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Rome, the Greek World, and the East Volume 2: Government, Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire by Fergus Millar Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Preface
Fergus Millar, Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford emeritus, is one of the most influential ancient historians of the twentieth century. Since the publication of A Study of Cassius Dio by Oxford University Press in 1964, Millar has published eight books, including two monumental studies, The Emperor in the Roman World (Duckworth, 1977) and The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.-A.D. 337 (Harvard, 1993). These books have transformed the study of ancient history.
In his study of the role of the emperor in the Roman World Millar argued that the reign of Augustus inaugurated almost three centuries of relatively passive and inert government, in which the central power pursued few policies and was largely content to respond to pressures and demands from below. After more than twenty years of scholarly reaction, The Emperor in the Roman World is now the dominant scholarly model of how the Roman Empire worked in practice.
Reviewers immediately hailed Millar's magisterial study of the Roman Near East as a "grand book on a grand topic" (TLS, 15 April 1994). In this grand book, displaying an unrivaled mastery of ancient literary, epigraphic, papyrological, and archaeological sources in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other Semitic languages, Millar made the indigenous peoples of the Roman Near East, especially the Jews, central to our understanding of how and why the three great religions of the book, Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, evolved in a cultural context that was neither "eastern" nor "western." There can be no doubt that The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.-A.D. 337 will be the standard work on the subject for a long time to come.
More recently, Millar has published two books, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Michigan, 1998) and The Roman Republic in Political Thought (New England, 2002), on the politics of the Roman Republic and how those politics have been understood or misunderstood by political thinkers from the ancient world to the present. These books have challenged widely held notions about the supposed oligarchic political character of the Roman Republic. In the future Millar intends to return to the Roman Near East for a study to be entitled Society and Religion in the Roman Near East from Constantine to Mahomet. In this study Millar will bring the story of Greco-Roman culture in the Near East from the early fourth century up to the Islamic invasions of the seventh century A.D.
During the same period when he has produced these ground-breaking books, Millar also has published over seventy essays on aspects of Greco-Roman history, from the Hellenistic period until the middle of the fifth century A.D. These essays have laid the foundations for or supplemented the ideas and arguments presented in Millar's very well known books. Some of these essays, such as "The Emperor, the Senate and the Provinces" (Journal of Roman Studies 56 [1966]: 156-66), or "Emperors, Frontiers and Foreign Relations, 31 B.C.-A.D. 378" (Britannia 13 [1982]: 1-23), have appeared in hitherto accessible journals and are widely regarded as classics of scholarship. But other outstanding essays, such as Millar's study, "Polybius between Greece and Rome" (published in Greek Connections: Essays on Culture and Diplomacy [1987], 1-18), have been more difficult to locate, even for professional historians doing research in the field.
Therefore, the primary goal of our collection, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, is to bring together into three volumes the most significant of Millar's essays published since 1961 for the widest audience possible. The collection includes many articles that clearly will be of great intellectual interest and pedagogical use to scholars doing research and teaching in the different fields of the volume headings: Volume 1, The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution; Volume 2, Government, Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire; and Volume 3, The Greek World, the Jews, and the East.
At the same time, we have conceived and organized the three volumes of Rome, the Greek World, and the East especially in order to make Millar's most significant articles readily available to a new generation of students, who increasingly may not have access to the specialty journals or edited volumes in which many of Millar's more recent articles have appeared.
The principle of arrangement of the essays in each of the three volumes is broadly chronological by subject matter treated within the ancient world. We believe that this chronological arrangement of essays (rather than by publication date of the essays) gives intellectual coherence to each volume on its own and to the collection as a whole. Overall, as Millar himself has defined it, the subject of this collection is "the communal culture and civil government of the Graeco-Roman world, essentially from the Hellenistic period to the fifth century A.D." ("Author's Prologue," volume 1, p. 11).
Publication of a three-volume collection of essays, drawn from a wide variety of journals and edited volumes, over nearly four decades of scholarly production, presents editors with some major stylistic challenges. Our collection contains more than fifty essays. Most of these essays originally were published in learned journals or books, each of which had its own house style. Some learned journals also have changed their house styles over the time when Millar has published in them. For these reasons we have not attempted to bring all of the citations in the texts or notes of the articles in the collection into perfect stylistic conformity. Conformity for the sake of conformity makes no sense; moreover, to achieve such conformity would delay publication of the collection for years.
Rather, the stylistic goal of our collection has been to inform readers clearly and consistently where they can find the sources cited by Millar in his essays. To help achieve that goal we have included a list of frequently cited works (with abbreviations for those works) at the beginning of each volume. Thus, in the text or notes of the essays, readers will find abbreviations for frequently cited journals or books, which are fully cited in our lists at the beginning of each volume. For example, references in the notes to the abbreviation JRS refer to the Journal of Roman Studies. For the abbreviations themselves we have relied upon the standard list provided in L'Année Philologique. In certain cases, where there have been individual citations in the original texts or notes to more obscure collections of inscriptions or papyri, we have expanded the citations themselves in situ, rather than endlessly expanding our list of frequently cited works.
In accordance with Fergus Millar's wishes, for the sake of readers who do not know Latin or Greek, we have provided English translations of most of the extended Greek and Latin passages and some of the technical terms cited by Millar in the text and notes of the original essays. In doing so, we have followed the practice Fergus Millar himself adopted in The Emperor in the Roman World in 1977. We believe that providing these translations will help to make Millar's essays more widely accessible, which is the essential goal of the collection. Readers who wish to consult the original Greek and Latin passages or technical terms that we have translated in the collection can look up those passages or technical terms in the original, published versions of the essays.
The editors would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have helped us in the process of collecting these essays and preparing them for publication. We are indebted first of all to Lewis Bateman, formerly senior editor at the University of North Carolina Press, who suggested the basic arrangement of the essays into three volumes. We are also grateful to David Perry, editor-in-chief, and Pamela Upton, assistant managing editor at the University of North Carolina Press, for their flexibility, advice, and support of the project.
Gabriela Sara, Ori Shapir, Amir Marmor, and Andrea Rothstein in Israel and Dr. Nancy Thompson of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provided editorial assistance. Our thanks also to Mark Rogers for his help with the maps. We continue to owe a great debt to Priscilla Lange for her helpfulness and kindness to us in Oxford. We also would like to express our gratitude to the Fellows of Brasenose College Oxford and All Souls College Oxford for their hospitality while we were working on this project.
Above all, however, the editors would like to thank Fergus Millar, for his scholarship, his generosity, and his friendship over more than two decades.
Hannah M. Cotton
Guy MacLean Rogers
The new reading of the familiar ancient sources was masterfully deployed in the two parts of the first volume (Rome, the Greek World, and the East: Volume 1, The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution) in order to vindicate the application of the term "democracy" to the Republic, and "monarchy" to the principate right from its inception. The present volume goes one step further in relying heavily on the direct and fresh evidence of documentary texts, inscriptions and papyri, rather than losing itself in the barren study of the Rome-centred ancient texts. The change of emphasis was dictated by the change of subject, as already observed at the end of chapter 11 of the first volume, "The Emperor, the Senate, and the Provinces"—a study of the provincial system that foreshadows some of the issues presented in the present volume:
The first part includes papers exploring (and expanding) some of the themes of Millar's monumental The Emperor in the Roman World (31 B.C.-A.D. 337),[2] whose chronological scope corresponds roughly to that of the present volume, the first three centuries A.D. under the Empire, when relative stability allows one to speak of a system of government. Other papers in the first part were written after the publication of that book, covering new ground, but using the same model of the working of imperial government.
The main theme of the first chapter, "Emperors at Work" (1967), rightly described as a "true classic," lies at the very heart of The Emperor in the Roman World and was in fact the most complete statement of Millar's new interpretation of the nature of imperial rule before the book's publication. Its cogent, and at times belligerent, tone is to be explained by the fact that "the hardest thing is precisely to drop anachronistic presuppositions and believe what one reads."[3] On a much smaller scale than The Emperor in the Roman World, "Emperors at Work" describes and interprets the role of the emperor in the Roman world through "words issued by, or in the name of, the Emperor, in response to words addressed to him by others."[4] Its message could be summed up in what is often regarded as Millar's personal credo: "The emperor was what the emperor did,"[5] that is, the impact of imperial rule was felt to the extent that it was exercised, and "its essential passivity" meant that it was exercised "in response to an initiative from below."[6] The clue to what the emperor did lies first and foremost in the imperial correspondence whose characteristics are best illustrated in the Younger Pliny's correspondence with the emperor Trajan, the subject of chapter 2: "Trajan: Government by Correspondence" (1998).
The fact that Rome remained a republic in theory, and sovereignty was retained by the Senate and People of Rome (senatus populusque Romanus), meant that the public treasury, the aerarium, like other republican institutions, continued to operate as before (chapter 4: "The Aerarium and Its Officials under the Empire," 1964) alongside the imperial private treasury (better called "estate"), the fiscus, which slowly and gradually came to absorb the main functions of the former, thereby losing its private character (chapter 3: "The Fiscus in the First Two Centuries," 1963). Millar's later discussion of the imperial financial and monetary system, chapter 5: "Cash Distributions in Rome and Imperial Minting" (translated here from the French "Les congiaires à Rome et la monnaie," 1991), is perhaps the best example of what I referred to before as Millar's aporia: in no other article do we encounter so many unanswered questions, but the sheer value of posing them cannot be overestimated.
We are told in the postscript of chapter 6, "Epictetus and the Imperial Court" (1965), that its genesis lay in "the collection of material for a book on the imperial court from Augustus to Constantine," but its unique theme, a counterpoint to "the values of status and ambition" on which the imperial court and imperial society as a whole were based, was not in fact integrated into The Emperor in the Roman World.
The gruesome subject of penal punishment in the Roman Empire is fully explored by Millar for the first time in chapter 7: "Condemnation to Hard Labour in the Roman Empire, from the Julio-Claudians to Constantine" (1984). The dual-penalty system introduced into the Roman legal system in the second century A.D. meant that the various forms of physical punishment, incarceration and hard labour, meticulously described here, were reserved for "lower-class" persons—and also for Christians.
Another classic piece is "The Equestrian Career under the Empire" (chapter 8), which contains the first part of Millar's review from 1963 of H.-G. Pflaum, Les carrières procuratoriennes équestres sous le Haut-Empire romain I-III (Paris, 1960-61), and also takes on board Pflaum's Procurateurs équestres sous le Haut-Empire romain (Paris, 1950). For Millar Pflaum's reconstruction of the equestrian career not only antedates the evolution of a fully fledged equestrian civil service with a highly regulated career, with rules of promotion and fixed grades of pay. Like other interpretations that rest largely on prosopographical data, it does not pay enough attention to the broader picture, to the sociopolitical and cultural framework which clearly resisted such a development.
Triggered off by E. N. Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore and London, 1976), chapter 9, "Emperors, Frontiers, and Foreign Relations, 31 B.C.-A.D. 378" (1982), analyzes "the conditions under which the external policy of the Empire was formulated and put into effect."[7] It explores the interplay between the emperor as the commander in chief and the restraining factors of time, distance, and availability of information in shaping foreign policy and expansion. In modern perception diplomatic activity is characteristic of relations with foreign powers beyond the borders of the state. This view proves itself inadequate in the case of the Roman Empire, where the very concept of borders did not exist. Here "most of the evidence for exchanges which have the form of diplomatic dealings in fact comes from … dealings with cities and communities unambiguously subject to the Roman Empire, which paid tribute to it, and which were in every sense within its borders," as demonstrated in chapter 10: "Government and Diplomacy in the Roman Empire during the First Three Centuries" (1988). The same is true of relations with the so-called client kings whose ambiguous status within the Roman world is revealed in chapter 11: "Emperors, Kings, and Subjects: The Politics of Two-Level Sovereignty" (1996).
The second part of this volume opens with an essay on the survival of local cultures under Roman aegis in a single province (chapter 12). At the time of its first publication "Local Cultures in the Roman Empire: Libyan, Punic, and Latin in Roman Africa" (1968) was a pioneer study in the true sense of the word. Millar's warning at the opening that the results and conclusions reached in such studies "may be falsified by new evidence" should not blind us to the enduring value of the methods employed and the questions asked here for the first time in dealing with the intricate and complex issue of "survival." This is the first expression in print of what became one of Millar's main preoccupations, explored in many of the articles to be included in volume 3 of Rome, the Greek World, and the East: The Greek World, the Jews, and the East and in The Roman Near East, 31 B.C.-A.D. 337.[8]
Survival is also the subject of chapter 13, "P. Herennius Dexippus: The Greek World and the Third-Century Invasions" (1969), which takes its cue from the resistance put up by the Athenians headed by the historian Dexippus in the face of the Herulian invasion and sack of Athens in 267/8 A.D. This is Fergus Millar at his best, with complete mastery of the ancient sources, the documentary evidence, and the prosopographical data—a lesson indeed in how to use prosopography profitably. There is enough material here for the writing of a new "War and Peace" aiming to explain, in the words of the last paragraph, why "the Byzantine world survived against repeated attack in a way that the Latin world did not; and that a profound attachment to the classical Greek past remained fundamental to Byzantine culture… . what we find in the third century is not merely that fuller literary evidence happens to reveal more about popular resistance in the Greek East; but rather that the Greek society of the Empire gained self-confidence and coherence precisely from its vigorous literary and intellectual tradition, and its intimate connection with a heroic past."
The role of the imperial cult in the various phases of the persecution of the Christians is an occasion to explore and nuance the nature of the cult itself in chapter 14 ("The Imperial Cult and the Persecutions," 1973). The racy style of chapter 15, "The World of the Golden Ass" (1981), turning Apuleius' fiction into a treasure trove for the depiction of real life in the Roman provincial countryside, gives way to the slowly mounting tension between imperial government and the self-governing cities of the empire in chapter 16: "Empire and City, Augustus to Julian: Obligations, Excuses, and Status" (1983). The vitality of city life was sapped by the multiplication of exemptions and immunities from performing municipal duties granted as rewards for employment in the growing imperial civil service. The interplay between private initiative and imperial helplessness or inconsistency encouraged the emergence of status distinctions, which left their mark on the honorific language of the inscriptions even before they received legal sanction. The process by which Italy, which until Domitian had occupied an abnormal status in the framework of the Empire, was provincialized is the subject of chapter 17: "Italy and the Roman Empire: Augustus to Constantine" (1986).
Chapter 18, "Style Abides" (1981), should be read together with the more personal notes about Millar's teacher (and an earlier holder of the Camden chair), the late Sir Ronald Syme, in the prologue to volume 1 (pp. 12-16). Both statements contain important insights into Syme's work, interests, intentions, and personality. No less, however, do they reveal to us by comparison Millar's own road as a historian of Rome. Millar certainly shared Syme's impatience with the German constitutional school. In speaking about Syme he is clearly expressing his own feeling, familiar to all of us who were his students and who found the temptation of exploring such notions as "The imperium of Augustus" irresistible; whereas for Millar Syme's "Imperator Caesar: A Study in Nomenclature"[9] represents "his finest single article"—precisely because the elucidation of the title is taken from the political reality of the time rather than from the Roman law books.
Not that Millar is oblivious to the enormous value of the writings of the Roman jurists for imperial history, as is made abundantly clear in the two chapters that conclude this volume (chapter 19: "A New Approach to the Roman Jurists," 1986; and chapter 20: "The Greek East and Roman Law: The Dossier of M. Cn. Licinius Rufinus," 1999). Lamentably, the juristic texts have not received "the textual attention almost guaranteed to anyone who had the sense to write in verse," and their invaluable contribution to our understanding of "the complex cultural landscape of the Empire" has been sorely missed. The career of the Greek jurist M. Cn. Licinius Rufinus takes us back some thirty-five years to A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford, 1964),[10] where for the first time Millar analyzes "the complex, and in historical terms extremely important, process by which the upper classes of the Greek East 'became Roman' while 'staying Greek.'"
The Greek historian, Cassius Dio, and the Greek jurist, M. Cn. Licinius Rufinus, embody that process in their career in the service of the Roman emperors as well as in their writings. Both represent "the fusion of Greek civilization and Roman government"; for both "to be a Roman … was to have a certain attitude to history, to identify oneself with an historical tradition going back to the Republic and beyond, and to look at history from Rome outwards … while retaining unimpaired the cultural outlook of the Greek world in which [they] were born." Both—but also P. Herennius Dexippus—could be regarded as "a symbol of the process that brought about a Roman Empire ruled from Byzantium, which survived for a thousand years after the western part had passed away" (A Study of Cassius Dio, 191-92).
Hannah M. Cotton
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