Late Roman Spain and Its Cities This page intentionally left blank Ancient Society and History Late Roman Spain MICHAEL KULIKOWSKI and Its Cities The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2004 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Johns Hopkins Paperback edition, 2010 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition of this book as follows: Kulikowski, Michael, 1970– Late Roman Spain and its cities / Michael Kulikowski. p. cm. — (Ancient society and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-7978-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns—Spain—History—To 1500. 2. Spain— History—To 711. I. Title. II. Series. HT145.S7K838 2004 307.76Ј0946—dc22 2004001111 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 13: 978-0-8018-9832-7 ISBN 10: 0-8018-9832-3 a mi padre por todos los años y todos los libros This page intentionally left blank Divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes. —Varro, De re rustica 3.1.4 A culture, we all know, is made by its cities. —Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations xiii Preface xv One The Creation of Roman Spain 1 Tw o Urban Institutions in the Principate 17 Three Urban Institutions in the Third and Fourth Centuries 39 Four Diocletian and the Spanish Fourth Century 65 Five Change in the Spanish City 85 Six Town and Country 130 Seven Imperial Crisis and Recovery 151 xi Contents Eight The End of Roman Spain 176 Nine The Aftermath of Empire 197 Ten The Impact of Christianity in the Fifth Century 215 Eleven The Earlier Sixth Century and the Goths in Spain 256 Twelve The New World of the Sixth Century 287 Appendix 1 The Epistula Honorii 311 Appendix 2 Magistrates of Late Roman Spain 313 Notes 317 Bibliography 417 Index 475 xii Illustrations Maps Spain, conventus boundaries and provinces before c. 293 xx Spain, the Diocletianic provinces excluding Tingitania and the Balearics, and important cities xxi Plans Munigua 19 Tarragona 59 Mérida 92 Zaragoza 105 Córdoba 115 Cercadilla 117 São Cucufate 134 El Ruedo, Almedinilla 139 xiii Illustrations Plaza de Almoina, Valencia 231 Barcelona 234 Church of Sta. Eulalia 237 Theater at Cartagena 280 Photographs Munigua from below 20 Street in Munigua 22 Cavea of circus at Tarragona 60 Façade of circus at Tarragona 61 Walls of Zaragoza 104 Vaults of São Cucufate 135 Bridge over the Guadiana at Mérida 211 Reuse of public space: forum of Segobriga 294 xiv Preface his book begins from three propositions. First, the polit- ical narratives and institutional history of many late an- † tique provinces must be revisited in light of recent ad- vances in source criticism. Many basic sources for the period have now appeared in new, improved editions and in some cases—that of Hydatius, for instance—the new edition has required fundamental changes, not least in matters of chronology. The now universal conviction that we must read evidence as text before we read it as source has altered our understanding of many authors, with the result that standard narratives of the period no longer seem to be as securely founded on the sources as they once did. Second, discussions of late antique history that take their starting point in the third or fourth century tend naturally to underestimate the continuity of late antique institutions with those of the early em- pire. Thus, to understand late antique urbanism, one ought neither to assume a normative high imperial standard from which deviation rep- resents decline, nor posit a third-century crisis that wipes clean the slate for late antiquity. Either assumption will miss how thoroughly conditioned late antique history is by the experience of the early em- pire, the period in which Spain became Roman, culturally and politi- cally. xv Preface Third, and finally, at a time and in a place for which the archaeo- logical evidence is more plentiful than the scant literary sources, we should interpret the literary sources against the background of the ma- terial evidence rather than trying to fit the archaeological record into a paradigm derived from the literary sources. That statement is un- controversial for certain periods of ancient and early medieval his- tory—archaic Rome, fifth-century Scandinavia, eighth-century cen- tral Europe—where written evidence ranges from the very scant to the nonexistent. But in most places where sufficient literary sources sur- vive, they tend to retain their primacy in creating a historical frame- work, even if good archaeological evidence also exists in quantity. This book posits an alternative approach. It argues that the traditional nar- rative arc of Spanish history—from a period of romanization and ur- banization, through a third-century crisis that destroys the city culture of the Antonine age, to a thoroughly rural late antiquity and early Mid- dle Ages—cannot be sustained on the basis of the extant evidence. In- stead, the evidence shows that the cities and their cultural and politi- cal world remained the chief motive force in Spain’s late antique history. That conclusion, to my mind, is the inevitable result of read- ing the well-known literary evidence against recent archaeological findings. The book’s first three chapters look at the implantation of cities and city culture in the peninsula, the institutions that a city implies, and the continuity of those institutions into late antiquity, suggesting that late antique developments must be read in light of their roots in the early empire. The fourth chapter centers on the Diocletianic reforms and what those meant for the role of Spain within the Roman empire as a whole. The archaeological backdrop of late antique cities in the peninsula and the material evidence for the relationship between town and country are examined in chapters 5 and 6, which draw conclu- sions against which the succeeding narrative chapters can stand. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 present a revision of the political narrative of Spanish history from circa A.D. 400 to circa 500, the first segment of Spanish history since the Republican era in which it is possible to write narrative history. Chapter 10 presents the evidence, both archaeolog- ical and literary, for Christianity in Spanish late antiquity. The final chapters look at the confusion of the earlier sixth century, in the xvi Preface decades before King Leovigild founded a stable Gothic kingdom that brought much of the peninsula under the rule of a single power. The start of his reign inaugurates a new period in Spain’s late antique his- tory and one that has been much better served by scholarship than have the three centuries that preceded it. For that reason, it seems log- ical to conclude with him. A book such as this could not have been written fifteen years ago. Only very recently has the archaeological record for Spanish late an- tiquity reached standards of reliability, and of independence from the historical sources, that make it a viable alternative category of evidence to the literary record. Only more recently still have modern studies of that material record been published in quantities large enough to al- low an attempt at synthesis. The scholarship on Spain’s Roman and late antique archaeology is scattered, and much of it does not circulate widely outside Spain and Portugal. I am sure that I have missed im- portant studies. Yet this book will have served a large part of its pur- pose if it introduces an Anglophone audience to the work of great im- portance now being done across the Iberian peninsula. Certainly it could not have been written without that work. One incurs many debts in a work of this scale. Some thirty pages of my dissertation on “The End of Roman Spain,” defended in the sum- mer of 1997, survive in chapters 7 and 8. Thanks are owed to its su- pervisor, T. D. Barnes, and to the other members of my dissertation committee, Walter Goffart and Alexander Callander Murray, for advice and encouragement both before and since. Thanks are also due to my thesis examiners Jonathan Edmondson, Leonard Curchin, and Mark Meyerson. Various people have helped shape this book and its con- tents over the years: Kim Bowes, Sebastian Brather, Palmira Brummett, Richard Burgess, Frank M. Clover, Craig Davis, Dimas Fernández- Galiano, Andrew Gillett, Geoffrey Greatrex, Kenneth Harl, Jocelyn Hill- garth, Lester Little, John Magee, Ralph Mathisen, Michael McCormick, Danuta Shanzer, David Wiljer, and Lea von Zuben Wiljer. My fellow participants in the colloquium on “Die spätantike Stadt—Niedergang oder Wandel?” organized by Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel in the Abteilung Alte Geschichte der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, inspired several last-minute changes. xvii Preface Research for this volume was undertaken in part with grants from Smith College and the University of Tennessee. The Cartographic Ser- vices Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, under the direction of Will Fontanez, produced the maps and plans; Kathryn Salzer took the photographs. The interlibrary loan departments at Smith College and the University of Tennessee have handled a constant stream of exotic requests with patience and resourcefulness, while the ingenuity of UT’s history librarian Anne Bridges has made it possible to acquire books otherwise inaccessible. Finally, no one living outside Spain can work successfully on its ancient history without the catalogues of Pórtico Li- brerías of Zaragoza, each a work of scholarly reference. In a labor of this sort, one’s personal debts are as numerous as one’s professional.