specific periods, more wealth stayed in the countryside than ever before. The spectacular ruins of late antique villages preserved from southeastern Turkey to the Negev in Palestine are palpable evidence that for many villagers this was a truly prosperous age. And this was not an exceptional development restricted to marginal areas of the countryside. Innumerable late antique synagogues and churches all over Palestine show what a vibrant rural world awaits the spade of archaeologists elsewhere, once they abandon the traditional civic centers.22 Little excavation has been undertaken in the villages of the Nile valley, yet recent surveys in Middle Egypt also suggest that the late antique period may have been the most prosperous era in this area until the nineteenth century.23
The developments in the countryside of the late antique Near East were thus a direct consequence of transformations in the structure of the urban landowning elites. It was the fragmentation of these elites that gave many villagers the means to challenge the urban landowners’ formerly unquestioned control over them. Yet the “Late Roman Revolution” had some positive implications for the lives of these elites as well. An expanded state apparatus—including a new senate drawing its members from all over the Eastern Empire—and a wider recruitment pool meant new opportunities for social and economic advancement. This development is particularly visible in Egypt, where it represented a radical departure from the previous situation. After more than three centuries of imperial rule, the elites of the Nile valley finally gained access to the prestigious and profitable offices of the Roman administration, an administration that—from an Egyptian perspective at least—had suddenly become an “equal opportunity employer.” This is part of a wider development that includes the complete assimilation of the legal, administrative, and monetary systems of Egypt to those prevailing elsewhere. As the empire’s center of gravity moved to the east and therefore much closer, Egypt was drawn fully and inexorably into late Roman civilization.
What is important here is that this unprecedented opening up of opportunities unleashed, both in Egypt and elsewhere, a process of competition and internal differentiation among the traditional civic elites. As a consequence, the elites of the fourth century were, as we have seen, fragmented and divided against themselves, but what they lost in unity and homogeneity they gained in dynamism. Many landowners must have surely experienced a relative degradation in their status and must have suffered the “audacity” of tenants protected by more powerful patrons. But a few managed, through an opportunistic combination of imperial officeholding and local landowning, to achieve a degree of economic growth and stability that had been beyond the reach of the traditional elites of the Nile valley.24
These successful officers cum landowners would eventually become the new “senatorial” aristocracy of late antique Egypt—“senatorial” because the appointment to an imperial magistracy conferred on its holder a permanent official status in an empire-wide hierarchy centered in the senate of Constantinople. Their rise was a slow, long-term process that begins in earnest only toward the end of the fourth century. But by the end of the fifth century the outcome becomes clear: an imperial aristocracy organized into durable dynasties that had managed, in some areas at least, to push aside competitors and consolidate local authority. It has been argued, in fact, that this aristocracy built up huge landed estates based on wage labor and estate-owned settlements that profoundly transformed the face of the Egyptian countryside. By the sixth century, this theory implies, the economic and social conditions that had enabled many well-off farmers to behave “audaciously” toward their landowners were—at least in certain areas of Egypt—long gone. Villages were rapidly losing their autonomy to all-powerful landowners who had overcome the fragmentation of power by controlling, at the same time, key positions of the civic administration, the local imperial government, and even part of the military (through access to the so-called bucellarii, soldiers in private service), thereby ensuring an unchallenged authority over the countryside.25
The problem is that it is not easy to estimate the speed, scope, and ultimate consequences of this process. The fact that these senatorial estates eventually became the building blocks of a reorganized urban administration certainly points to their profound impact. And the mushroom growth of estate settlements in certain areas of fifth- and sixth-century Egypt also suggests that important transformations were taking place in the countryside. But it is by no means clear how large these “large estates” were, what their impact on rural society as a whole was, or whether their growth always curtailed the autonomy of village life or could simply provide villagers with new economic opportunities.26 As we have seen, there is evidence for “rustic audacity” in some areas of Egypt even in the late sixth century.
The same has to be said about the rapidly rising senatorial titles found in documents that have been used to argue for the equally rapid rise and overwhelming prominence of this new group of landowners. Given the high grade inflation evident throughout late antiquity, one needs to be very careful with the value attributed to these titles. Tracking the emergence of an aristocracy by taking these titles at their face value is like comparing fortunes today with those of a century ago without distinguishing real and nominal prices: by the late sixth century, even a village assistant was a clarissimus, that is, nominally a “senator” in Egypt!27
In any case, the real novelty in the Nile valley may not have been so much an unprecedented accumulation of wealth as the fact that these aristocrats now had local origins. In this they were very different from the greatest landowners of Egypt in the third and earlier centuries, Alexandrian councilors who owned large estates in the immense hinterland of Alexandria that was the whole Nile valley.28 The emergence of a new “creole” aristocracy with local roots but wide social and cultural horizons—and whose estates seem in many ways to reproduce and expand the management methods practiced by their Alexandrian forerunners—is therefore another aspect of the relative progress of the Nile valley in respect to Alexandria in this period. This is a process that, as we shall see, is also apparent in the cultural sphere and that eventually found an administrative expression. After Justinian’s reforms in the sixth century, Egypt’s south came for the first time in a very long time under the rule of a governor who was no longer dependent on Alexandria, who held the same rank and titles as the governor stationed in Alexandria, and who finally became, in the late sixth century, a member of the local aristocracy.29
“Audacious” farmers and “senatorial” landowners: the very transformations that had allowed unprecedented village prosperity and autonomy paved the way, in the long term, for the emergence of a landowning class that threatened to do away with them. It is not surprising, therefore, that social and economic tensions were a structural feature of life in the countryside of the late antique Near East. The late fourth-century orations of Libanius of Antioch contain a firsthand account of such tensions. On the one hand, Libanius interprets the fragmentation of Antioch’s civic elite as an invasion of state-sponsored “strangers” who threaten to buy out traditional landowners such as himself. On the other, he complains about the “rustic audacity” now displayed by the rural population and in particular by a group of his own tenants, “some real, proper Jews” who “presumed to define how I should employ them.”30 His description of the outrages suffered by the civic councilors in charge of tax collection is memorable: when taxes and rents are reasonably demanded—he claims—the villagers reveal their “armoury of stones” and the tax collectors end up collecting “wounds instead of tithes and make their way back to town, revealing what they have suffered by the blood on their clothes.”31 The problem, Libanius argued, was the obstruction of tax and rent collection by rural patrons, particularly the military authorities who protected the peasants in exchange for an illegal and private “tax.” Libanius’s text makes clear that this was by no means class warfare, as Rostovtzeff once believed: the late antique elite was as much the beneficiary as the victim of this process.
Yet in these orations Libanius is profoundly misleading in one crucial respect. His description of the peasantry as “country bumpkins who have their oxen for company” does not do justice to the dynamic countryside
