THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYIt is the contribution of archaeology above all which has led historians to
question the older view, and it is worth noting that A.H.M. Jones published his
great work, The Later Roman Empire, in 1964, well before the current interest in
late Roman and early medieval archaeology. Although Jones himself was very
aware of the importance of archaeology and had travelled very widely round
the provinces of the Roman empire, his work relies mainly on documentary
evidence, and such a book would look very different today. The change is also
a matter of new ways of looking at the subject. While the older assumptions
of decline are still very much with us, many historians have been infl uenced
by different approaches, especially comparative ones. Perhaps most interest-
ingly, the debate about the ancient economy which has been going on since
the publication of M.I. Finley’s classic book, The Ancient Economy, in 1973,^12
has extended to the later empire, thus to some extent bypassing the supposed
great divide that came with the third century and the reforms of Diocletian.
The older model depends on a clear periodization based on the assumption
of a massive tightening up of government control and consequent increase
of government expenditure, generally attributed to Diocletian. Most books
still make ‘late antiquity’ begin with the reign of Diocletian, and that is under-
standable, given the instability of the preceding period and the administra-
tive innovations brought in from 284 onwards.^13 But if many, even if not all,
of Diocletian’s reforms were revisionist rather than fundamentally new, this
in turn should cause us to pay more attention to the underlying economic
structures and questions which hold good throughout the long history of the
empire. Current research on the Roman economy focuses on such issues as
technology and production, quantifi cation, movement of goods and indica-
tors of economic growth or decline rather than on competing overall models
of economic primitivism or economic rationalism.^14 Intense efforts are cur-
rently being made to quantify the Roman economy.^15 But tracing the actual
nature and level of market exchange remains diffi cult at all periods in the Ro-
man empire, including late antiquity, not least because of the unevenness of
the available source material.^16
East and westThere are nevertheless certain obvious issues which affect the later period
specifi cally, including that of the increasing divide between east and west. The
basic administrative, economic and military structures of the Roman state es-
tablished in the early fourth century were still in place in the eastern empire at
least up to the reign of Justinian, and often beyond. We must therefore look
for special factors, such as those described in Chapter 2, to explain why the
west should have been different.
The late Roman tax system was designed to cope with a situation in which
continual debasement of the coinage had led to near collapse, and revenues
had to be collected and payments made to the troops in kind; a regular
census and the fi ve-year indiction aimed at ensuring reliable collection of tax