This document is a letter from the Roman governor's chancery, which was the administrative office that handled the governor's correspondence and record keeping, dated to the year AD 342. The letter likely pertains to official government business in the province and was drafted and sent out by a scribe or clerk working in the governor's chancery office.

1. letter from the Roman governor's
chancery. AD 342
Dr Jamie Wood
CLAH266: Lecture 4

2.  To provide you with an overview of the
workings of the late Roman state and some
secondary scholarship on it
 To think about the relative benefits and
drawbacks of the bureaucracy for the
emperors (and the bureaucrats)
 To consider the impact of Christianity on this
system

3.  Government and bureaucracy
 Revisit earlier lectures
 Some theories
 How the system worked: benefits and drawbacks
 Impact of Christianity
 Economy
 Seminar: “Who you know or what you know?
Getting a job in the later Roman Empire“

4.  Writing, like money, was a medium
of exchange – in information and
knowledge – which helped to unify
Empire
 Emergence of legal and documentary
culture as Roman Empire expanded
 Accompanying process of
bureaucratization and
professionalization
▪ Keith Hopkins (‘Conquest By Book’, in Beard
et al. (eds.), Literacy in the Roman World,
JRA Supplement 3; Ann Arbor, 1991)

5.  Small imperial administrative system of
early empire
 Importance of local elites buying into the
system
▪ Civic system in earlier empire: cities administer
themselves and the empire leaves them alone
▪ E.g. tax raising delegated to cities
▪ This is best way of extracting a surplus
 2 interpretations:
1. Bureaucracy as a tool of power that
worked from top-down
2. Responsive not a proactive system
 Emperor ‘trapped’ in the system (F. Millar, The
Emperor in the Roman World)
 Or is it both?

6.  Fixing of frontiers in first century
CE creates permanent need to
pay and supply armies
 Taxation must be raised
 Troops must be supplied
▪ Over time, complex systems of
taxation, administration and requisition
develop to support this
 Pivotal role of emperor at head
of system (ultimate military
commander and judge)
 Bureacracy = Reinforces Imperial
Power? Or not?

7.  Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius: some
legal reforms; philosopher-emperors
 Septimius Severus: increasing
professionalisation of the bureaucracy, esp. law
(golden age of Roman jurisprudence);
equestrians granted formerly senatorial roles
 Commodus and Elagabalus: criticised for ruling
through favorites/ their family

8.  Governors and people in the provinces ask for
advice/ rulings from the centre
Petitions from cities/ individuals
Embassies
 Imperial government responds to these
requests
Imperial rescripts
Some of these were later collected into law codes
Rescripts survive, whereas petitions often do not

9.  ‘It is customary for me, sir, to refer to
you in all matters wherein I have a
doubt. Who truly is better able to
rule my hesitancy, or to instruct my
ignorance? [...] Therefore I stopped
the examination, and hastened to
consult you. For it appears to me a
proper matter for counsel, most
greatly on account of the number of Medieval statue of Pliny the Younger
on the façade of Cathedral of S.
people endangered.’ Maria Maggiore in Como.
(Pliny, Letters, 10.96)

10.  Recipients often not from high
elite
 Surviving examples mostly from
provincials, especially from eastern
empire
 About 20% of the total were
addressed to women
 Even slaves and former slaves sent
petitions and received answers
 Remember that they are not
Inscription of rescript from
proactive laws imposed from Constantine and his three sons
top/centre but reactions to about regulations of Tuscany
initiatives from below/periphery and Umbria, 333 CE, from
Spello, Perugia

11.  Organisation
 Chain of command linked civil administrators directly to emperor (via
councils/ departments)
 Increasing number of provinces (50 -> 100)
 Each province has separate civil and military administration
 Number of officials increased (15k -> 30k) – this is still ‘thin’
 Professionalisation and specialisation
 Entry qualifications enforced
 Specific roles developed: a militia
▪ E.g. secret service
▪ E.g. scribes and scripts (later Roman cursive)
 Development of elaborate systems of record keeping
 Reward and recognition
 Promotion ladder established
 Honours
 Tax exemption

12. Constantinople, late 4th century :
‘From time immemorial a place has been
allocated to him in the Hippodrome below the
imperial box and southwards right down to the
so-called Sling; and every matter since the
reign of the emperor Valens [late 4th C] which
has been dealt with in the greatest courts of
justice (as they once were) is preserved here
and is readily available to those who inquire –
as if it had been dealt with only yesterday.’
(John Lydus, On magistrates, 3.19, written in 6th century)

13. Diocletian’s
Spain, 290s

14.  Christopher Kelly (1994), ‘Late Roman
Bureaucracy: Going through the files’, in A.
Bowman and G. Woolf, eds., Literacy and power
in the ancient world (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 161-176.
 Discuss the reading with your neighbour
 Agree on 3 key/ interesting/ questionable points
about the reading that you are willing to share with
the rest of the class
 Be ready to share at least 1 of them

15.  Bureaucracy a tool of power that worked from top-
down (in theory)
 Emperor dependent on the bureaucratic system
 for collecting knowledge about the empire
 for carrying out his orders
 intermediaries are therefore vitally important
 But power of emperor not always in tune with
needs of bureaucracy
 tension between tendency of bureaucracy to rationalise
and emperor’s autocratic power

16.  Expansion of bureaucracy does
not necessarily increase power
of the emperor if others can get
control of it
 E.g. Third Century ‘Crisis’
 Who protects the ‘people’?
 Emperor is meant to restrict the
excesses of the bureaucracy
 Power of emperor not always in
tune with needs of bureaucracy:
tension between rationalisation
and autocratic power

17.  A law is invalid if “a person
claims that, as a result of our
decision, he has obtained
imperial letters of appointment
and either the outer seal of the
document or the writing inside
confirms his claim.”
 Theodosian Code is a collection of
over 2500 earlier laws made in
438

18.  3rd and esp. 4th C onwards:
increasing tendency for
empire to legislate on matters
of religion
 Bureaucracy used to enact
this
 Decian Persecution of 250/1 CE
 Diocletian’s law against the
Manichees (and the Great
Persecution) John Rylands Library, Greek Papyrus
12, certificate of Pagan Sacrifice, AD 250

19.  After conversion of Constantine in early 4th C;
increasing
 Patronage for the church
 Role for bishops within their cities (displacing old elites,
who had earlier been displaced by imperial bureaucrats)
 Involvement of bishops as
▪ Judges in disputes within their cities (not just between
Christians)
▪ As representatives and protectors of their cities to outside
authorities (e.g. imperial government)
▪ Are they taking on roles formerly occupied by civic elites/
bureaucrats?

20.  Bishops often have legal/ administrative
experience (e.g. Ambrose of
Milan, formerly governor of Emilia-
Liguria)
 Legalistic culture begins to infuse
Christian discourse and practice of justice
 see C. Humfress, Orthodoxy and the Courts in
Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007)
 'The single most outstanding factor of
change in the way elites handled justice
and the way ordinary people experienced
it was the rise in the person of the bishop
as an official who bridged the theory and
practice of justice'
 Kevin Uhalde, Expectations of Justice in the
Age of Augustine (Philadelphia, 2007), p. 8

21.  A massive and contested area of
research: what is significance of
economic changes in the end of
antiquity and birth of middle ages (in
west and east)?
 Romans do not have ‘economic
policies’ as we understand them
 Currency manipulated for symbolic and
political ends (e.g. to free up funds to pay
for army)
 Taxation system develops to pay for
bureaucracy and army
 Rapacity of imperial bureaucracy is a
common theme in literature
 Emperor Diocletian’s price edict: is this
an economic or a moral measure?

22. 1. Bureaucracy vital in articulation of relations between
imperial centre and provincial periphery
 It is what makes the empire function by extracting a surplus to
pay for the imperial superstructure (army, bureaucracy, imperial
household)
2. Bureaucracy is a tool for the imposition of imperial power
 But emperor (and central government generally) require
bureaucracy to gather information and carry out their wishes
3. At the end of our period bishops come to play an
increasingly important role in administration, esp. of law
 But is this because of conversion to Christianity or demise of local
civic elites? Or vice versa - which comes first?
 Over time we see development of an increasingly complex system
of church organisation: provinces – law – bureaucracy

23. 1. Take a look at the very useful summary on the
late Roman economy here:
http://isthmia.osu.edu/teg/50501/12.htm
2. Read: Price, R. (2005), ‘In hoc signo vinces: the
Original Context of the Vision of Constantine’, in
K. Cooper and J.
Gregory, eds., Signs, Wonders, Miracles:
representations of divine power in the life of the
church (Woodbridge), pp. 1-10. [uploaded to
VITAL]