At least two major developments have characterized the recent study of the Later Roman Empire. One has been to redefine, if not actually blur, the distinction between ‘‘Roman’’ and ‘‘barbarian’’ (notable here being the impact of Whittaker 1994 and the wealth of reflection generated in the ‘‘Shifting Frontiers’’ conferences - seven since 1995; and see Lee 1993; Mathisen and Sivan 1996; Pohl et al. 2001). Chapters here by Gillett (26), Halsall (27), and Vanderspoel (28) illustrate but also question the emphases that can result. There is, of course, a territorial dimension (more than hinted at already by Humphries (ch. 7) and Leyerle (ch. 8)), in that the ‘‘frontiers’’ of the Roman world are no longer seen as firm boundaries on a map (which was never a sound perception anyway) but rather as broad bands of country in which people subject (in varying degrees) to the writ of the emperor, whether fiscal or legal, mixed cautiously but extensively with people who might have seen themselves as allies but were essentially ‘‘free’’ (and therefore unpredictable and occasionally threatening). The mixing was to a considerable extent commercial, trade being to the advantage of both groups of people and vividly attested in the museum cases of the world; but there were political bargains struck - ad hoc squadrons of foreign horsemen for the Romans, and armed intervention against rivals for the barbarians. Well before the Goths crossed the Danube in the ad 380s and the Volkerwanderung truly began to impress itself on the Roman provinces, a shift in definition was also taking place, whereby individuals and groups essentially ‘‘foreign’’ to the Roman world began to think of themselves as Romans or committed to Roman values and customs, and (more rarely) Romans were ready to ‘‘defect’’ in some sense to a ‘‘barbarian’’ world, impelled by a thirst for adventure, a desire for profit, or a wish to escape personal or institutional pressures - their own crimes or failures, the burden of taxation, the ruthless hierarchies and competition of an autocratic and elitist society (the formal apparatus of which is revealed here by Humfress (ch. 25) and to some extent, in the next section, by Lim (ch. 33) and Gaddis (ch. 34); and see Honore 1998; Harries 1999; Matthews 2000; Kelly 2004).
The other major development has been a more urgent and informed interest in ‘‘the east,’’ which, in the late antique context, means all those areas that lay between the heartland of Roman culture and control and the centers of Persian power - the world of the Syriac-speaking peoples and of the Arabs that lived to their south. Contemporary circumstances, since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (less than a century ago), the rise of Arab nationalism (if we can use so unitary a term), and the associated shift in the self-definition of Islam, have made this interest - political and economic as well as linguistic, historical, and cultural - both necessary and natural. It has been affected no doubt by ‘‘orientalism’’ and by a sense of superiority that has outlasted its imperialist self-justification; but it has led, nevertheless, to a powerful expansion of the western mind. But there has also been a more objective interest in these ‘‘oriental’’ cultures, seen on their own terms; an awareness of their sometimes troubled but always intimate relations with the Greco-Roman world - relations that predated the rise of Islam - and of the wealth of those cultures themselves, in terms of their capacity to generate ideas that traveled beyond their immediate borders and to develop artistic and literary styles of great beauty and perception (leading examples: Bowersock 1983, 1990, 1994b; French and Lightfoot 1988; Millar 1993, 2002b; and Shahid 1984a, 1989, 1995, with further volumes forthcoming; Howard-Johnston 2006). This is the world, and the field of inquiry, explored here by Drijvers (ch. 29), Shepardson (ch. 30), Cook (ch. 31), and Marsham (ch. 32).
One further consideration has to govern our analysis. Late Antiquity could be defined as the period in which stable ethnic identities (insofar as they ever existed), whether in Europe or in Asia (as those terms would then have been understood), underwent their most drastic revision since the closing decades of the Roman republic (for a grand sweep, see Fowden 1993); a revision unequaled until our own ‘‘exploratory,’’ imperial, and postimperial experience. (On ethnicity and identity generally, see Wolfram and Pohl 1990; Wood 1990, 1998; Miles 1999; Mitchell and Greatrex 2000; Geary 2002; Gillett 2002b; Goetz et al. 2003.) In the eastern sphere, we speak happily of Syrians and Arabs, even of Armenians, without always attending to their internal divisions (particularly notable in the Arab case) and their localized self-interest and tested loyalties vis-a-vis the greater powers to their east and west (factors most evident in the case of Syria and Armenia). There is a tendency to suppose that language by itself has a sufficient force when defining a people, an ethnos or gens. In the European sphere (where the observation applies as much to the Danube region as it does, say, to Gaul and the Rhine), vague terms like ‘‘Scythians’’ or ‘‘Alamanni’’ or apparently more precise labels like ‘‘Goth’’ or ‘‘Lombard’’ were all attempts to hold steady in the Roman mind, and to endow with a history (and hark back in this respect to Woods in the previous section (ch. 24), while noting Goffart 1980, 1988, 2006), groupings that were still in the process of being formed, and formed in a context of complex migration and varied patterns of negotiation, both among themselves and with Roman authorities, local and imperial. The very ability of a Goth, say, to think of himself as a Roman sprang from the fact that being a Goth in itself depended on a relationship already established with the Roman world (Wolfram 1988; Heather and Matthews 1991; Heather 1991, 1999). From there, it is easy and proper to move to a view that being a ‘‘Gallo-Roman’’ or an ‘‘African’’ or a ‘‘Copt’’ (see the particular example provided by Choat (ch. 23) in the previous section) demanded a constant adjustment, both in one’s political relations and in one’s sense of one’s own past, that gave the ‘‘Roman’’ world itself a remarkably patchy and unstable character, dangerously disguised behind such terms as ‘‘province’’ or ‘‘local elites.’’ This was indeed an age of ‘‘peoples’’ as much as of empires or kingdoms, with all the uncertainty and opportunism that implies (Goetz et al. 2003; and, for fundamental structural reflections, Hardt and Negri 2000).
World History
