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CHAPTER 7
The Late Antiquity, 284–527
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I.
II.
The Restoration of the Roman Empire, 284–337
A. Diocletian and the Return to Order
1. In 284, Diocletian was named emperor by the Roman army. His reign marks the
beginning of the Late Roman Empire.
2. To prevent rebellions, he raised the status of the emperor from princeps to dominus,
took away the remaining power from the senate, split the army, separated civil careers
from military careers, and subdivided provinces from fifty to one hundred to decrease
the power of each governor.
3. He required that the land tax be paid in produce rather than worthless coinage.
4. In 303, he began the Great Persecution, ordering Christians to sacrifice in the imperial
cult or die.
B. The Rise of Constantine
1. Diocletian divided the empire into a Tetrarchy of four emperors—two senior
(“Augustus”) and two junior (“Caesar”).
2. In 305, Diocletian retired and a second Tetrarchy was formed.
3. The system failed when the army intervened to appoint Constantine, the son of the junior
emperor Constantius.
4. Civil war broke out and Constantine won. He issued the Edict of Milan, which gave
the Christians religious freedom.
C. Constantine and Late Roman Government
1. Constantine welcomed the senators into imperial offices and put the empire on the gold
standard by introducing the solidus.
2. He founded Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 330 as a Christian city. He built the
Church of Hagia Sophia and he also built the Church of Saint John Lateran, which
became the official church of the bishop of Rome.
3. He established a stable dynastic succession system that yielded a cumbersome but
highly functional late Roman government.
4. When Constantine died in 337, the empire was divided among his three sons.
The Christian Empire, 312–415
A. Constantine and the Church
1. Constantine hoped to use Christianity to unify the empire.
2. He exempted Christian priests from service on city councils, made Sunday an official
day of rest, and forbade Jews from having Christian slaves. He delegated social
services to the church.
3. The Christians were not unified, and the church was racked by disputes over theology,
practices, and authority.
4. In 325, 318 bishops assembled at the Council of Nicaea and condemned Arianism as
heresy. They issued the Nicene Creed, which became the official statement of faith of the
Roman Empire.
5.
III.
The Church developed a Roman administrative hierarchy with bishops in cities,
archbishops in provinces, and patriarchs in Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, Jerusalem, and
Constantinople.
B. The Impact of Christianity
1. There continued to be alternatives to Christianity.
2. Constantine’s nephew, Julian the Apostate (361–363), was the last polytheistic
emperor. His efforts to stop the growing impact of Christianity failed, and in 363, he
was killed.
3. Other non-Christian forms of belief included Neoplatonism and the cult of the Persian
sun god Mithras, whose birthday, December 25, was adopted by the Christians as the
birthday of their own god.
4. The only non-Christians who successfully retained their ancestral beliefs were the
Jews.
C. The Christian Life
1. The imperial acceptance of Christianity ended the distinction between personal and
state religion.
2. They called the believers in traditional gods pagans, which meant “country dwellers.”
3. Christians attended church on Sunday. Church services included prayers, readings
from scripture, singing of hymns and psalms, and sermons.
4. Christians were expected to live virtuous private lives, which included prayer and
fasting, performing good works, distributing their wealth to the poor and making
offerings to the church, and swearing not to have sex outside of marriage.
5. They were prepared for the Second Coming of Christ. To prepare for the Last
Judgment, many Christians, including Augustine, devoted their lives completely to
religion.
D. Christian Asceticism and Monasticism
1. Some particularly devoted Christians, both men and women, practiced asceticism
(physical self-denial) and monasticism (isolation as hermits in huts and desert caves).
2. Male monasteries were directed by abbots and female monasteries by abbesses. These
institutions distanced themselves from the authority of urban-based bishops,
contributing to the decentralization of church authority.
E. The Expansion of Christian Authority
1. The Christian Church expanded its authority through canon law (church law), the
establishment of the orthodox scripture by Jerome of Bethlehem in the Vulgate edition
of the Bible. Powerful Christian clerics exercised great influence over the Roman
emperors.
2. Bishop Ambrose of Milan showed the power of Christian clerics by excommunicating
and publicly humiliating emperor Theodosius I for supporting the heresy of Arianism.
3. Theodosius passed pro-Christian legislation such as the law of 392, outlawing all
pagan practices, leading to iconoclasm and the violent persecution of non-Christians,
such as the dismemberment of Hypatia, the female head of a Neoplatonic philosophy
school in Alexandria in 415.
Late Romans and Their World
A. The Pursuit of Personal Security
1. By the fourth century, everyone in the Roman Empire was looking for physical, spiritual,
and economic security that the government could not provide. Trade was declining and
everyone was threatened by barbarian attacks.
2. Senators pursued their self-interests, which resulted in the central government having
less power and the empire becoming less unified.
3. The imperial government forced more responsibilities on the decurions, who attempted
to escape their duties, which resulted in the decline of city services.
4.
5.
The gap between rich and poor grew.
Small peasant farmers fell into debt, becoming coloni (tenant farmers), while some
slaves were promoted to this status so owners could avoid feeding, clothing, and
sheltering them.
B. New Opportunities
1. The rise of the Christian church brought new opportunities including jobs as
doorkeepers, readers, gravediggers, deacons, priests, and powerful bishops, who
controlled finances and influenced public opinion.
2. Women could escape traditional subordination to males, such as Helena, mother of
Constantine, who discovered the True Cross on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the
ascetic Melania the Elder.
C. Literary Culture
1. Senators made manuscript copies of literature of the past.
2. Christian writers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome wrote sermons, letters,
theological treatises, commentaries on scripture, and Christian versions of Roman
history.
3. Christian practitioners, such as Jerome, felt conflicted about using pagan writers, but
ended up preserving Greek and Latin classical literature by recopying manuscripts into
parchment codex.
D. The Changing Landscape
1. Roman senators and local elites concentrated more on expanding their country estates
than on maintaining cities.
2. City populations shrank as rich and poor sought security in the countryside.
3. Cities still functioned as administrative centers and as the seats of bishops.
4. Resources were used to build churches, which became a city’s primary architectural
monuments.
IV. The Fall of the Western Roman Empire, 364–476
A. Rome’s Last Golden Age
1. The reign of Valentinian I was Rome’s third and last Golden Age (the first two were
Augustus and Trajan) because the imperial treasury was adequate and there was
general harmony.
2. Warning signs were the difficulties with military recruitment and the increasing
tendency to favor the more defensible, prosperous, populous, and cultured eastern part
of the empire at the expense of the western part.
B. The Barbarians and Rome
1. Barbarian groups including the Franks, Angles, Saxons, Alamanni, Visigoths,
Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Huns became part of the Roman military and
threatened it both from within and outside Roman borders.
2. Barbarian long hair and dress became fashionable in Rome, and the recruitment of
barbarians deprived the Roman Empire of its military superiority.
3. Visigoths settled on deserted lands inside the Roman frontier, pillaging and killing
Emperor Valens and his army at the Battle of Adrianople (378).
C. The Disintegration of the Western Roman Empire
1. Although the barbarians had no unity or common agenda, the attacks of several different
peoples at the same time overwhelmed the west.
2. In 410, Alaric and the Visigoths captured and sacked Rome, and they were the first
barbarian peoples to establish an independent kingdom on Roman soil.
3. In 451, King Attila’s Huns invaded Gaul. An embassy led by Leo the Great convinced
the Huns to withdraw.
4. In 476, the boy emperor Romulus was deposed by Odovacar, who called himself the
King of Italy. The year 476 marks the fall of the western empire.
D.
V.
Interpretations of the Fall of the West
1. Religious explanations for the fall of the western part were common. Gibbon suggested
that Christianity had weakened the will of the Romans to resist, opening the way for
barbarian invasions.
2. Historians propose many interrelated causes
a) Some suggestions can be easily dismissed: climatic change, ethnic mixing, and
lead poisoning.
b) More plausible suggestions include the withdrawal of senatorial support for the
emperors, increased administrative decentralization, barbarians in the army,
economic collapse, excessive taxation, corruption, military recruitment shortages,
excessive bureaucracy, poor leadership, lack of organized resistance, and bad
luck.
3. Due to the eastern part’s advantages (which included more secure geographical
frontiers, a stronger economy, a larger population, and a more dependable military
recruitment base), the downfall of the west was inevitable once the empire split.
The Post-Roman World, 400–527
A. Romans and Barbarians in the Post-Roman West
1. The barbarian peoples adopted Roman ways, including Roman administrative practices
and the Roman concept of law.
2. One incompatibility involved religion, but eventually, the Arian barbarians converted
to Nicene Christianity.
3. Another possible conflict involved property, but it was rare for barbarians to forcibly
evict Roman landowners.
4. Latin was the predominant language, evolving into the modern Romance languages
(Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian).
5. The Romans and barbarians created a hybrid culture that preserved and reinterpreted
classical culture.
B. The Barbarian Kingdoms
1. Most of the Barbarian Kingdoms such as the Visigoths in Aquitaine and Spain adapted
themselves closely to Roman practices.
2. The Franks, under the Merovingian family’s King Clovis and Queen Clotilde, though
brutal and loyal to their Germanic roots in the Salic Law, nevertheless adopted the
Nicene Christian faith.
3. In 493, Ostrogoth Theoderic the Great killed Odovacar in Italy, forming a Roman-like
Italian kingdom based in Ravenna.
4. Some barbarians were less conciliatory toward the Romans, such as the Vandals of
North Africa, who savagely persecuted Nicene Christians, and the Angles and Saxons
in Britain, who displaced the Roman population.
C. The Byzantine Empire
1. The Byzantine Empire in the east, through economic prosperity and cultivating good
relations with the New Persian Empire, avoided the misfortunes that caused the fall of
the west.
2. Disputes about Jesus within Eastern Christianity included Nestorians (Jesus was a man
until the crucifixion), Monophysites (he was completely divine with no humanity), and
the Orthodox view that the divine and human natures were intermixed.