Violence in Late Antiquity

Perceptions and Practices

H.A. Drake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754654988
• eBook ISBN: 9781351875745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

'Violence' is virtually synonymous in the popular imagination with the period of the Later Roman Empire-a time when waves of barbarian invaders combined with urban mobs and religious zealots to bring an end to centuries of peace and serenity. All of these images come together in the Visigothic sack of the city of Rome in A.D. 410, a date commonly used for the fall of the entire empire. But was this period in fact as violent as it has been portrayed? A new generation of scholars in the field of Late Antiquity has called into question the standard narrative, pointing to evidence of cultural continuity and peaceful interaction between "barbarians" and Romans, Christians and pagans. To assess the state of this question, the fifth biennial 'Shifting Frontiers' conference was devoted to the theme of 'Violence in Late Antiquity'. Conferees addressed aspects of this question from standpoints as diverse as archaeology and rhetoric, anthropology and economics. A selection of the papers then delivered have been prepared for the present volume, along with others commissioned for the purpose and a concluding essay by Martin Zimmerman, reflecting on the theme of the book. The four sections on Defining Violence, 'Legitimate' Violence, Violence and Rhetoric, and Religious Violence are each introduced by a theme essay from a leading scholar in the field. While offering no definitive answer to the question of violence in Late Antiquity, the papers in this volume aim to stimulate a fresh look at this age-old problem.

PART I
Assessing Violence in Late Antiquity

Chapter 1

Perceptions of Barbarian Violence

Walter Pohl

University of Vienna

In the summer of 599, the last Roman army ever to cross the middle Danube marched into the Tisza plain east of Pannonia. Its actions are described in detail in the seventh-century chronicle of Theophylact Simocatta. On the day after a victorious battle against the Avars, the Byzantine commander Priscus “marshaled four thousand men and ordered these to traverse the Tissus and investigate the enemy’s movements. So the men dispatched by the general crossed the nearby river. Accordingly, they encountered three Gepid settlements. The barbarians knew nothing of the previous day’s events [the battle], had arranged a drinking session, and were celebrating a local feast. Then they had entrusted their cares to drink and were passing the night in festivity. But in the twilight, as it is called, when remnants of night still remained, the Romans attacked the drunken barbarians and wrought extensive slaughter. For thirty thousand barbarians were killed.”¹

It may seem slightly inappropriate to start an chapter about barbarian violence with an example of violence against barbarians. But Ralph Mathisen and Wolf Liebeschuetz, in this volume, also raise the point concerning whether barbarians were any more violent than their Roman contemporaries. Thus, the story of the drunken Gepid villagers offers the opportunity for a few observations. An obvious conclusion is that barbarians might also have been victims of Roman violence. Rome was an empire, whose initial expansion and later maintenance of its overwhelming power was based on war and violence. Over the centuries, as Heather has stressed, there were many instances of what we might regard as excesses of violence against barbarians, as in this case.² The Gepids were Avar subjects since 567, and the villagers in Theophylact’s story had not even known that a major battle between their Avar lords and the Romans had raged in their vicinity, an interesting insight into the structure of the Avar khaganate. From a military point of view, butchering them was worthless. But behind such actions, there was an aim and an attitude: under certain circumstances, only a dead barbarian was a good barbarian. Roman armies had often pursued a similar policy in barbarian lands. In the Slavic countries north of the lower Danube, Emperor Maurice employed a systematic search-and-destroy strategy. In the autumn of 602, he even ordered an army to spend the winter in barbarian lands, when the trees were bare and the Slavs would not be able to hide in the woods.³ The ensuing mutiny led to the downfall of the Emperor and to another drastic example of Byzantine violence. First, Maurice’s sons were slain in front of his eyes to inflict preliminary punishment on him, as Theophylact remarked. Only then was his own head cut off.⁴ Of course, the mutinous Byzantine army had not objected to the killing of barbarians but to their own barbaric winter quarters. For the Roman public, slaughtering potentially violent barbarians hardly needed an excuse. Theophylact certainly did not disagree with the slaughter of the Gepids. He even grossly exaggerates their number, for it is quite unlikely that as many as 30,000 of them lived in three villages.

To look at things the other way round: what did barbarian raiders do when defenseless Romans were at their mercy? When the Avars took Sirmium in 582, according to John of Ephesus, they gave the almost starved inhabitants so much food that many of them died because they ate too much.⁵ But that, of course, may be an exception. There were also some dramatic massacres. When the city of Milan surrendered to the Goths in 539, in the course of the Gothic war, “the barbarians razed the city to the ground, killing all the males of every age to the number of not less than three hundred thousand and reducing the women to slavery and then presenting them to the Burgundians by way of repaying them for their alliance. And when they found Reparatus, the praetorian prefect, they cut his body into small pieces and threw his flesh to the dogs.”⁶ But then again, the Byzantines led by Belisarius had behaved the same way when they entered Naples in 536. “And then, a great slaughter took place; for all of them were possessed with fury, especially those who chanced to have a brother or other relative slain in the fighting at the wall. And they kept killing all whom they encountered, sparing neither old nor young, and dashing into the houses they made slaves of the women and children and secured the valuables as plunder.” Business as usual, we might say, except for the Huns in the Byzantine army, who “outdid all the rest, for they did not even withhold their hand from the sanctuaries, but slew many who had taken refuge in them.”⁷

After a while, Belisarius, the Emperor’s commander-in-chief, summoned his soldiers to give them a lesson in conduct at war: “Inasmuch as God has given us victory…, we should show ourselves not unworthy of his grace, but by our humane treatment of the vanquished make it plain that we have conquered these men justly. Do not, therefore, hate the Neapolitans with a boundless hatred and do not allow your hostility toward them to continue beyond the limits of the war. For when men have been vanquished, their victors never hate them any longer. And by killing them you will not be ridding yourselves of enemies for the future, but you will be suffering a loss through the death of your subjects …. For it is a disgrace to prevail over the enemy and then to show yourselves vanquished by passion. So let all the possessions of these men suffice for you as the rewards of your valor, but let their wives, together with their children, be given back to the men.”⁸

Procopius appropriately placed these admonitions after the first of many sieges and battles in the course of the Gothic war. The speech by Belisarius is a trace of a controversial debate about the conduct of armies in disputed territories. A very similar story is found in Gregory of Tours about the Merovingian king Guntram, whose army was sent to Aquitaine in 585 and brought about such indiscriminate destruction to subjects and enemies alike that the king chastised the commanders severely at their return. “Where such sins are committed, victory cannot be obtained.”⁹ Of course, Naples was not a barbarian village, but a Roman city, and from the Byzantine point of view it was returning to direct Roman rule after a few decades of Gothic administration. The majority of its inhabitants had, however, decided to remain loyal to the Gothic kingdom, not least because the strong Jewish community feared repressive measures by the Roman government. But at the same time, Belisarius knew even beforehand what was going to happen. Before the siege begins, Procopius presents a thoughtful Belisarius who says, “Many times have I witnessed the capture of cities and I am well acquainted with what happens at such a time. For they slay all the men of every age and as for the women, though they beg to die, they are not granted the boon of death, but are carried off for outrage and are made to suffer treatment that is abominable and most pitiable. And the children. are forced to be slaves, and that, too, of the men who are the most odious of all, those on whose hands they see the blood of their fathers.”¹⁰ In Gregory’s passage about Guntram’s army, the Frankish generals react with similarly resigned comments. “What can we do when the whole people has lapsed into viciousness and it pleases everybody to do what is unjust?”¹¹

Romans or barbarians, those were the ways of war. Still, there is a further element towards the end of the Roman general’s lament. “I pray that an ancient city which has for ages been inhabited by Christians and Romans, may not meet with such a fortune, especially at my hands as commander of Roman troops, not least because in my army there are a multitude of barbarians, who have lost brothers or relatives before the wall of this town; for the fury of these men I shall be unable to control.”¹² Two motifs appear in conjunction here as they do in the narrative about the actual sack of Naples: barbarians and passion.

By the sixth century, but to a large extent already in the fourth, Roman armies were to a significant degree composed of barbarians, or rather, of soldiers of barbarian origin, however remote.¹³ The list of different barbarians mentioned in the armies of Belisarius and Narses reads like an ethnographic manual of the period. There were hardly any barbarian peoples known in the age of Justinian who were not represented in his armies.¹⁴ Procopius did not much approve of the non-Roman composition of the Roman military. Before the decisive battle of the war in 552, he has the Gothic king Totila say to his soldiers, “The vast number of the enemy is worthy only to be despised, seeing that they present a collection of men from the greatest possible number of nations.”¹⁵ Sometimes, Procopius’ implicit criticism even takes the shape of tragic farce, as in the case of the Armenian general Gilakios who spoke only Armenian and when captured by the Goths could only say his name and title, Gilakios strategos, over and over again, until the Goths put him to death.¹⁶ At the same time, the barbarian composition of the Roman army served as an excuse for its poor conduct. In this respect, some barbarians were more ruthless than others, such as the Huns in the case of Naples or the Lombards in 552, who “in addition to the general lawlessness of their conduct, kept setting fire to whatever buildings t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Gauging Violence in Late Antiquity
• Part I Assessing Violence in Late Antiquity
• Part II “Legitimate” Violence
• Part III Violence and Rhetoric
• Part IV Religious Violence
• Conclusion: Violence in Late Antiquity Reconsidered
• Bibliography
• Index