Definitions

ONE OF THE MOST difficult problems facing historians of the late Roman and early Byzantine periods (sixth to eighth centuries) is that of what happened to the late Roman senatorial élite, which dominated late Roman politics and society both in terms of provincial urban and metropolitan culture as well as in terms of occupying most of the higher imperial positions throughout the empire. During the seventh and eighth centuries the sources suggest a rather different sort of dominant group (or groups), and the question I want to pose in this paper is largely concerned with the origins and constitution of those groups and whether or not they were in fact made up of members of the older establishment, or whether the latter had disappeared in the course of the dramatic changes that affected the empire in the middle years of the seventh century in particular. In fact, I cannot show that the latter was the case, and so my argument will for the most part tend t owards assuming a degree of transformation and assimilation: transformation as the older élite, reduced in both numbers and in economic strength, was unable to maintain its dominant position in either provincial or Constantinopolitan society; and assimilation as “novi homines” make their appearance in response to the urgent functional demands of the government for people with skills and abilities appropriate to the changed circumstances of the empire as a whole.

The results of this paper, which asks many more questions t han it can answer, should be treated as very provisional. To some extent, the material presented here reviews arguments already rehearsed in my book Byzantium in the Seventh Century, but I have attempted for the purposes of this workshop, and at the risk of a certain amount of repetition, to bring the disparate elements of that discussion together, to adduce new material, and to take into account the results of more recent research, especially into the prosopography of the early Byzantine period.

Any discussion about “élites” demands some preliminary attempt to define the terms of the debate. For the purposes of the present paper I will take for granted that the late Roman social order can be understood from two different but complementary points of view. First, we can take it on its own terms, as a hierarchical polity in which notions of poverty, honour (in the sense of social dignity and ancestral legitimacy) and piety intermingled to produce a particular set of descriptive terms, encapsulated in the vocabulary of the law and the notion of social “orders”, on the one hand, and on the other the moral universe of Christianity.