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state and aristocratic distribution 377
Melania the Younger, the holy woman persuades her over-zealous and
uncomfortable husband to abandon wearing sackcloth and to switch to
unostentatious cheap Antiochene cloth. 54 The story is set in Rome at the
beginning of the fifth century. Was Antiochene cloth perhaps the usual
material for the mass-market of the city, chosen for her husband by
Melania (and by the author of her life) because it was a clear and widely
recognized item of lower-class dress? If it was common in Rome, was it
also widely exported elsewhere, both within the regional economy of the
Near East and within the broad Mediterranean economy? Unfortunately,
we shall never know.
viii. state and aristocratic distribution; the effects
of taxation on the economy
To argue for the importance of commerce is not to argue that the role of
the state (and to a lesser extent the aristocracy) in redistributing goods and
wealth in the Roman world was negligible, nor to argue that there was no
change here in the fifth and sixth century. The importance of state spending
is, for instance, very clear just before our period, in the fourth century,
when a large army and the presence of the emperors themselves in
favoured residences near the frontier (such as Trier, Sirmium and Antioch)
concentrated great wealth in the frontier regions, some of which were not
by nature rich. Huge piles of gold, raised in the peaceful interior of the
empire, were collected and spent along the Rhine and Danube, and along
the eastern frontier. There is plenty of evidence – for instance, in the rich
urban and rural houses of the fourth-century Trier region – to show how
important this was as a mechanism for distributing wealth and encouraging
local demand. Similarly, we have plenty of evidence, from the fourth
and early fifth century, of the accumulation of widely scattered estates by
wealthy aristocrats, which must have led to substantial transfers of wealth
from region to region, and perhaps also to transfers of goods. 55
A major change in the way that the state distributed its revenues,
which took place just before our period, almost certainly had a marked and
generalized effect on the Mediterranean economy. The establishment of
Constantinople as an exceptionally privileged city in the fourth century, the
diversion to it of the Egyptian annona, and its emergence at the end of the
century as the pre-eminent eastern imperial residence, all helped create a
new, stable and substantial focus of consumption in the east. Furthermore,
the definitive break of the empire into two halves at the end of the fourth
century undoubtedly spared the eastern provinces from pouring resources
into the troubled fifth-century west. The creation of an autonomous
54 Discussed by Jones, LRE 850. 55 Trier: Trier Kaiserresidenz (1984). Estates: Jones, LRE 782.
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