11 - Late Roman social relations

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The most obvious characteristic of Roman society, its verticality, became more accentuated in late antiquity. The impression we receive is of a marked hierarchization which conditioned modes of thought as well as every other aspect of social relations. However, it would be wrong to derive from this the mechanical concept of a ‘caste system’, implying a rigidly bound society that did not permit any form of internal social mobility. It is understandable that the state, once reorganized after the disastrous period of crisis in the third century, acquired a crucial importance, and would retain it, in so far as politics and the economy were geared to serve, at any price, the primary needs of military deference and the maintenance of a constantly growing administrative apparatus. We thus witness the unprecedented phenomenon of the state seeking to tie to their occupations increasingly broad categories of people, and their children. Not even the class of town councillors, the decuriones or curiales, escape the fetters of the state. Having presided, at the local level, over the most prosperous era of the empire, they now found themselves compelled to manage the economic crisis.

This phenomenon has sometimes led historians to stress the coercive element in the state organization, which certainly existed, and the adjunct of which would have been a closed and immobile society. In reality, we note that a very characteristic phenomenon of late antiquity is the parallel opening-up of new channels of social mobility, which permitted unexpected opportunities for advancement. It seems too optimistic to assert that later antiquity saw a greater degree of social mobility than existed in preceding centuries.