SUMERGIDA CON FORMACIÓN DE PELLET
1.2. FUNDAMENTOS DEL PROCESO DE ESCALADO
Obviously, the fact of these many lacunae has not acted to prevent the writing of Sicilian history. (The synthesis in Section II.1, which is after a fashion my own contribution to the genre, should suffice to demonstrate scholars' continuing bad sense.177) What ithasdone, however, is shape the sorts of histories which may be written on the basis of the texts. The relative prominence of certain themes—or, put differently, the consistently greater attention paid to certain aspects of Sicilian history—is not primarily a result of decisions I have made. (The obvious exception, of course, being Sicilian Christianity, discussed above.178) Rather, it reflects a series of emphases which are present in the sources themselves. Cumulatively, they allow for the fuller treatment of certain subjects while limiting what we can say about others.
Briefly stated, the emphases which we observe in the textual corpus are the result of several factors. One of these is common to virtually all ancient literature, and should be raised at the outset. The ability, as often the leisure, to write was a privilege which belonged overwhelmingly to the upper strata of Roman (and for that matter Islamic) society.179 It is not only the wealthy who appear in the works under discussion—recall the multitudinous slaves of Diodorus' Republican-period revolts—but they are inevitably at the center of the frame. In consequence, it is their interests which predominate in the texts available to historians of Roman Sicily. The texts, meanwhile, encompass a limited range of literary forms, the characteristics of which differed in a variety of ways. The intersection of elite interests and generic limitations played an important role in determining what our sources can tell us.
2.2.1. The imperial gaze.
Beginning with Diodorus'Historical Library—that is, during the earliest phase of writing on Roman Sicily—a not-inconsiderable number of the sources may be characterized as works of "universalizing" history. By this I do not mean that they are necessarily works of universal history, which constitutes a particular sort of historiography to which only some of our sources belong,180 but rather that they
encyclopedia commissioned by al-Idrīsī's patron Roger II of Sicily (22 Dec. 1095 – 26 Feb. 1154) c. 1138, may constitute a sort of exception to the rule. This is not, however, because it is especially detailed; indeed, its schematic treatment of the island is atypical of the geographer, who frequently provides ethnographic information which is conspicuously absent from his discussion of Sicily. Rather, the difference lies in hismotivation. As Chiarelli 1980 has argued, the publication of any evidence for ethno- religious conflict might have constituted a political and perhaps even military liability for his Norman patron, and so it was consequently suppressed.
177. Others, recently, include Correnti 1999. 178. See p. 30.
179. Concerning patterns of ancient literacy, Harris 1989 is basic. A more detailed discussion of our
authors' uniformly comfortable circumstances follows in Section II.2.2.1.
180. Diodorus is one. Another is Ibn al-Aṯīr'sKāmil al-tawārīḫ(see n. 172), which covers the ancient history of Greece and Rome as well as the civilizations of his time.
share a certain (ambitious, but nonetheless definite) scope. Diodorus Siculus; Cassius Dio; Procopius; and Theophanes (to take a historical cross-section) wrote in different languages, with different sympathies, and for different reasons, but they did so from a position of concern with the same notional space. Their "inhabited world"—the
oikoumene, an originally Greek term whose use was current throughout the whole period of interest to this thesis—was defined by Roman experience. More specifically, it was defined by the fact of Roman conquest and subsequent control, and as such, constituted a political as well as a geographical space.181
Mutatis mutandis, the same can be said of the Arab writers on whom we depend for notices concerning the last phase of Late Antique Sicilian history. TheDār al-Islām, as is clear in the term itself, was the "abode" of the Muslim faith, but more than religion was at issue. The early history of Islam—and more pertinently its expansion throughout the Mediterranean basin, into areas which it frequently had to wrest from (as–frequently–belligerent) Christian Roman rivals—was in many respects the history of an empire. To be sure, tensions among Muḥammad's faithful, which soon exploded into factional conflicts of the sort which were typical of Muslim Sicily, had by the time of the island's conquest already shattered the political unity of that empire. But the lines drawn between the Idrīsid, Aġlabid, and Iḫšīdid dynasties of ninth–tenth North Africa were not as bright as the line which divided theDār al- Islāmfrom theDār al-Ḥarb, or "abode of war". The latter, basically, was the world in which Islam did not (yet) predominate.182 In the Mediterranean, that world was practically coterminous with the Roman empire and the polities descended from it (with which Muslim powers were indeed often at war). Thus constituted, the dichotomy had secular as well as religious ramifications. One of them was the reality of the Dār al-Islām as a political space. Another was the fact that this space was always adjacent to, and sometimes overlapped with, to the geographical space of the
oikoumene.
It was this shared political space which determined the scale, and often the subject, of the universalizing histories to which I earlier made reference, and its salience influenced their composition in ways which are relevant to their use as sources on Late Antique Sicily. One of these I have already raised as a problem of coverage, namely the rarity of historians' treatment of Sicily as a subject of more than incidental (and even then superficial) discussion. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it would be unrealistic to expect authors of universalizing history to do much more. So great is the range of subjects within their purview that, absent some deeply compelling reason to do otherwise, they are apt to limit the discussion ofany
single topic—or region, in the present case—to the essentials.
What, then, was "essential" about Sicily? The range of answers given by authors of universalizing history was as narrow as their remit was wide. Far from being a paradox, this "inverse proportionality" was to some degree inevitable. The implicitly political frame adopted by universalizing historians imposed a particular sort of logic on their narratives. Among other things, it worked to produce a concentration of the historian's attention on those aspects of a topic which were most
181. Humphries 2009: 97–98. 182. Abel 2012.
relevant to the constitution—or maintenance, or rupture—of the political space concerning which they wrote. An interest in the first and third themes, for example, is behind the repeated appearance of Sicily in moments of military conflict. The island's third-century BCE contestation by the infant Roman and Carthaginian empires guaranteed it an important place in any—we can be more specific: Diodorus Siculus'—history of Rome's transformation into an international power. Similar considerations determined Sicily's relative prominence in Procopius' account of Belisarius' campaigns, which, from the perspective of a historian sympathetic to Justinian's characterization of his western conquests as a "renovatio imperii", represented the reintegration of a space once united (in terms of identity as much as geography) by "Our Sea". And, finally, mention of the island in the Arab sources comes in the context of its excision from the Byzantine empire and incorporation into the Dār al-Islām.
Grosso modo, it seems safe to say that Sicily is most visible in the universalizing historiography when circumstances were such that its (always potentially advantageous) location became one of strategic value. As we have already seen, however, not every mention of Sicily is necessarily one of imperial instability. The island was possessed of other attributes which rendered it an occasional subject of interest. Unlike the question of its strategic significance, which was to a large degree the consequence of processes which were exogenous to the island, the latter were properly Sicilian characteristics. Probably the most important of these was the island's fertility, which, as implied by Cicero's use of an apposite Catonian aphorism,183 was common knowledge by the time the orator dilated upon the subject in 70 BCE. The way the aphorism is framed is revealing, however. Far from being a subject of idle interest, the fecundity of Sicilian fields was significant for fitting the island to the service of Rome and its people. That Sicily's productivity was intrinsic and (more or less) stable, and and its strategic value, extrinsic and (more or less) punctual,184 is orthogonal to the fact that both qualities were appreciated in similarly instrumental terms. To the degree that it is possible to generalize, the universalizing historians' "gaze" was attracted to the same phenomena, and usually for the same reasons, as the gaze of the politically powerful.
Needless to say, this was no accident. Indeed, it was an all-but-inevitable feature of the form. Universalizing historiography, by virtue of its acceptance of a supra-regional political space as a legitimate unit of analysis, necessarily took on board the (imperial) logic which explained, or perhaps more accurately justified, the coherence of that space. But it had as much to do with the fact that our universalizing historians (in fact basically all our authors) were the politically powerful. This is a phenomenon to which I have already alluded, in my discussion of the social ramifications of ancient literacy, but it is worth illustrating here. The pose adopted by Cicero in the Verrines—of outrage at the erstwhile provincial governor whom he
condemned and sympathy with the Sicilians who had suffered that governor's
abuses of power—was rhetorically effective but substantially misleading. In his role
183. See n. 39.
184. Of course, a period of drawn-out warfare—as, pertinently, occurred during the Arab conquest of the island—might act to maintain Sicily's strategic significance, at least in the medium term.
as quaestorof western Sicily in 75 BCE, Cicero had been, if less corrupt than Verres, no less complicit in the imperial system responsible for the island's subjugation. The success of his suit, furthermore, did less to shake the system of which they both were part and more to improve Cicero's place within it.
We are singularly ill-informed concerning Diodorus Siculus' circumstances (though they are not likely to have been modest185), and in consequence cannot assert that he was ever involved in Roman politics; but if he was not, he was the sole exception to the rule. Appian and Cassius Dio were, respectively, of equestrian and senatorial rank by birth, and both held a range of imperial offices.186Procopius' early life is a subject concerning which we know little, but he evidently received the sort of elite education which was required to serve as Belisarius' adsessor, or legal advisor, beginning in 527. In any event, we have already observed that he wrote from a position of sympathy for both Belisarius and Belisarius' patron, Justinian. Nikephoros and Theophanes, respectively the patriarch of Constantinople and the founder of the monastery of Megas Agros on Mount Sigriane, were members of the ecclesiastical rather than the secular aristocracy, which is to say much the same thing, during a period when the former was composed almost entirely of members of the latter.187 Even the Arab historians, for all that they belonged to a different society, occupied equally exalted places within it.188In one way or another, our authors were beneficiaries of the political system(s) whose existence underpinned the writing— indeed the conception—of universalizing history as I have defined it here, and as such, they had already internalized its foundational assumptions.
185. Regarding his origins, Diodorus tells us only that he was born at Agyrium (modern Agira), Sicily (1.4.4). He also says, however, that he traveled widely for research (1.4.1), which would seem to imply that he was not without means (notwithstanding the probability that he rather exaggerates the extent of his travels: Oldfather 1933). And whether or not hisfamilywas well-known, he certainly came to be. In an entry pertaining to the year 49 BCE, Jerome (Chron. 237i) reports that Diodorus "habetur clarus". Oldfather (Oldfather 1933) takes this to mean that he achieved a measure of fame, presumably for the publication of his history.
186. Appian filled a variety of offices in Alexandria, the province of his birth, before going to Rome to practice law in 120. Probably owing to the intercession of important friends, he was there appointed to the office of procurator: White 1912. Cassius Dio, who was born to a prominent family from Nicaea, Bithynia, held an even greater range of offices. He was a praetor in 194; a suffect consul c. 204; and, between 218–228, successively curator of Pergamum and Smyrna, proconsul of Africa, and legate of Dalmatia and Upper Pannonia. At the time of his retirement in 229, he held an ordinary consulship alongside the Emperor Severus Alexander: Rich 2005.
187. Indeed, neither came from penurious circumstances. Nikephoros was the son of anἀσηκρῆτις, or imperial secretary, and began his public career in the same role. Thereafter, he was appointed director of "the largest poorhouse" in Constantinople (c. 802) before finally becoming patriarch: Kazhdan 2005a. Theophanes, meanwhile, was the son of aστρατηγός, and before taking monastic orders, he served as a
στράτωρ, or groom, at the court of Leo IV: Kazhdan 2005b.
188. Ibn al-Aṯīr (1160–1233)—in full, Abu al-ḤassancAli ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Šaybanī—
was a member of the wealthy and influential tribe of the BanūBakr. Al-Nuwayrī(Šihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad bincAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī; 1272–1332) was, besides a historian, a civil servant in Mamluk Egypt,
where he came to know, and enjoy the good opinion of, the ninth Mamluk sultan, Al-Nāṣir Muḥammad. IbnḪaldūn, concerning whom we know the most, was the most illustrious of the three. As the scion of a wealthy Andalusian family, the Banū Ḫaldūn, he received a full classical Islamic education. In addition to writing, he held a number of political offices in Muslim North Africa, the Naṣrid kingdom of Granada, and, in his later years, Egypt.
2.2.2. Land and the gentry.
Our authors' rarified status did more than facilitate their adoption of the imperial gaze. It also ensured them a level of wealth which, though notably variable,189 far exceeded that of the less fortunate. At least for the period of Roman domination, during which the acquisition of land was at once the most acceptable and (for that reason among others) the most usual end to which such wealth could be put, our authors were concomitantly likelier to be large-scale landowners. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that that as a group they should have taken a particular interest in what was, after all, an important feature of Roman Sicilian history. This interest is best reflected in the epistles considered in Section II.1.3. There, the letters in question served to illustrate the frequent employ of indigenous
conductores on the Sicilian estates of Rome's aristocracy, who were only sporadically in residence on the island. Here, meanwhile, I mean to consider them in somewhat more detail, since they are equally revealing of other aspects of Sicilian landowning.
As a point of departure, it is worth noting that the very existence of such correspondence (of which, undoubtedly, many similar examples have been lost) speaks to an authorial interest which was not merely academic and general. It was economic and specific, the latter to the extent that it is not usually the estate which is the subject of discussion, but rather some aspect of its management or finances.190In light of the potential productivity of Sicilian land, and a tax regime which (if Vera is correct) magnified the profitability of Sicilian produce, such vivid interest is perfectly comprehensible.
From the historian's perspective, however, it is also pretty fraught. At issue is the uncertain (and probably variable) degree to which these letters' details should be seen as "representative". One aspect of this problematic has already been considered.191The difficulties inherent in attempting to integrate punctual documents into a systemic description of large-scale land-holding on Sicily are, I have argued, a problem of coverage, since the much-reduced scope of the epistolators' interest, relative to that of the historians upon whom we depend for information concerning Sicilian landholding during both earlier and later periods of the island's history, undermines the cogency of the narrative emergent from the textual corpus. But there are other motives for caution, most of which result from peculiarities of the epistle
qua literary form.
Like the "universalizing" histories discussed above, ancient letters are too variable to really constitute agenre.192The early (second century BCE) appearance of
189. Even amongst the very rich. Olympiodoros of Thebes, writing in the fifth century, attests (FHG4, fr. 44) to a massive gap between the income of the wealthiest families (4000 pounds of gold per year) and the class immediately below them (1000–1500 lbs per annum).
190. Greg.Reg. ep.1.42 comprises a veritable catalog of such concerns, including, by way of example, the regulation of marriage taxes assessed on tenants. Gregory orders that this tax be capped at 1solidus—
and if the couple are poor, "etiam minus dare debent" . 191. See pp. 35–36.
192. Thus, most famously, Derrida 1980: 48: "[l]a lettre, l'épître…n'est pas un genre mais tous les genres, la littérature même". My remarks on ancient epistolography are limited by concerns of space and relevance to the subject of this section. For an introduction to the subject, see Edwards 2005 and, more recently still, the contributions to Morello & Morrison 2007.
texts like "Plato's" letters, in which the epistolary form is simply a literary conceit,193 is eloquent testimony to the variety which it encompassed. Even those letters which were intended as such are not much less variable. Among the ways in which they
differed was in respect of their authors' conception of their audience.
Notwithstanding the fact that, for example, his letters were eventually published, Cicero does not appear to have been writing for posterity. His letters, Edwards notes,