LATE ROMAN SOCIETY AND ECONOMYtimes. Landlords were certainly involved in production, and engaged in long-
distance transport; it has been argued that both might take place within an
exchange system involving either simply his own estates, or those of himself
and his friends. If so, this was less an economic activity than a patronal rela-
tionship. Even the widespread appearance overseas of African pottery during
our period may be partly a product of this mutual exchange rather than the
result of new commercial market or production systems. However, recent
studies have argued forcefully for the commercial activity of such families,
and there has been greater emphasis on trade and profi t as motivation for
the long-distance movement of goods; the interpretation of the huge amount
of evidence from late Roman pottery is critical here.^36 It seems obvious, as
Wickham argues, that elite demand provided the stimulus for such activity.
If it is true that the amount of land in the hands of great proprietors (the po-
tentes) increased, and if we accept more recent views about the nature of their
economic activity,^37 a very different picture emerges of economic and political
factors in the late empire than the traditional one.
The enlargement and transformation of the senatorial class, greatly in-
creased in numbers from the time of Constantine on, rendered the old eques-
trian class otiose; the latter eventually disappeared as its former offi ces were
progressively renamed and redefi ned as senatorial. Nor was it enough to be
called simply vir clarissimus (the standard senatorial rank in the early empire).
Valentinian I in AD 372 laid down a senatorial hierarchy ranging from clarissimi
to spectabiles and (at the top) illustres; these grades were attached to the hold-
ing of particular offi ces, and other privileges of rank, such as seats allotted
at the Coliseum in Rome, also followed. The senate of Constantinople, on
the other hand, differed from that of Rome since it was an artifi cial creation;
while the Roman senate comprised families of vast wealth and pretensions to
aristocratic lineage (even if in many cases they did not go further back than
the third century), its counterpart in Constantinople was fi lled with new men.
This feature in the long run helped its future continuance; being based on
Constantinople itself, and before the late fi fth and sixth centuries generally
lacking the enormous estates of its counterparts in Rome, the eastern senate
was better able to avoid tensions which developed between the Roman senate
and the imperial government. But eastern senators also enjoyed substantial
privileges, and their role as members of the traditional landowning class, al-
legedly preyed upon by the rapacious emperor, is emphasized in the Secret
History of Procopius, who identifi ed with their interests. Like their western
counterparts, eastern senators were no doubt in a good position to evade the
special tax (collatio glebalis or follis) which had belatedly been imposed on the
senatorial class by Constantine. In the example of the senatorial class, we can
in fact see the combination of tradition and innovation which is typical of the
late empire; for while, on the one hand, the late Roman senate was essentially
a service aristocracy which differed considerably from the senate of the early
empire, it did not occur to anyone not to maintain existing social patterns, so
that many of the outward signs of senatorial status and privilege were retained