Through the Eye of a Needle

Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD

Peter Brown

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400844531
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der römischen Antike

A sweeping intellectual history of the role of wealth in the church in the last days of the Roman Empire Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven. Through the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely held notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to resist the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity.

PART I

Wealth, Christianity, and Giving at the End of an Ancient World

CHAPTER 1

Aurea aetas: Wealth in an Age of Gold

From Rusticulus (Little Farmer) to Censor (Civic Worthy)

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WEALTH, PRIVILEGE, AND POWER

In this chapter we will start with general considerations. We will deal first with the distinctive manner in which wealth and social status came together in Roman society. Then we will look at the way in which wealth was taken from the land. After this, we will focus on a single century. We will attempt to sketch, inevitably briefly, the structure of upper-class society in the Latin West in the fourth century AD. We will look at what was, in many ways, a new society, where new forms of status and new ways of showing wealth had emerged as a result of a profound reordering of the Roman empire in the period after 300 AD.

Let us begin by asking the first question: What was “wealth” in late Roman society? Those who observed the wealthy at this time tended to give a simple answer. In the overwhelming majority of cases, wealth was land turned by labor into food, which, in the case of the rich, was turned into sufficient money to be turned into privilege and power.

We can see this process at work on many levels of society. It can be illustrated by a success story from the hinterland of fourth-century Africa. An inscription from Mactar, a city on the edge of the inland plateau of southwestern Tunisia, tells how a truly “poor” man came into both wealth and privilege. His name is missing from the tomb that he set up, but he is known to scholars as the “Harvester of Mactar.” He recorded his life in a long inscription. He was never entirely landless. Having barely scraped a living from his own land, he made his way up as a foreman of one of the great gangs of laborers (many of them landless men much poorer than himself) who would spread out over the plateau of eastern Numidia (between modern Tunisia and Algeria) as harvest laborers. Twelve years spent working “under the rabid sun” made him, at last, “the master of a house”—the owner of a comfortable farm. Finally, the income from his property made him eligible to membership of the town council of Mactar.

I sat in the Temple of the City Council [the “sacred” council hall of Mactar] and from a little farmer [a rusticulus] I have become a civic elder—a censor.

His life of labor had “reaped the fruit of honors.”¹

By joining the town council, our “Harvester” crossed the most significant social threshold in the Roman world. This was not the modern threshold between poverty and wealth. It was the all-important, Roman threshold between facelessness and “honors.” Membership in the governing body of a Roman city such as Mactar linked the “Harvester” to privilege and to power. He ceased to be a mere rusticulus—a little farmer. As a town councillor (a curialis—a member of the curia, the town council—or a decurio, which was a similar term) he became an honestior, a more honorable person. For instance, he could no longer be flogged or tortured. That, in itself, was no small privilege, which the average subject of a notoriously cruel empire could not claim. His place on the town council and the “honors” associated with his activities on its behalf made him a little aristocrat in his own region.²

There were five hundred cities like Mactar in Africa alone. In what is now northeastern Tunisia, they covered the land in a tight grid. The nearest cities to Mactar were only ten miles away on either side. Most had populations of little more than two to five thousand inhabitants. A modern observer would have called them “agro-towns.” But this was not how they saw themselves. Technically each was an autonomous republic sheltered beneath the vast umbrella of the Roman empire.³

To a modern person, this can appear to be a bizarre situation. It is as if the infrastructure of France and Italy was made up of a network of little princedoms of Monaco and Republics of San Marino. But while, in modern times, these quirky survivals from the world of petty principalities and city-states are tax shelters, notorious for being uncooperative in making money saved within their territories available to the revenue officers of France and Italy, in the Roman empire it was precisely the opposite: cooperation with the imperial authorities in the collection of taxes made the cities important and bound their elites to the empire.

We must always remember that, by modern standards, the Roman empire was a “truly minimal state.”⁴ It delegated to local groups almost every task of government except the control of high justice and the army. Police, maintenance of roads, fortification, and, most important of all, the collection of taxes were tasks delegated to the town councils of some 2,500 cities scattered like fairy dust over the surface of an immense empire. The empire rested heavily on the members of these town councils. But it did so in return for giving them a free hand to bear down as heavily as they wished on everybody else. A town councillor entered the world of honors so as to become, also, a little tyrant. His principal duty was to act as an agent of extortion in the name of the empire.

Mactar (like so many other Roman cities) spoke of its town council as the splendidissimus ordo—“the most resplendent governing body.”⁵ It governed a territory that extended around the town (in the case of Mactar) within a radius of five miles. But it was the duty of the town councillors—and not (except in states of emergency) of the representatives of the Roman state—to go out each year to extract from the inhabitants of every ecological niche in this small territory the taxes due to the state in money, labor, food, livestock, and other useful materials.

Taxes and demands for labor were presented to each city by the imperial bureaucracy as lump sums. It was for the councillors to divide up these sums among themselves and to collect them from all the inhabitants of their midget state. As a result, in the case of Mactar and of innumerable small cities in every province, the decisions of groups of between thirty and one hundred persons directly affected the fate of thousands through the distribution of the tax load and through its yearly collection.

The Roman system of delegation to the cities ensured that this was an empire where power was never limited to the top. It seeped downward to the smallest city. The curiales (the members of the town council) policed the urban plebs on behalf of the empire. Outside the city, the curiales patrolled a countryside inhabited by rusticuli—the “little farmers” whose fate the “Harvester of Mactar” had avoided. From these farmers they drew their own income (in the form of rents and produce) and, at the same time, they flexed the muscle of the Roman state at their expense by collecting from them the taxes due to the emperor.

Thus, in the late Roman empire, the rich remained rich because their persons were sheathed in public authority. Even a modest farmer such as our Harvester expected to wrap the authority of the empire around himself once he joined the town council. It was in this direction that his laboriously accumulated wealth had led him—and in no other. In Rome there were no persons such as there were in ancient China who could be acclaimed (as the great historian Sima Qian had acclaimed the spectacularly rich merchants and monopolists of the Han empire) as members of an “un-titled nobility.”⁶ Wealth and “honors” were made to converge. The one could not be achieved or maintained without the other. For this reason, when approaching wealth in the later empire (as in most other periods of Roman history) we must make a fundamental transition “from a [modern] mental cosmos in which power depends largely on money to one where money depends … largely on power.”⁷

To a modern person, this situation produces strange tricks of perspective. It is hard to judge social distances in the later empire. Persons and institutions that seem to be separated by unbridgeable chasms of wealth often appear closer to each other than we expect. Our Harvester was probably not notably richer than many of the rusticuli among whom he grew up. All that was required to be made a member of a town council was a capital of three hundred solidi (gold pieces). This amounted to an income of around twenty-five to thirty solidi a year.⁸ But the “honors” associated with membership in the town council of Mactar placed him (and would certainly have placed his descendants had he succeeded) within sight of the very top of Roman society. Once our Harvester became a member of the town council, legally and institutionally he and a senator had more in common with each other in terms of the privileges that they shared than he had with any of his former neighbors, whose very bodies remained at the mercy of the Roman state.

We should always bear in mind the effects of this situation. The cities themselves were enormously diverse. Mactar was far from being a Roman town based on a single, cookie-cutter model. It had a gnarled identity all its own that reached back for over half a millennium. In the third century BC it had been the capital of a Numidian kingdom. Its town council maintained Punic titles for their civic offices up to the second century AD. In the fourth century, Punic may well have been spoken in its streets and in the countryside. But these diversities had been folded into the wider structure of the empire by a remarkable system of delegated power.⁹

If there was any such thing as a “political nation” in the later Roman empire (such as Sir Lewis Namier has delineated in his studies of the background of the members of Parliament in eighteenth-century England), it was not to be found only in the Roman Senate, with its venerable past and traditional membership of around six hundred persons. It was also to be found in the vast reservoir of talent provided by some sixty-five thousand curiales (what we call the “curial class,” made up of members of the town councils) spread throughout the cities of the western empire, not to mention the further tens of thousands of such persons in the yet more heavily urbanized provinces of the Roman East.¹⁰

The city-based nature of late Roman society determined the geographical range of this “political nation.” Let us conjure up for a moment a map of the Roman West that shows the relative density of cities in each region. In the northeastern tip of Africa (stretching inland some 125 miles from Carthage), in Sicily, in central Italy, and, far to the west, in southern Spain, cities lay no more than ten miles (half a day’s journey) apart. Abutting this dense area was a larger block, where cities appeared every twenty-five miles. This included northern and parts of southern Italy, the Dalmatian coast, the Mediterranean regions of Gaul, most of modern Spain and Portugal, and much of north Africa to within sixty miles inland from the coast. Beyond this vivid core, in much of Gaul, in Britain, along the Danube, and in the hinterlands of Africa, cities lay more distant from each other. The impact of their distinctive structures was muffled by great stretches of a countryside occupied by villages, estates, and rural sanctuaries.¹¹

MAP 1. A World of Cities, ca. 400 AD

The reader should know that this map of the overall distribution of cities in the Latin West in 400 AD was derived from a map of Christian bishoprics in ca. 600 AD. Roman cities survived largely because they formed the basis for the early medieval network of bishoprics in most regions of Europe.

Almost without exception, the principal protagonists of this book, Christian and non-Christian alike, lived in the first two zones. Apart from a few of senatorial origin, almost all the authors that we meet came from curial families. Indeed, until the very end of this period, the alarms and excitements associated with the rise of Christianity in the Roman West took place only on the brightly lit stage of ancient cities, which ranged from the off-scale megalopolis of Rome, through cities such as Milan, Carthage, Bordeaux, Barcelona, and Arles, to innumerable little towns such as Mactar in north Africa and their equivalents elsewhere. Only in Augustine’s Africa, in the fourth century, can we catch the voices of Christians in the countryside. Only after the fifth century does a rural Christianity emerge out of tantalizing silence in the countryside of Gaul, Spain, and Italy.

The Wider View: The Rich in a Changing Empire, 100–400 AD

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Now let us, for a moment, take a big step backward, so as to view the rich against the landscape of Roman society as whole.

The first thing that we notice is that our Harvester of Mactar was very low on the scale of the rich. Even in his own region, many town councillors would have been far richer than he was. Above him stretched a steep pyramid that became vertiginously high and narrow toward the top. At the very top of this pyramid lay fortunes the likes of which would not be seen again in Europe until the millionaires of the industrial age.

We must remember that this was a very small pyramid compared with the overall population of the empire. From top to bottom, all the rich put together made up no more than what modern modelers of the Roman economy call, with commendable moral restraint, “the fortunate decile” of the total population of the empire. They were the lucky 10 percent. Ninety percent of the subjects of the empire did not partake in the relative prosperity that the Harvester of Mactar and his like had achieved. Most persons lived miserable lives, at a standard of living that never reached beyond that enjoyed by the populations of other preindustrial empires, such as Moghul India. Like Moghul India, the Roman empire was a colorful place. But the color wore off very quickly as one descended the social scale. We should always bear this in mind. The noise generated by a vivid Christian discourse on wealth and poverty (written by members of the curial class and largely addressed to the inhabitants of the cities) affected only a small proportion of the overall population. It has to be set against the vast silence of a wider world “that failed even to begin to share in the moderate amount of economic growth” that had placed our Harvester and many ...