4
LATE ROMAN SOCIETY
AND ECONOMY
Understanding the late Roman economy presents a particular challenge. Cer-
tain topics, such as slavery, taxation and the so-called ‘colonate’, which used to
occupy a special place in the secondary literature, have undergone re-evaluation,
while the vast amount of new archaeological and other evidence that is
becoming available means that the whole subject has been transformed. The
‘cultural’ model of late antiquity based on the work of Peter Brown and others
in the past generation has been accused of ignoring or at least underplaying
important issues in economic and administrative history.^1 At the same time
the size and nature of the late Roman economy is still disputed; current ques-
tions include the impact of state taxation and the exaction of the grain from
Egypt and North Africa, the role of the super-rich with their large estates, the
level of integration, and the degree to which there was a market economy. In
the later part of the period, geopolitical factors pose in acute form the ques-
tion of whether and for how long this was still a Mediterranean world at all.
Consideration of the late Roman economy (which involves also the con-
sideration of groups such as landowners, tenants and slaves) is closely tied
to historiographical models of decline and collapse. While as we have seen
(Chapter 2), current revisionist approaches emphasize violence as a main fac-
tor in bringing about the end of the Roman empire in the west, internal fac-
tors have also been adduced by many historians anxious to explain Rome’s
fall.^2 A dark view of the later Roman empire is to be found, for instance, in
Ramsay MacMullen’s Corruption and the Decline of Rome.^3 According to these
approaches, which were foreshadowed in M.I. Rostovtzeff’s Social and Eco-
nomic History of the Roman Empire,^4 the ancient world came to an end because
of its own internal problems, among which were over-taxation and a decline
in the capacity and willingness of elites to maintain urban life. Though for
very different reasons, this was also the classic Marxist view, for which see
especially Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism^5 and G.E.M. de
Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: from the Archaic Age to the
Arab Conquests.^6
This negative picture of the later Roman empire (sometimes referred to
disparagingly as ‘the dominate’, in order to convey the idea of autocratic rule
supported by an unwieldy bureaucracy) has been held by many in the past to