From Rome to Byzantium, AD 363 to 565: The Transformation of Ancient Rome by A. D. Lee (review)

A. D. Lee’s From Rome to Byzantium is a highly readable survey covering the period from the death of the Emperor Julian to the death of the Emperor Justinian. It is also the final volume in a useful new series from Edinburgh UP that makes the main historical problems of diverse periods of the Roman state accessible to students and non-specialist scholars. Of the three volumes dedicated to the later Roman Empire, Lee’s follows the exemplary contributions of Clifford Ando (Imperial Rome AD 193 to 284: The Critical Century) and Jill Harries (Imperial Rome AD 284 to 363: The New Empire). The compass of Lee’s contribution is the period crucial for understanding the parting of eastern and western Roman territories, the collapse of the western Roman state and the emergence of a distinctively eastern Roman Empire and these three historical developments are a particular focus of this volume.

Lee’s primary approach is to explain the period in terms of the dynamics of imperial succession, the impact of the major theatres of war (both civil war and conflict on the frontiers) and the involvement of emperors in matters of religion. The book traces these themes (and other related issues) over the course of five sections: the introduction (1–16) outlines the major developments associated with the reigns of Constantine and his successors. Part one (19–78) treats, in three chapters, the challenges of imperial successions up to the reign of Theodosius and assays the social and political environments of Rome and Constantinople, including their respective positions of importance in wider imperial affairs. The five chapters of part two (81–195) focus on the divergence of the eastern and western Roman states up to the reign of Justin, with particular attention to military and religious affairs. Part three (199–239) offers two chapters surveying the changes in late-Roman urban culture and in the Mediterranean economy. Part five (243–300) portrays, in three chapters, the reign of Justinian as the legacy of longue durée developments of the fifth century.

From Rome to Byzantium makes immediately accessible the narrative of a period notably problematic to summarize. The volume’s conciseness is, in part, the result of Lee’s resolution of a problem that confronts all scholars of this period, that of how to define the state. Accounts of western ‘decline’ and eastern ‘survival’ are each predicated on particular definitions of the Roman state, whether as a set of institutions, an ideology, a cultural setting or a range of political interactions between different groups of people. Although never explicitly stated, Lee has clearly defined the state in terms of interactions and dependencies shared between the Roman emperor and a wide range of elites with varying degrees of interest in the preservation of a Roman polity. It is primarily with this framework of the emperor as actor that Lee sketches an explanation for the respective fates of the divided empires.

An advantage of this approach is that it brings into high relief the diversity of the cast with which emperors interacted on the imperial stage. One of the distinctive features of Late Antiquity was the emergence of a new aristocracy, the identity of which was increasingly Christian but, in other social, political and cultural terms, also increasingly variegated and less coherent as a whole. By following the emperor as the focal point in a series of interactions with often very different groups (military, bureaucracy, church, eastern and western Senates), Lee plots a course through historical developments of the late-fourth through the sixth century that reveals the major defining themes of the period—the political marginalization of Rome and the ascendance of Constantinople, an increasingly sedentary style of imperial government and the long-term effects of militarization and religious polarization. This treatment provides an immediately comprehensible framework for the more explicit purpose...