Commutatio et Contentio: Studies in the Late Roman, Sasanian, and Early Islamic Near East. In Memory of Zeev Rubin ed. by Henning Börm, Josef Wiesehöfer (review)

The integration of the Iranian world into the study of Late Antiquity has accelerated appreciably over the past decade. One of the pioneers of a broader "late antique Middle East" was Zeev Rubin, whose death in 2009 was a great loss to Sasanian specialists. In producing a volume in his honor, Henning Börm and Josef Wiesehöfer have brought together contributors whose works reveal the dividends Rubin's scholarship has yielded in the domains of Sasanian political history, Roman-Sasanian relations, and source criticism. Rubin's questions, these studies cumulatively show, will continue to animate the field for the foreseeable future.

How effectively could the Sasanians control the territories under their dominion? Rubin's influential contributions have envisioned a Sasanian monarchy unable to consolidate its power through centrally organized institutions. Rather, in his view, reliably centrifugal aristocracies kept the king of kings in check. Börm critically engages with Rubin's interpretation through a comparative study of Roman and Sasanian aristocratic politics, "Herrscher und Eliten in der Spätantike." The economically autonomous, genealogically exalted noble houses of Iran capable of obstructing royal ambitions were hardly unusual in the wider Mediterranean world. The Romans, too, had men with "eigene auctoritas." If Romans and Sasanians equally had to reckon with aristocrats of great wealth and power whom they could not directly assail (except in cases of rebellion), they sought to circumvent these rival sources of authority in similar ways, not least through the cultivation of a "meritocratic" elite personally dependent on emperors and kings of kings. Despite its important demonstration that the Sasanians were far from unique in their dependence on aristocratic collaborators nearly as powerful as the dynasty itself, Börm's exposition inadequately confronts the lack of evidence for a late Sasanian meritocratic elite, especially in light of recent sigillography amply documenting the continued prominence of the great aristocratic families. More fundamentally, Börm refrains from interrogating the opposition between aristocratic and royal power, a task for which discussion of the historiographical debates surrounding the Egyptian great estates (e.g., Gascou and Sarris) would have been helpful.

For Karin Mosig-Walburg, the goal of the Sasanians was not a meritocratic elite but a "problemfreies Miteinander von Königtum und Adel," which Ardashir I was believed to have embodied. In "Königtum und Adel in der Regierungszeit Ardashirs II., Shapurs III. und Wahram IV.," she reinterprets the dynastic instability that followed the death of Shapur II in 379. Perceiving the strength that these rulers, traditionally seen as stereotypically "weak," supposedly lacked, as residing in their aristocratic alliances instead of in their persons, she views the ideological innovations of the period—especially the mobilization of the image of Ardashir I as the model ruler—as efforts to redefine the relationship between monarchy and aristocracy. In place of the deceptive generalizations regarding the strength or weakness of individual rulers still common in narratives of Sasanian political history, Mosig-Walburg demands that we be attentive to the shifting patterns of aristocratic alliance and the modalities of communication between the kings of kings and their aristocratic collaborators.

Ursula Weber and Josef Wiesehöfer similarly approach a period of supposed instability as a test piece for theories on the structure of the Sasanian state. Narseh's dethroning of his great-nephew Wahram III in 293 was no mere usurpation but rather the product of alliances between the Sasanian dynast and particular aristocratic groups gradually established over the course of his decades as king of eastern Iranian territories (probably until 270/272) and subsequently king of Armenia. Here, too, the aristocracy is the source of Sasanian power. In their reading of Narseh's Paikuli inscription, rock reliefs, and coins, the authors emphasize the importance of fashioning sacred historical narratives in the service...