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.

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.