Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

‘prosperity’ and ‘sophistication’ 365
course, allows us to speculate that the experience of S. Antonino was a
special one, due presumably to the stationing there of a Byzantine garrison
supplied with coin and goods from the sea. Eventually, and ideally, it should
be possible in all areas to know the broad picture, against which can then
be set a mass of significant regional and local variation. But this state of
knowledge is a very long way off at present.
It would, in fact, be strange if any broad pattern was entirely untouched
by particular circumstance. In ‘northern’ lands there were certainly areas
where economic complexity survived much longer than in contiguous
regions: southern Italy and Sicily (perhaps because of their closer African
and eastern links), Ravenna and Rome (because of their political and ecclesiastical
importance), and the Marseilles–Rhône–Rhine corridor (because
it was an obvious funnel for any surviving interregional trade, and perhaps
because of the purchasing power of the new Frankish aristocracy).
Conversely, there were almost certainly areas in the southern and eastern
Mediterranean which, for particular reasons, did not share in the prosperity
of the fourth to the sixth century. One such area is the eastern North
African littoral, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which suffered badly from barbarian
raiding in late antiquity and which has produced much less evidence
of fourth- to sixth-century prosperity than have the contemporary central
North African provinces. 31
In short, any model of economic movement southwards and eastwards
needs to be loose enough to accommodate considerable local and regional
variation. This meant, for instance, that, in a.d. 550, Marseilles, on the
north-western shores of the Mediterranean, was probably a much larger
and richer town than Lepcis Magna, in the south-east; something which
had probably not been the case two hundred years earlier.
vi. ‘prosperity’ and ‘sophistication’
In the preceding pages, in describing different economies and economic
processes, I have often used terms loaded with value judgement, like ‘prosperous’,
‘poor’ and ‘economic decline’. Under the influence of anthropology
(one of whose fundamental assumptions is that cultures are different,
but equal ), such terms have become profoundly unfashionable in historical
writing. The various changes (including the economic) that took place at
the end of the Roman empire, which were once happily described as symptoms
of ‘decline’, are now generally seen as neutral ‘transformations’, or
even as willed ‘alternative strategies’. 32
There are, indeed, problems with words that imply a generally ‘better’ or
‘worse’ state of the economy: they suggest that individuals were in every
31 Mattingly (1995) 171–217. 32 E.g. Carver (1993) 46–61.
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