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AN EMPIRE ACROSS THREE C ONTINENTS 51 from their estates, not counting the produce they consumed directly! Incomes of the Roman The monetary system of the late empire broke with the Aristocracy, silver-based currencies of the first three centuries because the Spanish silver mines were exhausted and government Early FifthCentury ran out of sufficient stocks of the metal to support a stable ‘Each of the great houses of coinage in silver. Constantine founded the new monetary Rome contained within system on gold and there were vast amounts of this in itself everything which a circulation throughout late antiquity. medium-sized city could ThelateRomanbureaucracy,boththehigherandmiddle hold, a hippodrome, fora, echelons, was a comparatively affluent group because it temples, fountains and drew the bulk of its salary in gold and invested much of different kinds of baths… this in buying up assets like land. There was of course also Many of the Roman a great deal of corruption, especially in the judicial system households received an andintheadministrationofmilitarysupplies.Theextortion income of four thousand of the higher bureaucracy and the greed of the provincial poundsofgoldperyearfrom governors were proverbial. But government intervened their properties, not repeatedly to curb these forms of corruption – we only including grain, wine and know about them in the first place because of the laws that otherproducewhich,ifsold, tried to put an end to them, and because historians and would have amounted to other members of the intelligentsia denounced such one-third of the income in practices. This element of ‘criticism’ is a remarkable featuregold. The income of the oftheclassicalworld.TheRomanstatewasanauthoritarian households at Rome of the regime; in other words, dissent was rarely tolerated and second class was one government usually responded to protest with violence thousandorfifteenhundred (especially in the cities of the East where people were often pounds of gold.’ fearless in making fun of emperors). Yet a strong tradition of Roman law had emerged by the fourth century, and this – Olympiodorus of Thebes. acted as a brake on even the most fearsome emperors. Emperors were not free to do whatever they liked, and the law was actively used to protect civil rights. That is why in the later fourth century it was possible for powerful bishops like Ambrose to confront equally powerful emperors when they were excessively harsh or repressive in their handling of the civilian population. Late Antiquity We shall conclude this chapter by looking at the cultural transformation of the Roman world in its final centuries. ‘Late antiquity’ is the term now used to describe the final, fascinating period in the evolution and break-up of the Roman Empire and refers broadly to the fourth to seventh centuries. The fourth century itself was one of considerable ferment, both cultural and economic. At the cultural level, the period saw momentous developments in religious life, with the emperor Constantine deciding to make Christianity the official religion, and with the rise of Islam in the seventh century. But there were equally important changes in the Reprint 2026-27