Study in Survival (Oxford: 1982), 164–5: ‘politically the structure of the Later Roman Empire
is one of the grimmest of all ancient times’; ‘to modern man, the corrupt, brutal regimenta-
tion of the Later Empire appears as a horrible example of the victory of the state over the
individual’. Peter Brown’s review discussion of Jones, Later Roman Empire, in his Religion
and Society in the Age of St. Augustine (London: Faber, 1972), 46–73, is still worth reading, and
on Jones’s views on taxation and the late Roman economy see Bryan Ward-Perkins, ‘Jones
and the Late Roman economy’, in David M. Gwynn, ed., A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman
Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 193–212.
8 J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity. Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance, rev. ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Peter Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justin-
ian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
9 De mortibus persecutorum 7.
10 As argued by e.g. A.H.M. Jones, ‘Over-taxation and the decline of the Roman Empire’, in
Brunt, ed., The Roman Economy, 82–9.
11 Christopher Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) is an outstanding work which deals with both east
and west in a comparative perspective, and see further below.
12 Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1973), 2nd rev. ed. (London: Hogarth, 1985).
13 Cf. Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cam-
bridge: Orchard Academic, 2001); Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, The Birth of Classical
Europe. A History from Troy to Augustine (London: Allen Lane, 2010).
14 However, a controversial book by Peter F. Bang, The Roman Bazaar. A Comparative Study
of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
insists on the inapplicability of the market model, and see id., ‘The ancient economy and
new institutional economics’, review article on Scheidel, Morris and Saller, eds., The
Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, in Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009),
194–206.
15 See for instance Walter Scheidel and Steven J. Friesen, ‘The size of the economy and the
distribution of income in the Roman empire’, Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009), 61–91; Alan
K. Bowman and Andrew Wilson, eds., Quantifying the Roman Economy. Methods and Problems
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
16 On the methodological issues see Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 700–8.
17 On which see Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity and Sarris, Economy and Society in the
Age of Justinian.
18 R. MacMullen, ‘Late Roman slavery’, Historia 36 (1987), 359–82; C.R. Whittaker, ‘Circe’s
pigs: from slavery to serfdom in the later Roman world’, Slavery and Abolition 8 (1987), 87–
122; Y. Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World, Eng. trans. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
19 Noel Lenski, ‘Captivity, slavery and cultural exchange between Rome and the Germans
from the fi rst to the seventh century CE’, in Catherine M. Cameron, ed., Invisible Citizens.
Captives and their Consequences (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008), 80–109.
20 W. Klingshirn, ‘Charity and power: Caesarius of Arles and the ransoming of captives in
sub-Roman Gaul’, Journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985), 183–203.
21 For discussion of this diffi cult topic, see Cam Grey, ‘Contextualising colonatus: the origin
of the Later Roman empire’, Journal of Roman Studies 97 (2007), 155–75, especially 156–61,
responding to J.-M. Carrié, ‘Le “colonat du Bas-Empire”: un mythe historiographique?’,
Opus 1 (1982), 351–71, and in turn A.J.B. Sirks (who writes as a Roman lawyer), ‘The
colonate in Justinian’s reign’, Journal of Roman Studies 98 (2008), 120–43, responding to
Grey; see also A. Marcone, Il colonato tardoantico nella storiografi a moderna (Como: Edizioni
New Press, 1988); Giardina, ‘The transition to late antiquity’. Labour and social relations
in the late Roman world are discussed in Part III of Cambridge Ancient History XIII,
pp. 277–370, and by Bryan Ward-Perkins in vol. XIV for the period 425-c. 600, at 315–91.
22 Grey, art. cit., 159.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4