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Reviews of Books
idence for local police, whereas the much better developed police institutions in the Greek-speaking east display numerous local peculiarities. Modern studies,
therefore, traditionally see police in the Roman Empire
as almost exclusively a local affair and tend to limit
themselves to specific regions such as Egypt and Asia
Minor. Fuhrmann’s attempt to put diverse practices
and evidence on a common ground led him not only to
adopt a broader definition of policing, but also to focus
specifically on the policing responsibilities of Roman
soldiers who operated throughout the entire empire.
The use of soldiers in protecting public order, which
Fuhrmann presents as the policing role of the Roman
army, is what essentially holds his thesis, and his book,
together. Fuhrmann’s main arguments are that policing
was the state policy, and that the role of state, or military, policing grew consistently in the first three centuries of the empire.
A broader approach might have benefits, but it also
creates problems. According to Fuhrmann, military policing by “outposted soldiers performing temporary police duties among civilians” on a local level increased
markedly from the second century onward (p. 10). His
book, however, ends in the reign of Valerian, thereby
offering a very limited chronological scope of only
about one hundred years. Its broad geographical scope
also encounters a challenge. Trajan’s famous advice to
Pliny, the governor of a Greek-speaking province, was
to “keep to the laws of each city” (Pliny, Ep. 10.113).
But traditions of city life, including local police institutions, were almost non-existent in the western territories beyond Italy, allowing for a much more prominent Roman influence in maintaining public order and,
consequently, greater uniformity in the Latin-speaking
part of the empire. The higher level of development of
city life in the east also produced specific forms of interaction between local and Roman authorities, which
we do not see in the west. For example, Aristides (4.72)
refers to the Roman provincial governor as choosing
the eirenarch from the list of ten local city councilors.
A similar system seems to have survived until at least
the early fifth century, when, according to the letter of
Honorius and Theodosius, local city councilors nominated the eirenarchs in agreement with the Roman governor (C.J. 10.77). This evidence not only illustrates the
distinctiveness of police administration in the eastern
part of the empire, where the Romans demonstrated
their proverbial respect for local customs, but also
questions Fuhrmann’s proposed universal scheme of dividing Roman policing into levels—civilian, imperial,
gubernatorial, and detached-service military. The thesis of Roman policing as a concerted policy receives no
support; not even from officials with the same titles and,
evidently, similar responsibilities: the defensor civitatis
had local origins in the east, rather than being created
from scratch as in the west.
Not only did the eastern and western parts of the empire retain their differences in this field, the unifying
role of military policing looks problematic as well. The
locally stationed Roman soldiers (stationarii, regionarii,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
beneficiarii ) attended to many tasks, in addition to immediate police functions. Their increased visibility in
the second century and later appears to have been due
not only to the growing pressure on public order but
also the changing relationship between the Roman
state and individual cities, which itself reflected an
overall transformation of the Roman imperial administration during that time. Thus, while the problem of
whether we can speak about a uniform Roman policy
on policing remains, this interesting book has raised
many important questions and laid a useful ground for
future work in the field.
SVIATOSLAV DMITRIEV
Ball State University
SVIATOSLAV DMITRIEV. The Greek Slogan of Freedom
and Early Roman Politics in Greece. New York: Oxford
University Press. 2011. Pp. xiii, 524. $99.00.
Sviatoslav Dmitriev seeks in this book to parse the
“freedom” language commonly used in classical Greek
interstate politics and sometimes taken up by Roman
leaders in their dealings with the Greeks. The chronological horizons are the Peloponnesian War and the war
of 146 B.C. that led to the creation of a formal Roman
province in mainland Greece, with forward glances as
far as the third century A.D. In the fourth century B.C.
(and indeed earlier in my opinion) many Greeks discovered that freedom (eleutheria) and its cousin autonomia were highly malleable concepts, as indeed many
have discovered independently in more recent ages.
These concepts were constantly used by powerful
states such as Macedon to cajole the leaders of Greek
cities. (How a “slogan” worked in a world without mass
communications is, however, a basic and fascinating
question that our author does not address.) Dmitriev
realizes, unlike some historians, that when Flamininus
proclaimed the freedom of the Greeks on a famous occasion in 196 B.C., it was not philhellenism that was in
question but an astute calculation of Roman interests,
though this is a position that needs more nuances. And
Rome of course found it entirely unproblematic to interfere in the affairs of Greek cities that it had declared
to be free and autonomous, changing their constitutions, exacting taxes, and imposing garrisons wherever
it saw fit. This is all very familiar, and a number of acute
(and not so acute) scholars have been over the same
material before. Dmitriev reviews many of their opinions, not always fairly, with the result that his book,
though it is not a revised dissertation, is weighed down
with tedious doxography. The result is a book much too
plump in relation to its achievement.
What is most helpful here, however, is the longue durée : it probably does help to explain the ill-concealed
resentment of Roman power still felt by some Greeks
in the second and indeed third centuries A.D. that freedom had been so often dangled before them during centuries of what they perceived as enslavement. Not that
Dmitriev himself says this. Also useful is the detailed
account of Rome’s frequently misunderstood relations
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Europe: Ancient and Medieval
with the Achaean League, culminating in the destruction of the city of Corinth in 146 B.C.; these relations
were marked, according to Dmitriev, by a long series of
Roman provocations.
Yet this slogan (if that is the right word for such a
deeply held value) was a strange choice of subject for
the early twenty-first century, with ancient history opening up in so many new directions. Dmitriev strains to
find questions to answer. Why, for example, did it take
thirty years (after their supposedly initial political contact with “the Greeks”) for the Romans “to understand
the importance of Greek public opinion”? First, we
hardly know this (why did Fabius Pictor write in
Greek?); second, their Italian and Carthaginian experiences had not prepared them; third, they were men of
war. All this should be too obvious to need saying.
Half the central actors in this book are Romans, and
much of it concerns Roman imperialism. Apparently it
has to be pointed out yet again that you cannot understand Rome’s political and military encounters with the
mainland and Aegean Greeks without the full context
of Rome’s prior and concurrent expansion elsewhere.
Dmitriev pays no attention to the two generations of
Roman experience before 229 B.C. with the equally
Greek Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily, not to mention their (admittedly not well documented) policy of
leaving their Italian “allies” with a high degree of autonomy in exchange for loyalty and cooperation. It will
not do to start the history of Romano-Greek relations
in 229 B.C., all the less so since the publication of a
Rhodian inscription by V. Kontorini (see Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 33 [1983]) put it beyond
reasonable doubt that Rome really did have a “friendship” with Rhodes as early as about 306 B.C. (for reasons
that it is easy to understand), as Polybius says. Dmitriev
ignores this text.
Concentrating on a slogan leads almost inevitably to
exaggerating its importance. Thus we are told that
Rome’s “appropriation” of the freedom slogan “would
eventually lead to the foundation of . . . the pax Romana” (p. 6). Well, no: many other significant factors
were involved, including Rome’s ambitions and belligerence. That Dmitriev has a long way to go before he
assesses these factors more or less rightly he demonstrated in an earlier article (“The Rise and Quick Fall
of the Theory of Ancient Economic Imperialism,” Economic History Review 62 [2009], pp. 785–801), an eccentric essay denying in the face of a huge range of evidence and arguments that a desire for material gain
played any significant role in Rome’s imperial expansion.
W. V. HARRIS
Columbia University
TIMOTHY BARNES. Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and
Power in the Later Roman Empire. (Blackwell Ancient
Lives.) Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011. Pp. xiii,
266. $124.95.
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Timothy Barnes has devoted a significant portion of his
long and productive career to the study of Constantine
and his reign. This book represents the culmination of
those efforts. An enormous range of detailed studies on
points of chronology and prosopography here find their
fruit. This is also a deeply polemical work, in which a
huge number of contemporary scholars are criticized by
name for errors of method and philology, as well as
sheer sloppiness. This captiousness, combined with a
caprice as regards rules of evidence, undermines the
value of the book as a guide to the reign of Constantine
or scholarship upon it.
Constantine is not a conventional biography. It is perhaps best described as a series of small investigations
into carefully circumscribed problems—or complex
problems, defined so as to appear resolvable as mere
questions of fact. Among the former category one
might include such topics as, when did Constantine’s
parents meet? What was the social rank and status of
his mother, Helena? Among the latter category, perhaps foremost is the question whether it was Constantine himself who placed the date of Easter and practice
of Lent on the agenda at the Council of Nicaea.
The study overall aims to vindicate a series of interrelated positions that Barnes has advocated across
some thirty years: namely, that Constantine was sincere
in his conversion; that he involved himself deeply and
intensely in the governance of the church; and that he
pursued policies designed to favor Christianity and
Christians while also harming pagans and suppressing
their cult. Though Barnes appears not to perceive this,
these topics exist in different epistemic domains and are
therefore subject to different modes of proof. The question whether Constantine had a “genuine sense of mission” (p. 120) is ultimately not knowable, nor, for that
matter, is it consequential to the latter questions, which
can at least be rigorously addressed. I am myself
broadly in sympathy with Barnes’s depiction of the latter years of Constantine’s reign: having eliminated the
last of his rivals, Constantine abandoned the public
stance of tolerance he had nominally advocated since
313 and moved with ever greater determination against
those he found religiously deviant. What is more, like
Nero, his public policies were occasionally announced
and certainly pursued in ways intended to distract from
the dynastic struggles within his own house.
That said, the arguments of individual sections are
often problematic and Barnes’s summaries of the arguments of others are regularly willful to the point of
distortion. The use of ellipses to reduce a long argument of Norman H. Baynes to caricature strikes me as
particularly egregious in this regard (p. 202 n. 10), but
one might name, too, the somewhat hysterical section
on the so-called Edict of Milan (pp. 93–97). A typical
section identifies a problem, which is then characterized as one of fact; laments the errors as well as the
flaws of earlier scholars; catalogs the surviving evidence; and selects a position. These last moves are misleading in two regards. On the one hand, Barnes never
asks how knowledge was transmitted in antiquity: all
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