The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity by Cameron Averil

Author:Cameron, Averil
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

Urban Violence

Late antique cities could be turbulent places. We have already encountered rioting in the context of religious division, especially in certain explosive urban centres such as Alexandria. When the word was given for the destruction or conversion of a temple, bishops often led the way in provoking the feelings of the crowd; the imperial authorities on the other hand are found trying to re-strain such enthusiasm. But rioting in Constantinople was endemic in the fifth and sixth centuries. The most serious episode – not a religious disturbance – was the so-called Nika revolt of 532 (Chapter 5), when the emperor himself was ready to flee, and the disturbance was put down only at the cost of great loss of life when imperial troops had been sent in under Belisarius. The immediate reasons for this episode had to do with the execution of some criminals who belonged to the circus factions, the Blues and Greens, but it soon came to focus on Justinian’s unpopular ministers, especially the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian, whom the emperor hastily replaced. These are not revolutionary uprisings, but short-lived explosions of violence against a highly unstable background. While religious and political issues were of course likely to be thrown up as soon as violence began, even if they had not actually triggered it off, sustained movements for religious or political reform are not in question in this period. Protests against this or that piece of imperial policy, especially if it had to do with taxation or an unpopular minister, were common in Constantinople, and similar manifestations elsewhere mimicked those of the capital, but urban violence in this period, though it was extremely common, did not turn into revolution.65 Nor, though Procopius liked to think that they were the work of the ‘rabble’, can these episodes be read in any simple sense as expressions of the feelings of the poor or the masses. Only once is a riot explicitly ascribed to the ‘poor’ (in 553, as a result of a debasement of the bronze coinage – again the emperor immediately gave way), and riots about bread or grain were relatively infrequent, thanks to the care which the authorities took to ensure the supply and keep the population quiet on this issue.66

Apart from the prejudice shown by Procopius and others, including Malalas, Menander Protector and Agathias, and the concern voiced in the anonymous sixth-century dialogue On Political Science,67 there is no reason to think that the better-off or middling parts of the urban population were any less given to rioting than the really poor; many episodes were sparked off by hostility to individuals or passionate enthusiasm for chariot racing on the part of all classes, and, as at Constantinople and Antioch, especially by members of the ‘factions’ of Blues and Greens, the organized groups, effectively guilds, of charioteers, performers, musicians and supporters who staffed the public entertainments of late antique cities, and the wider constituency of their followers. Graffiti on seats at Aphrodisias and Alexandria vividly testify to their widespread following.

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