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Introduction to Private Worship, Public Values and Religious Change in Late Antiquity</em
Abstract
In Constantinople sometime in the 440s, the empress Pulcheria stood at the edge of an excavation trench. She was there under orders from none other than Saint Thyrsus, who had appeared to her in a dream and instructed her to find the relics of forty Christian soldiers who had perished on the ice of an Armeman Lake. Aided by clergy and palace officials she began a massive excavation, complete with its own public relations director, local church historian Sozomen, who recorded the event for prosperity. The excavation eventually uncovered a casket which, when opened, emitted the sweet odor of myrrh: the martyrs had been found. The day was proclaimed a public festival, the martyrs' relics were processed through the city streets, and, with the empress and bishop standing by, the Forty were laid to rest alongside the relics of Thyrsus himself. Thus were the Fort Martyrs of Sebaste enrolled among the capital's saintly citizens.
... 406 Caesarius,Ep. 10. 407 For shrines and oratories, see Bowes 2008 ...
... This was also repeated in Orléans (511), 27. 422 On Christian worship on private estates in late antiquity, see Bowes 2008, Chapter 3 and Bowes 2015. Cf. ...
This dissertation studies Christian pedagogy, through preaching as well as by less explicit means, in order to reconstruct what ordinary Christians in the fifth and sixth century learned about Christianity and thus how they understood themselves in relation to their local Christian communities and the wider community of a universal church. This approach moves outside the traditional narrative of late antiquity wherein theological controversy was negotiated among the elite. Ordinary Christians who attended the liturgy and tried to live as part of a Christian community as they were taught experienced Christianity as a much simpler and more unified structure, which arguably gave them a source of stability in a politically fraught time. The analysis takes the form of two case studies, one from the eastern Mediterranean and one from the western, both to emphasize the diversity of experience among Christian communities and to demonstrate that the different local Christian communities from all regions of the Mediterranean world were part of a single, though variegated, phenomenon. The first case study examines the homilies of Hesychius of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem liturgy from the first half of the fifth century. Through his preaching and the sensory experience of the liturgy, Hesychius taught his congregations to understand Christ as both human and divine, and how to encounter the divine as a community in the liturgy. The second case study considers the early sixth-century sermons of Caesarius of Arles and the numerous church councils he led in order to regulate the conduct of the clergy, including their interactions with ordinary Christians. In his sermons, Caesarius taught Christians how to demonstrate their belonging in a Christian community by acting virtuously. His life and legacy further communicated the same lessons of community and virtue that he taught by preaching. In these case studies, I argue that bishops and priests taught their congregations that their faith in God, their clergy, and their Christian community made them part of a universal Christian church, despite the higher clergy’s simultaneous participation in controversies over establishing an orthodox faith. By focusing on how clerics communicated vertically with ordinary Christians, rather than horizontally among themselves, I demonstrate that bishops and priests taught unity to their congregations and provided positive instructions for how they could demonstrate their faith in a universal Christian church. If the way ordinary Christians experienced Christianity was informed by how they learned about it, then they could rely on their church for continuity and stability even as the church as a whole was in constant flux.
... Cf. here below as well asBowes 2008, 112,a nd Magdalino 200159 and 61-64. Proc. ...
... Arbeiter (1988) 18-9. 7 For the juridical situation concerning church property see Bowes (2008) 64. 8 While Guarducci (1967) 56 wanted to see the pope as an individual as the guardian of the tomb of Peter and justified this with the oral or personal tradition and the temporal proximity, Dassmann (1994) 52 proved that the monepiscopate is indeed detectable by 150 and thus a single person possibly could have decided on construction projects. However, it was not yet a monarchical episcopate, which again limited this idea. ...
... The multiplication of churches in the countryside in Late Antiquity has often been linked to the initiative of rich landowners (Bowes 2008 and Wataghin Cantino 2000, among many others, but cf. Chavarría 2010 and now Fiocchi Nicolai 2017 and Chavarría 2018 for a more balanced perspective). ...
... Churches built into villas or adapting previous mausolea tend to be dated from the end of the fifth century onward and therefore postdate the abandonment of these residential buildings, which apparently occurred during the fifth century. Occasionally stratigraphic excavation reveals that churches were built when the villas were already in ruins or had been reused by new squatter occupants (see Bowes 2008 andChavarría Arnau 2007 for different views, and the balanced interpretation in Fiocchi Nicolai 2018). In these cases, it becomes difficult to link the Christian buildings to a particular founder, whether a private owner or a bishop. ...
... No es decente que se celebre el ágape en las iglesias del Señor, ni se coma dentro de ellas, ni se monten triclineos 76 . Tan sólo un pequeño número de fieles continuó en esa época reuniéndose en casas privadas para celebrar cenas en las que podían incluirse algunas oraciones y ciertos rituales específicos de carácter religioso 77 . Incluso comenzaron a proliferar en esta época capillas en el interior de las villae pertenecientes a potentiores cristianos (Fig. 6). ...
Asumiendo como propia la extendida costumbre del symposium en las sociedades antiguas, las comunidades cristianas celebraron, desde sus mismos inicios, banquetes o comidas rituales que sirvieron para fortalecer los v?nculos comunitarios y asentar la propia identidad religiosa. En el seno de este tipo de reuniones, conocido al principio gen?ricamente con el t?rmino de ?gape, surgi? la comida eucar?stica. Las fuentes literarias cristianas, desde los propios escritos neotestamentarios, nos hablan con cierta profusi?n de estos banquetes de car?cter religioso y, a partir del siglo III, aparecen representados en pinturas y mosaicos, en la mayor?a de los casos vinculados a los ritos funerarios cristianos.The First Christian Communities did assume the widespread symposium habit of the Ancient societies as theirs. From the beginning, they celebrated banquets or ritual meals that were used to strengthen the community ties and to consolidate their own religious identity. At the bosom of this kind of gathering, originally known as the Agape term, did emerge the Eucharistic meal. From the New Testament writings, the Christian literary sources speak us with some profusion about the religious banquets, and, from the third century, they appeared represented on Christian funerary fresco paintings and mosaics.
Religion is never simply there. In Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis, Mattias Brand shows where and when ordinary individuals and families in Egypt practiced a Manichaean way of life. Rather than portraying this ancient religion as a well-structured, totalizing community, the fourth-century papyri sketch a dynamic image of lived religious practice, with all the contradictions, fuzzy boundaries, and limitations of everyday life. Following these microhistorical insights, this book demonstrates how family life, gift-giving, death rituals, communal gatherings, and book writing are connected to our larger academic debates about religious change in late antiquity.
Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.
Los escasos testimonios escritos y datos arqueológicos, que evidencian las primeras manifestaciones de carácter cristiano conocidas hasta la fecha en el área de la actual provincia de Toledo, se datan a partir de principios del siglo IV y sugieren la existencia, en esos momentos, de un consolidado poder episcopal con sede en Toletum a la vez que una creciente vinculación de algunos acomodados terratenientes con el cristianismo. Con el objetivo de contribuir al debate sobre la implantación de esta religión en el ámbito rural toledano y su entorno, durante la etapa más antigua a la que estas fuentes escritas y materiales permiten acceder, se analizan algunas cuestiones que plantea la documentación disponible y se discuten críticamente las principales hipótesis avanzadas hasta la fecha.
A partir de la dedicatoria de una sacerdotisa de culto imperial de la colonia de Itálica (Santiponce, Sevilla) a varias divinidades femeninas (Victoria Augusta, Isis, Ceres y Juno), en este trabajo se explora el significado de la presencia de Isis y de la gens isiaca en espacios urbanos privilegiados: Isis como sustento de la ideología imperial, partícipe por tanto de los circuitos de culto de la ciudad de Itálica.
This article addresses a pattern in the representation of the spaces of heathen practice in late antique Christian literature and in the conceptualisation of a necessary response to those spaces. I argue that Christian authors came to regard both temple structures and homes as suspicious enclosures, potentially concealing nefarious practices that could harm civic order and fortune. This view developed out of both a progressive suspicion of the domestic sphere in late antique Christian culture as harbouring heathen and heretical devotion, and a broader Roman suspicion of the Near Eastern temple, its architecture, and its secret priestly activities within. Such temples were constructed from early antiquity to exclude outsiders and to privilege a priestly cult within, unlike Roman temples that visibly framed the main cult image.
This paper is focused on the decoration of some late antique residences in Egypt, Cyrenaica, and Cyprus. All of them show common forms of self-presentation of urban elites across the eastern Mediterranean between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. The analysis is based on a global vision of social life in a world that was deeply influenced by a transition from old to new models and by forms of syncretism between various backgrounds which merged in new decorative systems. By recognising their owners’ cultural environment, associations between décor and power can be elucidated in a comparative study of the main elements of these luxury residences. In this context, Christianity is one of the principal issues to be taken into account, along with deep pagan roots of the aristocratic paideia during the investigated period. In fact, the specific choice of the iconographies in the mosaics or the subjects for the statues displayed in these houses can be understood only if contextualised against the spiritual life of the period. In the discussed residences, cultural identity is also manifested by forms of continuity in the architectural elevations. The fact that local traditions developed during the Hellenistic Period were still in use – both as reused building elements and as newly created decoration – can be interpreted as a manifestation of the antiquity and prestige of the families who owned the dwellings. These phenomena are studied through a review of the contexts and their comparative analysis in order to highlight similar developments and their meanings.
This chapter establishes that the 340s and 350s were of paramount importance for the development of the traditional cults and their relation to Christianity and the increasingly Christian empire. Their impact extended beyond Constantius II’s death and is key to our understanding of Julian’s reaction and the further history of ancient religions. The chapter addresses the following issues. Firstly, it reviews the imperial religious legislation and its impact, and relates it to Church policy, in order to outline the confines in which pagan cults still could exist and be practised. Secondly, it assesses Christian intolerance and violence to illustrate to what extent paganism came under pressure in different parts of the empire. Thirdly, with a focus on paganism itself, it surveys religious beliefs and practices among pagans in the West and East, to reveal the diversity, and identify common trends, in what we usually term “paganism”, suggesting a uniform movement. Finally, the focus will be on pagan perceptions and constructions: how did pagan thinkers, for the most part looking back from the time after Constantius II, depict pagan life and cult under Christian emperors, and to what extent did they shape a distinct pagan identity to cope with Christian challenges? This examination reappraises whether “paganism” was rather an invention of their Christian opponents or something pagans sought to define themselves.
El período tardoantiguo asistió al florecimiento y consolidación del poder episcopal como uno de sus fenómenos más reseñables. Este proceso trajo consigo la construcción de un espacio eclesiástico sobre el que los prelados ejercerán su misión pastoral, la diócesis, a la cual dedicamos el presente artículo. Para ello centraremos nuestro marco de estudio en el período hispanovisigodo. En primer lugar, ahondaremos en la percepción de la misma, tanto como realidad espacial como social. Esta cuestión nos llevará directamente a analizar los mecanismos de construcción de la jurisdicción diocesana, para terminar con una relectura de las disputas episcopales por el territorio.
RESUMO Peter Brown recentemente descreveu a conversão de Paulino de Nola ao monasticismo, em 394, como a renúncia da mística da riqueza. De acordo com Brown, essa mística, perceptível nos vestígios materiais das uillae do século IV, expressava esplendor e prazer. O refinamento da arquitetura, o luxo das decorações e o cuidado do corpo celebravam a riqueza dos proprietários e a abundância da natureza. Meu objetivo neste artigo é usar o conceito de Brown de mística da riqueza como um termômetro, para entender como outros monges aristocratas da Gália dos séculos IV e V conciliaram sua conversão ao monasticismo com suas próprias riquezas. Argumento que sua conversão podia assumir sentidos muito diferentes. Nem todos os monges aristocratas sentiam a necessidade, como Paulino, de rejeitar os sinais que os identificavam como homens ricos e de dedicar sua fortuna a um santo ou a Deus.
Tirana, the capital city of Albania, in Antiquity did not exist as an inhabited centre, simply it was considered a rural area, the residential territory of Dyrrachium patricians, as was Ercolano for Pompeii. In 1972 in Tirana, during the construction of a building, the remains of a rustic villa built in Roman Period were brought to light accidentally, and some of the rooms were decorated with polychrome mosaics. This villa was used for more than four centuries and it has several phases of life, for this reason it was dated by the archaeologists between
the end of the 1st and the 5th century AD. The principal goal of the research is the punctual analysis of the mosaics motifs and their contextualization in the Balkan and Adriatic area, to identify the owner and the craftsmen who live and work in it. The second goal is to present to the international scientific community this rustic villa, a unique case for Tirana.
Aunque la mayor parte de la historiografía sitúa la Passio Mantii en época visigoda, en los últimos tiempos ha surgido alguna voz discordante que, con argumentos principalmente filológicos, sostiene que debe ser «trasladada» a la época mozárabe. Mediante un riguroso y exhaustivo análisis de los elementos extratextuales y contextuales, a la vez que intratextuales e intertextuales, que se desprenden de este relato hagiográfico, el presente artículo aporta nuevos y profundos argumentos que lo «devuelven» a la época visigoda y confirman a la vez su importancia como fuente histórica para el estudio de los judíos en la Hispania del siglo VII.
This dissertation explores one of the thorny problems of writing a social history of Early Christianity, the degree to which rhetoric either reflects or evokes worldviews, institutions, and other social formations. Through a focus on the textual traditions associated with Ignatius of Antioch, a second-century martyr and Christian bishop, I explore how language about Jews and Judaism was reproduced and rewritten in later centuries such that it has become evidence for our own histories of Jewish–Christian relations. The textual tradition of Ignatius’s letters includes multiple recensions and was reproduced repeatedly throughout Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages. By comparing the various recensions, I show how both retention and alteration in the textual tradition can create new rhetorical effects. The different recensions provide evidence for the effects of earlier versions on later readers and how the reading and writing practices of later scribes gave birth to new images of the past and new modes of reading early Christian literature. By engaging recent scholarship on ancient education, scribal practice, and the materiality of texts, I show how careful attention to the effects of texts and textual production helps us better understand the processes and practices that give rhetoric social traction and force.
This chapter describes the archaeologies of domestic rituals in classical Greek, Roman, Early Christian and Jewish households. In doing so, it relies principally on material culture to outline the kinds of spaces, communities and activities that comprised religiosity in the home. The chapter explores the ways in which the home helped to shape religious impulses and activities that were particular to the home itself. By paying careful attention to the physical remains and spaces of domestic rituals, it examines how the individuality of family life and house space gave rise to idiosyncratic, individualized practices and how the imitation of public rituals in domestic space might involve important changes to those rituals. Ancient Mediterranean housing exhibited enormous diversity, from the rabbit warren of Palestinian villages to the high-rise apartments of the Roman city.
This chapter presents an alternative view on sanctuaries in Roman Imperial urban contexts, Ostia in particular, and addresses a number of questions which allow the analysis of cult-sites beyond the distinction of sacra privata and sacra publica. Introducing various spatial issues, the heterogeneity which characterized sanctuaries in Roman Imperial times could be illustrated. Differences occurred especially in the kind of functions and activities associated with cult-sites. Architectural settings revealing limited visibilities and implying access restrictions can be found throughout Roman Imperial Ostia. Regarding their spatial settings and the activities hosted in them during Imperial times, the handling of sanctuaries thus reveals a strong pragmatism. From these observations we may detain for our understanding of the role sanctuaries had within urban space that it is impossible to regard them as separated from other spheres of daily life, as they were fully embedded into their urban environment.
In the first quarter of the fifth century the provinces of Gaul experienced their most dramatic shakeup since Julius Caesar, with the Rhine crossing of Vandals, Suebi and Alans, the retaliation from Roman forces in Britain under the usurper Constantine III, and the establishment of the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse under Wallia in 418. Exsuperius was bishop in Toulouse throughout much of this time. Most of what we know about him comes from the challenges that confronted him. Not only did he face the crisis of hostile forces besieging bis city, but he faced internal ones as well, with famine resulting from the siege and, at an earlier time, dissent being expressed to the asceticism and Christian discipline he promoted. While famine and theological dissent were regular features of what bishops had to deal with, responding to a siege was not something most bishops in previous generations had experienced. This article investigates how Exsuperius responded to these crises of varying magnitudes and argues that, although he is reported by Jerome as being solely responsible for averting the external threat, he was probably part of a team of negotiators, and that, with regard to the internal threat, he allied himself with Innocent I, the Roman bishop. The literary encounter between Toulouse and Rome in Innocents Epistula 6 reinforced Innocents position as the leading Western bishop, as well as offered support to Exsuperius in dealing with the crisis he faced.
The theme of individuality and individualisation in religious contexts in the fairly remote past is perhaps best viewed as a heuristic device whose main value, at least in the context of Graeco-Roman history, is to question the excessive dominance of a model of religious action as essentially collective, which is perhaps proximately Durkheimian but in the Classical field goes back ultimately to early scholarship on ancient Judaism. Terminology is a basic problem in this context. Religious individuality can be defined as the construction of personal religious achievement or the practice of mastery defined by sui generis rules. In the case of the Roman Empire, five types of such achievement have been suggested: pragmatic; moral; competitive; representative; or exemplary/ reflexive. All these distinguishable types of individuality are linked, at least indirectly, to the complex and highly differentiated social, political, economic and moral structures of the Empire. Specifically religious individuation emerges only with the development of religion as a distinctive field of (social) action and thus the possibility of specifically religious distinction. If sustained over the long term, any such achievement is to be seen as individualisation under ancient conditions. This article briefly explores three types of religious distinction based on a conviction and lived practice of such individualised competence: the figure of the Weberian mystagogue in his Mediterranean forms; the figure of the practitioner skilled in Graeco-Egyptian ‘magic’; and the idealised figure of Pythagoras as projected by Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean life (c.300 CE).
This paper discusses the applicability of recent theories of religion to the problem of describing and explaining religious transformation in the period between the final Bronze Age and Late Antiquity. Instead of evolutionist and cognitive approaches, it proposes a model of religion that tries to analyze religion in terms of its making by starting from the individual's appropriation and creation of religious tradition. Religion is understood as a strategy to attribute agency to agents that do not appear immediately plausible. Recent scholarly discussions on human agency suggest categorizing human religious agency into the three subsets, namely: (1) acting religiously with regards to past, present, and future; (2) collective religious identity; and (3) religious communication. These subsets are shown to produce fruitful questions for research on historical sources. Against this backdrop, religion is explained as a precarious cultural resource articulated through the agency of individuals and allowing changed attributions of individual agency.
RESUMEN Aunque el volumen de información hoy disponible para analizar el fenómeno de la elaboración de vino y aceite en el interior de la península Ibérica en época romana re-sulta aún limitado, las intervenciones arqueológicas llevadas a cabo en los últimos años, principalmente en el ámbito rural pero también en el urbano, permiten ir trazando las líneas de una producción hasta ahora desconocida. Entre las evidencias más destacadas se encuentran las de la villa de Carranque (Toledo) en la que las intervenciones de 2007 y 2008 han permitido conocer un importante complejo productivo destinado princi-palmente a la elaboración de aceite y, durante unas décadas, también de vino; complejo caracterizado por una activa y continuada dinámica constructiva desarrollada a lo largo de todo el siglo IV d.C. ABSTRACT The volume of information available to analyze the phenomenon of the wine and oil production in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula, in Roman times, is still limited.
This essay considers the development in the third and fourth centuries of the idea of a "universal church" and the transition from private power to corporate institutional polity as the basis of authority within the churches, in light of "minimalist revolution" in our understanding of Roman law and government over the last few decades.
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