FbF Book Club: The Final Pagan Generation (Watts, 2015)
Chapters 3 and 4 - Economic Reform, Political Stability, Court Intrigue, Institutionalization and Legalization of Anti-Paganism, Pragmatic Administrators
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Previous Entry - Chapter 2: Constantine the Great, De-Paganization, Incrementalism, Continuity, and Elite Training
System Loyalty.
This concept immediately leaps out at me whenever I see a parliamentary election in Europe play out and the local social-democrat party of whichever country is voting that day always manages to score a baseline 20% of the votes. These are the bureaucrats and the people who depend on the system for the position that they have or the station that they occupy in their own lives. They are naturally loyal to the system as they rely on its largesse.
System loyalty can stem from a principled, philosophical belief in which one concludes that the governing system is “the best one”, or “the least worst one”, as is commonly said of democracy. This loyalty is more often than not simply a case of self-interest, particularly economic. Because economic self-interest can be rationalized as an existential matter (which it often is) by the individual, one will frequently choose to overlook aspects of that very system when it violates their own values or ethics. To be fair, it is a sign of maturity to accept and understand that not everything can be the way you want it to be. You win some, you lose some.
It is the system and how it generated loyalty to it that is the main subject of the third chapter of this book. I’ve decided to combine both the third and fourth chapters in this entry because I do not want to drive us off course and onto wild tangents, but there still is value in taking a look at what Watts has to say about this subject because it will come into play later in the story, at least I assume it will (in fact, I’m quite certain that it will).
The Last Pagan Generation grew up in a Roman Empire very different from the one in which their grandfathers lived through. 3rd century Rome was characterized by political and economic instability, until Diocletian arrived on the scene to re-right the ship. This generation only knew political and administrative stability. On top of that, it also produced economic growth which allowed bureaucratic strivers to amass wealth and join (rather than replace) the existing wealthy elites. In fact, it created a new gilded age. Much of this was thanks to monetary reforms that ended galloping inflation (something that we are now privy to ourselves these days):
These political and economic uncertainties were met by repeated currency debasements as emperors reduced the amount of precious metal in gold and silver coinage in order to cover expenses. Throughout much of the third century, the relative value of gold and silver coinage remained pegged in such a way that smaller denomination coins retained their relative value. By the early 270s, however, the market’s faith in the basic worth of Roman silver and bronze coins had been shattered.3 The market responded quickly by adjusting prices upward, an inflation that created further economic instability, especially for those who were unable to keep their savings in gold.
Diocletian’s reforms introduced new gold, silver, and bronze coins to represent high, medium, and low values with the intention of first delivering economic stability that would then translate to political stability. His gambit worked (for the most part). The gold coin was known as the “Solidus” (pictured in the header), and it served as the currency of the wealthy. It managed to retain its value for a very, very long time, unlike the silver and bronze coinage that were debased rather quickly.
Those with access to accumulating solidii amassed great wealth over the 4th century, but those who were disqualified from it saw their lives barely improve at all despite the political stability that characterized this period. So to take the words out of your mouth, yes, it was an age of growing economic inequality. The parallels to our modern world keep piling up.
The new gilded age:
The anonymous author of a fourth-century military treatise spoke of the consequences of this: “It was in the age of Constantine that extravagant grants assigned gold instead of bronze . . . there ensued an even more extravagant passion for spending gold . . . which meant that the houses of the rich were crammed full and their splendor increased to the detriment of the poor.”
Other sources confirm this concentration of wealth around the fourth-century elite. Olympiodorus, a visitor to the city of Rome in the early fifth century, spoke of the wealthiest households receiving an income of “four thousand pounds of gold per year [$60,960,000 at current gold prices] from their properties.”
Please not the comparison that Watts himself makes here:
Olympiodorus remarked that “each of the great houses in Rome contained within itself everything that a medium-sized city could hold, a hippodrome, fora, temples, fountains, and different kinds of baths.”33 It seems that the later fourth century even produced a sort of building boom (complete with massive new mansions and teardowns of older, smaller homes) like the one that swept the East and West Coasts of the United States in the first decade of the 2000s.
What is key is that these policies did not just make the already wealthy even wealthier, but they allowed a new class, a bureaucratic and administrative one, to join the existing aristocratic elites as well without replacing them or even threatening them. What it did is produce another cohort of system loyalists to add to the already existing one. Clever. Even more clever was the fact that these elites were spread throughout the Empire and not concentrated in the capital, thus reducing the incentive for revolt in the far flung provinces, as the local elites and their fortunes were tied to the Imperial system and in the person of the Emperor, especially his whims.