or remarkable times. It is, of course, far harder to elicit generalized patterns of meaning from studies of this sort. Individual episodes and individual lives stand out from the crowded texture of events, sometimes with dazzling immediacy and vividness, but it is not easy to locate them within a larger context, and harder still to transform these contexts into an accurate representation of a social and cultural Zeitgeist. Classical and medieval historians alike have been captivated by these studies, but not always convinced by them.2
No one studying late antiquity today can fail to be influenced by the work of Peter Brown and his school, and much contemporary scholarship on the period, at least by English-speaking historians, tends to be eclectic. Thus the Cambridge Ancient History volumes XIII and XIV, which between them cover the period from 337 to c.600, combine a core of narrative history, emphasizing political, military, and broad institutional themes, with discussions of family and social life, religious phenomena, and approaches to the mentaUte of the period. Brown himself has contributed important sections to both volumes. The titles of Averil Cameron’s two books written in the early 1990s illustrate the same dichotomy of approach. The Later Roman Empire AD 284430 (1993) is a largely traditional history of the late Roman state, while The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity (1993, extensively revised second edition 2011), written for another series, abandons the chronological framework and detailed discussion of the institutions of the empire, in favor of a looser thematic survey, with a greater emphasis on social, economic, and religious issues. David Potter’s detailed and challenging survey of Roman history from 180 to 395, The Roman Empire at Bay, is an ambitious attempt to represent many facets of social, intellectual, and religious history within the grand sweep of political events.
The irst decade of the twenty-irst century has seen signiicant new developments and approaches with regard to the later Roman period, especially relating to the transition to the early middle ages. The most important contributions have come not from classical historians but from medievalists. Chris Wickham’s magnum opus, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean 400-800 (2005), is the most important landmark in the study of this period since A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire. This is an exhaustive “bottom-up” survey and analysis of changing social and economic conditions across the entire area occupied by the Roman Empire, with the exception of the Balkan regions, but including Britain and southern Scandinavia. Wickham’s emphasis, in the Marxist tradition, is on the control, ownership, and exploitation of the land, on relations between peasants and aristocrats, and on modes of production, rents, and taxation. He argues that one of the key distinctions between the post-Roman polities and states and the uniied empire that preceded them, was the inability of any of the powers after Rome to levy universal forms of taxation from their subjects, and the need for landowners, and political power-holders, to rely on land rents to sustain their political and military and institutions. A process of evolution, including long periods when the peasantry enjoyed relative autonomy from aristocratic control, led in due course to various forms of feudalism, in which power depended not on the imposition of centralized taxation, but on services and rents delivered to powerful landowners. Wickham has also written another large-scale history of the period, The Inheritance of Rome.
A history of Europe from 400 to 1000 (2009). This too ranges beyond the boundaries of modern Europe and includes a major section on the empires of the East from 550 to 1000, integrating the socio-economic analysis that underpins The Framing of the Early Middle Ages into a cultural and political history which culminates in the contrast between Carolingian Europe and the Islamic world of the Abbasids. Both books emphasize the economic relationships relating to land tenure which transcended the division of the Roman Empire between East and West, and suggest that similar transformational patterns in social and economic conditions can be observed across the entire region, albeit at different periods. This approach, relying heavily on archaeology and the evidence of early medieval charters, tends to play down, although it certainly does not overlook, the impact of warfare on post-Roman society, in marked contrast to other recent approaches to the late Roman West, which have emphasized the devastation, dislocation, and economic collapse caused by the barbarian invasions of former Roman territory.3 Another important synthesis by Peter Sarris, Empires of Faith. The fall of Rome to the rise of Islam, 500-700 (2011), has the same geographical scope but an earlier chronological terminus than Wickham, placing more emphasis on political and religious factors than Wickham’s materialist analysis.
New attention has also been given to the question of economic relationships between the Near East and the western Mediterranean environment, the subject of Henri Pirenne’s classic study, Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937). Pirenne’s hypothesis, that up to c.700 East and West were tied together by economic links based on long-distance trade, until these were broken by the early Arab conquests, and that links were not resumed again until the eleventh century, has been questioned and revised in the light of archaeological evidence, as well as on the basis of a more rigorous appraisal of the structures of the ancient and medieval economy, in which local and regional production not the long-distance transport of goods was paramount.4 Indeed the approach developed in P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (2000) seeks to establish that the Mediterranean should not be approached as a historical unity, but as an interlocking system of sub-regions, strongly emphasizing the significance of local environments and shorter links at the expense of all-encompassing interpretations of the region’s historical geography and the social systems that it generated. Meanwhile a new standard work evaluates the evidence for maritime connections across the Mediterranean during later antiquity, M. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and commerce AD 300-900 (2001).
These important studies of the transition from the late Roman to the postRoman period in Europe and the Near East have made it desirable to add a new chapter to the second edition of this book surveying the overall pattern of historical evolution from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages (Chapter 13). However, this book conforms to the older pattern of late Roman history. There are several reasons for this. One is quite simply that it is easier to organize the teeming abundance of historical evidence within the traditional contours than it is to reconfigure the framework into completely new thematic patterns. The point will be obvious to anyone who compares a volume such as CAH XIV, or the current standard German history, A. Demandt’s Die Spatantike, with Bow-ersock et al.’s Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World (1999), which is the first attempt to collect the harvest of the Brownian approach into a single handbook. Chronology, emperors, and armies are almost entirely jettisoned to make way for four thematic chapters on religion, two on attitudes to the past and the classical tradition, two on material culture, and one each on barbarians and ethnicity, and on war and violence. Only the last two overlap substantially with the more traditional agenda. The new approach is original, stimulating, and often carries historical conviction, but it also demands a huge sacrifice. The volume edited by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, Approaching Late Antiquity (2004) follows a more conservative agenda, in part due to the decision to focus on a much shorter period, from around 200 to 400.
Among the victims of the preference for the late antiquity rather than the late Roman history approach to the period are the historians of the period themselves. Historical writing was a central part of the educated culture of antiquity and it fiourished in late antiquity. Between the fourth and sixth centuries writers of extraordinary talent carried on the heritage and tradition of classical historical writing, which began with Herodotus and Thucydides. The histories of Ammianus Marcellinus and Procopius are essential for understanding the Roman Empire in the fourth and sixth centuries respectively. Their fifth-century counterparts, including Olympiodorus, Priscus, and Malchus, survive only in fragments, but these are sufficient to demonstrate their quality. The period was also documented by numerous less ambitious chroniclers, who presented visions of world history from the creation up to the writers’ own times, but with a localized, regional focus. The longest surviving example is the Chronicle of Malalas of Antioch. Late antiquity also witnessed the birth of an entirely new historical genre, Church history. This was created by Eusebius, whose history of the Church up to Constantine was continued and emulated by four works of the mid-fifth century, the histories of Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and the Arian Philostorgius, and by the sixth-century writers, Evagrius, John of Ephesus, and Ps-Zachariah of Mytilene. The work of these figures taken collectively underpins serious history of the later Roman Empire. It contributes only marginally to studies in the modern fashion of late antiquity.
Modern historiographical interests have also inevitably shaped contemporary approaches to the late classical world. Historians of the late twentieth century have widened the definition of their subject dramatically by choosing new themes and approaches. There has been a tendency to study social attitudes rather than social structures, popular activity in preference to high culture, mentalities rather than educational patterns, issues of personal or communal identity rather than questions of national politics. One general feature of these new approaches has been to play down the significance of individuals or specific events and look instead for underlying patterns, unconscious infiuences on human behavior, and, in social and economic history, to the importance of long-term, slow-moving change, the longue duree. The classic modern exposition of longue duree history, F. Braudel’s The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip, has been a huge infiuence on historians of late antiquity.
This approach, however, suggests a distinct detachment from the world that we experience. Modern media and the dissemination of news and information make it easier for us to appreciate the impact of historical developments as they unfold, and we should not too readily underestimate the significance of these changes simply because they have occurred in a short space of time. The extraordinarily rapid breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989/90 not only revealed how fragile imperial structures may be, but has also led to major shifts in the balance of world power. Within the same few years one of the world’s great religions, Islam, has also undergone a drastic transformation. Radical movements have become prominent, religious belief has crystallized into violent political action, and secular statecraft has lost ground to the charisma of religious leadership. Similar developments can easily be identified within Christianity and Judaism. The significance of the Islamic terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York has been colossal. Events of this magnitude lead to huge shifts in the world’s historical alignments. The nations of the world have been presented with stark choices about the nature of their relationship to the remaining imperial power, the USA. The nations of Europe after the collapse of the Russian empire have been reconfigured into the European Union, the world’s most powerful economic bloc. Its members confront the implications of this for their own nationhood, and debate whether religious identity should be a prime criterion for membership. Population transfers and large scale migration, especially within Europe, have had profound social and economic implications, and have contributed to the formation of new communal identities. The viability of nation-states themselves, the foundation of the modern world order, faces serious challenges both from transnational economic corporations and from religious ideologies.
Within our own immediate recollection we can appreciate the impact of imperial power and the entanglement of religion and secular politics. We have not only observed but undergone changes in national character and communal identity, and our recent experience enables us to document the vulnerability of national sovereignty to economic, political, or religious pressures. In addition many of the shifts in our collective perceptions can be traced to specific events and political developments. The world is not immune to the impact of histoire evenementielle. The events through which we have lived in the last twenty years cast a strong light back on later Roman history. They help to enhance our understanding of the evolution of the Roman and Sassanian empires, the role of Christianity as a defining force within society, the role of smaller civic units, the impact of the barbarian migrations, and the political and social transformations that followed from them. The history of the later Roman Empire holds
Up a mirror to the world we live in today. Through our contemporary experience we are better able to appreciate and learn from the past.5
World History
