Tales of the Riverbank: Severinus and Rome's Fall

The very edge of the Roman Empire; the people are being pushed out or taken captive by invaders; the remaining soldiers are fading away; a hero is needed to lead the people to fight back and win. A man appears as if from nowhere and does just that.

Does that sound a bit like King Arthur? Quite a bit, I’d say. But this was not post-Roman Britain, but almost-post-Roman Austria. This border was not Hadrian’s Wall, but the river Danube. And the hero was not Arthur, but Severinus, a mysterious holy man, later regarded as a saint.

We have a detailed biography of him by Eugippius, a monk who knew him well, the Vita Sancti Severini (henceforth just Vita), together with a letter from Eugippius to a deacon called Paschasius in AD511, and Paschasius’ reply. There is also a reference to Severinus and some of the events of that time in the work now known as the Anonymous Valesianus and the Vita Sancti Antonii Eremitici, a Life of St Antony the Hermit, who had lived and worked alongside Severinus. Severinus also features in the History of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon, a Lombard contemporary of Charlemagne. There is also a modern discussion in Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation (OUP, 2005).

Saints’ Lives were the principal form of literature in Europe and the Near East in late Antiquity. They were written for a growing monastic readership. The Rule of St Benedict requires a young monk with a good voice to read improving literature to the monks at dinner time (Rule, Ch.38) Benedict’s Rule was written at Monte Cassino between 528 and 543. Saints’ Lives that already existed were ready made for Chapter 38.

Severinus appeared, as if from nowhere in the 450s, to minister and run the towns along the south bank of the Danube in the Roman province of Noricum Ripense in what is now the panhandle of western Austria.

Austrian schilling coin of 1982 depicting St Severinus

What we witness through the Vita is the disintegration of a province in the middle of the fifth century. And Noricum Ripense was part of the prefecture of Italy, close enough to make the Italians notice. Yet it turns on many dubious points.

The appearance of Severinus at just the right time reminds me of nothing more that the role of The Stranger played by Clint Eastwood in my favourite western High Plains Drifter (1973); if Eugippius had not known him personally (a standard trope of vitae is personal attestation that however clichéd the miracles are, they really happened), you would consider it more like a classical myth.

The Noricans played little part in defending their own province. Local place names reflect this: Batavis (modern Passau), Asturis, Commagenis. These reflect the places established alongside the Danube by and for soldiers recruited from the Batavi (in the Netherlands), the Asturians (in north west Spain) and the men of Commagene (possibly Isaurians) in Asia Minor. These were clearly military forts.

It is hard to know where the ‘barbarians’ were located. At Commagenis they were within the walled town as protectors, and rushed out when an earthquake struck (Vita 2); in other locations they were invaders.

And who exactly were the locals? When Noricum asked to join the Roman Empire, what is now southern Germany was part of the Celtic world.  We can tell by the detailed place names given by Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblios map data, which are full of names ending in the classic Gaulish –acum and -dunum (Lacus Curtius has modern renditions of these maps). So the area north of the Danube was not yet Germanic in c.150. The names of Batavis and other places suggests that auxiliaries were settled upon discharge near where they had served. Only Lauriacum, with its Gaulish name (modern Lorch)  seems to have been a metropolis for the remaining Noricans.

Noricum was well known for its iron mines, which are mentioned in Rutilius Namantianus De Reditu Suo, book 1, where they are compared with those of Elba and Sardinia. Perhaps that was what made the area desirable for the Germanic peoples (had they worked as guards there?) and worth the Romans defending. Legion II Italica Pia was established in Lauriacum by Marcus Aurelius in c.180, and these may be the few who remained to defend Noricum in the fifth century. The Vita contains this moving account of the last soldiers:

So long as the Roman dominion lasted, soldiers were maintained in many towns at the public expense to guard the boundary wall. When this custom ceased, the squadrons of soldiers and the boundary wall were blotted out together. The troop at Batavis, however, held out. Some soldiers of this troop had gone to Italy to fetch the final pay to their comrades, and no one knew that the barbarians had slain them on the way. One day, as Saint Severinus was reading in his cell, he suddenly closed the book and began to sigh greatly and to weep. He ordered the bystanders to run out with haste to the river, which he declared was in that hour besprinkled with human blood; and straightway word was brought that the bodies of the soldiers mentioned above had been brought to land by the current of the river. (Vita Ch.20)

The border wall was the Roman limites, which ran from the North Sea to the Black Sea. Around Lauricum, the system switches from the Upper Germanic limes to the Raetian limes. Was there a weakness either in physical structure or in the chain of command, as might have been known by some Germanic peoples who had served with the Roman army? 

Reconstruction of the Danubian limes, 19th century

Eugippius tells us about the frozen Danube affording movement of people: ‘A well-known proof of the terrible cold is afforded by the Danube, which is often so solidly frozen by the fierce frost that it affords a secure crossing even for carts’ (Vita 4). This matches the comment of Jordanes that the Danube ‘freezes so hard that it will support like a solid rock an army of infantry, and carts and sleds’ (Getica 55). I suspect that this is the origin of the story often told as if fact about the barbarian invasion of New Year’s Eve 406 crossing the frozen Rhine near Strasbourg. The Danube froze at Vienna in January 1901 according to Eugippius’s translator in 1914. Our source for the crossing of the Rhine on that date is Prosper Tiro of Aquitaine, whose detailed Chronicle does not mention it being frozen then. It may be as late as Gibbon, but what Gibbon took as a surmise (‘On the last day of the year, in a season when the waters of the Rhine were most probably frozen, they entered without opposition the defenceless provinces of Gaul.’ Ch.30) has been relayed as a fact by later historians.

A comment is also made by Herodian that ‘The Rhine in Germany and the Danube in Pannonia are the largest of the northern rivers. In summer their depth and width make them easily navigable, but in the cold winters they freeze over and appear like a level plain which can be crossed on horseback. The river becomes so firm and solid in that season that it supports horses and men’ (Herodian Roman History 6.7); this is a description of a battle by Maximinus Thrax at Sirmium in AD236.

An icebound Danube also features in references to a famine at the town of Favianis. However it seems that the cause of the famine was a local magnate ‘a certain widow, Procula by name, had concealed much produce of the fields’ (Vita 3). Severinus is said to have publicly berated her for hoarding the corn, presumably for power and profit. By forcing her to release her store, Severinus ended the famine.

Not long after, there unexpectedly appeared at the bank of the Danube a vast number of boats from the Raetias, laden with great quantities of merchandise, which had been hindered for many days by the thick ice of the river Aenus. When at last God's command had loosed the ice, they brought down an abundance of food to the famine-stricken. Then all began to praise God with uninterrupted devotion, as the bestower of unhoped relief; for they had expected to perish, wasted by the long famine, and they acknowledged that manifestly the boats had come out of due season, loosed from the ice and frost by the prayers of the servant of God (Vita 3).

This was coming from Raetia (Switzerland) and had floated downstream, but been blocked off by ice floes from the river Aenus (the Inn, as in Innsbruck). This does show that the movement of food and supplies continued. How this had happened is hard to tell, but it looks more like commerce than the prayers of the stricken. Later we read of oil reaching Noricum Ripense ‘a commodity which in those places was brought to market only after a most difficult transport by traders’ (Vita 28). One of his acolytes, Maximus, arranged for a collection of donated clothes to be transported 200 miles across the Alps in winter to the Danube, having hired local men to fetch it on their backs (Vita 29), allegedly guided by a non-hibernating bear. Timing is all; the icebound river presumably prevented fishing, which would normally have prevented famine.

The frozen Danube in a recent picture

The Vita contains several elements found elsewhere in later hagiography. The enemy are always furious, always angry with the Romans and always keen on killing them. The enemy are implicated here in the death of the two soldiers mentioned above. Likewise two men are captured by the enemy less than two miles from the city walls of Favianis, having been warned off from going to collect fruit from the orchards (Vita 20). Similarly, we are told that ‘Hunimund, accompanied by a few barbarians, attacked the town of Batavis, as the saint had foretold, and, while almost all the inhabitants were occupied in the harvest, put to death forty men of the town who had remained for a guard’ (Vita 22).

Later we are told that the Heruli attacked Ioviaco (Salzburg) ‘That night the Heruli made a sudden, unexpected onslaught, sacked the town, and led most of the people into captivity. They hanged the priest Maximianus on a cross’ (Vita 24). The ‘enemy’ also sought to scale the walls of Lauriacum, but because nearly all livestock had been herded within the walls seized cattle left outside and went away, abandoning their scaling ladders (Vita 30).

There seems to be a considerable confusion just who the inhabitants of Noricum Ripense were facing. They seem to have the Heruli, the Alamanni, the Rugii and the Thuringi attacking them at different times. The saint’s response seems to have been to abandon the towns after a little resistance. It is worth quoting in full Chapter 27:

At the same time the inhabitants of the town of Quintanis, exhausted by the incessant incursions of the Alamanni, left their own abodes and removed to the town of Batavis. But their place of refuge did not remain hidden from the Alamanni: wherefore the barbarians were the more inflamed, believing that they might pillage the peoples of two towns in one attack. But Saint Severinus applied himself vigorously to prayer, and encouraged the Romans in manifold ways by examples of salvation. He foretold that the present foes should indeed by God's aid be overcome; but that after the victory those who despised his admonitions should perish. Therefore the Romans in a body, strengthened by the prediction of the saint, and in the hope of the promised victory, drew up against the Alamanni in order of battle, fortified less with material arms than by the prayers of the saint. The Alamanni were overthrown in the conflict and fled. The man of God addressed the victors as follows. "Children, do not attribute the glory of the present conflict to your own strength. Know that ye are now set free through the protection of God to the end that ye may depart hence within a little space of time, granted you as a kind of armistice. So gather together and go down with me to the town of Lauriacum." The man of God impressed these things upon them from the fullness of his piety. But when the people of Batavis hesitated to leave their native soil, he added, "Although that town also, whither we go, must be abandoned as speedily as possible before the inrushing barbarism, yet let us now in like manner depart from this place."

As he impressed such things upon their minds, most of the people followed him. A few indeed proved stubborn, nor did the scorners escape the hostile sword. For that same week the Thuringi stormed the town; and of those who notwithstanding the prohibition of the man of God remained there, a part were butchered, the rest led off into captivity and made to pay the penalty for their scorn.

In short, the people of Quintanis moved to Batavis, and when that was sacked, they went to Lauriacum, with a view to a withdrawal to Italy. Both the Alamanni and Thuringi were involved at different times.

Noricum Ripense was, as mentioned above part of the Prefecture of Italy. The Prefect at that time seems to have been Caecina Decius Basilius, a high born Italian noble, who later was made Consul and who had three sons who also made both Prefect and Consul under Odoacer. His sole objective seems to have been to suck up to whoever was ruler at the time. He clearly failed to maintain adequate communication with the Danube. The last Prefect before Odoacer was Felix Himelco, a man one assumes of Punic ancestry.

Relations with Germanic neighbours was not always bad, as Chapter 14 tells us how Gibuldus the local king of the Alamanni came secretly to Batavis and negotiated with Severinus and arranged for many prisoners to be freed and returned home. Interestingly, Amantius, a local priest, sent letters to Gibuldus and received several from him, suggesting either the king was literate or had staff who were. Perhaps the king was a former Roman soldier.

One of the groups most closely involved with Noricum were the Rugii. They had once lived on the Baltic island of Rugen, but had morphed into a warband, which means they were probably around 150 strong. Now 150 armed men can do a lot of damage, but they are not the overwhelming numbers people often talk about. This is Dunbar’s Number, the maximum number of people one individualcan know properly, and thus command. The Roman First Century of the primus pilus had a full strength of 160. As mentioned above, in Commagenis, the Germans were local defenders, while at Batavis, they were few enough in numbers to catch local men in orchards Sometimes, even in winter, it was safe enough to transport supplies down the Danube despite ice. The toughest of all warriors was General Winter.

In some instances the Rugii were voluntarily protecting the Romans against fellow Germans. Feba, the Rugian leader, probably a kinsman of King Odoacer, offered to protect the locals and this was accepted (Vita 31).

We have some clue to who Severinus was. When he died in AD482, he was conveyed to Naples, where a rich woman called Barbaria built a mausoleum for him in a castle. She had corresponded with Severinus, which suggests a postal service of some sort still existed. This suggests that Barbaria was some form of kinswoman (Vita 46).

Severinus is credited both in the Vita and the Anonymous Valesianus with having met Odoacer long before he became king of Italy and, like all good saints to have predicted Odoacer’s rule. After Severinus’ death, the Rugii seem to have fallen into a disputed succession between Feba’s brother and his son and for attacks on the Roman towns, which required Odoacer to send in a full army, and then, via his brother Onoulph, also a Roman general, and a comes called Pierus, to order the evacuation of all remaining Romans to Italy (Vita 44).

Those who would prefer to see the end of the Roman empire as the peaceful accommodation of a handful of almost-Roman soldiers will be disappointed. The terminology in French and German is educational: Les invasions barbares versus die Völkerwanderungen (wanderings of the people). Germans might easily be on all sides of what clearly could be a major struggle and people who considered themselves Roman could either settle down under new masters or be evacuated to Italy. Either way, nothing remained quite the same.

Stop Quoting Laws to Us, We Carry Swords

This is a famous quote from Plutarch (Life of Pompey 10.2), admittedly written over a hundred years after it was supposedly said, and in Greek. In fact, the translation I have in front of me actually says’ Cease quoting laws to us that have swords girt about us!’ (trans. Perrin).  It was said to the so-called Mamertines of Messana (Messina) in Sicily. Since these Mamertines were descended from Latin-speaking freebooters, their laws seem to have been cobbled together out of bits of Roman law.

That might include extracts from the Twelve Tables, the earliest known Roman law code, or from a regional code – many think that Salic Law, used by the Franks in the sixth century, may just be the local law of Roman Gaul. As the Kentish Law of Aethelbehrt (c.AD595) in Old English is so very close to the Lex Longobardorum, Lombard Law, which is in Latin and unlikely to have been translated from Old English, perhaps the Kentish Law is that of Roman Britain too. If Salic Law is just local Roman-era law, then much of it was far less grand than we generally suppose.

It’s also been noted that the Breviary of Alaric, written for the Visigothic king of Southern Gaul, Alaric II (early 500s) is a cut-down version of the Theodosian Code (early 400s), suggesting it was the law current in that area of Gaul prior to Alaric.

A great deal of research has gone into the Roman legal codes, as collected several times, notably by legal historians working for Theodosius II in the eastern empire in the early fifth century and again under Justinian in the sixth (the Code codifies Roman Law, the Institutes collects important jurisprudence (legal opinion on how laws should be interpreted) and the Novels brings together Justinian’s own laws; it’s noteworthy that the  Code and Institutes are in Latin, but the Novels are in Greek.

I was going to call this piece ‘Discipline and Punish’, after the book by the late Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), as these are major themes in the history of Rome.

Powerful people – mainly men – had two particular powers: beneficium and maleficium, literally the power to make things good or bad for others. Although Roman law had long banned debt bondage – temporary slavery until a debt was repaid – the result was clientela, in which a cliens danced daily attendance upon his patronus, who exercised patrocinium over him, in effect became a sort of father to him. It is said that a patron would often inscribe the name of his clients on a stone plaque in the atrium of his house. And since very rich men owned houses and land widely across the empire, we should assume that these were merely the clients in a single district.

The role of the paterfamilias is quite well known and the bizarre punishment set out from the late Republic for parricide – murder of one’s father – was a marker of the social disapproval of this crime. This was the poena cullei, under which the convict was sewn into a leather sack with animals and thrown into water, originally the Tiber. Originally just snakes (I say ‘just’ only in the light of what follows), under Hadrian it was extended to include a cock, a dog, a monkey and a snake; this faded until revived by Constantine (who restricted it to snakes) and later by Justinian. As the emperor was pater patriae, father of the fatherland, to conspire against him could be construed as parricide (as well as treason: maestas). It does seem that the ‘bad’ emperors of the third century may have been slightly more humane, or less inhumane, than the ‘good’ ones before and after.

The enormous power and wealth of landowners was a tiny reflection of the vast power held by emperors: the relief of the underclass from famine at Rome listed on two occasions by Augustus in his Res Gestae was only possible because he personally owned Egypt.

Nevertheless, provincial governors might extort the wealth of their province with little likelihood of being caught, or if caught, punished. Cicero, prosecuting Verres, the former governor of Sicily, said a corrupt governor must make three fortunes: one to repay the bribe he paid to get the job, one to bribe the judge at his inevitable corruption trial, and the third to live on afterwards (In Verrem 1).

The power to instigate patrocinium over clients was a means to discipline them. Claques of them would applaud and chant the name and slogan of their patron at elections and other public events. Ramsay MacMullan (Corruption and the Decline of Rome) notes this is very similar to what was going on in eastern Europe at the time he wrote. This was in 1988, and he singles out the praise given to Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania; on Christmas Day 1989, he was shot by firing squad, dead alongside the smoking ruins of the Warsaw Pact. Today, the model would be the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Within a region, local magnates (possessores and potentiores are the main terms used) could dominate all civic life. The weird behaviour of some emperors such as Gaius and Commodus seems to be a marker of how far they could push people before they rebelled.

Holders of public office often used it to enrich themselves, despite the frequent trials for excessive corruption. Musonianus, Pretorian Prefect of the East in the reign of Constantius II, was known for a love of ‘filthy lucre’. A contemporary, Theophilus, governor of Syria, was torn to pieces by citizens for extortion. Ammianus tells us how brazen some theft might be:

[Theophilus] was matched by Prosper, who was at that time still representing the cavalry commander in Gaul and held military authority there, an abject coward and, as the comic poet says, scorning artifice in thieving and plundering openly.

Meanwhile The Persians ‘kept raiding our territories with predatory bands, now fearlessly invading Armenia and sometimes Mesopotamia, while the Roman officers were occupied in gathering the spoils of those who paid them obedience’ (Ammianus XVI, 13). You can see that for many people, being ruled by the Persians was better than by Romans, because they may have been seen as less corrupt.

One of the worst cases of rapacity was that of Paul The Chain (Paulus Catena), described as a Persian by birth (Ammianus XV,3, where he is directly compared to Verres) also known as Paulus Tartareus, as of the keeper of Hell. He was sent to Britain to seize local lords who had sided with Magnentius against Constantius II (Ammianus XV,6). He piled chains on everyone and seized their assets for himself.. He then proceeded to do the same at Scythopolis, in Palestine, trumping up charges, imprisoning large numbers of people and torturing to extract money (Ammianus XIX, 12). He was so corrupt that Julian had him arrested, taken to Chalcedon in Asia Minor, tried and burnt to death (Ammianus XXII,3).

Perhaps the most vicious depiction of the kleptocracy is that of Rufinus, a Gallo-Roman sent to the Eastern Empire to be Master of the Offices to Arcadius, the elder son of Theodosius. He gets not one but two poems denouncing him by Claudian, the court poet of Stilicho I the late fourth and early fifth centuries. In Rufino (Against Rufinus, the terminology deriving from that of the law courts) I and II contain a detailed description of the way in which Rufinus stole vast sums, in the same abject and thuggish manner.

There is a term so close to patrocinium that there has to be a pun involved: ‘latrocinium’, from latro, latronis ‘thief’ can be translated as ‘a state of thiefdom’, brigandage. Neither was exactly lawful, but the master took what ever he wanted. The term is much wider than simple furtum (theft, hence ‘furtive’), theft of a thing, even real estate.

From the reign of Augustus, there was an increasing inequality in the face of the law; only plebeians could be sent to work in the mines (a delayed death penalty, since few survived that harsh regime). By the second century (the era, remember, of the ‘good’ emperors, the time in all history when Gibbon said it was happiest to be alive) the citizen body (civites) and non-citizen subjects (peregrini) had been sorted into an upper order (honestiores) and a lower (humiliores), who were awarded different penalties because of their social status. So for a particular crime, the honestior might receive a fine or banishment, but the humilior would be crucified. The honestiores comprised senators, equestrians and their families, local decurions and anyone who was a mate of the emperor. The humiliores were every other free person; slaves were ‘thinking tools’ to use Cato the Elder’s chilling phrase and could legally be killed by their master (at least in theory) and were routinely tortured for evidence in legal cases, even when only witnesses; other evidence from them was assumed to be a lie.

In the later empire, we do see evidence of people absenting themselves from imperial control. This is notable particularly in Gaul and Spain, where bacaudae (sometimes bagaudae) are known in the third to fifth centuries. They were a heterogeneous mix of thieves, army deserters, runaway slaves, people who refused to be subject to the Diocletian-era laws regarding proto-serf coloni. Others may equally have been small-time farmers and minor landowners who had fallen into an underclass.

To what extent they were organised is hard to see. The play Querolus, dating to the fifth century, has a figure who doesn’t like paying taxes, and it is suggested by his family spirit (lars familiaris) he join the ‘free men of the Loire’: ‘In that place people live by the law of nations… capital sentences are issued from an oak tree and written on bones… there all is permitted’. This sounds quite like the hundred courts of the middle ages, where local peasants met by a tree known to all; many English hundreds (subdivisions of counties) were named after trees. The Loire was in the mid-400s the border between Roman Gaul (administered by the Visigoths under a treaty (foedus)) and northern Gaul (a patchwork of local lordships); so a local near-anarchist community might thrive where nobody was quite sure who ran things; think more of Syria today. Had these various commanders had Jeeps with machine-guns  mounted on them, nobody could tell the difference. No doubt there were some Germanic people in the mix too.

In AD415/18, the Romans under Constantius III arranged the foedus mentioned above with the Visigoths under their king Wallia. Under that, the local Visigothic commander was paid a third of the tax assessment of each landowner in the area, and the rest was collected for the emperor. The local Gothic leader then accepted liability for local defence. It must have become clear to local payers that if all protection could be bought on a third of the taxes, what were the other two-thirds for? This process has been described in detail in Walter Goffart’s Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton University Press, 1997), where he famously described the treaty as ‘a good idea that got slightly out of hand’.

Tax liability and weak enforcement led to many simply abandoning land they had been allocated or which they had been tied too. There is a term agri deserti, which suggests empty land, but may just mean land for which nobody admitted tax liability; St Patrick however landed somewhere in the west of Britain (Devon or Cornwall, perhaps) and talks of walking for many days before he encountered anyone.

Despite the large body of law and a large array of courts, nothing ultimately mattered, as it was held in the third century by the jurist Ulpian that ‘whatever the emperor says is law’(Domitii Ulpiani fragmenta). Emperors held so many overlapping powers from different legal principles that it wasn’t worth disentangling them. With so little enforcement, the powerful could do anything they wanted anyway.

Local possessores lorded it over courts and, since they ran private armies, often of slaves, could seize anyone’s land and livelihood. The holding of multi-generational feuds, similar to the vendettas of modern mafiosi, were beyond the ability of an honest man to cure. Nor did the arrival of Christianity as a source of power in the fourth century improve things. It just created a new means to power: being a bishop.

Early bishops were elected by their parishioners, and Sidonius in a letter tells of the election at Bourges that he supervised, where the congregation was offered a big bribe to elect one man, but then defied him and elected a man of God (Epistulae 7, various letters). Whilst the bishop didn’t own things, he did control them, and could cream off money and goods, taking the usufruct of lands he controlled.  Although bishops were not allowed to marry, many were already married with children before they became bishops. This was true of Sidonius, who had been Urban Prefect of Rome before suddenly being made a bishop. St Ambrose is similar, having been the provincial governor based in Milan before being made bishop there by acclamation of local supporters, presumably his clients. Constantine made bishops judges, which may have speeded up the court system, but probably failed to make it more honest.

The fifth century author Priscus describes (fragment 6) meeting a man who had suffered in this way; here ‘Scythian’ means ‘Hun’ or ‘hunnish’:

As I waited and walked up and down in front of the enclosure which surrounded the house, a man, whom from his Scythian dress I took for a barbarian, came up and addressed me in Greek, with the word Xaire, "Hail!" I was surprised at a Scythian speaking Greek. … Having returned his salutation, I asked him who he was and whence he had come into a foreign land and adopted Scythian life. When he asked me why I wanted to know, I told him that his Hellenic speech had prompted my curiosity. Then he smiled and said that he was born a Greek and had gone as a merchant to Viminacium [capital of Moesia Superior, destroyed by Attila in AD441], on the Danube, where he had stayed a long time, and married a very rich wife. … He considered his new life among the Scythians better than his old life among the Romans, and the reasons he gave were as follows: ... ‘the condition of the subjects in time of peace is far more grievous than the evils of war, for the exaction of the taxes is very severe, and unprincipled men inflict injuries on others, because the laws are practically not valid against all classes. A transgressor who belongs to the wealthy classes is not punished for his injustice, while a poor man, who does not understand business, undergoes the legal penalty, that is if he does not depart this life before the trial, so long is the course of lawsuits protracted, and so much money is expended on them. The climax of the misery is to have to pay in order to obtain justice. For no one will give a court to the injured man unless he pay a sum of money to the judge and the judge's clerks’.

This piece by Priscus, from the 440s AD, sums up the massive quandary Rome faced. It had become so corrupt that people preferred to live under ‘barbarian’ rule than remain Roman.

The Emperor's Right Hand: The Urban Prefect of Rome

 Much attention is given to emperors, obviously, but after the changes made by Diocletian, the emperor became a distant figure and Rome ceased to be the imperial seat. If in Italy, the emperor lived mainly in Milan and Paris, Trier and Vienne were more likely to be imperial seats than ever Rome was, even if it remained the biggest city in Europe. It has been noted that Constantius II, emperor since AD337, did not enter Rome until AD356, following his defeat of Magnentius. Ammianus has a detailed description of the parades that greeted him there (Ammianus XVI, 10).

Once the emperor had left the city, the day to day administration was left to the Urban Prefect (praefectus urbis), an official who might claim the position more on his honour than on proven ability. Someone clearly thought that having writers like Quintus Symmachus (384-5), Sextus Aurelius Victor (389), Rutilius Namantianus (414) and Sidonius Apollinaris (468-9) do the job was a good idea, although Symmachus was involved in the controversial decision to remove the altar of victory; as a pagan, he was against it.

The Urban Prefect seems to have been subject to the Praetorian Prefect of Italy, who was in effect Prime Minister of the core of the Roman Empire. All Urban Prefects seem to have taken the honorific praenomen ‘Flavius’. There was no fixed term of office as there was for many such posts, such as Consul, which always ran from 1 January. We have many instances of new Urban Prefects taking on the role part way through a year, with others even returning to office for a short time as a sort of suffect prefect.  Two Urban Prefects also held the Praetorian Prefecture of Italy at the same time; as these two (Ulpius Limenius [AD347-9) and Hermogenes [AD349-51] followed one another, this may reflect the complex politics of the reigns of Constantius II and Magnentius, to ensure that Italy and Rome spoke with the same voice.

To take an example: Afranius Syagrius, a gallo-roman noble from Lyon. He was a notarius in AD369, but was sacked by Valentinian for incompetence; however he was brought back into favour under Gratian due to his friendship with Ausonius and made magister memoriae, then proconsul of Africa. In AD380 he became Pretorian Prefect of Italy, and simultaneously Urban Prefect and finally Consul for AD382. He was certainly collecting the full set of honours. We can’t trace him after that, and is is feasible that he was caught up in the rebellion of Magnus Maximus and killed. He may have been an ancestor of the Roman commander of the enclave of Soissons after the collapse of Gaul in the late fifth century. There is nothing to suggest that Afranius Syagrius was a Christian.

A certain Tanaucius Isfalangius held the role soon after and for two or three years (373-5). He certainly doesn’t sound very much like a standard Roman. Our only record of his is in re-erecting a status, of what we don’t know. He might even have been an Arab or other near-easterner, or maybe he was an Isaurian, like Tarasicodissa, later the Emperor Zeno.

The role of Urban Prefect was held by Christians in the fourth century, notably by Junius Bassus, who held the Prefecture for a few months in AD359. He clearly was Christian as his sarcophagus (see below), carved elaborately with Christian iconography (including a beardless Christ) can be seen to this day in the Vatican Museum. It’s extremely likely that Christians dominated the role after a while; Boethius held the position in AD486 just before he was made consul, something which is attested earlier, suggesting successfully holding the urban prefecture was a step towards the consulate.

Christian Sarcophagus of the Urban Prefect Bassus, 4th Century AD (Vatican Museum)

We do know something about Memmius Vetrasius Orfitius, who served two terms (December 353 to July 355 and January 357 to March 359, replaced by Bassus). Ammianus Marcellinus says of him:

Meanwhile Orfitus was governing the eternal city with the rank of Prefect, and with an arrogance beyond the limit of the power that had been conferred upon him. He was a man of wisdom, it is true, and highly skilled in legal practice, but less equipped with the adornment of the liberal arts than became a man of noble rank. During his term of office serious riots broke out because of the scarcity of wine; for the people, eager for an unrestrained use of this commodity, are roused to frequent and violent disturbances. (Ammianus XIV, 6.1). The Urban Prefect was in charge of Rome’s wine tax, according to the Notitia Dignitatum (see below), so there may have been a black market going on.

  

No urban prefect ever became emperor, but Priscus Attalus, the puppet who Alaric ‘made’ emperor at odd times when he felt like it, had been Urban Prefect in AD409.

The most powerful holder of the Urban Prefect role was however Gordianus Gregorius (born AD540), who became Urban Prefect in 573, then entered the Church and rose rapidly through being part of the papal delegation to the emperor in Constantinople to become Pope Gregory ‘the Great’ in AD590, dying in 604.

Tomb of Gregory the Great

We do know quite a bit about the tenure of Sidonius as Urban Prefect (AD468-9), because he refers to it in letters and poems. He came to the new emperor Procopius Anthemius and composed a panegyric to him on his consulate (he had previously praised Avitus and Majorian); the emperor made him a patrician, a senator, caput senati and praefectus urbis. Quite a haul for one smarmy poem (I’ve read it). Sidonius was able to use his close contacts with the emperor to get him to commute the death penalty for treason of Arvandus, pretorian prefect of Gaul, a position held by Sidonius’ grandfather and father, as well as his father-in-law Avitus. Arvandus had allied himself with Euric, the Visigothic leader, against Rome. That caused Sidonius to resign the prefecture rather than be sucked into its complex politics.

The Urban Prefect seems to have had the Roman police force (cohortes urbis) under his command, and as there were only three cities in the empire with police forces – Rome, Carthage and Lyon – this must have been a considerable responsibility; given the short tenure of the prefects, and their erratic terms of office, the police would have had to have been professionally led. So would the vigiles, who were a mix of nightwatchmen and fire brigade.

The Notitia Dignitatum lists the following as being under the Urban Prefect:

The prefect of the grain supply,

The prefect of the watch,

The count of the aqueducts,

The count of the banks and bed of the Tiber, and of the sewers,

The count of the port,

The master of the census,

The collector of the wine-tax,

The tribune of the swine-market,

The consular of the water-supply,

The curator of the chief works,

The curator of public works,

The curator of statues,

The curator of the Galban granaries,

The centenarian of the port,

The tribune of art works

The staff of the illustrious prefect of the city:

A chief of staff,

A chief deputy,

A chief assistant,

A custodian,

A keeper of the records,

Receivers of taxes,

A chief clerk (or receiver),

Assistants,

A curator of correspondence,

A registrar,

Secretaries,

Aids,

Clerks of the census,

Ushers,

Notaries

Obviously it’s hard to work out exactly what the gradations of rank and thus authority are, or what the boundaries of given domains may be. Some titles may have been traditional or set in a law otherwise half-forgotten. What the difference is between the Prefect of the Grain Supply and the curator of the Galban Granaries, I have no idea, since the horrea Galbana were brought into public ownership by Nero as revenge against Galba’s uprising (Rickman, G.E. (1971) Roman Granaries and Store Buildings, Cambridge: CUP). Possibly the grain in them was different (barley, not wheat, for instance), or had different owners; some grain was paid in tax, and some belonged to the Emperor and could be stored separately and accounted for in a different way, being used for imperial largesse, the grain dole (annona) being an obvious candidate.

Grain was not the only resource based there. An inscription refers to Aurelia Nais, pisciatrix (fishmonger) at the Galban Warehouse (CIL 6.9801), while another refers to C. Tullius Crescens, marble merchant at the same place (CIL 6.33886). Aurelia may have been an African, since that was a frequent name there while Crescens may have been descended from a freedman of Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero). These do not seem to be high-ranking operatives.

However, the Notitia clearly indicates that the Urban Prefect was (technically) responsible for all matters to do with foodstuffs, the river and port, and the beautification of the city. This brings us to the fourteen districts of Rome and the minor officials who ran them.

Each of the fourteen districts (vici) of Rome had a council of sorts, comprising 48 ‘district masters’ (vicomagistri) in each. It’s not clear exactly what a vicomagister did or how he was selected. It’s easy to see each district as a bit like a Parisian arrondisment with a council and a mayor, elected from notable citizens of the district and with a clear level of local authority within its bounds, perhaps with a sense of civic pride and responsibility. It would be easy, of course, but we have no idea if it resembles the truth.

The fact that each of the fourteen districts had the same number of vicomagistri irrespective of size, population and what lay within its vicus tended to make me think the role was set out with no actual authority. If we make a comparison with the decuriones found in provincial cities across the empire, these were not positions which people sought, but to which they were assigned by virtue of their wealth and local status.

The provincial decurion was the sort of man who would have been a chieftain in earlier times, largely from inherited status. He was obliged to be on the local curia and if he did not, he could be compelled to attend. Exemption could be made for great age, current military service away from the area and such things, but the tax assessment made by the staff of the provincial governor had to be met by the decurions collectively, and they in turn were loaned the money by the publicanus in order to meet their obligation, and he in turn was given his head to extort the sum plus his staff wages and profit margin from the citizens. Decurions had the idea of joining the Church in the late empire, so they are particularly forbidden to take holy orders as a means to avoid their decurial obligations.

So were the vicomagistri in that situation? Nicholas Purcell in the Oxford Classical Dictionary gives their responsibilities as largely reactive, meeting at a crossroads (compitum), running local rites to lares and presumingly praising the emperor and running games (ludi compitalicii) in honour of the lares at set times. There is a frieze showing people carrying a lar in their hand found of a base of altar and now in the Lateran Museum. Here's view of that.

Vicomagistri carrying lares in procession

Purcell considers them to have constituted a local council, able to own property, run the vigiles in their district (mentioned in Cassius Dio) and so on; as there were seven cohorts of fire fighters with 500 men assigned to each, each cohort covered two districts, at least in theory (somehow the district with the imperial palace and great houses probably had at least one cohort of its own, while poorer neighbourhoods had to share one) .  They seems to have some authority over staff through supervisors (hepimeloton in Dio).

We have some indication as to when they took office (1 August) but none as to how they were picked, under what obligation they operated or how long they lasted. In their processions they were appointed two lictors. The Description of Rome in the Chronicle of AD354 refers to them at full strength, but the Christian terror implemented by Valentianian and Valens will have removed the pagan vestiges; indeed Theodosius in AD394 banned everyone but Christians from holding any public office.

Between the upper level of the praefectus urbis and the lower level vicomagistri seems to have been a selection of aediles, tribunes and praetors, their names drawn from the republican cursus honorum, but their functions quite mundane; Vespasian had been a district aedile and was accused by Gaius of failing to keep the streets clean (Suetonius Vespasian 5.3). Some firefighters were slaves of the local aedile, supervised on his behalf by the vicomagistri.

The Urban Prefect’s role predated the empire and outlived it, continuing under the kings and last mentioned in AD879 under later Carolingian rule; the pope may have taken on the civic responsibilities at some point. We know Alfred the Great visited Rome twice as a child with his father; the Urban Prefect was still going strong then.

There does not seem to have been much work done with regard to the Praetorian Prefects or vicarii in the Prefecture of Italy. Then there are ‘castellans’ an innovation of the later fourth century; a ‘castellan of the sacred palaces’ for the eastern and western provinces.  That will be for a later posting, I suspect.