Acts of the Apostles and the riots of the Roman Peace

I am currently reading the New Testament more or less in the order that it was written. I began with the Acts of the Apostles, which discusses the missionary efforts of Jesus's followers after his ascension to heaven.
Taking the Acts as a historical document, I am very impressed by how chaotic social religious and political scene was in this era of "Roman peace." Many of you know that during this apostolic era was characterized by strong opposition to the new Christian movement by a variety of better established Jewish and Greek/Roman parties. It is remarkable how nervous the established powers seem to have been – how quickly they ran to the Roman authorities to denounce the new religious movement. There is a lot of actual fighting described or implied, and of course sometimes the opponents of the Christians got them imprisoned, beaten up, and murdered.
We have to wonder-- at least I do – whether the reaction by the established religious authorities was justified or completely out of proportion. Is there a big difference between these two alternatives? Either way it's not exactly happy days in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first century A.D.
You might well come away with a much more sympathetic understanding of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who did his best to stay out of the conflict between the established Jewish authorities in Jerusalem and Jesus's movement. It may have been commonplace to credit the Romans and their representatives with peace and reform, but if you were one of the governors mentioned in Acts, you probably felt that your office was like a wild horse, and you would be lucky to stay on it.

"Two Worlds Become One: A 'Counter-Intuitive' View of the Roman Empire and 'Germanic' Migration" by Guy Halsall

This is an interesting re-interpretation of the "migration" period, part of a debate that has contemporary resonances and which has been going on for decades now.

Here is the abstract:

Abstract

The Roman Empire and barbaricum were inextricably linked throughout the Roman Iron Age. By late antiquity, Germanic-speaking trans-Rhenan areas were inundated with imperial influence. Migration was two-way and in various forms, all of which, including large-scale ‘folk movement’, were normal: part and parcel of the imperial frontier’s dynamics. The counter-intuitive conclusion is drawn from this that the relationship between the existence of a formal frontier and significant migration is quite the opposite of the one we have grown used to imagining. The collapse of the frontier took with it the mechanisms for migration. Therefore I have to modify my 2007 epigram that ‘the end of the Roman Empire produced the Barbarian Invasions and not vice versa’. The end of the Roman Empire put an end to the barbarian migrations. This conclusion helps us contribute more responsibly to modern debate on migration. It also contributes to a discussion of the formation of Germany. The end of migration changed the political dynamics of the regions between Rhine and Baltic. The latter became more inward-facing and from these, eventually, emerged ‘Germany.’

Here is the complete text

Was the Roman Empire drowned in a bathtub?

Recently, I was at the conference Shifting Frontiers X, a leading late antiquity conference in North America.  At the conference George Benton and Richard Burgess gave an interesting talk on the changing role of gold in late antiquity. Here is an excerpt of the abstract reproduced with permission.

From the time of the introduction of the solidus by Constantine the use and perception of gold were changed radically in the Roman Empire. Silver, hitherto the dominant metal for the making of high-volume coinage, was demoted to use in decoration and gifts, while gold, whether as a unit of account or, increasingly, as bullion minted in solidi, dominated economic exchange. The massive scale of gold use is amply attested in literary sources and papyri, as well as archaeologically in the form of hoards. What remains less clear is whether there was actually more gold circulating… A largely ignored study that used proton activation analysis (PAA) provides tantalizing evidence that a new source of gold became available in the 350s.… This new supply enabled the empire to move to sort of gold standard. With this model in place of the changing use of gold, we are not a position to revisit the earlier trace elementanalyses with new hypotheses. At which minted the gold edge of the empire, was the new goal available in both the East and the West? Where were the mines?

And much of the actual paper was a discussion of which techniques might be feasible for testing coins nondestructively for trace elements like platinum. Best of luck to this project.

For my part, the paper implied that the fall of the Western Empire might be a sort of Grover Norquist scenario, in which all the new extremely high-value money accumulated in the hands of the ultra-rich, and the Imperial government became small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.

Not to be missed: conjuring up Rome in AD 600

Dr. Beachcombing imagines the near-ghost town it must have been:

Let’s take the lowest sensible estimate for classical Rome – half a million – and the highest for Rome c. 600, about 50,000. That means that the population has not only been decimated, but that it had been decimated nine times over. And what is more these heirs of Rome (as fashionable ‘late antique’ historians call them) were resident in an echo box; a city that they no longer had the technology to repair, let alone recreate, where nine out of every ten residences were empty, where three and four story buildings gradually keeled over into the streets and where the Parthenon and the Coliseum looked down mockingly on the little people below, not so much dwarfs on giants’ shoulders, as blue-bottles buzzing around a cow’s backside.

Then, remember, perhaps the actual population of Imperial Rome was more like a million and the population of Rome c. 600 was more like  ten thousand, a hundredth of what it had been. The psychopathic Anglo-Saxon guard, the tourist from Scythia and the Pope and his tiny administration could shout as loud as they wanted and no one would have heard them in their ghost town. No one was listening, not even the red baked tiles made in a happier age.

I have recently lived across the river from Detroit...so this is evocative.  Detroit is not, however, quite so echoic.

Parthenon presumably should be Pantheon (above).

More on ancient population estimates in a later post.

Guy Halsall asks...

Why do we need the barbarians?

My contribution to these sessions is essentially to sum up by asking you one big question: why do we need the barbarians?  For it seems that we really do need the barbarians.  The answer was found, or at least suggested, in 1904 by C.P. Cavafy in his famous, much quoted, poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (even quoted, inexplicably, in the names of chic jewellery boutiques in the 7me arrondissement in Paris, as left):

“Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come
And some of our men just in from the border say
There are no barbarians any longer.

“Now what’s going to happen to us without the barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”

He was right; the bigger question, a hundred years on from Cavafy, is probably ‘a solution to what?’  As far as I can see, the problem which they solve cannot be ‘why did the Roman Empire fall?’  The barbarians’ role in any analysis of the Empire’s collapse must surely be sought under ‘consequences’ or ‘effects’ or – perhaps better – ‘components’, rather than under ‘causes’.  If one looks at the matter in simple descriptive terms, the number of provinces or amount of territory actually conquered by barbarians during the fifth century is minimal.  Note that the general move, in the colour scheme adopted in these maps [a reference to the PowerPoint Slides, I'm afraid, but they were simply the maps in Barbarian Migrations], is rarely from white to black, from Roman rule to barbarian rule, but from white to some shade of grey, either as a federate kingdom or as an area simply where the write of the Ravennate court did not run.>

Lots more, from what was a contentious paper at the Leeds conference this past week.

Sunday morning, and Explorator comes to my mailbox...

...full of archaeological goodies.  Thanks, David Meadows!

One of the nice things about this e-mail news compilation is that it supplies me with links to the little stories.

For instance, I don't get excited about the power, wealth and claims to divinity of Greco-Egyptian queens, but who would not want to see this amazing coin/medallion on Sunday morning?

And I find it pleasant to have nonsense about "Roman Chinese" systematically dealt with.

I'm grateful both to David and the originating sources.