Late antiquity

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Louvre Museum
)

Late antiquity is sometimes defined as spanning from the end of classical antiquity to the local start of the Middle Ages, from around the late 3rd century up to the 7th or 8th century in Europe and adjacent areas bordering the Mediterranean Basin depending on location.[1] The popularisation of this periodization in English has generally been credited to historian Peter Brown, who proposed a period between 150–750 AD.[2] The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity defines it as "the period between approximately 250 and 750 AD".[3] Precise boundaries for the period are a continuing matter of debate. In the West, its end was earlier, with the start of the Early Middle Ages typically placed in the 6th century, or even earlier on the edges of the Western Roman Empire.[citation needed]

Terminology

The term Spätantike, literally "late antiquity", has been used by German-speaking historians since its popularization by

Belgica Prima, seat of the praetorian prefecture of Gaul (Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier
)

The continuities between the later Roman Empire,[6] as it was reorganized by Diocletian (r. 284–305), and the Early Middle Ages are stressed by writers[who?] who wish to emphasize that the seeds of medieval culture were already developing in the Christianized empire, and that they continued to do so in the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire at least until the coming of Islam. Concurrently, some migrating Germanic tribes such as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths saw themselves as perpetuating the "Roman" tradition. While the usage "Late Antiquity" suggests that the social and cultural priorities of classical antiquity endured throughout Europe into the Middle Ages, the usage of "Early Middle Ages" or "Early Byzantine" emphasizes a break with the classical past, and the term "Migration Period" tends to de-emphasize the disruptions in the former Western Roman Empire caused by the creation of Germanic kingdoms within her borders beginning with the foedus with the Goths in Aquitania in 418.[7]

The general decline of population, technological knowledge and standards of living in Europe during this period became the archetypal example of societal collapse for writers from the Renaissance. As a result of this decline, and the relative scarcity of historical records from Europe in particular, the period from roughly the early fifth century until the Carolingian Renaissance (or later still) was referred to as the "Dark Ages". This term has mostly been abandoned as a name for a historiographical epoch, being replaced by "Late Antiquity" in the periodization of the late West Roman Empire, the early Byzantine Empire and the Early Middle Ages.[8]

Period history

The Roman Empire underwent considerable social, cultural and organizational changes starting with the reign of

state church of the Roman Empire.[citation needed
]

The city of

Aqueduct of Valens was constructed to supply it with water, and the tallest Roman triumphal columns were erected there.[citation needed
]

Migrations of Germanic, Hunnic, and Slavic tribes disrupted Roman rule from the late 4th century onwards, culminating first in the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 and subsequent Sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455, part of the eventual collapse of the Empire in the West itself by 476. The Western Empire was replaced by the so-called barbarian kingdoms, with the Arian Christian Ostrogothic Kingdom ruling Rome from Ravenna. The resultant cultural fusion of Greco-Roman, Germanic, and Christian traditions formed the foundations of the subsequent culture of Europe.[citation needed]

In the 6th century, Roman imperial rule continued in the East, and the

Justinian the Great led to the fall of the Ostrogothic and Vandal Kingdoms, and their reincorporation into the Empire, when the city of Rome and much of Italy and North Africa returned to imperial control. Though most of Italy was soon part of the Kingdom of the Lombards, the Roman Exarchate of Ravenna endured, ensuring the so-called Byzantine Papacy. Justinian constructed the Hagia Sophia, a great example of Byzantine architecture, and the first outbreak of the centuries-long first plague pandemic took place. At Ctesiphon, the Sasanians completed the Taq Kasra, the colossal iwan of which is the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world and the triumph of Sasanian architecture.[citation needed
]

The middle of the 6th century was characterized by extreme climate events (

middle Byzantine period, and together with the establishment of the later 7th century Umayyad Caliphate, generally marks the end of late antiquity.[citation needed
]

Religion

Main article: Christianity in late antiquity

One of the most important transformations in late antiquity was the formation and evolution of the Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and, eventually, Islam.[citation needed]

Augustus
in 306

A milestone in the

Christianity the State religion, thereby transforming the Classical Roman world, which Peter Brown characterized as "rustling with the presence of many divine spirits."[11]

Constantine I was a key figure in many important events in Christian history, as he convened and attended the first ecumenical council of bishops at Nicaea in 325, subsidized the building of churches and sanctuaries such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and involved himself in questions such as the timing of Christ's resurrection and its relation to the Passover.[12]

The birth of

Stylites counted among the more extreme forms but through such personalities like John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine or Gregory the Great monastic attitudes penetrated other areas of Christian life.[15]

Late antiquity marks the decline of

Flavius Claudius Julianus to create an organized but short-lived pagan state religion that ensured its underground survival into the Byzantine age and beyond.[16]

Dualist faith, arose in Mesopotamia and spread both East and West, for a time contending with Christianity in the Roman Empire.[citation needed
]

Many of the new religions relied on the emergence of the parchment codex (bound book) over the papyrus volumen (scroll), the former allowing for quicker access to key materials and easier portability than the fragile scroll, thus fueling the rise of synoptic exegesis, papyrology. Notable in this regard is the topic of the Fifty Bibles of Constantine.[citation needed]

Laity vs clergy

Within the recently legitimized Christian community of the 4th century, a division could be more distinctly seen between the

priestly celibacy, celibacy in late antique Christianity sometimes took the form of abstinence from sexual relations after marriage, and it came to be the expected norm for urban clergy. Celibate and detached, the upper clergy became an elite equal in prestige to urban notables, the potentes or dynatoi.[18]

The rise of Islam

The Byzantine Empire after the Arabs conquered the provinces of Syria and Egypt – the same time the early Slavs settled in the Balkans

Islam appeared in the 7th century, spurring Arab armies to invade the Eastern Roman Empire and the

Visigothic Spain, the Islamic invasion was halted by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in modern France.[19]

On the rise of Islam, two main theses prevail. On the one hand, there is the traditional view, as espoused by most historians prior to the second half of the twentieth century (and after) and by Muslim scholars. This view, the so-called "out of Arabia"-thesis, holds that Islam as a phenomenon was a new, alien element in the late antique world. Related to this is the

Arab invasions marked—through conquest and the disruption of Mediterranean trade routes—the cataclysmic end of late antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.[citation needed
]

On the other hand, there is a more recent thesis, associated with scholars in the tradition of Peter Brown, in which Islam is seen to be a product of the late antique world, not foreign to it. This school suggests that its origin within the shared cultural horizon of the late antique world explains the character of Islam and its development. Such historians point to similarities with other late antique religions and philosophies—especially Christianity—in the prominent role and manifestations of piety in Islam, in Islamic asceticism and the role of "holy persons", in the pattern of universalist, homogeneous monotheism tied to worldly and military power, in early Islamic engagement with Greek schools of thought, in the apocalypticism of Islamic theology and in the way the Quran seems to react to contemporary religious and cultural issues shared by the late antique world at large. Further indication that Arabia (and thus the environment in which Islam first developed) was a part of the late antique world is found in the close economic and military relations between Arabia, the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanian Empire.[20] In recent years, the period of late antiquity has become a major focus in the fields of Quranic studies and Islamic origins.[21]

Political transformations

The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius, 1883: John William Waterhouse expresses the sense of moral decadence that coloured the 19th-century historical view of the 5th century.

The late antique period also saw a wholesale transformation of the

political and social basis of life in and around the Roman Empire.[citation needed
]

The Roman citizen elite in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, under the pressure of taxation and the ruinous cost of presenting spectacular public entertainments in the traditional

Augustus.[citation needed
]

The ruins of the Taq Kasra in Ctesiphon, capital of the Sasanian Empire, photographed in 1864

Cities

The later Roman Empire was in a sense a network of cities. Archaeology now supplements literary sources to document the transformation followed by collapse of cities in the

souk (marketplace).[23] Burials within the urban precincts mark another stage in dissolution of traditional urbanistic discipline, overpowered by the attraction of saintly shrines and relics. In Roman Britain, the typical 4th- and 5th-century layer of dark earth within cities seems to be a result of increased gardening in formerly urban spaces.[24]

The city of Rome went from a population of 800,000 in the beginning of the period to a population of 30,000 by the end of the period, the most precipitous drop coming with the breaking of the

aqueducts during the Gothic War. A similar though less marked decline in urban population occurred later in Constantinople, which was gaining population until the outbreak of the Plague of Justinian in 541. In Europe there was also a general decline in urban populations. As a whole, the period of late antiquity was accompanied by an overall population decline in almost all Europe, and a reversion to more of a subsistence economy. Long-distance markets disappeared, and there was a reversion to a greater degree of local production and consumption, rather than webs of commerce and specialized production.[25]

Asia Minor
.

Concurrently, the continuity of the Eastern Roman Empire at

Asia Minor. The degree and extent of discontinuity in the smaller cities of the Greek East is a moot subject among historians.[26] The urban continuity of Constantinople is the outstanding example of the Mediterranean world; of the two great cities of lesser rank, Antioch was devastated by the Persian sack of 540, followed by the plague of Justinian (542 onwards) and completed by earthquake, while Alexandria survived its Islamic transformation, to suffer incremental decline in favour of Cairo in the medieval period.[citation needed
]

Justinian rebuilt his birthplace in Illyricum, as Justiniana Prima, more in a gesture of imperium than out of an urbanistic necessity; another "city", was reputed to have been founded, according to Procopius' panegyric on Justinian's buildings,[27] precisely at the spot where the general Belisarius touched shore in North Africa: the miraculous spring that gushed forth to give them water and the rural population that straightway abandoned their ploughshares for civilised life within the new walls, lend a certain taste of unreality to the project.[citation needed]

In mainland Greece, the inhabitants of

rocca; Cameron notes similar movement of populations in the Balkans, 'where inhabited centres contracted and regrouped around a defensible acropolis, or were abandoned in favour of such positions elsewhere."[28]

Roman cavalry from a mosaic of the Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily, 4th century CE

In the western Mediterranean, the only new cities known to be founded in Europe between the 5th and 8th centuries

Suinthila as a fortification against the Basques, modern Olite. All of these cities were founded for military purposes and at least Reccopolis, Victoriacum, and Ologicus in celebration of victory. A possible fifth Visigothic foundation is Baiyara (perhaps modern Montoro), mentioned as founded by Reccared in the 15th-century geographical account, Kitab al-Rawd al-Mitar.[31] The arrival of a highly urbanized Islamic culture in the decade following 711 ensured the survival of cities in the Hispaniae into the Middle Ages.[citation needed
]

Beyond the Mediterranean world, the cities of Gaul withdrew within a constricted line of defense around a citadel. Former imperial capitals such as Cologne and Trier lived on in diminished form as administrative centres of the Franks. In Britain most towns and cities had been in decline, apart from a brief period of recovery during the fourth century, well before the withdrawal of Roman governors and garrisons but the process might well have stretched well into the fifth century.[32] Historians emphasizing urban continuities with the Anglo-Saxon period depend largely on the post-Roman survival of Roman toponymy. Aside from a mere handful of its continuously inhabited sites, like York and London and possibly Canterbury, however, the rapidity and thoroughness with which its urban life collapsed with the dissolution of centralized bureaucracy calls into question the extent to which Roman Britain had ever become authentically urbanized: "in Roman Britain towns appeared a shade exotic," observes H. R. Loyn, "owing their reason for being more to the military and administrative needs of Rome than to any economic virtue".[33] The other institutional power centre, the Roman villa, did not survive in Britain either.[34] Gildas lamented the destruction of the twenty-eight cities of Britain; though not all in his list can be identified with known Roman sites, Loyn finds no reason to doubt the essential truth of his statement.[34]

extreme weather events of 535–536 and subsequent Plague of Justinian, when the remaining trade networks ensured the Plague spread to the remaining commercial cities. The impact of this outbreak of plague has recently been disputed.[36][37] The end of classical antiquity is the end of the polis model. While there was a decline of urban life in late antiquity (especially in the West) the epoch brought with it new forms of political participation in the urban spaces as well.[38] Especially the role of crowds and masses in cities has increased, leading to new levels of tension.[39]

Column of Arcadius, Constantinople (built 401–421)
Side view of the Column of Arcadius, with carved reliefs of scenes and figures on the pedestal, on the socle and spiralling up the column shaft, capped by a capital and a statue's empty plinth
Side view of the Column of Arcadius, with carved reliefs of scenes and figures on the pedestal, on the socle and spiralling up the column shaft, capped by a capital and a statue's empty plinth. A door is visible in the top-most section.
Side view of the Column of Arcadius, with carved reliefs of scenes and figures on the pedestal, on the socle and spiralling up the column shaft, capped by a capital and a statue's empty plinth. A door at ground level giving access to the spiral staircase within is visible.
Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: ms. O.17.2 (the "Freshfield album"), folios 11–13

Public building

In the cities the strained economies of Roman over-expansion arrested growth. Almost all new public building in late antiquity came directly or indirectly from the emperors or imperial officials. Attempts were made to maintain what was already there. The supply of free grain and oil to 20% of the population of Rome remained intact the last decades of the 5th century. It was once thought that the elite and rich had withdrawn to the private luxuries of their numerous villas and town houses. Scholarly opinion has revised this. They monopolized the higher offices in the imperial administration, but they were removed from military command by the late 3rd century. Their focus turned to preserving their vast wealth rather than fighting for it.[citation needed]

The

Roman pounds of gold.[citation needed
]

City life in the East, though negatively affected by the plague in the 6th–7th centuries, finally collapsed due to Slavic invasions in the Balkans and Persian destructions in Anatolia in the 620s. City life continued in Syria, Jordan and Palestine into the 8th. In the later 6th century street construction was still undertaken in

Chosroes I with massive payments in gold in 540 and 544, before it was overrun in 609.[41]

Sculpture and art

St. Marks, Venice

The stylistic changes characteristic of late antique art mark the end of classical

realism tradition largely influenced by ancient Greek art to the more iconic, stylized art of the Middle Ages.[42] Unlike classical art, late antique art does not emphasize the beauty and movement of the body, but rather, hints at the spiritual reality behind its subjects[citation needed]. Additionally, mirroring the rise of Christianity and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, painting and freestanding sculpture gradually fell from favor in the artistic community. Replacing them were greater interests in mosaics, architecture, and relief sculpture.[citation needed
]

As the soldier emperors such as

naturalism, Roman verism, and Greek idealism diminish.[43][44] The Arch of Constantine in Rome, which re-used earlier classicising reliefs together with ones in the new style, shows the contrast especially clearly.[45] In nearly all artistic media, simpler shapes were adopted and once natural designs were abstracted. Additionally hierarchy of scale overtook the preeminence of perspective and other classical models for representing spatial organization.[citation needed
]

From c. 300

Sarcophagi carved in relief had already become highly elaborate, and Christian versions adopted new styles, showing a series of different tightly packed scenes rather than one overall image (usually derived from Greek history painting) as was the norm. Soon the scenes were split into two registers, as in the Dogmatic Sarcophagus or the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (the last of these exemplifying a partial revival of classicism).[46]

Nearly all of these more abstracted conventions could be observed in the glittering mosaics of the era, which during this period moved from being decoration derivative from painting used on floors (and walls likely to become wet) to a major vehicle of religious art in churches. The glazed surfaces of the

Jupiter or of classical philosophers.[citation needed
]

As for luxury arts, manuscript illumination on vellum and parchment emerged from the 5th century, with a few manuscripts of Roman literary classics like the Vergilius Vaticanus and the Vergilius Romanus, but increasingly Christian texts, of which Quedlinburg Itala fragment (420–430) is the oldest survivor. Carved ivory diptychs were used for secular subjects, as in the imperial and consular diptychs presented to friends, as well as religious ones, both Christian and pagan – they seem to have been especially a vehicle for the last group of powerful pagans to resist Christianity, as in the late 4th century Symmachi–Nicomachi diptych.[47] Extravagant hoards of silver plate are especially common from the 4th century, including the Mildenhall Treasure, Esquiline Treasure, Hoxne Hoard, and the imperial Missorium of Theodosius I.[48]

Literature

Dioscorides
in Greek, a rare example of a late antique scientific text

In the field of literature, late antiquity is known for the declining use of

Procopius of Caesarea (6th century) were able to keep the tradition of classical Hellenistic historiography alive in the Byzantine empire.[citation needed
]

One genre of literature among Christian writers in this period was the Hexaemeron, dedicated to the composition of commentaries, homilies, and treatises concerned with the exegesis of the Genesis creation narrative. The first example of this was the Hexaemeron of Basil of Caesarea, with the first occurrence in Syriac literature being the Hexaemeron of Jacob of Serugh.[49]

Poetry

Greek poets of the late antique period included

Romanus the Melodist and Paul the Silentiary.[citation needed
]

Latin poets included

Rutilius Namatianus, Orientius, Sidonius Apollinaris, Corippus and Arator.[citation needed
]

Jewish poets included

Yose ben Yose.[citation needed
]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ https://guides.loc.gov/late-antiquity. Retrieved 5 November 2023.
  2. The World of Late Antiquity
    (1971)
  3. ^ https://www.ocla.ox.ac.uk/. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
  4. ^ A. Giardina, "Esplosione di tardoantico", Studi storici 40 (1999).
  5. ^ Glen W. Bowersock, "The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome", Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49.8 (May 1996:29–43) p. 34.
  6. ^ The Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity dates this as follows: "The late Roman period (which we are defining as, roughly, CE 250–450)..."
  7. ^ A recent thesis advanced by Peter Heather of Oxford posits the Goths, Hunnic Empire, and the Rhine invaders of 406 (Alans, Suevi, Vandals) as the direct causes of the Western Roman Empire's crippling; The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians, OUP 2005.
  8. ^ Gilian Clark, Late Antiquity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2011), pp. 1–2.
  9. ISBN 978-0-521-81838-4
    .
  10. ISBN 0-8020-6369-1
    .
  11. ^ Brown, Authority and the Sacred
  12. Eusebius of Caesarea
    , Vita Constantini 3.5–6, 4.47
  13. OCLC 1148587171
    .
  14. ISBN 978-1-108-98931-2
    .
  15. ISBN 978-3-11-054378-0
    .
  16. ^ Smith, Rowland B.E. Julian's Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian
  17. ^ Jerome of Stridon wrote in c. 406 the polemical treatise Against Vigilantius in order to, among other disputes concerning relics of the saints, promote the greater spiritual nature of celibacy over marriage
  18. ^ Brown (1987) p. 270.
  19. ^ For a thesis on the complementary nature of Islam to the absolutist trend of Christian monarchy, see Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Princeton University Press 1993
  20. ^ Robert Hoyland, 'Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion', in: Scott F. Johnson ed., The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford 2012) pp. 1053–1077.
  21. OCLC 1371946542
    .
  22. ^ Cf. the compendious list of ranks and liveries of imperial bureaucrats, the Notitia Dignitatum
  23. ^ 'The changing city' in "Urban changes and the end of Antiquity", Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, CE 395–600, 1993:159ff, with notes; Hugh Kennedy, "From Polis to Madina: urban change in late Antique and early Islamic Syria", Past and Present 106 (1985:3–27).
  24. ISBN 9780582072978
    .
  25. ^ See Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, OUP 2005
  26. ^ Bibliography in Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, CE 395–600, 1993:152 note 1.
  27. Buildings of Justinian
    VI.6.15; Vandal Wars I.15.3ff, noted by Cameron 1993:158.
  28. ^ Cameron 1993:159.
  29. ^ "Arte Visigótico: Recópolis"
  30. ^ According to E. A Thompson, "The Barbarian Kingdoms in Gaul and Spain", Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 7 (1963:4n11).
  31. ^ José María Lacarra, "Panorama de la historia urbana en la Península Ibérica desde el siglo V al X," La città nell'alto medioevo, 6 (1958:319–358). Reprinted in Estudios de alta edad media española (Valencia: 1975), pp. 25–90.
  32. ISBN 978-90-485-5197-2
    .
  33. ^ Loyn 1991:15f.
  34. ^ a b Loyn 1991:16.
  35. ISBN 9783487151540
    .
  36. PMID 31792176
    .
  37. ISSN 0031-2746
    .
  38. ISSN 0950-3110
    .
  39. ^ Magalhães de Oliveira, Juan Caesar. "Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?*". Past and Present. 249 (1): 3–52.
  40. ^ Robert L. Vann, "Byzantine street construction at Caesarea Maritima", in R.L. Hohlfelder, ed. City, Town and Countryside in the Early Byzantine Ear 1982:167–70.
  41. ^ M. Whittow, "Ruling the late Roman and early Byzantine city: a continuous history", Past and Present 129 (1990:3–29).
  42. ^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 2–21.
  43. ^ Kitzinger 1977, p. 9.
  44. ^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 12–13.
  45. ^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 7–8.
  46. ^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 15–28.
  47. ^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 29–34.
  48. ^ Kitzinger 1977, pp. 34–38.
  49. ^ Gasper 2024.

References

External links

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