East and West in Late Antiquity: Invasion, Settlement, Ethnogenesis and Conflicts of Religion

508 Pages·2015·1.84 MB·English

by  Wolf Liebeschuetz

East and West in Late Antiquity
Impact of Empire
Roman Empire, c. 200 B.C.–A.D. 476
Edited by
Olivier Hekster
(Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Editorial Board
Lukas de Blois
Angelos Chaniotis
Ségolène Demougin
Olivier Hekster
Gerda de Kleijn
Luuk de Ligt
Elio Lo Cascio
Michael Peachin
John Rich
Christian Witschel
VOLUME 20
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/imem
East and West in Late Antiquity
Invasion, Settlement, Ethnogenesis and
Conflicts of Religion
By
Wolf Liebeschuetz
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Fragment of the Tabula Peutingeriana, Section IV, a medieval copy of a Roman road map.
Östereichische National Bibliothek, Vienna. Cod. 324.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon) East and West in late antiquity : invasion, settlement,
ethnogenesis and conflicts of religion / by Wolf Liebeschuetz.
  pages cm.—(Impact of empire : Roman Empire, c. 200 Bc–AD 476, ISSN 1572-0500 ; volume 20)
 Includes index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-28292-6 (hardback : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-90-04-28952-9 (e-book)
1. Rome—History—Empire, 284-476. 2. Social change—Rome—History. 3. Rome—Ethnic relations. 4. Roman
provinces—History. 5. Rome—Relations—Europe. 6. Europe—Relations—Rome. 7. Rome—Relations—
Syria. 8. Syria—Relations—Rome. 9. Land settlement—Syria—History—To 1500. 10. Christianity—Syria—
History—To 1500. I. Title.
 DG312.L54 2015
 937.09—dc23
2015001418
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities.
For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 1572-0500
isbn 978-90-04-28292-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-28952-9 (e-book)
Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Introduction  vii
1 The Author  vii
2 Introduction to the Volume  xxiii
3 Acknowledgements  xxviii
Part 1
The West
1 Rubbish Disposal in Greek and Roman Cities  3
2 Was There a Crisis of the Third Century?  19
3 Transformation and Decline: Are the Two Really
Incompatible?  29
4 Unsustainable Development: The Origin of Ruined Landscapes in the
Roman Empire  54
5 Warlords and Landlords  66
6 The Debate about the Ethnogenesis of the Germanic Tribes  85
7 Making a Gothic History: Does the Getica of Jordanes Preserve
Genuinely Gothic Traditions?  101
8 Why did Jordanes Write the Getica?  135
9 Habitus Barbarus: Did Barbarians Look Different From
Romans?  151
10 Barbarians and Taxes  167
11 Violence in the Barbarian Successor Kingdoms  191
12 Goths and Romans in the Leges Visigothorum  202
vi contents
Part 2
The East
Syria: Defence and Settlement
13 The Impact of the Imposition of Roman Rule on Northern
Syria  223
14 Nomads, Phylarchs and Settlement in Syria and Palestine  241
15 Late Late Antiquity (6th and 7th Centuries) in the Cities of the
Roman Near East  256
16 Arab Tribesmen and Desert Frontiers in Late Antique Syria  288
Paganism and Christianity
17 Julian’s Hymn to the Mother of the Gods: The Revival and Justification
of Traditional Religion  325
18 The View from Antioch: From Libanius via John Chrysostom to John
Malalas and Beyond  341
19 From Antioch to Piazza Armerina and Back Again  370
20 Theodoret’s Graecarum affectionum curatio: Defending Christianity
in Christian Syria  389
21 The School of Antioch and Its Opponents  408
The Balkans: A Contrast
22 The Lower Danube Region under Pressure: From Valens to
Heraclius  425
Index  465
Introduction
1 The Author
I was born on June 22, 1927 on the third floor of my maternal grandmother’s
house in Hamburg, Rabenstrasse 21. The house faced the Dammtor Bahnhof
and the Moorweide, an extensive meadow, which up to 1933 was the site of
rallies of various political parties, including the Communists and, already by
then, the Nazis. My parents were members of the Liberal Jewish community to
which our family had belonged for several generations. The family’s Jewishness
had a considerable influence on my life. It certainly stimulated my interest in
Ancient History.
I have been interested in history as long as I can remember, inspired by my
mother. She was a doctor and research physiologist,1 but she had to leave her
research institute at the Hamburg University Hospital at Eppendorf on get-
ting married, and was stopped from exercising her venia legendi at Hamburg
University by the National Socialist government. She therefore had plenty of
time to devote to her three children, and particularly to myself, the eldest. She
told fairy tales, and drew pictures to illustrate them. One of her favourites was
Heinrich Hoffmann’s König Nussknacker und der arme Reinhold (Nutcracker
king and poor Reinhold). She had an extraordinary visual memory, which
enabled her to reproduce that book, text and illustration, from memory for her
eldest granddaughter nearly thirty years later. Mother regularly told us stories
from the Bible: the creation, Joseph and his brothers, Moses and the exodus
from Egypt, Saul and David and Jonathan, selected incidents from the Books of
Kings, and the heroic story of the Maccabees. In an account of our life under the
Nazis that mother wrote she records that she had learnt from her parents that
a fighting spirit is the only antidote against the low self-esteem experienced by
outsiders, such as the Jews, and that this is what she was nursing in her chil-
dren. She also related the stories of the Trojan War as well as much more recent
history, notably of the “victorious war” of 1870−71 and “the lost war” of 1914−18,
in accordance with our patriotic perspective of those days. I seem to remem-
ber that Hindenburg, then president of Germany and in some ways the man
who let Hitler in, figured quite prominently. Mother also read from a series of
books by Elisabeth Averdiek about a Hamburg family in the first half of the
1  List of 25 publications in Silke Kaiser-von Holst, Rahel und Hans Liebeschütz—Zwei jüdische
Wissenschaftler der Hamburger Universität: Ihr Leben unter dem Nationalsozialismus bis 1939
und im Exil in Grossbritannien, überarbeitete Magisterarbeit, Hamburg, 2000, 141–42.
viii Introduction
nineteenth century. I particularly remember an account of the great fire that
destroyed much of the old city in 1842. I also heard quite a lot about Napoleon
and his campaigns from the memoirs of Louis de Ségur, Napoleon’s aide-de-
camp. Later, mother read us a lot of plays, mainly historical ones: Goethe’s
Götz von Berlichingen (as well as the autobiography of that knight with an iron
hand); Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, his Wallenstein plays, and Jungfrau von Orleans;
and then Shakespeare, first in German translation and later in English, starting
with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and going on to Henry IV Part I and Macbeth.
So history played a prominent role in my early life.
I have not yet mentioned my father, Hans Liebeschütz, who was a
historian.2 He had received the classical education then provided by German
gymnasia at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg. When he left
school he wanted to become a rabbi and had spent 1913 as a student in Berlin at
the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums, a seminar for training Liberal
rabbis. He was at the same time registered as a student at Berlin University,
where he heard, among others, Ulrich von Wilamowitz and Eduard Meyer. The
impression lasted for the rest of his life. When he resumed his studies after war
service in France he specialised in Medieval History. But he kept a particular
interest in the language and literature, and especially the history, of the Greeks
and Romans. Homer and Plato (especially The Republic) were his favorite
Greek authors. Of Roman authors, he preferred Lucretius to Virgil. In the late
1920s and up to 1933 he taught a combination of German, Latin, History, and
Religion (Kulturkunde) at the Lichtwarkschule, an experimental progressive
school run by the city authorities.3 At the same time he obtained the venia leg-
endi to teach Medieval Latin and Medieval Literature at Hamburg University.
Of course he lost both jobs when Hitler came to power. After a short interval
he began to teach at the Lehranstalt der Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin,
where he had attended courses before the war. So in term time he was away
from home during the week. But he had many books, which I was free to look
at and read. It might be worth mentioning that thirty or so years later my chil-
dren did not read my books. Fathers are not what they used to be! Their power
(potestas) may be much the same, but their influence (auctoritas) has been
2  “Liebeschütz Hans,” with list of publications (Silke Kaiser-von Holst) Biographisches und
Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, XXIX (2008), 813−21. Liebeschütz, Hans, Neue Deutsche
Biographie XIV, Berlin 1985, 489ff (W. Liebeschütz). Veit-Brause. “Emigration in England,
ein Gespräch mit Wolfgang Liebeschuetz und Edgar Feuchtwanger,” in O.H. Oexle and
H. Lehmann (eds.), Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, Göttingen, 2004, 513−44.
3  Joachim Wendt, Die Lichtwarkschule in Hamburg 1921−37, Hamburg, 2000.
Introduction ix
much reduced. My father’s books included Carl Oppel’s Das alte Wunderland
der Pyramiden (4th ed., 1881) (Wonderland of the Pyramids), a book that he
had read as a boy, and that I found fascinating as soon as I was able to read
it. Another book I read quite early was James Breasted’s Geschichte Egyptens
(History of Egypt), a German translation of a book originally written in English,
and published in 1936. The library also included Georg Dehio’s Geschichte der
Deutschen Kunst (History of German Art). I was fascinated by the architectural
illustrations. The volumes are at Nottingham now, and they still show evidence
of serious childish misuse As long as I can remember I have been interested
in looking at historical buildings, and was sorry even then that Hamburg had
so few of them, and that apart from the destruction caused by the great fire of
1842, the citizens of Hamburg had been quite ruthless with their architectural
heritage. Since then, of course, the war has destroyed almost all that was left,
except for two beautifully restored Gothic churches.
Soon after Hitler came to power our parents realised that there would be
no future for their children in National Socialist Germany. They would have
to learn English. So they arranged for us to have regular lessons from Frau
Schröder, who was, if I remember rightly, a Quaker and who had spent many
years in England. I don’t remember how often she came, or how I old I was
when her visits began, or indeed how she taught us. But by the summer of 1936
I could converse in English and follow English conversation quite easily. That
summer we visited mother’s brother, uncle Theodore, who had emigrated to
England soon after he had lost his job as a result of Hitler’s having coming to
power (Machtergreifung), and was now living in Hull. As well as visiting her
brother, my mother also wanted to explore the possibility of sending her chil-
dren to school in England.
I started school at Easter 1934, when I was almost seven. I attended the local
primary school (Volkschule). There were between fifty and sixty children in the
class, but the teacher, one Herr Hahn, had no trouble handling them. He was
obviously a very good teacher. He was also a Nazi. We cut out pictures from
newspapers to display in the classroom conveying the message that the Führer
loves children. On at least one occasion our teacher came to class in his SS
uniform. But he did not discriminate against the two “non-Arian” children in
his class. On the first day, he told my parents that I would be able to stay at
the school as long as the Führer would allow it; the Führer evidently allowed it
for more than two years. Then, one day, Herr Hahn told the two “non-Arians”:
“You can go home,” and that was the end of my time at the Dockenhudener
Volkschule. My education continued at a tiny school for Jewish children started
by my parents. Our teacher was Fräulein Henriette Arndt, and she taught us