BMCR 2008.12.23, Olivier Hekster, Crises and the Roman Empire

Olivier Hekster, Gerda de Kleijn, Danie+lle  Slootjes (ed.), Crises and
the Roman Empire: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop of the
International Network Impact of Empire, Nijmegen, June 20-24, 2006.
Impact of Empire v. 7.  Leiden/Boston:  Brill, 2007.  Pp. xiii, 448.
ISBN 9789004160507.  $179.00.

Reviewed by Peter Fibiger Bang, University of Copenhagen
([email protected])
Word count:  813 words
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This volume doubles as a book on the question of crises in the Roman
Empire and as a Festschrift dedicated to Lukas de Blois. As indicated
by the subtitle, the collection groups together the papers given at one
of the workshops organised by the "Impact of Empire" network of which
de Blois was among the founders and, until this meeting where he
retired, the successful chairman. The broad spread of papers reflects
the wide-ranging and catholic interests of the honorand. There is much
of interest in these papers, though precisely what catches the eye will
depend on personal preferences. This reviewer thought Drinkwater and
Peachin's two analyses of the Principate, reinterpreting Mommsen's
notion of the most "illegitimate" form of government, both lively and
stimulating. John Rich and Luuk de Ligt offer instructive and learned
discussions of the preconditions and details of the Gracchan crisis of
the Late Roman Republic. Manders and Horster make interesting
observations concerning Roman coinage as a medium of "propaganda".
However, as will also be clear from this list, the issues dealt with in
this book are fairly disparate and the whole is not strongly focused.
Clearly some lack of coherence can be tolerated and certainly must be
expected from a Festschrift.

The content is organised under 4 headings plus an introductory part and
an epilogue. "Crisis and The Empire" contains nine papers on life and
rule in various Roman provinces and aspects of the character of
imperial government and power such as aristocracies and military
commands, all mostly in the third century AD. The six papers of "Crisis
and the Economy" focus on the demography and land issue in late
republican politics as well as the Antonine plague and its possible
consequences. Another six papers, "Crisis and the Emperor", bring the
emphasis back to the third century AD and deal with issues of imperial
ritual and representation. Finally the five papers of "Crisis in
(Legal) Writing" treat aspects of late antique literary culture.

During the last decades the twin notions of crisis and decline have
become problematised as a form of historical explanation. Too often
change has automatically been taken as a symptom of crisis or decline
rather than merely transformation; and too often, the notion of crisis
has been utilised in a totalising fashion. Severe problems in one field
of activity are immediately and crudely read into developments in other
spheres. But art and philosophy do not necessarily conform to the same
rhythms as say the military or economic life. Two to three generations
separate the onset of the Antonine plague, identified by Jongman in
this volume as the beginning of serious imperial decline, and the 50
years of internal division and succession struggles which followed the
fall of the Severan dynasty and which Liebeschuetz in his contribution
insists mark a period of real and serious crisis for the survival of
the Empire.

Work in the 1990s by Strobel and Witschel on the third-century crisis
of the Roman Empire pointed out how often crisis had simply been taken
for granted in the scholarly literature and showed the need for a much
more circumscribed and analytically precise application of this
concept.[[1]] This challenge seems to have been the starting point of
this volume. But instead of just staying within the third century, the
editors have laudably sought to broaden out the perspective to include
discussions of crisis in other periods of Roman history. In this
enterprise, they have been only partly successful. The comparative
discussion which could have emerged out of such a project does not
happen. A few intimations apart, there is very little attempt to
examine the notion of crisis as a form of historical explanation, how
is it used, which sort of assumptions have shaped the concept, how can
it be analytically differentiated. What dominates the collection, is
Wolfgang Liebeschuetz' common sense reassertion, which does service as
the analytical introduction, that "crisis", understood as a set of
serious problems and challenges which threatened the continuation of
Roman rule, cannot be wholly written out of, indeed must remain central
to the history of the empire in the 3rd century AD. While this
intervention may in many respects serve as a salutary antidote against
exaggerated revisionism, it does not really alleviate the need for a
more systematically worked out classification and definition of crisis
(and decline) that could tie the volume together. Instead the reader is
served with a series of more- or less well-connected papers that either
discuss specific aspects of individual crises or deal with phenomena
dating from periods customarily thought of as characterised by a state
of crisis. All in all, however, these various papers provide the reader
with a good sense of a range of issues and topics which at the moment
attract attention and stir up debate among Roman historians dealing
with the 3rd century AD and to a lesser extent the late Republic.

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Notes:


1.   Karl Strobel, Das Imperium Romanum im "3. Jahrhundert": Model
einer Historischen Krise? Stuttgart 1993; Christian Witschel, Krise,
Rezession, Stagnation?: der Westen des roemischen Reiches im 3.
Jahrhundert n.Chr., Frankfurt am Main 1999.