Late Roman Spain and Its Cities

Preface

Preface xv † his book begins from three propositions. First, the political narratives and institutional history of many late antique provinces must be revisited in light of recent advances in source criticism. Many basic sources for the period have now appeared in new, improved editions and in some cases—that of Hydatius, for instance—the new edition has required fundamental changes, not least in matters of chronology. The now universal conviction that we must read evidence as text before we read it as source has altered our understanding of many authors, with the result that standard narratives of the period no longer seem to be as securely founded on the sources as they once did. Second, discussions of late antique history that take their starting point in the third or fourth century tend naturally to underestimate the continuity of late antique institutions with those of the early empire . Thus, to understand late antique urbanism, one ought neither to assume a normative high imperial standard from which deviation represents decline, nor posit a third-century crisis that wipes clean the slate for late antiquity. Either assumption will miss how thoroughly conditioned late antique history is by the experience of the early empire , the period in which Spain became Roman, culturally and politically . Third, and finally, at a time and in a place for which the archaeological evidence is more plentiful than the scant literary sources, we should interpret the literary sources against the background of the material evidence rather than trying to fit the archaeological record into a paradigm derived from the literary sources. That statement is uncontroversial for certain periods of ancient and early medieval history —archaic Rome, fifth-century Scandinavia, eighth-century central Europe—where written evidence ranges from the very scant to the nonexistent. But in most places where sufficient literary sources survive , they tend to retain their primacy in creating a historical framework , even if good archaeological evidence also exists in quantity. This book posits an alternative approach. It argues that the traditional narrative arc of Spanish history—from a period of romanization and urbanization , through a third-century crisis that destroys the city culture of the Antonine age, to a thoroughly rural late antiquity and early Middle Ages—cannot be sustained on the basis of the extant evidence. Instead , the evidence shows that the cities and their cultural and political world remained the chief motive force in Spain’s late antique history. That conclusion, to my mind, is the inevitable result of reading the well-known literary evidence against recent archaeological findings. The book’s first three chapters look at the implantation of cities and city culture in the peninsula, the institutions that a city implies, and the continuity of those institutions into late antiquity, suggesting that late antique developments must be read in light of their roots in the early empire. The fourth chapter centers on the Diocletianic reforms and what those meant for the role of Spain within the Roman empire as a whole. The archaeological backdrop of late antique cities in the peninsula and the material evidence for the relationship between town and country are examined in chapters 5 and 6, which draw conclusions against which the succeeding narrative chapters can stand. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 present a revision of the political narrative of Spanish history from circa A.D. 400 to circa 500, the first segment of Spanish history since the Republican era in which it is possible to write narrative history. Chapter 10 presents the evidence, both archaeological and literary, for Christianity in Spanish late antiquity. The final chapters look at the confusion of the earlier sixth century, in the Preface xvi decades before King Leovigild founded a stable Gothic kingdom that brought much of the peninsula under the rule of a single power. The start of his reign inaugurates a new period in Spain’s late antique history and one that has been much better served by scholarship than have the three centuries that preceded it. For that reason, it seems logical to conclude with him. A book such as this could not have been written fifteen years ago. Only very recently has the archaeological record for Spanish late antiquity reached standards of reliability, and of independence from the historical sources, that make it a viable alternative category of evidence to the literary record. Only more recently still have modern studies of that material record been published in...