Bacaudae – thieves or social bandits?

‘The lunatic is easily recognised. Sooner or later he brings up the Templars’ (Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum) The Bacaudae are seen in a similar light.

On three occasions we find references to Bacaudae (or Bagaudae, or variants of that name) in Roman Gaul. The first time was in the third century, the second in the fourth and the final in the fifth.

They have been characterised in many ways, existing mainly in the political analysis of those discussing them. It does remind me of Umberto Eco’s maxim.

There has been much controversy over the name, which appears to be Gaulish. It’s possible that they did not know the meaning of the word either. There may have been groups calling themselves Bacaudae prior to this, but which we know nothing of.  We can’t even be certain this is an endonym (what people call themselves) as opposed to an exonym (what others call you, which the Romans were quite good at).

Bacaudae is of course a plural, and the singular form Bacauda. A man of that name was made Tribunus Voluptatum (minister for public amusement) at Milan by Theodoric (Cassiodorus Variae 5.25), a position to be held for life and an innovation at that time. This man was a Visigoth, so it is possible that the Bacaudae were followers of a Bacauda, a Germanic leader of some sort.

Why the Bacaudae were so prominent, because banditry and piracy were endemic in the Roman world? Julius Caesar had himself been captured by pirates. Lincoln Blumell in his article ‘Beware of Bandits! Banditry and Land Travel in the Roman Empire’ Journeys 8.1-2 (June-December 2007) points out that an expectation of banditry was commonplace, citing the plot of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (aka The Golden Ass).

Eric Hobsbawm refers to later ‘social bandits’ :

The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and the state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice . . .and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported  (EJ Hobsbawm 1969 Bandits)

We should consider as something close to that resistance figures such as the Lusitanian Viriatus, whom Diodorus Siculus refers to as ‘lord of all’; there are references to him also in Silus Italicus and Livy; he resisted Roman conquest of what is now Portugal in 147BC, the same year as Carthage and Corinth were burnt down by the Romans. Polybius sees him as using both war and theft to resist Roman conquest; even Romans could become social bandits, as in the case of Sertorius, who followed the example of Viriatus in the same area fifty years later.

Modern Statue of Viriatus, Portugal

Moreover in the era of Septimius Severus around AD190-210 we find references in Cassius Dio to Bulla Felix (‘Lucky Charm’) a semi legendary Robin Hood figure, who evaded capture for two years. Since Dio says he had a gang of 600 supporters, that seems incredible. If he existed at all (some doubt it) Bulla Felix would have found it impossible to navigate around Italy without being found, since he would have had to provide 1800 meals and fodder for 600 animals every day. A gang of 600 riders would have blocked the roads and been visible for miles. Dunbar’s Law (the so-called Law of 150) suggests that any number over 150 becomes increasingly difficult for one individual to manage. A Roman century had eighty men, and the double century  which headed each legion had 160, but there would always be absences and injuries to subtract from that.

Bulla Felix, 'lord of all'

Another liminal figure is Tacfarinas (Tiqfarin), a former Roman officer who deserted and led Berber groups into raiding Roman supply camps in north west Africa in the time of Tiberius, reported by Tacitus Annals). Unlike Juba and Jugurtha, he was not a local king with Roman tastes, but a non-noble Berber. We might also consider the case of Gildo, a rebel and former Roman soldier, who also used the Roman’s own fighting techniques against them in the 390s AD.

Mausoleum of Tacfarinas, North Africa

Galen, writing in the early third century AD, refers to what many might have considered normal reactions to banditry:

On another occasion we saw the skeleton of a bandit lying on rising ground by the roadside. He had been killed by some traveller repelling his attack. None of the local inhabitants would bury him, but in their hatred of him were glad enough to see his body consumed by the birds which, in a couple of days, ate his flesh, leaving the skeleton as if for medical demonstration. (Galen On Anatomical Procedures 1.2)

It’s hard to tell common thieves from Hobsbawm’s social bandits, as in the parable told by Jesus (Luke 10.30) ‘A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.’  Centuries earlier, Isaiah had commented that ‘Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.’ (Isaiah 1.23). Men who were supposed to be magistrates and heard cases were allying themselves with thieves and acting as rebels. In the east there were continuing reports of semi-political bandits (Strabo Geographika 16.2.18, Josephus Bellum Judaicum 1.304)

Galen

Bacaudae seem to be a product of social stress, since they are reported around AD289 by Claudius Mamertinus in a panegyric about Maximian; we know that Maximian hired barbarians to attack him so he could defeat them, so we should not be surprised if the original Bacaudae were invented for that same purpose. However, the name is associated with Gallic revolutionaries Amandus and Aelianus, both of whom, it should be noted, had fairly standard Roman names.

Some consider them to be social bandits, the term coined by Eric Hobsbawm for movements in Greece, Hungary and the Balkans in the early modern era which undermined the Ottomans in south-eastern Europe. The closest seem to be the Hajduk, who operated in that has recently been Yugoslavia, peasant Christian irregulars operating as small warbands of at most 100 men.

The crises which provoked the so-called Fall of the Roman Empire were mainly crises in Gaul.  Virtually every problem of territory and people in the later empire led to break-up involved Gaul at some point. Take Rutilius Namatianus’s comments in his poem De Reditu Suo (On his return home [to Gaul], Loeb translation, 1934)

the fields of Gaul summon home their native. Disfigured they are by wars immeasurably long, yet the less their charm, the more they earn pity. 'Tis a lighter crime to neglect our countrymen when at their ease: our common losses call for each man's loyalty. Our presence and our tears are what we owe to the ancestral home: service which grief has prompted ofttimes helps. 'Tis sin further to overlook the tedious tale of disasters which the delay of halting aid has multiplied: now is the time after cruel fires on ravaged farms to rebuild, if it be but shepherd's huts.

This is not just the invasions of Vandals, Sueves and Alans, but a protracted period of ‘wars immeasurably long’, with ‘fires on ravaged farms’.

Then there are the great complainers, Paulinus ‘of Pella’ and Salvian ‘of Marseille’. Paulinus (377-461) actually lived in southern Gaul and had only been born at Pella, the ancient capital of Macedonia, when his father was proconsul there, leaving it forever at age nine months. Salvian (400-490) was actually from Trier in the Roman Rhineland, and left it for Marseille when Trier was evacuated in AD407.

The perils of being a landed noble in fifth century Gaul are ably told in Paulinus’s Eucharisticos (Thanksgiving), written when he was eighty-three in AD461 (born in 378). Paulinus was the grandson of Ausonius and his own father had been Proconsul of Africa. After a life of luxury and idleness, Paulinus was at 37 in AD415 made head of imperial finances by Priscus Attalus, the Visigoths’ puppet emperor in southern Gaul. This meant he was probably party to the treaty between the Visigoths in Gaul and northern Spain and the Romans, which lasted until the Visigothic leader Euric annulled in the 470s.

Professor Walter Goffart

Under that treaty, one third of all taxes were to be handed to the local Gothic commander in cash, while the remainder was to be handed to the Roman tax-farmer as before. The scheme is detailed by Walter Goffart in his groundbreaking Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton University Press, 1987). It must have occurred to the Roman taxpayer in Gaul that if he could be defended adequately on a third of his taxes, what were the rest of his taxes for?

This book will change your history

The invasion of Gaul and then Spain by Germanic groups from AD407 onwards led to an major outbreak of disease in Spain in 409 (Chronicle of Hydatius), famines in Spain in 410 (Hydatius) and Gaul in 411 (Gallic Chronicle of 452). Much of the reason for the famine must have been seizure of crops by the invading Vandals, Sueves and others; the invading groups had no provision for food, so they must have seized what they could each day. People are less likely to plant crops or rear livestock if there is a good possibility of it being stolen by a foreign army. The imperial government had to forgive much is its tax revenues in the second and third decades of the fifth century. Even in Britain, Gildas refers to a famine ‘the discomfited people, wandering in the woods, began to feel the effects of a severe famine, which compelled many of them without delay to yield themselves up to their cruel persecutors, to obtain subsistence’ (De Excidio Britanniae 20).

Bacaudae are mentioned in Gaul during this very period, specifically in the Loire Valley and Aremorica (today’s Brittany), and it seems the Alans, a Turkmen warrior group associated with the Vandals, but known for their attack on Orleans ,were used to suppress them. It has been claimed that Aetius hired the local Alans under their king, Goar, to do so (Constantius of Lyon, Vita Sancti Germani).

Aremorica was seized by British rulers around this time. Today’s Brittany  has ancient divisions known today as Domnonée and Cornouaille, which replicate Dumnonia and Cornovia, today’s Devon and Cornwall. It’s possible that some of the people displaced by the British takeover also ended up as Bacaudae. The invading Britons were not fleeing from the Saxons, because the Saxons never got there until the time of Alfred the Great in the late ninth century. Quite possibly the Britons crossed to Aremorica to take advantage of the chaos there. Many people had ceased to work on farms in the semi-bondage which had become normalised in the fourth century, but never accepted. Lands termed agri deserti were not actually deserted, but farmed only by tenants who were too small and poor to pay major taxes; it was their landlords who deserted their tax liability.

Leaders like Tibatto (Constantius and Hydatius, who calls him princeps rebellionis) and Basilius, (Hydatius, s.a. AD449), accused of killing federates troops in a church at Tyrasso. Spain) don’t seem to be either social bandits or oppressed workers.

Execution of bearded men, perhaps Bacaudae, by Roman soldiers

The Loire Valley seems to have been a dividing line between various authorities. It marked provincial boundaries in imperial times, and by the fifth century the polities into which Gaul had transformed used this navigable waterway as a boundary. The comic play Querolus (The Angry Man) includes a conversation between the titular Querolus and his lar familiaris, household god. Querolus asks for power without responsibility. The Lar says “I know! Go and live on the banks 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. … private persons act as judges:.

Salvian’s most famous work, De praesenti judicio, often renamed De gubernatione Dei, On the Governance of God, attacks the imperial government for the existence of the Bacaudae. He blames the harshness of the rich and the high taxes on the lower orders which has made people flee to the Bacaudae (DGD v.5-6). He comments over and over that the barbarians may be rough and uncouth, but at least they are honest and not hypocrites.

In the middle of the fifth century AD, the phenomenon of Attila the Hun stunned Europe. Priscus, a member of the Roman posse sent to negotiate with Attila,

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!"… He considered his new life among the Scythians better than his old life among the Romans, and the reasons he gave were as follows: "After war the Scythians live in inactivity, enjoying what they have got, and not at all, or very little, harassed. The Romans, on the other hand, are in the first place very liable to perish in war, as they have to rest their hopes of safety on others, and are not allowed, on account of their tyrants to use arms. And those who use them are injured by the cowardice of their generals, who cannot support the conduct of war. But 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."… My interlocutor shed tears, and confessed that the laws and constitution of the Romans were fair, but deplored that the governors, not possessing the spirit of former generations, were ruining the State. (Priscus Fragment 7)

We see here the sorts of circumstances the Bacaudae faced, repeated by Salvian and Priscus: severe taxes and injustice, which made Romans happy to consider viable alternatives. If the Goths charged only a third of the regular tax assessment, where was the rest going to? Many would have said the idle mouths of the rich and the Church.

In conclusion: rebellion against the empire was not new or confined to a limited area. What the Bacaudae did, antagonists like Viriatus and Bulla Felix had done before them: take advantage of Roman weakness along liminal areas; in the valley of the Loire, the fifth century Bacaudae could take advantage of fragmented jurisdictions to act like the Border Reivers of the Anglo-Scottish border did for centuries; sometimes making themselves available to either party in a dispute, as the medieval gallowglass would do. They don’t sound very different to Alaric’s Visigoths.

Gender Bending in the Late Empire and Beyond

Sexual dysphoria in late antiquity, which I discussed in my posting on Ausonius, can be found in other instances.

There is a Vita, a saint’s life, for St Matrona, a woman who gave up a typical life in the eastern empire in the fifth century to become a monk, rather than a nun, disguised her sex and took a male name, Babylas. She seems to have been born c.AD410. Her name is suspect (Matrona just means ‘married woman’ in Latin). However she is historical, was visited by the wife of the Emperor Leo and the wife of Anthemius, dating her to the 460s, and her reasons for adopting male identity are rational. She came from Perga in Pamphylia, on the south coast of Asia Minor. ‘Babylas’ is the name of a famous third century bishop, martyred in Syria, and whose church was built to block the temple of Apollo at Daphne, near Antioch.

Here’s a selection from the Vita.

Again, as Matrona was seeking to learn how she must live in quietude (and) to please God, she was taught by the Lord through a vision in her sleep. Hers was a marvellous one. It seemed that her husband was chasing her and, as she fled, she was saved by some monks, which signified that she must go in a monastery of men and enter into the life of monks. For in this way, she would not be recognized either by her husband or by others.

She shaved her hair close to the skin and dressed herself like a eunuch. [That is to say that she put on men's clothes]. Once more she went with Eugenia to the said Church of the Holy Apostles, and desiring to learn the meaning of secret things from the divine, she opened the Holy Bible, and there she found it stated: "He who wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take his cross, and follow me." [Lk. IX. 23). Thereupon, they had a firm knowledge of the things that please God, and having abandoned themselves to Him and expecting Him to be their assistant in their practices, they parted from each other.

Matrona, as has already been said, pretended to be a eunuch, and called herself Babylas. She went to the monastery of the holy Basianus. There she was received by the monks and immediately engaged in spiritual competition. She did not feign devotion by sadness and paleness of her face rather, she was truthfully pursuing virtue and was eager to escape notice, so that she soon elevated herself to the perfect life according to God, and all marvelled that a man afflicted with the weakness of a eunuch could so endure hard labors and seek to surpass all the monks, winning over the spirit and despising glory as vanity and being completely obedient out of great modesty (From Ch.6).

It happened that once she was working in the garden with other monks, (and) she was more zealous than they in her work. A monk by the name of Barnabas, who was assigned to work with her, looked at her curiously. He had entered the monastic life a short while earlier, (and) even though he had come from the stage later he increased in virtue and became a hegumen [abbot]. He asked her to tell him why the lobes of her ears were pierced. The blessed woman quickly gave him an intelligent answer saying, "You have, O brother, suffered something human which is alien to our profession. One must pay attention to the land and not gaze curiously on human features. But to answer your question: the woman who had owned me before and who raised me was so affectionately disposed toward me that she wished even to place gold ornaments in my ears." So, the blessed woman, wisely, rid the monk of his suspicions.

But many troublesome thoughts came to her, and she remembered the exhortation of Eugenia who said: "it is difficult for a woman to live with men and pretend to be a man. It is impossible to avoid detection forever." (From Ch.7)

A similar life was lived by Theodora of Alexandria, wife of a Prefect of Egypt, who left her husband and lived as a man in a monastery, only being discovered as a woman after her death. During her time as a man she must have been tonsured and acted in a masculine way never to have been discovered. She was accused of fathering a child with a local woman. She had become a monk supposedly in penance for a sin; the logic of this is that she may have had a lesbian experience and punished herself by placing herself among only men as a man, a symbolic removal of self from sex.

There are also vitae of ‘desert mothers’ such as St Pelagia and St Marina ‘the monk’, who may be the same person, because their names have identical meanings in Greek and Latin. Certainly St Marina of Syria seems a bit late (her death is given as AD750) since Syria had been under Islamic rule for 110 years. St Pelagia lived as Pelagius, so it may have involved some transfer from the British heterodox theologian of that name, whose followers in fifth century Britain were known for their flamboyant clothes. By contrast, there is a late imperial princess Marina, sister of the Emperor Theodosius II, born in AD401 and possibly his non-identical twin. She gave her name to the Marina Quarter of Constantinople and was known for her piety, following the example of her elder sister and imperial regent, Pulcheria.

Marinus/Pelagius was so much into the role of being a man, she accepted responsibility for impregnating a local girl and acted as a father to her baby. It was only after her death that the women charged with washing her body discovered the truth. This transgender saint is venerated by the Maronite church and by the local Roman Catholic church, refounded in AD751, a year after Marina’s supposed death, suggesting that there was a power struggle in the Church at that time, each side using her to legitimate their presence in the Muslim-dominated Levant; among a dwindling congregation of dhimmi (non-Muslims allowed to worship freely), a genuine local saint would have been a strong impetus.

Many of the comments refer to the extreme asceticism of the woman living as men, notably how starved they were. All of them may be mythologised versions of St Mary of Egypt, found starving to death in the Egyptian desert dressed in rags that had once been a monk’s habit. Marina is a diminutive of Maria, on whom she may have been modelled.

The second extract, which involves a man living as a woman, is from Gregory of Tours, the sixth century Gallo-Roman metropolitan (archbishop) of that city. If anyone thinks this is a bit late to be Roman, let’s remember that Gregory (born Georgius Florentius) considered he came from a ‘senatorial family’, one that would have held the position of senator if it had still existed (his ancestor Aquilinus had been a noble in Lyon under the empire). Gregory was born in AD538, which makes him contemporary with Justinian and Procopius.

The following event took place at the nunnery in Poitiers (Pictavia) in AD589, in which Basina and Clotild, two Frankish princesses living as nuns, revolted. Gregory was their metropolitan and was called in to adjudicate at a formal tribunal; he reports:

Then the bishops who were present sat on the tribunal of the church, and Chrodield [Clotild] appeared and gave vent to much abuse of the abbess and many charges, asserting that she had a man in the monastery who wore woman's clothes and was treated as a woman although he had been very clearly shown to be a man, and that he was in constant attendance on the abbess herself, and she pointed her finger at him and said: "There he is himself." And when this man had taken the stand before all in woman's clothes, as I have stated, he said that he was impotent and therefore had put these clothes on; but he did not know the abbess except by name and he asserted that had never seen her or spoken with her, as he lived more than forty miles from the city of Poitiers. Then as she had not proved the abbess guilty of this crime, she added: "What holiness is there in this abbess who makes men eunuchs and orders them to live with her as if she were an empress." The abbess, being questioned, replied that she knew nothing of this matter. Meantime when Chrodield had given the name of the man who was a eunuch, Reoval, the chief physician, appeared and said: "This man when he was a child was diseased in the thigh and was so ill that his life was despaired of ; his mother went to the holy Radegunda to request that he should have some attention. But she called me and bade me give what assistance I could. Then I castrated him in the way I had once seen physicians do in Constantinople, and restored the boy in good health to his sorrowing mother’. (Gregory of Tours Decem Libri Historiarum, Bk 10.15)

Here ‘thigh’ seems to be a euphemism for male genitals, as it is believed to be in the birth of Dionysus (who was born from Zeus’s ‘thigh’ and was god of wine, while Athena was born from his head and was goddess of wisdom; you work it out!). We might wonder if ‘diseased in the thigh’ is a physiological condition from malformed or damaged genitals, or a psychological interpretation of homosexuality as a mental illness. Castration here seems to mean total removal of exterior genitals, which it was in the Eastern Roman/Byzantine world in the sixth century. This would have meant the child would have more closely resembled a girl, and could have passed as such for a while. Male castrati in adulthood do not resemble females. According to Georgian descriptions and cartoons, they grew to be very tall and had large chests.

The last narrative I want to discuss here is the strange tale of the Valesians of southern Gaul. This religious sect, originating in the near east, was found in Gaul in the later fourth century AD. It is noted for its extreme attitudes towards sin, which they thought came to men through the genitals and could only be cured through castration. This is discussed in Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul by Raymond Van Dam (U Calif Press, 1985, pp.80-1). Despite its dull name, this is an excellent book on the later empire.

This sect was known well to Epiphanius of Salamis who discusses them at length (Panarion 38, pp100-4). Epiphanius was bishop of Constantia on Cyprus. Even he says ‘But these people are really crazy’. They seem to have been Arabs living in what is now northern Iraq and to have broken off during the reign of Aurelian, when this area was under the rule of Palmyra and almost anything went. They seem to have been extreme Sethians, followers of a religion similar to Judaism which regarded Seth, third son of Adam and Eve, as their founder.

Epiphanius reports they were not allowed to eat red meat unless they had been castrated. ‘It is widely rumoured’ he says ‘that they have often made this disposition [forced castration] of strangers when they were passing through and accepted their hospitality. They seize them when they come inside, bind them on their backs to boards and perform the castration by force’. (Panarion 38, 6-7).

A panarion is a Greek medicine-chest, and Epiphanius (AD320-403) wrote the book in c.377. As its name suggests, he treats heresies as diseases, so a mutilation of the body is a medical treatment. He differentiates the Valesians from those born as eunuchs, who he says carry no blame (rather like Gregory’s at Poitiers), and from those made eunuchs by others, such as ‘barbarian’ kings in order to serve in seraglios (somewhat like St Matrona). Epiphanius treated each of the fifty heresies he discusses as animals, and the Valesians he considered to be scorpions.

The difference between the Valesians and the self-castrated priests of Cybele is unclear. Cybele, imported into Rome as ‘Magna Mater’, was a near-eastern goddess, whose priest, Attis, had self-castrated, and all later priests of her cult did, and were allowed to do so in defiance of Roman law, which made it illegal. The Latin term for those priests was galli, literally ‘male-hens’, as galla means hen. The word is a homophone for Galli, men from Gaul (Gallia). This is why the symbol used to this day in France is a cock, and is used in sport (le coq sportif) and the famous crowing bird on the Pathé movie openings.

The great problem for religious groups which oppose sexual contact is that they cannot exist beyond the current generation except by induction of new recruits. This is what did for the Shakers in America and for the higher levels of the Cathars. They depend on junior members who are allowed to marry and on adult converts. The Cathars, as Manichees, survived almost underground from antiquity with ‘hearers’ allowed to reproduce, while the Valesians mentioned by van Dam in Gaul may have been assigned that title by outsiders; they may have been no more than particularly nasty Bacaudae.

Roman Cities

Roman Cities

The Roman idea of a city is civilisation; the civilised person (cives, plural civites) lives in a city (civitas), a constructed place for a human to live in. Aristotle said that those who live outside the city are gods or monsters; Romulus allegedly offered his followers a deal: follow my laws and you will be protected by me and free of all previous obligations.

We think we know what a Roman city looks like: a grid of streets, with the cardo and decumanus crossing at the place where the temple and law court denote a central square. By that token, the one city which fails that is, of course Rome. It had grown up long before the idea of planning a town had reached Italy and around several cores.

Three groups, two of them incomers, had settled on the seven hills above the marsh. The incomers were the Rhames, a bunch of runaways and malcontents led by a small core group of young men who’d recently left the village of Alba Longa to prevent overpopulation; the second group was a contingent of Sabines looking to populate the coastal region. They both kept themselves to themselves away from those who’d settled there, the so-called ‘aborigines’. Where they had to work in common, the three groups voted by threes, tribus; that ablative plural became a noun, giving us ‘tribe’.

As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has recently pointed out, few Romans lived in villas or even town houses which presented a blank face to the street, but which surrounded a beautiful atrium in the centre. The vast majority lived in an insula, a multi-storey block of flats, often hundreds of years old. There would be shops on the ground floor, including cook shops for those who had no ability to cook for themselves. The poor maintenance led to innumerable court cases and to several spectacular collapses. Don’t think of a modern western block, but more of the jerry-built blocks still being out up in places like Bangladesh and Nepal with poor building standards and backhanders to officials to turn a blind eye. Fourth century estimates cite up to 46,000 insulae and only 1790 houses. This must mean that, even though the city of Rome had a declining population, everyone who was not a senator or senior member of the imperial or city bureaucracy must have lived in one.

Remains of insulae from Ostia Antica, second century AD

Pliny the Younger brought a case to the attention of Trajan in Book 10 of his collected letters: the city of Nikapolis in Bithynia-Pontus had erected an arena as a showpiece for the city, hoping to raise its status in Asia Minor. But they had built it without foundations and it soon collapsed, prompting Pliny to ask Trajan to endorse an official investigation as to how this had happened.

The truth about the layout of cities and towns in the Roman era is that the central concept of a regular planned urban space was perhaps an ideal, but many cities already existed and had to be accommodated. Nevertheless, the ideal was that the city you were born in was your citizenship: they used the same word: civitas. We might call this a city-district, since it comprised an urban core in which a number of higher-function activities took place (justice, religion, politics) along with different types of industrial activity. Dirty and noxious industry was often moved to the outskirts, downstream from the places where people drew water to drink, cook and clean themselves and their clothes, and ideally down the prevailing wind from the city is foul-smelling (rendering animal fats and fulling cloth being good examples).

People who lived in dependent communities outside the city would come there in the spring to bring animals to sell, and again in early autumn with grain. The political control of the city would extended to their journey inbound and going home, with the laws and gods invoked to depend the honesty of the market. Mis-selling goods and short measure were forbidden and the safety of all was protected. While in the city, the area’s farmers would look for any additional farmhands in a hiring fair, hear the latest news and gossip, eye up potential spouses for their children, ask the elders to settle any local disputes and perform for the gods what they had promised in the event of good fortune.

Such things have happened in many sorts of cities all over the world from the earliest days and still do. Rome’s rising cities fulfilled the traditional function.

When Augustus rebuilt Rome and other cities, he filled in the democratic spaces some had made use of. At Rome, he built a memorialised quarter over the Field of Mars; the Campus Martius had been the mustering place for the citizen army each spring; many places had a March field. It was also the area where citizens went to vote, through stalls like those used for some horse races. Now Rome’s wars were elsewhere, the legions stationed for hundreds of years in provicial cities, and democracy was dead. So how better to obliterate that apace than by building over it.

In Athens, the historic agora, where citizens had voted, was filled up with temples transferred their from across Greece. The democratic space in Athens was killed, as in Rome, by religion.

Around each city was a dead zone. It was considered unhygienic in a hot climate to bury the dead within the urban area; the idea of burying the dead near a sacred place only arrives with Christianity, so the burial of early Christians are the Vatican (Mons Vaticanus) is possible because it was ‘trans Tiber’; to this day the area is called ‘Trastevere’; curiously, this was a place where vates, Gaulish priests, performed their rituals. Circling the zones of the living and dead at Rome was a sacred belt, the pomerium, where religious and legal restrictions were enforced. These included forbidding the use of arms within the urbs under Augustus’s’s law (lex julia de vi privata).

Rome was divided into a number of districts, each named for a notable feature such as a monumental fountain, a particular temple or a theatre. Modern cities often do this (Charing Cross, Unter den Linden, Temple Bar, Opéra, Tivoli Gardens, etc.).  We also know that different districts had different status levels; the Subura at Rome is described as a red light district, a working class district (not that Romans had class structures as we would understand the term)

Surviving structures from Rome’s Subura district

However, areas then as now changed over time and it should be noted that Julius Caesar was born in a house in this district. The district lies in a dip between the Viminal and Esquiline Hills at the north side of the city. Then as now, the higher the altitude, the higher the status; the imperial palace was on top of Palatine, one of Rome’s seven hills; the Italian royal palace was atop the Quirinal Hill; today the Italian President lives there.

Walls set boundaries and were obviously available for defence. Rome’s original wall dates back only to the fourth century BC, but was credited to Servius Tullius, Rome’s penultimate king. Clearly, this wall, which survives in places, was not extant when the Gauls seized Rome in c380BC, so the name may have been traditional, or maybe the plans for it were approved by Servius but it was never built.

A section of the Servian Wall, near to Rome’s railway station

The much larger Aurelian Wall, the one which survives today, is built completely outside the Servian Wall, and encloses an area some three times as large. This was built c270–5 for utterly changed political circumstances. Before that, the outer parts of the city must have been entirely extramural.

Aurelian Wall section near Via Veneto

The wall was improved by Maxentius by improvements to forts and again by Stilicho in AD401. This shows that it was in fine condition when Alaric’s Gothic Army turned up in AD410 and that they must have been invited in, as they could hardly have broken through.

It is well known that eventually Constantinople developed a triple ring of walls, which is why it survived till AD1453, when the cannon of Sultan Mehmet II, known as The Prophet and built for him by the Venetians, blew a hole in it.

However, walls could be decorative, and as such might be part of civic eurgetism by social competing citizens. Those of Le Mans in France (Cenomanum) are particularly pretty, with at least four rows of contrasting designs.

The third century AD walls of Le Mans, Maine, France

These are walls designed for display more than four defence. By contrast, the walls of Arverna (modern Clermont-Ferrand) were ruinous in the fifth century when they needed to be strong; they fell down through great age and the city’s bishop, the celebrated letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris, conducted Christian rogations, beating the bounds of the city in a hope that magical thinking would stop the forces of King Euric from seizing it.

Le Vasso Galate, a surviving section of the imperial city wall of Arverna (Clermont-Ferrand)

It the later parts of the empire, cities everywhere shrank and became less multi-functional.

It would be useful to consider the link between cities and early Christianity. In every town where there was a Roman presence, there was a priest; in every city with a governor, a bishop; in cities which were seats of vicarii, there was a metropolitan, what we’d call an archbishop. In imperial capitals and cities of high standing, there were senior metropolitans with overarching authority; some were termed patriarchs, great fathers, a term used civicly for men of high authority just below the emperor: Stilicho, Aetius and Theodoric held such a title. Thus it can be seen that the Christians shadowed the urban authority of the empire. Once legal, the network of clergy stepped forward. Constantine allowed bishops to run their own law courts in parallel with the civic ones. In the late empire, towns generally survived if the bishop stayed; if he left, the city was eventually abandoned, such was his network of patronage. There were no rural clergy at that time, so Christianity was professed as an urban religion and those who had no priest to instruct them were termed pagani – country people.

We discussed before the straight Roman streets of many cities; these remained while there was a city authority of decurions to prosecute anyone who impinged his shop or house onto the public highway. In the earlier empire and before, local nobles had wanted to be on the city council. Latterly, however, they had to be compelled. The praetorian prefect and governor set the tax expectations of the emperor as a precept and it was the job of the decurions to collect it; they therefore were loaned the money by a tax farmer, who then forced locals to pay, skimming off the surplus collected.

In the countryside taxes were harder to collect and there were no Christian clergy to demand a tithe and attendance at church. The fact that being outside the walls with the gods and monsters and at risk of seizures by brigands (Bacaudae) did not stop removal from the city to a country retreat suggests that there was an impetus to leave the city.

The fifth century comic play Querolus (the Complainer) refers to a man fed up with paying taxes is offered a chance to join the ‘free men of the Loire’ who live under the trees and pay no taxes. He refuses because he is civilised.

Research on the city of Antioch shows that the straight, Romanised streets were becoming deviated in the 300s AD, centuries before the Islamic conquest of Syria in the 630s. Shop owners had built out into the city streets, possibly with shaded awnings, narrowing the road and making it crooked.

In Britain, there was a forced removal of skilled artisans after the regime of Carausius and Allectus was defeated. A Latin panegyric poem to Constantius Chlorus from the people of Autun (Augustodunum) in Gaul refers to such people being transported to repair Autun because they were so numerous in Britain. It should be recalled that by the time of St Wilfrid the Anglo-Saxons had to import glass-makers from the kingdom of the Franks because nobody in Britain knew how to make glass. Archaeologists tell us that for a while watermills, a common sight in the Roman world ceased to exist in Britain.

There are curious burials associated with urban buildings at Wroxeter, Shropshire (Viroconium), where high-status buildings were turned into forges and city houses were partly demolished to be turned into cattle pens. However, a change in function need not be read as a social collapse; today we find people living in oast houses, old windmills, maltings, converted stables and barns, even old factories and warehouses, as in the US, and we don’t consider any of that to be a sign of social collapse; if anything some may think it cool.

Climate change in Britain may have exacerbated many other problems. We read in Gildas about severe famines, which would have hastened departures from cities. A typical small town like Ixworth, Suffolk (Sitomagus) may have suffered from earthquakes; in the 19^th century the town underwent severe quakes, and people may  have left the Roman town of Sitomagus for similar reasons. It is quite clear across Britain that there were no resources to repair dilapidated buildings, that urban life with its high taxes, controlled labour, nosy clergy and the possibility of being transported to Gaul on a whim would not have been attractive to building workers. The rise of rural villa life in Britain in the fourth century, something that is well attested, may have been a way for pagans and discontented people to supply skilled labour to others who had opted out of the Roman system.

In some places, cities retreated back into their cores, with a barrier built across exit roads. Populations shrank away, but as long as the priest stayed there and the ruler at least went there to administer ritual and justice, the community might survive. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle records kings with British names losing the Battle of Dyrham in AD577; their kingdoms were the towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath, which suggests highly local rule, based solely on a town.