birthrates declined, and communities were wracked by offi -
cial and unoffi cial persecutions of the Christians, a new but
growing religious minority.
By 280 c.e. these pressures came close to destroying
Rome, but a new and strong emperor, Diocletian (r. 284–305
c.e.), took offi ce in 284. For the 23 years of his reign and the
31 years of his successor, the emperor Constantine (r. 306–337
c.e.), imperial policies both averted immediate collapse and
perhaps ensured that it would eventually occur.
Diocletian attempted to take control of the economic cri-
sis by putting strict control on the prices of certain goods,
which prompted farmers, artisans, and merchants simply
to stop dealing in those goods. When Constantine tried to
increase trade and commerce by distributing gold from the
Roman temples, infl ation increased even more dramatically.
Under Diocletian the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire was
split in two, east and west, and Constantine reacted to the
pressures of foreign invasion by virtually eliminating the
authority of the Senate, thereby putting all power into the
emperor’s hands, and by building up the army. Th ese changes
did allow Rome to ward off invasion, but they also had im-
mediate consequences for Roman society.
Diocletian’s splitting of the empire doubled the weight
of bureaucracy. Always prone to corruption, the now more
numerous civil offi cials became generally more rapacious.
Citizens found themselves subject to extortion or required to
pay bribes to secure basic services such as protection under
the law. In succeeding years, the emperors’ various eff orts to
crack down on corruption only made matters worse. Offi cials
came to realize that they could lose their jobs at any time, and
they reacted by trying to amass as much illicit profi t from
their positions as they could before being caught.
New laws against usury, which began during Constan-
tine’s reign, had a similarly paradoxical eff ect. Th ese laws
forbade lending money at exorbitant interest, and they were
passed as the result of infl uence from Roman Christians. But
citizens still needed to lend money, and bankers continued to
make loans. Under the new laws, however, a lender could not
expect the courts to support claims against debtors who de-
faulted on loans. Th is increased the risk to the lender, which
led creditors to charge ever-higher rates of interest. Th e com-
mon citizens suff ered accordingly.
Constantine’s eff orts to consolidate military power un-
der the emperor and to defeat the invasions of groups from
northern Europe, while largely successful, held long-term
consequences for Roman society. In Constantine’s army in-
creasingly more legions, and eventually all of the most ef-
fective legions, were composed of soldiers from the very
Germanic peoples that Rome was resisting. Th ese soldiers
served and became Roman citizens, some of them reaching
high military and civil offi ce, and introduced new cultural
elements into Roman society.
Th e rise of Christianity had other eff ects on Roman cul-
ture. For example, in the middle of the fourth century c.e.
the Greek prelate Gregory of Nyssa (ca. 335–ca. 394 c.e.) pub-lished tracts arguing, from a Christian perspective, against
the institution of slavery. While enslaved people revolted
numerous times and earlier philosophers had argued against
the cruel treatment of slaves, Gregory is the earliest example
of any writer from the Greco-Roman world suggesting that
slavery was, in itself, an evil institution. Th e economic conse-
quences of a rejection of slavery, by the late Roman Empire,
may not have been great, but such a radical rethinking of a
universal social institution was destabilizing. Similar Chris-
tian arguments against capital punishment and aggressive
wars drove wedges between the Christian and non-Christian
populations.
As the offi cial institutions of Rome became dominated
by Christians and, aft er Constantine, offi cially Christian, di-
visions within the faith continued to disrupt society at all
levels. Starting in the fourth century c.e. a series of schisms
between Orthodox Christianity (whose defi nition changed
decade by decade) and various alternative sects, branded he-
retical by defenders of orthodoxy, oft en brought legislation
to a standstill and repeatedly sparked riots in all the major
cities of the Roman world. Nestorians, Monophysites, Do-
natists, Monothelites, and Arians all diff ered in theology
(sometimes only by exceedingly fi ne points of doctrine), but
each claimed to represent true Christianity. Each sect ar-
gued, legislated, and fought against the others whenever and
wherever they could.
During the fourth and fi ft h centuries imperial power grew
weak and dispersed. Th e city of Rome itself became less hos-
pitable as the mouth of the river Tiber silted up and became a
malarial marsh. Th e center of political activity in Italy moved
to Ravenna and Milan. Constantinople, the splendid new
capital, became less involved in aff airs to the west and increas-
ingly Greek in its language and customs. New generations ofCoins from the Hoxne hoard, Roman Britain, buried in the fi ft h
century c.e. and found in Hoxne, Suff olk; the hoard is thought to
have been buried for safekeeping during diffi cult times for the Roman
British, who were left without any help from the Roman Empire to
defend themselves from the attacks of the barbarians. (© Th e Trustees
of the British Museum)social collapse and abandonment: Rome 10070895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i1007 1007 10/10/07 2:30:44 PM