Ruling the Later Roman Empire (review)

Pliny, Ep. 4.9.6: Haec accusatores furta ac rapinas, ipse munera vocabat ("These things that his accusers called thefts and plunder, he called presents").

This is a fine book. While students of the later Roman Empire have had A. H. M. Jones' magisterial survey since 1964,¹ this book takes advantage of forty years of more recent scholarship to produce an elegant synthesis attempting "to capture something of what it was like to rule, and what it was like to be ruled" in the later Roman Empire (1). The author, University Lecturer in Classics and Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge, has been publishing earlier aspects of this study since 1994. Kelly received his first degree from the University of Sydney (New South Wales being especially strong in late antiquity) before moving to the University of Cambridge for his graduate work, which he completed in 1993 (with a dissertation entitled "Corruption and Bureaucracy in the later Roman Empire").

The book, obviously the product of many years of research, is organized in two parts. The first, entitled "The Bureaucrat's Tale," focuses on the late Roman administrator John Lydus and his work On the Magistracies of the Roman State (a bureaucratic history including much autobiographical information). This work has been receiving attention from scholars lately for its close discussion of the mechanics of the late Roman bureaucratic apparatus.² Part 2, entitled "Rulers and Ruled," provides an examination of how late Roman bureaucracy actually worked, with chapters such as "Standing in Line," "Purchasing Power," and "Autocracy and Bureaucracy." Throughout, Kelly starts the chapters with provocative quotations from a range of modern scholarly works and civil service handbooks, including Britain's Cabinet Office Staff Handbook and Handbook for the New Civil Servant (my favorite was the Ghanaian proverb "Mouth smile—but money smile better," 138). While many of us fall victim to the Teutonic vice and force readers to wade through a swamp of scholarly controversies in the text, Kelly has relegated those to the endnotes and instead presents a distilled text that should be interesting to nonspecialists as well as to scholars in the field.

While there is much that is useful in the book, I found the analysis of costs most interesting (especially in chapters 2 and 4: "The Competition for Spoils" and "Purchasing Power"). Kelly's quotation (132) of the passage from the first-century Pliny, appearing at the beginning of this review, reveals that extra charges were nothing new in Roman administration. The demonstration of how many additional costs and fees were involved for litigants in the later Roman Empire, as well as how much time could be spent in a lawsuit, vividly shows how government really worked at the local level. In that direction, I hope I may be forgiven for wanting to add that the office of the defensor civitatis shows that emperors at some level either wanted to remedy the problem of high costs, or at least appear to seem interested in helping their poorer subjects.³

We could additionally add the use of the structure of the Church as a tool for "ruling the later Roman empire." While Kelly discusses the costs of ordination of bishops (163–64) as an example of the sale of offices as well as the reception of images of imperial bureaucrats in theology in his epilogue (232–45), he does not develop the potential use of bishops by emperors as a supplement to the traditional bureaucracy.⁴ One such attempt was the granting of legal sanctions to the arbitration decisions of bishops by Constantine (the so-called episcopalis audientia) in at least two laws (CTh 1.27.1, traditionally dated to 318, although it could be argued that this should be redated to c. 324; Con. Sirm. 1, dated to 333) that provided a cheap alternative to the state courts for litigation.

Kelly's book is very strong. A work of intense study, thorough knowledge of primary sources...