LATE ROMAN SOCIETY AND ECONOMYapply to the period from Diocletian onwards. However, much of the evidence
adduced is impressionistic. Complaints about tax collectors or soldiers bil-
leted in towns are indeed common, but similar examples can be found in al-
most any society, and need to be read with caution. Whether things had really
changed signifi cantly for the worse is hard to establish, and plenty of evidence
from the Principate suggests that the condition of the peasant then was hardly
any better. Individual instances of peasants taking evasive action at the tax
collector’s approach do not necessarily add up to a general picture of fl ight
and collapse. Also fundamental to this view is the legal evidence, especially the
often repeated laws in the Theodosian Code, by which successive emperors
legislated to keep decurions in place in their towns and coloni on the estates
in which they are registered. The picture of oppression and authoritarianism
which these laws seem to suggest was endorsed in the past by scholars who
have represented the later Roman empire as virtually collapsing under its own
weight, and described it in terms such as ‘totalitarian’ and ‘repressive’.^7 But
as A.H.M. Jones recognized, when laws are constantly repeated, they must
be presumed to be ineffective; moreover, laws need enforcement. Where the
necessary apparatus for the latter is lacking, as it largely was in the Roman
empire, it may be comforting for those in authority to repeat the law itself, but
it does not necessarily follow that it was actually carried out in practice. Jones
also recognized that social mobility was possible in the later Roman empire
- probably even more so than under the Principate. But a wholesale re-evalu-
ation in the last generation of the nature of the legal evidence, in particular the
construction and evolution of the Theodosian and Justinianic Codes, has now
led to a very different understanding of the actual signifi cance of this legisla-
tion and of the working of law in late antique society (Introduction). Similarly,
recent work on the papyrological evidence from Egypt, especially that relating
to great landowning families, lies behind a new and more commercial view of
the economy in the sixth century.^8 Taking the literary sources at face value
can lead to equally overstated conclusions. Many previous discussions have
taken literally the apparent statement by the Christian Lactantius, a biased and
hostile source,^9 that Diocletian quadrupled the size of the army, and since
the maintenance of the army was the single largest call on the state revenues,
have then used this as the basis for a highly negative view of the economy in
general. Similarly, despite Diocletian’s measures to ensure better collection
of revenue and an elaborate system of taxation in kind, it is far from certain
that the level of taxation itself increased.^10 The few general statements that
we have in contemporary sources on such matters as taxation tend to come
from writers as biased and unsubtle as the pagan Zosimus or the fi fth-century
Christian moralist Salvian, and must be treated with considerable caution. Fi-
nally, in considering these methodological issues, it is also necessary to bal-
ance contrasts between east and west; if the structure of the state in the late
fourth and fi fth centuries was really as top-heavy and as liable to collapse from
its own internal contradictions, why did the eastern empire resist fragmenta-
tion and maintain prosperity for a signifi cantly longer period?^11