Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty. Ariel G. Lopez

were considered to be “a source of constant trouble” for their manager. In Syria, the pagan sophist Libanius of Antioch complained that the peasants had turned into brigands sheltered by powerful military protectors—the very group whose intervention Papnuthis had called for. Tax collectors were welcomed in the same way as bishops intending to convert those villages to “orthodox” Christianity: with rocks.⁷

      It is important to identify precisely what lies behind all these complaints of “rustic audacity.” They do not need to be the symptom of a new communal village identity or of a general, collective peasant resistance. If anything, the case seems to have been the opposite. Numerous documentary and literary sources show that villagers were displaying a remarkable “audacity” not only in their dealings with urban landowners but even more so in their dealings with each other. We have a significant amount of evidence, in this period, for conflicts between villagers and in particular between villages.⁸ Roger Bagnall has described the Egyptian villages of the fourth century as “rudderless and captainless vessels.” They have few public structures—a characteristic they share with the late antique villages of Syria—and no clearly defined authorities.⁹ The overwhelming concern with solidarity in Egyptian monastic literature reflects the breakdown of village solidarities that most monks had witnessed earlier in life. Mediating in these conflicts quickly became one of the traditional functions of Egyptian and Syrian holy men such as Shenoute.¹⁰

      Conflicts between villagers and struggles against the payment of taxes and rents are of course a perennial aspect of rural life in Egypt and elsewhere.¹¹ In late antiquity, however, these issues were magnified by a fundamental and well-known process: the fragmentation of the ruling class and the resulting development of rural patronage. These had been among the unintended consequences of the “Late Roman Revolution.”¹² Following the third-century crisis, the Roman Empire reinvented itself in the late third and early fourth centuries and redoubled its efforts to become an effective presence in the life of every one of its inhabitants.¹³ The roots of this revolution go much further back in time, to the age of the Antonines, but it was only in the late third century that, through the establishment of a “New Deal,” the state took advantage of irreversible social and cultural changes instead of trying to contain them.¹⁴ The result, in Egypt and elsewhere, was a dramatic acceleration of some of the historical processes that had been slowly advancing during the previous three centuries of imperial rule.

      The Roman state expanded, diversified, and developed a stronger presence at the local level. As a consequence, urban control over the countryside splintered. The collection of rural rents and taxes, the lifeline of an ancient city, came to depend on the cooperation of multiple groups with different and potentially conflicting interests: the civic councilors themselves, the military hierarchy, the provincial governor and members of his staff (officium), former magistrates (honorati), administrators of imperial land (domus divina), and eventually the clergy and monks. The institutional pluralism that is so characteristic of late Roman society supplied the rural population with a large pool of enterprising would-be patrons. As a result, competing patronage networks flourished in the countryside in this period and gave villagers unprecedented room to play patron against patron and thus to acquire the “audacity” that troubled landowners so much.¹⁵ These vertical relations of rural patronage threatened not only other patrons and landowners, but also the always-fragile horizontal solidarity of the rural population. They did this, above all, by offering new, disruptive opportunities: the opportunity to abandon one’s village and settle at a more attractive estate settlement; the opportunity to enjoy differential protection; the opportunity to evade taxes; the opportunity to lease vineyards, which required large investments beyond the reach of most peasants; the opportunity to become a monk.

      Moreover, the capillary presence of the state in rural areas threatened to bypass cities and to deprive them of their traditional control of the surrounding countryside. The juridical and economic unity between city and its dependent rural hinterland, so defining for the classical city, can no longer be taken for granted in late antiquity.¹⁶ Many cities, in particular those that did not become capitals of the new, smaller provinces, had a hard time adjusting to the new situation.¹⁷ The well-known case of the struggle between the large village of Aphrodito and the town of Antaeopolis—both located not far from Shenoute’s monastery—shows what might be at stake for the city in such a situation. In the fifth century Aphrodito had gained the right to pay much of its taxes directly to the imperial government by delivering them to the provincial capital, Antinoe, instead of having them collected by magistrates of the nearby city of Antaeopolis.¹⁸ The domus divina, one of the many new branches of the central government with a local presence, had apparently become Aphrodito’s patron and protector.¹⁹ This was unacceptable for the elite of Antaeopolis: it threatened to curtail its influence in the countryside and to reduce the profits brought by tax collection. It threatened, in other words, to reduce the city to the status of a simple village to the advantage of the provincial capital.²⁰ The result was a prolonged conflict in which the village elite of Aphrodito appealed constantly to the provincial governors and even directly to the emperor against the encroachment of the local civic authorities, who must have regarded Aphrodito’s ambitions as nothing more than another case of “rustic audacity.” A member of this village elite, the notary and poetaster Dioscorus, eventually moved to the provincial capital, where he made a living as a notary drafting petitions on behalf of members of his village and other provincials. In the end, the village lost its privilege, but the fact that it could put up such a long and tenacious fight is revealing.²¹

      A corollary of this partial weakening of urban control over the Near Eastern countryside may have been that, at least in some areas and during specific periods, more wealth stayed in the countryside than ever before. The spectacular ruins of late antique villages preserved from southeastern Turkey to the Negev in Palestine are palpable evidence that for many villagers this was a truly prosperous age. And this was not an exceptional development restricted to marginal areas of the countryside. Innumerable late antique synagogues and churches all over Palestine show what a vibrant rural world awaits the spade of archaeologists elsewhere, once they abandon the traditional civic centers.²² Little excavation has been undertaken in the villages of the Nile valley, yet recent surveys in Middle Egypt also suggest that the late antique period may have been the most prosperous era in this area until the nineteenth century.²³

      The developments in the countryside of the late antique Near East were thus a direct consequence of transformations in the structure of the urban landowning elites. It was the fragmentation of these elites that gave many villagers the means to challenge the urban landowners’ formerly unquestioned control over them. Yet the “Late Roman Revolution” had some positive implications for the lives of these elites as well. An expanded state apparatus—including a new senate drawing its members from all over the Eastern Empire—and a wider recruitment pool meant new opportunities for social and economic advancement. This development is particularly visible in Egypt, where it represented a radical departure from the previous situation. After more than three centuries of imperial rule, the elites of the Nile valley finally gained access to the prestigious and profitable offices of the Roman administration, an administration that—from an Egyptian perspective at least—had suddenly become an “equal opportunity employer.” This is part of a wider development that includes the complete assimilation of the legal, administrative, and monetary systems of Egypt to those prevailing elsewhere. As the empire’s center of gravity moved to the east and therefore much closer, Egypt was drawn fully and inexorably into late Roman civilization.

      

      What is important here is that this unprecedented opening up of opportunities unleashed, both in Egypt and elsewhere, a process of competition and internal differentiation among the traditional civic elites. As a consequence, the elites of the fourth century were, as we have seen, fragmented and divided against themselves, but what they lost in unity and homogeneity they gained in dynamism. Many landowners must have surely experienced a relative degradation in their status and must have suffered the “audacity” of tenants protected by more powerful patrons. But a few managed, through an opportunistic combination of imperial officeholding and local landowning, to achieve a degree of economic growth and stability that had been beyond the reach of the