Courses

This course explores the social history, cultural and economic history of the Roman Empire in late antiquity.  This period, from 284 to 642 AD, begins with the accession of Diocletian and ends with the Islamic conquest of Egypt.  The course focuses primarily on the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which presents a political unity absent from the western half of the Roman Empire and its successor states in the same period.  It will explore the decline of traditional (pagan) religions and the role of Christianity in this period.  The rise of monasticism; the role of Christian holy men; and the doctrinal disputes that caused internal rifts throughout the Christian world will require special attention.  The course will approach the social history of the city and the countryside through specific case studies: riots in Alexandria and peasant agency in Syria and Egypt.  The course will explore the poetry, rhetoric and philosophy that comprised an important part of elite culture in this period, and also attempt to use chariot racing and the circus factions to access the culture of the masses.  Exploration of economic history will focus on an emerging gap in the field’s historiography between materialists who see the period as one of rising oppression of the peasantry by a profit-driven elite on the one hand and papyrologists who see a risk-averse elite working alongside an entrepreneurial and growing middle class on the other hand.  The semester will close with a study in micro-history, the Roman Egyptian village of Aphrodito, its leading families and its agricultural working classes whose lives are recorded in the documentary papyri.