The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity 1107032660, 9781107032668

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THE CITY IN THE CLASSICAL AND POST-CLASSICAL WORLD

This volume examines the evolving role of the city and citizenship from classical Athens through ifth-century Rome and medieval Byzantium. Beginning in the irst century CE, the universal claims of Hellenistic and Roman imperialism began to be challenged by the growing role of Christianity in shaping the primary allegiances and identities of citizens. An international team of scholars considers the extent of urban transformation and, with it, of cultural and civic identity, as practices and institutions associated with the city-state came to be replaced by those of the Christian community. The twelve essays gathered here ask: What was the efect on political ideology and civic identity of the transition from the city culture of the ancient world to the ruralized systems of the Middle Ages? How did perceptions of empire and oikoumeneˉ respond to changed political circumstances? How did Christianity redeine the context of citizenship? Claudia Rapp is Professor at the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Vienna, and Director of the Division of Byzantine Research, Institute for Medieval Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She has published widely on hagiography and the cult of saints, episcopal authority and the city, monasticism, and writing culture in late antiquity and Byzantium. She is the author of Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (2005) and the forthcoming Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen and Christian Ritual. H. A. Drake is Research Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Constantine and the Bishops (2000). Drake has written extensively on issues related to the transition from a Roman to a Christian empire in late antiquity, including political theology and religious violence. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Annenberg Research Institute.

THE CITY IN THE CLASSICAL AND POST-CLASSICAL WORLD CHANGING CONTEXTS OF POWER AND IDENTITY Edited by

CLAUDIA RAPP University of Vienna

H. A. DRAKE University of California, Santa Barbara

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107032668 © Cambridge University Press 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data The city in the classical and post-classical world / [edited by] Claudia Rapp, H. A. Drake. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-03266-8 (hardback) 1. Cities and towns, Ancient – Mediterranean Region. 2. City and town life – Mediterranean Region – History – To 1500. 3. Citizenship – Mediterranean Region – History – To 1500. 4. Social change – Mediterranean Region – History – To 1500. 5. Imperialism – Social aspects – Mediterranean Region – History – To 1500. 6. Religion and politics – Mediterranean Region – History – To 1500. 7. Political culture – Mediterranean Region – History – To 1500. 8. Group identity – Mediterranean Region – History – To 1500. 9. Mediterranean Region – Social conditions. 10. Mediterranean Region – Politics and government. I. Rapp, Claudia. II. Drake, H. A. (Harold Allen), 1942– HT114.C526 2014 307.7609182′2–dc23 2013048925 ISBN

978-1-107-03266-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URL s for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Publication of this book was made possible in part by the Oice of Research of the University of California.

In memoriam Sabine G. MacCormack (1941–2012) Wanderer between Worlds Scholar, Inspiration, Friend

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations List of Contributors POLIS – IMPERIUM – OIKOUMEN Eˉ: A WORLD RECONFIGURED

page ix xi

1

Claudia Rapp and H. A. Drake 1

A “COVENANT” BETWEEN GODS AND MEN: HIERA KAI HOSIA AND THE GREEK POLIS

14

Josine Blok 2

HELLENISTIC IMPERIALISM AND THE IDEAL OF WORLD UNITY

38

Rolf Strootman 3

LAWYERS AND CITIZENS FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE: GAIUS ON THE TWELVE TABLES AND ANTONINE ROME

62

Jill Harries 4

LAWS’ EMPIRE: ROMAN UNIVERSALISM AND LEGAL PRACTICE

81

Caroline Humfress 5

A MOST UNUSUAL EMPIRE: ROME IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

109

Bryan Ward-Perkins 6

MOBILITY AND IDENTITY BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THE FOURTH CENTURIES: THE “COSMOPOLITIZATION” OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

130

Claudia Moatti 7

CITY AND CITIZENSHIP AS CHRISTIAN CONCEPTS OF COMMUNITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY

153

Claudia Rapp

vii

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CONT E N T S

8 CHURCH – FESTIVAL –TEMPLE: REIMAGINING CIVIC TOPOGRAPHY IN LATE ANTIQUITY

167

Susanna Elm 9 LEO THE GREAT: RESPONSES TO CRISIS AND THE SHAPING OF A CHRISTIAN COSMOPOLIS

183

Michele Renee Salzman 10 THE BATTLE OF THE MAPS IN A CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

202

Emily Albu 11 TOPOGRAPHIES OF POWER IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND BEYOND

217

H. A. Drake POSTSCRIPT: CITIES, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE WORK OF EMPIRE

240

Clifford Ando Index

257

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

5.1. Map of the Roman Empire 11.1. Plan of Hagia Sophia

page 114

231

PLATES

Plates follow page xvi. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X.

Victory stele of Naram-Sin of Agade from Susa Relief from the stairway to the Great Apadana at Persepolis Tetradrachm of Antiochos VIII from Ake-Ptolemais Ptolemaic shield mold showing the sun surrounded by stars Turin Beatus map Segment of Peutinger map Small section of the Peutinger map showing imperial Roma Reconstruction of mosaic from the Lateran triclinium, Rome Hagia Sophia “Beautiful Door” mosaic Hagia Sophia Imperial Door mosaic

ix

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Emily Albu, associate professor of classics at the University of California, Davis, has most recently completed The Medieval Peutinger Map (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Her research interests include classical receptions in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Cliford Ando is David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor and professor of classics at the University of Chicago as well as Research Fellow in the Department of Classics and World Languages, University of South Africa. A specialist in Roman law and religion, he is the author of Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley, 2000), for which he was awarded the APA’s Goodwin Award in 2003, and, most recently, Imperial Rome, AD 193–284: The Critical Century (Edinburgh, 2012). Josine Blok holds the chair of ancient history and classical civilization at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her ield of interest is the political, social, and cultural history of archaic and classical Greece. She edited, with André Lardinois, Solon of Athens: New Historical and Philological Approaches (Leiden, 2006) and, with Marc van der Poel, Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion in the Ancient World (Leiden, 2011). Her book Citizenship, Cult and Community in Classical Athens will be published by Cambridge. H. A. Drake is research professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specializes in social and political issues related to the Christianization of the Roman Empire in late antiquity. He is the author of Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Hopkins, 2000) and The Orations of Constantine and Eusebius, Eusebius’Werke 1:2 (GCS, forthcoming). Susanna Elm is professor of history and classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Focusing on the history of the later Roman Empire, she is the author, most recently, of Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley, 2012).

xi

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LI ST O F CO N T R I B U T O R S

Jill Harries is professor of ancient history at the University of St. Andrews. She specializes in the history of late antiquity and Roman legal culture; her publications include Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1999) and, most recently, Imperial Rome, AD 284–363: The New Empire (Edinburgh, 2012). Caroline Humfress is reader in history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2007) and, most recently, coeditor of and contributor to the volume Law and Empire: Ideas, Practices, Actors (Leiden, 2013). She is currently preparing her 2013 Carlyle Lectures (University of Oxford) for publication as Laws’ Empire: Rethinking Law and Life under Rome. Claudia Moatti is professor of classics and law at the University of Southern California and of history at Paris 8. A specialist of Roman intellectual and political history, she is the author of Reason in Rome:The Birth of Critical Spirit in the Late Republic (Paris, 1997, translation to be published by Cambridge, 2014), and she has edited several volumes on mobility in the Mediterranean, including La mobilité des personnes en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne. Procédures de contrôle et documents d’identiication (Rome, 2004). Claudia Rapp is professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek studies at the University of Vienna and Director of the Division of Byzantine Studies, Institute for Medieval Studies, Austrian Academy of Science. She is the author of Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2005) and of numerous articles on late antique and Byzantine social and cultural history. Michele Renee Salzman is professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, and held a University of California Presidential Chair from 2009 to 2012. Her research focuses on Roman social and religious history. She is the author of The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Harvard, 2002) and general editor of The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 2013). Rolf Strootman is associate professor of ancient history at the University of Utrecht. His current research focuses on imperial networks and cultural encounters in the Seleucid Middle East. His latest book is Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires: The Near East after the Achaemenids, c. 330 to 30 BCE (Edinburgh, 2013). Bryan Ward-Perkins is director of the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme at Oxford University and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is a

LI ST OF CO N T R I B U T O R S

specialist on the transition from late Roman to post-Roman times and the author of The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005). Most recently he was centrally involved in producing the Last Statues of Antiquity database (http://laststatues.classics.ox.ac.uk/), a searchable record of all the evidence for newly dedicated statuary from 284 CE to the seventh century.

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THE CITY IN THE CLASSICAL AND POST-CLASSICAL WORLD

POLIS – IMPERIUM – OIKOUMEN Eˉ: A WORLD RECONFIGURED Claudia Rapp and H. A. Drake

Classical civilization began for the Greeks with the creation of the polis, a unique institution that so completely deined Greek identity that when Aristotle in the fourth century BCE wrote the Politics, he began with the observation, “Man is an animal whose natural habitat is the polis.”1 “Politics” is one of the many words in our language that derive from this institution, relecting a way of life that was so thoroughly focused on public participation that someone who concentrated exclusively on business or family concerns was known, literally, as an “idiot” (idioteˉs). But our word “politics” shows how treacherously misleading the practice of borrowing words from another culture can be. For in our usage, “politics” is strictly a secular activity, one to be contrasted with “religion” or “piety”; this was never the case for the ancient polis, which, as Fustel de Coulanges observed a century and a half ago, had its origin in the religious rituals of the Greek family.2 The ancient version of our notion of a “social contract” was the “covenant,” a pact between humans and divinity. This notion we associate with Judeo-Christian thought, but it is one that is equally at home in ancient Greek thinking about the state. The ancient polis on the Greek model was more than just a large settlement of people. It was an economic hub, a concentration of religious sites, a stage for 1

2

ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον, Pol. 1253a. The sentence is usually translated as “Man is a political animal.” Fustel de Coulanges (2010).

1

2

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culture and entertainments, the focal point of the convergence of people and goods from its hinterland, and an administrative center, often governed by the self-rule of its citizens, led by their elected magistrates.3 It was characterized by great political autonomy: it conducted its own foreign relations, created its own laws, minted its own coins, and employed its own dating system. It was thus also the context in which people’s legal status was deined and where they discharged their civic duties. “Political” thought that tied civic identity to the model of the polis dominated the Mediterranean for a thousand years, enduring through the creation of territorial states by Alexander the Great and his successors, the foundation of the Roman Republic, and its eventual transformation into the geographic expanse of the Roman Empire. At the end of antiquity, a great shift in political thought occurred when membership in a world state, an oikoumeneˉ, replaced the polis as the conceptual framework in which the ancient Mediterranean peoples thought about their relationship to each other. This reorientation was no simple swap of one term for another; it involved a sea change in everything from personal identity to the relative value assigned to families, cities, and regions. The aim of this book is to explore and untangle the complicated ways in which this change took place. For this purpose, it is best to leave the term polis untranslated. This caveat is more than an academic quibble. In many ways “city” is an analogue to polis in our language, but since modern cities are not sovereign, the term “city-state” is perhaps a more appropriate analogue. But this term, too, can be misleading as it conjures up medieval and early modern city-states, such as Genoa or Florence in Italy. These were indeed sovereign, but they were also completely secular, and the phrase thus encourages us to project this same orientation onto the “city-states” of antiquity. The medieval oikoumeneˉ that replaced the polis, by contrast, was not just a universal state but also one that speciied religion as the basis for membership. It was a Christian oikoumeneˉ that subordinated all previous forms of civic identity to the overarching criterion of membership in a single, Christian polity. This expansion of the framework of reference is beautifully encapsulated by Eusebius of Caesarea in his fourth-century Life of Constantine.4 Immediately preceding his description of Constantine’s famous and fateful vision in the sky, Eusebius describes the gradual opening of his hero’s geographic horizons in the context of his conquests: after Constantine was made by God the “universal ruler and governor,” he irst dealt with the part of the empire he had inherited from his father, and after bringing order and peace to those regions, “he turned his attention to the other parts of the inhabited world [teˉs oikoumeneˉs] 3

4

Freeman (1950) is a standard work. More recently, see Thomas and Conant (1999); Hansen (2006). De Vita Constantini (VC), ed. Winkelmann (1975).

POLI S – I M P ER I UM – O I K O UM ENEˉ

… so that he might bring healing where help was needed.”5 After simply expanding his radius of activities in his father’s footsteps, Constantine then made a conceptual leap, which allowed him, in the words of his admiring biographer, to grow into his true stature: “When he then perceived that the whole earthly element was like a great body” and that the head of that body, Rome, was oppressed by a tyrant, he felt compelled to take action.6 Constantine’s victory against the pagan Maxentius is here cast not merely as an epic triumph of Christianity but also as an event on a global scale. As Eusebius tells the story, by transforming himself into the First Christian Emperor, Constantine also transformed his world from a Roman to a Christian identity. For most of the modern era, scholars have assigned a negative value to this transformation, seeing it as one of a series of blows that ended classical civilization. The rise of Christianity has been paired with the fall of Rome (whether deined as city, empire, or imperial authority in the West), the establishment of Germanic kingdoms in western Europe, and the advent of Islam, resulting in a grand narrative of an idealized humane and rational ancient world brought to a close by the rise – in Edward Gibbon’s deinitive formulation in the closing decades of the eighteenth century – of “barbarism and religion.”7 The developments on which Gibbon’s conclusion was based are easily traced in our written sources, whose prejudices we must be wary of repeating. Gibbon’s premise of a rational world populated with proto-philosophes on the model of his Enlightenment contemporaries that was displaced by this cruel descent into barbarism and religion has been challenged by a substantial amount of research in the past ifty years, during which late antique studies has grown into full maturity. One of the primary developments of this ield has been to deine late antiquity as a transitional period that must be understood on its own terms – a period of change that was neither a “decline” from a previous standard of excellence nor a harbinger of even worse times in the “dark” Middle Ages.8 This emphasis on continuities has had its critics, who claim that it comes at the cost of minimizing the severe disruptions that occurred during these centuries.9 But one result that has gone unchallenged is renewed interest in the religious underpinnings of classical civilization and, with it, the recognition that if we carelessly transfer our modern and limited deinition of “political” life to the ancient state, we run the risk of completely misunderstanding 5 6 7 8

9

Eus., VC I.24–5, trans. Cameron and Hall (1999): 79. VC 1.26, trans. Cameron and Hall (1999): 79. Gibbon (1909–14), 7:320. Brown (1971) remains an important point of entry for understanding this period. Of a host of more recent works, see Callu (2006); James (2008); Clark (2011); and the essays in Swain and Edwards (2004). Most vociferously in Liebeschuetz (2001a, 2001b). See also the essays in Drinkwater and Salway (2007).

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the causes and signiicance of the changes that occurred during late antiquity. The most important marker of that evolution for the western empire was Augustine’s City of God, the product of a rethinking of the Christian’s role in the empire that was prompted by the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410 CE. Although Cliford Ando’s Postscript to this volume calls attention to the evolution of Augustine’s thinking about the Roman civitas, we have deliberately avoided further exploration of the precipitous military and political decline that occurred in the western empire during the ifth century – not because it is unimportant but because it has been so thoroughly explored in a number of recent works.10 Instead, this volume suggests that one of the touchstones for the tectonic shifts that mark the transition from the ancient to the medieval world during late antiquity is the fate of the ancient polis, its transformation, decline, and disappearance, and the impact of these developments on the political thought of the time that is increasingly shaped by a Christian discourse. Constantine’s reign can again serve as a telling example for the link between polis status and Christianity: in Phrygia, he granted the political autonomy of polis status to Orcistus, on the grounds that the majority of its population was Christian, while nearby Nacoleia, to which it had been subject, was largely pagan. And in Palestine, he separated the harbor settlement of Maiouma from the city territory of Gaza, because the former had a largely Christian population, while the latter was dominated by its large pagan temples.11 While the irst Christian emperor took the entire world into his purview, he also pursued a decisive strategy to privilege Christians within the context of the polis. In recent decades, our understanding of the polis in late antiquity has been greatly advanced by numerous individual studies and conference volumes. Archaeology has done much to provide a better understanding of the fate of individual cities: the crumbling of protective walls; the encroachment of private dwellings onto public streets and places; the neglect and destruction of pagan temples; the lack of repair of large public baths, theaters, and porticoes; and the erection of churches as focal points of the community. Laws and inscriptions corroborate complaints by contemporary authors about the social shifts that were leading to the crystallization of an upper crust of very wealthy citizens and a reduction in the rights and status of the middle class. Regional topographies have shown the overall decline within speciic regions in the number of settlements with the size and administrative structure to deserve the designation as “city,” thus leading to a more ruralized system of habitation.12 10 11

12

See, e.g., Ward-Perkins (2005); Halsall (2007); Heather (2012); Brown (2012). Eusebius describes the policy at VC 4.37–9. On Orcistus, see Van Dam (2007): 150–62, and further discussion by Ando in his Postscript to this volume. From a large bibliography, see esp. Ward-Perkins (1984); Wickham (1984); Kennedy (1985); Barnish (1988, 1989); Mathisen (1993); Webster and Brown (1997); Camille (2000);

POLI S – I M P ER I UM – O I K O UM ENEˉ

The written sources complement this picture. Numerous studies investigate the changing power structures within the polis: the decline of the curiales, the increasing inluence of a small group of leading citizens, and the rise of the bishop to greater public prominence. Christianity is added as one of the transformative forces, not only in matters of social power but also in ownership of space. Its impact on the urban fabric becomes noticeable with the great wave of church building in the late fourth and ifth centuries. This volume introduces a new approach intended to provide a means to integrate the historical markers of this transition, whose treatment has often been disjointed, and to address the uniqueness of late antiquity: the expansion of the framework of political thought and social interaction from the ancient city to the Roman Empire, and the further transformation of these phenomena as a result of the inluence of Christianity, which led eventually to an amalgamation of the idea of Christendom with that of empire. By this means, we seek to weave together disparate strands of inquiry that have dominated ancient, late antique, and medieval scholarship in recent years: the fashioning and representation of the self within speciic social and political contexts, the mechanisms that led to the establishment and maintenance of empires, and the ancient polis and its decline. Our concern is to understand how changes in political framework afect the enactment and articulation of citizenship and public identity. In order to maintain this focus, we have had to neglect some equally important aspects of this transition. The size of this volume could easily be doubled by incorporating more sophisticated understanding of such basic terms as identity, ethnicity, and nationhood produced in recent scholarship. These approaches have been particularly useful for understanding the all-important changes in Judeo-Christian relations. In order to stay focused on the issues involved in the change of a polis-oriented culture into an ecumenical one, here we can refer the reader to only a few of these studies.13 The chapters in our study unfold chronologically along three distinct but overlapping lines of inquiry. The irst of these involves a dialectic between the localized identity of the polis and a universalizing trend that culminated in the Christian oikoumeneˉ. The second is the religious process of change from the Greco-Roman pantheon and the Roman imperial cult to a Christian worldview that was directed toward divine realities that exist above this world and beyond its duration in time. This transformation has signiicant consequences not only for the conceptualization of the role of the emperor but also for the articulation of ideas about citizenship and civic identity. The third

13

Liebeschuetz (2001c); Lewit (2003); Bowes and Gutteridge (2005); Richter (2011); Brown (2012); Shawcross (2013). Judaism: Buell (2002); Boyarin (2004); Johnson (2006); ethnicity: Geary (1983); Pohl and Reimitz (1998); Mitchell and Greatrex (2000); Gillett (2002); Curta (2006).

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line of inquiry considers changes in conceptions of space, its real or imagined ownership, and its appropriation for the display of power. POLIS

to

IMPERIUM

Our irst line of inquiry traces the progressive evolution of the ancient political framework from the independent polis of Athens, governed by democratic self-rule, to the Hellenistic kingdoms ruled by monarchs, and on to imperial rule in the Roman Empire. The ancient and late antique polis was not just a physical entity but also a community of its citizens. In Chapter 1, Josine Blok analyzes the complex reciprocal relationship between citizens and the gods, on the one hand, and the cohesion and communal belonging among the men and women of a polis, on the other. Through careful examination of a number of well-known ancient Greek texts, from archaic poetry and Homer to the tragedians and Demosthenes, she shows how the Greek word hosios, that we translate loosely as “pious,” governed the complex set of interrelationships by which classical Greeks conceptualized their civic identity. It was religious coordinates that determined the positioning of the free individual, whether male or female, within the community. The sense of shared civic identity was an important component of the ancient self whose public side had the polis as its framework and point of reference. But as early as 776 BCE, when the Olympic games began, Greeks were conscious of an identity larger than that of the polis that they shared with others.The pull of this “supra-polis” identity is evident in the refusal of the fourthcentury BCE philosopher Diogenes to identify himself in the traditional way by association with his polis. Instead of saying “Diogenes of Sinope,” the great Cynic gadly would only respond to questions about his city of origin by saying he was a “citizen of the world” (cosmopoliteˉs). The conquests of Alexander the Great and the creation of large territorial states by his successors at the end of that century forced Greek thinkers to try to accommodate the polis to the new reality of these entities that dwarfed the traditional boundaries by which they identiied themselves. Under the Hellenistic kings, the ancient poleis continued to act as inancial, legal, social, and religious centers, but as Rolf Strootman shows in Chapter 2, the monarchic system of rulership encouraged a universalist political ideology that was supraregional.Theories of kingship developed during this age eventually mediated Rome’s change from a government centered on a polis situated on the banks of the Tiber River to a state that controlled a vast Mediterranean empire. Innovative thinkers during this period deined the new universalism of their age in three ways that profoundly inluenced later developments: the ideal of an empire without end, a limitless empire; the use of cosmic, especially solar, imagery as a means of expressing that rule; and the concept of a golden

POLI S – I M P ER I UM – O I K O UM ENEˉ

age that would be the product of such rule. This Hellenistic ideology had lasting impact for a simple reason: as Strootman concludes, “it worked.” The original seedbed of the polis was the East, and this model of settlement-cum-political structure was further disseminated in the Greek world after Alexander the Great’s conquests. Several centuries later, when Rome expanded its empire, this also resulted in a greater degree of urbanization in the conquered territories. This historical preponderance of the polis as a Greek phenomenon is also relected in the balance between Greek- and Latinthemed contributions in this volume. The ainity between monarchy and universalist claims would be further enhanced by the spread of a monotheistic religion under the Roman Empire. Strong as these universalist ideas were, however, for centuries they had surprisingly little impact on Rome’s civic identity. In part, the jury-rigged way in which the empire had been put together was to blame: in a very real sense, the fall of the Roman Republic can be attributed to the Roman Senate’s attempt to rule a large, territorial state with institutions created for the polis. The way the irst emperor, Augustus, obscured his power behind a façade of republican institutions further complicated the problem: indeed, the imperial system could be described as a temporary solution to a crisis that never went away. In Chapter 3, Jill Harries shows how, as late as the second century CE, Roman jurists still struggled to accommodate republican notions of civitas to an empire that had spread its citizenship to the farthest reaches of the Mediterranean world. Part of the problem was the fact that the Roman imperial system was “still largely a mosaic of cities.” But another contributing factor was the respect for tradition in Roman jurisprudence. “There comes a point,” Harries observes, “when tradition inhibits the ability to adapt to, or even acknowledge, new realities.” The Severan dynasty (193–238) has long been singled out as a turning point in imperial administration. But what was once regarded negatively as a “leveling policy” that reduced the primacy that Italy in general and the Senate in particular had continued to enjoy is now seen in a more positive light as the introduction of a truly empirewide perspective. As Harries observes, Severan jurists like Ulpian were not as concerned as their predecessors with “defending or justifying the legal heritage of the City of Rome.” Instead, their concern was to rationalize the emperor’s de facto power. The best-known result of this process was Ulpian’s stipulation of a lex regia, whereby the Roman people had delegated to the emperor the legislative power they themselves had wielded in republican assemblies.14 As Caroline Humfress observes in Chapter 4, this concern for public law and order should be understood as a unifying and “universalizing” force. 14

Ulpian in Just., Digest 1.4. See Brunt (1977).

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Adopting a “legal anthropological” approach, Humfress studies the extent to which recourse and access to the law deine a person’s political identity. Her approach brings out the efect of Severan initiatives on political identity. The Antonine Constitution of 212 that made virtually everyone a Roman citizen did not oblige these new citizens to abandon either their local customs or their local identities. Instead, it gave them one more option when they sought legal remedies. Citizens now had multiple identities, and they showed great resourcefulness in opting on any given occasion to assert their imperial or local rights. Where Humfress challenges a nineteenth-century model of statehood based on the application and enforcement of one uniied law, in Chapter 5 Bryan Ward-Perkins shows that a deinition of empire that relies exclusively on geographic criteria is equally unsatisfactory. He also points out that the Roman Empire does not it the center-periphery model, which posits a powerful political and inancial center as the focal point for a wide swath of subject and tributary people along the periphery. His detailed analysis of the movements of Roman emperors in the course of the fourth century and of the patterns of extracting and allocating resources (largely through taxation) results in the unexpected vista of an empire “turned inside out,” where emperors, surrounded by their court, were constantly on the move between the trouble spots along the borders that were threatened by foreign invaders, with very few of them ever spending a signiicant amount of time in Rome. Like Humfress, Ward-Perkins assigns an important role to the Antonine Constitution, which he sees as a “deining moment” in a long process whereby peoples initially conquered by Rome came to identify themselves with the laws and institutions of their sometime overlord.This change makes him wonder whether Rome more its the modern deinition of a “nation” rather than an “empire.” In Chapter 6, Claudia Moatti also casts doubt on the usefulness of the “center-periphery” model for understanding the Roman Empire. Although she, like Humfress, is interested in the multiple identities accessible to the empire’s inhabitants, Moatti’s aim is to create a dynamic model to explain this new awareness of a common world of shared identities. To do this, she turns away from law and institutions and concentrates instead on the surprising degree of geographic mobility, even for those of only moderate wealth, that the empire facilitated. She inds that as early as the irst century BCE Romans were experimenting with diferent identities, such as residence and citizenship, created as a result of oice-holding, marriage, or the ownership of property. “Cosmopolitization” is the term Moatti coins for this process that, far from weakening the cities of the empire, actually wove them together through new networks that transcended local and even regional ties.

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IMPERIUM

to

OIKOUMEN Eˉ

Caracalla’s decision to make virtually all residents of the empire citizens through the Antonine Constitution may have been only symbolically important, but it had very real consequences for Christians, who now were subject to the obligation of citizens to honor the empire’s tutelary deities. As divine protection became increasingly important in the third century, empirewide requirements to propitiate these deities snared Christians for the irst time in persecutions that were no longer local phenomena.15 The last and most determined of these was initiated by the emperor Diocletian in 302. The Great Persecution, as Christians remembered it, lasted a decade and led to the elevation of Constantine I (306–337), during whose long reign Christianity for the irst time established a secure foothold in the corridors of power. Christians brought with them an “ecumenical” way of thinking that contrasted sharply with the increased claim to universalism in imperial ideology. But the direction was not entirely one way, and the pull of polis thinking also remained strong. The chapters in the second part of the volume all engage with the impact of Christianity by studying its efect on the location of the self in relation to community and space.The foundation of Constantinople as a new imperial capital in the East and the emperors’ increasingly sedentary lifestyle gave impetus to reliance on ceremonial and ritual occasions to maintain imperial ties to the soldiery. What was true for the military was true for other constituencies as well. These chapters show how, in the course of the third to the ifth century, imperial claims to rule over all of the Christian oikoumeneˉ were expressed not only through law but also through changing spatial consciousness and evolving models of civic leadership in the context of the late antique city. In Chapter 7, Claudia Rapp uncovers both the enduring impact of polis consciousness and the erosion of this concept by Christian universalizing tendencies through her study of the works of Christian preachers in the fourth and ifth centuries. She shows how these preachers attempted to impress Christian converts with the signiicance of joining the church through baptism by employing the notion of the polis as a closed community of people who follow the same way of life. In Chapter 8, Susanna Elm also inds the polis central to Gregory of Nazianzus’s strategy for defending actions he took during his time in Constantinople.What stands out from her nuanced reading is the way Gregory manipulated traditional views of civic topography to create a new one based on Christian values.The efect, she concludes, was to reorient, rather than to destroy, traditional

15

For changes in imperial religion in the third century, see Rives (1999).

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values: the Greek polis became the Greek Christian polis. Gregory, she writes, preserved “much of the old as a means to imagine the new.” The new topography of Constantinople that Elm emplots, with the help of Gregory of Nazianzus’s orations, Michele Renee Salzman also discovers for Rome by studying a sermon of Pope Leo the Great in Chapter 9. Dating Leo’s sermon to 440, Salzman shows how Christians crafted a narrative of the traumatic Visigothic sack thirty years earlier that emphasized the mitigating inluence of their religion on barbarian appetites. More than by sermons, however, bishops like Leo used innovations in ritual and institutions to assert a new role for themselves that eventually supplanted the inluence of the Roman aristocracy. By the late ifth century, the popes had not only appropriated certain locations for church building but also laid a claim to the public commemoration by the entire city of the Visigothic sack. Under the tutelage of the church, this annually recurring public festival asserted Christian dominion not only over the entire urban area but also over the festival calendar of the city. Space and time thus became subject to a Christian reinterpretation, administered by powerful bishops, thanks to the initiative of individual leaders who were able to enact a strong pastoral and political agenda. Just as Gregory in Constantinople created a Greek Christian polis, so Leo in the West transformed the city of Rome from a Roman cosmopolis into a Roman Christian cosmopolis. Space and place as centers for this power contest occupy the attention of Emily Albu and H. A. Drake in the next two chapters. In Chapter 10, Albu presents a sweeping view of the changing Roman attitudes to maps. Romans appear to have used itineraries – lists of the distances between stopping places – rather than “bird’s-eye view” maps to get from one place to another. They saw their empire as an oikoumeneˉ, but equation of the city of Rome with this orbis terrarum inhibited their ability to think of a world that was truly “universal.” This Roman oikoumeneˉ belonged quite literally to the emperor: for others merely to possess a world map signaled imperial pretensions that led to their swift demise. Whereas Roman itineraries by design made cities their focal point, Christian maps relected a set of values that emphasized the connection of every individual to a larger world embodied by the church. By emphasizing territories rather than cities, Christians in late antiquity achieved a “conceptual leap” that, once imperial authority waned in the West, opened the way for Christian maps to serve “as signiiers of dominion over the earth.” In Chapter 11, Drake uses the complex ceremony whereby power was transferred from emperor to emperor to tie together the various strands that created a Christian oikoumeneˉ out of the classical polis. Eschewing the long-held concept of “Caesaropapism” to characterize the diference between eastern and western Christianity, Drake shows how the eastern church used ceremony and ritual to negotiate a relationship with imperial authority that was in many

POLI S – I M P ER I UM – O I K O UM ENEˉ

ways more stable and inluential than the free hand that western Christians exercised in the absence of a similar check on their prerogatives. The slow seismic shift involved in the transition from civic polis to Christian oikoumeneˉ is captured by changes in the ritual chant by which ordinary citizens signaled support for a new emperor. Drake closes by musing on the fate of the paradigm we have used for the past four hundred years to legitimate political groupings. Has the nation-state, like the polis, run its course? Does “globalization” portend for us the type of disruptions that accompanied the rise of a Christian oikoumeneˉ ? If so, what changes would such a shift entail, and what models shall we use to guide ourselves through the process? In a penetrating postscript to this study, Cliford Ando pursues these questions by posing a paradox: How could “an empire that governed through civitates … be understood ultimately to have dispensed with them”? Part of the resolution of this paradox, he suggests, lies in “a failure in communication,” exempliied in exchanges between Augustine of Hippo and correspondents who relied in vain on standard cultural markers to ind common ground with elite Christians. This failure indicates that a gap had opened “between a normative vocabulary and the worlds it was being called upon to describe.” As Ando also observes, this book does not have answers to all of the questions it raises. Important issues dealing with the history of subjectivity and social power, as well as important conclusions being drawn from nontextual sources, remain outside our purview. All too true. But, like Ando, we take comfort in the thought that our efort to spell out some of the factors involved in the shifts in identity that occurred in late antiquity will prompt others to bring their skills to this important and still understudied issue.

THE IMPETUS FOR THIS BOOK CAME FROM THE SUSTAINED AND INTENSIVE

collaboration within the Multicampus Research Group in Late Antiquity of the University of California between 1999 and 2010. These eleven years of support from the Oice of Research of the University of California Oice of the President are gratefully acknowledged.The original members of the group (Emily Albu, Harold Drake, Susanna Elm, Claudia Rapp, Michele Salzman) found a common ground for their own individual research in a set of questions that addressed the relation of the individual to larger power structures, and the role that Christianity played in this context. In 2007, thanks to funding from the Borchard Foundation, whose generosity it is a pleasure to acknowledge, a conference was held at the Château La Bretesche, near Nantes, to enter into conversation with ancient historians and scholars from Europe. Not all of the participants of that conference are represented in this volume; and other

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contributors have joined the project since then, with the result that the current volume relects scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. It is our hope that it will open the door to further discussion of the real and conceptual frameworks of civic identity as a key aspect of the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barnish, S. J. B. (1988). “Transformation and Survival in the Western Senatorial Aristocracy, A.D. 400–700,” PBSR 56: 120–55. Barnish, S. J. B. (1989). “The Transformation of Classical Cities and the Pirenne Debate,” JRA 2: 385–400. Bleckmann, B., and H. Schneider. (2007). Eusebius von Caesarea: De vita Constantini, Über das Leben Konstantins. Fontes Christiani, 83. Turnhout. Bowes, K., and S. Gutteridge. (2005).“Rethinking the Later Roman Landscape,” JRA 18: 405–13. Boyarin, D. (2004). Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia. Brown, P. R. L. (1971). The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750. New York. Brown, P. R. L. (2012). Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton. Brunt, P. A. (1977). “Lex de imperio Vespasiani,” JRS 67: 95–116. Buell, D. (2002).“Race and Universalism in Early Christianity,” JECS 10: 429–68. Callu, J.-P. (2006). Culture profane et critique des sources de l’Antiquité tardive. Trente et une études de 1974 à 2003. Collection de l’École française de Rome, 361. Rome. Cameron,A., and S. G. Hall, trans. (1999). Eusebius of Caesarea: Life of Constantine. Oxford. Camille, M. (2000). “Signs of the City,” in B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka, eds., Medieval Practices of Space, 1–36. Minneapolis. Clark, G. (2011). Late Antiquity: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford. Curta, F., ed. (2006). Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Turnhout.

Dräger, P., trans. (2007). Eusebios: Über das Leben des glückseligen Kaisers Konstantin (De vita Constantini). 2nd ed. Oberhaid. Drinkwater, J., and B. Salway, eds. (2007). Wolf Liebeschuetz Relected: Essays Presented by Colleagues, Friends, & Pupils. London. Freeman, K. (1950). Greek City States. New York. Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. (2010). La cité antique: étude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions de la Grèce et de Rome. Cambridge. (Orig. pub. 1864.) Geary, P. (1983). “Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages,” Mitteilungen der antropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113: 15–26. Gibbon, E. (1909–14). The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. Bury. 7 vols. London. (Orig. pub. 1776–88.) Gillett, A., ed. (2002). On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages. Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 4. Turnhout. Halsall, G. (2007). Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568. Cambridge. Hansen, M. H. (2006). Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State. Oxford. Heather, P. (2012). Empires and Barbarians:The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. Oxford. James, E. (2008). “The Rise and Function of the Concept ‘Late Antiquity,’” Journal of Late Antiquity 1: 20–30. Johnson, A. (2006). Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica. Oxford. Kennedy, H. (1985). “From Polis to Medina: Urban Change in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria,” Past and Present 106: 3–27. Lewit, T. (2003). “‘Vanishing Villas’: What Happened to Elite Rural Habitation in the West in the 5th–6th c.?,” JRA 16: 260–74. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (2001a). “Late Antiquity and the Concept of Decline: An Anglo-

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American Model of Late Antique Studies,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 45: 1–11. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (2001b). “The Uses and Abuses of the Concept of ‘Decline’ in Later Roman History, or Was Gibbon Politically Incorrect?,” in L. Lavan, ed., Recent Research in Late-Antique Urbanism, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Supplementary Series 42: 233–45. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. (2001c). The Decline and Fall of the Roman City. Oxford. Mathisen, R. W. (1993). Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition. Austin. Mitchell, S., and G. Greatrex, eds. (2000). Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity. London. Pohl, W., and H. Reimitz, eds. (1998). Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300–800. Leiden. Richter, D. S. (2011). Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. Rives, J. (1999). “The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire,” JRS 89: 135–54. Shawcross,T. (2013). “Mediterranean Encounters before the Renaissance: Byzantine and Italian Political Thought concerning the Rise of

13 Cities,” in M. S. Brownlee and D. H. Gondicas, eds., Renaissance Encounters: Greek East and Latin West, 57–93. Leiden. Swain, S., and M. Edwards, eds. (2004). Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire. Oxford. Thomas, C., and C. Conant. (1999). From Citadel to City State:The Transformation of Greece, 1200– 700 BCE. Bloomington. Van Dam, R. (2007). The Roman Revolution of Constantine. Cambridge. Ward-Perkins, B. (1984). From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Urban Public Building in Northern and Central Italy, A.D. 300–850. Oxford. Ward-Perkins, B. (2005). The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. New York. Webster, L., and M. Brown, eds. (1997). The Transformation of the Roman World: AD 400–900. Berkeley. Wickham, C. (1984). “The Other Transition: From the Ancient World to Feudalism,” Past and Present 103: 3–36. Winkelmann, F., ed. (1975). Über das Leben des Kaisers Konstantins. Eusebius’ Werke I,1. 2nd ed. Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller. Berlin.

ONE

A “COVENANT” BETWEEN GODS AND MEN: HIERA KAI HOSIA AND THE GREEK POLIS Josine Blok

Citizenship in the Classical

POLIS

For more than a thousand years, the polis was the deining structure of social and political life in ancient Greece. Essentially, a polis was a community of people, with all material and immaterial goods they owned privately and as a collective.1 A polis conceived its identity in terms of the traditions by which the community had lived over generations (nomoi), the body of political rules in the strict sense as well as social practices and attitudes that had grown with those rules (politeia).2 There is not a single modern word by which to translate polis accurately, since depending on context the word referred to all inhabitants

I am much indebted to H. S.Versnel, Robert Parker, Stephen Lambert, Ineke Sluiter, and Saskia Peels for discussions of aspects of this article and to the participants of the conference “Clisthène et Lycurgue d’Athènes: autour du politique dans la cité classique” (Paris, January 2009) for responses to a draft. A more extensive version of the argument presented here is included in Blok (forthcoming). 1 All dates are BCE and translations, unless indicated otherwise, my own. On the pluriformity of the Greek polis, Murray (1990); Funke (2004). In spite of deinitions of the polis primarily by its political institutions (e.g., Hansen [1993]), most scholars agree that the notion of “society at large” is essential to the polis as a political entity; cf. Ober (1996). Polis as community (e.g., Dem. 23.41): Manville (1990); Manville (1994); Walter (1993); Cartledge (2000). 2 Nomoi: Ostwald (1969); Hölkeskamp (2002); Gagarin (2008). Politeia: Bordes (1982); in the fourth century, politeia could also denote “citizenship” (e.g., Dem. 23.89, 127, 151, 199, 200) in the sense of polis membership, Cartledge (2000): 20.

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of a particular area, to the area itself, to its city center, or to all of these.3 Some measure of political autonomy is usually taken to be implied, but when the Greek cities lost their political independence under Macedonian and Roman rule, they did not cease to be poleis but continued striving to keep their traditional institutions alive.The politai, usually translated by “citizens” in modern scholarship, were the free members, male and female, of the polis community. Beside them, many poleis included resident immigrants and unfree dependents who partook in polis life in some way.4 Yet the identity of a polis was primarily deined by its politai by descent; in other words, we ind poleis as “the Athenians” or “the Corinthians,” rather than “Athens” or “Corinth.” The polis, then, was the frame that shaped the social and political identity of its members, in modern terms their citizenship,5 but what this general idea entailed precisely is not at all straightforward. In a famous passage of the Politics (1275b17–22) Aristotle deined a politeˉs as someone who takes active part in archeˉ (political decision making) and krisis ( judicial judgment), but this deinition could not cover citizenship of women who were politai but not involved in political oice. Nor would his deinition account satisfactorily for all aspects of men’s citizenship. In classical Athens, democratic institutions were meant to involve all adult male citizens in active political duties. During the oligarchic regimes of 411 and 404/3, however, political participation was restricted to a few hundred wealthy men. Those who found themselves excluded in these years were not politically active citizens anymore, but they did not cease to be Atheˉnaioi.6 Aristotle observed that indeed all Greeks deine citizenship by descent, whereas the questions of who is a citizen in the political sense and who is not would be answered diferently depending on a polis’s political institutions.7 He therefore justiiably and explicitly distinguished his own deinition from normal Greek practices, a deinition that consequently is inadequate

3

4

5

6

7

Deining the polis is the aim of the Copenhagen Polis project; see Hansen (1998); Hansen (2000); Hansen (2007); on origins of the polis in the archaic period, political aspects: Raalaub (1993); Gehrke (1993); Gehrke (2000); city and landscape: Alcock and Osborne (1994); Polignac (1995); Hölscher (1998); Hölkeskamp (2002); Cole (2004). On politai and other terminology of citizenship, Blok (2005); economic and social inclusion of noncitizens in a polis, notably Athens, Ober (1996); Cohen (2000); inclusion of noncitizens in polis cults, Funke (2006); Blok (2007); Wijma (2010). The modern word “citizenship” refers both to communitarian ideas of membership in and attachment to a particular community and to rights and entitlements, notably to participation in political decision making; Kymlicka (2002): 284. The regime of the Thirty of 404/3, which limited the number of active citizens even more drastically and persecuted fellow citizens in an unprecedented manner, created a crisis in citizens’ sense of identity and may have triggered the use of metechein to supplement meteinai in combination with teˉs poleoˉs to indicate citizenship (see below). Arist., Pol. 1274b32–1275b17; citizenship based on descent: 1275b22–32; numerous political practices: 1275a3-5, 1275b34-1276a14. On descent deining citizenship: Davies (1977); Patterson (2005); Blok (2009).

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to account for ancient Greek citizenship in the Greeks’ own terms.8 Indeed, when in the ifth and fourth centuries the Athenians articulated their conception of citizenship, they never mentioned political oice or judicial duties. Of course, politics in the sense of decision-making institutions and processes were highly important, in particular to male citizens, but in the Athenians’ perception they were not the quintessence of citizenship. Instead, citizenship was captured in the formula meteinai or metechein toˉn hieroˉn kai toˉn hosioˉn, and this formula applied to all politai, male and female.9 Meteinai means to be an acknowledged member of the community and have a share in all its possessions, while metechein means to take an active role in something together with others.10 Methexis, active participation, therefore adequately captures a citizen’s role,11 while hiera kai hosia was used frequently as an equivalent of polis, encompassing all that essentially mattered to the polis.12 But what exactly were hiera kai hosia? How could participating in them convey or express citizenship? Exploring the meaning of these terms, I argue that the polis was conceived to be based on a covenant between gods and men, and that citizenship meant to participate in this reciprocal relationship. TA HIERA

Ta hiera seem rather straightforward: the words mean “things of the gods,” or, more precisely, things that belong to the gods, manifesting their power, because they have been consecrated by humans.13 Hiera refers to temples, sacriices, votives, and other gifts to the gods, ofered in return for the gods’ generative power and protection.14 By extension, ta hiera can evoke the process of consecration and 8

9

10

11

12

13 14

Aristotle’s deinition itting his logic: Johnson (1984); itting his political theory: Blok (2005): 31–5. E.g., ephebic oath: SEG 21.519; RO 88.8–9; citizenship male and female: Apoll., Neair. = [Dem.] 59.104; Dem. 57.3; Dem. 23.65; Is. 6.47; Dem. 43.51; Schol. Aeschin. 1.39; hiera kai hosia of the oikos: Dem. 39.35; of the polis: Thuc. 2.52.3–4; Lys. 30.25; Antiphon 5.62; Dem. 23.40; on agenda of assembly: AthPol 46.3. Outside Athens, the formula is attested occasionally, e.g., Andros (IG XII, 5 718; fourth century?); Labraunda 48 (early third century) in decrees conferring citizenship. LSJ s.v. μετὰ, 1. LSJ s.v. μετείναι; μέτεστί μοί τινός. Citizenship expressed by meteinai: Hdt. 4.145.13–21; Soph., OT 628–30; Eur., Herakl. 185; Eur., Erechth. 38–40; Dem. 57. An equivalent of μέτεστί μοί τινός is προσήκω, Dem. 57.2. Participation: LSJ s.v. μετέχειν. Generally:Theogn. 1.82; Lys. 31.5–6; Pind., Pyth. 2.83; Eur., Med. 117; Aesch., Pers. 540, etc. Citizenship: AthPol 21.2; 26.3–4; Apoll., Neair. = [Dem.] 59.111–12; Dem. 57, etc. On citizenship as meteinai and metechein, Blok (2009). Cf. Harrison (1971): vol. 1, Todd (1993): 167–200, Patterson (2005) on legal aspects, notably of the distinct status of citizens, metics, and slaves. Ostwald (1996); Cartledge (2000): 20–1 rightly contrasts the Greek idea of methexis and archeˉ with modern principles regarding civic rights, but refers to the politeia rather than the polis. On hiera kai hosia Mai (1982); their signiicance for the concept of the polis, Connor (1988); Blok (2011); and see note 1 in this chapter. LSJ s.v. ἱερός. On the reciprocity between gods and humans, Parker (1998).

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gift giving, but such rituals and festivals are usually indicated by the speciic words teletai and heortai. Things that are hieros, that is, “of the gods,” due to the exchange between humans and gods, are normally distinguished from things that are innately pure or divine, called hagnos, hagios, or semnos. Ta hiera, therefore, is the Greek word closest to “religion,” according to Robert Parker, while participation in hiera deined group identity of the polis and within the polis.15 The juxtaposition with ta hosia, however, elicits speciic connotations of ta hiera that can be gauged only after an analysis of its counterpart. HOSI Eˉ

and

TA HOSIA

The meaning of hosios, the adjective from which ta hosia is derived, has been a topic of scholarly debate for decades.16 I argue that hosios is a value term referring to human actions, words, or possessions that comply with hosieˉ, a set of speciic norms and rules of human conduct, and therefore are pleasing to the gods. A concise analysis based on a representative selection of texts must suice here to clarify the main aspects. The irst attested occurrences of hosios and cognates igure in archaic poetry: the Odyssey, three Homeric Hymns,Theognis, and Simonides.The chronological order in which these texts presumably were composed has led scholars to suggest that the lexeme hosios began its life in Greek as the noun hosieˉ, from which subsequently the adjective hosios was derived. A.Willi, who relates Greek hosieˉ to a Hittite word meaning “divine favor,” goes even further, arguing that it originated as the negative phrase ouk hosieˉ (it is not hosieˉ) as attested in the earliest text, the Odyssey.17 However, the oral background of these texts renders dating of their vocabulary based on the texts in which they appear hazardous.18 15

16

17 18

Parker (2005): 61, providing a comprehensive survey of the hiera of Athens; participation: Sourvinou-Inwood (1990); Osborne (1993); Burkert (1995); Cole (1995); Georgoudi (1998); Blok (2009). Recently: Blok (2010); Mikalson (2010): 140–207; Jay-Robert (2009); Willi (2008); Scullion (2005); see also Van der Valk (1941); Jeanmaire (1945); Van der Valk (1951); Eatough (1971); Burkert (1977) = (1985): 269–70; Parker (1983): 329–33; Mai (1982); Connor (1988); JayRobert (1999); Chadwick (1996) s.v. ὅσιος; Schmidt (1955–2010); Samons (2000). S. Peels in her forthcoming Utrecht University PhD thesis investigates the semantics of the value term hosios in discourse, including the relationship between hosios and related adjectives such as hagnos and dikaios, and diferences between hosios and its cognates. My analysis here is based on TLG and PHI searches on ὅσιος and cognates and on interpretation of passages in context, following methods of Adkins (1972): 1–9 and Chadwick (1996); see also Blok (2005): 9–10 on the chronological order of texts and passages bearing on historical changes in meaning. I follow Dover (1974): xv in transliterating adjectives in uninlected forms, except the plural neuter substantive (e.g., ta hiera, things that are hieros). To avoid confusion between (ta) hosia and (heˉ) hosia (Attic), I have retained Ionic hosieˉ also in Attic contexts. Willi (2008); compare Hinge (2007): from Sanskrit satyá (truth). The Odyssey arguably was composed in the early seventh century, the Hymn to Demeter and the Hymn to Pythian Apollo in the seventh to sixth century, the Hymn to Hermes ca. 500, and

17

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Linguistic arguments rather suggest that hosieˉ and hosios both emerged in the seventh century in various oral genres and then became current in Greek usage more widely.19 The earliest passages reveal that hosieˉ means normative conduct, not divine favor. In Odyssey 16.421–5, Penelope rebukes Antinoös: Wretched fool, how dare you plot Telemachos’s death and destruction, and disregard the rights of suppliants, over which Zeus himself watches? It is not hosieˉ to plot evil against each other. Don’t you know that your father came here as a suppliant, in deadly fear of the deˉmos?

Likewise, Odysseus censures Eurykleia, who rejoices about the death of the suitors (22.411–13): Be joyful in your heart, old lady, and keep it to yourself but do not shout; it is not hosieˉ to boast over slain men. These the moira of the gods and their own awful deeds brought to their doom.

Hosieˉ here indicates norms set to human conduct, notably observing the safety of suppliants and piety regarding the dead; the latter norms regulating interaction among humans are safeguarded explicitly by the gods. Simonides (in fr. 541 [Loeb]) means by hosieˉ norms to be observed in conduct toward one’s fellow beings in general: But only to a few does [god] grant that they have virtue to the end; for it is not easy to be good. Either irresistible greed for proit or the powerful gadly of wile-weaving Aphrodite or vigorous ambitions coerce a man against his will. But he who is unable to walk the hosios way throughout his life … as far as possible …20

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (210–11), Metaneira, queen of Eleusis, ofers to an unknown woman – mourning Demeter in human disguise – a cup of wine to receive her as her guest. Demeter, however, asks for a special mixture, kykeon: She [Metaneira] made the kykeon and gave it to the goddess as she asked; and the great mistress Deo received it because of hosieˉ. And among the women Metaneira began to speak, “Welcome, lady …”

Hosieˉ here irst recalls the rules of guest friendship, imperative among humans and protected by Zeus. Next, as Demeter will not drink (human) wine but

19

20

the poetry known as “Theognis” in the late seventh to sixth century, but all these texts drew on traditional material and acquired their more or less ixed form between 550 and 450; see Janko (1982). Simonides was active in the late sixth, early ifth century. Hosios is not attested in the Iliad and Hesiod, but themis and cognates abound. Schmidt (1955–2010) convincingly rejects priority of hosieˉ over hosios when based on occurrence in extant texts with linguistic arguments of Shipp (1972): 343 A.4. Trans. D. Campbell (Loeb), slightly modiied.

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asks for (divine) kykeon, a ritual is established in which the humans partake in communion with the goddess by drinking kykeon. This ritual too is implied in hosieˉ: Demeter’s action turns one set of rules into another. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (237–8), hosieˉ refers entirely to the ritual relation of humans with the gods: Then [the horses] for a while rattle the empty car, being rid of guidance; and if 21 they break the chariot in the woody grove, the [men] look after the horses, but tilt the chariot and leave it there; for this was hosieˉ from the very irst; the drivers pray to the lord [of the shrine] and the moira of the god then keeps the chariot.22

Consecrating the broken chariot to the god (Poseidon) is hosieˉ – apparently a set of rules about what humans owe to the gods and how they are to ofer this. As in Odyssey 22, these obligations grant to the recipient what beits moira, the portion due to each mortal and immortal. We ind, then, that hosieˉ refers to a set of norms or rules of conduct either between humans sanctioned and controlled by the gods or of humans toward the gods, notably in rituals fulilling their obligations in exchange for divine favor. The adjective hosios indicates the condition of being in accordance with hosieˉ. Theognis (130–1) comments: Nothing, Kyrnos, among humans is better than a father and a mother who observe hosios dikeˉ.

Dikeˉ (justice) evokes settling claims to honor and property in a way that satisies the community and implies (re-)creating a fair balance of interests, preventing conlict from turning into violence. Like moira, the archaic idea of dikeˉ relects the notion that each mortal and immortal should receive a portion beitting his or her social value, and a wide range of archaic texts testify to the belief that the gods were responsible for the distribution of these portions and watched over human observance of this order.23 Dikeˉ and hosieˉ thus both refer to norms of conduct imperative to proper social relations and under divine protection, but whereas dikeˉ connotes a socially acceptable settlement between parties, human or divine, whose interests need to be brought into balance,

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Such a conditional clause beginning with εἰ signals didactic poetry, Lardinois (2002): 12; e.g., Hes., W&D 106–7, 274, 381, 618, etc., and here likewise suggests instruction in a traditional pattern of action. Trans. H. Evelyn-White, modiied. As the original had no punctuation, the presence of which is already a matter of interpretation, I have used semicolons in this passage in all conjunctions to maintain the equal value of all clauses in the original. On hosios referring to hosieˉ as ritual, see the Hymn to Dionysos by Philodamos of Skarpheia (Delphi, ca. 340; BCH [1895]: 393; Furley and Bremer [2001]: no. 2.5) l. 34: ὀργία ὁσία = the rituals for the god. In Homer, Sarischoulis (2008); generally Gagarin (2008): 16–22; Papakonstantinou (2008): 37–46.

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hosieˉ refers to norms of human conduct per se and can apply in particular to humans’ ritual obligations to the gods. This analysis of the meaning of hosieˉ and hosios in archaic poetry is conirmed in Herodotus’s classical historiography, where beside hosieˉ esti we ind hosion esti (it is in accordance with hosieˉ); the relevant passages all refer to rules of religious conduct that humans must observe.24 The same expressions are attested in inscribed regulations on sanctuaries, so-called leges sacrae, stating it is not hosieˉ for certain groups, such as strangers or women, to enter or to participate in the ritual.25 Here we see hosieˉ, as the rules of ritual exchange with the gods, referring to a vital element, namely who is to be a member of the group participating in this exchange and who is not. Similar regulations on participation pronounced “it is not themis” instead of “it is not hosieˉ,” and in late antiquity the lexicographer Hesychius duly noted that hosieˉ could be the same as themis, traditional law of divine origin.26 In sum, hosieˉ consists of a set of rules or “laws” of commendable conduct, and hosios when applied to humans means that they are respectful of these rules in a wide ethical, social, and religious sense. One component of hosieˉ concerns conduct between humans valued particularly by the gods; hosios operates as a value term and its connotations run from “decent” and “dutiful” to “righteous,” overlapping to some extent with dikaios. A second component concerns conduct of humans toward the gods, notably regarding the ways and means by which humans are to deal with ta hiera. Being hosios means observing the regulations on contact with the divine and can overlap with eusebeˉs, having proper reverence for the gods, and katharos, being pure, a necessary condition when being in touch with the divine. Both components belong together and afect each other, however, as will be clear in the analysis of the adjective. 24

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Herodotus: ὁσίη ἐστί: 2.45, sacriice; 2.171, to say holy things; ὅσιον ἐστί: 2.61, to mention a holy thing; 2.70, 2.81, burial; 2.81, participation in rites; 4.154, not hosion for a stranger to participate in sacriice; 8.37, not hosion to touch a holy thing. Leges sacrae is a modern term for ancient regulations or decrees concerning (human relations with) the gods but are in no other way diferent from other regulations or decrees, Parker (2004); Lupu (2005): 8–112. For the transformation of hosieˉ into polis law, Blok (2011). ID 68 (Delos) ifth century: ξένωι οὐκ ὁσίη ἐσι[έναι] (It is not hosieˉ for a stranger to enter); IG XII, 1 (Lindos) II, 26 ca. 400: γυναιξὶ ὀκ ὅσια. (For a woman not hosieˉ [to enter? to participate in sacriice?]), etc. Compare: LSCG 109 (IG XII, 5, 183; Paros) ifth century: [Ὅ]ρος ῾Υπάτο · ἀπ[ελ]εστοι οὐ θέμ[ι]ς, οὐδὲ γυναι[κ]ι. (Boundary of [Zeus] Hypatos. [It is] not themis for an uninitiated [man] or for a woman [to enter]). Lupu (2005): 14–30 on entrance not being the same as participation in ritual; on rules forbidding entrance to women, Cole (1992), Osborne (1993); to foreigners, Butz (1996), Funke (2006). Themis divine: Hes. Th.16, 135, 901 (mother of Dikeˉ with Zeus); Themis = justice: Suda theˉta 114 (Adler); foundation of dikazein, Staford (1997); Gagarin (2008): 30; speaking themis = oracular response, Suda theˉta 118, 281. Hesych. s.v. ὅσιη; Suda, eˉta 152 Ἧι θέμις· ὡς νόμος, ὡς προσῆκον. Themis and the Horai represent the cyclic aspects of time in the renewal of nature and recurrence of festivals (e.g., Pind. Paian 1.5–7); Rudhardt (1999); Pavlou (2011).

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HOSIOS

Words and Deeds

From the ifth century onward, hosios is applied with increasing frequency to things people do or say: words and deeds can be evaluated as in accordance with hosieˉ or not.27 A passage by Antiphon (5.82) on a murder case illustrates the social signiicance of acting hosioˉs: I hardly think I need to remind you that many a man with not katharos hands or some other form of pollution who has embarked on shipboard has destroyed, together with his own life, the people who are in a condition of being hosios towards the gods (τοὺς ὁσίως διακειμένους τὰ πρὸς τοὺς θεούς). Others, while they have escaped death, have had their lives imperiled owing to such polluted wretches. Many, too, have been proved to be anhosios as they stood beside a sacriice (ta hiera), because they prevented the sacriice to be as it should be. With me, the opposite has happened in every case. Not only have fellow passengers of mine enjoyed the calmest of voyages, but whenever I attended a sacriice, the sacriice has always been very successful.

Being hosios fulills the conditions required to make the sacriice successful, referring here in particular to ritual purity. One’s fellow beings notice whether one is hosios or not because the gods act favorably toward the community when everyone is hosios. Referring to the condition in accordance with hosieˉ, both the group of rules and the norms they set for human behavior, hosios could be used as a value term. In the ifth and fourth centuries, this usage is frequent in rhetorical contests, as illustrated in two passages from Thucydides’ account of the conlict between the Thebans and Plataians in 427.28 In the verbal agon between them before the Spartan adjudicators, the Plataians claim (3.56.2): They attempted to seize our city in time of truce and on a festival day; therefore we were right (orthoˉs) in punishing them according to a law which is valid among all, that it is hosios to repel him who comes to you as an enemy.

It is a valid nomos among all humans, the Plataians assert, that one does not attack on a festival day; therefore, it is hosios to punish those who do so 27

28

For instance in Herodotus: 2.119, to do (not) hosios things; 3.16, to act against religious rules; 3.19, to harm one’s children; 3.120, to plan murder of someone who did not harm you; 4.154, to plan murder of one’s child; 4.146, to claim timai unjustly; 6.86, to fail to return hostages; to do and to say hosios things: 9.79, mutatis mutandis: anhosios things. Cf. Thuc. 5.104 (Melian dialogue): “We trust that … we shall through divine favor be at no disadvantage because we are hosioi standing our ground against men who are unjust (ou dikaious).” Eatough (1971) argues that Thucydides himself is not indiferent toward the religious appeal of hosios but seeks to demonstrate that people act ultimately in their own interests and manipulate moral claims to justify them.

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nevertheless. The Thebans, for their part, accuse the Plataians of treacherous behavior, claiming (3.67.2): We have discussed these matters … that you (Spartans) may know that you will justly (dikaioˉs) condemn them and we that we have exacted vengeance still more hosioˉs.

These passages exemplify how hosios and cognates could be applied to a variety of acts and words: hosios evaluated a state of mind or acts concerning suppliants, aged parents, children, all other humans, and the dead and toward the gods as according with a norm that was highly valued but also hard to deine precisely. What then, Socrates asks Euthyphron in the dialogue named after him, is to hosion, the core quality of hosios? Although an expert in ta theia, Euthyphron cannot give a satisfactory answer. He irst states (12e) that the part of the just (to dikaion) that has to do with service of the gods constitutes piety and to hosion, and … the remaining part of the right is that which has to do with the service of men.29

When he cannot suiciently defend this deinition, Euthyphron ventures that hosios means human actions generally that are pleasing to the gods and honor them, to which Socrates objects that this deinition is tautological.30 Even the versatile Demosthenes does not do much better than Euthyphron: when he, too, attempts to deine the core of hosieˉ in his suit against Meidias, he identiies this element of human behavior with the divine (semnos, daimonios).31 HOSI Eˉ, HOSIOS ,

and Human Behavior

The passages discussed so far exemplify several hundred occurrences of hosios and cognates in literary and epigraphical texts of the archaic and classical age. Most of them originate in Athens, but numerous others, especially inscriptions, are attested elsewhere. Nearly all of them conirm that hosios refers to the human sphere of life and indicates human conduct that is in accordance with hosieˉ, a set of norms and rules the gods themselves protect. Where hosieˉ concerns relations between humans, the gods are involved as a third party since

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Τοῦτο τοίνυν ἔμοιγε δοκεῖ, ὦ Σώκρατες, τὀ μέρος τοῦ δικαὶου εἴναι εὐσεβές τε καὶ ὅσιον, τὸ περὶ τὴν τῶν θεῶν θεραπείαν· τὸ δὲ περὶ τὴν τῶν ἀνθρώπων τὸ λοιπὸν εἶναι τοῦ δικαίου μέρος. 15b: E.: [the gods gain advantage from what they get from us. S.:What then would those gifts of ours to the gods be?] E: What else than τιμή τε καὶ γέρα καὶ … χάρις; Dem. 21.126.10: καὶ τὸ τῆς ὁσίας, ὁτιδήποτ’ ἐστί, τὸ σεμνὸν καὶ τὸ δαιμόνιον … (and this of the hosieˉ, whatever it is, what is sacred and spiritual …).

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being hosios will be approved by the gods. Between humans and gods, hosieˉ typically denotes humans’ ritual actions toward the gods, not the other way round, and being hosios will solicit the gods’ favor.32 The underlying sense of obligations to other humans and to the gods relates hosieˉ and cognates to the realm of charis: by acting hosioˉs, one may expect the other to reciprocate in a itting way.33 Against this general pattern, a few exceptions stand out where hosieˉ or cognates are applied to gods. A representative case appears in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, dated to the late sixth, early ifth century. The Hymn portrays the adolescent, ingenious god making an animal sacriice of two bovines, dividing the meat into twelve portions (moirai) and making the geras (gift of honor) for each as it should be.Then “glorious Hermes longed for the hosieˉ of meat, as the smell preyed on his strength, even if he were a god. But his proud heart kept his own” (130–2). Rebuked by his mother, Hermes expresses his eagerness to be the equal of his older half-brother Apollo (172–3): “As regards timeˉ (social value), I will strive for the very same hosieˉ that Apollo has.”34 In the context of the sacriice, hosieˉ refers to the rules of the ritual as we saw earlier in the Hymns to Demeter and Apollo, and here includes the apportioning of sacriicial meat. Unlike the normal situation in a sacriice, in the Hymn to Hermes the sacriice is arranged by the god for himself and the eleven other Olympians among whom he wants to have an acknowledged position as an equal. Acquiring portions itting one’s status is as important among gods as among humans, but here Hermes’ feelings and strategies are rendered with a very human touch. Desiring real meat (64, 131–6), moreover, the god is decked out with explicitly human, not divine attributes.35 This and similar cases seem a conscious 32

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Jay-Robert (1999) argues that hosieˉ in the Hymn means “the existence of a divine law who, according to the timeˉ and geras, determines the rights and the rituals, essential elements of every god” and that this law determines how humans should act toward the gods. In her view, therefore, hosieˉ originates among the gods and next has implications for humans. She bases this view primarily on the Hymn to Hermes, which I interpret in the opposite way (see main text). Saskia Peels (in her PhD thesis forthcoming) shows convincingly that long-term reciprocity is an important component of hosios conduct. Pulleyn (1997) points to the connections between Greek prayer and charis to argue that prayer was expected to be efective in relation not only to the gods but also to the dead; this applies likewise to hosieˉ. The da-quia-dedi formula, which is strongly based on expectations of reciprocity with the gods, is attested widely in Greece (in the εἴ ποτε formula); Pulleyn (1997): esp. 18–19. A phrase similar to and even following on the εἴ ποτε formula is [ἐ]ξ ὁσίων ὅσίης, attested in dedications (e.g., Halikarnassos 121 l.7, fourth/third century). 130: ἔνθ’ ὁσίης κρεάων ἠράσσατο κὺδιμος Ἑρμῆς. 173: ἀμφὶ δὲ τιμῆς/ἐπιβήσομαι ἧς περ Ἀπόλλων. On this passage, see above all Versnel (2011): 319–29, with discussion of other views. A comparable paradox occurs in Euripides’ Orestes (595) when the desperate protagonist brands Apollo as anhosios because of the impious acts he has demanded Orestes to commit. Euripides uses anhosios and anhosioˉtatos even more frequently than its positive counterpart; e.g., El. 1261; HF, 853; Tr. 628; Hel. 869; Ph. 67, 493; Or. 24.

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application to gods of language that normally is appropriate for humans.36 Another, slightly diferent case occurs in funerary inscriptions from the fourth century onward, expressing the feeling that death can be ouk hosieˉ.37 This usage suggests that death could be felt as an infringement of a fair exchange of beneits between gods and humans, giving a new shape to the long-standing hope among humans that the gods would be just.38 Because these exceptional passages apparently aim at a powerful efect by applying the language of human obligations toward the gods to the gods themselves, they can be interpreted as a conscious reversal of the normal order. In sum, hosios and cognates refer to a set of norms and rules; hosieˉ does not mean “divine favor” but that compliance with hosieˉ creates divine favor (charis). These rules apply to a variety of actions of humans toward each other and toward the gods and convey the strong expectation that this conduct be observed. When applied to persons or situations, the semantics of hosios may overlap partly with those of piety (eusebeia), purity (katharos), or justice (dikeˉ) depending on context.39 Yet by selecting hosios rather than one of the other adjectives, evaluation takes place in the framework of hosios, which includes more and other elements than each of the other adjectives and hence evokes diferent connotations. Put diferently, the partial overlap of hosios with the other value terms indicates the range of attitudes and actions that may be involved in hosieˉ, making hosios more than and diferent from the sum of its parts. From a comparative perspective, hosios has much in common with the Roman value term pius,40 while in the Judeo-Christian tradition hosieˉ invites 36

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In Eur., Or. inversion of appropriate language seems a literary device; in the Hymn to Hermes a ritual context, in which “human” traits of the god were highlighted, may have been involved; cf.Versnel (2011): 367–76. E.g., SEG 38: 440 (fourth-century Thessaly); SEG 30: 291; SEG 28: 354 (Attica 400–350), etc. This usage of course difers from the numerous grave inscriptions praising the deceased to have been hosios in his or her lifetime. Versnel (1981);Yunis (1988): 38–58; Parker (1998). See, e.g.,Van der Valk (1941), Rudhardt (19922), Chadwick (1996) on the meanings of hosios in such cases, based on literary texts; cf. Hesych. s.v. ὅσιος· καθαρός. δίκαιος. εὐσεβής. εἰρηνικός. ἁγνός. Epigraphical evidence: IG I3 52 (ca. 433/2 [?], Kallias decree) A16: “the tamiai are to supervise as much of the money of the gods as is possible and hosios …” = in accordance with hosieˉ = the obligations to the gods, shading over into eusebeˉs. RO 79 (337/6, Schwenk 6; “law against tyranny”) 11: “Whoever kills the man who has done any of these things (= create tyranny) shall be hosios” – acting in a way honoring the gods; translated by RO as “undeiled” = hosios shading over into katharos; which is in my view essentially better than “innocent” (Schwenk) or “blameless” (Meritt), translations that seem to rely on the traditional view of hosios meaning “desacralised” or “permitted.” The equivalent of pietas is not hosieˉ but hosioteˉs, the virtue of observing hosieˉ and a near equivalent of eusebeia, emerging in the late ifth and early fourth centuries (Plato, Isocrates) and after that widespread. Cf. Cic., Deor. Nat. 1.2.4: est enim pietas iustitia adversus deos, going back to Posidonius (Adv. Phys. 1.124: ἔστιν ἡ ὁσίοτης δικαιοσύνη τις πρὸς θεούς) as Wagenvoort (1980): 10–11 noticed (and see Breij [2011]), and ultimately to Plato, Euth. (cited earlier).

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comparison with the Ten Commandments. Hosieˉ and the Ten Commandments both prescribe fundamental rules of conduct between humans (honor thy parents; do not desire what belongs to thy neighbor) and rules respecting the gods: in the Ten Commandments “Thou shalt not make images after god,” in Greece the rules concerning ta hiera. There are also notable diferences. Although clearly the rules represented by hosieˉ and themis invoke the gods as source of their legitimacy and enforcement, it is not easy to ind an unambiguous divine origin of hosieˉ, and I do not know a Greek story about a divine gift of hosieˉ to humans as equally powerful and eloquent as that about Moses receiving the Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai (but see comments in the next section on Aeschylus). Neither can we deine a clear boundary between hosieˉ transformed into laws and other man-made laws.41 Nevertheless, in both hosieˉ and the Ten Commandments, the quality of the relationship between humans and gods depends on the degree to which humans act or speak in accordance with these rules. HOSIOS

Things

Finding that hosios indicates the condition of being in accordance with hosieˉ – that is, fulilling norms the gods expect humans to observe – how are we to understand hosios things? Let us examine a few representative cases. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (772–8), the chorus draws a distinction between people under the sway of Hybris and those committed to Justice: But Dikeˉ shines out in smoky hovels and honors the righteous man; gold-spangled abodes where hands are not clean, she quits with eyes averted and goes to hosios ones.42

Hosios is used here for a house as a metaphor of its inhabitants, whose way of life is hosios. The chorus in Prometheus Vinctus (527–9) recalls the beneits granted to mankind when living in accordance with the will of Zeus: May Zeus, who apportions all things, never set his power In conlict with my will, nor may I be slow To approach the gods with hosios sacriices (thoinai) of slain oxen.

The qualiication hosios pertains either to the condition of the sacriice that meets the requirements of hosieˉ or to the attitude of the sacriicers, who fulill their obligations toward the gods. When addressing the gods, hosios can be 41 42

Blok (2011). Δίκα δὲ λάμπει μὲν ἐν / δυσκάπνοις δώμασιν, τὸν δ’ ἐναίσιμον τίει βίον. / τὰ χρυσόπαστα δ’ ἔδεθλα σὺν πίνῳ χερῶν παλιντρόποις ἔμμασι λιποῦσ’, ὅσια πεοσέμολε, trans. A. H. Sommerstein (Loeb). For another hosios home, Xen., Cyr. 7.5.56–7.

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applied to parts of the body involved in the encounter with the gods, such as in Empedokles’ hymn: But gods! turn aside their madness from my tongue and channel a pure stream from hosios mouths. And you, maiden Muse of the white arms, much-remembering, I beseech you.43

These passages show either that things called hosios metaphorically represent their human owners who act in a hosios way or that the things themselves are used in a way that complies with hosieˉ and are approved by the gods. Nevertheless, many scholars suppose that hosios can mean “profane” or “desacralized,” in exactly the opposite sense to its regular meaning.44 The two most important cases adduced as evidence concern hosios applied to things, and it is therefore appropriate to discuss them at this point. In the irst case, a passage in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, one of the women guarding the Acropolis pretends to be at the close of her pregnancy, terriied she is going to give birth and pollute this sacred area. She cries (743–4): O mighty Eileithyia, hold my labor, that I may get to a hosios place (chorion)!45

This passage has been interpreted as follows: since clearly the hosios place is a place where it is permitted to give birth, where pollution is allowed, and that is human and not divine (hieros), hosios itself means permitted, liable to pollution, human, and not divine – in sum, profane. Next, the interpretation of the semantics of hosios is adjusted to accommodate this meaning, with the remarkable result that hosios would mean both “in agreement with divine rules” and “profane.” In my view, this argument is neither methodologically nor logically correct. In this passage, hosieˉ entails the rules distinguishing between places that may or may not be polluted. The woman needs a place that hosieˉ allows to be polluted, and indeed such a place will be one belonging not to the gods (hieros), where pollution is not allowed, but to humans.The place is called hosios not because it will be polluted but because its use accords with hosieˉ. Interpretation of this passage is complicated by a comment in the Suda, stating that the place the woman had in mind was bebeˉlos (accessible for humans also in a state of pollution) and not hieros (of the gods), comparing it with hosios moneys, also not hieros, and adding: “The Dionysion was also called (sc. 43

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Emp., DK B 3. 1–3 trans. B. Inwood. Cf. Soph., OC 469–70, for hosios hands during puriication. For hosios as “desacralized” and hence “profane,” LSJ s.v. ὅσιος; Van der Valk (1941); Parker (1983): 329–31; Burkert (1985): 269–70; Willi (2008). Compare Scullion (2005): “religiously neutral.” Contra: Schmidt (1955–2010); Chadwick (1996) s.v. ὅσιος; Samons (2000): 29, 325–9; Blok (2010). ὦ πότνι’ Ἱλείθυ, ἐπίσχες τοῦ τόκου, ἕως ἂν εἰς ὅσιον μόλω ‘γὼ χωρίον.

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hosion chorion).”46 This Dionysion is presumably the sanctuary of Dionysos in the Marshes.47 On the second day of the festival Anthesteria (Choes), the only day every year when entrance into this sanctuary was allowed, a part of the hieros gamos of the Basilinna with the god took place there, in accordance with a lex sacra kept in the sanctuary.48 On this occasion, then, the sanctuary was the scene of actions normally not allowed in a hieron, but they were allowed on this single day as part of the ritual program of the festival. The Dionysion, therefore, although normally hieros (of the god), was used once a year by humans in an exceptional way that was part of a ritual and hence in accordance with a lex sacra (hosieˉ and hence hosios). There is, in sum, no need to abandon the meaning of hosios as established in the body of ancient texts to make sense of the Lysistrata passage. The second case concerns the use of hosios applied to money, designating speciic budgets.49 The irst instance occurs in an account of the deme Ikarion (ca. 450–425), but the adjective returns more frequently in several fourthcentury texts, notably Demosthenes’ attacks on Aristocrates, Timocrates, and Aristogeiton.50 Here, hosia chreˉmata are mentioned in juxtaposition with hiera chreˉmata. The main issue in these suits was a vast amount of money, chiely war booty captured by friends of Timocrates. Of this money, 10 percent was to be dedicated to Athena, 2 percent to the other gods, and the rest was claimed by the polis – ta hosia, that was to be “yours,” as the speaker reminded the judges (dikastai).51 The lemma in Harpokration s.v. hosion is worth quoting in full: 46

47 48

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50 51

S.v. ὅσιον χωρίον (Adler omikron 688). Bebeˉlos literally means “allowed to be trodden,” designating an area where humans may be in a state of impurity. Yet insofar as bebeˉlos came to be associated with impurity and to denote “profane,” with its connotations of freedom from religious constraint, it is inadequate as an equivalent of hosios. This is conirmed by its use as an equivalent of anhosios (Philo 2.165): it is logically and semantically impossible that hosios would also mean anhosios. The Suda is anyway an ambiguous source on the meaning of hosios because the author, unlike Hesychius, clearly looks at the classical adjective through a Christian lens; see, e.g., his lemma ὁσιότης (being hosios): “being entirely dedicated to god. And he is hosios who has fully dedicated himself by faith and good works and has consecrated himself to the god,” with a reference to Moses; and his lemma ὁσίων, clearly meaning “the blessed” in the Christian sense, discussing whether all or only few are chosen to enter heaven. As H. S.Versnel suggested to me. Thuc. 2.15.4; Apoll., Neair. = [Dem.] 59.75–7; AthPol 3.5. The irst meeting of Dionysos and the Basilinna took place at the Boukolion; see Parker (2005): 303–5. For the phrase “it is not hosios to enter the sanctuary” or “to bring into the sanctuary” in leges sacrae: IG XII, 1, 677, ll. 9–10, 19–20; and my note 26. Hosios money: τὰ χρήματα τἀ τε ἱερὰ καὶ τὰ ὅσια. Dem. 24.11, 82, 96 (διόικησις ἱερὰ καὶ ὁσία), 101, 111, 112, 120, 130, 137; Hyp. fr. 32. καὶ τὰ χρήματα τά τε ἱερὰ καὶ τὰ ὅσια. Chreˉmata are generally useful things for exchange (Reden [1995]: 173–5) but in ifth- and fourthcentury Athens the word referred most frequently to money. Ikarion: IG I3 253, and see previous note. Dem. 24.120.

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Hosion: Hypereides says in the Against Aristogeiton: and the moneys, both the hiera and the hosia. And Isokrates in the Areopagitikos: with the hiera and the hosia. They call the deˉmosia hosia. That the hosia are the deˉmosia Demosthenes makes clear, as he explains this adequately in the Against Timocrates. The hiera, the tenths of the goddess and the iftieths of the other gods, you have purloined. And a bit later: the hosia that were ours, you have stolen. Didymos, however, says that to hosion is used in two ways, both to hieron and to idioˉtikon.52

Because this money is distinguished from money owned by the gods (hieros money) and clearly belonged to humans, hosios money likewise has been understood to be “permitted” or “profane” money, to be used in any way humans would think it. Yet, as I have argued more fully elsewhere, this money was speciied as hosios because it was designated to be used in a hosios way.53 In the ifth century, this meant primarily expenditure for gifts to the gods, such as sacriice, or maintenance of sanctuaries and festivals.This usage of hosios seems to be conirmed by Didymos’s observation: hosios could mean both idioˉtikos – owned by a human (here, an individual) – and hieros, that is, brought within the divine sphere.54 In the fourth century, the use of hosios money belonging to the polis (deˉmosios) seems to have been extended to inancing hosios actions more generally, such as payment to the theoric fund that subsidized Dionysian and other festivals, but occasionally was also used for other matters.55 Even if thus the application of being hosios was stretched more widely, nevertheless the meaning of hosios itself did not change; hosios money was in no way considered simply “profane” money. In Delphi, ive oicials called hosioi were responsible for the moneys owned by humans but meant to be used for exchange with the gods, notably sacriice, and gifts to the gods, for instance, by former slaves upon manumission.56 In several Greek cities including Athens, a special tamias or tamiai toˉn hosioˉn are mentioned in decrees from the third century onward whose budgets provided for festive honors for exceptional humans taking place in the theater 52

53 54 55

56

Harpocration writes “ours,” Demosthenes “yours,” but the result amounts to the same. Isocrates does not refer to moneys but to ta hiera kai ta hosia in general, as discussed in the main text. Cf. Suda s.v Ὅσιον. … Δίδυμος δέ φησι διχῶς λἐγεσθαι τὸ ὅσιον, τό τε ἱερὸν καὶ τὸ ἰδιωτικόν. Blok (2010). Ta hosia as private means: Dem. 39.35. Dem. 24.96–101 lists numerous purposes on which deˉmosia or hosia moneys, beside the hiera moneys, were to be spent, but the text does not allow a detailed speciication of the irst group of expenditures. I attempt a reconstruction of these purposes in Blok (forthcoming). Plut., QG 292D; Is.Os. 365A; Def. Or. 437A; 438B; Epigraphical: FD III, 2, 118.5; III, 3:297; 297a; 300; 302 (dealing with manumission); the hosioi were selected among a few aristocratic families claiming descent from Deukalion, i.e., the beginning of human time. On the hosioi, Roux (1976): 59–63 (who interprets hosios as “free from religious danger,” apparently following Van der Valk, cf. note 45); Bowden (2005): 16; Jay-Robert (2007); Jay-Robert (2009): 74–90. CID 1:11 (ca. 380?) grants ateleia of the hosia moneys to the Asklepiadai.

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of Dionysios.57 The juxtaposition of hiera and hosia in connection with moneys thus underlines the distinction between owners, gods, and humans respectively. As to the use of each, hiera chreˉmata were handled by humans for the gods. Although intended irst of all for the gods themselves to inance sacriice and maintenance of hieros buildings, hiera chreˉmata could be used for anything the gods would not seriously object to – they were often borrowed by humans to fund wars.58 Hosios money, owned by humans, by deinition was to be used in a way complying with hosieˉ and hence pleasing to the gods. TA HOSIA

and

TA HIERA

Ta hosia means hosios things, and we are now in a better position to explore what such things might be. When the adjective is used to qualify a concrete object, ta hosia refers to such objects in general. Although hosios might indicate the way such things were gained, the analysis so far points to the way they are to be used. In several cases, however, the hosia, with or without the article, seem to be more abstract. In the irst extant occurrence of the word hosia, in Aeschylus’s Suppliants (400–6), hosia are contrasted with adika: Pelasgos [king of Argos]: I will not do this without the consent of my people, lest hereafter, if any evil befall, the people should say, “You honored aliens and brought ruin upon your own land.” Chorus: Zeus, who is related by blood to both, leaning now to one side and then to the other, oversees these things, apportioning, as he always does, unjust things (adika) to the wicked and hosia to the those who observe the nomoi. When these things are thus balanced, why would you shirk from doing to dikaion?59

Adika cannot be concrete things but must be unjust acts and words; Zeus makes wicked men sufer such adika. Likewise, Zeus gives to the righteous hosia, which here cannot be concrete things either but must be hosios words and acts – these people are law-abiding, and as a reward Zeus makes their fellow beings act hosioˉs toward them.60 In Euripides’ Suppliants (121–4) hosia 57

58 59

60

IG II2 793 (Athens, ca. 255) orders the tamiai toˉn hosioˉn to provide the money for an eikoˉn and a beˉma in the theater in honor of King Antigonos; ISmyrn 573 II and II, 2 (ca. 254 BCE) decrees among others that the tamias t.h. is responsible for the costs involved when King Seleucus visits the city; in ISmyrn 578 = IK (Knidos) I 231 (late third century) the tamias t.h. is to provide money for honoriic crowns. Samons (2000). ἀμφοτέροις ὁμαίμων τάδ’ ἐπισκοπεῖ Ζεὺς ἑτερορρεπής, νέμων εἰκότως ἄδικα μὲν κακοῖς, ὅσια δ’ ἐννόμοις· τί τῶνδ’ ἐξ ἴσου ῥεπομένων μεταλγεῖς τὸ δίκαιον ἒρξαι; Cf. IMT LApollon/Milet 2315.3– 4, a list of rules of living: ἄδικα φεῦγε. μαρτύρει ὅσια (Stay away from adika.Witness hosia). In curse tablets, all post-classical in date, hosieˉ, hosios, and (ta) hosia are used in the wider sense of “well-being, prosperity,” which is clearly due to the god invoked but presumably put into practice by one’s fellow beings; the wish for hosieˉ or being hosios is often combined with the

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likewise are acts in accordance with hosieˉ, in this passage referring to the rules regarding burial.61 A Hellenistic-Roman lex sacra commends visitors of the sanctuary at Mytilene to “enter the precinct hagnos (pure), thinking hosia.”62 Hosia, then, can be an abstract plural indicating all acts and words in accordance with hosieˉ. The irst more or less datable passage with the combination hiera kai hosia63 is Thucydides’ description of the conditions at Athens when the city, overcrowded with people in the irst year of the Peloponnesian War, fell victim to the plague (2.52.3–4): The temples (ta hiera), too, in which they had quartered themselves, were full of corpses of those who had died in them; for the calamity which weighed upon them was so overpowering that men, not knowing what was to become of them, became careless of hiera and hosia. And the customs (nomoi) which they had hitherto observed regarding burial were all thrown into confusion and they buried their dead each one as he could. And many resorted to disrespectful modes of burial because so many members of their households had already died that they lacked the proper funeral materials.64

Because of the disastrous situation, people died in the temples (where they should not have quartered anyway), causing pollution where no pollution was allowed. Moreover, they failed to observe hosieˉ regarding burial of the dead, once again failing in observance of ritual purity and of obligations toward their fellow humans. In this passage, hiera refers to the proper conduct within the sphere of the gods and hosia to proper conduct toward humans as approved by the gods. Hiera kai hosia are used here in a general, abstract sense, while the context connotes especially obligations pertaining to ritual pollution incurred by death.

61

62

63

64

wish to be eleutheros, free from destructive claims created by the opponent. See Knidos 256, b-2; Knidos 258.6–8; Knidos 260, where Prosodion wishes for herself and her children ὅσια κατὰ πᾶν μέρος; Knidos 261 (= Gager [1992]: no. 89, DT 4, who, however, translates hosia as “permissible,” on which see main text); Knidos 262–9; Versnel (1990) argues that this latter group of deixiones comprises prayers for justice rather than curses.The opponent in the curse is to get anhosia, “all misfortune one can imagine.” Thes.: “Did you rely on heralds of Hermes, to bury the dead?” Adr.: “Yes, and yet the slayers did not yield them to me.” Thes.: “But what did they say, then, when you asked them hosia?” LSS 82: ἁγνὸν πρὸς τέμενος στείχειν ὅσια φρονέοντα. Cf. note 60 IMT L.Apollon/Milet. 2315 l. 4: μαρτύρει ὅσια. The formula hiera kai hosia is also included in the ephebic oath (RO 88, 8–9). The oath presumably goes back to the archaic age (Siewert [1977] and RO 88 comm. ad loc.), and although this does not imply beyond any doubt that the formula was a part of the oath from the beginning, it is certainly possible; this would take the earliest occurrence of the formula into the sixth century if not earlier. Trans. C. F. Smith (Loeb), modiied. ἐς ὀλιγωρίαν ἐτράποντο καὶ ἱερῶν καὶ ὁσίων ὁμοόως.

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In other contexts, however, the hosia and the hiera with which they are juxtaposed seem to refer to concrete but unspeciied things. When Isocrates (Areop. 66) rhetorically asks: And who of my own generation does not remember that the democracy arranged the city so well with the hiera and the hosia that all those who also now come to visit, consider her worthy to rule not only over the Greeks but over the whole world?

he could mean either general normative conduct in relation to the gods or concrete objects used in such a way.65 Xenophon perhaps speaks about the same hiera kai hosia in his advice to the city to improve its inancial situation by keeping peace (Por. 5.1–4): Then there will be those rich in corn and wine and oil and cattle; men possessed of brains and money to invest; craftsmen and professors and philosophers; poets and the people who make use of their works; those to whom hiera or hosia appeal that are worth seeing or hearing. Besides, where will those who want to buy or sell many things quickly meet with better success in their eforts than at Athens?66

These hiera and hosia adorning the city can actually be seen; indeed, they are worth both seeing and hearing. In this passage, hiera are probably temples with their votives and other buildings of the gods, including the theater of Dionysos. Considering that hosieˉ includes the rules of participation in cult and that hosios money irst and foremost designated money to be used for gifts to the gods, the hiera kai hosia here may refer to processions full of music and color, dramatic festivals, and other competitions in sports and music in honor of the gods. With its connotation of dikeˉ, and of the oaths taken by the dikastai to observe the laws, involving the gods in the judicial process, hosia may also refer here to the law courts and jurisdiction. In his speech against Aristocrates, Demosthenes expounds the legal regulations concerning someone guilty of unintentional homicide and exiled from the communities to which his victim had belonged. A killer, being polluted until he was ritually puriied, could not participate in any ritual (hieron) and

65

66

Isoc. 7.66: Καὶ μὲν δὴ καὶ τὰδε τίς οὐ μνημονεύει τῶν ἡλικιωτῶν τῶν εμῶν, τὴν μὲν δημοκρατίαν οὕτω κοσμήσασαν τὴν πόλιν καὶ τοῖς ἱεροὶς καὶ τοῖς ὁσίοις ὥστ’ ἔπι καί νῦν τοὺς τοὺς ἀφικνουμένουη νομίζειν αὐτἠν ἀξίαν εἶναι μὴ μόνον τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἄρχειν. … Both G. Norlin (Loeb) and the Budé edition interpret the phrase as “temples and public buildings.” There is no evidence, however, that hosia here (or anywhere else) refers in particular to (public) buildings. Hiera kai hosia as all obligations laid down in law: Lys. 30 (C. Nikom.) 25, ὃς καὶ τῶν ὁσιων καὶ τῶν ἱερῶν ἀναγραφεὺς γενόμενος εἰς ἀμφότερα ταῦτα ἡμάρτηκεν (He, who was appointed to write down the hosia and the hiera, has ofended against both). Trans. E. C. Marchant (Loeb), slightly modiied.

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was excluded from the group sharing the ritual and from the sanctuary (hieron) where the ritual took place. Regarding the unintentional killer, [the lawgiver] debars the ofender from everything in which the deceased used to have a share (meteinai) in his lifetime, irst from his fatherland (patris) and everything therein, both the hiera and the hosia, assigning the frontier market as the boundary from which he declares him excluded … and from the hiera of the Amphictyonic communities, in which he, if he was a Greek, had a share … and from the Games pertaining to the whole of Greece, in which all have a share (meteinai) and hence also the victim.67

The lawgiver is Draco, whose law seems to be quoted here partly verbatim, partly in paraphrase, and who deals in this passage with restrictions on a killer’s membership of a community (meteinai) deined by its hiera.68 According to Demosthenes, the law identiied the locations where this meteinai took place, corresponding to various groups to which the victim had belonged and the hiera they shared: irst of all, the polis of which the victim had been a member, called fatherland, and all its hiera and hosia; next, the group of people with a share in a supraregional sanctuary and collectively participating in its cult and upkeep, a type of community of which the one in charge of the Delphic oracle is the best known;69 and, inally, the Panhellenic Games, athletic competitions in honor of the god(dess) in whose sanctuary this ritual agon with sacriices and festivities was celebrated. Demosthenes mentions hosia only in connection with the polis, whereas the regional levels beyond the polis seem to be deined exclusively by hiera.70 Although we saw earlier that hosieˉ in the Hymns and in the Odyssey could refer to norms generally valid among humankind, in the fourth century the hosia seem to be a matter of each single polis. We are now reminded of the application of hosios to money and of the use of ta hosia (beside ta hiera) as the material and immaterial property of the oikos, transferred by inheritance to the next generation. This evidence suggests that ta hosia could denote, besides abstract things such as words, deeds, and thoughts 67

68

69

70

Dem. 23.40. The fatherland, with all things hiera and hosia, is also evoked by Lycurgus (Lyk., C. Leocr. 77), portraying the polis as represented by its hiera koina (5, 9). On homicide, laws, puriication, and exile also Antiph. 6 (Chor.) 3–5. IG I3 104; for text and discussion, Stroud (1968); Körner no. 11; Efenterre/Ruzé no. I, 2. Lines 27–9 on the frontier markets and participation in hiera are reconstructed with Demosthenes’ text. On Draco’s law on homicide as part of a larger code and on its application in the fourth century, Phillips (2008) with bibliography. For the ritual status of the unintentional and the justiied killer, see Parker (1983): 366–9. Athens participated in at least three amphictyonies: of Apollo at Delphi (and the connected Demeter of Anthela near Thermopylai), of Apollo at Delos, and of Poseidon at Kalaureia; see Parker (2005): 80–8; on such sanctuaries beyond Athens, Freitag et al. (2006). It is impossible to tell whether the formula already was a part of Draco’s law, as the text is severely damaged, but clearly the combination hiera kai hosia immediately came to Demosthenes’ mind when thinking of the polis.

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in accordance with hosieˉ, concrete possessions; such possesions owned privately (idia) and collectively (deˉmosia) were property of the polis and oikos to be used in a hosios way. Perhaps this is what Didymus meant to say when he observed that “to hosion is used in two ways, both to hieron and to idioˉtikon.”

Conclusion: HIERA KAI HOSIA and the

POLIS

Having explored hosios and cognates, we return to hieros, that is, what belongs to the gods given by humans in return for divine favor, and to the combination of both. Hiera kai hosia comprise the relations between human and divine from the perspective of the human community, that is, fulilling its obligations to the gods and involving the gods in relations among humans. All the actions in hiera kai hosia sustain the fundamental reciprocity among humans and of humans with the gods, creating charis among all involved. All rules regulating these relationships are included in the noun hosieˉ; the terms involved refer to those relationships as well as to the material objects involved in them. In sum, the juxtaposition of hiera and hosia acknowledges the diferences between gods and men, and between the kinds of obligations humans have toward each party, but in no way entails an opposition between their spheres of action, let alone between sacred and profane domains. Instead, I suggest that the ancient Greek perception of society can be rendered as a covenant between humans and gods, and hiera kai hosia as the synopsis of all relations of exchange and obligation between gods and men contained in this covenant from the human perspective.71 When we keep this foundational notion of the polis’s reciprocal relations with the gods in mind, we arrive at a better understanding of the concepts shaping polis membership and participation (“citizenship”). Meteinai and metechein indicate that each individual had a share in this covenant that was entered upon when the polis came into being. This covenant was made between a particular polis and the gods of the Greeks, each polis having its own covenant, beside those in common at supra-polis level. As a descendant of the polis’s “irst” members, every citizen, male and female, received a share of this particular covenant as an inheritance. This notion of an inherited share in the exchange of beneits with the gods underlies the Greek practice of deining citizenship by descent. Hiera kai hosia comprised the polis’s identity and the conditions of its very existence. Unlike the covenant described in the Hebrew Bible, which was known as such (berît) among the Jews and laid down in (divine) writing, in the Greek

71

I prefer the word “covenant” to “contract,” a type of legal agreement enforceable in court and emerging in the fourth century, cf. Carawan (2007), Carter (2007); relying on written agreements, moreover, a contract is meant to be explicit in all details, whereas hosieˉ and its cognates have moral efects while being lexible in application and content.

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polis the covenant was an implicit notion for which no explicit term existed and which was not laid down in a single divine text but found expression in a wide range of man-made regulations. Nonetheless, once we recognize the scope and signiicance of this notion, the concept and practices of the polis appear in a diferent light. Although the room for humans to negotiate with the divine was quite large in Greece – larger, so it appears, than in Israel and the ancient Near East – the conventional view of a “secular” or “rational” Greek polis compared to a theocratic Near East is untenable. The diferences between the two have more to do with distinct political systems (kingship versus oligarchy or democracy) and distinct views on the nature of the divinity and divine action, than with an alleged distinction between political societies based on recognition of divine powers and those without such a foundation. In classical Athens, we ind a widespread and profound awareness that human laws should not and cannot be at odds with divine order, and that the polis needs to observe its obligations toward the gods if any policy is to be successful. Conversely, humans who were conspicuously successful were taken to be special favorites of the gods. From the later fourth century onward, such successful humans were the Macedonian kings and their generals and successors. In the Greek world, the balance of power shifted from the poleis with their varying forms of autonomy to the overarching empires in the wake of the Macedonian conquests. While over time this regime change altered the social composition of the cities’ elites and the modes of citizens’ participation, the ideology of divine kingship was anchored in the long-standing covenant between the Greek poleis and their gods. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Hansen, M. H. (1993). “Introduction. The Polis as a Citizen-State,” in M. H. Hansen, ed., The Ancient Greek City-State: Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre, 1:7–29. Copenhagen. Hansen, M. H. (1998). Polis and City-State: An Ancient Concept and Its Modern Equivalent. Copenhagen. Hansen, M. H. (2000).“A Survey of the Use of the Word Polis in Archaic and Classical Sources,” in P. Flensted-Jensen, ed., Further Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis: 173–215. Stuttgart. Hansen, M. H., ed. (2007). The Return of the Polis: The Use and Meanings of the Word Polis in Archaic and Classical Sources. Stuttgart. Harrison, A. R. W. (1971). The Law of Athens. 2 vols. Oxford. Hinge, G. (2007). “The Authority of Truth and the Origin of Hosios and Etymos (= Skt. Satyá- and Tutumá).With an Excursus on Preconsonantal Laryngeal loss,” in H. G. Coulter, ed., Greek and Latin from an Indo-European Perspective: 145–61. Cambridge. Hölkeskamp, K.-J. (2002). “Nomos, Thesmos und Verwandtes.Vergleichende Überlegungen zur Konzeptualisierung geschriebenes Rechts im klassischen Griechenland,” in D. Cohen, ed., Demokratie, Recht und soziale Kontrolle im klassischen Athen: 115–46. Munich. Hölscher, T. (1998). Öfentliche Räume in frühen griechischen Städten. Heidelberg. Janko, R. (1982). Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction. Cambridge. Jay-Robert, G. (1999). “Essai d’interpretation du sens du substantif hosiˉe dans l’Odyssée et dans les Hymnes Homériques,” REA 101: 5–20. Jay-Robert, G. (2007). “Les hosioi de Delphes,” Euphrosyne 25: 25–45. Jay-Robert, G. (2009). Le sacré et la loi. Essai sur la notion d’hosion d’Homère à Aristote. Paris. Jeanmaire, H. (1945). “Le substantif HOSIA et sa signiication comme terme technique dans le vocabulaire religieux (1),” REG 58: 66–89. Johnson, C. (1984). “Who Is Aristotle’s Citizen?,” Phronesis 29: 73–90. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford. Lardinois, A. P. M. H. (2002). Wetenschap, literatuur en de wedstrijd tussen Homerus en Hesiodus. Nijmegen (oratie).

Lupu, E. (2005). Greek Sacred Law: A Collection of New Documents. Leiden. Mai , A. (1982). “Ta hiera kai ta hosia. Contributo alla studio della terminologia giuridico-sacrale greca,” in J. Modrzejewski and D. Liebs, eds., Symposion 1977: 33–53. Cologne. Manville, P. B. (1990). The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. Princeton. Manville, P. B. (1994). “Toward a New Paradigm of Athenian Citizenship,” in A. L. Boegehold and A. C. Scafuro, eds., Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology: 21–33. Baltimore. Mikalson, J. D. (2010). Greek Popular Religion in Greek Philosophy. Oxford. Murray, O., and S. Price, eds. (1990). The Greek City from Homer to Alexander. Oxford. Ober, J. (1996). “The Polis as Society: Aristotle, John Rawls, and the Athenian Social Contract,” in Ober, ed., The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory: 161–87. Princeton. Osborne, R. (1993). “Women and Sacriice in Classical Greece,” Classical Quarterly 43: 392–405. Ostwald, M. (1969). Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy. Oxford. Ostwald, M. (1996). “Shares and Rights: ‘Citizenship’ Greek Style and American Style,” in J. Ober and C.W. Hedrick, eds., Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies Ancient and Modern: 49–61. Princeton. Papakonstantinou, Z. (2008). Lawmaking and Adjudication in Archaic Greece. London. Parker, R. (1983). Miasma: Pollution and Puriication in Early Greek Religion. Oxford. Parker, R. (1998). “Reciprocity in Greek Religion,” in D. Gill, N. Postlethwaite, and R. Seaford, eds., Reciprocity in Ancient Greece: 105–26. Oxford. Parker, R. (2004). “What Are Sacred Laws?,” in E. Harris and L. Rubinstein, eds., The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece: 59–70. London. Parker, R. (2005). Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford. Patterson, C. (2005). “Athenian Citizenship Law,” in M. Gagarin and D. Cohen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law: 267–89. Cambridge. Pavlou, M. (2011). “Past and Present in Pindar’s Religious Poetry,” in A. P. M. H. Lardinois,

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J. H. Blok, and M. van der Poel, eds., Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion: 59–78. Leiden and Boston. Phillips, D. D. (2008). Avengers of Blood: Homicide in Athenian Law and Custom from Draco to Demosthenes. Stuttgart. Polignac, F. de. (1995). Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek State. Chicago. Pulleyn, S. (1997). Prayer in Greek Religion. Oxford. Raalaub, K. A. (1993). “Homer to Solon.The Rise of the Polis. The Written Sources,” in M. H. Hansen, ed., The Ancient Greek City State: 41–105. Copenhagen. Reden, S. von. (1995). Exchange in Ancient Greece. Oxford. Roux, G. (1976). Delphes, son oracle et ses dieux. Paris. Rudhardt, J. (1992). Notions fondamentales de la pensée religieuse et actes constitutifs du culte dans la Grèce ancienne. 2nd ed. Geneva. Rudhardt, J. (1999). Thémis et les Hoˉrai: recherche sur les divinités grecques de la justice et de la paix. Geneva. Samons, L. J., II. (2000). Empire of the Owl: Athenian Imperial Finance. Stuttgart. Sarischoulis, E. (2008). Schicksal, Götter und Handlungsfreiheit in den Epen Homers. Stuttgart. Schmidt, M. (1955–2010). “hosieˉ,” in B. Snell and H. J. Mette. eds., Lexicon des frühgriechischen Epos. Göttingen. Scullion, S. (2005). “‘Pilgrimage’ and Greek Religion: Sacred and Secular in the Pagan Polis, ” in J. Elsner and Ian Rutherford, eds., Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman & Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods: 111–30. Oxford. Shipp, G. P. (1972). Studies in the Language of Homer. Cambridge. Siewert, P. (1977). “The Ephebic Oath in FifthCentury Athens,” JHS 97: 102–11. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. (1990). “What Is Polis Religion?,” in O. Murray and S. Price, eds., The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander: 295– 322. Oxford. Staford, E. J. (1997). “Themis. Religion and Order in the Archaic Polis,” in L. G. Mitchell

37 and P. J. Rhodes, eds., The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece: 158–67. London and New York. Stroud, R. S. (1968). Drakon’s Law on Homicide. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Todd, S. C. (1993). The Shape of Athenian Law. Oxford. Van der Valk, M. H. A. L. H. (1941). “Zum Worte HOSIOS,” Mnemosyne 10: 113–40. Van der Valk, M. H. A. L. H. (1951). “Quelques remarques sur le sens du nom ‘hosia,’” REG 64: 417–22. Versnel, H. S. (1970). Triumphus:An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the Roman Triumph. Leiden, New York, and Cologne. Versnel, H. S. (1981). “Religious Mentality in Ancient Prayer,” in H. S. Versnel, ed., Faith, Hope and Worship: Studies in Greek and Roman Religion: 1–64. Leiden, New York, and Cologne. Versnel, H. S. (1990). “Beyond Cursing,” in C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink, eds., Magika hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion: 60–106. New York. Versnel, H. S. (2011). Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology. Leiden and Boston. Wagenvoort, H. (1980). “Pietas” [1924], in Wagenvoort, Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion: 1–20. Leiden, New York, and Cologne. Walter, U. (1993). An der Polis teilhaben. Bürgerstaat und Zugehörigkeit im archaischen Griechenland. Stuttgart. Wijma, S. M. (2010). “Joining the Athenian Community: The Participation of Metics in Athenian Polis Religion in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.” Diss. Utrecht. Willi, A. (2008). “Nosos and hosieˉ: Etymological and Sociocultural Observations on the Concept of Disease and Divine (Dis)favour in Ancient Greece,” JHS 128: 153–71. Yunis, H. (1988). A New Creed: Fundamental Religious Beliefs in the Athenian Polis and Euripidean Drama. Meisenheim.

TWO

HELLENISTIC IMPERIALISM AND THE IDEAL OF WORLD UNITY Rolf Strootman

Introduction In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the rulers of the Christian Romano-Byzantine Empire and Islamic Arab empires cherished the ideal of a united world under one god and one ruler. Pagan imperialist ideology profoundly inluenced the evolution of this imperialist ideal of the world as a unity. The conception of the whole (civilized) world as a single empire was continually propagated by Middle Eastern monarchies from the third millennium BCE.1 Undoubtedly it appealed to some common belief. People living in the Achaemenid, Seleucid, or Sasanian Middle East adhered to a certain kind of belief in a legitimate Great King whose existence was in some way connected with the divinely ordained order of the world. The presence of a world ruler at the center of civilization was believed to be an essential condition for peace, order, and prosperity. Essentially a religious concept already in pagan times, the ideal of world unity became extremely forceful when imperialism and monotheism joined hands. After Constantine, the Roman imperator, Byzantine basileus, or Arab caliph could claim to be the exclusive earthly representative of a sole universal deity. Thus, what had formerly been a somewhat indeinite distinction 1

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All dates are BCE unless otherwise stated.

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between a civilized, ordered world and a chaotic, barbaric periphery now became a clear-cut dualism of believers and unbelievers. Universalistic pretensions are a deining aspect of premodern tributary empires from China to the Americas.2 This chapter focuses on universalistic ideology in the Macedonian empires of the Hellenistic age. In the context of this volume, the signiicance of the Hellenistic empires lies in their intermediate position, in both time and space, between the ancient Near East and the Roman Mediterranean.The Macedonian rulers of the Hellenistic Age adopted and transformed the age-old traditions of empire of the Ancient Near East to create their own ideologies of empire. Alexander the Great and his principal successors, the Seleucids and Ptolemies,“Hellenized” Eastern universalistic pretensions; they did so for the sake of their Greek subjects, on whose loyalty and cooperation their power for a large part rested.3 By converting Near Eastern royal ideology into Greek forms, adding Greek notions of belonging and unity, and actively encouraging current universalistic tendencies among the Greeks – Panhellenism,4 Stoic philosophy,5 religious syncretism – what was previously looked upon by the Greeks as oriental despotism became an intrinsic part of Hellenic polis culture. Macedonian imperialism thus shaped the ways in which the Greek and Hellenized poleis of the eastern Mediterranean later conceptualized and formalized their relationships with imperial authority under the Roman Empire. Conversely, the Hellenized variant of an empire characterized by an ideal of universal dominion provided the Roman Empire with an acceptable model for imperial uniication in a world characterized by a multitude of city-states.To be sure, Hellenistic universalism not only endured in the Roman Mediterranean; it was also transmitted to the Parthian and Sasanian empires and ultimately to the empires of early Islam.

The Ancient Near East When Alexander the Great replaced Darius III as ruler of the East in 330, he became heir to a more than thousand-year-old belief in universal kingship. We can trace the development of this tradition back to the early second 2

3 4

5

For the similarities and diferences between preindustrial empires consult Sinopoli (1994): 159, who deines empire as “politically expansive polities, composed of a diversity of localized communities and ethnic groups.” I return to the theme of empire later in this chapter. For a comparable view, see Lehmann (1998). Already in the classical period, the Panhellenic sentiment served as a useful tool of propaganda for the hegemonial or imperial rule of one polis over other Greek states; cf. Perlman (1976). In the Hellenistic age, ethnic and cultural diferences between the Greeks were ironed out, especially in cities outside the Greek mainland. In particular, the views about the unity of the world of Zeno, the founding father of Stoicism and a philos of Demtrius Poliorcetes (he wrote a treatise on kingship and educated Demetrius’s son Antigonus), correspond closely to the monarchical image of the world as empire; cf. Baldry (1959); I could not consult Baldry (2009).

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millennium, when Mesopotamian kings claimed universal hegemony even when in reality they were not the most powerful rulers.6 An early instance is the self-praise of the Sumerian king Shulgi (ca. 2029–1982), the second ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur, who calls himself “king of the four corners of the Universe, herdsman, shepherd of the blackheads, the trustworthy, the god of all the lands.”7 In what Mario Liverani has called the “siege complex,” Mesopotamian royal propaganda divided the world into a civilized, peaceful core surrounded by a barbaric periphery whose inhabitants are dangerous, aggressive, and wicked.8 In this simple matrix of human civilization versus barbaric disorder, the entire civilized world is conceived of as an empire protected from the surrounding forces of Chaos by a benevolent Great King who is himself protected by the gods.9 In a lengthy epic poem celebrating Assyrian victory against the Babylonians, Tukulti-ninurta I (1244–1208 or 1233–1197) is lauded as “he who [rules] the extremities of the four winds; all kings without exception live in dread of him.”10 Rival kings are routinely marginalized. They are either rebels or unruly vassals – never equals. Babylonian, Assyrian, or Egyptian kings are presented as the rulers of boundless empires in their own propaganda, expressed by such titles as Great King, King of Totality, King of the Four Corners (of the World), King of Lands, King of Peoples, or King from the Low Sea to the High Sea (i.e., from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean coast). Along with such titles, royal titulature sometimes comprised titles stressing the ethnicity of the king, thus singling out speciic peoples – Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians – as beneiting speciically from the royally and divinely ordained world order. This ideology may be exempliied by a longer quotation from an inscription celebrating the victories of the Assyrian Adad-nirari I (1307–1275 or 1295– 1264) against the Anatolian kingdom of Mitanni: Adad-nirari, king of the universe, strong king, king of Assyria, son of Assyria, son of Enlil-nirari, also king of Assyria. When Shattuara, king of the land Hanigalbat, rebelled against me and committed hostilities; by the command of Ashur, my lord and ally, and of the great gods who decide in my favor, I seized him and brought him to my city Ashur. I made him take an oath and then allowed him to return to his land. Annually, as long 6

7 8 9 10

See Liverani (1990), who shows how monarchies in the Near East of the second millennium – when political power in the East was divided up among several competing empires – employed strategies to deal with the inconsistency of claims to world power on the one hand and the recognition of the existence of other monarchies on the other hand, two conlicting realities that were kept radically apart as separate cognitive realities. Barton (1918): 52; cf. Klein (1981): 50–123. Liverani (1981). Liverani (1979); Stadnikow (1995); Holloway (2002). W. G. Lambert in Archiv für Orientforschung 18 (1957–8): 48–9, cited from Kuhrt (1995): 1:356; cf. Machinist (1976).

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as he lived, I regularly received his tribute within my city, Ashur. After his death, Wasashatta, his son, revolted, rebelled against me, and committed hostilities. He went to the land Hatti for aid. The Hittites took his bribe but did not render him assistance. With the strong weapons of the god Ashur, my lord, with the support of the gods An, Enlil and Ea, Sin, Shamash, Adad, Ishtar, and Nergal, most powerful among the gods, the awesome gods, my lords, I captured by conquest the city Taidu, his great royal city.11

Battle accounts in the Assyrian royal inscriptions present enemy forces always as numberless. Because of their inherent cowardice, rebel kings dare not ight alone. They call upon other states for help but must ofer them material goods in return for military assistance – a sign of their allies’ moral inferiority. Yet they are doomed because the Assyrian king alone is favored by the gods who grant him victory, even when surrounded by an overwhelming number of enemies.12 In the second millennium, universalistic claims in royal ideology normally did not coincide with actual political realities. Military campaigns were raids rather than real attempts at permanent territorial expansion, and in international diplomacy kings treated each other as equals, as the Amarna letters reveal. A change occurred when a new style of empire developed in the NeoAssyrian kingdom. Neo-Assyrian imperialism aimed at the actual conquest and control of as large a territory as possible.The Assyrians set the example for all succeeding empires in the Near East.13 As Paul-Alain Beaulieu notes, The history of Assyria was not only the history of the growth of an empire, but also the history of the growth of an imperial idea. Although the Assyrian Empire eventually collapsed, … the structure it had created ultimately survived because there was no serious attempt at returning to the previous state of political fragmentation. Assyria’s enduring contribution was to create the irreversible fact of empire and to inculcate it so deeply in the political culture of the Near East that no alternative model could successfully challenge it, in fact almost up to the modern era.14

For the Neo-Assyrian kings, going to war was more than a moral obligation – it was a divinely ordained commandment.15 Universalistic ideology required of kings that they always try to expand their realm in actuality.16 The yearly campaigns conducted by Neo-Assyrian kings were military as well as 11

12 13 14 15 16

A. K. Grayson, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden 1972/6), Kuhrt (1995): 1:353. Liverani (1981). Postgate (1992): 247; cf. Larsen (1979). Beaulieu (2004): 49. Kuhrt (1995): II:511. For diferent forms of Assyrian control, see Liverani (1988).

LXXVI,

3, cited after

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ritual acts, and claims to world power now became connected with real conquest. A relief from Nineveh showing King Sennacherib (705–681) at prayer is accompanied by an inscription in which the king boasts that “trusting in the great might of the gods, I led my armies from one end of the earth to the other and brought in submission at my feet all kings … of the four quarters [of the earth], and they accepted my rule.”17 The extent of a king’s military reach was demarcated both at the edge of empire and in the center. At the imperial frontiers steles, altars, or statues were set up in places like coastlines and mountain ranges, places that could be perceived as the extremities of the earth (Plate I). In an inscription of Shalmaneser III, the king boasts to have concluded a campaign in Syria successfully by constructing a statue of himself “at the source of the river Saluara, at the foot of the Amanus Mountains,” and to have erected a statue of himself and made oferings at the Mediterranean coast, after having “washed my weapons in the Great Sea” (i.e., to have established peace).18 The second mechanism was what has been called “the symbolic attainment of the world [border]”: the accumulation of images, objects, lora, fauna, and even human beings in the imperial center.19 The Persian Achaemenids, too, presented themselves as rulers of a world empire. The reliefs with tribute bearers at the Great Apadana of Persepolis are quite illustrative in this respect (Plate II): the imperial iconography and eclectic style of the palace reliefs made Persepolis a palais des nations, the tangible expression of an ideology of commonwealth under a benevolent Great King: “a cosmos in the real sense of the word: ordered beauty and beautiful order.”20 The trilingual Foundation Charter of Darius’s new residence at Susa speciies sixteen groups of peoples that contributed to the palace’s construction by providing materials and skilled labor.21 Part of the vast multicultural army reviewed by Xerxes near Doriskos in Thrace when he invaded Greece in 480 (Herodotus 7.60–99) may in actuality have consisted of small token contingents brought along for mere ceremonial purposes, as Briant suggested; their participation in parades showed the extent and “ininite diversity” of Xerxes’ empire,22 comparable with the inventory of subject peoples in the Behistun Inscription where in line 6 Darius I – ”the Great King, King of Kings, King of Countries” (line 1) – proclaims:

17 18 19 20

21 22

Museum of the Ancient Near East, Istanbul, inv. no. 1. ANET 277. Liverani (1979). Nylander (1979): 356; cf. Postgate (1992): 261. For Achaemenid imperial iconography, see Cool Root (1979). Briant (2002): 168, cf. 171–2. Briant (1999): 116–20; indeed, none of the exotically outitted Ethiopians, Chaldaeans, Libyans, Outians, Pactyans, Paricanians, etc. later participated in the actual ighting at Thermopylai and Plataiai, which was done almost exclusively by Iranians.

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These are the countries which are subject unto me, and by the grace of Ahuramazda I became king of them: Persia, Elam, Babylonia, Assyria, Arabia, Egypt, the countries by the Sea, Lydia, the Greeks, Media, Armenia, Kappadokia, Parthia, Drangiana, Aria, Chorasmia, Bactria, Sogdia, Gandhara, Skythia, Sattagydia, Arachosia, and Maka; twenty-three lands in all.

The principal titles of the Persian emperors were Great King and King of Kings. There seems not to have been any formal diference between the two titles, which were sometimes combined. Probably they existed alongside each other simply because they had diferent origins: vazka šah ‘great king’ was the Middle Persian equivalent of the common Babylonian title lugal galú, whereas the Middle Persian šaˉhaˉn šah ‘king of kings’ presumably was borrowed from Urartu.23 The titles could be extended with Mesopotamian designations pertaining to the same, such as King of Lands, King of the Four Corners [of the Earth], or King of Peoples.

The Hellenistic Empires In the summer of 331, on the eve of the Battle of Gaugamela, the Persian Great King Darius III sent an embassy to Alexander to negotiate peace.24 The envoys ofered Alexander all the territory to the west of the Euphrates, an enormous amount of silver bullion, and the hand of Darius’s eldest daughter. Alexander declined the ofer. Just as the universe (kosmos) will not hold together when there are two suns, he said, the inhabited world (oikoumeneˉ ) cannot be ruled by two kings; he bade the envoys to tell Darius that battle would decide “which of them would have sole and universal rule.”25 Some thirty years later, when the Wars of the Successors raged, it is said that King Demetrius Poliorcetes – whom the Athenians once honored with a painting of the king standing upon the oikoumeneˉ 26 – used to scorn people who gave the title of king to anyone but his father, Antigonus Monophthalmus, and himself. His friends thereupon drank toasts to Demetrius the king, Seleucus the commander of the elephants, Ptolemy the admiral, Lysimachus the treasurer, and Agathocles the governor of the island of Sicily27 – as if his royal rivals were no real monarchs but oicials in the service of the one and only Great King. 23 24

25 26 27

Wiesehöfer (1996); cf. Griiths (1953). Arr., Anab. 11.25; Diod. 17.54.1–5; Plut., Alex. 29.7–8; Curt. 4.11.1–22; Just. 11.12.9–15. Arrian dates the embassy (erroneously) to the siege of Tyre in 332; cf. Bosworth (1980): 228–9. Diod. 17.54.5; the metaphor of the two suns is also given by Just. 11.12.15. Ath. 535–6. Plut., Demetr. 25.4. Plutarch adds that Lysimachos was the most ofended because the oice of treasurer was commonly given to eunuchs.

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Universality is not a well-known aspect of Hellenistic ideology. Modern scholarship usually describes the world of the Macedonian empires in terms of a balance of power.28 Both Alexander’s and Demetrius’s universalism are therefore commonly believed to be exceptional – the irst an illustration of Alexander’s idiosyncratic pothos, the second evidence for Antigonus’s and Demetrius’s overambitious plans to reunite Alexander’s empire as opposed to the other Diadochs’ more limited aspirations. But as far as the Hellenistic kings themselves were concerned, there was no such thing as a balance of power.The perception of the oikoumeneˉ as an empire, united under the rule of a single great king, was a core element in the ideologies of Ptolemies and Seleucids, precisely as it had been characteristic of the ideologies of the preceding Egyptian and Near Eastern monarchies for many centuries.29 In other words, the two episodes just paraphrased, rather than being anomalous, are typical for the imperial ideology that Hellenistic kings – “men to whose rapacity neither sea nor mountain nor uninhabitable desert sets a limit” to use Plutarch’s words30 – promulgated and lived by. The adoption of oriental universalistic ideology and propaganda by the Macedonians took place under Alexander the Great. Alexander out of necessity had to create means to pacify and unite his newly conquered empire. He needed to position himself vis-à-vis various nations and polities. He had to relate himself to the preceding Achaemenid Empire and its Iranian imperial elite. He transformed both his kingship and his court to it his new status, against strong opposition from the members of the most powerful Macedonian noble families, who understood, with good reason, that Alexander’s increasingly autocratic style was a threat to their own power. Alexander, conversely, saw the Macedonian nobility as a threat to his ambitions, and with equally good reason. The resulting conlicts are well known: the proskyneˉsis afair, the pages conspiracy, the violent deaths of Alexander the Lynkestian, Philotas, Parmenion, and Cleitus the Black.31 Alexander was ultimately victorious in

28

29

30

31

E.g., Müller (1973);Will (1984): 38; Shipley (1993); Bosworth (2006): 12–13. Proverbial exceptions to the rule are Ager (2003): 49–50 and Adams (2006): 49. Interestingly, if we look more carefully at Darius’s ofer to Alexander, it becomes clear that the Great King himself likewise found it inappropriate for the world to be ruled by two kings; the ofer to marry his daughter unmistakably entailed a notion of hierarchy: Alexander, as Darius’s son-in-law, was ofered dominion of the western Achaemenid lands only as a viceroy. As all biographers of Alexander make notice of the peace ofer, it is usually accepted as historical fact; if not, it may relect the later Seleucid practice to transform rebellious rulers into vassals by granting them the title of king and through dynastic marriage; cf. Strootman (2011). Pyrrh. 12.2–3. Plutarch’s critical appraisal of the Diadochs’ motives is pithily expressed in the word πλεονεξία (rapacity), that is, the craving for expansion at the expense of others, a vice he attributed in particular to Pyrrhos (cf. 7.3; 9.6; 23.2; 30.3); however, just as the vanity and pomposity ascribed to Hellenistic kings by pro-Roman authors was in fact a misinterpretation of trypheˉ, so too was the greed ascribed to these kings derived from their own selfpresentation as triumphant world rulers. For a complete overview, see Müller (2003).

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this power struggle by cooperating with members of the lesser Macedonian nobility and non-Macedonians (Greeks and Iranians). What concerns us here, however, are not the conlicts at Alexander’s court but the way in which Alexander and his successors reshaped the ideology of empire, and the practical consequences of that ideology. Alexander presented himself as the legitimate successor of Darius III, whose throne he had won by right of victory. This does not mean that Alexander continued the Persian Empire, that he was the “last Achaemenid,” as it is now widely held; it means simply that he claimed to have taken over from Darius the status of world ruler. To augment the legitimacy of his takeover, Alexander married a daughter of Darius and a daughter of Artaxerxes III in 324 so that his ofspring would be the formal heirs of the title of Great King by matrilineal descent through two branches of the Achaemenid family.32 Thereafter, claims to world empire by Hellenistic kings, in particular the Seleucids and Ptolemies, found expression in royal titulature, ideological texts, public royal ritual, and visual imagery. In the following section, three aspects of Hellenistic universalism that were to endure in later ages will be discussed: the ideal of limitless empire; the concept of a golden age; and the use of cosmic, in particular solar, images as expressions of universal rule.

World Empire The lack of contemporary Persian sources makes it impossible to prove that Alexander styled himself (or was styled) Great King and King of Kings. It is hard to imagine, however, that in his dealings with the Iranian nobility Alexander would have presented himself as a lesser king than Darius had been. In the Babylonian astronomical diaries Alexander is King of the World and King of Countries.33 In his dealings with the Greeks, Alexander adopted the newly invented Hellenic title King of Asia.34 This was an adaptation of the oriental title Great King. It was carefully created not to antagonize the inhabitants of mainland Greece and Macedonia, who were excluded from its pretensions (the designation Asia however could include Egypt).35 The title King of Asia 32

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Diod. 17.107.6; Just. 12.10.9–10; Arr., Anab. 7.4.4; Curt. 10.3.12; Plut., Alex. 7.2; Mor. 329e, 338d–e. Alexander had conirmed the titles and status of the Achaemenid royal women nine years before when they were captured after the Battle of Issos. It is possible that Alexander already then tried to create dynastic continuity by marrying Darius’s wife Stateira, another daughter of Artaxerxes III, because she died in childbirth some two years after she had been captured by the Macedonians (Just. 11.12.6; Plut., Alex. 30.1–3) and Alexander is said to have mourned her excessively in public (Diod. 17.54.6; Just. 11.12.6–8; Curt. 4.21.4; Plut., Alex. 30.1–3). S-H I, no. 330; S-H I, no. 329; cf. Kuhrt (1990). Arr., Anab. 2.14.8–9; Curt. 4.1–14; Plut., Alex. 34.1. For a discussion of the title King of Asia, see Fredricksmeyer (2000); for a diferent view, see Brosius (2003): 173–6. Alexander’s epithet “The Great” may have had oriental antecedents,

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turns up again a mere seven years after Alexander’s death, when according to Diodorus the Persians accepted Antigonus Monophthalmus as King of Asia when he entered Persis in 316.36 Since Antigonus received the honor from the Persians (he was not yet a Greek basileus), and Asia was a Greek concept, this passage may mean that Antigonus was proclaimed vazka šah in Iran.37 The Seleucids, too, used the title King of Asia, and Asia became a common name for their empire in Greek sources. They were Great Kings in their cuneiform correspondence with Babylonian cities, where, in accordance with Babylonian practice, other Akkadian titles pertaining to the same could be added, for instance, in the opening lines of a cuneiform inscription of Antiochus I Soter from the Ezida temple in Borsippa, near Babylon (268): Antiochus the Great King, the Mighty King, King of the World, King of Babylon, King of Countries, caretaker of Esagila and Ezida, irst son of King Seleucus, the Macedonian, King of Babylon.38

From the reign of Antiochus III (if not earlier) the Seleucids went one step further by translating Great King directly into Greek as basileus megas.39 To be sure, in the Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Antigonid kingdoms the title basileus in itself had the connotation of emperor; basileus was mutatis mutandis the Hellenistic Greek equivalent of the Oriental title of Great King (and as such would reappear in the Byzantine Empire).40 The Hellenistic title basileus megas lived on in several successor states of the Seleucids. Post-Seleucid great kings include two rulers of Commagene and Mithridates the Great of Pontus. All of them could rightfully claim to be the direct matrilineal descendants of the Seleucids and thus to have inherited the title. Also Tigranes the Great of Armenia and Eucratides I of Bactria (ca. 170– 145) adopted the title. The latter conquered a vast empire in Central Asia and took the title at the death of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 164; he too may have claimed to have inherited the title because his grandmother presumably was

36 37 38

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but is attested (as magnum) not earlier than in Plautus, Mostellaria 775, although this passage shows that the title was then already in existence; cf. Worthington (1999): n. 3, who suggests that the title was “perhaps [irst used] during the reign of Ptolemy I, at the time that he kidnapped the funeral cortege.” Diod. 19.48.1. Cf. Bosworth (2002): 162 with n. 221; cf. Brosius (2003): 174 n. 9. ANET 317; Austin (1981): 189. For a discussion of this document, see Kuhrt and SherwinWhite (1991). The title is also given to several Seleucid kings in the Babylonian king list BM 35603 (Austin [1999]: 138); cf. Sachs and Wiseman (1954); Del Monte (1997): 208. The interconnectedness of the two titles is clear in 1 Macc. 8.6: “Antiochus [III] the Great King of Asia”; for contemporary conirmation in the epigraphic record, see Ma (2000), who suggests distinct periods (and signiicance) for the use of the titles “the Great” (megas), which Antiochus III took after his anabasis (App., Syr. 1), and “Great King” (basileus megas); cf. I.Délos 1547 and 1548, with Just. 38.10.6 (Antiochus VII). Strootman (2007): 23.

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a daughter of Seleucus II. Later Bactrian rulers followed suit.41 The Parthian kings adopted the title on their coinage after they had wrested Media and Babylonia from the Seleucids in the 140s and 130s. The crucial event presumably was the defeat and capture of Demetrius II Nicator by the Parthian king Mithridates I in the year 139; this allowed Mithridates to claim the title by right of victory, just as Alexander had done when he defeated Darius. And inally, in 34, Cleopatra VII and her son Ptolemy XV (Caesarion) were proclaimed respectively Queen of Kings and King of Kings as the matrilineal heirs of the Seleucids, claiming imperial hegemony in the East “as far as India.”42 World empire is a main theme in Hellenistic, particularly early Ptolemaic court panegyric.43 The surviving poetry of such court poets as Callimachus and Theocritus conveys a consistent image of the world as (potentially) peaceful and harmonious. Relevant in this respect is, for instance, the encomiastic passage in Callimachus’s Hymn to Delos, where it is said that Ptolemy II Philadelphus “shall rule over the Two Countries and over the lands that lie beside the sea, as far as the edge of the earth, where the swift horses always bring the sun.”44 In another Ptolemaic court poem, Theocritus’s encomium for Ptolemy Philadelphus, the king is lauded as a new brand of Homeric hero, and the poet sketches both a realistic outline of his actual empire and an image of unlimited dominance: Wealth and good fortune are his in abundance; and vast is the territory he rules, vast the sea. Countless countries and numberless tribes harvest rich crops thanks to the rains sent by Zeus. But none is as fruitful as the broad plains of Egypt, where loods of the Nile soak and soften the soil, or has so many towns full of skilled laborers. … And over all of this Ptolemy rules as king. And he also takes as his Phoenicia, Arabia, Syria, and Libya, and the dark Ethiopians; he commands all the Pamphylians, the Cilician and Lycian spearmen, and the warlike Carians; he even rules the isles of the Cyclades, for his ine ships control the seas. The whole sea and all the land and the roaring rivers are ruled by Ptolemy.45

The list of countries and peoples in this poem corresponds in part to the countries claimed by Cleopatra VII at the so-called Donations of Alexandria.46 41

42

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Coins struck in the irst century CE by a Kushan ruler identiied as Vima Taktu, the grandfather of the Kanishka, have Greek legends calling the king soˉteˉr megas, that is, “great savior” or “the savior, the great [king]”; see Frye (1996): 135. For the title in Pontus and Armenia, consult Sullivan (1990): 44 and 61. Dio Cass. 49.40.2–41.3; cf. Plut., Ant. 54.3–6. In 41 Cleopatra had celebrated her marriage with Marc Antony, in Tarsus, as a hierogamy of Dionysus and Aphrodite “for the beneit of Asia” (Plut., Ant. 26.3); cf. S´niez>ewski (1998): 134. Strootman (2007): 236–48; cf. Strootman (2010a). Call., Hymn 4, 169–70. Theocr., Id. 17.77–92. Dio Cass. 49.40.2–41.3; Plut., Ant. 54.3–6. For discussion, see Schrapel (1996); Strootman (2010b): 140–57.

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But where Philadelphus’s realm is depicted as a maritime empire, incorporating the coastal areas of the eastern Mediterranean and united by Ptolemaic sea power, Cleopatra in addition claimed Syria and Armenia “and all of the other lands east of the Euphrates as far as India,” that is, the whole land empire once ruled by the Seleucids, whose heiress she could claim to be.47 The victory stele of Ptolemy III Euergetes, a Greek inscription of circa 241, copied in the sixth century CE from a now lost original at Adulis on the Red Sea, gloriies the achievements of Ptolemy III during the Third Syrian War (246–241) in a style that combines ancient pharaonic and Greek terminology: Ptolemy the Great King, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoe the Brother-Sister Gods, children of King Ptolemy and Queen Berenice the Savior Gods, descendant on his father’s side of Heracles, the son of Zeus, and on his mother’s side of Dionysos, the son of Zeus, after inheriting from his father the kingship over Egypt, Libya, Syria, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Lycia, Caria, and the islands of the Cyclades, marched out into Asia with infantry, cavalry, a leet, and elephants from the land of the Troglodytes and from Ethiopia. … Having gained possession of the whole land on this side of the Euphrates, of Cilicia, Pamphylia, Ionia, the Hellespont,Thrace, and of all the forces in these countries and of the Indian elephants, and having made all the rulers of these lands his subjects, he crossed the river Euphrates, and subdued Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Susiana, the Persis, Media and the rest of the land as far as Bactria.48

The historicity of Ptolemy III’s conquests can be doubted, although Appian’s claim that his armies advanced as far as Babylonia (Syr. 65) have found conirmation in a newly published cuneiform document from Babylon.49 Still, Ptolemy III deinitely did not conquer the whole of Asia “as far as Bactria”; and whatever conquests he made, these were of short duration as he withdrew from Seleucid territory in 241.50 But Ptolemy was probably not at all boasting that he had really subdued so vast a territory with all of its peoples. He merely claimed that he considered the entire Seleucid empire dorikteˉtos choˉra (“spearwon land,” i.e., war booty), meaning that the whole of Asia had become his own by right of victory over its previous master, the Seleucid king – hence his self-presentation as basileus meˉgas, a title adopted by Ptolemaic kings only twice and in both instances as an expression of victory over their Seleucid rivals.51 47 48 49 50 51

Dio Cass. 49. 41.3; Strootman (2010b); cf. Bingen (2007). OGIS 54; Austin (1981): 221. BM 34428 = BCHP 11. Just. 27.1.9. The other instance is Ptolemy IV, who is proclaimed Great King on the Raphia Decree after his victorious return from war against Antiochus III in Coele Syria in 217; see Hölbl (2001): 162–4 with n. 23; cf. 81: “Ptolemaic propaganda efectively used [Egyptian] anti-Persian nationalism against the Seleucids who were, after all, the direct heirs of the Achaemenid empire.” An Egyptian variant of King of Kings (nswt nswjw) existed in Hellenistic times as a

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Seleucid universalistic ideology resonates, for example, in Appian’s account of the conquests of the dynasty’s founder, Seleucus Nicator: He conquered Mesopotamia, Armenia, Anatolia, the Persians, the Parthians, the Bactrians, the Arabs, the Tapyri, the Sogdians, the Arachosians, the Hyrcanians, and all the other peoples that had before been conquered by Alexander, as far as the river Indus.52

As far as India – As far as Bactria – As far as Ethiopia. These are standard claims, meaning no less than “as far as the ends of the (civilized) earth.” The idea that the aim of conquest is to reach a inal frontier had already been a pivotal element in the propaganda of Alexander. The Macedonian conqueror ordered altars to be set up in India on the banks of the Beas, the river where the gods forbade him to go farther, and regularly ofered sacriice at the extremities of his empire: at the Danube in 335, at the Jaxartes in 329, and at the Hydaspes in 326.53 It is all very similar to the Assyrian kings’ routine of erecting statues and steles at the seashore and in the mountains. Indeed, Alexander’s celebrated pothos, in particular his determination to reach the limits of the known world, stood in an age-old tradition. This tradition did not die out with him either. Decades after his death, in the 280s, the Seleucid general Demodamas of Miletus crossed the river Jaxartes (Syr Darya) into the steppe lands of Inner Asia to drive away the nomads who threatened Seleucid Central Asia. Demodamas, too, built altars there, dedicated to the Seleucid tutelary deity Apollo; he set them up at the same location where altars allegedly had been previously built by Heracles, Dionysus, Cyrus, and Alexander, whose expeditions had all ended there.54 At about the same time, another Seleucid general, Patrocles, explored the Caspian Sea. When Patrocles returned, he conidently informed his king that the Caspian was indeed a branch of Oceanus, the river encompassing the world: the newly created Seleucid Empire now stretched to the northern edge of the world, too.55 In Hellenistic royal ideology, kingship became associated with the allembracing cosmic rule of (the Stoic) Zeus. For instance, a series of coins of Antiochus VIII (121–96) bears on the reverse the image of Zeus Ouranius stretching out his right hand in a gesture of omnipotence.56 In his right hand the King of Heaven holds the sun and, in his left hand, a royal scepter; above his head the moon is depicted, and the whole picture is framed by a victory

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title for Osiris, particularly in Philai (Hölbl [2001]: 291–2), where the title is also awarded to Ptolemy XII; see Junker (1958): 214, and cf. Griiths (1953); Huss (1977); Hölbl (1992). App., Syr. 55. Danube: Arr., Anab. 1.4.5; Jaxartes: Plin., NH 6.18; Orosius 1.2.5; Hydaspes: Arr., Anab. 5.29.1– 2; Plut., Alex. 62.7–8; Curt. 9.3.19; Diod. 17.95.1–2. Plin., NH 6.49. Memnon 227a. On this gesture, see L’Orange (1953): 139–70.

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wreath. The obverse bears the portrait of Zeus’s earthly mirror image, the Seleucid emperor Antiochus (Plate III). The Seleucids put Zeus on their coins regularly from the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes onward. The Ptolemies used Zeus’s eagle as an emblem of their rule from the beginning. In the opening lines of his encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus, Theocritus says: From Zeus let us begin, Muses, and with Zeus let us end, when we make our songs, for he is preeminent among the gods. But among mortals, let Ptolemy be reckoned irst – irst and last and in between, for he is supreme among men.57

Zeus is King of Heaven, Ptolemy King of the World. In his Hymn to Zeus, Callimachus too compares the rule of Philadelphus with the rule of Zeus. There are other kings, of course, but Philadelphus is the only real king because he is Zeus’s chosen one (lines 79–90). Closely related to the dream of world empire is the almost eschatological promise of a better world, a golden age. In Hellenistic imperial mythology the ruler was seen as a savior whose military prowess secured peace, justice, and prosperity. Like Dionysus (a “royal god” par excellence), the king was a harbinger of joyful tidings, bringing good fortune to the cities he enters.58 Kingship could even be connected directly with the fertility of the land, as in Theocritus’s encomium for Ptolemy Philadelphus (Idyll 17) or Callimachus’s Hymn to Delos. Popular too in this period was the theme of royal control of the forces of nature, which enjoyed a strong revival in imperial Roman panegyric.59 In other panegyric poetry the opposite of the royal order is brought to the fore: the barbaric, peripheral Others who threaten civilization but are vanquished.60 In several poems in Callimachus’s Aitia, Heracles is presented as a savior and a culture hero: like the king, Heracles defeats monsters and paciies savage peoples by introducing Greek culture to the barbaric periphery. He expands civilization, demarcating the new frontier by the establishment of altars.Theocritus’s sixteenth Idyll, an encomium for the Syracusan ruler Hieron II, emphasizes the causal connection between kingship, on the one hand, and the prosperity, peace, and harmony of the land, on the other.The poet irst describes a confused, violent world in which greed prevails over honor, war over peace, and the barbaric Carthaginians have the better of the civilized Greeks. The 57 58 59

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Theocr., Id. 17.1–4. Versnel (1970): 371–96; Strootman (2007): 289–305. Hardie (1986): 205–56. Compare, e.g., Alexander’s calming of the waves while crossing the Gulf of Pamphilia with Caesar’s calming of the Adriatic in Lucan, De bello civili 5.476–721. Cf. Weinstock (1971): 212; Fiedler (1931): 10; Kovács (2009). For Greco-Roman images of foreign peoples as subhuman savages, see Isaac (2004): 194–215.

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coming of Hieron, Theocritus prophesies, will change everything. He will defeat the Carthaginians and restore peace and order to Sicily: Grant that the original inhabitants may repossess their cities, and restore what has been destroyed by the hands of foes. May the soil be tilled again and bring forth crops, while bleating sheep in countless numbers grow fat upon the pastures. … May fallow lands be plowed again and become fertile, while the cicada, watching the shepherds in the midday sun, makes music in the foliage of the trees. May weapons rust under cobwebs and may the battle cry become a forgotten sound.61

To bring peace, war must irst be waged. Chaos has to be defeated to secure order. A common theme in royal ideology was the presentation of the king as vanquisher of barbarians. In Idyll 16 the Carthaginians are brought up as the barbaric foes, but the archetypal enemies of the Hellenistic order were the peoples known as Celts. Antigonus Gonatas used his victories over Celts to legitimize his usurpation of the Macedonian throne, and both Attalus I and (perhaps) Antiochus I styled themselves soˉteˉres after they had defeated the Asian Galatians in battle.62 A inal means by which the ideal of universal empire was communicated was the use of cosmic emblems in monarchical iconography, above all the sun, the symbol of almighty and eternal power. The religious association of the king with the sun (and the moon) has a long tradition in Egypt and the Ancient Near East, but in the Hellenistic empires the sun became an emblem of kingship more profoundly than in any of the preceding monarchies (Plate IV). It found expression, too, in the use of sun rays attached to a king’s diadem, as depicted on coins and perhaps worn during ceremonial occasions.63 In the Hellenistic age the sun also became a symbol of the expectation of a new, and inal, golden age.64 Even the ostentatious display of gold, most notoriously in the famous Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus recorded by Callixeinus of Rhodes,65 had solar connotations, as the association of gold with the sun was common in many Near Eastern cultures, including Greece.66 In the Ithyphallic 61 62 63

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Theocr., Id. 16.88–97. Strobel (1994); Barbantani (2001); Strootman (2005). Kingship as relection of the sun in the Near East: Eisler (1910); Goodenough (1928): 78–83; L’Orange (1953); Calmeyer (1989); Nagel and Jacobs (1989); S´niez>ewski (1998). For radiant crowns, see Bergmann (1998). Grant (1972): 171–5; cf. S´niez>ewski (1998): 135–8. The sun appears on Seleucid drachms and tetradrachms from the reign of Antiochus IV, when he took the epithet of (Theos) Epiphanes in 173/2, sometimes in combination with an image of the sun god Apollo but never in combination with a portrait of the king wearing a radiant diadem; cf. Mittag (2006): 135–6; pace Fleischer (1991): 46. FHG III 58 = Athenaios 5.196–203. In New Kingdom Egypt, the golden jewelry and regalia worn by the pharaoh – who was not without reason called the Golden One or the Mountain of Gold That Brightens All The Lands – symbolized his status as the son of Re, the sun god; the hieroglyph for “gold” was a

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Hymn of Hermocles with which the Athenians hailed Demetrius Poliorcetes as a god incarnate in 291/0, the king surrounded by his philoi is likened to the sun encircled by stars.67 In 2000 a bronze shield decorated with the image of a large sun with twelve rays surrounded by stars was uncovered in the Macedonian sanctuary of Dion; according to the votive inscription on the shield, it had been dedicated by Demetrius Poliorcetes.68 Demetrius’s father, Antigonus Monophthalmus, was gloriied as “the ofspring of the sun” in a poem by Hermodotus,69 just as Seleucid propaganda maintained that Seleucus Nicator was the son of Apollo. The so-called Star of Vergina as a monarchical emblem is a case in point, too.70

Hellenism and Empire Expressions and images of the universalistic ideal varied. It is easy enough to notice diachronic developments and mutual inluences. One empire might copy universalistic imagery from a predecessor or rival, adapt and develop it, and transmit it to another. As I have argued, the Hellenistic empires, particularly Ptolemaic and Seleucid ones, were notable for their role as transmitters of a Hellenized variant of Eastern imperial ideology to the West, to Rome, while preserving and further developing the Eastern tradition of empire in the East itself. But the claim to universality as such is typical of empire in general.71 Continuity alone ofers no satisfactory explanation for the persistence of universalistic ideology in the Macedonian, Parthian, Sasanian, Roman, Byzantine, and Arab empires. Considering that political ideology is normally entwined

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beaded necklace, augmented by a falcon or a solar disk to signify “Golden Horus” or “Gold Sun”; cf. Muller and Thiem (1999): 60. Douris FGrH 76 F13 = Ath. 6.253b–f; cf. Demochares FGrH 75 F2. A similar image appears in Hor., Sat. 1.7.24, where Brutus is called the “Sun of Asia” (Sol Asiae) and his companions are compared to stellae salubres, “propitious stars” (I owe this reference to H. S.Versnel). Relevant too is Cass. Dio 63.4–6: the emperor Nero gives the diadem of the kingdom of Armenia to the Parthian prince Tiridates in the manner of a true Great King, having the power “to take away kingdoms and to bestow them” (63.5.3); in the ensuing inaugural celebrations (taking place, in Hellenistic fashion, in a theater), “the stage … had been gilded, and all the properties that were brought in had been adorned with gold, so that people gave to the day itself the epithet of ‘golden’”; on the drapery above the stage was an embroidered image of Nero as the Sun “with shining stars all around him” (63.6.1–2). Pantermales et al. (2000): xviii–xxii; I am grateful to Olga Palagia for this reference. Plut., Mor. 182c. The Star of Vergina is of course not a star but a sun – a similar sun still decorates Antigonid infantry shields on the victory monument of Aemilius Paullus in Delphi; it can also be seen on the captured Seleucid shields depicted on the friezes of the Athena precinct in Pergamon; see Liampi (1998) for further examples. Cf. Bosbach (1985); for a plethora of instances in the ancient world, see L’Orange (1953) and Eisler (1910).

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with real political circumstances, and often dictated by culture and public expectations rather than willfully created, we must also ask why empires developed this notion, which apparently was an essential element of empire as a state form. Premodern empires such as the Achaemenid and Seleucid states are by deinition large, culturally and politically heterogeneous polities. They are “world powers.”72 In a review article from 1994, Carla Sinopoli showed that deinitions in modern studies concerning diverse periods and cultures have in common a view of premodern empires as “territorially expansive and incorporative, involving relationships in which one state exercises control over other sociopolitical entities, [which] typically retain some degree of autonomy.”73 According to a more recent deinition, “empire” means rule over extensive, far-lung territories, far beyond the original “homeland” of the rulers. … But it carried also two further connotations. One was of absolute sovereignty, acknowledging no overlord or rival claimant to power. … The other was an aspiration to universality. … Empires must by deinition be big, and they must be composite entities, formed out of previously separate units. Diversity – ethnic, national, cultural, often religious – is their essence.74

Claims to universal power arise from the way empire works. Empires by definition come into existence through conquest, and conquest is seldom a single event. Internal rebellions and attacks from the outside, and most of all competition with rival expansionist states, force the empire to continuous 72

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Chua (2009) distinguishes superpowers – genuine great powers such as empires like the Assyrian and Seleucid empires, Republican Rome, Austria-Hungary, and the Soviet Union – from hyperpowers, the more rare phenomenon of world-dominant states without any serious rival, e.g., the Achaemenid Empire, imperial Rome, the Ummayad Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire in its heyday, and the United States (for which the term was coined in 1999 by France’s foreign minister Hubert Vedrine) in the past decades; Chua, too, acknowledges that cultural pluralism is the essence of empires, though her central thesis that imperial success depends on the degree of “tolerance” practiced by empires is perhaps somewhat anachronistic. Sinopoli (1994): 160; most authors discussed by Sinopoli share a conception of “various kinds of empires distinguished by difering degrees of political and/or economic control, viewed either as discrete types or as variations along a continuum from weakly integrated to more highly centralized polities” (160). The kind of empire that was typical for the Ancient Near East has been variously described as “patrimonial” by Eisenstadt (1963), as “hegemonic” by Luttwak (1976), and as “empire of domination” by Mann (1986). For more recent comparative approaches, see Alcock et al. (2001); Bang and Bayly (2003); Münkler (2005); Hurlet (2008); Morris and Scheidel (2009); Duindam, Kunt, and Artan (2011). Howe (2002): 13 and 15; Pagden (2001): 7–11, too, deines an empire as a large sovereign state that is relentlessly expansive, embraces a wide variety of diferent customs and beliefs, and peoples who practice a vast array of languages; for more deinition, pertaining to the same, see Morrison (2001), esp. 5–6; (premodern) territorial empires should be distinguished of course from the overseas colonialism of modern Western European powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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campaigning. The Hellenistic empires were notoriously warlike.75 They were in essence tribute-taking military organizations whose rulers were burdened with the obligation to pursue territorial expansion and military glory: “The engine of imperial conquest, once started, may be diicult to turn of especially as systems of economic and social rewards and privileges become associated with expansion and with military success.”76 In the ancient world, imperial control of territory, though in some places intensive, was predominantly of the hegemonic type. Hegemonic rule implies recognition by local rulers or oligarchic elite groups of the overlordship of the imperial sovereign, with personal ties established by marriage or other connections, and cemented by the exchange of gifts and honors.77 A Great King (or King of Kings) is basically someone who can legitimately assign royal status to others. Imperial armies provide the security that the subjects need in order to produce the surplus that supports the imperial military system.The titles Great King and King of Kings are thus realistic expressions of actual political and diplomatic relations. The ideal of world unity is the basic notion that holds empires together. Many empires collapse after the initial conquest phase.78 For empires to endure, conquered territories must somehow be incorporated into the empire’s political, economic, and ideological domain. Military force alone will not do: “Territorial expansion, through conquest and incorporation, is the deining process in the creation of the geographic and demographic space of empire.”79 An essential component of the incorporation process is the creation by all empires of “an overarching political identity capable of holding their ethnically and religiously diverse subjects together.”80 Of course, it would be rash (and perhaps anachronistic) to think of a supranational ideology of imperial rule in terms of “tolerance.” In the Hellenistic empires, “Hellenism” was instrumental in creating cohesion. Hellenistic kings of course did not deliberately try to Hellenize their realms. 75

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Gehrke (1982); Austin (1986); and Austin (1999). With the aid of realist theory from modern international relations studies, Eckstein (2007) explains the ruthless “multipolar anarchy” that characterized the Hellenistic world as the result of the absence of a single predominant state to impose order, so that all states were compelled to ight desperately for their survival. Sinopoli (1994): 163; cf. Münkler (2005), showing that empires throughout history aimed necessarily at obtaining world power, compelling “imperial agents” to follow basic patterns of behavior with extremely limited options. Frye (1996): 80, following Vogelsang (1992): 304–15. Imperial collapse often takes place in the irst or second generation of rulers after the death of the empire’s charismatic founder, e.g., the Ch’in Empire in China (230–206), the NeoBabylonian Empire (625–539), the Inca Empire, the Mongol Empire, and, perhaps the most notorious case in point, the Timurid Empire of the late fourteenth to early ifteenth century CE. Sinopoli (1994): 162 (emphasis added). Chua (2009): xxix.

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They were inclined to adapt themselves to local customs rather than to impose an alien form of monarchy on their subjects.81 Thus, the same Seleucid basileus could be a Babylonian lugal in Babylon, a pious Israelite king in Jerusalem, and the “benefactor and savior” of a Hellenic polis. The Ptolemies likewise practiced a policy of pluralism.They were pharaohs in Egypt but not in Alexandria, Tyre, or Athens. However, Hellenistic kings did favor Hellenic culture by consistently patronizing at their courts Greek poets and scholars whose work was deliberately concerned with “Greekness” and the Greek cultural heritage, as we can see particularly clearly at the early Ptolemaic court.82 In part through the xenia networks of the king’s friends, imperial elite culture spread from the royal courts to patrician families in the cities and became the high culture of empire, tying together members of various local elites and binding them to the political center. This can be seen most clearly in Seleucid Babylonia and Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, the infamous Hellenizers in 2 Maccabees were in fact those elite members who had risen to predominance within the Judean state by gaining royal protection and support.83 They had become part of the Seleucid imperial order and hence adopted a double, Judean-Greek, identity, including the adoption of Greek names alongside their Aramaic names.84 This expressed their loyalty to the crown and connected them with both the court and local elites elsewhere in the empire; it also distanced them from their rivals and inferiors at home. Their less fortunate opponents within the Judean aristocracy, who had in the past beneited from Ptolemaic rule (and who for all we know may have cultivated a Greco-Judean Ptolemaic imperial identity), typically embraced a converse “traditionalist” self-presentation; this is true notably of the Maccabean priestly dynasty.85 In Babylon, ethnic Babylonians likewise assumed double names and an imperial identity.86 They were members of the oicial body of Babylonian “Greek” citizens, or politai, who are well attested from the early second century onward in cuneiform documents, written in Akkadian; the politai of Babylon were represented by an oicial epistateˉs and established a palaistra, a gymnasion, and a theater.87 A body of Hellenized politai

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82 83 84 85 86 87

Cf. Herz (1996), who analyzes Ptolemaic and Seleucid self-presentation in various cultural contexts, and Koenen (1993), showing how the Ptolemies responded variously to the varying expectations of Egyptians and Greeks in Egypt. Strootman (2010a). 2 Macc. 4.1–20; cf. 1 Macc. 1.43 and Dan. 11.39. Strootman (2006). Strootman (2006). For the phenomenon in general, see Stern (2003). Van der Spek (2006): 393–408, stressing that (multiple) identity is situational; cf. Hall (2005). Hauser (1999); Boiy (2004): 208; van der Spek (2001); and van der Spek (2005). In cuneiform Akkadian, the Greek word politai is transcribed as pu-li-te-e or pu-li-ta-nu; the epistateˉs is indicated by the Babylonian word paˉhaˉtu (van der Spek [2005]: 204); a cuneiform chronicle dated to October 163 (BCHP 14) perhaps mentions a bouleˉ in relation to the politai (BCHP 205).

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is attested, too, for Seleucid Jerusalem in this period.88 It too could establish a gymnasion for the training of its “ephebes.”89 The crucial point is this: rather than becoming Greek (or semi-Greek), Hellenized non-Greeks like the Babylonian priest Marduk-eriba, who was also called Heliodorus,90 or the Judean high priest Joshua, who was also known as Jason, were becoming “Seleucid.” Thus the empire was united at its highest level as a commonwealth of elites. Religious syncretism enhanced this notion of imperial commonalty. The adaptation by Hellenistic rulers of their self-presentation to variegated local demands, manifest irst of all in their reverence for the speciic tutelary deities of cities, facilitated the gradual equalization of gods like Zeus, Marduk, Ba’al, and Yahweh. This went hand in hand with royal patronage of local and regional sanctuaries. Typically, the Seleucids patronized sanctuaries sacred to Zeus, the almighty king of heaven, and to Apollo and Artemis, the gods who were directly associated with the king and queen, or to these three gods’ nonGreek counterparts.91 The Ptolemies favored in Egypt notably Isis and Osiris, the provincial pendants of their principal royal gods Aphrodite and Dionysus.

Conclusion Elite integration in the Hellenistic empires was the result of political, cultural, and religious factors working together to create a sense of imperial commonwealth.The umbrella ideology was the ideal of world unity.This followed from the empires’ nature as expansionist states based on conquest. It was also their heritage – a heritage from which they could not deviate. Moreover, it worked. It was a successful idea. Although the Hellenistic dynasties disappeared, and the East thereafter became for a long time divided between two imperial worlds – a Roman Levant versus an inland empire dominated by Iranian rulers – the notion of a world empire united by a single king of kings endured in both worlds. Already in the Late Roman Republic, Roman warlords had experimented with Hellenistic concepts of kingship and empire, not only to forge a form for their own personal power, but especially to create a modus operandi for Roman rule in the East after the demise of the Seleucids, and already in the age of Augustus the Roman Empire had become a divinely ordained,

88 89 90 91

2 Macc. 4.9–10. 2 Macc. 4.12. CT 49, 138; cf. Boiy (2004): 290; cited from van der Spek (2005): 208. Notable loci of Seleucid religious patronage were the Greek Apollo sanctuary of Didyma in Ionia, the Letoon of Xanthos in Lycia (Leto, Apollo, and Artemis), the sanctuary of “Zeus” at Olba in Rough Cilicia, the precinct of Apollo and Artemis at Daphne near Antioch, the sanctuary of Artemis-Atargatis at Hierapolis-Bambyke, and the important temple of the Phoenician god Zeus Baetocaece opposite the island city of Arpad (Arados).

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Hellenistic-style imperium sine ine over the entire orbis terrarum.92 The emperors of the Principate subsequently operated in the East as “great kings,” appointing and dismissing kings in principalities such as Judea, Commagene, and Armenia. Beyond the Euphrates, the Parthian rulers had appropriated the status of Great King as well, in time transmitting the ideal of world empire to their successors, the Sasanians.93 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbreviations ANET J. B. Pritchard, ed. (1969). Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3rd ed. Princeton. BCHP R. J. van der Spek and I. L. Finkel. Babylonian Chronicles of the Hellenistic Period (preliminary online at www.livius.org). BM British Museum. CT D. Kennedy, ed. (1968). Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum. London. I.Délos F. Dürrbach, ed. (1923–37). Inscriptions de Délos. Paris. OGIS W. Dittenberger, ed. (1903–5). Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae. Leipzig. S-H A. J. Sachs and H. Hunger, eds. 1988, 1989, 1996). Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia. 3 vols.Vienna. Adams,W. L. (2006).“The Hellenistic Kingdoms,” in G. R. Bugh, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World: 28–51. Cambridge. Ager, S. L. (2003).“An Uneasy Balance: From the Death of Seleukos to the Battle of Raphia,” in A. Erskine, ed., A Companion to the Hellenistic World: 35–50. Oxford. al-Azmeh, A. (2001). Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities. 2nd ed. London and New York.

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Alcock, S., et al., eds. (2001). Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. Cambridge. Austin, M. M. (1981). The Hellenistic World from Alexander to the Roman Conquest: A Selection of Ancient Sources in Translation. Cambridge. Austin, M. M. (1986). “Hellenistic Kings,War, and the Economy,” Classical Quarterly 36: 450–66. Austin, M. M. (1999). “Krieg und Kultur im Seleukidenreich,” in K. Brodersen, ed., Zwischen Ost und West. Studien zur Geschichte des Seleukidenreichs: 129–66. Hamburg. Baldry, H. C. (1959). “Zeno’s Ideal State,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 73: 3–15. Baldry, H. C. (2009). The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought. Cambridge. Bang, P. F., and C. A. Bayly, eds. (2003). Tributary Empires in History: Comparative Perspectives from Antiquity to the Late Medieval. London. Barbantani, S. (2001). Phatis Nikeˉphoros. Frammenti di elegia encomiastica nell’età delle Guerre Galatiche. Milan. Barton, G. A. (1918). Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions. New Haven. Beaulieu, P.-A. (2004). “World Hegemony, 900– 300 BCE,” in D. C. Snell, ed., A Companion to the Ancient Near East: 48–62. Oxford. Bergmann, M. (1998). Die Strahlen der Herrscher. Theomorphes Herrscherbild und politische Symbolik im Hellenismus und in der römischen Kaiserzeit. Mainz.

Verg., Aen. I 278–9; for the Hellenistic background of the imperial imagery in the Aeneid consult Hardie (1986): 85–156. For continuity among the Parthians, see Wiesehöfer (1996) and Fowler (2005). For Hellenistic inluences on Islamic imperialism, see al-Azmeh (2001): 3–10; for the marriage of “religious universalism with political imperialism” (Karsh [2007]: 7), see Crone and Hinds (1986), and the rather politically motivated treatment by Karsh (2007), who aims to show that “Islam has retained its imperialist ambition to this day” (7).

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Culture and Society 48. Berkeley and Los Angeles. Eisenstadt, S. N. (1963). The Political System of Empires London and New York. Eisler, R. (1910). Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt. Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes. Munich. Fiedler, W. (1931). Antikes Wetterzauber. Stuttgart. Fleischer, R. (1991). Studien zur seleukidischen Kunst. Band I: Herrscherbildnisse. Mainz. Fowler, R. (2005). “‘Most Fortunate Roots’: Tradition and Legitimacy in Parthian Royal Ideology,” in O. Hekster and R. Fowler, eds., Imaginary Kings: Royal Images in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome: 125–56. Stuttgart. Fredricksmeyer, E. A. (2000). “Alexander the Great and the Kingdom of Asia,” in A. B. Bosworth and E. J. Baynham, eds., Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction: 96–135. Oxford. Frye, R. N. (1996). The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion. Princeton. Gehrke, H.-J. (1982). “Der siegreiche König: Überlegungen zur hellenistischen Monarchie,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 64.2: 247–77. Goodenough, E. R. (1928). “The Political Philosophy of Hellenistic Kingship,” Yale Classical Studies 1: 55–102. Grant, M. (1972). Cleopatra. London. Griiths, J. G. (1953). “βασιλευς βασιλέων: Remarks on the History of a Title,” Classical Philology 48: 145–54. Hall, J. M. (2005). Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago. Hardie, P. (1986). Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford. Hauser, S. R. (1999). “Babylon in Arsakidischer Zeit,” in J. Renger, ed., Babylon: Focus mesopotamischer Geschichte, Wiege früher Gelehrsamkeit, Mythos in der Moderne: 207–39. Saarbrücken. Herz, P. (1996). “Hellenistische Könige. Zwischen griechischen Vorstellungen vom Königtum und Vorstellungen ihrer einheimischen Untertanen,” in A. Small, ed., Subject and Ruler: The Cult of the Ruling Power in Classical Antiquity: 27–40. Ann Arbor. Hölbl, G. (1992). “Zum Titel ‘Herrscher der Herrscher’ des römischen Kaisers,” Göttinger Miszellen 127: 49–52.

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Hölbl, G. (2001). A History of the Ptolemaic Empire. London and New York. Holloway, S. W. (2002). Aššur Is King! Aššur Is King! Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Leiden. Howe, S. (2002). Empire: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford. Hurlet, F., ed. (2008). Les empires. Antiquité et Moyen Âge. Analyse comparée. Histoire. Rennes. Huss, W. (1977). “Der ‘König der Könige’ und der ‘Herr der Könige,’” Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 93: 131–40. Isaac, B. (2004). The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton. Junker, H. (1958). Der große Pylon des Tempels der Isis in Philä.Vienna. Karsh, E. (2007). Islamic Imperialism: A History. New Haven and London. Klein, J. (1981). Three Shulgi Hymns: Sumerian Royal Hymns Glorifying King Shulgi of Ur. Tel Aviv. Koenen, L. (1993). “The Ptolemaic King as a Religious Figure,” in A. W. Bulloch et al., eds., Images and Ideologies: Self-Deinition in the Hellenistic World: 25–115. Berkeley. Kovács, P. (2009). Marcus Aurelius’ Rain Miracle and the Marcomannic Wars. Leiden and Boston. Kuhrt, A. (1990). “Alexander in Babylon,” in H. W. A. M. Sancisi-Weerdenburg and J. W. Drijvers, eds., Achaemenid History 5: The Roots of the European Tradition; Proceedings of the 1987 Groningen Achaemenid History Workshop: 121– 30. Leiden. Kuhrt, A. (1995). The Ancient Near East, c. 3000– 330 BC. 2 vols. London and New York. Kuhrt,A., and S. Sherwin-White. (1991).“Aspects of Seleucid Royal Ideology. The Cylinder of Antiochus I from Borsippa,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 111: 71–86. Larsen, M.T. (1979). “The Tradition of Empire in Mesopotamia,” in M. T. Larsen, ed., Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires: 75–103. Copenhagen. Lehmann, G. A. (1998). “Expansionspolitik im Zeitalter des Hochhellenismus: Die Anfangphase des ‘Laodike-Krieges’ 246/5 v. Chr.,” in T. Hantos and G. A. Lehmann, eds., Althistorisches Kolloquium aus Anlass des

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70. Geburtstages von Jochen Bleicken. 29.–30. November 1996 in Göttingen: 81–101. Stuttgart. Liampi, K. (1998). Der Makedonische Schild. Berlin. Liverani, M. (1979). “The Ideology of the Assyrian Empire,” in M. T. Larsen, ed., Power and Propaganda: A Symposium on Ancient Empires: 297–317. Copenhagen. Liverani, M. (1981). “Kitru, kataru,” Mesopotamia 17: 43–66. Liverani, M. (1988). “The Growth of the Assyrian Empire in the Habur/Middle Euphrates Area: A New Paradigm,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 2: 81–98. Liverani, M. (1990). Prestige and Interest: International Relations in the Near East, ca. 1600– 1100. Padua. L’Orange, H. P. (1953). Studies in the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World. Oslo. Luttwak, E. N. (1976). The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third. Baltimore and London. Ma, J. (2000). “Μέγας and βασιλεύς μέγας,” in J. Ma, Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor: 271–6. Oxford. MacCormack, S. (1972).“Change and Continuity in Late Antiquity:The Ceremony of Adventus,” Historia 21: 730–3. Machinist, P. (1976). “Literature as Politics: The Tukulti-Ninurta Epic and the Bible,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 38: 460–82. Mann, M. (1986). The Sources of Social Power.Vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginnings to A.D. 1760. Cambridge. Mittag, P. F. (2006). Antiochos IV. Epiphanes. Eine politische Biographie. Berlin. Morris, I., and W. Scheidel, eds. (2009). The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium. Oxford. Morrison, K. D. (2001). “Sources, Approaches, Deinitions,” in S. E. Alcock et al., eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History: 1–9. Cambridge. Muller, H. W., and E. Thiem. (1999). Gold of the Pharaohs. Ithaca. Müller, O. (1973). Antigonos Monophthalmos und “Das Jahr des Könige.” Untersuchungen zur Begründung der Hellenistischen Monarchien, 306– 304 v. Chr. Bonn.

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THREE

LAWYERS AND CITIZENS FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE: GAIUS ON THE TWELVE TABLES AND ANTONINE ROME Jill Harries

We think of cities as territorial entities, an urban center, perhaps, and some surrounding, productive countryside – or variants of this, such as clusters of villages with a shared identity. But the city was also its citizens, and the citizens of, say, Athens, were diferentiated from those of Sparta and other Greek cities because they fulilled certain qualiications, undertook deined responsibilities for their city community, and were subject to the laws of the city. Romans could not see empires, on the other hand, as having any legal system as such; there was no ius imperii Romani. In the long course of Roman history, however, Roman citizen law (ius civile) became the law of a citizenship (civitas, which also means city), which, after 212, was (all but) coextensive with the Roman Empire.1 The civitas, now, was no longer only a territorial and administrative unit but also a citizenship subject to laws, and without physical boundaries. This in turn opened the way for Augustine to extend the idea further, to create one of the building blocks of the concept of Christendom.The De Civitate Dei, usually translated as the “City of God,” could also appropriately be rendered the “citizenship” of God, the citizen community, without boundaries in space or time, subject to the lex Christiana. Justinian’s Digest of Roman Law, published in Constantinople in 533, was intended to be the deinitive publication of extracts from Roman legal 1

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Sherwin White (1973) is still an excellent basic guide to the expansion of the Roman citizenship down to 212. (Unless speciied otherwise, all dates are CE.)

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interpreters, or jurists, whose professional activity dated back to the Roman Republic.The Digest, along with the Codex Justinianus, of imperial legal enactments, and Justinian’s Institutes, formed the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the Corpus of Citizen Law or Right, and was the culmination of the trend that equated the law of the Roman civitas with that of empire. Justinian’s creation was that of an autocracy, which claimed sole control over all aspects of law making – although the rights of the citizen would be respected because the emperor, too, accepted the rule of law.2 The Corpus, and speciically the Digest, was a statement of law, which conlated the law of the city with the law of empire and, thenceforth, would exist outside time. It did not matter, for purposes of Justinian’s deinitive statement of law, whether a jurist lived in the republican Rome of the irst century BCE or under the imperial autocracy of late antiquity. The impression of timelessness thus so deliberately created was an illusion and, for the modern historian, a dangerous one. The citizen of the republican Roman civitas retained his or her ties with the city of Rome and (after the Social War) with Italy, even when resident overseas. The civis Romanus, after 212 CE, on the other hand, shared in a civitas equated with the whole of the known world. Under the republic, the two meanings of civitas, the “city” and “citizenship,” could be easily accommodated, although the distinction between the patria (native place) of birth and of “citizenship” could already, in Cicero’s day, prompt questions of loyalty and identity.3 After 212, however, the connection between the physical city of Rome and the citizenship of Rome was at an end. The civitas of which the post-Caracallan “Roman” was a citizen was not a city but an empire, incorporating an immense diversity of territories, histories, and cultures; in that sense, the citizen had changed, but the ius civile, the law to which s/he was subject, apparently, had not. The subject of this chapter is the extent to which this seismic but gradual shift in the idea of citizenship and its legal implications was recognized, or not, among the academic jurists active at Rome in the mid-second century CE, when the Roman Empire was at its height, but the Severan jurists, headed by Papinian and Ulpian, had not yet arrived from the provinces to change legal discourse forever.The question is important because, although academic jurists, as we may call them, taught and wrote but did not (necessarily) advise emperors, they made an inluential contribution to the legal discourse also employed by the administrators and members of the imperial consilium, who, through their access to emperors, were able to incorporate their interpretations of law into the ever-evolving ius civile. Their recommendations and decisions, therefore, had a practical impact on the lives of the citizens of a changing empire and the methods by which they settled disputes and punished wrongdoing.Thus, if the 2 3

Cod. Just. 1.14.4. Cic., De Leg. 2.2.5, on the two patriae.

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lawyers themselves failed to keep pace with change, they ran the risk that the law they interpreted would become irrelevant, and in practice ignored, by the citizens whom the ius civile was designed to serve and regulate. As we shall see, the legal discourse of Rome the city in the mid-second century ran a real risk of appearing to be entrapped in the morass of an apparently irrelevant obsession with distant antiquity. Although the Roman jurists – the Severans included – all worked within a long and living tradition, the language of lawyers was traditional, even archaic, emphasizing continuity with the past. But there comes a point when tradition inhibits the ability to adapt to, or even acknowledge, new realities. Is this a criticism, which could be leveled at the Antonine academic jurists, speciically the legal historian Pomponius and his associate, Gaius?

Empire and

CIVITAS

At irst sight the response of one academic jurist to the impact of empire on civitas appears nonexistent. Indeed, the unwary reader of Pomponius, as excerpted in the Digest, might ind it hard to recognize that Rome had acquired an empire at all. According to his potted history of law and jurisprudence, Roman legal history progressed serenely forward from its roots in the legendary era of the kings and their leges regiae, the “laws of the kings,” allegedly compiled by one Papirius.4 The Twelve Tables were published in circa 450 BCE5 and would form the basis of the ius civile, the law applicable to the citizen community (civitas); written law was also enshrined in a series of statutes (leges) passed by the people (populus) and senatusconsulta, resolutions of the Senate. From the beginning too, according to Pomponius, there existed a “succession” of learned interpreters, the jurists, who interpreted the ius civile, which was itself based on the Twelve Tables.6 By virtue of their inclusion in the Digest, the succession of jurists was in efect extended unbroken down to the sixth century. The historical evolution of Rome from city-state to imperial world-state is acknowledged by Pomponius only insofar as it related to law.7 Whether

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D. 1.2.2.2 and 36. Pomponius thought that, to start with, the civitas had no leges or iura but, when the civitas was large enough, Romulus introduced the curiae and leges curiatae, which were collected by Papirius. On Pomponius, see Nörr (1976). D. 1.2.2.4 and 24; on legis actiones, based on the Twelve Tables, D. 1.2.2.5; on ius civile “emerging from” the Twelve Tables, D. 1.2.2.6. On leges and plebiscita, D. 1.2.2.8; on senatusconsulta, D. 1.2.2.9. What Pomponius reports is tradition, not history; see Lintott (1999) for the institutions described. D. 1.2.2.35. As a jurist himself, Pomponius’s aim was to enhance the status of his profession by emphasizing its antiquity. Pomponius does mention en passant the expulsion of the kings and the Struggle of the Orders, the latter the traditional setting for the creation of the Twelve Tables.The creation of a sole ruler (Augustus) is explained by the Senate’s failure to govern provinces honestly (D. 1.2.2.11).

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his civitas be subject to the institutions of a republic or an imperial monarchy or autocracy, the citizen, whose legal right is set out in the ius civile, is a constant. Pomponius’s only explicit acknowledgment of Roman expansion under the republic is mention of the annexation (in the third and second centuries BCE) of Sardinia, Sicily, Spain, and Gallia Narbonensis;8 they receive a mention because the number of praetors was expanded to take account of the new provinces. The praetor urbanus was the chief judge at Rome and the Praetor’s Edict formed the basis of the ius honorarium: the edict was rearranged and codiied by Salvius Julianus, from Hadrumetum in Africa, in circa 130 CE. Pomponius’s special interest in the praetorship in the context of legal history is thus easily explained. He was primarily interested in law, not empire. So was the expansion of empire and, over time, the creation of a world citizenship simply irrelevant to the evolution of Roman law, as Pomponius implies? The answer lies in the remarkable lexibility of ius civile as a concept. It applied to the citizens of a particular civitas,9 as contrasted with the ius gentium, which applied to all peoples and which could be glossed as natural (i.e., universal) or as international law (applicable to all “peoples”).10 The size of the civitas, in terms of both the numbers of citizens and their geographic spread (provided they lived where the law of their civitas operated), was irrelevant. So too was the nature of the constitution or form of government; the Spartans, with their curious mixed constitution of kings, ephors, council of elders (over sixty), and rudimentary assembly had its own ius civile, just as did democratic Athens.11 A civitas or polis could change its constitution without afecting its ius civile – although obviously over time the law of a community would be afected by a changing political, as well as social or legal, climate. A Roman legal historian could thus reasonably ignore or sideline constitutional change and territorial expansion as irrelevant to his purpose. For the ethos of the ius civile as it evolved under the republic proved remarkably tenacious when faced with the pressures of empire. The technical purpose of Roman civil law was, and remained, to provide remedies for injuries,12 enable certain transactions to take place, and resolve disputes, using clearly deined 8 9

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D. 1.2.2.32. Gaius, Inst. 1.1: “quod quisque populus ipse sibi ius constituit, id ipsius proprium est, vocaturque ius civile, quasi ius proprium civitatis.” Gaius, Inst. 1.1 (continuing from previous note): “quod vero naturalis ratio inter hominess constituit, id apud omnes populos peraeque custoditur, vocaturque ius gentium, quasi quo iure omnes gentes utuntur.” For complications, see Ulpian’s Institutes I, as preserved at D. 1.1.1.2–4; 4; 6. Cf. Just., Inst. 1.2.2, on the ius civile of Athens (the laws of Solon and Draco). Just., Inst. 1.2.10, ascribes the distinction between written and unwritten law to Athens and Lacedaemon (Sparta). Cf. D. 1.2.2.6–7 on the origins of the earliest form of legal action, the legis actio, and the publication of legal actions available in the ius Flavianum (ca. 300 BCE). By the late republic, the legis actio had been largely superseded by the formulary procedure (for full survey, see Gaius, Inst. 4).

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procedures – hence the concentration in the legal sources on “legal actions” and their applicability in given cases. It also had a limited moral dimension, much emphasized in the rhetoric of imperial laws and deriving originally from Greek political thought.13 In the second century BCE the Greek philosopher Chrysippus declared that the purpose of law was to instruct citizens on what forms of behavior were to be followed and what avoided, a statement that would be recycled over the centuries despite its lack of practical application to the Roman remedy-based system.14 But the ius civile and its procedures, as envisaged in the Twelve Tables, were initially designed not for a far-lung empire but for small, face-to-face communities. Distances to be traveled by the parties were short. Legal relationships were based on direct personal contact and accepted rituals. A quasi-arbitral system of dispute settlement operated, allowing disputants to agree on their choice of a “judge or arbitrator” (iudex arbiterve), whose adjudication would be accepted by both.15 In both public and civil disputes, the citizen was expected to take an active part; as the irst clauses of the Twelve Tables stated, and subsequent commentators conirmed, the plaintif had the right physically to compel the attendance of a defendant before the magistrate.16 While lawyers preferred to concentrate on process, they also adhered to contemporary social values. It was thus assumed, for example, that transactions based on ides, good faith, should be handled lexibly;17 and that the right of killing in self-defense was common to all men under the ius gentium, although it was left to the ius civile to determine how that right was to operate.18

Processes of Adaptation So, how far could a system not initially designed for the needs of a “world city” adapt? And how far did it need to? As the centuries passed, the framework sanctioned by tradition proved lexible enough to accommodate change and to cater for preexisting local systems in the incorporated territories. For example, the criminal courts set up at Rome by Sulla (81–80 BCE), Caesar, and Augustus, whose proceedings were to operate within the city and the area up

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For the absence of political thought in Roman jurisprudence, see Johnston (2000). D. 1.3.2 cites Chrysippus as quoted by Marcian, Institutes 1. Identiication of what was to be “followed” and what “avoided” was also the declared purpose of the Theodosian Code. CT 1.1.5: “qui … sequenda omnibus vitandaque monstrabit.” Still relevant to this is Jolowicz (1948). For the continued importance of “agreeing” about the judge, see Ulpian at D. 5.1.1 and 2. Twelve Tables, 1.2: “If [the defendant] delays or drags his feet, let him [the plaintif] lay hands upon him.” For manus iniectio for a judgment debt, see Gaius, Inst. 4.21–5. For ides as the foundation of justice and community, see Cic., De Oiciis 1.23; 2.84. D. 1.1.3 (Florentius, Institutes 1).

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to a mile from its center,19 had ceased to exist by the end of the second century CE, and it is doubtful that the texts of the statutes themselves survived as independent entities into late antiquity – yet the Leges Corneliae and Iuliae continued to provide the framework for criminal law, as other ofenses were assimilated to the existing statutory framework. Sulla’s Lex Cornelia on knife crime and poisoners, for example, initially designed to deal with public order ofenses at Rome,20 quickly became the law on homicide in general.21 Juristic commentary, imperial rulings, and court decisions22 brought other forms of encompassing someone’s death, including some forms of judicial malpractice, into its remit and replaced the penalty of “interdiction from ire and water” with, in general, harsher forms of retribution.23 Continuity was assisted by the fact that the Roman Empire was still largely a mosaic of cities with a measure of autonomy, which decreased over time; most litigants therefore knew each other as fellow citizens, if not as family members. Judicial roles carried out at Rome by Roman magistrates, especially the praetors, were taken over in the provinces by the governors, who also had the “right of the sword” to judge criminal cases (although in the irst century CE Roman citizens, like Paul of Tarsus, still had the right of transfer of trial [provocatio] to Rome).24 Where existing statute or custom failed, resort could be made to the law as operated in the city of Rome, a practice enshrined in the Flavian municipal law of the late irst century CE.25 Other Roman processes were catered for in the provinces by new local expedients. Parallel institutions were created to carry out the functions of bodies based at Rome, such as the two “councils” convened to vet manumissions.26 And, for convenience, some situations were treated “as if ” they were Roman: for example, although technically provincial land could not be declared 19

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Under the Severans in the early third century, juristic commentary reported and commented on the limited application of Sulla’s Lex Cornelia on knife crime and poisoners (ca. 80 BCE) to the city of Rome and up to a mile from it (Ulpian, On the Duties of the Proconsul VII = Collatio of Roman and Mosaic Law 1.3). Riggsby (1999); Ferrary (1991). Cic., Clu. 48; Cael. 51. Just., Digest 1.3.12 = Salvius Julianus, Digest, book 15: “Statutes or senatorial resolutions cannot deal with every speciic point, but whenever in any case the sense is clear, the president of the tribunal should proceed by reasoning based on analogy and proclaim the law (or legal verdict) accordingly.” This is important evidence for how precedents may be created by the court decisions of governors, independently of imperial rulings. D. 48.8.16 (Modestinus); 48.19.2.1 (Ulpian, on replacement of interdiction from ire and water). Acts 25:10–12. Ironically, had he not appealed, Paul might have been freed by Herod Agrippa (Acts 26:32). Text at Gonzalez (1986): 147–243, esp. 187 (ch. K), 190–1 (ch. 64), 197–8 (chs. 89, 91, 93); also D. 1.3.32 pr. (Salvius Julianus, Digest 84). Gaius, Inst. 1.20 “The consilium is composed in the city of Rome of ive senators and ive equites; in the provinces, of 20 Roman citizen recuperatores, and it takes place on the last day of the [governor’s] assizes; at Rome manumissions take place before a consilium on ixed days.”

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“religious,” because it was “owned” by the Roman people or the emperor, relevant land could be regarded “as if ” religious.27 Where the shape of Roman law changed most under the early empire – and with it, to some extent, the emphasis of juristic commentary – was in the ields of public administrative, tax, and criminal law. By the late second century CE, jurists devoted commentaries to aspects of iscal law, the duties (oicia) of magistrates and oicials (which tended to focus on the law they were expected to administer), and the public or criminal courts (iudicia publica). However, their attention remained focused on their traditional remit, the ius civile and the ius honorarium, the law as represented in the edict of the Roman praetor (and, to a lesser element, the Roman aedile).

Juristic Conservatism at Rome Thus, despite their adherence to frameworks created in the past, Roman jurists proved adept at integrating change into the existing structures without the bother of creating new ones. In practice, under the empire, the ius civile, with appropriate modiications, proved capable of serving a citizen body vastly more numerous than that for which it had initially been designed. But were the jurists always the agents of change? Jurists were satirized from Cicero in the Pro Murena (63 BCE) onward as reactionaries who deliberately resorted to obfuscation and overcomplicating matters in order to keep themselves in a job. Although drawn largely from the senatorial and educated equestrian classes, jurists operated behind the scenes as legal consultants, advising on the law and preparing cases. In a performance culture, therefore, they could not compete with the impact of the high-proile advocate. Moreover, the stereotypical jurist, as represented by, for example,Tacitus’s depiction of C. Cassius Longinus, sufect consul in 30 CE and founder of the “Cassian School” at Rome, was stern, austere, old-fashioned, self-righteous, and out of touch with modern mores.28 For the interpreters of the ius civile, therefore, respect for tradition was an asset, in that their profession claimed (as Pomponius did) the endorsement

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Gaius, Inst. 2.7–7a: “In the provinces however, the general opinion is that land does not become religiosum, because the ownership of provincial land belongs to the Roman people or to the emperor, and individuals have only possession and enjoyment of it. Still, even if it be not religiosum, it is treated as such. (7a) Also, a thing consecrated in the provinces and not by the authority of the Roman people is not sacrum in the strict sense, but it is treated as if sacrum.” A diferent line was taken by Trajan to his governor, Pliny, which may explain Gaius’s aside about the “general” opinion, implying that there were exceptions. Pliny, Letters 10, 50, allows the removal of a temple, “as the soil of an alien country is not capable of being consecrated according to our laws.” On legal ictions (the “as if ” device), including the treating of a peregrinus “as if ” he were a Roman citizen, see Gaius, Inst. 4, 32–8. See Cassius’s speech on the SC Silanianum, Tac., Ann. 14.43.1–2. At Ann. 12.12.1, Cassius is described as preeminent in legal expertise (peritia legum).

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of history. But it was also a weakness, if jurists chose to ignore the changed realities of empire. In the reign of Antoninus Pius (138–161 CE), discussion of the Twelve Tables still lourished at Rome. Was this juristic conservatism carried to excess? Some at the time clearly thought so. Aulus Gellius notes, with disapproval, the refusal of a legal expert to engage with discussion of the meaning of proletarius in the Twelve Tables and Ennius, claiming that “my duty is to devote my eforts and expertise to the law, statutes, and opinions we currently use.”29 This was no isolated case: Pomponius’s perspective on the two law schools of his day was that one was traditionalist, the other more innovatory. Concentration on the past on the part of academic lawyers at Rome was therefore a deliberate but not an automatic choice and was already under challenge by legal modernizers. For the conservatives, as represented by Pomponius, Gaius, and their teachers, tradition, as represented by the Twelve Tables, was a source of strength. It could be traced from the authoritative statement on the ius civile issued by Q. Mucius Scaevola in the 80s BCE, the structure of which was in turn based on the Twelve Tables.30 Under Augustus, the praetorian lawyer Antistius Labeo compiled a commentary on the Twelve Tables, also used by Gaius, which discussed, among other things, the status of Vestal Virgins with regard to intestate succession,31 the cruelty of the law on theft,32 and the story of L.Veratius, who made a mockery of the ixed penalty for assault laid down by the Twelve Tables and thus provoked reform.33 Gaius’s contemporary, Aulus Gellius, a signiicant source for the antiquarian-style jurisprudence largely excluded by Justinian’s Digest, happily discussed the use and meanings of obscure words in the Twelve Tables, as well as points of law and history.34 Gaius in his turn incorporated provisions and principles present in the Twelve Tables into his teaching book of Roman law, the Institutes.35 29 30

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Gell., NA 16.10.8. This unhelpful attitude is dismissed by implication in Gellius’s discussion. Watson (1974): 143–58; Schulz (1946): 94–6. Scaevola himself looked back to the edition and commentary of Aelius, probably in the early second century. For Gellius’s (probably) secondhand knowledge of Scaevola, see his NA 3.2.13; also 6.15.2, citing Scaevola, De Iure Civili 16. Pomponius’s commentary on Q. Mucius (Ad Q. Mucium) was in efect commentary on the Twelve Tables at one remove. Gell., NA 1.12.18. Gell., NA 6.15.1. Gell., NA 20.1.13. He went round the Forum hitting people; his slave who followed him then paid out the twenty-ive asses required on the spot. The new process allowed damages to be assessed by the praetor. NA 7.7.3, use of intestabilis and origins of Arval Brethren; 7.7.8 cites “Masurius” (known to jurists as Sabinus) for Acca Larentia as Romulus’s nurse and mother of the original Arval Brethren. NA 8.1 (nox for noctu, by night); 11.18.69 (penalties for theft); 15.13.11 (word meanings); 16.10.1–8, proletarius in Ennius, derived from the Twelve Tables; also adsiduus. E.g., in Inst. 1, 111 (usus marriage); 132 (triple mancipatio); 144 (freedom of Vestal Virgins from guardianship); 155 (agnate guardians); 165 (patrons as guardians).

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When Gaius opted to write on the Twelve Tables, he could cite the precedent of Antistius Labeo, who, as we have seen, assumed the connection between the roots of Roman law and Roman (legendary) history. In fact, in Augustan Rome, this assumption seems to have been widespread. Labeo’s contemporary and rival,36 Ateius Capito (consul 5 CE), was interested in Vestal Virgins37 and various aspects of senatorial procedure. These he discussed with reference to Varro, noted as an antiquarian but also the author of a lost treatise on the civil law, and the jurist Tubero.38 He also drew on anecdotes from Republican history to justify the immunity of prostitutes from gratuitous annoyance, and the ining of a noblewoman for verbal abuse in public.39 In the next generation, Masurius Sabinus, teacher of Cassius, who wrote a three-book guide to the ius civile, was also a noted student of the ancient past of Rome and cited as such by Pliny the Elder.40 In the early Principate it must often have been hard to separate the jurist from the antiquarian. Gaius and Pomponius were consistent with the Rome-centered legal tradition in which they worked. But the natural conservatism of lawyers – or, less kindly, intellectual inertia – cannot explain the durability of the Twelve Tables as a subject of commentary. The urbs Roma of Gaius was not that of Capito, Labeo, or Masurius Sabinus. Unlike Augustan Rome, a city encouraged by its princeps to celebrate its origins and the pristine virtues present at its foundation, the Rome of Gaius and Pomponius was a city no longer certain of its cultural or even its political primacy in the Roman Empire. For many, especially in the Senate at Rome, the memory of Hadrian’s favoring of Greek culture and his prolonged absences from the capital had added to their anxiety. For if power was where the emperor was, then what was Rome the city for? The answer ofered by historians of Roman antiquities (including the laws) was that Rome the city had shaped the empire from its beginnings. To commentate on the Twelve Tables, therefore, was to reairm the central importance of early law to modern Roman imperial identity. The task was rendered the more urgent by Greek cultural assertiveness. Plutarch’s researches on the Roman past dealt, among other things, speciically with the issue of the place of Greece in the early formation of Roman law. If the Greeks could demonstrate 36

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On Labeo’s integrity and rivalry with Ateius Capito, Tac., Ann. 3.75, with 3.70; D. 1.2.2.47 (Pomponius) on Labeo as innovator, versus Gell., NA 13.12.1, that Labeo accepted nothing not already sanctioned by the ancient Roman authorities (Romanis antiquitatibus). Gell., NA 1.12.8 (from Capito’s De Iure Pontiicali), that fathers of Vestals must be resident in Italy. Gell., NA 4.10.7–8 (order of speakers and Cato’s ilibuster in 59); 14.7.12–13; 14.8.1–2. Gell., NA 4.14.1 (story of Hostilius Mancinus and Manilia); 10.6.4 (abusive behavior of daughter of Appius Claudius Caecus, 246 BCE). Cited as “Masurius” in Plin., NH 7.5.40 (with Gell., NA 3.16.23); NH 7.43.135; 15.38.126; 15.40.135. See also Gell., NA 5.6.27; 10.15.7. A character with juristic leanings called Masurius attends the dinner party celebrated by Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, clearly a representative of a known type.

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cultural ownership of so distinctively a Roman achievement, the position of Rome as the deiner of the identity of empire would be further subverted. So Gaius’s unusual (for him) focus on the Greek language in what survives of his commentary on the Twelve Tables suggests he was aware of the challenge from the Greeks and prepared to meet it. Gaius’s treatise on the Twelve Tables did not, therefore, necessarily relect a legal profession in denial or refusal on the part of conservative lawyers – and perhaps others, too – to acknowledge the impact of empire. Rather, we should read his work more positively as a means of interpreting the empire to itself, invoking the past to explain the nature of empire and assert the place of the city of Rome within it. What follows will focus on three elements: his introduction on the history of law and the city; the antiquarian and etymological elements; and his treatment of the Greeks.

Exordium Gaius’s introduction – or rather that bit of it excerpted by the Digest – is worth quoting in full, for its emphasis on the importance of “origins” and “the beginning” of the city’s history:41 When about to embark on a work of interpretation of the ancient laws, I decided that, of necessity, I should irst trace my record back to the origins of the city, not because I wished to pad out my commentary but because I am aware that in all matters, the most efectively completed task is the one that creates a consistent whole from all its parts; and assuredly the most essential part of anything is its beginning.42

Like Pomponius, therefore, Gaius connected the Twelve Tables irmly with the foundation of Rome. Romulus, not Appius Claudius and the Decemviri credited with the Twelve Tables, is the founder of the Roman legal tradition. How Gaius made the connection between the laws of the kings and those of the republican commission is not known. But the focus on the origins of the city was not simply interest in the past for the past’s sake; it was also to assist understanding and encourage the reader to go forward. It would be quite wrong, Gaius wrote, for an advocate pleading a case in the Forum to launch on a detailed exposition of his case without a preliminary explanation.43 Likewise, he as an author must win the goodwill of his reader, as well as assisting his comprehension of the subject: 41 42

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D. 1.2.1. Facturus legum vetustarum interpretationem necessario prius ab urbis initiis repetendum exisimavi, non quia velim verbosos commentaries facere, sed quod a omnibus rebus animadverto id perfectum esse quod ex suis partibus constaret; et certe cuiusque rei potissima pars principium est. Deinde si in foro causas dicentibus nefas ut ita dixerim videtur nulla praefatione facta iudici rem exponere.

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For, unless I am mistaken, introductions like these both encourage us to read the subject matter set out before us more willingly, and when we come to the main part of it, they make the subject more clearly understood.

Gaius’s rhetorical education, such as it was, would have made him aware of the role of exordia in setting out the main points and conciliating the goodwill of the audience.44 But Gaius’s emphasis on “beginnings” is twofold. The exordium will help the reader’s comprehension and encourage him to read on; and an account of law from the origins of the city is a requirement for understanding the Twelve Tables.

Commentary: Process and the Past It is likely, although it cannot be proved, that Gaius used a lemma form for his commentary, citing the original Latin of the Twelve Tables (as he had them) and then adding notes to aid comprehension of obscure archaic words, legal problems, and other problematic details. The reader would thus be presented with a text in two forms of Latin, the archaic statements of the original and Gaius’s attempts to explain obscure terminology and illustrate how these laws were applied in his own day.Thus, in a few lines, we can see what the Romans prized about their law. Text and commentary together provided a statement of continuity between the humble beginnings of Rome and its imperial present, and an airmation of the durability of the law of the “citizen community” itself into the centuries of empire. Early in the commentary, Gaius focused at once on an aspect of Roman law unique to it – the concept of ius.The word ius did not mean “law” in the sense of positive law (Latin lex) but “right.” The deinition of “right” was enshrined in the opening clauses of the Twelve Tables on how to initiate litigation and oblige your opponent to appear before the judge. “Right” was what the citizen was entitled to in law, and the object of the Twelve Tables, and later procedural regulation, was to explain what the “right” was and how rights might be asserted. The opening clause of the Twelve Tables described how the plaintif and the defendant were to appear before the judge: Si in ius vocat ?ito? ni it, antestimino; igitur (im) capito. If X summons to [assert his] legal right, ?let him attend? If he [the defendant] does not attend, let him [the plaintif] call to witness; so then, he is to take him.

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On exordia, see Cic., De Inventione 1.14.20–18.26; Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.6.11–12 (epideictic oratory).

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In ifth-century BCE Rome, direct action, including physical coercion, was sanctioned in order for a lawsuit to proceed; in other clauses, the location (the Forum), where the magistrate was to be found, was speciied and the times of day by which certain actions were to be completed.45 What interested Gaius, however, was how launching a suit and obliging a defendant to be present worked in his own day.The law in action had generated problems not addressed by the original statute, requiring the responses of interpreters. For example, were there people who could not be summoned as defendants? Among others, Gaius named underage girls, under the legal authority of another person (parents, guardians, or, less often, husbands).46 Were there places where the defendant was of limits and could not be arrested? Gaius accepted that a plaintif could issue a summons in doorways, bathhouses, and the theater, but the Roman’s home was held to be a place of safety, where the owner could not be touched:47 performance of a citizen’s arrest in the defendant’s home, therefore, counted as violent assault and could be prosecuted as such. This is the world of Roman legal procedure as it had evolved over centuries of experimentation and of interpretation by the indigenous Roman jurists. This was not a place for Greeks. While the matching of comment to text is speculative, as it depends on the accidents of survival, a few illustrations may suice. The irst example of a deinition shows word derivation at work (its accuracy is immaterial) and is self-explanatory: Si quid pignoris dapis ergo nancito. (Twelve Tables Tab. XII.1) If he shall have taken a pledge for sacred purposes. Pignus appellatum a pugno [ist], quia res, quae pignori dantur, manu traduntur. (Gaius at D. 50.16.238.2) Pignus (pledge) is derived from “ist,” because things given as pledges are transferred by hand.

Second, a deinition relevant to how the law should be applied: Glande in alieno pastum ne inmitto.(Crawford Tab. VIII.3 [others VIII.7; VII.10]) He is not to send (sc. his animal) to pasture on the produce of land owned by another. Glandis appellatione omnia fructus continetur, ut Iavolenus ait. (Gaius at D. 50.16.236.1) In the word acorn (glandis), all produce is included, as Iavolenus stated. 45

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Gell., NA 17.2.10 cites Tab. 1 on the timing of lawsuits for the use of the words sol occasus for sunset. The numbering used for the Twelve Tables is that of Crawford (1996). D. 2.4.22: Neque impuberes puellas, quae alieno iuri subiectae essent, in ius vocare permissum est. The neque, if not a later insertion, implies others in the list. D. 2.4.18: Plerique putaverunt nullum de domo sua in ius vocari licere, quia domus tutissimum cuique refugium atque receptaculum sit, cumque qui inde in ius vocaret, vim inferri videri.

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This was important for the application of the law: it was not possible for an ofender to escape a lawsuit on the grounds that his pigs had been gorging on fallen apples, say, on someone else’s land, rather than acorns. For an agricultural community, the relevance is obvious.The citing of the opinion of the late irst-century jurist Iavolenus Priscus (consul in 86 CE) adds authority to Gaius’s interpretation. A inal example, of doubtful ascription as the word occurs twice in the extant fragments, discusses the change in the meaning of a much-used word and illustrates the application of etymology to legal interpretation. On Romans’ dealings with non-Romans, Gaius traced the ancient and contemporary meanings of the word hostis: Morbus sonticus aut status ?condictus? dies cum hoste etc. (Crawford Tab. II.2) A serious disease or a day ixed ?and notice served? with a foreigner etc.

Also: Adversus hostem aeterna auctoritas esto. (Crawford Tab.VI.4) Against a foreigner, let “authority” be in perpetuity. Quos nos hostes appellamus, eos veteres perduelles appellabunt, per eam adiectionem indicentes cum quibus bellum esset. (Gaius at D. 50 16.234. pr.) Those whom we (today) call hostes [= enemies], the men of old used to call perduelles, indicating by that term that they were the men with whom they were at war.

The point of Gaius’s comment was that modern readers must not misunderstand what the Twelve Tables meant by hostis. The ancient crime of perduellio, treason, was superseded by maiestas in the irst century BCE; the traitor was in efect an enemy of the people, later denominated as a hostis publicus. The right translation for Gaius’s readership was “foreigner” (peregrinus) or “alien,” but the point is not made in Gaius’s text as we have it.48 This serves as a reminder of the unintended efects for the historian of Justinian’s editorial activity; the sixth-century imperial lawyers were not anticipating any re-creation of the past juristic texts, which had ceased to matter to them as works in their own right. These are illustrations of the legal specialist at work, providing a demonstration that a knowledge of ancient words and their meanings was not abstract antiquarianism but an essential part of the jurist’s toolbox. Moreover, Gaius’s work asserted the unique contribution of Rome the city, its history and its traditions, to the character of a Roman empire that extended thousands of miles beyond the city walls.Without apparent efort, the juxtaposition of ancient law 48

Cf. Cic., De Of. 1.12.37; D. 50.16.234. Festus, De verborum signiicatione s.v. hostis: Hostis apud antiquos peregrinus dicebatur, et qui nunc hostis perduellis.

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code and modern interpretation embedded Roman law in Roman history from the beginning, revealing it as an evolving and living tradition, unique to Romans and the history of their city.

Gaius and the Greeks Beyond the city walls of Rome, there were also the Greeks. Gaius’s connection of the distant legal past with the Roman present deliberately distanced itself from those who sought to celebrate and even exaggerate the Greek contribution.The presence of the Greeks of both Magna Graecia and mainland Greece in the early history of Rome and its institutions had been long accepted and could not be ignored. The myths and legends surrounding Rome’s foundation and early history under the kings celebrated the contribution of Greek immigrants (and honorary Greeks, for these purposes, like the Trojan Aeneas). But the assumption of such Romans as Cicero, who accepted that Solon’s laws in Athens (traditional date 594 BCE) had inluenced the content of the Twelve Tables,49 did not detract from Roman ownership of its early institutions. The Greeks had contributed, but the product was owned by the imperial city. Some Greeks thought otherwise. Toward the end of the irst century CE, Plutarch’s literary assault on early Roman history, and speciically the history of Roman law and institutions, advanced on several fronts.50 The irst consisted of assertions – or reminders – that early Roman lawgivers were “taught” by famous Greeks. The tradition, for example, that Numa Popilius, the legendary founder of Roman religious law and observances, was in fact a pupil of the philosopher Pythagoras occurs already in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diogenes Laertius, and later Ovid, with some help from Livy.51 Plutarch’s Life of Numa acknowledged chronological diiculties and suggested that there was an earlier Pythagoras of Sparta, who helped Numa with his politeia; he was a congenial colleague because the Sabines, Numa’s people, were originally colonists from Lacedaemon.52 The Sabines, therefore, whose intermarriage with Romulus’s people was a famous foundation myth, were Spartans, really. A second argument was that Roman institutions were no more than imitations of Greek models. In his comparison of the two founders of “democratic” states, Solon and Valerius Publicola, who also resisted tyranny, Plutarch declared that Publicola “imitated” Solon and that the entire structure of the 49 50

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Cic., De Leg. 2.59 and 64 on debt legislation and funerary rites. For the argument that Plutarch aimed to assert the superiority of Hellenic culture over Rome, see Preston (2001). Dion. Hal. 2.59.1; Diog. Laert. 8.14; Ovid, Fasti 3.151–4; Met. 15.1–8; 60–72; 479–84; Livy 40.29.2–14. On Livy’s account of the discovery in 181 of a box containing writings of Numa and Pythagoras, see Gruen (1990): 158–70. Plut., Numa 1.3–4. Numa’s Life is paralleled with that of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus. Denied by Scipio Aemilianus in Cic., Rep. 2.28–9; cf. also Livy 1.18.1–3.

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early Roman politeia, as constructed by Publicola after the expulsion of the kings in 510 BCE, was based on Solon’s reforms in Athens, early in the sixth century.53 Like Solon, Publicola gave the people the right to appoint their rulers; he gave defendants the right of appeal to the people; he did not create a new council (as Solon allegedly did) but doubled the membership of the old (the Senate); and he appointed quaestors to administer public funds, a further Solonian idea.54 A third strategy was to swamp early Rome with Greek immigrants or refugees, who lent their superior Greek wisdom to the ledgling Roman res publica. Again, the presence of Greek immigrants was common ground between Greece and Rome, but what was made of the implications was not. For Romans, the presence of early Greeks, such as the “good” Bacchiad, Demaratus of Corinth, mentioned by Pomponius and allegedly the ancestor of the Tarquins,55 internationalized and validated their origins but did not make them Greek. Plutarch’s technique was to imply that constitutional and social progress in early Rome and Italy had depended entirely on immigrants: Janus, Evander, and Aeneas all arrived by sea, as Saturn also had done, bringing good government and prosperity.56 At Rome, the Janus cult seems to have begun in the third century BCE,57 but according to Plutarch’s Roman Questions, the god was in fact a Greek immigrant who had crossed the sea and settled among the barbarians in Italy, where he persuaded the natives to “till the soil and live under government as a community of citizens (politeuesthai).”58 Clearly, Plutarch’s Romans were quite incapable of creating a politeia – or a law code – on their own. But what of the Twelve Tables themselves? Dionysius of Halicarnassus asserted that, as part of their preparation for their law code, the Romans sent embassies to the cities of Magna Graecia and to Athens to learn best practice in legislation and report back.59 Their reports were duly incorporated into the Twelve Tables, thus explaining the similarities between the Twelve Tables and Solon, acknowledged by other authors. But, in the irst century CE, a further tradition grew up, apparently from nothing, which ascribed part of the credit for the Twelve Tables directly to yet another Greek immigrant, one Hermodorus of Ephesus.60 53

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Plut., Sol. and Publ. 1.1: “The second was an imitator (mimetes) of the irst and the irst witness (martus) for the second.” Plut., Sol and Publ. 2.1–3.2. Likeness does not establish the direct inluence of the earlier on the later legislator. Wiseman (2004): 37–40. Quaest. Rom. 41. The river brought the prosperity through trade, the immigrants the constitutional guidance. Wiseman (2004): 158–63. Plut., Quaest. Rom. 22; cf. Quaest. Rom 19, where Numa chooses January as the irst month because Janus was a statesman and a farmer. Dion. Hal. 10.51.5. RE 859–61 s.v. Hermodorus admits the unreliability of the entire tradition.

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Through writings by Romans and Greeks on geography, natural history, and law, Hermodorus made his discreet way into the Roman tradition on the authorship of Rome’s early law. First, in Cicero we meet Hermodorus the exile, driven from his native Ephesus in the late sixth century,61 but Cicero makes no connection between Hermodorus and Rome. Second, under Augustus, the geographer Strabo recollects the story of Hermodorus in connection with Ephesus, adding that “this man is believed (dokei) to have compiled certain laws for the Romans.”62 Third, Pliny the Elder recorded a statue of Hermodorus that had been set up at public expense in the Comitium but was no longer extant: Hermodorus is now described as “the interpreter (interpres) of the laws which the Decemviri wrote.”63 Finally, Pomponius records the tradition that the Decemviri were to study the laws of the Greek cities and that “some writers” had reported that “the man behind the enactment of these laws” was Hermodorus of Ephesus, who was in exile in Italy. Pomponius is rightly on his guard; what “some writers” said was not necessarily to be relied on.64 Thus, in addition to the Greek contribution to Roman religious law (Pythagoras/Numa) and the early Roman politeia, a Greek was made integral, as adviser or actual draftsman, to the most “Roman” aspect of the evolving empire, the foundation document of the ius civile. Indeed, as an interpres, he could count as the irst jurist. In isolation, the development was not obviously sinister. But in the context of the strategies employed by Plutarch, the appearance of Hermodorus is part of a wider pattern of subversion, the superimposition of a Greek empire of culture on a Roman empire of law. Gaius, for his part, like Cicero, was content to accept the inluence of Solon as a given. “It is said,” reports the author, that the dimensions of boundaries were adopted by the Romans from Solon’s law on the subject;65 and rules on agreements made by guilds and corporations were also taken directly from Solon’s law, which he duly quotes in the original.66 Moreover, Gaius ofered several more citations of Greek as a means of deining terminology found in the Twelve Tables. In his discussion of the meaning of telum (missile), he translates telum into Greek as belos, from the Greek “to throw” (ballesthai), citing Xenophon as his authority;67 elsewhere, Homer is quoted on pharmaka (drugs), 61

62 63 64 65 66 67

Cic., Tusculan Disputations 5.105, quoting the wording of the alleged law: “nemo de nobis unus excellat; si quis exstiterit, alio in loco et apud alios sit.” Cicero would naturally equate the unjust exile of the virtuous Hermodorus with his own. On Heracleitus as remembered in secondcentury Rome, see Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights preface 12, quoting him for the proverb that “much learning does not educate the mind.” Strabo, Geography 14.642. Plin., NH 34.21. Pomponius, Enchridion at D. 1.2.2.4, quiddam rettulerunt. D. 10.1.13. D. 47.22.4. D. 50.16.233.2. The Twelve Tables passage (Tab. VIII.13, Crawford) may be the one commented on, as it concerns “tela” leaving the hand by accident, “si telum manu fugit magis quam

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as part of Gaius’s explanation of the Latin venenum, the point being that “drugs” can be poisonous or curative and so require qualiication by an adjective.68 But Gaius’s use of the Greeks did not imply dependence on their law in general. Despite the admitted borrowing from Solon, and their usefulness for etymological studies, the Greeks were “others”: the bow “among the Greeks” was called a toxeuma, whereas “among us” it is called by the general term for a weapon (telum); pharmaka and Homer are both categorized as “among them” (the Greeks); and what “we” called a telum, “they” called a belos. It is the professed “otherness” of the Greeks, which is crucial to Gaius’s perspective; he was not about to concede ownership of Roman law to “someone else.” In acknowledging early Rome’s debt to Solon, he did no more than conident Roman cultural icons like Cicero had done. In context, the references to Homer, Xenophon, and the like would appear as literary embellishment; taken as a whole, the commentary would have read as an emphatic statement of the Roman character of Rome’s early law. The references to the Greeks mattered, because, as all agreed, the Greeks had an input into the Twelve Tables; but Gaius’s commentary accepted them only as contributors, not as authors, still less owners. Indeed, Solon’s contribution made him, in efect, a forerunner, even an integral part, of the Roman legal tradition. In that sense, Gaius’s Solon had become Roman.

Conclusion I have argued that the apparent conservatism of Gaius’s commentary did not render him or his project irrelevant to his times. His use of the Twelve Tables was creative and forward-looking, and his commentary was a means of creating a bridge from the past to the present. That present was, still, the world of the jurist based in Rome, the city; the framework created by the ancient law code was, inevitably, Rome-centered. But this structure allowed Gaius to assert, if only by implication, Rome’s enduring place in the empire, through the unique contribution made by Roman law to the culture of the empire as a world civitas. Without the city and its history, there could be no Roman Empire, and it was an empire under a citizen law to which the contribution of Greeks, though signiicant, was nonetheless peripheral. He would probably have known too that interest in the Twelve Tables was not conined to Rome; Gaius’s contemporary, Apuleius, is found referring to the Twelve Tables in an oration before a Roman governor in Africa circa 159.69

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iecit …”; Tab. 1.18, Crawford (1996), concerns theft in the daytime: “si luci (furtum faxit ast) se telo defendit …,” but it is less obviously relevant. D. 50.16.236.pr. Apuleius, Apologia 47.4.

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Gaius was, nonetheless, a member of the last generation of jurists to focus on the legal tradition of the early republic. By the end of the second century CE, the cultural and legal debate had moved on. Roman antiquities still mattered and would be of absorbing interest, still, to the circle of Symmachus as represented by Macrobius in the early ifth century. Indeed, they were seen as being uniquely the possession of those “Romans of Rome” fortunate enough to reside in the capital. When Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae convene for a series of learned banquets in early Severan Rome, their Roman host, Larensis, is quietly acknowledged to be the expert on matters of Roman history and topography (Marius in Africa and his deposit of a “Gorgon” in a temple at Rome),70 as well as the nature of the Parilia, the New Year festival at Rome, which featured a noisy procession with music, singing, and dancing.71 The Roman past could now safely be exploited by writers and scholars at Rome, who were concerned about its present role in the empire (or lack of one), to create an image of what Rome the city uniquely was – and still might be. Also present at Athenaeus’s banquet as symposiarch was one Oulpianos of Tyre, namesake, compatriot, and perhaps close relation of the man who would be the most celebrated of Roman lawyers, Ulpian, from Syrian Tyre, by far the most extensively cited of the jurists in Justinian’s Digest. Like Gaius, through his Institutes, Ulpian would be a teacher of law to empire. But Gaius’s views on the Twelve Tables, like those of Pomponius on “Quintus Mucius,” although they survived, in some form, down to the sixth century, were in general “not much read.”72 With the advent of Septimius Severus would come a new brand of jurist, who wrote not about “Q. Mucius” or the Twelve Tables but about the (Praetorian) Edict and Masurius Sabinus’s commentary on the ius civile. Although reared in the juristic tradition, Ulpian and his colleagues, who were working jurists and advisers of emperors, were no longer primarily concerned with defending or justifying the legal heritage of the city of Rome. In the end, the Roman city jurists did not reach out to the empire; the empire came to them. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braund, D. (2000). “Learning, Luxury and Empire: Athenaeus’ Roman Patron,” in D. Braund and J. Wilkins, eds., Athenaeus and His World: Reading Greek Culture in the Roman Empire: 3–22. Exeter. Crawford, M. H. (1996). Roman Statutes. London.

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Ferrary, J.-L. (1991). “Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneicis,” Athenaeum 79: 417–34. Gonzalez, J. (1986). “The Lex Irnitana: A New Copy of the Flavian Municipal Law,” JRS 76: 147–243. Gruen, E. (1990). Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy. Berkeley.

Ath., Deip. 5.221b–e (Gorgon); 5.221f (Larensis and the Temple of Hercules). Ath., Deip. 8.361e–362a (Parilia). On the role and identity of P. Livius Larensis, see Braund (2000). D. 1.2.2.45, Pomponius on Trebatius, jurist and friend of Cicero.

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Johnston, D. (2000). “The Jurists,” in C. Rowe and M. Schoield, eds., Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought: 616–34. Cambridge. Jolowicz, H. F. (1948).“The Iudex and the Arbitral Principle,” in Melanges F. de Visscher, RIDA 2: 477–92. Lintott, A. (1999). The Constitution of the Roman Republic. Oxford. Nörr, D. (1976). “Pomponius, oder ‘Zum Geschichteverstandnis der römischen juristen,’” ANRW II.15: 497–604. Preston, R. (2001). “Roman Questions, Greek Answers,” in S. Goldhill, ed., Being Greek

under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire: 86–119. Cambridge. Riggsby, A. (1999). Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome. Austin, Tex. Schulz, F. (1946). History of Roman Legal Science. Oxford. Sherwin White, A. N. (1973). The Roman Citizenship. 2nd ed. Oxford. Watson, A. (1974). Lawmaking in the Later Roman Republic. Oxford. Wiseman, T. P. (2004). The Myths of Rome. Exeter.

FOUR

LAWS’ EMPIRE: ROMAN UNIVERSALISM AND LEGAL PRACTICE Caroline Humfress

Introduction: Cities and Empire Sometime in the late third or possibly early fourth century, a rhetorician, writing in Greek, probably in the Roman provinces of the East, composed a treatise on epideictic rhetoric (the rhetoric of praise and blame). Transmitted under the name of Menander of Laodicea (a city in southwest Asia Minor), the treatise advises orators on how to praise gods, peoples, and cities according to a long and technical tradition of encomiastic speech. There are explicit references to Isocrates’ Panathenaicus, various works by Plato, the “encomium on Sicily” in Cicero, and orations by Aelius Aristides on both Rome and Athens. Among other subjects, we ind speciic advice on how an orator should assess the actions of a city, according to the four classical philosophical virtues: courage, justice, temperance (soˉphrosuneˉ ), and practical wisdom (phroneˉsis).1 After a lengthy discussion concerning how a city’s actions should be praised according to the virtue of justice, and some brief pointers concerning praise for temperance “in public life” and then in relation to the household, the discussion turns to the virtue of practical wisdom:

This essay was published in 2012 by Edinburgh University Press in New Frontiers: Law and Society in the Roman World, edited by Paul J. du Plessis. 1 (Ps-)Menander, Treatise I.III.361–5 (Russell and Wilson [1981]: 60–70). Heath (2004): 127–31 argues that Treatise I should not be attributed to Menander of Laodicea.

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In the public sphere, we consider whether the city accurately lays down legal conventions and the subject matter of the laws – such as inheritances by heirs and other topics covered by the laws. (This aspect, however, is now redundant, because we use the universal laws of the Romans.) Within the private sphere, the issue is whether there are many famous rhetors, sophists, geometricians, and representatives of other sciences that depend on practical wisdom.2

According to the author of this late Greco-Roman treatise, praising cities for the display of practical wisdom in the legal sphere was an outdated activity. Public oicials in the cities of the East no longer exercised their practical wisdom in framing their own laws and legal procedures, because the inhabitants of their cities used “the universal laws of the Romans.” Thus, whereas Isocrates (fourth century BCE) and Aristides (mid-second century CE) could both use “the topic of laws” to amplify their praise of a city, rhetoricians working under the later Roman Empire apparently could not. The orator can now praise a city only for its eˉtheˉ (customs).3 The implication is that by the late third century CE, the Greco-Roman cities in the East had lost whatever autonomy they had previously possessed as lawgivers. The question of to whom these Greco-Roman cities had lost their lawmaking powers seems to ind an answer in a second late Roman rhetorical treatise, also transmitted under the name of Menander of Laodicea and copied with the irst treatise in the manuscripts.4 This second treatise addresses the orator directly as “the voice of the city” and includes a section on how to construct a formal speech of praise for an emperor (basilikos logos). As in an encomium for a city, praise for the actions of an emperor should be set out according to the four virtues.5 Under “justice,” the orator should praise an emperor’s “mildness towards subjects, humanity towards petitioners, and accessibility,” as well as commending him for sending “governors around the nations, peoples, and cities, [who are] guardians of the laws and worthy of the

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(Ps-)Menander, Treatise I.III.364, lines 10–16 (Russell and Wilson [1981]: 68). For discussion of this passage, see Nutton (1978): 214–15; Carrié (2005): 274; Mélèze Modrzejewski (1982): 350; and Garnsey (2004): 148–9. (Ps-)Menander, Treatise I.III.363, lines 7–14 (Russell and Wilson [1981]: 67). The context is how to praise a city with respect to the topic of “fair dealing towards men,” one of three subdivisions within the virtue of justice (the other two subdivisions are piety toward the gods and reverence toward the dead): “If the citizens neither wrong foreigners nor do harm to one another and have customs that are equal and fair and laws that are just, they will manage their city with the highest degree of excellence and justice. Nowadays, however, the topic of laws is of no use, since we conduct public af airs by the universal laws of the Romans. Customs (eˉtheˉ), however, vary from city to city, and form an appropriate basis for an encomium.” This second treatise survives in the manuscript tradition alongside (Ps-)Menander, Treatise I but they do not seem to have been written by the same individual. See Heath (2004): 128–9. (Ps-)Menander, Treatise II.373, lines 5–8 (Russell and Wilson [1981]: 84).

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emperor’s justice, not gatherers of wealth.”6 With regard to the emperor’s practical wisdom (phroneˉsis), the orator should say that it surpasses that of all other men on earth, hence: Of his legislative activity, you should say that his laws are just, and that he strikes out unjust laws and himself promulgates just ones.“Therefore, laws are more lawful, contracts between men are more just.”7

The “topic of laws” was thus seen to have excellent potential in terms of amplifying praise for a late Roman emperor’s actions, in stark contrast to praise for a city, where, as we have seen, it counted as a futile exercise.8 As far as our late Greco-Roman orator was concerned, emperors, not cities, made laws. Book 1 of Gaius’s Institutes, an elementary legal textbook composed in the mid-second century CE, lists a number of sources for Roman law, past and present: leges (“laws” of the Roman people); enactments of the plebeians (plebiscita); resolutions of the Senate; constitutions of the emperors; “the edicts of those who have the right to issue edicts” (which would include consuls, praetors, aediles, and governors of provinces); and the responses of jurisprudents.9 Each of the sources named by Gaius remained relevant to learning Roman law and doing Roman law – in diferent ways and to difering extents – throughout the later empire. For good reasons, however, modern Roman historians – like late Roman orators – tend to focus upon the emperors themselves: L’empereur a le quasi monopole du droit. La loi au troisième siècle, ce sont les décisions impériales qui, à l’époque postclassique, seront qualiiées par le terme de lex qui désigne la source principale et presque exclusive du droit.10

Moreover, the juristic sources give the impression that imperial decisions could be interpreted as having a universality that other sources of law lacked. For example, in book 25 of his commentary on the Praetor’s Edict, the Severan jurist and imperial bureaucrat Ulpian refers to an imperial rescript, issued by Hadrian, that laid down monetary penalties against anyone who buried a body 6 7

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(Ps-)Menander, Treatise II.375, lines 8–10 and 18–21 (Russell and Wilson [1981]: 88–90). (Ps-)Menander, Treatise II.375, lines 24–28 (Russell and Wilson [1981]: 90). Compare Themistius, Oration 1.15b, Oration 5.64b, and Oration 15.187a. Early Christian writers also make various uses of this (Hellenistic kingship) ideology; for discussion, see Nasrallah (2010): 119–63; Buell (2002); and Chadwick (1993). A point made again in (Ps-)Menander, Treatise II in the section on “The Speech of Arrival” for an imperial governor at 386, lines 1–4 (Russell and Wilson [1981]: 108–10): “If there had still been a need for lawgiving, it [sc., the city that the governor is entering] would have legislated for mankind universally, as Sparta and Athens did once for the Greeks.” See also Slootjes (2006): 112. Gaius, Inst. I.1.2; cf. Digest 1.2.2.12 (Pomponius, enchirid.) On Gaius, see Harries in this volume. Coriat (1997): 70.

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in a city, as well as any magistrate who allowed the practice – but, Ulpian continues: What if the municipal law allows burial in the city? We must consider whether, in the light of imperial rescripts, this provision has to be departed from; for the rescripts are of general scope and imperial legislation has its own force and should apply everywhere.11

From at least the late second century CE Roman jurists had begun to copy imperial rescripts together systematically, an activity that was continued in the codices of the late third-century legal experts (and probably imperial oicials) Gregorius or Gregorianus and Hermogenianus, both cited as models for the later ifth-century imperial Codex Theodosianus.12 Before the promulgation of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis, however, jurists did not approach imperial constitutions as exclusive sources of Roman law. In fact, before the Justinianic reforms to the legal curriculum, students at law schools (such as those at Beirut, Rome, and Constantinople) had apparently “barely begun to read imperial pronouncements after four years of study.”13 Nonetheless, late Roman legal experts – whether giving responsa to private individuals or employed as various types of oicials within the imperial bureaucracy – certainly worked within a legal and administrative system that functioned with the emperor at its apex.14 What Hopkins terms “the symbolic unity of the Roman emperor” is thus as important to our understanding of Roman law under the empire as it is to our understanding of politics, administration and religion.15 There can be no doubt that in the course of the irst three centuries of the empire Roman law had expanded from the city of Rome and Italy into the provinces. Processes associated with “municipalization” and “provincialization” led to rapid developments in (what we now term) administrative and iscal law under the early empire, as well as contributing to a marked expansion in the scope of the imperial bureaucracy. One estimate for the numbers of imperial 11 12

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Digest 47.12.3.5 (Ulpian, Ad Edictum, book 25). On the late second-century collection of Papirius Iustus, see Franciosi (1972). On the later third-century codices: Sperandio (2005); Cenderelli (1965); and CTh 1.1.5pr with Scherillo (1934). Also Honoré (1994) and more generally on the “idea” of an exclusively “imperial” law, Riccobono (1949). Justinian, Inst. pr: “Until now even the best students have barely begun to read imperial pronouncements after four years of study; but you have been found worthy of the great honor and good fortune of doing so from the beginning and of following a course of legal education which from start to inish proceeds from the emperor’s lips.” See also Digest, Const. Omnem, 1, in P. Birks and G. McLeod, trans., Justinian's Institutes (Ithaca, 1987), 33. Liebs (1987); Liebs (1989); and Liebs (2002) discuss jurists in the Western provinces. Honoré (1998) and Honoré (2004) argue for a special relationship between legal expertise and government in the East. Hopkins (1978).

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oicials operating between circa 250 and 400 CE gives a rise “from about two hundred and ifty overall to at least three thousand per generation in each half of the Empire, a twenty-fold increase.”16 In particular, emperors and their oicials had an empirewide concern for the maintenance of law and order and for the eicient extraction of tax revenue and other iscal burdens. Moreover, as Brélaz argues, “Law and order are, together with taxation, the main attributes of sovereignty and the most visible demonstrations of the power of an authority.”17 Hence in terms of an ideology of empire building, taxation and a concern for the maintenance of public law and order should be understood as unifying and “universalizing” forces.18 In practice, imperial oicials tended to work through, or alongside, local elites. Civic elites, where they existed, were particularly important: “From the administrative point of view the Roman world empire was a union of urban communities; the city was the foundation on which imperial administration rested.”19 While diferent models of imperial and local civic interaction developed in distinct geographic regions of the early empire, all Roman cities had some administrative responsibilities in terms of executing orders and judgments from imperial oicials. Epigraphic evidence from the eastern empire, however, suggests a marked shift in relations between cities and central government dating from the mid-third century CE, when inscriptions honoring imperial governors begin to outweigh those dedicated to local oicials.20 Carrié is right to reject the idea of a “pre-conceived political program of authoritarian centralization” under the Severi; we should likewise be wary of attributing an “out-and-out bureaucratization of the administration” to the age of Diocletian and Constantine.21 Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that when local governments performed legal administrative functions in the later third and early fourth centuries, they did so increasingly under the supervision of or in tandem with imperial oicials. For example, the text of the Pauli Sententiae, which circulated in various copies and editions in the late Roman West, states that municipal magistrates can arrest fugitive slaves and “transfer them to the oice of the governor of the province or proconsul” (1.6a4); that municipal magistrates, “if they have the legal power,” can emancipate and manumit slaves (2.25.4); and that an heir can be compelled by a municipal magistrate to enter upon and transfer an estate, on request of the beneiciary of a ideicommissum, “on the authority of the governor” (5.5a.1). Late Roman imperial constitutions also refer to the 16 17 18

19

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Heather and Moncur (2001): 31. Brélaz (2008): 45. Army: Galsterer (1986): 26; Demougeot (1981); and Palmer (2007). Taxation: Hobson (1993): 197; Eck (2000): 282; and Carrié (2005): 275–6. Wolf (2006): 443. See in general Nörr (1969); Gascou (1999); Eich (2005); and Camodeca (2006). Robert (1948), discussed by Nutton (1978): 219–20; Saller (1982): 168; and Rouché (1998). Carrié (2005): 275–6 and 282.

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duties of municipal magistrates with regard to the administration of testamentary bequests and the performance of manumissions and guardianships, as do a number of fourth- and ifth-century papyri from Egypt. Municipal magistrates were involved, along with imperial oicials, in prosecutions against Christians in the early fourth century, as well as later prosecutions against Christian schismatics and heretics.22 There is also some evidence for city councils and municipal magistrates judging legal cases on their own authority, although the main subject of petitions to boulai (city councils) in third- and fourth-century Egypt concerned municipal liturgies, in particular attempts to avoid nominations and burdens.23 The fact that an imperial constitution, issued in 412 and addressed to the proconsul of Africa, forbids duumvirs from extending “the power of their fasces” (i.e., their jurisdictional authority) outside the limits of their own municipalities, implies that municipal magistrates still had jurisdictional powers to abuse.24 Nonetheless, as Denis Feissel has demonstrated, between 324 and 610 CE a mere handful of inscriptions that record legal acts undertaken at either a municipal or provincial level (i.e., at provincial assemblies) survives.25 In the later Roman legal epigraphy, then, the focus is almost exclusively on what Feissel terms “les actes de l’État imperial.” Given the emphasis on imperial law and state jurisdiction within late Roman epigraphy, in addition to the promulgation of centralized imperial law codes – coupled with fourth-century developments establishing “new” imperial legal oicials within the localities, such as the defensor civitatis and “new” central “Palatine” legal oices, such as the imperial Quaestor – it begins to seem absurd not to assume that all law and legal practice in the later Roman Empire was subject to the universal control of the emperors and their bureaucrats.26

Contextualizing “The Universal Laws of the Romans”: The Early Empire Our problem is then: was Rome at all interested in producing a single juridical framework for the whole Empire, or at least for all Roman citizens living in any part of the Empire? Did they want Superinius Aquila 22

23

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For the evidence on municipal magistrates being involved in the persecution of Christians, see Carrié (2005): 289 with n. 85. On the prosecution of schismatics and heretics, see Humfress (2007): 243–68. Bowman (1971): 113. P.Oxy. LIV 3758 records a case heard before the logistes in 325; Libanius, Oration 11.139 refers to the boule of Antioch judging a legal case. See also the epigraphical sources listed by Feissel (2009): 99–102. CTh 12.1.174 = CI 10.32.53 (given at Ravenna, 10 March 412). Compare Digest 50.1.26 (Paul, Ad Edictum, book 1). Feissel (2009). Defensor civitatis: Frakes (2001); imperial quaestor: Harries (1988) and Faro (1984). See in general Meyer (2004): 217, 252, and 296. On “imperial law,” see Vessey (2003); a review article of Honoré (1998); Harries (1999); and Matthews (2000).

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of Cologne and Aurelius Bonosus of Carthage to live under the same system of laws?27

Galsterer’s problem, as outlined in the preceding quotation, is central to the question of legal universalism under the early empire: Did “Rome” seek to impose a uniform application of Roman law in the provinces?28 Supposing for the moment that our Greco-Roman rhetorician, Pseudo-Menander, was right to imply that local law had been displaced by Roman law by the late third and early fourth centuries, does it necessarily follow that this was a consequence of imposition from above? In terms of private law (“inheritances by heirs and other topics”), Pseudo-Menander’s Treatise I states only that the inhabitants of the eastern cities made use of the “universal laws of the Romans”; it does not tell us that Roman private law was forced upon them by imperial oicials or, indeed, by any other kind of oicial. Pseudo-Menander’s treatise, however, was composed after 212 CE and the promulgation of Caracalla’s Constitutio Antoniniana (an imperial edict granting Roman citizenship to almost all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire).29 As such, the brief comments that Pseudo-Menander makes on the “universal laws of the Romans” have been cited as evidence for the fact that Roman law was imposed on the vast majority of the free inhabitants of the empire, as a result of Caracalla granting them Roman citizenship.30 Roman historians and legal scholars from Mitteis onward have suggested, to widely varying efects, that Caracalla’s Constitutio Antoniniana required large numbers of provincials to order their private relations with each other according to Roman law.31 Thus Ando, for example, states that “Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to all freeborn residents of the empire in 212 CE will have dramatically altered the legal landscape: any and all earlier provincial edicts will have had to be entirely rewritten.”32 Having accepted some kind of necessary link between the extension of Roman citizenship and the “state” imposition of Roman law, other scholars place Caracalla’s edict at the apex of historical processes that reach back into the Roman Republic. Bispham, for example, links the Constitutio

27 28 29 30 31

32

Galsterer (1986): 23; see also Galsterer (1999). Stolte (2001): 169 discussing Galsterer. See Sasse (1958) and Wolf (1976). Talamanca (1971). Mitteis (1891), esp.: 160–6, arguing that the Constitutio Antoniana was part of a programmatic attempt to replace existing local laws (Volksrecht) with Roman law (Reichsrecht). Ando (2006): 178. Compare Lintott (1993): 154: “Only after Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to almost all the free population of the empire (in AD 212 on the usual view), can Roman law be said to have been, at least in theory, the law of the empire”; and Honoré (2004): 113: “With the Constitutio Antoniniana Roman law had become a universal law.” Rowlandson and Takahashi (2009): 117 state that sibling marriage in Egypt ended abruptly when the Constitutio Antoniniana made it “illegal” (i.e., it was not permitted by Roman law and virtually all were now Roman citizens).

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Antoniniana to the provisions of late republican and early imperial municipal charters and relates both in turn to the extension of Roman law and citizenship to Italy and the provinces: How far, and how quickly, the new municipia picked up the ius ciuile is, then, an important question, and one which recurs again and again as Roman citizenship spreads across the Empire, right up to the aftermath of the Constitutio Antoniniana. One would like to know, in particular, whether Rome was proactive and dirigiste, enforcing the adoption of the ius ciuile and other provisions of universal application in the new municipia, or whether it was left up to the communities themselves to mug up on it as best they could.33

Looking forward from the Constitutio Antoniniana, most scholars express doubts as to the success of Caracalla’s (supposed) attempt at legal universalism. As Yiftach-Firanko questions with respect to law in Greco-Roman Egypt, In 212 the Antonine Constitution turned the provincial population into Roman citizens. Formally, it subjected all its inhabitants to the precepts of Roman law.Yet did this change in status also mean a profound change in the legal practices in Egypt?34

Virtually none of the vast secondary literature questions the premise that once individuals or communities had been granted Roman citizenship, they were henceforth required to use Roman law to govern their private relations.35 To assume that the Roman authorities aimed at the uniication of law through the extension of citizenship is, in fact, one aspect of what Galsterer has rightly identiied as “a tendency among the legal historians of the uniication school [sc. Mitteis, Arangio-Ruiz, Wolf , et al.] to assign motives to the Roman state which are taken unselfconsciously from the modern national state as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”36 In reality, no state act obliged Roman citizens to use Roman private law.37 Citizenship should be understood rather “as an enabling mechanism, ofering access to the judicial procedures and remedies of the society at diferent levels.”38 The 33

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Bispham (2007): 205–6. Compare Gardner (2001). On the “Roman private law” clauses within the Flavian municipal charters, see Gonzales (1986), in particular lex Irnitana chapters 93, 10B 52–102C and 85; Johnston (1987); Lamberti (1993); Tomlin (2002); Wolf (2006); and Nörr (2007). Yiftach-Firanko (2009): 543; see also 554 on the use and adaptation of the stipulatio clause in Egypt after 212 CE. Exceptions: Schönbauer (1931) and Schönbauer (1937), both contra Mitteis. See also Seidl (1973); Galsterer (1986); Cotton (2003); Meyer (2004): 183; Garnsey (2004): 146–7; and Carrié (2005): 274–5. Galsterer (1986): 24. Mélèze Modrzejewski (1993): 998. Garnsey (2004): 155. For a broader contextualized reading of Roman citizenship, see Dench (2005): 93–151.

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papyrological record, alongside other sources, certainly provides a wealth of evidence for individuals and communities engaging in numerous diferent ways with Roman private law, both before and after 212 CE; but the reasons why they did so need to be sought from below.39 Those who had more at stake than others in terms of landowning and “elite” sociopolitical status may have been more likely to seek out the remedies and protections of Roman law, or to be enmeshed in them already. The establishment of economic rights and entitlements to property; the agreement and regulation of contracts; and the negotiation of a host of other material interests might demand the use of speciically Roman legal instruments within any particular context. Moreover, as John Crook notes, the de controversiis agrorum, one of “the least-discussed” of the handbooks of Frontinus (irst century CE) “shows what a lot of litigation was generated by land, with its questions of ownership, boundaries and taxation.”40 This activity, however, still does not amount to the emperor or Roman “state” oicials requiring individuals to use Roman law because they were Roman citizens. Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to virtually all free inhabitants of the empire would have certainly increased the number of individuals who had the right (ius) to make use of Roman law qua citizens. Before 212 CE, however, there were also various types of legal mechanisms that gave “noncitizens” the ability to make use of some Roman legal concepts and practices. According to Gaius’s Institutes, every individual was either slave or free: some were free by birth (ingenui), and some were made free through a grant of freedom (libertini or liberti, “freedmen”). A free man or woman was either a Roman citizen; or a “Latin” (i.e., holding the ius Latii); or a peregrine, a foreigner or “alien,” who might in turn be a citizen of some other speciic peregrine community.41 As a class, Latins had some of the juridical iura (rights) of full citizenship: in particular the right to make a contract with a Roman that would then be enforceable according to Roman law (ius commercii). As Woolf states, “In this, and in other respects, Latins had access to Roman law, even if Roman law was in practice probably interpreted in the light of local traditions.”42 Nor were foreigners 39

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For “new” papyri from the Roman Near East (provinces of Syria; Mesopotamia; Arabia; Judaea/Syria Palaestina), see Cotton, Cockle, and Millar (1995), including relevant texts from P. Euphr. (nos. 24–29); P. Dura (nos. 44 and 45); P. Bostra (no. 171); and Pap. Colon. (no. 173). Also Cotton and Yardeni (1997); Cotton (2006); Kraemer (1958) = P. Nessana III; Arjava, Buchholz, and Gagos (2007) = P. Petra. For Egypt, see also now Richter (2008). For the later West:Tjäder (1955); Wessel (2003); and Velázquez Soriano (2000): esp. document nos. 8, 39, 40A, and 40B. Crook (1995): 53. See now Campbell (2000) and Cuomo (2007): 103–30 discussing the expertise of land surveyors vis-à-vis legal experts (including jurists) in resolving boundary disputes. On the Roman law of status, see Crook (1967): 36–67, including a lucid discussion of the relative status of “Coloniary Latins” and “Junian Latins.” On the ius latinum, see also Kremer (2006). Woolf (1998): 67.

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(peregrini) entirely outside the Roman legal system. Ius gentium (law of the peoples) referred to “those legal habits which were accepted by the Roman law as applying to, and being used by, all the people they met, whether Roman citizens or not.”43 The elaboration of this concept enabled jurists to deine certain interactions between peregrines, Latins, and citizens as being under Roman jurisdiction: for example, peregrines could acquire ownership through “natural” modes of acquisition (traditio, occupatio, accessio); slavery was also iure gentium, all peoples had it – although there were aspects of the (Roman) law of slavery that were peculiar to the Roman ius civile alone. Moreover, according to Gaius’s Institutes 4.37, a legal iction enabled foreigners to either sue or be sued “as if ” they were Roman citizens, in certain actions. At Rome, the praetor peregrinus handled litigation between foreigners and citizens and probably also cases where foreigners were the only parties – such cases were judged according to what the jurists termed “honesty and fairness” (iudicia bonae idei).44 Within the city of Rome and across the empire, contact with foreigners and “aliens” was unavoidable, especially in terms of commerce, and business dealings generally. The Roman Senate, the jurists, the emperors, and their oicials were well aware of a world of private legal transactions involving “noncitizens” and recognized the need to regulate those transactions from within the Roman legal system itself. From the perspective of the peregrinus, on the other hand, a grant of Roman citizenship would have by no means necessarily implied a irst contact with Roman law. Certain historical developments within Roman law and legal practice were peculiar to the city of Rome; one such fundamental development was the ius honorarium, a branch of law developed by the urban praetor (and other magistrates at Rome) in order to “support, supplement, and correct the civil law.”45 In theory, the edictal remedies developed under the authority of the urban praetors were valid only for Rome and its environs because this was the limit of the urban praetors’ own jurisdiction. It thus became necessary to develop mechanisms through which Roman citizens throughout Italy and the provinces could access important praetorian innovations, as and when they were developed (e.g., the praetorian remedy bonorum possessio, “possession of goods”).46 This was partly achieved through imperial constitutions, juristic commentary, and responsa, and partly through the actions of imperial oicials within the provinces. This is a much contested topic, but provincial governors – or magistrates of at least praetorian standing – were apparently responsible for promulgating provincial edicts, primarily for the beneit of Roman

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Crook (1967): 29. For discussion, see Turpin (1965). Digest 1.1.7.1 (Papinian, Deinitiones, book 2). See Watson (1971) and for the later empire, Pulitanò (1999).

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citizens within their own jurisdiction. The contents of the “provincial edicts” seem to have essentially mirrored those of the urban praetors at Rome, with some variation. The stabilizing of the urban praetorian edict around 125 CE (the edictum perpetuum) prompted the writing of relatively large-scale edictal commentaries, such as that by Ulpian under the Severans.47 The fact that Gaius wrote a commentary on “the provincial edict” may imply a similar type of juristic development. Imperial constitutions and governor’s edicts could also contain legal and administrative measures directed to a single province, or part of a province – what was technically termed Provinzialrecht (provincial law) in nineteenth-century Romanist scholarship.48 Again this “provincial law” – as far as it goes – was elaborated piecemeal and in response to speciic situations. In sum, as even this brief sketch highlights, we cannot think in terms of a “ready-made” Roman law being exported en bloc from Rome to the provinces, either before or after 212 CE. As recent studies and critiques of the concept of “Romanization” have demonstrated, particularly with respect to religion, urbanism, and cultural identity, “imperialism was a dialectic in which both sides played a part.”49 The same insight can be developed with respect to “Roman” law and legal practice. According to the beneicial ideology – which advertised power relations of mutual beneit to both ruler and ruled – emperors were the ultimate bestowers of gifts and largess, as well as dispensers of justice.50 They granted general acts of amnesty in criminal matters (indulgentia) regularly and dispensed special legal privileges and exemptions to individual petitioners on a daily basis. In terms of private law (e.g., inheritance, family, property, contracts, commerce), petitioners throughout the Roman provinces also looked to the emperors and imperial oicials for decisions on individual situations and case-speciic responses.51 They thus contributed to, in the words of Fergus Millar, “the formation of a body of rules which were in principle valid throughout the Empire.”52 As Millar also stresses, however, “the body of rules thus created was not so much enforced by any apparatus of government as available for use by interested parties making claims or bringing suits, and then by oicials, or Emperors, giving rulings in response.”53 The question for us, then, is not so much whether “Superinius 47

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Ulpian’s Ad Edictum apparently had a wide circulation under the later empire, with numerous fragments found in papyri; in addition, the Fragmenta Berolinensia possibly indicates a postclassical edition. For further discussion, see Purpura (1995). See Amelotti (1995). Revell (2009): 191; also Mattingly (2002). Nutton (1978); also Stolte (2002). See Hauken (1998); Connolly (2010): 137–58; and Gascou (2004). For the later empire, see Fournet and Gascou (2004) and Fournet (2004). Petitioners also variously looked to Roman military oicials, as discussed by Peachin (2007). Millar (1983): 78. Millar (1983): 78. See also Carrié (2005): 273–6 and Arjava (1999) on the “penetration” of Roman family law into Egypt.

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Aquila of Cologne” and “Aurelius Bonosus of Carthage” had the same system of laws enforced upon them by Rome; but rather why “Superinius Aquila of Cologne” or “Aurelius Bonosus of Carthage” used Roman law, as and when he did, in any speciic context or situation. Reframing Galsterer’s problem in this way demands asking much broader questions concerning Roman private law and its “reception” in the provinces under the early empire. It also necessitates exploring what other alternatives – and limitations – existed on the ground, in speciic localities, in terms of maintaining sociolegal order and handling conlict. How and to what extent any given individual, before or after 212 CE, either could make use of or would want to make use of Roman private law would have depended on a combination of various economic, political, cultural, and sociolegal factors. What kind of access any speciic individual, group, or community had to (Roman) legal advice, to notaries, or to Roman legal oicials needs to be considered.54 Juridical capacity, gender, and socioeconomic status are also relatively obvious determinants (although how they functioned in practice under both the early and later empires is often less than clear).55 Neither juridical capacity nor socioeconomic status should be thought of as a static phenomenon within an individual’s life-span: for instance, slaves could become freedmen, a ilius familias could become sui iuris, or honestiores and potentiores could sufer a loss of status. Patronage was fundamental, alongside the expectation that elite social status would be given its proper due within Roman legal processes.56 Individuals, and groups, would also have weighed the costs and beneits – in terms of time, money, and social status – of using Roman private law, relative to any speciic situation.57 Lodging a formal case before a Roman oicial was a particularly costly option; alongside the payment of necessary tips and fees to various oicials, petitioners had to reckon with the possibility of a lengthy wait for justice – P. Euphrates 1 (246 CE) registers a complaint from the villagers of Beth Phouraia (Coele Syria) that they had waited for more than eight months in Antioch for a decision from the governor.58 An appeal to an imperial oicial, or a general reference to “the law of the emperors” in a petition, however, could function as a marker of elite status or as a deliberate advertisement of loyalty to imperial authority. To use an example from the later Roman period, Joelle Beaucamp has demonstrated from papyrological evidence that elites in Justinianic Egypt were more likely than 54 55

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For the early empire, see Kantor (1999). Gender: Grubbs (2002) and Bannon (2001); socioeconomic status: Garnsey (1970) and Humfress (2006a). On patronage, see now Garnsey (2010). On the time and expense associated with Roman litigation in particular, see Kelly (2006): 138–85. Cotton and Eck (2005): 41.

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those lower down the social strata to invoke substantive Roman law principles and imperial constitutions throughout their legal dealings. She concludes that “closeness to imperial law was therefore connected to social conditions.”59 Byzantine Egyptian elites may have had better access to imperial law, in the sense of better access to legal expertise, but they also had sociological reasons for aligning themselves with texts of law promulgated by the emperors. Existing social structures and traditional local practices would also have inluenced the way in which individuals engaged – or not – with Roman law principles or practices. For example, justice could be sought from the god(s) via a local temple, priest, or holy man or through “self-help” activities such as cursing.60 More generally, within any given community, disagreements may usually have been heard before a local “big man,” for example a senatorial landowner, a tribal chief, or community elder. Depending on the context or situation, local “big men” might have intervened in disagreements and disputes with some awareness of Roman legal principles and practices (such as, e.g., formal arbitration). It is just as likely, on the other hand, that a local big man would seek to resolve a dispute using local knowledge alone and employing general sociocultural norms – thus providing a type of “justice” that the parties to the dispute were more likely to acquiesce in.61 The social density of any given community – whether in a city, village, rural area, or “great estate” – could also determine whether any use was made of Roman legal procedures or institutional structures.62 As numerous modern studies in social anthropology, microeconomic theory, and law have shown, sociolegal order can be maintained in a “tight-knit” community or group with little or no recourse to formal law. In a 1991 monograph, for example, Ellickson showed how contemporary boundary and cattle trespass disputes in Shasta County, California, were settled in the context of long-established and continuing social relationships and groupings, highlighting the role of “strategic” gossip, the threat of violence, and the appeal to “community elders.”63 This perspective also provides a crucial context for the development of the Christian episcopalis audientia, the “bishop’s hearing.”64 Finally, violent self-help should not necessarily be thought of as simply an alternative to Roman law and state-sanctioned coercion. Imperial oicials took breaches in public law and order very seriously, if and when they came to their attention; “private” violence, however, could also work in conjunction with Roman law. For example, individuals might attempt to enforce 59 60 61

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Beaucamp (2007): 286. Chaniotis (2009). See also Tomlin (1998) and Versnel (2010). For discussion of potentially relevant “Roman” sociocultural norms, particularly in the context of elite behavior, see Barton (2001). Shaw (2000): 373 notes the “vast tracts of cityless lands that had to be controlled through the agency of local landowners and their domains.” Ellickson (1991). See also Galanter (1981): 17–25. This argument is explored in Humfress (2011).

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a property claim by violently seizing possession as a prelude to lodging a court case for rightful ownership – or they might seek out a Roman legal remedy for possession and then use private violence to enforce it. All of the various factors discussed so far could change over time, as well as difer from one locality to the next – and each, of course, needs to be understood as operating in relation to the others, in any given context. When we do ind individuals using Roman law – whether in Rome or the provinces – that engagement could take place on a number of diferent levels, each implying various types of legal knowledge. First, in the broadest sense, Roman concepts of property, contract, trust, inheritance, and the like were not just “legal” concepts; they were also part of a broader sociocultural repertoire.65 Hence, for example, we ind the technical Latin phrase, sine dolo malo translated into Greek and inscribed on “confession inscriptions” in Lydia and Phrygia (irst to third centuries CE).66 Or we ind early Christian authors, such as Tertullian and Cyprian in North Africa, developing theological ideas by working through Roman legal metaphors.67 Second, on a more speciic level: “Law may be used as a cookbook from which we learn how to bring about desired results – disposing of property, forming a partnership, securing a subsidy.”68 Until at least the age of Justinian, there was no clear set of authoritative Roman legal “cookbooks” to work from: hence, the “recipe” being followed would have difered according to access to legal advice, local practices, or speciic situations. Moreover, as the legal anthropologists Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann explain, with reference to modern ethnographic studies, In each arena actors make more or less constrained choices. They may avoid any use of law, opting for non-legal means. They may opt for one law and exclude others; they may also use more than one law. They may sharply distinguish legal systems, or eface their boundaries, or develop hybrid forms. Most of the time, people just go along in their daily routines without relecting on [the] law that has shaped these routines, their social relationships and attitude.69

Seen from the perspective of the individual actor, then, speciic Roman legal forms could be used to transform an everyday occurrence – the making of a promise, the ofering of a loan, a gift of property – into something that could then be viewed (plausibly) as a Roman “legal” act, whether by other parties to the transaction, or by an imperial oicial, or in a Roman court. This is perhaps the situation that we ind in the irst-century BCE Tabula Contrebiensis,

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Fögen (2002). Chaniotis (2009): 382–4. Humfress (2007): 174–5. Galanter (1981): 12. Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann (2006): 24.

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in which a judgment is preceded by two technical Roman formulae, despite the fact that the “underlying dispute did not rely on Roman law.”70 Or, similarly, with the evidence for third-century CE Egyptians inserting Roman stipulatio clauses into their “Greek” contract documents.71 Individuals might also make use of Roman institutionalized practices by having a contract drawn up according to a speciic Roman structure, maybe employing specialist notaries or copyists where available, while expressing the contents of that document in nontechnical Latin or Greek, or Aramaic or Hebrew, for instance.72 Imperial constitutions and juristic writings had to develop various principles to decide upon the “legality” of such agreements, if and when they were tested in the Roman courts. Individuals might equally opt for a “Roman” procedure, such as appointing an arbitrator ex compromisso (by formal agreement), at the same time as deciding the dispute itself according to “local” norms.73 In all these examples, the focus is on what any given actor’s particular use or adaptation can tell us about how Roman law functioned within a speciic “local” framework, or even just with respect to a single case. Those who went to the trouble and expense of litigating a dispute through a Roman court (or courts), or petitioning a Roman oicial or emperor, would be judged, in general, according to Roman legal principles. Emperors, jurists, and Roman oicials under the early empire, however, did take some established customs,“ancient practices,” and even “peregrine laws” into account. For example, an imperial rescript promulgated on 26/27 March 224 CE, informs a certain Aper, a veteran, that whether the ruins of a house could be legally turned into a garden or not (thus changing the original land use) would be decided by the provincial governor on the basis of “what has usually been done in the town in similar cases.”74 Determining certain long-established local practices might also be essential to deciding cases according to Roman legal principles; for example, as in CI 3.34.7 (promulgated 4 May 286 CE, to Julianus), which refers to respecting “ancient practices” and “established customs” in determining the right (servitude) to take water. In fact, according to Ulpian’s commentary on the praetorian edict, taking the customary practices of an urban neighborhood into account could be an essential part of aequitas (equity).75 Certain practices, however, could be judged by the emperors and 70 71 72

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Birks, Rodger, and Richardson (1984). See Yiftach-Firanko (2009): 554. Roman documentary forms: Ciulei (1983); Cotton (2003); Meyer (2004): 170 and 180–2; and Meyer (2007). On arbitration ex compromisso, see Roebuck and De Loynes de Fumidon (2004): 174–85. CI 8.10.3; see also CI 8.52.1, which probably relates to the same case. Cf. Digest 1.3.32 (Iul., Dig. 84) and Digest 1.3.33 (Ulp., De. Of. Pro. 4). Digest 25.4.1.15 (Ulp., Ad Ed. 24) with speciic reference to determining the paternity of a newborn child, according to a list of praetorian formalities. For further discussion of “custom,” in terms of legal and anthropological approaches, see Humfress (2012).

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their oicials to be “non-Roman” – as and when they came to their attention.76 There is also (limited) evidence for some petitioners addressing questions to the emperors with “Greek” legal principles in mind. Other petitioners had done their Roman law homework, or else had found someone else to do it for them: a 294 CE rescript, addressed to a certain Fronto, instructs him to “cite the response of the jurist Papinian and the opinion of others whom you [sc. Fronto] have mentioned” and set up the defense of fraud (CI 5.71.14). A certain Mucianus had likewise apparently copied an opinion of Papinian into his petition to the emperors (CI 6.37.12, 240 CE). In general, classical jurists – addressing themselves perhaps to a particular “elite” top section of society – agreed that those who made use of Roman law could not then plead ignorance of Roman law as a defense. Ulpian, again commenting on the praetorian edict, speciically on time limits for claiming praetorian possession of an estate, goes further: Pomponius says that the knowledge which is necessary is not such as is exacted from persons learned in the law, but is what anyone can acquire, either by himself or through others; that is to say, by taking the advice of persons learned in the law, as the diligent head of the household should do.77

In sum, a culture of “professional” Roman law was by no means irrelevant to legal practice within the provinces of the empire, but it was not determinant of it either. Even if we were to suppose that individuals had unlimited access to relevant jurisprudential texts and legal expertise (in some cases, a big “if ”), we still need to acknowledge what Wickham terms “a constant dialectic between local practices and organized legal knowledge.”78 Since at least Mitteis and Schönbauer, Roman historians have in fact acknowledged the existence of other types of “organized legal knowledge,” existing alongside Roman law in certain provinces of the early empire, such as “Greek law,” “Egyptian law,” “Jewish law,” “Nabatean law,” or what Mélèze Modrzejewski terms “Hellenistic law.”79 Much of this scholarship, however,

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CI 5.5.2 (285 CE, to Sebastina): the Praetor’s Edict brands a man who has two wives with infamy, thus having two wives should be punished; CI 8.46.6 (288 CE, to Hermagenes), a Greek custom of publicly disowning children is “not approved by Roman laws.” For the restriction of Jewish marriage under the later empire, see CI 1.9.7 (393 CE to Infantius, Count of the Orient) and more generally CI 5.5.4 (to Andromachus, count of the private estate). Millar (2008): 126 discusses a Jewish marriage contract (ketubah), dated 417 CE and written in Aramaic, from Antinoopolis Egypt. Digest 38.15.2.5 (Ulp., Ad Ed. 49); cf. Digest 37.1.10 (Paul, Ad Sab. 2). Wickham (2003): 4. Mélèze Modrzejewski (1993). See in general Tuori (2007). On “Nabatean law,” see Cotton (2009); on “Coptic law” as a misleading concept, see Papaconstantinou (2009): 450 with n. 16.

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tends to be based on what Lauren Benton (in a diferent context) describes as a “stacked legal systems or spheres” model: a model that imagines a number of “ordered, nested legal spheres or systems,” with state law, in our case to be understood as Roman law, “capping the plural legal order” through its ability to establish a monopoly on violence.80 Benton argues that this “stacked” model is fundamentally lawed because individuals on the ground engage in “rampant boundary crossing” across legal systems or spheres: Legal ideas and practices, legal protections of material interests, and the roles of legal personnel (specialized or not) fail to obey the lines separating one legal system or sphere from another. Legal actors, too, appeal regularly to multiple legal authorities and perceive themselves as members of more than one legal community. The image of ordered, nested legal systems clashes with wide-ranging legal practices and perceptions.81

This argument can be developed with respect to the irst-century “Babatha archive”: a collection of papyri, found in the Nahal Hever cave in the Judaean desert, consisting primarily of legal family documents – including contracts of loan, marriage contracts, and deeds of sale and gift – variously written in Greek, Aramaic, and Nabatean languages. Babatha’s archive (and the accompanying archive of Salome Komaise) has generated a great deal of scholarly discussion concerning what type of law might have governed the legal situations envisioned in these papyri: whether Jewish, Rabbinic, Hellenistic, or Roman.82 The question of the “legal identity” of the Babatha archive has also been linked to questions concerning the “identity” of Babatha herself: was she more Jewish, Hellenistic, or Roman? Comparatively little work, however, has been done on how Babatha might have attempted to strategically range across diferent types of law and legal institutions in order to achieve an outcome favorable to her interests. A 2005 essay by Satlow, focusing on marriage payments and succession strategies in the Judaean desert documents, begins to explore this alternative perspective: I have tried to avoid explaining the papyri in the light of Rabbinic or “Hellenistic” law or practice. I have done this not because I believe, a priori, that such comparisons are methodologically unsound; indeed in this particular case the rabbinic material nicely illustrates and conirms some of the suggestions ofered here. Rather, my goal has not been to see how “Jewish” or “Hellenistic” Babatha and her friends were, but to try to understand a family at work, negotiating the mundane and treacherous terrain of money and familial relationships.83

80 81 82 83

Benton (2002): 8. See also Benton (2007). Benton (2002): 8. See, e.g., Cotton (2002); Cotton and Eck (2005); and Mélèze Modrzejewski (2005). Satlow (2005): 65.

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Likewise, Elizabeth Meyer and Hannah Cotton have both drawn attention to the fact that Babatha was a woman who led to the Nahal Hever cave with no fewer than three Greek translations of the Roman formula of the actio tutelae in her leather pouch, so it is easy to believe that she was investigating the legal possibilities of the Roman legal system in Arabia for the likes of herself, and trying to exploit the opportunities it ofered to the best of her abilities.84

Babatha’s use of both Rabbinic and Roman law thus becomes evidence for (her access to) a kind of “multilegal” knowledge or at least a “multilegal” awareness – through which she attempted to achieve certain speciic goals.85 Franz von Benda-Beckmann has developed a similar argument on the basis of ethnographical ieldwork in contemporary Western Sumatra; working in the ield, legal anthropologists were forced to contextualize, [to] see how diferent categories of actors were inluenced by, and made use of, diferent legal bodies in diferent contexts of interaction. In order to do this systematically, they had to dissociate categories of actors from the categories of law to which the actors “belonged” by normative construction, that is, the farmer from his/her customary law; the bureaucrat from his state law; the religious functionary from his religious law. Only then could they see that farmers used, or were inluenced by, state law; bureaucrats by traditional law etc. Empirical research further showed that the relations between the elements in a plural legal whole could be diferent; people could distinguish legal subsystems and choose between them, or accumulate them, or create new combined legal forms and institutions, while other actors, in other contexts, would act diferently.86

There seems to be real potential for developing this kind of legal anthropological methodology further with respect to the much broader vista of legal practice revealed to us by papyrological evidence, epigraphical data, and other irst- to third-century sources (including “Patristic” texts). This approach leads us irmly away from the idea of an empirewide imposition of Roman law potentially or actually governing the legal behavior of Rome’s subjects; rather, it will reveal them, as groups or individuals, negotiating the structures of 84

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Meyer (2007). Also Cotton (2002): 18: “Rome’s subjects could and would seek Roman justice whenever they believed that it would be more efective, more advantageous, and more just than the local one.” On “multilegal” awareness, compare, e.g., Pirie (2006): 97. Tibetan pastoralists are “iercely protective of the autonomy of their cultural patch when it comes to managing internal afairs and conlicts – and defer voluntarily to the Chinese authorities in matters of criminal violence.” Benda-Beckmann (2009): 32.

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Roman law and choosing – insofar as they were able – to engage with them, or not.

Roman Law and the Later Empire: Developing a Legal Anthropological Approach I ask of your illustrious knowledge, whether there is one law for advocates and another for retired advocates, one equity for Rome and another for Matar?87

These questions, written in an early ifth-century letter addressed to a practicing advocate by a retired advocate (ex togato), were intended to be understood rhetorically: according to the questioner at least, when two such learned individuals had a dispute with each other, their sense of equity, of “fairness” and right dealing, should be the same whether the conlict unfolded at Rome or in the environs of their home town of Matar in Africa Proconsularis. While some important modern scholarship has explored the kind of out-of-court negotiations and “extralegal” strategies that our two elite ifth-century North Africans were engaged in here, law in the later Roman Empire is more usually associated with the uniied legal system of the emperors and their imperial magistrates (as well as other legal oicials operating from within the imperial bureaucracy).88 What is most visible in the late Roman legal evidence is, naturally, the product of the “central” imperial government (imperial constitutions and law codes), and the imperially sponsored institutional Christian church (especially with respect to the development of a speciic ius ecclesiasticum and the early beginnings of a “canon law”).89 Moving from the principate to the dominate, we seem to shift from a legal world of “citizens” to one of “citizens and subjects”: “As the Roman Empire expanded, the state became ever more intrusive in seeking to resolve the disputes of its citizens. … The judge under the Empire in the provinces was an extension of state power and a symptom of the expanded role of the state in the lives of its citizens and subjects.”90 This is a trend that appears to culminate in the sixth-century

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Ep. Ad Salvium PL 20.243C–D. For discussion of this letter and its background, see Lepelley (1989): 240–51 and Sirks (1999). On late Roman out-of-court negotiation and formal arbitration, see Gagos and Van Minnen (1995); Harries (2003); and Harries (2007): 28–42. Studies for the post-Roman West are, of course, more numerous, e.g., Davies and Fouracre (1986);Wormald (1998); Rosenwein (1999); Brown (2001); Brown and Gorecki (2004); Karras, Kaye, and Matter (2008); and Rio (2009). See Gaudemet (1985); Gaudemet (1983); Gaudemet (1979); Crogiez-Pétrequin, Jaillette, and Huck (2009); and Aubert and Blanchard (2009). Harries (2003), 71. Garnsey (2004): 140–50 rightly stresses that citizenship and its various gradations still functioned as important legal mechanisms in the later Roman Empire.

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emperor Justinian’s insistence that he alone is the sole interpreter of the law and the source of both Roman and ecclesiastical jurisprudence, alongside his conirmation of the canons of the Christian church themselves as civil laws.91 However, even if – for the sake of the argument – we were to equate all late Roman law with imperial law, a “legal anthropological” perspective is still essential to understanding how that law functioned in practice. As Chris Wickham has argued with reference to courts and conlict in medieval Tuscany, Even if we restricted our interest to the impact of Roman law, we would have to recognize that its nature and extent depended on the choices of the members of diferent local communities (whether litigants, lawyers, or judges) as to how to approach law, and what law (if any) to use. … These were cultural choices, whether conscious or unconscious, made inside locally speciic realities; the social processes that generated them must be studied before anything else. There was everywhere, furthermore, a constant dialectic between local practices and organized legal knowledge: each afected the other. What we need to study in order to understand this dialectic is how people approached courts and arbitrations, with what expectations, and which strategies they used to get their way.92

This kind of legal anthropological approach foregrounds individual parties, their perceptions of action, and the choices that they make within any given sociocultural situation, while still taking account of law codes, “state” institutions, and legal oicials where relevant. It thus contrasts with what the legal sociologist Marc Galanter characterized as a legal-centralist perspective – namely, that “the justice to which we seek access is a product that is produced – or at least distributed – exclusively by the state.”93 If we set to one side a (nineteenth- and early twentieth-century) state-based theory of law that puts oicial law codes, formal legal institutions, and the state at the core of all social order, then the idea of legal universalism under the later empire has the potential to look quite diferent. What is at stake in developing a legal anthropological approach, rather than adopting a legal-centralist perspective, can be demonstrated via a brief analysis of the concept of “legal practice” itself. If we adopt a legal-centralist starting point, then exploring legal practice inevitably involves some kind 91

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CI 1.14.12, Justinian to Demosthenes PP (given at Constantinople 30 October 529); Digest Const. Deo Auctore, 6; Justinian, Institutes pr.; Justinian, Novel 9pr (14 April 535, addressed to John, archbishop and patriarch of Old Rome); and Justinian, Novel 131.1 (given 18 March 545). Cf. CI 1.14.11 (given 22 April 474). On Roman and Canon law in the age of Justinian, see the introductory chapter to Van der Wal and Stolte (1994). Wickham (2003): 4. Galanter (1981): 1.

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of questioning as to how far the “law-in-the-books,” or indeed unwritten customary law, relates to the law-in-action.94 Exploring legal practice thus becomes an exercise in “gap analysis”: Does the law on the ground match the oicial law as promulgated, or at least as transmitted, in the books? If not, how big are the gaps and why might they exist?95 Late Roman historians, for example, tend to ask to what extent late Roman imperial constitutions – or even the canons of church councils – were applied in practice, and whether they were used correctly or not; in other words, when we go to the “legal” texts, and then look at law in practice, we inevitably ind gaps and try to account for them.96 A “legal anthropological” approach, on the other hand – where we try to understand legal processes as sociocultural processes – does not neglect the “law-in-the-books” (such imperial codes and juristic writings) but seeks to contextualize that “state” law in terms of a much broader understanding of legal practice. From a legal anthropological perspective, for example, “the principal contribution of courts to dispute resolution is providing a background of norms and procedures against which negotiations and regulation in both private and governmental settings take place.”97 Individuals bargain and strategize “in the shadow of the law”; hence, in the words of Galanter, “the courts (and the law they apply) may thus be said to confer on the parties what Mnookin and Kornhauser call a “bargaining endowment,” that is, a set of “counters” to be used in bargaining between “disputants.”98 All of this activity, moreover, takes place in the context of what Galanter terms “indigenous ordering” or “indigenous law,” a “social ordering that is indigenous – i.e., familiar to and applied by the participants in the everyday activity that is being regulated.”99 For the later Roman Empire we might think of a particular Christian community within the city of Constantinople, or a speciic trade association at Carthage. In order to explore “law in practice,” we irst have to take account of who is using the formal or oicial law, in the context of what “indigenous order” or “indigenous law” and to what ends. As Galanter concludes, I am not trying to turn legal centralism upside down and place indigenous law in the position of primacy. Instead I suggest that the relation of oicial and indigenous law is variable and problematic. Nor do I mean to idealize indigenous law as either more virtuous or more eicient than oicial law. Although by deinition indigenous law may have the virtues 94 95 96

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On the concept of “customary law” as “unwritten law,” see Schulze (1992): 13–14. On “gap analysis,” see Hartog (1985): 925 with n. 94 and Galanter (1981): 5. This was the methodology that I (unconsciously) followed in Humfress (2005) and Humfress (2006b). Cf. Arjava (2003–4) and Stolte (2009). Galanter (1981): 6. Galanter (1981): 6. The reference is to Mnookin and Kornhauser (1979). Galanter (1981): 17.

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of being familiar, understandable, and independent of professionals, it is not always the expression of harmonious egalitarianism. It often relects narrow and parochial concerns; it is often based on relations of domination; its coerciveness may be harsh and indiscriminate; protections that are available in public forums may be absent.100

A legal anthropological approach, then, acknowledges that rule systems and their measures of enforcement were efectively spread throughout late Roman society. Its starting point would be an attempt to reconstruct the ield of late Roman legal practice from the perspective of individual actors, groups, or communities, given their respective “horizons of the possible”: who they were, where they were, and what kinds of indigenous ordering structured their lives – as well as their access to diferent types of formal legal “knowledge” and imperial institutional structures.

Conclusion Oicial Roman (or Greco-Roman) sources envisage a world ruled by the universal law of Rome and its emperors. However, the central government of Rome, whether in the early or the late empire, before or after the edict of Caracalla, did not control the lives of all its subjects in the sphere of law, and did not attempt to do so. It is more proitable to look at the issue of law and legal practice from the bottom up and to ask whether, how, and why Rome’s subjects, as individuals or as groups, availed themselves of the Roman legal system – given that, from the third century CE, the sphere of Roman law had expanded and the bulk of the inhabitants of the empire (most of those who were free) had rights, as Roman citizens, to access it. Such an inquiry takes us well beyond the imperial law codes into papyri, inscriptions, and diverse literary texts (including the works of the church fathers, a rich source of evidence for legal or extralegal behavior at the local level), and it leads us to explore the ways in which Roman law and legal knowledge were used and adapted to local conditions and needs, or simply bypassed, as diverse other strategies were employed for settling disputes and securing order. A legal anthropological approach is an essential complement to and corrective of the legal-centralist perspective that is dominant in late Roman legal studies. “The main point may be, that law never was one and that, however sublime justice may be, law is a complex of systems of social control among other complexes of systems of social control.”101

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Galanter (1981): 25. Van den Bergh (1969): 350.

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A MOST UNUSUAL EMPIRE: ROME IN THE FOURTH CENTURY Bryan Ward-Perkins

Not unnaturally, the Roman Empire is seen as a model for Western empires that have succeeded it. Consequently its similarity to later empires is often taken for granted. But even a supericial comparison between the empire of the fourth century and more recent imperial experiments reveals what a curious creature the Roman Empire had become.

A House Divided Against Itself? The late empire did not even share that most immediately recognizable characteristic of many empires – rule by an emperor – because from the last years of the third century it was normally ruled by two or more emperors, initially by an arrangement that we call the Tetrarchy (with two senior Augusti each aided by a Caesar), and then by pairs, or trios, of rulers (normally brothers, and almost always close relatives). Only for about a third of the fourth century was it under the rule of one man, and even during these years he often had a junior colleague with whom to share the responsibility.1 From 395 onward, after the death of Theodosius and the accession of his two sons (Arcadius in the East, and Honorius in the West), the empire was always divided in two, a situation 1

There is a useful table at the back of Jones (1966): 372.The approximately thirty-two years of sole rule, or obvious domination by one man, are 324–37 (Constantine), 351–60 (Constantius II), 361–4 (Julian and Jovian), and 388–95 (Theodosius I).

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that persisted until the western empire disappeared in 476. Given the size of Rome’s territory and the multiplicity of threats along its borders, a division of power did make sense, but it is very strange. It is as though, on the death of George V, the British had decided that their empire was rather too large for one person to manage, had crowned both Edward VIII and the future George VI as king-emperors and had packed George of to rule from New Delhi, with half the empire, half the civil service, half the legislature, half the tax revenue, and, most importantly, half the army under his command. What is also strange is that this fourth-century Roman practice of divided rule worked reasonably well. The most obvious parallel for it in European history is the Franks’ habit of dividing their kingdoms, later their empire, between the surviving male children of the previous ruler. In the case of the Franks, this was not a happy solution. Rather than resulting in the coexistence of loving brothers, each content with his portion of power and land, the division of the kingdom gave disgruntled siblings multiple power bases from which to challenge each other’s authority. Most notably, the emperor Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son and successor, had a number of male children, three of whom survived him; even before his death in 840 they were squabbling among themselves and in revolt against their father. The resultant civil wars were the most important factor in reducing the power of the Carolingians and in hastening the break-up of their empire. Why the history of the fourth-century Roman Empire, with its similarly divided rule, is less troubled than that of the ninth-century Franks is not immediately obvious. Perhaps in part it was because the Romans had a longstanding tradition of sharing power, dating back to republican times with their two consuls – a tradition that occasionally reemerged under the empire, as when the brothers Caracalla and Geta both succeeded to the throne of their father Septimius Severus in 211. But this example, which ended with Caracalla’s murder of Geta, also shows that Roman brothers were not necessarily better at sharing power than Frankish ones. During the fourth century some imperial brothers appear to have lived in reasonable amity: Constantius II and Constans ruled a divided empire in peace from 340 to 350, as did two later brothers, Valens and Valentinian I, from 364 to 375. But Constans had earlier had to ight, and kill in battle, an older brother (Constantine II), and his relations with Constantius II were decidedly tense in the mid-340s, while in 361 a major battle between the cousins Julian and Constantius II was averted only by the latter’s unexpected death as their armies marched toward each other. Furthermore, the hold that dynasties had on power in fourth-century Rome was far less secure than that of the Carolingians in ninth-century Francia, rendering Roman politics if anything even less stable than that of the Franks. In Francia, the various claims and counterclaims to the throne all came from

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within the Carolingian family, whereas in the fourth-century empire there was a succession of successful military coups by claimants from outside the contemporary imperial family – most notably, the usurpations of Magnentius in the West (350–3), of Procopius in the East (365–6), of Firmus in Africa (372–4), and of Magnus Maximus (383–8) and Eugenius (392–4), both again in the West.2 These usurpations were almost bound to lead to civil war, since each usurper was able to seize only a part of the empire and consequently always faced an emperor from the “established” dynasty ruling elsewhere – indeed, in the cases of Magnentius, Magnus Maximus, and Eugenius, each coup involved the violent death of a “legitimate” emperor, an act that cried out for bloody revenge.3 There were at least sixteen signiicant civil wars in the fourth century, an impressive igure for any period of history.4 However, these did much less harm to the power of the state than the indecisive internal wars of ninthcentury Francia, or indeed the protracted strife of Rome’s third century, probably because once launched they were normally over very fast, settled by one or two decisive battles and by the violent death of the rival emperor. In 312, for instance, Constantine I and Maxentius faced each other in open battle at the Milvian Bridge, Maxentius was defeated and killed, and that was the end of his rule in the West; similarly, when Constantine marched against Licinius in 324, there were two battles in swift succession, resulting in the immediate and complete collapse of the latter’s rule. Civil wars are always undesirable, but if they can be won decisively, as they generally were in the fourth century, they 2

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We should also note the successful “dynastic” coups of Maxentius and Maximian, and of Constantine, against Diocletian’s attempt in 305 to institute succession by adoption. Despite centuries of experimentation, the Roman Empire failed dismally to establish stable rules of succession. It does, however, also need to be said that the stable solution that European kingdoms eventually settled on, male primogeniture, could be disastrous. In 1422, for instance, no one in England seriously questioned the right of succession of the son of the dead Henry V, but this stable succession gave England Henry VI, a nine-month-old baby, whose regency was savagely fought over, and who grew up to sufer periods of insanity. An open civil war in 1422 might have produced a happier outcome. For the political and military events mentioned in this paragraph, and in the two that follow, I have relied primarily on the very clear narrative history of Potter (2004), supplemented in part by that of Jones (1964). This is a conservative estimate, omitting coup attempts that were rapidly suppressed (such as that of Silvanus in 355). I have counted the following: 306–8 (events following the retirement of Diocletian), ca. 308–9 (Domitius Alexander vs. Maxentius), 310 (Maximian vs. Constantine), 312 (Constantine vs. Maxentius), 313 (Maximinus vs. Licinius), 316 (Constantine vs. Licinius), 324 (Constantine vs. Licinius), 340 (Constantine II vs. Constans), 350 (Magnentius vs. Constans and Julius Nepotianus), 351–3 (Constantius II vs. Magnentius), 361 (Julian vs. Constantius II), 365–6 (Procopius vs. Valens), 383 (Magnus Maximus vs. Gratian), 387 (Magnus Maximus vs. Valentinian II), 388 (Theodosius vs. Magnus Maximus), 394 (Theodosius vs. Eugenius).There was also at least one major bloodletting that did not result in military activity (on the death of Constantine in 337), and one imperial claim, that may well have been self-promoted, which was successful without a civil war (that of Theodosius in 379).

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can strengthen, rather than weaken, the power of the state.5 This, of course, raises the question of why, once launched, fourth-century civil wars were over so speedily, and why rival emperors were so ready to face each other in open battle. Presumably this was because imperial claimants knew that their power and authority depended on the support of the army, which was never entirely secure and could be guaranteed only by decisive, and successful, military action. Fourth-century civil wars were military afairs, based on rivalries between army generals, rather than on ideological or political divisions deeply rooted within the fabric of the empire. They could be, and were, rapidly resolved in open battle. Furthermore, the geography and vast size of the empire probably also helped to keep the peace, even when rule was divided and relations between joint rulers were strained. Emperors, even if they did not get on, were often well over a thousand miles apart (for instance, one of them might be at Sirmium or Milan, while the other was at Antioch), and they often had their own problems to distract them (such as hostile peoples on the frontiers). It was a huge risk, almost guaranteed to end in the death of one or the other party, and a massive logistical undertaking to march an army hundreds of miles along the military roads to confront a colleague one did not like. In the spring of 360, Julian was proclaimed Augustus by his troops in Paris, a direct challenge to the authority of Constantius II. But it was not until the autumn of 361 that Constantius was able to disentangle himself from campaigning against the Persians in the East, in order to march westward and confront Julian. Ninth-century Francia, unfortunately for the Carolingians, was a much smaller stage, and rival Carolingians were never very far from each other.

An Empire Turned Inside-Out The tight relationship between fourth-century Roman emperors and their armies, is made very clear by the map that is Figure 5.1, on which I have crosshatched the parts of the empire that we know saw the presence of emperors in the years between the end of the irst Tetrarchy in 305 and the end of the fourth century.6 The situation under the Tetrarchy had been very diferent. In 5

6

For modern parallels, see the unchallengeable authority of Lenin, Mao, and Franco, after they had fought, and won, bitter civil wars. The information used to produce this map comes principally from a series of studies by T. D. Barnes: Barnes (1982): ch. 5, “Imperial Residences and Journeys,” 47–87 (for the period before 311, this largely supersedes Barnes [1976], though this has a fuller discussion of some issues and is still useful); Barnes (1993): appendix 9, “Imperial Residences and Journeys, 337– 61,” 218–28; Barnes (1998): “Appendix: The Movements of Valens, 247–54”; Barnes (1999): 165–74, at 166–8 (“The Movements of Gratian, 375–383”). I also found useful, for the overview they ofer and for information on the very end of the fourth century, two classic works: Seeck (1919) and Kienast (1990).

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the years 284–305 emperors had traveled quite widely, though always driven by the military imperative of suppressing revolts and establishing imperial authority: Diocletian, for instance, was in Egypt on two occasions (in 297–8 and 301–2), and during one of his visits traveled as far south as Elephantine at the furthest reaches of the empire; while in 296–8 Maximian was irst in Spain, then in Mauretania, before traveling to Carthage, and perhaps even as far as Tripolitania.7 My map does not pretend to convey absolutely the full picture, because sometimes we simply do not know where an emperor was. However, the impression it gives is substantially complete and accurate, since we can plot emperors on the map both when they are mentioned in narrative sources and whenever they issued a law subsequently collected and preserved in the Theodosian Code (of 438). All laws were issued by an emperor in person, and most laws, fortunately for us, are preserved in the code with a subscription recording their place and date of enactment. Because the text of the code was inevitably somewhat corrupted during the process of manuscript transmission, there are occasions when there is doubt over the place or date of issue; but, by combining all the available evidence, it is generally possible to be fairly conident where and when a law was issued. For instance, Theodosian Code XII.1.76, a law issued by Valens against city councilors who evaded their duties, provides us with the reliable information that on 13 July 371 Valens was at Ancyra (on the road between Constantinople and Antioch): “Given on the third day before the Ides of July at Ancyra in the year of the second consulship of Gratian Augustus and the consulship of Probus.”8 What is immediately striking about this map is how little of their empire fourth-century emperors saw, and vice versa: Britain (but only once, in 343, after a visit by Constantine in 307); a broad belt along the Rhine frontier, including the important residence of Trier, and reaching as far west as Paris and Autun; the Rhone valley down to Arles and Marseille; the Alpine passes into Italy; the northern Po plain, including frequent sojourns at Milan; the Po delta down to Ravenna and Rimini; a broad belt along the entire length of the Danube frontier, with prolonged stays in Sirmium; the roads linking the Danube plain with Thessalonica and Constantinople; the major towns of Bithynia (Cyzicus, Nicaea, and Nicomedia); the great highway that crossed Anatolia, by way of Ancyra, toward Cilicia and eventually Antioch, where the eastern emperor was often resident; and inally the campaigning grounds against Persia of northern Mesopotamia. There were one or two outlying visits that very slightly break the pattern: for instance Constantius II is known to have been in Emesa (to the 7

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Barnes (1982): 49–66. Probably correctly, it is assumed that these journeys were primarily prompted by the need to suppress revolts sparked of by the increased tax demands of Diocletian and his colleagues. CTh 12.1.76, trans. Pharr (1952).

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MAP

5.1. Map of the Roman Empire showing areas visited by emperors in the fourth century.

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south of Antioch) in 338, and Valens, during his campaign against the usurper Procopius in 366, was briely in Lydia, around Sardis.9 But the only city regularly visited, outside what we can reasonably term the empire’s “military” or “frontier belt,” was Rome: this was still a frequent residence for Maxentius between 306 and 312; it was visited by Constantine on three occasions (312–13, 315, and 326); it subsequently received visits from Constantius II in 357 and Theodosius in 389; and in 350 a rival emperor, Nepotianus, was proclaimed Augustus there (but survived for only twenty-eight days). It is just possible, but very doubtful, that it was also visited by Constans in 340 and by Gratian in 376.10 By far the greater part of the empire never saw the emperor, including most of the empire’s richest and proudest provinces: all of Gaul west of Paris and the Rhone valley; Iberia; the entire north African coastline, including Carthage; Egypt and the great city of Alexandria; the entire Near East south of Mesopotamia and Antioch; all Asia Minor, beyond the neighborhood of the Bosphorus and the Anatolian military road, despite its plethora of great cities (such as Ephesus and Pergamon); the whole of Greece south of Thessalonica, including Athens and Corinth; all of Dalmatia; and the whole of Italy south of Rome, including the historic province of Campania and the rich island of Sicily. The experience of the ifth century, when eastern emperors were irmly based in Constantinople and the western empire slowly disintegrated, might lead us to wonder whether what had happened in the fourth century was simply the abandonment of one imperial capital (Rome) for a new one on the Bosphorus. However, while it is true that Constantinople was built up into a very special city, even a “New Rome,” with highly privileged features like its own Senate and a free grain dole, until the last years of the fourth century it was never more than one imperial residence amongst many.11 The western emperors, of course, never used it, and even in the East until 378 it was clearly surpassed by Antioch in terms of the number of days spent by emperors within it. Constantinople was no ordinary city, but arguably its importance before the last years of the fourth century was determined less by its inherent status than by its position on the road linking Mesopotamia and the Danube, and by its relative proximity to both areas of military activity. One of the striking features of the fourth century was the absence of any stable imperial “capital.” 9

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Additionally, Gallus, Constantius II’s Caesar, may have campaigned in person in Palestine, to suppress a Jewish revolt in 352. These doubtful visits are discussed, and the evidence set out, in T. D. Barnes (1975), modiied, for Gratian, in Barnes (1999): 168–9 n. 17, and in Errington (2000): 889–93. For a wider discussion of emperors’ relations with Rome, see Humphries (2007). For the institutional and physical enhancement of Constantinople: Dagron (1974); Mango (1985). See also the papers in Grig and Kelly (2012).

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Rather there were various favored residences used by an itinerant court, some frequently, like Trier, Milan, Sirmium, Constantinople, and Antioch, and sometimes for months at a time (particularly in the winter), others much more occasionally, and only en route.12 Even when emperors had good reason to travel outside the military belt, they seem to have resisted the temptation. None, for instance, ever visited the Holy Land, even though several were devout Christians and pilgrimage was becoming an established phenomenon.13 Constantine planned to spend his last days there, after baptism in the River Jordan, and he invested substantial amounts of imperial efort and money on building the great Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. For its dedication in 335 he organized a council of the bishops of the empire, which was to meet in Tyre and move on to Jerusalem so that a host of clerics could be present to celebrate the event (as well as a hoped-for unity of the church). But Constantine himself did not attend either the council or the dedication (he was in distant Constantinople at the time), and in 337 he died, not near the River Jordan but in the suburbs of Nicomedia.14 Normally an empire has a clear “center” and an equally clear “periphery,” and political power over the periphery is exercised from the empire’s historic center, be this (at very diferent times and in very diferent empires) Lisbon, Madrid, London, Paris,Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul, Moscow, Delhi, Tokyo, Tenochtitlan, Cusco, or Washington. But politically the fourth-century Roman Empire had been turned inside-out. The emperors did pay occasional visits to the historic center, Rome, and they lavished patronage on it, but they and their courts spent almost their whole lives in the periphery. This was not a sudden revolutionary change in the fourth century but the culmination of developments in the second and third centuries that had increasingly taken the emperors away from Rome: Septimius Severus, for instance, spent only two of the years 193–203 in the imperial city. However, long stays in Rome were still normal until the onset of the third-century crisis, with the city still deinitely the favored imperial residence and the center of politics: for instance, Elagabalus and Severus Alexander between 219 and 231 were resident in Rome almost without interruption. It was the extreme military crises 12

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14

This is one of the principal conclusions of Brown (2002), whose title carefully, and rightly, avoids the word “capitals.” For pilgrimage: Hunt (1982). Given the great interest that Christian authors would have had in the event, we can be conident that any visit would have left a record. For Constantine and the Holy Land, see, with its commentary, Cameron and Hall (1999), 132–8 (III.25–40), 168–72 (IV.40–47), 177–9 (IV.61–4). For Constantine at Constantinople in 335, during the council and dedication: Barnes (1982): 79. For an emperor who did make a (slight) detour for religious reasons, see Julian and his diversion to Pessinus, to worship at the shrine of Cybele, on his way to Antioch in 362: Ammianus Marcellinus 22.9.5–8.

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on the frontiers from the 230s onward, along with the resulting civil wars, that took some emperors completely out of the city, with Maximinus Thrax (235–8) as the very irst Roman emperor never to set foot in Rome.15 This situation persisted under the tetrarchs, with Diocletian paying only one certain visit (in 303), although, as we have seen, tetrarchs did travel through regions like Spain, Africa, Egypt, and southern Syria/Palestine, that were never to see their fourth-century successors. The move away from Rome and Italy was also marked structurally by Diocletian’s abolition of Italy’s privileged tax status. Before this, Italy had been exempt from many of the taxes levied in the conquered provinces, making the low of wealth from the periphery of Roman power to its historic center as clear and unambiguous as in all the later empires I have already listed. But this iscal exemption was swept away at the end of the third century and the tax burden across the empire rendered uniform.16 In the fourth century, with the lion’s share of imperial revenue going to the army (stationed, of course, on the frontiers), and with the emperors living in the same regions, these had become the new iscal and political centers of the empire. Italy, although the historic heart of the empire, had become peripheral – its taxes lowed to the military belt, to be spent there on the army and in the new imperial centers nearer the frontiers. The empire, iscally as well as politically, had been turned inside-out. The reality of this momentous change was, however, to some extent blunted by the continuing high status and privileges of the city of Rome itself. Rome enjoyed a substantial free grain dole for as long as this could be sustained, and it also beneited from some impressive imperial building projects. Between 298 and 306 Maximian and Diocletian built the huge baths now named after Diocletian alone; a little later Maxentius rebuilt the temple of Venus and Rome, and added his massive basilica to the Forum (the largest structure ever built there); Constantine built baths on the Quirinal and began the construction of Christian basilicas on an imperial scale, most notably the ive-aisled hundredmeter-long basilicas at the Lateran and St. Peter’s;17 Constantius II brought to Rome a great obelisk from Thebes, the largest ever erected in the city; and at the end of the century the patronage of a number of emperors added the new basilica of S. Paolo, built on the same scale as Constantine’s churches. There is no doubt that both the size and the number of imperial buildings declined somewhat after the irst three decades of the century: it would have been 15 16 17

For this slow change, see Halfmann (1986): 51–4; Millar (1977): 43–57. Jones (1964): 64–5. Bowersock (2002) has argued that it was probably Constans, not Constantine, who built St. Peter’s. He is right to question the evidence of the Liber Pontiicalis; but I see no reason to doubt the testimony of the prominent inscription in St. Peter’s, recorded in the ninthcentury Einsiedeln Sylloge, that unambiguously named Constantine as the builder: http:// www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/sbe/0326/68r/medium.

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diicult indeed to sustain a building boom on the scale of that which gave the city the baths of Diocletian, the basilica of Maxentius, and Old St. Peter’s, and from 324 Constantine was spending much of his spare cash on his new city of Constantinopolis. But Rome even at the end of the fourth century was still receiving lavish imperial patronage, and in the irst decade of the ifth this was to be marked by the impressive heightening and strengthening of the Aurelianic walls under Honorius.18 Furthermore Rome remained the residence of choice of the immensely rich, and highly prestigious, senatorial aristocracy. By the fourth century the formal power of the Senate as a body was negligible, but the inluence of individual senators remained considerable: many of them rose to high rank within the imperial civil service, and provincials still vied to join their ranks.19 The richest among them held estates on a truly “imperial” scale, both in terms of their broad geographic spread and in terms of the size of their landholdings. Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that the highly inluential Roman aristocrat Petronius Probus (four times a praetorian prefect, and consul in 371) “possessed estates scattered through almost the whole Roman world,” while the Life of the saintly Melania tells us that she and her husband in the early ifth century owned land in Rome, Campania, Sicily, Spain, across North Africa, and even apparently as far away as Britain (as well as “other places”), before they sold everything for the good of the church and of the poor.20 The fabulous wealth that landholding on this scale brought the aristocracy of Rome, much of which will have been spent in the city, is marveled at by the eastern historian Olympiodorus in the early ifth century. He recounts that the very richest senators had incomes of four thousand pounds of gold a year, with additional renders in kind worth a third as much again, and that even a senator of lesser wealth might spend two thousand pounds of gold on games to celebrate his son’s praetorship.21 So, while taxation revenue in the fourth century was for the irst time lowing from the old center, Italy, out to the military belt in the periphery, rents and renders were still deinitely lowing to important individuals and families in Rome. But there was no disguising the decline in the political importance of Rome. Whereas an emperor of the second or third century, coming to Rome after years away, was an emperor returning “home,” after Maxentius, and the very 18

19 20

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As a one-stop illustrated guide to the secular monuments, Nash (1968) remains invaluable. For a short introduction to the churches: Krautheimer (1980). Matthews (1975). Ammianus Marcellinus 27.11.1: “orbi Romano, per quem universum paene patrimonia sparsa possedit”; D. Gorce, ed., Vie de Sainte Mélanie, Sources chrétiennes no. 90 (Paris, 1962) chs. 11, 19, 20, and 37 (pp. 146–7, 164–5, 168–71, and 196–7). Olympiodorus, frag. 41, in Blockley (1983): 2:204–5. Matthews (1975): 384 rightly notes that we have no idea where Olympiodorus got these convincing-sounding igures from, and they have been questioned by Cameron (1999): 492–9.

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early years of Constantine’s rule, emperors coming to Rome were deinitely visitors. In Ammianus Marcellinus’s famous account of the visit of Constantius II in 357, the emperor even behaves like a rubber-necking tourist, visiting the city’s “great sights,” while marveling at their size and splendor.22 Rome, as we shall also see in the inal section of this chapter, retained its allure but had definitely lost the reality of imperial power. Because almost all emperors now came from an army background, the military belt is also where they had spent much of their early careers. Indeed, most of them were born, and presumably spent their very earliest years, within an even more restricted zone, the area of the Danube frontier. Galerius was born near Serdica, Constantine at Naissus, Jovian at Singidunum, the brothers Valentinian I and Valens at Cibalae (in Pannonia), and Gratian at Sirmium. The places of birth of Maximian, Constantius I, Maximinus Daia, Valerius Severus, and Constantius II are less precisely known, but all are described as coming from Illyricum, while Licinius is said, more speciically, to have been a native of the province of Dacia. Constantine II was born at Arles and Julian at Constantinople, both at some distance from the frontier itself but still irmly within the military belt. Furthermore, since almost all of the emperors pursued a military career before assuming the purple, they also spent most of their early adult years with the army and within the frontier zone. The early career of Julian, who passed a few years in the philosophical schools of Asia Minor and Athens, far from the military zone, was highly exceptional.23 The attraction of the military belt pulled even the fourth-century church into its orbit. The sacred and historical geography of Christianity, established in its early days, was irmly south Mediterranean, centered on Jerusalem and the Holy Land, with its neighboring great sees of Antioch and Alexandria, and, in the West, on the see of Rome, with its claims to the legacy of Peter and Paul. But in the fourth century two new centers of ecclesiastical power were created, Constantinople and Milan, not because of any ancient legacies of holiness (or at least not through ones that were authentic), but because they were important imperial cities.24 Even more striking is the fact that most important fourth-century councils of the church took place within the military belt, for the simple reason that they were imperially summoned and so held within the immediate imperial sphere of inluence, indeed sometimes in the presence of the emperor. There were a few major councils held elsewhere, as we have seen in the case of Constantine’s paired council of Tyre 22 23

24

Ammianus Marcellinus 26.10.13–15. My information on the birthplaces and early careers of the emperors is derived from Kienast (1990) and Jones, Martindale, and Morris (1971). Eugenius (emperor 392–4), like Julian, pursued a wholly civilian career (much of it as a teacher) before becoming emperor. For Milan: McLynn (1994). For Constantinople: Dagron (1974): 454–87.

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and Jerusalem in 335. But almost all the councils at which large numbers of bishops were present from several diferent parts of the empire were held farther north, at places like Seleucia, Nicaea, Constantinople, Serdica, Milan, and Ariminum (Rimini). For instance, when Constantius II sought to resolve (to his own satisfaction) the “Arian” schism within the church, he held an impressive string of ecclesiastical councils: at Antioch (341), Serdica (342), Sirmium (351), Arles (353), Milan (355), and inally Ariminum and Seleucia (both in 359), all within the military belt.25 Rome is notably absent from any but the most partisanly Catholic list of places where important decisions for the imperial church were made during the fourth century. In truth, it was marginal. It is hard to exaggerate how strange this fourth-century reality was. It is as though the nineteenth-century British Empire had been ruled by autocrats whose families, often of quite humble origin, came from the frontier zones of Canada and lived and ruled there for their whole lives, making only the occasional ceremonial visit to London, while the proud bishops of the Anglican Church’s historic sees were forced to travel to councils summoned in Toronto or Winnipeg. At one level it is obvious why the empire had become so militarized and so centered in its own periphery. During the fourth century there were almost continuous threats from Germanic tribes along the Rhine and Danube and, in Mesopotamia, from Persia. Gone were the halcyon days of Hadrian (117– 38), when an emperor could stroll through the peaceful provinces of a secure empire, righting wrongs and enjoying some cultural tourism. The visit to his native land in Africa by Septimius Severus in 202–3 was the last recorded imperial journey made for essentially personal reasons, and even this was combined with a brief campaign against troublesome tribesmen in the interior.26 But the threat to the frontiers was probably not the only reason, nor indeed the principal one, that kept emperors within the military belt. There were after all plenty of good generals who could be put in charge of military operations, and outside the Rhine-Danube and Mesopotamian frontiers fourth-century emperors avoided leading campaigns in person. There were no imperially led campaigns against the tribesmen who continuously attacked Tripolitania in the second half of the fourth century, and when Britain was devastated by barbarian invasion in 367, the emperor Valentinian did not himself cross the Channel but sent his general Theodosius (father of the later emperor) to deal with the problem.27 In 373 the same Theodosius 25 26 27

I have taken this list from Potter (2004): 464. Halfmann (1986): 51. Tripolitania: Mattingly (1995): 176–8. Britain: Salway (1993): 268–73. Constans, however, did pay a rapid visit to Britain in 343 in the face of an earlier, if obscure, crisis: Salway (1993): 244.

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was sent, again by Valentinian, to Africa to suppress the rebellion of Firmus, a local leader who had proclaimed himself emperor.28 Valentinian was not militarily idle during these years, and campaigned in person against Alamanni and Quadi on the upper Rhine, but the threats to Britain and Africa were almost certainly more serious than the threats he faced along the Rhine, where many of the emperor’s campaigns appear to have been more aggressive than defensive.29 So why did Valentinian choose to send a general to Britain and Africa, and himself stay in the Rhineland? There is no way of being certain, but the most likely explanation is fear of his own armies.What kept emperors on the Rhine and Danube, in Mesopotamia, or in rapid reach of the frontiers, in cities like Milan, Constantinople, and Antioch, was probably not so much the Persian and Germanic threat as the danger posed by their own troops. The military belt was where the greatest concentrations of troops in the empire were based, and the army, not Rome or some other peaceful province, was the political world in which emperors lived, or died. The serious coups of the later third and fourth centuries all came from within the army; the greater part of the army was in the military belt; ergo, emperors did not dare stray far from it and did so only for brief visits to Rome.

A Return to the Center At the end of the fourth century this situation changed remarkably.Theodosius I (379–95) pioneered a style of sedentary rule from Constantinople, and then in 395, on the accession of his young sons, Honorius and Arcadius, the emperors in both East and West deinitively broke with the tradition of campaigning in person and did not revive the practice as a regular feature until the reign of the emperor Maurice (582–602).30 The most aggressive emperor of the ifth and earlier sixth century, Justinian, conducted his manifold campaigns against Persians, Slavs and Avars, Vandals, Ostrogoths and Visigoths through generals, without leaving Constantinople. The armies, whether in the East, or in Africa, Italy, and Spain, were never even visited by Justinian, let alone lived among in the style of the fourth century. In the famous mosaic in San Vitale, Justinian is shown within the church, standing next to the archbishop of the city, but his presence there was entirely “virtual” – he never visited Ravenna, nor any of his conquests. 28 29 30

Ammianus Marcellinus 19.5; PLRE I, 340 “Firmus,” and 902–4 “Flavius Theodosius 3.” For the Rhine campaigns: Drinkwater (2007): 279–310. For Theodosius and Constantinople: Croke (2010). Of the ifth-century emperors, Marcian in 451 is known to have campaigned in person against the Huns, delaying the opening of the Council of Chalcedon by his absence: Price and Gaddis (2005): 1:107–10, nos. 12, 14, and 15.

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In the West this change is at least partly explicable in terms of a substantial shift in political power after 395, away from the emperors and toward military generals like Stilicho, Constantius, Aetius, and Ricimer. During the ifth century, the western emperors no longer lived close to their armies but resided permanently in Italy, either at Ravenna or indeed back in Rome.31 But this did not signify a complete reversal of the late third- and fourth-century situation, with political power moving back to civilian centers, because so much power had slipped entirely out of the emperor’s hands and into those of his generals or, increasingly, those of Germanic warlords settled within the old frontiers. Unsurprisingly, these new political masters remained close to their ighting men, very much in the tradition of fourth-century emperors. The change in the East, however, is more diicult to explain. The eastern emperors held on to power, but still broke with fourth-century practice, by leaving their armies, and living, almost without interruption, in, or very close to, Constantinople. On the few occasions that they did travel, they never went anywhere near the frontiers. Arcadius (395–408), for instance, seems to have journeyed no farther than Ancyra (and there, apparently, only to escape the summer heat in Constantinople), while Theodosius II, during a forty-two-year reign (408–50), never got farther than Thessalonica to the west and Carian Aphrodisias to the southeast.32 Yet they, or their regents (often powerful imperial women), successfully held on to power and were not rocked by a series of civil wars.33 In the ifth century, Constantinople became what no city had been in the fourth century – a ixed imperial capital, playing a role similar to that of Rome in the irst two centuries of empire. There was plenty of intrigue and jostling for power and inluence within the ifth-century eastern empire, but this now occurred within the civilian environment of the palace at Constantinople, rather than among the military on the frontiers. That Constantinople rose in importance is not entirely surprising, since this relected the changed military circumstances of the late fourth and ifth centuries. In this period the eastern frontier with Persia was quiet, with only very occasional interruptions, which inevitably relegated Antioch, the favored imperial city of the fourth-century East, to a marginal role.34 By contrast, the Balkans from 376 onward were in almost continuous turmoil, caused irst by the Goths and then by the Huns.This was now where the threat to the emperors was centered, both from barbarian invaders and from potential usurpers 31 32 33

34

Gillett (2001). Seeck (1919): 285–387; Millar (2006): 8–10. Williams and Friell (1999) also note the demilitarization and stability of the ifth-century East and also ind these two qualities hard to explain. Blockley (1992): 30–96 and 123–7. After Valens marched out of the city in 378, Antioch did not see an emperor again for 250 years, when during the 630s it was (almost certainly) used as a campaigning base against the Arabs by Heraclius: Kaegi (2003): 235 and 257.

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within their own armies, but former favored residences very close to the frontier, like Sirmium, were no longer safe. It is therefore not surprising that emperors wished to keep a close eye on events in the Balkans but chose as their principal base a city at some distance from danger. They might have selected another center, like Nicomedia (favored by Diocletian, and with the advantage of the Bosphorus as an additional line of defense) or Thessalonica (favored by Galerius), but by the end of the fourth century the status of Constantinople had been enhanced to the point of making it the obvious choice. Around 413 this choice was further consolidated by the building of the city’s massive new land walls, the most impressive urban defenses of the whole of antiquity, and a successful bulwark against the manifold invaders of the Balkans. While the rise of importance of Constantinople can be explained, the fact that emperors lived there permanently, and ceased campaigning in person, is much more puzzling – and, even more so, that they survived the change. Theodosius II, for instance, succeeded as sole emperor at the age of seven, reigned for forty-two years without ever going on campaign, and died not in a military coup but after a fall from his horse.35 Were the emperors and empresses of the ifth century peculiarly adept at maintaining their power, or had the emperors of the fourth century been unnecessarily concerned to stay with their armies? I wish I had a satisfactory answer to this question. I can ofer only a very partial explanation in the care taken by fourth- and ifth-century eastern rulers to integrate their army into the life of the capital, particularly through set-piece events held at the Hebdomon, the military parade ground a few miles outside Constantinople. Here Valentinian I had his brother Valens proclaimed emperor in front of the troops in 364, and this ceremony was repeated for almost all the emperors of the later fourth and ifth centuries.36 Although emperors no longer campaigned with their troops, and did not even journey to see them on the frontiers, care was taken to bring together the ruler and representatives of his soldiery, but now just outside Constantinople. The emperor no longer visited the army, but the army did at least visit him.

An “Empire,” or a “Nation”? The fourth-century empire also difers from any classic deinition of “empire” in the degree to which its subjects identiied with it. “Subject peoples” in the conquered peripheries of most empires view their masters as exploitative and oppressive, believing that their own interests are subjugated to those of the 35

36

Serious trouble from his general Zeno may, however, have been brewing at the time of his accidental death: Martindale (1980): 1200 “Fl. Zenon 6.” For the Hebdomon and its use: Janin (1950): 408–11.

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imperial power; and in recent times by far the most important factor in the disintegration of empires has been the wish of these subject peoples to be free. This was, for instance, the downfall of all the modern European empires: Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Belgian, Dutch, and Soviet.37 In most cases, other factors have also been at work, in particular the relative economic decline of the central power (for instance of Britain, Ottoman Turkey, and Soviet Russia), but the underlying reason that all modern empires have failed is because people have wanted to leave them. In premodern times subject peoples did not have access to fully evolved ideals and ideologies of “nationhood” and “self-determination” to spur them on, but they still had a strong awareness of the beneits of freedom and of the need to ight for them. This is very clear in the early history of the Roman Empire, whose expansion was vigorously contested, and, even when triumphant, initially bitterly resented. In the western Mediterranean, for instance, it took three great wars to crush and conquer Carthage, and almost two hundred years to subject the Iberian Peninsula, including a series of diicult campaigns against the Celtiberians, whose stronghold of Numantia fell to Scipio Aemilianus only when he built a wall right around it and starved it into submission (and even then some defenders apparently preferred suicide over surrender).The Roman conquests of Gaul and Britain were achieved much more swiftly than that of Iberia, but here too only by overwhelming military force; and Roman rule once imposed was badly shaken in both Gaul and Britain by early revolts, such as those led by Vercingetorix and Boudicca. Subject peoples did not remain quietly under the Roman yoke, and attempts to extend the empire beyond the Rhine were just as iercely resisted, efectively ceasing when three legions were destroyed in battle by Arminius in 9 CE. In its early days the Roman Empire was very typical – it was held together by military might, or the threat of it, and populated by reluctant subject peoples forced to acknowledge Roman authority and Roman taxation. However, this situation had changed completely by the fourth century. In institutional and legal terms the 212 Constitutio Antoniniana was a deining moment, granting Roman citizenship to all free subjects of the empire, and thereby removing the distinction between Romans and their subjects.38 But probably an even more important development was a slow shift in mentality

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The only exceptions are the imperial powers that lost their colonies because other empires took them as the spoils of war (as happened to the pre-1918 German empire), or whose empires collapsed through crushing defeat (as happened to the Third Reich and Italy in 1942–5). On the 212 law and its consequences: Honoré (2004) and Garnsey (2004).The consequences of the Constitutio were less momentous than we might expect from a modern perspective, because access to law was restricted to the rich, and very many of these had already obtained Roman citizenship before 212. Structurally, the removal of Italy’s privileged tax status, mentioned previously, was also important in changing the nature of the empire.

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that, in Cliford Ando’s words, “transformed the empire from an imperium, a collection of conquered provinces, to a patria, a focus for the patriotic loyalty of its subjects.”39 Literate Romans of the fourth century had strong local identities; but they also identiied powerfully with Rome.When, for instance, the fourthcentury Gallic aristocrat and poet Ausonius wrote a work on the “noble cities” of the empire, he proudly included his native city of Bordeaux (Burdigala) in his list, describing it as his homeland (patria), but inevitably he opened with Rome: “First among cities, home of the gods, golden Rome” (Prima urbes inter, divum domus, aurea Roma).40 There is no evidence from fourth-century Gaul that anyone would still have identiied with Vercingetorix’s gallant resistance to the imposition of Roman power – he had to await the emergence of French nationalism to see his reputation revived. Literate Romans, above all when they viewed peoples outside the empire, saw themselves as a coherent group, and as an obviously superior one.41 There were certainly important exceptions to this picture. Within the empire there were peoples who were never fully assimilated, in particular the Jews, whose religion gave them a powerful identity and who were in revolt in the early 350s, and the Isaurians, whose mountain fastnesses in southern Asia Minor guaranteed them a degree of autonomy, often expressed in terms of banditry. There were also plenty of individuals at the bottom of the social order, almost certainly the vast majority of the population, who felt themselves oppressed by the government. In certain circumstances they might even revolt in support of their own freedom, as the Bacaudae did in Gaul and Spain during the troubles of the third and ifth centuries. But the oppression that the Bacaudae fought was that of the government and local landowners alike, not one speciically identiied with an alien imperial power – in other words their rebellions were social rather than nationalistic.42 Almost the only evidence we have for a subject people seeking to break free from Rome, rather than from the generalized oppression of society, is an extraordinarily diicult passage in the Greek historian Zosimus, writing at the very beginning of the sixth century about events that had occurred in distant Britain about a hundred years earlier (but with access to a lost source, Olympiodorus, that we know could be very reliable). Zosimus tells us that the Britons (and the people of Armorica, across the Channel), “having expelled 39 40

41 42

Ando (2000): xi. Ausonius, Ordo Urbium Nobilium. The quotation is the opening line of the poem. For a general account of Roman patriotic ideology under the late empire: Paschoud (1967). See, for instance, Garnsey and Humfress (2001): 95–104. It is much disputed exactly who the Bacaudae were. There has been a recent fashion for seeing them as self-help groups in troubled times, led by landowners (in which case their interest in “freedom” would be minimal). Personally, I think the evidence points to social oppression playing a substantial role in their revolts: Ward-Perkins (2005): 45; and see the useful pages in Wood (2000): 502–4.

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their Roman rulers,” set up their own government. At irst sight, this passage seems straightforwardly to describe indigenous peoples in revolt against a hated imperial master. But, as Paschoud, the editor of the text, has observed, Zosimus is probably abbreviating his source dramatically, and from the wider context that he gives, it is already unclear to what extent the British and Armorican revolts were forced on these people, by the failure of the central government to protect them, rather than willed.43 The Roman Empire was certainly a powerful state, even if, judged against the strictest modern criteria, it was an ineicient one.44 It was able to protect its territory against outside aggressors, and to impose internal order – the essential prerequisites of a state for Weber. Was it perhaps also a “nation,” for which the simplest deinition is “a state with which its subjects identify”? Other empires have certainly made the transition from hated imperial rule, to nationhood – for instance, this is true of most of China, though of course not true (or not yet true) in disputed areas like Tibet and Xinjiang. There are problems in using the term “nation” to describe the later Roman Empire, because we inevitably link the word with “nationalism,” with its connotations of populism and mass appeal, which are wildly anachronistic for the fourth century. But, as far as the active political class of the Roman Empire was concerned, it does seem that provincials had made the transition from being “subjects of Rome” to being “Romans,” and that their hope was no longer to be free but to remain within the empire.45 If this is suicient to deine a “nation,” then the later Roman Empire was indeed a nation. A passage by the Spanish-born Christian historian of the early ifth century, Orosius, is highly illuminating about both the changed structure of the empire and the way that hundreds of years of a shared history had altered its subjects’ view of Roman rule. Orosius was writing in defense of his own times, so his account is certainly rose-tinted. But he was a provincial himself (from Spain), and he wrote for a provincial audience (in Africa), so he needs to be taken seriously when he wrote that “the enormous diference between past and present can be seen in the fact that what Rome once [at the time of its conquests] extorted from us at sword-point to satisfy her own extravagance, now she contributes with us for the good of the state we share.”46 Orosius was 43

44 45

46

Paschoud (1989), VI.v.2–3 (vol. 3:9), with a splendidly erudite note on pp. 38–42, where Paschoud summarizes, and wonders politely at, the elaborate card houses that “les historiens anglo-saxons” have constructed on the foundations of Zosimus’s very brief and highly obscure summary of Olympiodorus. MacMullen (1988); but, for a very diferent perspective on the evidence: Kelly (2004). Indeed the attraction of Rome was such that many of its invaders, like Alaric and his Goths, clamored to be included within the Roman state structure, rather than sought to destroy it. Orosius 5.1.13, trans. Fear (2010): 208. I owe this reference to Neil McLynn. The Latin is as follows: Tantumque interest inter praeterita praesentiaque tempora, ut quod Roma in usum luxuriae suae ferro extorquebat a nostris, nunc in usum communis reipublicae conferat ipsa nobiscum. ArnaudLindet (1991): 84–5.

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a Christian polemicist, not a political scientist, but he ofers here almost a textbook description of a shift from “imperial” exploitation to shared “national” commitment. The late Roman Empire was indeed a very curious empire. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ando, C. (2000). Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire. Berkeley. Arnaud-Lindet, M.-P., ed. and trans. (1991). Orose Histoire (contre les païens).Vol. 2. Paris. Barnes, T. D. (1975). “Constans and Gratian in Rome,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 79: 325–33. Barnes, T. D. (1976). “Imperial Campaigns, A.D. 285–311,” Phoenix 30: 174–93. Barnes, T. D. (1982). The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine. Cambridge, Mass. Barnes, T. D. (1993). Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, Mass. Barnes,T. D. (1998). Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality. Ithaca. Barnes, T. D. (1999). “Ambrose and Gratian,” Antiquité Tardive 7: 165–74. Blockley, R. C., ed. and trans. (1983). The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire. Liverpool. Blockley, R. C. (1992). East Roman Foreign Policy: Formation and Conduct between Diocletian and Arcadius. Leeds. Bowersock, G.W. (2002).“Peter and Constantine,” in J.-M. Carrié and R. Lizzi Testa, eds., “Humana Sapit,” études d’antiquité tardive ofertes à Lellia Cracco Ruggini: 209–17. Turnhout. Brown,T. (2002). “Emperors and Imperial Cities, AD 284–423.” PhD diss. Oxford. Cameron, Av. (1999). “The Antiquity of the Symmachi,” Historia 48: 477–505. Cameron, Av., and S. G. Hall, trans. (1999). Eusebius: Life of Constantine. Oxford. Croke, B. (2010). “Reinventing Constantinople: Theodosius I’s Imprint on the Imperial City,” in S. McGill, C. Sogno, and E.Watts, eds., From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: Later Roman History and Culture, 284–450 CE: 241–64. Cambridge.

Dagron, G. (1974). Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451. Paris. Drinkwater, J. F. (2007). The Alamanni and Rome, 213–496. Oxford. Errington, R. M. (2000). “Themistius and His Emperors,” Chiron 30: 861–904. Fear, A. T., trans. (2010). Orosius: Seven Books of History against the Pagans. Liverpool. Garnsey, P. (2004). “Roman Citizenship and Roman Law in the Late empire,” in S. Swain and M. Edwards, eds., Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from the Early to Late Empire: 133–55. Oxford. Garnsey, P., and C. Humfress. (2001). The Evolution of the Late Antique World. Cambridge. Gillett, A. (2001). “Rome, Ravenna and the Emperors,” Papers of the British School at Rome 69: 131–67. Grig, L., and G. Kelly, eds. (2012). Two Romes: From Rome to Constantinople. Oxford. Halfmann, H. (1986). Itinera principum. Geschichte und Typologie der Kaiserreisen im römischen Reich. Stuttgart. Honoré, T. (2004). “Roman Law, AD 200–400: From Cosmopolis to Rechtstaat?,” in S. Swain and M. Edwards, eds., Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from the Early to Late Empire: 109–32. Oxford. Humphries, M. (2007). “From Emperor to Pope? Ceremonial, Space, and Authority at Rome from Constantine to Gregory the Great,” in K. Cooper and J. Hillner, eds., Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300–900: 21–58. Cambridge. Hunt, E. D. (1982). Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460. Oxford. Janin, R. (1950). Constantinople byzantine: développement urbain et repertoire topographique. Paris. Jones, A. H. M. (1964). The Later Roman Empire: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey. 3 vols. Oxford.

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Jones, A. H. M. (1966). The Decline of the Ancient World, London. Jones, A. H. M., J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, eds. (1971). The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. Vol. 1, A.D. 260–395. Cambridge. Kaegi, W. E. (2003). Heraclius Emperor of Byzantium. Cambridge. Kelly, C. (2004). Ruling the Later Roman Empire. Cambridge, Mass., and London. Kienast,D.(1990).Römische Kaisertabelle:Grundzüge einer römischen Kaiserchronologie. Darmstadt. Krautheimer, R. (1980). Rome, Proile of a City, 312–1308. Princeton. MacMullen, R. (1988). Corruption and the Decline of Rome. New Haven. Mango, C. (1985). Le développement urbain de Constantinople (IVe–VIIe siècles). Paris. Martindale, J. R., ed. (1980). Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. Vol. 2, A.D. 395–527. Cambridge. Matthews, J. (1975). Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, A.D. 364–425. Oxford. Mattingly, D. J. (1995). Tripoliitania. London. McLynn, N. (1994). Ambrose of Milan. Berkeley. Millar, F. (1977). The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC–AD 337). London. Millar, F. (2006). A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II, 408–450. Berkeley.

129 Nash, E. (1968). Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome. London. Paschoud, F. (1967). Roma Aeterna, études sur le patriotisme romain dans l’occident latin à l’époque des grandes invasions. Rome. Paschoud, F., ed. and trans. (1989). Zosime: histoire nouvelle.Vol. 3. Paris. Pharr, C., trans. (1952). The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions. New York. Potter, D. S. (2004). The Roman Empire at Bay, A.D. 180–395. London. Price, R., and M. Gaddis, trans. (2005). The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 3 vols. Liverpool. Salway, P. (1993). The Oxford Illustrated History of Roman Britain. Oxford. Seeck, O. (1919). Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste für die Jahre 311 bis 476 n. Chr. Stuttgart. Ward-Perkins, B. (2005). The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford. Williams, S., and G. Friell. (1999). The Rome That Did Not Fall. London. Wood, I. N. (2000). “The North-Western Provinces,” in Av. Cameron, M.Whitby, and B. Ward-Perkins, eds., Cambridge Ancient History, 14:497–524. Cambridge.

SIX

MOBILITY AND IDENTITY BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THE FOURTH CENTURIES: THE “COSMOPOLITIZATION” OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Claudia Moatti

What made the Roman Empire an empire, a global world and not just a juxtaposition of cities or provinces? This question has rarely been raised. Most of the studies have concerned local (civic or provincial) stories or have been dominated by the center-periphery model, developed with perfection by Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World. Here, I would like to challenge this model and raise the issue of the internal dynamic of the empire and of the awareness people had of this dynamic, especially in the period between the second and fourth centuries. There are several ways to address this issue: through analysis of the way space was perceived and represented in geographic works; through study of the places of contact and the networks that linked the diferent parts of the Mediterranean; or through the study of mobility, which will be my point of view here. From the second century CE onward, the Roman Empire was seen as a luid space where people were free to move, and this freedom was regarded as an important innovation in human history. What made this luidity possible and what were its efects? Like other Mediterranean societies from the Bronze Age onward, the Roman Empire was a world in motion. This does not mean that movement was the same during all these periods or that everybody moved: to be considered mobile, a society needs only a certain rate of mobility. Neither does it mean that the authorities always considered this phenomenon in the same way. Indeed, the study of laws about mobility in diferent periods and circumstances 130

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helps us understand the speciicity of each society, its worldview. In the Roman Empire, many rules regulated the movement of people, with diferent logics and diferent concerns, whether for public order or for airming a privilege or for iscal purposes, among other reasons. Here, I would like to present one case study, freedom of domicile, in order to show its progressive regulation and its efects on the construction of the empire, what I call its “cosmopolitization.” This category, which I borrow from the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, has nothing to do with any idea of acculturation, cultural transfer, or cultural contact, all notions based on a substantial deinition of culture, nor has it anything in common with cosmopolitanism.

The Concept of Cosmopolitization Cosmopolitanism is usually considered to be a philosophy, an ideology that deines a world citizenship; cosmopolitization is a process or, as Ulrich Beck says, a situation.1 This process creates a multidimensional world, not a linear one; that is to say, a world based not on the succession but on the accumulation of time-space experiences and of various ailiations. Such a world is more a bricolage than a coherent construction, and it is based on all forms of exchanges, movements (e.g., institutional, economic), and networks. The core of this process is the action of individuals: besides traditional groups and hierarchies, besides imperial control, there is a space for individual agency, which in the Roman Empire was more important than has traditionally been assumed. Consequently, three terms need to be taken into account: mobility, which weaves links and networks; individual action within networks; and accumulation, which produces a new awareness of a common world. However, these three terms would be insuicient. The weakness of the network model, which puts so much stress on the role of the actors, is probably that it is disconnected from the legal and institutional contexts. This is why I suggest linking the two approaches: the policies and the networks, the constraints and the luidity, the controls and the freedom. This does not mean that there is necessarily a direct inluence of one aspect on the other; it is not a question of causation, but there is undoubtedly a link between regulations and individual experiences. Here, I discuss how cosmopolitization developed alongside the creation of norms about freedom of domicile.

Freedom of Domicile in the Roman Empire: The Domus In the city-state regime, from an oicial point of view, a citizen was supposed to have his residence in his place of citizenship, his patria, even if, at that time, 1

Beck (2000).

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he could spend a part of his life and own other houses and properties abroad. Until the Social War in 91 BCE, the patria of a Roman citizen was either Rome or any Roman city (colony or municipium) in Italy; after the Social War and the grant of Roman citizenship to all the Italians, the Italians had two patriae, as Cicero said: one of law, Rome (which gave them the status of citizens), and one of nature, the local city through which they exercised their Roman citizenship and which deined both their origo (their origin) and their status of municeps within the Roman system.2 It was in Rome or in some other city in Italy that a Roman citizen was generally considered to have his domicile; it was in this place also, in Italy or in Rome, that he was registered. So, for the Romans who lived in the provinces, their domicile outside Italy was, until the irst century, considered as a matter of fact but not as a legal residence, and the sources contrasted those who lived in Italy (i.e., in their legal domicile or in their patria) with those who were abroad (qui in Italia non sunt or qui transmare sunt).3 In his biography of Atticus, for example, Cornelius Nepos explains that Cicero’s friend, living in Athens during Sulla’s dictatorship, refused Athenian citizenship in order to keep the Roman one, and he adds that “this way, he had his citizenship and his domicile in the same place [eamdem et patriam et domum],” that is, in Rome (Att. 3). This passage highlights the old city-state practice: the exclusiveness of the Roman citizenship, the idea that the patria was also ideally the place of the domicile, the contrast between the legal residence (here Rome) and the place outside Italy, Athens, where Atticus was merely spending some time. But the text also suggests that in Cornelius Nepos’s time, a distinction between the patria and the legal domicile was thinkable. It is possible that the notion of legal domicile was already deined in the second century BCE,4 but Caesar was the irst to draw a list of the cives Romani domo Roma (citizens living in Rome),5 and a responsum of the jurist Alfenus 2 3 4

5

Cic., De Legibus, II, 2–5. Their status was that of an absentee: see Moatti (2009): 321–53. The lex repetundarum of 123 BCE states that the judges in the quaestiones had to have a Roman 2 domicile: CIL I , 583 = FIRA I, 3, n. 10, l. 13: … queive in urbem Romam propriusve urbem Romam p(assus) M domicilium non habeat. But it is diicult to decide whether domicilium means legal domicile or a domicile. The chronology of the concept of domicilium is still debated among historians: for a late chronology, see Thomas (1998): 25f ., who puts its emergence in relation with the grant of citizenship to all the Italians after the Social War (91–88 BCE); for an early one, see Licandro (2004), for whom it was already a legal category in the second century BCE. Suet., Div. Iul., XLI, 5: Recensum populi nec more nec loco solito, sed vicatim per dominos insularum egit atque ex viginti trecentisque milibus accipientium frumentum e publico ad centum quinquaginta retraxit; ac ne qui novi coetus recensionis causa moveri quandoque possent, instituit, quotannis in demortuorum locum ex iis, qui recensi non essent, subsortitio a praetore ieret. Before Caesar, the Roman domicile was known only through the traditional census. Caesar introduced a speciic census (called recensus) for those who had their legal residence in Rome, at least for the corn distributions. See Lo Cascio (1997).

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Varus (who was consul in 39 BCE) shows that the notion of domicile was still under debate at the end of the republic. Discussing a clause of the lex portoria of Sicily that those who transported goods and slaves for their own use in their legal domicile did not have to pay customs taxes, he raised the question of the deinition of a domus. Igitur quaeri soleret, utrum, ubi quisque habitaret sive in provincia sive in Italia, an dumtaxat in sua cuiusque patria domus esse recte dicetur. Sed de ea re constitutum esse eam domum unicuique nostrum debere existimari, ubi quisque sedes et tabulas haberet suarumque rerum constitutionem fecisset. (D.50.16.203, Alfenus 7 Dig.) So the question usually arises: will it be right to speak of a domus [to deine the place] where a man lives, whether he lives in a province or in Italy, or is it only where his patria is? But in this matter, it was decided that the home of each one of us must be regarded as being where one has one’s residence and keeps one’s accounts and organizes one’s afairs.6

There are two sides to this issue: the deinition of a domus (not just a house but a legal residence) outside the origo, and the possibility of having one outside Italy. The answer Alfenus gives is that a legal domicile is the place where all one’s possessions are. The jurist does not refer any longer to the old deinition: the law, he explains, should take into account the concrete situation of the citizen, the place where he efectively lives, in Italy or elsewhere, with all his belongings, and thus recognize the choice of a domicile as a private decision. However, a question remains: How did anyone prove his place of residence at the checkpoints? Many other issues were raised during this period about the legal domicile: Was it possible to have several domiciles or even to be without a domicile? The discussion continued under the empire until at least the third century. A text from the jurist Paulus, writing under the Severans, discusses the response of the Augustan jurist Labeo: Labeo indicat eum, qui pluribus locis ex aequo negotietur, nusquam domicilium habere: quosdam autem dicere refert pluribus locis eum incolam, aut domicilium habere: quod verius est. (D.50.1.5, Paulus 45 Ed.) Labeo holds that anyone who engages in business equally in diferent places does not have a domicile anywhere; he admits however that some people say that such a person is an incola or has a domicile in a number of diferent places, which is closer to the truth.

Several elements are worthy of attention here.We see the attempt of the jurist to make a distinction between a legal domicile and a place where one does 6

Translation Watson edition (2009), modiied. Generally, the translation of the Digest follows that of the Watson edition, unless a modiication is noted.

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business. The goal is to deine carefully two diferent categories of mobility: a luctuating situation (for business) and emigration (the change of domicile). The diference of mentality between Labeo and Paulus is striking: for Labeo, a man could be without a domicile, which means that the origo, the city of his family, was still the most important to him; for others, and Paulus follows them, it was possible to have several domiciles, a situation that was perhaps recognized in Italy at the very end of the republic, as is shown by the Tabula Heracleensis.7 Finally, we see that a person who did not live in the place of his or her origin was deined as an incola (resident alien, the equivalent of a metoikos in the Greek world).8 At the end of the republic, a Roman citizen could thus have three legal ailiations: he could be civis of Rome, municeps in his place of origin, and incola in his place of domicile. The jurists of imperial times ininitely discussed the criteria of a legal domicile. When a person lives equally in diferent places, how does one determine his or her domicile? In the following passage, Ulpian refers to a response of Celsus, a jurist of the second century: Celsus libro primo digestorum tractat, si quis instructus sit duobus locis aequaliter neque hic quam illic minus frequenter commoretur: ubi domicilium habeat, ex destinatione animi esse accipiendum. Ego dubito, si utrubique destinato sit animo, an possit quis duobus locis domicilium habere. Et verum est habere, licet diicile est: quemadmodum diicile est sine domicilio esse quemquam. Puto autem et hoc procedere posse, si quis domicilio relicto naviget vel iter faciat, quaerens quo se conferat atque ubi constituat: nam hunc puto sine domicilio esse. (D.50.1.27.2, Ulp.2 edict.) Celsus in the irst book of his Digest, discusses the case of someone who is equally at home in two places and does not spend any more time in one than the other; one must establish where he has his domicile from his full intention. Myself I doubt, if someone lives in both places with full intention, whether he can have a domicile in two places. It is true that it is possible to hold two, but it is diicult, just as it is diicult for anyone to be without a domicile. I think, however, that even this can 7

8

Tab.Heracl. line 157 (FIRA I2, n. 13 = Crawford (1992): no. 24, 355–91): Qui pluribus in municipiis colonis praefecturis domicilium habebit, et is Romae census erit, quo magis/ in municipio colonia praefectura h(ac) l(ege) censeatur, eius h.l. n(ihilum) r(ogatur) (Whoever shall have a domicile in more than one municipium, colony or prefecture and shall have been registered at Rome, to the efect that he should be registered in a municipium, colony or prefecture under this statute, nothing of it is proposed by this statute). This document has been dated from 78 to 45, but most scholars now accept that it dates from the time of Caesar. The tabula also shows that foreign residents (incolae) were registered during the census. See Nicolet (1987). The word incola deines in fact two categories of persons: foreign residents (those who have their legal domicile in a city other than their patria or origo: they are the equivalent of metoikoi in the Greek world); and indigenous people (those who had been living in a place before foundation of a colony and remained there afterward, without having the status of citizens): they are the paroikoi of the Greek world. See recently Gagliardi (2006): 46f., 110f ., 329f.; Licandro (2004); Licandro (2007): 1357–88. On the Greek vocabulary: Rizakis (1998); Papazoglu (1997): 201f., 231–2.

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happen, if someone leaves his domicile and travels by sea or land, seeking somewhere to go and establish himself, I think that such a person has no domicile.

Again we see an attempt to deine the categories precisely and to discuss the possibilities ofered by the law. The response to the issue was that the animus, the intention of the person, had to be clearly expressed (I will return to this point). Undoubtedly, changing a legal domicile was an individual and free decision, but it also was an explicit pact with the new place. The idea of a free choice of domicile is constantly stressed in our sources – with some limits: Nihil est impedimento quo minus qui ubi velit habeat domicilium, quod ei interdictum non sit. (D.50.1.31, Marcellus 1 Dig.) There is no hindrance to having a domicile wherever one wants, as long as it is allowed.

This passage simultaneously claims universal freedom of domicile and alludes to exceptions, which, actually, were numerous: for example, a senator had to have his domicile in Rome until Caracalla;9 a legitimate wife had to take her husband’s domicile, and a rescript deines her as a forced incola.10 However, a domicilium necessarium could be imposed only by the authorities, as the following discussion of a will states: Tito centum relicta sunt it uti … in illa civitate domicilio haberet. Potest dici non esse locum cautioni, per quam ius libertatis infringitur. Sed in defuncti libertis alio iure utimur. (D.35.1.71.2, Papinian 17 Quaest.) One hundred are left to Titus if … he establishes his domicile in a given city. It can be said that there is no scope for any undertaking whereby the status of liberty is infringed. But our rule is diferent in respect to freedmen of the deceased.

In other words, a private person could not force anybody, even a freedman, to have his domicile in a speciic place: his capacity of movement was a part of his status as a free person.11 That said, not only were there exceptions, but the law also supervised this freedom by indirect rules, which shows that the category of illegal migration was thinkable.12 9 10

11 12

See Chastagnol (1992): 46–7, 167–8. D.50.2.38.3 (Papirius 2 De Constitutionibus): Imperatores Antoninus et Verus item rescripserunt, mulierem, quamdiu nupta est, incolam eiusdem civitatis videri, cuius maritus est; et ibi unde originem trahit, non cogi muneribus fungi (The emperors Antoninus and Verus replied that a wife, during the time she is married, is considered as the incola of the same city as her husband’s; and where she has her origo, she is not forced to fulill iscal duties). Cf. Licandro (2004): 385. Under the republic, the idea of illegal migration concerned those who had illegally left their city or illegally taken Roman citizenship. This was the case of the Latins in the second century BCE. See Broadhead (2004): 315f.

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The Declaration of Domicile To become a resident in a city other than the origo, to become an incola, a person had to show his animus, his intention. As we saw in Celsus’s passage, this would help to distinguish between a temporary settlement and a permanent one.13 Many texts refer to this idea: Domicilium re et facto transfertur, non nuda contestatione. (D.50.1.20, Paul. 24 Quaest.) The change of domicile is shown by facts and actions, not by mere words.

A nuda contestatio, a declaration or oral expression of a will, was not suicient, as Paulus says. The voluntas had to be made explicit, by transferring all the afairs (re) into the new city and by taking part in the community’s social and religious life (facto).14 We do not know before whom, when, or where the contestatio had to be enacted, but we can well imagine that, as in Republican times, it was done during the local census. Several sources attest to a survey of the incolae, as was previously the case in the Greek world,15 mainly for iscal reasons: qui in ea colon(ia)/ intraue eius colon(iae) ins domicilium praedi-/umue habebit neque eius colon(iae) colon(us) erit, is ei-/ |36| dem munitioni uti colon(us) pare{n}to. (Lex Ursonensis, 98, l. 32) Whoever in that colony or within the boundaries of that colony shall have a domicile or estate and shall not be a colonist of that colony, he is to be liable to the same construction work as a colonist.16

In this Caesarian law of the colonia Ursonensis in Spain, the term munitio refers to local operae (duties), here activities of construction, which are deined as “similar to those of the citizens of the colony.” As for the munera, the iscal obligations of the elite, other sources suggest that their extension to the incolae did not become a general practice before Hadrian.17 A Trajanic inscription, for 13 14 15

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D.50.1.27.2 (Paul. 1 edict.). Cf. Thomas (1998): 34f. E.g., in Pergamon before the Roman domination (OGIS 338), or in Athens [on the metics, see Mai (2009): 307f .]; for the Roman Republic, the survey is explicitly documented by some inscriptions: see the Tabula Heracleensis (note 6). Trans. Crawford (1996): t. 1, n. 25. The Vardagate decree, dated between Augustus and Trajan, also seems to attest to the fact that only the municipes had to fulill the iscal duties: Liberti eorum qui secundum voluntatem suam cooptati sunt m[u]nicipes vardacati alterius condicionis sunt quam patroni nisi si et ipsi cooptari volunt et utroque loco munere fungi id est in eo in quo coop[t]ati sunt [e]t in eo ex quo patroni eorum oriundi sunt v vacat (The freedmen of those who have been chosen according to their will as municipes of Vardagate are of diferent condition from that of their patron, except if they want to be themselves chosen and to fulill their munera in both places [as municipes], that is in the place

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example, honors a man who obtained for his city the right of imposing the munera on the incolae: et super ce[tera omnibus sit notu]m sacratissimum principem Traianum A[gustum decrevisse rogatu ei]us, ut incolae, quibus fere censemur, muneri[bus nobiscum fungantur]. (CIL V 875 = Inscr.Aq. 495) It is well known to all that the princeps Trajan Augustus has decided at the request of this man that incolae fulill with us the munera, for which we are generally assessed.

The generalization of this obligation as well as the deinition of the status of the incolae thus seems to have been introduced by Hadrian. This is also conirmed by the observation that the substantive incolatus, which abstractly deines the status of the incolae, is not attested before him.18 From his reign, the incolae had to fulill their munera not only in their city of residence but also in their city of origin; and they were subject to the two jurisdictions, as Gaius explains in his commentary on the provincial edict: Incola et his magistratibus parere debet, apud quos incola est, et illis, apud quos civis est: nec tantum municipali iurisdictioni in utroque municipio subiectus est, verum etiam omnibus publicis muneribus fungi debet. (D.50.1.29, Gaius, 1 edict. prov.) An incola must obey both the magistrates of the place where he is an incola and those of the place where he is a citizen; nor is he subject only to municipal jurisdiction in both municipalities, but he must also perform all public munera.

Undoubtedly, Gaius’s text, in the second half of the second century, constitutes a terminus ad quem. After that period, the sources provide important

18

where they have been chosen and in the place from which their patron has his origin). For the dating: Arangio-Ruiz and Vogliano (1942): 3f ., who date the document from the Flavians and Trajan; Degrassi (1948): 254f., from Augustus; see also Harris (1981): 358f. Diferent texts conirm this dating. See D.50.1.37, Callistr. 1 De Cogn.: De iure omnium incolarum, quos quaeque civitates sibi vindicant, praesidum provinciarum cognitio est. Cum tamen se quis negat incolam esse, apud eum praesidem provinciae agere debet, sub cuius cura est ea civitas a qua vacatur ad munera, non apud eam, ex qua ipse se dicit oriundum esse (On the right of all the incolae. The governors of provinces have jurisdiction over all the inhabitants whom any towns claim as their own; but still, where anyone denies that he is a resident, he must bring suit before the governor of the province in whose jurisdiction the town, by which he is called to discharge a public employment, is situated, and not before the governor of the one where he himself alleges that he was born). The irst texts concerning the students’ domicile are also from Hadrian: C.10.40.2 (a student is not considered to have his domicile in his place of study) and 10.40.7 (the father who visits his son in his place of study is not considered to have his domicile there). Seen from this point of view, these statements clearly prevent the cities from claiming from the students and their fathers the munera as incolae (and not only, as Licandro [2004]: 337f . suggests, to force the students to fulill their duties in their city of origin). Before the time of Hadrian, no documents provide a general statement on the status of the incolae.

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evidence for this double iscal obligation.19 The moral and legal principle is that it is not possible to refer to a patria or to a legal domicile by name only: acts, fulillment of duties, and solemn commitments also were necessary.20 The requirement of the double munera had several implications. First, it meant that an incola had to declare his change of domicile to his patria, in order not to be accused of avoidance. This is the meaning of a text of Ulpian:21 If it has been proved that the decurions left their domicile of the city to which they belonged in order to move elsewhere (decuriones quod sedibus civitatis ad quam pertinent relictis in alia loca transmigrasse probabitur), the governor of the province will have to bring them back to their fatherland ( praeses provinciae in patrium solum revocare) and force them to fulill their iscal duties (et muneribus congruentibus fungi curet).22

Second, if an incola wanted to move to another domicile, he could oicially renounce his previous place of residence only after completion of his iscal duties, as a third-century text explains: Incola iam muneribus publicis destinatus nisi perfecto munere incolatui renuntiare non potest. (D.50.1.34, Modestinus 3 regul.) An incola who has been designated for the performance of public munera cannot renounce his position unless the munus has been completed.

The expression incolatui renuntiare refers to a public declaration by which a person abandoned his status of incola. The expression also appears in a rescript of the Emperor Julian to a petition of the decurions of a city of Phoenicia, asking if their incolae, who had been decurions in their city of origin, could be sued in their place of domicile for not having fulilled their duties: ad Iulianum consularem foenices. non obstat curialium petitioni, quod ii, quos incolas dixerunt, alibi decuriones esse dicuntur; poterunt enim et aput eos detineri, si eorum 19

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D.50.2.38.3 (Papirius 2 De Constitutionibus): Imperatores Antoninus et Verus item rescripserunt, mulierem, quamdiu nupta est, incolam eiusdem civitatis videri, cuius maritus est; et ibi unde originem trahit, non cogi muneribus fungi. The fact that the wife, although compared to an incola, is not forced to fulill the munera in the city where her husband has his domicile but which is not her origo, seems to prove that an incola had to be compelled to the double munera; C.10.38.3; C.10.38.5 (Constantine, 325) = C.Th. 12.1.12 [Brev. XII,1,2]. This is the meaning of Plutarch’s critique of the Stoics who traveled so far from their fatherland of which they only kept the name (Plut., Contrad. Stoic. 4,1034 A). Of course, Plutarch expressed a moral critique but he undoubtedly referred to common knowledge. D.50.2.1.pr. Ulp., lib.2 Opin. = Lenel, Paling. II 2308. D.50.2.1.pr. Ulp., lib.2 Opin.: Decuriones, quos sedibus civitatis, ad quam pertinent, relictis in alia loca transmigrasse probabitur, praeses provinciae in patrium solum revocare et muneribus congruentibus fungi curet. See remarks by Jacques (1984): 349–50; and it is probably also the meaning of a rescript of Caracalla to a man named Silvanus (C.J. 10. 39.1): as your place of origin is Byblios but your domicile is Beyrouth (Cum te Byblium origine, incolam autem apud Berytios esse proponis), you have to fulill your iscal duties in the two cities (merito apud utrasque civitates muneribus fungi compelleris).

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patitur substantia et ante conventionem incolatui renuntiare noluerunt. sola vero possessione sine laris collocatione praedictos onerari iuris ratio non patitur, quamvis res decurionum comparasse dicantur. Sane incolatus iure tunc detinendi sunt, sinon aut arma gesserunt aut expedition militari praefuerunt aut sub praecone administrationis facti sunt senatores. (C.Th. 12.1.52 [Antioch, 3 September. 362]) Emperor Julian Augustus to Julianus, governor of Phoenicia.The fact that those who are claimed as residents are said to be decurions elsewhere will not bar a petition of the decurions of their place of residence. For the aforesaid persons can be detained by the decurions also in their place of residence if their property permits and if they have not been willing to renounce their residence (incolatui renuntiare) before they are sued. But if a person has only a possession in a place without having moved his lares, it is not legally right to charge him, even if his goods can compete with those of the decurions. But those are bound by the ius incolatus who have not served in the army or led a military expedition or been made senator by the recommendation of having held an administrative oice.23

The incolae could be sued, unless they had renounced their status before being claimed as decurions. The abandoning of their status is an explicit destinatio animi, an expression of voluntas analogous to the acts performed to become incola. The role of the administrative conirmation is also suggested by the expression incolas dicere, as Lorenzo Gagliardi rightly pointed out: it is the administrative conirmation of a private decision.24 As we can see, the change of domicile gave birth to numerous declarations, acts, and documents, as mechanisms for supervising the freedom of movement. But the text also reveals two other important details: the irst is that the ius incolatus was still the object of discussions in the fourth century (concerning who could be claimed as an incola); the second is that upper-class incolae also had to be decurions in the two cities (that of origin and that of domicile). This possibility for the incolae to be decurions in their city of domicile, which is attested in the epigraphical sources from the end of the second century and by the passage of Gaius quoted earlier, highlights the evolution of their status and their progressive assimilation to the municipes: under the republic, they had access to urban facilities and were registered in their city of domicile;25 under the early empire, they could vote (and in the East their children could go to the gymnasia);26 and from the end of the second century they could also have civic functions, even if, according to some jurists of the third century, it was not fair to force people to fulill honores in the

23 24 25 26

Trans. Pharr (1952), changed. Gagliardi (2006): 405–6. Thomas (1998): 26f . Mastrocinque (1994): 237f .

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two cities:27 in the fourth century the double decurionship had become a regular practice.28 How to explain this phenomenon? According to some historians, this was due to the lack of candidates for civic oice because of the emigration of the local elites to Rome; but such an explanation seems insuicient.29 Rather, these developments help us to understand how mobility reshaped the sociability of urban space and eroded the barriers between foreigners and citizens. The evidence adduced so far also proves that mobility was a big issue for the cities and needed to be monitored. As we have seen, until Hadrian the complaints and requests of the cities were treated case by case. Hadrian then imposed a general rule, that of the double munera, which was a way to monitor and control mobility and to help the cities. The numerous rescripts on the double munera make explicit the authorities’ will to respond to the problems raised by this important feature of the Roman Empire: the free choice of domicile for everybody, even freedmen.

Freedmen Various inscriptions attest to freedmen’s mobility. Some of them suggest that it was controlled by their patrons, as in the Vardagate decree, which refers to freedmen who, after moving with their patrons to this Italian city, obtained irst the status of incolae and then of municipes;30 others explicitly reveal that the freedmen moved on their own account: mobility was precisely a part of their ius libertatis. In fact, Roman lawyers recognized the possibility of a freedman engaging in free migration that was often linked to a social and economic promotion:31 Eius qui manumisit municeps est manumissus, non domicilium eius sed patriam secutus. (D.50.1.27 pr., Ulp. 2 edict.) A man who is manumitted is fellow municeps of the man who manumitted him, adopting not his domicile but his patria. Municipes sunt liberti et in eo loco ubi ipsi domicilium sua voluntate tulerunt nec aliquod ex hoc origini patroni faciunt paeiudicium et utrubi muneribus adstringuntur. (D.50.1.22.2, Paul., 1 Sentent.) 27

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Papinian, D.50.1.17.4; Ulpian, D.50.2.1. However, inscriptions show that it could be the case: CIL XII 1585 (Lugdunum): Adlecto in curiam Lugdunensium nomine incolatus; CIL II 1055: in municipio Flavio Axatitano ex incolatu decurioni; CIL II 2135 (and Gagliardi [2006]: 402f.); cf. also CILA III 1, 306. C.Th. 12.1.5 (Licinius, 317). See Lepelley (1979–81): 197f . on the decurions in the cities of late antiquity. See note 11. See also CIL XII 4377: L. Afranius Cerialis l(ibertus)/Eros IIIIIvir Augustalis domo Ta/racone ospitalis a Gallo/Gallinaio, Afrania Ceria/lis l(iberta) Procilla uxor: as Bonsangue (2006): 39f . suggested, the freedman probably moved with his patron, Cerialis. See, e.g., Haley (1991): 23f.

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Freedmen are municipes also in the place in which they have themselves established domicile of their own volition; nor does this involve any prejudice to the origin of the patron; and such freedmen are bound to perform munera in both places.

The issue, however, was that the freedmen still had to fulill some duties toward their patrons.The law foresaw, for example, that in a situation of migration (of the freedmen or of the patron), a freedman would have to go to the place where his patron resided: Ex provincia libertum Romam venire debere ad reddendas operas Proculus ait: sed qui dies interea cesserint, dum Romam venit, patrono perire, dummodo patronus tamquam vir bonus et diligens pater familias Romae moraretur, vel in provinciam proiciscatur: ceterum si vagari per orbem terrarum velit, non esse iniungendam necessitatem libero ubique eum sequi. (D.38.1.20.1, Paul. 40 edict.) Proculus says that a freedman should come from the province to Rome for the purpose of rendering services, but the patron loses those days that passed while he was on his way to Rome, so long as the patron was residing at Rome as a man of good character and diligent head of the household or was setting out for his province; however, if he wishes to roam the world, his freedman is not to be obliged to follow him everywhere.

This opinion of a irst-century jurist is very interesting evidence for the limits of freedom: the control consisted in forcing freedmen not to follow their patron’s movements but to fulill their social (and economic) duties, wherever the patron was. It is also interesting to note the prejudice against mobility: a good pater familias did not move without purpose. Such movement actually was commonplace, as shown by the deinition of the domicile as a place where one always returns: Et in eodem loco singulos habere domicilium non ambigitur, ubi quis larem rerumque ac fortunarum suarum summam constituit, unde rursus non sit discessurus, si nihil avocet, unde cum profectus est, peregrinari videtur, quo si rediit, peregrinari iam destitit. (C.J. 10.40.7) There is no doubt that individuals have their domicile where they have placed their household gods32 and the greater part of their property and fortunes, and no one shall depart from there unless something requires him to do so, and whenever he does leave the place, he is considered to be on a journey, and when he returns, to have completed it.

Mobility could only be temporary or be motivated by necessity: frequent mobility would be threatening or unreasonable. 32

On the Lares, see Gagliardi (2006): 339f.

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Evolution in the Fourth Century: The Case of Sons IN POTESTATE From the end of the third century, the emperors introduced more and more constraints on mobility within the empire, whether social or geographic: the legal texts seem to relect an obsessive fear of iscal evasion and an increasing fear of uncontrolled mobility (vagrants, monks, soldiers, slaves, or other social categories),33 a bureaucratic efort also to reinforce the link of individuals to a speciic place (adscriptio) – their origo, a collegium, or land (to quote but a few examples) – and to require identity documents.34 At this time, even imperial service (in the administration or in the army) could not be invoked as a good reason for avoiding the performance of local duties, and many imperial constitutions repeated this concern from the time of Constantine.35 Does this mean that mobility declined?36 A very interesting case study is that of decurions’ sons in potestate (under the legal control of their fathers).37 Before the fourth century, sons in potestate were free to have an independent domicile, as Ulpian explains: Placet etiam ilios familias domicilium habere posse (lib.25 ad Sabinum) … non utique ibi, ubi pater habuit, sed ubicumque ipse domicilium constituit (lib. 39 ad edictum). (D.50.1.3–4) It is thought right for a son-in-power also to be able to have a domicile … not indeed wherever his father has it, but wherever he himself ixes his domicile.

The domicile was the result of their voluntas, and the texts strongly contrast it to the origo, which could never be changed by a personal decision: origine propria neminem posse voluntate sua eximi manifestum est, as Diocletian and Maximian still explained (C.J. 10.39.4). There is apparently no change in the fourth century on this point, although very few texts directly refer to this question; the same logic operated as in the

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Pottier (2009). I shall return to this important aspect elsewhere. A very good example is in C.11.10.4 (Honorius and Theodosius to Anthemius, praetorian prefect), where it is said that a man who wants to join the guild of the armorers “has to make a record (acta) showing that neither he, his grandfather or his father were born a curialis”; cf. also Constantine’s rescript in C.Th. 12.1.9 = C.10.32.16. C.Th. 12.1.16 (Constantinus); 12.1.76; C.10.32.31; 32.55 (Theodosius and Valentinianus). Cf. Lepelley (1992), who recalls this attraction of the imperial service for those who wanted to leave their city, as Augustine did, for example. See remarks by MacMullen (1964): 53. The texts on this topic have been gathered by Alaina Binstock, in a research paper written in 2009 under my direction and at my suggestion at University of Southern California. See also Licandro (2004): 342f.

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second century, whether it concerned the double munera, the double jurisdiction, or the double honores.38 What is more visible in the imperial constitutions of this time is an insistence on the absolute necessity for sons to fulill duties incurred by their familial status. According to some historians, this condition proves that their status had become hereditary; such a development would certainly have limited their social and geographic mobility. Actually, the imperial constitutions often refer to the origo curialis, but as François Jacques pointed out, not only did wealthy plebeians also rise to the status of decurions, but the old principle of election to the curia, according to the ideas of idoneitas and honorability, was maintained during this period and constantly invoked.39 What changed in the fourth century was development of imperial legislation on this legal obligation, such as measures to force those who had attempted to lee and escape their duty without good reason to return to their city,40 attempts to rule the relationship between municipal and imperial service,41 restrictions on exemptions and privileges, and explicit intentions to avoid fraud, favoritism, and patronage.42 What also changed was the authoritarian language of the law: the local career of a son in power was presented not as what his father had decided,43 or even as dependent on his own will,44 but as imposed by his status as deined by either the father or the grandfather.45 This did not change the fact of mobility itself but probably had some efect on its rhythm and rate, that is, on the age when sons could depart. Undoubtedly, mobility was, for inancial and demographic reasons, a very important challenge to the cities, and the emperors wanted to help them; they constantly referred to the priority of this link. However, the imperial law had 38

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C.Th.12.1.5 (21 July 317); 12.1.12 (325); 12.1.46 (27 June 358); 12.1.52 (3 September 362); 12.1.137.1 (9 August 393), etc.; see also Julian, Misopogon 40. See Gaudemet (1951): 44f . and, above all, Jacques (1984): 318–19, followed by Carrié and Rousselle (1999): 682f. See also the constitution of 436 from Theodosius and Valentinianus (C.10.32.55), addressed to Isidorus, praetorian praefect, which makes the distinction between the curiales and those who were subiecti curiae (plebeians without exemptions): another proof that the status of decurion has not become strictly hereditary. On this distinction, see Jacques (1984): 314f. C.Th. 12.1.16 (Constantinus to Annius Tiberianus, comes, 21 April 327); see also C.10.32.55 (Theodosius and Valentinianus, to Isidorus, praetorian prefect, 436 CE). C.Th.12.1.9; 11; 13, etc. Even the sons of veterans were urged to return to their city of origo if they were not able to join the military service: C.Th. 7.22.5 (13 November 333); C.Th.12.1.35 (27 June 343); 12.1.45 (22 June 358), etc. C.Th.12.1.1; 17; 20; 24; and later: 33; 35; 48. On the father’s responsibility: cf. D.50.1.2 (Ulp.1 Disput.): Quotiens ilius familias voluntate patris decurio creatur … ; C.10.32.1 (Valerianus and Gallianus to C. Caeso, 259 CE): si cum te pater decurionem voluisset; C.10.32.5 (Diocletianus and Maximianus, 286 CE). This changes after C.Th. 12.1.7, as Jacques (1984): 316 also remarked. D.50.4.3.5. See, e.g., C.11.64.1 (Gratianus,Valentinianus, and Theodosius to Cynegius, praetorian prefect), quoted note 30 in this chapter; cf. C.Th. 12.1.79 (Valentinianus and Valens, 3 December 375).

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limited efects. First, cities were free to decide whether they wished to force a son to become a decurion, and we know that they did not always make this claim on those who left the city (Augustine is a good example of this):46 as François Jacques has rightly said, the attachment to the city could be virtual.47 Second, the imperial orders were often vague (it is not clear, sometimes, whether they refer to the munera or to membership in the curiae) and not observed to the letter: there is always a distinction between what the law says and what it tolerated, and in fact the sources document the social resistance to this policy. Allusions to frauds (fraus, artiicium, audacia, contumacia),48 to lack of obedience,49 and to occultatores who would have helped the fugitives,50 as well as to the appeal to informers, are good evidence of this resistance. And it came not only from individuals – those, for example, who attempted to avoid the onera decurionatus by establishing their residence in another city, as attested in a rescript of Constantine to Maximus,Vicar of the Orient51 – but also from the administration, as shown by a rescript of Gratian, Valentinian, and Theodosius to Cynegius, praetorian prefect, which alludes to the coniventia militaris oicii,52 or even to the curiae themselves.53 Lastly, repetition of the same statements about the origo and the domicilium – civico nomine aut vinculo incolatus, as in a constitution of 35854 – proves the continuance of mobility as well as the vitality of civic links.This phenomenon had the same efects as in the past: it made it obvious that the ailiations (origo and domicile) could not be substituted one for the other but were cumulative. In fact, even if some citizens ran away from their city of origin, generally speaking wealthy people still had, as in the past, an evident and symbolic interest to show that they were honored in several places, to manifest their plural membership – which they did in inscriptions. On the basis of the fourth-century evidence, we can thus assert that mobility was also a feature of the late empire. It wove links between the cities instead of creating ruptures, and it was one of the 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

On Augustine: Petit (1955): 34–8; Lepelley (1979–81): 271–3. Jacques (1984): 321. E.g., C.Th.12.1.12 (below); C.Th. 12.1.9. C.Th. 12.1.23. Cf. C.10.32.31 (Valentinianus,Valens, Gratianus to Modestus, praetorian prefect, 13 July 371). C.Th.12.1.12 [= brev.12.1.2] Si qui vel ex maiore vel ex minore civitate originem ducit, si eandem evitare studens ad alienam se civitatem incolatus occasione contulerit, et super hoc vel preces dare tentaverit vel qualibet fraude niti, ut originem propriae civitatis eludat, duarum civitatum decurionatus onera sustineat, in una voluntatis, in una originis gratia. (If any person derives his origo from a greater or lesser municipality, and if because of his desire to avoid the duties of the aforesaid status he betakes himself to another city for the purpose of establishing residence there, and if he attempt to ofer a supplication to the emperor about this matter or to depend upon any fraud whatsoever to escape the birth status of his own city, he shall sustain the burdens of the decurionate in both municipalities, in the one because of his will, in the other by origo). C.J.11.64.1. C.Th.12.1.71 of 370; 79 of 375; 129 of 392. C.Th.12.1.46.

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means by which the imperial territory was uniied, at least in the consciousness of the people. This is how it created what I have called “cosmopolitization.”

The Cosmopolitization of the Empire The epigraphic evidence helps us to better understand this phenomenon, which was also a feature of the early empire. Our purpose in examining this kind of source is not to respond to the usual questions about the origin of this or that individual but to look at the diferent identities displayed by both Roman citizens and peregrini who moved.55 What identities did these inhabitants of the empire want to display? And what conception of identity is being revealed? The goal here is to shift from norms to practice, in order to better analyze how people experienced mobility and freedom of movement.The accumulation of multiple identities, an efect of the luidity of the empire, is one of the responses to this issue. Let us consider a few examples, starting with the evidence from the second century CE, which, as noted, was a key moment for the legal elaboration of the notion of freedom of domicile and of the status of the incolae. In an inscription of Betica, dated after Hadrian, we can see how a citizen of Cordoba (colonia Patricia) received the status of decurio as an incola in Axati. L. Lucretio Severo patriciensi et in municipio lavio Axatitano ex incolatu decurioni statuam quam testamento s(uo) poni sibi iussit … (CIL II 1055 [Lorae = Axati, municipium lavium, Baetica]) To L. Lucretius Severus, citizen of the colonia Patricia and decurion, as an incola, in the Flavian municipium of Axati, this statue which, in his will, he asked to be set up …

The distance between the two sites is not far, and he probably moved for this social promotion. For wealthy persons, social and geographic mobility were often linked, as was also the case for Roman senators.What is interesting is that before he died, L. Lucretius Severus ordered a statue to be set up in the place of his domicile, without forgetting to name his place of origin. As he gave this order in his will, he probably wrote the text of his funerary inscription himself: this means that it was his own decision to be deined by his ailiation to both places. An inscription of the late second century, found in Spain, shows another kind of multiple ailiation. M. Valerio M. f. Gal(eria) Aniensi Capelliano, Damanitano, adlecto in coloniam Caesaraugustanam e beneic(io) divi Hadriani omnibus honoribus in utraque republica funct … 55

Important remarks on that point in Frezouls (1989): 123f .

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To M. Valerius Capellianus, son of Marcus, from the tribes Galeria and Aniensis, who was inscribed in the colony Caesaraugusta thanks to Hadrian’s benefaction, and who completed all the honors in the two cities … (CIL II 4249 = ILS 6933 [F. Jacques, 1984, p. 659])

A Roman citizen, M. Valerius Capellianus was municeps of two cities: his place of origin (Damani, where he belonged to the tribe Galeria) and the place where he was registered by Hadrian (Saragossa, where he belonged to the tribe Aniensis).The case of double tribes is rare, and often linked to an adlectio. Equally noteworthy is the fact that he held local magistracies in the two places. Other people had two origines, for example, the freedmen of several patrons or people who beneited from an imperial [i]adlectio[/i], as Ulpian also attests.56 D(is) M(anibus) et memoriae aeter(nae / Illiormari Apri, lintia/ri, ex civitate Veliocas/sium, sublecto in numer(um)/colonor(um) Lug(dunensium), corpora/to inter utriclar(ios) Lug(duni)/ consistentium,/qui vix(it) ann(os) LXXXV sine ul/ lius animi sui laesione/ Aprius Illiomarus il(ius) pa/tri karissim(o) p(onendum) c(uravit) et sub a(scia) d(edicavit). (CIL XIII, 1998) To the Manes and the eternal memory of Aprius Illiormarus, a linen trader from the city of Veliocasses, inscribed among the coloni of Lugdunum, a member of the corporation of the goatskin makers who lived in Lugdunum, who lived 85 years without any moral fault, his son Aprius Illiomarus set up (this monument) to his dear father and dedicated it sub ascia.

Born in the city of the Veliocasses, in Normandy, this man, who bore a name of Celtic origin, died in Lugdunum, where his epitaph was set up by his son in the third century. This man was a linen trader and a member of the college of foreigners living in Lyon and, as such, was granted citizenship in the Roman colony. As Nicolas Tran has pointed out, he certainly obtained the adlectio by an imperial privilege since he was a foreigner, but he seems to have kept his previous civitas and also his previous regional and ethnic identity, since his name was not romanized.57 This inscription also conirms that local activity was more important than status; yet, the son of this man, as is the case of many other collegiati, referred to the city of origin of his father, and explicitly displayed his double membership. Some multiple ailiations were a sign of prestige, as in the following inscription: … / …/ ann(is) XXXIII/ G. Blossius Saturninus Galeria/N(e)apolitanus Afe/r, Arniensis, inco/la Balsensis, ili/ae pientissimae, h(ic)s(ita)e(st)s(it)t(ibi)

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D.50.1.7 (Ulp. 5 Of. Procons.): si quis a pluribus manumissus est, omnium patronum originem sequitur. Tran (2006): 281.

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t(erra)l(evis). (CIL II 105 = ILS 6902 [Pax Iulia: AE 1927, 129; HAE 157; 973)58 … she lived 33 years. G. Blossius Saturninus Afer, from Napeul, belonging to the tribe Arniensis, resident in Balsa, to his pious daughter, here she lies, may the earth be light upon you.

Coming from Napeul (in Africa, hence his cognomen Afer), a city that belonged to the tribe Arniensis and where his name is attested, G. Blossius Saturninus was probably adlected civis in another city where he became ailiated with his other tribe (Galeria) – perhaps Pax Julia, where the inscription has been found59 – but resided in Balsa (Ravira, in Lusitania). He not only accumulated local citizenship in two diferent provinces, and two tribes, but resided in a third place. He dedicated this inscription to his daughter but did not forget to declare his multiple identity, which conirms the visibility of the status of incola and the prestige attached to being honored in diferent places. Linked to wealth, this mobility was a source of pride. It is hard to estimate the proportion of people who felt themselves involved in this way, but it seems fair to say that such involvement was not unheard of. The inscriptions that attest to this phenomenon relate to all the provinces, albeit with some regional diferences,60 and to all kinds of people: soldiers; freedmen; notables, such as Aponius Cherea, who exercised many important functions in his origo, Narbonna, and also in Sicily at Syracusa, Thermae, Himera, and Panhormos;61 members of the imperial administration and senators.

Elite Mobility Until late antiquity, not only were provincials uprooted when they were promoted to the rank of senator, but they constantly moved during their cursus. A good example is M. Cornelius Nigrinus Curiatius Maternus, who was born in Edeta (Spain). In his career, some of his appointments included military tribune of the legio XIV Gemina in Britain after the civil war in 68–9, governor of Aquitania, consul in 83, governor of Moesia, legate of Moesia inferior, and governor of Syria between 95 and 97.62 Such people spent a large part of their lives outside Rome and maintained links with the provinces they had 58 59 60 61

62

D’Encarnaçao (2000): 1291f.; Haley(1991): 44; Lefèvre (2005): 118. In Lusitania (today Beja). Frezouls (1989); Pavis D’Escurac (1988). ILGN, 573: A]ponio L(ucii) il(io), Papiria /Chereae auguri quaes/tori c(olonia) J(ulia) P(aterna) C(laudia) N(arbone) M(artio) aedilicis or/narmentis honorato ob/ quam rem rei publicae Narbonens/(is) [HS M]D intulit. Item provinc(ia)/Sicilia Syracusis Thermis/ [Him]eris Panhormo aedili/cis et duumviralibus et/lamonis et /libus ornamentis/honorato/[Ap]nius Blas[tus] /[pa]trono op[timo] d.d. Alföldy and Halfman (1973).

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administered, for example, through patronage of the cities and collegia.63 How did this mobile way of living inluence their conception of membership, and their relationship to Rome? Did they really maintain contact with their city of origin? This last issue has often been raised, especially by Werner Eck,64 but it is rarely possible to extend our observations over several generations.65 Legally, under the republic, a notable who received a Roman oice did not lose his local ailiation,66 but the emperors (Augustus, Claudius, Trajan above all) repeatedly tried to wrest provincial senators from their local homeland and settle them in the capital, or at least in Italy. Beginning with Augustus, they received Rome as their ictive origo and their place of legal domicile; then Trajan ordered them to transfer one-third of their properties to Italy,67 which shows that many senators had maintained strong interests abroad, either in their city of origin or elsewhere.68 Senators under Caracalla, while conserving their Roman origo, were recognized as having a double domicile (in Rome and in their city of origin), and their ability, as well as that of their descendants, to assume local oices in their place of origo was strongly airmed.69 The jurist Paulus explained how it was that senators who had to adopt a Roman origo and residence could at the same time remain linked to their respective homelands: Senatores licet in urbe domicilium habere videantur, tamen et ibi, unde oriundi sunt, habere domicilium intelleguntur, quia dignitas domicili adiectionem potius dedisse quam permutasse videtur. (D.1.9.11, Paul. 41 edict.) Although senators are deemed to have their domicile in the city, nevertheless, they are also considered as having a domicile in the place from 63

64 65

66

67 68

69

In the album of Canusium, we see that the great patrons were the eponymous consul of 224, the prefect of Egypt, and the legate of Moesia. See Jacques (1984): 508–26; Salway (2000); see also Clemente (1972): 142–229. Among an impressive number of publications, see, e.g., Eck (1996b): 213–26. The most famous inscription is that of Hispallis in Spain (CIL II, 1174). She is called consularis iliae, senatoris uxori, senatoris sororis, senatoris matri. So, while she remained in Spain, she was linked to three generations of senators (see Eck [1996a]). On these questions, see also Ruino et al. (2006), especially the contributions of F. Javier Navarro and J. Rodriguez Neila; see also the important publication Tituli 5 (1982). Cf. lex Ursonensis (Crawford [1992]: I, 25), tablet c, col. III, XCV: sive is propter magistratu potestatemque p(opuli) R(omani) minus atesse poterit) (lines 23–4). The bibliography is huge: e.g., Biondo (2000): 33–69; Gaggiotti and Paci (1992): 201–44. Pliny the Younger, Ep. 6.19. Cf. Eck (1996a): 175; Nicols (1990): 81f. On the resistance to this measure, see Chastagnol (1992): 166f. On the question of the senatorial domicile, see Chastagnol (1992): 46–7, 167–8, 196–7; and on the resistance to the measures of Trajan see Chastagnol (1992): 166. D.50.1.22.5 (Paul. 1 Resp.): senatores et eorum ilii iliaeque quoquo tempore nati nataeve, itemque nepotes, pronepotes, et proneptes ex ilio origini eximuntur, licet municipalem retineant dignitatem (The senators and their sons and daughters whenever born as well as their grand sons and granddaughters, born from a son, are taken away from their origo although they keep their municipal dignitas). The reference to the descendants reveals the imperial attempt to divest the senators of their local roots but conirms that the relationship with the city of origo was not lost for several generations because the local dignitas was maintained. On this text, see Chastagnol (1992): 166–7.

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which they originated; for their rank is seen to have given them rather an additional domicile than a change of domicile.

The term adiectionem (addition) is of fundamental importance: senators could consider themselves as plainly belonging to two places. Indeed, by recognizing their double domicile, Caracalla acknowledged their right not only to mobility but also to a double identity, thereby reinforcing their local power.70 It should be noted, however, that this idea of a cumulative identity was, in principle, valid for all citizens, since, as we saw previously, they could be at the same time cives, municipes, and incolae. Moreover, the concept of Roma patria communis, which implied that even while staying in Rome citizens were not, on that account, absent from their local homeland, was the recognition of their ictional ubiquity,71 their capacity of being here and there at the same time. Each of these practices was a form of what I call the cosmopolitization of the empire, which was operative at least until the middle of the fourth century.72

Multiple Identities So far, we have considered only civic ailiations. But multilingual inscriptions in the Roman Empire also reveal the existence of other degrees of cosmopolitization linked to mobility, and the inscriptions show sometimes very complex situations, with at least three levels of ailiation: membership, origin, and culture. For example, a Roman citizen felt linked to the city of Rome, to his origo, the place of origin, and, later on, even to the province of his birth, but also to various other communities (e.g., collegia, professional groups): these were diferent memberships. He could also claim an origin (natione, natus) as a Parthian, a Thracian, or a Palmyrene, to which, from the fourth century onward, he could add a religious identity, that of being a Christian (or not); inally, he could also express this in several languages, thereby deining his cultures. The same applied to peregrini, who would state their membership (of such and such a village or city), their origin (e.g., Syrian), and their culture (Greek or Aramaic). Take, for instance, the famous second-century dedications in Rome, in Latin and Greek (IGUR 117 = CIL VI 50–51) to the Palmyrene deities Belus and Malachbelus for the well-being of the emperor: they were set up by two individuals, C. Licinius and Heliodorus, in one or several temples in the Trastevere quarter. Heliodorus indicates his Palmyrene origin; possibly, like Licinius, he is a Roman citizen (if so he is a freedman): that is his membership. His inscriptions 70 71

72

On the link between a global and a local power, Chastagnol (1992): 313f. Thomas (1998): 9f. has considered all the juridical efects of what he calls the ubiquity of Rome. But we could also say that all the citizens were, in that way, ubiquitous. On the change in the status of the senatorial elite from the middle of the fourth century, see Chastagnol (1992): 313f.

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are written in two languages, Greek (which was one of the languages in Palmyra) and Latin (which he learned in Rome), which shows his culture.73 In the third century (February 236), another Palmyrene, also named Heliodorus, presents a rather diferent case: he had dedicated an altar to the gods of the Aglibol Moon and the Malachbel Sun and records this in a bilingual inscription (Greek and Palmyrene) (IGUR 119). In the Greek version, he identiies himself as Iulius Aurelius Heliodorus Hadrianus, the son of Antiochos, and a Palmyrene; but in the Palmyrene version, he uses his former name (IGUR 119): Iarhai, son of Haliphi, son of Iarhai, son of Liusamusu, son of Soadu.This Roman citizen, a freedman, combines two group memberships and identities but retains his original culture, which is a combination of Greek and Palmyrene. Many inscriptions refer to this juxtaposition of identities, with double names and double identities, like the inscription of M. Antonius Gaionas, Roman citizen of Syrian origin who dedicated a ring of sacriice to the sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus on the Janiculum in Rome: the Greek text gives his name in Greek and his sacerdotal function as a deipnokriteˉs. The same Gaionas also dedicated in 186, in honor of Commodus, a marble column to the same god, called Jupiter Optimus Maximus Heliopolitanus: this time, the inscription is in Latin and Gaionas not only gives his Roman name but also refers to his religious functions and administrative charge as a cistiber: a controller of the streets on the right side of the Tiber.74 As these examples show, an individual’s identity was no longer thought of in terms of exclusion but rather in terms of accumulation. Cosmopolitanization was engendered by the accumulation of spatiotemporal experiences that resulted from mobility: it produced a global efect thanks to the links that the circulation of human beings forged between diferent parts of the world and those that immigrants from diferent regions forged in one particular place, links that then afected their identities, their language, and their practices. This cosmopolitan consciousness is what made the Roman Empire an empire: the capacity of moving and weaving links between places, and the liberty of accumulating identities and ailiations, have provided several authors a basis for their theories, such as Cicero in the De Legibus, with his theory of the two fatherlands and his irst deinition of Rome as a communis patria, and Favorinus of Arelate, a sophist of the second century, in his treatise On Exile, which is perhaps the irst treatise on mobility: the idea that mobility is the condition of all individuals and people (we are all immigrants everywhere); that the patria is a place of free choice; and that identity is cumulative (he claims that he is at the same time from Arelate, Roman by citizenship and Greek by culture and peregrination).75 This is another example of the development of 73 74 75

CIL VI 50 = IGUR 117; on these inscriptions, see Adams (2003): 248f. On this inscription, I follow Hajjar (1977): nos. 300, 298, 301. Moatti (2007): 129–36.

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a Roman discourse of mobility and multiple ailiations. It is also a perfect sign of a cosmopolitan consciousness that was not a philosophy but a real way of life. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, J. (2003). Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge. Alföldy, J., and H. Halfman. (1973).“M. Cornelius Nigrinus Maternus, General Domitians und Rivale Trajans,” Chiron 3: 331–37. Arangio-Ruiz, V., and A. Vogliano. (1942). “Tre rescritti.” Athenaeum 20: 2–13. Beck, U. (2000). What Is Globalization? Cambridge. Biondo, R. (2000). “Struttura della classe dirigente a Pompei e mobilità sociale. I rapporti con il centro,” in M. Cebeillac, ed., Les élites municipales de l’Italie péninsulaire: 33–69. Paris. Bonsangue, M. L. (2006). “Des afaires et des hommes. Entre l’emporion de Narbonne et la péninsule ibérique,” in C. Ruino et al., eds., Migrare: la formation des élites dans l’Hispanie romaine: 15–68. Bordeaux. Broadhead, W. (2004). “Rome and the Latins: Problems of Control,” in C. Moatti, ed., La mobilé des personnes en Méditerranée, de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne. Procédures de contrôle et documents d’identiication: 315–35. Rome. Carrié, J. M., and A. Rousselle. (1999). L’empire romain en mutation, des Sévères à Constantin (192–337). Paris. Chastagnol, A. (1992). Le sénat romain à l’époque impériale. Paris. Clemente, G. (1972). “Il patronato,” SCO 21: 142–229. Crawford, M. (1996). Roman Statutes. 2 vols. London. Degrassi, A. (1948). “Mittente e destinatario dei rescritti imperiali riguardanti il municipio di Vardacate,” Athenaeum 26: 254–8. d’Encarnaçao, J. (2000).“L’Afrique et la Lusitanie: trois notes épigraphiques,” Africa Romana 13: 1291–8. Eck, W. (1996a). “La presenza delle famiglie senatorie nelle città dell’impero romano in al tardo III sec.,” in W. Eck, ed., Tra epigraia prosopograia e archeologia. Scritti scelti, rielaborati ed aggiornati, coll.Vetera 10:175–212. Rome.

Eck, W. (1996b). “I senatori e la loro provincia d’origine. L’esempio della Baetica,” in W. Eck, ed., Tra epigraia, prosopograia e archaeologia. Scritti scelti, rielaborati ed aggiornati, coll. Vetera 10:213–26. Frezouls, E. (1989). “Déplacements à l’intérieur des provinces occidentales sous le Haut Empire romain,” Ktema 14: 123–38. Gaggiotti, L., and G. Paci. (1982).“Ascesa al senato e rapporti con i territori d’origine. Italia. Regio V,” in Atti del Colloquio Internazionale AIEGL su Epigraia e ordine senatorio, 1:201–44. Rome. Gagliardi, L. (2006). Mobilità e integrazione delle persone nei centri cittadini romani: aspetti giuridici. Milan. Gaudemet, J. (1951). “Constantin et les curies municipales,” IURA 2: 44–75. Gil, E. M., and J. Rodriguez Neila. (2006). Poder central y autonomia municipal: la proyeccion publica de las elites romanas de Occidente. Cordoba. Hajjar,Y. (1977). La triade d’Héliopolis-Baalbek. Son culte et sa difusion à travers les textes littéraires et les documents iconographiques et épigraphiques. EPRO 59/1. Leiden. Haley, E. W. (1991). Migration and Economy in Roman Imperial Spain. Barcelona. Harris, W. (1981). “The Imperial Rescript from Vardagate,” Athenaeum 59: 358–62. Jacques, F. (1981). “Volontariat et compétition dans les carrières municipales du HautEmpire,” Ktema 6: 161–70. Jacques, F. (1984). Le privilège de liberté: politique impériale et autonomie municipale dans les cités de l’occident romain (161–244). Rome. Jacques, F. (1985). “‘Obnoxius curiae.’ Origines et formes de l’astreinte à la cité au IVe siècle de notre ère,” RHD 4e s, ann. 63: 303–28. Lefèvre, S. (2005). “Les migrations des Africani en Péninsule Ibérique: quelle vérité?,” in C. Ruino et al., eds., Migrare: la formation des élites dans l’Hispanie romaine. Bordeaux. Lepelley, C. (1979–81). Les cités de l’Afrique romaine au Bas-Empire. 2 vols. Paris.

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Lepelley, C. (1992). “The Classical City in Late Roman Africa,” in J. Rich, ed., The Classical City in Late Antiquity: 50–76. London. Licandro, O. (2004). Domicilium Habere. Persona e territorio nella disciplina del domicilio romano. Turin. Licandro, O. (2007). “Pomponio e l’incola. Osservazioni su D.50.16.239.2 (Pomp.l.sing. Ench.) alla luce di lex Urs. Cap.98 e lex. Irn. cap.83),” in F. M. D’Ippolito, ed., Scritti per Gennaro Franciosi, 2:1357–88. Naples. Lo Cascio, E. (1997). “Le procedure di recensus dalla tarda Reppublica al tardo antico e il calcolo della popolazione di Roma,” in AAVV, La Rome impériale: démographie et logistique, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome, 230: 3–76. Rome. MacMullen, R. (1964). “Social Mobility and the Theodosian Code,” JRS 54: 49–53. Mai , A. (2009). “Assenza nel mondo greco,” in C. Moatti, W. Kaiser, and Chr. Pébarthe, eds., Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée, de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne. Procédures de contrôle et d’identiication: 307–20. Bordeaux. Mastrocinque, A. (1994). “Gli Italici a Iaso,” in M. Sordi, ed., Emigrazione e immigrazione nel mondo antico, CISA (Contributi dell’Istituto di storia antica / Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Milano): 237–52. Milan. Moatti, C. (2007). “De la peregrinatio comme stratégie intellectuelle dans l’Empire romain au IIe siècle de notre ère,” MEFRIM 119, 1: 129–36. Moatti, C. (2009). “Le traitement de l’absence dans le monde romain,” in C. Moatti,W. Kaiser, and Chr. Pébarthe, eds., Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne. Procédures de contrôle et d’identiication: 321–53. Bordeaux. Nicolet, C. (1987). “La Table d’Héraclée et les origines du cadastre romain,” in L’Urbs. Espace urbain et histoire (Ier siècle av. J.-C.–III siècle ap. J.-C.), Actes du Colloque International, Rome 1985: 1–25. Rome.

Nicols, J. (1990).”Patrons of Greek Cities in the Early Principate,” ZPE 80: 81–100. Papazoglu, F. (1997). Laoi et Paroikoi. Recherches sur la structure de la société hellénistique. Belgrade. Pavis D’Escurac, H. (1988). “Origo et résidence dans le monde du commerce sous le HautEmpire,” Ktèma 13: 57–68. Petit, P. (1955). Libanius et la vie municipale à Antioche au IVe siècle après J.C. Paris. Pharr, C., trans. (1952). The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions. Princeton. Pottier, N. (2009). “Contrôle et répression des vagabonds, des mendiants et des populations migrantes dans l’Empire romain au IVe siècle,” in C. Moatti, W. Kaiser, and C. Pébarthe, eds., Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne: procédures de contrôle et d’identiication: 203–40. Bordeaux. Rizakis, A. D. (1998). “Incolae-Paroikoi: populations et communautés dépendantes dans les cités et les colonies romaines de l’Orient,” REA 100, nos. 3–4: 599–617. Ruino, C., et al., eds. (2006). Migrare: la formation des élites dans l’Hispanie romaine. Bordeaux. Salway, B. (2000). “Prefects, Patroni and Decurions: A New Perspective on the Album of Canusium,” in A. E. Cooley, ed., The Epigraphic Landscape of Roman Italy: 115–71. London. Thomas, Y. (1998). Origine et commune patrie. Rome. Tituli 5. Epigraia e ordine senatorio, 2 (1982). Tran, N. (2006). Les membres des associations romaines, Le rang social des collegiati en Italie et en Gaules sous le Haut-Empire, CEFR 367. Rome. Virlouvet, C. (1995). Tessera frumentaria. Les procédures de distribution du blé public à Rome, BEFAR 286. Rome. Virlouvet, C. (2008). La plèbe frumentaire dans les témoignages épigraphiques. Essai d’histoire sociale et administrative du peuple de Rome à la in de la République et au Haut-Empire. Rome.

SEVEN

CITY AND CITIZENSHIP AS CHRISTIAN CONCEPTS OF COMMUNITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY Claudia Rapp

The relation of the Christians of the irst centuries to the world in which they lived has perhaps been of greater concern to modern scholars than it was to the men and women of the time. Our post-Enlightenment sensibilities have conditioned us to postulate a strict barrier between religion and politics, between church and state, and even between the (spiritual) interior and the (public) exterior of the individual. Applied to late ancient history, this dichotomy underlies the scholarly interest in martyrdom interpreted as Christian resistance against the state and in the relation of bishops to their cities – both usually conceived as a contest for power. Along the same conceptual grid, the reign of Constantine will necessarily appear as being of magniied importance, because it represents the irst This chapter has had a long gestation, beginning with the conference at Château La Bretesche. Further versions were presented at Utrecht University, Leiden University, Harvard University, the University of Belgrade, the Friends of Ancient History in California, the Athens Dialogues Conference, and the International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Soia. I am grateful to all audiences for their feedback and suggestions. The Athenian version can be found on the Internet: http://athensdialogues.chs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/athensdialogues.woa/ wa/dist?dis=70; the Soia version in the Conference Acts. Both pay greater attention to the ancient signiicance of the terms polis, politeuma, and politeia, while the latter also includes relevant Byzantine material. I am grateful to the Onassis Foundation for its permission to reproduce parts of that paper. My greatest debt of gratitude, which it is a pleasure to acknowledge, is to Hal Drake who not only acted as the intellectual midwife for this article and collaborated on the introduction, but also single-handedly performed a major rescue operation for this volume at a critical time.

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time when an emperor takes an active interest in Christianity. Usually, this is interpreted as the moment when the church is invited to collude with the empire, compromising its otherwordly ideals and blurring the dividing line between the religious and the secular realm. But it is also possible to argue the case diferently: the reign of Constantine is the irst time that groups of Christians in cities and towns that had until then existed in loosely organized communities under the pastoral care and administrative leadership of their bishops and priests enjoyed recognition from the outside. They responded by seizing this opportunity to regard and comport themselves as belonging to an organized entity. In this manner Christian communities began to grow into the church as an institution. This fostered the need for a new conceptualization of the public signiicance of the church within its political context of city and empire. Constantine’s religious policies that favored Christians had a second important consequence: in the religious marketplace of the later Roman Empire, Christianity as a religion of choice became an increasingly attractive option, even as it required an allegiance that was exclusive of all others. As the fourth century progressed and Constantine’s successors, with the notable exception of Julian, continued to support Christianity, the new religion gained in numbers and in social status. The number of converts grew exponentially, and they increasingly hailed from higher social strata, irst from among the curial class and, by the late fourth century, also from among the aristocracy. This echelon of society provided the recruiting ground for bishops, many of whom count among the most important patristic authors. These men were steeped in city life: they were the sons of city councilors and had beneited from all the privileges, including a ine education, that their status aforded. Whether all these developments had the efect of watering down the original Christian message to the degree that post-Constantinian Christianity ought to be regarded as an oxymoron is a question that cannot concern us here. What is of concern, however, is the way in which Christians of late antiquity articulated their sense of identity as belonging to a community of fellow Christians. What is the conceptualization of the individual’s place in the Christian Church? What is the frame of reference that is invoked in order to explain such concepts as “belonging” or “community”? As I hope to show in the following, the model that Christians applied is that of the polis in all its facets. The focus will be on the Greek-speaking regions of the eastern Mediterranean, where polis culture had its deepest roots and greatest density. The polis – not the town, nor the empire – provided a point of comparison familiar to every man, woman, and child at a very visceral level of his or her existence. For the fourth and early ifth century, this is not surprising: the number of poleis throughout the empire had by then reached its peak. According to one estimate, they amounted to around two thousand in number. To be

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registered as a citizen of a particular city was considered to be a privilege that one repaid with loyalty, taxes, and other obligations. Even people who lived in towns and villages in the countryside oriented themselves to the nearest polis as their commercial and administrative hub and, if they were Christian, ecclesiastical center. But in subsequent centuries, for a variety of reasons whose relative importance is still under debate, the overall number of poleis declined rapidly, while structural changes in the empire meant that cities lost their importance and independence. The internal workings of the cities in the East began to be dominated by a few wealthy aristocrats, who increasingly monopolized the dealings of the council, rather than a broad basis of citizens. Still, being registered as a member of the city council (curia, bouleˉ ) was considered a distinction and an honor, much as it also constituted an obligation that could sometimes amount to a burden. Government intervention did its own part to undermine the administrative and economic autonomy of the cities, irst in the 360s by the appointment of the defensor civitatis, an outside watchdog to ensure the preservation of social peace, and in 518 by the creation of an imperially appointed tax collector, the vindex, which replaced the previous practice whereby each city was collectively responsible for the collection of taxes from its own hinterland. In the mid-sixth century, the successive waves of the plague that swept the empire from east to west resulted in a dramatic population decline, which gravely afected the urban centers. The eastern Mediterranean was further impacted in the early seventh century by the Persian invasions, which caused many cities in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine to protect themselves with newly constructed or hastily repaired walls that surrounded a contracted center, or prompted their population to seek refuge in a fortiied mountaintop akropolis. A few decades later, the Arab invasions brought the inal collapse of a city-based economy and autonomous structures of governance.1 But it would take until the very end of the ninth century for the polis as a political entity to be inally pronounced obsolete, when the emperor Leo VI declared that city councils were a thing of the past.2 Yet, throughout these developments, it is striking to observe that the polis retained some of its allure as an idealized way to think about the church as an institution, even as its political and social role was diminishing. In the apostolic age, when followers of Jesus formed small family-like communities, city imagery was invoked only rarely, and usually only in the sense of the city as a distinctive physical entity. This view was inherited from the Hebrew Bible, where the kingdom of God is imagined as a splendid city or, more speciically, as a heavenly version of the central site of the temple cult, 1

2

Koder (1986); Haldon (1999). For the socioeconomic functioning of cities in the early and middle Byzantine periods, see Dagron (2002): 393–405. Leo VI, Novella 46, ed. Noailles and Dain (1944): 183–5.

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Jerusalem. In the Gospels, the word polis is rarely mentioned, and when it is, it occurs almost exclusively with reference to a speciic city, or in a structural juxtaposition to towns or the countryside. The only abstract use of the Greek word polis occurs in Matthew 5:14 when Jesus addresses his disciples: “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.” It is perhaps signiicant that these words are pronounced in the Sermon on the Mount, atop a mountainside near the Sea of Galilee. They suggest that Jesus’ followers who had converged from diferent places of origin could be regarded as a recognizable and distinct community on the model of a polis. Within New Testament writings, city imagery is most prominent in the book of Revelation, supposedly composed by a certain John (who may or may not have been the evangelist) in Patmos, and datable to the last decades of the irst century. The last few chapters of Revelation contain a comparison of Babylon, the great and sinful city – teeming with traders, merchants, and artisans who are bartering their services and ofering their wares – with the promise of the new Jerusalem as a holy city. The juxtaposition of Babylon, depicted as a whore, with Jerusalem, the pure and undeiled bride, calls to mind the ancient notion of the fortiied city whose walls provide protection from outside penetration.3 For the author of Revelation, the juxtaposition of the bad city of Babylon and the good city of Jerusalem serves to drive home the contrast between this world and the next. Paul of Tarsus (ca. 5–ca. 67 CE), a converted Jew who made the Christian message palatable to educated gentiles steeped in the Greco-Roman tradition, was the irst to explore the image of the polis on a larger scale. For him, as for the author of Revelation a few decades later, God’s promise for the future includes the provision of a permanent homestead for God’s faithful followers, and this home is deined as a city. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews 11:10 describes how Abraham lived in tents, in a foreign land, in anticipation of the better future that God had promised: “For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” And indeed, Paul continues, God “has prepared a city” for the many descendants of Abraham (Hebr. 11:16). But the followers of Christ still live in anticipation: “For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebr. 13:14).These passages represent an extension of the Jewish anticipation of the kingdom of God as a city, understood in the physical sense as a settlement surrounded by walls and boasting all the amenities of a reined life. But Paul also formulates a new idea that would become especially inluential in later centuries. In his Epistle to the Philippians 3:20, he introduces the notion of the heavenly city deined as a community of members: “But our citizenship (politeuma) is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus 3

Behlmer (2002): 21.

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Christ.”4 As I shall discuss, this notion of citizenship, which is both a right and a duty, would provide Christian authors of the post-Constantinian period with a way of explaining the signiicance of membership in the church. The biblical notion of the city as an enclosed and safe space that is distinguished from its surroundings and fortiied by walls with controlled access through a few gates was readily adapted by Christian authors of the fourth century to express the distinction between the interior and the exterior life in the formation of a new Christian. John Chrysostom explains to fathers why they must be constantly on the guard in the formation of their children, by screening what the little ones see or hear. “Regard thyself as a king ruling over a city which is the soul of thy son; for the soul is in truth a city.”5 A father must not only act as a lawgiver to regulate the soul of his son but must also provide the necessary protection for it, as if he was charged with its defenses. Draw up laws, and do you pay close attention; for our legislation is for the world and today we are founding a city. Suppose that the outer walls and four gates, the senses, are built. The whole body shall be the wall, as it were, the gates are the eyes, the tongue, the hearing, the sense of smell, and, if you will, the sense of touch. It is through these gates that the citizens of the city go in and out; that is to say, it is through these gates that thoughts are corrupted or rightly guided.6

The enclosed space of the polis as a metaphor for the interior life is also explored by Gregory of Nyssa in his treatise The Formation of Man (De Opiicio Hominis). He highlights not the aspect of the circuit wall but the diferent attractions within the city that vie for the attention of those who converge on it from the outside, regardless of their status and origin, and regardless of the gate – again understood as the senses – through which they enter. And just as if there were some extensive city receiving all comers by different entrances, all will not congregate at any particular place, but some will go to the market, some to the houses, others to the churches, or the streets, or lanes, or the theatres, each according to his own inclination, – some such city of our mind I seem to discern established in us, which the diferent entrances through the senses keep illing, while the mind, distinguishing and examining each of the things that enters, ranks them in their proper departments of knowledge.7

4 5 6 7

On this passage, see Cotter (1993). John Chrysostom, On Vainglory 23, trans. Laistner (1951). John Chrysostom, On Vainglory 27, trans. Laistner (1951). Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man (De Opiicio Hominis) 10, PG 44, 151C–153A; trans. Nicene- and Post-Nicene Fathers, ser. 2, vol. 5, from http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaf/ npnf205.x.ii.ii.xi.html.

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Not only the mind but also the body can be compared to a city under threat from the outside. The body of the faithful individual as a city protected by walls became a recurrent theme in hagiographical writing, especially in martyrdom literature. The earliest instance occurs in the fourth book of Maccabees, a text of the irst half of the irst century CE that inspired later Christian martyrdom accounts, which describes the Maccabean revolt of the 160s BCE. The old man Eleazar was the irst person to be martyred at the hands of the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He is praised as follows: “No city besieged with many ingenious war machines has ever held out as did that most holy man. Although his sacred life was consumed by tortures and racks, he conquered the besiegers with the shield of his devout reason” (4 Macc. 7:4). From the body of the martyr that is impervious to the instruments of the torturer because of the strength of his determination, it is only a short leap to the body of the holy man that is steeled by vigorous asceticism against the assault of demons or the pangs of temptation. In a further extension of the notion of a Christian “inside” and a pagan “outside” separated by a metaphorical boundary marker or wall, the presence of a holy man or the relics of a dead saint could become the guarantee for the safety of his city, like a rampart or a bulwark. Relics of dead saints, and even holy men while still alive, thus provided protection for the city in which they were located. A good example is Symeon the Stylite, who lived on a pillar near Antioch and died in 459.The Syriac Life explains why his body was brought to the city of Antioch for burial: “Because our city has no wall as it fell in anger, we brought him to be for us a fortiied wall that we may be protected by his prayer.”8 Not surprisingly, when the emperor Leo I a few decades later requested that the body of Symeon be transferred to Constantinople, the Antiochenes refused to part with him, because he had been for their city “a wall and a fortress.”9 In the same spirit, it is reported that the Visigothic general Alaric in his famous sack of the city of Rome in 410 desisted from utterly demolishing the entire city out of respect for the relics of Saint Peter.10 Epigraphy conveyed the same message. An inscription on the church of Saint Theodore in Gerash, in Jordan, proclaims: “I am the undeiled house of victorious Theodore … defense and barrier against ill for the town and the dwellers therein and its citizens yet to be.”11 Sometimes, even living holy men could shield their entire city territory with their protective powers. The Life of Ambrose reports that the city of Milan was safe from any enemy aggression as

8 9 10 11

The Lives of Symeon Stylites, trans. Doran (1992): 194. Evagrius, Historia Ecclesiastica I 13, ed. Bidez and Parmentier (1964): 23. Sozomenus, Historia Ecclesiastica IX.9.9. On this inscription, see most recently Moralee (2006).

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long as Ambrose resided inside it, but demons descended to attack it as soon as he left it for a journey.12 We have seen that the notion of the city as an enclosed and protected space could be applied to the individual believing soul as much as to groups of believers in the Sermon on the Mount. In the case of particularly outstanding followers of Christ – martyrs, holy men, and saints – the boundaries that protect the individual’s soul against the forces of evil were believed to extend to the entire community that identiied with them. A holy man’s actual presence in a city – whether as a living, breathing body or in his relics – made it unassailable to hostile attacks from the outside. The city of the saint thus became an extension of his own body. It would not take long until membership in the medieval city came to be deined in terms of adherence to the common cult of the saint, a prominent feature especially in the Latin West. Thus the city of Tours which in the fourth century was home to the ascetic saint and bishop Martin was soon transformed into the “community of Saint Martin,” the civitas Martini. The idea of the city as a community of members had great purchase in Christian thought. Paul of Tarsus, as has been seen, was the irst to articulate it: “But our citizenship (politeuma) is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil. 3:20). Still, it would not be until the fourth century that this idea was further developed on a signiicant scale. Resonances occur already in the apostolic age. The Epistle to Diognetus declares that “[Christians] dwell in their own fatherlands, but as if sojourners in them; they share all things as citizens (politai), and sufer all things as strangers. … They pass their time upon the earth, but they have their citizenship (politeuontai) in heaven.”13 This is the spirit of internal alienation from one’s current city of residence in preparation for the true city of Christian destination suggested by Paul. In the middle of the second century, the Shepherd of Hermas further explores this thought: “Know that you, who are the servants of God, are residents in a foreign land; for your city is at a great distance from this city.”14 The contrast between these two cities is expressed in terms of incompatible sets of laws, the laws of the polis versus God’s commandments. It is by observing the latter already in this life that one can hasten and secure one’s future arrival in God’s city. By the end of the second century, the eschatological expectations of the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God lost 12

13 14

Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 21, ed. Kaniecka (1928). There are later indications that seem to suggest that not only particular holy men but indeed any bishop is surrounded by such a safe zone, and thus functions as a sort of “walking asylum.” I have suggested in Rapp (2005): 250–60 that this belief may well be the root of the practice of ecclesiastical asylum that is for the irst time recognized by imperial law in the year 392. Epistle to Diognetus 5. 5–9. Shepherd of Hermas 50 (Parable 1).

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their urgency and immediacy. From then on, Christian authors developed the idea that God’s polis was already present in this world, however incomplete and faulty, in the form of the church. This notion would eventually become the guiding principle of Augustine’s City of God, composed in Roman North Africa after the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Visigoths in 410. After the Constantinian turn led to a noticeable increase in men and women who were eager to join the church, Christian preachers explored the notion of the polis to explain the signiicance of baptism. Particularly instructive are the catechetical homilies that were delivered by bishops (or priests acting on their behalf) to the catechumens in the period immediately preceding their baptism, which usually occurred at Easter. John Chrysostom and, as we shall see, Basil of Caesarea ofer rich material in this regard. As if entering a city gate, it is explained, the men and women preparing themselves for baptism were told that they were about to cross the threshold that separated the true believers from those outside. And as if gaining citizenship rights, they were on the brink of acquiring full membership in the church community.The term of preference that they employ is politeuma, a word with a long history in Greek political thought that generally refers to a group of people who observe a shared set of rules. It is here that the communal aspect of city imagery comes to the fore. John Chrysostom refers to Paul’s remark that the citizenship (politeuma) of the Christians is in heaven (Phil. 3:20) in order to remind his audience of prospective Christians that they should concentrate their thought and their eforts on proving themselves worthy of their redeined civic identity (politeuma) in the new place in which they have been inscribed (apegrapheteˉ).15 In his First Catechesis, John Chrysostom refers to the catechumens as soldiers of Christ and then compares the act of baptism to a marriage ritual that is accompanied by the exchange of gifts between bride and groom.The abundant generosity and grace of God (his marriage-gift, as it were), he explains, is evident in the mere fact that “you have been deemed worthy to be inscribed as citizens (politographeˉtheˉnai).”16 He uses the same verb in his Fourth Catechesis, when he addresses the catechumens as soldiers of Christ who have today been “inscribed” as citizens in heaven.17 Later in the same work, he reminds his audience that “we have been inscribed in a diferent politeia, the Jerusalem above” and therefore should show themselves worthy of this distinction in their deeds.18 15

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John Chrysostom, Catechesis VII 12, ed. Wenger (2005): 235, l. 9–12. On John’s complex views of the relation between the concepts of church and the polis, see Sandwell (2004). John Chrysostom, Catechesis I 18, ed. Wenger (2005): 118, l. 9–10. John Chrysostom, Catechesis IV 6, ed. Wenger (2005): 185, l. 11–12. John Chrysostom, Catechesis IV 29, ed. Wenger (2005): 197, l. 4–5. For inscription in the citizen list of the Heavenly Jerusalem, see also John Chrysostom, In Sanctum Pascha, PG 52, col. 771. From TLG.

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These words are loaded with meaning. Politographesthai as well are apographesthai are the technical terms for the inscription of one’s name as a citizen in a speciic city.19 Clearly, Christian authors were well versed in the political language of their day. They used these terms metaphorically to illustrate the signiicance of joining the church through baptism, which is tantamount to inscription in the igurative citizenship roll of the church with the future option of joining the Heavenly Jerusalem.20 The church community is thus understood and explained in analogy to the polis community.Whether it is also conceived as being in competition with it is a question that cannot be pursued here. John Chrysostom was not the only preacher to invoke citizenship language. His younger contemporary Basil of Caesarea in Cappadocia (330–79) was, like him, a bishop of a large city faced with the challenge of maintaining a high threshold for acceptance into the church for an increasing number of willing recruits. Basil waxes eloquent about this process of enrollment in a homily on baptism, where he encourages the members of his audience to surrender themselves completely to God: Change over to the side of the Lord. Give yourself the appellation (of being a Christian). Enroll with the church. The soldier is enrolled in lists, the athlete competes after registering himself, the member of a deme (deˉmotes) who is enrolled as a citizen (politographeˉtheis) is counted among the members of a tribe (phyletais). In all these respects, you are answerable: as a soldier of Christ, as an athlete of piety, and as someone whose citizenship (politeuma) is in heaven. Have yourself inscribed, then, in that book, so that your name may be transferred above [i.e., in Heaven]. Learn and be instructed in the conduct (politeian) according to the Gospels.21

The application of civic terminology to conceptualize the signiicance of baptism extends even further, to the role of the baptismal sponsor. In the centuries when adult baptism was still the norm, a baptismal sponsor introduced the future baptizand of the same gender to the bishop and vouched for him or her as his or her name was entered into the list of the catechumens. Being a sponsor was a grave matter since it entailed the personal 19 20

21

Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum V.84. This raises the question of whether citizenship in a particular polis could at any time be attained by application. In ancient Athens, this was deinitely not the case. The detailed study of the epigraphic and literary evidence has shown that in classical and Hellenistic Athens, from the ifth to the late second century BCE, citizenship could not be applied for. It was granted by the Athenian assembly, often in recognition of benefactions (andragathia) shown to the Athenian people. See Osborne (1983): 145 (purpose of grants of citizenship). See also Osborne (1981): 16, where he notes a signiicant shift in the phrasing of the inscriptions that record grants of citizenship: the earlier formulation “making a person an Athenian” (einai Athenaion) is replaced after 229 BCE by the declaration of “granting a person citizenship” (didonai politeian). Basil of Caesarea, Homilia Exhortatoria ad Sanctum Baptisma, PG 31, col. 440.

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responsibility for the catechumen’s conduct, as if allowing him shared access to a personal bank account of good deeds. The church fathers who explain this process use the legal term of ideiussio, “standing surety.” The Greek word for ideiussor, anadochos (or engyeteˉs), is routinely used for baptismal sponsors. It is a legal term that has no connection with lifting someone up from the baptismal font. The word appears most frequently in inancial transactions, when a ideiussor guarantees a loan to a third party with his own property.22 Interestingly, the term ideiussio also inds application in the context of holding civic oice. Several laws in the Codex Iustinianus, under the appropriate title De Periculo Nominatorum, use this word when they stipulate that oiceholders must nominate their successors and take full inancial responsibility for any expenses incurred by the nominee if the latter proves to be insolvent.23 The role of the baptismal sponsor was thus conceptualized in direct analogy to active participation in a city’s self-governance by holding oice. That theologians employ the language of the law is striking. It suggests that these authors – far from rejecting the world in which they lived – had been groomed for a life of public leadership and were well versed in the relevant terminology, as was their potential audience. In the course of the fourth century, as Christian communities grew in membership and acquired structure and organization, it was increasingly the entire church that was considered a politeuma, a community of members. Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine (ca. 263–339) – the learned bishop, innovative theologian, and self-appointed biographer of the emperor Constantine – was particularly eloquent in this regard, frequently declaring the church to be “the godly polity” (theosebeˉs politeuma) and “the city of God” (polis tou theou).24 Later in the fourth century, the Apostolic Constitutions addressed the congregation in the same sense as “the holy ekkleˉsia of God which is listed by name (apogegrammeneˉ) in Heaven.”25 The rich resonances of the word ekkleˉsia are easily lost in translation.Within the context of the ancient polis, it referred to the citizens’ assembly with its membership list, the elementary building block of ancient democracy. In Christian parlance, it is translated as “church,” a rendering that makes it easy to forget that organized Christian communities were conceptualized on the model of the ancient polis.26 22 23

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See the discussion and further references in Rapp (2008): 121–48. Codex Iustinianus XI 34 The same principle applies also to oices routinely held by two men, who are required to bear inancial responsibility for one another, an obligation for which again the term ideiussor is employed (Codex Iustinianus XI 36.2; XI 36.4). For a concrete example, see Jouguet (1917): 311–23. For the phenomenon in general, see Jones (1940): 184–8. For example, Eusebius, Commentaria in Psalmos, vol. 23, p. 1045- Hollerich (1990). Also Basil of Caesarea, Homilies on the Psalms, vol. 29, p. 421. Apostolic Constitutions II 26. 1, ed. Metzger (1985): 234, l.3–236, l. 4. The Platonic roots especially of Eusebius’s ecclesiology have been elucidated by Schott (2003).

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The city as a structured organization, with its citizenship lists and magistracies, thus ofered to Christian authors of late antiquity very concrete analogies in their eforts to explain the signiicance of joining the church. Paradoxically, the conceptualization of the ekkleˉsia as a polis was propagated just at the time when the cities of the empire were beginning to lose political relevance. It airms once more that concepts often outlive the realities that generated them. A further important moment in the institutionalization of Christianity after Constantine was the growth of the monastic movement. Although its earliest beginnings can be traced to the late third century, it gained in popularity in the second half of the fourth century so that by the ifth century, it had developed into a very inluential social, economic, and political force. Men and women took up a life of intensiied asceticism in the hope of gaining greater closeness to God and thus formed a spiritual elite among their fellow Christians. This often involved physical withdrawal from the city to inhabit a marginal position outside it. In this context, too, the language of city and citizenship inds its application. Especially relevant in this context is the term politeia, which has many diferent shades of meaning. Some of these shades are captured in the English word “constitution,” which can refer to an individual’s health as much as to the guiding principles for a body of people. In ancient theories of rulership, the two were often regarded as interrelated. The Constitution of the Lacedaemonians (Lakedaimonioˉn Politeia) attributed to Xenophon, for example, suggests an intimate link between the character and moral insights of the lawgiver Lycurgus and the rules he devised for the ancient Spartans. Indeed, Xenophon introduces his treatise Ways and Means (Poroi) with the observation, “For my part, I have always held that the constitution of a state (politeia) relects the character of the leading politicians.”27 Hesychius of Alexandria, who in the ifth or sixth century CE compiled a dictionary of Greek terms, renders politeia as follows: “either city, or life, also conduct; also deeds.”28 Christian and Jewish authors employ the noun politeia with preference to denote “personal conduct” or “way of life.”29 This is particularly evident in the hagiographical literature of Byzantium. Numerous Lives of saints – seventy-eight, to be exact, according to a search in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae – carry the title bios kai politeia, “Life and Conduct.” More than mere descriptive biographies, hagiographical texts are intended as narratives of role models.The precedent for this was set in the very irst specimen of hagiography, the Life of Anthony composed by Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria. Anthony (d. 356) was widely recognized as the irst 27 28 29

Xenophon, Ways and Means, trans. Bowersock (1968): 193. Hesychius, ed. Schmidt (1861), s.v. Wilhelm (1925): 78–82. Bauer (1963), s.v. politeia, politeuomai. See also Robert (1994): 78. I am grateful to Christopher Jones for pointing out this reference to me.

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hermit among the desert fathers of fourth-century Egypt and his Vita was circulated under just that title, bios kai politeia, “life and conduct.”30 Stoic philosophy in particular picked up the Platonic notion of the polis as a community of good men who follow the same natural law and thus conduct themselves according to the same politeia.31 This inds a distant relection in the Christian idea that monasticism represents an alternative community guided by adherence to the same models of conduct. A powerful theme and an evocative rhetorical trope in the Life of Anthony is the repeated insistence that “the desert was made a city” because Anthony acted as a spiritual father to many disciples who followed his advice and imitated his way of life by setting up their own dwellings in the desert.32 This has to be understood not merely in the literal sense of populating inhospitable territory that had until then been believed to be dominated by demons, but especially in the sense of creating a new politeuma. The desert was made a polis because it housed a community of good men (and women) who followed their conscience and the call to asceticism and thus were inevitably led to observance of the same way of life, a shared ascetic politeia. Athanasius manufactures an interesting expression to convey this idea right at the beginning of the Life of Anthony, when he approvingly remarks that monastic dwellings have already been founded among his addressees, who live at some distance, and that “the designation as monks has become their civic identity” (to toˉn monachoˉn onoma politeuetai).33 It is in this sense that monastic communities are often compared in Christian literature either to choirs of angels, to the Heavenly Jerusalem, or to the “city on the hill” of the Sermon on the Mount.To give but one example, the Coptic author Besa chides the nun Herai for her intention to leave the monastery and to take her initial donation of property with her, asserting that “you have insulted the place into which you were received and where you were honored by saying: ‘your convent is the Heavenly Jerusalem.’ It is truly the Heavenly Jerusalem, and it is the hill which God has blessed!”34 The application of “city” language for monasticism difers from that for baptism. Unlike baptism, which is a punctual act, monasticism is the lifelong practice of one’s ascetic calling. In a person’s life, it follows after baptism. This is relected in the use of polis imagery. In contrast to baptism, the emphasis in the context of monastic life is not on the one-time act of joining the politeuma of the church, analogous to inscription as a member of a polis, but on 30 31 32

33 34

On the hagiographical use of politeia, see Usener (1890): 117–18. Schoield (1991). Athanasius, Life of Anthony 14.7: heˉ ereˉmos epolistheˉ monachoˉn, exelthontoˉn apo toˉn idioˉn kai apograpsamenoˉn teˉn en tois ouranois politeian. A literal translation would be: “the desert was cityied by monks, who left their own and inscribed themselves in the way of life (or: community) of the Heavens.” On this theme and for further references, see Rapp (2006). Athanasius, Life of Anthony, Preface 1. I thank Anastasia Maravela for this translation. Behlmer (2002): 21.

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the continuous exercise of a particular kind of conduct, in other words, in the adoption of a certain politeia. It is through lifelong efort that monks strive to achieve the reward of citizenship in the Heavenly Jerusalem. In some spectacular cases, this privilege was believed to have been granted already in this lifetime. Thus Symeon the Stylite, whose presence was – as has been noted – believed to be a bulwark for the city of Antioch, was called an “angel on earth, the citizen of the Jerusalem above while he was in the lesh.”35 A later imitator of the famous stylite, Symeon the Younger, was addressed by his mother Martha in similar terms: “In your prayers to God, remember the entire world. And pray also for the city in which you were born and its inhabitants, even though you have become city-less (apolis) because of Christ, and a fellow citizen (sympoliteˉs) of the saints.”36 Already here on earth, the community that is established through the common bond of ascetic observance is conceptualized as a polis. But this is a conceptualization with a divisive sting. The monastic politeuma is purposefully set up in rejection of and distinction from the world.This stands in marked contrast to the representation of church communities within cities. To the newly baptized, the polis was presented as a point of reference, to elucidate the signiicance of joining the “citizens’ assembly” of the ekkleˉsia. As long as they observed the Christian moral code, they were fully expected to continue their engagement as citizens in the secular world, which was interpreted as irrelevant in comparison with the Heavenly City and therefore not in competition with it.37 To return to the question posed at the beginning: it was not the martyrs or Constantine who drew a sharp dividing line between the religious and the secular, but the monastic movement, by choosing the life of angels as an alternative and replacement of the life of the ancient polis. But even the monks and their literary advocates could not escape the overwhelming importance of the polis as the only available point of reference to articulate ideas of organized community. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartelink, G. J. M., ed. (2004). Athanase d’Alexandrie: vie d’Antoine. Paris. Bauer, W. (1963). Griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur. 5th ed. Stuttgart. Behlmer, H. (2002). “The City as Metaphor in the Works of Two Panopolitans: Shenoute and Besa,” in A. Egberts, B. P. Muhs, and J.

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van der Vliet, eds., Perspectives on Panopolis: An Egyptian Town from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest: 13–27. Leiden, Boston, and Cologne. Bidez, J., and L. Parmentier, eds. (1964). Evagrius: Historia Ecclesiastica. Amsterdam. (Orig. pub. 1898.) Bowersock, G.W., trans. (1968). Xenophon: Scripta minora. Cambridge, Mass.

Evagrius, HE I.13, ed. Bidez and Parmentier (1964): 21. Vita Marthae 22. 14–17. The composition of this text predates the tenth century. A key passage for the distinction between the ekkleˉsia of citizens and that of Christians is Origen, Contra Celsum III 30.

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Cotter, W. (1993). “Our Politeuma Is in Heaven: The Meaning of Philippians 3:17–21,” in B. H. McLean, ed., Christianity: Essays in Honour of John C. Hurd, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplement Series 86: 92–104. Sheield. Dagron, G. (2002). “The Urban Economy, Seventh–Twelfth Centuries,” in A. Laiou, ed., The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, 2:393–461. Washington, D.C. Available online at: http:// www.doaks.org/publications/doaks_online_ publications/EHB.html. Doran, R., trans. (1992). The Lives of Symeon Stylites. Kalamazoo, Mich. Haldon, J. (1999). “The Idea and Ideal of the Town in the Middle Byzantine Empire,” in B. Ward-Perkins and P. Brogiolo, eds., The Idea and Ideal of the Town between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: 1–23. Leiden. Hollerich, M. (1990). “Religion and Politics in the Writings of Eusebius: Reassessing the First ‘Court Theologian,’” Church History 59: 309–25. Jones, A. H. M. (1940). The Greek City, from Alexander to Justinian. Oxford. Jouguet, P. (1917). “Sur les métropoleis égyptiennes à la in du IIe siècle après J.-C. d’après les papyrus Rylands,” Revue des études grecques 30: 294–328. Kaniecka, M. S., ed. (1928). Paulinus: Vita Sancti Ambrosii. Washington, D.C. Koder, J. (1986). “The Urban Character of the Early Byzantine Empire: Some Relections on a Settlement Geographical Approach to the Topic,” in The 17th International Byzantine Congress, Dumbarton Oaks / Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., August 3–8, 1986: Major Papers: 155–79. New Rochelle, N.Y. Laistner, M. L. W. (1951). Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire, Together with an English Translation of John Chrysostom’s Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children. Ithaca. Metzger, M., ed. (1985). Les constitutions apostoliques.Vol. 1. SCh 320. Paris. Moralee, J. (2006). “The Stones of St. Theodore: Disiguring the Pagan Past in Christian Gerasa,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14.2: 183–215.

Noailles, P., and A. Dain, eds. (1944). Les novelles de Léon VI le Sage. Paris. Osborne, M. J. (1981). Naturalization in Athens. Vol. 1. Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschapen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse de Letteren 43, no. 98. Brussels. Osborne, M. J. (1983). Naturalization in Athens. Vol. 4. Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschapen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Klasse de Letteren 45, no. 109. Brussels. Rapp, C. (2005). Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in a Time of Transition. Berkeley. Rapp, C. (2006).“Desert, City and Countryside in the Early Christian Imagination,” in J. Dijkstra and M. van Dijck, eds., The Encroaching Desert: Egyptian Hagiography and the Medieval West, Dutch Archive of Church History = Church History and Religious Culture 86:93–112. Leiden. Rapp, C. (2008). “Spiritual Guarantors at Penance, Baptism and Ordination in the Late Antique East,” in A. Firey, ed., A New History of Penance: 121–48. Leiden. Robert, L. (1994). Le martyre de Pionios, prêtre de Smyrne. Washington, D.C. Sandwell, I. (2004). “Christian Self-Deinition in the Fourth Century AD: John Chrysostom on Christianity, Imperial Rule and the City,” in I. Sandwell and J. Huskinson, eds., Culture and Society in Later Roman Antioch: 35–58. Oxford. Schmidt, M., ed. (1861). Hesychii Alexandrini lexicon.Vol. 3. Halle. Repr., Amsterdam, 1965. Schoield, M. (1991). The Stoic Idea of the City. Cambridge and New York. Schott, J. M. (2003).“Founding Platonopolis:The Platonic politeia in Eusebius, Porphyry and Iamblichus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11.4: 501–31. Usener, H. (1890). Der heilige Theodosios. Schriften des Theodoros und Kyrillos. Leipzig, Repr., Hildesheim, 1975. Wenger, A. (2005). John Chrysostom: huit catéchèses inédits. SCh 50 bis. Paris. Wilhelm, A. (1925). “Zum griechischen Wortschatz,” Glotta 14: 68–84. Van den Ven, P. (1970). La vie ancienne de s. Syméon le Stylite le Jeune (521–592).Vol. 2. Brussels.

EIGHT

CHURCH – FESTIVAL – TEMPLE: REIMAGINING CIVIC TOPOGRAPHY IN LATE ANTIQUITY Susanna Elm

Transforming the late Roman Greek polis into a late Roman Greek Christian polis required ingenuity. After all, the process implied innovation, a deeply controversial concept for persons whose worldview revolved around maintaining the divinely created “good order” that placed them at the apex of their society. Change could be countenanced only within the framework of the hallowed “old” and as phrased in the time-honored codes of conduct and ethical comportment marking elite status and authority to lead, even to innovate. By the end of the fourth century most Christian leaders were members of the polis elites and hence full participants in these customs, entirely committed to preserving the eutaxia, the good order of the status quo. They, however, were also the ones innovating, wishing to mold their fellow citizens into citizens both of their polis on earth and of “that above” (Gr. Naz., Or. 26.16; Or. 19.11). Dual citizenship was a known phenomenon, as Claudia Moatti’s chapter in this volume makes clear, but it was an ambivalent concept. Philosophers, especially Cynic ones, and rhetoricians had long grappled with the potentially conlicting loyalties of being a citizen of the cosmos (cosmopolites), a citizen of Rome (the empire), and a citizen of the city of one’s birth.1 Being a Christian

I would like to thank the Borchard Foundation for a truly memorable occasion and the members of the MRG Late Antiquity for many stimulating discussions and above all the philia of friends. 1 Griin (2003): 92–113, esp. 92–3.

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philosopher, even merely a Christian, meant striving for citizenship in the city above, which could call for actions antithetical to the complex set of reciprocity and solidarity so characteristic of Roman Greek cities that it has given rise to scholarly notions of Mediterraneanism.2 To be loyal to Christ, which by the fourth century meant more speciically to be loyal to a particular view of the Trinity, could place solidarity to such a view over and above the norms of friendship and patronage, which for the elite citizen were axiomatic.3 In fact, it is important to ask whether and, if so, to what degree loyalty to one interpretation of the Trinity (i.e., “orthodox” versus “heterodox” interpretations) indeed overrode ties of patronage and friendship. The issue afects the intellectual as well as the actual topography of the city directly. Christians were public men, and public men were Christian. Persons seeking to create orthodox Christian citizens and an orthodox Christian city had to persuade their peers to adopt a particular view of the Trinity and to be loyal to it, molding their actions accordingly. This could afect, for example, where they could meet and what their meeting places signiied. It required reimagining the role of the citizen and the norms of civic behavior, perhaps even suggesting actions counter to the norms that had shaped all these men from infancy. Close analysis of literary models reveals in fact that late Roman Greek authors, Gregory of Nazianzus in particular, altered the traditional norms only very slightly, and hence disrupted the social webs only minimally (strident rhetoric notwithstanding).Their innovations were ingeniously nuanced alterations of the classic blueprints.Yet the impact was considerable precisely because their innovations were so nuanced: after all, they were model citizens themselves.

Men and the City Biography and its related genres, such as panegyric and funeral eulogy, as well as their inverse, the invective, were one highly eicient way to reimagine the citizen and the topography of his city.4 As prescribed by theoreticians such as Menander Rhetor, the structural demands of these genres were designed to praise (or condemn) the exemplarity of the addressee as citizen – hence the focus on good family, high-status birth, education, and well-spent youth, which formed a man solicitous of the common good, as manifested in construction of public buildings, erection of honoriic statues, sponsorship of festivals 2

3

4

Schwartz (2010): 7–42, for a discussion of the concepts of reciprocity and solidarity in creating what has been called Mediterraneanism and the potentially conlicting demands of loyalty to co-religionists and the norms of reciprocity, relevant for Christians. Though membership criteria difered for Christians and Jews, both required exclusivity. Frequent references to “pilgrimage” or xenitheia (foreignness) in our sources appear to corroborate such acts of seeming subversion; Gautier (2002): 9–24. For the popularity of biography in creating cohesion while also allowing for innovation, see, e.g., Warren (2007): 133–49.

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and celebrations, and worthy administration of justice and public inances.5 However, biographies and their “subgenres,” funeral eulogy and invective, granted the author a great deal of leeway. Unlike the panegyric, they praised persons who were absent so that the author or speaker could make his hero or villain into exemplars of whatever he wished to persuade his listeners. By praising the hero as model citizen, the author could adhere to the tradition of the genre while presenting subtle shifts in behavior, examined in a web of “actual” occurrences and localities, which resulted in a reimagining of the hero’s actions and the actual occurrences and topographic givens. Hence, biography and its subgenres are a fertile ground when looking for ways in which authors imagined the workings of their city as Christian.6 How did the Christian hero (or the villain of the invective) and his city celebrate festivals? How did he and his fellow citizens erect or destroy temples? How did he speak frankly (parrhesia) to power, or react to frank speech if in power himself? The lexibility of the traditional structures of the genre permitted a myriad of permutations through which to imagine an orthodox citizen active within his city, acts of imagination designed to result in tangible topographic changes. To illustrate my point, I discuss briely some passages taken from biographical texts by Gregory of Nazianzus, whose writings are rarely examined for their inluence on the late Roman Greek city because scholars tend to view him more as theologian than as civic leader.7 I focus on Oration 21, dating to Gregory’s time in Constantinople while waiting for the arrival of the new emperor Theodosius (between 379 and 380) – the period when he lost, in the eyes of many scholars, whatever leadership credentials he may have had because of his self-presentation as a cautious and reticent man – and his second invective (Or. 5) against the deceased emperor Julian, composed 365/6.8 Gregory was a curialis of the Cappadocian polis Nazianzus, also known as Diocaesarea, the son of its leading citizen who had become bishop shortly after 325 and had subsequently ordained Gregory, his eldest, as priest.9 After about ifteen years spent mostly as adviser to his father, Gregory arrived in Constantinople in the winter of 378/9 to lead a small group of Christians known as Nicenes.Those adhering to a so-called Nicene interpretation of the Trinity were then in the minority in the city and the East, since the emperor Valens had not approved of their views. In August 378,Valens died near Adrianople in a military operation against the Goths. In January 379 his successor, Theodosius, had been appointed. As to 5

6

7 8

9

Hägg and Rousseau (2000): 1–24 discuss in detail questions of genre and the relation between audience and speaker. A strategy of persuasion not limited to the inhabitants of the Roman Empire as Nylan (2008): 40–4 has pointed out. Elm (2003): 493–515 for biography. Van Dam (2002): 194–5. For views regarding Gregory’s Constantinopolitan afairs: McGuckin (2001): 311–69; Goméz-Villegas (2000): 119–83; McLynn (2010): 215–33. McLynn (2006): 177–95.

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his religious intentions, initially not much was known.10 Change in imperial leadership inevitably implied adjustments in religious policy. As a consequence, signiicant numbers of religious leaders (who were at the same time civic leaders) rushed to the imperial residences to jostle for access to the court to make their voices heard. Hence Gregory moved to Constantinople to take the helm of the Nicene community there.11 Theodosius arrived in Constantinople in November 380. However, already in February of the same year – about a year after his accession – while in residence in Thessalonica, he had issued a law indicating his wish that the people of Constantinople follow the faith of the Apostle Peter as practiced by Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alexandria. Those doing so ought to adopt the appellation catholic. All others were suspect of the infamy of heresy and ought to be aware that their meeting places would be denied the name churches.12 This law, famously known as cunctos populos, has long been read as a clear signal of Theodosius’s religious vision for the city and the empire, since Damasus of Rome and Peter of Alexandria represented Nicene views. However, such certainty has recently come under scrutiny. The decree endorsed two diferent views of what being Nicene meant, Damasus’s and Peter’s, and as Neil McLynn has convincingly shown, it was carefully worded by imperial lawyers to convey minimal commitment.13 As his predecessors had done, Theodosius wanted to maintain room to maneuver the complex religious alignments of the capital in person once he had arrived in Constantinople. To cite Caroline Humfress, “Theodosius’ legislation had to be played out in actual disputes.”14 Gregory of Nazianzus was fully aware of this. It is in fact his contemporary testimony that serves as proof of the reception of Theodosius’s edict in the capital: it was a waiting game during which much was up for negotiation. All those concerned were tensely anticipating the imperial arrival while shoring up their respective position by proving their capacities as leaders, seeking to solidify their communities, and denouncing all competition.15 Gregory projected a stance of restraint and “inactivity,” advocating what he called a middle road. It was a prudent move since it allowed for the creation of the unity and harmony so prized by all, the emperor included. In the event,Theodosius chose Gregory to replace the “Arian” bishop Demophilus once the latter had rejected an imperially initiated compromise. But what does this have to do with the imagined topography of the sacred in the city? 10 11

12 13 14 15

Errington (1997a): 21–36 for details and further bibliography. For discussions of the dating and of the modalities of his selection, see McGuckin (2001): 229–43 and Gautier (2002): 354–8. C.Th. 16.1.2. with analysis by Escribano Paño (2002). McLynn (2010): 215–18. Humfress (2001): 144–5. McLynn (2010): 215–33.

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Meeting Places – Churches – Meeting Places: Shifting Shapes One of the ways in which Gregory presented himself as valid leader and as candidate for the bishop’s see of Constantinople was through a series of orations in which he praised outstanding exemplars of orthodox Christian leaders in orthodox Christian cities. Before the edict of 28 February, in the fall of 379, Gregory had pronounced a eulogy of Cyprian of Carthage in which he had merged aspects of the North African Cyprian with those of another Cyprian, of Antioch, not by coincidence a city and imperial residence in which he had many supporters. On 2 May 380, Gregory pronounced a celebratory funeral oration in praise of Athanasius, the deceased Nicene bishop of Alexandria and Peter’s predecessor, after a turbulent Easter where he and his community had been physically attacked while celebrating baptism.16 Before discussing this oration in greater detail, it is worth considering the actual location where Gregory delivered these orations and where he had been attacked. Gregory called the place in question Anastasia (Resurrection), and scholars often describe it as a house chapel. Gregory called the Anastasia a naos (temple), but more frequently skene (tent), evoking parallels between his community and the Israelites wandering in the desert.17 The emphasis is signiicant. Rather than a speciically designed “church” or “chapel,” the Anastasia was a portion of an upper-class residence serving as a meeting place. The space had what Gregory called an “altar” and was large enough to accommodate a number of persons, but most of the audience remained in the open, probably in a courtyard. The residence belonged to one of Gregory’s relatives, identiied by most scholars as his cousin Theodosia, who had married in Constantinople. The exact location of this residence is not certain, but archaeological evidence places it either in the region between the Forum Tauri and the Column of Constantine or between the Hippodrome and the Marmara coast.18 In either case, the residence was located in the wealthy parts of the city, and Theodosia belonged to its elites. Others whom Gregory counted as his ierce opponents met in similar places. Followers of a certain Novatus met in a residence in an equally upmarket quarter and called their meeting place likewise Anastasia – indeed, this was later conlated with Gregory’s community and is one reason for the uncertainty of its location.19 Eunomius, nominally bishop of Cyzicus, 16

17 18

19

Goméz-Villegas (2000): 100–2, dates it to 2 May 379; for 380, see, e.g., McGuckin (2001): 266. Gr. Naz. DVS 1079, ed. Jungck; carm. 2.1.5,1–7, PG 37, 1022a; Or. 25.19. Seeck (1876): 235, places it in the seventh region (ca. 430) and Ambrose, Ep. 13.3, calls it privatae aedes. Janin (1964): 377–8; Snee (1998): 158–64. Bernardi’s (1984): 354–6 suggestion that Theodosia was related to Olympias, in turn married to a grandson of Constantine’s prefect Ablabius, has been questioned by McLynn (1998): 227–8, 246. This is signiicant in that it realigns Theodosia’s circles, which remain, however, elite. Janin (1964): 405;Vaggione (2000): 320 n. 53.

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resided at that time in Constantinople, and his community also met in private residences, primarily in Eunomius’s own property in the suburb Chalcedon. Like Gregory, Eunomius celebrated baptisms and other liturgical feasts in his residence. Followers of a certain Apollinarius, then also locking into the city, presumably met under similar circumstances.20 Theodosius’s edict addressed such “meeting places” when declaring that persons who did not follow the teachings of Peter and Damasus were no longer allowed to call theirs “churches.” By withdrawing that denomination, Theodosius’s edict reconverted such “meeting places” from churches to private residences without moving a single stone. Importantly, the edict envisions no other consequences. Any further action on the emperor’s part, such as coniscating the property, was postponed pending divine retribution (i.e., if not indeinitely, then for some considerable time).21 Indeed, the Hagia Sophia and the Church of the Holy Apostles remained under the control of the nonNicene, “Arian” bishop Demophilus until Theodosius’s arrival (and would have remained so had Demophilus acted diferently).22 What made a (part of a) private residence into a “church” was not primarily a physical structure but a community’s declaration of allegiance to a particular interpretation of the Trinity. By praising Athanasius of Alexandria after 28 February 380, Gregory emphasized his allegiance to the Nicene views endorsed by Peter of Alexandria and Theodosius. This oration thus pronounced the Anastasia a “church.” A “church” was in the eyes of the beholder. The acceptance of a meeting place declared “church” by others depended on the efectiveness and the clout of the one claiming it as such. Even after 28 February, the followers of Eunomius and Novatus continued to consider their meeting places “churches,” while the majority homoians (or “Arians”) under Demophilus continued to meet in the actual churches of Hagia Sophia and Holy Apostles, without giving much indication that they now considered Gregory’s Anastasia anything but a meeting place (itself proof that the edict’s language was understood to be noncommittal).23 In this context, two incidents are signiicant, one before and one after Gregory’s Oration 21 in praise of Athanasius. As mentioned previously, on Easter 380 Gregory and those meeting in the Anastasia had come under attack by a mob, which included persons throwing stones.24 As a result of the mêlée, an outraged Gregory was called before the magistrates and treated as if he were a murderer. The magistrates in question, “who stared at [him] with proud and 20 21 22 23 24

Soz., HE 7.6.2;Vaggione (2000): 311. McLynn (2010): 222–3; compare the penalties speciied in C.Th. 16.5.7 against Manichaeans. McLynn (2010): 221–3. Ritter (1961): 28–31; Errington (1997b): 411–16. Gr. Naz., Ep. 77; DVS 655–7; carm. 2.1.12, 103; Or. 33 and 23.5.

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supercilious glances,” evidently felt they had a case for holding him responsible for what today would be known as a disturbance of the peace.25 Whatever the circumstances, those attacking Gregory and his community apparently did not consider the Anastasia a place in which violence ought to be avoided out of respect for a sanctiied building. Gregory’s public appeal to Peter of Alexandria through praise of his predecessor, his claim that the Anastasia was a church, changed that perception only among those disposed to accept it. In the summer of 380, several bishops just arrived from Alexandria consecrated one of Peter’s protégés and a conidant of Gregory as bishop in the Anastasia. Peter’s envoys evidently considered the Anastasia a place in which their interests were properly represented; for them it was a “church.” However, a mob Gregory described in near identical terms to the one that had thrown stones at him a few months prior, namely as consisting of high-ranking oicials, homoians, other opponents of the Nicenes, and “those on the outside” (i.e., pagans, DVS 901–2), interrupted the proceedings. Undaunted, the Alexandrians moved to the nearby residence of a supporter to complete the ceremony, which thus functioned as a church for the duration (DVS 909).26 As it happens, by the time Gregory described the incident, he considered his former conidant an enemy and wished to emphasize the illegitimacy of the procedure. Therefore, he alleged that the owner of this residence had been a lute player, hence a person considered “infamous.” Gregory’s choice of this term was signiicant, given that Theodosius’s edict warned that persons who did not embrace the name catholic incurred the “infamy” of heresy.27 Thus, by labeling the owner of this building as “infamous,” Gregory signaled that he did not consider this residence a church, and indeed denied the Anastasia that function when persons loyal to Peter of Alexandria but now disloyal to Gregory (mis)used it. “Church,” in sum, was a term that denoted as much a category as a physical location. It signiied conlicting claims and loyalties as much as a discrete ediice and, therefore, changed its shape according to the view of the beholder. Once Gregory had become bishop, once his view of what the Trinity meant had found wide acceptance and imperial support, his meeting place became an orthodox or, rather, catholic church and the ecclesiastical landscape of the city changed accordingly. By the time Socrates wrote his Ecclesiastical History, the emperors had erected a large church adjacent to the residence.28

25 26 27

28

Gr. Naz., DVS 669; McGuckin (2001): 257–8. Van Dam (2002): 139–41; Elm (forthcoming). Theodosius used the term iguratively to denote disgrace rather than the civic restrictions and penalties infamia could also carry; McLynn (2005): 83–4; pace Errington (1997b): 414. Soc., HE 5.7; Soz., HE 7.5.2.

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Festivals Gregory’s praise of Peter of Alexandria’s predecessor thus changed the imagined topography of the city – it declared a meeting place a “church.” But his encomium did more. Following the rules of the genre epitaphios logos (praise of the deceased’s city, his good birth, acts to beneit the city, and civic virtues), Gregory presented Athanasius as an ideal ruler, in accordance with Platonic notions of the philosopher as king, and depicted his city as emulating its irst citizen’s ethical stance. For example, Athanasius was elevated to the throne of bishop of Alexandria because he had followed the simple truth, whereas his “Arian” opponent had to rely on the support of the heretical emperor’s eunuchs only to be murdered when the emperor’s support ceased (Or. 21.26). His miserable end, indicative of his evil character and of that of his imperial supporter, also revealed the Alexandrians’ (who had murdered him) proper comprehension of the truth – not an easy concept to digest for persons who traditionally considered rabble-rousing citizens anathema. Rather than discussing the oration in detail, however, I shall focus on the description of Athanasius’s entry into Alexandria after his opponent’s demise.29 Gregory used the means of ekphrasis, what anthropologists now call “thick description,” to transform his listeners into spectators by means of what he claims to be the report of an eyewitness in Alexandria, his friend Philagrius. According to Philagrius, the returning Athanasius was greeted by an immense crowd of enthusiastic citizens, greater even than if the emperor in person had arrived (Or. 21.28). “This was the efect produced in the imagination by the entrance [of this man] we now memorialize. The city had divided itself spontaneously according to gender, age, and occupation, as they are wont to do, especially each time they organize a public festival honoring someone. How shall I describe this magniicent spectacle?” The mass of people – now well organized and harmoniously united after the deep rifts that had led to the anti-Arian riot – lowed like the Nile to greet Athanasius riding on a donkey. People waved branches before him and spread beautifully embroidered cloths on his path, and he was preceded by an escort that acclaimed him and danced before him (as a chorus). Children and adults chanted praises. Streets and porticos were covered in lowers, perfumes sweetened the air. At night the city was illuminated everywhere, and everyone feasted at private and public banquets (Or. 21.29). “It was the image of Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem” (Or. 21.29), which Gregory styled and narrated in the idiom of the imperial adventus combined with a Greek civic festival.

29

For a detailed discussion of Or. 21, see McGuckin (2001): 266–9; Mossay (1980): 89–103.

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It was a winning formula.30 Gregory of Nyssa’s description of bishop Meletius of Antioch’s funeral procession in Constantinople in 381 similarly evokes scenes where “the people … crowded together as to look like a sea of heads [and] … streams of ire, from the succession of lamps, lowed along the unbroken track of light … so far that the eye could not reach them.” Theodosius requested that the bishop’s casket, transported back to Antioch overland, ought to receive an adventus, like an emperor or magistrate, in every city it passed, accompanied by laudatory choirs in the traditional manner.31 Also in 381, Theodosius fashioned the arrival of the relics of the former Constantinopolitan bishop Paul as an imperial adventus. It was a blending of the civic-imperial and Christian that was to become quintessentially “byzantine.”32 In January 381, on the occasion of the celebration of the Epiphany on 6 January, Gregory once again invited his audience to imagine “our festival (pan e3gyrismos).” The occasion was yet another adventus: “This is what we celebrate today, God’s coming to the human race. … And how will we celebrate? Let us not adorn our porticos with lowers, let us not dance nor sweeten our nose with perfumes or adorn ourselves with costly clothes. Let us not build canopies for the banquets, private and public, nor indulge in drinking and eating, let us not illuminate our cities with lamps, nor sing and dance.” Such practices belong “to the Greeks, to Greek feasts” (Or. 38.4 and 5). These are the “old” habits of the polis to be changed into new ones. Those whose memory retained the description of Athanasius’s entrance might have been puzzled. Then Gregory had praised in identical terms the practices he now condemned, and he did not provide alternatives. Fifteen years earlier, in Oration 5, Gregory had already used the biographic genre of the invective to condemn these practices – singing, dancing, lowered porticoes, perfumes, nightly illuminations, and feasts – in identical words. Then, too, he had explicitly assigned such practices to “the Greeks,” that is, the pagans. In 365, two years after the death of Julian, Gregory used Oration 5 to enter vivid debates regarding the manner in which that emperor ought to be remembered, seeking to convince his audience that it ought to support Valens (the Arian) against a relative of Julian’s who had then usurped power and resided in Constantinople.33 Parts of Oration 5 acknowledge that Valens and his supporters were but the lesser evil, since they did not always act in a manner appropriate to citizens and rulers – not ideal but better than the alternative, a relative of Julian. Valens’s magistrates had engaged in excessive cruelty, and such triumphant vengeance was not the proper way for any citizen, let alone a Christian. 30 31 32 33

MacCormack (1981). J. Chrys., In Meletium; Soz., HE 7.10.5. Soz., HE 7.10.4; Soc., HE 5.9.1–2; Croke (2010): 246, 255. Elm (2010).

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In this context, Gregory addressed how Christians ought to celebrate victory and other festivals: “Let us celebrate the festival, brothers, but not with the splendors of the body, nor with costly clothes, or drinking and banquets. Let us not decorate the streets and porticos with lowers, or the tables with perfumes, nor illuminate our houses with lamps or ill them with the sound of music – all these are the habits of the Greek festivals” (Or. 5.35). Gregory’s alternative vision followed: We do not celebrate like that … but through the purity of our souls and the joys of the spirit and the lamps that illuminate the interior body of the church – I mean contemplation and relection – which illuminate the entire oikoumeneˉ as well once they have been placed on the sacred candelabrum, and with a much stronger light than those that people light for their private and public banquets. … My perfume … is that with which priests and kings are anointed. … My lowers … are the priests and teachers, and those who have been elected among the people. … Instead of sounding trumpets, we sing hymns; instead of [playing] indecent instrumentals, we sing psalms; rather than [clapping] theatrical applause, we move our hands decorously; rather than laughing, we meditate; instead of [engaging in] drinking bouts, we hear a wise discourse; and if we dance, we dance the dance of David, which is the change of our internal habit towards God.

Gregory established a contrast between “Greek” festivals, which the context also aligns with “Arian” habits, involving laudatory hymns, processions, dancing, lowers, perfumes, lights, and banquets, and proper orthodox Christian ones, in which the same celebratory customs ought to be reimagined as Christian. In part, this involves a real change: hymns and psalms rather than trumpets and other songs. Other prescriptions aim at an internal readjustment according to which priests adorn as much as lowers, contemplation supplants dancing, and relection of the divine in one’s soul provides true illumination. Yet the “external” accoutrements of Greek civic festivals and Greek Roman imperial representation retained their full force. When it came to praising Athanasius’s entrance into Alexandria as its true leader and ruler, the traditional customs fulilled their function. Only the hero was neither emperor nor magistrate but a bishop on a donkey. Gregory did not criticize or even invite his audience to alter signiicantly its image of the traditional festivals. It mattered by whom and in whose honor the festival was celebrated, not of what the celebration consisted. “Greeks” and “Arians” would misuse the civic habits of the festivals to honor the wrong gods and the wrong occasions. The liturgical context was the proper place to celebrate the demise of Julian or the “entrance” of Christ among humanity. But when it came to welcoming an orthodox bishop into his orthodox city, acclamations, choirs, dancing, lowers, and costly cloths were more than appropriate.

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Temples Gregory’s Oration 5, his second invective against Julian, provides my third example of a reimagined sacred topography of a city. Oration 5, usually considered as the second part of a dyad denigrating Julian in which Gregory rises to top form as a hysterical, ahistorical grouch, challenges several aspects of Julian’s imperial persona and the manner in which posterity ought to judge the divinized, legitimate Roman emperor who had died so calamitously in Persia.34 Much was at stake, and many among the leading elites, Christian and nonChristian, were engaged in debating Julian’s legacy. Who was responsible for the Persian iasco and the disadvantageous peace treaty it necessitated; should Julian truly be considered received among the divi; what had the divine’s intention been in allowing the emperor to perish as he did? Gregory’s arguments focused on a demonstration that Julian’s fate corresponded to his lack of comprehension of the divine will. Since he had deserted Christianity, he had been unable to understand what the divine uttered, and his ill-fated campaign was but one example of his nonexistent comprehension of the divine omen and, hence, divine will. Other examples of misjudged divinatory signs abound. Among them were the monuments through which Julian wanted to assure that the empire would remember his greatness.35 One of the ways in which Julian had wished to celebrate his memory had been the restoration of neglected or destroyed temples, including that in Jerusalem (Or. 5.3–5). The emperor saw it as an act of piety to reverse the fatal innovations of the Christians and to restore ancient sacred customs, including those of the Jews. Hence, he intended for them “to return to their home, to reconstruct the Temple and to renew the force of their traditions” (Or. 5.3). According to Gregory, the Jews supported the enterprise enthusiastically.36 However, no sooner had the work begun when an earthquake and ire leveled all to the ground. Immediately, many Jews in Jerusalem led to a Christian temple, an act that showed they understood this was where the sacred now resided. God added even further signs. A cross appeared in the sky above Jerusalem, and a cross also marked the clothes of those present that day (Or. 5.4).37 “Thus heaven and earth; and did the air not provide a sign in these opportune circumstances and was it not made holy by the signs of the passion?” (Or. 5.7). Thus convinced, many “invoked the God of the Christians 34 35

36

37

Van Dam (2002): 194–5; Elm (2010): 174–82. To paraphrase the words of Ammianus 23.1: imperii sui memoriam magnitudine operum gestiens propagare. Women sold their jewelry and even carried earth with their own hands as acts of piety; Or. 5.4. According to Gregory, persons present preserved their clothes to his day; some even said that the cross reappeared when retelling the story. See also Ruinus, HE 10.40; Lugaresi (1997): 180–1.

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and sought to placate him with many benedictions and supplications,” and “ran to our priests.” The passages have received scholarly attention because of what they reveal about Julian’s attitude toward Jews, Jewish attitudes vis-à-vis Julian and the reconstruction of the Temple, and the implication of the project for Jerusalem’s legal status, oicially still Aelia Capitolina.38 However, these concerns tend to divorce the passage from Gregory’s context: Julian’s inability to decipher divine will even when it was plain to see. Here, Gregory’s presentation of sacred topography takes on its signiicance for the context of this chapter. Julian could not interfere and alter the sacred topography of any city because he did not comprehend divine will. For Gregory, then, all alterations of the sacred topography of any city required prior divine authorization, especially when it involved actual physical buildings. Only persons divinely elected, properly puriied, and legitimately entrusted with the care of the sacred, the hiera, could erect (or destroy) temples. Because Julian did not qualify, God interrupted his attempts to build a temple through an earthquake. This act of divine intervention further altered the city’s sacred topography. Many Jews now locked to the churches, thus recreating unity in the city, which Julian’s plan had sought to divide by setting Jews against Christians in a reversal of the divinely preordained history of salvation, according to which the Temple’s fate symbolized the old covenant ushering in the new.39 For Gregory, the fate of Julian’s attempt to reconstruct the Temple in Jerusalem was only one of a series of examples proving this point. Years earlier, when Julian, still nominally a Christian and ordained as reader, sought to erect a sanctuary for the martyr Mamas together with his half brother Gallus, God, aware of Julian’s deception (he had already deserted in his heart), sent another earthquake. This earthquake tore down only Julian’s part of the structure, while that erected by the true Christian Gallus remained standing.40 The fate of Apollo’s temple at Daphne, the suburb of Antioch, is famous. After Julian ordered the remains of a martyr buried nearby removed as part of reconstructing the sacred precinct, the temple was consumed by ire, ending 38

39

40

For example, the discussion addresses whether or not Julian’s act was meant to win the support of Antioch’s important Jewish community for his Persian endeavor as alleged by J. Chrys., Jud. 5.11 (PG 48.900–1). After it became Aelia Capitolina as a consequence of the Bar Kochba revolt and Hadrian’s decree to that efect, Jews were not permitted to enter Jerusalem or its municipal territory, so that Julian’s restoration of the temple would have nulliied Hadrian’s decree; Eusebius, HE 4.6.4; It. Burdig. 591; Jer., Comm. in Soph. 1.16 (PL 25. 1354ab); Drijvers (2004): 1–11; Lugaresi (1997): 39–41; Hahn (2002): 236–42, with bibliography, noting also the silence of Jewish sources regarding the endeavor. For an excellent discussion of Gregory’s semantics of sacred space, see Lugaresi (1997): 43–8. He, like many scholars, discusses this as a “resacralization of political space,” 48 (my translation), while I argue that the space in question had never lost its sacred dynamis. Gr. Naz., Or. 4.25–27. The collapse of the Mamas shrine could be read as foreshadowing the Jerusalem iasco.

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Julian’s restoration and erasing the structure together with its famous statue of Apollo. In Gregory’s presentation, to alter a sacred building (Christian, Jewish, or pagan) required divine authorization. Success or failure of the alteration ascertained the legitimacy of divine authorization, regardless of the “confessional denomination” of the sanctuary. God interfered with Julian each time he sought to alter sacred topography, whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan, because he lacked such divine authorization.The universal God, Christ the Logos, retained ultimate decision-making power as to who could alter the topography of the sacred. In my view this suggests that for Gregory divine dynamis or power continued to reside in all sacred structures. As a consequence, for him there was no such thing as a profanation (or desacralization) of previously sacred structures. Both the destruction (or restoration) of a pagan (or Jewish) sanctuary and the erection of a church could be accomplished only if this corresponded to divine intent as manifested in the person authorizing either.41 Consequently, Gregory does not invite his audience to alter its perception of the sacred topography of the city drastically. Sanctuaries retained their “sacredness,” and temples continued to house divine dynamis, even for those whose religious allegiance had shifted to the true Logos. Temples could not be arbitrarily rebuilt – nor could they be arbitrarily destroyed. In the case of Julian, for example, God meant the ruins of his attempts to alter the sacred topography to serve as lieux de mémoire for his failed religious policies. By seeking to return to what was old and hence to reverse what he considered wrong innovation, Julian himself had innovated wrongly and to this these ruins stood as testament. However, it was God who had wished it so, and hence he alone determined the fate of temples, Christian, Jewish, and pagan.

A New/Old Sacred Topography These examples of Gregory’s use of biographical genres to reimagine the sacred topography of the city all express his insistence on the correct use of existing civic structures. At issue was not the abolition of time-honored civic practices and their sacred signiicance but their correct use, deined as the correct (right or orthos) intention of the actors. Private residences were “churches” when used properly by legitimate Christian leaders – namely, thoroughly puriied philosophers who comprehended the Trinity correctly, such as Gregory. In the hands of others, the same structure lost its sacred connotation and became merely a meeting space. Gregory’s imperial supporter Theodosius (and his lawyers) shared this view, as did his Arian competitors. Likewise, Gregory of Nyssa and Theodosius shared Gregory’s stance according to which traditional public 41

See Emmel, Gotter, and Hahn (2008).

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celebrations such as an imperial adventus were entirely appropriate when celebrating true Christian leaders. Again, they were inappropriate only when used by the wrong persons for mistaken reasons. Temples too carried a sacred aura, so that their physical fate could be altered only in accordance with divine will. No emperor or magistrate or anyone else could arbitrarily interfere with such buildings unless they were true “orthodox” Christian emperors and leaders. Such emperors and leaders were also divinely authorized to designate meeting places as churches – and if their alteration of the sacred topography occurred in accordance with divine will, it would last and thus alter, in time, the city’s “real” topography.42 Theodosius II, whose long and stable rule also, as it happened, established Nicene Christianity as orthodox, was also the irst emperor to reside in Constantinople for any length of time, during which he changed the topography of the city irrevocably. Much of this change occurred in collaboration with Gregory’s successor as bishop of Constantinople, the praetorian prefect and senator Nectarius.43 The fact that Theodosius chose a high-ranking oicial, evidently well versed in the art of reciprocity and patronage, aligns well with Hahn, Emmel, and Gotter’s observation that all aspects of the sacred topography of a city “were central symbols of changes in religious relationships, in the socio-political system, and in the public perception in late antiquity.”44 Gregory’s carefully calibrated language demonstrates that all persons actively involved in these changes were well aware of this. They knew what was at stake: the very stability of the “good order” essential to the security and success of their shared enterprise – namely, to lead the city on earth such that its inhabitants would progress in the best manner possible toward “the city above.” Gregory’s occasionally strident rhetoric should not blind us to the great care with which he and his fellow Christian leaders negotiated change. Everyone, whether Christian, pagan, or Jewish, was after all enmeshed in complex, dynamic allegiances, and relations and disruptions of the good order of the city and the society it represented served no one (and very few temples were in fact destroyed).45 Gregory’s advocacy of preserving much of the old

42

43 44

45

That destruction of temples was no small matter is also attested by Eusebius, VC 3.30.4, where God ordered Constantine to destroy the Venus temple erected over the site of Christ’s burial, and Theodoret, HE 5.21.1 on the destruction of the temple of Zeus in Apamea. Croke (2010). See also Bagnall’s incisive remarks in Bagnall (2008). Emmel, Gotter, and Hahn (2008): 3. Much of our knowledge of temples actively destroyed rather than passively neglected dates to the late fourth and early ifth centuries, while the archaeological evidence for actual building of churches within existing temples tends to show that this also occurred often late and presents methodological complications because one has to assess what part of the structure was converted when; see Bayliss (2004): esp. 7. Temples were often converted into other types of public buildings, that is, indeed desacralized, Ward-Perkins (2003): 286. Papaconstantinou (2001): 244–5.

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as a means to imagine the new is representative of the kind of civic leadership that made the transition from Roman Greek city into Roman Greek Christian city into a slow but ultimately successful process. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bagnall, R. (2008). “Models and Evidence in the Study of Religion in Late Roman Egypt,” in J. Hahn, S. Emmel, and U. Gotter, eds., From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity: 23–41. Leiden. Bayliss, R. (2004). Provinical Cilica and the Archaeology of Temple Conversion. Oxford. Bernardi, J., ed. (1983). Grégoire de Nazianze. Discours 4- Contre Julien 5. Paris. Bernardi, J. (1984). “Nouvelles perspectives sur la famille de Grégoire de Nazianze,” VigChris 38: 352–9. Croke, B. (2010). “Reinventing Constantinople: Theodosius I’s Imprint on the Imperial City,” in S. McGill, C. Sogno, and E. Watts, eds., From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: 241–64. Cambridge. Drijvers, J.W. (2004). Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City. Leiden. Elm, S. (2003). “Hellenism and Historiography: Gregory of Nazianzus and Julian in Dialogue,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33: 493–515. Elm, S. (2010). “Gregory of Nazianzus’s Life of Julian Revisited (Or. 4 and 5): The Art of Governance by Invective,” in S. McGill, C. Sogno, and E. Watts, eds., From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: 171–82. Cambridge. Elm, S. (forthcoming). “Waiting for Theodosius or the Ascetic and the City: Gregory of Nazianzus on Maximus the Philosopher,” in R. Darling and B. Leyerle, eds., Festschrift Rousseau: 232–52. Notre Dame. Emmel, S., U. Gotter, and J. Hahn. (2008). “From Temple to Church: Analysing a Late Antique Phenomenon of Transformation,” in Emmel, Gotter, and Hahn, eds., From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity: 1–22. Leiden. Errington, R. M. (1997a). “Church and State in the First Years of Theodosius I,” Chiron 27: 21–72.

Errington, R. M (1997b). “Christian Accounts of the Religious Legislation of Theodosius I.,” Klio 79: 398–443. Escribano Paño, M. (2002). “Ley religiosa y propaganda política bajo Teodosios I,” in M. F. Simón, F. Pina Polo, and R. J. Rodriguez, eds., Religión y propaganda política en el mundo romano: 143–58. Barcelona. Gautier, F. (2002). Le retraite et le sacerdoce chez Grégoire de Nazianze. Paris. Gómez-Villegas, N. (2000). Gregorio de Nazianzo en Constantinopla: ortodoxia, heterodoxia y régimen teodosiano en una capital cristiana. Madrid. Griin, M. (2003). “De Beneiciis and Roman Society,” JRS 93: 92–113. Hägg, T., and P. Rousseau, eds. (2000). Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity. Berkeley. Hahn, J. (2002). “Kaiser Julian und ein dritter Tempel? Idee, Wirklichkeit und Wirkung eines gescheiterten Projektes,” in J. Hahn, ed., Zerstörungen des Jerusalemer Tempels: Geschehen – Wahrnehmung – Bewältigung: 237–62. Tübingen. Hahn, J., S. Emmel, and U. Gotter, eds. (2008). From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity. Leiden. Humfress, C. (2001). “Roman Law, Forensic Argument and the Formation of Christian Orthodoxy (III–IV Centuries),” in S. Elm, E. Rebillard, and A. Romano, eds., Orthodoxie, Christianisme, histoire: 125–47. Paris. Janin, B. (1964). Constantinople Byzantine: développement urbain et répertoire topographique. Paris. Jungck, C. (1974). Gregor von Nazianz. De vita sua (= DVS). Heidelberg. Lugaresi, L., ed. (1997). Gregorio di Nazianzo. La morte di Giuliano l’apostata: oratio V. Fiesole. MacCormack, S. (1981). Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity. Berkeley. McGill, S., C. Sogno, and E. Watts, eds. (2010). From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians. Later Roman History and Culture, 284–450 CE. Cambridge.

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McGuckin, J. (2001). Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, N.Y. McLynn, N. (1998). “The Other Olympias: Gregory of Nazianzus and the Family of Vitalianus,” ZAC/JAC 2: 227–46. McLynn, N. (2005). “‘Genere Hispanus’: Theodosius, Spain, and Nicene Orthodoxy,” in K. Bowes and M. Kulikowski, eds., Hispania in Late Antiquity: 77–120. Leiden. McLynn, N. (2006). “Curiales into Churchmen: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen,” in R. Lizzi Testa, ed., Le trasformazioni delle élites in età tardoantica: 177–95. Rome. McLynn, N. (2010).“Moments of Truth: Gregory of Nazianzus and Theodosius I,” in S. McGill, C. Sogno, and E. Watts, eds., From the Tetrarchs to the Theodosians: Later Roman History and Culture, 284–450 CE: 215–39. Cambridge. Mossay, J., ed. (1980). Grégoire de Nazianze. Discours 20–23. Paris. Nylan, M. (2008). “The Rhetoric of ‘Empire’ in the Classical Era in China,” in F. H. Mutschler and A. Mittag, eds.,Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared: 39–64. Oxford. Papaconstantinou, A. (2001). “‘Ou le péché abondait, la grâce a surabondé.’ Sur les lieux de culte dédiés aux saints dans l’Égypte de

v–viii s.,” in M. Kaplan, ed., Le sacré et son inscription dans l’espace à Byzance et en Occident: études comparées: 235–49. Paris. Ritter, A.-M. (1961). Das Konzil von Constantinopel und sein Symbol. Göttingen. Schwartz, S. (2010). Were Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judiasm. Princeton. Seeck, O., ed. (1876). Notitia Dignitatum. Berlin. Snee, R. (1998). “Gregory Nazianzen’s Anastasia Church: Arianism, the Goths, and Hagiography,” DOP 52: 157–86. Vaggione, R. (2000). Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution. Oxford. Van Dam, R. (2002). Kingdom of Snow: Roman Rule and Greek Culture in Cappadocia. Philadelphia. Ward-Perkins, B. (2003). “Reconiguring Sacred Space: From Pagan Shrines to Christian Churches,” in G. Brands and H.-G. Severin, eds., Die spätantike Stadt und ihre Christianisierung: 285–90. Wiesbaden. Warren, J. (2007).“Diogenes Laertius, Biographer of Philosophy,” in J. König and T. Whitmarsh, eds., Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire: 133–49. Cambridge.

NINE

LEO THE GREAT: RESPONSES TO CRISIS AND THE SHAPING OF A CHRISTIAN COSMOPOLIS Michele Renee Salzman

Late antique Rome was no mere relic or fossil of an earlier imperialism. Rome remained the Cosmopolis because the power invested in it was still of use, because its claims to epitomize the empire were still worth defending to groups with the power to do so. Edwards and Woolf, Rome the Cosmopolis

In 271, in response to anticipated invasions, the emperor Aurelian expanded the walls of Rome “after consulting with the Senate.”1 Since the security of the city depended on the leaders of the state maintaining the goodwill of the gods, Aurelian also established a new temple to Sol and instituted a priesthood to minister this cult, appointing as its leaders Rome’s senatorial aristocracy.2 As emperor and pontifex maximus, Aurelian assumed responsibility for the survival of the city and reinforced his position by demonstrating leadership in this crisis. Disaster was averted, but by the ifth century Rome was not so fortunate. The city was sacked in 410, for the irst time in eight hundred years.This event led to a crisis of conidence in Rome’s leadership and civic institutions, which simultaneously, as I will show, opened new opportunities for ifth-century bishops to develop their spiritual and, ultimately, their civic authority with greater resources, with wider claims to inluence, and with innovative rituals. One such novel rite, created in response to the sack of Rome, is the focus of 1

2

Historia Augusta, Life of Aurelian 21.9 and 29.2. It fell to Aurelian’s successor, Probus, to inish the project; see Zosimus 1.49 and Dey (2011): 111–23. Salzman (1990): 150 and nn. 105–7 for full documentation and discussion.

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this chapter. As a type of the contest that still made late antique Rome of vital import to powerful groups, this new rite serves as a case study of the changes analyzed by this book, for it was by means such as this that the city of Rome became a Christian “Cosmopolis.” At some point after the 410 sack, an annual commemoration and thanksgiving for the liberation of Rome was established in the city. The best evidence for this ritual is an important but little-known text, Pope Leo’s (440–61) Sermon 84, delivered in Rome in the years 441–5. Although the sack to which this sermon referred was once disputed, A. Chavasse’s work on the manuscripts of Leo demonstrated that there was an initial publication of some ifty-nine sermons of Leo from the irst ive years of his pontiicate, and hence this sermon must refer back to the 410 sack of the city.3 Yet this sermon has not been fully appreciated for the evidence it provides for new religious rituals and for the crafting of episcopal authority in Rome. A day of thanksgiving prayer, orchestrated annually by the bishop of Rome, was an innovation in the ifthcentury calendar of the city, and one that likely derived part of its meaning from traditional Roman rituals associated with imperial victory. By incorporating this day and these associations into the Christian festival calendar, the bishop asserted dominion over the city’s civic calendar as he reinterpreted the signiicance of 410 to it into a Christian narrative. By the time that Leo delivered Sermon 84, some thirty years after the event, the memory of the disaster and its commemoration had taken on quite different meanings. By the 440s, this ritualized day of thanksgiving served to reinforce Leo’s theology of salvation, but of particular relevance to this book, it also supported his claim to religious and civic leadership of the city. In taking on this role, Leo, like earlier ifth-century bishops, faced competition from Rome’s now Christian lay elite. Indeed, since most fourth-century emperors spent little time in Rome, the emperor’s representatives – namely Rome’s senatorial aristocrats in their positions as magistrates, urban prefects, or pagan priests – would have typically undertaken the responsibility for maintaining divine favor and hence the security of the city. The catastrophe of 410 pointedly raised the issue of who best could guarantee divine protection for the city. In the aftermath of the sack, this was a real question in the minds of the city’s inhabitants, Christians as well as pagans. The return of the western emperor Valentinian III to the city for extended periods between 440 and 450, the longest period of residence of any emperor in more than a century, complicated the political environment. But the emperor lent his support to the bishop’s claims to having the best authority for interceding with the divine to secure 3

Chavasse (1973): 523–4 and cxci–cxcii, with discussion in vol. 138, xiv–xlv and clxxv–cxciii. See too Montanari (1997). For dating this sermon to 30 August or 6 September, but not precisely to the year 442 CE as Chavasse (1973): 523 proposed, see my subsequent discussion.

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Rome. A day of thanksgiving to God thus ofered the ifth-century bishop Leo an important way to demonstrate that he deserved the title of pontifex urbis Romae; prayers of thanksgiving for the city’s liberation in mass celebrated in church, and not in a formerly pagan civic space, manifested that authority.4 Leo’s intervention was simultaneously a symbol of and a means to transform Rome into a Christian cosmopolis.

410: The Historical Moment for the Original Ritualized Response It is necessary to begin by looking at the circumstances that lie behind the ifth-century commemoration of Rome’s sack. Alaric had besieged Rome at least twice in the years 408–10; as he cut of the grain supplies of the city, famine led to bickering and desperate measures on the part of an increasingly desperate urban population. After negotiations failed a second time, Alaric captured Rome on the evening of 24 August 410; he then proceeded to sack and pillage the city for three days.5 He did not, however, burn the city, and as an Arian Christian he respected Christian places of worship. According to Orosius, Alaric’s Gothic soldiers led Christian women and men in a pious procession to St. Peter’s, singing hymns and carrying sacred vessels to safety, united in praise of god.6 It is worth noting that Orosius’s account diverges from those of some of his contemporaries, for he minimizes the violence and destruction that attended upon the Gothic presence, whereas Jerome most famously dwells on the sufering of the inhabitants during the siege and capture, as did Augustine in sermons delivered soon after the sack.7 After Alaric’s departure, laden with booty and hostages, those who survived were relieved, no doubt, and grateful to be alive. These feelings elucidate the religious response to the events that may have begun as a spontaneous outburst of gratitude. But by the time that Leo delivered Sermon 84 in the 440s, this day had become an annual commemoration. Leo notes that the religious devotion with which the whole body of the faithful used to come together to give thanks to God for the day of our chastisement and of our liberation has recently been neglected by almost everyone as 4

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The evolving civic role of the bishop was underscored by Rapp (2005): 274–291, in a chapter entitled, “The Bishop as a New Urban Functionary.” However, the nature, extent, and implications of civic leadership on the part of the bishop of Rome are a unique case, given the city and its ties to empire. For this view, see Neil (2009): 4–8. For the bishop taking on the title of Pontifex urbis Romae from the 360s, see Cameron (2007): 361. For sources and discussion of Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, see especially Chain (1993); Heather (2006): 227–32; and Piganiol (1964). Orosius, Hist. Adv. Paganos 7.39. For a discussion of this reaction by Jerome, see Salzman (2009). See too Frend (1994). For Augustine’s sermons that pertain to the sack, see especially De Bruyn (1993).

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the very scarcity of the few who were present has shown. It brings much sadness to my heart and produces very great anxiety.8

P. Courcelle proposed that Leo’s remarks refer back to an initial thanksgiving immediately after Alaric’s departure from Rome on 27 or 28 August 410.9 If so, the commemoration was orchestrated by the priests in the city; at the time the city was taken, Bishop Innocent I (410–17) was away, for he had accompanied an embassy to Honorius’s court in Ravenna to lend his weight to requests for imperial intervention.10 After the sack, Innocent remained at court for many months, probably not returning to the city until 412.11 Indeed, some Christians saw his absence as providential.12 But if the initial thanksgiving service had been spontaneous, the evidence from Leo’s Sermon indicates that by the 440s it had become an annual observance in church. Since Leo’s Sermon 84 is the irst to mention this annual commemoration, it is possible that the commemoration was instituted as late as the 440s. I, however, think that it is far more likely to have been instituted earlier, by 414. The evidence is speculative but signiicant. Part of my argument rests on the reasons why such a commemoration had become an annual event. Indeed, in considering the origins and contemporary signiicances of this day, it is worth reiterating that an annual commemoration in church with thanksgiving prayers to memorialize the city’s liberation from the barbarians was an innovation in the ifth-century Christian calendar at Rome. Annual services for martyrs were certainly part of the liturgical year, and Innocent is known for having taken an active role in developing liturgy for the church; from his letter to Decentius, we learn that Innocent was eager to establish a weekly mass on Fridays and Saturdays in Rome in 416.13 The annual church commemorations, holidays, and services noted by Innocent were days associated with the martyrs or with the life of Christ.14 So where did the bishop or church leaders in Rome take inspiration for an annual commemoration and thanksgiving prayers for the city’s liberation in the early ifth century?

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Leo, Sermo 84.1 (CCSL 138A, p. 525): Religiosam devotionem, dilectissimi, qua ob diem castigationis et liberationis nostrae, cunctus idelium populus ad agenda Deo gratias conluebat, pene ab omnibus proxime fuisse neglectam, ipsa paucorum qui adfuerunt raritas demonstravit, et cordi meo multum tristiae intulit, et plurimum pavoris incussit. Courcelle (1964): 184 n. 2. Zosimus, Hist. Nova 5.45; Orosius, Hist. 7.39; and see too Sozomen, HE 9.7. Innocent accompanied the embassy; he did not replace the civic ambassadors. Demougeot (1954): 32 n. 3. From Ravenna, Innocent wrote to the bishop of Nich (Ep. 299, ed. Jafé and Kaltenbrunner [1956]: 46), stating that he stayed at Ravenna “propter Romani populi necessitates creberrimas.” For Innocent’s activities during the sack, see now Dunn (2009). Orosius, Hist. Adv. Paganos 7.39. Innocentius, Ep. 25 Ad Decentium (PL 20: 551–61). Baldovin (1987): 185–6.

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There were, to be sure, Christian liturgies and public prayers of thanks for divine intercession in times of military crisis. One such liturgy is noted for Constantinople by John Chrysostom in a homily In Martyres Omnes (CPG 4441.15).15 Chrysostom mentions the emperor Arcadius coming to a martyrium to solicit the martyr’s aid for battle; after his victory, the emperor asked the martyr to share in thanking God in public. This, however, was a one-time occurrence, not an annual commemoration. Similarly, when bishops asked for aid and gave thanks to God in times of crisis, it was a one-time occurrence. In the early ifth century Maximus, bishop of Turin, organized his city to pray and to fast in order to ward of a barbarian attack; as part of his eforts, he delivered sermons on the importance of ofering thanksgiving prayers to God.16 If we turn to the sixth and seventh centuries, notices of such ritualized responses become more common, though again most of these appear as spontaneous outbursts in times of military tensions or internal strife.17 But these were not made annual commemorations as seems to have been the case for the day of thanksgiving prayer recorded by Leo’s Sermo. In the ifth century, the only notices for annual days of commemoration with thanksgiving prayers in the church calendar are those to memorialize natural disasters. One such is recorded to thank God for the survival of Constantinople after the earthquake of 6 November 447; this was commemorated annually with a procession and special liturgy, including thanksgiving prayers. This commemoration appears to have lasted for at least two hundred years, for it is recorded as a contemporary celebration in the Chronicon Paschale dated to the year 629.18 But these annual commemorations were not for manmade military disasters, as had been the case in 410.

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John Chrysostom, In Martyres omnes (CPG 4441.15); see too the translation by Mayer (2006): 247–8. McCormick (1986): 244f. included the instance noted by Synesius, De Prov. 121C, which records prayers of thanksgiving and supplication for the future by the high priest after the expulsion of the Goths. This example is problematic since the identity of the high priest in this complex, metaphorical poem is likely only a literary construct; see Cameron and Long (1993): 386 n. 260. Maximus of Turin, Sermon 72.3, ed. Mutzenbecher (1962): 302.54–303.79. See too Tellenbach (1934–5): esp. 9. The anonymous Miracles of Demetrius (BHG 516Z-523) 192, in Lemerle (1979–81): 262–8, a document dated between the late sixth and seventh centuries, tells of how the Thessalonians ran to the church of St. Demetrius and intoned a hymn of thanksgiving after repulsing a sea attack. And in Rome, Pope Zachary in 742 organized one such thanksgiving litany to celebrate successful negotiations with the Lombards; see Duchesne and Vogel (1955–7): 429.5–7, and the comments by McCormick (1986): 244 and n. 55 on the recurrence of these rituals in later centuries. Baldovin (1987): 186 nn. 117 and 118. The Chronicon Paschale, compiled during the reign of Heraclius, ca. 629, p. 586, indicates that this was a contemporary celebration at the Church of the Triconch in Constantinople. If the liberation of Rome was an annual thanksgiving ritual, it would seem that Rome preceded Constantinople in this regard. See Dindorf (1832).

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A communal day for thanksgiving prayers to commemorate Rome’s liberation may have taken part of its meaning from Christian rituals that developed in association with imperial victory. Leo’s Sermon 84 suggests this possibility; he noted that it was a day to give thanks to God “for our chastening and liberation” (ob diem castigationis et liberationis nostrae). This is more than a spiritual liberation of the soul. Here, and again when Leo notes that liberation was owed to God’s “softening of the barbarian hearts” (sed inefabili omnipotentis Dei misericordiae deputantes qui corda furentium barbarorum mitigare dignatus est; Sermo 84.2 CCSL 138A, p. 525), the pope is referring to the liberation of the city when the Goths departed after just three days of looting. This same view of the sack as a punishment, though for the revival of paganism, and as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of true faith as a liberating force is present in the account of the sack by Orosius; his History against the Pagans, written circa 412–18, describes the Gothic incursion as a spontaneous expression of piety.19 Indeed, Orosius describes vividly the Goths carrying the sacred vessels to St. Peter’s to the sound of hymns and trumpets as a pious ceremonial procession with triumphant imagery: And so, to the great wonder of all, the gold and silver vessels, distributed one to each individual and raised above their heads were carried openly; the pious procession was guarded on all sides for their protection by drawn swords; a hymn to God was sung publicly with Romans and barbarians joining in; in the sacking of the City, the trumpet of salvation sounded far and wide, and invited and struck all, even those lying in hidden places.20

The conjunction of these ideas – of the city’s capture as a sort of chastening and its liberation as the victory of the Christian god – was familiar, especially in Rome. In the early fourth century, the emperor Constantine had been portrayed in a similar way. He was styled on his triumphal arch as “Liberator Urbis” for freeing the city from the tyrant Maxentius in 312; and in Eusebius’s celebratory account, Constantine went into battle with “the victorious trophy, the truly salutary sign (of Christ) … claiming for the Romans their ancestral liberties”; after the battle, Constantine piously and appropriately gave thanks to the true god for victory.21 19

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Orosius, Hist. Adv. Paganos 7.38.6–7: Ita minimo negotio paucorumque poena ecclesiae Christi cum imperatore religioso et liberatae sunt et vindicatae. 7. Itaque post haec tanta augmenta blasphemiarum mullanmque paenitentiam ultima illa diuque suspense Urbem poena consequitur. Orosius, Hist. Adv. Paganos 7.39.8: Itaque magno spectaculo omnium disposita per singulos singula et super capita elata palam aurea atque argentea vasa portantur; exertis undique ad defensionem gladiis pia pompa munitur; 9 hymnum Deo Romanis barbarisque concinnentibus publice canitur; personat late in excidio Urbis salutis tuba omnesque etima in abditis latentes invitat ac pulsat. For Constantine as liberator, see the inscription on the Arch of Constantine, CIL 6.1139 = ILS 694. Eusebius, VC 1.37.1 notes Constantine’s restoration of liberties and see n. 24 for Constantine’s prayer of thanks.

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The religious ritual and imagery, which is most similar to that used by Leo and Orosius to describe the aftermath of 410, are associated with the supplications for victory celebrations. In the early empire, supplications with incense and wine, including processions to the temples, were decreed to expiate transgressions, to ensure future divine support, or to render thanks for a signal military victory; hence supplications came to be associated with the safety of the emperor and the state. Although the last recorded supplication for an imperial victory is dated to 277, the memory of such rituals and their imagery survived in Roman memory, as suggested by texts such as the fourth-century Augustan History.22 And even if formal supplications are not evidenced after 277, thanksgiving prayers and rituals of gratitude for divine favor continued as part of imperial victory celebrations into the fourth and ifth centuries; these traditionally included a triumphal ceremonial parade through Rome and later Constantinople, though after Constantine these no longer included thanksgiving sacriices by the triumphant Roman emperor to the gods and to Jupiter Optimus Maximus in particular. However, banqueting and circus games continued unabated.23 Imperial victory celebrations were central community rituals that were “Christianized” over the course of the fourth and ifth centuries. It was important for the emperor to give thanks for victory in public, more than the simple prayer that Constantine, according to Eusebius, ofered in thanksgiving “to the Giver of his victory.”24 Early on, bishops were given a distinct role, for they are recorded in attendance for Constantius’s victories over the Persians in 343.25 In 394, thanksgiving services in a church are noted for the irst time in conjunction with imperial victory; Theodosius asked the Bishop Ambrose for an ofering and thanksgiving mass after his victories over Eugenius in what was ostensibly a civil war, along with more traditional circus games and processions in Milan.26 As Michael McCormick observed, the service in Ambrose’s church efectively Christianized this imperial victory.27 How novel this service was in 394 is suggested by the creative symbolism of the rite that Ambrose describes: “I carried your Piety’s (Theodosius’s) letter with me to the altar, I placed it on the altar, I held it in my hand when I ofered the sacriice, so that your faith 22 23

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Historia Augusta, Life of Probus 28.15.2. For the rituals of triumph, see especially Beard (2007): 257–87, and for the persistence of triumphal imagery, 318–30. For Constantine’s refusal to sacriice in Rome to Jupiter, variously dated to 315 or 326, see Zosimus, Hist. Nova 2.29.5. Eusebius, VC 1.39.3. Athanasius, Historia Arianorum 16.2. Ambrose, Ep. 61 (PL 16.1237–8). Ambrose praised Theodosius as being unlike other emperors who prepare only triumphal arches or other ornaments of triumph; Theodosius is great because he “desires bishops to celebrate an ofering and thanksgiving service to the Lord” (Ambr., Ep. 61.4 [PL 16.1237–8]). McCormick (1986): 45.

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spoke with my voice and the letter of the emperor discharged the function of the bishop’s ofering.”28 Ambrose underscored that this commemoration was made possible only through the intercession of the bishop. Yet the public display of imperial letters to validate an individual or his actions is well known in other contexts; in Rome, for example, in the Forum, letters from emperors were inscribed on statues as a sign of honor.29 The symbolic import of the imperial letter was innovatively harnessed by Ambrose in his ritual of Christian imperial triumph. Such creative ritualism may also explain the thanksgiving service in the aftermath of the 410 sack. There is one other reason for connecting Leo’s description of an annual thanksgiving commemoration for the 410 sack with imperial victory celebrations, and that is the simple fact that the latter were normally annual commemorations. So, in the sixth century, we hear from Procopius that the Romans still celebrated annually the Theodosian victory over the usurper Maximus, overthrown in 388.30 After Theodosius, we hear of annual thanksgiving masses to celebrate other imperial victories. In 425, a thanksgiving procession with prayers in church was organized to celebrate Theodosius II’s defeat of the usurper John.31 The 414 visit of the emperor Honorius to Rome could have reinforced the association of victory with this thanksgiving commemoration. In the aftermath of 410, Honorius was eager to reassert his control over Rome and donated moneys to restore the city, its populace, and its buildings. He made a ceremonial entrance into Rome for his vicennalia in 414 and is attested there by a law dated to 30 August 414 (C. Th. 16.5.55).32 And he celebrated again in Rome some two years later, in May 416, for his triumph over Attalus.33 Hence, if some sort of thanksgiving ceremony was instituted by the time of Honorius’s visit to Rome, it could have been reinforced by the imperial presence and coincided with it. This can only be speculative, but if this initial thanksgiving was an annual event by 414, it would have begun under the papacy of Innocent. The manuscript evidence (discussed in the following section) for the actual date of delivery for Leo’s Sermon 84 lends some support to this suggestion that the sermon was tied to Honorius’s 414 visit. 28 29 30 31

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Ambrose, Ep. 61 (PL 16.1237–8). Weisweiler (2012): 305–25. Procopius, Bella Gothica 3.4.16. Socrates, HE 7.24, PG 67.792A; cf. John of Antioch, De Insidiis, frag. 82, De Boor (2003): 3.27–9. See McCormick (1986): 60. Gillett (2001): esp. 138. Prosper Tiro, Epitoma Chonicon 2.417, ed. Mommsen (1892): 468; Philost., HE 12.5, and McCormick (1986): 57. Honorius’s 416 victory celebration took place at some time after 16 June. McCormick (1986): 57–8 proposed 28 June 416 for the triumph in Rome and Constantinople, but see too Gillett (2001): 138.

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The Date to Commemorate the Sack of 410 The manuscript evidence leaves open two possible periods for the delivery of Leo’s Sermon 84 and hence the dating of the thanksgiving commemoration. In Manuscripts K and Du, this sermon is found after Sermon 78, that is, after 2 May 441 and with other Pentecost sermons that date between 2 May and 2 June. So, it would have been delivered between 2 May and 2 June. But in other manuscripts, Sermon 84 is found after the Festival of Peter and Paul, that is, after 29 June; hence A. Chavasse, who prepared the modern edition of Leo’s works, proposed 30 August or 6 September for Leo’s Sermon 84 because, he argued, it was irst celebrated on a Sunday soon after Alaric’s departure from the city on 27/28 August 410.34 This late August date its well in terms of the content of the sermon as well. In Sermon 84, Leo refers to circus games as drawing of attendance from the thanksgiving service in the church. If he had delivered his sermon in late August, the competing games would have been those to Luna and Sol at the end of August, a cult that still had worshipers in Rome whom Leo’s other sermons attack.35 This is far more plausible than identifying the games with those of 416 to honor Honorius’s imperial victory celebrations since it is unlikely that the bishop would discourage attendance at such an important imperial event. An August date for the thanksgiving service in the aftermath of the sack would it with the 414 visit of Honorius. If the original commemoration was spontaneous soon after 410, it may have become an annual communal ritual by the time of Honorius’s visit of 414. If this is the case, the thanksgiving service described by Leo’s Sermon 84, held on either the last Sunday in August or the irst Sunday in September in the years 441–5, hearkens back to a ritual instituted some thirty years earlier. This is only speculative, for we have no other evidence for its celebration in the decades after the sack. We can, however, consider the reasons why Leo, in the 440s, was eager to include this thanksgiving service in the Christian calendar of Rome.

The Import of the 410 Thanksgiving Service in Rome in the 440s Leo claimed that the Church in Rome had continued to commemorate the liberation of Rome down to his own pontiicate (Sermon 84.1). But Leo’s concern to continue this thanksgiving service relects in part contemporary anxieties he faced in Rome in the early 440s. After the fall of Carthage (19 October 34

35

Chavasse (1973: 523–4 and cxci–cxcii proposed 30 August or 6 September, assuming a Sunday soon after Alaric’s departure from the city on 27/28 August. See Leo, Sermons 22.6; 28.4-.5.

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439), the Vandals threatened the whole Mediterranean area. They reached Sicily and were poised to attack peninsular Italy. Tensions ran high in Rome especially as negotiations continued until, in 442, Valentinian III accepted the treaty ofered by Geiseric, the Vandal leader. In these anxious years, the emperor alternated his residence between Rome and Ravenna.36 A day to give thanks and do penance, in celebration of Rome’s earlier victory over barbarians, may well have attracted crowds and reduced anxieties. But by 442 tensions in Rome diminished;37 this may also help to explain Leo’s complaint about church attendance in Sermon 84, mentioned earlier.38 Leo intended the service to ofer thanks to God for the city’s liberation. But the absence of worshipers reinforces his secondary message, the need for penance. Leo viewed the sack as a chastisement, and warned that divine punishment would fall on an ungrateful populace again if it did not heed his warnings and thank God.39 Failure to come to church is all the more destructive, claims Leo, since people are spending their time on the daemoniis rather than on the apostles. “It shames me to say it, but one must not keep silent. More efort is spent on demons than on the apostles, and the wild entertainments draw greater crowds than the blessed shrines of martyrs.”40 This devotion to games and circuses is dangerous since, Leo warns, it ignores the true source of salvation: “Who restored this city to safety? Who snatched it from captivity? Who rebuilt this city for health? Who protected it from slaughter? Was it the games of the circus, or the watchful care of the saints? Assuredly it was by their prayers that the sentence of divine judgment was appeased.”41 Such ingratitude is equivalent to impiety in Leo’s view since salvation, he states, is owed more to the “veneration of the saints” (cura sanctorum) than to the “circus games” (ludi Circensium) (Sermo 84.1). Leo is concerned that Rome’s salvation be correctly understood; the liberation of Rome was not owed to the stars, that is, to fate or astrology, or the gods, as some “impious folk” believe; these impii no doubt included the Manichees and other heretical groups that were targeted by Leo in other sermons in his attempt to purify the city.42 Rather, Rome survived because “God 36 37

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Gillett (2001). Chavasse (1973): 525 has suggested this as a reason for dating Leo’s Sermon 84 to late 442. While this scenario is possible, there is no irm evidence to support such a precise dating; rather, any year between 441 and 445 must be allowed, i.e., any time within Leo’s irst ive years as bishop. Leo, Sermo 84.1, ed. Chavasse (1973): 525. For the text, see note 9 in this chapter. For more on Leo’s idea of penance, see Salzman (2010). Leo, Sermo 84.1, ed. Chavasse (1973): 525: Pudet dicere, sed necesse est non tacere: plus impenditur daemoniis quam apostolis, et maiorem obtinent requentiam insana spectacula quam beata martyria. Leo, Sermo 84.1, ed. Chavasse (1973): 525: Quis hanc urbem reformavit saluti? Quis a captivitate eruit? Quis a caede defendit? Ludus Circensium, an cura sanctorum, quorum utique precibus divinae censurae lexa sententia est. Leo’s concern with “demons” and the efects of the stars also suggests his ongoing concern to root out Manichees and heretics; see especially Maier (1996).

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deemed it worthy to soften the hearts of the barbarians” (corda furentium barbarorum mitigare dignatus est; Sermo 84.1), a reference to the Gothic departure from the city. But if it was God who softened the barbarians’ hearts, it was the bishop who had to convey thanks and lead the community in penance on this day of “chastisement and liberation.” By taking on responsibility for maintaining the goodwill of God, Leo was assuming the symbolic role once held by the emperor as pontifex maximus. For Leo, however, God’s favor is maintained through the prayers of thanks ofered by the bishop on behalf of his lock. In his conclusion to Sermon 84, the bishop turned to Peter and all the saints who have acted, with Christ, as intercessors on behalf of the Romans: “For our correction let us make use of the gentleness of one who spares us, the Blessed Peter and all the saints who have been with us in many diiculties.”43 In this emphasis on Peter, the irst bishop of Rome, Leo, like Ambrose, posits the central role of the bishop in securing divine favor for his lock in the past and in the present. Hence Leo makes the bishop central to Rome’s salvation in times of crisis. His focus on Peter – not Peter and Paul – is worth noting, for his association with the former was especially important to Leo’s view of his own role as bishop.44 No wonder, then, that the failure to appear at thanksgiving services, due in part to the circus games, was considered particularly egregious by the bishop in a church that was far from full; it undermined his claim to authority not only in spiritual matters but in civic afairs as well, because, in this city, the two had always been intertwined. It is the link between the religious and civic role of the bishop that led Leo to undertake his most famous act, to negotiate with Attila in 452 to prevent another sack of the city.

Religion and Politics: SERMON 84 By assuming responsibility for the survival of the city, Leo also asserted the centrality of the empire – the temporal realm – to the church. This emphasis on the city as the care of the bishop helps to explain why Leo eagerly sought to maintain the memory of and thanksgiving for Rome’s survival in the annual yearly cycle of the church. Moreover, Leo claimed that he did so in opposition to those who supported other means to secure Rome’s survival – ludi. Leo’s derogatory references to the circuses and demons sound like formulaic topoi. Nonetheless, opposition to the circus had contemporary relevance, for this remark was part of Leo’s sustained opposition to the traditions of Rome’s senatorial aristocratic civic leaders who still, in the 440s, spent conspicuous sums 43

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Leo, Sermo 84.1, ed. Chavasse (1973): 525, and 84.2: Ad emendationem nostra mutamur lenitate parcentis, ut beatus Petrus et omnes sancti qui nobis in multis tribulationibus adfuerunt. On Peter as central to Leo’s episcopacy, see Wessel (2008): 285–96.

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of money on the games that competed so successfully with the ceremonies in church. A series of ifth-century inscriptions from the Colosseum shows how elites and emperors manifested their support in this public space.45 Indeed, in other sermons, Leo explains his motivation for establishing a speciic day in the calendar of the Roman Church for the Collects; the collection of charity in the parishes in Rome will now fall on the days of the ludi Plebeii in November in order to “destroy the snares of the Devil”46 and to be “most proitable to the growth of the church.”47 The collections, and Sermon 84, were part of Leo’s eforts to redirect traditional patterns of elite patronage. Moneys spent on the games by Rome’s lay elite as well as its emperor would be better spent on the Christian community in Rome. Leo’s assertion of responsibility for the spiritual and physical well-being of Rome in Sermon 84 is reiterated in Sermon 82, delivered on the Feast of Peter and Paul, 29 June, in roughly these same years, 441–5. Here, Romulus and Remus are made the explicit precursors to Peter and Paul. Through these founders, Rome has “grown larger by many victories” and “has spread out the law of your empire on land and sea.”The positive patriotic traditions revolving around Romulus and Remus are acknowledged, but their accomplishments pale in comparison to the victory of the Apostles: “What the labors of war have subjected you to is less than what the peace of Christ has subdued” (Serm. 82.1). The presence of Peter and Paul in Rome and their “victory” thus supersede Rome’s founders. Leo validates Romulus and Remus as precursors to the imperial church, but it is Peter and Paul who save Rome, and Peter’s successor, the bishop, who must continue that work.48 Indeed, in the thirty years since the earlier sack, the city had revived, and this, claims Leo, is one indication of divine favor as mediated through the bishop. This interpretation has the advantage of hindsight, in sharp contrast to the message expressed by Augustine in his sermons that discussed the events of 410, delivered in North Africa in the months immediately after the sack and continuing through 411. Augustine stressed the bewilderment of Christians who sought to answer pagans and to justify how Rome, the home of the memorial of the apostles Peter and Paul, could have been harmed in “Christian times”; Augustine’s response was to deny the physical signiicance of Peter and 45 46

47

48

See Orlandi (2004): 42–6, 67–81, and 86–159. Leo, Sermo. 8, ed. Chavasse (1973): 31: … ad destruendas antiqui hostis insidias in die quo impii sub idolorum suorum nomine diabolo serviebant. Leo, Sermo 9.3, ed. Chavasse (1973): 35–6: ut quia in hoc tempore gentilis quondam populus superstitiosius daemonibus serviebat, contra profanas hostias impiorum sacratissima nostrarum elemosinarum celebraretur oblatio. Quod quia incrementis Ecclesiae fructuosissimum fuit, placuit esse perpetuum. In this passage and in Sermo 8, Leo attributes the establishment of the Collects to the Apostles, but in Sermo 7, he simply ascribes it to the “Fathers.” For the ifth-century development of an annual liturgical cycle in Rome, see Baldovin (1987): 259–62. See too Wessel (2008): 285–96. Of interest on this point is Armitage (2005): 42–5.

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Paul’s memorial, the physical manifestation of belief, and focus instead on the importance of individual faith.49 Leo’s position is sharply opposed to that taken by Augustine in these sermons. Interestingly, Leo shows no familiarity with the Augustinian sermons on this topic. Rather, Leo’s Sermon 82, like Sermon 84, emphasizes the role of the bishop in preserving the city and its empire. Salvation and the liberation of Rome were possible through God’s power, but the 410 catastrophe was a just chastening (castigatio)50 by God in response to Roman weaknesses for, as Leo wrote in Sermon 39, delivered in these same years,“We are weakened by our sins and only through the correction of our lives can the enemies be overcome.”51 The enemies – barbarians, true, but also heretics or even aristocrats who competed with Leo for civic leadership in the city – needed guidance. Hence, the bishop, as intercessor and pastor, as the successor of Peter, is indispensable for bringing about forgiveness from God. God’s punishment brings the acknowledgment of sin necessary to maintain a free and secure Christian city. In light of Leo’s understanding of his own role in securing Rome’s safety, it is interesting to note that the emperor was not directly mentioned in Sermon 84. Given Honorius’s failure to prevent the sack, this may well have been politic. In Leo’s ideology of empire, however, the emperor had an important role to play. Leo contends that it is the duty of the emperor to protect the church and the bishop, so that the bishop can fulill his role as spiritual leader of the city. Only in this way can the empire be safe. Leo stated this succinctly in Letter 136.3 to the Emperor Marcian: “Your reign is tranquil because Christ directs it; it is powerful because Christ protects it.”52 Christ mediates his message through the bishop. Hence, in Leo’s view, it is important for the emperor to heed the bishops since they convey Christ’s directives. So, for instance, the emperor should assist the bishop in eliminating heresy; in this way, the emperor will preserve peace in the church and that, in turn, will ensure divine protection for the empire. As Leo observed in 452 in another letter to the emperor Marcian concerning heresy: By the great bounty of God’s mercy the joys of the whole catholic Church were multiplied when through your clemency’s holy and glorious zeal the most pestilential error was abolished among us; … so that our labors the more speedily reached their desired end, because your God-serving Majesty had so faithfully and powerfully assisted them. … The liberty of

49 50 51

52

Aug., Sermo 296.6-7, 9, 12; and see De Bruyn (1993). For castigatio as signifying chastening or correction, see its similar usage in Leo, Sermo 89.4. Leo, Sermo 39.1 (263 C): quos graves nobis, non ipsorum merita, sed nostra delicta fecerunt. See Bartnik (1968): esp. 767. Leo, Ep. 136.3, PL 54 (1881): 1099: ut regnum vestrum Christo regnante tranquillum, Christo defendente sit validum.

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the Gospels had to be defended … through the instrumentality of the Apostolic See.53

Leo contrasts the glory of vanquishing enemies with the greater glory of taking strong action against internal church dissension. Hence in Leo’s Letter 156.5, dated to 457, the pope encourages the emperor Marcian to take strong action to repress Timothy Aelurus in Alexandria, for Timothy had been “encouraging strife” (i.e., heresy). Leo writes: “For if it be a matter of praise to you to vanquish the armies of opposing nations, how great will be the glory of freeing from its mad tyrant the church of Alexandria, the aliction of which is an injury to all Christians?”54 It is right, as Ullmann observed, that for Leo, “the Christian corpus was founded on the Petrine commission and as a member of this corpus the emperor’s function is to protect it.”55 But the emperor must be guided by the bishop.56 Leo’s articulation of this role for the emperor in Christian Rome may relect in part the support he received from the emperors of the mid-ifth century, and from Valentinian III in particular. That support was expressed in part inancially; so, for example,Valentinian III’s wife, Licinia Eudoxia, made donations to the church later known as St. Peter in Chains, and Valentinian and his mother Galla Placidia renovated a chapel at S. Croce in Jerusalem.57 But even clearer demonstrations of support lie in the emperor’s willingness to lend force to Leo’s attacks on heretics. So, for example, at Leo’s urging, Valentinian III issued a strong edict against the Manichees (Valentiniani Nov. 18; CFML 1:51; 445) and supported Leo’s excommunication of Hilary (Valentiniani Nov. 18 = Leo, Ep. 11, PL 54:636–40). Such imperial actions strengthened Leo’s claim to leadership in the West and his attempts at it in the East.58

Leo’s Response to the Crises of the 450s Given Leo’s view of the importance of the city of Rome to the Christian oikoumeneˉ, his presence in the embassy that was sent to negotiate with Attila 53

54

55 56

57 58

Leo, Ep. 104.1, PL 54 (1881): 991: Magno munere misericordiae Dei totius Ecclesiae catholicae multiplicata sunt gaudia, cum sancto et glorioso clementiae vestrae studio perniciosissimus error exstinctus est; ut labor noster citius ad desideratum perveniret efectum, quem Deo serviens principatus vester, et ide et potestate juvisset. … Evangelii erat defendenda libertas, … et sua integritas Ecclesiae redderetur. Leo, Ep. 156.5, PL 54 (1881): 1131: quia si laudabile vobis est adversarum gentium arma conterere, quanta erit gloria, ab insanissimo tyranno Alexandrinam Ecclesiam, in cuius contritione omnium Christianorum est injuria, liberare? Ullmann (2009): 13. Leo, Ep. 156.3, PL 54 (1881): 1131: Debes incunctanter advertere regiam potestatem tibi non solum mundi regimen, sed maxime ad ecclesiae presidium esse collatam. Cf. Ep. 104, in which Leo appreciatively speaks of the emperor’s eforts to quell heresy, but at the same time underlines the emperor’s function as an assistant in the pope’s task. Humphries (2007): 43. For Leo’s political eforts in the East, see especially Wessel (2008): 31–2, 46–8, and 323–43; and Neil (2009): 42–4.

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in 452 is readily understandable.59 Attila, of course, was no Christian, but the status of Leo would matter to the Hunnish king. Prosper, the Christian chronicler and admirer of Leo,60 wrote circa 455 about the 452 meeting. Prosper’s account emphasizes the importance of Leo, who is made to play a role alongside Rome’s other civic leaders: To the emperor and the senate and Roman people none of all the proposed plans to oppose the enemy [Attila] seemed so practicable as to send legates to the most savage king and beg for peace. Our most blessed Pope Leo – trusting in the help of God, who never fails the righteous in their trials – undertook the task, accompanied by Avienus, a man of consular rank, and the prefect Trygetius. And the outcome was what his faith had foreseen; for when the king had received the embassy, he was so impressed by the presence of the high priest that he ordered his army to give up warfare and, after he had promised peace, he departed beyond the Danube.61

Despite Prosper’s desire to depict Leo as the sole reason for the positive outcome, even this partisan author records that the bishop was sent in conjunction with Rome’s civic leaders, the consul Avienus and the urban prefect Trygetius. Leo’s success was owed, in Prosper’s view, to the intervention of Christ mediated through the bishop’s prayers and strengthened by Leo’s special tie to Peter. So Leo himself noted in an earlier Sermon 3.3: “If we do something correctly or judge something correctly, if we obtain something from the mercy of God through daily supplications, it is [the result of] his [i.e., Peter’s] works and merit, whose power lives in his see and whose authority reigns.”62 And while it may only be a Renaissance legend that, after deterring Attila’s attack on Rome, Leo set up a statue of Peter on the Capitoline Hill, which was later removed to St. Peter’s, the legend relects Leo’s strong emphasis on the support of Peter for his leadership of the city and its church.63 This helps explain why Leo was the irst bishop to be buried in St. Peter’s.64 Not even Leo could avert the destruction that befell Rome in 455 at the hands of the Vandal king Geiseric. He could, however, alleviate the sufering, or 59 60 61

62

63 64

McShane (1979). For Prosper’s relationship with Leo, see Green (2008): 193–201. Prosper, Chron. PL 51, col. 603: nihilque inter omnia consilia principis ac senatus, populique Roman salubrious visum est, quam ut per legatus pax truculentissimi regis expeteretur. Suscepit hoc negotium cum viro consular Avieno, et viro praefectorio Trigetio beatissimus papa Leo auxilio Dei fretus, quem sciret numquam piorum laboribus defuisse. Nec aliud secutum est quam praesumpserat ides. Nam tota legatione dignanter accepta, ita summi sacerdotis praesentia rex gavisus est, ut et bello abstineri praeciperet, et ultra Danubium promissa pace discederet. Leo, Sermo 3.3, ed. Chavasse (1973): 13: Si quid itaque a nobis recte agitur recteque decernitur, si quid a misericordia Dei cotidianis supplicationibus obtinetur, illius est operum atque meritorum, cuius in sede sua vivit potestas, excellit auctoritas. Grisar (1901): no. 238, p. 320. Loomis (1916): 100.

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so Prosper claimed. With the death of Petronius Maximus, there was no civic authority in Rome to confront the Vandals. Leo, however, bravely confronted Attila on behalf of the citizenship. According to Prosper, Leo “went outside the gates of the city, and by his supplications with God, softened Geiseric’s heart.”65 Although the Vandals looted and sacked Rome for fourteen days – taking much treasure and many prisoners back to Carthage – including the widow of Valentinian III, her two daughters, and Gaudentius, the surviving son of Aetius – Geiseric did not burn the city, and he abstained from mass murders and revenge.66 Leo saw his role as intercessor for Rome as central to his episcopate, and it is worth noting that the Liber Pontiicalis records Leo’s special care to repair St. Peter’s in the wake of the 455 sack.67 It seems likely, as P. Liverani has recently argued, that the inscription relating to an image of Christ on the façade of the basilica of St. Peter’s should be tied to Leo’s eforts after 455. The inscription reads: You who consecrated the church in the name of Peter and to whom You have orders to feed your lock, O Christ, Through the prayers of the same [Peter], may you always preserve these halls that they remain unviolated as your defense.68

In this monumental statement of his role as bishop, Leo emphasized the support of Peter, but his ready adoption of the role of civic leader in the 450s was the direct extension of attitudes and views articulated earlier in Sermon 84.

Conclusion: Leo and Other Early Fifth-Century Views of the Fall of Rome in 410 Leo’s interpretation of 410 and his articulation of the church’s annual commemoration of it were clearly not the only positions for a ifth-century bishop to take. In his Sermons on the capture of Rome delivered between 410 and 411, Augustine denied that the physical sufering mattered in comparison with the eternal punishment for sin. Augustine explained that human sufering was necessary because, in this way, “the Lord shows how unstable and perishable are all the vanities and foolish deceits of the world.”69 Augustine would return to this theme in the City of God. Here, as in his other sermons of 410–11, the 410 sack proved the failure of allying the church with the empire on earth. 65 66 67

68 69

Prosper, PL 51, cols. 605–6. Prosper, PL 51, cols. 605–6. Loomis (1916): 100; see Duchesne (1955–7): 239: Hic renovavit basilicam beati Petri apostoli [et cameram] et beati Pauli post ignem divinum renovavit. ICUR 2.4124. See Liverani (2008). The translation is by Liverani, with slight modiications. Augustine, Sermo De Excidio Urbis Romae 9: demonstrante Domino quam sint instabiles et caducae omnes saeculi vanitates et insaniae mendaces.

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Most famously, Augustine denied that the fall of the city of man was relevant to the city of God.70 Augustine’s disciple, Orosius, followed a similar view but added to it eschatological overtones, seeing in the disaster evidence that the parousia would occur within human calculation.71 It is clear from Leo’s Sermons and Letters that this was not Leo’s view. Rather, Leo saw the fall and salvation of the city of man as the responsibility of the bishop. In Leo’s view, victory over the barbarian and the liberation of Rome were owed to the bishop who, as Peter’s successor, had the responsibility of acting as intercessor; the bishop’s role was to ensure divine favor and then lead the community in thanksgiving for salvation. I have suggested that one such thanksgiving ritual for the survival of the city after the sack of 410 likely began during the papacy of Innocent, though certainty on this point is not possible. But thirty years later, when Leo, who began his career under Innocent, preached on this occasion, the meaning of the day had changed. Now, what was central was the bishop’s intercession and prayers of thanksgiving for these had saved Rome in the past; it was the bishop, not the emperor or the urban elite, whose role it was to thank God and hence save Rome in the present and the future as well. This represents a change in civic leadership; now the bishop was claiming the responsibility for the city, not just its religious life. Hence to be a citizen of Rome and to enjoy its protection meant being a member of the a Christian cosmopolis. I have also proposed that Leo’s criticism of the circus games should be read in their social and historical context; hence, they are more than mere generic attacks. Rather, Leo’s comments about the games were aimed at the senatorial aristocracy that traditionally orchestrated civic celebrations in Rome. So long as the locus of spiritual attention was squarely on the bishop in his church in Rome, the city would be “safe.” No wonder, then, that Leo attacked the failure of Romans to appear at thanksgiving services and the apparent competing culprit, circus games; both undermined the bishop’s authority. Leo was more than willing to take a stand against Rome’s senatorial aristocracy in the 440s, especially as he enjoyed the support of the emperor Valentinian III.72 At issue for Leo was not just the question of leadership – religious and civic – of the city of Rome. Rome the Cosmopolis had for centuries claimed to “epitomize the empire.” And this claim was still worth defending in the mid-ifth century. Hence, the bishop and the aristocracy competed not only for the right to assert leadership of the city but also for the ability to articulate how Rome 70

71 72

The bibliography on Augustine’s view of the fall of Rome in 410 is vast; for a good overview, see Wessel (2008): 346–76. Augustine and Orosius minimized the importance of this event; on this, see McShane (1979): 38–41. For a general view of the response of the ifth-century church to 410, see Hanson (1972). For more on Orosius’s views, see the bibliography in note 70 and Frend (1994): 241–55. Salzman (2002): 19–68 and 73–83. See too Wickham (2005): 154–68.

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could still epitomize empire. The end result of this process is known; by the seventh century, Roma cosmopolis had become Roma Christiana, the home of Peter, the papacy, and Latin Christendom. But what has not, to my mind, been suiciently appreciated in discussions of this evolution are the innovations in ritual and institutions undertaken by ifth-century bishops of Rome. In this shifting ifth-century landscape, the bishops of Rome asserted their right to represent Rome, its city, and, ultimately, its now Christian empire. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armitage, J. (2005). A Twofold Solidarity: Leo the Great and the Theology of Redemption. Strathield, Australia. Baldovin, J. (1987). The Urban Character of Christian Worship. Rome. Bartnik, C. (1968).“L’interprétation théologique de la Crise de l’empire romain par Léon le Grand,” Revue d’Histoire Écclesiastique 35: 745–84. Beard, M. (2007). The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, Mass. Cameron, A. (2007). “The Imperial Pontifex,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103: 341–84. Cameron, A., and J. Long. (1993). Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius. Berkeley. Chain, C. (1993). Olympiodorus of Thebes and the Sack of Rome: A Study of the “Historikoilogoi.” Lewiston, N.Y. Chavasse, A. (1973). Sancti Leonis Magni Romani Pontiicis Tractatus Septemet nonaginta. CCSL 138A. Turnhout. Courcelle, P. (1964). Histoire littéraire des grands invasions germaniques. 3rd ed. Paris. De Boor, C., ed. (2003). Excerpta historica iussu Imp. Constantini Porphyrogenetii confecta. Vol. 3, Excerpta de insidiis. Hildesheim. (Orig. pub. 1905.) De Bruyn, T. (1993). “Ambivalence within a ‘Totalizing Discourse’: Augustine’s Sermons on the Sack of Rome,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 1.4: 405–21. Demougeot, É. (1954). “À propos des interventions du Pape Innocent I dans la politique séculiere,” Revue Historique 212: 23–38. Dey, H. (2011). The Aurelian Wall and the Refashioning of Imperial Rome, AD 271–855. Cambridge.

Dindorf, L., ed. (1832). Chronicon Paschale. CSHB 22, 23, Bonn. Duchesne, L., and C.Vogel, eds. (1955–7). Le Liber pontiicalis. Paris. Dunn, G. (2009). “The Care of the Poor in Rome and Alaric’s Sieges,” in G. Dunn, D. Luckensmeyer, and L. Cross, eds., Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church: 5:319–33. Melbourne. Edwards, C., and G. Woolf . (2003). Rome the Cosmopolis. Cambridge. Frend, W. H. C. (1994). “Augustine’s Reactions to the Barbarian Invasions of the West, 407– 417: Some Comparisons with His Western Contemporaries,” Augustinus 39: 241–55. Gillett, A. (2001). “Rome, Ravenna, and the Last Western Emperors,” Papers of the British School at Rome 69: 131–67. Green, B. (2008). The Soteriology of Leo the Great. Oxford. Grisar, H. (1901). Geschichte Roms und der Päpste im Mittelalter, t. I: Rom zum Ausgang der antiken Welt. Freiburg. Hanson, R. P. C. (1972). “The Reaction of the Church to the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the Fifth Century,” Vigiliae Christianae 26: 272–87. Heather, P. (2006). The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Oxford. Humphries, M. (2007). “From Emperor to Pope? Ceremonial, Space, and Authority at Rome from Constantine to Gregory the Great,” in K. Cooper and J. Hillner, eds., Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300–900: 21–58. Cambridge. Jafé, P., and F. Kaltenbrunner. (1956). Regesta pontiicum Romanorum. I (a S. Petro ad a MCXLIII), 2nd ed. Graz. (Orig. pub., Leipzig 1885.)

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James, N. (1993). “Leo the Great and Prosper of Aquitaine: A Fifth Century Pope and His Adviser,” Journal of Theological Studies 44: 554–84. Lemerle, P., ed. (1979–81). Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans. 1.Texte. 2. Commentaire (Le monde byzantin). Paris. Liverani, P. (2008). “Saint Peter’s, Leo the Great and the Leprosy of Constantine,” Papers of the British School at Rome 76: 155–72. Loomis, L., ed. (1916). The Book of the Popes.Vol. 1. New York. Maier, H. (1996). “Leo the Great and the Orthodox Panopticon,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.4: 440–61. Mayer, W. (2006). “On all the Martyrs,” in W. Mayer and B. Neil, eds., The Cult of the Saints: Select Homilies and Sermons, St. John Chrysostom: 239–56. Crestwood, N.Y. McCormick, M. (1986). Eternal Victory:Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West. Cambridge. McShane, P. (1979). La Romanitas et le Pape Léon Le Grand. L’apport culturel des institutions imperials à la formation des structures ecclésiastiques. Paris. Montanari, E. (1997). “Nota sulla storia del testo dei sermoni,” in M. Naldini, ed., I Sermoni di Leone Magno Fra Storia e Teologia: 1:171–214. Florence. Mueller, M. (1943). The Vocabulary of Pope St. Leo the Great. Patristic Studies 67. Washington, D.C. Mutzenbecher, A., ed. (1962). Maximi Episcopi Taurinensis: Collectionem Sermonum antiquam nonullis sermonibus extravagantibus adlectis. CCSL 23. Turnhout. Neil, B. (2009). Leo the Great. Oxford. Orlandi, S. (2004). Roma, Aniteatri e strutture annesse con una nuova editione e commento delle

201 iscrizioni del Colosseo. Epigraia Anitreatrale dell’ Occident Romano 6 = 15. Rome. Piganiol, A. (1964). Le sac de Rome: vue d’ensemble. Paris. Rapp, C. (2005). Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition. Berkeley. Salzman, M. R. (1990). The Codex-Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity. Berkeley. Salzman, M. R. (2002). The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Religious and Social Change in the Western Roman Empire. Cambridge, Mass. Salzman, M. R. (2009). “Apocalypse Then? Jerome and the Fall of Rome in 410,” in P. B. Harvey Jr. and C. Conybeare, eds., Maxima Debetur Magistro Reverentia: Essays on Rome and the Roman Tradition in Honor of Russell T. Scott, Bibliioteca di Athenaeum 54:175–92. Salzman, M. R. (2010). “Leo in Rome: The Evolution of Episcopal Authority in the Fifth Century,” in G. Bonamente and R. Lizzi Testa, eds., Istituzioni, Carismi, ed Esercizio del Potere (IV–VI secolo d.C.): 343–56. Bari. Tellenbach, G. (1934–5). Römischer und christlicher Reichsgedanke in der Liturgie des frühen Mittelalters. Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akad. Der Wissenschaftern, philos.-hist. Kl., 1. Heidelberg. Ullmann, W. (2009). The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages. 2nd ed. London. (Orig. pub. 1962.) Weisweiler, J. (2012). “Inscribing Imperial Power: Letters from Emperors in Late-Antique Rome,” in R. Behrwald and C. Witschel, eds., Rom in der Spätantike: Historische Erinnerung im städtischen Raum: 305–25. Stuttgart. Wessel, S. (2008). Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome. Leiden. Wickham, C. (2005). Framing the Early Middle Ages. Oxford.

TEN

THE BATTLE OF THE MAPS IN A CHRISTIAN EMPIRE Emily Albu

Christianity profoundly altered Roman concepts of the space within the empire and beyond its borders. Under the powerful inluence of the new religion, the Roman itinerary mind, with its linear thought, yielded to a diferent kind of spatial thinking, a Christian mapping mentality on a scale encompassing the known inhabited world (the oikoumeneˉ ).The new sensibility developed within the context of ideas cultivated by Roman intellectuals and literati of the late republic, who had envisioned a cosmic universalism increasingly equated with Roman imperium. Christianity broadened and popularized that universal view, ofering ownership of God’s created world to all people who followed God’s will. Who did possess the earth and the right to display symbols of universal dominion? The emperor and his agents? Christian peoples or authorities of the church? The battle of the maps exempliies one arena of the ensuing competition for supremacy, even as it vividly illustrates old and new conceptions of space in late antiquity.

I am grateful to the Borchard Foundation for funding the conference at Château de la Bretesche, to conference participants, and especially to my colleagues on the steering committee of the University of California Multi-Campus Research Group on History and Culture of Late Antiquity – Hal Drake, Susanna Elm, Claudia Rapp, and Michele Renee Salzman – for nurturing this work and making scholarship such a convivial delight. The UC Davis Humanities Institute gave me a research quarter in Spring 2008, when I completed a draft of this chapter. I thank the DHI director, Carolyn de la Peña, and the seminar organizer, Daniel Stolzenberg, and participants for their support and guidance.

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The Roman Itinerary Mind Romans do not seem to have used maps to plot their travels through the world. Instead, they thought in terms of itineraries that led them along their vast route network, with its origins in the era when republican Rome was just embarking on the conquests that would lead to empire.1 As early as 312 BCE, the censor Appius Claudius Caecus completed the irst section of the irst great road, the Via Appia, from Rome 132 Roman miles south to Capua. By 244 BCE, the Via Appia extended to Tarentum and Brundisium. More than a hundred years later (ca. 130 BCE) the Via Egnatia continued the land journey begun by the Via Appia, resuming the route on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, opposite Brundisium at Dyrrachium. With a connecting interval of a sea voyage across the Adriatic, the road inally stretched from Rome all the way east to Byzantium.The Appia and Egnatia formed part of a network eventually totaling well over eighty thousand kilometers of Roman roads. Romans built and maintained their empire on those roads.The irst Roman emperor, Augustus, so thoroughly grasped their critical role that he worked to put the road network under his own control, taking over the cura viarum in Italy. Romans of the early empire managed their travels along these roads through itineraries, lists of sites along a given route, with the distance marked from one site to the next. Other notations ofered additional information essential for travelers: mansiones (stations), for instance, indicated places to spend the night; mutationes (changing places) might ofer even simpler lodgings but at least fresh animals and wagons; in civitates (larger settlements) the discriminating voyager could hope to ind a fancier meal or other diversions. For Roman travelers, the towns and cities of their increasingly urbanized culture became the major markers of a longer journey.2 While some Roman itineraries still exist, we have no world maps from the Roman era. Miniatures of centuriation (the division of land into units called centuries) and ground plans from the Corpus Agrimensorum suggest that Romans could imagine and depict an aerial image of a small plot of land. Hanging in Rome’s Templum Pacis, the large Severan Marble Plan of Rome (Forma urbis Romae) ofered early third-century Romans a detailed presentation of their imperial city.3 We also have literary evidence that Ovid’s Augustan audience could readily visualize a bird’s-eye view of a magniicent polis. In Heroides I, Ovid’s Penelope imagines a Greek veteran, returned from 1

2

3

For the argument that Romans understood the world as linear “hodological space,” see Janni (1984). On Roman itineraries: Dilke (1987): 234–57; Salway (2012). Salway (2007) has shown how Roman itineraries exhibit “a certain level of spatial awareness in more than one dimension.” For more on this monumental map (ca. 60 by 43 feet) and its restoration, see http://formaurbis. stanford.edu.

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Troy, drawing that city with wine spilled on a tabletop and pointing out its salient features and military encampments (Heroides 1.31–6). But the Romans who could envision a country plot or even a polis did not carry maps to assist their travels.4 In a ground-breaking study, Kai Brodersen has challenged the assumption that Romans made world maps.5 None survive. And without a word for “map,” the Romans have left unclear exactly what they meant by itinerarium pictum (painted itinerary), descriptio mundi (representation of the world), or tabula (tablet, public record, picture). Was “Agrippa’s map,” famously displayed in Rome’s Porticus Vipsania, a globe, a painting, a mosaic, an itinerary list – or what we would recognize as a map of the Roman world? The evidence is enigmatic, the conclusions widely varying.6

The Roman Cosmic View While travelers imagined their world as a nexus of linear paths from site to site, the intellectuals among them were drawing a mental image of the whole universe. So Lucretius (ca. 99–ca. 55 BCE), with the philosophic calm that comes from Epicurean knowledge, watched: … moenia mundi discedunt, totum video per inane geri res. … The walls of the world fall away; I see the things taking place throughout all space. (De Rerum Natura 3.16–17)

His contemporary, Cicero (106–43 BCE), famously described the view from another perspective, looking at the earth from space. Romans inherited the old contemplative tradition of the soul’s ascent to heaven, and in the Somnium Scipionis that closed his De Re Publica Cicero evoked that imagery.7 There he presented the venerable Roman victor over Carthage, Scipio Aemilianus, dreaming that he was looking down from the stars and observing from his cosmic perspective the tiny extent of Roman imperium. Cicero accepted the concept, in his day already at least a century in the making, that a universal Roman empire should rule over the inhabited world 4

5 6 7

The famous, often-cited example of the mapless traveler is Julius Caesar, whose own accounts of his campaigns never mention a map, though a map could have rescued him from serious diiculties at many a moment in his career when he found himself of-road. This was true in Gaul, of course, but also in Italy, when he wandered lost as he tried to ind his army at the Rubicon. For the Italian example, see Whittaker (2002): 81. For Gaul, see Bertrand (1997): 107–22. Brodersen (2003). For my synopsis of Brodersen’s theory, see Albu (2008): 112. Brodersen (2004): 185. See also Brodersen (2003): 269–70. Cic., Somn. Scipionis, ed. Powell (2006).

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(the oikoumeneˉ) that his Scipio surveyed.8 The orbis terrarum belonged to Rome, and this ideology fueled Roman conquests, including those of Julius Caesar, acclaimed as dominus terrarum or dominus mundi.9 Roman power stretching to the edges of the world paralleled the ideal harmony of the cosmos. In the next generation, Augustan rhetoric and imagery adopted and expanded this view. Vergil’s Aeneid has Jupiter assure Venus that the Romans will hold “the sea and all the lands” in their dominion (1.236) when Augustus “bounds his empire by Ocean and his glory by the stars” (1.287).10 Only this universal empire under Roman control can bring universal peace to all the peoples, as Vergil implies in Jupiter’s promise (Aeneid 1.286–96).11 The imagery on the Shield of Aeneas (Aeneid 8.630–728) reinforces this idea, as do such Augustan visual arts as the breastplate of the Augustus Primaporta and even perhaps the Ara Pacis.12 Central to this imagery is the equation of the city with world empire: urbs / orbis.13 The Aeneid repeatedly links the wall building of Romulus (1.276–9; 6.781–4) with the promised Roman “empire without end” (1.279), boundless in time as in space. The idea is even implicit in the Lucretian passage that began this section, in the moenia mundi (De Rerum Natura 3.16). In his Fasti, then, Ovid could assert that Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem (The space for the city of Rome is the same as that of the world).14 On Vergil’s shield of Aeneas, the analogy culminates with the victorious Augustus, returned within the walls of Rome, reviewing peoples from all the oikoumeneˉ presenting themselves as Roman subjects. Here the moenia Romana are the moenia mundi. By this imperial ideology, Roman imperium rightfully encompasses the cosmos as well as all the peoples of the world.15 For Romans, then, the globe came to be a symbol of their imperium.16 It appeared on coins as early as the 70s BCE. With Julius Caesar and Augustus, it 8

9 10 11

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Hardie (1986): 377. See this volume for a survey of Roman imperial and cosmic political thought, rhetoric, and imagery. Hardie here cites Brunt (1978): 168f. Hardie (1986): 378. For an insightful discussion of this and related passages, see Adler (2003): 194–9. Adler (2003): 193; Hardie (1986): 358–9. On this Roman connection between geography and imperial rule, see Whittaker (2002): 84. As Whittaker notes here, “a global setting was one reason why Strabo thought geographia was ‘relevant to the practice of provincial governors’ by stressing ‘the whole oikoumene under one rule.’” On the cosmic imagery and imperial ideology of the shield, see Hardie (1986): 336–75; on the Augustus Primaporta and Ara Pacis, see Hardie (1986): 379. Hardie (1986): 365. On the union of urbs and orbis, as envisioned by Julius Caesar, see Mazzolani (1970): 112. For the urbs-orbis analogy in Lucan’s Bellum Civile, where “the destruction of Rome (urbs) is tantamount to the destruction of the world (orbis),” see Lapidge (1979): 359. For this passage as well as universal imperial claims in Strabo’s slightly later Geography, see Humphries (2007): 38–9. Adler (2003): 197 discusses “the destined universality of Rome … expressed in the Aeneid not only by the geographic notion of ‘all lands’ but also by the ethnographic notion of ‘all nations’” (Aeneid 6.794–805; 8.720–8). The following examples come from Hardie (1986): 367. See also Schlachter (1927): 64f.; Weinstock (1971): 42f.

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became an often-used signal of their political aspirations. A silver cup from Boscoreale, for instance, shows two related scenes featuring Augustus. In one, he holds the globe in his right hand; in the other scene, defeated peoples of the oikoumeneˉ acknowledge him as their master. Emperors who followed him, in Rome and Constantinople and wherever rulers claimed a Roman heritage or imitated Roman precedent, appropriated this sign of universal empire.17 Given the awesome force of the orb or sphere as a sign of world domination, we can understand why an emperor would oppose the private possession of any depiction of the world, which could be exhibited only in service to Roman imperium. Surely anyone who kept such an artifact was demonstrating dangerous pretensions, and likely plotting rebellion. So when Mettius Pompusianus committed the “cartographic crime” of painting a depiction of the world on his bedroom wall, the emperor Domitian (81–96 CE) ordered his execution on the assumption that he was harboring imperial ambitions.18 Just as Augustus had placed road planning, building, and maintenance under his direct authority, so the Roman emperors who followed him seem to have controlled cosmic imagery, symbols of imperium. The globe was in every sense their singular domain.

The Challenge of the Christian

OIKOUMEN Eˉ

Christianity thoroughly challenged the imperial claim to dominion over the earth.19 From the creation story in Genesis, Christians learned that God gave the earth to all his human creations, for their sustenance and enjoyment: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the ish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”(Genesis 1:26)

Christians believed that their God once lived on that earth as a fully human being himself before dispatching his apostles to spread the word among all peoples: And he [Jesus, arisen from the dead] said to them [the disciples], “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.…” So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with 17 18 19

The classic study is Schramm (1958). Arnaud (1983). This section develops the argument introduced in Albu (2008): 114.

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them and conirmed the message by the signs that attended it. (Mark 16:15–16, 19–20)

Precisely because their God entered that physical world through the incarnation and exhorted his apostles to spread the Gospel among all peoples, Christians came to believe that they should be able to display the world that those holy men traversed along Roman roads, claiming lands and peoples for Christianity. The Roman route network played a signiicant role in the spread of Christianity. In its irst two centuries, the new religion beneited from the pax Romana that let missionaries move through the empire in relative peace. Paul’s often-mapped journeys took him over roads and across seas made safe for travel by Roman protection. In later centuries, Christian pilgrims trekked along Roman roads to Spain and the Levant, as their medieval successors followed the old roads to Jerusalem in the First Crusade. Increasingly, eastern Christians modiied the Roman milestones that survived, sometimes covering them with prayers.20 And they adapted the form of those milestones by raising crosses onto columns built at the crossroads, rededicating the land through which they moved.21 Still, despite the continuing importance of Roman roads in the formation of Christendom, Christianity subtly changed the Roman itinerary mind to a mapping mind that imagined and depicted the world in a diferent way. That way, of course, was not entirely new. As it developed within the Roman world, Christianity adapted Roman universalizing concepts of space to Christian ways of thinking. Roman imperial ideology insisted that the empire alone could achieve universal peace and welfare for all human beings. Through wars of aggression, Rome built its universal empire, whose ends the individual was bound to serve, as Vergil’s Aeneid illustrates in linking the cosmos with imperial destiny. For Christians, if universal peace prevailed, it would come through human and divine benevolence and not through war and conquest. Early Christianity turned from an imperial model to issues of each person’s relationship with the divine, each person’s salvation. Like Lucretius and the Epicureans, Christians situated the individual within the cosmos. As Claudia Rapp showed in Chapter 7, when the horizons of the Christian world expanded, so did the individual perceptions of personal identity undergo a seismic shift. Within the old Roman Empire, people had maintained their sense of localized communal identity, as the residents of their own polis or territory. In the late antique Christian world, that local sense gave way to a more universal idea as people began to identify themselves as Christian citizens of a larger Christian oikoumeneˉ. Christian intellectuals, including Augustine, taught 20 21

Avramea (2002): 62. Feissel (1991): 725.

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that the faithful needed to study the world that God made since it was the best evidence for the scriptural truth of Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” “The earth is our big book,” Augustine wrote in response to this passage; “in it I read as fulilled what I read as promised in the book of God.”22 But did that earth belong to all God’s children or to the emperor? The tension between two world orders, imperial and Christian, manifested itself in many ways. Even as the new religion spread within the Roman Empire, Christianity wrested the symbols of world dominion from its host empire and claimed them for itself. The orb, for instance, once the adornment of Roman emperors, entered the realm of Christian iconography. Christians began to create their own unique depictions of the world and to disseminate them for spiritual ediication – to present God’s creation and the inheritance of all God’s children, or to show where the apostles would take the Word of God. In popularizing an elite habit of mind, Christians came to produce maps unlike any that Rome had seen or imagined, though inspired by Roman universalism. If this earth was theirs, ordinary people as well as church oicials could reproduce it in pictorial form. They could create distinctively Christian maps, as did Cosmas Indicopleustes (“World Sailor to India,” writing ca. 547–9 CE) when he imagined the cosmos shaped like the tabernacle of Moses. In his Christian Topography, this Alexandrian merchant ridiculed ancient pagan concepts of a spherical earth and promoted, in their place, a lat-earth schema based, he asserted, on a strict interpretation of biblical testimony.Three surviving copies of this work, from the ninth to eleventh century, include illustrations thought to derive from Cosmas’s own drawings, some depicting the folly of a round earth, with people standing at right angles from its sides, and others promoting the biblically inspired lat earth, watered by four rivers lowing from a verdant paradise beyond the ocean.23

The Secular Counterpoint: Display Maps of Roman

IMPERIUM

The earliest well-attested Roman world maps appeared in late antiquity, as Christianity was making signiicant inroads into the Roman consciousness. Rhetoricians have left us testimony for two of these lost maps.24 The orator Eumenius praised the earliest of these, on display at Augustodunum (Autun) at the end of the third century, concluding his speech before the provincial governor with this exclamation: “For now, now at last it is a delight to see a

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Lozovsky (2000): 142, citing Augustine, Epistulae 43.9.25. On the long-lived eforts to locate the Garden of Eden in space and time, see the beautifully illustrated volume by Scai (2006). Salway (2005): 128–9 and 133–4.

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picture of the world, since we see nothing in it that is not ours.”25 Celebrating the later map commissioned by Theodosius II in 435, Aemilius Probus lattered the map’s imperial patron as a man “whom the whole world scarcely contains.”26 Theodosius’s map and the world map at Autun publicly asserted Roman authority over its vast empire. Yet Rome’s world was in jeopardy, threatened by barbarians on its borders and by equally serious assaults within. By the late fourth century Christianity was winning its own social war with ancestral Greco-Roman polytheism. In one ongoing battle, the Christian emperor had removed the Altar of Victory from the Senate house in Rome. The senators, still for the most part devoted to the cults of the old gods, asked for its return. On their behalf, the illustrious Quintus Aurelius Symmachus wrote to Valentinian II, beseeching him to admit religious diversity within their shared cultural heritage: “We see the same stars, and share the same sky; the same earth surrounds us,” he wrote. “What does it matter what scheme of thought is used to seek out the truth? It is not possible to reach such a great mystery by one road alone.”27 Unfortunately for Symmachus and his pagan allies, Christians saw their shared cosmos through a thoroughly diferent lens.Their Christian world maps ofer insight into that new worldview. Often oriented to the east where Paradise lay, many Christian maps promoted a spiritual depiction of an earth centered on Jerusalem. Some placed Caesar, Augustus, or Agrippa in the margins to emphasize God’s role in aligning the creation of the Roman Empire with the birth of Jesus. These secular leaders, though present, are overtly peripheral – mere tools for creating the Roman peace and infrastructure that facilitated 25

26

Nunc enim, nunc demum iuuat orbem spectare depictum, cum in illo nihil uidemus alienum. Eumenius, Oratio pro instaurandis scholis, 9(4), ed. Mynors (1964): 20.2–21.3. Translation by Salway (2005), adapted from Nixon and Rodgers (1995): 176–7. For more on this speech, the map, and its imperial context, see Lozovsky (2008) and Talbert (2007): 224–5. Hoc opus egregium, quo mundi summa tenetur, aequora quo, montes, luuii, portus, freta et urbes signantur, cunctis ut sit cognoscere promptum quidquid ubique latet, clemens genus, inclita proles, ac per saecla pius, totus quem uix capit orbis, Theodosius princeps uenerando iussit ab ore conici, ter quinis aperit cum fascibus annum. This outstanding work – in which the whole world is included, in which seas, mountains, rivers, harbours, straits and towns, are indicated, so that all might know where any feature lies – the kind natured, nobly born, and forever pious emperor Theodosius (whom the whole world scarcely contains) from his reverend mouth ordered to be made, when he opened the year with his ifteenth consulship. For Probus’s poem, see Schnabel (1935): 440; and Dicuil’s Liber de mensura orbis terrae, ed. Tierney and Bieler (1967): 5.4.Translation by Salway (2005): 128. For the manuscript tradition and the poem’s lasting inluence, see Lozovsky (2008): 172–3.

27

Symmachus, Relatio 3.10, quoted in Humphries (2007): 34.

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the dissemination of the gospel. Paradise at the top and the Holy Land in the center dominate this vision of a Christian earth.

The Battle of the Maps With the rise of imperial display maps came the increasing production of Christian maps in various media. The sixth-century Madaba map is one early example. In the late nineteenth century, workmen in Madaba, Jordan, uncovered this beautiful mosaic in the loor of a Byzantine basilica over which they were building a Greek Orthodox church.The surviving fragments do not map the entire oikoumeneˉ, but the mosaic may once have encompassed the land- and seascape and the cities – especially the prominently featured Jerusalem – from the Levant across Asia Minor at least as far as Constantinople, linking the Holy Land to the late Roman imperial capital.28 Less idiosyncratic Christian mapmakers accommodated the teachings of ancient geographers and cosmographers to their own beliefs, creating the Christian maps most often reproduced in textbooks to illustrate medieval mapping. In late antiquity, they illustrated Christian encyclopedic works like Orosius’s Historiae Adversus Paganos (ca. 418) and Isidore’s De Natura Rerum (ca. 620), and Etymologiae (ca. 635).29 By the ninth century, when the term mappamundi is irst attested, we see a proliferation of these Christian world maps.30 Commonly called T-O maps from their circular form inscribed with a T that separates the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, these maps aim to present the spherical earth as an ordered Christian universe. Perhaps the best known maps of this type are the Beatus maps, variant versions of a world map that illustrated the eighth-century Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John (the Book of Revelation) by Beatus of Liébana. Fifteen of these maps survive in tenth- to thirteenth-century manuscripts, celebrating evangelism to the far corners of the earth (Plate V).31 Writing from his Benedictine monastery in the mountains of northern Spain, Beatus introduced his world map this way: “And how [the Apostles] reap with their sickles these grains of seed throughout the ield of this world, which the prophets prepared, the following picture shows.”32 His language here recalls the words of 28 29 30 31

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For recent speculation on the original range of the map, see Bowersock (2006): 1–29. Scai (2006): 86. Woodward (1987): 286–358. This number excludes the lost map of the Biblioteca del Monasterio at the Escorial but includes the newly found map in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.The deinitive study is by Williams (1994–2003). The discussion of Beatus maps that follows here owes much to its treatment in Edson (1997): 149–59, an invaluable study. Though the Turin map pictured here is round, others are oval or even square, illing two manuscript sheets. Translation by Edson (1997): 149; and see her n. 6, p. 188, on the Latin text of Sancti Beati a Liebana Commentarius in Apocalypsin, Romero-Pose (1985): I.193.

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the angel, in Revelation 14:15: “Put in your sickle and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe.” The oldest of the surviving Beatus world maps suits this rural imagery.33 Drawn in the midtenth century by a scribe named Magius for the Monastery of San Miguel de Escalada, it shows the lands surrounded by the ocean, with Adam and Eve in the Garden, the Mediterranean at its center, rivers, mountains, greenery, and only one city, Jerusalem. Another Beatus world map, today in the Cathedral of Burgo de Osma, inserts portrait heads of the Apostles at their assigned territories for evangelizing.There are more city symbols on this late eleventh-century map, perhaps additions relecting an increasingly urbanized society. The most detailed of these maps, from the Abbey of Saint-Sever in Gascony in the mideleventh century, is busy with islands, rivers, and 270 named places. Since ifty of these are medieval, and since Gascony receives particular attention on this map, it seems logical “to conclude that it is a local and contemporary production.”34 Magius’s simpler map of “the ield of this world” with its single city, Jerusalem, may well be the closest to Beatus’s original, as John Williams has suggested.35 Any display of the world, even one as apparently benign as Magius’s map, encroached on the prerogatives once claimed by the Roman emperor. In the absence of a strong imperial authority, the church exercised its freedom in presenting the earth as a ield ripe for the sowing of Christianity.When an increasingly powerful papacy began displaying its own maps, the message acquired its own imperial claims of papal dominance. Marcia Kupfer has written perceptively about this phenomenon and the commission of Pope Zacharias (741– 52) of a world map for the dining room at the Lateran Palace.36 When the embattled Pope Leo III symbolically restored Roman imperium by crowning Charlemagne emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800, he must have intended to honor and empower his savior from the murderous Romans while also demonstrating Rome’s renewed authority against the eastern Roman emperor and patriarch in Constantinople. But with the same gesture he also unwittingly invited a new Roman emperor ultimately to challenge the privileges usurped by the church. Charlemagne was well armed to present his claims with his own ideologically provocative display maps. The pope’s Lateran map along with others implying Christian dominion, may have inspired Charlemagne’s own cartographic display. According to his biographer Einhard, Charlemagne kept in his palace at Aachen four grand maps, three of silver and one of gold. Two of the silver maps depicted Rome

33 34 35 36

Williams and Shailor (1991): 16–17. Edson (1997): 156. Williams (1997): 7–32. On the Lateran map and papal claims to universal power, see Kupfer (1994): 262–88.

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and Constantinople, respectively. The third, “which far surpasses the others both in the beauty of its workmanship and in its heavy weight,” was “a map of the entire world, fashioned from three concentric circles and completed in exquisite detail.”37 Charlemagne’s maps are presumed lost. But we may still possess a copy of a Carolingian map created expressly to present imperial and decidedly secular rights to dominion over the earth.38 This is the so-called Peutinger map of circa 1220 CE. Now a set of eleven separate parchment sheets, once attached in a roll about 6.70 meters wide by about 33 centimeters high, it depicts most of the oikoumeneˉ as known to the ancients, from Britain’s eastern coastline to the farthest shores of India and the island of Sri Lanka, showing rivers, lakes, islands, and mountains while also naming regions and peoples who once claimed the landscape (Plate VI). Onto this oddly elongated panorama, the mapmaker has plotted the ancient Roman road network with hundreds of icons along nearly seventy thousand Roman miles of roads, identifying towns and spas, places to change horses and to ind a meal or a bed for the night, with mileage marked from point to point. Richard Talbert has suggested that Rome was at the horizontal and vertical center of the original and intact map, before the western edge was lost.39 The Austrian National Library in Vienna now conserves this beautifully colored artifact (MS Lat. 324), not far from where it was probably produced, in the southwest corner of Germany. The Peutinger prototype may well have presented a late Roman expression or a Carolingian revival of Roman imperial ambitions at once inspired by and vying against a Christian conception of the oikoumeneˉ. Students of the Peutinger map have traditionally imagined a late antique original, created precisely in the period when Christianity was making inroads into Roman consciousness. Richard Talbert’s placement of the prototype in Diocletian’s palace, for instance, makes it an early version of imperial display mapping, roughly contemporary with the map at Augustodunum and an assertion of Roman imperium restored by the Tetrarchs who resolved the crisis of the third century.40 Yet Carolingian monasteries with friendly ties to secular rulers possessed 37

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Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. and tr. Firchow and Zeydel (1972): ch. 33. Einhard calls the three mensae (tables, but also table tops, slabs, planks). He is unlikely to have known the new word for map, which was entering the Latin language as he wrote. Einhard describes the fourth mensa only as “made of gold and extraordinarily large and heavy.” Concerning the value of these objects as “transmitters of symbolic meaning,” see Innes (1997): 848–9. On Charlemagne’s maps and his geographic curiosity, see Albu (2005): 139–40. On the possible Carolingian origins of our Peutinger map, see Albu (2005) and Albu (2008). For a detailed study of the map: Talbert (2010), with a view of the map at www.cambridge. org/9780521764803. Talbert (2007): 222. Talbert (2010): 149–55. Salway (2005) has presented the evidence for a Roman creation, while Gautier Dalché (2008) has claimed a late antique legacy for the Christian mappaemundi and for the Peutinger map.

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ample motive and resources, too, for creating such a world map. A Carolingian artisan may have worked directly from itinerary lists and a collection of the Roman geographic works prized by the Carolingians.41 Whatever the date of its prototype, the surviving world map embodies the conceptual leap achieved in late antiquity, while neatly symbolizing a Roman vision of the oikoumeneˉ that Rome’s true heirs could traverse and possess. In signiicant ways, then, the map represents the old imperial concept of space, reaching back to the Roman understanding of geography and mental maps as linked to imperial ambitions.The mapmaker was signaling the ancient authority of Roman emperors, which his imperial patron was likely reclaiming for himself (Plate VII). The Roman roads prominently displayed on this map are markers of Romanitas and links to the old Roman itinerary mind. Next to the roads, the map’s most commanding features are the pictorial symbols representing cities, villages, spas, and changing places. The cities and other stations are equally signs of Roman antiquity, of the urban culture that distinguished the old imperium. With its large medallion and the twelve roads radiating out into the oikoumeneˉ in all directions, Rome is a major focal point. And as in Pliny’s description of the world, Italy occupies a disproportionate amount of the map, enlarged to ill one-third the width of the oikoumeneˉ.42 Yet the map pictured the Roman world in a way that the Romans themselves could not have imagined. However schematic and lawed we may think this map – however unusable for the traveler or inaccurate for the conceptual geographer – the Peutinger map has taken the linear itineraries to another dimension that ancient Romans were not accustomed to depict on such a scale. Fortunately for the preservation of a Roman map, the great cultural shifts of late antiquity nurtured the production of world maps in their many manifestations. Even as Roman power inally collapsed in the West and Roman emperors disappeared in the ifth century, Christian bishops illed the resulting void as caretakers of people, property, and some semblance of order. Christian maps replaced Roman maps as signiiers of dominion over the earth. The populist impulse that drove the Christian mapping mind eventually turned to its own competing brand of imperialism, culminating in the maps of an imperial papacy.43 41

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The lost Carolingian Codex Spirensis, for instance, contained the Notitia Dignitatum, the Antonine Itinerary, the seventh- or eighth-century Cosmographica of Aethicus Ister, Dicuil’s ninth-century Liber de mensura orbis terrae, and related texts, some illustrated. Spirensis was a late ninth- or early tenth-century product, but its antecedent alone (whether also a single manuscript or a collection of texts) would have ofered itineraries, sample vignettes, and even guides to help establish relationships of roads, cities, and rivers to one another. We cannot know what other collections, also now lost, were available to a Carolingian mapmaker. Albu, The Medieval Peutinger Map (forthcoming) treats this question in greater detail. Talbert (2010): 91. On the continuing appropriation of imperial images by medieval popes, see Stroll (1991).

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The persistence of this implied claim to an ancient, pre-Christian Roman inheritance explains the near absence of Judeo-Christian names and references on the Peutinger map, a lacuna that has long puzzled commentators. Those few Christian notations on the map may be additions by a later hand, a scribe eager to demonstrate biblical knowledge and ill empty spaces. They are incidental comments on an essentially secular realm centered at Rome. By merging imperial space and time, this map conlates ancient Rome and the newly restored imperium to present an imperial alternative to Christian world maps. This was a competition in which the late antique church increasingly held the upper hand, as it came to control many of the resources essential for world map production, most notably monastic scriptoria. We should not be surprised that the Peutinger map, featuring ancient roads and cities, is the sole survivor of a Roman imperial type. The lost Roman imperial maps, attested in late antique texts, show that some secular rulers had the wealth and certainly the ambition to engage in this contest, answering the widely proliferating Christian mappaemundi with their own world maps, grounded in knowledge transmitted by ancient pagan geographers, road builders, and travelers but enabled by the expansive Christian worldview.44 This intense activity of map production, Christian and imperial, should give pause to historians accustomed to regard late antiquity as an age of shrinking horizons, when the empire was breaking apart and the local community was replacing the Roman universal vision. The revolution in spatial and mapping consciousness suggests an opposite force, as Christian evangelizing and pilgrimage led to a mental and physical expansion of worldview, and as Christians came to see their place within a larger oikoumeneˉ. The battle of the maps demonstrates the brilliance of that conceptual leap. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Augustine, Epistulae, ed. A. Goldbacher, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 34.2. Prague,Vienna, and Leipzig, 1895: 43.9.25. Beatus, Sancti Beati a Liebana Commentarius in Apocalypsin, ed. E. Romero-Pose. Rome, 1985: I, 193. Cicero, Marcus Tullius, Somnium Scipionis, in J. G. F. Powell, ed., M. Tulli Ciceronis De re publica, De legibus, Cato Maior De senectute, Laelius De amicitia. Oxford, 2006. 44

Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. and trans. E. S. Firchow and E. H. Zeydel. Coral Gables, 1972: ch. 33. Eumenius, Oratio pro instaurandis scholis, 9(4), in R. A. B. Mynors, ed., XII Panegyrici Latini. Oxford, 1964: 20.2–21.3. Forma urbis Romae, Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project: http://formaurbis.stanford.edu. Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. New York, 1974. Peutinger Map, database and resources for Talbert (2010): http://www.cambridge. org/9780521764803.

Albu (2005) argues for the production of the Peutinger map and its prototype in the scriptorium at Reichenau, a royal (Carolingian) foundation that sometimes harbored antipapal sympathies. The traditional view places the Peutinger prototype at a late antique Roman imperial court. Either scenario positions it (and its subsequent copies leading to the extant map) within the context of imperial polemic.

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Probus, Aemilius, poem (preface to world atlas or map), in J. J. Tierney and L. Bieler, eds., Dicuili Liber de mensura orbis terrae. Dublin, 1967: 5.4; trans. Salway (2005): 128. Vergil, Aeneid, in R. A. B. Mynors, ed., P. Vergili Maronis Opera, Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford, 1969. Secondary Sources Adler, E. (2003). Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid. Oxford. Albu, E. (2005). “Imperial Geography and the Medieval Peutinger Map,” Imago Mundi 57.2: 136–48. Albu, E. (2008). “Rethinking the Peutinger Map,” in R. J. A. Talbert and R. W. Unger, eds., Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods,Technology and Change in History 10:111–19. Leiden and Boston. Albu, E. (forthcoming). The Medieval Peutinger Map. New York and Cambridge. Arnaud, P. (1983).“L’afaire Mettius Pompusianus, ou le crime de cartographie,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Antiquité 95: 677–99. Avramea, A. (2002). “Land and Sea Communications, Fourth–Fifteenth Centuries,” in A. E. Laiou, ed., The Economic History of Byzantium from the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century: 1:57–90.Washington, D.C. Bertrand, A. C. (1997). “Stumbling through Gaul: Maps, Intelligence, and Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum,” Ancient History Bulletin 11.4: 107–22. Bowersock, G. W. (2006). Mosaics as History: The Near East from Late Antiquity to Islam. Cambridge, Mass., and London. Brodersen, K. (2003). Terra Cognita: Studien zur römischen Raumerfassung. 2nd ed. Hildesheim. Brodersen, K. (2004). “Mapping (in) the Ancient World,” Journal of Roman Studies 94: 183–90. Brunt, P. A. (1978). “Laus Imperii,” in P. D. A. Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker, eds., Imperialism in the Ancient World: 159–91. Cambridge. Dilke, O. A. W. (1987). “Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman Empires,” in J. B. Harley and D. Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography,

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vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean: 234–57. Chicago. Edson, E. (1997). Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World. London. Feissel, D. (1991). “Bulletin épigraphique,” Revue des études grecques 104: 725. Gautier Dalché, P. (2008). “L’héritage antique de la cartographie médiévale: les problèmes et les acquis,” in R. J. A. Talbert and R. W. Unger, eds., Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods,Technology and Change in History 10:29–66. Leiden and Boston. Hardie, P. R. (1986). Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium. Oxford. Humphries, M. (2007). “A New Created World: Classical Geographical Texts and Christian Contexts in Late Antiquity,” in J. H. D. Scourield, ed., Texts and Culture in Late Antiquity: Inheritance, Authority, and Change: 33–67. Swansea. Innes, M. (1997). “Charlemagne’s Will: Piety, Politics and the Imperial Succession,” English Historical Review 112: 833–55. Janni, P. (1984). Le mappa e il periplo cartograia antica e spazio odologico. Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di lettere e ilosoia, Università di Macerata 19. Rome. Kupfer, M. (1994). “Medieval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames,” Word and Image 10: 262–88. Lapidge, M. (1979). “Lucan’s Imagery of Cosmic Dissolution,” Hermes 107: 344–70. Lozovsky, N. (2000). The Earth Is Our Book. Ann Arbor. Lozovsky, N. (2008). “Maps and Panegyrics: Roman Geo-Ethnographical Rhetoric in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in R. J. A. Talbert and R. W. Unger, eds., Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Fresh Perspectives, New Methods, Technology and Change in History 10:169–88. Leiden and Boston. Mazzolani, L. S. (1970). The Idea of the City in Roman Thought: From Walled City to Spiritual Commonwealth. Bloomington. = L’idea di città nel mondo romano (Milan, 1967), trans. S. O’Donnell.

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Nixon, C. E. V., and B. S. Rodgers. (1995). In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini. Berkeley. Salway, B. (2005).“The Nature and Genesis of the Peutinger Map,” Imago Mundi 57.2: 119–35. Salway, B. (2007). “The Perception and Description of Space in Roman Itineraries,” in M. Rathmann, ed., Wahrnehmung und Erfassung geographischer Räume in der Antike: 181–209. Mainz am Rhein. Salway, B. (2012). “Putting the World in Order: Mapping in Roman Texts,” in R. J. A. Talbert, ed., Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome: 193–234. Chicago. Scai, A. (2006). Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. Chicago. Schlachter, A. (1927). Der Globus: Seine Entstehung und Verwendung in der Antike. Leipzig and Berlin. Schnabel, P. (1935). “Die Weltkarte des Agrippa als wissenschaftliche Mittelglied zwischen Hipparch und Ptolemaeus,” Philologus 90: 405–40. Schramm, P. E. (1958). Sphaira, Globus, Reichsapfel: Wanderung undWandlung eines Herrschaftszeichens von Caesar bis zu Elisabeth II; ein Beitrag zum “Nachleben” der Antike. Stuttgart.

Stroll, M. (1991). Symbols as Power: The Papacy Following the Investiture Conlict. Leiden. Talbert, R. J. A. (2007).“Peutinger’s Roman Map: The Physical Landscape Framework,” in M. Rathmann, ed., Wahrnehmung und Erfassung geographischer Räume in der Antike: 221–30. Mainz am Rhein. Talbert, R. J. A. (2010). Rome’s World:The Peutinger Map Reconsidered. Cambridge. Weinstock, S. (1971). Divus Julius. Oxford. Whittaker, C. R. (2002). “Mental Maps: Seeing like a Roman,” in P. McKechnie, ed., Thinking like a Lawyer: Essays on Legal History and General History for John Crook on His Eightieth Birthday: 81–112. Leiden, Boston, and Cologne. Williams, J., ed. (1994–2003). The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse. 5 vols. London. Williams, J. (1997). “Isidore, Orosius, and the Beatus Map,” Imago Mundi 49: 7–32. Williams, J., and B. A. Shailor, eds. (1991). A Spanish Apocalypse: The Morgan Beatus Manuscript. New York. Woodward, D. (1987).“Medieval Mappaemundi,” in J. B. Harley and D. Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography I: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean: 286–358. Chicago and London.

ELEVEN

TOPOGRAPHIES OF POWER IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND BEYOND H. A. Drake

On the night of 9 July 518, the Roman Empire was plunged into crisis. On that night, Anastasius, who had ruled for the previous twenty-seven years, died in Constantinople with no male heir and without having named a successor. On such occasions, the empire was up for grabs. While the people in the hippodrome cheered the Senate and chanted for a new ruler, bitter inighting broke out in the Great Palace, with one set of palace guards, the excubitors, faced of against another, the scholae. Meanwhile, the cubicularii, attendants of the imperial bedchamber, barred the ivory door leading into the emperor’s quarters and repeatedly refused demands for the imperial vestments. The stalemate inally was broken when the Senate put its weight behind the commander of the excubitors, who became the emperor Justin I. With the cubicularii no longer barring the way, Justin received the robes of oice and proceeded to the imperial box in the hippodrome, where he was acclaimed by Senate and people. He then processed to the church of Hagia Sophia for a service presided over by the patriarch of Constantinople, who had previously presented him the crown in the hippodrome. His accession ended with a private banquet in the Great Palace. The story of these events comes to us from a contemporary, Peter the Patrician, who likely witnessed and even participated in at least some of them. It was not Peter’s aim to discuss the politics, much less the conlicts, of imperial selection. His account is included in the Book of Ceremonies compiled in the

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tenth century at the behest of Constantine Porphyrogenitus as a sort of desk manual for the increasingly complicated ritual that surrounded virtually every aspect of court life. Writing four centuries earlier, Peter’s motivation seems to have been similar. From his vantage point as magister oiciorum, a post he eventually held for an unprecedented twenty-six years during the eventful reign of Justinian I, Peter also thought it useful to have a record of recurring events such as imperial accessions. But since those procedures were anything but routine in his day, his account is more descriptive than proscriptive, providing a narrative of the accessions not only of Justin but also of Leo I and Anastasius before him and Justinian after.1 Peter is not a perfect guide. Because of his interest in variations and differences, for instance, he omits the religious ceremony that followed Justin’s appearance in the hippodrome, contenting himself with the observation that, from this point, everything followed as it had for Anastasius. Still, his account is suicient to identify for us the topographies of power in late antiquity: palace, barracks, church, and hippodrome – the seats of emperor, army, bishop, and people, respectively. Not every city in the empire, of course, had all of these structures, much less the elaborate rituals that surrounded a resident emperor. But as symbols of the constituencies that made up the political world of late antiquity, these structures would have been recognized anywhere, by anyone who lived in that world. They will serve as our guide for determining what, if anything, was distinctive about power in late antiquity, and what, if anything, this distinctiveness can tell us about the transition from polis to oikoumeneˉ that occurred during this period. What was “power” in late antiquity? What did it look like, feel like, smell like?2 The aim of this chapter is to try to answer these questions by looking at the topographies upon which power was exercised. In what follows, we proceed like a returning space shuttle, starting in the rareied ether of theoretical discourse where the elites lived, descending through the frictions and occasional disasters of ritual and ceremony where Senate, army, and people all played their roles, and inally landing on the hard, gritty soil of imperial politics, where polis met oikoumeneˉ.3

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For the accession of Justin, see Const. Porphyr., De Caer. 93, ed. Reiske (1829): 1:426–30. On the genesis and structure of the Book of Ceremonies, see the important article by McCormick (1991); on the ritual, McCormick (1985). On the relationship between power and smell, see Harvey (2006); indirectly (through healing), Caseau (2005); more generally, Classen (1994). Dagron (2003): 104 observed that “it was accepted that the actors would sometimes improvise and step out of their conventional roles, that the people at the hippodrome might boo the emperor instead of acclaiming him, that the patriarch might refuse to introduce the emperor into the church, and that the ceremony might go tragically wrong.”

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Power Negotiated About the same time as Peter the Patrician was pulling together his records of accessions and other imperial ceremonies, an anonymous author composed a dialogue On Political Science (Peri Politikes Katastaseos) that hearkens back to the glory days of such tracts in classical Greece and republican Rome. Originally as many as six books, it survives primarily in fragments from two of them that were discovered on a palimpsest and published early in the nineteenth century (an additional fragment was discovered in 1973).4 The fragments imagine a discussion between two high oicials at the court of Justinian I about the traditional categories of government as they had been known for a thousand years – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – in which the participants agree (with Polybius, Cicero, and the U.S. Founding Fathers) that a “mixed constitution” is best. Despite this antiquarian framework, however, the discussants stray from the traditional political categories in ways that relect the political world of late antiquity, incorporating bishops into the hierarchy (5.19), worrying about monks (5.69), and condemning the unbridled behavior of the notorious circus factions (5.104–15). More than anything else, what identiies this discourse, despite all its archaizing, as a product of late antiquity, is the overwhelming amount of space it devotes to the role of the monarch. For hundreds of years, the Mediterranean world had known only this one form of government, and by late antiquity a consensus had emerged in public discourse that monarchy was not just the only viable form of rule but also the most desirable. In this dialogue, the weight assigned the ruler is so preponderant that even the discussion of the other constituents of a “mixed” constitution is framed in a way that makes them dependent on the monarch’s willingness to accept limits on his arbitrary power. Above all, the interlocutors agree that the most important role of the king was to appear to his subjects as a mimesis, an eikon, of God. A relationship between kingship and divinity can be found in classical theory, but the emphasis placed on this particular role betrays the dialogue’s roots as being not in Plato but in Hellenistic political thought. Because the successors of Alexander needed to justify their usurpation of power, a dialogue opened between them and the Greek cities under their rule: in return for honors and titles, these monarchs would present themselves as champions and defenders of “political” liberties (meaning the liberty of the poleis) and benefactors of the public good. Once dismissed as so much proof of the degenerate “Orientalizing” of the pure 4

Mazzucchi (2002). An English translation is now available in Bell (2009): 123–88. For discovery of the fragments, see Bell (2009): 9.

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Greek ideas of the Hellenic age, the ideology that grew out of this marriage of convenience actually obligated rulers to engage with those they ruled in ways that were completely foreign to those of their Egyptian and Persian predecessors. A good king was a savior (soter), a benefactor (euergetes), a manifestation of deity (epiphanes) whose harmony with the divine will made him a “living law” (nomos empsychos). Good works, in short, were important to legitimacy.5 The Romans inherited this ideology, and Augustus blended it with Roman principles of popular representation (the tribunate) and aristocratic prestige (princeps senatus) to create a uniquely Roman articulation, in which the Hellenistic principle of “living law” came to be expressed through the concept of “restraint.” The “public secret” of the empire was that the Roman emperor was capable of exercising fearsome physical force but, because of his virtues, he voluntarily elected instead to be guided by principles of governance that had been crafted by educated elites over centuries of discourse.6 For this reason, the place to look for intellectual debate about the nature of rule, oddly enough, is not so much in tracts devoted to that subject as in speeches given to glorify rulers. These speeches were given on myriad occasions: by public oicials to acknowledge imperial anniversaries or the gift of oice, by ambassadors from cities seeking favors or acknowledging favors bestowed, by foreign emissaries as a vital part of their mission. So frequent were the occasions for such displays that Fergus Millar once wondered how the emperor ever got any work done.7 To meet the need for such speeches, a cottage industry developed in handbooks instructing the less well-equipped how to pull one of.8 To modern ears, surviving examples of these eforts sound like so much blather, and they were long dismissed as, at best, fawning examples of court propaganda. More sensitive readers now are inclined to see them as stages on which subtle negotiations between ruler and ruled took place. Orators spoke in a coded language, whereby emphasis on one virtue over another, or the omission of one of the set platitudes expected by the audience, served to 5

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On Hellenistic kingship theory and its inluence, see Chapter 2 in this volume, and see further: Steinwenter (1946); Béranger (1964); Murray (1971); Dagron (1967); Stertz (1974); Weinfeld (1982); Aalders (1975); Bringmann (1993). Dated but still useful: Goodenough (1928). For the importance of “denial,” see Wallace-Hadrill (1982); Béranger (1943). For the importance of voluntary restraint, Brown (1992): esp. 50: “So much alert attention to deportment betrays a fact almost too big to be seen.We are in a world characterized by a chilling absence of legal restraints on violence in the exercise of power.” On Augustus: Millar (1984); Hammond (1940). I take the term “public secrets” from Taussig (1999), with the understanding that he would probably be horriied by the use to which I have put it. The historian Tacitus referred to a diferent “secret of empire” (imperii arcano) that was revealed upon the death of Nero: that emperors could be made “elsewhere than at Rome.” Tacitus, Histories 1.4. Millar (1977): 6: “If we follow our evidence, we might almost come to believe that the primary role of the emperor was to listen to speeches in Greek.” Russell and Wilson (1981). On this work, see Humfress’s chapter in this volume.

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signal important changes in a given emperor’s character and priorities. Most important of all, however, was the occasion itself. In reminding his audience of the emperor’s bravery, benevolence, and commitment to the rule of law, an orator also was telling his imperial subject how to behave if he wanted to be remembered as a “good king.” Conversely, simply by agreeing to hear such a speech, the ruler committed himself to follow the protocols it outlined, even if he could not understand a single word the orator was saying.9 As much as the ceremonies in which they were enacted, then, the language of these speeches became a topography of power.10

Power Embodied In late antiquity, adventus was the ceremony that encapsulated the ideology of mutual dependence that underlay the relationship between ruler and ruled. In its origins, adventus was little more than a greeting for an arriving emperor: the citizens, led by their local curials and other dignitaries, would advance beyond the walls of their city to escort the emperor into their city, all the while singing songs of welcome and thanksgiving. But by the late empire it had grown into something more. Formalized and ritualized like so much else in that era, adventus became an important means of celebrating the ties that bound each locality to the Roman Empire, periphery to center.11 Simultaneously, the emperor came to stand for more than the current holder of that title; by distributing largesse and listening favorably to the boasts and pleas of local orators, he personiied the imperial center and reairmed its commitment to the peace and well-being of the periphery. In step with a general trend that will be important for our study, the emperor in this ceremony became less of a person and more of a type, a symbol of triumph, victory, and eternal rule.12 In Ammianus Marcellinus’s famous description of Constantius II’s entry into Rome in 357, the emperor seemed more like a statue than a man.13 Even more than a statue, we might say, he embodied Rome, and his adventus became a means to celebrate the universal state he carried in his person. The importance of this exchange is relected in a Muslim story, quoted by Sabine MacCormack in her path-breaking 1981 study of imperial ceremonial.14 The story tells of an encounter that occurred in the days following the Arab conquest of Syria, and of a disaster narrowly averted: 9 10

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As was the case, for instance, with the emperor Valens. See Lenski (2002): 94. For the importance of ceremony in late antiquity, see MacCormack (1981); McCormick (1985). For an earlier period, see Sumi (2005). MacCormack (1972). The classic study is Gagé (1955). Ammianus, Res Gestae 16.10.9–11. MacCormack (1981): 22.

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I was one of those who went with abu-‘Ubaidah to meet ‘Umar as he was coming to Syria. As ‘Umar was passing, he was met by the singers and tambourine players of the inhabitants of Adhri’ât with swords and myrtle. Seeing that, ‘Umar shouted, “Keep still, stop them.” But abu-‘Ubaidah replied, “This is their custom (or some other word like it), Commander of the Believers, and if thou shouldst stop them from doing it, they would take that as indicating thy intention to violate their covenant.” “Well, then,” said ‘Umar, “let them go on.”

As MacCormack observes, the incident deines “what the ceremonial meant at that moment of crisis.”15 Adventus was the means whereby a ruler and his subjects demonstrated a mutual commitment to a “covenant” to forswear violence on the one side and pledge obedience on the other. In Constantinople, this ritual was reenacted every time an emperor arrived or returned. In a series of stages detailed with great insight by Gilbert Dagron, the emperor reairmed through changes in costume and carriage his disavowal of force and his commitment to the behavior of a good king: This metamorphosis, which gave the emperor not power, which he already possessed, but legitimacy, which he still lacked, was marked by a series of changes in his conduct and his dress; when he dismounted from his warhorse to climb into a carriage, vehicle of oicials, or to walk on foot like a citizen, when he returned the tribute given him, when he removed certain items of his military apparel in favour of elements of senatorial and consular dress and when he removed the crown from his head, gave it to the praepositus (who held it, with covered hands, over the altar) and received it back from the patriarch.16

Just as every emperor became a symbol of imperial victory and justice, so every encounter between an emperor and his constituencies became fraught with cosmological signiicance. Dagron has further observed that this compact “had to be reairmed at every opportunity as a reminder that the violence which had given power to the former had been paciied and guaranteed by the latter.”17 This at least partially explains why, over time, the symbolism of the adventus blended with that of the other great ceremonial negotiation, which occurred at the accession of a new ruler.

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MacCormack (1981): 22. The quoted text is a translation of al-Baladhuri, in Hitti (1916): 214–15. The citizens of Ephesus were less fortunate when they sent a chorus of children to greet the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane around the year 1402: with no adviser to explain the signiicance of the action,Tamerlane ordered his cavalry to ride them down. But the incident testiies to the endurance of the adventus ritual. See Goodwin (1999): 27. Dagron (2003): 65, citing De Caer. 1.91. See further Bauer (2001). More generally, Bassett (2004). Dagron (2003): 65.

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This increasing tendency to typologize, so well attested in the art of late antiquity,18 explains one of the most intriguing aspects of Peter the Patrician’s account of the accession of Justin I with which this chapter began. This is the role of the cubicularii, the palace eunuchs, whose numbers and intrigues, access to and abuse of power drew the withering scorn of late antique commentators.19 Yet during the tumult following Anastasius’s death, these notorious sybarites stood up to the demands of the burly excubitors not once but repeatedly, barring the doors and denying access to the imperial regalia.20 It is not so much the unexpected resolve of the cubicularii that demands attention as the helplessness of the military in the face of it. Despite the force these palace guards represented, they were powerless to install a ruler without the proper symbols with which to vest him. It seems bizarre. Yet an American might ponder what would happen if a chief justice refused to swear in an American president. Probably nothing; another oicial would be found – unless the circumstances of the election itself were so clouded that the chief justice had strong constitutional grounds for her refusal. So it was in Constantinople: the shakier a candidate’s claim to the purple, the more elaborate the ceremony by which he was invested. It is a bit daunting for constitutional scholars to realize that the Roman Empire had survived ive hundred years without a clearly established set of rules for succession. But this is precisely the point. Without a universally recognized process, small items like wearing the proper regalia took on a heavy symbolic charge. The experience of the usurper Procopius in the fourth century can serve as an illustration. Taking advantage of the absence of the new emperor, Valens, and the unpopularity of his inance minister, in 365 Procopius began his putsch by gaining the support of two Gallic legions in Constantinople. Ammianus tells what happened next: No purple robe was available and he was dressed in a gold-spangled tunic like a court oicial, though from the waist downwards he looked like a page. He wore purple shoes and carried a spear, with a shred of purple cloth in his left hand. Altogether he was a grotesque object such as might suddenly appear on the stage in a satirical farce. Elevated in this ridiculous way to an honour rooted in dishonour, he addressed his supporters in tones of servile lattery.21

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See, e.g., L’Orange (1965): 22–3. Roman scorn for eunuchs as typifying emasculated Eastern ways in general can be found as early as Horace’s Nunc est bibendum victory ode and Vergil’s scorn for Cybele’s galli in the Aeneid (viz. 4.215–17, 9.614–20, 12.97–100). On the role of eunuchs, see Hopkins (1963); Ringrose (1994). De Caer. 1.93; Dagron (2003): 68. Ammianus 26.6.15–16, trans. Hamilton (1986): 323. On Procopius, see Austin (1972).

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As Noel Lenski has observed, Ammianus’s account is steeped in “explicitly theatrical terms.”22 Less explicit, but equally obvious, is Ammianus’s bias against Procopius. He depicts the usurper as stumbling through a speech that should have been delivered with strength and eloquence; instead of cheers, it is received with, at best, polite murmurs. Ultimately, Procopius is betrayed by the soldiery who, prior to a critical battle, go over to Valens’s side en masse.23 There is plenty of tar in Ammianus’s brush. For present purposes, however, these traits make his account all the more useful. For it is the means he chose to impugn Procopius’s legitimacy more than the fairness of his judgment that is at issue. Rejection by the populace and betrayal by the military implicitly expose Procopius as a false pretender, but nothing does so more efectively than the inappropriate, farcical vestments in which he is enrobed. Like Julian, whom he sought to replace, Procopius did not grasp the importance of appearances in this late Roman world.24 Unlike the excubitors, he did not have the foresight to secure the garments that would make him look like an emperor, instead of a joke. But Ammianus also had a blind spot of his own.

Power Contested For diferent reasons, Ammianus’s and Peter the Patrician’s accounts have little to say about an increasingly important constituency, the Christian Church. In Ammianus’s case, such discussion would have been anachronistic, although his well-known scorn for the resources “wasted” on church councils shows that he failed to grasp the new role this religion was already playing in the ancient concept of national security.25 In Peter’s case, the religious conirmation of Justin I’s accession was omitted for precisely the opposite reason: it had become so routine that he saw no need to take notice of it. Together, the two accounts show us just how much the ground had shifted in the two centuries that separate them. In earlier periods of Roman history, agreement of Senate and army, with acclamation by the urban plebs, completed the process of imperial selection. Justin’s elevation, however, required a separate ceremony over which the patriarch of Constantinople presided. By Peter’s day, it could go without saying that anyone who became emperor would have to be Christian, and that his Christianity would have to be acceptable to the clergy. 22 23

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Lenski (2002): 73. Ammianus, 26.6.18. It is sobering to remember that, had Procopius not been defeated militarily, none of the ceremonial gafes that drew gibes from Ammianus would have mattered in the slightest. But that is a level of reality that we are not at present obliged to consider. On Julian, see Dvornik (1955); Béranger (1972); Tougher (2007). Ammianus 21.16.18; for characterizing relations with the divine as national security, see Drake (2011).

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Echoes of Gibbon’s decrial of the role of “superstition” in Rome’s fall are still loud enough that we need to be careful not to misread this change. It would be a mistake, as Josine Blok reminds us in Chapter 1, to think that earlier periods did not consider divinity important to the well-being of the state – unless we want to think of all the temples that littered the ancient landscape as simply so many prototypes for bank and museum architecture. Nor, as Rolf Strootman showed in Chapter 2, was divine conirmation of an emperor’s rule a novelty. But in the grand scheme of “civic religion” the emperor assumed the role of chief priest, and his role in conducting and supervising state sacriices made a separate religious ceremony redundant. The real change that came with a Christian emperor was introduction of a priestly class whose lines of authority had never intersected with the civic religious structure. In this sense, Constantine’s great achievement was not so much that he opened a door to salvation for millions of lost souls as that he found a way to bring this separate organization into the power structure of the Roman state. The alignment was far from perfect, and not always harmonious. It involved another topography that is not being considered here, the sacred landscape of monks and holy men where access to the divine was a living issue. Still, in the persons of the patriarch in the East and the pope in the West, this topography represented a force lacking in the classical world of Greece and Rome, an institutionalized and hierarchical alternative means of access to the divine. To put large matters briely, Christianity meant that the emperor had to share this privilege. East and West eventually worked out diferent means of accommodation, but in neither case was the diference as stark as implied by the once-popular model of “Caesaropapism.” Coined in the nineteenth century, this term has been used to distinguish the relative independence of western Christians from the lot of their eastern counterparts, who seemed to western observers to be subject to the whims of an imperial master who made and unmade patriarchs and dictated theology in a way never tolerated in their own proto-Protestant church. The situation, as often is the case, was much more nuanced. Two sets of images created in the two capitals of Rome and Constantinople at roughly the same time give us a way to calibrate the diferences and come to a better understanding of their signiicance. The irst is a set of mosaics that once graced the dining hall of the Lateran Palace in Rome, one of the few parts preserved when the burned-out Church of St. John Lateran was rebuilt by Pope Sixtus V in 1586 (Plate VIII). A detailed reconstruction now stands, somewhat nakedly, east of the Piazza di Porta di San Giovanni in a structure built by Pope Benedict XIV in 1743. On either side of an apsidal mosaic depicting Christ and the apostles are the images that are of particular concern here. The group on the left is

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conjectural.26 Today, the viewer sees Christ handing symbols of power to the irst Christian emperor, Constantine, and another igure plausibly identiied as either St. Peter or Sylvester I, the bishop of Rome, who by this time was thought to have baptized Constantine and to have received from him the grant of authority over the West articulated in the notorious “Donations of Constantine.” The parallel set of images on the right depicts St. Peter distributing symbols of regency to Charlemagne and Leo III, the pope who crowned him Roman emperor on Christmas Day of the year 800. While only this set of images survives from the original, some conclusions about papal ideology in the West can still be drawn from the restored ensemble.27 From that same century as the images on the right-hand side, or only a little later, date two famous mosaics in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the former Constantinople. Above the “Beautiful Door” leading into the narthex from the southwest vestibule (Fig. 11.1), a lunette depicts the emperors Constantine and Justinian to the right and left respectively of the Virgin Mary, who stands in the center with the infant Jesus in her arms (Plate IX). Each emperor bears as a gift a model of the endowment for which he is best known: Constantine, the city that bears his name; Justinian, the great church itself. Farther north along the narthex stands the second mosaic, above the main Imperial Door that led directly into the church (Plate X). It is a striking panel that shows an emperor in the act of prostrating himself before a Christ seated in judgment. Flanking this igure are two medallions, the one on the left depicting Mary with her hands extended in prayer, the other an angel or archangel. Scholars are divided over both the identity of the emperor and the message the panel was meant to convey, but the abject posture of the emperor and Mary’s pose both suggest penance and intercession as themes, with the angel perhaps poised to carry out Christ’s judgment. For present purposes, it is suicient to note that Cyril Mango once called the iconography of this mosaic “unique in Byzantine art.”28 No such ambiguity exists about the Lateran mosaics. At irst glance, they seem to illustrate the principle of the separate spheres of church and state, symbolized by the gifts being bestowed on Leo and Charlemagne (and, conceivably, on Sylvester and Constantine). But the images on the left constitute a much bolder assertion. From as early as the second century, Christians had argued that church and empire started simultaneously as part of God’s overall divine plan.29 If the bishop paired with Constantine were Peter, the mosaic 26

27 28 29

Luchterhand (1999): 60–4. I am grateful to Professor Judson Emerick of Claremont College for calling this article to my attention. As by Noble (2001); Belting (1978). In Kähler (1967): 53; for a proposed date and discussion of these mosaics, see 54–5. Melito of Sardis made the argument in his Apology, according to Eusebius (HE 4.26.7). Eusebius himself took it up in an address he delivered to Constantine on the Holy Sepulcher: Drake (1976): 120 (De Sepulchro Christi 16.5–6).

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would be a visual conirmation of that position. On the other hand, if it were Sylvester, the claim would be even more startling, for by using Sylvester and Constantine the panel would be proclaiming the birth of a Christian empire, to which everything that preceded was irrelevant. No matter which saint was depicted in that panel, however, the overall purpose of the Lateran mosaic, and its signiicance here, was not (as theorists would assume) to proclaim the separation of church and state. If that were the message, then the right-hand panel should show power being bestowed on Leo and Charlemagne by either Christ or their respective predecessors. Instead, by replacing Christ with Peter, the irst bishop of Rome, this panel proclaims that both secular and ecclesiastical power low from Rome – precisely the ideology that moved Leo to crown Charlemagne emperor on Christmas Day 800 and that, at least according to some accounts, infuriated the recipient of this largesse. The Lateran mosaic, thus, more than fulills expectations about the role of the church in the West. But do the mosaics in Hagia Sophia do the same for the East? Yes and no. By showing emperors in diferent postures of supplication, they give the lie to the idea of secular rulers who saw themselves as masters over both church and state, as the doctrine of “Caesaropapism” would have it. But viewing these mosaics side by side with their Lateran counterparts also reveals a glaring diference: in sharp contrast to the prominence given the bishop of Rome in the latter, in these his counterpart in Constantinople is nowhere to be seen: in each, the emperor presents himself directly to Christ, without the need of episcopal mediation. Too much should not be made of this absence: surely, the fact that the bishop of Rome was responsible for the Lateran mosaic and an emperor for those in Hagia Sophia explains much, if not all, of this diference. Still, it remains signiicant that the pope was patron of the one and the emperor of the other. If nothing else, the mosaics serve as a reminder that, after the ifth century, the West rarely saw or felt the presence of a Roman emperor. Underlying this relatively simple observation lies a more important factor: the sacrosanctity that Christian emperors inherited from their pagan predecessors by virtue of their role as head of the state cult. This is the fundamental error of the Caesaropapism hypothesis: it presents “Caesar” as asserting some new power to serve as mediator between the empire and the divine world, whereas the real novelty was the intrusion of what had been a private priesthood into this realm.The emperor’s sacrosanctity greatly complicated eforts in both East and West to draw a boundary to his religious jurisdiction. Like being a little bit pregnant, it was hard to be a little bit holy. Or, as Gilbert Dagron has put it,“An emperor was nothing if he was not everything.”30

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Dagron (2003): 113.

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The threshold of this new topography, the entry to the church, is where these two traditions – the imperial and the ecclesiastical – met, and where the greatest potential for conlict lay. Again, examples from East and West can be instructive, but only if proper care is taken to choose appropriate analogies. The famous example of an explosive encounter in the West is, of course, Ambrose’s threat in 390 to refuse to celebrate mass if Theodosius attempted to attend without irst doing penance for the slaughter of civilians in Thessalonika.31 His successful intervention became a paradigm for churchstate relations that sufered nothing from the retelling: very soon, negotiations that had, in fact, been discreetly conducted in writing were transformed into a much more satisfying public spectacle performed on the steps of Ambrose’s church, where a deiant emperor inally yielded to the full moral authority of a determined bishop. The usual analog to this successful intervention put forward by western scholars is the failure of Ambrose’s younger contemporary, John Chrysostom, to assert similar authority over the imperial family in Constantinople, an efort that ended in his exile in 404 and eventual death.32 The moral becomes obvious: successful independence of the church and its highest representatives in the West versus slavish obedience in the East. But the two situations do not align in a way that permits this conclusion: too many variables and contingent circumstances allow them to be exact analogies. Instead, a search for comparisons should begin with the Church History written by Theodoret of Cyrrhus sometime around the middle of the ifth century. Half a century after it occurred, the Ambrose-Theodosius story here inds its most edifying treatment. On the steps of the church, a deiant Ambrose warns the emperor, “Do not try to aggravate your irst crime by a second [entering the church by force],” a rebuke that sends Theodosius away in tears because, Theodoret tells us, he had been “raised in the Holy Scriptures, [and] knew very well what was the province of the priests and what of the emperors.”33 Later, when Theodosius begs permission to attend Christmas services, Ambrose again refuses, telling the emperor that, if he forces his way in, he will “transform his basileia into a tyrranis.” Only then does Theodosius repent and receive absolution from Ambrose’s hands. The irst thing to note about this version of the story is that it was told in the East, not the West. The second is that Theodoret was himself a bishop, and it is not beyond reason to suppose that he found at least as much ediication in this tale of an emperor who “knew very well what was the province of the priests and what of the emperors,” as would his readers for centuries to come. Whence the inal and most important reason for citing this text: it points 31 32 33

For a detailed account, see McLynn (1994): 315–30. See, for a recent example, Groß-Albenhausen (1999). HE 5.18.1–19, trans. in Dagron (2003): 105–6.

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the way to an exact analog to Ambrose in the person of Nicholas Mystikos, the patriarch of Constantinople who confronted the sinful emperor Leo VI at Christmas in 906. Like Henry VIII centuries later, Leo had taken a third and then a fourth wife in his desire to produce an heir, thereby putting himself in direct deiance of canon law. At the Imperial Door of Hagia Sophia, Nicholas politely but irmly refused Leo entry, using words that echo Theodoret’s more than four hundred years earlier: “For the present,” Nicholas said, “will your Majesty, without in any way taking it ill, enter as usual [κατ᾽ἔθος] at the righthand side-door; and at the feast of the Epiphany you shall come and enter with me and be received without our making any objection. But if you insist and force your way in [εἰ δὲ τυραννικῶς ἐπιβῇς], we are all ready to withdraw from this church.”34 According to the account in the Life of Euthymios the Patriarch (Nicholas’s successor), Leo accepted the rebuke and withdrew. But when he appeared again at the Festival of Lights, Nicholas still barred the way, again warning, “if you try to take the law into your own hands and enter [εἰ δὲ ἐκ τῆς αὐτονομίας εἰσελθεῖν βουληθῇς], both I and those who are here with me will immediately leave the place.” This time Leo responded with threats of his own, but according to the Life, Nicholas, τούτοις ἐπακηκοὼς ἔστη μέσον τῶν βασιλικῶν πυλῶν ἄναθδος, μἠτε τὴν εἴσοδον μήτε τὴν ὑποστροφὴν δυνάμενος ποιεῖν. I have deliberately used the Greek text in order to demonstrate the pitfalls of translation. The editor of the Life translates this passage: “he stood in the middle of the royal gates speechless, unable either to go in or make his escape”; but the English edition of Dagron’s Emperor and Priest renders the same passage as “the patriarch stood his ground, saying nothing, in the middle of the Imperial Doors, neither allowing the entry nor withdrawing.”35 The diference in wording is slight, but in tone unmistakable. Should ἄναυδος be rendered “speechless” or “saying nothing”? ὑποστροφὴν “withdrawing” or “escape”? In the one, Nicholas bars the emperor from entering; in the other, he himself is trapped. Without becoming mired in the details of this very tangled afair, it is safe to say that the anonymous author of the Life had no incentive to make Nicholas a hero; his subject, after all, was the man who replaced Nicholas as patriarch after signaling a willingness to overlook Leo’s peccadillo. So KarlinHayter’s translation may be truer to the author’s intent, while Dagron’s does a better job of capturing the signiicance of the moment, and perhaps also Nicholas’s own resolve. In any case, faced with a patriarch who was either heroically barring his way or standing like a deer in the headlights, Leo, like Theodosius, crumbled; and like him, by doing so he restored legitimacy to his reign with a show of 34 35

Karlin-Hayter (1970): 74–5. Karlin-Hayter (1970): 76; Dagron (2003): 108.

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remorse that, as the author of the Life remarks, proved he was a true king, in exactly the same way that republican orators centuries earlier had legitimated their power by characterizing themselves as “slaves of the People.”36 The scene was played once again in 969, when John Tzimiskes was denied entry to Hagia Sophia after the murder of the emperor Nikephoros Phokas, the patriarch Polyeuktos “saying that a person whose hands were still wet from the freshly spilled and still warm blood of a relative [was] unworthy to set foot in the divine temple.” Once again, the emperor yielded to the bishop’s authority.37 These examples suice to show how little use the concept of “Caesaropapism” is as a guide to the working of power in late antiquity. More importantly, they show the importance attached in this period to terrain. Presumably, patriarchs could have stood up to an emperor in the palace or the hippodrome, but they instinctively knew that the place that carried the heaviest symbolic charge, and where they had the greatest leverage, was at the entry to their church, the place where the two topographies of spiritual and imperial power met. Hence the importance also attached to ceremony in this age, for the potential for friction at the border of these two powers could be mitigated by ritual behavior that enacted the passage of imperial power into the realm of spiritual power. Neither East nor West ever succeeded in making the boundary between these two spheres impenetrable, but whereas the West relied on bold statements of episcopal priority such as the Lateran mosaics, the East used the subtler techniques of ritual and ceremony to draw a line, literally. This was the Green Line in Hagia Sophia that separated from the rest of the church the sanctuary that only clergy could enter. Appropriately enough, the line was not concrete but a more elegant substance, marble. When emperor and patriarch processed into the church, they walked together step by step but were irmly placed on opposite sides of this line, which the emperor crossed only to deposit his gifts on the altar, before retiring to his private gallery on the priestly side but separated by a barrier from the inner sanctum. It was a punctilious protocol that recognized the ambiguous role of the emperor as above the laity but not quite equal to the clergy. The rigid protocols surrounding the emperor’s attendance at a liturgy were laid out in Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s Book of Ceremonies. Each step of the emperor’s progress carried a heavy symbolic charge. It began with the arrival of an emissary from the patriarch who laid out the protocols for the day, thereby establishing, in the words of Gilbert Dagron, that “the ceremonial

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I owe this comparison to my colleague Robert Morstein-Marx. For Leo, notice the Life’s language: βασιλικόν τι βασιλικῶς ἐποίησεν. Karlin-Hayter (1970): 77. μὴ ἄξιον εἶναι φήσας ἐπιβῆναι θείναι θείου ναοῦ νεαρῷ καὶ ἀτμίζοντι ἔπι τῷ συγγενικῷ αἵματι σταζομένος τὰς χεῖρας τάς ἔχοντα. Thurn (1973): 285; trans. Dagron (2003): 109.

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11.1. Plan of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, modiied to show the location of the “Beautiful Door” and the Imperial Door in the narthex. From A. D. F. Hamlin, A Textbook of the History of Architecture (New York, 1915), 128, ig. 76.

was regulating an encounter between two powers, each master of its own ground.”38 From here, the emperor would take up a rod believed to be the one Moses used in the desert and the “Cross of Constantine” and rendezvous with soldiers who would accompany him to the Great Church, carrying legionary standards and ensigns. Before leaving the palace, he attended receptions hosted by the circus factions, where he received copies of acclamations shouted in the hippodrome. Upon entering the church by the “Beautiful Door” on the south side of the narthex (above which the mosaic of Constantine and Justinian stood), he would remove his crown in symbolic recognition that he did not rule over this space, and then proceed to meet the patriarch and clergy awaiting him inside (Figure 11.1). Together, they walked to the central Imperial Door, and through the door down an aisle now lined by the standard-bearers and senatorial aristocracy. It was a grand scene.

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Dagron (2003): 90. The outline here summarizes pp. 90–5.

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This attention to minute detail gave patriarchs like Nicholas and Polyeuktos the leverage they needed.The Imperial Door was the point at which Nicholas barred Leo from entering the church. Now, with a better sense of the rules and lourishes that accompanied that meeting, the full impact of his refusal can be weighed. When the patriarch entered the nave and proceeded down the ceremonial line alone, a shock wave must have rippled through the congregation.39 By the time Constantine Porphyrogenitus initiated the compilation of prescriptions for such occasions, the lunette above the Imperial Door had been illed with the image of an emperor, possibly Leo VI himself, prostrating himself before Christ, a reminder to all future emperors of what had transpired at that very spot. Indeed, the asymmetry of the composition, with the space opposite the penitent emperor and beneath the avenging angel unilled, virtually invited subsequent emperors to consider the possibility that their behavior might make them negative exemplars for future ages.40 Such was the power that the conluence of ritual, ceremony, and topography could exercise in a civilization that, as Dagron has observed, was, if nothing else, one “of remembering and commemoration.”41 At this point, it should be clear that “Caesaropapism” is not only an erroneous concept but also a dangerously misleading one. In both East and West, sacrosanctity attached to the oice of Roman emperor. Indeed, it might well be said that antiquity comes to an end not with the recognition of a division between church and state, but when the emperor comes to be seen, and treated, as purely a secular igure. For present purposes, however, another change is more important. As others have noted, the efect of Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s prescriptions in the Book of Ceremonies is to replace particular accounts with generalizations, to the point where oicials are simply not named; symbols have replaced individuals.42 Constantine has been criticized for this trait, but it is of a piece with other trends in these centuries, in art and ceremony, to substitute abstraction for speciics, generalities for particulars: the embodied emperor now stands for victory and empire, regardless of his personal history or performance. This

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Leo himself testiies to the efect in the Life of Euthymius, where the anonymous author has him rebuke Nicholas over the Nativity encounter during a private dinner with the following words: “on which occasion you left us thwarted, humiliated and shamed in the very entrance of the sacred doors, with everybody standing there, both those in holy orders and all the senate” (ὅτε καὶ ἀπράκτους ἡμᾶς τεταπεινωμένως τε καὶ κατῃσχυμμένους ἐποίησας ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ τῶν ἱερῶν πυλῶν εἶσόδῳ, παρεστώτων ἐκεῖσι πάντων, τῶν τε ἐν ἱερῷ βαθμῷ ὄντων καὶ πάσης τῆς ἱεράς συγκλἠτου). Karlin-Hayter (1970): 84–5. A suggestion I owe to John W. I. Lee and Christine Thomas. Dagron (2003): 113. Dagron (2003): 56: “participants are reduced to symbols.”The same point was made earlier by Gagé (1933) and, for art, by L’Orange (1965): 22–3.

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tendency to abstract and universalize provides a bridge for considering the change from polis to oikoumeneˉ. POLIS

to

OIKOUMEN Eˉ

While the excubitors, scholae, and cubicularii faced of in the Great Palace on the night of Justin I’s accession, the people gathered in the hippodrome chanted support for the Senate and called on God to give them a new emperor, for the sake of “the army and the oikoumeneˉ”: τὸν εκ θεοῦ βασιλέα τῷ ἔξερκίτῳ. τὸν ἐκ θεοῦ βασιλέα τῇ οἰκουμένῃ.43 The incident nicely encapsulates the four constituencies – Senate, people, army, and clergy – of a successful emperor. It is noticeable here for another reason, the use of oikoumeneˉ in the chant. The term is of obvious interest for present purposes: Is it a sign that by the sixth century the transition from polis to oikoumeneˉ was complete? Perhaps, but the evidence is mixed. To Hellenophones, the term had multiple meanings, sometimes signifying “the whole world,” other times being used to separate Greek (i.e., “civilized”) lands from “barbarians.”44 And, as Rolf Strootman observed in Chapter 2, claims to universality are a trait of empires from the earliest records in the Near East. From the earliest days of the Roman Empire, Greeks had regularly rendered such acclamations as conservator generis humani as σωτήρ τῆς οἰκουμένης, “savior of the world.”45 Oikoumeneˉ in the chant of 518, then, could have meant nothing more than orbis terrarum, as indeed it is rendered in Niebuhr’s Latin translation,46 echoing the equally well-established Roman claim to rule the whole world. But there is also reason to think some change had indeed taken place. In earlier iterations, when oikoumeneˉ was used as a synonym for imperium, it was modiied by “Roman,” as in ἡ ὑπὸ ῾Ρωμαίων οἰκουμένη (Plut., Pomp. 25), or ἡ ὑπὸ ῾Ρωμαίους οἰκουμένη (Herodion 5.2.2). Even then it was more common to ind Greeks using ἀρχή, βασιλεία, or ἡγεμονία to refer to the empire rather than οἰκουμένη.47 It is hard to be precise when there was no set ceremonial, but some sixty years prior to Justin I, when Leo I became emperor, the cries in the hippodrome still referred to the state as “the republic” (τὸ πρᾶγμα τὸ δημόσιον),48 and Peter the Patrician says that the ceremony on this occasion

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De Caer. 1.93; Dagron (2003): 68. LSJ, 6th ed., 1079, citing Hdt. 4.40, Dem. 85.17, 242.1. Magie (1905): 67. De Caer., 1: 93. Magie (1905): 58, s.v. imperium Romanum. “Hear us, O God, we beseech you; hear us, O God! Let Leo live. Hear us, O God! May Leo be emperor! God, you who love mankind, the republic asks for Leo as emperor. The army asks for Leo as emperor. The laws uphold Leo. The Palace upholds Leo. This is the wish of the Palace. This is the request of the military. This is the wish of the senate. This is the wish

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followed older protocols that were changed when Anastasius succeeded Zeno in 491.49 So it may be that in those sixty years something had happened. That something would likely be the inluence of Christian usage. In patristic literature, οἰκουμένη retains its standard meanings, such as “inhabited earth” and “civilized world,” but even here it starts to fall into a diferent register through association with another word that Christians used to identify themselves, καθολικός, a term whose root meaning of “general” gets transformed through Christian usage to mean “universal” or “worldwide.” The same Theodoret who crafted the story of Ambrose and Theodosius into such an edifying tale used language that was equally instructive when he wrote of “the catholic orthodox church in Constantinople” to which Nestorios was elevated as being “tantamount to the whole oikoumeneˉ” (τῆς κατὰ Κωνσταντινούπολιν τῶν ὀρθοδόξων καθολικής ἐκκλησίας … οὐδὲν ἧττον καί τῆς οἰκουμενῆς ἁπάσης).50 Through such associations oikoumeneˉ becomes synonymous to the adjectival form, oikoumenikos, to mean not just “the whole world” but speciically a Christian world.Theodoret’s passage shows that such associations were already being made no later than the middle of the ifth century. Thus, when the crowd in the hippodrome called for τὸν ἐκ θεοῦ βασιλέα τῇ οἰκουμένῃ, they may have been merely following tradition in using this term for the empire, but by associating their plea not with the emperor, as in classical usage – the despotes or autokrator – but with God, Theos, by which of course they meant their God, the Christian God, they also reveal for us the path whereby polis became oikoumeneˉ.The oikoumeneˉ that replaced the polis was grounded in religious, not civic, identity.51 As Jill Harries shows in her instructive chapter on the way jurists struggled to relate Rome the city to Rome the empire, the sort of conceptual change under consideration here does not come about easily, or all at once. Comparison with our own eforts to come to grips with the limitations of the nation-state is instructive.Western states have organized themselves around the premise of the “nation-state” for roughly the past four hundred years.There is now increasing awareness of the deiciency of this model, on both theoretical and practical grounds (“races” and “ethnicities” are not natural but invented; globalization has created problems that the nation-state cannot address). Increasingly, there

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of the people. The world awaits Leo. The army supports Leo.” De Caer. 1.91, trans. Dagron (2003): 60. καὶ ταῦτα μὲν ἡ ἀρχαιότης, νῦν δὲ ἐπενοήθη …: De Caer. 1.91. Theodoret, Peri Nestoriou, 12. Fowden (1993). Kaldellis (2007): 100–4, argues forcefully that such claims to universalism were rhetorical and had no practical efect on Byzantine behavior or identity. I do not dispute that conclusion with regard to behavior, but when considering identity it should be noted that Kaldellis did not take into account popular participation in such ideology, as expressed in these chants.

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is talk of the need for a “world state.” From the quaintly naive picture of a “global village” that began being painted ifteen or twenty years ago to the more ominous but realistically named discussions about “globalization” that are now taking place, it is increasingly clear that the principal mechanism of political organization that we have used for the past several hundred years is rapidly becoming antiquated.The idea of some sort of entity that would either surmount or replace the nation-state has been around for almost a century, if we regard programs like the League of Nations and United Nations as eforts in that direction. What sort of conceptual shift would it take for us to stop thinking of ourselves as Britons, French, or Americans and instead as Earthians or Terrans? If we follow the analogy, the physical presence of a Roman Empire certainly put the idea of a universal state into play, as the preceding discussion of terminology demonstrated. Similarly, as several authors in this volume have already noted, Christians found that the traditional models were useless for identifying a social grouping such as theirs, which identiied itself not just, like Rome, with a new citizenship, but also a community rooted in a heavenly kingdom. But even with these two powerful motivators, Greco-Roman identity continued to be stuck in the model of the polis, or city-state, created by the Greeks in the irst millennium BCE. For Romans, their empire bore the name of their city, and as Harries observed, this dual usage impeded the conceptual shift, for the city, or polis, remained the organizing principle for Roman thought. When Tacitus, for instance, wanted to highlight diferences between Rome and the Germanic tribes, one of his irst observations was that “they have no cities.” A century later, when a Greek, Aelius Aristides, tried to capture the magniicence of Rome’s accomplishment, all he could say was that “the whole civilized world” now was “one citystate.”52 Finally, and most strikingly, Augustine of Hippo titled the book that ultimately would undermine this concept the City of God, despite abundant Scriptural precedent for thinking of it as the Kingdom of God. These examples represent more than mere verbal artifacts: just as the term “United Nations” shows that we can at present think of a world-state only in terms of an alliance of nation-states, so too does this vocabulary show that ancients could think of their universal state only as a metastasized polis. It was diferent for Christianity. From the start, Christians could not conform to the polis model; they had to ind a diferent way to identify themselves. Much has been written about this question, so there is no need to devote space to it here.53 But we should take note of the confusion Christians generated 52

53

ὑμεῖς ὥσπερ ἐν μιᾷ πόλει πάσῃ τῇ οἰκουμένῃ πολιετυόμενοι. Εἴς ῾Ρώμην 36, Keil (1958), 2: 102. Cf. 61: ὅπερ δὲ πόλις τοῖς αὐτῆς ὀρίοις καὶ χώραις ἐστίν, τοῦθ᾽ ἥδε ἡ πὀλις τῇ πάσῃ οἰκοθμένῃ (2: 108); 65: διὰ γὰρ τὸ κοινήν εἴναι τὴν πολιτείαν καὶ οἷαν πόλεως μίας (2: 109). See, e.g., Johnson (2004); Lieu (1998); Sandwell (2007): esp. 34–59.

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when they represented themselves to the authorities as citizens of “Jerusalem,” as well as Eusebius of Caesarea’s efort in the Praeparatio and Demonstratio Evangelica to separate Christians from both the polis identity of the Greeks and the localism of the Jews.54 Equally important is Eusebius’s frequent theoretical claim that a universal god necessitates a universal empire.55 By late antiquity, this was a criterion that Augustine could use in his conlict with the Donatists: his group was in communion with the ecumenical church; the Donatists were not.56 Universalism had become a marker not only of identity but also of legitimacy. The hippodrome chant in 518 thus marks an important shift in Roman identity, in the course of which the emperor came to be seen as the protector not so much of the Roman patrimony as of the Christian domain.There is no exact moment at which this change occurred; rather, it is best seen as part of a broader trend in late antiquity that has revealed itself during the course of this imaginary shuttle descent: through the idealization of the ruler, the symbolism of ceremony, and the sanctiication of ritual, the ancient mind was trained to read a cosmic understanding into the particulars of life. That singularly anachronistic yet pertinent political Dialogue composed in the age of Justinian provides another indication of this change: in their discussion of human existence, the interlocutors use metaphors of exile and return to a mother city in the heavens. It is a concept rooted for us in the writings of Augustine but for them 54

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Eusebius summarizes his aim at the outset of the Demonstratio Evangelica (DE) in this way: “On the one side I placed the attacks of the polytheistic Gentiles, who accuse us of apostasy from our ancestral gods, and make a great point of the implication, that in recognizing the Hebrew oracles we honour the work of Barbarians more than those of the Greeks. And on the other side I set the accusation of the Jews, in which they claim to be justly incensed against us, because we do not embrace their manner of life, though we make use of their sacred writings. Such being the division, I met the irst so far as I could in my Preparation for the Gospel by allowing that we were originally Greeks, or men of other nations who had absorbed Greek ideas, and enslaved by ancestral ties in the deceits of polytheism.” DE 1.1.10, Farrar (1920). For his views on the limitations of the Temple, DE 1.6–7. See, e.g., his speech to the emperor Constantine, Laus Constantini (LC) 3.6, Drake (1976): 87: “There is One God, not two or three or even more. For strictly speaking, belief in many gods is godless.There is one Sovereign, and His Logos and royal law is one, … the living and actual God the Logos, who directs His Father’s kingdom for all those under and beneath Him.” Cf. LC 10.6, Drake (1976): 102: “Together with those who live in the East, those allotted the West are trained in His teaching at the same moment of time, and with those in the South those allotted the Northern sphere sing out a harmonious strain: to pursue the pious life under the same customs and laws; to praise one God who is over all; to acknowledge one Only Begotten Savior, the cause of all good things; and to recognize also one sovereign, rector of the earth, and his sons beloved of God.” See, e.g., Cont. Pet. 2.37:“For, as a matter of fact, you do not communicate with all the nations of the earth, nor with those Churches which were founded by the labor of the apostles.” King and Hartranft (1887): 538. The term “Donatist” is, of course, not one that the North African church used but a pejorative label applied by opponents like Augustine. See Shaw (2011): 5.

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in the writings of Plato.57 As in the typologizing of emperor and empire, so also the literature, art, and philosophy of the age reveal the heavy value placed on the soul’s longing for return to an eternal world. As in so many other ways, Christianity consolidated as much as it initiated this trend. Our shuttle thus comes to land in a place that was at once sacred and profane. Above all else, the oikoumeneˉ was a Christian world. The end of Roman rule in the West brought with it not just the end of the emperor system, with all of its untidy sacrosanctity, but also the end of a rival oikoumeneˉ. The Lateran mosaics herald both an imperial papacy and the arrival of a single unifying superstructure for the local and regional kingdoms that now provided the only secular government.This relationship continued to characterize “Christendom” in western Europe until the Reformation, with its devastating religious wars, led to the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, an ideological change that facilitated the rise of the nation-state by eliminating the need for a separate religious authority. It goes beyond the charge of this book to consider this change from oikoumenˉe to nation-state. But it is perhaps not so irrelevant to present concerns about the limitations of the nation-state to recognize that two of the three great paradigm shifts in Western identity – from polis to oikoumenˉe and from oikoumenˉe to nationstate – were accompanied, if not caused by, high levels of violence and destruction: the devastating religious wars of the Reformation in the one case, the turmoil associated with the “Fall of the Roman Empire” in the other. The European Union is potentially a model for an alternative and less destructive means to this end. Was there a similar, nonviolent mechanism that helped Romans negotiate this change? This glance at the topographies of power in late antiquity suggests that the eastern Roman Empire may provide a suitable peaceful alternative. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aalders, G. J. D. (1975). Political Thought in Hellenistic Times. Amsterdam. Austin, N. J. E. (1972). “A Usurper’s Claim to Legitimacy: Procopius in A.D. 365/6,” Riv. Stor. dell’Ant. 2: 187–94. Bassett, S. (2004). The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople. Cambridge. Bauer, F. A. (2001). “Urban Space and Ritual: Constantinople in Late Antiquity,” trans. A. M. Yasin and D. Richter, Acta ad archaeologiam et atrium historiam pertinentia 15: 27–61.

57

Bell, P., trans. (2009). Three Political Voices from the Age of Justinian,Translated Texts for Historians, 52. Liverpool. Belting, H. (1978). “Die beiden Palastaulen Leos III. und die Entstehung einer päpstlichen Programmkunst,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 12: 55–83. Béranger, J. (1943).“Le réfus du pouvoir,” Museum Helveticum 5: 178–96. Repr. in F. Paschoud and P. Ducrey, eds., Principatus, études de notions et d’histoire politiques dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine. Geneva. 1975.

O’Meara (2002): 53. For Augustine’s views of empire, I am indebted to a lecture by Gillian Clark, “City and World: Augustine on Empire,” given at the UCLA Conference on Late Antiquity in Spring 2007. On Platonic inluence, see Bell (2009): 54–8.

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Béranger, J. (1964). “Grandeur et servitude du souverain hellénistique,” Études de Lettres (Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Lausanne), 2 ser., 7: 1–14. Béranger, J. (1972). “Julien l’Apostat et l’hérédité du pouvoir impérial,” in A. Alföldi, E. AlföldiRosenbaum, and G. Alföldy, eds., Bonner Historia Augusta Colloquium 1970: 75–93. Boor, C. de, ed. (1903). Constantinus VII Porphyrogenitus: Excerpta de legationibus gentium. Berlin. Bringmann, K. (1993). “The King as Benefactor: Some Remarks on Ideal Kingship in the Age of Hellenism,” in A. Bulloch et al., eds., Images and Ideologies: Self-Deinition in the Hellenistic World: 7–24. Berkeley. Brown, P. R. L. (1992). Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. Madison, Wisc. Caseau, B. (2005). “Parfum et guérison dans les sources patristiques,” in V. Boudon-Millot and B. Pouderon, eds., Les Pères de l’Eglise face à la science médicale de leur temps: [Actes du 3e Colloque d’études patristiques, Paris, 9–11 septembre 2004], Théologie historique, 117:39–63. Paris. Classen, C., et al. (1994). Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. New York. Dagron, G. (1967). “L’Empire romain d’Orient et les traditions politiques de l’Hellenisme: le témoignage de Themistios,” Centre de Recherche d’histoire et civilization byzantines, Travaux et Mémoires 3: 1–242. Paris. Dagron, G. (2003). Emperor and Priest:The Imperial Oice in Byzantium, trans. J. Birrell. Cambridge. Drake, H. A. (1976). In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius’ Tricennial Orations. Berkeley. Drake, H. A. (2011). “Intolerance, Religious Violence and Political Legitimacy in Late Antiquity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79: 193–235. Dvornik, F. (1955). “The Emperor Julian’s ‘Reactionary’ Ideas on Kingship,” in K. Weitzmann, ed., Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of A. M. Friend Jr.: 71–81. Princeton. Farrar, W. J., trans. (1920). Eusebius Pamphili: Proof of the Gospel. London. Fowden, G. (1993). Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Princeton.

Gagé, J. (1933). “Σταυρός νικοποιός, La Victoire impériale dans l’Empire chrétien,” RHPhR 13: 370–400. Gagé, J. (1955). Apollon Romain, Essai sur le culte d’Apollon et le développement du “ritus Graecus” à Rome des origines à Auguste, Bibliothèque des Écoles franç. d’Ath. et de Rome, fasc 182. Paris. Goodenough, E. R. (1928). “The Political Philosophy of Hellenistic Kingship,” Yale Classical Studies 1: 78–83. Goodwin, J. (1999). Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire. New York. Groß-Albenhausen, K. (1999). Imperator christianissimus. Der christliche Kaiser bei Ambrosius und Johannes Chrysostomus, Frankfurter Althistorische Beiträge, Band 3. Frankfurt am Main. Hamilton,W., trans. (1986). Ammianus Marcellinus: The Later Roman Empire, A.D. 354–378. Baltimore. Hammond, M. (1940). “Hellenistic Inluences on the Structure of the Augustan Principate,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 17: 1–25. Harvey, S. (2006). Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 42. Berkeley. Hitti, P. K. (1916). The Origins of the Islamic State, Columbia Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, 68. New York. Hopkins, K. (1963). “Eunuchs in Politics in the Later Roman Empire,” Proc. Camb. Phil. Society 189: 62–80. Johnson, A. (2004). “Identity, Descent, and Polemic: Ethnic Argumentation in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12: 23–56. Kähler, H. (1967). Hagia Sophia, with a Chapter on the Mosaics by Cyril Mango, trans. E. Childs. New York. Kaldellis, A. (2007). Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition. Cambridge. Karlin-Hayter, P., ed. and trans. (1970). Vita Euthymii patriarchae. Brussels. Keil,B.,ed.(1958).AeliiAristidis Smyrnaei,Quae supersunt omnia. Berlin. Originally published 1898. King, J. R., and C. D. Hartranft, trans. (1887). “Augustine, Answer to Letters of Petilian, Bishop of Cirta,” in P. Schaf, ed., A Select

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Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ser. 1, 4:519–628. New York. Lenski, N. (2002). Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A. D. Berkeley. Lieu, J. (1998). “Christian Identity,” Meditarch 11: 71–82. L’Orange, H. P. (1965). Art Forms and Civic Life in the Later Roman Empire. Princeton. Luchterhand, M. (1999). “Famulus Petri, Karl der Grosse in den römischen Mosaikbildern Leos III,” in C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhof , eds., 799, Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit, Karl der Grosse und Papst Leo III, 3:55–70. Mainz. MacCormack, S. (1972).“Change and Continuity in Late Antiquity:The Ceremony of Adventus,” Historia 21: 721–52. MacCormack, S. (1981). Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity. Berkeley. Magie, D. (1905). De Romanorum Iuris Publici Sacrique Vocabulis Sollemnibus in Graecum Sermonem Conversis. Leipzig. Mazzucchi, C. M., ed. and trans. (2002). Menae patricii cum Thoma referendario de scientia politico dialogus. Biblioteca erudita studi e documenti di storia e ilologia, 17. Milan. McCormick, M. (1985). “Analyzing Imperial Ceremonies,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 35: 1–20. McCormick, M. (1986). Eternal Victory:Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West. Cambridge. McCormick, M. (1991). “De Ceremoniis,” in A. Kazhdan, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1:595–7. New York. McLynn, N. (1994). Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. Berkeley. Millar, F. (1977). The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC–AD 337). London. Millar, F. (1984). “State and Subject: The Impact of Monarchy,” in F. Millar and C. Segal, eds., Caesar Augustus: 37–60. Oxford. Murray, O. (1971). “Περί βασιλείας. Studies in the Justiication of Monarchic Power in the Hellenistic World. ” DPhil. Oxford. Noble, T. (2001). “Topography, Celebration, and Power: The Making of a Papal Rome in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries,” in M. de Jong

239 and F. Theuws, eds., Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, Transformation of the Roman World 6:45–91. Leiden. O’Meara, J. D. (2002). “The Justinianic Dialogue ‘On Political Science’ and Its Neoplatonic Sources,” in K. Ierodiakonou, ed., Byzantine Philosophy and Its Sources: 49–62. Oxford. Reiske, J. J., ed. (1829). Constantinus Porphyrogenitus, De ceremoniis aulae Byzantinae. Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, 2 vols. Bonn. Ringrose, K. (1994). “Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium,” in G. Herdt, ed., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History: 85–109. New York. Russell, D. A., and N. G. Wilson, eds. and trans. (1981). Menander Rhetor. Oxford. Sandwell, I. (2007). Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch. Cambridge. Shaw, B. D. (2011). Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge. Steinwenter, A. (1946). “NOMOS EMPSUXOS: Zur Geschichte einer politischen Theorie,” Anzeiger der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch – Historische Klasse 83: 250–68. Stertz, S. A. (1974). “θεία βασιλεία. Hellenistic Theory and the Foundations of Legitimacies, A.D. 270–395.” PhD diss. University of Michigan. Sumi, G. S. (2005). Ceremony and Power: Performing Politics in Rome between Republic and Empire. Ann Arbor. Taussig, M. (1999). Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Palo Alto. Thurn, J., ed. (1973). John Skylitzes: Synopsis Historiarum. Berlin. Tougher, S. (2007). Julian the Apostate. Edinburgh. Wallace-Hadrill, A. (1982). “Civilis Princeps: Between Citizen and King,” JRS 72: 32–48. Weinfeld, M. (1982). “The King as the Servant of the People: The Source of the Idea,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33: 189–94.

POSTSCRIPT: CITIES, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE WORK OF EMPIRE Cliford Ando

For SGM Ecce abstulisti hominem de hac vita, cum vix expleuisset annum in amicitia mea, suavi mihi super omnes suavitates illius vitae meae. Augustine, Conf. 4.4.7

In their splendid introduction, Claudia Rapp and H. A. Drake describe a principal development of the high Roman Empire, in which “membership in a world state, an oikoumeneˉ, replaced the polis as the conceptual framework in which the ancient Mediterranean peoples thought about their relationship to each other.” They conceive this volume as describing this change and inquiring into its efects using three lenses: political thought, social interaction, and legal status.This Postscript inquires into the trajectories of this development in discourse and practice, in order to highlight the achievement of the work in hand and suggest paths of future inquiry. The irst part of this essay poses the question of how the relationship between citizenship, city, and state was reconceived between the late republic and late antiquity. Or perhaps I should say, it seeks to frame that question by inquiring into the shifting meanings of the term civitas, whose metonymic For comments on earlier drafts, my thanks to Ruth Abbey and John Weisweiler. To Hal Drake and Claudia Rapp I owe gratitude not simply for their comments and courtesy along the way, but especially for the invitation that spurred these relections.

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reach in classical Latin extended from “citizenship” to both “city” and “state.” I accomplish this task by asking why an allusion to Cicero using just this language, an allusion recognized and esteemed by its recipient, failed of its purpose. The second part of this essay answers that question not by pointing to “Christianity” but by suggesting that the metonymic reach of the term civitas had shifted under pressure from the structures of empire. Political and practical realities had raced beyond the languages of public law and political theory, and we witness in the early ifth century a failure in communication consequent upon this gap between a normative vocabulary and the worlds it was being called upon to describe. The inal section examines means by which these background understandings of belonging to both city and empire were actualized in spatial and material terms. Following the lead of the irst two sections, I situate a Julio-Claudian ritual in comparative relation to a late ancient one and seek an apparatus by which to make the strikingly similar gestural vocabularies of the two rituals intelligible in a patterned relation of similarity and diference. CIVITAS IN CAELO

from Augustine to Cicero

In the Latinate Roman world, the principal igures in the history of political thought and the primary bookends in any history of citizenship are Cicero and Augustine. Augustine’s readings of Cicero have been the subject of numerous sustained investigations.1 Their separate remarks, and Augustine’s revisions of Cicero, merit study nonetheless, in the special light of this volume’s focus on citizenship and empire. Let me commence by attempting to unpack two moves made by Augustine that are often taken as at once characteristic of his thought and symptomatic of its status as post-classical and Christian. One consists in the insistence that cities (and societies) fail and that such falls need not be grieved, if some members of those societies survive. The other consists in the contrast between a society of the here-and-now, a civitas terrena, and some other in heaven, the civitas in caelo. One reason these distinctions are so often taken as essentially Christian is that they emerge in Augustine’s writings in charged moments of religious argument between pagans and Christians. I take them in turn. Augustine irst articulated – and likely irst formulated – ideas about the ontology and temporality of human societies in the aftermath of the sack of Rome in August 410. In the sermons delivered in the months that followed, Augustine sought repeatedly to draw two distinctions: irst, the urban fabric had been devastated, but many people had been spared; second, the city as a totality of people and buildings had not been destroyed, as had Sodom. 1

For surveys, see Testard (1986–94) and Hagendahl (1967): 1:35–169 and 2:479–588.

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Therefore, he urged, it was more accurate to say that Rome had been punished, or even corrected, not destroyed.The most pithy formulation of the irst distinction is the question, Roma enim quid est, nisi Romani? “What is Rome, if not the Romans?” (Augustine, Serm. 81.9, from 410 or 411). In the longer Sermon on the Sack of the City, Augustine poses the same question in a diferent formulation. Having irst rehearsed a ictive speech of gratitude to God that he attributes to Christians spared in the sack of the city, Augustine asks: Qualis civitas est humilium quae ista dicit? An putatis, fratres, civitatem in parietibus et non in civibus deputandam? (Augustine, Sermo de Excidio Urbis 6) What sort of civitas of the humble is it that says such things? Or perhaps, my brothers, you suppose that a civitas should be regarded as consisting in walls, not citizens?

Later in the same sermon he presses the case, albeit within a specious framework. Having described an earlier event when destruction was foretold for Constantinople, but the city was spared when the pious evacuated and, by that evacuation, displayed their piety, Augustine compares that moment to the withdrawal of an imminent blow when one sees the intended victim cringe. “This is what happened to that civitas.” But what if at that moment when the civitas was abandoned – when the populus universus had left – devastation had befallen that locus, and God had destroyed the entire urbs, like Sodom, with not a single building left standing: who would doubt that God had spared the civitas? For the locus was consumed only after the people were forewarned and terriied and departed and went away.(Augustine, Sermo de Excidio Urbis 8)

Bracket the problems that Rome had not been abandoned and that rape, murder, and enslavement occurred on a vast scale. (The commemorative practices analyzed by Michele Salzman should be understood as consequent upon just these facts.) In this context, what is crucial to observe is Augustine’s manipulation of the term civitas. Its primary meaning is “citizenship” – it is an abstraction from civis, “citizen” – but by metonymies standard already in the late republic it could also mean “citizen body,” which is to say, populus, as well as “city,” namely, urbs.2 Augustine thus exploits the standard metonymic range of civitas, and the cluster of terms and concepts it interanimated, to distinguish a city’s people from its urban structure, city-as-populace from city-as-materialartifact. The distinction between “Rome” and “Romans” drawn in Sermon 81 thus rests upon a conceptual distinction inherent in a classical lexeme and essential to Roman political thought.3 2 3

TLL s.v. civitas (Hey), vol. 3: 1229.40–1240.29. Compare Cicero, Rep. 3.35 Powell: Syracuse may be the most beautiful of all Greek cities, with a splendid citadel, an extraordinary port, wide roads, and so forth, but nothing belonged to the populus and hence there could be no res publica; likewise Athens under the Thirty.

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In so writing, Augustine obviously entertained the possibility of divorcing citizenship from its locus, from those spaces and places where it could be legitimately performed. That said, he did not proceed in any totalizing way to divorce the situation of Christians in the world from the material realities of social, political, and economic conduct in the here and now. On the contrary, he characterized their situation using two vocabularies. First, he described Christians as simply one kind of human being, existing alongside non-Christians, the two populations being thoroughly and completely interpenetrated in the same locales.4 But he also famously exploited the language of the law of persons, so that Christians became alien in respect to this world while they sought citizenship in heaven. “You are aliens in terra who seek citizenship in caelo” (Serm. 81.7).5 We are in the territory charted by the contribution of Claudia Rapp. If something is missing from her elegant survey, it is recognition of two factors that make empires distinctive contexts for citizenship (distinctive not least from the world given normative – and deeply interested – description by the vocabulary analyzed by Josine Blok): irst, political belonging in the context of empire had further gradations between citizen and alien and further axes beyond mere citizenship, not least residence; and, second, that one could be juridically alien in respect to the metropole and citizen of a notionally alien polity and nonetheless a fully governed and contributing subject of imperial rule. That said, Augustine was not the irst to exploit the language of the law of persons to articulate the relationship between deicient populations in this world and their unity under a single and singular divine law in a world beyond some eschaton; nor was he consistent in asserting the radical alienism of Christians in respect to the terrestrial polities of which they were also members; nor was the language of law the only one that he exploited. In what follows, I explore irst the context in which Augustine was provoked to explore the classical roots of these schemata; second, I briely survey the late republican context in which they originated; and, third, I consider varied ways in which the bravura theorizing of citizenship, city, and empire was expanded, extended, revised, and undermined in the centuries between Cicero and Augustine. Augustine delivered his irst substantial (surviving) verdict – and made his irst substantial (surviving) use – of Ciceronian political theory in the letters he exchanged with Nectarius of Calama in 408/9, in the aftermath of a riot in that city.6 The pagan Nectarius was an elderly notable of Calama. He wrote to Augustine after the riot, seeking the bishop’s intercession against a 4

5 6

See, e.g., Serm. 81.3: Mundus malus, mundus bonus: mundus malus, omnes in mundo mali; et mundus bonus, omnes in mundo boni. For an overview, see Lepelley (1986–94); see also Garnsey (2004), 150–5. For the circumstances of the riot, see Shaw (2011): 251–9; on the Augustine-Nectarius correspondence, see MacCormack (1998): 185–7; see also Hanoune (1990) and Bermon 2011.

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heavy-handed response by the state. Nectarius’s letter alluded to Cicero, and Augustine recognized the allusion: “Consider for a moment those books On the Commonwealth, from which you imbibed the disposition of a most devoted citizen, namely, that a good man’s regard for his fatherland has neither limit nor end.”7 Although Augustine’s response is often described as outlining themes of great importance to The City of God, which he started four years later in 412, it is essential to observe that those themes receive articulation in wholly Ciceronian language, without violence to Ciceronian political or metaphysical priorities. This is so at least in part because Augustine slips easily into an apologetic mode, in which he operates principally by citing their own literature against his pagan interlocutors. But one cannot adopt whole cloth another’s language and yet reject the intellectual and philosophical apparatus it animates. Modern scholars of late ancient Christianity often write as if one can. In doing so, they rehearse an ideological claim of providentially minded Christians in antiquity, to the efect that Christianity entered the world from outside and operated exogenously upon the cultures it found there.8 Within such frameworks, Christian intellectuals are endowed with a percipience and self-awareness that enables them wholly to segregate pagan and Christian ideas at some prediscursive level – on the grounds, it is assumed, that these are ontologically alien to one another – despite the embeddedness of those ideas within complex intellectual traditions and their articulation within speciic lexical and discursive systems. One might go further: scholars employing such frameworks treat the history of ideas – and write the lives of intellectuals – as if the life of the mind and the operations of language were susceptible to revolutions of the sort ancients called conversion. Again, this amounts to little more than the naïve rehearsal of the tropes of an ideologically motivated discourse. Scholars of late antiquity would do better to study the interrelated acts of self-deinition and intercommunal diferentiation as historical processes that commenced and continued in conditions of deep sharing and profound sameness. Indeed, it is precisely the very great similarity of one’s deepest opponents that normally motivates discourses of radical alterity. It is more essential to distinguish the potentially same than the radically other: the risk that one might be mistaken for that which one hates is too great to bear. On these issues, historians of Christian late antiquity have much to learn from scholars of Judaism and Islam in the same period.9 7 8

9

Augustine, Ep. 91.3; Cicero, Rep. Testimonium 21 Powell. A view mocked already by Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall, ch. 15:“The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” See, e.g., Boyarin (2004) and Sizgorich (2009); see now Shaw (2011).

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Where the political thought of late ancient Christians is concerned, there is additionally the problem that modern scholars of classical political thought generally shy from metaphysical questions. In consequence, the metaphysical priorities of Ciceronian political theory have received little attention and often go unremarked in modern commentary.This neglect is not acceptable in itself, failing as it does to account for the totality of ancient intellectual projects. But it is particularly damaging to intellectual histories of late antiquity, in which metaphysical issues are so often taken to be sites of diference between the classical and the Christian. When, therefore,Augustine responded to Nectarius by distinguishing between two patriae, one terrena, the other superna, to the former of which we are born bodily, while to the latter we are born by commitment, he made principled claims that Nectarius was able wholeheartedly to endorse.10 In his second letter, Nectarius seized upon those areas of agreement and sought on their basis to persuade Augustine to reconsider the messy, lower-order details regarding the aftermath at Calama about which they disagreed. In doing so, Nectarius assumed the characteristic posture of the pagan (subaltern) reader of Christian apologetic. Augustine had, after all, condemned Nectarius primarily for falling short of true realization of Ciceronian ideals. Nectarius could scarcely be faulted for assuming that an appropriate response would consist in traveling still further down the road already charted, in becoming ever more hard core. He replied, therefore, in hopeful if cringing tones, to the efect that he and Augustine agreed on almost all matters of substance, not least the existence of a caelestis patria, a civitas not encircled by walls but inhabited by god and all worthy souls. When you urged me to attend to our heavenly fatherland, I listened gratefully. For you did not seem to me to speak of a civitas girt by some circuit of walls, or of the worldly one that the treatises of philosophers call common to all, but of that civitas in which the great god and all truly deserving souls reside and dwell: a civitas that all laws seek, by diverse ways and paths, which we cannot describe in speech but perchance can discover in thought.11

On such a foundation, Nectarius urged, he and Augustine could surely ind means for peaceable coexistence. To modern eyes, the allusions to Symmachus in Nectarius’s second letter portend failure and disappointment, and indeed, Augustine responded with petty, petulant sarcasm. How had Nectarius failed to see that Augustine qua Christian did not share his classicizing understanding of citizenship, city, and empire? Beyond the 10

11

Augustine, Ep. 91.1 (supernae … patriae); 91.4 (illi doctissimi viri, qui rem publicam civitatemque terrenam … requirebant vel etiam describebant); 91.6, contrasting haec patria carnalis with the one cui non corpore sed ide nascimur). Nectarius apud Augustine, Ep. 103.2.

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profound and easily underestimated issue of shared language, two substantive problems intervene. First, bracketing for now the evaluative terms of ancient metaphysics (terrena, superna, carnalis), the claim that (nearly) all Roman citizens have two patriae, one material and immediate and the other far of and superordinate if not transcendent, had long since become traditional. In political thought, it had received deinitive articulation in Cicero’s On the Laws. In the conversation that opens the second book, Cicero referred to the land in which he, Quintus, and Atticus walked as his patria, which elicited a question from Atticus: “Have you then two patriae? Or is our communis patria the only one? Unless, that is, you think that Cato’s fatherland was not Rome, but Tusculum?” To which Cicero responded: “Absolutely I think that both he and all other municipal men have two patriae: one by birth, and one by citizenship. … Thus we consider as our patria both the place where we were born, and that place by which we are adopted. But that patria must be preeminent in our afection, in which the name of the res publica signiies the common citizenship of us all. For her it is our duty to die; to her we ought to give our entire selves, and on her altar we ought to place and to dedicate, as it were, all that we possess” (Cicero, Leg. 2.5). The profound commonality of this situation, that after the Social War most Roman citizens traced their origin and domicile to one or another locality but held citizenship in Rome, has already been mentioned by Claudia Moatti, and to it I shall return. The second substantive justiication for Nectarius’s act of recognition in response to Augustine is simply that Augustine’s metaphysical claims, and the language in which they, too, are couched, were profoundly Ciceronian. To vindicate this claim one might have recourse to close reading of the allusions both men make to the dream of Scipio. Such readings have been often performed. But one might also cite the more strictly Stoic language of On the Commonwealth’s third book, as quoted and approved by Lactantius.12 There is one true law, which is right reason consonant with nature, spread through all people, constant and eternal, which summons to duty by its orders and deters from crime by its prohibitions. … There will not be one law at Rome and another at Athens, one now and another later, but all nations at all times will be bound by this one eternal and immutable law. There will be one common teacher, as it were, and commander of all people, god the author, expounder and mover of this law, and the person who does not obey it will be in exile from himself.13

According to Cicero, true law – divine law – is externally existent. That law is not instantiated in the world at present. The primary index of the world’s 12

13

Lactantius, Inst. 6.8.6–9, quoting Cicero rather than speaking himself on the grounds that at this moment Cicero speaks paene divina voce. Cicero, Rep. 3.27 Powell (translated by James E. G. Zetzel, with modiications).

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present deiciency – of its distance from the divine – is its pluralism. At a linguistic and perhaps even a conceptual level, the distance between present inadequacy and transcendent perfection is characterized as temporal: note the shift from emphatic present-tense verbs in irst position (Est quidem vera lex) to futures similarly placed (Nec erit alia lex Romae). The unity of mankind under divine law is thus postponed to some eschatological future. CIVITAS

as Citizenship and as City from Gaius to Tribonian

Six hundred years later, at the twilight of the tale this volume seeks to tell, the coexistence of Athens and Rome as autonomous polities, each with its own body of citizens’ law (ius civile), served a second time as an exemplar of legal pluralism. The occasion was the efort by the jurist Tribonian, in sixth-century Constantinople, to write a new handbook of law to be published over the name of Justinian. That efort commenced in classical terms, with a deinition of “civil law”: The law of the citizen community and the law of nations are distinguished as follows: all peoples who are ruled by laws and customs use partly their own law and partly a law common to all human beings. The law that each people makes for itself is the law of that civitas and is called ius civile. The law that natural reason has established among all human beings, which is preserved among all peoples equally, is called the law of nations, being as it were the law all nations use. … A ius civile is named after its particular citizen body (sed ius quidem civile ex unaquaque civitate appellatur), for example, that of the Athenians. Hence, if one wanted to name the laws of Solon or Draco the ius civile of the Athenians, he would not err. Likewise we call the law used by the populus Romanus the ius civile of the Romans. (Justinian, Institutes 1.2.1)

Tribonian here adapts the rather more elegant formulation of Gaius, Institutes 1.1, who ofered no such examples – this, despite the fact that other bodies of citizens’ law existed in Gaius’s day but not in Tribonian’s. It seems therefore all the more likely that the formulation in Justinian’s Institutes relects the inluence of Cicero as theorist of law, nor would this be the only such instance of Ciceronian inluence on the works written and supervised by Tribonian.14 There is, of course, a substantial historical irony in Tribonian’s formulation, which is that, with the extension of Roman citizenship to nearly all freeborn residents of the empire in 212 CE, the separate civil laws of the empire had ceased in theory to exist. That in practice many preexistent situations were grandfathered in, and many local customs were eventually granted recognition as norms – that, in essence, within many of the empire’s semiautonomous 14

For a related inquiry, see Ando (2008): 59–92.

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social ields one or another form of pluralism continued to obtain – is not at all surprising, and Caroline Humfress does ine work in reminding us of this fact and suggesting some contours for its future study.15 That said, Gaius’s deinition of ius civile merits close reading, for the distance traveled between his world and that of Tribonian is very much the journey mapped by this volume. The law that each people establishes for itself is peculiar to it, and is called “civil law” (ius civile), being, as it were, the special law of that civitas, that community of citizens, while the law that natural reason establishes among all human beings is followed by all peoples alike, and is called ius gentium, being, as it were, the law observed by all peoples.(Gaius, Institutes 1.1)

On one level, Gaius employs the term civitas as a metonym for populus, citizen body, community of citizens, or polity. On that level, he understands all political communities to make their own law, even as he understands the Roman world to be tessellated into so many civitates, so many subordinate, autonomous polities. The hard work in his deinition is thus performed by the distributive and relexives “each” and “for itself ”: the term “civil law” denotes those bodies of law that each political community makes for itself. (The tight nexus here obtaining between civitas as citizenship and civitas as metonym for political community recalls the power “citizenship” played in theories of belonging in discourses outside the state that Claudia Rapp so ably describes.)16 On this reading, in his theory of civil law Gaius articulates a fundamental constituent of empire as a political form. Empires govern through the cultivation and management of diference. (Precisely this understanding of empires as universal in reach but internally heterogeneous underlies the ideologies analyzed by Rolf Strootman.) At the level of law and administration, ancient empires actualized such theory by interpellating subaltern populations, which had purely bilateral relations with the metropole but no public law relations with each other; they were thus rived, one from another, with few institutional loci around which relations of solidarity against the metropole might develop. Indeed, in his assertion that the separate civil laws of the empire existed in purely parallel, nonhierarchical relation to one another, Gaius characterizes the legal pluralism of the Roman Empire as radical, indeed. We may now appreciate somewhat more clearly the power of the movement mapped by Rapp and Drake in their introduction, and remarked by Bryan Ward-Perkins, by which the notionally unitary state of the fourth century arose from the systemically pluralist empire of the second.

15 16

See also Ando (2011a): 19–36 (a chapter also named “Law’s Empire”); see also Ando (2014). See also Ando (forthcoming).

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That said, we should beware adhering too closely to the processualist impulse of the legal historian. Rome as metropolitan power – Rome as juridical center – was bounded neither in space by its own laws on procedure (which inter alia restricted the use of select procedures to the city of Rome itself) nor in jurisdiction by the notional restriction of its legal forms to Roman citizens. In his deinition of ius civile, Gaius would have us believe that the primary vehicle for legal change was the extension of citizenship – a claim already destabilized in his day by the practices of empire, of which fact Gaius was nascently aware, as Jill Harries ably shows. But in fact, there is every reason to believe that nonRoman legal systems within the empire felt considerable pressure to reconstitute and reorganize themselves, at the levels of both principle and procedure, in homology with Roman norms.17 Such change constitutes an important counterweight to the history of persistent pluralism after the Antonine Constitution charted by Humfress. It should also be understood as an efect of empire, one by which Rome undermined its own principled commitment to pluralism. On this understanding, pluralism should be understood as the essence of empire as political form, but eradication of pluralism – through rationalization, standardization, or reorientation – a necessary efect of empire as form of power.18 In short, to survive, empires must self-subvert, which process must end in self-willed destruction and loss of empire or self-abnegation and evolution to some other form. On another level, we might understand Gaius to employ civitas to refer also to cities.That is to say, he is overwhelmingly likely to have assumed that legally articulated political communities would reside in nucleated settlements with monumentalized cores. (In linguistic or cognitive terms, we might say that the range of meanings interanimated by the lexeme were nearly always multiply operational.) Political communities, civitates, were understood in Roman political, legal, and administrative thought to function as nodal points for regional economic exchange and social and legal relations. Villages in the hinterlands of such cities were administratively subordinated to those cities; and to them villagers were expected to repair for the settlement of disputes and conduct of legal relations.19 In the classical period, cities and villages were expected to coordinate in the extraction of agricultural surplus from their hinterlands – to give the process an overly modern lavor – and the repair of public conveniences, especially roads. Several related consequences of importance to this volume follow from these observations. First, the classical city of the Roman period was a fundamental 17

18 19

See Ando (2012a). Ando (2012b): 76–99 covers much the same ground but in English, with somewhat broader conceptual and chronological parameters but less detailed consideration of primary documents. Burton (2002); Ando (2006): 184–5; see also Burton (1998). Ando (2011b); see also Ando (2012c).

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product, as well as an essential instrument, of empire. Indeed, the growing urbanism of empire overall was taken as a principal index of its success and, indeed, of its legitimacy.20 Second, the intentional exploitation of the built environment of cities to house the depersonalized institutions that instantiated Roman power in provincial landscapes was instrumental to the functioning of those cities as nodal points for the transmission of metropolitan culture. Third, the conceptualization of two-dimensional space – of routes and journeys – by means of itineraries, so nicely described by Emily Albu, should be understood as having a corollary in the imagining of regional, provincial, and imperial landscapes through cities and their hinterlands. One might imagine that the grant of universal citizenship did pave, or might have paved, or could have paved, the way to a diminishing of the importance of cities in the late ancient governmental imaginary. Civitates no longer being loci for speciic, separate juridically constituted populations – which is to say, cities no longer having separate citizenships or, for that matter, their own iura civilia – some of their role in the imagining of the landscape of empire must have faded away. But in light of the considerations just noted regarding the role of cities in the practice of government, it is hard to see how an ancient empire, or even an ancient state, without cities would have functioned. To assess this problem of practice, let us consider the history of urbanism that oicial documents of early late antiquity might permit to tell. We might start by considering late ancient petitions for city status, both that from Orcistus in Phrygia under Constantine cited by Rapp and Drake and that by Tymandus in Pisidia under the Tetrarchs.21 In both cases, the communities sought the “status and rank of civitas,” as it is named in the text from Tymandus. The two petitions were received with enthusiasm because the emperors in both cases desired that urban life should lourish: We observe that the citizens of Tymandus wish with an especial longing, even with the highest zeal, that they may obtain at our bidding the status and rank of civitas, dearest Lepidus. Therefore, since it is inborn in us to desire that throughout this our entire world the dignity and number of civitates should increase, and since we observe that these people are extremely eager to obtain the title and honor of civitas … grants are received with enthusiasm by the emperors. (lines 3–12; trans. after Ancient Roman Statutes) The inhabitants of Orcistus, already now a town and civitas, have furnished a pleasant subject for our Muniicence, dearest and most agreeable 20 21

Ando (2012c): 114–16; see also Ando (2012b): 176–200. Orcistus: Abbott and Johnson no. 154 = HD048607 = Chastagnol (1981) = Kolb (1993); Tymandus: Abbott and Johnson no. 151 = Bru, Labarre, and Özsait (2009).

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Ablabius. For to us, who desire to found new urbes or to perfect ancient ones or to restore decayed ones, this petition is most acceptable. (col. 1, lines 9–16; trans. Ancient Roman Statutes)

The more complete dossier from Orcistus provides considerable further information of relevance to this essay. On the one hand, possessing a signiicant part of the original petition from Orcistus, we can see the extent to which the reply echoes the petition. This is to be expected in bureaucratic enterprises, of course, but it is also signiicant testimony to the luency of the original text: it is because Orcistus knew what language to supply that the imperial administration received the petition with enthusiasm and rehearsed its language in its response. And on the other, the community based its petition in large measure upon its embeddedness within the material infrastructure of the region and the patterns of social and economic conduct that made civitates essential to empire. To quote the letter of Constantine: For so suitable in site and character is said to be the place, that from four directions come together just as many roads, by virtue of which this may be said to be an advantageous and convenient stopping place for all public oicials.There are there abundant streams of water, also their public and private baths, a forum adorned with statues of old-time leading men … (col. 1, lines 20–27; trans. Ancient Roman Statutes)

The petition of Orcistus had spoken in greater detail than Constantine employs in his reply, though he treats all the same topics: the Orcistans observed that their land is located in the middle of the border of Galatia, and they named the next cities along each road leading out of their own, along with the distance to each. The two surviving distances are each thirty miles (col. 2, lines 26–33). Imperial and provincial authorities had long taken care not to allow periodic markets in too close geographic and chronological proximity to each other, and it may well be that some middling distance like thirty miles was felt appropriate between civitates in this region. A similar concern at a material level for the support of civitates is on display in the remarkable letter from 371 CE of the emperors Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian to the proconsular governor of Asia, Eutropius, which directed revenues from imperial estates to the support of cities. The history of the scheme, and the scheme itself, involve complexities that are not relevant here. What is crucial is the very general and generous support expressed by the emperors for urban life: Inasmuch as we have allowed, in very truth, various civitates to reap a rich reward from our Liberality by assigning to each several city (ad singulas urbes) for the repair of its urban fabric a set portion of the estimated yield … from the revenues of the private imperial estates in Asia: you report that by means of this new support they are rising from the unsightly

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desolation of recent ruins to their ancient aspect, as beits the felicity of our times.(HD021695 lines 2–5;22 trans. Ancient Roman Statutes)

In both language and substance, this text displays great continuity with the praises of urbanism in the Tetrarchic and Constantinian documents. Latent here, however, is a potential slippage between some conception of civitates as autonomous political communities, with their own determinate form of selflourishing, and urbes, mere agglomerations of buildings, no more and no less than aggregations of persons and material infrastructure, which exist merely in contribution to some imperial whole. One does not want to overemphasize minor points of diction, or overanalyze possible changes in valence on the basis of small samples or single texts. What is more, as Claudia Rapp reminds us, in 371 a long time yet remained before municipalities were robbed of their role in imperial tax collection, by which act the function of civitates in the pragmatics of empire was diminished and the degree of arbitrary power of local governing elites over their communities was reduced.23 Nonetheless, it is here, in oicial language, that the varied concerns of this book ind conjoined articulation. Any pressure to disarticulate the concepts of civitas-as-citizenship from that of civitas-as-city, such that the one concept could be invoked without (strongly) activating the latter, can help to explain how Augustine used such thoroughly Ciceronian language and yet understood himself to be giving voice to a quite diferent set of priorities. That said, the explanation adumbrated here diminishes Augustine’s achievement in subtle but important ways. Crucially, I disallow the possibility that this divorce between citizenship-cum-transcendent juridical concept and city-asmaterial particularity was the work of Augustine himself. The elevation of the former to transcendent status was, rather, the work of empire, even as the de facto reduction of civitates from autonomous political communities to mere municipalities was an essential and unavoidable side efect of the universal grant of citizenship. I stress again that I am not claiming that the Antonine Constitution worked such a revolution overnight. The pragmatics of ancient politics and the conservatism of the language of public law – which conceived of communities of Roman cities as somehow having res publica separate from that of the Roman state – resisted such a revolution. Nonetheless, the steady

22

23

Bruns 97 = Abbott and Johnson no. 157 = FIRA 108 = I. Ephesos no. 42. On this text, see Chastagnol (1986) and Lenski (2002): 295–6. That said, the history of taxation, and of the role of cities and civic elites in collecting taxes, is more complex than Rapp’s remark allows. What is more, as Bransbourg (2008) shows, the shift in law and practice in taxation did not issue in a single or monolithic transfer of power from local landed elites to central government. Bransbourg shows inter alia how members of local landed elites, in particular those bearing imperial titles (as he sees it), which is to say, those with regular access to gold coin (as Banaji might say), often emerged in the second quarter of the ifth century with their power enhanced.

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stream of remarks by jurists and rhetoricians alike, insisting that cities had once had their own law but later did not, indicates a more-than-incipient awareness that the world post Caracalla was other than it had been before. What is more, it is crucial at this juncture to recall that distinguishing between civitates as political communities resident in cities and mere aggregations of human beings resident in urbes had long been a concern of Roman politics and political theory. Cicero, for example, had imagined the punishment of Capua after the Hannibalic war as having consisted in depriving the community of “magistrates, senate and public debate,” in short, in leaving it imaginem rei publicae nullam. “For they saw that if any trace of res publica were contained within its walls, the urbs might ofer a home to empire.”24 Such imaginings were not neutral acts: they occurred in contexts of punishment. The reduction of civitas to urbs was even then a profoundly imperial act. If in the early empire it was an act of imperial power, in the late empire it was an efect of imperial governance.

An Empire of

URBES

The importance of roads and connectivity in the Orcistan petition to Constantine directs our attention to the problems of topography and the movement of peoples, and in particular the coordinated and ritualized movement of populations, which recur in diferent guises as foci of analysis in the chapters of Ward-Perkins, Moatti, Elm, and Drake. At stake in their chapters are such issues as the construction of social and religious authority within urban landscapes, the role of built environments in those constructions, and the performance of those interpellative acts whereby the distance between local and imperial was momentarily collapsed. In many respects, these acts, too, have roots and analogs in the early Principate, of which I take up one by way of paradeigma. The importance of the city of Lavinium in Roman myth and ritual before the age of Augustus is largely beyond recall. Commencing in the age of Augustus, however, the city of Lavinium as a foundation of Aeneas and one-time home of the Roman people received greater and greater prominence in myth, ritual, and politics. Indeed, both the city of Lavinium and its epigraphy are almost wholly the creation of the late Julio-Claudian period and beyond, with the bulk of building completed under the Antonines and Severans. The epigraphy encompasses nearly all surviving evidence for those supposedly ancient priesthoods and institutions that notionally preigured those of Rome and which served earlier scholars as evidence for the ancientness of the ties between the two communities: the irst pater patratus of the Lavinian people and priest of 24

Cicero, Leg. Agr. 1.19 and 2.87–88, on which see Ando (2012c): 112–15.

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the rites of Roman origins is in fact attested only under Claudius.25 Likewise, the ritual whereby the consuls assumed oice could occur only after they departed Rome itself, sacriiced at Lavinium, and returned to the city. How is one to explain these developments? The huge prominence of Lavinium long after the Julio-Claudians had passed away requires that we seek some explanation beyond the obvious one, namely, the importance of the Trojan legend to Augustan ideology. The best explanation is that ofered by Yan Thomas and John Scheid in splendid essays from the early 1990s.26 The need for the consuls-elect to leave Rome before they could enter both it and oice in the same ritual motion served to enact and recall the imbricated origins of the Roman people:Trojan by ancestry, Italic by domicile, and Roman by foundation and citizenship. In this way, the history of some historical version of the Roman people might stand in typological relation to any present one, in which most people traced their origo, their ancestry as a matter of legal fact, to one or another city of the empire, but held citizenship in Rome, a city they might never see. The ritual importance of Lavinium should thus be understood as articulating at a material level the interpellation of local and metropolitan given discursive articulation by Cicero when he assigned to all citizens two patriae. A late ancient analog to the return of the consuls from Lavinium might be the imperial arrival. In most accounts of adventus, the ritual is understood to divide and reconstitute the people as collective, even as it overlaid the victorious, imperial, and transcendent upon the local, historical, and particular. In this latter scheme, the city of an emperor’s arrival exists in bilateral relation with some real or imagined metropole.27 But the passage of the consuls to Lavinium and back reminds us that arrivals were always arrivals from somewhere, even as in local perspective – the perspective of Orcistus, for example – roads are always roads to somewhere, even to Rome. Early imperial triumphal entries into cities outside Rome, like late ancient arrivals, must have been understood as iterated events, which linked cities to capital, to be sure, but also cities to each other through movements in imperial space. It is just this understanding that sustained the meaningfulness of adventus as a topos of late ancient rhetoric, even when what was described was an arrival elsewhere, as Susanna Elm so nicely shows. This postscript has followed a trajectory not unlike that charted in the chapter by Hal Drake, commencing in the rareied ether of theoretical discourse and landing in the hard, gritty pavement of Roman roads, traversing the oikoumeneˉ from civitas to civitas. I have tried to ofer shifting perspectives on the arguments 25 26

27

ILS 5004. Thomas (1996): 133–79, an essay irst published in 1990; and Scheid (2003), an essay irst published (in French) in 1993. For such a reading, building on others, see the chapter by Hal Drake.

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of this splendid volume, of two kinds above all. First, I have suggested ways in which the problems and solutions of imperial politics in late antiquity were anticipated or preigured in the late republic and early Principate. In doing so I hope to have drawn varied problems of both history and method into sharper focus. Second, I have tried to provide a causal dimension to the argument of the book as a whole, to address the paradoxical question how an empire that governed through civitates can be understood ultimately to have dispensed with them. In closing, let me add that classicizing answers, which is to say, answers grounded in the political, sociological, and anthropological awareness of ancient texts will get us only so far. In focusing on political communities and categories of public law, this volume – and this essay – have largely dispensed with the history of subjectivity, or what scholars of religion might call the history of individualization, or historians of politics might call the gradual atomization of individuals as subjects of law. We have further not engaged the most important change in the history of social power in late antiquity, namely, the co-optation of nonstatal forms of social dependency in service of state interest.28 Nor have we drawn in any signiicant way on nontextual evidence, especially statuary, which the researches of R. R. R. Smith and John Weisweiler have shown to be central to any robust consideration of the self-fashioning of elites and their claiming of status as an elite on the stage of the late ancient city.29 May this volume serve as an elegant and learned invitation to that work. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, F. F., and A. C. Johnson. (1926). Municipal Administration in the Roman Empire. Princeton. Ando, C. (2006). “The Administration of the Provinces,” in D. S. Potter, ed., A Companion to the Roman Empire: 177–92. Oxford. Ando, C. (2008). The Matter of the Gods. Berkeley. Ando, C. (2011a). Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition. Philadelphia. Ando, C. (2011b). “Law and the Landscape of Empire,” in S. Benoist and A. Daguey-Gagey, eds., Figures d’empire, fragments de mémoire: Pouvoirs (pratiques et discours, images et représentations), et identités (sociales et religieuses) dans le monde romain impérial (Ier s. av J.-C. –Ve s. ap. J.-C.): 25–47. Paris.

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Ando, C. (2012a). “Pluralisme juridique et l’intégration de l’empire,” in S. Benoist, S. Demougin, and G. de Kleijn, eds., Les voies de l’intégration à Rome et dans le monde romain: 5–19. Leiden. Ando, C. (2012b). Imperial Rome, AD 193 to 284: The Critical Century. Edinburgh. Ando, C. (2012c). “The Roman City in the Roman Period,” in S. Benoist, ed., Rome, a City and Its Empire in Perspective: The Impact of the Roman World through Fergus Millar’s Research. Rome, une cité impériale en jeu: l’impact du monde romain selon Fergus Millar: 109–124. Leiden. Ando, C. (2013). Religion et gouvernement dans l’Empire romain. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études. Turnhout.

Ando (2013) attempts to sketch the problematics of these latter two topics. Smith (2008); see also Smith (1999); Weisweiler (2012).

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Ando, C. (2014). “Pluralism and Empire, from Rome to Robert Cover,” in A. C. Johnson, P. R. Coleman-Norton, and F. C. Bourne, eds., Ancient Roman Statutes. Austin. Ando, C. (forthcoming). “Religious Ailiation and Political Belonging from Caracalla to Theodosius.” Bermon, E. (2011). “Le songe du Scipion dans la correspondence entre Saint Augustin et Nectarius de Calama (Ep. 90–91; 103–104),” Les Études philosophiques 99: 521–42. Boyarin, D. (2004). Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia. Bransbourg, G. (2008). “Fiscalité impériale et inances municipales au IVe siècle,” Antiquité tardive 16: 255–96. Brown, P. (2000). Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley. Originally published 1967. Bru, H., G. Labarre, and M. Özsait. (2009). “La constitution civique de Tymandos,” Anatolia Antiqua 17: 187–207. Burton, G. P. (1998). “Was There a Long-Term Trend to Centralisation of Authority in the Roman Empire?,” Revue de philologie 72: 7–24. Burton, G. P. (2002).“The Roman Imperial State (A.D. 14–235): Evidence and Reality,” Chiron 32: 249–280. Chastagnol, A. (1981). “L’inscription Constantinienne d’Orcistus,” MÉFR 93: 381–416. Chastagnol, A. (1986). “La législation sur les biens des villes au IVe siècle à la lumière d’une inscription d’Éphèse,” in VI Convegno internazionale dell’Accademia romanistica constantiniana: 76–104. Perugia. Garnsey, P. (2004). “Roman Citizenship and Roman Law in the Late Empire,” in S. Swain and M. Edwards, eds., Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire: 133–55. Oxford. Hagendahl, H. (1967). Augustine and the Latin Classics. Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 20. Göteborg. Hanoune, R. (1990). “Le paganisme philosophique de l’aristocratie municipale,” in L’Afrique dans l’Occident romain, Ier siècle av. J.-C.–IVe siècle ap. J.-C. Actes du colloque organisé

par l’Ecole française de Rome sous le patronage de l’Institut national d’archéologie et d’art de Tunis, Rome, 3–5 décembre 1987: 63–75. Rome. Kolb, F. (1993). “Bemerkungen zur urbanen Ausstattung von Städten im Westen und im Osten des Römischen Reiches ahand von Tacitus, Agricola 21 und der Konstantinischen Inschrift von Orkistos,” Klio 75: 321–341. Lenski, N. (2002). Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD. Berkeley. Lepelley, C. (1986–94).“Ciuis, ciuitas,” in C. Mayer, ed., Augustinus-Lexikon, 1:942–57. Basel. MacCormack, S. (1998). The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine. Berkeley. MacCormack, S. (2013). “Cicero in Late Antiquity,” in C. Steel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Cicero: 251–305. Cambridge. Scheid, J. (2003).“Cults, Myths and Politics at the Beginning of the Empire,” trans. P. Purchase, in C. Ando, ed., Roman Religion: 117–38. Edinburgh. Shaw, B. (2011). Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge. Sizgorich, T. N. (2009). Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam. Philadelphia. Smith, R. R. R. (1999). “Late Antique Portraits in a Public Context: Honoriic Statuary at Aphrodisias in Caria, AD 300–600,” Journal of Roman Studies 99: 155–89. Smith, R. R. R. (2008). “Sarcophagi and Roman Citizenship,” in C. Ratté and R. R. R. Smith, eds., Aphrodisias Papers 4: New Research on the City and its Monuments: 347–94. Providence. Testard, M. (1986–94). “Cicero,” in C. Mayer, ed., Augustinus-Lexikon, 1: 913–30. Basel. Thomas, Y. (1996). “Origine” et “commune patrie.” Étude de droit public romain (89 av. J.-C.–212 ap. J.-C.). Rome. Weisweiler, J. (2012). “Honoriic statues, Imperial Power and Senatorial Identity in LateAntique Rome,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 25: 319–50.

INDEX

Achaemenid Empire, 53 and universalism, 42 actions, legal, 66, 73 Adad-nirani I, 40–1 adiectio, 70–4, 148 adlectio, 146 Adriatic Sea, 203 adscriptio, 142 adventus, 180, 221–2, 254 in Gregory of Nazianzus, 175 as topos, 254 Aelius Aristides, 235 Aemilius Probus, 209 Aeneas, 75, 76 Aeneid, 205, 207. See also Aeneas Shield of Aeneas, 205 Aeschylus Agamemnon, 25 Prometheus Vinctus, 25 Suppliants, 29 Agathocles, 43 Agrippa, 209 Alaric, 158, 160, 185 Alexander III (Alexander the Great), 44–5 and Darius III, 39, 43, 45 titles, 45 Alfenus Varus, jurist, 132–3 Altar of Victory, 209 Amarna letters, 41 Ambrose of Milan, 189 Life of Ambrose, 159 and Theodosius I, 189, 228 Ammianus Marcellinus, 119, 120, 221, 223, 224 Anastasius I, emperor I, 217–18, 234 Anthesteria, festival (Choes), 27 Antigonus I Monophthalmus, 43, 46, 52 Antigonus II Gonatas, 51 Antioch, 92, 112, 113, 178

as imperial residence, 116 and Symeon Stylites, 158, 165 Antiochus I Soter, 46, 51 Antiochus III the Great, 46 Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 46, 50, 158 Antiochus VIII, 49 Antiphon, 21 Antistius Labeo, 69, 133 Antonine Constitution, 8, 9, 87–8, 125, 249, 252 Antoninus Pius, emperor, 69 Apollo. See also Homeric hymns and Seleucids, 49, 52 temple at Daphne, 178 Aponius Cherea, Lucius, 147 Apostolic Constitutions, 162 Appian, 48, 49 Appius Claudius Caecus and Via Appia, 203 Apuleius, 78 Ara Pacis, 205 Arcadius, emperor, 109, 123, 187 Aristophanes Lysistrata, 26 Aristotle Politics, 1, 15 Arminius, 125 Assyrian royal inscriptions, 40, 41–2, 49 Ateius Capito, consul, 70 Athanasius, bishop adventus at Alexandria, 174 funeral oration for, 171, 172 as ideal ruler, 174 Life of Anthony, 163–4 Athenaeus, 79 Athens, 15, 28 Aelius Aristides on, 81 and dual citizenship, 132

257

258

I NDE X

Athens (cont.) and Hellenistic kings, 55 inscriptions in, 22 and ius civile, 65, 247 plague in, 30 polis structure of, 6 religious foundation of, 34 Solon’s reforms, 76 Attalus I, 51 Atticus, 132, 246 Attila, 193, 197 Augustan History, 189 Augustine, 144, 208, 241, 245, 252 City of God, 4, 62, 160, 198, 235 and Donatists, 236 on Visigothic Sack of Rome (410), 185, 194, 198, 241 Augustodunum (Autun), 113, 208 Augustus, emperor, 7, 66, 148, 203, 205, 209, 220, 253 Primaporta statue of, 205 Aulus Gellius, 69 Aurelian, emperor, 183 Ausonius, 126 Autun. See Augustodunum Babatha archive, 97–8 Babylon, 46, 48, 55 in Revelation, 156 Bacaudae, 126 baptism baptismal sponsor, 161–2 catechetical homilies, 160–1 Basil of Caesarea and cities, 161 homily on baptism, 161 basileus megas as title, 46 as victory title, 48 basilikos logos, 82. See also encomium; speeches in praise Beatus maps, 210–11 Beatus of Liébana, 210 Beaucamp, Joelle, 92 Beck, Ulrich, 131 Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, 94, 98 Benton, Laura, 97 Besa, Coptic author, 164 Bible. See Hebrew Bible; Scripture

bishop and civic calendar, 184 and civic elite, 184 education of, 154 rise of, 5, 10, 183, 189 bishops councils of, 120 Book of Ceremonies, 217, 232 Boscoreale Cup, 206 Boudicca, 125 bouleˉ. See city council Britain, 113, 119, 121–2, 125, 126, 147, 212 Brodersen, Kai, 204 Brundisium, 203 Byzantium hagiographical literature, 163 caelestis patria, 245 Caesar, C. Julius, 132, 205 lex Iulia, 66 Caesaropapism, 225, 227, 230, 232 Callimachus, 47 Aitia, 50 Hymn to Delos, 47, 50 Hymn to Zeus, 50 Capua, 203, 253 Caracalla, 9, 87, 88, 110, 135, 149. See also Antonine Constitution and citizenship, 89 and domicile, 148 Carolingians, 110, 112 and Peutinger map, 212–13 Carthage, fall of, 191 Cassius Longinus, C., jurist, 68 Celsus, jurist on domus, 134 Celtiberians, 125 Celts, 51 center-periphery model, 8, 130 centuriation, 203 ceremony, 232 Charlemagne, 211 on Lateran mosaic, 226 and maps, 211 Chronicon Paschale, 187 Chrysippus, philosopher, 66 Chrysostom, John, bishop, 157, 160, 187, 228 churches as ekklesia, 162 Hagia Sophia, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231

259

I NDEX

Holy Sepulcher, 117 Lateran, 225, 226, 237 San Vitale, 122 St. Peter in Chains, 196 St. Peter’s, 197 Cicero, 63, 75, 81, 132, 150, 219, 241, 244, 246, 247, 253, 254 on Hermodorus, 77 and maps, 204 Pro Murena, 68 citizenship Christian in Epistle to Diognetus, 159 formulae for, 16 idea of, 63 legal types, 134 in Scripture, 156 city. See also polis in Augustine, 242 as basis for empire, 85 Biblical notion of, 157 changes in, 243 Christian, 169 as community, 159 concept of, 62, 205, 235, 240 dual meanings, 137 heavenly, 156 imagery of, 155 in New Testament, 156 and monasticism, 164 as organization, 163 and polis, 2 and politeia, 163 security of, 183 city council (bouleˉ, curia), 86, 143, 144, 155 end of, 155 civitas, 62, 63, 64, 78, 146 in Augustine, 242 civis Romanus, 63 as metonym, 240, 248 Cleopatra VII Philopator, 47 Codex Iustinianus, 63, 162 Codex Theodosianus, 84, 113 Constans, emperor, 110 Constantine I the Great, 2, 9, 111, 117, 142, 153, 188, 189, 225, 226, 231 on “Beautiful Door,” 226 buildings in Rome, 118 and civitas, 251 Life of Constantine, 2

rescript on residence, 144 Constantine II, emperor, 110, 120 Constantine Porphyrogenitus Book of Ceremonies, 218, 230 Constantinople, 9, 101, 113, 120, 122, 169, 180, 187, 189, 210, 222, 223 in Augustine, 242 in ifth century, 123–4 as imperial residence, 116 as New Rome, 116 Constantius II, emperor, 110, 112, 189 adventus and visit to Rome, 120, 221 and Arian heresy, 121 obelisk in Rome, 118 Constitutio Antoniniana. See Antonine Constitution converts, growth in numbers, 154 Cornelius Nepos, 132 Corpus Agrimensorum, 203 Corpus Iuris Civilis, 63 Cosmas Indicopleustes (World Sailor to India), 208 cosmopolis, Christian, 10, 199 cosmopolitanism versus “cosmopolitization,” 131 cosmopolites and Christianity, 167 cosmopolitization, 145 deined, 131 and empire, 145–7 and mobility, 149 covenant and adventus, 222 in Greek polis, 33–4 in Hebrew Bible, 33, 178 Crook, John, 89 cubicularii, 217, 223, 233 curia. See city council Cyprian, bishop, 94 eulogy of, 171 Dagron, Gilbert, 222, 227, 229, 230, 232 Darius I the Great, 42 Behistun inscription, 42 Darius III, 39, 43, 45 defensor civitatis, 86, 155 Delphi, 28, 32 Demaratus of Corinth, 76

260

I NDE X

Demetrius I Poliorcetes, 43, 51–2 Demetrius II Nicator, 47 Demodamas of Miletus, 49 Demophilus, bishop, 170, 172 Demosthenes, 22, 27–8, 31–2 Didymos, 28 Digest, of Justinian, 62–3, 69, 71, 79 dikeˉ, 25, 31 and hosieˉ, 20 Diocletian, emperor, 113, 118 baths of, 118 Great Persecution, 9 law on domicile, 142 Diodorus, 46 Diogenes Laertius, 75 Diogenes of Sinope, Cynic philosopher, 6 Dionysion, 26 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 75, 76 Dionysus, 49, 50, 56 Domitian, emperor, 206 domus, 131 deinition of, 133 Donations of Alexandria, 47 Donations of Constantine, 226 Draco, 32 Dyrrachium, 203 Eck, Werner, 148 Einhard, 211 Empedokles, 26 emperors, fourth-century travels, 113 empire characteristics of, 109 criteria for, 127 and identity, 124 encomium, 50. See also basilikos logos; panegyric; speeches of praise Ennius, 69 episcopalis audientia, 93 Epistle to Diognetus, 159 Eucratides I of Bactria, 46 Eugenius, usurper, 111, 189 Eumenius, 208 Eunomius, bishop, 171 Eusebius of Caesarea, 2, 236 and cities, 162 on Constantine’s trophy, 188 Life of Constantine, 2

Favorinus of Arelate, 150 Firmus, usurper, 111, 122 Francia, 110 freedmen, 89, 92, 135 and mobility, 141 Frontinus, 89 G. Blossius Saturninus Afer, 147 Gaionas, M. Antonius, 150 Gaius, jurist, 72, 73, 78, 247–9 and Greeks, 75, 77–8 Institutes, 83, 89, 90 on legal change, 249 on provincial edict, 137 and republic, 79 on Solon, 78 on Twelve Tables, 74 Galanter, Marc, 100–2 Galla Placidia, 196 Gaza, 4 Geiseric, 192, 198 Genesis. See Scripture Geta, emperor, 110 Gibbon, Edward, 225 on fall of Rome, 3 globe as map, 204 as symbol of imperium, 205–6 golden age ideology of, 50 good king terms for, 220 Gospels. See Scripture Gratian, emperor, 113, 120, 251 and Rome, 116 Great King, 40 deined, 54 as title, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 54 Great Persecution. See Diocletian Gregorius (or Gregorianus), 84 Gregory of Nazianzus, 168, 169, 170 on adventus, 174 on Athanasius, 174, 175 on church space, 172–3 on festivals, 175–6 on Julian, 177 and Temple, 178 Oration 5, 175, 177 Oration 21, 172 on religious space, 179

261

I NDEX

Gregory of Nyssa, 157, 175 and adventus, 179 Hadrian, emperor, 137, 140 rescript of, 83 Hagia Sophia, 172, 217, 226 “Beautiful Door,” 231 Green Line in, 230 Imperial Door, 226, 229, 231 mosaics, ideology of, 227 Hebdomon ceremonies at, 124 Hebrew Bible. See Scripture Heliodorus. See Marduk-eriba Heracles, 48, 49, 50 Hermodorus of Ephesus, 76–7 Hermodotus, 52 Hermogenianus, 84 Herodotus, 20, 42 Hesychius of Alexandria, 20, 163 hiera Christian, 178 deined, 16 hiera kai hosia deined, 33 and polis, 16 Hieron II, 50 Holy Sepulcher, 117. See also churches Homer, 77 Odyssey, 17–18, 19, 32 Homeric Hymns, 17, 32 To Apollo, 19 To Demeter, 18 To Hermes, 23 Honorius, emperor, 109, 119, 122, 195 visit to Rome (414), 190 hosieˉ deined, 19–20 hosios, 20 deined, 17 and pius, 24 semantics of, 24, 26 Hypereides, 28 identity, Christian, 154 imperial buildings, 118 imperialism Neo-Assyrian, 41 incolae, 140, 145, 149 India, 212

as world’s end, 47–9 Innocent I, pope, 186 Isaurians, 126 Isidore of Seville, 210 Islam, 39 Isocrates, 28, 31, 82 Panathenaicus, 81 ius civile, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 77, 247 and citizenship, 62 as concept, 65 and Twelve Tables, 64 ius gentium, 66 Ius gentium, 90 ius honorarium, 65, 68, 90 ius incolatus, 139 Jacques, François, 143, 144 Jerusalem in Gospels, 156 in Gregory of Nazianzus, 178 Heavenly Jerusalem, 161, 164, 165 in Revelation, 156 Jesus on maps, 209 John Tzimiskes, 230 Judea, 55, 57 Julian, emperor, 110, 112, 120, 139 in Gregory of Nazianzus, 169, 177 jurists, Roman, 64 Justin I, emperor, 217, 218, 224, 233 Justinian I, emperor, 100, 231 on “Beautiful Door,” 226 Digest of, 63, 69, 71, 79 Kupfer, Marcia, 211 Lateran Palace map in, 211 mosaics, 225, 226–7, 237 Lavinium, 253 and adventus, 254 legal anthropology and Roman law, 102 leges sacrae, 20, 27, 30 Leo I, emperor, 158, 218, 233 Leo I, pope and Attila, 197 and Augustine, 195 and Geiseric, 198

262

I NDE X

Leo I, pope (cont.) and Honorius, 195 and Marcian, 195 on role of bishop, 195–6 Sermon 84 (on Visigothic Sack of 410), 185, 191, 193 on St. Peter, 193 and St. Peter’s, 197, 198 on Visigothic Sack of Rome (410), 184, 199 Leo III, pope, 211 on Lateran mosaic, 226 Leo VI, emperor, 229 and polis, 155 Lex Ursonensis, 136 Liber Pontiicalis, 198 Licinius I, emperor, 111, 120 Life of Constantine, 2 Life of Euthymios, 229 living law (nomos empsychos), 220 Louis the Pious, 110 Lucretius, 204, 207 ludi in Leo I, 192, 193 Lycurgus, 163 Lydia, 43, 94, 116 Lysimachus, 43 Maccabean revolt, 55, 158 Maccabees. See Scripture Macrobius, 79 Madaba map, 210 Magnentius, usurper, 111 Magnus Maximus, usurper, 111, 190 Manichees, 192, 196 mappamundi, 210 maps at Aachen, 211 Agrippa’s map, 204 at Augustodunum, 212 Beatus maps, 210 Christian, 208, 210, 213 descriptio mundi, 204 Forma urbis Romae, 203 itinerarium pictum, 204 Lateran map, 211 Madaba map, 210 mappaemundi, 214 Peutinger map, 212–13 T-O maps, 210

Marduk-eriba (Heliodorus), Babylonian priest, 56 Martin, bishop of Tours, 159 Masurius Sabinus, 79 and ius civile, 70 Matar, 99 Maternus, M. Cornelius Nigrinus Curiatius, 147 Maurice, emperor, 122 Maxentius, 111, 116, 188 buildings in Rome, 118 Maximian, emperor, 113, 118 Maximinus Thrax, emperor, 118 Maximus, bishop of Turin, 187 Melania, Life of, 119 Meletius of Antioch, 175 Menander Rhetor (Menander of Laodicea), 81, 82, 87, 168 metechein and meteinai, 16, 33 Mettius Pompusianus, 206 Milan, 112, 120, 121 and Ambrose, 158 milestones, 207 military belt, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122 in fourth century, 120–1 Millar, Fergus, 91, 130, 220 Mithridates I, Parthian king, 47 Mithridates the Great (Mithridates VI), 46 mobility challenge of, 143 and identity, 149–50 monasticism as a city, 163–4 as polis, 164 munera, deined, 137 Nectarius of Calama, 243, 245 Neo-Assyrian empire, 41–2 New Testament. See Scripture Nicholas Mystikos, patriarch, 232 and Leo VI, 228–9 nomoi, 30 deined, 14 nomos empsychos. See living law Numa Popilius, 75 Numantia, 125 oikoumene3, 233 Christian, 2, 234 in Gregory of Nazianzus, 176

263

I NDEX

in Hellenistic age, 43 and imperium, 233 in Leo I, 196 and maps, 204–5 and polis, 2 Olympiodorus, 119, 126 On Political Science (peri politikes), 219–20, 236 orbis terrarum, 10, 57, 205, 233 Orcistus, 4, 250–1, 254 Orosius, 127, 185, 188, 199, 210 Oulpianos of Tyre, 79 Ovid, 75, 203, 205

p. Euphrates 1 (246 CE), 92 panegyric, 47, 168. See also encomium Papinian, jurist, 63, 96 Papirius and leges regiae, 64 parrhesia, 169 Parthian empire, 39 patria as domicile, 131–2 Patrocles, Seleucid general, 49 Paul of Tarsus and citizenship, 67 Letter to the Hebrews, 156 and polis, 156 Paulus, jurist, 133, 148 Sententiae, 85 pax Romana, 207 Persepolis Apadana reliefs, 42 Peter the Patrician, 217, 224 Petronius Probus, 119 Peutinger map, 213, 214 Phoenicia, 138 Phrygia, 4, 94, 250 Plato, 81, 237 Euthyphro, 22 Pliny the Elder, 70, 77 Plutarch, 44, 70, 75, 76 Life of Numa, 75 Roman Questions, 76 polis and baptism, 160 deined, 14 end of, 155

in late antiquity, 4 as model for Christians, 154 number of, 154 in Plato, 164 sacred topography of, 180 politeia as way of life, 163 politeˉs, deined, 15 politeuma in Christian authors, 159–60 162 monastic, 165 Polyeuktos, patriarch, 230, 232 Pomponius, legal historian, 68, 69, 70, 79, 96 on ius civile, 64–6 praetor, 67 edictum perpetuum, 91 praetor peregrinus, 90 Praetor’s Edict, 65, 68, 79, 83, 95 urban praetor, 90 Procopius, usurper, 223–4 Prosper of Aquitaine, 197 provocatio, 67 Pseudo-Menander. See Menander Rhetor (Menander of Laodicea) Ptolemies, 39, 50, 55, 56 Ptolemy I Soter, 43 Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 47, 51 Ptolemy III, 48 Ptolemy XV (“Caesarion”), 47 Pythagoras, 75 Quaestor, imperial oice, 86 residences, imperial, 117 Revelation. See Scripture roads on Peutinger map, 213 Via Appia, 203 Via Egnatia, 203 Rome Aelius Aristides on, 81 Altar of Victory, 209 in Augustine, 242 as Christian cosmopolis, 185 conceptual change, 234 as cosmopolis, 199 decline in importance, 119

264

I NDE X

Rome (cont.) evolution of, in law, 64, 78 expansion of, in law, 84 in Gaius, 74 and Greeks, 75 imperial buildings in, 118 imperial visits, 116, 190, 221 and ius civile, 247 as juridical center, 249 as patria, 132 role in empire, 70 Temple of Venus and, 118 Vandal sack of (455), 198 Visigothic sack of (410), 158, 183 Rome, churches Lateran, 225 St. Peter in Chains, 196 St. Peter’s, 197 Romulus, 71, 205 and Remus, 194

Simonides, 17, 18 Socrates, historian, 173 Socrates, philosopher, 22 Solon, 76, 77 inluence on Twelve Tables, 75 reforms in Athens, 76 Sparta, 21, 62, 65, 163 speeches of praise, 82, 220. See also basilikos logos; Menander Rhetor Strabo, 77 Suda, 26 Sulla, L. Cornelius lex Cornelia, 66 sun as symbol of power, 51 Susa, 42 Symeon the Stylite, 158, 165 Symeon the Younger, 165 Symmachus, Quintus Aurelius, 209 circle of, 79

Salome Komaise archive of, 97 Salvius Julianus, 65 San Vitale, mosaic of Justinian, 122 Sasanian empire, 39 Scaevola, Q. Mucius, 69 Scipio Aemilianus, 125, 204 Scripture Genesis, 206 Gospels, 156, 161 in Leo I, 196 Hebrew Bible, 33, 155 Letter to the Hebrews, 156 Maccabees, 55, 158 New Testament, 156 Revelation, 156, 211 Seleucids, 39 Seleucus I Nicator, 43, 49 Sennacherib, 42 Septimius Severus, emperor, 110, 117, 121 Shalmaneser III, 42 Shepherd of Hermas, 159 shield of Aeneas, 205 Shulgi, 40 Sicily, 43, 51, 192 encomium on, 81 lex portoria, 133

Tabula Contrebiensis, 94 Tabula Heracleensis, 134 Tabula Peutingeriana. See Peutinger map Tacitus, 68, 235 Talbert, Richard, 212 Tarentum, 203 Tertullian, 94 Tetrarchy, 109, 112 Theocritus, 47 encomium for Ptolemy Philadelphus, 47, 50 Idyll 16, 50 Idyll 17, 50 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 228 Theodosian Code. See Codex Theodosianus Theodosius I, emperor, 122, 169, 189, 228 cunctos populos law, 170 Theodosius II, emperor, 123, 124, 180, 190 map of, 209 Theognis, 17 Thucydides, 21, 30 Tigranes the Great, 46 titulature, royal, 40 Trajan, emperor, 137, 148 Tribonian, jurist, 247 Tubero, jurist, 70 Tukulti-ninurta I, 40

265

I NDEX

Twelve Tables, 64, 66, 69, 71, 72–4, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 Gaius on, 71 inluence of, 72–4 Tymandus, 250 Ulpian, jurist, 7, 63, 79, 83, 91, 134, 138, 142, 146 on Praetor’s Edict, 95 Umar and adventus, 222 universal citizenship, 250 universal dominion, as ideal, 39 universalism Hellenistic, 39, 44 in Hellenistic monarchies, 45 in premodern empires, 52–4 of Roman law, 83 Ur, 40 urbes, 253 Valens, emperor, 110, 124, 169, 175, 251 Valentinian I, emperor, 110, 124, 251 and Theodosius, 121 Valentinian III, emperor, 192

edict against Manichees, 196 and Pope Leo I, 196 and Rome, 184 Valerius Publicola, 75 Vandals, 192 Varro, M. Terentius, 70 Vercingetorix, 125, 126 Vergil, 205 Aeneid, 205 vindex (tax collector), 155 virtues, four canonical, 82 Weber, Max on empires, 127 Xenophon Constitution of Lacedaemonians, 163 hiera kai hosia in, 31 Xerxes, 42 Zacharias, pope, 211 Zeus as universal ruler, 49 Zosimus, 126