Labouring for God
The Christianization of late Roman society had a profound impact on the Roman economy. Alongside the surfeit of funds and properties, which passed into ecclesiastical coffers, the proliferation of churches brought hundreds of thousands of Romans into the employ of the Christian clergy. The past forty years of prosopographical research has revealed that the bulk of the late ancient clergy had much more modest social origins than traditional scholarship presumed. The majority were sub-elite Romans far below the true senatorial aristocracy; many also laboured in secular occupations in order to supplement their clerical stipends. As this chapter explains, socio-legal proscriptions against the ordination of noble, servile, and occupation-bound populations as well as demographic constraints largely limited the recruitment of the clergy to ‘middling’ tradesmen and urban professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and educators. More importantly, such occupation-holders usually exceeded the basic literacy mandatory for biblical study and liturgical performance. This chapter attempts to quantify the difficulties which bishops encountered in stocking their clergies. It argues that bishops deliberately targeted free plebeians and curiales who had already escaped their onerous civic burdens through exemptions granted to certain profession-holders such as educators, physicians, and architects. In identifying these ‘free agents’, churches gained access to a sizeable portion of the empire’s available human capital, especially in regard to administrative, legal, and medical training. The admission of such men promoted the appropriation of their prior occupational practices within the Church, which drove institutional innovations from nascent ecclesiastical bureaucracies to ecclesiastical hospitals.