Approaches to the Byzantine Family: 14 (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies) [1 ed.] 1409411583, 9781409411581

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Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Edited by Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher

Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies About the series Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies is devoted to the history, culture and archaeology of the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds of the East Mediterranean region from the fifth to the twentieth century. It provides a forum for the publication of research completed by scholars from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, and those with similar research interests. About the volume The study of the family is one of the major lacunas in Byzantine Studies. Angeliki Laiou remarked in 1989 that ‘the study of the Byzantine family is still in its infancy’, and this assertion remains true today. The present volume addresses this lacuna. It comprises 19 chapters written by international experts in the field which take a variety of approaches to the study of the Byzantine family, and embrace a chronological span from the later Roman to the late Byzantine empire. About the editors Professor Leslie Brubaker is Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, UK. Dr Shaun Tougher is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History in the Cardiff School of History, Archaeology & Religion at Cardiff University, UK.

Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies The Emperor Theophilos and the East, 829–842 Court and Frontier in Byzantium during the Last Phase of Iconoclasm Juan Signes Codoñer Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age Zeynep Yürekli The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium Texts and Images Edited by Leslie Brubaker and Mary B. Cunningham Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond Antony Eastmond Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos Church Law and Church Order in Rome and Byzantium A Comparative Study Clarence Gallagher Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca 680–850): The Sources An Annotated Survey Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

BIRMINGHAM BYZANTINE AND OTTOMAN STUDIES Volume 14

General Editors

Leslie Brubaker A.A.M. Bryer Rhoads Murphey John Haldon

Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies University of Birmingham

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Edited by Leslie Brubaker Birmingham University, UK Shaun Tougher Cardiff University, UK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Approaches to the Byzantine Family / [edited] by Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher. pages cm. – (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Families – Byzantine Empire. 2. Byzantine Empire – Social conditions. 3. Byzantine Empire – Social life and customs. I. Brubaker, Leslie. II. Tougher, Shaun. HQ513.A67 2013 306.8509495–dc23 2013008921 ISBN ISBN

9781409411581 (hbk) 9781315567440 (ebk)

Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies Volume 14

Contents List of Figures and Table   Abbreviations   Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgements   Preface  

vii xi xiii xvii xix

1

Looking for the Family: The Greek and Roman Background   Mary Harlow and Tim Parkin

2

Family Violence: Punishment and Abuse in the Late Roman Household   Julia Hillner

21



Family Relations and the Socialisation of Children in the Autobiographical Narratives of Late Antiquity   Ville Vuolanto

47

4

The Death of the Father in Late Antique Christian Literature   Fotis Vasileiou

5

Preserving Family Honour: Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina as Theological Polemic   Nathan Howard

3

6

The Family in the Late Antique West (AD 400–700): A Historiographical Review   Emma Southon, Mary Harlow and Chris Callow

7

The Family in Medieval Islamic Societies   Julia Bray

8

Age, Gender and Status: A Three-Dimensional Life Course Perspective of the Byzantine Family   Eve Davies

9

Looking at the Byzantine Family   Leslie Brubaker

1

75

91

109 131

153 177

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vi

10

The Byzantine Child: Picturing Complex Family Dynamics   Cecily Hennessy

11

Social Mobility in Byzantium? Family Ties in the Middle Byzantine Period   Claudia Ludwig

12

The Middle Byzantine House and Family: A Reappraisal   Simon Ellis

13

Family in the Byzantine Greek Legend of Saint Alexios, the Man of God   Stavroula Constantinou

14

La Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique, un écrit familial   Michel Kaplan

285

15

Imperial Families: The Case of the Macedonians (867–1056)   Shaun Tougher

303

16

An Abbasid Caliphal Family   Nadia Maria El Cheikh

327

17

Byzantine Monastic Communities: Alternative Families?   Dirk Krausmüller

345

18

Families, Politics, and Memories of Rome in the Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios   Leonora Neville

359

Changes in the Structure of the Late Byzantine Family and Society   Fotini Kondyli

371

19

207

233 247

273

Afterword   Shaun Tougher

395

Index  

401

List of Figures and Table Figures 2.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11

9.12 10.1

(Appendix) A late Roman magistrate’s hypothetical ‘checklist’ on the occurrence of iniuria (ὕβρις) in the household and the possibilities to allow for legal action Life of Basil (Paris.gr.510, f.104r), c. 880, © Bibliothèque nationale de France Christ in the temple (Paris.gr.510, f.165r), c.880, © Bibliothèque nationale de France The infant Virgin Mary with her parents (Paris.gr.1208, f.52r), mid-twelfth century, © Bibliothèque nationale de France Basil I with the archangel Gabriel and the prophet Elijah (Paris.gr.510, f.Cv), c.880, © Bibliothèque nationale de France Eudokia with Leo VI and Alexander (Paris.gr.510, f.Br), c.880, © Bibliothèque nationale de France Solidus: Valentinian III and Licinia Eudoxia, 437, © Classical Numismatic Group, Inc., http://www.cngcoins.com/ Solidus: Marcian and Pulcheria, 450, © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2012 Nomisma: Leo IV and Constantine VI (obverse), Leo III and Constantine V (reverse), © The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham Istanbul, Hagia Sophia, south gallery mosaic, John II, Eirene and Alexios with the Virgin, c.1120, © Dumbarton Oaks, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Washington, DC Thessalonike, Hagios Demetrios, Demetrios with father and son, sixth century, © Author Istanbul, Hagia Sophia, south gallery mosaic, Zoe and Constantine IX with Christ, 1042–1050, from nave, © Dumbarton Oaks, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Washington, DC Royal crown of Hungary, front, 1074–1077, © Károly Szelényi, Hungarian Pictures Coin of Romanos IV, showing Michael VII, Constantios and Andronikos on the obverse, Romanos and Eudokia on the reverse, 1068–71. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of Thomas Whittemore. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

45 179 181 182 183 184 186 186 187 188 190

193 194

208

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10.2 Headpiece probably showing Michael VII Doukas and his brothers Andronikos and Constantios, John Klimakos’ Heavenly Ladder, Milan, Ambrosiana co. B. 80 sup. (fol. 14r). Photo: author. 10.3 Anthropomorphic initial M showing Michael VII Doukas, his wife Maria and their son Constantine, Leningrad Psalter, National Library of Russia, cod. Gr. 214 (fols 1r, 311v) 10.4 Coin of Theodora, showing Theodora on the obverse, Michael III and Thekla on the reverse, 842–3. Harvard Art Museums/ Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of Thomas Whittemore. © President and Fellows of Harvard College 10.5 Coin of Theophilos, showing Theophilos with his wife Theodora and eldest daughter Thekla on the obverse, two younger daughters, Anna and Anastasia, on the reverse, 830s. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of Thomas Whittemore, 1951.31.4.1174. Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College 10.6 James (stepson of Mary) leading donkey in Flight to Egypt, St Barbara Kilise in the Soğanlı valley, Cappadocia. Photo: Author 10.7 Detail of deisis, seven sleepers of Ephesus, and anastasis, St Barbara Kilise in the Soğanlı valley. Photo: Author 10.8 Eirene with hands on heads of Kali and Maria, donor panel, niche on south side of west wall of Karşı Kilise in Gülşehir. Photo: Catherine Jolivet 11.1 Number of entries/source categories in the PmbZ 11.2 Family names in the PmbZ 12.1 Schematic reconstruction of Michael Attaleiates’ house in Constantinople, with the church of the ‘Forerunner’ to the left 12.2 Traditional houses of the ‘iwan’ type, Baalbek, Lebanon 12.3 Traditional ‘iwan’ in Sheikh Isa Bey House, Manama, Bahrain 12.4 Traditional Turkish ‘konak’, Cebeciler Sehir Evi, Saframbolu, Turkey 12.5 Khojo (Gaochang); example of mudbrick building 15.1 Family tree of the Macedonian dynasty, 867–1056 (adapted from George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, trans. Joan Hussey, 1980, genealogical table, p. 576) 19.1 Family size based on the 1284 Lavra act 19.2 Family size based on the 1304 Lavra act 19.3 Example of a family with eight members based on the 1304 Lavra act 19.4 Family size based on the 1348 Lavra act 19.5 Family size based on the 1361 Lavra act 19.6 Land ownership per household in 1284 19.7 Vines ownership per household in 1284

210 212

213

213 217 223 225 236 239 261 262 263 264 265 305 374 374 375 376 377 378 378

List of Figures and Table

ix

19.8 Oxen ownership per household in 1284 19.9 Sheep ownership per household in 1284 19.10 Land ownership per household in 1304 19.11 Vines ownership per household in 1304 19.12 Oxen ownership per household in 1304 19.13 Sheep ownership per household in 1304 19.14 Land ownership per household in 1361 19.15 Lemnos, distribution of Late Byzantine sites. Map by F. Kondyli

379 379 380 380 381 381 383 387

Table 9.1

Family groups on post-iconoclast Byzantine coinage, 842–1453198

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Abbreviations AASS AB AJA BF BHG BMGS Byz BZ ChHist CIL CLE CQ DOP GRBS JECS JHS JLA JRS JThSt PBSR PG PL PLRE PmbZ P&P REB TM VigChr ZRVI

Acta Sanctorum, 71 vols (Paris, 1863–1940) Analecta Bollandiana American Journal of Archaeology Byzantinische Forschungen Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, ed. F. Halkin, 3rd edn., 3 vols (Brussels, 1957) Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Byzantion Byzantinische Zeitschrift Church History Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Carmina Latina Epigraphica Classical Quarterly Dumbarton Oaks Papers Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Late Antiquity Journal of Roman Studies Journal of Theological Studies Proceedings of the British School at Rome Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne, 161 vols (Paris, 1857–66) Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris, 1844–80) Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, ed. A.H.M. Jones et al., 3 vols (Cambridge, 1971–92) Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit, ed. R.-J. Lilie et al. (Berlin and New York, 1998–) Past & Present Revue des études byzantines Travaux et mémoires Vigiliae Christianae Zbornik Radova Vizantološkog Instituta

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A note on transliteration In general we have used Anglicised or Latin forms for names up to the sixth century AD, but Greek forms from the seventh century AD onwards. There are some exceptions however, when an English or Latin form feels more natural (e.g. Heraclius rather than Herakleios, Nicholas rather than Nikolaos).

Notes on Contributors Julia Bray was Professor of Medieval Arabic Literature at the Université Paris 8 – Saint Denis before becoming Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford. She works on medieval Arabic literature and society. Her recent publications include the chapter ‘Arabic Literature’ in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 4, Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert Irwin (2010). Leslie Brubaker is Professor of Byzantine Art and Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham. She has published widely on gender, iconoclasm and Byzantine manuscripts. Her books include Gender in the Early Medieval World (with Julia Smith, 2004); The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium (with Mary Cunningham, 2011); Byzantium in the Era of Iconoclasm (with John Haldon, 2011); Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (2012); and Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium (1999). Chris Callow is Lecturer in Medieval History in the School of History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham. He has published several articles on historywriting and aspects of the social and economic history of medieval Iceland. His book, Landscape, Tradition and Power in Medieval Iceland is due to be published in 2013, with a broader volume, The Viking Diaspora, to be published with Oxford University Press in 2014. Stavroula Constantinou is Assistant Professor in Byzantine Philology in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Cyprus. She has particular interests in hagiography, genre, gender and literary theory. Her most recent publications include Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women (2005) and (co-edited with Alexander Beihammer and Maria Parani) Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in the Medieval Mediterranean (2014). Eve Davies was recently awarded a PhD in Byzantine History at the University of Birmingham and is currently working as a Student Experience Tutor at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her thesis, From Womb to the Tomb: The Byzantine Life Course 518–1204 AD, focuses on constructions of age and life stage. Her research interests include family roles and Life Course trajectories in the Middle Byzantine period.

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Nadia Maria El Cheikh is Professor of History at the American University of Beirut. Her book, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, was published in 2004. Her other main areas of research are gender history and court history in the Abbasid period. Her most recent articles include ‘Court and Courtiers: A Preliminary Investigation of Abbasid Terminology’, in Court Cultures in the Muslim World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Albrecht Fuess and Jan-Peter Hartung (New York, 2011) and ‘The Gendering of “Death” in Kitab al-‘Iqd al-Farid’, al-Qantara 31 (2010). Simon Ellis was educated at Weymouth College of Education, Lincoln College Oxford, and the University of Newcastle. He has held research positions at Oxford and Dumbarton Oaks, as well as honorary lectureships at St Andrews and Reading. From 1976 to 1988 he directed British, Canadian and US excavations at Carthage. In the 1990s he published a large number of studies on housing of the Roman to the Byzantine periods and beyond. From 2001 to 2012 he worked as a team leader at UNESCO, producing the 2009 Framework for Cultural Statistics as well as international standards for education, literacy, and ICTs. He is currently working as a freelance contractor on culture and heritage issues.  Mary Harlow is a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester. Her research interests are in the Roman Life Course and Roman dress. Her most recent publications include The Cultural History of Childhood and the Family, vol. 1, Antiquity (co-edited with Ray Laurence, 2010), and Dress and Identity (ed. 2012). Cecily Hennessy is Senior Lecturer at Christie’s Education, London. Her research has focused on children and young people in Byzantine art as well as on Constantinopolitan manuscripts, paintings and topography. Her publications include Images of Children in Byzantium (2008). Julia Hillner is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. She specialises in the social and legal history of the later Roman empire, with a particular interest in the family, crime and punishment, and the city of Rome. She is the author of Jedes Haus ist eine Stadt: Privatimmobilien im spätantiken Rom (2004) and co-editor (with Kate Cooper) of Religion, Dynasty and Patronage in Early Christian Rome (2007). Nathan Howard is Associate Professor of Ancient and Medieval History at the University of Tennessee at Martin. His major area of research is late antique Christianity, with an emphasis on letter writing and classical Greek influence. His publications include ‘A Sacred Eloquence: The Literary Legacy of the Cappadocian Fathers in Western Europe, 400–1600’, The Patristic and Byzantine Review 29 (2011), and ‘Classical and Christian Paideia in Fourth-Century Cappadocia’, Medieval Perspectives 19 (Spring 2005).

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Michel Kaplan is Professor of Byzantine History at the University Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), where he is the director of the IRBIMMA (Institute for Research on Byzantium, Islam and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages). He has particular interest in Byzantine economics and in the place of sanctity in Byzantine society. His most recent book is Pouvoir, église et sainteté: essais sur la société médiévale (2011). Fotini Kondyli is a post-doctoral researcher in Byzantine Archaeology in the Joukowsky Institute of Archaeology at Brown University. Her main research interests include the study of non-elite groups and the archaeology of daily life in Byzantium. Her most recent publications include ‘Tracing Monastic Economic Interests and Their Impact on the Rural Landscape of Late Byzantine Lemnos’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 64 (2010), pp. 129–150, and (co-authored with Joanita Vroom) Life Among Ruins (2011). Dirk Krausmüller is Assistant Professor in Western Medieval and Byzantine History in the Department of History at Mardin Artuklu University. His research interests are late antique and Byzantine belief systems and Byzantine monasticism. He has written numerous articles on both topics. Claudia Ludwig is research associate at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She is co-author of the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (641–1025). She specialises in church history of the Middle Byzantine period and in Byzantine lead seals. She has a particular interest in the comparison of political culture in Byzantium, the Islamic world and the Latin west. From 2012 she has been working on paraphrases of texts of Aristotle, especially by Theodore Metochites. Leonora Neville holds the John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe chair of Byzantine History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She studies social and cultural history of the tenth through twelfth centuries, focusing currently on religion, historical memory and gender.  Her major publications are Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Byzantium: the Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios (2012) and Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (2004). Tim Parkin is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester. He has particular interests in ancient social, legal and demographic history. His recent publications include Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History (2003), Roman Social History: A Sourcebook (2007, co-authored with Arthur Pomeroy), and The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (2013, co-edited with Judith Evans Grubbs).

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Emma Southon has a PhD from the University of Birmingham. Her primary interests include late antique social and cultural history, gender and masculinity in the Roman and late antique west, early Christianity and the emperor Caligula. She is currently based at the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University. Shaun Tougher is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History in the Cardiff School of History, Archaeology & Religion at Cardiff University. He has particular interests in the Constantinian and Macedonian dynasties and in eunuchs. His publications include The Reign of Leo VI (886–912) (1997), Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (ed. 2002), Julian the Apostate (2007), The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (2008), and (co-edited with Nicholas Baker-Brian) Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate (2012). Fotis Vasileiou holds a PhD in Late Antique History (Open University of Cyprus, 2012). His research interests include hagiography, gender issues, family and religious life. He is currently working on the publication of his thesis on The Father Figure in Late Antique Christian Literature. Ville Vuolanto is Research Fellow at the University of Oslo and Adjunct Professor at the University of Tampere. He is particularly interested in late antique social history and the history of childhood. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on children’s socialisation, religion and family continuity strategies in late Roman and early medieval contexts. He also maintains an extensive online bibliography on Children in the Ancient World and the Early Middle Ages.

Acknowledgements This volume marks the culmination of a series on panels on the Byzantine Family held at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds from 2007 to 2010, and there are a number of thanks due which are a pleasure to acknowledge here. The organising of the panels was a collaborative effort between the University of Birmingham, Cardiff University and Queen’s University Belfast, and a particular debt of gratitude is owed to Margaret Mullett for being instrumental in initiating the project. Thanks are due also to Dion Smythe who continued to represent Queen’s in the collaboration. We are especially grateful to John Smedley for his support in the publication of a selection of the proceedings from the panels. His advice and enduring patience have been much appreciated. Thanks are due also to the staff of the library at the University of St Andrews who were helpful above and beyond the call of duty in providing vital material in the final stages of the editing. Finally, we would like to thank all those who contributed to and participated in the panels at Leeds for making the annual pilgrimage such a rewarding and enjoyable experience. LEsliE BRubaKER and ShauN TOuGhER, 24 August 2012

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Preface Leslie Brubaker

What constitutes a family? Fifty years ago, the ‘normative’ western family was the nuclear unit of parents and children, with outlying circles of grandparents and/ or grandchildren, then of aunts, uncles and cousins. Though our snap response to the word ‘family’ may remain the 1950s ideal of mother, father, and 2.5 children, it takes little reflection to realise that this ideal unit is not the actuality with which most of us live, and the more fragmented families familiar to all of us in the twentyfirst century should prepare us to question assumptions about the Byzantine family unit enshrined in the scholarly literature during the twentieth.1 Though only one of the authors in this volume – Julia Bray – directly tackles the subject of the range of meanings ‘family’ could have in the medieval world, the issue lies at the heart of many of the chapters which follow. From the Byzantine perspective, at least some of the problems involved are clear from the opening sentence of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium’s entry on ‘Family’: ‘Although the family was the fundamental unit of Byzantine society, there was no specific word for it in Byzantine Greek: the most common term syngeneia designated both the nuclear family and kinship in general; relationship through marriage is defined or rather described as “connection and joining”’.2 In fact, as Evelyne Patlagean has demonstrated, the family as we often understand it – the nuclear family – was the fundamental social unit in Byzantium by the ninth century,3 but it was never the only important social unit and, as the following chapters will make clear, the idealised 1950s-style family is not a relevant model. The lack of a specific word or phrase to designate ‘nuclear family’ does not mean that the concept was unimportant to the Byzantines: as we have learned from Pierre Bourdieu, important concepts can be so engrained that they are simply an accepted given, and have (and need) no special terminology.4 But the difference between Byzantine and modern English nomenclature does at least emphasise an obvious (but not always clearly articulated) point: we cannot think about the Byzantine family in terms identical to those we use for our own. As Ruth Macrides has 1   The classic example is Kazhdan and Constable 1982, which summarises and synthesises much of Kazhdan’s earlier work in Russian. 2   Kazhdan 1991, p. 776. Kazhdan’s entry reiterates points made in Kahzdan and Constable 1982. 3   Patlagean 1986, esp. p. 427. 4   Bourdieu 1977.

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demonstrated, even relationships that superficially seem similar, such as kinship by adoption, were structured and understood quite differently from the way we think of them.5 A society that privileges the relationship of godparent, and, as we learn from Theodore of Stoudion in the early ninth century, embraces an icon of St Demetrios as a child’s godfather,6 does not conceptualise family membership in the same way as most of us do. Oikos (broadly, ‘household’) also needs to be understood flexibly, and problematised, as Paul Magdalino demonstrated long ago.7 Magdalino based his remarks on wills and monastic typika (the rules governing a monastery, which often include significant commentary on ‘domestic’ issues), and so concentrated on aristocratic households, as have more recent discussions by Gilbert Dagron and Jacques Lefort.8 This is not surprising, as we have little information on non-elite families and households except for occasional references in saints’ lives, but it does mean that the social model of the household that Byzantine historians have built up from texts may have only had relevance for a relatively small proportion of the Byzantine population. Again, most of the authors in this volume have not dealt directly with questions of what constituted an oikos – and here the major exceptions are Mary Harlow and Tim Parkin, who provide comparative data about the Roman familia, and Simon Ellis, who looks at the oikos in the Middle Byzantine period – and how this changed over space and time, but they have nonetheless broadened our understanding of how the social model of ‘family’ worked, and pushed our knowledge beyond the socio-economic and topographic level where discussions of the oikos normally situate themselves. This brings us to the essays themselves. The chapters in this volume are all expanded versions of papers originally delivered as part of a series of connected sessions at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (2007–2010). When Margaret Mullett, Shaun Tougher and I initiated these sessions, there was already considerable literature on ‘the family’ in Rome and during late antiquity,9 but little had been published on the family in Byzantium since Evelyne Patlagean’s seminal works of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.10 As Angeliki Laiou noted in her introduction to the papers delivered at Dumbarton Oaks in 1989 in a symposium dedicated to ‘The Byzantine Family and Household’, ‘the study of the Byzantine family is still in its infancy’.11 It still is. But, since then, a number of relevant studies or collections   Macrides 1990, 1999b.   Macrides 1987; on Theodore and the icon in context see also Brubaker and Haldon

5 6

2011, p. 785. 7   Magdalino 1984. 8   Dagron 2002, esp. pp. 426–9; Lefort 2002, esp. pp. 290–93. Lefort concentrates on rural large-landowners. See also Magdalino 2001. 9   E.g. Nathan 2000; Cooper 2007. 10   Many collected in Patlagean 1981; for a more recent overview see Patlagean 1986. 11   Laiou 1990, 97. Laiou published extensively on the family: see the articles collected in her two Variorum volumes, Laiou 1992 and, posthumously, 2011.

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have appeared,12 mostly concentrating on particular members of families (notably children13 and, to a lesser extent, women in the family14), many of them written by contributors to this volume. This emerging interest in the Byzantine family was apparent in the Leeds sessions, which grew larger in scope across the four years of their existence. Sadly, we have only been able to select a representative sample of the papers delivered for publication here. We have included a handful of the comparative papers, partially in order to contextualise the material on the Byzantine family, but also because approaches to studying the family have been more fully developed in Roman, late antique, and western medieval than in Byzantine studies. Hence, as comparative yardsticks, in addition to the overview of the Roman familia, we have included a historiographical review of the family in the early medieval west (jointly authored by Emma Southon, Mary Harlow and Chris Callow). The constant interchange between Byzantium and the caliphate urged inclusion of chapters on the family in Islam (the contributions by Julia Bray and Nadia El Cheikh). Four themes recur across the chapters in this volume. Issues concerning children and childhood are found in nearly all chapters, and are the particular focus of Cecily Hennessy’s and Ville Vuolanto’s contributions, who show us that modern issues surrounding step-children and step-parents have ample Byzantine precedents, and underscore the importance of the mother–son relationship, especially in fatherless homes. Sibling rivalry surfaces in Nadia El Cheikh’s examination of the Abbasid caliphal family and Shaun Tougher’s exploration of the family relationships within the Macedonian dynasty. Parent–child relationships also cut across most articles, though they are the explicit focus only in Fotis Vasileiou’s discussion of the two Gregories of Nazianzus, father and son. And Eve Davies opens her discussion of the Byzantine Life Course with a series of observations on how the Byzantines constructed the ideal of childhood, and saw childhood traits as indicative of adult behaviour, a point that finds a strong echo in Vuolanto’s chapter. A second theme that cross-cuts a number of chapters is social mobility, within and across families. This is the stated focus of Claudia Ludwig’s chapter, underpins the analysis of Late Byzantine village life addressed by Fotini Kondyli, and is a key sub-theme of Dirk Krausmüller’s consideration of the ‘alternative’ family of the monastery. Krausmüller is also concerned with the third major focus of this collection, texts and the rhetorical (and performative) construction of families. Again, this theme recurs in nearly all chapters. Legal texts have become a standard feature of studies about the family, and here Julia Hillner examines legislation concerning domestic abuse – when, and why, can and should the state step in? – and considers how this changed with the advent of Christianity as a normative social   E.g. Talbot 1990.   E.g. Hennessy 2008; Papaconstantinou and Talbot (eds) 2009. Despite its title,

12 13

Kaldellis 2006 contains little about children, but has some important material on women in family contexts. 14   E.g. Meyer 2009.

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regulator. Stavroula Constantinou, Nathan Howard, Michel Kaplan, and (again) Ville Vuolanto look at different aspects of the family in hagiography; Leonora Neville dissects Nikephoros Bryennios’ Material for History, which – as it was probably performed serially – visualised family history to its living members. Bryennios’ imaging of family brings us to the final theme that unites a number of chapters: looking at the Byzantine family. Cecily Hennessy and I are particularly concerned with images of family, and what these tell us about perceptions of family across the Byzantine period. As with the performative family history Neville discusses, and, in a different way, the understanding of the space these families inhabited that is Ellis’s focus, images of family expected a type of audience and audience response quite distinct from those of hagiographies, legal texts and histories. Alongside the new understanding of family space articulated by Ellis, Hennessy and I broaden our understanding of what ‘family’ could mean to the Byzantines in new, and often overlooked, ways. As a collective, the essays presented in this volume demonstrate a number of key points. The importance of childhood for the Byzantines – at least in narrative textual accounts of the lives of important people – is clear. Except in extensive narrative sequences such as the Kokkinobaphos manuscripts illustrating the life of the Virgin Mary, however, children are rarely pictured unless they are imperial or aristocratic markers of dynastic security and succession.15 This underlines the importance of register: for example, children were important to consider when issues of inheritance are at stake, or when it was rhetorically required to demonstrate that personal characteristics were already present at birth; they were not important when state history was being written or when key points of Christian doctrine were being illustrated. Women, too (apart from saints), are often absent from visual and written narrative; like children, they could be important signals of state security and dynastic succession, but that is the only role that ‘real’ women play in visual images, and even in hagiography women are often nameless.16 Visual evidence underscores the point: with the lone exception of the image of Eirene (wife of John II Komnenos) in the southwest gallery mosaic at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (c. 1120),17 most Byzantine female portraits are interchangeable: all Byzantine women look alike. They are, essentially, anonymous. Family relationships, broadly defined, were, in contrast, always important. There is no category of Byzantine text except for mathematical treatises that does not discuss family in some way; and while there are plenty of images that do not include family groups, the core visual unit of all Orthodox Christian churches was (and remains) an image of a mother and her son. That the greatest sign of male holiness was the ability to renounce family ties – a trope referred to repeatedly throughout this volume – only, in the case of the monastic relationships discussed by Krausmüller   This is a key point made by Meyer 2009.   Meyer 2009; Ashbrook Harvey 1990; Brubaker 1997; Brubaker and Tobler 2000. 17   Whittemore 1942. 15 16

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(and elsewhere by Alice-Mary Talbot18), to replicate them in the monastic social structure, demonstrates how critically important such ties were, however family was defined. Bibliography Ashbrook Harvey, Susan (1990), ‘Women in Early Byzantine Hagiography: Reversing the Story’, in Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane and Elisabeth W. Sommer (eds), That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press), pp. 16–59. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brubaker, Leslie (1997), ‘Memories of Helena: Patterns in Imperial Female Matronage in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries’, in Liz James (ed.), Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium (London: Routledge), pp. 52–75. Brubaker, Leslie, and Tobler, Helen (2000), ‘The Gender of Money: Byzantine Empresses on Coins (324–802)’, Gender & History, 12: 572–94; repr. in Pauline Stafford and Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (eds), Gendering the Middle Ages (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), pp. 42–64. Brubaker, Leslie, and Haldon, John (2011), Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680–850: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cooper, Kate (2007), The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dagron, Gilbert (2002), ‘The Urban Economy, Seventh–Twelfth centuries’, in Laiou (ed.) (2002), pp. 393–61. Hennessy, Cecily (2008), Images of Children in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate). Kaldellis, Anthony (2006), Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters. The Byzantine Family of Michael Psellos (Notre Dame, IN: University of Note Dame Press). Kazhdan, Alexander (1991), ‘Family’, in Alexander P. Kazhdan et al. (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, vol. 2 (New York and Oxford), pp. 776–7. Kazhdan, Alexander, and Constable, Giles (1982), People and Power in Byzantium. An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Laiou, Angeliki E. (1990), ‘Symposium on the Byzantine Family and Household: Introduction’, DOP, 44: 97–8. Laiou, Angeliki E. (1992), Gender, Society and Economic Life in Byzantium (Hampshire: Variorum). Laiou, Angeliki E. (ed.) (2002), The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks).   See the essays collected in Talbot 2001.

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Laiou, Angeliki, E. (2011), Women, Family and Society in Byzantium (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum). Lefort, Jacques (2002), ‘The Rural Economy, Seventh–Twelfth Centuries’, in Laiou (ed.) (2002), pp. 231–310. Macrides, Ruth (1987), ‘The Byzantine Godfather’, BMGS, 11: 139–62. Macrides, Ruth (1990), ‘Kinship by Arrangement: The Case of Adoption’, DOP, 44: 109–18; repr. in Macrides (1999a), II. Macrides, Ruth (1999a), Kinship and Justice in Byzantium, 11th–15th Centuries (Aldershot: Variorum). Macrides, Ruth (1999b), ‘Substitute Parents and Their Children in Byzantium’, in Mireille Corbier (ed.), Adoption et fosterage (Paris: Editions de Boccard); repr. in Macrides (1999a), III. Magdalino, Paul (1984), ‘The Byzantine Aristocratic Oikos’, in Michael Angold (ed.), The British Aristocracy IX to XIII Centuries (Oxford: BAR), pp. 92–111; repr. in Paul Magdalino, Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Byzantium (Aldershot: Variorum, 1991), II. Magdalino, Paul (2001), ‘Aristocratic Oikoi in the Tenth and Eleventh Regions of Constantinople’, in Nevra Necipoğlu (ed.), Byzantine Constantinople: Monuments, Topography and Everyday Life (Leiden: Brill), pp. 53–69. Meyer, Mati (2009), An Obscure Portrait. Imaging Women’s Reality in Byzantine Art (London and New York: Pindar Press). Nathan, Geoffrey (2000), The Family in Late Antiquity: The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (London and New York: Routledge). Papaconstantinou, Arietta, and Talbot, Alice-Mary (eds) (2009), Becoming Byzantine. Children and Childhood in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Patlagean, Evelyne (1981), Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté à Byzance (IVe– XIe siècle) (London: Variorum). Patlagean, Evelyne (1986), ‘Familles et parentèles à Byzance’, in Andre Burguière et al. (eds), Histoire de la famille I: Mondes lontains, mondes anciens (Paris: Armand Colin), pp. 421–41 (Eng. trans. Oxford, 1996). Smythe, Dion (2006), ‘Middle Byzantine Family Values and Anna Komnene’s Alexiad’, in Lynda Garland (ed.), Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800–1200 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 125–39. Talbot, Alice-Mary (1996), ‘Family Cults in Byzantium: The Case of St Theodora of Thessalonike’, in J.O. Rosenqvist (ed.), ΛΕΙMΩΝ: Studies Presented to Lennart Rydén on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Uppsala: Uppsala University), pp. 49–69; repr. in Talbot (2001), VII. Talbot, Alice-Mary (1990), ‘The Byzantine Family and Monastery’, DOP, 44: 119–29; repr. in Talbot (2001), XIII. Talbot, Alice-Mary (2001), Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate).

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Whittemore, Thomas (1942), The Mosaics of Hagia Sophia at Istanbul. Third Preliminary Report, Work Done in 1935–1938. The Imperial Portraits of the South Gallery (Boston, MA: Byzantine Institute).

To our families

Chapter 1

Looking for the Family: The Greek and Roman Background Mary Harlow and Tim Parkin1

Meeting the Family To seek out and meet an ancient Greek or Roman family two millennia or more after its heyday is no easy feat, and not only because of the tyranny of distance in time. Greeks and Romans rarely wrote about or illustrated their families for public consumption; much that we have learnt in recent years has been gleaned from semi-private correspondence or from reading between the lines in more public statements or images, especially after the death of a wife or child. But very occasionally we get generalised insights from different and potentially revealing perspectives. In a schoolbook, probably originating from fourth-century AD Gaul, we are given, in Greek and in Latin, the textbook description of a household as a Roman freeborn son greets them one morning:2 I go and greet my parents, my father and mother and grandfather and grandmother, my brother and sister and all my relations, my uncle and aunt, my nurse and my carer, the major domo, all the freedmen, the doorkeeper, the housekeeper, the neighbours, all our friends, the other residents and those who live in the apartment block, and the eunuch.

The order of events preceding this passage is a little bizarre (the boy gets up twice, for example, and goes out to greet his friends before returning home to greet his family); part of the reason must be that, as with our passage, any opportunity of reciting vocabulary is not missed. It is highly unlikely that a Greek or Roman child typically greeted all these individuals as part of his or her morning ritual. On the other hand, we should not think of the ancient family as a static or unchanging institution. The family not only evolved in the course of history, but changed on a generational basis as family members came and went. At the same time, the family in both Greek and Roman societies was deemed absolutely fundamental and a 1   A version of this paper was first published as ‘The Family’ in Erskine (ed.) 2009, pp. 329–41. We thank Andrew and Wiley-Blackwell for their permission to rework it for this volume. 2   Dionisotti 1982.

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reflection of the wider society: in effect, a microcosm of the state, as both Aristotle (Politics 1.2) and Cicero (On Duties 1.54) declared. Rather than attempt in this brief introductory chapter to give a chronological narrative of the ancient family over a period of more than a millennium and across vast geographical space, we shall turn to two individuals – one Greek, one Roman – about whom we happen to know some details regarding their families; we shall attempt to use these two case studies to develop a number of themes relevant to this volume as a whole. Our case studies are not typical – the very fact that we know quite a lot about their personal lives makes them unusual in itself – but they are illuminating and do point to some key aspects relating to ancient families in general. Plutarch, in writing of illustrious Greeks and Romans, composed his biographies as ‘parallel lives’, one Greek, one Roman: Demosthenes and Cicero were to him an obvious pairing (Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes 3); it is also a useful point of comparison for our purposes. First a few words about the nature of the topic. The study of the history of the family in the Greek and Roman worlds has had a profound effect on all other areas of ancient history. It has moved historians away from solely political and military arenas which tended to dominate until the last decades of the twentieth century; this has shifted most historical analyses to include the private and domestic realm, and from an area of an arguably segregated male world to one also inhabited by women and children. The change of focus has also brought about a sharpening of methodological approaches and a more sophisticated interpretation and analysis of our sources: written, visual and material. In order to find ‘individuals’ (or at any rate, ‘types’) other than politicians and generals (who tend to be the main writers of history in the ancient world) it has been necessary to learn how to approach the evidence in new ways; to look at groups who do not write their own history (women, children, slaves, non-citizens and perceived outsiders) but who appear, more often than not, as bit-part players in the writings of men. This has meant that ancient historians have become familiar with methodologies of other disciplines, particularly the social sciences, gender studies and the histories of sexuality and medicine. This multi- and interdisciplinary approach has produced some innovative work.3 As we have already said, finding the family is not a simple business. Early studies concentrated on the evidence of legal codes and court cases (often purely rhetorical) associated with marriage and inheritance with smatterings of supporting evidence from, say, Greek drama and writers such as Cicero and Pliny the Younger, as well as tombstone epitaphs. The critical interpretation of such material has become increasingly rigorous and nuanced. The understanding and deconstruction of genre, style, and author and audience expectation are key when trying to extrapolate information about the ‘family’. The relationship between 3   As with much of this paper there is an extensive bibliography on the various themes; we include the most influential and the most recent in our notes. On new methodologies see, for instance: Revell 2010; Baker 2010; Dixon 2011.

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social ideals (literary, male and elite) and social reality, especially for those who do not themselves have a voice, has to be carefully interpreted.4 More recently historians of the family have embraced a more diverse range of evidence, from looking at the layout of domestic space and the cultural appearance of family groupings in art to the role of patronage and particular social relationships within the family.5 It is also very important to realise from the outset that the reality of the family would have been vastly divergent over time and space. To generalise about the ancient family, as if there were no difference between the Greek and the Roman, would be patently absurd; indeed differences probably outweigh similarities.6 As we proceed we shall seek to highlight significant divergence as well as overlap. The societies of Athens and Rome were patriarchal: power was vested in men and perceived masculine roles in society. Masculinity implied citizenship which in itself bestowed upon select individuals superior social power: men were ostensibly the decision-makers in ancient societies. They might make jokes about the ability of wives, children and slaves to undermine their power, as we see, for example, in the anecdote several times recorded by Plutarch in the second century AD about the fifth century BC Athenian statesman Themistocles: Themistocles once said jokingly of his son, who was spoilt by his mother and, through her, by his father, that he was the most powerful person in Greece: ‘For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother.’7

The humour (for an ancient male reader) lay in the representation of a patently ridiculous reversal of traditional roles. Women were more generally perceived through a culturally constructed idea of biology and physiology as ‘failed men’, as not having the physical or mental capacity to run a city state, and only with training to run a household. This line of thinking is embodied in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus or On Household Management; and Plutarch’s Coniugalia Praecepta or Advice to the Bride and Groom.8 We should not be completely taken in by the male view, however, as much as it tends to be the image that husbands and fathers wish to present to the outside world. Instead we need to unpick the evidence to get glimpses of life inside the family grouping. Here we are looking primarily at the elite, since they are the group for whom most evidence has survived. Assumptions   See for example, Joshel 1992; Joshel and Murnaghan (eds) 1998; Dixon 2001; Rawson 2003. 5   See, for instance: Huskinson 1996, 2007 and 2011; Uzzi 2005; Nevett 2010. 6   The title of Beryl Rawson’s final edited volume A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds makes the point in its uses of the plural. 7   Plutarch, Life of Themistocles 18, Life of Cato the Elder 8, Moralia 185d. 8   On the biological ‘failure’ of women see (e.g.) Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals 728a; Galen, On the Usefulness of Parts of the Body 14.6 (IV.158–65 Kühn). 4

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can be made, however, about the lives of other social groups using a wider range of evidence and anthropological comparata. We have to assume that many of the ideals that surround the upper classes are a result of having status and property to pass on to the next generation – without these controlling parameters social behaviour is not so essential to the public image of an individual. Another crucial factor to remember in analysing the testimony that we have is that it describes families that are atypical or are being described at a time that they are experiencing atypical circumstances; we tend to meet families when they are at critical moments, of formation or, even more often, of fragmentation and dissolution. For most individuals in the ancient world, as we have already emphasised, we know very little of their personal family life, but sometimes a few words can tell us a great deal, and even about those below the social elite. Consider, for example, the tombstone of Veturia, the wife of a centurion, from Aquincum, Pannonia Inferior:9 Here do I lie at rest, a married woman, Veturia by name and descent, the wife of Fortunatus, the daughter of Veturius. I lived for thrice nine years, poor me, and I was married for twice eight. I slept with one man, I was married to one man. After having borne six children, one of whom survives me, I died. Titus Julius Fortunatus, centurion of the Second Legion Adiutrix Pia Fidelis, set this up for his wife: she was incomparable and notably respectful to him.

A relatively short but eventful life – and far from atypical, given demographic and social realities. Two Ancient Families Our two more detailed case studies, while highlighting critical moments, will also serve to illuminate features shared between societies, as well as those that are quite disparate. One case study comes from fourth-century BC Athens, the other from first-century BC Rome. It is inevitable, in an introductory survey such as this, that our attention is drawn towards classical Athens and Rome, simply because the vast majority of our material dates from these periods. Our two protagonists, Demosthenes and Cicero, are relevant, and unusual, because they (and others) wrote about themselves and their families. Their political lives are of interest here only in so far as they influenced the choices each made in terms of his marriage and his behaviour to his wife, children, friends and family. Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator and politician (384–322 BC), was born to a well-off family. We are able to reconstruct, from biographies and legal speeches, Demosthenes’ family tree, even though, following Athenian

  CIL 3.3572 = CLE 558. See also the comments of Adamik 2005 and 2006.

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social convention, most of the females in the tree remain unnamed.10 His father, also named Demosthenes, had married Cleoboule early in the 380s (when she was probably in her early or mid teens; he would have been twice her age). Demosthenes senior died when his only son was just seven years old. The father had made provision for an untimely death: in his will he had betrothed his wife to his sister’s son, Aphobus (the latter was probably about the same age as his intended bride, highly unusually), and his daughter (five years old at the time) to his brother’s son, Demophon – a typically endogamous (i.e. a partner chosen within the extended family) arrangement, and also a very clear sign that women should not be left unattached, especially where property was concerned. Both women had large dowries attached. Demosthenes junior being so young, the family estate – a sizeable one – was left to the management of two of his father’s nephews, Aphobus and Demophon, along with a friend, Therippides, as guardians (kyrioi). They did not manage the estate well (if we believe Demosthenes they were more than just careless, they were positively evil), nor did the intended marriages to Demosthenes’ mother (with Aphobus, her nephew) and sister (with Demophon, her cousin) take place as planned, though both men apparently appropriated their substantial dowries; indeed Demosthenes’ young sister would not be married for another decade, to another of her mother’s nephews. Demosthenes meanwhile grew up under his mother’s care.11 At the age of 18, when he was able to assert his financial independence, Demosthenes found himself in serious straits. On claiming his patrimony from his guardians, long and difficult negotiations ensued. Finally, at the age of 21 years, Demosthenes was successful in the action he brought against his guardians; it would be another two years, however, before he received what little was left of the estate. In all this it is revealing to see the way the family grouping effectively and publicly disintegrated into litigious squabbling. At least his experiences gave Demosthenes real grounding in the law, and his career would blossom thereafter. Demosthenes married at least once: we do not know the name of any wife, or the name of a daughter he had. The latter died before her father, in 336 BC, and too young to have married.12 Allegedly, and much to the disgust of his enemy Aeschines, Demosthenes’ grief was assuaged by the assassination of Alexander the Great’s father Philip II a week later (Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes 22). Demosthenes himself committed suicide in 322, and left a rich estate to his sister and her kin. Cicero (106–43 BC) was a ‘new man’ and not particularly wealthy, so he needed to make the right choice in his marriage partner. In about 79 BC he married Terentia, a wealthy heiress at a point where his legal career had had a good start but his political career needed a boost – in financial and social terms. Cicero would 10   Pomeroy 1997, p. 165. For evidence for what follows re Demosthenes’ family life, see especially Davies 1971, pp. 113–39, with his Table III. 11   For Cleoboule’s role in all this, see Foxhall 1996. 12   Davies 1971, p. 138.

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have been aged 26 or 27 and, as this was Terentia’s first marriage, we can assume that she was in her mid to late teens.13 This age gap between husband and wife in a first marriage was normal practice.14 Without the evidence of personal letters this marriage could have the appearance of a business and political alliance, but the partnership demonstrated in correspondence, particularly at times of stress, suggests that Terentia and Cicero managed a semblance, and perhaps a reality, of concordia for a large part of their 30 years together. They had two children, Tullia (born in the first years of the marriage) and Marcus (born over a decade later, in 65 BC – a long interval, and one can imagine that there were other unsuccessful pregnancies, or even offspring who died very young), and again Cicero’s correspondence reflects a personal affection and concern. Cicero, very much the traditionalist in some ways, arranged for Tullia’s first marriage to take place when she was aged 13–15 to an aspiring politician aged 25 (Cicero, Letters to Atticus 1.3.3, late 67 BC). While Roman ideals and laws suggest that a father should have complete control over his children (potestas – see below), Cicero’s relationship with his offspring suggests that the reality might sometimes be rather problematic. Young Marcus caused his father angst while he was away studying in Athens and Tullia demonstrated a strong independence of mind, supported by her mother, in the choice of her third, and last, husband (see, e.g., Cicero, Letters to Friends 3.12.2–3, 50 BC). Finding suitable partners was considered a key parental duty, as was the provision of a dowry for daughters. The reality, as the letters of Cicero show, was that the womenfolk of a family were often closely involved in both the process of choice of partner and the provision of dowry.15 Alongside the immediate family, Cicero’s letters also allow us glimpses into wider family relations – particularly that with his brother Quintus and close friend Atticus. The families were joined by the marriage of Atticus’ sister, Pomponia, to Quintus Cicero. This marriage was not a happy one and the seemingly accepted interference of brother and brother-in-law in the relationship of the troubled couple is quite revealing, as is Cicero’s concern for his nephew and the effect that his parent’s divorce might have on him (Cicero, Letters to Atticus 5.1, 6.1). The marriage of Quintus and Pomponia is also atypical in that they appear to be very close in age – this might suggest that this was not Pomponia’s first marriage. Cicero’s own marriage was not always rosy; it is not irrelevant that Terentia was independently wealthy (and it should be noted that Roman husbands and wives could not normally make each other gifts of money or property).16 Cicero disagreed with the choice of Tullia’s third husband – a selection made by the two women while he was out of the country – and his long marriage finally ended in divorce in     15   16   13

Treggiari 2007, pp. 30–32. Shaw 1987. For dowry see Saller 1994, pp. 204–24. On Cicero’s family see Dixon 1986; Bradley 1991; Treggiari 2007. On gifts between husbands and wives more generally see Cherry 2002. 14

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46 BC.17 In the same year Cicero married a young heiress, Publilia, when he was 60 and she at the age of first marriage and younger than his daughter. The marriage did not last and allegedly attracted the ridicule of Terentia (Plutarch, Cicero 41) and was defended by Tiro (Cicero’s secretary and freedman) on the more traditionally accepted grounds that the marriage was for financial and political reasons. Unlike the representation of Demosthenes’ grief at the death of his young daughter the grief Cicero felt at the death of Tullia was overpowering – it preoccupied him for many months in 45 BC – to the extent that his friends began to worry about the very public nature of his grief.18 The information we have on Cicero’s family and friends is not unproblematic in terms of its provenance but it does expose emotive reasoning and moments of affection that are lacking in many of our sources, and serves as a reminder that social interaction, particularly in the close confines of family living, is not all about ideals and rules. Defining ‘Family’ The tribulations and motivations at work in Demosthenes’ and Cicero’s family lives have a certain timeless ring to them, and it is easy and tempting to empathise or even take sides, but we should be careful not to read twenty-first-century western mores into ancient family structures. It is only in early modern times that the sense of the English word ‘family’, namely of the traditional and stereotypical triad of father, mother and children, which we dub the nuclear family, has emerged. The English term ‘family’ derives from the Latin familia, but the Latin word actually means something else: not only parents and children (and in fact legally it might not even include the mother, as we shall see shortly) but also other kin, family retainers and even property (in the last category might be put slaves, and indeed to many ancient readers the word familia might first evoke images of their slaves rather than their kin). Familia is best translated into English as ‘household’, as in the Roman emperor’s vast familia, including his freedmen and slaves. Familia in the Roman context meant all those people and things in the head of the household’s power (potestas); the Romans – or at least the fathers among them, including Cicero – saw the institution of patria potestas, the total power of the oldest living male ascendant over all those in his familia, as fundamental to their way of life and as an object of considerable pride and satisfaction (Gaius, Institutes 1.55; it is still being talked about in the sixth century AD: Justinian, Institutes 1.9.2). The Roman term domus (which can also refer to the physical abode) better conveys the modern idea of the nuclear triad, at least to the extent that it seems to have more regularly included the conjugal couple.19 The Greek word oikos also conveys the   Treggiari 2007, pp. 131–2.   For the intensity of Cicero’s grief see, for example, his letters to Atticus in the

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following month (Ep. ad Att. 12.13-20), with Plutarch, Life of Cicero 41. 19   Saller 1984 and 1986. Both articles are updated and reprised in Saller 1994.

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sense of a wider grouping than just the nuclear group, and like Latin familia is based around the male line (in Roman law the agnates). Our sense of the Greek household is based much more on a patrilineal line (a reflection of its endogamous basis), and the Athenian family appears much more patriarchal than the Roman, with the kyrios dominant, despite the fact that the Athenians did not have an institution which equates with patria potestas. This Athenian male dominance is a reflection of the gendered nature of the society and the sources, with less evidence (than in the Roman context) that illustrates women’s ability as a group to act outside the patriarchal arena (though sometimes circumstances might dictate otherwise: Cleoboule was unusual, Terentia was less so). In Aristophanic comedy, for instance, women are depicted as acting independently, but this is not meant to be viewed as a typical scene from daily life: it is comic precisely because it is (to a male audience at least) extraordinary.20 Ideally, Athenian upper class women would lead a segregated lifestyle, only meeting males at family occasions. The reality for the lower classes was necessarily different, but that was simply an illustration of failing to meet the ideal, for economic reasons.21 The contrast with Roman society is patent, as the Latin writer Cornelius Nepos notes, from the time of Augustus, in the preface to his Lives of Great Generals of Foreign Nations (praef. 6–7): Many things which we Romans think seemly are thought shameful by the Greeks. For example, what Roman would be embarrassed to take his wife to a dinner party with him? What materfamilias does not hold first place in the house and take part in its social life? But things are very different in Greece. There no woman is present at a dinner party unless it is one held by her relatives, and she sits only in the inner part of the house, the so-called women’s quarters, which no one enters unless he is a close relative.

As noted above our use of the word ‘family’ to convey the idea of the fathermother-children triad is relatively recent, but it has become very evident to historians in recent decades that the institution of the nuclear family type in the western world stretches far further back in time (even though the Greeks and Romans had no word for nuclear family). The classic article illustrating this in the Roman context, by means of the statistical scrutiny of epitaphs (tombstones being afforded by not just the very wealthy but also those of more moderate means), is Saller and Shaw (1984), which remains essential reading. Key to Saller and Shaw’s method is the analysis of the commemorator’s relationship to the deceased. Epitaphs, unless they were set up by the person him or herself while still alive (se   To take perhaps the obvious instance, in Lysistrata women take over the assembly and go on a sex strike; both actions would have been unthinkable in the ‘real world’ of fifthcentury Athens. See further (e.g.) Bowie 1993, pp. 178–204 and passim. 21   On segregation and Greek women see (e.g.) Nevett 2009; Blundell 1995; Foxhall 1989. 20

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vivo), typically refer to commemorations between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters; much less often are there mentioned relationships between extended kin (grandparents, uncles, etc.). Indeed in civilian populations (as compared with populations of soldiers) friends, patrons, freedmen, masters and slaves – that is, individuals unrelated by blood – feature more frequently than extended kin. This sort of evidence suggests very strongly that the focus of obligations, where possible, was usually between close family members – what we would now call the nuclear family group, rather than the extended kin grouping. In a society where the paterfamilias in theory maintained complete control over the family, the pattern displayed by the tombstones is very surprising, and telling. This focus of obligations in civilian populations confirms what Cicero tells us: If there should be a debate about and comparison of those to whom we ought to offer the greatest duty (officium), then in the first rank are one’s country and one’s parents, to whose good services we have the deepest obligations; next come our children and the entire domus, which looks to us alone and can have no other refuge; then come relatives, with whom we get on well and with whom even our fortunes are generally held in common.22

So the father-mother-children triad in Roman times (and, our literary and legal sources imply, in classical Athens as well) was the primary focus of family obligations: feelings of affection, duty of commemoration, and transmission of property, as well as maintenance of the family cult. In this context it is easy and tempting to focus on the evident similarities between now and then. But note the transitory nature of Greek and Roman father-mother-children triads. Awareness of the differences is vital: much higher mortality levels at younger ages then than now, meaning that fertility levels need to be correspondingly higher and that the chances of your parents being alive when you yourself came to marry are relatively small. Very few Greeks or Romans knew their grandparents.23 Demosthenes would not have been unusual in growing up without a father, and it has to be said that the social realities of growing up without a father figure in a patriarchal society have only recently begun to be intensively investigated.24 Other factors must be taken into account when considering the structure of the ancient family, allowing for its life course, as its members age, leave home, marry, have children, lose a spouse (through death or divorce), move back to the family home (with or without children), and at some point, sooner or later, die. In short, nuclear does not mean simple: we can glimpse a complex network of connections within family marriage patterns. Aristocratic families, with political ties at the   Cicero, On Duties 1.58.   For demographic realities in antiquity, see Parkin 1992; Scheidel (ed.) 2001. 24   See the papers in Hübner and Ratzen (eds) 2009. 22 23

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forefront, undergo many changes, with divorce and remarriage leading to stepparents and stepchildren.25 Egypt – A Different World? When looking at the societies of Greece and Rome, Egypt under Roman rule is commonly cited as the exception. Here family, or, perhaps more properly, household structures, often appear very different, particularly lower down the social scale. The provincial census returns from Graeco-Roman Egypt (first to third centuries AD) provide unparalleled evidence for variety in household structures.26 The diversity is astounding, ranging from the most simple (one person living alone) to highly complex multiple family and extended family groups. Shorter returns have a greater chance of being preserved, but even so 36 per cent of households in the sample can be classified as complex rather than simple. Less than 23 per cent of the sample of 167 are made up of a father, mother and children – and, interestingly enough, such couples are on average much older than one might expect. When one considers the village/metropolis split between simple and complex, there is clearly a marked difference: metropolite households have a greater tendency towards simple; village households also tend to be slightly bigger (complex does not necessarily mean big), though lodgers and slaves boost the metropolite numbers. The urban/rural divide is revealing; these census returns reinforce the suspicion that outside of the urbanised west and lower down the social ladder, at least at some points in the family life cycle more complex family groupings were much more common than many may have assumed. It is easy to forget that we are dealing not with numbers but with people. Fascinating examples of households abound within the census returns. For example, in Berliner Leihgabe griechischer Papyri (P.Berl.Leihg.) III.52B, AD 147, there are at least five co-resident siblings, all declared as apatores (i.e., illegitimate), ranging in age from 14 to 30 years, two married to each other, and the oldest married to an outsider. In Berliner Leihgabe griechischer Papyri I.17, AD 161, three brothers and two sisters live in a house that they rent from two wards of one of the brothers; all five siblings are (or have been) married, two of them to each other (but now divorced), and two of the brothers to two sisters. All have children; a divorced or widowed sister also lives in the house with her child. The ex-wife of one of the brothers also lives there, with a child. Finally there are two slaves (mother and son) of that child. Compare Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester (P.Ryl.) II.111, AD 161, for a similarly complex situation, where a man’s former wife (his sister) and their children co-reside with the man’s new wife and their children; in total 27 individuals are in the household. At the extreme is Aegyptische Urkunden aus   See Bradley 1991, pp. 125–76.   Bagnall and Frier 1994 and 2006.

25 26

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den Königlichen Museen zu Berlin, Griechische Urkunden (BGU) I.115 i, AD 189, where a 50-year-old male lives with his wife (who is also his sister and who is 54); they have eight children, five boys and three girls, the youngest 7, the oldest 29. The 29-year-old son has married his sister, and both their one-year-old sons live in the house; another brother, aged 26 years, has married, this time outside of the family, and also has two sons, the older 13 years old (which means this brother become a father at the age of 13). In this household 27 people reside (at least five of them named Heron!), including some lodgers who are also related by blood. Quite apart from such fascinating examples, the evidence in total makes for at least one inevitable conclusion: on the basis of these returns, newly married Egyptian couples did not regularly leave their parents’ homes and form new households. The complexities of the households are further emphasised when one remembers that the returns give us a snapshot of an ever-changing scene, in which as the life course of each member of the household evolves, the household structure continually changes, even from simple to complex and vice versa.27 Marriage In both classical Athens and imperial Rome patriarchy and paternalism are reflected in marriage ideals and practices. The aim of marriage was the joining of a couple in order to produce legitimate offspring for the greater good of the state – to maintain the citizen body and provide soldiers for the army, to maintain and hopefully expand the patrimony, to continue the family name, as well as to provide security in the parents’ old age. Remaining unmarried was simply not an option for the vast majority of citizens in either Athens or Rome – for women outside the ‘working classes’ marriage was essentially the only available career option. The realities of marriage for women not of the elite are difficult to track; it is questionable how far legitimate marriage would have affected them and we must assume that large numbers of ‘informal’ unions existed. Informal need not imply temporary (although it might) and they need also to be recognised as likely ‘family’ groups. At many points through history legislators insisted that people should marry and produce children: the Augustan marriage legislation (18 BC and AD 9) is perhaps the best known example, but both Greek and Roman legislators had already been concerned about falling birth rates, particularly among the upper classes, and sought to reverse the perceived trend either with inducements or penalties.28 Marriage and motherhood gave women status in the Greek and Roman worlds. It can be argued that Pericles’ citizenship law of 451 BC, and in a different way Augustus’ social legislation on marriage and childbearing, increased the public status of the citizen   For the Egyptian family in Roman times, see Alston 2005.   There is a large bibliography on the Augustan social legislation regarding marriage

27 28

and childbearing, but still one of the most comprehensive coverages is Treggiari 1991.

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mother.29 To be unmarried and/or infertile as a woman was unfortunate, in several senses; indeed it was felt to be detrimental to a woman’s health not to fulfil her biological role as a mother. In both societies the lack of children was easy grounds for divorce.30 It was not uncommon to resort to the adoption of adults into the family line in order to resolve the disaster of a lack of heirs.31 Marriages were arranged at an early stage in children’s lives, by fathers and mothers, together with other interested parties. In classical Greek the verb ‘to marry’ was sunoikein, literally ‘to live together’, and in both Athenian and Roman contexts it was the intent of being married that most mattered. Ceremony was secondary. Marriage thus at first glance looks like a semi-business arrangement between groups of men, especially in the case of Athens and epikleroi, where an orphaned daughter with no siblings had the absolute right to inherit the estate from her father. In this case Athenian legislation ensured the oikos lived on: the girl (the epikleros) would be immediately ‘attached’ to a close male relative, in order to ensure property remained within the family. In Athens the wife moved household and took her dowry with her; she became a member of a different oikos. Athenian marriage was typically endogamous, at least among the upper classes. Romans tended more towards exogamy (choosing marriage partners outside the family), as far as our evidence suggests. In early Roman times the situation was similar to the Athenian in terms of the wife’s place in the household: she entered the manus or control of her husband (or his father if he was still in patria potestas) and so she was in effect in the position of a daughter, just as in Athens. But over the course of the later Roman republic there was a significant, albeit gradual, change in marriage structure, and most wives did not fall into the manus of their husbands: they remained within the property and inheritance network of their natal family, even though they lived in their husbands’ household. One of the legal consequences of this was that the mother was not in the same familia as her children. Again, this legal viewpoint must not be read as a straight description of affective (i.e. emotional) family relationships, but it did have significant implications for family structures and inheritance patterns.32 We should not assume that arranged marriages lacked affection. Even Aristotle allowed that marriage was not just for procreation but also for companionship (Nicomachean Ethics 8.12). In Athens and in Rome it was expected that marital harmony (homonoia, concordia) developed within marriage, not in advance of it. Traditionally, in Athenian society, men of about 30 would marry brides at the age of puberty. In Roman society too there was a smaller but still notable disparity between the ages of husband and wife at first marriage. Almost inevitably, marriages of this nature took on an air of paternalism, at least at the outset: a     31   32   29

Regarding Pericles’ law, see Patterson 1981. Cox 1998, pp. 71–2; Treggiari 1991, p. 462. For a succinct survey of adoption in Greece and Rome see Lindsay 2011. For marriage in Rome see first and foremost Treggiari 1991; note also Larsson Lovén and Strömberg (eds) 2010. 30

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bride’s status in her husband’s household would increase as she aged and became a mother. Xenophon in his Oeconomicus, for example, encouraged the subordinate position of women.33 As such texts make clear, in both Athenian and Roman society it was accepted and expected that the wife and mother would in practical terms run the household. Children Whatever the degree of affection between the couple, it was certainly true that the primary aim of marriage was to produce children and to raise them in a way that would not only reflect well upon their parents but also inculcate traditional social mores. In effect, the family, as a fundamentally conservative unit, served as an arena for socialisation. The experience of children in ancient times is difficult to ascertain, as they leave no direct literary record of their lives and what we see of them is viewed primarily through the prism of adult fathers, although recent work on the material culture of childhood is opening up new avenues of investigation.34 As children grew they would come into contact with a number of adult carers; they might stay with their own parents, or through the death or divorce of a parent they might find themselves with a number of step-parents and stepsiblings. Within an upper class household a child would certainly have experienced a number of slave carers, some of whom assumed duties we might today consider the proper role of parents. In some cases the relationship between child and carer could become a close one, and this potential for closeness caused anxiety among some male commentators. Children were generally considered a desirable asset in the ancient world but the care they received depended on their status, rank and economic position and, ultimately, on the whim of their parents and carers. Some children, particularly of the elite, might experience a period equivalent to a modern definition of childhood: a time for play and indulgence. Others, depending on the status of their families, might find themselves working in the family business, or even in the labour market, as soon as they were able, or at least acting as minders of younger siblings.35 Within the family a child would learn from an early age how to negotiate the power dynamics of society: between husband and wife, parents and children, master (or mistress) and slave, men and women. In Roman society in particular, where the evidence exists, familial bonds appear strong among all social groups, even those who could not form legal unions. Among ex-slaves, who might legally marry, the desire to emulate the family life of patrons is striking.36 As well as   See Pomeroy 1994 and 1999.   E.g., Huntley 2010. 35   Golden 1993; Rawson 2003; Bradley 1991; Cohen and Rutter (eds) 2007; Harlow 33 34

and Laurence (eds) 2010. 36   A fact well illustrated in Kleiner 1977.

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influencing social behaviour, ideals also mask some of the less palatable realities of life. Some marriages were doubtless made entirely for the convenience of male alliances. Some were unhappy; wives, husbands and children could suffer abuse, as did many slaves.37 The End of Marriage The difference in the status of Athenian and Roman wives is illustrated by what happens at the end of a marriage, whether through death or divorce. Demosthenes’ father had made arrangements for his widow’s remarriage. The wealthy Roman widow or divorcee might choose to remarry, and under the Augustan laws was actively encouraged to do so, but she might be independently wealthy if her father had already died. In Athens a daughter was only entitled to a dowry from the patrimony while her brothers shared in partible inheritance. If she had no brother(s), then as an epikleros she would ideally be remarried as soon as possible to another male in the family. In Rome a daughter also received a dowry but was additionally considered an heir alongside her brothers. Roman women also owned their own property and were allowed to dispose of it as they wished.38 For a young widow (still of child-bearing age) in both societies remarriage was the preferred option. Cicero’s daughter Tullia married three times, presumably returning to her father’s house between husbands; Terentia, on the other hand, remained divorced (and subsequently a widow – although there developed an intriguing rumour that she married the historian Sallust after her divorce, and subsequently married a third time).39 On the death of the father children in Athens would be in the care of a guardian (kyrios) who would usually be a male relative. In the case of Demosthenes, as we have seen, this was not a successful arrangement, but it highlights the strong sense of power and family control lying in the male line. At Rome guardianship was also common in the sense that those under age could not engage in financial dealings, and the sense of the dominance of the paternal line in the legal construction of the familia meant that children were supposed to stay with close paternal relatives, rather than with their mother. Again, demographic realities not infrequently subverted this idea and there are many instances of

37   See, for instance, Pomeroy 2007; Laes 2005. On domestic violence see also the chapter by Julia Hillner in this volume. 38   This was legally sanctioned at the end of the second century AD, but the law was clearly following established social practice. See especially work by Suzanne Dixon, such as Dixon 1992, pp. 48–9. 39   Jerome, Against Jovinian 1.48. Other, earlier, sources allege that Terentia lived to the age of 103 years: Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 8.13.6, Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories 7.158.

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widowed mothers raising their children, but this did not become a legal reality until AD 380 and then only if the mother agreed not to remarry.40 Conclusions As fundamental as the family was to ancient societies, at its heart it was also a fragile institution. Both Demosthenes and Cicero experienced the vagaries of life in both the public and the private spheres. The unpredictable nature not only of human emotions but also of high mortality levels meant that the Greeks and Romans lived with the notion of instability ever present. As familiar as so many aspects of the ancient family may appear to us in modern western societies, we should always be aware that the ancient framework for envisaging the family was fundamentally alien to our own. This very brief survey simply lays out the frameworks within which we tend to study the ancient family. Each theme has experts in its own area and extensive bibliographies to which we have done scant justice here. The study of the family in antiquity is expanding all the time but it has much to offer in terms of the methodologies it has absorbed from other disciplines, some of which are represented in this chapter. Even here, however, we have been relatively conservative, the result not only of space constraints but also of our own interests. We have taken a view of the family that comes almost exclusively from texts; while archaeology and iconography are mentioned in the footnotes, we have not directly engaged with them. This is not because we do not value their findings – on the contrary, this is where new ideas are emerging – but they are not our fields of expertise. The nature of the evidence inevitably frames the nature of any debates about the family but this should not preclude us from asking the difficult questions and challenging given orthodoxies. New research in the Byzantine family, as this volume offers, may indeed mean that we question some of the assumptions that are expressed here about its predecessors. Bibliography Primary Sources Aegyptische Urkunden aus den Königlichen Museen zu Berlin, Griechische Urkunden, vol. 1 (= BGU 1) (Berlin, 1895). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, 1926). 40   Regarding relevant aspects of the family in later Roman law, see especially Arjava 1996; Evans Grubbs 1995.

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Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, ed. and trans. A.L. Peck (Loeb Classical Library, 1953). Aristotle, Politics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, 1932). Berliner Leihgabe griechischer Papyri (= P.Berl.Leihg.) (Uppsala, 1932–) Carmina Latina Epigraphica (= CLE), ed. F. Buecheler (Leipzig: Teubner, 1895). Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester (= P.Ryl.), vol. 2: Documents of the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, ed. J. de M. Johnson, V. Martin and A.S. Hunt (Manchester, 1915). Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares, ed. D.R. Shackleton Bailey, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Cicero, Letters to Atticus, ed. and trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965–70). Cicero, On Duties (= de Officiis), ed. and trans. W. Millet (Loeb Classical Library, 1913). Cornelius Nepos, On the Great Generals of Foreign Nations, ed. and trans. J.C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library, 1929). Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (= CIL), vol. 3, ed. T. Mommsen (Berlin, 1873). Gaius, The Institutes, ed. and trans. F. de Zulueta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). Galen, On the Usefulness of Parts of the Body, ed. C.G. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. 4 (Leipzig, 1822). Jerome, Against Jovinian, PL 23, 221–354. Justinian, The Institutes, ed. and trans. J.A.C. Thomas (Amsterdam and Oxford: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1975). Pliny the Elder, Natural Histories, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 2, 1942). Plutarch, Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to his Wife, ed. Pomeroy (1999). Plutarch, Lives of Demosthenes and of Cicero, ed. and trans. B. Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 7, 1919). Plutarch, Lives of Themistocles and of Cato the Elder, ed. and trans. B. Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 2, 1914). Plutarch, Moralia, ed. and trans. F.C. Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 3, 1931). Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, ed. and trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey (Loeb Classical Library, 2000). Xenophon, Oeconomicus, ed. Pomeroy (1994). Secondary Sources Adamik, Tamás (2005), ‘Veturia unicuba uniiuga (CLE 558)’, Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 45: 91–8. Adamik, Tamás (2006), ‘Veturia unicuba uniiuga (CLE 558)’, in Carmen Arias Abellán (ed.), Actes du VIIème Colloque international sur le latin vulgaire et tardif, Séville, 2–6 septembre 2003 (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla), pp. 31–9.

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Alston, Richard (2005), ‘Searching for the Romano-Egyptian Family’, in Michele George (ed.), The Roman Family in the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 129–57. Arjava, Antti (1996), Women and the Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Bagnall, Roger S. and Frier, Bruce (1994 and 2006), The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Baker, Patricia (2010), ‘Health and Science’, in Harlow and Laurence (eds), (2010), pp. 153–70. Blundell, Sue (1995), Women in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: British Museum Press). Bowie, Angus M. (1993), Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bradley, Keith (1991), Discovering the Roman Family (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Cherry, David (2002), ‘Gifts between Husband and Wife: The Social Origins of Roman Law’, in Jean-Jacques Aubert and Boudewijn Sirks (eds), Speculum Iuris. Roman Law as a Reflection of Social and Economic Life in Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 34–45. Cohen, Ada and Rutter, Jeremy (eds) (2007), Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (Hesperia Supplement 41) (Princeton, NJ: ASCSA Publications). Cox, Cheryl Anne (1998), Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Davies, John K. (1971), Athenian Propertied Families, 600–300 B.C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Dionisotti, A.C. (1982), ‘From Ausonius’s Schooldays? A Schoolbook and its Relatives’, JRS, 72: 83–125. Dixon, Suzanne (1986), ‘Family Finances: Terentia and Tullia’, in Beryl Rawson (ed.), The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (London, Sydney and Ithaca: Croom Helm), pp. 93–120. Dixon, Suzanne (1992), The Roman Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins). Dixon, Suzanne (2001), Reading Roman Women (London: Duckworth). Dixon, Suzanne (2011), ‘From Ceremonial to Sexualities: A Survey of Scholarship on Roman Marriage’, in Rawson (ed.) (2011), pp. 245–61. Erskine, Andrew (ed.) (2009), A Companion to Ancient History (Oxford and Maldon, MA: Wiley-Blackwell). Evans Grubbs, Judith (1995), Law and Family in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Foxhall, Lin (1989), ‘Household, Property and Gender in Classical Athens’, CQ, 39: 22–44. Foxhall, Lin (1996), ‘The Law and the Lady: Women and Legal Proceedings in Classical Athens’, in Lin Foxhall and A.D.E. Lewis (eds), Greek Law in its

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Political Setting: Justifications not Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 133–52. Golden, Mark (1993), Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins). Harlow, Mary and Laurence, Ray (eds) (2010), A Cultural History of Childhood and Family. Volume 1: Antiquity (Oxford: Berg). Harlow, Mary and Parkin, Tim (2009), ‘The Family’, in Erskine (ed.) (2009), pp. 329–41. Hübner, Sabine and Ratzen, David (eds) (2009), Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Huntley, Katherine (2010), Material Culture Approaches to the Study of Children and Childhood in the Roman World (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leicester). Huskinson, Janet (1996), Roman Children’s Sarcophagi (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Huskinson, Janet (2007), ‘Constructing Childhood on Roman Funerary Monuments’, in Cohen and Rutter (eds) (2007), pp. 322–38. Huskinson, Janet (2011), ‘Picturing the Roman Family’, in Rawson (ed.) (2011), pp. 521–41. Joshel, Sandra (1992), Work, Identity and Legal Status at Rome. A Study of Occupational Inscriptions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press). Joshel, Sandra, and Murnaghan, Sheila (eds) (1998), Women and Slaves in GrecoRoman Culture (London and New York: Routledge). Kleiner, Diana (1977), Roman Group Portraiture: The Funerary Reliefs of the Late Republic and Early Empire (New York: Garland Publishing). Laes, Christian (2005), ‘Child Beating in Antiquity: Some Reconsiderations’, in K. Mustakallio et al. (eds), Hoping for Continuity. Childhood, Education and Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Rome: Institutum Romanum Findlandiae), pp. 75–89. Larsson Lovén, Lena and Strömberg, Agneta (eds) (2010), Ancient Marriage in Myth and Reality (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press). Lindsay, Hugh (2011), ‘Adoption and Heirship in Greece and Rome’, in Rawson (ed.) (2011), pp. 346–60. Nevett, Lisa (2009), ‘Housing’, in Erskine (ed.) (2009), pp. 368–80. Nevett, Lisa (2010), Domestic Space in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Parkin, Tim (1992), Demography and Roman Society (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins). Patterson, Cynthia (1981), Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451–50 B.C. (New York: Arno Press). Pomeroy, Sarah B. (1994), Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Pomeroy, Sarah B. (1997), Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Representations and Realities (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

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Pomeroy, Sarah B. (1999), Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Pomeroy, Sarah B. (2007), The Murder of Regilla, A Case of Domestic Violence in Antiquity (Harvard: Harvard University Press). Rawson, Beryl (2003), Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rawson, Beryl (ed.) (2011), A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford and New York: Wiley-Blackwell). Revell, Louise (2010), ‘Geography and the Environment’, in Harlow and Laurence (eds) (2010), pp. 61–78. Saller, Richard (1984), ‘Familia, domus and the Roman Conception of the Family’, Phoenix, 38: 336–55. Saller, Richard (1986), ‘Patria potestas and the Stereotype of the Roman Family’, Continuity and Change, 1: 7–22. Saller, Richard (1994), Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Saller, Richard and Shaw, Brent D. (1984), ‘Tombstones and Roman Family Relations in the Principate: Civilians, Soldiers and Slaves’, JRS, 74: 124–56. Scheidel, Walter (ed.) (2001), Debating Roman Demography (Leiden: Brill). Shaw, Brent D. (1987), ‘The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage: Some Reconsiderations’, JRS, 77: 30–46. Treggiari, Susan (1991), Roman Marriage (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Treggiari, Susan (2007), Terentia, Tullia and Publilia. The Women of Cicero’s Family (London: Routledge). Uzzi, Jeannine D. (2005), Children in the Visual Arts of Imperial Rome (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press).

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Chapter 2

Family Violence: Punishment and Abuse in the Late Roman Household 1

Julia Hillner

Roman law drew a different line between punishment and abuse in the home than western society is accustomed to today. While it is true that not all modern western nations have outlawed corporal punishment of children (the United Kingdom, for example), all have laws that protect children against intentional physical harm and injury, and consider physical violence against spouses, partners and elderly family members a criminal offence. Furthermore, terminological boundaries are becoming more inclusive. Since the late twentieth century the definition of family violence increasingly has come to include verbal and emotional intentional acts of aggression against members of the same household alongside those of a physical nature (e.g. intimidation, isolation). The law is somewhat slower to react to these more comprehensive concepts due to difficulties of measuring psychological effects, but Spanish law, for example, bans emotional abuse of spouses.2 By contrast, Roman law interfered only to a minimal extent in the violent aspects of the domestic sphere. To understand this reluctance it is important to bear in mind the legal parameters of the Roman household which largely remained unchanged until the end of antiquity. In a legal sense – and in the sense the term is used in this chapter – the Roman household extended far beyond the people who co-habited within the domestic unit, the domus. It denoted the vast sphere of control of the paterfamilias, the senior male in the patrilineal line, over all legitimate minor 1

  I use the term ‘family violence’ to denote the myriad directions violence can historically take within the home, although I am aware that ‘family violence’ can be a contested term as it does not fully describe the gender and age imbalance often at play in violence in the home. 2   See Jackson (ed.) 2007, particularly the entries on ‘Battered Wives’, pp. 59–63, ‘Child Abuse: A Global Perspective’, pp. 119–23, and ‘Coercive Control’, pp. 166–72. In Jackson’s book the term ‘domestic violence’ is taken as referring to violence within families generally, while in other usages it often denotes aggression against spouses and partners only. An inspiring, if at times polemical, survey of realities and perceptions of physical punishment of children in the United States within a larger comparative prospective is Strauss 2001, on definitions of ‘punishment’ and ‘abuse’ in particular: pp. 4–9. In the United Kingdom corporal punishment of children that does not leave a mark on the body is allowed (Children Act 2004, sect. 58, see www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/31/notes/ division/2/4/5/2; accessed 5 September 2011).

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and adult children and grandchildren, including married ones, as well as slaves, freedmen and property. This sphere of control was called familia.3 At the same time, however, the paterfamilias’ legal power (patria potestas) did not extend to everyone in the domus. Most importantly, it usually did not extend to his wife, who remained under the potestas of her own paterfamilias, if still alive, and also not to his wife’s slaves or freedmen. In turn, his wife did not have any legal control over her children or grandchildren, even though children were legally and morally expected to show obedience (obsequium) and devotion (pietas) to both father and mother.4 Peter Brown famously wrote that late antiquity was characterised ‘by a chilling absence of legal restraints on violence in the exercise of power’.5 It can be argued that this was true for family life throughout the Roman period and increasingly so during late antiquity. The law allowed for some practices, such as the flogging of children and slaves, and, by the sixth century, of wives, which we would, from a modern perspective, consider abuse. To term these practices simply ‘abuse’, however, crucially risks overlooking the cultural beliefs that lay beneath them. Rather, I would argue, we need to investigate, alongside the realities of family life, whether and how intentional violent acts against children, slaves and wives were construed as legitimate punishment for disturbing rules of conduct, in legal texts and in moralising literature alike.6 While this focus on techniques of socialisation admittedly emphasises the viewpoint of the perpetrator of punishment, rather than the victim, this approach will help us to shed light on wider perceptions of social order in Roman antiquity and their changes in late antiquity, as they pertain to the family. All of this is not to say, of course, that Romans did not know the concept of abuse. Abuse can mean, in a simple definition, the exercise of violence prohibited by law. Roman law, accordingly, awarded some limited legal remedies to victims of illegitimate violence, as we shall see. Legal norms, however, are only a basic indicator of cultural perceptions of violence. Abuse can also mean the incorrect use of legally rightful power. As far as Roman views on abuse are concerned, particularly from the imperial period on, moralising sources abounded with advice on how correctly to treat children, slaves and wives. Such reflections came in the wake of a rise of Stoic principles on anger management and self-control that went beyond, but also influenced legal principles. Correct behaviour within the 3   For an excellent definition of familia and domus see Saller 1994, pp. 75–88; for patria potestas in late antiquity see Arjava 1998. For the sake of simplicity I will call a paterfamilias at times a ‘father’, although this does not entirely describe the nature of this legal institution. 4   On the legal status of Roman wives see Treggiari 1991, pp. 16–34; for late antiquity see Arjava 1996, pp. 123–7. Marriage cum manu which saw the transferral of the wife into the legal power of her husband may have largely fallen out of use by the first century BC. On respect expected of children: Saller 1994, p. 114. 5   Brown 1992, p. 50. 6   See for a similar approach Perry 2009, pp. 49–51.

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household became one of the prime indicators of male elite morality.7 In the absence of legal restraints, for many people such self-reflection of those in power may have been the only protection against arbitrary violence.8 At least at the elite level, therefore, we witness some contemplation on the correct use of domestic power. It is important to remember, however, that physical violence as a form of punishment for misbehaviour was never rejected as a possibility or even a necessity in the organisation of the Roman household, not even in philosophical debates.9 The deliberate infliction of pain was not seen as equating with cruelty, as it would be in modern eyes. Also, among the elite the critical issue was not the elimination of violence, but the curbing of excessive violence. Debates on punishment and abuse often considered the same violent actions, but their interpretation as either reasonable or excessive changed according to the age, gender and socio-legal status of the punished. Arguably, in late antiquity the debate regarding the boundaries of legitimate punishment and the nature of excessive violence changed direction. The rise of Christianity also saw the rise of a new discourse on the authority of the paterfamilias, which acquired an additional dimension, and at the same time limitation, as a link between divine command and human moral behaviour. Accordingly, the head of the household was seen as assuming a new responsibility, to ensure that each family member was equally fit to stand up to final judgement. What was at stake now was not only harmony and order at the civic level, but, and more importantly, at the cosmological level as well.10 This chapter investigates the changing boundaries between punishment and abuse in the late Roman household, or, to put it in terms perhaps more contemporary, between the punisher’s ‘self-control’ (moderatio) and ‘cruelty’ (atrocitas, crudelitas). I will approach the issue firstly by examining the legal remedies available under both classical and late Roman law for those suffering violence in the household, and by subsequently contrasting these with another set of norms: Christian assumptions about the legitimacy of such violence. As a result, I will argue that late Roman views on family violence, both in law and in Christian debate, do not reflect cultural changes due to the influence of Christian theology. Rather, these views continue to be based on inherited cultural norms, even though such norms, due to the regional and social origins of some late antique bishops and law-givers, were not always in tune with classical aristocratic traditions.

7   Harris 2001, pp. 312–14; but also see Saller 1994, p. 104, on compassion (pietas) as the ruling principle of parent–child relationships throughout the Roman period. 8   Brown 1992, pp. 50–51. 9   Gaddis 2005, p. 141; for the Roman family specifically see Laes 2005, p. 83. 10   Cooper 2007a, pp. 32–3.

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Victims of Family Violence and the Law Violence in the household was traditionally not a public crime under Roman law, except if it involved killing. Some actions that we would class as ‘crime’ fell under the category of ‘delict’ (delictum) in Roman legal thought. Delictum included a range of anti-social behaviour, such as wilful property damage and iniuria, which denoted any inter-personal aggression ranging from verbal insult to bodily assault. It was essentially a breach of obligations between individuals. Originally, victims of iniuria were only able to start a civil lawsuit for financial compensation, but by late antiquity criminal procedure was allowed and hence a publicly imposed penalty seems to have been common in iniuria cases. Yet, contrary to other criminal proceedings, in iniuria cases only the victim, not any citizen, could make a public accusation, which was essential for legal procedure to take place.11 As we shall see, public recognition of whether iniuria had actually happened depended much on the status and perceived dignity of the victim. To begin with, where iniuria in the family were concerned, not all members of the household had the right to make an accusation. Yet, even where they had, the nature of Roman legal process required a magistrate, that is, in late antiquity, normally the provincial governor, to decide about the appropriateness of complaints before allowing legal action.12 The appendix to this chapter contains a late Roman magistrate’s hypothetical checklist of what the law said about the boundaries between punishment and abuse for different members of the household. Such a checklist is of course an entirely a-historical document. While it gives us a one-glance overview of Roman law on family violence, it cannot be assumed that a late Roman provincial governor would have had access to such comprehensive legal information, although communication of legal literature was probably better in late antiquity than in previous periods.13 Still, governors may have often followed their instincts or listened to public opinion of what constituted excessive violence when deciding the feasibility of legal action. Social assumptions, to which we will turn below, are therefore important to bear in mind also when we consider the possibilities of legal action against family violence. Still, this document allows us to extrapolate a number of legal principles on family violence. The appendix indicates that at all times in Roman antiquity, household members below the level of the paterfamilias would have found it very difficult to start a lawsuit against excessive violence. To begin with, Roman children under patria potestas and slaves did not have a legal persona under Roman law and therefore could not start legal action, for iniuria or any other wrongdoing.14 What 11   See the excellent discussion of delictum in Harries 2007, pp. 42–58; also Krause 2004, pp. 87–122; specifically on iniuria Kaser 1971, pp. 623–5, and 1975, p. 439. 12   On provincial governors as judges see Harries 1999, pp. 53–4, and on criminal procedure Harries 2007, pp. 28–33. 13   Harries 1999, pp. 96–8. 14   Kaser 1971, pp. 284–5, 341–5.

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this means is that the law offered little protection to children, even adult ones, and to slaves against maltreatment within the family, however violent. The exception was killing of children, for which a public murder charge could be brought under certain circumstances.15 Significantly, this legal principle came to be questioned for slaves in the course of the second century AD. Some emperors began to punish individual slave-owners for having submitted their slaves to ‘immoderate punishment’ (immoderata castigatio) for ‘light’ (levis) wrongdoings or for having exercised their power with ‘cruel savagery’ (atrox saevitia). They also gave slaves the opportunity to ask for asylum at the statue of the emperor, which in the fourth century became church asylum.16 For children, however, none of this ever happened. Evidently, the law was acutely aware that the relationship between master and slaves was the most vulnerable aspect in the maintenance of social order in the Roman world. Maltreatment of slaves could endanger a master’s life, not to speak of financial losses. Roman moralists also perceived masters as being prone to unreasonable acts against their slaves, as they did not love them as they did their children. Such attitudes may have influenced legal developments under the philosophically minded Antonines.17 In contrast, underlying the legal principle that children could not sue their parents was a wider consensus that parents would not treat children in potestate with unreasonable violence. The second-century jurist Claudius Saturninus, in any case, justified the uncontested power of a paterfamilias to flog a child with the fact that it was always an educative, never an uncontrolled, act.18 15  See Theodosian Code 9.15.1 (318) (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, pp. 458–4) = Justinianic Code 9.17.1 (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 3, p. 379), which classes child-killing as parricide; see Harries 2007, p. 15; also see Shaw 2001, pp. 56–77, who argues that the famous ‘right of life and death’ (ius vitae necisque) of the Roman father had always been a cultural construct, never a legal right. 16   Coll. 3.3.4–5 (Hadrian and Antoninus Pius; Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani, vol. 2: 551–2); Theodosian Code 12.1.39 (349) (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, p. 672). On asylum: Gaius, Institutes 1.53 (Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani, vol. 2, p. 18); Digest 1.6.2 (Ulpian) (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1, p. 36); Justinian, Institutes 1.8.2 (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: 3); Theodosian Code 9.44.1 and 9.45.3.4 (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, pp. 518, 519); slaves had to be returned to masters after a period of grace; on all these legal developments: Buckland 1908, p. 38. 17   Harris 2001, pp. 334–5; Cooper 2007b, p. 115. We can assume that most of the legal texts discussed here, but also Christians’ moralising reflections about slave treatment considered below, concerned domestic, rather than rural slaves. This is not only because rural slavery was perhaps a rare practice throughout Roman antiquity, but also because the presumed level of interaction between masters and slaves suggests a domestic context. On urban and rural slavery in antiquity and late antiquity, with a discussion of the historiography, see Nathan 2000, p. 171. 18   Digest 48.19.16.2 (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: 866): ‘flogging goes unpunished if administered by a teacher or a parent, for it is evident that it is administered to correct and not to insult; it is punished when someone is beaten by an outsider out of anger’ ([verbera],

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Things were somewhat different when a child was emancipated from patria potestas, which for children could happen, and perhaps in late antiquity it increasingly did, when they reached adulthood.19 An emancipated child, unlike a child in potestate or slave, but just like a freedman, could theoretically be granted a lawsuit for iniuria against a father or patron.20 Emancipation therefore conferred a degree of dignity that could even be violated by a former paterfamilias. However, even this dignity did not protect against all physical violence. The second- and third-century jurists who discussed the possibility of granting a lawsuit for iniuria against a patron or parent also anxiously explained its limitations. A punishment was only excessive (atrox), if it had been administered with lashes or rods (flagris, verberibus) or if it had inflicted a wound. In this case, a freedman and an emancipated child had been treated like a slave, which was intolerable. Freedmen were also not under any circumstances to be put in chains.21 Yet, verbal admonishment or a ‘light’ beating did not provide grounds for legal proceedings.22 In short, a father’s or a patron’s right of physical or emotional punishment, seen again as an often necessary educational method, was confirmed, as long as the punitive method took account of the delinquent’s status. Even emancipated adult children, not to speak of freedmen, were allowed to be subject to physical violence to some extent. Due to her position in the household that legally excluded her from the power of the paterfamilias, a wife was theoretically in a better position to counter potential violence of her husband than children and slaves. Wives traditionally could not start a lawsuit against their husbands for iniuria, but they could divorce them, and more importantly, start a lawsuit for the recovery of their dowry, an essential prerequisite for remarriage, on the grounds of maltreatment.23 There were a number of complicated developments concerning divorce over the period of late antiquity, to which I will return below. It needs to be stressed, however, that at all quae impunita sunt a magistro allata vel parente, quoniam emendationis, non iniuriae gratia videntur adhiberi: puniuntur, cum quis per iram ab extraneo pulsatus est). 19  On emancipatio in late antiquity Arjava 1998, p. 161. 20   Digest 47.10.7.2-8 (Ulpian) and 47.10.11.7 (Ulpian) (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: 831, 832). 21   Justinianic Code 6.6.6 (242) (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 2: 521): ‘it is certain that freedmen and freedwomen, particularly those upon whom no service is imposed, have to show the usual obedience to those who have manumitted them rather than provide servile labour, and should not be put in chains’ (libertos sive libertas, maxime quibus impositae operae non sunt, consuetum potius obsequium quam servile ministerium manumissoribus exhibere debere neque vincula perpeti non est opinionis incertae). 22   Digest 47.10.7.2 (Ulpian, Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: 831): quod dominus ei convicium dixerit vel quod leviter pulsaverit et emendaverit; and 47.10.7.3-8 (Ulpian, Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: 831); 47.10.11.7 (Ulpian, Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: 832): levis enim coercitio etiam in nuptam vel convici non impudici dictio cur patrono denegetur? 23   On Roman divorce see Treggiari 1991, p. 431.

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times a wife only had the right to request legal protection (or, in late antiquity, exemption from certain public penalties for divorce) if a husband had administered flogging or whipping (verbera), which was, as Theodosius II (408–450) put it in a law from 439 echoing sentiments from classical antiquity, ‘unbefitting to a freeborn’.24 A Roman wife who sought legal protection on the grounds of violent treatment other than flogging, if, for example, a husband had merely insulted her, struck her with his bare hands, or isolated her at home, may have had a daunting task against the letter of the law.25 This was similar to the situation of emancipated children and freedmen discussed above. Roman law therefore also offered wives little protection against day-to-day violence. The restrictions of the household dependents discussed so far on bringing legal actions of iniuria were designed to safeguard the honour of the paterfamilias, slaveowner and patron, and the institution of marriage, which rested on the principle of marital harmony.26 Actions that had the potential to damage a householder’s or a couple’s reputation could not be easily brought. Yet, for the same reasons, there were also considerable restrictions on those with domestic authority to start a lawsuit for iniuria against household dependents. Fathers, and also mothers, could not sue their children, and slave masters could not sue their slaves or freedmen, for violent acts against themselves, but were encouraged to deal with misbehaviour at home.27 The restrictions on bringing an action for iniuria also extended to a patron against his freedmen, clients and labourers.28 While these restrictions may seem odd at first sight, they were certainly also intended to underline the role of domestic authority within the suppression of wrongdoing. Parents and slaveholders were encouraged to deal with misbehaviour at home. Such perhaps unsurprising, if unsettling, legal principles were characteristic of all Roman antiquity. However, there were also some uniquely late antique developments. Overall, from the early fourth century on the role of domestic authority was stressed even more vehemently. To begin with, while restrictions on parents and patrons to bring their subordinates to court for violent behaviour continued, in late antiquity the paterfamilias was awarded extended rights to recall emancipated children and freedmen into patria potestas, and hence into his punitive authority, if they had demonstrated ‘ingratitude’ (ingratitudo). For 24   Justinianic Code 5.17.8 (449) (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 2: 212): si se verberibus, quae ab ingenuis aliena sunt, adficientem probaverit. On flogging wives in classical antiquity Saller 1998, pp. 85–91. 25  See Oxyrynchus Papyri 6, 903 (ed. Grenfel and Hunt 1908, pp. 238–41) for a fourth-century wife who may have tried. Significantly, she put much more emphasis on her husband wilfully damaging her property than injuring her physically. See further on this text Beaucamp 1990, vol. 2, p. 93. 26   Treggiari 1991, pp. 430–31. 27   Justinianic Code 3.41.1 (224); 4.14.6 (287)  ; 8.46.3 (227) (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 2: 146, 155, 357) 28   Digest 47.2.90 (89) (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: 824).

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freedmen such a possibility had always existed, but for emancipated children it was introduced by Constantine I (306–337). In this newly conceived vision of a return to patria potestas, children could be recalled if they had behaved ‘arrogantly and cruelly’ (superbe crudeliterque), which could be as little as verbally insulting a parent.29 Also for freedmen the terms that justified revocation of emancipation became harsher under Constantine. Even a ‘light’ (levis) offence could lead to reenslavement, and the rule was also extended to the children of freedmen.30 Late Roman law clearly applied very different definitions of iniuria across the family hierarchy. The most striking development in late Roman law on family violence, however, was the shift away from an emphasis on the method of punishment as a measure of moderation or excess to that on the intention of the punisher to ‘correct’. Traditionally, a magistrate had had the possibility to assess acceptable levels of violence on the grounds whether certain methods or tools had been used. If the methods did not match with the victim’s status, it was clearly a case of abuse. For example, abuse of parents, masters and patrons could be, as we have just seen, as little as verbal insult. For wives, freedmen and emancipated children the law traditionally saw the use of whips, rods, inflicting a wound and enchainment as a sign of abuse. Where free members of the household were concerned, it was therefore use of tools deemed appropriate for slave treatment which could provide, for the magistrate, the touchstone to decide that the perpetrator had used unreasonable violence. However, also in the treatment of slaves, tools traditionally played a role. Antoninus Pius (138–161) declared that a master who killed his slave ‘without cause’ (sine causa) could be criminally charged with murder.31 Constantine, in a law intended to clarify previous regulations on the killing of slaves, explained that it was the use of certain punitive methods, such as beating with clubs, stoning, hanging, poisoning, or burning and amputating body parts, which provided evidence that a slave had been killed due to a master’s excessive

29   Fragmenta Vaticana 248 (330) (Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani, vol. 2: 513); see also Theodosian Code 8.14.1 (367) (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, p. 415) = Justinianic Code 8.49.1 (Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 2:360); on liberti ingrati see in particular Buckland 1908, pp. 422–6. 30   Theodosian Code 4.10.1 (326) (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, p. 187) = Justinianic Code 6.7.2 (Corpus Iuris Civlis, vol. 2: 247). Later laws (Justinianic Code 6.7.3 (423) and 4 (426) (Corpus Iuris Civlis, vol. 2:247)) speak of ingratitudo as a cause for reenslavement of freedmen and their children in very general terms. For a reflection of these laws in Christian discourse see Augustine, Sermons 367.1 (PL 39, 1651), which shows that revocation from emancipation was known as a legal possibility in late Roman North Africa. 31  Gaius, Institutes 1.52-3 (Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani II: 18; = Digest 1.6.1.1-2 (Ulpian) = Institutes 1.8.1-2 (Corpus Iuris Civlis, vol. 1: 36, 3)).

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behaviour. Constantine was certainly echoing principles of classical, in particular second-century, law here.32 Yet, only a few years later, Constantine made a crucial amendment to this law.33 He explained that any violent treatment of a slave, even if lethal, could be justified if a master had intended to apply ‘correction’ (correctio) to a slave, and not to kill. This law therefore implied that masters could do whatever they wished, as long as the slave did not die. However, even if the slave did die, the murder charge could be dismissed where a magistrate acknowledged a slave’s previous wrongdoing and hence the slave-holder’s intention to correct this. It was implied that, in this case, the ‘correction’ had just gone horribly wrong. There is no mention anymore that some tools were not appropriate for slave punishment. We can note a comparable development also where wives were concerned. By the sixth century, wives had lost their right to divorce and recover their dowry for physical violence.34 By way of compensation, under Justinian I (527–565) wives gained the right to sue their husbands for financial settlement if they had been beaten with a whip or a rod (μάστιξ, ξύλον). However, such legal dispute was only allowed if a husband had punished a wife for trivial reasons. In fact, husbands were now allowed to flog their wives for reasons for which they could also divorce them. This included immoral conduct, such as dining or bathing with other men.35 Although Justinian did not abolish divorce outright, he sought, through this law, to promote marital continuity, by offering flogging of wives as an incentive to husbands for not divorcing. Un-wifely behaviour could now be corrected within the household and with tools hitherto considered taboo for wives. The message of late Roman law was that fathers, slave masters and husbands were to a large extent to be left well alone, as their domestic authority to ‘correct’ was sacrosanct, even if they had used certain tools traditionally associated with ‘immoderate’ behaviour. For children this had always been the case, but it was new, or perhaps rather a return to archaic models of family life, for slaves and wives.36 There was a lot of public benefit in this. Late Roman laws present a watered-down Aristotelian notion on how the family was seen as the essential building block of social harmony and order. A paterfamilias was responsible for

32   Theodosian Code 9.12.1 (319) (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, p. 455) = Justinianic Code 9.14.1 (Corpus Iuris Civlis, vol. 2: 378–379). 33   Theodosian Code 9.12.2 (326/329) (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, pp. 455–6); see Lovato 1994, pp. 174–6, and Harris 2001, p. 335. 34   On late Roman divorce legislation: Kaser 1975, pp. 174–9; Arjava 1996, pp. 177– 83; Evans Grubbs 1995, pp. 226–42; Dossey 2008, pp. 5–7, on divorce and violence against wives in particular. 35   Novels 117.14 (542) (Corpus Iuris Civlis, vol. 3: 564); see for the reasons that justified divorce Novels 117.8 (542) (Corpus Iuris Civlis, vol. 3: 557–558). 36   On legal principles structuring the archaic Roman family see Kaser 1971, pp. 50– 83; on the situation of wives in this period Harries 2007, p. 95.

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the social behaviour of members of his household and the household provided a vitally important training ground to instil socially useful behaviour.37 The key term here was emendatio. In legal (including those on domestic iniuria) and literary texts throughout Roman antiquity this term was widely used to denote benevolent educative punishment for offenders who were considered not to be conscious of their own wrongdoing, because they were intellectually or morally inferior and therefore able to be shaped through discipline, such as animals, children and slaves (although traditionally not wives).38 By giving families wide powers to apply discipline at home it was hoped that it would not come to the worst outside the home. Misbehaviour of household dependents in the public sphere would bring shame to families, as well as straining the limited resources of civil and criminal prosecution.39 Such notions of what Brent Shaw has called the ‘enclosed household’40 had of course at all times been connected to the legal power of the paterfamilias over his children and his slaves, even though they became more pronounced in late antiquity. However, it is striking how by the sixth century the ideal of the ‘enclosed household’ also had come to encompass wives, with the law preferring punishment at home, rather than divorce and expulsion of the wife, at least for a limited number of offences that directly affected the honour of the marriage union. Victims of Family Violence and Christianity Late antiquity did not only see marked changes in family law, it also saw Christian authorities’ near monopolisation of moral debates on correct social behaviour. Some scholars, most notably Richard Saller, have therefore argued that the late antique discourse on the ‘levelling’ of punishment methods in both legal and moralising sources needs to be seen within a new theological framework. Christianity insisted on everyone’s equal share in humanity’s sinful nature. In consequence, as everyone was a slave in the eyes of God, even free children and wives could now be seen as subject to punishment more commonly associated with slaves, such as flogging.41   Cf. Aristotle, Politics 1.1260b.   Digest 48.19.16.2; 47.10.7.2 (Ulpian) (Corpus Iuris Civlis, vol. 1: 866, 831); Theodosian Code 9.12.2 (326); 9.13.1 (365/368/370/373) (ed. Krueger and Mommsen 1954, pp. 455–6) (slaves and children); Columella, On Agriculture 6.2.11 (on animals); Seneca, Controversies 2.6.5, and On Mercy 2.7.2 (both on slaves and children); Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 2.4.10, and 2.9.2 (children). For more references see Thesaurus Linguae Latina, s.v. ‘emendare’ and ‘emendatio’ [Krohn], vol. 5.2 (Leipzig, 1931–53), pp. 458–67, 454–6. 39   Nathan 2000, p. 148. 40   Shaw 1987, pp. 30–31. 41   Saller 1994, p. 146; also see Garnsey 1997. 37 38

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This understanding of the Christian contribution to the definition of late antique household authority hinges on a reading of the work of one Christian author, Augustine, bishop of Hippo (395–430), one of our best witnesses of late antique family life and family perception.42 However, while in retrospect Augustine may be considered the greatest theologian of his time, his contemporary representativeness is far more debatable. As Leslie Dossey has recently shown, we need to confront him with contemporary Christian thinkers, most notably John Chrysostom, priest in Antioch (386–397) and bishop of Constantinople (398–404), our other main Christian source on the late antique family.43 In doing so, it becomes clear that in Christian moralising sources, as much as in classical ones, there was a debate about the appropriateness of some forms of family violence, even that which was legally allowed, such as the flogging of children or the smacking of wives. We therefore may need to shift the attention away from the role of Christian theology in late antique discourse on family violence to inherited cultural norms, which could however differ across regions or social groups. On the whole, Christian authors shared with the legal norms the notion that rational and formal administration of violence was constitutive to the maintenance of discipline in the household and, in consequence, in human society. Perhaps even more forcefully than the laws, Christian authors promoted an ideal of the ‘enclosed household’. Disorder at home, they argued, could lead to disorder in civic life.44 It was in the household that members of human society learned the rules of dominion and obedience, which could then be reproduced, to the benefit of all, in civic society. Not to discipline particularly a child, John Chrysostom argued, would be to act in a more ‘savage’ (ὡμός) way than barbarians, for it would be difficult to alter behaviour in adulthood. Where discipline was lacking in childhood, adults could end up as criminals. However, where wrongdoing was dealt with at home or between neighbours, there was no need to take it into the public sphere. The state would not have to get involved with criminal behaviour, which was seen as an advantage as public laws were not perceived as having the power to rectify all misbehaviour.45 Christian authors were therefore in tune with the legal precept that family quarrels should be dealt with at home, otherwise the

42

  See Shaw 1987.   Dossey 2008. On Chrysostom and the late antique family see, for example, Scaglioni 1976. 44   John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians 34.3 (PG 61, 289–90). 45   John Chrysostom, Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life 3.3–4 (PG 47, 351–6); see also John Chrysostom, The Widow is Chosen 10 (PG 51, 330); for John Chrysostom’s view on the household as seedbed of civic society and the duty of the paterfamilias to educate accordingly Scaglioni 1976, pp. 379–80. For the understanding of household discipline as protecting from public disorder and criminal prosecution see also Augustine, Sermons 302.18–19 (PL 38, 1392–93) (where Augustine distinguishes between mala occulta and mala publica). 43

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hierarchy of domestic authority would be undermined, but they also express a long-ingrained Christian sentiment to resolve disputes without state interference.46 Yet, for a Christian paterfamilias it was not enough to instil and enforce civic values in his dependents. The household was not only the training ground for the earthly city, but domestic harmony, based on mutual love and the love of God, was a reflection of the heavenly city. Those who had authority (potestas) in the earthly city, and particularly those with authority in the household, had the duty to care for and to guide their subjects to the love of God. For Augustine, the paterfamilias was, in this respect, like a bishop.47 The civic and spiritual duty of the paterfamilias, then, was to maintain domestic harmony and to enforce domestic rules, if necessary through correction of non-compliance. John Chrysostom frequently called this ‘training’ (ῥυθμίζειν), while Augustine, like the laws, at times used the term emendare. This extended firstly, of course, to children and slaves, yet it also included wives.48 After all, according to Paul, Christian husbands had a duty to lead and educate their wives.49 All of this does not mean that Christian authors condoned all forms of violence against household dependents. As we shall see, while the distinction they drew between punishment and abuse also was not measured by the presence or absence of physical violence, they put a particular emphasis on the emotional context in which it was administered, the type of violence administered, and, in particular, on the presence of anger in the day-to-day treatment of wives and slaves. Here it is striking how Christian authors virtually turned around the magistrate’s checklist discussed above, by displaying a real concern about the sort of petty violence that slipped through the legal net, such as shoving, smacking or verbal insult. Roman law, as we have seen, only considered the most flagrant forms of violence against household dependents worthy of attention. By contrast, casual violence, such as shouting or swearing at wives or slaves, spying on wives, enchaining a slave for trivial reasons, striking wives with the bare hand, or pulling a slave’s hair, received

46   On the Christian ideal to deal with misbehaviour within the community see Harries 1999, p. 192. 47  Augustine, Letters 24.2; On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount 1.59; Sermons 90.10; Homilies on the Gospel of John 51.13; City of God 19.14–16. For a detailed discussion of Augustine’s City of God 19.14–16 see Markus 1988, pp. 197–210. John Chrysostom, Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life 3.3–4; Homilies on First Timothy 9.2. In his earliest work, John Chrysostom was pessimistic regarding the ability of parents to fulfil these expectations and recommended giving children to monks, but later he embraced a notion of the household as civic and spiritual preparation cf. Scaglioni 1976, pp. 393–5. 48   John Chrysostom, First Homily on Ephesians 20.7, On Vainglory 20, and see Scaglioni 1976, p. 338; Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 51.13, 10.9; Letters 153.17; Expositions on the Psalms 117.13; on wives in particular: John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians 26.8, Augustine, Letters 246.2. 49   Colossians 3:19.

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particular negative criticism from Christian authors, who at times employed legal terminology (iniuria or ὕβρις, the Greek equivalent of iniuria) to describe them.50 To some extent, this insistence on petty violence may be taken as reflecting real occurrences within late Roman households. As Christian clerics, both Augustine and John Chrysostom, as well as their colleagues throughout the late Roman empire, must have had some direct knowledge of what was going on within their communities.51 No doubt they were also at times called upon by victims and used the platform of preaching as a form of counselling.52 Yet, quite beyond any direct concerns they may have felt for maltreated household dependents, Christian authors’ anxiety about petty violence needs also to be seen as a legacy from classical moralists. They had inherited from these the notion that treating subordinates with contempt and passion – even though allowed by the law – revealed loss of self-control, jeopardised male authority and hence the established social order. The presence of abuse was therefore measured by the role that anger (ira, θυμός) played in the interaction with household dependents. Such admonitions usually concerned treatment of wives and slaves, less that of children. While again this may mean that these two groups were in particular danger of being maltreated (and there is evidence that habitual violence against slaves, but also against wives, was rife in the late Roman household53), it also betrays a particular anxiety about the role of women and slaves as outsiders in the patrilocal Roman family who it may take effort to treat well. This was common throughout antiquity and also explains the law’s insistence on these two social groups, at the expense of children.54 Christian authors echoed such sentiments by arguing that men could feel more anger and outrage at their wives and slaves than at their children, due to the absence of natural love towards them, and hence would submit them to more sustained day-to-day casual violence.55 In its Christian form, the debate about self-control of masters and husbands became enriched with an emphasis on the common humanity of all and the duty of the paterfamilias

  John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians 26.7 (smacking (τύπτειν) of wife is ὕβρις); First Homily on Ephesians 15.3–4, 20.7; Homilies on Genesis 37.5; On Virginity 52; Acts of the Apostles 15; Augustine, Letters 246.2, Expositions on the Psalms 140.9, and 73.16 (swearing at a slave is a form of iniuria); Confessions 9.9. On John Chrysostom’s interest in petty violence see Schroeder 2004, p. 10. 51   On hermeneutical problems regarding the reading of late antique sermons and their relationship to daily life see Leyerle 2000, pp. 247–8; Shaw 1987, p. 5. 52   Shaw 1987, p. 30; Schroeder 2004, pp. 418–19; Arjava 1996, pp. 127–8. 53   On slaves Nathan 2000, pp 169–84; on wives: Dossey 2008, although she argues that there may have been less abuse of wives in the Greek east. 54   Joshel and Murnaghan 1998, pp. 1–3. 55   Dolbeau 1996, n. 21.4, pp. 273–4; John Chrysostom, First Homily on Ephesians 21.1; Homilies on Colossians 10.1; Homilies on First Corinthians 26.8; Acts of the Apostles 15. 50

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to educate, which put a further limit on the arbitrary excess of power.56 With Christianity the notion of passion-management therefore became combined with an emphasis on accountability of such actions to God. As Augustine put it, a paterfamilias was not to take vengeance for vindication (punire) or to arbitrarily rule (coercere), but was to counsel (consulere) and to guide to the correct civic and spiritual behaviour.57 It was precisely trivial and habitual squabbles with wives and slaves that betrayed presence of the wrong passions. Insulting words or smacks, in this respect, could be more harmful for the authority of the punisher than rationally administered blows.58 This idea is most obvious in John Chrysostom who employed, like many classical authors before him, the image of the savage mistress who punished her slaves excessively for the smallest, most quotidian things, such as misplacing jewellery. John Chrysostom warned men not to get involved when women quarrelled with their slaves in this way. Rather than as an indication that such female behaviour was frequent or even that Chrysostom intended to give direct advice to female slave-holders, his admonitions can be read as a warning for the men in his audience how not to behave, if they did not want to be seen as weak or uncontrolled. 59 Yet, we find similar ideas about poor anger control against women and slaves in a daily context also in Augustine, who is sometimes seen as a strict defender of harsh punishment in the household. In a famous anecdote, which he used more than once to explain the absurdity of believing in fate, Augustine described how an astrologer, after he had sold his predictions to his customers, went home and beat up his wife for as little as looking out of the window (not even, as Augustine was quick to emphasise, leaning forward out of the window). Augustine did not condone his behaviour. The astrologer was clearly a pathetic figure, whose actions revealed him as a hypocrite. He beat up his wife for the most trivial daily transgression, while he expected his customers to believe that everything in life (including the behaviour of wives) was due to fate.60 Augustine was also concerned about verbal insults. This becomes clear in his description of his father ‘burning with anger’ (ira fervidus), which caused maltreatment of his mother Monica. Augustine left it open whether his father’s actions amounted to beating (plagae), but they certainly

56   Cooper 2007b, p. 127, Klein 1988, pp. 33, 185–92, Nathan 2000, p. 171; on brotherly love and the master’s duty to educate: Maximus of Turin, Sermons 36.3; Ambrose, On Naboth 20; Augustine, On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount 1:59, and Sermons 90.10. 57  Augustine, Against Cresconius 3.57; On the Morals of the Catholic Church and the Morals of the Manicheans 1.63; cf. Sermons 146.3 (attribution not secure), Letters 104.8 (for the juxtaposition of punire and corrigere). 58  Augustine, Sermons 5.2. 59   John Chrysostom, First Homily on Ephesians 15.3–4; on the motif in classical authors see Clark 1998, pp. 118, 122–3; Harris 2004, p. 135. 60  Augustine, Letters 246.2, Expositions on the Psalms 140.9.

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included verbal abuse.61 The habitual and petty abuse of wives was therefore, also in Augustine’s eyes, objectionable, even though, as we shall see below, he was more pessimistic than John Chrysostom about men’s ability to refrain from such behaviour. Despite the described concerns about petty violence, Christian authors, as in fact preceding classical moralists, did not view violence as negative per se. Rationally administered violence was often seen as necessary for the civic and spiritual training that the household should provide. Where slaves were concerned, even John Chrysostom, who is the Christian author who disapproved most of the violent treatment of slaves, appreciated that despite their human equality with their masters some slaves, particularly the stubborn and rebellious ones, needed to be flogged or enchained, as they were not able to appreciate any other form of non-violent reasoning. The master who put chains onto the feet of his slave girl prone to gossiping in the street was a ‘wise’ man (σώφρων, which also could mean ‘moderate’), according to John Chrysostom.62 The trick was, of course, to do this with the correct emotional attitude. As John Chrysostom put it bluntly for slave-holders: ‘You may rebuke, you may chide, you may do whatever you like, only let it be without anger or passion’.63 Furthermore, flogging should also not be administered for trivial reasons. As in classical literature, unmeasured flogging for being slow, disruptive or disrespectful at dinner was consistently condemned in Christian sermons.64 John Chrysostom also gave some practical advice how to measure abusive physical violence: if the marks of whipping did not disappear within a day and could still be seen by others when a slave accompanied a master to the public baths, the punishment had certainly been too excessive. Whipping should be done not ‘immoderately’ (ἀμέτρως), not for small and trivial failings, but only if slaves were doing ‘harm to their soul’ (ἀλλ’ εἰ τὴν ἑαυτῆς βλάπτει ψυχὴν) otherwise it would be ‘savagery’ (ὠμότης).65 However, not all Christian authors agreed on what form domestic discipline of the freeborn should take. A particularly contentious issue was the flogging of children beyond the age of infancy. When we compare what John Chrysostom and Augustine had to say about violent behaviour towards children we can see that for John the mere use of physical violence was a good indicator that the wrong passions were at play, even where the intention had been to correct behaviour.  Augustine, Confessions 9.9; Clark 1998, pp. 113–14.   John Chrysostom, Against the Jews 8.6, Homilies on Genesis 39.4. 63   John Chrysostom, Acts of the Apostles 15: κἅν ἑπιπλήττῃς, κἁν νουθετῇς, κἁν ὁτιοῦν ποιῇς, ὀργῆς χωρὶς καὶ θυμοῦ, Augustine (Sermons 161.9, On the Spirit and the Letter 33.58, On Free Will 3.27, Expositions on the Psalms 103.s.4.10, Dolbeau 1996, n. 21.7, p. 278) speaks as a matter of fact about cool and reasoned degradation within the slave hierarchy, forced rural labour, and beating administered by a delegate slave. 64  Seneca, On Anger 3.24-5; Ammiamus Marcellinus 28.4.16; Maximus of Turin, Sermons 36.3; Augustine, Sermons 146.3 (attribution not secure). 65   John Chrysostom, First Homily on Ephesians 15.3–4. 61

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John Chrysostom also argued that parental beating (πλήγαι), which may mean formal flogging, as opposed to the less formal (τύπτειν) of children, here probably meant those between seven and fourteen years of age, would be harmful, at least if done all the time and for trivial reasons. A beaten child would only come over time to disrespect a father, who was, in consequence, jeopardising male authority.66 Just threats of corporal punishment were much more effective. Although John Chrysostom perhaps put more emphasis on the aspect of fear as a pedagogical method, his words are similar to those of classical authors, such as PseudoPlutarch, who called beating of children ‘outrage’ (ὕβρις).67 For Augustine, in contrast, using physical violence against children could be an act of love (pietas) and compassion (misericordia), as long as it was without anger (ira). Conversely, refraining from physical violence, yet harbouring anger in one’s heart, would be uncivilised (saevus) and an act of cruelty (crudelis).68 Augustine was so fond of the notion of punishment as an act of love that he advocated strict behaviour of fathers for which it is difficult to find any parallels in classical authors. Most importantly, he did not distinguish between tools appropriate for slaves and appropriate for freeborn, as long as the act was one of love and correction. As is well known, Augustine often explained that sons (pueri or filii) needed to be corrected with the whip (virga) or the rod (flagellum). The offences, for example squandering money, suggest that Augustine was thinking of adolescents.69 Although much of Augustine’s discourse on the treatment of children is clearly framed as a metaphor to explain God’s role within human misery and men’s failure to understand God’s precepts through reason, we have to allow for Augustine’s metaphor to be grounded in reality and he certainly played with his listeners’ and his own childhood memories of harsh castigatio.70 Yet, advocating the flogging of children beyond infancy, while entirely legitimate, would have been abhorred by some classical and Christian authors, as we have just seen, even though it was entirely legal and perhaps the most undisturbed issue of family authority in the history of Roman family law. Late Roman Law and Christian Discourse on Family Violence: Closing the Gap? Late Roman law was geared towards pumping up the position of the father, husband and slave-master. The late Roman paterfamilias continued to have unchecked power over children in potestate (with the exception of killing, but this   John Chrysostom, On Vainglory 30; Leyerle 1997, pp. 256–7.  Pseudo-Plutarch, The Education of Children 12. 68  Augustine, Sermons 5.2, and 114A.5 (dubious attribution). 69   On age distinctions within the vague terminology of pueri see Clark 1997, pp. 12–13; Shaw 1987, pp. 38–40. 70   On the metaphor of the pater flagellans in Augustine see De Bruyn 1999. 66 67

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may never have been part of paternal power anyway) and gained the right to recall emancipated children for the slightest offence. A late Roman husband was granted the right to flog his wife for immoral behaviour as a direct incentive not to divorce her. A late Roman slave-master could violently punish or even kill a slave as long as a slave’s misbehaviour was acknowledged. For a magistrate approached by those victims of family violence lucky enough to have recourse to legal help life became easier, or more difficult, depending on the perspective. Where traditionally the use of particular tools – whips and rods for freeborn people, poison, hooks or similarly unsavoury tools for slaves – had served to determine an abusive expression of anger, rather than punishment, now the emphasis of the law shifted towards a far less measurable intention to ‘correct’ the behaviour of subordinates that was detached from any tools used. It is striking that in late antiquity we can observe, to some extent, the closing of a gap between legal and moral discourse. While in the earlier imperial period moralists had expressed doubts about the appropriateness of the use of some tools of punishment even where legally allowed, in particular the flogging of children beyond infancy, in Augustine’s view this punitive method was permitted as long as it happened ‘without anger’. Anger control remained important for the elite Roman male, but for some it was no longer linked to certain utensils. For Christian authors, the focus of attention shifted more towards the frequency of casual violence in daily routines. However, there is evidence that the emphasis on the use of the right tools for the right people persisted in late antiquity, even where all agreed that, in principle, rational punishment of subordinates was socially and spiritually beneficial. Among the Christian voices, John Chrysostom is certainly the most vocal example of the continuing power of the classical discourse on moderation of those with domestic power and on the use of certain punitive methods, in particular flogging of the freeborn, as an indicator of immoderate violence, even if allowed for by the law. Leslie Dossey has recently argued that the diverging positions on the treatment of wives between John Chrysostom on the one hand, and Augustine and late Roman divorce law in the west on the other, reflect differences in Greek and Roman conceptions of masculinity that hark back to classical antiquity. In the Latin west, in a society that based male virtue on military success, masculinity was traditionally asserted through subordination and violence, while in the Greek east masculinity was linked to notions of reason and restraint, and hence allowed for generosity towards female household members.71 Augustine in fact often referred to a wife as the serva of her husband.72 Yet, as we have seen, Augustine’s view on the treatment of wives did demand reason and restraint on the part of the husband and he classed petty violence against wives, entirely allowed for by the law, as abusive. He acknowledged that social status had to be taken into account when punishing wives, where he explained that if anyone found a wife or slave 71

  Dossey 2008.  Augustine, Confessions 9.9; Sermons 332:4; Expositions on the Psalms 143.6.

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girl behaving immorally, such as by drinking, or going to the theatre, he should adjust punitive methods accordingly, by restraining the wife severely (refrenare, probably isolating her at home), and flogging (verbera) the slave girl.73 It is perhaps significant that in the only instance where Augustine advocated the formal flogging of a wife by her husband for insulting her mother-in-law, the woman in question was a Jew. Although the mother-in-law could have publicly accused the wife of iniuria, Augustine suggested an out-of-court solution for this family conflict, by entrusting her punishment to her husband. The husband agreed to this, perhaps conscious that by Jewish custom he could also have divorced his wife for insulting his mother.74 Augustine’s solution may also have sought to mirror the type of public penalty a civic magistrate might have ordered for a Jewish woman in this period of increasing ecclesiastical hostility and severity in the legal treatment of Jews.75 It may therefore have been her Jewishness, rather than her gender or marital status, which for Augustine justified the flogging. Overall, Augustine’s view of the punishment of wives was still more grounded in classical moral discourse than Justinian’s sixth-century divorce law. Yet, it can be argued that for Augustine the debate about punishment and abuse of wives or any other household member was altogether futile. It is in the confidence in man’s ability to live up to the expectations of reason and restraint where the main difference lies between Augustine and John Chrysostom. In Augustine’s view no man could accomplish this. All human behaviour was sinful and could only be abusive, because it only had vindication and material gain at heart. Yet, the principle of domestic peace had to be protected, however saevus the behaviour of the one in power. Human life was not possible without order, which, according to Augustine, must be self-evident to all. Even the thief, though saevus and punishing his wife and children for vindication, knew that domestic peace could not exist, if he was not in control of his household. Order started with hierarchy at home.76 Ultimately, the aim of human life was not determined by human behaviour, but by God, who could turn abusive behaviour into a form of spiritual correction. Using the example of his mother Monica, who had been habitually abused by his father, Augustine knew that enduring such abuse in the long term had been to Monica’s advantage.77 Her decision not to rebel and to take this situation outside the household had maintained social order in this world, however imperfect. Both John Chrysostom and Augustine thought that petty violence against a wife could only be considered abuse in this world, yet for Augustine it had to have some role in God’s plan, the nature of which was yet to be revealed. This certainly  Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 51.13, 10.9.   Mishna, Ketubbot 7.6. 75  Augustine, Letters* 8; on this case see Lenski 2001; although Jews of a propertyholding status traditionally were exempt from corporal punishment this privilege gradually became eroded in late antiquity, cf. Juster 1914, p. 261. 76  Augustine, City of God 19.12. 77  Augustine, Confessions 9.9. 73

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reinforced male dominance in the household, and may be due to a more ‘Latin’ outlook on male authority, but it also did not grant the male head of the household the unlimited right to use violence. Potentially ‘ethnic’ differences of wife abuse need to be distinguished from how the treatment of other family members was conceptualised. As this chapter has shown, John Chrysostom and Augustine also differed, perhaps even more forcefully than on their position of wives, on their discussion of the punishment of children, where again Augustine took the more severe view. Violence against children, however, has to be seen as a separate issue than that against wives and slaves, the margins to the family axis, as it were. As a cultural norm violence against children is usually not linked to notions of masculinity, but rather seems to be prevalent in hierarchically structured communities that value conformity and loyalty as tools of social advancement, rather than individuality and autonomy.78 This may explain why some form of child beating is still legitimate in current western societies, while wife beating is not. While again such theories may be applied beneficially to the differences in eastern and western educational values (where the Romans may have misunderstood the Greek point of paideia),79 it is also important not to lose perspective on the more immediate cultural background of Christian writers, not to mention any uniquely individual experiences they may have had. As Gillian Clark puts it as a succinct point on Augustine’s and John Chrysostom’s social learning, family life in the small towns of North Africa was not like family life in cosmopolitan Antioch.80 While regional differences are important, ‘class’ played a role too, and many Christian bishops, certainly Augustine, had a decidedly provincial and middling background.81 Their background, in turn, makes them and their texts comparable to late Roman emperors and late Roman laws. In fact, as Judith Evans Grubbs has argued, the emphasis of late Roman emperors, particularly Constantine, on the patriarchal family and ancient family mores can be seen to reflect their own provincial and old-fashioned, rather than aristocratic or cosmopolitan values.82 Seen in this light, John Chrysostom, raised in a more elite family, could afford the high-flying ideals of leniency, particularly towards children, while Augustine and some late Roman emperors, raised from lower backgrounds with expectations of social advancement, could not.83 Yet, what unites all these scholarly approaches is their agreement that Christianity was not instrumental in bringing a new and more violent concept of family about. Rather, inherited but varying concepts of patriarchy were beneficially, yet differently, incorporated into descriptions of the relationship between God, paterfamilias and household subordinates. 78

    80   81   82   83   79

Petersen et al. 1992. Laes 2005, p. 82. Clark 1997, p. 25. Arjava 1996, pp. 127–32; Evans Grubbs 1995, pp. 333–4. Evans Grubbs 1995, pp. 338–9. On John Chrysostom’s family background see Kelly 1995, p. 4.

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One thing is certainly clear: legal and moral norms of punishment in the household tell us much about cultural anxieties about domestic power and antisocial behaviour, but they tell us very little about the experiences of the victims, or indeed the frequency of family violence. The sources are largely normative, not descriptive. They are not about victims of family violence; they are about the perpetrators whose duties of household management by late antiquity had become one of cosmic magnitude. As Augustine explained with reference to slavery, although original sin had created inequality between men, it was masters, not slaves, who shouldered the heavier burden, as they assumed responsibility for the care of others and for the maintenance of domestic harmony.84 Christian writers took a particular interest in specifying the parameters of this care and here addressed issues, such as petty violence against women and slaves, which fell through the net of legal and indeed much traditional moral discourse. Yet the focus of their attention was to protect the punisher, not the punished, from endangering their soul. For the slave, John Chrysostom said to the men and women in his audience, ‘the blow is on the body or the clothes, for you it is on the soul’.85 The absence or presence of anger in punishment continued to make a difference for judging the morality or legal responsibility of the punisher. For the punished, pain will have been the same and the late Roman household a very isolated and bleak place indeed. Bibliography Primary Sources Ambrose, On Naboth, ed. C. Schenkl, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 32.2 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1897). Ammianus Marcellinus, History, ed. and trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). Aristotle, Politics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). Augustine, Against Cresconius, PL 43. Augustine, City of God, ed. B. Dombart, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 48 (Turnhout: Editores pontifici, 1955). Augustine, Confessions, ed. L. Verheijen, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27 (Turnhout: Editores pontifici, 1981). Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, ed. E. Dekkers, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 38–40, 3 vols (Turnhout: Editores pontifici, 1956).  Augustine, City of God 19.15–16.   Cf. John Chrysostom, Acts of the Apostles 15: ἐχείνῳ μὲν γὰρ περὶ τὸ σῶμα καὶ περὶ τὴν ἐσθῆτα ἡ πληγὴ, σοὶ δὲ περὶ τὴν ψυχήν. 84 85

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Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, ed. R. Willems, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 36, 2nd edn (Turnhout: Editores pontifici, 1990). Augustine, Letters, PL 33. Augustine, Letters* (Recently Brought to Light), ed. J. Divjak, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 88 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981). Augustine, On Free Will, ed. W.M. Green, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 29 (Turnhout: Editores pontifici, 1970). Augustine, On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, PL 34. Augustine, On the Morals of the Catholic Church and the Morals of the Manicheans, ed. J.B. Bauer, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992). Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, PL 44. Augustine, Sermons, PL 38–39. Augustine, Sermones inediti, PL 46. Columella, On Agriculture, trans. E.S. Forster and Edward Hefner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). Corpus Iuris Civilis, vol. 1: Institutes, Digest, vol. 2: Justinianic Code, vol. 3: Novels, ed. P. Krueger, T. Mommsen, R. Schoell and G. Kroell (Berlin: Weidmann, 1928–59). Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani, ed. S. Riccobono et al., 3 vols (Florence: G. Barbera, 1940-43). Greek New Testament, ed. K. Aland, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: American Bible Society, 1966). John Chrysostom, Acts of the Apostles, PG 60. John Chrysostom, Against the Jews, PG 48. John Chrysostom, Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life, PG 47. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Colossians, PG 62. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, PG 62. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, PG 61. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Timothy, PG 62. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, PG 53. John Chrysostom, On Vainglory, ed. Anne-Marie Malingrey (Paris: Cerf, 1972). John Chrysostom, On Virginity, PG 48. John Chrysostom, The Widow is Chosen, PG 51. Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. 6, ed. B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt (London: London Egypt Exploration Society, 1908). Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Maximus of Turin, Sermons (Sermonum collectio antiqua), ed. A. Mutzenbecher, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 23 (Turnhout: Editores pontifici, 1962). Mishna, trans. D. Correns, Die Mischna. Das grundlegende enzyklopädische Regelwerk rabbinischer Tradition (Wiesbaden: Matrix, 2005).

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Pseudo-Plutarch, The Education of Children, trans. F.C. Babitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Seneca, Controversies, trans. M. Winterbottom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). Seneca, On Anger, ed. trans. John Basore, Moral Essays, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). Seneca, On Mercy, ed. trans. John Basore, Moral Essays, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). Theodosian Code, ed. P. Krueger and Th. Mommsen, Theodosiani Libri XVI (Berlin: Weidmann, 1954). Secondary Sources Arjava, Antti (1996), Women and Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Arjava, Antti (1998), ‘Paternal Power in Late Antiquity’, JRS, 88: 147–65. Beaucamp, Joëlle (1990), Le statut de la femme à Byzanze (4e–7e siècle), 2 vols (Paris: De Boccard). Brown, Peter (1992), Power and Persuasion. Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Buckland, William (1908), The Roman Law of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Clark, Gillian (1997), ‘The Fathers and the Children’, in Diana Wood (ed.), Church and Childhood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), pp. 1–27. Clark, Patricia (1998), ‘Women, Slaves, and the Hierarchies of Domestic Violence: The Family of St Augustine’, in Joshel and Murnaghan (eds) (1998), pp. 109– 30. Cooper, Kate (2007a), ‘Closely Watched Households: Visibility, Exposure and Private Power in the Roman domus’, P&P, 197: 3–33. Cooper, Kate (2007b), The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). De Bruyn, Theodore (1999), ‘Flogging a Son: The Emergence of the Pater Flagellans in Latin Christian Discourse’, JECS, 7: 249–90. Dolbeau, F. (1996), Vingt-six sermons au peuple d’Afrique (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes). Dossey, Leslie (2008), ‘Wife Beating and Manliness in Late Antiquity’, P&P, 199: 3–40. Evans Grubbs, Judith (1995), Family and Law in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine’s Marriage Legislation (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gaddis, Michael (2005), ‘There is no Crime for those who have Christ’: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Garnsey, Peter (1970), Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Garnsey, Peter (1997), ‘Sons, Slaves and Christians’, in Beryl Rawson and Paul Weaver (eds), The Roman Family in Italy. Status, Sentiment, Space (Canberra, Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 101–21. Harries, Jill (1999), Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Harries, Jill (2007), Law and Crime in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Harris, William V. (2001), Restraining Rage. The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Harris, William V. (2004), ‘The Rage of Women’, in S. Braund and G.W. Most (eds), Ancient Anger. Perspectives from Homer to Galen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Jackson, Nicky (ed.) (2007), Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence (New York: Routledge). Joshel, Sandra R., and Murnaghan, Sheila (1998), ‘Introduction’, in Joshel and Murnaghan (eds) (1998), pp. 1–22. Joshel, Sandra R. and Murnaghan, Sheila (eds) (1998), Women and Slaves in GrecoRoman Culture: Differential Equations (London, New York: Routledge). Juster, Jean (1914), Les Juifs dans l’empire romain, vol. 2 (New York: Burt Franklin). Kaser, Max (1971 and 1975), Das römische Privatrecht, 2 vols (München: C.H. Beck). Kelly, John N.D. (1995), Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom-Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press). Klein, Richard (1988), Die Sklaverei in der Sicht der Bischöfe Ambrosius und Augustinus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner). Krause, Jens-Uwe (2004), Kriminalgeschichte der Antike (München: C.H. Beck). Laes, Christian (2005), ‘Child Beating in Antiquity: Some Reconsiderations’, in Katariina Mustakallio et al. (eds), Hoping for Continuity: Childhood, Education and Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandae), pp. 75–89. Lenski, Noel (2001), ‘Evidence for the Audientia episcopalis in the New Letters of Augustine’, in Ralph Mathisen (ed.), Law, Society and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 83–97. Leyerle, Blake (1997), ‘Appealing to Children’, JECS, 5: 243–70. Leyerle, Blake (2000), ‘John Chrysostom, Sermons on City Life’, in Richard Valantasis (ed.), Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 247–62. Lovato, Andrea (1994), Il carcere nel diritto romano dai Severi a Giustiniano (Bari: Cacucci). Markus, Robert (1988), Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Nathan, Geoffrey (2000), The Family in Late Antiquity: The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (London: Routledge).

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Perry, Donna L. (2009), ‘Fathers, Sons and the State: Discipline and Punishment in a Wolof Hinterland’, Cultural Anthropology, 24: 33–67. Petersen, Larry R., et al. (1992), ‘Social Structure, Socialization Values and Disciplinary Techniques: A Cross-Cultural Analysis’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 23: 39–54. Saller, Richard (1994), Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Saller, Richard (1998), ‘Symbols of Gender and Status Hierarchies in the Roman Household’, in Joshel and Murnaghan (eds) (1998), pp. 85–91. Scaglioni, Carlo (1976), ‘Ideale coniugale e familiare nel Crisostomo’, in R. Cantalamessa (ed.), Etica sessuale e matrimonio nel cristianesimo delle origini (Milano: Vita e Pensiero), pp. 273–422. Schroeder, Joy A. (2004), ‘John Chrysostom’s Critique of Spousal Violence’, JECS, 12: 413–42. Shaw, Brent (1987), ‘The Family in Late Antiquity: The Experience of Augustine’, P&P, 115: 3–51. Shaw, Brent (2001), ‘Raising and Killing Children: Two Roman Myths’, Mnemosyne, 54: 31–77. Strauss, Murray A. (2001), Beating the Devil Out of Them. Corporal Punishment in American Families and its Effects on Children (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers). Thesaurus Linguae Latina, vol. 5.2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1931–53). Treggiari, Susan (1991), Roman Marriage. Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

APPENDIX: A late Roman magistrate’s hypothetical ‘checklist’ on the occurrence of iniuria (ὕβρις) in the household and the possibilities to allow for legal action

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Chapter 3

Family Relations and the Socialisation of Children in the Autobiographical Narratives of Late Antiquity1 Ville Vuolanto

Introduction The starting point for the present chapter is the recent discussion on the history of family and children in late antiquity. While this theme has aroused increasing attention, scholarly interest has mainly concentrated on issues such as family structure, attitudes and responsibilities of parents towards children, conceptions of childhood, and formal education. Scholars of both the ancient world and early Christianity have been interested in ideals of childhood and children’s status in society and their possible change with the rise of Christianity. The view of childhood has been rather parent-centred, and analysis has mainly focused on the normative sources, such as tracts and sermons of ecclesiastical writers, and legal material. Children’s roles and responsibilities in family dynamics, parent–child relations from the point of view of the children, and childhood experience have not been the subject of much research.2 The focus has been on the history of childhood, not on the history of children. Thus, as my aim is to study representations of childhood socialisation and family dynamics in late antiquity, this would introduce a new approach to the study of late antique childhood. For the source material, I use autobiographical texts dating from the late fourth to mid fifth century, which, rather surprisingly, have seldom been used as sources for family history as a group. These texts reveal their late antique authors at the crossroads of two sets of values: firstly, there was the public role of the traditional Graeco-Roman male elite: they needed to show themselves as family men, that is, concerned about their family background and tradition, eager to contribute to the family honour and renown, and capable of running their household in a proper   I would like to thank the Academy of Finland for financial support, and Institutum Romanum Finlandiae for a place to do the major part of the work. 2   See especially Shaw 1987; Nathan 2000; Bakke 2005; Horn and Martens 2009; Evans Grubbs 2009; and now the articles in Horn and Phenix (eds) 2009. On recent work in the history of children in antiquity, see further Aasgaard 2006; Harlow, Laurence and Vuolanto 2007, with Vuolanto 2010a. 1

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way. Secondly, however, in late antiquity there developed a pervasive cultural ideal of an intellectual (a philosopher, Christian or pagan), devoted to his or her art (teknee) and intellectual pursuits (logos) in a way that would exclude any interference on the part of family life. The texts used in the present chapter result from the clash of these conflicting sets of values; some authors, like Gregory of Nazianzus, were more aware of and explicit about the nature and origin of this discourse, while others, like Paulinus of Pella, tried to combine the competing demands with less reflection. Autobiography and Socialisation: Limitations and Possibilities Not only do the autobiographical writings inevitably advance some specific ideas and values of their authors, but even more importantly, they participate in elaborate discourses using different narrative strategies for self-promotion.3 Moreover, the autobiographical writing of late antiquity was heavily influenced by three interlinked aims which would have taken precedence over any truth claims or unmasking of the self which would nowadays be connected with literate ‘memoirs’ or ‘self portraits’: ancient autobiography was preoccupied with the preservation of memory, with portraying oneself as an exemplary figure, and with justifying some quite precise deeds or thought systems.4 Accordingly, Libanius is constantly depicting himself as the favourite of Fate (Tykhe), with a tendency to self-heroisation.5 Both the autobiographical poems of Gregory of Nazianzus and his orations aim at explaining and rewriting his past deeds, first, as a fugitive local cleric and, later, as a church politician and patriarch forced to retire. Moreover, in Gregory’s narration, the typical features of ancient autobiography are combined with the rhetoric of Christian sainthood. Thus, he aimed at representing himself as a saintly figure, and, to use the words of Neil McLynn, he became ‘a self-made holy man’.6 The same intention is clearly visible in the Religious History of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, in which the author appears as a virtuous and authoritative eyewitness and observer in his stories about lives of Syrian ascetics, interweaving himself and

3   For autobiographical writing in antiquity, see especially the papers collected in Baslez, Hoffmann and Pernot (eds) 1993, with Starowieyski 2004. 4   See especially Follet 1993, p. 326 (conclusions of the volume); and Hadas–Lebel 1993, p. 127, on specific characteristics of the Graeco-Roman autobiographers as child prodigies, philosophical seekers, heroes evading dangers (caused by diseases, shipwrecks or other disasters), and, most importantly, virtuous individuals perfected by god(s) taking special care of the writers in question as ‘the chosen ones’. 5   Schouler 1993, pp. 317–19. 6   McLynn 1998; for Gregory’s writing as apology, see Bernardi 1993, pp. 159–61. See also Elm 2009, pp. 289, 295–300.

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his life as a child and a young man in the biographies of these living saints.7 On the other hand, Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions deals only with those instances in his life through which specific theological points and ideological statements can be made; he is scrutinising the significance of sin and the guidance of God in human life more than observing his own actions as an individual.8 The same can be said about the figure of the young John appearing as the main protagonist in the frame narrative in John Chrysostom’s On Priesthood. Thus, the autobiographical nature of these narratives should be approached with caution. Rather, there is a continuum from anecdotes consisting of possibly first-hand experience, to the exemplary stories using the author himself and his family members as the main protagonists. Unfortunately, the mixing ratio for these ingredients is unknown to the modern scholar, and the texts are far from being transparent for modern social historical reading.9 However, whereas it is questionable what is the exact relationship between these stories and the actual living conditions of the specific children they are supposed to refer to, they have to depict a childhood plausible for their audience. Thus, they help to understand not only contemporary values but also social practices; even to find some traces of the authors’ own experience on living as a child is not impossible, even if complicated. Far from claiming that these texts describe facts about certain childhoods which could somehow be reconstructed, I rather aim to scrutinise what these literary representations of the self can tell us about social history and childhood socialisation. Even if it turns out to be futile to make any specific psycho-historical analyses, for example, based on Augustine’s depiction of his childhood, at least his depiction should be a reliable source for seeing what kinds of forces an adult late antique elite male bishop sees at play during the period of childhood. Beyond the Christian clerics and bishops, the material for the present chapter includes texts authored by Ausonius, Paulinus of Pella and Libanius, the first two Christian lay men of elite background, the last mentioned a non-Christian teacher of rhetoric. Paulinus of Pella’s Thanksgiving and Libanius’ Autobiography serve as points of comparison with the narratives of the Christian intellectuals. Writing about one’s family is inevitably also writing about oneself; sometimes this is accomplished with direct references to self, sometimes as a part of promotion of oneself through one’s family members, as in praising one’s siblings’ good birth (eugeneia).10 Therefore, I have supplemented my primary source material with some texts which are not ‘autobiographical’ as such, as they deal with close family members. With Ausonius’ texts, Genethliacos (Letter 21) and Parentalia, which   See Urbainczyk 2002, esp. pp. 130, 140–42. I am currently writing an article on Theodoret as a self-made saint. 8   Fredouille 1993, pp. 168–9, 177–8. See also O’Donnell 2005, pp. 88–9, on Augustine’s self-promotion. 9   As Burrus 2006, p. 168, rightly notes. 10   See Bernardi 1993, p. 155, and Elm 2009, pp. 290–91, with Van Dam 2003, pp. 110 and 112, on both Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. 7

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celebrate his relatives, I also make use of the biography of Macrina by her brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus’ funeral orations on his relatives.11 Therefore, it is also possible to draw some comparisons between girls and boys. The sources span from the early 370s to the mid fifth century. It should be noticed that all the writers here involved were male members of prosperous families of the local or imperial elites.12 My specific approach to these childhood narratives is to search for traces of different factors in social interaction and, especially, in socialisation processes. I focus on three main questions: firstly, I address the question of how the processes of socialisation are depicted: which factors are mentioned, and what is their relative importance? Secondly, I am interested in the ways in which the authors represent family relationships during their own or their family member’s minority. Who is mentioned, and in which contexts? At the most general level, I am interested in how much can be deduced about children’s actual enculturation processes to the practices and values of the community in question. Continuity within a community depends not only on its biological renewal and economical survival, but also on the transmission of its cultural and social norms and customs to succeeding generations. This socialisation begins right from birth, childhood as a whole being the key period in the development of personality, and in learning and absorbing the cultural rules. In modern childhood studies, the use of the socialisation theory has been criticised as a method by which the child is reduced to a passive object, created, measured and manipulated by others: the child is being socialised.13 Most recent childhood studies have, however, focused on socialisation not as an automatic process, and children have been seen as agents on their own, active in their growing and learning processes, transforming and renewing the cultural heritage they were born into.14 In contrast with modern studies, the socialisation of children in everyday life, through the daily interaction of family members, has received only marginal attention in the study of Roman and early Christian children, as the interest of studies dealing with the upbringing of children has mostly been in formal education, with children seen mostly as

  For these texts by the two Gregories see also the chapters by Nathan Howard and Fotis Vasileiou in this volume. 12   Augustine was from a prosperous family, and his father belonged to the curial class (Shaw 1987, pp. 8–10, with O’Donnell 2005, p. 10); Theodoret was from a prominent and prosperous family (Urbainczyk 2002, pp. 21 and 150); Gregory of Nyssa’s parents belonged to the local elites (Van Dam 2003, pp. 15–18); Gregory of Nazianzus’ father was a member of the local city council and later a bishop (Van Dam 2003, p. 41); Ausonius and his grandchild Paulinus of Pella belonged to the senatorial class (Evans Grubbs 2009, pp. 202–3, 217); Libanius was a descendant of high elite families, and his father was a member of the city council (Schouler 2002, p. 152). 13   James and James 2004, pp. 26–7; Alanen 1990. 14   See for example James and James 2004, pp. 23–7 and 37–40. 11

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passive recipients and professionals depicted as socialising agents.15 The agency of children and the experience of childhood in antiquity is an even more marginalised viewpoint.16 True enough, in ancient sources the direct experiences of children cannot be easily found. There are no interviews or diaries to use and any direct marks (such as toys, writings and drawings) are rare, if at all available. As a result, direct application of agency based theories is very difficult.17 However, the questions and viewpoints derived from this approach are readily applicable to the study of these periods: socialisation is a concept directing attention to historically dependent social mechanisms and mentalities. By looking at patterns and forms of socialisation it is possible to scrutinise how communities worked and lived, cultural continuity and changes, and the freedom for action of an individual within the framework of the local community and culture at large. I have divided the discussion of the autobiographical texts by different actors present in the processes of childhood socialisation. In this, I have started with the categorisation of modern sociological studies, which have identified family and parents, schooling, peer groups and mass media as the central socialising agents.18 Naturally, in a pre-modern society like the late Roman empire, these categories take a different form; most importantly religious practices, public spectacles and work (among the lower classes) taking the role of media as agents socialising children in public life and values.19 In the following, I will start with schooling and religion, and then consider the representations of work, play and peer groups. After that, I will continue to study the influence of parents, and finally that of relatives and other household members (that is, of those other people living in the same estate or house, under the authority of the household head. This would include slaves, paid workers and educators, resident freedmen and possibly other clients). Before presenting my conclusions, I will deal briefly with the role of storytelling in the narratives. Schooling and Religion Literate education was, naturally, a central element in the lives of young elite boys. As learning became an important element in the future lives of the authors, these autobiographical texts often mention different elements of the curriculum – as boys they were supposed to know the basic canon of Latin and Greek authors in 15   See however Harders 2010; Prescendi 2010; Vuolanto 2010b; Horn and Martens 2009; Rawson 2003, pp. 153–7 and 269–80. 16   See Aasgaard 2009; Rawson 2003, pp. 269–80, with Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011. 17   See however Aasgaard 2009. 18   See for example Handel (ed.) 2006. 19   See Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011.

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their original language.20 Two themes related to socialisation, however, emerge from the texts. Firstly, different kinds of educators and teachers appear all the time as background figures, unfortunately with little specific information about their influence. Gregory of Nazianzus refers to his seemingly long-time pedagogue and guide, Carterius, even having followed him to Athens when he started his studies.21 Libanius mentions in passing his paedagogus;22 Paulinus of Pella mentions the magistri who taught him Latin and Greek, and a Grammaticus;23 Ausonius mentions the magister of his grandchild correcting and training his reading and pronunciation, and, on another occasion, seems to refer to his own experiences in urging his grandson not to be afraid of the stern discipline maintained by the teachers.24 Augustine also mentions his paedagogus and magister, remembering his bad experiences in his teachers’ clutches.25 This leads to the second theme: the main thing these authors remember of their schooling time, or, at least, the main point they wished to transmit to their future readers, was the constant threat of violence,26 leading to problems in learning and antipathy for their early studies. The narratives of Augustine and Ausonius on this issue are well known, both highlighting the acts of violence, flogging and beating, stripes, rod and birches. Paulinus of Pella also mentions his problems with learning Latin, albeit without mentioning violent teachers, and Libanius claims that before his conversion to rhetoric, he neglected his studies but, unlike in the cases of Augustine or Ausonius, his pedagogues could not intervene because of the lenience of his mother.27 What has often escaped the attention of modern scholars is the place given to the power of teachers and the fear of pain in these narratives: it overshadows all the other issues related to schooling.28 In all, however, schooling comprised only a part of the education of the protagonists of the autobiographical depictions. Writing in the 440s, Theodoret of Cyrrhus tells us that as a child he was once a week sent to Peter the Galatian,   See for instance Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 68–80, 117; Augustine, Confessions 1.14.23. Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 3: she was not educated with the stock Greek authors, but by reading biblical literature. I will not dwell on this discussion further, as the particulars of the curriculum as such do not tell us about childhood dynamics or experience. See further especially Morgan 1998. 21   Palatine Anthology 8.142–6. 22   Libanius, Autobiography 12. 23   Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 68–80, 117. 24   Ausonius, Epistle 21 (Genethliacos), 1–5; Ausonius, Epistle 22, poem to Ausonius the younger, lines 12–28. 25   Augustine, Confessions 1.9.30; 1.9.14–15; 1.14.23. 26   For domestic violence see the chapter by Julia Hillner in this volume. 27   Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 75–8; Libanius, Autobiography 4–5 and 12. Fear of punishment was also for Jerome one of the most characteristic features of his own childhood: Jerome, Apology against Rufinus 1.30. 28   See however Laes 2005. 20

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a hermit living on the mountains near Antioch, to obtain his blessing. He relates that he often sat on the knees of Peter, who gave him bread with raisins. Even if we, naturally, cannot know for sure if this idyllic recollection indeed represents an actual event taken place – as Theodoret programmatically highlights his nearness to the ascetics – the scene with homely nearness and sweetness of raisins is a perfect example of how a child would end up having a positive view of a certain lifestyle and values. Nor was Peter the only ascetic contact he had, as he claims he frequently met another hermit, Macedonius, to have his blessing and listen to his teachings during his childhood. Theodoret also joined his mother to see the hermit Aphrahat, and the ascetics visited their home at least occasionally.29 These ‘pilgrimages’ to the ascetics continued in his youth: in the early 410s when Theodoret was a teenage student, and served as a reader in Antioch, he visited many ascetics: from the hermit Zeno he sought advice, and discussed asceticism with him for a long time. He also relates that he, along with some other pilgrims, lived for a week with the ascetic David.30 Theodoret consistently depicts his childhood and youth as surrounded by holy people – and at the age of 22 or so, after his parents had died, he sold his patrimony and entered a monastery. Like Theodoret, many other children joined their parents as they visited the nearby ascetic holy men. These journeys, small-scale local pilgrimages to see the living saints, were an important part of the everyday religiosity in late antiquity – a practice that John Chrysostom was eager to promote in Antioch in the late fourth century.31 In the other childhood stories it is also commonplace to claim that mothers had given the basic religious and moral education to the child at home, but without much further detail. Only Paulinus of Pella gives equal credit for his education to his father and mother: almost immediately after having learned the alphabet, his parents made sure he would learn ‘to shun the ten special marks of ignorance’ and to avoid vices. Clearly, in the early Christian context, the religious education of the children was not institutionalised, and was seen as the duty of the parents, especially the mother.32 29   Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.4 and 13.18 (Macedonius played a great part in the birth of Theodoret, as he was the hermit who interceded when the father-to-be of Theodoret prayed for progeny); Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.14 and 13.3. 30   Aphahat: Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 8.15; Aphahat died most probably in AD 407, when Theodoret was 13 or 14. Zeno: Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 12.4. David: Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 4.10. On these visits, see also Horn 2007, p. 449. 31   See for example John Chrysostom, Homily 14.13 (On First Timothy); Homily 72.4 (On Matthew), with Frank 2000. 32   Mother: Augustine, Confessions 3.4.8; Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 3; Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.1.445–54; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 7.5–8. I will return to the issue of maternal influence below. Parents: Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 60–67, 89–97; see also Basil of Caesarea, Letters 204.6 and 223.3, on the influence of his mother Emmelia and paternal grandmother Macrina on his religious upbringing as a

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It is somewhat curious that Theodoret’s story is ultimately unique with its many details related to religious participation in childhood. For example, none of the authors depict themselves attending the liturgy in their childhood, even if it is clear that many of them, like Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine, had taken part in it regularly. Augustine, even if he was not baptised, was a catechumen since infancy, and, throughout his childhood, a member of the local Christian community, even if not a member of the Church.33 Augustine is also exceptional in recalling praying to God, that he would not be flogged in school. He claims that he had learned to pray from observing other people doing so, stressing that nobody, not even his mother, had specifically taught him it.34 The specific references to other religious practices are referred to only when the people are older. Augustine, for example, refers to himself as attending the mass regularly at the age of 19 (but he is not referring to it as if it was a new thing in his life), and Gregory of Nazianzus refers to his fervent prayers in the midst of a terrible sea storm.35 Like the motif of violence in schooling, the motif of serious illness and other mortal dangers appears often linked with the religious practices and life choices in the autobiographical texts. Issues of health, or more exactly, the lack of it, brought children frequently into contact with the religious life and saints, as the healing stories concerning Theodoret’s household show. Already as a child, Theodoret learned to rely on the healing power of the ascetics and their relics.36 In Gregory of Nazianzus’ case his conversion – as he told it – was a result of a mortal danger he experienced on a stormy sea, and, consequently, led to his baptism, and functioned as a seal in his narrative on different kinds of divine favours in his life.37 Augustine, boy (especially his grandmother telling him stories about Gregory Thaumaturgus). For (the informal character of) religious education in the early Roman empire, see Prescendi 2010, pp. 76–9; Horn 2009, pp. 109–10. For mothers in charge of religious education, see also Nathan 2000, pp. 149–55, even if he exaggerates his point. After all, there are indications of fathers taking part in the religious education of children – Jerome, Letter 128, on the religious education of the girl Pacatula is, after all, addressed to her father (cf. Nathan 2000, p. 149). Nathan also claims that the mother was in charge of Paulinus of Pella’s moral education, even if Paulinus’ text gives equal appreciation to both parents (Nathan 2000, pp. 151, 153). Also, the claim of Nathan 2000, p. 144, that religious education was given even outside of the home is misplaced for the fourth–fifth century contexts. 33   See especially Augustine, Confessions 1.11.17; also Augustine, Confessions 6.4.5. See O’Donnell 2005, p. 53. People commonly attended the liturgy when minors: see for example Horn 2009, pp. 135–6, with Horn and Martens 2009, pp. 292–4. 34   Augustine, Confessions 1.9.14–15. See Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 3, on Macrina as a child reciting the Psalter on all possible occasions, and rising in the night for prayer. For children and family prayer, see also Horn and Martens 2009, pp. 295–6. 35   Augustine, Confessions 3.3.5 and 3.4.7; Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.1.308 and 320; 2.1.11.121–209. 36   Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.15 and 13.16, with Horn 2007, p. 447. 37   Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.1.308 and 320; 2.1.11.121–209; see Elm 2009, pp. 289–91, on Gregory’s self-portrait as a predestined divine messenger of the Logos.

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in turn, writes that when he was still a child, he was taken suddenly ill with stomach pains, and it was thought that he would die. On that occasion, he himself begged for baptism, but, as he soon recovered, the baptism was postponed.38 A serious fever affecting Paulinus of Pella at the age of 15 had more dramatic consequences: as his body was enfeebled, the physicians recommended that continuous gaiety and amusement would do him good, instead of studying. As a result, Paulinus began to neglect his studies and instead entertained himself especially by hunting with his father. His parents, delighted with his recovery, had no objection to this.39 To be sure, the (auto)biographical genre required a dramatic change to take place so that one’s real self and vocation could be able to shine forth. Moreover, these often somewhat miraculous stories of recovery and deliverance from danger could easily be utilised to highlight divine intervention in the lives of the protagonists in question, and thus to include reference to being chosen by God or Fate.40 However, these stories also show the continual presence of death in the lives of children, and how the experience of this reality could mould the subsequent ideas about oneself and the way in which one’s place in society is represented.41 In analysing the effect of religious practices on socialisation, there should be made a separation between socialisation into religion, and a more general concept of socialisation through religion into societal values and norms. Thus, for example, through frequent visits to the ‘holy men of the family’, Theodoret was, unquestionably, well socialised into the ascetic forms of Christianity, and in retrospect it is not surprising that he entered a monastery (even if he did not stay there long) and an ecclesiastical career. However, on the other hand, it is clear that through the kind of religious participation Theodoret relates, he was able to take part in community life and already as a child negotiate the mountains and outskirts of Antioch, meeting people independently. The importance of religion in socialisation was not limited to children who ended up in ecclesiastical careers or chose not to marry.

  Augustine, Confessions 1.11.17.   Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 121–53. 40   For Augustine, the real turning point was, naturally, his baptism – thus, in his 38

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narrative his religiosity before that was not to be stressed (see also O’Donnell 2005, p. 53). Libanius in his autobiography constantly presents himself as a special favourite, even elect, of Fate. For him, the death of his father and his ‘conversion’ to rhetoric was the decisive turning point (see Schouler 1993, pp. 317–19). Theodoret’s birth was also a double miracle (as a response to the prayers, and as surviving the danger of miscarriage) and he was ‘ordained’ by the hermits (see especially Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.15, with Urbainczyk 2002, pp. 138–42); similarly, Gorgonia’s miraculous recovery from her illness and the cart accident were signs of her holiness (see Burrus 2006, pp. 162–3). 41   On childhood mortality see also the chapter by Mary Harlow and Tim Parkin in this volume.

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Work, Play and Peer Groups If religious practices had little space in the autobiographies, other activities with involvement in the public space during childhood and early youth are seldom mentioned either. Not surprisingly, elite boys did not do much housework – Theodoret mentions carrying food from his mother to the hermits on the mountain, but this was more part of his religious upbringing than work. For girls, the situation might have been somewhat different. Augustine, for example, mentions that the parents of his mother Monica used to send her to the cellar with a servant girl to draw wine from the cask ‘as was the custom’.42 Similarly, Macrina is depicted as being engaged in household tasks and being proficient in woolwork before she reached the age of 12.43 In all these instances, however, there was no need for a working contribution to the household, as the families were prosperous enough to have servants to take care of the necessary things. However, these instances show that parents in late antiquity used little tasks to introduce their children to the workings of a household and to adult responsibilities.44 Augustine mentions that he followed some, not further elaborated, spectacles and loved to play ‘games’ (ludi), especially with his friends on the streets of Thagaste: they used to exchange and sell to each other different kinds of small booty they had extracted from their parents or other citizens. He also mentions having played ballgames with a friend – instead of studying.45 Libanius mentions his more innocent but again unspecified playing in the fields in his early teens – which he preferred to studying – and his hobbies of rearing doves and watching gladiator shows, both of which he laid aside when he ‘fell in love with rhetoric’ at the age of 15.46 At the same age Paulinus of Pella had, as he enumerated, a fine horse bedecked with special trappings, a tall groom, a swift hound, a shapely hawk and a tinselled ball for games of pitching. At that age he hunted regularly with his father, whereas when he was younger he had played with the household

  Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 13.3; Augustine, Confessions 9.8.17–18.   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 3–4; after her decision to remain unmarried

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at the age of 12, she is also depicted helping her mother in household management and, especially, in preparing meals for her. 44   Naturally, the reference to wool-working in the Life of Macrina may well refer more to the idealistic picture of a wool-working chaste and diligent Graeco-Roman elite woman than her actual activities. See also Jerome, Letter 107.10, with Larsson Lovén 1998. That the imagery was not particularly common among the Latin speaking sub-elites and middling class people, as seen in the evidence of the inscriptions (Jeppesen-Wigelsworth 2010, pp. 11–13, 218–21), does not reduce its usefulness in creating the image of a woman waiting for her true spouse (here Christ) in the manner of Penelope. 45   Augustine, Confessions 1.19.30 and 1.9.15. See also Augustine, Confessions 2.4.9, for the stealing of pears (see below). 46   Libanius, Autobiography 4–5.

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servants.47 Gregory of Nazianzus depicts in a similar way the entertainments of the elite youth, in claiming that his friend Basil of Caesarea was trained in education and exercised piety instead of shooting hares, running down fawn, hunting deer, excelling in warlike pursuits or in breaking in young horses.48 What is interesting is the role of spectacles and gladiator shows in child’s socialisation as a way for teenagers (if not also younger children) to take part in community life.49 As can be seen, in the descriptions of leisure activities age peers and childhood friends are seldom mentioned. In fact, the texts give an impression that it was only later, during student years, that any more tight friendship ties were established. This, naturally, may be due to the backward gaze too, as these relationships were those that lasted and had an influence also in later life. It is hard to say what kind of bonding is in fact referred to, when Basil later in life appeals to his boyhood acquaintances to get favours for him and his protégés.50 Moreover, there seems to have prevailed a rather natural tendency for the writers (except Augustine) to depict themselves as ‘older’ and less childish than their age peers – using a puer senex motif was a standard way of depicting childhood both in earlier biographic and autobiographic writing, and in later hagiographical accounts.51 However, Paulinus of Pella explicitly highlights his bonding with his father in his youthful pastimes, and both Libanius and Gregory of Nazianzus enthusiastically depict the friendship networks they developed in Athens as a new feature of their lives: at last, they had found like-minded friends. Gregory, instead of mentioning his childhood friends, claims about his earlier relations only that ‘of men I associated with those excellent in character’.52 Moreover, the only playmates who are mentioned in the narratives concerning early childhood are servants of the household: a girl servant had carried Monica’s father on her back when he was a baby, ‘as older girls do with small children’.53 Similarly, Paulinus

  Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 141–53 and 75–8 (‘conloquio Graiorum adsuefactus famulorum / quos mihi iam longus ludorum iunxerat usus’). 48   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.12 (AD 381 or 382). 49   See also Horn 2009, p. 130, and Rawson 2003, pp. 331–2, on children and the violence of the spectacles in the early empire. As she notes, ‘it is difficult to know what emotions and behavioural models children transferred from the amphitheatre to the rest of their lives’. 50   See for instance Basil of Caesarea, Letters 272.1, 274 and 290, with Horn 2009, p. 134. 51   Earlier (auto)biographies: Dixon 1992, pp. 104–5, and Schouler 2008, p. 234; for childhood in Byzantine hagiography, see Chavallier Caseau 2009, pp. 147–57, and Angelov 2009, esp. pp. 87–8. 52   Libanius, Autobiography 56–8; Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.11.95–100. 53   Augustine, Confessions 9.8.17. The servant was the same who later took care of Monica’s upbringing. 47

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of Pella writes that he had learned his Greek while playing with the household slaves (famuli) in Pella.54 It seems that elite families protected their children quite carefully, secluded them rather than let them be exposed to unwelcome acquaintances.55 The criteria for friends were high: the processes of socialisation were not only positive and encouraging but also limiting. They define expectations and restrict the choices available. In his autobiographic sketch John Chrysostom, for example, gives as the foundations of his friendship with a certain Basil that, firstly, they shared everything, and, secondly, that their means were as matched as their views, as their families were of the same class: ‘everything was in keeping with our common opinion’.56 Chrysostom depicts here his literate self as being in his early twenties, the same age at which both Gregory and Libanius praise their friendships keenly. In the same spirit, John makes his friend sum up the essence of friendship in his narrative rather idealistically: ‘no one knows me as well as you; since you know my inner nature better than my parents who brought me up’.57 Augustine, however, brings forth the significance of the peer groups – and even reflects the influence they have had in his own life. He gives an impression of having been part of a youthful group of boys playing and wandering in the streets of Thagaste in search of excitement. In this, they pilfered from here and there. An instance of taking a huge load of pears from a nearby tree and dumping them uneaten, makes him ask why did he and his companions end up doing such a thing, causing no profit for themselves, but only damage for others. Augustine highlights the role played by the company as such. He writes: ‘And yet, as I recall my feelings at the time, I am quite sure that I would not have done it on my own’, and again more pointedly: By myself I would not have committed that robbery. It was not the takings that attracted me but the raid itself, and yet to do it by myself would have been no fun and I should not have done it. This was friendship of a most unfriendly sort, bewitching my mind in an inexplicable way.58

  Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 75–8. Unfortunately it is impossible to ascertain if these famuli were age peers of Paulinus. 55   In the case of girls this feature is even clearer. The passage in John Chrysostom, On Priesthood 3.17, is telling, as John here first describes how in the ‘normal’ case a father should watch over his daughter, and then continues to compare this to a case in which a girl is vowed to virginity, demanding even stricter measures. See also for instance Jerome, Letters 22.16, 22.25 and 107.4–11, on the necessary seclusion of virgins. 56   John Chrysostom, On Priesthood 1.1. 57   John Chrysostom, On Priesthood 2.4. For further discussion of friendship in late antiquity, see Samellas 2010. 58   Augustine, Confessions 1.19.30, on pilfering in general. On the pear tree incident: Augustine, Confessions 2.4–10. Quotations: Augustine, Confessions 2.8.16, ‘Et tamen solus id non fecissem (sic recordor animum tunc meum) solus omnino id non fecissem. Ergo 54

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Augustine here finely describes the power of a peer group in affecting behaviour and socialising to a certain subculture, and, as he also depicts, the subsequent strengthening of the sense of solidarity. Parents What is eye-catching and common in the stories concerning the childhood of the bishops, and the likewise unmarried Libanius, is the central role played by their mothers both in their childhood and in later life. It was his mother who sent Theodoret as a child to converse with the ascetics, and also in other respects she took care of his religious education. Theodoret depicts her many times telling him stories about the renowned ascetics and the miracles they had accomplished. Often these stories concerned the mother herself, or other household members. His mother is a pious and ascetically oriented figure, presented with many of the characteristics of the Virgin Mary. The father is only occasionally mentioned in his stories.59 After all, even if it was his father who went around asking the hermits for help and intercessions for his children, it was his mother who made the actual vows to dedicate her future child to God in the presence of the hermit Macedonius. Moreover, it was she who used the prophylactic belt of Peter to cure her husband, her son, and herself, or borrowed it for family friends.60 Thus, it is she who is described as responsible for the interaction with the saints and the transcendent sphere. The case of Theodoret was not unique. It was the mother of Gregory of Nazianzus, Nonna, who offered Gregory to God immediately on his birth, followed by a dream which announced his name. Gregory does not get tired of highlighting his mother’s dedication to her son, her constant prayers for him, and her influence on her son’s future spiritual strivings. Gregory even interprets his survival from the stormy sea and the subsequent baptism as a direct response to Nonna’s prayers – to prove this, he claims that a boy on the ship had seen her walking on water and directing the ship through the storm.61 John Chrysostom also depicted his widowed amavi ibi etiam consortium eorum, cum quibus id feci’; Augustine, Confessions 2.9.17. According to Shaw 1987, p. 22, this kind of forming ‘of peer groups with their own norms and powers’ would have been impossible for peasant boys, not only for economic reasons, but also because of the lack of schooling and, thus, schoolmates – but this is an argument ex silentio. English translations from Confessions are by R.S. Pine-Coffin. 59   On (the absence of) fathers in late antiquity see the chapter by Fotis Vasileiou in this volume. 60   Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.9–10, 9.15, and 13.16–17; and see also Urbainczyk 2002, pp. 135–8. 61   Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.1.118–122 and 424–4; Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.11.51–94. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 7.4–8. See also Van Dam 2003, pp. 88–93, who concludes: ‘Throughout his life Gregory’s one true love had always been his mother’.

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mother as having brought him up by herself, and having paid for his education, and Basil of Caesarea stressed his mother’s and grandmother’s influence on his upbringing and religious formation.62 As is well known, Augustine’s mother, Monica, is similarly depicted as the crucial person in the life of Augustine, trying to bring him up as a Christian, praying for her son year after year, and providing him with financial support for his studies. Monica is depicted as an exemplary ‘ordinary’ Christian and materfamilias, especially in her deathbed scene in the Confessions – again with Virgin Mary-like characteristics.63 Likewise, in his early works, Augustine uses his mother as a character in philosophical conversations. In this, her role is akin to that of Macrina in her brother Gregory of Nyssa’s On Soul and Resurrection,64 but in other aspects Augustine’s mother is depicted rather in a similar manner to Nonna or Emmelia, Macrina’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s mother. According to Gregory’s Life of Macrina, Emmelia was a paradigm of simple piety in her life, not being able to stay unmarried despite her will. And, like Nonna, she also had a vision announcing to her the name of her future child – the secret name of Macrina, Thecla. Like Monica, Emmelia took care of both the religious and secular education of her children, praying and reciting psalms to Macrina. Later, Gregory depicts Macrina directing her mother to the monastic lifestyle, especially after the death of Basil the Elder, her husband. Elsewhere Gregory also mentions that Emmelia obliged him to participate in the festival of the Forty Martyrs when he was still a young man. In Gregory’s stories the father’s role is minimal – he is mentioned as active only when Macrina is about to be married off by her parents.65 The maternal influence and its results were not limited to the representation of Christian families – the demographic realities as such took care that there were plenty of fatherless children.66 Libanius, for example, highlighted his mother’s role in his education, both as a person in charge of the financial costs of his upbringing, and of the educational principles to be used. Libanius claims that ‘she did not become angry with lazy children, as she thought that a loving mother should

62   John Chrysostom, On Priesthood 1.5; Basil of Caesarea, Letters 204.6, 210.1 and 223.3 (see also Van Dam 2003, p. 100, on the role of Emmelia in the early religious education of Basil). 63   See for example Augustine, Confessions 3.4.7–8 and 9.9–13; see further Clark 1999, pp. 14–15. 64   In Augustine’s On the Happy Life and On Order, Monica intervenes to ask questions and also to express her opinion. On Monica as a Christian philosopher, yet an uneducated model of simple female piety, see Clark 1999, pp. 15–20. In Gregory of Nyssa, On Soul and Resurrection, Macrina is depicted as a widely read and schooled teacher of Gregory (in philosophy, i.e. in Christian theology). 65   On Macrina’s education by her mother and her engagement, see Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 2–4. On the festival of the Forty Martyrs, see Van Dam 2003, pp. 101–2. On the virtues of Emmelia, see also Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 5, 7, 11 and 13. 66   See for example Scheidel 2009.

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never sadden her children in any way’.67 Because of that even the pedagogues ‘were powerless against the young orphan’, and Libanius was able to be ‘his own guardian (phylaks)’. It is interesting that Libanius himself reflects the significance of the early death of his father, and the fact that he was brought up by his mother with the help of her two brothers.68 If his father had reached old age, instead of becoming a professional rhetorician he would have ended up a member of the local curia or having a career in the imperial bureaucracy. Even if Libanius is careful not to give an impression that he was happy that his father died young, he expresses his happiness at the outcome in retrospect.69 What Libanius does not mention, but what also connects his situation with that of his Christian contemporaries, is the fact that he remained unmarried, even if he had on one occasion (like Augustine) a fiancée, and, (like Augustine) an illegitimate son by a concubine. Looking back, Libanius also interprets his bachelorhood as a matter of principle: in his youth, he preferred student life in Athens to marriage in Antioch; later, as a professor in Nicomedeia, he explains his decision to remain unmarried by claiming that ‘my art is my spouse’.70 The religious education of the future bishops was depicted as depending on mothers even in cases in which fathers were alive. Augustine’s father has a minimal role in his narrative.71 The role of Gregory of Nazianzus’ father is not, either, depicted as nearly as significant as that of his mother. Even in his father’s funeral oration Gregory gives more praise to his mother than to his father. And, like Augustine, Gregory also takes opportunities to depict his father in not so positive a light without taking the edge away from his praise. If Augustine’s father was ambitious to see his son a father and a renowned rhetor, and regularly beating his wife,72 likewise Gregory’s father is depicted as a self-centred, powerful and distant character who ‘tyrannised’ his son, his virtues depending on the good influence his wife had with him – as is the case with Augustine’s father. Indeed, Gregory the Elder is depicted as Nonna’s spiritual child.73   Libanius, Autobiography 4 and 27.   Libanius, Autobiography 12–13. 69   Libanius, Autobiography 1.6. (1.5 ends with a note that Libanius’ uncle had quite 67

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early thought that Libanius would become a sophist). See also Schouler 1993, p. 318. 70   Libanius, Autobiography 12 and 54. 71   Augustine, Confessions 9.9, with O’Donnell 2005, pp. 57–8. 72   Beating: Augustine, Confessions 9.9; ambitions for his son: Augustine, Confessions 2.3.5 and 2.3.8. 73   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 7.4 and 8; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 8.5; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 18 (on the death of his father), 8 and 11 (on his mother, see praise at 8–13, 30–31, 43). Father’s power: Oration 18.40, and Carmina 2.1.11.340, 345 and 392. See also Carmina 2.1.11.503–14, with the father blackmailing Gregory to take ordination as the bishop of Sasima. Occasionally, however, the father is included in the affectionate language, as in Carmina 2.1.1.268–74, in which Gregory claims that he was overwhelmed by affection for his dear parents in their old age – immediately afterwards

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The role of fathers is depicted rather similarly, that is, with at least a twist of uneasiness, in all of the autobiographical texts, even if in those texts in which the authors have ended up continuing their lineage instead of remaining unmarried the depiction is not as pointedly strained. Both Ausonius and Paulinus of Pella were married and had children. Ausonius’ parents were rather distant to him during his childhood: even though he mentions his mother as having been in charge of his early education, he was sent to be brought up by relatives at an early age. This distance can be seen in Ausonius’ depiction of his parents in his Parentalia as well as, for example, in his congratulatory letter to his father on the birth of his father’s first grandchild by him.74 Paulinus, in turn, claims that his parents aimed at renewing their line through him, and therefore married him off against his will. On the other hand, he presents his relationship with his father both during his teenage years, in hunting and other pastimes, and later when giving an overall appraisal on his father’s death, as affectionate, calling him his ‘dear comrade’ (carus socius), and claiming that their relationship surpassed the friendship of age peers.75 In all, the fathers are represented as authority figures having high hopes for their progeny: sons are to their fathers sources of honour for the family with their learning and career, and, pointedly, also the providers of the next generation for their lineage. The fathers also expected their sons to bury them in the proper way.76 On the other hand, it seems that not only in the narratives of Gregory of Nazianzus, as analysed by Virginia Burrus and Susanna Elm, but also in the cases of Basil, Augustine and Theodoret, the mothers were highlighted at the expense of the paterfamilias, also in order to convey a sense of a sacred philosophical family and to be able to claim ‘both the social and cultural potential of the role of the elite father and mother’.77 The stress on positive femininity and the submission to the heavenly Father instead of the earthly one was, therefore, also a strategy in self representation for claiming a certain sanctity and authority. However, despite this rhetoric tending to highlight the role of mothers (and other female relatives), it is safe to conclude that in the midst of family life, women’s work explaining that it is, after all, perhaps ‘not so much affection indeed but pity’. Nonna as spiritual mother: Hägg 2006, p. 141, with Elm 2009, p. 297; Gregory’s ambivalence towards his father and playing his role down: Hägg 2006, pp. 145–6, and McLynn 1998, pp. 472–3. 74   Ausonius, Parentalia 2.5: the task of Ausonius’ mother was ‘natos cura regendi’; Ausonius and his father: Ausonius, Epistle 19.33–4, and Parentalia 1. 75   Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 154–5, 176–86, 242–7 (on the death of the father, when Paulinus was around 30): ‘per quem cara mihi et patria et domus ipsa fiebat … tamque etenim fido tradentes nobis affectu consortio viximus aevo / vinceret aequaeuos nostra ut Concordia amicos … tam caro socio et monitori fideli’. 76   Augustine, Confessions 2.3.5–8; Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 154–5, 176–86; Ausonius, Epistle 20 (Genethliacos), 1–5; Ausonius, Epistle 22, poem to Ausonius the younger, lines 35–8; Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.11.506–14. 77   Elm 2009, pp. 289, 296–300; Burrus 2006, pp. 156–65, with Hägg 2006, pp. 144– 5. On Augustine, see also O’Donnell 2005, pp. 57–8.

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was, nevertheless, acknowledged as a major factor in childhood socialisation and in transferring the cultural values of society to the next generation – and, on the other hand, fathers were, in general, rather distant and even frightening figures.78 This same presupposition is also inherent in many of the texts promoting asceticism, highlighting the crucial importance of mothers in directing their progeny to make the ‘right’ choices and to choose perpetual virginity. However, in these cases it is most often a question of girls, not boys as in the autobiographical writings.79 Other Relatives and Household Members Naturally, parents were not the only relatives to have an influence on children and their youth.80 In these autobiographical accounts, Ausonius devoted most space to his relatives – not only because he has set out a project aiming at commemorating his deceased relatives (in his poems in Parentalia), but also as he was brought up by relatives after his earliest childhood. Thus, he writes that after having been torn from his mother’s breasts, he received his early training under the stern but kindly rule of his maternal grandmother. Almost as an echo of this, Ausonius writes later to his grandchild claiming that grandchildren prefer their grandfathers and grandmothers to their own parents.81 Basil and Jerome also emphasise their nearness to their grandmothers.82 Ausonius gives credit for his upbringing to other relatives also: with his grandmother, his maternal uncle is the other person who took charge of the earliest years of his life; Ausonius depicted him not only as his ‘father and mother’,   See also Shaw 1987, esp. p. 25.   John Chrysostom, for example, pointedly urged women to consecrate their

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(firstborn) children to God: John Chrysostom, Homily 21.2 (On Ephesians). Although it was the father who was active in asking for advice, Jerome notably associates women with the making of the vow regarding a daughter (on the upbringing of Pacatula, Jerome, Letter 128, esp. 2 (AD 413). See also for example Pseudo-Athanasius of Alexandria, Canons 97 (Arabic text) (c. AD 370), for an exhortation to women to pledge their daughters to virginity in order to keep them pure for Christ (there is no such exhortation for men). For further discussion of mothers active in educative choices, see Vuolanto 2008, pp. 102–7. 80   I will not deal in this chapter with the issue of family structure, but the conclusions in Shaw 1987, pp. 49–51, fit well with my analysis: the late Roman family was ‘neither a true nuclear family nor an extended-kin family, much less an agnatic lineage … the family was a more complex aggregate that included assemblages of persons attached in an integral way to a discernible nuclear core’, that is, to a married couple and (their) children, on which the primary obligations were focused. What is interesting, though, is that in the present study, no clear difference can be discerned between the western and eastern Mediterranean patterns (cf. Shaw 1987, p. 51). 81   Ausonius, Parentalia 5.9–10 (Aemilia Corinthia Maura). Ausonius, Epistle 22, poem to Ausonius the younger, lines 17–19. 82   Jerome, Apology against Rufinus 1.30; Basil of Caesarea, Letters 204.6, and see also Letters 210.1 and 223.3.

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but in addition as his teacher of rhetoric.83 Ausonius also honours two of his maternal aunts ‘as a son’.84 Maternal uncles also play a major role in the life of Libanius. As his father died young, and the boy was brought up under his mother, the uncles served as the heads of the household one after another – and it was the younger uncle’s permission which in the end made it possible for him to leave Antioch to study at Athens, even if his mother opposed the plan, and the older uncle, before his death, had sided with the mother.85 The presence of maternal uncles in these texts is not surprising: because of the demographic realities (women marrying earlier in the life course than men),86 they were more likely than grandparents or paternal uncles to be available if surrogate fatherhood was needed.87 The role of siblings is not much elaborated in the autobiographical writings, and even when they are brought to the fore, there is a kind of distancing attitude prevailing in the texts. Gregory of Nyssa writes with great respect about his elder brothers Basil and Naucratius, not to mention his sister Macrina, who not only seems to have been responsible for his early education, but is described as the spiritual teacher of the whole family with incomparable virtue and perfection, and with affection about his younger brother Peter, but he does not elaborate their personal relationships further.88 The same observation holds true also for Gregory of Nazianzus and his depictions of his brother Caesarius and sister Gorgonia – the latter being called ‘a common counsellor not only of her own family but also of those about her’, and described as having ‘reached a higher perfection in all than anyone else attained’.89 Augustine   Aemilius Magnus Arborius: Ausonius, Parentalia 3.8–10 and 3.19.   Ausonius, Parentalia 6.12 (Aemilia Hilaria): ‘supremis redo filius exequis’;

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Parentalia 25.9–10 (Aemilia Dryadia): ‘discebas in me matertera / mater uti fieres’. 85   Libanius, Autobiography 13: his mother opposed the idea of him departing for Athens. Her older brother sided with her, but when he (Panolbius) died, the younger brother (Phasganius) gave his permission (‘as my mother’s tears did not have as much influence on him’). It is unclear what the legal position of the uncles was, but in any case they had a determinant influence on Libanius’ life choices. 86   For a Life Course approach to the Byzantine family see the chapter by Eve Davies in this volume. 87   Scheidel 2009; Harders 2010. On the maternal uncle (avunculus) see also Tougher 2012, esp. pp. 189–90 and 195 n. 64 and n. 67. Also Gregory of Nazianzus’ maternal uncle Amphilochius the Elder played a role in his life as a teacher (even when Gregory the Elder was still alive): see Palatine Anthology 8.131–8, and Van Dam 2003, p. 53. For uncles taking care of education, see also Cribiore 2009, pp. 262–4. See however Basil, Letters 204.6 and 223.3, on the influence of his paternal grandmother on his religious upbringing. The ‘maiores’ mentioned in Augustine, Confessions 1.6.8, 1.7.11 and 1.8.13–9.15, should, nevertheless, be understood in a more vague sense as ‘adults’ (in the sense ‘not children’) rather than ‘grandparents’ as understood by Shaw 1987, pp. 16–19 (moreover, Augustine claims he has never seen his grandfather). 88   Van Dam 2003, pp. 67–74 . 89   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 8.11–15, with Van Dam 2003, pp. 93–6.

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mentions his brother only once in his Confessions, and his sister not at all. Libanius, in turn, does not mention his two brothers in the context of his childhood notes, but, for example, describes later very emotionally the misfortunes and eventual death of the younger brother.90 It would be a mistake, therefore, to claim that siblings were of little importance or that after leaving the parental home the interrelationships broke down. I would suggest, rather, that it was part of the conventions of autobiographic writing, that siblings (and one’s children, for that matter) were not to be taken up for discussion – at least not as long as they were alive. But, in view of the lack of studies on sibling relations in late antiquity, a theme certainly worth scholarly attention, this conclusion is bound to remain only a suggestion.91 One particular group of people is easily forgotten as socialising agents when studying the world of the Roman elites: servants and slaves. The wet-nurse especially features in the texts as a symbol of homeliness. For Augustine, the milk of his mother and his wet-nurse are the first consolations and gifts of God for a human being in this world.92 Augustine also contrasts his experiences of learning Greek full of fear with the way of learning Latin in his infancy, ‘by keeping my ears open while my nurses (nutrices) fondled me and everyone laughed and played happily with me’.93 Ausonius – who mentions that his mother took care of his early education – even contrasts wet-nurses to mothers: ‘A child will love its nurse’s wrinkles, who shrinks from its mother’.94 Augustine also reports that his mother gave credit for her good upbringing to an aged slave nurse, in whose care the children of the household were securely placed, rather than her own mother. Moreover, as already referred to, a servant had played with Monica’s father when he was a child, and Paulinus of Pella claims he had learned Greek while playing with the household slaves.95 Naturally, the narratives also mention the paedagogi, whose personal statuses are, however, hard to discern.96   Augustine: Martin 2001, pp. 18–19; Libanius, Autobiography 197–204.   For an examination of the relationship between imperial siblings in the Byzantine

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empire see the chapter by Shaun Tougher in this volume. 92   Augustine, Confessions 1.6.7. 93   Augustine, Confessions 1.14.23: ‘Nam et Latina aliquando infans utique nulla noveram et tamen advertendo didici sine ullo metu atque cruciatu inter etiam blandimenta nutricum et ioca arridentium et laetitias alludentium’. 94   Ausonius, Epistle 22, poem to Ausonius the younger, lines 17–19: ‘rugas nutricis amabit / qui refugit matrem’. See also Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 27–32, for his nurse. 95   Augustine, Confessions 9.8.17 (thus, the children of the household were cared for and disciplined by the old slave even when the parents were not absent, cf. Shaw 1987, p. 42); Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving 75–8 (‘conloquio Graiorum adsuefactus famulorum / quos mihi iam longus ludorum iunxerat usus’). Nathan 2000, p. 142, interprets that it was his parents’ idea to make the learning of Greek a game, but in the text itself there is no indication of any parental involvement in this. 96   See above, and with Gregory of Nazianzus’ teacher: Palatine Anthology 8.142–6. See Libanius, Autobiography 12, and Augustine, Confessions 1.9.30, for Libanius’ and

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More generally, the everyday presence of slaves is nearly invisible in the narratives – a telling example is the story by Augustine about his mother as a young girl fetching wine from the cellar: she used to seize the opportunity to drink it secretly. Only when Augustine refers to a slave girl who reproached ‘her young mistress’ as a drunkard, does it come out that Monica was not alone in the cellar, but in the company of a handmaid, who is, moreover, only in this point introduced as having been her personal servant, and most of the time in her company in any case.97 It seems that in elite households children were habitually accompanied by slaves, and, at the very least, these slaves were in a much more central position for having influence on the freeborn children than their age peers of the same social class. The Role of Storytelling The autobiographical narratives are full of references to stories apparently circulating inside the household, both vertically from generation to generation, and horizontally within the household and the networks of relatives. Libanius, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine all refer directly to stories about their grandparents – and even their more distant ancestors. Libanius, for example, tells as a part of his family tradition, that his great-grandfather had seen beforehand, in a vision, the violent death of his sons. There also circulated stories about the great care he took in educating his children. Augustine, in turn, retells stories about his maternal grandparent, which he had heard from his mother.98 The richest range of this kind of story is told by Theodoret, linked to his family background and household, claiming in many cases that he had heard these directly from his mother, or from the hermits. Many of these stories concerned family tradition, like the stories about the mother’s eye disease and her recovery Augustine’s pedagogues respectively. 97   Augustine, Confessions 9.8.18: ‘Nam cum de more tamquam puella sobria iuberetur a parentibus de cupa vinum depromere, submisso poculo qua desuper patet, priusquam in lagunculam funderet merum, primoribus labris sorbebat exiguum, quia non poterat amplius sensu recusante. … itaque ad illud modicum cotidiana modica addendo (quoniam qui modica spernit, paulatim decidit) in eam consuetudinem lapsa erat ut prope iam plenos mero caliculos inhianter hauriret. … ancilla enim, cum qua solebat accedere ad cupam, litigans cum domina minore, ut fit, sola cum sola, obiecit hoc crimen amarissima insultatione vocans “meribibulam”’. 98   Libanius, Autobiography 2; Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 2 and 20 (stories on Macrina the Elder, his and Macrina’s grandmother; Basil of Caesarea tells that he, in turn, had heard stories directly from Macrina the Elder: Letters 204.6). Cf. John Chrysostom, who recommended telling children (biblical) stories in the midst of daily routines because of the socialising effect of the practice (On Vainglory 39–41). On the memories of grandparents in Basil’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s family of origin, see also Van Dam 2003, pp. 66 and 108; Augustine, Confessions 9.8.17. For further reflection on women and the preservation of family memories, see Geary 1994, pp. 48–73.

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from puerperal fever, in both cases Peter the Galatian curing her; or the stories concerning the miracles surrounding Theodoret’s own birth; or the diet he was following, which the mother of Theodoret supplied: barley soaked in water.99 There were also stories about other household members, like the exorcism stories about a peasant, whose grandmother was Theodoret’s nurse, or a cook of Theodoret’s parents’ household, both of whom were cured by Peter.100 Moreover, there were stories about the renowned ascetics, like the ‘many stories’ the mother of Theodoret had told to her son about Symeon the Elder.101 Like Theodoret, Gregory of Nazianzus also must have heard repeatedly the story about his own birth, his dedication to God, and a vision of his mother which was linked to it; and Augustine mentions that his parents told him stories about his own infancy.102 All were writing down family stories they must have heard countless times – or, at least, they wanted their audience to think that this was the case, and that they were intimately linked with their family heritage. Thus, children were carefully integrated into family traditions and stories circulating in the household. That Theodoret heard about the eye disease of his mother is not surprising, but even more telling is that he can write about events which had happened to family servants and acquaintances. It seems that it was carefully made sure that all the household members had information on events deemed of importance. Stories were often repeated in the familial sphere, and children were made part of them. Conclusions Taken as a whole, these autobiographical accounts depict rather scattered anecdotes about childhood and the life of young men from the elite male perspective. Moreover, with these stories we are completely at the mercy of our informants, as they use these stories for their own ends, willing to depict themselves both as family men and as heroes of their respective ‘philosophies’, to be held as exemplary characters. Taking these caveats into account, some features deserve attention, features which seem not to have been given much attention in previous scholarship, which has often concentrated on one narrative at a time. Firstly, the persons themselves seem to have been convinced that their childhood experiences had destined them to end up what they became. Despite their undeniable selfpromotion, both Gregory and Theodoret seem to hold it central for their selfunderstanding and identity that they were born as God’s gifts; Libanius, that he 99   Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.9–10 (eyes); 9.14 (puerperal fever); 13.16–17 (birth); 13.3. (Macedonius’ diet). 100   Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.9–10. 101   Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 6.14. 102   Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina 2.1.1.424–31 and 2.1.11.68–94; Augustine, Confessions 1.6.7–8.

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has been under the special guidance of Fate; and Augustine, that the outcome of his spiritual journey was greatly due to his mother’s heritage and her simple and continuous prayers. In this, nor in any other feature in the socialisation process or in family dynamics, Libanius’ attitude does not stand out in any particular way from those of his Christian contemporaries. Secondly, there is the role of mothers in these narratives: according to these stories, mothers frequently played the decisive part in making decisions. All point to the conclusion that the prominence of mothers in connection with either the early death of fathers, or their relatively distant role, had a strong positive influence for the authors ending up in intellectual and/or ascetic careers in late antiquity, and to stay unmarried.103 Most importantly, it was to their mother’s (or grandmother’s) religiosity the bishops later on wanted to attach themselves, and to proclaim it to their readers. At the very least, it was socially accepted and ‘normal’ that mothers took care of the religious upbringing of their sons – and not only because of demographic reasons. However, I would like to propose that in many cases it is exactly because of the maternal influence that we have these autobiographies at our disposal: as Libanius himself notes, had his father lived longer, his future would have been different. An intellectual career in late antiquity, whether Christian or non-Christian, seems to have been more likely within the reach of the fatherless: the duty to continue the (male) family line was less pronounced in their cases. Thirdly, what do these texts tell us about childhood socialisation and childhood experience of the late antique elites? The informal instruction and stimulus given during the practice of daily routines by the most intimate social circle, parents, and the closest kin (especially maternal uncles and grandparents) was the most important incentive to adopt certain behaviour and cultural expectations. The role of maternal relatives, servants and early life educators is more pronounced than might have been expected.104 On the other hand, age peers feature rather seldom in these stories. It seems that elite children led rather secluded lives – even in cases in which there were no ascetic aspirations involved. However, it is clear that all these factors had their role. Moreover, the authority of teachers and the fear of pain comes up forcefully in their narratives: it overshadows all other issues related to schooling. As expected, the role of religion (or, in the case of Libanius, the role of rhetoric) comes out in the stories, together with public spectacles, as the socialising agents to public life and its values. However, the role religion plays is not as important as might have been expected in a situation in which most of the 103   After all, Ausonius and, especially, Paulinus of Pella, were the only writers having an unstressed and longer or even (in the case of Paulinus) rather close emotional relationship with their fathers – and they were the only ones legally married. As Cribiore 2009, pp. 271–2, shows, for an elite boy, fatherlessness as such was not a hindrance to acquiring higher education in late antiquity. 104   It seems to be wrong to claim that ‘in the Christian sources, nurses, teachers and slaves do not play any large part in the upbringing of children’ (Bakke 2006, p. 163). See also Nathan 2000, p. 159.

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‘informants’ are religious professionals, bishops. It is interesting, for example, that none of the authors give any details of their actual religious education. It seems that this depends at least partly on the requirement of the literary genres in question – the religious sphere of life can be stressed only after ‘a conversion’, or an act of divine intervention (understood as showing a special favour for the person in question) has taken place. In Augustine’s Confessions, this is his baptism (which almost took place when he was ill in his youth – which, in fact, is the only context in which his childhood religiosity is directly under scrutiny in his text); in Gregory of Nazianzus, this is his ‘conversion’ in the sea storm; in John Chrysostom, his ordination. In Theodoret, as he was ‘chosen’ right from his birth after miraculous events, the religious practices and religious education are present through all his narrative about himself.105 Moreover, these writings show the central role of storytelling in GraecoRoman family culture – often linked with maternal influence – in creating a sense of belonging to a certain family background with certain values.106 All were writing down family stories they must have heard countless times – or at least, they wanted their audience to think that this was the case, and to show that these family traditions had socialised them early and permanently to certain religious and intellectual traditions, and to their family heritage. Bibliography Primary Sources Augustine, Confessions, ed. J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), trans. R.S. Pine Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). Ausonius, Epistles, ed. and trans. H.G. Evelyn White (Loeb Classical Library, 1919), vol. 2, pp. 3–153. Ausonius, Parentalia, ed. and trans. H.G. Evelyn White (Loeb Classical Library, 1919), vol. 1, pp. 56–95.

105   See also Theodoret’s mother, who started a new phase in her life when her eye disease was miraculously cured; Macrina, the death of whose fiancé made her dedicate herself to virginity; Paulinus of Pella, whose illness turned his life around in the opposite direction (and he did not end up in an ecclesiastical or intellectual career); Libanius, who was ‘converted’ to philosophy at 15 years of age. For these kinds of turning points as a characteristic feature of ancient autobiography, see Hadas-Lebel 1993, p. 127. 106   Indeed, personal storytelling operates as a routine socialising practice in widely different cultures. However, the exact function of storytelling shifts according to time and place. In modern Chinese families, for example, storytelling is used, as in late antiquity, to convey moral and social standards, but European American families employ stories more as a medium of entertainment and affirmation. See Miller, Wiley, Fung and Liang 1997.

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Basil of Caesarea, Letters, ed. and French trans. Y. Courtonne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957–66). Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina, ed. A. Tuilier and G. Bady, French trans. J. Bernardi (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2004). Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 6–12, ed. and French trans. M.-A. Calvet-Sebasti (Paris: Cerf, 1995). Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 18, PG 35, 986–1043. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 42 and 43, ed. and French trans. J. Bernardi (Paris: Cerf, 1992). Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina, ed. and French trans. P. Maraval (Paris: Cerf, 1971). Gregory of Nyssa, On Soul and Resurrection, PG 46, 12–160, trans. Catharine P. Roth, St. Gregory of Nyssa: The Soul and the Resurrection (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993). Jerome, Letters, ed. and French trans. J. Labourt (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1949– 63). Jerome, Apology Against Rufinus, ed. Pierre Lardet (Turnholt: Brepols, 1982), trans. John N. Hritzu, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 53, St. Jerome, Dogmatic and Polemical Works (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965). John Chrysostom, Homily 14, On First Timothy, PG 62, 571–9. John Chrysostom, Homily 21, On Ephesians 2, PG 62, 149–55. John Chrysostom, Homily 72, On Matthew, PG 58, 595–603. John Chrysostom, On Priesthood, ed. and French trans. A.-M. Malingrey (Paris: Cerf, 1980). John Chrysostom, On Vainglory, ed. and French trans. A.-M. Malingrey (Paris: Cerf, 1972). Libanius, Autobiography (Oration 1), ed. and trans. A.F. Norman (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). Palatine Anthology, ed. and trans. W.R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library, 1919). Paulinus of Pella, Thanksgiving, ed. and French trans. C. Moussy (Paris: Cerf, 1974). Pseudo-Athanasius of Alexandria, Canons, ed. and trans. W. Riedel and W.E. Crum (London and Oxford: Text and Translation Society & Williams and Norgate, 1904). Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History, ed. and French trans. P. Canivet and A. Leroy Molinghen (Paris: Cerf, 1977 and 1979). Secondary Sources Aasgaard, Reidar (2006), ‘Children in Antiquity and Early Christianity: Research History and Central Issues’, Familia, 33: 23–46.

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Aasgaard, Reidar (2009), ‘Uncovering Children’s Culture in Late Antiquity: The Testimony of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas’, in Horn and Phenix (eds) (2009), pp. 1–28. Alanen, Leena (1990), ‘Rethinking Socialization, the Family, and Childhood’, Sociological Studies of Child Development, 3: 13–28. Angelov, Dimiter (2009), ‘Emperors and Patriarchs as Ideal Children and Adolescents: Literary Conventions and Cultural Expectations’, in Papaconstantinou and Talbot (eds) (2009), pp. 85–125. Bakke, O.M. (2005), When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press). Bakke, O.M. (2006), ‘Upbringing of Children in the Early Church. The Responsibility of Parents, Goal and Methods’, Studia Theologica – Nordic Journal of Theology, 60.2: 145–63. Baslez, M.-F., Hoffmann, P., and Pernot, L. (eds) (1993), L’invention de l’autobiographie d’Hésiode à Saint Augustin. Actes du deuxième colloque de l’Équipe de recherche sur l’hellénisme post-classique (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole normale supérieure). Bernardi, Jean (1993), ‘Trois autobiographies de saint Grégoire de Nazianze’, in Baslez, Hoffmann and Pernot (eds) (1993), pp. 155–65. Børtnes, Jostein, and Hägg, Tomas (eds) (2006), Gregory of Nazianzus. Images and Reflections (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press). Burrus, Virginia (2006), ‘Life after Death: The Martyrdom of Gorgonia and the Birth of Female Hagiography’, in Børtnes and Hägg (eds) (2006), pp. 153–70. Chavallier Caseau, Béatrice (2009), ‘Childhood in Byzantine Saints’ Lives’, in Papaconstantinou and Talbot (eds) (2009), pp. 127–65. Clark, Elizabeth A. (1999), ‘Rewriting Early Christian History: Augustine’s Representation of Monica’, in Jan Willem Drijvers and John Watt (eds), Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium and the Christian Orient (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill), pp. 3–23. Cribiore, Raffaella (2009), ‘The Education of Orphans: A Reassessment from the Evidence of Libanius’, in Hübner and Ratzan (eds) (2009), pp. 257–72. Dasen, Véronique, and Späth, Thomas (eds) (2010), Children, Memory, and Family Identity in Roman Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dixon, Suzanne (1992), The Roman Family (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Elm, Susanna (2009), ‘Family Men: Masculinity and Philosophy in Late Antiquity’, in Philip Rousseau and Emmanuel Papoutsakis (eds), Transformations in Late Antiquity: Essays for Peter Brown (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate), pp. 279–301. Evans Grubbs, Judith, ‘Marriage and Family Relationships in the Late Roman West’, in Philip Rousseau (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 201–19.

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Follet, S. (1993), ‘A la découverte de 1’autobiographie’, in Baslez, Hoffmann and Pernot (eds) (1993), pp. 325–8. Frank, Georgia (2000), The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press). Fredouille, J.-C. (1993), ‘Les Confessions d’Augustin, autobiographie au présent’, in Baslez, Hoffmann and Pernot (eds) (1993), pp. 167–78. Geary, Patrick J. (1994), Phantoms of Remembrance. Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millenium (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Hadas-Lebel, Mireille (1993), ‘Le double récit autobiographique chez Flavius Josèphe’, in Baslez, Hoffmann and Pernot (eds) (1993), pp. 125–32. Hägg, Tomas (2006), ‘Playing with Expectation: Gregory’s Funeral Orations on his Brother, Sister and Father’, in Børtnes and Hägg (eds) (2006), pp. 133–51. Handel, Gerald (ed.) (2006), Childhood Socialization (Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction). Harders, A.-C. (2010), ‘Roman Patchwork Families. Surrogate Parenting, Socialization, and the Shaping of Tradition’, in Dasen and Späth (eds) (2010), pp. 49–71. Harlow, Mary, Laurence, Ray and Vuolanto, Ville (2007), ‘Past, Present and Future in the Study of Roman Childhood’, in Sally Crawford and Gillian Shepherd (eds), Children, Childhood and Society (Oxford: Archaeopress), pp. 5–14. Horn, Cornelia (2007), ‘Children as Pilgrims and the Cult of Holy Children in the Early Syriac Tradition: The Cases of Theodoret of Cyrrhus and the ChildMartyrs Behnām, Sarah, and Cyriacus’, Pilgrimages and Shrines in the Syrian Orient. ARAM Periodical, 19.1 and 2: 439–62. Horn, Cornelia (2009), ‘Children in Fourth-Century Greek Epistolography: Cappadocian Perspectives from the Pens of Gregory Nazianzen and Basil of Caesarea’, in Horn and Phenix (eds) (2009), pp 171–98. Horn, Cornelia and Martens, John W. (2009), ‘Let the Little Children Come to Me’: Childhood and Children in Early Christianity (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Horn, Cornelia and Phenix, Robert (eds) (2009), Children in Late Ancient Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Hübner, Sabine R. and Ratzan, David M. (eds) (2009), Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). James, Allison and James, Adrian (2004), Constructing Childhood. Theory, Policy and Social Practice (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan). Jeppesen-Wigelsworth, Alison (2010), The Portrayal of Roman Wives in Literature and Inscriptions, (PhD Thesis, University of Calgary), available at https:// dspace.ucalgary.ca/jspui/handle/1880/47797 [accessed 18.04.2013]. Katajala-Peltomaa, Sari and Vuolanto, Ville (2011), ‘Children and Agency. Religion as Socialization in Late Antiquity and the Late Medieval West’, Childhood in the Past (Forthcoming).

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Laes, Christian (2005), ‘Childbeating in Roman Antiquity: Some Reconsiderations’, in K. Mustakallio, J. Hanska, H.-L. Sainio, and Ville Vuolanto (eds), Hoping for Continuity. Childhood, Education and Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae), pp. 75–89. Larsson Lovén, Lena (1998), ‘Lanam fecit – Woolworking and female virtue,’ in Lena Larsson Lovén and Agneta Strömberg (eds), Aspects of Women in Antiquity (Jonsered: Aströms), pp. 85–95. Martin, René (2001), ‘La jeunesse de saint Augustin, ou l’itinéraire d’un enfant gâté’, Cahiers des études anciennes, 37: 17–25. McLynn, Neil (1998), ‘A Self-Made Holy Man: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen’, JECS, 6.3: 463–83. Miller, P.J., Wiley, A.R., Fung H., and Liang, C.H. (1997), ‘Personal Storytelling as a Medium of Socialization in Chinese and American Families’, Child Development, 68.3: 557–68. Morgan, Teresa (1998), Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Nathan, Geoffrey (2000), The Family in Late Antiquity. The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (New York and London: Routledge). O’Donnell, James (2005), Augustine, Sinner and Saint: A New Biography (London: Profile Books). Papaconstantinou, Arietta and Talbot, Alice-Mary (eds) (2009), Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Prescendi, Francesca (2010), ‘Children and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge’, in Dasen and Späth (eds) (2010), pp. 73–93. Rawson, Beryl (2003), Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Samellas, Antigone (2010), ‘Friendship and Asceticism in the Late Antique East’, in K. Mustakallio and C. Krötzl (eds), De Amicitia: Friendship and Social Networks in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Roma: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae), pp. 79–96. Scheidel, Walter (2009), ‘The Demographic Background’, in Hübner and Ratzan (eds) (2009), pp. 31–40. Schouler, Bernard (1993), ‘Libanios et 1’autobiographie tragique’, in Baslez, Hoffmann and Pernot (eds) (1993), pp. 305–23. Schouler, Bernard (2002), ‘Libanios en son temps, Libanios aujourd’hui’, Pallas, 60: 151–64. Schouler, Bernard (2008), ‘Réflexions sur les origines antiques de l’autobiographie’, Lalies, 28: 229–39. Shaw, Brent (1987), ‘The Family in Late Antiquity: The Experience of Augustine’, P&P, 115: 3–51. Starowieyski, M. (2004), ‘L’autobiographie dans l’Antiquité chrétienne’, in B. Gain, P. Jay and G. Nauroy (eds), Chartae caritatis: études de patristique et

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d’antiquité tardive en hommage à Yves-Marie Duval (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes), pp. 37–54. Tougher, Shaun (2012), ‘Imperial Blood: Family Relationships in the Dynasty of Constantine the Great’, in Mary Harlow and Lena Larsson Lovén (eds), Families in the Roman and Late Antique World (London and New York: Continuum), pp. 181–98. Urbainczyk, Theresa (2002), Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the Holy Man (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Van Dam, Raymond (2003), Families and Friends in Late Roman Cappadocia (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Vuolanto, Ville (2008), Family and Asceticism. Continuity Strategies in the Late Roman World (PhD thesis, University of Tampere). Vuolanto, Ville (2010a), Children in the Ancient World and the Early Middle Ages. A Bibliography (8th c. BC–8th c. AD) (University of Tampere), available at http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/historia/sivut/BIBChild.pdf. Vuolanto, Ville (2010b), ‘Faith and Religion’, in Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence (eds), A Cultural History of Childhood and Family. Volume 1: Antiquity (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 133–51, 203–6.

Chapter 4

The Death of the Father in Late Antique Christian Literature1 Fotis Vasileiou

In the theological debate which marked the world of late antiquity, the burning issue was the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.2 The correct definition of the nature of the Son and His relationship with the Father arose as a major precondition for the salvation of humankind; many generations of Christians argued over it and even political crises were caused. The ‘winner’ was eventually the Son; in the Roman empire, where the paterfamilias exerted strict authority over his adult children until his death,3 the Church established limits to the authority of the Father and, most importantly, elevated the Son’s status as His equal. However, in the Christian narratives of the period writers are not concerned with the father– child relationship.4 For instance, such popular late antique Vitae as the Life of Symeon the Fool (BHG 1678–1688) and that of Mary of Egypt (BHG 1041–1044b) fail to mention the saint’s father, whereas in those in which he is referred to, the information about the family is brief and general.5 We may nowadays consider the death of the father as a crucial and formative event in human life, but in the Lives of late antique saints its mention is brief, amounting to just a few words. Even in extensive Vitae like Cyril of Scythopolis’ Life of Euthymius or the Life of Symeon Stylite the Younger the death of the saint’s father is recorded only in passing. This apparent lack of interest can find an explanation in the factual reality of the pre-modern world. As shown by means of demographic research, most children would lose their father at a young age;6 a fatherless orphan was a common 1   I would like to thank Shaun Tougher and Leslie Brubaker for their insightful suggestions. I would like also to thank A. Petrides, P. Antonopoulos and G. Deligiannakis, who read and commented on my paper. I am also grateful to S. Efthymiadis for his inspirational guidance. 2   For the Christological debate of this era, see Meyendorff 1975; Studer 1993; O’Collins 1995; Hanson 1988. 3   For the authority and the obligations of fathers during this period, see Nathan 2000, pp. 143–9; Arjava 1988, and 1996, pp. 28–75; Saller 1994, pp. 102–32. 4   See also the comments of Ville Vuolanto in his contribution to this volume. For an overview of late antique hagiography, see Efthymiadis with Déroche 2011. 5   Boglioni 1985; and more recently, Agapitos 2004. 6   Scheidel 2009; Saller 1994, pp. 43–69.

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phenomenon, not something to attract the hagiographer’s attention. Moreover, the Church aspired to establish a different perception of death and pain.7 Christian rhetors and moralists urged their congregation on various occasions not to feel sorrow but joy for those who met their Saviour, and certainly not to express their pain vociferously in public, as pagans did.8 This was a message hagiographers also sought to transmit, so in their works no one, especially not the saint, mourned his/ her beloved’s loss. This chapter aims to explore the consequences of the father’s death in the life of his offspring. It will focus first on late antique hagiographic narrations and then on the families of the Cappadocian Fathers of the Church, whose lives are better documented. The discussion will show that the silence of the sources is not in proportion to the impact the death of the father had on his offspring. The passing of the paterfamilias was in fact a turning point in his children’s life, their best chance to change course, to launch a new start. The Death of the Father in Hagiography Athanasius of Alexandria in his influential Life of Antony laconically reports the death of his hero’s father and mother.9 He says nothing about Antony’s feelings or his reaction to this occurrence. He does not even mention it as a separate event, with a value of its own, but only in relation to the responsibilities Antony had to take over and finally reject, that is managing his family’s estate and looking after his younger sister. Despite Athanasius’ bluntness it is clear that before the death of his parents, Antony was a rather ordinary young Egyptian; only after their death was he able to supersede the norms of his community, to liberate himself from his familial responsibilities and set off to become Great. Gerontius in his Life of Melania the Younger (BHG 1241–1242) describes the death of Valerius Publicola,10 his heroine’s father, at much greater length.11 In fact, this may be the most detailed narration of a father’s death encountered in a late antique Christian text. Valerius, one of the wealthier Romans of his time, had his daughter married at a very young age to the 17-year-old Pinian.12 He was so eager to have grandchildren, heirs of his vast fortune, that he did not take into account his daughter’s desire to lead an ascetic life. Sharing his father-in-law’s view, Pinian asked his wife to give birth to two children before withdrawing from   For the Christian view of death, see Bernstein 1993, pp. 203–341, and Gregg 1975, p. 152 onwards; on pain, Perkins 1995. 8   John Chrysostom, for example, repeatedly urged his audience to control themselves, i.e. Homily 4, On First Corinthians (PG 61, 29) and Homily 6, On First Thessalonians Chapter 4 (PG 62, 430). 9   Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Antony, ed. Bartelink 1994, 2.1. 10   PLRE, vol. 1, p. 753, Publicola 1. 11   Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger, ed. Gorce 1962, 7.138–40. 12   Life of Melania the Younger 1.130. 7

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the world.13 However, after a painful premature labour and the death of her first child, Melania convinced her husband that they should live in chastity.14 Opposing this decision, her father was determined to prevent their renunciation. Valerius tried hard to achieve his goal, even threatening to disinherit them. Just before he died, though, he called Pinian and his daughter to his deathbed and apologised for the obstacles he had raised in their spiritual advancement, asking them to pray to God for his salvation. Gerontius stages a touching scene for his readers, but his two main characters experience a different and rather inappropriate emotion: ‘They heard those (i.e. Valerius’) words with much joy (εὐφροσύνη)’. In this scene it is the person about to die who causes all the touching emotion – both Melania and her husband are happy because finally they would be set free. Gerontius actually does not fail to show later on, as well, how relieved his heroine felt at her father’s demise; when Serena, the wife of Stilicho and mother-in-law of the emperor Honorius (395–423), visited her, Melania referred to the difficulties Valerius had put her through and explained exactly how much the devil had led her father astray.15 Gerontius spent many years with Melania, even considering her his spiritual mother,16 so it is likely that the Vita echoed her own feelings towards her father. Other sources portray Valerius as a devoted Christian and generous donor to Church foundations.17 This does not mean, though, that he favoured his daughter’s ascetic ambitions. As Elizabeth A. Clark notes, Valerius himself ‘spent much of his childhood as a virtual orphan because of his mother’s ascetic enthusiasms’, and he ‘may well have wished his daughter to adopt a mode of life in which Christian concern was not divorced from the usual societal expectations for aristocratic maidens’.18 Moreover, he wanted his glorious familia not to end with his daughter, but to live on.19 It is clear that Valerius felt obliged to secure the continuity of his family. The means he used to impose it, however, created friction between himself and Melania, which ended only with his death. The Life of Melania the Younger shows that, as time passed, the sense of relief, euphoria even, brought about by the father’s death could peter out, but the rage his actions had caused was longer lasting. After Valerius’ death, Melania and her husband were free to engage in the ‘angelic life’. Initially they changed their expensive and comfortable apparel for cheap and rough clothes and ceased to bathe. When they managed to liquidate their vast fortune, they travelled in Sicily, North Egypt, Alexandria and Palestine, making the acquaintance of churchmen like Augustine of Hippo and Palladius     15   16   17  

Life of Melania the Younger 1.132. Life of Melania the Younger 5.134–6. Life of Melania the Younger 12.150 Life of Melania the Younger, Prologue, 124–8 On Valerius’ image in Gerontius’ text and in other Christian sources, see Clark 1984, pp. 86–90. 18   Clark 1984, p. 89. 19   On the possibility that Valerius had another child, see Clark 1984, pp. 90–92. 13 14

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of Helenopolis, making generous donations to Church foundations and building monasteries. Finally, they settled on the Mount of Olives, where Melania founded the convent in which she lived for the rest of her life. Melania and Antony came from two regions of the empire with great cultural and social differences, Rome and Egypt; still, they both reacted in the same way to the death of their fathers. Once they had taken care of family affairs, they donated their fortune and withdrew from the world. The death of their father released them from the authority of the paterfamilias and gave them the opportunity to break the shackles of family continuity and tradition. They could now develop their own creative powers and manage their lives as they wished. Other saints, who came from affluent families, follow the same pattern. Olympias, for example, a wealthy citizen of Constantinople, became an orphan and a widow at a very young age.20 She began to donate her fortune to ecclesiastical institutions in such a generous fashion that the emperor Theodosius II (408–450), a distant relative of hers, appointed a trustee to manage her estate, until she reached the age of 30. When she regained control of her property, she donated large amounts to the Church and became a deaconess. In turn, Syncletica, after her parents’ death, did not sit brooding in grief, but she also gave her heritage away and built a convent, where she retired with her blind sister.21 In the Apophthegmata of John Colobus (the Dwarf), we hear about a young girl from a wealthy family who, once left an orphan, spent all her fortune in taking care of the monks and eventually had to become a prostitute in order to survive.22 Palladius of Helenopolis met Paisius and Esaias, sons of a successful merchant, Spanodromus.23 When their father died, they decided that there was no use in following his example, i.e. making a living by trade and accumulating money for their heirs, so Paisius donated his share and became a monk, while Esaias used his part to found a monastery. The example of Sabas is different, as for him the death of his father resulted in his reconnecting with his mother, Sophia.24 The saint’s father, Joannes-Conon, was a high-ranking military official in Cappadocia. Upon his appointment as a commander of a military unit in Alexandria, he was followed there by his wife, leaving behind his five-year-old son. The latter was to be looked after by his uncles, until he would be of age to inherit his paternal estate.25 But Sabas was disappointed by his uncles’ behaviour and left home. He became a monk and ended up living in the monastery of Theoctistus, in the desert of Palestine. From there he had the

  Life of Olympias, ed. Malinguey 1968, 406–49.   Pseudo-Athanasius, Life of Syncletica, ed. Ampelarga 2002. 22   Apophthegmata Patrum, John Colobus 40, PG 65, 217. For John Colobus see 20 21

Harmless 2004, pp. 196–202, where there is also a discussion of this story. 23   Palladius of Helenopolis, Lausiac History 14.1, ed. Bartelink 1974, pp. 58–60. 24   A biography of Sabas can be found in Patrich 1995, pp. 37–48. 25   Life of Sabas 87–9. For the role of uncles in looking after nephews see also the comments of Ville Vuolanto in this volume.

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opportunity to visit Alexandria and confront his father.26 It was a tough encounter, in which Sabas had to point out to his parents that he was no longer in need of their fortune, their protection or their help. Thus he refused to stay in Alexandria and become a priest in the military unit his father commanded.27 When they offered him 20 golden coins, he took only three to spare their frustration. This was, as Bernard Flusin notes, his way of showing them that despite his protests, arrogance and bluntness, he did not want to burn all bridges with his family.28 He still cared about their feelings; he just wanted to make a point, not to hurt them. Sabas does not seem to have had any other contact with his family until his father died. It was at this point that the wall separating him from his mother was suddenly torn down. Despite her old age, Sophia went to Jerusalem to meet her son.29 In the past she had abandoned young Sabas in Cappadocia to follow Joannes-Conon to Alexandria; she was now leaving her husband’s buried body in Egypt to go to Palestine for her son’s sake. As his father no longer stood between them, Sabas had the opportunity to establish a new relationship with his mother. He used her money to build new facilities in his monasteries and prepared Sophia for becoming a nun. In other words, he became the spiritual father of his biological mother and under these new identities they spent her last months together.30 Saints who came from a less privileged background than Sabas faced a very different reality after their father’s death. In pre-modern Mediterranean societies, the financial management of the household primarily rested on the father; the paterfamilias had to sustain and provide for his family. In the Roman empire widows or women in general had the right to possess, manage and invest both their personal property and everything their husband left to them.31 But practically there were many restrictions and social conventions, so women could not act as freely as men did. Thus, the death of the father, for many families, especially of the middle and lower social strata, had immediate and disastrous repercussions in the economic sphere. The case of Paisius is a case in point. He was the youngest of the seven children of a middle-class family, which as long as the father was alive, led a comfortable and dignified life. Yet afterwards the family’s finances collapsed. The distressed widow could not sleep at night agonising over how she would feed her children.32 It is therefore no surprise that Christian widows sought the help of the Church. Apart from psychological support and the hope for a better and fairer afterlife, the Church could provide assistance with practical and everyday needs. Indeed, since its early days, the Church institutionalised care for widows     28   29   30  

Life of Sabas 92–3. Chitty 1966, p. 94 and n. 108. Flusin 1983, pp. 96–8. Life of Sabas 109. For the use of family terms to describe spiritual relationships in Byzantine monasticism see the chapter by Dirk Krausmüller in this volume. 31   See Arjava 1996, esp. pp. 133–54, 167–72 and 248–54. 32   Life of Paisius, ed. Pomjalovskij 1900, pp. 3–4. 26 27

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and orphans following the Gospels’ teachings and the sermons of theologians and preachers.33 The Christian God and consequently the Church and the bishop acted as their father and guardian.34 However, even this help seems to have been insufficient for such large families as Paisius’. As a result, his mother had to take more drastic measures. She decided to get one of her children off her back by offering him to the Church. According to the Vita, during one of those sleepless nights an angel visited her and suggested that she offer her younger son to the Church. In return God would take care of the other six orphans. The woman objected that Paisius was too young to be in His service but, to her suggestion to give another of her sons, the angel answered that he was the chosen one, so she obeyed. The dedication of an orphan to the Church is common in hagiographical texts. It reminds us of the practices of infanticide and exposure of unwanted newborns, a practice harshly condemned by Christian apologists.35 So, Alypius the Stylite was given to the local bishop after his father’s death,36 whereas both parents of Daniel the Stylite tried vainly to convince the abbot of a local monastery to undertake the guardianship of their five-year-old son.37 In an attempt to explain this stance, hagiographers often referred to the example of the prophet Samuel, who was offered to the Temple by his mother when he was an infant.38 It seems though that the abandonment of children in Christian as well as in pagan families was not prompted by indifference or the parents’ lack of affection, but from their desperation and their concern to sustain the rest of their family.39 These were the motives of Paisius’ mother too, who dedicated her younger and most vulnerable son to the Church.40 Everybody benefited from such a transaction eventually. The mother and the child ensured their survival and perhaps a career in the Church, which itself had the opportunity to bring up its future servants in an appropriate way. In addition, unmarried and childless priests and bishops could find an actual human outlet for their suppressed paternal instincts. To be sure, only a few orphans could be adopted by and fully benefit from the Church. It is therefore not surprising that after the death of her husband, Dionysia, the mother of St Euthymius, asked her brother, who worked in the bishopric of Melitene, to arrange a meeting with the bishop Otreius. There, like Samuel’s mother Anna, she offered the bishop her three-year-old son. Otreius raised the child as if he was the one who gave birth to

33   For the welfare system for orphans developed by the Church, see Miller 2003, esp. pp. 41–8 and 108–40. 34   For example, God as the father of the orphans in the Life of Paisius 3; as a guardian (κηδεμών) in the Life of Alypius the Stylite (Vita Prior) 3.149. 35   See Boswell 1988, pp. 52–180. 36   Life of Alypius the Stylite 3.149. 37   Life of Daniel the Stylite 3.3–4, ed. Delehaye 1923. 38   Kings I, 1. 39   Garnsey 1991. 40   Life of Paisius 3.

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him (τρόπον τινὰ τεκνοποιησάμενος) and in due course made him a reader in the local church. Later on, Dionysia herself became a deaconess.41 Consequently, the death of the father emancipated his descendants and changed their financial situation dramatically. Those who came from a poor family, especially younger children, faced enormous difficulties that made them seek help and protection in the Church, while the wealthiest among them could finally use their property as they wished. This freedom was not limited to the economic sphere. They now had the opportunity to loosen the ties that accompanied traditional family values and change their path of life, even to reinvent themselves. Thus fathers in hagiographic literature stood as symbols of the restrictions and the responsibilities towards one’s family and community. Fathers represented worldly life, i.e. everything the hero/heroine had to abandon to seek salvation. Therefore the relationship between the saint and his/her father was always beyond the scope of the hagiographer, whose main theme was the spiritual advancement of his hero. Everything that happened before – upbringing, education, family life and, of course, the death of the saint’s father – was just a starting point, the opening credits, a convention for the story to start. The mother, on the other hand, was a symbol of the mystic and supernatural element.42 More often than not, she was the inspiration, the driving force that led her offspring to strive for spiritual perfection. Mothers did not merely offer their fatherless children to the Church. Signs were sent to them revealing that their child was special and chosen.43 Therefore, a kind of secret alliance was formed between them and God. Thus in some cases, the Life of a saint is also the life of his/her pious mother. The Life of Macrina, a text we will focus on next, is a notable example of this trend. The Cappadocians and their Fathers The pattern presenting the father as the conservative, reactionary force, a representative of the pragmatic, down-to-earth spirit, and the mother as the one who introduced her children to spiritual life, is confirmed in one of the most famous and illustrious families of late antiquity, the family of Macrina, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa.44 The Cappadocians did not share the hagiographers’   Life of Euthymius, ed. Schwartz 1939, p. 10.   For the significance of mothers see also the comments by Ville Vuolanto in this

41 42

volume.

43   For example, a vision revealed to Emmeleia the destiny of her daughter Macrina before she was even born (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 2.21–30, ed. Maraval 1971, pp. 144–6); Maria, the mother of St Theodore of Sykeon, saw a star touching her belly right after conceiving him (Life of Theodore of Sykeon 3.17–19, 3), whereas the mother of Daniel the Stylite saw two stars (Life of Daniel the Stylite 2.2). 44   For this family see also the contributions by Nathan Howard and Ville Vuolanto in this volume.

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contempt for worldly life. Conversely, as they were self-conscious aristocrats, proud of their origin, they considered both their childhood and their upbringing to be of great importance. It is not surprising therefore, that a wide variety of literary genres (orations, letters, theological treatises, poems, autobiographies and biographies) provide a plethora of information about their family and the role that each member played in it. Despite the variety of sources and the large number of references to the family, nevertheless the information we can obtain about Basil the Elder, the father of the three, is relatively meagre. For instance, although his father was his first teacher, Basil of Caesarea does not reserve a single word for him in his writings. He only appreciates his mother’s and grandmother’s influence on his thought.45 By the same token, his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, made only two references to their father in his Life of Macrina, whereas he describes in detail their mother’s spiritual advancement. Basil the Elder, famous orator and a teacher of rhetoric, was a devoted Christian. As a young boy, he took refuge on the mountains with his parents thereby avoiding the Great Persecution. Nevertheless, and this is indicative of his personality and perception of life, unlike his parents, he was not considered a ‘living martyr’.46 Despite his faith, his experiences, his charitable activities and fasting,47 Basil the Elder was a man of the world till the end, and he never got involved in Church affairs. The way he organised the lives of the members of his family is quite typical: Basil was a father of nine, which means that, for the longer part of their common life, his wife Emmelia was pregnant.48 Moreover, when Macrina entered puberty, Basil arranged her engagement.49 His firstborn daughter’s fiancé was his own choice, whereas, according to Gregory of Nyssa, Emmelia has been preparing Macrina from her infancy to live as a virgin, like St Thecla, and to be dedicated to God.50 Basil the Elder also found the time to get involved in the education of his eldest sons. He taught young Basil51 and most probably Naucratius their first letters and he must have chosen the teachers and the schools they would attend afterwards. In other words, this was an ordinary late antique family, where the paterfamilias had the responsibility and the right to define the lives of his offspring according to his own views and values. It seems that Emmelia did not bother to discuss with him her own expectations for Macrina, but kept them to herself. A conversation with Basil the Elder was pointless; father knew best. After his death, everything changed in the family. One of the most impressive consequences was the exceptional managerial abilities Emmelia demonstrated.     47   48   45

46

1964.

Basil of Caesarea, Ep. 223, ed. Courtonne 1966, p. 12. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 43, ed. Bernardi 1992, 5.9, p. 126. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 43, ed. Bernardi 1992, 9.3–5, p. 132. Van Dam 2003, p. 19. On the children of Basil the Elder and Emmelia, see Pfisters

  Life of Macrina 4.13–19, ed. Maraval 1971, pp. 152–4.   Life of Macrina 3, ed. Maraval 1971, pp. 148–50. 51   Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 43, ed. Bernardi 1992, 12.14–15, p. 140. 49 50

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Free henceforth from the obligation to give birth and raise children, once she had assigned the upbringing of the youngest to Macrina, she dealt with the finances of the family and managed to increase her fortune.52 Macrina, on the other hand, after the death of her fiancé, chose not to marry. She stayed with her mother, helped her, and practised a kind of domestic asceticism.53 They also moved their household from Neocaesarea, the city where Basil the Elder taught and lived, to a remote farm on a family estate in the Pontus. The death of Basil the Elder affected the male members of his family too, but in a different fashion. Naucratius, who was slightly younger than Basil of Caesarea, ceased his studies and after working for a while as an orator, withdrew to a different part of the estate in the Pontus. There he indulged in hunting, his favourite hobby, and practised a kind of asceticism under his mother’s supervision.54 His premature death sank the family into grief and, according to Gregory of Nyssa, impelled Emmelia to engage more actively in the ascetic lifestyle herself, with Macrina as her counsellor.55 Basil, on the other hand, did not rush to finish his studies; he attended the classes of famous teachers in Constantinople and Athens until he was in his late twenties. Then he returned to Cappadocia, where he also worked as an orator and teacher of rhetoric.56 Naucratius’ death did not seem to have any obvious effect on him; he continued to pursue a career in the world, the kind of life his father would have liked him to lead. The rest of the family, especially Macrina, was irritated by his worldly activities and even his dear friend Gregory of Nazianzus made some sarcastic remarks about it.57 Of course, it was not long before Basil abandoned teaching and, having amassed ascetic experience, became bishop of Caesarea.58 The same path was followed by Gregory of Nyssa, the third son of the family. Initially, he attempted to remain in the world, practising his father’s profession, and he even got married.59 Eventually, urged by his brother Basil, he turned his back on all this, and was consecrated a bishop. Thus, all the sons of Basil the Elder, with the exception of Peter the Orphan,60 felt obliged to follow his footsteps and fulfil their father’s expectations. The death of the father did not have such an immediate effect on them as on their mother and sister; the dead paterfamilias   Life of Macrina 24.14–20, ed. Maraval 1971, p. 201, and Elm 1994, pp. 89–90.   Kawiec 2003, esp. pp. 295–301, and Rousseau 2005. 54   Life of Macrina 8–9, ed. Maraval 1971, pp. 164–72. Elm 1994, pp. 83–91; Van 52

53

Dam 2003, pp. 65–7. 55   Life of Macrina 11.5–6. 56   For this period of Basil’s life, see Rousseau 1994, pp. 27–62. 57   Life of Macrina 6, ed. Maraval 1971, pp. 160–164. Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 2, ed. Gallay 1969. 58   Basil of Caesarea ascribed his change of life to a vision he had: Ep. 223.2, ed. Courtonne 1966, p. 10; Rousseau 1994, pp. 17–18 and 21–2. 59   Daniéllou 1956. 60   According to the Life of Macrina 12.4–5, ed. Maraval 1971, p. 182, ‘Orphan’ was Peter’s nickname, because he was born after the death of his father.

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still exerted authority over his sons. They had to take one more necessary step to liberate themselves from paternal claims. They had to prove that they were able to succeed in his field; that they were his equals, as Jesus is equal to the Father according to their doctrine. After that, they were free to move on to what they were really interested in, the field in which the women of the family excelled for three generations. Unlike Basil the Elder, Gregory the Elder (the father of Gregory of Nazianzus) died at a very old age, when he was almost 100, and had thus the chance to intervene in and shape the lives of his children according to his views. He was a dynamic and decisive man who would force his opinion without any hesitation. It is indicative that he converted to Christianity in his forties, after marrying the Christian Nonna, despite the fact that his decision estranged him from his family, even from his own mother.61 Gregory of Nazianzus ascribed his father’s conversion to Nonna’s persuasion and prayers, but, when we think of the emperor Constantine I’s pro-Christian policy, being put into practice in that period, we can find other, more practical reasons, that could have driven this self-made middle-aged man to be baptised and become the bishop of his hometown.62 Two of Gregory the Elder’s children predeceased him; Gorgonia, his firstborn daughter, who was married to a high-ranking army official – indisputably, a profitable arrangement for both parties – and his youngest son, Caesarius, who seems to have inherited the old man’s attitude; capable and well-educated, he soon reached the highest ranks of imperial bureaucracy, even becoming a ‘friend of the emperor’.63 Nevertheless, a letter describing his father’s disappointment and distress at his son’s remaining in the service of the pagan emperor Julian (361–363), thus undermining the Elder’s authority as a bishop, was enough for him to resign and return home.64 Gregory of Nazianzus was 47 when his father died, and he considered himself defeated by his old man.65 All he desired was to commit himself to his own version of the Christian ‘philosophical life’, and thus to fulfil his mother’s promise to God – Gregory was one of those children who were dedicated to God before their birth.66 He always thought that he shared a special tie with his mother, as he was the answer to her prayers.67 Gregory the Elder did not force him to find a worldly occupation; he understood that his talents were spiritual. As a result, he tried to get him involved in Church affairs. Gregory of Nazianzus refused. In his

    63   64   65   66   67  

Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 18, PG 35, 992–993. Van Dam 2003, pp. 41–2. For Gorgonia see Van Dam 2003, pp. 87–97, and for Caesarius, pp. 60–65. Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 7. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 2, ed. Bernardi 1978, 1, p. 84. Gregory of Nazianzus, De vita sua, ed. Jungck 1974, 5.68–71. On Gregory’s relationship with Nonna, see McGuckin 2001, pp. 19–20; Van Dam 2003, pp. 87–98. 61 62

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view, priesthood involved too much fuss; it was almost a worldly activity.68 He only wanted ‘to combine a gentlemanly solitude, in which he could study and contemplate, with a ready access to civilized society, as befitted his rank’.69 In other words, he wanted a different relation with the Church than the one his father had. Nevertheless, he could not achieve it. His father always came up with a new way to break his denial and impose his will; he tyrannised him.70 Gregory the Elder did not use his fortune, as Valerius did in the case of Melania – after all, Nonna was wealthy enough to ensure a comfortable living for her most beloved son. His way was more spiritual and mystical. Gregory of Nazianzus gave in and agreed to become a priest when his father threatened to curse him.71 Later on he became his assistant bishop for the simplest reason that, if he did not, he would not have had his father’s permission to bury him.72 According to Gregory, this power derived from the Elder’s quality as a father, not as a bishop.73 In other words, he ascribed to the ‘fearful paternal filter’ a kind of supernatural quality. In the end, Gregory of Nazianzus totally abandoned his old dreams and embraced his father’s plans. He no longer aimed at distinguishing himself from the old man, but he pursued everything he had achieved, to become everything his father was. He already had his name, he took up his bishop’s duties and he wished to share his grave too.74 Since he was unable to fulfil the maternal dedication, becoming his father and replacing him in their community and even in his mother’s life was the ultimate means to prove his devotion to her.75 Gregory shepherded the paternal bishopric after the death of his father, but he resigned when Nonna died. He still did not manage to follow the peaceful life he dreamt of as a young man. Instead he became the homoousian bishop of Constantinople, and he found himself at the heart of doctrinal and political controversies. But at least he had finally achieved everything his father might have wanted for him. Only after the establishment of the predominance of the homoousian party and his dethronement because of a technicality did he manage to retire and lead a private life. Like his friend Basil,   Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 2, ed. Bernardi 1978, 6.16–17, p. 96; and Or. 18.37, PG 35, 1036. 69   McGuckin 2001, p. 87, and more generally, on Gregory’s views on the ‘philosophical life’, pp. 87–99. 70   On many occasions Gregory defined his father’s attitude as tyrannical, for example De vita sua, ed. Jungck 1974, 5.345, Or. 10, ed. Calvet-Sebasti 1995, 2.7–9, pp. 319–20, and Or. 12, ed. Calvet-Sebasti 1995, 4, pp. 314–16. 71   De vita sua, ed. Jungck 1974, 5.363. 72   De vita sua, ed. Jungck 1974, 5.514–15. Christians considered it a blessing to bury a distinguished monk or clergyman; see for example the narration of a certain Paphnutius, who is praised because he had the chance to bury the monk Onouphrius, in Halkin (ed.) 1989, pp. 79–88. 73   De vita sua, ed. Jungck 1974, 5.311–19. 74   Epigram 84.58. 75   Or. 18.43, PG 35, 1041. 68

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Gregory had to fulfil paternal expectations before devoting himself to his beloved ‘philosophical life’, but his father was far too demanding – and alive. Gregory the Younger’s work is rich and important, but one full of bitterness and sadness, because he never had the chance to live by his personal aspirations. Gregory of Nazianzus exemplifies the effect a father could have on his family, if he was lucky enough not to succumb too early. During his long life, Gregory the Elder acted like a typical Roman father imposing his will on his children and adjusting their lives how he deemed fit. If necessary, he used the power Christianity gave him to extort their obedience. His son’s melancholy was the price for his strict authority. To sum up, the death of the father was a crucial turning point in the lives of late antique Christians, even if hagiographers were not interested in it. Undoubtedly, a family’s financial status changed dramatically and those who were of a distinguished lineage could finally use their fortune the way they preferred, while the descendants of poor and middle-class fathers lost their safety net. But in the final analysis, Vitae focused on the spiritual struggles and advancements of the main character, and information about their worldly relationships and activities is usually scarce and incidental; the Lives are more forthcoming on the consequences of the father’s death on a moral and ideological level. In this respect, what strikes us more is the sense of freedom the fatherless orphans gained to choose a mode of life beyond tradition and convention. The two famous Cappadocian families help us to confirm this tendency and to examine more thoroughly the consequences of the death of the father on the male and female members of his family. Emmelia and Macrina immediately put into practice their secret dreams, whereas the sons felt obliged to follow their late father’s legacy, maybe even to compete with him in his own field. The need for the son to prove himself his father’s equal and worthy of his legacy is also discerned in the case of Gregory of Nazianzus.76 In the long term though, the death of the father released everybody’s hidden and repressed creative forces. Male or female, the child was not accountable to anyone anymore. Macrina, Naucratius, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa had the opportunity to concentrate on and distinguish themselves in a comparatively new field in which Basil the Elder never became involved, the Church, while Gregory of Nazianzus was finally able to leave the public scene and occupy himself with study and writing, developing a relationship with the Church that was closer to the dreams of his youth. The control that their father had on their lives, the ‘tyranny’, had eventually come to an end, allowing them to enjoy the freedom that derived from their mother’s blessing.77

  This is indeed a fact of life beyond time and place, but it would be interesting to survey it as a literary motif as well. For example, in the Odyssey (1.156–324) Telemachus feels the burden of his father’s legacy, while the suitors devour his inheritance. He is prompted to go and look for him (an action of major symbolic significance) after Athena, in the guise of Mentes, reminds him of the great man. 77   Or. 18.43, PG 35, 1041. 76

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Bibliography Primary Sources Apophthegmata Patrum, PG 65, 71–440. Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Antony (BHG 140), ed. G.J.M. Bartelink (Paris: Cerf, 1994), trans. Tim Vivian and Apostolos N. Athanassakis, Athanasius of Alexandria, The Life of Antony: The Coptic Life and the Greek Life (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2003). Basil of Caesarea, Letters, ed. Yves Courtonne, Lettres I–III (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1966). Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius (BHG 647–8b), ed. Schwartz (1939). Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas (BHG 1608), ed. Schwartz (1939), pp. 85–200. George the Archimandrite, Life of Theodore of Sykeon (BHG 1748), ed. and French trans. A.-J. Festugière (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1970). Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger (BHG 1241–42), ed. Denys Gorce (Paris: Cerf, 1962), trans. Elizabeth A. Clark, The Life of Melania the Younger (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1984). Gregory of Nazianzus, De vita sua, ed. Christoph Jungck (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1974). Gregory of Nazianzus, Letters, ed. Paul Gallay (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1969). Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 2, ed. Jean Bernardi (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1978). Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 10 and 12, ed. Marie-Ange Calvet-Sebasti (Paris: Cerf, 1995). Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 18, PG 35, 985–1044. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43, ed. Jean Bernardi (Paris: Cerf, 1992). Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina (BHG 1012), ed. Pierre Maraval (Paris: Cerf, 1971), trans. in Anna M. Silvas, Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). John Chrysostom, Homily 4, On First Corinthians, PG 61, 29–40. John Chrysostom, Homily 6, On First Thessalonians Chapter 4, PG 62, 429–34. Leontius of Neapolis, Life of Symeon the Fool (BHG 1677), ed. Lennart Rydén, in André-Jean Festugière, Leontios de Neapolis. Vie de Symèon le Fou et Vie de Jean de Chypre (Paris: Geuthner, 1974), pp. 105–60, trans. Krueger 1996. Life of Alypius the Stylite, ed. Delehaye 1923, 148–94. Life of Daniel the Stylite (BHG 489–490e), ed. Delehaye 1923. Life of Olympias (BHG 1376), ed. Anne-Marie Malinguey (Paris: Cerf, 1968). Life of Paisius (BHG 1403), ed. I. Pomjalovskij (St. Petersburg, 1900). Life of Symeon Stylite the Younger (BHG 1689–1691c), ed. Paul Van Den Ven (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962). Palladius of Helenopolis, Lausaic Hisory, ed. G.J.M. Bartelink (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1974). Pseudo-Athanasius, Life of Syncletica (BHG 1694), ed. A.G. Ampelarga (Thessalonike, 2002), trans. E.A. Castelli in Vincent L. Wimbush, Ascetic

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Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook (Mineapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), pp. 266–311. Secondary Sources Agapitos, P.A. (2004), ‘Mortuary Typology in the Lives of Saints: Michael the Synkellos and Stephen the Younger’, in P. Odorico and P.A. Agapitos (eds), Les Vies des saints à Byzance. Genre littéraire ou biographie historique? (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines), pp. 103–35. Arjava, Antti (1988), ‘Paternal Power in Late Antiquity’, JRS, 88: 147–65. Arjava, Antti (1996), Women and Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Bernstein, Alan E. (1993), The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (London: UCL Press Limited). Boglioni, Pierre (1985), ‘La scène de la mort dans les premières hagiograpies latines’, in G. Couturier, A. Charron and G. Durand (eds), Essais sur la mort. Travaux d’un séminaire de recherche sur la mort (Montreal: Fides), pp. 269– 97. Boswell, John (1988), The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon). Chitty, Derwas J. (1966), The Desert A City. An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire (Oxford: Blackwell). Clark, Elizabeth A. (1984), The Life of Melania the Younger (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press). Daniéllou, J. (1956), ‘Le marriage de Grègoire de Nysse et la chronologie de sa vie’, Revue des études augustiniennes, 2: 71–8. Delehaye, Hippolyte (ed.) (1923), Les saints stylites (Brussels: Jules de Meester et fils). Efthymiadis, Stephanos (ed.) (2011), The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiographry, vol. 1, Periods and Places (Farnham: Ashgate). Efthymiadis, Stephanos with Déroche, Vincent (2011), ‘Greek Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Fourth-Seventh Centuries)’, in Efthymiadis (ed.) (2011), pp. 35–94. Elm, Susanna (1994), Virgins of God. The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Flusin, Bernard (1983), Miracle et histoire dans l’oeuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis (Paris: Études Augustiniennes). Garnsey, Peter (1991), ‘Child Rearing in Ancient Italy’, in David I. Kertzer and Richard Saller (eds), The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 49–51. Gregg, Robert C. (1975), Consolation Philosophy. Greek and Christian Paideia in Basil and the Two Gregories (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation).

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Halkin, François (ed.) (1989), Hagiographica inedita decem (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989). Hanson, R.P.C. (1988), The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark). Harmless, William (2004), Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kawiec, R. (2003), ‘From the Womb to the Church: Monastic Families’, JECS, 11: pp. 238–307. Krueger, Derek (1996), Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’ Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California). McGuckin, John A. (2001), St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press). Meyendorff, John (1975), Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press). Miller, Timothy S. (2003), The Orphans of Byzantium. Child Welfare in the Christian Empire (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Nathan, Geoffrey S. (2000), The Family in Late Antiquity. The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (London and New York: Routledge). O’Collins, Gerald (1995), Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Patrich, Joseph (1995), Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism. A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Perkins, Judith (1995), The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London and New York: Routledge). Pfisters, J. Emile (1964), ‘The Brothers and Sisters of St. Gregory of Nyssa’, VigChr, 18: 108–13. Rousseau, Philip (1994), Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press). Rousseau, Philip (2005), ‘The Pious Household and the Virgin Chorus. Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina’, JECS, 13: 165–86. Saller, Richard (1994), Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Scheidel, Walter (2009), ‘The Demographic Background’, in Sabine R. Hübner and David M. Ratzen (eds), Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 31–40. Schwartz, Eduard (1939), Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs). Studer, Basil (1993), Trinity and Incarnation: The Faith of Early Church (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press). Van Dam, Raymond (2003), Families and Friends in Late Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

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Chapter 5

Preserving Family Honour: Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina as Theological Polemic1 Nathan Howard

In the year 380 Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395) was emerging as a dynamic theologian.2 While engaged in the heated Trinitarian controversy of the early 380s he composed the Life of Macrina.3 This sacred biography extolled the piety of his sister Macrina (c. 328–379/380), the eldest sibling of a family in the eastern Roman empire that included the oldest brother Basil of Caesarea (330–c. 379), Gregory himself, and Peter of Sebaste (c. 340–391), each of whom would eventually serve as a prominent bishop in Asia Minor or Armenia.4 The family included another brother, Naucratius, and four sisters whose identities remain unknown. The parents Basil (the Elder) and Emmelia were wealthy landowners in the provinces of Pontus and Cappadocia. Their dynasty enjoyed a highly respected Christian lineage that included members who had survived persecution under Diocletian (early 300s) and ancestors who had been associated with Gregory Thaumaturgus5 (c. 213–c. 270), an influential Pontic bishop and student of Origen. While reinforcing the pious image of this family, the Life also functioned as a theological polemic that used couched references and metaphors to reinforce Gregory’s Trinitarian doctrine. It undermined the character of Eunomius (c. 325–c. 395), a former bishop of Cyzicus, a native Cappadocian, and a long-time   I am grateful to the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The Institute awarded a Lindsay Young research fellowship for the summer of 2010, allowing me to carry out research in the excellent late antique and early medieval holdings at the Hodges Library. I have enjoyed helpful direction from the editors Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher, and I also want to acknowledge the comments and critique by Lynda Coon, Aneilya Barnes, and Jeff Childers. 2   For a succinct and well-researched overview of Gregory of Nyssa’s background, career, and theology see Meredith 1999, pp. 1–26. 3   I consulted the following editions and translations: Callahan 1967; Maraval 1971; Cox Miller 2005. Dating of the Life of Macrina ranges from 380 to 382. 4   For this family see also the chapters in this volume by Fotis Vasileiou and Ville Vuolanto. 5   On the social significance of Gregory, see Slootjes 2011. 1

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theological opponent of Gregory’s recently deceased older brother Basil. After several years of study and debate, Basil had adopted a pro-Nicene account of the Eternal One as having one substance (οὐσία) consisting of three divine entities (ὑποστάσεις). As a proponent of a form of Arianism called Anomoeanism,6 Eunomius threatened this doctrine by teaching that God the Son and God the Father were unlike in their natures (φύσεις). In 365 Basil had denounced Eunomius’ Apology (completed in 361)7 in his Against Eunomius. Eunomius responded with a scathing counter attack on Basil in his Apology for the Apology, its first books finished shortly before Basil’s death in 378 or early 379.8 With Basil now deceased and the Council of Constantinople approaching in 381, Gregory was compelled in 380 to take up the theological cause against Eunomius.9 He was unwilling to tolerate Eunomius’ teaching, which challenged Nicene conceptions of the Trinity and thus subordinated the essence of the Son to that of the Father. Duty also called Gregory to defend the honour of his maligned older brother and, by association, the entire family. Furthermore, Macrina, the eldest of Gregory’s siblings, died in 379 or 380, within a year of Basil’s passing. Throughout the Life, Macrina appears as a stabilising force in the family. Losing Basil and Macrina in less than a year presented a blow to Gregory. Against this backdrop in 380 he composed the first two books of his extended treatise Against Eunomius10 – responding to Eunomius’ Apology for the Apology – and within two or three years he completed the Life of Macrina.11 The Against Eunomius constituted a more standard declamation against Eunomius’ character and theology, while the Life of Macrina issued an alternative narrative for undermining Eunomius by using Gregory’s family members to accentuate the Nyssen’s own credibility in juxtaposition to Eunomius. It functioned well as a complementary text to the Against Eunomius. The oblique critiques of Eunomius appearing in the Life were based on the protracted rebuttal in Against Eunomius. The Life was a much less direct reproach, but nevertheless it weakened Eunomius’s authority. The name ‘Eunomius’ does not appear in the Life and the work does not contain the usual elements of a theological treatise or

6   The opponents of Eunomius’ doctrine called his followers by this term, which derives from ἀνόμοιος, ‘unlike’. 7   Eunomius of Cyzicus, First Apology; see Van Dam 2003a, p. 28 n. 27. 8   Extracts from this apology were preserved in Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius; see Vaggione 2000, pp. 301–11, and Rousseau 1994, pp. 101–6. 9   Gregory of Nyssa, Epistle 29 (Epistle 1 in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series). 10   Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius; subsequent references will cite the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series with Werner Jaeger’s corresponding book and section designated in parentheses; all Greek quotations come from Jaeger’s edition. 11   See Burrus 2000, p. 98 n. 27, and Van Dam 2003a, pp. 33–4.

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classical invective. But the image of Gregory’s family presents a direct contrast with representations of Eunomius by Gregory himself and other theologians.12 Gregory’s family formed a crucial backdrop to his theological combat with Eunomius because in late antique society, the character of an individual was associated with his or her family. In a culture of extended households, the individual represented a product of the influence of one’s grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters. Descent from a highly esteemed kinship group brought immediate credibility. A good name was worth more than gold or silver.13 A commendable affiliation proved its value in rhetorical clashes. In classical invectives, authors routinely denounced their opponents by pointing out deficiencies within their dynastic heritage. Shortcomings in the relatives of one’s rival created ammunition for the calculating epideictic orator and writer. By demonising the adversary’s family one could weaken that person’s trustworthiness. On the other hand, a favourable pedigree, whether real or rhetorically constructed, bolstered one’s authority because it validated the individual as derived from a fruitful source. A close bond with his family – renowned for its sacred and civic heritage – brought Gregory credibility. It linked him to a collective source that guarded his image from certain literary assaults and it provided an excellent means by which he could legitimise his own theology. Specifying his own family’s ascetic endeavours enabled Gregory to articulate his doctrine in comprehensible form. In the Life of Macrina, he used this strategy to convey his beliefs and to make a case for his own worthiness as a voice of truth. In three ways Gregory presented the Life of Macrina as a polemic that set forth Macrina and the rest of his family as a contrast to the unworthy Eunomius and his theology. First, the Life discredited Eunomius by portraying Gregory’s family members as purified by their ascetic endeavours, and thus able to contemplate God.14 Their lives of discerning God through a numinous participation in his nature represented a radical departure from Eunomius the rhetorician, a man bent on fame and wealth, who taught that God’s nature could be explained through human logic. From the charges of his opponents, Eunomius appeared anti-ascetic. Second, Gregory showed that his family’s ascetic pursuits (which he called φιλοσοφία) allowed them to gain closer access to God, thus allowing them to refute Eunomius’ doctrine. Their participation in the activities (ἐνέργειαι) of the Godhead produced deeds that benefited others and strengthened communities. These acts of benevolence resulted from a spiritual maturity and ethos that taught his lay Christian audience not to be consumed by wealth, but rather to use it responsibly in service. Macrina and her family’s philanthropy related to their descent from a lineage of social and spiritual benefactors. Eunomius could 12   Begun by Basil in his Against Eunomius of the mid-360s, and perpetuated in the 380s by Gregory of Nyssa, fellow Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330–390), and others; see discussion and citations below. 13   Proverbs 22.1. 14   Rousseau 2005; Howard 2010.

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claim no such dynastic heritage. And finally, Gregory’s discussion of his family’s individual ascetic practices provided an illustration of God that accorded well with the doctrine authorised at the Council of Nicaea in 325 – a God defined by three complementary forms, each having the same essence. The Life read as a human model of a multi-functional divinity. His family consisted of disparate members, with each serving a counterpart function while reflecting the ἀρετή (excellence) embodied by Macrina. This characterisation attempted to discount Eunomius’ emphasis on the disparate nature between the Father and Son, an issue that had divided Eunomius and Basil for years. Contrasting Paths to Knowledge of God The Life of Macrina served effectively as a castigation of Eunomius because the hagiographical tract coincided with rhetorical images of him as one who shunned the life of ascetic withdrawal in favour of public acclaim and worldly pleasures.15 His Nicene adversaries presented Eunomius as a man obsessed with praise, adept at proving his points through dialectics, but failing to have personal knowledge of God. In the early 360s, Basil had reprimanded Eunomius for his pride.16 According to Basil, ambition – not sound doctrine – was driving Eunomius. By 380, when Gregory of Nyssa penned his first two books of Against Eunomius, this condemnation still struck a powerful chord.17 Gregory mocked his adversary as a sensationalist, a mere entertainer suited for theatrics, but not theology.18 According to his opponents, Eunomius did not have time for communion with God, nor did he have use for contemplating the divine. Gregory derided him as an insecure wordsmith, more preoccupied with winning his contests with other rhetoricians than disclosing the truth of God.19 He was content to outwit his theological dissenters, shaming them through the precision (ἀκρίβεια) of his words and the accuracy of his logic. Gregory also likened Eunomius to the scribes and Pharisees, Jewish religious experts who were depicted unfavourably in the Gospels as legalistic – guarding the laws and doctrines of the Jews but not putting into practice the spirit of God’s love behind these mandates.20 Other Nicene opponents also invoked topoi of anti-rhetorical polemic, thus questioning Eunomius’ character and his motives.   Vaggione 2000, pp. 184–7; Burrus 2000, pp. 101–3; Van Dam 2003a, pp. 28–37.   Basil, Against Eunomius 1.2. 17   See Burrus 2000, pp. 97–112, for analysis of this work; especially her discussion of 15 16

the unflattering ‘specular’ image that Gregory of Nyssa painted here. 18   Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.3 (1.16–17). 19   Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.3 (1.18–19). 20   Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.10 (1.107); for examples from one of the Gospels, see Matthew 12.2–14, 12.38–39, 15.1–9, 16.5–12; and especially chapter 23; on the anti-Judaising rhetoric of the Cappadocians against Eunomius see Shepardson 2007.

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Epiphanius (c. 315–403), bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, described him as a lover of luxury,21 moving from one wealthy home to another to satisfy his base appetites.22 Theodoret (393–460), bishop of Cyrrhus and a dominant figure in fifth-century debates about the nature of Christ, later condemned Eunomius for caring nothing for holiness (ἁγιότης) and restricting the nature of God to one word, ‘uncreated’ (ἀγέννητος).23 In these characterisations Eunomius appears anti-ascetic,24 a direct contrast to the image of Macrina and her brothers in the Life.25 An unwillingness to engage in or support the life of spiritual training – especially when coupled with his drive for status and wealth – undermined any pretence Eunomius might give for explicating the nature of God.26 The career of a rhetorician was suitable for prestige and fame, but it did not draw one closer to God or enable one to discern his divinity.27 Acquiring any semblance of comprehending God came through contemplation (θεωρία), part of a process that would lead to illumination. Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus in Cappadocia (c. 330–390) was one of the three ‘Cappadocian Fathers’, together with his friends Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea. Like his fellow Cappadocians, he asserted that discussion of theology was not for everyone. ‘For one who is not pure (καθαρός) to lay hold of pure things is dangerous,’28 he explained. Only when one is ‘free from the mire and noise without’29 is it possible to discern God. Gregory of Nazianzus advocated ‘“to be still” in order to know God and … “to judge uprightly” in theology.’30 Purification came through Christian acts (πρᾶξεις) – constant meditations, prayers, witness, and contrition.31 This removal of one’s sin and uncleanness thus allowed one to draw nearer to God. Likewise Basil argued that one must practise θεωρία in order to ascertain the divinity of the Holy Spirit, as well as the Father and the   On rhetoricians as ‘lovers of luxury’ see Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.3, 2.5, and 2.10. 22   Epiphanius, Against Heresies 74.4.4. 23   Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Church History 2.27.9; for the ecclesiastical and social significance of Theodoret, see Schor 2011. 24   Vaggione 2000, p. 184; Vaggione writes that ‘an attempt was made to make Aetius and Eunomius the “anti-monks” of the fourth century’. 25   For an analysis of the ascetic community in the Life of Macrina, see Elm 1994, pp. 78–105. 26   See Beeley 2008, pp. 68–9. 27   Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.15; on the public’s distrust of rhetoricians, Philostratus writes that ‘even while they praise it [the art of rhetoric] they suspect it of being rascally and mercenary and constituted in despite of justice’. 28   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3.7–9. 29   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3.16–18. 30   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3.13–14; see Psalm 46:10. 31   Beeley 2008, pp. 70–71; Beeley writes ‘Purification is the change of one’s whole conduct of life, one’s praxis, which is the necessary basis and context for the deep knowledge of God that Gregory calls contemplation’. 21

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Son.32 Through contemplation and participating in the activities of the Divine One, a holy person could experience characteristics that ushered forth from the nature of God. Purity of heart enabled one to achieve this reflection and to challenge nonNicene theology.33 Unlike his more direct literary assaults on Eunomius in other works, Gregory of Nyssa relied on subtler denouncements in the Life. After Basil had died, Gregory wrote, Macrina endured the grief in a way that manifested the ‘undebased quality of her soul’.34 Gregory prefaced this statement by inserting a metaphor alluding to the pain that Basil’s death caused her. He stated: But, just as they say gold is tested in many furnaces, that if it gets through the first firing and is tested in the second and, in the last is finally cleansed of all extraneous matter (ῥύπτον τῇ ὕλη) (this is the most accurate proof of true gold) if, after all this firing, no impurity (ῥύπτον) remains, something similar happened in her case.35

Macrina underwent the trial of grief, Gregory wrote, and her soul was proven virtuous by the test. But while praising his sister, Gregory was also discrediting Eunomius, whose spiritual mentor Aetius had worked as a goldsmith before becoming a prominent theologian.36 The job of a goldsmith included producing a pure quality of gold through many tests (as shown above). The implication in Gregory’s analogy was that although Macrina’s purity withstood the test of fire, Aetius’ product (Eunomius) did not meet the standard. Eunomius remained polluted by the world, whereas Macrina was clean. This metaphor was based on both Old Testament scripture and ancient Greek texts.37 Thus, it would have resonated with a Christian audience, whose classically educated members would have recognised the Hellenic allusions as well. As an orator, Eunomius was not situated in a setting conducive to a state of purity. Not only did the ascetic practices extolled in the Life of Macrina run counter to the life of a rhetorician, they also challenged the norms of society, mitigating the authority of logicians like Eunomius and replacing it with the lessons of unauthorised wilderness dwellers.38

  Basil, On the Holy Spirit; see Ayres 2004, pp. 218–20, and Hildebrand 2007, pp.

32

178–88.

  Ayres 2004, p. 220; Ayres writes ‘For Basil an account of the character of true Christian θεωρία provides both a context within which he can begin to articulate how one learns to speak appropriately of the divine being and a polemical tool for describing ways in which non-Nicene exegesis and theology fail’. 34   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 14.20–24, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 173. 35   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 14.15–20, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 173. 36   Philostorgius, Church History 3.15; see Vaggione 2000, pp. 12–29. 37   Proverbs 27.21; for Greek metaphors of gold see Brown 1998. 38   Harrison 1990, p. 444. 33

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The Life of Macrina challenged Eunomius’ theology because its heroines and heroes subverted Eunomius’ belief that the nature of God could be explained merely through reason. Their understanding of God came through departing from civic life and the influence of expert sophists. Macrina apprehended God not through a mastery of logic, but rather by withdrawing from normal social intercourse and achieving the purity necessary to contemplate the divine.39 Not surprisingly, the art of oratory receives minimal esteem in the Life. When Macrina was a young woman, her father arranged for her to marry a man of great talent, a rhetorician. ‘His reputation as an orator’, Gregory tells the reader, represented the young man’s bridal gift.40 This talent, however, was fleeting as ‘envy cut short this bright promise’.41 The youth died before he could marry Macrina. The young man’s untimely death carried great significance in the Life. His demise preserved Macrina’s pre-sexual state of purity and thus the inviolate nature of her family and the Christian community that Gregory oversaw as bishop.42 His passing also represented the fleeting nature of the benefits produced by a career in oratory. Macrina’s earthly spouse, an orator, was replaced by a heavenly bridegroom, Christ, one who provided blessings that transcended earthly benefits. A contemplative life of marriage to the Son superseded the prestige, security, and wealth that would have come from union with the budding orator. Moreover, the celebrated oldest brother Basil shed his life of rhetoric – through Macrina’s influence – for a sojourn of public withdrawal, physical labour, and complete poverty, each practice a rebuke of Eunomius’ preoccupation with public acclaim. Basil had become excessively conceited by his speaking skills and disdainful of others.43 As a man of great importance – a recipient of much attention and praise, a performer – Basil had allowed his humility to give way to pride. But after having undergone Macrina’s guidance in philosophy, Basil abandoned his love of fame as a man of eloquence. His energies had been tamed and curbed toward a nobler goal, contemplating God.44 Subsequently he became a man of virtue (ἀρετή). Thus the once conceited Basil was redeemed. By contrast, the reader had to consider, Eunomius remained fixated on worldly matters. Likewise, Macrina’s second oldest brother Naucratius, an up-and-coming man of strength and potential public leadership, ‘turned to a life of monasticism and poverty’,45 thus passing up a career of wealth and glory in order to live away from the city.46 Living in the wild as a hunter, with God as his only provider, was a far cry from public disputations and mesmerising audiences in the polis. For Naucratius, as for     41   42   43   44   45   46   39 40

Smith 2004, p. 67. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 4, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 166. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 4, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 166. Clark 1998, pp. 28–9; Howard 2010, p. 6. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 6, Callahan 1967, p. 167. On Macrina as a ‘tamer’ see Smith 2001. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 8, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 168. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 8.7–21, Callahan 1967, p. 168–9.

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Basil, communing with God in nature provided a sacred locus for understanding the Eternal. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – they had to be encountered, not formularised. A Dynastic Heritage of Philanthropy A further critique of Eunomius appears in the nature of this communion. For Basil and Naucratius, spiritual retreat entailed more than a personal search for the divine. It warranted service to one’s fellow man. Directed in φιλοσοφία by Macrina, Basil initiated a building project that became renowned as a site of charity.47 Meanwhile, the younger Naucratius used his hunting skills to provide food for older people he was serving.48 Macrina appears throughout the Life as the consummate giver and facilitator of kindness and generosity. Along with her guidance of Basil and Naucratius, Macrina moulded the youngest brother Peter into a ‘co-worker with his sister and mother in every phase of their angelic existence’.49 During a terrible famine, Peter organised his community of ascetics into a relief site that provided food for so many people that the place appeared like a city.50 The philosophy of benevolence embodied by this family measured favourably against the reputation of Eunomius as a showman bent on reputation and self-service. These acts of sacrifice for others were part of a larger message in the Life. Gregory was showing that understanding God could not be attained from a distance. Only through participating in his goodness was it possible to gain a deeper apprehension. This belief was exemplified by the self-denial of Macrina. It was indispensable to a philosophically reflective religion.51 This emphasis on participation in God was pivotal to Gregory’s defence of his family and criticism of Eunomius. A wordsmith could impress audiences seeking simplistic definitions of God, and thus Eunomius had enjoyed a large following. Gregory’s family, on the other hand, grew in their knowledge of the Godhead – not through specialised language to impress lay theologians – but through devoting themselves fully to his essence as a God of love. Gregory and Macrina’s mother Emmelia provides a fine example of the transformative function of a participatory life in Christ. After her husband Basil (the Elder) had died, Emmelia joined her daughter Macrina in her life of renouncing worldly comforts and devoting herself to rigorous sacrifice and service. Describing his sister and mother’s ascetic endeavours, Gregory wrote ‘What 47   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43; see Daley 1999, pp. 437–42; Holman 2001, pp. 64–72; Rousseau 1994, pp. 139–44; and Van Dam 2003a, pp. 95–7. 48   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 8.24–34, Callahan 1967, p. 168–9. 49   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 12, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 172. 50   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 12.25–34, Callahan 1967, p. 172. 51   Daley 1999, pp. 437–9.

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human word could bring this life before your eyes?’52 knowing God transcended human language. They had experienced the transformative process of purification through radical spiritual training, thus enabling them to contemplate the divine.53 If the Life stood as a testament of Gregory’s family experiencing God through πρᾶξεις, it represented an indictment of Eunomius and his fallacy of confining God by human words. Eunomius contended that God could be discerned through rational illustration. In contrast, Gregory argued that the knowledge of God was limited for any human, and that only a few adequately purified Christians – such as his sister and her family – could gain a measure of this understanding.54 Coming from a similar belief, Gregory of Nazianzus devoted two orations specifically to this issue in order to counter Eunomius’ position.55 He invoked the analogy of Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai to appear in the presence of God. While sheltered by a rock on the mountain, Moses gazed at God, yet he was able to perceive only a vague impression of Yahweh.56 Gregory explained that Moses’ impressions were like ‘shadowy reflections of the Sun in water … the Sun overmastering perception in the purity of its light’.57 If God’s chosen leader Moses had difficulty explaining his Master, Gregory surmised, the nature of the Almighty must be difficult to know and impossible to describe.58 Gregory of Nazianzus continued: For language may show the known if not adequately, at least faintly, to a person not totally deaf and dull of mind. But mentally to grasp so great a matter is utterly beyond real possibility even so far as the very elevated and devout are concerned, never mind slack and sinking souls.59

Gregory of Nyssa applied this sentiment as part of his rhetorical strategy in the Life. His audience would have known that Eunomius was a man of the city, one of the ‘slack and sinking souls’. Nothing in his spiritual life justified Eunomius’ challenging the theology of Basil or the other Cappadocian Fathers. He was not ascetically qualified. The image of Macrina and her brothers accentuated his unfitness for asserting doctrines of God’s nature. Macrina, the epitome of sanctity and communion with God, could lay claim to the purity necessary to discern God. So too could her mother and brothers, as Gregory was careful to emphasise. Eunomius, therefore, stood condemned as unworthy to contest Basil, and by connection, the entire family.     54   55   56   57   58   59   52 53

Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 11.33–35, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 171. Beeley 2008, pp. 68–9. Beeley 2008, pp. 66–80; McGuckin 2001, pp. 277–85. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27 and Oration 28. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.3; see Exodus 33. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.3.17–19. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.4. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.4.6–10.

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In addition to exuding the purity requisite for contemplating God, Gregory of Nyssa’s family enjoyed another distinct advantage over Eunomius, their social standing and a legacy of serving as benefactors. Eunomius’ family was probably of respectable status and education in their town of Oltiseris. As providers for Roman troops in northwest Cappadocia, his family probably included farmers, craftsmen, and small entrepreneurs, thus allowing them a comfortable living.60 Their ability to serve as major patrons, however, would have paled in comparison to the families of the Cappadocian Fathers. Scholars have not reached an exact consensus on the background of Eunomius, but they agree that his ancestry descended from a much less influential and prosperous lineage than Basil and Gregory of Nyssa’s dynasty, or that of Gregory of Nazianzus.61 The families of both Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus issued from landed gentry and their εὐεργεσία in Cappadocia and Pontus extended back many decades.62 Gregory of Nyssa makes no attempt to downplay his family’s wealth and status in the Life,63 but rather he indicates that his relatives commanded both, thus making their sacrifices all the more noteworthy.64 Lives of contemplating God transformed a familial sense of treasure: ‘Continence was their luxury and not being known their fame; their wealth consisted in their poverty and the shaking off of all worldly abundance like dust from the body’.65 Gregory did not shy away from illustrating his family’s prosperity because he was able to show that their asceticism had freed them from passion for money and human praise. One of the fruits of Macrina’s guidance of her mother was to lead Emmelia to ‘the immaterial and simpler life’.66 It was fitting that mother and daughter enjoyed a high level of affluence, Gregory insinuates, because they were not consumed by it. Rather, they used it responsibly, as part of both their φιλανθρωπία and εὐεργεσία. Emmelia subordinated herself to the level of her servants and provided the financial means of creating an ascetic community.67 Having no need for money, Macrina sacrificed her inheritance to the younger members of her family.68 Peter used resources at his disposal not to enhance his own economic standing, but   Van Dam 2003a, pp. 15–19; Vaggione 2000, pp. 3–7.   For varying interpretations see Van Dam 2003a, pp. 15–19; Vaggione 2000, pp.

60 61

3–7; and McGuckin 2001, p. 279 n. 278. 62   Van Dam 2002, pp. 16–38; Kopecek 1973. 63   For example, he states that his mother was paying taxes on property in three provinces; see Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 5.37–40, Callahan 1967, p. 167; and before joining Macrina in a life of asceticism, she had enjoyed an ostentatious existence, which included the service of maids; see Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 7.3–8, Callahan 1967, p. 168. 64   Cardman 2001, pp. 47–50. 65   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 11.24–28, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 171. 66   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 5.49–50, trans. Callahan 1967, p. 167. 67   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 7, Callahan 1967, pp. 167–8. 68   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 11.1–7, Callahan 1967, p. 175.

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to organise relief for those suffering from famine.69 And Basil became renowned across Asia Minor for his charity and patronage.70 In his Against Eunomius Gregory pointed out Basil’s reputation as a provider when he castigated Eunomius as a lover of money. Eunomius was concerned above all, Gregory declared, with his reputation and his money.71 Gregory asked his audience who deserved a greater reputation: Basil, who had given away his own wealth to provide for the needs of the poor, or Eunomius, who had exploited his theological discourses in order to increase his income?72 In the Life Gregory built on this contrast by portraying the self-abnegating Macrina and her family as a much more trustworthy source for theology than a man who catered to patrons based on his ability to earn their financial support. Macrina and her family members were pillars of εὐεργεσία, whose altruism and sincerity were well established, while Eunomius was a man of empty words. This point would have resonated in communities that depended on the local elite to provide for civic needs and to mediate with imperial officials. In addition Gregory could trace his theological orthodoxy by referring to the unerring piety of his mother Emmelia and grandmother Macrina (the Elder), the latter who had been persecuted because of her faith and who had associated with Gregory Thaumaturgus, the third-century Pontic bishop who studied under Origen and was famed for his miracles.73 These women, to use the phrase of Philip Beagon, were the ‘bedrock of Cappadocian Christianity’.74 Likewise, Gregory of Nazianzus could claim a divinely inspired εὐγένια (nobility) through his sister Gorgonia, but also one that reached back to the holiness of his mother Nonna and the priestly service of his father Gregory the Elder, bishop of Nazianzus.75 Like Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa was not only defending a theological stance against Eunomius, but also protecting his family’s heritage of benevolence and authority in their province.76 Attacks by Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus consequently emphasised that Eunomius did not come from an established family and thus his charges – especially his personal declamation against Basil – were out of place and undermining the order of society. Both Gregories wrote with the knowledge that their opponent’s pedigree would not be lost on their audiences.   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 12.30–35, Callahan 1967, p. 172.   See Rousseau 1994, pp. 133–89; Van Dam 2002, pp. 39–64. 71   Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.6 (1.50–53); χλανίδα καὶ ζώνην ἀσχοληθείς 69 70

is translated as ‘cloak and purse’. 72   Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 1.10 (1.103); ὁ προσόδων ἀφορμήν τὴν τοῦ δόγματος προστασίαν πεποιημένος. 73   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 20.15–18, Callahan 1967, p. 177; their great grandfather, according to the Life, had been executed because of his faith; for Macrina the Elder and Emmelia, see Basil, Epistles 223 and 204; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43.6; see Beagon 1995, pp. 165–7. 74   Beagon 1995, p. 166. 75   Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 8; see Elm 2006, pp. 188–91. 76   McGuckin 2001, pp. 280–288, Van Dam 2003a, pp. 17–21, 37–43.

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Family as a Divine Entity A final function of the Life relates to its spiritual imagery. The portrait of Gregory’s family in the Life reflected the nuances of the Nicene doctrine of God versus the formula articulated by Eunomius. The Cappadocian Fathers imparted that a full knowledge of God’s nature fell outside the bounds of the human mind.77 People could, however, perceive certain qualities in God, which He chose to reveal to them. This process of discerning (ἐπίνοια) entailed an intellectual contemplation of the subject but not an understanding that could be quantified or easily drawn.78 Lewis Ayres defines the term ἐπίνοια as ‘the activity of reflecting on and identifying the distinct qualities or properties of something’.79 Gregory of Nyssa was emphasising the limitations of understanding God’s nature, but he emphasised an aspect of God that could be perceived, his ἐνέργειαι (divine activities). Each part of the Trinity had a unique ἐνέργεια (also translated as ‘process, movement, energy’) that emanated from the common nature (φύσις) of the three.80 That each action proceeded from one substance represented a significant departure from Eunomius’ thought, which held that the Father and Son did not share the same substance. The Eunomians (also called Anomoeans) consequently subordinated the nature of the Son to that of the Father.81 The Life challenged Eunomius by presenting a human analogy for considering the Godhead, a household composed of multiple members, each one reflecting the same essence. The concern of the Life was not hierarchy, but rather common purpose, and Macrina stood as the foundation of the family. She played the part of father (πατήρ), teacher (διδάσκαλος), and guide (σύμβουλος) among other roles, to her brother Peter.82 She surpassed the nature of a woman through her virtue83 and she proved herself an athlete/combatant (ἀθλητής).84 This casting

    79   80   81   77

Scriptures that address this idea include Isaiah 53:8 and Romans 11:33. Ayres 2004, pp. 191–6; Vaggione 2000, pp. 241–6. Ayres 2004, p. 191. Torrance 2009, pp. 64–5, and Maspero 2007. For another example of differences between the doctrines of Eunomius and the Cappadocian Fathers see Barnes 1998, pp. 61–70; Barnes explains that Eunomius depicted the Son as having been delegated power (δύναμις) from the Father to create the cosmos. Thus Eunomius considered the Son a divine power, but one subservient to the Father because he was commanded by, and received his power from, the Father (pp. 62–7). By contrast Gregory of Nyssa believed that the Son was entrusted with the construction of the universe by the Father’s authority (ἐξουσία), but that the Son already possessed the creative power (δύναμις) found in the Father. Thus, for Gregory their natures were the same (pp. 68–70). 82   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 12.10–15, Callahan 1967, p. 182. 83   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 1.14–17, Callahan 1967, p. 163. 84   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 14.27, Callahan 1967, p. 173. 78

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of Macrina in traditionally male functions85 represented Gregory’s attribution of paradoxical roles to a woman, a strategy that Elizabeth Clark, Virginia Burrus, and Morwenna Ludlow have recognised as a means of voicing his theology through the mouthpiece of a female, mediatory figure.86 As a shaming device, Macrina was directed specifically at Eunomius, the anti-ascetic and misguided theologian.87 As a woman, Macrina did not represent a traditional authority figure. Instead, she constituted an applicable figure for satirising Eunomius’ image of God as composed of disparate natures. Macrina evoked the purity of her family, the core quality that Gregory was juxtaposing against Eunomius’ theology and his person. Each member of the family related in some capacity to her sanctity (ἁγιότης), but not always in the same way. Her kinship group exuded the varying ἐνέργειαι of the household, the activities that all derived from a common quality, their virtue (ἀρετή). This essence permeated the life of each member, but it emanated from a common source, the family as guided by Macrina. Although Gregory clearly implied a biblical precedent for thinking of divinity in this way,88 he added a deft touch by using classical language to convey his illustration.89 Thus Macrina reached the highest peak of virtue through φιλοσοφία;90 Basil pursued the goal of φιλοσοφία;91 Naucratius lived a moderate existence in the outdoors through φιλοσοφία;92 her mother Emmelia reached a high level of φιλοσοφία alongside Macrina;93 and Peter was raised to the high goal of φιλοσοφία.94 By defining the pursuit of God as philosophy, Gregory underscored – just as the ancients Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had – that this was an intellectual endeavour not easily negotiated.95 Readers would have understood that he was censuring Eunomius, who had relegated the comprehension of God to an exercise in dialectics. In every ἐνέργεια of the individuals in the Vita, their philosophy was punctuated by a participation in the divine (θεῖος). The familial ἀρετή manifested itself in various forms of φιλανθρωπία, which was at the heart of any responsible, cultivated

  On Macrina’s assumption of male gender roles according to these examples, and for other similar references, see Burrus 2000, pp. 119–22. 86   Burrus 2000, pp. 119–22; Clark 1998, pp. 23–9; on Macrina’s function in Gregory’s texts see Ludlow 2007, pp. 206–19. 87   Clark 1998, p. 29. 88   See I Corinthians 12:12–31. 89   Helleman 2001, pp. 90–99. 90   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 1.27–29, Callahan 1967, p. 163. 91   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 6.8–11, Callahan 1967, p. 167. 92   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 9.1–2, Callahan 1967, p. 169. 93   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 11.6–14, Callahan 1967, p. 170. 94   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 12.15–18, Callahan 1967, p. 172. 95   On the Christian appropriation of the language of philosophy see Rousseau 1994, pp. 77–82; Elm 1994; and Van Dam 2003a, pp. 109–13. 85

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Greek civic leader.96 After having spent time in ascetic retreat in Annesi of Pontus, Basil was eventually consecrated bishop of Caesarea.97 Here his ἐνέργεια took the form of spiritual and civic patronage for members of his province. As a holy man, now seasoned by spiritual training, service to others represented his participation in the divine. For Naucratius, procuring food for older people in his region and caring for his mother characterised his path to comprehending God, ‘by following divine injunctions’.98 Emmelia relinquished her high status by giving up her life of luxury to live in simplicity and communion with other ascetic women, some of whom had been her servants. With former slaves she prayed and sang praises to God.99 The youngest son Peter oversaw male saints in Macrina and Emmelia’s ascetic community. Like Basil, he too entered the priesthood after his communion with God in the countryside.100 And Macrina’s ἐνέργειαι are too numerous to describe fully here. But embracing a life of purity, guiding others to the pursuit of God, caring for others’ physical needs, and strengthening loved ones during times of grief were a few of her activities. The sacred ventures described above revealed divergent forms of φιλανθρωπία and εὐεργεσία, each driven by the pursuit of the divine as a manifestation of the family’s ἀρετή. This family portrait illustrated a model of Nicene orthodoxy. First it showed that it was difficult to understand the full nature of this family, but that one could perceive a sense of it through the ascetic workings of its members. Second, it accentuated the Cappadocian Fathers’ belief that comprehending God resulted from joining in his activities, not merely pontificating about them to a spectator audience. Conclusion A recurring theme in the Life is that contemplating the nature of God requires self-discipline, sacrifice, and charity. These qualities, conspicuously absent in representations of Eunomius, were trumpeted by late-fourth-century Nicenes as validation of belonging to the orthodox camp of Christianity. Accentuating these virtues in their hagiographic subjects enabled Nicene authors to present their saints as arbiters of a legitimate theology of God’s nature. Macrina and her family served as an illustration of the Godhead. Her Life captured the idea of a Trinity united in nature and working together through complementary ἐνέργειαι. The Almighty had to be understood by personally participating in the activities that issued from his nature. He could not be relegated to human definition. Christians knowing God in this way, Gregory contended, would perceive this sacred tri-partite nature     98   99   96

Daley 1999, p. 434. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 14.1–2, Callahan 1967, p. 173. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 8.25–35, trans. Callahan 1967, pp. 168–9. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 7.5–11, and 11.28–37, Callahan 1967, pp. 168 and 171. 100   Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina 12.25–35, Callahan 1967, p. 172. 97

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and recognise the oneness of the Father with the Son. Eunomius’ subordinationist characterisation of the Son made him a dangerous teacher and church leader. Thus he stood as an inviting target for Nicene supporters. For Gregory of Nyssa, preserving family honour added a powerful incentive to neutralise this erstwhile antagonist. The Life of Macrina did not contain the same oblique smearing of Eunomius as Gregory’s Against Eunomius, but its thinly veiled polemic would have been every bit as evident to an educated audience. Together, these works vindicated Basil and promoted the image of Gregory’s family and his theology. Bibliography Primary Sources Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius, ed. and French trans. Bernard Sesboüé, Georges-Matthieu de Durand and Louis Doutreleau, Contre Eunome, 2 vols (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1982–83). Basil of Caesarea, Epistles, trans. Roy Deferrari, Saint Basil, The Letters, 4 vols (Loeb Classical Library, 1926–34). Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, trans. David Anderson, St Basil the Great on the Holy Spirit (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980). Epiphanius, Against Heresies, trans. F. Williams, Panarion, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1987). Eunomius of Cyzicus, First Apology, ed. and trans. Richard Vaggione, Eunomius: The Extant Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 8, trans. Brian Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus (London: Routledge, 2006). Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 27–28, trans. Lionel Wickham and Frederick Williams, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus (Leiden: Brill, 1991); French trans. Oration 27 by Paul Gallay, Grégoire de Nazianze Discours 27–31(Discours Théologiques) (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1978). Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 43, trans. C.G. Browne and J.E. Swallow, S. Cyril of Jerusalem. S. Gregory Nazianzen, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, vol. 7 (1893; reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), pp. 395–422. Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius, ed. Werner Jaeger, Gregorii Nysseni opera, vols 1 and 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), trans. W. Moore, H.C. Ogle and H.A. Wilson, Select Writings and Letters of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, 2nd Series, vol. 5 (1893; reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), pp. 33–100, 135–248, 250–314. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina, ed. and French trans. Pierre Maraval, Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de Sainte Macrine (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1971); trans. Callahan (1967), and Cox Miller (2005).

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Philostorgius, Church History, trans. Philip R. Amidon, S.J, Philostorgius: Church History (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007). Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, trans. Wilmer C. Wright, Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists (Loeb Classical Library, 1921). Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Church History, ed. Léon Parmentier, rev. Felix Scheidweiler, Theodoret, Kirkengeschichte, 2nd edition (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1954). Secondary Sources Ayres, Lewis (2004), Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Barnes, Michel (1998), ‘Eunomius of Cyzicus and Gregory of Nyssa: Two Traditions of Transcendent Causality’, VigChr, 52: 59–87. Beagon, Philip (1995), ‘The Cappadocian Fathers, Women and Ecclesiastical Politics’, VigChr, 49: 165–79. Beeley, Christopher (2008), Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Brown, Adam (1998), ‘Homeric Talents and the Ethics of Exchange’, JHS, 118: 165–72. Burrus, Virginia (2000), ‘Begotten, Not Made’: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Callahan, Virginia Woods (1967), Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Cardman, Francine (2001), ‘Whose Life Is It? The Vita Macrinae of Gregory of Nyssa’, in Wiles and Yarnold with Parvis (eds) (2001), pp. 33–50. Clark, Elizabeth (1998), ‘A Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”’, ChHist, 67: 1–31. Cox Miller, Patricia (2005), Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Daley, Brian (1999), ‘Building a New City: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Rhetoric of Philanthropy’, JECS, 7: 431–61. Elm, Susanna (1994), ‘Virgins of God’: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Elm, Susanna (2006), ‘Gregory’s Women: Creating a Philosopher’s Family’, in Jostein Børtnes and Tomas Hägg (eds), Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press), pp. 171–91. Harrison, Verna (1990), ‘Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology’, JThSt, 41: 441–71. Helleman, Wendy Elgersma (2001), ‘Cappadocian Macrina on Lady Wisdom’, in Wiles and Yarnold with Parvis (eds) (2001), pp. 86–102. Hildebrand, Stephen (2007), The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea: A Synthesis of Greek Thought and Biblical Truth (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America).

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Holman, Susan (2001), The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Howard, Nathan (2010), ‘Familial Askêsis in the Vita Macrinae’, in J. Baun, A. Cameron, M. Edwards and M. Vinzent (eds), Studia Patristica 47: Papers Presented at the Fifteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2007 (Leuven: Peeters), pp. 33–8. Kopecek, Thomas (1973), ‘The Social Class of the Cappadocian Fathers’, ChHist, 42: 453–66. Ludlow, Morwenna (2007), Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Maraval, Pierre (1971), Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de Sainte Macrine (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf). Maspero, Giulio (2007), Trinity and Man: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium (Leiden: Brill). McGuckin, John (2001), Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press). Meredith, Anthony (1999), Gregory of Nyssa (London: Routledge). Rousseau, Philip (1994), Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley: University of California Press). Rousseau, Philip (2005), ‘The Pious Household and the Virgin Chorus: Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina’, JECS, 13: 165–86. Schor, Adam (2011), Theodoret’s People: Social Networking and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria (Berkeley: University of California). Shepardson, Christine (2007), ‘Defining the Boundaries of Orthodoxy: Eunomius in the Anti-Jewish Polemic of his Cappadocian Opponents’, ChHist, 76: 699– 723. Slootjes, Daniëlle (2011), ‘Bishops and their Position of Power in the Late Third Century CE: The Cases of Gregory of Thaumaturgus and Paul of Samosata’, JLA, 4: 100–115. Smith, J. Warren (2001), ‘Macrina, Tamer of Horses and Healer of Souls: Grief and Therapy of Hope in Gregory of Nyssa’s De Anime et Resurrectione’, JThSt, 52: 37–60. Smith, J. Warren (2004), ‘A Just and Reasonable Grief: The Death and Function of a Holy Woman in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina’, JECS, 12: 57–84. Torrance, Alexis (2009), ‘Precedents for Palamas’ Essence-Energies Theology in the Cappadocian Fathers’, VigChr, 63: 47–70. Vaggione, Richard (2000), Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Van Dam, Raymond (2002), Kingdom of Snow: Roman Rule and Greek Culture in Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Van Dam, Raymond (2003a), Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Van Dam, Raymond (2003b), Families and Friends in Late Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

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Wiles, M.F., and Yarnold, E.J., with Parvis. P.M. (eds) (2001), Studia Patristica 37: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 1999 (Leuven: Peeters).

Chapter 6

The Family in the Late Antique West (AD 400–700): A Historiographical Review1 Emma Southon, Mary Harlow and Chris Callow

The family in the late antique west (here defined as c.AD 400–c.700) is a field which has arguably been shaped too much by a privileging of normative evidence at the expense of evidence for social practice. This has had the effect that imagined social structures have been accepted as realities. For the most part, this has to do with the nature of the source material that survives, which mirrors the highly complex social, cultural and political changes of the period. As the power of Rome waned in the west and the political and military strength of the ‘barbarians’ came to prominence the western empire entered a period of significant – and sometimes violent – transformation.2 The nature of the ‘fall’, ‘collapse’ or ‘transformation’ of the Roman world, along with the validity of the new paradigm of late antiquity itself, is still a matter of lively debate, especially for some western European scholars dealing with the ‘fall’ in the west.3 The social changes and changes to the nature of ideas and practices surrounding the family have an important part to play in such debates. This chapter will consider just a small selection of key issues: kinship; marriage; gender; children; spiritual kin and the regulation of incest. It does not set out to be all encompassing or to present an extended bibliographic essay but to emphasise areas where thinking about the family has changed and the implications this has for current and future research.4 One of the issues for the period considered here is the boundaries of traditional historical periods: historians of classical antiquity have looked forward from the past, while medieval historians

1   For the sake of convenience this review deals with mainland western Europe, mostly former Roman Gaul, and does not deal explicitly with the British Isles or Scandinavia. 2   Walter Goffart (1980 and 2006) has been the primary advocate for the theory that the barbarian migrants were accommodated over a long period of time with very little violence, in contrast to the more traditional narrative of invasion culminating in the sack of Rome in AD 410. For recent discussion of Goffart’s ideas about the nature of hospitalitas see Halsall 2010b and Goffart 2010. 3   Ando 2008; James 2008. 4   For an excellent overview of work on the family in the west, for the whole of the medieval period, up to the mid-1990s, see Nelson 1997.

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have tended to look back from c. 800.5 There is a growing sense that, since the development of the late antique paradigm, ancient and medieval historians can both, fruitfully, lay claim to the period c. 300 to c. 800. As with the problems of looking at east and west, addressed in other chapters in this volume, traditional historical periodisation and geographical divisions have played a part in the way the historiography has developed. For western Europe, the focus in this period has centred on the novelty or otherwise of the political and social structures within the Germanic successor kingdoms of the Goths, the Franks, the Burgundians and, later, the Lombards.6 At the same time the development of Christian doctrine in the west and its wider influence has had to be considered within these smaller polities, such as through the effects of ascetic doctrines and the dominance of Christian rhetoric about the family and role of sexual relations.7 For a long time, much of the work on the Germanic kingdoms focused on the now discredited notion of a supra-familial unit of kinship known as the Sippe which, as a supposed pan-Germanic phenomenon, also served to distinguish Germanic structures from Roman. After Alexander Murray’s dismantling of this theory in the early 1980s, however, historians have paid less attention to the family, and social history more generally has been less important;8 in the past 30 years scholarship has also been influenced by the cultural and linguistic turns. Since Janet Nelson’s excellent review of scholarship on medieval family, gender and sexuality published in 1997, early medieval historians have, by and large, continued to be ‘willing to learn from literary analysts’.9 The family in the late antique west has been studied less directly as historians have reflected more on the difficulties of the surviving evidence, with solid social structures and clear lines of chronological development seemingly 5   Note for instance the overlaps in coverage between the recent relevant parts of the Cambridge Ancient History and the New Cambridge Medieval History series: Cameron, Ward-Perkins and Whitby (eds) 2000; Fouracre (ed.) 2005. For an issue of more relevance to this volume, see the recent Berg series A Cultural History of Childhood and the Family, Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence (eds) (Oxford, 2010), vol. 1 (Antiquity), which has a chronological range of 800 BC to AD 800; volume 2 (the Middle Ages) begins in 800. 6   Nelson 1997, p. 155. 7   Roman historians arguably underplay any influence of new, immigrant groups in the structures of the family in late antiquity, looking at elite families with obviously Roman cultural heritage, e.g. Arjava 1996; Evans Grubbs 1995; Nathan 2000; Cooper 2007; and Shaw 1987. With the exception of Arjava and Cooper all edge into the post-Roman world but without fully acknowledging the existence or influence of the non-Roman inhabitants. 8   See below, pp. 112ff. 9   Quotation from Nelson 1997, p. 154. Two good cases from just beyond the period considered here probably make the point best. Stone 2007 shows a more careful attention to the specificity of individual cases rather than grand narrative. Stafford 1997a also shows a keen awareness of the problems of the form of the evidence and how this can be used to illuminate ‘family’. In this context, however, note Wickham 2006, who comments on many historians’ need to take on board the approaches of Pierre Bourdieu.

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less discernible. Yet the family has been discussed in its own right as well as tangentially through scholarship on gender and, more recently still, childhood. This chapter, then, presents a brief overview of some of the unique developments in the historiography of the western family for c. 400–c. 700, and its distinctive features, ranging from the idea of the clan (German Sippe), to that of Friedelehe marriage, to spiritual kinship. It ends with an examination of future directions; some of the grand narratives about the family in the earlier middle ages have been dismantled but how we put the pieces back together again is less certain. Clans and Kindred Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship has had a long-lasting impact when it comes to considering the supposed role of the extended kinship networks among ‘Germanic’ society. Such scholarship focused primarily on the concept of clans, the German Sippe, supposing that the Germanic barbarians organised themselves not in small family groups – a development which was considered to be entirely post-industrial – but in very large, amorphous kin groups. The importance of the Sippe was first emphasised in the nineteenth century by legal scholars such as Jacob Grimm (in 1898) but was most influentially described in 1906 by Heinrich Bruner in his Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte. So effective was this work that in 1960, it could be said by Karl Kroeschell that ‘until now, scarcely anything in this theory has been changed’.10 There were two primary foundations for this thesis. First, the leges barbarorum, the barbarian law codes, which survive for each of the most successful barbarian successor kingdoms in the west, and second, the use of first-century Roman ethnographic studies by Julius Caesar (c. 40 BC) and Tacitus (c. AD 98). These two sets of sources, now recognised as difficult and multifaceted, were approached through the lens of nineteenth-century social evolutionary theory as accurate descriptions of a homogeneous cultural group. Indeed, that the ‘Germanic’ invaders of the Roman world were both entirely ‘other’ from the idealised Romans and yet also internally homogeneous in the makeup of their gentes were fundamental to the validity of the notion of the panGermanic Sippe and were rarely, if ever, questioned. However, through reading the laws it was clear that there were significant cultural differences between the different Germanic kingdoms. To take just one example, the variation in the nature of the guardianship of women (munt/mundium) across the various codes remained a particular issue for those who insisted on a homogeneous Germanic culture. The solution to this problem of heterogeneity was to posit a pre-migratory, unilineal, homogeneous Germanic kinship system that was diluted and changed by the migrations and by contact with the Romans. This premise remained central to

  Kroeschell 1960, p. 13.

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discussion concerning the society of the early middle ages until the 1980s with very little modification.11 With this foundation generally agreed upon, the debate instead centred on the ‘evolution’ of kinship systems, and in particular whether the nature of the ‘premigratory’, prehistoric, system of descent was patrilineal (agnate) or matrilineal (cognate). In German scholarship, driven by Heinrich Brunner (1906), agnatic descent was seen as the norm. In French and English language scholarship, a belief in the importance of cognate kinship prevailed, as extolled by Hector Chadwick (1907, 1912), Bertha Phillpotts (1913) and E.A Thompson (1965, 1969). Influential figures such as Marc Bloch could suggest that the ‘agnatic clan system’ derived from a ‘more ancient system of uterine filiation’.12 Indeed, Murray noted the ‘remarkable vitality of the matrilineal viewpoint among British historians which persists to the present day’.13 (Such views in turn prefigured the work of Karl Schmid, Georges Duby and Gerd Althoff, who have supposed that in the central middle ages the western family underwent a significant structural change towards an agnatic system, itself now a view which no longer necessarily holds good.14) Yet these two schools of thought were united by the sources they privileged and their assumption of a single, evolutionary pattern. Both agreed that clans or Sippen were fundamental to barbarian society, and that pre-historical barbarian society shared a single, exclusive form of kinship, and all agreed that in the historical period kinship was strongly agnatic with women excluded from all forms of inheritance. Faith in the idea of the Sippe remained common to much European historiography of the ‘barbarians’ and barbarian kinship until the 1980s. As late as 1985 David Herlihy, one of the key figures in the history of the medieval family, could see not only a common ‘Germanic’ Sippe but an equivalent in Ireland, a region which had been outside the former Roman empire.15 Yet with the publication of Murray’s Germanic Kinship Structure, a version of his 1976 Toronto PhD thesis based on an analysis of the Frankish Lex Salica, confidence in the notion of the Sippe has waned significantly, along with the kinds of overarching narratives of the medieval family put forward by the likes of Herlihy, Duby and Goody.16 Murray concluded that: ‘Despite the extent to which the clan and lineage have figured in modern attempts to describe the social, military and political life of the early Germans, none of the evidence documents extensive uni-lineal, or for that matter cognate, descent groups as the constituent kinship groups of society’.17 His conclusions not only underlined     13   14   11

Although Phillpotts 1913 acknowledged the significant difficulties with the thesis. Bloch 1961, p. 137. Murray 1983, p. 15. E.g. Schmid 1957; Duby 1977; Althoff 2004, esp. pp. 23–41. Le Jan 1995 sees a move towards greater emphasis on patrilineal structures before 900; Stafford 1998. 15   Herlihy 1985, p. 32. 16   Nelson 1997, pp. 160–64. 17   Murray 1983, p. 109. 12

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the importance of viewing the post-Roman kingdoms as separate entities, but also drew explicit attention to the importance of the small family group.18 Such conclusions were already commonplace in both feminist and political studies of the period from the 1970s onward (see below). Indeed, the difference between ‘Roman’ and ‘Germanic’ inheritance practices does not seem so striking; property was at least passed down through both lines and in practice people’s notion of family appears flexible in former Roman Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries.19 This applies equally for those who might have seen themselves readily as Roman or as Merovingian and is conveyed in letters, narratives, and laws.20 Marriage and the Law Alongside the clan, there was a second area which received considerable attention during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly among German and French scholars, and which was subject to the same assumptions. This was the legal study of ‘Germanic’ marriage. Again focusing on the leges barbarorum, these studies concentrated only on the legal and financial aspects of Germanic marriage with very little consideration of the social aspects. Julius Ficker’s extensive four-volume Untersuchungen zur Erbenfolge der ostgermanischen Rechte (published 1891–99) was particularly influential as an investigation of ‘Germanic’ inheritance rights (volume 3). Richard Schröder’s work (1863) on marriage settlements and André Lemaire (1929) and Louis-Maurice-André Cornuey (1929) on dowry payments are also representative of their age. They are concerned only with the financial aspects of marriage and are keen to investigate a particularly ‘Germanic’ practice as seen through the legal texts. Ficker’s work, along with Herbert Meyer’s 1927 article ‘Friedelehe and Mutterrecht’, however, had a particularly strong influence on understandings of the early medieval family with their invention of the concepts of Friedelehe, Raubehe and Kaufehe.21 These were identified as distinct and separate forms of marriage, denoted by the different position of the wife within each and the manner of her entering the marriage. Kaufehe (also known as Muntehe) was described as formal marriage, indicated by the exchange of the bride’s munt or mundium (guardianship) for a brideprice. This form was invoked in emotive language as ‘marriage by purchase’ or as ‘selling women’ as men’s chattel. Raubehe was defined as marriage by capture and described a perceived practice where women and girls were stolen against their own will and that of their parents into marriage. Finally, Friedelehe was defined as marriage by mutual consent or romantic marriage. Here, no brideprice was paid, only a morgengabe (morning gift) upon the consummation of the marriage, there     20   21   18 19

Murray 1983, pp. 217–19. Wood 2000, pp. 420–21, 425–6, 429. See Southon 2012. Ficker 1891–99, vol. 3.3, pp. 409ff; Meyer 1927, esp. pp. 224, 242–5.

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was no transfer of munt from father to husband and the union was therefore more easily dissolved. Many scholars claimed that Friedelehe was not true marriage but that it was differentiated from Roman concubinage. It was thus seen as a form of ‘informal’ marriage.22 This theory of the various forms of Germanic marriage remained fundamental to the understanding of the family in the early middle ages for many decades, with considerable debate over the definition and perceived frequency of each form within German legal historiography. For example, in Germany under Nazi rule during the 1930s and 1940s there was a considerable effort to align the current German state and the Aryan race with the early medieval Germanic peoples who were accordingly ascribed perfect Aryan characteristics. The concepts of Raubehe and Kaufehe, identified by the scholars of the time respectively as rape and as woman selling, however, did not accord with this goal. Thus it was argued that Friedelehe was the only form of marriage practised by the Germanic peoples.23 In 1967 Karl-August Eckhardt refuted the romanticised elements of Friedelehe which were common to the prevailing literature and described it as merely an endogamous form of Raubehe and Kaufehe.24 In 1983 Suzanne Wemple challenged the practice of comparing Roman and Germanic marriage and instead focused on the place and function of women within these marital forms. She thus rejected both Raubehe and Kaufehe as types of marriage but – drawing on Tacitus and still supposing a first-century AD author’s view was pertinent to a discussion of the post-Roman world – argued that there were instead two different forms of Friedelehe. She further asserted that Raubehe and Kaufehe could also be forms of Friedelehe as the woman ‘might co-operate with her captor, or, in the case of marriage by purchase, she might encourage the man to bid for her hand’.25 Despite this vigorous debate and continual re-evaluation of the concepts of Raubehe, Kaufehe and Friedelehe – or perhaps because of it – it was not until the twenty-first century that the actual existence of these phenomena was fully questioned, with scholars accepting their existence as fact well into the 1990s.26 Their existence was taken to be fundamental; the finer detail of their definition and practice were the loci for discussion. It has taken a long time for anyone to put forward any kind of sustained denial of these ideas but probably the most successful attempt at re-examining these nineteenth-century categories has come from Ruth Karras, who has previously worked on medieval sexuality and the social history of medieval Scandinavia. Karras dismantles the older work of Ficker and Meyer by pointing out that   Wemple 1981, p. 12.   For example, Merschberger 1927, p. 47; Köstler 1943. For a fuller analysis see

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Wemple 1981, p. 12. 24   Eckhardt 1967, p. 75. 25   Wemple 1981, pp.13–14. 26   For example Le Jan 1995, pp. 271–4. Note Nelson’s dismissal of Friedelehe’s validity in 1997, p. 161 n. 27, and 1999, p. 527.

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Friedelehe, and Muntehe, as invoked originally by Ficker, are not readily separable forms of marriage. The sources use Latin terms, a fact explained away by many generations of legal and family scholars. Karras sees distinctions between forms of marriage arising only after the period covered by this review; she suggests that for Lombard Italy, at least, the mundium recorded in seventh-century laws may be the same as the transfer of the manus in republican Rome; the break in practice, when it comes, happens under Carolingian influence.27 The Gender Revolution: Women and the Family As contemporary gender roles shifted after World War II, so too did historians’ attitudes to gender and the family. Although the early middle ages remained somewhat behind other fields, gradually through the work of American and British historians and the rise of interest in social and women’s history, priorities began to shift away from exclusive focus on legal texts towards narrative sources, documents and hagiography. As a result, the study and understanding of the family in the early middle ages changed considerably in a short space of time. In 1997 Nelson noted of medieval history in general that there was ‘an increasingly widespread (though still not widespread enough) perception that gender too belongs with family among the central themes [of social, political, economic and cultural history], and that family and domesticity are not interchangeable terms’.28 The emergence of gender studies provided an entirely different focus on the family through women’s experience. The field was really given life, however, by Pierre Riché’s series of articles in the Histoire mondiale de la femme (1965), examining women in Germanic society during the ‘pagan’ period, the ‘barbaric’ era and the Carolingian era. In the English-speaking world, Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple were fundamental to this new way of examining the family, beginning with their mid-1970s articles ‘The Power of Women Through the Family in Medieval Europe 500–1100’ and ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdoms’.29 While these utilised traditional legal sources, their explicitly feminist purpose meant they interpreted these texts in dramatically different ways by focusing on the family and on women from the perspective of women. They concluded that during the early middle ages the decline in ‘public power’ led to a corresponding growth in ‘family power’, which enabled ‘Germanic’ women to gain access to and wield considerable practical and economic power both within the family and in the wider world. Wemple and McNamara saw this as being a profoundly different situation to both the earlier classical Roman period and the later high middle ages, and as one which offered women unique advantages to   Meyer 1927, p. 225; Karras 2006, pp. 123, 130.   Nelson 1997, p. 155. 29   McNamara and Wemple 1976a and 1976b. 27 28

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gain individual power.30 In a much later article McNamara still considered that the early middle ages saw elite women having greater access to power. In her view traditional historical periodisation is essentially a male one whereas in fact the whole of the first millennium had formed a meaningful unity for women’s experiences.31 In the early 1980s, Wemple’s Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500–900 (1981) would come to epitomise this strand of history with all its strengths and weaknesses. At the same time, Nelson’s and Pauline Stafford’s examinations of Merovingian queens and their access to power shed considerable light on their unique roles within their families.32 The new surge in the history of women and of gender, as well as demographic studies based on Carolingian-period estate inventories (polyptychs)33 focusing on later centuries, and the publication of Murray’s monograph, effected not only the weakening of the Sippe thesis but also weakened ethnicist interpretations of the period. The family came to be considered as a primarily nuclear unit, with the extended family invoked only in special circumstances. Attention had shifted towards the study of women and female power. The turn of the millennium also witnessed the development of critical interest in the history of emotions among early medievalists34 which coincided with greater interest in love and affection within marriage, books explicitly examining the role of love within medieval marriage.35 As well as demonstrating a dramatic shift of focus onto the affective worlds of the people of the early middle ages, these books also demonstrated a further significant swing: from the Germanic/Roman dichotomy to Christian/preChristian. As the complexity and ambiguity of the ethnic and cultural milieu of late antiquity became increasingly more apparent, the simplicity of the Germanic/ Roman divide became all the more clear. The focus instead progressed to examine how the Christianisation of the west affected social structures, with marriage coming under increasing scrutiny. In the 1990s late antiquity was seen as being the starting point for a number of cultural shifts in the conception of marriage which crystallised in later centuries; principally, Christian marriage was said to be characterised by the consent of the couple and by affective love between them. This is a thesis (again) presented by Georges Duby in his Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, which is primarily concerned with high medieval courtly love, but which sees the beginning of such changes in earlier centuries. Phillip Reynolds’ Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianisation of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (1994) maintains a similar argument,   McNamara and Wemple 1976b, pp. 137–8.   McNamara 2003. 32   Stafford 1978 on Anglo-Saxon queens, particularly Emma, and 1983 on queenship 30 31

in general, particularly the Merovingians; Nelson 1978. 33   E.g. Siegfried 1986 responding especially to Coleman 1976. 34   Rosenwein (ed.) 1998, followed by much of a volume of the journal Early Medieval Europe (10, 2001) dedicated to short papers discussing issues raised by it. 35   Sheehan 1996; Elliot 1993; McCarthy 2004a and 2004b. See also Stafford 1997b.

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claiming that Christian marriage was – during this period – fundamentally devised to be different from traditional marriage. Reynolds considers Augustine to be the prime mover behind the new conception of marriage and dedicates nearly a quarter of his book to analysing those developments which derived from Augustine’s works.36 By 2004, sourcebooks such as Conor McCarthy’s Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages demonstrated that not only was the notion of affection within medieval marriage firmly embedded in the historiography, but also that ecclesiastical sources (the largest section in the early medieval chapters) were recognised as significant. Studies of the effects of Christianity, particularly ascetic practice, have also had an impact on the way we might analyse the internal motivations and workings of marriage, sexuality and sexual behaviour. The work of Peter Brown opened up this debate in the late 1980s and the implications of this for reading law codes was taken up by Judith Evans Grubbs and Antti Arjava. Kate Cooper questioned the dominance of asceticism in late fourth- and early fifth-century Rome. More recently David Hunter has consolidated his own research in this area to demonstrate both the influence of teachings of the Church Fathers on the role of sex and sexuality on family behaviour, again providing a counterbalance to those who privilege the doctrine of ascetic practice and the relationship of such rhetoric on lived reality.37 By the 1990s, the older construction of the west in the early middle ages as a period defined by a Roman populace being terrorised and barbarised by a ferocious minority of Germanic invaders was largely alien to the historiography of the family. Instead, the cultural revolution of feminist and social history acted to increase the focus away from legal and onto narrative and ecclesiastical source material in order to find women and social practice. Such methodological shifts fundamentally altered the way the period was viewed and how the family was studied. As the legal sources faded into the background, so did the state, to be replaced with literary sources, the church and the female. Some recent overviews of the period 400–700 in the west by British scholars have reverted to an older model of the dramatic fall of the Roman empire – British scholars tend to emphasise change more than others anyway – but it remains to be seen whether these will impinge on the social and/or cultural history of the period.38 Guy Halsall’s more nuanced views are perhaps related to his own more detailed studies; he dismisses the usefulness of the notion of ‘transformation’ which emerged in the 1990s and recognises the value of a closer (re)investigation of various forms of evidence at the regional level.39

    38   39   36

Reynolds 1994, pp. 240–315. Brown 1988; Evans Grubbs 1994 and 1995; Arjava 1996; Cooper 1996. O’Donnell 2005. Halsall 2007 for his overview, and 2010a for updated versions of many of his earlier case studies and a new paper on the life course, ‘Growing up in Merovingian Gaul’, pp. 383–412. 37

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Children and Childhood A further significant development from the 1960s was the sudden emergence of interest in children and childhood. Interest in this area was sparked by the controversial thesis of Philippe Ariès that medieval society had no concept of childhood. Working from artistic representations of children from the high medieval and early modern periods, he argued that children were viewed as miniature adults. The first reactions to Ariès tended to strongly agree with his conclusions, and many went even further, arguing that not only did medieval parents not view their offspring as children but as a result they had no emotional connection to them. Edward Shorter in his highly influential 1975 book The Making of the Modern Family was particularly emotive in his depiction of medieval parent–child relations, describing pre-industrial childhood as ‘the ghastly slaughter of innocents’ perpetrated by mothers who ‘did not care’ for the welfare of their children.40 Such an argument was briefly extremely common and espoused by such significant historians as Lawrence Stone (1977) and Lloyd deMause (1974). Following this flurry of support, however, there came a severe and lasting backlash which still today forms the foundation for studies of medieval childhood. Already by 1985 David Herlihy could write that ‘[t]here are few today who support Ariès’ thesis’, and throughout the 1990s and early twenty-first century there have been a great many detailed refutations of his ideas.41 Despite his erroneous conclusions, Ariès remains responsible for the creation of the field of childhood studies, and his thesis forced a focus on the relationships between parents and children and, in particular, on their affectionate and emotional bonds. There are now many reviews of the subject, from Barbara Hanawalt’s 1993 Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History, to Shulamith Shahar’s 1990 general textbook review Childhood in the Middle Ages, to the most recent 2007 volume edited by Louis Haas and Joel Rosenthal, and the 2009 edited volume and 2010 monograph by Cornelia Horn. Although this field is now vibrant and extensive, it is also limited in some respects. Much of the work on children focuses on the child as an infant or juvenile and on the experience or construction of childhood. Moreover, the primary thesis of each of these works has been remarkably similar; specifically, they tend to argue that there was a concept of childhood in medieval culture, and that parent–child relationships were both valued and characterised by affection.42 In more recent years some work has been done – entirely in article form – on the relationship between parents and adult offspring,   Shorter 1975, p. 204.   Herlihy 1985, p. 125; James and Prout (eds) 1990; Pollock 1983; Arnold 1908;

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Burton 1989; Hanawalt 1977; Manson 1983; Riché 1962; Néraudau 1984; Shahar 1990, pp. 2–7, and see p. 4 n. 6 for a further bibliography of medievalists who have approached and criticised his ideas. 42   For example Heywood 2001; Ozment 2001; Alexandre-Bidon and Lett 2000; Jochens 1996; Orme 2001; Horn and Phenix (eds) 2009; Hanawalt 1993; Horn and Martens

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almost all of which focuses on grown sons.43 However, these are concerned with the world of northern Europe, while the parents and children of more southerly regions remain relatively neglected. The study of children therefore remains somewhat narrow in scope. Furthermore, the number of studies which explicitly mention or examine the early middle ages is still limited. The vast majority of this research concerns the period 1100–1500 for which the written evidence is greater and has been made more accessible in printed editions and translations. Although Daniele Alexandre-Bidon and Didier Lett’s Children in the Middle Ages: Fifth to Fifteenth Centuries (2000) does cover the earlier period, it remains a short and correspondingly superficial work covering a huge period and marred by a lack of citations. It is only through tangentially related issues that childhood has received consideration in the earlier periods. Sally Crawford’s work on childhood in AngloSaxon England, in which she combines archaeological and textual evidence, along with similar studies by Edward James and Guy Halsall for Merovingian Gaul, provide excellent starting points for further research in this area.44 The primary lenses through which children have been examined in the early medieval period is that of Christianity’s impact on the lives of children, in particular on the practice of oblation and the development of the importance of spiritual kin through baptism. Primarily through the work of Mayke de Jong, particularly her 1996 monograph In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West, abandonment and oblation are now seen as different and separate practices. However, in most other examinations of the subject of oblation the differentiation has not been so clear. This is due to the uneasiness that modern scholars have had with regard to the practice of parents giving away their children.45 The most famous work on oblation prior to de Jong’s is that of John Boswell, whose primary thesis is that oblation was a humane form of abandonment. The middle ages of Boswell’s book is one in which the Roman world and its systems had crumbled leaving an impoverished land full of destitute people unable to raise their children under such harsh conditions. Oblation, in his view, presents an opportunity for such families to forsake responsibility for their children without guilt.46 In this interpretation, oblation is the last recourse of the poor and desperate, akin to 2009; and most significantly in the reviews by Haas and Rosenthal 2007 and Hanawalt 2002. 43   For example, Stafford 1978; Jorgensen Intyre 1996. 44   Crawford 1999; James 2004; Halsall 2010a. As these and other archaeologists would acknowledge, the burial archaeology of the early medieval west is every bit as problematic as the written evidence; many older excavations were done to less than exacting standards and recorded poorly. Although vastly expensive to do, a scientific reinvestigation of the age and gender of excavated early medieval burials could transform our understanding of many aspects of early medieval society. 45   Vuolanto 2011. 46   Boswell 1988 also argued that the lives of oblates were harsh and tantamount to slavery, in a manner that is – to paraphrase de Jong – full of moral indignation. One suspects

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child exposure and child selling. It is, however, a deeply flawed argument very heavily influenced by twentieth-century mores, and it takes de Jong a mere page to demolish it.47 Using a much wider selection of sources, she constructs oblation not as abandonment but as a gift from the family to God, influenced heavily by a discourse drawn from the Old Testament.48 In her view oblation is either a manifestation of calculated parental self-interest or of the ‘inherently reciprocal nature of early medieval religion’.49 Either way, it is framed as a deeply spiritual sacrifice, generally performed by the richest and most influential families. It is this more nuanced view, rather than that of Boswell, which remains predominant in current historiography. The second area in which Christianity influenced a child’s life in a unique fashion during the early middle ages was through infant baptism and the consequent creation of spiritual kin through godparenthood. This is often seen as a development particular to late antiquity, and especially to the Frankish kingdoms. The introduction of universal infant baptism comes about between the fourth and sixth centuries, and has a profound impact on the way in which families were conceptualised and performed with the addition of a new form of ‘co-parents through baptismal sponsorship’.50 As a new and apparently extremely influential development, spiritual kin and co-parenthood has attracted a good deal of attention from scholars. Joseph H. Lynch, in his seminal work on spiritual parenthood, distinguished four different methodological approaches to the subject in modern historiography developing chronologically: ecclesiastical, literary/folkloric (both co-existing between the 1880s and 1930s), anthropological (1930s) and historical (post-1950).51 It is this last which has been most fruitful, and it has followed the general pattern of scholarship outlined above. First historical studies, all of German origin, were primarily interested only in the political aspects of baptismal sponsorship, viewing it as a cynical political tool of kings and emperors alongside treaty-building and adoption.52 Joseph H. Lynch, however, in his 1986 Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe is highly critical of such an approach. He instead argues that the baptismal font was the site of the second birth, where the baptismal sponsor became the second parent. While this had significant social uses, it also placed a good deal of responsibility for the education and care for the godchild on the godparent.53 Much like oblation then, godparenthood and spiritual therefore that he believed that the parents should feel some guilt for their actions, however humane. 47   De Jong 1996, p. 5. 48   De Jong 1996, pp. 6–14. 49   De Jong 1996, p. 7. 50   Lynch 1986, pp. 334–5. He is, however, insistent that godparenthood and coparenthood were not to be conflated (pp. 74–5). 51   Lynch 1986, pp. 32–80. 52   For a full list see Lynch 1986, p. 75 n.81. 53   Lynch 1986, p. 335.

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kinship has come to be seen as a nexus between the family and the church, and an indicator of the importance of reciprocity within both institutions.54 Spiritual Kin and Incest The final area of particular focus for historians of the early medieval family has been incest legislation. Again, this has been viewed as a special development of the time and period due to the unusually restrictive provisions laid down by the development of the concept of ‘spiritual incest’. Such laws, developed through canon law and eventually adopted by secular law makers, came to the fore in the sixth century at the council of Orleans in AD 511 and were the literal manifestation of the metaphorical notion that Christian married couples are joined into one unit. Such laws forbade individuals from marrying anyone who was a member of his spiritual kin, up to the seventh degree of separation. In particular the laws forbade marriage to one’s deceased wife’s sister (i.e. sister-in-law), mother-in-law, cousin, child of a cousin, uncle’s widow (both paternal and maternal) and step-daughter. As the laws developed in complexity, they also began to include individuals related by baptism: godparents and the biological and spiritual kin of godparents. Clearly, in small communities these new rules could become extremely restrictive. The reasons for and causes of this sudden and extraordinary re-definition of incest have been much debated over the decades, with varying degrees of credibility. Giants of their fields such as Jack Goody, Georges Duby and David Herlihy have all advanced their own explanations.55 Mayke de Jong provides an excellent overview and dissection of these various theories in her 1991 article ‘To the Limits of Kinship: Anti Incest Legislation in the Early Medieval West (500–900)’, and again with even more detailed analysis in 1998’s ‘An Unsolved Riddle: Early Medieval Incest Legislation’. Incest legislation is considered in many other places, but in terms of its impact rather than concept. The fundamental question here has been whether the provisions were motivated by religious and spiritual considerations, or whether there are secular concerns at work in them too. Most scholars who have approached this question have tended to use it as a platform to air their biases against the perceived role of the Christian church during this period. Goody’s ‘historico-anthropological’ approach and Duby’s grand narrative are both symptomatic of this. Goody has argued in both The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe (1983) and The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay (2000) that the development of such restrictive incest legislation was a deliberate ploy by the church to limit the number of marriages and thus heirs families had in order to encourage them to bequeath 54   Lynch’s study has not signified the end of this politicised approach to sponsorship though. Jussen 2000 (originally published in German in 1991) maintained a particular focus on the royal families and the political and social uses of spiritual kin. 55   Goody 1983 and 2000; Duby 1977, pp. 28–9; Herlihy 1990.

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their wealth to the church. He explicitly connects it to the church denunciations of adoption, and argues that the church was deliberately trying to gather wealth through these means. Duby, writing in the late 1970s and with an anti-clerical view, believed and argued that these provisions were developed in order to give the church as an institution a way to control fully the private lives of lay peoples, in particular those from rural areas. In contrast, David Herlihy considered the Christian aspect of the legislation to be a false flag and instead argued that the provisions were enacted by secular law makers to prevent prominent males from hoarding women in their households through serial monogamy (or possibly polygamy).56 These ideas, all of which construct the church and the state as homogeneous and calculating entities, were decisively criticised and demolished by Mayke de Jong in 1991 and 1998. She instead forwarded her own thesis that the provisions were in fact drawn from a deep-seated and popular cultural distaste for the idea of spiritually incestuous marriage, and that such marriages would be widely seen by lay people as well as clergy as spiritually polluting. Despite her criticism of previous theses, her own remains far from fully accepted and the meaning, importance and enactment of these provisions remains somewhat controversial and unclear.57 This remains, however, a vital area of study for the late antique family, demonstrating as it does the new and widening concepts of the family during this period, and how it became subject to new provisions from both secular and religious legal authorities. Conclusions and Future Directions There are many areas of family life we have not covered in this short chapter but we hope we have highlighted issues where methodologies have altered over the years to impart more analysis and create a more holistic picture of the early medieval family. Perhaps not unusually historians of the family in any period tend to examine how others are dealing with evidence and what questions are being asked in other chronological periods.58 Research on the family in the early medieval west tends to be regionalised, to respect the different ethnic groups that make up Europe in the period; this suggests that more international co-operation would enhance the field. Interdisciplinary approaches are likely to become more important for understanding the family. Work on the emotional world of early medieval individuals, such as that by Barbara Rosenwein, is raising new questions.59   Herlihy 1990.   See for example the discussion of her paper ‘An Unsolved Riddle: Early Medieval

56 57

Incest Legislation’ transcribed in Wood (ed.) 1998, pp. 125–40, where numerous issues with her thesis are raised. 58   For a short survey of the historiography of the Roman family see Harlow, Laurence and Vuolanto 2007. 59   Rosenwein 2006.

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Advances in archaeology have led to new research directions, particularly into the health of individual communities.60 At least one recent overview of the early middle ages reminds us of the importance of the household as the major social unit rather than the nuclear family.61 A more detailed investigation of the archaeology of rural settlement might perhaps yield a better sense of how the design of domestic buildings related to their use.62 The move away from empiricist readings of genealogies has allowed historians to expand the remit of what might be considered ‘family’ groupings and what might constitute ‘family’ relationships and behaviour.63 Much new work is being carried out in these areas. This movement away from genealogies and clans also allows the historian of the early medieval family new ways to examine the extended family and multigenerational households without the constraint of the assumptions which have coloured so much earlier research. Since the feminist revolution of the 1970s, gender has been the primary lens through which the family has been viewed, a development which has broadened the field immensely. Gender does not just mean women, however, and a move towards incorporating the male perspective on and experience of the family using the methodologies developed by women’s history seems vital if one is to understand fully the family as both a real world unit and a social construction. The 1970s also saw the beginning of a movement to integrate diverse types of source material that had previously been examined separately, such as law codes and narrative texts, in order to gain a broader and complete picture of the family.64 Only very recently has this methodological approach been taken up again, for example by Guy Halsall, and it is an approach which can only serve to benefit historians of the family.65 The study of the family in the early medieval west is a subject which, despite its long history, is still in its infancy with near endless scope for new research as scholars engage with familiar sources with new approaches. After many decades of static assumptions, the past 30 years have seen a rapidly changing field of scholarship as we have demonstrated here. The study of the family of late antiquity offers a valuable point of comparison for the present-day ideological struggles and social issues concerning families, as a pre-modern society with circumstances much akin to the reality of developing countries today. In particular, it is useful for considering power structures within families, high childhood mortality rates, child exposure, strategies for ensuring security in older age and differing marriage practices. The study of the late antique family can provide us with an insight into a number of vital questions concerning social relations in the late antique world.     62   63   64   65   60

Mays 2010. Smith 2005, pp. 86–7. Hamerow 2003 provides an excellent overview for part of the west. Wood 2003; Widdowson 2009. McNamara and Wemple 1976a. Halsall 2010a, especially part four: ‘Age and Gender in Merovingian Social Organisation’, pp. 287–412. 61

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Families, in all their various forms, serve as a microcosm of the intersections of class and gender, and of apparently oppositional notions such as ‘Germanic’, Roman, pagan and Christian. The study of late antiquity also reminds us of the dynamic, flexible conception of what a family is and how it functions, in both the past and the present. Bibliography Alexandre-Bidon, Daniele and Lett, Didier (2000), Children in the Middle Ages: Fifth to Fifteenth Centuries (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). Althoff, Gerd (2004), Family, Friends and Followers. Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe, trans. Christopher Carroll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ando, Clifford (2008), ‘Decline, Fall and Transformation’, JLA, 1: 31–60. Ariès, Philippe (1973), Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldrick (London: Jonathon Cape). Arjava, Antti (1996), Women and the Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Arnold, Klaus (1908), Kind und Gesellschaft in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Paderborn: Schöningh). Bloch, Marc (1961), Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manyon (London: Routledge). Boswell, John E. (1984), ‘Expositio and Oblatio: The Abandonment of Children and the Ancient and Medieval Family’, American Historical Review, 89: 10– 33. Boswell, John E. (1988), The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon). Brooke, Christopher (1989), The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Brown, Peter (1988), The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York and London: Faber). Brubaker, Leslie and Smith, Julia M.H. (eds) (2004), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brunner, Heinrich (1906), Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte: Systematisches Handbuch der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot). Burton, Anthony (1989), ‘Looking Forward from Ariès? Pictorial and Material Evidence for the History of Childhood and Family Life’, Continuity and Change, 4: 203–29. Cameron, Averil, Ward-Perkins, Brian and Whitby, Michael (eds) (2000), Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 14, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, A.D. 425–600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Chadwick, Hector Munro (1907), The Origins of the English Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Chadwick, Hector Munro (1912), The Heroic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Coleman, Emily (1976), ‘Infanticide in the Early Middle Ages’, in Susan Mosher Stuard (ed.), Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 47–70. Cooper, Kate (1996), The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Cooper, Kate (2007), The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cornuey, Louis-Maurice-André (1929), Le régime de la ‘dos’ aux époques mérovingienne et carolingienne (Algier: These Université d’Alger La Typolitho). Crawford, Sally (1999), Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud: Tempus). Crawford, Sally (2009), Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Greenwood World). De Jong, Mayke (1991), ‘To the Limits of Kinship: Anti Incest Legislation in the Early Medieval West (500–900)’, in Jan Bremmer (ed.), From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge) (orig. pub. 1989), pp. 36–59. De Jong, Mayke (1996), In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden: Brill). De Jong, Mayke (1998), ‘An Unsolved Riddle: Early Medieval Incest Legislation’, in Ian Wood (ed.), Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period – An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge: Boydell), pp. 107–40. DeMause, Lloyd (1974), A History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press). Duby, Georges (1977), The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (London: Edward Arnold). Duby, Georges (1981), Le chevalier, la femme et le prêtre: Le mariage dans la France féodale (Paris: Hachette). Eckhardt, Karl-August (1967), ‘Die Decretio Childeberti und ihre Überlieferung’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte Germanistische Abteilung, 84: 1–71. Elliott, Dyan (1993), Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Continence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Evans Grubbs, Judith (1994), ‘“Pagan” and “Christian” Marriage: The State of the Question’, JECS, 2: 361–412. Evans Grubbs, Judith (1995), Law and the Family in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Ficker, Julius (1891–99), Untersuchungen zur Erbenfolge der ostgermanischen Rechte, 4 vols (Innsbruck: Wagner). Fischer Drew, Katherine (1963), ‘The Germanic Family of the Leges Burgundionum’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 15: 5–14. Fouracre, Paul (ed.) (2005), New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 1, c.500–c.700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Goffart, Walter (1980), Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418–584: The Techniques of Accommodation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Goffart, Walter (2006), Barbarian Tides. The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Goffart, Walter (2010), ‘The Technique of Barbarian Settlement in the Fifth Century: A Personal, Streamlined Account with Ten Additional Comments’, JLA, 3: 65–98. Goody, Jack (1983), The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Goody, Jack (2000), The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay (Oxford: Blackwell). Grimal, Pierre (ed.) (1965), Histoire mondiale de la femme (Paris: Nouvelle librairie de France). Haas, Louis, and Rosenthal, Joel T. (2007), ‘Historiographical Reflections and the Revolt of the Medievalists’, in Joel T. Rosenthal (ed.), Essays on Medieval Children: Responses to Recent Debates (Donington: Shaun Tyas), pp. 12–26. Halsall, Guy (2007), Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376–568 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Halsall, Guy (2010a), Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul: Selected Studies in History and Archaeology, 1992–2009 (Leiden: Brill). Halsall, Guy (2010b), ‘The Technique of Barbarian Settlement in the Fifth Century. A Reply to Walter Goffart’, JLA, 3: 99–112 Hamerow, Helena (2003), Early Medieval Settlements. The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400–900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hanawalt, Barbara (1977), ‘Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8: 1–21. Hanawalt, Barbara (1993), Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hanawalt, Barbara (2002), ‘Medievalists and the Study of Childhood’, Speculum 77: 440–60. Harlow, Mary, and Laurence, Ray (eds) (2010), A Cultural History of Childhood and the Family, (Oxford: Berg). Harlow, Mary, Laurence, Ray and Vuolanto, Ville (2007), ‘Past, Present and Future in the Study of Roman Childhood’, in Sally Crawford and Gillian Shepherd (eds), Children, Childhood and Society (Oxford: Archaeopress), pp. 1–14. Heers, Jacques (1977), Family Clans in the Middle Ages: A Study of Political and Social Structures, trans. Barry Herbert (Amsterdam: North-Holland). Herlihy, David (1985), Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Herlihy, David (1990), Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York and London: McGraw-Hill). Heubner, Rudolf (1968), A History of Germanic Private Law, trans. Francis S. Philbrick (South Hackensack, NJ: Rothman Reprints).

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Heywood, Colin (2001), A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Horn, Cornelia B. and Martens, John W. (2009), Let the Little Children Come to Me: Childhood and Children in Early Christianity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press). Horn, Cornelia B. and Phenix, Robert R. (eds) (2009), Children in Late Antique Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). James, Allison and Prout, Alan (1990) (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (Basingstoke: Falmer Press). James, Edward (2004), ‘Childhood and Youth in the Early Middle Ages’, in P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (eds), Youth in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer), pp. 11–23. James, Edward (2008), ‘The Rise and Function of the Concept “Late Antiquity”’, JLA, 1: 20–30. Jochens, Jenny (1996), ‘Old Norse Motherhood’, in John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Medieval Mothering (New York and London: Garland), pp. 201–22. Jorgensen Itnyre, Cathy (1996), ‘The Emotional Universe of Medieval Icelandic Fathers and Sons’, in Cathy Jorgensen Intyre (ed.), Medieval Family Roles (New York and London: Garland), pp. 173–96. Jussen, Bernhard (2000), Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice: Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press). Karras, Ruth Mazo (2006), ‘The History of Marriage and the Myth of Friedelehe’, Early Medieval Europe, 14: 119–51. Köstler, Rudolf (1943), ‘Raub-, Kauf- und Friedelehe bei den Germanen’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte Germanistische Abteilung, 63: 92–146. Kroeschell, Karl (1960), ‘Die Sippe im Germanischen Recht’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte Germanistische Abteilung, 77: 1–25. Le Jan, Régine (1995), Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (VIIe–Xe siècle). Essai d’anthropologie sociale (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne). Lemaire, André (1929), ‘La ‘dotatio de l’éspouse’ de l’époque mérovingienne au XIIIe siècle’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 4th series, 8: 569–80. Lynch, Joseph H. (1986), Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Manson, Michael (1983), ‘The Emergence of the Small Child in Rome (Third Century BC – First Century AD)’, History of Education, 12: 149–59. Mays, Simon (2010), ‘The Effects of Infant Feeding Practices on Infant and Maternal Health in a Medieval Community’, Childhood in the Past, 3: 63–78. McCarthy, Conor (2004a), Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge).

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McCarthy, Conor (2004b), Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (Woodbridge: Boydell). McNamara, Jo Ann (2003), ‘Women and Power Through the Family Revisited’, in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). McNamara, Jo Ann and Wemple, Suzanne (1976a), ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish Kingdoms’, in Susan Mosher Stuard, (ed.), Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 95–124. McNamara, Jo Ann and Wemple, Suzanne (1976b), ‘The Power of Women through the Family in Medieval Europe 500–1100’, in Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (eds), Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York: Octagon), pp. 126–41. Merschberger, Gerda (1927), Die Rechtsstellung der germanischen Frau (Leipzig: C. Kabitzsch). Meyer, Herbert (1927), ‘Friedelehe und Mutterrecht’, Zeitschrift der SavignyStiftung für Rechtsgeschichte Germanistische Abteilung, 47: 198–286. Murray, Alexander (1983), Germanic Kinship Structure: Studies in Law and Society in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies). Nathan, Geoffrey S. (2000), The Family in Late Antiquity: The Rise of Christianity and the Endurance of Tradition (London and New York: Routledge). Nelson, Janet L. (1978), ‘Queens as Jezebels: The Careers of Brunhild and Bathild in Merovingian History’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women: Dedicated and Presented to Rosalind Hill (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 31–77. Nelson, Janet L. (1994), ‘Parents, Children and the Church in the Earlier Middle Ages’, in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and Childhood: Studies in Church History 31 (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 81–114. Nelson, Janet L. (1997), ‘Family, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 153–76. Nelson, Janet L (1999), Review of Le Jan (1995), Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 77: 523–8. Néraudau, Jean-Pierre (1984), Être enfant à Rome (Paris: Belles Lettres). O’Donnell, James J. (2005), Review of Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (London: Pan, 2005) and Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2005, http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2005/2005–07– 69.html Orme, Nicholas (2001), Medieval Children (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Ozment, Steven (2001), Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Phillpotts, Bertha (1913), Kindred and Clan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Stafford, Pauline (1978), ‘Sons and Mothers: Family Politics in the Early Middle Ages’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women: Dedicated and Presented to Rosalind Hill (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 79–100. Stafford, Pauline (1983), Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages (London: Batsford Academic and Educational). Stafford, Pauline (1997a), Queen Emma and Queen Edith. Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). Stafford, Pauline (1997b), ‘Review: Did the Priests Plant a Cross on this Woman’s Loins? Love and/or Marriage in the Middle Ages’, Gender & History, 9: 375– 9. Stafford, Pauline (1998), ‘“La mutation familiale”: A Suitable Case for Caution’, in Joyce Hill and Mary Swan (eds), The Community, the Family and the Saint. Patterns of Power in Early Medieval Europe (Turnhout: International Medieval Institute/Brepols), pp. 103–25. Stone, Lawrence (1977), The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Stone, Rachel (2007), ‘“Bound from Either Side”: The Limits of Power in Carolingian Marriage Disputes, 840–870’, Gender & History, 19: 467–82. Thompson, Edward Arthur (1963), ‘The Barbarian Kingdoms in Gaul and Spain’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 7: 3–33. Thompson, Edward Arthur (1965), The Early Germans (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Thompson, Edward Arthur (1969), The Gauls in Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Vuolanto, Ville (2011), ‘Infant Abandonment and the Christianization of Medieval Europe’, in Katariina Mustakallio and Christian Laes (eds), The Dark Side of Childhood in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxbow), pp. 3–19. Wemple, Suzanne (1981), Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500–900 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press). Wickham, Chris (2005), Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400 – 800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wickham, Chris (2006), Review of Althoff 2004, Speculum, 81: 800–802. Widdowson, Marc (2009), ‘Merovingian Partitions: A “Genealogical Charter”?’, Early Medieval Europe, 17: 1–22. Wilson, Adrian (1980), ‘The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariés’, History and Theory, 19: 132–53. Wood, Ian (ed.) (1998), Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period – An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge: Boydell). Wood, Ian N. (2000), ‘Family and Friendship in the West’, in Cameron, WardPerkins and Whitby (eds) (2000), pp. 416–36. Wood, Ian N. (2003), ‘Deconstructing the Merovingian Family’, in Richard Corradini, Max Diesenberger and Helmut Reimitz (eds), The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Texts, Resources and Artefacts (Leiden: Brill), pp. 149–71.

Chapter 7

The Family in Medieval Islamic Societies Julia Bray

Problems of Terminology: ‘Islamic’ and ‘Medieval’ – People, Times and Places Family is an under-researched topic in Islamic history. The purpose of this chapter is not to survey primary and secondary sources, to which a summary guide has been provided in a separate article,1 nor to attempt to identify all the areas and aspects under which family might be studied, or to fill gaps through case studies, but to identify some of the general problems of framing family within the mainstream of Islamic history, a topic which remains substantially unaddressed.2 For many of the difficulties that I shall describe, the term or concept of ‘Islamic’ history is itself to blame. Its remit is confusing. To what people, societies, times and places does it apply? First, people. What in political history is called an ‘Islamic’ state might have had a Muslim ruler but not have been coterminous with a Muslim society. This was true as early as the founding of the city-state of Medina by Muḥammad in AD 622. The inhabitants of Yathrib (as Medina was until then) converted – when they did so – to a religion which had yet, according to traditional Muslim accounts, to undertake the shaping and governance of a society of believers, and Jewish tribes remained an important part of the population. Arabia was a historically and culturally complex subcontinent still involved with, but on the margins of, Byzantine and Sasanian politics.3 Later medieval Muslim sources emphasise the cultural resistance that earliest Islam faced within its own immediate region and subsequently throughout Arabia and among the Arab diaspora of Syria. Thereafter cultural disjunction typified the caliphate as an imperial power. By the 1   Bray 2011. For comment on the lack of study of the family in Islamic history see also the chapter by Nadia Maria El Cheikh in this volume. 2   For example, despite its title of ‘Rethinking’ medieval Islamic family history, of 16 papers given at a round table held recently in France, 10 were case studies examining family types and networks in the established sub-field of Fatimid (969–1171) and Mamluk (1250–1517) Egypt; one dealt with methodology, and only two with symbolic dimensions of family. Julien Loiseau (Université Montpellier 3 and Institut Universitaire de France), organiser, ‘Repenser l’histoire de la famille dans l’Islam médiéval’, Montpellier, 3 and 4 May 2012. http://cemm.upv.univ-montp3.fr/2012/04/21/repenser-lhistoire-de-la-familledans-lislam-medieval/ 3   An accessible introduction to the cultures and political configuration of the Arabian peninsula in the antique and late antique periods is Hoyland 2001.

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time of its overthrow by the ‘Abbasids in AD 749–50, the Umayyad empire had become a cosmopolitan entity stretching from Iberia to central Asia over mainly non-Muslim populations, but its multicultural composition is poorly visible in the writings of the founding Muslim historians of the late eighth to tenth centuries AD, our main primary sources, who are almost exclusively concerned with the destiny of Muslims. They have little to say about non-Muslims and do not trace their history following the conquests, even though they outnumbered Muslims for several centuries. (When and where conversion made Muslims a majority continues to be debated.4) Modern western ‘Islamic historians’ struggle to free themselves from this perspective, but continue to assign the leading roles to Muslims without always reminding their readers that they are therefore writing selective, indeed confessional, history. Their use of ‘Islamic’ oscillates between the confessional and the political. When ‘Islamic’ is used in this chapter, it is in the political sense, or else as a term designating norms for living and thinking derived from mixed cultural heritages, and including shifting cultural overlaps between Muslims and non-Muslims. ‘Muslim’ will be reserved for matters of creed, law and social practice by which Muslim believers sought to demarcate themselves from non-Muslims or (a more important target) from other Muslims whom they considered deviant. But however carefully it is used, the word will still have unintended connotations. As Ramzi Rouighi remarks apropos of ‘the “Islamic Mediterranean” … rarely meant as a serious analytical category, this epithet lends credence to the practice of understanding history through the prism of religion’, even though ‘[m]erely stating that some societies were Islamic does little to illuminate why understanding them as such improves our interpretation of their histories’.5 Aziz Al-Azmeh goes further and condemns: the common way in which unnecessary culturalist conclusions are adduced to cartographic data, whereby ‘Islam’ which, unlike Europe or the West, is not a place, however vague, is transfigured into a ‘world of Islam’ with an even surface and a coherent interior … Islam without further specification of time, space or level of analysis appears as a vast error of historical categorization.6

Such criticisms are especially applicable to the study of family, which, as we shall see, much modern scholarship has treated with little differentiation, assuming

4   For an overview of rates of conversion in Iberia and North Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Arabia, Syria and Iraq from the seventh to eleventh and twelfth to fifteenth centuries AD, see Hourani 1991, pp. 96–7. 5   Rouighi 2011, pp. 16–17. Avoiding ‘the prism of religion’, the Metropolitan Museum in New York has used geographical terms in renaming its galleries devoted to ‘The Arts of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Asia, and Later South Asia’, and its online search tools designate objects only by place of origin, material or maker. 6   Al-Azmeh 2009, pp. 78, 74.

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a Mediterranean, longue durée model prevailing across cultures, regardless of specific context. The second difficulty attaching to the term ‘Islamic’ concerns times and places, and with them, questions of periodisation. Twentieth-century western historians, writing mainly about the Middle East, Islamic Iberia and North Africa, and viewing the Balkans, Africa, India and East Asia as out of the mainstream or unparadigmatic, used ‘Islamic history’ for the whole period from the coming of Islam in the early seventh century to the end of the eighteenth century, when the impact of Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt was supposed to have triggered a crisis of modernity. In line with this, an ‘Islamic historian’ is still a historian, usually of the Middle East (or, in Spain or the French-speaking world, of Iberia and North Africa), who writes on any period up to the nineteenth century. Within this framework, the need has been felt to connect the beginnings of Islamic history with its precursors and contemporaries. For the first century or so, the notion of late antiquity has served to bring out continuities and contiguities. This is the ground on which Byzantinists and Islamic historians most often meet.7 Thereafter the focus tends, in contrast, to narrow, and dynasties – the only families routinely foregrounded by Islamic political historians – often serve both for chronological and geographical labelling and to demarcate what are increasingly specialised fields, such as ‘Abbasid or Mamluk studies.8 (Here again, though, terms meant as neutral or felt to be natural may nevertheless be problematic; thus, together with static shorthand renderings of fluid medieval political terms such as dawla, translated as ‘state’ and ‘dynasty’, Rouighi questions the use of ‘regions’ as a natural category coherent with the dynasties that laid claim to them; he sees it rather as an ideological one derived from layers of dynastic and imperialist historiography.9) The timespan of the present chapter combines these two widely accepted but unaligned projections, taking as its end point what Marshall G. Hodgson, from the perspective of world history, called the rise of the ‘gunpowder empires’, around AD 1500. Following Hodgson, R. Stephen Humphreys, from the viewpoint of   The pioneering forum was the seven interdisciplinary ‘Workshops on Late Antiquity and Early Islam’ involving Byzantine, Islamic and Sasanian historians which took place between 1989 and 2003. The papers have been published by the Darwin Press, Inc., Princeton, in the series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam under the general editorship of Lawrence I. Conrad and Jens Scheiner. 8   In this volume Nadia Maria El Cheikh studies the family of the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir. Since the 1980s, the ‘Abbasid caliphate of Iraq (750–1258) has had its own interdisciplinary forum, the School of ‘Abbasid Studies, which meets every two years and publishes Occasional Papers. In addition to colloquia at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, which are now in their second decade (‘Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras’), the Mamluk dynasties of Egypt and Syria (1250–1517) have a specialist journal, Mamluk Studies Review, which has been available free online since vol. 13 (2009) at http://mamluk.uchicago.edu/MamlukStudiesReview 9   Rouighi 2011, pp. 2–9, 173–8. 7

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Middle Eastern history, calls this the end of the middle ages in the Middle East.10 For convenience, and because, in a general discussion, greater detail is as likely to bring confusion as clarity, I shall follow Humphreys in using ‘medieval’ for the first 900 years of Islamic history and confining myself to what are conventionally seen as the central Islamic lands. Because of my own linguistic bias, I shall refer mostly to sources written in Arabic, even though from the start the range of source languages is broader and continues to expand in the course of nearly a thousand years. As a result, the coverage given here, which is in any case selective, will evidently be uneven. The imbalance is by and large typical of current scholarship,11 and its distorting effects, like those of the words ‘Islamic’ and ‘state’, need to be kept constantly in mind, particularly in reference to family. The importance of language must be stressed. The components of family differ from culture to culture, and the terms that identify them may not be reproducible from one language to another. How this may affect understanding of political structures and events has been shown by, for example, Étienne de la Vaissière.12 Conversely, ‘when the language of kinship is the same for several communities’ – or societies, cultures or languages – ‘it does not mean that they all share a common kinship system’.13 As Zoltàn Szombathy and others have shown, the Arab genealogical name-forms adopted by medieval Muslims and non-Muslims alike do not fully map social or biological realities.14 The last difficulty posed by terms and concepts routinely used in Islamic history concerns society, social actors and ‘state’, whether the latter is defined by the medieval sources in abstract terms, as the coercive authority (sulṭān) of those in power and of the bureaucratic and military apparatus, or equated with the person and actions of the ruler. What were the real types and extent of rulership? Which social actors had the most authority? How widely were Islamic norms of society and government spread, by what agencies, and how deeply rooted were they? To modern eyes, Islamic state and civil institutions were largely informal, and Muslim law (sharī‘a) is the most visible institutional agency in medieval Islamic societies, thanks to its abundant and, in the second half of the twentieth century, intensively studied literature consisting both of lawbooks and of grouped biographies of legal scholars, the latter projecting a strong self-image of ubiquity, importance and authority across the whole of society. Other intellectual agents – 10   Hodgson 1974, gives vol. 3 the subtitle The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times. On demarcating the period 600 to 1500 as ‘medieval Islam’, see Humphreys 1991, pp. ix–x. On pre- and post-1500 periodisation, see also Morgan 2011, a review of Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 11   Thus, for example, Robinson 2003 is in effect a survey of medieval Arabic history writing, with some remarks on Persian and Turkish. 12   De la Vaissière 2010. 13   Peters 1976, p. 27, cited in Szombathy 2003, p.180. 14   See below, Ideology.

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the literati who serviced both rulers’ courts and bureaucracies; economic actors – merchants, artisans – and even the military, have not commanded the same breadth of attention in recent scholarship; yet we do not really know much about how sharī‘a affected the mass of medieval Muslims in practice, nor how other social groups and actors imposed themselves. Norms and Reality: The Law Muslim law was not state law, and its relation to the state, in different times and places, is a matter of uncertainty. Sharī‘a judges were state-appointed, but the schools of jurisprudence (fiqh) developed out of the endeavours of private scholars, some of whom were pro- and some anti-state. Muslim rulers – caliphs, or the local or empire-building warlords such as the Saljuqs15 whom they endorsed as de facto rulers – only sometimes aligned themselves with Muslim law when setting taxes16 or ratifying their subjects’ right to hold or own land. On the other hand – and this is a topic which deserves more investigation – they often seem to have accepted sharī‘a limitations on themselves. They owned land only privately:17 they did not lay personal claim to the territories they ruled, and, importantly, apparently did not use marriage and dowries to add to or reconfigure the state.18 Among the examples she cites from medieval Iran, in what is still the only detailed documented study of marriage strategies in ruling dynasties in medieval Islamic states, Ann K.S. Lambton makes useful distinctions, observing that while ‘[m]arriage alliances played an important part in the policy of the Saljuqs and the succession states, and many of their women played a prominent role in public affairs … [t]he purpose of marriages within the Saljuq family was only partly, if at all, political’ (emphases added).19 For example: marriages were perhaps sometimes made with the intention of controlling younger members of the family. When Maḥmūd [ibn] Muḥammad rebelled against Sanjar in … 1119–20, [the latter’s] mother, who was also Maḥmūd’s grandmother, apparently persuaded Sanjar to make peace with his nephew. It

  A Turkish dynasty which ruled in Iran and Iraq 1040–1194.   For a rare example, from Egypt, of a cadastral survey showing agricultural and

15 16

confessional taxation of Muslims and Christians and dating to AD 1245, see http://www. history.qmul.ac.uk/ruralsocietyislam (the website of the Queen Mary, University of London, project Rural Society in Medieval Islam: ‘History of the Fayyum’). 17   Landowning in medieval Iran across the social scale, including rulers, is surveyed in detail in Lambton 1988, chap. 4: ‘Landed Property and its Administration: Idrārāt and Auqāf’. 18   See Lambton 1988, chap. 8: ‘The Constitution of Society (2) Women of the Ruling House’. 19   Lambton 1988, pp. 258–9.

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was probably after this that Sanjar married [a] daughter to Maḥmūd. When she died … Sanjar sent another daughter … to be Maḥmūd’s wife.

If this was an endogamous strategy, others might be exogamous: [The] common tribal practice [of exchanging] brides to mark the conclusion of hostilities … or consolidate an existing alliance or friendship … can be seen in the relations of the Saljuqs with former local ruling families and persons of local influence. The Saljuqs needed their help to administer their conquests and one of the means by which they hoped to gain their cooperation was through marriage alliances.20

Caliphal marriages with Saljuq princesses, on the other hand, were the result of more complicated strategies on both sides. They ‘rarely produced offspring’, according to Eric Hanne, for ‘the production of potential [caliphal] heirs … was tightly controlled by members of the court’ in order to avoid ceding control of the dynasty to outsiders. As in earlier centuries, slave women were preferred as the mothers of future caliphs.21 Neither Muslim family law nor tribal or local custom provided an automatic rule of succession (as through primogeniture); and partly because of this, the ruler, together with his relatives, stood in a flimsy relationship, legally speaking, to the lands and people that he ruled. Many political theorists tried to bulk up the ties between ruler and ruled (but not between ruler and territory) by drawing upon nonMuslim political paradigms. Andrew Marsham argues that in the second half of the eighth century AD the chanceries of the early ‘Abbasids used pre-Islamic precedent as well as nascent Muslim law to devise ‘a new genre of legal text’ designed to make binding a caliph’s choice of which family member was to succeed him.22 Louise Marlow has shown that medieval courtly traditions of Islamic political thought – advice literature and mirrors for princes, written by the literati of the chanceries and of the ruler’s personal entourage – occupied a central place in both theory and practice,23 far larger than is allowed them in such surveys as Patricia Crone’s God’s Rule – Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought, which despite their comprehensive titles give pride of place to the ideas of jurists and theologians rather than engaging with the whole spectrum of Islamic thinking about politics;24 and this should encourage us to take seriously the fact that advice

  Lambton 1988, pp. 259–60.   Hanne 2008, pp. 40–41. On such women see also the comments by Nadia El

20 21

Cheikh in this volume. 22   Marsham 2009, p. 243. 23   Marlow 2007. 24   Crone 2004; first published as Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). For a detailed critique of Crone’s book, see Al-Azmeh 2007, chap. 7, ‘Islamic Political Thought: Current Historiography and the Frame of History’.

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on marriage often bulks large in the courtly political tradition,25 whereas whom a caliph marries and begets potential heirs upon is not discussed in legal literature. In fact, one and the same author may disregard the topic in a legal tract and address it in a courtly one; an example is al-Māwardī (died 1058), who says nothing about marriage in his legal theory of caliphal authority and administration, al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya,26 while the courtly Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, ‘Advice to Rulers’, which is also attributed to him but has received far less attention from modern scholarship, discusses marriage, offspring and heirs.27 The indeterminacy, in medieval legal discussion, of many aspects of the ruler’s person, family and household contrasts with the thoroughness with which legal thinking went about defining the status and relationships of ordinary Muslims. A main concern of Muslim law, adumbrated in the Qur’an, was the individual and his or her property rights – not least those operating in marriage and divorce – notably their responsibilities towards their creditors and kin, who were statutory heirs.28 Though scholars have always been aware of a highly theoretical dimension in Muslim jurisprudence, the idea of sharī‘a norms as being more ideology than practice is still difficult to accept. And yet, as David S. Powers has shown, citing legal opinions that enabled testators to gift far more than their Qur’anic share to family members, ‘Muslim proprietors found numerous ways to circumvent … rules of partible inheritance … [whose application would have] resulted in the progressive fragmentation of wealth and capital … and … received important assistance in this respect from Muslim jurists’, at least in twelfth-century Andalus and fifteenth-century Morocco.29 However applied, the law meshed individuals, through their property, in a network of social and kinship claims. Nevertheless, it recognised as legal 25   An example is the Persian Qābūsnāma, composed in 1082 by the petty Iranian ruler Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar ibn Qābūs for his son and heir; see Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar ibn Qābūs, Qābūs Nāma, chap. 26, ‘Marrying a Wife’ and chap. 27, ‘On Rearing Children’. From the same region, earlier in the same century, advice on marriage, and warning examples from past and recent history, are offered to his prince by the courtier al-Tha‘ālibī in an Arabic treatise, Ādāb al-mulūk; see Bray 2010a, p. 37. 26   Al-Māwardī, al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya. 27   Al-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk, ed. Muḥammad Jāsim al-Ḥadīthī (Baghdad: Dār al-Shu’ūn al-Thaqāfiyya al-‘Āmma, 1986); on pp. 297–300 rulers are urged to seek wives who are beautiful, intelligent and virtuous and their equals in rank, in order to beget worthy heirs; then follow passages on the breast-feeding, weaning, naming and education of offspring. 28   For Qur’anic proof texts bearing on marriage, family, inheritance and related matters with discussions of their interpretation, see the articles ‘Adultery and Fornication’, ‘Children’, ‘Community and Society in the Qur’ān’, ‘Family’, ‘Fosterage’, ‘Guardianship’, ‘Inheritance’, ‘Kinship’, ‘Lactation’, ‘Law and the Qur’ān’, ‘Marriage and Divorce’, ‘Orphans’, ‘Parents’, ‘Prohibited Degrees’, ‘Sex and Sexuality’, ‘Tribes and Clans’, ‘WetNursing’, ‘Widow’, and ‘Womb’, in McAuliffe (ed.) 2001–6. 29   Powers 1996, pp. 9, 114–15.

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personalities only individuals. The lack of corporate entities is sometimes cited as a reason why capitalism did not develop in the same ways in medieval Islamic lands and in Europe.30 But the effects were perhaps more significant in politics. With no legally endorsed representatives nor legal instruments for claiming and passing on the rights of interest groups, and with armed service usually reserved for professionals – a practice introduced by the ‘Abbasids and adopted by other regimes – in a successful polity, there was a heavy imbalance of power in favour of ruler and army. Such factors must have influenced thinking about state, society, groups such as family, and individuals. As we shall see presently, some historians would argue that, in the course of time, the institutional gap came to be filled by family networks of ‘ulamā’ (men learned in religious law), drawing their wealth and social importance from the waqfs (shar‘ī charitable trusts) in which they held office, often over generations, or which they established and ran, often to the benefit of their kin. The law devoted much thought to the sexual relations, both free and servile, which produced the Muslim families that formed society, and which are already of central concern in the Qur’an: the contractual relationship of marriage, and the non-contractual but legally circumscribed relationship of female slave concubinage, which increased enormously, as did slavery in general, with the early Muslim conquests. The centrality of slavery to family and to society must be stressed: ‘Discussing slavery in tandem with marriage will strike some readers as deliberately provocative … It would have been unexceptionable to early Muslim audiences, to whom both life and law were saturated with slaves and slavery’, says Kecia Ali (adding, ‘In this, Muslim societies were not unusual’). She continues, ‘[S]lavery … was central to the [Muslim] jurists’ conceptual world. In particular, it affected how marriage and gender were thought about. There was a vital relationship between enslavement and femaleness as legal disabilities, and between slave ownership and marriage as legal institutions’; and the ubiquity of slavery in the urban societies in which Muslim law was being developed also underpinned thinking about [male] ‘bodily rights, individual freedoms, kinship structures, and systems of patronage’.31 This being said, the status of slaves, legal or informal, and their access to power, could vary as widely as those of free individuals. In legal theory alone, a case in point is that of the slave mother whose child is acknowledged by her master. Called umm walad (‘mother of a child’), her position in the household was, notionally, more secure than that of a free wife who could be divorced and lose custody of her children. An umm walad could not be sold, but remained in the household along with her (free) child, who was a co-heir with any other children.32 As we have already seen, such women often played an important part in dynastic household politics.   See, most recently, Kuran 2010.   Ali 2010, pp. 6–8, 24. See also Bray 2004, p. 141. 32   Ali 2010, p. 168, points out that ‘The early development of rules about the umm 30 31

walad has not yet been adequately studied, but it is clear that the protections granted to her

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Approaches such as Ali’s provide fresh frameworks for understanding how the law developed in certain directions during the first two Islamic centuries (midseventh to ninth centuries AD) but cannot, and do not aspire to, bridge the gap between legal thought and everyday behaviour, as opposed to the jurists’ own ‘social assumptions’.33 In the longer term, however, over some three or more centuries, as different Muslim confessions emerged, law came to spell out their basic norms, whether or not habitually complied with, and to shape the rhythms of daily life. Adam Mez’s Die Renaissance des Islams (1922) remains the classic portrayal of the interactions of the letter of the law with real-life practices, as well as depicting other norms, encoded in dress, food, manners, trade, statecraft and the arts and sciences as they stood in the tenth century AD,34 a period which modern scholarship, until recently, took as representative of Islamic cultures throughout the middle ages. Now, after an interval of intense disciplinary specialisation followed by a broadening of interest in post-tenth-century developments, scholars are again exploring the lived interplay of different strands of thought and practice, and are looking beyond the so-called formative period of Islam for paradigms. The Problem of Longue Durée Naturalism and longue durée In line with this, the family is re-emerging as a topic in Islamic history, but without, as yet, any clear positions on what disciplines or ideas might be used to frame it. This continues an earlier trend in which ‘family’, ‘kinship’ and so on are not identified as technical terms or concepts, or as a field or subject, in the indexes and entries of such authoritative reference works as Humphreys’s Islamic History and the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam,35 where, when family comes into the discussion of other subjects, its components and structures by formative-period jurists were not unanimously upheld by earlier authorities’. 33   Ali 2010, p. 24. 34   Mez 1922, English translation by S. Khuda Bukhsh and D.S. Margoliouth, The Renaissance of Islam (London: Luzac & Co., 1937). Mez deals mainly with Iraq, Syria and western Iran. Nevertheless, his book’s range is both wider and more specific than that of some more recent works on everyday life, particularly as regards their treatment of family; for example, discussions of family by Lindsay 2005 centre on the Arabia of the first century of Islam and the prescriptions of the Qur’an, while Waines (ed.) 2002 reprints articles that deal only with the material settings of family life: domestic architecture, textiles and food. Mez’s book furthermore is a precursor of D.S. Goitein’s seminal A Mediterranean Society (see below and note 38) insofar as it consists entirely of thematically organised quotations from, and summaries of, primary materials of the period (in Mez’s case, chiefly literary texts or documentation preserved in literary sources). 35   Gibb et al. (eds) 1960–2002.

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are taken as given. This is default, invisible, naturalism: the family is treated as a known entity, however it might happen to be constituted socially or legally. In her Two Queens of Baghdad: Mother and Wife of Hārūn al-Rashīd,36 Nabia Abbott treated the first generations of the ‘Abbasid caliphal family, in which polygamy and female slave concubinage were the norm, and indeed the cause of the events related, with visible naturalism.37 The book is a work of careful scholarship, based on medieval sources recast to meet some of the expectations of modern narrative, and a similar narrative naturalism can be observed intermittently in the summings-up in indirect style of original materials (letters, financial accounts and so on) in S.D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza38 – a work in which, to quote Humphreys, the author ‘consciously eschewed any attempt to develop an analysis based on the application of contemporary [that is, twentieth-century] concepts of society and culture’.39 Yet another example of medieval voices left to speak for themselves are the passages quoted in a recent and, in contrast to Goitein’s, theoretically explicit work dealing, this time, with Arabic autobiography. The words used by medieval writers for the feelings they entertained for family members, which signal motivations or turning points in their lives, are translated without comment.40 Earlier, Hartwig Derenbourg had been at pains to signpost, without commentary, the importance of family in the life and diplomatic encounters of the Yemeni merchant and poet ‘Umāra (died 1174).41 This type of naturalism is a strategy of interpretative minimalism: in respect of a culture of whose emotional mores we know little, it preserves as primary evidence the integrity of their literary representation. But it can also be taken as implying that things as natural as family relationships are not culturally specific. As its sub-title says, Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society is firmly focused on a particular community in particular times and places (mainly the Egypt of the tenth to mid-thirteenth centuries); but in their description of the paperback edition of 2000, the publishers use a presumably Braudelian notion of a ‘Mediterranean personality’ which suggests that ‘the’ (in their words) Mediterranean family is culturally and chronologically undifferentiated; thus: ‘Volume III … reveals the   Abbott 1946.   At around the same time (the 1950s to early 60s), the Egyptian Muslim feminist

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scholar Bint al-Shāṭi’’s ‘biographies, mainly of women of the Prophet’s family … combine impeccable … scholarship with engaging narrative … [They are] novelistic dramatizations of the domestic sphere’: McLarney 2011, p. 432. 38   Goitein 1967–88. Volume 3, sub-titled The Family, appeared in 1978. 39   Humphreys 1991, p. 268. Earlier, Mez 1922 was similarly innocent of contemporary theoretical influences. 40   Reynolds (ed.) 2001. For late Roman autobiographical texts on family relationships see the chapter by Ville Vuolanto in this volume. 41   Derenbourg (1897 and 1904), vol. 2, pp. 24–5, 27–8, 30–31, 31–45, 45–6, 65–70, 93, 101, 141, 142–3, 153–4, 158.

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Mediterranean family – the extended family, marriage … the Mediterranean household, widowhood, divorce, remarriage, and the world of women’.42 Goitein’s work is popular as an introduction to Islamic social history, and his portrayal of family does indeed seem to be taken by some readers as a longue durée blueprint for Muslim as well as Jewish families irrespective of cultural geography. Ideology Cultural geography is reasserted, with particular reference to the family, by scholars of Islamic Spain. The issues in this instance – which is unique in that it directly engages the feelings of many of the historians concerned – are those of a succession of twentieth and twenty-first century ideologies of race, nationhood and historical identity. The bone of contention is whether, as a result of the early eighth-century conquest of Iberia, previous putative kinds of native family were overlaid by ‘oriental’ (Arab or Berber) kin structures (also putative) and their accompanying cultures; or whether, on the contrary, Muslim society in Spain was shaped by an underlying Hispanicity.43 John Tolan has tried to de-ideologise these questions by drawing a broad, concrete, comparative picture of slavery, the platform of these ethnic debates, throughout the medieval Mediterranean, both Christian and Islamic, from Spain to Byzantium. He underlines the many ethnicities to which captives and slaves throughout the region belonged, as well as the range of their social, reproductive and economic roles outside as well as within the family.44 Other historians equally wary of essentialism have argued that ethnic labels often had no biological substrate but were used as markers of behaviour, as when ‘Arab’ was applied to nomads or unruly outsiders.45 This leads to the question of when to work with, and when against, the labels and ideologies of the societies themselves. Societies and families tend to describe their origins mythologically and themselves symbolically. Arab tribal genealogies – strings of paternal ancestors attached to an overall collective affiliation – were often part of male and female names in Islamised societies, and not just in supposedly Arab, or Arabic-speaking, ones; but how often were they reliable guides to real lineages? And if they were fictional or partly so, what was their purpose as social or other labels? Ella Landau-Tasseron remarks:

    44   45   42

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520221604 See Guichard 1977 and 2000, pp. 8, 30–32, 210–11, 236–8. Tolan 2009. For examples, see Rapoport 2011, review of Mohamed Ouerfelli and Élise Voguet (eds), Le Monde rural dans l’Occident musulman médiéval, Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 126 (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2009). 43

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There is no dispute about the tribal nature of Arabian society before and after the advent of Islam; yet we do not know what the members of any given tribe had in common … we know thousands of names of tribes and sections but we cannot describe the defining features of a tribe or section.46

It is agreed that the first Muslim conquests, which settled Arab tribal soldiers and their families in garrison towns and in villages throughout the empire, must have changed the composition and organisation of tribes and clans and the ways in which they served to assert kinship and proclaim social or political belonging or exclusion. Within a century or so, urban scholars such as Ibn al-Kalbī (died 819) were compiling compendia of ancient Arabian tribal genealogies, of which many elements were, says Szombathy, ‘artificial’ and ‘bookish’, but which proved hugely influential to later understanding (or misunderstanding) of actual tribal societies, not least by Ibn Khaldūn,47 and were lastingly popular among aspirants to élite social status as offering a well-known skeleton to which … later manufactured family pedigrees could easily be attached at anyone’s point of choice. This process of grafting ever new lineages and families, often non-[Arab] too, onto the standardized mediaeval genealogical stem has become the very essence of all subsequent genealogical pretensions in the Islamic cultural sphere,48

enabling both the founding myths of ruling houses and the claims to distinction of lesser families to be expressed in a common trope of longue durée and homogeneity. In a ground-breaking study, Jacqueline Sublet showed the perils of interpreting post-tribal as well as tribal Arabic names over-literally,49 as, more recently, has Thierry Bianquis,50 the lesson being hard to take to heart. Sociology For in spite of the difficulties they present, family names and prosopographies based on them are the source of the most influential modern sociologies or social histories of medieval Islam,51 all of which rest on the exploitation of medieval biographical dictionaries with their predominance of men of religious learning (‘ulamā’). In 1979, Richard Bulliet tried to demonstrate that, throughout the     48   49   50   46

Landau-Tasseron 2005, pp. 366, 368. Szombathy 2003, pp. 180, 31. Szombathy 2003, p. 181. Sublet 1991. Bianquis 2011, review of Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 and 2003). 51   For the value of prosopography for studying Byzantine family and society see the chapter by Claudia Ludwig in this volume. 47

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territories conquered by the Arabs, generational changes in personal names could be read as an indicator of local rates and dates of conversion to Islam.52 Earlier, he set out to show, in the case of the northern Iranian city of Nishapur, that between the mid-tenth and mid-twelfth centuries, an elite of wealthy families used religious learning to consolidate a political position.53 Ira M. Lapidus meanwhile, in what Humphreys calls ‘an excellent distillation of ideas generated by Orientalist thought over a long period of time’,54 attributed a key role in society to the ‘ulamā’ of Mamluk Egypt and Syria, whose marriage ties and other family and social connections enabled them, in the absence of corporate institutions, to represent common interests and mediate between local populations and their foreign military rulers.55 Finally Michael Chamberlain, in an ‘exploratory essay’,56 used the notion of the élite household possessed of religious learning to analyse civil identities and access to prestige and authority in Ayyubid and Mamluk Damascus. Originally hypotheses, these approaches have become paradigmatic even though, as ‘functionalist sociology’, they tend to ‘minimize evidence of change in favor of discerning stable institutions’,57 besides accepting too readily the ‘ulamā’’s self-projection of their own importance in society. Even when the ‘ulamā’ are not given the leading role, the longue durée model is hard to shake off: thus despite stressing ‘the fluidity and complexity’ of late medieval urban Egyptian society, when it comes to discussing the family, ‘the institution … which for virtually everyone was the fundamental unit of society’, Jonathan Berkey falls back, anachronistically, on the Cairo Geniza.58 Yet not all records of family activity leave an impression of changelessness. Adaptability and diversification over the generations, as physicians, courtiers and historians, are apparent in the dynasties of Christian and pagan intellectuals who contributed to the ‘translation movement’ from Greek and Syriac into Arabic in Iraq during the eighth to tenth centuries,59 while, still in the Iraq of this period, in one and the same kin group, one branch of a family of landowners, civil servants and judges might cultivate an image of values and behaviours handed down intact over centuries while the less visibly managed track record of another branch shows it to have moved rapidly with the times.60 Examples of social loss, too, are well represented in a range of sources, and are as deserving of investigation as those of gain and consolidation. 52   Bulliet 1979. See the criticism of Bulliet’s database and methodology by Humphreys 1991, pp. 281–2. 53   Bulliet 1972. See the criticism of Bulliet’s assumptions and methods by Humphreys 1991, pp. 198–9. 54   Humphreys 1991, p. 202. 55   Lapidus 1967. 56   Chamberlain 1994, p. 3. 57   Humphreys 1991, pp. 202–3. 58   Berkey 1998, pp. 385, 395, 387. 59   Gutas 1998. 60   Bray 2008.

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Functionalist sociology remains the main approach to the study of family in the Islamic middle ages, increasingly enriched by case studies,61 but with only one voice, that of Roy Mottahdeh, raised against collective approaches and proposing instead, for what he terms the ‘self-description’ of their social bonds by social groups in tenth and eleventh-century Iran and Iraq, that individuals and not kin groups were the agents of social reproduction. Furthermore, Mottahedeh argues that ‘To understand [their] associations we should … give an account of the moral world in terms of which men explained their choices’.62 Incest and Intimacy The moral world that Mottahedeh had in mind is that of social relations; but one that would have been present to the minds of his subjects, although Mottahedeh does not mention it, was that of more intimate personal relations, not least love. Love is a major theme of medieval Islamic literatures, giving rise to several distinct sets of conventions in different languages, and, within languages, the conventions of love differ as between prose and poetry. When it is represented in story-telling, whether in the form of romance or of ostensible reminiscence, it is usually against a background of family, and even if reduced to the basic form of a male–female or male–male sexual connection (between a free male and a slave male),63 family (or in the latter case, household) is depicted not only as a place of intimacy but also, if the intimacy is affective as well as physical, as a place where a specific kind of learning, moral and social, takes place. In sharp contrast, the formal categorisations of knowledge found in the most widely used sources for the study of family, biographical dictionaries of ‘ulamā’, make no mention of kinds of education belonging to the domestic sphere. The transmission of ḥadīth (sayings of the Prophet) is sometimes noted as having occurred between family members; otherwise, neither training in manners, nor indeed in household skills or in the crafts or the professions, are shown in these works as taking place in the family or under family tuition. There is clearly a disjunction here between two different modes of identifying or acknowledging significant kinds of knowledge; yet the surviving witnesses to domestic and non-domestic conceptions of learning are often one and the same. The Iraqi judge and courtier al-Muḥassin al-Tanūkhī (died 994), who according to the formulae of ‘ulamā’ biography was a pattern of the man of ḥạdīthbased learning,64 was also one of his period’s leading men of letters, and many of the stories he collected have a domestic setting. One that proved popular for centuries   For example, Rapoport 2007; Guo 2005.   Mottahedeh 1980, pp. ix, 5. 63   See the discussion of this topic in the Qābūsnāma (n. 25 above), a mirror for 61 62

princes which provides a nexus with literary typologies, by Richter-Bernburg 2001. 64   Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (d.1071), Ta’rīkh Baghdād aw Madīnat al-Salām, 14 vols (Cairo: n.p., 1931), vol. 13, pp. 155–6, no.7134.

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was the tale of a respected and beloved materfamilias who is discovered after her death to have committed incest with her unwitting son, and to have married him off to a daughter she conceived adulterously and brought up as her household slave, so that her innocent son and daughter and their children are all trapped in incest.65 Compare this nightmare reversal of élite family values, particularly those attached to the mother-and-son relationship, with their lyrical celebration in autobiographical anecdotes by Ibn al-Qifṭī (died 1248), a government minister in Aleppo who also excelled in the branches of formal learning. Significantly, his reminiscences of informal, domestic moral education were preserved not in a dictionary of ‘ulamā’ but in an encyclopaedia of men of letters.66 These are Arabic sources. The literatures of other Islamic languages, it must be repeated, had their own conventions, in which other aspects of family as a moral or emotional sphere developed, either incidentally or as lasting topoi.67 In Arabic, and especially in Arabic prose, where imagination and even fantasy rarely part company with the formats of supposedly documentary narrative, literature is sometimes difficult to demarcate generically, and symbolic representations may overlap factual ones. Whatever the formats, however, to the extent that in all cultures family and kinship are as much imagined as experienced, and that one key to any culture is the stories it tells itself, imaginative sources ought to take their place alongside documentary ones in the study of medieval Islamic families. The Family and Moral Judgements of Islamic History A failure to see that family, which is rarely solely biological, is not a natural given, and a failure to appreciate, or else to foreground, the fact that the ways in which a society defines or depicts family serve as a way for that society to think about itself, and as a means of rehearsing fears, hopes and beliefs about history, identity and destiny, have been two reasons why only a narrow range of types of sources has been used by social historians of medieval Islam, who have been the most influential proponents of the study of family, and why the topic of family remains under-theorised. But the problem goes deeper, to the reasons why Islamic   Al-Muḥassin ibn ‘Alī al-Tanūkhī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, ed. ‘Abbūd al-Shāljī , 8 vols (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1971–3), vol. 5, pp. 122–8, from the later citation by Ibn alJawzī (died 1201), Dhamm al-hawā, ed. M. ‘Abd al-Wāḥid and M. al-Ghazzālī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Ḥadītha, 1962), pp. 448–53. The story is translated in van Gelder 2005, pp. 146–51. 66   His biography was composed by his contemporary Yāqūt (died 1229), whose admiration for his aristocratic family values may have been heightened by the fact that he himself was without kin and had been a slave until early adulthood; Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Mu‘jam al-udabā’, ed. Iḥsān ‘Abbās, 7 vols (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1993), vol. 5, pp. 2022–36. It is summarised and analysed in Bray 2010b, pp. 250–53. 67   See, for example, Arberry 1958, pp. 120, 399–400, 430. 65

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historians have studied family, and to a number of framing concepts of Islamic history itself. As we have seen, the study of family in the Islamic middle ages has been dominated by the sociological analysis of Muslim learned élites and their political role. In a way that is in keeping with their own vision of themselves as the coguardians, through their knowledge of the law, of the Community of Believers, in partnership with the ruler, whose duty was to make it possible for the Community to observe the law,68 modern social historians have tended to portray the ‘ulamā’ as holding the balance between authoritarian rulers and an unarmed populace. The virtuous but flawed nature of their passive-active agency is best expressed by Mottahedeh (even though his analysis substitutes elective social bonds for those of kinship and makes the whole Community, not just the ‘ulamā’, a moral actor): By disengaging itself from government and the moral burdens of government, and at the same time giving enormous power to governments, Islamic society … freed itself to maintain a community of duties and obligations in levels of life below the government … [It learned] how to define its relations with actual governments so that it might withstand repeated changes of government. This community understood its constraints and possibilities so well, in fact, that it has never entirely disappeared.69

It is no coincidence that longue durée sociological approaches to family were developed during a period of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa and a growing conviction among observers that the region’s political traditions could not supply culturally rooted mechanisms or concepts powerful enough to bring about genuine changes of regime and social participation. The trope of the Islamic family, medieval and (as Mottahedeh is one of the few to say openly) modern, as a kind of civil society, and of its changelessness, mirrored beliefs about the changelessness of twentieth-century Middle Eastern politics, and was used apologetically, to assert moral value and historical purpose in the past, whereas they seemed to be lacking in the present. But current events pose a challenge to this set of beliefs. If the Arab Spring,70 which has brought down regimes without drawing on the traditional socio-political mechanisms identified by historians, brings about real changes in the long term – and even, perhaps, if the movement is frustrated – it will have demonstrated a vitality and originality that must make observers consider the region’s future and its societies’ potential in a new light. This in turn must alter the ways in which historians view the past   For the evolution of this theory in legal circles over several centuries, see Lambton

68

1981.

  Mottahedeh 1980, p. 190.   The name given to the wave of street protests against authoritarian rule that began

69 70

in Tunisia in December 2010, swept Egypt, Libya and Yemen in 2011, eventually bringing about regime change, and, in 2012, has triggered a civil uprising in Syria.

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that has ultimately led up to these events, including the roles and significance they attribute to family over the centuries in the processes of society and politics. Bibliography Primary Sources (Arabic and Persian) N.B. The Arabic article ‘al-’ is not counted in the alphabetical order in the bibliography of primary sources. Authors’ names are given in the form in which they are most usually found in European reference works. They do not follow a uniform pattern. Ibn al-Jawzī, Dhamm al-hawā, ed. M. ‘Abd al-Wāḥid and M. al-Ghazzālī (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Ḥadītha, 1962). Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar ibn Qābūs, Qābūs Nāma, ed. Sa‘īd Nafīsī (Teheran: Kitābfurūshī Furūghī, [1342]); trans. Reuben Levy, A Mirror for Princes. The Qābūs Nāma by Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar, Prince of Gurgān (London: The Cresset Press, 1951). al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, Ta’rīkh Baghdād aw Madīnat al-Salām, 14 vols (Cairo: n.p., 1931). al-Māwardī, al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya (Cairo: Maṭba‘at Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī wa-Awlādih, 1966); trans. Edmond Fagnan, Les statuts gouvernementaux: ou, règles de droit public et administratif (Algiers: Typographie Alphonse Jourdan, 1915); trans. Wafaa H. Wahba, The Ordinances of Government (Reading: Center for Muslim Contribution to Civilization; London: Garnet Publishing Ltd., 1996). al-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk, ed. Muḥammad Jāsim al-Ḥadīthī (Baghdad: Dār al-Shu’ūn al-Thaqāfiyya al-‘Āmma, 1986). al-Tanūkhī, al-Muḥassin ibn ‘Alī, Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, ed. ‘Abbūd al-Shāljī, 8 vols (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1971-3). al-Tha‘ālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk, ed. J. al-‘Aṭiyya (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1990). ‘Umāra al-Yamanī, ed. and French trans. Derenbourg (1897 and1904). Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Mu‘jam al-udabā’, ed. Iḥsān ‘Abbās, 7 vols (Beirut: Dār alGharb al-Islāmī, 1993). Secondary Sources Abbott, Nabia (1946), Two Queens of Baghdad: Mother and Wife of Hārūn alRashīd (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Al-Azmeh, Aziz (2007), The Times of History. Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press). Al-Azmeh, Aziz (2009), ‘Jack Goody and the Location of Islam’, Theory, Culture & Society, 26/7–9: 71–84.

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Ali, Kecia (2010), Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press). Arberry, Arthur J. (1958), Classical Persian Literature (London: George Allen & Unwin). Berkey, Jonathan (1998), ‘Culture and Society during the Late Middle Ages’, in Carl F. Petry (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1, Islamic Egypt, 640–1517 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 375–411. Bianquis, Thierry (2011), Review of Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, repr. 2003), al-Qanṭara, 32/i: 264–70. Bray, Julia (2004), ‘Men, Women and Slaves in Abbasid Society’, in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World. East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 121–46. Bray, Julia (2008), ‘Place and Self-Image: The Buhlūlids and Tanūhids and their Family Traditions’, Quaderni di Studi Arabi, n.s. 3: 39–66. Bray, Julia (2010a), ‘Al-Tha‘alibi’s Adab al-Muluk, a Local Mirror for Princes’, in Yasir Suleiman (ed.), Living Islamic History. Studies in Honour of Professor Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 32–46. Bray, Julia (2010b), ‘Literary Approaches to Medieval and Early Modern Arabic Biography’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 20: 237–53. Bray, Julia (2011), ‘The Family in the Medieval Islamic World’, History Compass, 9 (September 2011): 1–12 (online subscriber publication). Bulliet, Richard W. (1972), The Patricians of Nishapur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Bulliet, Richard W. (1979), Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Chamberlain, Michael (1994), Knowledge and Social Practice in Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Conrad, Lawrence I. and Scheiner, Jens (series eds) (1992–), Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, Inc.). Crone, Patricia (2004), God’s Rule – Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought (New York: Columbia University Press); first published as Medieval Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). De la Vaissière, Étienne (2010), ‘Oncles et frères. Les qaghans Ashinas et le vocabulaire turc de la parenté’, Turcica, 42: 267–77. Derenbourg, Hartwig (1897 and 1904), ‘Oumâra du Yémen. Sa vie et son œuvre, 2 vols; vol. 1 [Arabic], Autobiographie et Récits sur les Vizirs d’Egypte. Choix de poesies, vol. 2 (partie française), Vie de ‘Oumâra du Yémen (Paris: Ernest Leroux). Gaborieau, Marc, Krämer, Gudrun, Nawas, John, and Rowson, Everett (eds) (2007–), Encylopaedia of Islam, Third Edition (Leiden: Brill). Gibb, H.A.R., et al. (eds) (1960–2002), Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, 11 vols and Supplements (Leiden: Brill).

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Goitein, S[helomo] D[ov] (1967-88), A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520221604 Guichard, Pierre (1977), Structures sociales ‘orientales’ et ‘occidentales’ dans l’Espagne musulmane (Paris and The Hague: Mouton). Guichard, Pierre (2000), Al Andalus, 711–1492. Une histoire de l’Espagne musulmane (Paris: Hachette). Guo, Li (2005), ‘Tales of a Medieval Cairene Harem: Domestic Life in al-Biqā‘ī’s Autobiography’, Mamlūk Studies Review, 9/1: 101–21. Gutas, Dimitri (1998), Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th– 10th centuries) (London: Routledge). Hanne, Eric (2008), ‘The Banū Jahīr and Their Role in the ‘Abbāsid and Saljūq Administration’, al-Masāq, 20: 29–45. Hodgson, Marshall G. (1974), The Venture of Islam. Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press). Hourani, Albert (1991), A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber and Faber). Hoyland, Robert G. (2001), Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (London and New York: Routledge). Humphreys, R. Stephen (1991), Islamic History. A Framework for Inquiry, revised edition (London and New York: I.B. Tauris). Kuran, Timur (2010), The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Lambton, Ann K.S. (1981), State and Government in Medieval Islam. An Introduction to the Study of Islamic Political Theory: The Jurists (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lambton, Ann K.S. (1988), Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia. Aspects of Administrative, Economic and Social History, 11th–14th Century (London: I.B. Tauris). Landau-Tasseron, Ella (2005), ‘Tribes and Clans’, in McAuliffe (ed.) (2001–6), vol. 5, pp. 363–8. Lapidus, Ira M. (1967), Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Lindsay, James E. (2005), Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World (Westport: The Greenwood Press). Marlow, Louise (2007), ‘Advice and Advice Literature’, in Gaborieau, Krämer, Nawas and Rowson (eds) (2007–), vol. 1, fasc. 1, pp. 34–58. Marsham, Andrew (2009), Rituals of Islamic Monarchy. Accession and Succession in the First Muslim Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). McAuliffe, Jane Dammen (ed.) (2001–6), Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, 6 vols (Leiden and Boston: Brill).

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McLarney, Ellen (2011), ‘The Islamic Public Sphere and the Discipline of Adab’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 43/3: 429–49. Mez, Adam (1922), Die Renaissance des Islams (Heidelberg: C. Winter); trans. S. Khuda Bukhsh and D.S. Margoliouth, The Renaissance of Islam (London: Luzac & Co., 1937). Morgan, David (2011), review of Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Times Literary Supplement, May 6: 25. Mottahedeh, Roy P. (1980), Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Peters, Emrys (1976), ‘Aspects of Affinity in a Lebanese Maronite Village’, in J.G. Peristany (ed.), Mediterranean Family Structures (London, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press), pp. 27–79. Powers, David S. (1996), ‘The Art of Legal Opinion: al-Wansharisi on Tawlīj’, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, Brinkley Messick, and David S. Powers (eds), Islamic Legal Interpretation. Muftis and their Fatwas (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press), pp. 98–115. Queen Mary, University of London, Rural society in Medieval Islam: ‘History of the Fayyum’: http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/ruralsocietyislam Rapoport, Yossef (2007), ‘Women and Gender in Mamluk Society: An Overview’, Mamlūk Studies Review, 11/2: 6–47. Rapoport, Yossef (2011), review of Mohamed Ouerfelli and Élise Voguet (eds), Le Monde rural dans l’Occident musulman médiéval. Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 126 (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2009), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 74: 140–42. Reynolds, Dwight F. (ed.) (2001), Interpreting the Self. Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press). Richter-Bernburg, Lutz (2001), ‘Plato of Mind and Joseph of Countenance. The Notion of Love and the Ideal Beloved in Kay Kā’ūs b. Iskandar’s Andarznāme’, Oriens, 36: 276–87. Robinson, Chase F. (2003), Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rouighi, Ramzi (2011), The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate. Ifrīqiyā and Its Andalusis, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: PENN, University of Pennsylvania Press). Sublet, Jacqueline (1991), Le Voile du nom. Essai sur le nom propre arabe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Szombathy, Zoltán (2003), The Roots of Arabic Genealogy. A Study in Historical Anthropology (Piliscsaba: The Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies). Tolan, John (2009), ‘Captifs et esclaves’, in Henri Laurens, John Tolan and Gilles Veinstein (eds), L’Europe et l’Islam. Quinze siècles d’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob), pp 70–76.

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Van Gelder, Geert Jan (2005), Close Relationships. Incest and Inbreeding in Classical Arabic Literature (London and New York: I.B. Tauris). Waines, David (ed.) (2002), Patterns of Everyday Life (Aldershot: Ashgate).

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Chapter 8

Age, Gender and Status: A Three-Dimensional Life Course Perspective of the Byzantine Family Eve Davies

This chapter seeks to expose the ways in which age, gender and status are aligned with family roles in Byzantine hagiographies composed between the sixth and twelfth centuries. It has long been acknowledged that status and gender impacted upon the construction of the Byzantine family. Alice-Mary Talbot noted that for male saints, cults were perpetuated by disciples but, from the ninth century onwards, cults for female saints were initiated by wealthy relatives.1 Gender studies have highlighted disparities between concepts of masculine and feminine sanctity and looked at the non-consummated marriage as a means to achieve both ‘filial obedience and pious chastity’.2 But academic enquiry has, so far, largely overlooked the significance of age.3 While the course of an individual’s life is determined by certain biological features (e.g. puberty, reproductive fitness, death), the trajectory of life is not fixed, but is subject to culturally specific customs. For instance – as Romanists have already highlighted – marriage is a movable Life Course marker, subject to gender and status.4 Byzantine hagiographies open with conception and birth, and move forwards to death, enabling us to unpick the Byzantines’ presentation of their Life Course trajectories in biographical narratives. The authors do not present their characters as stagnant; each persona is shown to develop in character over the duration of their life. The study of age and life stage can expose Byzantine individuals’ evolving familial roles and responsibilities.

1   Talbot 1996, p. 68. Further studies on the relationship between status and family include Patlagean 1983; Laiou 1992; Kazhdan and Constable 1982. For the case of the cult of Theodora of Thessalonike see also the chapter by Michel Kaplan in this volume. 2   Kazhdan 1990, p. 132; Brubaker 2004, p. 89, ‘female power can only work in a “domesticised” setting’; James 2009, p. 31, ‘Now not only can we see class as a significant feature in Byzantine society but also gender as equally fundamental to the ways in which Byzantine society operated’. 3   Laiou 1977, p. 43. As no family of more than three generations is described, average Byzantine life expectancy is about 60 years. 4   Saller and Shaw 1984; Saller 1987; Shaw 1987.

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Byzantine authors normally introduce their biographical writings with an overview of their subjects’ status, gender and age. Gregory the Cleric’s Life of Theodora of Thessalonike (composed c. 894) exemplifies this three part emphasis: the vita opens with her birth in Aegina; her elite status is determined by the description of her parents as ‘[those] who had been attended by many servants’; and her gendered characteristics are constructed when Gregory describes the budding saint as ‘graceful and intelligent’ and claims that by the age of seven she was admired for ‘her pretty face and her inherent modesty’.5 Within the first five chapters of the modern edition of the Life (which constitutes 61 chapters), Gregory has defined Theodora’s status, placed her firmly within a set of gendered conventions, and begun to trace her development using age as a signpost.6 This is a standard trope, seen for example in the Lives of Euthymius the Great, David, Symeon and George of Lesbos, and Niketas of Medikion, to mention just a few.7 The age or life stage of the developing saint is crucial from the outset of the narrative. Even in those rare Lives that omit birth and childhood, age remains critical. In the opening of the Life of Symeon the Fool (composed c. 642–649), bishop Leontios of Neapolis reveals that Symeon and John are ‘young men’ and that they are ‘about 22 years old’.8 Status and gender roles remain, of course, important as well: Leontios tells us that Symeon and John have horses, ‘for their families were very wealthy’; and that they ‘had been instructed in Greek letters’.9 The two young men fit into the gendered construct of devoted and protective sons: each is accompanied by an aged mother or father.10 It is notable that in describing any of these three assets (status, gender, or age), authors often draw upon allusions to family heritage, family wealth, family responsibilities or family role.11 Symeon and John’s families’ wealth is noted in order to indicate their status. In terms of gender, the sons are presented as dutiful when bringing their aged parents on their journey to Jordan with them. In terms of life stage, Symeon and John’s youthfulness is contrasted with their parents’ infirmity. Age, gender and status are tools used by the hagiographers in order to surmise their character’s familial identity. A Life Course perspective is fundamental to analysis of Byzantine family roles. This chapter draws upon evidence revealed in 42 saints’ lives that were composed between the sixth and twelfth centuries. These 42 vitae (which represent 44 subjects because David, Symeon and George of Lesbos are all the focus of one vita) have   Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 3, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996,

5

p. 167.

    8   9   6

Gendered conventions: Smith 2004; James 1997a. I explore this trope in detail in my PhD, conducted at the University of Birmingham. Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 124, trans. Krueger 1996, p. 134. Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 124, trans. Krueger 1996, p. 134. 10   Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 124, trans. Krueger 1996, p. 134, ‘John had an ageing father, but no mother’, ‘Symeon did not have a father, only a mother’. 11   See also for instance the chapter of Nathan Howard in this volume, which touches on such issues in the Life of Macrina. 7

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been selected because of their familiarity: all of the Greek texts have been translated into English and therefore have already been critically evaluated. There are a number of limitations to using hagiographies: in terms of status, we are largely dealing with the educated elite. Writing in about 894, Gregory the Cleric confirms Theodora of Thessalonike’s high status: ‘her wealth was her rejection of all the material fortune of the world’.12 Evelyne Patlagean has already asserted that it is precisely the rejection of extensive material wealth and high status that characterises the Byzantine saint.13 In terms of gender, men are more frequently the subject of hagiography than women. In the sample of hagiographies used here we find a total of 55 main characters (as has been seen, John takes a major role in the Life of Symeon the Fool). Of these, men represent 37 of the 55 main characters (67.27 per cent), while women represent 18 of the 55 main characters (32.73 per cent), and many of these women exhibit masculine attributes.14 Aside from their sanctity, the characters analysed here are by no means typical of the ‘average’ Byzantine. Lisa Alberici has already suggested that age statements in hagiographies are not necessarily truthful.15 The authors probably manipulated ages in order to fit in with their intended audience’s preconceptions about familial and societal roles at certain times of life. Furthermore, the majority of the authors wrote in monasteries and most of their subjects – though not all – were tonsured at some point in their lives. But the ages of nuns and monks do correspond to the lay Life Course: for instance, Thomais of Lesbos, whose vita was written in the tenth century, successfully resisted marriage for as long as possible, until her parents forced her to marry at the age of 24.16 So although we are examining a saint’s Life Course, we may understand from this statement that the age of 24 was perceived to be the upper age boundary for a lay female’s first marriage. The wide and varied spread of age statements collected here suggests that numerical age was included to create a sense of accountability and to emphasise the authenticity of the vita. Nevertheless, the fact that 31 of the   Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 3, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996,

12

p. 165.

13   Patlagean 1983, p. 103, ‘The saint is often born of well-to-do or rich parents, or even dignitaries’. 14   Kazhdan 1990, p. 131, ‘The hero has to forget, in his or her claim to holiness, what sex he or she was given’. 15   Alberici 2008, p. 15, ‘Hagiographic writers played with age statements and characteristics associated with different stages of life in order to present biographies of their holy characters’. 16   Life of Thomais of Lesbos 236, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996, p. 304; Laiou 1989, pp. 240-241, suggests that this age was inserted by a subsequent scribe in order to emphasise Thomais’ determination to remain virginal. This seems likely as the surrounding text does not support the construction of a 24-year-old woman: ‘But [as for] her daughter who was a tender age at which it was customary to occupy herself with childish playthings, [who] discerned the tumult of life, and [who] was married to a husband, was she unmindful of virtue, or did she neglect the zealous and God-pleasing life, or have a lazy disposition?’

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44 (70.45 per cent) subjects surveyed are attributed with one or more numerical ages, even if just an age at death, indicates that the Byzantines did have concepts and expectations of how people should behave at specific numerical ages, and that authors felt it was important to note age in order to enhance their descriptions. Dennis Hogan asserted that there is clear statistical regularity in the patterning of social roles in the Life Course.17 This study employs a methodology which compares the statistical analysis of numerical age statements to the accompanying literary descriptions of age; the reconciliation of both sets of data will provide a nuanced understanding of Byzantine family role trajectories. Starting with infancy, the Byzantines did not attribute individuals less than two years old with an age in years, but instead used days and months to describe their numerical age. They probably recognized, as we do today, that an age in years inadequately describes a baby, whose fast paced development is more accurately defined with words. Words can be employed to portray vividly a particular stage of infantile development. For instance, ὁ νήπιος is used to describe a ‘babbling’ toddler, unable to talk coherently, and can denote greater specificity than the generic terms ὁ βρέφος (baby) or ὁ παίς (child).18 There is only one example of a person attributed with a numerical age between zero and two. In the Life of Niketas of Medikion (composed c. 1110), Theosterikos tells us that the newborn saint was eight days old when his mother died.19 It is noteworthy that this age is counted in days and not months or years. As this is the only example of a stated numerical age in babyhood, we can discern the importance of the mother and baby relationship, which is emphatically absent from an early stage of this baby’s development. Numerical ages take on a new significance once the subject has reached about three years of age. At this stage, we can notice further methodological limitations to studying numerical age. On the one hand, numerical age statements can provide an insight into ‘normative’ stages of infant development. In the Life of Michael the Synkellos, whose vita was written soon after his death c. 846, the author tells us: ‘When the boy had been weaned (ἀπουαλακτισθέντος) and had reached the age of three, she [his mother] offered him to God in accordance with her promise’.20 The suggestion that children were usually weaned around the age of three is supported by archaeological evidence.21 On the other hand, age statements are most commonly employed in hagiographies to emphasise that the protagonist has surpassed ‘traditional expectations of age-associated behaviour’.22 Euthymius the   Hogan 1978, p. 573.   Life of Ioannikios 385, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1998, p. 258: ‘But nonetheless [the

17 18

story] will be told, even if inadequately, since the prattlings of children are dear to their fathers (ἐπεὶ καὶ φίλα πατράσι τά τῶν νηπίων ψελλίσματα) and our best efforts are dear to God’. 19   Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 19. 20   Life of Michael the Synkellos 46, trans. Cunningham 1991, p. 47. 21   Bourbou and Garvie-Lok 2009, p. 66. 22   Alberici 2008, p. 208.

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Great, whose vita was written by Cyril of Scythopolis c. 530–558, is said to have been tonsured and made lector at age three, which seems unusual, if not highly improbable.23 Consequently, analysts must treat numerical ages in hagiographies – and in other genres – with caution. The inclusion of a specific age is always used to evoke a specific response in the audience; most usually to express the comparatively advanced maturity of the subject. As a child, we are told that Luke the Younger (whose vita was composed after his death c. 946/955) exhibited signs of mental acuity beyond his chronological age: he ‘did nothing in childish fashion (παῖδας ἐποίει)’.24 Luke was exceptional: ‘Most children enjoy and delight in toys, jokes, games, lively activity, and running, but for Luke there was none of this, but rather calmness, tranquillity, a steady character and maturity in all things (τὸ πρεσβυτικὸν διὰ πάντων ὑποφαινόμενον)’.25 Luke had the reserved deportment of an old man while children are usually energetic. In the Life of Saint Nikon (composed c. 1042) his disciple summarises the saint’s childhood: ‘while still of an early age and being counted among children, [he] did not have the mind of a child (οὐ κατὰ παῖδας εἶχε τὸ φρόνημα) … And in that immature and early age he displayed the wisdom of an old man’.26 Writing c. 1110, Theosterikos has us believe that Niketas of Medikion never indulged in childish play.27 Historians of Rome and the medieval west have already noted that children, in particular, are marked out as exceptional when they are said to exhibit mature characteristics.28 Children or adolescents are sometimes described as exhibiting qualities normally ascribed to old men, which has led to the topos being coined puer senex (literally: boy, old man). Talbot was the first to comment that Byzantine writers employed this puer senex motif too.29 Perhaps a more accurate name for the Byzantine equivalent is pais geron (παίς γέρων). Chris Gilleard asserted that this topos shows us that ‘the Church viewed the earlier stages of life as little more than rehearsals for a worthy   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 7.   Life of Luke of Steiris 8, trans. Connor and Connor 1994, p. 9: ‘Most children enjoy

23 24

and delight in toys, jokes, games, lively activity, and running, but for Luke there was none of this, but rather calmness, tranquillity, a steady character and maturity in all things. He did not eat fruit, not to mention other pleasant things, which some might disbelieve knowing that for children fruit is the most delightful food. But he was so unusual and extreme a lover of self control that even from childhood he abstained not only from meat but from cheese and eggs and everything else that provides pleasure. He lived on barley bread, water and vegetables and whatever kind of legume was at hand. On Wednesday and Friday he did not eat until sunset’. 25   Life of Luke of Steiris 8, trans. Connor and Connor 1994, p. 9. 26   Life of Nikon 32, Sullivan 1987, p. 33. 27   Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 19. 28   Alberici 2008, pp. 209–13; Carp 1980, pp. 736–9. 29   Talbot 1984, p. 273, ‘A common feature of hagiography is the statement that during his childhood or youth a saint displayed the characteristics of an old man’.

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old age’.30 But Teresa Carp traced the origin of the topos to the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and it is possible that our writers exploit the notion simply to draw upon long established rhetorical formulae for distinguishing children who were destined for greatness.31 It is precisely future leaders and saints who were exceptional for their ability to surpass their contemporaries and sometimes to invert the normative attributes associated with their age.32 Arietta Papaconstantinou pointed out that as saintly women are exceptional for their ability to overcome the boundaries of their gender, so saintly children are exceptional for their ability to overcome the restrictions of their age.33 In Byzantine narratives children who behave like adults are exceptional; their behaviour is an inversion of conceptions of normal childish behaviour. As has been seen, most children were expected to ‘enjoy and delight in toys, jokes, games, lively activity, and running’.34 While advanced development may have been valued in children, we should not imagine that most children were expected to behave like adults. Education takes a prominent position in the rhetorical construction of saintly childhood. In the sixth century, Cyril of Scythopolis writes that Theodosius the Cenobiarch ‘was from childhood a most proficient cantor in the holy church of Comana, where he was accurately instructed in the office of the Church and learnt thoroughly the Psalter and the other Holy Scriptures’.35 In the Life of Mary of Egypt, written in the seventh century, Mary is able to recite the Scriptures and Psalms.36 Patlagean has observed that ‘Those who take early to the hermit’s life always receive miraculously the education which they would otherwise have lacked: an indication of how important education was’.37 Beatrice Chevallier Caseau has noted that ‘It seems clear that in Byzantium, literacy was a prerequisite for sainthood’.38 But we see here and in the examples below that it is the ability to read and recite (and not necessarily write) that is noted by the authors. It is clear that the Byzantines perceived ideal children to advance and develop faster than their peers. Surpassing both his contemporaries and his tutor, sevenyear-old Nicholas of Sion (whose vita was composed in the sixth century) was

    32   33   34   35   30 31

262.

Gilleard 2007, p. 360. Carp 1980, p. 736. Angelov 2009, p. 87. Papaconstantinou 2009, p. 7. Life of Luke of Steiris 8, trans. Connor and Connor 1994, p. 9. Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Theodosius the Cenobiarch 236, trans. Price 1991, p.

  Sophronios, Life of Mary of Egypt 3720; Patlagean 1983, p. 103, points out that Mary of Egypt is attributed with the ability to recite the Scriptures, having never read them, which exposes the importance of education. 37   Patlagean 1983, p. 103. 38   Chevallier Caseau 2009, p. 155; Alberici 2008, p. 214, ‘virtue in early life was associated with learning [in Pontius’ Life of Cyprian]’. 36

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able to recite the Scriptures.39 At the age of seven, Theodora of Thessalonike was distinguished for her advanced development too; being betrothed ‘early’, the author notes that by this age ‘she had learnt the Sacred Letters and part of the Psalms’.40 In the Life of Athanasia of Aegina (whose vita was composed c. 916), the pace of learning is important: ‘When she was seven years old, she learnt the Psalter in a short time and eagerly studied all the Holy Scriptures’.41 As the educational development of Theodora of Thessalonike, Athanasia of Aegina and Nicholas of Sion is mentioned at age seven, it is prudent to assume that the age of seven was an important educational milestone for both male and female children. But there is a clear gendered differentiation in the source of children’s education: while the male children learnt letters with a tutor, the female children did not. We are told that Mary of Egypt miraculously recited the Scriptures, having never read them, while Athanasia of Aegina learnt the Scriptures in the domestic sphere, presumably being taught by her mother, Eirene, or father, Niketas.42 It seems that for boys, education was usually outsourced, while for girls, education took place at home within the family. The significance of the age of 18 is common to both our male and female saints. In the vitae, the age of 18 is associated with moving away from the place of birth and homeland for men and women. But, again, there is a clear gendered divide between the places that males and females move on to. At this numerical age, the men continue to live communally, moving to urban centres or coenobia. Writing c. 558, Cyril of Scythopolis recorded that Abba Cyriacus and Sabas set off for Jerusalem, while Abramius moved to Constantinople at this age.43 Continuing the theme of community, George Eleusius (writing in the seventh century) described how Theodore of Sykeon was advanced for his age and asserted that he acquired a bishopric at age 18, despite protests from the local population that he was legally too young.44 At the same Life Course juncture, Cyril of Scythopolis tells us that John the Hesychast established a coenobium (a monastery characterised by its 39   Life of Nicholas of Sion 22, trans. Ševčenko and Ševčenko 1984, p. 23: ‘And when the child was seven years old, they resolved in accordance with God’s will, to hand him over to learn letters. Assisted by the Holy Spirit (his teacher of that time being inexperienced), the child Nicholas indicated the words to his own teacher, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, so he would write [these words] for him syllable by syllable’. 40   Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 3, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996, p. 167. 41   John of Stoudios, Life of Athanasia of Aegina 212, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996, p. 142. 42   John of Stoudios, Life of Athanasia of Aegina 212, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996, p. 142: ‘Being born of and reared by these [parents], she truly earned her designation as a useful vessel of the all-holy Spirit. When she was seven years old, she learned the Psalter in a short time and eagerly studied all the Holy Scriptures’. 43   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Cyriacus 224, Life of Abramius 244, Life of Sabas 92. 44   George Eleusius, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 18.

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sense of community, as opposed to isolation).45 Euthymios the Younger (whose vita was composed in the ninth century), Lazaros of Mount Galesion (whose vita was composed soon after his death c. 1053) and Niketas of Medikion (whose vita was composed c. 1110) were recorded as taking the tonsure at this age, leaving their homeland for a monastery elsewhere.46 By contrast, some female saints commenced solitary seclusion at age 18. Syncletica of Palestine (whose vita was composed in the sixth century) entered the desert, while Theoktiste of Lesbos (whose vita was composed c. 900) became a hermit at this age.47 Our male saints did not enter isolation until they were older: Cyril of Scythopolis wrote that Abba Cyriacus became a solitary around the age of 27; Abramius spent at least the first three decades of his life in a community and despite being ‘a lover of solitude since boyhood’ he soon returned to become bishop of Kratea; John the Hesychast did not enter the desert at Roubâ until he was 50; Sabas practised for the solitary life by living in a cave when he was 30, before moving to the desert at age 35; and Theognius moved to a cave when he was 50.48 In the Life of Mary of Egypt (written in the seventh century), Zosimas entered the desert when he was 53; Richard Greenfield calculates that Lazaros of Mount Galesion commenced his solitary life as a stylite around the age of 52, and Niketas of Medikion became a solitary around the age of 38.49 In legal codes, the gendered disparity in the numerical ages reveals the perceptions that girls matured physically faster than boys, and that social expectations of female adults were achievable at a younger age than the social expectations of male adults.50 Our   Cyril of Scythoplis, Life of John the Hesychast 203.   Basil of Thessalonike, Life of Euthymios of Thessalonike 172; Theosterikos, Life

45 46

of Niketas of Medikion 19; Gregory the Cellarer, Life of Lazaros of Mount Galesion 560. 47   Life of Syncletica of Palestine 300; Niketas Magistros, Life of Theoktiste of Lesbos 231. 48   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Cyriacus 225, Life of Abramius 246, Life of John the Hesychast 209. 49   Sophronios, Life of Mary of Egypt 3700; Greenfield 2000, p. 11; Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 30. 50   Contemporary legal codes clearly distinguish between the male and female transition to adulthood. Justinian’s Institutes (c. 535) records: ‘Males arrived at the age of puberty [14], and females of a marriageable age (viripotentes) [12], receive curators, until they have completed their 25th year; for, although they have attained the age of puberty (puberes), they are still of an age which makes them unfit to protect their own interests’ (XXIII, 42, trans. Mears 1882, p. 304). Here it is implied that the age of 12 to 25, for women, and 14 to 25, for men, constitutes youth. In the same legal code, 12 for women and 14 for men are stated to be the age of physical puberty (judged by ‘the inspection of the body (inspectionem habitudinis corporis)’: XXII, 42, trans. Mears 1882, p. 304). The Byzantines considered puberty to begin chronologically earlier for girls than for boys. In the Ekloga of Leo III (726), the age of marriage is increased, but gender differences are maintained: ‘that is for a man at 15 and for a woman at 13 years of age, both being desirous and having obtained the consent of their parents, shall be contracted either by deed or by

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hagiographies reiterate this attitude: women were able to progress through life stages earlier than their male counterparts. There are, however, exceptions to this clear cut division of gendered Life Course pathways. First, in the Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos (composed c. 863–865) the standard male Life Course trajectory is inverted: David fled to the desert aged 16 and returned from isolation around the age of 46.51 The author may have been employing this Life Course structure to emphasise the advanced development of David: ‘The noble [David] displayed endurance of many trials and tribulations, though he was still an adolescent … he lived in the desolate wilderness and mountains’.52 Second, Mary of Egypt entered the desert after she had reached the age of 29, which, as we have seen, is an age more usually associated with isolation in the male Life Course pattern.53 Mary’s youth is characterised by her role as a female prostitute; perhaps entering the desert at an age typical of the male Life Course symbolises the renunciation of her profligate feminine gender. Our authors can invert the standard saintly Life Course construction to highlight specific attributes of their characters: in these instances, David’s advanced maturity and Mary’s renunciation of her femininity. Numerical age can be employed by hagiographers in order to emphasise the responsibilities attached to a life stage. For instance, when bishop Leontios of Neapolis (writing c. 642–649) tells us that the then 22-year-old ‘Symeon did not have a father, only a mother, a very old woman about 80, he had no one else’, he hints that Symeon’s entrance into the monastic community would leave his aged mother without family, and without the comfort and protection of her only son.54 Here, the revelation of the mother’s numerical age is a tool used to emphasise the magnitude of Symeon’s choice to reject his familial responsibility to his mother in order to become a monk. The fact that the information about Symeon’s mother’s age is a rhetorical tool is evident from the biological improbability that a mother of 80 would have a son aged 22.55 Perhaps Leontios of Neapolis attributed the age of 80 to Symeon’s mother (as opposed to 50 or 60 which, after all, would have been more plausible) because this was perceived to be a time of particular weakness and need. In the same vita, John is concerned about who will feed his parents in their old age and who will console them in his absence.56 Symeon is concerned that he parol’ (Ekloga 170, trans. Freshfield 1927, p. 72). As has been noted in Roman and late antique studies, adolescence is the first life stage in which masculine and feminine Life Courses noticeably diverge (Harlow and Laurence 2002, pp. 69–72; Alberici 2008, p. 62). See my PhD for detailed analysis. 51   Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 215 and 217. 52   Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 234, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1998, p. 193. 53   Sophronios, Life of Mary of Egypt 3712. 54   Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 125, trans. Krueger 1996, p. 135. 55   Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 125. 56   Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 126.

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is sacrificing the happiness of his mother, who would otherwise see him grow up, and he prays: ‘Remember, Lord, the breasts at which she suckled humble me, so that she might enjoy my youth, but she did not enjoy it’.57 We see in other genres that sons were expected to care for their parents: the most notable example is in Skylitzes’ Synopsis of Histories (c. 1096) where a mother pleads with her son not to abandon her in her old age.58 In the Life of Symeon the Fool, both youths are shown to be plagued with guilt for rejecting one of the normative responsibilities of their life stage: to protect and comfort their aged parents. There is clearly something significant about being the first, or only surviving, male son; many of our saints are the first male offspring. Sabas, Nicholas of Sion, Theodore of Sykeon, George of Amastris, Euthymios the Younger, Niketas of Medikion and Michael the Synkellos are all stated to be the eldest male child.59 Females are often not mentioned in the context of their siblings. It is not stated whether Mary the Younger, Theodora of Thessalonike or Theoktiste of Lesbos had siblings or not.60 Anthousa, the daughter of Constantine V (741–775), was one of six children, but this is not mentioned in her entry in the Synaxarion.61 This suggests that sons, particularly eldest surviving sons, held a special significance. Perhaps this special significance is linked to the duty of sons to care for their parents. There is a clear tension between young men’s responsibility to their parental family and their devotion to God. Ignatios the Deacon writes in the Life of George of Amastris (composed c. 830) that when the young George was making his decision to become a monk, he did not ‘consider the old age (γήρως) of his parents, this well-known and blessed impediment to the better way’.62 Writing in the ninth century, Basil of Thessalonike reports that in order to strengthen his resolve during the transition from lay to monastic life, Euthymios repeatedly chanted ‘He who 57   Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 140, trans. Krueger 1996, p. 147: ‘Do not forget, Master, that she could not be separated from me, even for an hour, and she was separated from me the whole time. Recall, Master who knows all, that although she wished to rejoice in me, I deprived her of myself for your name’s sake. Do not forget, O righteous one, the rendering of her innards, which she endured the day I fled to you. You understand, Lord, what sleeplessness she suffered every night from the time I abandoned her, she remembered my youth’. 58   Skylitzes, Synopsis of Histories, Basil I, 4, trans. Wortley 2010, p. 120: ‘She refused to allow him to do what he wanted to do, begging him to remain and care (γηροτροφεῖν) for her in her old age. Once she was dead [she said] and he had accompanied her in person to the grave, then he could undertake the journey his heart desired’. Note that the verb used here, ‘γηροτροφεῖν’, meant care specifically during old age. 59   Life of Nicholas of Sion 24; Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 87; George Eleusius, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 105; Life of George of Amastris 8; Basil of Thessalonike, Life of Euthymios of Thessalonike 171; Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 19; Life of Michael the Synkellos 52. 60   Synaxarion of Constantinople 829: Theodosia of Constantinople was an only child. 61   Constas 1998, p. 21. 62   Life of George of Amastris 19, trans. Jenkins (online).

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loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’ and ‘Everyone who has left father or mother or brothers or wife or children for my sake will receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life’.63 Niketas of Medikion (c. 760–824) forsook ‘his father, friends, kinsmen, those of his own age, his fellow sextons, others he cared for (πατρί, φίλοις, συγγενέσιν, ὁμήλινξι σὺν νεωκόροις διαφέρουσιν, ἐξέπτη τῆς θρεψαμένης καὶ ἔρχεται…τῆς αὐτῆς)’ in order to pursue a monastic career.64 Texts stress the sacrifice sons make when terminating ties to their parental family.65 Patricia Skinner has argued that sons were normatively expected to take responsibility for their parents, comforting them both emotionally and materially.66 There are no records of parents explicitly requesting their son’s financial support in the Lives examined here, but Ignatios the Deacon does record the local community’s anguish when they did not profit from George of Amastris, telling him: The city that has reared you and the church that nurtured you are distressed and complain bitterly since they have failed in their hopes of gaining great profit from you (for the city hoped to become famous for rearing him and to obtain from other cities surpassing glory, and the church, to be well governed and to maintain its customs). Now here you are aloof, pay your debt by staying at home and return payment to those who reared you, settling things justly.67

Here we see clearly that George is said to be indebted to those who raised him and that there is an expectation that he should repay his obligation. It is unsurprising then that tension between the desires of parents and their maturing offspring are manifested in the offspring’s choice between monastic and   Basil of Thessalonike, Life of Euthymios of Thessalonike 177; Matthew 19:29 and

63

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64   Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 19, trans. Rosenqvist: ‘Yet he never stayed away from divine services. He listened to Holy Writ with perception of his heart, sometimes to God when He says to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house”; sometimes to the prophet Isaiah, “Go out from the midst of them, separate yourselves and touch no unclean thing, says the Lord, and I will receive you”; and again to the divine voice, “He who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who does not take his cross come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”; and again, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”; and again, “If anyone comes to me and does not renounce all that he has, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”’. 65   Abrahamse 1979, p. 510, ‘Not only in the fourth-century texts, but once again in the ninth century, saints were identified as men who had chosen their monastic life by running away from home and family in an act of youthful rebellion, at an age closer to 20 than 10’. Alberici 2008, p. 89, ‘Gregory mentioned how Caesarius would never have a wife, children or inherit property inferring that his audience should count these as significant life markers associated with adulthood’. 66   Skinner 1997, p. 398. 67   Life of George of Amastris 30, trans. Jenkins (online).

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lay status. In the Life of Sabas, written around 555, Cyril of Scythopolis describes that Sabas’ father John, a commander of the Isaurian regiment, and mother Sophia ‘urged him to stay there; enlist in the army and become senator (πρεσβύτερον) of the regiment’.68 Sabas responded ‘Having once enlisted in the service of God the King of all, I cannot cancel this service, and those who try to draw me from it I cannot bear to call my parents’.69 Sabas renounced his own family but embraced fellow monks as brothers.70 In the Life of Symeon the Fool (composed c. 642–649), Symeon and John’s struggle for autonomy is related metaphorically when, while journeying home from Jordan, they come to a division in the road: their parents prefer to stay on the main track (which is referred to as ‘the road that leads to death’) while the two future saints prefer to take the alternative road (described as ‘the road that leads to life’).71 This journey symbolises the parents’ desire for their sons to stay as laymen compared to the sons’ desires to become monks. Significantly, the young men deviate from their parents’ instructions. The anecdote is perhaps representative of the tension between parental desires and their offspring’s desires. Saintly youth, then, is characterised by the struggle with parents for independence and autonomy; and perhaps for freedom from their obligation to protect them. For men and women, conversion to monasticism can require the saint to overcome resistance from their family. Male youths resist their natal parents’ wealth, care and acceptance. Reciprocally, they abdicate their responsibilities to care for their ageing parents. In the Life of George of Choziba, which is traditionally dated to c. 631, Antony tells us that the young saint forsakes the inheritance of his ‘father’s house’.72 In the Life of Theodore of Sykeon (composed after his death c. 620), when the youngster leaves his family for God and his home for the oratory, his mother hoped that his divine zeal would pass as he grew older, ‘but his mother and the women who lived with her did not realise that he had irrevocably chosen his blessed mode of life and that his resolve was no youthful (παιδικὴν) fancy’.73 Theodore’s family continued to show their care for him in a material way: ‘they used to carry up to him fresh white loaves and all kinds of boiled and roast birds’.74 Signifying Theodore’s transition to independence, George Eleusius tells us that the saint ‘never touched any of these things but after his mother and her sister had gone down he   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 92, trans. Price 1991, p. 101.   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 92, trans. Price 1991, p. 101. 70   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 92. For monastic ‘families’ see the chapter by 68 69

Dirk Krausmüller in this volume. 71   Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 124, trans. Krueger 1996, p. 134. 72   Life of George of Choziba 95, trans. in Vivian (ed.) 1996, p. 53. 73   George Eleusius, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 13, trans. Dawes and Baynes 1948, p. 97: ‘By now he had reached the age of fourteen and decided within himself to bid a final farewell to his home, and take up abode in the martyr’s oratory. And he did indeed bid farewell to the women’. 74   George Eleusius, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 13, trans. Dawes and Baynes 1948, p. 97.

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would come out of the chapel and throw all the food out on the rocks and go in again, and the birds and beasts ate it all up’.75 Michael the Synkellos (whose vita was composed in the ninth century) ‘put aside for himself a very small and meagre amount of money and took to flight, that he might not be held back by family friends, and kinsfolk’.76 Tenth-century Luke the Younger was subjected to many tests by his family, who tricked him into eating meat, and after suffering ‘rebukes and recriminations’ he left the family home for Jerusalem.77 Athanasios of Athos (whose vita was composed in the twelfth century) resisted his father’s aspirations for his career as a ‘clerk of the public services’; Athanasios was subsequently beaten by his father.78 The hagiographies present tension between parents and male youths in order to emphasise the youths’ resistance to parental pressure. For female youths, however, the emphasis lies in their rejection of their natal parents’ desire for marriage and reproduction. In the Life of Syncletica of Palestine, who lived in the sixth century, Pseudo-Athanasius describes her father’s concerns for the continuation of family lineage and wealth when his daughter chooses not to marry.79 The Life of Eirene of Chrysobalanton (composed c. 980) reveals that the young woman rejected an imperial betrothal in order ‘to become the bride of Christ and always to satisfy him alone’.80 Significantly, this is described as Eirene’s choice and not her parents’. Eirene’s decision to reject marriage is a clear deviation from the normative female Life Course pattern: ‘therefore, the   George Eleusius, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 13, trans. Dawes and Baynes 1948,

75

p. 97.

  Life of Michael the Synkellos 48, trans. Cunningham 1991, p. 49.   Life of Luke of Steiris 8 and 16, trans. Connor and Connor 1994, pp. 9 and 17: ‘he

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was released from prison and was restored to his family, enduring rebukes and slanders and recriminations from them much harsher than his beating … They said that they were travelling to Jerusalem, but they refused to allow him to accompany them or to alter his garb for these two reasons: first, he was young and had no experience with long journeys; second, if the matter became known to his parents and family, they would suffer no small punishment’. 78   Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 20, trans. Rosenqvist: ‘He was very dear to his father and when he had been taught reading and writing to perfection by him, he was entrusted to the so-called logothesion as clerk of the public archives, since his father thought that he would gain considerable glory in the world through him. However, as the young man despised everything and sought refuge in one of the monasteries – I mean that of Hoi symboloi – his father was informed and dragged him to himself with force. He threw away the clothes from the monastery and dressed him against his will in precious garments. But he said to his father, “Do you think, father, that you can keep me away from the course that lies ahead of me by means of silk clothes? The whole world is the object of my contempt, for what will it profit if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” And his father shut him up so as to persuade him to give up his good purpose’. For domestic violence in late antiquity see the chapter by Julia Hillner in this volume. 79   Life of Syncletica of Palestine 299. 80   Life of Eirene Abbess of Chrysobalanton 12, trans. Rosenqvist 1986, p. 13.

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rumour about her spread widely among her kin and among wives and daughters of senators (συγκλητικαῖς)’.81 In the Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos (composed c. 863–865), a young girl desired to enter the ‘monastic life’, while her mother urged her to marry and perpetuate the family line.82 Resistance to marriage represents the commencement of independence to make one’s own decisions, as it is assumed that parents would naturally want their daughter to marry. Here, the hagiographies present tension between parents and female youths in order to emphasise the sacrifice of familial continuity through reproduction. In many vitae, men and women waited until their parents were deceased before entering the monastic order.83 Michael the Synkellos’ father died when he was 25 and so when Michael chose to enter the monastic order, his dependants, including his mother and sisters, chose to follow the same path: presumably to relieve him of his responsibility to care for them.84 Anthousa, the daughter of Constantine V, reputedly ‘refused her father’s numerous attempts to compel her to take a husband. After his departure from this life, she consequently found herself unconstrained’.85 At the age of 19 Anthousa – relieved of the obligation to obey her husband and her father – was free to pursue monasticism.86 Luke the Younger was free to follow his   Life of Eirene Abbess of Chrysobalanton 12, trans. Rosenqvist 1986, p. 13.   Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 234, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1998, p.

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193: ‘For love and especially worldly are not able to look forward toward the better things. But the girl was upset and distressed at this since she wanted to present to God her beauty of soul and body uncorrupted by human intercourse. continued to make even stronger appeals and arguments, enumerating many suitors and promising the girl to marry her to whichever one of these she wished. But strengthened by the divine spirit shook off the drops of her mother’s words as solid rock does drops of water’. 83   In other instances, the destined saints put the family under their care into monasteries, freeing themselves of familial responsibilities. For example: Basil of Thessalonike, Life of Euthymios of Thessalonike 202, trans. Talbot: ‘The holy man, after shepherding his flock in anonymity for fourteen years, made himself known to his relatives and family after 42 years, just like Joseph. And he summoned them and entertained them like the man of old and, after buying a place for them, he established for the women a monastery that prospered in all ways, and entrusted the administration to the men … as if having cast off the burden of his care for them he himself ascended his pillar’. 84   Life of Michael the Synkellos 48, trans. Cunningham 1991, p. 49: ‘When his father came to the end of his days and his mother was widowed, Michael was greatly concerned about how he might provide for his mother and his sisters. As his mother was spurred on after a short time by his godly preaching and by seeing the virtuous life of her son, she chose with her daughters to become a nun in one of the monasteries of the holy city of Christ our God’. There are further examples of mothers following their sons into the monastic order once their husband can no longer provide for them, for example: Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 109. 85   Synaxarion of Constantinople 600, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1998, p. 23. 86   Synaxarion of Constantinople 600.

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vocation once his father had died: ‘A short time later his father departed to God and he devoted himself more to his Heavenly Father, turning aside from the cares of the flock and from the fields, and applying himself more attentively to prayer alone and to the study of Holy Scripture’.87 In the Life of Symeon the Holy Fool Leontios of Neapolis reiterates biblical teachings: ‘remember the word of the Lord to the one who said “Let me first go and bury my father”, [He responded], “Leave the dead to bury their own dead”’.88 It is notable that while men could enter the monastic order after the death of their parents in order to be sure of freedom from the responsibility of providing for dependants, women, such as Anthousa, entered the monastic life after the death of their parents in response to their newfound freedom from parental subjugation. For both sexes, the ages between 30 and 50 are infrequently documented, suggesting that this period of adulthood was considered to be the least extreme: neither young nor old. Indeed, adulthood was portrayed as the ‘normative’ life stage by our mostly adult authors. The data shows us that ages 24–25 were significant for women while the late twenties were significant for men, perhaps marking the upper boundary of youth. In the Life of Abramius, after recording some of the saint’s adulthood achievements, Cyril of Scythopolis then condensed occurrences during the ages of about 41 to 56, writing ‘At this point, out of consideration for brevity, I shall pass over in silence the individual pious acts performed … and hasten onto the end of the account of his episcopacy’.89 In the majority of cases, when the subject died at an old age, our authors are less concerned with adulthood achievements than they are interested in the later years of their saint. Saintly activity in old age trumped saintly activity in adulthood. Statements of numerical age reoccur more frequently again in the early fifties, perhaps indicating that this was perceived to be the onset of old age.90 At this age, our male saints typically began to commit some of their most worthy acts. For instance, Cyril of Scythopolis starts to refer to Sabas as a ‘revered old man’ (σεβάσιμος οὗτος πρεσβύτης) when he is 54, while Euthymius the Great consecrated churches (aged 52) and attended canonical councils (aged 54), Abba Cyriacus was ordained a priest (aged 53), and Abramius visited the Holy Land (aged 56).91 Aged 56, David of Lesbos (c. 717–783) celebrated the tenth anniversary of the establishment of his monastery.92 In vitae which record the acts     89   90  

Life of Luke of Steiris 14, trans. Connor and Connor 1994, p. 15. Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 128, trans. Krueger 1996, p. 137. Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Abramius 247, trans. Price 1991, p. 276. Kazhdan and Constable 1982, p. 53, ‘These figures agree approximately with those found in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the West, where anyone over fifty was regarded as gravis or senex, and old age was said by different authors to begin sometime between fifty or sixty’. 91   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 110, Life of Euthymius 26, Life of Cyriacus 226, Life of Abramius 247. 92   Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 218. 87 88

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of iconophiles, common ages of excommunication occur in the fifties too: Symeon was exiled to Lesbos (aged 54); Michael the Synkellos was imprisoned (estimated to be aged 54); and Nikephoros was exiled (estimated to be aged 57).93 At this Life Course juncture, male saints lead either publicly active lives, or lives that impact upon their community. Women in their fifties can be mentioned in the context of their age at death: Anthousa, daughter of Constantine V, died aged 52; Theoktiste of Lesbos died around age 53.94 In other examples of female age statements at this time of life, women can be referred to in the context of their dependants: Theodora of Thessalonike’s daughter became Mother Superior when she was age 56.95 We are given a further insight into the caring role attributed to women when Gregory the Cleric tells us that Theodora of Thessalonike cared for an elderly nun, Anna, who died when Theodora was 68, after many years of dependency on her.96 He describes Theodora’s compassionate disposition towards the elderly woman: ‘one could see the blessed Theodora ministering almost alone to Anna’s every need’.97 In the Life of Michael the Synkellos, we hear of women caring for the elderly too: ‘a certain Euphrosyne, a faithful and orthodox nun, comforted this all holy man greatly and greatly provided for his bodily needs … she did not cease serving him and sending him food, drink and a covering for his body with the help of the man who attended him’.98 On the rare occasions that women are depicted in old age, female saints are valued for their role as caregivers. The data collected between the ages of 80 and 120 largely constitute statements of age at death. In the Life of Theodora of Thessalonike, Anna, who reputedly lived to 120, constitutes one of the clearest examples of probable exaggeration.99 Talbot has cautioned against reading these ages literally, interpreting them rather as an indication of the close association of old age and sanctity.100 We can assume that surges in the data around the ages of 80 and 100 denote these two landmarks as being particularly prestigious. Not only do our hagiographers describe the saints as being of great longevity but, on occasion, we are told that the saints did not 93   Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 231; Abrahamse and DomingoForasté 1998, p. 144, dispute this chronology and place his exile in 820. Ignatios the Deacon, Life of Nikephoros 152. 94   Synaxarion of Constantinople 614; Niketas Magistros, Life of Theoktiste of Lesbos 232. 95   Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 33. For the family of Theodora of Thessalonike see also the chapter by Michel Kaplan in this volume. 96   Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 33. 97   Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 33, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996, p. 196. 98   Life of Michael the Synkellos 74, trans. Cunningham 1991, p. 75; Cunningham identifies this Euphrosyne as Theophilos’ stepmother. 99   Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 33. 100   Talbot 1984, p. 269.

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physically deteriorate to the extent usually expected. Cyril of Scythopolis asserts that preceding his death, Euthymius (c. 378–473) was in good health: ‘All his limbs were unimpaired, neither his eyes nor his teeth had suffered any damage at all, but he died with full physical and mental vigour’.101 Similarly, fifth-century Abba Cyriacus ‘despite being such an old man, [he] was strong and zealous, standing for the office of psalmody and serving his visitors with his own hands. He was not in the least debilitated but was able to do everything’.102 We hear that Zosimas ‘as if unmindful of his old age and with no thought for his fatigue from his journey’ ran to catch Mary of Egypt.103 In the Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos, we are told that since George ‘was truly an imitator of the Lord’s love of humanity and very ready for good works, he did not refuse or delay, but ignored his old age and bodily weakness resulting from his labours and exertions on behalf of piety’.104 The elderly are praised for ignoring their physical afflictions and for continuing with their everyday work. One can deduce that, ideally, the elderly were expected to overlook their own infirmities and continue to be independent for as long as possible, thereby not requiring the assistance of their peers and relations. Conclusion Gender methodologies have exposed the men, women and eunuchs in our male dominated writings as rhetorical constructions: gender being acknowledged as the literary tool of manipulation.105 Looking at hagiographies specifically, Caroline Bynum, and more recently Judith Butler, found that saintly characters could invert the normative attributes of their sex in order to highlight themselves as exceptional.106 Elizabeth Clark argued that women could overcome the limitations of their sex, taking on the attributes of men, and surpassing gendered expectations.107 When comparing gendered constructions in opposition to one another, we learn the Byzantines’ founding principles and expectations of what constituted masculine and feminine.108 This chapter has found that age and stage of the Life Course are used with similar effects as gender by our Byzantine writers; and as such, we can deconstruct the expectations of people of certain ages, trace the Byzantines’ understanding of emotional and physical development, and finally, by placing constructs of the ‘young’ in opposition to constructs of the ‘old’, as our     103   104  

Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Euthymius 59, trans. Price 1991, p. 56. Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Cyriacus 235, trans. Price 1991, p. 259. Sophronios, Life of Mary of Egypt 3708, trans. in Talbot (ed.) 1996, p. 76. Lives of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 258, trans. Abrahamse and Domingo-Forasté 1998, p. 238. 105   Smith 2004; James 1997a. 106   Bynum 1984; Butler 2006. 107   Clark 1998, p. 41; Galatariotou 1985. 108   Galatariotou 1985. 101 102

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writers sometimes do, we can understand the familial roles and responsibilities expected of someone at a specific Life Course juncture.109 Alexander Kazhdan noted the paradoxical treatment of the Byzantine family by hagiographers: they valued both familial responsibilities and the rejection of the family unit in favour of monasticism.110 This theme is reiterated in the texts studied here: youths in their late teens and early twenties are distinguished for rejecting their family, as in the cases of Sabas, Symeon the Holy Fool, George of Amastris, Euthymios of Thessalonike, Niketas of Medikion and Theodore of Sykeon.111 In other cases, including Michael the Synkellos, Anthousa (daughter of Constantine V) and Luke the Younger, the saints are praised for supporting their family, only converting to monasticism in the event of parental death.112 These instances are perhaps not as paradoxical as they first seem: stressing the importance of family values bolsters the gravity of the saint’s rejection of their family. It has long been established that family values strengthened from the fourth through to the ninth centuries.113 We have seen how many of our authors in this period, including Pseudo-Athanasius, Leontios of Neapolis and George Eleusius, constructed a tangible tension between responsibility to one’s family and duty to God, which, given that hagiographies celebrate the lives of the most saintly, illustrates the importance of family values to Byzantines of the Middle period.

109   Life Course research focuses on the timing and ordering of events in the life span. The progression through familial roles (e.g. from daughter to wife or son to husband) signify transitions in an individual’s Life Course. Of course, a single person can occupy multiple social and familial roles at any one time (Macmillan 2005, p. 4, ‘Life courses are structured by virtue of the order and timing of multiple social roles over the life span’). Therefore, Life Course research analyses the appropriate time for the duration of a specific role, including when it commences and terminates. Perceptions of ‘appropriate’ times or ages for a specific role are governed by cultural traditions and therefore large-scale cultural and structural changes such as famine, plague or war, are important determinants in the structure of the Life Course (Marini 1984). ‘Normative’ Life Course trajectories are subject to change across any given period and these shifts highlight emerging social trends and expectations of family members. 110   Kazhdan 1990. 111   Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 92; Leontios, Life of Symeon the Holy Fool 126; Life of George of Amastris 19; Life of Euthymios the Younger 177; Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 20; Life of Theodore of Sykeon 8. 112   Life of Michael the Synkellos 48; Synaxarion of Constantinople 600; Life of Luke of Steiris 14 . 113   Laiou 2009, p. 56; Patlagean 1981, p. 427.

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John Skylitzes, Synopsis of Histories, ed. Hans Thurn, Ioannis Scylitzae Synopsis Historiarum (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973); trans. Wortley (2010). Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. H. Delehaye, ‘Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae’, AASS Novembris Propylaeum (1902), 597–600, 613–14, 828–30, 848–52; trans. Nicholas Constas (‘Life of St Theodosia of Constantinople’), Alice-Mary Talbot (‘Life of St Anthousa of Mantineon’), and Nicholas Constas (‘Life of St Anthousa, Daughter of Constantine V’), in Talbot (ed.) (1998), pp. 1–8, 13–20, 21–4. Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion, AASS April 1, Appendix, 3rd edition (1866), xviii–xxvii, available online www.doaks.org (accessed 24th January 2010); trans. J.O. Rosenqvist, ‘A Funeral Oration on Our Holy Father and Confessor Niketas, Written by Theosterikos, Disciple of that Most Blessed Man’ (unpublished; I thank him for its provision). Secondary Sources Abrahamse, Dorothy (1979), ‘Images of Childhood in Early Byzantine Hagiography’, The Journal of Psychohistory, 6: 497–517. Abrahamse, Dorothy, and Domingo-Forasté, Douglas (1998), ‘Life of Sts David, Symeon and George of Lesbos’, in Talbot (ed.) (1998), pp. 143–242. Alberici, Lisa A. (2008), Age and Ageing in Late Antiquity: A Life Course Approach (PhD thesis, The University of Birmingham). Angelov, Dimiter (2009), ‘Emperors and Patriarchs as Ideal Children and Adolescents: Literary Conventions and Cultural Expectations’, in Papaconstantinou and Talbot (eds) (2009), pp. 85–126. Bourbou, Chryssi, and Sandra J. Garvie-Lok (2009), ‘Breastfeeding and Weaning Patterns in Byzantine Times: Evidence from Human Remains and Written Sources’, in Papaconstantinou and Talbot (eds) (2009), pp. 65–84. Brubaker, Leslie (2004), ‘Sex, Lies and Textuality: the Secret History of Prokopios and the Rhetoric of Gender in Sixth-Century Byzantium’, in Brubaker and Smith (eds) (2004), pp. 83–101. Brubaker, Leslie, and Smith, Julia M.H. (eds) (2004), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Butler, Judith (2006), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge). Bynum, Caroline Walker (1984), ‘Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality’, in Robert L. Moore and Frank E. Reynolds (eds), Anthropology and the Study of Religion (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion), pp. 105–25. Carp, Teresa C. (1980), ‘Puer Senex in Roman and Medieval Thought’, Latomus, 39: 736–9. Chevallier Caseau, Beatrice (2009), ‘Childhood in Byzantine Saints’ Lives’, in Papaconstantinou and Talbot (eds) (2009), pp. 127–66.

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Clark Elizabeth A. (1998), ‘The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”’, ChHist, 67: 1–31. Connor, Carolyn L., and Connor, W. Robert (1994), The Life and Miracles of Saint Luke of Steiris (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press). Constas, Nicholas (1998), ‘Theodosia of Constantinople’, in Talbot (ed) (1998), pp. 1–8. Cunningham, Mary B. (1991), The Life of Michael the Synkellos (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises). Dawes, Elizabeth, and Baynes, Norman H. (1948), Three Byzantine Saints: Contemporary Biographies of St. Daniel the Stylite, St. Theodore of Sykeon and St. John the Almsgiver (Oxford: Blackwell). Freshfied, E.H. (1927), A Manual of Roman Law: The Ecloga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Galatariotou, Catia (1985), ‘Holy Women and Witches: Aspects of Byzantine Conceptions of Gender’, BMGS, 9: 55–94. Gilleard, Chris (2007), ‘Old Age in Byzantine Society’, Ageing & Society, 27: 623–42. Greenfield, Richard P.H. (2000), An Eleventh Century Pillar Saint: The Life of Lazaros of Mount Galesion (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Haldon, John (ed.) (2009), A Social History of Byzantium (Chichester: WileyBlackwell). Harlow, Mary, and Laurence, Ray (2002), Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge). Hogan, Dennis P. (1978), ‘The Variable Order of Events in the Life Course’, American Sociological Review, 43: 573–86. James, Liz (1997a), ‘Introduction: Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Byzantine Studies’, in James (ed.) (1997), xi–xxiv. James, Liz (ed.) (1997b), Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium (London and New York: Routledge) James, Liz (2009), ‘Men, Women, Eunuchs: Gender, Sex and Power’, in Haldon (ed.) (2009), pp. 31–50. Kazhdan, Alexander P. (1990), ‘Byzantine Hagiography and Sex in the Fifth to Twelfth Centuries’, DOP, 44: 131–43. Kazhdan, Alexander P., and Constable, Giles (1982), People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Krueger, Derek (1996), Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’ Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press). Laiou, Angeliki E. (1977), Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire. A Social and Demographic Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Laiou, Angeliki E. (1989), ‘H ιστορία ενός γάμου: ο βίος της αγίας Θωμαϊδος της Λεσβίας’ (‘The Story of a Marriage: the Vita of St. Thomais of Lesbos’), Acts of the First Symposium on Daily Life in Byzantium (Athens), pp. 237–51.

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Laiou, Angeliki E. (1992), Gender, Society and Economic Life in Byzantium (London: Variorum Reprints). Laiou, Angeliki E. (2009), ‘Family Structure and Transmission of Property’, in Haldon (ed.) (2009), pp. 51–75. Macmillan, Ross (2005), ‘The Structure of the Life Course: Classic Issues and Current Controversies’, in Ross Macmillan (ed.), The Structure of the Life Course: Standardized? Individualized? Differentiated? (Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 3–24. Marini, Margaret M. (1984), ‘Age and Sequencing Norms in the Transition to Adulthood’, Social Forces, 63: 229–44. Mears, Thomas Lambert (1882), The Institutes of Gaius and Justinian (London: Stevens and Sons). Papaconstantinou, Arietta (2009), ‘Introduction: Homo Byzantinus in the Making’, in Papaconstantinou, and Talbot (eds) (2009), pp.1–14. Papaconstantinou, Arietta, and Talbot, Alice-Mary (eds) (2009), Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Patlagean, Evelyne (1981), Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté à Byzance: IVe– XIe siècle (London: Variorum Reprints). Patlagean, Evelyne (1983), ‘Ancient Byzantine Hagiography and Social History’, in Stephen Wilson (ed.), Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 101–21. Price, Richard M. (1991), Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications). Rosenqvist, J.O. (1986), The Life of St. Irene Abbess of Chrysobalanton (Uppsala: Uppsala University). Saller, Richard P. (1987), ‘Men’s Age at Marriage and its Consequences in the Roman Family’, Classical Philology, 82: 21–34. Saller, Richard P., and Shaw, Brent D. (1984), ‘Close Kin Marriage in Roman Society?’, Man, 19: 432–44. Schwartz, Eduard (1939), Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig: Hinrichs). Ševčenko, Ihor, and Ševčenko, Nancy Patterson (1984), The Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press). Shaw, Brent D. (1987), ‘The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage: Some Reconsiderations’, JRS, 77: 30–46. Smith, Julia M.H. (2004), ‘Introduction: Gendering the Early Medieval World’, in Brubaker and Smith (eds) (2004), pp. 1–22. Skinner, Patricia (1997), ‘“The Light of My Eyes”: Medieval Motherhood in the Mediterranean’, Women’s History Review, 6: 391–410. Sullivan, Denis F. (1987), The Life of Saint Nikon: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press). Talbot, Alice-Mary (1984), ‘Old Age in Byzantium’, BZ, 77: 267–78. Talbot, Alice-Mary (1996), ‘Family Cults in Byzantium: The Case of St. Theodora of Thessalonike’, in J.O. Rosenqvist (ed.), ΛEIMΩN: Studies Presented to

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Lennart Rydén on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Uppsala: Uppsala University), pp. 49–69. Talbot, Alice-Mary (ed.) (1996), Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Talbot, Alice-Mary (ed.) (1998), Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints’ Lives in English Translation (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Vivian, Tim (ed.) (1996), Journeying Into God: Seven Early Monastic Lives (Minneapolis: Fortress). Wortley, John (2010), John Skylitzes, A Synopsis of History, 811–1057 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Chapter 9

Looking at the Byzantine Family

1

Leslie Brubaker

Like modern images of ‘the family’, Byzantine familial representations fall into two broad categories: portraits of an actual family and, occasionally, generic images of intentionally anonymous parents and children, representing the family unit as a social group. Byzantine portraits of actual families were produced for many of the same reasons as are their modern counterparts, and both play the basic and important role of preserving memory. The difference between the ‘artisanal productions’ of Byzantium and the ‘fine art’ of today notwithstanding, even in the modern world portraits are rarely understood in a purely aesthetic framework. Unlike most early modern and modern art of other types, neither modern nor Byzantine portraits are (or were) normally produced for museums or art collectors. In this respect, however, Byzantine portraiture differed little from any other Byzantine imagery, the main purpose of which was to communicate – a critical role in a world with low literacy levels – and which therefore favoured easily grasped convention over creativity for its own sake. Early modern and modern art is in other contexts more concerned with showcasing the artist, but because portraiture is usually as much about the sitter (who usually commissioned the work) as the painter, it remains in many ways closer to Byzantine values than any other category of fine art production. Certainly the uses of portraiture are remarkably similar, then and now, as Shearer West’s Portraiture (2004) makes clear. West considers ‘the portrait as biography’, ‘the portrait as document’, ‘the portrait as proxy and gift’, ‘the portrait as commemoration and memorial’, and ‘the portrait as political tool’, before going on to consider the role of the portrait as a communicator of power and status, the use of portraiture to forge group identities (familial, institutional or professional), to express the stages of life, and to communicate gender strategies. All of these aspects of the portrait apply to Byzantine examples, and some are particularly relevant to looking at images of the Byzantine family. Byzantine family portraits are also important barometers of what aspects of family were important to the Byzantines to record: as West notes, ‘the family portrait originates from some conception of why a family is

1   I would like to thank Daniel Reynolds for his help with obtaining the photographs and permissions for this chapter.

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important, and therefore can reveal a great deal about the perceptions of the family at different points in history’.2 Before turning to the roles of familial portraiture that we share with the Byzantines, one substantial difference needs to addressed, and that concerns the difference between what the term ‘portrait’ means to us and what it appears to have meant to the Byzantines. To us, a portrait means a likeness of a person, usually painted from life, and specifically designated as a portrait. Although modern representations of men, women and children are normally drawn from life, and so are actually portraits of the artist’s models, we do not interpret most human images as portraiture, which is a fairly restricted genre in Renaissance and post-Renaissance art. In contrast, the Byzantine saw many – perhaps most – representations of humans as portraits, in the sense that they re-presented a historical personage whose appearance had been agreed by social consensus. Icons, portraits of saints, are particularly cogent examples; allegorical representations, personifications and groups of people in larger narrative compositions are the most obvious exceptions. To the Byzantines – whose historical chronologies began with the creation of the world – an icon of Christ had the same historical validity as a portrait of the reigning emperor. There are thus relatively few generic images of families in Byzantine imagery: biblical crowd scenes come closest, as in depictions of the crossing of the Red Sea, which regularly include a mother and child.3 The Portrait as Biography Despite this fundamental difference, however, the functions of the Byzantine family portrait largely correspond to those of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance portrait, and most of the categories West established find Byzantine equivalents. Her first classification, ‘the portrait as biography’,4 for example, is neatly exemplified in Byzantium by visualised saints’ lives. In post-medieval terms, this usually involved the addition of text or emblems to a portrait;5 in Byzantium, though, sequential narrative allowed the portrait as biography considerably more latitude. Byzantine biographical family portraits are almost always centred on saintly or biblical families, such as St Basil’s, the Virgin’s, and of course Christ’s.6 The 2   West 2004, p. 107; for her discussion of family (and marriage) portraits as a genre, see pp. 107–18. There has been no comparable study focusing on Byzantium, though Spatharakis 1976 published all Byzantine portraits in manuscripts known to him. 3   See, for example, the Khludov Psalter (Moscow, Historical Museum, cod.129, f.108r): Ščepkina 1977. For the depiction of children in Byzantine art see also the chapter by Cecily Hennessy in this volume. 4   West 2004, pp. 50–52. 5   West 2004, pp. 50–52. 6   Pace Robin Cormack, I do not think that the images of girls with gold crosses on their foreheads at Hagios Demetrios in Thessalonike represent different stages in the life of

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ninth-century Paris Gregory (an illustrated manuscript of the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus) presents Basil as a child (but depicted as an adult) hiding in a cave with his parents, followed by scenes of his life and culminating in his funeral (Fig. 9.1).7 The family element appears in the first scene (though the emperor Valens and his son appear as well, in the second register).

Figure 9.1

Life of Basil (Paris.gr.510, f.104r), c. 880

a single child, but rather show a succession of different young girls healed (as indicated by the cross) by the saint: Cormack 1969; Brubaker 2004. 7   Brubaker 1999, pp. 137–41. On Byzantine children and their representations more generally, see Hennessy 2008 (with particular consideration of children and family at pp. 83–100); Papaconstantinou and Talbot (eds) 2009.

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Aside from his non-ecclesiastical clothing, the portrait of the child Basil looks exactly as it does elsewhere on the page, which suggests that it was difficult for the Byzantines – at least in the ninth century, when this miniature was painted – to envision a venerable saint as a child. But elsewhere in this same manuscript, the child Christ appears as a youth (Fig. 9.2),8 and there are many later images of the Virgin with her parents where she is shown as a child as well. These give us some of the core exemplifications of the depiction of the Byzantine family. Figure 9.2 shows Christ approaching the temple (from the right), preaching in it (in the centre), and finally his discovery by Mary and Joseph, who had been searching for him frantically. The family grouping once again is emphasised by its status as the first scene on the page, though the narrative had to be constructed as reading from right to left (a very unusual feature in Byzantine representations) in order to achieve this. Narrative sequences of the life of the Virgin, where she frequently appears with either both of her parents or just her mother Anna, also belong to the category of biographical portraiture. The Kokkinobaphos manuscripts provide a classic Middle Byzantine example: Figure 9.3 shows Mary in her room with her parents from the mid-twelfth-century copy in Paris.9 Biographical portraiture of living people certainly existed in Byzantium, as is amply attested by literary evidence.10 But it is not clear that such narrative sequences regularly incorporated family. Perhaps the examples closest to the ideal of biographical familial portraiture are portraits with captions outlining attributes of individual family members, such as the frontispiece sequence in the Paris Gregory manuscript (879–882), where poems have been inscribed on the frames surrounding the image of the emperor Basil flanked by the archangel Gabriel and the prophet Elijah, and the (originally) facing image of the empress Eudokia with the two sons next in line for succession, Leo VI and Alexander (Figs 9.4–9.5).11 The inscriptions read: ‘Elijah promises victory over [Basil’s] enemies. But Gabriel, having predicted joy, crowns you, Basil, governor of the cosmos’ (around the emperor) and ‘Basil, Emperor of the Romans, precedes you, the wellbranched vineyard bearing the grapes of the empire, the gentle despotes. With them you shine forth, light-bearing Eudokia’.12 Basil’s portrait has overt political implications, amply discussed elsewhere,13 but what interests us here is the family portrait of emperor, empress and two of their sons, the future emperors Leo VI and Alexander, and the ‘biographical’ inscriptions that surround them. The first poem emphasises Basil’s military prowess and alliance with prophets and archangels; the second links the empress to the emperor, and eulogises Eudokia’s radiance   Hennessy 2008, pp. 83–6.   Paris.gr.1208, f.59r and Vat.gr.1162, f.43r: the Vatican manuscript has been

8 9

published by Hutter and Canart 1991; the Paris version by Omont 1927. 10   See, e.g., Magdalino and Nelson 1982. 11   Brubaker 1999, pp. 158–63. 12   Brubaker 1999, pp. 158–63. 13   Brubaker 1999, pp. 158–63; and Maguire 1995.

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Figure 9.2

Christ in the temple (Paris.gr.510, f.165r), c. 880

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Figure 9.3

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The infant Virgin Mary with her parents (Paris.gr.1208, f.52r), midtwelfth century

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Figure 9.4 Basil I with the archangel Gabriel and the prophet Elijah (Paris. gr.510, f.Cv), c. 880

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Figure 9.5

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Eudokia with Leo VI and Alexander (Paris.gr.510, f.Br), c. 880

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(probably an allusion to Aphrodite) and motherhood. This biographical portrait conveys conventional gender attributes – male might and female nurture – and also promotes dynastic succession, both through the image of the two sons in line for the throne and in the poem, with its reference to the ‘grapes of empire’.14 The ‘portrait as biography’ has a strong message of idealised family life, expressed through transparent gender stereotyping, and domestic stability – another Byzantine ideal, here translated into the language of dynastic succession. The Portrait as Document West used this terminology to indicate portraits used as validating records, such as passport photographs or coin portraits, which authenticate and confirm the coin’s value.15 Coin portraits appeared in Byzantium from the beginning, though at first only individuals were shown: there are, for example, coins depicting Constantine I (sole rule 324–337), different coins depicting his wife Fausta, others showing his mother Helena, and still others portraying his stepmother Theodora.16 In the fifth century, couples appear. The earliest numismatic portraits of emperor and empress are solidi (high denomination gold coins) apparently struck to celebrate the marriages of Valentinian III and Licinia Eudoxia in 437 (Fig. 9.6), of Marcian and Pulcheria in 450 (Fig. 9.7) and of Anastasius and Ariadne in 491.17 Valentinian and Licinia flank Licinia’s father, the senior emperor Theodosius II, so the portrait functions as a sort of validation of Valentinian’s succession to the throne of the western half of the empire through his association-by-marriage with the other branch of the Theodosian house. This, presumably, explains the introduction of both the portrayal of the emperor and empress as a couple and the two-generation familial portrait. The later coins also commemorated marriages where the empresses (Pulcheria, heir of Theodosius II in the east, and Ariadne, heir of Leo I after the death of her young son Leo II) legitimised their new husbands’ authority as emperors. In all three of the early portraits of imperial couples on coins, then, the rationale for introducing a family portrait appears to have been dynastic politics, thus linking this category to one aspect of ‘the portrait as biography’ and expanding West’s category of ‘the portrait as document’ into ‘the portrait as document of legitimacy’.

  In this it differs from the other family portrait of Basil and Eudokia, known only through textual description, which showed all of their surviving children and is discussed below: Brubaker 1999, pp. 162–3. For the Macedonian dynasty see also the chapter by Shaun Tougher in this volume. 15   West 2004, pp. 53–9. 16   On these coins see Brubaker and Tobler 2000, pp. 575–8. 17   Brubaker and Tobler 2000, pp. 580–81. 14

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Figure 9.6

Solidus: Valentinian III and Licinia Eudoxia, 437

Figure 9.7

Solidus: Marcian and Pulcheria, 450

Byzantine coinage was reformed in 498, and family portraits disappeared until 565. They recurred during the reign of Justin II and Sophia (565–578), and continued under various emperors until 629.18 The dynastic flavour of this group of coins is clear, as is the (transient) importance of the empress in ensuring the production of the heir apparent: Heraclius (610–641), for example, appeared with his first son, born in 612 and crowned in 613, on coins minted between 613 and 616; on the death of the child’s mother, Heraclius remarried, and the coins then show the three members of the family (father, son, new wife); after the birth of his second son (by his new wife), Heraclius’ wife disappeared and his second   Brubaker and Tobler 2000, pp. 582–7, for discussion.

18

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son was substituted.19 After Heraclius, however, this model disappeared and was replaced under Leo III (717–741) with a new formula that focused exclusively on male family members, dead or alive.20 The gold coins of Leo IV (775–780), for example, show Leo IV and his son Constantine VI on the obverse (front), with posthumous portraits of Leo’s grandfather and father (Leo III and Constantine V) on the reverse (Fig. 9.8). Though with a different emphasis, the Isaurian coins continued to promote dynastic succession; but the role of women as bearers of the heir apparent disappeared and only resurfaced under Theophilos (829–842), whose coins include images of his sons, wife and – exceptionally – daughters.21

Figure 9.8

Nomisma: Leo IV and Constantine VI (obverse), Leo III and Constantine V (reverse)

After the end of the image debates (see Table 9.1), coin portraiture briefly returned to earlier patterns. The coinage of Michael III (842–867) portrayed his mother Theodora (regent after the death of Theophilos for Michael, then two years old) and his elder sister Thekla;22 the coins of his successor Basil I (867–886) included his wife and sons in line of succession;23 those of Leo VI (886–912) did not – perhaps understandably – portray his various wives but showed his eldest son Constantine VII and, though only on the low denomination copper,

  Brubaker and Tobler 2000, pp. 586–7.   Discussion and examples in Brubaker and Haldon 2001, pp. 121–4. 21   Brubaker and Haldon 2001, pp. 126–7. On Theophilos’ daughters see also the 19 20

comments of Cecily Hennessy in this volume. 22   Grierson 1973a, pp. 461–5. 23   Grierson 1973b, pp. 487–502.

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Figure 9.9

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Istanbul, Hagia Sophia, south gallery mosaic, John II, Eirene and Alexios with the Virgin, c. 1120

his detested brother and co-ruler Alexander.24 This pattern dissolved during the succession struggles following Leo VI’s death. At first, the pattern seen under Michael III recurred, and Constantine VII, then a minor, was accompanied by his mother Zoe Karbonopsina. But his father-in-law Romanos Lekapenos soon effectively maintained the reins of power, and his sons were shown on the coinage, sometimes replacing Constantine VII entirely.25 When Constantine VII regained his authority, coin portraiture was reduced to images of himself and his son Romanos II – and with very rare exceptions, this reduced range of imperial portraiture, with its concentrated focus on ruler and co-ruler, remained the norm until the end of the Byzantine empire (see Table 9.1). When a female member of the imperial house provided continuity with the previous reign, she was normally included (so, for example, Maria – formerly the wife of the retired Michael VII, and now the wife of his successor – appears on the coins of Nikephoros III26), and additional family members occasionally appear in exceptional circumstances: when the usurper Alexios I reformed the coinage and elevated his son John II as co-ruler in 1092, for example, the event was commemorated with a gold coin (nomisma) 24   Grierson 1973a, pp. 513–21. On the relationship between Leo and Alexander see the comments by Shaun Tougher in this volume. 25   Grierson 1973a, pp. 541–69. 26   Grierson 1973a, pp. 821–32.

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portraying Alexios, his wife Eirene, and John II to visualise and legitimise the new Komnenian dynastic structure.27 The dynastic focus of Byzantine coinage is not surprising: coins were ‘official’ expressions of imperial authority linked directly to the reigning emperor. But other media also participated in ‘the portrait as document’. Perhaps the most famous examples are the mosaic portraits in the south gallery of Hagia Sophia, where the imperial family – Zoe and Constantine IX Monomachos in one panel, John II, Eirene and their son Alexios (Fig. 9.9) in another – present funds and a chrysobull recording their donation to the church to, respectively, Christ and the Virgin.28 The Portrait as Proxy and Gift The ‘portrait as proxy and gift’ means, to West, portraits that ‘stood in’ for the people represented and evoked their presence.29 In Rome and Byzantium, portraits of the emperor in law courts played this role, and so, after the seventh century, did virtually all Byzantine religious portraits. Aside from images of the Virgin and Child, however, this is not a category that tends to emphasise family groupings. The Portrait as Commemoration and Memorial In her discussion of this category of portrait, West is primarily concerned with funerary images,30 which certainly appear in Byzantium, but this classification also applies to ex voto imagery and to donor portraits as well. Before they were destroyed by fire in the early twentieth century, the sixthcentury mosaics from the church of Hagios Demetrios in Thessalonike showed a number of family groupings. One, portraying a man and boy (presumably father and son), survives in reasonably good condition; the father presents his son to the saint, either requesting or – more likely – commemorating the child’s healing, accomplished by St Demetrios’ intercession with Christ on the boy’s behalf (Fig. 9.10).31 Demetrios’ hands are depicted in gold tesserae to indicate their healing power, and elsewhere in the church are matched by golden crosses on children’s heads, an indication that they have been healed (or, in one case, conceived)     29   30   31   27

Hendy 1999, pp. 192–4. Whittemore 1942; Kalavrezou 1994; Cormack 1994. West 2004, pp. 59–62. West 2004, pp. 62–5. The mosaic is in a prominent position in the church, and would have required considerable lead-in time to commission and execute. For both these reasons I believe it is more likely that the panel commemorates, rather than requests, a healing. The bibliography on the Hagios Demetrios mosaics, and the rituals involved in healing miracles, are summarised and synthesised in Cormack 1969 and Brubaker 2004. 28

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Figure 9.10 Thessalonike, Hagios Demetrios, Demetrios with father and son, sixth century through the grace of God, mediated through his saintly agent, Demetrios.32 Commemorations of five healings of children shown with one or both of their parents either survive or were recorded in watercolours prepared shortly before the church burned down. Hagios Demetrios thus housed the most extensive gallery of family portraits known from the Byzantine era, though we may speculate that other healing shrines and churches once matched it. The families whose portraits appear at Hagios Demetrios were wealthy enough to commission a mosaic panel: they were presumably the urban elite of sixthcentury Thessalonike. What is significant in the context of this volume is that family portraits (rather than any other form of donation) were evidently considered an appropriate way to thank God and God’s saintly helpers for their help. This suggests that the family unit was an important element of sixth-century urban identity, the visible sign of which (these family portraits) marked the major shrine of the city’s patron saint, Demetrios.33 In turn, this gets us as close to the political 32   Children with crosses appear in spandrels D, E, F, and G: see Brubaker 2004, pp. 72–5. 33   This will shift in the seventh century, when Demetrios becomes a marker of civic protection rather than familial healing: Brubaker 2004, pp. 85–90.

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idea and role of the family as we can in all the images considered here: urban political influence and status was clearly seen in familial terms, just as imperial legitimacy was. This leads directly to the next category. The Portrait as a Political Tool Virtually all imperial family portraiture could be classed as ‘political’, and the dynastic imagery already discussed provides a case in point. But dynastic succession and security were not the only political messages that family portraiture could convey. During the reign of Basil I, for example, a room in the Great Palace known as the Kainourgion was decorated with portraits of Basil’s entire family. These no longer survive, but were described in the tenth-century Life of Basil commissioned by his grandson, Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos: a mosaic presented Basil and Eudokia, enthroned, surrounded by their children, all holding books ‘to indicate that not only the male but also the female offspring have been instructed in holy writ and are not unfamiliar with divine wisdom’.34 An inscription offered God the thanks of the parents on behalf of their children and, again, those of the children on behalf of their parents. The inscription of thanks coming from the parents offers the following, almost word for word: ‘We thank thee, O supremely good God and king of kings, for having surrounded us with children who are thankful for the magnificence of thy wondrous deeds …’. In turn, the inscription of the children offers this message: ‘We are thankful to thee, O word of God, for having raised our father from Davidic poverty and having anointed him with the unction of thy holy ghost. Preserve him and our mother by thy hand and deem them and ourselves worthy of thy heavenly kingdom’.35 The mosaic celebrated family piety – an issue of some importance to Basil, a former groom in Michael III’s employ who had murdered Michael to take the throne himself – but it also tells us that God was directly responsible for Basil’s rise to power (God ‘raised our father from Davidic poverty’), and equated Basil with the quintessential ideal ruler, David, who also came from nowhere. This is not an isolated example – the Life of Basil spells out many other instances where Basil’s future greatness was predicted – but what is important in the context of this chapter is that a description of a family portrait was the vehicle used to carry a political message. To the author of the Life (and, if the text records an actual mosaic with the inscriptions and images described, to Basil as well), a family

  Life of Basil 89, ed. Bekker 1838, p. 334.   Life of Basil 89, ed. Bekker 1838, pp. 334–5. The English translation is from the

34 35

deeply missed Ihor Ševčenko’s edition and translation of the text, which he kindly sent me well over a decade ago (and which was finally published at the end of 2011).

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portrait was considered the appropriate site to celebrate the piety and pre-ordained and divinely sponsored success of the Macedonian house.36 In her discussion of ‘the portrait as a political tool’, West follows Bert Smith’s distinction between propaganda and ‘portraiture that was intended to provide reassuring images of authority’ or to ‘bolster’ that authority (again, she cites coins); and she notes that alteration or destruction of a portrait helps both to ‘rewrite history’ and to signal a new political position (the example she uses is the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003).37 The classic Byzantine examples of altering a family portrait to rewrite history are both from the eleventh century: the famous mosaic in Hagia Sophia that originally portrayed Zoe with her first husband Romanos III, but was subsequently altered to show her third husband Constantine IX Monomachos (as is clear from the alteration in the inscription and the disruption of the cubes around the emperor’s and Zoe’s heads),38 and the relabeling and (slight) repainting of Maria of Alania’s first husband, Michael VII, as her second, Nikephoros III, in the Paris Chrysostom.39 The public face of the imperial couple was on show at Hagia Sophia – when lit by candles or oil lamps, the mosaic, in the south gallery of the church, was clearly visible from the nave, and appears to have been deliberately positioned in the direct sight line of the imperial door leading from the narthex into the body of the building (Fig. 9.11). Yet from the ground floor, where most of its viewers were likely to have been, it cannot have been possible to tell which emperor was portrayed; the changed identity of the emperor would normally have been apparent only to the imperial family itself, which – except for the emperor – probably sat in the south gallery for the service.40 There were other reasons for the changes in this family portrait, as Ioli Kalavrezou has convincingly argued, and they concerned the personal dynamics of the imperial couple rather than the more abstract politics of the empire.41 But if not narrowly political, it nonetheless seems to have been important to update family portraits during the lifetime of the main protagonist of the image. The manuscript portrait of Maria and Michael VII/Nikephoros III was in a book unlikely to have been seen by many people, so altering the emperor’s portrait can hardly have made a political statement of any ‘official’ impact, but the pictures were cut out of their original pages (presumably because text specific to Michael VII surrounded the images) and glued onto fresh sheets when the alterations were made. Images of past imperial families were not, so far as we know, changed in this way: there is   Constantine VII had good reason to celebrate his family line: as we have already seen, his father-in-law tried to keep him from the throne and it was only his status as Porphyrogennetos (born in the purple chamber reserved for imperial births) that saved him and allowed the continuation of the Macedonian house. 37   West 2004, pp. 65–9. She refers to Smith 1988, p. 27. 38   References in n. 27 above. 39   Paris, BNF Coislin 79, f. 1v: Evans and Wixom 1997, pp. 207–9. 40   Taft 1998, esp. p. 41. 41   Kalavrezou 1994, esp. pp. 252–9. 36

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Figure 9.11 Istanbul, Hagia Sophia, south gallery mosaic, Zoe and Constantine IX with Christ, 1042–1050, from nave no indication, for example, that subsequent owners of the Paris Gregory had their portraits painted over those of Basil I and Eudokia. It is remarriage that is signalled by changes in family portraits, not the shifting ownership of the work. What the Hagia Sophia mosaic and the Paris Chrysostom show us, then, is that at least in the eleventh century, images of the family reveal in a very direct way the importance of marriage alliances and strategic partnerships to the Byzantine elite. Power and Status In her chapter on ‘power and status’, West considers family portraiture only briefly, but her example is telling: Andrea Mantegna’s fresco decoration of the Camera

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Figure 9.12 Royal crown of Hungary, front, 1074–1077 degli Sposi (wedding room) at the Ducal Palace in Mantua (1465–1474), which portrays members, young and old, of the ruling Gonzaga family in a detailed depiction of the local landscape.42 Marriage partnerships and family portraiture are, once again, linked, as indeed they still are in contemporary wedding photographs. Family portraits indicative of power and status are amply represented in Byzantium. As we have already seen, family portraiture meant to secure dynastic status runs from the coins of iconoclasm (Fig. 9.8), through the images of the Macedonian dynasty (Figs 9.4–9.5), and it continued to the end of the empire, for example in the well-known miniature of Manuel II Palaiologos with his wife Helena and sons John, Theodore and Andronikos, in a manuscript dated around 1405.43 Family portraiture demonstrating power is equally prevalent, the classic example being the eleventh-century royal crown of Hungary (1074–1077), with its sharp distinctions between Michael VII Doukas and his son Constantine, on the one hand, and Geza I of Hungary, on the other (Fig. 9.12). The Byzantines have the prime locations (Michael in the centre and Constantine to Michael’s right), carry the Constantinian labarum as a visible sign of their august lineage, are inscribed in the prestige colour red rather than Geza’s plebeian black, look straight   West 2004, pp. 70–103, the family portrait at pp. 78–9.   Paris, Musée du Louvre, MR 416: Durand et al. 1992, pp. 463–4.

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ahead rather than, as Geza does, turning their eyes in submission, and have the neat coiffure of Romans as opposed to Geza’s shaggy barbarian hair and beard.44 Group Identity45 Family portraiture that displays ‘group identity’ is well known from texts: both Galla Placidia (in the mid-fifth century) and Anicia Juliana (in the early sixth) displayed their lineage in portrait sequences in buildings no longer extant as, in the ninth century, the Macedonian founding family was apparently displayed in the Kainourgion, as we have seen.46 Group identity is also promoted in surviving family portraits. The ninth-century miniaturist of the Paris Gregory provided us with several images of Gregory of Nazianzus and his family, from isolated scenes to a group portrait accompanied by scenes of his brother’s funeral and his sister’s death.47 But perhaps the most striking example of family portraiture employed to exploit group identity is the sequence in the early fourteenth-century Lincoln College typikon, the rule book of the monastery of the Virgin of Certain Hope in Constantinople, founded in the late twelfth century. Here eight sets of sumptuously dressed members of the founding family, each accompanied by his or her spouse, follow each other in a stately procession until their final arrival at the donor portrait showing the original founder of the familial monastery, Theodoule, and her daughter Euphrosyne, who succeeded her and commissioned this sequence of images. Euphrosyne clearly does not want us to forget that she is part of familial, elite group as well as a member of a monastic community.48 Stages of Life and Gender Strategies West’s final two categories of portraiture that are applicable to Byzantine images of families are ‘stages of life’ – nicely exemplified in the miniatures of the fourteenth-century Alexander Romance in Venice, which portray Alexander as a child, young man, and mature adult49 – and ‘gender strategies’, which are implicit

  On this much-discussed object see, e.g., Kalavrezou 1994, pp. 250–51.   West 2004, pp. 104–29, with emphasis on family and marriage portraits, civic and

44 45

institutional portraits, and artist groups. Only the latter is absent from Byzantium. 46   For Galla Placidia and Anicia Juliana, see Brubaker 1997. 47   Brubaker 1999, pp. 119–37. On Gregory’s family see also the chapters by Ville Vuolanto and Fotis Vasileiou in this volume. 48   See Cecily Hennessy’s chapter in this volume, and, on the creation of elite group identity in the manuscript, Brubaker 2006. 49   Trahoulias 1997. On the Byzantine Life Course see the chapter by Eve Davies in this volume.

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in virtually all familial portraits, where males are given the highest status location, either in the centre or on the right hand side of Christ or the Virgin (Fig. 9.9).50 The Portrait as Theological Statement West considers some aspects of portraiture that do not apply to Byzantine pictures of families (the portrait as a work of art, the self-portrait, the portrait and modernism); but I would like to close with an aspect of the Byzantine familial portrait that she does not cover, the portrait as a theological statement. The classic expressions of this involve the dominant mother–son relationship of orthodox Christianity, the Theotokos and Christ.51 Most important for our theme is the well-known shift in Crucifixion imagery that occurred in the ninth century, when a new inscription attached itself to the scene. One of the earliest examples appeared in a manuscript already cited several times in this chapter, the Paris Gregory of c. 880.52 The legend inscribes Christ’s dying words to his mother, ‘Behold thy son’ (meaning John the Evangelist), and to John, ‘Behold thy mother’ (meaning the Virgin Mary; John 19:26–27). As Ioli Kalavrezou has demonstrated, this is part of the ninth-century shift toward ‘humanising’ the holy family: the emphasis on Mary as mother here coincides with the move from addressing her as Theotokos (Bearer of God) to addressing her as Meter Theou (Mother of God).53 This new stress on family ties also coincides with Evelyne Patlagean’s observation that the family had become the fundamental social and political model in Byzantium by the ninth century.54 Conclusions I have approached representations of family thematically rather than chronologically because I wanted to display the range and diversity of Byzantine family portraiture. But it is nonetheless clear that pictures of the family changed over time. Ex voto familial portraiture does not disappear, but it withers after the sixth century, a victim of the emergence of new ‘professionalised’ social elites, that is to say elites which depend on office-holding by single individuals, not on collective family status. Meanwhile, imperial dynastic family portraiture becomes 50   Even in generic group scenes, husbands normally take precedence over wives, as in a preaching scene in the Paris Gregory (Paris.gr.510, f.78r) where the male members of the audience are closer to the priest than are the females: Brubaker 1999, fig. 15. 51   See further Hennessy 2008, pp. 179–212. 52   Paris.gr.510, f.30v: Brubaker 1999, pp. 291–302, fig. 7. 53   Kalavrezou 1990. 54   Patlagean 1986, esp. p. 427.

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much more prominent in the eighth century, as part of the new emphasis on hereditary succession promoted by the Isaurians. In the ninth century, the holy family is humanised, visualising the role of Christ’s human nature as a justification of religious imagery after the image debates and, following Patlagean, the new emphasis on the family unit. All of this culminates in an increasing interest in picturing family donations (which, to a degree, replace ex voto family images, now that family identity becomes important for the aristocracy again),55 on the one hand, and, on the other, visualising the family narrative of holy figures, particularly the Virgin, whose childhood begins to be pictorialised in the eleventh century (Daphne), and is expanded in the twelfth-century Kokkinobaphoi manuscripts (Fig. 9.3) and the fourteenth-century Chora mosaics. The images we have examined in this chapter demonstrate the importance of family to elite Byzantine viewers. Family portraiture could be used to convey a variety of themes, from narrative biography to theological arguments. Always commemorative, the main additional messages carried by family portraits differed depending on the status of the family. Though sometimes containing overt political subtexts, imperial family portraits were largely focused on stability and continuity. Family portraits of biblical figures – predominantly Christ and the Virgin – emphasised their humanity, and thus underscored a fundamental tenet of orthodox Christianity, the co-existence of Christ’s human and divine natures. Family portraits of ‘common’ – though usually elite – Byzantines were, in the beginning, largely a means of visualising thanks for divine intervention in human problems; those that survive focus on conception (an issue of obvious importance to family continuity) and health, often the health of the commissioner’s child. Later images of ‘ordinary’ Byzantine families tend to commemorate a donation, recording the patronage of a church or its redecoration.56 It is significant that in all of these categories, whole families were visualised, not simply the head of household, for this suggests that, however patriarchal Byzantine authors presented their society as being, in fact the importance of the family as an economic and social unit was visually (if not always textually) recognised. This is important. Looking at the Byzantine family may, in the end, give us a truer picture of how the family worked in practice than reading about the family in texts written by mainly male (and often monastic), mainly elite, and mainly urban authors.

  See Cecily Hennessy’s chapter in this volume.   I have not discussed family donor portraits here because this is a major focus of

55 56

Cecily Hennessy’s contribution to this volume.

Table 9.1

Family groups on post-iconoclast Byzantine coinage, 842–1453

Emperor

Family members

Coin type1

Date

Reference2

Michael III (842–867)3

Mother & sister: Theodora & Thekla

Nomisma (gold), miliaresion (silver)

842–843, 842–856

DOC 3.1:461–62, 464-65

Mother: Theodora

Nomisma

843–856

DOC 3.1:463

Son: Constantine

Nomisma, follis (copper)

868–870

DOC 3.2:487–89, 493–96

Sons: Constantine & Leo VI

Follis

870–879

DOC 3.2:496–500

Eldest son & wife: Constantine & Eudokia

Nomisma, tremissis (gold)

882?

DOC 3.2:489–90

Sons: Leo VI & Alexander

Semissis (gold), tremissis, miliaresion

868–879

DOC 3.2:490–92

Half-follis

879–886

DOC 3.2:501–02

Son: Constantine VII

Nomisma, miliaresion

908–912

DOC 3.2:513–15

Brother: Alexander

Follis, half-follis

886–912

DOC 3.2:516–21

Basil I (867–886)

Leo VI (886–912)

Alexander (912–913)

None

Emperor

Family members

Coin type1

Date

Reference2

Constantine VII (913–959)

Mother: Zoe

Nomisma, follis

914–919

DOC 3.2:541–42, 559–60

Father-in-law: Romanos I

Nomisma

920–921, 930–944

DOC 3.2:542–43, 548

Father-in-law & his son: Romanos I & Christopher

Nomisma4

921

DOC 3.2:544–45

Father-in-law & his son: Romanos I & Christopher

Nomisma, miliaresion

ca 930, 921–931

DOC 3.2:547–48, 554–55

Father-in-law & his sons: Romanos I, Stephen & Constantine Lekapenos

Miliaresion

931–944

DOC 3.2:556–57

Son: Romanos II

Nomisma, miliaresion, follis

945–959

DOC 3.2:551–53, 557–58, 568–69

Nomisma

963–969

DOC 3.2:582–83

Nomisma, miliaresion

977–1025

DOC 3.2:613–26, 628–29

Romanos II (959–963) Nikephoros II (963–969)

None 5

Stepson (& son of Romanos II): Basil II

John I (969–976)6

None

Basil II (976–1025)

Brother (& co-ruler): Constantine VIII

Constantine VIII (1025– 1028)

None

Romanos III (1028–1034)

None

Emperor

Family members

Michael IV (1034–1041)

None

Zoe (1041–1042)

None

Zoe & Theodora (1042)

None (the two appear together)

Constantine IX (1042–1055)

None

Theodora (1055–1056)

None

Michael VI (1056–1057)

None

Isaac I (1057–1059)

None

Constantine X (1059–1067)

Wife: Eudokia

Follis7

1059–1067

DOC 3.2:774–76

Eudokia (1059–1071)

Sons: Michael VII & Constantios

Nomisma

1067

DOC 3.2:783–84

Husband & son: Romanos IV & Michael VII

Nomisma

1067

DOC 3.2:784

Stepsons & wife: Michael VII, Constantios, Andronikos & Eudokia

Nomisma

1068–1071

DOC 3.2:789–91

Wife: Eudokia

Nomisma

1068–1071

DOC 3.2:791–92

Michael VII (1071–78)

Wife: Maria

Nomisma, miliaresion

1071–1078

DOC 3.2:807–12, 815

Nikephoros III (1078–1081)

Wife: Maria

Miliaresion

1078–1081

DOC 3.2:829

Romanos IV (1968–1071)

Coin type1

Date

Reference2

DOC 3.2:731–32

Emperor

Family members

Coin type1

Date

Reference2

Alexios I (1081–1118)8

Son: John II

Nomisma

1092–1093

DOC 4.1:224–26

Wife & son: Eirene & John II

Nomisma

1092–1093

DOC 4.1:231

John II (1118–1143)

None

Manuel I (1143–1180)

None

Alexios II (1180–1183)

No surviving coins

Andronikos I (1183–1185)

None

Isaac II (1185–1195, 1203–1204)

None

Alexios III (1185–1204)

None

Period of exile (1204–1261)

None

Michael VIII (1259–1282)

Son (co-emperor): Andronikos II

Trachy (electrum & billon)

1272–1282

DOC 5:nos 36, 44, 197– 219

Andronikos II (1282–1328)

Son (co-emperor): Michael IX

Hyperpyron (gold), tornese (silver), trachy, assarion (copper)

1294–1320

DOC 5:nos 235–492, 560, 595–622, 633–716

Son (co-emperor): Andronikos III

Hyperpyron, trachy

1325–1328

DOC 5:nos 493–503, 623, 853–56

Andronikos III (1328–1341)

None9

Emperor

Family members

Coin type1

Date

Reference2

John V (1341–1391)10

Mother & (deceased) father: Anna of Savoy & Andronikos III

Hyperperon , basilikon (silver)

1341–1347

DOC 5:176–77, nos 945–65

Mother: Anna of Savoy

Basilikon

1341–1347

DOC 5:nos 966–1175

(deceased) father: Andronikos III

Basilikon, assarion

1341–1347

DOC 5:nos 944, 1191

Son: Andronikos IV11

Basilikon, assarion

1365–1367?

DOC 5:no. 1196

Son: Manuel II

Stavraton (silver)

1374?

DOC 5:200

Manuel II (1391–1425)

None

John VIII (1425–1448)12

None

Constantine XI (1449–1453)

None

Notes 1   For clarity, unless otherwise noted this chart omits coins from mints other than at Constantinople until 1204, after which all mints are included. 2   DOC 3.1–2 = Grierson 1973a and 1973b. DOC 4.1–2 = Hendy 1999. DOC 5.1–2 = Grierson 1999; this catalogue is differently organised from other Dumbarton Oaks coin catalogues and the referencing is therefore normally to coin numbers in the catalogue rather than to pages where the coins are listed and/or discussed. 3   Coins minted in 866–867 in Cherson and Syracuse show Michael III and his successor (to whom he was not related) Basil I: DOC 3.1:468–70. 4   In this sequence, Romanos I, who was crowned augustus in 920 on the pretext of Constantine VII’s supposed poor health, takes precedence, and is shown crowned by Christ. There are also nomismata struck with Romanos I and Christopher only, miliaresia with only Romanos I, and folles with either Romanos or Christopher alone: DOC 3.2:546–7, 554, 561–5.

5   Nikephoros introduced a lighter counterpart to the full-weight nomisma (histamenon), the tetarteron, but they will not be distinguished in this table. 6   Usurper who, despite his marriage to Constantine VII’s daughter shortly after acceding to the throne – presumably to cement his legitimacy – did not add her portrait to his coinage. 7   After 80 years of anonymous copper coinage (the so-called ‘anonymous folles’), Constantine X revived the portrait, and for the first time since Basil I included his wife. 8   The various coinage reforms under Alexios I do not inflect any points made about family members on coinage and so will be ignored in this table. 9   Unless the politikon showing two emperors dates from his reign and pairs Andronikos III with his son John V: see DOC 5:193–5. 10   In some coins of the regency period (1341–1347) Anna is in the hierarchically favoured position: see DOC 5:175–81. In coins issued between 1347 and 1353, John VI appears with John V (see DOC 5:182–89), but as he was not a family member these coins are omitted from this table. For the single coin on which John VI’s son appears, see DOC 5:190–191. Anna also issued her own coins from Thessalonike, which she effectively ruled as an appanage 1352–1365, usually with her son John V is an inferior position: DOC 5:197–9. 11   Andronikos IV also issued coins in his own name between 1376 and 1377, but they do not picture family members and are therefore omitted from this table: DOC 5:207–10. 12   The coinage associated with John VI Kantakouzenos (co-emperor 1347–1353) and John VII, grandson of John V and regent to Manuel II, is irrelevant here and has been omitted from this table.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Life of Basil, ed. I. Bekker, Theophanes continuatus, Chronographia (Bonn, 1838); ed. trans. Ihor Ševčenko, Chronographiae quae Theophanis Continuati nomine fertur Liber quo Vita Basilii Imperatoris amplectitur (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011). Secondary Sources Brubaker, Leslie (1997), ‘Memories of Helena: Patterns in Imperial Female Matronage in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries’, in Liz James (ed.), Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium (London: Routledge), pp. 52–75. Brubaker, Leslie (1999), Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium. Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brubaker, Leslie (2004), ‘Elites and Patronage in Early Byzantium: The Evidence from Hagios Demetrios at Thessalonike’, in John Haldon and Lawrence Conrad (eds), Elites Old and New in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East (Princeton: Harvard University Press), pp. 63–90. Brubaker, Leslie (2006), ‘Pictures Are Good to Think With: Looking at Byzantium’, in Paolo Odorico, Panagiotis A. Agapitos and Martin Hinterberger (eds), L’écriture de la mémoire. La littérarité de l’historiographie (Paris: Centre d’Etudes Byzantines), pp. 221–40. Brubaker, Leslie, and Haldon, John (2001), Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca 680-850): The Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate). Brubaker, Leslie, and Tobler, Helen (2000), ‘The Gender of Money: Byzantine Empresses on Coins (324–802)’, Gender & History, 12: 572–94. Cormack, Robin (1969), ‘The Mosaic Decoration of S Demetrios, Thessaloniki: A Re-Examination in the Light of the Drawings of W.S. George’, Annual of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, 64: 17–52; repr. in Robin Cormack, The Byzantine Eye: Studies in Art and Patronage (London: Variorum, 1989), I. Cormack, Robin (1994), ‘The Emperor at St Sophia: Viewer and Viewed’, in André Guillou and Jannic Durand (eds), Byzance et les images (Paris: La Documentation française), pp. 225–53. Durand, Jannic et al. (1992), Byzance. L’art byzantin dans les collections publiques françaises (Paris: Réunion Des Musées Nationaux). Evans, Helen C., and Wixom, William D. (1997), The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, AD 843–1261 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Grierson, Philip (1973a), Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection III.1 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks).

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Grierson, Philip (1973b), Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection III.2 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Grierson, Philip (1999), Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection V.1–2 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Hendy, Michael (1999), Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection 4.1 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Hennessy, Cecily (2008), Images of Children in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate). Hutter, I., and Canart, P. (1991), Das Merien homiliar des Mönches Jakobos von Kokkinobaphos, codex Vaticanus graecus 1162, Codices Vaticanis selecti LXXIX (Vatican City). Kalavrezou, Ioli (1990), ‘Images of the Mother: When the Virgin Mary Became meter theou’, DOP, 44: 165–72. Kalavrezou, Ioli (1994), ‘Irregular Marriages in the Eleventh Century and the Zoe and Constantine Mosaic in Hagia Sophia’, in Angeliki E. Laiou and Dieter Simon (eds), Law and Society in Byzantium: Ninth–Twelfth Centuries (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks), pp. 241–59. Magdalino, Paul, and Nelson, Robert (1982), ‘The Emperor in Byzantine Art of the Twelfth Century’, BF, 8: 123–83; repr. in Paul Magdalino, Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Byzantium (Aldershot: Variorum, 1991), VI. Maguire, Henry (1995), ‘A Murderer among the Angels: The Frontispiece Miniatures of Paris.gr.510 and the Iconography of the Archangels in Byzantine Art’, in Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker (eds), The Sacred Image East and West (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press), pp. 63–71. Omont, Henri (1927), ‘Miniatures des homélies sur la Vierge du moine Jacques (MS grec 1208 de Paris)’, Bulletin de la Société française de reproductions de manuscrits à peintures, 11: 1–24. Papaconstantinou, Arietta, and Talbot, Alice-Mary (eds) (2009), Becoming Byzantine. Children and Childhood in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Patlagean, Evelyne (1986), ‘Familles et parentèles à Byzance’, in Andre Burguière et al. (eds), Histoire de la famille I: Mondes lontains, mondes anciens (Paris: Armand Colin), pp. 421–41. Ščepkina, M.V. (1977), Miniaturi Khludovskoi Psalt’iri (Moscow). Smith, R.R.R. (1988), Hellenistic Royal Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Spatharakis, Ioanni (1976), The Portrait in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill). Taft, Robert (1998), ‘Women at Church in Byzantium: Where, When – and Why?’, DOP, 52: 27–87. Trahoulias, Nicolette S. (1997), The Greek Alexander Romance, Venice Hellenic Institute Codex gr. 5 (Athens: Exandas).

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West, Shearer (2004), Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Whittemore, Thomas (1942), The Mosaics of Hagia Sophia at Istanbul. Third Preliminary Report, Work Done in 1935–1938. The Imperial Portraits of the South Gallery (Boston, MA: Byzantine Institute).

Chapter 10

The Byzantine Child: Picturing Complex Family Dynamics Cecily Hennessy

Introduction This chapter discusses the depiction of children in association with members of their families – with parents, siblings and step relations – in Byzantine art. Taking three themes, it examines the nature of the portrayal of familial structures, whether nuclear or extended as well as the more intricate arrangements of ‘blended’ families with stepchildren and step-parents. The themes are chosen to highlight three recurring subjects in Byzantine art, the prevalence of which reflect the importance of these topics in Byzantine life. They thus form illustrative examples of approaches to the Byzantine family. The first section looks at imagery conveying children’s power and discusses the roles of the children of the emperors and their kin as seen on coins and in manuscripts. The second section examines biblical families, including the Virgin’s. According to apocryphal texts, she takes on the role of stepmother when she enters Joseph’s house, and is shown in various contexts with her stepsons. Biblical families are further examined through scenes showing relations eating together, a central familial pastime. The third section explores donor portraits, focusing on three examples in Cappadocia, and considers the ways in which children are included and how familial units are presented. The themes therefore highlight the portrayal of children in three integral areas of Byzantine art: the first two encapsulating secular and religious authority with representations of political power and Christian imagery, and the third looking to the popular depiction of living or recently living individuals in religious benefaction. Thus while being highly selective in the areas of focus, the material aims to exemplify certain features of Byzantine art and life, drawing on material from a broad time period. While the first section on imperial children is confined to the ninth to eleventh centuries and the third on Cappadocian portraiture to the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, the second section discussing biblical children ranges from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. Children with members of their families are depicted in most contexts in Byzantine art. Portraits of children include both those who are known and unknown. The majority are of prestigious children, such as aristocratic and imperial ones, and those who gain religious status through their sanctity, saints whose childhoods become mythologised. Depictions of children also illustrate numerous biblical

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narratives, showing them as both key players and peripheral characters. These latter often appear as genre figures, giving a sense of context. One often tends to assume that children shown with adults are representing a nuclear family, but in many contexts, the familial structures are more complex, including both step families and extended families. Children are depicted with half-siblings, stepsiblings, step-parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents and so on. Equally, in any given portrayal, some close family members may be left out, thereby focusing on particular relationships to the exclusion of others. Imperial Children In imperial contexts, in official portraits and on coins, relationships are often clearly defined. Images give an impression of sanctioned dynastic connections, but can become nuanced and changed over time according to the winds of fortune and various alliances, marriages and associations. An intriguing example is the sons of Constantine X Doukas (1059–1067) and Eudokia Makrembolitissa.1 Their three boys, Michael VII (1071–1078), Andronikos and Constantios do not appear on the coinage of their father but feature on those of his successor Romanos IV Diogenes (1068–1071), who married Eudokia in 1068. Seemingly the existence and support of his stepsons supplemented Romanos’ power. They appear on the obverse (converse side) of the class I and II histamena (a form of the gold solidus, the standard gold coin), with Christ blessing Romanos and Eudokia on the reverse, dated 1068–71 (Fig. 10.1).2

Figure 10.1 Coin of Romanos IV, showing Michael VII, Constantios and Andronikos on the obverse, Romanos and Eudokia on the reverse, 1068–71 1   For other imperial representations of children, see Hennessy 2008a, pp. 143–78, figs 5.1–5.11, pls 11–12. 2   Grierson 1973, pp. 785–7, 789–91, pl. LXV, Romanos IV, 1, 2.

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Probably these same three sons are also portrayed in a headpiece in a copy of John Klimakos’ Heavenly Ladder, Milan, Ambrosiana cod. B. 80 sup. (fol. 14r) (Fig. 10.2).3 A series of monograms on the page preceding the illumination, which resolve to the name of Andronikos Doukas, suggest that he, the middle brother, was the original owner of the book (fol. 13r).4 In the miniature, the three figures stand frontally below a seated Christ.5 Following the order of hierarchy on the coinage of Romanos IV, Michael, the eldest, wearing a golden loros, stands in the centre, flanked by Andronikos on the right, and Constantios, the youngest, on the left, both wearing a purple chlamys and gold studded crown with prependulia.6 This order gives precedence to Andronikos over Constantios.7 Most likely made for private use, this illumination demonstrates how official imagery became assimilated into the private sphere. In what must have been an uneasy familial hierarchy, Constantios was made co-emperor at birth in 1060. This was presumably because his father had just been made emperor, and he was therefore the only son to be born a porphyrogennetos. Michael was made co-emperor only after Constantios, probably also in 1060 when he was about the age of ten. The birth and crowning of the porphyrogennetos seems to have instigated the crowning of the eldest son who eventually succeeded to the throne, even though sources suggest he was not well-suited to it. Michael and Constantios ruled for a brief period after the death of their father in 1067 under the regency of their mother, and both then appeared on the coinage. Rather anomalously, Andronikos, the middle son, only received the title despot, given in the monograms, after the death of his father and his mother’s remarriage to Romanos IV, and then, as mentioned, took precedence over his little brother.8 Subsequently, Romanos IV ruled for some three years until he lost power in the spring of 1072 after the disastrous battle of Manzikert in August 1071.9 Eudokia then resumed joint rule as regent with all three of her sons. However, Michael quickly exiled his mother in October of the same year.10 The manuscript is dateable between 1068, when Andronikos became despot, and 1078, when Michael retired. It provides an interesting example of brotherly yet hierarchical representation in a private sphere and one which perhaps reflected Andronikos’ satisfaction in finally being raised to the throne and given precedence over his little purple-born brother Constantios.11 3   Gengaro, Leoni and Villa (1957), pp. 117–23, pl. 29; Martin 1954, pp. 21–2, 169, fig. 26; Anderson 1979, figs 1–3; Spatharakis 1981, vol. 1, no. 91, vol. 2, fig. 165. 4   Spatharakis 1981, vol. 2, fig. 163; Anderson 1979, pp. 234–6. 5   Anderson 1979, pp. 230 and 235. 6   Anderson 1979, p. 235. Grierson 1973, 3.2, pp. 789–91. 7   Grierson 1973, 3.2, pp. 785–6 and n. 2. 8   Grierson 1973, 3.2, p. 779. 9   Grierson 1973, 3.2, pp. 779–80. Gautier 1966, pp. 156–9. 10   Grierson 1973, 3.2, p. 780. 11   For discussion of sibling relationships within the Macedonian dynasty see the chapter by Shaun Tougher in this volume.

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Figure 10.2 Headpiece probably showing Michael VII Doukas and his brothers Andronikos and Constantios, John Klimakos’ Heavenly Ladder Michael VII, at the age of about 15, married in 1065 a Georgian princess of a similar age, called Martha and renamed Maria on her marriage. While she is not included in the Heavenly Ladder illumination, which depicts brotherly relations, she is incorporated into two anthropomorphic initials in the manuscript formerly known as the Leningrad Psalter, National Library of Russia, cod. gr. 214 (fols

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1r, 311v).12 In the second, only Michael and Maria are shown, but in the first, the initial M, which begins the word makarios (‘blessed’) at the opening of the psalms, Michael, Maria, and their child Constantine, form the three legs of the initial M (Fig. 10.3). Although the representation of Michael is indistinct, Constantine is clearly visible, standing with his parents’ hands on his head. An inscription names Constantine as porphyrogennetos.13 He was born in January 1074 and was associated with the throne before his infant betrothal in August 1074 to Helen, the daughter of Robert Guiscard, since he is referred to as basileus in the contract. Here he is referred to only as porphyrogennetos and not as basileus, therefore the miniature probably predates his coronation in 1074.14 At this time, he would have been less than eight months old, and the manuscript, with his image on the first folio, initialising the word blessed, may have been made to celebrate his birth. The manuscript, richly decorated in brilliant colours, is similar to other luxurious books which probably derived from the imperial court.15 Michael, Andronikos and Constantios had three sisters, Anna, Theodora and Zoe, of whom only Zoe was purple-born.16 As is typical, even in a manuscript such as the Heavenly Ladder that was surely for personal use, the sisters do not appear. This is apparently because the portraits are formal representations of dynastic power and not simply family portraits which would include the daughters, although often the wives of emperors are shown, as mothers of future rulers. Similar examples are the frontispieces to both Middle and Late Byzantine manuscripts, such as two folios showing Basil I’s (867–886) sons, Leo and Alexander, with their mother Eudokia Ingerina facing Basil himself in a luxurious edition of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus,17 and another depicting Manuel II’s (1391–1425) three sons with their parents in a manuscript given as a diplomatic gift to the Abbot of St Denis.18 On coinage, however, imperial daughters do appear occasionally, if rarely. An unusual example of a sister of the emperor being shown with her brother is that of Thekla, sibling to Michael III (842–867), who is depicted with him on the reverse of class I solidi (gold coins) and miliaresia (silver coins) dated to 842–3   Spatharakis 1981, no. 93, with bibliography, figs 170–171; Lazarev 1967, pp. 189, 248 n. 18; Spatharakis 1976, pp. 36–8, figs 9–10. 13   Spatharakis 1976, pp. 36–7. The inscriptions read: Κωνσ(ταν)τι(νος) Πορφυρογεν(ν) ητ(ος) and Μαρια Αυτο(κρα)τ(ορισσα). 14   Spatharakis 1976, p. 38. On the marriage agreement, see Bibicou 1959, pp. 45, 52–4. 15   Lazarev 1967, p. 189. 16   Sources vary on the number and names of the daughters, see Oikonomides 1963, p. 101 n. 3; Polemis 1968, p. 34. 17   For these images and discussion of them see in this volume the chapter by Leslie Brubaker, which considers the depiction of the family in general in Byzantine art. 18   Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, gr. 510, fol. Br, dated 879–883, see Brubaker 1999, pp. 158–63, figs 2, 5; Paris, Louvre, MR 416, fol. 2, see Durand (ed.) 1992, p. 356; Spatharakis 1981, no. 278, figs. 492–4, with bibliography. 12

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Figure 10.3 Anthropomorphic initial M showing Michael VII Doukas, his wife Maria and their son Constantine, Leningrad Psalter

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Figure 10.4 Coin of Theodora, showing Theodora on the obverse, Michael III and Thekla on the reverse, 842–3.

Figure 10.5 Coin of Theophilos, showing Theophilos with his wife Theodora and eldest daughter Thekla on the obverse, two younger daughters, Anna and Anastasia, on the reverse, 830s (?), while their mother Theodora is on the obverse (Fig. 10.4).19 It is not clear why Thekla is on the coinage. It may be that she also had some claim to the throne or that Michael’s position was uncertain, being underage and not having a clear successor.20 However, before Michael’s birth, Thekla, as the eldest child of her father Theophilos (829–842), is seen on the obverse of a class IV gold solidus (dated to the late 830s) with both her parents, while on the reverse appear her two younger sisters, Anna and Anastasia (Fig. 10.5).21 Theophilos had two further 19   Grierson 1973, 3.1, pp. 454, 456–7, 461–2, 464–5, pl. XXVIII, nos 1a–1d.4. On coinage see also the comments of Leslie Brubaker in this volume. 20   Grierson 1973, 3.1, p. 454. 21   Grierson 1973, 3.1, pp. 407–8, 415–16, 428, 454, pl. XXII no. 4.

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daughters, Pulcheria and Maria. Maria was betrothed to Alexios Mousele but she died very young, and her absence on the coins may indicate this.22 Regardless, the presence of three daughters, all Augustae, suggests they had some importance in the dynastic sphere prior to their brother’s birth, and that Thekla maintained a certain status after Michael’s accession to the throne. It is these daughters of Theophilos who are strikingly represented in the illustrated chronicle of John Skylitzes in the context of a story highlighting the influence of their grandmother on their religious upbringing (Madrid, cod. Vitr. 262, fol. 44 v).23 This manuscript is the only illustrated chronicle to survive from the Byzantine empire and contains the text written by John Skylitzes in the eleventh century, covering the period from 811 to 1057. The manuscript is a twelfthcentury edition, probably produced in Sicily during the Norman period, and was copied from a model with seven artists working on the illustrations.24 Skylitzes (Theophilos 5) relates that the parents of Theodora, the wife of the iconoclast Theophilos, did not renounce icons. Theodora’s mother is named Theoktiste: This Theoktiste had her own house close by the Monastery of Gastria and there she would receive Theodora’s children, of which there were five: Thekla, Anna, Anastasia, Pulcheria and Maria. She gave them various gifts which are attractive to the female sex. Then, taking them aside, she would earnestly entreat them not to be feeble nor to remain the women they were, but to play the man and to think the kind of thoughts which were worthy of and appropriate to their mother’s breast. They were to hold in abomination their father’s heresy and to do homage to the outward forms of the holy icons. Whereupon she would thrust some of the icons (which she kept in a chest) into their hands, setting them against their faces and lips, to sanctify the girls and to stir up in them a devotion to the icons.25

Theophilos, hearing of this, interrogated his daughters, and the older girls ‘neatly sidestepped’ his questions, but little Pulcheria let slip that her grandmother ‘had many dolls in the chest’, and she explained, ‘she puts them to our heads and to our faces after kissing them’.26 Theophilos was enraged, but out of respect for his wife did not punish his mother-in-law except to prevent the girls from visiting her. The story suggests that the granddaughters had a close relationship with their grandmother and went freely to visit her. She, in turn, gave them girlish presents and encouraged them to be strong and to resist their father’s beliefs. Clearly the older girls did not wish to betray their grandmother, perhaps because   Grierson 1973, 3.1, p. 407.   Grabar and Manoussacas 1979; Tsamakda 2002, p. 87, fig. 100, with full bibliography;

22 23

reproduced on Biblioteca Nacional de España website, http://bibliotecadigitalhispanica. bne.es, image Vitr_000026–002_0098.jpg. 24   Most recently, Tsamakda 2002, pp. 373–8. 25   Trans. Wortley 2010, pp. 54–5. 26   Trans. Wortley 2010, p. 55.

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they supported her faith or felt female loyalty. The history may well not be true, but even if only a story it reflects attitudes about female family relations and the differences in the text and the illustration are intriguing. The text suggests that Theoktiste tried to buy the girls’ favour by gifts; the illustration focuses on the act of the grandmother teaching the children how to venerate icons, with Theoktiste made to appear elevated and holy, dressed in a blue maphorion and wearing a halo, standing next to the icon shrine with the girls approaching her. In contrast, the granddaughters wear twelfth-century style formal imperial dress and have no haloes, so that their dynastic role is emphasised. They all look very similar but are presented in animated poses, turning to each other, and each is individualised by her name. The illumination emphasises both the righteousness of the iconophile imperial mother-in-law and the deluxe finery of the girls, clearly representing a post-iconoclastic interpretation of Theoktiste’s role, with the grandmother’s influence over her granddaughters, as detailed in the story, illustrated by her instructing the dutiful girls. A graphic example of a grandmother’s visual association with her granddaughters is found in frontispiece portraits to the Lincoln College Typikon, Oxford, Lincoln College, gr. 35, where, in the portraits showing secular dress, all the female family members are presented in very similar garments.27 The manuscript contains the rules for the Convent of our Lady of Certain Hope (Bebaia Elpis), which was founded by Theodora, niece of Michael VIII Palaiologos (1261–1282). Among the portraits that precede the text are a series of secular representations of paired members of Theodora’s family, her parents, herself and her husband, her two sons and their wives, and her two granddaughters and their husbands (fols 1v, 2r, 3r, 4r, 5r, 6r, 8r, 9v). Each pair is shown in a strikingly similar way, standing frontally in formal attire, assimilated into familial unity, old and young alike, but each slightly differentiated in features and distinguished by title.28 It is striking that the granddaughters are visually given equal value as the sons although a generation further from the founder herself. Biblical Families Perhaps the most renowned grandmother in Byzantine iconography is Anna, mother of the Virgin. The representation of Anna with the Virgin and Christ, showing the three generations, is not frequently found in Byzantine art. Rather, her role as an idealised mother is imaged in representations of the conception, birth and childhood of Mary. This is particularly noticeable in certain scenes   Hutter 1995, with full bibliography; for analysis and plates, Spatharakis 1976, pp. 190–207, pls 143–54; Cutler and Magdalino 1978; Hennessy 2008b. See also the comments by Leslie Brubaker in this volume. For the text, see Delehaye 1921; for commentary and translation, see Thomas and Hero (eds) 2000, pp. 1512–78. 28   For the inscriptions, see Spatharakis 1976, pp. 192–9. 27

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at the Church of Our Saviour in Chora (Kariye Camii) in Istanbul, which was redecorated between 1316 and 1321 and has a complex cycle of stories from the apocryphal life of the Virgin. Both Anna and Joachim are shown cuddling and nurturing their daughter.29 The Virgin in turn, rather than initially becoming a mother, takes on the role of stepmother to Joseph’s children born from a previous marriage. The existence of this prior family derives from the canonical gospels, as Christ is said in both the Gospels of Mark and Matthew to have four brothers and some sisters (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55–6). The apocryphal Infancy Gospel of James only mentions two sons (Infancy Gospel 17:5), although the less well-known apocryphal Story of Joseph the Carpenter refers to four sons and two daughters (Story of Joseph the Carpenter 2).30 In art, the sons of Joseph appear on occasion, although to my knowledge there are no examples showing the daughters. James, perhaps the youngest son and the purported author of the Infancy Gospel, becomes a common feature in the iconography of the holy family from as early as the sixth century. The more standard iconographic type, depicting just one son, became established in Cappadocia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and shows James, who is usually named Jacob, leading the donkey in scenes of the Journey to Bethlehem and the Flight to Egypt, as seen for example in Saint Barbara in the Soğanlı valley, Cappadocia (Fig. 10.6).31 The depiction of more than one son is rare, although on the front cover of the sixth-century Armenian Etschmiadzin gospel book, two sons are shown in the Journey to Bethlehem, suggesting that this iconography also is present from an early date.32 Variations on the number of brothers occur in the mosaics at the Kariye Camii. For instance, one son is present in the Journey to Bethlehem and in the Flight to Egypt, and one accompanies Joseph when he leads the Virgin to his house and when he leaves for work.33 Two brothers go to Jerusalem at Passover and four are present in the enrolment for taxation, perhaps appropriately showing that all heads were then counted.34 In late Byzantine paintings, two or three sons are again seen, as for instance at St Phanourios at Valsameonero in Crete, dated to c. 1430, and at the

  For instance, Underwood 1966–75, vol. 2, no. 90, pls 114–15.   For the most recent text and commentary for the Infancy Gospel of James, see

29 30

Hock 1997; for further bibliography, see Hennessy forthcoming. For the Story of Joseph the Carpenter, see Tischendorf 1853, pp.115–133; James 1924, pp. 84–6; Lafontaine-Dosogne 1964–65, vol. 1, p. 22. 31   See n. 55 for references. 32   Yerevan, Matenadaran 2374, in Volbach 1976, no. 142, pl. 75; Dournovo 1961, preface photograph. 33   Underwood 1966–75, vol. 1, pp. 81, 83–4, 87–8, 111, and vol. 2, pls 143–5, 148– 150, 152–5,158, 200, 202. 34   Underwood 1966–75, vol. 1, pp. 89, 106–7, and vol. 2, pls 159, 163, 165, 206, 208–9.

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Figure 10.6 James (stepson of Mary) leading donkey in Flight to Egypt, St Barbara Kilise in the Soğanlı valley, Cappadocia church of the Virgin at Matejče.35 In two illustrated editions of the Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos, Paris gr. 1208 and Vatican gr. 1162, containing twelfthcentury homilies on the Virgin with copious illustrations of her early life, the four sons are depicted frequently in their home in which the Virgin lives.36 The youngest son, who although not referred to in the text is most probably James, appears often, accompanying the Virgin as servant, witness and protector. This elaborated role   Lafontaine-Dosogne 1966–75a, pp. 205 n. 57, 227 and n. 202; also p. 227 and n. 203, with references to two boys shown at Matejče and three at Kalenić; also Spatharakis 2005, for St Phanourios, pp. 29, 161, figs 47, 523; for Matejče, p. 56, fig. 100. 36   Hutter and Canart 1991, with full bibliography. The miniatures in the Paris manuscript are available at ‘Mandragore, base des manuscrits enluminés de la B.n.F.: http:// mandragore.bnf.fr/jsp/rechercheExperte.jsp’. 35

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for the son may suggest that the iconography in the Homilies was specific to those texts and was not dependent on a well-known tradition and that this might perhaps reflect the interests of the patron or recipient of the book.37 The sources of iconography and the choice of particular imagery in any given context may or may not reflect societal norms. In the case of biblical illustrations, which are to some degree dependent on the text, the images may derive from models or tradition, but may also be influenced by particular choices made by the patron, recipient, artist or collaborator.38 John Lowden has argued that there is no evidence for picture recensions in late antiquity, as early manuscripts are all unique and their format and presentation unpredictable, allowing for independent decisions to be made in designing the iconography.39 This implies that each of the manuscripts is created autonomously, with choices made about what to include and how to depict any given scene. In this context, the portrayal of children and families can be interpreted as reflecting the circumstances in which it was created to a greater degree than if the illustrations were modelled on an exemplar. Undoubtedly in later manuscripts throughout the Byzantine period images are copied, reinterpreted or loosely referenced, so that it is challenging to determine to what degree an illustration might reflect current cultural attitudes or practices. Yet however complex the iconographic influences might be, representations can reveal Byzantine attitudes about the family and relations between adults and children. One situation where families often come together is at the dinner table. The following section focuses on a selection of early manuscript illuminations, dating from the sixth to tenth centuries, which show the complexity of familial relations in the context of sharing food and drink. In the biblical texts, the dinner table was by no means always a site of harmony and family union, and on occasion it appears to have been one of intensity, of friction, of dispute. Meal times are sites of intrinsic family bonding but are also fraught with potential tension. Illustrations of family meals are examined here to explore the way familiar relations are conveyed. An early illustration of such a scene is in the story of the twins Esau and Jacob, pictured in the sixth-century Vienna Genesis, a richly decorated slightly abbreviated Book of Genesis written in silver ink on purple dyed parchment and perhaps made in Constantinople (Genesis 15: 27–34) (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek MS theol. gr. 31, fol. 8r).40 The text does not refer to the boys as twins, but important to the narrative is the idea that they are physically different, although fraternal twins, and as such they are distinctively depicted, Jacob with a smooth skin and   On this, see Hennessy forthcoming.   On visual knowledge used in Byzantine manuscripts, see Lowden 2002, ills 1–13. 39   Lowden 2005, p. 336, 2002, and 1999, esp. pp. 48–58; on the considerable 37 38

discussion concerning the use of extra biblical material as a source of images in the Vienna Genesis, see Lowden 1999, n. 98; also Gutmann 1966; Levin 1972. 40   Mazal 1980, with earlier bibliography; Kessler 2007, p. 158; Zimmermann 2003, esp. pp. 115–17, pl. 7.

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fresh face, Esau with sideburns and hairy legs, highlighting their dissimilarity. The story is told in two registers, very simply with no added figures or settings except for the graceful youth who accompanies Esau on the hunt in the upper register.41 In the lower one, Esau returns home to his brother Jacob, who is cooking red lentil soup. Jacob is dressed in blue, holding a cauldron in front of a fine brazier. Esau, famished from the hunt, begs for some food and, in exchange, gives away his birthright. The hapless elder son is pictured sitting alone, at the moment when, dunking his hand into the bowl of soup, he eats away his priority as the eldest. The image succinctly conveys his isolation in contravening his birthright. Later in the biblical story, Jacob goes on to father 12 sons from four women. Two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, are born to his favourite wife, Rachel. Joseph arouses his half-brothers’ jealousy and is betrayed by them at Dothaim (Genesis 37). An early example of this scene is in the ninth-century edition of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus, Paris cod. gr. 510, which was probably made in Constantinople in about 880 for Basil I and his family. The full page miniature has six registers. In the first, Joseph walks up from the left towards his halfbrothers, who are all seated eating together, grouped in a semi-circle around a pot of food.42 As noted by Leslie Brubaker, this is an unusual scene in the depiction of Joseph’s story.43 Perhaps the intent is to show the unity of the brethren who are to betray Joseph, a unity exemplified in the image by the similar appearance of all the brothers and their shared meal, even though this is not mentioned in the biblical text. This is presumably to sideline the polygamous nature of Jacob’s family. The brothers plot to kill Joseph, but the eldest, Reuben, prevails on the others to put him in a pit, whereupon, while feasting again, they spot a group of trading Ishmaelites approaching, and Judah suggests they sell Joseph for profit rather than be responsible for his death. The illustrator uses the imagery of the dinner table in the second context to demonstrate again the communality of the malicious brothers. Reuben and Judah, who each in turn mediate on behalf of Joseph, are not distinguished, but rather the half-brothers are all shown united. This betrayal is also shown again in the ninth-century Sacra Parallela, Paris cod. gr. 923, a collection of theological writings with marginal illustrations (fol. 391r). The brothers sit around a table while two of them cast Joseph into a pit.44 A story embedded with familial suffering is that of Job. In this case, pain is caused not by sibling rivalry but by God and nature. In the earliest extant manuscripts of Job (Vatican, gr. 749 from the second half of the ninth century; Patmos, Monastery of St John the Theologian, cod. 171, from the ninth or tenth century; and Venice, Marciana Library, Marcianus gr. 538, dated to 905), strong familial distinctions are apparent, ones which are particularly revealing about the roles of male and female 41   On this figure and on iconographic examples of the entire scene in early manuscripts, see Zimmermann 2003, pp. 116–17. 42   Brubaker 1999, pp. 316–28, fig. 12. 43   Brubaker 1999, pp. 317–18. 44   Weitzmann 1979, pp. 43–4, pl. XI, fig. 39.

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siblings.45 Job’s children are illustrated in the Vatican (folio 6v) and Marciana (folio 5v) manuscripts, when the seven sons and three daughters are first introduced (Job 1:2). In the Vatican miniature, the parents, Job and his wife, stand in the centre, with the daughters on the left beside their mother dressed in colourful finery and wearing jewelled tiaras, and the boys on the right beside their father dressed in bright but simple tunics. In the Marciana illumination the parents are omitted so the 10 children stand together, again grouped by sex.46 They are all shown as fully grown, if not adult, and in the Marciana edition two of the sons have grey hair. However, there are no further family, wives, husbands, children and so on mentioned in the text or included in the illustrations, so the image is confined to the siblings. Consistently the girls and boys are grouped separately, presumably to emphasise that they are siblings and not couples, so there is no mistaking that all these 10 children are Job’s blood kin. That they appear to be all full brothers and sisters is perhaps emphasised by the similarities in dress and physiognomy within each group. They are conceivably depicted as an ideal family so that Job’s loss is underlined. In all three manuscripts, the children are again illustrated on their way to the eldest brother’s house. In the Patmos manuscript they have similar attributes, appearing richly dressed, with the girls posed in an elegant and graceful interchange on the right, being encouraged to enter the house by the boys grouped together in camaraderie on the left.47 In the Vatican manuscript the children are facing in the opposite arrangement, with one boy leading on the right, the brothers following in a row and gesturing to their sisters as if encouraging them (folio 7v).48 In the Marciana manuscript, the siblings are divided into two registers, boys above and girls below (folio 7).49 In the next scene, as in the Vatican example, they are pictured eating together in a splendid display of luxurious conviviality, with seven servants in attendance at a semi-circular table (folio 16v) (Job 1:13).50 The artist has employed a setting well known in the late antique tradition and incorporated genre details, including various lively servants and attendants.51 In the final scene of the sequence, all Job’s sons and daughters are killed by a tremendous gale that batters the house and throws the roof on top of them as they dine together (Job 1: 18–19). This is also shown, for instance, in a miniature in the Paris Sacra Parallela where a demon pours down wind and rain, and the beams of the house break on the heads of the children, leaving golden vessels as the only remaining signs of the meal (fol. 204v).52   Huber 1986; catalogued in Papadakē-Oekland 2009, pp. 323–39.   Papadakē-Oekland 2009, pp. 48–65, figs 11 and 13, with slightly different

45 46

interpretation. 47   Papadakē-Oekland 2009, pp. 66–70, fig. 31. 48   Papadakē-Oekland 2009, pp. 66–70, fig. 36. 49   Papadakē-Oekland 2009, pp. 66–70, fig. 37. 50   Papadakē-Oekland 2009, pp. 88–92, fig. 65. 51   Papadakē-Oekland 2009, pp. 88–92, esp. p. 88. 52   Weitzmann 1979, pp. 111–12, pl. LV, fig. 211, with further bibliography.

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In the New Testament, a death (that of John the Baptist) occurs again at a feast, this time hosted by Herod (Matthew 14:1–12; Mark 6:14–29). The scene involves a stepfather/uncle (Herod) and his stepdaughter/niece (Salome) and, not visualised, Herod’s wife Herodias. Herodias was formerly married to Herod’s brother, and John had told Herod it was unlawful for him to marry her. A vivid and poignant example of this incident is in the sixth-century Sinope Gospels (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément grec 1286, fol. 10v).53 In this partial sixth-century Gospel of Mathew, which perhaps originated in Syria or Constantinople, five of the surviving purple dyed pages have illustrations. The miniature beneath the chapter headed ‘On the daughter of Herodias’ depicts the moment when John’s head is served up on a platter and given to Salome.54 To the left Herod and his guests recline on a couch at a semi-circular table with a communal plate before them. In the centre Salome stands with face aghast, looking at John’s head as it is presented to her, and on the right two of John’s disciples mourn over his decapitated body. As in the depiction of Jacob and Esau in the Vienna Genesis, the narrative is paired down in the miniatures so that Salome stands out as a strong protagonist without the support of her mother. If anything, the familial link between uncle and niece is emphasised as they wear identical crowns, have similar features, and are dressed in comparable robes with clavi (bands) and orbiculi (roundels). While this examination of families at table is by no means comprehensive, it serves to indicate the numerous portrayals of family life and relations in biblical illustrations. Old and New Testament stories are rife with familial tenderness and tensions, and it is evident that these emotions as well as some of the complex relationships are highlighted in narrative illustrations. While taking into consideration all the other influences on iconography, they must reflect to some extent the relations within contemporary Byzantine families. Donor Portraits Portraits of historical families, though rarely seen in narrative contexts, appear in patronal paintings in religious buildings. While some of these survive from the early period, the majority are tenth-century or later. Several examples found in the rock-cut churches in Cappadocia include children. In other churches where the identifying paintings are lost, it is possible to deduce that they originally marked memorials to children. One instance where a church seems to have been built or rededicated for the memory of a child is St Barbara Kilise in the Soğanlı valley.55 In this rock-cut complex, there are two barrel vaulted, single nave spaces: the south – a church   Omont 1901. Grabar 1948, fol. 10v, pl. 1; Sevrugian 1990; Kessler 2007, no. 81.   Kessler 2007, p. 161. 55   Jerphanion 1925–42, vol. 2, pp. 307–32; Lafontaine-Dosogne 1963, pp. 133–4; 53 54

Restle 1967, no. XLVI, vol. 1, p. 159, vol. 3, figs 433–43; Rodley 1985, pp. 203–7.

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dedicated to St Barbara – and the north (built slightly later as the pre-existing wall of the south chapel is broken through to access it) – apparently a burial chapel. The patron of the church is known from an inscription on the west wall above the entrance, which records that it was decorated under the emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII by Basileios the domestikos.56 Further dating details limit the decoration to 1006 or 1021.57 Basileios’ title is slightly unclear and he may have been either a clerical or a military domestikos, but the latter seems more likely.58 An arcosolium in the south wall of the church contains a child-sized grave. Lyn Rodley has suggested that a motive for building the church was the death of the child and that the choice of decoration on the adjacent walls had funereal and childhood themes. These include a deisis to the left, the seven sleepers of Ephesus on the adjacent transverse arch (who are shown as youths), and five scenes from the nativity, in addition to an anastasis in the vault (Fig. 10.7).59 The coupling of iconography of children or the young with scenes of intercession and resurrection point to the imagery being chosen for a dead child. The paint on the arcosolium itself is lost, but it would perhaps have included an inscription and portraits. If the church was excavated and decorated for the burial of a child, this suggests the affection and significance attached to children. One assumes that the child was Basileios’ offspring, but there is no firm evidence of this. Other Cappadocian churches include children in group portraits, where they appear as donors with adults. In the absence of inscriptions one tends to assume that these are relatives, and usually nuclear families. One such instance is Karşı Kilise in Gülşehir, which was renovated in 1212, and has two donor panels.60 One, in a niche on the south side of the west wall, shows a woman standing frontally with her hands resting on the heads of two girls, each standing at her side (Fig. 10.8). Their hands are folded across their breasts. The figures are dressed in fine clothes, one of the girls in a white dress, like that of the woman, and the other in a dark dress with white collar and veil. Each is named: the woman as Eirene and the girls as Kali and Maria. The inscriptions each repeat the supplication, ‘Lord, help your servant’.61 Nearby are parallel portraits of a man (largely destroyed by the insertion of a niche, but whose turbaned head remains and who perhaps holds a model of the church) and two boys, one on each side. Catherine Jolivet-Lévy has suggested that these are a man and his sons and form a pair with the female     58   59   60   56

For Basil II and Constantine VIII see the chapter by Shaun Tougher in this volume. Jerphanion 1925–42, vol. 2, p. 309, inscription no. 182. Rodley 1985, pp. 206–7. Rodley 1985, p. 207. Jerphanion 1925–42, vol. 2, pp. 1–16; Lafontaine-Dosogne 1963, pp. 123–7; Restle 1967, no. LI, vol. 1, pp. 165–6, vol. 3, figs 468–73; Jolivet-Lévy 2001, pl. XVI; reprinted in Jolivet-Lévy 2002, pp. 285–321, figs 14–23. I am indebted to Catherine Jolivet-Lévy for sending me her article both pre and post publication and for allowing use of her photograph. 61   Jolivet-Lévy 2002, p. 289, with inscriptions; on inscriptions, also see Jerphanion 1925–42, vol. 2, p. 9, nos. 123–5. 57

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Figure 10.7 Detail of deisis, seven sleepers of Ephesus, and anastasis, St Barbara Kilise in the Soğanlı valley

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portraits, perhaps his wife and daughters. It is not clear, as she mentions, whether they are already dead, but there is no reason to assume that they are, just that the family members are imaged as beneficiaries to the church.62 Yet, while our instinct is to think of a nuclear family, this is unstated, and the paintings may well rather represent a less obvious set of connections. It is curious perhaps that no relationships are mentioned in the inscriptions but the names alone are given. Perhaps familial ties were understood without labelling, and the children were known to be the sons and daughters of the adults, but it is intriguing that the relationships, whatever they were, are not emphasised. In other instances, the emphasis in the imagery does not seem to be on familial connections but rather on the presence of children as individuals. This occurs, for example, at the eleventh-century Karanlık Kilise in Göreme, which has a series of male donor portraits that include at least one child but have an unusual lack of familial connections.63 The church is decorated with wall paintings featuring scenes from the life of Christ and many standing portraits of saints as well as Christ Pantokrator. Throughout the decoration of the church there seems to be an awareness of youth and age. For instance, the narrative paintings feature some apparently young apostles and children, or at least people who seem to be children, and many of the portraits of saints depict them looking youthful. The youthful saints are apparently consciously paired with older saints, and the emphasis on considerations of age is highlighted by a bust of the young Christ Emmanuel in the central dome.64 Originally there were portraits of eight patrons or figures who were in some way associated with the monastic church, of which seven survive, but none of whom have obvious familial links, which is uncommon.65 Probably the most significant donor image is the one in the apse, where two male donors flank a deisis. One donor is named Nikephoros the Presbyter, who is beardless (so perhaps a eunuch) and dressed in a priest’s garments, and the other donor, who has a short beard and is in lay dress, is named Basil. It has been suggested that these two were buried in the church as their depiction in a deisis has associations with death.66 A further donor portrait in the narthex, on the west vault opposite the entrance to the naos, shows two men incorporated into a portrayal of the Blessing of the Apostles. The one on the left is named John Entalmikos, and both are mature and bearded and may well have been the patrons of the church.67 Two further patronal portraits are in the nave, in the centre of the north and south walls, with two figures   Jolivet-Lévy 2002, p. 290.   Jerphanion 1925–42, vol. 1.2, pp. 393–430; Restle 1967, no. XXII, vol. 1, pp.

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128–9, vol. 2, figs 218–244; Rodley 1985, pp. 48–56; Jolivet-Lévy 1991, pp. 132–5; on the group of churches to which this belongs, see Epstein 1975 and 1980–81. 64   For issues of age in relation to sanctity and the Byzantine Life Course see the chapter by Eve Davies in this volume. 65   Wharton 1988, pp. 45–6. 66   Yenipinar and Şahin 1988, p. 60 and figs on pp. 61–2. 67   Yenipinar and Şahin 1988, p. 31.

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Figure 10.8 Eirene with hands on heads of Kali and Maria, donor panel, niche on south side of west wall of Karşı Kilise in Gülşehir on each wall flanking the archangels Gabriel and Michael respectively.68 On the south wall, the figures standing facing Michael could well be adults, although their faces are lost. On the north wall, a very small boy with short dark hair and a white round-necked top is still clearly visible standing on Gabriel’s left. Again it is not clear whether the boy is living or dead and here there is no inscription. His pair, presumably standing on Gabriel’s right, is lost. However, it appears that the child, pictured standing alone, is in some sense under the protection of the archangel. A child’s grave was found in the narthex, making it fairly certain that a child was buried there, which may help explain the presence of the portrait and the emphasis on youth throughout the iconographic programme. It is intriguing, though, that   Yenipinar and Şahin 1988, pp. 40, 76, figs on pp. 41 and 77.

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none of the donor portraits feature women and there is no visible emphasis here on nuclear family groupings. Conclusion In conclusion, this selective consideration of Byzantine imagery shows the varied and subtle depiction of children in a range of contexts which reflect the complexity of familial relationships. The three themes addressed – imperial power, Christian imagery, and portraiture – each draw on material reflecting multifaceted associations. The imperial portraits are perhaps the most obvious perpetrator of familial distinctions, with the examples chosen (the coinage of Michael III and Romanos IV, and the two Doukan manuscripts) defining hierarchical distinctions and demonstrating a finely tuned balance between siblings and parents, both natural and step, so that nuances of power and authority are implied through the imagery. Two further manuscripts picture extended family ties: the illustrated chronicle of Skylitzes and the Lincoln College Typikon. The depiction of Theoktiste and the five imperial girls in Skylitzes’ chronicle highlights a subversive accord between grandmother and granddaughters, with the grandmother taking on an educative role as arbiter of holiness. The familial affiliation of a grandmother with her granddaughters and their husbands is highlighted in the Lincoln College Typikon, where the formal portraits establish familial ties between the convent’s founder and not only her two sons but also her four granddaughters. In terms of biblical narratives, apocryphal supplements to the canonical stories about the Virgin elaborate her role as stepmother to Joseph’s sons, in particular James, who is pictured accompanying the holy family as if perhaps providing evidence of Joseph’s age and thus impotence or as a witness to the integrity of the Virgin’s purity. The addition of such a figure into the iconography perhaps reflects the integration of stepchildren and half-brothers and half-sisters into familial life. Other aspects of complex family dynamics in Old and New Testament narratives are discussed here through families eating together, a theme chosen as one of the typical situations where relations gather and so where intense events or emotions are often experienced. The story of Jacob and Esau is visualised to highlight the physical dissimilarity between blood brothers, twins even, and the rivalry between them. Similar jealousy is integral to the story of Joseph, who not only has a beloved full brother Benjamin, but also 10 halfbrothers born of three different women. The imagery in the two ninth-century books discussed does not emphasise this Old Testament custom, anathema to Christian morals, by differentiating the brothers, but rather shows the unity of the 10 as they sit and eat together. A similar unity is noted in the portrayal of Job’s children in various illustrated Books of Job, where the boys and girls are separated to indicate that they are siblings and not couples and where their similarities are highlighted, perhaps in this case indicating an idealised congenial

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family whose loss is so poignant. An interesting familial link is also found in the similar portrayals of Herod and Salome in the Sinope Gospels, a similarity perhaps highlighting the uncle’s discordant role as stepfather. Finally, portraits in Cappadocia give a sense of the significance of children whether memorialised as donors in paintings, depicted with saints as if protected by them, or given a special place of burial. In the examples discussed the nature of familial relationships was not emphasised, implying either an implicit knowledge of the blood ties or an overriding concern with the message of salvation. While not seeking to advance grand generalisations about the portrayal of the Byzantine family, this investigation endeavours to highlight the varied and nuanced depiction of children in familial contexts in Byzantine imagery, drawing on examples from imperial, biblical and portrait iconography that tease out and convey some of the complex dynamics in extended family life, including multiple generations and second families. Bibliography Primary Sources John Skylitzes, Synopsis of Histories, ed. Hans Thurn, Ioannis Scylitzae Synopsis Historiarum (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973); trans. Wortley (2010). Infancy Gospel of James, ed. Hock (1997), and Tischendorf (1853), pp. 1–49. Story of Joseph the Carpenter, ed. Tischendorf (1853), pp. 115–33; trans. James (1924), pp. 84–6. Typikon of the Convent of Our Lady of Blessed Hope, ed. Delehaye 1921; trans. Thomas and Hero (eds) (2002). Secondary Sources Anderson, Jeffrey (1979), ‘A Manuscript of the Despote Andronicus Ducas’, REB, 37: 229–38. Bibicou, Hélène (1959), ‘Une page d’histoire diplomatique de Byzance au XIè siècle: Michael VII Doukas, Robert Guiscard et la pension des dignitaires’, Byz, 29–30: 43–75. Brubaker, Leslie (1999), Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cutler, Anthony, and Magdalino, Paul (1978), ‘Some Precisions on the Lincoln College Typikon’, Cahiers Archéologiques, 27: 179–98. Delehaye, Hyppolyte (1921), Deux typica byzantins de l’époque des Paléologues (Paris: Lamertin).

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Dournovo, Lydia (1961), Armenian Miniatures (London: Thames and Hudson). Durand, Jannic (ed.) (1992), Byzance: L’art byzantin dans les collections publiques françaises, Exhibition Catalogue (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux). Epstein, Ann (1975), ‘Rock-cut Chapels in Göreme Valley: The Yilanli Group and the Column Churches’, Cahiers Archéologiques, 14: 115–35. Epstein, Ann (1980–81), ‘The Fresco Decoration of the Column Churches, Göreme Valley, Cappodocia: A Consideration of their Chronology and Their Models’, Cahiers Archéologiques, 29: 27–45. Gautier, Paul (1966), ‘Monodie inédite de Michel Psellos sur le basileus Andronic Doucas’, REB, 24: 156–70. Gengaro, Maria Luisa, Leoni, Francesca, and Villa, Gemma (1957), Codici decorati e miniati dell’ Ambrosiana. Ebraici e Greci (Milan: Ceschina). Grabar, André (1948), Les peintures de l’Évangéliaire de Sinope: Bibliothèque nationale Suppl. gr. 1286 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale). Grabar, André, and Manoussacas, M. (1979), L’illustration du manuscrit de Skylitzès de la Bibliothèque nationale de Madrid (Venice: Institut hellénique d’études byzantines et post- byzantines de Venise). Grierson, Philip (1973), Catalogue of Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, vol. 3.1, Leo III to Michael III (717–867), vol. 3.2, Basil I to Nicephorus III (867–1081) (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Gutmann, Joseph (1966), ‘The Illustrated Jewish Manuscript in Antiquity: The Present State of the Question’, Gesta, 5: 39–41. Hennessy, Cecily (2008a), Images of Children in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate). Hennessy, Cecily (2008b), ‘The Lincoln College Typikon: The Influences of Church and Family’, in John Lowden and Alixe Bovey (eds), Under the Influence: The Concept of Influence and the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts (Turnhout: Brepols), pp. 97–109. Hennessy, Cecily (forthcoming), ‘The Stepmum and the Servant: The Stepson and the Sacred Vessel in the Illustrated Homilies of John Kokkinobaphos’, in Liz James and Antony Eastmond (eds), Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art (Aldershot: Ashgate). Hock, Ronald (1997), The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press). Huber, Paul (1986), Hiob Dulder oder Rebell: byzantinische miniature zum Buch Hiob in Patmos, Rom, Venedig, Sinai, Jerusalem und Athos (Düsseldorf: Patmos). Hutter, Irmgard (1995), ‘Die Geschichte des Lincoln College Typikons’, JÖB, 45: 79–114. Hutter, Irmgard, and Canart, Paul (1991), Das Marienhomiliar des Mönchs Jakobos von Kokkinobaphos: Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1162 (Zurich: Belser).

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James, M.R. (1924), Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Jeffreys, Elizabeth (1982), ‘The Sevastokratorissa Eirene as Literary Patroness: The Monk Iakovos’, JÖB , 32/3: 63–71. Jerphanion, Guillaume de (1925–42), Les églises rupestres de Cappadoce, 2 vols in 4 parts, 3 vols of plates (Paris: Librairie orientaliste, Paul Geuthner). Jolivet-Lévy, Catherine (1991), Les églises byzantines de Cappadoce, le programme iconographique de l’abside et de ses abords (Paris: CNRS). Jolivet-Lévy, Catherine (2001), ‘Images et espace cultuel à Byzance: l’exemple de Karşı kilise, Cappadoce (1212)’, in Le sacré et son inscription dans l’espace à Byzance et en Occident. Études comparées (Paris: Sorbonne, 2001), pp. 163–81; reprinted in Jolivet-Lévy 2002, pp. 285–321. Jolivet-Lévy, Catherine (2002), Études Cappadociennes (London: Pindar Press). Kessler, Herbert (2007), ‘The Word Made Flesh in Early Decorated Bibles’, in Jeffrey Spier (ed.), Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (New Haven, London: Yale University Press and Kimbell Art Gallery), pp. 141– 168. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jaqueline (1963), ‘Nouvelles notes cappadociennes’, Byz, 33: 121–83. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jaqueline (1964–65), Iconographie de l’enfance de la Vierge dans l’empire byzantine et en occident, 2 vols (Bruges: Académie royale de Belgique). Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jaqueline (1966–75a), ‘Iconography of the Cycle of the Infancy of Christ’, in Underwood (1966–75), vol. 4, pp. 195–241. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jaqueline (1966–75b), ‘Iconography of the Cycle of the Infancy of the Virgin’, in Underwood (1966–75), vol. 4, pp. 161–94. Lazarev, Viktor (1967), Storia della pittura bizantina (Turin: Einaudi). Levin, Michael (1972), ‘Some Jewish Sources for the Vienna Genesis’, Art Bulletin, 54: 241–4. Lowden, John (1999), ‘The Beginnings of Biblical Illustration’, in John Williams (ed.), Imaging the Early Medieval Bible (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press), pp. 10–59. Lowden, John (2002), ‘The Transmission of “Visual Knowledge” through Illuminated Manuscripts: Approaches and Conjectures’, in Catherine Holmes and Judith Waring (eds), Literacy, Education, and Manuscript Transmission in Byzantium and Beyond (Leiden: Brill), pp. 59–80. Lowden, John (2005), Review of B. Zimmermann, Die Wiener Genesis, in JÖB, 55: 335–8. Martin, John (1954), The Illustration of the Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Mazal, Otto (1980), Kommentar zur Wiener Genesis, Faksimile-Ausgabe der Codex theol. gr. 31 der österreichischen Nationalbibliothek in Wien (Frankfurt: Insel). Oikonomides, Nicolas (1963), ‘Le serment de l’impératrice Eudocie (1067)’, REB, 21: 101–28.

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Omont, Henri (1901), ‘Notice sur un très ancien manuscrit grec de l’évangile de saint Matthieu’, in Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la bibliothèque nationale, 36 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale), pp. 599–676. Papadakē-Oekland, Stella (2009), Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts of the Book of Job: A Preliminary Study of the Miniature Illustrations, its Origin and Development (Turnhout: Brepols). Polemis, Demetrios Ioannis (1968), The Doukai: A Contribution to Byzantine Prosopography (London: Athlone). Restle, Marcell (1967), Die byzantinische Wandmalerei in Kleinasien, 3 vols (Recklinghausen: Bongers). Rodley, Lyn (1985), Cave Monasteries of Cappadocia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sevrugian, Petra (1990), Der Rossano-Codex und die Sinope-Fragmente (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft). Spatharakis, Ioannis (1976), The Portrait in Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill). Spatharakis, Ioannis (1981), Corpus of Dated Greek Manuscripts to the Year 1453, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill). Spatharakis, Ioannis (2005), The Pictorial Cycles of the Akathistos Hymn for the Virgin (Leiden: Alexandros Press). Tischendorf, Konstantin von (1853), Evangelia apocrypha, In Greek and Latin (Lipsiae: Mendelssohn). Thomas, John P., and Hero, Constantinides Angela (eds), (2000), Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments, 5 vols (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Tsamakda, Vasiliki (2002), The Illustrated Chronicle of Ioannes Skylitzes in Madrid (Leiden: Alexandros Press). Underwood, Paul (1966–75), The Kariye Djami, 4 vols (New York: Bollingen Foundation). Volbach, Wolfgang (1976), Elfenbeinarbeiten der Spätantike und des frühen Mittelalters (Mainz: Fritz). Weitzmann, Kurt (1979), The Miniatures of the Sacra Parallela, Parisinus Graecus 923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Wharton, Annabel (1988), Art of Empire: Painting and Architecture of the Byzantine Periphery (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press). Wharton, Annabel (1995), Refiguring the Post Classical City: Dura Europas, Jerash, Jerusalem, Ravenna (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Wortley, John (2010), John Skylitzes: A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811–1057 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Yenipinar, Halis, and Şahin, Seracettin (1988), Paintings of the Dark Church (Istanbul: A Turizm Yayınları).

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Zimmermann, Barbara (2003), Die Wiener Genesis im Rahmen der antiken Buchmalerei: Ikonographie, Darstellung, Illustrationsverfahren und Aussageintention (Wiesbaden: Reichert).

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Chapter 11

Social Mobility in Byzantium? Family Ties in the Middle Byzantine Period Claudia Ludwig

When exploring families and family ties generally the first thing to do is to define the members of a certain family. In doing so we usually presuppose that we know roughly how many persons belong to this family and who they are. It is obvious that prosopographical research is instrumental in many respects for any study of the Byzantine family. From about the twelfth century onwards family names are comparatively common and were rather regularly in use, at least by the important families well connected to the Byzantine court. This makes it easy to identify the members of any major family and thus to study them and their family ties. However, things are considerably different regarding the Byzantine empire – and especially the Middle Byzantine period – up to the eleventh century. Family ties in that period are hard to detect, primarily due to the lack of family names. The narrative sources tell us only the forenames of the persons mentioned (with just a few exceptions), their main focus being the events which they report. In most cases people appear in the sources only when they become important, when they obtained a higher office. This fact applies not only to emperors and patriarchs but to other important persons as well, such as higher military commanders. They are not mentioned until the chronicler or historian begins the narration of the campaign the respective commander is going to lead or to participate in. Most scholars have tended to assume that larger powerful families, such as the Komnenoi, Angeloi, Palaiologoi and others, did not exist earlier than the twelfth century because in the majority of cases people seem to come to power or climb the social ladder in the Byzantine empire from nowhere. They are not identifiable as members of a powerful and well connected family by a well-known family name, and earlier stages of their careers are often not mentioned in the historical or other narrative sources. Therefore, vertical mobility within Byzantine society is often considered as one of the hallmarks of the Middle Byzantine period. In this respect Byzantium is regarded as different from other medieval societies, where ancestry and birth were key factors in the promotion prospects of one person. Thus prosopographical research is essential all the more for the Middle Byzantine period for detecting family ties and other connections between individuals. The prosopographical research conducted over the last 15 years provides a deeper insight into how people were connected in the Middle Byzantine period, and we are now in a much better position to verify the assumption of social mobility in Byzantium.

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Prosopography means to bring together every piece of information available in the sources about every member of a larger or smaller group of individuals. This group is to be defined beforehand, i.e. one has to develop criteria to define who belongs to this specified group and who does not. The acceptance of prosopography as an auxiliary discipline has continued to increase not only in Byzantine Studies but also in other areas of history as well. Regarding Byzantine Studies, a number of smaller prosopographies are being undertaken that are limited to a regional or chronological subgroup of people.1 A considerable number of studies, especially relating to established Byzantine families, derive from the editing of and the work on Byzantine lead seals.2 (I shall return later to the specific advantages and problems of Byzantine lead seals for prosopographical studies.) There are a couple of major prosopographies as well. The Late Byzantine period, from 1261 to 1453, is covered by the Prosopographie der Paläologenzeit, published in Vienna.3 In addition, there are two major projects, the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (or the Prosopography of the Byzantine World) and the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (Prosopography of the Middle Byzantine Period – henceforth PmbZ), in London4 and Berlin respectively.5 Finally, there is the incomplete undertaking by Alexandros Savvides and others of an Encyclopaedic Prosopographical Lexicon of Byzantine History and Civilisation.6 The long-term objective of all these projects combined is to cover the whole Byzantine period from Constantine the Great (AD 306–337) to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 with a view to creating a shareable prosopographical database or at least databases on the internet. But to achieve this common purpose a lot of work remains to be done. The PmbZ, on which this chapter is mainly based, is a project at the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The period under investigation is the time between 641 and 1025. The aim is to collect information on persons who are mentioned in Byzantine sources, regardless of their geographical origin or location. Individuals identified as ‘Byzantines’ in sources from outside the empire and in languages other than Greek are also considered. The opus is a compilation of all the available information on about 20,000 persons: both Byzantines and people who had contact with the Byzantine empire. The biography of each individual has 1   For a recent introduction to prosopography see Smythe 2008 (with literature). For limited prosopographies see for example Kaldellis and Efthymiadis 2010, and Cosentino 1996 and 2000. 2   Seibt 1976; Cheynet 1986, 1999 and 2005; Cheynet and Vannier 2003. 3   Trapp et al. (1976–96). An update with recent secondary literature and additional lemmata is being prepared at the Aristoteles University of Thessalonike under the guidance of Sophia Kotsabassi and should be available on the internet in the near future. 4   Martindale 1992 and 2001. For the Prosopography of the Byzantine World see now Jeffreys et al. 2011. 5   Lilie et al. 1998–2002. 6   Savvides (ed.) 1996–2006, trans. Savvides and Hendrickx with Simpson and Sansaridou-Hendrickx (eds) 2007–11.

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been reconstructed as far as possible. In this process sources (literary as well as documentary) have been critically examined and solutions to some of the source problems have been proposed. In addition to the biographical data, the entries contain references to secondary literature on the person, on particular problems, sometimes on specific places (towns, monasteries etc.) and other Byzantine ‘realia’. In the case of authors, they also indicate the literary works by the pen of that person. For the sake of convenience of use, the work is divided into two sections: the first section covers the time from 641 to 867, the second section extends to the year 1025.7 The splitting of the prosopography into two chronological sections was necessary above all for one technical reason: until the end of the ninth century the Byzantines used family names very rarely. So we have for example, in both sections, about 1,500 persons known simply as Ioannes. And, what is more, for quite a number of people we cannot fix an exact date. We know them from lead seals or other sources whose date can only be narrowed down to a certain century. The statistical data presented in this chapter are mainly based on the information gathered in both sections of the PmbZ. But first, it seems necessary to outline the different kinds of documentation and what is important about them for the topic of this chapter, the Byzantine family. The main sources are chronicles and other historiographical texts, letters, acts of the church councils, saints’ lives, homilies, papyri, inscriptions, seals, and coins.8 A diagram (Fig. 11.1) shows the amount of entries each type of source contributed to the PmbZ. By far the largest amount of entries (almost 8,000) come from Byzantine lead seals, but most of these entries are rather short because the seals mostly provide us with only the name and title(s) of the respective individuals. The second largest amount of entries is provided by the hagiographical sources, followed by the acts of the ecumenical councils, collections of letters (epistolography), history and chronicles, documents, inscriptions, ‘Fachschriften’, and other sources. Historiographical texts might be assumed to be quite accurate but in fact tend to display a fairly strong tendency in favour of the ruling dynasty, or a strong dislike of certain people at court, or other distorting influences. Names or titles are usually given, but sometimes not accurately it seems. That means the first name or the family name may be missing or the person in question is called by a nickname or by the appellation of their geographical origin only. Since family names may be derived from fathers’ names they can be forenames as well (e.g. Phokas or Krenites) and thus cause problems in identifying a certain individual. As for titles, authors of a narrative often neglect to give the title in its correct and entire form but instead use another word or a paraphrase for one title while omitting another. There is a whole range of possible reasons for this phenomenon, from literary style to emphasising a certain title or just assuming that the audience is familiar with the persons and their titles and functions anyway.   A database combining both sections is planned for a later date.   For more details see PmbZ, vol. 1, Prolegomena, and Lilie et al. 2009.

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Figure 11.1 Number of entries/source categories in the PmbZ Kinship is mentioned, but not regularly and sometimes not reliably, depending on the tendency or preference of the author. Epistolography (letters written in the period under discussion) is a great deal more important than one might imagine. Letters record Byzantine people and mostly clerics, because the letters preserved are written mainly by clerics themselves. Compared to historiographical sources, letters also give us more information about the lower clergy and ordinary people. Moreover, since letters are more private in nature, they contain more detailed and more specific information to complement our other sources. It is rare that we know the exact date of letters, which makes it sometimes difficult to incorporate the gathered information into the database. Family ties play an important role in letters, therefore they are especially relevant for social matters. From acts of church councils we can gather many people, because they often contain one or more lists with signatures of the participants. Unfortunately, these lists contain nothing more than just the name, title and location. Sometimes even the latter are omitted. Naturally, nearly every person named is a bishop or cleric. Hagiographical texts provide us with a lot of information, but it is often very difficult to decide whether the given information is reliable or fabricated. Even in biographies of prominent people such as patriarchs one has to be wary of fictional elements. The authors of hagiographical texts use fabrication for various reasons: for example, they want to incorporate certain literary topoi, they want to show their hero/heroine to best advantage, and sometimes they have to exculpate themselves for political reasons or they follow an actual political trend. All this information is very important and helpful, of

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course, but it is difficult to make full use of it without detailed analysis. This applies also to the discovery of family ties: if we learn something about the kinship of a holy person, we still have to find out whether the information is to be regarded as historical fact or just a literary topos. Almost irrelevant for our purposes are sources such as homilies, the so-called ‘Fachschriften’, i.e. specialised literature on specific themes, such as the writings of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (913–959), instruction manuals, lists like the list of tombs of Byzantine emperors, or lexicographical works such as the Suda. By far the majority of persons in the PmbZ derive from lead seals, which were used in Byzantium for documents and letters on a daily basis – for administration and commerce of all kinds – in order to ensure that no one except the addressee could read the document. The advantage of lead seals as a source for prosopography is that the information they provide is reliable, i.e. the person certainly lived and bore the title(s) written on the seal. Lead seals, however, give us the name(s) and title(s) of the person only and nothing further, and mostly their dating can be narrowed down only to a period of several decades or even one century. From these two facts the problem arises of whether seals bearing the same name and the same or similar titles belong to the same owner or not. It is essential for prosopographical research to develop criteria to solve this problem.9 Sometimes, due to poor preservation, the name or the title(s) may even be missing. Among the owners of lead seals are found the greatest number of laymen because most documents were sent by members of the Byzantine civil and military administration. Only a few seals of women are preserved; 39 can be located in the whole PmbZ, mostly of nuns or wives of officials. Finally, finding information about Byzantine family members from Greek inscriptions is rather difficult, because their editions are of very uneven quality, and the material itself is very diverse.10 Further, inscriptions are not always securely dated. In addition to collecting and presenting biographical data, the information gathered in the PmbZ may also serve as a solid basis for a thorough analysis of the underlying structures of Byzantine society. Even if some of the actual results might have been assumed beforehand, there now exist the statistical data to support them. Only a few examples of these analytical possibilities can be given here. One major group that might appear rather unusual for a prosopography are the anonymous people. In both sections, about 4,500 out of the 20,000 listed persons are anonymous. To these must be added the anonymous relatives listed in the articles of persons known by name. The anonymous people partly come from badly preserved lead seals, where the original name is no longer legible. Other sources, too, from time to time mention persons without giving their names. There   See for example Seibt 2005 and Ludwig 2005.   Nearly all these types of sources mentioned exist also in languages other than

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Byzantine Greek, e.g. Latin, Church Slavonic, Armenian, Arabic, Georgian, Syriac and Coptic. Since this material has its own particularities and problems, I will leave it aside here.

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may be various reasons for this: the name might be well known to the intended reader, it might not be important, or perhaps it was simply not known to the author. The largest number of anonymous people, however, derives from hagiographical sources, especially from the accounts of miracles preserved within texts or collected separately. The people that come to a certain saint seeking healing or any other kind of help are very often not identified by their name. A special group are the eunuchs.11 This group was important in Byzantine society (as in other eastern societies), and eunuchs often held high positions at the Byzantine court. Families with more than one son could give the second to God (meaning into a monastery for a clerical career), and the third might be castrated to give him the opportunity for a good career (for himself but also for other family members) at the Byzantine court. Since the physical condition of eunuchs prevented them from staking a claim to the Byzantine throne, they held positions of great power and influence close to the emperor (as they had done from at least the fourth century AD, the first famous example being that of Eusebius the grand chamberlain of Constantius II (337–361)). As for women, our knowledge about their situation in Byzantium is extremely limited. About only 5 per cent of the persons included in the PmbZ are female, and most of these are only mentioned in connection with, and overshadowed by, their husbands. Among the 20,000 persons just a handful of women are attested independently. These statistics underline how hypothetical any general statement on ‘women’ in the Middle Byzantine period must remain. Finally, the often-asserted vertical mobility within Middle Byzantine society has been largely overestimated. The analysis clearly shows that – just as in late antiquity and in the Late Byzantine period (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) – Byzantine society from the seventh to the tenth centuries is dominated by only a limited number of aristocratic families.12 The only difference is that family ties are much harder to detect due to the lack of family names in that period. The assumption of Byzantinists in the past, that the Byzantine empire allowed the rise from rags to riches – the possibility for a slave or servant, or for someone of foreign origin, to gain the imperial throne – was based on a number of characteristics of the Byzantine sources and the information about persons given in them. The lack of family names, especially in the period covered by the first section of the PmbZ until the end of the ninth century, has already been mentioned. Even though the number of persons whose family names are known increases during the following centuries, their number is still not really significant (see Fig. 11.2). In PmbZ I there are only 134 out of 11,000 entries with a given family name, or 481, if we add those with surnames. In PmbZ II, consisting of about 9,500 entries,   See Tougher 2008 and (ed.) 2002, and Ringrose 2003.   Whether these families meet all the criteria developed for the later aristocratic

11

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families from the eleventh/twelfth centuries onwards remains to be seen. Certainly, we find rich, powerful and well-connected families in Constantinople just as in a province like Paphlagonia. On aristocracy see for instance Angold (ed.) 1984, and Neville 2004.

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Figure 11.2 Family names in the PmbZ the number of persons with family names or surnames has more than doubled: we find about 570 persons with family names plus around 400 with surnames. Besides actual family names literally distinguishing members of a certain family from others we find different kinds of surnames (‘Beinamen’) that characterise certain individuals but which do not, or not yet, constitute a whole family called by that name. The surname can derive from a location, from the father’s name, or from a certain attribute (e.g. profession or appearance) that could be used to distinguish one person from others bearing the same name, and the surname may of course become a family name later on. If a person plays a role in political life and consequently appears in the sources, he (and it is usually a he, as has been seen) mostly seems to come from nowhere, because his prior actions are only very rarely described. Even emperors or patriarchs sometimes are referred to in the sources only once they have achieved their position. The sources, especially the historiographical texts, normally focus on events like campaigns or rebellions, diseases or disasters, important meetings and so forth. The relationships between the people involved are in the majority of cases not mentioned in the sources and thus overlooked by researchers. Prosopography on the other hand focuses on the individual person and his or her connections and blood relationships, and so in every entry kinship and other relationships are listed and traceable. The preponderance of clerics in the literary sources produces another effect: monks/nuns and clerics do not have any offspring – at least none to be put on record – unless they became monks/nuns or clerics later in life. The latter group, though, is rather small; most clerics recorded in the PmbZ did not live a secular life before. This is probably due to the fact that most clerics (monastic or pontifical) who are recorded belong to the higher echelons. Hagiographical texts that describe their origin and mention the father (and sometimes the mother) of the holy man or woman are not necessarily reliable, because the author is anxious to prove his

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hero to be holy in a way defined by his intended purpose.13 Some texts, however, specify not only the parents but also uncles, cousins and other relatives.14 If these statements are argued to be accurate, then they can help to establish the existence of family ties. Seals in most cases do not indicate any relationships; only in a very few cases is the father of the official who issued the seal named. Due to the fact that seals constitute our most extensive source of information for court officials and the military and civil administration, it is virtually impossible to discover the connections between these officials represented on seals. I hope to have demonstrated that the perceived lack of family ties in Byzantine society is primarily due to the fact that information about blood relationships is scattered in the sources, if it is available at all. Let me conclude by offering three examples to illustrate that the society of the eighth and ninth centuries was in fact as tightly knit and higher positions similarly limited to a small number of families as we know to have been the case from the tenth century onwards, which goes to prove that Byzantium did not differ from other medieval societies we know about. The first example is the family of Theodore the Studite, who lived from 759 to 826. My colleague Thomas Pratsch15 identified in the PmbZ more than 30 members of the family. Furthermore, he was able to show two branches of the family: one of clerics, monks and abbots, and the other of generally high officials of the fiscal administration. The members of the family were identifiable by putting together pieces of information from a range of different types of sources: the Lives of Theodore the Studite, historiographical texts, acts of church councils, homilies, and especially the letters of Theodore. Since letters sometimes are rather private they can offer us the information we need to identify family ties. The second example is the family of Maria of Amnia,16 first wife of the emperor Constantine VI (780–797). She came from Paphlagonia, just like the future empress Theodora, wife of the emperor Theophilos (829–842), who will occupy us in a moment. In the Life of her grandfather Philaretos17 all the members of her rather large family are given names and the author of that Life is, or at least pretends to be, her cousin.18 For the present purpose, it is significant that the whole family is mentioned: when Maria was chosen as the emperor’s bride, the entire family moved to Constantinople, and our source indicates that other members of the family also held high positions in the empire or, in the case of the women, were married to prominent people. Fiction or not, this story underlines the importance of the fact that the whole family could be integrated into existing social networks.   See Pratsch 2005, esp. chap. 2, pp. 56–80.   See for instance in this volume Michel Kaplan on the family of Theodora of

13 14

Thessalonike. 15   Pratsch 1998, pp. 45–61. 16   PmbZ 4727. 17   PmbZ 6136. 18   PmbZ 5434; Ludwig 1997, pp. 154f.

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Furthermore, we should assume that the entire family was positioned in high society, and not necessarily just after but perhaps also before Maria’s selection as the bride of the emperor.19 The detail that the family of the empress Maria of Amnia came from Paphlagonia leads me to my third and last example, the family of the empress Theodora.20 Like Maria, Theodora and her family came from Paphlagonia. Theodora was married to the emperor Theophilos. Like Maria, Theodora is said to have been chosen in a bride-show, and later she herself allegedly chose a wife for her son Michael III (842–867) in the same way.21 Other members of her family are also well known: her father Marinos was a military commander, probably a drungarios or turmarches in Paphlagonia;22 her younger brothers were the magistros and patrikios Petronas (strategos of the theme of Thrakesion),23 and Bardas (commonly known as Caesar Bardas, an honour he attained during the reign of his nephew Michael III).24 Her sisters, too, were married to well-established people. Sophia25 was married to the magistros and patrikios Constantine Babutzikos,26 who was one of the 42 martyrs of Amorion. (Notably there is another Babutzikos found in the PmbZ: Theodosios,27 envoy to king Ludwig the Pious, and referred to as relative of the emperor Theophilos.) Maria28 was married to the magistros Arsaber.29 Eirene30 was married to the patrikios Sergios,31 uncle of the later patriarch Photios (858–867 and 878–886).32 One could certainly argue that it was only because of Theodora’s marriage to the emperor that her brothers rose to their titles and functions and her sisters were married to high officials. But her uncle was also a very wellknown high military commander, the patrikios and magistros Manuel,33 who held 19   Maria reportedly was chosen in a bride contest: see Ludwig 1997, pp. 104–45; Vinson 1999 and 2004, esp. pp. 105, 113–15. It was, and still is, controversial whether the bride-shows we find in Byzantine literature in the eighth to tenth centuries actually took place or are merely a literary topos. More references to the vast literature on this topic can be found in the studies cited. 20   PmbZ 7286. 21   See Ludwig 1997, pp. 130–137; Vinson 1999 and 2004, esp. pp. 105, 111, 115–18. See Connor 2004, pp. 167, 173f., and Herrin 2001, pp. 185, 190f., 222–5, 237. 22   PmbZ 4812. 23   PmbZ 5929. 24   PmbZ 791. 25   PmbZ 8642. 26   PmbZ 3932. 27   PmbZ 7874. 28   PmbZ 2738. 29   PmbZ 601. 30   PmbZ 1448. 31   PmbZ 6666. 32   PmbZ 6253, to be continued in PmbZ II (26667). 33   PmbZ 4707.

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a whole series of titles and functions. This seems to indicate that at least part of the extended family already had established their presence in Constantinople and their role in the administration prior to Theodora becoming empress. Generally, it is worthwhile taking a closer look at the family ties of empresses. Despite the fact that a number of sources of the eighth and ninth centuries especially preserve the legends of bride contests, one can easily find more practical reasons for the choice that was made, not the least among them being blood relationships. I could easily continue with other examples, examining the families of other empresses as well as the family of the aforementioned Sergios and his nephew, the famous patriarch Photios. Fairly often the important personalities of the Middle Byzantine period found in the prosopography are blood-relations or relations by marriage of varying degrees. As for the larger, well-known, families from the end of the ninth century and onwards, we have identified for example 17 members of the Phokas and 11 of the Skleroi families in the second section of the PmbZ so far. It seems extremely unlikely that these families emerged suddenly at the time when they were readily identifiable by their family name. In my view, these accumulated prosopographical cases provide sufficient evidence to abandon the established paradigm, attractive though it may have been, of Byzantine careers at the court as forerunners of American rags-to-riches stories. Prosopographical research shows that larger familial networks are involved and over a longer period of time. Bibliography Angold, Michael (ed.) (1984), The Byzantine Aristocracy IX to XIII Centuries (Oxford: BAR). Asdracha, Catherine (1988)‚ ‘La Thrace orientale et la mer noire: Géographie ecclésiastique et prosopographie (VIIIe–XIIe siècles)’, in Hélène Ahrweiler (ed.), Géographie historique du monde méditerranéen (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne), pp. 221–309. Božilov, Ivan (1995), Bălgarite văv Vizantijskata Imperija (Sofia). Cheynet, Jean-Claude (1986), ‘Trois familles du duché d’Antioche’, in JeanClaude Cheynet and Jean-François Vannier, Études prosopographiques (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne), pp. 7–122. Cheynet, Jean-Claude (1999), ‘Un aspect du ravitaillement de Constantinople aux Xe/XIe siècle d’après quelques sceaux d’hôrreiarioi’, Studies in Byzantine Sigillography, 6: 1–26. Cheynet, Jean-Claude (2003), ‘L’époque byzantine’, in Bernard Geyer and Jacques Lefort (eds), La Bithynie au moyen âge (Paris: Lethielleux), pp. 311– 50 (Appendice prosopographique. Fonctionnaires et ecclésiastiques byzantins en Bithynie: pp. 330–350). Cheynet, Jean-Claude (2005), ‘L’iconographie des sceaux des Comnènes’, in Ludwig (ed.) (2005), pp. 53–67.

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Cheynet, Jean-Claude, and Vannier, Jean-François (2003), ‘Les Argyroi’, ZRVI, 40: 57–90. Connor, Carolyn Loessel (2004), Women of Byzantium (New Haven: Yale University Press). Cosentino, Salvatore (1996), Prosopografia dell’Italia bizantina (493–804), vol. 1, A–F (Bologna: Lo Scarabeo). Cosentino, Salvatore (2000), Prosopografia dell’Italia bizantina (493–804), vol. 2, G–O (Bologna: Lo Scarabeo). Georgiu, Stavros G. (2008), ‘A Contribution to the Study of Byzantine Prosopography: The Byzantine Family of Opoi’, Byz, 78: 224–37. Guilland, Rodolphe (1970), ‘Contribution à la prosopographie de l’empire byzantin. Les patrices sous les règnes de Basile Ier (877–886) et de Léon VI (886–912)’, BZ, 63: 300–317. Hannick, Christian, and Schmalzbauer, Gudrun (1976)‚ ‘Die Synadenoi. Prosopographische Untersuchung zu einer byzantinischen Familie’, JÖB, 25: 125–61. Herrin, Judith (2001), Women in Purple. Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Jeffreys, Michael, et al. (2011), Prosopography of the Byzantine World, available at http://pbw.kcl.ac.uk; previous version Prosopography of the Byzantine World 2006.1, accessed 1st September 2006. Kaldellis, Anthony, and Efthymiadis, Stephanos (2010), The Prosopography of Byzantine Lesbos, 284–1355 A.D.: A Contribution to the Social History of the Byzantine Province (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press). Kazhdan, Alexander (1987), ‘Some Notes on the Byzantine Prosopography of the Ninth through the Twelfth Century’, BF, 12: 63–76. Korpela, Jukka Jari (1995), Beiträge zur Bevölkerungsgeschichte und Prosopographie der Kiever Rus’ bis zum Tode von Vladimir Monomah (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä). Kountoura-Galake (Κουντούρα-Γαλάκη), Eleonora, Lampakes (Λαμπάκης), Stelios, Lounghis (Λουγγής), Telemachos, Savvides (Σαββίδης), Alexios, and Vlyssidou (Βλυσίδου), Vasilike (1998), Η Μικρά Ασία των θεμάτων. Έρευνες πάνω στην γεωγραφική φυσιογνωμία και προσωπογραφία των Βυζαντινών θεμάτων της μικράς Ασίας (7ος-11ος αι.) = Asia Minor and its Themes. Studies on the Geography and Prosopography of the Byzantine Themes of Asia Minor (7th–11th Century) (Athens: Institute for Byzantine Research). Lilie, Ralph-Johannes, Ludwig, Claudia, Pratsch, Thomas, Zielke, Beate et al. (1998–2002), Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit. Erste Abteilung (641–867), 7 vols (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter). Lilie, Ralph-Johannes, Ludwig, Claudia, Pratsch, Thomas, Rochow, Ilse, Zielke, Beate et al. (2009), Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit. Zweite Abteilung (867–1025). Prolegomena (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter).

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Lilie, Ralph-Johannes, Ludwig, Claudia, Pratsch, Thomas, Zielke, Beate et al. (2013), Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit. Zweite Abteilung (867– 1025), 8 vols (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter). Ludwig, Claudia (1997), Sonderformen byzantinischer Hagiographie und ihr literarisches Vorbild. Untersuchungen zu den Viten des Äsop, des Philaretos, des Symeon Salos und des Andreas Salos (Frankfurt: Peter Lang). Ludwig, Claudia (2005), ‘Sigillographie und Prosopographie: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen gegenseitigen Nutzens’, in Ludwig (ed.) (2005), pp. 105–14. Ludwig, Claudia (ed.) (2005), Siegel und Siegler. Akten des 8. Internationalen Symposions für Byzantinische Sigillographie (Frankfurt: Peter Lang). Manini, Milena (2009), Liber de Caerimoniis Aulae Byzantinae: prosopografia e sepolture imperiali (Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo). Martindale, John Robert (1992), The Prosopography of Later Roman Empire, vol. 3, A.D. 527–641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Martindale, John Robert (ed.) (2001), Prosopgraphy of the Byzantine Empire I: 641–862, CD-ROM (Aldershot: Ashgate). Neville, Leonora (2004), Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pratsch, Thomas (1998), Theodoros Studites (759–826) – zwischen Dogma und Pragma (Frankfurt: Peter Lang). Pratsch, Thomas (2005), Der hagiographische Topos. Griechische Heiligenviten in mittelbyzantinischer Zeit (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter). Ringrose, Kathryn M. (2003), The Perfect Servant. Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press). Savvides (Σαββίδης), Alexis G.C. (ed.) (1996-2006), Εγκυκλοπαιδικό Προσοπογραφικό Λεξικό Βυζαντινής Ιστορίας και Πολιτισμού/ (Encyclopaedic Prosopographical Lexicon of Byzantine History and Civilisation), vol. 1, ΆαμρΆλφιος (Athens: Metron and Iolcos, 1996), vol. 2, Άλφιος-Αντιοχεύς (Athens, Metron and Iolcos: 1997), vol. 3, Αντίοχος-Αψίμαρος (Athens, Metron and Iolcos: 1998), vol. 4, Βαάνης-Βέσσας (Athens, Metron and Iolcos: 2002), vol. 5, Βηρίνα-Γρηγέντιος (Athens, Metron and Iolcos: 2006), vol. 6, ΓρηγοράςΕφραίμ (Athens, Metron and Iolcos: 2006); trans. Alexis G.C. Savvides and Benjamin Hendrickx with Alicia J. Simpson and Thekla Sansaridou-Hendrickx (eds) (2007–11), Encyclopaedic Prosopographical Lexicon of Byzantine History and Civilization, vol. 1, Aaron-Azarethes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), vol. 2, Baanes-Eznik of Kolbed (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), vol. 3, Facundus of Hermiane-Juvenal of Jerusalem (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). Seibt, Werner (1976), Die Skleroi. Eine prosopographisch-sigillographische Studie (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press). Seibt, Werner (2005), ‘Zwischen Identifizierungsrausch und -verweigerung: zur Problematik synchroner homonymer Siegel’, in Ludwig (ed.) (2005), pp. 141–50.

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Sideras, Alexander (1994), Die byzantinischen Grabreden. Prosopographie, Datierung, Überlieferung 142: Epitaphien und Monodien aus dem byzantinischen Jahrtausend (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press). Smythe, Dion (2008), ‘Prosopography’, in Elizabeth Jeffreys, John Haldon and Robin Cormack (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 176–81. Tougher, Shaun (ed.) (2002), Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (London: The Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth). Tougher, Shaun (2008), The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London and New York: Routledge). Trapp, Erich, et al. (1976–96), Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, 14 vols (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press). Vinson, Martha (1999), ‘The Life of Theodora and the Rhetoric of the Byzantine Bride Show’, JÖB, 49: 31–60. Vinson, Martha (2004), ‘Romance and Reality in the Byzantine Bride Shows’, in Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World. East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 102–20. Waßenhoven, Dominik (2006), Skandinavier unterwegs in Europa (1000–1250). Untersuchungen zu Mobilität und Kulturtransfer auf prosopographischer Grundlage (Berlin: Akademie Verlag).

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Chapter 12

The Middle Byzantine House and Family: A Reappraisal1 Simon Ellis

Introduction The revival of the Byzantine state under the Macedonian and the Komnenian dynasties (ninth to twelfth centuries AD) places Byzantium in a medieval context rather than in continuity with late antiquity: the emphasis is on the limitations of the weakened post-Roman state and the development of new social structures designed to meet these needs.2 This historical viewpoint, though it is based in part on archaeological evidence, has not yet been fed back into a revision of the interpretation of archaeology.3 One reason for this is very clear. There are simply very few well-dated excavations of Middle Byzantine secular buildings and settlements. Byzantium has suffered from the work of classical archaeologists. The concentration of archaeological work on the great classical cities and monuments has meant that, as with a Byzantine history pegged to late antiquity, the resulting view has been coloured by the ‘decay’ of the classical city. Only where such cities had some continuity into the Middle Byzantine period, as at Corinth and Pergamum, has some evidence emerged, even then threatened by a desire to reach classical levels as quickly as possible. Thus the picture of Middle Byzantium is not only limited by the interests of classical archaeology, but also misinterpreted on the basis of activity at classical sites. The excavations at Amorium are an explicit attempt to excavate a major city with a Middle Byzantine ‘floruit’, yet even here the picture that has emerged so far is more about civic than domestic buildings. Alongside the archaeological sources are the fleeting references to houses in Byzantine literature. Arguably more than the literature for the preceding Roman period, Byzantine literature does not present accurate descriptions of domestic 1   This paper was initially prepared for the 2007 International Medieval Congress at Leeds. I thank Shaun Tougher for inviting me to speak at the Congress and for determinedly pursuing publication along with Leslie Brubaker. Since I was based in Bangkok during the writing of this chapter I must apologise for any shortcomings in bibliography due to resulting distance from the Byzantine world. 2   See for instance Haldon 1999 and Laiou 2002. 3   For observations on the need for archaeology to inform the understanding of the Middle Byzantine empire see Whittow 1996, esp. p. 14.

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housing. No authors set out simply to describe a house. They all had another end in view; usually a moral purpose, but sometimes a political one. Polemics might intend, for example, to indicate the extravagances of a rich man, or the decent honesty of a saintly figure. As the Byzantines considered themselves Romans they might strengthen this image by describing as contemporary a way of life which had disappeared in the sixth century AD or earlier. Archaeologists then retain three types of narrative. First, an anecdotal observation by an author which is told in passing and which does not seem to have been fundamental for the objective of the narrative. The danger here is that such anecdotes are taken out of context by the modern reader who indeed may simply not have understood how they relate to the ancient writer’s objectives. Second, archaeologists will rely on narratives which appear for one reason or another to be ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. An example of this from this chapter would be the will of Michael Attaleiates; as a last testament written, one assumes, with at least a degree of legal accuracy. Third, there are those documents whose narrative and overall purpose seems to the modern author to coincide with his interpretation of the evidence. An example from the current text is the description of the paintings in Digenis Akritis’ palace, which, with their heroic themes and setting in a large hall, seem to match the aristocratic reception rooms of the late antique Mediterranean lands and Middle Byzantine Cappadocia. From the archaeological point of view such textual references serve to add colour, or depth of interpretation, to the physical remains, but become problematic when, as for the Middle Byzantine period, there is a major lack of physical evidence. Thus, for example, it is difficult to be certain of the precise arrangements of the rooms in Michael Attaleiates’ house, while we cannot know for certain whether the kind of hall described in the Digenis Akritis epic was apsidal (as it almost certainly would have been in late antiquity), whether it was open ended or closed with a large/small doorway, how high it was, or simply an imaginary archaism that did not reflect contemporary reality. Methodologically, therefore, this chapter needs to tread very carefully between a lack of material evidence and ambiguous textual documentation. Undoubtedly all that is written here will require fundamental reinterpretation as, finally, the archaeological evidence comes to light (one assumes that few if any new Byzantine texts are likely to be found). Despite these limitations I believe that what evidence we now have allows the development of some interesting new hypotheses regarding Middle Byzantine society. I will argue that the archaeology of the house has a central part to play in the understanding of the emergence of a Middle Byzantine state, and at a slightly later date the architecture of Turkish and Venetian housing. The Middle Byzantine family In this section I review the picture of the Byzantine household. In this I follow Leonora Neville’s Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society 950-1100 for two

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principal reasons.4 First, I find her statement that Middle Byzantine sources describe a society in which titles and discourses present a relational view between individuals, rather than an absolute picture of status, to be a true reflection of the literary sources. As she says, ‘The preference for relational description … is a systematic aspect of Byzantine culture that needs to be engaged rather than worked around’.5 Second, as her model builds upon a broad conception of the oikos as the basis for social, and even administrative relations, it is a very appropriate construct with which to examine housing in a more physical sense. Neville notes, for example, the increasing use during the tenth and eleventh centuries of family terms between people who were not related at all. In the previous generation of scholarship it had been customary to describe the tenth to eleventh centuries as a time when a Byzantine society built around the ‘bureaucrat’ was replaced by a society built around the ‘noble family’. This has now been debunked by various scholars, as summarised by Walter Kaegi.6 In particular, it is now suggested that the ninth-century bureaucracy was not as large or as ‘professional’ as that of late antiquity. Titles were not necessarily consistent with offices. Some, perhaps the majority, had titles which were honorific, while others held office but had lesser ‘court’ status. The Komnenian reforms are seen as ushering in a period when ‘nobility’, family, and so ‘house’, had more importance than any ‘bureaucratic’ status, but the transition had begun earlier and took some time to be implemented. Neville nuances this picture by emphasising the primacy of the oikos during this period. For her, the household formed the basic unit of society with a role ranging from the basis for taxation to social relations and local politics: it was the fundamental social and economic building block. She is careful to stress that she is talking about the household in a social rather than necessarily a physical sense. The household could be a large group of people. It could represent a nuclear family in the world of the village,7 or it could represent a major ‘house’ on the provincial or imperial stage. She believes that the distinction between different households is more important than the distinction between the ‘powerful’ and the lower levels of Byzantine society. This interpretation reminds one of Roman housing, for which (ever since Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s ‘The Social Structure of the Roman House’) it has been customary to see large houses as inhabited by a range of different social groups including the ‘lord’ (dominus), his family, tutors, servants, and other ‘followers’ all interacting in specific spatial contexts.8 A separate study might be undertaken to test this model for the Middle Byzantine house. The Middle Byzantine head of the household, the ‘oikodespotos’, emerges from this picture in a very powerful position, with complete authority over all the     6   7   8   4 5

Neville 2004. Neville 2004, p. 66. Kaegi 1993. For Late Byzantine villages see the chapter by Fotini Kondyli in this volume. Wallace-Hadrill 1988.

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other members of the oikos either as a nuclear unit or as a ‘clan’.9 In the later part of the period there was an increased tendency for a person to be termed the ‘man’ or ‘slave’ of someone else. This tendency extends from the emperor’s absolute control of his subordinates to the head of the household’s complete control over lesser members of family and clan. Kekaumenos, a high ranking author of an eleventh-century text known as the Strategikon (a work of advice including reflections on public and domestic relationships), describes how a subordinate should act totally at the will of his superior even if he knows better.10 Naturally, prime mechanisms for building such relations were the ability to award favours, as well as carefully positioned marriages. On the economic plane the basic unit of taxation seems to have been the household. From the eighth century land was assessed on the basis of a geographic ‘cadaster’ or extent, but during the eleventh century this system was replaced by one in which, rather than listing geographic parcels and associating them with ownership, the tax registers instead listed owners and associated them with all the various parcels of land they may hold. Instead of a figure being attached to the land parcel, an aggregate figure was attached to the owner.11 This statement of the property owned by a person and the tax due was known as a praktikon. This change has been associated with the difficulties of maintaining a cadastral system in the face of fragmentation of land and partible inheritance. The tax system was also simplified by the widespread introduction of the system of paroikoi or those who did not pay their taxes directly to the state.12 The significance of this system is still much debated but may be understood as having been introduced in the eleventh century to cover tax payments on rented land, but seems to have come to include many smaller ‘owner-occupiers’ who also ended up paying tax to a major figure in the neighbourhood.13 Overall, these economic arrangements indicate an increased emphasis on the household and personal relations. They place the onus more on a person to person relationship than on a relationship between size of plot and tax assessment. This translated into a system by which certain villages (or villagers) were responsible for areas of communal land or rights and duties in their communities. Neville sees this as reflecting the way the authorities found for dealing with ‘groups of households’. She suggests that households in such groups were independent but cooperative. I suspect that given the meagre nature of our sources for the period that such arrangements may still conceal more formal village ‘councils’, but the key point here is that they indicate associations of households and householders, and, as Neville suggests, actually lend further support to the centrality of the household   Neville 2004, pp. 69–70.   Kekaumenos, Strategikon 77–88; Neville 2004, pp. 73–6. 11   Lefort 2002; Neville 2004, pp. 48–58. 12   For the paroikoi see also the chapter by Fotini Kondyli. 13   Lefort 2002, pp. 238–9, Neville 2004, pp. 48–50. 9

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in Middle Byzantine society rather than diluting its role.14 Chris Wickham also suggests on the basis of a comparison between villages in east and west that eastern villages had more formal organisations and more effective collaborative action as villages than those in the west.15 The picture of villages is a very important one for Middle Byzantine society. Most of the evidence is based on work by Jacques Lefort in the 1970s on documents associated with the villages surrounding the Athos monasteries. This is worth restating as the archaeology of village society is one of the agreed and better understood developments.16 In the documentary texts we see independent villages and villagers negotiating with the Athonite monasteries and with each other. The villagers had some clear rights and independent land ownership, which in certain cases they ended up losing as they became more dependent on the monasteries. Most of our documentation is derived from the monastic archives, which of course are biased towards documenting their claims over villagers. If anything, then, the literary sources are more likely to be biased against villagers’ rights, and independent villages may have been more common than historians accept.17 Nevertheless, there is also agreement that from the eleventh century the voice of independent villagers begins to diminish, and it is suggested that more and more became dependent on major landowners under the new Komnenian nobility.18 A reduction in appeals from the poor is for example documented by both John Haldon and Lefort.19 There is a long tradition linking analysis of domestic architecture and social analysis. At its foundation it is anthropological in the way it examines the cultural organisation of space. For someone like Claude Lévi-Strauss this is a matter of the way that societies structure themselves,20 but many others use the structures and the spatial arrangements to draw conclusions about social and family structures. Some anthropologists, such as Jack Goody, have themselves worked on the medieval west.21 There is little real anthropological study of the Roman world, but since the 1980s Roman studies can be said to at least have adopted a sociological approach.22 Conversely, the other main society discussed in this chapter – that of the Turks – has long been subject to anthropological study. For example, each compass point in the traditional Central Asian tent (‘yurt’ or ‘geir’) is associated with a particular group of people and a particular activity.23 It is     16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   14 15

Neville 2004, pp. 94–7. Wickham 2005a. See also the chapter of Fotini Kondyli. Lefort 2002, pp. 279–82, Neville 2004, pp. 48–50. On this new nobility see also the chapter by Leonora Neville in this volume. Haldon 1993, p. 52, Lefort 2002, pp. 283–7. Lévi-Strauss and Lamaison 1987. Goody 1983. Wallace-Hadrill 1988, Ellis 1988b. Ringen 2009.

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important nonetheless that interpretations stay close to observed evidence in the societies we are studying, and in this there is a particular problem for Byzantium as evidence of housing in the lands controlled by the Byzantine empire from the seventh century to the Latin conquest is scarce, to say the least. Combined with the difficulties in interpreting textual evidence mentioned earlier in this chapter, it is evident that we must tread particularly carefully. Aristocratic Housing from the Seventh to the Ninth Centuries The traditional housing and way of life of the late antique aristocracies survived until at least AD 550. Even in areas outside imperial control in the western empire, bishops, generals, and more retiring provincial aristocrats who do not appear in our sources managed to maintain their lifestyles in adversity. The situation is most obvious in Gaul where Sidonius Apollinaris in the later fifth century under Visigothic rule, and even bishop Gregory of Tours in the mid sixth century under Frankish rule, were able to retain aspects of a Roman lifestyle.24 However, a century later things seem to have changed. In particular, even in cities of major international importance, no rich houses with peristyles, colonnades, or rich décor can be identified. Carthage in the seventh century was the residence of both a governor (whose son became the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (610–641)) and a leading theologian, Maximus Confessor. Constans II (641–668) considered making Sicily and adjoining Africa the seat of the empire as the Arabs pressed on Constantinople. Yet, despite the presence of widespread poor housing, bronze coins and late-seventh-century pottery forms, no rich houses have emerged.25 Similarly, Marseilles, the site of a bishopric, a lively commerce, and a Frankish mint, has also produced no rich houses.26 In the east it used to be commonplace to see cities ‘decaying’ as in the west at this time. Nowadays it is accepted that cities such as Beth Shean demonstrate continued public building into the seventh century, and yet even here new and repaired public buildings are not matched by a similar tradition of upkeep of private residences.27 Wickham has addressed this issue head on, suggesting that a cultural change led to the abandonment of villas starting from around AD 350–400, before the barbarian invasions.28 He would link this with a militarisation of the aristocracy in the north-west provinces where villa-based society was strongest. I am convinced that cultural change is the major answer, but we need to know more about the beginnings of this change, and we need to know where those who, as shown in 24   Ellis 1998b. For the family in the late antique west see the chapter by Emma Southon, Mary Harlow and Chris Callow in this volume. 25   Ellis 1985. 26   Loseby 1992. 27   Khamis 2007. 28   Wickham 2005b, pp. 468–81.

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sources, continued to identify with a classicising elite lived, but this is the subject of another article. Such arguments are of course based on negative evidence, and are thus always open to negation as new discoveries are made. Nevertheless I think that since 1988, when I suggested that Roman aristocratic houses were no longer built after the later sixth century, the argument still stands.29 Furthermore, Byzantinists are increasingly supporting this line of reasoning in historical analysis. This suggests that the straitened restricted Byzantine state of the late seventh century no longer included the traditional late antique aristocracy. Haldon observes: The period from c. 690 to 717 provides some useful illustrations, where we can detect a conflict between members of the older metropolitan elite and the newer men promoted by the imperial court, and between the population of Constantinople and the surrounding provincials … The result of all these changes was the slow emergence during the 8th and 9th c. of a new elite of service, which eventually – by the early 11th c. – grew into an aristocracy.30

One lesson of some 20 years of study of the late antique period is that change could take place very fast, and yet a similar pattern of change might occur in different provinces at different times. As analysis edges more into the Middle Byzantine period we must similarly be wary of assuming that the seventh to eighth centuries represents a collapse or ‘dead’ period. Haldon cautions that change was taking place slowly, but from the archaeological point of view it would seem as if the hiatus between about AD 650 and 800, or some time under the Macedonians (867–1056), was sufficiently long and deep, or the social transformation sufficiently profound, for later housing to bear little relation to that of late antiquity. Equally, while there is still too little evidence to speak of anything more than a general picture of housing across the ninth to eleventh centuries, there was continuing social change or evolution of the new aristocracy, also indicated by Haldon above. In archaeology, as in the historical evidence, the direction of this change may only become evident later in the eleventh or even twelfth century when a new aristocratic tradition of housing emerges in fully fledged medieval ‘palazzi’. I shall, however, concentrate on what for me is the more interesting transformative epoch of the eighth to eleventh centuries, which formed the foundation of medieval Byzantium.

  Ellis 1988b.   Brubaker and Haldon 2005, pp. 629–31.

29 30

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The Re-emergence of the Aristocratic or Middle Class House in the Komnenian Period: Some Key Sites Corinth31 is one of the few ancient cities that may have had a certain status in the medieval world. Although the classical urban landscape was radically altered or abandoned after the sixth century the city was a theme capital from the late eighth to the eleventh century. Early excavations identified large courtyards, lying behind streets lined with shops. Few rooms opening off these yards are differentiated by size or by the centrality usually seen in classical reception rooms. It is difficult under these circumstances to determine if the rooms around the yards formed one house or many apartments. While everyone is agreed that the dating evidence for the houses is not associated with well-defined stratigraphy, modern opinion seems to suggest that the settlement reached its zenith in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Seen with late antique eyes, the houses, though they have courtyards, are more irregular in their layout. Although there are columns these seem more occasional ornament than architectural features; rather than the shady colonnades of a peristyle they seem intended more to hold up the roof or upper storey. Foundations are more likely to be of rough masonry than well-dressed plastered walls. Floors are earthen or stone flagged. Pergamum is an ancient city with a medieval settlement on top of it, and excavated with much more precision than Corinth. Though it may have been a military post from the ninth century the site only seems to have been reoccupied in the twelfth century and has been identified as the capital of the Neokastros theme.32 The houses were grouped around irregular courtyards. As at Corinth it is difficult to be sure about property boundaries as courtyards seem sometimes to be accessed through wider passages that may have been formal gateways and at other times through winding passages that seem to tumble into the yards by chance. Klaus Rheidt also notes ‘enclosed spaces that, because of their position along the street, must have been of a commercial nature, though there are no specific finds of any kind to confirm this’.33 Whichever way one looks at the housing it seems that almost every property had some form of yard in which a cottage garden might be established, chickens kept, or a cart stowed. Although there are rooms that seem larger than others there are none that one would clearly identify as ‘reception’ rooms with grander pretensions for receiving guests. It is interesting to relate the lack of differentiation between rooms and houses to the emphasis on families and ‘houses’ in the texts. Neville considers the basis of society to be a certain relativism in which the person lower on the social scale saw himself as the slave of the powerful, two people on the same social level saw themselves as siblings, and the emperor was close to a god, or at least his first-hand 31   For the original excavations see Scranton 1957. For a recent re-assessment, though largely from the economic point of view, see Sanders 2002. 32   Rheidt 1990 and 2002. 33   Rheidt 2002, p. 628.

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agent. One could suggest that this relativism led people to place less emphasis on absolute distinction as emphasised by display of riches. An alternative hypothesis is that society was differentiated more at the social level than at the material level. In this view relativism in society meant that physical differentiation between houses was less important than the differentiation manifested immediately by the meeting of two people in a social setting. It was not the physical ambiance that mattered but the social ambiance. During the 1990s the excavations at Amorium explicitly aimed to bring to light this Middle Byzantine city that was a major centre during the period. However, here too large-scale housing has proved elusive. Excavations in the lower town, while not yet fully published, seem to have discovered a large irregular enclosure and structures associated with small scale crafts and industrial working. It may well be that large-scale domestic architecture will indeed be identified in the future, but so far the picture is very similar to that at Corinth and Pergamum. Structure 2 has been tentatively identified as a dye works dating to before the sack of the city in 838.34 It had walls built out of roughly mortared masonry and signs of a brick course. It was a rectangular structure 6 m wide and at least 15 m long before its foundation disappeared below the later ‘enclosure’ wall to the south-east. There were at least four entrances to this rectangular building and the walls were supported by buttresses. Originally paved with stone slabs, it was occupied until the end of the tenth century as the latest earth floors sealed coins of Nikephoros I (802–811). During the main period of its use a series of tanks were constructed, hence the attribution to dyeing, but it was later subdivided with ‘rubble walls’.35 The walling and a storage jar found in situ in this latest phase of occupation recall those in similar contexts at Corinth and Pergamum. Scholarship always used to claim that the reason Middle Byzantine housing was so hard to find was that excavations concentrated on classical cities and either did not consider later levels or concentrated on sites that had little importance in medieval times. This is getting harder and harder to accept. However, there is one region where a very different picture is now emerging. In Cappadocia many monuments previously considered monasteries are now interpreted as housing. The similarity to overall layouts of domestic buildings has been recognised. The location of the church seems marginal to the overall complex (sometimes there is no church as such) and while dining and reception halls are frequently found there is little or no evidence for ‘monastic cells’.36 When this suggestion was first made, Thomas F. Mathews and Annie-Christine Daskalakis Mathews associated the tradition with the Sasanian and Semitic ‘iwan’. This is incorrect in a number of respects. First an ‘iwan’ should be entirely open to the exterior on one side. While, as in the great Persian palaces, it may be the setting for a throne, the architecture is specifically designed to create a sheltered area in which cool air and breezes can circulate by entering through the   Lightfoot and Ivison 2001, pp. 385–7, and Lightfoot et al. 2003, pp. 289–91.   Ivison 2007, p. 48. 36   Mathews and Daskalakis Mathews 1997, Ousterhout 2005, and Kalas 2007. 34 35

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open front of the space. Closed side rooms on each side then form the living spaces (Figs 12.2, 12.3). The clearest exposition of the ‘iwan’ in domestic architecture, as opposed to palaces, is by El Khoury in his analysis of Lebanese housing.37 The central ‘iwan’ was walled on three sides, and open to the courtyard in front on the fourth side. It was flanked by two closed living rooms. By contrast, Roman houses had a central closed reception or living room, flanked by two service rooms.38 In the Cappadocian complexes the central large room is closed, and as cave buildings in valleys they simply cannot function as an ‘iwan’. The most likely, though indirect, architectural link for these Cappadocian reception suites is with earlier late antique or Byzantine models of a centralised apsidal reception room with adjoining service rooms. It is tempting to be more explicit and associate the design with the late Roman villa, but I am convinced this is a step too far until evidence for such a connection is clearly identified. While the reception room is often preceded by a large yard as would be expected in villa architecture, the association is more coincidental than intentional. Any large room fronting a large open space will seem like a reception room opening onto a courtyard, whereas the two spaces here could have very different functions. Though the area in front of the reception room looks like a yard in plan, the Cappadocian topography often includes a steep slope, or irregular surfaces of different elevations, thus consisting of more ‘open ground’ in the approach to the reception suite rather than a ‘yard’, and, as at Corinth or Pergamum, this space is very irregular compared to the ‘perfect’ geometry of Roman housing. A classic example of careful geometric design is the Nymfarum Domus at Nabeul, where the plan of the house was manipulated to create an impression of rectangular perfection that did not reflect its actual shape.39 An example of such Cappadocian housing is the complexes at SelimeYaprakhisar.40 The use of churches with a central dome supported by four main piers suggests that they were built in the tenth to eleventh century, as do funerary inscriptions. The houses are arranged around rock-cut courtyards, which are often set back from the sides of the valley and thus partly hidden. In each house a chapel and a large reception hall can be recognised and are usually located at the far end of the court. As in the late antique aristocratic house both these rooms were probably ‘public’, or at least visited by more important guests, yet they were far away from the main entrance in order to maintain social divisions with minor clients and dependents who hung around the main entrance. Both church and reception room could have architectural embellishments. The halls might have dining niches, while both rooms could have sculpture or paintings. Upper storey rooms were common in this landscape, where tufa could be cut without the concern of falling masonry. This allowed vistas to be opened onto the courtyard and galleries to     39   40   37 38

El Khoury 1975. Ellis 2000. Darmon 1980. Kalas 2007.

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look into the reception hall. Such disclosed views of course allowed for unseen supervision of the spaces concerned by servants or women. More utilitarian rooms may have been found near the main entrance; kitchens and stables have been identified. The use of upper storey galleries may itself be a novelty of Middle Byzantine domestic architecture. Late antique houses were rarely of more than one storey, especially those of the aristocracy. If galleries did exist they took the form of exterior balconies rather than opening onto interior spaces. It would seem that in Cappadocia something of a Middle Byzantine estate can be recognised. A frontier theme previously seen as inhabited by monks hiding, or resisting Islam, is now seen as one inhabited by the contemporary hero Digenis Akritis.41 Digenis is Byzantium’s true ‘super-human’ epic hero defending the eastern frontier, and naturally had appropriately lofty halls, especially the formal niched ‘triclinos’ dining room, which is now paralleled by contemporary physical remains in Cappadocia. In the distinction between the urban housing of Corinth or Pergamum and the ‘heroic’ estates of Cappadocia, we should perhaps recognise the conflicts between the military ‘warlords’ of the frontiers and the more settled land-owning aristocracy of the core provinces. The main question is whether both types of housing might co-exist. Certainly, as suggested above, there is so far little sign of such ‘lofty reception halls’ in the core provinces outside Constantinople itself until perhaps after the Latin conquest. The challenge now to projects such as those at Amorium and Euchaita is to reach a conclusion as to whether aristocratic houses did exist in other regions or settlements. This is less an issue about following the ‘continuity’ of a few ‘top’ Byzantine families we know by name,42 and more about the archaeological evidence for the presence of an aristocratic class overall. A wider range of housing has been recorded by Robert Ousterhout at Canlo Kilise, which extends the range of housing known from the region down to those more comparable, at least in size, with Corinth and Pergamum.43 It is appropriate to note here that I have preferred to use the term aristocracy rather than elite throughout this article. Without the evidence of Cappadocia this choice might have been different. The Cappadocian evidence suggests the emergence of a very dominant group with significant material superiority expressed in conspicuous display. This is very different to evidence elsewhere which does not seem to indicate the use of domestic architecture as display of social status. I would consider that ‘aristocracy’ suggests a class that clearly, and materially, placed itself ‘above’ other groups in society, whereas the word ‘elite’ suggests a clearly distinct superior group but one which is less conspicuous. This distinction may seem like ‘semantics’ but I think it is a very important one for Middle Byzantium, and one that is key to debates about the emerging identity of a Byzantine state as well as the continuity or lack of it with a sixth century and earlier past. This also makes the point that the archaeology of   Jeffreys 1998.   E.g. Whittow 2009. 43   Ousterhout 2005. 41 42

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the domestic house has a large part to play in this debate and ought to be pursued as a major area of research. The Village44 Field survey in many areas is suggesting that the once ‘cosy’ picture of late antique ‘decline’ is misleading. Although there undoubtedly were problems in the late antique city many continued to be successful throughout the sixth century. Field survey in Macedonia and in Syria is suggesting that village life continued to strengthen into the seventh century in both Byzantine and Arab spheres of control. Wickham’s comprehensive study of the period 400–800 for much of the Mediterranean stresses that Byzantine villages (above all after the sixth-century life of St Theodore of Sykeon) were more autonomous than those in the west in the seventh century with more village institutions.45 This may be a valid observation, and Wickham is careful to note the limitations of the hypothesis, especially ‘micro-regional’ differences, as the evidence of archaeology and texts for many areas is still fragmentary. Archie Dunn suggests that village life in at least parts of Macedonia continued through the ‘dark ages’ unabated, to strengthen from the eighth century.46 In northern Syria expansion stopped in the sixth century, but some would suggest that it is only from the eighth or ninth century (as the region became very much a frontier) that real change set in.47 On the other hand, it is precisely from the Cappadocian area on the Byzantine side of the frontier with the Arabs, where we have just examined rich reception rooms and houses, that the strongest Byzantine aristocratic families emerge in the eighth century.48 While consistent and carefully collected archaeological evidence for housing in the Middle Byzantine period remains rare, the historical evidence for the formation of villages is becoming stronger and stronger, on the one hand through documentary evidence from the area around Mount Athos, and on the other from the increasing frequency and sophistication of field survey. This data suggests that, as in the west, villages at this time were becoming the bedrock of Byzantine society. Social evidence as discussed at the beginning of this chapter emphasises that the Byzantine villager had some independence.49 Villages acted as real   The remarkably consistent picture of successful Byzantine villages across the sixth and seventh centuries was brought home to me at the International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Paris in 2001. All the papers presented on villages have now been published by Lefort, Morrisson and Sodini (eds) 2005, forming a remarkable archive of projects across the empire. On the Byzantine village see also the chapter by Fotini Kondyli in this volume. 45   Wickham 2005b, pp. 406–11. 46   Dunn 2005. 47   Wickham 2005b, p. 449. 48   Cheynet et al. 2006, p. 178. 49   Wickham 2005a. 44

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communities with distinct voices, and indeed were seen as such by the state. The ‘Farmer’s Law’ presents an overall impression of life in villages of the eighth century through a summary of the principles of small scale land disputes,50 as summarised by Cyril Mango: Orchards and vineyards are protected by ditches or fences, but fields are not, and cattle often stray into them. Herds are attacked by wolves, dogs fight and are occasionally put down, farmers pinch one another’s implements. Harsh and often barbarous penalties are imposed on offenders – amputation of hands or tongue, blinding, impalement, death by fire.51

This is a vivid summary of the everyday struggles with human, and animal, mentalities that probably applied to many village communities of the early middle ages. It is the nature of the penalties that reflects the rather ‘unique’ morality of Byzantium, mitigated no doubt by the rural patronage and ‘clan’ relationships described by Neville.52 It is not yet possible to provide excavated examples of Middle Byzantine village houses, but the town houses discussed above suggest that they are unlikely to have had a very sophisticated plan. It is tempting indeed, given the historical parallelism, to consider them similar to medieval village housing in the west. It is also possible to supplement the direct archaeology of villages with the archaeology of the rural environment. Thus documentary evidence for the expansion of rural settlement in Macedonia can be supplemented by palaeobotanical evidence suggesting the retreat of woodland from the tenth to the thirteenth century and later.53 Thus archaeology, documentary evidence and palaeobotany all suggest continuity or expansion of rural settlement after the eighth century until at least the Latin conquest. It has traditionally been considered that from at least the Komnenian period there was an expansion of large estates. The evidence for this is based on documentary evidence such as the Athos archives. It is not my intention to debate this point. I would, however, indicate the difficulties that have been encountered in identifying such estates dating from the republican period of Roman Italy and the imperial period in North Africa. For example, an ‘estate’ can often consist of many widely separated land parcels.54

    52   53   54   50 51

Ashburner 1912. Mango 1980, p. 47. Neville 2004. Dunn 1992, Lefort 2002, Cheynet et al. 2006, p. 253. Wickham 2005b.

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Houses in Constantinople It is often supposed that houses in the capital must have been much more sophisticated than those in the provinces, but we have no archaeological evidence to suggest what they looked like. It is clear from the texts, and some fragmentary archaeology, that the palaces of the Middle Byzantine dynasties had mosaic decoration, and perhaps some stone sculpture. There are reports of erotic pictures and statues in twelfth-century aristocratic houses, but the author (the theologian Balsamon) may have just been following a late antique discourse or exaggerating to make a moral injuncture.55 The famous will of Michael Attaleiates which converted his provincial estate into a monastery in 1077 included a sizeable inventory of belongings. Attaleiates was a senior civil servant and judge, and one has the impression of a substantial estate in both property and goods. The will includes two houses; the one at Rhaidestos is not described in any way, but that at Constantinople is. It had a ground floor triclinos and a gallery, which would seem to be on an upper floor overlooking the courtyard. These were joined with a three-storey house above (or two-storey apartment above and including) a donkey-driven mill, which he purchased from his aunt, the nun and protospatharissa Euphrosyne Bobaina.56 Several observations can be made on this description based on archaeological evidence. First, even as early as the sixth century a triclinos meant a dining or reception room, and not necessarily a formal semi-circular or rectangular couch, as in earlier Roman times. From at least the ninth century biblical scenes of the Last Supper and other dining scenes in manuscripts show rectangular tables and upright chairs rather than couches.57 These manuscripts, which one might expect to show archaising classical diners, are more likely to represent everyday realities than the continued use of semi-circular stibadia in more formal settings in monasteries such as Vatopedi on Mount Athos, which was rebuilt in the traditional style as late as 1786,58 or the famous Chrysotriklinos of the Great Palace. The stibadium (semi-circular couch) had begun as an outdoor feature in firstcentury AD Italy and had a brief empire-wide popularity in late antique houses.59 Smaller couches may have accommodated no more than three diners, but larger examples could have accommodated seven or more people. They were often placed in three, five, or seven niches around a dining room. There would be one ‘high table’ in the apse at the far end of the room, and the other stibadia would be located in paired niches, one each side of the main body of the room. The fact that, from perhaps the seventh century, such couches were confined to the   Mango 1980, p. 276.   Thomas and Hero 2000, p. 336. 57   Vroom 2007. On dining scenes see also the comments of Cecily Hennessy in her 55 56

chapter in this volume. 58   Müller 2005, pp. 76–9. 59   Dunbabin 1991, Bowes 2010, and Ellis 1988b and 2000.

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Figure 12.1 Schematic reconstruction of Michael Attaleiates’ house in Constantinople, with the church of the ‘Forerunner’ to the left. Great Palace and monastic settings reveals both a typical Byzantine archaising classicism and a wish to situate such palaces and monasteries as environments ‘outside’ everyday life. As in the case of Cappadocian houses, a domestic feature is used conspicuously to identify a particular class of society. It seems to be implied, though not clearly stated, that the gallery in Attaleiates’ house in some way linked the triclinos to the three-storey apartment, though the gallery and triclinos were on different floors. It may well be that the gallery overlooked the interior of the triclinos on the one side and the courtyard on the other, like a medieval ‘minstrels’ gallery’. This would match the Cappadocian evidence. If we assume a very high triclinos then this would also match that of Digenis Akritis, also from the eastern frontier, where the upper walls had panels depicting heroic exploits. Given Attaleiates’ status as historian and ‘nouveau’ aristocrat, similar images might be expected. Of course, it is notoriously difficult to reconstruct an actual building from textual evidence, as such descriptions are at best partial accounts of selected rooms, but Attaleiates’ house may suggest that in the capital, as in the case of local ‘big men’ on the Anatolian frontier, some elements of rich reception rooms survived, but the presence of the donkey mill, later referred to as a bakery, should be noted.60   Thomas and Hero 2000, pp. 336 and 341.

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This mix of ‘industrial’ production and domestic was very common throughout antiquity when there was no separation between domestic and working spaces. One should not expect to find agricultural pursuits limited to rural locations, since food always had to be ‘live’ to be fresh and animals remained the best source of ‘power’ for mills. Turkish Housing Another element which must be included in this jigsaw puzzle is the part played by early Turkic housing. Turkish houses are not represented in the architectural record until the 1600s. The earliest extant buildings that can be associated with a domestic tradition are the Çinli kiosk in the Topkapi palace from the 1400s and the Çakiraga konak at Birgi from 1764.61 The ‘konak’ has a ‘piano nobile’ of wood extending out over adjoining streets with extensive shuttered balconies (Fig. 12.4). Similar examples can be found from Ohrid to Cairo. There is some consideration in modern literature as to whether types with central courtyards are earlier than types with a covered central yard.62

Figure 12.2 Traditional houses of the ‘iwan’ type, Baalbek, Lebanon.   Goodwin 1969.   Eldem 1984–87.

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Figure 12.3 Traditional ‘iwan’ in Sheikh Isa Bey House, Manama, Bahrain. There is very little indication as to what Turkish houses looked like before the eighteenth century. No examples of Seljuk housing have yet been identified. It is often said that when the Turks arrived in Anatolia they were entirely nomadic. This seems unlikely. The Turkish people had a long history of interaction with many urban-based Central Asian civilisations. Their rulers had adopted something of the sedentary lifestyle, including farming, and had at the very least established central places and palaces from which to impose their rule. There were continuing tensions between nomadic and sedentary lifestyles among the upper echelons of Turkish society in Anatolia, but one can certainly expect both that the early Turks adopted certain aspects of the sedentarism and housing of the locals and that they introduced new elements into that lifestyle.63 Many Turkish scholars still associate the Turkish ‘oda’ with a nomad tented form, based purely on supposed links to the nomad ‘tradition’.64 The oda is the traditional living room of the konak. It has a raised threshold where a guest is expected to leave their shoes. There are cushions rather than wooden furniture, often in the balcony areas, and there may be a raised central part of the ceiling. All these features are said to come from the original Turkish tent.   Hopwood 1991.   Ireland and Bechhoefer (eds) 1998, p. 5.

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Figure 12.4 Traditional Turkish ‘konak’, Cebeciler Sehir Evi, Saframbolu, Turkey.

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Figure 12.5 Khojo (Gaochang); example of mudbrick building. The Turkic empires of Central Asia covered a huge swathe of land from ancient Sogdiana on the borders of modern Russia and Afghanistan in the west, to Mongolia in the east. The archaeology is poorly known, but rich. The deserted cities of the Taklamakan and Tarim basins in Xinjiang provinces in China form a crucial archaeological reserve for this work, because of their good preservation and their critical role in the formation of Turkish states, particularly those of the Uighurs. To take one example, the Uighur capital in the ninth to twelfth centuries AD was at Khojo, now Gaochang.65 The culture of cities in this area is notoriously mixed, involving for example Hindu, Confucian, Nestorian, Buddhist and other religions. Each city would seem to have had its own style of housing. That of Khojo/ Gaochang appears to have involved fairly substantial mudbrick substructures that are reminiscent of a similar environment in Egypt – a requirement for thick walls supporting heavy superstructures, where few trees were available for wooden structures (Fig. 12.5). At the very least such structures indicate vertically orientated housing rather than the Arab tradition of one storey and a central court. The Turkish kagan was said to have a yurt on the top of his palace in Khojo to remind him of his nomad origins.66 It is a sign that both nomad and sedentary traditions are present in the Turkish heartlands. While there is sometimes a romantic notion that the Turks arriving in Anatolia were purely nomadic this is not entirely the case.   Guang-da 1996; Whitfield and Sims-Williams 2004.   Whitfield 1999, p. 105.

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This high pavilion might also be held to reflect similar Turkish palatial structures in Konya and Istanbul, but again this is no more than conjecture without detailed contemporary evidence. Remarkably, despite numerous expeditions to the area in the first quarter of the twentieth century and increasing interest in the last 20 years, including for example major Japanese investment in the preservation of Jiaohe, to my knowledge no houses have been published in detail. In the early 1900s many monuments, including houses, were preserved to two storeys high, but there has been increasing deterioration and the last chance to record medieval housing in the Tarim basin is slowly crumbling away. The housing in Central Asia reflects the interaction between nomads and sedentarists in that region. The konak reflects a similar situation in Anatolia. The solid stone virtually windowless basement resembles a certain medieval style of housing also found in the west. The opulence of later housing in Istanbul clearly reflects European early modern traditions. But the ‘oda’ sitting room and balconies, and the associated ‘ocak’ hearth are entirely Turkish and do not fit clearly with either Arab or western traditions.67 Living rooms in traditional houses in the Gulf, including the broad Sasanian/Middle Eastern tradition, follow the ‘iwan’ arrangement in which a central open bay wafts air into more closed sitting rooms on each side (Figs 12.2, 12.3).68 The key point to retain from this discussion of Turkish housing is that one element which heavily influenced housing styles around the Mediterranean, into central Europe and possibly the palazzo of the Serenissima, is completely and utterly missing from the archaeological record, namely the early Turkic housing of the Anatolian plateau. Furthermore, should early Anatolian Turkish housing prove to have a ‘piano nobile’, with animals and workshops on the ground floor, we have a further archaeological problem. It can be seen from previous descriptions of Middle Byzantine housing that much of it is described as at best ‘utilitarian’ with few ‘reception’ rooms. However, if early Turkic influences included the piano nobile then many ‘artisanal’ houses may actually have had a richer upper floor. Archaeologists are very fond of demonstrating structurally that a certain strength of walling is required to support an upper floor, but such arguments are very tenuous when even Hagia Sophia was an inherently unstable building that collapsed several times. It is, moreover, well accepted by archaeologists that stairs can be undetectable, being replaced as needed by wooden ladders or even a simple notched pole, as in traditional Indonesian and Pacific island houses.69 Excavation of early Turkish settlements in Anatolia ought therefore to be a priority.

  Ellis 1991a.   El Khoury 1975. 69   Waterson 2009. 67 68

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Putting Animals on the Ground Floor A key development associated with the piano nobile, and present in the Turkish konak (though not present in the Venetian palazzo), is the use of the ground floor for animal pens. It is worth dwelling on this issue for a few moments because to do so will enlighten some aspects of the changes we are discussing. First, of course, it is important to note that the keeping of animals on the ground floor of a house is a separate change from the development of a piano nobile, though both may have had their origins in the late antique period. One of the first houses to have a piano nobile was the truly Roman villa of San Giovanni di Ruoti, which clearly had an upper storey triclinium in the fifth century AD though there is no clear sign of animals kept on the ground floor.70 The room is off one corner of the villa, an unusual though not unique position for such a room. However, the lack of preservation of the upper levels makes it difficult to be precise about how it was articulated into the main building. Furthermore, the upper floor setting was probably occasioned by the slope of the site rather than by any particular desire for a ‘piano nobile’. The keeping of animals in an urban house actually goes back further still. Penelope Allison has remarked on the presence of a cart in the central court, or atrium, of a Pompeian house.71 Pompeian and indeed other early Roman urban houses commonly stored agricultural items, which may have included the odd ‘farm animal’ as well as the better preserved farming implements. The cart in the atrium is, however, the first potential indication that horses had to enter a major ground floor room. However, by the end of the fourth and certainly in the fifth century a number of North African houses had rooms with lines of stone basins against one wall or across the centre of the room. There has been some disbelief among scholars that such otherwise rich houses could contain animal pens or stables. Some of these rooms with basins have been considered to be taxcollecting rooms. It still seems somewhat surprising to find that at the House of the Hoard at Utica the triclinium was given basins. If this was indeed a stable, the horses would have had to trot across the mosaics of both the entrance corridor and the peristyle to reach their lodging!72 More appositely many of the late antique village houses in the uplands of northern and southern Syria discovered in the early twentieth century had rooms with basins on the ground floor and living rooms above. Similar vertical housing, though without the presence of stables, existed at the same period in Egypt.73 Many would like to see this type of housing as the origin of medieval Byzantine housing, and by extrapolation perhaps the konak. Ummayad period housing excavated in Pella in Jordan uncovered ground floor rooms in which the stabled camels had     72   73   70 71

Small and Buck 1994, pp. 76-8. Allison 2004. Alexander 1973. Ellis 2000.

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died on the spot, possibly during an earthquake.74 Living rooms, which collapsed on top of the stables, were on the floors above. Nevertheless it is very unclear how a rural house type of the Middle East could have become the basis for housing in Constantinople or even the Anatolian plateau. It is generally acknowledged that, as evidenced by inscriptions and limited archaeology, that the northern Syrian villages were in decline by the seventh century. It seems unlikely that a declining house type would then have crossed what was soon the frontier between the Byzantines and the Arabs. The new interpretation of the Cappadocian evidence also suggests that a very different house type was in use just over the frontier by the Middle Byzantine period. Conclusions In conclusion, while we are still very far from beginning to be able to piece together the transformation of Byzantine private life from the seventh to the eleventh centuries AD some congruences between textual and archaeological evidence are beginning to emerge. First, and most clearly, is the emergence of a village-based society in many parts of the empire. This may be connected with a reorganisation of social and material structures associated with the family in which conspicuous display of wealth in domestic housing was not possible, or unacceptable. Second, a new form of aristocratic housing may have emerged alongside a new aristocracy in the Middle Byzantine period. This may have involved new architectural expressions such as interior galleries and the piano nobile. Given the vagaries and overall lack of archaeological evidence it is too soon to claim any strong observable trends but the above provides some hypotheses based on current evidence which can be tested in future research. The arrival of the Turks brought a new cultural influence into the region. I have suggested that this was not simply an arrival of tented nomads but of people who arrived with a developed culture that blended nomad and sedentary traditions, including a new style of domestic architecture. As in the case of Middle Byzantine housing there is little or no evidence from Anatolia on which to base this assertion, but remains from the lands the Turks crossed before reaching Anatolia suggest they had met and absorbed some elements of domestic architecture. Archaeological evidence has an important part to contribute to the development of social theories of Byzantium. The archaeology of domestic housing can indicate something of the range of social groups present in Byzantine society. It is commonly agreed that villages became the bedrock of Byzantine society from the seventh century and yet we have at present no well-excavated villages that can suggest the level of self-sufficiency of these communities, their lifestyles, the extent to which they used goods produced by their own communities or those of their neighbours. The Cappadocian evidence demonstrates that, at least in one   Walmsley 2007.

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region, domestic architecture was used in Middle Byzantine times to express social differences. It is of course likely that similar forces operated in the capital, but once again without firm archaeological evidence it is not possible to say what shape such architectural expressions took. The arrival of the Turks in Anatolia created a fundamental cultural shift mixing nomad and sedentary values, as well as Central Asian culture with that of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. However, we still know virtually nothing from archaeology about how this interchange of values took place. Bibliography Alexander, Margaret A. (1973), Corpus de mosaiques de la Tunisie, vol. 1.1, Utique Insulae I-II-III (Tunis: Institut national d’archéologie et d’arts). Allison, Penelope M. (2004), Pompeiian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture (Los Angeles: University of California Press). Ashburner, Walter (1912), ‘The Farmer’s Law’, JHS, 32: 68–95. Bowes, Kim (2010), Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire (London: Duckworth). Brubaker, Leslie, and Haldon, John (2005), Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca 680–850): The Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate). Cheynet, Jean-Claude, et al. (ed.) (2006), Le monde byzantin, vol. 2, L’empire byzantine (641-1204) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Darmon, Jean-Pierre (1980), Nymfarum Domus (Leiden: Brill). Dunbabin, Katherine M.D. (1991), ‘Triclinium and stibadium’, in W.J. Slater (ed.), Dining in a Classical Context (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 121–48. Dunn, Archie (1992), ‘The Exploitation and Control of Woodland and Scrubland in the Byzantine World’, BMGS, 16: 235–98. Dunn, Archie (2005), ‘The Problem of the Early Byzantine Village in Eastern and Northern Macedonia’, in Lefort, Morrison and Sodini (eds) (2005), pp. 267–78. El Khoury, Fouad (1975), Domestic Architecture in the Lebanon (London: Art and Archaeology Research Papers). Eldem, Sedad H. (1984–87), Turk Evi Osmanli Donemi, 3 vols (Istanbul). Ellis, Simon (1985),‘Carthage in the Seventh Century, an Expanding Population?’, Cahiers des études anciennes, 17: 30–42. Ellis, Simon (1988a), ‘Bait et Iwan: les salles de reception des maisons ottomanes’, in A. Temimi (ed.), La vie sociale dans les provinces arabes à l’époque ottoman (Zaghouan), pp. 133–8. Ellis, Simon (1988b), ‘The End of the Roman House’, AJA, 89: 565–78. Ellis, Simon (1991a), ‘Privacy in Byzantine and Ottoman Houses’, BF, 18: 151–8.

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Ellis, Simon (1991b), ‘Power, Architecture, and Décor: How the Late Roman Aristocrat Appeared to his Guests’, in Elaine K. Gazda (ed.), Roman Art in the Private Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 117–34. Ellis, Simon (2000), Roman Housing (London: Duckworth). Ellis, Simon (2005), ‘Byzantine Villages in North Africa’, in Lefort, Morrison and Sodini (eds) (2005), pp. 89–100. Goodwin, Godfrey (1969), Ottoman Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson). Goody, Jack (1983), The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Guang-da, Zhang (1996), ‘Kocho (Kao-ch’ang)’, in B.A. Litvinsky, Zhnag Guangda and R. Shabani Samghabadi (eds), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, vol. 3, The Crossroads of Civilizations A.D. 250 to 750 (Paris: UNESCO), pp. 303–14. Haldon, John (1993), ‘Military Administration and Bureaucracy: State and Private Interests’, BF, 19: 43–55. Haldon, John (1999), Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565– 1204 (London: Routledge). Hopwood, Keith (1991), ‘Nomads or Bandits? The Pastoralist Sedentarist Interface in Anatolia’, BF, 18: 179–94. Ireland, Stanley, and Bechhoefer, William (eds) (1998), The Ottoman House: Papers from the Amasya Symposium 24-27 September 1996 (Ankara/Warwick: British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara). Ivison, Eric (2007), ‘Amorium in the Byzantine Dark Ages (Seventh to Ninth Centuries)’, in Joachim Henning (ed.), Post-Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, vol. 2, Byzantium, Pliska and the Balkans (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter), pp. 25–59. Jeffreys, Elizabeth (1998), Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kaegi, Walter (1993), ‘The Controversy about Bureaucratic and Military Factions’, BF, 19: 25–34. Kalas, Veronica (2007), ‘Cappadocia’s Rock-Cut Courtyard Complexes: A Case Study for Domestic Architecture in Byzantium’, in Lavan, Özgenel and Sarantis (eds) (2007), pp. 393–414. Khamis, Elias (2007), ‘The Shops of Scythopolis in Context’, in Lavan, Swift and Putzeys (eds) (2007), pp. 439–72. Laiou, Angeliki (ed.) (2002), The Economic History of Byzantium, 3 vols (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Lavan, Luke, Özgenel, Lale, and Sarantis, Alexander (eds) (2007), Housing in Late Antiquity: From Palaces to Shops (Leiden: Brill). Lavan, Luke, Swift, Ellen, and Putzeys, Toon (eds) (2007), Objects in Context, Objects in Use: Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill). Lefort, Jacques (2002), ‘The Rural Economy, Seventh – Twelfth Centuries’, in Laiou (ed.) (2002), pp. 231–310.

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Lefort, Jacques, Morrison, Cecile, and Sodini, Jean-Pierre (eds) (2005), Les villages dans l’empire byzantine (Paris: Lethielleux). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, and Lamaison, Pierre (1987), ‘La notion de maison’, Terrain, 9: 34–9. Lightfoot, Chris, and Ivison, Eric (2001), ‘The Amorium Project: The 1998 Excavation Season’, DOP, 55: 371–99. Lightfoot, C.S., Mergen, Y., Olcay, B.Y., and Witte-Orr, J. (2003), ‘The Amorium Project: Research and Excavation in 2000’, DOP, 57: 279–91 Loseby, Simon (1992), ‘Marseilles a Late Antique Success Story’, JRS, 82: 144– 55. Mango, Cyril (1980), Byzantium: The Empire of the New Rome (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Mathews, Thomas F., and Daskalakis Mathews, Annie-Christine (1997), ‘Islamic Style Mansions in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Development of the Inverted T- Plan’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 56: 294–315. Müller, Andreas E. (2005), Berg Athos: Geschichte einer Mönchsrepublik (Munich: C.H. Beck). Neville, Leonora (2004), Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society 950-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ousterhout, Robert (2005), A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Rheidt, Klaus (1990), ‘Byzantinisches wohnhauser der 11 bis 14 jahrhunderts in Pergamon’, DOP, 44: 195–204. Rheidt, Klaus (2002), ‘The Urban Economy of Pergamon’, in Laiou (ed.) (2002), pp. 623–9. Ringen, B. (2009), Mongolian Traditions at a Glance (Ulaanbaatar: Montsame). Sanders, Guy (2002), ‘Corinth’, in Laiou (ed.) (2002), pp. 647–54. Scranton, Robert L. (1957), Mediaeval Architecture in the Central Area of Corinth, Corinth XVI (Princeton: Harvard University Press). Small, Alastair M., and Buck, Robert J. (1994), The Excavations of San Giovanni di Ruoti (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Thomas, John P., and Hero, Angela Constantinides (eds) (2000), Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks). Vroom, Joanita (2007), ‘The Archaeology of Late Antique Dining Habits in the Eastern Mediterranean: A Preliminary Study of the Evidence’, in Lavan, Swift and Putzeys (eds) (2007), pp. 313–61. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew (1988), ‘The Social Structure of the Roman House’, PBSR, 56: 43–97. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew (1994), Housing and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Walmsley, Alan (2005), ‘The Village Ascendant in Byzantine and Early Islamic Jordan: Socio-Economic Forces and Cultural Responses’, in Lefort, Morrison and Sodini (eds) (2005), pp. 511–22.

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Walmsley, Alan (2007), ‘The Excavation of an Ummayad Period House at Pella in Jordan’, in Lavan, Özgenel and Sarantis (eds) (2007), pp. 515–21. Waterson, Roxana (2009), The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia (Singapore: Oxford University Press). Whitfield, Susan (1999), Life Along the Silk Road (London: John Murray). Whitfield, Susan, and Sims-Williams, Ursula (2004), ‘Gaochang: Death and Afterlife’, in Susan Whitfield (ed.), The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (London: Serindia Publications), pp. 307–33. Whittow, Mark (1996), The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600–1025 (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Whittow, Mark (2009), ‘Early Mediaeval Byzantium and the End of the Ancient World’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 9: 134–53. Wickham, Chris (2005a), ‘The Development of Villages in the West 300–900’, in Lefort, Morrison and Sodini (eds) (2005), pp. 31–53. Wickham, Chris (2005b), Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Chapter 13

Family in the Byzantine Greek Legend of Saint Alexios, the Man of God Stavroula Constantinou

Scholars have often assumed that the ascetic ideals promoted by Byzantine hagiography subvert family values and traditional social norms, and as a result family members or social issues do not have any important (narrative) function in this literature.1 As Alice-Mary Talbot characteristically points out: The severance of all worldly ties after adoption of the monastic habit was a cardinal principle of Byzantine monasticism … Among the sacrifices expected of those who committed themselves to a regime of asceticism and prayer was a renunciation of all family ties, not only marriage, but also relationships with parents, siblings and children. … Byzantine hagiography provides numerous examples of holy men and women who managed to attain this ideal of renunciation of their families.2

Of course, family renunciation is a commonplace in hagiography. However, family and relatives, especially parents, play a more significant role in hagiographical literature than we tend to believe.3 There is a substantial number of texts in which the saintly protagonist’s family is important from both a thematic and a narrative point of view, since the saint appears to ‘sustain [his or her family relationships] in an ascetic [and other] context[s] in a manner affirming both devotion to God and a personal loyalty to [family] of considerable emotional weight’.4 In Lives of lay saints, for instance, the presence of family is very strong. Examples are the Life of Mary the Younger and the Life of Thomaïs of Lesbos. In the first text, the actions of both Mary’s husband and her twin sons take up considerable narrative space, and the first part of the latter text is devoted to Thomaïs’ parents, and to their common

1   See, for example, Angelov 2009, pp. 122–3; Kiousopoulou 1997, pp. 102–3; Morris 1981, p. 45; Pratsch 2005; Talbot 1990. 2   Talbot 1990, p. 119. 3   See for instance the chapters by Fotis Vasileiou and Nathan Howard in this volume. 4   Ashbrook Harvey 1996, p. 28. For the role of family in hagiography see also Talbot 1996a.

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life which is contrasted to the saint’s relationship with her husband.5 As for monastic saints, not a few maintain their family relationships despite their monastic status. Macrina initiates her mother into the ascetic life, practised by both women in the family house, which is transformed into a monastic community.6 While incarcerated in her cell, the cross-dressing saint Euphrosyne/Smaragdos accepts for many years and until the day of her death the frequent visits of her grieving father Paphnutios who does not recognise her, but whom she consoles for her ‘own loss’.7 Another cross-dressing saint, Mary/Marinos, enters the monastery with her own father.8 Theodora of Thessalonike spends her monastic years with her daughter in a nunnery directed by a relative;9 and the list could certainly be extended. Among the hagiographical texts in which family is significant, there are two anonymous Lives where it is even more central. These are the Life of Alexios, the Man of God (eighth century) and one of its models, the Life of John Calybites (fifth or sixth century); the second text which influenced the author of Alexios’ Life is the Life of the Man of God (mid-fifth century),10 a text of Syriac origin in which family is not important.11 Alexios’ Life, which was a ‘best seller’ in the middle ages, in both east and west,12 tells the story of an extremely pious and rich noble man from Rome called Euphemianos and of his equally righteous wife Aglaïs,13 a childless couple (§1), who after many prayers are granted a son (whose name is not mentioned in version BHG 51) that brightens their lives. They offer him the best profane and religious education, and when he reaches the age of marriage, they marry him off to one of the most illustrious Roman ladies. On 5   Both the Life of Mary the Younger and the Life of Thomaïs of Lesbos are edited in AASS Nov. 4 (1925), pp. 693–705 and 234–42 respectively. For translations, see Talbot 1996b, pp. 254–89 and 297–322 respectively. For the relationship between lay saints and their spouses, see Constantinou (forthcoming). 6   See the edition by Maraval 1971, pp. 136–267. For translations, see Corrigan 1987, and Silvas 2008, pp. 109–148. 7   The text is edited in Boucherie 1883, pp. 196–205. 8   The Life is edited in Richard 1975, pp. 83–94. For a translation, see Talbot 1996b, pp. 7–12. For cross-dressing saints, see Constantinou 2005, pp. 91–128. 9   For Theodora of Thessalonike see also the chapter by Michel Kaplan in this volume. For an edition see Paschalides 1991, pp. 66–188. For a translation see Talbot 1996b, pp. 164–237. 10   See Amiaud 1889; Boulhol 1996, pp. 71–3, 117; Ivanov 2006, pp. 81–6. 11   For a discussion of the Syriac Life of the Man of God, see Ashbrook Harvey 1990, pp. 15–21. 12   Amiaud 1889, p. XXVIII. 13   As attested by the many versions of the Byzantine Greek legend of Alexios that have come down to us (see BHG 51–6), the legend was extremely popular in Byzantium. The story summarised here is based on the first version of the BHG list (BHG 51) that is edited by Esteves Pereira 1900. It is this version that will be used for the analysis attempted in the present chapter. For reasons of comparison, however, references to other versions will be also made.

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the bridal night, instead of consummating the wedding, Alexios runs away after giving the bride his ring and belt, asking her to accept a spiritual union (§2). He sails to Syria; he arrives in Laodicea and from there he walks to Edessa. He eventually finds shelter in the narthex of a church devoted to the Virgin, where he leads a life of poverty, fasting and prayer. Back in Rome, Alexios’ parents and wife are heartbroken at his disappearance. The grieving father sends all his 3,000 servants in search of his beloved son. When they come to Edessa they offer Alexios alms without recognising him (§3). At the loss of her son, Alexios’ mother (followed by her daughter-in-law) shuts herself in her room, after opening a small window before which she kneels. She promises not to rise until she hears what has happened to her only son. As for Euphemianos, from now on he decides to lead a chaste married life with the hope that God might send Alexios back. After 17 years of living as a beggar, Alexios’ holiness is revealed to the church attendant (προσμονάριος) through the agency of the icon of the Virgin (or the Virgin herself in a vision or a dream, according to other versions).14 Leaving Edessa to avoid being revered as a holy man, Alexios takes a ship bound for Tarsus but storms drive it to Rome instead. Disembarking from the ship, the holy man decides to return to his parental house. On his way there, he encounters his father who does not recognise him. Alexios asks to be accepted in his house for the sake of God’s Kingdom, and the relatives he has abroad (§5). Moved by these words, which remind him of his son, Euphemianos takes the beggar to his home, asking his servants to look after him. However, the servants mistreat him: they pour dirty dishwater over his head, and they beat and mock him. Alexios welcomes suffering and humiliation with joy. Seventeen years later, when his death is approaching, Alexios calls for ink and paper and records his identity (§6). In the meantime, a bodiless voice heard in the church of Saint Boniface reveals the presence of a saint in Euphemianos’ house (§7). When Euphemianos finds the holy man he is already dead, holding the paper which cannot be removed from his hand despite the old man’s attempts (§8). The paper is released when the Roman emperors Honorius (395–423) and Arcadius (395–408), who arrive at the spot along with the pope and all the senators to see the holy man, ask him to let them read what is written on it. Alexios’ text is then read aloud before all the people gathered in Euphemianos’ house. As soon as Euphemianos realises that the beggar living in his house for the last 17 years was his own son who now lies dead before him, out of his mind he runs to Alexios’ dead body (§9). He is followed by Aglaïs who rushes to her son expressing an equally immense sorrow. Some time later, Alexios’ wife approaches her dead husband, lamenting and shouting her sorrow too (§10). The emperors order the saint’s holy relic to be exposed in the centre of the city, where healing miracles are performed. After a seven-day ceremony takes place in the church

14   See, for example, BHG 52m, §5 (edition by Halkin and Festugière 1984, pp. 80– 92) in which the Virgin appears in a vision. In BHG 52, p. 131 (edition in Rösler 1905, pp. 118–54), the Virgin appears in a dream.

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of Saint Boniface, Alexios’ relic is placed in a tomb made of gold and precious stones, out of which miraculous fragrant myrrh is emitted (§11). As for the Life of John Calybites, it runs as follows.15 John, the third son of a rich noble Roman couple (p. 5), flees from the parental house (p. 8), and becomes a monk in the monastery of the Akoimitoi where he stays for six years (p. 8). Unable to conquer the attacks of the devil which instil in him a great desire to see his beloved parents, John has to leave the monastery and return home (p. 9). On his way he meets a beggar with whom he exchanges clothes. When he arrives at his parents’ house, the guard does not recognise him and asks him to go away, but John convinces him to let him stay there, as he is a poor and homeless man. Seeing his parents going in and coming out of the house, John cannot hold back his tears (p. 10). Feeling sorry for this beggar who has nowhere to go, his father sends him food, which he does not eat but gives to other beggars. His mother, on the contrary, asks the servants to remove the beggar from the entrance of her house, since she cannot stand seeing a man with such a wild appearance there. John asks the guard to make a shed for him so that the lady of the house might not see him. After three years of ascetic life in the shed, John is informed in a dream that he will die in three days. He then asks the guard to call his mother, who is very surprised by the beggar’s request. She refuses to go and see him despite her husband’s advice to do so (p.11). She eventually meets the beggar who keeps insisting on seeing her. At their meeting, he makes her promise to bury him in the beggar’s clothes he wears and in the place where the shed stands. He then offers her a jewel-studded Gospel book, which she and his father gave him when he was young. She immediately shows the Gospel to her husband who recognises the book they once gave to their youngest son. Both of them go to the beggar to ask him where he got the Gospel and where their son is. In tears, John reveals his identity. They then embrace his neck, and weep without restraint. After John’s death, his mother breaks her promise, and dresses him in golden clothing. She is then punished with paralysis, but she is healed as soon as John is dressed again in his rags and is buried according to his instructions (p. 12). In contrast to the holy protagonists who maintain their relationships with their families after deciding to lead a religious life away from their own houses and societies, both Alexios and John interrupt their religious careers abroad to return home. John’s case seems even more striking: he gives up his life as a monk because he longs to be with his parents. It is, however, in the Life of Alexios, the text on which the analysis attempted here is based, that family plays the most central role in all Byzantine hagiographical literature. As I will show, in contrast to all expectations, it is Alexios’ family members who are the protagonists of the Life in question rather than Alexios himself, and this is the case in almost all Greek versions of the legend. But why does the hagiographer choose to focus on Alexios’ family and not on the holy subject instead? What made this necessary? Was it the type or the desires of the hagiographer’s intended audience that led   See Lampsides 1966, pp. 5–13.

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him to such a decision? Could the great appeal of Alexios’ legend to both eastern and western medieval audiences, and even to later and contemporary readers, be explained through the family’s protagonistic role and function in the text?16 The following analysis cannot give definitive answers to all these questions. It will, however, show how profane values dominate religious texts in order to render them pleasant for their audiences. I hope that it will also provoke a re-examination of hagiographical literature from a less biased point of view concerning the role of family and other profane issues. The protagonistic role of Alexios’ family, and especially that of his father, is established at the outset. The text begins with Euphemianos, who is the first person introduced in the narrative.17 After recounting his noble origins, and his incredible riches, the omniscient narrator goes on to describe his pious way of life, and his actions as well as those of his wife. Alexios’ parents lead the life of the ascetics: they follow God’s commandments; they fast and pray. They also appear to possess important saintly virtues, such as faith (πίστις), piety (εὐσέβεια, hope (ἐλπίς), prudence (σωφροσύνη), humility (ταπείνωσις), and philanthropy (φιλανθρωπία). As we realise later, it is in fact the saintliness of the parents that contributes to the piety and eventual holiness of the son who is a gift offered to them by God for their goodness. As the plot – which, in contrast to all expectations, is basically set at the parental house, and not in the church or the places where Alexios spends the first part of his religious career – develops, it is mostly his parents who are presented acting and not Alexios – and this is a violation of another hagiographical convention according to which the narrative focuses on the saint’s deeds. Thus we see through the narrator’s perspective how Alexios’ parents give food to the needy, how they pray for the acquisition of a child, how they give birth to a son, how they rear and educate him, how they arrange his marriage, how they and their daughter-in-law behave at his disappearance, how Euphemianos finds out about the man of God who dwells in his house, how he welcomes the emperors, the pope and all the illustrious men who arrive at his house, how his wife and daughterin-law react to the sight of all these important people, how both Alexios’ parents   Sergei Averintsev remarks: ‘[t]his legend fulfilled deep spiritual needs’. Averintsev goes on to say that Alexios’ family provokes sentiments of sympathy in both the author and his readership, since their suffering is not the result of their mistakes, but of their inability to reconcile the celestial with the terrestrial (cited in Ivanov 2006, pp. 85 and 86). The Life of John Calybites, which, as has already been pointed out, relates another tragic family story, was also popular in Byzantium (see Boulhol 1996, p. 71), but it never experienced the popularity that the Life of Alexios enjoyed. 17   The version of Alexios’ legend discussed here (BHG 51) does not have the standard prologue. The versions with a prologue are the following: BHG 53, 54, 56b, 56d, 56e, 56f and 56g. (For the use of prologue in saints’ Lives, see Pratsch 2005, pp. 19–55, and 2007, pp. 19–55.) Even though Alexios is presented in the prologue of some of these versions as the subject of the narrative, the texts focus either on his family (see, for example, BHG 53), or on both Alexios and his family. There are even versions in which the prologues present not Alexios but his father as the story’s protagonist (e.g. BHG 56e). 16

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and his wife behave when they become aware of the fact that the unknown beggar who had stayed with them for so many years is Alexios himself, and how they act during his funeral. Alexios, on the contrary, is almost absent from the narrative, since he rarely acts. As Duncan Robertson remarks, Alexios ‘is a minimalist among saints. He does almost nothing; he achieves perfection in terms of anonymity and passivity’.18 At the beginning he takes no initiatives, even on issues concerning him such as his education and marriage.19 He just lets his parents decide and act for him. He thus appears as the good and obedient son who simply follows his father’s orders. It is only after being sent by his father to the bridal chamber that Alexios becomes an independent and active person. However, his behaviour after leaving the parental house is reminiscent in many respects of that of his parents. Following his parents’ practices, he maintains a spiritual relationship with his wife, and he both gives alms and deprives himself of food. Additionally, he acquires the saintly virtues possessed by his parents. Alexios’ imitation of his parents’ character and behaviour in association with his decision to return home reveal his strong attachment to his family which is maintained until the end of his life; otherwise he would not have felt the need to write down his life story before his death so that his parents and wife will become aware of his identity, as pointed out by the narrator (§6.9–10). Alexios, therefore, does not really flee his family despite his seventeen-year absence and the concealment of his identity until his death. In fact, he does not even escape marriage, as is the case with most Byzantine saints. Despite his physical separation from his wife, Alexios maintains his marriage, and in so doing he follows for one more time his parents’ will. That Alexios’ marriage is not dissolved, as is the case with other saints (such as Matrona who runs away from her husband, and avoids seeing him again),20 is indicated both by the way in which the hero separates himself from his wife on the bridal night and by the wife’s actions after his departure. In the scene that takes place in the bridal chamber, in which Alexios speaks for the first time, the hero offers his wife his golden ring and military belt wrapped in a purple cloth, saying the following words: ‘do take these and keep them, and may God be between me and you for as long as he decides’ (§2).21 Both Alexios’ gifts – which are his most precious and important personal belongings – and his words   Robertson 1995, p. 206.   Quite often saints are depicted in hagiographical literature deciding about both

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their education and marriage. In many cases, they are presented rejecting profane education and the marriages arranged by their parents. Macrina, for instance, opts for the religious education offered by her mother, and refuses to marry another man after the death of her fiancé, despite her father’s attempts to marry her off (see for instance the chapters by Fotis Vasileiou and Nathan Howard in this volume). 20   Matrona’s Life is edited in AASS Nov. 3 (1910), pp. 790–813. For a translation see Talbot 1996b, pp. 18–64. 21   All the translations of the cited passages from the examined legend are mine.

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function as symbols of the hero’s interminable fidelity to his wife, on the one hand, and of the couple’s strong and indissoluble bond, on the other. His wife, for her part, accepts the spiritual union suggested by her husband, as her own behaviour and words show: she remains at Alexios’ parental house where she is treated as an important member of the family, and as soon as all of Euphemianos’ desperate attempts to find his lost son prove unsuccessful, she expresses in the most graphic way her loyalty to her husband. She says to her mother-in-law: I shall never in my life depart from here, but I shall imitate the monogamous turtledove who loves solitude, and who, after losing her mate, looks for him mourning and shaking the valleys [with her laments]. I too will stay here and wait patiently until I hear about what has happened to my husband, who has adopted the honorable and virtuous way of life (§6.23–19).

The wife’s strong attachment to Alexios is also revealed in her final words when she finds herself before his dead body: ‘O woe to me! My turtledove, who loved solitude. I was lonely, and today I have become a widow. Now, I have nothing to look forward to; I have no one to wait for. From now on I will mourn over my wounded heart’ (§10.18–20). Apart from her strong devotion to and love for her husband, the wife’s words manifest simultaneously her heroism and her extremely sad situation. Like the Homeric Penelope, she has been patiently waiting many years for the return of her beloved husband, but in contrast to Penelope, she is destined never to live together with him. The wife’s grief over the disappearance of her husband in the first place and his death in the second becomes very human and extremely moving through the hagiographer’s skilful use of an emotional and romantic language dominated by the image of the turtledove. According to Physiologus, a late antique bestiary (dated between the second and the fourth centuries AD) which exercised a very strong influence in the middle ages, the turtledove is the symbol of eternal love and fidelity. It is described as a bird that lives in the wilderness because she likes isolation. She is said to strongly love her mate with whom she lives faithfully. If she loses her mate she will not take another one (Physiologus §28 and 28a).22 In Byzantine literature, the symbol of the turtledove is mostly found in profane texts, such as romances and poetry. In the thirteenth-century romance Livistros and Rodamne, for instance, the male protagonist’s first encounter with the power of love takes place when on a hunting expedition he kills a male turtledove and its mate commits suicide by falling onto a rock (N 127–36).23 Manuel Philes, to cite an example from Byzantine poetry, employs the metaphor of the turtledove in one of his epigrams, which was commissioned by Eirene Palaiologina for her deceased

  See the edition by Sbordone 1936.   See the edition by Agapitos 2006.

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husband John II Doukas Komnenos Angelos (ruler of Thessaly, 1303–1318), to describe the widow’s loyalty to her husband that extends beyond death (line 17).24 The audience of Alexios’ Life is invited to share the tears shed by the people assembled at Euphemianos’ house. As the narrator states after the scene in which Alexios’ parents and wife express their extremely deep sorrow for not being aware of his presence in the house, and for his death, ‘becoming speechless, all the people could not stop their tears which were flowing without restraint’ (§10.20–22). Earlier, while beating her breast and lamenting, Alexios’ mother asks all the bystanders to mourn with her: ‘come, all of you lament with me for my only son was in my house for 17 years and no one recognised him. He received only beatings and insults and abuse from his own servants’ (§10.4–7). I believe this particular scene is key to understanding the function of family in the text, the author’s purpose in producing a saint’s Life such as that of Alexios in which family plays the protagonistic role, and the text’s great appeal to contemporary and later audiences. From a narrative point of view, this is a significant scene; it is the recognition scene that gives the solution to the problem around which the narrative develops – that is the disappearance of Alexios – and in so doing it leads to the narrative’s closure. That the anonymous author himself bestowed further importance upon this particular scene becomes obvious from the way it is constructed: it is the longest, the best structured, the most rhetorical, theatrical, suspenseful and emotional scene of the whole narrative. Through its form and structure, the scene highlights in the most graphic way the protagonistic character of Alexios’ family. For the first time all its members, even Alexios himself, albeit dead, are present, and all of them speak: Alexios speaks through his autobiographical text, and his father, mother and wife engage in rather lengthy dramatic monologues. The Life’s actual audiences, however, do not hear Alexios’ text. It is the words of his father, mother and wife that are heard. Through their speeches, movements and whole behaviour the members of Alexios’ family become the protagonists of the scene. Both the bystanders’ and the audiences’ gaze is fixed not upon Alexios, a new saint who lies dead before them, but upon the staging of his family’s tragedy: upon his father, who as soon as he hears Alexios’ text ‘immediately stands up from his chair, and tears his tunic, and pulls the hair of his head, … and runs quickly to the honourable relic saying: “Woe me, my son” …’ (§9.15–18); upon his mother who, running ‘like a lioness … tearing her garments’ (§10.25–26), and shouting her deep sorrow, throws her face upon Alexios’ hands; and upon his wife who appears in black, lamenting. Even though from a theological viewpoint Alexios’ family members are not supposed to grieve over his death, but to rejoice instead, the hagiographer does not fail, as we have seen, to illustrate in the most vivid way the family’s tragedy. In one of the versions of the legend (BHG 54), the narrator even goes so far as to accentuate further the family’s tragedy by interrupting the flow of the narration to address his audience with the following words: ‘O faithful audience, Christ’s army   See the edition of the epigram in Brooks 2006, pp. 228–9.

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of recruits, lend me, the storyteller, your ears for a while so that you may know with accuracy with which painful words then the parents greatly mourned from the bottom of their heart over [the death] of their son’ (p. 198).25 Here the narrator’s comment reveals an interest, on both the author’s part and that of his audience, in melodramatic scenes. Such scenes seem to have provided medieval audiences with a particular pleasure and fascination because they allowed them to identify with the heroes or heroines through strong emotions. As William Barron suggests, the ‘lasting appeal’ of popular narratives results ‘from the universal nature of the emotions which the listener is invited to share by identifying with the hero (or, quite commonly, heroine) in the exploration of experience through feeling rather than conscious thought’.26 It is in their attempt to satisfy their audiences’ need for this kind of pleasure that the authors of the various versions of Alexios’ legend emphasised the human drama of his family members by placing them at the very centre of their narratives. The popularity of the legend manifests in the best way possible how successful they have been in their endeavour. If we agree with the extensively used metaphor that literature is the mirror of certain social realities, the study of Byzantine hagiography might lead us to some conclusions concerning family and kinship ties in Byzantine society. The various versions of Alexios’ legend, the Life of John Calybites and other saints’ Lives, reveal that Byzantine people either treated family and kinship bonds as very important or were expected to regard them as such. Hagiographical texts whose protagonists did not dissolve their family relationships after entering holy orders offered their Byzantine audiences models of exemplary kinship bonds that they were invited to imitate within the framework of their own families. It seems that, contrary to widely held opinion, Byzantine monastics did not at all times follow, or were not always obliged to put into practice, the Biblical maxim according to which Jesus’ followers should ‘hate [their] own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters’ (Luke 14.25–26). Bibliography Primary Sources Life of Alexios, the Man of God, ed. Esteves Pereira (1900); Halkin and Festugière (1984), pp. 80–92; Rösler (1905), pp. 118–54; Massmann 1843, pp. 192–200. Life of Euphrosyne, ed. Boucherie (1883). Life of John Calybites, ed. Lampsides (1966). Life of Macrina, ed. Maraval 1971, pp. 136–267; trans. Corrigan 1987, and Silvas 2008, pp. 109–48.   See the edition in Massmann 1843, pp. 192–200.   Barron 1987, p. 3.

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Life of Mary/Marinos, ed. M. Richard (1975); trans. in Talbot (ed.) (1996b), pp. 7–12. Life of Mary the Younger, AASS Nov. 4 (1925), pp. 603–705; trans. in Talbot (ed.) (1996b), pp. 254–89. Life of Matrona, AASS Nov. 3 (1910), pp. 790–813; trans. in Talbot (ed.) (1996b), pp. 18–64. Life of Theodora of Thessalonike, ed. Paschalides 1991, pp. 66–188; trans. in Talbot (ed.) (1996b), pp. 164–237. Life of Thomaïs of Lesbos, AASS Nov. 4 (1925), pp. 234–42; trans. in Talbot (ed.) (1996b), pp. 297–322. Livistros and Rodamne, ed. Agapitos (2006). Physiologus, ed. Sbordone (1936). Secondary Sources Agapitos, P.A. (2006), Αφήγησις Λιβίστρου και Ροδάμνης. Κριτική Έκδοση της Διασκευής α (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece). Amiaud, Arthur (1889), La légende syriaque de saint Alexis, l’homme de Dieu (Paris: E. Bouillon). Angelov, Dimiter (2009), ‘Emperors and Patriarchs as Ideal Children and Adolescents’, in Arietta Papaconstantinou and Alice-Mary Talbot (eds), Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks), pp. 85–126. Ashbrook Harvey, Susan (1990), Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley: University of California Press). Ashbrook Harvey, Susan (1996), ‘Sacred Bonding: Mothers and Daughters in Early Syriac Hagiography’, JECS, 4: pp. 27–56. Barron, W.R.J. (1987), English Medieval Romance (London and New York: Longman), repr. 1990. Boucherie, A. (1883), ‘Vita sanctae Euphrosynae secundum textum graecum primaevum nunc primum edita’, AB, 2: pp. 196–205. Boulhol, Pascal (1996), Αναγνωρισμός: la scène de reconnaissance dans l’hagiographie antique et médiévale (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence). Brooks, Sarah (2006), ‘Poetry and Female Patronage in Late Byzantine Tomb Decoration: Two Epigrams by Manuel Philes’, DOP, 60: pp. 223–48. Constantinou, Stavroula (2005), Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women (Uppsala: Uppsala University). Constantinou, Stavroula (2014), ‘Performing Gender in the Lives of Lay Saints’, BMGS, 38. Corrigan, Kevin (1987), The Life of Saint Macrina by Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (Toronto: Peregrina).

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Esteves Pereira, Francisco Maria (1900), ‘Legende grecque de l’homme de Dieu Saint Alexis’, AB, 19: 241–53. Halkin, François, and Festugière, A.-J. (1984), Dix texts inédits tirés du ménologe impérial de Koutloumous (Geneva: P. Cramer). Ivanov, Sergey A. (2006), Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, trans. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kiousopoulou, Antonia (1997), Χρόνος και ηλικίες στη βυζαντινή κοινωνία: η κλίμακα των ηλικιών από τα αγιολογικά κείμενα της μέσης εποχής (7ος–11ος αι.) (Athens: Institute for Neohellenic Research). Lampsides, O. (1966), ‘Βατικανοί κώδικες περιέχοντες τον βίον αγίου Ιωάννου του Καλυβίτου’, Archeion Pontou, 28: pp. 3–36. Maraval, Pierre (1971), Grégoire de Nysse, Vie de Sainte Macrine. Introduction, texte critique, traduction notes et index (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf). Massmann, Hans Ferdinand (1843), Sanct Alexius Leben in acht gereimten mittlehochdeuschen Behandlungen (Leipzig: G. Basse). Morris, Rosemary (1981), ‘The Political Saint of the Eleventh Century’, in Sergei Hackel (ed.), The Byzantine Saint (London: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius), pp. 43–50. Paschalides, Symeon A. (1991), Ο βίος της οσιομυροβλύτιδος Θεοδώρας της εν Θεσσαλονίκη. Δίηγηση περί της μεταθέσεως του τιμίου λειψάνου της οσίας Θεοδώρας. Εισαγωγή, κριτικό κείμενο, μετάφραση, σχόλια (Thessaloniki: Holy Metropolis of Thessaloniki). Pratsch, Thomas (2005), Der hagiographische Topos: griechische Heiligenviten in mittelbyzantinischer Zeit (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Pratsch, Thomas (2007), ‘Rhetorik in der byzantinischen Hagiographie: Die Prooimia der Heiligenviten’, in Michael Grünbart (ed.), Theatron: Rhetorische Kultur in Spätantike und Mittelalter (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), pp. 377–408. Richard, M. (1975), ‘La vie ancienne de sainte Marie surnommée Marinos’, in Eligius Dekkers (ed.), Corona Gratiarum: Miscellanea Patristica, Historica et Liturgica Eligio Dekkers O.S.B. XII lustra complenti oblata (Bruges: Sint Pietersabdej), pp. 83–94; repr. in M. Richard (ed.), Opera minora III (Turnhout, 1977), pp. 83–94. Robertson, Duncan (1995), The Medieval Saints’ Lives: Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum). Rösler, Margarete (1905), Die Fassungen der Alexius-Legende mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der mittelenglischen Versionen (Vienna and Leipzig: W. Braumüller). Sbordone, Francesco (1936), Physiologus (Milan: Aedibus Societatis ‘Dante Alighieri’). Silvas, Anna M. (2008), Macrina the Younger, Philosopher of God (Turnhout: Brepols). Talbot, Alice-Mary (1990), ‘The Byzantine Family and the Monastery’, DOP, 44: pp. 119–29.

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Talbot, Alice-Mary (1996a), ‘Family Cults in Byzantium: The Case of St Theodora of Thessalonike’, in J.O. Rosenqvist (ed.), Λειμών: Studies Presented to Lennart Rydén on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Uppsala: Uppsala University), pp. 49–69. Talbot, Alice-Mary (ed.) (1996b), Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks).

Chapter 14

La Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique, un écrit familial Michel Kaplan

Considérer la Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique (BHG 1737) et le récit du transfert de ses reliques (BHG 1739) comme un dossier familial est loin d’être une nouveauté.1 Cette question a fait l’objet de plusieurs publications, notamment un article d’Évelyne Patlagean,2 l’introduction de la dernière édition par S.A. Paschalidès et surtout un article d’Alice-Mary Talbot,3 tout comme, de façon plus brève, son introduction à la traduction de la Vie et de la Translation dans Holy Women of Byzantium.4 L’article de Talbot a beau être extrêmement complet, nous voudrions ici discuter quelques points sur lesquels, à mon sens, la réflexion peut être conduite plus loin. Il s’agira notamment de revenir sur les commanditaires de la Vie et de la Translation et sur les raisons de cette orientation résolution familiale. C’est un jeune clerc de Thessalonique, Grégoire, qui a écrit la Vie, la Translation et les Miracles de Théodora. La Translation, accompagnée d’une version remaniée et abrégée de la Vie (BHG 1738), ne nous est parvenue que dans une paraphrase ultérieure, dont le premier manuscrit date du xive siècle, alors que nous disposons de ce qui semble être une version proche de l’original pour la Vie dont le manuscrit le plus ancien est du xiie siècle.5 Dans le dernier chapitre de la Translation, Grégoire, ‘le plus humble des clercs’ (ὁ ἐλάχιστος τῶν κληρικῶν), explique écrire ‘dans la seconde année du départ [de Théodora]

1   La dernière édition de ces deux textes est celle de Paschalidès 1991. L’édition est accompagnée d’une traduction en grec moderne. 2   Patlagean 1984. 3   Talbot 1996a. 4   Talbot 1996b, pp. 159–63. 5   Étude complète du dossier hagiographique dans Paschalidès 1991, pp. 28–40. La Translation est donc sans doute également une paraphrase abrégée; mais nous ne possédons que ce manuscrit. D’une façon générale, vu l’importance de la Vie et de la Translation et celle du culte de Théodora de Thessalonique, la tradition manuscrite est bien peu importante. Cela n’empêche pas Théodora de figurer dans le Synaxaire de Constantinople. Elle figure aussi dans un synaxaire inédit du xve siècle conservé à la Bibliothèque Nationale d’Athènes.

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vers Dieu’.6 Dans le chapitre introductif de la Vie,7 l’auteur exposait déjà qu’il écrivait pour l’anniversaire de la mort de la sainte, donc le second anniversaire, le 29 août 894. Comme la translation a eu lieu le 3 août 893,8 Grégoire a eu tout le temps de préparer ces deux textes, intimement liés, tant sont fréquents dans la Vie les renvois à ce qui va être écrit dans la Translation.9 Le récit de la translation est suivi d’une série de six miracles, qui semblent précéder celle-ci. Si nous pouvons accorder quelque confiance à la Translation dans l’état où elle nous est parvenue, Grégoire comptait parmi ceux à qui son œuvre s’adressait les clercs et moines de Thessalonique, précisément ceux qui avaient, au départ, refusé que Théodora bénéficie d’une tombe séparée de celle des autres moniales; Grégoire a écrit pour prouver qu’ils avaient eu tort et pour empêcher toute contre-attaque de ceux-ci.10 Théodora (PmbZ 7285) est morte le 29 août 89211 au monastère SaintÉtienne de Thessalonique, où elle était entrée 55 ans auparavant, en 837. À ce moment-là, et depuis 868, si la chronologie interne de la Vie est exacte,12 l’abbesse est sa propre fille Théopistè (PmbZ 8377): Théodora lui avait prescrit que son corps fût enseveli séparément et seul,13 alors que les moniales étaient normalement ensevelies dans un tombeau commun.14 Comme nous l’avons vu, le clergé officiel et les moines de Thessalonique, sans aucun doute les moines les mieux établis, s’y opposèrent et Théodora est d’abord enterrée avec les autres moniales décédées. Mais des miracles commencent à se produire auprès du tombeau commun. À l’aube du 24 juin 893, une des plaques de marbre qui fermaient celui-ci se soulève et se brise avec fracas, en présence du prêtre Théodote alors en prière,15 tandis qu’une paralytique sourde et muette de Berroia

  Translation des reliques de Théodora 20, affirmation énoncée par deux fois (Paschalidès 1991, pp. 230 et 232). Voilà une Vita importante qui est l’œuvre d’un clerc, non d’un moine; les préoccupations ne sont pas forcément les mêmes. 7   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 1, Paschalidès 1991, p. 66. 8   Translation des reliques de Théodora 7, Paschalidès 1991, p. 204. 9   Au c. 57 de la Vie, contant plusieurs miracles posthumes, l’hagiographe fait intervenir ‘le nommé Théodote, dont mon récit à venir révélera la dévotion envers Théodora’, Paschalidès 1991, p. 178. Les deux textes, Vie et Translation, sont écrits à la suite l’un de l’autre. 10   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 43, Paschalidès 1991, p. 154. 11   L’hagiographe date cette mort avec une précision absolue: an du monde 6400, dans sa quatre-vingtième année, dans la sixième année du règne de Léon et Alexandre, dont le 29 août est précisément le dernier jour; il n’y manque que l’indiction! Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 45, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 156–8. 12   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 37, Paschalidès 1991, p. 138. 13   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 40, Paschalidès 1991, p. 150. 14   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 43, Paschalidès 1991, p. 154. 15   Cf. supra n. 9. 6

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est guérie; Théopistè, alertée par le bruit, accourt et assiste au miracle.16 Dans les jours qui suivent, les deux autres plaques de marbre se brisent successivement dans les mêmes circonstances. Aidée de Théodote, Théopistè fait réaliser par un prêtre tailleur de pierres un sarcophage décoré de sculptures à l’extérieur et muni de trous pour l’écoulement du myron;17 quelqu’un fournit un couvercle de bois muni d’une ouverture à la hauteur de la tête, fermée par un clapet aisé à soulever.18 Pour éviter une nouvelle opposition du clergé officiel au transfert de la relique dans le sarcophage, Théopistè profite de ce que l’archevêque Jean est parti à Constantinople avec tous ses suffragants19 pour l’élection et la consécration du patriarche Antoine Kauléas (fin juillet ou août 893)20 pour faire opérer le transfert de la relique le 3 août 893, créant ainsi un fait accompli sur lequel l’archevêque pourrait difficilement revenir. L’auteur, Grégoire, aida son père Jean, qui comptait au nombre des sept prêtres requis pour accomplir la cérémonie et que l’on convoqua discrètement après le crépuscule: il tint les pieds de la sainte pour la déposer dans le sarcophage.21 Si la Vie et la Translation de Théodora constituent une histoire de famille, elles contiennent une histoire de famille secondaire concernant l’auteur. Comme nous l’avons vu, il a assisté au transfert. Son père faisait partie de cette partie du clergé de Thessalonique qui désobéit à l’archevêque et à la majorité des clercs et moines de la ville; ceux-ci refusaient la sépulture séparée réclamée de son vivant par la sainte, du moins aux dires de l’hagiographe, car ils voulaient empêcher le surgissement d’un sanctuaire à miracles qui entrerait en compétition avec le sanctuaire principal de la ville, celui de saint Dèmètrios qu’ils contrôlaient. La position des clercs ayant effectué le transfert, dont le propre père de Grégoire,   Translation des reliques de Théodora 2, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 192–4.   Translation des reliques de Théodora’ 3, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 194–6. Sage

16 17

précaution prise par Théopistè ou interprétation de l’auteur au vu de la suite des évènements? 18   Translation des reliques de Théodora’ 4, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 196–8. 19   C’est ainsi que nous comprenons ‘σὺν πᾶσιν τοῖς ἀρχιεῦσιν’. Mais cela peut inclure également les officiers de l’église cathédrale de Thessalonique. 20   Notre source est la seule qui donne des précisions sur la date de nomination de ce fidèle de Stylianos Zaoutzès: Grumel 1936, p.  6. Tougher 1997 ne donne pas davantage de précision. En revanche, la translation a lieu le 3 août 893 (Translation des reliques de Théodora 7, Paschalidès 1991, p. 204). Il n’était pas question d’attendre plus longtemps, par exemple le premier anniversaire de la mort de Théodora qui aurait mieux convenu, car l’archevêque et sa suite pouvaient revenir à tout moment et s’opposer à la translation. Cette hâte explique l’absence de récit de la Vie et de la Translation composé sur le moment et le renvoi de l’ouvrage au second anniversaire de la mort, peu éloigné du premier anniversaire du transfert. 21   Le récit du transfert, auquel Théopistè est la seule moniale admise, occupe les c. 4 à 7 de la Translation, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 198–204. Comme le fait remarquer Talbot, ces sept prêtres sont peut-être les mêmes que ceux requis par Théopistè pour assurer la liturgie usuelle des quarante jours qui suivent la mort de la sainte (Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 46, Paschalidès 1991, p. 158): Talbot 1996b, p. 221 n. 295.

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était donc difficile et l’on comprend que son fils veuille assurer la défense de ce groupe. C’est ainsi que Grégoire inclut dans les miracles qui suivent la translation deux épisodes favorables aux prêtres qui ont opéré celle-ci. C’est d’abord Théopistè, fille du prêtre Théodote, que la sainte guérit par deux fois.22 Ainsi, au travers de Théopistè et de son père Théodote, la sainte bénit les clercs qui ont accompli la translation. Puis c’est la propre sœur de l’auteur, Marthe, qui est frappée par la variole et que la sainte guérit. Ce miracle est d’ailleurs bien situé, car il est le dernier.23 Ainsi, à travers Marthe, la sainte bénit le père, qui a participé à la translation, et le fils qui écrit la Vie et la Translation, et donc toute la famille. De façon subliminale, l’auteur tente de s’assurer que les lecteurs ou auditeurs de son récit vont croire aux miracles que raconte un auteur ainsi béni à travers sa famille, façon de combattre l’hostilité méprisante du clergé officiel de Thessalonique. Revenons à Théodora et à sa famille pour cerner la qualité des informations dont dispose Grégoire. Si nous admettons que, en 894, selon ses propres termes à l’extrême fin de la Translation, Grégoire est bien, comme susdit, ‘le plus humble des clercs’,24 il doit être né au début des années 870. Les informations qu’il donne sur la mort de la sainte sont donc de première main. Cependant, lorsque nous lisons la vie dans son ensemble, nous constatons que l’auteur ne raconte la vie réelle de la sainte qu’à grands traits: par exemple, il ne consacre que quatre chapitres aux vingt-trois années qui séparent la nomination de Théopistè (868) comme abbesse du monastère Saint-Étienne où résidait sa mère depuis 837 et la dernière année de la vie de Théodora (891–892). Il peut avoir obtenu les informations qu’il donne pour la période allant de 837 à 892 auprès des moniales de Saint-Étienne dont il est un familier. En revanche, à part les grandes étapes chronologiques qu’il détaille de façon plutôt convaincante, il est beaucoup moins bien informé sur ce qui précède, comme il l’avoue d’ailleurs lui-même dans le deuxième chapitre, qui reste purement introductif : Comme il est de coutume lorsque l’on raconte l’histoire (ἱστοριῶν) d’une personne de décrire qui elle est et d’où elle vient, d’énoncer le détail de ses caractéristiques en ce monde, je vais le faire (car il n’est pas permis de les omettre), de façon à donner au corps du récit une harmonie continue, pour le

  Translation des reliques de Théodora 13-15, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 214–-20.   Translation des reliques de Théodora 16-20, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 222–30. On

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remarquera au passage que ces deux miracles sont longuement détaillés, tandis que les autres sont en général évoqués beaucoup plus brièvement. Les deux miracles sont séparés par une première conclusion, avant que Grégoire ne se décide à ajouter l’histoire de sa sœur, puis à justifier ce récit en arguant que c’est ce miracle qui l’a poussé à écrire pour combler le manque de récit des exploits de la sainte, alors qu’elle est déjà morte depuis deux ans. 24   Translation des reliques de Théodora 20, Paschalidès 1991, p. 232.

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faire connaître des gens pieux et qui désirent savoir, sans rien laisser de côté de ce qui doit être inclus.25

Les faits rapportés ne sont donc pas forcément exacts, sauf la chronologie globale que l’auteur a pu connaître d’après l’âge de la sainte à sa mort; mais ils expriment la conception de Grégoire, ce que l’on connaît ou veut faire connaître de la famille de Théodora et des premières années de sa vie, dans la Thessalonique de la fin du ixe siècle. C’est à l’évidence insuffisant pour établir des faits, mais cela traduit sans doute de façon fidèle ce que la puissante famille de Théodora entendait faire croire en 894, même si, nous allons le voir, il se glisse des failles dans cette œuvre qui, comme tout récit hagiographique, est avant tout de propagande. Tout le monde s’accorde sur le fait que Théodora est issue d’une famille aristocratique de Thessalonique. Comme Grégoire l’écrit au moment où il va inclure dans son récit la vie de l’archevêque Antoine, il ‘aurait voulu décrire la vie de bon nombre des parents de Théodora qui appartenaient aussi à une famille de haut rang (γένους ἀνωτάτου)’.26 La première parente dont nous entendons parler est l’abbesse du monastère Saint-Luc à Thessalonique, ville où Théodora, alors appelée de son nom de baptême, Agapè, et son mari, fuyant les raids arabes sur leur terre d’origine, l’île d’Égine, se sont réfugiés vers 830 et où ils ont eu trois enfants. Les deux plus petits meurent jeunes;27 les parents, submergés de douleur, décident d’offrir l’aînée, Théopistè,28 à Dieu. Ils s’adressent à Catherine (PmbZ 148), sœur de l’archevêque Antoine alors exilé, parente (συγγενοῦς) de 25   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 2, Paschalidès 1991, p. 70. Ce point de vue n’est pas partagé par tous les hagiographes. Méthode, écrivant la Vie d’Euthyme de Sardes (BHG 2145), explique que ‘sa famille, sa naissance et, comme je l’ai dit, l’accomplissement du héros, de l’enfance à l’âge d’homme, ne sont pas consignés ici, pour la raison que nous ne les connaissons pas et que, forcément, cela n’apporterait à personne de profit’: Gouillard † 1987, c. 2, p. 23. 26   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 10, Paschalidès 1991, p. 84. 27   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 8, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 78–80. La Vie dit que la mort de ces enfants vient encore ajouter au chagrin de vivre en un lieu inconnu et d’avoir tout perdu. Dans sa traduction Talbot 1996b, p. 169, ajoute au texte (‘le troisième et celui de milieu moururent bientôt’) qu’ils moururent peu après la naissance; en réalité, cette conclusion est excessive. La fille aînée survivante entre au monastère à six ans (Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 9, Paschalidès 1991, p. 82); les autres sont visiblement morts peu avant, donc jeunes, mais pas forcément nouveaux-nés. Si, comme il paraît vraisemblable, Agapè-Théodora, son père et son mari ont fui Égine vers 830, Agapè étant âgée de 18 ans, Théoktistè, qui a six ans à son entrée au monastère en 836/837, est née à Thessalonique, et les autres enfants a fortiori. 28   C’est le nom qu’elle reçoit lors de son entrée au monastère, Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 9, Paschalidès 1991, p. 82; son nom de baptême n’est pas mentionné. Que les petites filles soient élevées au monastère n’est pas une nouveauté; mais l’âge de consécration comme moniale ne saurait être six ans. La Vie dit que la fillette eut les cheveux

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Théodora, abbesse du monastère cité plus haut.29 Par la suite, Théopistè sera transférée au monastère Saint-Étienne, rejoignant ainsi sa mère.30 Une fois Théopistè entrée à Saint-Luc, l’auteur s’offre une digression de neuf chapitres,31 qui constituent une Vie dans la Vie, celle d’Antoine (PmbZ 556), autre parent de Théodora, et de loin le plus éminent, ce qui lui vaut ce traitement particulier.32 Antoine était métropolite de Dyrrachion33 avant la reprise de l’iconoclasme en 815, comme la suite le montrera. Survient l’iconoclasme. Antoine s’oppose à Léon V (813–820), qui le convoque34 et à qui il tient un discours coupés (ἀπέκειρε) par un homme pieux (εὐλαβής), qui n’est qualifié ni de prêtre ni de moine; la confusion avec la tonsure définitive est évidemment voulue. 29   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 9, Paschalidès 1991, p. 82. La notice de Janin 1975, p. 395, est extrêmement succincte; localisation par Talbot 1996b, p. 170 n. 47 et 48. La Vie dit que le monastère se trouve sur la grande route (λεωφόρος) qui mène à la porte Kasséandréotique, celle par laquelle la Via Egnatia quitte Thessalonique; il se situe donc à proximité de cette artère majeure, à l’est de la ville. Il n’est pas dit explicitement que Catherine est l’abbesse, mais comme les parents lui offrent (προσφέρουσι) leur fille, cela semble vraisemblable. 30   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 25, Paschalidès 1991, p. 114. Quand a lieu ce transfert de Théopistè, cela n’est pas clair. Dans la Vie, il ne s’est écoulé que trois chapitres depuis que, en 837, une fois son mari mort, Agapè s’est faite moniale à Saint-Étienne sous le nom de Théodora (c. 21 et 22, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 104–8). Suit un chapitre sur la bonne conduite de Théodora; puis, au c. 24, ces qualités la font choisir par l’abbesse, qui est aussi une parente (cf. infra), comme ecclésiarque (τὴν τῆς ἐκκλησίας ποιεῖσθαι φροντίδα καὶ ὑπηρεσίαν). Quelques années ont dû s’écouler depuis l’entrée de Théodora au monastère. Pas trop toutefois: Théopistè est qualifiée d’enfant. Comme le fait remarquer Talbot 1996b, p. 185 n. 131, Théopistè est sans doute encore novice, ce qui permet de la transférer sans contrevenir aux canons. 31   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 10–18, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 84–102. 32   Sur Antoine, Paschalidès 1994. De façon peu compréhensible, dans cet article comme dans la chronologie figurant dans l’édition (1991, pp. 59–60), l’auteur, qui enregistre dans le texte (c. 17, Paschalidès 1991, p. 100) comme date de mort ‘le 2 novembre de la septième indiction’, estime qu’il s’agit de 844 et non de 843 (cf. infra). 33   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique c. 10, Paschalidès 1991, p. 86. La Vie qualifie Antoine d’archevêque, à Dyrrachion comme à Thessalonique. Antoine reçoit deux lettres de Théodore Stoudite pendant son exil, entre 823 et 826: Fatouros 1992, n° 462, pp. 659– 61, et 542, pp 818–19. La première est adressée à ‘Ἀντωνίῳ τοῦ Δυρραχίου’; la seconde ‘Ἀντωνίῳ ἐπισκόπῳ’. Dans la lettre suivante, un moine nommé Denis a bénéficié de conseils qui l’ont guéri (ἱαθεῖσα) d’une maladie spirituelle de la part de ‘notre père et archevêque de Dyrrachion’ (p. 820). Tant pour Dyrrachion que pour Thessalonique, l’auteur de la Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique utilise systématiquement le titre d’archevêque; les listes épiscopales qualifient ces deux sièges de métropoles. Archevêque est donc ici, comme chez Théodore Stoudite, un prédicat honorifique, non un terme technique. Il est fréquent dans le cas de Thessalonique. Nous utiliserons le terme de métropolite, sauf quand nous citons ou suivons de près la source. 34   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 12, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 88–90.

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digne de ceux que l’on trouve dans les plus élaborées des vies iconodoules.35 Léon finit par l’interrompre et lui inflige des tortures non précisées et le condamne à un exil perpétuel.36 Comme un certain nombre d’autres exilés, il est rappelé par Michel II (820–829), sans retrouver de charge, et autorisé à vivre chez lui, sans que l’on sache s’il s’agit de Dyrrachion ou de Thessalonique; la seconde solution semble la meilleure, car, faute de siège épiscopal, on voit mal ce qu’Antoine ferait à Dyrrachion, alors que sa famille est implantée à Thessalonique.37 La Vie ne dit rien du règne de Théophile (829–842), bien que la vie monastique de Théodora ait commencé à cette époque. Lorsque l’orthodoxie est rétablie, donc en mars 843, Antoine, qui semble être un vieillard, est nommé archevêque de Thessalonique par un décret synodal (ψήφῳ συνοδικῇ). Il succède ainsi à Léon le Mathématicien (PmbZ 4440), déposé, mais pour peu de temps, car il meurt dès le 2 novembre 843.38 La correspondance de Théodore Stoudite garantit l’historicité de l’exil d’Antoine, confesseur du second iconoclasme. Pour autant, le long développement de Grégoire, écrit cinquante et un ans après la mort du prélat, est situé de façon entièrement artificielle dans le développement de son sujet principal; lorsque le prélat est mort, Grégoire explique qu’il a assez parlé de ce sujet et qu’il a abandonné son récit. Il me paraît donc que cette ‘Vie dans la Vie’ est destinée avant tout à fournir à la famille de Théodora un brevet d’iconodoulie dont elle avait sans doute éminemment besoin, nous y reviendrons. De plus, elle permet à l’auteur un dernier développement sur le lieu d’ensevelissement du prélat, dans la chapelle du Prodrome située dans l’aile nord de l’église Saint-Dèmètrios; en 889, lors de la mort de l’archevêque Méthode que l’on enterre au même endroit, le corps d’Antoine n’est pas corrompu.39 Dans le climat de rivalité qui règne en 894, quand Grégoire écrit son récit, entre le monastère Saint-Étienne et le clergé de Thessalonique attaché à maintenir les privilèges de Saint-Dèmètrios, la présence de ce corps préservé, synonyme de démonstration de sainteté, d’un parent de Théodora, sonne comme une déclaration de non-agression de la part du monastère Saint-Étienne. Grégoire raconte que, si le monastère Saint-Luc de Thessalonique a pu survivre durant l’iconoclasme alors que ses moniales étaient ‘orthodoxes’, donc iconodoules, et que l’abbesse était la propre sœur du confesseur Antoine, c’est vraisemblablement (τάχα) à cause de la petite taille du couvent, qui conduisit les ‘brûleurs d’images’ à le traiter par le mépris.40 Peu après que les époux eurent confié Théopistè à ce monastère, le mari de Théodora, alors âgée de 25 ans, meurt. Elle se trouve ainsi libre de satisfaire ‘le désir   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 13-15, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 90–98.   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 16, Paschalidès 1991, p. 98. Le lieu d’exil n’est

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pas non plus précisé. 37   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 17, Paschalidès 1991, p. 100. 38   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 17, Paschalidès 1991, p. 100. 39   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 18, Paschalidès 1991, p. 102. 40   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 9, Paschalidès 1991, p. 82.

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qui lui tenait à cœur depuis tant d’années de prendre l’habit monastique’.41 Elle se réfugie, nous dit la Vie,42 auprès de sa parente (αὐτῆς συγγένετις)43 Anne, abbesse du monastère Saint-Étienne (PmbZ 455). D’après la Vie, cette dernière aurait subi les persécutions d’un certain Choirosphaktès (PmbZ 1073), qualifié de ‘δορυφόρου τινος τοῦ τυραννοῦντος’ (‘mercenaire du tyran’ – Léon V ou Théophile).44 Nouvel élément qui vient confirmer la volonté de l’auteur de présenter la famille comme un pilier combattant de l’iconodoulie. Notons que cette persécution, qui peut dater de Léon V ou de Théophile, n’empêche nullement ce monastère, prétendument iconodoule, de connaître une certaine prospérité, car il n’est pas qualifié de petit comme Saint-Luc, et d’admettre une aristocrate cette fois-ci adulte. Or nous sommes en 837, au plus fort de la politique iconoclaste de Théophile. Anne a quelques raisons de faire bon accueil à celle qu’elle qualifie de ‘mon sang et mon enfant’:45 elle offre 100 nomismata au monastère (ἑκατὸν ἐν χαρἀγματι χρυσοῦς).46 Anne lui propose d’être novice, ce qui dure en principe trois ans; Agapè refuse et nous avons vu qu’elle avait des arguments sonnants et trébuchants à faire valoir, que l’hagiographe cache derrière une menace purement spirituelle de responsabilité au jour du Jugement. Anne cède sans délai et fait venir le prêtre qui tonsure la nouvelle moniale désormais appelée Théodora.47 Du coup, le monastère reçoit le reste de la fortune et les trois servantes de la nouvelle moniale.

  Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 19, Paschalidès 1991, p. 104.   ‘Προσφυγεῖν’. Le sens de ‘trouver refuge’ ne vient pas d’une quelconque

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persécution; son mari semble être paisiblement mort dans ses bras, et elle a tout le temps de diviser la fortune dont elle a hérité en trois parties, le premier tiers étant donné aux pauvres pour le salut de l’âme de son mari. La nécessité d’un refuge provient vraisemblablement de son état de veuve, sans plus d’enfants puisque la dernière est devenue moniale. Elle pourrait éventuellement se remarier, mais elle fuit cette perspective (la Vie rappelle qu’elle aurait sans doute préféré devenir moniale que de contracter mariage dès l’origine, ayant pris dès ce moment le dessus sur ses passions charnelles) en se réfugiant auprès de sa parente. Notons qu’une sœur de Anne est également moniale dans ce monastère décidément familial: Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 34, Paschalidès 1991, p. 154. 43   L’expression semble signifier qu’il s’agit d’une parente d’Agapè-Théodora, non de son mari. 44   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 20, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 104–6. C’est le premier personnage portant ce nom qui nous soit connu. Le suivant est Léon (PmbZ 4527): Kolias 1939. Le nom devient plus courant au sein de l’aristocratie byzantine par la suite, au témoignage d’une abondante sigillographie. Voir en dernier lieu un résumé sur cette famille dans Cheynet and Théodoridis 2010, n° 52 (Georges Choirosphaktès, juge du Charsianon), p. 65. Sur Thessalonique au ixe siècle et sur les monastères qui y existent, on se reportera à Malamut 2005. 45   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 21, Paschalidès 1991, p. 106. 46   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 20, Paschalidès 1991, p. 106. 47   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 21, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 106–8. Sur la durée du noviciat et sa suppression possible pour une adulte, cf. Talbot 1996b, p. 182 n. 111.

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La difficulté politique que nous venons d’énoncer n’est pas la seule que pose le récit d’admission de Théodora à Saint-Étienne.48 Lorsqu’Agapè rencontre pour la première fois Anne pour lui demander l’habit monastique, celle-ci avance les relations familiales, comme nous l’avons vu, mais aussi les mérites spirituels de la postulante, car elle est ‘bien au courant du mode de vie [qu’elle a] mené depuis qu’elle portait ses habits d’enfant’.49 L’auteur veut nous faire croire qu’Anne connaît Agapè depuis son enfance. Pourtant, plus loin dans la Vie, il nous expose qu’Anne a vécu au monastère depuis sa propre enfance, certainement à Thessalonique et non à Égine, où Agapè est supposée être née et avoir vécu jusqu’aux premières années de son mariage et sa fuite devant les raids arabes vers 830. Ce n’est d’ailleurs pas la seule invraisemblance, car, dans ce paragraphe consacré à la mort de Anne, l’auteur déclare que Théodora a 68 ans (nous serions donc en 880) et que l’abbesse a vécu 120 ans.50 Notons que cela l’aurait fait naître en 760, sous le règne de Constantin V (741–775) et, là encore, au plus fort de l’époque iconoclaste, ce qui ne l’aurait pas empêchée de devenir moniale dès son enfance. Et pourtant 880 est une date relativement proche de l’écriture de la Vie, ce qui n’empêche nullement Grégoire de donner dans le topos de la vie très longue de la sainte, très au-delà de ce que l’on trouve dans la plupart des récits hagiographiques mésobyzantins, où les centenaires restent rares. Dans ces conditions, la question se pose de savoir ce que nous pouvons croire de la Vie de Théodora par Grégoire, en dehors de ce que l’auteur a lui-même vu, c’est-à-dire avant tout la translation de la relique. Faute d’arguments, nous ne remettrons pas en cause plusieurs éléments dont certains sont pourtant discutables, comme la chronologie de la vie de la sainte. Nous acceptons les localisations, tant Égine pour la naissance que les monastères où elle plaça sa fille et où elle entra ellemême. Comme c’est selon toute apparence Théopistè qui a commandité l’œuvre de Grégoire, comme nous l’établirons plus bas, nous admettrons également que celleci a bien été transférée de Saint-Luc à Saint-Étienne, puis est devenue l’abbesse de ce dernier monastère, donc la mère spirituelle de sa mère physiologique, ce qui fournit à l’hagiographe ses morceaux de bravoure. La famille de Théodora étant l’une des plus éminentes de Thessalonique, nous admettrons également les liens familiaux allégués, d’autant qu’ils sont pour partie à l’origine de la promotion du culte de la sainte et que la Vie est, à notre sens, en partie conçue pour défendre cette famille, comme nous allons le revoir. Ce qui nous paraît donc exact, c’est qu’Agapè-Théodora est issue d’une famille aristocratique et que le métropolite Antoine ainsi que deux abbesses sont ses parentes. Dans ces conditions, si Agapè est bien née à Égine, c’est qu’une   Sur ce monastère, cf. Janin 1975, p. 411, et l’appendice de Paschalidès 1991, pp. 283–96. Pour cet auteur, le monastère changea de nom pour devenir Sainte-Théodora dès la translation de la relique de la sainte, même si les premières sources qui le mentionnent sous ce nom datent du xive siècle. Patlagean 1984 est plus prudente (cf. infra n. 60). 49   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 21, Paschalidès 1991, p. 106. 50   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 38, Paschalidès 1991, p. 140. 48

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branche de cette famille y a été exilée, car on voit mal des membres d’une telle famille s’établir volontairement sur cette île lointaine et comparativement peu hospitalière. Malgré cet exil, Agapè jouit d’une condition relativement aisée lorsque son mari meurt: trois servantes et quelques centaines de nomismata. Mais nous devons nous montrer précautionneux vis-à-vis de bien des détails donnés par Grégoire, notamment quand il s’agit de ce qui s’est passé à Égine, car lui-même, nous l’avons vu, nous prévient qu’il raconte les premières années de Théodora non parce qu’il en a eu une connaissance assurée, mais parce que c’est la coutume. Notre interrogation principale est la suivante. Théodora, baptisée Agapè51 par ses parents, avait de nombreux parents dans la couche dirigeante de Thessalonique. Selon l’auteur, l’abbesse Anne proclame être liée à elle par le sang, mais sans autre explication. Que faisaient donc les parents d’Agapè à Égine? Ces liens du sang venaient-ils de son père ou de sa mère? Malgré les incohérences relevées dans le discours de l’abbesse Anne, nous ne pouvons valablement contester qu’Agapè est bien née à Égine, car cette circonstance n’est pas essentielle, ni même utile dans la démonstration de sainteté qui est l’objectif principal de l’hagiographe. Comme la Vie la fait mourir dans sa quatre-vingtième année le 29 août 892, date que nous considérons comme certaine, elle doit être née aux alentours de 812. En 892, l’iconodoulie était la doctrine officielle de l’empire, mais tout le monde gardait en mémoire ce qui s’était passé durant la période iconoclaste, par exemple qui avait été, ou non, iconoclaste, comme en témoignent par exemple les écrits anti-iconoclastes d’un Aréthas de Césarée. Comme il est d’usage, la Vie présente les parents de la sainte. Contrairement à la Vie, nous commencerons par sa mère, appelée Chrysanthè (PmbZ 1148), fleur d’or.52 Comme l’a fait remarquer Marie-France Auzépy à propos de la famille de Philarète le Miséricordieux, les familles iconoclastes avaient l’habitude de donner des noms de fleur à leurs filles pour éviter les saints.53 Comme Chrysanthè meurt immédiatement après la naissance d’Agapè,54 nous n’apprenons pas grand chose d’elle, sinon qu’Agapè avait un frère diacre (PmbZ 549A) et une sœur (PmbZ 549B) morte jeune et moniale.55 Chrysanthè devait avoir juste un peu plus de 20 ans à sa mort en 812, compte tenu d’un âge au mariage souvent situé avant 15 ans, ce qui laisse bien la place à trois naissances. Elle était donc née vers 790. Ses propres parents s’étaient mariés sans doute peu avant; en tout cas, ils avaient grandi avant 51   Le prénom n’est pas courant: la seule mention dans la PmbZ renvoie à Théodora; une seule mention également pour la période dans Prosopography of the Byzantine World, pour la période 1025–1102. Notons toutefois qu’il est thessalonicien: Agapè, Irène et Chionè, veuves, auraient été martyrisées à Thessalonique sous Dioclétien (BHG 34), ou avec une quatrième nommée Anastasia (BHG 81–83b, mais en association variable). 52   Encore un prénom rare: c’est la seule mention dans la PmbZ (pour trois Chrysanthos) et il n’y en a pas dans la Prosopography of the Byzantine World (un Chrysanthos). 53   Auzépy 1993. 54   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 3, Paschalidès 1991, p. 72. 55   Frère et sœur cités, Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 6, Paschalidès 1991, p. 72.

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787, durant l’époque iconoclaste: ainsi, nous pensons que Chrysanthè provient d’une famille iconoclaste. Si ses parents prennent le risque de lui donner ce prénom après 787, c’est qu’ils étaient des iconoclastes plutôt convaincus. Tout porte donc à croire qu’elle est issue d’une famille aristocratique exilée, vraisemblablement de Thessalonique, pour ne pas avoir renoncé de façon suffisante à l’iconoclasme après 787. Ses parents durent se résoudre à lui trouver un mari dans cette petite île où l’on ne devait pas trouver d’autre famille du même niveau social qu’eux, surtout pour une fiancée issue d’un génos iconoclaste: le prôtopresbytéros de l’église cathédrale56 locale pouvait s’avérer un compromis acceptable. Intéressons-nous maintenant au père d’Agapè, un nommé Antoine (PmbZ 549). Il peut être tentant de relier ce prénom au métropolite de Dyrrachion puis de Thessalonique dont nous avons parlé, car il est courant d’user plusieurs fois du même prénom dans la même famille. Mais Antoine est un prénom très courant; comme le père d’Agapè va devenir moine à la fin de sa vie,57 Grégoire renvoie au fondateur du monachisme égyptien,58 et n’établit aucun lien avec le prélat. Pouvaitil néanmoins être un parent de celui-ci? Aux environs de 810, plus de 20 ans après le second concile de Nicée, nous ne voyons pas de raison pour qu’une partie de cette famille de haut rang demeure exilée à Égine; comme le prélat Antoine était approximativement du même âge que le père d’Agapè, en tout cas en gros de la même génération et avait été nommé métropolite de Dyrrachion après 787, il est peu vraisemblable qu’une partie de sa famille appartînt à la frange dure de l’iconoclasme au point d’être maintenue dans cet exil. Au reste, l’office de prôtopresbytéros d’un si petit évêché n’était pas une position qui convînt à un membre d’une famille appartenant à l’aristocratie. Dans les évêchés de second ordre, contrairement aux grandes métropoles, les prôtopresbytéroi venaient en général de l’humble clergé local.59 Dans ces conditions, nous estimons raisonnable de penser que les parents de Théodora à Thessalonique étaient liés par le sang à sa mère.60 Si nous poursuivons l’étude de l’histoire familiale d’Agapè-Théodora, nous constatons que la façon dont elle s’est mariée n’est pas claire, car Grégoire ne 56   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 3, Paschalidès 1991, p.  70: ‘τῷ κλήρῳ κατειλεγμένος τῆς ἐκεῖσε ἁγιωτάτης μεγάλης ἐκκλησίας καὶ πρωτοπρεσβύτερος γεγονώς’. 57   Après avoir suivi sa fille et son gendre à Thessalonique, peu soucieux de vivre dans une cité iconoclaste (nouveau brevet d’iconodoulie familiale délivré par Grégoire), il s’éloigne de la ville et se fait ermite jusqu’à la fin de sa vie, que l’auteur ne date pas: Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 7, Paschalidès 1991, p. 78. 58   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 3, Paschalidès 1991, p. 72. 59   Un siècle plus tard, le dossier du prôtopapas Nicéphore, prôtopresbytéros de l’évêché de Hiérissos en Chalcidique, montre un membre issu de la moyenne paysannerie, en pleine ascension sociale, à l’opposé de l’aristocratie: Actes d’Iviron, éd. Lefort, Oikonomidès, Papachryssanthou and Métrévéli 1985, n° 4 (982), pp. 123–9, n° 5 (982) pp. 132–4, n° 9 (995), p. 163, n° 12 (1001), pp. 178–9. 60   Patlagean 1984, p. 48, estime au contraire que c’est le père d’Agapè qui est porteur de cette parenté, sur le seul argument du prénom Antoine.

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dispose pas d’informations suffisantes. Elle fut fiancée à sept ans (819), l’âge légal minimum pour cet engagement,61 avec un jeune homme d’Égine qualifié d’issu d’une famille illustre (περιφανής).62 Pour autant, nous ne savons rien du mariage, qui ne pouvait pas être célébré avant les 12 ans d’Agapè (824); nous ne sommes même pas informés du prénom du fiancé, une chose étonnante, car nous le retrouvons jusqu’à sa mort en 837, mais ne plaide pas pour un personnage vraiment illustre. À ce stade, Égine est encore un endroit relativement tranquille. Mais, dans les années suivantes, l’île va être ravagée par les Arabes, à qui la conquête de la Crète (827) a ouvert le chemin de la piraterie en mer Égée.63 Le frère d’Agapè est tué. Son père et son mari décident de fuir à Thessalonique, où nous avons vu que premier avait de la famille.64 Aucun enfant du couple n’est mentionné à ce stade, ce qui signifie sans doute qu’ils n’en ont pas, car le sort des frères et sœur d’Agapè est mentionné. Quand ils arrivèrent à Thessalonique, ils sont remplis d’admiration par la situation de la ville et la tranquillité de la vie qu’on y mène; protégée par saint Dèmètrios, elle semble imprenable.65 Grégoire fait ainsi au passage l’éloge de sa ville, dans des termes d’autant plus remarquables, au moins sur ce point, qu’il écrit exactement dix ans avant le sac par les Arabes de Léon de Tripoli (904) qui va prouver qu’elle est tout sauf imprenable. À en croire la Vie, même le père d’Agapè ne connaissait pas la ville; il n’était pas un exilé de celle-ci, constatation qui renforce notre point de vue, à savoir que les liens familiaux de Théodora avec Thessalonique proviennent de sa mère. Si sa famille était originaire de Thessalonique, le père en aurait au moins entendu chanter les louanges. Agapè et son mari s’établissent en ville et voient naître, comme nous l’avons vu, trois enfants. Soit le mari d’Agapè a trouvé un bon métier – nous ne connaissons pas plus ses compétences que son prénom – soit Agapè a hérité quelque chose de sa parentèle aisée: moins de dix ans plus tard, à la mort de son mari, elle a de quoi apporter au monastère Saint-Étienne une dot coquette. Quant à son père, si l’on en croit la Vie, il se fait ermite pour échapper aux iconoclastes, ce qui prouve que, vers 830, une politique iconoclaste active était menée à Thessalonique; ceci n’empêche pas Agapè d’entrer dans un monastère tenu par une prétendue martyre des iconoclastes! Ce dernier point nous ramène à Grégoire, aux raisons pour lesquelles il écrit et à ce sur quoi il veut mettre l’accent. Il ne donne pas de raison explicite, mise à part 61   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 5, Paschalidès 1991, p. 74. La Vie raconte, contre tout bon sens, que, vu sa beauté, sa modestie et sa piété, une foule de gens de bonne naissance (ἄπειρος τῶν εὐπατριδῶν ἑσμός) la demande en mariage: Égine ne comptait vraisemblablement pas un nombre suffisant de véritables aristocrates pour que l’expression reflète une réalité. 62   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 5, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 74–6. 63   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 6, Paschalidès 1991, p. 76–8. 64   Le mari considère l’île comme sa patrie, ce qui semblerait vouloir dire qu’il en est originaire. Mais le même terme est utilisé pour la famille d’Agapè. 65   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 7, Paschalidès 1991, p. 78.

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la constatation factuelle que deux ans se sont écoulés depuis la mort de la sainte et que personne n’a encore écrit de récit de la vie et des miracles de celle-ci.66 Qui a commandité son ouvrage? Deux donneurs d’ordre viennent à l’esprit. Grégoire était le fils de l’un des prêtres qui a participé au transfert de la relique de Théodora de la tombe commune des moniales à son sarcophage, profitant du départ du métropolite à Constantinople pour désobéir à la volonté de celui-ci, de son clergé et de nombreux moines. La partie rebelle du clergé de la cité a pu demander que l’on écrive la Vie et les Miracles de la sainte pour sa propre défense. La façon dont Grégoire, dans le chapitre final de la translation, s’adresse aux ‘pères et frères’,67 la majorité hostile des clercs et moines de Thessalonique, montre qu’il veut les convaincre que la translation de la relique et le culte naissant de Théodora sont parfaitement justifiés. Mais cela ne saurait constituer la seule ni la meilleure raison qui lui fait écrire ce texte. Le donneur d’ordre le plus probable nous semble être Théopistè elle-même.68 La première raison qui la pousserait à commander son ouvrage à Grégoire, c’est naturellement que Théodora était sa mère. Mais la seconde raison est plus ordinaire: la Vie et la Translation, avec les miracles qu’elles contiennent, vise à promouvoir le culte naissant. Voilà qui attirera du monde au sanctuaire et fournira au monastère non seulement une forte renommée, mais aussi des offrandes qui lui assureront un revenu confortable. Grégoire décrit comment agit une abbesse énergique et ambitieuse69 au point de ne pas hésiter à désobéir au métropolite et à son clergé en accomplissant le vœu maternel pour faire de son monastère un sanctuaire à miracles et un lieu de pèlerinage dont la popularité va rapidement s’affirmer au point de faire finalement renommer le monastère du nom de sa principale héroïne, comme nous l’avons vu. Certes, ce dernier point a sans doute pris du temps, puisque nous n’avons la preuve de la chose que quatre siècles plus tard; mais, au bout du compte, Théopistè a réussi.   Translation des reliques de Théodora 20, Paschalidès 1991, p.  232. Il reprend ainsi en plus explicite ce qu’il exprimait dans la Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 1, Paschalidès 1991, p. 68. 67   Translation des reliques de Théodora 20, Paschalidès 1991, p. 234. Comme le fait justement remarquer Talbot 1996b, p. 237 n. 367, l’expression ‘πατέρες καὶ ἀδελφοί’ (pères et frères) s’adresse à une audience masculine et peut surprendre si le public est composé également des moniales du monastère Saint-Étienne, ainsi que de simples fidèles, tant hommes que femmes. Cette phrase est un argument pour faire des hommes de religion hostiles à la naissance d’un culte de Théodora les destinataires principaux au moins du récit du transfert. Les destinataires de la Vie ne sont pas si clairement désignés, mais l’ensemble forme un tout et une seule adresse suffit. De plus, il convient de rappeler que, pour la Translation, nous sommes en présence d’une version plus tardive; on ne peut exclure que le manuscrit qui la contient ait été copié pour un monastère masculin et que la formule soit due au scribe. 68   Proposition déjà faite par Talbot 2001a, p. 9. 69   Comme l’a déjà souligné Talbot 1996b, p. 161. 66

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Pour autant, il nous semble que le but principal poursuivi par l’auteur et son commanditaire principal est de prouver la sainteté de toute la famille. Ce motif explique pourquoi Grégoire a inséré la ‘Vie dans la Vie’ du métropolite Antoine, autrement connu par la seule correspondance de Théodore Stoudite. Car la Vie contient une absolue contradiction. Antoine et Anne sont présentés l’un et l’autre comme des confesseurs, persécutés par les iconoclastes, ce que Théodore confirme pour Antoine. Mais Chrysanthè, la mère d’Agapè-Théodora et la grand-mère de Théopistè, fine politique, est issue d’une famille iconoclaste et la persécution alléguée contre Anne n’empêche pas le monastère de sembler relativement florissant sous le règne de Théophile, présenté par maintes autres sources comme un inflexible iconoclaste. La famille de Théodora n’était pas si mal vue par cet empereur. En 894, selon toute vraisemblance, la ville de Thessalonique se rappelle que la famille de Théodora était, pour l’essentiel, iconoclaste; cela explique, en même temps que la volonté au départ chimérique de ne pas laisser croître un culte dont personne ne peut savoir qu’il va réellement faire de l’ombre à SaintDèmètrios, l’opposition du clergé thessalonicien. Cette macule iconoclaste pouvait être utilisée par ce clergé et expliquer son refus de laisser Théodora être enterrée à l’écart des autres moniales. Voilà pourquoi il fallait que la famille entière fût lavée d’un soupçon de cet ordre à travers un tel récit hagiographique. À cet égard, le métropolite Antoine est un personnage essentiel, d’où la place que le récit le concernant occupe dans la vie, en longueur et en position: c’est le seul personnage de la famille dont l’iconodoulie militante soit à la fois incontestable et reconnue par tous. Au bout du compte, cela a-t-il marché? Théodora opère ses miracles par le myron qui coulait du sarcophage au travers des trous prévus à cet effet aux pieds de la relique. Elle est connue par la suite comme ‘ὁσιομυροβλύτιδα’, la sainte d’où coule le myron. À peu près au même moment, ou peut-être un peu plus tard, Dèmètrios est aussi doté du myron et devient ‘μυροβλύτης’.70 En tout état de cause, cela n’empêche nullement le culte de Théodora,71 puis le changement de nom du monastère; une église de ce nom existe toujours à Thessalonique, un peu   La première mention apparaît dans le récit de la prise de Thessalonique par Jean Caminiate, éd. Böhlig 1973, p. 5. La date du récit a pu être contestée, mais une écriture proche de 904 semble la plus probable (cf. en dernier lieu Kaplan 2009, p. 512 n. 61, avec la bibliographie). De deux choses l’une: ou bien, comme la rivalité évidente dans la Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique le montre, le clergé, faute de pouvoir s’opposer au culte de Théodora, dote Dèmètrios d’un attribut semblable; ou bien le myron existait déjà pour Dèmètrios avant la mise en exploitation de la relique de Théodora, mais aucune source antérieure à la Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique ne nous en a conservé le témoignage, auquel cas c’est Grégoire qui s’est inspiré de ce qu’il connaissait et le clergé veut préserver le monopole du myron pour Dèmètrios. La note 86, p. 58, de l’introduction de Paschalidès 1991 (avec bibliographie sur le myron de Dèmètrios) nous semble trop catégorique. En tout état de cause, le myron est absent des Miracles de saint Dèmètrios en date du viiie siècle. 71   Sur ce point, on se reportera au développement de Patlagean 1984, pp. 52–8, pour la période médiévale; l’article pousse l’étude jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine. 70

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à l’est de Saint-Dèmètrios. Sa situation correspond à ce qu’indique la Vie pour le monastère Saint-Étienne. De la même façon, Dèmètrios était depuis longtemps appelé ‘Dèmètrios de Thessalonique’, ce qui en faisait le saint de la cité, ce qu’il est toujours. Mais Théodora devait également gagner sur ce point, car elle est aussi appelée ‘Théodora de Thessalonique’.72 Il paraît donc clair que l’enjeu que comporte l’écriture de la Vie et de la Translation dépasse de loin l’humble moniale Théodora, dont la Vie nous dit qu’elle refusa de devenir abbesse d’un monastère.73 Le véritable enjeu était au moins autant social et politique que religieux: laver une famille importante de Thessalonique du soupçon d’iconoclasme. En ce sens, la Vie de Théodora, commanditée par sa propre fille, est bien un écrit familial. Elle présente un exemple assez rare, du moins pour une époque aussi haute, d’une famille byzantine que nous pouvons suivre sur plus d’un siècle et sur quatre générations. Bibliography Primary Sources Actes d’Iviron, ed. Lefort, Oikonomidès, Papachryssanthou and Métrévéli (1985). Jean Caminiate, ed. Böhlig (1973). Miracles de saint Dèmètrios, ed. Paul Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius, t. 1 (Paris: CNRS, 1979). Synaxaire de Constantinople, ed. H. Delehaye, ‘Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae’, AASS Novembris Propylaeum (Bruxelles, 1902), pp. 585–8. Théodore Stoudite, Correspondance, ed. Fatouros (1992). Translation de la relique de Théodora de Thessalonique, ed. Paschalidès (1991), pp. 190–234; English trans. Talbot (1996b), pp. 218–37. Vie d’Euthyme de Sardes, ed. Gouillard (†) (1987). Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique, ed. Paschalidès (1991), pp. 66–188; English trans. Talbot (1996b), pp. 164–217. Secondary Sources Auzépy, Marie-France (1993), ‘De Philarète, de sa famille et de certains monastères de Constantinople’, in Catherine Jolivet-Lévy, Michel Kaplan and Jean-Pierrer Sodini (eds), Les saints et leur sanctuaire à Byzance: Textes,   C’est déjà le cas dans le manuscrit du xiie siècle.   Vie de Théodora de Thessalonique 36, Paschalidès 1991, pp. 136–8: l’archimandrite

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des monastères de Thessalonique lui propose de la transférer dans un autre monastère dont elle deviendrait abbesse; cet épisode se situe juste avant la démission d’Anne et l’élection de Théopistè comme abbesse de Saint-Étienne.

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images et monuments (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne), pp. 117–136 (repr. in Auzépy (2007), pp. 179–98). Auzépy, Marie-France (2007), L’histoire des iconoclastes (Paris: Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance). Böhlig, Gertrudis (1973), Ioannis Caminiatae De Expugnatione Thessalonicae (Berlin: De Gruyter). Cheynet, Jean-Claude, and Théodoridis, Dimitri (2010), Sceaux byzantins de la collection D. Théodoridis. Les sceaux patronymiques (Paris: CNRS). Fatouros, Georgios (1992), Theodori Studitae epistulae (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter). Gouillard, Jean (†) (1987), ‘La Vie d’Euthyme de Sardes († 831), une œuvre du patriarche Méthode’, TM, 10: 21–89. Grumel, Venance (1936), ‘Chronologie des évènements du règne de Léon  VI (886–912)’, Échos d’Orient, 35: 5–42. Janin, Raymond (1975), Géographie ecclésiastique de l’empire byzantin, t. 2, Les églises et les monastères des grands centres byzantins (Bithynie, Hellespont, Latros, Galèsios, Trébizonde, Athènes, Thessalonique) (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines). Kaplan, Michel (2009), ‘Villes et campagnes à Byzance du vie au xiie siècle: aspects économiques et sociaux’, in Città e campagna nei secoli altomedievali (Spolète: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo), pp. 495–536 Kolias, Georges (1939), Léon Choerosphactès, magistre, proconsul et patrice (Athènes: Byzantinisch-neugriechische Jahrbücher). Lefort, Jacques, Oikonomidès, Nicolas, Papachryssanthou, Denise, and Métrévéli, Hélène (eds) (1985), Actes d’Iviron, t. 1, Des origines au milieu du xie siècle (Paris: Lethielleux). Malamut, Elisabeth (2005), ‘Thessalonique 830–904’, in Lars M. Hoffmann and Anuscha  Monchizadeh (eds), Zwischen Polis, Provinz und Peripherie. Beiträge zur byzantinischen Geschichte und Kultur (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz), pp. 159–90. Paschalidès, S.A. (1991), Ό βίος τῆς ὁσιομυροβλύτιδος Θεοδώρας τῆς ἐν Θεσσαλονίκη. Διηγήση περὶ τῆς μεταθέσεως τοῦ τιμίου λειψάνου τῆς ὁσίας Θεοδώρας (Thessalonique). Paschalidès, S.A. (1994), ‘Ἕνας ὁμολογητὴς τῆς Δευτέρας Εἰκονομαχίας ὁ ἀρχιεπίσκοπος Θεσσαλονίκης Αντώνιος († 844)’, Byzantina, 17: 189–216. Patlagean, Évelyne (1984), ‘Théodora de Thessalonique. Une sainte moniale et un culte citadin (IXe–XXe siècle)’, in Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucia Sebastini (eds), Culto dei santi, istituzione e classi sociali in età preindustriale (Rome: Japadre), pp. 39–64. Talbot, Alice-Mary (1996a), ‘Family Cults in Byzantium: The Case of St Theodora of Thessalonike’, in J.O. Rosenqvist (ed.), ΛΕΙΜΩΝ: Studies Presented to Lennart Rydén on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Uppsala: Uppsala University), pp. 49–69 (repr. Talbot (2001b), VII).

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Talbot, Alice-Mary (1996b), ‘Life of St. Theodora of Thessalonike’, in AliceMary Talbot (ed.), Holy Women of Byzantium. Ten Saints Lives in English Translation (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks), pp. 159–237. Talbot, Alice-Mary (2001a), ‘Female Sanctity in Byzantium’, in Talbot (2001b), VI (English translation of ‘Essere donna e santa’, in Sebastiano Gentile (ed.), Oriente cristiano e santità: figure e storie di santi tra Bisanzio e l’Occidente, Milan: Centro Tibaldi, 1998). Talbot, Alice-Mary (2001b), Women and Religious Life in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum). Tougher, Shaun (1997), The Reign of Leo VI (886–912): Politics and People (Leiden: Brill).

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Chapter 15

Imperial Families: The Case of the Macedonians (867–1056) Shaun Tougher

Introduction The type of family we are probably best informed about in Byzantium is the imperial family. A series of dynasties (as well as a few one-off emperors) ruled the Byzantine empire from the foundation of Constantinople in 324 to the fall of the city to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. However, to what extent the richer evidence for these imperial families can inform us of the nature of other families in Byzantium is a moot point. In an article published in 2006 examining how the celebrated imperial female Anna Komnene ‘related to her father [Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118)] and family’ Dion Smythe commented ‘Whether … it is possible to extrapolate from the clues provided by Anna in her text to the generality of Middle Byzantine families remains to be seen’, but added ‘I rather suspect not’.1 Thus there can be the expectation that the imperial family is atypical.2 For instance, issues of power and politics apply to the imperial family that probably do not apply to other Byzantine families. Yet, even if this is true, one can still justify examining imperial families in their own right, and also in relation to one another.3 One can ask whether they exhibit recurring patterns of behaviour and attitude, or whether there is variety. If there is variety one can ask why this was so (e.g. perhaps there was cultural change over time). One should also ask a more fundamental question, was there such a thing as a typical Byzantine family anyway? In this chapter I will begin to explore some of these issues in relation to a specific dynasty, that of the Macedonians. I will first identify a range of family relationships that could be fruitfully explored within the dynasty. I will then establish key distinctive features of the family history of the dynasty. Finally I will explore a specific relationship within this imperial family, that of siblings. This will build on work   Smythe 2006, p. 138.   See for instance Schreiner 1991, esp. p. 182, ‘La famille impériale, pense-t-on, est

1 2

quelque chose de bien différent’. 3   For a brief consideration of some aspects of the imperial family see Schreiner 1991. He is primarily concerned with two aspects, the idea of dynasty and the role of women in the imperial family. For reflections on family relationships within the Constantinian dynasty see for instance Tougher 2012.

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I have previously undertaken on the relationship between Leo VI (886–912) and his younger brother Alexander by considering it in relation to two other pairs of siblings, those of Basil II (976–1025) and his brother Constantine VIII, and Zoe (1028–1050) and her sister Theodora (1055–1056).4 I will then conclude with reflections on the nature of the imperial family and whether it can shed light on the subject of families in general. The Macedonian Dynasty: A Diversity of Relationships The Macedonian dynasty ruled Byzantium from 867 to 1056, and was one of the most long-lived and celebrated dynasties in the history of the empire. The dynasty stretches from the reign of the dynasty founder Basil I (867–886) to that of his great-great-great granddaughter Theodora (1055–1056). There follows a list of the reigns of the rulers across the lifetime of the dynasty (see also the family tree: Fig. 15.1): Basil I (867–886) Leo VI (886–912) Alexander I (912–913) Constantine VII (913–959) Romanos I Lekapenos (920–944) Romanos II (959–963) Nikephoros II Phokas (963–969) John I Tzimiskes (969–976) Basil II (976–1025) Constantine VIII (1025–1028) Zoe and Romanos III Argyros (1028–1034) Zoe and Michael IV (1034–1041) Zoe and Michael V (1041–1042) Zoe and Theodora (1042) Zoe and Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–1050) Constantine IX Monomachos (1050–1055) Theodora (1055–1056)

It is an odd fact that the Macedonians have not been studied as a group before. There has been a tendency to study individual rulers rather than the dynasty as a whole. Basil I, Leo VI, Constantine VII and Basil II have all been the subject of monographs.5 The interlopers Romanos I Lekapenos and Nikephoros II Phokas   See Tougher 1997, pp. 219–32.   Basil I: Vogt 1908, and Tobias 2007; Leo VI: Tougher 1997; Constantine VII:

4 5

Toynbee 1973; Basil II: Holmes 2005.

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Figure 15.1 Family tree of the Macedonian dynasty, 867–1056 (adapted from George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, trans. Joan Hussey, 1980, genealogical table, p. 576) have also had books devoted to them.6 A cross-dynasty approach, however, offers rich material for the examination of a wide diversity of family relationships.7 On fathers and sons one thinks immediately of the apparently tense relationship between Basil I and Leo VI, which some have understood in terms of Leo not being a biological son of Basil but of his predecessor Michael III (842–867) but which could be explained purely in terms of a personality clash.8 There would also be mileage in considering Leo VI’s desperate quest to have a son and heir (which he eventually managed in the shape of Constantine VII), as well as Romanos I Lekapenos’ betrayal at the hands of his own sons Stephen and Constantine (who were eager to claim power for themselves rather than respect the claims of the

  Runciman 1929; Schlumberger 1890.   I intend to pursue a cross-dynasty approach to the Macedonians in a monograph.

6 7

For depictions of the Macedonian dynasty in art see for instance the chapter by Leslie Brubaker in this volume. 8   For Basil I and Leo VI see for instance Tougher 1997, pp. 42–67.

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Macedonian Constantine VII, their brother-in-law).9 Reflection on the relationship of the other parent with their male offspring offers up strong cases of mothers who sought to protect the imperial status of their sons: Zoe Karbonopsina and Constantine VII, and Theophano and Basil II and Constantine VIII.10 The relationship of fathers and daughters is well served too, especially by the examples of Basil I and Constantine VIII, raising in particular the issue of marriage. Famously Basil chose not to arrange marriages for his daughters (Anastasia, Anna, Helena and Maria) but to confine them to a nunnery, that of St Euphemia of Petrion.11 The daughters of Constantine VIII did not marry while their uncle Basil II was still alive, but even after his death only Zoe was to marry, and then only when her father was dying, by which time she was about 50 years old.12 The message appears to be that marrying off imperial females is dangerous, for it allows other families to establish a claim to imperial power themselves. However, not all imperial females were restricted to the life of a nun. Several were married to foreign rulers. Most famously Anna, the sister of Basil II, was married to Vladimir of Kiev, but there are other cases from the history of the dynasty.13 For instance, Leo VI married his daughter (also called Anna) to Louis III of Provence, Maria Lekapena became the wife of Peter the Bulgarian, and it was planned that Zoe (or perhaps Theodora) should marry Otto III.14 Perhaps one of the advantages of such marriages of Byzantine imperial females is that it was an alternative way of keeping them out of the clutches of other Byzantine families, neutralising the potential to extend claims to the throne. Another strategy was to marry such women to other members of the family, thus   For Leo VI and Constantine VII see for instance Tougher 1997, pp. 133–63. For Romanos I and his sons see for instance Runciman 1929, pp. 229–37. 10   See for instance Garland 1999, pp. 118–23 and 128–35. 11   As noted by Macrides 1992, esp. p. 272 (reprinted in Macrides 1999, IV). It was also the fate of the sisters of Romanos II to be confined in nunneries, though Theodora did later marry John Tzimiskes: see below. For Petrion, a district on the Golden Horn, see for instance Talbot and Kazhdan 1991. The nunnery of St Euphemia may have been founded by Basil I. It certainly became a location with which Macedonian females were associated. Not only were the daughters of Basil confined there but so were Zoe Karbonopsina (Leo VI’s fourth wife) and Theodora (the daughter of Constantine VIII). 12   Psellos, Chronographia 6.160, says Zoe was 72 when she died in 1050, the same age at which he says her uncle Basil II died: see n. 72 below. Perhaps Psellos was seeking to emphasise the close connection between Zoe and Basil, rather than just simply reporting a fact. 13   For Anna and Vladimir see for instance Macrides 1992, p. 273. 14   For Anna and Louis see Tougher 1997, pp. 147–8; for Maria and Peter see Macrides 1992, p. 273, and also Shepard 1995; for the planned marriage with Otto III see Garland 1999, p. 137. Perhaps the most famous case of an imperial female marrying a foreign ruler is that of Theophano and Otto II, though there has been debate about her identity: was she a genuine Macedonian or the niece of John Tzimiskes? Most seem to favour the latter view: see for instance Leyser 1995, esp. pp. 17–18. For projected marriages between Byzantium and the west in general see for instance Davids 1995. 9

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keeping the scope for power within the dynasty itself. For example, Zoe’s first husband Romanos Argryos was related to the Lekapenoi, and notably one of the reasons given for Zoe’s sister Theodora refusing to marry Romanos herself was the close family connection with him.15 Of course, the issue of marriage is not just relevant to females of the dynasty; care was also taken in the selection of wives for males of the dynasty.16 Again we see that marriage with foreigners was an option. For instance, Basil I planned to marry his eldest son Constantine to the daughter of Louis II, Constantine VII was engaged to Helena the daughter of Symeon the Bulgar, Romanos II’s first wife was Bertha the daughter of Hugh of Provence (her name was changed to a Macedonian one, Eudokia), and it was planned that both Basil II and Constantine VIII should marry Bulgarian royal females.17 We also encounter imperial males marrying relatives or women of obscure backgrounds. The parents of Leo VI chose for him as his first wife Theophano, who was related to the dynasty.18 Romanos II’s second wife Theophano (though her original name was Anastaso and it was changed to a more suitably dynastic one) was apparently of humble origin, while Constantine VIII’s wife Helena belonged to the obscure family of the Alypioi.19 The subject of marriage also raises a notorious aspect of the dynastic history of the Macedonians, the decision of Basil II not to get married.20 It seems likely that his decision was taken on religious grounds, rather than because of sexual preference, but the fact remains that this was a highly unusual act for a ruler, though not unprecedented: Constans I (337–350), one of the sons of Constantine the Great (306–337), did not get married, though he was engaged.21 It is noteworthy too that Basil II’s own niece Theodora did not marry either, even when she was sole empress in 1055– 1056.22 For those who did get married this created the relationship of husband 15   Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, Constantine VIII, chap. 3. See also Holmes 2005, p. 520, and Garland 1999, p. 137. Skylitzes says Zoe was able to marry Romanos as the church and the patriarch rejected that there was a problem of consanguinity. On the family connection of Romanos Argyros with the Macedonian dynasty see n. 56 below. 16   Schreiner 1991, esp. p. 191, is of the view that beauty was the criterion for selecting wives for imperial males, but it is clear that political considerations could be at play. See also in this volume the comments of Claudia Ludwig on the much discussed Byzantine bride shows (with references). 17   For Constantine and the daughter of Louis see for instance Tougher 1997, p. 34; for Constantine VII and Helena see for example Garland 1999, p. 119; for Bertha-Eudokia see for instance Macrides 1992, p. 274; for Basil II and Constantine VIII and the Bulgarian females see Leo the Deacon, History 5.3. 18   See for instance Tougher 1997, pp. 134–6. 19   See for instance Holmes 2006, p. 336. 20   See for instance Arbagi 1975, but also Crostini 1996, esp. pp. 76–80, and Holmes 2006, p. 336. 21   See for instance Chausson 2007, p. 113. 22   See for instance Hill 1999, pp. 55–8.

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and wife, and again there is ample material here for study. One thinks of Leo VI’s four wives, and the contrasting relationship between him and his first wife Theophano (who was chosen for him by his parents) and his other three wives whom he selected himself.23 There also comes to mind the sense of partnership between Constantine VII and Helena (the daughter of Romanos Lekapenos), and the tension between Nikephoros II Phokas and Theophano, which was to result in his death. The three husbands of Zoe also reward attention.24 When studying imperial families (and families in general) it is natural to focus primarily on the relationships of parents and children and husbands and wives, but considering a wider set of relationships can provide intriguing and valuable material too. In relation to the Macedonian dynasty one is struck by the relationship between uncles and nephews (and nieces also). Especially arresting is the relationship of Basil Lekapenos (the son of Romanos I Lekapenos) with his nephew Romanos II and great-nephews Basil II and Constantine VIII. Michael Psellos asserts that Basil Lekapenos was ‘genuinely attached to the imperial house – after all, it was his own family. He was particularly devoted to his nephew Basil, embracing the young man in the most affectionate manner and watching over his progress like some kindly foster-parent (ὡς εὔνους ἐτιθηνεῖτο τροφεύς)’.25 Michael Psellos also refers to the strong relationship that Zoe had with her uncle Basil II, in a speech he attributes to her on the occasion of her removal from the palace by Michael V. He records that he was informed that when Zoe was being transported away by ship she looked back at the palace and ‘spoke of her family and her ancestors … and when she recalled her uncle … then her eyes suddenly filled with tears and she exclaimed’: It was you, my uncle and emperor, you who wrapped me in my swaddling clothes as soon as I was born, you who loved me, and honoured me too, more than my sisters, because, as I have often heard them say who saw you, I was like yourself. It was you who said, as you kissed me and held me in your arms, ‘Good luck, my darling, and may you live many years, to be the glory of our family and the most marvellous gift to our Empire!’ It was you, also, who so carefully brought me up and trained me, you who saw in my hands a great future for this same Empire. But your hopes have been brought to nothing, for I have been dishonoured. I have disgraced all my family, condemned on most horrible charges and expelled from the palace, driven away to I know not what place of exile, convicted of crime … I beg you, watch over me from Heaven and with all your strength protect your niece.26

    25   26   23

See for instance Tougher 1997, pp. 133–63. See for instance Garland 1999, pp. 136–57. Psellos, Chronographia 1.3, trans. Sewter 1966, p. 28. Psellos, Chronographia 5.22, trans. Sewter 1996, pp. 135–6. Schreiner 1991, p.187, also comments on this speech attributed to Zoe, considering the dynastic claim to imperial power. 24

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However, relations between uncles and nephews could also be marked by tension. It is alleged that Alexander contemplated castrating Constantine VII, while Basil II chafed against the control exerted by his great-uncle Basil Lekapenos, as did Michael V in relation to his father’s brothers.27 Indeed John Tzimiskes was to be instrumental in the downfall of his uncle Nikephoros II Phokas.28 The relationship of aunts and nephews can also surface in the history of the dynasty, witness the example of Theodora (sister of Romanos II and wife of John I Tzimiskes) and Basil II and Constantine VIII.29 The case of Basil Lekapenos raises a further aspect of the nature of the Macedonian family (and Byzantine families in general): the presence of relatives who could be eunuchs.30 Basil Lekapenos, also known as Basil the Bastard and Basil the parakoimomenos (grand chamberlain), was an illegitimate child of Romanos I Lekapenos and a slave woman, but went on to become one of the most powerful court eunuchs in the history of the Byzantine empire.31 He was not the only one to feature in the dynasty though. Equally celebrated is the brother of Michael IV and the uncle of Michael V, John the orphanotrophos (orphanage director),32 whose brothers George and Constantine were eunuchs too, while the son and grandson of Romanos I Lekapenos, Theophylact and Romanos respectively, were said by some to be eunuchs too.33 The Lekapenids also serve to raise the subject of in-laws. The minority of Constantine VII created political uncertainty and instability, which Romanos Lekapenos successfully exploited to forge a union with the imperial family by marrying his daughter Helena to Constantine in 919.34 The powerful position a father-in-law of the emperor could achieve is illustrated too by Stylianos Zaoutes, the father of Leo VI’s mistress and second wife Zoe.35 Also under Leo VI, Himerios, a relative of the emperor’s mistress and fourth wife Zoe Karbonopsina, managed to carve out a prominent and influential position in the regime.36 It is clear that the relatives of Michael IV, Zoe’s 27   For Alexander and Constantine see for example Karlin-Hayter 1969, p. 587 (reprinted in Karlin-Hayter 1981, XV); for Basil II and Basil Lekapenos see for instance Holmes 2005, esp. pp. 469–74; for Michael V and his uncles see for example Garland 1999, pp. 140–42. 28   Garland 1999, pp. 131–2. 29   Garland 1999, p. 134. 30   See for example Tougher 2008, esp. pp. 60–67. On eunuchs in Byzantium see also the comments by Claudia Ludwig in her chapter in this volume. 31   See especially Brokkaar 1972. 32   For John as orphanotrophos see for instance Miller 2003, pp. 186–7. 33   For John see especially Janin 1931. For Theophylact as eunuch see Liudprand of Ceremona, Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana 62. For Romanos as eunuch see Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, Constantine VII (solus), chap. 3. 34   See for example Runciman 1929, p. 60. 35   On Stylianos Zaoutzes see for example Tougher 1997, pp. 89–109. 36   See for instance Tougher 1997, esp. pp. 229–31.

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second husband, sought to benefit from their association with the Macedonians, at the expense of the empress herself.37 Further, Thephano, the wife of Romanos II, was keen to oust from the palace both her mother-in-law as well as her five sistersin-law (Zoe, Agatha, Theophano, Anna and Theodora), who were removed from the palace to convents.38 Theophano also raises the subject of step relations, for through marriage to her Nikephoros Phokas became the stepfather of Basil II and Constantine VIII. Although he appears to have respected their imperial status and claim, some report that he was thought to be planning to castrate them.39 Finally, Nikephoros Phokas serves to focus attention on another form of relationship too, that of fictive kinship.40 When Nikephoros married Theophano it was objected that this was illegal as he was already godfather to her sons Basil II and Constantine VIII, but he responded by asserting that it was his father Bardas Phokas who was the baptismal sponsor of the boys.41 A further example is Zoe’s adoption of the nephew of her husband Michael IV, who succeeded him as Michael V.42 Defining Features of the Macedonian Dynasty Thus there is a wide range of family relationships that could be fruitfully explored in relation to the Macedonian dynasty. There are several features of the history of the dynasty, though, that deserve to be singled out here, for they are specific to it. First, one is struck by the lack of sons produced by the dynasty. While Basil I had four sons (Constantine, Leo, Stephen and Alexander)43 and Romanos II had two, Leo VI and Constantine VII only had one, while Alexander, Basil II, Constantine VIII, Zoe and Theodora all had none (though as has been seen Zoe did adopt her husband’s nephew Michael). Given this situation one surely has to express amazement that the dynasty lasted as long as it did. On the other hand, one can observe that a multiplicity of sons could be problematic. In the case of the sons of Basil there is the sense that spare sons could present a difficulty. It seems that for a ruling emperor to have a sibling co-emperor was a cause of uncertainty and tension, witness for instance the infamous case of Leo and Alexander (see below for further detail). It is likely that the decision to dedicate their brother Stephen to   Garland 1999, pp. 138–42.   Davids 1995, p. 116, and Garland 1999, p. 127. 39   E.g. Historia Syntomos 105, ed. Aerts 1990, p. 100.31–34. See also Garland 1999, 37 38

p. 133.

  On fictive kinship in Byzantium see especially the work of Ruth Macrides, e.g. Macrides 1987 and 1990 (both reprinted in Macrides 1999, I and II). The role of fictive kinship in Byzantine society is also emphasised by Smythe 2006, p. 139. 41   Leo the Deacon, History 3.9. 42   Psellos, Chronographia 4.22–23. 43   Though there is the allegation that some of these (especially Leo) were actually sons of Michael III: see for instance Tougher 1997, esp. pp. 42–6. 40

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an ecclesiastical career, while a cunning political move, was also motivated by the need to find a role for younger sons who were not the main heirs (one can note also Romanos I Lekapenos’ decision to enter his son Theophylact on an ecclesiastical career).44 Nevertheless, one cannot evade the stark fact that the Macedonian dynasty came to an end simply because there was no one to succeed Theodora.45 This brings us to a second, associated, feature, the problem of making arrangements for an heir. In the cases of Basil I, Leo VI and Romanos II this was not such an issue; it surfaces primarily in the reign of Basil II. Here we come back to the puzzling fact that Basil did not marry and had no son of his own to succeed him. This need not have been an insurmountable problem as his brother Constantine VIII outlived him and was married, but the succession was complicated because it seems that there was a reluctance to nominate Basil’s brother as his successor (see below), while in addition Constantine’s children were all female (in addition to Zoe and Theodora there was the eldest Eudokia, who had been disfigured by an illness in her childhood and became a nun) and, moreover, marriages for them had not been arranged while Basil was alive.46 As for Zoe and Theodora, by the time Zoe came to marry she was already old, perhaps too old to have children of her own (though her relations with her husbands could be strained anyway), while Theodora remained a nun and refused to marry. Given such circumstances it is no surprise the dynasty expired, but a key question is, why did Basil II not prepare for the succession? Perhaps he simply feared that it was too risky, that to offer any indication of who was to be his heir was to provide a focus for opposition to him. A third, connected, feature is that of other families becoming associated with the Macedonian dynasty and acquiring imperial status themselves. Amongst the rulers who feature in the history of the dynasty are several who were not of Macedonian blood: in the tenth century Romanos I Lekapenos, Nikephoros II Phokas and John I Tzimiskes, and in the eleventh century Romanos III Argyros, Michael IV, Michael V and Constantine IX Monomachos. The circumstances in which these men came to prominence is significant: Romanos and Nikephoros rose to power at times of minority rule and regency, thus when there was political uncertainty; the eleventh-century cases all emerged in the context of the reign of Zoe, who took partners in her rule;47 only John actively overthrew an emperor, and that was his relative Nikephoros rather than the youthful Macedonians Basil II and Constantine VIII. Indeed, what is striking about most of these men (the exception is Michael V who sought to oust Zoe, but then paid the price) is the respect they showed the Macedonian dynasty: they did not seek to supplant it but to forge ties with it and support it. Such a scenario relates to a fourth aspect of the dynasty, 44   On Stephen see for instance Tougher 1997, pp. 32–3. See also in this volume the comments of Claudia Ludwig on the roles found for spare sons. 45   Though one would think that a Lekapenid might still have been alive. 46   Psellos, Chronographia 2.5. On Eudokia see for instance Garland 1999, p. 137. 47   On Zoe as ruler and a channel of imperial power see for instance Hill, James and Smythe 1994.

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that in effect it was a hybrid dynasty. In this respect one thinks especially of the Lekapenids, for it was the descendants of Constantine VII and Helena Lekapena who were the reigning Macedonians until the demise of the dynasty. As noted already Romanos I Lekapenos heeded the imperial claim of Constantine VII to the frustration of his own sons. Further, Zoe’s first husband Romanos Argryos was related to the Lekapenoi.48 Catherine Holmes has observed that Basil II was a Lekapenid himself, and has also noted the role played in the reign of Basil by Michael the sakellarios (treasurer), who was a grandson of Romanos I Lekapenos.49 It is worth remarking too that from its very foundation the Macedonian dynasty had strong associations with the previous ruling family, commonly known as the Amorian dynasty (820–867).50 It was thanks to the patronage of Michael III that Basil the Macedonian rose to prominence, the emperor making him his coemperor in 866 as well as adopting him as his son.51 Basil was also married to Eudokia Ingerina, who was related to the Amorians. There is a case, then, for arguing that the Macedonian dynasty should encompass the Amorians too (despite the assassinations of Michael III and his uncle Bardas at the hands of Basil), but ultimately the family did look back to Basil I as its progenitor (and perhaps one could refer to the dynasty more accurately as the Basilian dynasty rather than the Macedonian dynasty). The sense that Basil marked the beginning of a separate imperial family is expressed, for instance, in the reflections of Psellos at the beginning of his account of the joint reign of Zoe and Theodora: I doubt if any other family was ever so favoured by God as theirs was – a surprising thing, when one reflects on the unlawful manner in which the family fortune was, so to speak, rooted and planted in the ground with murder and bloodshed. Yet the plant blossomed out and sent forth such mighty shoots, each with its royal fruit, that no others could be compared with it, either in beauty or grandeur.52

Psellos’ evident admiration of the dynasty underscores a further, fifth, distinctive aspect of its history: its popularity and the devotion it engendered. This is famously seen in the reaction of the populace in Constantinople to the banishment of Zoe from the palace by her adopted son Michael V. Psellos records that he witnessed women crying out: ‘Where can she be … she who alone is noble of heart and alone is beautiful? Where can she be, she who alone of all women is free, the mistress of all the

  Holmes 2005, p. 520.   Holmes 2006, pp. 332–3. 50   On this point see for instance Tougher 1997, p. 67. See also the remarks of Schreiner 48 49

1991, p. 185. 51   On the relationship between Michael and Basil see also Tougher 1999. 52   Psellos, Chronographia 6.1, trans. Sewter 1966, p. 155.

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imperial family, the rightful heir to the Empire, whose father was emperor, whose grandfather was monarch before him – yes, and great-grandfather too’.53

The people then removed Theodora from her monastic home at Petrion and acclaimed her as empress. The attachment to, and concern for, dynasty members is also seen in the reaction to the fact that Zoe’s third husband Constantine IX had a mistress, Maria Skleraina. The chronicler Skylitzes records that in 1044 there was an outcry against Constantine, the people shouting ‘We don’t want Skleraina for empress and we don’t want our mothers, the porphyrogennetoi Zoe and Theodora, put to death on her account’.54 Skylitzes asserts that such sentiments were also found in the tenth century, reporting that the marriage of John Tzimiskes to Theodora the sister of Romanos II in 970 ‘pleased the citizens greatly for it kept the imperial power within the family [of Basil I]’ (‘μεγάλως εὔφρανε τοὺς πολίτας, ὡς τὸ τῆς βασιλείας κράτος περιφυλάττων τῷ γένει’).55 There are two further aspects (aspects six and seven) of the dynasty that should be emphasised. One is the dearth of cousins found within the family. This relates to the lack of offspring produced by the dynasty, as well as the fact that some Macedonians never got married. While Leo VI’s brother Alexander did get married (the identity of his wife is unknown) it seems that he did not have any children, so Constantine VII had no cousins. Constantine VII himself was an only child, so did not have any siblings who could provide cousins for Romanos II. Romanos II’s five sisters were confined to a nunnery until Theodora was released to marry John Tzimiskes, but she did not have any children by him. Basil II had no children so there were no cousins for his brother Constantine’s daughters Eudokia, Zoe and Theodora. None of these imperial women had any children themselves. From the reign of Leo VI we do hear of a cousin (exadelphos) of the emperor (who may have been of the Rhabdouchos family), who was significant enough to attend an assembly where Leo discussed his plans for the succession.56 The final aspect is   Psellos, Chronographia 5.26, trans. Sewter 1966, pp. 138–9. See also Schreiner 1991, p. 187. 54   Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, Constantine IX Monomachos, chap. 7, trans. Wortley 2010, p. 408. 55   Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, John I Tzimiskes, chap. 8, trans. Wortley 2010, p. 281. Interestingly, when Leo the Deacon, History 7.9, reports the wedding he does not make the same observation as Skylitzes about the pro-Macedonian sentiment of the people. Perhaps Skylitzes was reflecting a later sentiment (echoing Psellos), or perhaps Leo the Deacon did not want to emphasise Macedonian popularity as his hero was the interloper John Tzimiskes. 56   See Flusin 1985, esp. pp. 128–9, and 1987, esp. pp. 235–6, and also Tougher 1997, p. 229. Note also that Yahya ibn Sa’id of Antioch’s History (ed. French trans. Kratchkovsky, Micheau and Troupeau 1997, pp. 484–5) reports that Romanos Argyros was chosen as the husband for Zoe because Romanos II and the father of Argyros were maternal cousins, sons of daughters of Romanos I Lekapenos. 53

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that of names. Clearly there were names, both male and female, that were regularly used by the dynasty, most notably Basil, Constantine, Romanos, Anna, Eudokia, Theodora, Theophano and Zoe. Some of these are clearly Macedonian, such as Basil (Leo VI’s first-born son was named Basil too) and Theophano (Leo VI’s sainted first wife, and the name Anastaso had to adopt), but others came from the Lekapenids, obviously Romanos itself, but also Theodora (the name of Romanos Lekapenos’ wife).57 What is especially striking is that the name Leo was not used again after the death of Leo VI. One would have expected Constantine VII to name his eldest son Leo, but Romanos was selected, presumably in deference to the powerful position of Romanos I Lekapenos.58 However, the name of Leo was not revived by Romanos II, who selected Basil (after the dynasty founder) and Constantine (after his father, but it was a name which also had greater resonance because of the key place of Constantine the Great in Byzantine history). As Basil II had no children at all and Constantine VIII only had daughters there was naturally no further opportunity to revive the name of Leo.59 Imperial Siblings For the remainder of this chapter I will explore in more detail a particular family relationship in the dynasty, that of siblings. I will examine three cases, those of Leo and Alexander, Basil II and Constantine VIII, and Zoe and Theodora. I will establish what we know about these relationships, and consider how they are presented in the literary sources. I will argue that by examining a series of cases rather than just one, we can cast more light on the nature and dynamics of this specific relationship within the context of an imperial family.

  On the name Theophano see also Davids 1995, esp. pp. 111–20.   Unless, of course, Constantine did have a son called Leo who died prematurely.

57 58

The fact remains that the name was never again held by a ruling emperor. 59   One wonders, though, whether Leo had become a tainted name for the dynasty anyway, because of the scandal over the four marriages of Leo VI. However, perhaps this would be to take too dim a view of Leo’s reputation. Even though the legendary figure ‘Leo the Wise’ (whose identity was partly contributed to by the emperor) only appears from the twelfth century onwards, Leo VI was already celebrated as wise in his own day and did have a more mixed reputation than the tetragamy crisis might suggest. For an impression of Leo’s reputation in the eleventh century see the Historia Syntomos 100, ed. Aerts 1990, 88.5–91.45. For Leo as wise see Tougher 1994 and 1997, pp. 110–32.

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Leo VI and Alexander60 Leo was Alexander’s elder brother, being born in 866, while Alexander was born around 870. When Basil I’s eldest son Constantine died in 879, Leo became Basil’s main heir, though Alexander was his co-emperor, an appointment made by Basil himself. Nevertheless Leo was clearly the senior partner, although Alexander maintained his position as co-emperor throughout the reign (and did have a wife, though her name is unknown and they do not seem to have had any children).61 Given that the relationship appears to have been a tense one (see below) one wonders whether Leo deliberately restricted the power wielded by his brother, but it is possible that his very much junior position was the typical fate of a younger coemperor anyway. Alexander’s official activities during the reign seem to have been minimal and undemanding. Steven Runciman was of the view that ‘co-Emperors probably had little work to do except on ceremonial occasions, accompanying the Senior Emperor or deputizing for him’,62 and Alexander is testified to have participated in ceremonies, though he probably had a heightened role when his brother was excommunicated (during the scandal concerning his fourth marriage, the tetragamy crisis) and ill. We do know that Alexander acted as one of sponsors of Constantine VII at his baptism in 906. Otherwise all we are told is that Alexander continued with his education,63 devoted himself to hunting, ‘delicate living’ (τρυφαῖς), licentiousness and drinking,64 and plotted against his brother. This last activity brings us to the question of the difficult relationship that was said to exist between the two brothers, mentioned by both the Life of Euthymios (Euthymios was Leo’s spiritual father, and patriarch from 907–912) and the chronicle of the Logothete tradition. Alexander and Leo are said to have been ‘unbrotherly disposed’ (τὰ ἀδελφὰ μὴ φρονοῦντι) towards one another,65 while Leo is said to have been suspicious of Alexander.66 In 899 or 900 Leo suspected Alexander of plotting against him, and as punishment separated him from his wife.67 When Leo was nearly assassinated in 903 Alexander was surmised to have masterminded 60   For what follows see Tougher 1997, pp. 219–32. On Alexander see also KarlinHayter 1969. 61   One assumes that Basil I arranged the marriage of Alexander before his death, perhaps at the time when Leo was in disgrace for being suspected of plotting against his father: see for instance Tougher 1997, pp. 57–60 and 224. 62   Runciman 1929, p. 17. 63   Life of Theophano 21, ed. Kurtz 1898, p. 14.17. 64   Symeon the Logothete, Chronicle, Alexander, chap. 3, ed. Wahlgren 2006, p. 295.13–16. See also the comments on Alexander in Historia Syntomos 101, ed. Aerts 1990, pp. 90.45–92.54. 65   Life of Euthymios, ed. trans. Karlin-Hayter 1970, p. 5.20–21, and also p. 67.24–5. 66   Symeon the Logothete, Chronicle, Alexander, chap. 3, ed. Wahlgren 2006, p. 295.12–13. 67   Life of Euthymios, ed. trans. Karlin-Hayter 1970, p. 55.21–4.

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the attempt.68 Another source asserts that at the end of his reign Leo planned to eliminate Alexander in order to safeguard the rule of Constantine VII (it was planned that Himerios should become the guardian of Constantine).69 It is natural to wonder why there was hostility between Alexander and Leo. Assuming that it was not just a clash of personalities, a number of explanations present themselves. Perhaps Alexander resented the fact that Leo was restored as Basil’s main heir after his disgrace, thus robbing Alexander of his chance to succeed his father as sole emperor. Perhaps it was related to the question of the paternity of Leo, if indeed that was an issue at the time; the Logothete chronicle asserts that only Alexander was a genuine son of Basil.70 Perhaps Leo’s anxiety to produce a son and secure his succession affected his relations with his brother, though Alexander himself did not have any offspring of his own. One has the impression that Leo was not happy at the thought that Alexander should succeed him, though in the end this is indeed what happened. Perhaps ultimately Leo recognised that it was better that a member of the dynasty should be left as guardian of a youthful emperor rather than a relative through marriage: imperial blood trumped friendly alliance. Basil II and Constantine VIII There are strong parallels between the case of Leo and Alexander and that of Basil and Constantine.71 Basil was about three years older than Constantine,72 and both brothers had acquired imperial status when their father Romanos II was still alive. They were thus co-emperors, a pairing nicely reflected by the fact that twin forts at Lake Prespa were named after them.73 However, the elder brother is portrayed as the senior emperor, the real ruler. Psellos asserts that this situation was agreed to by Constantine: ‘By mutual consent all real power was vested in Basil, and Constantine was associated with him as emperor in name only. They planned wisely, for the Empire’s well-being depended on the elevation of the older and more experienced brother’.74 As with Alexander, our knowledge of Constantine’s activities as co-emperor is limited. The main incident we are informed about is Constantine’s participation in the Battle of Abydos against the rebel Bardas Phokas (the nephew of Nikephoros Phokas) in 989 (and notably it was later said

  Symeon the Logothete, Chronicle, Leo VI, chap. 37, ed. Wahlgren 2006, p. 284.256–9. 69   See Flusin 1985, pp. 128–9, and 1987, pp. 237–9. 70   Symeon the Logothete, Chronicle, Basil I, chap. 6, ed. Wahlgren 2006, p. 262.41–2. 71   For Basil and Constantine see for example Holmes 2005, esp. pp. 522–4. 72   See Holmes 2005, p. 28 and p. 450 n. 3. Psellos, Chronographia 1.37 and 2.1, says Basil was 72 when he died (the same age at which Basil’s niece Zoe died he says: see n. 12 above) and that Constantine was in his seventieth year when he became sole emperor. 73   Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, Basil II and Constantine VIII, chap. 41. 74   Psellos, Chronographia 1.2, trans. Sewter 1966, p. 27. 68

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that it was Constantine’s spear that had killed Bardas Phokas).75 Otherwise the impression is that Constantine, like Alexander, was largely reduced to having a ceremonial function. Runciman argued that the younger brother did have a more significant role in the reign, such as acting as his elder brother’s representative in Constantinople when Basil was on campaign,76 but Holmes doubts this.77 Even before 989 it seems that Constantine mostly had a ceremonial role, and Psellos indicates that his part was further reduced after this when Basil II rid himself of his dominating great-uncle Basil Lekapenos and took control into his own hands. Psellos remarks that the emperor: took great pains to ensure that the various departments of the government should be centred on himself, and that they should work without friction. He adopted a supercilious manner, not only in his dealings with other men, but even towards his brother. To Constantine he allotted a mere handful of guards, as though he grudged him protection of a more dignified or imposing nature. Having first straitened himself, so to speak, and having cheerfully stripped off the proud contraptions of monarchy in his own case, he now dealt with his brother and gradually decreased his authority too.78

One has the sense that Basil was jealously guarding imperial power, perhaps affected by the examples of the interlopers Romanos Lekapenos, Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes, the dominance of the eunuch Basil Lekapenos, and the attempted usurpations of Bardas Skleros (the brother-in-law of John Tzimiskes) and Bardas Phokas. Nevertheless his containment of his brother does recall the treatment of Alexander by Leo. Like Alexander, Constantine has the reputation of enjoying the good life too. Psellos asserts that Constantine ‘appeared to be apathetic, lazy, and devoted to a life of luxury’, and that Basil ‘left him to enjoy the beauties of the country, the delights of bathing and hunting, his special hobbies’.79 It is notable that Basil also did not arrange marriages for the daughters of Constantine, his own nieces, and it appears that he was avoiding creating any potential threats to his own rule, as sons-in-law of the co-emperor could have been.80 Perhaps such marriages would also have enhanced the status of Constantine himself. Further, at the end of Basil’s reign there was the question of who would succeed him. It seems that Basil’s advisers were not keen to select     77   78   79  

Psellos, Chronographia 1.16. Runciman 1980, p. 219. Holmes 2005, p. 523, and 2006, p. 329. Psellos, Chronographia 1.22, trans. Sewter 1966, pp. 39–40. Psellos, Chronographia 1.2 and 1.22, trans. Sewter 1966, p. 27 and p. 40. See also Historia Syntomos 106, ed. Aerts 1990, pp. 106.43–44 and 108.53–5, and Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, Constantine VIII, chap. 1 (Constantine’s frivolous activities when sole emperor). 80   See also Holmes 2006, p. 336. 75 76

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Constantine, but Basil did choose his brother as his heir.81 Significantly, perhaps, Constantine was not living in Constantinople at the time of Basil’s last illness, but on an estate at Nicaea. Thus, as with Leo and Alexander, we see a wariness of the sibling relationship but also a reluctance to dispense with it altogether. There were evident tensions between individual power and dynastic interests. Zoe and Theodora This impression is further reinforced when one considers the case of the sisters Zoe and Theodora, the daughters of Constantine VIII, though there are some interesting and important gender distinctions to be made here.82 Zoe was slightly older than Theodora, and they both held imperial status. Once again the elder sibling is seen as the senior figure, the younger exercising fewer privileges. As with their male ancestors, there are signs of tension in the relationship. Some sources assert that when Constantine VIII was planning his succession in 1028 he intended that the younger sister should marry Romanos Argyros, the idea perhaps being that since Theodora was slightly less old she might have a better chance of conceiving and giving birth to a child.83 Theodora, however, rejected the match, but this may have caused some resentment on Zoe’s part. During the reign of Zoe and Romanos, Theodora was removed from the palace and made a nun at Petrion, where her ancestors the daughters of Basil I had been confined over 150 years earlier. Psellos indicates that Zoe was jealous of Theodora,84 though Skylitzes reports that Theodora was embroiled in plots against her sister (with Prousianos the Bulgar, who was related by marriage to the Kourkouas family, and with Constantine Diogenes, the son-in-law of Romanos Argyros’ brother Basil).85 There is a strong sense of déjà vu. And as with the other co-emperors already discussed, there is little information about Theodora’s activities, though she was more restricted in her movements, being confined at Petrion by Zoe and Romanos III Argyros. However, she did come into her own at the time of the public protests against the emperor Michael V after he had ousted his adopted mother Zoe from the palace. Theodora was dragged out of cloistered retirement and restored as empress. With the fall of Michael, Zoe and Theodora ruled together, until Zoe married for the third time and the younger sister was sidelined once more, though Psellos asserts that Theodora (like Constantine)

  Aristakes of Lastivert, Account of the Misfortunes of the Armenian Nation 4, French trans. Canard and Berbérian 1973, p. 25. 82   For Zoe and Theodora see for instance Garland 1999, pp. 136–67, and Hill 1999, pp. 42–58. 83   E.g. Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, Constantine VIII, chap. 3. See the comments of Hill 1999, p. 51. 84   Psellos, Chronographia 5.34, though he also alludes to the fact that Theodora was slandered to Zoe. 85   Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, Romanos III Argyros, chap. 3 and chap. 9. 81

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accepted her lot.86 One gets the impression that Zoe could not risk alienating her sister too much, in case she became a figurehead for further opposition. In relation to Zoe and Theodora the issue of frivolous lifestyle arises again, though in relation to both women. Psellos notes the sisters’ ‘luxurious, laughter-loving habits’, which he says Constantine IX indulged.87 In this respect they are both characterised as lesser rulers than the emperor, perhaps unsurprising in that we are dealing with an added dimension of gender, for the male ruler was expected to take precedence and the female rulers were expected to have a more restricted role in the political arena. It is emphasised, and noteworthy, that both women still had a ceremonial role under Constantine IX.88 It is also intriguing that when Zoe and Theodora ruled together in 1042 Psellos presents their reign very much as a partnership, rather than Zoe being the dominating figure as one might expect to see in a case of co-emperors (though he does note that in the court Theodora’s throne was set slightly further back than her sister’s).89 Perhaps again this is due to their being female rulers, age not necessarily giving clear precedence in this instance. Psellos records that some people in fact thought Theodora had more right to rule (as she had opposed Michael V), and that Zoe was only able to secure power for herself by marrying again.90 Conclusions The examination of three sets of siblings of the Macedonian dynasty sheds interesting light on this relationship within the context of an imperial family. In all three cases tension is evident between the siblings, though not to the extent that the younger sibling – the ‘spare’ – could be dispensed with. There are, however, important gender distinctions to be made. While the younger brothers of Leo VI and Basil II remained as co-emperors, the younger sister of the empress Zoe could be removed to a nunnery; and whereas Alexander and Constantine VIII were clearly the junior partners of their elder brothers, Theodora could be a full partner of her sister. As for understanding the relationships between the different sets of siblings, and the lifestyles of the siblings, the literary sources tend to explain things in terms of personality or moral character. Thus Leo and Alexander were ‘unbrotherly disposed’ to one another, while Zoe was jealous of Theodora; Alexander embraced a louche and hedonistic lifestyle, the lazy Constantine devoted himself to a life of luxury, and both Zoe and Theodora had their ‘luxurious and laughter-loving habits’ indulged by Constantine IX. The suspicion might arise that one is being confronted by a topos about the behaviour of, and relationship between, co-rulers and siblings. However, I would argue that what is being indicated are the serious     88   89   90   86

87

Psellos, Chronographia 6.62. Psellos, Chronographia 6.49, trans. Sewter 1966, p. 180. For instance Psellos, Chronographia 6.61. Psellos, Chronographia 6.3. Psellos, Chronographia 6.11.

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structural issues which could account for such behaviour. It is evident that power does affect sibling relationships in an imperial context. A younger sibling of a ruler could be deemed a potential threat to the position of their elder sibling, for they too had a claim to imperial power and could replace them. Nevertheless, the younger sibling had special status as a member of the imperial family and as possible co-ruler, so would not necessarily be simply eliminated. They might also be needed in the future, if the elder sibling died without children of their own or a surviving marriage partner. Thus the existence of a younger sibling of a ruler could present very particular political challenges. Further, there arose the question of what roles the younger sibling and co-ruler was supposed to play in society. The elder sibling was evidently expected to be the one who exercised power (or in the case of a female dynast, let their husband exercise power), so what did this leave for the younger sibling (and in the case of a husband ruling for a female dynast, a wife) to do? Evidently they were to be seen on great state or ceremonial occasions, otherwise they could be expected to keep a low profile and occupy themselves with pastimes and the enjoyment of their wealth. That Alexander, Constantine, Zoe and Theodora are all credited with enjoying lives of luxury says not so much about their moral character but the limbo world they found themselves in as imperial second fiddles to the main ruler of Byzantium. The challenging position ‘spares’ of the Byzantine imperial family faced can be illuminated by comparisons with other dynasties in different cultures, such as the House of Windsor of the United Kingdom. The difficult quest for a role by the siblings of Prince Charles is only all too well known, witness the criticism that has dogged the lives and careers of Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.91 Particularly relevant however, are the cases of Princess Margaret (sister of Queen Elizabeth II) and Prince Harry (brother of Prince William). Both are the sole sibling of a monarch or a monarch-in-waiting, and both acquired the reputation of being rebellious and devoting themselves to having a good time.92 This is especially true of Princess Margaret, who became notorious for being part of a ‘fast’ set, for her luxurious lifestyle (symbolised for instance by the time she spent on the Caribbean island of Mustique), and in general for her fun-loving attitude (it was she who suggested joining incognito the crowds outside Buckingham Palace

  See for instance the polemical Hari 2002, esp. pp. 110–67.   The cases of Margaret and Harry are connected together by Junor 2006, pp. 369–

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70. For Harry see also Hari 2002, pp. 168–73, who observes ‘The younger sibling of the heir to the throne is in an exceptionally difficult position, as the miserable life of Margaret Windsor shows. You get all the downside of growing up royal … but you get few of the perks (power, influence), and you almost always get an inferiority complex the size of Sandringham’ (p. 168). More recently Harry seemed to have redeemed himself, given for instance his career as a soldier and the sense that he had matured, but in August 2012 he was photographed partying naked in a hotel suite in Las Vegas, reviving the image of him as a ‘playboy prince’ (e.g. Metro 23 August 2012, pp. 1 and 5).

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on VE-Day).93 In 1971 she was hailed by the MP Willie Hamilton as ‘the most expensive kept woman in the country’, given the contribution she received from the Civil List and the lack of public appearances she made the previous year.94 Johann Hari opines that Margaret’s ‘greatest achievement in life seems to have been to have successfully got away with doing virtually nothing’.95 However, it is clear that her lifestyle, in part at least, derived from not being queen herself but being sister of the queen and trying to find a role for herself. Robert Lacey observes that Margaret ‘never proved able to establish a satisfying identity of her own’ and that she was ‘wreathed with the perpetual grievance of the also-ran’.96 Intriguingly, when she was born at Glamis Castle in Scotland in August 1930 her existence raised the prospect of a joint-rule of sisters, akin to that of Zoe and Theodora, a prospect that was quickly put to bed.97 Later, in 1953, Margaret was also deprived of the entitlement of becoming Regent for Prince Charles in the event of her sister pre-deceasing her when Charles was not yet of age.98 The awkward position of Margaret, and the image of her that developed, is memorably reflected upon by her friend the American writer Gore Vidal in his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation (2006). He remarks: she was far too intelligent for her station in life. She often had a bad press, the usual fate of wits in a literal society. ‘Also,’ she said, ‘it was inevitable: when there are two sisters and one is the Queen who must be the source of honor and all that is good while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.’99

Thus Margaret herself suggests that there was an element of topos in how one casts the ‘spare’.100 Perhaps her apparent religiosity was part of an attempt to create an identity for herself, rather than just genuine belief or a response to her difficult personal life (her thwarted desire to marry the equerry (and divorcé) Peter   For biographies of Princess Margaret see Warwick 2002 and Aronson 2001, but see also the measured Pimlott 2002, as well as Hari 2002, esp. pp. 74–81. For a dual biography of Margaret and Elizabeth, entitled Royal Sisters, see Edwards 1991. This biography only records their lives up to 1956. 94   See Lacey 2002, p. 237, and also Pimlott 2002, p. 404. 95   Hari 2002, p. 80. 96   Lacey 2002, p. 191. 97   See for instance Pimlott 2002, p. 17, ‘Some experts argued that legally the two sisters enjoyed equal rights to the succession’. 98   See Lacey 2002, p. 188, and Warwick 2002, pp. 193–4. 99   Vidal 2006, p. 212. 100   On the early-established contrasting images of the ‘dutiful’ Elizabeth and the ‘mischievous’ Margaret see also Pimlott 2002, pp. 30 and 198, and Warwick 2002, pp. 48– 9. Margaret also rejected the view that she suffered from ‘“second daughter-itis”’: Warwick 2002, p. 124. 93

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Townsend in the 1950s, and the failure of her marriage to Antony ArmstrongJones (Lord Snowdon) in the 1970s).101 Ben Pimlott raises the prospect of her becoming a nun, like Prince Philip’s mother Alice (Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark).102 Nevertheless, Margaret maintained a strong sense of her special royal identity. She is said to have proclaimed ‘“I am unique … I am the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen.”’103 The general view is that she never let people (or herself) forget how royal she was, even insisting that ‘anybody who married into the royal family should “defer to those born in the purple.”’104 Gore Vidal records that Margaret asserted ‘“I detested Queen Mary … She was rude to all of us except Lilibet [Elizabeth], who was going to be queen. Of course, she had an inferiority complex. We were royal, and she was not.”’105 However, the gulf that opened up between the sisters when the eldest became queen is nicely symbolised by the fact that from then on Margaret had, in company at least, to curtsey to Elizabeth, her Sovereign.106 So, the case of Princess Margaret usefully sums up the awkward position ‘spares’ could find themselves in; they were of privileged status but could struggle to find a role for themselves, and could be defined in opposition to their elder sibling. Thus it is clear that power does affect the nature of relationships within the imperial family and how they are depicted. This returns us to the question of how typical (or rather, atypical) imperial families are. We can assert that imperial families can be studied in their own right, as a type apart (as the comparison with the Windsors suggests), but to say that this is all we can do is I think too pessimistic. Even if imperial families are atypical, how they are written about can reveal underlying Byzantine expectations about the nature of family relationships, what the ideal should be. For instance, in the case of the Macedonians there were expressed views on the closeness and intimacy of family relationships, such as those attributed by Psellos to Zoe and Basil Lekapenos about Basil II, uncle and great-nephew respectively. The case of the Macedonians can also reveal what was deemed inappropriate about family relationships, such as Leo VI and Alexander’s unbrotherly feelings about one another, the prospective marriage between Theodora and Romanos Argyros (too close a relative), and Nikephoros Phokas marrying Theophano although he was allegedly already godfather to her sons. I would argue, then, that given the relative wealth of evidence we have concerning imperial families, they deserve to be studied thoroughly not just in their own right

101   See especially Pimlott 2002, pp. 299 and 437. On Margaret’s religiosity see also Warwick 2002, pp. 177–82, and Junor 2006, p. 370. 102   Pimlott 2002, p. 437. 103   Lacey 2002, p. 190. 104   Hari 2002, p. 75. 105   Vidal 1995, p. 194. Vidal opines that Margaret took her ‘station in life … altogether too solemnly’. 106   Pimlott 2002, p. 187.

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but also in order to inform our understanding of the subject of families in general in Byzantium. Bibliography Primary Sources Aristakes of Lastivert, Account of the Misfortunes of the Armenian Nation, French trans. Marius Canard and Haïg Berbérian, Récit des malheurs de la nation arménienne (Brussels: Byzantion, 1973). Historia Syntomos, ed. trans. W.J. Aerts, Michaelis Pselli Historia syntomos (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1990). Leo the Deacon, History, ed. C.B. Hase, Leonis diaconi Caloënsis Historiae libri decem (E. Weber: Bonn, 1828), trans. Alice-Mary Talbot and Denis F. Sullivan, The History of Leo the Deacon: Byzantine Military Expansion in the Tenth Century (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2005). Life of Euthymios, ed. and trans. Patricia Karlin-Hayter, Vita Euthymii Patriarchae Cp. Text, Translation, Introduction and Commentary (Brussels: Byzantion, 1970). Life of Theophano, ed. Eduard Kurtz, ‘Zwei griechische Texte über die hl. Theophano, die Gemahlin Kaisers Leo VI’, Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Pétersbourg, eighth series, Classe Historico-Philologique, 3.2 (1898): 1–65. Liudprand of Ceremona, Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana, ed. trans. Brian Scott, Liudprand of Cremona, Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993). Michael Psellos, Chronographia, ed. Émile Renauld, Michel Psellos, Chronographie, 2 vols (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1926–8), trans. Edgar Robert Ashton Sewter, Michael Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). John Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Histories, ed. Hans Thurn, Ioannis Scylitzae Synopsis historiarum (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1973), trans. John Wortley, John Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811–1057, with Introductions by Jean-Claude Cheynet and Bernard Flusin and Notes by JeanClaude Cheynet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Symeon the Logothete, Chronicle, ed. Staffan Wahlgren, Symeonis Magistri et Logothetae Chronicon (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006). Yahya ibn Sa’id of Antioch, History, ed. Ignace Kratchkovsky and French trans. Françoise Micheau and Gérard Troupeau, Patrologia Orientalis, 47 (1997): 373–559.

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Secondary Sources Arbagi, Martin (1975), ‘The Celibacy of Basil II’, Etudes Byzantines, 2: 41–5. Aronson, Theo (2001), Princess Margaret: A Biography (London: Michael O’Mara Books Limited), orig. pub. 1997. Brokkaar, W.G. (1972), ‘Basil Lacapenus: Byzantium in the Tenth Century’, Studia Byzantina et Neohellenica Neerlandica, 3: 199–234. Chausson, François (2007), Stemmata aurea: Constantin, Justine, Théodose. Revendications généalogiques et idéologie impériale au IVe siècle ap. J.-C. (Rome: Bretschneider). Crostini, Barbara (1996), ‘Basil II’s Cultural Life’, Byz, 66: 55–80. Davids, Adelbert (1995), ‘Marriage Negotiations between Byzantium and the West and the Name of Theophano in Byzantium (Eighth to Tenth Centuries)’, in Davids (ed.) (1995), pp. 99–120. Davids, Adelbert (ed.) (1995), The Empress Theophano: Byzantium and the West at the Turn of the First Millennium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Edwards, Anne (1991), Royal Sisters: Elizabeth and Margaret 1926–1956 (London: Fontana), orig. pub. 1990. Flusin, Bernard (1985), ‘Un fragment inédit de la Vie d’Euthyme le Patriarche?’, TM, 9: 119–31. Flusin, Bernard (1987), ‘Un fragment inédit de la Vie d’Euthyme le Patriarche?’, TM, 10: 233–60. Garland, Lynda (1999), Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium AD 527–1204 (London and New York: Routledge). Hari, Johann (2002), God Save the Queen? Monarchy and the Truth about the Windsors (Duxford: Icon Books). Hill, Barbara (1999), Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025–1204: Power, Patronage and Ideology (Harlow: Longman). Hill, Barbara, James, Liz, and Smythe, Dion (1994), ‘Zoe: The Rhythm Method of Imperial Renewal’, in Magdalino (ed.) 1994, pp. 215–29. Holmes, Catherine (2005), Basil II and the Governance of Empire (976–1025) (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Holmes, Catherine (2006), ‘Constantinople in the Reign of Basil II’, in Elizabeth M. Jeffreys (ed.), Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization: In Honour of Sir Steven Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 326–40. Janin, Raymond (1931), ‘Un ministre byzantin: Jean l’orphanotrophe (XIe siècle)’, Echos d’Orient, 30: 431–43. Junor, Penny (2006), The Firm. The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (London: HarperCollins). Karlin-Hayter, Patricia (1969), ‘The Emperor Alexander’s Bad Name’, Speculum, 44: 585–96. Karlin-Hayter, Patricia (1981), Studies in Byzantine Political History: Sources and Controversies (London: Variorum Reprints).

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Lacey, Robert (2002), Royal. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (London: Time Warner). Leyser, Karl (1995), ‘Theophanu divina gratia imperatrix augusta: Western and Eastern Emperorship in the Later Tenth Century’, in Davids (ed.) (1995), pp. 1–27. Macrides, Ruth (1987), ‘The Byzantine Godfather’, BMGS, 11: 139–62. Macrides, Ruth (1990), ‘Kinship by Arrangement: The Case of Adoption’, DOP, 44: 109–18. Macrides, Ruth (1992), ‘Dynastic Marriages and Political Kinship’, in Jonathan Shepard and Simon Franklin (eds), Byzantine Diplomacy (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 263–80. Macrides, Ruth (1999), Kinship and Justice in Byzantium, 11th – 15th Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate). Magdalino, Paul (ed.) (1994), New Constantines: The Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4th–13th Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate). Miller, Timothy S. (2003), The Orphans of Byzantium: Child Welfare in the Christian Empire (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press). Pimlott, Ben (2002), The Queen. Elizabeth II and the Monarchy. Golden Jubilee Edition (London: HarperCollins). Runciman, Steven (1929), The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Runciman, Steven (1980), ‘The Country and Suburban Palaces of the Emperors’, in Angeliki E. Laiou-Thomadakis (ed.), Charanis Studies: Essays in Honor of Peter Charanis (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), pp. 219–28. Schlumberger, Gustave Léon (1890), Un empereur byzantine au dixième siècle, Nicéphore Phocas (Paris: Firmin-Didot). Schreiner, Peter (1991), ‘Réflexions sur la famille impériale à Byzance (VIIIe–Xe siècles)’, Byz, 61: 181–93. Shepard, Jonathan (1995), ‘A Marriage Too Far? Maria Lekapena and Peter of Bulgaria’, in Davids (ed.) (1995), pp. 121–49. Smythe, Dion C. (2006), ‘Middle Byzantine Family Values and Anna Komnene’s Alexiad’, in Lynda Garland (ed.), Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800–1200 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 125–39. Talbot, Alice-Mary, and Kazhdan, Alexander (1991), ‘Petrion’, in Alexander P. Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press), 3 vols, vol. 3, pp. 1643–4. Tobias, Norman (2007), Basil I, Founder of the Macedonian Dynasty: A Study of the Political and Military History of the Byzantine Empire in the Ninth Century (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press). Tougher, Shaun (1994), ‘The Wisdom of Leo VI’, in Magdalino (ed.) 1994, pp. 171–9. Tougher, Shaun (1997), The Reign of Leo VI (886–912): Politics and People (Leiden: Brill).

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Tougher, Shaun (1999), ‘Michael III and Basil the Macedonian: Just Good Friends?’, in Liz James (ed.), Desire and Denial in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 149–58. Tougher, Shaun (2008), The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London and New York: Routledge). Tougher, Shaun (2012), ‘Imperial Blood: Family Relationships in the Dynasty of Constantine the Great’, in Mary Harlow and Lena Larsson Lovén (eds), Families in the Roman and Late Antique World (London and New York: Continuum), pp. 181–98. Toynbee, Arnold (1973), Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World (London and New York: Oxford University Press). Vidal, Gore (1995), Palimpsest. A Memoir (London: André Deutsch). Vidal, Gore (2006), Point to Point Navigation. A Memoir 1964 to 2006 (London: Little, Brown). Vogt, Albert (1908), Basile Ier empereur de Byzance (867–886) et la civilisation byzantine à la fin du IXe siècle (Paris: A. Picard et fils). Warwick, Christopher (2002), Princess Margaret. A Life of Contrasts, second edition (London: André Deutsch).

Chapter 16

An Abbasid Caliphal Family Nadia Maria El Cheikh

Family history has not yet been established as a distinct field of inquiry in Middle Eastern studies. Assumptions about the important part the family played in the structuring of socio-economic and political relations have not been translated into historical works in any ‘systematic study of family history in the Middle East, whether by region or by historical period’.1 The lack of interest in family history can perhaps be explained by the scholarly assumption of a monolithic traditional family that constituted the fabric of Middle Eastern societies over centuries. Indeed, there is little or no perceived diversity in this area, which remains one ‘to which the critique of Orientalism has yet to reach’.2 As Beshara Doumani has pointed out, the positing of a linear evolution from extended group to modern nuclear family helps also to explain the lack of interest in family history.3 The centrality of the family renders it a slippery concept as the diversity of family forms and household structures prevent attempts at taxonomies and generalisations.4 Indeed, the term ‘family’ is ambiguous. Part of the problem is the overlapping of kinship and family boundaries and the concomitant difficulty of setting a universally accepted line of demarcation.5 Islam does not prescribe any specific organisational family type; different gradations of family organisation obtain, from permanent monogamous families, to polygamy, to temporary arrangements. Moreover, it is likely that different household arrangements were common with multiple generations living under one roof.6 The nature of the institution of marriage is key to many issues that directly relate to and bear on the nature of the family in Islam. The centrality of marriage in Islamic legal discourse and practice is to be understood primarily as the result of the major sources of law, the Qur’an and the Sunna (prophetic custom). In the Qur’an, marriage appears in many verses as one of the most important human relationships.7 Hadith literature similarly includes many statements by the Prophet on the subject of marriage. One hadith (prophetic tradition) states: ‘If you are a     3   4   5   6   7   1 2

Tucker 1993. See also the comments by Julia Bray in this volume. Gran 1996. Doumani 2003. Doumani 2003. ‘Abd al-‘Ali 1977, pp. 19 and 28–30. Mitchell 2007, p. 68. Tucker 2008, p. 38.

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Christian monk, then join them; if you are one of us, marriage is our sunna’.8 Marriage was considered the norm for all. The Prophet’s own example established marriage as sunna. While Christian monasticism with its obligations of chastity, poverty and obedience entailed the severance of all worldly ties, notably family ties,9 the Islamic rule against monasticism insured that such a situation did not obtain in the Islamic context. Marriage, in Islam’s sexual morality, was treated as polygamous and was not viewed as a permanent relationship; indeed, easy divorce could end it at any time. However, unlike Christianity, Islam did not confine sex to marriage: legitimate sexual intercourse extended also to the institution of concubinage.10 A number of important recent works on aspects of the family in Islamic societies have focused on the Ottoman and modern periods where historians benefit from court documents which enable the study of the nature of the family system. An examination of these records gives an idea, among other things, of the relationship between family members, marriage patterns, the nature of marriage contracts and divorce settlements, how the courts ruled in matters of inheritance, and the guardianship of children.11 Such archival material is totally absent for the earlier Islamic period. Getting a sense of family history for the Abbasid period specifically is an especially difficult task because the nature of the sources is very limited. While Byzantine historians wishing to write a history of the family profit from objects such as ivories, silks, jewels, icons and amulets; from manuscript miniatures; from monastic cartularies; and from private documents, notably letters,12 the Abbasid documentation is largely literary and is distinguished by its avoidance of references to family structures and to details about private life. Biographical literature can be singled out as one source which gives information about family structure. Al-Sakhawi’s ninth-/fifteenth-century biographical dictionary, al-Daw’ al-lami‘ fi ahl al-qarn al-tasi‘, includes a whole book on women who were transmitters of hadith. Al-Sakhawi recorded information on the marital history of about 500 women, the largest sample for any period of medieval Islam. Significantly, it shows a pattern of repeated divorces and remarriages by Mamluk women.13 The one biographical dictionary that could be useful in this connection for the Abbasid period is Tarikh baghdad of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 463/1071), which includes a record of 32 female scholars who lived between the second/eighth century and al-Baghdadi’s own day. It provides information on family networks involved in the transmission of hadith. 8   Ibn Qutayba, ‘Uyun al-akhbar, ed. Yusif ‘Ali Tawil 1985, vol. 4, p. 19; Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, al-‘Iqd al-farid, ed. Ahmad Amin et al 1940–53, vol. 6, p. 82. 9   Talbot 1990, p. 119. 10   Musallam 1983, p. 11. 11   ‘Abdal Rehim 1996. 12   Patlagean 1987. 13   Rapoport 2005, p. 5; see also Musallam 1996, pp. 186–97; Lutfi 1981.

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If one tries to find sources which can give some intimate detail about private life, one has to resort to a literary genre, within adab, quite popular in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, namely, compilations of edifying and entertaining anecdotes. Adab has been defined as including the ‘best’ of what had been said in the form of verse, prose, aphorism and anecdotes on every conceivable subject which an educated man, an adib, is supposed to know. Adab also purports to deal with a wide range of problems of language, literature, and ethical and practical behaviour.14 Such books of anecdotal narratives convey not only historical information but also social values and the art of social conduct.15 The two adab anthologies of alTanukhi (d. 384/994), al-Faraj ba‘da al-shidda (Ease after Diversity) and Nishwar al-muhadara (The Elegant Talks of the Assembly), are particularly valuable as they contain material pertaining to the social history of this period. For dynastic families, one has to depend on historical chronicles which provide material pertaining to the ruling dynasties and members of their entourage.16 The scant information available concerns the private or semi-private lives of caliphs, princes and viziers, and other notables at court. However, even when the texts speak of these influential people, they are normally silent about their childhood and the many intimate details of their private lives.17 In this chapter, I will focus on the immediate household of the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir (295/908–320/932). For specific historical and historiographical reasons, the narratives pertaining to his reign provide substantial information about this caliph’s family. While it is very rare for the sources to divulge private aspects of a ruler’s life, in the case of al-Muqtadir we read of his mother, his aunt, his uncle, his concubines, his sons, and his cousins. Moreover, three of al-Muqtadir’s sons became caliphs and therefore we have some information about their mothers. Al-Muqtadir’s personal relationships with his mother, his affection towards his own sons, the involvement of the grandmother in the education of her grandsons, are aspects, among others, that will be investigated in this chapter. The Harem: The Locus of the Family Archaeologically, the palaces related to the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad are not well known since almost nothing of the monuments and of the urban fabric of the Abbasid city remains. However, some information about the Baghdad palaces can be derived from literary descriptions.18 We know that from the reign of al-Mu‘tamid (256–279/870–892) the Hasani palace, built during the reign of Harun al-Rashid   Bonebakker 1990.   Leder and Kilpatrick 1992. See also El Cheikh 2002. 16   For a dynastic approach to Byzantine families see the contribution by Shaun 14 15

Tougher in this volume. 17   Bianquis 1996. 18   Grabar 1987, p. 134.

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(170–193/786–809), became the centre of a huge mass of buildings which were to form the core of the caliphal residence, the Dar al-Khilafa. Caliph al-Mu‘tadid (279–289/892–902) built two palaces called al-Thurayya and al-Firdaws, and laid foundations of a third, Qasr al-Taj. All three buildings stood on the Tigris bank, with great gardens stretching to the back, enclosing many minor palaces within their precincts. By the time of al-Muqtadir, the caliphal residence had expanded into a vast complex of palaces, public reception and banqueting halls, residential quarters, prayer halls and mosques, baths, pavilions, sports grounds, pleasure and vegetable gardens, orchards and the like. It occupied an area nearly a square mile in extent, surrounded by a wall with many gates.19 The caliphal residence came to resemble a small city, deep within which the caliph and his throne room were located, reached by a long route. Al-Muqtadir enlarged al-Taj, which became the principal caliphal residence and was linked by a subterranean passage to the palace of al-Thurayya for the benefit of the women.20 The expansion of the palace complex allowed for the spatial articulation of political hierarchy. Prominent women had their own apartments within this complex and it is probably from this time that a separate women’s quarter within the palace first emerged.21 The Abbasid caliphs maintained a secluded female household, conventionally called harem, meaning the protected or inviolable part of the house. While women of the caliphs had not always lived in seclusion, by the late third/ninth century they now lived in separate women’s quarters.22 The family members in the Abbasid harem of the early fourth/tenth century included the caliph’s mother, the wives of the caliph, his concubines, the children and the unmarried, widowed or divorced sisters and aunts. But a large number of people who were not part of the caliph’s family populated his harem. Concerning the harem of al-Muqtadir, Hilal al-Sabi’ states that ‘It is believed that in the days of al-Muqtadir … the residence contained 11,000 servants … 4,000 free and slave girls and thousands of chamber servants’.23 Very few references are made to the harem section of the palatial complex in the literary sources. Al-Tanukhi includes in his anthology an intimate description of al-Muqtadir’s harem: it was the duty of palace attendants occasionally to enter the women’s quarters (dur al-huram) in order to cleanse the sleeping quarters. In this story, a drunk attendant on duty entered the quarters of a concubine of al-Muqtadir. He fell asleep and was left behind while the other attendants left the private quarters. He was awakened in the evening when al-Muqtadir arrived with a number of slave-girls who started singing. Al-Muqtadir then chose the concubine ‘who lived in these quarters’ and the rest left. The attendant who remained in   Le Strange 1900, p. 263.   Le Strange 1900, pp. 252–5; Yaqut al-Hamawi, Mu‘jam al-buldan 1956, vol. 2 ,

19 20

p. 4.

  Kennedy 2004, p. 164.   Kennedy 2004, pp. 160–64; see also El Cheikh 2005. 23   Al-Sabi’, Rusum dar al-Khilafa, ed. Mikha’il ‘Awwad 1964, p. 8. 21 22

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hiding witnessed the amorous behaviour of al-Muqtadir and his concubine.24 This passage gives a rare glimpse into the most private area of the caliphal palace as well as into a most intimate moment in the caliph’s personal life; it also reveals the polygamous nature of the Abbasid caliphal harem as well as the prominent presence of concubines. The notion of polygamy is not limited to the four legal wives but to the multiplicity of concubines who populated the caliphal harem. Once the concubine had borne a child she became an umm walad (mother of a child) and enjoyed a legally and socially enhanced position. Upon the death of her master, she was freed. The hope of attaining the status of queen mother must have been entertained by every concubine taken into the caliphal harem. The prospect was not impossible since a number of concubines ascended through these ranks. The mothers of the Abbasid caliphs al-Muntasir (247–248/861–862), al-Muhtadi (255–256/869–870), and al-Mu‘tadid (279–289/892–902) were all concubines of Byzantine origin.25 So was Shaghab, the mother of caliph al-Muqtadir, who was bought by the caliph alMu‘tadid. In 282/895, she gave birth to a son, Ja‘far. Upon the accession of her son to the caliphate, she achieved great influence. Several concubines could become umm walad at the same time and the competition between them must have been acute for the ambitions of their children, because the oldest son was not automatically preferred over a younger one and sometimes brothers succeeded one another. Al-Muqtadir had a number of wives and concubines. The sources tell us that he was married to the daughter of Badr al-Mu‘tadidi for years and that he was generous towards her. When he was killed, she managed to escape the upheaval and to save her money and precious belongings. Later on she married someone of lower status, but he was always known as the husband of the free woman (zawj al-hurra). The text explains that she was called al-hurra because al-Muqtadir had married her; since the caliphs mostly had slave concubines, whenever caliphs married, their wife was called al-hurra (the free woman).26 We do not know whether al-hurra bore him any children, but in any case none of her off-spring became caliph. It is the sons of al-Muqtadir’s concubines who became caliphs. Hugh Kennedy has suggested that after the death of caliph Harun al-Rashid in 193/809 caliphs, with rare exceptions, do not seem to have married as they ‘no longer felt bound by the conventions of aristocratic Arab society and above all they wanted to sever rather than reinforce the ties with their own kin’.27 Al-Muqtadir had numerous concubines. One of them was Zalum. On Tuesday night, the fifth of Rabi II, the year 296/908, Zalum brought forth to the world Abu

  Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj ba‘da al-shidda, ed. ‘Abbud al-Shalji 1978, vol. 2, pp. 137–9.   Al-Mas‘udi, Muruj al-dhahab was ma‘adin al-jawhar, ed. Charles Pellat 1974,

24 25

vol. 5, pp. 46, 92 and 137. 26   Al-Tanukhi, Nishwar al-muhadara wa akhbar al-mudhakara, ed. ‘Abbud al-Shalji 1971, vol. 5, pp. 10-12. 27   Kennedy 2004, p. 167.

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al-‘Abbas Muhammad, the eldest son of al-Muqtadir.28 ‘Arib mentions that Abu al-‘Abbas was born in Dar Hanina’, just before dawn.29 Zalum is not mentioned on this occasion. It is only later on, once her son became caliph, that Zalum is mentioned in the sources.30 Her bringing forth of a male child meant that she would be freed as umm walad on al-Muqtadir’s death. Upon the accession of her son to the caliphate, she would become an influential person at the court. Al-Muqtadir had another concubine named Khumra. She also brought forth a son, thus becoming umm walad. Her son’s name was ‘Isa. Khumra is described as having been very charitable to the poor and the needy.31 We also read of another concubine to alMuqtadir, the mother of the prince Ibrahim,32 and of yet another concubine of alMuqtadir who brought forth a child in the year 297/909: ‘The mother of the child died … and was buried in al-Rusafa. Those attending her funeral included the vizier Ibn al-Furat, the leaders of the army and the Hashemites’.33 Al-Muqtadir had other concubines, as a long story found in al-Tanukhi’s al faraj ba‘da al-shidda implies. Al-Muqtadir once gave an order that a number of singing slave-girls be purchased on his behalf. The secretary of one of his concubines (mother of the future caliph al-Muttaqi) fell in love with one of the newly purchased singing-girls. Abu al-Hussayn b. Maymun al-Aftas related the following: ‘I was then a secretary, katib, for the mother of al-Muttaqi when he was still in his youth, and I refrained for days from calling in … I was neither eating nor drinking, doing nothing but cry’.34 When prompted about the causes for his state of disturbance, in tears he requested the prince al-Muttaqi to ask his father the caliph to sell him or give him the singing-girl in question. The mother of alMuttaqi tried to get the mother of the caliph to intervene but was reprimanded by the latter: ‘a man who has been blinded by passion is not to be blamed … but the blame is on you, for how did you think that it is acceptable that someone tell the caliph: cede your slave-girl to someone who is in love with her’. However, the tale is a happy one as the caliph hears about the plight of the protagonist and offers him the slave-girl.35 This story, in addition to the previous ones, tells us about the presence of a large number of concubines that could be purchased by the caliph at any point. It also informs us of the possibilities of intervention of his concubines and mother   Al-Suli, Ma lam yunshar min awraq al-Suli: akhbar al-sanawat 295–315, ed. Hilal Naji 2000, p. 68 [henceforward, Akhbar al-Muqtadir]. See also al-Mas‘udi, Muruj al-dhahab, vol. 5, p. 217. 29   ‘Arib, Silat tarikh al-Tabari, ed. M.J. De Goeje 1897, p. 33. 30   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Radi billah wa al-Muttaqi lillah, ed. J. Heyworth Dunne 1935, p. 1. 31   Ibn al-Sa‘i, Nisa’al-Khulafa’, ed. Mustafa Jawad, pp. 106-8. 32   Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj, vol. 4, p. 311. 33   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 61. 34   Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj, vol. 4, pp. 310–11. 35   Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj, vol. 4, pp. 311–14. 28

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in the personal lives of the men around them. But most importantly it tells us that singing-girls had come to represent the actual and symbolic centre of anxieties of fourth/tenth century Baghdadi society. The kind of passion that these jawari could kindle is reflected in many texts. In addition to the Epistle on the Singing Slave-Girls of al-Jahiz in the early third/ninth century, the texts of al-Tanukhi reveal that a number of men became destitute after having spent all their money on their passion for slave-girls, notably singing slave-girls. Al-Faraj, for instance, mentions a prosperous man in Baghdad who fell passionately in love with a slave-girl. He kept on spending his money on her until he went bankrupt.36 The overwhelming passion that the slave-girls stirred in the hearts of men lead us to uphold Bouhdiba’s contention of a double-status for women: in appearance, the legitimate wife benefits from a superior status, but in reality the concubine ended up becoming a true ‘anti-wife’.37 Their presence led to a role reversal affecting profoundly the position of the free women, on the actual and affective levels. The Mother of the Caliph The medieval texts emphasise the affective strength of the ties between adult men and their mothers, a strength that was superior to that of the married couple, which they describe as fairly precarious. Similarly the young wife would, as soon as she had given birth to a son, identify with him and plan his future.38 Texts report on this important dimension of family relationships. Al-Tanukhi emphasises the affective strength of the ties between mothers and their sons in a number of anecdotes. Abu al-Qasim b. al-Hawari, a man close to the power circle of al-Muqtadir, was said to have been extremely devoted to his mother. He was not comfortable eating anything unless she ate with him, and it was his habit that if he tasted any delicious dish that he would send it over to her table.39 Although this story cannot be taken at face-value and may be understood primarily as a topos it suggests, nonetheless, that strong relations could exist between an adult male and his mother and that a son’s fondness for his mother did not necessarily diminish after he became completely independent, having reached high positions of power. Our texts also reveal the other side to this close relationship, namely the disapproval of a mother’s remarriage. A conversation that took place in the presence of the Hamdanid ruler Sayf al-Dawla (333/945–356/967) made mention of a man whose mother had remarried. Sayf al-Dawla is said to have ordered his secretary to write the man a letter of condolence.40 A second anecdote has Ibrahim b. Hilal al-Sabi’ 36   Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj, vol. 4, p. 316. For more anecdotes on these aspects see El Cheikh 2002. 37   Bouhdiba 1986, p. 131. 38   Bianquis 1996. 39   Al-Tanukhi, Nishwar, vol. 1, p. 122. 40   Al-Tanukhi, Nishwar, vol. 2, p. 264.

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write a letter to a man whose mother had remarried in which he congratulated him for his ‘firm endurance’.41 Thus a mother’s remarriage warranted comforting words in the context of the prevalent value system which seems to have frowned upon her decision to enter into a new marriage. The affective relations with her son perhaps compensated for the expected celibate widowhood. Mothers were important and mothers of caliphs all the more. The most powerful person in the Abbasid harem tended to be the mother of the caliph. This was certainly the case in the early fourth/tenth century with the accession of the young al-Muqtadir to the caliphate, when his mother achieved great power. She figures prominently in the annals of this period through her political interventions, her financial contributions to the reign, and her wide philanthropic activities. Umm al-Muqtadir’s economic power was based on her agricultural estates which she had received as land grants. Her wealth became a source of power and this in turn allowed her to foster a series of subordinate patronage networks. She had her own retinue, secretaries and other officials.42 The sources highlight the closeness between the caliph and his mother, stating that the caliph used to spend a lot of time at his mother’s quarters in the harem. The historian Miskawayh (d. 420/1030) mentions ‘an apartment belonging to al-Sayyida [the caliph’s mother], but frequently used by the caliph when he sat with her’.43 Mother and son visited one another. She used to visit him on a regularly scheduled basis, for on one occasion when she appeared to ask for a special favour his first words were ‘Oh Sitty [my Lady], this is the regular time for your visit.’44 It seems that it was his practice when he saw her to stand up for her, hug her and kiss her on the head, and seat her beside him in the place of honour.45 We also find al-Muqtadir on one occasion in the harem inquiring about new clothes that this mother had bought and that were carried in by a harem stewardess.46 The sources emphasise the closeness between the young caliph and his mother to the extent of blaming the ills of the faltering Abbasid state at this historical juncture on the relationship between son and mother. For instance, the annalist ‘Arib (d. ca. 370/980) in a partial defence of al-Muqtadir states: ‘Had he not been dominated in most affairs, people would have lived comfortably. But his mother and others of his retinue thwarted his plans’.47 Al-Muqtadir’s close relationship with his mother is manifested in the sources in other ways. When in 315–316/927 the Carmathians threatened Baghdad, Umm al-Muqtadir supported the treasury with her own private wealth. She ordered the transfer of half a million dinars of her own to the public treasury to be spent on     43   44  

Al-Tanukhi, Nishwar, vol. 3, p. 211. See El Cheikh 2004. Miskawayh, Tajarib al-umam, ed. H.F. Amedroz 1920, vol. 1, p. 118. Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Muntazam fi tarikh al-muluk wa al-umam, ed. Muhammad and Mustafa ‘Ata 1992, vol. 13, p. 71. 45   Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Muntazam, vol. 13, p. 71. 46   Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj, vol. 4, pp. 364–5. 47   ‘Arib, Silat, p. 24 41 42

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the troops. Her act was momentous for, in the words of the vizier ‘Ali b. ‘Isa, ‘since the demise of the Blessed Prophet, no more serious disaster has befallen the Muslims than this’.48 On the eve of his last battle in 320/932, al-Muqtadir asked his mother one last time for her financial assistance. She provided it and as he was bidding her farewell, he expressed his concern for her fate, were he to fall in battle.49 Al-Muqtadir was killed and his mother became desperate upon hearing that he had been put to death and had not been properly buried. In the words of Miskawayh ‘she bruised her face and head and would neither eat nor drink until she nearly died’.50 In addition to supporting her son, Umm al-Muqtadir promoted her own family. Although they were of foreign (and probably of slave) origin, they became very important, notably her sister Khatif, her brother Gharib, and her nephew Harun. Her sister Khatif was one of the sada, a term connoting the proto-regency council which was in charge of affairs upon the accession to the caliphate of the 13-yearold al-Muqtadir.51 Khatif, being the aunt of the young caliph, acquired influence. It was she who suggested that Abu al-‘Abbas al-Khasibi be appointed vizier in 313/925.52 A longer anecdote connected to Khatif is related by Ja‘far Muhammad b. Shirzad, the secretary of her nephew Harun. Seeking to hide, Ja‘far dressed like a woman, and entering the dwelling of the maternal aunt (dar al-khala) he made himself known to her, and she allowed him to stay there for two months.53 Gharib al-khal (the maternal uncle) was among the highest ranking generals of the period. He received an important post following al-Muqtadir’s accession and generally played a prominent role in the affairs of state. In 298/910 he was appointed governor of the Syrian frontiers, and in 300/912 of Halwan, Oman and al-Bahrayn.54 Gharib had direct contact with the caliph and was consequently used by courtiers and others to pass on requests or gifts to the caliph. In 297/909, upon the birth of al-Muqtadir’s son Ibn al-‘Abbas, the courtier al-Suli wrote a poem and gave it to Gharib to pass on to the caliph.55 In the year 302/914 a person wishing to have a meeting with the caliph gained access to Gharib and convinced him to organise such a meeting for him.56 Gharib’s prominence is witnessed on the occasion of his marriage in 298/910 to the daughter of Badr al-Mu‘tadidi. Al-Suli has a short description of the lavishness of the marriage, including the gift of the   Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 180.   ‘Arib, Silat, p. 184. 50   Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 243, trans. Amedroz and Margoliouth 1921, vol. 1, 48 49

p. 274; al-Hamadhani, Takmilat tarikh al-Tabari, ed. Albert Kan‘an 1959, p. 91. 51   Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj, vol. 2, p. 45. 52   Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 143. 53   Al-Tanukhi, al-Faraj, vol. 4, pp. 37-9. 54   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, pp. 77 and 90; al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 14. 55   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 68. 56   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, pp. 96–7.

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bride to Gharib, clothing and perfumes for the amount of 20,000 dinars.57 Moreover his importance can be assessed from the notification of his death in 305/917: his funeral was attended by the leading officials of the state, notably the vizier Ibn alFurat and his circle of courtiers (hashiyya), the generals and the judges.58 Notably a number of Gharib’s children achieved prominence, including alQasim who died in 305/917 and whose funeral was attended by the grandees of the state;59 and Harun, who succeeded his father following the latter’s death in 305/917.60 We also read of Gharib’s daughters: Al-Suli mentions that in the year 307/919 the harem stewardess, Umm Musa, carried in a lavish cortege gifts from the daughters of Gharib to their husbands, the sons of Badr al-Hamami. The impressive cortege consisted of cavaliers and men on foot. The gift included 12 horses saddled magnificently, sumptuous cloths and 100,000 dinars.61 In addition to Umm al-Muqtadir, who promoted her siblings, nephews and nieces, the sources refer to another motherly figure, al-Muqtadir’s wet-nurse. She appears in an anecdote concerning the very costly and unique silver village which was made for al-Muqtadir. The hero of the story wished to borrow it in order to display it at his son’s circumcision, to show that he stood high in the court’s favour. The caliph’s wet-nurse and his mother persuaded al-Muqtadir to lend it.62 The wet-nurse’s presence in the anecdote reminds us that one should think in terms of households rather than in terms of family in the more restricted sense, an important distinction to make as the way a society deals with artificial kinship is indicative of its organisation and mental profile.63 Indeed, one must distinguish between the biological family and the kin created by artificial links such as milk relationships. Qur’an 4/23 mentions milk mothers and milk sisters among those with whom a man may not have sexual relations. Thus milk relationships functioned as a mechanism to broaden the network of relatives.64 The Caliphs’ Children: Upbringing, Education, and Public Role The royal children seem to have lived with their mothers in the harem of the caliphal palace. The young al-Muqtadir and his mother lived in the same residence, as revealed in an anecdote related to al-Muqtadir’s childhood. The eunuch Safi al-Hurami was walking one day with the caliph al-Mu‘tadid in the quarters of the     59   60   61   62   63  

Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 72. ‘Arib, Silat, p. 69; al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 27. Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 116. Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 117. ‘Arib, Silat, p. 78. Bray 1998. Laiou 1990, p. 97. For this point in relation to the ancient world see for instance the chapter of Harlow and Parkin in this volume. 64   Giladi 2007. 57 58

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harem. Upon reaching the door of Umm al-Muqtadir, the caliph peeked from behind the curtain to find his son al-Muqtadir, then five years old, sitting surrounded by 10 servants of about his age. The young al-Muqtadir was sharing his expensive food with them, and this angered his father for his son was lowering himself to the level of his servants.65 In this anecdote in which we have a rare glimpse of the caliph in his boyhood playing with other children, we find him in his mother’s quarters. We also read that during the coup of 296/908 al-Muqtadir vacated the palace and moved with his mother to another palace.66 We again find them together 20 years later, during the coup of 317/929, being removed from the palace together: al-Muqtadir was accompanied by his mother, his aunt and his concubines.67 The princes, even at a very young age, were made to play a public role. In a famous description about a Byzantine ambassador’s visit to the caliph al-Muqtadir, one source states that after touring the palace the ambassador was brought into the presence of al-Muqtadir, who was sitting flanked by his five sons, three to the right, and two to the left.68 The presence of the princes on this and other such important occasions reflects their symbolic function. Indeed, during the coup of 317/929, as the rebellious troops approached the palace, al-Muqtadir opened the gates, dismissed the guards, and sat on his throne reading the Qur’an, surrounded by his sons.69 The sons, at such a young age, served a multiplicity of political functions, representing an extension of the caliph’s ritual sanctification and enhancing his authority.70 At the end of al-Muqtadir’s reign we read again that on the eve of the battle against general Mu’nis, and after the Friday prayer, al-Muqtadir rode through the city, preceded by his seven oldest sons.71 Al-Muqtadir had numerous children. ‘Arib lists 10 sons and one daughter.72 The daughter died in 305/917. Unlike the sons, she is nameless. She was buried in Rusafa, and the reigning family and the important notables attended her funeral.73 Al-Suli mentions another nameless daughter who had died earlier, in 299/911. She was buried beside the grave of her grandfather al-Mu‘tadid in the Dar of Muhammad b. ‘Abdallah b. Tahir.74 It is notable that we hear of the daughters of al-Muqtadir for the first and last time on the occasions of their deaths. Otherwise, the sources report no information either on their births or their marriages. During the early part of the Abbasid era, the daughters of the caliphs were married off to members of the ruling family and other notables of the state. We stop hearing of     67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   65

66

Al-Tanukhi, Nishwar, vol. 1, pp. 287–8. Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 6. Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 193. Al-Baghdadi, Tarikh Baghdad, vol. 1, p. 104. ‘Arib, Silat, p. 140. Marmer 1994, pp. 146–7. ‘Arib, Silat, p. 167. ‘Arib, Silat, pp. 180 and 68. ‘Arib, Silat, p. 68. Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 86.

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their marriages as the third/ninth century progresses. As Hugh Kennedy wonders, is it that their weddings were no longer considered important enough to be recorded by the historians, or is it that they were now living secluded lives in the palaces of Baghdad, prevented by their status from marrying at all?75 We read several stories pertaining to the children of the caliphal household. In 302/914, at the age of five, the eldest son of al-Muqtadir, Abu al-‘Abbas, and four of his brothers, were circumcised, honoured with a lavish celebration.76 AlSuli provides a vignette which shows all the royal children gathered around their father, al-Muqtadir. The youngest son at the time was al-Fadl. The caliph made him sit with him on his throne and cuddled him. When the caliph thought that his action may have displeased his eldest son, Abu al-‘Abbas, he addressed him, reminding him that al-Fadl was the youngest: ‘It still holds true that tenderness and playfulness are the share of the youngest, while respect and due position are the share of the eldest.’77 Another anecdote related to the relationship between the young siblings has al-Muqtadir scolding his eldest son Abu al-‘Abbas for not having invited his younger brother al-‘Abbas to an outing in al-Zubaydiyya. Abu al-‘Abbas explained that he had indeed invited him, but that al-‘Abbas had declined his invitation. The caliph answered him that he should have gone to him personally to get him, since he is the eldest of the children and their leader, and thus ‘must treat them gently, tolerate them and be kind to them.’78 Abu al-‘Abbas was put into the palace school at an early age, in 302/914.79 His first tutor was al-‘Arudi, but his most famous tutor was al-Suli (d. 336/946), who was assigned to meet with him twice a week.80 We hear about the interference of the caliph’s mother, who had her own agenda regarding the education of her grandson. Al-Suli recalls a day when Abu al-‘Abbas was reading the poetry of Bashshar b. Burd and had in front of him books of philology and history, when the eunuchs of his grandmother arrived. They took away the books, and Abu al-‘Abbas was upset by their action. Al-Suli tried to calm him down by saying that his grandmother had been informed that he was reading ‘proscribed’ books. A few hours later the eunuchs brought the books back. The prince Abu al-‘Abbas told them: Tell whoever ordered you to do what you have done that these are purely learned and useful books on theology, jurisprudence, philology, poetry, history … and are not the kinds of books that you read, such as stories of the marvels of the sea, Sindbad, and the fable of the cat and the mouse.81 75   Kennedy 2004, p. 178. See also the remarks of Leonora Neville in this volume about what is or is not recorded by our sources. 76   Al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 22. 77   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 32. 78   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Muqtadir, p. 32. 79   Al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 22. 80   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Radi, p. 25. 81   Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Radi, pp. 5–6.

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This was not the only incident in which we find his grandmother, as well as his father, interfering in the education of the young prince. Eunuchs reported to al-Muqtadir and his mother that al-Suli was teaching the prince Khalq al-insan, by al-Asma‘i (d.213/828), a philological treatise which included the names of the genital organs. Al-Suli was asked to bring in the volume and had to explain to the caliph that this is knowledge that is necessary for jurists and judges.82 That the young prince’s family had a different agenda regarding his education is clearly stated in an anecdote in which the prince Abu al-‘Abbas is praised by the scholar Husayn al-Mahamili for his knowledge acquired through al-Suli’s teaching. AlMahamili asked that his praise be reported to the harem stewardess Zaydan in the form of a question: ‘What have you done for the man [al-Suli] who has transformed the prince in such a way?’ The answer that was given by Zaydan reflected that their ideas were diametrically opposed to those of al-Suli: The qualities of this man [al-Suli] are in the eyes of al-Sayyida [al-Muqtadir’s mother] and those who serve her, shortcomings. So please tell him: we do not want our children to be men of letters or learned scholars … Look at their father [caliph al-Muqtadir]: we find in him all the qualities that we like and yet he is not a learned man.83

At some point in their education Abu al-‘Abbas seems to have been put under the tutorship of Mu’nis, the commander of the troops (kana fi hijr Mu’nis).84 We do not know what kind of tutorship Abu al-‘Abbas received from Mu’nis, but the loyalty that they felt towards each other was obvious during their difficult years. Upon the death of al-Muqtadir, Mu’nis came out clearly in favour of the succession of Abu al-‘Abbas, asking that he be placed on the throne since ‘he is my nursling (tarbiyati).’85 While the young princes were brought up in the caliphal harem, they received independent homes at an early age. In 306/918, the vizier Hamid b. al-‘Abbas took up residence in Bab al-Basra, and the caliph gave the vacant waziral palace to prince Abu al-‘Abbas.86 When Ibn al-Furat was appointed vizier five years later, al-Muqtadir returned the waziral palace to him, upon his request. There is no indication as to where Abu al-‘Abbas moved.87 Having a residence inside the palace complex would have afforded a useful physical proximity for the prince as he would have been able to influence caliphal decisions in a more immediate way. However, by establishing a residence outside the royal complex, the prince was     84   85  

Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Radi, pp. 25–6. Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Radi, p. 26. Al-Suli, Akhbar al-Radi, p. 5. Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol.1, pp. 241-2, trans. Amedroz and Margoliouth 1920, vol.1, p. 272. 86   Al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 30. 87   Al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 43. 82

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able to assert his independent political identity. This increased the possibility of his participation in a coup against his father.88 Indeed, in 319/931 al-Muqtadir heard that Mu’nis was plotting to carry off the prince Abu al-‘Abbas from his palace in al-Mukharrim to Egypt or Syria and there proclaim him caliph. Al-Muqtadir therefore returned the prince from al-Mukharrim palace to his apartment in the caliphal palace to keep a closer watch over him.89 The sources provide us with information about both sibling rivalries and emotional bonds.90 We read, for instance, that upon the death of Harun his brother Abu al-‘Abbas (al-Radi) grieved over him.91 Familial bonds among siblings are reflected in the relationship between al-Muqtadir and his half-brother al-Qahir. Following the failed coup of al-Qahir in 317/929, al-Muqtadir summoned him, invited him to sit, kissed him on the forehead and reassured him that he did not blame him for the attempted coup. Al-Muqtadir promised him that no harm would fall upon him as long as he, al-Muqtadir, lived. He then placed al-Qahir in his mother’s care and she treated him well. She was extremely kind and generous to him, lodging him magnificently and buying him slave-girls to serve him.92 Later on, upon the death of her son, Umm al-Muqtadir reminded al-Qahir that she had treated him like a son: ‘I am your mother according to the Book of God … I am the one who saved you from my son the first time thus enabling you to get to this position.’93 Al-Qahir, however, related how with his own hands ‘he had scourged her a hundred times on the soft parts of her body with intent to make her confess and how she had not confessed to the possession of a single dirham.’ She died owing to her increasing illness and to the tortures which al-Qahir made her suffer.94 The texts hint at his ungratefulness towards his step-mother: ‘He showed no gratitude for the kindness she had done him when he was imprisoned by Muqtadir’.95 Conclusion At the outset of this chapter I mentioned that family history is an underdeveloped field of study, especially with respect to early Islamic history. The scarcity of sources and references makes such an investigation daunting. In order to get a sense   Marmer 1994, p. 137.   Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 221; al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 83. 90   For imperial sibling relationships in Byzantium see the chapter by Shaun Tougher 88 89

in this volume. 91   Al-Hamadhani, Takmila, p. 116. 92   Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fial-tarikh, ed. Tornberg 1979, vol. 8, p. 206. 93   Al-Tanukhi, Nishwar, vol. 2, p. 76. 94   Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 243, trans. Amedroz and Margoliouth 1920, vol.1, p. 274. 95   Miskawayh, Tajarib, vol. 1, p. 244, trans. Amedroz and Margoliouth 1920, vol.1, p. 275.

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of the inner world of the family in the Abbasid period, I have looked at material that provides information on one specific household structure and the relationships within that household. The information that was gathered is exceptional and would be hard to acquire for another Abbasid caliphal household. The specific circumstances surrounding the caliphate of al-Muqtadir, notably his youth and the role that his mother and her own family played, permits this focus and provides, as much as possible, an in-depth case study of a specific family at work, at a specific historical moment. The information pertaining to al-Muqtadir’s reign is, in a true sense, unique, because in general texts, even when they speak of famous men, are silent about their boyhood. Here we are able to apprehend something of the childhood of al-Muqtadir and about his relations with other children. Moreover, we get glimpses of the intimacy between the caliph, his mother, and his concubines. We read about the harem women’s interference in the personal and political lives of the most influential men of the state. We see the children playing in the harem quarters but also having a more formal role, although they were still very young. We are informed of the grandmother’s involvement in the upbringing of her grandsons, of the relations between siblings, and those between stepmothers and stepchildren. This is certainly a congregation of information about family dynamics that is not readily available in the Abbasid narratives. The fact that the information relates to a caliphal family is directly linked to the source limitation. Chronicles and other literary evidence provide little if any information on all of these aspects. However, it is important to note that while much was specific to this royal family, it also shared much in common with other family models in terms of structure, family dynamics, and legal aspects pertaining to the relationship between parents and children and between men and women, notably divorce, polygamy and concubinage. More, of course, much more, effort needs to be exerted in order to get behind the screens and learn about a panorama that still lies largely in shadow. Bibliography Primary Sources ‘Arib, Silat tarikh al-Tabari, ed. M.J. De Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1897). Al-Baghdadi, al-Khatib, Tarikh Baghdad (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-‘ilmiyya, n.d.). Al-Hamadhani, Muhammad, Takmilat tarikh al-Tabari, ed. Albert Kan‘an (Beirut: al-Matba‘a al-kathulikiyya, 1959). Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih, Ahmad, Al-‘Iqd al-farid, ed. Ahmad Amin et al (Cairo: Lajnat at-ta’lif wa-al-tarjama wa-al-nashr, 1940–53). Ibn al-Athir, ‘Izz al-Din, Al-Kamil fi al-tarikh, ed. C.J. Tornberg (Beirut: Dar Sader, 1979). Ibn al-Jawzi, Abu al-Faraj, Al-Muntazam fi tarikh al-muluk wa al-umam, ed. Muhammad and Mustafa ‘Ata (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-‘ilmniyya, 1992).

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Ibn Qutayba, ‘Abdallah, ‘Uyun al-akhbar, ed. Yusif ‘Ali Tawil (Beirut: Dar alkutub al-‘ilmiyya, 1985). Ibn al-Sa‘i, Taj al-Din, Nisa ’al-khulafa’, ed. Mustafa Jawad (Cairo: Dar alma‘arif, n.d.). Al-Mas‘udi, ‘Ali b. al-Husayn, Muruj al-dhahab wa ma‘adin al-jawhar, ed. Charles Pellat (Beirut: Publications de l’université libanaise, 1974). Miskawayh, Ahmad b. Muhammad, Tajarib al-umam, ed. H.F. Amedroz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1920), trans. Amedroz and Margoliouth (1921). Al-Sabi’, Hilal, Rusum dar al-Khilafa, ed. Mikha’il ‘Awwad (Baghdad: Maatba‘at al-‘Ani 1964), trans. Salem (1977). Al-Suli, Abu Bakr, Akhbar al-Radi bi-llah wa al-Muttaqi li-llah wa tarikh aldawla al-‘abasiyya, ed. J. Heyworth Dunne (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Sawi, 1935). Al-Suli, Abu Bakr, Ma lam yunshar min awraq al-Suli: akhbar al-sanawat 295315, ed. Hilal Naji (Beirut: ‘Alam al-kutub, 2000). Al-Tanukhi, Abu ‘Ali al-Muhassin, Al-Faraj ba‘da al-shidda, ed. ‘Abbud al-Shalji (Beirut: Dar Sadir, 1978). Al-Tanukhi, Abu‘Ali al-Muhassin, Nishwar al-muhadara wa akhbar almudhakara, ed. ‘Abbud al-Shalji (Beirut: no publisher, 1971). Yaqut al-Hamawi, Shihab al-Din, Mu‘jam al-buldan (Beirut: Dar Sader, 1956). Secondary Sources ‘Abd al-‘Ali, Hammudah (1977), The Family Structure in Islam (Indianapolis, Indiana: American Trust Publications). ‘Abdal Rehim, Abdal-Rehim ‘Abdal Rahman (1996), ‘The Family and Gender Laws in Egypt during the Ottoman Period’, in Sonbol (ed.) (1996), pp. 96–111. Amedroz, H.I., and Margoliouth, D.S. (1921), The Eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate (London: Blackwell). Bianquis, Thierry (1996), ‘The Family in Arab Islam’, in Andre Burguière et al. (eds), A History of the Family, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 601–47. Bonebakker, S.A. (1990), ‘Adab and the Concept of Belles-Lettres’, in Julia Ashtiani et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Abbasid Belles-Lettres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 16–30. Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab (1986), La sexualité en Islam (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Bray, Julia Ashtiany (1998), ‘Figures in a Landscape: The Inhabitants of a Silver Village’, in Stefan Leder (ed.), Story-telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz), pp. 79–93. Doumani, Beshara (2003), ‘Introduction’, in Beshara Doumani (eds), Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany: SUNY Press), pp. 1–19. El Cheikh, Nadia Maria (2002), ‘Women’s History: A Study of al-Tanukhi’, in Manuela Marin and Randi Deguilhem (eds), Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources (London and New York: I.B. Tauris), pp. 129–48.

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El Cheikh, Nadia Maria (2004), ‘Gender and Politics: The Harem of al-Muqtadir’, in Leslie Brubaker and Julia Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 147– 61. El Cheikh, Nadia Maria (2005), ‘Re-visiting the Abbasid Harems’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 1: 1–19. Giladi, Avner (2007), ‘Some Notes on the Qur’anic Concepts of Family and Childhood’, in François Georgeon and Klaus Kreiser (eds), Enfance et jeunesse dans le monde musulman (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose), pp. 15–26. Grabar, Oleg (1987), The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven: Yale University Press). Gran, Peter (1996), ‘Organization of Culture and the Construction of the Family in the Modern Middle East’, in Sonbol (ed.) (1996), pp. 64–78. Kennedy, Hugh (2004), The Court of the Caliphs (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Laiou, Angeliki (1990), ‘Symposium on the Byzantine Family and Household: Introduction’, DOP, 44: 97–8. Le Strange, Guy (1900), Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Leder, Stefan, and Kilpatrick, Hilary (1992), ‘Classical Arabic Prose Literature: A Researcher’s Sketch Map’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 22: 2–25. Lutfi, Huda (1981), ‘Al-Sakhawi’s Kitab al-Nisa’ as a Source for the Social and Economic History of Muslim Women during the Fifteenth Century’, The Muslim World, 71: 104–24. Marmer, David Bruce Jay (1994), The Political Culture of the Abbasid Court, 279–324 (A.H.) (PhD thesis, Princeton University). Mitchell, Linda Elizabeth (2007), Family Life in the Middle Ages (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press). Musallam, Basim F. (1983), Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Musallam, Basim F. (1996), ‘The Ordering of Muslim Societies’, in Francis Robinson (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 164–207. Patlagean, Evelyne (1987), ‘The Byzantine Empire’, in Paul Veyne (ed.), A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 554–615. Rapoport, Yossef (2005), Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Salem, Elie (1977), Rusum dar al-Khilafa (Beirut: American University of Beirut). Sonbol, Amira El Azhary (ed.) (1996), Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press). Talbot, Alice-Mary (1990), ‘The Byzantine Family and the Monastery’, DOP, 44: 119–29.

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Tucker, Judith E. (1993), ‘The Arab Family in History: Otherness and the Study of the Family’, in Judith E. Tucker (ed.), Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press), pp. 195–207. Tucker, Judith E. (2008), Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Chapter 17

Byzantine Monastic Communities: Alternative Families? Dirk Krausmüller

Byzantine monks addressed each other as fathers, sons or brothers, and monastic texts from the Middle Byzantine period are replete with terms and concepts that have the family as their original context. In this chapter I will present evidence for such ‘spiritual’ relationships within Byzantine monasteries and ask whether one can consider them as alternative families. My starting point will be the noviciate as the context in which socialisation into the monastic life took place.1 It was during this time that the newcomers acquired knowledge of a set of prayers and hymns, which allowed them to participate in monastic worship, and furthermore assimilated behavioural patterns, which ensured their smooth integration into the community. Only after these aims had been achieved did a novice become a fully fledged monk through tonsure by the abbot. From hagiographical texts of the eighth and ninth centuries it is evident that the process of socialisation was in the hands of individual monks who would accept the newcomers and who would let them live in their cells where they would then give them the necessary training. By contrast, the role of the abbot was limited to assigning to the novices tasks in the administration of the monastery. In the next stage of my argument I will further demonstrate that even after tonsure the relationship between spiritual fathers and their sons remained an important feature of monastic life. After having described the status quo in the eighth and ninth centuries I will then turn to monastic rules from the late tenth and eleventh centuries, in order to assess whether this status quo underwent changes over time. During these years coenobitism experienced a revival, which strengthened the role of the community and of its leader: abbots now reserved for themselves the right to hear confession and monks were told not to hold private meetings in their cells. However, there is little evidence that these developments had much impact on the socialisation of novices. While the authors of rules devote considerable space to the admittance of newcomers they do not specify how they should spend their time until their eventual tonsure. Indeed, stray references suggest that in the overwhelming majority of monasteries the integration of recruits into the community remained the prerogative of experienced monks and continued to take place in their living quarters. This is in marked contrast to the situation in the medieval west where this task was performed by a particular   For socialisation into family life see the chapter by Ville Vuolanto in this volume.

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official, the master of novices, and where the novices lived together in separate houses, well away from the rest of the community. At the end of the chapter I will explore possible reasons for the absence of such a system in Byzantium. I will argue that the relationship between mentor and disciple reflects a broader culture of social networking, which shares important traits with the nuclear family but cannot be reduced to it. In the early years of the eighth century a 13-year-old boy by the name of Theophilos who had grown up in the Anatolian town of Tiberiopolis decided to enter the monastic life. He climbed up nearby Mount Selention in search of the monk Stephen, with whom he was already acquainted: his parents had had him blessed by Stephen immediately after his baptism.2 A brief interview revealed the seriousness of Theophilos’ intentions and thus became the starting point for his subsequent monastic career. In a summary of Theophilos’ lost vita, which is preserved in the Synaxarion of Constantinople,3 the first stages of this career are described in the following way: Ὁ δὲ ὅσιος τῷ θεῷ εὐχαριστήσας προσελάβετο τὸν παῖδα, ἀνάγων καὶ ἐκπαιδεύων τὴν τοῦ μονήρους βίου ἀκολουθίαν καὶ ἄσκησιν. Τριῶν οὖν ἤδη ἐνιαυτῶν παραδραμόντων, προσκαλεσάμενος ὁ ὅσιος τὸν τῆς λαύρας ἡγούμενον, παρέδωκε τὸν παῖδα. Καὶ ὃς λαβὼν τοῦτον ἀπέκειρεν ἐν τῇ ὑπ’ αὐτὸν λαύρᾳ.4 The saint (sc. Stephen) gave thanks to God and accepted the boy, bringing him up and instructing him in the routines and practices of the monastic life. Then, when three years had already passed, the saint called the leader of the lavra, and handed the boy over to him. And that one took him and tonsured him in the lavra that was under his rule.

  There is no agreement about the location of Tiberiopolis and Mt Selention. Alexander Kazhdan identifies Tiberiopolis with Strumica in present-day Macedonia: Kazhdan and Talbot 1998, p. 107. By contrast, the compilers of the Prosopographie der mittelbyzantinischen Zeit (PmbZ) locate Tiberiopolis in Bithynia and consider Mt Selention to be a corruption of Mt St Auxentios, with further identification of the hermit Stephen with Stephen the Younger: PmbZ, vol. 4, pp. 639–40. It is more likely that Tiberiopolis is to be identified with the bishopric of that name in Phrygia Capatiana, in particular since the author of Theophilos’ lost Life was a bishop of the Phrygian city of Hierapolis. See also Holman 2008, pp. 79–80. 3   Synaxarion of Constantinople, Theophilos of Tiberiopolis (class M), p. 125, l. 41 – p. 129, l. 44. Synaxaria are liturgical books that produce for each day of the year brief biographies of the saints whose feast days fall on this particular day. Many of these brief biographies are summaries of longer saints’ Lives. 4   Synaxarion of Constantinople, Theophilos of Tiberiopolis (class M), pp. 125–6, ll. 53–56. 2

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This passage informs us that the early monastic career of the saint was comprised of two distinct stages. He first went through a lengthy period of probation during which he was provided with the knowledge necessary for succeeding in his chosen vocation, and then became a monk during a specific ceremony in which his hair was cut off. This arrangement is in keeping with the laws of Justinian I (527–565) and the canons of the Council of Trullo (AD 692), which permits us to conclude that these regulations were not merely a dead letter but did have an impact on eighth-century monasticism.5 However, the passage also provides us with important evidence for the manner in which socialisation into the monastic life was organised. It is evident that the acceptance of the young saint as a novice and his subsequent instruction were entirely in the hands of a simple monk. Moreover, it was this monk, Stephen, who presented the boy to the abbot for tonsure. Indeed, this is the first time that the abbot is mentioned in the text. The curious absence of any earlier reference to the abbot might be accounted for by the assumption that Stephen was a hermit who lived outside the community. However, one detail in the account militates against such an interpretation: when the boy comes to Mount Selention in order to seek out Stephen he walks ‘up to the gate’ (μέχρι τοῦ πυλῶνος), which suggests that Stephen did indeed live within the monastic compound. Nevertheless, it appears as if Stephen could freely choose to accept a disciple and did not need to ask the abbot for permission. There can be little doubt that the monastic community on Mount Selention was very loosely structured. Not only does the author of the text identify it as a lavra, which in the late antique period denoted a hermits’ colony, but he also gives clear indications that the abbot was not a monarchical leader but at best a primus inter pares. When Theophilos’ parents expressed their wish to found a monastery for their son and his new community ‘the abbot … put everything into the hands of the brothers … and they voted together to receive guidance in this matter from God’ (τοῦ ἡγουμένου … τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς τὸ πᾶν προσανατιθεμένου, … ἐκ θεοῦ τὴν περὶ τούτου λύσιν λήψεσθαι κοινῶς ἐψηφίσαντο).6 It is evident that there is a close link between the loose structure of the community and the mechanisms of recruitment and socialisation: the monastery is little more than an aggregate of individuals whose links with the outside world become an important factor in the attraction of new members. In late antiquity the lavra was only one of a range of social settings within which men could pursue a monastic lifestyle. Of equal if not greater importance were more tightly organised coenobitic communities, which had the support of state and church. As far as we can tell from the fragmentary evidence, the first half of the eighth century was not a time in which the coenobitic ideal had many followers. However, this situation changed radically in the decades before the year 800 when charismatic leaders such as Theodore of Stoudios and Niketas of Medikion   See Justinian, Novels 5.2; Canons of the Council of Trullo 41 (PG 137, col. 657D).   Synaxarion of Constantinople, Theophilos of Tiberiopolis (class M), pp. 127–8, ll.

5 6

34–36.

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ushered in a second golden age of coenobitism.7 This raises the question: did this change affect the patterns of monastic socialisation that we have encountered in the biography of Theophilos of Tiberiopolis? The Lives of Theodore of Stoudios and of Niketas of Medikion do not speak in any detail about the specific social contexts in which the early monastic careers of these saints unfolded. However, this gap can be filled through recourse to another hagiographical text originating in a coenobitic community, the Life of Makarios, the abbot of the Bithynian monastery of Pelekete, who died in exile around the year 840.8 Makarios’ hagiographer, the monk Sabas, informs us that the young saint grew up in Constantinople and that a local priest advised him to go to Pelekete where he was accepted by the monks.9 We are given the impression that right from the start he was fiercely competitive and strove to outdo the other members of the community.10 However, this does not mean that he was already a fully fledged monk because the hagiographer then proceeds to state: Ἑνὶ δὲ τῷ πάντων †δοκούντων† κρατεῖν ἐπιφυεὶς Ἰωάννῃ τοὔνομα, οὐκ ἐρισμοῦ χάριν, †ἡνίκα† γὰρ ὁ νέος τῇ προθυμίᾳ, ἀλλὰ τύπου τῆς τῶν μοναζόντων ἕνεκα, τάξεως καὶ κανόνος εἰδήσεως σὺν τούτῳ τοὺς πόνους διήνυσεν.11 Having associated himself with one man by the name of John who seemed to be better than all, not for the sake of contention – for the young men excelled in eagerness – but for the sake of the patterns of knowledge of the order and yardstick of the monks, he performed the toils together with him.

In this passage we are told that the young saint associated himself with one particular individual who then instructed him in the monastic lifestyle. The hagiographer gives the impression that Makarios acted entirely on his own initiative, making an assessment of the relative status of all members of the community and selecting the one that best suited his needs. It is evident that this course of action does not differ categorically from the behaviour of Theophilos when he attached himself to the monk Stephen, even though Pelekete was a coenobium. There is no reference to the abbot, who only makes an appearance in the next paragraph where we are told that he noticed the saint’s interest in religious literature and that he therefore gave him the task of copying manuscripts.12 This suggests that the abbot was first and foremost the head of the hierarchy of monastic offices and that 7   On Theodore of Stoudios and the monastic culture of his time see most recently Hatlie 2007, esp. pp. 212–372; and Cholij 2002. 8   On Makarios see PmbZ, vol. 3, pp. 120–123. 9   Life of Makarios 3, p. 145, ll. 9–10. 10   Life of Makarios 3, p. 145, ll. 15–23. 11   Life of Makarios 3, p. 145, ll. 9–10. 12   Life of Makarios 3, p. 145, ll. 19–23.

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interaction between him and new members of the community was limited to this sphere. Makarios’ noviciate ends when he ‘receives a common vote from all’ (κοινὴν παρὰ πάντων εἰσδέχεται ψῆφον) that he be clad in the monastic garb.13 The community continues to play an important role in the next stage of the saint’s monastic career: by common consent he is first promoted to the rank of steward and then elected abbot.14 By contrast, there is no further mention of the mentor and we get the impression that after his tonsure Makarios conducts his ascetic exercises on his own. However, this impression may well be misleading and reflect the hagiographer’s wish to show the outstanding asceticism of the saint rather than the reality of community life. This is at least suggested by another hagiographical text, the Life of Euarestos of Kokorobion, which dates to the end of the ninth century.15 Euarestos’ hagiographer informs us that the saint began his monastic career in Thrace where he attached himself to a hermit, but that he was then sent to the Constantinopolitan monastery of Stoudios in order to experience the rigours of community life. Euarestos arrived at the monastery in the middle of the ninth century when Naukratios, a disciple of Theodore the Studite, was abbot. We are told that the saint met Naukratios ‘at the gate’ (πρὸς τῷ πυλῶνι) and presented him with a letter of recommendation. The abbot responded by asking the questions that were customarily put to a new monk, gave him the tonsure and told him to work in the storehouses of the community.16 Unlike the two figures we have discussed so far, Euarestos had already completed his probation when he arrived at Stoudios and was thus admitted as a fully fledged monk. However, the manner in which he found a place for himself within his new community is strikingly similar to what we read in the Life of Makarios. Again we are told that Euarestos imitated and emulated the other members of the community,17 but it soon becomes clear that he did not do so as an independent player: Τῶν δ’ ἐν τῇ μονῇ ταύτῃ κατὰ Θεὸν ζῆν αἱρουμένων ἕνα προκρίνας ὅστις αὐτῷ ὑπεραίρειν ἐδόκει τοῖς κατορθώμασιν· ἔστι γὰρ κἂν τοῖς τοιούτοις ἄλλον ἄλλου προέχειν καὶ φθόνος ἐν αὐτοῖς οὐδείς ἐστιν ἀναβάσεως, ὁ τῶν καλῶν κάκιστος βάσκανος, ζῆλος δὲ μᾶλλον θεῖος καὶ ἀξιέραστος τούτῳ συνομιλεῖν καὶ κοινωνεῖν τῶν σπουδασμάτων τίθετο.18

    15   16   17   18   13 14

Life of Makarios 4, p. 145, ll. 33–34. Life of Makarios 4, p. 147, ll. 23–27. On Euarestos see PmbZ, vol. 1, pp. 514–15. Life of Euarestos 8, p. 302, ll. 9–37. Life of Euarestos 8, p. 303, ll. 14–20. Life of Euarestos 9, p. 303, ll. 21–26.

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And having preferred one of those who chose to live according to God in that monastery, who seemed to him to excel in achievements, – for among such ones, too, it is the case that one excels the other and among them there is not envy of ascent, the most evil jealousy of the good things, but rather a divine and praiseworthy zeal – he decided to converse with him and to participate in his achievements.

The similarity between this passage and its counterpart in the Life of Makarios is striking, which leaves no doubt that we are in the presence of two variants of the same topos. Thus it seems that even when full monks entered a monastery they would seek to associate themselves with an established member of the community. As in the case of Pelekete, there is no sign that the abbot was involved in this interaction: Euarestos seems to be able to choose freely. Unlike the earlier text, the Life of Euarestos makes no mention of instruction in the basic features of the monastic life, which the saint may already have been familiar with in any case. However, it is much more forthcoming with information about the practical arrangements. We hear that Euarestos and Eubiotos ‘ate together … shared the same roof and followed the same life-style’ (συσσίτους … ὁμοστέγους τε καὶ ὁμοδιαίτους),19 which is then set out in great detail. For example, we are told that they used to spend the whole night wandering about in the monastery and then go together to the church in order to celebrate Matins.20 Such church services seem to have been the only activities where they joined the whole community: there is no mention that they ever took their food in the refectory. The abbot again only appears in connection with the monastic offices: we are informed that Nicholas, the successor of Naukratios, promoted Euarestos to the rank of deputy steward.21 The relative weakness of the ties that bound Euarestos and Eubiotos to the community of Stoudios becomes evident when they leave the monastery in order to lead a more rigorous eremitic life and return only after lengthy entreaties by the abbot.22 Indeed, whole communities could with great ease split up into groups of two and three as can be seen from the example of the monasteries of Peter of Atroa, which in this way evaded persecution by the Iconoclasts.23 A much later hagiographical text, the eleventh-century Life of Symeon the New Theologian, suggests that the social mechanisms facilitating the entry into a monastic community were still unchanged more than a hundred years later.24 Symeon’s hagiographer, Niketas Stethatos, informs us that the young saint had forged a close relationship with a Studite monk, Symeon the Pious, when he was     21   22   23   19

20

2011.

Life of Euarestos 9, p. 303, l. 30. Life of Euarestos 10, p. 304, ll. 17–38. Life of Euarestos 12, p. 306, ll. 11–17. Life of Euarestos 11, p. 305, ll. 13 – p. 306, l. 2. Life of Peter of Atroa 63, p. 187. On Iconoclasm see now Brubaker and Haldon

  On Symeon the New Theologian see most recently Alfeyev 2001.

24

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still living in the world and that he turned to this monk when he decided to devote himself to a religious life.25 We are told that Symeon the Pious helped Symeon to give away his inheritance and then facilitated his entry into the community of Stoudios: Τῇ οὖν ἐπαύριον λαβὼν τὸν γενναῖον προσφέρει τῷ προεστῶτι, Πέτρος δὲ ἦν ὁ τὸ μέγα τοῦτο ποίμνιον τῶν Στουδίων τότε ἰθύνων, καὶ δύο καταβαλόμενος τῇ μονῇ λίτρας χρυσίου ἐνδύει τὸν σάκκον αὐτῷ τῆς γυμνασίας τῶν ἀρετῶν. ἐπεὶ δὲ κελλίον οὐκ ἦν σχολάζον εἰς ξενίαν τότε τοῦ νέου, παρατίθεται αὐτὸν ὁ καθηγούμενος τῷ μεγάλῳ τούτῳ πατρὶ οὕτω δεῖν κεκρικότων ἀμφοτέρων διὰ τὸ νέον τῆς ἡλικίας τοῦ Συμεών.26 On the following day, then, he presents the valiant one to the superior – this was Peter, who then led this great flock of the Studites – and having paid to the monastery two pounds of gold, he clothed him in the tunic of the training in virtues. But since there was then no cell vacant for housing the youngster, the abbot hands him over to this great father, both having deemed this necessary because of the youthful age of Symeon.

Unlike the earlier texts, the Life of Symeon appears to accord a greater role to the abbot who decides whether Symeon can enter and where he might live. However, otherwise the mentor is again given free rein. Symeon the Pious not only dresses the newcomer in the distinctive habit of the novice, but also lets him live in a room attached to his cell and supervises closely his conduct and his ascetic regime.27 And finally when Symeon’s standoffishness makes his position at Stoudios untenable he finds for him another monastery, St Mamas, to which he can transfer.28 Niketas’ account is largely based on autobiographical sections in the writings of Symeon the New Theologian. In these texts, which date mostly from the time when he was abbot of St Mamas, Symeon describes what steps a prospective monk should take: Ἀδελφέ, ἐκτενῶς τὸν Θεὸν παρακάλεσον, ὅπως δείξῃ σοι ἄνθρωπον, τὸν καλῶς ποιμαίνειν σε δυνάμενον, ᾧ καὶ ὀφείλεις ὡς αὐτῷ τῷ Θεῷ ὑπακοῦσαι καὶ τὰ παρ’ αὐτοῦ σοι λεγόμενα ἀδιστάκτως ἐπιτελέσαι, εἰ καὶ ἐναντία σοι καὶ ἐπιβλαβῆ κατὰ τὸ δοκοῦν σοι τὰ προσταττόμενα φαίνονται. Καὶ εἰ μὲν εἰς ὃν ἤδη ἔσχες πατέρα πνευματικὸν περισσοτέρως πληροφορεῖται παρὰ τῆς χάριτος ἡ καρδία σου, ποίει ἃ σοι λέγει καὶ σῴζῃ· κρεῖσσον γὰρ μαθητὴν μαθητοῦ ὀνομάζεσθαι καὶ μὴ ἰδιορρύθμως βιοῦν καὶ τρυγᾶν ἀνωφελεῖς καρποὺς τοῦ ἰδίου θελήματος.

    27   28   25 26

Life of Symeon 10, p. 18, ll. 1–11. Life of Symeon 11, p. 18, ll. 1–7. Life of Symeon 11, p. 18, ll. 7–20. Life of Symeon 22, p. 32, ll. 1–5.

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Εἰ δὲ πρὸς ἄλλον τὸ ἅγιον Πνεῦμα ἐκπέμψει σε, μὴ διστάσῃς τὸ σύνολον· ἀκούομεν γὰρ καὶ Παῦλον φυτεύσαντα καὶ Ἀπολλῶ ἀρδεύσαντα καὶ Χριστὸν αὐξάνοντα.29 Brother, entreat God fervently that he show you a man who can shepherd you well, whom you must obey like God himself and whose words you must follow without doubt, even if his orders seem to you to be harmful according to your own lights. And if your heart is more greatly reassured by grace as regards the spiritual father whom you already have, do what he tells you and you are saved. For it is better to be called the disciple of a disciple and not to live according to your own fashion and to pluck unprofitable fruits of your own will. But if the Holy Spirit will send you off to another one, do not hesitate at all for we hear that Paul planted and Apollo watered and Christ increased.

In this passage there is no reference to the abbot, and other members of the community are treated as outsiders. However, when we turn to catecheses in which Symeon speaks about the proper behaviour for fully fledged members of the community we are confronted with a radically different picture. Here he is completely opposed to any relationships between individuals even if they seem to be spiritually profitable.30 This negative attitude towards interactions between individuals is also reflected in the extended Studite rule. This text, which is lost in its original form but can be largely reconstructed from later adaptations, probably dates to the last years of the tenth century.31 It contains a passage in which monks are told that they must all confess to the abbot and not reveal their thoughts to other members of the community and in which they are furthermore prohibited from congregating in each others’ cells.32 Similar stipulations then recur in later monastic rules such as the Evergetis Typikon, which dates to the second half of the eleventh century.33 These developments must be seen in the context of a second wave of monastic reform, which aimed at strict implementation of the coenobitic ideal. The hallmark of this movement was the proliferation of communal activities in church and   Symeon the New Theologian, Catecheses 20.   Krausmüller 1994. 31   On this rule, which is not included in the Dumbarton Oaks collection of Byzantine 29 30

Monastic Foundation Documents, see Pentkovskij 2001, text on pp. 233–420. In the introduction to his edition, pp. 49–104, Pentkovskij can show that the typikon of Alexios the Studite, which has only survived in a Church Slavonic translation, is based on a lost Studite rule. His argument is based on a comparison with Southern Italian rules such as the unedited typikon of the Patirion monastery, which contain much of the same material but state explicitly that they are based on Studite traditions. 32   Typikon of Patirion, Codex Jenensis G.B.q.6a, foll. 126–126v; see Pentkovskij 2001, pp. 70–72. 33   Typikon of Evergetis, esp. 7, p. 29, ll. 241–261; and 21, p. 65, ll. 894–896.

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refectory. Monks now spent much more time in church services and were obliged to take all their meals together with their brothers.34 By contrast, private activities were frowned upon. The keeping and consuming of food in cells was outlawed, and even the saying of prayers was discouraged when it had a negative impact on communal worship. A comparison between three hagiographical texts reveals how much attitudes had shifted. In the ninth century Euarestos and Eubiotos are said to have stayed awake all night and then to have attended communal services in the morning, and the hagiographer does not even consider the possibility that the two activities could be irreconcilable.35 A century later such behaviour has already become problematic: Paul of Latros spent his nights in a similar fashion but yawned during Matins and was then punished by his abbot for this misdemeanour.36 In this case the tension is resolved through a miracle: the hagiographer contends that the beating transmitted a grace, which gave Paul the ability to stay awake and yet never feel tired. By the later eleventh century such a compromise was no longer possible: in the Life of John and Euthymios of Iviron monks are told in no uncertain terms that they will be punished if they do not get enough sleep and then nod off at Matins and disrupt the communal ritual.37 Given the ferocity with which the coenobitic ideal was promoted one would expect that the clampdown on individual activities and relationships between individuals also affected traditional mechanisms of socialisation into monasticism. After all, the interactions between mentors and novices were intensely personal and had as their locus the cell of the mentor. It is likely that in the eleventh century novices were obliged to engage in communal activities in church and refectory although the typika do not mention them explicitly in their stipulations concerning these matters. However, there is little evidence that the old model was completely abandoned. It is possible that the monastery of Stoudios attempted to change established practice since in the second Studite rule the prohibition to meet in cells is complemented with the following stipulation: Εἴ τινες δέ τι μανθάνειν βούλοιντο τῶν ἐκκλησιαστικῶν μαθημάτων, μετὰ τὸν ὄρθρον ἐν τῷ νάρθηκι τῆς ἐκκλησίας ταῦτα μανθανέτωσαν· πρὸ πάντων δέ, τὸ ψαλτήριον ἐκστηθίζειν καὶ πᾶσαν τὴν τῆς ἐκκλησίας τάξιν τε καὶ ἀκολουθίαν.38

  See Krausmüller 1997 and forthcoming.   Life of Euarestos 10, p. 304, ll. 17–38. 36   Life of Paul of Latros 6, p. 107, l. 31 – p. 108, l. 10. For punishment in a family 34 35

context see the chapter of Julia Hillner in this volume. 37   Life of John and Euthymios 62, esp. p. 120, ll. 1047–1055. 38   Typikon of Patirion, Codex Jenensis G.B.q.6a, fol. 126v. For the Church Slavonic translation of this passage in the Typikon of Alexios the Studite, see Pentkovskij 2001, pp. 70–72 and 382–4. An English translation of this passage runs as follows: ‘As for those who want to learn ecclesiastical teachings let them learn them having gathered in the refectory after matins. Above everything the abbot shall take care that each monk knows the Psalter

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Approaches to the Byzantine Family But if some wish to learn some of the ecclesiastical teachings, let them learn them in the narthex after Matins! Above all, however, [they must] memorise the Psalter and the whole order and service of the church.

However, this passage provides us with no information about the mechanisms of socialisation. In particular, it does not identify the person or persons who would have given instruction so that we cannot be sure that it was not still in the hands of the traditional mentors. Moreover, such a concern is not reflected in later typika. The Evergetis Typikon, for example, contains detailed regulations about the admittance of new members into the community. It states that newcomers who are not known to the monks should be given special clothing and assigned tasks in the monastery in order to test their mettle before they are tonsured by the abbot. Moreover, it outlaws the practice of asking a newcomer for a financial contribution.39 However, the text contains only one brief passage that throws some light on the ways in which the novices were integrated into the community. In chapter 24 the author of the typikon stipulates that two monks should share a cell in order to practice the commandment of love, and then adds: Δέον δὲ κἂν τούτῳ τὴν διάκρισιν ποιῆσαι τὸ ἴδιον, ὡς ὑπείκειν δηλαδὴ τὸν ἀρχαρέστερον τῷ προωδευκότι, τὸν ἰδιωτικώτερον τῷ λογιωτέρῳ, τὸν ἀγροικότερον τῷ ἐμπειροτέρῳ, καὶ τὸν νεώτερον τῷ γηραιοτέρῳ.40 But in this, too, discretion must apply, so that naturally the more novice-like yields to the one who is advanced, the more simple to the more learned, the more rustic to the more experienced, and the younger to the older.

This comment suggests that at the Evergetis monastery the socialisation of new recruits was still in the hands of individuals even though the novices were more involved in the life of the community than had been customary before. The evidence presented so far has shown that even at the height of the reform movement in the eleventh-century Byzantine monastic communities were unable or unwilling to create new mechanisms of socialisation that would have been more in keeping with the coenobitic ideal, which discouraged all personal relationships. This is in stark contrast with contemporary practice in the west where one of the hallmarks of monastic life was the existence of an institutional framework within which socialisation could take place: there newcomers lived well apart from the rest of the monastic community and were under the control of a particular official, the master of novices, who was directly answerable to the abbot.41 in order that he does not seek books somewhere else but according to a living spiritual book corrects sacred singing and finds his soul’. 39   Typikon of Evergetis 37, pp. 79–81, ll. 1122–1161. 40   Typikon of Evergetis 24, p. 67, ll. 923–926. 41   See de Jong 1995, esp. pp. 622–5.

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It seems likely that the reasons for the lack of institutional innovation must be sought in Byzantine society at large. This raises the question: what were the particular social structures that functioned as a template for the organisation of monastic communities? At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned that monastic authors regularly use terms and concepts that have the Byzantine family as their original context. Moreover, monastic authors switch between the two spheres with great ease as can be seen from a passage in John of Damascus’ Exposition of Faith. When some of his contemporaries concluded from the Biblical imprecation ‘Cursed be all who do not raise a seed in Israel!’ that Christians had a duty to marry and procreate, John responded that the commandment to ‘raise a seed’ does not apply to families at all but rather to monastic contexts where spiritual fathers acquire spiritual children through love.42 The use of the appellations ‘father’ and ‘son’ and the verb ‘to give birth’ suggest that the Byzantines themselves conceived of relationships between mentors and disciples as alternative families, where the mentors took the place of both parents. By doing so they emphasised the radical nature of monastic socialisation where recruits were expected to unlearn the behavioural patterns and value system of the world and replace them with new and radically different alternatives. The social context within which this ‘rebirth’ took place was characterised by strong emotional ties and a heavy emphasis on obedience, two features which have clear counterparts in the Byzantine family where children were expected to love and obey their parents.43 However, one must be careful not to overstress the analogy. Young men who wished to enter a monastery were in a radically different position from newborn children. They actively searched for suitable spiritual fathers and formed relationships with them through a process of negotiation: in many saints’ lives older monks are shown to be initially reluctant but to be then won over by the entreaties of the young men that have come to them.44 This results in the paradox that the social context whose purpose it is to stamp out the habit of forming particular relationships is created through this very habit. It is thus evident that mentors and disciples are not straightforward counterparts of parents and children. Indeed, one could argue that the relationship is closer to that between husband and wife, which was also established through negotiation. However, this is an equally awkward fit because it does not take account of the ensuing process of socialisation. I would therefore suggest that we need to cast our net more widely and consider other social settings. One close parallel is the establishment of relationships between young men and powerful acquaintances or relatives. Such relationships, which allowed individuals of relatively low status to rise up within society, are often mentioned in Byzantine saints’ lives. The young   John of Damascus, Exposition of Faith 97, vol. 2, pp. 227–8.   For filial obedience see for example the Life of Demetrianos of Chytri, p. 302B, and

42 43

the Life of Euthymios the Younger 5, esp. p. 173, ll. 1–13. 44   See for example above the Synaxarion of Constantinople, Theophilos of Tiberiopolis (class M).

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Euarestos, for example, was taken to Constantinople by his father and entrusted into the care of a powerful relative whom he then accompanied on an embassy to the Bulgarians.45 Such relationships could be very close and bear many of the characteristics that we have encountered in our discussion of monastic socialisation. A particularly striking example is found in the Life of Athanasios the Athonite.46 Athanasios was an orphan but was nevertheless determined to make his way to the capital. In order to achieve his goal he made friends with a government official who visited his hometown, Trebizond. In his account the hagiographer emphasises that this official ‘loved Athanasios exceedingly and embraced him sincerely and had him with him and ate with him’ (ἠγάπησε λίαν καὶ γνησίως ἐνηγκαλίσατο τοῦτον καὶ συνόντα εἶχεν αὐτῷ καὶ συνεσθίοντα).47 It is immediately evident that this arrangement bears close resemblance to the shared lifestyle of Euarestos and Eubiotos at Stoudios. Moreover, Athanasios’ later behaviour may present us with a further parallel for the social structure of monastic communities. Once in Constantinople, he transferred his loyalty from the government official to a relative of his, who let him live in his house and expected him to join his family at meal times and who later took him with him on official missions.48 Such behaviour, which goes a long way in explaining the remarkable mobility of Byzantine society, may well have been common in monasteries too, with young monks being constantly on the lookout for better opportunities.49 This would explain the endlessly repeated admonitions to novices only to listen to their mentors and not to interact with other monks. The only difference between the two social settings is the fact that mentors and disciples in monasteries are part of a community, which has its own organisational structure with a hierarchy of officials such as stewards and cellarers. Here the closest parallel may well be found in the Byzantine bureaucracy where a formal structure of offices was also paralleled by a web of personal relationships.50 Thus one could conclude that the bond between mentors and disciples in Byzantine monasteries was only one instance of a broader social phenomenon, which has some aspects in common with the relationship between parents and children but which cannot be reduced to the template of the family.

  Life of Euarestos 6, p. 300, ll. 4–26.   Life of Athanasios the Athonite, pp. 127–213. I am quoting from Vita B, which

45 46

by and large preserves the text of the Vita prima, the model for the metaphrasis of Vita A. For a discussion of the relationship between the different versions, see Kazhdan 1983 and Krausmüller 2007. 47   Life of Athanasios the Athonite 4, p. 130, ll. 16–18. 48   Life of Athanasios the Athonite 5–6, p. 130, l. 33 – p. 132, l. 47. 49   For the question of social mobility in Byzantium see also the chapter by Claudia Ludwig in this volume. 50   See the Life of Plato of Sakkoudion 5, PG 99, col. 808AB.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Canons of the Council of Trullo, PG 137. John of Damascus, Exposition of Faith, ed. Bonifatius Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, 5 vols, vol. 2 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973). Justinian, Novels, ed. Rudolf Schoell and Wilhelm Kroll, Corpus iuris civilis, vol. 3: Novellae (15th ed., Berlin, 1972). Life of Athanasios the Athonite, ed. Jacques Noret, Vitae duae antiquae sancti Athanasii Athonitae (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982). Life of Demetrianos of Chytri, AASS Nov. 3 (1910), pp. 300–308. Life of Euarestos of Kokorobion, ed. Charles Van de Vorst, ‘La vie de s. Évariste, higoumène à Constantinople’, AB, 41 (1923): 287–325. Life of Euthymios the Younger, ed. Louis Petit, ‘Vie et office de saint Euthyme le Jeune. Texte grec’‚ Revue de l’orient chrétien, 8 (1903): 155–205. Life of John and Euthymios, ed. Bernadette Martin-Hisard, ‘La Vie de Jean et Euthyme: le statut du monastère des Ibères sur l’Athos’, REB, 49 (1991): 67–142. Life of Makarios of Pelekete, ed. Anonymus, ‘S. Macarii monasterii Pelecetes hegumeni acta graeca’, AB, 16 (1897): 142–63. Life of Paul of Latros, ed. Hippolyte Delehaye, ‘Vita s. Pauli junioris’, in Theodor Wiegand, Milet. Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen und Untersuchungen seit dem Jahre 1899, 3.1: Der Latmos (Berlin, 1913), pp. 105–35. Life of Peter of Atroa, ed. Vitalien Laurent, La Vie merveilleuse de saint Pierre d’Atroa (Brussels, 1956). Life of Plato of Sakkoudion, PG 99. Niketas Stethatos, Life of Symeon the New Theologian, ed. Irénée Hausherr, Un grand mystique byzantin. Vie de Syméon le Nouveau Théologien (949–1022) par Nicétas Stéthatos (Rome, 1928). Symeon the New Theologian, Catacheses, ed. Basile Krivocheine and trans. Joseph Paramelle, Syméon le Nouveau Théologien, Catéchèses (Paris, 1963– 1965). Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Hippolyte Delehaye, ‘Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae’, AASS Novembris Propylaeum (1902). Typikon of Evergetis, ed. Paul Gautier, ‘Le typikon de la Théotokos Évergétis’, REB, 40 (1982): 5–101. Typikon of Patirion, ed. Pentkovskij 2001, pp. 233–420. Secondary Sources Alfeyev, Hilarion (2001), St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Brubaker, Leslie, and Haldon, John (2011), Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680–850: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cholij, Roman (2002), Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). De Jong, Mayke (1995), ‘Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer’, in Rosamund McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History c.700–c.900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 622–31. Hatlie, Peter (2007), The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Holman, Susan R. (2008), ‘On Phoenix and Eunuchs: Sources for Meletius the Monk’s Anatomy of Gender’, JECS, 16: 79–101. Kazhdan, Alexander (1983), ‘Hagiographical Notes. 1. Two Versions of the Vita Athanasii’, Byz, 53: 538–44. Kazhdan, Alexander, and Talbot, Alice-Mary (1998), Dumbarton Oaks Hagiography Database (www.doaks.org/document/hagiointro.pdf). Krausmüller, Dirk (1994), ‘The Monastic Communities of Stoudios and St Mamas in the Second Half of the Tenth Century’, in Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby (eds), The Theotokos Evergetis and Eleventh-Century Monasticism (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises), pp. 67–85. Krausmüller, Dirk (1997), ‘Private vs Communal: Niketas Stethatos’s Hypotyposis for Stoudios, and Patterns of Worship in Eleventh-Century Byzantine Monasteries’, in Margaret Mullett and Anthony Kirby (eds), Work and Worship at the Theotokos Evergetis (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises), pp. 309–28. Krausmüller, Dirk (2007), ‘The Lost First Life of Athanasius the Athonite and its Author Anthony, Abbot of the Constantinopolitan Monastery of Ta Panagiou’, in Margaret Mullett (ed.), Founders and Refounders of Byzantine Monasteries. Papers of the Fifth Belfast Byzantine International Colloqium, Portaferry, September, 1999 (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises), pp. 63–86. Krausmüller, Dirk (forthcoming), ‘The Abbots of Evergetis as Opponents of “Monastic Reform”: A Re-Appraisal of the Monastic Discourse in Eleventhand Twelfth-Century Constantinople’, REB, 69 (2011): 111–34. Pentkovskij, A.M. (2001), Tipikon patriarha Aleksija Studita v Bizantii i na Rusi (Moscow).

Chapter 18

Families, Politics, and Memories of Rome in the Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios Leonora Neville

In the early twelfth century Caesar Nikephoros Bryennios wrote a history about the early life of his father-in-law the emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118).1 While mostly a story about men and war, Nikephoros’ history provides an interesting perspective on Byzantine family history. The history contains considerable information about the families of the major political contenders of the era. All the major male political actors are presented as members of aristocratic families and representatives of those families’ interests. This means that the wives and mothers of those actors are mentioned and described as well. In contrast to some earlier Byzantine histories, women are more frequently presented in Nikephoros’ history. Scholars have long taken note of Anna Dalassene, Eirene Doukaina and Anna Komnene as great, almost larger than life, female figures of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.2 The prominence of kinship ties in early twelfth-century imperial politics has been connected, tentatively, with the influence of women in the life of Alexios Komnenos, who has been seen, by some, as particularly beholden to the women in his life.3 Nikephoros’ history is one of the key sources for their stories. The increasing visibility of aristocratic women in the late eleventh century prompts an investigation of how and why Nikephoros presents politics as family business. Nikephoros’ history was composed in the early twelfth century some time before his death in 1136/7. It tells the story of the military losses and rebellions of the 1070s, in which the grandparents, uncles and aunts of Nikephoros’ primary audience were the major characters, and combatants. Eirene Doukaina asked Nikephoros to write a history of her husband Alexios, but the story of Alexios’ rise to power involved the histories of all the most significant aristocratic families in the   Gautier 1975, Failler 1989, Seger 1888, Carile 1968 and 1969, Jeffreys 2003, and Neville 2008. 2   Garland 1994 and 1999, pp.180–198, Hill 1999, and Malamut 1999. 3   On Alexios’ supposed weakness before women see Lemerle 1977, p. 298, seconded by Magdalino 1996, pp. 150–151, and Angold 1996, p. 406, but vigorously disputed by Hill 1996. 1

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late eleventh century. For the twelfth-century imperial court it is a story of what their grandparents did, and as such is a deeply personal, family history. It is mostly likely that the text was performed aloud serially as court entertainment.4 The essential plot of the history was also emotionally charged for its initial audience because the period covered was a disastrous time for the empire, in which the Normans conquered all of the Byzantine territory in Southern Italy while in the east the Seljuk Turks seized control of nearly the entire Anatolian peninsula, establishing a capital at Nicaea. Meanwhile, the leading Byzantine generals and politicians of the 1070s were engaged in incessant rivalry and infighting over which family would rule the empire. The aristocratic infighting prevented any effective opposition to the Turkish advance.5 So the grandchildren remembering and observing this story in the twelfth century were looking back to a time when their ancestors were fighting each other instead of effectively defending the empire. The audience remembered this period of political catastrophe from a position of relative security when borders had stabilised and aristocratic in-fighting had been brought to an end.6 The early twelfth-century political stability was grounded in the Komnenian network of marriage alliances that knit together former rival families into the extended imperial family.7 One consequence of this is that nearly all the members of the initial court audience of the 1120s and 1130s would have been descended from people who had been contending against each other with varying degrees of violence in the 1070s. For Nikephoros’ own children, the story was about how one of their grandfathers defeated and blinded one of their great-grandfathers. The period of intense military decline and aristocratic infighting in the 1070s has the characteristics of a moment of community disruption that frequently call for intensive historicising. The writing of history and practices of memorialisation can help communities process and deal with traumatic events.8 So it is not surprising that a history of the era was written in the court community at a time when a new generation of people, born in the process of peacemaking among the rival families, was rising to adulthood and, in all likelihood, demanding explanations for the failures of the previous century. Whatever his other merits as an intellectual, it makes sense that Nikephoros was chosen to be the person to interpret this past for the rising generation, because through his marriage to Anna Komnene he became one of the lynch-pins of the twelfth-century clan reconciliation. It is unlikely that anyone had forgotten that Nikephoros’ namesake and grandfather had been proclaimed emperor, and little logic would be needed to work out that he would have been emperor had Nikephoros the Elder’s battle against Alexios Komnenos ended differently.     6   7   8   4 5

Neville 2012, pp. 29–38. Korobeinikov 2008, pp. 701–8. Magdalino 2008, pp. 629–35. Magdalino 1993, pp. 180–206. Gowing 2005, p. 18, and Connerton 1989, pp. 6–7.

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It is perhaps not surprising that Nikephoros tried to create a sympathetic and apologetic treatment of the major politicians and generals of the 1070s. However, it is striking how well he succeeded. John Doukas and Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder are the primary heroes, but a number of other characters are portrayed as courageous and honourable. Overall, Nikephoros does a masterful job of telling a story of military losses and rebellions as a story of heroic actions. Nikephoros uses a variety of rhetorical techniques to make his heroes look good, but one significant and largely overlooked aspect of his work is an appeal to classical Roman ideals of masculinity and honour. Scholars have remarked on a renewed interest in classical Roman history on the part of other eleventh- and twelfthcentury writers, and a vogue for Plutarch in court rhetoric of the later twelfth century.9 Nikephoros’ history, however, has not been considered as participating in these developments. The extreme militarism and macho aristocratic posturing of Nikephoros’ text has been noted but has been seen in the context of the later western influence on Byzantine culture, so that Nikephoros becomes a ‘great seigneur’.10 When the details of the militarism and aristocratic honour-culture of Nikephoros’ heroes are examined in detail, however, they look more like that of republican-era Romans than that of western knights. Nikephoros was emphasising cultural memories of old Roman honour. He valorised the actors of a troubled era in part by characterising them with cultural patterns derived from his reading of classical Roman history. Nikephoros’ knowledge of Roman history came from his reading of the Greek historians of Rome, such as Plutarch, Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Cassius Dio. His self-identity as a Roman whose language was Greek would lead him to read these authors as Romans telling their own history, rather than as Greeks responding in various ways to Roman hegemony. In reading these historians Nikephoros could easily draw an idealised memory of Roman honour by picking up their explanations of what made the Romans great as well as their imperial-era nostalgia for ancient Roman honour. The case for Nikephoros’ use of Roman values has many components. We can tell Nikephoros read some Roman histories because of quotations from classical authors and details of Roman history only found in Plutarch.11 But beyond this evidence of reading, having the ideals of Roman honour and virtue as a frame of reference reveals more meanings in Nikephoros’ text. If one reads Nikephoros with the idealisation of ancient Roman honour found in the Greek historians of Rome firmly in mind, then the blur of battles and military confrontations in the history resolves into a consistent moral argument for a particular way of being Roman. One of the discourses in which Nikephoros patterns himself on classical Roman models is that of the family as a vehicle for political action. I would argue that Nikephoros’ presentation of families in his history has many parallels with the   Markopoulos 2006, Macrides and Magdalino 1992, and Cresci 2004 and 2005.   Kazhdan and Epstein 1985, p. 106. 11   Neville 2012, pp. 39–45. 9

10

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presentation of aristocratic classical Roman households in the works of Polybius, Cassius Dio and Plutarch. The marriages of Alexios’ brothers and sisters are presented in Nikephoros’ history as forging alliances with various families with the expectation that the marriage marked an accord of mutual support in political advancement and a cessation of possible hostilities. While there is no doubt that the marriages indeed served these functions, what they did is a separate matter from why and how they were described. In other eras the women necessarily involved in family networks were not mentioned. Nikephoros explained all of the family arrangements of the Komnenoi in detail because it served his rhetorical purposes to include them. The marriages of Anna Dalassene’s children are described as part of the history of the Komnenos family. While Anna’s husband John Komnenos was still alive, their daughter Maria was married to Michael Taronites and their daughter Eudokia to Nikephoros Melissenos. Nikephoros mentioned that Nikephoros Melissenos was related through his father to the Bourtzes family.12 After her husband’s death Anna married her daughter Theodora to Constantine Diogenes, the son of the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes (1068-1071) by his first wife. Nikephoros specified that Theodora’s marriage to Constantine was celebrated while Romanos was the reigning emperor. Once the Doukai had secured the accession of Michael VII (1071-1078) after Romanos’ blinding, Anna arranged a connection with them through the marriage of her son Isaac: when Michael VII Doukas married Maria of Alania, Isaac Komnenos married Maria’s cousin Eirene. By marrying two cousins, Isaac and Michael became ‘kin by marriage’.13 The most famous marriage alliance in Nikephoros’ history is that of Alexios Komnenos to Eirene Doukaina. This union put all of the remaining resources of the Doukas family behind Alexios and became the key to Alexios’ eventual triumph. The interest Nikephoros expresses in marriage alliances and connections between various families mimics the practice of classical Roman history. To take one example, Plutarch’s Life of Pompey records in detail the attempts of various leading politicians to forge marriage connections with Pompey. The marriage of Julia, Caesar’s daughter, to Pompey was a significant political event and her death was considered a catalyst of their civil war.14 Similarly, the Triumvirate arrangement of Octavian, Antony and Lepidus was sealed by the marriage of Octavian to Clodia, the daughter of Antony’s wife Fulvia.15 When Octavian wanted to sever this alliance he sent this wife back to Fulvia and dissolved the marriage kinship.16 However, after Fulvia’s death the alliance was re-established 12   The Bourtzes family held great power in Antioch in the tenth and eleventh centuries: Cheynet 1990, pp. 219, 225–7. 13   Bryennios 2.1.8-9, διὰ κήδους αὐτοὺς ἑαυτῷ οἰκειοῦται. 14   Plutarch, Life of Pompey 49.3.1–3, 53.1–7, 55.1, 70.4. 15   Cassius Dio 46.54.3–4. 16   Cassius Dio 48.6.

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by the marriage of Antony to Octavian’s sister Octavia.17 These examples could be multiplied easily.18 Women are visible players in Roman politics because they were crucial as dynastic glue, binding contending parties into alliances.19 It is also a characteristic of Roman culture that the women involved in these alliances are named. The visibility of aristocratic women in Nikephoros’ history and the importance placed on marriage alliances in part reflect Nikephoros’ use of classical Roman models. The fictive kinship mentioned in Nikephoros’ history also has precedents in classical Roman history. Isaac and John Komnenos are described as entering Basil II’s household upon the death of their father Manuel.20 Romanos Diogenes strengthened the bond between his family and the Komnenoi, already established by the marriage of his son Constantine to Theodora, when the oldest of Anna’s sons, Manuel, became part of the imperial household. As soon as Romanos had ‘seized the rudder of the empire, the first of the brothers, Manuel, was made kinsman with the emperor and appointed protostrator’.21 This practice of the sons of one family joining in the household of another family mimics the practice of the Roman republican aristocracy. When Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus remarried, he placed the sons by his first marriage to Papiria with two other aristocratic families. Aemilius’ oldest son was adopted by Fabius Maximus and became Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus. The second son was adopted by Aemilius’ sister Cornelia and her husband Cornelius Scipio. This son took the name Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus and earned the epithet Africanus the Younger.22 While this case is not unique, it was perhaps particularly well known because of the eventual fame of Africanus the Younger. The political adoption practiced by the Antonine ‘Adoptive’ dynasty provided another powerful example of the value of fictive kinship.23 Nikephoros presents regard for family as an aspect of virtuous conduct. Bryennios the Elder was unwilling to abandon his rebellion and accept Botaneiates’ offer to become Caesar because he wanted guarantees of amnesty for his followers.24 His entire family had taken part in his rebellion.25 Nikephoros is here working hard to portray his grandfather positively although he is a rebel. John Doukas’ character is also enhanced by his concern for the other members of   Plutarch, Life of Antony 31.1–4; Cassius Dio 48.31.   Dixon 1985b, p. 366. 19   On the actions of women in classical Roman politics see Woodhull 2004, p. 77, and 17 18

Dixon 1983 and 1985a. 20   Bryennios 1.1. 21   Bryennios 1.7.1-3, Ἄρτι δὲ καὶ τοῦ Διογένους Ῥωμανοῦ τῶν τῆς βασιλείας οἰάκων ἐπειλημμένου, πρῶτος τῶν ἀδελφῶν Μανουὴλ ᾠκείωτο τῷ βασιλεῖ καὶ πρτοστράτωρ πρὸς αὐτοῦ ἀποδέδεικτο. 22   Plutarch, Life of Aemilus Paullus 5.5. 23   Peachin 2006, p. 144. 24   Bryennios 4.3.14–25. 25   Bryennios 3.4.

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his family. His realisation that his son Andronikos was dying, and that most of his family had already died, pushed him to become particularly involved in the marriage of his granddaughter Eirene. He worked to bring about the match with Alexios Komnenos because he needed to find a new defender for his family.26 Nikephoros portrays these men as admirable because they care for their families. Women in Nikephoros’ history are similarly portrayed as emotionally committed to the well-being of their families. Nikephoros brings women into his narrative of men’s deeds when their responses to the difficulties of their families add pathos to the story. John Doukas’ concern about the survival of his family after the impending death of his son Andronikos was shared by Andronikos’ wife, Maria of Bulgaria. Maria urged her husband to ‘bring some defender for his children’ into their household.27 In Nikephoros’ story it is Maria who suggested a match between her daughter, Eirene, and Alexios Komnenos. Maria is described as working tirelessly to secure the match.28 When Manuel Komnenos, Anna Dalassene’s oldest son, died, Anna grieved deeply, but with appropriate restraint: The noble and great-hearted mother completing the required rites for her son and grieving so much as is appropriate for the loss of such a son, a soldier and general, recovering her pain a little, she sent the famous Alexios campaigning with the emperor.29

Anna’s grief at the death of her son recalls Plutarch’s Cornelia mourning the death of her sons Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.30 Both women were noble and emotionally magnanimous, megalopsuchos, in the face of their sons’ deaths.31 Anna’s immediate decision to send another son to war for the empire also recalls Cornelia’s paradigm. Anna’s impassioned speech urging her husband John to take up imperial power after Isaac’s abdication mostly functions to distract the audience from the embarrassment of male lack of ambition by having John staunchly resist the ills of female influence, but Anna’s argument is couched in terms of the necessity of defending her family.32 The affection of brothers, fathers and sons also spurs them on to greater military actions. Andronikos Doukas risked his life to save his father, John Doukas, in battle. Affection for his father spurred Andronikos to leave his position of safety to come to his father’s aid. With great effort he succeeded in protecting his father, but     28   29   30   26 27

volume.

Bryennios 3.6.1–3. Bryennios 3.6.12. Bryennios 3.6.38–41. Bryennios 1.12.19–24. See also the discussion of family grief in Stavroula Constantinou’s chapter in this

31   Plutarch, Life of Gaius Gracchus 40.1.2. Cornelia bore her grief ‘εὐγενῶς καὶ μεγαλοψύχως’. Anna was a ‘γενναία μήτηρ καὶ μεγαλόψυχος’: Bryennios 1.12.19–20. 32   Neville 2010.

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sustained wounds from which he never recovered.33 In his final battle, Bryennios the Elder entrusted his right flank to his brother John, who is specified as being of the same blood.34 A series of unexpected reversals leaves Bryennios fighting alone with his son and brother against an entire Turkish host. The pathos of the scene is enhanced by the repeated emphasis on the familial bond between the three men left fighting on alone against the Turks after having been abandoned by all other allies.35 Brothers could work together to advance each other’s careers. When Isaac Komnenos became emperor in 1057 he immediately appointed his brother John to the high rank of kouropalates and put him in charge of the western defenses.36 Similarly, one of Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder’s first acts as a newly proclaimed emperor was to appoint his brother John domestikos ton scholon, and give him the rank of kouropalates.37 John campaigned in Thrace on behalf of his brother’s revolt while Nikephoros solidified his control of the western provinces. Kouropalates was a high honorary rank in the eleventh century given to select members of the imperial family and Georgian and Armenian princes. The domestikos ton scholon was the commander-in-chief of either the western or eastern imperial military forces in the eleventh century. In both of these cases the new emperor moved to promote his brother to the highest military rank immediately upon his proclamation. Numerous other examples show brothers and in-laws working together to further their common interests. The reliance on brothers and sons to support each other explains the necessity that drove John Doukas to pursue a marriage alliance with his rivals, the Komnenoi, once his brother and sons were dead and dying. The depictions of brothers and sons working together and caring for each other found in Nikephoros’ history have multiple parallels in classical Roman histories. The story of Andronikos Doukas leaving his relative safety to rush again into battle to save his father John is strongly reminiscent of the story of young Scipio Africanus charging forward to rescue his father in the battle of Ticinus against Hannibal.38 Various members of the Scipio and Paullus families, to name two of many, helped promote each other’s careers, all while serving Rome. Scipio Africanus ran for an aedileship early because he was concerned that his older brother Lucius would not win on his own.39 Publius Cornelius Scipio acted in concert with his brother Gnaeus, just as the Carthaginians Hasdrubal and Hannibal worked together. The innate loyalty of both sets of brothers allowed them to conduct war against each other simultaneously in Spain and Italy with greater confidence.40     35   36   37   38   39   40   33

Bryennios 2.15.14–32. Bryennios 4.6. Bryennios 4.12. Bryennios 1.3.4–6. Bryennios 3.11.1–3. Polybius 10.3.4–7. Polybius 10.4.1–3. For one example among many: Publius Cornelius Scipio sent his brother to fight Hasdrubal in Spain while he fought Hannibal in Italy (Polybius 3.49.4). 34

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Plutarch mentioned that one of Aemilius Paullus’ qualifications for the consulship was his ‘many sons and sons-in-law and a great crowd of friends and kinsmen of great influence’.41 The model of family support for a political leader presented by Plutarch would be entirely consonant with the actions of the aristocratic families of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Nikephoros and his contemporaries could read Plutarch and Polybius with a keen appreciation for how the workings of their kin networks mimicked those of the great old Romans. The histories of republican-era politics, in providing Nikephoros with stories of aristocratic family solidarity and competition in service to empire, gave him models of behaviour which he could use to create a reasonably positive portrayal of the civil wars of the 1070s. Rebellion had strongly negative valences in Byzantine political culture,42 and Nikephoros certainly took great pains to avoid the discourse of rebellion in his discussion of eleventh-century politics. Keeping in mind that his overarching goal was to make the politicians who kept rebelling and fighting each other while the Turks conquered the empire look good, Nikephoros can be seen as using familial affection to make the men seem sympathetic. In addition, it is possible that the histories of families engaged in civil strife in the late republican era provided a positive – or perhaps the least negative – discourse for depicting the civil wars of the 1070s. None of the phenomena described here are unique to either Roman or Byzantine political culture or practice. Many societies organise politics through families. One could point to marriage alliances and brothers helping each other in numerous other contexts. But while the practice of organising politics through families may be common, it is not universal, and Byzantine political culture of the eighth and ninth centuries presents one of the great counter-examples of a society that organized power through title and office rather than through family.43 Ninth-century Byzantine rulers were known to sideline or eliminate relatives as potential competitors.44 The presentation of families, complete with their women, as engines of political action represents a change in Byzantine political culture. Therefore Nikephoros’ presentation of family affection and cooperation cannot be dismissed as ‘natural’, and the specificity of the alignment with Roman cultural models is compelling. The change in political culture in which Nikephoros participated encouraged the discussion of marriage alliances and women in families. It did not, however, necessarily reflect a change in the way politics was actually practiced. All men have mothers and most get married, but whether those relationships make it into the historical record is a matter of cultural choice. Although there was manifestly less interest in family names and the details of family connections in the eighth     43   44   41

42

Plutarch, Life of Aemilius Paullus 10.2. Cheynet 1990, pp. 177–84. Neville 2004, pp. 14–-38. Tougher 1997, p. 31.

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and ninth centuries, kin networks undoubtedly played some role in politics.45 Descriptions of family relationships and networks are relatively lacking in detail in histories of the ninth century because that information was not important to the cultural construction of politics. That Nikephoros allows us to know the names of more women and presents their marriages as politically significant is not in itself evidence that women had more power in the Komnenian era than previously. Yet cultural change is significant. Nikephoros participated in a tradition in which history writing had the explicit purpose of presenting models of behaviour to educate and inform the behaviour of the audience. Plutarch and Polybius never let one forget that history is read in order to learn how to act. At least one of Nikephoros’ purposes was to tell his audience how to behave. In portraying his heroes and heroines as acting like the grand old Romans he was telling his contemporary courtiers to act like Romans. Roman republican history offered positive models of strong, heroic, women, such as Cornelia and Octavia, which twelfth-century women could take as exemplars of proper behaviour. Nikephoros’ narrative of aristocratic families contending to serve the empire better was an exhortation to that kind of behaviour, and the exhortation of an individual who was in a position to be an influential cultural arbiter. Given that later twelfth-century court rhetoric drew extensively on Roman exempla,46 it seems fair to say that Nikephoros’ preferences caught on. A political culture that allows women’s roles in familial alliances to be seen and celebrated can reasonably be expected to be more open to the appreciation of women’s roles than one which avoids mention of women, if possible, as a matter of good taste. If, following Nikephoros’ lead, twelfth-century courtiers indeed tried to emulate Roman models, then the women at court would have enjoyed at least a greater degree of acknowledgment of their function in connecting male politicians, and perhaps a more significant role in politics. The change in political culture seen in Nikephoros’ representation of elite families may indeed reflect a shift in thinking about families, in which the roles of women and children were more overtly recognised. Certainly women and children were not new elements of the Byzantine elite family, nor was the powerful influence of family networks. Yet the depiction of all members of families working together to support the political careers of their leading male members reflected an ideal which valued the impact of the whole family in ways that were at least somewhat novel in the twelfth century. Whether Nikephoros’ deployment of this ideal is accepted as stemming from his interest in classical Roman models of behaviour, or taken more simply as a reflection of his contemporary culture, the performance of his history would positively reinforce a vision of political action as enabled by harmonious activity of all members of a politician’s family.

  See also the remarks by Claudia Ludwig in her contribution to this volume.   Cresci 2004, pp. 115–45.

45 46

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Bibliography Primary Sources Cassius Dio, Roman History, ed. trans. Ernest Cary (Loeb Classical Library, 1914). Nikephoros Bryennios, Material for History, ed. and French trans. Gautier 1975. Plutarch, Life of Aemilius Paullus, ed. trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 6, 1918). Plutarch, Life of Antony, ed. trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 9, 1920). Plutarch, Life of Gaius Gracchus, ed. trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 10, 1921). Plutarch, Life of Pompey, ed. trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 5, 1917). Polybius, Histories, ed. trans. W.R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library, 1954). Secondary Sources Angold, Michael (1996), ‘Alexios I Komnenos: An Afterword’, in Mullett and Smythe (eds) (1996), pp. 38–417. Carile, Antonio (1968), ‘Il cesare Niceforo Briennio’, Aevum, 42: 29–54. Carile, Antonio (1969), ‘La Hyli historias del cesare Niceforo Briennio’, Aevum, 43:56–87. Cheynet, Jean-Claude (1990), Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (963–1210) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne). Connerton, Paul (1989), How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cresci, Lia Raffaella (2004), ‘Exempla storici greci negli encomi e nella storiografia bizantini del XII secolo’, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 2: 115–45. Cresci, Lia Raffaella (2005), ‘Storiografia drammatica dall’antichità a Bisanzio: elementi di continuità e discontinuità’, Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica, 33: 257–82. Dixon, Suzanne (1983), ‘A Family Business: Women’s Role in Patronage and Politics at Home, 80–44 B.C.’, Classica et Medievalia, 34: 91–112. Dixon, Suzanne (1985a), ‘Polybius on Roman Women and Property’, American Journal of Philology, 106: 147–70. Dixon, Suzanne (1985b), ‘The Marriage Alliance in the Roman Elite’, Journal of Family History, 10: 353–78. Failler, Albert (1989), ‘Le texte de l’histoire de Nicéphore Bryennios à la lumière d’un nouveau fragment’, REB, 47: 239–50. Garland, Lynda (1994), ‘“The Eye of the Beholder”: Byzantine Imperial Women and Their Public Image from Zoe Porphyrogenita to Euphrosyne Kamaterissa Doukaia (1028–1203)’, Byz, 64: 19–39, 261–313.

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Garland, Lynda (1999), Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantum AD 527–1204 (London: Routledge). Gautier, Paul (1975), Nicephore Bryennios Histoire; introduction, texte, traduction et Notes (Brussels: Byzantion). Gowing, Alain (2005), Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Grégoire, Henri (1953), ‘Nicephore Bryennios Les quatre livres des histoires. Traduction française avec notes’, Byz, 23: 469–530. Hill, Barbara (1996), ‘Alexios I Komnenos and the Imperial Women’, in Mullett and Smythe (eds) (1996), pp. 37–54. Hill, Barbara (1999), Imperial Women in Byantium, 1025–1204: Power, Patronage and Ideology (New York: Longman). Jeffreys, Elizabeth (2003), ‘Nikephoros Bryennios Reconsidered’, in V.N. Vlyssidou (ed.) (2003), The Empire in Crisis (?): Byzantium in the Eleventh Century (1025–1081) (Athens: Institouto Vyzantinon Erenon), pp. 201–14. Kazhdan, A.P., and Epstein, Ann Wharton (1985), Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press). Korobeinikov, D.A. (2008), ‘Raiders and Neighbours:The Turks (1040–1304)’, in Shepard (ed.) (2008), pp. 692–727. Lemerle, Paul (1977), Cinq études sur le XIe siècle byzantin (Paris: CNRS). Macrides, Ruth, and Magdalino, Paul (1992), ‘The Fourth Kingdom and the Rhetoric of Hellenism’, in Paul Magdalino (ed.), The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe (London: The Hambledon Press), pp. 117–56. Magdalino, Paul (1993), The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Magdalino, Paul (1996), ‘Innovations in Government’, in Mullett and Smythe (eds) (1996), pp. 146–66. Magdalino, Paul (2008), ‘The Empire of the Komnenoi (1118–1204)’, in Shepard (ed.) (2008), pp. 627–63. Malamut, Élisabeth (1999), ‘Une femme politique d’exception à la fin du XIe siècle: Anne Dalassène’, in Stéphane Lebecq, Alain Dierkens, Régine Le Jan and Jean-Marie Sansterre (eds), Femmes et pouvoirs des femmes à Byzance et en occident (VIe–XIe siècles) (Lille: Centre de Recherche sur l’Histoire de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest), pp. 103–20. Markopoulos, Athanasios (2006), ‘Roman Antiquarianism: Aspects of the Roman Past in the Middle Byzantine Period (9th-11th Centuries)’, in Elizabeth Jeffreys and Fiona Haarer (eds), Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Alderhot: Ashgate), pp. 277–97. Mullett, Margaret, and Smythe, Dion (eds) (1996), Alexios I Komnenos (Belfast: Belfast Byzantine Enterprises). Neville, Leonora (2004), Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Neville, Leonora (2008), ‘A History of the Caesar John Doukas in Nikephoros Bryennios’ Material for History?’, BMGS, 32: 168–88. Neville, Leonora (2010), ‘Strong Women and their Husbands in Byzantine Historiography’, in Paul Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine World (London: Routledge), pp. 72–82. Neville, Leonora (2012), Heroes and Romans in Twelfth-Century Constantinople: The Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Peachin, Michael (2006), ‘Rome the Superpower: 96–235’, in David S. Potter (ed.), A Companion to the Roman Empire (London: Blackwell), pp. 126–52. Seger, Johannes (1888), Nikephoros Bryennios: Eine philologische-historische Untersuchung (Munich: Verlag der J. Lindauerschen Buchhandlung). Shepard, Jonathan (ed.) (2008), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500–1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tougher, Shaun (197), The Reign of Leo VI (886–912): Politics and People (Leiden: Brill). Woodhull, Margaret L. (2004), ‘Matronly Patrons in the Early Roman Empire: The Case of Salvia Postuma’, in Fiona McHardy and Eireann Marshall (eds), Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization (London: Routledge), pp. 75–91.

Chapter 19

Changes in the Structure of the Late Byzantine Family and Society Fotini Kondyli

The family is a multi-faced unit that moulds and at the same reflects the socioeconomic conditions of a region, an empire, a culture.1 Traditional views have portrayed peasant families in medieval societies as static groups with no real power to initiate or influence change in the economic and political spheres.2 However, recent studies on medieval family organisation and its economic strategies underline the peasant family’s ability to adapt to new conditions, and further argue for its important role in socio-economic events.3 The Late Byzantine family (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) provides a great opportunity to study aspects of family organisation, social networks and economic strategies during a period of economic and demographic change. It further allows a deep examination of the potential adaptability and resilience of non-elite groups in times of crisis. The thirteenth century was a period of economic prosperity and demographic boom witnessed in most European regions including Byzantium.4 However, already in the early fourteenth century, Byzantium faced an economic crisis that was enhanced significantly by the demographic crisis in the middle of the century caused by plague. Civil wars and enemy attacks, the loss of important territories and the control of the international trade by the Italian cities also had significant political and economic consequences for Byzantium. In this chapter I examine the 1   This paper was originally presented at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2008. I would like to thank Leslie Brubaker for her invitation and her support to participate in the Congress and Shaun Tougher for his kind invitation to participate in this edited volume. I am also greatly indebted to Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, where I conducted my research and wrote parts of this revised article and especially to Alice-Mary Talbot and Deb Stewart for their help. I am always grateful to John Haldon and Archie Dunn for their constant guidance and support. 2   Karayiannopoulos 1981; Ostrogorski 1954, pp. 344–7; for similar issues in the medieval west, see Razi and Smith 1996, p. 16. 3   Resilience and adaptability can be seen in various activities of peasant society. For some examples see Laiou 2009, pp. 56–72; Lefort 1986; Dunn 2007; Dyer 1989, p. 140; Poos 2004, p. 291. Rudolph 1995, pp. 6, 12; Wray 2009, p. 263. 4   For an overview of the economic and demographic conditions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Harvey 1989; Laiou-Thomadakis 1977; Laiou 2002.

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Byzantine family before and after the mid-fourteenth century and study potential changes in family structure and property. I am particularly interested in strategies employed by the Byzantine family such as mobility, cooperation and alternative economic activities in order to adapt to demographic and economic conditions. I also examine potential changes in family and social ties as consequences of the economic and demographic conditions in the Late Byzantine period. The chapter is focused on the island of Lemnos and its local society between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and based on the information in the monastic archives of Mount Athos and Patmos for this period. In using the monastic archives, I recognise both their potential and their limitations, already discussed by other scholars.5 In the case of the Lemnian acts, the very fragmented state of some acts and the lack of sufficient acts for consecutive decades, as for example between the 1320s and 1360s, pose additional limitations. Despite these limitations, some tentative conclusions about the Late Byzantine family and the socio-economic conditions of the Late Byzantine period can still be reached. Archaeology can also be very informative for the study of non-elite social groups, including the peasant family. Archaeology permits the study of family in different scales, ranging from the study of specific individual family members through the study of human remains to family interaction, organisation and activities in the family realm through the study of houses, household activities, function of space in and around the house, as well as through the study of mortuary practices.6 Further, archaeology can contribute to the study of space organisation on a larger scale, examining settlement patterns and areas of economic and social activity and investigating population movement and economic strategies at a community level. For the purposes of this chapter, I am taking into consideration the results of my extensive field survey on Lemnos.7 One of the main objectives of the survey was to study the settlement patterns and fortification networks on the island in the Late Byzantine period and investigate factors that contributed to its development, such as demography, economic activities, trade routes, and enemy threats. For this purpose, all areas of potential Late Byzantine activity were recorded and studied, and included settlements from hamlets to fortified towns, monasteries and metochia, fortifications and other areas of economic activities. Late Byzantine activity was recognised based on surface finds, especially pottery and architectural remains. In this chapter, I discuss the survey’s results in relation to changes in demography and economic strategies. Finally, the case-study of Lemnos adds to existing knowledge of the socioeconomic conditions of the Late Byzantine period while emphasising the importance of regional studies. Thus, generic interpretations of the fourteenth-century crisis   Laiou-Thomadakis 1977; Jacoby 1962, p. 164.   For the contribution of archaeology to understanding family ties and structure

5 6

see for example Bourbou and Garvie-Lock 2009; Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008. For the contribution of household archaeology see King 2006; Beaudry 1999. 7   Kondyli 2008.

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that derive from the study of Macedonia and Thrace cannot be applied directly to Lemnos without taking into consideration the regional socio-economic conditions on the island and understanding the consequences of change at a local and regional scale.8 On the other hand, Lemnos cannot be studied in isolation; rather it should be understood as a product of Byzantine culture forged by the political and socioeconomic events developing in the eastern Mediterranean and medieval Europe during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Thus, I study the Late Byzantine family on Lemnos in comparison to other case-studies of peasant families in other parts of Byzantium and in medieval Europe. While recognising regional diversity and, in the case of medieval Europe, major differences in political and social organisation, I believe that analogies can be made that facilitate a better understanding of Late Byzantine society.9 Under the Same Roof: Family Size and Family Organisation The paroikoi recorded in the monastic acts are mentioned by their names, followed by their possessions and fiscal obligations. The description of each family begins with the registration of its head-person, who was in most cases male, and then continues with the rest of the family, notably his wife, children, brothers and sisters, parents and other relatives, depending on how many people are registered under the same household. Women or male children also appear as the heads of their family, when the husband/father was dead or absent. Family ties among members of the same household (wife, son, daughter) and among members of the same extended family are also mentioned, especially in cases of joint property among family members. According to the act of the Lavra monastery dated to 1284, the majority of families had two members, followed by families of four and then by families of five, as can be seen in Fig. 19.1.10 There were also larger families, with seven or even eight people. Based on the 1304 act of the Lavra monastery, at the turn of the fourteenth century the majority of families in the same area (i.e. northwestern Lemnos) had two or three members, followed by families of four. A few families were larger, with five, six or eight members (Figs 19.2 and 19.3).11 Both acts of 1284 and 1304 suggest that the nuclear family (consisting of the married couple and their children) was the dominant family type on Byzantine Lemnos at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century. The same can be observed in other parts of Byzantium, such as in   Laiou 2002, p. 317; Antoniadis-Bibicou 1965, pp. 364–74.   Campbell 1984, pp. 87–8; Razi 1980, pp. 109, 120. 10   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 73 (1284), pp. 16–22; 8 9

no. 74 (1284), pp. 22–7. 11   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), pp. 142–51.

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Figure 19.1 Family size based on the 1284 Lavra act

Figure 19.2 Family size based on the 1304 Lavra act

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Figure 19.3 Example of a family with eight members based on the 1304 Lavra act Macedonia, as well as in parts of medieval Europe, such as medieval England.12 There are also larger families registered in both acts, ranging from five to eight members. These larger families were composed of more than one nuclear family. Their members shared the family fortune, possibly co-habited in the same house or in the houses of the family, and were part of the same fiscal unit, thus also sharing the family’s fiscal obligations. In the Lavra act of 1304, the number of smaller households with 2–4 members has increased but also the overall number of the paroikoi registered is also significantly larger than 20 years before. The number of larger families registered as one fiscal unit has decreased but there are still large families present; we find members of the same extended family registered in the same village, working together and even co-owning specific assets. For example, in the village of Tsoukalaria, Kalothetos’ family included his wife Kali, their daughter Eirene and her husband, with joint properties and shared fiscal obligations. Kalothetos’ other daughter, Maria, was registered separately with her husband and son and distinct property.13 In Chrysippou the large family of   Laiou 2009, p. 60; Levine 1987, p. 17; Razi 1996, p. 370.   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), p. 150.

12 13

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Gargarinos counted for at least 11 members, although Gargarinos was registered on his own (as one household) while his four children (a son and three daughters) had all been married and were registered with their families as separate fiscal units, with distinct possessions and taxes.14 In the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth century, according to the acts of the Lavra, Vatopedi and Docheiariou monasteries, the nuclear family continued to be dominant, even though the sample of registered paroikoi is significantly smaller. In the act of Vatopedi dated 1348 there are no extended families recorded as part of the same fiscal unit with joint properties and shared fiscal obligations (Fig. 19.4).15 From the 1360s onwards, a small number of five–six member households reappeared in the acts of Lavra and Docheiariou but were still absent in Vatopedi and Dionysiou (Fig. 19.5).16 This ‘absence’ of extended families registered as one fiscal and production unit does not suggest shrinkage of the average family size; rather they are markers of change in family economic strategies and property, as I will argue in the next section.

Figure 19.4 Family size based on the 1348 Lavra act

  Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), pp. 148–9.   Acts of Vatopedi, ed. Lefort et al. 2006, no. 127 (1346), pp. 33–5. 16   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle et al. 1979, no. 139 (1361), pp. 74–82; Acts of 14

15

Docheiariou, ed. Oikonomidès 1984, no. 60 (first quarter of the fifteenth century), pp. 307– 11; Acts of Vatopedi, ed. Lefort et al. 2006, no. 128 (1368), pp. 333–40; Acts of Dionysiou, ed. Oikonomidès 1968, no. 21 (1425), pp. 122–4.

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Figure 19.5 Family size based on the 1361 Lavra act

Property, Economic Strategies and Family Ties Property is a key component of the economic and social life of the family. In this section I explore differences in property and economic strategies before and after the mid-fourteenth-century economic and demographic crisis. Further, I consider family size and patterns of inheritance as important factors affecting the type and size of family property. Finally, I discuss the impact of economic strategies, including management and allocation of family property, on family organisation, family ties and social networking. Based on the Lavra act of 1284, the majority of paroikoi owned at least one house; 27per cent are registered with one house, 19 per cent with two houses, and 6 per cent with three houses. Fewer than half of the families registered had any land at all, and only 21 per cent had vineyards (Figs 19.6 and 19.7). Animal ownership, however, presented a different aspect of the paroikoi’s economic situation. More than half of the families had at least one ox, with an impressive 41 per cent owning a zeugari (pair of oxen), followed by 16 per cent with one ox. Sheep were also a popular form of investment on the island, with 27 per cent owning sheep and 8 per cent owning more than 50, which would support the idea that they could produce a sellable surplus of related products (Figs 19.8 and 19.9).17 17   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 73 (1284), pp. 16–22; no. 74 (1284), pp. 22–7.

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Figure 19.6 Land ownership per household in 1284

Figure 19.7 Vines ownership per household in 1284

Fotini Kondyli

Figure 19.8 Oxen ownership per household in 1284

Figure 19.9 Sheep ownership per household in 1284

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Figure 19.10 Land ownership per household in 1304

Figure 19.11 Vines ownership per household in 1304 In the 1304 act, the lack of arable land in the hands of paroikoi is striking, with 96 per cent of the families recorded having no land to cultivate. On the contrary, there was a significant increase of vineyard ownership, with half of the registered population owning some modioi (Figs 19.10 and 19.11). An increase in sheep ownership is also attested, with 30 per cent of the registered paroikoi owning between 1 and 50 sheep. Oxen ownership per family was slightly reduced; although the numbers of families with one ox were higher (20 per cent), ownership of a pair or more oxen

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Figure 19.12 Oxen ownership per household in 1304

Figure 19.13 Sheep ownership per household in 1304 was reduced (32 per cent) (Figs 19.12 and 19.13).18 The growing population in combination with the lack of sufficient arable land forced peasants to rethink their economic strategies in order to adjust to the economic conditions and maintain their self-efficiency. Peasants turned to other types of investment, such as vine, sheep, mills, orchards and others that were cash crops and could help them meet their fiscal obligations. They also turned to alternative sources of income, working as millers, potters, and shoemakers, and offering a variety of products and services   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), pp. 142–51.

18

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to meet the needs of a growing population.19 For example, the village of Kaletzika in 1304 had the highest concentration of individuals registered with a specialisation that provided the area with goods and services. This high concentration of skilled individuals should be linked to a well- or over-populated area with increased need of goods and services and insufficient arable land that drove many paroikoi to seek out alternative sources of income.20 Such activities could provide an economic safety net in times when arable land was scarce; they could also be combined with agricultural production or they could lead to a specialisation.21 Further, these activities could initiate economic and social differences in the family and in the local community, with significant consequences for individuals’ social roles and identities, as I have argued elsewhere.22 The most important aspects of family fortune in the early fourteenth century were economic collaboration and joint property.23 Families often relied on undivided common family fortune, collaboration and even cohabitation. For example, in cases when a daughter continued to stay at her parents’ house after her marriage, her dowry or share in the family fortune continued to be managed and exploited by the entire family and contributed to the family income. Family members could also only share specific assets rather than the entire family fortune, as for example a pair of oxen or a vineyard. Shared property, such as owning halves, thirds, fifths, eighths of mills, vines, boats and animals, is very common among family members in the 1304 act.24 There are also economic collaborations that do not involve joint properties but rather rely on pooling resources for common tasks. This is strongly suggested by the type and size of property. In the act of 1284 for example there are paroikoi with more than 100 modioi and no oxen, making it theoretically impossible to cultivate their lands fully, and in the 1304 act entire villages show a high concentration of oxen but no land.25 After the mid-fourteenth century, family property changed dramatically in size and type. The arrival of the Black Death on Lemnos at that time, and the probable migration of locals because of heavy taxation and insecurity, undoubtedly led to a degree of depopulation.26 This situation proved beneficial for those who survived and chose to remain on the island. Although fewer paroikoi were registered in   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), pp. 142–51.   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, pp. 146–7. 21   For alternative economic strategies and activities, see Lefort 1991a; Dunn 2007; 19 20

Laiou 2002. 22   Kondyli 2012, pp. 75–90. 23   Laiou 2009, pp. 70–71. 24   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), pp. 142–51. 25   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 73 (1284), pp. 16– 22; no. 74 (1284), pp. 22–7; no. 99 (1304), pp. 142–51. See also Nesbitt 1972; LaiouThomadakis 1977, pp. 69–70. 26   For phenomena of depopulation in the mid-fourteenth century and the consequences of the Black Death see Laiou 2002, p. 317; Lefort 1991b.

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the archives, the increase in their properties was significant. In Lavra’s act of 1361, there was no family without land, and half of the registered paroikoi owned more than 50 modioi (Fig. 19.14).27 This average of modioi per family was further increased at the end of the fourteenth century and first decades of the fifteenth century, ranging from193 modioi to 284 modioi per family. This increase in land ownership extends also to vineyards. For example, in Docheiariou’s act at the beginning of the fifteenth century, all but one family have between 4 to 15 modioi.28 The increased availability of cultivable land and abandoned properties reduced significantly the need of paroikoi to maintain common property, or even to cohabit and share fiscal obligations with other members of their extended family. Similar phenomena of increased property per family and the end of cohabitation in the second half of the fourteenth family have also been noted for other areas, including regions of medieval Europe.29

Figure 19.14 Land ownership per household in 1361 Property was also affected by type and size of family as well as by patterns of inheritance. Families with five or more members tended to have more extensive properties than smaller families, especially in cases where the family fortune remained undivided and shared by all its members. The majority of families in the 1284 Lavra act which own land are families of four, five or more members, whereas most of the families with five members in the acts of 1304 and even 1361 are among the wealthiest. Another interesting factor is a correlation between the larger families and ownership of animals, especially sheep. In the acts of 1284   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle et al. 1979, no. 139 (1361), pp. 74–82.   Acts of Docheiariou, ed. Oikonomidès 1984, no. 60 (first quarter of the fifteenth

27 28

century), pp. 307–11. 29   Campbell 1984, p. 103.

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and 1304 the majority of families that owned 30–70 sheep are all families with four or more members.30 A larger family translated to more manpower and more flexibility in task allocation, thus allowing the combination of agricultural and pastoral activities. However, there are also examples of nuclear families with significant fortunes. Family fortune, and in some degree family structure, was also influenced by patterns of inheritance, as Angeliki Laiou has already shown in her work on paroikoi families in Macedonia.31 In Byzantium, practices of equal partible inheritance allowed more flexibility in decisions regarding dowry, inheritance, and the time when family property would be allocated to recipients (during the parents’ life or upon their death).32 Even in societies with impartible inheritance, there was still some choice in property allocation. In medieval England for example, there are many instances in which the father or older brother would allocate some of his property to the rest of the children to secure for them a more comfortable life.33 Patterns of inheritance could in some cases even dictate cohabitation, collaborations and shared property inside the family. For example, in the case of Georgios Karouchis and his family, Georgios’ son shares his parents’ fortune and possibly lives with them. On the contrary, Georgios’ daughter Maria had established her own household with distinct possessions, probably as part of her dowry.34 Georgios’ property included one house, one pair of oxen, a donkey, 12 sheep and one modios of vine. Maria’s property resembled that of her parents, with the exception of one ox and ten sheep, which suggests that her property came exclusively from her dowry and she was given half of the family property.35 The son of the family would either have to receive a reasonable dowry from his wife or would need to remain with his bride in the parental home and benefit from the joint property until the death of his parents. If the children could extract a substantial part of the family fortune as dowry or inheritance while the parents were alive, as Maria did, then they could form their own nuclear family and register as an independent fiscal unit, even if they still shared some properties with their parents. Crisis and Peasant Mobility Availability of arable land and demand of manpower also influenced paroikoi’s mobility patterns. Rise in population and lack of sufficient arable land in many areas led paroikoi to abandon their villages and move to less populated and   For similar phenomena in medieval Europe see Rudolph 1995, p. 9.   Laiou 2009, p. 52. 32   For Byzantine patterns of inheritance see Kiousopoulou 1990; Laiou 2009, pp. 53, 30 31

61.

  Razi 1996.   Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), p. 149. 35   For more information on dowry see Kiousopoulou 1990; Laiou 2009, p. 61. 33 34

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possibly more marginal areas to improve their chances of increasing their income, as Jacques Lefort has shown for the village of Radolibos.36 The same conditions led other peasant families to remain in their village but adjust their economic strategies by establishing economic collaborations, maintaining joint property, and turning to alternative income-generating activities.37 In the act of 1304, there are villages with large numbers of families registered, such as Kaletzika and Chrysippou, and others with fewer families, such as Paroikou and Phouske.38 In the well-populated villages, more families and more children were registered. In addition, members of their extended family can also be traced living or having property in the same area. On the contrary, in the case of Phouske, there are only two children registered and no one seems to be related to anyone in the village, with the exception of Ioannis Katzatouros and his family, who might have had relatives in the well-populated village of Chrysippou.39 The overall small size of the families in Phouske, their limited family network in the village and their small fortunes, perhaps suggest that these were recently settled families in that area. Laiou has argued that families which have long settled in one area tend to have more extensive property and family network than recently settled ones.40 Thus, it is possible that the paroikoi of Phouske consisted mainly of young families that left their village of origin and their extended families and moved to newly founded satellite or marginal settlements in the hope that there would be less competition over exploitation of resources, especially arable land. In the act of 1304, there is also a number of males who are registered in relation to their fathers-in-law and not their fathers, as is typical in most acts.41 These men have distinct properties and fiscal obligations but occasionally share assets with their wife’s family. The reference to the father-in law instead of their father must be associated with family property. In most cases the fortune of the couple is partly created by the woman’s dowry and is similar or identical to the wife’s family’s fortune. For example, Nicholas Boidettos has two houses, one ox, one mule and half a modios of vineyard. His son-in-law, who is specifically referred to as Boidettos’ son-in-law, also has one house, one ox, one mule and half a modios of vineyard that must have become his from his wife’s dowry.42 The reference to the father-in-law instead of the father facilitated the recognition and recording of both families’ assets since the fortunes of the two families were connected. But the need to register property in a detailed way does not explain sufficiently why of all the male paroikoi that received a dowry upon their marriage only some are mentioned in connection with their fathers-in-law. What makes these men different? It is     38   39   40   41   42   36 37

For similar phenomena in Macedonia, see Lefort 1985 and 1986. For similar phenomena in the medieval west see Razi 1996, p. 378. Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), pp. 142–51. Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, pp. 146, 149. Laiou 2009. Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, no. 99 (1304), pp. 142–51. Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle, Guillou and Svoronos 1977, pp. 145–6.

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possible that the need for this group of men to be identified with their fathersin-law derived from the absence of any other family in the village and the need for a better identification of these men. If that is the case, then perhaps these men originated from another place and settled in the village of their wives, and became known to their new communities though their association with their wife’s family. In early modern Greece a similar practice led local communities to name some men after their fathers-in-law, when the fathers-in-law were highly respected members of the community and thus it was a great honour to be associated with them, or because the young men were not locals and were recognised by connection with the family members better known among the locals, i.e. their wives and wives’ families. The serious reduction of registered paroikoi and the numerous references to abandoned properties in the mid-fourteenth century argue for peasant mobility. The various measures taken by the state and the monasteries to keep depopulation and abandonment under control show the reality and seriousness of the situation as well as the continuous efforts to deal with it.43 Although the acts for Lemnos from the mid-fourteenth century are scarce, the majority of references to exaleimmata are found in the acts of that time. In the early fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they are less frequent, suggesting a more intense problem in the 1340s–1350s and a slow recovery towards the fifteenth century.44 Further, the references to abandoned property in the acts are more numerous for the abandonment of cultivated lands, buildings and small hamlets, rather than villages. This is also supported by the results of the archaeological survey I completed on Lemnos. Based on the survey results, main settlements, both coastal and inland, continued to be inhabited in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, even if some settlements were reduced and some smaller hamlets were abandoned (Fig. 19.15).45 Thus, there were overall no significant changes in the settlement pattern between the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries and the later fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries.

43   Such measures included repopulation of abandoned areas, further strengthening of the island’s fortifications and giving additional lands to the remaining paroikoi. Acts of Vatopedi, ed. Lefort et al. 2006, no. 128 (1368), pp. 333–40; Acts of Iviron, ed. Lefort and Oikonomidès 1995, no. 99 (1430–48), pp. 165–9. 44   Bartusis 1986. According to Bartusis the term exaleimmata and its meanings in the Late Byzantine period suggest ownerless property through death without heirs or through flight of the owner. Bartusis also stressed the importance of distinguishing between land ‘abandoned’ by its original owner and ‘deserted’ land in terms of exploitation, because many of these abandoned lands were allocated to monasteries, lay landowners, and even to paroikoi. For the frequency of references to abandoned properties, see Acts of Lavra, ed. Lemerle et al. 1979, no. 126 (1346), pp. 30–32; no. 136 (1355), pp. 60–65; no. 139 (1361), pp. 74–82; no. 164 (1415), pp. 167–9. 45   Kondyli 2008, pp. 172–209.

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Figure 19.15 Lemnos, distribution of Late Byzantine sites At the end of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the majority of families in the acts were small nuclear families with distinct possessions and obligations from those of their extended families. Perhaps these were newly relocated families that moved when arable lands were abandoned and available to them. Their small size and the striking lack of any reference to their extended families and to joint property are reminiscent of the situation of possibly relocated peasants of Phouske at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Peasant mobility was also encouraged by the decision of monasteries to relocate paroikoi to their lands and boost production. For example, the Pantokrator monastery revived the area around Pisperagos in southern Lemnos by restoring a tower and relocating paroikoi to revive and repopulate the area.46 Vatopedi might have also relocated paroikoi   Acts of Pantokrator, ed. Kravari 1991, no. 20 (1394), pp.140–145.

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to populate the monastery’s recently acquired lands in the southern part of the island.47 David Jacoby has also argued for increased peasant mobility in that period in the region of Macedonia, where the effects of the Black Death and of enemy raids were even more heavily felt.48 Further, similar phenomena are observed in post-plague western Europe where the availability of vacant holdings and heavy taxation of feudal lords encouraged many families to leave their homes and occupy abandoned properties elsewhere.49 Social Networks, Family Ties, and Multiple Identities So far I have argued that demographic and economic changes in the course of the Late Byzantine period impacted on family property and family organisation. In this section I explore how changes in property and family organisation could affect social and family networks, as well as identities and roles within the family. The numerous examples of collaboration and shared property in the early fourteenth century, and the possible co-existence of the extended family in the same house or the same village, suggest a complex family organisation in which strong family ties and shared property were essential to the family’s survival. This organisation affected the roles and identities of individual family members.50 Family members could assume different roles depending on their sex, age and marital status, on their contribution to the family income, and their participation in decision making. Their roles were also dependent on the degree of independence from other family members, based on cohabitation, joint property, shared fiscal obligations and property. For example, a young man who was head of his own family with distinct possessions and obligations from his and his wife’s families possibly enjoyed more freedom to develop his own economic strategies than if he lived with and shared property with his extended family. In the latter situation older males might have made the decisions for him.51 In a similar situation, in a house with more than one nucleated family, decision making for house organisation, house economy and upbringing of children might have been left not to the young females but to the older and more experienced ones. Young women who moved to their in-laws’ house upon marriage might have been comforted by other women’s help but they could have also been treated as outsiders. Marriage, joint property, and cohabitation contributed to the formation of new social networks and to negotiation of multiple identities in the family and the community. In the 1304 act, the case of male household heads identified in relation to their fathers-in-law   Acts of Vatopedi, ed. Lefort et al. 2006, no. 128 (1368), p. 339. See also Haldon

47

1986.

    50   51   48 49

Jacoby 1962. Razi 1996, p. 379; Schofield 2003, p.83. For changes in roles, see the discussion in Hughes 1975, pp. 19–20. Hughes 1975; Litavrin 1990; Laiou 2009.

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instead of their own father is indicative of such changes in identity. Emphasis was placed on their connection to another family, its members, fortune and social network, rather than to their own families. That connection became a key element of their identity upon marriage. What happened to family ties after the mid-fourteenth century when cohabitation and intense family economic collaborations became scarce? Scholars have argued that similar demographic and economic changes in fourteenthcentury medieval England caused a loosening of ties since increased availability of property and opportunities in post-plague England decreased the need for cohabitation and cooperation among family members and increased population mobility.52 Taking into account the striking lack of mention of family ties or joint properties in the monastic acts after the mid-fourteenth century, can we also talk about loosened family ties in Late Byzantine Lemnos?53 Zvi Razi, who studied peasant society in medieval England, argues against the idea of loosened ties. He points out that such views have arisen partly from a methodological error, since scholars have tried to trace family ties through common surnames, thus leaving out of their study sample an important number of peasants who were related but did not share the same surname.54 However, this does not apply to the study of Byzantine peasants. In the monastic acts there are often explicit references to family ties and the degree of relationship among family members (son of, brother of, married to someone’s sister etc.). Razi suggests that although there might be a disentanglement of the immediate family, relocation could create different and new ties and social networks.55 Peasants could have placed more emphasis on relations with their extended kin as well as with the local community. Ties with distant family might have been intensified in post-plague Europe for a variety of reasons, such as mobility and increased availability of property, and also loss of immediate family due to the Black Death and the uncertainty it brought with it. In her research on wills in pre- and post-plague Bologna, Shona Wray found that not only did more people turn to family members as executors of their wills in Bologna but the choice of family members as heirs was then extended to include more distant kin.56 A similar situation is possible for the Late Byzantine family. If peasants were taking over abandoned lands belonging to their extended family, then they were strengthening their ties with members of their extended family. At the same time, they could maintain strong ties with immediate family through   Razi 1996.   Acts of Vatopedi, ed. Lefort et al. 2006, no. 128 (1368), pp. 333–40; Acts of

52 53

Docheiariou, ed. Oikonomidès 1984, no. 60 (first quarter of the fifteenth century), pp. 307–11. 54   Razi 1996, pp. 375–6; see also the discussion in Whittle 1998, pp. 31–2. On the issue of names and identifying family ties see also the comments by Claudia Ludwig in this volume. 55   Razi 1996, p. 384; similar ideas have been expressed by Hughes 1975, p. 27. 56   Wray 2003, p. 210, and 2009, pp. 248–9.

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visitations, social events and rituals. If they were relocating to repopulate monastic lands, they might have forged strong ties within the local community, with friends and co-villagers, thus creating a wider network of relationships (not necessarily economic but definitely social). Conclusions Throughout the Late Byzantine period the nuclear family remained the dominant type of family in Lemnos, regardless of changes in demographic and economic conditions. Changes in family structure were closely related to changes in property, property management and to measures against limited resources. Such measures include extended families functioning as productive and fiscal units in the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries. In the early fourteenth century there are fewer cases of extended families registered as part of same fiscal unit, but large families continued to exist, often living in the same village and sharing common properties with other family members. In that period there is a notable increase of joint property and economic collaborations between family members. There is also more diversity in economic activities, suggesting an increased need for alternative income sources. After the mid-fourteenth century the demographic crisis and the abandonment of properties created more favourable circumstances for the peasants who remained on the island. Availability of arable land and lack of manpower resulted in a dramatic increase of property, especially of available land in post-plague Lemnos. These new circumstances also enhanced abandonment of the paternal roof, the end of joint property, and in many cases relocation to a different village. Further, these demographic and economic conditions influenced the evolution of family ties and social affiliations by creating possibly wider social networks, including distant family and members of the local community. Finally, the study of the Late Byzantine family on Lemnos has shown that the economic and demographic changes initiated numerous changes in the decisions and actions of each family. In that respect, the family as a social unit could change, be reshaped, adjust and be flexible in its responses to crisis. Further, the variety of responses in a time of crisis also argues against a generic explanation framework that is usually applied to these three centuries and all Byzantine regions. Such explanations easily reach conclusions of general decline and depopulation, but fail to describe the complexity and variability of peasant society’s actions and motivations in different regions of the empire.

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Well-Being in Byzantium (400–1453) (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), pp. 101–9. Dyer, Christopher (1989), Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Haldon, John (1986), ‘Limnos, Monastic Holdings and the Byzantine State: ca.1261–1453’, in Bryer and Lowry (eds) (1986), pp. 161–215. Harvey, Alan (1989), Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hughes, Diane O. (1975), ‘Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa’, P&P, 66: 3–28. Jacoby, David (1962), ‘Phénomènes de démographie rurale à Byzance aux XIIIe, XIVe et XVe siècles’, Études rurales, 5–6 (Apr.–Nov.): 161–85. Karayiannopoulos, Ioannes (1981), ‘Ein Problem der spätbyzantinischen Agrargeschichte’, JÖB, 30: 207–37. King, Julia A. (2006), ‘Household Archaeology, Identities and Biographies’, in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 293–313. Kiousopoulou, Antōnia (1990), Ho thesmos tēs oikogeneias stēn Ēpeiro kata ton 13o aiōna (Athens: A. Sakkoulas). Kondyli, Fotini (2008), ‘Late Byzantine Rural Sites in the Northern Aegean: Their Archaeology and Distribution Patterns’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham). Kondyli, Fotini (2012), ‘Meeting the Locals: Peasant Families in 13th Century Lemnos’, in Guillaume Saint-Guillain and Dionysios Stathakopoulos (eds), Liquid & Multiple: Individuals & Identities in theThirteenth-Century Aegean (Paris: Centre de recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance), pp. 75–90. Kravari, Vassiliki, Lefort, Jacques, and Morrisson, Cécile (eds) (1991), Hommes et richesses dans l’empire Byzantin, VIIIe–XVe siècle, vol. 2 (Paris: Lethielleux). Laiou, Angeliki E. (2002), ‘The Agrarian Economy, Thirteenth–Fifteenth Centuries’, in Angeliki E. Laiou et al. (eds), The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks), pp. 311–76. Laiou, Angeliki, E. (2009), ‘Family Structure and the Transmission of Property’, in John Haldon (ed.), The Social History of Byzantium (Chichester: WileyBlackwell), pp. 51–75. Laiou-Thomadakis, Angeliki E. (1977), Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Lefort, Jacques (1985), ‘Radolibos: population et paysage’, TM, 9: 195–234. Lefort, Jacques (1986), ‘Population and Landscape in Eastern Macedonia during the Middle Ages: The Example of Radolibos’, in Bryer and Lowry (eds) (1986), pp. 11–21. Lefort, Jacques (1991a), ‘Anthroponymie et société villageoise (Xe– XIVe siècle)’, in Kravari, Lefort and Morrisson (eds) (1991), pp. 225–38.

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Lefort, Jacques (1991b), ‘Population et peuplement en Macedoine orientale IXe– XVe siècle’, in Kravari, Lefort and Morrisson (eds) (1991), pp. 63–82. Levine, David (1987), Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Litavrin, Gennadij G. (1990), ‘Family Relations and Family Law in the Byzantine Countryside of the Eleventh Century: An Analysis of the Praktikon of 1073’, DOP, 44: 187–93. Nesbitt, John W. (1972), Mechanisms of Agricultural Production on Estates of the Byzantine Praktika (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin). Ostrogorski, Georgije (1954), Pour l’histoire de la féodalité byzantine (Brussels: Editions de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves). Poos, Lawrence R. (2004), A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350– 1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Razi, Zvi (1980), Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen, 1270–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Razi, Zvi (1996), ‘Interfamiliar Ties and Relationships in the Medieval Village: A Quantative Approach Employing Manor-Court Rolls’, in Razi and Smith (eds) (1996), pp. 369–91. Razi, Zvi, and Smith, Richard M. (1996), ‘The Historiography of Manorial Court Rolls’, in Razi and Smith (eds) (1996), pp. 1–35. Razi, Zvi, and Smith, Richard M. (eds) (1996), Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rudolph, Richard L. (1995), ‘Major Issues in the Study of the European Peasant Family, Economy and Society’, in Richard L. Rudolph (ed.), European Peasant Family and Society: Historical Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 6–25. Schofield, Phillipp R. (2003), Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan). Tritsaroli, Paraskevi, and Valentin, Frédérique (2008), ‘Byzantine Burial Practices for Children; Case Studies Based on a Bioarchaeological Approach to Cemeteries from Greece’, in Francesc Gusi I Jener, Susanna Muriel and Carme Olària (eds), Nasciturus, infans, puerulus vobis mater terra: La muerte en la infancia (Diputació de Castelló: Servicio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Prehistóricas), pp. 93–113. Whittle, Jane (1998), ‘Individualism and the Family-Land Bond: A Reassessment of Land Transfer Patterns among the English Peasantry c. 1270–1580’, P&P, 160: 25–63. Wray, Shona Kelly (2003), ‘Women, Family, and Inheritance in Bologna during the Black Death’, in Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols). Wray, Shona Kelly (2009), Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death (Leiden: Brill).

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Afterword Shaun Tougher

It is a truism that the older one gets the more interested in family one becomes. This volume devoted to the subject of the Byzantine family certainly comes later rather than earlier in my career, but looking back at the interests that have preoccupied me so far in my research it is clear that the subject of family has always been an underlying concern. My doctoral study of the reign of the Macedonian emperor Leo VI (886–912) dwelt in part on Leo’s relationship with his father (biological or not) Basil I (867–886), but also addressed his interaction with his brother Alexander, as well as his relations with his four wives and their families, raising the topics of marriage, in-laws and other kinship ties. The subject of the Macedonian dynasty also raised questions about its relationship with the previous imperial family, the Amorian dynasty, not least the infamous partnership of Basil and his predecessor the emperor Michael III (842–867), who adopted Basil not long before he was murdered by him. An earlier imperial family has also been a focus of my research, the Constantinian (or second Flavian) dynasty, notably the figure of Julian the Apostate (361–363). Much of my interest in Julian was sparked by the nature of his relationship with his cousin the emperor Constantius II (337–361), given their notoriously difficult history. Within this context Julian’s interaction with Constantius’ second wife Eusebia was an initial topic of interest, but subsequently I have explored a range of familial relationships within the dynasty, taking in (amongst others) brothers, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews and cousins. My work on eunuchs has also brought me to the subject of family, for in the Byzantine empire native families were a source of the supply of eunuchs for the imperial court (in contrast with the dependence of the Roman empire on the importation of foreign slave eunuchs). Thus in Byzantium powerful court eunuchs could work to promote family interests and family members, by such methods as the forging of family ties through marriage or adoption. Further, eunuchs could be fostered or adopted themselves, and famously Leo VI ruled that eunuchs themselves should be allowed to adopt (Novel 26) even though he continued to refuse to allow them to marry (Novel 98). Thus family has formed a uniting theme in the diverse strands of my research, but this volume emerged out of a group concern to address a major lacuna in the field of Byzantine Studies. As already noted by Leslie Brubaker in her Preface to this volume, in her introduction to the papers delivered at Dumbarton Oaks in 1989 in a symposium dedicated to ‘The Byzantine Family and Household’ Angeliki Laiou asserted that ‘the study of the Byzantine family is still in its infancy’. In the early twenty-first century this assertion still holds true, and this volume arose

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out of a desire to address, or at least focus attention on, this problem. Further, the subject of family is one of inherent interest anyway, as the family remains a basic unit of human life – and of modern political discourse – no matter how families or attitudes to them have evolved over time. Thus we deemed that a volume devoted to the Byzantine family was a necessity as well as one that would be of deep natural interest and contemporary relevance. The volume presents a selection of papers that were delivered in a series of panels at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in recent years. The collection (and panels) had a number of aims. It sought to present a range of approaches to studying the Byzantine family, exemplified for instance by the employment of prosopographical, archaeological, comparative and Life Course methodologies. It was concerned with covering the span of the history of the Byzantine empire but also looking beyond the empire to include comment on other cultures and time periods to provide further food for thought and material for contrast and comparison. The majority of the chapters deal with the Middle Byzantine period, but several address late antiquity (or the Early Byzantine period) and a few the later period. There are also chapters on the Graeco-Roman background and the late antique/early medieval west (both areas in which the family has been intensively studied), and two on medieval Islamic history (within which it transpires that the family has been even less studied than in Byzantine Studies). It is important to emphasise also something the volume did not intend to do: it did not set out to be a comprehensive guide to the Byzantine family; rather, it sought to raise the problem of the limited progress in the study of the Byzantine family, identify and discuss interesting aspects for study, and encourage further research. Having reached the end of the volume it is appropriate and useful to reflect on major recurring observations and aspects of the chapters, as well as indicate a range of other intriguing topics and issues touched upon (beyond the four major themes identified and addressed by Leslie Brubaker in her Preface). Fundamental of course is the question of evidence for the study of the Byzantine family. A broad range of sources, literary and material, has been drawn upon by the chapters, including histories, biographies, autobiographies, letters, law, sermons and homilies, monastic rules, documents from archives, art, archaeology and coins. Despite this range of evidence it is worth remarking (as noted for instance by Claudia Ludwig and Leonora Neville) that sources do not necessarily tell us all we would like to know about Byzantine families as they are not interested in recording certain types of information. It is also striking that many of the chapters focus on one particular type of literary source: hagiography. This concentration deserves some comment. It is well known that hagiography can be seen as a good source for the social realia of Byzantium, and hagiographies by their very nature have an element of family history, dealing as they do with the biographies of holy Byzantine individuals. It is intriguing to observe though that the chapters which deal with hagiographies utilise them in a variety of ways. For instance Eve Davies used a range of Lives to explore Byzantine perceptions about the Life Course in relation to the family, Michel Kaplan considers the Life of Theodora

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of Thessalonike as a family text promoting a family cult, and Nathan Howard reads the Life of Macrina as ammunition in a theological conflict. It is important to remark also that a number of contributors emphasise the need to use the range of sources together in order to form a fuller and richer understanding of the family (e.g. Julia Bray, and Emma Southon, Mary Harlow and Chris Callow alluding to the work of Guy Halsall). The prevalent focus on hagiography raises another essential topic relating to the Byzantine family, and that is Christianisation. The key question is, what difference did Christianisation make to the nature of, and attitude to, family in Byzantine society? The ascetic movement in early Christianity, drawing on the words and example of Christ, advocated the rejection of family ties and marriage in favour of retreat from the world and devotion to God through rigorous physical hardship. However, as noted for example by Stavroula Constantinou, although the life of a saint is predicated on the rejection of family, hagiography dwells much on the subject of family and can emphasise the ties and feelings that continued to exist, to the extent that the Life of Alexios, the Man of God focuses on the hero’s parents and wife rather than on him. Further, as discussed in particular by Dirk Krausmüller, holy men (and women) and monastic communities cast their spiritual relations in family terms (e.g. fathers and brothers). Finally, Leslie Brubaker also emphasises that one of the most prevalent visual images in Byzantine society was that of the Virgin and the child Christ; at the heart of Christianity lay an image of a mother and her son. Another aspect of social history signalled by the chapters in the volume is class. Much of the evidence, and its subject matter, relates to the social elite. To take hagiography again as an example, the Lives of Macrina and Theodora of Thessalonike are dealing with women from wealthy and socially distinguished families, so what can they tell us about families in general, or families of lesser social status? Many of the chapters also deal with material relating to imperial families, most obviously my own on the Macedonian dynasty but also for example Leslie Brubaker’s and Cecily Hennessy’s, which deal with examples of imperial art. Can the depiction of the imperial family in texts and art inform us about Byzantine families in general? One can argue that they can, for these (and other) sources can provide an ideal of the family, how it should be, or how it does not match up to this in reality. Nevertheless there are limits to what such evidence might reveal, for ‘ordinary’ families might have had different dynamics or required different social roles for members of families. There is, however, scope for exploring peasant families, as highlighted by Simon Ellis and Fotini Kondyli especially, in their consideration of such families through the lens of villages, archaeology, and archival evidence. The definition of what a family is anyway in Byzantium is something that has been addressed by previous scholarship on the Byzantine family but is dwelt upon by most of the chapters in the volume too. It is recognised that there is no Byzantine word for family but rather Byzantines refer to the ‘household’ (oikos). Thus the Byzantine family encompasses all those who lived in the household,

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including slaves and servants. Nevertheless it is apparent that the Byzantines did see that a key element of the household was the core unit of a husband and wife and their children (what we term the nuclear family). Many of the chapters do focus on the central group of parents and children, exploring in particular the emphatic role of mothers within families (e.g. Ville Vuolanto), the status of the father (e.g. Julia Hillner), and the situation of children (Cecily Hennessy). However, many chapters also acknowledge (often at the same time) the more complex reality of Byzantine families and the subject of wider kin, such as siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, step-parents, step-children, in-laws and fictive kin, and relatives who might be eunuchs (not just my chapter but Claudia Ludwig’s too). Households also raise the question of houses, the material setting of families, a topic addressed by Simon Ellis and one of the utmost interest and importance (and one which looks at the question of palaces and the living arrangements of the imperial family too). Connected with the question of the definition of family and discussion of household it is apparent that a major component of analysis of family and family roles is gender. Indeed much emphasis, as just noted, is placed on the position and role of women within families, especially as wives and mothers. It is evident from the chapters that women could play a very strong and influential role within families (e.g. Macrina, Anna Dalassene), and this in a society in which the official political power of women was extremely limited if non-existent. Ironically, the study of men as husbands and fathers is much more limited, as is the examination of the subject of men as men in general. Some of the chapters show that this is a very rich field for further research. Fotis Vasileiou highlights this in general in his chapter considering the impact of the deaths of fathers on certain late antique children, and Ville Vuolanto includes Ausonius’ fascinating praise of his maternal uncle in his Parentalia as both a father and a mother. The special relationship between maternal uncles and their nephews has been recognised, and is mentioned by Ville Vuolanto in relation to the case of Libanius too, but nicely raises a rewarding example of what can be achieved in the study of men, gender and family. These references to Macrina and Anna Dalassene, Ausonius and Libanius, help to raise another interesting feature of the chapters in the volume: the targeting of case studies as a way to explore the subject of family. In their survey of the Graeco-Roman family Mary Harlow and Tim Parkin foreshadow the approach of many of the chapters, using the cases of Demosthenes and Cicero as a method of discussing the family more generally. A range of case studies came to the fore across the chapters, including the Cappadocians (who received much attention), Augustine, Theodore the Stoudite, Theodora of Thessalonike, members of the Macedonian dynasty, the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir, the family of Nikephoros Bryennios, and the island of Lemnos. This use of case studies proved a sensible and stimulating way to access the subject of family. As already noted, imperial families featured prominently in the evidence discussed and provided a method for thinking about families in general, but also for thinking about a specific type of family (a method also enriched by the comparative approach, witness for instance the chapter by Nadia El Cheikh on al-Muqtadir). The wealth of material the

Afterword

399

imperial family can provide for discussion is well illustrated too by Hagith Sivan’s recent book Galla Placidia: The Last Roman Empress (2011), which explores the life of this daughter, (half-)sister, wife, mother and aunt of emperors (not to mention wife of a Gothic king, Athaulf, relative of Alaric the infamous sacker of Rome in AD 410) as a paradigm of the life of women within the later Roman/early Byzantine empire. There is clearly much potential for the further study of imperial families; while Theodosian women and the mother of Constantine – the trailblazer and ultimate role model Helena – have been much studied, Theodosian men (such as the brothers Arcadius and Honorius) and the sons of Constantine, for example, deserve attention of their own. In addition to these recurring observations and aspects of the chapters a range of other interesting and important subjects have surfaced, such as socialisation, incest, spiritual kinship, fictive kinship, age, names and naming, emotions, abuse and violence, marriage, demography, communal dining (the family that eats together stays together?), burial practices, the position of slaves and servants within families, concubinage, the role of teaching and teachers, alternative families, rulers as metaphorical parents of their subjects, storytelling, changing familial attitudes over time, and the interrelationship between the nature of families and the nature of states. Some of these are familiar topics while others deserve further study. The major subjects identified by the chapters as meriting and requiring more research seem to me to be men and the family; relationships between siblings; houses; and imperial families. However, in addition to this, it is evident that what the subject of the Byzantine family really needs is a major interdisciplinary project, such is the scale and scope of the research that needs to be undertaken. We hope that this edited volume can play a part in encouraging, informing and inspiring such a project, or at least encouraging, informing and inspiring the continuing work of individual researchers of the Byzantine family and other families.

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Index

abandonment, of children 80, 119–21 Abbasids 132, 133, 136, 138, 140, 327–41 Abbott, Nabia 140 Abramius 159, 160, 167 abuse 14, 21–40 Abydos, battle of 316–17 adoption xx, 12, 80, 122, 310, 312, 318, 363, 395 Aegina 154, 289, 293–4, 295, 296 Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus 363, 366 Aeschines 5 Aetius, mentor of Eunomius 96 Africa 39, 133, 146, 252, 259, 267 Agape (baptismal name of Theodora of Thessalonike) 289, 292, 293, 293–4, 295–6 brother of, deacon 294, 296 sister of 294 Aglaïs, mother of Alexios the Man of God 274–9 Ahprahat 53 Akoimitoi, monastery of 276 al-Muhtadi, Abbasid caliph 331 al-Muntasir, Abbasid caliph 331 al-Muqtadir, Abbasid caliph, 329–41 al-Mu‘tadid, Abbasid caliph, father of alMuqtadir 330, 331, 336–7 al-Mu‘tamid, Abbasid caliph 329 al-Muttaqi, Abbasid caliph 332 al-Qahir, half-brother of al-Muqtadir 340 al-Sayyida, mother of al-Muqtadir 334–5, 338–9, 340 Alberici, Lisa 155 Aleppo 145 Alexander, emperor, brother of Leo VI 180, 184–5, 188, 211, 304, 309, 310, 313, 314, 315–16, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322, 395 Alexander the Great 5, 195

Alexander Romance, fourteenth-century 195 Alexandria 78, 79 Alexios I Komnenos 188–9, 303, 359–61, 362, 364 Alexios II Komnenos 188, 189 Alexios, the Man of God 273–81 Alexios Mousele 214 Ali, Kecia 138 Alice, Princess, mother of Prince Philip 322 Alypioi, family of 307 Alypius the Stylite 80 Amastris 163 Amorian dynasty 187, 213–15, 241–2, 312, 395 Amorion, forty-two martyrs of 241 Amorium 247, 255, 257 Anastasia, Anna, Helena and Maria, daughters of Basil I 306 Anastasius, emperor 185 Andronikos Doukas, brother of Michael VII Doukas 208–11 Andronikos Doukas, son of John Doukas 364, 364–5 Anicia Juliana 195 animals 56, 57, 267–8, 377, 379–84 Anna, abbess of the monastery of St Stephen in Thessalonike, relative of Theodora of Thessalonike 168, 292, 293, 294, 298 Anna, daughter of Leo VI 306 Anna, mother of prophet Samuel 80 Anna, mother of Virgin Mary 180, 216 Anna, sister of Basil II 306 Anna, Anastasia, Pulcheria and Maria, daughters of Theophilos and Theodora 213–15 Anna, Theodora and Zoe, sisters of Michael VII Doukas 211

402

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Anna Dalassene 359, 362, 398 Anna Komnene 303, 359, 360 Annesi 104 Anthousa, daughter of Constantine V 162, 166, 167, 168, 170 Antioch 39, 53, 55, 61, 64 Antonine dynasty 363 Antoninus Pius 28 Antony, St 76, 78 Antony, archbishop of Thessalonike, metropolitan of Dyrrachion, relative of Theodora of Thessalonike 289–91, 293, 295, 298 Antony, father of Theodora of Thessalonike 295, 296 Antony, Life of George of Choziba 164 Antony Kauleas, patriarch of Constantinople 287 Aphobus, nephew of Demosthenes senior 5 Apollo, contemporary of St Paul 352 Arab Spring 146 Arabia 131 Arcadius, emperor 275, 399 archaeology 123, 156, 247–69, 329, 372, 386 Arethas of Caesarea 294 Ariadne, empress 185 Ariès, Philippe 118 Aristotle 2, 12, 29, 103, 158 Arjava, Antti 117 Arsaber 241 asylum 25 Athanasia of Aegina 159 Athanasios of Athos 165, 356 Athanansius of Alexandria, Life of Antony 76 Athens 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 52, 57, 61, 64, 83 Atticus, friend of Cicero 6 Augustine of Hippo 31–6, 37–40, 49, 52, 54, 54–5, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64–5, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 77 brother of 65 father of 34–5, 38, 61, 67 maternal grandparent of 66 mother of 34, 38, 54, 56, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68

sister of 65 wet-nurse of 65 conception of marriage 117 Confessions 49, 60, 65, 69 Augustus/Octavian 11–12, 362–3 aunt/s 1, 93, 208, 260, 309, 329, 330, 335, 337, 359, 395, 398 maternal 64, 335 Ausonius 49, 49–50, 52, 62, 63–4, 65, 398 maternal aunts of 64 maternal grandmother of 63 maternal uncle of 63–4, 398 mother of 62, 65 parents of 62 relatives of 63–4 Genethliacos 49–50 Parentalia 49–50, 62, 63, 398 autobiography 47–69, 82, 140, 145, 280, 351 Ayyubids 143 Baghdad 192, 329–30, 333, 334, 338 Balsamon 260 Barbara, St, church of in Cappadocia 216–17, 222, 223 Bardas, brother of empress Theodora 241, 312 Bardas Phokas, father of Nikephoros II Phokas 310 Bardas Phokas, nephew of Nikephoros II Phokas 316–17 Bardas Skleros, brother-in-law of John Tzimiskes 317 Barron, William 281 Basil I 180, 183, 187, 191–2, 193, 211, 219, 304, 305, 306, 307, 310, 311, 312, 313, 315, 316, 318, 395 Basil II 222, 304, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316–18, 319, 322, 363 Basil, donor in Karanlık Kilise in Göreme 224 Basil, friend of John Chrysostom 58 Basil, son of Leo VI 314 Basil of Caesarea 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 81–4, 85–6, 91–105, 178–80 grandmother of 63

Index influence of mother and grandmother on 60, 82 Against Eunomius 92 Basil the Elder 82, 83, 86, 91 husband of Emmelia 60, 82, 98 parents of 82 Basil of Thessalonike, Life of Euthymios of Thessalonike 162–3 Basil Argyros 318 Basil Lekapenos, eunuch 308, 309, 317, 322 Basileios the domestikos 222 baths/bathing 35, 317, 330 Beagon, Philip 101 beard/s 195, 224, 225 Benjamin, son of Jacob and Rachel 219, 226 Berroia 286 Bertha/Eudokia, wife of Romanos II 307 Beth Shean 252 bishop/s 32, 69, 80, 84, 85, 91, 97, 159 Black Death 382, 388, 389 Bloch, Marc 112 Bologna 389 Boniface, St, church of in Rome 275–6 Boswell, John 119 Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab 333 Bourtzes family 362 bride-show/s 241, 242 brother/s 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 60, 61, 64, 64–5, 78, 80, 81–4, 86, 91–105, 163, 195, 208–11, 214, 216–18, 218–19, 220, 221, 226–7, 241, 281, 294, 296, 304, 309, 310–11, 315–18, 320, 331, 335, 338, 362, 364–5, 366, 373 half- 219, 226, 340 monks as 164, 345, 347, 352, 353, 389, 395, 399 older 384 Brown, Peter 22, 117 Brubaker, Leslie 219 Bulgarians 356 Burgundians 110 burial 85, 222–6, 227, 275–6, 285–99, 332, 335, 336, 337, 372 Burrus, Virgina 62, 103 Butler, Judith 169

403

Bynum, Caroline 169 Caesarius, brother of Gregory of Nazianzus 64, 84 Cairo 262 Cairo Geniza 140, 143 caliphs/caliphate 131, 135, 136, 137, 140 Canlo Kilise 257 Cappadocia 83, 91, 95, 100, 207, 216–17, 221–6, 227, 248, 255–7, 258, 261, 268, 268–9 rock-cut churches in 221–6 Cappadocian Fathers 76, 81–6, 95, 99, 100, 102, 104, 398 Carolingian/s 115, 116 Carp, Teresa 158 Carterius, paedagogus of Gregory of Nazianzus 52 Carthage 252 Caseau, Beatrice 158 Cassius Dio 361, 362 castration 309, 310 Catherine, abbess of monastery of St Luke in Thessalonike, relative of Theodora of Thessalonike, sister of Antony archbishop of Thessalonike 289, 290, 291 Chamberlain, Michael 143 Charles, Prince 320, 321 children/childhood xxi, xxii, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 14, 15, 21–40, 47–69, 75–86, 118–21, 123, 137, 138, 145, 156–67, 179–80, 189–90, 191, 197, 207–27, 239, 273, 277, 281, 289, 293, 296, 308, 311, 313, 314, 328, 329, 330, 331, 336, 336–40, 341, 355, 356, 362, 364, 367, 373, 384, 385, 388, 398 boys 50–69, 159, 160, 220, 224, 225–6, 227 girls 50, 56, 57, 63, 66, 78, 159, 160, 220, 222–4, 227 Choirsophaktes, agent of iconoclast emperor 292 Chora (Kariye Camii, Constantinople) 197, 216 church of Our Saviour 216

404

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Christ 178, 180, 181, 188, 189, 193, 196, 197, 208, 209, 216, 352 Christianity 23, 30–40, 47–69, 75–86, 91–105, 116–17, 119–22, 196, 197, 207, 328, 397 Chrysanthe, mother of Theodora of Thessalonike 294–5, 298 Chrysippou, village of 375–6, 385 Chrysotriklinos 260 Cicero 2, 4, 5–7, 7, 9, 15, 398 Clark, Elizabeth 77, 103, 169 Clark, Gillian 39 Cleoboule, mother of Demosthenes 5, 8 Clodia 362 coins/coinage 185–9, 208, 209, 213–14, 226, 235, 252 Comana, church of 158 concubinage/concubines 61, 114, 138, 140, 328, 329, 330–33, 337, 341 Constans I 307 Constans II 252 Constantine I 28, 29, 39, 84, 185, 194, 234, 307, 314, 399 Constantine V 162, 166, 170, 187, 293 Constantine VI 187, 240 Constantine VII 187–8, 191, 237, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316 Constantine VIII 222, 304, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 316–18, 319, 320 Constantine IX Monomachos 189, 192, 193, 304, 311, 313, 319 Constantine X Doukas 208, 209 Constantine, son of Basil I 307, 310, 315 Constantine Babutzikos 241 Constantine Diogenes, son of Romanos IV Diogenes 362, 363 Constantine Diogenes, son-in-law of Basil Argyros 318 Constantine Doukas, son of Michael VII Doukas and Maria of Alania 194–5, 211, 212 Constantinian/Flavian dynasty 395 Constantinople 78, 83, 85, 159, 195, 219, 221, 234, 240, 242, 252, 253, 257, 260–62, 268, 287, 312, 317, 318, 348, 349, 356

Council of (381) 92 Constantios Doukas, brother of Michael VII Doukas 208–11 Constantius II 238, 395 Cooper, Kate 117 Corinth 247, 254, 255, 256, 257 Cornelia, mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus 364, 367 Cornelia, wife of Cornelius Scipio 363 Cornelius Nepos, Lives of the Great Generals of Foreign Nations 8 Cornelius Scipio 363 Council of Trullo, canons of 347 cousin/s 5, 93, 121, 240, 313, 329, 362, 395, 398 Crete 217, 296 cross-dressing 274 Crucifixion, imagery of 196 Cyriacus 159, 160, 167, 169 Cyril of Scythopolis 75, 160 Life of Abramius 159, 167 Life of Cyriacus 159, 169 Life of Euthymius the Great 157, 169 Life of John the Hesychast 159–60 Life of Sabas 159, 164, 167 Life of Theodosius the Cenobiarch 158 Cyzicus 91 Dagron, Gilbert xx Damascus 143 Daniel the Stylite, parents of 80 Daphne (Athens) 197 daughter/s 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 75–86, 100, 136, 145, 162, 165, 166, 168, 187, 195, 211, 213–15, 216, 220, 221, 224, 274, 286, 288, 299, 306, 307, 308, 309, 313, 314, 317, 318, 322, 331, 336, 337–8, 362, 364, 373, 375, 376, 382 eldest 311 David, ascetic 53 David, king 191 David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 154 David of Lesbos 154, 161, 167 George of Lesbos 169 Symeon of Lesbos 168 De Jong, Mayke 119–20, 121–2

Index Demetrios, St xx, 189–90, 287, 296, 298, 299 church of in Thessalonike 189–90, 287, 291, 299 Demophon, nephew of Demosthenes senior 5 Demosthenes 2, 4–5, 9, 14, 15, 398 Derenbourg, Hartwig 140 Digenis Akritis 248, 257, 261 dining, family 218–21, 226–7, 260–61, 356 Diocletian, emperor 91 Dionysia, mother of St Euthymius 80–81 brother of 80 Dionysiou monastery 376 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 361 divorce 6, 6–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 26, 29, 30, 37, 38, 115, 137, 138, 328, 330, 341 Docheiariou monastery, acts of 376, 383 domus 7, 9, 21–2 Dossey, Leslie 31, 37 Doukas dynasty 188, 194–5, 208–12, 226, 362 Doumani, Beshara 327 doves/turtledove 56, 279–80 dowry/dowries 6, 12, 14, 29, 113, 135, 296, 382, 384, 385 Duby, Georges 116, 121–2 Dunn, Archie 258 Dyrrachion 290, 291 Edessa 275 education/educators 51–5, 57, 60, 60–61, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 81, 82, 83, 102, 105, 120, 144–5, 158–9, 215, 226, 249, 274, 277, 278, 308, 315, 329, 336–40, 345–56 Egypt 10–11, 78, 79, 133, 140, 143, 265, 267, 340 Eirene, cousin of Maria of Alania 362 Eirene, daughter of Kalothetos 375 Eirene, mother of Athanasia of Aegina 159 Eirene, portrait of in Karşi Kilise in Gülşehir 222–5 Eirene, sister of empress Theodora 241 Eirene of Chrysobalanton 165–6 Eirene of Hungary, empress, wife of John II Komnenos 188, 189

405

Eirene Doukaina, empress, wife of Alexios I Komnenos 189, 359, 362, 364 Eirene Palaiologina, wife of John II Doukas Komnenos Angelos 279–80 El Khoury, F. 256 Elijah, prophet 180, 183 Elizabeth II, Queen 320–22 Elm, Susanna 62 Emmelia, mother of Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina 60, 91, 98–9, 100, 101, 103, 104, 274 wife of Basil the Elder 82–3, 86 emotions 116, 118, 122, 140, 145, 169, 221, 226–7, 279–81, 308, 322, 340, 355, 360, 364 affection 12, 13, 62, 80, 116, 117, 118, 329, 333–4, 338, 364–6 grief 5, 7, 83, 96, 104, 274, 275, 276, 279, 280–81, 289, 335, 340, 364 jealousy 226, 318, 319 love 116, 144–5, 279, 308, 332–3, 355, 356 England, medieval 375, 384, 389 Ephesus, seven sleepers of 222, 223 Epiphanius of Salamis 95 epitaphs 8–9 Esau and Jacob, twins 218–19, 221, 226 Etschmiadzin gospel book 216 Euarestos of Kokorobion 349–50, 353, 355–6 Eubiotos, monk 350, 353, 356 Euchaita 257 Eudokia, daughter of Constantine VIII 311, 313 Eudokia Ingerina, wife of Basil I 180, 184–5, 191, 193, 211, 312 Eudokia Komnene 362 Eudokia Makrembolitissa, empress 208, 209 Eunomius 91–105 Apology 92 Apology for the Apology 92 eunuch/s 1, 169, 224, 238, 309, 336–7, 338, 339, 395, 398 Euphemianos, father of Alexios the Man of God 274–9 Euphrosyne/Smaragdos, St 274

406

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Euphrosyne, daughter of Theodoule, founder of monastery of the Virgin of Certain Hope 195 Euphrosyne, nun who cares for Michael the Synkellos 168 Euphrosyne Bobaina, nun, protospatharissa and aunt of Michael Attaleiates 260 Eusebia, empress 395 Eusebius, eunuch, grand chamberlain of Constantius II 238 Euthymios, spiritual father of Leo VI 315 Euthymios of Thessalonike 170 Euthymios the Younger 160, 162 Euthymius, St 80 Euthmyius the Great 154, 156–7, 167, 169 Evans Grubbs, Judith 39, 117 Evergetis monastery, Typikon of 352, 354 exaleimmata 386 exposure, child 120, 123 Fabius Maximus 363 familia 7, 8, 12, 14, 22, 77 family/families, see also adoption, aunt/s, brother/s, children/childhood, cousin/s, daughter/s, father/s, grandchild/ren, grandparents, husband/s, in-laws, kinship, mother/s, nephew/s, niece/s, parents, siblings, sister/s, son/s, stepfamilies, uncle/s, wife/wives definitions xix–xx, 7–10, 134, 139–41, 145, 327, 397–8 nuclear xix–xx, 7, 8, 9, 116, 123, 207, 208, 224, 226, 249–50, 327, 346, 373, 375, 376, 384, 387, 388, 390, 398 extended 207, 208, 227, 373, 376, 383–4, 385, 387, 388–90, 398 second 227 biblical 207–8, 216–21, 226–7 holy 196–7, 216–18, 224, 397 imperial (dynasties) 133, 136, 138, 140, 207, 303–22, 329–41, 395, 398–9 aristocratic xx, 197, 207, 238, 249, 251, 252–8, 260, 261, 268, 289, 293, 295, 359–67, 397

peasant 371–90, 397 monastic 345–56 late Byzantine 371–90 Greek, ancient 1–15 Roman 1-15, 21-40 early medieval western 109–24 medieval Islamic 131–47, 327–41 father/s 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 22, 26, 27, 29, 34–5, 36, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62–3, 63, 64, 68, 75–86, 97, 102, 114, 154, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166–7, 185, 187, 189–90, 208, 209, 214, 220, 239, 240, 241, 274–81, 288, 294, 296, 303, 305–6, 309, 313, 314, 316, 337, 339, 340, 356, 362, 364–6, 384, 385, 389, 395, 398 monks as 345, 351, 352, 355 Fausta, wife of Constantine I 185 Flusin, Bernard 79 Forerunner, see John the Baptist Forty Martyrs, festival of 60 Franks 110, 112, 115, 116, 120, 252 friends/friendship 1, 6, 7, 9, 56–9, 59, 62, 85, 95, 136, 163, 165, 366, 390 Fulvia 362 Gabriel, archangel 180, 183, 225–6 Galla Placidia, empress 195, 399 Gargarinos, peasant, family of 375–6 Gastria, monastery of 214 Gaul 113, 119, 252 gender, see men, women George of Amastris 162, 163, 170 George Eleusius, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 159, 164–5, 170 George and Constantine, eunuchs, brothers of John the orphanotrophos 309 Georgios Karouchis, peasant, family of 384 Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger 76–8 Geza I of Hungary 194–5 Gharib, brother of mother of al-Muqtadir 335–6 Gilleard, Chris 157–8 Glamis Castle, Scotland 321 Gnaeus, brother of Publius Cornelius Scipio 365

Index Goitein, S.D. 140 Gonzaga family 193–4 Goody, Jack 121–2, 251 Gorgonia, sister of Gregory of Nazianzus 64, 84, 101 Goths 110 grandchild/ren 22, 52, 62, 63, 76, 360 granddaughters 214–15, 226, 364 grandson/s 52, 191, 309, 312, 329, 338, 341 great-great-great granddaughter 304 grandparent/s 1, 9, 63, 64, 66, 68, 93, 208, 359, 360, 398 grandfather/s 187, 240, 313, 337, 360 grandmother/s 60, 63, 67, 68, 101, 135, 214–15, 216, 226, 298, 329, 338–9, 341 great-grandfather 66, 313, 360 Great Palace 260–261 Great Persecution 82, 91 Greenfield, Richard 160 Gregory of Nazianzus 48, 50, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 67, 69, 83, 84–6, 95, 99, 100, 101 brother Caesarius 64 father of 61, 84–6, 101 mother of 59, 61, 67, 84, 101, 195 sister Gorgonia 64, 101 funeral orations on relatives 50, 61 ninth-century illustrated manuscript of the homilies of 179–85, 193, 195, 196, 211, 219 Gregory of Nyssa 50, 60, 64, 66, 81–4, 86, 91–105 brothers of 64 father of 60 grandmother of 101 mother of 60 sister of 64, 91–105 Against Eunomius 92, 94, 101, 105 Life of Macrina 50, 60, 81–3, 91–105 On Soul and Resurrection 60 Gregory the Cleric, Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 154, 155, 168, 285–99 Translation and Miracles of Theodora 285–99

407

Gregory the Elder, father of Gregory of Nazianzus 61, 84–6, 101 Gregory of Tours 252 Gregory Thaumaturgus 91, 101 guardian/s 5, 14, 61, 80, 111, 113, 316, 328 Hagia Sophia 188, 189, 192–3, 266 hagiography xx, xxii, 75–86, 91–105, 115, 153–70, 178–9, 207, 235, 238, 239, 273–81, 285–99, 346–52, 353, 355, 356, 396–7 hair 195, 219, 220, 225 Haldon, John 251, 253 Halsall, Guy 117, 119, 123, 397 Hanne, Eric 136 Hannibal 365 harem, Abbasid 329–41 Harry, Prince 320 Harun, nephew of mother of al-Muqtadir 335, 336 Harun al-Rashid, caliph 329, 331 Hasdrubal 365 health 54–5, 189–90, 311, 340 Helen, daughter of Robert Guiscard 211 Helena, daughter of Symeon the Bulgar 307 Helena, mother of Constantine I 185, 399 Helena, wife of Constantine VIII 307 Helena Lekapena, wife of Constantine VII 308, 309, 312 Heraclian dynasty 186–7 Heraclius, emperor 186–7, 252 Herlihy, David 112, 118, 121–2 Herod 221, 227 brother of 221 Herodias 221 Himerios, relative of Leo VI 309, 316 Hogan, Dennis 156 Holmes, Catherine 312, 317 Homilies of James Kokkinobaphos, illustrated editions of 217–18 Honorius, emperor 77, 275, 399 Horn, Cornelia 118 horses 56, 57, 154, 267, 336 household/s xx, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 21–40, 47, 56, 64, 65, 66, 67, 79, 83, 93, 102, 103, 122, 123, 137, 138, 144, 159, 197, 218, 249–51, 327,

408

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

329–41, 363, 372–90, 397–8; see also domus, oikos houses/domestic buildings 123, 247–69, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279, 280, 372, 375, 377, 382, 385, 388, 398 Hugh of Provence 307 Hungary, royal crown of 194–5 Hunter, David 117 hunting 55, 56, 57, 62, 83, 97, 98, 219, 279, 315, 317 husband/s 3, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14, 26–7, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 38, 59, 60, 79, 84, 98, 114, 166, 192, 215, 238, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278–80, 289, 291, 294, 295, 296, 307–8, 310, 311, 313, 320, 331, 336, 355, 359, 362, 364, 373, 375, 398 Iberia (Spain) 141 Iconoclasm/Iconoclasts 194, 290–92, 293, 294–5, 296, 298, 299, 350 Iconophiles 168, 214–15, 291, 292, 294, 298 Ignatios the Deacon, Life of George of Amastris 162, 163 in-laws 6, 309–10, 365, 388–9, 395, 398 brother/s-in-law 306, 317 daughter-in-law 275, 277 father/s-in-law 76, 188, 309, 359, 385–6, 388–9 mother/s-in-law 38, 77, 121, 215, 279, 310 sister/s-in-law 121, 310 son/s-in-law 317, 318, 366, 385 incest 121–2, 144–5 seventh degree of separation 121 Infancy Gospel of James 216 infanticide 80 Ioannis Katzatouros, peasant, family of 385 Ireland 112 Isaac I Komnenos 363, 364, 365 Isaac Komnenos, brother of Alexios I Komnenos 362 Isaurian dynasty 187, 197 Islam 131–47, 257, 327–41 Istanbul 266 Iviron, monastery of 353 Jacoby, David 388

James, son of Joseph 216–18 James, Edward 119 Jerome, grandmother of 63 Jerusalem 79, 159, 165, 217 Jews 38, 94, 131, 140, 141 Joachim, father of Virgin Mary 216 Job 220–21, 227 children of 220–21, 227 manuscripts of 220–21 John I Tzimiskes 304, 309, 311, 313, 317 John II Komnenos 188–9 John II Doukas Komnenos Angelos, ruler of Thessaly 279–80 John, archbishop of Thessalonike 287 John, monk 348 John/Joannes-Conon, father of Sabas 78–9, 164 John, friend of Symeon the Fool 154, 155, 164 parents of 161–2 John, priest, father of Gregory the Cleric 287–8 John the Baptist 221 Forerunner/Prodromos, church of 261 chapel of in church of St Demetrios in Thessalonike 291 John of Damascus, Exposition of Faith 355 John the Evangelist 196 John the Hesychast 159–60, 160 John the orphanotrophos, eunuch 309 John Bryennios, brother of Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder 365 John Calybites 275 John Chrysostom 31–6, 37, 38, 39, 40, 49, 53, 58, 59–60, 69 mother of 59–60 On Priesthood 49 manuscript of homilies of 192–3 John Colobus, Apophthegmata 78 John Doukas 361, 363–4, 364–5, 365 John Entalmikos, donor in Karanlık Kilise in Göreme 225 John Klimakos, Heavenly Ladder 209–11 John Komnenos, husband of Anna Dalassene 362, 363, 364, 365 John Skylitzes, chronicler 162, 313, 318 Synopsis of Histories 162 illustrated chronicle of 214–15, 226

Index John and Euthymios of Iviron 353 Jolivet-Lévy, Catherine 224 Jordan 154, 164 Joseph, husband of Virgin Mary 180, 207, 216–18, 226 Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel 219, 226 Judah, half-brother of Joseph 219 Julia, daughter of Julius Caesar 362 Julian, emperor 84, 395 Julius Caesar 111, 362 Justin II 186 Justinian I 29, 38, 347 Kairnourgion, in Great Palace 191, 195 Kalavrezou, Ioli 192, 196 Kaletzika, village of 382, 385 Kali, wife of Kalothetos 375 Kali and Maria, girls, portraits of in Karşi Kilise in Gülşehir 222–5 Kalothetos, peasant, family of 375 Karanlık Kilise, in Göreme 224–6 Karras, Ruth 114–15 Karşi Kilise, in Gülşehir 222–5 Kazhdan, Alexander 170 Kekaumenos, Strategikon 250 Kennedy, Hugh 331, 338 Khatif, sister of mother of al-Muqtadir 335 Khojo/Gaochang 265 Khumra, concubine of al-Muqtadir 332 kinship, fictive/artificial 310, 336, 363, 398 foster-parent 308 godchildren 120 godfather/s xx, 310, 315, 322 godparent/s xx , 120–21 ‘kin by marriage’ 362 milk relationships 336 milk mothers 336 milk sisters 336 kinship, Germanic 110–13 kinship, spiritual 111, 119–22, 293, 345–56 spiritual children 61, 355 spiritual father 79, 315, 352, 355 spiritual mother 77, 293 spiritual son 355 Kokkinobaphos manuscripts 180, 197, 217–18 Komnenian dynasty 188–9, 249, 359–67 Konya 266

409

Kourkouas family 318 Kratea 160 Kroeschell, Karl 111 kyrios 8, 14 Labarum 194 Laiou, Angeliki xx, 384, 385, 395 Lake Prespa, twin forts at 316 Lambton, Ann K.S. 135–6 Lapidus, Ira M. 143 Lavra monastery 373–5 acts of 373–5, 376–84, 385, 388–9 law/legislation 11, 12, 21–40, 113–14, 132, 160, 347, 395 law codes 117, 123 leges barbarorum 111, 113 Lex Salica 112 Augustan marriage legislation 11–12, 14 Farmer’s Law 259 incest legislation 121–2 Islamic 134–9, 146, 327–28 Lazaros of Mount Galesion 160 Lefort, Jacques xx, 251, 385 Lekapenids 309, 312, 314 Lemnos 371–90 Leningrad Psalter 211, 212 Leo I 185 Leo II 185 Leo III 187 Leo IV 187 Leo V 290–91, 292 Leo VI 180, 184–5, 187–8, 211, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315–16, 317, 318, 319, 322, 395 Leo the Mathematician 291 Leo of Tripoli 296 Leontios of Neapolis, Life of Symeon the Fool 154, 161, 167, 170 Lepidus 362 Lesbos 168 letters 236, 240, 328 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 251 Libanius 48, 49, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 64, 65, 66, 67–8, 68, 398 brothers of 65 father of 61, 64, 68

410

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

maternal uncles of 61, 64, 398 mother of 52, 60–61, 64 Autobiography 49 Licinia Eudoxia, empress, wife of Valentinian III 185–6 Life Course 9, 64, 153–70, 177, 195–6, 224, 293, 388 Life of Abramius 167 Life of Alexios, the Man of God 273–81 Life of Antony 76 Life of Athanasia of Aegina 159 Life of Athanasios of Athos 165, 356 Life of Basil the Macedonian 191–2 Life of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 154, 161, 166, 169 Life of Eirene of Chrysobalanton 165–6 Life of Euarestos of Kokorobion 349–50, 353 Life of Euthymios of Thessalonike 162–3 Life of Euthymios the Patriarch 315 Life of Euthymios the Younger 160 Life of Euthmyius the Great 154, 156–7 Life of George of Amastris 162 Life of George of Choziba 164 Life of John the Hesychast 159–60 Life of John Calybites 274, 275, 281 Life of John and Euthymios of Iviron 353 Life of Lazaros of Mount Galesion 160 Life of Luke the Younger 157 Life of Makarios 348–50 Life of the Man of God 274 Life of Mary of Egypt 158, 160 Life of Mary the Younger 273 Life of Michael the Synkellos 156, 165, 168 Life of Nicholas of Sion 158 Life of Niketas of Medikion 154, 156, 157, 160, 348 Life of Nikon 157 Life of Paul of Latros 353 Life of Philaretos 240–41 Life of Sabas 164 Life of Symeon the Fool 154, 155, 162, 164, 167 Life of Symeon the New Theologian 350–52 Life of Syncletica of Palestine 165 Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 154, 155, 159, 168, 285–99

Translation and Miracles of Theodora 285–99 Life of Theodore of Stoudios 348 Life of Theodore of Sykeon 159, 164, 258 Life of Theodosius the Cenobiarch 158 Life of Theoktiste of Lesbos 160 Life of Thomais of Lesbos 155, 273–4 Lincoln College typikon 195, 215, 226 Livistros and Rodamne, Byzantine romance 279 Logothete chronicle 315, 316 Lombards 110, 115 Louis II 307 Louis III of Provence 306 Lowden, John 218 Lucius, brother of Scipio Africanus 365 Ludlow, Morwenna 103 Ludwig the Pious, king 241 Luke the Younger 157, 165, 166–7, 170 Lynch, Joseph H. 120 Macedonia 258, 373, 375, 384, 388 Macedonian dynasty 180, 183–5, 187–8, 191–2, 195, 253, 303–22, 395 Macedonius, hermit 53, 59 Macrides, Ruth xix–xx Macrina, sister of Gregory of Nyssa 50, 56, 60, 64, 81–4, 86, 91–105, 274, 398 father of 97 fiancé of 82, 83, 97 Life of 50, 81–4, 91–105 Macrina the Elder, grandmother of Gregory of Nyssa 101 Magdalino, Paul xx Makarios, abbot of the Bithynian monastery of Pelekete 348–9 Mamluks 133, 143, 328 Mango, Cyril 259 Mantegna, Andrea 193–4 Manuel II Palaiologos 211 three sons of 211 Manuel, magistros, uncle of empress Theodora 241–2 Manuel Komnenos, father of Isaac I Komnenos 363 Manuel Komnenos, son of Anna Dalassene 363, 364 Manuel Philes 279

Index manus 12, 115 Manzikert, battle of 209 Marcian, emperor 185–6 Marcus, son of Cicero and Terentia 6 Margaret, Princess 320–22 Maria, daughter of Georgios Karouchis 384 Maria, daughter of Kalothetos 375 Maria, sister of empress Theodora, wife of Arsaber 241 Maria/Martha of Alania, empress, wife of Michael VII and Nikephoros III 188, 192, 211, 362 Maria of Amnia, first wife of Constantine VI, family of 240–41 Maria of Bulgaria, daughter-in-law of John Doukas 364 Maria Komnene 362 Maria Lekapena, wife of Peter the Bulgarian 306 Maria Skleraina, mistress of Constantine IX 313 Marinos, father of empress Theodora 241 Mark Antony 362–3 marriage xix, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 11–13, 13–14, 14–15, 27, 30, 55, 60, 61, 62, 64, 76, 82, 83, 84, 97, 111, 113–15, 116–17, 121, 122, 123, 135–7, 138, 143, 145, 153, 155, 165–6, 185, 193, 194, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 221, 240–42, 273, 274–5, 277, 278, 294, 295, 296, 306–8, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 315, 317, 318, 319, 321–2, 327–8, 331, 333–4, 335–6, 337–8, 355, 360, 362, 362–3, 364, 365, 366–7, 376, 382, 385, 388, 389, 395, 397 Marseilles 252 Marsham, Andrew 136 Martha, sister of Gregory the Cleric 288 Mary, Queen 322 Mary/Marinos, St 274 Mary of Egypt 158, 159, 161, 169 Mary the Younger 162 materfamilias 8, 60, 145 Mathews, Thomas F. and Annie-Christine Daskalakis 255 Matrona, St 278

411

Maximus Confessor 252 McCarthy, Conor 117 McNamara, Jo Ann 115-116 Medina 313 Melania the Younger 76–8, 85 men/males/masculinity 3, 12, 13, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 47, 64, 79, 103, 116, 123, 144, 153, 153, 155, 159, 160–61, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 184, 191, 195–6, 197, 220, 224–6, 239, 273, 279, 307–8, 314, 318, 319, 333, 341, 359–67, 373, 385–6, 388–9, 398, 399 Merovingians 113, 116, 119 Methodios, archbishop of Thessalonike 291 Michael II 291 Michael III 187, 188, 191, 213–14, 226, 241, 305, 312, 395 Michael IV 304, 309, 309–10, 310, 311 Michael V 304, 308, 309, 310, 311, 318, 319 Michael VII Doukas 188, 192, 194–5, 208–12, 362 Michael VIII Palaiologos 215 Michael, archangel 225 Michael the sakellarios, grandson of Romanos I Lekapenos 312 Michael the Synkellos 162, 165, 166, 168, 170 Michael Attaleiates 248, 260 Michael Psellos 308, 312–13, 316, 317, 318, 318–19, 322 Michael Taronites 362 Monica, mother of Augustine 34, 38, 56, 57, 60, 65, 66, 68 father of 57, 65 parent/s of 56, 66 nurse of 65 Moses 99 mother/s xxi, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 27, 38, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59–61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 66–7, 68, 69, 76–86, 98, 98–9, 100, 101, 104, 135, 136, 138, 145, 154, 156, 159, 161–4, 166, 185, 186, 187, 191, 196, 209, 211, 216, 220, 221, 239, 274–81, 288, 294, 295, 297,

412

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

306, 313, 322, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333–6, 338–9, 340, 341, 359, 364, 366, 398 Mottahdeh, Roy 144, 146 Mount Athos 251, 258, 260, 372 archives of 372–90 Mount Selention 346, 347 Mount Sinai 99 Muhammad 131, 327–8 Mun’is, Abbasid general 337, 339, 340 munt/mundium 111, 113, 115 Murray, Alexander 110, 112–13, 116 Muslims, see Islam Mustique 320 Nabeul, Nymfarum Domus at 256 names, family 233–42, 294, 295, 307, 314, 366–7, 389 Naucratius, brother of Gregory of Nyssa 64, 82, 83, 86, 91, 97–8, 103, 104 Naukratios, abbot of monastery of Stoudios, disciple of Theodore the Studite 349, 350 Nelson, Janet 110, 115, 116 Neocaesarea 83 Neokastros, theme of 254 nephew/s 5, 6, 135, 241, 242, 308–9, 310, 316, 335, 336, 395, 398 great-nephew/s 308, 322 Neville, Leonora 248–9, 250–51, 254–5, 259 Nicaea 318, 360 Council of (325) 94 second council of 295 Nicholas, abbot of monastery of Stoudios 350 Nicholas of Sion 158–9, 162 Nicholas Boidettos, peasant, family of 385 Nicomedia 61 niece/s 215, 221, 307, 308, 317, 336, 396 Nikephoros I 255 Nikephoros II Phokas 304, 308, 309, 310, 311, 317, 322 Nikephoros III Botaneiates 188, 192, 363 Nikephoros, iconophile 168 Nikephoros the Presbyter, donor in Karanlık Kilise in Göreme 224 Nikephoros Bryennios 359–67

Material for History 359–67 Nikephoros Bryennios the Elder, grandfather of historian Nikephoros Bryennios 360, 361, 363, 365 Nikephoros Melissenos 362 father of 362 Niketas, father of Athanasia of Aegina 159 Niketas of Medikion 154, 157, 160, 162, 163, 170, 347–8 Niketas Stethatos, Life of Symeon the New Theologian 350–52 Nishapur 143 Nonna, mother of Gregory of Nazianzus 59, 60, 61, 84, 85, 101 Normans 360 noviciate 345–56 nurse/s 1, 65, 67 wet-nurse 65, 336 oblation 119–21 Octavia 363, 367 Ohrid 262 oikos xx, 7–8, 12, 249–50, 397–8 Oltiseris 100 Olympias 78 Origen 91, 101 Orleans, Council of (in 511) 121 orphan/s 77, 78, 80, 356 Otreius, bishop of Melitene 80–81 Otto III 306 Ousterhout, Robert 257 Paisius 79–80 mother of 79–80 Paisius and Esaias, sons of Spanodromus 78 Palaiologan dynasty 211, 215 Palladius of Helenopolis 77–8, 78 Pantokrator monastery, Athos 387 Papaconstantinou, Arietta 158 Paphlagonia 240, 241 Paphnutios, father of Euphrosyne/ Smaragdos 274 Papiria 363 parents 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 27, 28, 36, 47, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59–63, 65, 67, 68, 78, 79, 80, 82, 93, 118–21, 154,

Index 155, 161–7, 170, 179, 180, 182, 190, 191, 211, 214, 215, 220, 226, 240, 273–81, 289–91, 294, 294–5, 296, 305–6, 307, 308, 341, 346, 347, 355, 356, 373, 382, 384 paroikoi 250, 373–90 Paroikou, village of 385 paterfamilias 9, 21–2, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29–30, 32, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 62, 75–86 Patlagean, Evelyne xix, xx, 155, 158, 196–7, 285 Patmos, monastic archives of 372 Paul, St 32, 352 Paul of Latros 353 Paulinus of Pella 48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56–7, 57–8, 62, 65 father of 56, 57, 62 parents of 53, 62 Thanksgiving 49 Paullus family 363, 365–6 Pelekete, Bithynian monastery of 348, 350 Pella, in Jordan 267–8 Penelope, wife of Odysseus 279 Pergamum 247, 254, 255, 256, 257 Pericles, citizenship law 11 Peter, abbot of monastery of Stoudios 351 Peter of Atroa, monasteries of 350 Peter the Bulgarian 306 Peter the Galatian 52–3, 59, 67 Peter the Orphan (of Sebaste), brother of Gregory of Nyssa 64, 83, 91–105 Petrion, nunnery of St Euphemia at 306, 313, 318 Petronas, brother of empress Theodora 241 Phanourios, St, church at Valsameonero in Crete 217 Philaretos 240, 294 grandfather of Maria of Amnia 240 Philip II of Macedon 5 Phokas family 242 Photios, patriarch 241, 242 Phouske, village of 385, 387 Physiologus, late antique bestiary 279 Pinian, husband of Melania the Younger 76–7 Pisperagos, Lemnos 387 plague 371, 388, 389, 390

413

Plato 103, 158 Pliny the Younger 2 Plutarch 2, 3, 5, 7, 361, 362, 364, 366, 367 Advice to the Bride and Groom (Coniugalia Praecepta) 3 Pseudo-Plutarch 36 Polybius 361, 362, 366, 367 Pompey 362 Pomponia, sister of Atticus 6 Pontus 83, 91, 100, 104 pope 275, 277 portraits, family 177–97, 207–27 potestas 6, 7, 22 patria potestas 7, 12, 22, 24, 27, 28 Powers, David S. 137 praktikon 250 Pratsch, Thomas 240 Prodromos, see John the Baptist prosopography 142, 233–42 protopresbyteros 295 Prousianos the Bulgar 318 Pseudo-Athanasius 170 Life of Syncletica of Palestine 165 Publilia, wife of Cicero 7 Publius Cornelius Scipio 365 Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, Africanus the Younger 363 puer senex 157–8 Pulcheria, empress 185–6 punishment, corporal 21–40, 353 queens, Merovingian 116 Quintus, brother of Cicero 6 Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus 363 Qur’an 137, 138, 327, 336, 337 Rachel, wife of Jacob 219 Radolibos, village of 385 rape 114 Razi, Zvi 389 Reuben, half-brother of Joseph 219 Reynolds, Phillip 116–17 Rhabdouchos family 313 Rhaidestos 260 Rheidt, Klaus 254 Riché, Pierre 115 Robert Guiscard 211 Robertson, Duncan 278

414

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Rodley, Lyn 222 Romanos I Lekapenos 188, 304, 305, 308, 309, 311, 312, 314, 317 Romanos II 188, 304, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 316 Romanos III Argyros 192, 304, 307, 311, 312, 318, 322 Romanos IV Diogenes 208, 209, 226, 362, 363 Romanos Lekapenos, grandson of Romanos I Lekapenos 309 Rome 3, 4, 11, 12, 14, 78, 117, 274, 275 Rosenwein, Barbara 122 Roubâ 160 rules, monastic xx, 352–4 Runciman, Steven 315, 317 Rusafa 337 Sabas 78–9, 159, 160, 162, 164, 167, 170 parents of 78–9, 164 uncles of 78 Sabas, monk, author of Life of Makarios 348 Sacra Parallela 219, 221 Saddam Hussein, statue of 192 Safi al-Hurami, Abbasid eunuch 336–7 St Denis, abbot of monastery of 211 St Euphemia of Petrion, nunnery 306, 313, 318 St Luke, monastery of in Thessalonike 289, 290, 291, 293 St Mamas, monastery of 351–2 St Stephen, monastery of in Thessalonike 286, 288, 290, 291, 292, 293, 296, 299 Saljuqs/Seljuks 135, 135–6, 263, 360; see also Turks Saller, Richard 8, 30 Sallust, Roman historian 14 Salome 221, 227 Samuel, prophet 80, 119 mother of 80 San Giovanni di Ruoti, villa of 267 Sasanians 131, 255, 266 Savvides, Alexandros 234 Sayf al-Dawla, Hamdanid ruler 333 Scandinavia, medieval 114 Scipio family 363, 365

Scipio Africanus 365 seals, lead 235, 237, 240 Selime-Yaprakhisar 256 Serena, wife of Stilicho 77 mother-in-law of Honorius 77 Sergios, uncle of Photios 241, 242 servant/s 56, 56–7, 57, 65–6, 67, 68, 100, 104, 154, 218, 220, 238, 249, 257, 275, 276, 280, 292, 294, 330, 337, 398; see also slaves/slavery Shagab, mother of al-Muqtadir 331 Shaw, Brent 8, 30 Shorter, Edward 118 siblings xxi, 1, 9, 10, 12, 13, 49, 60, 64–5, 81–4, 86, 91–105, 162, 213, 220, 226 227, 241, 254, 273, 294, 303–4, 310–11, 313, 314–22, 335–6, 340, 341, 398, 399 half- 208 Sicily 252 Sidonius Apollinaris 252 Sindbad, stories of 338 Sinope Gospels 221, 227 sippe 110–13, 116 sister/s 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 60, 64–5, 76, 78, 81–4, 86, 91–105, 121, 164, 166, 187, 195, 211, 214, 216, 220, 241, 281, 288, 289, 294, 296, 304, 308, 309, 313, 318–19, 320–22, 330, 335, 362, 363, 373, 389 half- 226 Sivan, Hagith 399 Skinner, Patricia 163 Skleroi 242 slaves/slavery 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 21–40, 51, 57, 65–6, 104, 136, 138, 140, 141, 144, 145, 238, 250, 254, 309, 330, 331, 332, 335, 340, 395, 398; see also servants Smith, Bert 192 Smythe, Dion 303 Snowdon, Lord 322 social mobility xxi, 233–42, 356 socialisation 13, 22, 47–69, 345–56 Socrates, philosopher 103 son/s xxi, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 36, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 68, 75–86, 119, 145, 154, 161–4, 179, 180, 184–5, 186–90,

Index 196, 208–9, 211, 215, 216–18, 219, 220, 224, 226, 241, 273–81, 297, 305–6, 307, 308, 309, 310–311, 312, 314, 316, 322, 329, 331, 332, 333–6, 337–40, 347, 362, 363, 364–6, 373, 375, 376, 384, 389, 399 eldest 162, 307, 331, 332, 338, 364 first-born 314 younger 311 youngest 276, 331, 338, 363 monks as 345, 355 Sophia, empress 186 Sophia, mother of Sabas 78–9, 164 Sophia, sister of empress Theodora, wife of Constantine Babutzikos 241 Spanodromus, merchant 78 Stafford, Pauline 116 stepfamilies 208, 310 stepchildren xxi, 10, 207, 226, 341, 398 step-daughter/s 121, 221 stepmother/s 185, 216–18, 226, 340, 341 stepfather/s 221, 227, 310 step-parents xxi, 10, 13, 207, 208, 398 stepsiblings 13, 208 stepsons 208 Stephen, monk 346–7, 348 Stephen, son of Basil I 310–11 Stephen and Constantine, sons of Romanos I Lekapenos 305–6 Stilicho 77 Story of Joseph the Carpenter 216 storytelling 66–7, 69, 144–5, 281 Stoudios, monastery of 349–51 rule of 352, 353–4, 356 Stylianos Zaoutzes 309 Symeon the Bulgar 307 Symeon the Elder, ascetic 67 Symeon the Fool 154, 155, 161, 164, 170 mother of 161–2 Symeon the New Theologian 350–52 Symeon the Pious, Studite monk 350–51 Synaxarion of Constantinople 162, 346 Syncletica, St 78, 160 Syria 131, 143, 221, 258, 267, 268, 275, 340

415

Tacitus 111, 114 Talbot, Alice-Mary 153, 157, 168, 273, 285 teachers, see education/educators tent/s 251, 263, 268 Terentia, wife of Cicero 5–6, 6–7, 7, 8, 14 Thagaste 56, 58 Thecla, St 82 Thekla, sister of Michael III 187, 213–14 Themistocles 3 Theodora, empress, daughter of Constantine VIII 304, 306, 307, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 318–19, 320, 321, 322 Theodora, empress, mother of Michael III 187, 213–15, 240, 241–2 family of 241–2 Theodora, empress, wife of John I Tzimiskes 309, 310, 313 Theodora, niece of Michael VIII Palaiologos 215 Theodora, stepmother of Constantine I 185 Theodora, wife of Romanos I Lekapenos 314 Theodora of Thessalonike 154, 155, 159, 162, 168, 274, 285–99 daughter of (see also Theopiste) 168, 274 relics of 285–99 Theodora Komnene 362, 363 Theodore the Studite xx, 240, 291, 298, 347–8 family of 240 Theodore of Sykeon 159, 162, 164–5, 170 Theodoret of Cyrrhus 48–9, 52–3, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 66–7, 67, 69, 95 father of 59 mother of 53, 56, 59, 66–7 parents of 67 nurse of 67 Religious History 48 Theodosian dynasty 185–6, 195, 399 Theodosios Babutzikos 241 Theodosius II 27, 78, 185 Theodosius the Cenobiarch 158 Theodotos, priest in Thessalonike 286–7, 288 Theodoule, founder of monastery of the Virgin of Certain Hope 195

416

Approaches to the Byzantine Family

Theognius 160 Theoktiste, mother of empress Theodora 214–15, 226 Theoktiste of Lesbos 160, 162, 168 Theophano/Anastaso, empress, mother of Basil II and Constantine VIII 306, 307, 308, 310, 314, 322 Theophano, wife of Leo VI 307, 308, 314 Theopiste, daughter of Theodora of Thessalonike 286, 287, 288, 289–90, 291, 293, 297, 298, 299 Theopiste, daughter of Theodotos 288 Theophilos, emperor 187, 213–15, 240, 241, 291, 292, 298 Theophilos of Tiberiopolis 346–7, 348 Theophylact Lekapenos 309, 311 Theosterikos, Life of Niketas of Medikion 156, 157 Theotokos 196; see also Virgin Mary Thessalonike 189–90, 285–99 Thomais of Lesbos 155 Thrace 349, 365, 373 Tiberiopolis 346 Tiro, freedman and secretary of Cicero 7 Trebizond 356 Tsoukalaria, village of 375 Tullia, daughter of Cicero and Terentia 6, 7, 14 turban 224 Turks 251, 262–6, 268–9, 360, 365, 366; see also Saljuks/Seljuks housing of 262–6 twin/s 218–19, 226, 273, 316 Umara, Yemeni merchant and poet 140 Umayyads 132, 267–8 umm walad (‘mother of a child’) 138 uncle/s 1, 9, 61, 78, 93, 121, 208, 221, 227, 240, 241, 241–2, 306, 308–9, 312, 322, 329, 359, 395, 398 maternal 63–4, 68, 335, 398 paternal 64 great- 309, 317 Utica 267 Valens, emperor, and son 179 Valentinian III 185–6

Valerius Publicola, father of Melania the Younger 76–7, 85 Vatopedi monastery 260, 376, 387–8 acts of 376 Veturia, wife of a centurion, tombstone of 4 Vidal, Gore 321, 322 Vienna Genesis 218–19, 221 village/s 123, 249, 250–51, 258–9, 268, 375–90 violence 21–40, 52, 54, 61, 68 Virgin Mary xxii, 59, 60, 178, 180, 182, 188, 189, 196, 197, 207, 216–18, 226, 275, 397; see also Theotokos church of Virgin in Edessa 275 church of Virgin at Matejče 217 monastery of Virgin of Certain Hope 195, 215 Visigoths 252 Vladimir of Kiev 306 Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 249 Wemple, Suzanne 114, 115–16 West, Shearer 177–8, 185, 189, 192, 193–4, 195, 196 Wickham, Chris 251, 252, 258 widow/s 14, 59–60, 78, 79, 121, 279–80, 330, 334 wife/wives 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21–40, 61, 76–7, 78, 82, 113, 121, 136, 138, 163, 166, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 211, 214–15, 219, 220, 221, 224, 237, 240, 241, 275, 277, 278–80, 281, 296, 306, 307–8, 309, 310, 313, 314, 320, 330, 331, 333, 355, 359, 362, 373, 375, 384, 385–6, 388, 395 William, Prince 320 Windsor, House of 320–22 women/females/femininity xxi, xxii, 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 33, 34, 38, 40, 62–3, 64, 79, 84, 101, 102, 111, 114, 115–17, 122, 123, 135, 136, 138, 140, 144, 153, 155, 158, 159, 160–61, 162, 164, 165–6, 167, 168, 169, 184, 187, 188, 191, 195–6, 214–15, 220, 222, 224–6, 237, 238, 239, 240–42, 257, 273, 274, 306–7, 311, 312–13, 314, 315, 318–319,

Index 320, 328, 330–41, 359–67, 373, 385, 388, 398, 399 Wray, Shona 389 Xenophon, On Household Management (Oeconomicus) 3, 13 Zalum, concubine of al-Muqtadir 331–2 Zeno, hermit 53 Zoe, empress, daughter of Constantine VIII 189, 192, 193, 304, 306, 307, 308,

417

309–10, 311, 312, 312–13, 314, 318–19, 320, 321, 322 Zoe, second wife of Leo VI 309 Zoe Karbonopsina, empress, mother of Constantine VII 188, 306, 309 Zoe, Agatha, Theophano, Anna and Theodora, sisters-in-law of empress Theophano 310, 313 Zosimas 160, 169