Jairus Banaji – Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity Gold, Labour, And

AGRARIAN CHANGE IN LATE ANTIQUITY This page intentionally left blank Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance JAIRUS BANAJI 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Jairus Banaji 2001 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right of Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2001 First published in paperback 2007 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, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Banaji, Jairus, 1947– Agrarian change in late antiquity : gold, labour, and aristocratic dominance / Jairus Banaji. p. cm. — (Oxford classical monographs) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Land tenure—Rome. 2. Land tenure—Byzantine Empire. 3. Administration of estates—Rome. 4. Administration of estates—Byzantine Empire. 5. Rome— History—Empire, 284–476. 6. Rome—Economic conditions—30 B.C.–476 A.D. 7. Byzantine Empire—History—To 527. 8. Byzantine Empire—Economic conditions. I. Title. II Series. DG105 .B36 2002 937—dc21 2001021140 ISBN 978-0-19-924440-9 (Hbk.) 978-0-19-922603-0 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk For Rohini, Shaku, and Murad This page intentionally left blank PREFACE When Santo Mazzarino announced, in 1942, ‘For us moderns it appears impossible to return to Gibbon’s interpretation’, he could scarcely have anticipated the sheer speed with which long- established conceptions of late antiquity would soon be overturned by the rapid proliferation of a wide range of new sources and by the appearance of new historiographical perspectives, which were less positivistic in their obsession with causality and closer, in some ways, to Gibbon’s own intuition that late antiquity had brought a profound cultural transformation. Today it is impossible to conceive of the period between Diocletian’s overhaul of Roman imperial structures and the Islamic expansion as one of persistent decay, let alone dramatic decline. No one who thinks late antiquity can think about it outside the framework established by Mazzarino’s own work, or that of Tchalenko, for that matter, or Peter Brown. (See the brilliant review of Jones by Peter Brown in ‘The Later Roman Empire’, EcHR 2nd ser. 20 (1967) 327 ff.) At another level, however, the old historiographical visions survive and continue to shape the interpretation of the late antique world, both in detail and in more general and subtle ways, and it may be worth asking why this is so. The most general explanation, perhaps, is that old paradigms never die completely and continue to exert a pervasive influence, especially in fields like the social sciences and history, long after new and better ways of understanding have emerged. But this is probably also the weakest explanation, for it does not explain why many scholars familiar with the new evidence and new models of historical thinking should still cling to moribund dogmas. (I recall one of them, for example, challenging the credibility of the numbers contained in Byzantine papyri when these were read to him at a conference in Milan some years ago!) In the case of Roman or ‘late Roman’ economic history, this persistence of the old pessimism is linked, in my view, to two other factors which have been of considerable importance: on the one hand, the sheer strength of primitivism in continuing to influence the ways we think about ‘ancient’ (and medieval?) economies, and, on the other, the powerful influence of Max Weber in constructing an internally viii Preface coherent economic explanation of decline which seemed to elide the late antique into an emerging medievalism and, in this way, provide the economic underpinnings of the otherwise largely political and moral story of the late empire. Weber forged his ideas in the 1890s, when papyrology was still a nascent science and local evidence thin on the ground, when the historian’s interest in money rarely extended beyond the third century, and when, scientifically, it was still possible, indeed respectable, to rely on a few scraps of evidence to sustain generalizations stretching over centuries. None of this would be acceptable today but primitivist and Weberian legacies remain pervasive, and what is surprising is how rarely they have been challenged. This book sets out to do just that by upgrading, or less ambi- tiously, perhaps, beginning to upgrade, our vision of late antique economy through the rich infrastructure of evidence available to historians writing at the end of the twentieth century by contrast with those who may have thought about these issues a century earlier. It began, obscurely, as an interest provoked in the mid- 1970s by my first reading of Gunnar Mickwitz’s brilliant book on the fourth century, and grew more precise when I finished reading the late Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World with, like everyone, obvious awe, but also a sense of latent dissatisfaction at what seemed, still, a traditional picture of late antiquity (based unremittingly on legal and textual sources). Those were years when, against the background of lively intellec- tual discussions about the nature and epistemological claims of eco nomic laws and whether any such set of laws could explain the ‘decline’ of the Roman empire, I began to think increasingly about the intelligibility of the notion of decline, both in its own terms and with reference to the classical world. Motivated in a general way by the slogan of ‘going back to the things themselves’, I undertook a D. Phil. at Oxford in the late 1980s, and the book below is a revised version of the thesis I presented in 1992. Interrupted by other com- mitments and a different field of study in the 1990s, the revisions had to be made at various times throughout that decade. If I were to write the whole thing from scratch, assuming that were possible, some parts of the argument would hopefully emerge with greater clarity, more would be said about institutional landholders, and there would be a more detailed consideration of the origins of the eastern aristocracy. With these qualifications, there is nothing in the argument I would want to present differently. The writing of this book over the late 1980s and 1990s owes a great deal to the many friends, colleagues, and supervisors who Preface ix interacted with different portions of it. Without the assistance of the librarians of the Ashmolean and various reading rooms in the Bodleian, it would not have been possible, however, and I would like to thank all of them first of all. I am particularly grateful to Alan Bowman, Elio Lo Cascio, and Nicholas Purcell for their invalu- able support over several years, and to them as well as Michael Metcalf, Chris Howgego, and Clementina Panella, for comment- ing on earlier drafts of individual chapters. So too John Lloyd, whom I shall always remember with the greatest affection. Jane Rowlandson was extremely kind in sharing her comprehensive list of leases with me in the late 1980s. Richard Hodges and Amanda Claridge made my stay at the British School at Rome in the early 1990s one of the most interesting experiences of my life. Bryan Ward-Perkins and James Howard-Johnston have been generous with lunches and ideas. I have also learned a great deal from Gavin Williams, Barbara Harriss-White, and Terry Byres, all of whom have spent much of their professional lives writing and thinking about agrarian issues. I was fortunate to have John Matthews as my main supervisor in the formative years of this book and owe much to his encouragement and stimulation. Cathy King and John Rea extended specialist supervision, in late Roman numismatics and papyrology respectively, and were always accessible in terms of time as well as ideas. Their contribution is so comprehensively embedded in this book that I owe each of them more than I could possibly express in this acknowledgement. My greatest debt is to Fergus Millar, who more than anyone encouraged me to write this book, contributed to its general shape, and saw the project through to completion. Without his involvement it is not just possible but very likely that the arguments which follow would forever slumber quietly in the basements of the Bodleian. I should also like to thank Hilary O’Shea and her colleagues at Oxford University Press for expe dit ing publication with remarkable thoroughness and efficiency. Finally, I am immeasurably indebted to my family for their love and support, and for putting up with the ‘fourth century’ for what sometimes seemed to them almost 400 years! J.B.

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