INTRODUCTIONthe later Roman empire, or late antiquity, and Byzantium has proved difficult.
Many books on Byzantium choose the inauguration of Constantinople by
Constantine (AD 330) as their starting point, since Constantinople remained
the capital of the Byzantine empire until its fall in 1453, but others only begin
with the sixth or seventh centuries. From a quite different perspective, west-
ern theologians tend to place a major break at 451, the date of the Council
of Chalcedon; however, this is to exclude the large and growing amount of
scholarship – historical as well as theological – that deals with the eastern
church in the period that saw the rise of Islam. Readers of this book may
therefore find that they will also be consulting modern works which at first
sight seem to belong to other disciplines or specialisms, and should not be put
off by a seemingly irrelevant title.
Terminology does matter, and whether we like it or not, it shapes our per-
ceptions, especially of controversial issues. The title of this book, The Med-
iterranean World in Late Antiquity, invites consideration of the two concepts
‘Mediterranean’ and ‘late antiquity’. The first will be discussed further in the
Conclusion. As for ‘late antiquity’, this is a term which has come to denote
not simply a historical period but also a way of interpreting it – ‘the late antiq-
uity model’, or what I have called elsewhere for shorthand ‘the Brownian
model’, since it has been so much associated with the work of Peter Brown.
As suggested already, this has been an enormously fruitful way of looking at
the period, and has the great advantage of avoiding the ‘decline and fall’ sce-
nario, but it does not preclude critical approaches or changed emphases, as is
clear from several of the contributions to Philip Rousseau’s Companion to Late
Antiquity. I hope that these will become clear in the chapters that follow.
The sourcesThe source material for this period is exceptionally rich and varied, including
both the works of writers great by any standards, and plentiful documentation
of the lives of quite ordinary people. Changing circumstances also dictated
changes in contemporary writing: St Augustine, for example, was a provincial
from a moderately well-off family, who, having made his early career through
the practice of rhetoric, became a bishop in the North African town of Hippo
and spent much of his life not only wrestling with the major problems of
Christian theology but also trying to make sense of the historical changes
taking place around him. Instead of a great secular history like that of Ammi-
anus Marcellinus in the late fourth century, Augustine’s Spanish contempo-
rary Orosius produced an abbreviated catalogue of disasters from the Roman
past which was to become standard reading in the medieval Latin west, while
numerous calendars and chronicles tried to combine in one schema the events
of secular history and the Christian history of the world since creation. In the
sixth century one man, the Roman senator Cassiodorus, composed Variae,
the official correspondence of the Ostrogothic kings, a history of the Goths,
and later, after the defeat of the Goths by the Byzantines in 554, his Institutes,