Roman Perspectives: Studies in Political and Cultural History, from the First to the Fifth Century 1910589276, 9781910589274

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
ABBREVIATIONS
1 GIBBON AND THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE: Causes and circumstances
2 POWER IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD A three-cornered dialogue: Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes, Tacitus
3 RONALD SYME, CONSTANTINE THE GREAT AND THE SECOND ROMAN REVOLUTION1
4 TACITUS,
AND THE INAUGURATION OF TIBERIUS
5 SIX TALES OF THE EQUESTRIAN ORDER
6 A LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
7 TRAVEL, DIPLOMACY AND THE DIFFUSION OF IDEAS IN THE ROMAN MEDITERRANEAN AND NEAR EAST
8 THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF THE BORDEAUX ITINERARY
9 AMMIANUS AND THE ETERNITY OF ROME
10 THE LETTERS OF SYMMACHUS
11 FOUR FUNERALS AND A WEDDING This world and the next in Fourth-Century Rome
12 CHILDREN’S GAMES IN AUGUSTINE’S
13 ROMAN LAW AND ROMAN HISTORY
14 AMMIANUS ON ROMAN LAW AND LAWYERS
15 ROMAN LAW AND BARBARIAN IDENTITY IN THE LATE ROMAN WEST
16 INTERPRETING THE
OF THE BREVIARIUM OF ALARIC
17 MACSEN, MAXIMUS, CONSTANTINE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

R OMAN P ERSPECTIVES Studies in the social, political and cultural history of the First to Fifth Centuries

John Matthews

The Classical Press of Wales

First published in 2010 by The Classical Press of Wales 15 Rosehill Terrace, Swansea SA1 6JN Tel: +44 (0)1792 458397 Fax: +44 (0)1792 464067 www.classicalpressofwales.co.uk Distributor in the United States of America ISD, LLC 70 Enterprise Dr., Suite 2, Bristol, CT 06010 Tel: +1 (860) 584–6546 www.isdistribution.com

© 2010 The author All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-1-910589-27-4 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset, printed and bound in the UK by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales

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The Classical Press of Wales, an independent venture, was founded in 1993, initially to support the work of classicists and ancient historians in Wales and their collaborators from further afield. More recently it has published work initiated by scholars internationally. While retaining a special loyalty to Wales and the Celtic countries, the Press welcomes scholarly contributions from all parts of the world. The symbol of the Press is the Red Kite. This bird, once widespread in Britain, was reduced by 1905 to some five individuals confined to a small area known as ‘The Desert of Wales’ – the upper Tywi valley. Geneticists report that the stock was saved from terminal inbreeding by the arrival of one stray female bird from Germany. After much careful protection, the Red Kite now thrives – in Wales and beyond.

CONTENTS Page Preface

vii

Abbreviations

xv

1. Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire: causes and circumstances

1

2. Power in the Classical world – a three-cornered dialogue: Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes, Tacitus

21

3. Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution

41

4. Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius

57

5. Six tales of the Equestrian Order

85

6. A Last Will and Testament

111

7. Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas in the Roman Mediterranean and Near East

157

8. The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary

181

9. Ammianus and the eternity of Rome

201

10. The Letters of Symmachus

215

11. Four funerals and a wedding: this world and the next in Fourth-Century Rome

255

12. Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions

275

13. Roman law and Roman history

291

14. Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers

311

v

Contents 15. Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West

327

16. Interpreting the Interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric

343

17. Macsen, Maximus, Constantine

361

Bibliography

379

Index

395

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PREFACE To engage in the re-publication of essays written over a period of many years is to court disappointment as well as satisfaction; so many arguments not stated with clarity, so many annotations not as crisp as they should be, so many important things hidden away, so many irritating quirks of style in pieces written so long ago. There are compensations, in recollections of the enjoyment with which one researched and wrote them, of how much one learned in doing so, of the opening up of new and unknown historical landscapes, and in one’s sense, the stronger in retrospect, of the connections between them. There is even the engaging possibility that one’s work may have improved in the meantime (which, after all, is what it is supposed to do). It is, however, not the memories of bygone pleasures that justify revisiting the past in this way, but a realistic sense of the value of what one has written, and a feeling that the sum of it may be more than the parts. Over the course of an academic career one’s writing tends increasingly to appear in conference proceedings which, however productive and enjoyable the conferences, produce a rather scattered publication record, and in collections of papers that may not be widely known. There might be something to be said for bringing some of it together, in such a way as to reveal the connections and continuities. The opportunity to add new and unpublished work is a final encouragement. The unifying theme of the essays collected in this volume is the formation of the cultural perspectives within which contemporaries (who are also our sources) viewed the world in which they lived. If this strikes one as an unsurprising theme (what else do historians ever do?), it should be understood as describing the underlying sense of discipline that controls our study rather than any particular project that might arise from it, and which now seems to have been present in my work from the beginning. It is an axiom requiring no repetition or proof, that we must understand our sources if we wish to understand the world which they described. I would put it a bit differently, in saying that to understand the sources is in itself to understand the world which they described, this being the world in which they also lived. This is so, even when the actual events which they described were in the past – for as is well known, large parts of the mental world of literate Greeks and Romans were located in the past. This is no profession of credulity. It does not mean that one believes everything the

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John Matthews ancient sources say, any more than, living in a modern democracy, one accepts the doctrines professed by every single political party. This does not mean that one does not study them, for understanding an opponent is not a handicap in political discussion; it is more like a secret weapon. So too we can understand Tacitus’ attitude to the early Principate while taking issue with it, and using what he writes in order to do so. It is a normal exercise of the historian’s craft, to borrow the English title of Marc Bloch’s remarkable book on that subject. If a distinction can be made between the practices of history and historiography, the first can be defined as the study of a society and the events that took place in it in some other time than our own, the second as a critical reflection, in its own right and as a contribution to cultural history, on the question ‘how people write history’ – that is to say, how they achieve the first of these aims. It is obvious that the distinction is not an exclusive one. All ancient history is the study of its sources (which includes the material as well as the written sources) and what modern interpreters have to say about them. Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus are sources for us at the same time as they interpret their own world, and we have to understand not only what they say, but why they say it in the way that they do. We are all inescapably practitioners of historiography, for history is writing, we write what we are capable of, and in doing so we express our intellectual and cultural formation as well as our own temperaments. We do not read all our sources with the same attitude of mind, realising that they too are the products of their times. We know that Thucydides and Tacitus are inherently sceptical, that their writings express, suggest and create doubt, all as part of their intention. We know too that late Roman saints’ lives are inherently credulous, in that the texts express no doubt at all about the impossible things they report; and we sharpen our own doubts accordingly. (One would think that the scepticism and credulity of ancient sources and their modern readers would be in inverse proportion to each other, but that does not always seem to be the case. It is a sad fact, that all too often the most credulous sources produce the most credulous readings.) Similar principles of discrimination apply to modern writing on the ancient world. We understand (see Chapter 13) that we should read Mommsen’s writings on Roman public law in the context of 19th-century discussions of the developing idea of a centralised state, just as (in Chapter 3) we read Syme’s Roman Revolution in the context of the fascist dictators of the 1930s. In juxtaposing the two, we encounter very different views of the nature of the Roman res publica, which in turn deepens our own understanding of that most important political and cultural institution.

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Preface To take a different example, discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, readers have often thought of the ‘General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West’ with which Edward Gibbon concluded Chapter XXXVIII (and Volume III) of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as insubstantial in relation to what has preceded. This is not surprising, since although this essay was published in 1781, it was drafted much earlier. It is when we turn to the notes, added later, that we get a sense of Gibbon’s engagement with the contemporary world. Here we find references to the Declaration of Independence, the foundation in London of the Royal Academy of the Arts, the discovery of Australia through the ‘voyages of discovery’ of James Cook. So too, Gibbon’s verdict, expressed in these ‘General Observations’, that the fall of the Roman empire could not be repeated in his own day because the nations of Europe, not differing much from each other in power and with similar technical capacities, would prevent each other from attaining imperial power, must be read in terms of late eighteenth-century political theories of the ‘balance of power’. All of them – Mommsen, Syme, Gibbon, no less than Tacitus – wrote in their time and reflect its preoccupations. Late Roman historians have rarely begun their studies in that field. They have moved into it, either forward from the Classical world or backward from the Middle Ages. In either case, there are disadvantages corresponding to the advantages (if it is at all clear which is which); medieval historians already know the future, Classical historians only know the past. Knowledge of the future seems to me a very dangerous commodity for a historian of any period (it is to be distinguished from that other ‘secret weapon’, the gift of hindsight), and it will be obvious from everything I have written, that I fall into the category of those who only know the past. Despite my own focus on late antiquity I have, both at Oxford and at Yale, continued to teach the early Principate (for many years, also, Greek history and even, at times, the history of the Roman Republic), and one of the constant elements of my approach to my area of special interest is the assumption that Classical techniques and modes of analysis can continue to be applied to it; indeed the weakening power of these methods is one of the clearest signs that the ancient world is coming to an end – much as the Breviarium of Roman law made for the Visigothic king Alaric II, discussed in Chapters 15 and especially 16, reveals the almost complete disappearance of that world from the consciousness of early sixth-century Gaul. Three of the most substantial chapters in this book, all previously unpublished, are on the political, social and legal history of the early Roman empire. A fourth paper, also unpublished though once given as a lecture, is a comparative excursion into Greek history – with the support of Tacitus

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John Matthews and Thomas Hobbes as well as Thucydides. This allows me to acknowledge my own student acquaintance with philosophy (ancient and modern) as well as Classical literature and history, in which Hobbes, like Aristotle, was always a favourite: not so much for any particular doctrines he might have espoused (far from it) but because of the probing intelligence that marks every page that he wrote, and the wonderful variety of his interests; this man was a true genius. I was happy to give Hobbes his say, through his translation of Thucydides and the recently published Discourse on the first fifteen chapters of Tacitus’ Annals which is discussed in Chapter 2. This leads naturally to the analysis of Tiberius’ accession that follows in Chapter 4, expressing my belief that not everything has yet been said about that much-discussed occasion, especially in relation to Tacitus’ own use of his sources. I would especially thank my Yale colleague Christina Kraus for her comments on this chapter. The influence of Sir Ronald Syme, formally recognized in the commemorative lecture printed as Chapter 3, is pursued in Chapter 5, which evokes the manner of Syme, and in the process takes up one of the few specific questions of Roman historical interpretation on which I think he was mistaken. Chapter 6, in the footsteps of Mommsen, is an unpublished study of an important inscription of the early second century known, though misleadingly, as the ‘Testament of Dasumius’, after which the selection reverts to materials that have appeared previously, with the exception of Chapter 8 on the Bordeaux Itinerary, a revised version of a lecture delivered in Oxford in November 2008, and Chapter 12, a jeu d’esprit on the Confessions of Augustine. As suggested earlier, in selecting material for re-publication I have focused on what has appeared in conference proceedings and other collections rather than in academic journals. Most of the latter are available online through JSTOR, and the articles are often of a specialized and technical nature, devoted to the discussion of specific issues and points of dispute. Of those which might have something to add to the themes of the present collection, ‘Olympiodorus of Thebes and the history of the West (AD 407–425)’, published in the Journal of Roman Studies of 1970, would have required too much revision, and in any case was reprinted in my Variorum collection of 1985 (see the Bibliography for all these references). ‘The tax law of Palmyra: Evidence for economic history in a city of the Roman East’, in the Journal of Roman Studies of 1984, would have been fitting company for Chapter 7, on the cultural ramifications of travel; while ‘The origin of Ammianus’, in the Classical Quarterly of 1994, reasserts with additional arguments a position set out in my The Roman Empire of Ammianus, of 1989. Anyone who is interested can easily find these papers and locate them where they belong.

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Preface The essays have been revised to give uniformity to their presentation, to accommodate editorial changes and to strengthen connections between the papers; only the later part of Chapter 10 has been revised to incorporate the results of a later paper that modified the conclusions of the original version. The bibliography has not been updated systematically, though I have added certain directly relevant work that is known to me. Some chapters retain the less formal style that is appropriate to essays that were given as lectures and seminar presentations. The chapters are grouped by topic, in the framework of a general movement through time. I am grateful to my friend Anton Powell and to The Classical Press of Wales for undertaking the publication of these essays, and to the editors and publishers of the previously published papers for permitting their inclusion in this volume; detailed acknowledgments are made below. I recognise also all those historians, some of them close colleagues and others far distant, whose publications have provoked my own ideas and fed my research. Quite apart from our conversations on endless subjects, ranging from the dilemmas of Wotan to the flowering habits of the clematis, my wife Veronika Grimm has encouraged me and kept me moving when my energies have flagged and when competing duties have claimed too many of them; for all of this and much more, my deepest thanks. This book does not carry a formal dedication, but I am sure that both Veronika and Anton will join me if I inscribe it in honour of the dedicated school and university teachers we have had in many places and at all stages of our education, and of the teaching profession in general and all that it stands for. It is an underrated profession, but one that is essential to the well-being of our society.

*

*

*

Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 12 are previously unpublished, though Chapter 2 was given as a Tracy Lecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago in April 2003, and Chapter 8 as a lecture at Oxford University in November 2008. Chapter 1 first appeared in Rosamond McKitterick and Ronald Quinault (edd.), Edward Gibbon and Empire (1997), and is reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3 was the inaugural Syme Memorial Lecture given at the Victoria University of Wellington in September 1992 and was published, together with an appreciation of Syme that appeared in the Oxford Magazine in September 1989 but is not included here, in Prudentia 26 (1993), pp. 24–41. It is reprinted here by permission

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John Matthews of Victoria University and the editorial board of Prudentia. Chapter 7 appeared in F. M. Clover and R. S. Humphreys (edd.), Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), the proceedings of seminars held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April 1984 and at the University of Chicago in October 1984; it is reprinted by courtesy of The University of Wisconsin Press. Chapter 9, from C. T. Holdsworth and T. P. Wiseman (edd.), The Inheritance of Historiography, 350–900 (Exeter University Press, 1986), is reprinted by permission of The University of Exeter Press. Chapter 10, which appeared in J. W. Binns (ed.), Latin Literature of the Fourth Century (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Boston, 1974) and was reprinted as Chap. IV of Political Life and Culture in Late Roman Society (Variorum Reprints, 1985), is revised to incorporate in its final pages some conclusions of ‘Symmachus and his enemies’, in F. Paschoud and others (edd.), Colloque genevois sur Symmaque, à l’occasion du mille six centième anniversaire du conflit de l’autel de la Victoire (1986), pp. 164–75. It is reprinted in its revised version by permission of Taylor & Francis Books (UK). Chapter 11 appeared in Philip Rousseau and Manolis Papoutsakis (edd.), Transformations of Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown (Ashgate: Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2009). The sequence of four chapters on aspects of Roman law begins in Chapter 13 with the introduction to the subject published in David S. Potter (ed.), A Companion to the Roman Empire (Blackwell; Malden, MA, Oxford, UK, and Carlton, Victoria, Australia), and continues with ‘Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers’, from J. den Boeft, D. den Hengst and H. C. Teitler (edd.), Cognitio Gestorum: The historiographic art of Ammianus Marcellinus (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Amsterdam, Oxford, New York, Tokyo, 1992), the proceedings of a conference held at Amsterdam in August 1991. These chapters are reprinted by permission respectively of Wiley-Blackwell ( John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Malden, Massachusetts) and The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chapter 15, presented at a conference held in Swansea in 1998, appeared in Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex (edd.), Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (2000), and is reprinted by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., London, and The Classical Press of Wales. Chapter 16 was presented at the second conference under the series title ‘Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity’, held at Columbia, South Carolina in March 1997, in Ralph Mathisen (ed.), Law, Society and Authority in Late Antiquity (2001), and is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 17 stands by itself in every way; it is the only essay reprinted from a standard academic journal, first appearing in The Welsh History Review of 1983, and then as Chapter XII of Political Life and Culture in Late Roman Society; it is reprinted here for a second time with

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Preface slight revisions by permission of The Welsh History Review. The photographs of the testamentary inscription in Chapter 6 were freely made available from their original publication (by R. Neudecker and Maria Grazia Cecere, Wiesbaden, 1997) by the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut at Rome. To all these, I express my thanks. October 2009

John Matthews New Haven, Connecticut

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ABBREVIATIONS Standard abbreviations for texts, editions and reference works are used throughout. The following is a list of the more frequently used or cumbersome titles; those that occur only on one or two occasions are given in full in the notes and Bibliography. AEp AJP BAR Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians Bruns, Fontes 7 CCL Chastagnol, Fastes CIL CJ CPL CQ CRAI CSEL CTh GCS HSCP ICUR ILCV IGR

L’Année Epigraphique American Journal of Philology British Archaeological Reports R. C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius,Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus (2 vols., Liverpool, 1983) K. G. Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani Antiqui, 7th ed. by O. Gradenwitz, 1909 Corpus Christianorum, series latina A. Chastagnol, Les Fastes de la Préfecture de Rome au Bas-Empire Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Codex Justinianus, ed. P. Krüger, Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol 2 (Berlin 1877, repr. Aalen, 1969) Corpus Papyrorum Latinarum (ed. R. Cavenaile, Wiesbaden, 1958) Classical Quarterly Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum Theodosiani libri XVI, cum Constitutionibus Sirmondianis, ed. Th. Mommsen, with P. Meyer and P. Krüger (Berlin, 1905, repr. 1962) Die Griechischen Christlichen Schrifsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte Harvard Studies in Classical Philology G. Rossi (ed.), Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae E. Diehl (ed.), Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres, 3 vols, Berlin, 1925-1931, repr. 1970 Inscriptiones Graecae ad Res Romanas Pertinentes, ed. R. Cagnat and others, vols. I, III, IV, Paris, 1906–1927, repr. Chicago 1975)

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Abbreviations ILS Jones, Later Roman Empire

JECS JHS JRS JTS MAMA MEFR MGH, auct. ant. –––– , leges Müller, FHG OGIS PG Pharr

PIR (PIR 2 ) PL PLRE I and II

REA Riccobono, FIRA 2 SChr SEG ZPE ZSS, Rom Abt.

H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (3 vols., Berlin 1892–1916) A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A social, economic and administrative survey (3 vols. and maps, Oxford, 1964; repr. in two volumes, 1973) Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Roman Studies Journal of Theological Studies Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome Monumenta Germaniae Historica, auctores antiquissimi –––– , leges C. Müller, Fragmenta Historicum Graecorum H. Dittenberger (ed.), Orientis Graecae Inscriptiones Selectae J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca Clyde Pharr (ed.), The Theodosian Code and novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions; A translation, with commentary, glossary and bibliography (Princeton, NJ, 1952; repr. New York, 1969) Prosopographia Imperii Romani (1st ed. by E. Klebs and others, Berlin 1897–8; 2nd ed. by E. Groag and others, Berlin, 1933–) J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina Jones, A. H. M, Martindale, J. R., and Morris, J., The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire I, AD 260–395 (Cambridge, 1971) and II, (ed. J. R. Martindale, Cambridge, 1980), AD 395–527 Revue des Etudes Anciennes S. Riccobono, J. Baviera, J. Furlani, Fontes Iuris Romani AnteJustiniani (2nd ed., Florence 1968–72) Sources Chrétiennes Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung, Romanistische Abteilung

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1 GIBBON AND THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE: Causes and circumstances Having reached the surrender of Carthage to the Vandals in the year 439, Gibbon ended Chapter XXXIII of Decline and Fall by telling the ‘memorable fable of the SEVEN SLEEPERS, whose imaginary date corresponds with the reign of the younger Theodosius and the conquest of Africa by the Vandals’ (II, pp. 291–3).1 Gibbon was not the last philosophic mind to feel the fascination of the story,2 and that he was not the first is attested by his own erudite tracing of the legend and its variants, from Syriac and Latin versions to the Koran and among Moslem nations from Bengal to Africa, even in the ‘remote extremities of Scandinavia’, not to mention the inscription of the saints’ names in the Roman, Abyssinian and Russian calendars. It told of the martyrdom of seven young men of Ephesus under the Emperor Decius by their entombment in a cave which was blocked by stones. The young men fell asleep, and were wakened, it seemed after a few hours, when someone opened the cave and let in the sunlight. They sent one of their number to town to buy bread, but he could no longer recognise the country; the main gate of Ephesus was, to his amazement, surmounted by a large cross. His odd dress and old-fashioned speech equally surprised an Ephesian baker, to whom the young man, in an episode that should interest numismatists, offered a coin of Decius as current exchange. The mystery was solved, if that is the word, when it was discovered that it was not just a few hours but almost two hundred years, since the young man and his companions had ‘escaped from the rage of a pagan tyrant’ to find themselves living, however briefly, under a Christian emperor – ‘however briefly’, because as soon as the seven young men had bestowed their benediction and told their story to their amazed hearers, they ‘at the same instant peaceably expired’. Gibbon assigned the interest of the fable to its ‘genuine merit’; the contrast between two ages so far apart would display what was surprising in the new world, to one with a still clear image of the old; ‘his surprise and his reflections’, wrote Gibbon, ‘would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance’. Such a perception would in Gibbon’s view,

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Chapter 1 however, not constitute history, for that would be concerned, not with the dramatic contrast between two ages so presented, but with the process by which one became the other; the ‘perpetual series of causes and effects’ by which ‘the imagination is accustomed to unite the most distant revolutions’. The historian’s task is not just to draw dramatic and pleasing contrasts, but to make connections. The two hundred years between the reigns of Decius and Theodosius II were ideally placed to provide the materials for such reflection, for during this period, in Gibbon’s words, the seat of government had been transported from Rome to a new city on the banks of the Thracian Bosphorus; and the abuse of military spirit had been suppressed by an artificial system of tame and ceremonious servitude. The throne of the persecuting Decius was filled by a succession of Christian and orthodox princes, who had extirpated the fabulous gods of antiquity; and the public devotion of the age was impatient to exalt the saints and martyrs of the Catholic church on the altars of Diana and Hercules. The union of the Roman empire was dissolved; its genius was humbled in the dust; and armies of unknown Barbarians, issuing from the frozen regions of the North, had established their victorious reign over the fairest provinces of Europe and Africa (II, p. 293).

Whether as history or romance, however, these two centuries did not form a consistent framework for Gibbon’s conception of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He had, famously, set its origins under the Antonine Emperors of the second century, when the ‘long peace and uniform government’ of the Romans had ‘introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire’ – notably, in this passage, by the extinction of the fire of genius, and the evaporation of the military spirit among the populations of the empire (I, p. 83). Gibbon’s narrative begins with the sole reign of Commodus (180–92), which marked the end of this era of seductive, poisoned peace; but even this choice of starting point, as he wrote later in a possibly excessive fit of self-criticism (one has to begin somewhere), was a mistake now beyond retrieval. He should, he now claimed, have begun with the civil wars after the death of Nero, or even with the ‘tyranny which succeeded the reign of Augustus’.3 In the General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West with which he concluded Chapter XXXVIII, he extended the framework still further, for he began this section by describing how Polybius had explained the strengths of the Roman constitution of the Republic to his Greek contemporaries of the second century BCE. In Gibbon’s powerful phrase, Polybius had ‘opened to their view the deep foundations of the greatness of Rome’, for those Greeks who erroneously believed that this greatness

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire was the product, not of merit, but of Fortune.4 The longer perspective is evoked in an episode narrated in Chapter XXX of Decline and Fall. When the senate was invited by the government of Ravenna to discuss the terms of peace offered by Alaric the Visigoth in 408, it was as if they – rather like the Seven Sleepers, except for the reversal of values of past over present – ‘had been suddenly awakened from the dream of four hundred years’: They loudly declared, in regular speeches, or in tumultuary acclamations, that it was unworthy of the majesty of Rome to purchase a precarious and disgraceful truce from a Barbarian king; and that, in the judgment of a magnanimous people, the chance of ruin was always preferable to the certainty of dishonour (II, p. 156).

That ‘tumult of virtue and freedom’ subsided, however, and the senate voted a ransom of 4,000 pounds of gold. The decline of Rome was not to be impeded by such occasional reminders of her once-great liberties. Historical processes, the constructions of historians, are unstable phenomena; as their ‘true causes’ move back in time, so too their moments of fulfilment move forward. There is however a point beyond which a historical process may become so attenuated that it cannot be examined with proper discrimination, and it has often been remarked that Gibbon’s concept of ‘Decline and Fall’ is not particularly well-defined. He said as much himself, in a revealing passage of his Memoirs: So flexible is the title of my history that the final era might be fixed at my own choice: and I long hesitated whether I should be content with the three Volumes, the fall of the Western Empire, which fulfilled my first engagement with the public (Memoirs, ed. Bonnard, p. 164)

– words which echo the postscript to the preface published with the appearance of Volume III in 1781: The entire History, which is now published, of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the West abundantly discharges my engagements with the Public. Perhaps their favourable opinion may encourage me to prosecute a work, which, however laborious it may seem, is the most agreeable occupation of my leisure hours.5

The point, if it is accepted, that Gibbon did not have an exactly formulated definition of ‘Decline and Fall’, is relevant to the famous General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West (II, pp. 508–16), and more broadly to the way in which the critic should approach Gibbon as an analytic historian of the later empire. The General Observations, taken as a whole, are not so much a positive statement of what Gibbon thought to be the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire, as a summary of what he thought he

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Chapter 1 could take for granted, together with a wish to correct misunderstanding. Above all, they point to the future. As I just mentioned, they begin with a reference to Polybius as the writer who had made clear to Greek contemporaries the true character of the greatness of Rome. It may be no coincidence that the last clause of the narrative part of Chapter XXXVIII, in the sentence immediately preceding the General Observations, contains a reference to ‘the history of the Greek emperors [who] may still afford a long series of instructive lessons, and interesting revolutions’ (II, p. 507); but that is to look forward to the second part of Gibbon’s project, and does not fully connect the Observations with the preceding text of a history from which they seem, to me and to others, to stand apart. One reason for this, obviously, is that the Observations were actually drafted at an early stage, whether in summer/autumn of 1772 or, perhaps more likely, in summer 1773.6 What Gibbon now says about the decline of Rome as ‘the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness’ is less a positive attempt to offer an analysis of the phenomenon, than a prefiguring of the contrast with the states of modern Europe which forms the second part of the Observations. Indeed, in so far as anything needed explaining, Gibbon thought it was not the fall, but the rise, of Rome that ‘may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind’ (II, p. 509). He meant, of course, that it had already deserved the reflection of just such a mind – that of Montesquieu.7 The story of the ruin of Rome, Gibbon wrote in 1772 or 1773, was ‘simple and obvious’. Whether this is so or not, Gibbon did not go into that question here; except that in his opinion that ‘as time or accident [my italics] had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight’, we have re-entered the dimensions of the memorable fable of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. There, as we saw, Gibbon noted the distinction between seeing two worlds juxtaposed without transition, and the tracing of the series of causes and effects – ‘time or accident’ – by which the two were connected. Next in the Observations come two points of correction (II, pp. 510–11). It might be thought that the foundation of Constantinople was a material factor in the decline of the west, but Gibbon thought that not to be so; ‘The foundation of Constantinople more essentially contributed to the preservation of the East than to the ruin of the West’ – again looking forward to the still notional second half of Decline and Fall. So too one might think that the ‘introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire’. Gibbon conceded the force of the argument but offered in return the contribution of ‘eighteen hundred pulpits’ to the lawful obedience of the people of the

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire Roman world, and the mollifying effects of Christianity on the ferocious temper of its barbarian conquerors. These two factors are often seen as contributory factors in the decline of the Roman empire, but, in this passage at least, Gibbon denied this, to him commonplace, interpretation. All of this – drafted before Gibbon published even Volume I of Decline and Fall – is more observation than systematic analysis, and his reader may be misled if he mistakes one for the other. Gibbon now moved on to modern Europe, in order to explain how its sovereign states, individually modest in size and improved by a level of scientific invention that made them collectively immune from barbarian conquest, might hope to avoid the fate of the Roman empire. It is at this point worth emphasis that the editions of Gibbon that most present-day readers have at their disposal fail in their arrangement of volumes to bring out the role of the Observations in the economy of Decline and Fall. They stand, not indeterminately between Chapters XXXVIII and XXXIX in the middle of Volume IV of Bury’s seven-volume edition (to take one example), but emphatically at the end of the first three volumes of the original publication, bringing to an end what Gibbon thought would satisfy his ‘first engagement with his public’.8 The narrative text preceding the Observations ends with the reference to the ‘Greek emperors’ who would form the second part of his work, and the beginning of Chapter XXXIX is composed as a new start to a new Volume and instalment. The Observations themselves end, in a gracious footnote added to the final version, with praise of the five voyages of exploration (the voyages of James Cook) ‘undertaken by the command of his present Majesty’, who had also, ‘adapting his benefactions to the different stages of society’, founded a school of painting in his capital, and `introduced to the islands of the South Sea the vegetables and animals most useful to human life’ (II, p. 516 n. 15).9 One is reminded of that earlier footnote, to a description of the dietary habits of the barbarian folk of Roman Britain, expressing the ‘pleasing hope that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere’ (I, p. 1001) – in the form possibly, as he himself hinted with characteristic sly subtlety, of that distinctly Gibbonian New Zealander, Sir Ronald Syme.10 In his famous essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, Sir Isaiah Berlin used a fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus to suggest ‘one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general’; ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing ’. Some people, like the hedgehog, know one big thing – ‘a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance’.11 Others, like the fox, know many things; ‘their thought is scattered or diffuse, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a

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Chapter 1 vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing...unitary inner vision’. Among Berlin’s examples, Dante is a hedgehog, Shakespeare a fox; Plato a hedgehog, Aristotle a fox. Herodotus is an obvious fox, Thucydides, whom Berlin happens not to mention, a prime candidate for hedgehog;12 and so on. Tolstoy, Berlin proposes, believed himself to be a hedgehog, but was in fact a fox, and it may be that a similar misidentification sometimes affects readers of Gibbon. I am not sure that Glen Bowersock was correct in asserting that Gibbon’s problem ‘consisted in the continuing search for a single secret cause’, and that ‘It is unclear why Gibbon’s concept of the philosophic spirit kept driving him to find a secret poison, a single hidden cause to explain the whole story of Rome’s decline’.13 The question can certainly be posed differently. Gibbon, as Momigliano wrote with a delightful humour which I remember much appealing to me as a graduate student of late Roman history, ‘must not be made responsible for the D.Phil. candidate’s dream of sleeping beauty: somewhere in the wood the true cause of the decline and fall of the Roman empire lies hidden and only awaits to be awakened by him, the lucky D.Phil. candidate’. To Gibbon, ‘the decline and fall of Rome suggested a picture of new societies, laws, customs, superstitions, something to be described in its various stages rather that to be deduced from certain premises’.14 To adapt this to the literary zoology of Sir Isaiah Berlin, Gibbon was a fox – erudite, imaginative, universal, someone who, in his own words, ‘by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries’ (I, p. 235). Gibbon himself says as much on the first page of Decline and Fall and, given this clue, in many other passages. Even the full title of his work, ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ – not, as he might have taken over from Montesquieu, ‘Considerations on the Decline and Fall...’ – is revealing, and at the end of the very first paragraph of his work Gibbon spells out the implications of this: It is the design of this and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of [the Antonines’] empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall’ (I, p. 31; my italics)

– that is, not to explain or analyse, but to describe and bring out the most important circumstances of a known phenomenon. The notions of ‘decline and fall’, of a ‘declining empire’ and so on, as well as the physical metaphors aptly noted by Bowersock, like the ‘secret poison’, the ‘wounds of civil

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire discord’ affecting the Roman empire like a human body,15 recur throughout the text without doing more than provide reminders of what the book is about; they do not, and are not meant to, explain it. The historian’s task, to return to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, is to ‘unite the most distant revolutions’ by a ‘perpetual series of causes and effects’, not to expatiate upon the ‘pleasing romance’ provided by the juxtaposition of two ages; this is what Gibbon means by ‘deducing the most important circumstances’ of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, and this too is what is meant in the General Observations, in Gibbon’s reference to the way in which ‘time or accident’ had removed the artificial supports of the Roman empire. All this is at one with the emphasis placed by Momigliano and others (from Byron onwards) on Gibbon’s overpowering erudition, and with the first words of the ‘Advertisement to the Notes’ (which in the first printing of Volume I appeared at the end of the volume and not at the bottom of the page); ‘Diligence and accuracy’, wrote Gibbon, ‘are the only merits which an historical writer may ascribe to himself; if any merit indeed can be assumed from the performance of an indispensable duty’.16 Contrast the philosophe Voltaire, for whom details in history were ‘the vermin that kills great works’ – or, to put it differently: Details which lead to nothing are in history what baggage is to an army, impedimenta; for we must look at things in large, for the reason that the human mind is small and sinks under the weight of trivial encumbrances.17

It speaks for itself that no good historian will spend time on details that lead to nothing (although this may not always be clear at the outset); but no more than an army, as Europe was about to see with a vengeance, can history function without impedimenta. For Gibbon, therefore, the fall of the Roman empire, itself no mystery, was to be described in the sequence of circumstances, sometimes accidental, by which it came about. Not surprisingly, there were many moments at which something relevant to the process came to pass and, therefore, many moments to which Gibbon seems to assign the decisive influence. These passages come with a certain similarity of expression which can give the reader the impression, when he puts them side by side (ignoring the hundreds of pages that may lie between them), that Gibbon is contradicting himself, or allowing himself the constant luxury of hedging his bets by invoking ever new and shifting ‘immediate causes’. Having located the infusion of ‘secret poison’ into the Roman empire as early as the time of the Antonines, it would be surprising if Gibbon had found no ‘important circumstance’ of the decline of Rome before the fourth century, the first significant moment occurring under the emperor Septimius

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Chapter 1 Severus, with his unleashing of the power and privileges of the army. So Chapter V ends emphatically, that ‘Posterity, who experienced the fatal effect of [Severus’] maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire’ (I, p. 148). Bowersock considered that Gibbon had forced himself into this ‘remarkable opinion’ by his obsession with a ‘secret cause for the whole decline of Rome’. Having expressed my doubts already about this obsession, I should add in support of Bowersock that, whatever its origin in Gibbon’s mind, his view about the contribution of Severus would not be widely accepted today. It might still be agreed that Severus and his dynasty saw significant changes in the military organisation of the Roman empire, but if so, this would not be in the terms laid down by Gibbon, but with reference to the pressures on the frontiers of the Roman empire going back at least to the time of Marcus Aurelius.18 Gibbon’s narrative of the third century is from a technical point of view the weakest part of his treatment of the Roman empire, largely because of his reliance on the set of imperial biographies known as the ‘Augustan History’, a text of which he perceived the difficulties without drawing their consequences. (It was, indeed, in his understanding of the principles of source criticism that lay Gibbon’s most obvious methodological weakness, as was pointed out by an early German reviewer.)19 The reign of Constantine might next seem to offer great opportunities for one tracing the circumstances of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Various aspects of the reign – the founding of a new Rome, the recruitment of barbarians, the adoption and encouragement of Christianity – were all features in Gibbon’s conception of the process of decline; while the manner in which the ‘abuse of military spirit had been suppressed by an artificial system of tame and ceremonious servitude’, as he wrote in commentary on the Seven Sleepers, formed the subject of the imposing chapter XVII, in which Gibbon described the political system of Constantine and his successors, using sources from the time of Constantine himself down to the publication of the Theodosian Code in 437. Gibbon did not adopt an especially critical approach to Constantine, even though one was already formulated by hostile pagan writers of the fourth and fifth centuries. Though he wrote of his description as ‘amusing the fancy by the singular picture of a great empire, and illustrating the secret and internal causes of its rapid decay’ (I, p. 602), he regarded the actual decline of the empire (i.e. the circumstances of its decline) as beginning only after the strong emperors of the fourth century. The reforms of Constantine strengthened it and, at the price of a further suppression of liberty and independence, maintained its institutions for several generations.

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire In what must be admitted to be a rather inconsequential fashion, the Emperor Julian is said to be responsible, in some measure, for the triumph and the calamities of the empire, not, as we would expect and as Gibbon’s admired Ammianus concedes, because of the disastrous losses on the Persian campaign which he had undertaken but because, fatally wounded in the course of the campaign, he neglected to nominate a successor (I, p. 946). More significantly, Julian’s religious fanaticism and otherworldly intellectualism might seem to stand against him, but in Gibbon’s words the emperor ‘could break from the dream of superstition to arm himself for battle; and, after vanquishing in the field the enemies of Rome, he calmly retired to his tent, to dictate the wise and salutary laws of an empire, or to indulge his genius in the elegant pursuits of literature and philosophy’ (I, p. 873). Despite the distant unreality of this picture, Gibbon’s emphasis on the value of action marks him, as it seems to me to mark Ammianus Marcellinus, as an essentially Classical historian.20 Valens, who lost the battle of Hadrianople to the Goths, is a straightforward case. From his reign, wrote Gibbon, may justly be dated the ‘disastrous period of the fall of the Roman empire’ (III, p. 70), a point of view forcibly endorsed in a footnote, the last in Chapter XXVI, criticising Montesquieu for a most serious historical error in asserting that the Goths had left the Roman territory after the battle. The error was inexcusable, wrote Gibbon in one of his rare direct denunciations of a scholar, ‘since it disguises the principal and immediate cause of the fall of the Western Empire of Rome’ (I, p. 1083 n. 143). Yet again, at the end of the reign of Theodosius, Gibbon wrote, after the military writer Vegetius, that it was the pusillanimous indolence of the soldiery that might be considered as the ‘immediate cause of the downfall of the empire’ (II, p. 70).21 After the reign of Theodosius, who like Constantine receives a surprisingly warm endorsement from Gibbon, a series of inactive emperors, both in east and west, failed to assert the initiatives of their predecessors and delegated military control to barbarian war-lords. Of one of these emperors, Honorius, Gibbon wrote with magnificent sarcasm that since, in the course of a busy and interesting narrative, he might possibly forget to mention the death of such a prince when it occurred, he would take the precaution of observing at this place (under the year 413) that he survived the last siege of Rome about thirteen years (II, p. 218).22 Taking this select list of immediate or proximate causes as a systematic account of the reasons for the decline and fall of the western empire, we might concede it as a somewhat assorted collection, with an unhelpfully broad conception, both in time and character, of what counts as an

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Chapter 1 ‘immediate cause’. This is however a serious objection, only if we regard Gibbon as one of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs, such as would be forced into self-contradiction by an obsession with a single cause for the decline and fall of the Roman empire. But, as Momigliano said in a passage quoted earlier, for Gibbon the decline and fall of Rome suggested a much more complex and varied picture of ‘new societies, laws, customs, superstitions, something to be described in its various stages rather than to be deduced from certain premises’.23 To convey this complex and varied picture, Gibbon established his account not only upon the narratives that would trace the most important circumstances of the decline of the Roman empire, but upon the digressions that are, in themselves, a monument to Gibbon’s multifarious learning, and to his debt to the historians of the Classical world. In reading Decline and Fall, it is just as important to grasp the interrelations of these with each other, as with the narrative chapters that frame them. Chapters VIII and IX, on the Persians and the Germanic peoples respectively, should be taken with the vivid pages within Chapter XXVI on the manners of the pastoral nations, and with Chapter XXXIV on the history of the Huns – in the course of which Gibbon’s conception, at least of the indirect causes of the fall of the Roman empire, extends to the frontiers of China.24 Chapters XV and XVI, on the character of Roman religion, the early advances of Christianity and its persecutions by the Roman government, should be taken, not only with the delayed Chapter XXXVII on the monastic life and the conversion to Christianity of the barbarian peoples, but also with the long Chapter XXI on the persecution of heresy, the descriptions of the pagan policies of Julian in Chapter XXIII and the end of paganism in Chapter XXVIII. With the large section of Chapter XXXI on the society, population and physical extent of Rome, we should connect the earlier description of the foundation of Constantinople in the first part of Chapter XVII. The four chapters on Constantine (XVII–XVIII, XX–XXI) form a substantial monograph on that emperor, taking within themselves the form of narrative and digressions largely because Gibbon deliberately segregated civil and ecclesiastical affairs in his narrative. This was a tactical, not a strategic segregation, one of the most notable features of Gibbon’s writing being its extraordinary assimilation of all types of source and all subjects. No arrangement of a large literary structure is ever perfect and there are, to be sure, some inconcinnities in Gibbon’s managing of his digressions. He remarks that the account of the monastic movement (XXXVII) is ‘purposely delayed’, but does not explain why this should be, with an account that begins with St. Antony and proceeds into the fourth

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire and fifth centuries but is placed after the accession of Theodoric the Ostrogoth in 493. Perhaps the explanation lies in the second half of the chapter, on the conversion of the barbarians, but this does not really belong to it, and the effect is to delay an account that is clearly relevant to Gibbon’s conception of the religious history of the fourth century. The description of the city of Rome and its society is offered in the context of the sieges of the city by Alaric in 408/10, but its material is taken explicitly (in the form of an extended translation) from Ammianus Marcellinus, whose account is contextually located quite differently, and begins with an explanation of the eternity of Rome (14.6.3ff.). More significantly, the location of the digression on Roman law in the time of Justinian ( XLIV) defers that important subject to the second part of Gibbon’s ‘engagement with the public’, and means that Gibbon cannot give to it due recognition in its proper place, as a component of the liberties and rights of the Romans in earlier centuries. This is unfortunate, since most modern historians, like ancient ones, would look to the law as a restraint on the tyranny of those emperors in whose hands Gibbon laid much responsibility for the decline and fall of the Roman empire.25 He obliquely concedes in its narrative context (the violent deaths of Papinian and Ulpian) the significance of the Classical jurists of the Severan period (I, pp. 156f., 175); a deeper reflection, based on the Digest of Justinian and its sources, might conclude that the temper of the Severan (and, indeed, the Tetrarchic) Age was as much juristic and militaristic.26 And, for some reason, in his account of Roman law under Justinian, Gibbon pays hardly any attention to the earlier codification of Theodosius II, the subject of the scholarly work of Godefroy that was so much admired by him. In his Memoirs Gibbon described the Theodosian Code, with Godefroy’s commentary, as ‘a work of history, rather than of Jurisprudence’ (ed. Bonnard, p. 147), which only increases one’s surprise that he made so little reference to it in his account of Roman jurisprudence, and that this subject as a whole did not take its place as a central feature of the history of the Roman empire. It is indeed a paradox that in Gibbon’s text one reads about the foundation of barbarian legal systems (in Chapter XXXVIII) before one reads about Roman law itself; and that, on a literal interpretation of Gibbon’s words mentioned earlier, if he had failed to proceed beyond the first three Volumes of his history he would not have discussed the subject at all. It is one of the ways in which, as will be pursued below, Gibbon tended to follow the disposition of his sources. The Digest was edited under Justinian, so that is where, despite its massive relevance to the earlier period, he located the digression that grew out of it. This is not the place for a systematic account of the ways in which

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Chapter 1 modern scholarship has superseded Gibbon’s methods and conclusions. J. B. Bury’s introduction to his edition has a review of how this stood at the very end of the nineteenth century, after a hundred years of scientific scholarship since Gibbon’s time. By the end of the nineteenth century Gibbon’s texts had largely been superseded by critical editions – though one would be hard pressed to find an occasion on which any conclusion drawn by him was vitiated by a false reading in a text, and Gibbon made more use than most modern scholars of the great commentaries of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editors.27 There is affection as well as irony in Gibbon’s admiration of the great editor of the Greek patristic writer of the fourth century, John Chrysostom – Father Montfaucon, ‘who, by the command of his Benedictine superiors, was compelled to execute the laborious edition of St. Chrysostom, in thirteen volumes in folio (Paris, 1738)’ (II, p. 237 n. 1) – and of the learned Tillemont, ‘who compiles the lives of the saints with incredible patience and religious accuracy. He has minutely searched the voluminous works of Chrysostom himself ’ (II, p. 252 n. 41)! This was the same Tillemont, ‘whose inimitable accuracy’, according to a famous phrase in the Memoirs, ‘almost assumes the character of Genius’ (ed. Bonnard, p. 147). Gibbon knew nothing of the developed sciences of numismatics and epigraphy, and was unable to exploit these sources as modern historians use them, as the base of his method and to assert their independence of the literary texts;28 for this, one needs the systematic collections, such as the Corpus of Latin inscriptions initiated by Mommsen and its Greek equivalents. Yet Gibbon knew how to illuminate his theme from this material as it then stood. He was aware that the ‘majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces’ were the products, not directly of imperial policy but of local munificence by the leading citizens of the empire, citing the inscription of the ‘stupendous bridge at Alcantara’ as proof that it was ‘thrown over the Tagus by the contribution of a few Lusitanian communities’, and quoting the tenth book of the letters of Pliny to show the competitive rivalries of local communities of Asia Minor (I, p. 71 with n. 65). The same passage and others show Gibbon’s appreciation of the possibilities of archaeology, at least in terms of an awareness of the standing ruins and surviving artefacts of the Roman period – especially when one adds the reminder that the idea of writing Decline and Fall first came to his mind while reflecting on the ruins of Rome, and that his first idea was to write a history of the city rather than of the empire as such.29 It is not irrelevant to add that the very year, 1764, of Gibbon’s famous (though somewhat redrafted)30 musings on the Capitol was that of the discovery of the Great Theatre at Pompeii. Nine years

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire earlier, in his French Journal of the tour of Switzerland which he undertook from 21 September to 20 October 1755, the eighteen-year-old Gibbon noted the ruins of Avenches in words curiously reminiscent of those of Ammianus Marcellinus, who was later to mean so much to the historian of the later Roman empire; ‘a en juger par les ruines il a du avoir été fort grand et fort beau’, he there wrote of a town that was ‘bien plus considérable autrefois qu’il n’est aujourdhuy’, mentioning columns, remains of walls, a small amphitheatre, and a bath-house mosaic discovered just four years earlier.31 Papyrology was a science of the future when Gibbon wrote, and indeed still was so when Bury added his survey of scholarly developments since Gibbon’s day. The ‘stately and populous city of Oxyrinchus’ (as Gibbon spells it) does gain a single mention in his text, as a place of twelve churches, and of ten thousand female and twenty thousand male adherents of the monastic profession (IV, p. 60); but neither Gibbon nor anyone else could have anticipated the historical riches that lay hidden within this efflorescence of misguided piety. As for the technique of prosopography, that too lay beyond Gibbon’s grasp as a developed method, but that he would have seen its possibilities is clear. In describing the proclamation of Pertinax after the death of Commodus, he set out in detail the earlier military career of the new emperor as ‘expressive of the form of government and manners of his age’ (I, p. 121 n. 45), and later, describing the late Roman state as established by Constantine, explicitly paralleled this (with cross-reference) with the career of a late Roman court official, Mallius Theodorus, as it is known from a poem of Claudian (I, p. 616 n. 121).32 In the implications of these two passages lurk the unborn souls of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani and the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire respectively. As we saw earlier, a more rigorous use of the principles of source criticism might have saved Gibbon from the largely fictitious narrative, based on the Historia Augusta, which he provides of the history of the third century (from the reigns of Elagabalus and Alexander Severus to the immediate predecessors of Diocletian). If he had fully appreciated that the fifth-century historian Zosimus was in all essential respects an abbreviated paraphrase of the late fourth-century pagan historian Eunapius, he might have come up with an answer to the chronological problem of the conversion of Constantine, and his description of the luxury of the Romans in the time of Theodosius might have appeared to him as the propaganda that it is. This, to be sure, would have undermined what he here has to say about ‘the progress of luxury amidst the misfortunes and terrors of a sinking nation’; especially since it is immediately followed by the dubious

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Chapter 1 judgment on the pusillanimous character of the soldiery derived from Vegetius that I mentioned earlier (II, p. 70). On the other hand, where there are no relevant advances in technique since Gibbon’s day, and where the sources he used can still be understood as he read them, his judgments are often still highly pertinent. To take just three examples, Gibbon’s assessment of Constantine the Great is not only extraordinarily full and well documented but presents an emperor closer to the modern conception than some that have appeared in the meantime. His explicit appreciation of the impact upon the Goths of the invention of writing as the vehicle of their translated Bible has observations relevant to modern discussions of literacy and the role of a culture based on a book.33 His judgment of the ascetic movement of the fourth and fifth centuries is as waspish as only Gibbon can be, but many will judge it closer to the truth than some of the neo-fundamentalist hagiography of our own time. In general, and it can be a strength and a weakness, Gibbon tended to follow the grain of his literary sources. He did so consciously, relying on his judgment of their value. He thereby produces a marvellous account, derived from a famous fragment of Priscus, of a Byzantine embassy to the court of Attila the Hun, and his account of the history of the third quarter of the fourth century, from Constantius II to Valentinian and Valens, is constantly underpinned, not only by the information but by the judgment and correctives of Ammianus Marcellinus, whom he rightly admired. At the same time, his equally famous criticisms of Ammianus’ literary style suggest an inference relevant to the way in which Gibbon conceived of the historical character of his subject.34 That Gibbon’s concept of the decline and fall of the Roman empire was influenced by his judgment of the quality of its literary sources, is clear from what he wrote in the Memoirs of his early reading of Classical texts: The Classics, as low as Tacitus, the younger Pliny, and Juvenal, were my old and familiar companions. I insensibly plunged into the ocean of the Augustan History; and in the descending series I investigated, with my pen almost always in my hand, the original records, both Greek and Latin, from Dion Cassius to Ammianus Marcellinus, from the reign of Trajan to the last age of the Western Caesars (ed. Bonnard, p. 146f.).

We should not make too much in this passage, taken alone, of Gibbon’s language of descent through the ages. People commonly use phrases like ‘down to the present day’ without, at least consciously, thinking of a process of decline (though they may also say ‘up to the present day’). But other passages also suggest that Gibbon’s concept of decline should be seen, less as a specifically studied analytical tool than as an attitude

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire embedded in his Classical culture and the use he made of it. I can illustrate this by citing three of Gibbon’s opinions on literary and artistic movements of late antiquity, taking first his judgment on late Roman philosophy, especially the movement of the ‘New Platonists’: The declining age of learning and of mankind is marked, however, by the rise and rapid progress of the new Platonists. The school of Alexandria silenced those of Athens; and the ancient sects enrolled themselves under the banners of the more fashionable teachers, who recommended their system by the novelty of their method and the austerity of their manners. Several of these masters...were men of profound thought and intense application; but, by mistaking the true object of philosophy, their labours contributed much less to improve than to corrupt the human understanding (I, p. 398).

Gibbon took a similarly negative view of the visual arts of late antiquity, as he saw them exemplified on the Arch of Constantine at Rome (c. 315) – a structure with which he will certainly have made himself familiar during his youthful visit to Rome. The arch, wrote Gibbon, still remains a melancholy proof of the decline of the arts, and a singular testimony of the meanest vanity. As it was not possible to find in the capital of the empire a sculptor who was capable of adorning that public monument, the arch of Trajan, without any respect either for his memory or the rules of propriety, was stripped of its most elegant figures. The difference of times and persons, of actions and characters, was totally disregarded. The Parthian captives appear prostrate at the feet of a prince who never carried his arms beyond the Euphrates; and curious antiquarians can still discover the head of Trajan on the trophies of Constantine. The new ornaments which it was necessary to introduce between the vacancies of ancient sculpture are executed in the rudest and most unskilful manner (I, p. 428).

As for the literary arts of late antiquity, the popularity of the poems of Ausonius seemed to Gibbon to ‘condemn the taste of his age’, one particular production being dismissed as a ‘servile and insipid piece of flattery’ (II, pp. 19f., nn. 1–2). In sharp contrast stands his judgment of Claudian, a poet of altogether more Classic virtues: In the decline of arts and of empire, a native of Egypt, who had received the education of a Greek, assumed, in a mature age, the familiar use and absolute command of the Latin language, soared above the heads of his feeble contemporaries, and placed himself, after an interval of three hundred years, among the poets of ancient Rome (II, pp. 163f.).

Gibbon omitted to remark, as he might have done, on the fact that both the greatest Latin poet and the greatest Latin historian of late Antiquity originated in the Greek east, Claudian from Alexandria and Ammianus Marcellinus from Syrian Antioch.35 His preference for Claudian over other

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Chapter 1 late Classical poets was clearly because he most resembled the poets of the Silver Age. Gibbon did not ask what positive aspects there might have been to the developments which he saw in late Classical philosophy, art, and poetry, nor did he wonder what changes in the sensitivities and self-perceptions of men might have taken place to explain these developments. In a fashion that has long survived Gibbon, late Roman culture was judged by the standards of an earlier period, and these standards were as much aesthetic as historical. Particularly telling are those recurring phrases shown here in italics, ‘the declining age of learning and of mankind...’, ‘the decline of arts and of empire...’. If we may use them to judge by, Gibbon conceived the nature of the artistic and literary culture of a society as fundamental to an evaluation of that society in all its aspects, and saw the relationship between the two, the arts and society, as a very intimate one; if, indeed, he consciously distinguished them at all. He took a standpoint from which a judgment of the culture of late antiquity led him – as he might have said, insensibly – to a corresponding judgment of the decline of society and its government. Not surprisingly, it is in the fields of late Roman literary and artistic style, and of later Roman religion and philosophy, that some of the most interesting recent advances have been made, as historians have looked for more positive appreciations of what Gibbon, and many after him, perceived in such negative terms. The new ornaments added to the arch of Constantine may have been ‘executed in the rudest and most unskilful manner’; but this cannot be said of the mosaics of Ravenna, which display some of the same stylistic characteristics and are composed with the most exquisite subtlety. It goes without saying that modern judgments of the arch of Constantine also are very unlike Gibbon’s in their positive evaluations, even of those aspects of style that Gibbon found most offensive.36 In the last resort, it must be remembered that, although Gibbon’s history was one of decline and fall, it was in the long term an optimistic work, because of its lessons for the present day. The effects of that great revolution, the fall of the Roman empire, were still felt in the world of Gibbon’s day, but modern Europe, as he explained in the General Observations – drafted, as we have seen, before he had published any of Decline and Fall – was well placed to avoid the same fate. I will say no more about this judgment, true or false as it may be, except to illustrate the theme from one of Gibbon’s characteristically precise footnotes, and to adduce a passage of his text. Describing the submission of the Alamanni to Clovis the Frank, Gibbon had occasion to mention the ‘vestige of stately Vindonissa [that] may still be discovered in the fertile and populous valley

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire of the Aar’ (II, p. 456). At this point a marginal note in one of Bury’s square brackets adds ‘[Windisch]’ to denote the spot at which the early Romans had established a legionary fortress, and at the foot of the page appears one of Gibbon’s luminous notes: Within the ancient walls of Vindonissa, the castle of Habsburg, the abbey of Königsfeld, and the town of Bruck, have successively arisen. The philosophic traveller may compare the monuments of Roman conquest, of feudal or Austrian tyranny, of monkish superstition, and of industrious freedom. If he be truly a philosopher he will applaud the merit and happiness of his own times (II, p. 456 n. 23).37

In Chapter XXXIV on the wars of Attila with the Romans, Gibbon had described the unique resistance offered by ‘the firmness of a single town’, the obscure, in fact otherwise unknown, Azimus in Illyrian Thrace (II, pp. 309f.). Organising its own resistance, the town held out against Attila and induced him to make an agreement, even deceiving him when he asked for the return of captives, by asserting that they had already killed them. Delegating to the casuists the morality of this deception, Gibbon asserted that every soldier and every statesman ‘must acknowledge that, if the race of the Azimuntines had been encouraged and multiplied, the Barbarians would have ceased to trample on the majesty of the empire’ (II, p. 309). Here for Gibbon was a lesson for modern times – one for every ‘soldier and statesman’ – as it should have been for its own; a community whose sense of liberty had borne the weight of the ‘stupendous fabric’ of the political power of Rome, and expressed in action the spirit of industrious freedom. Notes 1 References to Decline and Fall are to volume and page of the magnificent edition in three volumes by David Womersley, with Introduction and Appendices (and Gibbon’s own Index) (Harmondsworth, 1994). The widely available edition in seven volumes by J. B. Bury (1897–1901) is still useful for its historical corrections, and for its introductory discussion of the progress of historical method since Gibbon’s time. 2 It forms the riveting opening sentence of Peter Brown’s Carl Newell Jackson Lectures, The Making of Late Antiquity (1978); ‘I wish I had been one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’! 3 Womersley, III, p. 1093 (Bury, I, p. xxxv). See for Gibbon’s second thoughts (and adducing the parallel of Tacitus), G. W. Bowersock, ‘Gibbon on Civil War and Rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire’, in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 3, 1976), pp. 63–71, at 63. 4 II, p. 508. In the text Polybius is referred to without name as a ‘wiser Greek’ and ‘sage historian’, but he is identified in a footnote.

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Chapter 1 5

In Womersley’s edition, Vol. I, p. 3; Bury, I, p. vii. Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian: 1772–1794 (1989), p. 8; for 1772, P. R. Ghosh, ‘Gibbon’s Dark Ages; some remarks on the genesis of the Decline and Fall ’, JRS 73 (1983), pp. 1–23, at 18–19. David Womersley presents the Observations as separate from Chapter XXXVIII, without chapter heading and with new note sequence. 7 Craddock, p. 9. 8 The division comes at Vol. II, p. 517 of Womersley’s edition, complete with Gibbon’s new title page and preface. 9 Craddock, p. 13. The ‘five voyages’ of exploration take us down to 1776; similarly note 8 of the Observations, on the ‘political situation’ of the American colonies. 10 R. Syme, Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, p. 22 n. 3 (cited below, Chapter 3, n. 11). 11 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history (1953 and reprinted), p. 1. 12 See however Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (1987), pp. 145f. 13 Bowersock, p. 67. In going on however to hazard the guess that the explanation may ‘once again have been Gibbon’s great evil genius, Tacitus’, Bowersock satisfactorily counts Tacitus among the hedgehogs. 14 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Gibbon’s contribution to historical method’, in Studies in Historiography (1966), pp. 40–55, at 49–50 [an article first published in 1954]. 15 o.c. pp. 63f.; the metaphors occur ‘in contexts which rarely represent the historian’s most profound thought’, but rather show him in the grip of his own literary style. 16 Womersley, I, p. 5; Bury, I, p. ix. 17 In the spirit of Voltaire, I have mislaid this reference. 18 See for example, R. MacMullen, Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire (1963); J. B. Campbell, The Emperor and the Roman Army, 31 BC–AD 235 (1984). 19 Momigliano, o.c., p. 40. 20 The Roman Empire of Ammianus (1989), pp. 471-2. 21 J. B. Bury, commenting on this passage in one of what Peter Brown calls his ‘implacable square brackets’ (III, p. 187 n. 128), cites the doubts of Otto Seeck on the dating of Vegetius, adding soberly that ‘the work is by no means critical or trustworthy’. This is perfectly true, though on the question of dating, it happens that more recent scholarship has (on balance, rather than decisively) favoured Gibbon’s view. See now N. P. Milner, Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science (2nd ed., 1996); pp. xxxi–xli on the author and time of writing. 22 Cf. III, p. 239 (the last words of Chapter XXIX): ‘In the eventful history of a reign of twenty-eight years, it will seldom be necessary to mention the name of the emperor Honorius’. 23 Above, n. 14. 24 Cf. Bury’s discussion of the identity of the Hiong-Nou (vel sim.) of the Chinese sources, at Vol. III of his edition, pp. 493-4. Gibbon’s discussion is in his Chapter XXVI (Womersley I, pp. 1035ff.; Bury, III, pp. 82ff.); The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 488 n. 26, 533 n. 95. 25 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 250–2. 26 See Tony Honoré, Emperors and Lawyers (1981, 2nd ed., 1994). 6

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Gibbon and the Later Roman Empire 27

Cf. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, p. vii; these editions are a ‘mine of curious information’. 28 See on this theme Momigliano, ‘Ancient history and the antiquarian’, in Studies in Historiography, pp. 1–39, at 13ff. 29 Memoirs, ed. Bonnard, p. 136; ‘But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the City, rather than of the Empire’, etc. 30 See Bonnard, pp. 304f. for the various drafts of this passage of the Memoirs. 31 Journal de mon voyage dans quelques endroits de la Suisse, 1755, edd. G. R. de Beer, G. A. Bonnard, and L. Junod, Miscellanea Gibboniana (Lausanne, 1952), p. 66; cf. Amm. Marc. 15.11.12; ‘Aventicum, desertam quidem civitatem, sed non ignobilem quondam, ut aedificia semiruta nunc usque demonstrant’. The resemblance is coincidental, or due to the identity of subject-matter; the Memoirs place Gibbon’s reading of Ammianus long after the composition of the Journal (see below). For the journey, Patricia B. Craddock, Young Gibbon: Gentleman of letters (1982), pp. 79–85. 32 In another of his ‘implacable square brackets’, Bury adds at this point that ‘Inscriptions supply us with more illustrations of official careers under the Constantinian monarchy. The career of Caelius Saturninus (C.I.L. 6, 1704) occasioned an important study by Mommsen’, etc. 33 II, pp. 432f.; ‘They received, at the same time, the use of letters, so essential to a religion whose doctrines are contained in a sacred book, and, while they studied the divine truth, their minds were insensibly enlarged by the distant view of history, of nature, of the arts, and of society’; cf. I, pp. 223f., on the early Germans’ ignorance of letters. 34 I, p. 1073; ‘It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary’, cf. p. 1067, n. 98; ‘Zosimus, whom we are now reduced to cherish’. At 1063 n. 91 admiration for Ammianus is tempered by ‘the vices of his style, the disorder and perplexity of his narrative’. 35 At I, p. 1073 nn. 113–4, Gibbon touches in passing, but does not stress, Ammianus’ origin in the Greek east. See my ‘The origin of Ammianus’, CQ n.s. 44 (1994), pp. 252–69, reclaiming his Antiochene roots. 36 From this more recent work on the literary character of late Antiquity I cite just one book, for its freshness and sophistication, and for the positive adventure of its interpretation; Michael Roberts’ The Jeweled Style: Poetry and poetics in Late Antiquity (1989); Chapter 3 is on ‘Poetry and the Visual Arts’. Roberts begins his critique by assembling modern approbations of Gibbon’s judgment of Ausonius, quoted above, and discusses the Arch of Constantine at pp. 91–2; on which see now R. Ross Holloway, Constantine and Rome (2004), Chap. II. 37 The eighteen-year-old Gibbon (already a ‘philosophic traveller’?) had visited Bruck (or Brugg) twice in the course of the tour of Switzerland of September–October 1755 mentioned in the Memoirs (ed. Bonnard, pp. 79–80) and described in the French Journal (above, n. 31). He will have passed it on the way from Aarau to Baden on 28 September, and he spent the night of 6 October there on the return journey ( Journal, pp. 20f., 39).

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2 POWER IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD A three-cornered dialogue: Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes, Tacitus Historians will debate for ever, whether the Athenians deliberately provoked, or whether they merely failed to avert the war against Sparta and her allies, on which they embarked in ‘the forty-eighth year of the priesthood of Chrysis in Argos, Aenesias being then ephor at Sparta and Pythodorus, archon of Athens, having then two months of his government to come’ – Thucydides’ expression for what we call the year 431 BCE (2.2.1).1 It is however a matter of record that the war produced, in the end, the destruction of Athenian power and, in the process, one of the greatest of historians, who both described the events of the war, the decisions underlying them and the strokes of fortune that so often determined their outcome, and presents us with the moral and psychological framework within which we inescapably still judge it.2 A few years into his narrative, Thucydides told how in 427, not content with the defensive strategy advocated by Pericles at the outset of the war, the Athenians took the action overseas and sent a large force to Sicily. After two years of Athenian presence in their land, a conference of the Sicilians was held at Gela, an important city on the south coast of the island, to devise a collective response to the occupation. In his characteristic manner, Thucydides refers to the many speeches on all sides of the issue that were given by the delegates, before coming to what he presents as its major contribution. This was made by Hermocrates son of Hermon, a Syracusan, and a man of great influence among the Sicilians. Hermocrates built his case on a statement of the nature of power. He does not blame the strong for attacking the weak; that is a consequence of their strength. It is the weak who deserve blame, if they fail to unite and resist. For reasons that will appear later, the translation is that of Thomas Hobbes, published, some years after its date of composition, in 1628.3 It is uncanny to hear the voice of Hobbes superimposed upon that of Thucydides: The Athenians, that covet and meditate these things, are to be pardoned. I blame not those that are willing to reign, but those that are most willing

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Chapter 2 to be subject; for it is the nature of man everywhere to command such as give way and to be shy of such as assail. We are to blame that know this and do not provide accordingly and make it our first care of all to take good order against the common fear. Of which we should soon be delivered, if we could agree amongst ourselves (4.61; p. 263).

The problem of reported speeches in Thucydides is familiar to all his readers, and every possible point of view has been defended. We should begin with the claim that is laid before us by the author himself. As Thucydides explains very near the beginning of his history (1.22.1), it was difficult for himself, or anyone else who may have heard them, to recall the precise words that were used in the many speeches that were made in their particular circumstances. The problem is addressed by Thucydides in his declaration that he would try to convey what was likely to have been said on any occasion, keeping as close as possible to its actual sense.4 This formulation is perhaps most helpful in relation to what it excludes. Thucydides means that, unlike his predecessors (and most of his successors), he did not just make up his speeches without any regard for their actual circumstances. This is in itself a noteworthy claim considering the practice of his predecessors, but still leaves considerable scope for constructive invention.5 Some readers of Thucydides would put a high estimate upon his ability to recover the actual words used on specific occasions; whether or not this is so in general, I suspect in this case that what we are hearing from Hermocrates is Thucydides’ judgment of what he should have said, in his particular circumstances, rather than a direct report of what he actually did say. However, an acquaintance with modern political discourse will suggest there need be little difference between what an orator might actually say and what a intelligent commentator might assume him to have said, the perceived needs of the situation, and of the audience, being common ground between them; political speeches rarely depend on surprise for their effect. Similar comments on the nature of power are found elsewhere, notably in the ‘Melian Dialogue’ at the end of Book Five of the history, in which the Athenian delegates to the island spell out the consequences if Melos, a Spartan colony, refuses to leave the Peloponnesian and join the Athenian alliance.6 Among much else, the Athenians are made to say to the Melians (again Hobbes): For of the Gods we think according to the common opinion; and of men that for certain by necessity of nature they will everywhere reign over such as they be too strong for. Neither did we make this law nor are we the first that use it [once] made; but as we found it, and shall leave it to posterity for ever, so also we use it, knowing that you likewise, and others that should have the same power which we have, would do the same (5.105; p. 368).

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Power in the Classical world Apart from its unusual form as a dramatic dialogue, which recreates the character of contemporary philosophical discourse at Athens,7 it seems fairly clear that this debate is invented by Thucydides. Indeed he gives a hint of this, in describing how the Melians refused to allow the Athenians to address their assembly but had them deliver their message ‘before the magistrates and the few’ (5.84.3). This avoidance of the public allows the Athenian delegates to suggest to the Melians the dialogue form (rather than a formal exchange of speeches in the assembly), providing a context for which no-one would expect the actual words of the debate to be known.8 It is conceivable, of course, that Thucydides might have tracked down Athenian, or even Melian, participants in the discussion and so acquired an account of it, but a more economical explanation is that he composed it as appropriate to the occasion – or to the outcome, for which its appropriateness is beyond question. Melos surrendered to the Athenian siege, upon which the Athenians ‘slew all men of military age, made slaves of the women and children and inhabited the place with a colony sent thither afterwards of five hundred men of their own’ (5.111; p. 372). It is a dreadful moment in the history, and critical in the economy of Thucydides’ work.9 Turning the page, we come up immediately against the second, Great Sicilian Campaign of 415, which in its defeat led ultimately to the destruction of the Athenian Empire. And before long, turning our gaze to Sicily, there again is Hermocrates of Syracuse, telling the leaders of the faction-ridden Sicilian cities what he had told them twelve years earlier; to save themselves from the Athenians, they must unite. What makes this more than merely an apt remark for its circumstances but a real moment of truth, is the way in which Hermocrates now puts the Athenian threat in a wider context. He refers in his address to the general failure of ambitious campaigns overseas, where he cannot but mean the great Persian invasion of 480: For in truth there have been few great fleets, whether of Grecians or barbarians, sent far from home that have not prospered ill (6.33; p. 396)

– a point to which he returns more explicitly just a few (real or imagined) moments later: If for want of necessaries in a strange territory they chance to miscarry, the honour of it will be left to us against whom they bend their councils, though the greatest cause of their overthrow should consist in their own errors. Which was also the case of these very Athenians, who raised themselves by the misfortune of the Medes…; And that the same shall now happen to us is not without probability (6.33; p. 397).

The Athenians had in the Melian dialogue just made the claim attributed to them by Hermocrates, using the classic technique of praeteritio, passing

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Chapter 2 over while mentioning what you do not intend to say. In any case they do not expect to be believed in saying it: We therefore will not, for our parts, with fair pretences, as, that having defeated the Medes, our reign is therefore lawful, or that we come against you for injury done, make a long discourse without being believed... (5.89; p. 365).

To understand the ironic power of this claim, we must look back 65 years from the dramatic date of the Melian dialogue, to the story of the Persian expedition of Xerxes narrated by Thucydides’ older contemporary, Herodotus. Though not actually offered as examples by him, these two great historians are a paradigm of Isaiah Berlin’s legendary contrast, described in Chapter 1 in connection with Gibbon, between the Fox and the Hedgehog.10 As between Herodotus and Thucydides, it is obvious which is the fox, ‘knowing many things’, and which the hedgehog, ‘knowing one big thing’. Thucydides wrote a work of particular intensity and concentration on one big theme, Greeks at war with Greeks, and, in its extreme form, at civil war in their own cities.11 Herodotus presented the wars of Greeks against Persians as a multi-ethnic conflict of cultures, allowing him to range in his narrative over the entire known world, Greek and ‘barbarian’ – Egypt, Scythia, Mesopotamia and far beyond, it is all there in digressions from his narrative.12 If, in the course of reading about the background for the invasion of Xerxes, you want to learn about the golddigging ants of India, ‘as big as foxes but not as big as dogs’, and how to steal the gold from them, this is where you go (3.102–5). Thucydides would not have told us this, but we should not be misled, for Herodotus’ is a profoundly serious work with a moral purpose, in which the author presented the Persian War and its outcome in the context of the great themes of despotism and freedom, expressed in the strengths and weaknesses of different political cultures. On one side of the conflict, Xerxes is a great despot, and he enjoys the benefits of autocracy. Through his vassals he can assemble a huge army and submit it to his command, he can terrify his enemy by the sheer scale of his preparations – but he suffers from the corresponding weaknesses of the despot, arrogance and lack of proportion. Herodotus shows us wellchosen episodes in support of this conception, describing how Xerxes, lord of the elements, built a bridge of boats over the Hellespont for the passage of his army and flogged the insubordinate waves when a storm destroyed it; how he excavated a canal through the isthmus of Mt. Athos to shorten the distance of travel for his navy; how before advancing on the Greeks, he counted his army to show its size – much exaggerated both

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Power in the Classical world by rumour and by the method of counting, but the purpose of the exercise was as much to instill fear as to make strategic calculations. Later, he set up a throne to view the battle of Salamis and put soldiers on an island in the bay to kill shipwrecked Greeks as they sought safety – but it was the Persians themselves who were killed by the Greeks when the battle was lost, before the Great King’s astonished eyes. Xerxes had never contemplated the possibility of failure; he demonstrated the pride of a tyrant, exposed in Greek terms in what seems to be accepted as the earliest extant Greek tragedy, the Persians of Aeschylus. Its author was among those who fought at Salamis for the freedom of the Greeks.13 For, on their side, the Greeks have the benefits of self-government and freedom – they were fighting for their own way of life, not for the prestige of a despotic master – but they too suffer from corresponding disadvantages. They feel passionate loyalty to their communities, but these are their individual cities, not the Hellenic cause at large. It took the foresight of Themistocles to use the threat of war with Athens’ local enemy, Aegina, to build a fleet large enough to resist the Persian onslaught, just as it took his cunning to hold the Greek forces together to fight at Salamis when they threatened to disperse. In describing Themistocles, Thucydides produced a paradigm of the Athenian politician, insightful and resourceful, quick to see what was needed and able to explain it: By his natural prudence, without the help of instruction before or after, he was both of extempore matters upon short deliberation the best discerner and also of what for the most part would be their issue the best conjecturer... Also he foresaw, no man better, what was best or worst in any case that was doubtful. And (to say all in a few words) this man, by the natural goodness of his wit and quickness of deliberation, was the ablest of all men to tell what was fit to be done upon a sudden (1.138; p. 79).

It was thanks to their heroic role in the Persian Wars, that the Athenians could say to the assembly of Sicilian cities held in 415 what they had almost refrained from saying to the Melians; ‘We took upon us our dominion over [the allies], both as worthy of the same, in that we brought the greatest fleet and promptest courage to the service of the Grecians, whereas they, with like promptness in favour of the Medes, did us hurt; and also as being desirous to procure ourselves a strength against the Peloponnesians’ (6.83; p. 425). Defending himself when the people turned against him after the Great Plague of 430, Pericles had said to the Athenians, that they should not imagine that they could give up their power, ‘for already your government is in the nature of a tyranny, which [it might seem] unjust for you to have acquired [but would be] unsafe to lay down’ (2.63; p. 124), but

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Chapter 2 he also declared, in an earlier passage, that the Athenians had made a better and morally superior use of their situation than others would have: Those men are worthy of commendation who following the natural inclination of man in desiring rule over others are juster than for their own power they need. And therefore if another had our power, we think it would best make appear our own moderation (1.76; pp. 44–5).

The ironies are obvious, and have long been appreciated. In 480 Athens saved Greece, but in 427 and 415, having built up an empire of Greek subjects on the ‘fair pretence’ of pursuing war with Persia, she is the aggressor against other Greek states.14 In 415 the city prepared a great fleet to go to Sicily, supposedly to ‘liberate’ the Greek cities from the power of Syracuse but really to conquer the island for themselves. Thucydides describes the Athenian fleet as it set sail, in a display of splendour reminiscent, even, of Herodotus’ description of the army of Xerxes. After describing the competition of contributors that made each ship the finest that could be afforded, he goes on: After they were all aboard, and all things laid in that they meant to carry with them, silence was commanded by the trumpet; and after the wine had been carried about the whole army, and all, as well the generals as the soldiers, had drunk a health to the voyage, they made their prayers, such as by the law were appointed for before their taking sea, not in every galley apart, but all together, the herald pronouncing them. And the company from the shore, both of the city and whosoever else wished them well, prayed with them. And when they had sung the Paean and ended the health, they put forth to sea; and having at first gone out in a long file, galley after galley, they went a vie [racing] by Aegina (6.32; p. 395).

If Thucydides is more often admired for his philosophical penetration than for his narrative vividness, this is a mistake, for in such writing we can appreciate Plutarch’s famous judgment, quoted by Hobbes in the Introduction to his translation, that Thucydides ‘maketh his auditor a spectator. For he setteth his reader in the assemblies of the people and in the senate, at their debating; in the streets, at their seditions; and in the field, at their battles’ (p. xxii). We also see the ironies. The Persian Wars had made Athens a naval power and enabled her to rule allied cities, to suppress them if they revolted and to control them, in Pericles’ words, ‘like a tyrant’. It was through fear of Athens’ power that, in Thucydides’ own analysis (1.23.6), Sparta went to war against her; the Athenians threatened everybody, and the Spartans dared not risk the dissolution of their own League (led, for example, by Corinth). Now, having held off Sparta and her allies, this ‘democratic tyrant’ is going to war against Syracuse – another democracy. Having liberated the Hellenes from the Persians, the Athenians

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Power in the Classical world have inherited the role of Xerxes in building up an empire and attacking Sicily like a despot – and they will come to grief through similar weaknesses of despotism. Even the sea battle in the Great Harbour of Syracuse, seen in this light, evokes Salamis.15 But the cycle does not end here, for the drive to accumulate power and express it in domination over others is not just an Athenian weakness; it is inherent in human nature. Thucydides reported the Athenians’ own accusation, expressed to the Sicilian congress of 415, that Syracuse too only wanted to subdue the rest of Sicily to her will (6.85). On one level, this is a practical application by the Athenians of the time-honoured principle, ‘divide and rule’. For Thucydides, it is more than this; the power of states and their almost biological imperative towards aggrandisement is a universal factor in human behaviour. Not just Persia, or Athens, but all states are liable, in their foreign relations, to resemble tyrannies, and will do so even if they are democracies at home. If Herodotus is the anthropologist, viewing all cultures with an open curiosity, tolerant and undogmatic in his judgments, understanding that different cultures, as well as different individuals, may see the world differently, Thucydides is the creator of a new genre in historical writing, owing much to the character of philosophical discussion in Athens of which we get an echo in the losing arguments of some of Plato’s dialogues – harsh in logic and opportunistic, interested in power rather than justice, possessing an unsentimental realism about human nature.16 It is a style of political reflection picked up by some Roman writers, notably Sallust and Tacitus, and if Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue has shown us one ‘moment of truth’ in the consideration of power, there is another, though it will turn out rather to be a moment of dissimulation, in Tacitus. Thucydides chose the Sicilian campaign as the context for a digression on the end of tyranny at Athens in the late 6th century. Now, the fall of the Athenian tyranny, as it happens, was almost exactly contemporaneous with the end of kingship at Rome, if that is correctly located in 509 BCE. For Romans of a later time, this was an immensely important moment. Monarchy was replaced by Republican (that is to say aristocratic) government, kings were replaced by consuls as symbols of liberty, and as guarantees that kings would not return. This is all expressed in concentrated form in the preface, indeed in the first two clauses, of Tacitus’ Annals, written in the early second century: Urbem Romam a principio reges habuere; libertatem et consulatum L. Brutus instituit (‘In the beginning the city of Rome was ruled by kings. Liberty and the consulship were established by L. Brutus’).17

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Chapter 2 Passing over the interesting facts that the first of these Latin clauses can be made to scan as a hexameter verse, and that ‘habuere’ is an archaic form of the Classical ‘habuerunt’ (both phenomena suggesting an archaic, poetic and religious tradition of historical writing), we observe how Tacitus goes on to show that the Roman Republic was not a time of tranquil political liberty but of disorder and rivalry, in which competing interests fought for power and no form of government lasted for long, until in the end, power came back to monarchy. This happened when Octavian (later Augustus) put an end to the civil wars, suppressing his enemies and winning over the soldiers by gifts, the people by food, seducing all by the blessings of peace, before imposing his own powers upon the Roman state, supported by those who had the most to gain from it; all this from the first chapter of the Annales. The culmination of this process was the meeting of the senate on 13 January 27 BCE, when Augustus18 returned his powers to that body, yielded to the demand that he receive them back, and suggested a division of power in which he would retain that portion of empire containing the newly reorganised armies (also, it is fair to say, the hard work of establishing peace in freshly conquered provinces). But Tacitus did not choose this as his starting point. Instead, he began his Annals ‘from the death of the deified Augustus’ (‘ab excessu divi Augusti’), a choice that enabled him to avoid passing judgment directly on Augustus’ truly colossal but morally ambiguous achievement. Using the occasion of Augustus’ funeral in 14 CE, Tacitus proceeds indirectly, putting opposing views, favourable and unfavourable, into the mouths of the crowd in imagined conversations – no pretence here that the historian was recording the precise words that had been said! – Tacitus so contrives it that the favourable view of Augustus is concisely expressed, the unfavourable following at greater length, with instances of bad conduct designed to leave the worse impression. The real moment of truth followed this, in the meeting of the senate on September 17, when the position of Tiberius as Augustus’ successor was confirmed. As Tacitus saw, it was the entry into power of a successor that would really show the system to be established – and provide the last moment when it might be effectively challenged.19 It will now appear why I am using the translation of Thucydides by Thomas Hobbes, rather than any of the more modern, and undoubtedly more exact translations that exist. About a decade before the publication of his Thucydides translation in 1628 (as we saw, it was written some years before this), Hobbes was the author of a substantial little monograph, entitled Discourse on the Beginning of Tacitus. It is a sentence-by-sentence commentary on the first four chapters of the Annals (less than three pages

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Power in the Classical world in the modern text of Tacitus), stopping at the point where, with the decline of Augustus’ health, the historian began his narrative of the accession of Tiberius. Hobbes’ commentary is a new discovery, almost unknown until its publication by Noel Reynolds and Arlene Saxonhouse in 1995.20 It forms part of a collection of twelve essays, first published in London in 1620 under the title Horae Subsecivae, of which ten essays, including the Discourse, were found in manuscript in the Library at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. This was the great house in which the young Hobbes served as tutor to successive members of the Cavendish family; this is what you did if you did not have money of your own but wanted to avoid the academic professions like law and the church – and Hobbes’ father, an alcoholic clergyman of slender means, had not set a good example of the latter. Not all the twelve essays are by Hobbes, though the hand in which the manuscript is written has been identified as his. However, stylistic comparison with known works of Hobbes and with writings known not to be by him has made the authorship of the Discourse more or less certain, and this is borne out by some startling anticipations of the sentiments and philosophy of the later Hobbes. Hobbes was born in 1588, back in the reign of Elizabeth; in the lovely vignette in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, it is said that his mother gave birth to little Thomas in fright at hearing of the approach of the Spanish Armada (the threat of another mighty empire)! Through his lifelong attachment to the Cavendish family, and no doubt also through conviction, he remained committed to the Royalist cause, to such an extent that in 1640, as the Civil Wars loomed, he left England for exile in France; like Thucydides and some others (notably Polybius),21 Hobbes spent some years contemplating his country from a distance. There he lived for ten years before returning to England at the time of the publication, in 1651, of his masterpiece, Leviathan. In his travels in Europe he had become acquainted, in 1636, with the exiled Galileo, and with associates of Descartes, whom he met in Paris in 1648, just two years before Descartes’ death in Sweden. Hobbes’ political position left him rather exposed. On the one hand his Royalist past made him suspect to the Republican cause, while his dislike of clerical influence made him suspect to the Royalists; while Leviathan, published under the Commonwealth, seemed not only to have betrayed his earlier Royalist principles but to have endorsed a materialist philosophy antithetical to orthodox Christianity, as well as a forbiddingly ruthless conception of the power of the state. The book was certainly, in effect and by intention, anticlerical. Yet, if he was an intellectual threat, he was not a really a personal threat to anyone – King Charles II, whose tutor in mathematics Hobbes

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Chapter 2 had been in Paris during the 1640s, apparently described him as ‘the oddest fellow that I ever did meet’ – and he managed to live out a quiet life in Derbyshire, where he died in 1679 at Hardwick Hall, at the age of 91. It was said that he even began going to church, but turned his back on the sermon. It is possible, of course, that this is precisely why he went. Hobbes’ Discourse on the Beginning of Tacitus, written before 1620, and so when he was in his late twenties and before the Thucydides translation, has an interest, not only for Tacitus, but also for the development of Hobbes’ own thought. It is nothing new to find Tacitus used as a source of political wisdom, at once practical and ironic in tone. It was so by Machiavelli and Guicciardini and many others, as has been brought out in Ronald Mellor’s wide-ranging and perceptive book on Tacitus.22 The spirit of Machiavelli surely lurks behind Hobbes’ comments in his Discourse, on the clever discrimination exercised by Augustus in rewarding his followers (Ann. 1.2.1): It is both justice, and good policy, to reward with preferments those that yield their obedience readily, and willingly; for it stirs emulation in men, to exceed each other in diligence. And on the contrary, to heap benefits on the sullen, and averse, out of hope to win their affection, is unjust and prejudicial. For first, they shall lose one benefit after another, through vain hope of winning them, and not losing the thanks of their first benefit; and then also others will learn, and think it wise to be averse and stubborn, by their example. Also those that were rewarded for their service, must needs strive to maintain the present State, and help to keep off the Civil wars (pp. 46–7).

Hobbes wrote these uncomfortably clear-sighted words long before the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, and it may be that, as much as his Royalist sentiments, his later decision to live in France reflected his anticipation of the nature of civil war, which, as he continued in the passage just cited, ...is commodious for none but desperate unthrifts, that they may cut their Creditors’ throats without fear of the gallows; men against whom the Law, and the sword of Justice makes a fearful war, in time of peace.

Just as peace is infinitely preferable to war, so any government, if it will preserve peace, is better than none; for without it ensues that ‘nasty and brutish’ state of nature, in Hobbes’ famous phrase, that is worse than anarchy. Any form of government, whether of one man, the few or the many, can be well or badly conducted. If badly, then the fault lies not in the institution of government, but in the men who compose it, and even bad government, so long as it possesses authority, is better than none. As to which of these or other forms of government may exist in a particular case,

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Power in the Classical world this is a matter of the historical process rather than of planning or choice. The first words of the Discourse on the Beginning of Tacitus were to observe that ‘the first form of government in any State is accidental; that is, according to the condition the Founder happens to be of’. It was merely a matter of historical circumstance, that Rome began as a monarchy; ‘If one man of absolute power above the rest, be Founder of a City, he will likewise be Ruler of the same; if a few, then a few will have the government; and if the multitude, then commonly they will do the like’ (pp. 31–2). More important than its historical accuracy is the logic of Hobbes’ assumption. The empirical precedes the abstract; power precedes governance, and changes of governance will express changes in the nature of power. Whether or not this is true, it makes very little of the moral intensity of Tacitus’ opening sentences, where the replacement of the kings by consuls is not simply a historical circumstance but a symbol of liberty, the foundation of the political freedom of the Romans. However, Tacitus’ parade of optimism is short-lived, as he shows how the ‘liberty’ of the Roman Republic was not tranquil but turbulent, as competing interests fought for power and no form of government lasted for long. In fact, Tacitus’ preface is not so much a historical summary of the Republic, as of the nature of power in that period, as we can see from the catena of words for power and its instruments that fill these paragraphs; ‘dictaturae... decemviralis potestas... consulare ius… potentia… dominatio... arma... imperium...’ (Ann. 1.1.2f.).23 All these phases were expressive of the character of the Republic but temporary in their sequence, until in the end (after just eight lines in Tacitus’ highly compressed text), Augustus put an end to the civil wars, suppressing his enemies and winning over the soldiers by gifts, the people by distributions of food, seducing all, rich and poor alike, by the blessings of peace. As Hobbes summarized it: …the rich, and such as were in love with titles of honour, found more ease and contentment here, than they could expect in the Civil war, and did accept the present with security, rather than strive for the old, with danger. In Tacitus’ words (Annals 1.2.1), having enriched themselves through the favour of Augustus, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangers of the past.

We are very close to the world described by Ronald Syme, who picked up the theme in the preface to his The Roman Revolution of 1939; ‘Liberty or stable government: that was the choice confronting the Romans themselves, and I have tried to answer it precisely in their fashion’.24 There was of course a price to pay, security coming at the cost of political and intellectual freedom. One result of the growth of adulation in

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Chapter 2 the early Principate, according to Tacitus, was a decline in the quality and freedom of historical writing, as great talents subsided under the fear of those in power. Hobbes rose at once to this claim, commenting on the passage, that – under Monarchs, so long as their deeds be such, as they can be content to hear of again, the Historiographer has encouragement to follow the truth in his writings; but when they be otherwise, men must dissemble, if they will please, and must please, if they will have their writings pass unsuppressed (p. 39).

Hobbes took literary censorship for granted, accepting it as an instrument of the strong government that he considered essential for human society. Indeed, in what is to modern ears a surprising remark, he thought that the historian Cremutius Cordus, who, in an episode described later in the Annals (4.34–5), was put to death because he called Brutus and Cassius the last of the Romans, ‘was perhaps worthily punished’ (p. 41).25 The counterpart of adulation among the ruled was the dissimulation of those in power, and Hobbes, whose Discourse shows many points of contact with Machiavelli’s Principe (still more, perhaps, with the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio)26 in its appraisal of the political skills that underpin the maintenance of power, is as good as we would expect on the renowned ‘dissimulation’ of Tiberius, that sinister master of the genre: For a passion that can be mastered, is nothing so dangerous as one that cannot, especially in Tiberius, that knew best of all men how to dissemble his vices. Those things that Tiberius would dissemble, were evil, and those evils he could not dissemble, were great ones; therefore for such cruelty as he himself was not yet able to cover, he was justly to be feared (p. 64).

Thucydides too was interested in the connections between the words and the realities of politics – the relations of words with the world as it is, the notion that words do not always mean what they seem to say, that they can be misleading and manipulated into being so. We will not be surprised to find the idea expressed in the Melian Dialogue – in fact it is the Athenians’ final contribution: For many, when they have foreseen into what dangers they were entering, have nevertheless been so overcome by that forcible word dishonour that that which is but called dishonour hath caused them to fall willingly into immedicable calamities (5.111; p. 370)

and more especially in Thucydides’ stunning account of civil war in Corcyra, when, in the stress of civil dissension, words not only lost their true meanings but came to mean the opposite of what they should:

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Power in the Classical world The cities therefore being now in sedition and those that fell into it later having heard what had been done in the former, they far exceeded the same in newness of conceit, both for the art of assailing and for the strangeness of their revenges. The received value of names imposed for the signification of things was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness was counted true-hearted manliness; provident deliberation, a handsome fear; modesty, the cloak of cowardice; to be wise in everything, to be lazy in everything. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour (3.82; p. 204).

One can hardly fail to be reminded of this passage, in reading Hobbes’ later analysis of language in Chapter IV of Leviathan, ‘on Speech’: The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please, and displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourses of men, of inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them... For one man calleth Wisdome, what another called feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true ground of any ratiocination. Nor more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they do profess their inconstancy; which the other do not (Leviathan, p. 17; ed. R. Tuck, p. 31).

Hobbes’ Discourse on the Beginning of Tacitus is interesting for the student of that historian, because it declares an open preference for a judgment that Tacitus himself (and Ronald Syme) left ambiguous. If our problem is to decide between liberty and stable government, we will not expect much help from Tacitus, but Hobbes had little doubt. Stable government was what mattered most. (It should be added that he also had clear views about the restraints upon their own conduct that governments should accept). In broader terms, however, the Discourse is worth attention because, written before 1620, it is by far the earliest text in which Hobbes set out his leading ideas in political philosophy. It is up to a decade earlier than the publication of his translation of Thucydides, more than twenty years before the De Cive of 1642, and the two tracts, Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy and De Corpore Politico, or the Elements of Law, written in 1640 but properly published only a decade later; and a whole thirty years earlier than the fearsome Leviathan.27 That is why the Discourse may be compared to Machiavelli, for its sentiments, and the manner of their expression, belong to that tradition of political criticism, strongly influenced by Tacitus, familiar from the writers of an earlier generation than Hobbes’. It is disconcerting, but not surprising, to find that Tacitus was read by these writers as a

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Chapter 2 handbook of advice for both the sufferers from and the wielders of tyranny. If you want to be an effective tyrant, Tacitus seems to say, this is how to do it – a perfect model for The Prince.28 The Hobbes of the Discourse was a broadly educated and very clever young man of his time, versed in languages and well read, skilled in science and mathematics as well as literature. If however we open the two tracts of the 1640s, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, we find something that goes beyond this, to systematic philosophy of a high technical order. In Human Nature, we find an extraordinarily concentrated discussion of senses and sense perceptions, optics,29 thinking and dreaming, the nature of language, the logic of naming and the classification of emotions and many other topics; followed, in De Corpore Politico, by a similarly exacting diagnosis of the nature of man in his social and political environment, including the powers of the church and the impropriety of rebellion. (At the risk of a moment’s distraction I cannot resist Hobbes’ definition of the qualities required of the authors of a rebellion [De Corpore Politico, p. 209]: ‘I. To be discontented themselves; II. To be men of mean judgment and capacity; and, III. To be eloquent men, or good orators’. Hobbes illustrates these propositions from the case of Catiline, ‘author of the greatest sedition that ever was in Rome’!). In these later works, Hobbes’ doctrines derive not just from his general culture or political instincts but from the working out of philosophical principles. His understanding of human experience resembles that of Descartes, in being based on the observation that all a man can be sure of, is the fact of his perceptions of the world. However, that there is a world that is the subject of the perceptions, and that therefore such a world does exist, is, for Hobbes, proven by the fact that perceptions change, and this must have a cause. The actual nature of this world is debatable, but man is not trapped in a pure solipsism; the world is there, even if we do not always agree what it is like. In the same way, from man’s essential individualism – from his social solipsism, in which all man can be sure of is his own will to survive – is inferred the need to accept the formation of an organized state, however imperfect, to protect him from the unleashed consequences of this will. As in the matter of perception, so too in politics there has to be an agreement among men, the enemy of both being an uncontained solipsism. This is the Hobbes we see in the works of the 1640s and in Leviathan. The particular interest of the Discourse on the Beginning of Tacitus is that, long before the exposure to Continental philosophy that resulted in his mature statements of it, the preoccupation with the need for strong government is already there as something more like a political instinct, expressed in Hobbes’ political judgment of the Augustan Revolution.

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Power in the Classical world We saw that Pericles, addressing the Athenians about the character of their rule, made the same claim attributed to the envoys to Melos, that Athens was not unique in seeking and exercising power as it did; it was a defining feature of human nature. Where Athens differed from other states that either had achieved similar power or would do so if they had the opportunity, was in the moderation with which they exercised it. The Athenians had been ‘juster than for their own power they needed’. ‘If another had our power’, they are made to say to the Melians, ‘we think it would best make appear our own moderation’. But in whose interests is power exercised, beyond the interests of those who possess it? What Pericles is not made to express, and what seems nowhere to be expressed by Thucydides, is the idea that power might be used for the betterment of the larger community, even of the human race as a whole, giving them peace and justice in a way that might compensate for, even be thought an improvement upon, the liberty under which they were accustomed to live.30 It is this theme that in Tacitus’ preface to the Annals is offered in justification of the Romans’ acceptance of monarchical after Republican government. And it is taken in the broadest sense, as applying to the provinces as a whole, which are seen as escaping through their acceptance of monarchical rule the factional conflicts, violence and corruption of the Republic; ‘the provinces did not reject that state of affairs’, wrote Tacitus, ‘the rule of the senate and people being suspect on account of the conflicts among the powerful and the avarice of magistrates, while the laws offered no protection, being corrupted by violence, ambition and in the last resort, hard cash’. So the provincials joined those Romans who, ‘profiting from the new state of affairs, preferred the security of the present to the dangers of the past’ (Ann. 1.2). In Syme’s words, they had chosen stable government over liberty.31 We have here a situation possibly anticipated (not necessarily welcomed) by the historian Polybius in his discussion of the growth of Roman power in the Mediterranean, but it is very far from the thinking of Thucydides, whose analysis of the nature of power does not encompass the idea of imperial control as a means of achieving tranquillity over large-scale dominions. All that he and his speakers seem concerned about is the wellbeing of the city of Athens. Now, Hobbes gave particular attention in his Discourse to Tacitus’ sentence on the reaction of the provinces to monarchical rule under Augustus, beginning with the remark that ‘The Roman State did not consist in the magnitude of that one City of Rome, or in the extent of Italy alone, but in the multitude, and greatness of Provinces, that were subject unto it’ (p. 47). After expanding on the complaints mentioned by Tacitus, he concluded that ‘it is better for a

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Chapter 2 Province to be subject to one, though an evil master, than to a potent, if factious, Republic’, for ‘in this time the Provinces would have been content with a Monarchy, or tyranny, rather than to be troubled with so different, and ill humours of divers men’ (p. 48). There may of course ‘be covetousness in Magistrates, when one has the sovereignty, being a fault of the person, and not of the form of government. Indeed, there may be bribing in such a State [a Monarchy]; but in a factious, and divided Commonwealth it cannot be otherwise’ (p. 47). Hobbes here touches a theme of great significance in his own later philosophy; the role of strong government in defending men from the anarchic violence into which their own basic interests would drive them. This is how he introduced Part 2 of Leviathan, ‘Of Commonwealth’: The finall Cause, End or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which wee see them live in Commonwealths), is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from the miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe, and tye them by fear of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and observation of those Lawes of Nature set down in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters (ed. R. Tuck, p. 117).

As for the actual character of particular Commonwealths, we saw earlier that for Hobbes this was a matter of circumstance rather than of sociopolitical logic. However, if it was merely a historical accident that Rome began as a monarchy, it is made clear that it was no accident that she finished as one. This, thirty years before the publication of Leviathan, was a natural consequence of the need of men for powerful government even at the cost of individual liberty, to save human society from the basic instincts of its own members. These basic instincts, what Hobbes calls the ‘natural passions’ of men for ‘Liberty, and Dominion over others’, could only be reconciled by government – wise government if possible but if not wise, better any government than none at all. No-one ever thought of this as a comfortable philosophy, but Hobbes is not a comfortable writer. He has nevertheless given us a positive evaluation of empire, as an institution that may sometimes be exercised in the interests of the ruled. As to how often this is accomplished in practice, that is another matter; it was however a central part of the Augustan claim to have done so. Of all Thucydides’ statements of historical principle, the best known is probably his declaration, made near the beginning of his history, that his

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Power in the Classical world work was written, not for passing enjoyment, but as a possession for all time – ‘rather for an everlasting possession’, as Hobbes translated the famous phrase κτῆµα ἐς αἰεί, ‘than to be rehearsed for a prize’ (1.22: p. 14); in Jowett’s similar version, ‘an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten’. Some readers think of the second part of this claim as an allusion to Herodotus, though how that magnificent enterprise could ever be dismissed as a ‘prize composition’, or, once read, expect it to be forgotten, is hard to imagine.32 Thucydides means something different; his work is a possession for all time because it will be useful, as a book on philosophy or medicine may be useful. This is because similar things as we now see happening would happen in the future, and this in turn is because human nature, in its essentials, will not change: He that desires to look into the truth of things done and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable (1.22; p. 14).

Thucydides’ conception was bound up with his understanding of human nature as something that would not change in its essentials; and it arises from the basic drive of man to dominate his neighbours. In this he has much in common with his translator Thomas Hobbes, who rather saw human beings as in need of the power of an organized state in order to avert the state of nature into which men – ‘who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others’ – would fall without it. In this, Hobbes saw further than Thucydides, whose conception of the uses, rather than simply the exercise, of power seems limited to Pericles’ claim, which Thucydides may not have himself believed even as he made Pericles say it, that the Athenians had used theirs with a moderation that others had not shown, nor would show if they acquired it. Neither Pericles nor, apparently, the Athenians, had any idea that power – power expressed as government – might be devoted to the wellbeing of the governed. For all the bleakness of his vision of human nature, or precisely because of it, Hobbes did believe this, and even Tacitus was forced to concede that the monarchy of Augustus had brought benefits to men, for which they were prepared to surrender their political liberties. The world in which Tacitus himself lived, in which men of equestrian rank might flourish, a successful Roman senator might come from southern Gaul or Spain, and, in the words of Ronald Syme, ‘colonials and provincials from the Latin West [might occupy] the place of the Caesars’, bears witness to the benefits. It is not that Thucydides’ conceptions of power and human nature have nothing to say to us, far from it; they had as much to say to Machiavelli as to Hobbes – and Machiavelli’s world of city-states fighting each other while

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Chapter 2 sharing a common linguistic and material culture is quite close to that of Thucydides. Our ideas of psychology perhaps make us more critical than we might once have been of explanations of behaviour in terms of a single conception of human nature; while as historical observers living in a still wider and so evidently diverse a world, with the conflicts that arise from its differences, we are perhaps more inclined to see human conduct more in the style of Herodotus, as taking different forms according to the differences between human societies. In the end, it may be that the fox has some advantages over the hedgehog, but if a single motivation is needed for all the varieties of human behaviour, it is hard to think of a better candidate than the pursuit and exercise of power.

Notes 1 This is a revised version of the Tracy Lecture, delivered at the University of Illinois at Chicago on 4th April 2003. I have kept annotation, which on such a topic could be endless, to a minimum. 2 Ronald Syme, ‘Thucydides’, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), pp. 39–56 – Syme’s only published excursion into Greek history. 3 The History of the Peloponnesian War, transl. Thomas Hobbes (1629 & later editions; repr. with Introduction by David Grene [Ann Arbor, 1959 and Chicago, 1989]). References are given to Thucydides in the conventional fashion to book and chapter, and by page number to Grene’s edition. 4 I take the view that the words τὰ δέοντα at 1.22.1 mean what speakers are likely to have said and not, as some think, that Thucydides will ‘explain the essentials’ for his readers. 5 This presentation of the issue is no doubt over-simplified. Much more subtle is the approach of Emily Greenwood, Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006), esp. Chapter 4, ‘Speaking the Truth’; in ‘writing’ speeches that were delivered orally to specific audiences, Thucydides has both adapted their style and transformed the original audience into his own. 6 See on this famous passage H.-P. Stahl, Thucydides: Man’s place in history (2003) [first published in 1966 as Thukydides:Die Stellung des Menschen im geschichtlichen Prozess (Zetemata 40)], Chap. 8. 7 See Emily Greenwood, pp. 57–63 on Gorgias of Leontini. 8 Cf. Stahl, p. 165; ‘the author himself is simultaneously speaking’. I am not sure whether this eliminates or avoids the question of source. 9 W. R. Connor, Thucydides (1984), pp. 157–8 is one of many writers who emphasise this, to me fundamentally important, aspect; cf. Stahl, p. 160, citing Jebb, writing in 1907; ‘The simple juxtaposition of insolence and ruin is more effective than comment’. 10 See Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (1987), Chapter 1, ‘Thucydides and Herodotus’, and p. 145ff.; see on Gibbon, Chapter 1 above. 11 Hence the so-called ‘misunderstanding of Thucydides’ (H. Strasburger) committed by successors who saw him as creating a tradition of continuous history

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Power in the Classical world ‘capable of indefinite prolongation’ rather than a monograph on a particular theme, see F. W. Walbank, Polybius (1972), pp. 66–8. 12 See esp. for this perspective, James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (1992). 13 Thomas Harrison, The Emptiness of Asia: Aeschylus’ Persians and the history of the Fifth Century (2000); ‘Thucydides’ account of Athens, and in particular of the Athenian expedition to Sicily, plays off Herodotus’ account of Persian imperialism and of the Persian expedition to Greece’ (p. 48, citing also Francis Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus, of 1907). 14 Harrison, pp. 62–3. 15 Harrison, pp. 68–71. 16 R. Syme, ‘Thucydides’ (above, n. 2). 17 Syme, Tacitus (1958), p. 364. 18 He bore this name from 16 January; W. K. Lacey, ‘Octavian in the Senate, January 27 BC’, JRS 64 (1974), pp. 176–84. 19 See the discussion of Tacitus’ starting point, and of the circumstances of Tiberius’ succession, in Chapter 4 below. 20 Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Thomas Hobbes: Three Discourses; a critical modern edition of newly identified works of the young Hobbes (1995). Page references are to this edition. 21 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, p. 465, citing Momigliano, ‘The historians of the Classical World and their audiences: some suggestions’, Sesto Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici (1980), pp. 361–75 [first published 1978]. 22 Ronald Mellor, Tacitus (1993), esp. Ch. VIII; and again Momigliano, ‘The first political commentary on Tacitus’, JRS 37 (1947), pp. 91–100 [= Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (1977), pp. 205-27]. 23 Tacitus, Ann. 1.1.2f.: ‘dictaturae ad tempus sumebantur; neque decemviralis potestas ultra biennium, neque tribunorum militum consulare ius diu valuit. Non Cinnae, non Sullae longa dominatio; et Pompeii Crassique potentia cito in Caesarem, Lepidi atque Antonii arma in Augustum cessere, qui cuncta discordiis civilibus fessa nomine principis sub imperium accepit’. 24 The Roman Revolution, p. viii; below, Chapter 3. 25 Ann. 4.34–5. In fact he ended his life by starvation; ‘vitam abstinentia finivit’. As Syme notes, his writings were not the only charge against him; Tacitus, pp. 337, 517. 26 Mellor, Tacitus, p. 139, notes that Machiavelli used the first printed edition of Tacitus, of 1470, as he wrote the Discourses and The Prince; that edition did not however include Annals 1–6, which have their own manuscript tradition and were first printed in 1515; R. J. Tarrant, in L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: a Survey of the Latin Classics (1983), pp. 406–9. 27 Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, and De Corpore Politico: of the Elements of Law (Thoemmes Press, Bristol, 1840, reprinted with a new Introduction by G. A. J. Rogers, Thoemmes Press, 1994). 28 R. Mellor, Tacitus, pp. 138ff. refers to the numerous ‘Discourses’ on Tacitus written after the first printing of the (partial) text of the historian in 1470. 29 Aubrey’s Brief Lives tells how Hobbes was fascinated by the acuity of vision of the hawk, which could so precisely detect distant objects, with an eye of so short a focal length.

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Chapter 2 30

G. E. M. de Ste Croix, ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, Historia 3 (1954/5), pp. 1–41, is classic, but does not quite address this issue. 31 A central theme of Chapter 3 below. 32 Hornblower, Thucydides, p. 29, cites an anecdote told by Thucydides’ biographer Marcellinus, that Thucydides burst into tears on hearing Herodotus recite, but then wonders whether this was because he thought Herodotus ‘very good or very bad’. This is an unnecessary point of hesitation. The only possible reading of the anecdote (which is all it is), is that Thucydides was moved by Herodotus’ writing.

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3 RONALD SYME, CONSTANTINE THE GREAT AND THE SECOND ROMAN REVOLUTION 1 When, in 1970, Ronald Syme retired from the Camden Professorship of Ancient History at Oxford, he also, in the normal way, relinquished the Fellowship at Brasenose College to which the Professorship is attached. The next stage in his cursus had been prepared by his election to an Extraordinary Fellowship at Wolfson College: this was at the instance of the then President of Wolfson, Sir Isaiah Berlin, in whose judgment, if I was rightly informed, Syme was quite simply the greatest living historian of any period of history, ancient or modern. But there was a complication. Wolfson College, a graduate college still of recent foundation, was in the process of moving to extensive new buildings on a new site, and the penthouse flat in which Syme was to live, with its view, of which he grew so fond, over the river Cherwell and its water-meadows, did not yet exist. There then followed an itinerant period in Syme’s career – an outcome not without irony, since his tenure as Camden Professor had often seemed, to some, to be marked as much by itinerancy as by presence. We might fancifully see this phase of Syme’s life as prefiguring his interest in those third-century Roman emperors to whom he devoted much of his later work: embattled figures, fighting their way around the frontiers of empire, ‘running around here and there’ as Ammianus Marcellinus put it, hardly ever approaching Rome, the ‘eternal city’ to which their distant labours were devoted.2 For all his love of travel, based on an amazing range of academic and social contacts in all parts of the world, Syme missed the sense of a ‘home base’ that Oxford had given him: and I think that he was relieved when, in due course, the penthouse was completed and he could take up residence. There then followed, naturally enough, a party, held on the grass terrace of the new buildings of Wolfson, overlooking the little artificial harbour which has always seemed to me, mutatis mutandis, to resemble the Round Harbour of Carthage: and, equally naturally, one of Syme’s characteristic, brief occasional speeches – elegant, oblique, ironic, a little subversive. Syme even allowed himself to wonder whether the Fellowship at Wolfson would have

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Chapter 3 been quite so attractive to him, had he known how long he would have to wait to enjoy its benefits. On that or possibly a later occasion, he also referred to his own survival, to what was then after all not such an advanced age, in one of those many quotations of which he knew the source but his audience did not: ‘If I’d known that I would live so long’, he said, ‘I would have taken better care of myself ’.3 As often with Syme, this was more closely relevant than it sounds. He was something of a fatalist, not exactly in the sense of believing in fate: but, as he often said, ‘anything may happen’ – in life as in history – and it might be a waste of energy to take, as it were, excessive evasive action. Not many years before his retirement he had, indeed, been very seriously ill, and had people wondering whether he might not survive. Even as a boy in Eltham he had suffered from illness, including a bout of measles that entailed his being kept in a darkened room, and caused a permanent weakness of the eyes. Somewhat contradictorily, he had also used his periods of teenage illness to embark on the voracious reading of French literature which throughout his life was an abiding passion.4 There was also that mysterious period in the war years – a period marked by service, in Professor Dearden’s aptly elusive phrase, ‘of the special assignment type in intelligence and diplomatic areas’ 5 – when Syme was clearly, at times, in great danger. I have heard it said that there is, in the pages of the great Classical encyclopaedia, Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie, the name of one southern European contributor (I will leave him anonymous) who, if he had caught Syme in those years, would gladly have had him shot (and had the power to do so): and there are other such stories. It was perhaps for good reason, or reasons, that Syme was sometimes heard to say that he had not expected to live for as long as he did. However that may be, once installed in Wolfson, Syme continued to take insufficient care of himself for the best part of another twenty years – a neglect which, if I may say this in honour of his new college, was modified by the care taken of him by Wolfson, and by his personal friends, who grew ever fonder of him as he grew older. It is touching to recall how this reserved and proud man responded to these affections, and was increasingly willing to show that he did appreciate them. These years, right down to his death in September 1989, were immensely productive. Syme claimed to write slowly, and anyone who reads his individual, idiosyncratic and, it must be said, increasingly mannered style, can see how this was so. (Only Syme could ever have written, and left standing, the sentence ‘The imbroglio enjoins a further regress’, to mean ‘This problem requires more sorting out’).6 But he evidently did not work all that slowly, he began early in the day and worked long hours: also, it

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Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution was uncanny that he was hardly ever seen to write anything down, a tremendous saving of time compared with those of us who have to take notes in order to remember what we read. Those notes which he did take he wrote down, economical as ever in his personal expenditures, on Oxford University Press index slips, which he stored in used wooden cigar boxes, stacked in neat piles on top of his bookshelves; there can have been few more inexpensive and at the same time more fragrant bibliographies! The results of those late years of work can be seen in the third and subsequent volumes of his collected Roman Papers, edited with skill and devotion by Professor Anthony Birley, of Manchester and subsequently Düsseldorf University.7 They can also be seen in his studies on the so-called ‘Historia Augusta’ entitled Emperors and Biography (1971), and, on the earlier period of Roman history, in his History in Ovid, of 1978; lastly, in The Augustan Aristocracy, of 1986 (though it went to the Press four years earlier), in which he returned to the theme of his first great masterpiece, The Roman Revolution of 1939. It was a sad irony that Syme’s death coincided almost to the day with the fiftieth anniversary of the publication, on 6 September 1939, of this great book, reissued in 1952 and 1956 and brought out in 1960 as the first in the series Oxford Paperbacks: since when, in covers of various shades, all of them lapidary and dignified, it has been a best-seller always kept in print. (Syme’s comment on the first paperback version was only that ‘the cover wasn’t a bright enough shade of red’!). The inevitable party to commemorate the anniversary, arranged by Oxford University Press, was not held, and his friends thus missed the opportunity to hear Syme’s reflections on The Roman Revolution, fifty years on – though it may be that, content to let the printed page speak, he would not have added very much. Certainly, when a few years earlier Syme had addressed a crowded audience at Oxford on his development as a historian, he said little that, at one time or another, he had not let slip before. It was almost as if, with no interest in doing it himself, he was scattering the clues that might allow others to write his biography. I have had three interesting experiences, at different times, at the hands of immigration officers. On the first of these, in the United States, the officer, noting my declared purpose in entering the country (for the very first time), startled me by saying, ‘Roman history, huh? Would that be the Elder or the Younger Cato?!’ – before bringing down his stamp with a great thump from a considerable height and allowing me to enter. On the second occasion, when I was re-entering the United Kingdom after a trip abroad, the officer said, ‘So, you teach Roman history. You’d know Syme then?’. This mystery was solved when the officer turned out to be a Classics

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Chapter 3 graduate of Reading University (indicating the wide relevance of a Classical education). On the third occasion, when I entered New Zealand to give the lecture of which this chapter is a revised version, the officer took a different, possibly more realistic line: ‘So, Roman history: not much quarantine risk in that!’. This is the last thing that could be said of The Roman Revolution, if one sees it as a book imported into the domains of Roman history in 1939. It was, one might say, a scholarly quarantine risk of major proportions. ‘It is surely time’, wrote Syme in his Preface (p. viii), ‘for some reaction from the “traditional” and conventional view of the period. Much that has recently been written about Augustus is simply panegyric, whether ingenuous or edifying. Yet it is not necessary to praise political success or to idealize the men who win wealth and honours through civil war’. The theme of The Roman Revolution, the transition, if it can be called that, from Republic to Empire in the days of Pompey the Great, Cicero, Julius Caesar and Octavian Augustus, was one of high political and moral drama: it raised themes, relating to questions of political liberty, the character of despotism, and the advantages of stable government, which had been of great importance to men of the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century – themes, indeed, which seem ever more relevant to our own post-imperial age, as political systems fall apart and ethnic and religious factions proliferate. What one might call the ‘traditional’ view of Augustus referred to by Syme had as its components two contrasting themes. On one side, there is the issue of the political liberties of the Roman senate, faced with the tendencies towards despotism enshrined in figures like Sulla, Pompey and Caesar and given philosophical and historical expression by Cicero and Sallust; on the other side the rise through civil war of the young Octavian, transformed by political adroitness, ruthlessness, insight and good fortune into the benevolent despot, dying as an old man in the odour of piety, a full forty years after the establishment of the ‘Principate’. It was a history readily romanticized, on one side or the other: but not by Syme. ‘The design’, he wrote, ‘has imposed a pessimistic and truculent tone, to the almost complete exclusion of the gentler emotions and the domestic virtues. ∆ύvαµις and Τύχη [Power and Fortune] are the presiding divinities...’ (Preface, p.viii). Syme had seen at close hand what the 1930s could do with concepts of despotism, the control of public opinion and the hypocrisy of the ambitious. When he wrote that the book had ‘not been composed in tranquillity’ he meant just what he said: one can even demonstrate it. The Preface is dated 1 June 1939 (in sharp contrast with The Augustan Aristocracy, only three months elapsed between that date and the date of publication): but on the preceding page Syme

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Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution wrote that parts of the book, and they are important parts, had ‘in an earlier form and draft’ been given as lectures at Oxford in the summer of 1937. The book, which is more than 500 pages long, was brought to completion in less than two years from that time: others have told me that the entire work was composed by this ‘slow writer’ in a single year.8 For Syme, the problem was plainly stated: ‘Liberty or stable government: that was the question confronting the Romans themselves, and I have tried to answer it precisely in their fashion’ (p. viii). There was no ‘Revolution’ in the twentieth-century sense (or rather, there were no ‘Revolutions’ either). Both before and after the civil wars, power was in the hands of cliques, or oligarchies; and power, and its concomitants, wealth and influence – and not ideology and sentiment – were what civil wars, and politics in general, were about. Each protagonist in the Roman civil wars – Pompey, Caesar, the ‘Liberators’, Octavian – collected and led a party, or ‘factio’; and power, wealth and influence were transferred to the victorious factio, which (in Chapter XXIV of The Roman Revolution) is metamorphosed into the ‘party’ of Augustus. Ideologies – in the works of Cicero – are dispatched as ‘Political Catchwords’ (Chapter XI) and reduced under Augustus to ‘The National Programme’ and ‘The Organization of Opinion’ (Chapters XXIX–XXX): shades everywhere of the 1930s. As for the redistribution of wealth, that other defining feature of modern ‘Revolutions’, this was between faction and faction: if any movement of wealth and resources took place, it was not from the rich to the poor, or the upper to the lower classes, but from the idle and decadent to the vigorous and the energetic. Redistribution of wealth to the people occurred, not as a ‘structural’ phenomenon related to the means of production, but as payments by the princeps: to the army in salaries and donations, and to the people in distributions of cash, food and in the provision, on a vast scale, of public entertainments. By these techniques, traditional in manner but unparalleled in scale, the political and social clientèle of Augustus came to dominate all others. I have not so far mentioned one facet that throughout his work was of immense importance to Syme: the widening social base from which the emperors’ support was gathered. The Roman Republican senate had been restrictive in its policies of recruitment to its numbers. These policies favoured the established families: new men, what the Romans called, precisely, ‘novi homines’, joined the senate with difficulty and were made to feel the depth of their social inferiority. Not surprisingly, they often responded, like Cicero and the historian Tacitus, by being more Roman than the Romans themselves.9 The late Republic, and especially the rise of Pompey, Caesar and

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Chapter 3 Octavian, changed all that. The support of these men, what the historian Appian called the ‘dynasts’, or ‘men of power’,10 was largely drawn from what Syme would call, with some irony, the ‘better sort of person’ from the municipalities of Italy: good, solid, burghers, Roman citizens from an earlier generation, substantial local farmers and landowners financially able to enter the Roman senatorial class and, in due course, to furnish the emperors with their senators and public servants: above all, they were fresh men, with new energies. In due course, the ‘Roman Revolution’, continuing as a wider stream of historical change, recruited these new supporters from further and further afield: from central and northern Italy, then southern Gaul, Spain and Africa, from Asia Minor and the east. With this theme, ‘the rise of the provincial’, Syme the New Zealander identified himself;11 and it pervades not only The Roman Revolution but his later masterpiece Tacitus, of 1958 – taken by some to be a still greater work than its more spectacular predecessor – and those works which followed, on the Balkan soldier-emperors of the later Roman period. Syme delineated this class of ‘novi homines’, recruited from ever-widening circles into the Roman élite, with a brilliant and imaginative technical virtuosity. In The Roman Revolution he referred at one point (p. 31, n. 2) to the connections of Pompey the Great with ‘other families of local gentry, the men of substance in the municipia of Italy’, supporting this with a footnote identifying such people which is, to me, a hidden treasure of the book (I cite from the note as it stands, complete with references as they are given): For example, M. Atius Balbus from Aricia, who married Caesar’s sister Julia (Suetonius, Divus Aug. 4.1); and Hirrus was married to a daughter of L. Cossinius (Varro, RR 2, 1, 2), the leading authority on goats (ib. 2, 3, 1), who had been a legate of Pompeius in the war against the Pirates (ib. 2, praef. 6). Another member of the group was Cn. Tremellius Scrofa, suitably eloquent about pigs (ib. 2, 4, 1 ff.) and a master of all rural science (ib. 1, 2, 10).12

This is on the basis of references to Varro’s work De Re Rustica, transforming substantial local farmers into partisans of Pompey, on an assumption that Syme saw no need to state explicitly: that the basis of ancient wealth, and therefore of social and political life, was agriculture. Syme did not omit to mention elsewhere in the book that Varro was himself at one point proscribed but protected by a friend,13 to which he might have added the episode narrated at the end of Book 1 of De Re Rustica. The conversations about pigs and goats and such were presented as taking place as the participants waited to be joined by a friend, the sacristan (aedituus) of the Temple of Tellus (Earth). The friend did not

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Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution show up, but there then appeared a freedman of his in a state of agitation, apologising for the delay and telling his astonished hearers to prepare for a funeral on the following day; it turned out that on his way to meet them, his former master had been stabbed to death in the forum by an unknown assailant, who had been heard only to say as he ran off through the crowds that he had got the wrong man. Such was the misfortune of human life, remarked Varro, that the news was more distressing than surprising – a sobering acknowledgement of the violence of the times.14 In his Annals, Tacitus famously summarised the public mood at the death of Augustus, by remarking that most old men still living had been born in times of civil war, and asking how many were left who had seen the Republic; ‘quotus quisque reliquus qui rem publicam vidisset?’ (Ann. 1.3). He did not need to pose the unspoken question; how many were there who would choose to have it back? In the Roman Revolution the Romans had, as Syme put it, exchanged ‘liberty for stable government’. This pact, grudgingly acknowledged by the historian Tacitus, takes us through the first into the second century, that ‘golden age of the Antonines’ when, to paraphrase Gibbon, justice, order and tranquillity were diffused across the greatest part of the earth.15 It did not go on like this. From the later part of the second, and especially in the third century, the Roman provinces came under heavy and increasing attack from beyond the river frontiers that formed the defended limits of the Roman empire.16 The consequence for the social history of the empire was the rise of another sort of ‘provincial’: Danubian soldiers who provided a new élite of professional officers, generals and, before long, emperors. Those emperors from, say, Maximinus (235–8) to the Illyrians Decius, Claudius, Probus and Aurelian in the later third century, formed the subject of some of Syme’s later papers and of his book Emperors and Biography, in which he characterized them with fresh insight, and with his usual technical skill in evaluating the inscriptions, documentary material and the very difficult literary sources which are the evidence for them. This period of structural change and political discontinuity, often called the ‘period of anarchy’ of the Roman empire, was brought to an end by the emperors Diocletian and Maximian and their two colleagues in what is known as the Tetrarchy, or ‘Rule of Four’. One of the Tetrarchs, Constantius, was the father of Constantine the Great, the author of the ‘Second Roman Revolution’ of the title of this chapter. Syme could be evasive in revealing to his friends and colleagues what was his current subject of interest: in any case, there were so many. There is no sign that he ever planned a study of Constantine the Great.

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Chapter 3 The subject nevertheless offered much that would have appealed. We could start with the emperor declaring, in a letter addressed to the eastern provincials, how, ‘beginning at the remotest shores of the British ocean’,17 he had advanced upon the Roman empire to establish his power there and suppress the ‘pretenders’ who occupied it. The next phase would address the civil wars in which, between 306 and 312 and again in the 320s, Constantine defeated his rivals, with all the usual accoutrements of these events; not only battles, in the wars in which he defeated Maxentius and Licinius, but treaties and their betrayal, dynastic marriages, rivals killed or forced to suicide. There was also ‘trouble in the family’ uncomfortably reminiscent of Augustus when, in 326, Constantine ordered the execution of his son and first heir Crispus; an event which was followed, at no great interval and with a widely suspected causal connection, by the unexplained death of Constantine’s wife Fausta, Crispus’ stepmother. She is said to have died in an over-heated bath. Accidents will occur, but this was no great triumph for Roman technology! We also have a topic very close to Syme’s interests, as we see them, for instance, in the early articles on military history preceding The Roman Revolution, the importance of geography – particularly that of the Balkan lands which carried the Roman high road through Sirmium and Naissus (modern Niš: where Constantine was born) through Serdica (modern Sofia) to Byzantium and thence into Asia Minor. In one of his early articles, and many times subsequently, Syme showed how the focus of Roman military strength, measured in its legionary distribution, had shifted during the first century from the Rhine to the Danube, corresponding to a realignment of the most serious enemies of Rome.18 The importance in historical events of the military high road through the Balkans – not to mention the notion that emperors could be made ‘elsewhere than at Rome’ (Tacitus, Histories 1.4) – was already familiar from the civil wars of 68–70. Constantine’s power once established, like that of Octavian Augustus, by military means, we turn to the creation of a consensus; let us call it ‘the National Programme’. Again, the parallels with the founder of the Principate offer themselves: legislation on marriage and sexual morality, adapting for a new age the laws of Augustus:19 the foundation of a consensus through the use of a religion – though it is a new and contentious one: the building of a great new city, a ‘new Rome’, founded in the east at Constantinople; and the support and embellishment of cities everywhere. Arelate (Arles) in Southern Gaul and Cirta (modern Constantine) in north Africa both acquired the honorific name of ‘Constantina’, and Naissus in the Balkans, Constantine’s birthplace, was ‘magnificently embellished’ by him.20

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Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution We have, too, possible conflicts with the senate; even, for the connoisseur of Augustan politics, an exiled poet to remind us of Ovid (though this one was recalled); 21 and finally, after Constantine’s death in 337, a series of dynastic murders that would surely have reminded Syme of the situation at the deaths both of Augustus, with the murder of Agrippa Postumus on the isle of Planasia – and, more especially, of Trajan and his successor Hadrian. At the accession of Hadrian, four men of consular rank had to die; at the emperor’s death an elderly senator, three times consul, and his grandson perished, to ensure the succession of the gentle Antoninus.22 In all these respects – civil war, dynastic upheaval, social change, systematic propaganda and the transfer of power to new groups – the rise and reign of Constantine would well suit the ‘pessimistic and truculent’ tone of The Roman Revolution. In the rise of Constantine as much as of Augustus, Power and Fortune – ∆ύvαµις and Τύχη – were the ‘presiding divinities’. There is something very important that is missing so far, and I will introduce it by remarking that the most explicit connection of Augustus with Constantine is offered not by Ronald Syme but by a Christian bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine. Writing of the reign of Augustus, Eusebius argued that, as any reflecting person would agree: it was no matter of mere human agency that the majority of the inhabited world fell under the sole sway of the Romans – and at no other moment in history than at the birth of Jesus. For the power of the Romans reached its zenith at precisely the moment of his unexpected sojourn among men – at the time when Augustus first acquired power over all nations, defeating Cleopatra and putting an end to the succession of the Ptolemies... From then also the Jewish race has been subject to the Romans, that of the Syrians likewise, the Cappadocians and Macedonians, Bithynians and Greeks: in a word, all the nations which now fall under the Roman Empire. That this did not happen without regard to the teaching of our Saviour must be plain to anyone who reflects on the difficulty with which his disciples would otherwise have travelled to foreign parts, the different nations being at war with one another, their diversities of government preventing relations between them.23

It is an interesting perspective, a positive evaluation of the results of the Roman Revolution described by Syme – this surrender of political freedom for stable government which had, for Syme, secured the interests of the ‘non-political classes’, and was grudgingly accepted by Tacitus.24 For Eusebius and those of his way of thinking, the ‘pax Augusta’ under which Christianity had begun its life in the Roman world was only part of the providential design which they saw in history. The design was completed, three centuries after Augustus, by the conversion of Constantine to Christianity – and, more particularly, by the conversion of

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Chapter 3 the governing classes which ensued in the emperor’s wake. This too was summarised by Eusebius, in commenting on the verse of Isaiah 49.23: ‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and queens thy nursing mothers’.25 For Eusebius, this foretold the protection of the Christian church by pious emperors, and by magistrates and governors who served the ‘kingdom on high’. As for the rest of the verse of Isaiah: they shall bow down to thee with their faces to the earth and lick the dust of thy feet: and thou shalt know that I am the Lord, and they that wait for me shall not be ashamed

– these words prophesied the same event, with magistrates and governors bending their knees in the church of God, lowering their foreheads to the ground in prayer. Who would not believe this to be the literal fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah, asked Eusebius, having seen it for themselves? Ronald Syme was an ironic, detached observer of human affairs, rather in the spirit of Gibbon, for whom traditional (that is, political) history was, in his famous phrase, ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’.26 He was also (again like Gibbon) more than a shade anti-clerical, an attitude whose origin I once heard him assign to the day when, as a small boy at Eltham, he found that his parents had uprooted the produce of his private garden plot and sent it to the local harvest festival: ‘From that day’, he said, ‘dates my anti-clericalism!’. Syme would have been little interested in the visions and personal experiences that led Constantine, by however indirect a route, to his specific commitment to Christianity. These were as they might be: who could tell? He would however have appreciated the operations of influence and imitation that led others to adopt the emperor’s belief – thereby producing a process of social and cultural change, the Christianisation of the Roman empire, quite as distinctive and important as that initiated by Augustus. Again without subscribing to Eusebius’ presentation of the matter – ‘magistrates and governors bending their knees in the church of God, lowering their foreheads to the ground in prayer’ – Syme would have relished the social changes inherent in this perception: yet another wave of ‘new men’, recruited from the middle-ranking literate classes of the Roman empire who had manned Diocletian’s much expanded bureaucracy. It was this class of men who, by reason of their origin among the relatively Christianised cities of the Roman empire, were among those best placed to carry the influence of their religion into government circles – and, of course, to profit from it.27 This would be a great theme for Syme, a true ‘Roman Revolution’ showing how an ideological commitment could be transformed into a

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Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution social change, a religion into a profit-making concern – for Constantine was notorious for his open-handed generosity to his friends, and many examples can be found in the sources. It would call forth all the detached, subversive irony of which he was capable. One would not wish to impose upon Syme a book he never showed any interest in writing: only to show some parallels between Augustus and Constantine that would have interested him, and to use these to help illustrate the manner of his historical writing. There is one more, crucial, element that needs to be put in its place. Syme was a master of institutions, and had a staggering knowledge of the epigraphic and documentary evidence for Roman history. But he was at all times an essentially literary historian, as one can see even from the titles of most of his major works: Tacitus, Sallust, Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, History in Ovid. It is true that the title of The Roman Revolution mentions no writer, but the names of some candidates are given on the first page of the Preface: In narrating the central epoch of the history of Rome [a very Gibbonian phrase!] I have been unable to escape from the influence of the historians Sallust, Pollio and Tacitus, all of them Republican in sentiment. Hence a deliberately critical attitude towards Augustus. If Caesar and Antonius by contrast are treated rather leniently, the reason may be discovered in the character and opinions of the historian Pollio – a Republican, but a partisan of Caesar and of Antonius. This also explains [with a sting in the tail] what is said about Cicero and about Livy...

This statement is more enigmatic than it seems, in one respect. The writings of the historian Asinius Pollio, to which Syme ascribed the tone of his own writing, do not actually survive: Syme’s description of their character is an inference based on the political allegiance of their author, and on what other ancient writers say about him. The presence of Pollio, as a sort of literary ghost summoned up to haunt the pages of Syme’s book, is however an essential part of his method, and adds much to its resonance. From the critical Pollio, the restless Sallust, to Tacitus, austere and dignified, and the author of the Historia Augusta, a ‘rogue grammarian’ discovering as he wrote an increasing taste for fantasy and invention – in all these cases one can see the same manner and technique in Syme’s writing. An author is chosen who wrote of his subject not submissively (as was easy to do under the empire)28 but critically, subversively or with humour, interposing a space, a sort of ‘domain of scepticism’, between himself and his subject: and it was in this space that, having defined it, Syme himself moved.

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Chapter 3 From this point of view, the ‘Second Roman Revolution’ of Constantine would have presented a problem – though one not insoluble. The church historian Eusebius would hardly do as model or inspiration: one can hardly imagine Syme consorting (as he would have put it) with an ecclesiastical partisan who had gained so much from the reign of Constantine and, in the end, was a mouthpiece of it.29 Other ecclesiastics, notably Athanasius and Augustine, might hold out more intellectual appeal, but Syme had no interest whatsoever in theology (as little, I’m much sorrier to say, as he had in music, which was always a great mystery to him – ‘just noise’, he called it). Another, Jerome, interested Syme as a Latin stylist with many of the classic virtues. Jerome was clever – ‘the alert and eloquent monk’, as Syme styled him on one occasion – but, as to intellectual content, opportunistic and, worse, mendacious.30 On the ‘Classical’ side, the author of the Historia Augusta, amusing and frivolous, had subscribed to light biography rather than the solemn majesty of true Roman history. For all his interest, he would not do as a model. But there was the magnificent author who shares the title page of Syme’s book on the Historia Augusta: Ammianus Marcellinus. Ammianus’ books on Constantine the Great do not survive (the first 13 books of his history are lost): but that, as we saw in the case of the historian Pollio, need not be an impediment, and there are enough back-references to define his views. Further, Ammianus, writing in the 380s, was no contemporary of Constantine; but neither was Tacitus a contemporary of Tiberius, about whom he wrote with such severe understanding. Ammianus gives us the essentials. A Greek writing in Latin, even in his choice of language he established that distance between himself and his subject-matter which we have seen characteristic of Syme’s literary prototypes. He remained a supporter of the old gods while the Roman empire became ever more Christianised, yet played a public role and retained his independence of mind; he even withheld full approval from his dead hero, the apostate emperor Julian. One might say of Ammianus, as Syme wrote of Tacitus, that ‘It is good fortune and a privilege if one can consort for so many years with an historian who knew the worst, discovered few reasons for ease or hope or confidence, and none the less believed in human dignity and freedom of speech’.31 Living in an unsympathetic age, Ammianus commented on it with irony, describing Christianity as a ‘just and gentle’ religion in the context of the violence of its partisans; praising provincial bishops for their restraint and modesty in the midst of a description of ambitious urban prelates, ‘dressed conspicuously, surrounded by columns of matrons and eating dinners fit for kings’ – and rising to the episcopal throne through the carnage of urban

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Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution rioting; describing how a town in Germany was captured while (that is, because) its garrison was at church; and criticising Constantine for the financial greed which led him to make war upon Persia, while on the other hand pouring wealth upon his favourites and associates.32 Ammianus, like Syme, wrote his history in a city far from his place of origin (though Syme the New Zealander was more fully honoured at Oxford than ever Ammianus the Antiochene was at Rome): and there is even a famous episode, reminiscent, if only in fable, of those ‘special assignments in intelligence and diplomacy’ mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, when Ammianus was sent as a special agent into the mountains of Kurdistan. ‘In September of 1944’, wrote Syme in an article on the site of the Armenian city of Tigranocerta, first published in 1983, ‘I had cursory autopsy of Martyropolis’. Syme does not say what he was doing there. Martyropolis, modern Mayferqat or Silvan, stands at the southern edge of the Taurus, about 25 miles west of the Batman Sou, a tributary of the upper Tigris. It is important in the communications of the region, and especially in the routes from Mesopotamia to Asia Minor and the Black Sea.33 Above all, there is Ammianus’ style, a magnificent if idiosyncratic instrument conveying colour, force and emotion. To style, if to anything, Syme owed his ultimate loyalty. As he wrote at the very end of the marvellous Tacitus, in sentences which concentrate and define his essential historical preoccupations: When Tacitus wrote, colonials and provincials from the Latin West occupied the place of the Caesars. There was only one higher pinnacle: literary renown. To that also the epoch of Trajan and Hadrian might confidently aspire. Men and dynasties pass, but style abides (Tacitus, Vol. II, p. 624).

As men and dynasties passed, so also could times change. By the time of Constantine, military officers from the Balkan north ‘occupied the place of the Caesars’, and there is little sign that they or their compatriots aspired to the ‘higher pinnacle of literary renown’. Certainly, with the exception of Julian, Ammianus did not think so (though one should concede his remark about the intellectual pretensions of Constantius).34 The evolution of the Roman empire into a bureaucratic state had brought opportunities to ‘novi homines’ on a scale far beyond any dreamed of by Augustus: while the conversion of the empire had brought a new ideology of power, and had transferred wealth to the Christian church in a way that even – or possibly most of all – embarrassed its recipients. Jerome announced, in a sadly unfulfilled promise, that he would one day write a history of the church, in which he would show how the church, ‘from its pure and innocent beginnings down to the sad degradation of the present’, had

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Chapter 3 grown richer in wealth and power, but poorer in virtue.35 From his very different perspective, Ammianus Marcellinus, with his professed but ironic admiration for the humble ways of provincial bishops, would have agreed. As for Ronald Syme, whom little could surprise because he understood so much, all these things would have fulfilled the dictum with which he was once heard to open a public lecture. ‘In history’, he said, ‘anything can happen. But... [then, after a pause, and with carefully placed emphasis] ...anything can be explained ’. It was the historian’s duty, he left it to be clearly understood, to do the explaining. It is a reassuring note, in our ever more surprising world, on which to end.

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised version of the inaugural Syme Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Victoria University of Wellington on 23 September 1992. I have made only minor revisions to the text (as published in Prudentia 26 [1993], pp. 24–41), with some additions and documentation. I refer to some of Syme’s published articles as they appear in his Roman Papers, edited by Anthony Birley, with a note of the original date of publication. 2 Ammianus Marcellinus 14.11.10, words attributed to the emperor Constantius; ‘non resides, sed ultro citroque discurrentes’ (hardly appropriate to Syme, in that they did this in obedience to the will of their senior colleague Diocletian). 3 I remembered the remark as made on the occasion described, but there is a problem with the reminiscence, such as would have amused its subject. Chris Ehrhardt of the University of Otago drew my attention to the attribution in the 1991 Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (p. 34 No. 22), of the expression, ‘If I’d known I was gonna live this long [100 years], I’d have taken better care of myself’, to ‘Eubie’ ( James Hubert) Blake (1883–1983), as cited in The Observer of 13 February 1983. Either there is a common source for Syme and Eubie Blake, or I misplaced the occasion. The latter is perhaps more likely, given that Syme also made a (memorable) speech at a dinner held at Wolfson College in April 1983 on the occasion of a colloquium to celebrate his 80th birthday (the proceedings published as Caesar Augustus: Seven aspects [Oxford, 1984]). Knowing what was to come, he could have noted the quotation in The Observer of 13 February, and used it in his speech of two months later. 4 One more Eltham reminiscence, imparted by his younger sister when she came to Oxford for the commemoration of Syme held in November 1989: as a child, it infuriated him that he was unable to master the art of riding a bicycle. 5 In the open letter inaugurating the Memorial Lecture Project that gave rise to my visit to New Zealand. The letter is itself an excellent appreciation of Syme’s work. 6 In ‘Fiction about Roman jurists’, Roman Papers III (1984), p. 1393 [first published in 1980]. 7 Volume III of Roman Papers contains 41 papers dated 1971–81; Volumes IV–V contain 42 papers dated 1981–5; Volume VI contains 46 papers, of which 22 date from 1985–9; and Volume VII contains 12 unpublished papers, plus a jeu d’esprit on Tacitus. There were also the books on Ovid and the Augustan Aristocracy mentioned

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Ronald Syme, Constantine the Great and the Second Roman Revolution above, and the posthumous volumes, both edited by Anthony Birley; Anatolica: Studies in Strabo (1995); The Provincial at Rome, and Rome and the Balkans, 80 BC–AD 14 (1999). 8 A graduate student, not in ancient but modern history, has just commented (in 2009) to me very perceptively, on reading the book for the first time, on the sheer confidence of its style. 9 Cf. Tacitus, p. 610 (and Appendix 89 at pp. 797–8), where Syme alludes to opinions such as that Tacitus was a patrician from the old nobility. The likely origin was in southern Gaul, cf. Tacitus, Chapter XLII, ‘Novus Homo’; below, Chapter 5. 10 Appian, Civil War 1.2.7; see Syme’s index entry, The Roman Revolution, p. 546. 11 In his Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, p. 22, n. 3, Syme quotes Gibbon on the alleged cannibalism of the Attacotti; ‘If, in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of the Scottish history, the opposite extremes of savage and civilized life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas; and to encourage the pleasing hope, that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere’ (Decline and Fall, Chap. XXV; ed. Bury, III, p. 44; Womersley, I, p. 1001). There is no need to emphasise the levels of allusiveness in Syme’s use of this remark. 12 ‘Suitably eloquent’, because the name Scro-fa itself derived from pig-breeding (De Re Rustica 2.1.4). 13 The Roman Revolution, p. 193. There is a succinct portrait of Varro at p. 247. 14 De Re Rustica 1.69.2ff.; cf. Josiah Osgood, Caesar’s Legacy: Civil war and the emergence of the Roman Empire (2006), pp. 208–12, at 211f. 15 Decline and Fall, Chap. III (ed. Bury, I, pp. 76–7; Womersley, I, p. 102). 16 On this period see now David Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180–395 (2004). 17 In Eusebius, On the Life of Constantine, 2.28 (translated in the series Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, p. 507). The passage occurs on a contemporary papyrus, cf. A. H. M. Jones, ‘Notes on the genuineness of the Constantinian documents in Eusebius’ Life of Constantine’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 5 (1954), 196–200; reprinted in his papers The Roman Economy (ed. P. A. Brunt, 1974), 257–62. 18 ‘Some notes on the legions under Augustus’, JRS 23 (1933), 14–33, and in his three chapters in the Cambridge Ancient History, published in 1934 and 1936. 19 Judith Evans-Grubbs, Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The emperor Constantine’s marriage legislation (1995); ‘Abduction marriage in Antiquity: a law of Constantine (CTh IX.24.1 and its social context’, JRS 79 (1989), 59–83; Antti Arjava, Women and Law in Late Antiquity (1996). 20 Anonymus Valesianus 2; ‘quod oppidum postea magnifice ornavit’. 21 Namely Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius. According to Jerome’s Chronicle (s.a. 329 but perhaps not referring to this year), the poet won his recall from exile by sending a volume of his works to Constantine; for a discussion of the evidence see T. D. Barnes, ‘Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius’, AJP 96 (1975), 173–86. 22 Cf. Tacitus, pp. 244; 600–1. This late victim of Hadrian was the Julius Servianus who features in the will of ‘Dasumius’ discussed in Chapter 6. For Tiberius, see Chapter 4. 23 Eusebius, Demonstratio Evangelica III.7.30ff.; Greek text in PG 22, cols. 245/6, or GCS (ed. I. A. Heikel, 1913), pp. 145–6. Cf. D. S. Wallace-Hadrill, Eusebius of Caesarea

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Chapter 3 (1960), at 173f., citing this passage and tracing Eusebius’ line of thought back to Origen. In his Ecclesiastical History (4.26.6–11), Eusebius cited the second-century writer Melito of Sardis for something very similar; cf. R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and society in the theology of St. Augustine (1970), at 47–8. 24 Contrast Tacitus, Annals 1.2 on the ‘pax Augusta’ – a ‘non-political’ viewpoint, according to which the provincials were glad to be rid of the political rivalries and financial depredations of Republican magistrates, against which the law offered them no protection. A similar sentiment recurs at Annals I.9 and at Histories 1.1; ‘postquam bellatum apud Actium atque omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit....’. For its victims the provincials, Roman liberty had proved an expensive commodity. See the discussion in Chapter 2 above. 25 PG 24, cols. 439/40; GCS (ed. J. Ziegler, 1975), p. 316. 26 Decline and Fall, Chap. III (ed. Bury, I, p. 77; Womersley, I, p. 102). 27 A. H. M. Jones, ‘The social background of the struggle between Paganism and Christianity’, in A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1963), pp. 17–37. 28 Compare Tacitus, Ann. 1.1; ‘...non defuere decora ingenia, donec gliscente adulatione deterrerentur’, with Hist. 1.1, ‘magna illa ingenia cessere’, and similar sentiments in the opening paragraphs of the Agricola. 29 T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (1981). 30 Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, p. 80. Cf. pp. 7, where Jerome is ‘astute’, showing ‘austerity, fervour and an insinuating address’, and 21, where he is said to have possessed ‘inventive talents of a high order, with no inhibition or scruple’; and there are other such remarks ( Jerome is not the only recipient of them), among which I recall but cannot trace ‘acute and sagacious’. Chapter XXI, in which Jerome’s Lives of ascetic saints are discussed, is entitled ‘Other Frauds’! 31 In the preface to Tacitus, p. vi. 32 For these and other examples, cf. my The Roman Empire of Ammianus, esp. at 441ff. I maintain my position on this issue, against the criticisms of T. D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (1998). 33 Amm. Marc. 18.6.20–3; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 43f, and Chapter 4.1; Syme, ‘Tigranocerta. A problem misconceived’, Roman Papers IV (1987; first published in 1983), p. 251. 34 Amm. Marc. 21.16.4. 35 The quoted expression is Syme’s, in Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, p. 210, cf. n. 2; ‘the narration of that declension would have been congenial to his idiosyncrasy’. Jerome’s promise was made in the first chapter of his Life of the monk Malchus (PL 23, col. 53).

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4 TACITUS, ACTA SENATUS, AND THE INAUGURATION OF TIBERIUS I. Introduction Although Edward Gibbon began his historical narrative of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the Emperor Commodus, he knew that the story really started with Augustus.1 Historians commonly realise, and are admonished by their critics, that their books should have begun earlier than they in fact do – how easy to suppose that the more profound a cause, the further back in time it should lie, and how tempting to claim that the difficulties of a book which one has oneself not attempted to write should have been solved differently! Yet, for all that Gibbon came to regret what he later called his ‘irretrievable error’ in not giving a full narrative of the earlier period,2 he took full advantage of his decision, in his three fine introductory chapters on the character of the early empire, culminating in the system of politics and administration established by the first Princeps. As for Gibbon’s great predecessor Tacitus, ‘the first of historians’, in Gibbon’s famous words, ‘who applied the science of philosophy to the study of facts’, it was suggested by Ronald Syme that a better starting-point for the Annales than the one actually chosen by their author, the accession of Tiberius in 14 CE, would have been ten years earlier, when Tiberius resumed his interrupted duties in the dynastic schemes of Augustus after the Princeps’ existing plans had gone awry.3 The following years would then trace the rise of a ‘Tiberian’ faction in Augustus’ later years, culminating in the succession of its leader, and running without pause into the reign of Tiberius. In practical terms, this would have been extremely hard to accomplish – the arguments are intricate, composed of many disparate elements, and difficult to organise in narrative form; so that, all things considered, the moment of Augustus’ death was a satisfactory place to begin. In explaining what came before, Tacitus, like Gibbon, used thematic analysis as the springboard for narrative, a procedure which allowed a certain licence. It enabled him to review Augustus’ achievement at a distance, to concede the accomplishment while challenging its creator’s motivations through the purported opinions of others, to subvert a

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Chapter 4 consensus without direct criticism in the writer’s own voice. More broadly, it allowed him to summarise the history of power at Rome, beginning with kings and returning to the rule of one man, without requiring more than the briefest statement of how Augustus achieved the transformation of corrupt and bellicose Republic into stable monarchy and peaceful empire. It also allowed him to begin his story with a spectacular display of the dissimulations that were fundamental to his conception of the Principate.4 It is not surprising to find that the young Thomas Hobbes should have chosen this passage of events to illustrate his own early conception of the nature of power and its necessary means of support.5 We should not underestimate what was at stake. If successfully accomplished, this, the first succession to the imperial office as defined by Augustus, would establish the Principate as an institution transcending the circumstances that had brought it into being. In the year before his death, in legislation brought forward by the consuls, Augustus had ensured that Tiberius possessed exactly the same powers, defined in precisely the same way, as his own.6 The only effect of Augustus’ death in public law was to leave Tiberius in sole rather than joint possession of these powers. Tiberius took them for granted, as Tacitus makes clear in explaining how, upon Augustus’ death, he took an oath of loyalty from the senate, the praetorian guard and the people of Rome, gave a watchword to the armies, and summoned the senate by publishing an edict under the tribunicia potestas also received under Augustus (Ann. 1.7). That sinister ripple on the smooth surface of the succession, the killing of Agrippa Postumus, was left in the obscurity that from the first surrounded it; whether the act was done under the instructions of Augustus or of Tiberius (which he denied), it was treated as one of those private matters (‘arcana domus’) best not reported to the senate.7 In terms of those powers and prerogatives that could be conveyed by public action, nothing further was needed to establish Tiberius’ position. This was precisely Augustus’ aim in the arrangements he had made. At the same time, Augustus’ death was too large a political fact to pass by with a casual nod of recognition. Some discussion was to be expected, even encouraged – Tiberius could hardly be allowed to slide into the Principate through family connection, especially given the widespread opinion that this was just what he had done.8 Words must be found for a new situation; to express acceptance of a successor, to acknowledge that the Augustan political order was not a contingent arrangement lasting only as long as the first Princeps, but permanent, and to assert the principle of its continuity. No-one doubts, or doubted, that the question was one of management rather than substance (it is in this way that the situation resembles an

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius inauguration rather than an election), but that does not mean that there was no room for manoeuvre, no ground to be won and no awkward moments to avoid, or that it was a matter of indifference how the situation was handled. Such reflections, and a natural curiosity to see how it would turn out, will have made the senatorial meeting that gathered on September 17 of 14 CE an unusually interesting one – and an excellent point of departure for a work of history whose central theme was the relations between senate and emperor, by a historian able to look below the surface and prepared, as we shall see, to do some research. The background of that meeting of the senate is a matter of record and can be briefly reviewed. Augustus died at Nola in Campania in the midafternoon of August 19, his body then, after due preparation, being conveyed to Rome in a procession described by Suetonius. It pursued its solemn march by night, escorted by relays of city councillors of the coloniae and municipia along the route, in each of which, as it passed, the body was laid out during the daytime in its basilica or main temple to receive the respects of the populace.9 An enumeration of the coloniae and municipia (there are thirteen of them) is all that is needed to show that the cortège can have reached Rome, at the earliest, on September 3, after which the senate met to hear the reading of the will and other documents, and to determine arrangements for the funeral. This was the only business of a meeting held extra ordinem, that is one not falling as a senatus legitimus on the Kalends of the month, and it was convened by Tiberius, as we have seen, by virtue of his tribunician power received under Augustus. Despite suggestions to the contrary, there is nothing surprising in the restriction of the senate’s business to this one issue, and no reason to suppose that discussion of any other matters was suppressed by Tiberius.10 Tact, correctness, and a sense of propriety are sufficient explanation. The funeral was followed by a period of public mourning.11 A second meeting of the senate was then held, the date of which can be established as September 17 by inscribed calendars bearing that date for the consecration of Augustus, the first of the items discussed.12 That writers earlier than Tacitus had described the period from the death of Augustus to the establishment of his successor in power, and the Principate of Tiberius himself, is easy to show from comparisons of Tacitus with Cassius Dio, who also used them. For example, the episode of the slave Clemens, who in 16 CE impersonated Agrippa Postumus to gain a short-lived following in Italy and Gaul, clearly derives in Tacitus from a source used later by Dio; this is evident from similarities between their narratives, and from details in Dio that are not in Tacitus as well as vice versa.13 Tacitus’ reference to Sejanus’ concentration of the praetorian

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Chapter 4 cohorts in a single camp at Rome also presents distinctive similarities of phrasing with Dio, with the difference that Dio places the event in the year 20, while Tacitus makes it part of a summary of general developments placed under 23; so he is able, by transferring the item from its original narrative to a thematic context and thereby releasing it from the year in which it actually occurred, to add weight to his identification of a turning point in Tiberius’ principate.14 As to the passage of events during the thirty days after the death of Augustus, a reading of Dio and Suetonius, not to mention the unjustly neglected (because extremely well-placed) Velleius Paterculus, will show many details that are not to be found in Tacitus’ more selective approach. Since the reaffirmation by Syme in 1982 of a position set out in his Tacitus of 1958, there has been a growing recognition of another type of source available to Tacitus, the acta senatus.15 This marks a reaction to the account of the matter appearing in what was for long the only systematic study of Tacitus’ use of his sources, Fabia’s Les Sources de Tacite of 1893.16 One needs only to go back to Fabia’s arguments to see how weak they are. His supposition that Tacitus’ references to the acta senatus are to be explained by his use of other historians who had already employed them offers no advantage over the alternative view, that Tacitus was himself responsible for what those other, lost historians are supposed to have done. The claim that Tacitus cannot be derived from the acta senatus because he includes details that would not be recorded there, can be met by the simple proposition that Tacitus added his own observations to the material recorded in the acta. Yet Fabia’s insistence that Tacitus followed a single literary source, in which were already to be found the differences of opinion and varieties of source material apparent in his own text, still echoes in the scholarly literature.17 Even the concession that Tacitus may have known the acta senatus is expressed with the reservation that there is no telling how often or to what effect he used them.18 There is also a tendency among those who have considered the matter, to base their argument on those few passages where Tacitus explicitly or by direct implication claims knowledge of the acta. There has been relatively little discussion of those passages of text where use of the acta seems, without direct acknowledgment, to underlie the general tenor and content of what is recorded.19 In the year 22, for instance, cities from Asia Minor sent delegations to the senate to make rival claims for asylum rights in their temples. Their presentations are summarised by Tacitus, with allusion to the exhaustion of the senate, which led to the referral of the arguments to the consuls to report back with proposals.20 Also in the time of Tiberius, the campaigns against the Numidian rebel Tacfarinas, as long as they were

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius conducted by proconsuls, are extensively recorded by Tacitus, for the simple reason that the proconsuls reported their activities to the senate and that these reports were discussed there. As soon as the campaigns were transferred to the uncle of Sejanus as an agent of imperial government, such reports were not received, discussion ceased, and Tacitus’ account lacks its previous detail; information was no longer to be found in the acta.21 The reasons given by Tiberius to the senate against accepting proposals involving magisterial elections and appointments, given by Tacitus in oratio obliqua, have every appearance of deriving from the emperor’s own words; in the spirit of irony in which the proposals were made, he argued against this ostensible enlargement of his powers, which he correctly perceived would actually reduce them (Ann. 2.36). So too does his speech delivered ‘meditato temperamento’ before the trial of Cn. Piso on a variety of capital charges, including the murder of Germanicus, in 20 CE; there is no reason to doubt that Tacitus is summarising what Tiberius actually said to the senate (Ann. 3.12).22 Particular interest has been devoted to this last case, in light of the publication by Werner Eck and colleagues of an epigraphic version of a senatusconsultum on this very subject.23 It is quickly apparent, however, that the senatus consultum is not congruent with Tacitus’ narrative, for the very obvious reason that its date is given as December 10, while the events described by Tacitus belong indissolubly to the earlier part of the year. Tacitus states explicitly that the trial of Piso caused the postponement of an ovatio granted to Drusus Caesar, which we know from calendars to have been celebrated on May 28, after the trial was finished. It is not right to argue that Tacitus distorted (we would have to say falsified) his account of the trial in order to make it appear to have been held earlier in the year than it in fact was. The trial must unequivocally be placed some time before May 28, and the dating of the senatus consultum to December 10 explained by the notion (interesting enough in itself ) that the senate was not dealing directly with the events described in the Annales, but was reviewing and putting closure to things done earlier in the year.24 This does not affect the growing presumption that Tacitus used the acta senatus directly as a source of his writing. The question to ask is a more precise one; not whether Tacitus used one type of source or another, literary or documentary, but how he used one in relation to the other. In his article of 1982, Syme stated the need to broaden the enquiry from those passages in which Tacitus more or less explicitly refers to the acta senatus, to the structure and content of his narrative, an approach that is clearly invited in his presentation of the senatorial debate of September 17 of the year 14.25

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Chapter 4 With this encouragement, it is surprising that no-one has observed that Tacitus’ account of the debate reads just like the minutes of a meeting, punctuated by the author’s comments. There is nothing in standard commentaries, in Syme’s Tacitus or in other books on the author,26 nothing in studies of senatorial procedure such as Richard Talbert’s fine book on the Roman imperial senate,27 nor in books on Tiberius, such as those by Marsh, Seager and Levick, or articles like those of Wellesley or Woodman,28 in which the occasion is discussed. The absence of such a study entails the neglect of an essential means of control in the interpretation of Tacitus’ presentation of this occasion, and of his procedures in general. When so much reading of Tacitus consists of seeking definite meanings for what he intended to be ambiguous, we should not pass by the opportunity to study him in relation to the source that he used, especially when it is such a source as the acta senatus. In what follows, the relevant passage is set out in such a way as to distinguish the actual record of the meeting from Tacitus’ own comments on the proceedings. The result is shown in two columns. In the left-hand column is the record of the meeting. It is entered in nineteen episodes involving Tiberius and various interlocutors.29 Words and phrases marking contributions to the debate – the ‘speech acts’ identifying successive interventions – are shown in bold print. In the right-hand column are Tacitus’ authorial comments and digressions. For the most part these are easily separated from the documentary material. In §3, for instance, the summary of Tiberius’ speech, set in oratio obliqua, is plainly distinguished from the Tacitean comment that follows, as also, following the interventions of Gallus and L. Arruntius, are the historian’s comments on Asinius Gallus and the other potential ‘capaces imperii’ of whom Augustus spoke at the end of his life (§§10–11).30 In the case of Asinius Gallus, the same information as is given by Tacitus also appears in Cassius Dio (57.2.5–6), with the addition of an allegation about the parentage of Drusus, and Tacitus himself signals a difference of opinion among his sources (‘quidam tradidere’) as to the identity of the senators in question. There is of course room for judgment. It is not altogether clear how much of §5 is from the acta senatus and how much is Tacitean commentary; in favour of the latter is the fact that Tacitus summarises the various documents in their entirety, but at the same time indicates that their reading was interrupted by renewed senatorial protestations (§6, ‘inter quae’, etc.), and he ends with an attribution of motive (‘incertum metu an per invidiam’) that is purely Tacitean. For the argument at hand there was no need for Tiberius to report Augustus’ advice not to extend the empire, and it may be that Tacitus has written this note from his own knowledge of this widely

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius publicised document. The first words shown in the right-hand column in §14 might possibly be an inference of Tacitus from words spoken by Tiberius, though they may seem more likely to be a Tacitean comment on the occasion. In §18 Tacitus has allowed himself to give a broader account of the popular and senatorial reaction to a change of procedure with regard to elections, returning to the acta senatus to describe Tiberius’ conduct on the occasion in question. In addition, some Tacitean glosses that are too deeply embedded in the Latin syntax to be easily separated from their context are shown in italics in the left-hand column. The text as Tacitus wrote it can be restored simply by reading from column to column across the page.

II. The text: Annales 1.11–15: (1.10.8) Ceterum sepultura more perfecta 1. templum et caelestes religiones decernuntur. 2. Versae inde ad Tiberium preces. 3. Et ille varie disserebat de magnitudine imperii sua modestia. solam divi Augusti mentem tantae molis capacem; se in partem curarum ab illo vocatum experiendo didicisse quam arduum, quam subiectum fortunae regendi cuncta onus. proinde in civitate tot inlustribus viris subnixa non ad unum omnia deferrent: plures facilius munia rei publicae sociatis laboribus exsecuturos. Plus in oratione tali dignitatis quam fidei erat; Tiberioque etiam in rebus quas non occuleret, seu natura sive adsuetudine, suspensa semper et obscura verba; tunc vero nitenti ut sensus suos penitus abderet, in incertum et ambiguum magis implicabantur. 4. At patres, quibus unus metus si intellegere viderentur, in questus lacrimas vota effundi; ad deos, ad effigiem Augusti, ad genua ipsius manus tendere,

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Chapter 4 5. cum proferri libellum recitarique iussit. opes publicae continebantur, quantum civium sociorumque in armis, quot classes, regna, provinciae, tributa aut vectigalia, et necessitudines ac largitiones. quae cuncta sua manu perscripserat Augustus, addideratque consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii, incertum metu an per invidiam. 6. Inter quae senatu ad infimas obtestationes procumbente, 7. dixit forte Tiberius se non toti rei publicae parem, ita quaecumque pars sibi mandaretur eius tutelam suscepturum. 8. Tum Asinius Gallus, ‘interrogo’, inquit, ‘Caesar, quam partem re publicae mandari tibi velis’. Perculsus improvisa interrogatione 9. paulum (Tiberius) reticuit; dein collecto animo respondit nequaquam decorum pudori suo legere aliquid aut evitare ex eo cui in universum excusari mallet. 10. Rursum Gallus (etenim vultu offensionem coniectaverat) non idcirco interrogatum ait, ut dividerent quae separari nequirent sed ut sua confessione argueretur unum esse rei publicae corpus atque unius animo regendum. addidit laudem de Augusto Tiberiumque ipsum victoriarum suarum quaeque in toga per tot annos egregie fecisset admonuit. Nec ideo iram eius lenivit, pridem invisus, tamquam ducta in matrimonium Vipsania M. Agrippae filia, quae quondam Tiberii uxor fuerat, plus quam civilia agitaret Pollionisque Asinii patris ferociam retineret. 11. Post quae L. Arruntius haud multum discrepans a Galli oratione perinde offendit,

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius quamquam Tiberio nulla vetus in Arruntium ira; sed divitem, promptum, artibus egregiis et pari fama publice, suspectabat. quippe Augustus supremis sermonibus cum tractaret quinam adipisci principem locum suffecturi abnuerent aut inpares vellent vel idem possent cuperentque, M. Lepidum dixerat capacem sed aspernantem, Gallum Asinium avidum et minorem, L. Arruntium non indignum et si casus daretur ausurum. de prioribus consentitur, pro Arruntio quidam Cn. Pisonem tradidere; omnesque praeter Lepidum variis mox criminibus struente Tiberio circumventi sunt. 12. Etiam Q. Haterius et Mamercus Scaurus suspicacem animum perstrinxere, Haterius cum dixisset ‘quo usque patieris, Caesar, non adesse caput rei publicae?’, Scaurus quia dixerat spem esse ex eo non inritas fore senatus preces quod relationi consulum iure tribuniciae potestatis non intercessisset. 13. In Haterium statim invectus est; Scaurum, cui implacabilius irascebatur, silentio tramisit. 14. Fessusque clamore omnium, expostulatione singulorum flexit paulatim, non ut fateretur suscipi a se imperium, sed ut negare et rogari desineret. Constat Haterium, cum deprecandi causa Palatium introisset ambulantisque Tiberii genua advolveretur, prope a militibus interfectum quia Tiberius casu an manibus eius inpeditus prociderat. neque tamen periculo talis viri mitigatus est, donec Haterius

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Chapter 4 Augustam oraret eiusque curatissimis precibus protegeretur. 15. Multa patrum et in Augustam adulatio. alii parentem, alii matrem patriae appellandam, plerique ut nomini Caesaris adscriberetur ‘Iuliae filius’ censebant. 16. Ille moderandos feminarum honores dictitans eademque se temperantia usurum in iis quae sibi tribuerentur, ceterum anxius invidia et muliebre fastigium in deminutionem sui accipiens, ne lictorem quidem ei decerni passus est aramque adoptionis et alia huiusce modi prohibuit. 17. At Germanico Caesari proconsulare imperium petivit, missique legati qui deferrent, simul maestitiam eius ob excessum Augusti solarentur. quo minus idem pro Druso postularetur, ea causa quod designatus consul Drusus praesensque erat. 18. Candidatos praeturae duodecim nominavit, numerum ab Augusto traditum; et hortante senatu ut augeret, iure iurando obstrinxit se non excessurum. Tum primum e campo comitia ad patres translata sunt: nam ad eam diem, etsi potissima arbitrio principis, quaedam tamen studiis tribuum fiebant. neque populus ademptum ius questus est nisi inani rumore, et senatus largitionibus ac precibus exsolutus libens tenuit, moderante Tiberio ne plures quam quattuor candidatos commendaret sine repulsa et ambitu designandos. 19. Inter quae tribuni plebei petivere ut proprio sumptu ederent ludos qui de nomine Augusti fastis additi Augustales vocarentur. sed decreta pecunia ex

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius aerario, utque per circum triumphali veste uterentur: curru vehi haud permissum. Mox celebratio annua ad praetorem translata cui inter civis et peregrinos iurisdictio evenisset. (1.16.1) Hic rerum urbanarum status erat, cum Pannonicas legiones seditio incessit.

III. Tiberius in the senate The depth of irony with which the historian has invested his narrative is clear, from the very moment at which Tacitus moves from his invented account of the opinions expressed at the funeral of Augustus (1.9–10), to the resumed narrative sequence taking us into the senate and the consecration of the dead Princeps; the adversative ‘ceterum’ marks both the return from digression to narrative, and the contrast between the view of Augustus that has just been expressed by the dissenting part of Tacitus’ imagined populace, and his recognition as a god. The paradox is maintained through the transition to the second item of business. Having consecrated Augustus as a god, the senate turned its ‘prayers’ ( preces) to Tiberius as if he too were one – an irony at once intensified by Tiberius’ own use of the phrase ‘divus Augustus’ (§3). The senate’s ‘prayers’ are then picked up in language of mounting intensity. The senate is reduced to complaints, tears, vows (§4 questus lacrimas vota), it throws itself down in abandoned pleading (§6 ad infimas obtestationes procumbente), it cries out and expostulates with Tiberius, collectively and individually (§14 clamore omnium, expostulatione singulorum). We come to the ridiculous episode of Q. Haterius, who, having given offence to Tiberius in the senate, later went to the palace to apologise (§14 deprecandi causa). In his anxiety to make amends, Haterius clasped Tiberius by the knees and brought him sprawling down, narrowly missing being killed by the guard as an assailant! 31 It is a physical enactment of the moral self-abasement of the senate, as is emphasised by Tacitus’ use of the phrase ‘deprecandi causa’ to explain Haterius’ visit to the palace – the word ‘deprecandi’ cleverly working in the ‘preces’ with which the meeting opens. So Tacitus brings in (§15) the concept of adulatio as the central theme of the meeting of the senate and of the Annales in general – the senate as the architect, if that is not too positive a term, of its own humiliation.32 The process begins at the instant of Augustus’ consecration and leads in an inexorable decline to the tragic-comedy of Haterius’ performance in the palace.

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Chapter 4 This is the literary aspect of Tacitus’ description of the occasion. In the presentation of Tacitus’ text offered above, however, its starting-point, the word ‘preces’, appears, not in the right-hand column of Tacitean comment, but in the left-hand column, as part of the procedural story of the occasion. This is deliberate, for the word and the sentence in which it appears are also Tacitus’ way of indicating the context and sequence of topics raised at the meeting. After the consecration of Augustus, introduced by the ironic ‘ceterum’, which also returns us to a narrative sequence marked by the historic present ‘decernuntur’, the senate’s ‘prayers’ turn to Tiberius. He responds by saying that only the ‘divine Augustus’ had the capacity to rule without help – an elegant stroke, by which Tiberius is able at the earliest possible opportunity to use the appellation ‘divus Augustus’ just voted by the senate. We can sense the stir that runs round the house as the phrase is used in public for the very first time. The debate now hangs on the nature of Tiberius’ successive responses to questions and objections put to him – his wish to have partners to share the burden of empire (§3), an assertion supported by the reading of documents left by Augustus making clear the scale of the responsibility (§5), even to divide the empire and take only part himself (§7). On the other side the senators insist that the res publica cannot be divided, that Tiberius is qualified by experience and loyalty (§10), that the res publica should have a ‘caput’ (§12). Asinius Gallus’ famous demand to know of Tiberius which part of a divided empire he would choose for himself (§8) is quoted also in Cassius Dio’s narrative of the same scene (57.2.5–6), but Tacitus has it from the acta senatus, since he is in a position also to cite Tiberius’ response, and Gallus’ reply when he saw (in Tacitus’ interpretation) that his question had been taken amiss (§§9–10).33 The interventions of L. Arruntius (§11), Q. Haterius and Mamercus Scaurus (§12), each with Tiberius’ response – in the case of Scaurus, his pointed withholding of a response (§13) – fall into sequence in the development of the discussion. The question of Tiberius’ position is somewhat indeterminately resolved in a way that I will return to later (§14), and the discussion moves on to his family members. Honours are offered to Augustus’ widow, Tiberius’ mother Livia, now styled Augusta and adopted into the Julian family as prescribed by Augustus’ will.34 Tiberius resisted the proposals for further honours, and the suggestion that he himself be styled ‘Iuliae filius’, on the grounds that women’s honours should be restricted and that as for himself, he would observe his usual restraint in such matters. So too he declined certain religious and other honours (§16). Proposals, corresponding to their seniority and current status, are then put forward for Tiberius’ adoptive

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius son Germanicus and his natural son Drusus, and accepted or declined on their behalf, as appropriate (§17; see below). The question of praetorian elections then arises, and how to treat the slate of candidates left behind by Augustus (at the time of Augustus’ death the consular elections for 15 CE had been completed, but not those for the office of praetor).35 Again, Tiberius made no change to Augustus’ intentions (§18). Finally, there is a request from the tribuni plebis that they be permitted to finance the new games that had been established with the name Ludi Augustales; this request too was treated with exemplary restraint – that is to say, it was declined, although the tribunes were granted the honour of wearing triumphal dress on the occasion (§19). Some writers have commented on the length of the meeting, claiming that its substance is too great for a single session and that it must have been deferred into a second day, possibly more.36 It is hard to see why this should be so. The agenda can be set out under the five items just reviewed, namely (i) consecration of Augustus; (ii) discussion of Tiberius’ position; (iii) honours for members of his family; (iv) praetorian elections; and (v) request from the tribuni plebis. Some of these matters involved several exchanges, and Tacitus has clearly abbreviated them, but the most substantial, the debate about Tiberius’ position, was surely the work of a single session, and the other items could be quickly dispatched. As to item (ii), the most complex on the agenda, it has often been remarked that Tacitus leaves unclear the procedural basis of the discussion. He alludes to it, at a late stage of the debate and without emphasis, in reporting the provocative comment of Mamercus Scaurus, that the senate might at least be thankful that Tiberius had not used his tribunician power to veto the relatio consulum (§§12–13). Such a relatio, mentioned here for the first time, must be the formal basis of the discussion, and commentators are right in noting the indirectness, and belatedness, of Tacitus’ reference to it.37 However, the idea that Tacitus, following the course of the debate as closely as he did, gave no indication of the content of the relatio, is disconcerting and invites second thoughts. On the assumption that a consular relatio would be the first procedural stage in the conduct of the meeting, the logical place to look for it will be at the beginning of Tacitus’ procedural narrative (in the left-hand column presented above). Here we find, after the consecration of Augustus, the sentence already discussed; ‘versae inde ad Tiberium preces’. Now the word ‘preces’, shown earlier as the first stage in Tacitus’ charting of the emotional trajectory of the meeting from consecration to adulatio, also has a neutral, more public sense; of a petition, as in a request made by one individual to another, or by an embassy to a public body. If the expression ‘versae ad Tiberius preces’ is

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Chapter 4 Tacitus’ summary of the relatio consulum on which the subsequent discussion was based, it follows that what the consuls were making was a request of Tiberius to act in a certain way.38 This is indeed how Tiberius responds, in making what is clearly a reply to whatever had been said to him; ‘et ille varie disserebat’ (§3). The immediate effect of this reading is to define the nature of the discussion in the senate. The consuls’ first move was to make a request, to ask Tiberius to do or to accept something. It was not to offer anything, whether a grant of powers, or any redefinition, renewal or confirmation of powers.39 No such issue came into play in any case; Tiberius’ powers had been established in the previous year, and any discussion of them now would only weaken their force. Who would at this moment question arrangements made by Augustus? If the expression ‘versae ad Tiberium preces’ is not just ironic commentary, nor a general anticipation of the tenor of the meeting as a whole, but Tacitus’ indication of the formal basis of the discussion in the senate, it is natural to wonder what were the actual terms of the petition expressed in the relatio consulum. This too can perhaps be determined. Actually present at the meeting of September 17 was the historian Velleius Paterculus, who with his brother was among the praetorian candidates especially commended by Augustus.40 Spokesman for the regime he may have been, but he was also there in person, and Velleius describes the issue as a conflict between Tiberius, who aspired to equality as a citizen rather than eminence as a Princeps, and the wish of the senate and Roman people that he take on a greater responsibility; that he be willing, in Velleius’ words, ‘to succeed to his father’s station’; ‘ut stationi paternae succederet’.41 Both in what they say and in what they avoid saying, these words fit the situation to perfection. Statio ( in Greek, taxis) was very close to a technical term – but of a philosophical rather than a political or constitutional character. P. A. Brunt thought it ‘incredible’ that so vague a concept could have entered into discussion of Tiberius’ constitutional position, but this objection is not persuasive; on the contrary, it was the vagueness of the term, combined with an aura of precision deriving from philosophical discourse, that provided just what was needed.42 Through the metaphor of a military station or post, it appeals to a sense of the duty or ‘station’ in life prescribed by Stoic philosophy. At the same time, it sails a safe course around any actual definition of the Principate. No-one could object to a Roman accepting a paternal duty, and the senate might not be expected to enquire just in what the duty consisted. The term had been used by Augustus himself in precisely this way in writing to his adoptive son Gaius, referring to the duty as Princeps that he and his brother would one day

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius inherit.43 It also appears in the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre mentioned earlier, on this occasion referring to the paternal duty of Tiberius himself in relation to his son Drusus, and in Tacitus’ Dialogus as almost a shorthand term for the imperial office itself. 44 If all this is so, we know both the formal basis and the subsequent course of the debate held in the senate on September 17, 14 CE, as drawn by Tacitus from the acta senatus. What inferences can we draw? (i) The meeting, postponed from its regular date of the Ides of September because of the period of mourning following the funeral of Augustus, differed from the session held earlier in the month, in that it was not summoned by the new Princeps under any of the powers that he possessed. The position of Tiberius was a matter that was allowed to arise like any other item of deferred business; it was not pressed on the senate by any particular act of authority, of Tiberius or anyone else. (ii) The basis of the discussion was a relatio made by the consuls as presiding officers.45 In this procedure also we see the avoidance of any suggestion that consideration of Tiberius’ position was a matter of great urgency and, in particular, of any implication that the initiative had lain with Tiberius; he is merely the recipient of a request from the consuls, senatorial procedure taking its normal course. (iii) If what is at issue is the new Princeps’ acceptance of his ‘statio’, we can begin to understand why the outcome of the debate is not recorded by Tacitus. Before the senate was a form of words, possessing resonance and moral weight but no constitutional or legal substance. In Suetonius’ much briefer account of the occasion, Tiberius eventually accepted the burden imposed on him, ‘until it would please the senate to relieve his old age’ of it (Tiberius 24.1). This would be consistent with Tacitus’ statement that Tiberius ‘yielded gradually’ (§14 flexit paulatim), but it would yield nothing like a senatusconsultum or any sort of decision that could be recorded in the acta senatus.46 The consuls would simply have to judge when Tiberius’ words amounted to acceptance of the request made to him, and pass on to the next business. (iv) If Tacitus’ account is a record from the acta senatus, it may be possible to argue from silence – if an apparently significant remark or piece of information is not in Tacitus, it is because it was not recorded in the acta. An example occurs in the account of the meeting given by Suetonius, who records a comment shouted out from among the mass of senators; ‘Let him take it or leave it (aut agat aut desistat )!’ (Tiberius 24.1). Despite its pertinence to the occasion (and impertinence to Tiberius), this contribution is not mentioned by Tacitus; it was an informal outburst not recorded in

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Chapter 4 the acta senatus.47 Tacitus’ individualised speakers are men of consular rank; the consuls with their relatio (not named by Tacitus, they were Sex. Pompeius and Sex. Appuleius), Asinius Gallus (cos. 8 BCE), L. Arruntius (cos. 6 CE), Q. Haterius (cos. suff. 5 BCE). The last speaker to be named, Mamercus Scaurus, was as yet only of praetorian rank ( he was suffect consul in 21, clearly not suffering permanent handicap from Tiberius’ displeasure on this occasion). The order of speaking was laid down by seniority, senators of consular rank coming first, though in no particular order among themselves, after the consuls themselves and the consuls designate;48 that the time has come for a senator of praetorian rank to contribute to the debate is another sign that it is coming to an end. The last proposal made at the meeting, concerning the Ludi Augustales, came from the tribuni plebis.49 Tribunes were low in the order of business; it was not for nothing that the grant of tribunicia potestas made to Augustus in 23 BCE, and in due course to Tiberius, specifically included the right to make the first relatio to the senate. They would otherwise have been left adrift far down the order of precedence.

IV. Time and distance After concluding his account of the senatorial meeting of September 17 with the request of the tribuni plebis, Tacitus moves to a different arena, and in doing so invests his narrative with a new sense of anxiety. Stirred by the news of Augustus’ death and hopes of remedy from a new master, discontent over pay, conditions of service and retirement benefits inspired mutiny in the northern armies. The protests began in Pannonia, where Iunius Blaesus was legate, and spread to Germany, where the legions were under the command of Germanicus. Tacitus’ introduction of the Pannonian mutiny does not make clear, and possibly Tacitus did not know, just how its chronology related to the story he had told of events at Rome, but he leaves no doubt that Tiberius responded urgently.50 He sent to the scene Drusus with two reinforced praetorian cohorts, a detachment of the praetorian cavalry and forces from the German imperial bodyguard. Attending Drusus was the praetorian prefect Aelius Seianus and ‘primores civitatis’ (Ann. 1.24). The force hastened to Pannonia and was met by unkempt and resentful legionaries. Drusus hastily addressed the troops and made some promises. There was disorder and throwing of stones, but before the situation could get out of hand, fortune intervened, in the form of an eclipse of the moon that very night, fear of which subdued the discontent. This provides to the modern historian an indication of time that Tacitus himself did not possess; the eclipse took place in the early

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius hours of September 27.51 After daybreak Drusus was able to address the soldiers in calmer circumstances (and order the execution of ringleaders). The circumstances behind the mutiny are extremely interesting, in ways well understood by Tacitus and his source, in this case a literary predecessor. Geography is an important part of it, and the Roman advance into the Balkans and the Danube basin. The only place actually named in Tacitus’ narrative is the town of Nauportus, in whose territory detachments of troops were engaged in constructing roads and bridges and in other activities (‘ob itinera et pontes et alios usus’, 1.20.1). Nauportus, which is well characterised as a municipium with its vici, or dependent villages and townships, lay on the road from Aquileia to Emona, the current base of one of the three legions involved in the mutiny, XV Apollinaris.52 The road was of strategic and commercial importance as the main route from Italy to Pannonia, currently being opened up by the Romans after the setbacks of the later Augustan period. Nauportus was however neither the centre of the mutiny nor the place where it began. At this very moment, Emona (modern Ljubljana) was preparing for life as a veteran colony; an inscription dated between March and May, 15 CE, shows that walls (and gates?) were provided for the new settlement as the joint gift of Augustus and Tiberius, and the name of the new city, Colonia Iulia Emona, reveals its Augustan origin.53 The complaint alleged by the inciter of the mutiny, that battleworn veterans were being offered nothing better than mountains and marshes to make into farmland, corresponds to the terrain around Emona, and again speaks to the quality of Tacitus’ information.54 The soldiers were well aware of the hard labour that awaited them in their new colony. With Emona established as a veteran colony, the legion would move on, in this case to the forward position of Carnuntum on the Danube. This must have happened at the latest in the spring of 15. At the time of the mutiny, however, the legions were not in their base camps, but in a summer camp, all three together (Ann. 1.16.2; 18.2). It is not known where the camp was situated. The soldiers engaged in road-construction and bridgebuilding around Nauportus were an outlying detachment, and the camp must be located further inside the province, somewhere in the triangle formed by Emona and the bases of the other legions involved in the mutiny; Poetovio for VIIII Hispana and an unknown location, possibly Siscia, for VIII Augusta. In any event the camp was more distant from Rome than was Emona.55 The purpose of this digression into questions of space and time is to frame a difficulty in the text of Tacitus, whose narrative contains a chronological problem of some consequence.56 Tacitus not only has Drusus in the summer camp of the Pannonian legions by what we know,

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Chapter 4 from the eclipse of the moon, to be the evening of September 26, but seems also to record his presence in the senate for the debate of September 17 (above, §17). Even Emona is 467 Roman miles distant from the capital, far too great a distance to be covered in a maximum of nine days of travelling (September 18–26 inclusive) by the force described by Tacitus, and we have seen that the summer camp to which Drusus travelled was still more distant.57 His force involved infantry as well as cavalry, and ‘primores civitatis’, whose speed on the road cannot remotely have approached a rate in excess of fifty Roman miles a day. Various solutions have been offered to this difficulty. One is simply to insist that the distance could in fact be covered in the time available, but this is wishful thinking that flies in the face of the physical possibilities. Another is to suppose that the second meeting of the senate recorded by Tacitus in fact fell before September 17. A consequence of this rearrangement is that the part of the debate incorporating the reference to Drusus would have preceded Augustus’ consecration, but it is clear that, quite apart from the violence it does to Tacitus’ narrative structure, this solution is incompatible with what has been argued above about his sources and procedure.58 Tiberius’ reference to ‘the divine Augustus’, preserved in the acta senatus, cannot possibly have preceded his actual deification, while the honours granted or proposed for Livia, Germanicus and Drusus, and the proposals made by the tribuni plebis about the Ludi Augustales, are equally dependent on that event. The entire debate recorded by Tacitus, from consecration to Ludi Augustales and including the reference to Drusus, belongs to September 17. Other solutions reconstruct Tacitus’ presentation of the departure of Drusus for Pannonia. Possibly the two praetorian cohorts mentioned by Tacitus were mobilised from Aquileia, where three cohorts are claimed to have been stationed, allowing a more swiftly moving force sent from Rome to meet and continue with them into Pannonia. Unfortunately for this theory, the epigraphic evidence for praetorians at Aquileia derives from their presence on campaigns into Illyricum in 12–10 BCE and does not indicate a permanent detachment.59 Or, it has been argued, perhaps the entire force was sent ahead from Rome, to be joined by Drusus, travelling on horseback and catching them up on the road.60 Both theories incur the same objection (in the case of the first theory, the additional objection), that the narrative of events that they require bears no relation to Tacitus’ description of the sending of the force to Pannonia; he writes as if the entire body of men – praetorian infantry and cavalry, their prefect Sejanus, German bodyguard, Drusus, ‘primores civitatis’ and all – left Rome in a single dispatch.

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius The demands of time and distance being so unyielding, it is preferable to find a solution of the problem within the terms of Tacitus’ narrative, and I conclude this discussion by exploring a new possibility suggested by the arguments presented above on his sources and procedures. Under §17 of the senatorial discussion as analysed above, honours are considered for Tiberius’ adoptive and natural sons, Germanicus and Drusus respectively. The honours requested for Germanicus entail two proposals. Presented schematically, they are: (a) the grant of proconsular imperium, and (b) the selection of legati, senatorial envoys with a double mandate; (i) to convey to Germanicus the grant of imperium, and (ii) to console his grief at the death of Augustus. That the legati were in fact sent we discover in due course, where they find Germanicus in the legionary camp at Cologne (Ann. 1.39). Their leader, Munatius Plancus, is insulted and his life threatened by angry troops. Prevented by his dignitas from simply making an escape (he had been consul the previous year and this is not how Roman ex-consuls behaved), Plancus is protected by Germanicus, who upbraids his soldiers for not respecting the rights of envoys, and explains why they had come. He was then able to get them away from danger with an escort of auxiliary cavalrymen. It is unlikely that Plancus was ever in a position to fulfill his mandate to console Germanicus. If so, it was a pity, for he was heir to a great tradition of timely oratory. It was his grandfather, the former Antonian L. Munatius Plancus, who had proposed to the senate, on January 16, 27 BCE, that C. Iulius Caesar Octavianus be honoured with the name ‘Augustus’.61 Essential to what follows is the separation of the elements of Tiberius’ proposals for Germanicus as set out above, namely a grant of imperium followed by the choice of legati with the double purpose of conveying the grant and offering consolation. Tiberius now explains to the senate why corresponding requests are not made for Drusus. We need to expand Tacitus’ account a little, bringing out the sequence of logic in the same way as was done for Germanicus: (a) a grant of imperium is not requested for Drusus because he was consul designate (he held the office in 15, with C. Norbanus as his colleague). There has been some discussion as to the constitutional significance of this, but all that is required for the present argument is that it is the reason given to the senate by Tiberius; (b) legati are not chosen, in the absence of the two reasons why they were to be sent to Germanicus; (i) there was no grant of imperium to convey. But also: (ii) the need to console Drusus did not arise, because, unlike

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Chapter 4 Germanicus, he had been at Rome during the entire period of Augustus’ obsequies. In fact he had taken a central role in them. He was with Tiberius at the first meeting of the senate held after the arrival of Augustus’ body in Rome, and on that occasion conveyed Augustus’ will from the Vestal Virgins to be read to the senate. On that occasion, too, according to Suetonius, Tiberius was so overcome by grief that he was forced to hand his speech to Drusus to complete. Then, on the day of the funeral, Drusus read a pronouncement from the Rostra of the orators.62 On this analysis of the text (remembering that Tacitus is reconstructing the item from the acta senatus), the phrase ‘praesensque erat’ has nothing to do with the presence of Drusus in the senate on September 17, nor with his status as consul designate.63 It is an echo of Tiberius’ observation that Drusus’ presence at Rome throughout the period of the obsequies made superfluous the question of consolation, thus removing the second reason adduced in the case of Germanicus for the sending of legati. There is a clear even if somewhat elliptical corollary. Whether to convey imperium or offer consolation or for any other reason, the question of legati would never have arisen, had Drusus been present in the senate on September 17. And indeed, he was not. News of the Pannonian mutiny having reached Rome some time before, he had already been dispatched to the Pannonian legions with the force described by Tacitus.64 The sending of that force occurs later in his text, but Tacitus’ presentation was thematic, events at Rome being followed by events abroad, and he was not exactly clear in his mind how they intersected (n. 50). Lacking our knowledge of the date of a lunar eclipse, he was in no position to appreciate the difficulty caused by his misreading of a statement of Tiberius recorded in the acta senatus. A second corollary reflects on the broader themes discussed in this chapter. The dispatch of a substantial force from Rome, together with the praetorian prefect, Drusus Caesar and ‘primores civitatis’, was a major event that cannot have been kept secret. Everyone must have known about it, including the senators who met on September 17 to consecrate Augustus and turn their ‘prayers’ to Tiberius. It is obvious too that no-one in the senate mentioned the events in Pannonia – not so much rebellion as a protest about pay and conditions, it is true, but still serious, and enough to provoke a major response from Tiberius. Had these events been mentioned, then Tacitus would have known about it from the acta senatus and seen their importance. Writers whom he would have read had ascribed Tiberius’ hesitation in accepting the burden of government to his fear of the armies, and although there is little to be said for this view, the opportunity to allude to it was too good to miss, had any suggestion of it

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius existed in the acta, especially since Tacitus had himself countenanced fear of Germanicus as one reason for Tiberius’ hesitancy in accepting the Principate (Ann. 1.7.9). Indeed, the failure of this issue to appear in Tacitus’ narrative was one of the reasons why K. Wellesley attempted to transfer this meeting of the senate to a time before the crisis was known. If the meeting were held on September 17, Wellesley argued, the revolt must unavoidably have been discussed, since ‘it would have furnished an irrefutable argument to those who appealed to Tiberius to accept the principate without colleagues or collaborators’.65 What stronger proof could there be that the res publica needed a ‘caput’ than a crisis in the armies that only Tiberius could resolve? So the meeting must have taken place before news of the revolt had reached Rome. A moment’s reflection will show the strategic flaw in this argument; that it makes the position of Tiberius depend on the particular circumstances of the moment rather than on considerations of principle. Far from strengthening Tiberius’ authority, to raise the question of unrest in the armies would weaken it, by leaving unresolved the central issue in the entire discussion. What would happen when the crisis was over? This was not a line of thought to be encouraged. The res publica was to have a ‘caput’, not in order to solve a passing problem, mutiny in the armies or any other, but because that was to be the system of government. What was before the senate was a programmatic discussion for the future, not a circumstantial discussion of the present, and was to remain on the abstract level on which the consuls had placed it in their relatio. In any case, the state of the armies in Pannonia lay squarely within the imperium of Tiberius; who would want to question this by raising the matter in the senate, or to imply, for that matter, that what was happening in the north was actually a threat to Rome? It was in no-one’s interest to raise the issue, and no-one did so. Modern descriptions of Tiberius’ accession have seen the senatorial debate of September 17, 14 CE, in the ironical, not to say cynical terms of which Tacitus would surely have approved – not least because he suggested them. The occasion was a charade, a farce, a piece of play-acting in which the players knew their parts, more or less well; at best a ceremony, certainly a foregone conclusion.66 It is strange to read such verdicts, coming as they largely do from senior academics, who know better than most what it means to attend long meetings and witness foregone conclusions, often dressed in eccentric attire, with every appearance of being serious in what they do – rather like senators, in fact. Yet there can be a point to approving publicly what has been decided elsewhere and by other means. A University degree ceremony provides the occasion for the approbation by those

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Chapter 4 attending of decisions taken by others, which the participants wish to endorse. Something has gone badly wrong if the occasion remotely resembles a farce – which is not to say that a sceptical, hostile or bored spectator may not regard it as such. We must also grant to the participants in the debate of September 17 the privilege of not knowing the future – that future which Tacitus so cunningly insinuated into his account of the deliberations. What the senate had before its eyes was a very real past, and a possible or likely future, and it was its task to bring about a particular version of the latter; to express a recognition that the regime of Augustus was not merely a political solution to the crisis of the late Republic, but an institutional reform that was intended to last, and in which the Princeps would have a successor. On his side, the successor must acknowledge that he was the heir, not to a personal monarchy but to an array of institutional powers, in which the senate and others, as well as himself, had a share, and in which all had their roles to play. If the occasion did not quite go to plan, that is not surprising. Even within the terms of the debate there were gains and losses to be made, scores to settle, moments of discomfiture to exploit. Everyone knew, and Tacitus does not fail to remind us, when Asinius Gallus rose to make his difficult interventions, that the speaker was the son of the historian Asinius Pollio, no great admirer of Augustus; still more piquant, that he was the husband of Tiberius’ ex-wife Vipsania, having married her after their reluctant divorce, forced on them by Augustus in the interests of his dynastic policy. For connoisseurs of embarrassment, it was a delicious moment, a real, old-fashioned showdown; amid so much that was predictable, how would this turn out? It is not the purpose of this discussion to resolve such questions, but to use Tacitus’ account of this important meeting of the senate to enter into its atmosphere as it actually was conducted, in its own terms and not simply as he presented it. It can do this, because of Tacitus’ willingness to do some original research. The historian was able to supplement the literary accounts with which he was familiar, by direct reference to the public record of the meeting in the acta senatus. In doing so, he was able to weave together the two elements, allowing his exploitation of the acta to alternate with comments derived from other sources, and from his own ironic insight. The result is to throw light on Tacitus’ method in a way that may help to resolve difficulties in his narrative, and that may be exploited elsewhere in other places of his text. It also yields a priceless irony. Tacitus was able to document the decline of senatorial freedom into a self-abasing adulatio by reference to the very

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius source in which that adulatio was first expressed, and in so doing to underline a still greater irony – senatorial history composed in the form of ‘annales’ and based on consular years, to document the decline and fall of the senate and senatorial government. ‘Libertatem et consulatum’; from the first sentence of the Annales, interpretative theme is conveyed in the very structure of the work. If these were Tacitus’ theme and method, the inauguration of Tiberius was exactly the place to start.

Notes 1 Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon, Luminous historian: 1772–1794 (1989), pp. 16–20. 2 In a somewhat theatrical marginal note written in his own copy of Decline and Fall, for which see J. B. Bury’s ed. of 1900, Vol. I, p. xxxv, or (better) that of David Womersley (1994), Vol. III, p. 1093; ‘Should I not have given the history of that fortunate period which was interposed between two Iron ages? Should I not have deduced the decline of the Empire from the civil Wars, that ensued after the Fall of Nero or even from the tyranny which succeeded the reign of Augustus? Alas! I should: but of what avail is this tardy knowledge? Where error is irretrievable, repentance is useless’. 3 R. Syme, Tacitus (1958), pp. 368–74, 427; cf. The Roman Revolution (1939), pp. 434–7; The Augustan Aristocracy (1986), Ch. III. For Gibbon’s evaluation of Tacitus, see the first paragraph of Chapter IX of Decline and Fall. 4 See esp. A. J. Woodman, ‘Tacitus on Tiberius’ accession’, in his Tacitus Reviewed (1998), pp. 40–69, with the opinions collected at pp. 40–41 (Sinclair, Griffin), 42 (Martin), 46 (Syme). 5 Chapter 2 above. 6 Suetonius, Tiberius 21. 7 Ann. 1.6, alleging Livia’s influence in averting Tiberius’ desire to make the deed accountable to the senate. Robin Seager, Tiberius (1972), pp. 48–50, makes a strong case for Augustus’ responsibility. The Princeps did not disinherit Postumus in his will (it would be known when the will was published if he had done so), an indication that he did not expect him to be alive when the will was published. 8 Cf. Ann. 1.7.7; ‘dabat et famae ut vocatus electusque potius a re publica videretur quam per uxorium ambitum et senili adoptione inrepsisse’. The words anticipate the second meeting, at which these matters were offered for discussion, but fall short of Woodman’s view that they convey Tiberius’ promise, as a ‘concession to public opinion’, that they would be so discussed (‘Tacitus on Tiberius’ accession’, pp. 57–8, 60, cf. his 2004 translation of the Annals; ‘He was also conceding to public opinion’, etc.). In my view this is too specific an interpretation of ‘dabat et famae’. 9 Suetonius, Divus Augustus 100.2. For the chronology (the shortest possible, assuming that the cortège did not leave Nola before August 21), see cf. B. M. Levick, Tiberius the Politician (1976), pp. 69–70; M. M. Sage, ‘Tacitus and the accession of Tiberius’, Ancient Society 13/14 (1982/3), pp. 293–321. 10 As supposed by Woodman, ‘Tacitus on Tiberius’ accession’, at pp. 48, 50, 60, cf. 65; ‘as Tacitus tells us, it was Tiberius, not the consuls, who dictated the terms of the debate’.

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Chapter 4 11

Cassius Dio, 56.42f., remarks that the period of mourning observed by men after Augustus’ funeral was a few days only, for women a whole year, and that Livia remained at the site of the funeral for five days. 12 The calendar entries are conveniently printed together by V. Ehrenberg and A. H. M. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus and Tiberius 2 (1955), p. 52. The calendars are explicit that it was the senatusconsultum, and not any subsequent lex, that was dated to September 17. 13 Dio 57.16.2–3, cf. Ann. 2.39–40. 14 Dio 57.19.1–8; Ann. 4.2. The passage marks the mid-point of the first hexad of the Annales. 15 ‘Tacitus: some sources of his information’, JRS 72 (1982), pp. 68–82 [= Roman Papers IV, pp. 199–222]; Tacitus, pp. 278–86. 16 Ph. Fabia, Les Sources de Tacite dans les Histoires et les Annales (1893), pp. 311–319, esp. 317f.; effectively criticised by F. B. Marsh, The Reign of Tiberius (1931), Appendix I, ‘The Sources’, pp. 233–66, esp. 259–66. 17 A. N. Sherwin-White, JRS 49 (1959), at p. 144 (in a review of Syme’s Tacitus); Levick, Tiberius the Politician, p. 222. According to Sherwin-White, the question of Tacitus’ use of primary sources ‘remains a matter of personal conviction’. In Tacitus, p. 282 n. 5, Syme cited scholars who wrote in favour of Tacitus’ use of primary sources including the acta senatus, notable among them Mommsen, A. Stein and Marsh. 18 Syme, JRS 72 (1982), p. 75 n. 56, citing Momigliano (again in a review of Tacitus) and Flach. Cf. Ronald Martin, Tacitus (1981), pp. 199–207 (at 206 directly critical of Syme). More responsive, though referring only to imperial orations to be found in the acta, is Ronald Mellor, Tacitus (1993), p. 33. Cesare Questa, Studi sulle fonti degli Annales di Tacito (2nd. ed., 1967) acknowledged (p. 13, from the preface of the 1st ed. of 1960) his lack of a treatment of Tacitus’ use of documentary sources including the acta senatus, confining himself to recommending a middle course between Fabia and Syme. Olivier Devillers’ thorough Tacite et les Sources des Annales: Enquêtes sur la méthode historique (2003), pp. 55–64, does not discuss the relevant passage in any detail. 19 JRS 72 (1982), pp. 73–5, cf. Tacitus, pp. 278–81, and ‘How Tacitus wrote Annals I–III’, Historiographica Antiqua (1977), pp. 231–63 [= Roman Papers III, pp. 1014–42, at 1028–30]. 20 Ann. 3.60–63, ending ‘factaque senatus consulta’; Syme, JRS 72 (1982), p. 74; Tacitus, p. 268. See Ann. 2.47; 3.66–9 (ending ‘in hanc sententiam facta discessio’) for other senatorial debates involving Asia. 21 Syme, Tacitus, pp. 268, 280. 22 Important studies too have been made of passages derived from the acta that can be compared with other sources, such as Claudius’ famous speech to the senate recommending the promotion of Gallic senators, where the actual text of the emperor’s oration and Tacitus’ version of it can be compared; M. T. Griffin, ‘The Lyons Tablet and Tacitean hindsight’, CQ 32 (1982), pp. 404–18; Syme, Tacitus, Appendixes 40–41. At Tacitus, p. 285, and JRS 72 (1982), p. 73, Syme looks to the acta senatus rather than to collections of imperial speeches as Tacitus’ source for such passages. 23 W. Eck, A. Caballo, F. Fernández, Das senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre (Vestigia 48; Munich, 1996): discussed (with translation) by Miriam Griffin, ‘The Senate’s Story’, JRS 87 (1997), pp. 249–63; Elizabeth Meyer, The Classical Journal 93 (1998), pp. 315–24

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius (also with translation); Cynthia Damon, Sarolta Takács, David Potter, etc., The Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre: Text, translation, discussion, AJP 120.1 (Special Issue; Spring 1999). 24 Ann. 3.11–19, with A. J. Woodman & R. H. Martin, The Annals of Tacitus, Book 3 (1996), pp. 67–77. The date of Drusus’ ovatio (cf. Ann. 3.11.1; 19.4) is given by the Fasti Amiterni and Ostienses (see above, n. 12). 25 JRS 72 (1982), pp. 73–4, cf. 75; ‘To those doubts and uncertainties (how often the acta and for what purposes) a proper scrutiny of the text, if undertaken, might be expected to yield some kind of response’. 26 Cf. Syme, Tacitus, pp. 410-11 and 700 (in a parenthesis); ‘...a few items after the decease of Augustus, but a pretty full record for the year 15, viz. I.72-81’. There is a little more in JRS 72 (1982), pp. 76–7, and in his 1977 article in Historiographica Antiqua [= Roman Papers III, p. 1025, and IV, pp. 213–4]. 27 R. J. A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (1984), pp. 308–334 on the acta in general; on Tacitus, pp. 326–34. 28 F. B. Marsh, The Reign of Tiberius, pp. 48–51; R. Seager, Tiberius (1972), Chap. III, commented on by Syme, ‘History or biography: the case of Tiberius Caesar’, Historia 23 (1974), at pp. 485–6 [= Roman Papers III, p. 941]; Levick, Tiberius the Politician, Chap. V; K. Wellesley, ‘The Dies Imperii of Tiberius’, JRS 57 (1967), pp. 23–30; Woodman, op. cit (n. 8 above). Levick notes in passing (p. 79) that Tacitus composed his account of the senate’s discussion ‘perhaps with the aid of its minutes’, but in an oblique context and without detail. J. Béranger, Recherches sur l’aspect idéologique du Principat (1953) does not discuss the occasion from a procedural point of view (cf. pp. 218–19, 230–1). 29 The most thorough discussion of the debate is Woodman’s ‘Tacitus on Tiberius’ accession’, which does not identify (though cf. p. 42, on Ann. 1.11.1–3) the two types of text that are involved. Woodman writes correctly (p. 46) of the occasion as a ‘developing drama’ rather than a ‘defective blueprint for Tiberius’ constitutional position’, cf. p. 52 n. 16. 30 As Devillers (above, n. 18) also notes ( pp. 149–50), the reported reactions of Tiberius and Asinius Gallus to each other’s comments (1.12.2 & 4; below §§9 & 10, in the right-hand column) will not have been recorded in the acta senatus. Both are Tacitean enlargements of what was on the record. 31 This must be the occasion referred to without context by Suetonius, Tiberius 27; Tiberius was so anxious to evade the attempt of an apologetic consular (Q. Haterius was cos. suff. in 5 BCE) to embrace his knees, that he recoiled and fell on his back. 32 Cf. Ann. 1.7.1; ‘At Romae ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques’. 33 Tacitus’ interpretation exploits Gallus’ supposed perception of Tiberius’ expression (‘etenim vultu offensionem coniectaverat’). It is obvious that we are dealing with literary colouring rather than anything in the acta senatus, which did not describe the facial expressions of participants. 34 Ann. 1.8.2; Suetonius, Divus Augustus 101.2; ‘quos [sc. Tiberius and Livia] et ferre nomen suum iussit’. 35 The first consular elections of Tiberius’ principate are described at Ann. 1.81. 36 Levick, Tiberius the Politician, p. 79; ‘the agenda that Tacitus gives for the day of the debate is impossibly long, and it is quite clear that some of the events he

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Chapter 4 describes...belong to later sessions’. Cf. Woodman, p. 53 n. 37; ‘That the subjects of [chapters] 14–15 were debated on 17 September is an assumption: as far as I know, we cannot be certain’. 37 For Syme, Tacitus, p. 410, neglect of the relatio was a ‘gratuitous omission’ on Tacitus’ part, a view apparently modified later (next n.). 38 Syme, Tacitus, p. 410 and n. 7, connected the relatio with the ‘preces’, but did not use the latter to define the content of the relatio, which (p. 411 n. 4) is presumed to entail ‘a definition of powers without limit of time’. Contrasting both with Seager (next n.) and his own earlier view, Historia 23 (1974), pp. 485–6; ‘the motion of the consuls was general in tenor, not specific. Entreaty was brought to bear on Tiberius, so Tacitus states. He is being requested to do something. Rather perhaps not to do something. The motion, it might be conjectured, conveyed the earnest exhortation that Tiberius should not desert the commonwealth which he had so signally sustained and adorned in peace and war’. Woodman, p. 42, suggested that ‘[the prayers] no doubt related to the formal motion of the consuls’, etc. More to the point: the prayers were the relatio. 39 Seager, Tiberius, pp. 52–3, asserts that ‘the detailed content of this motion is nowhere recorded, but can perhaps be established with some precision’ – to provide Tiberius with a provincia, ‘a sphere in which to exercise the powers he already held’. The formulation of Marsh, The Reign of Tiberius, p. 48, ‘the consuls proposed a decree declaring Tiberius emperor’, begs every possible question, and Woodman’s statement that the senate was ‘the one body which had the power to formalize [ Tiberius’] position’ (p. 60, cf. 55, 58, 65–6) does not indicate which aspects needed ‘formalization’, or in what way. 40 Velleius 2.124.4; Velleius and his brother were ‘candidati Caesaris’, i.e. two of the candidates whose commendation by Augustus was accepted by his successor. 41 Levick, Tiberius the Politician, pp. 78–81. At p. 79 Levick cites the phrase ‘versae inde ad Tiberium preces’ as a sort of motto for the occasion, referring however to the senate in general and not to the relatio consulum in particular. 42 JRS 67 (1977), p. 97 n. 15. 43 Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 15.7.3. See on the Stoic metaphor statio/taxis P. A. Brunt, ‘Stoicism and the Principate’, PBRS n.s. 30 (1975), pp. 7–35, at 12; ‘From the first orthodox Stoic thinking enjoined specific duties on the husband, father, slaveowner and so forth’. 44 Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre (above, n. 29), lines 128–9, ‘paternae pro r(e) p(ublica) stationis in uno [sc. Tiberio] repositam’; see Miriam Griffin, JRS 87 (1997), at p. 257: Tacitus, Dialogus 17.3. For other references, see A. J. Woodman, Velleius Paterculus: the Tiberian narrative (2.94–101) (1977), p. 222 (on Velleius 2.124.2). 45 For this and what follows, Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome is exemplary; cf. p. 225; ‘the consuls (who normally presided) continued to follow the traditional Republican practice of acting jointly in their presidential capacity’. 46 Levick, pp. 78–80. 47 The intervention is covered by Tacitus’ ‘clamore omnium, expostulatione singulorum’ (§14). 48 Talbert, pp. 240–52. A pertinent illustration is the speech of an emperor, possibly Claudius, preserved on papyrus, in which he exhorts the senators to express their opinions freely and without constraint; ‘It is quite unbefitting to the majesty of this

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Tacitus, Acta Senatus, and the inauguration of Tiberius order, conscript fathers, that one man and he alone, the designate consul, should express his opinion here, copying it word for word from the relatio of the consuls, and that the others should pronounce but one word, “I agree”, and then leave the senate saying, “We have spoken”’ (Riccobono, FIRA 2 1.44, lines 17–22). 49 The first holding of the games, with attendant disorder, is recorded at Ann. 1.54.2; the date is given by calendars as ‘IV id., Oct.’, or October 12 (CIL 12, p. 332). I do not need to enter into the origin of the celebration, which is put as early as 11 BCE by Dio (54.34.2). It appears that in 14 CE an existing festival was formally entered into the Fasti on a regular date. 50 Tacitus employs a reverse syntax with ‘cum’, connecting the event in Pannonia with the process at Rome and leaving the articulation between them unclear: Ann. 1.16.1; hic rerum urbanarum status erat, cum Pannonicas legiones seditio incessit. 51 D. Justin Schove and Alan Fletcher, Chronology of Eclipses and Comets, AD 1–1000 (1984, repr. 1987), pp. 4–5 (‘Total eclipse in SE Europe’). It happens that on the very evening that I revised an earlier draft of these pages there was a highly visible eclipse of the moon in Connecticut. I am not a superstitious person, but it was an uncanny sight. 52 For this and what follows, see the revealing note of J. J. Wilkes, ‘A note on the mutiny of the Pannonian legions in AD 14’, CQ n.s. 13 (1963), pp. 268–71. 53 Wilkes, p. 269 n. 4. 54 Ann. 1.17.5; ‘trahi adhuc diversas in terras ubi per nomen agrorum uligines paludum et inculta montium accipiant’; Wilkes, p. 270. 55 Wilkes, p. 269 n. 3. 56 H. H. Schmitt, ‘Der Pannonische Aufstand des Jahres 14 n. Chr. und der Regierungsantritt des Tiberius’, Historia 7 (1968), pp. 378–83. 57 Levick, Tiberius the Politician, p. 72, gives the distance from Rome to Emona. Schmitt, p. 379 gives the distance from Rome to Nauportus as c. 700 km., and the legionary summer camp was considerably more distant from Rome. 58 K. Wellesley, ‘The Dies Imperii of Tiberius’, JRS 57 (1967), pp. 23–30. For the violence to Tacitus’ narrative structure, pp. 28–9 (with no mention of the phrase ‘divus Augustus’ put into the mouth of Tiberius). 59 For epitaphs of praetorians at Aquileia in the Augustan period, see A. Calderini, Aquileia Romana (1930), pp. 211f. For the context of Augustus’ Illyrian campaigns, H. Durry, Les Cohortes Prétoriennes (1968), p. 45 n. 3. Suetonius, Divus Augustus 49.1 is clear that praetorians were only ever stationed near Rome. 60 P. A. Brunt, JRS 51 (1961), p. 238 (in a review); Schmitt, Historia 7 (1958), p. 381. Seager, Tiberius, pp. 60–1 offers both this and the preceding theory. Wellesley, pp. 25–7, demolishes this and other attempts to ‘stretch’ Tacitus’ chronology to accommodate Drusus’ apparent movements. 61 Suetonius, Divus Augustus 7.2; PIR 2 M 728–9. Munatius Plancus carried the name Augustus against others, who thought ‘Romulus’ more appropriate. 62 Dio 56.30ff; Suetonius, Divus Augustus 100.3; Tiberius 23. 63 Levick, Tiberius the Politician, p. 247 n. 8, conjectures that what Tacitus meant was that Drusus was ‘domiciled at Rome’. This has the same effect as the arguments offered above, of removing Drusus from the senate on September 17, but it is of indeterminate validity in its context, and I do not think that it was the reason given to the senate by Tiberius.

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Chapter 4 64

Ann. 1.91.4f. describes the sending of the son of Iunius Blaesus, a military tribune, as an envoy from the mutinous camp to present the soldiers’ case at Rome. 65 JRS 57 (1967), p. 26. 66 For Suetonius’ expression ‘impudentissimo mimo’ (MSS ‘animo’) (Tib. 24.1), referring to Tiberius’ conduct), and similar modern verdicts, see Woodman, ‘Tacitus on Tiberius’ accession’, p. 43.

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5 SIX TALES OF THE EQUESTRIAN ORDER The political and social history of the early Principate was described by its historians with great verve and anecdotal detail, rhetorical skill and prejudice. Modern historians of the period have often shared the best of these qualities, especially when they have also acknowledged that the writers whom they take as their sources were themselves products of, and complicit in, the political and social movements that they describe. Whether it is Tacitus, expressing the collective guilt of senators for their role in the destruction of their colleagues by Domitian, or the younger Pliny, claiming that his name occurred on a sinister list of names found among Domitian’s papers after his assassination, these writers were part of the processes they describe, and used their experience in writing about them. As any Roman would understand, it was this engagement in public life that gave them their authority in writing about it. We do well to bear in mind that it also tends to magnify the prejudice. Such men as Pliny and Tacitus belonged to the highest strata of a ruling elite that, absorbing the upward pressures from the equestrian order, as did the equestrian order from the municipal aristocracies of the cities of the Roman empire, was an extremely large one, with a very broad base in society. As so often, it is the significant anecdote that can give life to the process, as Pliny shows in a well-known letter, composed with that exquisitely self-promoting sensibility for which he is famous (Ep. 9.23). The source of the anecdote is Tacitus, in a conversation at the circus games between him and his neighbour, a man of equestrian rank. ‘Italicus es an provincialis?’ asked the neighbour, after some learned conversation between them: ‘Are you Italian or provincial?’; and then, learning that his new friend was a literary figure: ‘Are you Tacitus or Pliny?’ The exchange, whether fact or fiction, has been often discussed for its implications as to the origin of the two literary men, but Pliny’s distributive logic allows no options. Since Pliny is Italian, Tacitus is the provincial. The beauty of the story is that it is Tacitus who is made to reveal the fact of his own provincial and Pliny’s Italian origin. Not that this matters much, for, as Pliny’s uncle had written, Narbonese Gaul, where Tacitus’ family had its origin, was, on the various criteria mentioned – the prosperity of its agriculture,

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Chapter 5 the distinction of its inhabitants and their way of life, the extent of its wealth – more Italian than provincial; ‘Italia verius quam provincia’.1 Pliny’s remark does not address another important feature that he and Tacitus had in common; both were of equestrian origin, and were the first senators in their families. Indeed, the first contact between them takes us far from Rome, north Italy and the old provincia, to Tres Galliae and the German armies. It is the first of this little group of chosen episodes that show us the relations between equestrian and senatorial orders, and the interplay of Italian and provincial origins. Little of what follows is novel, but in its details will be familiar mainly to specialists, being discussed in commentaries, reference works and footnotes without entering the broader flow of historical writing. How many of us are as conversant as we should be with the treasure trove of Roman social history contained in the ninetyfive Appendixes of Syme’s Tacitus?

1. Pliny and the Procurator The elder Pliny believed that, as in other ways, the human race was diminishing in physical stature on account of the ‘exhaustion of the fertility of semen’. He offered this strange opinion in preface to a chapter of his Natural History on the subject of deviations from the norms of human growth, dwarfs and people of gigantic stature. The opinion is not only strange but inconsequential, because abnormal deviations tell us nothing about the average stature of normal people over a period of time – and because, even if they did, Pliny’s actual examples bear no relation to his claim. Among cases of abnormally large stature, Pliny had found in the written record (‘invenimus in monumentis’) the case of the son of one Euthymenes of Salamis. The child grew to a height of three cubits, about four feet six inches, in his third year, ‘walked slowly, was dull of sense, became sexually quite mature, had an adult’s voice and was carried off by a sudden attack of paralysis when he turned three’. Another case, almost identical except for the question of sexual maturity, had occurred within Pliny’s own more recent experience, indeed he had seen it himself, not so long ago; ‘ipsi non pridem vidimus’. It concerned the son of a Roman eques, the procurator of Gallia Belgica. Pliny’s way of writing implies that, like the son of Euthymenes, this young boy had also died early. His father the procurator’s name was Cornelius Tacitus.2 Historians have generally concurred that this Cornelius Tacitus was a close relative, most likely the father, of the historian. This was concluded by Mary Gordon in her study of Tacitus’ origin, and Ronald Syme, having floated early on in his Tacitus the possibility that he was an uncle, later

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order settled down to the conclusion, recently endorsed by Anthony Birley, that he was indeed the father.3 There is good enough reason for this. For all its patrician resonance, the family name (nomen or gentilicium) Cornelius is one of those names of the old Roman aristocracy that are characteristic of the early years of the western provinces; they go back to the days when their bearers had governed these areas and spread the citizenship in the areas under their jurisdiction.4 The cognomen Tacitus, which is not as common as we might expect, looks like one of those Latinised names that either translate the original meanings of native Celtic names, or else simply resemble them in sound, without respect to their original meaning.5 There are many examples of the resulting combination of the old-fashioned and the picturesque. A prime example is the C. Julius Rufus descending from a Celtic dynasty commemorated over four generations on a triumphal arch at Saintes, dated 19 CE; his ancestors, back to his great-grandfather, were C. Iulius Otuaneunos, C. Iulius Gedomo, and the spectacularly nonRoman Epotsorovidus.6 We can see here, who it was that was favoured by Julius Caesar! Similar cases are the Julii, Florus and Sacrovir, who led an uprising of the Aedui and Treveri against Tiberius (Tacitus, Ann. 3.40–47), several senatorial Julii from Gaul who show up in the literary sources (Marinus, Vestinus, Vindex), and others like Domitius Afer, Valerius Asiaticus – provincial grandees combining picturesque cognomina with solid gentilicia from the Republican aristocracy. We know of them because they hit the big-time of Roman imperial history, making appearances in Tacitus’ Annals and other sources, but there were many others who did not. Just as the combination of gentilicium and cognomen points to an enfranchised Gaul, so does the office of Pliny’s friend Cornelius Tacitus as procurator of Gallia Belgica; it was the sort of appointment, in the same general area as a person’s origin but not identical with it, that the emperors liked to make. Similar cases at a higher political and social level are the appointments of Julius Vindex of Aquitania as praetorian governor of Gallia Lugdunensis (from where he raised rebellion against Nero), and Julius Agricola of Forum Iulii (Fréjus) as praetorian governor of Aquitania. The practice enabled use to be made of a person’s local connections, such as might be achieved for example through the annual meetings of the tribal magnates at the concilium Galliarum at Lyons, while avoiding the improprieties that might ensue if governors held power in their actual province of origin. In the very first chapter of his Histories, Tacitus explained that his senatorial rank had been established by Vespasian, to be later enhanced by Titus and Domitian. It is a perfect match for the son of an equestrian procurator. Born around 55 or 56, Tacitus, freshly elevated as the first senator in his family, married the daughter of a second-generation senator,

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Chapter 5 herself therefore of the third generation to hold this rank. Her grandfather, Agricola’s father Julius Graecinus (another picturesque combination of nomen and cognomen), had been killed because he refused to denounce one of Caligula’s enemies in the senate (Agricola 4.1). As his career gathered pace, Agricola was raised to patrician rank – by Vespasian, the author of Tacitus’ senatorial dignity. Tacitus followed his father-in-law into patrician rank in the time of Domitian. It is a typical story of social progression mobilized by imperial patronage. When was it that Pliny saw the handicapped child of the procurator Cornelius Tacitus? At the time of writing of the passage of the Natural History, it was ‘not very long ago (non pridem)’. Now, Pliny’s career has a somewhat military character and very active, surprising, perhaps, to those who think of him only as the corpulent encyclopedist of the Natural History, as in his nephew’s famous description (Ep. 3.5).7 Yet it is worth bearing in mind that the author of a lost work On the German War inspired by the appearance in a dream of the long-dead Drusus (the father of the emperor Claudius, under whom he wrote it), and of an instructional pamphlet in one book On Throwing the Javelin on Horseback written when he was the commander of an auxiliary cohort, was at the time of his death in 79 still in active service as the prefect of the Roman fleet stationed at Misenum. It is how he came to be so close to the eruption of Vesuvius that saw his end, as we learn from another famous letter of Pliny, addressed to Tacitus at the historian’s invitation (Ep. 6.16). The best reconstruction of Pliny’s earlier career puts him in the Germanies, where he saw military service under Domitius Corbulo in Lower Germany in 47, then under the general and playwright Pomponius Secundus in Upper Germany in 51 (Pliny also wrote a Life of this remarkable man in two books), and in one Germany or the other, as a ‘contubernalis’ of Titus the future emperor, in the middle to later 50s.8 Relating Pliny’s movements to the early career of Titus, 57 and 58 are the most likely years for this acquaintance, though he writes as if he had seen the procurator’s son’s abnormal growth throughout the poor boy’s short life, and if so would have been there for longer. From the point of view of the connection with Cornelius Tacitus the procurator, it does not much matter which of the Germanies is in question, since the procurator of Belgica exercised his functions in both – the Germanies were not yet provinces in their own right, but military zones appended to Belgica under the command of legati. If Pliny had seen the procurator’s son on the most recent of these tours of duty, then the ill-starred child saw the light no more than three years after the other Cornelius Tacitus, the future historian. His name, identical with his father’s, supports the idea that

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order Tacitus, born somewhere in Belgica in 55 or 56, was the eldest son of the procurator; in which case he would have been two or three years old at the birth of his younger brother, five or six at the time of the poor child’s death. Not very old, perhaps, and young children can be very resilient, but enough of a memory to carry into adult life. One wonders what went through Tacitus’ mind as, growing up, he read of some of the portents of abnormal births reported in the histories of Livy. We may recall that it was Livy that the teenaged younger Pliny was reading as he witnessed the outbreak of the eruption of Vesuvius.

2. Columella at Tarentum In the city of Tarentum, the old Greek colony in the south of Italy, the following inscription was read in the 17th century (CIL 9.235 = ILS 2923): L. IUNIO L. F. GAL. MODERATO COLUMELLAE TRIB. MIL. LEG. VI FERRATAE L(ucio) Iunio L(uci) f(ilio) Gal(eria) / Moderato Columellae, / trib(uno) mil(itum) / legi(onis) VI Ferratae. To Lucius Moderatus Columella, son of Lucius, of the tribe Galeria, military tribune of Legion VI Ferrata.

There has never been much doubt that the inscription, set up in his honour by an unknown person or persons, commemorates the agricultural writer Columella.9 As shown by two passages of his work De re rustica (8.16.9; 10.185), Columella’s city of origin was Gades (Cadiz) in southern Spain, and Galeria, the voting tribe of the honorand of the inscription, was the tribe assigned to Roman citizens from that city. Originally functioning as an electoral division, this role was now defunct, but the tribal affiliation was still used as the basis of registration of communities and their citizens, and is part of the way (tria nomina + tribe) in which enfranchised Romans identify themselves. The family of Columella had likely gained its citizenship, not as a personal grant from a leading Roman, but by virtue of the promotion of Gades to municipal status, the effect of which was to bestow the citizenship on the elected magistrates of the city. Columella’s family was among the leaders of its community; entering the wider Roman world it possessed equestrian status, as we can see too from his tenure of the military tribunate. The post is part of the normal career of a member

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Chapter 5 of the equestrian class who wishes to advance beyond the bounds of his local community; the elder Pliny, we have just seen, held three such appointments. Columella was no doubt related to a well-known Pythagorean philosopher named Moderatus, whose origin is likewise attested as Gades.10 What was the equestrian from Gades doing at Tarentum? At Annals 14.27, under the year 60, Tacitus describes how the government of Nero made veteran settlements in the territories of Tarentum and Antium, to remedy depopulation in those parts. The scheme was not successful, as most of the veterans, reluctant to settle down in their new homes, slipped away to the regions where they had performed their military service. ‘Not being accustomed to tie themselves by marriage and rear children’, observes Tacitus, ‘they left behind them homes without families’ (so failed to establish a local population); adding in his best judgmental fashion that this was likely to happen, in days when veteran settlements were not composed of entire legions discharged and settled ‘with their tribunes, centurions and officers of every grade’, but of men from different companies who were strangers to each other and lacked the unity of sentiment that a community needs.11 We know from the epitaphs of soldiers at Tarentum, including a discharged veteran of Columella’s own legion, VI Ferrata, and another from XII Fulminata, that the veterans included men discharged from the Syrian legions (CIL 9.6156–7). Columella’s tour of duty with VI Ferrata nicely explains how he came to have seen the regions of Cilicia and Syria, as he mentions in De re rustica.12 His service there dated back many years before 60, if we can make the connection with M. Trebellius, who was legate of Syria in 36 and conducted campaigns in the mountainous country of Rough Cilicia (Ann. 6.41); in the De re rustica Columella thanked ‘M. Trebellius noster’ for his encouragement to add the subject of land surveying to his work on agriculture.13 The advice was not necessarily given in Syria, it being likely that both legate and tribune, acquainted with each other through service in the east, would at some point have returned to Italy, where Columella also mentions his ownership of agricultural properties (3.3.3; 3.9.2). However, granted the enlargement of his interests under M. Trebellius’ influence, Columella’s presence at Tarentum is nothing if not suggestive. No doubt he was expected to put his skills in agriculture and in land surveying – both forms of expertise were needed in such a project – to the settling of the veterans of his former legion. If so, his involvement with the colonial settlement followed by more than twenty years his service with one of the legions now settled there; he must have known from that time some of the colonists, young soldiers themselves when he had been a young tribune, while his ownership of properties in

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order Italy may have made him accessible to the government’s claims on his services. He also provides us with an example, if not of the systematic ‘professionalism’, at least of the selective employment policies of the Roman government, as it made use of a person of known qualifications to supervise land assignments and agricultural development in a new colony. There may be yet a further dimension to the story, in the connection between Columella and the Pythagorean philosopher from Gades, Moderatus. The combination of agricultural science and Pythagorean philosophy speaks for quite a range of interests in this educated provincial family – and possibly more than this, if we recall the attractions of southern Italy for adherents of the Pythagorean way of life. It hardly seems worth even wondering whether Columella the agricultural writer and Moderatus the Pythagorean were not just related but were one and the same person, and Pythagoras’ adopted city of Thurii is a different place from Tarentum. Nevertheless, the influence of the Pythagorean school extended from its original home to other cities of Magna Graecia, and the connection might add an unexpected nuance to Columella’s presence at Tarentum. It would not occur to those philosophical writers who refer to the Pythagorean Moderatus, to ask whether their subject might also have written on agriculture. Or else he might be a son or nephew, if the Pythagorean had a pupil who was known to Plutarch.14

3. Burrus at Vasio The subject of my third tale, Columella’s close contemporary Sextus Afranius Burrus, is known to us in a rather different way. Rising to the praetorian prefecture in the later years of Claudius through the influence of the emperor’s wife Agrippina, Burrus shared the tutelage of the young Nero – and the credit for some positive qualities of the first part of the reign – with the philosopher Seneca. Tacitus presents him as a man of military renown, who nevertheless knew perfectly well whose influence had brought him to his present position; ‘egregiae militaris famae, gnarum tamen cuius sponte praeficeretur’.15 So the military man and the philosopher share the supervision of a young emperor who is, initially at least, actually controlled by his mother. The balance of power subsists for some years, beyond the murder of Agrippina and other domestic remedies for Nero’s problems, until Burrus’ death in 62. It was this, wrote Tacitus, that broke the power of Seneca also (14.62). A statue base from Vasio in Narbonensis (modern Vaison-la-Romaine), commemorates Burrus as patron of the city (CIL 12.5842 = ILS 1321):

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Chapter 5 VASIENS VOC PATRONO SEX AFRANIO SEX F VOLT BURRO TRIB MIL PROC AUGUS TAE PROC TI CAESARIS PROC DIVI CLAUDI PRAEF PRAETORIO ORNA Ment IS CONSULAR Vasiens(es) Voc(ontii) / patrono, / Sex(to) Afranio Sex(ti) f(ilio) / Volt(inia) Burro, / trib(uno) mil(itum), proc(uratori) Augus/tae, proc(uratori) Ti(berii) Caesaris, / proc(uratori) divi Claudi, / praef(ecto) praetorio, orna/m[ent]is consular(ibus) The Vocontii of Vasio to their patron, Sextus Afranius Burrus son of Sextus, of the tribe Voltinia, military tribune, procurator of ( Julia) Augusta, procurator of Tiberius Caesar, procurator of the divine Claudius, praetorian prefect, honoured by consular ornaments.

The ‘Vocontii of Vasio’ are the members of the Gallic civitas of the Vocontii, for whom Vasio, now a Roman city (and an elegant one), was their civitas capital. We know that Voltinia was the tribe in which Roman citizens among the Vocontii were enlisted, by virtue of the grant of municipal status given to the community; as we saw with Columella, the effect of this form of grant was to bestow the citizenship upon those members of the leading class who were elected magistrates of their city. It is interesting therefore that, like Columella, Burrus was enrolled in the same tribe as his community. There is an extremely good chance that he was himself a citizen of Vasio, a conclusion naturally supported by the location of the inscription in that city. Nero’s praetorian prefect was then a southern Gaul, from Vaison, a local product made good. Rising to the prefecture, he was given ‘ornamenta consularia’, a grant of honorary status at the level of the highest senatorial magistracy, bestowed upon a distinguished equestrian who did not qualify to hold the consulship; apart from Burrus’ own deserts, the honour maintained some sort of parity between himself and that true senator and vir consularis, Seneca. Performing some service to his town of origin as their patron, he is commemorated by a public dedication in his native city. The inscription is a document of social history, illustrating several themes: the workings of patronage; a great political figure seen in the provincial community from which he arose; the emergence of such communities in the context of their relationships with Rome; citizenship in the provinces; the rise of provincial elites into Roman public life. These are among the major themes of Roman imperial history.

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order The inscription also raises an interesting question as to Tacitus’ claim that Burrus possessed a distinguished military reputation. It mentions only the junior post of tribunus militum, a component of the equestrian career that does not of itself imply any particular military accomplishments or ambition. It all depends on what you make of the opportunity; we have seen how the elder Pliny made a great deal of it – unlike his nephew, who made rather little (Ep. 1.10). The inscription then lists a series of equestrian procuratorships, appointments as estate manager for members of the JulioClaudian family on its Claudian side; Julia Augusta (this is Livia, Augustus’ wife and Tiberius’ mother, who received the name and title in Augustus’ will), Tiberius and Claudius. It is an administrative or managerial, rather than a military career. Tacitus may for dramatic purposes have over-drawn the contrast between the senator and philosopher Seneca and the equestrian prefect Burrus; or possibly, as himself the product of a provincial background in Narbonensis, he may have been a little overindulgent to one of his own type and background. It might be different if the hand he had lost was in some great military exploit, but if this was so, Tacitus does not mention it.16

4. M. Antonius Pallas, libertus a rationibus Early among the events of the year 55, Tacitus describes the removal from his duties of Claudius’ powerful a rationibus, the freedman Pallas (Ann. 13.14).17 The description has more than a touch of humour, as Pallas vacates his place of work with a crowd of followers, and it provoked an apt comment from the young emperor; it was, said Nero, as if Pallas were going to ‘swear off ’ his office like a public magistrate. The term for ‘swearing off’, eiurare, indicates the procedure whereby a retiring magistrate will swear an oath that he has performed his duties according to the law. In fact, Pallas had done just the opposite, in extracting a promise (from whom, Tacitus does not say) that he face no questions about his administration. In the crowd of followers that leaves with him, we see the development of the post of a rationibus into a veritable department of state with armies of slave and freed employees; it may be a good moment to remind ourselves, that in Seneca’s comic satire on the reign of Claudius, the Apocolocyntosis, which was no doubt recited very close to this moment, the late emperor is last seen receiving the punishment of assignment as secretary to a former freedman of Caligula (Apocol. 15.2). Pallas’ removal is an early instalment in Tacitus’ tracing of the decline in the fortunes of Agrippina after her son’s accession to the Principate in October 54; for it had been Pallas who had canvassed her claims, against

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Chapter 5 those of other possible candidates, as conjugal successor to the lamented Messalina. Agrippina is now represented as trying to retrieve her position by threatening Nero that she would take Britannicus, Claudius’ son by Messalina and Nero’s adoptive brother, to the praetorian guard; let Nero see whether they would prefer a professor of philosophy and the mutilated Burrus to the daughter of Germanicus! Nero’s brisk response to his mother’s threats was to arrange the murder of Britannicus, which was achieved (as was widely assumed) by poison, and in due course that of Agrippina herself. All this is well known to readers of Tacitus, but there is another way of viewing the removal of Pallas from his duties. It fell in the first few months of an imperial regime which began with Nero’s promise to the senate, expressed in the words of Seneca, that the abuses permitted by his predecessor would be abolished (Ann. 13.4). Senate and consuls would retain their old responsibilities in Italy and the public provinces while the emperor would concern himself with the armies entrusted to him, nothing in the imperial household would be offered for sale or open to corruption, personal and public affairs would be kept distinct and separate; ‘discretam domum et rem publicam’. It looks as if, in furtherance of this clear statement of policy, the new regime had determined to move quickly against its predecessor’s practices, Pallas, despite his support for Agrippina, being its chosen target. Hence the irony in Nero’s comment, that Pallas seemed almost to be behaving like a public magistrate laying down office according to proper forms, and in Pallas’ arrangement that his accounts be held in balance with those of the republic; ‘paresque rationes cum re publica haberet’. It was as if Pallas was making fun of what the new regime would require. Pallas incurs one more substantive mention in the Annals, his death notice at the end of Book 14. It coincides here with the death of Nero’s freedman Doryphorianus, with the imputation of poison in both cases. In the case of Doryphorianus the motive was his opposition to Nero’s marriage to Poppaea, a neat counterpoise to Pallas’ support of Agrippina under Claudius, which had brought about the culmination of his power. The motive given for the poisoning of Pallas is that he hung onto his immense wealth in a prolonged old age; ‘immensam pecuniam longa senectute detineret’ (14.65). Tacitus combines innuendo with an implausible (and unverifiable) motive, at the same time as he offers a perfectly straightforward explanation. Pallas died in old age, of natural causes. Almost exactly a half-century later, the younger Pliny described in a letter to his friend Julius Montanus how he had come across a monument to the great freedman, less than a mile from the city along the via Tiburtina

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order (Ep. 7.29).18 Pliny paused to read the inscription on the monument, which stated how, in recognition of his unbroken loyalty to his patrons, the senate had decreed him the symbols of praetorian rank and a reward of 15 million sesterces from public funds, of which Pallas was ‘content with the honour’. Not satisfied with the temporary burst of indignation he allowed himself at this moment, Pliny returned to the subject in a second, extended essay, addressed to the same friend and placed early in the next book of his letters (Ep. 8.6). It must always have been Pliny’s intention to expand his earlier comments in this way; as in other cases in his correspondence, we can see design and a sense of development in sequential letters on the same subject, placed in a casually contrived relationship to each other. Pliny’s starting-point in this second letter is to repeat verbatim the text of the inscription he had given in the first, from where he goes on to say how ‘it seemed worthwhile’ to search out the original senatus consultum.19 Pliny’s enterprise is not only an act of ‘onerosa collatio’ reminiscent (deliberately so, one would think) of Tacitus himself, but can be compared with Tacitus’ own description, which of course had yet to be written, of the same event (Ann. 12.53). Of the two accounts, Pliny’s is the more detailed, both as to the senatus consultum itself, and the procedural manoeuvres that surround it. With the more selective discipline of the historian, Tacitus provides fewer details but more context, and he gives the names of certain senators who lent their support to the proceedings. It is best to begin with his account. Tacitus locates the episode in the year 52, its context the establishment of an extremely influential principle of Roman law. The issues brought to the senate by Claudius concerned the status of free women who by cohabitation were deemed married to slaves. Two situations are considered, that in which the master of the slave does not know of the relationship, and that in which he does know and has agreed to it. In the first instance, itself an interesting indication of the de facto independence in which a slave might live his life away from the direct supervision of his master, the woman is herself given servile status. (In compensation for her loss of freedom, she might of course enter the protective framework of a slave-owning family that did not keep too close an eye on its human property.) In the second instance, she acquires the status of a freedwoman (liberta). The legal ruling, known as the s.c. Claudianum, with subsequent commentary became the basis of Roman law in these and like situations.20 Standard legal texts like the Digest contain whole titles on the subject, and its provisions were only repealed, through disuse, in the time of Justinian.21 The connection of Pallas with this matter of business was revealed to the senate by the emperor, who praised him as the deviser (repertorem) of the

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Chapter 5 relatio of his own that had elicited the senatus consultum. The irony that it was a libertus who had suggested legislation (a senatus consultum did count as this) in matters involving servile status passes unspoken, while Tacitus moves on to the honours pressed upon Pallas by the senate, with the names of those who gave voice to these expressions of senatorial servility. The grant of praetorian insignia and the reward of 15 million sesterces were proposed by Barea Soranus. It may be that Soranus’ position as consul designate (he was suffect consul later in the same year) gave him a seniority that made it impossible for him to avoid collusion with this act of homage to a freedman,22 but it cannot escape the reader that Barea Soranus is the same man who later fell into disfavour with Nero, ostensibly because of his honest conduct as proconsul of Asia and because he had failed to punish the Pergamenes for preventing one of Nero’s freedmen from exporting statues and paintings to Rome after the Great Fire of 64 – but really because he had Stoic beliefs and the wrong friends (Ann. 16.23; 30–33). We will see other cases where Tacitus pointedly picks out on their first public appearance individuals who would be prominent later in his narrative. In addition, a senator with the ultimately blue-blooded Roman name of Cornelius Scipio proposed a vote of thanks to Pallas that, born of ancestral Arcadian royal stock, he had set aside his ancient nobility in the public interest and allowed himself to be counted among the ministers of the Princeps. Whoever thought of it, this somewhat recondite allusion to the Aeneid (where the young prince Pallas is the son of king Evander of Arcadia), would give Pallas, more or less by definition (since the Arcadians were in Italy before the Trojans), a more ancient descent than any Roman senator. Yet the claim was perhaps relevant in a different sense, if it was connected with the procedure known as natalium restitutio, which dissolved the stigma of servile origin by restoring to a freedman, more usually to the children of freedmen, the legal presumption of free birth.23 In this case it allowed Pallas to acquire the equestrian rank that would enable him to bear the ornamenta praetoria, and to wear the gold ring of the equestrian order.24 In reply to these requests from the senate, the emperor asserted that Pallas, content with the honour, would be content to remain within his former modest means. The text of the senatus consultum declaring this, and showing how a man of libertine origin and the possessor of 300 million sesterces could be praised for his parsimony, was engraved on bronze tablets for all to see (Ann. 12.53). Everyone in Tacitus’ account – Barea Soranus with his proposal for praetorian honours and a monetary gift, the sounding-brass nonentity Cornelius Scipio with his reference to the legendary kings of Arcadia, the emperor himself with his claim of Pallas’ slender means, and of course

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order Tacitus himself – seems to be indulging in an exchange of mutual contempt and irony, that cynical urbanitas which Pliny thought one possible explanation of what he read in the senatus consultum. Indeed, to this point Tacitus’ account is recognisably similar to that given by Pliny, but the latter’s parsing of the text, while less revealing of the circumstances of 52, adds much detail as to procedure and expands on the motivations of the principals in his moral satire. Compared with the effuse language of the senatus consultum itself, said Pliny, the wording of Pallas’ inscription on the via Tiburtina, which had first inspired his researches, was modest and restrained. Pliny’s account of the senatus consultum alternates between direct citation and a close version in oratio obliqua. His outrage is breathless and predictable. That the senate should offer the praetorian insignia to a slave, that it should insist that Pallas wear the gold ring of the equestrian order (a detail, as we saw, not in Tacitus) and not the iron ring of a former slave, for it would be contrary to the majesty of the senate that a vir praetorius should wear an iron ring (confusing the issue on all sides, Pliny knew perfectly well that a freedman is not the same as a slave, and that the equestrian holder of the ornamenta praetoria is not the same as a vir praetorius)25 – bad as they were, these things mattered less than the humiliating absurdity that the senate should in Pallas’ name thank Caesar for his own recognition of his freedman’s claim to such honours, and for giving the senate the opportunity to duplicate it. Pliny now follows his text to the point where it is agreed by the senate that Pallas should reap the reward of his unique loyalty and devotion to duty; the senate and Roman people could hope for no better opportunity to display their liberality than by enhancing the resources of this selfless and honest guardian of the imperial finances. It was in response to this sentiment that the gift of 15 million sesterces, so briefly mentioned by Tacitus, was voted by the senate, together (in Pliny’s account) with an expression of its desire that the publicus parens, namely the emperor, should prevail upon his freedman to accept it. Pallas nevertheless declined the offer, which the emperor duly reported back to the senate. Pliny has evidently shifted to a later moment in the proceedings (Pallas’ response would not take long to ascertain), noting Claudius’ request that the senate rescind the grant of 15 million, and the senate’s meek acceptance of the emperor’s wish; since it was right in no way to oppose the emperor’s desires, it would yield to them in this matter also. It was as if Pallas, who of course was present in none of these proceedings, had interposed a magisterial intercessio in the interests of moderating his own honours, rejecting 15 million sesterces but accepting the praetorian insignia as if they were worth less, while the emperor did his freedman’s bidding before the senate!

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Chapter 5 This is enough of Pliny’s outrage at the reversal of the natural order represented by the prosperity and influence of a freedman – though in reading it one should not forget that the sum of 15 million sesterces foregone by Pallas is not far from the total wealth of Pliny himself, as it has been calculated.26 There is one more item before Pliny’s vein of social satire is exhausted. He concludes by reporting yet a further senatus consultum, beginning with the legislative term, ‘utique’, referring to the emperor’s statement to the senate on January 23 and the senatus consulta passed in response to it (the whole story we have just read), ordering that both be engraved in bronze and displayed by the cuirassed statue of Julius Caesar. According to the elder Pliny (Hist. Nat. 34.10.18), the statue was put up ‘in foro suo’ under the dictator Caesar – near to Pallas’ place of work in the offices of the fiscus.27 In reading Tacitus’ and Pliny’s accounts of Pallas, as with Petronius’ portrayal of Trimalchio in the Satiricon, we have to discount a very large element of satire and prejudice – more than most readers are prone to do – when it comes to the wealth and power acquired by some freedmen. They were an extremely important class in Roman society, representing more than any other the levels of opportunity and social mobility that were available in the time of the early Principate. In cases involving very great and rapidly acquired wealth, it is easy for those who think they have taste to perceive a lack of it in others, and in the case of great power to question the way it is acquired and exercised. In his desire to draw a moral lesson from the case of Pallas (‘How glad I am that I did not live in those times!’), Pliny has not acknowledged the importance of Claudius’ wish to present Pallas as a model of loyal public service, with the assurance to others, provided by his example, that such virtues would receive their reward. After the failures of Tiberius and Caligula, Claudius came to the imperial office with a renewed sense of the nature of the Principate founded by Augustus, not simply as a political institution but as an instrument of government, and he had important public works and policies to show for it. The building of a harbour at Ostia and the draining of the Lacus Fucinus, not to mention the conquests of Mauretania and Britain, were major projects, and they required planning, organisation, skilled advice and manpower. The emperor’s freedmen were a critically important part of this enterprise, especially since Claudius came to the throne unexpectedly, with no power-base among the senators. This is not to say that all went well, but it was in a way typical of Claudius’ innocence, his lack of concern for the political consequences, or of his willingness to pay the price of his accomplishment, that he should allow his freedmen such power as would threaten the social order as Pliny and Tacitus perceived it.

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order The inscription on the via Tiburtina, with the brief notice that first sent Pliny to the acta senatus, is different from that by the cuirassed statue of Julius Caesar with which he ended his moral essay. The latter, with the texts of Claudius’ relatio to the senate and the senatus consulta arising from it, may or may not have been extant in the early second century; Pliny and Tacitus knew about it from the archives of the senate and its proceedings, not from seeing it in person, and later emperors did not repeat Claudius’ experiment with freedmen. It is likely that what Pliny saw, less than a mile from the bounds of the city, was Pallas’ funerary monument, erected after his death in 62.28 If, as Tacitus wrote on that occasion, Pallas had carried his great wealth into a ‘long old age’, he can by no means have been a young man when he was honoured by the senate in 52, or when he was removed from office in 55. His service to the imperial family went back many years, as we can see from his gentilicium when enfranchised, Antonius.29 Claudius must have inherited this trusted servant from his mother Antonia (the daughter of Mark Antony), possibly enfranchised in her will and entering into Claudius’ clientela. Pallas may, ‘iuste an secus’, to borrow a phrase of Ammianus Marcellinus (27.11.1), have acquired an immense fortune in the course of his public service. So too did the senator Seneca and his brother the equestrian Annaeus Mela, and many others. It is hard, or perhaps not so hard, to see why the successful freedman should monopolise the moral obloquy of becoming rich.

5. Cornelius Fuscus in Moesia Juvenal’s Fourth Satire is a wickedly funny account of a meeting of an advisory council of the Emperor Domitian; the problem before it, what to do with a huge fish that had been caught off the coast of Ancona and presented to the emperor. The matter is treated as urgently, writes Juvenal, as if the emperor were about to make an announcement about the ‘Chatti, or fierce Sygambri’, or as if a message had flown ‘on anxious wing’ to Domitian’s Alban villa (where the meeting, like a real one very close in date to this fictional one, was held) about some crisis at the far end of the world (Sat. 4.147–9).30 In fact, this is just what had happened, for Juvenal’s poem is a parody of a more serious occasion narrated by another writer. In his edition of Juvenal, the Renaissance scholar Valla cited a now lost commentary in which were quoted four lines from Statius’ also lost poem De bello Germanico, to show that the object of Juvenal’s satire is not just Domitian but the poet Statius, for whom Juvenal elsewhere expressed a particular contempt.31 There appear in Statius’ fragment three persons – Vibius Crispus, Fabricius Veiento 32 and the elder Acilius Glabrio – who

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Chapter 5 also appear in Juvenal’s advisory council on the fish, with turns of phrase clearly intended to echo the earlier writer. The personnel of Juvenal’s Satire, eleven named individuals, can then be transplanted into a council of war ‘de bello Germanico’ described by Statius in his lost poem. This makes especially intriguing Juvenal’s two lines (111–2) describing one of its members, Cornelius Fuscus: et qui vulturibus servabat viscera Dacis Fuscus marmorea meditatus proelia villa ...and Fuscus, guts reserved for Dacian vultures, Planning battles in the marble halls.

Cornelius Fuscus, praetorian prefect of Domitian, commanded in the Dacian campaign of 86 or 87 and with his army was lost in a great battle fought in the territory of the Dacians.33 The disaster is referred to in the second chapter of Tacitus’ Histories, in effect a table of contents of the work, though the narrative of the war has disappeared along with the bulk of the Histories, and we are left with little detailed evidence for it. As mentioned above in the case of Barea Soranus, it is Tacitus’ habit to introduce on the occasion of their first appearance, individuals who will later be important in his history, with hints of their later importance as it arose from their character. The paradigm case is Thrasea Paetus, whose fame as principled opponent of Nero is anticipated in his early intervention in a trivial piece of senatorial business. It is only by attention to the little things, he tells those senators who thought him officious, that they can lay claim to the larger. So Tacitus tends the subversive idea, already planted in the Agricola (42.5), that it was as much officiousness as high principle that brought Paetus to his end (Ann. 13.49). So too, the support offered by Cornelius Fuscus to the cause of Galba in the Year of the Four Emperors, and the bold temerity that he showed in offering it, brought him the promotion that would ultimately lead to his death. Bringing over his colony to Galba, he was rewarded by appointment as procurator of the imperial estates in Dalmatia. Tacitus adds extra details on his first appearance in the Histories, concerning the social background of Cornelius Fuscus.34 Born to senatorial parents, he renounced their rank in favour of life in the equestrian order. He did so, wrote Tacitus, by a desire for quies – meaning not that he was a lover of idleness (far from it in this case), but that he preferred the freedoms of equestrian status to the stresses, restrictions and dangers of life as a senator. In much the same way Annaeus Mela, the brother of Seneca (and father of the poet Lucan), had chosen to remain a Roman knight when the higher rank was his for the choosing. This, for Tacitus, was the outcome of a

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order ‘perverse ambition’ ( praepostera ambitio), but this misses the point. In his equestrian rank Mela enjoyed the business freedoms conventionally denied to senators – freedoms from which his senatorial brother, the philosopher, and their entire family, stood to benefit. Between them, the two brothers had the political and business universe of Rome in their grasping hands, leaving to Seneca a monopoly of the hypocrisy that was involved in justifying it.35 In the closing chapters of his Agricola, Tacitus highlights the dangers into which a great general might fall through pointed talk about disasters in the res publica. In Moesia, Dacia and Germany armies were lost ‘by temerity or through the inactivity of the generals’, threatening not only the frontiers of the empire but Roman possessions within them. All of which, Agricola could only watch and lament, in helpless retirement. Temeritate aut per ignaviam ducum; in this careful phrase, Tacitus is referring to successive defeats in Roman and then in barbarian territory – in the province of Moesia under its passive legate Oppius Sabinus, and in Dacian territory under Cornelius Fuscus as the field commander, in an impetuous response to the earlier defeat. Boldness, energy, impetuosity: these were the qualities that both made Fuscus’ reputation and brought about his end. As with Thrasea Paetus’ officiousness, Tacitus defines Fuscus’ character from the moment of his first appearance in the Histories. Some years after Fuscus’ death an emperor, either Domitian after his later, successful Dacian war, or (more likely) Trajan, after his annexation of Dacia as a province, erected a cenotaph in honour of those killed in the war of 86–7.36 The following severely damaged inscription appears on its eastern side (CIL 3.14214; ILS 9107): tri ]B · POT [ in honorem et ]MEMORIAM · FORTIS[simorum virorum qui ]PRO RE · P · MORTE OCCVBV[erunt ]COL · POMP · DOMICIL · NEAPOL · ITALIAE · PRAE[ fectus

The first line of the inscription, written in monumental letters with the words ‘trib(unicia) pot(estate)’, clearly contained the name and titles of an emperor. The second and third lines, ‘[to the honour and] memory of the brave heroes who fell for the res publica’, are engraved in smaller letters than the heading, but still larger than the next line, which preserves the origin and rank of praefectus, of a man whose name is lost at the beginning of the line; ‘[of the] colony of Pompeii, domiciled at Neapolis in Italy, pre[fect...’. Then follow, in much smaller letters, the names of more than 3,000 of the fallen heroes, engraved in columns on all four sides of the monument. Each man is named with the military unit to which he belonged, and with his place of origin; as, too, is their commander.

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Chapter 5 For, given the disposition of the lines, it is hard to see the praefectus as other than the commander of the troops lost in the battle; in which case we are looking at the commemoration of none other than the Cornelius Fuscus whose presence in Juvenal’s Fourth Satire evoked the image of Dacian vultures. Syme’s effort to see the praefectus of the inscription as the holder of some other office than the praefectura praetorio, and as some other person than Cornelius Fuscus, is unconvincing, for a number of reasons. As we saw, Cornelius Fuscus gained his appointment as procurator in Dalmatia from his service in bringing over his colony to Galba. For Syme, the colony could not have been the Pompeii of the inscription – ‘a mere Ulubrae’, as he put it, alluding to Horace’s paradigm of an insignificant place; still more dismissively, ‘anywhere but Pompeii’! 37 Syme was looking for somewhere more directly relevant to Galba’s power-base in Spain or to his ‘slow and bloodstained’ advance through southern Gaul (that advance, in which Agricola’s mother lost her life to marauding soldiers); 38 if not Vienne, which was in Galba’s hands from the start of his rebellion, then one might think of a colony in Spain (Corduba or Barcino) or northern Italy (Aquileia). Syme had a soft spot for Forum Iulii (Fréjus), seeing in that city the antecedents by marriage of Tacitus himself, and adducing the nomen Cornelius that Cornelius Fuscus shared with the historian.39 There is really no need for this. However important or otherwise a place might seem to be in the larger scheme of things, to bring over one’s city to the cause of a claimant in a civil war is a service that deserves, and expects, a reward. In a very interesting chapter of the Histories, Tacitus described how the partisans of Vespasian, meeting at Berytus in mid-69, laid the foundations of his bid for empire – initiating levies, recalling veterans, manufacturing arms, minting coin. There were approaches to cities and to individuals, with the prospect of the rewards they might win. For many, men of equestrian rank, the rewards were prefectures and procuratorships, for some, even the prize of senatorial rank – eminent men, says Tacitus in a gesture of deference to the Flavian interest, later to occupy the highest positions.40 Such rewards might be adjusted to match the services offered, and procuratorships were especially adaptable, given the numbers of them, and the variety of greater and lesser appointments that were available. A procuratorship in Dalmatia for Cornelius Fuscus seems a quite modest reward for bringing over his colony to Galba, not suggesting that it need have been a place of any special importance. Indeed, the appointment in itself need have led to nothing, for it was only the unforeseen chance of the advance of the Flavians across his territory that gave Fuscus the opportunity for his further advancement; he had the youth and energy to compensate for the elderly sloth of the consular legates of Pannonia and

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order Dalmatia. It cannot be argued that his very appearance in the text of the Histories ensures the importance of his contribution to Galba, given Tacitus’ practice to characterize individuals later prominent in his story at their first appearance in it. It was Fuscus’ energy, attached to him from the start by Tacitus, that explained his rise under the Flavians, and later, misused as temerity, led to his death in Dacia. In conceiving his portrayal of Fuscus, Tacitus begins from the later event and leads back to the earlier. Bold and restless from beginning to end – that was the character of Cornelius Fuscus. A final point relates to a famous natural disaster mentioned in the prefatory chapters of the Histories and covered, no doubt in some detail, in the lost books. It is well known that the younger Pliny’s two letters on the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 were addressed to Tacitus, as material that he might wish to use in describing the event in the forthcoming Histories – as well as demonstrating Pliny’s own capacity to rise to the occasion if he had so chosen (Epp. 6.16, 20). It is frustrating that with the loss of this part of the Histories we are unable to say whether Tacitus accepted the challenge. At the very least one would expect a death notice of the elder Pliny, given Tacitus’ own use of him as a historical source, and the existing links between their families. Like the men under his command, Cornelius Fuscus is given his place of origin in the inscription at Adamclisi. He is said to have been from the colony of Pompeii, and to have been domiciled in ‘Neapolis in Italy’ – so called, to distinguish it from cities of the name elsewhere. The explanation is clear. The destruction of Pompeii removed the city from the physical and juridical landscape of Italy. For social and legal reasons, Romans had to have an origo, a place to which their families belonged, and where their status was registered. Survivors of the disaster, or Pompeians absent at the time of their city’s destruction, were therefore registered in other cities; in Cornelius Fuscus’ case, Naples. We should think of him as among those citizens of Pompeii who, happening to be elsewhere at the time of the eruption, heard of their city’s destruction, wondered about the survival of their relatives and friends, and awaited further news.

6. Suetonius in Bithynia The last public service performed for Rome by the younger Pliny was his governorship of the province of Bithynia and Pontus, which he held for about eighteen months from the late summer of 110 until early in 112 (the date might be a year or two earlier than this, but that does not concern us here).41 The province, normally under the disposition of the Roman senate, was transferred, in the case of Pliny and his immediate successor

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Chapter 5 Cornutus Tertullus, to the emperor’s direct jurisdiction, and they held office not as proconsuls but as legati pro praetore of the emperor Trajan. It was the custom of legati to report constantly to the emperors on the issues that confronted them, and it is this change in the formal status of the province, and not any such consideration as Pliny’s over-anxiety or the emperor’s officiousness or lack of trust in his legate, that caused Pliny to consult Trajan so often, both on the financial questions that were the chief ground of the change in the administration of the province, and on other issues as well.42 The more than 100 letters exchanged between Pliny and his emperor over this period of eighteen months give us priceless insight into provincial life and government in the period of the early empire, and shed a revealing and complimentary light on the conscientiousness of both parties. Late in the series of letters is a request to Trajan that Suetonius Tranquillus, the later biographer of the emperors, be given the ius trium liberorum – the legal rights that would accrue to him as if he had three children, whereas, because of what Pliny styles his unfavourable marital circumstances and bad fortune ( parum felix matrimonium and fortunae malignitas), he had none (Epp. 10.94–5). Pliny describes his own relationship with Suetonius as a long acquaintance followed by a more recent and deeper knowledge. It will appear from Mynors’ Oxford Classical Text version of the letter, that the reading at one point is not absolutely certain. What is however clear is Pliny’s emphasis on Suetonius’ taste for learning and literature; Suetonium Tranquillum, probatissimum honestissimum eruditissimum virum, et mores eius secutus et studia iam pridem, domine, in contubernium adsumpsi, tantoque magis diligere coepi quanto nunc (MSS hunc) propius inspexi.

There is not much doubt what the correct reading should be. Even though it was accepted by Pliny’s earlier editor, M. Schuster, ‘hunc’ produces a thoroughly indeterminate impression, whereas ‘nunc’ yields good, sharp sense, its contrast with the phrase ‘iam pridem’ strengthening the adversative effect of ‘tantoque magis’; their shared intellectual interests had long ago prompted Pliny to take Suetonius into his companionship (contubernium), and he had now, from a closer association, gained the stronger impression of his qualities. One does not absolutely need to accept Mynors’ choice of reading to make an obvious inference; Suetonius was in BithyniaPontus with Pliny, having been recruited in some capacity onto his staff.43 The earlier connection between them is attested by a number of letters written by Pliny to Suetonius, or to others in his interest.44 On one particularly intriguing occasion he yielded to Suetonius’ request that the

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order military tribunate Pliny had secured for him from the consular senator Neratius Marcellus be transferred to a relative.45 Since Neratius Marcellus was at this moment legate of Britain, it would appear that Suetonius, a north African from Hippo Regius, was averse from pursuing his equestrian career in that remote province (perhaps he had read Tacitus’ account of its climate in the Agricola). Pliny’s apparent ability to transfer a military assignment in Britain from one beneficiary to another is an interesting comment on the way in which some junior appointments at the equestrian level were made. The Roman government was certainly capable, when the need arose, of putting the right man in the right place, but if there was no particular need, it seems to have taken a relatively undemanding view. It did not occur to Pliny that it would make any difference to the government of the empire whether Suetonius Tranquillus or his relative held the position. The only issue in his letter, a preoccupation typical of its author, is the extent to which the transfer of his patronage to another would reflect well on Suetonius, and on himself. The reason for thinking that Pliny’s Bithynian correspondence was published in chronological order is that those letters that can be dated occur in the sequence in which they should occur, and that at the beginning of Pliny’s second year of office we see cities appearing for the second time, as the annual tour, or assize circuit of the cities of the jurisdiction comes round again.46 It is however unlikely that Pliny’s tour of duty was intended to last for just the eighteen months for which it is attested; appointment as legatus pro praetore implies a longer term of office, probably for three years in the first instance. These considerations suggest, as has for long been assumed, that the reason for the abrupt end of Pliny’s correspondence was his death in office at this point of his governorship. Now, the very last letter in the series (10.120, to which Trajan replied in 121), is Pliny’s request for the emperor’s indulgence for his having made out a travel warrant in favour of his wife, who had learned of the death of her grandfather and wished to travel home. A poignant consequence follows from this. The departure of Pliny’s wife from Bithynia-Pontus upon the news of her grandfather’s death was the last time she and her husband will have set eyes on each other. It looks as if Pliny’s death was very soon after her departure; and given the rapid speed of the imperial transport service on which she was travelling, it is not very likely that she learned of it until after her arrival in Italy. Perhaps a high-speed courier was dispatched to catch her up, but we do not know that. What of Suetonius? The letter involving him too is late in the series, which makes him an obvious candidate for a sad task that now awaited attention; the collection of the Bithynian letters of his friend and their

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Chapter 5 publication as an appendix to the nine books that had already appeared – letters to and from emperors complementing the nine books of private correspondence. Given his presence in Bithynia and Pliny’s description of his studious tastes earlier in his correspondence and in his letter to Trajan, it seems perverse to deny to the a studiis, a bybliothecis and ab epistulis of Hadrian this additional place in literary history.47 It is somewhat consolatory to think of Suetonius coming in the course of his work across the letter written about himself by Pliny, and Trajan’s friendly reply. This chapter has begun and ended with episodes of family life; with the handicapped son born to the procurator Cornelius Tacitus, and the departure of Pliny’s wife from a husband whom she would never see again. In the meantime we saw Columella, meeting again after many years his military colleagues from Syria as he helped to establish a Roman colony at Tarentum, M. Antonius Pallas confounding his critics by the sheer volume of his social dissonance, and Cornelius Fuscus contemplating the destruction of Pompeii, before his own death in Dacia. Unless we count the murder of Agrippina, I can think of nothing so personal affecting the praetorian prefect Afranius Burrus, but I am eager to dispel any suspicion of sentimentality. Historians of the Roman empire have a tremendous asset in the regularity of its social and political systems. It is because we know the principles of nomenclature, the nature of the citizenship, the importance of tribal affiliations, the system of government, the sequence of senatorial and equestrian careers, that we can locate people where they should be found, understand them when we find them there and, sometimes, miss them where we would expect them to be.48 For this, the systems need to be reconstructed, and a mass of truly impressive work, to which historians are endlessly indebted, has been devoted to this. But the systems are as much a means to an end as an end in themselves, and what I have done in this series of sketches is to use them to reveal things about individuals that we might otherwise not know. It is because we understand the formalities of Roman senatorial and equestrian careers that we can place individuals, whom we may encounter at one or two moments in time and of whose personalities we know little, in the fuller context of their public and private lives. In the case of the senatorial class we could hardly forget this, given the emphasis of our literary sources. This is less true of members of the equestrian order, who in opting for quies rather than the stresses of political life tend (though not always) to evade the march of great events and to escape the attention of the literary sources. But they are there all the same, and can sometimes be recovered as individuals from the systems that framed their lives.

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order Notes 1 Hist. Nat. 3.31; ‘agrorum cultu, virorum morumque dignatione, amplitudine opum nulli provinciarum postferenda breviterque Italia verius quam provincia’. 2 Hist. Nat. 7.76; ‘Invenimus in monumentis Salamine Euthymenis filium in tria cubita triennio adcrevisse, incessu tardum, sensu hebetem, puberem etiam factum, voce robusta, absumptum contractione membrorum subita triennio circumacto. Ipsi non pridem vidimus eadem ferme omnia praeter pubertatem in filio Corneli Taciti equitis Romani Belgicae Galliae rationes procurantis’. 3 Mary L. Gordon, ‘The patria of Tacitus’, JRS 26 (1936), pp. 145–51; R. Syme, Tacitus (1957), pp. 60, 63 n. 5, 613–4, etc.; Anthony R. Birley, ‘The life and death of Cornelius Tacitus’, Historia 49 (2000), pp. 230–46, at 233 (observing that the connection is ‘generally accepted’, with reference to PIR 2 C 1466–7). 4 Syme, Tacitus, pp. 611–13 and Appendix 89. 5 Provincial nomina, Syme, Appendixes 78–79; cognomina, pp. 621–2. 6 CIL 13.1036; C. Iulius C. Iuli Otuaneuni f(ilius) Rufus, C. Iuli Gedomonis nepos, Epotsorovidi pron(epos), sacerdos Romae et Augusti ad aram quae est ad confluentem, praefectus fabrum d(at). 7 The elder Pliny is PIR 2 P 493. 8 R. Syme, ‘Pliny the Procurator’, HSCP 73 (1968), pp. 204–8. 9 This episode is included for its inherent interest, despite its similar treatment in Miriam Griffin’s fine book, Seneca: A philosopher in politics (1976), p. 291, cf. JRS 62 (1971), p. 17 (with ref. to C. Cichorius, cited in n. 12 below). I doubt whether ILS 2923 is Columella’s epitaph (as Griffin, p. 291 n.3), rather than a dedication from a client to his patron (like 2922, etc.). 10 Columella is PIR 2 I 779; the philosopher Moderatus of Gades, PIR 2 M 652 (citing Plutarch, Porphyry, Simplicius, etc.). 11 Ann. 14.27; ‘veterani Tarentum et Antium adscripti non tamen infrequentiae locorum subvenere, dilapsis pluribus in provincias in quibus stipendia expleverant; neque coniugiis suscipiendis neque alendis liberis sueti orbas sine posteris domos relinquebant’. 12 C. Cichorius, ‘Zu Biographie Columellas’, Römische Studien (1922), pp. 417–22; see esp. Columella 2.10.18 (on sesame); ‘hoc idem semen Ciliciae Syriaeque regionibus ipse vidi mense Iunio Iulioque conseri et per autumnum, cum permaturuit, tolli’. It is not certain where the Syrian legions were stationed at this time; L. J. F. Keppie, ‘Legions in the East from Augustus to Trajan’, in Philip Freeman and David Kennedy (edd.), The Defence of the Roman and Byzantine East; Proceedings of a colloquium held at the University of Sheffield in April 1986 (BAR International Series 297, 1986), Vol. II, pp. 411–29, at 413–15. VI Ferrata was somewhere near Laodicea (at Raphanaea?) in 17, cf. Tacitus, Ann. 2.79. XII Fulminata was later at Melitene. 13 Columella 5.1.2; ‘...ut proxime, cum de commetiendis agris rationem M. Trebellius noster requireret a me, vicinum atque adeo coniunctum esse censebat demonstranti, quemadmodum agrum pastinemur, praecepere etiam pastinatum quemadmodum metiri debeamus’. Cichorius, pp. 421–2, has Columella at Rome at the beginning of the reign of Claudius. 14 Plutarch, Quaes. Conv. (Table Talk) 8.7.1 (ed. Loeb, vol. 9, pp. 166–7), set at Rome. The pupil was one Lucius from Etruria. PIR 2 I 779 refers to a treatise of 1910 on Columella’s own philosophical tastes.

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Chapter 5 15

Ann. 12.42; ‘igitur distrahi cohortis ambitu duorum et, si ab uno regerentur, intentiorem fore disciplinam adseverante uxore, transfertur regimen cohortium ad Burrum Afranium, egregiae militaris famae, gnarum tamen cuius sponte praeficeretur’. 16 Syme, Tacitus, pp. 591, 622–3; Ann. 13.14, ‘debilis...trunca scilicet manu’. 17 There is a useful though not very incisive treatment of Pallas by S. I. Oost, ‘The career of M. Antonius Pallas’, AJP 79 (1958), pp. 113ff. 18 For comment on this and Pliny’s second letter on the subject (Ep. 8.6), see A. N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A historical and social commentary (1966), pp. 438–9 and 453–5. The date of the letters (Books 7 and 8 seem to have been published together, perhaps as part of the series 7–9) is c. 107/8; Sherwin-White, pp. 37–41 and Syme, Tacitus, Appendix 21. Ep. 8.4 concerns the project of Pliny’s correspondent Caninius Rufus to compose a Greek epic poem on the Dacian War. 19 Sherwin-White, p. 453; R. J. A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (1984), p. 315; Pliny will probably have consulted the register of senatus consulta preserved in the aerarium Saturni rather than (like Tacitus) the acta senatus themselves. 20 By dint of legal commentary and later legislation added to it, the s.c. Claudianum contained many more provisions than those reported by Tacitus; Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the time of Cicero to the time of Ulpian (1991), p. 78. 21 Gaius, Inst. 1.84 (modified by Hadrian); Justinian, Inst. 3.12; Digest 29.5; Codex Theodosianus 4.12.1–7; also mentioned 10.20.10; 12.1.179; Codex Justinianus 7.24 ‘de senatus consulto Claudiano tollendo’. 22 On these questions of seniority and protocol, Talbert, pp. 240–8; 242 for the precedence of the designate consuls; above, Chapter 4 n. 48. 23 Sherwin-White, pp. 453–4, cf. A. Berger, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (1953), s.v. Natalium restitutio (directly relevant to Pallas); ‘The privilege of a freeborn, granted by the emperor to a freedman. All official posts accessible to free-born persons were open to the individual thus privileged. He could enter the ordo equester... for which the status of a free-born was required’, referring to Digest 40.11 and Codex Justinianus 6.8. 24 Tacitus does not mention the ring, which is here added from Pliny – a significant detail. 25 Any more than that the equestrian Burrus, the holder of ornamenta consularia, was a vir consularis (see above). 26 Richard Duncan-Jones, The Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative studies (1974), Chap. 1 (pp. 17–32), ‘The finances of a senator’. 27 Sherwin-White, p. 455, citing Platner-Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), p. 498; cf. L. Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Rome (1992), p. 370, and especially J. Aronen, in Lexikon Topographicum Urbis Romae vol. 4 (1999), pp. 362–3 (s.v. statua loricata divi Iulii) and vol. 3 (1996), p. 191 (s.v. loricata). The statue is distinguished from an equestrian statue of Caesar in the forum and another inside the temple of Divus Julius. It was, in the words of the senatus consultum, a ‘celeberrimus locus’ – a regular phrase often found on inscriptions. Tacitus does not give the location of the inscription. 28 As presumed also by Sherwin-White, p. 438. 29 CIL 6.11965, from Rome, is the epitaph of one of Pallas’ own freedmen, M. Antonius Asclepiades.

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Six tales of the Equestrian Order 30

For a historical consilium held at Alba in 82, CIL 9.5420 (Bruns, FIRA 7 No. 82; Riccobono, FIRA 2, I, No. 75). 31 For Valla’s note (on Sat. 4.94), see G. Highet, Juvenal the Satirist (1954), pp. 258–9; Acilius Glabrionis filius consul sub Domitiano fuit, Papirii Statii carmine de bello Germanico, quod Domitianus egit, probatus: lumina, Nestorei mitis prudentia Crispi, et Fabius Veiento – potentem signat utrumque purpura, ter memores implerunt nomine fastos – et prope Caesareae confinis Acilius aulae. Compare Juvenal 4.81, ‘Crispi iucunda senectus’ and the word ‘lumina’, perhaps referring to the blind Catullus Messalinus (e.g. ‘orbatus lumina’). For Fabricius Veiento, cf. Juvenal 4.113, and for Acilius Glabrio (senior and junior), 94–5. 32 Fabricius is his correct name; Statius called him ‘Fabius’ as a compliment to his caution, after the legendary general Fabius Cunctator. Juvenal calls him ‘prudens’ (4.113), coupling him with the ‘deathbearing’ (‘mortifero’) Catullus (L. Valerius Catullus Messalinus). 33 PIR 2 C 1365 see esp. Suetonius, Dom. 6.1; Martial 6.76. 34 Tacitus, Hist. 2.86; ‘Tampius Flavianus Pannoniam, Pompeius Silvanus Dalmatiam tenebat, divites senes; sed procurator aderat Cornelius Fuscus, vigens aetate, claris natalibus, prima iuventa quietis cupidine senatorium ordinem exuerat; idem pro Galba dux coloniae suae, eaque opera procurationem adeptus, susceptis Vespasiani partibus acerrimam bello facem praetulit’, etc. 35 The anonymous but circumstantial Life of Lucan claims that the poet’s father, ‘distinguished among his own people [at Corduba], and known at Rome’, harboured a preference for the quiet life (‘studium vitae quietoris’) in contrast with the greater fame of his brother; Vita M. Annaei Lucani, printed in the Teubner edition of Lucan, pp. 334–6, and in Adnotationes super Lucanum (Teubner 1909, repr. 1969), pp. 1–3. 36 I am leaving out of this story the victory monument certainly erected by Trajan. 37 R. Syme, ‘The colony of Cornelius Fuscus: an episode in the “Bellum Neronis” ’, AJP 58 (1937), pp. 7ff.; reprinted with addendum in Danubian Papers (1971), pp. 73–83 (and cf. Tacitus, Appendix 33); J. Colin, ‘Le Préfet du Prétoire Cornelius Fuscus: un enfant de Pompei’, Latomus 15 (1956), pp. 57ff. 38 Agricola 7 (near Intimilium, otherwise Albintimilium, in Liguria); compare Histories 2.13 (municipium Albintimilium). 39 Tacitus, Appendix 33 (at p. 684). 40 Hist. 2.82 (Mucianus at Berytus); ‘multos praefecturis et procurationibus, plerosque senatorii ordinis honore percoluit, egregios viros et mox summa adeptos; quibusdam fortuna pro virtutibus fuit’. See Syme, Tacitus, pp. 593-4 and Appendix 84, ‘The role of Corbulo’s legates’. Tacitus’ readers would know who many of these men were. The Ravenna fleet made Cornelius Fuscus their praefectus (Hist. 3.12, cf. 42), and he was later granted praetorian insignia (Hist. 4.4). 41 Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny, pp. 529–33; Syme, Tacitus, Appendixes 19–21. 42 Most writers (cf. Sherwin-White, pp. 80–2) underplay the importance of this change in the status of the province, in assessing Pliny’s correspondence. It was his position as legatus pro praetore with the duty to report to the emperor, and not personal indecisiveness, that led Pliny to consult Trajan so often. 43 R. Syme, ‘The travels of Suetonius Paulinus’, Hermes 109 (1981), at p. 107.

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Chapter 5 Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius; The scholar and his Caesars (1983), p. 5 n. 6, reserves judgment, but the text of Pliny’s letter, once amended, is explicit. 44 Epp. 1.18, 24; 3.8; 5.10; 9.34. Suetonius is described as Pliny’s ‘contubernalis’ in the opening words of Ep. 1.24. 45 Ep. 3.8, with Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny, pp. 229–30. 46 On the chronological sequence of letters in their geographical context, SherwinWhite, pp. 529, and on the assize circuit, pp. 639f. and 675. 47 Syme, Tacitus, Appendix 2 at p. 660, and Appendix 76, remarking (p. 779 n. 2) that the connection had not been made earlier, which is surprising; it is however noted favourably in P. G. Walsh’s translation of Pliny’s letters (Oxford World Classics, 2006), pp. xxxiv–v. Suetonius’ own patron was Pliny’s friend (the dedicatee of his letters) Q. Septicius Clarus; Syme, pp. 778f. For the appointments listed for Suetonius, AEp 1953, 73 (Hippo Regius). 48 A classic case of a significant absence is that of M. Ulpius Traianus (the father of the emperor), not among the legionary legates at the council of war held before Titus’ assault on Jerusalem in 69, and inferred from this to have accompanied Vespasian to Egypt; Syme, Tacitus, p. 30.

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6 A LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT I. Introduction For propertied Romans, few things in life were more important than the correct disposition of their assets and the protection of their reputation after death, and few social events provoked more interest than the arrangements made by their peers, and the insights into character that might be revealed in the process. The questions that arise are no less interesting for being obvious. How much property did he (or she) have? Who was to get it? Did the testator remember his or her family in the proper way? Is anyone left out, or anyone included unexpectedly? How much was left to the emperor (a special question for difficult times)? Was there a secret life? Are there any interesting asides in the will that might reflect, preferably unfavourably, on the living? Not every testament could rival that of Petronius, who before committing suicide wrote a codicil enumerating the sexual vices of Nero and sent a copy to the emperor, but a last will and testament could in lesser ways too be an occasion for the frank expression of opinions kept hidden in life. The sources abound with descriptions of wills, political commentators offer interpretations of the intentions of the great, moralists reflect on the character of the deceased, inscriptions commemorate benefactions to communities in the form of buildings, charitable foundations and public festivities, and, perhaps more commonly than anything else since the beneficiaries themselves record it, the manumission of slaves; and few topics are more extensively discussed by jurists.1 We possess the original copies of some testamentary dispositions written on papyrus, and commemorative inscriptions sometimes quote particular provisions, relating for example to the form of burial and type of tomb requested by the testator, or setting out the precise terms according to which a benefaction is to be administered.2 Petronius’ Satiricon contains a wonderful account of the reading of a will by the arriviste freedman Trimalchio, which reduces his fictional audience to tears and his reading audience to patronizing merriment at the same time as it plays very effectively with the actual forms of Roman wills, and there is a later Roman parody of a will, the so-called Testamentum Porcelli, which makes a different sort of fun of this solemn event.3

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Chapter 6

Photo courtesy of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Rome.

Fig. 1. The Testamentum.

It is therefore surprising that there should be such a dearth of actual examples of Roman wills in their complete form. A single inscription preserves, or once preserved, the entire text of a Roman will, dated to the year 108 with a later codicil.4 An incomplete though still substantial text, it was found by the Appian Way in two discoveries, of 1820 and 1830, broken into several pieces. As reconstituted, the inscription was published by Mommsen with supplements in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and by others in various secondary publications, especially in collections of texts relevant to Roman law.5 It comprises part of a title in large letters, followed by the text of the will in 133 incomplete lines. A new fragment, published in 1976, by a stroke of good fortune makes a clean join with the right-hand edge of the uppermost of the existing pieces, adding a further part of the title and up to 12 additional letters to the first 19 lines of the text – not much in itself, but enough to require substantial changes to Mommsen’s interpretations.6 A new version of the text, published with illustrations in the catalogue of sculptures and inscriptions of the German Institute at Rome, is the essential foundation of further study.7 A glance at Fig. 1 will show that, in Sir Ronald Syme’s subtly ironic words, it is indeed a ‘slender portion’.8 Many problems remain. Even with the new fragment, neither the beginning nor the end of any line of the inscription survives, with the result that the line length of the original text, and so the plausibility of any reconstruction, are uncertain. For the same reason there is no way of knowing whether words were kept intact at the end of lines or carried over from one line to the next (normal practice in the inscribing of continuous text might suggest the latter). Individual words are marked off by an interpunct with hardly any space between them, while to judge from what survives, new topics (we might say paragraphs) were introduced by an extra space without interpunct, and did not use a fresh line or indentation or any other mark of division.9 There is

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A Last Will and Testament little abbreviation except for numbers and some technical terms in the closing formulae. Allowing for these limitations, there are two, possibly three ways in which the original length of line may be estimated. The first argues from the presentation of the title of the inscription, the second from the restorations necessary to provide the legal wording of certain provisions of the text. The third argument, which can hardly play more than a supporting role, is based on the way in which the stone was at some later time cut for re-use. As to the first argument, the words ‘[Test]AMENTUM FE[cit]’ appear at the head of the stone in large letters (2.6 cm. high), followed by the smaller letters of the text itself (1.2 cm. high); the number of letters per line is in the proportion of about 1:2.5 between the larger and the smaller letters. A regular form of words would add the name of the testator to the heading. However, in the body of the text (lines 114–5) the testament is ordered to be inscribed on the side (‘ad latus’) of the funeral monument of the testator, whose full name and titles would have stood on the front, in a lost commemorative text. It is therefore possible, I would think likely, that the words ‘TESTAMENTUM FECIT’ stood by themselves at the head of the text, without the name of the testator to precede them; it is clear from the remains of an upper border that nothing stood above them. We have no idea how much space at each end of the heading the stonecutter allowed for the centering of the 16 large letters that comprised it. If we allowed a minimum of 5 spaces at each end for the centering, added these to the letters of the heading to give a total of 26 letter spaces in the line and multiplied this by the ratio of 2.5 of large letters to small, we would reach a line length of about 65 letters for the text proper. The second argument shows that this is insufficient. In those passages of the inscription where the length of two or more successive lines can be calculated from the presence of repeating formulae, it appears that up to 85–90 letters are required to encompass all the necessary words.10 The third argument, necessarily speculative, would begin from the observation that the left-hand edge of the surviving portion was apparently dressed for re-use in a single vertical cut, and that the other breaks in the stone were later. We might then guess that the great slab was cut in three vertical bands of more or less equal width, of which we have the middle band.11 A reconstruction of the top section of the stone on this basis is shown as Fig. 2. It too suggests a line length of something like the 90 letters required for the reconstruction of the text in those sections where the length of line is defined by the legal formulae in use. In the arrangement offered below it is assumed that the words ‘TESTAMENTUM FECIT’ stood alone at the head of the text, and were used to centre a line length of about 90 letters.

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Chapter 6 The text can be summarised in ten sections: (i) appointment of heirs (lines 2–13); (ii) cash bequests to named friends (14–29); (iii) consecration by fideicommissum of commemorative monuments under the testator’s name and the injunction to the heirs to carry out these and other instructions (30–35); ( iv) bequests to a nurse, Dasumia Tyche,12 and possibly another person (35–39); (v) manumissions of slaves together with monetary bequests to those manumitted, payment of the 5% tax on manumissions, and annual clothing allowances to freedmen (40–66); (vi) bequests to two female persons, one of them probably the testator’s wife, the other his maternal aunt (66–87); (vii) commemoration of the memory of the testator (87–110), arrangements for the funeral (110–114) and the inscribing of the will (114–115); (viii) payment of the 5% inheritance tax (116–119);

Fig. 2. The Testament, heading and lines 1–42, to show the possible format of the inscription. The new fragment is at the top right-hand corner.

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A Last Will and Testament (ix) authorisation of any future codicils (120–121) and other testamentary formalities (121–124), and (x) a codicil with additional bequests (125–133). A fuller description of these ten sections will help to introduce the legal issues that were involved, and in some cases prompt supplements to the language used to express particular transactions, where it is not extant on the stone. (i) The first section of the will (lines 2–13), deals with the appointment of heirs, who are named in order (lines 2–6) with their respective substitutes, in case those first named are unable or unwilling to act (lines 7–13). The listing of heirs and substitute heirs in a corresponding order means that references back from the substitutes to the heirs of first choice can provide some missing names in lines 2–5 of the text. The correct appointment of heirs was the essential foundation of a valid will, and without it nothing could be done; it is a distinct procedure from the naming of individual legatees, and must precede it.13 Here, despite its slender proportions, the fragment of the inscription published in 1976 makes a great difference to the interpretation of the testament. Not only does it provide an alternative opening sentiment to the two-line fantasia proposed by Mommsen, but it establishes an important substantive point that Mommsen could not have anticipated; the testator was in the first two lines of the text naming two heirs in succession, and not the same heir in both.14 Now the (male) heir in lines 3–4 of the inscription, the second to be named, is required as a condition of his appointment to accept the testator’s name for himself and his descendants; this is the process commonly but rather loosely styled ‘testamentary adoption’, the most famous historical example of which is Julius Caesar’s ‘adoption’ of his nephew C. Octavius by his will published in 44 BCE.15 The use of this procedure implies that the testator lacked a surviving natural son, and this in turn yields the reasonable inference that the heir named in the previous line as providing ‘affection’ (and some other appropriate sentiment) to the testator and described in line 7 as ‘pientissima’, is his daughter. The first two heirs are thus the testator’s daughter and a very close friend (‘amicus rarissimus’) whom the testator wishes to adopt into his name and fortune. After the daughter and the friend, the testator names two heirs jointly in third position. Both of them, as can be seen from line 5 and from the appointment of their substitutes in lines 10–11, are women. The first, whose name is given in line 10 as Domitia [–––], is to inherit ‘ex uncia’, that is one-twelfth of the estate. Her co-heir, Dasumia [–––], is referred to in full in line 11 as Dasumia Polla. Inheritances being regularly divided into proportions of one-twelfth and its multiples, Dasumia Polla is no doubt also heir to that portion.16 The heirs named in lines 2–4, the testator’s

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Chapter 6 daughter and his envisaged son by ‘testamentary adoption’ will then share ten-twelfths of the estate. A straightforward inference would make them respectively heirs to one-half (‘ex semisse’) and one-third (‘ex triente’) of the estate, and these are the supplements given in the text and translation printed below.17 After the naming of the heirs of first choice, lines 5–6 state the requirement that they declare (‘cernunto’) their acceptance of their inheritance within a specified period of time, in this case probably 100 days, after they can have learned of their nomination (‘quibus scient poterintque’). This is the procedure known as cretio, and is followed by the statement that if they do not so declare, they are disinherited.18 The relevant language is given by standard legal sources and supplies a restoration of the words surrounding what remains of line 6 of the inscription. The testator now names his substitute heirs. To take them in order: (a) if the first-named heir, the ‘filia pientissima’ who has shown him affection in line 2, does not or for some reason cannot accept, she is to be replaced by two persons jointly, the ‘daughter of Servianus’ in the portion of one-eighth (‘ex sescuncia’),19 and someone called D[––– –––], presumably in the same portion; the text is restored accordingly, with the name of Servianus’ daughter, Iulia Paulina.20 (b) If the ‘amicus rarissimus’ of line 3 does not accept, he is replaced, again jointly (because of the plural ‘heredes sunto’ in line 10) by Iu[––– ––––] and a second person whose name is not extant. If either (c) Domitia [–––] or (d) Dasumia Polla does not accept, she is to be replaced by a single individual (as is shown by the singular ‘heres esto’ used in each case);21 the names of these substitutes too are unknown. The substitute heirs are given 60 days to declare their acceptance. The last line of this first section (13) deals with the unlikely situation in which none of the named heirs accepts his or her nomination. However unlikely, this situation had to be allowed for, in case the estate turned out to possess more debts than assets and none of the heirs would accept its obligations; as was pointed out very clearly by the jurist Pomponius, ‘An heir succeeds to the whole legal position of the deceased and not only to the ownership of individual things, because the assets which take the form of debts also pass to the heir’ (Dig. 29.2.37).22 Our testator names as heir of last resort his slave Syneros, in a standard legal device that would force the slave to accept the inheritance and the opprobrium attaching to it, while limiting the financial obligations that would accrue. A former slave placed in this position could be sued only once for payment of the debts transmitted with the estate (and no-one would seriously expect him to pay),

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A Last Will and Testament whereas a free person who imprudently accepted such an inheritance could find his assets repeatedly challenged, even if they did not accrue from the inheritance. It was a condition of the procedure that the slave become free at the same time that he is made to accept the inheritance, and that is what happens here.23 (ii) The second section of the will names a series of recipients of legacies in quantities of gold and silver. Here again, the 1976 fragment makes important contributions. The first and possibly best known is a negative one. The first two legatees of line 13 , ‘[––––] Secundo, Cornelio [–––]’ in the text as it then stood, had to universal satisfaction been restored as Pliny the Younger (Plinius Secundus) and the historian Cornelius Tacitus, for the particular reason that Pliny happens to say in a letter that he and Tacitus were often named together in wills (Ep. 7.20.6). Indeed, the only part of the will included by Dessau in his Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae was a little extract including this reference and restoration.24 We see from the new fragment, however, that the Cornelius in question was not the historian, but Cornelius Pusio, suffect consul in the year 90, probably the son of a consul of the time of Vespasian.25 The lists of individual legatees will be discussed later (with an estimate of how many names might be missing). For the moment it is sufficient to observe that they include a number of known senatorial and equestrian figures of the testator’s period. Minicius Iustus was a veteran supporter of Vespasian in the civil wars of 69–70, Fabius Rusticus a historian of the Neronian age; as in the case of Cornelius Pusio, it was probably the members of a later generation who are mentioned in the Testament. Iunius Avitus was a young equestrian and later senatorial protégé of Pliny, who wrote with intimate sadness of his death in a letter (Ep. 8.23) published very soon after the date of his mention in this will. The names of three women occur, Iulia Paulina being supplied by the new fragment as the first name of one of the legatees receiving ten pounds of gold, Fabia Balbin[i], the wife of Balbinus, in the same category, and Fabulla the wife of Asiaticus among those who received (?)five pounds of gold.26 The legal expressions requiring the heirs to make the payments are restored to lines 14–15 from standard sources. In the later part of the list we find ourselves looking at names suggesting a different social milieu, some of them of Greek origin, indicative of freedman and equestrian (surely not senatorial) status; [––?Sall]ustius Acanthus, the Agrii ( brothers) Phoebus and Servatus, Valerius Hermes, the Otacilius Or[––] who is also mentioned in the codicil at the end of the will, the Iulii Threptus and [––––]. There is a ‘jurisconsult’, ?Pro]culus, and

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Chapter 6 finally an ‘adfinis’, or relative by marriage, whose name terminates (in the dative case) with ‘[––]oro’ ( line 29); he is among the group of legatees to receive, apparently as a class, the sum of 125,000 denarii.27 (iii) The third section, a short one of 5/6 lines, lays it as a trust upon the heirs to commemorate the testator in public dedications to bear his name. Nothing survives on the stone to indicate the nature of the constructions, only that one of them is to be at Corduba (line 31). The words ‘Cordubae it[em’ relating to the second of the two dedications may show that the first was to be in some other city, which might also have been in Spain. We will see later that provincial, and especially Spanish connections pervade the document. (iv) The document now moves on to specific legacies, beginning with a bequest to the testator’s ‘nutrix’, Dasumia Tyche, evidently a freedwoman connected with the family – ‘Tyche’ being the Latin transcription of a Greek name, and Dasumia the gentilicium of the fourth of the heirs, Dasumia Polla, named in the first lines of the document.28 Her bequest, in the disconcerting form of two named fishermen Venugus and Arrus (possibly with others preceding them), finds a striking parallel in the Digest, where a maritime estate is bequeathed to a ‘nutritor’ with the ‘piscatores’ attached to it. However coincidental, the parallel is informative: A man legated to the man who had reared him (his ‘nutritor’) his maritime estates with the slaves who were there and all the instrumentum and the fruits which were there and the rents outstanding from tenants. It was asked whether slave fishermen, who were accustomed to attend on the testator and follow him everywhere, who were reckoned in with the urban accounts and had not been found on the legated estates at the time of the testator’s death, appeared to have been legated. He replied that, according to the facts as stated, they had not been legated (Dig. 33.7.27 pr. [Scaevola]).29

In order to avoid such legal uncertainties, it was important that the identity and whereabouts of mobile instrumentum such as slaves be clearly defined, and perhaps this, rather than anything more personal, is why Venugus and Arrus are named in the bequest to Dasumia Tyche. It looks as if the ‘nutrix’ was bequeathed a seaside property with fishermen belonging to it, rather than that the fishermen were the main component of the legacy; they are mentioned in order to be sure that they were included, wherever they might happen to be at the time when the will came into force. Dasumia Tyche is also allowed to choose objects to a value of 100 denarii and some item of silverware, but whether it is she or another legatee who is bequeathed (?paper and) a calculating table in the following line is unclear. (v) The next long section (lines 40–66) covers manumissions, cash legacies to freedmen and freedwomen, payment by the heirs of the 5% tax

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A Last Will and Testament on manumissions, and annual clothing allowances to freedmen. The manumissions are made in a regular form to the slave receiving freedom, in some cases with his ‘contubernalis’, or established concubine, also of slave status, with whom he may be exhorted (as at line 45) to live in faithful matrimony. The form of words required to supplement the text can be supplied from standard sources, and the cash bequests are uniformly of 1,000 denarii. The will strictly, and for the historian most usefully, follows the rule recorded by Gaius that in manumission documents the name and also the household occupation of the manumitted slave must be recorded (Dig. 40.4.24). This requirement in itself makes the testament an important document of social history. (vi) The following section ( lines 66–87) comprises specific legacies to an unknown woman who, because of the term ‘[pienti]ssimae’ used of her (72), is likely to be either the testator’s daughter appointed as heir in the first degree or, perhaps more likely, his wife; and to his maternal aunt, Septuma wife of Secundinus.30 Among other interesting legacies of persons and property, the wife ( if it is she) is enjoined to display in public some objects owned by the testator, perhaps, as Mommsen suggested, his statues of gods and emperors, and to manumit at least three slaves owned by herself. This is most plausibly seen as a pre-testamentary agreement made between husband and wife. An interesting feature of the bequests to the aunt is the request that she keep two slaves bequeathed to her always in the same employment as at present (and surely never free them), so much had they offended the testator. (vii) Lines 88–115 provide instructions for the burial of the testator and the preparation of his tomb, including (at 114–5) the inscribing of the testament on the side of the funerary monument – the very document that we are reading. The arrangements are the usual ones, and can be paralleled from other testamentary documents. The duties of preparing and maintaining the tomb fall to the freedmen of the testator and their descendants, who are given rights of access for this purpose, the tomb and the enclosure in which it stands are secured in perpetuity by the prohibition of sale or any other way of disposing of the plot, and arrangements are made to appoint curators to manage the monument equitably in future. An unusual feature, to be discussed later, is the exclusion from those granted access to the tomb, of one Hymnus, clearly a freedman, because of some undutiful act or acts that have led the testator to suffer at his hands and fear him (lines 92, 109–110). The conduct of the funeral itself is entrusted to the testator’s friend Ursus Servianus and an unnamed freedman of the testator, and to the freedmen of Servianus. As we saw, it was Servianus’ daughter Iulia Paulina who is named in the opening lines of

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Chapter 6 the will as substitute heir for the testator’s own daughter, and is the first recipient of a legacy of ten pounds of gold (lines 8, 15). (viii) and (ix) The final sections of the main text of the will comprise first (viii) the payment of the standard 5% testamentary tax (188–21) and (ix) concluding formalities, including the confirmation of any later instructions left in a legally valid form (122–6). These passages are important because they give the date of the will (they would also have given the place in which it was made) and, restored with the appropriate legal formulae, help to determine the length of line of the document as a whole. (x) Lastly, we read the fragments of a codicil with nominal bequests to the emperor Trajan, the senator Sosius Senecio and others – presumably, like those mentioned at the outset of the testament, in differentiated groups; the surviving text speaks only of five pounds of silver and cash legacies in silver, but it is unlikely that the emperor and Sosius Senecio received anything less than gold. The recipients of cash legacies include Otacilius Or[–––], whose name, in exactly the same state of preservation, also occurs among the list of legatees in the opening lines of the document ( line 26), suggesting that he was a close associate, perhaps a freedman, of the testator; and a ‘medicus’ whose name is not extant. It is natural to think of this as the physician who attended the testator at the end of his life, when the codicil was appended to the will made in 108. The exact date of the codicil cannot be determined, since the emperor Trajan already held the titles listed and Sosius Senecio had already been twice consul when the main will was completed. It is true that the name of Iunius Avitus occurs as a legatee not far from the time of his early death (see above), but this is not quite conclusive; the testator may simply have omitted to delete his name among the many (perhaps as many as eighty) that he had listed. Notes 1 M. Amelotti, Il Testamento Romano attraversi la prassi documentale (1966); J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome (1967), Chap. IV, ‘Family and succession’; E. Champlin, Final Judgments: Duty and emotion in Roman wills, 200 BC–AD 250 (1991), and on the juridical aspects, David Johnston, Roman Law in Context (1999), pp. 44–52. A. Berger’s invaluable Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (1953, repr. 1968) is enough to handle the technical issues that arise in the following discussion. 2 Amelotti, pp. 10–71, describes 40 western and 77 eastern testamentary documents and in an Appendix (pp. 253–85) gives the Latin or Greek texts of 20; none is of a complete will. See also the relevant sections of Dessau’s ILS, vol. II.2, nos. 7818–8560. 3 Cf. Cena Trimalchionis 71 and the ‘Testamentum Porcelli’ in Bücheler’s Petronii Saturae (8th ed., 1963), pp. 346–7; Champlin, ‘The Testament of the Piglet’, Phoenix 41 (1987), pp. 174–83. Translation by Jane Gardner and Thomas Wiedemann,

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A Last Will and Testament The Roman Household: A sourcebook (1991), No. 164 (pp. 142–3). The ‘Testament of Trimalchio’ is no. 13 in Amelotti’s list of western texts ( p. 16); the ‘Testament of the Piglet’ is not included. 4 Champlin, Final Judgments, pp. 36–7, calls it ‘the only will known to have been inscribed in toto’. 5 CIL 6.10229 (Mommsen); cf. Bruns, FIRA 7, No. 117 (pp. 304–8); translation (including the new fragment) by Gardner and Wiedemann, No. 155 (pp. 133–9). The Testament is Amelotti’s no. 16 western (pp. 17–19), but he does not offer a text. 6 AEp 1976, 77 (from the catacombs of Callistus), with the fine discussion of Werner Eck, ‘Zum neuen Fragment des sogennanten Testamentum Dasumii’, ZPE 30 (1978), pp. 277–95. 7 R. Neudecker and Maria Grazia Granino Cecere, Antike Skulpturen und Inschriften im Institutum Archaeologicum Germanicum ( Wiesbaden, 1997), No. 87 ( pp. 152–9 with Figs. 169–72). 8 R. Syme, ‘The Testamentum Dasumii: some novelties’, Chiron 15 (1985), pp. 41–63 [= Roman Papers V, pp. 521–45] at 48. 9 Unlike, for example, the so called ‘Laudatio Turiae’, in which new paragraph sections stand out from the text on a new line. For examples of spacing to indicate a new topic or section, see lines 5 before ‘Dasumia’, 11 before ‘si Dasumia Polla’, 18 before ‘Aem[ilio’ (an important division of the text, see below) and 35 before the bequests to Dasumia Tyche. 10 W. Eck (above, n. 6) p. 288 also supposes a longer line than the 80 letters supposed by Mommsen. 11 It is suggested (by M. G. Granino Cecere) in Neudecker and Granino Cecere (above, n. 7), p. 152, that what we have is the ‘parte centrale destra della lastra’ to allow for the name of the testator to precede it. But formal usage would require the full version of a name (nomen + cognomen), which would still demand more space to the left than is available. 12 In Mommsen’s text and subsequent versions the name is given as ‘Dasumia Syche’. This would be a phonetic Latin version of the Greek name ‘Psyche’, but the inscription clearly has ‘Tyche’, as printed by Neudecker and Granino Cecere (p. 154). 13 Cf. Gaius, Inst. 2.116; ‘before everything else it must be ascertained whether there has been an institution of an heir made in solemn form’ etc., cf. 229; ‘A legacy preceding the institution of an heir is invalid, for the simple reason that wills derive their whole efficacy from the institution of an heir’. 14 On this and all that follows on the selection of heirs, see the article of W. Eck. 15 Not so much a strictly legal device, as a condition attaching to the acceptance of appointment as heir; Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 43. 16 Eck, p. 280. The Roman pound has twelve ounces, hence an ‘uncia’ is onetwelfth. 17 Eck, p. 285, describes these restorations as ‘exempli gratia’, but I would regard them as secure conjectures. 18 Gaius, Inst. 2.165, cf. 170, where he gives 100 days as a reasonable limit (‘tolerabile tempus’). The will of Antonius Silvanus (Cavenaile, CPL 221, lines 10, 16), has 100 days as the limit for the first-named heir and 60 days for the heir named ‘secundo gradu’, as seems also to be the case in the text before us (lines 6, 12).

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Chapter 6 19

‘Sescuncia’ is ‘sesqui-uncia’, 1½ unciae of a unit of twelve (above, n. 16), i.e. one-eighth. 20 A daughter of Iulius Servianus is mentioned by Pliny (Ep. 6.26 to Servianus) as about to be married to Pedanius Fuscus. If she is the same as the first legatee to be listed (and for other reasons) her name was Iulia Paulina; her mother, the wife of Servianus, was Domitia Paulina the sister of Hadrian; see Appendix (i) to the text and translation. 21 It is intact in line 11 and as a secure restoration in line 12; ‘[heres e]sto’. 22 See briefly Johnston, p. 44. It was an honour to be named among the heirs, even if no benefit or duties accrued. According to Suetonius (Aug. 101.2), Augustus named in third position ‘propinquos, amicosque compluris’. With the ‘primi heredes’ being Tiberius and Livia, it is clear that no duties were likely to come their way, but it was a great honour to be named. 23 Cf. Gaius, Inst. 2. 153–5, 185–90. 24 Mommsen printed the conjectured names of Pliny and Tacitus; ‘?Plinio] Secundo, Cornelio [ Tacito?’, cf. ILS 8379a – including also the reference to ‘Dasumia Syche’ (in fact, ‘Tyche’; see above) as evidence of the testator’s own name, on which see Eck, p. 281f. and the discussion in §3 below. 25 Sc. L. Cornelius Pusio Annius Messalla, cos. suff. 90; to be distinguished from (no doubt the son of ) L. Cornelius Pusio, cos. suff. early in the reign of Vespasian; see Appendix (i). 26 On these figures see §3 below; for ‘Fabia Balbin[i]’ see the note on line 19 of the text. 27 Restoring ‘co[niunctim]’ at line 29. 28 See above, n. 12, for the reading ‘Dasumia Tyche’ (not ‘Syche’). 29 The parallel case is noted by Mommsen, ad loc. ( p. 1350). 30 For the reading ‘Septuma Secundin[i]’, see the note on line 19 of the text.

II. Text and translation The following text and translation of the Testament are based on the publication by Mommsen in CIL, supplemented by the revised readings and photographs from the German Archaeological Institute at Rome (n. 7 above), by the study of Werner Eck on the new fragment (n. 6 above) and, for the legal formulae in the closing lines, the article of Edward Champlin (n. on line 122 below). In certain passages, notably the list of legatees at lines 15-29, the names and occupations of manumitted slaves at lines 40–59 and 68ff., and the bequests to the freedwoman Dasumia Tyche at lines 35–9, and those to the testator’s wife(?) and maternal aunt at lines 75–87, only the restoration of some incomplete or missing words and phrases can be attempted. For much of the text, however, it is possible from parallel sources to supply some of the formulae and procedures in use, and with the help of these to reconstruct the intentions, though rarely of course the actual words, of the testator. The restorations in these lines aim only to express these intentions, in cases where they can be reasonably

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A Last Will and Testament identified. Where Mommsen’s interpretations of the testator’s wishes are accepted, there seems little point in deviating far from his choice of words, except perhaps to make a greater effort to fill out the text to an approximation of the original length of line; when a different understanding from his has been adopted, this is indicated in the notes to the text. In certain passages, notably the appointment of heirs in the opening lines of the text, the list of legatees in gold and silver that follows, and the manumissions in lines 40ff., we can be sure that what stood on the stone was a name or names (in the case of manumissions a name plus occupation), even when the name itself is lost. The missing elements are indicated by dashes (––– –––), on the assumption that heirs and legatees were always identified by nomen plus cognomen or some other secondary identifier (such as ‘wife of ’), and manumitted slaves by name plus occupation (see above and on line 40 of the text). There may be some advantage in knowing how many names originally stood on the stone, even if we cannot know what they were. The letters supplied by the new fragment of the inscription in lines 1–19 are underlined. The translation is indebted to that of Gardner and Wiedemann (n. 3 above) and, in the opening lines where the new fragment comes into play, to that of Werner Eck; also to a version prepared by Joshua Tate for a graduate seminar held in the Department of Classics at Yale (below, §3 n. 43). It departs from the first of these in representing more closely the physical format of the original text (Eck adheres to this in his presentation of the opening lines of the text). The format is more strictly replicated in those sections of the text in which the lines must remain incomplete, with large gaps at their beginnings and ends; it is a difficulty with Gardner and Wiedemann’s translation that one gets no sense of how the text was laid out, and cannot easily see the extent of the lacunae in it (one would never guess, for instance, that, while the list of legatees in the opening lines of the text preserves the whole or part of the names of 36 persons, it originally contained more than 80). In these sections, square brackets are used as in the original, to distinguish what can be seen on the stone from what is not extant (individual damaged letters that can be restored routinely are not marked). In more continuous passages, where reconstruction of the testator’s intentions is possible beyond what survives on the stone, the translation is presented more freely. In these sections uncertainties are indicated only by regular parentheses; the reader will need to consult the facing Latin text to see how deep the uncertainties are. In these passages, since the translated word order will differ from the original, indications of line numbers are only approximate. Text and translation are for convenience divided into the ten sections summarized above.

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Chapter 6 [Test]amentum fe[cit (i) Appointment of heirs ––– –––, filia mea, quae af ]fectum praestitit et mei m[emor(-iam) (?) . . . ex semisse mihi heres esto.––– ––– , – f(ilius), ] amicus rarissimus, si intra t[riginta(?) proximos dies quibus sciet poteritque pollicitus erit se nome]n meum laturum posterosque [suos laturos ex triente heres esto 5 (Tunc) Domitia ––– mearum fortu]narum ex uncia, Dasumia [Polla ex uncia mihi heredes sunto iique cernunto in diebus C pro]ximis quibus scient poterint[que. Si non creverint, exheredes sunto. Si ––– –––, filia mea p]ientissima mihi heres non [erit vel si quo casu humanitus impedita fuerit, tunc Iulia Paulina (?)f]ilia Serviani ex sescuncia, D[–– –––– ex sescuncia mihi heredes sunto. Si –––– –––– amic]us meus heres non erit, Iu[–– –––– ex (. . .) 10 et –––– –––– ex (. . .) m]ihi heredes sunto. Si Domitia [–––– mihi heres non erit, –––– –––– ex (. . .) m]ihi heres esto. Si Dasumia Polla [mihi heres non erit, –––– –––– ex (. . .) mihi heres e]sto iique cernunto in diebus LX p[roximis quibus scient poterintque. Quod ni quisquam eorum] creverit, tunc Syneros servos [meus heres liberque esto. (ii) Legacies in gold and silver Quisquis mihi heres erit amicis] infra scriptis quod cuique hoc [testamento dari legari iussero 15 dare damnasque esto singul]is auri p(ondo) libras: Iuliae Paulinae [ –––– ––– ]no, Volusio Iuliano, Fabiae Balbin[i ––– ] Secundo, Cornelio Pusioni, Atili[o ––– A ]uspicato singulis auri p. li(bras) X: Aem[ilio ––– Mi ]nicio Iusto, Fabullae Asiatici, Te[tti(en)o ––– 20 I ]unio Avito, Pontio Laeliano [ P ]etronio Crescenti, Ianuari[o ––– ––– ]o Nepoti, Tullio Varroni, Sat[–– ––– ––– –– ]nniano, Appuleio Nepoti, Re[–– –– (singulis auri p. li(bras) V): (et amicis infra scriptis) ?Sall ]ustio Acantho, Fabio Rustico [ 25 ––– –– ]co, Agris Phoebo et Servato[ Val ]erio Hermeti, Otacilio Or[––– ?Pro ]culo iurisconsulto, Ateio M[––– –––– –– ]no, Cornelio Seni, Iulis Threp[to et ––– –––– –– ]oro adfini meo den. m. CXXV co[niunctim?

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A Last Will and Testament Last Will and Testament (i) Appointment of heirs Let ––– –––, my daughter, who showed affection and was (always mindful?) of me, be my heir to one half; Let ––– ––– (?son of ––), the rarest of friends, if within thirty days in which he is informed of it and is able to, he shall promise that he will bear my name and that his descendants will bear it, be heir to one-third; 5 Let Domitia ––– be heir of my fortune to one-twelfth, Dasumia Polla heir to one-twelfth; Let the foregoing declare within one hundred days of being informed and able to declare. If any of them do not declare, let them be disinherited. If ––– –––, my most loyal daughter, shall not be my heir (or shall be prevented by any human circumstance from being so), then let Iulia Paulina daughter of Servianus and D–– ––– be my heirs, (each) to one-eighth. 10 If ––– –––, my friend, shall not be my heir, let Iu–– –––, and ––– ––– be my heirs to ( portion). If Domitia ––– shall not be my heir, let ––– ––– be my heir to ( portion). If Dasumia Polla shall not be my heir, let ––– ––– be my heir to ( portion). Let the foregoing declare within sixty days in which they are informed and are able to. If none of the above shall declare, let Syneros my slave be my heir and receive his freedom. 2

(ii) Legacies in gold and silver Whoever shall be my heir shall be obligated to give to the friends written below what I order by this testament to be given 15 to each: pounds weighed in gold as follows; to Iulia Paulina [ –––– ––– ]nus, Volusius Iulianus, Fabia wife of Balbinus [ ––– ] Secundus, Cornelius Pusio, Atili[us ––– –––– A ]uspicatus, to each, 10 pounds of gold: to Aem[ilius ––– Mi ]nicius Iustus, Fabulla wife of Asiaticus, Te[tti(en)us ––– 20 I ]unius Avitus, Pontius Laelianus [ P ]etronius Crescens, Ianuari[us ––– ––– ]us Nepos, Tullius Varro, Sat[–– ––– ––– –– ]nnianus, Appuleius Nepos, Re[––– ––– , to each, ?5 pounds of gold: and to the friends written below; ?Sall ]ustius Acanthus, Fabius Rusticus [ 25 ––– –– ]cus, the Agrii Phoebus and Servatus, [ Va ]erius Hermes, Otacilius Or[––– ?Pro ]culus the jurisconsult, Ateius M[––– –––– –– ]nus, Corneliis Senex, the Iulii Threp[tus and ––– and to –––– ––]orus my relative by marriage, jointly, 1,125 denarii [

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Chapter 6 (iii) Fideicommissa and (iv) bequests to Dasumia Tyche (and Anon.?) Quisquis mihi heres 30 heredesve erit eruntve rogo fideiq]ue eius eorumque com(m)itto u[t . . . sub inscriptione nominis m ]ei consecrent; Cordubae it[em . . . sub inscrip ]tione nominis mei consec[rent Volo et iubeo ut ] opera supra scripta fiant [eius eorumque arbitratu qui mihi heredes erunt fidei ]que eius eorumque commit[to ut omnia 35 ita ut scriptum ] est. Dasumiae Tyche nutric[i do lego ]Venugum Arrum piscator[es et (. . .) quae ] elegerit praeterquam den. C [ argenti es ]cari et potori ex meo quod e[legerit ?chartam si ]ve philuram calculatoriam [ (v) Manumissions & allowances ––– ––– e ]t Sabinum notarium et My[–– ––– rat ]ionibus redditis cum cont[ubernalibus suis liberos esse volo. ––– ]m cocum et Grammicum c[ellarium(??) ––– ––– ] et Diadumenum notarium [ (et) –– ]onem sumptuarium ration[ibus redditis cum contubernali sua, 45 ita ut eam in m]atrimonio habeat fidele. Iu[beo in a]rculis pusillis componi. Tu[ C ]olono lib(erto) den. m(ille), Dasumiae Sy[ – lib(ertae) (den). m.? ––– li]b. m.; Heliopaedi lib. den. m.; Ca[–– lib. (m.) ––– lib. et ––– lib. ] singulis m.; Eurotae lib. (den.) [m.? 50 volo dar ]i. Eros vestiarius ratione u[t oportet reddita ––– paeda ]gogus ratione reddita, Pho[ebus –––, rationibus redditis liberi sunto. Si que ]m ex his alio scripto liberum [esse vetuero, is liber ne esto. Quodcum ]que vicensimae nomine e[x lege publica debebitur propter eos omn ]es quos liberos esse iussi, eo s[oluto iis qui solverint meos 55 meos reddere volo fideique it ]em eorum committo. Quis[quis mihi heres heredesve erunt dent tri ]buant concedant sine ull[a controversia ho ]c amplius den. mil. V et hoc ampli[us ––– ancillae ] cum primum manumissa [fuerit do legoque a ]rculam, Thallum ornato[rem 40

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A Last Will and Testament (iii)Fideicommissa and (iv) Bequests to Dasumia Tyche (and Anon.?) Whoever will be my heir or heirs, I ask and entrust to their good faith that they consecrate (foundation or building) inscribed with my name; likewise that they consecrate at Corduba ( foundation or building) inscribed with my name. I wish and order that the aforesaid works be carried out on his or their authority and I entrust to his or their good faith that they 35 be completed just as is written. To Dasumia Tyche the nurse I give and bequeath (a waterside estate together with?) Venugus and Arrus the fishermen . . . . . . . . and also articles that she may choose, to the limit of 100(?) denarii. . . . . . . . and also from my silver(?) tableware for eating and drinking such item as she shall choose . . . . (and paper?) or wooden tablets for accounting [. . . . 30

(v) Manumissions and allowances ––– ––– ] and Sabinus the secretary and My[––– ––– ] subject to their rendering accounts, together with their part[ners, I wish to be free; also ––– ] the cook and Grammicus the c[ellar-master(?) ––– ––– ] and Diadumenus the secretary [ and ––– ] the comptroller, subject to his rendering accounts, [with his partner, 45 so that he may have her ] in faithful marriage. I order [ ] to be stored in small chests. [ I give and bequeath to C ]olonus the freedman 1,000 den., to Dasumia Sy[–– the freedwoman, 1000 den., to ––– the freed ]man 1,000 (den.), to Heliopaes the freedman 1,000 den., to Ca[–– the freedman 1,000 den. . . . . .( more names) ] to each, 1,000 den.; to Eurotas the freedman, [1,000 den. . . . . 50 I wish to be ] given. Let Eros the wardrobe-master, subject to his rendering accounts in the proper way, be free. Likewise, let ––– ] the pedagogue, subject to his rendering accounts (and) Phoe[bus the –– be free. If] in any other writing [I forbid any of these to be free, let him not be free. Whatever amount is due under public law in payment of the five per cent tax on account of all of those whom I have ordered to be free, I wish and entrust to the good faith of my heirs to restore this payment to 55 those who shall have paid it. Whoever will be my heir or heirs . . . . let them give, ] bestow and grant without any dispute [ ] and in addition 5,000 den., and in addition [ To ––– the maidservant ] as soon as she is manumitted [I give and bequeath . . . ] small chest, Thallus the beautician [ 40

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Chapter 6 60

65

Heres heredesve supra nomin ]ati dent tribuant concedan[t sine ulla controversia Thau ]masto Anatellonti liberti[s in singulos annos quamdiu quis eorum vivet initio cuiusque an ]ni vestiari nomine singul[is d.(-). (heres heredesque supra nominati) Te ]rpno Achilli Heliopaedi lib[ertis initio cuiusque anni vestiarii nomine singulis in sing ]ulos annos quamdiu quis eo[rum vivet d.(-), ––– et ––– libertis in singulos annos quamdi ]u quis eorum vivet initio c[uiusque anni vestiarii nomine singulis d.(-) danto cura]ntove dare.

(vi) Legacies to wife(?) and maternal aunt Infra scriptis c[ondicionibus do lego ––– –––, uxori meae pientissimae patera ]m auream meam maxima[m . . . . et ——- quae —— es ]t et Diadumenum cubicul[arium et ––– ––– e ]t Stephanum dropacatorem [?et ––– ––– 70 et ––– –– ]orem et Faustum sutorem e[t ––– ––– ?et . . . mearum fa ]mularum quae elegerit cum [liberis? . . . Do lego ?uxori meae pienti ]ssimae hoc amplius Ephaphro[ditum ––– –– ]tum medicum, Philocyrium [––– simulacra? aure ]a et argentea omnia et ima[gines . . . . 75 Rogo autem ?pie ]tatem tuam, ut cures in pub[lico poni ??omnia simulacra deorum et imperatorum?? ] quae ubique habeo, in amp[lis locis exhibenda? Rogo ut ––– d ]ispensatorem rationibus [ut oportet redditis –––– –– ]em et Eutychen cubicul(arium) maio[rem manumittas. Do lego mat ]erterae Septumae Secundin[i . . . . 80 (Menecraten et) Paede ]rotem. Menecraten et Paedero[tem . . . rogo ut in eodem o ]pere illos habeas donec viv[ent (nec umquam manumittas) quia n ]ullo merito meo tam valde [offenderunt? . . . . . . . ini ]qua. Septumae materterae m[eae hoc amplius do lego omnia ea . . . quae ?( . . . .)ib ]us meis habuit fideique eius n[. . . . 85 . . . . committo. Hoc a ]mplius Septumae matertera[e meae do lego ––– cu ]rsorem, Encolpium actorem [ sestertiu ]m sexagies quod beneficio [

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A Last Will and Testament 60

65

Let the heir or heirs ] named above give, bestow and grant [without any dispute to Thau ]mastus, Anatellon the freedmen [each year for as long as any of them shall live, at the beginning ] of each year for clothing, to each, [(–) den. to Te ]rpnus, Achilles, Heliopaes the freedmen [at the beginning of each year for clothing, for ] each year as long as any of them shall live, [to each (–) den., also to ––– and ––– the freedmen, ] as long as any of them shall live, at the beginning of each [year for clothing, let them give(–) den.] or see that the gift is made.

(vi) Legacies to wife(?) and maternal aunt Under the conditions written below I give and bequeath ––– –––, to my ] most loyal wife(?) my largest golden dish [. . . and . . . . which is . . . ., ] and Diadumenus the chamberlain [and . . . . ] and Stephanus the hair-plucker [and . . . . 70 and ––– the ––– ] and Faustus the shoemaker and [. . . . and . . . . of my ] maidservants(?) which she may choose, with [their children?? I further give and bequeath ] to my most loyal wife, Epaphroditus the [––– and ––– ] the doctor, Philocyrius the [––– and all my images ] of gold and silver and my portraits [. . . . 75 I ask of your pi ]ety(?), that you see to the placing in public [?of all the statues of gods and emperors? ]that I possess in any place, to be displayed in spa[cious surroundings?? I also ask that you manumit –––] the steward on due rendering of account [ and ––– the ––– ] and Eutyches the senior chamberlain [. . . . I give and bequeath ] to my maternal aunt, Septuma wife of Severinus [. . . . 80 Menecrates and Paede ] ros. As to Menecrates and Paederos [. . . . I ask that you keep them in the same] employment as long [as they live and never manumit them since through ] no fault of mine they have so grievously [offended] . . . . . . their?) ] unjust actions. To Septuma my maternal aunt ] I give and bequeath . . . . all the . . . . . which she has ] held through my ( . . . .) [and I entrust to her good faith . . . . 85 I further ] (give and bequeath) to Septuma my maternal aunt . . . . ––– ] the runner, Encolpius the driver [. . . . and . . . . to the value of ] six million sesterces which by the favour [of . . .

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Chapter 6 (vii) Obsequies and monument Memoriae meae colendae intr]a biennium quam mo[rtuus ero, quisquis mihi heres heredesve erit eruntve fidei com]mitto, uti praedium, in quo[d per eos qui secundum mandata testamenti huiu]s reliquias meas cond[erent . . . . 90 Postea quam reliquiae] meae inlatae fuerint, cui[cumque sive antea sive hoc testamento sive postea libertatem ded]ero, praeterquam Hymno pess[ime de me merito ob delicta sua, monumentum cum adiacen]tibus silvis instructum ma[ncipio dent, ita ut de nomine eorum non exeat, neve vendant, nec pig]nore dent, cedant, condonen[t. Eius portionem qui ex his decess95 erit reliquis volo adcrescere done]c in rerum natura esset un[us eorum. Si autem omnes liberti mei in rerum natura esse de]sierint, tunc ad libertorum [libertarumque meorum posteros illas portiones volo perti]nere; quod si esse desierit [ullus eorum in rerum natura esse, ad . . . . pertineat. Cum a]utem in tam multas partes [praedium cum locis adiacentibus distributum est, ita ut om]nes universa possidere rel[icta sibi facile non possint, curatores 100 hoc testamento constituo A]chillen, Heliopaeden, Cym[–––. In futurum eis, qui hoc munere funguntur, suffragio omnium cur]atorem substitui curatori [qui decesserit iubeo, et ab eo curatore, qui hoc suffragio succederit,] alimenta omnia computar[i et reditus distribui volo. Sic enim quam facillime effectum iri exist]imo, ut ab uno omnia percip[iant omnes . . . . Fidei her]edum meorum committo, t[uae autem maxime, ?filia 105 pientissima?, ne pati]aris post me quemquam ill[o loco sepeliri praeter eis quos manumisi vel manumittam et in post]erum libertorum tuorum. P[orro monimentum meum colere volo ex omnibus libertis praeci]pue Thaumastum et Anat[ellontem et itum aditum ambitum ad id monimentum habere omn]es quos sive ante testament[um sive hoc testamento manumisi excepto te Hymne qui quamvis] plurimum tibi praestitiss[em . . . (valde noveris vel sim.)

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A Last Will and Testament

90

95

100

105

(vii) Obsequies and monument [For the observance of my memory,] within two years of my death I ask whoever will be my heir or heirs and entrust it to their good faith, to establish and consecrate the plot of land in which, through (my freedmen) and according to the instructions of this testament, they inter my remains. After my remains are interred, to whomsoever, either before this testament or by this testament or subsequently I have given freedom, excepting Hymnus, who has deserved ill of me on account of his misdeeds [. . . .], to these let my heirs give and mancipate my monument together with the adjacent grove, on condition that it never leave their name, nor may they sell, pledge, cede, or dispose of it by gift. The portion of any of them who may die I wish to accrue to the survivors, as long as any of them shall be among the living. If all my freedmen shall have ceased to be among the living, then I wish those portions to accrue to the descendants of my freedmen and freedwomen. And if the last of them has ceased to be among the living, then I wish the portion to accrue to [. . . .]. And since I have divided that property with its associated holdings into so many parts, with the result that all beneficiaries may not easily possess the whole of what is left to them in equal shares, by this testament I appoint as curators Achilles, Heliopaes, Cym[. . . .]. For the future, I wish a curator who has deceased to be replaced as curator by the votes of all those who are entitled to perform this duty, and that this curator, who has succeeded by this vote, shall calculate and distribute all subsistence allowances. By this procedure it may most readily be achieved, in my estimation, that all may through one person receive the benefits due to all. I entrust to the good faith of my heirs, and to yours in particular, my most loyal daughter, that you not permit anyone after me to be buried in that place, except for those whom I have manumitted or will manumit, and your freedmen in the future. I further wish my monument to be cared for by all my freedmen, especially Thaumastus and Anatellon, and for all whom I have freed before this testament or by this testament to have rights of access, entry and perambulation at that monument, except for you, Hymnus, who, despite the many benefits you had received from

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Chapter 6 110

115

. . . . omnia qu ]ae a te passus sim aut timuer[im . . . Corpus meum ] Ursi Serviani domini mei et [? ––– liberti mei? curae commendo et lectum volo meu ]m ferri per Serviani mei lib[ertos. Obsequia mea iubeo intra dies (. .) postquam defu ]nctus ero consummari, in q[uae omnium sumptuum qui expendantur eundem libertum ratione ]m reddere volo Serviano me[o. Iubeo lapidi incidi testamenti huius exempl]um et poni ad latus monimen[ti mei.

(viii) Payment of inheritance tax and (ix) legal formalities

120

Quisquis autem heres heredesve mihi erit eruntve, e ]um eosque rogo fideique eiu[s eorumque committo, ut quae hoc testamento cuique dedi l ]egavi ea vicensimis omni[bus solutis tribuantur, et aut reddant quod solutum erit vicensimae ] nomine aut vicensimae n[omine . . . . . . . pacis ]cantur aut decidant aut in [arbitrium compromittant. Si quid post hoc pugillaribus codicibus alio ]ve quo genere scriptum sign[atumque exstet, id valere volo quasi hoc testamento scriptum signatu ]mque reliquissem. Liturae [inductiones a me ipso factae sunt. H.t.d.m.a. Familiam pecuni ]am testamenti faciundi [causa emit ––– –––, libripende ––– ––– Antestatus est Hermen ]tidium Campanum. Testa[mentum factum ( place and date) Ael]io Hadriano et Trebatio Pr[isco cos

(x) Codicil 125 Quisquis heres heredesve erun ]t, do lego damnasq[ue esto dare infra scriptis; Imp. Caesari Nervae Traia ]no Aug. Germanic[o Dacico, p(ont.) m(ax.), p(atri) p(atriae) Sos ]io Senecioni singu[lis arge ]nti p. V; Otacilio Or[––– ] medico HS (m.) X. I[tem 130 singuli ]s HS (m.) CCCC, ex qu[orum reditu ] Eurota lib[ert(us) ]tione di[ ]c ex[

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A Last Will and Testament 110

115

me (know full well) what I have suffered and feared from you. My body I commend to the care of my lord Ursus Servianus and (named freedman?), and I wish my pall to be carried by the freedmen of my Servianus. I order that my obsequies be performed within (. .) days of my death, and that the same freedman render an account of all the expenses that are incurred to my Servianus [ . . . ]. I order a copy of this testament to be inscribed on stone and placed on the side of my monument.

(viii) Payment of inheritance tax and (ix) legal formalities Whoever shall be my heir or heirs, I ask him or them and entrust to his or their good faith, that whatever I have given and bequeathed to any person in this will shall be granted after payment of all five percent taxes, and that they shall either reimburse whatever has been paid under the heading of the five percent tax or under the heading of the five percent tax . . . . make an agreement, decide or submit to arbitration the obligation due under the tax. 120 If after this testament anything shall be found written and signed in writing-tablets, notebooks or in any other form, I wish that to be valid, as if I had left it written and signed in this will. All corrections and amendments were made by myself. May this will be free from deceit and fraud. For the purpose of making the will ––– –––– purchased my household and cash, the scale-holder being ––– ––– . He called as witness Hermentidius Campanus. The will was made (place and date) in the consulships of Aelius Hadrianus and Trebatius Priscus. (x) Codicil 125 Whoever shall be my heir or heirs, I give and bequeath and obligate to give to those written below: to Imp. Caesar Nerva Traia ]nus Augustus Germanic[us, Dacicus, pontifex maximus, pater patriae, . . . . . . . . . . . . to Sos ]ius Senecio, to each [ ] of silver, five pounds: to Otacilius Or[ ] physician, 10,000 sesterces. Likewise [ to each, ] 400,000 sesterces, from the revenue of which [ ] Eurotas the freedman. ].......[ ]....[

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Chapter 6 Notes to text and translation 2 ‘quae (or quia) af ]fectum praestitit’, etc. The supplement ‘m[emor / m[emoriam’ is intended exempli gratia, to provide the basis of a suitable sentiment (Eck, p. 285). 5 The names of Domitia (+ cognomen) and Dasumia Polla are read back from lines 10–11. 5, 8 For ‘uncia’ as one-twelfth and ‘sescuncia’ as one-eighth, §1, n. 19. 6, 12 For the periods of cretio of 100 and 60 days (12), see above. For the formulae in 6ff., cf. Gaius, Inst. 2.165, etc.; ‘cernitoque in centum diebus proximis quibus scies poterisque. Quodni ita creveris, exheres esto’, and the Latin will at CPL 221, lines 10–11; ‘ne ita creverit, exheres esto’. The reading at 6 (cf. 12) is ‘scient’ and not scierint’. 6-7 The phrases ‘iique cernunto...si non creverint’, etc., cover all the heirs mentioned in the preceding lines. The ‘amicus rarissimus’ is given a shorter time limit of 30 days (the only plausible restoration in 3) to accept the particular condition that applies to him. 9–12 will have identified the substitute heirs in more detail (e.g. ‘son/daughter/wife of’). Apart from the one-eighth portions of the first two substitute heirs, appointed jointly, the portions of the inheritances of the substitute heirs (‘ex...’) are not known. The situation is complicated, since the refusal to act of any of the heirs of first choice would affect the portions of the estate available to the others. It might be hoped that such a situation would rarely occur. 13 On the appointment of the slave, Cf. Gaius, Inst. 2.18-6; ‘sicut autem liberi homines, ita et servi, tam nostri quam alieni, heredes scribi possunt. Sed noster servus simul et liber et heres esse iuberi debet, id est hoc modo: STICHUS SERVUS MEUS LIBER HERESQUE ESTO, vel HERES LIBERQUE ESTO’. For the form ‘servos’, cf. CPL 221 line 32. 14 For the formula, restored here and elsewhere, cf. 55. 15, cf. 125. A standard formula (Gaius, Inst. 2.201). The procedure of damnatio obligates the heir to convey the legacy to its intended recipient. 15–29 For the names in this section, see Appendix (i). [–––] Secundus (17) could still be Pliny, but it is a frequent cognomen. 18 For the reading and division of this line see below, §3; ‘auri p. li(bras) X’ belongs with the preceding names, not those that follow. 19 ‘Fabulla Asiatici’ was the wife of M. Lollius Paulinus D. Valerius Asiaticus, proconsul of Asia; see Appendix (i). As it happens, she bore in her own right the name Asiatica (IGR 1.967) but is still identified as ‘Asiatici’, from which we may infer the parallel readings ‘Fabia Balbin[i]’ at 16 and ‘Septuma Secundin[i] at 79. 23–24 For the supplements and their placing before [Sall]ustius Acanthus, marking the transition to a new category of legatee, see below §3. Freedman origin in this and other cases is implied by the presence of a Latin nomen with a Greek cognomen. The plural nomina in 25 and 28 (‘Agris’ and ‘Iulis’) indicate the presence of freed slaves from the same familia. 27 The juristconsult Pro]culus is presumably responsible for the drafting of the will and is hereby acknowledged; cf. 129, a ‘medicus’ recognized in the codicil. 29 For ‘––]orus adfinis meus’ see below, §3. 35 The reading ‘Tyche’ (not ‘Syche’) is clear (Granino Cecere, p. 162). ‘Dasumia Sy[––]’ (hitherto ‘Dasumia Sy[che]’) in 47 is thus a different person – though also a freedwoman.

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A Last Will and Testament 36 On these ‘piscatores’ see above. 39 Greek philyra/Latin philura is the inner bark of the linden tree, used for making writing-tablets; cf. Digest 32.1.52 pr. (Ulpian, on the legal definition of ‘books’, which includes them), 33.9.3 10. What is at issue here is probably some sort of accounting manual. It is not clear whether it was Dasumia Tyche or some other person not extant on the stone (perhaps a freed ‘calculator’, or accountant?) who received the legacy. 40ff. Here and in what follows the testament observes the important rule set out at Digest 40.2.4 (Gaius) that in manumissions the occupation as well as the name of the freed slave should be given. To Gaius’ examples is owed the speculative ‘Grammicum c[ellarium’ in 41. For ‘Grammicum’ (not ‘Crammicum’) see Granino Cecere, p. 152. 41, 44–45 Cf. (from the will of Trimalchio), ‘omnes illos in testamento meo manu mitto. Philargyro etiam fundum lego et contubernalem suam’ (Cena Trimalchionis 71.1–2). 49 The presence here of at least two freedmen is inferred from the word ‘singulis’. 51 To be understood here, as in other cases, is the manumitted slave’s occupation. 52 The formulation of this standard provision is Mommsen’s; its converse is expressed at Digest 40.4.28; ‘Stichus, si codicillis eum non vetuero liberum esse, liber esto’. 53–5 Cf. CPL 221 lines 31–3; ‘Cronionem servom meum...liberum volo esse, vicesimamque pro eo ex bonis meis dari volo’; the 5% manumission tax is paid from the estate. 57, cf. 72, 85 The standard phrase ‘hoc amplius’ shows that we are dealing with continuing bequests to the same legatee as in the preceding lines. Here it appears to refer to bequests of 5,000 denarii to the manumitted slaves named above, whose manumission tax is dealt with in 53–55. Existing freedman are in 47–49 made bequests of 1,000 denarii. 61–66 The underlinings show the letters in restored sections of the text that are present in the extant part (clearly somewhat more, such as the full phrase ‘initio c[uiusque anni’ in 62, 63 and 65, can be restored). The repetition of the formulae is useful in indicating the length of line of the inscription. 64 The presence of two named liberti is suggested on the basis of the similar formulations in 61 & 63. 66 The conditions referred to are laid out in 75–78. A new legatee is named at 79. 71 ‘cum [liberis]’, an extremely speculative restoration (so too ‘contubernalibus’ for ‘liberis’). Still more so, but with easier syntax (since ‘quae’ requires a neuter antecedent and otherwise must be considered an error for ‘quas’) is Mommsen’s ‘[paria m]ularum quae elegerit cum [carrucis]’; ‘pairs of mules, at her choice, with carriages’. The anticipation of Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi and the best mule in Tuscany, bequeathed to himself by its cunning hero, is irresistible, but Mommsen can cite Digest 34.2.13: the question arose, whether ‘the overnight travelling coach together with the mules are due to her, since the wife has always had use of them’ (‘carrucha dormitoria cum mulis, cum semper uxor usa sit’) are to be included among ‘all the women’s toilet equipment, jewellery and whatever I have given, donated, acquired or had made for her benefit’ (‘mundum muliebrem omnem, ornamenta et quidquid vivus dedi donavi eius causa comparavi confeci’). The answer was that the carriage and mules are due to her if they were kept for her use. 72 ‘[?pienti]ssima’ (cf. 75 ‘[?pie]tatem tuam’) used in 7 of the testator’s daughter, might also refer to his wife, as I think more likely here. ‘Hoc amplius’ (cf. 57) shows

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Chapter 6 the continuation of bequests to the same legatee. The name of the next legatee, the maternal aunt, ‘Septuma Secundin[i]’ appears for the first time at 79, where she is identified by her own and her husband’s name (see above on 19). 76 This too is extremely speculative, but less presumptive (or presumptuous?) than Mommsen’s ‘in amp[liorem nominis nostri honorem]’. A neuter plural is required by ‘quae’ (76), hence ‘simulacra’. 78 The testator asks the legatee (still his wife) to free a number of slaves (these are the conditions mentioned at 66). The same legal rule is applied in naming them as is described above, on line 40. 84 What seems to be needed is an ablative plural representing the way in which the aunt came into possession of certain items; possibly ‘[donationib]us’, ‘gifts’ or ‘iussionib]us’, ‘orders’? The letter ‘n’ after ‘fideique eius’ is undisputed, so that ‘committo’ must come later. 85 ‘hoc amplius’, cf. 57, 72. 87–115 The restorations in this passage are exempli gratia, its general sense and intentions being clear. 91 See 110 on the ill-deserving Hymnus. 98 In a case recorded at Digest 33.2.34 pr. (Scaevola) the obligation was in such a case to revert to the city of Arles; ‘post cuius novissimi decessum ad rem publicam Arelatensium pertinere volo’. In the present case one might think of an association, for example a priesthood, to which the testator belonged. 106 Mommsen restored this clause to forbid the burial in that place of the testator’s and his daughter’s freedmen, but it seems more likely that they are mentioned in order to be included rather than excluded. It seems clear that the heir addressed in 104–105 is the daughter. The genitive ‘libertorum’ in 107 signifies that those so privileged were among the daughter’s liberti and not necessarily the entire number. 107 For this standard provision, AEp 1945, 136, lines 17–18; cf. ILS 8156, ‘neque iter ambitum introitum ullum in eo habere’. See next note. 110 ‘qu]ae a te passus si aut timuerim’. The testament preserved as CPL 220 deals (at lines 23ff.) with the case of the troublesome Thais, presumably an undutiful freedwoman, who is prohibited from approaching the tomb of the testator and from having any business dealings with the four daughters who are named as heirs; ‘Thais mi[...] quam mihi molesta sit, quam propter [...volo e]t iubeo eam non pervenire corpori meo’, etc. A similar provision must be understood here in relation to Hymnus, ‘pess[ime de me merito...] iniqua’ in 92; cf. ILS 8156, ‘excepto M. Antonio Athenione’. 122 ‘H(oc) t(estamento) d(olus) m(alus) a(bsit)’, a standard phrase, ‘let all deceit and fraud be absent from this will’. For the phrase ‘lituras inductiones superductiones ipse feci’ (‘I myself made the corrections, erasures and amendments’) in 123, see Digest 28.4.11 (Ulpian). For the closing formulae, permitting the reconstruction of the text as above (differing considerably from Mommsen’s), cf. the parallels at CPL 220 lines 29–31, 221.38–47 and 222.12–14, as discussed by E. Champlin, ‘Miscellanea testamentaria’, ZPE 62 (1986), pp. 251–5. 126 Trajan’s titles ‘Germanicus Dacicus, p(ontifex) m(aximus), p(ater) p(atriae)’ are restored as they were in and after 108, the year of the Testament. The level of the bequest to the emperor was no doubt modest, a matter of courtesy rather than substance, but probably higher than that to Sosius Senecio (consul in 99 and 107). An unknown number of names is missing.

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A Last Will and Testament Appendix (i): List of legatees(in the order in which they occur) (1) Iulia Paulina. M.-T. Raepsaet-Charlier, Prosopographie des femmes de l’ordre senatorial (I–II siècles) (1987), No. 452; Eck, pp. 290–1; Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 149. Daughter of L. Iulius Ursus Servianus (PIR 2 I 631) by his marriage (before 98) to Domitia Paulina the sister of Hadrian. She married Cn. Pedanius Fuscus Salinator (cos. 118) between 105 and 107 (Pliny, Ep. 6.26) and is named substitute heir for the testator’s own daughter. Like the family of Servianus, that of Pedanius Fuscus came from Spain (Barcino). The family of Hadrian was from Italica. (2) [––– ––]nus (3) Volusius Iulianus. PIR 1 V 656, only here. (4) Fabia Balbin[i] (or Balbina). Not in PIR 2. Raepsaet-Charlier, No. 349 (p. 305). (5) –––] Secundus. Could be Pliny but the cognomen is frequent (cf. Eck, p. 292). (6) Cornelius Pusio (L. Cornelius Pusio Annius Messalla). PIR 2 C 1425 + P 1091, cf. P 512 (Pegasus); Eck, p. 292. Cos. suff. 90, to be distinguished from (probably son of ) L. Cornelius Pusio, cos. suff. with the jurist Pegasus in the early years of Vespasian (Gaius, Inst. 1.31; 2.254; Justinian, Inst. 2.23.5). From Baetica (Gades). (7) Atili[ius –––]. A common nomen (Eck. p. 292, citing letters of Pliny); PIR 2 A 1302 is M. Atilius Metilius Bradua, cos. ord. 108. (8) [––– A]uspicatus. PIR 2 A 1676 (‘inter heredes Dasumii nobiliores’); only here. (9) Aem[ilius –––] (10) [Mi]nicius Iustus. PIR 2 M 615; Pliny, Ep. 7.11; Tac. Hist. 3.7.1 (his father?). (11) Fabulla Asiatici. PIR 2 A 1214 + F 92; Raepsaet-Charlier Nos. 109 + 351 (pp. 124, 306–7); Eck, pp. 292–5. Wife of M. Lollius Paulinus D. Valerius Asiaticus Saturninus, cos. suff. 94 and proconsul of Asia c. 108/9 (Eck, p. 293). She is commemorated at Gortyn (IGR 1.967, after 125). Her full name was (Fabia?) Fabulla Asiatica. (12) Te[ttius/-ienus/ –––]. Eck, p. 295. ‘Terentius’ is also possible. (13) [I]unius Avitus. PIR 2 I 731. Pliny, Ep. 8.23.2 (108/9?); took the laticlave in Pliny’s home and enjoyed his support in seeking office. Tribunus militum under Iulius Servianus in Upper Germany (97/8) and Pannonia (98–101/2); PIR 2 I 631. Died as aedile designate in 108/9. (14) Pontius Laelianus. PIR 2 P 804, cf. 791, 805–6 for other members of the family. Of equestrian/senatorial origin with consular descendants; father of cos. suff. 144, M. Pontius Laelianus Larcius Sabinus. (15) [P]etronius Crescens. For the reading [P]etronius, Granino Cecere, p. 152. (16) Ianuari[us –––]. Cited only as cognomen in PIR 2 I, pp. 106–7. (17) [–––]us Nepos. (18) Tullius Varro. PIR 2 T 284; his son L. Dasumius Tullius Tuscus, quaestor after 138 and cos. suff. 152, was adopted by a L. Dasumius (PIR 2 D 16), far too late to be the ‘amicus rarissimus’ of the Testament.

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Chapter XX (19) Sat[rius Rufus?]. PIR 2 S 197; praetorian senator in 97, Pliny, Ep. 1.5.11; cf. 9.13.17 and 9.35(?) (of 106/8). (20) [––– –]nnianus. (21) Appuleius Nepos. PIR 2 A 965, only here. (22) Re[–– –––]. (23) [?Sall]ustius Acanthus. Clearly a freedman; [Sall]ustius rather than [Ven]ustius or [Fid]ustius, since the latter are not true gentilicia. (24) Fabius Rusticus. PIR 2 F 62. ?Cf. Pliny, Ep. 9.29. (?Son of ) Fabius Rusticus, friend of Seneca, cited by Tacitus (Ann. 13.20, 14.2, 15.61) as historian of reign of Nero. ?Spanish origin, cf. ILS 1354a. (25) [––––– ––]cus. (26, 27) Agrii Phoebus et Servatus. Freedmen, cf. PIR 2 A 464–7 for the nomen Agrius (none obviously relevant). (28) [Val]erius Hermes. PIR 1 V 60, only here. (29) Otacilius Or[–––], cf. line 130. PIR 2 O 174, only here. (30) [?Pro]culus iurisconsultus. PIR 2 P 1005 (or restore [Si]culus?) The famous jurisconsult of the name, PIR 2 P 999 (Dig. 37.14.17) is too early for this text. (31) Ateius M[–––]. PIR 2 A 1280, only here. (32) [––– ––]nus. (33) Cornelius Senex. PIR 2 C 1451, only here. (34, 35) Iulii Threptus et [––––]. Freedmen (of Servianus? or of the testator?) (36) [––– ––]orus adfinis meus. Syme (‘Testamentum’, p. 56) suggests [Iulius Fl]orus (‘a name that recalls a famous Gallic orator’), but it could be a Greek name in -dorus, in which case the testator’s ‘adfinis’ was a freedman; see below, §3.

Appendix (ii): Freedmen and slaves Freedmen and slaves are listed in three categories; slaves manumitted by testament, liberti manumitted at an earlier time, and slaves not manumitted. Their names and occupations are listed in the form in which they appear on the stone, including cases where the presence of names and/or occupations is implied by the wording of the incomplete text (or by the presence of a connective, as at line 40). Names and occupations are entered in the grammatical form in which they appear on the stone. (a) Manumissions: (1, 2) [––– ––– e]t Sabinum notarium (40) (cum contubernalibus) (3) My[–– –––] (40) (cum contubernali) (4) [–––]m cocum (42) (5) Grammicum c[ellarium?] (42) (6, 7) [––– –––] et Diadumenum notarium (43) (8) [––]onem sumptuarium (44) (cum contubernali) (9) Eros vestiarius (50) (10) [––– paed]agogus (51)

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A Last Will and Testament (11)

(12)

Pho[ebus –––] (51) The names in lines 40–45 (nos. 1–8) and 50–2 (nos. 9–11) are presented in two groups, separated at lines 47–50 by cash legacies to existing freedmen (nos. (b) 2–7 below) [ancilla?] cum primum manumissa [fuerit] (therefore mentioned earlier)

(To be manumitted by the (?)wife): (13) [––– d]ispensatorem (77) (14) [––– –––] (78) (15) Eutychen cubicularium maiorem (78) (b) Existing freedmen and freedwomen; (1) Dasumiae Tyche nutric[i] (35) (2) C]olono lib. (47) (3) Dasumiae Sy[––] (47; unless same as No. 1) (4) [––– li]b. (48) (5) Heliopaedi lib. (also at 61, 100) (6) Ca[–– lib.] (48) (7) Eurotae lib. (49; also at 133) (8, 9) [Thaum]asto (et) Anatellonti (61; also together at 107) (10) [Te]rpno (63; probably mentioned earlier) (11) Achilli (63; also, with Heliopaes, at 100; probably mentioned earlier) Heliopaedi (63; also at 48 & with Achilles at 100) Achilles (100; also at 63) Heliopaeden (100; also at 48 & 63) (12) Cym[––] (100; probably mentioned earlier) (13) Hymno (92, ?109) Eurota (133; also at 49) In addition there are the liberti of Servianus mentioned in connection with the funeral of the testator. (c) Slaves named in legacies: To Dasumia Tyche (see (b) 1 above) (1, 2) Venugum, Arrum piscatores (36) To the freed ‘ancilla’ (see (a) 12 above) (3) Thallum ornatorem (59) To the wife: (4) Diadumenum cubicularium (68) (5, 6) [––– ––– e]t Stephanum dropacatorem (69) (7) [––– –––] (70) (8, 9) Faustum sutorem e[t ––– –––] (70) (10) Epaphro[ditum –––] (72) (11) [––]tum medicum (73) (12) Philocyrium [–––] (73) also: [??fa]mularum . . . . cum [liberis/contubernalibus??] (71) (extremely speculative)

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Chapter 6 To the maternal aunt: (13, 14) Menecraten et Paederoten (80) with instructions not to free (15) [––– cu]rsorem (86) (16) Encolpium actorem (86) Heir of last resort: (17) Syneros (13) The numbers give 15 slaves to be manumitted together with 4 contubernales, 13 liberti already manumitted, and 16 slaves (17 counting Syneros) referred to individually, together with a collective (and speculative) reference to others bequeathed at her choice to the (?)wife, in addition to the liberti referred to by name as recipients of legacies (at least 6 of 35 extant names) and as a group in connection with the funeral (the freedmen of Servianus).

III. The testator and his society Despite its incompleteness and the persistent anonymity of the testator, for the legal and social historian the Testament is a gold-mine of information and possibilities. In its original form it nominated in their different degrees no less than nine heirs and substitutes, not counting the slave who was to be heir if all else failed. It lists the fully or partly preserved names of thirty-six recipients of legacies in gold and silver, less than half the number of those that were originally on the stone, covering a social range from the highest connections in Roman society, to freedmen and professional persons.1 In the incomplete text, the testator further manumitted or caused to be manumitted fifteen slaves (in four cases with their contubernales), listed with their occupations as the law required. He mentions thirteen liberti manumitted at an earlier time, and sixteen slaves in addition to Syneros, the heir of last resort. For the social historian of the ancient world, this is valuable information. An obvious and very interesting feature in the listing of heirs is the prominence of women. Three of the first four heredes are women, including the testator’s daughter, who is placed ahead of the ‘amicus rarissimus’ whom he required to accept his family name; she receives a larger share of the inheritance than his, one-half as against a third. The heir named as substitute for the daughter is Iulia Paulina, daughter of Servianus, and there follow the names of Domitia [–––] and Dasumia Polla.2 In fact the ‘amicus rarissimus’ is the only one among all the heirs whose male gender is certain – four of the nine are unknown, so that on any account males are unlikely to have been in the majority of those named as heirs. The story is somewhat different among the cash legatees whose names

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A Last Will and Testament are wholly or in part preserved. The first-named legatee is Iulia Paulina, and two other women are listed among the first ten recipients of legacies whose names survive, but after that there are no women among those names that are well enough preserved to reveal their gender. To judge by the extant text, all the women who are named as legatees are also identified through their connection with a male relative, husband or father.3 The legatees themselves are a cross-section of senatorial dignitaries of the day, yielding as the list advances (and this is an important point) to an assortment of equestrians and freedmen, a jurisconsult and, in last position of all, a relative of the testator by marriage, whose name is incompletely preserved. It is not clear at what point in the text the recipients of legacies in gold and silver were divided into their respective categories. The text as known to Mommsen offered only the (presumed) figure of a pound of gold at the beginning of the list, changing at some unknown point to 125,000 denarii at the end, apparently to be shared equally (‘co[niunctim’]) among all the legatees in this category.4 The new fragment revealed a new category of beneficiary, beginning in line 18, to whom was bequeathed what is reported (but see below) as two pounds of gold; ‘singulis auri p(ondo) II’. This raises the question of the amount of gold bequeathed to the persons whose names were listed in lines 15–18. It does not seem likely that the figure can have risen from one pound of gold for such a favoured person as Iulia Paulina at the beginning of the list, to two pounds of gold for the group beginning at line 18, then falling again as we meet the recipients of silver denarii. Even though it is not present on the stone, some interpreters therefore supply a figure such as five pounds of gold for the opening category of legatees, falling then to two pounds for the second category.5 This is in itself not unreasonable, though it is an argument of last resort, and further examination of the stone yields a different solution. A closer inspection of the part of line 18 preserved by the new fragment reveals, apparently unnoticed by its commentators, an unobtrusive but distinct ‘X’, immediately after what they have read as ‘AURI P(ondo) II’. The result of this observation, the now meaningless ‘AURI P(ondo) II X’, prompts another look at the photograph, from which it will be seen that the first character of what has been read as ‘II’ distinctly resembles the letter ‘L’ as it occurs in the vicinity, a vertical stroke with an abbreviated tail sloping to the right; see for examples the extant ‘L’ in the names ‘Atilio’ in the preceding and ‘Fabullae’ in the following lines respectively (Fig. 3). The true reading of this part of line 18 will then be ‘AURI P(ondo) LI(bras) X’, not two but ten pounds of gold. The earlier question now recurs in more acute form; it hardly seems

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Chapter 6

Fig. 3. Testamentum, lines 2–33. The reading ‘AVRI P(ondo) LI(bras) X’ followed by a space before ‘AEM[ilio’ can be clearly seen in line 18.

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A Last Will and Testament possible that the level of legacy would rise in one step from one pound of gold for the first category of beneficiaries, to ten pounds for the second. Interpreters who were content to supply a relatively unobtrusive five pounds of gold in line 15 might well hesitate before supplying such a large figure as fifteen or twenty pounds, and we might well ask how likely it is that such a large and epigraphically conspicuous sum was ever omitted from the text.6 Indeed, we might ask how likely it ever was that the legacies in gold were entered in rising order, to be followed in a third category by much lower legacies in silver. The solution to the problem is facing us on the stone. It is that the initial reference to pounds of gold in line 15 is an unquantified rubric referring to legacies in gold to follow, the word ‘LIBRAS’ being written out in full with no figure attached to it; and that the figure of ten pounds now read in line 18, and the word ‘singulis’ preceding it, refer back to the first group of recipients and not to what follows. This is borne out by the configuration of the words on the stone, the phrase ‘AURI P(ondo) LI(bras) X’ being followed by a space without interpunct before the next word, the name ‘AEM[ilio]’. As noted above, this configuration, space without interpunct, represents a division in the text, so that the name ‘Aem[ilio –––]’ in line 18 belongs not to the first but to the second group of legatees. This second group, beginning in the latter part of line 18 and ending at 23/4, will have received a lower amount, perhaps indeed five pounds, of gold. The figure will have been stated at the end of the second category of legatees. We will come back later to the recipients in silver.7 As mentioned, the text preserves traces of the manumissions of fifteen slaves (there were originally many more), twelve by the testator himself and three to be manumitted by someone else (his wife or daughter) at his request. Thanks to the legal requirement to state the occupation as well as the name of a slave to be manumitted, the text also presents us with a substantial number of slave occupations. Apart from the ‘nutrix’ Dasumia Tyche (35) and another previously manumitted freedwoman of unknown occupation, Dasumia Sy[––] (47),8 the incomplete text presents among those manumitted a cook (‘cocus’, 42) and possibly a wine steward (‘c[ellarius]’, 42), two secretaries (‘notarius’, 40, 43), a ‘sumptuarius’ or controller of expenditure (44), a wardrobe master (‘vestiarius’, 50) and a ‘paedagogus’ or household tutor (51). The testator’s wife (or, as it may be, daughter) is requested to free a ‘cubicularius maior’ (78), a ‘dispensator’ (77), and one other whose profession is incomplete on the stone (78), and is herself bequeathed another ‘cubicularius’ (68), a hair-plucker (‘dropacator’, 69), a cobbler (‘sutor’, 70), a doctor (73), and others whose occupations are no longer extant (69–70). To the maternal aunt are

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Chapter 6 bequeathed a ‘cursor’, or runner (86) and a driver (‘actor’, 86), in addition to the two recalcitrant slaves who are never to be relieved of their present tasks. We should add the freed servant girl of unknown duties who is bequeathed a make-up box and a beautician (‘ornator’, 59). What will strike the attention at once is the scale of manumissions initiated by the testament; ‘liberti ex testamento’ are often recorded in the inscriptions of the beneficiaries of the procedure but it is not so common to see them at their point of origin, nor so many of them. If the testament is typical, the death of the master of a household was the occasion for substantial changes in it, and for new opportunities, as the senior slaves – the heads of the occupational divisions under which the work of the household was organized – were manumitted, to be replaced by their juniors in a sort of system of promotion within the familia.9 It amounts to a considerable flow of individuals from the slave personnel of Roman households to freedman status, and their replacement by slave successors who might in due course expect to receive the same benefit. One of the slaves whom the testator requests his wife to manumit is indeed described as a ‘senior cubicularius’ (‘cubicularius maior’); he was at the point in his slave career where manumission might be anticipated. At least four of those manumitted received their freedom along with their ‘contubernales’ or conjugal partners, and if a textual supplement to the bequests to the testator’s wife or daughter is accepted she is invited to make a choice from the female slaves in the estate ‘with their children (or partners)’ as well as receiving a number of slaves with named occupations.10 A fully intended consequence of the manumission of the senior slaves of a household was the widening of its ‘clientela’ among the class of freedmen who remained connected with it and continued to owe it social duties. As they entered a more independent life as freedmen with the skills and experience they had gained in the household, the manumitted slaves would all contribute to the prestige and influence of the family of the testator. This process can be seen in the Testament, in the convention by which the freedmen of a deceased master are given the duty of caring for the burial place of their patron. Using well-established legal language, from which that of the Testament can be supplemented, the texts go to great lengths to secure free access to the burial place for those entrusted with this duty and, in an interesting exception that can be paralleled, the exclusion of a freedman who has offended the testator. Just as the Testament excludes by name the freedman Hymnus, who has ‘deserved ill’ of the testator and caused him ‘suffering and fear’ (92, 109–10),11 so the humble testament of an anonymous testator at Arsinoe in Egypt excludes the freedwoman Thais from access to his tomb and forbids her to have any

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A Last Will and Testament business connection with the two daughters whom he named as joint heirs, because she had been ‘troublesome’ to him – in what way he leaves us to guess, just as the cause of offence given by Hymnus to our testator remains unknown.12 By an extension of displeasure into the future, the testator also enjoins his maternal aunt to keep at their present tasks for as long as they live the two slaves, Menecrates and Paederotes, who have so grievously offended him (80–83). It is on the other hand by an unusual act of deference to his friend Servianus that the testator’s body is to be carried in the funeral procession not by his own but by Servianus’ freedmen; usually, as in the case of the Athenian millionaire Herodes Atticus, this duty fell to the deceased person’s own freedmen, and the reason why this convention is not observed in the present case is a matter of some interest.13 It is presumably connected with the honour paid to Servianus’ daughter by her appointment as substitute heir for the testator’s own daughter, and her place as the first of all the legatees mentioned. This brings us to a question so far deferred, the identity of the testator and the social milieu to which he belonged. Ever since its publication by Mommsen, the testament has been known, with or without inverted commas, as the ‘Testament of Dasumius’, by inference from the name of the freedwoman Dasumia ‘Syche’ (line 35), who is taken as a previously manumitted slave of the testator, bearing his family name. The connection is strengthened by the fact that, with the now corrected reading of line 35 as Dasumia Tyche, the freedwoman Dasumia Sy[––] who appears at line 47 can be seen as a second freedwoman of the same origin, and by the confirmation of the name of the second heir mentioned in lines 5 and 11 of the testament as Dasumia Polla.14 The next step in the argument was to search the next generation for the ‘amicus rarissimus’ who is required to adopt the testator’s name for himself and his posterity, and Mommsen identified him as L. Dasumius Tullius Tuscus; his name would be the result of an adoption by a L. Dasumius Tuscus of a Tullius, perhaps P. Tullius Varro from a family of Tarquinii.15 Mommsen made light of the difficulty that L. Dasumius Tullius Tuscus was quaestor only after 138 and suffect consul in 152, asserting that he could have come late to his public honours, but this is very unconvincing; someone who was quaestor (a young man’s office) after 138 could not be the same person described as ‘amicus rarissimus’ (presumably an adult) in 108.16 Others have thought, for the testator and his ‘amicus’ respectively, of L. Dasumius Hadrianus, suffect consul probably in 93 and proconsul of Asia in 106/7, and L. Dasumius Rusticus, ordinary consul in 119,17 while

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Chapter 6 further discussion by Syme, building upon different assumptions, identified as the testator Cn. Domitius Tullus, whose will is discussed by Pliny in a letter dated to 107 or 108 (Ep. 8.18).18 The problems with Syme’s presentation begin with the extreme complexity of its analyses of persons, origins and careers (and, it must be said, the oblique manner, even for Syme, with which they are expressed), and can perhaps be resolved with some saving of labour by noting, first, that the testament before us is dated May/August 108,19 with a codicil, which was obviously written later. How much later is not known, but the codicil presents very tight limits for a connection with a death and testament recorded by Pliny for 108 at the latest.20 Second, the actual terms of the will described by Pliny do not fit easily with the Testament. The will of Domitius Tullus was much discussed because, after a disreputable life in which he had notoriously encouraged legacy-hunters, he unexpectedly did the right thing in the end, leaving his entire estate to his adopted daughter (formerly his niece) and her descendants.21 Despite one or two points of similarity, such as the appointment of his daughter as his heir, the will of Domitius Tullus does not correspond to our inscription. The fact that it was so widely discussed should not lead us to assume that it is identical with an epigraphic testament that happens to be close in date.22 A note of caution may be entered at this point. Our information on the senatorial nobility of the early second century, based on the names recorded in the consular fasti and the other epigraphical evidence, and on the correspondence of Pliny, is extensive, but it is not complete. We cannot assume that the name of the testator and his ‘amicus rarissimus’ are waiting to be discovered among those whom we happen to know, or even that he belonged to the highest echelons of Roman society. There were many men of property below the levels of the greatest senators, and outside the senatorial class itself. In addition, the prevalence of second and later marriages, and of the procedure of adoption, means that family names are distributed very widely among the nobility, and that they accumulate, in an increasing polyonymy culminating in the thirty-four nomina and cognomina of the consul ordinarius of 169.23 Without supporting evidence to guide us through the connections, the tracing of family ties on the basis of names alone is extremely hazardous. Further, it is by no means clear that the nomen Dasumius is that of the testator. It is a former slave ‘nutrix’ who appears as Dasumia Tyche in a favoured position in the Testament. Given her role in the family such a person, if she is the long-retired wet-nurse of the testator, is best seen as a former slave of the testator’s mother, earlier manumitted by her.24 A further observation about the names in the Testament, forcibly stated by Werner

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A Last Will and Testament Eck, may be decisive. Dasumia Tyche and her counterpart, Dasumia Sy[––] are the only persons of libertine status whose family as well as personal names are given in the document. By contrast, of the other nine or ten previously manumitted freedmen whose names are sufficiently complete to permit this judgment, none bears a family name. All are identified by their personal name only, the gentilicium which they would have received upon manumission – that of the testator – being taken for granted. It seems to follow that the two freedwomen whose gentilicium is recorded had been freed by someone other than the testator, probably the Dasumia Polla who appears in fourth place among the heirs. Dasumia Polla would then be a female member of the family on the mother’s side, perhaps the mother herself. In this case we would have to relinquish the attempt to use nomenclature to identify the testator. He will remain, as Eck concluded, an ‘Ignotus’.25 We may contribute just as much to social history if we focus not upon the identity of the testator but upon his connections and milieu – not who he was, but what he was: of what sort and condition. The first and most obvious point is the connection with Spain. Of the two monuments whose consecration under the testator’s name is entrusted to the heirs as a fideicommissum, the second is to be at Corduba. The location of the first, whether at Rome, or at some other place in Baetica, or indeed also at Corduba, is not known.26 The connection with Spain, not surprising in this period of provincial ascendancy, is further expressed in the ramifications of the testator’s friendship with Servianus. L. Iulius Ursus Servianus, consul for the second time in 102, had married Domitia Paullina, a sister of P. Aelius Hadrianus, before 98, before the rise of the emperor Trajan and long before that of Hadrian as Trajan’s adopted son and successor. He remained close to the ruling family, rising to a third consulship in 134, until his enforced suicide two years later, at the age of ninety, for inappropriate ambitions in the difficult last years of the reign of Hadrian; he was therefore around 62 at the time of the Testament.27 The Ulpii (the family of Trajan) and the Aelii (that of Hadrian) had their origin at Italica, the old Roman colony near Hispalis (Seville), province of Baetica. Maintaining the Spanish connection, Servianus’ daughter, presumed here to be the Iulia Paulina of the Testament, was chosen, in 105/7, to marry Cn. Pedanius Fuscus Salinator (consul, as colleague of the new emperor Hadrian, in 118).28 The young senator came from the Pedanii of Barcelona; the first representative of the family is the urban prefect Pedanius Secundus, whose murder by a slave and its dreadful consequences were recorded by Tacitus (who will have known the descendant).29 Another associate of Servianus mentioned in the Testament was Iunius Avitus, who

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Chapter 6 served under him in Germany and followed him to Pannonia. Recently married and aedile-elect, Avitus died late in 108, drawing from Pliny an elegant appreciation (Ep. 8.23). Since the name of Avitus appears on the Testament, either the testator died before him, or else he omitted to delete his name from the list of legatees at some later date. Servianus himself, widely assumed for the reasons just given to be of Spanish origin, may rather be a Narbonese Gaul. The family name Iulius is one of those nomina, common in the Roman aristocracy, acquired by leading provincials from governors of an earlier time, and is a better fit for Narbonensis than Spain.30 Dasumius on the other hand is a rare name and is part of a different pattern. It is found in several places in Baetica (and nowhere else in Spain), including Corbuba, Gades, Hispalis and a town called Ilipa, the last two being close to Italica.31 Like other such names (Ulpius, and the gentilicium of Seneca and Lucan, Annaeus, are examples), ‘Dasumius’ leads us back to Italy, in this case the south. In the opening chapter of its Life of Marcus Aurelius, the Historia Augusta identified the origin of Marcus’ paternal great-grandfather as the municipality of Uccubi in Baetica, but goes on to report from the early third-century biographer Marius Maximus the claim that Marcus’ family traced its origin both from Numa and from ‘king Sallentinus Malemnius, son of Dasummus, who founded Lopiae’ (HA, Marcus 1.4–6). The first claim can be ignored, the second is a claim, enshrined in mythology, of an ultimate origin in Italy for a family from the provinces, from where they had taken their name in the early days of expansion and now brought it back to their Italian homeland.32 Given the presence of the name ‘Dasumius’ in Baetica, it is tempting to suppose that this was the origin of the mother of the testator, assuming this to be Dasumia Polla. The dedication at Corduba, the second of the two mentioned in the Testament, might then be a gesture of honour to her home city, while the first was to be in the testator’s own place of origin. This may also have been in Spain. The relations between the testator and Servianus were both intimate and deferential. In line 111 he is presented (on his first appearance since being introduced as the father of Iulia Paulina in line 8) as ‘Ursus Servianus dominus meus’, and is given the duty of supervising the burial of the testator, in the next line he is ‘Servianus meus’, whose freedmen are to act as pallbearers. The second reference is to be understood in the light of the first, Servianus being formally introduced and then referred to more intimately. The expression ‘dominus (meus)’ can of course indicate a political or social inferior in his relations to his superior – it is the term used by Pliny in addressing Trajan in Book Ten of his letters – but it can also denote a mutual deference among distinguished equals (much as

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A Last Will and Testament members of the British aristocracy may address each other formally as ‘My Lord’).33 A new man of the Flavian period, Servianus’ distinction and connections made him the social superior of most; he was one of the great men of the age. The intimacy implied in the phrase ‘my Servianus’ is strikingly paralleled in Pliny’s letter to Servianus on the occasion of the announcement of the marriage of his daughter to Pedanius Fuscus Salinator; Pliny can imagine himself holding in his arms the baby children of the forthcoming marriage, almost as if they were his own grandchildren (Ep. 6.26)! The affectation of intimacy in the remark is excused by its poignancy, for it was known that Pliny was and expected to remain childless. In the case of the testator the presumption of intimacy is borne out in the appointment of Servianus’ daughter as substitute heir for his own. There was little chance of Iulia Paulina’s actually finding herself required to act in this capacity, but her appointment in this position is a great honour, close to the testator’s regarding her as his own daughter. This, and the request that Servianus’ rather than his own freedmen be his pallbearers, are expressions of deference to his distinguished friend. If the testator looked up to Servianus as, at least, a respected equal if not superior, an entirely different social milieu is suggested by the names of his maternal aunt, ‘Septuma wife of Secundinus’.34 Not a ‘classy’ name, in Syme’s pointed appraisal; a cognomen formed from another cognomen, ‘Secundinus’ is more appropriate for the provincial west (what Syme called the ‘Celtic lands’), and for a distinctly humbler social class than the senatorial aristocracy, whether Italian or provincial. This is true enough; parallel cases were found, and similarly explained, by Edith Wightman in her model study of Trier and its region.35 The names of the testator’s aunt and her spouse do not point us to the highest social class. They look like modest, well-achieving provincial folk, whether still living in the provinces or in Italy at the time of the Testament is not known – not members of the senatorial aristocracy sporting the names of the great Roman governors of the time of the Republic or distinguished local names of Italian origin. This raises an interesting question, for on the arguments presented above the name Dasumia(-us) is not the testator’s own but comes in from his mother’s side of the family, and now we find a maternal aunt, with a spousal name identified for its lack of class. It can be said that the new men of any period of Roman history will often bring with them part of their old world, and the nomenclature that goes with it, into their new milieu. It may be, however, that there is something different going on, and it will be worthwhile to take a final look at the names of those receiving legacies in gold and silver in the first lines of the Testament.

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Chapter 6 To recapitulate what was said earlier: the cash legatees are presented in three groups, in the descending order of the value of their legacies. The first group, receiving ten pounds of gold, begins with Iulia Paulina and one other woman among the eight names extant or partly extant in this group, all of them well-connected in the senatorial aristocracy. This is a smaller group than the recipients of five(?) pounds of gold, beginning at line 18 with the name ‘Aem[ilius –––]’. The point at which this second category of legatees ended and the list of recipients of silver began cannot be exactly determined, but there is a change of tone at line 24, with the name of [?Sall]ustius Acanthus. The combination of Roman nomen and Greek cognomen is a clear sign of freedman origin, and Acanthus is the first of several names in the list to take this form, after an unbroken series of names of Latin ancestry. The impression of a change of social milieu is quickly confirmed by the appearance of two brothers, evidently freedman, the Agrii Phoebus and Servatus. The name of Fabius Rusticus, occurring between [Sall]ustius Acanthus and the Agrii brothers, justifies a moment’s reflection, if he is the same as or (surely) the son of the friend of Seneca and historian of the time of Nero; does the free-born Roman Fabius Rusticus raise the freedman Acanthus into the second group of legatees, or does Acanthus take Rusticus down with him into the third? The answer, which would place both in the third category, may lie not in free or libertine status but in equestrian rank. As Syme remarked in a quite different context, Fabius Rusticus the historian was ‘perhaps not a senator’.36 Perhaps neither he nor his son, if that is whom we see on the Testament, ever became one, and a successful freedman like Acanthus might well be an equestrian. The same goes for the names that follow Fabius Rusticus. After the two freedmen brothers, the Agrii, there are Valerius Hermes and another pair of freedmen, the Iulii, Threptus and [–––], of line 28. Among them is a jurisconsult, possibly named [Pro]culus, and the Otacilius Or[–––] whose name occurs in the same state of preservation and in similar company, in the fragmentary codicil at the end of the text.37 What defines the third group, and distinguishes it from the first two, is then equestrian as opposed to senatorial status. We may also detect a shift in social perception, expressed in the change in the denomination of legacies in precious metal from gold to silver, and from quantities expressed in pounds of gold to sums of money expressed in silver coin. The explanation for the change may be neutral, a matter of accounting convenience rather than social perception. With gold bullion maintaining a differential of about twelve times the value of silver, the sum represented by five or ten pounds of gold would be enormous, larger than one could conveniently measure in monetary terms. On the other hand

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A Last Will and Testament the sum of 125,000 denarii, even divided among legatees, could have been expressed in pounds of silver.38 The shift from precious metal measured by weight to silver coin might be an expression simply of the relatively small size of the bequests to members of the third group – unless a more subjective consideration comes into play. If only through a sense of noblesse oblige, one might hesitate to bestow large cash legacies upon members of the senatorial elite (especially if one were socially inferior to them), but not feel such inhibition with the sum of 125,000 denarii distributed among one’s equestrian friends, including several freedmen. These were people to whom a cash legacy was welcome and not below their dignity; one would not presume to enrich members of the senatorial class with legacies of money. There is one more question, that of the testator’s relative by marriage, only the last three letters of whose name survive as the last of the recipients of a silver legacy; ‘––]oro adfini meo’ (line 29). Syme, alert as ever to the possible presence of a member of a provincial elite, thought of ‘[Iulio Fl]oro’, who would be of Gallic origin (the conjectured nomen Iulius would suggest this); perhaps a connection of the Iulius Florus, ‘in eloquentia Galliarum princeps’ as Quintilian described him, whose nephew, Iulius Secundus, was a participant in Tacitus’ Dialogus.39 The identification would fit nicely into the provincial dimensions of the Testament, as we now know them, but there is nothing positive to support it. Quintilian is writing of an orator of the Julio-Claudian period, Tacitus of the time of Vespasian, and no Iulius Florus is on record for the period of the Testament. Other men called Florus might be found, for example the Mestrius Florus who was the patron of Plutarch (and the author of his Roman citizenship).40 A better candidate, Mestrius Florus being a senator when what we need is an equestrian, is the rhetorician (and possible historian) P. Annius Florus, who came from Africa but settled at Tarraco after a literary failure at Rome which he ascribed to the prejudice of Domitian.41 This Florus later wrote a verse encomium of the Dacian Wars of Trajan and he was a poetic sparring partner of Hadrian, a recorded exchange with the itinerant emperor being something of a classic. To Florus’ affectation of sympathy for the hard life he led, Hadrian replied in kind, cleverly and with pointed humour: Ego nolo Caesar esse, ambulare per Brittanos, latitare per Scythicas pati pruinas

Caesar I’ve no wish to be, Wandering among the Britons, Lost to view among the , Putting up with Scythian frost

Ego nolo Florus esse, ambulare per tabernas latitare per popinas, culices pati rutundos.

Florus I’ve no wish to be, Wandering among the taverns, Lost to view among the cookshops, Putting up with well-fed fleas.42

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Chapter 6 It is tempting to consider the low-living Florus who settled at Tarraco as the ‘adfinis’ of the testator. The Spanish connection, acquired by residence, would make him a suitable relative by marriage, and there is no need to think that he rose above equestrian status. There is a yet further possibility. ‘Florus’ is not an uncommon Latin cognomen, but it cannot escape notice that by far the greater number of names ending in ‘-orus’ are not Latin but Greek – theophoric names like Diodorus, Apollodorus, Artemidorus, and so on. If the name originally to be seen on the stone were a Latin nomen with a Greek cognomen, the testator’s ‘adfinis’, like several of his friends in this category, would be a freedman, no doubt of equestrian rank. This would raise still more intriguing questions as to the testator’s own status. We might even begin to wonder, for example, whether he might have been a freedman of Servianus himself, so that he too would be a ‘Iulius’ and the freedmen who were to carry his funeral pall his own ‘colliberti’.43 One more letter would settle it; all that is needed is ‘D’ to give the Greek termination ‘––d]oro’, but the stone refuses to yield it (see Fig. 3). Nevertheless, our impression of the testator has undergone quite a change as the discussion has progressed. We began with a senator Dasumius, whose adoptive descendants were found among the public figures of the Hadrianic and Antonine periods, or with Domitius Tullus, whose notorious life and exemplary will are described by Pliny, or even Licinius Sura, the great Trajanic marshal. On further consideration, the will of Domitius Tullus seemed to have little in common with the text before us, and it further seemed likely that the name Dasumius – or rather Dasumia, used in the Testament of three persons (two of them freedwomen) – belongs to his mother’s family and is not the name he inherited. A Spanish connection, attested by the dedication to be made at Corduba, was supported by the Spanish provenance of the name Dasumius itself. The natural instinct to find the testator’s social background among the high aristocracy emanating from the provinces was undermined by the nomenclature of his maternal aunt and her husband, ‘Septuma Severin[i]’, pointing to an origin in the western provinces but not to the highest social class; and finally we have the testator’s relative by marriage listed among the legatees not of senatorial background but of equestrian rank, including, even if he were not one himself, several freedmen. One wonders too about the deference shown to Iulius Servianus, whose daughter is a substitute heir for the testator’s own daughter, and whose freedmen, and not his own, are to be his pallbearers. And there are those surprising moments in the Testament – the exclusion of a freedman from the privilege of access to the tomb of the deceased, because he has ‘deserved ill’ of his patron and has

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A Last Will and Testament caused him ‘suffering and fear’ despite all the benefits he had received, and the two slaves bequeathed to his aunt who are never to be manumitted because of their ‘unjust actions’. These do not look like the sentiments of a high and mighty senator, nor sentiments that such a person would wish to be preserved to eternity. There are many unanswered questions in and around the Testament. It seems strange that, of all the thousands of upper-class wills that must have been made in the highly epigraphic generation of the testator, this is the only surviving example of a will transcribed in its entirety. We have many examples of testamentary provisions on particular matters – foundations of buildings and charitable institutions (like the library and other benefactions of the Younger Pliny),44 manumissions, on occasions burial arrangements – and even some original texts, preserved on papyrus without any thought of public commemoration, of the wills of soldiers and other persons of modest resources. Legal texts are full of discussions of situations that arise from the testamentary process, and from time to time details of the wills of the powerful, like those of Julius Caesar and Augustus, are transmitted in literary sources for their historical importance, or those of figures like Seneca or Petronius (or Domitius Tullus) for what they reveal of the conditions of their time and the characters of those who made them. It is disconcerting that the best example of a complete text is the satirical and much later ‘Testament of the Piglet’, and that one of the fullest earlier ‘citations’ of a Roman testament is the will of Trimalchio in the Satiricon. It is unusual, and possibly revealing a certain ostentation, to find a complete testament inscribed, at the testator’s express wish, on the side of a funeral monument, together with the thirty-six extant names, which must originally have numbered more than eighty, of those friends to whom he had made legacies in gold and silver. One cannot imagine a great senator being so eager to advertise the extent of his clientela among his social equals and inferiors. Name-dropping is not for the socially superior, and the connections of the truly great do not require such advertisement. Our testator, with his less than ‘classy’ maternal aunt and his ‘adfinis’ among his equestrian and freedman beneficiaries, combines a pride in the connections and friends he has made with a powerful, and surely unsenatorial need to advertise them; not to mention those strange moments with the undutiful freedman, and the two slaves bequeathed to his maternal aunt. Suffering and fear: this is not how a great senator responds to slaves and freedmen who have caused offence. Of equestrian rather than senatorial rank, whether a Roman of free birth or a libertus, our testator has more than a touch of the Trimalchio about him.

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Chapter 6 Notes 1 The original number of names can be estimated as follows: there survive on the stone 47 nomina and cognomina that can be read or reconstructed, with an average length of 7 characters per name, or 14 characters per individual (since all were listed with both nomen and cognomen, or in the case of women with a male identifier). Allowing 14 complete lines, each of 85 characters, for the listing of names (omitting space for instructions), a total of 1190 characters, yields a total of 85 individuals. A similar result is gained by estimating the extant 36 individuals as a proportion of the space available. The social implications of this are drawn below. 2 Perhaps the wife and mother of the testator; see Eck (§1 n. 6 above), pp. 281–3. 3 Iulia Paulina (line 15) has earlier been identified as ‘daughter of Servianus’ (8); see too Fabia Balbin[i] (16), Fabullae Asiatici (19), Septuma Secundin[i] (79). 4 Cf. Mommsen, ad loc. (on lines 14–28); ‘legata pecuniae...ad minimum bipertita’, inferring a third group from the word ‘singulis’ in line 18. 5 Eck, p. 290, infers from the word ‘libras’, that the missing figure in line 15 must be plural and suggests that the number has fallen out, either through a stonecutter’s error or a fault in his working copy of the text; cf. the translation of Gardner and Wiedemann (§I n. 3 above). 6 To suggest that the figure is lost among the damaged letters at the beginning of the line is to inflict unacceptable violence upon the word order. 7 Here again the figure, 125,000 denarii ‘co[niunctim’, comes at the end of the group. 8 Her status is inferred from the presence of the gentilicium Dasumia; see below. 9 For an illustration of the organization of a household see Apuleius, Metamorphoses 9.2; ‘nam Myrtilum mulionem et Hephaestionem et Hypatophilum cubicularium et Apollonium medicum, immo vero et plures alios ea familia’, etc.; cf. 10.13 (two brothers, a ‘pistor dulciarius’ and a ‘cocus’). 10 Line 71; see n. on line 40. We saw too the freedman Iulius Threptus among the third group of legatees (line 28). ‘Threptus’ (in Greek) means ‘raised in the household’. Another name, Philocyrius (line 73) means ‘lover of his kyrios’, or ‘master’. Petronius, Cena Trimalchionis 53 has an agent read out among the events of a single day the numbers of slaves born on his estate at Cumae; ‘in praedio Cumano...nati sunt pueri XXX, puellae XL’ (!). 11 Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 58, is mistaken in thinking of Hymnus as a slave. The context shows clearly that he was a freedman. 12 Cavenaile, CPL 220 lines 23ff.; ‘quam propter [volo e]t iubeo eam non pervenire corpori meo [...] neque habere nullum (sic) negotium cum filias (sic)’. The New York Times of 2nd September 2007 reported that the socialite Leona Helmsley left two of her four grandchildren out of her will ‘for reasons which are known to them’. 13 Philostratus, Vitae Sophistarum 565. The inscription of the prefect of Rome Iunius Bassus, deceased in 359, notes that the duty did not fall as usual to Bassus’ ‘famuli’ but was claimed by the ‘populus’ (AEp 1953, 239, lines 8–9); see Chapter 11 below. 14 Mommsen had already restored ‘Da[sumia]’ at line 11, taking her to be the testator’s daughter. The new fragment shows that the daughter had occurred in the first line of the text, as the testator’s first choice of heir. Eck, p. 281, gives a summary of Mommsen’s reasoning. 15 Tullius Varro is mentioned among the second category of legatees (line 22).

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A Last Will and Testament 16

Mommsen, ad loc.; ‘quod Tuscus filius quaestor fuit imperatoris Pii, id est non ante annum 138, non impedit, quo minus natus fuerit ante a. 108...Potuit enim serius solito ad honores pervenire’. It also transpired that P. Tullius Varro was consul not, as had been thought, under Trajan, but in 127 (Syme, ‘Testament’, pp. 41–2). 17 Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 42. 18 Syme, ‘Testament’, also citing Carmen Castillo García, ‘El famoso testamento del Cordubes “Dasumio”’, Actas del I Congreso Andaluz de Estudios Clásicos (1982), pp. 159ff. Another name to be mentioned is that of Licinius Sura, consul for the third time in 107, who may have died in 108 (Syme, Tacitus, p. 232), but there are no positive arguments for this identification. 19 P. Aelius Hadrianus and M. Trebatius Priscus were suffect consuls for the middle third of the year (1 May–August 31); Degrassi, Fasti Consolari, p. 32. 20 For Book 8 of Pliny’s letters, with events up to 107/8, Syme, Tacitus, Appendix 21, and Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny, pp. 38–9. Ep. 8.23 records the death of Iunius Avitus, who is mentioned in the Testament (line 20), but this is not quite conclusive (see above). 21 Champlin, Final Judgments, p. 98. 22 Syme (‘Testament’, p. 52) calls it ‘the most famous will in the literature of the Latins’ between that of Julius Caesar and the ‘Testamentum Porcelli’. Yet the ‘literature of the Latins’ has little to do with the survival of inscriptions. 23 Degrassi, Fasti Consolari, pp. 47–8. 24 Keith R. Bradley, ‘Wet-nursing at Rome: a study in social relations’, in Beryl Rawson (ed.), The Family in Ancient Rome: New perspectives (1986), Chapter 8 (pp. 201–29; especially 203ff., with tables, on the social origins of ‘nutrices’). 25 Eck, pp. 281ff. 26 Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 49, wondered whether the word order ‘Cordubae item’ (rather than ‘item Cordubae’) might suggest that the first dedication also was at Corduba – surely too meticulous a reading of the text. 27 PIR 2 I 631; Syme, Tacitus, p. 600; see Appendix (i) to the text and translation. 28 Pliny, Ep. 6.26, cf. (addressed to Fuscus), 7.9. 29 Ann. 14.42–5. For the origin of the family, Syme, Tacitus, Appendix 80 at p. 785. Note esp. ILS 5486 (a freedman of the family). For this and the other names mentioned, see Appendix (i). 30 Syme, ‘Testament’, pp. 45–6. Another example is the Cornelius Pusio mentioned in the Testament – from Baetica, perhaps Gades (PIR 2 C 1425), and of course the historian Cornelius Tacitus, from Narbonensis; Syme, Tacitus, Appendixes 79–80 and above, Chapter 5. 31 Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 44. 32 For ‘Dasimii’ as civic magistrates in southern Italy, Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 44 n. 21. At Tacitus, p. 785 n. 1 (inscrs. from Canusium, Herdoniae) the name is characterized as ‘Illyrian’; the patronymic in ‘Medella Dasm(i) f(ilia)’ of ILS 7840 (Canusium) was identified by Mommsen as Messapian. 33 Eleanor Dickey, Latin Forms of Address: from Plautus to Apuleius (2002), pp. 77–99 and Carlos F. Noreña, ‘The social economy of Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan’, AJP 128 (2007, pp. 239–77, at 247–50 (248; ‘a polite address for social equals and superiors’). 34 ‘Septuma Secundin[i]’, line 79. Syme prefers the supplement ‘Septuma

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Chapter 6 Secundin[a]’; ‘Testament’ pp. 57–8. For the reading adopted here see the note on line 19 of the text. 35 Edith Mary Wightman, Roman Trier and the Treveri (1970), pp. 48–50. In fact an exact parallel, cf. p. 50; ‘Secundinus belongs to a widespread class of Gallo-Roman names which can used as either nomina or cognomina, according to the termination used’. Cf. Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 57, with figures drawn from the Indexes to relevant volumes of CIL. 36 Tacitus, p. 179; PIR 2 F 62. There is a good case for connecting him with Spain. It is unknown whether Fabius Rusticus is the same as the Rusticus to whom Pliny wrote Ep. 9.29. 37 He too could well be a freedman; possibly Otacilius Or[igenes? 38 The distinction between silver measured by weight and minted coin recurs in the fragmentary codicil, where legacies of five pounds of silver are followed by legacies expressed in sestertii (4,000, the equivalent of 1,000 denarii). 39 Syme, ‘Testament’, p. 56, referring to Quintilian, Inst. Or. 10.3.13; PIR 2 I 317. The orator is of course to be distinguished from the Treveran noble Iulius Florus, whose rebellion with the Aeduan Iulius Sacrovir in the time of Tiberius is narrated by Tacitus (Ann. 3.40–47; PIR 2 I 315). 40 PIR 2 M 531 (Mestrius Florus), cf. P 526 (Plutarch). 41 PIR 2 A 650; RE VI, cols. 2761–70, at 2769. He is assumed to be the Florus who composed an epitome of Livy. The details of his life are told to a supposed Baetican visitor to Tarraco, in the extant preface to his truncated work, Vergilius Orator an Poeta (ed. Rossbach, Teubner, pp. 183–7). It is not certain whether his name, ‘Anneus’ in the MSS of the Livian epitome, was Annius or Annaeus (but not Iulius, cf. PIR 2 I 318). 42 Historia Augusta, Hadrian 16.4; ‘, the name of a German people, satisfies the needs of the metre in the third line of Florus’ poem; the other words in the line are established by Hadrian’s response. 43 This was the view suggested by Joshua Tate (see above) and argued in his article, ‘New thoughts on the “Will of Dasumius”’, ZSS 122 (2005), Rom. Abt., pp. 166–71 – although, as explained above, the term ‘dominus’ does not prove it. The legatees in the third category include the Iulii Threptus and [––––]. 44 As recorded in ILS 2927.

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7 TRAVEL, DIPLOMACY AND THE DIFFUSION OF IDEAS IN THE ROMAN MEDITERRANEAN AND NEAR EAST The theme of this chapter, the diffusion of cultural understanding within the Mediterranean world and in its relations with its neighbours, is a large one, which I have reduced to more manageable proportions by selecting certain categories of traveller to whom a cultural role attaches, directly or indirectly, through the purpose and outcome of their travel. The range and complexity of the issues involved need no emphasis; they touch upon the role of late Roman government and the formation of its diplomatic policy; the discovery of alien cultures and their significance in the development of a classical ‘world view’, trade relations with India and the East and the moral preoccupation with luxury that was generated by these relations, and the curious fascination of philosophers with eastern knowledge. I realise that my choice of traveller, in the merchant, the hostage and the philosopher, may seem arbitrary against the magnitude of such issues, but I propose to make light of this objection by introducing yet a further category, in the form of that ‘involuntary traveller’, the castaway. It is not surprising that the theme of the castaway has been of longlasting appeal in literature, for these travellers present in a particularly colourful way the confrontation of strange cultures and their mutual understanding. To find oneself bewitched by a sorceress and one’s companions turned into farmyard animals, in a landscape that had appeared familiar and welcoming, is nothing if not a culture shock of major dimensions, and the theme of the unexpected cultural consequences of unplanned travel recurs constantly after the Odyssey. It is not fortuitous that Medea the sorceress comes from outside the Greek world, from the regions beyond the Hellespont explored, with varying degrees of intention, by the Argonauts; I think too of Sinbad the Sailor, Shakespeare’s Tempest and Gulliver’s Travels, not to mention those latter-day science fiction stories that plant space travellers in distant worlds or alien beings on ours, and then explore the communications (as if there could ever be any) that take place between visitors and residents. In saying this, I note the reluctance of the writers of popular science fiction to envisage the social structures,

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Chapter 7 as opposed to the magical technologies, of times far in the future and societies very unlike our own: how often does one see such societies equipped with devices for time travel and instant destruction, but governed by the political structures of the distant past, with councils of elders, praetorian guards and consuls, and names and costumes reminiscent of classical Greece and Rome, Mycenae, or ancient Assyria? Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, its title deriving from a beautiful scene in The Tempest, is one of the few such stories to imagine the social structures, as well as the technologies, of a future society. Another is E. M. Forster’s short story of 1909, The Machine Stops, an uncanny anticipation of a world of gregarious solipsism made possible by advanced electronic communication.1 The theme of the castaway generates curious stories, and I begin with one of these, as told by the elder Pliny. It is the tale, widely enjoyed by classical historians, of a freedman of the tax collector Annius Plocamus who, while assessing the taxes payable at ports of the Red Sea in the time of Claudius, was blown off course and found himself cast up on the shores of Taprobane – Ceylon or Sri Lanka.2 It was from this event and its sequel, noted Pliny, that the Romans first acquired a ‘fuller knowledge’ of that island. In six months the freedman had learned the language and could communicate with his hosts, to whom he gave an account (one would love to have heard it) of the Roman emperors. For their part, the Ceylonese were very taken by the honesty of the emperors, judging this by their visitor’s carrying with him denarii bearing the portraits of different ( JulioClaudian) emperors, all of the same weight! To discover more, the Ceylonese sent an embassy to Rome under one Rachias (i.e. Rajah), and it was from this embassy, according to Pliny, that the Romans learned of the topography and customs of Ceylon. Pliny’s account is particularly interesting in that it begins with those customs and practices best explained by direct comparison between the two cultures. There was greater wealth in Ceylon (so it seemed to the visitors) but that in Rome, we are asked to believe, was put ‘to greater use’ (‘in maiorem usum’). In Ceylon, no one has a slave, people get up at sunrise, there is no midday siesta. The buildings there are of only moderate height (the contrast with Roman insulae is obvious), the price of grain is never inflated, and there are no law courts or litigation. The king is chosen for gentleness and lack of children; if he has a child he is deposed to avert the risk of hereditary monarchy. He is advised by a panel of thirty ‘governors’, who may by a majority impose sentence of capital punishment, appeals against which, if upheld by a further panel of seventy, lead to the disgrace of the thirty, and so on... These points, which I have given in the order in which they are set out by Pliny, seem to attempt a systematic comparison between Ceylonese

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... and Roman modes of life and government, it being natural that the first stage in mutual understanding should be through an exploration of common features and intelligible points of contrast. Pliny’s account also yields the remark that Ceylon is ‘placed by nature beyond the bounds of the civilized world’ (‘extra orbem a natura relegata’), especially in relation to the luxury of living standards there – a frequent preoccupation of the moralizing Roman. The remark is rather anomalous, given that Pliny has also described, on the authority of Rachias, whose father had been personally involved, how the Ceylonese traded with the still more distant Chinese, across a river on whose banks were stacked goods for exchange, to be accepted or rejected as the Chinese thought fit, in a sort of ‘silent trade’.3 What is beyond the civilized world for one observer will be the centre of it for another, and Pliny appears not fully to realize that the Ceylonese found the Romans as exotic as the Romans found them. The Ceylonese were for the Romans a new discovery, made possible in unexpected circumstances by the accident that befell the freedman of Annius Plocamus. A longer and more complicated history lies behind the Indian embassy that had come to see Augustus in 20 BCE; it was seen at Syrian Antioch by Nicolaus of Damascus, whose account was incorporated by Strabo (15.1.73). Three ambassadors had got as far as Antioch, though the Greek letter they carried indicated that there had been more, the others having died on the journey; the letter was written by one Poros, already a ruler of ‘600 other kings’ who wished nevertheless to become Augustus’ friend – it is hard to know whether Poros’ words betray ignorance of, or are meant diplomatically to conceal, his conception of the true extent of Augustus’ power. The ambassadors brought gifts, which were presented to Augustus on Samos by eight servants clad in loincloths: namely, a man (whom Strabo himself had seen) born without arms, callously styled by his Greco-Roman witnesses a ‘Herm’, who could stretch a bow and aim arrows, and hold a trumpet to his lips, all with his feet; huge vipers and a serpent ten cubits long; a river tortoise of three cubits; and a ‘partridge larger than a vulture’. And lastly, there came with the embassy an Indian philosopher who, going on to Athens, was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries and then, ‘in order to preserve at its height the happiness of his life’, anointed himself and, wearing only a loincloth, leapt laughing onto a funeral pyre. The Athenians inscribed on his tomb that this was ‘Zarmanochegas the Indian from Bargosa, who immortalized himself according to the native customs of his country’ (kata ta patria Indo-n ethe-).4 One is prevented from seeing in this a culture shock of massive dimensions by realizing, as both Strabo and Plutarch did, that the philosopher, in immolating himself, was following the example of a

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Chapter 7 predecessor who had done just the same thing before Alexander the Great.5 The scene is transposed from India to Athens, the spectator is Roman princeps rather than oriental conqueror; yet it was precisely because of the campaigns of Alexander, and all that went with them, that the philosopher could expect his act to be understood as ‘kata ta patria’, in a tradition of Indian philosophy with which the Athenians would be familiar. Eccentric behaviour it might be, but it could be comprehended, and treated with the respect due to recognized ancestral custom. It has been well emphasized by Albrecht Dihle just how dependent is Strabo’s entire account of India on the descriptions of that land brought back three and a half centuries before by men who had accompanied the campaigns of Alexander the Great.6 It was these campaigns – and little had been learned since – that provided the cultural context within which the customs of an alien people could be understood. On the other side, something can be said of the Indian view of the classical world, for people known as ‘Yavanas’ – that is, ‘Ionians’, or Greeks – are seen from time to time in early Tamil poems as residents in or visitors to southern India and its cities.7 Some appear as merchants, whose ships come with gold and depart with pepper from the rich city of Muziris, ‘where the music of the surging sea never ceases’,8 or who bring in their fine ships cool and fragrant wine, which is served to the king in vessels of chased gold by girls with jewelled wrists, in palaces lit by oil lamps in the form of statuettes made, again, by Yavanas;9 some as skilled craftsmen employed in the building of palaces, or as flourishing inhabitants of a wealthy quarter of the city of Puhar (to be identified with Ptolemy’s Chaberis);10 or, in a very different image, as fierce bodyguards of Tamil princes on hunting expeditions, or as Yavanas of barbarian speech living in mountainous regions to the north. It is an intriguing variety of roles. There is no need to doubt that the merchants coming to Muziris were Greeks (that is, Greco-Romans) sailing from the Red Sea to southern India and back by using the monsoons.11 The city of Muziris is shown on the Peutinger Map as possessing a temple of Augustus, a monument no more incredible than the temple of the imperial cult known to have stood in the early second century at Vologesias in Parthia.12 ‘Ionian’ craftsmen cause no surprise either, when one thinks of the apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas, whose hero is brought to northwest India by King Gundaphoros (an authentic king of the period) for his skill as a builder in wood and stone: In wood I can make ploughs and yokes and balances...and ships and oars for ships and masts and pulleys; and in stone, pillars and temples and royal palaces. And Abban the merchant said to him: ‘It is good, for of such a craftsman are we in need’.13

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... The fearsome royal bodyguards are perhaps mercenaries from the partly Hellenized Afghan and Bactrian communities in the far north. Although the word Yavanas, handed on to Tamil from the ‘northern language’ of Sanskrit, comes to denote a variety of foreigners or outsiders, whether Greeks and Romans or Arabs, the Muslim inhabitants of the Malabar Coast, even Turks and Europeans, the evidence supports its interpretation in these poems as denoting Greek-speaking immigrants and visitors from the north, or from the eastern provinces of the Roman empire.14 Against the partial understanding by one world of the other achieved by Rome and India, we can set the uncomprehending nature, already hinted at by Pliny, of the mutual contacts between Rome and China. In the late first century a Chinese man turned up at T’iao-tche or Mesene (Maishan) at the head of the Persian Gulf as an envoy of the Han governor Pan Tch’ao, asking how he could ‘cross the sea’ to the Roman Empire.15 The men of Mesene, who told him nothing of the land route through Parthia, with equal cunning warned him off the sea journey. So long was it, and so unpredictable the winds, they told him, that although in favorable circumstances the journey could take as little as three months, in unfavorable circumstances it could take as long as two years. Travellers took provisions for three years, and some even died on the journey, from sheer homesickness! So deterred, the envoy decided not to go – and the ‘wily merchants’ of Maishan kept their monopoly of the trade; they had no wish to surrender their lucrative role as middlemen to direct contact between the two great empires of Rome and China.16 The Chinese annals that record this story also preserve a description of the eastern Roman empire, with its four hundred cities, their walls built of stone; its agriculture, trees (especially pine and cypress), and vegetation; its public relay system (the cursus publicus) and paved roads leading to the ‘royal capital’; its gold and silver coinage; its administration with written records; and its people, regular in features and of middle height, with barbered hair and embroidered clothing, honest in trade and expert in the making of perfume.17 It is recognizably, once one is given the hint, the Levantine Roman empire. The limits of the Chinese understanding of the empire appear with equal vividness in their description of the ‘king’, or emperor, who is claimed to go about on a white carriage with a black canopy, accompanied by drums and banners and followed by a man carrying a bag into which his subjects throw their letters and petitions, to be read and judged by the king when he returns to his palace.18 And what are we to make of the description of the Roman emperor as not appointed in perpetuity but chosen for his wisdom, on the understanding that he may be deposed in case of disaster, ill omen, or unseasonable weather, and

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Chapter 7 in such circumstance will accept his deposition equably and without protest? The oddity of this description is lessened, once we understand the Chinese word for the Roman empire, Ta-Ts’in, as denoting the province of Syria, and realize that the potentate described in the annals is actually not the emperor at all but his viceroys – Roman provincial governors as they are sent out and receive successors according to Roman decisions and conventions. Governors no doubt were replaced if they were the victims or perpetrators of misfortune or disaster, and the legati pro praetore Syriae held office and left it at the emperor’s pleasure; this aside, what we have in the Han accounts is a Chinese interpretation, distorted but recognizable, of the operation of Roman senatorial careers in the emperor’s service. If a man left office, he must naturally have been deposed; what other reason could there be? One is led to wonder what the provincial populations of the Near East itself, used to the rise and fall of Hellenistic dynasts, made of the replacement of their provincial governors by orders emanating, in circumstances entirely hidden from them, from Rome. A similar failure of understanding arises in the case of the celebrated embassy sent to the Chinese in 166 CE under the emperor Ngan-touen (or An-tun: that is, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus); it was the first time, so it was said, that contacts between Rome and China had been made after many years of obstruction by the Parthians, whose policy it was to prevent direct communications between the two empires. The emissary passed by the province of Je-nan (the district of Hanoi), to China and there offered as his gifts elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns, and tortoise shell. The Chinese concluded from the modesty of these gifts that the rumors they had heard of the wealth of the Roman empire were greatly exaggerated – misguidedly, if only because the gifts mentioned were products, not of the Roman empire at all, but of the lands to its east, notably India.19 The ‘envoy’ assumes the more manageable proportions, not of an officially appointed representative of the Roman government, but of an individual, no doubt again from Syria, claiming imperial support for his venture and offering to his Chinese hosts gifts he had picked up on his journey. I have tried so far to bring together two facets of my subject: the actual process, whether random or deliberate (or a combination of the two), by which contacts were made between one society and another, and the cultural framework within which mutual understanding was attempted. Now, Strabo noted that knowledge of India had been opened up by those who had travelled there with the army of Alexander the Great, and that the private individuals who subsequently made the journey were neither

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... perceptive nor interested enough in what they saw to be of any use to a serious geographer (15.1.4). A similar remark is made by Ptolemy (1.11.6) in describing the knowledge transmitted to his predecessor Marinus of Tyre by a ‘Macedonian’ – a Greek Syrian – merchant named Maes Titianus, of the route from Lithinos Pyrgos (‘Stone Tower’, identified as Tashkurghan) to the metropolis of the Seres. Maes Titianus, remarked Ptolemy, had recorded the distance, not having gone himself but sending agents, but Marinus ‘appeared not to believe the stories told by the traders with those parts’. Marinus had commented that men intent on trade cared little about truthful observation and were apt to inflate their self-esteem by exaggerating distances. Yet someone, merchant or not, had reported that the Chinese metropolis of Thinae did not, as was apparently supposed, have walls of bronze or anything else worthy of note (7.3.6). What is notable about much of this information is its indirectness, and historians of the Roman empire have often been struck by the lack of consistently organized attempts by the government itself to undertake foreign exploration on any sort of official basis.20 This is an aspect of a much broader issue, the failure of ancient governments in general to establish relations with foreign powers on a permanent footing – if by this one means, for example, the foundation of foreign legations supported by an organized diplomatic service, and institutions for the exchange of information and the conduct of espionage. This failure is not really so surprising when one reflects on the conditions suggested by Garrett Mattingly as necessary for the development of diplomatic institutions in early Renaissance Italy: numerous cities in a restricted area, possessing superabundant social energies and similar and therefore conflicting aims; the absence of any single dominant power that had no need to fear others; and a common language and culture that made communications between them very easy.21 It takes no great insight to see that these are, in general, not the conditions applying in the Roman empire, with its immense geographical area and wide divergences of language and culture, not only beyond but also within its frontiers. Mattingly’s criteria come closest to being satisfied, say, in Asia Minor of the Antonine Age, had other essential conditions, like political freedom, been present; apart from this, the cultural and economic divergences within the empire, and between it and its neighbours, would have tended to inhibit rather than to encourage the formation of permanent institutions for the discovery and exchange of information, even when the conduct of successful political relations might seem to have required them. Neither the Greek institution of guestfriendship between states ( proxenia) nor the Roman institution of clientela comes close to satisfying the requirements.22

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Chapter 7 On the other hand, we must not underestimate the extent of the officially-sanctioned exploration and discovery that was conducted in Roman times. Both Strabo and, particularly, Pliny the Elder give examples of missions undertaken to prepare for military campaigns, and of the geographical and cultural information gained as a result. These examples range, in the case of Pliny, from Armenia, Arabia, and Ethiopia through the Libyan desert and Mauretania to Gaul, Britain, and the North Sea.23 In similar circumstances (a Roman expedition in the area), Strabo gives a particularly full description of the Nabataeans, who later formed the province of Arabia;24 and we must add to such information the constant flow of reports sent in by provincial legates and governors, and accounts given by them to emperors after their departure from office. I would assume, to take only one example, that reports made by the Neronian governor of Moesia, Plautius Silvanus, whose exploits in negotiating with barbarian tribes, settling them on the Roman side of the Danube, receiving hostages for their good behaviour, and so on, are recorded in his funerary inscription at Tibur, played an important part in determining both the general shape and the specific detail of Flavian policy on the Rhine and Danube frontiers.25 There is also the account of the Black Sea regions given to Hadrian by his governor of Cappadocia, Arrian, who combines literary allusions to Xenophon with reference to distant kings who take to brigandage or refuse to pay tax, and reminds Hadrian that certain clients had received their kingdoms from him or from Trajan. He mentions ‘Roman’ – that, is Latin – ‘letters’ sent, or to be sent, to Hadrian, presumably in the form of the regular reports of a provincial governor, and even notes the condition of imperial statues in cities under his jurisdiction.26 From a different point of view, we may add the meticulous work of exploration and annotation implied by the reliefs of Trajan’s Column at Rome. For all the qualities of accurately observed detail in the finished product, the sculptures can give only an incomplete impression of the fieldwork and documentation that went into their design.27 The extent of information acquired in this way about foreign lands and peoples was considerable. Yet it tends to concern those peoples and areas over which war was conducted or contemplated, at those times when this was so, rather than through the routine collection of information as by the foreign services of a modern state; Strabo’s information about India, as we saw, had essentially not been updated since the campaigns of Alexander, the last time that war had been made in those regions. Strabo also remarked that the expansion of the Roman and Parthian empires had made available new information about regions hitherto imperfectly known, mentioning in the case of the latter Hyrcania, Bactria, and the regions to the north of

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... them.28 Yet when Strabo wrote, war against the Parthians was not seriously contemplated, and to explain how this information had come to the west we have to look to those more informal means by which communication was maintained between Rome and its neighbours – that ‘traffic in embassies, fugitive princes, hostages, letters [and] gifts’ acknowledged by Fergus Millar without (it seems to me) sufficient indication of the importance of these forms of traffic as, in effect, the replacement for organized exploration and diplomacy.29 It was to these more personal, social, as well as political relationships that were ‘displaced’ the diplomatic functions that would have been conducted by permanent legations and other such institutions, had they existed. To put it the other way round: the absence of such institutions does not imply the absence of diplomatic functions, or of the forms of imperial policy-making that these made possible. The contribution of the merchant in the gathering of intelligence is pervasive. One of the fascinating stories told of the Sassanian monarchs in the ninth-century Arabic handbook known as the ‘Book of the Crown’, is intended to illustrate the patience of Chosroes I in exacting vengeance.30 A Persian slave, believed but not proven guilty of misconduct in respect of the royal harem, is set up by Chosroes as a merchant in Byzantium, with instructions to keep his ears to the ground and report useful information back to the king. This he does, and after a first, apparently successful, tour of duty as merchant-cum-spy he is sent back to do the same for a further six years, during which time he becomes well known there. At this point the patient Chosroes commissions the making of a silver cup bearing the slave’s image as if in intimate conversation with himself, and he gives the cup to another merchant with instructions to trade with Byzantium in such a way that it will fall into the emperor’s possession. The cup is duly sold to the emperor, who recognizes on it the portrait of the slave, known to him as a merchant. The emperor of Byzantium realizes, and has the ‘merchant’ agree, that no man of low birth has his portrait engraved on royal cups, and also, to meet objections from the listeners to the story though at some cost to the logic of his own position (since he has not been told that the ‘merchant’ is actually a slave), that no slave and nobleman in Persia look identical. He then invites him to a feast, ignoring his protestations to be a man of low birth and unworthy of the honour, and then has him arrested and executed in the highest place possible, the top of a high tower – his head being displayed on high and his body cast down to earth. The end of the story, though not strictly relevant here, is worth telling for its disconcerting air of surrealism. Chosroes, on hearing of the execution, had a proclamation made in his own city, to the effect that ‘anyone meriting

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Chapter 7 death is executed on earth, but he who assaults the honour of the king’s wives is executed in the sky’. But no one, ends the story, knew what the proclamation meant! Fairy tales aside, the significance of the role of the merchant, as of modern trade missions, in East-West relations is obvious. A more serious example on the Roman side is the merchant and former bureaucrat Antoninus, who contrived his desertion to the Persians just before the great invasion of Sapor II in 359. Forced to this desperate remedy by debt to the imperial fiscus, Antoninus, who knew Greek and Latin from his service in the bureaucracy, devoted himself to collecting all the information he could about Roman military dispositions in Mesopotamia.31 He was able to do so freely, since as a former merchant he was ‘very well known in those parts’ and could move about without giving cause for suspicion. He finally covered his departure from the Roman Empire by purchasing a farm at its very edge near the river Tigris, which he visited frequently to allay suspicion, before having himself ferried over the river at dead of night. The Persian satrap with whom he arranged this was, as Ammianus Marcellinus remarks, ‘known to him already’.32 I mention Antoninus partly because of his counterpart on the Persian side, who also played a prominent role in the events of 359. This was the satrap of Corduene (Kurdistan), Jovinianus – at least, as Ammianus explains, this was his Roman name, since Jovinianus was a foreigner who had adopted it when he had been ‘detained as a hostage’ in Syria and educated there.33 It was during this time that he had come to know Ammianus Marcellinus, who was sent to him on an exploratory mission to discover the exact scale and intentions of the Persian forces being massed against the eastern Roman empire. Ammianus found his way to Jovinianus across the difficult country and was provided by him with a guide, who went with Ammianus to a vantage point from which they could see the Persian army, massing for its advance; then, on his return, he rested and was entertained by his old friend. Jovinianus professed nostalgia for the Roman Empire, to which, he said, he would dearly love to return.34 As it was, he stayed in his satrapy, which, as Ammianus clearly implies, he had carried over into the Persian sphere of influence. To be given as a hostage at all, Jovinianus was obviously a young man of a noble oriental family, whose stay in the Greco-Roman Orient was a striking extension of his cultural range. In fact, an eastern source shows him in the explicit role of local dynast, in describing how he settled transhumant Arabs on land in the territory east of Nisibis and Singara, where sedentary occupation and cultivation were possible in the conditions provided by stable government.35 An analogous case from the west is that of a German prince

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... who appears in Ammianus with the incongruous name ‘Serapio’. His father, Mederichus (brother of the Alamannic king Chonodomarius), had been ‘long detained as a hostage in Gaul’ and, having become interested in Greek mystery cults, named his son Serapio after one of them. His German name was Agenarichus (16.12.25). The exchange of hostages was standard practice in the diplomatic relationships between ancient peoples. The conventions involved, both political and social, were highly complex.36 The interplay of interests that might be involved is well shown by the respective views expressed by Augustus in the Res Gestae, and by Parthian envoys to the senate in the time of Claudius. For Augustus, Parthian kings and princes sought refuge with him from their own people, offered their sons as pledges of peace, and sent embassies to request that kings be provided for them.37 As Strabo remarked of this time, ‘now all [king Phraates’] surviving children are cared for in royal style at public expense in Rome, and his successors have also continued to send ambassadors’ (16.1.28). For the envoys in the time of Claudius, the whole point of providing princes as hostages was in order that, if they ever grew tired of their government, they could apply to senate and emperor for a change.38 The envoys referred to the educational and social advantages of a sojourn in the Roman Empire, a repeated theme in references to the institution of hostage exchange. It did not always work out to the advantage of the nominee, for a regular pattern, at least in Tacitus’ accounts of these exchanges, is of an initial period of popularity followed by dissension and expulsion – the motive for this often being precisely that the new king was too well versed in Roman ways for the taste of his compatriots. One king, and there are other examples like him,39 had so far forgotten ancestral customs that he not only rarely went hunting and was indifferent to the practice of horse riding, went around in a litter, disliked native banquets, and was attended by Greek companions, but also, to cap all this, in a fit of Roman parsimony locked away even the cheapest of his dinner plates! I take this unusual ground for complaint to refer to that careless ostentation of wealth that was in itself an expression of an oriental monarchy and a demonstration of its power. It has been well noted that in the Oriental monarchies, including those with which Rome came into contact, the idea of ‘luxury’ (tryphe- ) was political rather than moral.40 Through the exchange of hostages, many cities of the Roman Empire (Rome, Ravenna, and Fréjus are just three of those attested) possessed enclaves of foreign nobles and their sons, which, with the personal attendants allowed the hostages, might form quite considerable communities (they have been compared with the colonies of English at Florence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the setting of

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Chapter 7 E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, a celebration of the victory of insight over ignorance and of the awakening effect, for some, of foreign travel). On one occasion the emperor Caligula faked an attack on Germans by taking prisoners from his own German bodyguard; he then rounded up a number of hostages who were having their lessons at a school of literature and took them to his headquarters as if he had captured them in war.41 In rather similar circumstances, when the Gallic notables Julius Florus and Julius Sacrovir initiated a rebellion against Tiberius in 21 CE, one of their moves was to seize sons of the Gallic nobility who were devoting themselves to liberal studies at Augustodunum (Autun).42 The cultural implications of the extensive and regular exchange of hostages are most thoroughly documented from an earlier period of Roman history. There are many examples, for instance, the one thousand Achaeans, including the historian Polybius, deported to Italy after the battle of Pydna in 167 BCE; when they were repatriated in 150, only three hundred survivors remained of an evidently elderly original contingent.43 The successors of one hundred hostages taken from Carthage in 202 BCE were still in Rome, by the usual exchange arrangements by which hostages could be ‘traded in’ for substitutes, in 168; they would remain there, in a curious but not inconsequential reversal of the principle of Overseas Scholarships for Higher Education, until the tribute imposed after the end of the Second Punic War was fully paid off.44 The opulence in which a hostage could live, and the style of life and freedom of movement he could enjoy, are illustrated by the account in Polybius of the escape from Italy of king Demetrius in 162. In a plot hatched with the help and advice of his friends – including Polybius, whom he had first met at a boar hunt – Demetrius contrived his escape by getting himself invited out to dinner and then leaving the party as if he felt ill. He had meanwhile covered his tracks by sending slaves to Circeii with nets and dogs to arrange a hunting party, but instead of joining them he slipped off to Ostia and took ship there. He was well out to sea before his departure was realized, and nothing could be done about it.45 Polybius himself, though a political internee, through his friendship with Scipio Aemilianus acquired the use of a fleet with which he explored the western Mediterranean and reached the Atlantic coast of Mauretania.46 He was also interested in tracing the route of Hannibal over the Alps, and F. W. Walbank made it very clear how Polybius’ contact with Greek exiles in Italy enabled him to write a history broader in scope and sympathy, and certainly more critical of Rome, than the Romans could ever have written for themselves: it was, too, a view of events in Greece that he could not have acquired had he stayed there.47 This is more than the practical advantage of foreign travel for the aspiring historian who must

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... seek out his sources; it is a genuine cultural enlargement on the part both of Romans and of Greeks, which was fundamental to the development of both parties. At a later date, Pliny the Elder remarked on the great increase of knowledge of inner Asia Minor made possible by the campaigns of Corbulo, by the kings sent from there as suppliants to Rome, and by their children as hostages (Hist. Nat. 6.23). The relative lack of interest of the Roman imperial government in sponsoring foreign exploration and in organizing the collection of information about foreign peoples should not be taken to imply that this information was not collected, or that it was not available for the use of the government. The presence in Rome of one thousand Achaeans, a hundred Carthaginians, forty Aetolians, as later of the Bohemian king Maroboduus at Ravenna, Jovinianus in Syria, or Agenarichus, alias Serapio, in Gaul should be allowed for in any assessment of Roman intelligence operations regarding their foreign neighbours, for the hostages moved in high social circles, attended schools with leading Romans and members of the official classes, and learned their languages.48 The institution of hostage exchange continued undiminished into later times. It is clearly relevant to fifthcentury relations between Romans, Goths, and Huns, for example, that the patrician Aetius served three years as a hostage with Alaric and a later period as a hostage with the Huns;49 and that Fl. Orestes, the father of Romulus Augustulus, was what is described as a ‘secretary’ (hypographeus, or notarius) to Attila the Hun.50 This was an appointment, if ever there was one, to challenge the imagination (was it a job for which one applied?), though as it happens another secretary of Attila’s is mentioned, one Rusticius, a Latin-speaking prisoner of war from Moesia; he also knew Hunnish and composed Attila’s letters.51 In the other direction, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric spent ten years, between the ages of eight and eighteen, as a hostage at Constantinople. There he received what his panegyrists described as the best Greek education available and was sent back to his people with great gifts by the emperor Leo.52 The practice of hostage exchange for the mutual understanding between Romans and barbarians about language, national culture, and political aims is highly relevant to the conduct of Roman foreign policy and its gathering of intelligence, and on the broader questions of mutual understanding with which I began: and it is in this perspective that I introduce much more briefly, two other categories of traveller, the philosopher and the pilgrim. The role of philosophers in the conduct of political and cultural relations between cities and governments is well understood. They were among those classes of men whose persuasive gifts were essential to societies in

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Chapter 7 which public policies were defined and mobilized as much by the spoken as by the written word.53 Even in this relatively well-defined area anomalies could arise, which may be of interest in defining the limits of understanding between one side and the other. The Neoplatonist philosopher Eustathius was sent to Persia by the emperor Constantius to negotiate peace with Sapor II in 358. He was, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, ‘a philosopher and good at persuading’; ‘philosophus, ut opifex suadendi’ (17.5.15). Some, according to Eunapius’ unconsciously revealing account of the same embassy, accompanied it in order to see whether Eustathius would retain his persuasive powers before the tyrannical Sapor.54 So impressed, indeed, was the Persian king that (we are asked to believe) he was within an ace of laying down his tiara and bejewelled robe in favour of the philosopher’s cloak! But something went wrong, for Sapor’s actual reply to the embassy, prompted, it is alleged, by ‘magoi’ in his entourage, was rather different. It was to ask why, when the Roman emperor could have sent any number of distinguished men as envoys, he had chosen men ‘no better than slaves who had enriched themselves?’ Constantius had made an error of judgment. He himself had intellectual ambitions, had a soft spot for philosophical (and theological) discourse, and tried, without much success, to write poetry;55 but what impressed Sapor, as the emperor should have realized, was the social rank and distinction by which he might feel himself honoured. Nor does Eunapius’ narrative give any hint of the procedures of control that had to be undergone by envoys to the Persian king; they had, for example, to report their purpose to successive regional commanders and receive escorts as they advanced on their journey, and, for envoys who came from Syria, to wait at Hit until the king’s permission was received for them to proceed further.56 Their reception at the king’s court was a matter involving great formality, and even a Neoplatonist philosopher could expect no exception to be made in his favour. Persia had an especially well-defined role in the ‘cultural landscape’ of the late Roman philosopher, not merely as the origin of Chaldaean magic and astrology, but also as a royal road to the wisdom of India.57 The philosopher Plotinus is said to have accompanied the Persian campaign of Gordian III in the hope, incredible as it may seem (philosophers are not always the most practical of folk), of making his way to India. In the event, the defeat and death of Gordian in Persian territory left him in some difficulty about how to get back to Antioch.58 Later, it was claimed by Ammianus Marcellinus that a philosopher’s lies were the cause of the outbreak of war between Constantine the Great and Persia, though the details of the claim have to be recovered from a much later source, the Byzantine writer Cedrenus.59 Metrodorus had gone to India to visit the

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... Brahmin wise men, and had been greatly honoured by them and enriched with gifts from their shrines. In a striking echo of the works of the ‘Yavanas’ mentioned earlier, Metrodorus is said also to have taught the Indians how to construct water mills and baths! Returning with his gifts through Persia, in an episode reminiscent of the surveillance of the trade route through Iran exercised earlier by the Parthians, he was stopped by Sapor’s agents and much of his wealth confiscated. So at least he told Constantine, who was provoked to write to Sapor demanding the return of the confiscated property, unless he wanted war with Rome. Metrodorus’ journey was emulated, with equally interesting, though largely unintentional, consequences, by a successor, Meropius of Tyre.60 Meropius, returning from India by the sea route around Arabia, was killed by Ethiopians hostile to Rome; but his two young companions, taken to the Ethiopian court, became influential there and initiated the conversion of the people to Christianity, building churches, in the first instance for the benefit of Roman merchants who came by. Eventually one of the young men, Aedesius, returned to Tyre and many years later told his story to the church historian Rufinus; the other, Frumentius, was at his own request sent back to Ethiopia as its first bishop, consecrated by Athanasius of Alexandria.61 Frumentius’ role in Roman diplomatic relations with the Ethiopians of the kingdom of Axum was closely paralleled by the almost contemporaneous activities of the ‘Indian’ Theophilus ( he came in fact from the island of Dibous, or Socotra).62 Theophilus, earlier sent as a ‘hostage’ to the Roman Empire and baptized and ordained there by Eusebius of Nicomedia, was dispatched by Constantius II to the kingdom of the Sabaioi, otherwise known as the Homeritae or Himyarites, the ancient kingdom of Sheba; his purpose was to secure the building of a church for the Romans who travelled to the country, and to aid his petition he took with him valuable gifts, including two hundred horses from the imperial stud farms in Cappadocia;63 it was evidently quite a transport fleet that accompanied him. In the event, he founded no less than three churches; one at the Himyarite capital, one at the ‘Roman’ emporium of Adane (Aden), and the third at a Persian emporium at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, no doubt in the territory of Oman.64 Theophilus later went further afield in Constantius’ interest, on a theological-cum-diplomatic mission to south India (there were Christian communities in those parts also) and, finally, to the kingdom of Axum in which Frumentius resided. It is possible, though not certain, that Theophilus was responsible for the summons (ignored by its recipient) of Constantius to Frumentius to present himself at Alexandria to be ‘straightened out’ theologically by the

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Chapter 7 Arian bishop George – Frumentius’ patron, the ultra-Nicene Athanasius, being now exiled by Constantius. Like that of Frumentius among the Ethiopians, the evangelizing role of Theophilus among the Sabaioi converges with the political and diplomatic connections otherwise attested between them and the Romans; a law of 357 refers to Roman envoys to the Axumites or Homeritae passing through (or rather delaying at) Alexandria on their way there.65 As in other contexts, the ‘diplomatic’ function in foreign relations is displaced in favour of a cultural, in this case a religious, one, and the emphasis shifted from the domain of public policy to that of private interest, without any loss of purpose and possibly with a considerable gain in flexibility and subtlety. The role of Christianity as an instrument of diplomatic policy in this sense has wide implications. One wonders, for instance, about the presbyter of the village of the Gothic martyr Saba, absent as a fugitive in ‘Romania’ from the persecution of Gothic Christians initiated by Athanaric; 66 about the Christian priest sent by the Goths with his followers to make representations to the Romans before the battle of Hadrianople in 378; 67 and indeed about the entire role of the Gothic evangelist Ulfila in RomanoGothic relations in the mid fourth century, in the sense at least that he will through his religious mission have been able to make the views of each party on other issues also more intelligible to the other. The transmission of the Passion of Saint Saba, in the form of a Greek letter to the Cappadocian church, is in itself a document of cultural relations between the occupants, Roman and barbarian, of the lower Danubian basin and Asia Minor in the years preceding the great crossing of the river in 376.68 Philosophers and missionaries were men whose profession made them mobile, and they were from this general point of view, as well as from the more precise one of their intellectual interests, a significant element in the maintenance of cultural unity within the Mediterranean world, and in certain respects outside it. They also provide a link with the last category of traveller I wish to present, that of the pilgrim. Philosophers provide this link because they too had established a tradition of travelling to see personally the ‘holy places’ of their belief. Under Constantine the Great an Athenian sophist, Nicagoras, went to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt to view the funeral galleries. Travelling by means of the public transport system with warrants provided (a point of some interest) by Constantine, Nicagoras added his name to the many others scrawled there over centuries to commemorate such journeys of sentiment and cultural allegiance.69 There was nothing casual about Nicagoras’ commemoration, however, for his graffiti are written by the scene in which the soul stands before Osiris, god of the dead, in a direct

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... allusion to the theme of death and rebirth that was central to the Eleusinian mysteries in which he was a torch-bearer.70 Almost a century later a Greek poet, rhetorician and historian, Olympiodorus of Thebes, went to Upper Egypt ‘in order to see it’ and visited the Blemmyes.71 Reappearing on an embassy to the Huns and on visits to Athens and Rome, Olympiodorus can well be seen as one of the first in a notable tradition of Byzantine diplomathistorians. In more eccentric vein, Olympiodorus is notable also for his faithful companion of many years, a parrot that could ‘sing, call its owner’s name, dance, and do many other tricks’! 72 It was the campaign of C. Petronius under Nero, to pick up a theme mentioned earlier, that had brought back to Rome many details of Ethiopian geography not precisely known before, among them the exact point, the island of Gaugade between Syene (Aswan) and Meroe, above which dog-faced baboons and parrots were seen.73 The cultural importance of Christian pilgrimage in the late Roman Empire is profound. For the pilgrim of Bordeaux of the year 333, as E. D. Hunt remarks, his journey was from a land in which Christianity had just begun to make serious inroads, into an ‘exclusively Biblical world’; while in the far west, without knowledge of the geographical locations, the Bible was, as it were, ‘disembodied’ from its physical context.74 Eusebius of Caesarea composed his Onomasticon, a gazetteer giving locations for the sites mentioned in the Bible, for the benefit of an eastern Christian audience that wished to put its religion into its historical setting: the work had already been once rendered in Latin by the time Jerome set himself to produce a scholarly translation in the late fourth century to meet the needs of an increasing western audience.75 In the early 380s, the pilgrim Egeria was able from personal experience to inform her ‘sisters’ living in Spain of the many holy sites she had seen, each with its specific biblical setting. She described the Christian cults of the city of Edessa and the paganism of nearby Carrhae, and, in the second part of her work, gave a long account of the distinctive liturgy of the church of Jerusalem.76 Beyond Carrhae she could not go, for since the surrender of north-eastern Mesopotamia to the Persians in 363, the border was closed and further travel prevented. It is rare but explicit documentation of the effect upon contacts between East and West (at least by the main roads, an important reservation in a region of such open communications) of hostile relations between Rome and Persia.77 It is interesting that, just as for her western sisters Egeria compared the river Euphrates with the more familiar Rhone, the pilgrim of Bordeaux began his (or her) account of the long journey to the Holy Land with an allusion to the Atlantic tides of Bordeaux, and measured the

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Chapter 7 first part of his journey by the leagues that were still, in the fourth century, in use in south-western Gaul.78 For the pagan pilgrim, to visit the Tombs of the Kings and the wise men of India or Egypt was an experience satisfying to the emotions and improving of the intellect. For the Christian pilgrim, what was at stake was more definite than this, for it was the explicit claim of Christianity to be a historical religion, the precise point of which was that particular events had happened at certain places and at certain times. The broader significance of pilgrimage, and the personal testimony it made available to distant communities of Christians who lacked the opportunity to undertake it themselves, was as a direct expression of a feature fundamental to their religion. The ‘disembodied Bible’ of the fourth-century west acquired theological as well as antiquarian substance through the reports of pilgrims – a development soon extended, on an ever-increasing scale, by an eminently substantial traffic in saints’ relics. So too the Christian ideology of the Roman Empire was communicated to distant places by the physical movement (how else?) of persons and objects, a process in which pilgrimage played a creative, and significant role. Through the invented connection of Helena the mother of Constantine with the discovery of the True Cross (a connection first made only in the late fourth century), through attempts like that of Eusebius to set the Christian Roman emperor in a Biblical succession deriving from Abraham and the Patriarchs,79 through the adherence of the emperors and their supporters to the physical ideology of the Holy Land and the cult of martyrs – in all these ways, the developing image of a Christian empire was linked with and gained strength from the privately inspired initiatives with which it was in harmony. In this, pilgrims speak for the other categories of traveller discussed in this chapter. From mercantile relations with India and China, through hostages and philosophers, to Abraham and the Patriarchs as facets of the ideology of the Christian empire, all are expressions of the displacement of effort from a centrally organized enterprise in diplomacy, intelligence, and exploration, which was at best intermittent, to private initiatives with a bearing, direct or indirect, on the needs, policies, and ideologies of government.

Notes 1 E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops, and Other Stories, ed. Rod Mengham (1997), pp. 87–118. In the preface to his Collected Short Stories of 1947 (Mengham, p. xvi), the author described his fantasy as ‘a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells’. 2 Hist. Nat. 6.84–91. The historicity of the story (not strictly necessary to my argument) is viewed with possibly undue rigour by A. Dihle, Umstrittene Daten (1965), p. 27 n. 24. The ‘firm’ of Annius Plocamus is attested by inscriptions of 6 CE from the

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... Red Sea area; David Meredith, ‘Annius Plocamus: two inscriptions from the Berenice road’, JRS 43 (1953), pp. 38–40. 3 Hist. Nat. 6.89. ‘Silent trade’ is the expression of E. H. Warmington, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India (2nd ed., 1974), at pp. 58, 64, 88, etc. 4 Dio 54.9.8ff. gives a characteristically hostile view of the Indian’s action (Dio did not like philosophers). Bargosa is the port of Baryzaga (Broach), often mentioned in reference to trading contacts between the Roman empire and India. 5 Strabo 15.1.4; Plutarch, Alexander 69. 6 A. Dihle, ‘The conception of India in Hellenistic and Roman literature’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, n.s. 10 (1964), pp. 15–23. 7 See on these poems the still fascinating article of Pierre Meile, ‘Les Yavanas dans l’Inde tamoule’, Journal Asiatique 232 (under the title Mélanges Asiatiques) (1940–41), pp. 85–123 (the relevant passages are often quoted, e.g. by Mortimer Wheeler, Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers (1954), pp. 132f.); most recently Martha Ann Selby, ‘Representations of the foreign in classical Tamil literature’, in Grant Parker and C. Sinopoli (edd.), Ancient India in its Wider World (2008), pp. 79–90, with Grant Parker’s The Making of Roman India (2008), pp. 173, 195. 8 Meile, ‘Les Yavanas’, pp. 89–95, gives the evidence on Muziris; Grant Parker, p. 173. 9 Grant Parker, p. 173; Selby, pp. 85–6 (citing the new translation of George Hart). 10 Meile, pp. 97f. locates Chaberis = Kaviripattinam at lat. 11° 9 N, to the north of Tranquebar (on the eastern coast). For the emporium at Pondicherry (Arikamedu) see Wheeler, Rome beyond the Imperial Frontiers, pp. 145–50. 11 These are the seasonal monsoons named after the legendary navigator Hippalos, on which see Wheeler at p. 126 and esp. Lionel Casson, ‘Rome’s trade with the East: the sea voyage to Africa and India’, TAPA 110 (1980), pp. 21–36, esp. 31–35 (with a chart of the winds at 26). 12 SEG 7.135; see my ‘The Tax Law of Palmyra: evidence for economic history in a city of the Roman east’, JRS 74 (1984), pp. 157–80, at 166. 13 Acts of Thomas 3 (trans. R. McL. Wilson), New Testament Apocrypha [1965], p. 444. On King Gundaphoros (Guduvhara), see George Huxley, ‘Geography in the Acts of Thomas’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 24 (1983), pp. 71–80, at 74f.; Grant Parker, p. 193. A north Indian inscription gives the equivalent of 45 CE as year 26 of his reign. 14 On the extension of the term, see Meile, ‘Les Yavanas’, pp. 99–102; Selby, p. 82; Grant Parker, p. 173. 15 E. Chavannes, ‘Les pays d’occident d’après le Heou Han chou’, in T ’oung Pao 8 (1907), at pp. 177–78. The chapter of the Han Annals reporting this episode dates to the fifth century but repeats the contents of a report of 125 CE. 16 S. A. Nodelman, ‘A preliminary history of Characene’, Berytus 13 (1960), pp. 106f. ‘Wily merchants’ is Nodelman’s phrase (p. 107). 17 Chavannes, ‘Pays d’occident’, pp. 179–84. 18 The text is also summarized (from the earlier translation of F. Hirth) by Keith Hopkins in his review-discussion of Fergus Millar’s Emperor in the Roman World, in JRS 68 (1978), at p. 181. 19 Chavannes, ‘Pays d’occident’, p. 185 with n. 2. 20 See esp. Fergus Millar, ‘Emperors, frontiers and foreign relations, 31 BC to AD 378’, Britannia 13 (1982), pp. 1–23. The point is made for Classical Greece by D. J.

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Chapter 7 Mosley, Envoys and Diplomacy in Ancient Greece (Historia, Einzelschriften 22, 1973), Chapter II, ‘Intelligence and information’, at p. 4. 21 Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955), esp. chap. 5, ‘The Renaissance environment’. 22 For proxenia, see Mosley (n. 20), pp. 4–7. The question does not enter into E. Badian’s fine study, Foreign Clientelae (264–70 BC ) (1958). 23 Robert K. Sherk, ‘Roman geographical exploration and military maps’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.1 (1974), pp. 534–62, at 537–43. 24 Strabo 16.4.21–26, cf. 2.5.12; G. W. Bowersock, Roman Arabia (1983), pp. 47ff. 25 ILS 986. The inscription is discussed by Millar, ‘Emperors, frontiers, and foreign relations’, p. 8 – without noting the (surely significant) inference that Plautius Silvanus reported his experiences to the emperor. The inscription quotes from a speech in Silvanus’ honour by the emperor Vespasian. 26 Arrian, Periplus Ponti Euxini, ed. G. Marenghi (Naples 1958), 1.3; for the ‘Roman [sc. Latin] letters’, 6.2. Statius, Silvae 5.l81ff. describes the situation from the viewpoint of the ab epistulis who received such reports from imperial legati; Fergus Millar, Emperor in the Roman World, p. 79. 27 Lino Rossi, Trajan’s Column and the Dacian Wars (1971). 28 Strabo 1.2.1; cf. 7.1.4, where he remarks that certain tribes ‘would have been better known if Augustus had allowed his generals to cross the Albis [the river Elbe] in pursuit of those who had emigrated there’. 29 Millar, ‘Emperors, frontiers, and foreign relations’, p. 11. 30 Le livre de la couronne: Kitab al-tâj, trans. Charles Pellat (ed. Budé, 1954), pp. 89–93. Chosroes I reigned from 531 to 578/9. 31 Amm. Marc. 18.5.1-3; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 41, 44, 68, 55–7, etc. 32 18.5.3, ‘et antea cognitus’. 33 18.6.20–7.1, cf. 6.20, ‘obsidatus sorte in Syriis detentus’. T. D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (1998), p. 60, observes that Ammianus wrote not ‘in Syria’ but ‘in Syriis’, meaning the region rather than any particular province. It is wise not to be too insistent, however; Ammianus’ formulation can hardly exclude Antioch as a possible venue for their acquaintance. Further, there were strictly speaking two Syrian provinces, Syria Coele and (Syria) Phoenice; see Chapter 8 below, n. 18. 34 18.6.20, ‘...et dulcedine liberalium studiorum inlectus remeare ad nostra ardenti desiderio gestiebat’. 35 G. Hoffmann, Auszüge aus Syrischen Akten Persischer Martyrer (Leipzig, 1880), pp. 22–24; cf. L. Dillemann, Haute Mésopotamie orientale et pays adjacents, Institut français d’archéologie de Beyrouth 72 (1962), p. 110. For Agenarichus/Serapio, E. A. Thompson, ‘Barbarian collaborators and Christians’, in Romans and Barbarians: The Decline of the Western Empire (1982), pp. 230–48, at 233. 36 See now Joel Allen, Hostages and Hostage-Taking in the Roman Empire (2006); the most significant earlier study was by A. Aymard, ‘Les Otages barbares au début de l’empire’, JRS 51 (1961), pp. 136-42 [= Etudes d’histoire ancienne (1967), pp. 451-60]; see also n. 44. 37 Res Gestae 32–33, ‘Ad me rex Parthorum Phraates Orodis filius filios suos nepotesque omnes misit in Italiam non bello superatus, sed amicitiam nostram per

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... liberorum suorum pignora petens’, and ‘a me gentes Parthorum et Medorum per legates principes earum gentium reges petitos acceperunt: Parthi Vononem’, etc. 38 Tacitus Annals 12.10 (requesting Meherdates to replace Gotarzes). 39 Annals 2.2.5f. (the Vonones mentioned above, n. 37); cf. 6.32.4, 14.26.1f., etc. Annals 2.2.3 alludes to ‘petitum ex alio orbe regem’. 40 J.-M. Dentzer, Le Motif du banquet couché dans le proche-orient et le monde grec du VII au IV siècle avant J.-C., Bibliothèque de l’Ecole française de Rome (1982), pp. 68-69: ‘II est certain qu’en Orient le concept que recouvre la tryphe est politique et non moral’. 41 Suetonius, Caligula 45, discussed in this sense by Aymard, ‘Otages barbares’, p. 141. 42 Tacitus, Annals 3.43.1: ‘nobilissimam Galliarum subolem liberalibus studiis ibi operatam’. 43 Pausanius 7.10.11f.; see F. W. Walbank, Polybius, Sather Lectures 42 (1972), pp. 7f., 75f. 44 Polybius 15.18.8, cf. A. Aymard, ‘Les Otages carthaginois à la fin de la deuxième guerre punique’, Pallas 1 (1953), pp. 44-66 [= Etudes d’histoire ancienne, pp. 436–50]; and F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, vol. 2 (1967), pp. 470f. 45 Polybius 31.11–15 (ed. Loeb, vol. 6, pp. 186–93), with Walbank’s Historical Commentary, vol. 3 (1979), pp. 478–83; see also his introduction to Vol. 1 (1957) of the Historical Commentary pp. 3f., and his Polybius, p. 9. 46 Pliny Hist. Nat. 5.9 (= Polybius 34.15.7; ed. Loeb, vol. 6, p. 338); cf. again Walbank, ‘The geography of Polybius’, Classica et Medievalia 9 (1948), pp. 155–82, at 159–62. It is not clear how much of Pliny’s account comes from Polybius and how much from Agrippa, whom he also cites. Strabo 4.2.1 cites Polybius (34.10.7) on the geography of the Loire region. 47 Walbank, Polybius, pp. 7–10 and esp. l0f. 48 Aetolians: Polybius 21.32 (Livy 38.11), with Walbank’s Commentary, 2, pp. 135ff., cf. 470f. (on 15.18.8); F. E. Adcock and D. J. Mosley, Diplomacy in Ancient Greece (1975), p. 264. Maroboduus: Strabo 7.1.3; Tacitus Annals 2.62f., with E. A. Thompson, The Early Germans (1965), 95–106, esp. 99ff. 49 Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum 2.8 (citing ‘Frigeridus’); Merobaudes, Carmen 4.42–46, etc. In 408 Alaric asked for Aetius to be sent to him as a hostage, but was refused; Zosimus 5.36.1. See PLRE 2, Aetius 7, at pp. 21–22. 50 Priscus, frag. 8 (Müller, FHG 4, p. 78 = Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians, II [1983], pp. 248–49); Anon. Val. 2.8 (38). 51 Priscus, frag. 8 (Müller, FHG 4, pp. 80, 93 = Blockley, pp. 252ff. and 288f.) – surely the same man, despite PLRE 2, Rusticius 2, pp. 961f. Aetius’ son Carpilio was also a hostage with Attila; FHG 4, p. 81 = Blockley, pp. 256f. 52 Jordanes, Getica 271, 281; cf. Ennodius, Panegyricus 11; Theophanes, Chronographia 5977. 53 Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, e.g., at pp. 203ff. (and passim; it is a central theme of Millar’s book); and my art. ‘Gesandtschaft’ (transl. R. Werner-Reis), in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 10 (1977), cols. 653–85, esp. 669–72. 54 Vitae sophistarum, 465–66 (Loeb ed., pp. 394–99). 55 Amm. Marc. 20.16.4, cf. 18. 56 A. Christensen, L’lran sous les Sassanides (2nd ed., 1944), pp. 414f.

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Chapter 7 57

Dihle, ‘Conception of India’, and ‘Indische Philosophen bei Clemens Alexandrinus’, in Mullus: Festschrift für Theodor Klauser (1964), pp. 60–70; Walter Schmitthenner, ‘Rome and India: aspects of universal history during the Principate’, JRS 69 (1979), pp. 90–106, at 97f. 58 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 3 (Loeb ed. of Plotinus, vol. 1, p. 9). 59 Amm. Marc. 25.4.23; Cedrenus 1, p. 516 (Bonn). Cf. Jerome, Chronicon, s.a. 330 (ed. R. Helm, GCS [1956], p. 232): ‘Metrodorus philosophus agnoscitur’. 60 Rufinus Hist. Eccl. 10.9f.; cf. Socrates 1.19, Sozomen 2.24; and A. Dihle, ‘Frumentius und Ezana’, chap. 2 of Umstrittene Daten, pp. 36–64. 61 Athanasius, Apologia ad Constantium 29, 31 (ed. J.-M. Szymusiak, SChr 56 [1958], pp. 121, 124–26). 62 Philostorgius, Hist. eccl. 3.4–6, 4.1 (ed. Bidez and Winkelmann, GCS [2nd ed., 1972], pp. 32ff., 57). See again Dihle, ‘Die Sendung des Inders Theophilus’, Politeia und Res Publica: Beiträge Rudolf Starks gewidmet (Palingenesia 4, 1969), pp. 330–36. 63 The farms, 18 m. NW of Tyana, are a rare landmark in the Bordeaux Itinerary of the year 333; 577.6, ‘ibi est villa Pammatii, unde veniunt equi curules’; see below, n. 78, and Chapter 8. 64 See for Ommana/Oman, Periplus Maris Erythraei 36; trans. and commentary by W. H. Schoff (1912), pp. 36, 150f., or L. Casson (1989), pp. 73, 180f. The place was a market town or port of trade (emporion) of Persia. 65 CTh 12.2.2, with (for the date) O. Seeck, Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste (1919), p. 21.4–8. 66 Passio Sancti Sabae 4.2, in H. Delehaye, ed., ‘Saints de Thrace et de Mésie’, Analecta Bollandiana 31 (1912), pp. 216–21; G. Krüger/G. Ruhbach, Ausgewählte Märtyrerakten (4th ed., 1965), pp. 119–24; transl. in Peter Heather and John Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century (1991), Chap. 4, at pp. 109–17. E. A. Thompson, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila (1966; repr. 2008, with the Passio of St. Saba added at pp. 166–77), esp. pp. 65, 77, and 84f. discusses the racial admixture of Christians among the Goths – Phrygians, Cappadocians, Syrians, Dacians – deriving from Roman prisoners and their descendants; cf. Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths (transl. Thomas J. Dunlap, 1988), pp. 75–9. 67 Amm. Marc. 31.12.8f., ‘cum aliis humilibus’ – other Gothic Christians. 68 Heather and Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century, pp. 118–25. 69 Dittenberger, OGIS 720–71, with J. Baillet, ‘Constantin et le dadouque d’Eleusis’, CRAI, 1922, pp. 282–96; P. Graindor, ‘Constantin et le dadouque Nicagoras’, Byzantion 3 (1926), pp. 209-14; and Fergus Millar, ‘P. Herennius Dexippus: the Greek world and the third-century invasions’, JRS 59 (1969), p. 17. 70 Garth Fowden, ‘Nicagoras of Athens and the Lateran obelisk’, JHS 107 (1987), pp. 51–7, at 51f. 71 Olympiodorus, frag. 37; Müller, FHG 4, p. 58–68 = Blockley frag. 35. 72 Huns, Müller frag. 18; Athens, frag. 28; Rome, frags. 43, 44; parrot, frag. 36 (= Blockley frags. 19, 28, 41.1.2, 35, respectively). See my ‘Olympiodorus of Thebes and the history of the west’, JRS 60 (1970), at pp. 79–80. 73 Pliny, Hist. Nat. 6.184 – together with the resolution by the campaign of divergent opinions about distances. 74 E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460 (1982), pp. 83 (of the Bordeaux pilgrim), 88 (of Egeria); see Chapter 8 below.

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Travel, diplomacy and the diffusion of ideas... 75

Eusebius of Caesarea, Onomasticon, ed. E. Klostermann, GCS (1904), repr. 1966, with Jerome’s translation. 76 Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, pp. 86ff.; John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (1971). Note esp. 18.2 (Euphrates), 19.1ff. (Edessa), 20.8 (Carrhae), 24ff. ( Jerusalem liturgy; cf. Hunt, chap. 5, Wilkinson, pp. 54–88). 77 Itin. Eg. 20.12. On the interplay of political and cultural factors in this frontier zone see Fergus Millar, ‘Paul of Samosata, Zenobia and Aurelian: the church, local cultures and political allegiances in third-century Syria’, JRS 61 (1971), pp. 1–17. 78 Itin. Burd. 549.7–551.2; see Chapter 8. 79 D. S. Wallace-Hadrill, Eusebius of Caesarea (1961), at 168ff.

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8 THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE OF THE BORDEAUX ITINERARY I I can still remember, many years ago, being informed by a very senior colleague of those times, that the wine region known as ‘Entre-deux-Mers’ is so called because it lies between two great seas, the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Despite my informant’s authoritative manner, this could not possibly have been true, for if it were it would have covered the entire wine-making country of south-western France. Supporting evidence for my disbelief also came from my then current interest in the social background and connections of Ausonius and his colleagues among the Gallic intelligentsia, which had given me some familiarity with the region. To put matters straight: Entre-deux-Mers is the region defined by the rivers Garonne and Dordogne, which meet just below Bordeaux to become the Gironde, are tidal and thus, as it were, inland extensions of the sea. This old conversation comes to mind because of the opening words of the subject of this chapter, the so-called Bordeaux Itinerary of the year 333, where the tides of the Garonne are said to ebb and flow inland for ‘a hundred leagues, more or less’.1 This is true enough, and the tidal surge of the Garonne, like the Severn ‘bore’ and that of the river Seine, is a sight to see, but it is a curiously inconsequential remark; what has it got to do with a return journey from Bordeaux to Jerusalem? Local readers would already know about the Atlantic tides of Bordeaux, and it is hard to see what interest they would have for any who were not local – unless, perhaps, they are an attempt to establish the perspective of the text in terms of the sheer remoteness of its starting-point from its subject-matter. This is a possibility worth considering, for the remark is a sturdy gesture in its assertion of a ‘non-Mediterranean’ cultural setting, one of a select number of texts that are evocative in this sense – Tacitus’ Agricola on the massive tides of northern Britain, or Cassius Dio’s vignette, based, so he claims, on personal experience, on the miserable culture of Pannonians. They are, he says, ‘the most violent of men, who make only a little poor wine and

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Chapter 8 drink a cheap beer made of barley, and in general have nothing to make life worth living’. There speaks the Greek senator from Nicaea, whose governorship of Pannonia under Alexander Severus is as surprising an appointment for one of his background, as is the reputation for harsh discipline that led the emperor to persuade Dio to celebrate his second consulship outside Rome, for fear of the anger of the praetorians. As for the beer-drinking, Dio’s remark is repeated in Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of the insults hurled down at the Pannonian emperor Valens by the defenders of the walls of Chalcedon in 365; they called him ‘Sabaiarius’ – sabaia being, as Ammianus (another Greek) explained, a sort of cheap beer drunk in Illyricum.2 One thinks too of the description of these northern regions given by the fourth-century Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium: Moesia and Dacia are provinces which support themselves, but suffer from extreme cold; they possess a great city called Naissus. Then comes Pannonia, a land rich in all resources, fruits, beasts and other forms of commerce, including slaves. This province is the regular abode of the emperors. It too possesses great cities, Sirmium and Noricum (sic)... So much for Pannonia. What lies over the Danube belongs to the race of the Sarmatians.3

We see in such texts a foggy, freezing, beer-drinking zone, all of these things, as it were ‘contra-indications’ of the sunny, temperate, winedrinking Mediterranean – not to mention the fact that after the tidal reach of ‘100 leagues, more or less’, the road distances from Bordeaux to Toulouse are given in leagues rather than miles.4 These locally inspired first gestures may encourage us to wonder about the author of the Bordeaux Itinerary as well as the text itself. What else might we learn from it? What sort of perspective does it offer on the society of his time? II To begin with the nature of the text, the Itinerary is an extended list of places and distances, setting out a traveller’s route from Bordeaux to Jerusalem and back, extrapolated, as it might be, from a universal itinerary such as the Antonine Itinerary, or whatever lists and itineraries lay behind the Peutinger Map (where the journey can indeed be followed).5 Different routes, outward and inward, are given from Milan to Constantinople, and locally from Caesarea to Jerusalem. The repeated parts of the journey are omitted, and the heading of the document reflects this; ‘From Bordeaux to Jerusalem and from Heraclea to Aulona and through the city of Rome

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary to Milan’.6 We do not need to look for a literary or tactical design in the omission of large parts of the return journey (from Caesarea to Heraclea via Constantinople and from Milan to Bordeaux); there was just no need to duplicate what could be read in reverse from what was there already.7 Modern guide-books will do the same. It is clear that the itinerary records an actual journey, one taken by a particular individual at a certain time; it is not just a route extrapolated from more general sources – like a route planner, say from New Haven to Toronto or from Staffordshire to Llandovery 8 – in case anyone might one day need to make it. The itinerary certainly could be used like this, and perhaps was so used later (hence its preservation); as a generic route that one could join at many points, a sort of trunk road with feeders from different places. This is supported by the fact that the itinerary lists all possible stopping places on the route, whether city (civitas), lodging-place (mansio), or way-station (mutatio), with distances between them. It gives all possible options on the chosen route – in fact with some obvious exceptions we have no way of telling in which of all the places mentioned the writer actually stayed. An informative parallel from the same period might be the travel memoranda of Theophanes of Hermopolis, whose journey plan, no doubt also extracted from a comprehensive gazetteer, lists only places where he actually stopped, with mileages between them and the journey stages numbered – so that a daily average can be worked out, based on places where we know him to have spent the night.9 The difference between the texts goes further than this, in that Theophanes’ memoranda are a record not only of his travel plans but of the expenditures undertaken on the journey. To appreciate the Bordeaux Itinerary more fully we must imagine it as enlivened by the sort of everyday details recorded by Theophanes in his memoranda – even to the extent of our being able sometimes to reconstruct possible lunch and dinner menus (one can only imagine the changes of diet entailed by a return journey from Bordeaux to Jerusalem extending over four seasons of the year!). Both texts leave us to imagine the actual conditions of travel, on two- or fourhorse passenger wagons, some equipped for sleeping, grinding their way at no more than a brisk walking pace from halt to halt along the endless Roman roads – in the case of the Itinerary through widely varying climates and landscapes in the different regions and seasons of the year.10 The itinerary is divided into sections ending, almost always, with a city or civitas, which will then be the starting place for the next section. Each section ends with a count of miles, mansiones and mutationes for that section, with cumulative totals, for the outward journey only, from Bordeaux to Constantinople and from Constantinople to Jerusalem. As we would

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Chapter 8 expect, the numbers can go wrong in all sorts of ways, but on the whole they can be reconciled with only minor corrections, and there are striking cases of accuracy where one might not expect it. For example, places, and there are many of them, located by milestone reference alone and called Ad Octavum, Ad Quintumdecimum, Ad Sextum Miliarem, and so on, are sometimes given with what appear to be incorrect mileages – but this is only if one sees them, as one instinctively does, in the direction of travel, for on further inspection they turn out to be measured back from the next place along the road. ‘Mutatio Tricesimum’, for example, the ‘thirtieth milestone’, is not 30 miles from Carcassonne, but is measured back from Narbonne in two stages of 15 miles.11 The text also absorbs the transition from leagues to miles in the opening section. The distance from Auch to Ad Sextum is given as 6 leagues (Ad Sextum being, one might say, the ‘sixth league-stone’), while that from Toulouse to the place called Ad Nonum is given as 9 miles (followed, 11 miles further along, by Ad Vicesimum).12 Despite this change of standard, as if from miles to kilometers, the totals for the section of the journey in which all these entries fall work out correctly, with a rating of the league as 1½ miles. In another example of what can go wrong, some totals may seem inaccurate until misplaced texts are put back where they belong. A case in point is the mansio at the Frigidus river beyond Aquileia, where the distance for the section in which it should fall was evidently calculated before the misplacement of the entry, and corrects itself as soon as this is restored to its proper place.13 As mentioned above, the text presents its lists of places under three categories of importance; civitates for cities, which are usually given in the nominative but sometimes in the locative case (it is not clear that this is at all significant); mansiones for lodging-houses, and mutationes for way-stations where a rest could be taken and draught-animals changed.14 The longest distance between any two adjacent locations is 24 miles, and there are only two other stages anything like this in length;15 the great majority fall in the region 8–12 miles, even 15 miles being a somewhat extended distance. There was obviously no need to stop for long in every single place listed, one had to allow for the unexpected, and a day’s journey might be made up of various combinations of stops and pauses, so long as evening came at a civitas or mansio, where accommodation was to be found. In the case of some of the smaller places, and especially in those named simply by a milestone number, one imagines that there was nothing much to see but a lodging or staging-post and whatever roadside settlement had grown up around it. A much-quoted description of such a place is given by Gregory of Nazianzus, who found himself unwillingly made its bishop:

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary a little station on a high road in Cappadocia, where the road divides three ways [it was a crossroads]; no water, no grass, no trace of liberal culture; an awful, nasty, narrow little village; everywhere dust and carts, weeping and shouting, guards and prisoners rattling their chains. The people are all foreigners and travellers... (De Vita Sua 439ff.).

This repellent backwater was Sasima, a place on the road through Anatolia which is named in the Itinerary; no place to be a bishop – and Sasima was a mansio, a metropolis of culture compared with some of those places denoted by an unadorned milestone number.16 Provincial boundaries are noted as they are crossed, sometimes with an extra detail to mark the circumstances – for example ‘you cross the bridge’ from Poetovio into Pannonia Inferior (in fact, an error for Superior)17 – and they never coincide with the end of a main section in the text; apparently one would not expect to spend the night at an actual provincial frontier. The provinces themselves are the authentic provinces of the later period – Dacia, found on the Roman side of the Danube, where it had migrated after Aurelian’s withdrawal from the Trajanic province; Europa and Rhodope, mentioned only on the return journey from Heraclea; the provinces south of Antioch correctly named Syria Coele and (Syria) Foenice.18 Useful as they are to the modern historian as evidence for exactly where they fell on the road taken by the traveller, we should not exaggerate the significance of these provincial boundaries in our reading of the text. It is of course true that they were part of what might be called a Roman conceptual landscape,19 but they were also places where one could expect a customs-post, which would have a practical impact on the journey. One such place, ‘mutatio Fines’, is named just after the boundary of Bithynia and Galatia (574.3–4). Place-names are distorted in various ways, but can usually be restored to their regular form without much difficulty (whether we should do this in restoring the transmitted text is a matter of editorial judgment not pursued here; it is not done in the printed texts in general use). There are interesting cases where some local feature, unmentioned by the author, is inherent in a place-name; for example, ‘mutatio Ad Iovem’ in the first section of the itinerary (551.1), and ‘mutatio Iovis pago’ in Upper Pannonia (565.2); ‘Dea Vocontiorum’ (‘goddess of the Vocontii’, the modern town of Die; 554.7); ‘mansio Ad Marte(m)’ at the summit of the Mont Genèvre pass (556.3); ‘mutatio Artemis’ in Bithynia (573.11). These are the sites of pagan shrines along the road (rather like an English town named after a medieval church or monastery), and we find other sorts of local colour in place-names, such as ‘mutatio Castra’ at the foot of the Julian Alps (560.2), ‘mansio Turribus’, ‘the Towers’, in the province of Dacia (566.8); ‘mutatio Cenaxen Palidem’

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Chapter 8 for a location by a lake near Ankara (575.3), ‘mutatio Pilas’ for Pylae, the Cilician Gates (578.5). Another touch of local colour might be the mutatio ‘ad Fornolos’, ‘the Kilns’, twenty-three miles east of Aquileia (560.1); one imagines it as covered by a pall of smoke from pottery manufacture or charcoal-burning. One wonders too whether it would disturb the traveller to pass through places named after pagan gods, any more than it would disturb him to name the days of the week; that is just what they were called. We might reflect on those refugees from the persecution of Diocletian who took refuge on the ‘mount of Bellona’ near Cirta – Bellona as the protectress of Christian fugitives, including one called Mars! 20 As the traveller approaches the Holy Land, the itinerary becomes more varied, as it is punctuated by Biblical allusions, beginning with Tarsus as the birthplace of St. Paul (579.4). These allusions become more frequent and more expansive as the traveller approaches Jerusalem, and in doing so they distort the formal itinerary within which they are framed. Written in a new and more continuous style, there is then a ‘subsidiary’ itinerary around Jerusalem, after which the formal itinerary reappears and takes us home to the west.

III The Bordeaux Itinerary is then a route chosen to get one from one place to another, with the information necessary to repeat it, if necessary with a different choice of stopping-places, but it is also a particular journey, an actual journey taken by an individual person (or persons). There ensues the question of timing, and of the traveller’s motivation. When did he (or she) make the journey, and why? The answer to the second of these questions is inherent in the main purpose of the text. As David Hunt remarked in his book on fourth- and fifth-century pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there is a practical, which is at the same time an ideological purpose.21 The journey authenticates by personal observation Biblical narratives that had taken place in regions far distant from Bordeaux and a long time ago, by offering a first-hand account of the setting of those events and their still extant traces. These range from buildings and monuments, to ephemera miraculously preserved, like the imprint of soldiers’ boots, or the sycamore tree ascended by Zacchaeus, a row of plane-trees planted by Jacob, the very palm-tree from which branches were torn for Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem (all from the Holy Land section at 588.7ff.). In such passages, we can almost hear the voices of the guides who imparted this precious information to the tourist, but this does

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary not mean that we should take it any the less seriously. What we might call this ‘authentication of place’ by eye-witness testimony was important from more than a tourist’s point of view, since Christianity made a special claim to be a historical religion, that is to say a religion based on events that had taken place at a particular time in particular places. The same question also bears upon the issue of the ‘annexation’ of the events of the Old Testament into a new framework of exegesis, of which Eusebius of Caesarea, who was still alive at the time of the Itinerary, gives the most telling testimony. It was from more than one point of view, that the ‘exclusively Biblical world’ evoked by David Hunt was also, for the traveller, a specifically historical world, in a way that was of great relevance to him. A distant though informative parallel might be that of a reader of the Aeneid discovering the ancient sites of primitive Rome in the context of the pax Augusta.22 In both cases we are looking at the construction of an ideology, to be taken very seriously by those for whom it was intended. The date of the journey is given in the heart of the text, in a manner we might not have expected, a consular dating, the traveller arriving at Constantinople shortly before 30 May 333 and returning there from the east on 26 December of the same year. It is an explicitly personal reference written in the first person – the only one in the text, but giving us a moment of time around which to build our understanding of the journey.23 Having arrived at Constantinople, the traveller writes: we set out (ambulavimus) from Chalcedon on the third day from the Kalends of June in the consulship of Dalmaticus (sc. Dalmatius) and Zenophilus, and returned to Constantinople on the seventh day from the Ides of January in the aforementioned consulship. From Constantinople you cross the Pontus [sc. the Propontis], come to Chalcedon and set foot in the province of Bithynia.24

As to the how long the entire journey took, we might assume the rough average of 25 miles per day suggested by the much shorter journey of Theophanes; Gaius in the Digest allows 20 miles a day for someone to reach a court of law from the time he learns that his presence is required there, but one would expect this to be a cautious estimate in the interests of the proper conduct of legal business (there were usually 60 days allowed after one had learned about it, to accept appointment as heir in someone’s will).25 On this assumption, the 2,217 miles from Bordeaux to Constantinople would take just under 3 months. The traveller must then have left Bordeaux at the beginning of March, crossing the Alps by the Mont Genèvre pass (556.1, ‘inde ascendis Matronam’) a month or 762 miles later, in early spring. Even if the pass were not closed for winter, it might be best to hold back this part of the journey until the most severe weather was past.

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Chapter 8 We do not know the length of the traveller’s stay at Constantinople, but it cannot have been very long if he returned there in late December; on the rate of progress suggested so far, the return journey from Constantinople to Jerusalem would take just over 90 days (1,164 miles in each direction), leaving three months, or a little more, for the Holy Land itself. It is likely that the journey times were tighter than this, to allow for delays and the occasional day without travel,26 and it may be too that 25 miles a day is a high average for the entire journey, but there would still be two months or more for the visit to Jerusalem and its environs. The choice of a different itinerary on the return journey, by the more southerly route of the via Egnatia and a sea crossing to Otranto, might be connected with the arrival of winter in that frozen north whose rigours were evoked earlier. If the traveller got home in the same time as the outward journey, arriving at Bordeaux at the end of March 334, then the whole journey took thirteen months: but it may well have taken longer. The journey is entirely by land, apart from the ferry passage from Constantinople into Asia and the 100-mile crossing of the Adriatic Sea on the return journey – a choice of itinerary which goes against one sort of wisdom in praise of the conveniences and speed of sea transport.27 Travel by land was laborious, certainly, but what was the choice, especially if it involved not a single person but a group of travellers? Sea travel was not regularly scheduled as on a timetable, the journey would need building up in stages from port to port with new arrangements always needing to be made, ships to be found going in the right direction. Progress might be more rapid once at sea but it was also more hazardous, there were always unexpected delays, and a journey of this length would at some point encounter the closed season for sea travel.28 Even the much shorter journey of Theophanes from Egypt to Antioch was made by land rather than by sea along the Levantine coast; to those who express surprise that this was so, the best answer is that he was the best judge of it. An exception may prove the rule. In 417 the poet Rutilius Namatianus, needing to return from Rome to southern Gaul as a matter of political urgency, chose to travel by sea, but felt that he should explain the reasons for this; road communications were disrupted after the Gothic occupations of Italy, bridges were broken, lodging-houses had closed down. So Rutilius accepted the risks – and his poem De Reditu Suo makes it clear that there were such – attending a sea journey in the closed season.29 As has often been noted, the Itinerary of Bordeaux shows the infrastructure of land travel at a time when it was well maintained. The journey is overlaid onto the cursus publicus, though there is no reason to assume that our traveller had access to this.30

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary IV Apart from an inferred origin in Gaul, the identity of the traveller, even the question of his or her gender, evades a real answer.31 Nor, after his (or her) idiosyncratic beginning with the tides of the Garonne and measurement by leagues, does the writer offer any obvious connection with an intended readership. This is in contrast with a later pilgrim, Egeria, as she writes to her ‘sisters’ in the far west, promising to return home to them, and comparing the river Euphrates to the Rhone for its size and the speed of its current.32 It is only occasionally that the traveller’s observations rise to the personal level, even to the faintly colourful, as in the use of the second person singular to associate an imagined reader with the journey, or to convey a personal impression of it.33 The text mentions from time to time geographical features and interesting places, as in the rising (‘surgunt’) of the Julian Alps, nicely evoking the appearance of the Alpine ranges before the traveller (560.3); the climbing (‘ascendis’) of the Mont Genèvre pass (556.1); the crossing of the bridge (‘transis’) at Poetovio from Noricum to Pannonia (561.5–6) and of the (Pro)pontis from Constantinople to Chalcedon (571.9). There are references to the ‘palace’ of Daphne near Antioch (581.7), the only time in the main itinerary in which that word is used (it occurs in the Holy Land digression); to the ‘villa Pammatii’ in Cappadocia, where the famous coach-horses were raised (577.6); to the city of Antaradus lying two miles offshore, the mansio being on the mainland (582.10–11); in the more discursive Holy Land section, to the strange waters of the Dead Sea, which has no fish or boats and will tip onto their back anyone who tries to swim in it (597.9–10). We find a small number of allusions to historical events and persons, but they are a strange mixture, with no obvious principle of selection. To take them in order, on the outward journey the writer mentions the civitas of Viminacium, ‘where Diocletian killed Carinus’ (564.9); Libyssa, the burial place of king Hannibalianus (!) ‘of the Africans’ – perhaps added, given the confusion in his name, to distinguish him from the currently active nephew of Constantine (572.4–5); 34 Tyana, the birthplace of the magician Apollonius (578.1); on the return journey, ‘Peripidis’ (sc. ‘Euripidis’), the burial place of Euripides (604.7), and Pella (‘civitas Polli’), the birthplace of Alexander the Macedonian (606.1–2).35 It is an oddly fragmented awareness of a journey along ancient historical routes of the Roman empire and Hellenistic world before it, places of interest being visible on all sides; on such a journey, is this really all there was to say?

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Chapter 8 As we approach the Holy Land, however, the writer gets into his stride and Biblical references begin to appear with increasing frequency; Tarsus as the birthplace of St. Paul (579.4), and, at ‘Caesarea in Palestine, that is Judaea’, the bath of Cornelius the centurion, ‘who performed many acts of charity’.36 This, at last, is what he came for. In this stage of the journey, from the time that the traveller reaches Caesarea and the Holy Land, we find a mixture of Old and New Testament sites, also a change in the character of the text, as the bare list of places and distances shifts into a more discursive mode, something like a descriptive travelogue in a Biblical landscape, resembling, say, the Classical periplous tradition of travel writing rather than a formal itinerary.37 The change of tone is marked after Scythopolis. From there the traveller reached the village of Aser, ‘where was the house of Job’; this was at sixteen miles – and a sixteenth milestone has actually been found at the place, which the Itinerary mentions neither as a mansio nor a mutatio.38 Then to the city of Neapolis (Nablus) at a further fifteen miles: Here is Mount Gerizim where, according to the Samaritans, Abraham offered his sacrifice. There are 1,300 steps leading to the top of the mountain.39 Nearby, at the foot of the mountain, is the place called Schechem, which is the site of the tomb in which Joseph is buried, in the estate given him by his father Jacob. That too was where Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, was seized by the sons of the Amorites (587.1ff.).40

The succeeding pages on the Holy Land form the climax of the text; having guided us to the Holy Land from place to place along the Roman roads, the traveller will now show it to us. It was after all the purpose of the journey. It is however striking that, even in this more ‘exegetical’ section, the writer does not lose touch with the formal nature of an itinerary. After a full page of more digressive writing, at the point of reaching Jerusalem (589.4–6), he interrupts what is a now continuous narrative by giving the total of miles, lodgings and staging-posts from Caesarea to Jerusalem, and at the end of the excursus he abruptly makes the switch back to the itinerary form, with an alternative route back to Caesarea by Nicopolis, Lydda, Antipatris and Betthar (600.1–6). A formal account of the tripartite nature of the text (itinerary–exegesis–itinerary) may not give us a complete explanation of the author’s intention, but it well describes what has happened to the text.41 Its exegetical section is contained within the structure of an itinerary. As to the Holy Land itself, the writer builds his narrative upon a subsidiary series of excursions in and around Jerusalem – still giving distances between points of interest, even if they are very short, like 1,500 paces (596.6–7) or, on one occasion, a ‘stone’s throw’ (595.2). This section has what are presented as personal touches, indicated by direct appeals to

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary the reader couched in the second person singular; ‘you would think that the blood of Zacharias had just been shed; all around you can see the marks of the hobnails of the soldiers who killed him’…‘you can see the place where once the house of Caiaphas used to stand’…‘you can see where David had his palace’, and so on.42 The Holy Land visit falls into five sections, the first and longest covering Jerusalem itself, including Mount Sion, and sites in the city on the road to the Neapolis gate; Pilate’s praetorium and the site of the Holy Sepulchre (589.7–594.4). The second section is an excursion by the eastern gate, on the road to the Mount of Olives via Gethsemane, and to the Mount of Olives itself – all with their array of Biblical allusions and, still, the slight distances covered to get there (594.5–596.3). The third section is the road to Jericho (18 miles), the site of Jericho itself, where nothing is to be seen except the place where the Children of Israel set down the Ark of the Covenant and the twelve stones they brought from the river Jordan, the Dead Sea (nine miles, with the comment mentioned earlier on the strange nature of its water) and, at five miles, the Jordan itself, where, in a spectacular displacement of its correct location in Galilee, Jesus is said to have been baptized, and, near the river, Elijah taken into heaven (596.4–598.3).43 There is next the short journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem (four miles) (598.4–9), and after this the 14 miles to Bethasora (599.1–2), and then (the fifth and final section) on to the terebinth tree at 9 miles, where Abraham conversed with angels and took food, and Hebron (2 miles) (599.3–9). Here the visit comes to an end with the tomb of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah, and the text abruptly reverts to its original form with a return itinerary from Jerusalem via Nicopolis, Lydda and Antipatris, to Caesarea (600.1–6). This part of the route, continuing to Antioch, coincides with that taken by Theophanes a few years earlier.44 Details of the return journey from Caesarea through Constantinople to Heraclea are not given, and there was no need for them to be since it is the outward journey in exact reverse. At Heraclea the itinerary picks up an alternative route back to the west, going by the Via Egnatia through Philippi, where – in its last Biblical allusion – Paul and Silas were imprisoned (604.1), to Apollonia and Aulona, over the Adriatic to Otranto, then by road to Rome and Milan. It is hard to see, either why this alternative itinerary should be seen as a way of ‘avoid[ing] mentioning the return to Constantinople’, or why it should diverge from the outward journey ‘so as to go to Rome’.45 No special purpose attaches to the traveller’s visit to either city; they are just part of the itinerary. Again, the

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Chapter 8 last part of the journey from Milan to Bordeaux is left to be understood from the outward itinerary; its absence from the text does not imply in any way that the traveller did not return to Bordeaux.

V We have no right to expect the writer of such a document to respond as we ourselves would to the landscape through which he passed. He neither shares nor can have anticipated our interest in travel and geography in their own right; indeed, if asked he might well have said that such a journey was arduous enough without the additional burden of curiosity. This is no Herodotean tourist interested in everything seen or heard, nor a Victorian man of letters travelling hopefully, but someone with a specific aim and destination; nothing mattered as much as getting there and seeing what he had come to see. Nor was the purpose of the Itinerary to record such personal details as can make Theophanes so sympathetic a character, as when he mentioned a birthday offering for his daughter, a silver statue of the emperors dedicated at a temple, tickets for the theatre at Ascalon, or the purchase of snow-water at Byblos – not to forget that Theophanes too was travelling for a purpose; these things are mentioned because Theophanes recorded payment for them, not because he wanted to put his personal life on record.46 If we may make the distinction, the route taken by the Bordeaux traveller was for the most part not a tourist but a business route, incorporating some of the most strategically and economically important roads of the Roman empire. These were not the heartlands of Graeco-Roman culture, and this was not the road to the Valley of the Kings. The traveller may happen to have mentioned the burial place of Euripides or the birthplace of Alexander the Great, either because he stayed in these places and could not avoid learning about them from the locals, or because they had already occurred in a source used in compiling the Itinerary, but in doing so he made no further claims on our expectation. Nevertheless, some things do strike the eye, and I close with them as I ask what importance the writer of the Itinerary may have for the understanding of the times in which he lived. First and most important, the traveller mentioned the emperor Constantine no less than four times, but with always the same thing to say; for his building of basilicas, all of which he must have seen, in the Holy Land.47 Of these four basilicas, one was at the site of the Holy Sepulchre, a recently built (‘modo’) basilica – glossed as ‘dominicum’, ‘Lord’s house’, for readers not yet familiar with the Greek word – with cisterns from which

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary water is drawn, and a font in which infants are baptized; 48 one was on the Mount of Olives, at the place where Jesus taught the disciples before the Passion; another was at Bethlehem, at the site of the Nativity; and the fourth was a ‘most beautiful basilica’ at the terebinth tree, where Abraham spoke with angels. These references connect in a very obvious way with Constantine’s letters to Eusebius of Caesarea about church-building in the Holy Land, adding the date of his journey to the information that we have from Eusebius; the four basilicas were already there by 333, less than nine years after Constantine’s conquest of the east from Licinius. It is very fast work on the emperor’s part.49 If Constantine is noted as a builder in the Holy Land, he was also this, par excellence and in these same years, at Rome, where the traveller passed on the return journey, without making any comment. Rome is simply a stage on the journey, just like any other city punctuating a main stage of it, even though the impact of Constantine – triumphal arch, colossal statues, churches – was extremely visible there. Rome is, however, described as a ‘city’, urbs, the only place in the document of which this word is used.50 Every other city, without differentiation of status, is a civitas, and this is interesting when one considers Constantinople. The traveller passed twice through Constantine’s new city, in May and December 333, three years since the consecration of the city with the ceremonies described by the Chronicon Paschale, and on the outward journey, just three weeks after the third birthday celebrations.51 Not only this, but the emperor was in residence there, at least until 5 May and presumably for the birthday of the city six days later. For this and other reasons, the place must have been a hive of activity.52 We could imagine the traveller entering the city on the new road from Heraclea and Selymbria by way of Rhegion (this is the first evidence for it),53 and ask what there was for him to see. We know that when he died in 337 Constantine had not yet finished his city walls,54 but we might suppose that its main gate, the original Golden Gate, already stood there. Coming from Rhegion, the traveller must have passed through it. On the summit of what was later known as the fourth hill, some way off to the left, Constantine’s mausoleum was under construction, but it was not until much later that it became a church of the Apostles, and so it had not yet this interest to a traveller.55 A little closer, but outside the line of the Constantinian city wall, was the martyr-church of that shadowy saint, Mocius, again, perhaps, not enough to demand a traveller’s attention, even if we knew how far that construction had got.56 Continuing into the city, the traveller finds himself on the Mesé, the great ‘Central Avenue’ of the Constantinian city, but has quite some distance to go, past the future locations of the forums of Arcadius and

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Chapter 8 Theodosius, before he comes to the new forum and column of Constantine. Beyond this were the double colonnades inherited from the Severan city, and then the Augusteum (the Severan Tetrastoon), the baths of Zeuxippus and the hippodrome (inaugurated on the same day in 330)57 and the imperial palace; there would be no missing any of this. There is no trace yet of the ‘Great Church’ of S. Sophia, which was not dedicated until 360. If it was begun, as the Chronicon Paschale suggests, in 326 (just after the council of Nicaea), the Great Church was in 333 just a building site; it is notable as an expression of his priorities (and perhaps of the intended character of the new city), that Constantine could build much more quickly than this, and did so at Rome and in the Holy Land.58 We would expect the traveller to have stayed a day or two at Constantinople, but he takes the ferry to Chalcedon (leaving from what was later known as the ‘scala Chalcedonensis’),59 without saying anything about it. If there is no trace of Constantinople as the specifically Christian city conjured up by some modern scholars, perhaps that is because so far there was little in this line to see. After reading Gilbert Dagron and Cyril Mango that is perhaps not so surprising – on the evidence of his church-building at least, it is Rome rather than Constantinople that is Constantine’s Christian city 60 – but equally interesting is the writer’s indifference to the idea of Constantinople as a ‘new Rome’. This idea was in currency by 333, but the writer was not even moved to add such an expression as ‘quae et nova Roma’ to one of his references to Constantinople. It is true that from a formal point of view Constantinople has an important place in the text. It occurs at its centre, punctuating the journey in both directions, it is the context of the formal consular dating to 333, and it is the point of transition between west and east (though the writer somewhat spoils the effect of this by writing ‘Pontus’, the Black Sea, for ‘Propontis’, the Sea of Marmara at its northern inlet from the Bosphorus). Yet in giving this sort of emphasis to Constantinople, the author reproduces the thinking that had made of Byzantium Constantine’s new capital. Its importance in the Itinerary reflects its actual role in the journey undertaken by the traveller, without expressing any larger ideological dimensions, whether Christian or imperial. These are more conspicuous by their absence.61

VI Much has been made of this interesting text as a document of the Christian Roman empire established by Constantine. It presents us, in the words of Jas´ Elsner, with an ‘image of the Roman Empire as a series of roads, cities

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary and other stopping points, provinces and capitals, which expresses – through its structure – the new Constantinian dispensation’.62 This seems unexceptionable, but my question is a different one, in whose eyes, and with what effect, this ‘new dispensation’ is portrayed; for what seems just as remarkable about the text is the extent to which this larger conclusion is not inherent in it. It is not that the writer tries and fails to present such an image, nor even that he presents it unconsciously or without intention, but it seems simply not to be there at all. In fact, we are given a remarkably unintegrated view of the ideological importance of the Holy Land in relation to the Roman empire at large. In the entire text are named just three emperors (unless we count ‘Hannibalianus king of the Africans’ as a clarification to distinguish the famous Hannibal from the nephew of Constantine); Diocletian – the persecutor of the Christians! – for his defeat of Carinus, Hadrian for his two statues at Jerusalem, near the ‘pierced stone’, where the Jews came every year to anoint the stone, lament and tear their clothing; and Constantine, on the four occasions mentioned above, for his church building in the Holy Land. There is no hint of any broader interest in Constantine, even though Gaul, presuming that to be the origin of the writer, was the region that delivered him as emperor to the Roman world. We need think only of those Gallic orators at Autun and Trier, one of whom gives the first glimpse of the religious trajectory of the new emperor, not to mention Ausonius’ poem about the ‘professor of Bordeaux’ who went to teach at the new capital city.63 The traveller journeyed through Naissus, that ‘great city’ of the Expositio Totius Mundi cited at the beginning of this chapter; it was not only a very important city but Constantine’s birthplace, which, in the words of another source, the emperor ‘adorned magnificently’, surely already by 333 64 – but not a word about it; was Constantine less important to him than Alexander? The traveller left Rome along the via Flaminia and over the Milvian Bridge without so much as a nod towards Constantine’s victory there, which had changed the world in which he lived, just as he had passed through Nicaea without a word on the recent council of bishops, attended by Constantine. The city of Constantinople is just a civitas among all the others. Despite what looks like a catalogue of missed opportunities, we cannot insist that the writer had an obligation to mention these matters, or any other particular issue that might interest us. However, in not doing so he resists the positive claim that he had produced an integrated conception of the Christian culture of Constantine’s empire. For him, the Christian emperor was the centre of a very specific set of preoccupations, mentioned only because of his building in the Holy Land and given no broader context. It is true that in unifying east and west after the defeat of Licinius,

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Chapter 8 Constantine had done much to facilitate the journey undertaken by the traveller, and perhaps created a certain need for it, as a newly-protected Christian church in the west contemplated its eastern inheritance, but this is as far as it goes. Far from ‘envisioning a Christian empire’, in Jas´ Elsner’s words, it seems to me that the writer just accepts what Constantine had done, as if done for him personally with his interests, and expresses no larger conception. I suspect that such ‘tunnel vision’ was not uncommon among the beneficiaries of Constantine’s ‘Roman Revolution’; they liked what they saw, took what it offered, and saw no need to pursue its implications too deeply. Notes 1 549.7–9, ‘civitas Burdigala, ubi est fluvius Garonna, per quem facit Mare Oceanum accessa et recessa per leugas plus minus centum’ (1 league = 1½ miles). 2 Tacitus, Agricola 10, esp. 10.6 on the tides of western Scotland; on Pannonians, Cassius Dio 49.36.4, cf. Amm. Marc. 26.8.2. Dio and the praetorians; 80.4.1–5.2. Given the fates of the jurists Papinian and Ulpian, both victims of the praetorians at different times, the emperor’s fears were not groundless. 3 Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium 67 (ed. J. Rougé, SChr 124, 1966). These districts and places were among those seen by the traveller on his outward journey. 4 In the Antonine Itinerary distances in central and northern (not for western) Gaul are sometimes given in m(ilia) p(assuum) with an equivalent in leagues, cf. Cuntz, Itineraria (next n.) 359.1–363.2 (Lyon to Boulogne), cf. 365.9–366.4 (Reims to Trier, leagues only). 5 P. Geyer, CSEL 39 (1898), pp. 3–33; O. Cuntz, Itineraria Romana I (1929), pp. 86–102; CCL 175 (1965), I, pp. 1–26 (indexes at II, pp. 549–585). Among modern studies of the Itinerary, L. Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (1974), pp. 307–10, 314f. and O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps (1985), Ch. VIII, ‘Road maps and land itineraries’, are still most worthy of attention, and among more recent studies, esp. Jas´ Elsner, ‘The Itinerarium Burdigalense: politics and salvation in the geography of Constantine’s empire’, JRS 90 (2000), pp. 181–95 (with full bibliography and summary of the scholarship); Benet Salway, ‘Travel, itineraria and tabellaria’, in Colin Adams and Ray Laurence (edd.), Travel and Geography in the Roman Empire (2001), pp. 22–64; see pp. 34–6, 38f., etc. 6 ‘Itinerarium a Burdigala Hierusalem usque [the outward journey] et ab Heraclea per Aulonam et per urbem Romam Mediolanum usque [the return journey]’ (549.1–5). It was at Heraclea (ancient Perinthus, west of Constantinople) that the outward and return journeys diverge. 7 Elsner, p. 183; ‘These omissions of what would otherwise be repetitions give a sense of economy and taut organisation to the text’. I would see this as a consequence of a practical choice. 8 I take this example in honour of the publishers of this collection of papers, and of my old friend Wynne Williams, who had occasion to drive frequently from Keele University to Llandovery but hated roundabouts, and discovered a route between these places that did not have any.

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary 9

The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, business and daily life in the Roman East (2006), pp. 56–61 and Ch. 4. 10 Casson, Travel in the Ancient World, pp. 178–82; The Journey of Theophanes, p. 67. 11 551.9–552.2, ‘(castellum Carcassone) – mutatio Tricesimum, milia XV– civitas Narbone, milia XV’. 12 550.8–9, ‘(civitas Auscius) – mutatio Ad Sextum, leugae VI’; 551.2–4, ‘(civitas Tolosa) – mutatio Ad Nonum, milia VIIII – mutatio Ad Vicesimum, milia XI [20 miles altogether, measured from Toulouse]’. Cf. 612.3, ‘ad Nonum’, measured back from Rome. 13 557.10–11 ‘civitas Mediolanum – [mansio Fluvio Frigido, milia XII]’; 557.11 belongs after 560.1. 14 Exceptions, at one occurrence each, are vicus (Hebromagus, 551.7), castellum (Carcassonne, 551.9) and palatium (Daphne, 581.7), and of course urbs for Rome (see below). 15 615.5, Pisaurum to Ariminum (with some doubt as to the text). There is one distance of 22 miles (600.2, Jerusalem to Nicopolis), one of 19 miles (607.2, Parembole to Brucida), and several of 18 miles. 16 A telling comparison is Orcistus in Phrygia, which in the time of Constantine reclaimed urban status and independence of its neighbour Nacolia. In support of its claim it cited a flourishing population, magistrates and town council, its location at a crossroads leading to major settlements (Pessinus, Midaeum, Amorium) and its possession of a convenient mansio, excellent water supplies, and public and private baths filled with the statues of former emperors; Bruns FIRA 7 No. 25 (pp. 160–4), with the updated text in MAMA 7.305. 17 561.3–6 ‘(mutatio Pultovia) – civitas Poetovione, milia XII; transis pontem, intras Pannoniam Inferiorem [sc. Superiorem]’. 18 A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, III, pp. 381–91 and maps. It is by a misunderstanding that Elsner, p. 188, calls 585.3 (‘fines Syriae Finicis et Palestinae’) a ‘triple boundary’; it is the single boundary between the province fully called (Syria) Foenice, and Palestine (cf. 582.8). 19 Cf. Elsner, pp. 187–8. Elsner speaks of an ‘acute’ awareness of provincial boundaries, but this is to overstate the case. The text places them where they belonged, and this information had a practical relevance for the journey. 20 Optatus of Milevis, Appendix 1 (‘Gesta apud Zenofilum’), §2; CSEL 26, p. 186. 21 E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460 (1982) pp. 55–8, 83–5. 22 At Aeneid 8.306ff. Evander gives Aeneas a tour of the future site of Rome, picking out points of interest. The contemporary reader would recognize landmarks of Augustan Rome. 23 See below for the significance of Constantinople in the text of the Itinerary. 24 571.6–10, ‘item ambulavimus Dalmatico (sc. Dalmatio) et Zenophilo cons. III kal. Iun. a Calcedonia [sic] et reversi sumus Constantinopolim VII kal. Ian. cons. suprascripto [sic ]. A Constantinopoli transis Pontum (sc. Propontidem), venis Calcedoniam, ambulas provinciam Bithyniam’. 25 The Journey of Theophanes, pp. 49f., 56–61 (Gaius is cited at p. 49 n. 13); see Chap. 6 above.

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Chapter 8 26

On his outward journey Theophanes seems to have spent an extra day at Ascalon; The Journey of Theophanes, p. 60. 27 See the collection of material in R. Duncan-Jones, Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (1990), Chap. 1. 28 An idea of the possibilities is given by the list of maritime routes in Diocletian’s Prices Edict, in the edition of Marta Giacchero, Edictum Diocletiani et Collegarum de pretiis rerum venalium (1974), pp. 220–7; cf. the maritime sections of the Antonine Itinerary (ed. Cuntz, pp. 76–85), with categories of shelter (‘positio’, ‘portus’, ‘fluvius’, ‘plagia’) available in different places. On the chronology suggested here the crossing from Aulona to Otranto took place in the closed season, but that is different from an entire journey undertaken by sea. 29 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 325–8. 30 Salway (above, n. 5), p. 35. The cursus publicus provided the infrastructure of the system, whether or not one had the authority to use it. 31 L. Douglass, ‘A new look at the Itinerarium Burdigalense’, JECS 4 (1996), pp. 313–333, and S. Weingarten, ‘Was the pilgrim from Bordeaux a woman? A reply to Laurie Douglass’, JECS 7 (1999), pp. 291–7. 32 Itin. Eger. 18.2, ‘quasi terribilis est; ita enim decurrit habens impetum, sicut habet fluvius Rhodanus, nisi quod adhuc maior est Eufrates’; to her ‘sisters’, 23.10, ‘de quo loco [sc. Constantinople], domnae, lumen meum, cum haec ad vestram affectionem darem’, etc. 33 See Elsner, p. 195, on the use of the second person address. It can be quite neutral, as sometimes in the Antonine Itinerary (ed. Cuntz, 487.4, 493.5). 34 The timing is not quite right; Hannibalianus was appointed ‘rex regum et Ponticarum gentium’ only in 335 (PLRE I, p. 407, s. Hannibalianus 2). Since he and his brother Dalmatius had earlier been taught at Narbonne by the rhetorician Exsuperius of Toulouse (Ausonius, Prof. Burd. 17.8–13), it is conceivable that the writer of the Itinerary had some previous knowledge of him. He could have avoided confusion by presenting the name of Hannibal correctly. 35 Elsner, p. 186, adduces similar types of entry in the Antonine Itinerary, but they are exclusively mythological and only occur in particular maritime sections of the Itinerary. 36 585.7–8, ‘ibi est balneus Cornelii centurionis, qui multas elemosynas faciebat’. A tempting correction would be ‘balteus’ (‘belt’), except that the house of Cornelius (not the bath) is mentioned at Jerome, Ep. 108.8. For the meanings of ‘balneus’ and other words relating to baptism, see Elsner, pp. 193f. (cf. n. 48 below). 37 Elsner, pp. 190–4 gives relevant comparisons. The Holy Land section of the Itinerary is translated by J. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (1971), at pp. 153–63. 38 585.4–8, ‘civitas Caesarea Palestina id est Iudaea, milia VIII…ibi balneus Cornelii centurionis’, etc.; 586.4–587.1, ‘civitas Isdradela [sc. Stradela], milia X. ibi sedit Achab rex, et Helias prophetavit; ibi est campus, ubi David Goliat occidit – civitas Scithopoli, milia XII – Aser, ubi fuit villa Iob, milia XVI’. For the milestone, Wilkinson, p. 154. 39 The steps led to the temple of Jupiter built by Hadrian and are shown on coins of the city; Wilkinson, p. 154. 40 587.2–5, ‘civitas Neapoli, milia XV. ibi est mons Agazaren; ibi dicunt Samaritani Abraham sacrificium obtulisse, et ascenduntur usque ad summum montem gradi [sc. gradus] numero MCCC. inde ad pedem montis ipsius’, etc.

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The cultural landscape of the Bordeaux Itinerary 41

C. Milani, ‘Strutture formulari nell’ “Itinerarium Burdigalense” (a. 333)’, Aevum 17 (1983), pp. 99–108. 42 591.1ff., ‘in aede ipsa, ubi templum fuit, quam Salomon aedificavit, in marmore ante aram sanguinem Zachariae ibi dicas hodie fusum; etiam parent vestigia clavorum militum, qui eum occiderunt, per totam aream, ut putes in cera fixum esse. Sunt et ibi statuae duae Hadriani’, etc. See on the second-person usage Elsner, p. 195. 43 597.2ff., ‘Ibi fuit civitas Hiericho, cuius muros gyraverunt cum arca testamenti filii Israel et ceciderunt muri. Ex eo non paret nisi locus, ubi fuit arca testamenti et lapides XII, quos filii Israel de Iordane levaverunt… Inde ad Iordane, ubi Dominus a Iohanne baptizatus est, milia quinque’. 44 The Journey of Theophanes, pp. 68–70. 45 Elsner, pp. 183–4. 46 The Journey of Theophanes, pp. 60, 125–6. 47 594.2–4, ‘ibidem (sc. at Golgotha) modo iussu Constantini imperatoris basilica facta est, id est dominicum, mirae pulchritudinis habens ad latus exceptoria, unde aqua levatur, et balneum a tergo, ubi infantes lavantur’; 595.4–6, ‘inde ascendis in montem Oliveti, ubi dominus apostolos docuit; ibi facta est basilica iussu Constantini’; 598.5–7, ‘inde milia duo a parte sinistra est Bethleem, ubi natus est Iesus Christus; ibi basilica facta est iussu Constantini’; 599.3–6, ‘inde Terebintho milia VIIII, ubi Abraham habitavit et puteum fodit sub arbore terebintho et cum angelis locutus est et cibum sumpsit; ibi basilica facta est iussu Constantini mirae pulchritudinis’. 48 See Elsner, p. 193f. on these aspects of vocabulary, where the text does not use the technical language, for example for baptism, that became familiar later. 49 Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.25ff.; T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, pp. 248–9. 50 612.4, ‘in urbe Roma’, cf. 612.5, ‘a Capua usque ad urbem Romam’, and 10, ‘ab urbe Mediolanium’, etc. 51 Translated with commentary by Michael and Mary Whitby, Chronicon Paschale 284–628 AD (1989), pp. 17–19. 52 T. D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine, p. 79. Benet Salway (n. 5 above), p. 36, suggests that the traveller went from Gaul to Constantinople on official business, using the cursus publicus, and was able to extend his permit to visit the Holy Land. This is an interesting speculation but it goes beyond anything inherent in the text. 53 Cyril Mango, ‘Le mystère de la XIVe région de Constantinople’, Mélanges Gilbert Dagron (Travaux et Mémoires 14, 2002), pp. 449–55, at 453. 54 Nick Henck, ‘Constantius ὁ Φιλοκτίστης ’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001), pp. 279–304, at 286. 55 Mango, ‘Constantine’s mausoleum and the translation of relics’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 (1990), pp. 51–62 [= Studies on Constantinople (1993), Chapter 5]. The traveller would on the return journey see Galerius’ analogous monument at Thessalonica (605.4) and, leaving Rome, the ancient mausoleum of Augustus. 56 G. Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451 (1974), pp. 388–409. 57 On the original birthday of the city, 11 May; Chron. Pasch., translated Whitby and Whitby, p. 17. 58 According to Chron. Pasch. s.a. 360 (Whitby and Whitby, p. 35), the foundations

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Chapter 8 were laid 34 years earlier. Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale, pp. 397–401, suggests a confusion with the foundation of the city itself. 59 Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae, Regio V.19 (ed. Seeck, p. 234). 60 C Mango, Le développement urbain de Constantinople (IVe-VIIe siècles) (Travaux et Mémoires du Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et de Civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 2, 1985), p. 35. 61 It is strange that Elsner, p. 194, should describe pre-Constantinian Byzantium as ‘an obscure provincial village in the middle of nowhere’. R. Krautheimer’s ‘small Greek town’ (Three Christian Capitals; Topography and politics (1983), p. 42) is still inadequate for what had for long been a very important city. For a corrective see Sarah Bassett’s excellent The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (2004), and of course Cyril Mango’s Développement urbain de Constantinople. 62 Elsner, at p. 194. 63 Panegyrici Latini 6 (7 Galletier), §21, with translation and commentary in C. E. V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors; the Panegyrici Latini (1994), pp. 248–51, Ausonius, Prof. Burd. 16.13–16 (Aemilius Magnus Arborius); above, n. 34. 64 Anonymus Valesianus 1.2, ‘quod oppidum postea magnifice ornavit’.

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9 AMMIANUS AND THE ETERNITY OF ROME I It is a constantly intriguing paradox, that the last great Latin historian of Rome was a Greek from Syrian Antioch, and the last great Latin poet a Greek from Egyptian Alexandria. In the case of Ammianus Marcellinus, the meaning of the paradox is clearer in its general than in its particular aspects, for the exact circumstances in which it came about are not known to us – neither when Ammianus went to Rome to complete his history (except that he was there during the later 380s), nor precisely why he went there, nor by what route he travelled. What we do know, from crossreferences within the history, is that he was still composing, able at least to make some quite substantial insertions, as late as 390, but apparently not (on the evidence) later than this; 1 and, from a letter of Libanius written to him late in 392 but referring to a slightly earlier time, that he gave recitations from his history to an audience at Rome, some of whose members took news of them back to Libanius at Antioch.2 This letter of Libanius, praising his distinguished compatriot, is the only external reference we possess to Ammianus, the rest of whose life and attitudes must be inferred solely from his own text: and this is incomplete. Of 31 original books, running from the principate of Nerva to the battle of Hadrianople in August 378 and its immediate aftermath, the first thirteen books are lost, together of course with the preface in which he may have explained his overall design and purpose.3 The surviving books (14–31) cover in considerable but sometimes uneven detail, and with an occasionally capricious emphasis on the historian’s own experiences, the 25 years 353–378. Despite, or rather as part of, their capriciousness, these books are among the most revealing of late Roman sources. There is no important issue on which they do not have something to say; it is hard to think of any other ancient writer who surpasses Ammianus’ powers of observation and his ability to convey a visual image and penetrate character in a few telling words – even if, as Arnaldo Momigliano remarked, he is less adept at defining a situation.4 He is a fascinating and disconcerting guide to the society that he knew; but he still has not told us why he came to Rome.

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Chapter 9 We may however draw natural inferences from what we know of Ammianus’ background and the cultural milieu in which he grew up. To assert briefly what perhaps does not require exhaustive proof, I believe that the Latin language was more integral to the formation of this Greek than we might at first imagine.5 Antioch was in the fourth century a frequent imperial residence, and at all times an important centre of administration, military and civil. It would undoubtedly have been affected, more so than other cities, by the extended franchise of the Latin language in the fourth-century east. This had come about as a legacy of the enlarged and vastly more assertive governmental establishment of the Tetrarchs and their successors, in which Latin was the language in normal administrative use, with all the consequences that this implies for its wider diffusion; think for example of the appointment of the African Latinist Lactantius as professor of rhetoric at Nicomedia, the court capital of Diocletian. If it is right to attribute Ammianus’ early promotion as protector domesticus to paternal influence – a family friendship, perhaps, with the general Ursicinus, on whose staff Ammianus served from about 350 for ten years – then the Latin language will have impinged early on Ammianus’ upbringing. I suspect that, from wherever the family actually originated, he knew it from childhood, as a member of a family connected with the imperial army or administration. Further, Ammianus travelled widely in active service, to Roman Mesopotamia, north Italy, Gaul, the Danubian lands, the Tigris frontier, and under Julian to the Persian capital of Ctesiphon, from where he escaped to Roman territory after the death of Julian, in the embattled retreat that he described with such vivid authenticity: then, after his retirement from active service, to Egypt, Thrace, the Pontic region, and the southern Peloponnese, the last while ‘passing through’ on the way to somewhere else. Where he was going when he ‘passed through’ Mothone he does not say, nor does he locate the journey in time, except to mention that he saw there the hull of a ship cast inland by the tidal wave that followed the great earthquake of 365. The vessel was ‘gaping apart’ from long decay, ‘diuturna carie fatiscentem’ (26.10.19).6 With other readers of Ammianus, I think (and believe it to be formally demonstrable) of Julian the Apostate as the historical inspiration behind his work, linking things he had himself seen and experienced with the broader course of Roman history; while Julian by his policies challenged comparison with his Constantinian predecessors and with his secondcentury model, Marcus Aurelius.7 Yet Julian the Hellenist, on one occasion called an ‘untrustworthy Asian Greek’ by resentful Gallic troops (17.9.3)

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Ammianus and the eternity of Rome and described by Ammianus, rather smugly perhaps, as possessing an ‘adequate’ command of Latin (16.5.7), is far from explaining Ammianus’ choice of Latin as the language of history. He could perfectly well have chosen Greek, and produced a sort of latter-day Thucydides (better, Polybius), a combination of military history, social diagnosis and delineation of character that would be remarkable in any language. I have seen it suggested, with a nice touch of humour, that Ammianus chose Latin in order to avoid being upstaged by the appearance, in Greek, of the history of his younger contemporary Eunapius. I think, indeed, that Eunapius’ history had appeared (in its first edition) by the time that Ammianus wrote, and that Ammianus used him for certain episodes of the Persian campaign which, despite his presence on the campaign, he had not been able to witness himself.8 It is possible, too, that because of the manner in which his text has been preserved, Eunapius has been underestimated by modern critics; but not to such an extent as would justify Ammianus’ being deterred by the appearance of his work into an entire change of language. Not all Eunapius’ shortcomings can be assigned to his later epitomators, and they must have been visible at the time. One has only to read a few pages of Ammianus to see that his absorption into Roman, and Latin, ideals and ways of thought is too profound to be explained as a late evasive tactic in face of a work of inferior quality to his own. By the same token, Ammianus’ choice cannot simply be explained by his late discovery of the impoverished Latin historical tradition of the later period, nor, even, by an encounter with Tacitus. It seems quite likely that acquaintance with Tacitus has something to do with Ammianus’ extension back from his own into the second and third centuries, and particularly, of course, with the starting-point of the principate of Nerva; but not with the essential character of the history as a deeply engaged account, in Latin, of the contemporary age. Whatever the available models, Ammianus had a choice; he chose Latin, and a Roman idiom, and had surely done so before considering the more detailed tactical dispositions – such as where precisely to start – that a historian will necessarily make in the light of the literary models that seem appropriate to him. I would regard the choice of Rome as the place in which Ammianus would complete the history as a special case of the question why he chose Latin; it stems from and was implicit in an earlier phase in his development. It follows that Ammianus’ attitude to Rome may be expected to throw light on the deeper nature of the paradox stated at the opening of this chapter, and it is with this, leading to broader historiographical questions, that I begin.

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Chapter 9 II ‘Urbs aeterna’, the ‘eternal city’, is Ammianus’ regular expression for Rome.9 It is how it appears in the first reference in the surviving text, the prefecture of Rome of Memmius Vitrasius Orfitus in 353–6, and it is in this passage that Ammianus most fully sets out his ideal of Rome. The city, he writes, ‘will live [or should we read it as ‘conquer’ – victura?] as long as there are men’ (14.6.3), a happy state of affairs which is the consequence of an ‘eternal pact’ struck between those old enemies, Virtue and Fortune. Lacking either one or the other, the city would not have reached her summit of greatness. Ammianus turns now to the growth of Rome, from wars waged around her walls to the dominion of empire, a process compared with the growth of a man from childhood to old age: and to the splendour of the political assemblies, of people and senate, through which the greatness of Rome had been forged. But this historic splendour of the assemblies is ruined by the unrestrained conduct of a few individuals (‘levitate paucorum incondita’) who ‘do not reflect where they were born’ and yield themselves to license and ease; levitas reads here almost as the formal opposite of traditional Roman gravitas. From this starting-point, Ammianus launches into the first of his two onslaughts on the conduct of senate and people, of a satirically exuberant character that makes rather surprising his dismissive remark, in a later passage, about Juvenal and Marius Maximus as favoured reading-matter of members of the aristocracy (28.4.14). Ammianus introduces his first digression in order to show why it was that whenever his narrative turned to Rome, nothing was to be written of except for ‘rioting, drunkenness and scandals like these’. He thinks, or affects to think, that ‘foreigners’ ( peregrini ) would be particularly surprised by this shocking situation – as perhaps he had been himself, when as a peregrinus he first came to Rome. With a thematic emphasis pursuing its abstract, somewhat ‘ideological’ introduction, the digression moves from ostentation in the public conduct and self-advertisement of the senatorial class, to their (literally) dismissive treatment of foreigners (cf. 14.6.19), their lack of culture, their insularity, their lack of interest in anything that comes from outside Rome, even their hypochondria – a sort of perverse ostentation in disease expressing, to the end, the ostentation of their social position. Ammianus’ second digression is introduced, in more down-to-earth fashion, by licensing laws devised by the urban prefect Ampelius (28.4.3). No-one may open a tavern, heat water for mixing drink or cook meat before the fourth hour of the day, and no respectable person must be seen

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Ammianus and the eternity of Rome eating in public (snacks bought from the street kiosks and cookhouses) – excellent measures, in Ammianus’ view, had not Ampelius lost his nerve and failed to enforce them (28.4.4). In keeping with this more pragmatic introduction, Ammianus’ second digression illustrates senatorial and popular taste in a series of images of particular forms of behaviour. Some topics we find repeated from the first digression, now amplified by a more circumstantial emphasis. Lack of cultural interest, ‘libraries closed like tombs’ in the earlier digression, is in the later passage specified as a liking for Marius Maximus and Juvenal at the expense of any other writer (14.6.18; 28.4.14); the peregrinus treated with arrogant disdain in the first digression now finds himself closely interrogated on which bathing establishment he uses and which house he frequents (14.6.19f.; 28.4.10); lack of social finesse in the first digression is transformed in the second into the vivid, and very specific, image of senators averting their foreheads ‘in the manner of threatening bulls’ from those attempting to kiss them in greeting (14.6.13f.; 28.4.10)! Public processions of senators with columns of attendants now materialize as expeditions to Puteoli or Lake Avernus in painted barges with silk screens to keep out mosquitoes and the rays of the sun (14.6.16 f.; 28.4.18), or forays into public baths to seek out the latest courtesan or prostitute (28.4.9). In both passages, the differences in culture and the physical resources of life between the upper and lower classes of Rome are presented in the form of representative images rather than systematic analysis – the latter being left to the reader, as a natural inference from Ammianus’ description. Senators commission gilt statues to secure their name for posterity (14.6.8), and import flatterers to admire the columns of their mansions, their walls gleaming with variegated marble colours (28.4.13) – while the people squat in poverty under the awnings of the theatre (14.6.25) and quarrel at street corners and in forums and squares over the rival merits of teams of horses (28.4.29). Senators produce fantastic dinners of fish, fowl, and dormouse, and have secretaries standing by with writing tablets in hand to note the delicacies served (28.4.13) – while the common people haunt taverns and soup-kitchens and, drawn by the smell of cooking and the street-cries of women, bend over to inspect the revolting concoctions, standing on tiptoe and biting their fingers impatiently until the food is cool enough to taste (28.4.34). Intent on the dice, they vent their excitement with vulgar snorting noises (14.6.25). In both digressions, Ammianus emphasizes their passion for the races; incredible it was, he writes, to see the minds of so many men hanging as one on the outcome of a race (14.6.26). The Circus Maximus was ‘their shrine, their abode, their meeting place, their very heart’s desire’ (28.4.29)! There and in the theatre they unleash their

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Chapter 9 opinions, hissing performers who fail to win their support by the payment of a bribe, or shouting for strangers to be expelled (28.4.32), screaming their judgments of comedy or hunting-show, horse-race or theatrical performance, with acclamations aimed at ‘the major and minor magistrates, even matrons’, who provide them (28.4.33). Having introduced his first digression in order to show why it was that whenever his narrative turned to Rome there was nothing to write about except for ‘rioting and drunkenness’, it is in connection with urban disorder in its various forms that Ammianus generally presents, at regular intervals, the tenures of office of prefects of Rome.10 The administrations are characterised by rioting for a variety of reasons, especially grain and wine shortages. On one occasion the cause of rioting is the arrest of a popular charioteer, on another, to which I shall return, the bloody strife surrounding the succession to the bishopric of Rome, waged in one of the major churches of the city. In addition to its ancient assemblies, another aspect of the eternity of Rome resides in the grandeur of its public buildings. Ammianus conveys this in a famous passage, the triumphal entry to Rome of Constantius in 357 (16.10.1–17). There is no need to transcribe from Ammianus the details he provides of the ceremonial adventus, a text-book reference for all such ceremonies.11 Instead, I would draw attention to a particular facet of Ammianus’ account, the transition he makes between the entry itself, which is criticised for its inappropriately ‘triumphal’ character – ‘as if the emperor were off to terrify Euphrates or Rhine by a display of arms’ – and the emperor’s conduct once within the city, ‘the home of empire and all the virtues’ (16.10.13). Constantius addressed senate and people in the manner appropriate for each, above all he admired the buildings of Rome, his amazement conveyed by Ammianus in a sequence of figures of mounting hyperbole; ‘the shrines of Tarpeian Jupiter, excelling as divine things excel human; baths built up like provinces; the Flavian Amphitheatre, to whose summit the human eye can barely reach [we almost hear the cricking of the emperor’s neck as he strains upwards, that neck he had held firm, as if in a vice, to hold it steady and prevent the betrayal of amazement on his first entry to Rome]; the Pantheon, like an entire rounded city district...’. These were chief among the many glories of the eternal city: ‘aliaque inter haec decora urbis aeternae’ (16.10.14). Apart from its evocation of Constantius’ amazement, the purpose of Ammianus’ rhetoric is to convey in physical, architectural terms the theme of the city as mistress of the world, in an application of the ‘urbs-orbis’ paradox found in writers down to Jerome and Rutilius Namatianus. A city enshrines the world; so, Rome contains, physically,

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Ammianus and the eternity of Rome entire cities; it is a theme picked up by a later visitor to Rome, Olympiodorus of Thebes: each of the great houses...contained within itself everything that a mediumsized city could hold – hippodrome, fora, temples, fountains and baths. To put it briefly [at this point Olympiodorus breaks into verse]: One house a town, the city holds a thousand towns! 12

As for the monuments of Rome as symbols of its eternity, this theme arises also in Ammianus’ digression on Alexandria, where among many marvels the Serapeum is compared to the Capitol, with which in another building metaphor Rome ‘raises herself into eternity’; ‘quo se venerabilis Roma in aeternum attollit’ (22.16.12). Ammianus is obviously writing of the Serapeum before he knew of its destruction by bands of soldiers and monks in the late summer of 391. III In his digression on Rome in Book 14, Ammianus had written of the achievement of the city in laying down laws, ‘the foundation and eternal guarantees of liberty’, before handing on her inheritance of power ‘like a wise and thrifty parent’ to the Caesars ‘as to her children’ (14.6.5). One aspect of the notion of Rome as the symbol of liberty emerges in the transition to which I just drew attention, from Constantius’ conduct on approaching Rome to his conduct once inside the city. Addressing the people and giving them equestrian races, he allowed himself to enjoy their traditional freedom, expressed in acclamations and reaching what in other circumstances might have been a dangerous outspokenness. Even the horse-races, of which in other cities, we are told, the emperor controlled the outcome, in Rome were allowed to proceed as chance and fortune allowed (16.10.14): a sort of physical enactment of the concept of perfect liberty (a little like the expression of the ‘concept of extreme cold’ with which Anthony Powell opens his cycle of novels Dance to the Music of Time, as workmen round a brazier beat their arms together to keep warm). When, only four years after Constantius’ visit the pretender Julian marched against him and justified his action in a letter to the senate, that body demanded in acclamations that he ‘respect the author of his dignity’; ‘auctori tuo reverentiam rogamus’. This showed the senate, thought Ammianus, acting in the best traditions of its ancient frankness and confidence, speciosa fiducia (21.10.7). Having described Rome as the founder of liberty by her making of laws, Ammianus departs in an interesting manner from a pattern of

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Chapter 9 interpretation that is so far rather predictable. The question of the role of liberty in relation to autocracy was, of course, the central question of the Annals of Tacitus, the reconciliation of principatus and libertas, as expressed in his Agricola, a formulation of the relationship between senate and emperor under a benevolent government. Ammianus, however, writes not of conflict or mere reconciliation, but of a positive alliance between the two, achieved through the emperors’ acceptance of an inheritance or birthright handed on to them by the senate. The move in Ammianus’ argument has two effects: first, it enables him to break out of the cycle of growth, old age and death to which his image of the development of Rome in terms of human life seemed to have committed him. Ammianus is not talking, as a cursory reading might suggest, of a decline but of a rejuvenation of Rome in the persons and office of the emperors; it is through their efforts in conducting wars in the name of Rome (‘nomine solo aliquotiens vincens’) that Rome will ‘live’ – or ‘conquer’: victura – as long as there are men. Second, Ammianus’ placing of the defence of Rome and her values in the hands of the emperors conforms to the emphasis he places on their personal qualities, and to the role of human planning in the securing of the future. Criticising the conduct of the emperor Gratian in the year of the battle of Hadrianople, Ammianus reflects on the situation, which required an unremitting concentration on important issues, without the distraction of trivial forms of behaviour such as Commodus had indulged in (a severe comparison for the harmless Gratian!). Even had Marcus Aurelius been emperor, the desperate situation could only with difficulty have been retrieved, with the help of sensible colleagues and sober counsels; ‘aegre sine collegis similibus et magna sobrietate consiliorum lenire luctuosos rei publicae poterat casus’ (31.10.19). What is in practice meant by ‘sobriety of counsel’ comes out with harsh clarity in the aftermath of Hadrianople, when Julius, magister militum of the East, ordered to be assembled in the suburbs of the cities where they were stationed all the Goths presently in imperial service. The pretence was that they were to receive their pay; what actually happened was that, once assembled, they were cut down to a man. To the modern mind the morality of this speaks for itself, but Ammianus would have seen such a reflection as a luxury, indeed as irresponsible. For him, the action of Julius saved the eastern provinces from disaster. It was a matter of ‘effective action, quickly taken’, ‘efficacia...salutaris et velox’; a ‘prudent counsel, quietly and promptly put into effect’, ‘quo consilio prudenti sine strepitu et mora completo...’ (31.16.8). From these examples, and indeed from the whole tenor of the history, it is clear that Ammianus attached the highest importance to the enterprise

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Ammianus and the eternity of Rome and physical energy which the emperors and their supporters invested in the protection of an empire entrusted to them by the senate. In a sensational scene, the emperor Valentinian actually died of a massive stroke, brought on by an explosion of pent-up anger while receiving an embassy of Quadi at Brigetio on the Danube (30.6.1–6). On a more mundane level, the emperors spent their lives marching back and forth along the frontiers where military challenges were set; like the Caesars of the Tetrarchy, in a phrase attributed to the emperor Constantius in a letter to Gallus Caesar, they devoted themselves to ‘running here and there’ – ‘ultro citroque discurrentes’ – in obedience to their superiors’ will (14.11.10). The outstanding example, or rather the limiting case, of Ammianus’ pattern is that of Julian. Julian’s early career in Gaul was marked for the extraordinary, and quite unexpected, military success that expelled the Alamanni to their lands beyond the Rhine, and for the equally remarkable reforms in administration and taxation which Julian achieved, often against his subordinates’ advice: all as expressions of relentless personal energy, and of the conviction that by this, by discipline, and by constant intervention in the slow, recalcitrant processes of government, one could resist and turn back the tides of misfortune, mismanagement and corruption that had seemed irresistible. More than this, one might even turn back the religious and cultural decline of the Constantinian era in favour of a renewal of the Golden Age of the Antonines. The Persian campaign, which a modern historian might think the most damaging possible legacy an emperor could leave to his successors, is presented by Ammianus as a continuation of the personal inspiration of Julian thwarted only (Ammianus is not at his happiest here, though he sets this theme at the centre of his account of the campaign) by the decrees of fate. If on this occasion the alliance of Virtue and Fortune that had made Rome great broke down, it was a failure of Fortune, for there was no doubt of Julian’s virtue. The whole of Ammianus’ obituary of Julian in Book 25 is designed both in content and structure to convey it.13

IV Mention of Julian leads to an issue which from the point of view of the future is perhaps the most important of all: how, in his conception of the eternity of Rome, did Ammianus come to terms with Christianity? It is a real question, since (for example) Christianity is a notable absentee from the narrative of the visit of Constantius to Rome in 357. Only the old

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Chapter 9 shrines and public places of Rome are mentioned, and indeed these had largely succeeded so far in excluding the physical presence of Christian churches from the centre of Rome.14 But it is hard to believe that, in general, Constantius spent more time in the Forum and on the Capitol than he spent in the great Constantinian churches, especially St Peter’s and St John Lateran.15 It is worth recalling, too, that while Ammianus was completing his history at Rome in the later 380s, on the Ostia road outside the Aurelian walls of the city was being built a great church of St Paul. A relatio of Symmachus refers to it, a poem of Prudentius describes it, and it was dedicated by a Theodosian prefect of Rome in 391.16 It has been shown in more than one study how this is just the period, say 360–410, in which, with the encouragement of the papacy, Peter and Paul were being presented as the twin apostles of Rome, almost literally ‘enshrining’ the notion of Rome’s foundation by Romulus and Remus as it was transferred to a new eternity represented by Christianity.17 If there is a problem with this, as with other such interpretations of ‘ideologies’ in their literary and artistic representations, it is the extent of the public understanding of the often subtle patterns that were involved. As for this example, Ammianus is not surprisingly quite removed from it. Not that his history neglects Christianity, far from it: his narrative is studded with allusions to the Christian church and its clergy, in a way that seems to me to do no serious disservice to their actual contribution to the events which Ammianus describes (their influence on matters he does not describe is of course a very different question). Though he obviously fails to represent the true proportion of their time which they devoted to the issue, Ammianus mentions religious belief and policy in nearly all his obituaries of emperors, in a way that pays at least formal acknowledgment to their importance.18 He is not on all occasions hostile to the new religion, though clearly guarded in his attitude to its doctrines (and its technical vocabulary); he is capable, while reserving his position, of praising a modest provincial bishop and of expressing admiration for martyrs, and he refrains from polemic when it would, given a more openly hostile intention on his part, have been very easy to indulge in it. It showed considerable restraint, for example, not to blame the bishop of Bezabde on the Tigris for revealing the weak points of the city’s defences to the Persians, whose camp he had visited on an embassy (20.7.9). Ammianus operates more subtly, by the displacement of Christianity from the position it believed itself to occupy, and by an irony that challenged its values, as I will try now to show, from just two examples of it:

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Ammianus and the eternity of Rome In Book 15 (7.6ff.), Ammianus describes the attempt of Constantius to persuade Liberius of Rome to endorse the expulsion from his see of Athanasius of Alexandria. Athanasius was recalcitrant, and Constantius was eager to reinforce his own authority and that of ecclesiastical councils by the greater authority of the ‘bishop of the eternal city’; ‘auctoritate quoque potiore aeternae urbis episcopi’ (15.7.10). Liberius refused to cooperate, and was himself exiled, being hustled out of the city by night for fear of the people, which ‘burned with affection for him’, ‘qui eius amore flagrabat’. Ammianus’ phrase ‘auctoritate...aeternae urbis episcopi’ has been taken, and one can see why, as an early attestation, in an unexpected source, of the principle of papal supremacy. Despite the interesting fact that Ammianus is also the first writer of any sort to name the feast of Epiphany, there are many reasons why this interpretation cannot be correct.19 Ammianus’ description of the affair is notable for its sly ‘secularisation’ of the issues at stake. Athanasius has ideas ‘above his profession’, he dabbles in fortune-telling: Liberius is obstructive to the emperor, he is so popular that he has to be smuggled out to avert unrest in the city. The episode immediately follows the account, powerfully discussed by Erich Auerbach in his book Mimesis, of the arrest, flogging and exile by the urban prefect Leontius of the riot leader Petrus Valvomeres20 – with a reference to his subsequent execution in Picenum for the rape of a ‘young girl of a distinguished family’: an interesting context in which to be writing of the authority of the ‘bishop of the eternal city’! The riot led by Petrus Valvomeres had followed on from an earlier disorder over the arrest of a popular charioteer; and it is in this setting of persistent urban unrest that the episode of Liberius and Athanasius is told, and with the threat of its perpetuation that it closes. Whether intentionally or not (but surely intentionally), Ammianus is in this episode reminding us of the seamy side of life at Rome, described in his digression in the preceding book of his history. Why was it, indeed, that whenever his ‘oratio’ turned to Rome, nothing was found there to discuss except ‘rioting, drunkenness and other such frivolities’? The conduct of Christians is relevant to the life of the eternal city, but in its less savoury, more scandalous and trivial aspects. The same consideration applies, as will be obvious, to the famous episode of the dissension between the supporters of Damasus and Ursinus over the succession to the see of St Peter. The outcome, 137 dead bodies on the floor of a Christian basilica (another source gives a still higher number, perhaps including people who died of their injuries), speaks for itself.21 Not that Ammianus will blame those who seek with such passion this great prize, ‘considering the ostentation of urban life’. Successful

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Chapter 9 candidates could grow rich on the donations of matrons, ride on grand carriages dressed in conspicuous clothes, and surpass the dinners of kings (27.3.14). Not only does Ammianus link the competition for the papacy with his theme of rioting and disorder at Rome; his description of the conduct in their high office of the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the city recalls nothing more vividly than his adverse account of the unworthy behaviour of Roman senators. These, too, paraded the streets of Rome, dressed in fine robes, which they lifted with gestures of their hands so as to reveal the beautifully embroidered undergarments (14.6.9). The similarity of conduct is enhanced when we compare Ammianus’ descriptions with hostile letters of Jerome on the worldly conduct of ambitious priests.22 Ammianus does indeed link Roman Christianity with the eternity of Rome – but with that ‘levitas paucorum incondita’ which in the case of senators was the main threat to its values. In its connections with rioting and disorder, Ammianus robs the Christian faith of the motives integral to its own conduct; a subtle form of ‘polemic by displacement’ whereby, in further emphasising the ostentation of urban life as the chief motivation of contenders for the papacy, he links Christianity with what, in his digressions on Rome, is seen as most unworthy of the life and ideals of the city. Ammianus was not, when one compares him with a writer like Eunapius of Sardis, a systematic propagandist against Christianity; but one cannot deny the skill with which he subverts the integrity and claims of urban Christianity, and so deprives it of a share, or at least a respectable share, in the future of the eternal city.

Notes 1 On the period of composition, see The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 20–27. The latest extant reference is to the year 390 (26.5.14), with several more to the late 380s. 2 Libanius, Ep. 1063 Foester. I hold to the arguments of ‘The origin of Ammianus’, CQ n.s. 44 (1994), pp. 252–69; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 8f. The letter, dated to late 392, refers back to an earlier time – I would suggest to the stay of Theodosius and his supporters in the west, which ended in summer of 391. 3 On the scope and structure of Ammianus, see The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 17–30. T. D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (1998), pp. 23–31, argues, on what seem to me inadequate grounds, that the extant books have been misnumbered in transmission and originally ran from 19 to 36. 4 ‘Pagan and Christian historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.’, in Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (1963), p. 97 [= Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (1977), p. 122]. 5 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 71, 467f. 6 Gavin Kelly, ‘Ammianus and the Great Tsunami’, JRS 94 (2004), pp. 141–67. 7 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 242, 469f.

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Ammianus and the eternity of Rome 8

Accepting in essentials W. R. Chalmers, ‘Eunapius, Ammianus Marcellinus and Zosimus on Julian’s Persian expedition’, CQ n.s. 10 (1960), pp. 152–60; cf. T. D. Barnes, The Sources of the Historia Augusta (Coll. Latomus 155, 1978), pp. 117–20 – while emphasizing Ammianus’ specific purpose in the passages in which his reliance upon Eunapius seems demonstrable; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 169–75. 9 Francois Paschoud, Roma Aeterna: Etudes sur le patriotisme romain dans l’Occident latin à l’époque des grandes invasions (1967), esp. at pp. 59–67; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 279f., 414–6, etc. 10 For Ammianus’ notices, with the supporting evidence, A. Chastagnol, Les Fastes de la préfecture de Rome au Bas-Empire (1962). 11 Sabine MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (1981), esp. pp. 17–61. 12 Frag. 43 Müller = 41.1 Blockley. See my ‘Olympiodorus of Thebes and the history of the west (AD 407–425)’, JRS 60 (1970), pp. 79–97, esp. 80 [reprinted in Political Life and Culture in Late Roman Society (1985), Chap. III]. 13 The obituary (25.4.1–27) is arranged under the four cardinal virtues, ‘ut sapientes definiunt’, followed by a number of ‘external virtues’; ‘eisque accedentes extrinsecus aliae’, etc. This differs from the structure of any other imperial biography in Ammianus, and is clearly framed as a panegyric (cf. 16.1.3). 14 R. Krautheimer, Rome; Profile of a city, 312–1308 (1980), esp. pp. 29ff. 15 Cf. my ‘The Poetess Proba and fourth-century Rome: Questions of interpretation’, in M. Christol and others (edd.) Société et vie politique dans l’empire romain au IV e siècle ap. J.-C. (Actes de la table ronde autour de l’oeuvre d’André Chastagnol, Paris, 20–21 janvier 1989) (1992), pp. 277–304, at 299ff. 16 Chastagnol, Fastes, No. 96, Fl. Philippus (pp. 238–9), presents the administrative evidence but does not mention the description of the church offered by Prudentius, Peristephanon xii 45–54. 17 Ch. Pietri, ‘Concordia Apostolorum et renovatio urbis’, MEFR 73 (1961), pp. 273–322, and in his Roma Christiana: recherches sur l’église de Rome, son organisation, sa politique, son idéologie, de Miltiade à Sixte III (311–440) (Bibl. de l’Ecole française de Rome, 1976) II, Chap. 18, esp. pp. 1583ff.; J. M. Huskinson, Concordia Apostolorum. Christian Propaganda at Rome in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries; A study in Christian iconography and iconology (BAR International Series 148, 1982); reviewed by E. D. Hunt, JRS 74 (1984), pp. 229–31. 18 See esp. E. D. Hunt, ‘Christians and Christianity in Ammianus Marcellinus’, CQ n.s. 35 (1985), pp. 186–200; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 435–51. 19 Hunt, p. 190; cf. 188 for Epiphany (Amm. 21.2.5). I am not so sure about the tonsure (Hunt, p. 193; Amm. 22.11.9). 20 Mimesis: The representation of reality in Western literature (1953, repr. 1968), pp. 50–76; cf. my ‘Peter Valvomeres, re-arrested’, in Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie, Mary Whitby (edd.), Homo Viator: Classical essays for John Bramble (1987), pp. 287–84. 21 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 444f. and 548, n. 38. 22 D. S. Wiesen, St Jerome as a Satirist (1964).

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10 THE LETTERS OF SYMMACHUS I In the winter of 401/2, Q. Aurelius Symmachus travelled from Rome for the last time, as an envoy of the senate to the imperial court at Milan. His journey, briefly described in two letters to his son, was beset by inconvenience.1 The direct road to Milan was unsafe for travellers, enforcing a detour by way of Ticinum (Pavia). The rigours of the journey, always considerable at that time of year, were aggravated by Symmachus’ poor state of health; now advancing in years (he was about sixty), he had for some time been troubled by a bad liver and attacks of gout (which it would doubtless be uncharitable to regard as the natural consequences of an aristocratic life). Arriving at Milan, he was received graciously by the emperor, Honorius, but obliged to await the return of Stilicho, the effective political eminence of the day, before he could present the petition which he had brought from the senate.2 Symmachus returned to Rome early in 402, the emperor’s courteous reception fresh in his mind; but he had to inform his friends at court that his health was not restored.3 From the abrupt cessation of his letters, which were in their most intensive phase during the last few years of Symmachus’ life, we may infer his death soon after his return to Rome. From other sources, we can reconstruct in closer detail the background of Symmachus’ visit to Milan. The direct road to the court city was rendered unsafe by no less an event than the first invasion of Italy by Alaric the Visigoth.4 The absence of Stilicho was caused, according to his propagandist Claudian, by the need to recruit troops and to repel a Vandal incursion in Raetia.5 Indeed, Claudian would suggest that Milan itself was threatened, and that the return of Stilicho, with the reinforcements that Symmachus too had anticipated in one of the letters to his son, was barely in time to save the city from Alaric: his picture of its inhabitants, crowding the walls for a sight of their returning saviour, lends a new dimension to the anxieties of Symmachus’ visit.6 North Italian bishops were prevented by the invasion from attending the dedication of a new church by Gaudentius of Brescia;7 and when Symmachus returned to Rome, it was to a city recently – perhaps even during his absence – re-fortified by the direct

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Chapter 10 initiative of the imperial court.8 And finally: had Symmachus lived to visit the court again a year later, he would have found himself travelling from Ariminum, not along the familiar Via Aemilia through Bononia to Milan, but along the coastal road to Ravenna. For the court, thoroughly scared by the previous winter’s experiences, had taken its refuge behind the shifting lagoons and marshes that would also, in time, protect the Ostrogothic kings of Italy and the Byzantine Exarchate.9 This reconstruction of the last episode of Symmachus’ life well illustrates the feature of his correspondence which has caused most irritation to its modern readers: his apparent lack of response to the most pressing political events of his day. Symmachus’ later years were overshadowed by the threat of barbarian invasion. He ended his life with the threat realised in actuality – and to meet it, the Roman goverment under the control of a half-Vandal regent; yet the course of these events can scarcely begin to be told from the letters of the most prolific correspondent of the time. It was just the same a quarter of a century earlier. In the last months of 378, Symmachus had written to an acquaintance from the imperial court, Eutropius, in the aftermath of the greatest military disaster of the late empire – the battle of Hadrianople, in which the eastern emperor Valens had been killed and most of his army destroyed. Symmachus alluded in his letter to the precarious situation of the Roman state, and to the strenuous efforts of the surviving western emperor, Gratian, to sustain it.10 Now this was no more than courteous, for Eutropius was himself playing an important role in the crisis – he was involved in the political manoeuvres that brought the new emperor, Theodosius, to the eastern throne in place of Valens.11 But Symmachus declined to pursue this topic, consigning it instead to Eutropius’ proven abilities as a historian (he was the author of the highly successful Breviarium, dedicated to Valens); and he reverted to more intimate concerns – the state of his own health, which had been bad but, Eutropius would be reassured to know, was now improved. This too was an appropriate remark, whatever we may think of its suitability to the larger events in which Eutropius was involved: for he was known as an expert on medicine as well as on Roman history.12 Meanwhile, Eutropius was encouraged to assist Symmachus’ convalescence by granting him the benefit of a letter from his pen. These reactions of Symmachus to political events of his day are typical of what can perhaps be called a ‘systematic reticence’ concerning them: a tendency to evade the unpleasant or excessively dramatic, an unwillingness to allow the surface of his correspondence to be clouded by mention of disturbing events. For he cannot be held unaware of their significance. He was evidently alive to the importance of the battle of

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The Letters of Symmachus Hadrianople – in other letters to Eutropius he recommended men who would soon appear as supporters of the new emperor Theodosius, and he welcomed the imperial victories which he personally was honoured to announce to the senate in 379.13 He can hardly have been unconscious of the circumstances surrounding his journey to Milan in the winter of 401/2. Confronted by this persistent evasiveness on Symmachus’ part, his great editor, Otto Seeck, was moved to comment on his labour, that if an author of such limited talent was likely to find few readers in his own right, yet many might be drawn to consult him on one particular point or another.14 It is a judgment which, made in passing but allied to an edition of monumental authority, has found few dissentients. The letters of Symmachus have been consistently characterised: as ‘words without content’, ‘the dullest epistles in the Latin language’.15 ‘Never’, wrote one critic (by no means the least sympathetic), ‘has any man written so much to say so little.’ 16 For the disappointed historian, Symmachus ‘tells us less than might have been expected of the events of his day’ – while at the same time, in a particularly harsh judgment, being utterly devoid of literary merit.17 It is not difficult to understand these appraisals. Symmachus lived through an age of military crisis and religious diversity, perhaps the most tumultuous (certainly, for a modern student, the most richly documented) age since that of Cicero. Yet he is far from casting Cicero’s light on it. In a correspondence of more than nine hundred letters, extending from the middle 360s to 402, political highlights are few, moments of personal involvement sparing. Instead of the colour, variety and descriptive vigour that we might expect from a contemporary, we are shown the repetitive routine of upper-class life, reduced to its most monotonously undemonstrative: estate administration, the sale and purchase of property; travel with its petty inconveniences, the polite exchange of invitations to stay on the estates of senatorial colleagues or to entertain them on one’s own; interminable petitions for the social and political advancement of clients, for their protection in litigation by sympathetic governors and their support in professional difficulties by indulgent officials. The majority of the letters are notes of a mere few lines, expressed in a language as artificially wrought as it is often tantalisingly allusive. Over a quarter of the nine hundred concern the recommendation of protégés to well-placed acquaintances, brief notes for which the reputation of the writer was clearly of greater significance than anything he actually said of the candidate. Thus, taken at random: The merits of Sexio, formerly governor of Calabria [cf. ILS 790], are well spoken of by many, who have therefore requested that I should recommend him to your patronage (suffragium). It is part of the generosity habitual to your nature, to honour with your affection those whom others have found

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Chapter 10 congenial. I ask you, then, that if you find no obstacle against satisfying the wishes of those who make this request, you allow Sexio to draw the benefit of my words and the hopes of his many admirers (2.43, to Nicomachus Flavianus). I am delighted that my friend Drinnacius has proved acceptable to your judgment: for it conveys very great honour on me also, when our sentiments are in accordance. He will therefore enjoy the richest possible rewards for his blameless integrity of character, having won my affection by his proper attention to social duties, and your respect by the strictness of his professional conduct (mihi honestis carus officiis, tibi iustis negotiis adprobatus) (5.42, to Neoterius).

Other letters are formal acceptances or refusals of invitations to attend the public functions of Symmachus’ colleagues in official life: many others, the merest occasional courtesies, written for no other reason than that the opportunity presented itself in the form of a willing traveller – a friend, perhaps, on the way to court, or an agent on business: An address has to be brief, when it is handed to one in a hurry to be on his journey. So it satisfies the proprieties of friendship (officio satis est) as well as meeting the haste of the moment, for me to perform the honour of greeting you (salutationis honore perfungar ). I am sure that I have no need to exact a reply, which I think will be conveyed to me without any encouragement by our friend, a man most attentive to the duties of friendship (amicitiae servantissimo) (2.68, to Nicomachus Flavianus). You should not complain of my silence, having never until now honoured me with your letters. But since you await a like greeting from me, receive this as a demonstration of my proper duty (religiosi officii ), which you must emulate. I will in future be quicker to lay pen to paper, if you inspire me with the fruits of our exchange of greeting (8.39, to Dynamius).

Under the guise of a collected correspondence, suggested one writer with such letters as these in mind, we have nothing but a stack of visiting cards, a series of ‘polite attentions’:18 to put it otherwise, a museum of late Roman amicitia in all its complacency, with its affected rules of etiquette, its repetitive trivialities. Yet if so, it is fair to observe that there were moments at which Symmachus allowed himself to share these opinions. ‘For how long’, he wrote to his intimate friend Nicomachus Flavianus, ‘are we to go on pouring out futile words of salutation?’ – remarking that the restricted political life of their own day offered nothing to compare with the thrilling events with which their ancestors (meaning of course Cicero) had filled their letters.19 As for the letters of recommendation which he wrote in such prolific

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The Letters of Symmachus numbers, Symmachus expected his correspondents to distinguish those which were written from mere kindness and sense of duty, from those inspired by genuine warmth of feeling and respect for the abilities of their beneficiaries.20 In these as in other cases, much was to be understood by Symmachus’ correspondents that was not actually stated in the letters themselves. Le style, c’est l’homme is a deceptive principle of interpretation when applied to an age as complex as the later fourth century, and to a society as self-conscious as that of Symmachus. If there has been a certain tendency in his critics to allow literary judgments of his style to slide into historical assessments of his personality, Symmachus can be relieved at least of the worst misapprehensions entertained of him. It is clear, for instance, that the letters were not always intended to say everything that we might expect of them. In some cases, a surviving letter was merely the ‘covering note’ attached to a breviarium or indiculum which would have contained detailed news and information.21 On other occasions, it was left to the bearer of a letter to convey by word of mouth information of a more personal or trivial nature than was appropriately set down in writing.22 It has been suggested, also, that the process of editing the letters for publication has led to the excision of the more politically embarrassing among them – those referring, for instance, to Symmachus’ collaboration with the usurper Maximus, or to his conduct under the rebellion of Eugenius in 393–4.23 Such letters would, of course, have possessed a particular interest to historians of the age of Symmachus: but it does not seem that the process of excision, if it occurred, can have seriously affected the general character of the correspondence as we now read it. At the same time, the circumstantial information which is actually contained in Symmachus’ letters can easily be underestimated. Without the correspondence, and particularly the Relationes, the administrative reports submitted to the emperor during Symmachus’ prefecture of Rome in 384/5, our knowledge of the conditions of aristocratic life, and of the role of the senate and senatorial class in the politics and urban life of Rome in the late fourth century, would be very much the poorer.24 But there is a more fundamental way in which criticism of Symmachus has been misdirected. For it may be that Seeck’s invitation to look ‘here and there’ in the letters for information that might happen to be of interest, has in the end encouraged their misuse. Partly because of it, Symmachus has rarely been understood in his own terms, his letters for what, in their own time and social context, they were intended to achieve rather than as a quarry of facts for the modern historian to exploit. Symmachus was a senator and administrator, not a historian or social commentator. His aim

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Chapter 10 was the pursuit and cultivation of amicitia: and his letters were primarily intended not to inform but to manipulate, to produce results. In opening a friendship with one correspondent, Symmachus visualised its development very precisely – in terms of the benefits of patronage which it might convey.25 On another occasion, he used a recent introduction to a court official to support a petition of a delegation of Campanian curiales for tax concessions.26 Once, he felt unable to approach a man of influence at court because he happened not to have first exchanged formal introductions with him, and had therefore to make his way indirectly, through a functionary whom he did know.27 It is easy to criticise the letters of Symmachus as ‘words without content’. What may be harder to appreciate is that without the words, the ‘content’ as Symmachus saw it – the accumulation and exercise of patronage – could not have ensued. The relationship between ‘style’ and ‘content’ is thus a subtle one, so much of the ‘content’ lying, as it were, outside the letters themselves: and no apology is needed for a reassessment of the letters through a historical discussion of the nature and social context of Symmachus’ influence. At the same time, to cast adverse comment on the style of the letters is itself to affect a dangerous detachment from the standards of Symmachus’ own day. For what is not in doubt is that the publication of the letters was an event of literary importance. Symmachus regarded letter-writing as one of the acknowledged forms of literary activity.28 Some of his friends collected the letters they had received from him (and of course Symmachus preserved his own copies).29 He could affect to be afraid of forged imitations circulating under his name, and of the ‘highway robbery’ of letters from the hands of their bearers as they carried them on the road.30 Symmachus’ literary reputation is recognised by Sidonius Apollinaris and by a contributor in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, both of whom link him with the younger Pliny: and if Macrobius, who matched the two as exponents of the style known as ‘rich and ornate’ ( pingue et floridum), was referring to their oratory, Sidonius ought to have meant his judgment of the letters, since he made it in order to introduce his own collection of literary epistles.31 Sidonius’ contrast of Symmachus’ rotunditas with the disciplina and maturitas which he felt to be characteristic of Pliny, meets very well our sense of the stylistic ‘completeness’, combined with the economy, of his writing. Perhaps it was more the sense of economy of expression that lay behind the judgment of a twelfth-century critic, Alan of Lille, that Symmachus was ‘prodigus in sensu, verbis angustus’ 32 – and for this reason, also, that selections of the letters survive, as exemplars of style, in numerous medieval florilegia. The latest editor of Symmachus can list as many as forty, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.33

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The Letters of Symmachus By the time that the letters of Symmachus entered upon this late season of glory, the orations, upon which his contemporary reputation was chiefly founded, had been long lost from view. For two historians of the fifth century, Olympiodorus and Socrates, Symmachus was ‘the orator’ (logographos),34 and it was as orator disertissimus that his son (and editor) honoured him in an inscription to his memory.35 It is clear from references in the letters that Symmachus sent copies of his speeches to his friends for their appreciation.36 In one letter he cited a phrase of a speech of about 396; and brief quotations of others are made by Arusianus Messius (around 395), and in the early sixth century, by Cassiodorus.37 In these circumstances, it has not on the whole been to the advantage of Symmachus’ more recent reputation, that in the early nineteenth century, quite substantial fragments of eight speeches were detected, written in a sixth-century hand, on a palimpsest from Bobbio: three imperial panegyrics, and five speeches on various aspects of senatorial life.38 If the content of these orations has not seemed to support the judgment held of Symmachus by his contemporaries, at least the circumstances of their survival lend weight to Macrobius’ comparison of Symmachus with the younger Pliny; for preserved with them on the Bobbio palimpsest are a few fragments of the Panegyricus.39 Pliny can look after himself, but it is one of the more undeserved ironies of Symmachus’ fate, that his oratory survives only under a Latin translation of the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. The link with Pliny is brought out in the published arrangement of Symmachus’ letters.40 Like those of Pliny, they are set out in ten books, the first nine composed of letters to private correspondents. In the tenth book, the forty-nine Relationes evoke the letters of Pliny written to Trajan from Bithynia; preceding them, two letters (10.1–2), addressed respectively to the father of Theodosius and to Gratian, recall the letters written by Pliny in a private capacity to Trajan.41 The edition of Symmachus’ letters departs from its model, however, in that the letters are classified, not in a chronological framework, but under the names of their recipients. The inconvenience of the procedure will be recognised by anyone who has tried to browse casually in Seeck’s edition – the more so, since even within the individual groups of letters there is little attempt to preserve or to restore chronological order. Yet on this last point, it should be observed in defence of the editor, that once the actual sequence of composition of the letters had been disturbed, precisely that stylistic uniformity, brevity and allusiveness of which modern critics have complained, would have forbidden systematic reconstruction. The defence applies equally to the general arrangement of the letters; given their stylistic character, together with the practical consideration that the edition was

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Chapter 10 constructed (or so it would appear) from Symmachus’ own collection of his letters and so reflects his method of classification, the grouping by correspondents seems a natural solution. Within this scheme, the groups of letters are arranged after a coherent pattern, one which preserves a fairly steady movement in time, reflects the main phases of Symmachus’ influence, and allows an appropriate degree of variety within the individual books. At least, this is true of Books 1–7 of the collection. Books 8 and 9 provide a contrast. These books contain some of Symmachus’ most interesting, as well as his most elusive, individual letters. Yet the care for organisation and structure, which characterised the first seven books, is absent. The most obvious sign of this is in the sheer numbers of correspondents addressed. As against 56 recipients in the whole of the first seven books, 113 of the 229 letters in Books 8–9 (the remaining 116 letters lack the names of their recipients) are addressed to no less than 74 different correspondents. Of these, 49 are addressed in a single letter, 15 in only two; and in the case of those correspondents who are addressed more than once, scarcely any attempt is made to group these letters together.42 The discrepancy between Books 1–7 and 8–9 has led to the suggestion that 1–7 were prepared for publication by Symmachus himself, his son’s role as editor of the letters being confined to the ‘literary executorship’ of these books (and the Relationes), and to the assembling and publication of 8–9 in their present disordered state.43 There is no need to doubt Symmachus’ interest in the publication of his letters, and it is quite open to suppose that he gave any amount of advice and assistance in its preparation. But the suggestion needs to be handled with care. That the whole edition in its present form is to be attributed to Q. Fabius Memmius Symmachus is indicated by the fact that subscriptions recording his work, done after his father’s death, stand between Books 2 and 3 and between Books 4 and 5, as well as at the beginning of Book 9 of the letters.44 Further, Books 4, 5 and 7 contain the very latest of Symmachus’ letters, those relating to the journey to Milan of winter 401/2, shortly after which he died; Symmachus can hardly have had a significant role in preparing these books for publication. The notion of a substantial division of editorial functions between the younger Symmachus and his father requires a more subtle formulation than will be found in the evidence of the letters themselves. Since it is generally acknowledged that Books 8 and 9 look like nothing more than the ‘odds and ends’ of Symmachus’ files, it is worth asking what part of the work of editing the letters could not have been achieved by Symmachus’ son, working from his father’s papers. On this assumption

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The Letters of Symmachus the younger Symmachus, finding the majority of the letters preserved with the names of their recipients ( possibly even classified by individual correspondents, although this would not fully account for certain features in Books 8 and 9),45 satisfied himself with arranging Books 1–7 in accordance with the main phases of his father’s career. He then put the remainder – mainly isolated or anonymous letters – into two further books of unequal length, classifying them only in so far as he put nearly all the letters of recommendation among them into Book 9, ‘continens commendaticias’.46 He then returned to order, and to the model established by Pliny, with the official communications which comprised Book 10. It is difficult to see how he could have devised a less troublesome solution: while the disordered state of Books 8 and 9 will remind us again that in the letters of Symmachus we are reading what was in essence a working correspondence.

II The interpretation of the letters of Symmachus can only be attempted within the social, political, and stylistic horizons that defined their field of operation. The social horizons are at first sight the easiest to delineate; they were those of the senate and senatorial class, to which Symmachus belonged and to which he devoted so many of his ideological and emotional resources.47 Symmachus believed that the senate was the ‘noblest’, quite simply the ‘better part of the human race’.48 Given the opportunity, he could still represent the political system of his own day as, at its best, a balanced partnership between the senate and an emperor mutually respectful and unanimous in their wishes.49 In more realistic terms, he thought it the specific function of the prefecture of Rome to defend the rights of senators:50 in this as in so many ways, senatorial breeding, as Symmachus neatly put it, ‘recognised itself ’.51 Four of the eight speeches, of which fragments are preserved, directly concern the enrolment, status or public functions of senators; and the letters themselves show us nothing less than the senatorial life in action. In defending the claims of litigants with the expectation of favour before governors and officials,52 in petitioning for tax relief on the estates of a financially straitened senatorial lady,53 in getting governors in office to look after the interests of absentee landowners,54 no less than in supporting representations against the imposition of military levies upon senatorial estates,55 Symmachus was speaking as a member of a class which, with calculated selfishness, would preserve its economic interests and its prejudices through the impoverishment and collapse of the western

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Chapter 10 imperial government. Symmachus could summon up the traditional Roman attitude to Greek infirmity of character, in exhorting an acquaintance of Greek origin not to resign public office prematurely: let him recall that he was now enrolled in the ‘tribes of Romulus’ and sustain the burden of responsibility, at least for a year or two.56 He could bring to bear the moral authority of a senator, as well as the public duty of a Roman priest, in asking a Vestal Virgin to confirm or deny rumours that she intended to give up her office before the regular time; and in pressing a colleague not to call off a marriage arranged between his daughter and a young friend of Symmachus, he suggested that he ought not to sacrifice his fides as a senator to a mere change of mind.57 It is within the imaginative limits of a Roman and a senator that we must interpret Symmachus’ personal attitudes and sensitivities. His sense of bereavement at the deaths of relatives and colleagues must be set beside his anger when a group of Saxon prisoners committed suicide to a man, rather than grace his public games by fighting as gladiators. ‘But what could be expected from a race of men more vile than Spartacus?’, he wrote to his close friend Nicomachus Flavianus – drawing consolation from the attitude of Socrates to misfortune, and turning to the Libyan antelopes which he hoped to exhibit in their place.58 Again to Nicomachus Flavianus, who as praetorian prefect at the time held authority over Illyricum, Symmachus wrote asking for his help in securing twenty strong young men, again for the games – since slaves were easily come by on the frontiers, and the price was usually not extortionate.59 He could even say to the younger Flavianus (son of Nicomachus Flavianus, and Symmachus’ own son-in-law) that nothing had happened at Rome worth speaking of, except that an apartment block had collapsed, crushing all the inhabitants and forcing the resignation of the governor; contrast his attitude to a colleague who, having suffered some mishap to his person or property from the river Po, received from Symmachus’ Praenestine retreat an elaborately contrived letter of sympathy, denouncing the treacherous insolence of a river that had dared to incommode a senator! or his reaction to the fall from his official carriage of a suffect consul at a public ceremony, as a result of which he had been carried off, dressed in full consular regalia, with a broken leg. Shocked by the mishap, and disturbed by the ill-omen, which was only the worst of several recently witnessed by the city, Symmachus declined to narrate it at length.60 These expressions of attitude are taken from widely separated passages and different contexts in Symmachus’ letters, but they are the isolated outcrops of an imaginative sensibility so deeply aristocratic that one doubts whether Symmachus was even aware of its existence. It would have been

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The Letters of Symmachus inconceivable to have found it otherwise: Symmachus was no more capable than his senatorial predecessors (or some of his critics) of feeling any real sympathy for the passions and misfortunes of the lower classes in Roman society, or of questioning his own right to the privileges which he enjoyed as a senator. But, at the same time, Symmachus enables us to see that the real situation was far more complex than his stated attitudes would imply. Perhaps more than any other writer of his class, he gives an insight into the relationship between the senators and people of Rome, as one of a formidable complexity. This was particularly true of the fourth century. The absence of the emperors, devoted to the protection of the military frontiers from which they themselves originated, had left the senators of Rome as masters in their own house. They dominated the material and public life of the city – attended in the streets by columns of servants, the halls of their luxurious mansions crowded with clients and dependants, echoing with the sounds of banquets, music and dancing.61 Committed to a policy of conspicuous expenditure, they celebrated their public offices by providing spectacular games, and left their names all over Rome as the founders and restorers of monuments and public amenities. The prefects of Rome, in normal circumstances drawn from senatorial families, were responsible for public order, for the physical well-being of the city and the regular distribution of its supplies of corn, oil and wine.62 The influence of the senators extended through patronage beyond their own class, to the urban guilds and corporations: beyond Rome, to the communities of the Italian countryside and, further afield, to north Africa, where they possessed many of their estates.63 Peace went with plenty. In times of shortage, however, when the corn ships were delayed or held back by adverse winds, the relationship between the people of Rome and the senators might quickly turn sour. Rioting might ensue, and senators be forced to leave the city for safety, while their urban mansions rose in flames behind them.64 On one occasion, Symmachus’ own father had been forced to leave the city: he had been heard to say, during a wine shortage, that sooner than sell the surplus from his estates at a reduced price to the people, he would use it to mix concrete! 65 As was recognized not too long ago, he was referring to a technique, described in Pliny’s Natural History, for making a particularly hard, waterproof variety of concrete known as ‘maltha’, used for lining fish-ponds and bathing-pools.66 His remark was far from frivolous; it was a provocative assertion of senatorial privilege at a time when it was most out of place. Symmachus himself, who wrote letters to his father, perhaps at just this time, reporting on the family’s luxurious building operations in

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Chapter 10 Campania, formally thanked the senate, in his speech Pro Patre, when later in 376 a delegation sent by it had invited the old man to return to Rome.67 Much the same experience befell Symmachus himself late in his life. He was forced to leave Rome when a food shortage due to the withholding of the African grain-ships was attributed by the people to a political action taken by him (at the initiative of the court, Symmachus had proposed to the senate that the African rebel Gildo be declared a public enemy);68 yet before long, the people ‘turned to repentance’ and made known its wish, by public acclamations in the theatre, that he should return to Rome.69 From such episodes, which could be multiplied,70 it is clear that the relationship between the people and senatorial class of Rome was complex and volatile; it was certainly not one of aloofness on either side. For the city prefect, an adverse wind could mean the difference between the success and failure of his administration;71 while for the senators in general, their standing in the eyes of the people of Rome was more important than the expressed social attitudes of Symmachus might suggest. It was not necessary to develop, as some senators did, a taste for the pleasures and haunts of the lower classes.72 Symmachus’ letters show to particular effect the strenuous efforts made by him to ensure the success of the public games which he provided to celebrate his son’s quaestorship and praetorship ( in 393 and 401); indeed, commentators have tended to find these, from a circumstantial point of view, the most interesting of the letters.73 Symmachus appears in them, writing to landowning colleagues in Gaul and Spain,74 to provincial governors and to perhaps most of the important court officials of the day, invoking their assistance in collecting exotic beasts to display at the games: horses from Spain, lions from Africa, bears from Dalmatia, antelopes, crocodiles, Scottish dogs (and in 393, with the results already noted, Saxon gladiators). He petitioned Stilicho for the easing of restrictions of expenditure, so that the people should not have to go without a spectacle of which they were especially fond.75 The whole correspondence is not merely a splendid affirmation of the effectiveness of the links of friendship and patronage which Symmachus had patiently developed throughout his adult life; with their references to the popularity of some of the particular forms of display prepared by Symmachus, and his evident anxiety that the games should be a success with the people,76 the letters on this subject are a standing proof of the importance to senators of their good relations with the populus Romanus. The ‘social horizons’ of the letters of Symmachus, then, turn out to possess more varied contours than we might have anticipated. Behind their assumptions of privilege, their complacency, their absorption in upper-

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The Letters of Symmachus class attitudes, lies an intense, volatile relationship with the people of Rome, and a real awareness that the opinions of the people were important and needed to be fostered. The ‘political horizons’ of the letters need similarly close scrutiny. Symmachus was a politically active senator, at least in so far as he pursued a full career of the ‘senatorial’ type, culminating in the prefecture of Rome in 384–5. What is not so clear is the relationship between this career and the sort of influence which the letters show him to have exercised. To help define this relationship it is necessary to review briefly Symmachus’ political biography – the more so since it illustrates the general nature of the participation of the senatorial class in the political life of the later fourth century.77 Symmachus’ first public offices were the quaestorship and praetorship. These offices in themselves reflect the political evolution of the fourthcentury senate. In the early empire, they had been stages in distinguished careers, leading to legionary commands and governorships in the military provinces of the empire. In the fourth century, with military commands and governorships no longer in the hands of senators, they had suffered a diminution in their significance, being now held by young senators on the threshold of their public careers.78 The actual functions of the quaestorship and praetorship are obscure; their most significant feature was, indeed, strictly incidental – the obligation of the young senator’s father to provide the public games, upon which we have seen Symmachus exert so much energy and influence on his son’s behalf. Symmachus’ first administrative post fell in 364: the governorship of Lucania and Bruttium.79 Symmachus held the post while his father was prefect of Rome; and letters to Nicomachus Flavianus, written at this time, show that Flavianus was at the same moment governor (consularis) of Sicily – another regular post in a traditional senatorial cursus of the late empire. Symmachus advised his friend to secure his position after leaving office by making an exact inventory of the number of animals he had employed, what he had spent on the upkeep of his official residences, and the amount of tax he had succeeded in gathering. Another letter concerned the case of some arrested court officials whom Flavianus had asked should be transferred from Bruttium to Sicily, but whom the prefect of Rome – Symmachus’ father, perhaps hoping to save his young colleagues from embarrassment in a case concerning palatini – had claimed for his own jurisdiction.80 Next, after an interval of eight years (and the visit to the imperial court to be described below), came the proconsulship of Africa (373/4); here again, Symmachus was moving in the regular pattern of a senatorial career. Nothing is known of his administration, except for an obscure affair in

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Chapter 10 which Symmachus was deprived by ‘envy’ of the honour of a public statue;81 nevertheless, in a couple of letters, Symmachus recalled his affection for Carthage (where the proconsuls had their chief residence), and mentioned praises expressed by an African acquaintance for his conduct there.82 It can be suggested that, after leaving office in the early summer of 374, Symmachus remained in Africa for a time, perhaps travelling along the coast to Mauretania Caesariensis, where he possessed estates, and where he formed, or renewed, a friendship with the ill-fated magister militum, Theodosius.83 At least, by 375 Symmachus was back in Italy, as is shown by several letters written at this time; and either now or before his departure for Africa as proconsul, came his marriage to Rusticiana, the daughter of a former prefect of Rome.84 Another interval of eight or nine years separated Symmachus’ proconsulship from his prefecture of Rome, the culmination of his administrative career. A letter to the emperors, included in the Relationes, expressed Symmachus’ gratitude for the honour, which came to him at the regular age of about forty-five.85 He held the office for barely six months before, stricken by the death of his friend and ally Praetextatus and depressed by the other troubles of his administration, he wrote again, requesting his release from it.86 His tenure was thus a short one; but it should be emphasized that the prefecture of Rome was rarely, and only in special circumstances, held for much longer than a year. These three posts are the sum total of Symmachus’ administrative duties in a public career of more than forty years. The consulship, which he received from Theodosius in 391, was the result of circumstances far beyond the reach of prediction or calculation (see below). It was in fact quite rare for it to be held, in these days, by a member of the senatorial aristocracy, and Symmachus’ tenure of it leads to discussion of the other aspect of his official career: his relations with the imperial court. This was essentially a ‘diplomatic’ relationship. Symmachus’ first, and most protracted, visit to the imperial court took him, as a young man of about thirty, to Trier as a senatorial representative: his function was to convey the aurum oblaticium, the ‘contribution’ made by the senate to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the reign of Valentinian I. From the time of his stay at Trier, in 369–370, survive three of his orations, of which substantial fragments are preserved: they are panegyrics, two of them (Orationes 1 and 3) addressed in February 369, respectively to Valentinian and his young son Gratian, the third (Or. 2) again to Valentinian, at the opening of 370.87 The highly-wrought and compressed, somewhat ‘bulging’ style of these speeches has on the whole attracted unfavourable comment from modern critics; but their use for the historian, particularly in their

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The Letters of Symmachus allusive precision, should not be underestimated. Symmachus’ references in Oratio 2 to skirmishes against Alamanni, to the reception of Burgundian embassies to Valentinian, and to the emperor’s personal inauguration of the building of a new fort on the far bank of the Rhine, suggest a fascinating comparison with Ammianus Marcellinus’ descriptions of just such events; 88 while an allusion to Alta Ripa (Altrip-bei-Speyer) can be used to date Symmachus’ visit precisely, by a law issued there by Valentinian on 19 June 369.89 Symmachus’ sojourn at Trier was notable especially for new acquaintances made there; particularly for the friendship formed with the poet Ausonius, who was at Trier as tutor of the young Gratian.90 Symmachus probably accompanied Ausonius on the imperial journey described in the opening lines of Ausonius’ best-known and finest poem, the Mosella. In a letter written after his departure, he recalled with pleasure his stay ‘at camp’, while Ausonius’ virtuosic list of the fishes inhabiting the Mosel gave Symmachus the occasion to remind his friend of the dinners they had enjoyed together at Trier.91 In a later letter, he referred to the office of quaestor sacri palatii which Ausonius received after Symmachus’ departure from the court; and in return, Ausonius alluded to the rank of comes ordinis tertii with which his friend had left Trier.92 The honour was an elegant compliment to Symmachus’ presence ‘with the standards’; but Symmachus’ stay at court has the air of an organised tour of the frontier region of the empire rather than serious campaigning, with a minor clash with the barbarians, Burgundian legations and the building of the new fort ‘laid on’ for the occasion – and for Symmachus to report back to a senate which would want to be assured that its quinquennial contribution was not frivolously spent. Symmachus’ stay at Trier was salutary for its widening of his experience – and of his range of acquaintances. It is likely that not only Ausonius, but the magister militum Theodosius, to whom Symmachus later wrote after their meeting in Africa, first became known to him at this time.93 Symmachus’ later contacts with the emperors can be more summarily described. After his return from Trier, it was some years before he next approached the court; but his contacts became more frequent in the later years of his life – this reflecting his increasing prestige within the senate itself. It is incorrect to suppose that the third Relatio, on the altar of Victory, was personally presented by Symmachus to the court of Valentinian II. It was sent like the other Relationes, as an official dispatch of the praefectus urbi, but Symmachus refers in it to a senatorial legation of 382 on the same subject, of which he had been a member.94 In 387, he attended the consular celebrations of Valentinian II; and in 388, those of the usurper Maximus,

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Chapter 10 at which he delivered his panegyric to the usurper. If this turned out to have been an error of judgment which he later had to excuse, it was one shared by the senate – for Symmachus was undoubtedly acting as senatorial delegate on that occasion.95 Symmachus’ own consulship was held at Rome, inaugurated by the usual public games at the beginning of 391; he wrote to contacts at the court concerning the preparations, though the letters cannot now suggest the real scope of the arrangements.96 His behaviour during the usurpation of Eugenius and the pagan revival which attended it (393–4) was scrupulously discreet; at least, Symmachus refrained from anything that might look like direct association with the regime, contenting himself with the due performance of social civilities (see below). From the middle 390s, senatorial embassies are mentioned in the letters, with which Symmachus was concerned without himself participating in them; but he visited Milan at the beginning of 400 for the consular celebrations of Stilicho, and again in the winter of 401/2, on the last journey with which this chapter opened.97 Symmachus’ increasing contact with the imperial court during the last years of his life reflects a relationship between senate and emperor which was actually becoming more intimate in these years, and would continue to do so after his death.98 This development can be measured in the letters; but in general terms, it is not a simple matter to draw the connections between Symmachus’ official public career and the nature of his influence. Related to this, is the question of senatorial attitudes to the holding of office. If Symmachus is any guide, senators were not openly ambitious for office. His letters repeatedly express what can perhaps be termed an ‘ideology of leisure’ – a studious distaste for the cares and responsibilities of office, as opposed to the quiet charms, the leisured equanimity of private life. Office was a reward for merit, it provided status and title, opportunities to advance the interests of one’s friends. In office, senators were expected to – and to judge, not least from Symmachus’ Relationes, did – conduct themselves conscientiously; while the cares of office were one of the few accepted justifications for the incomplete performance of the social obligations of friendship. At the same time, it was made clear that senators undertook office as a matter of public duty, to satisfy the needs of the state and not their own ambitions; and their retirement was seen as the overdue restoration to private life of men who had never wished to leave it.99 The literal sincerity of these attitudes need not be taken for granted. They were shared, even, by Petronius Probus, of whom Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that he was like a ‘fish out of water’ when not holding office, pining away when not in possession of the prefectures which his

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The Letters of Symmachus family forced him to hold in order to defend their private interests.100 When Probus was recalled to office, to assume his fourth and last praetorian prefecture (in 383), he received a letter of sympathy from Symmachus, expressing regret at the interruption of his leisure. Probus was urged to be tolerant of the burden imposed upon him, remembering that repeated labours were the price of virtue, and that in calling again on his services, the emperors had considered more his abilities than his desires.101 Symmachus’ attitudes suggest a complex and ambivalent view of public office – a view in which office was valued in relation to a declared preference for private life. To put it differently: public office was a function of the private status of senators; it was not the other way round. One might be inclined to dismiss this view as an affectation, were it not consistent with certain features, which have already been noted, of senatorial office: short tenures of governorships, with intervals of several years between them – and equally important, the distribution of these offices in regions where senators already, as private individuals, possessed property and the economic and social influence which derived from it. It was precisely in the areas where their social influence was most pronounced – Rome itself, central and southern Italy, Sicily and north Africa (especially Proconsularis and Numidia) – that senators were accustomed to hold governorships. This congruence of the social and of the political distribution of senatorial influence is a matter of fundamental importance, which must underlie any discussion of the nature of the political role of the late Roman senatorial class. For it is not always easy to draw a clear line between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ comportment of senators in office – as for instance when they used it, as they often did, to foster and perpetuate links of patronage with provincial communities, which had been founded by their own ancestors, holding the same office in previous generations. Hence the patroni originales of Italian and African communities:102 and when a prefect of Rome paraded around the streets of his city in an official carriage, receiving the cheers and applause of the populace,103 was he doing so in his capacity as a public official, or as a senator who already possessed influence there? The position of senatorial governors in their provinces cannot be defined merely by reference to a set of precise functions and powers ascribed to them by their letters of appointment: also involved was a whole range of sources of influence deriving from their position as wealthy landowners with personal and inherited connections in these provinces. In these circumstances, the relationship between public office and the exercise of private influence will not have been a simple one, the influence

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Chapter 10 deriving directly and solely from the office. There is no need to doubt that Symmachus derived private influence from his tenure of governorships. The letters leave no question that the offices of Symmachus’ friends provided him with the opportunities to acquire benefits and advantages, and it would be unreasonable to deny that he used his own offices to convey benefits upon others. Although the great majority of the letters show influence which did not originate like this, it should be observed that they only concern the cases which Symmachus passed on for others to take action: they cannot give any idea of the number of occasions on which Symmachus might have exercised his own discretion in favour of a client, or responded directly to an approach made to himself. In these respects, the lack of reference in Symmachus’ letters to his own public offices, and to influence deriving from them, may be deceptive. There is a precise reason for this: that Symmachus’ administrative career, no less than his relations with the imperial court, itself derived from deeper sources, as the consequence, or rather the direct expression, of his prestige as a senator. It was this prestige, since it also lay behind Symmachus’ public career, which was the real basis of his patronage and influence. And finally, the nature of Symmachus’ influence should dissuade us from an excessively ‘political’ interpretation of its effects. For it was an influence with few moments of real impact at the highest levels of government policy, and lacking significant ambition in this direction. It was, rather, an accumulation of particular, often quite trivial, advantages which, however tedious to the modern reader of the letters, were appreciated by Symmachus and the colleagues and clients who benefited from them, and are central to an understanding of his position. It is misleading to regard the senate of the late empire as a forgotten class, deprived of political power and inhabiting a neglected backwater of late Roman life: equally so, to redress the imbalance by attributing too much to the senators in terms of direct political influence over the imperial government and participation in its institutions. There is a wide middle ground of senatorial influence, practical, cumulative and as unspectacular as it was durable. It is this influence which is illustrated by Symmachus, and within these horizons that his letters, with their style and social etiquette, their repetitive courtesies and ‘polite attentions’, must be understood.

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The Letters of Symmachus III Symmachus’ later years, as we saw, were lived against a background of military insecurity culminating, at the time of his final journey to Milan, in the first Visigothic invasion of Italy. It was also a time of great social fluidity, and within the upper classes themselves, of an unprecedented religious and cultural diversity. We have seen little of this in Symmachus’ letters, which are notable more for their immobility, their careful observance of precise rules of etiquette, than for any qualities of variety, movement or spontaneity. A man leaving on a journey is expected to write first, to inform his friends of his progress and safe arrival.104 He will never miss an opportunity to greet his friends, or fail to respond to a letter received. He will satisfy these obligations at the acknowledged cost of writing letters with no content except the salutatio which they were designed to convey (and the obligatory demand for a reply):105 he will even reply separately to two letters from the same correspondent which happen to have been brought simultaneously by different bearers.106 (This is less incongruous than might appear, when we remember that the replies might be carried by widely different routes, and that the bearers would normally be travelling in the pursuit of some business of their own, which would not be hindered by a supportive word from Symmachus.) Letters were supposed to avoid the inclusion of news – such as ill-health or personal distress, or unwelcome political events – that might be disturbing to their recipients, or too trivial to be enshrined in literary form; as we saw, such matters were attached on separate sheets, or entrusted to the bearer for oral communication. Silence was excused only for certain specified reasons, for instance bereavement, the occupations of office, illness (to avoid conveying bad news), or the most pressing family business.107 Lack of opportunity, in the absence of travellers to remote parts, was also accepted; in one letter, Symmachus implicitly contrasted the frequency of travellers to the Rhineland during an emperor’s visit to the region, with their extreme rarity after his departure; and his contacts with a friend in Spain were limited by distance and the seasons to an annual exchange of letters.108 Such rules were made, it goes without saying, in order to be broken (to defy etiquette by writing first to a departing acquaintance itself offered an appropriate sententia with which to open a letter);109 and they involved, in many cases, the elevation into principles of etiquette of the most prosaically obvious necessities. How could one do otherwise than regard the absence of letter-carriers as an excuse for not writing, or not recognise

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Chapter 10 the difficulties in contacting friends who were actually on journeys? Yet it is precisely this translation of practicalities into principles that is most characteristic of Symmachan amicitia in general. The social attentions just described were, for Symmachus, nothing less than the ‘religiones, quibus iure amicitia confertur’; and in this term, religio, with its companions munus and officium, we can see defined most clearly the nature of this ‘friendship’ and the qualities of character and social conformity which were exacted by its correct performance. As everyone knew, the term ‘religiosus’ implied not merely respect for the sanctity of the gods, but attention to social obligations among men.110 In these conditions, it is not surprising to find that the spontaneity which Symmachus permitted himself in his letters was carefully measured. Writing to his son, he admired the wit, the sparkling sententiae of his letters, but advised him to add variety to his style with something ‘maturum et comicum’, even a touch of negligence.111 Friends might be encouraged to drop the severe mode of address, with full names, ranks and titles, that was appropriate for strangers or distant acquaintances, in favour of a more intimate and informal manner.112 ( The letter mentioned earlier, in which Symmachus complained to Nicomachus Flavianus of the lack of interesting material with which to fill correspondence, was elicited by an error on the part of his own librarius, who had inserted Flavianus’ full name and title at the head of an earlier letter to him.) Such conventional forms of address were an affectation of archaism (‘archaïsmos scribendi’), which Symmachus appreciated, while himself preferring something more contemporary in style.113 Nor did Symmachus profess much liking for letters thin in content but artificially drawn-out in length. He preferred ‘Laconian brevity’ to ‘Nestorian expansiveness’ – while on other occasions welcoming the promise (or rather, regretting the failure to materialise) of ‘litterae largiores’ from certain friends.114 Within these conventions, Symmachus’ letters are remarkable for their sensitivity to individuals and the circumstances in which they found themselves. We have already seen this quality in the second Oratio, delivered at Trier at the beginning of 370. In letters addressed to Ausonius after his departure from the court, Symmachus referred with elegant brevity to his sojourn ‘in comitatu’; in a single phrase, ‘cum aeternorum principum … signa comitarer’, he recalled the visit itself, his presence ‘on campaign’ and the rank of comes tertii ordinis, acquired to mark it.115 He described his reaction to Ausonius’ Mosella in a letter almost swimming with pun and allusive metaphor relating to the poem and its subject;116 and in a letter to Julianus Rusticus, a friend both of himself and Ausonius, Symmachus neatly pointed the connection by quoting a phrase from a

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The Letters of Symmachus letter of Ausonius to himself, which happened to mention Julianus.117 We noted earlier how, in just a few lines to Eutropius, Symmachus could evoke his correspondent’s reputation both as a historian and medical writer, as well as the political crisis in which he was currently involved. Perhaps the most impressive instance of Symmachus’ allusive skill is in his letters to Vettius Agorius Praetextatus. In a formidable alliance of intellectual and spiritual capacities which made him the outstanding personality of late Roman paganism, Praetextatus established his reputation both as a philosopher, whose work on Themistius’ commentaries on Aristotle would be known to Boethius,118 and as a religious dévot – and activist. Not only was he initiated into the ‘Oriental’ cults in vogue among the aristocracy at Rome, and as proconsul of Achaia (361–4), into the leading mysteries of Greece:119 he used each of his senior official positions to win concessions from the Christian emperors; as proconsul he secured the relaxation for Greece of legislation against nocturnal sacrifice, as urban prefect in 367–8 he prohibited the abutting of private houses upon temples, and as praetorian prefect in 384 he provoked an enquiry into the unauthorised removal of valuables from temples.120 Praetextatus’ wife, Aconia Fabia Paulina, who shared her husband’s religious tastes, after his death commemorated his achievement in an epitaph, in which he was said to have devoted his erudition to the complex mystery of the divine nature;121 while in Macrobius’ Saturnalia, he was made to define his religious convictions in terms of a syncretism, the gods of the Classical pantheon being seen as different aspects, or functions, of the Sun.122 Symmachus, whose respect for Praetextatus is evident from the letters addressed to him, acknowledged his friend’s tastes when, having once broached a topic, he abandoned it to the ‘disputations of philosophers’: in another letter, he referred in a powerful phrase to Praetextatus’ spending his leisure at Baiae, ‘taming his mighty intellect’ in peace and solitude.123 Once, when Praetextatus was ill, Symmachus anticipated his return to health when the gods permitted the ‘reconciliation of the forces of his mind’; and the recovery of Paulina, on another occasion, was attributed to the restoration of the ‘pax deorum’.124 As prefect of Rome, Praetextatus had restored the ‘porticus deorum consentium’ in the Forum; there is no need to doubt that Symmachus’ expression was a precise allusion to Praetextatus’ theological beliefs.125 These are among a relatively small number of direct references to the traditional religions of Rome to be found in Symmachus’ correspondence. The great majority of such references occur in letters to his pagan allies such as Praetextatus and Nicomachus Flavianus, and they concern, almost exclusively, the public conduct of the old state religion – what Symmachus,

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Chapter 10 in a phrase to Praetextatus that well reflects the nature of his own preoccupations, calls ‘pontificalis administratio’.126 So he can be seen, writing again to Praetextatus of his concern at the failure of the priests to expiate a portent observed at Spoletium, or to his own brother on behalf of an agent despatched by the priestly college to defend one of its estates in Africa:127 deprecating the neglect of the gods, and attributing to it a serious food shortage, or the lack of conviction of Romans, as shown by their inclination to swim with the tide by absenting themselves from the altars:128 on occasions, even, persuading reluctant colleagues to attend meetings of the priestly colleges.129 We have noted his reaction to the Vestal Virgin who was reported to wish to give up her office before the regular time: perhaps better known is his attempt to persuade certain officials (unfortunately anonymous, though the prefect of Rome seems prudently to have evaded responsibility) to punish a Vestal, whom an enquiry of the college had pronounced guilty of adultery.130 The affair shows Symmachus in an unsympathetic light as a religious legalist – as indeed does his opposition to a proposal made to the college that the memory of Praetextatus be honoured by a statue dedicated by the Vestals, as against tradition and precedent.131 In other letters, Symmachus mentioned the festivals of Vesta and Minerva, and on a single occasion to Nicomachus Flavianus, the public cult of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods;132 while he was delighted to report, in a letter to his father (therefore before 377) the pagan loyalties of the citizens of Beneventum.133 Yet, while only relatively few of Symmachus’ letters were concerned with contemporary paganism, it need not surprise us that Christianity is still more fleetingly represented. The new religion is never mentioned by name in the letters, nor directly referred to: though on two occasions, Symmachus found himself recommending bishops – one, Clemens of Mauretanian Caesarea, from a town where he himself had connections.134 On each occasion, Symmachus took pains to anticipate his correspondent’s surprise by emphasising his respect for his client’s personal merits, as independent of those of his ‘sect’ – as Symmachus, with pointed objectivity, styles Christianity.135 Another letter refers with tantalising obscurity to a legal dispute involving an intervention of ‘priests’ (antistites), leading to a clash of interest between ‘justice and innocence’ on the one hand, and ‘religion’ on the other.136 There is no telling what is going on here, but there can be little doubt that the ‘priests’ in question were of the Christian persuasion, and Symmachus’ distaste is clear. For all Symmachus’ dislike of the new religion, there were times when he simply had to deal with it. His somewhat testy attitude on these occasions is illustrated by his letters to Ambrose of Milan. These letters

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The Letters of Symmachus are often taken to show Symmachus’ ‘unanimitas’, his sense of solidarity even with his opponent over the Altar of Victory.137 Closer examination does not really support this idea. The eight letters written to Ambrose contain only a single reference to Ambrose’s episcopal office, and none to his religion. Two letters recommend the same man, the second seeming to complain that Ambrose has done nothing so far and ending with the remark that a quick response will avert the need for yet a further request.138 On another occasion Symmachus plays the opposite game, in responding to a single letter sent by Ambrose on behalf of two individuals, Dorotheus and Septimius. Without doubting the worthiness of both men, Symmachus asks for a separate letter for each, and requests Ambrose to write again on behalf of Dorotheus, who lacks an individual recommendation.139 Symmachus did not need to insist on this and is perhaps taking the opportunity to embarrass Ambrose on a point of etiquette. Another letter defends Marcianus, the former adherent of a usurper. This too is a repeated request, implying that an earlier petition had gone unanswered.140 Finally, in the one reference to his correspondent’s episcopal office, Symmachus warns Ambrose off the exercise of jurisdiction in a matter affecting a client of Symmachus, whom he had assured that Ambrose did not normally entertain financial lawsuits.141 The letters to Ambrose seem to attest not so much the unanimity of amicitia, as the exploitation by Symmachus of Ambrose’s imperfect observation of its rules. No less than four of the letters raise such points of etiquette and one addresses the substantial issue of episcopal jurisdiction in a manner that is clearly antagonistic; the remaining three are formal notes of no particular significance. It may be that in these letters we catch a glimpse of the Ambrose whom Augustine found so difficult of access – a man preoccupied by everyday concerns, surrounded by the crowds of ‘busy men, whose infirmities he served’,142 but as far as concerns Symmachus and Ambrose, the exchanges do not justify the claims of friendship between them that are sometimes made. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the correspondence of Symmachus is its marginalization of religion. It might have been anticipated that such a correspondence, with its 130 named recipients (and many others unnamed), would have served as a ‘sounding board’ for the religious state of Roman society in the late fourth century, sensitive to its variety and enabling the progress of Christianity in this society to be measured with some finesse. In fact, this turns out not to be so; it is impossible to make any systematic or substantial classification of Symmachus’ correspondents between Christians and pagans. The fullest attempt to perform such a classification was not a success;143 and its failure is significant, less for the reason that the circumstantial evidence is so often

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Chapter 10 lacking for the identification of religious tastes, than because the letters themselves scarcely ever provide criteria to make the distinction. A possible explanation is that Symmachus’ letters functioned precisely to elide the distinction, to make it possible for his amicitia to operate across the threatening boundaries of religious difference (just as it also crossed the racial boundaries presented by the barbarian generals at court, whom Symmachus could likewise address with no change of tone or sign of embarrassment).144 He could employ a series of stylistic formulae to invoke the ‘gods’ in letters to demonstrably Christian correspondents – ‘dii modo optata fortunent’, ‘deos precor, ut tua secunda proficient’, ‘praefata ope deorum’ and other such phrases145 – while on the other hand referring to ‘divina miseratio’, or ‘dei venia’, when writing to a friend usually taken to have been a pagan.146 One metaphor in particular, deriving from initiation ceremonies, was used by Symmachus in introducing a protégé to the friendship of the younger Nicomachus Flavianus, ‘tamquam mystagogus’; yet he did not find the metaphor inappropriate in addressing a Christian praetorian prefect known also to St Martin of Tours, and other court officials whose Christian belief is not in doubt.147 It would be laborious and uninformative to catalogue such expressions through all their stylistic variations. The conclusion would not be affected – that they amounted to little more than formalities without significant religious content; that neither Symmachus nor the friends whom he addressed invested much emotional capital in them, and that he made no attempt on this basis to adapt his tone to the religion (assuming that he knew it) of a particular correspondent. They are a manner of speech, containing nothing to provoke contention or give offence: nothing to weaken the facade of unanimity affected by Symmachus and his colleagues.

IV It would however be a great mistake to imagine that Symmachus only wished to ‘cross the aisle’ of bipartisanship. It will be clear from his exchanges with Ambrose, that Symmachus’ correspondence is not devoid of differences of opinion, which might be expressed with considerable forcefulness. For, in addition to his now familiar language of friendship (amicitia, unanimitas, religio), Symmachus also has at his disposal a ‘language of enmity’ based on words such as livor, invidia, inprobi, aemuli.148 ‘Anger (livor)’, he says in one letter, ‘tends to rage against the good’, as shown in the present case when ‘envy (invidia)’ has deprived him of the presence of a friend. As Sergio Roda noted in his commentary on this letter,

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The Letters of Symmachus Symmachus may be referring to a threat or consequence of legal process impinging on his friend’s movements. This is an important observation, for one purpose of Symmachus’ ‘language of envy’ is to assign personal motives to adverse circumstance, even when issues of principle were involved.149 In attributing the blame to the envious and the hostile,150 Symmachus was able to ‘manage’ conflict by imputing personal grounds for it and, in doing so, to distract attention from the issues, legal or other, that might underlie it. The effect is to contain the threat to unanimitas that was inherent in such conflicts; a personal enmity can be resolved with fewer consequences than a difference of principle. Both in his private correspondence and even when dealing with the emperors, Symmachus can be surprisingly outspoken. In Relatio 17, for instance, he urges that the emperor should appoint to junior posts at Rome ‘conscientious and proven men’. A harmless enough sentiment, surely, but it emerges that in Symmachus’ opinion this has not been done – presumably, as he indicates with a skilful combination of tact and reproach, because the emperor is just too busy to know everything; ‘cedentibus reliquis, quos clementiae vestrae multiplex occupatio probare non sinit’. Symmachus refrains from direct criticism, remarking only that his own anxieties would be eased if ‘better men’ were appointed to administrative posts in the city. Indeed, the emperors would do better in future if they chose ‘unwilling’ candidates for office – a paradoxical but frequently stated principle designed to discourage personal ambition and to ensure honesty in the conduct of public administration.151 Relatio 17 is generally connected with an imperial constitution of 28 December 384, addressed to Symmachus as praefectus urbi.152 The emperor’s language is direct and to the point. To question the imperial judgment in matters of appointments, Symmachus was told, was tantamount to sacrilege, with a fine of 10 pounds of gold for the individual who made the criticism, and 5 pounds of gold for his officium. Whether or not the specific connection with Relatio 17 is upheld, it was a disconcerting document for an office-holder to receive, showing Symmachus’ words in that document as remarkably outspoken, in fact as rather courageous. A similar case is Relatio 21, where it appears that Symmachus had been accused of using an imperial decree safeguarding public monuments in order to victimise Christians; men were alleged to have been on Symmachus’ instructions seized from churches, bishops from all parts rounded up and thrown into chains. In consequence, he had been denounced in an imperial edict addressed to the people, composed, he says, in harsher language than the emperors usually employed.153 Symmachus rises vigorously to his own defence. Criticism of himself, he claims, was due

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Chapter 10 to the ‘anger (livor)’ and ‘envious rivalry (insidiae aemulorum)’ of men who had ‘blatantly lied’ at the imperial court, making up fantastic stories fit only for the stage. Whoever was responsible should be made to confess and say why he had done it. This was all no doubt entirely justified (Symmachus was supported by no less a figure than pope Damasus, as well as by the fact that the enquiry which he was accused of exploiting had not even commenced); but he was accusing of being misled by fabrication an emperor who, in an edict read out to the people and publicly displayed, had directly criticised his prefect. Symmachus is asking the emperor, in no uncertain terms, to eat his words. In the fourth century as at other times, public office was attended by risks of misrepresentation. Writing to an anonymous correspondent, Symmachus complains of being deprived of the honour of public statues as retiring proconsul of Africa, by decrees which instead of praising him in the usual vote of thanks for his conduct of office, criticised him. In the same language of envy, rivalry and anger, Symmachus despised his detractors and, confident of the esteem of his own conscience, tormented his enemies with his contempt for their opinion.154 With this sort of language in mind, we may look with fresh eyes at such a well-known passage as the opening of Symmachus’ Third Relatio on the Altar of Victory. Symmachus begins by telling the emperor how ‘vice was now made subject to laws’ (subiecta legibus vitia), and the ‘memory of recent times’ purged. In a violent metaphor the senate ‘vomited forth’ its longsuppressed anger, and for a second time appointed Symmachus as spokesman of its complaints. On the previous occasion (in 382) audience had been denied by ‘wicked men’ (inprobi ) who recognised the justice in the senate’s case and prevented it from being heard. Now, however, the senate was unanimous, no longer expecting that they would win favour by dissenting. In reading this very direct language, we should remember that Symmachus could not assume success in his petition. If in the event he failed (as he did, before the superior opportunism of Ambrose), his explanations of previous failure might begin to look tactless. Were ‘vitia’ after all not subject to laws? Did ‘inprobi’ still hold sway at court, preventing the emperor from hearing justice? Was the ‘zeal of courtiers’ (‘aulicorum studium’) still the dominant influence there? Is this really the language of conciliation, expressing, to quote my own words, echoing those of others, ‘great formal courtesy’?155 Symmachus’ outspokenness appears with equal force in his private correspondence. In a letter mentioned earlier, Symmachus exhorts a senatorial colleague to complete a marriage union he had tried to call off between his daughter and Herculius, Symmachus’ friend. The question is

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The Letters of Symmachus raised as a matter of duty rather than prejudice, after which ingratiating start Symmachus becomes progressively more direct. The performance of promises and the good faith of a senator should not be disfigured by a mere change of intention. To these general considerations Symmachus adds his personal support for Herculius, which cannot be denied without giving offence (‘non sine contumelia’), when the senator ought to yield to Symmachus’ wishes without being prompted.156 It is the clearest possible statement that if the senator refuses Symmachus’ request, openly staked as a matter of honour, he will sacrifice his friendship. In a further example, Symmachus tells Eusignius how glad he is to receive his letters, when bitterness and complaint are absent. On the present occasion, however, Eusignius’ pen had lacked its usual friendliness (‘iucunditas’), in falsely accusing the younger Nicomachus Flavianus of improper conduct, in a legal dispute in which Eusignius himself had no interest.157 Symmachus informs Eusignius (a former praetorian prefect) that he had suppressed letters written against the proper claims of friendship, and sets him straight on the facts of the matter. The dispute had not been decided, as Eusignius had claimed, by Venustus – this would be Volusius Venustus, Flavianus’ grandfather – but by another governor not connected with him. Further, Flavianus finds himself in a precarious position through misfortune (the aftermath of Eugenius’ usurpation), in addition to which, financial affairs ought never to be pursued ‘to the detriment of friendships’. Symmachus hopes to merit calmer letters in future, and for Eusignius’ usual respect for Symmachus to be extended also in affection to his friends. So ends a lecture on proper conduct among senators (unless one calls it moral blackmail), to a correspondent who otherwise received a number of congenial and friendly letters. This letter is one of many that bring up a particular set of circumstances in which invidia could arise: the vicissitudes of usurpation. So Symmachus presents to Palladius one Benedictus, who has been deprived of rank and honour by the misfortune of usurpation (again, of Eugenius). Palladius is requested to smile upon Benedictus’ ‘innocence’, to ensure that he shares in ‘the glory of these most serene times’ and enjoys the emperor’s clementia – all ‘coded language’ for the aftermath of a failed usurpation.158 Another such letter, incorporating the same ‘coded language’, is written to bishop Ambrose on behalf of Marcianus, ‘a good man, but caught up in the invidia of tyranny’ (which tyrant, does not matter here); may he too, with Ambrose’s assistance, enjoy the clemency enjoyed by others! 159 The recovery of Symmachus’ own reputation after his panegyric to the usurper Maximus is an important though complicated story that can only be followed in outline here. It is tied up in its successive phases with the

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Chapter 10 promotion of Nicomachus Flavianus, Symmachus’ friend, as quaestor sacri palatii, with Symmachus’ acquaintance with Theodosius’ magister officiorum Fl. Rufinus, and with the visit to Rome, in summer 389, of the victorious emperor.160 When, in autumn 388 and so very soon after the defeat of Maximus, he learned from Rufinus of Flavianus’ promotion, Symmachus replied expressing pleasure and gratitude. In doing so, he quotes a revealing phrase from Rufinus’ letter; ‘sed quod ais, exclusis inprobis spem bonis redditam...’.161 So the wicked were excluded and hope was restored to the good, what is surprising about that? – except that it is a clear reference to the supporters of Maximus, of whom Symmachus had been one, to the extent, at least, of delivering a panegyric to the usurper. Symmachus was invited to distance himself from the ‘inprobi’ and was quick to do so. The visit to Rome of the court of Theodosius in summer 389 provided more opportunities for Symmachus to set the record straight, and it was during this visit that he made the personal acquaintance of the magister officiorum. Upon Rufinus’ departure from Rome with the court in early September, Symmachus, consciously breaking normal etiquette (usually the person embarking on a journey will write first), wrote to him recalling their acquaintance and complimenting the amicable civility he had displayed at Rome. A few weeks later, Symmachus declined the invitation he had received to travel to Milan to attend the consular celebrations of the Emperor Valentinian. He had given his reasons in a separate letter to Rufinus, which he asked him to read with favour, depending as he did on the support of friends at court. Everyone knew this, friends and enemies alike; ‘hoc amici, hoc aemuli sciunt’.162 ‘Amici’, contrasted with ‘aemuli’ rather than ‘inimici’ (rivals rather than enemies), is a subtle displacement of opposites, presenting Symmachus himself as the object of envy, and so superior in merit to his opponents. In a similar letter to Neoterius (the consular colleague of Valentinian), Symmachus expressed his fear that his reasons for absence might be suppressed, or else misrepresented by these ‘rivals’ at court.163 So he forwarded copies of all the letters he had sent to the emperor and to the others at court who wished him to attend. The clementia of the emperor might take a little time to find full expression; but when in 390 he received news of his designation as consul for 391, Symmachus’ patient diplomacy was rewarded. In his new-found confidence, he was even able to withhold from the court his condolences on the death of a respected public servant, ‘civis emeriti’. If the deceased grandee was indeed the four-times praetorian prefect, Sextus Petronius Probus, Symmachus’ remarks cast an interesting light on his guarded letters to that disconcerting individual, whose political ambitions and personal

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The Letters of Symmachus neuroses inspired one of Ammianus Marcellinus’ most penetrating character studies.164 As we have just seen, Symmachus’ personal acquaintance with Rufinus was made during Theodosius’ visit to Rome in summer 389.165 We would never guess that Rufinus had left Rome in September, in the possession not only of Symmachus’ friendship, but of relics of the Roman saints, Peter and Paul, which he had acquired from pope Siricius – a side of his character that Symmachus does not illuminate. The relics he was to install, upon his return to the east, in a martyr shrine which he established at Chalcedon – and next to it, a monastery populated with monks from Egypt.166 Further, Rufinus’ sister-in-law was to embark on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Egypt, in the course of which she met the elder Melania and the monk Palladius, author of the Lausiac History in which the encounter was mentioned;167 while, upon Rufinus’ death in November 395, his widow and daughter took themselves to live in pious exile among the ascetic circles established at Jerusalem.168 It is worth pondering the different fates of the two men. For Symmachus, an explanation (he calls it a ‘defence’) of his panegyric of Maximus, together with the diplomatic manoeuvres we have just seen, was enough to purge him of the taint of supporting a usurper; while Rufinus’ exposure to the court politics of the Theodosian and post-Theodosian régimes of Milan and Constantinople resulted in his violent death at the hands of the army. Imperial clementia was a discriminating (though sometimes powerless) institution; it would have been inconceivable that a senator of Symmachus’ distinction would meet this fate. We might nevertheless expect Symmachus’ experience in the time of Maximus to have encouraged a sense of caution, when in 393 Eugenius, proclaimed emperor in Gaul the previous summer, brought his armies over the Alps and settled at Milan. There is no sign that Symmachus allowed himself to become actively involved with the régime.169 On the other hand, he did not refuse all contact with it. It was not long since Eugenius’ prefect of Rome, the younger Flavianus, had become Symmachus’ son-in-law; and precisely in 393 that Symmachus’ own son, Q. Fabius Memmius Symmachus (the editor of the letters), celebrated his quaestorian games.170 Symmachus saw no danger in writing to the elder Flavianus as Eugenius’ praetorian prefect, and to other officials for their assistance in assembling beasts and performers for the games;171 while he sent to Flavianus the usual offerings of ivory diptychs and small gifts to celebrate the occasion. To Eugenius himself he sent a special diptych framed in gold; and to other friends at court, presentation writing-tablets of ivory, and silver caskets.172 Further, when Flavianus assumed the consulship at the beginning of 394

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Chapter 10 – an appointment not recognised by Theodosius – even though he did not go himself, Symmachus did not refrain from conveying his pleasure, in the persons of friends invited to Milan for the ceremonies.173 It does not seem that Symmachus’ relations with the régime of Eugenius affected his standing with the restored imperial court of Theodosius after the battle of the river Frigidus and suicide of Nicomachus Flavianus in September 394.174 Already in the first months of 395 he was able to support the petition of a delegation of Campanian notables seeking tax concessions on their estates. He could intercede for individuals who had been drawn into supporting the usurper, such as the Benedictus whom we met earlier and, possibly, the Marcianus for whom he wrote to Ambrose, and in due course protect his son-in-law, Flavianus junior. By 399, thanks largely to Symmachus’ intercession and encouragement, Flavianus’ reputation was sufficiently restored to allow him a second tenure of the prefecture of Rome.175 There was apparently a distinction between active support for a usurping régime and the regular conduct of due social courtesies: a respect for politesse that allowed for the functioning of necessary social relations through times of political disturbance. In the same way, the emperors habitually issued legislation confirming private legal transactions undertaken under usurpers, nullifying only their political acts such as their appointment of consuls and other public officials. It was in no-one’s interest that ordinary legal acts – contracts, inheritances, manumissions of slaves, loans, sales of property and so on – which had been properly conducted according to correct legal forms, should be invalidated just because they happened to have been performed under a usurper.176 If cultural worlds with differences as great as those between Symmachus, Ambrose and Rufinus – pagan senator, bishop, Christian courtier – and if political challenges as great as those of the last decades of the fourth century could so be brought under control and ‘managed’ as in the correspondence of Symmachus, this can at least be said to have possessed a certain practical usefulness. But perhaps we can go further, in suggesting that it is precisely in its ability to disarm the contentious and to accommodate divisive issues that the letters, with their neutrality of style, their religious opacity, their careful observance of etiquette and endless ‘polite attentions’, their reduction of principled enmity to personal anger and envy, are seen at their most effective. The picture of the fourth century as an age of ‘conflict’ between paganism and Christianity has offered a vein of interpretation richly exploited by modern scholars. It is equally important to appreciate how men who lived in this age were able to limit the scope of this and other sources of conflict, in order to make the

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The Letters of Symmachus conduct of social relations possible for themselves, their colleagues and those dependent upon them. It is a complicated story, and the letters of Symmachus are an important part of it.

Notes The documentation for this chapter, though extensive, is selective in that it bears mainly upon Symmachus himself, and only secondarily upon the historical background against which it attempts to place him. The letters are cited from the edition of Otto Seeck, in MGH, auct. ant. VI.1 (1883, repr. 1961: cited as Seeck, Symmachus ). The Chicago dissertation of 1942 by J. A. McGeachy, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and the Senatorial Aristocracy of the West, is cited as McGeachy, Q. Aurelius Symmachus. When this study first appeared, only one volume of J.-P. Callu’s Budé edition of Symmachus’ letters was published; this is now complete in four volumes (1972–2002), together with the fine Italian translations and commentaries published under the general editorship of Lellia Cracco Ruggini in the series Biblioteca di Studi Antichi (Pisa). To date have appeared Books 2 (G. A. Cecconi, 2002), 3 (A Pellizzari, 1998), 4 (A. Marcone, 1987), 5 (P. Rivolta Tiberga, 1992), 6 (A. Marcone, 1983), 9 (S. Roda, 1981) and 10 with the Relationes (D. Vera, 1981); in preparation are Books 1 (Rita Lizzi), 7 (S. Roda), and the Orationes (Cristiana Sogno). A re-evaluation of Symmachus’ political career, giving full weight to the Orationes, is offered by Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A political biography (2006). I have also added some references to my Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, AD 364–425 (1975, reprinted with postscript, 1990). 1 7.13–14, cf. 7.2 and 5.95 (to Helpidius). 2 4.9 to Stilicho presents the ‘amplissimi ordinis petitiones’. 3 4.13, cf. 5.94, 96 to Helpidius; ‘sanitatis...quam labefactavit peregrinationis iniuria et hiemalis asperitas’. 4 Chron. Min. I, p. 299 (18 November 401). 5 Claudian, De Bello Getico (of 402), esp. 314f.; Alan Cameron, Claudian: Poetry and propaganda at the court of Honorius (1970), pp. 180–7. 6 De Bello Getico 450f., cf. Symmachus 7.13; ‘vir cuncta praecelsus...mox cum praesidiis validissimis adfore nuntiatur’. 7 Gaudentius, Tract. 17.1f., cf. 13.21 (CSEL LXVIII, pp. 141, 120). 8 ILS 797, with Chastagnol, Fastes, p. 256. 9 The first law issued there is dated 6 December 402 (C Th 7.13.15). For Symmachus’ connections with Ariminum, cf. 9.120, ‘Ariminum saepe praeteriens’; 9.48. 10 3.47. 11 See Latomus 30 (1971), pp. 1076–7; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 96–7. 12 Marcellus, De Medicamentis, praef. (ed. Helmreich, Teubner 1889, p. i). 13 1.95; 3.18. Cf. Seeck, Symmachus, cxi. 14 Seeck, Symmachus, lxxiii; ‘scriptorem ingenii tam pauperis pauci certe lecturi sunt, sed multi hic illic inspicient, ut singulas res excerpant’. 15 Respectively M. Schanz, Gesch. der römischen Litteratur 2 (1914), vol. IV(i), p. 127 (‘Worte ohne Inhalt’); F. Homes Dudden, The Life and Times of St Ambrose (1935), p. 39.

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Chapter 10 16

G. Boissier, La Fin du paganisme (1891), vol. II, p. 183 (cf. his long review of Seeck’s edition; in Journal des Savants [1888], pp. 402–10, 597–609, 712–26). 17 A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire (1964), vol. I, p. 155; F. Paschoud, ‘Réflexions sur l’idéal religieux de Symmaque’, Historia 14 (1965), at p. 215. 18 S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (1899), p. 153. 19 2.35; ‘quousque...dandae ac reddendae salutationis verba blaterabimus, cum alia stilo materia non suppetat? at olim parentes...etiam patriae negotia, quae nunc angusta vel nulla sunt, in familiares paginas conferebant’. 20 E.g. 2.82; 7.87; 9.60, 90, etc. 21 E.g. 2.25; 6.48; 7.82. 22 1.46, 90; 2.38; 3.30; 6.12; 9.116, etc. (cf. for the avoidance of unpleasant news, 1.85; 2.49; 6.65; 8.33, etc.). 23 Seeck, Symmachus, xxiii; developed by J. A. McGeachy, CP 44 (1949), pp. 222–9; see §IV below. 24 See esp. McGeachy, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, and A. Chastagnol, La Préfecture urbaine à Rome sous le Bas-Empire (1960). The Relationes are translated with summary comment by R. H. Barrow, Prefect and Emperor: The Relationes of Symmachus, AD 384 (1973), and in magisterial detail in the Italian translation and commentary by D. Vera (1981). 25 7.42; cf. 5.84; 9.18, 35, 102, etc. For the recipient of 7.42 as Hadrianus, magister officiorum in 399 (and later praetorian prefect), see R. J. Bonney, ‘A new friend for Symmachus?’, Historia 24 (1975), pp. 357–74. 26 4.46 (apparently fulfilled by CTh 11.28.2, of 24 March 395); cf. 4.35 for the formation of the acquaintance. 27 5.66–5–6, cf. 9.88; ‘diu officium scribendi per verecundiam distuli, ne in aula positum viderer ambire’. 28 8.69. 29 4.34, 64; 5.85–6. 30 2.12, 48 (not to be taken too seriously?). 31 Macrobius, Sat. 5.1.7; Sidonius, Ep. 1.1.1. 32 Cited by J. P. Callu, Symmaque: Lettres, ed. Budé, vol. I (1972), introd., p. 26. 33 Callu, p. 55f. See now Cristiana Sogno, ‘Aegidius Beneventanus and the “Epistulae” of Q. Aurelius Symmachus’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 40 (2005), pp. 407–16. 34 Olympiodorus, fr. 44 (Müller, FHG IV, p. 67 = Blockley, fr. 41,2, p. 205); Socrates 5.14.5. 35 ILS 2946. See below on Q. Fabius Memmius Symmachus’ editorial role. 36 Cf. 1.44, 52, 78, 96, 105; 3.7; 4.29, 45, 64; 5.8; 7.58; Seeck, Symmachus vi–vii. 37 4.49; Arusianus Messius, ed. Keil, Grammatici Latini VII, pp. 458, 489; Cassiodorus, Variae 1.1. Compare Symmachus’ influence upon Ennodius; Seeck, Symmachus v, n. 4. 38 Seeck, Symmachus, pp. 318–39 and introd., viii–ix. For the palimpsest (now divided between Milan and the Vatican), E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores I (1934), Nos. 26a–31 (Vatican); III (1938), Nos. 26a–31 (Milan): also – since the palimpsest is the unique source for Fronto’s letters – J. van den Hout, M. Cornelii Frontonis Epistulae (1954), pp. ix–xvii. 39 R. A. B. Mynors, XII Panegyrici Latini (Oxford Classical Texts, 1964), p. ix. 40 The significance of this has been questioned, but seems to me fundamental; see Alan Cameron, CQ n.s. 15 (1965), at pp. 295f. I still believe that Book 10 may stand

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The Letters of Symmachus in its original form (contrast Cameron, p. 296; Callu, pp. 19–22); and I am unconvinced by Seeck’s hypothesis (Symmachus, xvi f.; Callu, pp. 17f.) that the Relationes had been published separately by Symmachus himself. 41 Viz. 10.1–14, ‘the private letters’, followed by 15–121, ‘the Bithynian letters’: see A. N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny (1966), pp. 556f. 42 E.g. to Marcianus, 8.9, 23, 54, 58, 73; to Pacatus, 8.12; 9.61, 64. On the other hand, certain groups clearly belong together; 8.71–2; 9.147–8, 138–9, and many letters on the praetorian games at the beginning of Book 9. 43 H. Peter, Der Brief in der römischen Litteratur (1901), pp. 144f.; accepted by McGeachy, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, p. 25 and in CP 44 (1949), p. 222. For a full discussion see S. Roda, Commento Storico al Libro IX dell’Epistolario di Q. Aurelio Simmaco (1981), pp. 58–79. It is possible to imagine circumstances in which Symmachus might himself have published Book 1, perhaps later the Relationes, separately, but that is not to say that this is what happened. The idea that Symmachus himself published Books 1–7 encounters the difficulty mentioned above, that his death seems to have occurred very soon after the latest of the letters included in them. 44 In the form ‘editus post eius obitum a Q. Fabio Memmio Symmacho v.c. filio’. See the apparatus of Seeck’s ed., pp. 70 (Books 2/3), 124 (Books 4/5), 235 (Book 9). As Roda, Commento Storico, p. 72, notes, the last of these, based on a lost manuscript, is known only from the first printed edition of Iuretus, of 1580, but I see no particular reason to doubt it. 45 Viz. the presence in these books of letters to Patruinus (8.18–19) and to Probinus (9.60) – assuming these to be the same as the recipients of 7.102–28 and 5.67–71 respectively. Further, 9.126 is usually assigned to Probinus and 9.112 to S. Petronius Probus (cf. 1.56–61). In addition, the letters to Licinius (5.72–7) include two (74–5) to Limenius. But such errors might be ascribed to faulty record-keeping by Symmachus’ librarius (cf. 2.35). 46 Not inaccurate, if taken as a broad rather than exclusive description of contents: Book 8, by contrast, contains practically no commendaticiae. 47 See esp. H. O. Kröner, ‘Die politischen Ansichten und Ziele des Q. Aurelius Symmachus’, in Politeia und Res Publica: Beiträge Rudolf Starks gewidmet (Palingenesia 4, 1969), pp. 337–56, esp. at pp. 346f. 48 1.52; ‘pars melior humani generis’, cf. Or. 6.1; ‘nobilissimos humani generis’. 49 See esp. Or. 4. 5f. (of 376); and on the circumstances, A. Alföldi, A Conflict of Ideas in the Late Roman Empire: The clash between the Senate and Valentinian I (1952), pp. 84ff.; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 67–8. 50 Rel. 48.1; ‘praefecturae urbanae proprium negotium est senatorum iura tutari’, cf. Cassiodorus, Variae 6.4.1 (‘Formula praefecturae urbanae’); ‘grande est quidem procerem esse, sed multo grandius de proceribus iudicare’. 51 Or. 8.3; ‘. . . boni sanguinis, qui se semper agnoscit’. 52 E.g. 2.10, 91; 5.41, 66; 7.46, 89, 94, etc. 53 7.126; cf. 9.40, opening with a definition of Symmachus’ ideal of justice – ‘ratio quidem semper habenda iustitiae est, sed circa nobiles probabilesque personas plus debet esse moderaminis, ut perspiciatur in discretione iudicium’. 54 9.6; cf. 1.74; 4.68; and (concerning Symmachus himself ) 7.66. 55 Cf. Seeck, Symmachus, lxviii for the letters. 56 8.41; cf. Latomus 30 (1971), at p. 1081.

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Chapter 10 57

9.108; ‘quare officio pontificis, fide senatoris admoneor’; 9.43. 2.46; ‘ferunt Socraten, si quando excidit cupitis aut destinatis, id sibi utile, quod evenerat, aestimasse’. 59 2.78; ‘quoniam servorum per limitem facilis inventio et pretium solet esse tolerabile’. Flavianus was praetorian prefect under the usurper Eugenius (see below). 60 Respectively 6.37; 9.83; ‘accusato vernula tuo flumine, cuius turbidos meatus et infidum agmen expertus es’ (by flooding?); 6.40. 61 Cf. Amm. Marc. 14.6.16f.; 26.3.5, etc.; above, Chapter 9. 62 See Chastagnol, La Préfecture urbaine à Rome sous le Bas-Empire, esp. pp. 459f. on the wider aspects of the senators’ position; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, Chap. I. 63 For such connections in Symmachus, cf. 1.3 (Beneventum); 4.46 (Campanians); 8.27 (Naples); 9.58, 136 (Formiae), 131 (Caieta), 138–9 (Suessa); 1.17 (Sicily, cf. CIL 10.7017); 1.64 (Mauretanian Caesarea); 9.51 (Hippo Regius). Compare 9.103, 105; Rel. 44 (mancipes salinarum). 64 E.g. Amm. Marc. 27.3.8f. According to Ambrose, Ep. 40.13 (PL XVI, cols. 1105–6), this was a frequent experience of prefects of Rome (he may of course be exaggerating). 65 Amm. Marc. 27.3.4 (in 376). 66 J. Rougé, ‘Une émeute à Rome au IVe siècle’, REA 63 (1961), pp. 59–77, esp. at 63f. See Pliny, NH 36.181; Palladius, Op. Agr. 1.17. 67 1.10, 12; ascribed by Seeck (Symmachus, lxxiv) to late 375; Or. 4 (see below). 68 See esp. 4.5 to Stilicho; Seeck, Symmachus, lxix; Alan Cameron, Claudian, Chap. V; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 267–9. 69 6.61, 66; 8.65. 70 See for more examples (especially the case of Praetextatus), below, Chap. 11. 71 E.g. the case of Tertullus; Amm. Marc. 19.10.1f. 72 E.g. Olybrius; Amm. Marc. 28.4.2 (cf. 14.6.19f.; 28.4.9, 21, etc.). 73 Cf. Seeck, Symmachus, lxxi–ii. According to A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vol. II, p. 560, this was ‘the one subject on which he shows enthusiasm’. 74 See esp. 4.58f.; 9.11–12, 18, 20–4, etc. 75 4.8, cf. 12. 76 E.g. 2.76–8 (esp. 78; ‘avidus civicae gratiae’); 4.8, 12 (‘leopardorum cursus...cui iustior plausus et laeta vocum suffragia debeantur’); 4.60.3; 6.42, etc. 77 For the career see Seeck, Symmachus, xlv f.; more briefly (and with some improvements), Chastagnol, Fastes, pp. 218f. Cristiana Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A political biography (2006) is a significant re-evaluation. 78 See esp. Chastagnol, ‘Observations sur le consulat suffect et la préture du BasEmpire’, Revue Historique 219 (1958), pp. 221–53. 79 CTh 8.5.15 (25 March 365); Chastagnol, Fastes, p. 220. 80 2.27, 44. 81 9.115 (see below). The snub is sometimes ascribed to the influence of his successor, who happens to be known as a Christian (ILS 1287; Salona); but there is no evidence for this interpretation. 82 8.5, 20. 83 10.1; see Historia 20 (1971), pp. 122–8. Theodosius was executed shortly after his victory over Firmus ( Jerome, Chron. s.a. 376). 58

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The Letters of Symmachus 84

Memmius Vitrasius Orfitus; Chastagnol, Fastes, pp. 139f., 219. Relationes 1 & 2 – respectively to Valentinian II and, with scrupulous protocol acknowledging the fiction of collegiality of the emperors, to the eastern emperor, Theodosius. 86 Rel. 10.3; below, Chap. 11. 87 Seeck, Symmachus, ccx–xi; see now Angela Pabst, Reden: Q. Aurelius Symmachus (1989), and Cristiana Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A political biography, Chapter 1. 88 Or. 2.4, 13, 18f; cf. Amm. Marc. 28.2.2f (fort); 5.9f. (Burgundians); Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 32–3; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 284–6. 89 Or. 2.4; CTh 11.31.4. 90 1.23.3; cf. Ausonius, Praefatiunculae (Opusc. I Peiper), i, 35; Gratiarum Actio 2(11), etc. 91 1.14.3f.. 92 1.23.3; cf. 1.32.4 (Ausonius to Symmachus). 93 10.1; cf. Historia 20 (1971), p. 127. Theodosius was at court at the time (Amm. Marc. 18.3.9, 5.15; 29.3.6, etc.); and his son, the future emperor, was known to Ausonius (Opusc. I.iii–iv). 94 Rel. 3.1. 95 2.30/31, cf. Socrates 5.14.4f.; see below. Naturally no trace survives of either panegyric or apology. 96 Cf. 2.64; 5.15; 9.149: at Rome, 4.58, 60. 97 Seeck, Symmachus, lxiii (cf. 4.31; 7.8; 8.21, etc. – all of 399/400). For the other embassies, cf. 4.18, 52; 7.12, 22, 26 (in 396); 6.52, etc. (in 397; Seeck, Symmachus, clxiv); 6.58, 62; 7.54, 113–14 (398; cf. CTh 7.13.13). 98 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 264–70 and Chap. XIV. 99 E.g. 1.42.2; 2.17.2; 6.38; 7.50; 8.13, etc.; McGeachy, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, pp. 45f.; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 1–13. See more recently L. Cracco Ruggini, ‘Simmaco: otia et negotia di classe, fra conservazione e rinnovamento’, in F. Paschoud and others (edd.), Colloque Genevois sur Symmaque, à l’occasion du mille six centième anniversaire du conflit de l’autel de la Victoire (1986), pp. 97–118, and S. Roda, ‘Fuga nel privato e nostalgie del potere nel IV sec. d.C.; nuovi accenti di un’antica ideologia’, in C. Giuffrida and M. Mazza (edd.), Le Trasformazioni della Cultura nella Tarda Antichità (Atti del Convegno tenuto a Catania, Università degli Studi, 27 sett.-2 ott. 1982; Rome, 1985), pp. 95–108. 100 Amm. Marc. 27.11.3; below, Chapter 11. 101 1.58; ‘...debitam operam solve principibus [again note the formal acknowledgment of collegiality], qui rationem magis meriti tui quam voluntatis habuerunt’; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 10–11. 102 L. Harmand, Le Patronat sur les collectivités publiques, des origines au Bas-Empire (1957), esp. pp. 188f., 202f., 285; Chastagnol, Préfecture urbaine, p. 461; M. T. W. Arnheim, The Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman Empire (1972), pp. 155f.; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 23–31. 103 Cf. Cassiodorus, Variae 6.4.6; ‘carpento veheris per nobilem plebem, publica te vota comitantur, favores gratissimi consona tecum voce procedunt’ – words as applicable to the late fourth century as to the early sixth. 104 E.g. 4.23; 5.70; 6.60 (departures): 2.5, 8; 3.8, 65; 9.73, etc. (arrivals). See E. Wistrand, ‘ Textkritisches und Interpretatorisches zu Symmachus’, Symbolae 85

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Chapter 10 Gotoburgenses 56 (1950), pp. 87f. [= Opera Selecta (Stockholm, 1972), pp. 229f.]; McGeachy, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, p. 123. 105 2.58; 3.78; 6.13; 7.5; 8.4, 12, and passim. 106 E.g. 1.76; 4.22. 107 E.g. 1.83; 4.17; 9.68 (bereavement): 1.85; 7.77; 8.54–5, cf. 31 (illness); 1.18, 26, 95, 3.2, 28; 7.117; 8.25, etc. (occupationes). 108 4.28, cf. 30, 33; 4.58; ‘annuos gaudii fructus ex litteris tuis capio’. On the lack of carriers, 1.39, 42; 8.34; 9.27, etc. 109 E.g. 3.3, cf. 84; 5.30. 110 7.29; Festus, p. 348 Lindsay; ‘religiosus est non modo deorum sanctitatem magni aestimans sed etiam officiosus adversus homines’. Cited by Wistrand (n. 104 above), p. 88. 111 7.9. 112 4.30, 42. 113 3.34. 114 1.14; 3.11; 1.23, 45, cf. 3.10. 115 1.14.3, cf. Ausonius to Symmachus, 1.32.4. 116 1.14.2; ‘volitat tuus Mosella per manus sinusque multorum...sed tantum nostra ora praelabitur’. 117 3.6.1, cf. Ausonius to Symmachus, 1.32.1. 118 See the preface to Boethius’ Commentary on the De Interpretatione, ed. sec. (ed. C. Meiser [Teubner, 1880], pp. 3–4). 119 For the evidence, see Seeck, Symmachus, lxxxiii–viii; Chastagnol, Fastes, pp. 171f. Note esp. ILS 1259 (his epitaph); CIL VI 1778. 120 Proconsul; Zosimus 4.3.2f., cf. CTh 9.16.7, of 364; urban prefect, Amm. Marc. 27.9.10; praetorian prefect, Symmachus, Rel. 21.3, 5. 121 ILS 1259 (a tergo, v. 15; ‘divumque numen multiplex doctus colis’). For the religious tastes of Paulina, ILS 1260; below, Chapter 11. 122 Sat. 1.17.1f. 123 Respectively 1.48, 47 (‘ingentem animum solitudine domas’). 124 1.45, 47. 125 ILS 4003; cf. H. Bloch, ‘A new document of the last pagan revival in the west, 393–394 AD ’, Harvard Theological Review 38 (1945), pp. 199–244, at 207f.; Chastagnol, Fastes, p. 173. 126 1.51 (cf. 1.47; ‘pontificalis officii cura’). See JRS 63 (1973), pp. 175–95. 127 1.49, 68. 128 1.51 (referring also to ‘tanta sacerdotum neglegentia’); ‘nunc aris deesse Romanos genus est ambiendi’. 129 1.51, cf. 47; 2.34 (to Nicomachus Flavianus), cf. 53. 130 9. 47–8. 131 2.36. Compare ILS 1261, a statue set up by Praetextatus’ widow in his Esquiline house to the Vestal Coelia Concordia, and referring to a statue earlier dedicated to her by Praetextatus. But see JRS 63 (1973), p. 192, n. 111. 132 2.34. 133 1.3.4; ‘amantissimi litterarum morumque mirabiles. deos magna pars veneratur’, etc. 134 2.64; for the circumstances, Historia 30 (1971), at pp. 126f.

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The Letters of Symmachus 135

1.64; ‘causa istud mihi, non secta persuasit. nam Clemens boni viri functus officium’, etc.; cf. 7.51; ‘fratrem meum Severum episcopum omnium sectarum adtestatione laudabilem’. Rel. 21 refers twice to ‘Christiana lex’. Rel. 3, on the altar of Victory, does not name Christianity. 136 6.29; ‘neque enim iustitiae et innocentiae deferri plurimum potest, cum illis reverentia religionis opponitur’. For the usual meaning of ‘religio’ in Symmachus, see above with n. 110. 137 3.30–37; cf. D. Vera on Rel. 3 (Commento Storico, p. 155). 138 3.30–31; ‘praestabit beneficii tui celeritas, ne sit mihi necesse idem saepius facere’. 139 3.32. 140 3.33; ‘abstinere secunda petitione non debui, ut necessitatem viri optimi sed invidia tyrannici temporis involuti precatio geminate testetur’ see below on the circumstances. 141 3.36; ‘sunt leges, sunt tribunalia, sunt magistratus, quibus litigator utatur salva conscientia tua’. 142 Conf. 6.3(3); ‘secludentibus me ab eius aure atque ore catervis negotiosorum hominum, quorum infirmitatibus serviebat’. Symmachus had recommended Augustine to the city of Milan, not to the court or the bishop; below, Chapter 11. 143 J. A. McGeachy, CP 44 (1949), p. 226 n. 26; yielding, on what criteria is not clear, 54 pagans or probable pagans, 33 Christians or probable Christians, 47 indeterminate. For an ambitious recent attempt to identify pagans and Christians in the late Roman aristocracy and to analyse the results see Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and religious change in the Western Roman Empire (2002). Aggregated into the generality of evidence, the letters of Symmachus do not bulk very large, no doubt because they rarely provide direct evidence of the beliefs of individuals. 144 Viz. Ricomeres (3.54–69); Bauto (4.15–16); and of course Stilicho (4.1–14). For other generals, cf. 3.70–3; 74–80 (Timasius and Promotus). 145 Respectively 1.57 (Petronius Probus); 7.68 (Alypius); 5.13 (Fl. Manlius Theodorus – the Christian Platonist known to Augustine). 146 5.90, 95 to Helpidius – presumed a pagan on the evidence of 5.85, referring to the festival of Minerva. The formulae ‘praefato divinitatis favore’, ‘divinitatis honore praemisso’, attached to general invitations to his son’s praetorian games (8.71–2) might be thought deliberately non-committal. 147 6.25 to Flavianus; 9.9 to Fl. Vincentius (cf. Sulpicius Severus, Dial. 1.25.6); ‘in domus tuae sacrarium tamquam mystagogus induco’. Cf. 5.64 to Aemilius Florus Paternus; 7.45, to Hadrianus, as argued by R. J. Bonney (above, n. 25) – and if so, a Christian; also 4.40, 9.64. 148 In what follows I incorporate the arguments of my short chapter ‘Symmachus and his enemies’, in F. Paschoud and others (edd.), Colloque genevois sur Symmaque (above, n. 99), pp. 164–75. 149 9.97; ‘solet bonis livor obstrepere; ut nunc speratum praesentiae tuae gaudium mihi subduxit invidia’; Roda, Commento Storico, p. 230. 150 Marcone, Commento Storico, p. 61, adduces the imperial oratio of 431 to the senate, restoring the reputation of Nicomachus Flavianus (ILS 2948); ‘quidquid in istum caeca insimulatione commissum est, procul ab eius principis [sc. Theodosii] voto fuisse

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Chapter 10 iudicetis: cuius in eum effusa benivolentia... excitavit livorem improborum’. As Peter Brown remarked, ‘the Emperor shows an ability to forget the tensions of the immediate past which would be incredible in any other age. The paganism of Flavianus, and his role in the usurpation of Eugenius, are passed over in silence; instead, the eclipse of so great a name is ascribed to “blind misrepresentation”...’; JRS 51 (1961), at p. 3 = Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972), pp. 166f. It is a way of keeping divisive issues in their place. See also my comments at Historia 46 (1997), pp. 211–13. 151 A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, p. 383f. and D. Vera, Commento Storico, pp. 134–5, both citing Marcian, Nov. 1.1; ‘sciens quippe felicem fore rem publicam si a nolentibus et actus publicos repulsantibus regeretur’. See F. J. Pedersen, ‘On professional qualifications for public posts in late Antiquity’, Classica et Medievalia 31 (1970), at pp. 182f. 152 CTh 1.16.9. The connection is made by Jones, The Later Roman Empire, pp. 391f., and by Vera, Commento Storico, p. 156; as earlier by Seeck, Symmachus, lvi. The rebuff must be distinguished from the edict ‘to the people’ discussed immediately below (Rel. 21); Symmachus was reprimanded on two occasions. 153 Rel. 21.2, ‘asperioribus, quam pietati vestrae mos est, litteris’; Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A political biography, p. 52. 154 9.115; ‘aemulorum facta inproba uel ingratorum foeda decreta...ego solus torqueo corda liventium [cf. ‘livor’ in Rel. 21], cum alii quibus statuae quoquo modo tributae sunt, nihil habeant invidendum’. The circumstances are unknown; Roda, Commento Storico, pp. 255–7. Cf. 2.27 to Nicomachus Flavianus, a letter of advice to one leaving office. 155 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, p. 205. 156 9.43; ‘maneat igitur, oro te, stabilitas promissorum nec senatoriam fidem voluntatis mutatio devenustet’. The same affair is mentioned at 5.44, but I do not see that the Iulianus there mentioned need be the reluctant father-in-law of this letter (as Marcone, Commento Storico, p. 123). There are in any case strong grounds (Marcone, l.c.) against identifying this Iulianus with Sextius Rusticus Iulianus, praefectus urbi under Maximus (387/8), when he died. 157 4.71; ‘Summo gaudio, quotiens scribis, adficior, et tum maxime, cum abest amaritudo querimoniae. Nunc stilus tuus ab usitata iucunditate dissensit’. Eusignius was the recipient of 4.66–74. 158 9.1; ‘gradu atque honore militiae fortuna magis quam culpa privavit’. The letter belongs with 4.53 to Florentinus, otherwise certainly addressed only in 395 and later; the allusions to the aftermath of civil war (‘publicae felicitatis...serenissimorum temporum gloria...clementia maximi principis’) are unmistakable. 159 3.33 (see above). My (and Mommsen’s) view that the ‘proconsul’ Marcianus of the anonymous Carmen contra Paganos (v. 86) held this office under Eugenius is challenged by L. Cracco Ruggini, ‘Il paganesimo romano tra religione e politica (284–384 d.C.): per una reinterpretazione del “Carmen contra Paganos”’, Acc. Naz. dei Lincei, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, Memorie VIII,23 (1979), pp. 103–6, with n. 316. Whether Maximus or Eugenius was the ‘tyrant’ is not of great importance for present purposes. 160 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 230–1, with additional note of 1990, p. 401, and the detailed arguments in ‘Nicomachus Flavianus’ quaestorship: the

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The Letters of Symmachus historical evidence’, Xenia 23 (1989), at pp. 18–25 (notes at 44–48). An earlier date and setting were preferred by Callu, ed. Budé, I, p. 167 and II, p. 73, and fully argued in ‘La préfecture de Nicomaque Flavien’, Mél. Seston (1974), pp. 73–80. 161 3.81. The first law drafted by Nicomachus Flavianus as quaestor seems to be CTh 15.14.7, of 10 October 388. Another, CTh 4.4.2, of 23 January 389, is praised by Symmachus to Flavianus, 2.13. In 3.86, Symmachus expressed his satisfaction that Rufinus was friends with Flavianus, to the chagrin of those who were displeased by the friendship. 162 3.84 (‘sequor te litteris’, etc.), 85. 163 5.34; ‘ne aut lateant suppressa, quae scripsi, aut per aemulos resoluta vitientur’. 164 3.88; Amm. Marc. 27.11.1ff.; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 195–7 with additional note of 1990, pp. 400–1; below, Chap. 11. 165 PLRE I, Rufinus 18 (p. 778). A Gaul from Elusa in the south-west, he first appears as magister officiorum with Theodosius on the campaign against Maximus; Latomus 30 (1971), p. 1078. 166 Callinicus, Vita S. Hypatii 66 (ed. Teubner, 1895, p. 18; SChr 177, pp. 98f ). 167 Lausiac History 55 (ed. C. Butler, Texts and Studies 6 [1904], p. 148). See esp. E. D. Hunt, ‘St Silvia of Aquitaine’, JTS n.s. 23 (1972), pp. 351–73. 168 Zosimus 5.8.2. 169 I pass over the issue of the ‘pagan revival’ supposed to have been conducted by Flavianus in his capacity as Eugenius’ praetorian prefect; see esp. H. Bloch, ‘A new document of the last Pagan Revival in the West’, Harvard Theological Review 38 (1945), pp. 199–244, and ‘The pagan revival in the west at the end of the fourth century’, in The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (ed. A. Momigliano, 1963), pp. 193–218; cf. my ‘The historical setting of the “Carmen contra Paganos” (Cod. Par. Lat. 8084)’, Historia 19 (1970), pp. 464–79; Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 240–3. This whole interpretation is challenged in the paper of L. Ruggini cited above, n. 159. 170 Seeck, Symmachus, lii, lviii: J.-R. Palanque, REA 33 (1931), 353–5. 171 To Flavianus, 2.46, 76–8; cf. 5.20–2 (to Magnillus, vicarius of Africa); 5.59 (to Aemilius Florus Paternus, proconsul of Africa in 393, cf. CTh 10.19.4, issued from Constantinople by Theodosius); 7.117. For an invitation to attend the games, 5.46. 172 2.81; ‘praeterea domino et principi nostro...auro circumdatum diptychum misi’; cf. 7.76; 9.119. 173 2.84–5. At 2.83 Symmachus recommended to Flavianus one Alypius, whose attendance at the consular celebrations resolved an earlier difference between them (‘ut nubem invidiae superioris abstergeat’). This would be especially intriguing if this Alypius was Faltonius Probus Alypius, a member of the Christian Anician family and a recent (in 391) prefect of Rome of Theodosius, cf. Chastagnol, Fastes, pp. 236f. Alypius was probably the recipient of Ambrose, Ep. 89; cf. Latomus 30 (1971), p. 1081. 174 Symmachus, lix–x; see also Marcone, Commento Storico, p. 61f. 175 Seeck, Symmachus, lxxi (many letters); Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, p. 266; Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A political biography, pp. 80–4. For the second prefecture, Chastagol, Fastes, p. 243. The Campanian embassy, n. 26 above. 176 CTh 15.14, ‘De infirmandis his, quae sub tyrannis aut barbaris gesta sunt’. See the comments of Tony Honoré, ‘Some writings of the pagan champion Nicomachus Flavianus’, in Xenia 23 (1989), p. 11.

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11 FOUR FUNERALS AND A WEDDING This world and the next in Fourth-Century Rome I Some time in the summer or early autumn of 384 the prefect of the city of Rome, the famous orator, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, convened a panel of judges for a congenial task, to advise on a recommendation for the vacant chair of rhetoric in the city of Milan. Among the candidates (he may of course have been the only one to reach this point in the procedure) was an aspiring young man from Thagaste in Numidia, whose curriculum vitae included a public appointment in his home town and private teaching at Carthage and Rome (the careers of young academics were evidently as stressful then as they are now); and it was the African, Aurelius Augustinus, whom Symmachus, after hearing him deliver an oration on a set topic, dispatched to Milan with a permit to use the imperial transport service. ‘And I came to Milan, and to Ambrose the bishop’, wrote Augustine of his success. If Symmachus had known that he was issuing a travel warrant to the author, not only of the Confessions, from which we know most of this (the selection procedure is added from a letter of Symmachus on a different occasion),1 but of the City of God, in which Symmachus’ entire cultural inheritance was to be dismantled, he might have had second thoughts, but this is to read far into the future. Nor am I persuaded that, even as recommended to Symmachus by his Manichean contacts at Rome, Augustine was part of an undercover campaign conducted by the prefect against his adversary the Catholic bishop; this was far too indirect and ambiguous a mode of intervention to have been sure of success without a corresponding risk to Symmachus’ own good standing. Taking him as he was in 384, Augustine was just another ambitious young man enjoying Symmachus’ support on the way to higher things.2 However brief the stay, it was nothing if not an interesting moment to be in Rome. Within weeks (one way or the other) of his encounter with Augustine, Symmachus’ carefully expressed petition for the restoration of the altar of Victory to the senate-house, and of their financial and other

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Chapter 11 privileges to the priests and Vestal Virgins, was falling victim to Ambrose’s browbeating of a young emperor who happened to be resident in the city of which he was bishop. Overworked as it may be, this episode stands for more than one set of arguments against another. We see conservatism against an ideology of change, philosophical scepticism against Biblical authority, the rational tolerance of the old religion against the evangelism of a bold and self-confident church, full of powerful converts and enjoying imperial favour. Looking at the episode in its broadest dimensions, we sense the draining of a whole system of power and patronage from old channels into new, as the Roman government and society tested the implications of the emperors’ conversion to Christianity. It had been happening, in one context or the other, since the time of Constantine. Also in 384 or very close to it, there arrived in Rome a somewhat older man than either Symmachus or Augustine, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus – just in time to suffer from an expulsion of strangers at a time of grain shortage. Ammianus’ disillusion at the cultural aspirations of upper-class Roman society, as honourable visitors and lovers of the liberal arts were driven out, while 3,000 dancing girls, with their trainers and supporting troupes were allowed to stay in the city, provides one of the best-known passages of a memorable history and despite some satirical embellishment on the author’s part is usually, and I think rightly, taken to reflect his own experience.3 Finally, another visitor to Rome, an ambitious monk known to us as Jerome, had assumed the confidence of its bishop and was acting as pastoral adviser to a group of unmarried upper-class women in their houses on the Aventine. The absence of Jerome from Ammianus’ narrative may occasion some regret at a lost opportunity, but that is all. A Classical historian need not concern himself with clerical eccentricities on the Aventine – these were not the ‘negotiorum celsitudines’ that Ammianus thought the true material of history (26.1.1), nor did they belong to the texture of a work composed in the spirit of Sallust, Livy and Tacitus.4 They might at best have provided further scope for the satirical writing that Ammianus deploys in his two digressions on the senate and people of Rome. Ammianus does however mention the accession to the bishopric of Rome, eighteen years before, of Jerome’s patron Damasus, in rioting that left 137 (another source gives over 160) dead on the floor of a Christian basilica (27.3.12f.). This was not only a scandal for the Christian community but a matter of public interest proper for a historian, and the suppression of those troubles by the then prefect of Rome may serve to introduce the best-known public event of 384. This was the death late in the year of that former prefect, the famous senator Vettius Agorius Praetextatus.

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Four funerals and a wedding II At the time of his death, Praetextatus was consul designate, a just reward for a distinguished and loyal career; earlier in the year he had held the praetorian prefecture at the court of Valentinian II, resident at Milan – the same city, and the same imperial court, to which Symmachus dispatched Augustine.5 It was Symmachus who, as prefect of Rome, described his friend’s death in a formal relatio sent to the emperor. When the rumour of his death swept through the city, wrote Symmachus, the people assembled in the theatre and acclaimed the memory of Praetextatus. They added reproaches to the malice of fortune which had robbed them of the emperor’s gifts – the games that Praetextatus would have given at the beginning of his consular year. These were the emperor’s gift because the emperor had given the consulship which they would have celebrated.6 Jerome, also a contemporary witness, described the same event in a different perspective. At the death of Praetextatus, declared Jerome, ‘the whole city was in turmoil’ (Ep. 23.3). After this fleeting moment of agreement with Symmachus, Jerome went on to say that, while Praetextatus’ widow had declared that her husband now lived in a ‘heavenly palace’ among the stars of the Milky Way, this was a delusion; in fact, the great senator was cast into outer darkness. We can glimpse what the widow had in mind from the joint epitaph, erected later, in which she and her husband exchange poetic statements of their mutual affection. Through his sacred learning and by the initiations to which he had introduced her, Paulina thought, or is represented as thinking herself ‘freed from the common lot of death’.7 The idea provides a central theme of this chapter, but what is interesting for the moment is that Jerome’s knowledge of the circumstances of Praetextatus’ death included his widow’s sentiments. Probably these too were part of the public history of the event – a funeral oration perhaps, a statement made on her behalf to the senate, or some other form of announcement. Despite the public response to his death, expressed in acclamations of grief and anger, it would be a mistake to view Praetextatus as a sort of latter-day ‘popularis’. He was an intellectual leader, a man of high culture, a reader and translator of Greek philosophy, an exponent of Platonist doctrine and an affiliate of a variety of pagan cults, a learned man; even the poetic messages just mentioned between himself and his wife were composed in an archaic and rarely found Plautine metre. Ammianus Marcellinus, who surely knew him, described Praetextatus, in a much earlier context, as a ‘senator of ancestral gravitas’ (22.7.6). As we just saw, his tenure of the prefecture of Rome, in 367, had been marked by strict

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Chapter 11 discipline as he dealt with the disorders caused by the election to the bishopric. Praetextatus also showed his respect for the ancient religions, as he enforced building regulations to prevent the disfigurement of temples (27.9.9f.). We have before us a double image, for the sources are full of episodes that show the intimate relationship between the aristocracy and people of fourth-century Rome, as when a rioting mob threatens to set fire to the house of a great senator, upon which his neighbours’ familiae – other senatorial households – turn out to repel the mob by pelting them with missiles from the roof-tops.8 We detect a distant echo of Tacitus’ contrast, in 69 CE, between the ‘respectable’ part of the populace that was ‘connected with the great houses’ and so, conservative in its tastes, favoured the new regime after the death of Nero, and the ‘plebs sordida’ dependent on imperial munificence and devoted to the games, who regretted his fall (Hist. 1.4). The senators of late Rome did not live in an ivory tower. To shift the metaphor, they were poised on a social pyramid whose lines of force descended through ever-widening layers of clients and dependants; it was as true now as it ever had been, that what happened to senators mattered to all, and what happened to all mattered to senators.

III The death of Junius Bassus during his prefecture of Rome in 359 is briefly noted by Ammianus, to explain how his office was filled by a deputy.9 We need to appreciate the family background of the urban prefect. He was the son of Junius Bassus (senior), a Christian supporter of Constantine the Great, praetorian prefect in the west for an unparalleled thirteen years, and, in 331, consul. It is Junius Bassus the father who appears on a well-known marble inlay panel, leading out the chariot teams in the colours of their factions, for his consular games; Bassus leads the cavalcade on a quadriga, wearing the inaugural robes of his office. The panel, and others, came from the audience hall of the family mansion at Rome, in the fifth century converted into a church.10 The younger Junius Bassus, the short-lived urban prefect mentioned by Ammianus, is known for his monumental sarcophagus, a constant point of reference in discussions of late Roman art and iconography.11 Here we see a different aspect of the culture of the family. The sarcophagus displays biblical scenes in a refined Classical style, in two registers: in the upper register are shown Christ in majesty over the arc of heaven, flanked by scenes of Peter and Christ on trial, the sacrifice of Isaac and the confusion

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Four funerals and a wedding of Pilate; in the lower register Christ enters Jerusalem in the centre, while the outer scenes show Adam, Eve and the serpent, Daniel in the lion’s den and the martyrdom of St. Paul. On the ends of the sarcophagus are little angels picking fruit, an image of Paradise to complement the themes of sin, martyrdom and redemption shown in the front panels. An inscription on the lid declares that Junius Bassus ‘went to God’ on 25 August 359 at the age of 42 years and 2 months, as a newly baptised Christian; ‘neofitus iit ad deum’ (ILS 1286). Junius Bassus’ social position is articulated on an inscribed panel, which had been broken from the lid of the sarcophagus and was recovered during the excavations conducted at St. Peter’s in the 1940s.12 The inscription tells in elegiac couplets how Bassus’ death was the cause of ‘perpetual grief in the city’. The people competed to be pallbearers, a duty not allowed, as was the usual convention, to members of the household.13 The whole crowd wept – mothers, young boys, old men; the senate threw aside its togas and wept; the very roof-tops of Rome shed tears, even the paved streets ‘uttered groans’ as the cortège passed over them! The funeral was an event in the public domain; wending its way through the streets of Rome to St. Peter’s, the cortège was part of the urban theatre that in turn gave the public grief its opportunity for expression. The inscription foreshadows what we have seen on the death of Praetextatus. As far as the public impact of the events is concerned, either text could be applied to the other case.14 It is not so usual to finish up at St. Peter’s, but this is what great Roman funerals were like. Not so interchangeable are their religious connotations. The sarcophagus of Junius Bassus had come to light long ago, during reconstructions carried out at St. Peter’s in the late sixteenth century, when it was found at the head of the Constantinian basilica.15 Measured without the broken panel found in the 1940s, the sarcophagus is 1.41 metres high; it was found just below the surface of an infill of 1.45 metres above the original ground level of the apse. This was the height by which the floor was raised in rebuilding of the sixth century, when the workmen must have smashed off the panel as an obstruction and dropped it into the infill. What we can see from all this is that the sarcophagus was found in its original location in the Constantinian apse, directly behind the confessio of St. Peter, in a niche behind the altar designed for it; this last point is underlined by the fact that, while its front is so beautifully carved, the back of the sarcophagus is blank, as never intended to be seen. The location was the ‘prime site’ in the fourth-century basilica, claimed by a prefect of Rome who was the son of one of Constantine’s most prominent Christian supporters. It was impossible to be laid to rest closer than this to the traditional burial place

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Chapter 11 of St. Peter. The sculptured apostle looked out from the sarcophagus to his own resting place in Constantine’s basilica, just a few feet away – intertextuality in stone!

IV Our third funeral brings us back to St. Peter’s, a generation after Junius Bassus’ interment there. This is the burial of the most famous of all Christian senators of the period, S. Petronius Probus. Probus’ career is the subject of a remarkable obituary notice in Ammianus Marcellinus, who gives a penetrating sketch of the pathology of a man pressed into political life by the families whose ‘dominus’ he was, and whose interests he had to defend; in a brilliant stroke of paradox, Ammianus makes this domineering politician the victim of forces stronger than himself. In office, Probus was overbearing to the weak but submissive to those who stood up to him. He would never force a client or servant into illegal acts, but would defend through thick and thin any who committed them. Gasping like a stranded fish when out of office, Probus was assailed by anxieties while holding it, and was ‘therefore’ (ideo – another moment of acute insight) always subject to minor illnesses. Through his continuous holding of office and through his largesse, Probus had acquired unmatched political influence; all this for the families with which he was connected, ‘never innocent in their unbounded cupidity’, in one of those memorably evocative phrases for which Ammianus had a special genius (27.11.3). ‘The diagnosis of morbid ambition’, wrote Sir Ronald Syme, ‘is masterly’.16 Potuit, quoad vixit, ingentia, wrote Ammianus, who was living at Rome at the time of Probus’ death and had many opportunities to observe him; ‘a man, as long as he lived, of immense power’ (27.11.2). That the death and burial of Probus were public events of the first order is shown, in my view, by a letter of Symmachus, notable for the personal animus that shivers like a cold wind across the calm surface of his style.17 Writing to a court official, the magister officiorum Rufinus, Symmachus responds to a rebuke he had suffered for failing to send his condolences on the death of a ‘distinguished citizen’. Perhaps, Rufinus had suggested, he had not heard the news? The idea was so absurd, that Symmachus could treat it as facetious irony. How could this be so? he asked. How could he, living on the Mons Caelius, have failed to notice such a notable event, which had occurred at Rome? Symmachus dropped the pretence, and refused the opportunity he had been given to make good his lapse of courtesy. It was not ignorance or illcourtesy, but enmity, that was the cause of his silence. If he could not

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Four funerals and a wedding grieve but did not wish to give the impression of pleasure, he should at least be allowed the privilege of silence on the death of one with whom he had been on the least cordial of terms; ‘you know that it is normal in human relations that, with men for whom one feels a lack of respect arising from long dissension, in place of the grief with which death habitually strikes us, we may at least offer the respect of silence’.18 In circumstances that still seem almost too good to be true, Petronius Probus’ epitaph is extant. It was copied by the antiquarian scholar Mafeo Vegio in 1450, just six months before the inscription, and the mausoleum in which it stood, were demolished in the rebuilding of St. Peter’s by Nicholas V.19 The location of the mausoleum, abutting the outer wall of the apse, is given on a plan of the church which, though dated some time after the rebuilding, may preserve its earlier configuration. It was an imposing monument. The inscription begins by inviting the wonder of the visitor as he gazes at the lofty roof of the mausoleum, and asks, what great man is buried there? and it goes on to describe, in two elegiac poems, the earthly and heavenly career of Petronius Probus. We are led to believe that Probus’ entry into heaven was neither more nor less than an extension into the next world of his political distinction in this. This man, who had shared the discourse and table of emperors, had now, clad in the clean white robes of baptism, crossed new thresholds and dined with Christ and the saints – it is just a matter of promotion and, dare one say it, a new uniform. For it is not irrelevant to add that, when Probus’ sarcophagus was rescued from the rebuilding that destroyed the mausoleum, it was reported to contain traces of the gold thread that had been woven into his white robes of baptism.20 It also carried images of Christ entrusting the propagation of the ‘New Law’ of Christianity to the evangelists. This will be an important issue in the last part of this chapter. The epitaph of Petronius Probus speaks of him as ‘beloved throughout the world’, and dedications from his clients praise him as the ‘author of humanity, patron of moderation’, with all the other public virtues of an aristocratic Roman (ILS 1265–6). Others tell a different story. According to Jerome in a remarkable entry in his Chronicle – remarkable not least because it was written during its subject’s lifetime – Probus destroyed Illyricum through his unjust exactions more thoroughly than did the barbarians by fire and sword. And it was Petronius Probus who, in an episode described by Ammianus, forced the provincials of Epirus to send an embassy of thanks for his administration to Valentinian I. Probus’ plan to bury his misdeeds in late Roman rhetoric came unstuck when the emperor, recognising one of the envoys, asked him whether they had come of their own volition. ‘Unwillingly’, came the reply, from a courageous

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Chapter 11 philosopher, ‘and with groans’! In a resigned reflection on the way things were, Ammianus noted that the emperor was too busy or too distracted to rectify the complaint.21 Ammianus’ obituary of Probus might almost be read as a parody of his actual epitaph, ceremonious adulation replaced by barbed irony. We have just seen how one of his socio-political virtues, his munificence – ‘sparing of his wealth to no-one’, as the epitaph has it – is transformed by Ammianus into the lavish generosity by which he built up his power. What follows, the holding of continuous public office, appearing in the epitaph in the form of Probus’ four praetorian prefectures and the consulship, has in Ammianus a more pungent flavour. Probus built up his power ‘by largesse, and by holding continuous offices one after the other’; largiendo, et intervallando assiduas potestates. And it is not only Ammianus who says it. ‘Let others desire continuous offices’, declared Symmachus in very similar words (ament alii perpetuas potestates), offering his resignation from the prefecture of Rome after the death of Praetextatus. He surely has Petronius Probus in mind.22 We cannot leave this hyper-ambitious and over-anxious senator without noting the exact location of his burial. There it is on Alfarano’s plan, a magnificent mausoleum abutting the apse of St. Peter’s at its central point – outside the church. The sarcophagus of Junius Bassus lay just feet away, inside the church, with all the rights of possession in what I called the ‘prime site’ of the fourth-century basilica. There it had stood, for thirty years now; what is this but a case of territorial piety, the site of Probus’ interment compensating for its lesser desirability by ostentatious grandeur? It is perhaps just as well, divided as they were by the thickness of a wall, that it was impossible to see both monuments at the same time. Indeed, it would have taken a rather special effort to compare them. In the end, as our senators acknowledge, all earthly distinctions fade before those of the life to come. It is again striking how the two sides, pagan and Christian, address this issue in similar terms. For Junius Bassus, the honours of the living yield to the culmination of his glory in death; for Petronius Probus, his earthly fame is matched by his greater renown in heaven – ‘here your true honour, here your true nobility’, in the words of his epitaph. So too for Praetextatus the great pagan; the honours, powers and pleasures sought by men were insignificant for the devoted lover of the gods. Jerome saw in Praetextatus’ death the dissolution of his pomp and popularity; the man who a few days before was raised to the summit of dignity, who ascended the Capitol like a general in triumph, whom the people of Rome had received with applause and dancing, was now cast into outer darkness. The lesson was to fix one’s thoughts, not on the passing delights of this world, on its riches and powers, but on eternity;

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Four funerals and a wedding ‘pro brevibus et caducis aeterna succedant’ (Ep. 23.4). This is not only a cheap blow, but it misses the target, for it is exactly how Praetextatus’ widow addresses her husband on his epitaph. Praetextatus too regarded all honours, powers and human aspirations as transient and of no moment; ‘quae tu caduca ac parva semper autumans’, says Paulina to her husband.23 Like other controversialists, Jerome liked to think that only he was ever right; he sustained himself by the conviction that others were always wrong – to the extent, sometimes, that one wonders if he really wanted to persuade them of their errors if, in consequence, they would agree with him (I have known scholars like this). I doubt that he would have been best pleased to find his sentiments on the vanity of human wishes shared by the great pagan senator. The two sides, pagan and Christian, also visualise life after death in very similar terms. Praetextatus dwells in a ‘heavenly palace’ in the Milky Way, Petronius Probus ‘crosses new thresholds’ in the white robes of baptism. So too the senator and poet Rufius Festus Avienius, whose slightly earlier epitaph at Rome addresses the obscure goddess Nortia of Volsinii, his home town. In four lines added to the main text of the epitaph by his son, Jupiter ‘opens heaven’ to Festus, that he may enter ‘clothed in white’. Now he arrives, a ‘chorus of gods extends right hands’ in welcome, the heavens ‘resound in praise’.24 Just so for Probus the Christian, his epitaph asks that he may be ‘joined to the heavenly choruses’. There are differences. Probus is supposed to join the choruses in praise of Christ, while it is Festus himself to whom the heavens resound; but the mise-en-scène, as we may well call it, is identical.25 We may imagine it too in the case of Junius Bassus, who ‘went to God’ as a newly baptised Christian. After the public impact of his funeral, I doubt that his arrival in the next world was any less ceremonious. Considering their success in this life, these people did not expect disappointment in heaven.

V Three senators, two Christian and one pagan, sharing contempt for the things of this world, their deaths and funerals great public events at Rome, bring us to our wedding and to our fourth funeral, which followed it all too closely. In the same few months as he wrote his letter mentioning the death of Praetextatus, Jerome wrote three other letters in which he described the marriage, and its aftermath, of a young senatorial woman, Blaesilla. It is an over-familiar story, which may however bear re-telling in this context; to which I will add material that I do not think has been fully exploited.

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Chapter 11 Blaesilla’s mother, Paula, is when we meet her in the early 380s the widow of the senator Toxotius (and so sister-in-law of a former vicarius of Rome and proconsul of Africa).26 Blaesilla herself has married as a young woman of about twenty, but now shares her mother’s widowhood after just seven months of marriage – thereby, in Jerome’s words, ‘losing both the crown of virginity and the pleasures of wedlock’. Who but Jerome could be so cheerless in describing the worst of both worlds? For a time Blaesilla lived like other widows of her age, conducting themselves ‘as if they were looking for husbands rather than had just lost them’ – receiving priests, dreaming apostles after dinner, preferring their liberty as widows since they knew by experience what it was like to be married. Satirical in tone, not to mention its inconsistency, this is all in Ep. 22, addressed as a deterrent, soon after Blaesilla’s widowhood, to her sister Eustochium.27 By the time of Ep. 38, Jerome and Paula have been working on Blaesilla, who had been living like one of the merry widows of Jerome’s heated imagination. She had then fallen sick of a fever and, recovering from her close encounter with death, adopted a life of ascetic self-denial. In Jerome’s words, she has learned to ‘reject all those pamperings of that body into which worms will soon burrow their way’– caduca ac parva with a vengeance (Ep. 38.2)! She ministers to the Lord, she embraces his feet, she lives in endless prayers and weeping. Leaving aside the obvious symptoms of severe depression in the poor woman, it is hardly the best regime for one just emerging from a life-threatening illness; ‘her steps tottered with weakness, her face was pale and quivering, her slender neck scarcely upheld her head...her knees totter, her eyes drop off to sleep’, and so on, wrote Jerome, in evident pride at his achievement so far. In Ep. 39, however, Jerome’s plans have gone awry, for Blaesilla has suffered a relapse and died. The funeral of Blaesilla is described in this letter; her mother was so beside herself with grief (not to mention weakened by lack of food) that she collapsed in the procession and was carried off unconscious. If we are to believe Jerome, mourners complained that Blaesilla was killed by fasting, and a clamour arose that monks be expelled from Rome. Better still, stone them, hurl them into the Tiber (Ep. 38.6)! It would be interesting to know what Ammianus would have made of all this, if it were not so remote from any possible conception of ‘negotiorum celsitudines’. Nevertheless, we are back in the public domain described earlier. The deaths of senators were matters of public interest, their funerals public affairs. In the language of the inscription of Junius Bassus; ‘the whole crowd wept, mothers, young boys, old men...the very roof-tops of Rome shed tears, even the paved streets uttered groans’. This could be inserted

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Four funerals and a wedding as it stands into Jerome’s account of the funeral of Blaesilla – metaphor becoming sharp reality at the point where her mother is physically carried off by grief. Jerome is writing only a few months after his description of the death of Praetextatus and his widow’s funeral speech about a ‘heavenly palace’. When we recall the crowds that had expressed their grief in acclamations, we may imagine opposition to the monks being expressed in the same fashion – orchestrated, perhaps, by angry members of Blaesilla’s family. Within a few months, Jerome’s protector and Praetextatus’ famous adversary, bishop Damasus, was also dead. We soon find Jerome preparing to board ship at Ostia/Portus, pouring out his complaints in a letter to another of his female protégées.28 At last, we know what it was all about. Were it not for his intimacy with Paula, he claimed, by the consent of all he, Jerome himself, was worthy of the supreme pontificate. It is a breathtaking self-delusion, that shows Jerome, not for the first time, as a blundering careerist, whose sense of timing – what has been called his ‘masterful capacity to be in the right place at the right time’ 29 – was exceeded only by his ability to transform friendships into enmities, without a fraction of the social skills of a Symmachus in defusing the consequences. Jerome exported himself with his resentments to the Holy Land, and was there joined by Blaesilla’s widowed mother and virgin sister, Paula and Eustochium. Five years later, now settled at Bethlehem, Jerome, no longer in his persona as failed papal candidate but his better substantiated one as emerging biblical scholar, composed a commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes. His first major commentary, it carried a preface addressed to Paula and Eustochium. As we know, prefaces offer occasions for reminiscence and expressions of gratitude, sometimes a little sentimental but appreciated for all that, to those who have helped authors with their work. So now, Jerome recalled in the preface to his commentary how, when living at Rome, he had read the book to Blaesilla in order, he says, to ‘provoke her to contempt of this earthly scene, and to count as nothing all that she saw in the world’. Blaesilla had then asked Jerome to address his remarks to ‘obscure’ passages of the text in the form of a short commentary, so that she might understand what they meant, even when Jerome was not there to teach her.30 We might suspect Jerome of writing this ex post facto, in the light of his own, then unplanned, departure from Rome, except that it was not he himself but Blaesilla who was removed, by death, from their work of scholarship; ‘we were not counted worthy to have such a one as the partner of our life’ (PL 23.1010/CCL 72, p. 249).31 His remarks are however worth pursuing, for they may enable us to see

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Chapter 11 something of the character of the discussions between Jerome and his protégée; they may take us inside the relations between an ascetic teacher and one of his pupils. I think that we may also pick up another tone in Jerome’s preface – one of mutual reassurance among a group of devotees of a lifestyle that had already proved too much for one of them. What better device than to make Blaesilla ‘come back to life’ as the honorand of a commentary that responds to her anxieties? From a psychological point of view, Ecclesiastes is a natural choice of reading for one considering a life of ascetic renunciation. It is not difficult to see how a widowed, sick and depressed young woman might become interested in the text: Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? ... All things are wearisome; more than one can express; The eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun...32

– and so on, in a melancholy and beautiful song about the vanity of ambition and the fleeting nature of human pleasures. For an aspiring ascetic – and not only for an ascetic – these were perhaps the easier passages of Ecclesiastes. We have seen our senatorial epitaphs, Christian and pagan, echoing their sentiments as they contemplate the transition from this world to the next. But this is not all there is to the text. More challenging are those equally powerful refrains expressing a positive view of the good things of life – of food and drink, honest work, the pleasures of love and sex and marital partnership. For example: There is nothing better for [working men] than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil (3.12f., cf. 2.24; 5.18; 9.7),

or this; So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better [my italics] for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun (8.15),

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Four funerals and a wedding and especially: Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment (11.9).

Not that the world is easily understood, far from it. Often there is no justice; the wicked may prosper, the good come to grief. At times, the author’s words would not be out of place in a Roman moralist, someone like Seneca or Juvenal: Folly is set in many high places, and the rich sit in a low place. I have seen slaves on horseback, and princes walking on foot like slaves (10.6–7).

Yet, the proper response to the confusions and contradictions of life is not a refusal to engage in it. The quest for wisdom may be vanity, but still, wisdom is better than foolishness, just as piety is better than impiety. The good man should strive to please God, be content and humble, obey the king, accept misfortune, offer love to those who love him and enjoy the good things of life while he is able to. With these thoughts in mind, let us put ourselves in Jerome’s position as the teacher of Blaesilla – to whom he had read Ecclesiastes, we may recall, in order to ‘provoke her to contempt of this earthly scene, and to count as nothing all that she saw in the world’. But, have we not just seen its author recommending the pleasures of food, drink, hard work and sex? Is not the young man urged to ‘rejoice while he is young, to follow the inclination of his heart and the desire of his eyes’, to ‘let his heart cheer him in the days of his youth’? Perhaps these were the ‘obscure passages’ in which Blaesilla had sought her tutor’s help. How are they to be explained? In addressing Blaesilla’s request, Jerome must confront two general problems, and a number of specific questions of interpretation. I will review some of these, not in the order in which Jerome presents them, nor from a thorough knowledge of his commentary (life is indeed too short for that), but picking out from a reading of Ecclesiastes some passages that seem likely to have presented difficulty, and then seeing what Jerome has to say about them. It is perhaps not a bad way to recreate Blaesilla’s own experience of the text. To begin with the most general problem, how can the enjoyable things of a good God’s creation be described as ‘vanities’ not worth attention? The philosophical answer to this question is elementary, and Jerome gives it; material things and pleasures may be good in themselves, but are as nothing in comparison with God – as a candle, or the stars, brilliant in the

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Chapter 11 night, fade to nothing in the light of day (1066A–B/252–3). So the good things of life are not absolute but relative vanities, to be viewed in the context of eternity. It is a predictable move, but it lacks conviction – as if in view of their passing nature one could (or would wish to) withhold from such good things the worldly proportion of one’s enjoyment of them. The problem is that, even if in only their own measure, they are pleasurable and good – but Blaesilla was supposed not to enjoy these things at all! The theological difficulty of asserting that any of a good God’s creation could be described as ‘vanities’ was replicated in the ascetic life itself, in which significant elements in that creation, important for nothing less than the satisfaction and continuance of the human race, were rejected. Jerome’s problem is not the text of Ecclesiastes; it is his own philosophy. So on to a more difficult question, especially in view of what had happened to Blaesilla (whether or not she had asked it). Jerome must deal with Ecclesiastes’ view of death and its aftermath, as at 9.5–6: The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun.

The writer seems to deny a sentient life after death (‘the dead know nothing’). So what about heaven, that second life in which both our pagan and our Christian senators believed, and to which Blaesilla’s ascetic regime must be presumed to lead? Jerome handles the passage in a piecemeal fashion that ignores the general sense of the passage. It is only the living, he writes, who can perform acts of justice that may win the favour of God. After death there is no room either for good deeds or for repentance, but a man’s fate is sealed; ‘their love and their hate and their envy have already perished!’ While there is life there is hope; a living sinner may be better than a just dead man, if he adopts the latter’s virtues as his own. Indeed, it is through fear of death, asserts Jerome, that the living may be inspired to perform good works – a realistic sentiment perhaps, but one completely absent from Ecclesiastes (1136C–D/322–3). Others, with whom Jerome did not agree, apparently thought the meaning of the passage to be that the dead have no place ‘under the sun’ in this world, but only in the next (1137A/323). Ecclesiastes 11.8 likewise evokes the transience of human life and the need to enjoy its good things and to do good deeds during the short time that it lasts: Even those who live many years should rejoice in them all; yet let them remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity.

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Four funerals and a wedding Taking this text with what precedes it, ‘In the morning sow your seed, and at evening do not let your hands be idle’, Jerome interprets the passage to mean that good works should be done in old age as in youth, remembering that the present is fleeting, and that darkness and everlasting punishment will come to those who have not sown in the morning to take care of the evening. Or perhaps the passage alludes to the Old and New Testaments, to show how the reading of the Old Testament may bear fruit in the reading of the New; for one should not imagine that the literal words of the New Testament encompass all its meanings (a pupil of Donatus, Jerome knew all there was to know about symbolic interpretation). The New Testament – or inheritance, a meaning brought out by Jerome’s use of the legal term ‘instrumentum’ – should be read in the light of the Old (1159C– 1160C/347–8). Jerome’s Panglossian tendency – in the best of all possible worlds, all interpretations are true – to multiply even contradictory meanings is further shown by his treatment of Ecclesiastes’ homely proverb, ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion’ (9.4); meaning that the living, however modest they may be, have more hope than the dead, however majestic they once were. Clearly, this will not do for Jerome. For him the dog is the living Gospel, the lion is the dead law of the circumcised people – the Jewish people, abandoned by the Lord (1137B/324)! Jerome handles other questions with a similarly promiscuous touch. The phrase ‘A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing’ (3.5) contrasts the order to multiply of Genesis 1.28 with the exhortation to continence of I Corinthians 7.29 (again, the Old and the New Law juxtaposed); or alternatively, the writer may refer to the love of wisdom, allowing time ‘without embraces’, in a patent sublimation of the text, for the essential care of the body (1089B/275)! ‘A time to love, and a time to hate’ (3.8), contrasts love of God, children, wife and relatives with hatred of the persecutors, or else love of the Gospel with hatred of the Mosaic law; or who knows, perhaps we will one day, in the afterlife, come to hate what we once loved (1090B–C/276). There is no need to multiply such examples, but the intrusion of the Trinity into Ecclesiastes 4.9–12 is a choice item (1101A/287–8): If two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Of more direct concern to the aspiring ascetic, and for a fleeting moment more in keeping with the spirit of his text, is Jerome’s declaration that the enjoyments of food, drink and the good things of life recommended by Ecclesiastes are only to be enjoyed with and through God, and in

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Chapter 11 recognition that his justice will follow – but this is said only to contrast the teaching of Epicurus and his followers that there is no sentient life after this one (1138C–1139A/325). Beyond this, anything more than a man needs is to be spent on the poor and needy, in the spirit of 1 Timothy 6.8, ‘but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these’, rather than Isaiah 22.13, ‘let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ – again, the Old Testament superseded by the New (1091D–1092A/278, on Eccles. 3.12–13). True food and drink are spiritual, symbolised in the flesh and blood of Christ – not only in the literal sense of the Eucharist, but in the reading of the Scriptures (1092A/278), while earthly enjoyments in general are subject to the judgments of God. So Jerome interprets the nets and snares of Ecclesiastes 9.12: Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.

A plain reading of the text will show that the nets and snares stand for the adverse chances that may await a man, in fact for the opposite of justice (1139B/326). The point in Ecclesiastes is that the fish and birds do not deserve their fate: the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor favour to the skilful, but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster (9.11–12).

As for our young man of Ecclesiastes 11.9, who is encouraged to ‘rejoice while he is young and let his heart cheer him in the days of his youth’ (poor young Blaesilla, widowed at twenty and barely escaped from death, might well have wondered about this passage), this is not personal advice at all, addressed to the young man or any other. It stands, according to a ‘Jewish interpretation’ cited by Jerome, for the happiness of Israel before her captivity (1161A–1162B/349–50), while the ‘anxiety and pain’ which the young man is urged to banish from his mind and body (Eccles. 11.10) stand for the perturbations of thought and flesh which the ascetic life is designed to master (1162B–1163A/351). How successfully it does this is not for me to say. The message of Ecclesiastes I take to be that, in a world where everything is unsure and all good things pass away, human beings should nevertheless enjoy, as divine gifts, the good things of life: food and drink, companionship and love, sexual fulfilment, the satisfaction of honest work. Transient these things may be, but they are good in themselves, and they may be the best we can hope for. That such a humane if melancholy text should have been used to encourage a young woman’s decline into depression,

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Four funerals and a wedding anorectic starvation and an early death, is one of Jerome’s less endearing achievements.33 On the basic issue, however, the passing nature of earthly things, Jerome operates on common ground shared by Christians and pagans of his time. This is anything but surprising; the philosophical theme was inherent in Classical thought from Plato to the Cynics, while a moral message on the vanity of human wishes would be familiar to any reader of Roman satire. Indeed, Peter Brown’s observation, writing of Jerome, that ‘optimism was out of place in a Roman satirist’,34 is just as true of Ecclesiastes, as a Classical reader would understand it, as of Juvenal. Many of the differences of attitude that existed on this and other matters were not so much between the two sides, pagan and Christian, as among Christians themselves. Both sides shared a consensus on such moral basics as loyalty in marriage, as well as on the questions relating to this life and the next that I have been describing. In the context of this life, indeed, where metropolitan clergy share the social profile of the aristocracy of Rome – ‘dressed conspicuously, surrounded by crowds of matrons, and eating dinners fit for kings’, in Ammianus’ famous description – Praetextatus’ well-known barb to pope Damasus derives much of its force from its sheer plausibility. This is just as well, for again, we owe the story to Jerome; ‘ “Make me bishop of Rome”, used to say this sacrilegious man, a worshipper of idols, to the holy father – “make me bishop of Rome, and I’ll at once become a Christian!” ’ 35 Whatever the truth of this endlessly enjoyable anecdote, it is a matter of record that, if not already by the lifetime of Praetextatus then certainly by the next generation, the Roman aristocracy had moved over to a Christianity that allowed it to preserve the essentials of its traditional position, social, economic and cultural, within the protective shell of its new religion.36 As for the next life, what I have said in this chapter might suggest that, here too, the conversion of the late Roman aristocracy is to be understood, not so much in terms of a change of mentality, as in the adaptation of a cultural idiom within which a repertory of common ideas could continue to be expressed. What I feel increasingly sure of, is that Jerome is not part of this story but of a different one; not the conversion of the Roman aristocracy and its culture, in which he was rather a peripheral figure even among those who might have supported him,37 but the seizure of the media of communication by interested parties able to secure the transmission of their ideas into ages with quite different expectations. Historians who spend their time being sceptical about great minds like Thucydides and Tacitus should not lower their guard when confronted by someone like

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Chapter 11 Jerome. He wrote propaganda, not objective analysis; he created an impression of his own influence by himself repeating how great it was; his ascetic ideas were in his own day no more popular than was Jerome himself, and, as we have just seen, his interpretations were capable of a wilful disregard for the intended meanings of a text.

Notes 1 Ep. 1.15, to Ausonius on behalf of Palladius. The letter describes the hearing of Palladius’ oration by a ‘Latiare concilium’, and on behalf of the panel offers an appraisal of the result, including technical language on style. Jennifer Ebbeler and Cristiana Sogno (next n.) question whether Symmachus and Augustine ever met personally, but with Symmachus’ own reputation also at stake I would expect them to have done so. 2 Augustine, Conf. 5.13(23), with Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (1967), pp. 70–71, and P. Courcelle, Recherches sur les ‘Confessions’ de Saint Augustin (1950), pp. 78–9. Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and court in a Christian capital (1994), p. 169 offers a caution; ‘[Augustine] did not even have the backing of powerful connexions, as the Manichean patrons who recommended him to Symmachus will not have belonged to the latter’s milieu’. See now on this episode, with a critical appraisal of its ramifications and their limitations, Jennifer Ebbeler and Cristiana Sogno, ‘Religious identity and the politics of patronage: Augustine and Symmachus’, Historia 56 (2007), pp. 230–42. 3 14.6.9; The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 12–13 and above, Chapter 9. Note especially the second-person address to the reader at 14.6.12, ‘miraberis numquam antea visus summatem virum tenuem te sic enixius observantem, ut paeniteat ob haec bona tamquam praecipua non vidisse ante decennium Romam’ – an experience followed by an equal disappointment on later occasions. On this though on little else concerning Ammianus, I can claim the support of T. D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (1998), p. 122 (‘a transparent piece of autobiography’). 4 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 437–9. 5 As McLynn observes, p. 169, n. 45, Augustine’s appointment was to the city of Milan; his contacts with the imperial court arose from the opportunity that this presented rather than as a direct consequence of the appointment. 6 Relatio 10; transl. R. H. Barrow, Prefect and Emperor : The Relationes of Symmachus, AD 384 (1973), pp. 72–75 (see also Relationes 11–12), cf. Domenico Vera, Commento storico alle Relationes di Quinto Aurelio Simmaco (1981), p. 100; on the procedure of reporting the acclamations as the ‘acta populi’ to the emperor, A. Chastagnol, La Préfecture urbaine à Rome sous le Bas-Empire (1960), pp. 78f., and for acclamations in general Charlotte Roueché, ‘Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire: new evidence from Aphrodisias’, JRS 74 (1984), pp. 181–99; J. F. Matthews, Laying Down the Law: A study of the Theodosian Code (2000), pp. 35ff. 7 ILS 1259, a tergo 22ff.; ‘sorte mortis eximens’. 8 Amm. Marc. 27.3.8; see the dossier of such occasions in my ‘Peter Valvomeres, re-arrested’, in Michael Whitby, Philip Hardie and Mary Whitby (edd.), Homo Viator: Classical essays for John Bramble (1987), pp. 277–84, with The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 416–20. The following discussion is in part a restatement and expansion of those brief comments.

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Four funerals and a wedding 9

Amm. Marc. 17.11.5; Chastagnol, Fastes, pp. 149–51 (no. 62); PLRE I, p. 155 (Bassus 15). He was also styled Theotecnius; AEp 1964, 203. 10 R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome, the Late Empire; Roman art, AD 200–400 (1971), p. 96 with plates 88–90; PLRE I, pp. 154f. (Bassus 14); F. Guidobaldi, in E. M. Steinby, Lexikon Topographicum Urbis Romae, II (1995), pp. 69–70 (s. Domus: Iunius Bassus). 11 Surprisingly hard to find well illustrated in accessible standard works: cf. Diana Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian (1978), pl. 50; F. W. Deichmann, Repertorium der christlich-antiken Sarkofage I (1967), p. 680, plates 104–5. 12 AEp 1953, 239; Chastagnol, Fastes, p. 150. For the Vatican excavations, Ross Holloway, Constantine and Rome (2004), Chap. IV. 13 The duty is assigned to the familial liberti in the so-called ‘Testament of Dasumius’ of the early second century; CIL 6.10229, lines 111–14; above, Chapter 6. 14 Cf. Vera, Commento Storico (above, n. 6), p. 100. 15 J. M. C. Toynbee and J. Ward Perkins, The Shrine of St. Peter and the Vatican Excavations (1956), p. 210. 16 Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (1968), pp. 148–9. 17 See J. F. Matthews, ‘Symmachus and his enemies’, in F. Paschoud and others (edd.), Colloque Genevois sur Symmaque, à l’occasion du mille six centième anniversaire du conflit de l’autel de la Victoire (1986), at 174–5; above, Chapter 10. 18 Ep. 3.88; ‘scis humanitatis esse rationem, ut parum probatis et ante discordibus ad vicem doloris, quem mors incutere solet, reverentiam saltem silentii deferamus’. Pierre Callu translates this difficult phrase (Symmaque, Lettres, vol. 2, p. 79); ‘à ceux qu’on n’estime guère et qu’on avait tenus loin de son coeur’, etc. See too Cristiana Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A political biography (2006), p. 77. 19 The inscription is best published in Diehls, ILCV 63 (cf. under CIL 6.1756); on the reliability of Mafeo Vegio, see J. F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, repr. of 1990, Postscript, pp. 400–1. Rossi, ICUR II, pp. 347f. transcribes Vegio’s text on the mausoleum and inscription, and prints Alfarano’s plan of 1590 at p. 229f. 20 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, p. 196. 21 Jerome, Chron., s.a. 372; ed. R. Helm, Eusebius Werke (GCS 1956, 2nd ed. 1984), p. 246: Amm. Marc. 30.5.9. 22 Amm. Marc. 21.11.2; Symmachus, Rel. 10.3. For the ambiguities of Symmachus’ correspondence with Probus, see Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, p. 11, and above, Chapter 10. 23 ILS 1259, a tergo 20; autumans – ‘asserting, affirming’ – is a recondite word, known mainly from Plautus (see above). 24 ILS 2944; cf. Historia 16 (1967), at 486. The added lines allude to Rufius Festus’ translation of Aratus’ Phaenomena, but the white robes and the chorus of gods are new elements. 25 Compare the so-called ‘consecration diptych’, now in the British Museum, commemorating the funeral and reception into heaven by his ancestors of one of the Symmachi; Alan Cameron, ‘Pagan ivories’, in Colloque genevois sur Symmaque (above, n. 17), pp. 41–64, at 45–9. The central figure has often been seen as an emperor, but the monogram in the medallion is unquestionably ‘SYMMACHORUM’. 26 Namely Julius Festus Hymetius, vicarius in 362 and proconsul in 366–8; PLRE I, p. 447. Hymetius was exiled on complicated charges in 370/1 (Amm. Marc. 28.1.17–23) but later recalled; hence the inscriptions in his honour, ILS 1256

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Chapter 11 (Rome and Carthage). The dedication also recalls his restoration of the provincial priesthood. 27 On this letter and the situation it reveals, see esp. Veronika E. Grimm, From Feasting to Fasting; The evolution of a sin: Attitudes to food in Late Antiquity (1996), pp. 170–1. 28 Ep. 45.6; ‘Haec...cum iam navem conscenderem, raptim flens dolensque conscripsi’. 29 E. D. Hunt, in JRS 67 (1977), p. 168 – reviewing J. N. D. Kelly’s Jerome: His life, writings and controversies (1975). 30 The connection is noted but not further explored by Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis: Prosopographische und Sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Historia, Einzelschriften 72, 1992), p. 197. 31 Jerome’s commentary is printed at PL 23, cols. 1010–1110, and in a critical edition by M. Adriaen in CCL 72 (1959), pp. 248–361. I give references, by column and page respectively, to both editions. 32 From Eccles. 1.2–9; translations from the New Revised Standard Version. 33 See Veronika Grimm, From Feasting to Fasting (above, n. 27), p. 170; ‘The story of Blaesilla...could easily enter medical textbooks as an example of that 25 percent of cases of anorexia that end in death’. 34 Peter Brown, The Body and Society; Men, women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (1988), p. 376. 35 ‘Miserabilis Praetextatus, qui designatus consul est mortuus, homo sacrilegus et idolorum cultor, solebat ludens beato papae Damasae dicere, “Facite me Romanae urbis episcopum et ero protinus Christianus!”’; Against John of Jerusalem, 8 (PL 23.378, where a footnote already cites Ammianus 27.3.14). 36 I hardly need cite Peter Brown’s ‘Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman aristocracy’, JRS 51 (1961), pp. 1–11 [repr. with further annotation in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (1972), pp. 161–82]. 37 Again Brown, ‘The Patrons of Pelagius: the Roman aristocracy between East and West’, JTS, n.s. 26 (1970) pp. 56–72, at 57–9 [= Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, 210–11].

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12 CHILDREN’S GAMES IN AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS I

What many readers will think of as the climactic scene of Augustine’s Confessions begins in a distinctly everyday fashion, with an account of how Augustine and his friends were visited in their lodgings at Milan by a court official named Ponticianus.1 Noticing a book on the table, the visitor assumed it to be a book on rhetoric – reasonably enough, Augustine being public orator of the city of Milan – but discovered it to be the letters of Paul. Ponticianus, a devout Christian, was moved to tell of his own meeting at Trier, back in the days of the emperor Valentinian I, with two imperial officials who while walking in some gardens near the city had come across some holy men with a copy of Athanasius’ Life of St. Antony (recently available in a Latin translation), and on reading it were converted to the ascetic life.2 Augustine’s hearing of the story, and the example of the two officials, precipitated the emotional crisis for which the Confessions has been preparing. When Ponticianus had finished his story, completed his business and left, Augustine, followed by his friend Alypius, went out into the garden of the house in which the party was staying. Leaving Alypius in order to be alone, he heard the voice of a child singing the words of a song, which appeared to be a message to him, to ‘pick up a book and read’; in the famous words, ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’. Returning to Alypius, he opened his book, which he had taken to the garden with him, and found there Paul writing to the Romans; ‘Not in revelry and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires’. Alypius asked to see what Augustine had read, and found next the words ‘Welcome one who is weak in faith’, which he took (how else?) to apply to himself.3 This was in summer 386. In the sequel, narrated in Book 9 of the Confessions, Augustine wrote to the city of Milan to resign his chair of rhetoric. The party spent the winter in the country retreat of Cassiciacum, returning in the spring to Milan, where Augustine was baptised. In

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Chapter 12 complicated circumstances that he does not narrate in detail, Augustine returned to Africa, and in 395, against his will, became bishop of Hippo Regius. The Confessions were written in the early years of his episcopate, so looking back more than ten years to the events it describes. However, accounts of the conversion (not including this episode) are also given in some of Augustine’s writings of the winter at Cassiciacum, notably in the dialogue De Beata Vita – an account sometimes called (from an article of P. Courcelle) the ‘first confessions’ of Augustine.4 This is the famous ‘scene in the garden’, the psychological and dramatic heart of the Confessions, and a challenge to its readers. Interpretations veer between two poles of attraction: what we may call the circumstantial or ‘realistic’ account, according to which Augustine’s narrative is of an individual experience (or rather the parallel experiences of himself and Alypius), rooted in the events of that particular day; and the ‘symbolic’, according to which the narrative is patterned by typology and literary allusion to acquire a generic character – not so much, then, a unique, individual experience as an ‘example of conversion’. This view was elaborated especially by Courcelle in a classic and controversial (but still widely referenced) study of 1950.5 Intermediate positions are of course possible, and some were combined in a rather different perspective in E. R. Dodds’ diagnosis of a psychological crisis brought about by neurosis; in this version, Augustine’s account, though realistic in its detail, is understood as a generic ‘psychological’ state. Dodds’ presentation, also classic, is listed in Courcelle’s bibliography but plays no significant part in his discussion. Since both elements, ‘realistic’ and ‘symbolic’, are to be found in the narrative, I begin with some examples of both. The ‘realistic’ element is to be seen in the many points of circumstantial detail in Augustine’s account. He is, for example, precise as to the time of year at which the episode took place. It is a ‘very few’, otherwise ‘less than twenty’ days before the vintage, which began on August 23 (9.2.2,4). Augustine explains that the party rented the house in which it lodged together with the garden, since the owner did not live there. This is a careful detail, its importance being that if the owner had lived there, while sharing the building he might have retained use of the garden for himself (8.7.19). One friend, Nebridius, happened to be away that day, for a reason Augustine had forgotten (8.6.14). He mentions that Ponticianus had noticed the book Augustine was reading on a ‘gaming table’ (‘mensa lusoria’), and recalls that one reason for Ponticianus’ visit was that he too was from Africa (8.6.14). After the telling of Ponticianus’ story and his departure, Augustine and Alypius went off to a remote part of the garden,

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Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions away from the buildings, where Augustine’s description of his own physical state is extremely precise, no doubt reflecting Alypius’ account of it – who else can have told Augustine that he ‘did not look like himself’ (8.6.20, 28)? He remarks too that having read the passage of Romans relating to himself, he marked the place ‘with his finger or in some other way’ before closing the book, so that Alypius would find the next passage (8.6.30). The ‘symbolic’ element is most evident in the figure of ‘chaste Lady Continence’, in Henry Chadwick’s rather dignified translation of Augustine’s ‘casta dignitas continentiae’, who appeared in a vision to Augustine, accompanied by the followers of all ages who had accepted her (8.6.27). A flurry of allusions to Psalms illustrates Augustine’s state of mind, culminating with a broken sequence from the last phrase of Psalm 6.4, ‘[My soul also is struck with terror,] while you, O Lord – how long?’, to a composite citation from two verses of Psalm 78, ‘... How long, O Lord? Will you be angry forever?... Do not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors’ (8.6.28).6 As Augustine says, he uttered many things, not indeed in these words, but with these sentiments.7 That is, he wrote them up later, adding appropriate Biblical allusions. In what one might call its orderly disorder – confusion carefully reconstructed – it is a very obvious literary creation, the effect of which is to locate Augustine’s experience on a different plane from the everyday details with which the narrative began. The emphasis on his ‘inner’ experience that pervades Augustine’s account is reinforced by his deferring of some important ‘external’ issues to a later book of the Confessions. It is only there that he refers clearly to the chest illness, which in the ‘first confessions’ of the De Beata Vita is given as the main cause of his resignation (9.2.4; De Beata Vita 1.4), and only now that he alludes to events of summer 386 preceding the scene in the garden. These were important public events, of which no-one in Augustine’s position can have been unaware at the time – civic disorder in Milan, the conflict between the empress Justina and bishop Ambrose over the surrendering of the basilica Portiana, the dedication of a new cathedral, the finding of the relics of Gervasius and Protasius, the broadcasting of miracles supposedly connected with them (at the time disbelieved by Augustine), the introduction of hymn-singing from Syrian practice. Augustine makes none of these events any part of his personal story (9.7.15–16). His mother Monica was involved in them, as is indicated in De Beata Vita of Cassiciacum, where she brings the philosophical discussion to an end by quoting a hymn of Ambrose, precisely one of those with which he had encouraged his followers in the ‘siege of the basilica’ of 386 (9.7.15; De Beata Vita 4.35). Augustine’s deferring of these events to a

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Chapter 12 later context enables him to isolate his conversion as an episode in his inner life, as if they did not at all impinge upon it. The most elusive elements in Augustine’s narrative are those that might be either ‘realistic’ or ‘symbolic’, depending on one’s predisposition as a reader; for example the famous fig-tree under which Augustine threw himself, having left Alypius to be alone. This fig-tree, and fig-trees in general, carry a heavy burden of symbolic possibilities. For Courcelle, it is not a ‘real’ feature at all but a symbolic one, evoking the fig-tree under which Nathaniel hid himself from Jesus ( John 1.48) – a passage later interpreted by Augustine the bishop as a symbol of the ignorance of man in ‘the carnal condition of fallen humanity’.8 For Ambrose, Nathaniel’s fig-tree stood for the shadow of the Jewish Law under which he lived, while Augustine (again, much later) adduced the cursing of the fig tree by Jesus because it had leaves and no fruit (Mt. 21.19). Even while noting Augustine’s untroubled acceptance of multiple interpretations, Henry Chadwick adds another, the shame of Adam and Eve, when they covered their nakedness with loin-cloths made of fig leaves (Gen. 3.7).9 It is true also that gardens, and the vintage season as a time of leisure and reflection, have a symbolic as well as a practical role in the sort of intellectual (or philosophical or religious) context that is facing us; but a real north Italian garden may have a real fig-tree, and not even most fervent ‘symbolisers’ deny there was actually a garden.10 Augustine presents the chance reading by the courtiers at Trier of St. Antony’s exhortation to poverty (as proclaimed in Mt. 19.21), as a case of conversion by an ‘oracle’ (‘tali oraculo’, 8.12.29), and the affinities of the practice with the ‘sortes Vergilianae’, in which random lines of Vergil were scrutinized for their prophetic meaning, are obvious. Earlier in the Confessions, Augustine had cited the opinion of the proconsul Vindicianus, a learned man critical of astrology, that ‘when someone happens to consult the pages of a poet whose verses and intention are concerned with a quite different subject, in a remarkable way a verse often emerges appropriate to the decision under discussion’ (4.3.5).11 Even so, Augustine’s reading of the passage of Romans was not entirely a matter of chance. He was reading Paul’s letters in any case; the book he took into the garden and left with Alypius (the one seen on the gaming table by Ponticianus) contained the writings of Paul (‘codicem apostoli’). Fourth-century readers read the New Testament in separate editions of certain books or groups of books, of which one, as Augustine’s own account shows, was devoted to the writings of Paul. Augustine’s ‘consultation’ was heavily pre-selected. He was reading what interested him in his present frame of mind, and when Alypius read on to the passage that concerned himself, Augustine had marked the place

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Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions ‘with his finger, or in some other way’. Not everything that happened was a matter of chance; or rather, what seems to be a chance event turns out, as so often, to have previously unnoticed causes.

II The part of Augustine’s story of special interest here is the child’s song or chant, ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’, that he overheard in the garden (8.12.29). In a ‘realistic’ reading of this episode, Augustine hears the song coming from the house next door; ‘et ecce audio vocem de vicina domo’. He cannot tell whether it is a boy or a girl, and does not recall any children’s song with such words. The first doubt is convincing if obvious, for it can be very hard to tell a little boy’s from a little girl’s chanting voice. The second doubt is less so, as if Augustine could claim to know all the children’s songs that existed – had he paid any attention to them since he was himself a child (or young father, as he was) in Africa? were the songs he knew from Africa the same as those sung by children in Milan? – but is perhaps convincing in its awkwardness. Augustine’s mind was not clear at the time, but the innocent young voice pierced his confusion. As he fought to regain his bearings, it might be natural to ask himself what the game could be. In a ‘symbolic’ reading of the episode, on the other hand, the voice is not that of an actual child but is a heavenly one, the voice of an angel perhaps, or a projection of the ‘girls and boys’ seen a little earlier in the hands of Continentia (8.12.17). The effect of the reading is to transplant the child’s chant from the ‘realistic’ to the ‘symbolic’ levels of the story.12 Whatever the explanation, Augustine took it to be a divine instruction to himself; ‘interpretans divinitus mihi iuberi’ (8.12.29). In deciding how to read Augustine’s narrative, the prime question concerns his plan of composition; how he deploys the episode in context. As already indicated, a reading of the text of the Confessions will show the care with which Augustine framed his narrative. He assembles the participants, mentioning also Verecundus, for whom Augustine’s friend Nebridius worked as a teaching assistant. Alypius is there because he has completed his term of office as legal assessor and is awaiting further employment; he will play a very significant role in the story, both as Augustine’s witness and as the recipient of a parallel experience. Verecundus, though not present, is important later, as the owner of the villa at Cassiciacum to which the party withdrew after the events narrated in the Confessions. He was not yet a Christian but a potential convert – he was attracted by ascetic Christianity, a tendency that his already Christian

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Chapter 12 wife did not welcome (9.3.5)! On the day of the crisis Nebridius also is absent, Augustine has forgotten why, but Alypius is there when Ponticianus calls. It is noted, not only that Ponticianus is African, but that he is already a devout Christian, and – an important point – that Augustine too attends church as often as he can (8.6.13f.). Ponticianus thinks that the book is a book of rhetoric because that is Augustine’s profession; to which Augustine remarks that he gave much attention to the writings of Paul, provoking Ponticianus to embark on his story about the courtiers at Trier (14). The story induces a mood of acute introspection in Augustine, but Augustine interrupts this to explain that Ponticianus departed when he had done what he came for, leaving Augustine and Alypius by themselves (16). There are no loose ends. We know who was in Augustine’s party and why, where they were living, who was present on that particular day and who was not, who their visitor was, why he came and when he left, how they came to have access to the garden of their rented house. We know, within a margin of a few days, the time of year. It is also worth noting how Augustine has defined the issues at stake, as no longer intellectual but, as we would say, psychological or behavioural. In the preceding chapters of the Confessions he has systematically dissolved the remaining philosophical obstacles to conversion, making clear his position that the only question is now one of practice: not what to think, but what to do, and how to do it in face of the resistance of the will (voluntas). The psychological impasse is illustrated by the story of Marius Victorinus narrated by the priest Simplicianus; the story of a public orator converted to Christianity, but hesitant to declare this publicly, and not yet baptised (8.2.3–5, cf. 5.10). Simplicianus is the first of two important ‘narrators’ in Book 8 of the Confessions.13 Apart from his connection with Victorinus, he was the mentor of Ambrose, while (the second narrator) Ponticianus’ story leads to mention of the monastery near Milan, supported by Ambrose, of which – surprisingly enough – Augustine and his friends were ignorant (8.6.15). Both narrators point us to Ambrose, of whom more is to come in Book 9. Further, in the last chapters of Book 7, Augustine has resolved the philosophical problems presented by Platonism in Biblical terms, with special reference to Paul (7.19.25; 21.27). Augustine concedes the partial possession of truth by the Platonists on the issue of a spiritual reality, their central theological tenet; all that was lacking in their philosophy, he says, was Christ. This makes light of a very large issue and is consciously anachronistic; Augustine knows, and says, that he and his friends did not appreciate its significance at the time (7.19.25). They had even in their various ways succumbed to unwitting heresy (Apollinarianism and Photinianism) in order to avoid it, and it turns out later that one of

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Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions them, Nebridius, had believed that the ‘body’ of Christ was not real but a phantom – the heresy of docetism (9.3.6)! All of these questions reflect the impossibility, for a Platonic way of thinking, of the whole notion of the ‘Word’, construed as a divine entity, assuming a human body. Augustine has solved these issues to his own satisfaction in the context of a reading of Paul – all preceding the story of Victorinus in Book 8, as if he too should have solved them. At the cost of some anachronism, the intellectual components of Augustine’s crisis have been resolved in a context of Biblical reflection. What is left is a question of the will, the capacity to make a decision. This issue, the defeat of the recalcitrant will, is central both to Victorinus’ public declaration and to Ponticianus’ story of the courtiers at Trier, before it is given full rein in Augustine’s account of his own conversion. Having so cleared the ground, Augustine can change the tone from the intellectual to the psychological. Ponticianus’ story had produced an inner perception; Augustine saw himself as ‘vile, twisted, unclean’, but was unable to escape from his self-awareness. All his perceptions turned back on himself; ‘if I tried to turn my gaze from myself, there was Ponticianus telling what he was telling’ (16). It is in the context of Ponticianus’ narrative that Augustine recalls his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius twelve years earlier, as described in the Confessions, and only now that Augustine recalls his famous dream from many years ago; ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet!’ (17). He had not told us this at the time, and the recollection gains force, at some cost to its spontaneity, from its delayed appearance. It is no more than we should expect that Augustine, an experienced orator, shapes his story, invests it with literary allusion, and gives himself a measure of freedom in narrating it. In his re-telling of Ponticianus’ story, for example, the words of the courtiers at Trier, which are extremely important for Augustine’s presentation of his own state of mind, are reported in direct speech, which even Ponticianus can hardly have known (8.6.15), while the impact on the courtiers of their chance reading of Mt. 19.21, mentioned at the point of Augustine’s opening of Paul where he had left it (9.12.29), has not been mentioned before; had Ponticianus said this, or did Augustine add it as a parallel to his own experience? Then, after the vivid description of his agitated state as he ran out into the garden – ‘I did not sound like myself. My brow, cheeks, eyes, flesh, the pitch of my voice spoke my mind more powerfully than the words I uttered’, and so on – Augustine describes how upon hearing the child’s voice his ‘countenance changed’, though he was alone at the time and neither he nor Alypius can have seen it. He can reasonably have inferred it, however; such narrative freedom is no more than any writer will claim. It is enough neither to

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Chapter 12 undermine the historicity of the Confessions, nor on the other hand to locate the entire narrative on the symbolic plane; though it should be a reminder that the entire account is written in retrospect, and in the light of its known consequences.

III E. R. Dodds’ diagnosis of Augustine’s psychological state was delivered as an inaugural address at the University of Birmingham almost fifteen years before the death of Freud. Its presentation of a neurotic crisis based on unresolved childhood conflicts, leading to a nervous collapse with psychosomatic symptoms, is still persuasive, and consistent with the circumstances leading to Augustine’s resignation – a physical breakdown, which in the works composed earlier than the Confessions, is given as the reason for the resignation.14 One can see how much is at stake. Augustine’s career is at a crisis, his secular ambitions are challenged, his devoted partner of fifteen years (and the mother of his son) has been sent away as an impediment to these ambitions,15 and his health is breaking down, while his mother presents conflicting images, of ambition for her son and otherworldly piety. Which of these does she really want? Does she even know herself? Augustine’s letter of resignation offers a choice of explanations that corresponds exactly to this conflict, arguing both devotion to serving God, and illness in the form of breathing difficulties and chest pains (9.5.13). A letter of resignation will say what has to be said, but one cannot help wondering what Augustine’s employers on the city council thought of it. Much of this recurs (or rather, has already occurred) in the De Beata Vita, while in the Soliloquies of the same time, Augustine’s illness is aggravated by the sheer strain of weeping (Sol. 1.14.26). A little later in the Confessions, Augustine recalls a tremendous attack of toothache – a greater pain, he says, than any he had suffered in his life (9.4.12). It would be uncanny if none of this were psychosomatic; so too Augustine’s emotional disorder in the garden is part of this psychological conflict, and is the background of the two experiences reported there; the vision of Continentia and the child’s song. The vision of Continentia, seen in the silent and uncomprehending company of Alypius, is set in the context of Augustine’s battle with his old habits, which pull him back and prevent him making the leap over to continence (8.11.27). ‘Continentia’ is easily seen as a projection of Augustine’s inner conflict; she does not speak, but smiles encouragingly ‘as if to say’ (‘quasi diceret’, occurring twice) the words Augustine assigns

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Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions to her. There is little point in asking whether this is all literary artifice, or whether Augustine really did have some sort of visual experience of a silent, gesturing figure identified by him as Continentia, to which his own imagination at the time, or his memory or invention afterwards, or a combination of all three, provided the words. It is perhaps just a convention that Augustine does ‘externalise’ his experience, his language describing the vision as if in physical space (‘ab ea parte’, etc.). It is also a distorted, dreamlike image, in which Continentia appears, Escher-like, in her own outstretched hands; and a revealing one too, in that after the ‘pueri et puellae’ and an undifferentiated reference to people of all ages, only females – widows and unmarried women – are specified. Why does Augustine not lay more emphasis on his own category? Overcome by ‘a massive downpour of tears’, Augustine leaves Alypius in order to continue his weeping in solitude, which he does, as shown earlier, with the allusions to the Psalms supplied later to the narrative (28). It is now that he hears the voice of the child repeating over and over again the two words, ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’. At least, this is how Augustine remembered the words, and we know what he took them to mean, but this may not be all there is to say. Is this what the child actually said? And what did the words really mean? Some commentators’ views are presented by Courcelle (pp. 190–1), and they make diverting reading. Perhaps (as on the usual view) they did, as Augustine thought, mean ‘pick up and read’ and were a schoolteacher’s instruction to a pupil – but this will not work, for the words come from a child, not a schoolteacher. Perhaps a pupil was rehearsing paradigms of the third conjugation – but in that case it was a rather obsessive paradigm, and one repeating a form, the singular second person imperative, with which most children are familiar. ( These are old explanations, already recorded in the notes to the text in Patrologia Latina ).16 Another scholar thought that it might be a pretend boating game with the words ‘Raise the anchor and coil the rope’!17 Others look for parallels in non-Christian religious usage, in which the voices of children or words written in books give guidance to those seeking religious advice. Plutarch described how in Egypt ‘they try to divine the future from [children’s] chance cries when they are playing in temple precincts’ – but the cries heard by Augustine were, as he understood them, explicit; not much ‘divination’ was needed to interpret them, and it was not divination of the future but an instruction for the present that he received. A psychoanalytical view is that the voice, coming back at Augustine from his traumatic schooldays, ‘was his own voice projected and perceived in hallucinatory fashion’ ... ‘one of the first external voices of a harsh punitive authority introjected as superego’.18

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Chapter 12 In the context of such varied interpretations, the suggestion of A. Sizoo, writing a few years after the publication of Courcelle, that a child was looking over the wall from the house next door telling Augustine in a local harvest-song to ‘pick up and carry away’ the figs that lay around him on the ground is as fanciful as it seems, and encounters the pedantic but relevant objection that Augustine was not on his knees as if to pick up figs, but prone on the ground (8.12.28, ‘stravi me’).19 Presented with modesty and humour in a brief Latin note, however, the suggestion has the merit of calling attention to the intended meaning – that is, the meaning intended by the child – of the words heard by Augustine. We should recall Augustine’s state of agitation, upon which the words of the chant intruded; ‘As I was saying this and weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I hear a voice’; ‘et ecce audio vocem’ (replacing Chadwick’s ‘I heard’ by Augustine’s historic present, reinforced by ‘ecce’; Augustine makes us aware of the voice just as he became aware of it himself ). The words are delivered sing-song, and repeated over and over again; ‘cum cantu dicentis et crebro repetentis’. Now, if we combine his distracted state of mind with the repetition of the chant, it might occur to us that Augustine did not necessarily hear the voice from the beginning of the chant, but might have become aware of it at some point after it had started. If that were so, there is no way of telling with which of its two words it had begun, nor whether Augustine recorded the words in the order in which the child intended them. What then if we reverse the order? What if Augustine should have understood the words not as ‘...tolle lege, tolle lege...’, as he recalled them, but as ‘... lege tolle, lege tolle...’? The word ‘legere’ can of course perfectly well mean ‘read’, but this is not the only possibility. The idea of ‘reading’ gets its sense from an underlying notion of picking out, as of characters with the eye; just so, ‘lege’ in the child’s chant could mean ‘pick up’, ‘choose’, or ‘gather’. The second of the several examples of this primary meaning given in Lewis & Short’s Latin Dictionary is of gathering nuts, which might well have application to children’s games, objects being placed in a group and then removed one by one in some dexterous way; a childhood game like this that my schoolfriends and I used to play, in my own case without much dexterity, was called ‘snobs’, better known, perhaps, as ‘knucklebones’ but with many other names in different localities.20 So too, ‘tolle’ could indeed mean ‘pick up’, as of a book,21 but it could just as well mean ‘take away’ or ‘remove’ something chosen, as of an article or object from a pile or heap. Perhaps the child was alternately choosing objects (‘lege’) and rejecting them (‘tolle’) from a collection or pile of them and making up a chant to accompany the action. ‘Lege, tolle’ – ‘Pick up (or choose), take away’ –

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Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions seems convincing as the chanted accompaniment to a children’s game, such as Augustine took it to be, but there are endless possibilities. As far as the child was concerned, it had nothing to do with picking up and reading a book. Courcelle was of the opinion that the scene is not realistic at all, but has the same symbolic meaning as the vision of ‘Continentia’ that precedes it.22 It is time now to consider his arguments, which are offered as rigorous and logical, though there is much subjective judgment in his presentation of the case, and in the overstatement of the possible as the only possible answer – as for example in the statement that the fig-tree under which Augustine threw himself down ‘can only (my italics) possess a symbolic meaning’. Courcelle agrees (in a footnote) that there could have been a real fig-tree in the garden, and does not challenge the existence of a garden;23 however, I find myself mystified by fig-trees that may be both real and symbolic, and am not attracted by the notion that Augustine chose to fling himself down under a tree without noticing what sort of tree it was, and converted it into a fig tree later for symbolic purposes. There is more in all this than one is entitled to say. Courcelle thinks it futile (‘vain’) to look for a ‘realist’ interpretation of the scene, for two reasons, both of them reflecting Augustine’s own opinion; first, that Augustine avoids saying whether the voice he heard was that of a boy or girl, and second, ‘we know of no children’s game in Antiquity’ that involved the refrain in question. The second point is amazingly offhand, especially when one considers modern research on children’s games, sometimes in many volumes for a single geographical area.24 How many ancient children’s games do we (or did Augustine) know, of the thousands that must have existed? The first point begs the question. It is true that Augustine’s state of mind was a confused one; but once he heard the refrain he paid attention to it, and his comment that he did not know whether it was a boy’s or a girl’s voice might just as well be a realistic element as one inserted by Augustine for reasons of symbolism. Some years ago, in a village near Oxford, I heard a child playing a singing game in a nearby garden and, with Augustine in mind, tried to determine whether it was a boy or a girl, without success. Others have made similar observations.25 Courcelle also links the ‘boy or girl’ (‘puer an puella’) of the child’s song with the ‘pueri et puellae’ who have just appeared in the hands of Continentia. Both are claimed to relate to a celestial world and not to the everyday historical reality of the garden.26 To this there are two objections, the first of which is that Continentia holds out in her hands not only boys and girls, but young folk, people of all ages, widows heavy in years and old

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Chapter 12 unmarried women; ‘ibi tot pueri et puellae, ibi iuventus multa et omnis aetas et graves viduae et virgines anus’ (8.11.27). Nothing suggests that these ‘pueri et puellae’ have an especially privileged role among the followers of Continentia (indeed, of all the categories mentioned they are the least relevant to Augustine’s experience), or connects them to the ‘puer an puella’ of the child’s song. The second objection, and it is a serious one, is that for Augustine the world represented by Continentia is not a ‘celestial realm’ at all, but one to which he has ‘turned his face but feared to cross’, that is to say the ascetic life on earth. Augustine’s conflicts surround what he will do now, in this world, not at some future time in the next. The protégé(e)s of Continentia may hope to do so in future (without being proto-Pelagian heretics, who have no place in the Confessions, they cannot expect to), but they do not yet inhabit ‘le séjour céleste’. After all that Augustine says in the Confessions about the burdens of habit and the need for the ‘convalescence’ of the still ailing convert, it is an astonishing misapprehension to suppose that Augustine could identify the ascetic life with Paradise. Lastly, Courcelle supports the manuscript reading ‘de divina domo’ for the more generally accepted ‘de vicina domo’ at 8.12.29; in this case, the child’s voice would come directly from heaven and not be a real child’s voice at all.27 The textual situation is as follows. The reading ‘vicina’ is found in all manuscripts except S, a Sessorian manuscript commonly dated to the early seventh century, by some critics to the later fifth or sixth (it is in any event the only pre-Carolingian manuscript), which alone presents ‘divina’.28 It is supposed that an original reading ‘divina’ was supplanted by ‘vicina’ in all other manuscripts, and is to be restored to the text on the palaeographic criterion of lectio difficilior – an easier reading is more likely to oust the more difficult than vice versa.29 But the principle is itself subjective, in a situation where a judgment as to which of two (or more) alternative readings is the more difficult depends on a reader’s prior conception of a text. It is impossible to escape circularity of reasoning; a ‘symbolist’ reader will find a ‘realist’ reading the more difficult, and vice versa. In the present case, it is easy to see how an early copyist with symbolising tastes may have changed an original ‘vicina’ to ‘divina’, perhaps under the influence of the phrase ‘interpretans divinitus mihi iuberi’ a few lines below, or perhaps just as an individual contribution to the discussion. It is on the other hand very difficult to see how, if this reading were correct, there should be no trace of it in the later tradition – indeed, a manuscript that may be related to S has ‘vicina’, like all the rest. There were many early readers of the Confessions, and it seems unlikely that, for all its early date, S would be the only channel of an authentic tradition. The case for the

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Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions reading ‘de divina domo’ is more convincing as an isolated piece of early medieval symbolising than as an example of the workings of Augustine’s God in the Confessions, and the evidence of the manuscripts is against it. Courcelle also offers a technical explanation of his preferred reading, suggesting that the transition of ‘de divina’ to ‘de vicina’ was the product of an accident of haplography (the omission of characters by a copyist because of the recurrence of some of them). On this view, an original reading ‘de divina’, as preserved by S, is supposed to have been transmitted as ‘de vina’ in a later MS now lost, to be ‘corrected’ to ‘de vicina’ in all the others. However plausible or otherwise in itself (it requires all existing manuscripts apart from S to be descended from a single lost exemplar that happened to introduce this error), this is pure conjecture. It is also incompatible with Courcelle’s first suggestion, which attributes the alleged change from ‘divina’ to ‘vicina’, not to an accidental miscopying but to the deliberate intention of an early reader. He has offered two incompatible explanations for the same phenomenon. One of them must be false, but it does not follow that the other is true. Tenacious to the last, Courcelle argues that if Augustine had meant the house next door he should have written something different; not just ‘de vicina domo’, but ‘de vicina quadam domo’, as he wrote ‘sub quadam fici arbore’. This is tantamount to writing Augustine’s text for him, and it would be a strange thing to say. One can fling oneself down under any old (‘quadam’) fig tree; no-one pays any special attention to them individually, but the house, a particular house, was there all the time, and if the chanting child existed at all, it was in the garden of that particular house. If Augustine wished to write ‘the house next door’, he was perfectly entitled to do it in the way that he chose. The interpretation of the child’s song offered here gives weight to a ‘realist’ approach to the passage in general, since it will appear that Augustine reported an incorrect understanding of the words he heard. They were indeed part of a children’s game, but they had nothing to do with picking up and reading a book. At the point at which he reports his becoming aware of the child’s voice, Augustine’s error actually authenticates his experience. It is true that a few lines below, he concludes that the words conveyed a divine command (‘nihil aliud interpretans divinitus mihi iuberi’, etc.), but this is a movement in the text, as Augustine ‘interprets’ what he has just heard as having a divine meaning. Far from Augustine’s first hearing of the voice being of a ‘divine’ nature, his text traces the transition from ‘human’ to ‘divine’ as he gains his own (mis)understanding of the situation. The child’s voice is on the human side of the transition.

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Chapter 12 Indeed, from this point of view the reading ‘de divina domo’, as Augustine’s earlier editor de Labriolle saw, actually undermines its sense.30 From its own standpoint, the Confessions is an exploration of the experience of a particular life, and its particularity is essential to it. For Augustine, the divine will impinges upon the experiences of individuals. From this premise derives the emphasis throughout the Confessions on consuetudo, or ingrained habit; on the role of memory, explored in Book 10, as the vehicle of habit and so as the source of personal identity, and on the impact on this life of habit of what is conventionally translated as divine ‘grace’. For better or worse, this is an Augustinian formulation, though with respect to the Roman background against which Augustine wrote, the word gratia is better translated ‘favour’ or ‘influence’ – as of the support of a patron for a protégé, or of an emperor for an aspiring courtier.31 To sustain this doctrine, it is necessary that Augustine’s life should be a specific one with the experiences that are particular to it. This is why, from its everyday beginning, Augustine is careful to present the occasion in realistic terms. To see it as a generic ‘type’ of experience taking place in a largely symbolic context is to weaken its particularity in a way that is not intended by its narrator. Augustine described his fateful day with a careful control of its elements, and of the movement from the unremarkable events of an ordinary morning to the resolution of his crisis in the shade of a fig tree. Every detail is in its proper place. The transition from one level to the other, prepared throughout the narrative, is accomplished by the innocent singing of a child. The experience of hearing the song may have been instrumental in Augustine’s turning to a new way of life, but it is critical to understand that the child who sang it, whether boy or girl, belongs to the world as it is, with houses next door, real gardens, and actual fig trees – the more so if, as is argued here, Augustine misunderstood the words of the song. Notes 1 Conf. 8.6.14; ‘praeclare in palatio militans’. He may possibly be the Ponticianus known to Symmachus; Epp. 1.98; 5.32. 2 The conversation with the holy men took the whole afternoon (8.6.15 ‘promeridiano...quod iam declinasset dies’). Ponticianus’ account is as carefully embedded in the circumstances of that particular day – the emperor watching games, the courtiers at leisure – as was Augustine’s own. T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and politics in the Constantinian Empire (1993), makes no use of the Life of St. Antony on the arresting grounds that it is not by Athanasius; see p. 240 n. 64. Augustine does not name the author, but it is likely that he and Ponticianus would have thought it an authentic work. See also on this episode Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, self-knowledge and the ethics of interpretation (1996), pp. 95–102.

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Children’s games in Augustine’s Confessions 3

Rom. 13.13–14.1, where the New Standard Revised Version generalises 14.1 into the plural; in both the Greek and the Latin it is written in the singular, which was of course how Alypius took it. 4 P. Courcelle, ‘Les premières confessions de saint Augustin’, Revue des Etudes Latines 22 (1945), pp. 155–74. 5 P. Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin (1950), Chap. V, esp. pp. 188–202 (the 2nd ed. of 1968 offers the same pagination with additional material in appendices); Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire; antécédents et postérité (1963), pp. 137–197. J. J. O’Donnell, Augustine, Confessions (1992), III, pp. 59–60 gives a brief account of the critical reaction to the book. See also H. Chadwick, ‘History and symbolism in the garden at Milan’, in From Augustine to Eriugena: Essays on Neoplatonism and Christianity in honour of John O’Meara (1991), pp. 42–55. For E. R. Dodds, see below. 6 The only words of Ps. 6.4 actually cited by Augustine are ‘et tu, domine, usquequo?’, leading directly to Ps. 78(79).5, ‘usquequo, domine, irasceris in finem?’ and on to v. 8, ‘ne memor fueris iniquitatum nostrarum antiquarum’. 7 For a similar technique relating to the so-called ‘vision of Ostia’ experienced by Augustine and his mother, see Chadwick, p. 43–4 (Conf. 9.10.26). 8 Courcelle, p. 193 n. 2. 9 Chadwick, pp. 43 n. 2, 44. The large leaves of a fig-tree would provide effective cover for Adam and Eve’s nakedness. They would also provide shade on a hot August evening. 10 O’Donnell, p. 76, cites Minucius Felix, Octavius 2.3. and Cyprian, ad Don. 1 on the intellectual ‘ideology’ of gardens. 11 Helvius Vindicianus, from Musti in proconsular Africa, was former court physician of the emperor Valentinian (I or II); PLRE 1, p. 967 (Vindicianus 2). The translation is Chadwick’s with the replacement of ‘wonderful’ by ‘remarkable’ for Augustine’s ‘mirabiliter’. This seems more appropriate for the argument and the character of Vindicianus, a sceptical old physician. 12 I discuss below the variant MS reading ‘de domo divina’ for ‘vicina’ – a reading strongly endorsed by Courcelle and printed by one (and only one) of his editors. 13 Stock, Augustine the Reader (above, n. 2), pp. 89–95. 14 E. R. Dodds, ‘Augustine’s Confessions: a story of spiritual maladjustment’, The Hibbert Journal 26 (1927–8), pp. 459–73. 15 On which see above all Danuta Shanzer, ‘Avulsa a latere meo: Augustine’s spare rib – Confessions 6.15.25’, JRS 92 (2002), pp. 157–76. It is striking that Augustine takes no personal responsibility except (in the same chapter) for his acquisition of a second mistress to replace the dismissed partner of long standing. He nowhere mentions the legal consequences, either of a legitimate marriage for his natural son Adeodatus, or of his breaking of the engagement to the Milanese girl he had contracted to marry when she was of the right age. 16 PL 43, col. 210 (Courcelle, p. 191 n. 1). 17 Courcelle, p. 191. It is only fair to say that Courcelle is against all these ‘réaliste’ interpretations in favour of the symbolic approach criticized here. 18 C. Kligerman, ‘A psychoanalytic study of the Confessions of St. Augustine’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 6 (1957), pp. 469–484, at 482. 19 A. Sizoo, ‘Ad August. Conf. VIII, xii, 29’, Vigiliae Christianae 12 (1958), pp. 104–6.

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Chapter 12 20

See Chapter 3 of Iona and Peter Opie’s wondrously subtitled Children’s Games with Things: Marbles; Fivestones; Throwing and catching; Gambling; Hopscotch; Chucking and pitching; Ball-bouncing; Skipping; Tops and tipcat (1997). 21 It is the word used of Ponticianus as he picks up the book he finds on Augustine’s table at 8.6.14; ‘tulit, aperuit, invenit apostolum Paulum’. 22 For this and the following arguments, see Courcelle, pp. 190–6. 23 Courcelle, p. 193–4 n. 2. 24 See, for Great Britain alone, the classic books by Iona and Peter Opie: Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969), The Singing Game (1985), and Games with Things (above, n. 20), with their extensive citations, among them Alice Bertha Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 vols., 1894–8 – 964 pages). 25 O’Donnell, p. 63. 26 I discount a linguistic point raised by Courcelle (pp. 194–5), comparing the uses of ‘quasi’ in the phrase ‘quasi pueri an puellae’ (‘as of a boy or girl’) and in the imagined words of Continentia to him, ‘quasi diceret’ (‘as if she were saying’), and arguing that in both cases the word points to the ‘celestial character’ of what it qualifies; both Continentia and the child in the garden are shown by ‘quasi’ to belong to some other world than to the ‘here and now’ of this one, one in which people actually speak and children are either boys or girls. Courcelle appeals in support to ‘le lecteur attentif des Confessions’, but this is not an argument. ‘Quasi’ indicates two different moments of uncertainty. Continentia might be imagined to speak the words implied by her gestures, the child’s voice might be of a boy or a girl, and that is all. 27 O’Donnell, p. 62, refers to Courcelle’s ‘inordinate effort in defence of this odd reading’. But he does not give detailed arguments, while Chadwick, pp. 52–55, is in the end undecided, cf. p. 54; ‘the much belaboured reading of Sessorianus, divina, could conceivably be correct, and [that] at least its meaninglessness is not wholly selfevident’. Not that there is any need to go this far; the voice could be thought of by Augustine as divine in origin but come from an actual child. 28 See the conspectus of manuscripts presented in Skutella’s 1969 Teubner text of the Confessions, pp. xi–xvii and the summary list at p. xxviii. S is listed as generally dated to the 7th century, with B. Bischoff, cited ibid., cf. p. 382, giving 5th–6th century. 29 Courcelle, p. 195; the ‘plus rare’ reading being substituted by an ‘épithète banale’. The argument fails if the ‘plus rare’ reading is a deliberate scribal intervention. 30 Augustin, Confessions, ed. Budé, I (1925, repr. 2002), p. xxx, criticizing P. Knöll’s acceptance (alone among Augustine’s editors), of ‘de divina domo’ at 8.12.29. In arguing that the reading arose from ‘an unfortunate misconception, which destroys the harmony of the scene and imposes a clumsy supernatural intervention upon this delicate interplay of cause and effect unfolding along the limits of the divine and the human’ (my translation), Labriolle seems to have it just right. His view cannot be dismissed as a mere ‘appréciation esthétique’ (Courcelle, p. 194). 31 On which J. N. L. Myres, ‘Pelagius and the end of Roman rule in Britain’, JRS 50 (1960), pp. 21–36, is still eminently worth reading.

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13 ROMAN LAW AND ROMAN HISTORY 1. Introduction At the beginning of the twentieth century it would be surprising to have found a Roman historian who did not possess some knowledge of Roman law. If this is so, it was a legacy of the great historian Theodor Mommsen, whose last project, an edition of the Theodosian Code, was published in 1905, two years after Mommsen’s death at the age of 85. This late masterpiece complemented the edition of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis which, in collaboration with Paul Krüger, began to appear in 1876. The Theodosian Code, and especially its commentary by James Godefroy (Gothofredus), had already been among the most important influences in the reading, and later on the writing, of Edward Gibbon. Gibbon recalled this in his fascinating Memoirs of My Life, where however he described it as a ‘work of history, rather than Jurisprudence’, evidence above all for the ‘political state of the Empire in the fourth and fifth Centuries’.1 In due course, Gibbon included as Chapter XLIV of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a description of the work of Justinian in legal codification, incorporating a long account of the principles of Roman law (beginning with a waspish complaint about the arcane system of reference employed by ‘the civilians of the darker ages’).2 He had done the same, on a smaller scale, in Chapter XXXVIII, with an account of the legal enterprises of the barbarian kings of the fifth and early sixth centuries, with the strange result that we read about the law of the barbarian territories of the west in an earlier chapter – originally in an earlier volume – than we read about the Roman law from which it partly derived. But there is a vast difference between Gibbon’s and Mommsen’s approaches to the subject. Gibbon had made no use of the Digest (or Pandects, as he referred to this part of the Corpus Iuris Civilis) to illuminate the history of the period to which its assembled texts actually referred, and his description of the principles of Roman law derives not from the Digest but from the text-book account of Justinian’s Institutes.3 Gibbon made no attempt to integrate the subject with the history of the Roman empire as a whole, and his treatment of Roman law has only a shadow of the impact of his great digressions, for example

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Chapter 13 on the Germans and Persians, or on the early history of Christianity and its treatment by the Roman state. The gulf between Gibbon and Mommsen is not only one of times and temperaments, but between different assumptions about the nature of research and the academic environment. Gibbon was a gentleman of private means, whose University education had notoriously little influence on his intellectual formation. He was a genius, whose work still impresses us for its accuracy of judgment, its sustained intelligence, its breadth of learning and its respect for the learning of others. A German review of Decline and Fall, however, already noted its undeveloped sense of source criticism, a response that expresses the different academic traditions of Continental Europe.4 There, historians were professionals trained in techniques, who did not just read and respond to texts, but analysed them. The learning of Mommsen, as of his historian predecessor Niebuhr, and, in literary studies, the Homeric scholar Friedrich August Wolf, was founded on research and teaching based in public institutions, on scholarly collaboration and systematic publication, and a syllabus of study designed to train the skills of criticism. For these scholars, the study of ancient culture was based on the systematic analysis of its sources. It was also focussed on the institutions of Roman society as much as on its narrative history, and this led to an interest in Roman law even for those who did not, like Mommsen, consider themselves primarily students of law rather than Classics; already in his doctoral dissertation, Mommsen, with all the intellectual arrogance that would serve him so well later, pronounced that the study of Greek was essentially philological, that of Latin essentially legal.5 Among Mommsen’s earliest writings, which arose from his studies at Kiel University (where Niebuhr too had studied), were dissertations on the Roman collegia (trade associations), on the citizen tribes, and on certain minor magistracies (the doctoral dissertation just referred to). It was Niebuhr, already the author of a published history of Rome and editor of the second-century writer Fronto, and the future founder of the academic journal Rheinisches Museum (from 1827), who discovered at Verona and published the text of Gaius’ Institutes, to which we will return below. In the special field of Roman law, Friedrich Bluhme, whose research produced the still fundamental analysis of the mode of preparation of Justinian’s Digest, published his work in 1818.6 Two other elements strengthened Mommsen’s interest in Roman law and the history of Roman institutions. The first was his early involvement in the discovery and publication of inscriptions. These were important because they presented an alternative to the literary sources, and because they offered an approach to the institutional patterns in Roman society,

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Roman law and Roman history which in turn generated a new, and already modern way of approaching its history – through the description of its social and political order rather than the narrative of its events. The second element was the movement, in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, towards unification around a national identity, to be implemented not by the hereditary monarchies but by a strong leader who would give political expression, like Mommsen’s hero Julius Caesar, to the institutional and social changes that were taking place. Along with this movement went a complex debate about the relations between law and political reform, one strand of which concerned the relations between the Roman law, enshrined in the Digest, that had been inherited from the Middle Ages, and the European codes of the early nineteenth century.7 There was an issue of jurisprudence at stake in this debate; whether the law should be codified in the interests of clarity and consistency, or left in its natural state, in order to be more sensitive to the needs of individuals and unforeseen situations. Mommsen’s belief in law as an instrument of change has an obvious bearing on the politics of the nineteenth century, and, no less obviously, on his view of the Roman empire. Such motivation and emphasis lead more strongly to the study of public than of private law, as can certainly be said of Mommsen’s two late masterpieces on Roman law. Römisches Staatsrecht (Roman Public Law), published over the years 1870/88, traced the sources and processes of public law and administration as they led the transition from republican to imperial government; and Römisches Strafrecht, of 1899, was about the criminal law of Rome. This does not mean that private law was not studied, far from it. Roman private law remained an essential component of the curriculum of law schools, not only in Continental Europe, where the Roman model was relevant to modern practice (Mommsen’s dissertation on the Roman trade guilds qualified him to practise law), but in Great Britain, where it was not. Even there, Roman law ceased to be a compulsory discipline in the syllabuses of University law faculties only within the last few decades.8 Twentieth-century Roman historians writing in English, who unlike their European counterparts were never deeply involved in it (political debates in nineteenth-century Britain were very unlike their counterparts in Continental Europe), moved away from Mommsen’s concern for public law as the foundation of political institutions. This detachment was underlined by the experience of their own times. Two World Wars, and the rise of dictatorships in the inter-war years, showed how the institutions of a society could be manipulated by those who seized power, and how the law could as easily be made to support tyranny as to offer protection

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Chapter 13 against it. The real issue, emerging one might say from the unsentimental, disillusioned tradition of Thucydides, Sallust and Tacitus, concerned the nature of power and its manipulation by propaganda and deception. The Roman empire, presented by Mommsen as a system of law, was really a system of power, which emerged through the murderous rivalries of dynasts (the term of the historian Appian), the most successful of them Octavian who later became Augustus. One only has to read some of the chapter titles in Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution of 1939, to hear the march of the fascist dictators of the 1920s and 1930s; ‘Dux’; ‘Crisis in Party and State’; ‘The National Programme’; ‘The Organization of Opinion’. The eloquent but fruitless political philosophy of Cicero, sponsoring conservatism under the guise of unity, left stranded by the flow of events from Pompey to Julius Caesar and surrendered by Octavian to the revenge of Mark Antony, is dismissed in a phrase: ‘Political Catchwords’. Yet it was Mommsen’s hero Julius Caesar, practical as well as brilliant, who planned the codification of Roman law, and one of whose supporters wrote the first detailed commentary on the Praetor’s Edict.9 Another influence in twentieth-century historical writing, emerging from a different strand in nineteenth-century thought, was an interest in social history, and in the experience of the ordinary people of the Roman empire. This was not just a curious antiquarianism but part of a search for a historical dialectic built upon socio-economic determinants, that would correspond to the logic of development inherent in biological studies – it is not just a coincidence that Marx’s Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Darwin’s Origin of Species were published in the same year, 1859. This severe philosophical quest combined with the discovery of new materials in the form of archaeology, inscriptions, and in due course papyri, to produce a practical appreciation of the diversities of life in the regions of the Roman world. The central chapters of Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926: 2nd. ed. 1957) are arranged, not around the central organization of the empire, but under its regions, under the general theme of town and country and the gulf of economic standing and privilege that divided them. Some texts of the Digest are cited in the source indexes of that great work, and Roman law (or rather, individual laws) are discussed from time to time, but they are concentrated on specific issues such as agrarian, commercial and maritime law, the organization of town councils and the preservation of peace in the cities and countryside. Inscriptions and papyri are many times more numerous, and the legal texts do not form a central theme. The realisation of just how far the populations of the empire, including the vast majority who lived in the country, might have been in terms of distance and culture from the

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Roman law and Roman history city-based central authorities, might well encourage a sense that the resources of Roman law were peripheral to all but a minority of the people, and therefore to Roman history itself, as it was now understood. Yet the tendency to isolation is not all on one side. There is no shortage of textbooks and monographs on Roman law, from which the physical realities of the Roman empire seem no less remote than is the law from the pages of Rostovtzeff. This is not in all cases an outcome of neglect, but of a principled debate among legal historians themselves as to the nature of the connection between Roman law and the realities of Roman society. Alan Watson is the most recent to argue that the development of Roman law is to be understood from within the juristic tradition itself, without reference to an everyday society with which it had little connection.10 It is an austere view, which does not seem at present to be the prevailing one among legal historians.11 In any case, the argument would apply to juristic thinking rather than to the many primary texts that clearly relate to real conditions in the empire (see below, §5).

2. Recent developments; the Digest The last three or four decades have shown an increasing eagerness among Roman historians to use the evidence of legal texts, both to address questions of a specifically legal nature, and to enrich the general understanding of the character of Roman society. John Crook’s Law and Life of Rome, headed by the wry epigraph ‘Iuris consultus abesto’ (‘Jurisconsults Keep Off!’), appeared in 1967 and was quite explicit in its aim ‘to strengthen the bridge between two spheres of discourse about ancient Rome by using the institutions of the law to enlarge understanding of the society and bringing the evidence of social and economic facts to bear on the rules of law’.12 Since then has appeared a great number of studies representing the same way of thinking, on topics to which the legal evidence contributes – social and legal privilege, the status and duties of town councillors, marriage and the position of women, sexuality and prostitution, the food supply and commerce, city administration, the agrarian economy, landowners and tenants, the origin and character of the jurists themselves: not to mention those more specifically legal issues, such as crime and punishment, the Roman citizenship, testamentary succession, slavery and manumission, and others, for which the legal evidence has always been understood to be central. This work has been complemented by books in which specialists in Roman law have explained without compromise the technical character of issues in their field to a more general audience.

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Chapter 13 The single most important development in making Roman law accessible to the wider constituency of Roman historians is however the translation, by a team of translators assembled by Alan Watson, of the Digest, the most substantial of the four works that make up the Corpus Iuris Civilis of Justinian. This book, a still more massive achievement than the translation of the Theodosian Code produced by Clyde Pharr and a team of collaborators fifty years ago, should in time have a similar effect on Roman studies.13 The Digest is one of the most important intellectual legacies of the ancient world, in bulk and variety exceeding most of them (perhaps only the Hebrew Bible and its legal commentaries contain so much of interest on so many different things). It was produced in 533 after a mere four years of work, a true reflection of the astonishing burst of energy that marks the early years of the reign of Justinian.14 It was accomplished under the guidance of the great jurist (and hated politician) Tribonian, by editorial committees who reduced to a mere 150,000 lines a total of 3 million lines of text contained in nearly two thousand books (libri, in the sense of an ancient book division). At the head of their text the editors listed the 204 works of the thirty-eight jurists they had read, including 13 by Gaius, 23 by Ulpian and 71 by Paul. These works could be very substantial in their own right; Ulpian’s and Paul’s Commentaries on the Edict, for example, consisted of 83 and 80 books respectively. To give some sense of proportion, the combined lengths of these two works alone easily exceed the original number of 142 books into which Livy – the ‘Patavine historian’, as Syme described him, ‘sunk by his bulk’ – divided his history. Despite the scale of reduction, the emperor, no doubt giving voice to Tribonian’s opinion, remarked that the completed work seemed to contain more law than anyone knew existed (Const. ‘Tanta’, 17). Like other ventures at consolidation, the Digest put paid to the specialist works from which it was derived and it was the Digest, not the works of the jurists themselves, that was the foundation of the rediscovery of Roman law in the 11th century schools of Bologna. The majority of the jurists whose names occur in the Digest lived in the later second and early third centuries, with outliers such as Q. Mucius Scaevola and P. Alfenus Varus from the Republican period and Hermogenianus and Aurelius Arcadius Charisius from the late third and early fourth century of the empire.15 It is ironic that the period of the jurists coincides with one that, apart from ecclesiastical writers in the shape of Tertullian and Cyprian, has left hardly any Latin literature. The Cambridge History of Latin Literature produces no significant author between Fronto, Aulus Gellius and Apuleius in the second century and the fourth century,

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Roman law and Roman history and is totally silent on jurists. Yet jurists were invariably men of a literary education, which was the foundation of a legal education and always preceded it; they frequently rise to eloquence even in the excerpted form in which we have them, and their writings are in play in dictionaries of the Latin language. It is not obvious why juristic culture should have less of a presence in a history of Latin literature than an astrologer and the author of a handbook on military science.16 The Digest is such a monumental book as to defy summary, beyond saying that it is divided into fifty long books, that it covers the full range of public and private law, and that in translation it fills two very large volumes in fine print. Not that it is entirely unknown, for a few privileged texts have long been in play for their contribution to specific topics and have entered into the general literature on them. No-one would address such fundamental questions in political philosophy as the definition and purpose of law, or the distinctions between ‘civil law’, ‘the law of nations’ and ‘natural law’, without studying the first chapter of the Digest and the related definitions at the beginning of Justinian’s Institutes. Also in the first book of the Digest is a passage from Pomponius’ ‘Manual in One Book’, which is a plausible elementary guide to the historical development of Roman law (1.2.2). A substantial extract from Ulpian’s ‘On the Duties of a Proconsul’ explains very carefully how a governor should treat his province, to the extent of advising him that he may take his wife though it is preferable for him not to, asking him to ensure that he enters his province by the most important city (mentioning Ephesus, the metropolis of Asia), reminding him that he must listen patiently to endless speeches of welcome since the provincials expect it of him, and warning him to be careful to strike a balance between accepting too many gifts and seeming offhand through refusing them. On this last point a letter of the Emperor Caracalla is quoted, expressing his opinion with an apt Greek proverb. In any discussion of provincial life in its relations with the ruling power, this text is essential reading (1.16.4;6–7;9–10). So too in the matter of demographic trends is the ‘life-table’ cited by the jurist Aemilius Macer from Ulpian, giving figures for life expectancy from various base points, from birth to 60, in order to calculate the tax consequences that arise for the future in the case of usufructs and annuities received as inheritances (35.2.68). It is a complicated law, much debated by scholars, but on any account is an essential component in any discussion of life expectancy in the Roman empire.17 A ruling, again by Ulpian, that fideicommissa might be expressed in any language, whether Latin or Greek, ‘Gallic’ (that is, Celtic), Punic, or ‘Assyrian’ (which we know as Syriac), or ‘any other language’, so long as it was understood by the participants, through an interpreter if

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Chapter 13 necessary, has an obvious bearing on the use of the non-Classical languages in the Roman provinces (32.11 or.; 45.1.1); as, on the broad question of literacy, does his opinion as to the length of time, physical conditions and language in which a notice must be displayed to allow it to come to public attention (14.3.11). We learn too from the Digest that it was common practice in dispute settlement to avoid litigation by taking oaths, on the basis that ‘the taking of an oath is a species of settlement and has greater authority than a judgment’, and that ‘it is an indication of manifest wickedness and an admission, to refuse to swear or to countertender’ ( Paul, in Digest 12.2.2; 38). If widely practised, this custom would have a great impact on our understanding of the conduct of law in the Roman empire, and on the law itself.18 To such texts as these, we may add the endless individual circumstances, real or imagined, that arise in the course of legal discussion. What are we to make of the slave fishermen who ‘attended a testator and followed him everywhere’ (the question arose because at the time of the testator’s death the slaves were not on his farm and so did not seem to be part of his property)?19 Are plant pots full of earth and containing plants part of the house (they are, provided they are fastened to the house permanently)? This whole title of the Digest (33.7), on farms and their equipment or instrumenta, reads like a physical archaeology of the rural household; another, with a similar variety in the situations found or imagined, considers the uses of and damage caused by rain, ditches and water channels, rivers and standing water (39.3). The Roman empire, and not just the life of its richest classes, comes to life in these pages. Some of the circumstances that arise would not be out of place in Petronius or Apuleius (to which it is worth adding that the Dinner of Trimalchio contains an informative parody of a Roman will, and that Apuleius’ Apology is the best example that we have of a Roman lawsuit in the provinces). One text considers the value of a slave with a mental rather than a physical defect, such as being ‘addicted to watching the games or studying works of art or lying’ (21.1.65); another the consequences that arise when two carts being pushed up the slopes of the Capitol run out of control back down the hill and knock down a slave boy belonging to someone else (9.1.52.2); another asked what would happen if freedom had been given to two slaves on condition that they had painted a room and built a ship, and one completed his task but the other not (40.4.13)? Whether real, or imagined in order to illustrate points of law, such situations are part of the thought-world of the writers, and so part of the history of their society. Behind the whole question of the nature of legal texts and the way in which they can be used by historians is that of the legal procedures from

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Roman law and Roman history which they arise. This is another way of putting the question of the sources of law, and it is to this that I turn next.

3. Sources of the law and forms of legislation The term, ‘sources of law’, has two senses.20 The first is a practical question, better expressed in terms of ‘transmission’ than ‘sources’; how do we, as historians, recover our knowledge of the law? The answer, easier to state than to implement given the multiplicity of sources, comprises the writers of literature, legal texts, inscriptions, papyri and so on, on which we base our knowledge.21 In reading these sources, we must always be alert to the agendas, whether overt or hidden, that they contain. This is especially true of literary texts, which often describe legal processes, in anecdotes expressing the writer’s judgment, in matters not directly to do with the law; they were not written to tell us about the law, but with concerns of their own. An example is the story of the Emperor Claudius, who was extremely devoted to hearing legal cases and did it with such disregard for proper procedure, that on one occasion an infuriated defendant, a Roman knight, hurled his sharpened pen and writing tablets at the emperor, badly cutting his cheek (Suet. Claud. 15). Another anecdote shows Augustus as judge, questioning a man accused of parricide in such a way that the defendant would almost have to insist on his own guilt in order to be condemned; ‘You surely did not kill your father?’ (Suet. Aug. 33). Both stories are told in order to illustrate the character of the protagonists – Augustus conscientious and lenient, Claudius wilful and stupid – rather than to make a legal point. They are evidence, however, for the emperor’s role in jurisdiction. An especially important source of information is inscriptions, either put up by imperial instruction in order to publicise the law or by successful petitioners who were anxious to record decisions in their favour, and the services of the individuals who had secured them – that is to say that these too have their agendas, in the need to secure publicity. There are papyrus and other records of legal proceedings, which are interesting because they may take us to parts of the empire beyond the normal reach of the central government and into the domain of local law; and many individual documents in the class known as negotia (business transactions); agreements, leases and contracts of different sorts.22 The main single source is of course the massive compilations of extracts made by jurists, to which we shall return. The question of the sources of law in its second sense – what, in the Romans’ view, gave authority to the law – can most easily be addressed as

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Chapter 13 a law student in the later second century would address it, from a standard textbook. The opening sentences of Gaius’ Institutes go straight to the heart of the matter. The sources of law are as follows: in the first place there are laws (leges) and plebiscites; then senatusconsulta, imperial edicts and the edicts of other magistrates, especially the praetors and aediles; and the opinions of those jurists who were permitted to ‘establish’ it (the Latin word is condere). His formulation is echoed by the early third-century jurist Papinian; ‘the civil law (ius civile) is that which comes in the form of statutes, plebiscites, senatusconsulta, imperial decrees, or authoritative juristic statements’.23 From the point of view of the authority of the law, it does not matter that Gaius and Papinian were giving a composite picture as it had developed to their own day, since Roman law was cumulative, and in all the forms which they mentioned had left some law that was still in active use. For example, Gaius explains the historical distinction between statute laws and plebiscites, observing that the latter were given the status of laws by the Lex Hortensia (of 267 BCE). By Gaius’ time, the distinction was a matter of history only. It was still the case, however, that some of the ‘laws’ that he and his contemporary jurists had to deal with were in fact plebiscites. The Lex Aquilia, of the later third century BCE, concerned liabilities and remedies for damage to property, an extremely important subject. It merits an entire title in the Digest, in the first extract of which Ulpian notes the historical point that the ‘law’, which superseded all previous laws, was in fact a plebiscite, on a motion introduced by a tribune (9.2.1).24 Statute law, in whatever form, was uncommon under the Roman empire. After the many ‘Leges Iuliae’ and others introduced or instigated by Augustus on various subjects (a sort of Indian summer of statute legislation), few statutory leges emerged from the Roman assemblies. Those that did, tended to reflect the political and dynastic needs of the ruling house and were often ceremonial in character, such as the series of laws setting out the posthumous honours to be paid to the princes Gaius and Lucius in 5 CE, and to Germanicus and Drusus after their premature deaths in 19 and 23 respectively. The law of 19, previously known in part and recently supplemented by one of several spectacular discoveries of inscriptions from Spain, has been somewhat over-interpreted because of its apparent reference to reforms in the procedures for electing consuls and praetors, but in its complete version it emerges as an essentially ceremonial – though very interesting – enactment.25 After this, the list of leges promulgated by the Roman people peters out very quickly. The bestknown is the so-called Lex de Imperio Vespasiani of 70 CE, part of which survives in a fine bronze inscription now displayed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori at Rome, recording with precedents the concatenation of

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Roman law and Roman history powers bestowed upon Vespasian upon his accession to the imperial office; whether it is taken to be ceremonial or substantive legislation depends on the view taken of the institutions of the early Principate.26 The last statutory legislation issued by the people is from the time of Nerva in 97 CE, but existing laws, many of them very ancient, continued to underlie the legal processes of the Roman empire. It is evident from the law of 19 honouring Germanicus, that its origin was a resolution of the senate inviting legislation from the people, and this raises the next item in Gaius’ list of sources, decrees of the senate. So partisan was the role of the senate in the later Republic, that it could hardly then have been claimed as a legal authority by a conscientious jurist. Under the empire, however, despite complaints in some quarters of its loss of political liberties, the legal authority of the senate was increased, through its relations with the people in the way we have just seen, and with the emperors.27 We find the senate issuing regulatory provisions in the form of senatus consulta, on matters such as public games at Syracuse, the establishment of a market in north Africa, and the cost of gladiators in the provinces.28 Some senatus consulta, which were often, but not always, responses to an imperial request for legislation, had a permanent effect upon important issues, such as the senatus consultum Claudianum on the marriage of partners of free and slave status, and the senatus consulta Orfitianum and Tertullianum on the inheritance and testamentary rights of women. The s.c. Claudianum, a set of regulations framed, ironically, by Claudius’ freedman Pallas, was not repealed (through disuse) until the time of Justinian.29 Until the emergence of the emperors as lawgivers, Roman legal development owed more to the implementation and adaptation of existing rules than to substantive change in the law. This was done by the interventions of magistrates in the judicial process, and especially the Praetor’s Edict. This was the annual statement by which the urban praetor (also the praetor peregrinus in matters concerning resident aliens, and the aediles in matters affecting the markets) announced his forthcoming policy in the administration of the law – what types of case he would hear, what defences he would admit, what exceptions he would allow, and so on. Each year the praetor would review the policy of his predecessor, accepting arguments and grounds of procedure that had been found satisfactory and rejecting or reviewing those that had not.30 Praetorian jurisdiction was a cumbersome procedure, but it allowed for the application of the law to be changed even when the law itself was not. The most interesting example of this is the ‘legal fiction’ whereby the prohibition of a non-citizen from taking legal action against a citizen was

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Chapter 13 circumvented by the ‘fiction’ that the non-citizen was in fact a citizen, a counterfactual assertion that allowed the law to develop in the interests of a broader conception of justice. Another was the procedure of ‘restoration’ (restitutio in integrum), whereby under certain circumstances – if a victim had been unable to reach a court to defend his interests, for example, or could claim intimidation or fraud – a praetor could set aside a legal transaction in the interests of justice. A comical but still instructive example of the praetor’s powers is cited by Aulus Gellius (20.1.13) from the writings of the Augustan jurist Labeo on the Twelve Tables. An offensive Roman by the name of L. Veratius was in the habit of accosting free Romans and slapping them in the face. He would then take twenty-five asses from a slave following him and give them to the person he had insulted, this being the fine, by now of no value, laid down by the Twelve Tables. The praetors added to their Edict the provision that the question of damages in such a case would be henceforth submitted to a board of ‘recoverers’ (recuperatores) for appraisal, and this became the law in future. And to take an example from statute law, almost the whole title in the Digest relating to the Lex Aquilia mentioned earlier consists of extracts from juristic commentaries on the edicts of the praetors and provincial governors (Digest 9.2.1–57). The law itself was neither changed nor repealed, but was progressively modified in its application by magisterial edict and juristic interpretation. In the time of Hadrian, the Edict was consolidated as a statement of private law by the great jurist Salvius Julianus. It was the subject of the massive commentaries by Gaius, Ulpian and others mentioned earlier, and in its organization of subject-matter underlies the private law sections of the Theodosian Code, the Codex Justinianus, and the Digest itself. The text of the Edict, which does not survive in its complete state, was reconstituted by Otto Lenel from the references to it made by the commentaries cited in the Digest and other sources.31 Long before its codification by Salvius Julianus, the Edict had been superseded by a new set of procedures deriving from the concentration of magisterial powers in the hands of the Roman emperors. The emperor was now expected to remedy deficiencies in the law by changing it substantively, and he did so by all the means mentioned by Gaius – by decree, edict and letter, all of which became known collectively by the single term, ‘constitution’. Modern discussions are often content to describe them by the single term ‘pronouncement’, or even ‘law’, but they differ in character. Decrees (decreta) are strictly understood as legal rulings arising from the emperor’s role as judge. Edicts were open communications directly addressed to the people at large or to individual communities, while letters were addressed to governors with instructions

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Roman law and Roman history to enforce them within their jurisdictions. The best-known example of legislation by edict is probably the set of edicts issued by Augustus to the province of Cyrene on various aspects of local jurisdiction, while the tenth book of Pliny’s letters, those exchanged with Trajan from the province of Bithynia, provides an example of lawmaking by letters addressed to a provincial governor.32 Trajan’s reply to Pliny on the subject of the trial and punishment of Christians, for instance, is founded on an assertion of sound legal principles – only actual crimes are to be punished, alleged Christians are not to be sought out, and anonymous denunciations are not to be admitted (Plin. Ep. 10.96–7). Gaius’ claim, with which Ulpian agreed (Digest 1.4.1), that imperial edicts possessed the force of law because they were an exercise of an imperium that was bestowed on him by law, has been criticized as unsatisfactory. However, the formulation is only meant to provide an underpinning in constitutional theory for a right that the emperor was clearly understood to possess. Ulpian offered an enlargement of the theory, in the form of the proposition, ‘anything decided by the emperor has the force of law’ (Digest 1.4.1 pr.). This is not quite so bald a statement as it looks. Ulpian defined the categories of authoritative imperial pronouncements as whatever the emperor had decided ‘by letter over his signature or decreed on judicial investigation, or pronounced in an interlocutory manner or prescribed in an edict’; in sum, ‘what we commonly call constitutions’. The word used for ‘decided’, placet, is the formal word for a decision taken in due order by a properly constituted body, and there could hardly be any doubt that the emperor was such. We have also to take into account the expectation in every area of Roman life, that when serious decisions were taken, they were taken seriously and with relevant advice. The emperor’s rulings possessed legal force because of the emperor’s authority as properly exercised, namely with the advice of jurists. For the whole process of change and innovation in the law, whether this was done by procedural intervention by praetors or by substantive changes brought in by emperors, the contribution of jurists was essential.

4. The nature of the material In using the evidence of legal texts, historians need to be aware of two distinctions of form. The first is between imperial pronouncements that were meant to be valid in all relevant situations, and those that were not intended to create precedent. The first category, that of ‘general laws’, was defined as those pronouncements issued as edict, decree or letter to a public authority or official, and made known by posting in public places,

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Chapter 13 usually in association with an edict of the governor of a province.33 Many laws so issued and published were very specific and even eccentric in content; nevertheless, and this is the essence of their definition as ‘general laws’, the rule was to be applied whenever similar situations might recur in future. The Theodosian Code is a collection of more than 2,700 (originally 3,500) ‘general laws’ on all imaginable matters, legal, political and administrative, from the reign of Constantine down to the time of compilation in the 430s. The material is incomplete, since it could only contain those texts that were actually found by the editors and it is clear that they missed many; 34 not only this, but the manuscript tradition of the first five books of the Code – those on the private law – is incomplete, with the paradoxical result that the most important source for the content of these books is the Lex Romana Visigothorum published in southern Gaul in 506. Despite these deficiencies, the Code as we have it is a fuller and better organized collection of imperial constitutions than was available to any individual of the fourth or early fifth centuries who was living under the law, or to any emperor who was actually making it. The modern historian using the Code, and indeed the legal material in general, must always remember that while we have the material in codified form, its ancient subjects did not. It is difficult to weigh these considerations in assessing the force or effectiveness of any particular text. A. H. M. Jones’ much-quoted observation in the Preface to his The Later Roman Empire, that the laws preserved in the Theodosian Code ‘are clues to the difficulties of the empire, and records of the aspirations of the government and not its achievement’ is salutary, but less helpful than it seems.35 Take for instance the longest title of the Theodosian Code, which contains 192 laws originating between 313 and 436 on the subject of city councils (CTh 12.1). Even allowing for the fact that some of these texts are cited from the same original law and should be reassembled into a smaller number, this is still a lot of legislation; but the Roman empire was immense, and contained thousands of cities. It is the role of governments to confront problems, and governments are always at odds with taxpayers; it seems impossible to say whether this number of laws spread over this period is larger or smaller than one would expect, or whether the laws do more than document an unresolved battle of interests between government and (the better-off ) governed. Apart from their general legislation, there is a second and very numerous category of legal rulings, given by the emperor or in his name, in the form of replies to individual petitioners on matters they brought forward for

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Roman law and Roman history decision. From the start, the emperors had given rulings and benefits to all sorts of petitioners who managed to reach them,36 and Ulpian made the necessary distinction between general constitutions and those which, being issued to individuals, were not considered to set precedent (Digest 1.4.2). That there seems to have been an increase of rescripts during the third century may be a trick of the evidence for the reasons to be described below, but there may also be a substantive cause, in the form of Caracalla’s enactment of 212, the famous constitutio Antoniniana, to the effect that all free inhabitants of the Roman empire, whatever their social status, would become Roman citizens. Caracalla’s critics claimed that his motive was simply to extend tax liability to a greater sector of the population, but whether this is true or not, a consequence of the change was an immediate increase in the numbers of people who fell under Roman law and reaped the benefits – or were exposed to the disadvantages – of its procedures.37 Our main source of rescripts consists of two legal codes of the late third century, the Codex Gregorianus and its close successor the Codex Hermogenianus, both named after jurists who held court office under Diocletian and his colleagues (the system of government known as the Tetrarchy). Neither Code is extant in its own right, but both were excerpted for general rules in the Codex Justinianus, published in successive editions in 529 and 534, and can partly be reassembled from that source. The Gregorian Code contained rescripts going back from the jurist’s own day to the later second and early third centuries. The Hermogenian Code collected rescripts issued by the Tetrarchs – the vast majority by Diocletian himself, under whom Hermogenianus served as magister libellorum (‘Master of Petitions’); more precisely, he collected texts from just two years, 293– 4, of the reign of Diocletian. The result is a challenge to the imagination. Even in their excerpted state, the two Codes preserve more than 2,500 texts from the period they cover, and more than 850 from these two years of the reign of Diocletian.38 It is perhaps going a little too far to describe the situation, with Honoré, as a ‘legal advisory service’ provided by the emperor, but the scale on which the emperor, or his judicial department, was prepared to respond to his subjects’ legal enquiries is surprising, and has implications for our understanding of the imperial office itself. Diocletian cannot realistically be claimed to have personally weighed every judicial response made to his petitioners in these two years. The sheer numbers of rescripts and the detail and technicality of many of them imply delegation to the people – again, the jurists – who would know how to handle them. Rescripts were not in principle meant to apply to other than the cases for which they were issued. The very existence of the Gregorian and

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Chapter 13 Hermogenian Codes shows however that in practice this could not be so, for the obvious reason that, even in specific cases, the emperor or his jurists would state the grounds for their decisions. Legal thinking, like all organized thinking, is a matter of defining categories of understanding within which individual situations can be evaluated, and it is in the nature of law to justify action in a particular case by appealing to principles larger than the case itself. If the emperor gave a good reason for a decision issued to an individual, this would take its place in the thinking about the subject.

5. Leges and ius The second distinction, which has pervaded this chapter, is between different types of text – between the substantive pronouncements of legal authorities, in our period mainly the emperors, and the law that was written from the texts, which was the work of jurists. Legal codification before the Digest had a limited aim. It consisted simply in the collection and publication of the verbatim pronouncements of the emperors, classified by topic and set in order, without general indications of the law that could be inferred from them. This is true of the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes, of the Theodosian Code which imitated their arrangement although not their principles of selection (since it contained only general law), and of the Codex Justinianus, which excerpted the earlier codes and added material from the period after the Theodosian Code down to Justinian’s own day. The texts were edited to identify the substantive point at issue, which essentially means that the supportive rhetoric often attached to imperial pronouncements, together with any rationale the emperors may have offered to justify them, was omitted; the substantive text was left unchanged, though it might be divided into sections appropriate for the different titles under which the texts were arranged, or repeated if it were relevant to more than one. An incidental benefit to the historian is that, in the absence of any critical evaluation of the points of law that were involved, the texts were simply set out in chronological order, under the basic principle ‘the later, the more valid’ (CTh 1.1.5). Since the place of issue and recipient of the communications are also recorded, they provide us with the fullest information about emperors’ movements and the identity of their supporters that is available for any period of Roman history.39 The distinction before us is that between, on the one hand, leges or constitutiones in the various forms referred to, the primary pronouncements of Roman emperors; and, on the other hand, ius, the ‘law’ itself, as deduced by the jurists from their scrutiny of the texts. It was part of the original plan of Theodosius II to add a compendium of ‘law’ to the collection of

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Roman law and Roman history leges that we possess in the Theodosian Code itself. The projected volume would be closer to a modern idea of codification, an authoritative statement of ‘the law’ as it stood. It would present ‘no error, no ambiguities, [but would show] what must be followed and what must be avoided by all’ (CTh 1.1.5). No trace survives of progress on this ambitious project. In the meantime, Roman courts worked with an extremely restricted range of juristic writing, notably Papinian, Gaius, Ulpian, Modestinus and Paul, and epitomes of these writers (CTh 1.4.3). When the early sixth-century editors of the Lex Romana Visigothorum annotated their texts, which they selected from the Theodosian Code, to the effect that they needed supplementation from ius, they meant precisely this, that the pronouncements of emperors needed setting in the context of legal writing. It was left to Tribonian and his colleagues to complement the collection of laws in the Codex Justinianus by a critical presentation of the law as considered by jurists, in the Digest and Institutes. In considering the role of the jurists, one question that has not been mentioned so far but is of very great importance for the closer study of legal texts, is the extent of interpolation. The editors of the Theodosian Code were forbidden to do more than adjust texts in order to preserve their sense as they excerpted them, but it would be natural for jurists working on the legal texts of the past to modify them in the light of their own later knowledge, and all legal scholars agree that in the Digest this has taken place, to a greater or lesser extent.40 The point of high fashion in interpolation was reached in the nineteenth century, when literary texts too were exposed to the suspicions of editors who put their own judgment of what an author should have written above the evidence for what he actually did write, but that ancient legal texts were subject to interpolation is beyond doubt. How else, for example, did the provision in the Lex Julia de Maiestate that provincial governors may not act in certain ways ‘without the instruction of the senate and Roman people’ become transformed into the formula ‘without the instruction of the Princeps’, except by the silent correction of Marcian or some other jurist (Digest 48.4.3)? It is not conceivable that the wily, clever Augustus made such a change, and he is the latest plausible author of a Lex Julia on this subject (we can ignore the claims of that other ‘Julian’ emperor, Caligula). In the same way Constantine’s suspension of gladiatorial combat recorded in the Theodosian Code, which refers to the end of civil war and onset of domestic peace after the defeat of Licinius and is known only from the copy posted at Beirut, appears in the Codex Justinianus as the sole text of a title referring to a ‘total ban’ of the institution (CTh 15.12.1: CJust 11.44). Too many historians of Constantine accept the stronger interpretation

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Chapter 13 without asking whether it may be an interpolation of the time of Justinian, by which time gladiatorial combat had indeed come to an end.

6. Conclusion In his Prolegomena to the Theodosian Code, Mommsen remarked that their laws were collected by the Romans as a matter of public initiative only twice in their history; in the Twelve Tables, published at Rome at the outset of the Republic, and in the Theodosian Code, published at Constantinople at the close of the empire. He clearly regarded the work of Justinian as falling outside the true period of Roman history (or, worse, as a project of Greek inspiration). It is equally clear, however, that neither Theodosius nor Justinian thought of their work as a legacy of a dying empire for the future, but as a contribution to its continuing life. In that sense the readers closest to the original intentions of the Codes and the Digest are those historians who aspire to use it to reconstruct the life of the Roman empire in all its available dimensions. Roman law, in the fine words of Bruce Frier, is an ‘intricate and honored discipline’, and the historian must respond with an awareness of the intricacy, and a respect for the discipline.41 Some of the challenges have been described in this chapter: the question of precedent, the extent to which laws addressing one situation are intended to apply to others, whether they ‘map onto’ social reality, whether they portray a social ideal in the minds of legislators, or simply reveal the imperfections of society as perceived by them; whether, in many cases, they are real or imagined situations and, if the latter, what difference this makes; the sources of jurisdiction, the distinctions between procedural and substantive change, between leges and ius; the sheer technicality of much of the literature. All of these issues present difficulties which the historian must address by establishing rules of procedure and in difficult cases by principled judgment; which is, after all, how the law itself developed.

Notes 1 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. G. A. Bonnard (1966), p. 147. 2 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Womersley (1994), II, pp. 472–85 (barbarian law); 778–844 (Roman law). In the original publication, Gibbon’s vol. III (1781) ended with Chapter XXXVIII. Volume IV, including Chapter XLIV, followed in 1788. 3 Gibbon’s personal library catalogues list only a volume on ante-Justinianic law and an edition of Justinian’s Institutes – followed by six editions or translations of Juvenal; G. Keynes, The Library of Edward Gibbon (1940; 2nd ed., 1980) pp. 164–5.

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Roman law and Roman history 4

A. D. Momigliano, ‘Gibbon’s contribution to historical method’, Studies in Historiography (1966), pp. 40–55, at 40 [first published Historia 2 (1953/4), pp. 450–63]. 5 T. E. J. Wiedemann, ‘Mommsen, Rome and the German Kaiserreich’, in Mommsen, A History of Rome under the Emperors (based on the lecture notes of Sebastian and Paul Hensel, 1882–86), edd. Barbara and Alexander Demandt, Engl. translation by Clare Krojzl (1996), p. 40. 6 W. Kunkel, (tr. J. M. Kelly), An Introduction to Roman Legal and Constitutional History (2nd ed. 1973), pp. 158–9; A. M. Honoré, Tribonian (1978), pp. 150–70. 7 J. Q. Whitman, The Legacy of Roman Law in the Romantic Era (1990), pp. 212–28. 8 The Digest continues to provide the civil law of South Africa and, I am told, San Marino. 9 Suetonius, Div.Iul. 44.3; for Aulus Ofilius, ‘Caesari familiarissimus’, see Pomponius in Digest 1.2.2.44. The Praetor’s Edict is discussed in §3 of this chapter. 10 A. Watson, The Spirit of Roman Law (1995). 11 D. Johnston, Roman Law in Context (1999); B. W. Frier, ‘Roman law’s descent into history’ (reviewing Johnston and O. F. Robinson, The Sources of Roman Law [1997]), Journal of Roman Archaeology (2000), pp. 446–8. 12 J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome (1967), p. 7. 13 A. Watson, ed., The Digest of Justinian, English translation with Latin text, 2 vols. (1985); English translation only, 2 vols., 1998; C. Pharr, ed., The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions; A translation, with commentary, glossary and bibliography (1952; repr. 1969). 14 Honoré, Tribonian (above, n. 6), pp. 138–86. 15 See their several entries, by Tony Honoré, in Oxford Classical Dictionary (rev. 3rd ed., 2003). P. Alfenus Varus was the triumviral land commissioner petitioned in Vergil, Ecl. 9.26ff. 16 The astrologer is Firmicus Maternus and the handbook of military science is the Epitoma Rei Militaris of Vegetius – fascinating works both, but not what is conventionally understood as literature. 17 B. W. Frier, ‘Roman Life Expectancy: Ulpian’s evidence’, HSCP 86 (1982), pp. 213–51; T. G. Parkin, Demography and Roman Society (1992), pp. 27–41. 18 For the resolution of legal disputes by oath-taking, see Chapter 16 below. 19 For an instance of this situation in the so-called ‘Testament of Dasumius’ see Chapter 6 above. 20 Robinson, Sources of Roman Law, (above, n. 11), p. 1. 21 Robinson, pp. 54–78. 22 For negotia see Riccobono, FIRA 2 , Vol. III (1972). A Journal of Juristic Papyrology is published by the Department of Papyrology at the University of Warsaw (from 1947; Vol. 37, 2007). 23 Digest 1.1.7; the ius civile is that law which comes from substantive enactment rather than from magisterial intervention (the ius honorarium). The distinction underlies the arrangement of Books II–V of the Theodosian Code, cf. Matthews, Laying Down the Law, pp. 117–18. 24 There is a Penguin translation of the Digest title on the Lex Aquilia (and other topics), by C. F. Kolbert; Justinian, The Digest of Roman Law: Theft, rapine, damage and insult (1979, reprinted). 25 A. H. M. Jones, ‘The elections under Augustus’, Studies in Roman Government and

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Chapter 13 Law (1960), 29–50 [first published JRS 45 (1955), pp. 9–21]; J. Gonzales, ‘Tabula Siarensis, Fortunales Siarenses et Municipia Civium Romanorum’, ZPE 55 (1984), pp. 55–100; text translated by R. K. Sherk, The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian (Translated Documents of Greece and Rome, 6, 1988), No. 36. 26 P. A. Brunt, ‘Lex de Imperio Vespasiani’, JRS 67 (1977), pp. 95–116. 27 R. J. A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (1984), pp. 431–59. 28 Respectively Tacitus, Annals 15.49; Riccobono, FIRA 2, I, No. 47; Ibid., No. 49, with J. A. Oliver and R. E. A. Palmer, ‘Minutes of an Act of the Roman Senate’, Hesperia 24 (1955), pp. 320–49. 29 Talbert (1984), pp. 435ff. has lists of senatus consulta and imperial orationes cited or discussed in legal works. For Pallas and the senatus consultum Claudianum see above, Chap. 5. 30 A. Watson, ‘The development of the Praetor’s Edict’, Law Making in the Later Roman Republic (1974), pp. 31–62 (first published JRS 60 [1970], pp. 105–19). 31 O. Lenel, Das Edictum Perpetuum: ein Versuch zu seiner Wiederherstellung, 3rd ed., 1927; reprinted 1956; cf. Riccobono, FIRA 2, I, pp. 333–91, or Bruns, Fontes 7, pp. 211–38. 32 R. K. Sherk, Rome and the Greek East to the death of Augustus (Translated Documents of Greece and Rome, 4, 1984), pp. 127–32; A. N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A historical and social commentary (1966), pp. 525ff. 33 Matthews, Laying Down the Law, pp. 65–70. 34 Ibid., p. 291. 35 The Later Roman Empire, p. viii. 36 Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (1977), pp. 465–549. 37 ‘Disadvantages’, because the extension of the citizenship may actually have increased the exposure of ordinary people to the increasingly severe and discriminatory nature of inquisitions and penalties in the criminal law (cf. Digest 48.19, esp. Callistratus, at 48.19.28). As P. A. Brunt observes, ‘the extension of the citizenship and especially the constitutio Antoniniana probably levelled downwards rather than upwards’; see his ‘Evidence given under torture in the Principate’, ZSS 97 (1980), Rom. Abt., pp. 256–6. 38 A. M. Honoré, Emperors and Lawyers (2nd ed., 1994), pp. 163–81. For a sympathetic and perceptive treatment of this wealth of material, Serena Connolly, Lives Behind the Laws: The world of the Codex Hermogenianus, 2010. 39 O. Seeck, Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste (1919, repr. 1984); A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, J. Morris, PLRE I, AD 260–395 (1971) and II, AD 395–527 (1980); T. D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (1982). 40 D. Johnston, Roman Law in Context, pp. 17–22. 41 ‘Roman law’s descent into history’ (above, n. 11), p. 446.

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14 AMMIANUS ON ROMAN LAW AND LAWYERS The law, and the courts of law, of the later Roman empire bear in the text of Ammianus Marcellinus a heavy thematic, that is to say rhetorical and moral, importance. In the first place, the courts were public institutions, which when held in respect maintained the individual rights of citizens, while contempt for them was an index and instrument of tyranny.1 In the integrity of the institutions of law resided the notion of lawful and rightful government (‘fas iusque’); in the absence of this integrity, the whole notion of a ‘civil and just empire’ (‘civile iustumque imperium’) vanished from the state, as the courts were turned to satisfy the bloody will of one man, in this case Gallus Caesar (14.1.4f.). The avarice and envy of the emperors and their supporters put at risk the happiness, freedom and legitimate possessions of private individuals; anger outweighs a proper assessment of the scale of wrongdoing, and penalties far exceed what is fitting for the crime. In the second place, the law was the instrument of misfortune, as the wellbeing of individuals was replaced by poverty and suffering. Especially at times of civil strife, men were raised to great heights and cast down; the usurper Procopius failed to realise that by a turn of Fortune’s wheel, a man prosperous in the morning might be plunged into the depths of misfortune before the evening (26.8.13). The mutability of fortune was for Ammianus, as for Classical moralists in general, an integral aspect of the human condition. The philosopher Simonides laughed in mockery of the fragility of human affairs as the fire consumed him at the stake before the eyes of multitudes (29.1.38); noble houses of Gaul and Spain were brought to ruin (16.8.8–9), two brothers of distinguished lineage unjustly condemned to exile but later restored with their status intact (29.2.11); the son of another exile condemned to death, to be reprieved by a happy fortune as he was being led to his execution (29.1.44). Such experiences place men at the mercy of powers greater than themselves, powers from a rational point of view incomprehensible. In a fourth-century astrological writer, the abrupt loss of life and dignity in judicial proceedings provides examples of a turn of events of which the stars, correctly interpreted, might forewarn. ‘Sixtyeight passages predicting accusations, judicial sentences, and forms of

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Chapter 14 punishment give a sinister impression of his age’, it has been written of Firmicus Maternus, and further; ‘a dozen passages show the prevalency of capital punishment, and seven others mention executioners. Seven attest the widespread employment of torture, and twenty-two prophesy imprisonment, or mention warders and prison guards’.2 The figures are no more than impressionistic, but may be compared for scale with the ‘at least thirty passages’ in the same text which mention public finance.3 Thirdly and very important, the courts of law provide an arena for the display of moral courage, as defendants on capital charges show steadfastness of spirit under inquisition and torture. Philosophers – but not only philosophers – defy intense physical pain as their bodies are put on the rack and iron claws tear at their sides. Some refuse to admit to crimes they have not committed and to incriminate others, while others fail this test of moral and physical courage. One would think, from the frequency of such episodes in Ammianus’ text, that outside the sphere of military action the law, and the customary methods of legal enquiry, were by far the likeliest source of physical danger, and second only to battle provided the commonest opportunities to display courage that were available to late Roman men. (A broader reading of late Roman sources, without mentioning battle, might suggest the same to have been true of women also.) The frequent recurrence of law and legal procedures in the text of Ammianus undoubtedly expresses a real truth about late Roman society, at those more elevated levels – the ‘negotiorum celsitudines’ (26.1.1) – at which Ammianus usually describes it. It is natural to find that his presentation of the topic possesses a moral and rhetorical character, both in what he has to say of the civil law in his excursus on lawyers to which I shall turn next, and in the many passages in which he describes the progress of criminal trials, above all on charges of magic and treason. The particular question I wish to address is important because it is relevant not only to questions of law, but to the general character of Ammianus as a writer; it concerns the extent to which the moral dimension of his descriptions is at the expense of a proper presentation of the institutions and procedures that were involved. Ammianus’ attitude to the civil law is expressed in his digression on the conduct of Roman lawyers (30.4). Despite the author’s claim to have personally experienced what he describes (30.4.4), the whole passage is one of obvious rhetorical artifice. After a brief and conventional introduction to the origins and historical development of the art of advocacy, the digression describes lawyers in what are announced as four

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Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers categories. However, it quickly becomes clear that these are not really four categories of lawyers at all, but four ways in which the conduct of lawyers can be classified. Even then, once the initial point of distinction has been stated, the forms of conduct described tend to merge into more or less indistinguishable forms of wickedness. The first category is that of lawyers who provoke family litigation in order to profit from the disputes that it generated; this category quickly rises to a rhetorical climax, though the argument peters out, with allusion to sentiments of Cicero on the wickedness of those who attempt to corrupt the minds of judges with fallacious arguments in speeches. It is not clear what in particular this has to do with those lawyers who provoke family litigation. The second category consists of learned jurisconsults who devote themselves, once satisfied as to the financial standing of their clients, to finding recondite precedents in the juristic writings. Ammianus’ writing is quite pointed here, and this group of lawyers more resembles a professional category than any of the others, but the argument is neither profound nor developed. The third category is that of lawyers who win fame by attacking the truth, making a clamour in the court, and raising difficult questions in order to embarrass the judges and to delay the outcome; but it is not clear why members, at least of the first and fourth categories, cannot also behave in this way. The fourth category contrasts with the second. It is that of ignorant, under-trained advocates, who encourage futile litigation, attend the court in an ill-prepared state, plead illness in order not to appear and, in the end, claim the need for a fuller briefing and win adjournments, with expenses for all the trouble they have undergone. All this is thoroughly reprehensible, but it can hardly be claimed that Ammianus has effectively classified the profession of advocates into four groups. He has, rather, produced forms of behaviour to which all advocates were liable without distinction, and which tend to merge with each other as he develops them. The one category that is to some extent recognisable in professional terms is the second, that of the jurisconsults. Here Ammianus does offer some points of legal interest. The distinction acknowledged, even if only implicitly (30.4.11), between ius, the opinions of jurists, and leges, the enactments of emperors, is precisely that proposed in 429 and again in 435 to the compilers of the Theodosian Code, when they received their instructions to compile all the constitutions of general purport issued since the time of Constantine; a future volume would then combine the existing sources of leges, the Hermogenian, Gregorian and Theodosian Codes, with the writings of the lawyers, in order to produce an authoritative statement of the whole of Roman law.4 Ammianus’ allusion to the contradictions and confusions in the laws (his word is ‘leges’), which

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Chapter 14 is what gave scope to the exploitation of their clients by the jurisconsults, is echoed by a near-contemporary source, the anonymous pamphlet De Rebus Bellicis, which ends with an appeal for a codification of the law to remove its ambiguities (De Rebus Bellicis 21). A second point of juristic significance provides the point of departure for Ammianus’ excursus, when he explains how the legal profession had acquired such opportunities for profiteering under Valens. It was because the emperor’s praetorian prefect, Modestus, persuaded him not to give personal attention to private lawsuits (‘causarum minutiae privatarum’), these being below his dignity, almost designed as it were to humble his loftiness; with the result that Valens abandoned the practice of hearing them (30.4.2). Ammianus’ reasoning, as often at these junctures where general principle and personal opinion intersect, is partisan and a little paradoxical. Had the emperor persisted in hearing civil litigation, he maintains, innocence in the courts would have found a new defender in his stern character, and a check placed upon the influence of the powerful (30.4.1). This may be so, but the comparison suggested with the reign of Julian casts a strange light on Valens’ conduct in criminal jurisdiction, where his interference in the processes of law is seen as tyrannical. Nevertheless, the point at issue, the emperor’s involvement in civil jurisdiction, raises questions, relevant since the beginning of the Principate, as to how the emperor should spend his time; how to achieve the balance between his personal concern for the wellbeing of his subjects, and the risk of his being overwhelmed by an unwieldy mass of detailed business. The two law codes preceding the Theodosian, named after the Tetrarchic lawyers Gregorius and Hermogenianus, consisted almost entirely of rescripts issued by the emperors in response to just such private consultation, a source of texts not envisaged by the instructions given to the editors of the Theodosian Code in their quest for generalitas in the law.5 Indeed, by a law of 398 the Theodosian Code denied general validity to rescripts issued in particular cases (CTh 1.2.11), implying at the same time that, despite their scarcity in surviving sources, fourth-century emperors continued, like their predecessors, to issue rescripts to individual litigants and petitioners. If this is so, and if the absence of surviving rescripts in the fourth century is a reflection, not of actual practice but of the nature of the source material, then Ammianus’ description of Modestus’ advice to Valens is a significant item of evidence for the emperors’ continuance of this procedure. Other points raised by Ammianus concern, in a remark attached to the fourth of his categories, the question of delays in the law as advocates seek adjournments in order to be better briefed (30.4.19). This is a general

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Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers complaint, linked to no particular category of lawyer; it is addressed in various laws compiled in the Theodosian Code, and is a chief reason given by Constantine for his delegation of judicial powers to bishops. Such jurisdiction would provide rapid, honest and cheap resolution of disputes to those ‘entangled in the long and almost endless toils of litigation’ (Const. Sirm. 1). Despite his claim of personal experience, it is difficult to follow Ammianus in his observation that the abuses described by him were particularly prevalent in the east (‘orientalium quorundam versutia’; 30.4.4, cf. 8); and it was certainly not the case, as his words seem to imply, that the institution of a time-limit upon speakers was due to any recent experience there. The Classical Greek institution of the time-limit long precedes any deterioration in the administration of the law that may be attributable to the late Roman period.6 It is another essentially rhetorical move on Ammianus’ part to denounce the incompetence and corruption of the judges before whom forensic orators indulged in their manipulation of truth and integrity. Moving in conclusion from judges back to advocates, Ammianus is at least amusing in his description of the disadvantages of the legal profession, as lawyers quarrel among themselves, offend people by the violence of the abuse which they employ in the absence of substantial arguments, cope with the incompetent judges just mentioned, and in the end carry the blame if a case is lost, ‘though this may happen through any of a thousand accidents’ (30.4.22). In case we were about to find some sympathy with the unfortunate profession, Ammianus has begun his conclusion by observing that the disadvantages of the life are such that they would deter any honest man from embarking upon it. It is obvious that Ammianus’ excursus belongs to a satirical tradition about the venality of the legal profession.7 Like many satirists – it might almost be taken as a criterion of satire – Ammianus offers no programme of reform for the abuses he has identified except that of moral improvement: people should just behave better. He does not state or imply a practical alternative, nor does he suggest that an advanced society, in which property and status are leading and even dominant concerns, can do without litigation and lawyers. Despite all this, in his digression on the civil law and lawyers Ammianus touches upon points of legal interest, as in the implied distinction between ius and leges, and his excursus arises from a real situation clearly conceived, the resolution of private lawsuits by imperial rescripts, and the bearing of this upon the pressures of trivial business on an emperor with many other claims on his time.

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Chapter 14 Ammianus’ discussions of the administration of criminal law by the emperors involve no mere rhetorical excursus. They are based on the narration of actual situations, particularly of legal processes involving the capital charges of treason and magic arts; maiestas and maleficium. Now, Ammianus shared his contemporaries’ hostility to those who would challenge the authority of legitimate emperors, and acknowledged the entitlement of the latter, ‘the defenders of all men of good will’, to the protection of a law of treason which would, when their safety was at stake, even permit the torture of men of high rank (19.12.17).8 Ammianus’ attribution of this provision to the ‘Corneliae leges’ – the Republican laws of Sulla – is a display of historical erudition that may or may not be justified, but the historian could, had he known them, have cited fourth-century rulings to the same effect, such as a pronouncement of the early fourthcentury lawyer Arcadius Charisius preserved in the Digest (48.18.10.1), and rulings of Constantine I and Valentinian (on maiestas) and Constantius II (on maleficium) preserved in the Theodosian Code (9.5.1; 9.16.6; 9.35.1). What offended Ammianus was the severity of the emperor’s response, as he and his supporters used the situation to satisfy their personal avarice and anger, as victims were made to suffer without distinction of right and wrong, and the wealth of noble houses was confiscated to enrich the victorious party (he is writing of the aftermath of the rebellion of Procopius; 26.10.14). Ammianus produces many episodes in which judicial proceedings, and all that they entailed, followed civil war and usurpation, and at times the most frivolous suspicions of disloyalty. From his accounts, we may extrapolate a rhetorical stereotype of what might happen.9 The laying of information of a purely incidental character provokes in the ears of an emperor surrounded by sycophants who play on his suspicious character, the conviction that he is the object of a dangerous conspiracy. Agents chosen for their peculiar unpleasantness are sent out to supervise the investigations,10 arrests are made all over the provinces, men are loaded down with chains and manacles and, groaning, led in columns to places of confinement.11 Houses are sealed while searches are made for incriminating ‘evidence’, and the victims are submitted to cruel tortures, from which they emerge unable to walk, with hardly a breath in their pitifully torn bodies, but without having in their intense sufferings incriminated either themselves or others. The trials once concluded, the emperor declares the severest penalties for all alike, regardless of the degree of guilt established or the claims of friendship or clemency, and the victims submit to execution or exile, with the confiscation of property. Their houses closed, they are left without consolation as they are led to their death or dispatched

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Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers to remote, inhospitable places to live in beggary. Meanwhile, rabid accusers and subservient judges, and emperors beside themselves with fury, dance on the misfortune they have created, the courts of law being reduced to displays of personal cruelty, reprehensible even where guilt is admitted – as it often is, for Ammianus rarely claims for his victims actual innocence of the charges levelled. It would be possible to produce a similar composite narrative emphasising not rhetorical, but procedural patterns. The information giving rise to capital charges might indeed emerge from incidental events. The case against Theodorus, heard at Antioch in 371, came to light through enquiries about embezzlement made by a financial official and referred to the praetorian prefect when allegations of magic arts were made (29.1.5); then, when the praetorian prefect applied ‘strict investigation’ (that is, torture) to the informants under his jurisdiction, one of these revealed the full enormity of what was going on, no doubt with the hope, in the event justified, of saving his own skin by incriminating others (29.1.6; 2.1ff.). In due course and after further enquiries a report is made to the emperor and he makes a legal ruling, setting out the law under which the cases are to be heard (29.1.10f.). The law in question is that of maiestas; as too in the trials conducted by the agents of Valentinian at Rome, where a relatio submitted to the emperor by his praefectus annonae elicited the ruling that the cases under investigation be treated as maiestas (28.1.11). The effect of this ruling – as Valentinian seems not to have realised until told of it – was to make witnesses of the highest social rank liable to undergo torture.12 In the case of Theodorus the preliminary hearings (‘praeiudicia’, 29.1.12) continue, arrests are made, which might indeed extend over many provinces. Theodorus was brought back to Antioch from Constantinople, which he was visiting on private business, and was held in a remote part of the territory while he awaited trial; others were held in the public prisons, and, since there were not enough of these, under guard in private houses also (29.2.13f.). The detail, mentioned by Ammianus, that Theodorus was escorted to Antioch dressed in black (‘atratus’) is confirmed by Rabbinic and other sources, which tell how those awaiting trial dressed as if in mourning (not the best way, one would think, to preserve presumptions of innocence).13 In the meantime, a place for the trials has been chosen and judges appointed. In the cases of divination under Constantius, Scythopolis in Palestine was chosen as equidistant between Antioch and Alexandria, from which cities came a large proportion of the accused (19.12.8). Ammianus’ acquaintance with the trials conducted at Antioch under Gallus Caesar came about because his superior officer, the magister militum Ursicinus, was

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Chapter 14 summoned from Nisibis to preside over them – a role which, given the way in which they developed, Ammianus found more than faintly embarrassing. He found a way out of the problem by contrasting the plain, honest character of Ursicinus with the malicious subtleties of the colleagues with whom he was reluctantly associated, ‘forensibus iurgiis longe discretus’ (14.9.1). When the investigators’ report has been made and the emperor’s ruling has been given, the proceedings proper can begin. The judges, as in the case of Theodorus, declare the law under which they are being held (‘praescripta ostentantibus legum’, 29.1.27), and the hearings proceed to the examination of witnesses. Evidence is taken, relevant exhibits, such as, in this case, the actual tripod used in the séance attended by the accused, may be produced and discrepancies are resolved, if necessary with the help of torture (29.1.28). At this point Ammianus gives as a verbatim speech the statement of one defendant to the judges, ending with the claim, refuted in the outcome by the production of a letter, that Theodorus himself was unaware of the séance inquiring into his future. When Theodorus himself was brought into the courtroom and allowed to speak he began his defence with a prostrate plea for mercy, but was told by the judges to address himself to the point at issue (29.1.33f.). We should not delude ourselves as to the nature of what was going on. In such cases as I am describing, the application of torture, to which I shall return in a moment, might be very severe. Ammianus writes of the fear of onlookers that one Proculus, submitted to torture after the suppression of the usurper Silvanus, would expire on the rack, such was the violence to which his slender frame was subjected (15.6.1–3). Witnesses may, as often in Ammianus, have to be released and carried away from the instruments, apparently on the point of death, but the sources are clear that torture is not itself a legal penalty but strictly a technique for the gathering and testing of evidence.14 The determination of the punishment to be applied is a different process, not made until the end of the proceedings, when the emperor is again consulted and imposes the penalty by means of a formal declaration, or elogium (29.1.38). In the cases of magic arts and maiestas, the penalty may, for those of higher status, be death or exile, in either case with the confiscation of property. In other cases, burning at the stake is a common penalty, which Ammianus sometimes refers to without any obvious revulsion at the horror of this mode of death; where more emotive descriptions are given, it may illustrate the moral fortitude of the victims (cf. 29.1.39), but otherwise causes no particular comment, no doubt because only members of the lower orders were involved.15 The other mode of these ‘aggravated forms of the death penalty’,16 throwing to the

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Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers beasts, is only on one occasion mentioned as a judicial penalty by Ammianus, and that apparently as a special case.17 This may be partly because of the nature of the proceedings described by him; other sources do mention the penalty from time to time, as in Libanius’ reference to executions at Antioch ‘by the sword, fire and the jaws of wild beasts’.18 It is possible, however, that these references are rhetorical rather than circumstantial in character, and that historians are right in concluding that this penalty was passing out of use.19 A disquieting facet of Roman legal proceedings, and an obvious feature of the trials described by Ammianus, is the use of torture to extract and test information.20 In the section De Quaestionibus of the Digest (48.18) are recorded many provisions relating to the circumstances in which judicial torture may and may not be applied. Many of the provisions, which need not concern us here, concern the liability or non-liability of slaves to torture in cases involving their masters. There is no clear evidence for the main historical period covered by the Digest, the first and second centuries, that free men were then liable to be tortured in order to extract information. Evidence to this effect does however begin to appear from the Severan period, and it seems likely in general that on this matter, as P. A. Brunt puts it in discussing this subject, the Constitutio Antoniniana of Caracalla levelled down rather than up, extending to a much enlarged class of Roman citizens disabilities, such as the liability to be tortured, from which they had previously been exempt.21 This liability was established beyond question by the time of Diocletian, whose ruling is preserved in the Codex Justinianus (9.41.8.2), and, as indicated earlier, it is firmly established by Arcadius Charisius that in cases of maiestas no-one was exempt (Dig. 48.18.10.1). The torture of free witnesses, as described by Ammianus, certainly fell within the scope of late Roman law; the only point of distinction relevant to his narrative, as is recognised in general and on at least two specific occasions, is the torture of members of the senatorial classes (cf. 19.12.9, 17; 28.1.11, 25). This line of enquiry could be pursued, but my present interest in the Digest is of a different order. In discussing torture, the writers of the texts chosen for citation address themselves not only to the status of witnesses in courts of law, but to general questions of procedure, to the effects of torture on the reliability of the evidence acquired, and to other aspects of what one might call the ‘psychology’ of torture. The interest of these texts transcends the question of the status of the witnesses who happened to be involved, and I propose to survey them in order to suggest a general formulation of the practice of torture that may help to illuminate

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Chapter 14 Ammianus’ narratives. I am aware of the dangers in this approach. There is the risk of interpolation in the texts, it is not always easy to disentangle questions of procedure from the questions of status that were involved, and the texts compiled by the Classical jurists may have related to a wide variety of contexts and situations, in both the civil and the criminal law. Nevertheless, it was precisely the achievement of the jurists to have constructed the law, ius, from the pronouncements of emperors, leges, in the form in which it was transmitted to lawyers of later period. I am further encouraged by the fact that many of the texts come from the De Officio Proconsulis of Ulpian and the Sentences of Paul, texts that are likely to have been known to fourth-century lawyers, and from the early fourth-century jurist Arcadius Charisius.22 If the texts can be used in this way, a set of principles emerges, something like this: The use of torture to help in the eliciting of the truth in courts of law is accepted as normal practice; the questions to be posed relate to the context and extent to which, and especially the social categories to whom, it may be applied (48.18.1pr., Ulpian). Torture must not be used unnecessarily, nor be too severe (48.18.10.3, Charisius); a case must not begin with its use, nor must it be trusted in isolation, but only when a case is near proof and only seems to lack this final confirmation (48.18.1 pr. & 1, Ulpian; cf. CJust 9.41.8). ‘A case must not be resolved by the interrogation of a single slave’, wrote the divi fratres Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, ‘but by the examination of the arguments’ (48.18.1.4) – obviously a principle of more general application, irrespective of the victim’s status. Torture is not a punishment and must not result in the death of its victim (48.18.7), though, as Ulpian also allows in a different context, many (‘plerique’) in fact die under torture (48.19.8.3, cf. 48.18.6). It must not readily (‘facile’) be used when the accused is ‘not hard-pressed’ by any proofs, and it must not be applied to one who is merely a witness of the happenings being enquired into; the person subjected to torture has in some way to be involved in these happenings (48.18.18.2f., Paul). It is not for the accuser simply to demand that torture be applied, nor to determine its level of severity (48.18.10.3, Charisius); and his case must not rely entirely on information provided under torture, but must be supported by arguments (e.g. 48.18.1.17, Ulpian; 48.18.18.2, Paul; cf. CJust 9.41.8); and torture should not be applied to one whose evidence is uncontroversial and consistent (48.18.15 pr., Callistratus).23 A confession does not in itself establish guilt, but the conscience (‘religio’) of a judge must be convinced by proof (‘probatio’) (48.18.1.17, Ulpian). In proceeding with the case, the judge should begin by questioning those to whom attaches the greatest suspicion, from whom he may most readily hope to find out the truth (48.18.1.2,

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Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers Ulpian), and in a case where there were many defendants on the same charge, with the most fearful and youngest witnesses (48.18.18 pr., Paul). The intended effect of this would have been to get to the truth as early as possible in the proceedings, with the corollary, which may or may not have been intended, that those more likely to resist the incitements of torture were less likely to be exposed to it. Persons under fourteen years are exempt from interrogation under torture – not that their evidence without it should necessarily be believed, since their tender age, which exempted them from the torments, also makes them less reliable in any case (48.18.15.1, Callistratus; 48.18.10, Charisius). Interrogation and condemnation may take place de plano as well as before the tribunal (48.18.18.10, Paul); that is to say, a judge might proceed by summary cognitio if the guilt of a tortured person who did not qualify for a more formal hearing was clearly established. The texts also address an extremely interesting, and to some ancient, as well as modern, eyes a very difficult question, that of the intrinsic reliability of evidence produced under the threat or actuality of physical pain. Augustine reflected, in a typically restless discussion, on the anxieties of a judge who could never be sure whether confessions of guilt he had secured by torture were true or had been extracted from men who had chosen ‘to escape this life rather than endure those torments any longer’ and so pleaded guilty to crimes they had not committed,24 and in an equally revealing passage Ulpian commented that all men are not equally able to sustain physical pain; some steel themselves, despise the torments and resist all attempts to make them speak, others yield to fear and will utter any lies, falsely incriminating themselves and others, rather than suffer pain. For such reasons, evidence given under torture was ‘insecure, hazardous, and potentially deceptive’; ‘res...fragilis et periculosa et quae veritatem fallat’ (48.18.1.23).25 In some circumstances, a witness may be recalled to further torture, especially when he has hardened (‘duraverit’) his mind and body against pain; the situation envisaged here is one in which further evidence has accrued which has thrown doubt upon a witness’s earlier denials under torture (48.18.18.1, Paul, cf. 48.18.17, Modestinus). Further, it was well known that some men were inclined to accuse their enemies, and to confess to crime ‘through fear and other motives’ (48.18.1.27, Ulpian). In the case of the evidence against robbers elicited by torture from their accomplices, one had to reckon with the possibility that they had denounced others in order to forestall their own denunciation by them (ibid. 26). How should the judge pick his way to the truth through these hazards? Part of the answer is that statements made under torture are not the only basis upon which the judgment should be made. The judge will listen to all

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Chapter 14 the evidence and relate it to the particular statements at issue. He will not form a conclusion until all the material has been heard (‘causa cognita’; 48.18.1.25, Ulpian); and he will have observed the behaviour of the witness under torture in order to assess whether his evidence is reliable or not. The general principle that in ‘shaking out the truth’ from a witness a judge would have regard to his manner of speech, his degree of confidence or nervousness, as well as his reputation in his city (48.18.10.5, Charisius), was not one to throw aside just because the witness was undergoing torture; in fact it was particularly relevant, behaviour under torture being nothing if not a test of character. It is of course a corollary of this observation that the torture will have been carried out in view of the court, or at least of the judges (sometimes it was in public in the forum of a city), so that the behaviour of the witness under torture is open to observation; whether he has been overcome by fear, whether his resistance is resolute and honest, or contumacious and malicious. This ‘public’ character of evidence given under torture is relevant to several of the cases described by Ammianus, and conforms to many references in Classical and Rabbinic sources, in which victims are seen suffering torture before the eyes of the judge and watching public.26 In such circumstances it is difficult to conclude (and cannot have been clear to the victim) that torture was not being used as a mode of punishment. Many of these situations are relevant to cases described by Ammianus. He shows defendants bearing with fortitude the torments imposed, refusing to incriminate themselves or alleged accomplices; so the frail Proculus after the rebellion of Silvanus, who onlookers feared would die on the rack in the manner indicated (as illegal) by Ulpian; the rhetorician Eusebius in the trials conducted at Antioch under Gallus Caesar (14.9.5), the philosopher Pasiphilus in the trials held, again at Antioch, under Valens (29.1.36). The behaviour under interrogation of Simonides, whose torture is implied rather than stated by Ammianus, was interpreted as contumacious rather than resolute, and, although he had incriminated noone, he was burned alive (ibid. 37f.). Another philosopher, Demetrius, tortured before the judges at the trials held under Constantius at Scythopolis, gave no evidence against himself and was acquitted (19.12.12). In the trials held at Antioch under Valens, on the other hand, one witness blurted out to the court the names of many people; too many, Ammianus claims, for the judges to consider (29.1.25). They saved themselves the trouble by putting him to death at once – a case, presumably, of condemnation de plano rather than before the tribunal, in the manner countenanced by the Digest (48.18.18.10). A philosopher, ‘in name alone, as would appear’, who was tortured in the trials held under Gallus Caesar,

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Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers in ignorance of his rights and the law confessed to complicity in crimes of which he knew nothing (14.9.5) – exactly the situation imagined by Augustine, and posed in the Digest as one in which it was for the judge to decide from the whole context the validity of the evidence gained (48.18.1.23, 25). A witness in the trial of Theodorus, Salia, collapsed and died while putting on his shoes to be escorted from prison to the courtroom, in sheer terror of what awaited him (29.1.25). In the same trial, two of the accused produced variant stories, which were reconciled by the application of torture, and by the production in the court of the tripod with which the offending séance had been conducted. Ammianus places the two processes as adjacent and parallel phrases in his text (‘fodicatis lateribus, inlato tripede’, 29.1.28), with brutal appositeness satisfying the requirement in the Digest that the accuser should not expect the court to rely on torture alone, but should produce arguments and evidence. It was a similar combination of the torture of an accomplice and the production of an incriminating letter written by Theodorus, that destroyed the latter’s defence; in this case the witness held to his story, and it was the evidence of the letter that refuted Theodorus’ claim that he had tried to inform the emperor of what was going on but had been prevented (29.1.34f.). It was after Theodorus’ interrogation that the judges submitted to the emperor their report on the hearings, to which Valens responded by an elogium condemning all the defendants (29.1.38). It will be obvious that this is no more than a sketch of an important and substantial subject. Much more needs to be done, especially on the juristic aspects of the questions I have posed, and on technical issues such as the character of the texts from the Digest that I have used. It is reassuring to have been able to begin on the sure ground of Ammianus’ rhetoric, but I would not have been content to leave the subject like this. Like the Augustine of the Confessions, with whom he shares more than one might think, Ammianus lived in and described the real world, and his accounts of it are full of precisely observed detail, which often occur just when the rhetoric is most intense. This is so, in my opinion, whether one thinks of warfare, social life at Rome or the nomadism of the Huns, all topics on which it is only too easy to overstate the importance of the rhetorical in relation to the circumstantial aspects of Ammianus’ narrative method.

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Chapter 14 Notes 1 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, pp. 250–2. 2 Lynn Thorndike, ‘A Roman astrologer as a historical source: Julius Firmicus Maternus’, Classical Philology 8 (1913), pp. 415–35, at 428: cited in part by Ramsay MacMullen, ‘Social history in astrology’, Ancient Society 2 (1971), pp. 105–116, at 112 n. 53; D. Grodzynski, ‘Tortures mortelles et catégories sociales: les Summa Supplicia dans le droit romain au IIIe et IVe siècles’, in Du Châtiment dans la cité; supplices corporels et peine de mort dans le monde antique (Coll. de l’Ecole française de Rome, 79: 1984), pp. 361–403, at 398–403; ‘Sur la justice, Firmicus est abondant’, etc. (p. 399). 3 Thorndike, p. 422. 4 Codex Theodosianus, Gesta Senatus §4 (ed. Mommsen, p. 2) = 1.1.5 (Mommsen, p. 28f.); see Tony Honoré, ‘The making of the Theodosian Code’, ZSS 103 (1986), at pp. 161–8, and my Laying Down the Law, pp. 57–71. 5 On the difficult question of ‘generalitas’, compare CTh 1.1.5 (of 429), ‘cunctas constitutiones...edictorum viribus aut sacra generalitate subnixas’, with 1.1.6 (of 435), ‘omnes edictales generalesque constitutiones’; Laying Down the Law, pp. 67–70. The rescript system in both its technical and its human dimensions is now to be the subject of a sympathetic and imaginative treatment by Serena Connolly, Lives behind the Laws: The world of the Codex Hermogenianus (2010). 6 A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens: Procedure (1971), pp. 161–2. If Ammianus were referring to the Classical institution, it is odd that he should have also thought of it as an ‘Oriental’ (i.e. east Roman) practice. 7 MacMullen (above, n. 2), p. 112. 8 The Roman Empire of Ammianus, p. 252. 9 What follows is composite and impressionistic, but based on actual passages of Ammianus. Only specific points are documented. 10 E.g. the notorious Paulus ‘Catena’; 14.5.6ff.; 15.3.4, 6.1; 19.12.1f., 7; cf. PLRE I, pp. 683–4 (Paulus 4). 11 Handcuffs or manacles seem to represent a higher grade of dishonour than mere ‘vincula’; ‘vinculis membra ingenuorum affligens et quosdam obterens manicis’ (14.5.6; Paulus ‘Catena’ in Britain). 12 28.1.25; Valentinian was corrected on the point of law by his quaestor Eupraxius, cf. Jill Harries, ‘The Roman Imperial quaestor from Constantine to Theodosius II’, JRS 78 (1988), pp. 148–70, at 158; Eupraxius was ‘the first quaestor to be attested as advising on matters legal’. 13 ‘Ordinarily, a man expecting trial dresses in black, covers himself in black and lets his beard grow, for he does not know how his trial will end’; S. Lieberman, ‘Roman legal institutions in early Rabbinics and in the Acta Martyrum’, Jewish Quarterly Review 35 (1944–5), pp. 1–57, at 11, citing esp. Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht, p. 391 & n. 2. 14 Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (1970), pp. 122f., 213–6. Among the many non-juristic texts, Tertullian, Apology 2.10–15 is particularly detailed and explicit, cf. 15, contrasting tyrannical and legitimate practice; ‘apud tyrannos enim tormenta etiam pro poena adhibebantur: apud vos soli quaestioni temperantur’. 15 E.g. 29.1.44, ‘Diogene quodam et vili et solo’. For other cases, cf. 14.7.17; 21.12.20; 22.3.11; 27.7.5; 28.1.28, 29; 28.6.3.

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Ammianus on Roman law and lawyers 16

Garnsey, p. 124, etc. At 14.2.1 Ammianus describes a throwing to the beasts as ‘praeter morem’ (in the eyes of the victims’ associates), but does not say whether it was the penalty itself, or the circumstances, that were claimed to be unusual. The victims were alleged Isaurian bandits, on whose rights see CTh 9.35.7, of 408; God would have no objection to their being tortured during Lent, or even on Easter Day, if the welfare of society was thereby defended. 18 Libanius, Or. 19.37. It is not clear either that the two instances in Firmicus Maternus (3.4.20; 8.17.2) provide circumstantial evidence for the fourth century; J.-P. Callu (next n.), p. 340 n. 114. 19 See on the penalty U. Brasiello, La Repressione penale in diritto romano (1937), pp. 260–6; Garnsey, pp. 129–31. C Th 9.40.8, of 365, prohibits the sending of Christians to the gladiatorial ludus, while 9.40.11, of 367, rules likewise for any member of the imperial administration (‘de numinis nostri sacrario’). This penalty is not quite the same as plain damnatio ad bestias but there might be a connection (cf. CTh 9.18.1). Many examples are found in the Sententiae of Paul (late third century) and in the writings of Eusebius (early fourth century), cf. MacMullen (cited below), pp. 154 & n. 26, 156 & n. 30, but CTh 9.18.1, of 315, provides the only explicit reference to the penalty ad bestias to survive in the Theodosian Code. If it was passing out of use, it was not because of any abatement in the severity of late Roman penalties, cf. J.-P. Callu, ‘Le jardin des supplices au Bas-Empire’, in Du Châtiment dans la cité, pp. 313–359 and D. Grodzynski in the same volume (n. 2 above), pp. 361–403 (Callu p. 340 & n. 114, and Grodzynski p. 370, on the disappearance of damnatio ad bestias); Ramsay MacMullen, ‘Judicial savagery in the Roman Empire’, Chiron 16 (1986), pp. 147–166. The penalty falls under a different rubric from the exposure as gladiators of Saxon or Sarmatian prisoners of war, as in Symmachus, Ep. 2.46; Relatio 47 (‘ad laetitiam plebis Martiae’). The discussion of the latter passage by Domenico Vera, Commento Storico alle Relationes di Quinto Aurelio Simmaco (1981), at pp. 339–40, surveys the evidence for gladiatorial games in the fourth century, but does not address the issue in juridical terms. 20 Handbooks of Roman law tend to be reticent on this aspect of procedure; but cf. Garnsey, pp. 141–7; 213–6. 21 P. A. Brunt, ‘Evidence given under torture in the Principate’, ZSS 97 (1980), Rom. Abt., pp. 256–65, at 260. 22 PLRE I, pp. 200–1 (Charisius 2). 23 Brunt, pp. 264–5, discusses this text. It preserves a limitation on the torture of free men whose evidence is consistent (‘ex libero homine pro testimonio non vacillante quaestionem haberi non oportet’), but it may be that the principle has no relevance for the fourth century. 24 De Civitate Dei 19.6. Something of the complexity of Augustine’s thought on this subject is conveyed by the brief remarks in the absorbing book by Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (1989), at pp. 218–20. 25 Ulpian might almost be citing the discussion of Aristotle, in Rhetoric 1376b–1377a (concluding, in a possibly interpolated passage, that ‘no trust can be placed in evidence under torture’) as against the complacent remarks of Isaeus, Or. 8.12, ‘for you are aware that of those who have given witness in the past, many have seemed not to tell the truth, but of those who have given witness under torture none have ever been 17

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Chapter 14 found to have told untruths because of the tortures’(!), closely echoed by Demosthenes (30.37); cf. A. R. W. Harrison (n. 6 above), pp. 147–50. For sentiments similar to Aristotle’s, cf. Cicero, Pro Sulla 28(78); ‘in tot rerum angustiis nihil veritati loci reliquatur’. On this subject, philosophical rigour often falls victim to the rhetorical need, and to the societal fears, of the moment. 26 Cf. for instance Cyprian, Ep. 10.2.2 on the ‘throng of bystanders’ watching the torture of Christians (on which see esp. the discussion of Tertullian in the passage cited above at n. 14), and the forum scene of the interrogation under torture and execution of a bandit envisaged in a school text published by A. C. Dionisotti, ‘From Ausonius’ schooldays? A schoolbook and its relations’, JRS 72 (1982), pp. 83–125, at 104–5 (text translated by MacMullen, n. 19 above, pp. 155f.). Lieberman (n. 13 above), at pp. 15–19, gives examples from Rabbinic sources.

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15 ROMAN LAW AND BARBARIAN IDENTITY IN THE LATE ROMAN WEST When we look at the multiplicity of nation-states that have over the centuries occupied the territory of the Roman empire, and think how these nation-states have treated each other and the people living in them, it is not just sentimental to find one of the most appealing features of the Roman empire in its multi-ethnicity. By this I mean that racial and regional origins, while not forgotten (Lucian knew perfectly well that he was a Syrian from the region once known as Commagene, Augustine that he was an African from Numidia), were linked to a wider identity by an ‘international’ culture of choice. And by this I mean, not just a literary culture, but the whole array of social, economic and intellectual instruments that controlled the resources of Roman society. One of the greatest of these instruments – far greater than literary culture if we consider the numbers who were affected by it – was Roman law. In general, Roman historians are aware of this, late Roman historians more aware than most. They have watched an external world impinging upon the Roman and burrowing into it, as the barbarians extracted what they could by pillage and threat, bargain and blackmail, as eager to buy into the system as to destroy it, modifying their aggressions by a natural reluctance to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. In what we now call the ‘post-Roman’ period, Roman law was a defining feature in the new societies that emerged. The theme of this chapter is defined by two points of reference just under a century apart. The first is the marriage in 414 of the Visigothic king Athaulf to Theodosius’ daughter Galla Placidia; the second is the publication in 506 of the Breviarium of Alaric, a digest of Roman law incorporating selections, relevant for the contemporary period, of the Theodosian Code and other legal texts. Athaulf’s attitude to Roman law is known to us from a well-worn story, but one still worth repeating. It is recorded by Orosius, who heard it from a vir inlustris of Narbonne, whom he does not name but says he had met while visiting Jerome at Bethlehem; this was in the course of the journey that took Orosius from his native Spain via north Africa to the Holy Land,

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Chapter 15 where he attended the council held at Diospolis (Lydda) in 415.1 The Narbonensian had ‘often’ heard Athaulf say that his first intention had been to obliterate the Roman and replace it by a Gothic empire; ‘Romania’ would become ‘Gothia’. However, realising that the Goths were unable to live under law and so would never be able to form a state, he had devised an alternative policy, to defend the Roman name by Gothic arms. Athaulf had been much helped in this excellent design by the good advice of his wife, Galla Placidia. Orosius’ story has been used more than once as the opening move in discussions of the barbarian occupation of Gaul; notably by Michael Wallace-Hadrill, in his famous paper ‘Gothia and Romania’, first published in 1961 and reprinted the following year in his collection, The Long-Haired Kings.2 It performs this move very well, but something can yet be added if its precise circumstances are understood. My identification of the vir inlustris, who had held his high office under Theodosius, has not attracted much interest; 3 this is too bad, but there is no excuse for ignoring the fact of his origin. It takes us straight to the city where only a year earlier, on 1 January 414, Athaulf had married Galla Placidia. The wedding was held in the house of a leading Narbonensian, and wedding-songs were performed by Priscus Attalus, a Roman senator whom both Athaulf and his predecessor Alaric had supported for brief terms as emperor, and by two other local citizens. As the historian Olympiodorus wrote, ‘barbarians and the Romans among them enjoyed themselves together’. Galla Placidia dressed ‘in Roman fashion’, while Athaulf wore ‘a Roman general’s cloak and other Roman clothing’ and ‘fifty handsome young men, dressed in silk clothes, each [bore] aloft two very large dishes, one full of gold, the other full of priceless stones’ and presented them to the bride. Olympiodorus claimed, though I cannot imagine anyone so tactless as to have said this on the day, that these riches came from Alaric’s sack of Rome.4 We can enjoy the ironies in the occasion, as ‘the daughter of the king of the south’ fulfilled a prophecy of Daniel by marrying the king of the north, in the city that had been the first Roman colony in Gaul.5 This is just a piquant reflection; a real and nastier irony is that, little more than a year after his marriage, Athaulf, bearing out his first rather than his second thoughts on the subject, was murdered in satisfaction of a Gothic feud, while inspecting his horses in the royal stables. For the moment, however, everyone seems resolved to enjoy a thoroughly Roman occasion. Wallace-Hadrill began his paper of 1961 by describing Athaulf’s remark about Gothia and Romania as a ‘curious jest’ uttered in his ‘more relaxed moments’; others think that it is just rhetoric. These views do less than justice to the situation, and to Orosius’ informant. A Theodosian vir inlustris

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Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West from Narbonne is no casual bystander but a political heavyweight connected with the imperial dynasty (he may even have seen Placidia as a little girl at Constantinople, back in the 390’s). He was surely part of the planning of the occasion. Nor, to me at least, do Athaulf’s remarks have much of the ‘curious jest’ about them, in fact they seem rather serious. It is an attractive notion that they formed part of an oration delivered by him on the occasion of the wedding. I admit to saying this without knowing whether Roman bridegrooms delivered speeches at wedding receptions, but in any case, it was not the only occasion on which he uttered them; the Narbonensian vir inlustris encountered by Orosius had ‘often’ heard him do so. They would bear repetition, and there must have been many a social occasion for which they were appropriate. None the less for being rhetorical, they were part of a plan. Expressed to the upper class of Narbonne assembled in their own city, they were part of a programme set out by the king, and they mean that law – Roman law – was from the beginning a conscious element in the construction of relations between Romans and Goths. The programme of Roman law-making under Gothic protection envisaged by Athaulf was fulfilled by the Breviarium of Alaric, published in 506, just before the downfall of his kingdom to the Franks. The enterprise more than satisfied Athaulf’s expectations as he expressed them in 414, and I shall return to it. It would perhaps have been more surprising to Athaulf to know that law-making in the fifth century would not be a Roman monopoly. For a further element, taken by Athaulf to be what distinguished Romans from barbarians, came to form common ground between them; the idea of law as a written text enshrined in a book.6 For Isidore of Seville, the turning-point was under king Euric II (466–485), under whom the Goths ‘first acquired the institutes of law in writing; previously, they were held only by tradition and custom’.7 Isidore was referring to the so-called ‘Code of Euric’, of which part survives in a palimpsest manuscript in Paris, later used for works of Jerome and Gennadius of Marseilles. Its period of life coincides with that of the Visigothic regime in Gaul; after that regime had fallen and the Code passed out of use, the obsolete manuscript could be reused.8 The surviving text of the Code of Euric contains in imperfect condition the last 61 of 336 numbered clauses; they are on boundaries, gifts and sales, trusts and inheritances. In three passages of what survives the Code refers back to legislation of Euric’s father Theoderic I (417–451). The first two references occur in the same clause. Euric here mentions a law of his ‘father of blessed memory’, in which he had maintained the ‘ancient boundaries’, presumably those recognised in the first settlement of the

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Chapter 15 Goths on Roman lands. Euric then declares invalid any claims at law of more than thirty years’ standing, and gives the same protection to any suits decided by his father:9 Sortes Gothicas et tertias Romanorum, quae intra L annos non fuerint revocatae, nullo modo repetantur. Similiter de fugitivis, qui intra L annis inventi non fuerint, non liceat eos ad servitium revocare. Antiquos vero terminos sic stare iubemus, sicut et bonae memoriae pater noster in alia lege praecepit, et alias omnes causas, seu bonas seu malas, quae intra XXX annis definitae non fuerint, vel mancipia, quae in contemptione [sc. contentione] posita fuerint, sibe debita, quae exacta non fuerint, nullo modo repetantur. Et si quis post hunc XXX annorum numerum causam movere temptaverit, iste numerus ei resistat, et libram auri cui rex iusserit coactus exsolvat. Omnes autem causas, quae in regno bonae memoriae patris nostri seu bonae seu malae actae sunt, non permittimus penitus conmoveri. (Petitions for) Gothic allotments and Roman ‘thirds’ (tertiae) that have not been made within 50 years are in no circumstances to be renewed. Similarly, in the case of fugitive slaves who have not been found within 50 years, it is not allowed to recall them to service as slaves. We further order that the ancient boundaries are so to stand, as our father of good memory prescribed in another law, and all other cases, whether meritorious or otherwise, which have not been concluded within 30 years, whether they concern slaves subject to dispute or debts that have not been exacted, are in no circumstances to be reclaimed. If anyone after this period of 30 years shall attempt to renew a case, let that limit of time be against him and let him pay a pound of gold to whomsoever the king may order. Further, all cases, whether meritorious or otherwise, which were conducted in the reign of our father of good memory, we utterly forbid to be renewed. (Code of Euric, §277)

In a later, fragmentary clause under the title De donationibus, Euric confirms measures taken or gifts made by his father and apparently other predecessors, on the grounds that their decisions should not be overturned: [...] de rebus, quae principum donatione in eos conferentur vel collatae [...]ve sunt, hoc observandum esse volumus, quod gloriosae memoriae patris nostri vel decessorum nostrorum regum constituit mansuetudo; quia iniquum esset decessorum statuta convellere. [...] about things, which were conferred upon them by gift of the emperors (?) or have been bestowed or [...], we wish to be observed what the kindness of our father of glorious memory and our predecessors among the kings has determined; for it is unjust to uproot the decisions of our predecessors. (Ibid. §305)

These clauses attest previous lawmaking on the part of Gothic kings. They also, as in the thirty-year statute of limitations, concede the force of Roman

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Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West legal practice. It is however Gothic as much as Roman interests that are envisaged, as they are in a further clause concerning transfers from Romans to Goths of property that is the subject of legal proceedings. It is not clear what is the nature of the proceedings in question, nor who is the iudex whose executio – more Roman language – is to resolve the disputed possession. Perhaps smart Romans were making over to Goths property in dispute, leaving it to their beneficiaries to make good their claim to ownership: Romanus, qui Gotho donaverit rem, quae fuerat iudicio repetenda, aut tradiderit occupandam, priusquam adversarium iudicio superavit, si etiam eam Gothus invaserit, tum possessor rem suam per executionem iudicis, quae occupata fuerint, statim recipiat, nec de eius postmodum repetitione pulsetur, etiam si bona sit causa repetentis; sed Romanus Gotho eiusdem meriti rem aut pretium repensare cogetur, quia rem, antequam vindicaret, fecit invadi. A Roman, who gave to a Goth a piece of property which was subject to a claim at law, or gave it into his possession before he had overcome his adversary in the lawsuit, if the Goth had actually taken possession of it, then the owner must immediately receive back his property so occupied, by execution of the judge. He may not subsequently be dispossessed by a renewal of the claim, even if the party making the claim has a good case; but the Roman must give to the Goth a piece of property of equal value or pay him its price, because he allowed his property to be possessed before he had established ownership. (Ibid. 312)

Apart from these references in the Code of Euric, nothing significant is known of the legal administration, if it deserves this description, of Theoderic I. Much the same is true of his successor Theoderic II (453–466). It was of this that Sidonius Apollinaris wrote, denouncing his fellow aristocrat, Seronatus, as a collaborator. Seronatus, said Sidonius in this highly tendentious letter, ‘trod underfoot the laws of Theodosius, putting forward those of Theoderic’; ‘leges Theodosianas calcens, Theudericanasque proponens’. The reference to the Theodosian Code is obvious, but it is doubtful whether the second part of Sidonius’ flourish can be pressed to yield a legislative programmme on the part of Theoderic. It presses Sidonius too far to suppose, with Wallace-Hadrill, that Theoderic issued leges (like a Roman emperor) rather than edicta (like a barbarian king); while as Jill Harries observed, Sidonius’ words demonstrate their author’s love of assonance as much as the existence of a ‘Code of Theoderic’.10 And not only assonance; his words contrast the physical trampling underfoot of Theodosius’ discarded laws (think of them as lying on the ground like so many libelli famosi ) with the ‘posting up’ of those of Theoderic, just as Roman laws were promulgated by being displayed in

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Chapter 15 public places. Sidonius can hardly mean to tell us all this in his carefully turned phrases; yet, that he can write at all of ‘laws of Theoderic’ suggests a concept of ‘Gothic law’ beyond anything imagined by Athaulf in 414. What would not have surprised Athaulf is the Roman contribution to ‘Gothic law’. Fittingly when we recall the location of Athaulf’s marriage, the main contributor known to us was Leo, who is mentioned in a poem of Sidonius as one of a group of educated Roman aristocrats from Narbonne, and is further described in two letters. In one, Leo is counsellor of the ‘most powerful king’; he knows about foreign affairs, treaties, wars, ‘places, distances, and the worth of individuals’, about embassies, and so on. In the other letter we are told that Leo writes ‘declamations’ as the royal mouthpiece, by which the king terrifies his enemies and makes treaties with the ‘barbarians (!) on the banks of the Waal’; and his intervention had secured Sidonius’ release from the fortress of Liviana. As for king Euric, ‘as he restrained peoples by arms, so now throughout the bounds of his increased dominion, he restrains arms by statutes’.11 Sidonius is not easy to use as historical evidence. On the one hand, there is the risk of over-literal interpretation of what he intends metaphorically; on the other hand, his metaphorical language is precise if one can find the key to it. It is safe to assume that Leo was a counsellor to Euric in domestic and external affairs, that he drafted his pronouncements, including some to foreign enemies, that he was cultivated, that he interceded for Sidonius. It is taking Sidonius too literally to suggest that Leo ‘had some acquaintance with the Law of the Twelve Tables’, Sidonius is clearly declaring his friend to be a man with a knowledge of Roman law. On the assumption that Sidonius means something particular, it is irresistible to link him with the compilation of the Code of Euric.12 There is no need to be startled by the presence of such a man at the Visigothic court. If we knew more about Leo, above all if we possessed some of his writings, we might regard him as one of the most important men of his age, a sort of Gallic Cassiodorus. So too, in a different region of barbarian occupation, we find Sidonius’ correspondent Syagrius, who had learned Burgundian and was ‘a new Solon of the Burgundians in expounding the laws’. If we take Sidonius’ language to be as specific, in its encoded way, as it was in the case of Leo, we may connect Syagrius with a similar process of legal definition and consultation, resulting in this case in the Lex Romana Burgundionum in which the Theodosian Code is regularly cited.13 Mention of the Theodosian Code brings us to the Breviarium of Alaric, otherwise known as Lex Romana Visigothorum, of the year 506.

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Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West The Breviarium is a digest of Roman laws and legal opinion selected from the Gregorian, Hermogenian and Theodosian Codes, and from the most authoritative Classical jurists.14 It thus incorporates Theodosius’ unfulfilled aim to combine juristic writings with the constitutions of emperors, and shares the aims of the Theodosian Code in two other ways; in its promise to banish the obscurity of the law, and in its provision that henceforth no text other than those included in the Breviarium shall be valid in the courts. The symbolic importance of the Theodosian Code to secular and ecclesiastical men of power in the fifth century is obvious. For the former, Roman law was inherent in their claims to a tradition of Romanitas, while the latter would have an interest in the law as supporting the Catholic church and the rights of its clergy. A different set of issues comes into play in considering the Code as a text intended for use. Its stated purpose was to collect for scholars all constitutions of general application issued since the time of Constantine, whether or not they were currently valid.15 But this was not the limit of Theodosius’ ambitions. He planned a further project in which only those constitutions currently in force would be included, and the opinions of jurists as well as constitutions preserved in the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes would be added, to produce a compendium of valid law as it then stood; this would be a true ‘guide to life’, magisterium vitae. Until this happened, and it never did, the Theodosian Code would be inadequate – in one way too incomplete, in another too comprehensive, containing much superseded material – to serve as a handbook for ordinary use. The preparation of the Breviarium was the opportunity for a work of critical selection, that had never been performed on the Theodosian Code itself. In this sense, the Breviarium was a work of inherently Roman jurisprudence – so much so, that it is now the main source for the reconstruction of the first five books of the Theodosian Code, where the manuscripts are deficient. As for the compilers of the Breviarium of Alaric – who they were, what was their intellectual character, to what tradition of legal culture they belonged – these questions are addressed by the commonitorium, or letter of instruction addressed to the comes Timotheus, in which Alaric endorsed the project and laid down its authority.16 The work, it is explained, was conceived in consultation with ‘priests and noble men’, further described as those ‘reverend priests and chosen provincials’ whose ‘assent’ confirmed the completed work. The language is that of a formal consilium after the Roman pattern, of advice summoned to help the king and deepen the foundation of his authority. The commonitorium does not say that these were the men who did the actual work on the Breviarium. This was (had been) performed by ‘prudentes’, men knowledgeable in the law and in legal

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Chapter 15 literature. In its final sentences, the commonitorium refers to the ‘forum’ of Timotheus, in which only this compilation was to be valid. This is helpful information. It specifies a court, or ‘forum’, of the comes, whom we may understand as the successor to the late Roman praetorian prefect; that is, it defines the use of the Breviarium in the context of an actual legal institution. It describes the formal involvement of clerical and lay advisers of the king in the conception and approval of the project; and it mentions legal experts who devoted themselves both to the selection of the laws, and to their clarification by interpretationes, or explanatory notes appended to each of the selected texts.17 It is especially notable that the interpretationes cross no boundary between Roman and Gothic law. They consist entirely of explanations of Roman law in Roman terms. There is no attempt to accommodate Roman to Gothic law, or to assimilate the two; they contain none of those passages that occur in the Lex Romana Burgundionum, to the effect that provisions absent from Roman law had been made good by the king.18 We must assume the existence of a population still concerned with the forms and procedures of Roman jurisdiction, and still with access to institutional resources by which they could be administered. We glimpse the possibilities in Alaric’s commonitorium – if it was right to see Timotheus as a successor of the late Roman praefectus praetorio, entrusted with an oversight of whatever remained of the institutional framework of the Roman empire. Other possibilities are the municipal jurisdiction that is described in the leges municipales of the Roman empire, and, of course, the episcopal jurisdiction established by fourth-century legislation.19 If there were still curiales in Gallic cities, as is claimed in a famous passage of Salvian, and if there were still municipal archives, in some places, down to the seventh century, it is reasonable to suppose that elements of municipal jurisdiction also survived.20 The commonitorium also expresses the ideological conception that framed the composition of the Breviarium. In its opening words Alaric is made to speak as the king of his ‘people’ in considering among their other interests the reform of the laws. He goes on, however, to refer to the need to clarify ambiguities only in Roman law, in order to remove the grounds for disputes among litigants. Alaric also describes his work as undertaken with the help of a ‘propitious divinity’, a phrase calculated to appeal to his Roman subjects without raising the question of the Arian faith of the Visigoths. The whole commonitorium is drafted from a Roman point of view; if the Breviarium which it describes was ever used in a court of law, one cannot imagine that any other than Romans were involved. Later commentators who supplemented it did so from the Theodosian Code, or from other

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Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West Roman legal writings; no interpretatio ever states or implies that the law needed expansion or commentary because it failed to meet the needs of Goths. For instance: not only is Valentinian’s law forbidding intermarriage between Romans and barbarians included in the Breviarium; its interpretatio extends the prohibition to barbarian wives ‘of any nation’, which is not explicit in the original law, and it repeats the capital sentence: Nullus Romanorum barbaram cuiuslibet gentis uxorem habere praesumat, neque barbarorum coniugiis mulieres Romanae in matrimonio coniungantur. Quod si fecerint, noverint se capitali sententia subiacere. No Roman shall presume to have a barbarian wife of any nation whatever, nor shall any Roman woman be united in marriage with a barbarian. If they should do this, they shall know that they are subject to a capital sentence.21

The interpretatio is no doubt evidence against extensive intermarriage of Romans and barbarians in the Gothic kingdom, but it is a startling reflection that these words were written under Gothic overlordship. The whole thing is written within a Roman framework of assumptions. The Breviarium assumes that at least some of the Roman populations in Gothic territories were accustomed to dealing with their differences in terms of Roman law. In this, it differs from its counterparts, the Lex Romana Burgundionum and the north Italian Edict of Theoderic, which were intended to deal with Roman and barbarian inhabitants of these regions in their relations with each other. In its focus on the Romans and Roman law, the Breviarium also differs from the Code of Euric, and it is still to this that we should look for an evaluation of the law of the Visigothic kingdom as it affected the needs both of its Roman and of its barbarian subjects. In considering this question, we must begin with an appreciation of Roman law as it was actually administered to the populations of the Roman empire. This was not always the law of the Classical textbooks.22 To take an example from the law of sale: in Roman law, a contract for sale is an agreement to sell, the actual cash transfer being seen as a separate legal process. In the Code of Euric, the two are conflated into a single transaction. For the legal historian Ernst Levy, the simpler principle is apt ‘for a people who had not yet arrived at a higher standard of legal analysis’ (or who had declined from one), but this is a conspicuously value-ridden judgment.23 For most transactions the simpler concept is the more practicable. Another example might relate to the resolution of disputes by the exchange of oaths. This seems quintessentially barbarian, until one reads about it in a substantial title of the Digest and realises that the procedure was common in Roman law as well. ‘Conscientious oath-taking

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Chapter 15 is relied upon as an important means of shortening litigation. Disputes are settled in this way by virtue of agreement between litigants or on the authority of a judge’, wrote Gaius On the Provincial Edict (Digest 12.2.1), and later in the same work, ‘It is a frequent practice of judges in doubtful cases to pronounce, after an oath has been exacted, in favour of the party swearing’ (Ibid. 12.2.31). Paul thought in his work of the same title that ‘The taking of an oath is a species of settlement and has greater authority than a judgment’ (12.2.2), and that ‘It is an indication of manifest wickedness and an admission, to refuse to swear or to countertender’ (12.2.38).24 ‘This is what happens when an issue is put to oath’, wrote Ulpian in his Commentary on the Edict; ‘if the defendant swears, the judge absolves him; if he countertenders, the judge will hear him and, if the plaintiff swears, will condemn the defendant; if the defendant will not swear, if he discharges the debt the judge absolves him, if he does not discharge it, the judge condemns him; if after countertender the plaintiff does not swear, the judge absolves the defendant’.25 Many of the same considerations apply to arbitration by consent, another familiar procedure in the practical jurisdiction of the Roman empire. ‘When any of you has a grievance against another’, wrote St. Paul to the Corinthians, ‘do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints? Do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church? Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to decide between one believer and another, but a believer goes to court against a believer – and before unbelievers at that?’ (I Cor. 6:1–6). In practice and at ordinary levels of society, ‘Roman law’ operates in ways not covered by the formalities of legal textbooks. There is a need for practical sense in everyday matters, which produces natural similarities between different systems of law. ‘Pigs have always trespassed, and will always trespass in pursuit of acorns. There is no more delicate problem for legislators or jurists than to adjust the equities between owners of pigs and owners of acorns. Because in different laws these problems are resolved on a similar principle, that is no evidence that one law is borrowed from the other or that both have a common origin’. This was said long ago in comment on the so-called ‘Farmer’s Law’, a set of 7th–8th century Byzantine regulations, from Roman sources, for use in agrarian communities in western Asia Minor.26 The similarities between the ‘Farmer’s Law’ and the barbarian legal codes are striking, with precise points of contact, and general resemblances that one can see just by reading through the Code of Euric followed by the Byzantine law. It would be a mistake to argue descent of one law from the other, or of either law from a specific common source. The similarities are born of similar circumstances.

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Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West The affinities between the Code of Euric and the ‘Farmer’s Law’ support the arguments of those who would emphasise the extent of ‘Roman’ influences, in their more everyday forms, upon barbarian law. Consistent with this view is the role of the Roman advisers mentioned earlier in the Visigothic and Burgundian kingdoms respectively; and, of course, the rather large fact that the barbarian law books were written in Latin. A corollary of these observations concerns the application of the Code of Euric; was it intended as a ‘personal law’ for the use of Goths alone, or was it a ‘territorial law’, for all populations, Roman or Gothic, living in the area ruled by the Gothic king? Expressing the former (also the older) view, Wallace-Hadrill described the ‘vestigial legislation’ of Euric as ‘the work of Roman jurists, steering a subtle course between Vulgar Law and Gothic custom, and intended for the use of Goths, not Romans’.27 This last phrase is very inconsequential, and it is not surprising that more recent scholarship has come to believe that the legislation was territorial in character, and was intended for everyone, irrespective of ethnic identity, living in the Gothic kingdom. How are we to imagine it working in practice? Perhaps we should look to something like the later medieval idea of ius commune in dealing with the choice-of-law jurisprudence of that period, where ‘commune’ means ‘the law common to both litigants in any given proceeding, whatever it might be’.28 In their dealings among themselves, the barbarian populations fell under the jurisdiction of their king and his officials. Romans for their part expected, and were expected, to deal with their legal affairs under Roman law. Later Burgundian law makes this expectation quite explicit; it even warns against the danger of barbarian patronage being sought by Romans in dispute with each other.29 The resulting jurisdictions for Romans would be under procedures inherited from the Roman empire, supported by episcopal audience and by other forms of arbitration; while matters affecting the landowning classes in their relations with their clients and dependants would be dealt with by traditional devices that left the courts on one side. Letters of Sidonius show him exercised in keeping juridical affairs out of the courts; fortunate or unfortunate as this may be, there is nothing un-Roman about it. However, in cases where such jurisdictions were not accepted by all parties – especially in disputes between Romans and Goths – the Code of Euric was the ius commune. Everyone had a right to it, and if it was appealed to, no-one could refuse it. As extant, the Code covers those everyday personal and commercial transactions in which Goths and Romans were likely to have a common interest. It is not the law of the king’s retainers or the German settlements,

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Chapter 15 nor that of the Roman aristocracy, nor indeed of the old Roman coloniae and municipalities for which the Breviarium of Alaric was intended. It is a simpler law of town and country – the hire of pack-horses, loans, distributions of property, boundaries, the status of slaves, succession, sales, gifts, to take examples from the extant clauses. To whatever other jurisdictions they were entitled, it is not difficult to imagine Romans, and Goths whose interests were affected in their relations with Romans, taking advantage of such a commonsense body of law. The contrast between ideology and practice is not a clear one when it comes to the role of law in a society; to live under law at all is ipso facto to claim an ideology higher than those who do not. It was with this point, as expressed by Athaulf to the upper classes of Narbonne, that we began. In the sequel, we have found much that might have surprised and would surely have pleased him. We have found a barbarian king, with the help of Roman subjects, producing, in Latin, a written Code of law for the use both of Romans and barbarians. It is the first example of an activity that provided, for centuries to come, a source of prestige and authority for barbarian kings who knew the astonishing nature of the culture on whose remains they sat. For these kings, living in Roman cities whose monuments and amenities they were entirely unable to maintain, Roman law must have been one of the most forceful portrayals of the sophistication and sheer complexity of this culture, much as the Latin language and the Catholic church were its ever-present reminders. Not surprisingly, from Athaulf on, through Euric and Gundobad to Theoderic the Ostrogoth and beyond, they sought to define themselves in terms of it.

Appendix: Orosius and the vir inlustris It was suggested in Latomus 3 (1971), pp. 1083–7 (cf. Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 73, 149, 322), that the Narbonensian vir inlustris of Theodosius encountered by Orosius while visiting Jerome at Bethlehem in 415/16 (Historia adversus Paganos 7.43.4f.) was the medical writer Marcellus, known from his professional service at the court of Valentinian (I or II), and as the author of the extant De Medicamentis, in which this service and many other interesting things are mentioned. A vir inlustris should be a praetorian prefect or the holder of one of the four great court offices or ‘comitivae’ (quaestor sacri palatii, magister officiorum, comes sacrarum largitionum, comes rei privatae), and the dedication (to his sons) of De Medicamentis indeed describes its author as a former magister officiorum of Theodosius I; ‘vir inluster ex magistro officiorum Theodosii sen(ioris)’. A law was addressed

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Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West to him in that office on 24th November 395 (CTh 16.5.29). Marcellus is one of a group of Gauls and Spaniards who held illustrious office at Constantinople in the later years of that emperor, the most powerful of them the Gaul Fl. Rufinus, whose career and vicissitudes are discussed in Chapter 10 above. The identification of Orosius’ vir inlustris with Marcellus gains support from a passage of the De Medicamentis referring to a ‘remedium singulare’ for disorders of the spleen, as recently demonstrated by the patriarch Gamaliel, ‘quod de experimentis probatis Gamalielus patriarcha proxime ostendit’ (De Med. 23.77: ed. Helmreich, Teubner 1889, p. 242). The Jewish patriarch Gamaliel is mentioned in a law of 415 (C Th 16.8.22, of 20th October, depriving him of the codicils of his honorary prefecture): he is perhaps the successor (and son) of, rather than identical with, the ‘patriarch’ addressed in letters of Libanius of 388–93 and named as Gamaliel in a letter of Jerome of 395/6 (Ep. 57.3). (For the evidence see PLRE I, p. 385 [identifying them], and R. Syme, ‘Ipse ille patriarcha’, in Bonner Historia-Augusta-Colloquium 1966/67 (1968), pp. 119–30, at 123–6 = Emperors and Biography [1971], at pp. 21–5). Marcellus’ words indicate a recently witnessed demonstration rather than a published account, and the patriarch’s ‘remedium’ was indeed ‘singulare’. The ingredients had to be prepared after the fifteenth day of the lunar cycle and the mixture heated to form a ‘malagma’ (an emollient or poultice). This was put into a soft leather bag, tied while still warm to the area of the spleen and kept there for fourteen days and nights, during which time the patient must abstain from hot and cold baths, sex, fruit and vegetables, and all sweet foods. The treatment should be applied only in winter, to avoid the mixture’s being affected by perspiration. If Marcellus witnessed Gamaliel’s demonstration in the same period as his conjectured visit to Jerome, the completion of the De Medicamentis would fall after 415, and there is nothing impossible in this. He might alternatively have visited Palestine and met this or the earlier Gamaliel during the period after his deposition of the post of magister officiorum late in 395 (C Th 16.5.29, cited above). Nothing is known of any such journey, though it is worth mentioning that after the assassination, also late in 395, of Marcellus’ compatriot and likely patron, Fl. Rufinus, the latter’s wife and daughter were permitted to go to live at Jerusalem (Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, p. 136; above, Chapter 10). However, the dedication of De Medicamentis refers to its author as ‘ex magistro officiorum Theodosii sen(ioris)’, distinguishing him from the second emperor of that name – hence written after 10th April 401, the birth of Theodosius II, or, more realistically, after 1st May 408, the date of his accession. The expression ‘proxime ostendit’

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Chapter 15 of Gamaliel’s demonstration would not be so convincing if the phrase looked back from 408 or later to a time between 395 and 399, and a later date for Marcellus’ acquaintance with the patriarch has much in its favour. Marcellus is also tentatively identified with a landowning friend of Symmachus of the name, who owned estates in Gaul and Spain; in 399 he was living in Gaul, being known to Symmachus recently to have spent some time in Spain (Ep. 9.23). From any point of view, the words of a vir inlustris from Narbonne, speaking in 415 or 416 of such recent and important events in that city as those of 414, lend to Orosius’ Historia adversus Paganos an unusual moment of credibility and significance.

Notes 1 Orosius, Historia adversus Paganos 7.43.4ff. For the interesting ramifications of his journey, E. D. Hunt, ‘St. Stephen in Minorca; an episode in Jewish-Christian relations in the early 5th century A.D.’, JTS 33 (1982), pp. 106–23. 2 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Gothia and Romania’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 44 (1961), pp. 213–37 [= The Long-Haired Kings (1962), Chap. II]. 3 Latomus 30 (1971), pp. 1085f.; see the additional note (pp. 403–4) to the 1990 reprint of Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, and the Appendix to this chapter. 4 Olympiodorus, frag. 24 (Müller and Blockley); Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 316f. 5 For the prophecy, cited by the chronicler Hydatius, see Dan. 11, esp. v. 6; ‘After some years they shall make an alliance, and the daughter of the king of the south shall come to the king of the north to ratify the agreement. But she shall not retain her power, and his offspring shall not endure. She shall be given up, she and her attendants and her child and the one who supported her’. A son born to Athaulf and Galla Placidia died in infancy, and after her husband’s death Placidia was returned to the Roman court of Ravenna. 6 Patrick Wormald, ‘Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis; legislation and Germanic kingship, from Euric to Cnut’, in P. H. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (edd.), Early Medieval Kingship (1977), pp. 105–38, esp. 125ff. 7 Historia Gothorum 35 = Mommsen, Chron. Min. II, p. 281; ‘sub hoc rege Gothi legum statuta in scriptis habere coeperunt; nam antea tantum moribus et consuetudine tenebantur’. 8 E. A Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores V, No. 626; ‘written, doubtless in France, in a scriptorium where many discarded old MSS were available’. Edited by C. Zeumer, in Leges Visigothorum Antiquiores (1894), and with extensive annotation in MGH, Leges I.1 (1902), pp. 3–32; and by A. d’Ors, in Estudios Visigoticos II: El Codige de Eurico, Cuadernos del Instituto Juridico Español 12 (Rome & Madrid, 1960). Among more recent discussions, Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths (transl. Thomas F. Dunlap, 1988), pp. 194–7, and the collection of papers in M. Rouche and B. Dumézil (edd.), Le Bréviaire d’Alaric: aux origines du Code civil (2008). Suzanne Teillet, Des Goths à la nation Gothique: les origines de l’idée de nation en Occident du V e au VII e siècle (1984) has little more than passing references.

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Roman law and barbarian identity in the Late Roman West 9

See Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans: The techniques of accommodation (1980), at pp. 118–23 – though his discussion of the text is controversial. 10 Sidonius, Ep. 2.1 (the entry on Seronatus in PLRE II, pp. 995–6 is a catena of reported prejudice). For ‘Leges’ and ‘edicta’; Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings, p. 40, and for the ‘Code of Theoderic’, Jill Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome (1994), p. 126. 11 Carmen 23; Epp. 4.22; 8.3. The leading men of Carmen 23 are Consentius, Livius, Martius Myro, Magnus, Marcellinus (also described as an advocate), Lympidius, Marinus and Leo. The last of these is PLRE II, pp. 662–3 (Leo 5). See Harries, o.c. pp. 130–1 and elsewhere. Law and expansion of the kingdom of Euric; Wolfram, History of the Goths, p. 196; Harries, pp. 222–3. 12 Leo and the ‘Twelve Tables’, Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Gothia and Romania’, p. 38; and the Code of Euric, K. F. Stroheker, Der Senatorische Adel im Spätantiken Gallien (1948), p. 187 (No. 187). 13 Sidonius, Ep. 5.5.3; PLRE II, p. 663 (Syagrius 3). As Wallace-Hadrill observes, the Burgundian Law achieves ‘a more wide-reaching fusion of Roman and Germanic legal elements [than the Code of Euric]’. 14 J. Gaudemet, Le Bréviaire d’Alaric et les Epitome, Ius Romanum Medii Aevi (Milan, 1965); Wolfram, History of the Goths, p. 196. For the titles of the Breviarium see Mommsen & Meyer’s edition of the Theodosian Code, pp. 5–26. 15 See on all this my Laying Down the Law, esp. Chapter 4. 16 For Alaric’s commonitorium and other texts relevant to the Breviarium, Mommsen’s Prolegomena to the Theodosian Code, xxxiii–vii; Laying Down the Law, pp. 87–9; Ralph Mathisen, ‘D’Aire-sur-l’Adour à Agde, les relations entre la loi séculière et la loi canonique à la fin du royaume de Toulouse’ in Rouche and Dumézil (above, n. 8), pp. 41–52. 17 On the interpretationes see esp. Gaudemet, Le Bréviaire d’Alaric, pp. 37–41 and Chap. 16 below. 18 Lex Romana Burgundionum, ii (De homicidiis) 5 (Riccobono, FIRA 2, II, p. 717); quia de pretiis occisorum nihil evidenter lex Romana constituit, dominus noster statuit observandum (‘since Roman law has laid down no clear rule on the price to be paid for causing death, our Lord has decided that the following should be observed...’). 19 For municipal jurisdiction, see the now fundamental treatment of J. González, ‘The Lex Irnitana; a new copy of the Flavian municipal law’, JRS 76 (1986), pp. 147–243, with the relevant clauses (Nos. 84–93) at pp. 175–80, translated by Michael Crawford at 195–9; also David Johnston, ‘Three thoughts on Roman private law and the Lex Irnitana’, JRS 77 (1987), pp. 62–77. On episcopal audientia; Gaudemet, L’Eglise dans l’empire romain (IVe-Ve siècles) (1958), pp. 229–52, and Jill Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (1999), Chapters 9 and 10. 20 Salvian, De Gubernatione Dei 5.18.27. Municipal archives, Ian Wood, ‘Disputes in late fifth- and early sixth-century Gaul; some problems’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (edd.), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (1986), pp. 7–22, at 13f. 21 CTh 3.14.1, interpretatio; see Hagith Sivan, ‘Why not marry a barbarian? Marital frontiers in late Antiquity’, in Ralph W. Mathisen and Hagith Sivan, Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (1996), pp. 136–45; discussed below, Chapter 16. 22 For ‘the laws as they were practiced in the provinces’, cf. Wolfram, History of the Goths, p. 195, continuing, ‘This vulgar Roman law differed from classical or classistic

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Chapter 15 jurisprudence in its strong tendency toward simplification, popularization, and adaptation to the realities of a “smaller space”. It runs counter to that universalism that characterizes the legal work of Justinian’. 23 Law of sale; Code of Euric 286, 294, 296; Ernst Levy, ‘Reflections on the first “Reception” of Roman Law in Germanic states’, American Historical Review 48 (1942), pp. 20–9. 24 Digest 12.2.1–42, ‘Voluntary, compulsory and judicial oaths’. 25 Digest 12.2.34.9, cf. Wood, ‘Disputes’ (above, n. 20), at pp. 15–18. 26 Walter Ashburner, ‘The Farmer’s Law’, JHS 30 (1910), pp. 85–108 (text at 97–108) and 32 (1912), pp. 68–95 (translation at 87–95); Roger Collins, Early Medieval Spain; Unity in diversity, 400–1000 (1983), pp. 24–31, esp. at 28. 27 The Long-Haired Kings, p. 39. See too Wolfram, History of the Goths, pp. 195–6, arguing for territorial application but complicated by the unnecessary argument that the Code of Euric was drawn up under Alaric II. 28 James Q. Whitman, The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era (1990), pp. 7–9. 29 Wood, ‘Disputes’, at pp. 10, 21.

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16 INTERPRETING THE INTERPRETATIONES OF THE BREVIARIUM OF ALARIC Theodor Mommsen’s edition of the Theodosian Code, begun in 1898 and published in 1905 after the death of its initiator on November 1, 1903, is a truly amazing achievement. It is not however a book for the faint-hearted or casual reader. The complex presentation, with its exhaustive documentation of manuscript readings and other sources, can give an impression of finality, when it is really intended to show the variety of alternative possibilities that have to be considered. Nor is it easy to track down in the dense Latin print of his Prolegomena, Mommsen’s justification of an important decision of editorial policy in which he differed from the advice of his collaborator Paul Krüger. This was the decision not to include in the printed version of the incomplete early books of the Code, texts recovered from the Codex Justinianus of a century later; Krüger’s partial edition of the Theodosian Code, published two decades after Mommsen’s, is technically less accomplished than its predecessor, but in its first five books includes from the Codex Justinianus more than two hundred and thirty texts not printed by Mommsen. The extent to which Mommsen’s decision on this point has resulted in an under-exploitation of the possibilities for the reconstruction of these early books has not been widely realised by readers of the Theodosian Code – a lack of awareness that is aggravated by the extreme rarity of Krüger’s edition.1 The subject of this chapter is however a connection not subject to dispute, that between the Theodosian Code and the early sixthcentury Breviarium of the Visigothic king Alaric II. A puzzle for unwary readers of Mommsen’s edition, as indeed of Haenel’s edition of 1842 and Krüger’s of 1923, is the appearance after many laws, especially in the earlier books, of the word ‘INTERPRETATIO’, followed by what appear to be more or less detailed ancient comments on the laws. The word does not occur with any obvious pattern or regularity in the text of the Code, and the comments are on baffling levels of inconsistency – sometimes difficult, sometimes simple, sometimes superfluous, often in the strangely inconsequential form, ‘This

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Chapter 16 law needs no interpretation’. One law is even ‘so clear that it needs no interpretation’; ‘ista lex tam evidens est, ut expositione non indigeat’ (cf. CTh 9.27.1). So why does it receive this comment, and what are these ‘interpretations’? I am sure that many who have read this far will know the answer to this question, but I suspect also that many will not.2 This I judge from random enquiries made over the years, and from such events as a research seminar I was present at some years ago, when an ‘interpretatio’ was cited as if it were a part of the Theodosian Code itself, without even the original constitution to which it belonged. When the speaker was asked about this afterwards (in private conversation; this is the sort of question you don’t ask in public), he seemed not to understand the distinction; it was as if the text was printed in Mommsen’s edition and that was enough. I have to admit that I had shared the misapprehension for far longer than I would care to admit, and it is partly for this reason that I think it worth while to open the discussion here. In fact, the apparently random distribution of the ‘interpretationes’ is an illusion. It arises from the nature of Mommsen’s text, which is both an edition of the Theodosian Code as extant in the manuscripts, and a reconstruction of its early books, where the manuscripts are incomplete. It is to be explained in terms of the sources for these early books of the Code, of which the most important (leaving aside the Codex Justinianus, which, as I have said, Mommsen did not use) is the Breviarium of Alaric II, otherwise known as Lex Romana Visigothorum. The Breviarium, published in 506, is a compilation of selections from various legal texts of Roman origin: (i) the Theodosian Code, published in east and west respectively in 437 and 438 and containing imperial constitutions from the period from Constantine until the time of publication; (ii) the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes, both published in the 290s and containing texts, mainly imperial rescripts, of the second and third centuries; (iii) some Novellae of Theodosius II and Valentinian III from the period after the publication of the Theodosian Code; and (iv) extracts from Roman jurists, namely Papinian, Paul’s Sentences and Gaius’ Institutes. With the exception of Gaius, which was already an elementary handbook and could be thought not to need it, all these texts are equipped with explanatory comment in the form of an interpretatio. The puzzle I referred to, concerning the irregular appearance of interpretationes, thus arises from the role of the Breviarium as a main source for Books 1–5 of the Theodosian Code as Mommsen (and Haenel) presented it. These are the books on the sources of law (Book 1), on private law, following the order of the Praetor’s Edict (Books 2–4) and as

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric expressed in the ius civile, essentially the substantive legislation of Roman emperors as transmitted by jurists (Book 5). Given the poor state of the manuscript evidence for these books, it is a happy circumstance that these topics were the main preoccupation of the compilers of the Breviarium.3 For large parts of Books 1–5 of the Theodosian Code in Mommsen’s edition we are in effect reading the Breviarium, and this, paradoxically, is what makes the interpretationes seem to belong to the Theodosian Code. In effect, Mommsen edited the Theodosian Code and Breviarium simultaneously and published them as a composite text. An edition of the Breviarium could simply be extracted from Mommsen’s edition of the Code, and if this were done the origin of the interpretationes would be instantly visible, for every text would have one. Conversely, an edition of the Theodosian Code by itself would need to omit them (except for the special case mentioned just below). The question can now be posed in more precise terms. What is the nature of the connection between the laws and the interpretationes, and where do the latter come from? There are essentially two alternative solutions, though as will be seen they are not exclusive. Either the interpretationes are part of a broader tradition of juristic comment on the Theodosian Code in the period since its publication; or they are to be connected with the Breviarium itself, being specifically written for it and published as part of the Breviarium in 506. Of these alternatives, the second is clearly correct, if for no other reason than that the fit with the Breviarium is so tight. As noted above, all Breviarium texts (except for Gaius’ Institutes) are equipped with an interpretatio, even in the negative form, ‘This law needs no interpretation’. This is done for the sake of formal completeness; every text included in the Breviarium was to possess an interpretatio, even if there was nothing for it to say. On the other hand, no text in the Theodosian Code that was not selected for the Breviarium possesses one, except for a pair of manuscript pages, now in the Vatican Libary, belonging to Book 4 of the Code. These fragments are intended to supplement the Breviarium from the complete Theodosian Code, and have interpretationes in imitation of it.4 Even if there were a continuing tradition of juristic comment on the Theodosian Code in the later fifth century, and there is no reason why there should not have been, the interpretationes are to be connected explicitly with the composition of the Breviarium. This conclusion is supported by the interpretatio to Breviarium 1.4.1 (= CTh 1.4.3), the so-called ‘Law of Citations’, part of an imperial letter directed to the Roman senate on 7 November 426; other parts of the letter, in Krüger though not of course in Mommsen, can be recovered from the

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Chapter 16 Codex Justinianus.5 The interpretatio to this law commented on the jurists to whom it referred (‘Papinian, Paul, Gaius, Ulpian, Modestinus and others whom they cited’), adding that ‘Gregorianus and Hermogenianus’ – who are referred to as if they were individual jurists rather than the editors of Codes named after them – were ratified in the Theodosian Code by an earlier law ‘De constitutionibus principum et edictis’. The reference is to CTh 1.1.5, of 429, citing the Hermogenian and Gregorian Codes as precedents for the Theodosian Code itself.6 The interpretatio is doubly perplexing. In the first place, a text of 426 could not have adduced a later law as validation. The law to which it refers, as represented by the interpretatio, was ‘earlier’ than CTh 1.4.3 not in time, but because it stood in an earlier title of the published Theodosian Code. Second, the law of 429 was itself not included in the Breviarium. The interpretatio thus justifies the inclusion in the Breviarium of extracts from the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes by reference to a law from the Theodosian Code that was not included. Not that there was any reason to include it, for CTh 1.1.5 was concerned with the implementation of the Theodosian Code, which the Breviarium was to supersede; there was no reason to cite a law relating to the production of the earlier work. The ‘Law of Citations’ as represented by CTh 1.4.3, and its interpretatio referring to the mention of the Gregorian and Hermogenian Codes in CTh 1.1.5, ensured between them that all the sources excerpted by the Breviarium possessed judicial authority by reference to well established Roman sources. Having so established the validity of the sources cited in the Breviarium, the interpretatio concluded by saying that ‘We have chosen from these jurists, from Gregorianus, Hermogenianus [sc. their Codes, as just explained], Gaius, Papinian and Paul, those things that seemed needful for cases of the present times’; ‘quae necessaria causis praesentium temporum videbantur’. It is to this phrase that we now turn, on the understanding that the reference to the ‘present times’ is to the time of publication of the Breviarium. As with other late Roman acts of legal codification, notably the Theodosian Code and the Digest of Justinian, the circumstances of the publication of the Breviarium of Alaric are well documented. They are set out in a Commonitorium, or memorandum, addressed by the king to the comes Timotheus, the senior civil official in his domain (we should see him as a successor to the late Roman praetorian prefect).7 The memorandum gave royal authority to the Breviarium as a digest of ‘leges Romanae’ and ‘antiquum ius’ – that is to say, acts of primary legislation in various forms, and juristic opinion, a distinction between complementary sources of law well understood in Roman jurisprudence.8 It also noted that the project

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric had been approved by an assembly, or council, of bishops and nobles, that is to say the Roman leaders in the Visigothic kingdom, and that it had been accomplished by ‘prudentes’, or Roman jurists in the kingdom. Then, we read that the laws had been selected and explained; ‘excerpta vel [= et] clariori interpretatione conposita’. Like the Theodosian Code in its day, the book was to be definitive for the future, and the manufacture of copies was to be the responsibility of the vir spectabilis Anianus; he is the counterpart of the constitutionarii who had been given responsibility for the preparation of texts of the Theodosian Code.9 Lastly, the Breviarium was intended for use in the ‘forum’, or court, of Timotheus, and no other law or legal definition was to be cited there. In this provision, as in the responsibility of Anianus for the integrity of the text of the Breviarium, the precedent of the Theodosian Code is again obvious. We also possess enabling legislation in the form of a ‘subscriptio’ of Anianus written ‘Aduris’ – Adoure-sur-Aire near Toulouse, the capital of the Visigothic kingdom – and of a ‘praescriptio’ over the name of the vir inlustris, count Goiaricus (Goar), in which, echoing Alaric’s Commonitorium, the laws are described as selected and clarified, according to instructions; ‘electae vel, sicut praeceptum est, explanatae’.10 The evidence leaves little room for doubt on two important points; that the laws were intended for use, and that the interpretationes were an integral part of the project. Now of course, what legal minds (‘prudentes’) may intend for ‘use’ may reflect wishful thinking and an optimistic view of their own importance, together with a respect for irrelevancies from the past. It is unlikely that the early sixth century really needed such an explanation of the Roman citizenship and Latin rights as was given in the interpretatio to CTh (= Brev.) 2.22.1.11 On the other hand, the interpretatio to 3.17.3 speaks of the guardianship of minors as a present concern; ‘quotiens de pupillorum tutela tractatur, debet’, etc. If there were Roman courts in early sixth-century Gaul, and the interpretationes are evidence that there were, this was just the sort of issue one would expect to arise. It reflects the weight of the interest of the editors of the Breviarium in questions of Roman private law, especially the law of property, gift, and succession. The editors of the Breviarium, and writers of its interpretationes, were working, under a barbarian king in early sixth-century Gaul, on the Roman law of an earlier period. The situation is one with real historical possibilities. If the writers show a sense of the enduring relevance of Roman laws for their own time, then they might also show, both in their selection of laws and in their interpretations of them, an awareness of what made their own time different from that in which the original texts had been created. They

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Chapter 16 might reveal a gap of perception between the fourth and early fifth and the early sixth centuries, over which both their selections, and their interpretations on what they selected, provide a bridge. If we are right to think that the same people were responsible for both selecting and commenting on the laws, some more general questions might be addressed by looking at their selection of texts. To put the converse of this question, what sorts of things did they omit? We can begin with the later books of the Theodosian Code, those least well represented in the Breviarium. ( The question is distorted by the fact that the Breviarium is itself our main source for our version of Books 1–5 of the Theodosian Code. Nevertheless the balance of the content of the Breviarium in favour of the early books of the Code is perfectly clear.) From Book 7 of the Code, which contains 24 titles and 175 individual laws, the Breviarium has chosen just one text, the very first in the book. A law of Constantine of 323, it concerned the facilitation by Romans of barbarian ‘depredation’. Perhaps with an eye to his Visigothic master, the author of the summary interpretatio has replaced the term ‘barbarians’ by ‘any enemies at all’, and makes no use of the phrase ‘wicked faction’ (‘scelerata factio’) that is present in the original. No other law is selected from this entire book, which concerns late Roman military administration, a matter of no interest in early sixth-century Gaul. From Book 14 of the Theodosian Code, which contains 27 titles and 99 individual laws, again a single text has been chosen (CTh 14.7.1). It covers two aspects of the situation of collegiati, or guild members. It recalls them to their municipalities, together with their property, in order to ensure the performance of their obligations to their place of origin; and it deals with the children of collegiati by women of free or unfree status. The interpretatio is more interested in the second aspect than the first. It neglects the important connection in Roman law between property and origin,12 but comments more explicitly than does the original text on marriages between partners of unequal or equal status; the abstract juridical expressions, ‘non aequale’ and ‘iustum coniugium’, are explained in practical terms, as relationships of collegiati with ‘colonae’ or ‘ancillae’ (neither term is in the original text), and with women of free status (‘ingenuae’), respectively.13 Book 6 of the Theodosian Code consists of 38 titles and 209 laws on ‘dignities’ – public offices, their duties and functions, and the grades of precedence attaching to them – affecting minor offices as well as the most important in the late Roman administration. From the entire book, the editors of the Breviarium selected the two laws from the fifth title Ut dignitatum ordo servetur, on the principle of maintaining the correct grades of distinction attaching to public office. Whether deliberately or not, the

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric interpretationes offer a change of emphasis. Where the Theodosian Code seems to be concerned with the defence of grades of precedence against improper claims of seniority, the interpretationes read as if the issue was the presumption of office by men who had not received it at all. From the example of these three books, from which a very small number of laws has been chosen for inclusion in the Breviarium (four altogether, from a total of 483 original texts), we can see the chasm that has opened up between the late Roman empire and the Visigothic period. The Breviarium has dropped all reference to the Roman army, its recruitment, organisation, and supply, and to the organisation of social life at Rome, Constantinople, Carthage and Alexandria, which respectively formed the main topics of Book 7 and 14 of the Theodosian Code. It has ignored the detailed rules of precedence and conduct that formed the essence of the late Roman administration and were to be found in Book 6, retaining only the general principle of respect for legitimately acquired dignities and their author the ‘princeps’, with punishment for those who presumed to usurp them without authority. This was a matter of interest to any ruler, whether Roman emperor or barbarian king. A similar result obtains with Book 13, which consists of eleven titles on Roman taxation, 127 laws in all. The Breviarium includes three of these laws, concerning people who sell things they have produced themselves but do not buy and sell for a living (13.1.13); the improper transfer of tax burdens from the powerful to men of inferior status (13.10.1); and the respective time limits for appeals against tax assessments, of men who were present in their communities and those who were absent on public service (13.10.5). Practically the whole panoply of Roman tax law and its administration, including such topics as immunity for professors and physicians, the position of artists and manual workers, and the estates and duties of shipowners, is omitted. As to the four laws chosen for inclusion from Book 15 (15 titles, 116 laws), in every case the interpretatio changes the emphasis, and even the meaning, of the original text. In 15.1.32, on the restoration of public buildings and the heating of baths, the interpretatio ignores the heating of baths (reasonably enough; how many had Roman baths in the early sixth century?), and converts the burden imposed on municipal estates to the direct responsibility of the fisc. In 15.1.9, a law of Julian addressed from Antioch to the prefect of Egypt, a reference to the building of private accommodation above public workhouses (‘ergasteria’) has been broadened to include houses built in any public space. It is surprising to find in the Breviarium, with the comment that it ‘needs no interpretation’, a law addressed to the comes Orientis on established water rights and the irrigation of fields and pleasure gardens (15.2.7). Water rights

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Chapter 16 hardly present the same issues in the Middle East as in south-western Gaul, but the general principles were evidently thought worth maintaining. The fourth and last of the laws included in the Breviarium from Book 15 of the Theodosian Code (15.14.14) refers to the circumstances of the recent barbarian invasions, where, as in the case referred to above (7.1.1), ‘barbarian’ is changed to ‘enemy’ depredation. The editors of the Breviarium perhaps did not realise that the barbarian invasions referred to (it is a law of 416) were precisely those of Alaric and Athaulf, that is the ancestors of the present Gothic regime of southern Gaul. Apart from these few examples, the whole domain of Roman public works and entertainments is omitted; nothing here on aqueducts, road repair, imperial portraits, men and women of the stage, pimps and procurers, or wild beast shows and gladiators. Whether for better or for worse, it represents a considerable narrowing of social experience. From Book 12, a book of 19 titles and 273 laws, are chosen eleven examples for inclusion in the Breviarium, but nine of these are from the 192 laws of the first title, producing together a basic set of rules for membership of curial orders. The other two texts involve the appointment of exactores and susceptores, local officials responsible for the collection of taxes in municipalities (12.6.20, 22). The effect is a radical narrowing of the range of reference of the original book of the Theodosian Code, to those elements that might be relevant to Roman communities in the Visigothic kingdom. A particularly important omission is of any text from the title on civic embassies and the decrees that authorised them (12.12). At one stroke this eliminates the most commonly used means of communication between the cities of the Roman empire and their emperor. At 12.1.19, on the age at which curial obligations could be imposed upon individuals, the interpretatio ignores the complaint in the Theodosian Code that youngsters of seven or eight years of age were being nominated, stating only the general principle that these obligations were acquired at the age of eighteen. In this as in other texts, the term ‘munus’ for a civic obligation is replaced by ‘servitium’, a term which refers, not so much to slavery, as to a legal service of any kind that one person may owe another, or to a ‘servitude’ or obligation to others that may attach to a piece of property. Its use in the present context reflects the disappearance of the notion of a ‘munus’ as a contribution made by an individual to his community through a sense of civic duty rather than by coercion.14 Perhaps the most interesting of these categories of omission is Book 16, 11 titles containing 201 laws on religion in its various aspects. Again, eleven texts are selected, six of them from the 47 laws of the second title, ‘On bishops, churches and the clergy’. The chosen texts largely concern the

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric discipline of the clergy and their immunity from taxation, while two of them limit episcopal jurisdiction to church matters, with civil cases and criminal jurisdiction being reserved for the secular courts. It is also noteworthy that neither of the two extant laws from Book 1 of the Theodosian Code ‘On the jurisdiction of bishops’, was included in the Breviarium.15 It would not be surprising if the institution of episcopal jurisdiction, which might well work against its interests, were to have been discouraged by the Visigothic regime. We are left with five texts chosen from other titles of Book 16. One of these again sets limits on episcopal jurisdiction (16.11.1), the other four concern relations between Christians and Jews, in the shape of conversions from Christianity to Judaism, and the treatment of slaves by Jewish owners (16.8.5,7; 9.1; 7.3).16 The concentration on these topics is all the more striking when we consider what has been omitted. There is nothing on the Catholic faith and heresy (a point worthy of note, the Visigoths being Arians); nothing on monasticism, baptism, apostasy or paganism. The only glancing reference to this last subject adheres to an extract on Jews and is not chosen in its own right; the rest of the law involved Manichees and was omitted in the Breviarium (16.7.3).17 Not surprisingly given this dearth of opportunities for the clergy represented in the Breviarium, several of its manuscripts have versions of Book 16 supplemented from the full text of the Theodosian Code.18 As already noted, the vast majority of laws selected for inclusion in the Breviarium are taken from the first half of Book 1, on the sources and authority of the law, from Books 2–5 on private law, and from Books 8– 11 on property and inheritance, the criminal law, the interests of the fiscus, and appeal procedures. Omitted, as we have seen, are almost all references to Roman offices and institutions, the army, taxation, public works and services, civic life and the organisation of the great cities, entertainments and games, and religion. In all this, we see how the process of selection and omission expresses a sense of ‘what is needful for cases of the present times’. Put the other way round, by its silence on these matters, the Breviarium offers a statement of what is ‘no longer needful’ – of the extent to which the Roman empire and its institutions were no longer of any practical interest in the first years of the sixth century. Apart from what has been omitted, the commentaries on the texts that were included in the Breviarium may reflect a more positive awareness of the differences between the fourth and early fifth centuries and their editors’ own time. What follows is by way of example only; the material invites a careful and comprehensive study. The shortest form of interpretatio, as mentioned, is the commonly found

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Chapter 16 ‘this law does not need interpretation’. Sometimes, especially on some more complex problems of private law, the writers may refer to longer discussions in other interpretationes, as on the Novellae of Theodosius and Valentinian (see below). Sometimes, as in the case of the law on sacrilege (6.5.2), they may say that a legal problem needs elucidation from ius, that is from juristic writing. This is not a sign of incompleteness or haste, as Mommsen argued, but a recognition that the leges that comprised the Breviarium sometimes had to be considered in the context of juristic opinion, for which a different sort of commentary was required.19 The interpretations sometimes resemble little essays, which may be longer than the text commented on, and sometimes they may accumulate through a title in a sequence of essays forming quite a substantial discussion. An example of this is title 8.18, where three interpretationes, taken together, give an extensive account of questions relating to maternal property. Here, three texts, 8.18.1, 2 & 9, refer to Theodosius’ Novella 14, while the interpretatio on the latter refers back to the title in the Theodosian Code. The manner of expression of the interpretationes varies, partly, no doubt, because of the different personal conventions of individual commentators, and because commentators, like all of us, like to express themselves differently from time to time; at least, I see little reason to suppose that the different modes of expression reflect different traditions of juristic comment or different types of source.20 We read sometimes how ‘this law says that...’, ‘the emperor here expresses the wish that...’, or, still in the imperial first person plural, ‘these are our instructions...’, and so on. This is one respect in which the compilers sometimes rephrased their commentaries to accommodate the political realities under which they lived. As the source of the laws excerpted and commented, the emperor (normally a collegiate plurality) is sometimes referred to as ‘princeps’, but when he enters more actively into the situation he may become ‘the master(s) of things’ – ‘domini rerum’ – a phrase presumably designed to accommodate a barbarian king (9.41.1; 11.16.11). The imperial comitatus, or court, is transformed into ‘the place where the masters of things are to be found’ (12.1.20). At 1.16.7 appeals to praetorian prefects and their deputies for reference to the emperor are directed in the interpretatio to ‘our masters’ ears’, ‘dominicis auribus’. The interpretationes sometimes begin with a brief general statement of principle or legal definition. The interpretatio on 1.2.5 distinguishes between two sorts of praescriptio, moratoria offering a delay, and peremptoria ordering a resolution, observing that the first kind can be given by rescript, the second not; none of this general definition was in the original text. The interpretatio on 4.4.1 (De cretione vel bonorum possessione) referred to the

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric ‘antiquum ius’ as administered by the urban praetor in Rome, with the comment that this was now covered by ‘leges’ – that is, imperial legislation – so that explanation was not necessary; ‘quod explanari opus non est, quia legibus utrumque sublatum est’. The interpretatio on 2.15.1 begins with a formal definition of the familiar legal phrase ‘dolus malus’, while those on 10.10.2 and 9.39.3 define ‘delatores’ and ‘calumniatores’ respectively, and that on 4.13.1 explains ‘vectigalia’ as indirect taxes levied on transported goods. The long interpretatio of 8.12.1 begins by describing the various possible forms of ‘donatio’ (deeds of gift). In these and other cases, the interpretatio is offering a comment on the name of the Theodosian Code title before moving on to individual texts within it.21 The writers of the interpretationes may also define terms that are no longer familiar, or offer a paraphrase; as well as omitting, they may add details for clarity and relevance to their own day. On 9.15.1, setting out the famous penalty for parricide (included, no doubt, for legal-historical reasons rather than for its contemporary relevance), the commentator explains the meaning of ‘culleus’ – the sack into which the parricide was sewn with serpents, before being drowned in the sea or a river and left without burial. A similarly antiquarian comment comes at 9.16.4, where the writer explains forgotten terms from the old pagan religion; added to those who summon up demons and deities for foretelling the future are the ‘divini’ called ‘harioli’, while a ‘haruspex’ is one who ‘collects auguries’. Neither is a very precise or correct definition. In another context (9.19.1) a ‘tabellio’, or secretary, is ‘now called an admanuensis’. The interpretatio to 8.2.5 (cf. 13.10.1) explains ‘tabularii’ as ‘those who handle public accounts’, while 10.1.2 glosses ‘rationales’ and ‘magistri rei privatae’ as ‘administrators of our masters’ households’; ‘ordinatores domorum dominicarum’. A law about imperial coinage (9.22.1) forbids the clipping of solidi and observes that it makes no difference to the value of a coin whether the imperial portrait shown on it is large or small, provided that its weight is correct; the interpretatio comments on the first of these issues and pays no attention to the second, which is a feature characteristic of late Roman and Byzantine coinage.22 In another case, a law requires that governors do not take personal staff members to provinces with them as domestici and cancellarii but must only use personnel chosen ‘on the record’ (‘sub fide gestorum’), who will remain in the province for three years after the governor’s departure in case there is legal action against him; the interpretatio emphasises that any such adviser must not come from the governor’s own province or from any other region unless he is ‘publicly assigned by the choice of the citizens’; ‘publice civium electione deputatus’ (1.34.3). Whatever the precise nature of the procedures in question, the situation

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Chapter 16 envisaged in the interpretatio is rather different from that in the original legislation.23 Not surprisingly, the interpretationes commit misunderstandings and make mistakes, as in the case of 4.4.4, where a law issued at Constantinople and addressed to the prefect of the city is taken to relate to Rome. The interpretatio on 2.1.12 neglects the point that the court of five nobles known as the ‘iudicium quinquevirale’ was intended to apply specifically to Roman senators.24 Interpretationes may be inappropriate or tear laws out of their proper context, as in the case of the law mentioned above on private building on public property originally addressed to the prefect of Egypt, or that on water rights, addressed to the comes Orientis (15.1.9; 2.7). They may offer a single explanation to cover the contents of an entire title, as when they remark, in language derived from the Theodosian Code title as well as from the specific text in question, that occasions for public rejoicing are not a cause for enforced exactions in the name of a thanksgiving (8.11.5), or explicate Easter amnesties by commenting on a single representative law in the title (9.38.8). The interpretatio on 9.34.1 De famosis libellis goes beyond the law under discussion by giving a general description of how such libelli may be posted up or left on the ground for people to find them – adding the penalty of beating with a cudgel, which is not specified in the original text. And there are all sorts of minor variations and points of difference. The naming of a fine of 50 pounds of silver mentioned in the interpretatio to 11.36.20 comes not from that law but from two predecessors in the same title, not included in the Breviarium (11.36, 15–16); one law glosses ‘centesima’, an interest rate of 1%, as ‘tres siliquae in anno per solidum’, ‘three siliquae annually per solidus’ (2.33.2); another explains a point of law through an imagined intervention in direct speech, ‘ si forte dicat aliquis’, etc. (4.4.5). A law on ‘milites’ or ‘privati’ behaving as robbers and bandits becomes a general reference to ‘anyone’ who behaves in that fashion (9.14.2). All this means only that the interpretationes do everything that commentators are expected to do; they expound, summarise, give the meaning of terms, abbreviate or expand as seems appropriate. In some cases they also ‘update’ in a more fully circumstantial manner, and this chapter concludes with some examples of this. (i) Constantine’s law of 315 against kidnappers (9.18.1) had laid down the penalties of condemnation to gladiatorial combat with the certainty of death or, in the case of slaves, of exposure at the first opportunity to wild beasts. The law is included in the Breviarium with a brief interpretatio naming the penalty of death without specifying the means of execution, and with no distinction between slave and free. In early sixth-century Gaul there

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric were no longer gladiatorial shows or ‘venationes’ involving human victims, even had the penalties laid down in the Roman law still been thought appropriate. The essential rule of law is retained in a form adapted for the later period. In a similar way, a law advising provincial governors how they should conduct themselves in office (1.16.9) receives an interpretatio that simply omits the part of the law insisting they should not be distracted from serious business by attending shows and games. By this time, there were no such things. (ii) Another law of Constantine, on deeds of gift (8.12.1), requires that written documentation of the gift be provided, either by the donor himself, ‘or by him, whom opportunity has provided’. The long interpretatio, which begins with an explanation of the different types of gift (see above), expands this general remark into a reference to the literacy or illiteracy of the intending donor; the man ‘whom opportunity has provided’ is now a man who can read and write in cases where the donor cannot, and where written authentication of the gift is required. This may also have been the situation envisaged by Constantine, but the interpretatio goes beyond the original law to make explicit the application of the rule that was most relevant in the writer’s day. (iii) A law on prison custody ( 9.3.7) orders that every Sunday prisoners be brought out from their cells, given food, taken to the baths under trusty escort and questioned about their treatment, adding at the end of the text that a Christian priest will be present to ensure observance of the law. The interpretatio throws the emphasis onto ‘Christiani vel sacerdotes’ (meaning simply Christian priests)25 and gives to them the duty of providing food. This is a change from the situation set out in the original text; the clergy now themselves perform the specified services rather than ensure by their admonition that the governor does so. (iv) Constantine’s law on magic arts (9.16.3) is most justly famous for the exception that it provides for harmless ‘white magic’ used as a remedy for illness or to secure the prosperity of crops in country districts. The interpretatio ignores the exception, which is actually the main point at issue in the original text, referring only to ‘malefici vel incantatores vel inmissores tempestatum’. The last of these categories, ‘summoners of tempests’, was not mentioned in Constantine’s law at all – except by contrary implication, in the exemption from the threat of criminal prosecution of those who averted such storms. It is also noteworthy that this, and two other interpretationes from the same title, speak of the ‘invocation of demons’ – a phrase used nowhere in the original title of the Theodosian Code and reflecting a distinctly more everyday kind of Christianization than that pervasive in the fourth century.

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Chapter 16 (v) A particularly interesting case is C Th 2.8.19, issued at Rome by Theodosius in 389, a substantial law defining legal holidays. All days are defined as ‘iuridici’ except for the following: two months allowed for the mitigation of the summer heat and the harvest; the Kalends of January; the birthdays of Rome and Constantinople, ‘since it was in these places that the laws (iura) were born’; Easter Day and the seven days preceding and following; Sunday (‘dies solis’); the emperors’ birthdays and the beginnings of their imperium; ‘diebus, qui vel lucis auspicia vel ortus imperii protulerunt’. The interpretatio to this law offers variations relating both to the time and place of these legal holidays, and with a misunderstanding of the first point, where it claims that the law allowed four months for gathering harvests. On a plain reading, the law did not say this, the two months allowed for summer heat and for harvesting being the same and not separate periods. According to the interpretatio, the actual time allowed for legal holidays is to follow ‘the character of provinces’ and ‘the presence of landowners’; ‘pro provinciarum qualitate et pro praesentia dominorum’. Two periods of time are set out, from 24 June to 1 August for the harvest and from 23 August to 15 October for the vintage. The days between 1 and 23 August are allowed for the conduct of legal business. One can hardly imagine that situation for Rome, and it is obvious that the interpretation of this law is adapted to the conditions of southern Gaul, the general rule being varied, as the interpretatio says, to suit province and circumstance. As for the other holidays mentioned, the kalends of January and the birthdays of Rome and Constantinople are ignored – the former was regarded as a pagan holiday now superseded, while the birthdays of neither Rome nor Constantinople were of very much interest in early sixth-century Gaul. Sunday is allowed as a holiday, but has definitively evolved from ‘dies Solis’ in the original law into ‘dies dominicarum’ in the interpretatio, and it comes earlier in the sequence of holidays:26 the two weeks’ Easter holiday is maintained, while Christmas Day and Epiphany are added to the existing schedule of holidays, their regular observance having developed in the period since the original law. Finally, the birthday and the beginning of the emperor’s reign are retained, but the emperor has become a ‘princeps’ and his ‘imperium’ has become a ‘regnum’.27 Like some other changes mentioned above, this would allow the application of the rule to a Gothic king. It could be that legal holidays were a matter of special interest to the author of this interpretatio, one of the ‘prudentes’ or legal experts, whose role in preparing the Breviarium was mentioned earlier. It is still the case that the interpretatio has expressed change in various dimensions, regional,

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric political and cultural, between the conditions of the late fourth and those of the early sixth century. (vi) We saw earlier the law where, in deference to the Visigothic master of the authors of the Breviarium, ‘barbarian’ has become ‘enemy’ depredation and reference to ‘wicked factions’ is omitted (7.1.1). The same delicacy of touch, if we may call it that, is found also at 15.14.15, where the ‘disaster of barbarian devastation’ (‘clades barbaricae depopulationis’) of the original text is expressed in the interpretatio as ‘fear of the enemy’ (‘hostium terror’). On the other hand, Valentinian’s law against intermarriage between Romans and barbarians is retained in the Breviarium and even strengthened, with the expansion of the reference to cover barbarians ‘of any nation whatsoever’, ‘cuiuslibet gentis’ (3.14.1). The comment would suggest little intermarriage, or at least little support for it, between the Gothic and Roman populations under the Visigothic regime, a separation that might do much to explain Alaric’s endorsement of a code of Roman law for the use of the Romans in his kingdom.28 There are many such examples in the interpretationes, of words, formulas and comments that present significant differences from the original texts in question. Not all the differences will reflect the transition between the Roman and the post-Roman worlds. Some will reflect developments in the law itself and in enduring Roman institutions like the church, others the antiquarian interests of jurists; others, no doubt, their wishful thinking, not to mention errors and misunderstandings; others will be just haphazard and of no significance at all. But it seems clear that further consideration of the two issues discussed in this chapter – the selections and omissions made by the editors of the Breviarium, and the character of the interpretationes that they wrote – would continue to yield valuable historical evidence on this ‘shifting frontier’ between Roman and barbarian in the domain of Roman law. In general, the interpretationes fully bear out the alternative and perhaps better description of the Breviarium as ‘Lex Romana Visigothorum’. By the early sixth century the Roman empire has largely disappeared, but, however selective and simplified, this is still a handbook of Roman law. With the exception of intermarriage (which is prohibited) and the one or two other examples mentioned, where the editors seem to have evinced a certain tact in referring to barbarians, nothing within the texts gives any indication that there were Goths living anywhere around; it was clearly envisaged by the editors and by Alaric, as by the nobles and bishops who endorsed the Breviarium, that Roman law will continue to define relations among the Romans living in the Visigothic kingdom. There is nothing to

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Chapter 16 be found, as there is in the earlier Code of Euric, on relations between Romans and Goths, or between the Roman and any other system of law and courts, but that, and the relationship between the Code of Euric and the Breviarium, is another subject.29

Notes 1 For this and what follows as to the character of the Theodosian Code, see my Laying Down the Law, Chapter 5, ‘The Text of the Code’. 2 The interpretations have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. For an early treatment, C. Lécrivain, ‘Remarques sur l’Interpretatio de la “Lex Romana Visigothorum” ’, Annales du Midi 1889, pp. 145–82. For the Breviarium in general, Chapter 15 above. 3 Laying Down the Law, Chapter 5, at pp. 101–18. 4 Mommsen’s edition, pp. 185 and 189–90 and Prolegomena, pp. lxxxvi–vii. The laws in question are, in Mommsen’s edition, CTh 4.8.8; 4.10.2–3; 4.11.1–2; 4.12.1–3, 5–7. There is some doubt as to their exact location, and indeed as to the order of titles, in this part of the Theodosian Code; Laying Down the Law, pp. 110–14. 5 Tony Honoré, Law in the Crisis of Empire 379–455 AD: The Theodosian dynasty and its Quaestors (1998), pp. 249–51. The ‘Law of Citations’ is a much misunderstood text, but this is not the place to argue it; Laying Down the Law, pp. 24–6, 96–7. 6 C Th 1.1.5; ‘Ad similitudinem Gregoriani atque Hermogeniani codicis, cunctas colligi constitutiones decernimus, quos Constantinus inclitus et post eum divi principes nosque tulimus edictorum viribus aut sacra generalitate subnixas’, etc. 7 Mommsen, Prolegomena, pp. xxxii–xxxvii for the texts referred to here. For Timotheus, Anianus and Goiaricus, see PLRE, II, pp. 1121 (Timotheus 4), 90 (Anianus 1), 517 (Goiaricus), with Ralph Mathisen, ‘D’Aire-sur-l’Adour à Agde, Les Relations entre la loi séculière et la loi canonique à la fin du royaume de Toulouse’ in M. Rouche and B. Dumézil (edd.), Le Bréviaire d’Alaric: aux origines du Code civil (2008), pp. 41–52. For the Breviarium in general, J. Gaudemet, Le Bréviaire d’Alaric et les Epitome (Ius Romanum Medii Aevi I.2b; Milan, 1965). 8 Above, Chapter 13. 9 See the ‘Gesta Senatus de Theodosiano publicando’, §§1, 7, etc. and the law of 443 addressed to them (Mommsen, pp. 1–4); PLRE II, pp. 81–2 (Anastasius 14) and 731 (Martinus 5). 10 Mommsen, p. xxxii. ‘Explanatae’ is Mommsen’s necessary correction of the MSS ‘exemplatae’ or ‘explanari’. 11 Under the title De hereditatis petitione. For convenience, all references to the interpretationes are to Mommsen’s edition of the CTh text included in the Breviarium. 12 Where the Theodosian Code text regards ‘civitates’ and the ‘places’ of origin as different ways of saying the same thing, the interpretatio seems to distinguish them; ‘ad civitatis suae officia cum rebus suis vel ad loca, unde discesserunt, revocentur’ (the CTh phrase ‘loco originario’ has a different, more tendentious connotation). 13 The interpretatio to 9.29.2 (on harbouring ‘latrones’) similarly gives a more explicit description of differences of social rank; the phrase ‘pro qualitate personae’ is glossed

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Interpreting the interpretationes of the Breviarium of Alaric as ‘si ingenua et vilior persona est, si vero melior’, etc., where ‘ingenua et vilior’ means ‘free but of lower social rank’. 14 Cf. 12.1.55, 170; 10.3.2, etc. esp. 16.2.2 (interpretatio); ‘ab omni munere, id est ad omni officio omnique servitio’. See A. Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (1953), p. 702; ‘in the language of imperial constitutions servitium was used in the sense of any kind of service’. 15 CTh 1.27, two laws; not in the MSS of the Code or Breviarium but restored from other sources. A third text should be added from the Codex Justinianus (1.4.7). 16 Of these laws, 16.8.5 and 16.9.1 were edited in the Theodosian Code from the same original text. Of the four texts, only 16.9.1 carries a positive interpretatio; the others ‘do not need it’. 17 This law presents a complex situation, as can be seen from Mommsen’s apparatus to the text (pp. 884–5). Most MSS of the Breviarium deleted the part about the Manichees, with an interpretatio referring to the Novellae and the comment that the rest did not need interpretation. One MS (E ) reinstates the full text from the Theodosian Code. A reference to pagan ‘arae et templa’ is passed over rapidly in the first sentence of the law. 18 Laying Down the Law, p. 86. 19 Prolegomena, p. xxxv. For other examples, cf. 2.4.1, 6; 8.13.2; 9.39.3 (on calumniators). 3.13.2 refers (hesitantly) to Paul, as (with more confidence) does 3.16.2. 20 F. Wieacker, ‘Lateinische Kommentäre im Codex Theodosianus’, Symbolae Freiburgenses (1993), pp. 259ff.; W. E. Voss, Recht und Rhetorik in den Kaisergesetzen der Spätantike: Eine Untersuchung zum nachklassischen Kauf- und Übereignungsrecht (1982), pp. 43–50. 21 In similar fashion, the interpretatio to 3.2.1 begins with a definition of ‘commissoriae cautiones’, terminology which does not occur in the text of the selected law, but only in the title to which it belonged, ‘De commissoria rescindenda’. 22 In the distinction between the so-called ‘divided’ and ‘undivided’ legends. The former allowed room for a larger imperial portrait, the latter restricted the space for it. Some members of the late Roman public had evidently formed the impression that the larger size of imperial portrait added value to the coin. 23 The Codex Justinianus version of CTh 1.34.3 (CJ 1.51.8) adds the phrase ‘ex eodem officio’ after ‘sub fide gestorum’. There is a difference between this and the ‘choice of the citizens’. 24 The court was established in 376, in reaction to the trials of senators conducted under Valentinian; CTh 9.1.3, with Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, p. 66. 25 Cf. Pharr’s translation; ‘Christians, that is, by the priests’. 26 The version of the law in the Codex Justinianus (3.12.6) glosses the phrase ‘dies solis’; ‘quos dominicos rite dixere maiores’, as does CTh 8.8.3, of 386, together with its interpretatio (Brev. 8.3.1). 27 The old Roman phrase for the emperor, ‘dominus noster’, which is not actually used in C Th 2.8.19, has in the interpretatio a quite new sense, as in the birthday and epiphany of Christ. 28 For detailed discussion of this law, see H. S. Sivan, ‘Why not marry a barbarian? Marital frontiers in Late Antiquity (the example of CTh 3.14.1)’, in R. W. Mathisen, H. S. Sivan (edd.), Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (1996), pp. 136–45, where it is argued that Valentinian’s law concerned the events in north Africa narrated by

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Chapter 16 Ammianus Marcellinus (29.5). This seems to me doubtful, and in any case would not be known to the editors of the Breviarium. 29 Above, Chapter 15.

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17 MACSEN, MAXIMUS, CONSTANTINE For the historian of the Roman empire, the proclamation in Britain in 383 of its military commander, Magnus Maximus, and his subsequent reign in Gaul, Spain and Italy, are significant events. The rebellion is relatively well documented and is interesting in itself, both in a political and in a cultural and religious dimension (Maximus was the first emperor to order the execution of a heretic, even if the charge was a secular one), and as an example of something more widely relevant to the political structure of the Roman empire and its survival. At various times in the fourth century, as, more obviously, in the third, usurpation had met needs for local defence and financial and legal administration when the legitimate emperors were too distant and too harassed to attend to them. It is, therefore, a sort of diagnostic test of the natural divisions of the empire at times when these did not coincide with the ‘official’ ones (that is, those recognized by the formal distribution of powers that applied at the time). For on the side of the legitimate emperors, an overriding sense of the integrity of the imperial office had led to the determined suppression of usurpations, even to the apparent detriment of provincial communities which the usurpers, like the ‘Gallic emperors’ of the 260s and 270s, were better able to protect. Maximus established strong government over the regions under his control. Contemporary Gallic opinion seems favourable to his integrity of character and the rigour of his government – the more strikingly since Maximus met his downfall, in 388, at the hands of a legitimate emperor whom one would expect to have influenced the surviving sources against him.1 If, in all this, Maximus appears as a model of a wider phenomenon rather than a figure of consuming individual interest, he has a yet more farreaching reputation which is the product of a rather different aspect of his ambitions. In venturing his fortune on the Continent, Maximus, it was later believed, deprived Britain of its best fighting troops and exposed the province to the inroads of barbarian invaders. But there is not only this, one would have thought, rather negative achievement to consider. In the later tradition, Maximus is seen not only as the last Roman emperor to rule in Britain but, as David Dumville put it, ‘the first ruler of an independent

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Chapter 17 Britain, from whom all legitimate power flowed’.2 Through his role as precursor of post-Roman ‘successor states’ in the fifth and sixth centuries, and through the connections he was said to have forged with British ruling families, he is seen as the founder of the Celtic kingdoms of the west, and so as a seminal figure in the formation of the post-Roman world.3 It is in this light that Maximus is presented in the haunting Dream of Macsen Wledig. The central figure of this story is Macsen, emperor of Rome, who is sleeping on the banks of the Tiber while his companions go hunting, and dreams of a lovely maiden in a far-off castle, which he reaches over great mountains, plains, rivers and seas. On waking, he spares no effort in his sadness at her loss, until he can find her again and marry her. She is Elen, daughter of Eudaf, and the castle in which they live is at Caernarvon. Marrying Macsen, and naming for her maiden fee the whole island of Britain with the three adjacent islands, Elen sees to the building of great forts, at Carmarthen, Caerleon and the finest at Caernarvon itself, and to the construction of the Roman roads ‘from one stronghold to another across the island of Britain’. After seven years, Macsen’s absence in Britain costs him the imperial throne, so he sets off across the Channel to unseat the usurper who has seized it; this is achieved with the help of Elen and her brothers, Gadeon and Cynan, whose armies capture Rome and who subsequently embark on further wars of conquest. The supporters of Cynan settle in Brittany, taking wives from the women of the country but cutting out their tongues ‘lest their [own] language be corrupted’. Hence, it is said, the name of Brittany, Llydaw, ‘half-silent’: ‘because the women were silenced of their speech, and the men spoke on’. The Dream of Macsen Wledig is one of four ‘independent tales’ included in the Mabinogion, a collection of eleven stories preserved in two manuscripts of the fourteenth century, now in Aberystwyth and Oxford.4 The Dream bears no relation to the four stories of the hero Pryderi, the ‘four branches of the tale’ which are the core of the collection, nor to the three stories of King Arthur and his court that come last in it. It is unconnected also with the other three independent tales classified as such with it in the Mabinogion, and none of the other stories has anything to do with the Roman empire. The stories are consciously elaborated literary pieces, dating from not long before the earlier of their manuscript sources. A relatively late date of composition of the stories as a whole is implied by the Norman-French influences on the three tales at the end of the collection, with their world of high romance and chivalry. While these particular influences are not apparent in the Dream of Macsen, in the view of most critics this piece is not among the earliest in the collection. The tales, therefore, are not actual

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine examples of the oral traditions of story-telling which flourished in these centuries of the Celtic middle ages. But even as literary works, written in prose, they are evidently inexplicable without reference to this oral tradition. At the end of the Dream of Rhonabwy, a most strange and elaborate piece, with richly complex details of the colours of clothes, horses and heraldic emblems, appears a comment which, although it may be a gloss on the text, sums up very well the relation of the stories of the Mabinogion to an oral tradition: And here is the reason why no-one, neither bard nor storyteller, knows the Dream without a book – by reason of the number of colours that were on the horses, and all that variety of rare colours both on the arms and their trappings, and on the precious mantles, and the magic stones.

That is to say, even a bard or story-teller – a narrator in verse or prose – would need a book from which to tell the Dream of Rhonabwy, such was the variety of detail it contained. Otherwise, these practical considerations apart, it was precisely the sort of tale that one would expect to hear from the mouth of a bard or story-teller. The stories of the Mabinogion are elaborated, even learned literary versions of the sort of tales that were derived from an oral tradition. The legends of King Arthur are obvious examples of the same phenomenon. These stories were given literary form, greatly extended and popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in about 1136, but traces of them are found also in a well-documented tradition of oral legend. It has been maintained that the later medieval legends of King Arthur are entirely due to the influence of Geoffrey, but this view conflicts both with the earlier evidence for Celtic minstrels telling stories of Arthur which themselves influenced later French versions of the legend, and with the presence of Arthurian themes in literary sources long before the twelfth century.5 Two facets of the Dream of Macsen merit particular note. First, as mentioned earlier it is in subject-matter independent of the other stories of the Mabinogion. Its interpretation neither requires, nor is much helped by the introduction of parallel cases and external issues. Second, of all the stories in the Mabinogion, the Dream of Macsen is by far the most ‘historical’, in the sense that a central historical element, of which something is definitely known, survives within the accretions and embellishments of later times. The usurper Maximus is a much more definite historical figure than, say, King Arthur, and his story, as told in the Dream of Macsen, only makes sense in the particular narrative context in which it places him. Macsen, like the historical Maximus, is the man who comes to Britain and leaves it to seek his fortune. It is his arrival in and departure from Britain that are the

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Chapter 17 essential element in the Dream of Macsen, and there is not much else to be done with its central character.6 In turning now to the historical counterpart of the Dream of Macsen, I need only remark in introduction that in the relevant period, the late fourth century, the imperial office was collegiate, with separate court establishments in Gaul, Italy and the east; they were at Trier, Milan and Constantinople respectively. Magnus Maximus was a military officer from Spain, who first served in Britain under his then more famous compatriot, Count Theodosius, in suppressing the major invasion known, from Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of it (27.8.1ff.), as the ‘barbarian conspiracy’. This was in the later 360s.7 In the next few years, Maximus appears, again serving under Theodosius, in the wars against the African rebel Firmus, concluded successfully in 375. By 376, if a conjecture of mine is accepted, he had been promoted and transferred to the Danube frontier, playing an important but unedifying role in the great Gothic crossing of the river of that year.8 It was the disastrous culmination of the crossing, the battle of Hadrianople in 378, that brought to the eastern imperial throne in place of Valens, who was killed in the battle, the son of Maximus’ former commander; this was the Emperor Theodosius I, known as Theodosius the Great. None of this bears any relation to Macsen’s position in the Dream of Macsen, but the situation now improves. By 383, and probably a few years before this date, Maximus was again in Britain as dux or comes Britanniarum – whatever his title, as overall military commander of the provinces there.9 In the spring or early summer of that year he staged his proclamation against the emperor Gratian. Mobilizing the British armies, he crossed to the continent and disposed of Gratian near Lyons. Maximus set up his court at Trier, where he is known for his confrontations with bishop Ambrose, sent as envoy of the imperial court of Milan, and with Martin of Tours, and for his suppression, by criminal process, of the so-called ‘Priscillianist heresy’ that had gained some hold in southern Gaul and Spain.10 Maximus’ hopes that he would be recognized as a colleague by Theodosius were for a time realized. In 386 he was publicly acknowledged in the east. His consul was recognized by Theodosius, and portraits of Maximus were displayed at Alexandria during a visit there by Theodosius’ praetorian prefect. In 387, however, Maximus disturbed the diplomatic balance by crossing the Alps into Italy, deposing the young emperor Valentinian II and adding Italy to the prefecture of Gaul (including Britain and Spain) which he already controlled. So far – and, given the anachronism in their nomenclature, not inaccurately – the conquest of

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine ‘France, Burgundy and all the other countries as far as Rome’ mentioned in the Dream of Macsen. But the true story of Maximus does not end with a triumphant conquest of the city of Rome, with or without the British help described in the Dream. In fact, Maximus never went to Rome at all, though he controlled it for a short period from his capital at Milan. In response to the invasion of Italy, Theodosius brought his armies against Maximus, meeting him in battle near Aquileia. After two reverses, he was given up to Theodosius and executed (27 August 388). In the light of authentic history, not only the successful conquest of the city of Rome, but the British wife of Maximus and her warlord brothers recede into legend, or rather, as we shall see, into a mixture of legend and invention. Maximus had a son, Victor, whom he appointed to the rank of Caesar to bolster his regime, and who was executed with his father. A wife and daughter, their names not recorded, were allowed by Theodosius to live quietly in retirement.11 No more is heard of them, nor of the ‘brothers’ of his wife who, according to the Dream, assisted Macsen in his quest for the imperial throne and devoted themselves to the conquest of ‘lands and castles and cities’. There is obviously a wide gap between authentic late Roman history and the romance of the Dream of Macsen. To look first at the latter aspect, the romantic and other accretions to the story need little comment. The descriptions of the dress of Elen and her brothers, with their golden brooches and ornaments, white, black and gold brocaded silk robes and mantles, precious stones and pearls; the ship on which Macsen comes to Britain, with its ivory gangway and hull of gold and silver planks (‘as far as could be seen above water’, says the Dream, with a fine touch of scholarly scruple); the great castles standing at the mouths of rivers, the great hall at Caernarvon, with precious stones glittering in its walls, its roof and doors of gold – all this is expressive of the high romance of the middle ages rather than the sober realities of late Roman history. The court of Macsen at Rome, with his thirty-two vassal kings, the hunting expedition on which they go, the board game played by the brothers of Elen in the castle hall while their father carves pieces for it, are reminiscent of other tales in the Mabinogion and of the court of King Arthur described in them. The mysterious central theme of the Dream of Rhonabwy is such a game played between Arthur and Owein – this is the story for which the teller would need a book, because of the ‘number and variety of the colours of the horses, the arms and heraldic devices, and the magic stones’. The journey described in Macsen’s dream, retraced in waking life by his messengers and then by Macsen himself, is another of the story-teller’s

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Chapter 17 more self-conscious contributions, with its formulaically repeated references to the highest mountains, widest rivers, greatest fleet and biggest ships, the fairest island and grandest castle that man has ever seen. Memorable too are the evocations of the towering Alps, the wide plains and rivers of France, the coast of north Wales and of the island of Anglesey facing it. There is no special difficulty in accounting for such knowledge, in the twelfth or thirteenth century, of the lands between Rome and Anglesey; but it is skilful story-telling that can evoke the journey with such a lively visual sense, and induce the reader to think naturally of it as beginning at Rome and the Tiber and moving outwards to its farthest limit in north Wales. The story contains explanatory details, such as story-tellers like to incorporate: the naming of the fortress at Carmarthen, as if it were named after its building by a ‘myriad’ men rather than after Roman Maridunum; the derivation of Llydaw, the word for Brittany, from the words for ‘half’ and ‘silent’; the explanation of the building of the roads of Britain by Elen. In the tale of Lludd and Llefelys in the Mabinogion, the name of London, Roman Lundinium,12 is derived by a series of etymological shifts from the name of King Lludd, who built the walls and encouraged people to construct houses and live there. We should be wrong to be patronizing about these ideas (or to miss their humour). The physical remains of the Roman empire in Britain did leave something to explain. The walls of Carmarthen impressed Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century; still more the walls and other relics of Caerleon, the old legionary fortress, of which he gave an elaborate description.13 Deserted Roman roads, given such evocative names as ‘Devil’s Causeway’, forge their conspicuously direct way across open country beside hedgerows, or marked by lines of standing trees. They have left their trace on the names of hundreds of towns and villages near them – Stratford, Stratton, Stratfield, Stretton, and so on. What then of the sections of the Roman roads from Chester to Caerleon, from Caernarvon to the south, and from Neath to Brecon, still known as ‘Sarn Elen’ – ‘Elen’s Causeway’? 14 The colourful, romantic descriptions in the Dream of Macsen, the journey from Rome to Caernarvon, the aetiological details linked with a sense of the physical remains of Roman power – all these aspects provide material for the elaboration of the story of Macsen. But they do not explain it. In looking now at where the Dream of Macsen stands between historical fact and fiction, we enter a world not only of truth and invention, but also of historical confusion between similar episodes in the history of Roman Britain – occasions where the story seems to incorporate details

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine belonging not to the usurpation of Magnus Maximus, but to other known historical events. The scope for confusion even in the authentic history of late Roman Britain is considerable. Jerome described Britain in the early fifth century as a ‘province fertile in tyrants’, ‘Britannia fertilis provincia tyrannorum’ (Ep. 133.9).15 He was thinking of the sequence of proclamations which had in his own day produced first Marcus, then Gratian, then Constantine (known as Constantine III), the last of whom crossed in 407 to Gaul and, like Maximus a quarter of a century earlier, established his power there for a time before being suppressed.16 It is surely to this Constantine rather than to Maximus that we should ascribe the withdrawal of the Roman armies from Britain, leaving it defenceless against Picts, Scots and Saxons. A century earlier, another, more durable usurpation had taken place in Britain, in the city of York. This was the proclamation in 306 of Constantine I after the death there of his father Constantius. In a series of energetic civil wars beginning, as he himself later put it, ‘at the remote shores of the British ocean’,17 Constantine suppressed his rivals and from 324 until his death in 337 was sole emperor, ruling from his new capital at Constantinople.18 The possibilities of contamination from either or both of these Constantines to the story of Macsen are evident, especially when we consider the nomenclature of prominent individuals in the story. First, among the rivals suppressed by Constantine I in his rise to power were Maximianus, a former Augustus whom he eliminated in 309/10, and Maximian’s son Maxentius, defeated in 312 at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The name of the hero of the Dream of Macsen has often been noted as closer to that of Maxentius, defeated by Constantine near Rome, than to that of the usurper Maximus. Second, the name of the wife of Constantius and mother of Constantine I is, and was, well known. She was Helena, later famous as ‘St. Helena’ for her pious works, benefactions to churches, and the pilgrimage to the Holy Land during which she was supposed to have discovered the relics of the True Cross. Helena never, in fact, went to Britain, having been made to accept divorce from Constantius at the time of his elevation to the throne. She took the young Constantine off to the east, where she reappears only after her son’s successful claim for empire.19 Nevertheless, it seems clear that this Helena, the former wife of Constantius, was, by one route or another, Elen of the Dream of Macsen.20 We cannot ask how this came about, without introducing the real creative genius in this tale of historical deformation, Geoffrey of Monmouth.

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Chapter 17 Geoffrey brought out his History of the Kings of Britain in, or soon after, 1136. This exuberant book, an assemblage of fiction laced treacherously with the occasional authentic fact, began with the conquest of Britain and foundation of ‘New Troy’ at the site of London by King Brutus, the greatgrandson of Aeneas. ‘New Troy’ later becomes known as Kaerlud, and hence as London, after King Lud, in a version of the story also found in the Mabinogion (see above). The climax of Geoffrey’s achievement was the creation of the legend of King Arthur in the elaborate form in which it most directly influenced medieval romance. Between these two legendary extremes, on the relatively secure ground of the Roman empire of the late third and fourth centuries, Geoffrey concocts two episodes relevant to the Dream of Macsen. (1) Geoffrey begins, on the basis of a reference in Eutropius or some other Roman historian, by inventing a ‘King Asclepiodotus’, who seized power from the usurper Allectus (a historical figure) and was himself suppressed by a rebellion started by ‘Coel, duke of Kaercolim, that is to say Colchester’ (5.4–8).21 In response to the rebellion of Coel of Colchester, the senate at Rome sent out Constantius, a wise and respected senator who had already conquered Spain (so says Geoffrey). Rather than face Constantius in battle, Coel submitted to him, on condition that he himself retain the crown. Eight days later he died, upon which Constantius took the throne and married Coel’s daughter Helena, by whom he had a son, Constantine. After eleven years, Constantius died at York and Constantine succeeded him, before long accepting the invitation of ‘exiles’ to march on Rome and free the city from a tyrant, Maxentius. This last sentence is more or less historical, though the Roman exiles are a nice touch, and the story at once lapses again into fiction with the report that Constantine took with him three of Helena’s uncles, ‘Ioelinus’, ‘Trahern’, and ‘Marius’, whom he gets made senators of Rome. (2) Geoffrey’s second episode flows from the first, though with a certain chronological vagueness (5.9–16). In Constantine’s long absence the throne of Britain is seized by ‘Octavius, duke of the Gewissei (dux Gewisseorum)’. Octavius is first overcome by Constantine’s emissary, Trahern, but he then secures Trahern’s death in an ambush and successfully retains the throne until old age. He has a daughter (unnamed by Geoffrey), whom he debates whether to marry to Conanus Meridiadocus, his nephew, and declare him heir to the kingdom, or whether to choose a man from the nobility of Rome. He is advised to take the latter course and invites from Rome the senator Maximianus, a Briton on his father’s side, being the son of another of Constantine’s (to be consistent, Geoffrey should of course have said Helena’s) uncles. Resentful

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine at his exclusion from imperial power by the legitimate emperors Gratian and Valentinian, Maximianus accepts the invitation to come to Britain, marry Octavius’ daughter and succeed him. He has first to outwit Conanus Meridiadocus and defeat him in battle before joining him in alliance. Five years pass, and Maximianus becomes ambitious to acquire greater power. He raises an army in Britain and crosses, with Conan, to Gaul, defeating the Franks in Brittany and entrusting to Conan the rule of this ‘second Britain’. The episode ends with Maximianus establishing his court at Trier and Conan attempting, with little success in the outcome, to import British women to marry his troops in Brittany. Britain is attacked by ‘Scots and Norwegians, Dacians and Picts’, who find the island defenceless, deprived of its fighting men by Maximianus and Conan. The links between Geoffrey’s historical fantasy and the Dream of Macsen are clear enough. Geoffrey’s ‘Octavius duke of the Gewissei’ is Eudaf in the Dream, the old man carving pieces for the board game, and Conanus Meridiadocus is Cynan, one of the youths playing the game with his father in the great hall. The ‘senator Maximianus’ who comes to Britain and marries Octavius’ daughter is Macsen, and the conquest of Brittany by Conanus Meridiadocus is the same as the episode recorded at the end of the Dream of Macsen. On the other hand, there are substantial differences. Cynan in the Dream is the son, not the nephew, of Eudaf, and he has a brother, Gadeon, who does not occur in Geoffrey (though he is mentioned in several Welsh genealogies).22 When Macsen comes to Britain he meets no opposition from Cynan, nor does he have to assert himself over him. Macsen is already emperor of Rome and not a ‘senator’ resentful at his exclusion from power. His name and that of ‘Maximianus’ are not quite the same, and the circumstances of Macsen’s and Cynan’s conquest of Brittany are unlike those described by Geoffrey. It remains to explain how Eudaf’s daughter in the Dream acquired the name Elen, given by Geoffrey to the daughter of Coel of Colchester, but it should be emphasised that she and her name are an integral part of the story and are not artificially imposed on it. Her name explains why the Roman roads of Wales are called ‘Elen’s Causeway’, and this is as organic a part of the story as are the narrative details. It begins to look as if some of the divergences may have originated in the time before Geoffrey of Monmouth put the finishing touches to them. For the moralist and historian Gildas, writing in the mid-sixth century, the significance of Maximus was that he had been proclaimed emperor, as one of the vicious crop of usurpers, or ‘tyrants’, responsible for the ruin of Roman Britain (De Excidio 13f.). In taking away the army of the province

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Chapter 17 to support his continental designs, Maximus left the island open to the attacks of the Picts, Scots and Saxons who overran it.23 For whatever reason, he omitted to mention the usurper Constantine III (see above), whose role in the abandonment of Britain by the Romans most modern historians would take as more decisive than that of Maximus.24 Gildas further ascribed the building of the Roman walls of northern Britain, the walls of Hadrian and Antoninus, to the responses of the Roman government to successive British appeals for help (De Excidio 15–18).25 The Antonine Wall, according to Gildas, was built first, and was made of turf because its construction was left to the inhabitants of Britain to do themselves. The wall of Hadrian was constructed later in stone by the Roman army, in response to a second appeal for help. There is no need to rationalise this claim by asking whether either of these famous defences was rebuilt or repaired, nor whether the area between the two walls might have been re-occupied, at this time.26 Gildas is simply trying to accommodate these decayed but still imposing monuments of Roman rule to his own (mis)understanding of the end of Roman Britain. A further contribution is offered by the later compilation of historical and genealogical material known, for convenience, as the Historia Brittonum transmitted under the name of Nennius. Nennius produces a list of seven Roman emperors who held power in Britain.27 The first four, presenting us with no difficulty, are Julius Caesar, Claudius, Septimius Severus, and ‘Karitius’, by whom is no doubt meant the usurper Carausius, a fully historical figure (Hist. Britt. 20–24).28 The fifth is ‘Constantine, son of Constantine the Great’ (ibid. 25). It is not clear what Nennius thought he meant by this; what he should have written, to be accurate, was either ‘Constantius, father of Constantine the Great’ or ‘Constans, son of Constantine the Great’, but in saying this one only points out how easy it was to be genuinely confused in dealing with the more repetitive aspects of Roman imperial nomenclature. The sixth and seventh emperors (26–27) are Maximus, in whose time flourished St. Martin of Tours, and ‘Maximianus, who crossed over from Britain with all the soldiers of the Britons and killed Gratian, king of the Romans’: ‘et occidit Gratianum regem Romanorum’. This is the first appearance of ‘Maximianus’, the ‘Roman senator’ invited to Britain in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history to marry the daughter of Octavius. He is, of course, identical with Maximus, Nennius’s sixth emperor. In fact, Nennius adds a postscript to this section in which he declares that he will say more about this ‘Maximianus’, but he proceeds to write, from a standard source (the Chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine) about Maximus, whom he now calls by his correct name (Hist. Britt. 29).

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine Maximus is said by Nennius, as by Gildas, to have crossed from Britain with all the armies of the province. Still more directly relevant to the Dream of Macsen as well as to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he refused to allow his soldiers to return to Britain, giving them instead lands to possess in Brittany. ‘These’, wrote Nennius, ‘are the Britons of Armorica and they have never returned to the present day’; and this was why Britain was occupied by foreign peoples (Hist. Britt. 27). In a thirteenth-century manuscript of Nennius in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a reader’s note on this passage, giving the same explanation of the name of Brittany as that found at the end of the Dream of Macsen. The occupying soldiers took wives from the women of Armorica but cut out their tongues, ‘lest their descendants should learn the language of their mothers, and this is why we in our language call them “Letewicion”, that is, half-silent’.29 Either the reader of Nennius who added this note knew the Dream of Macsen, or else the explanation, which is not in Geoffrey of Monmouth, was also known from other sources. Gildas and Nennius, in assigning to Maximus responsibility for the abandonment of Britain by the Roman armies, offer an implicitly – indeed, in Gildas’ case, explicitly – hostile view of the usurper. A different perspective emerges from a fascinating, but very difficult, body of evidence which can only be hesitantly sketched here, that of the early Welsh genealogies.30 In a river valley near Llangollen in Denbighshire, just 400 metres from the thirteenth-century Cistercian foundation of Valle Crucis, stands on an ancient barrow the much damaged but still quite imposing monument from which the monastery derived its name.31 The monument, a standing column originally surmounted by a cross, carried an honorific Latin inscription of which hardly anything is now legible, but of which transcribed texts exist in manuscript versions of the seventeenth century in the National Library of Wales and in the British Library (Harleian 3780, fol. 95). It is from these transcribed texts, especially the Harleian manuscript, that the inscription can be interpreted.32 It was set up by a great-grandson of Eliseg, an early Welsh king, probably of the eighth century, who in a war lasting (according to one restoration of the text) for nine years recovered Powys from the Anglo-Saxons. The family of Eliseg is traced back in the inscription to ‘Britu, son of Vortigern’ by the latter’s marriage to ‘Sevira, the daughter of Maximus the king, who killed the king of the Romans’: ‘filia Maximi regis, qui occidit regem Romanorum’.33 The last phrase directly recalls the expression used of his tyrant ‘Maximianus’ by Nennius. What is interesting is that the historical Maximus has been ‘annexed’ as founder of a line of Welsh dynasts of the post-

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Chapter 17 Roman period, a position in which he is placed, with variations, by other genealogical sources. In another British Library manuscript (Harleian 3859) of about 1100, also containing the Historia Brittonum and the Annales Cambriae, are several genealogical tables, compiled in the middle of the tenth century and certainly before 988, since they reflect the dynastic claims of a king who died then. In the second of these tables, the line is traced back on the maternal side to ‘Dimet [sc. Domitius?] son of Maxim guletic’ – an earlier form of wledig.34 The fourth of the genealogies runs back through the paternal line of the same family to Anthun (sc. Antonius) son of Maxim guletic, ‘qui occidit Gratianum regem Romanorum’; another echo of Nennius and the inscription of Eliseg.35 This is, of course, fiction with a political purpose, to authenticate the claims of medieval dynasties. But it is interesting that this is done by tracing the line back to Maximus as a representative of Roman power, and with this in mind we return to the second of the genealogies in the British Library manuscript. The line of descent of Maximus himself is here taken further back, by entirely fictitious stages and a seriously excessive number of generations, to ‘Constans, son of Constantine the Great, son of Constantius and Helena Luicdauc [“Leader of the Hosts”], who went out from Britain to Jerusalem to find the cross of Christ, and took it with her from there(?) to Jerusalem, where it still is to the present day’. Maximus is now linked with the family of Constantine the Great, and the name of Helena has come into the reckoning. To suggest how this develops in relation to the Dream of Macsen, we need to know something about Helena and the growth of her reputation in the west. The reputation of Helena was a product of that of her son, the first Roman emperor to profess Christianity and a lavish benefactor of churches, who died a baptised Christian and was buried as a sort of thirteenth apostle in a mausoleum at Constantinople containing memorials of the twelve.36 It is certain as a matter of history that his mother never visited Britain. As mentioned above, she had been made to accept separation from her husband Constantius when he was raised to imperial status, and went with the young Constantine to Diocletian’s court in the east. It was from there that Constantine struck out in 305 to join his father in Britain, to be proclaimed at York in the following year. Helena owes her re-emergence to Constantine’s successful usurpation and conversion to Christianity, the high point of her career (though undertaken in unhappy family circumstances) being her pilgrimage to the Holy Land shortly before 330. There she founded churches and was claimed by later fourth-century sources to have discovered the True Cross – an appropriate complement

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine to the discovery, at her son’s instance, of the Holy Sepulchre, the focal point of the great new basilica which he ordered to be built at Jerusalem.37 Helena was remembered in later times for her supposed (but inauthentic) role in the conversion of her son to Christianity, for her benefactions to churches at Rome, Trier, and in the Holy Land, for her part in the discovery of the True Cross, above all for the simple fact that she was the mother of the first Christian emperor. By the mid-ninth century a Life of St. Helena, composed by Altmann, a monk of Hautvillers near Rheims, located her birth at Trier, where Constantine had in fact held court for several years.38 From there, her cult spread to other centres in the Rhineland and further afield. In Altmann’s Life, Helena is praised for her parentage of Constantine and for the Invention of the Cross. It is, however, Constantine who receives the greater emphasis, partly, no doubt, because of the political and ideological circumstances of the Carolingian revival. For all the inauthentic details of her birth and activities, which are startlingly at odds with what is known of her actual origin and background,39 Altmann’s Helena remains a historical figure, in the sense that her actual identity is not changed. Her role as the daughter of Coel of Colchester, married in Britain to Constantius the father of Constantine, appears first in a work composed in 1129, shortly before the appearance of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History.40 Yet, however abrupt the development may seem, there is a background to it in the commemoration of St. Helena in cults at London, Abingdon ( by the tenth century) and York, where, as well-known sources such as Jerome’s and Bede’s Chronicles attested, Constantius had died.41 There is no need to suppose that the appearance of Helena as Coel’s daughter was in any direct sense a reflection of the expansion of her cult in Britain, or of her role as discoverer of the True Cross. Her role as Coel’s daughter involves neither of these aspects. The dominant feature of the continental versions of her legend is the fact of her connection with Constantine, and it was this connection that provided the basis for the location of her birth at Trier and, later, in Britain, from where Constantine had sought the throne. What remains to be explained is the transformation of Helena, daughter of Coel, marrying Constantius at London, into Elen daughter of Eudaf, marrying Macsen at Caernarvon. What seems to have happened is that the story of Coel, Helena and Constantius has been transposed to a context in which the reputation of Maximus was strong enough to hold its own against the intruders. Part of the explanation of this lies in the strength of the politically-motivated dynastic sentiment which had already ‘annexed’ Maximus as the founder

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Chapter 17 of Welsh royal dynasties of the early medieval period. One more item of evidence may further indicate how the transposition could take place. Nennius wrote of the fifth of his Romans who held power in Britain, whom as we saw he confusedly calls ‘Constantine, son of Constantine the Great’, that he died in Britain, and that his tomb was shown outside the city called Cair Segeint, as letters on the grave bore witness (Hist. Britt. 25).42 Constantine had sowed three ‘seeds’, of gold, silver and brass, on the pavement of this city, ‘so that no poor man should ever live there’. Cair Segeint is Roman Segontium, later Caernarvon. No doubt a Latin inscription could be seen there, a milestone perhaps,43 or the funerary monument of a Constantine popularly identified as a son of Constantine the Great. The ‘seeds’ of gold, silver and brass will have been Roman coins found in the ruins of this town, where ‘no poor man had dwelt’. We are in the world of the Anglo-Saxon author of the poem called The Ruin, evoking the impact of the remains of a long-dead Roman city, where once A host of heroes, glorious, gold adorned... Shone in their armour, gazed on gems and treasure, On silver, riches, wealth and jewellery, On this bright city with its wide domains.44

If there was at Caernarvon a medieval tradition associated with Constantine as well as with Maximus, it becomes easier to understand how the two became conflated, as has happened in the Dream of Macsen. As we saw, one of the British Library genealogies of the tenth century had already linked Maximus with the family of Constantine. The Dream of Macsen may thus represent an absorption by the story of the usurper Maximus, of features properly belonging to the legend of Constantine the Great and Helena. The name of Macsen’s bride, Elen, and her nickname ‘Leader of the Hosts’ clearly come from this source. Yet Maximus has been strong enough to resist complete dissolution in the legend of Constantine. His story in the Dream preserves the essential features of his role as the British Roman emperor who took his forces to the continent to suppress the legitimate emperor and was there instrumental in the settlement of Brittany as a ‘second Britain’ in Armorica. The strength of Maximus’ reputation is reflected, again, in his earlier presence in royal genealogical traditions. It remains to ask what the late Roman historian is to make of all this. An adventurous view might suggest that the story of Macsen’s journey to Caernarvon and marriage there point to a historical connection of Magnus Maximus with Roman Segontium and its region. Perhaps he lived there for some time (though this is unlikely) as commander of the armies of

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine Britain, entered into diplomatic relations with local dynasties, acquired local influence – as other usurpers can be shown to have done – or was even proclaimed there. Such a view might, with C. E. Stevens, invoke the presence in the Illyrian field army of the early fifth century of an infantry unit named ‘Seguntienses’. Were they part of the army taken to the continent by Maximus, transferred later to Illyricum after his defeat by Theodosius? 45 But there are other possible contexts in the late fourth and early fifth centuries for the transfer of troops from Caernarvon to Illyricum, if indeed that is what ‘Seguntienses’ implies, and a more cautious and general interpretation of the Dream of Macsen is, in my view, preferable. The story, like the medieval genealogies and the other sources surveyed in this chapter, is an expression of the surviving memory of the Roman empire, put to political use by Celtic dynasties in the west, in an age of domination of the old province of Britain by Anglo-Saxons. Taken with the other evidence, from Gildas on, it shows the vivid impression made upon these peoples by the physical remains of the Roman empire, in the great walls, roads and ruined cities that could everywhere be seen, with inscriptions to be read and coins to be picked up in their now desolate streets. Notes 1 For the favourable view, Sulpicius Severus, Dialogus II.6.2, ‘vir omni vita merito praedicandus’, and III.11.2; 11, ‘multis bonisque actibus praeditus’, etc.; Orosius, Historia adversus Paganos, 7.34.9; cf. J. Fontaine, Vie de Saint Martin (SChr 133–5, 1967–9), III, p. 921. The hostile ‘official’ view, Pacatus, Panegyricus Theodosio dictus, ed. E. Galletier, Budé 1955, vol. III; with translation and notes by C. E. V. Nixon, in Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini (1994), pp. 437ff. 2 David N. Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain: history and legend’, History, n.s. 62 (1977), pp. 173–92, at p. 180. 3 This chapter first appeared as an invited commemoration of the sixteenhundredth anniversary of the usurpation of Maximus. In writing it, I was lent by my colleague Kenneth Morgan a pamphlet (in Welsh and English) by the Welsh Nationalist MP of that time, Gwynfor Evans, Magnus Maximus and the Birth of Wales the Nation (Swansea, 1983) – the perspective of the story converging with a certain paradox on the age of Roman occupation, seen across centuries of foreign domination, as the genesis of a national identity. My interest in the Dream of Macsen as a possible historical source had been stirred by C. E. Stevens, ‘Magnus Maximus in British history’, Etudes Celtiques, 3 (1938), pp. 86–94. 4 Edited by Ifor Williams, Breuddwyd Maxen (3rd ed., 1928); and translated with introduction by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, The Mabinogion (2nd ed., 1974). 5 Thomas Jones, ‘The early evolution of the legend of Arthur’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 8 (1964), pp. 3–21.

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Chapter 17 6

I am not altogether convinced, if I understand it, by Dumville’s suggestion, op. cit. at p. 181, that ‘Maximus is arguably the literary source of inspiration for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur, who does such great – but ultimately unsuccessful – deeds as a British emperor on the Continent’. 7 In 367–68, as argued by R. Tomlin, ‘The date of the “Barbarian Conspiracy”’, Britannia 5 (1974), pp. 303–9. 8 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 95ff.; accepted by A. R. Birley, The Fasti of Roman Britain (1981), pp. 349ff. 9 Dux Britanniarum is probably the better title; Birley, p. 350. 10 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, Chap. VII ( pp. 173–82) and IX (pp. 223–5), gives a summary account of the rebellion and regime of Maximus. On the Priscillianists, ibid. pp. 161–8 and Henry Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila: The occult and the charismatic in the early Church (1976). 11 Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, pp. 224f.; PLRE I, p. 588 (Maximus 39). 12 Read for the more usual and correct form, Londinium. In any case the word formation is of Celtic origin, ‘-dun-’ for a town or settlement, as in Lugdunum for Lyon, Camulodunum for Colchester or (see next n.) Maridunum for Carmarthen. 13 Giraldus Cambrensis, Itinerarium Kambriae, 1.10, on Carmarthen; ‘urbs antiqua, coctilibus muris, partim adhuc extantibus, egregie clausa’ (ed. J. F. Dimock, Rolls Series 21.6, p. 80); on Caerleon, ibid., p. 55, ‘a Romanis olim coctilibus muris egregie constructa’, with much further detail on individual buildings. The element ‘Caer-’ (‘fort’, ‘castle’) in Welsh place-names is equivalent to Old English ‘ceaster’, ‘cæster’, etc., yielding names in ‘-cester’, ‘-chester’. Caerleon is ‘fort of the Legion (sc. II Augusta)’, Carmarthen is ‘fort at Maridunum’ (the Roman name of the town), Caernavon is ‘fort on the river’, ‘avon’ (or ‘afon’), ‘river’, being a common element in place-names in western Britain. 14 J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest (3rd ed., 1939), I, pp. 74, 78ff. The names, known to Gibson, editor in 1695 of Camden’s Britannia, need not in themselves be very ancient. A three-mile stretch of the road in Ffestiniog parish was in 1806 called ‘Devil’s Causeway’; see Gough’s edition of Camden, III, 176. 15 Jerome is writing in the general context of the views of the third-century Platonist philosopher Porphyry, but is evidently using this phrase of the circumstances of his own day. It may not be used for the dating of Porphyry’s works, as attempted by T. D. Barnes, JTS n.s. 24 (1973), pp. 435–37. 16 C. E. Stevens, ‘Marcus, Gratian, Constantine’, Athenaeum, 35 (1957), pp. 316–47. 17 The phrase is cited from a letter of Constantine to the provincials of Palestine in Eusebius, Vita Constantini 2.28; authenticated by a contemporary papyrus, see above, Chapter 3 n. 17. 18 For historical details, see Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (1981). 19 As indicated by the Greek historian Praxagoras, in Müller, FHG IV, p. 2; Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum 18.10. 20 In saying this, I differ from writers – e.g. John J. Parry, Speculum 13 (1938), pp. 271–7; Rachel Bromwich, in N. K. Chadwick and others, Studies in Early British History (1954), pp. 93, 107–9 – who regard the two Helens as conflations of distinct, even if partly mythological, characters. My own view, argued below, is the converse of this; that we have one Helena, duplicated by being transferred from one context to another.

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Macsen, Maximus, Constantine 21

On the historical figures, see PLRE I , pp. 115ff. (Asclepiodotus 3); see esp. Jerome, Chron. s.a. 300, Eutropius 9.22. For Allectus; PLRE I, p. 45, and P. J. Casey, Carausius and Allectus: The British usurpers (1994). I have used the Latin text of Jacob Hammer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae: A variant version edited from manuscripts (1951), pp. 89–103. At 5.4, Ms H has ‘Kaercolis, id est Kolocestriae’ (p. 89; above, n. 12). 22 Thomas O’Sullivan, The ‘De Excidio’ of Gildas: Its authenticity and date (1978), pp. 93f. One genealogy (Peter C. Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts [1966], p. 45, No. 12) gives Gadeon and Cynan as father and son, which might be emended to make them brothers, as in the Dream of Macsen. The chronology, working back from the latesixth to the late-fourth century, is at least compatible with their possibly having existed in the time of Maximus (O’Sullivan, p. 94). 23 Mommsen, MGH, auct. ant. 13 (1898), pp. 32–33; or in the excellent and accessible edition of Michael Winterbottom, Arthurian Period Sources, 1 (London and Chichester, 1978), pp. 20–21 and 93. 24 On the reasons for Gildas’s omission, see M. Miller, ‘Bede’s use of Gildas’, English Historical Review 90 (1975), pp. 241–61; Dumville, loc. cit., p. 180. 25 Mommsen, pp. 33–35; Winterbottom, pp. 21–23, 93–94. 26 M. Miller, ‘Stilicho’s Pictish war’, Britannia 6 (1975), p. 145 with n. 21. It must be emphasized that there is no archaeological evidence for any re-occupation of the area north of Hadrian’s Wall at this time. 27 Historia Brittonum 20–29; ed. Mommsen (above, n. 23), pp. 162–67, and John Morris, Arthurian Period Sources 8 (1980), pp. 23–25, 64–66. 28 See P. J. Casey’s Carausius and Allectus (above, n. 21). 29 As printed in Mommsen’s ed., p. 167, n. 1: ‘unde et nos illos vocamus in nostra lingua Letewicion, id est semitacentes, quoniam confuse loquuntur’. ‘Letewicion’ is supposed to yield Llydaw, ‘half-silent’, on which see Gwyn Jones, Thomas Jones, The Mabinogion, p. 88. 30 Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (above, n. 21) helps to make this material accessible to a non-specialist, but it remains very difficult; see also his Welsh Genealogies, AD 300–1400 (8 vols., 1974). 31 See now the excellent and very full treatment by Nancy Edwards, ‘Rethinking the pillar of Eliseg’, The Antiquaries Journal 89 (2009), pp. 143–77, in the light of which I have rewritten what I had to say on the subject in 1983. 32 Bartrum, pp. 1–3; Edwards, pp. 155ff. with photographs of the transcriptions at figs. 10–12. 33 Edwards, pp. 165f.; the claim of descent from Vortigern and his marriage to ‘Sevira’ was taken much too seriously by John H. Ward, ‘Vortigern and the end of Roman Britain’, Britannia 3 (1972), 279ff. – postulating from the Welsh sources two wives for Maximus, more than one daughter and a number of sons. Contrast Dumville (n. 2 above), pp. 186ff. 34 Bartrum, pp. 9ff. 35 Bartrum, p. 10. 36 Eusebius, Vita Constantini 4.70; on the mausoleum, C. Mango, ‘Constantine’s Mausoleum and the translation of relics’; above, Chapter 8 n. 55. 37 See esp. E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460 (1982), Chap. 2: ‘Constantine and the Holy Land (ii); Helena – history and legend’.

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Chapter 17 The connection of Helena with the discovery of the True Cross first appears in the late fourth century and is nowhere even hinted at in contemporary sources. For the buildings, see Hunt, Chap. 1; John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (1971), pp. 36–53, and Chapter 8 above. 38 Acta Sanctorum, August, III, pp. 580–99. See esp. Amnon Linder, ‘The myth of Constantine the Great in the West’, Studi Medievali 16 (1975), at pp. 78–93. 39 Constantine was born at Naissus, and his mother, perhaps from Drepanum in Bithynia, is said to have been the daughter of an innkeeper – possibly an exaggeration of her admittedly humble status; PLRE I, pp. 410f. (Helena 3). 40 Winifred J. Mulligan, ‘The British Constantine: an English [sic] historical legend’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978), pp. 261ff.; Linder, op cit. pp. 91ff. 41 Linder, pp. 92ff. 42 C. E. Stevens, Etudes Celtiques 3 (1938), p. 88, n. 2. 43 Mommsen, p. 166; Morris, pp. 24, 65. See R. S. Loomis, ‘Segontium, Caer Seint and Sinadon’ in Wales and the Arthurian Legend (1956), pp. 1–18; Speculum 22 (1947), pp. 529–33. 44 Richard Hamer, A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (1970), pp. 28ff. 45 Notitia Dignitatum, Occ. 5.65, 213; 7.49; C. E. Stevens, ‘The British sections of the Notitia Dignitatum’, Archaeological Journal 97 (1940), pp. 133–35.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY It was once said to me, very wisely, that a printed bibliography should be ‘a guide to the book, not to the subject’, excellent advice which is still more pertinent to a collection of essays on various topics, even if they are related to each other, than to a book on a single theme. In what follows I simply gather together the books and articles that are directly referred to in the preceding chapters, adding publication details that are not given in the notes. I exclude standard works of reference, some of which, together with editions of certain particularly important texts, may be found in the Abbreviations at the beginning of this book.

Alföldi, A., A Conflict of Ideas in the Late Roman Empire: The clash between the Senate and Valentinian I (Oxford, 1952). Allen, Joel, Hostages and Hostage-Taking in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2006). Amelotti, M., Il Testamento Romano attraversi la prassi documentale (Florence, 1966). Arjava, Antti, Women and Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1996). Arnheim, M., The Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford, 1972). Aronen, J., artt. ‘Loricata’, Lexikon Topographicum Urbis Romae III (Rome, 1996), p. 191 and ‘Statua loricata divi Iulii’, ibid. IV (Rome, 1999), pp. 362–3. Ashburner, W., ‘The Farmer’s Law’, JHS 30 (1910), pp. 85–108. Auerbach, E., Mimesis: The representation of reality in Western literature (Princeton, NJ, 1953; repr. 1968). Aymard, A., ‘Les ôtages carthaginois à la fin de la deuxième guerre punique’, Pallas 1 (1953), pp. 44–66 [= Etudes d’histoire ancienne (Paris, 1967), pp. 436–50]. ––––, ‘Les ôtages barbares au début de l’empire’, JRS 51 (1961), pp. 136–42 [= Etudes d’histoire ancienne, pp. 451–60]. Barnes, T.D., The Sources of the Historia Augusta (Coll. Latomus 155; Brussels, 1978). ––––, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1981). –––– , The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982). –––– , Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and politics in the Constantinian empire (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), ––––, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1998). ––––, ‘Porphyry Against the Christians: date and the attribution of fragments’, JTS, n.s. 24 (1973), pp. 424–42. ––––, ‘Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius’, AJP 96 (1975), pp. 173–86. Barrow, R. H., Prefect and Emperor: The Relationes of Symmachus, A.D. 384 (Oxford, 1973). Bartrum, Peter C. (ed.), Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (Cardiff, 1966). Bassett, Sarah, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (Cambridge, 2004). Béranger, J., Recherches sur l’aspect idéologique du principat (Basel, 1953).

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Roman Perspectives Berger, A., An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia, Pa., 1953, repr. 1968). Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history (London, 1953, reprinted). Bianchi Bandinelli, R., Rome, the Late Empire; Roman Art, AD 200–400 (London, 1971). Birley, Anthony R., The Fasti of Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981). ––––, ‘The life and death of Cornelius Tacitus’, Historia 49 (2000), pp. 230–46. ––––, see also Syme, R., Roman Papers. Bloch, H., ‘A new document of the last pagan revival in the west, 393–394 AD ’, Harvard Theological Review 38 (1945), pp. 199–244. ––––, ‘The pagan revival in the west at the end of the fourth century’, in The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (ed. A. Momigliano, Oxford, 1963), pp. 193–218. Blockley, R. C., The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius,Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus (2 vols., Liverpool, 1983). Boissier, G., La Fin du paganisme (3rd ed., Paris, 1898), II, pp. 155–201, cf. Journal des Savants (1888), pp. 402–10, 597–609, 712–26. Bonney, R. J., ‘A new friend for Symmachus?’, Historia 24 (1975), pp. 357–74. Bowder, Diana, The Age of Constantine and Julian (London, 1978). Bowersock, G. W., ‘Gibbon on civil war and rebellion in the decline of the Roman Empire’, in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 3, 1976), pp. 63–71. Bradley, Keith R., ‘Wet-nursing at Rome: a study in social relations’, in Beryl Rawson (ed.), The Family in Ancient Rome: New perspectives (London and Sydney, 1986), pp. 201–29. Brasiello, U., La Repressione penale in diritto romano (Naples, 1937). Brown, Peter (P. R. L.), Augustine of Hippo (London, 1967). ––––, The Making of Late Antiquity (Harvard, Mass., and London, 1978). ––––, The Body and Society; Men, women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (New York, 1988; London, 1989). –––– , ‘Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman aristocracy’, JRS 51 (1961), pp. 1–11 [repr. with further annotation in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London, 1972), pp. 161–82]. ––––, ‘The patrons of Pelagius: the Roman aristocracy between East and West’, JTS, n.s. 26 (1970) pp. 56–72 [repr. in Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, pp. 208–26]. Brunt, P. A., ‘Stoicism and the Principate’, Papers of the British School at Rome n.s. 30 (1975), pp. 7–35. ––––, ‘Lex de Imperio Vespasiani’, JRS 67 (1977), pp. 95–116. ––––, ‘Evidence given under torture in the Principate’, ZSS 97 (1980), Rom. Abt., pp. 256–65. Bury, J. B., Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (edited in seven volumes, London, 1900). Calderini, A., Aquileia romana (Milan, 1930). Callu, J.-P., Symmaque: Lettres, ed. Budé (4 vols., Paris, 1972–2002). ––––, ‘La préfecture de Nicomaque Flavien’, Mél. Seston (Paris, 1974), pp. 72–80. –––– , ‘Le jardin des supplices au Bas-Empire’, in Du Châtiment dans la cité; supplices

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INDEX The Index contains substantive references to people and places, a very select number of modern scholars, and some of the more general themes that are discussed. It does not cover the texts, translation and commentary that appear in Chapters 4 and 6. Page references should be taken to include the corresponding endnotes, though attention is individually drawn to a few notes where something is said that is not directly indicated in the main text. Forms of Roman names are entered as they are used in the argument or as they are most likely to be sought, rather than in what may be technically the most correct form. The phrase ‘and passim’ refers only to the chapter in which the reference occurs. acclamations, at Rome 205f., 225f., 251 Achaeans, hostages in Italy 168 Adoure-sur-Aire (Aduris), Visigothic court at 347 Aedesius, companion of Meropius of Tyre 171 Aelia Capitolina, see Jerusalem Africa, proconsulship of 227f. senatorial estates in 231 Symmachus and 227f., 236, 240 Agenarichus, also Serapio, Alamannic prince, hostage with Romans 166f. Agricola, Cn. Julius, father-in-law of Tacitus, see Julius Agrippina, mother of Nero 93f. Alamanni 166f., 229 Alan of Lille, on style of Symmachus 220 Alaric (1), Visigothic leader 3, 11; sack of Rome 328 Alaric II (2), Visigothic king, Breviarium of 329, 332–5, 343f. commonitorium of 346f. Alcantara, Lusitania, bridge at 12 Alexander the Great, birthplace at Pella 89 in India 159f., 162 Alfenus Varus, P., jurist 296 Alypius, friend of Augustine 275, 276f., 279 Alypius, Faltonius Probus, praefectus urbi 391, and Symmachus 253 n. 173 Ambrose, bishop of Milan and Symmachus 236f., 241 and Augustine 277f. and Altar of Victory 255f. episcopal jurisdiction of 237 monastery near Milan 280 and basilica Portiana 277 and Gervasius and Protasius 277 on fig-trees 278 ‘amicitia’, conventions and necessities of, in Symmachus’ letters 217–20, 233f., 237 ‘inimicitia’ 238–42 Ammianus Marcellinus, historian and Antioch 202 and Libanius 201

relations with Ursicinus 317f. travels 202 composition of history 201 and Latin language 202f. and Eunapius 203 at Rome 201, 204, 256 on expulsion of visitors 204, 256 on prefects of Rome 206 digressions on Rome 11, 204–6, 225 on Praetextatus 257f. on Petronius Probus 260, 261f. on the emperors 41, 207–9 on Julian 9, 202f., 209 on Valens 182 on administration of justice 311 on civil law 312–15 on criminal law 316–9, 322f. on torture 318, 322f. attitude to Christianity 52f., 209–12 on bishops of Rome 211f., 271 on bishop Damasus 271 on Serapeum at Alexandria 207 his language and style 14f., 52f.; 202f. and Gibbon 9, 11, 14 Anianus, vir spectabilis 347 Annius Plocamus, freedman of, and Ceylon 158 Antioch, imperial capital Indian embassy at 159 Ammianus’ connections in 202 Latin at 202 palace at Daphne 189 Antonine emperors, in Gibbon 2, 6 in Chinese sources 162 Antonine Wall 370 Antoninus, merchant and official, deserts to Persians 166 Antonius Silvanus, testament of 121 n. 18 An-tun (Ngan-Touen), sc. M. Aurelius Antoninus, in Chinese sources 162 Aquileia, praetorians at 74 Arianism, of Goths 351 Arruntius, L., ‘capax imperii’ 62, 68

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Roman Perspectives Arthur, legends of 362f. Asia, cities of, deputations to senate 60 Asinius Gallus, son of Asinius Pollio 62 in senate in 14 CE 68, 78 Asinius Pollio, historian critical of Augustus 51, 78 Athanaric, Gothic king 172 Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria 171 in Ammianus 211 Life of St. Antony, translation of 275 authorship of 288 n. 2 Athaulf, Visigothic leader at Narbonne, marriage to Galla Placidia 327–9 and Roman law 328 death 328. Athens, as ‘tyrant’ 25–7 Attacotti, alleged cannibals, in Gibbon 55 n. 11 Attalus, Priscus, former usurper, at wedding of Athaulf 328 Attila, Hunnish chieftain 17 ‘secretaries’ of 169 augury, see haruspicina. Augustine, origin of 327 at Rome 255f. relations with Symmachus 255 and Ambrose 237 illness and resignation 282 reading of St. Paul 275, 278f. and Psalms 277 Confessions, manuscripts of 286f. Civitas Dei, on judicial torture 321 Augustus, emperor, interpretations of his regime 44–6 Tacitus on 47 Asinius Pollio on 51 supporters of 45f. at Samos, receives Indian embassy 159 as judge 299 death and burial of 59 deification 59, 67f., 74 and Tiberius 57–9 aurum oblaticium see taxation Ausonius, Decimius Magnus, poet and quaestor relations with Symmachus 229, 234f. Mosella of 229, 234 Professors of Bordeaux 195 Gibbon on, 15 Avenches, ruins of 13 Axum, kingdom of 171 Azimus, and Azimuntines 17 banditry 354 barbarians, legislation on law of Constantine on 348 ‘depredations’ of 348, 350, 357

intermarriage with Romans 357, 359 n. 28 Barea Soranus, consul designate, and M. Antonius Pallas 96 baths, maintenance of 349 beer- and wine-drinking 181f. Benedictus, supporter of usurper Eugenius 241 Beneventum, paganism at 236 Bethlehem, in Bordeaux Itinerary 190f. Jerome at 265, 327, 339 bishops in Symmachus’ letters 236 in Breviarium of Alaric 347 episcopal jurisdiction 315, 350f. Blaesilla, senatorial heiress, and Jerome 263–71 death of 264f. Blemmyes, Nubian people, visited by Olympiodorus 173 Bordeaux (Burdigala) and Bordeaux Itinerary 173, 181 Ausonius, Professors of Bordeaux 195 Breviarium, of Alaric II (‘Lex Romana Visigothorum’) 304, 307, 329, 332–5, 357 editing of 343–5 commonitorium on 333f., 346f. and bishops and nobles 347 selection and omission of laws 348–51 disappearance of Roman empire in 349–51 interpretationes in, 307 and Chap. 16 passim See Anianus, interpretationes, Timotheus Burgundians 229 Lex Romana Burgundionum 332, 334, 335, 337 Burrus, Sex. Afranius, praetorian prefect origin at, and patron of, Vasio 91f. equestrian career, in service of imperial house 93 role under Claudius and Nero 91 and Seneca 91 his reputation, in Tacitus 91, 93 death 91 Caerleon, legionary fortress, ruins of 366 Caernarvon (Segontium, Cair Segeint), Roman fort 362, 365, 374 ruins of 374 Caesarea, in Bordeaux Itinerary 190f. Caligula (Gaius), emperor, German ‘campaign’ of 168 Carmarthen (Maridunum), Roman fort 366 ruins of 366 and n. Carnuntum, legionary base at 73 Carrhae, paganism at 173. Cassiciacum, Augustine at 275f., 277 and De Beata Vita 276, 277 Cassius Dio, historian, on accession of Tiberius 59, 62 on Pannonians 181f.

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Index castaways, as travellers 157–9 Ceylon (Sri Lanka), customs of, in Pliny 158f. See also Annius Plocamus Chalcedon, Bordeaux pilgrim at 187, 190f. martyr-shrine and monastery at 243 Charisius, Aurelius Arcadius, jurist 296 China, contacts with Roman empire 161f. Chinese annals 161f. Chosroes I, Sasanian king 165f. Christians and Christianity in Pliny’s letters 303 in Ammianus 209–12 in Symmachus’ letters 236f. in Gibbon 8, 10 priests and prisons, 355 Christmas, see festivals and holidays Cicero, Hortensius, read by Augustine 281 citizenship, Roman in provinces 89, 92 Latin rights, in Breviarium 347 Claudian, Gibbon’s appraisal of 15f. on Stilicho 215 on Fl. Mallius Theodorus 13 Claudius, emperor government and projects of 98 and senate 82 n. 48 as judge 299 in Apocolocyntosis 93 See also, senatusconsultum Claudianum clementia, imperial 241f. Codex Gregorianus 305f., 333, 344, 346 Codex Hermogenianus 305f., 310 n. 38, 333, 344, 346 Codex Justinianus 305, 343 ‘Law of Citations’ in 345f. Codex Theodosianus 304, 306, 331, 333; 343–5 and passim manuscripts of 345 edited 343–5 in Gibbon 11 See also Gothofredus, law (codification of), Mommsen, and entries under jurists Coel, ‘duke of Coelcolim’ 368, 373 coinage, imperial images on 353 collegia and collegiati 348 Cologne (Colonia Agrippinensis), legionary base 75 Columella, L. Iunius Moderatus, agricultural writer at Tarentum 89–91 origin at Gades 89 citizenship, and equestrian career 89–91 military service in Syria 90 De Re Rustica 89f. Pythagorean connections 90f. comitatus, imperial court 352 commonitorium, of Alaric II, see Breviarium

Constantine I ‘the Great’, emperor birthplace 48, 195 rise to power 48, 367 in Britain 367, 370 in Welsh genealogies 372 Nennius on 370 his rule 49f. arch of, at Rome 15 deaths of Crispus and Fausta 48 and Christianity 49–51, 372 church-builder in Holy Land 192f. burial and mausoleum at Constantinople 193, 372 relations with Sasanian empire 170f. supports journey of Nicagoras 172f. laws of, in Theodosian Code and Breviarium 354–5 on gladiatorial combat 307, 354–5 deeds of gift 355 magic 355 on barbarians 348 his greed 53 in Gibbon 8 See also Helena Constantine III, usurping emperor 367 Constantinople 187, 193f. Bordeaux pilgrim at 188, 192–4 birthday of 193, 356 as Christian city 194 cult of St. Mocius, 193 See also Constantine Constantius, father of Constantine 367, 368, 372 Constantius II, emperor, at Rome 206 foreign relations of 171f. constitutio Antoniniana 305 and n. consulship, in Symmachus 238, 242 suffect consulship 224 Corduba, dedication of ‘Ignotus’ at 118, 148 Corduene, satrapy of 166 See also Jovinianus corn supplies, of Rome 225f. Cornelius Fuscus, praetorian prefect of Domitian in Juvenal’s Fourth Satire 100 in Tacitus’ Histories 100–3 background and character 101, 102f. supporter of Galba 102 as procurator of Dalmatia, supporter of Vespasian 102f. origin at Pompeii 102f. domiciled at Naples 103 death in Dacia 100 commemorated at Adamclisi 101f. Cornelius Scipio, senator, and M. Antonius Pallas 96 Cornelius Tacitus (1), equestrian procurator in Belgica

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Roman Perspectives known to Pliny the elder 86–9 handicapped son of 86–9 father of Tacitus (2) the historian 86f. Cornelius Tacitus (2), P., the historian See Tacitus Cremutius Cordus, historian, in Tacitus and Hobbes 32 and n. curial obligations 350 See also munus and servitium Cybele, cult of 236 Cynan, son of Eudaf 362 as ‘Conanus Meridiadocus’ 368f. Cyrene Edicts, of Augustus 303 Dacia, late Roman province 185 Dacian wars, of Domitian 100–3 of Trajan 151 Damasus, bishop of Rome accession of, in Ammianus 256, 271 and Symmachus 240 and Praetextatus 271 Daphne, near Antioch, palace at 189 Dasumia Polla, heres of ‘Ignotus’ 115, 140 Dasumia Sy[–––], freedwoman, legatee of ‘Ignotus’ 143, 145 Dasumia Tyche, freedwoman nutrix, legatee of ‘Ignotus’ 116, 146f. ‘Dasumius’ (Testament of), see ‘Ignotus’ Dasumius, provenance of name 148 Dasumius Hadrianus, L.; Dasumius Rusticus, L.; Dasumius Tullius Tuscus, L. connections with ‘Ignotus’ denied 148 Dead Sea 189 Decius, emperor 1 Demetrius I Soter, Syrian king, hostage in Italy 168 Digest, publication of 291f., 296 translated 296 its character 296–9 as source of Roman history 295 and passim See also Tribonianus, and entries on the jurists Diocletian, emperor 189, 209 persecution of Christians by 186 diplomacy, Roman 163–5 and passim ‘domini rerum’ (barbarian kings) 352 ‘dominus noster’ 359 n. 27 Domitia [––], heres of ‘Ignotus’ 115, 140 Domitian, emperor, in Juvenal’s Fourth Satire 99f. Dacian War of 100–3 Domitius Tullus, Cn., identification as ‘Ignotus’ denied 146 Drusus Caesar, brother of Tiberius in Rome in 14 CE 75f. sent to Pannonia 72–6 ovatio in 29 CE 61

Easter, see festivals and holidays Easter amnesties 354 Edessa, Christian worship at 173 Egeria, Christian pilgrim 173, 189 on river Euphrates 189 elections, consular and praetorian 69 Elen, daughter of Eudaf 362, 367, 369, 373f. See also Helena Eleusis, mysteries of, and Nicagoras 172f. Eliseg, Welsh king 371 embassies, civic 350 senatorial, in Symmachus 215f., 228–30 Emona (Colonia Iulia Emona), veteran colony at 73f. emperors, Ammianus on 207–9 nomenclature of the office 356 imperial adventus 206 Ephesus, Seven Sleepers of 1, 8 Epiphany, named by Ammianus 211 See festivals and holidays Ethiopia, Roman relations with 171f. ‘Eudaf’ (or ‘Octavius’), British king 362, 369 Eugenius, Fl., usurping emperor and Symmachus 243f. Eunapius of Sardis, historian and Ammianus 203 and Zosimus 13 on Eustathius 170 Euric II, Visigothic king 329–32 Codex Euricianus 329–32, 335, 337f. Euripides, burial place of 189 Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea on biblical geography 173, 193 on conversion of Roman empire 49f. Eusignius, Fl., correspondent of Symmachus 241 Eustathius, Neoplatonic philosopher, envoy to Persia 170 Euthymenes of Salamis, handicapped son of 86 Eutropius, Fl., historian and medical writer and Symmachus 216 Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium 182, 195 ‘Farmer’s Law’, Byzantine 336 festivals and holidays, in Theodosian Code and Breviarium 356f. Firmicus Maternus, astrological writer, on the law 311f. Flavianus, Virius Nicomachus (1), cos. 394 218, 227, 236 career of, under Theodosius 241f. under Eugenius 243f. and Symmachus 241f. death 244 Flavianus, Nicomachus (2), son of (1) 241 urban prefecture under Eugenius 243 rehabilitation of 244

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Index Florus, P. Annius, rhetorician and historian, friend of Hadrian 151f. Florus, Julius, uncle of Julius Secundus 151 Florus, Mestrius, patron of Plutarch 151 Frigidus river, in Bordeaux Itinerary 184 battle of 244 Frumentius, bishop in Ethiopia 171 ‘Gadeon, son of Eudaf’ 362, 369 Gaius, jurist 296, 344f., 346 on appointment of heredes 115 and n. on cretio 121 n. 18 on oath-taking 335f. on journey times 187 Institutes of, on sources of law 300–3 text of, 292 in ‘Law of Citations’ 346 in Breviarium 344f. Galla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius, marriage to Athaulf 327f. Gallus Caesar, at Antioch 311, 322 Gamaliel, the patriarch, medical demonstration by 339f. games, public, at Rome 205f., 207, 226, 243, 257 of children 283–5 Garonne, tides of 181 genealogies, Welsh 371f. Geoffrey of Monmouth 363, 368–9 Germanicus Caesar, nephew and adopted son of Tiberius commander in Germany 72, 75f. honours proposed for 75f. construed as threat to Tiberius 77 Germany, mutiny in 72, 75 Gibbon, Edward education and culture 292 classicism of 14–16 historical procedures of 1f., 6f. choice of starting-point 57 and n. digressions 10 use of sources, criticized 8, 13, 292 observations on archaeology 12f. historical and literary observations on Antonine emperors 6 on Septimius Severus 7f. on third century 8 on Julian and Valens 9 on Honorius 9 on Rome 3, 11 on Roman and barbarian law 11, 291 on Tacitus 57 on Ammianus 11, 14 and nn. on Ausonius 15 on Claudian 15f. ‘General Observations’ 3–5 Journal de mon voyage, etc. 12f., 16f. Memoirs of my Life 11f., 14–6

gift, law of, see law: private Giraldus Cambrensis, on Roman ruins in Wales 366 and n. gladiatorial combat, see law: penalties Goar (Goiaricus), vir inlustris 347 Gordian III, emperor, Persian campaign of 170 Gothofredus (Godefroy), and Theodosian Code 11 Goths (Visigoths) invasion of Italy 215 sack of Rome 328 in Gaul 327–9 and passim Gothic law 327–32, 337f. and passim Christianity among 172 Arianism of 351 Gothic Bible, and literacy 14 See also Alaric (1) & (2), Athaulf, Ulfila Gratian, emperor 216, 229, 364 guardianship (tutela), in Theodosian Code and Breviarium 347 Hadrian, emperor, from Italica 147 as poet 151 death of 49 statues of, at Jerusalem 195 Hadrian’s Wall 370 Hadrianople, battle of 172, 208, 216 Hannibal, tomb of 189 Hannibalianus, nephew of Constantine 189, 195 haruspicina, 353 Haterius, Q., obsequious senator, 67f., 72 Helena, mother of Constantine 367 in Holy Land 372f. and True Cross 174, 372f. as daughter of ‘King Coel’ 368 Life of, by Altmann 373 cult of, in Britain 37 Herculius, friend of Symmachus 224, 240f. Hermocrates son of Hermon, of Syracuse 21f., 23f. Hermogenianus, magister libellorum and jurist 296, 305 See also Codex Hermogenianus Herodotus 24f., 27 Historia Augusta 8, 13, 51f. Hobbes, Thomas, philosopher Aubrey’s Life of 29f. meets Galileo and Descartes 29 royalist sympathies of 29 anticlericalism of 29f. translation of Thucydides 21–7, 28 Discourse on Tacitus 28f., 30–32, 33–4, 58 De Corpore Politico 33f. Human Nature 34 Leviathan 29, 33, 36

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Roman Perspectives on civil war and rebellion 30, 34 on censorship 32 on perception 34 on the meaning of words 33 Honorius, emperor, in Gibbon 9 hostages, role in culture and politics 166–9 Huns, in Gibbon 10 embassy of Olympiodorus to 173 See also Attila, Rusticius, Orestes iconography, Christian 258f. ‘Ignotus’, epigraphic testament of location 112 date 120 inscribed on tomb 119, 152 text reconstructed 112–5 analysed 115–20 readings amended 141–3 identity of testator discussed 145–7 not a ‘Dasumius’ 146f. his daughter 115 wife 119 maternal aunt 119 ‘adfinis’ 118, 151f. social position of 147–53 dedication at Corduba 118, 148 relations with Julius Servianus 119, 148f., 152 obsequies of 119f. heirs of 115–7 and passim legatees 117–9, 137f., 150f. emperor as legatee 120 freedmen and equestrians among 117f., 150f. manumission of slaves 118f., 138f., 143–5 See also law: testamentary India, Roman knowledge of 159f., 162 interpretationes (legal commentaries) in Breviarium 333–5, 343–5 and passim authorship and purpose 346–8 distortions and misinterpretations in 348–50, 354–7 manner and style of 351–4 and ius 352 Ionians, see ‘Yavanas’ Isidore of Seville, on Gothic law 329 iudicium quinquevirale 354 ius commune 337 Jericho, in Bordeaux Itinerary 191 Jerome (Hieronymus) at Rome 256f., 263–5 on Praetextatus 257, 271 on Petronius Probus 261 on Paula 264f. and Eustochium 264, 265 and Blaesilla 263–71

delusions of grandeur of 265 mendacity of 52 leaves Rome, 265 at Bethlehem 265 receives Marcellus 338–40 and Orosius 327f. on end of Roman Britain 367 unwritten History of Church 53f. Commentary on Ecclesiastes 265–71 Jerusalem, pilgrim of Bordeaux at 190f. Constantinian building at 192f. statues of Hadrian at 195 relatives of Rufinus at 243 Jews, legislation on 351 John Chrysostom 12 Jovinianus, satrap of Corduene and Ammianus 166 as local dynast 166 Julia Paulina, daughter of Servianus heres of ‘Ignotus’ 116 and n., 119f., 137, 140, 148f. marriage to Pedanius Secundus 137 Julian, emperor, in Gibbon 9 in Ammianus 209 Julianus, Sextius Rusticus, praefectus urbi 387/8, friend of Ausonius 243f. Julii, enfranchised provincials, in Gaul 87 Julius, magister militum Orientis 208 Julius Agricola, Cn., father-in-law of Tacitus 87f. Julius Caesar and Roman citizenship in Gaul 87 testament of 115 Julius Florus, see Florus Julius Graecinus, father of Agricola, killed by Caligula 88 Junius Avitus, friend of Pliny, premature death of 117, 137, 147f. Junius Bassus (1) , cos. 331, as consul 258 Junius Bassus (2), praefectus urbi 359, son of (1) death and funeral of 258–60 sarcophagus and inscription 258–60 jurists, Roman 296–9, 306–8 and passim in Digest 296–9 in ‘Law of Citations’ 345f. in Breviarium 344f., 347 as ‘prudentes’ in 347, 356 See law and legal procedures, passim Juvenal, satirist on Statius and Domitian 99f. on Cornelius Fuscus 100 Kalends of January, see festivals and holidays kingship, at Rome 27f. Krüger, Paul as editor of Corpus Iuris Civilis 291 of Theodosian Code 291, 343 relations with Mommsen 343

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Index Latin, Gibbon and 15 in Ammianus 202f. Latin rights, in Breviarium 347 law, and legal procedures in Ammianus 311–9, 322f. on civil law 316–9 on criminal law 322f. on principles of jurisdiction 311 torture, use of, in Digest 319–22 in Ammianus 316, 318f., 322f. in cases of maiestas 316–8 Augustine on 321 penalties 305 and n., 318f. gladiatorial combat 307, 354f. oath-taking, in Digest 335f. sources of law 299–303 in Gaius’ Institutes 300 statutes and plebiscites, 300f. decrees and edicts 300–2 senatusconsulta 301 Praetor’s Edict 301f. imperial edicts 303 rescripts 304f., 314, 352 law in papyri 299 ius and leges 300f., 306–8, 352 legal transactions under usurpers 244 leges municipales 334 episcopal jurisdiction, 315 in the Breviarium 334, 351 contradictions in the law 313f. codification of law 293, 304, 306 private law, in the Code of Euric, 329 in the Breviarium 347 law of gift 347, 353, 355 tutela 347 territorial and personal law, in the Breviarium 337f. in the Edict of Theoderic 335 ‘Law of Citations’ 345f. Gothic law 329–32 and passim Roman and barbarian law 335–8 the ‘Farmer’s Law’ 336f. ‘Vulgar’ law 335f. in Gibbon 11, 291 See also Breviarium, Codex Gregorianus, Codex Hermogenianus, Codex Theodosianus, Digest, ‘Ignotus’ (epigraphic testament of), Mommsen, Praetor’s Edict, testaments (and testamentary law); and entries under the jurists leagues, in Gaul 182, 184 legions, in Pannonia 72–7 in Germany 72, 75 Leo of Narbonne 332 Lex Romana Burgundionum 332–5, 337 Lex Romana Visigothorum, see Breviarium ‘libelli famosi’ 354

Liberius, bishop of Rome 211 literacy, and Bible 14 in post-Roman Gaul 355 Lithinos Pyrgos (‘Stone Tower’), tradingstation with Far East identified as Tashkurgan 163 Livia, widow of Augustus, adopted into Julian family 68 honours proposed for 68, 74 Mabinogion, literary character of 362f. Machiavelli 30, 32, 33f., 37f. Macrobius, on style of Symmachus 220 Macsen, ‘emperor of Rome’ 362, 365f., 369 See also Magnus Maximus Maes Titianus, merchant, in Ptolemy 163 magic (maleficium), in Theodosian Code and Breviarium 355 Mamercus Scaurus, in senate in 14 CE 68f., 72 Manichees, legislation on 351 mansiones, and mutationes, see travel manumissions, see ‘Ignotus’ (epigraphic testament of ), slaves and slavery Marcellus, medical writer identified as Theodosian vir inlustris 327f., 338–40 and Athaulf 327f. known to Jerome and Orosius 338f. and Gamaliel the patriarch 339f friend of Symmachus 340 Marcianus, supporter of a usurper, and Symmachus 241 Marcus Aurelius, emperor origin of his family 148 See also An-tun Maroboduus, Marcomannic prince 169 ‘Maxim guletic’ (sc. wledig) 372 See also Macsen, Magnus Maximus ‘Maximianus’, ‘senator of Rome’ 368f. See also Macsen Maximus, Magnus, usurping emperor 361 and passim career of 363–5 family 365 and Theodosius (1) 364 and Symmachus 229f., 234f., 241f. and end of Roman Britain 361f. and Segontium 374f. in Gildas, 369f. in Nennius 370f. in Welsh genealogies 371f. Mela, Annaeus, brother of Seneca 100f. ‘Melian Dialogue’ 22–4, 32, 35 Meropius of Tyre 171 Metrodorus, philosopher, and India 170f. Milan, imperial capital 255, 257 and n. Augustine at 275 and passim

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Roman Perspectives Moderatus, Pythagorean philosopher 90f. See also Columella Modestinus, jurist 346 Modestus, Domitius, praefectus praetorio of Valens 314 Mommsen, T., and Roman law 291–3 as editor of Corpus Iuris Civilis 291 of Theodosian Code 291, 308, 343–5 and inscriptions 292f. opinion of Greeks 292, 308 interpretation of Roman empire 284 See also Krüger, Paul Mon(n)ica, mother of Augustine 277, 282 Montesquieu, and Gibbon 4, 6, 9 Montfaucon, Benedictine monk, and Gibbon 12 Mosella, of Ausonius 229, 234f. Munatius Plancus, L., senatorial envoy to Germanicus 75 munus and servitium 350 Naissus (Niš), birthplace of Constantine 195 Narbo (Narbonne) in Bordeaux Itinerary 184 marriage of Athaulf and Galla Placidia at 327–9 See also Leo, Marcellus Narbonensis, the province 85f., 91–3 natalium restitutio 96 Nauportus, municipium 73 Nebridius, friend of Augustine 276, 279f. Nennius, on end of Roman Britain 370f. on ‘Constantine’ 374 on Cair Segeint 374 Nero, emperor, and senate 94 Nicagoras, Athenian philosopher, visits Valley of Kings 172f. See also Constantine, Eleusis, Osiris Nicolaus of Damascus 159 Nicomachus Flavianus, see Flavianus (1) and (2) ‘novi homines’ 45f. ‘Octavius’, ‘dux of the Gewissei’ 368 See also Eudaf Olympiodorus of Thebes, historian and poet visits Blemmyes 173 Huns 173 on Rome 207 Orestes, father of Romulus Augustulus, ‘secretary’ to Attila 169 ‘Oriental cults’, at Rome 235 Orosius, historian visits Jerome at Bethlehem 327f., 338–40 on Athaulf the Visigoth, 327f. See also Jerome, Marcellus Osiris, Egyptian god, and Nicagoras 172f. Oxyrhynchus, in Gibbon 13

Pagans, and paganism in Symmachus 235f. in Theodosian Code and Breviarium 353 revival s. Eugenius(?) 253 n. 169 See also magic, haruspicina Palladius, correspondent of Symmachus 241 Pallas, M. Antonius, freedman a rationibus of Claudius in Tacitus and Pliny 93–9 and imperial familia 99 enfranchisement of 99 supporter of Agrippina 93f. honoured by senate 94–8 statue of, in Forum of Caesar 98 departure from office 93f. his wealth 94, 98 retirement and death 94 epitaph on via Tiburtina 94f. Pannonia, mutiny in 72–7 producer of slaves 182 Pannonians, in Cassius Dio 181f. Papinian, jurist 344, 346 on sources of law 300 papyrology 13 law in papyri 299 parricide, in Theodosian Code and Breviarium 353 parrots, in Egypt 173 Parthians, between Romans and Chinese 161, 165f. diplomacy with Roman empire 167 patronage, political and social 91–3, 144f. in Symmachus’ letters 217f., 220, 222, 225, 231f., 251f. patroni originales 231 Paul, jurist 296, 344, 346 on oath-taking 336 Paul, St., birthplace at Tarsus 190 on arbitration 336 basilica and cult, at Rome 210 read by Augustine 275, 278f. relics of 243 Paula, mother of Blaesilla 264f. Paulina, Aconia Fabia, wife of Praetextatus in Symmachus 235 in Jerome 257 her religious outlook 235, 257, 263 Peloponnesian War, in Thucydides 21f. and passim. penalties and punishments, in Roman law See law and legal procedures Pericles, and the Athenians 25f., 35 Peter, St., basilica and cult at Rome 210, 259–62 relics of 243 Petronius, senator under Nero testament of 111

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Index Satiricon 111, 298 See also Trimalchio Petronius, Gaius, Ethiopian campaign under Nero 173 Petrus Valvomeres, riot leader 211 Peutinger Map 182 pilgrims, and pilgrimage 173f., 186f. pagan 174 Piso, Cn. Cornelius, trial of, in senate 61 place-names, in Bordeaux Itinerary 185f. Platonism, in Augustine 280f. See also Eustathius, Plotinus Plautius Silvanus Aelianus, legatus pro praetore of Moesia under Nero 164 Pliny (the Elder) (1), uncle and adoptive father of (2) career and writings 88 service under Domitius Corbulo and Pomponius Secundus 88 on handicapped son of Cornelius Tacitus (1) 86–9 Pliny (the Younger) (2) and Tacitus 85f., 117 on M. Antonius Pallas 94–9 and acta senatus 95, 97 Panegyricus 221 and letters of Symmachus 220–3 Plocamus, see Annius Plotinus, Neoplatonist philosopher 170 Polybius, historian as hostage in Italy 168f. relations with king Demetrius 168 and Scipio Aemilianus 168f. on growth of Roman power 2f., 4, 35 Pompeii, colony, origin of Cornelius Fuscus 102f. destruction of 103 Pomponius, jurist, historical introduction to Roman law 297 Ponticianus, court official, and Augustine 275, 276, 280 Poros, Indian king 159 Porphyrius, Publilius Optatianus, poet 49 and n. Praetextatus, Vettius Agorius, †cos. des. 384, pagan senator religious and intellectual outlook of 235 as prefect of Rome 235 religious activism 235 and Symmachus 228, 235f., 257 death, as consul designate 228, 251f. reputation 235, 257 Jerome on 257, 271 See also Paulina, Aconia Fabia Praetor’s Edict, and Roman law 301–3, 344, 352f. See also Salvius Julianus praetorship, the office, in late empire 226f.

prefecture of Rome in Ammianus 204, 206 and Symmachus 228 in Symmachus’ Relationes 239f. and altar of Victory 240, 255f. and iudicium quinquevirale 354 principate, as an institution 58, 77f. prisons, and prison custody, in Theodosian Code and Breviarium 355 Probus, Sextus Petronius, cos. 371 senator and courtier 260–2 and Symmachus 242f., 260f., 262 in Ammianus, 230f., 242f., 260, 261f. in Jerome, 261 death, in Symmachus 260f. sarcophagus and epitaph 261f. Procopius, usurper 311 Proculus, supporter of Silvanus 318 provinces, late Roman 185 Ravenna, as imperial capital 216 mosaics 16 Rhegion, near Constantinople 193 Rome, the city and its people in Ammianus 204–7, 211f. and passim, 256 in Symmachus 224–6, 231 public games at 205, 224, 226 senatorial funerals, as public events 257–65 Augustine at 255 Jerome at 256, 263–5 unnoticed by Pilgrim of Bordeaux 193, 195 bishopric of 211f., 256, 271 Constantine at 193 ‘Eternity of Rome’ 204–8, 211f. birthday of 356 fortified, in early fifth century 215f. See senate (and senatorial class), Symmachus, prefecture of Rome Rostovtzeff, M., social and economic historian, his use of sources 294f. Rufinus, Fl., cos. 392, magister officiorum of Theodosius 242 relations with Nicomachus Flavianus (1) 242 with Symmachus 242f. Christian beliefs of 243 assassination of 243 female relatives of 243 Rufius Festus Avienius, senator, epitaph of 263 Rusticiana, wife of Symmachus 228 Rusticius, from Moesia, ‘secretary’ of Attila 169 Rutilius Namatianus, journey of 188 Saba, Gothic martyr 172 Sabaioi, kingdom of 171 Salvian of Marseilles 334 Salvius Julianus, codifies Praetor’s Edict 302

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Roman Perspectives Sapor II, Sasanian king 166, 170 Sasanian empire, relations with Constantine 170f.; with Constantius II 170 Sasima, mansio in Cappadocia 184f. Saxons, prisoners 224 Scaevola, Q. Mucius, jurist 296 Scipio Aemilianus, friendship with Polybius 168 Seguntium, Roman fort 374 Segontienses 375 See also Caernarvon, Cair Segeint Seianus, Aelius, praetorian prefect of Tiberius 59f., 72, 74 senate (and senatorial class) and accession of Tiberius 63–72, 77 and passim procedures and conduct seniority 72 relatio consulum 68, 69–71 length of meeting 69 adulatio rampant in 67 proconsuls and 60f. delegations to 60 trials in 60 Claudius and 82 n. 48 Tacitus on 258 late Roman, in Symmachus 223–6 careers and public office 226–8 attitudes to office 230f. relations with court 228–30 embassies 228f., 215 relations with people of Rome 258f. building operations 225 wine and corn supply 225f. and public games 205f., 224, 226 conversion of 271 Ammianus on 204–6 See also Pallas (M. Antonius), senatus consultum, Symmachus (2), Tacitus, Tiberius senatusconsulta, as source of law 301 senatusconsultum Claudianum 95, 301 s.c. de Cn. Pisone patre 61, 71 Seneca, M. Annaeus 91, 94, 101 and S. Afranius Burrus 91 and Nero 94 and Annaeus Mela 100f. Apocolocyntosis of 93 Septimius Severus, emperor, character of his reign 7f. Septuma wife of Severinus, maternal aunt of ‘Ignotus’ 119 her name and origin 149 Serapio, Alamannic prince, see Agenarichus Seronatus, Roman collaborator with Goths 331 Servianus, L. Julius Ursus, friend of ‘Ignotus’ the testator 119, 137, 145, 147–9 his origin 147f. See also Julia Paulina

servitium, see munus Sicilian campaigns, of Athenians 21f., 23, 25–7 Sidonius Apollinaris, on letters of Symmachus 220 on Seronatus 331 on Leo of Narbonne 332 on Syagrius 332 on laws of Theoderic 331f. extra-judicial activities of 337 interpretation of 332 Simplicianus, priest at Milan 280 slaves, condition of 95 in testament of ‘Ignotus’ 138–40 in Breviarium 348 domestic professions of 143f. troublesome slaves 145 and Jewish owners 351 from Pannonian (Illyricum) 182, 224 See also manumission, testaments (and testamentary law) ‘sortes Vergilianae’ 278 Statius, De Bello Germanico, parodied by Juvenal 99f. Stoic philosophy, on principate 70f. ‘Stone Tower’, see Lithinos Pyrgos Suetonius Tranquillus, C., biographer of emperors and younger Pliny 104–6 his origin 105 equestrian career under Hadrian 106 and ius trium liberorum 104 in Bithynia with Pliny 104–6 as editor of Pliny’s Letters Bk. 10 105f. Sunday, see festivals and holidays Syagrius, and Burgundians 332 Symmachus (1), L. Aurelius Avianius (Phosphorius), father of (2) building projects 225f. expulsion from Rome and recall 225f. Symmachus (2), Q. Aurelius (Eusebius), praefectus urbi 384–5, cos. 391, son of (1), orator and epistolographer political career of 227–30 quaestor and praetor 227 corrector of Lucania and Bruttium 227 proconsul of Africa 227f., 240 prefect of Rome 228, 239f. (see also, Relationes) consulship 228, 230, 242 relations with imperial court 215f., 228–30, 242f. visits Trier 228f. relations and friendships with Praetextatus 235f. Nicomachus Flavianus (1) 218, 224, 227, 243f.; (2) 241, 244 Petronius Probus 230f., 242f., 260f., 262

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Index Ausonius, the poet 229, 234f. Theodosius (1), general of Valentinian 228f. Eutropius, the historian 216 Augustine 255 Fl. Eusignius 241 Fl. Rufinus 241–3 Ambrose, 236f., 241 relations with usurper Maximus 229f., 234f., 241f. and Eugenius 230, 243f. with people of Rome 225f. as senator 223–6 and passim estates in Mauretania 228, 236 as orator 221 Orationes of 228f. survival of 221 cited by others 221 Relationes 221, 239f. Relatio 3 229, 240, 255f. Epistulae, appraisals of 216–20 style of 220 edited 219, 221–3 and younger Pliny 221 ‘paganism’ in 235f. Christians, and Christianity in 236f ‘neutralisation’ of religion 237f. See also ‘amicitia’, games, patronage, senate (and senatorial class) Symmachus (3), Q. Fabius Memmius, son of (2) as editor of Symmachus’ letters 219, 221–3 quaestorian and praetorian games of 226, 243 Syneros, slave and heres of ‘Ignotus’ 116f., 121 n. 18 Syria, Roman province, in Chinese sources 161f. late Roman provinces of 185 Tacitus (2), P. Cornelius, the historian origins of 85–7 nomenclature of 87 and Narbonensis 85f., 93 born in Belgica 88f. political advancement of 87f. marriage 87f. friendship with younger Pliny 85, 117 historical writing and opinions on early Rome 27f. preface to Annals 31 starting-point of Annals 28, 57 on Augustus 28, 57f. on Tiberius 62 and passim and decline of senatorial government 78f. on attitude of provinces to principate 35f. on Sex. Afranius Burrus 91, 93

on M. Antonius Pallas 93–9 on Cornelius Fuscus 100–3 sources 60 use of acta senatus 60–7 and passim. See also Cornelius Tacitus (1), Hobbes, Thomas Tamil poetry, on ‘Yavanas’ 160f. Tarentum, Columella at 89–91 Tacitus on 90 veteran settlement at 89–91 Tashkurgan, see Lithinos Pyrgos Ta-Tsin, Syria, in Chinese sources 162 taxation 118f. aurum oblaticium 228 manumission tax 118f. vicesima hereditatum 120 in Breviarium 349–51, 353 testaments, Roman fascination with 111 dearth of examples 112, 153 wills, of Petronius 111 of ‘Trimalchio’ 111, 153 of Domitius Tullus 146 ‘Testamentum Porcelli’ 111, 153 and testamentary law appointment of heirs 115–7 ‘testamentary adoption’ 115 cretio 116 women as heirs 140 substitute heirs 116f. fidei commissa 118, 119, 297f. vicesima hereditatum 120 legatees 116f., 150f. manumissions 118f., 138f., 143–5 tax on 118f. undutiful freedmen 144f., 152f. See also ‘Ignotus’ (epigraphic testament of ) Themistocles 25 Theoderic I, Gothic king, laws of 329–32 Theoderic II, Gothic king 331f. Theoderic the Ostrogoth, Edict of 335 hostage at Constantinople 169 Theodorus, tried for magic 317–9 Theodorus, Fl. Mallius, court official 13 Theodosius (1), magister equitum, father of (2) relations with Symmachus 228, 229 campaigns in Britain and Africa 363f. Theodosius I (2), emperor 327f., 338f. law on festivals 356–7 Theodosius II, emperor and Theodosian Code 304, 306–8 Novellae of 344, 352 See Codex Theodosianus Theophanes of Hermopolis, journey of 181, 183, 188, 192 Theophilus of Dibous (Socotra), missionary and envoy of Constantius II 171f.

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Roman Perspectives Thucydides, historical method of 21–3, 36–8 speeches in 22 ‘Melian Dialogue’ 22f. as narrator 26 on human nature 37 on the meaning of words 32f. Plutarch on 26 See also Hobbes, Thomas Tiberius Caesar, emperor, successor of Augustus 58 and passim in senate in 14 CE 67–72 sources on 59f. speeches of, in senate 61 dissimulatio of 32 Ticinum (Pavia) 215 Tigranocerta (Martyropolis) 53 Tillemont, Le Nain de, and Gibbon 12 Timotheus, comes of Alaric II 333f., 346f. Titianus, merchant, see Maes Titianus torture, judicial, see law Toulouse, in Bordeaux Itinerary 184 Visigothic capital 347 travel, conditions of 183, 188, 189 journey times 187 sea and land journeys 188 closed season 188 cursus publicus 188 mutationes and mansiones 183f. Trebellius, M., legatus pro praetore of Syria and Columella 90 Tribonian, jurist; and Digest 296 tribuni plebis 69, 72, 74 tribunician power 58f. Trier, imperial capital 228f. courtiers of Valentinian at 275, 281 nomenclature of region 149 Trimalchio, fictional freedman 98 testament and property 111, 153, 154 n. 10 Cena Trimalchionis, 298 ‘True Cross’, supposed discovery by Helena 373 Tullius Varro, P., and testament of ‘Ignotus’ 145 tutela, see law: private law Ulfila, Christian missionary among Goths, emissary of Constantius II 172 Ulpian, jurist 346 on judicial torture 321

on emperors and law 303 on rescripts 305 on fidei commissa 297f. on oath-taking 298 on life expectancy 297 Commentaries on the Edict 296 De Officio Proconsulis 297 in ‘Law of Citations’ 345f. Ursicinus, magister equitum, and Ammianus 317f. usurpation, as historical phenomenon 361 Valens, emperor, in Gibbon 9 in Ammianus 182 and administration of justice 314, 322f. Valentinian I, emperor, and Symmachus 228f. and law of maiestas 317 law on intermarriage 357 death of 209 Valentinian II, emperor 229, 239f., 257 Valentinian III, emperor, Novellae of 344 Valle Crucis, monument and inscription 371f. Varro, M. Terentius, De Re Rustica 46f. proscribed 46 Vegetius, Epitoma Rei Militaris 9 Velleius Paterculus, historian, in senate in 14 CE 70 Veratius, L., offensive Roman 302 Verecundus, owner of Cassiciacum 279f. Vestal Virgins, in Symmachus’ letters 224, 236 Vesuvius, eruption of 88f., 103 Via Egnatia 188, 191 Victor, son of Magnus Maximus 365 Victorinus, Marius, rhetorician, conversion and baptism 280 Vindonissa (Windisch), legionary fortress 17 Vocontii, of Vasio, Gallic civitas 91f. Vortigern 371, 377 n. 33 ‘Vulgar Law’ 335f. Wolf, Friedrich August, Homeric scholar 292 Xerxes, Persian king 24f., 26 ‘Yavanas’, Ionians or Greeks, in Tamil poetry 160f. Zosimus, see Eunapius

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