Inheritance of Rome, The
Chris Wickham
Number of quotes: 31
Book ID: 236 Page: 21
Section: 4B
The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up… he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune: he is absolved.This is an extract from a Greek-Latin primer for children, probably of the early fourth century. It expresses, through its very simplicity, some of the unquestioned assumptions of the late Roman empire.
Quote ID: 5892
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 236 Page: 21
Section: 4B
Actually, all the post-Roman societies, pagan, Christian or Muslim, were equally used to violence, particularly by the powerful; but under the Roman empire it had a public legitimacy, an element of weekly spectacle, which surpassed even the culture of public execution in eighteenth-century Europe.
Quote ID: 5893
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 236 Page: 24
Section: 4B
The empire was in one sense a union of all its cities (some thousand in number), each of which had its own city council (curia in Latin, boulē in Greek) that was traditionally autonomous. Each city also had its own kit of impressive urban buildings, remarkably standard from place to place.
Quote ID: 5894
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 236 Page: 24
Section: 4B
The Gaulish poet Ausonius (d. c. 395) wrote a set of poems in the 350s called the Order of Noble Cities, nineteen in number, from Rome at the top to his own home town of Bordeaux at the bottom (he uses the word patria, ‘fatherland’, of both Rome and Bordeaux); he enumerated his cities by their buildings, and, in so doing, he was in effect delineating the empire itself.
Quote ID: 5895
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 236 Page: 25
Section: 4B
So this sort of commitment to urban politics did not depend on the traditional structure of city councils. Essentially, it went on as long as Roman values survived; this varied, but in many parts of the empire it continued a long time after the empire itself fell.
Quote ID: 5896
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 236 Page: 26
Section: 4B
[When we consider] the inefficiency and poor record-keeping of Roman government ... we might wonder how the Roman world held together at all. But it did; a complex set of overlapping structures and presumptions created a coherent political system....
Quote ID: 7417
Time Periods: 3456
Book ID: 236 Page: 27
Section: 4B
The empire, in a sense, was run by amateurs. But the group of amateurs at least had shared values, and family experience in many cases as well....PJ: 4th and 5th centuries.
Quote ID: 7418
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 236 Page: 28/29
Section: 3A1B,4B
The existence of this effectively hereditary aristocracy was a key feature of the empire. Not because it dominated government; most leading bureaucrats were not of senatorial origin, even if they became senators later (Maximus was in that sense atypical) but rather because it dominated the tone of government. The Roman empire was unusual in ancient and medieval history in that its ruling class was dominated by civilian, not (or not only) military, figures.... Senators regarded themselves very highly, as the ‘best part of the human race’ in the well-known words of the orator Symmachus (d. 402); their criteria for this self-satisfaction did not rely on military or physical prowess, but on birth, wealth and a shared culture.
Quote ID: 5897
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 236 Page: 29/30
Section: 4B
A shared culture perhaps marked the Roman senatorial and provincial aristocracies most, for it was based on a literary education. Every western aristocrat had to know Virgil by heart, and many other classical Latin authors, and be able to write poetry and turn a polished sentence in prose; in the East it was Homer. The two traditions, in Latin and Greek, did not have much influence on each other by now, but they were very dense and highly prized. There was a pecking-order based on the extent of this cultural capital.
Quote ID: 5898
Time Periods: 2345
Book ID: 236 Page: 30
Section: 4B
by the fifth century the aristocracy knew both Virgil (or Homer) and the Bible.
Quote ID: 5899
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 236 Page: 30
Section: 4B
Roman literary culture used to be regarded as the high point of civilization; this belief, inherited from the Renaissance, perhaps reached its peak in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English public-school tradition, in which Virgil (and indeed Juvenal, by now seen as a more difficult author) was regarded as a basic training even for the government of India, not to speak of an academic center.
Quote ID: 5900
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 236 Page: 30/31
Section: 4B
But it is important to recognize its all-pervasiveness; in all the cities of the empire, even local office was linked to at least some version of this education. The shared knowledge and values that it inculcated was one of the elements that held the empire together, and indeed made the empire remarkably homogeneous…
Quote ID: 5901
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 236 Page: 31
Section: 4B
Roman law was another intellectual system that was, in principle, the same everywhere, and it acted as a unifying force.PJ: discussing roughly the Constantine to Theodosius time frame.
Quote ID: 5902
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 236 Page: 34/35
Section: 4B
And, most important, from the fourth century onwards the government issued laws to tie the peasantry, who were actually paying the taxes, to their place of origin, so that they would not move around or leave the land, thus making tax-collection more difficult.
Quote ID: 5903
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 236 Page: 35
Section: 4B
Taxation thus underpinned imperial unity itself, for it was the most evident single element in the state’s impact on the population at large, as well as the mainstay of the army, the administration, the legal system and the movement of goods throughout the Mediterranean and elsewhere, all the elements which linked such a large land area together.
Quote ID: 5904
Time Periods: 2345
Book ID: 236 Page: 52
Section: 1A,4B
Christian vocabulary, imagery and public practice were thus politically dominant in the empire by 400, a dominance which would only increase thereafter; and in cities, which were the foci for almost all political activity, Christians were for the most part numerically dominant as well. But we must ask what sort of Christianity this was, what effective content it had: how much it absorbed traditional Roman values (and even religious practices), how far it changed them, and what its own fault-lines were, for there were many of these.
Quote ID: 5905
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 236 Page: 53
Section: 1A
Between the comfortable assimilation of traditional hierarchies and values into Christianity by a secular-minded aristocracy…
Quote ID: 5906
Time Periods: 2345
Book ID: 236 Page: 55
Section: 2A3
Traditional Graeco-Roman religion regarded dead people as very dangerous and polluting; no adult could be buried inside city walls or in inhabited areas, and cemeteries were all beyond the edges of settlement.
Quote ID: 5907
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 236 Page: 58/59
Section: 3A1,4B
The church in the fourth and fifth centuries became an elaborate structure, with perhaps a hundred thousand clerics of different types, more than the civil administration, and steadily increasing in wealth as a result of pious gifts. It was not part of the state, but its wealth and empire-wide institutional cohesion made it an inevitable partner for emperors and prefects, and a strong and influential informal authority in cities...
Quote ID: 5908
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 236 Page: 59
Section: 3A1,4B
The fact that this institutional structure did not depend on the empire, and was above all separately funded, meant that it could survive the political fragmentation of the fifth century, and the church was indeed the Roman institution that continued with least change into the early Middle Ages.
Quote ID: 5909
Time Periods: 357
Book ID: 236 Page: 76
Section: 3D2
On 25 February 484, Huneric, king of the Vandals and Alans, and ruler of the former Roman provinces of North Africa, issued a decree against the ‘Homousian’ (we would say Catholic) heresy of the Roman population of his kingdom.
Quote ID: 5910
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 236 Page: 77
Section: 3D2
Huneric was not the only king to persecute Catholics; Thrasamund (496-523) did the same in the 510s. Conversely, however, there is evidence to show that the Vandals thought they were being very Roman. Those we know about all spoke Latin. Huneric married Honorius’ great-niece, and had spent time in Italy. The Vandal administration seems to have been close to identical to the Roman provincial administration of Africa, and to have been staffed by Africans (at most they may have adopted a Vandal dress code); the currency was a creative adaptation of Roman models; the kings taxed as the Romans had; the Vandal elites accumulated great wealth as a result, which they spent in Roman ways, on luxurious town houses and churches…
Quote ID: 5911
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 236 Page: 92
Section: 3D2
The high point of the Gothic western Mediterranean was around 500. It was destroyed by two men, Clovis the Frankish king and the eastern emperor Justinian…
Quote ID: 5913
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 236 Page: 170/171
Section: 2B2
A late ninth-century slate text from the Asturias, slightly further north, preserves an incantation against hail, in the name of all the archangels and St Christopher, adjuring Satan not to trouble the village of the monk Auriolus and his family and neighbors; in effect, an entirely traditional magical text, although couched in Christian terms.
Quote ID: 5914
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 236 Page: 171
Section: 2B2
After all, what could be described as weather magic was practiced even by saints, as when Caesarius of Arles (d. 542) held off hail with a cross made out of his staff, and when Gregory of Tours did the same by putting a candle from St Martin of Tours’s tomb in a tree.
Quote ID: 5915
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 236 Page: 171
Section: 4B
The Episcopal hierarchy of the late empire in most places survived into the early Middle Ages without a break. As we shall see, the monastic tradition established by John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia did as well, and took on even greater force in northern Europe. The organizational framework of Roman Christianity, discussed earlier, was still fully in operation. One important difference, however, was that it was less united.
Quote ID: 5916
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 236 Page: 172
Section: 3C1
The Arian-Catholic division lasted until 589 in Spain…
Quote ID: 5917
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 236 Page: 175
Section: 4B
The Christian culture of the early Middle Ages was, however disunited, not under threat.4B
Quote ID: 5920
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 236 Page: 176
Section: 2B2,2C
But there is no reason to think that Christian belief changed much as a result of its exposure to a new frontier of paganism beyond the old bounds of the Roman empire, apart from sometimes in terminology, as with the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, whose spring festival took place in the Easter period and whose name was borrowed by Anglo-Saxon Christians.
Quote ID: 5921
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 236 Page: 177/178
Section: 2D3B
Indeed, when ascetics did disobey bishops, Gregory saw them as openly demonic, as with the unauthorized miracle-workers who on two occasions turned up in Tours and attracted crowds around them, and who were rude, not respectful, to Gregory. Gregory of course gives us a bishop’s view, and such charismatics could evidently gain a considerable following. But Gregory was not being hypocritical either. Bishops at least had a church organization to legitimize them and train them.
Quote ID: 5922
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 236 Page: 178
Section: 2E2
The miracles of saints when they were dead were by contrast safer, ‘much more worthy of praise’, as Gregory says elsewhere, because they came from completed lives, and from people whose sanctity was testable; the bodies of the saintly dead were not corrupted, and smelt of roses, so that it could be seen that they were not ordinary sinners. Dead saints were also easier to control.
Quote ID: 5923
Time Periods: 34
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