East and West in Late Antiquity Impact of Empire Roman Empire, C
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East and West in Late Antiquity Impact of Empire Roman Empire, c. 200 B.C.–A.D. 476 Edited by Olivier Hekster (Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Editorial Board Lukas de Blois Angelos Chaniotis Ségolène Demougin Olivier Hekster Gerda de Kleijn Luuk de Ligt Elio Lo Cascio Michael Peachin John Rich Christian Witschel VOLUME 20 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/imem East and West in Late Antiquity Invasion, Settlement, Ethnogenesis and Conflicts of Religion By Wolf Liebeschuetz LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Fragment of the Tabula Peutingeriana, Section IV, a medieval copy of a Roman road map. Östereichische National Bibliothek, Vienna. Cod. 324. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon) East and West in late antiquity : invasion, settlement, ethnogenesis and conflicts of religion / by Wolf Liebeschuetz. pages cm.—(Impact of empire : Roman Empire, c. 200 Bc–AD 476, ISSN 1572-0500 ; volume 20) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-28292-6 (hardback : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-90-04-28952-9 (e-book) 1. Rome—History—Empire, 284-476. 2. Social change—Rome—History. 3. Rome—Ethnic relations. 4. Roman provinces—History. 5. Rome—Relations—Europe. 6. Europe—Relations—Rome. 7. Rome—Relations— Syria. 8. Syria—Relations—Rome. 9. Land settlement—Syria—History—To 1500. 10. Christianity—Syria— History—To 1500. I. Title. DG312.L54 2015 937.09—dc23 2015001418 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1572-0500 isbn 978-90-04-28292-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-28952-9 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Introduction vii 1 The Author vii 2 Introduction to the Volume xxiii 3 Acknowledgements xxviii Part 1 The West 1 Rubbish Disposal in Greek and Roman Cities 3 2 Was There a Crisis of the Third Century? 19 3 Transformation and Decline: Are the Two Really Incompatible? 29 4 Unsustainable Development: The Origin of Ruined Landscapes in the Roman Empire 54 5 Warlords and Landlords 66 6 The Debate about the Ethnogenesis of the Germanic Tribes 85 7 Making a Gothic History: Does the Getica of Jordanes Preserve Genuinely Gothic Traditions? 101 8 Why did Jordanes Write the Getica? 135 9 Habitus Barbarus: Did Barbarians Look Different From Romans? 151 10 Barbarians and Taxes 167 11 Violence in the Barbarian Successor Kingdoms 191 12 Goths and Romans in the Leges Visigothorum 202 vi contents Part 2 The East Syria: Defence and Settlement 13 The Impact of the Imposition of Roman Rule on Northern Syria 223 14 Nomads, Phylarchs and Settlement in Syria and Palestine 241 15 Late Late Antiquity (6th and 7th Centuries) in the Cities of the Roman Near East 256 16 Arab Tribesmen and Desert Frontiers in Late Antique Syria 288 Paganism and Christianity 17 Julian’s Hymn to the Mother of the Gods: The Revival and Justification of Traditional Religion 325 18 The View from Antioch: From Libanius via John Chrysostom to John Malalas and Beyond 341 19 From Antioch to Piazza Armerina and Back Again 370 20 Theodoret’s Graecarum affectionum curatio: Defending Christianity in Christian Syria 389 21 The School of Antioch and Its Opponents 408 The Balkans: A Contrast 22 The Lower Danube Region under Pressure: From Valens to Heraclius 425 Index 465 Introduction 1 The Author I was born on June 22, 1927 on the third floor of my maternal grandmother’s house in Hamburg, Rabenstrasse 21. The house faced the Dammtor Bahnhof and the Moorweide, an extensive meadow, which up to 1933 was the site of rallies of various political parties, including the Communists and, already by then, the Nazis. My parents were members of the Liberal Jewish community to which our family had belonged for several generations. The family’s Jewishness had a considerable influence on my life. It certainly stimulated my interest in Ancient History. I have been interested in history as long as I can remember, inspired by my mother. She was a doctor and research physiologist,1 but she had to leave her research institute at the Hamburg University Hospital at Eppendorf on get- ting married, and was stopped from exercising her venia legendi at Hamburg University by the National Socialist government. She therefore had plenty of time to devote to her three children, and particularly to myself, the eldest. She told fairy tales, and drew pictures to illustrate them. One of her favourites was Heinrich Hoffmann’s König Nussknacker und der arme Reinhold (Nutcracker king and poor Reinhold). She had an extraordinary visual memory, which enabled her to reproduce that book, text and illustration, from memory for her eldest granddaughter nearly thirty years later. Mother regularly told us stories from the Bible: the creation, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the exodus from Egypt, Saul and David and Jonathan, selected incidents from the Books of Kings, and the heroic story of the Maccabees. In an account of our life under the Nazis that mother wrote she records that she had learnt from her parents that a fighting spirit is the only antidote against the low self-esteem experienced by outsiders, such as the Jews, and that this is what she was nursing in her chil- dren. She also related the stories of the Trojan War as well as much more recent history, notably of the “victorious war” of 1870−71 and “the lost war” of 1914−18, in accordance with our patriotic perspective of those days. I seem to remem- ber that Hindenburg, then president of Germany and in some ways the man who let Hitler in, figured quite prominently. Mother also read from a series of books by Elisabeth Averdiek about a Hamburg family in the first half of the 1 List of 25 publications in Silke Kaiser-von Holst, Rahel und Hans Liebeschütz—Zwei jüdische Wissenschaftler der Hamburger Universität: Ihr Leben unter dem Nationalsozialismus bis 1939 und im Exil in Grossbritannien, überarbeitete Magisterarbeit, Hamburg, 2000, 141–42. viii Introduction nineteenth century. I particularly remember an account of the great fire that destroyed much of the old city in 1842. I also heard quite a lot about Napoleon and his campaigns from the memoirs of Louis de Ségur, Napoleon’s aide-de- camp. Later, mother read us a lot of plays, mainly historical ones: Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (as well as the autobiography of that knight with an iron hand); Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, his Wallenstein plays, and Jungfrau von Orleans; and then Shakespeare, first in German translation and later in English, starting with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and going on to Henry IV Part I and Macbeth. So history played a prominent role in my early life. I have not yet mentioned my father, Hans Liebeschütz, who was a historian.2 He had received the classical education then provided by German gymnasia at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg. When he left school he wanted to become a rabbi and had spent 1913 as a student in Berlin at the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums, a seminar for training Liberal rabbis. He was at the same time registered as a student at Berlin University, where he heard, among others, Ulrich von Wilamowitz and Eduard Meyer. The impression lasted for the rest of his life. When he resumed his studies after war service in France he specialised in Medieval History. But he kept a particular interest in the language and literature, and especially the history, of the Greeks and Romans. Homer and Plato (especially The Republic) were his favorite Greek authors. Of Roman authors, he preferred Lucretius to Virgil. In the late 1920s and up to 1933 he taught a combination of German, Latin, History, and Religion (Kulturkunde) at the Lichtwarkschule, an experimental progressive school run by the city authorities.3 At the same time he obtained the venia leg- endi to teach Medieval Latin and Medieval Literature at Hamburg University. Of course he lost both jobs when Hitler came to power. After a short interval he began to teach at the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where he had attended courses before the war. So in term time he was away from home during the week. But he had many books, which I was free to look at and read. It might be worth mentioning that thirty or so years later my chil- dren did not read my books. Fathers are not what they used to be! Their power (potestas) may be much the same, but their influence (auctoritas) has been 2 “Liebeschütz Hans,” with list of publications (Silke Kaiser-von Holst) Biographisches und Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, XXIX (2008), 813−21. Liebeschütz, Hans, Neue Deutsche Biographie XIV, Berlin 1985, 489ff (W. Liebeschütz). Veit-Brause. “Emigration in England, ein Gespräch mit Wolfgang Liebeschuetz und Edgar Feuchtwanger,” in O.H.