A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (review)

This volume is the product of a seminar held in Oxford in 2004 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the publication of A.H.M. Jones' Later Roman Empire. Eight of its chapters were first delivered in that series; three others, as well as its Afterword, were solicited for the publication. As both contemporaneous reviews and the volume's contributors observe, The Later Roman Empire marked a watershed in scholarship on the period, and the assessment of its achievement and influence is an eminently worthwhile project. What brief do the authors set themselves, how well do they fulfill it, and how cogent does that project or projects appear?

Leaving aside the Afterword by Wolf Liebeschuetz, the chapters divide into three groups: a biographical essay by Alexander Sarantis; historiographic studies by Peter Garnsey and Stefan Rebenich (the former on Jones' aims, sources, and method, the latter on his use of continental scholarship); and thematic investigations—on law, the role of the emperor, the army, and the like. These last may themselves be distinguished according to whether Jones understood himself to be surveying their field. As Caroline Humfress and David Gwynn, and not only they, both record, Jones explicitly eschewed a number of topics. His was a "social, economic and administrative survey": in consequence, Jones stated in the opening paragraph of his preface, "I ignore the two major intellectual achievements of the age, theology and law…." Thus where Michael Whitby can, in "The Role of the Emperor," assess Jones' work both in light of the standards and ambitions Jones set himself and also of the forms taken by subsequent inquiry in the field, Humfress and Gwynn have the rather different task of evaluating what modern historians can learn from Jones—indeed, also what Jones knew and wrote—in fields that he declined to address.

Varieties of tone and emphasis notwithstanding, the thematic investigations exhibit considerable uniformity of structure, surveying first the landscape of scholarship prior to Jones; next Jones' own achievement and, where possible, his relationship to that earlier work; and finally an overview of work since 1964, whether autonomously understood or assessed as an index of Jones' influence, or both. The results are almost uniformly informative: published in an era that has witnessed an explosion of historiographic surveys of the field (not least in the first issue of this Journal), this volume can take its place among the more useful such surveys, for the reach of its bibliographies and the generosity of its tone.

That said, the contributions do fulfill their remits in varied ways, and while this must up to a point follow upon the extraordinarily broad scope of the topics the authors were assigned, it is also a consequence of changes in the field underway even at the time Jones published his work. What is perhaps most signally lacking in the volume is any broader conception of changes in historical method writ large across the last forty years, and the relationship of British and more broadly Anglophone ancient history to these. That is to say, beyond hints that social and economic history simply yielded pride of place to religion, culture, and ceremonial, as if to a change in fashion, we are left with little sense of why the field changed; without arguments in that arena, my own sense is that we are left with a fairly narrow understanding of how it changed.

It is telling in this regard that so many of the contributors reflect on Jones' avowed avoidance of archaeological evidence: it is the uninterrogated assumption of the great majority of the contributors (Bryan Ward-Perkins and Averil Cameron are perhaps the two exceptions, albeit along different lines) that confronting archaeological data, or occasionally papyrological sources, would have forced Jones to different conclusions or, perhaps, a different sort of historical inquiry altogether. True this might be, but stated baldly it is pure fantasy...