Christianizing Asia Minor: Conversion, Communities, and Social Change in the Pre-Constantinian Era 1108481469, 9781108481465

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Christianizing Asia Minor

Paul McKechnie explores how Christianity grew and expanded in Roman Asia over the first three centuries of the religion. Focusing on key individuals, such as Aberkios (Avircius Marcellus) of Hierapolis, he assesses the pivotal role played by early Christian preachers who, in imitation of Paul of Tarsus, attracted converts through charismatic preaching. By the early fourth century, they had brought many cities and rural communities to a tipping point at which they were ready to move under a ‘Christian canopy’ and push polytheistic Greco-Roman religion to the margins. This volume brings new clarity to our understanding of how the Christian church grew and thrived in Asia Minor, simultaneously changing Roman society and being changed by it. Combining patristic evidence with the archaeological and epigraphic record, McKechnie’s study provides a strong factual and chronological framework for the study of Christianization, while bringing church history and Roman history more closely together. Paul McKechnie is an associate professor in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University. He is the author of The First Christian Centuries.

Christianizing Asia Minor Conversion, Communities, and Social Change in the Pre-Constantinian Era

PAUL McKECHNIE Macquarie University

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 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/9781108481465 doi: 10.1017/9781108686921 © Cambridge University Press 2019 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 2019 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McKechnie, Paul, 1957- author. Title: Christianizing Asia Minor : conversion, communities, and social change in the pre-Constantinian era / Paul McKechnie. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018061714| isbn 9781108481465 (hardback : alk. paper) | isbn 9781108722506 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Turkey–Church history. | Church history–Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600. Classification: LCC BR185 .M33 2019 | DDC 275.61/01–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061714 isbn 978-1-108-48146-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures List of Abbreviations Preface

page vi vii ix

Introduction 1 Phrygia in the New Testament 2 3

1 18

Hierapolis (Pamukkale) Teachers of Asia: Ignatius, Polycarp, Paul and Thecla

45 68

4

Montanism Part 1: The Origins of the New Prophecy

96

5 6

Montanism Part 2: Pepuza and Tymion Aberkios of Hierapolis (Koçhisar) and His Gravestone

123 147

7 8

Aberkios and the Vita Abercii Apollonia (Uluborlu): Curiales and Their Families

166 187

9

Eumeneia (Işıklı) and the Eumeneian Formula

210

Christians for Christians The Great Persecution and the Phrygian Fourth Century

232 246

10 11

Appendix 1 Vita Abercii Appendix 2 Dated Eumeneian Formula Gravestones Bibliography Index

v

263 288 297 317

Figures

1 Roman provinces in Western Asia before and after Diocletian 2 Western Asia and the Lycus Valley Cities 3 The Asian/Syrian World of Basil of Caesarea 4 Philadelphia, the Gate to Phrygia 5 Montanist Congregations 6 West-Central Phrygia 7 Alexander, Son of Antonios, Monument 8 Aberkios Monument: Reconstruction in Museo Pio Cristiano 9 Olympichos Family Stemma 10 Artemon Family Stemma

vi

page 7 46 62 98 120 140 148 149 193 205

Abbreviations

Abbreviations are as in Hornblower and Spawforth, Oxford Classical Dictionary4, plus the following: Année épigraphique ANRW b Barr Book of the Laws of Countries Bulletin épigraphique CIG Grammatici Graeci 3.2 Hauken

IAlex IAnazarbos ICG

(1888– )L’Année épigraphique: Revue des publications épigraphiques relatives à l’antiquité romaine. Paris. Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt Babylonian Talmud Talbert, R.J.A. (ed.) (2000) Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford. Drijvers, H.J.W. (1965) The Book of the Laws of Countries: Dialogue on Fate of Bardaisan of Edessa. Assen. Robert, J. and L. (1939– )Bulletin épigraphique in the Revue des études grecques (1828–77) Corpus inscriptionum graecarum, 4 vols. Berlin. Lentz, A. (1870) Grammatici Graeci vol. 3.2. Leipzig. Hauken, T. (1998) Petition and Response: An Epigraphic Study of Petitions to Roman Emperors 181–249. Bergen. Ricl, M. (1997) The Inscriptions of Alexandreia Troas. Bonn. Sayar, M.H. (2000) Die Inschriften von Anazarbos und Umgebung, 2 vols. Bonn. Breytenbach, C., K. Hallof, U. Huttner, J. Krumm, S. Mitchell, J. M. Ogereau, E. Sironen, M. Veksina, and C. Zimmermann (eds.) (2016) Inscriptiones Christianae Graecae (ICG): A Digital Collection of Greek Early Christian Inscriptions from Asia Minor and Greece. Berlin. http://repository.edition-topoi.org/collection/ICG vii

viii ICUR IEph IG IGRRP IHierapMir

IJudO IKaunos IMont

IMT Gran/Pariane

IParion IPrusa Joannou Keil and Premerstein

KILyk LXX NRSV

Sardis 7.1 SNG von Aulock

List of Abbreviations Rossi, G.B. de (1857–1888) Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae. Rome. (1979–1984) Die Inschriften von Ephesos . Bonn. Inscriptiones Graecae R. Cagnat (ed.) (1901–1927) Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes. Paris. Miranda, E. (1999) ‘La comunità giudaica di Hierapolis di Frigia’ Epigraphica Anatolica 31: 109–55. Ameling, W. (2004) Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis vol. 2. Tübingen. Marek, C. (2006) Die Inschriften von Kaunos. Munich. Tabbernee, W. (1997) Montanist Inscriptions and Testimonia: Epigraphic Sources Illustrating the History of Montanism. Macon, GA. Barth, M. and J. Stauber (eds.) (1983) Version of 25.8.1993 (Ibycus). Packard Humanities Institute CD #7, 1996. – Mysia, ‘Granikos mit Pariane’, nos. 1001–105. – Includes: Peter Frisch. Die Inschriften von Parion. ‘Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien’, 25. Leopold Wenger Institut, Universität München, Bonn. Frisch, P. (1983) Die Inschriften von Parion. Bonn. Corsten, T. (1991–1993) Die Inschriften von Prusa ad Olympum. Bonn. Joannou, P.-P. (1962) Discipline générale antique I.2: Les canons des synodes particuliers. Rome. Keil, J. and A. von Premerstein (1914) ‘Bericht über eine dritte Reise in Lydien und der angrenzenden Gebieten Ioniens, ausgeführt 1911 im Auftrage der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften’ Denkschrift der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, philosophisch-historische Klasse 57.1: 37–47. Laminger-Pascher, G. (1992) Die kaiserzeitlichen Inschriften Lykaoniens, fasc. 1. Vienna. Septuagint New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Buckler, W.H. and D.M. Robinson (1932) Sardis, VII: Greek and Latin Inscriptions Part I. Leiden. Aulock, H. von (1963) Sylloge nummorum Graecorum Deutschland: Sammlung v. Aulock. 8. Heft., Nr. 2868–3328 Lydien. Berlin.

Preface

Many debts have been incurred in writing this book. I wish to thank Macquarie University for relieving me of teaching and other responsibilities in the second half of 2015, and Ian Plant as Head of the Department of Ancient History for making arrangements which allowed me to spend the Michaelmas Term of 2014 in Cambridge. There, I wish to thank the Faculty of Divinity for making me a Visiting Fellow in that term, and Ridley Hall for accommodating me as a sabbatical visitor. In Sydney, I wish to thank the Sydney College of Divinity for making me an Honorary Research Associate, and Jim Harrison for allowing me to take refuge in his office. For advice and encouragement I also wish to thank the following colleagues and friends: Richard Bauckham, Cilliers Breytenbach, Alan Cadwallader, Adrian Chatfield, Bernard Doherty, Chris Forbes, Thomas Graumann, Tom Hillard, E.A. Judge, J.M. Lieu, Samuel N.C. Lieu, Alanna Nobbs, Brent Nongbri, Andrew Norman, Julien Ogereau, Rodney Stark, William Tabbernee, Michael Thompson, Alexander Weiss, and two anonymous referees. I wish to thank Jenni Irving for preparing most of the illustrations. Quotations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version, except where the Greek wording of the Septuagint makes a difference: there, Pietersma’s New English Translation of the Septuagint is used. Abbreviations other than those in the Abbreviations list are those in Hornblower and Spawforth, Oxford Classical Dictionary4. Names of places and people in this book are usually given in the form most intuitively familiar to me from their use by others. I have added modern place names in brackets where I thought they were needed for clarity. As for names of people, there were many in Asia Minor who had Roman-derived names: I apologize to readers who find my case-by-case choices conflict with what they think looks right. ix

Introduction

Leaving his beloved teacher Origen behind in Caesarea Maritima about the year 240, bound for his distant home in the province of Pontus, Gregory of Neocaesarea (Niksar) turned to a catastrophic flight of rhetoric:1 I may be going to prosecute no safe journey, as it sometimes fares with one who quits some safe and peaceful city; and it is indeed but too likely that, in journeying, I may fall into the hands of robbers, and be taken prisoner, and be stripped and wounded with many strokes, and be cast forth to lie half-dead somewhere.

Many miles of road lay ahead of him. Edward Gibbon would say of the Roman roads of the Antonine age that they ‘united the subjects of the most distant provinces by an easy and familiar intercourse’;2 but however ‘easy and familiar’ these roads supposedly were, cities were much safer. For the modern historians of the early churches, cities have had a similar appeal. Christianity, Thomas A. Robinson notes, ‘was, supposedly, an urban religion’.3 Noting how widespread this view is (‘almost every recent scholar of the early church’ has held it),4 Robinson cites powerful names – Ramsay MacMullen and W.H.C. Frend – before naming Wayne A. Meeks (in The First Urban Christians) as the historian ‘primarily responsible for the now near-universal assumption of the urban character of early Christianity’.5 1 2 3 4 5

Gregory Thaumaturgus In Originem Oratio Panegyrica 16. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol. 1, ch. 2. Robinson, Who Were the First Christians?, 15. Robinson, Who Were the First Christians?, 15. Robinson, Who Were the First Christians?, 17.

1

2

Christianizing Asia Minor

Robinson has snatched away the comfort of the urban thesis. The idea that at the time of the Edict of Milan (313) some 10 per cent of the population of the Roman empire was Christian, 6 million persons out of a population of 60 million, has been (he observes) commonly put forward as a working assumption for the size of the Christian movement. But the Roman empire was largely rural, with as few as 10 per cent of the population living in cities. If the rural Christian population approximated to zero, the cities would then have to be thought to be (at least) largely Christian – which ample evidence shows that they were not.6 Therefore, the numbers usually cited in recent work for the size of the Christian population cannot stand; and neither can the claim of no substantial number of Christians in rural areas. The model normally drawn on in studying the growth of early Christianity, therefore, is no longer plausible. Like Gregory, the historian must leave the ‘safe and peaceful city’ behind. This book, Christianizing Asia Minor: Conversion, Communities, and Social Change in the Pre-Constantinian Era, is admittedly an urban book, but in a special sense. It makes a supposed periphery into the centre, and moves the focus away from the cities of the west coast of Asia Minor and its immediate hinterland. The origins of Christianity in Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province of Asia, have been expounded at monumental length by Paul Trebilco,7 whose work need not be duplicated; while Colin Hemer’s Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia remains a definitive discussion of the cities of Revelation 2–3 and their churches. At the heart of this book, therefore, is the up-country development of Asian Christianity in Phrygia and neighbouring inland regions, from the first century to the time of Constantine. As a corollary of its focus on one region within Rome’s Asian realm, the book must deal with smaller and less important cities than Ephesus, or than most of the seven churches in Revelation. They do not measure up to the thirty-one cities which Rodney Stark examines in his Cities of God: cities chosen for his study because they had a population of 30,000 or more in the year 100;8 Phrygia, as will become clear, was a place where a ‘paper-thin façade of civic institutions and urbanization’9 had been overlaid on something much less economically advanced. Its cities were barely a blip on the metropolitan radar.

6 7 9

Robinson, Who Were the First Christians?, 19. 8 Trebilco, Early Christians in Ephesus. Stark, Cities of God, 34–5. Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 3.

Introduction

3

Phrygia, then, even urban Phrygia, was a different kind of place from the Roman world of Stark’s thirty-one cities. It had a distinctive history. Long before the time of the Roman empire, in the sixth century bc, when a Persian takeover steamrolled the archaic state built by Midas and others, Phrygia was transformed into ‘a post-literate, post-urban, highly fragmented, cellular agro-pastoral society’.10 Cities established later by Greeks and Macedonians had little impact on the overall pattern of settlement, and in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (Peter Thonemann argues on the basis of a sociologically informed reading), Phrygia ‘can only be understood as a “post-state” zone: a former centre which has . . . become a periphery’ – one where organizational weakness made the people vulnerable to slave-raiding.11 But for those people there were compensations, too: ‘egalitarian social institutions, little internal stratification, effective local autonomy . . . the certainty of never having to pay tax to anyone’.12 Thonemann takes pains to put the best face on the situation, and speaks of it (with some appearance of reservation) as a path ‘chosen’ by Phrygians:13 and yet the value to Phrygians of the compensations might be questioned – as might the applicability of the idea of ‘choice’. Phrygia was diverse. There were cities, few of them long established, with buildings, civic institutions, and their own bronze coinages;14 there were imperial and private estates – between which the highlands were divided;15 and there were peripheral areas which were still available for slave-raiding, even when Phrygia had long been under Roman government. But change came to this ‘highly fragmented . . . agro-pastoral society’ in the Roman period. As Christoph Schuler says, the urbanization of the interior of Asia Minor (including Phrygia) was progressing as the Roman imperial era began, and a side effect was ‘a massive increase in

10 11

12 13

14 15

Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 3. Within the Roman world, Phrygian slaves were common. As W.V. Harris observes, ‘The great source’ [of slaves] ‘was Asia Minor, with every region there, except perhaps the most prosperous parts of provincia Asia itself, being exploited for this purpose. Texts are numerous: over and over again we hear of the typical slave as a Cappadocian or a Phrygian’ (‘Towards a Study of the Roman Slave Trade’, 122). Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 15. A path ‘consciously or unconsciously chosen’ (Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 4); ‘the Phrygians’ choice [if such it was]’ (15). Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 38. Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 5.

4

Christianizing Asia Minor

the production of inscriptions’ in rural areas16 – a change without which much of the evidence used in this book never would have existed. Evidence in that category is relatively abundant, and provides illuminating insights into life as it was lived from about the first century onward. For example, the data relating to the angel-cult in Asia discussed in Chapter 9 are almost all epigraphical, and the practices and ideas which can be inferred would have stayed virtually unknown if the inscriptions had not been preserved. There remain traps, however, which one must be careful not to fall into. In pre-Christian Phrygia, people who were burdened with their sins would seek divine help in getting free of guilt. Two substantial corpora of inscriptions – if validly seen as separate – provide interesting data about religious practice in Phrygia and neighbouring territories. One, centred on the temple of Apollo Lairbenos, 18 kilometres north-east of the Phrygian city of Hierapolis (Pamukkale) in the Lycus valley,17 records ‘manumissions’ and confessions by worshippers – but the records of ‘manumissions’ do not record ordinary emancipations of slaves by their owners.18 The confessions, often expressed in the first person, record the name of an individual and a wrong which he or she has committed, and then say that he or she was punished (by the god); the text ends by warning the reader not to disregard the god.19 The offences referred to are often oath-breaking, entering sacred precincts while in a ritually impure condition, or sexual transgressions. An equal or greater concern with wrongdoing appears in the second of the corpora of inscriptions referred to above, the Beichtinschriften corpus, rather more than 120 inscriptions dating from the first to third centuries, mostly from inland Lydia, Mysia, and Phrygia. In many cases these inscriptions tell stories of the same kinds of transgressions recorded in the Apollo Lairbenos series (which, depending on how one slices the data, could be regarded as a subset of the Beichtinschriften series): breaches of oaths, improper activities in sacred places, sexual misconduct. In Beichtinschrift 1, for example, a stele from the first or second century from Akçaavlu near Magnesia on the Maeander (Manisa), 16 18

19

17 Schuler, ‘Inscriptions and Identities’, 90. Miller, ‘Apollo Lairbenos’, 49. Kevin M. Miller says that ‘it was not a manumission in any normal sense of the word’, and argues that the ‘manumitted’ children ‘may have been doing service in other households . . . under conditions similar to apprenticeship or indenture’, adding that ‘[a] καταγραϕή clearly brought about some improvement in status’ (‘Apollo Lairbenos’, 59–60). Miller, ‘Apollo Lairbenos’, 60–7.

Introduction

5

Meidon, son of Menander, and his servants drank and ate unsacrificed meat, on the premises of Zeus Trosou, and then Meidon was struck dumb for three months; however, the god appeared to him in dreams and commanded him to set up an inscribed stele – after which, Meidon was able to speak again.20 The act of setting up the inscription, in that case, was conceived by the dedicator as atonement for his transgression – and gaining forgiveness may also be taken as part of the motive for setting up the inscription in the many cases where a divine demand for an inscription is not recorded. Other offerings, including animal sacrifices, might also be needed, as at Beichtinschrift 5, where Theodorus has to offer a sheep, a partridge, a mole, a piglet, a tuna fish, a chicken, a sparrow, a pigeon, a measure of barley-wheat mixture, a jug of wine, and a measure of wheat, in atonement for his sexual misdemeanours.21 The Beichtinschriften appear across a wide swathe of Asian territory, and are associated with a range of sanctuaries and deities. Christianity, perhaps more than most religions, is concerned with sin and atonement for sin. This is perhaps why there has been a tendency to explain the conversion of Phrygia to Christianity with reference to an ingrained impulse to confess sin and achieve reconciliation with God, evident in the Beichtinschriften. The idea is that ethnic communities where people were conscious of sin and inclined to explain their misfortunes – such as Meidon’s inability to speak – as divine punishment for that sin, would, more easily than others, be attracted to a religion in which a central teaching is that ‘God . . . commands all people everywhere to repent.’22 This theory in some cases has been linked with an argument which finds the cult and the castrated priests of Cybele and Attis to be vital as background to the Montanists’ understanding of Christian worship and prophecy.23 But this argument leans too heavily, for the explanations which it generates, on a stereotypical and ethnocentric view of the Phrygian character. Robinson finds these ‘slippery slopes to be playing on’.24 The best and fullest discussion of this kind of ‘Phrygianism’ – at least of which I am aware – is in my colleague Bernard Doherty’s regrettably unpublished doctoral dissertation.25

20 22 24 25

21 Petzl, Beichtinschriften no. 1, pp. 1–2. Petzl, Beichtinschriften no. 5, pp. 7–11. 23 Acts 17.30. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis, 24–32. Robinson, Who Were the First Christians?, 185–6. Doherty, ‘Montanist Milieu’, 266–306.

6

Christianizing Asia Minor

The first Christian missionaries in Asia headed inland. In 49 or 50 (Acts 16.6), and again in 53 or 54 (Acts 18.23), Paul the Apostle travelled in Phrygia, in the course of preaching the gospel of Jesus. Phrygia is mentioned each time in connection with Galatia. In Acts 16, ‘They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia’ (τὴν Φρυγίαν καὶ Γαλατικὴν χώραν);26 but in Acts 18 the order is reversed: ‘he departed and went . . . through the region of Galatia and Phrygia’ (τὴν Γαλατικὴν χώραν καὶ Φρυγίαν). It is not likely that any significance attaches to which place name is given first. These two verses, however, have been used as data in the long-standing debate between proponents of the North Galatian and South Galatian theories of who the intended recipients of the Epistle to the Galatians were – a debate about which there will be more to say in due course. The northern and southern question about Galatia, while not in itself representing core business, provides a way into a key matter of definition for this book: the matter of where and what ‘Phrygia’ was. Stephen Mitchell, writing in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, describes Phrygia as a ‘large and ill-defined geographical region which stretched across much of west central Anatolia’.27 In the great days, the days of King Midas (known to the Assyrians as Mita, king of the Mushki) in the eighth and early seventh centuries bc, Phrygian power extended widely; but in the period of the Roman high empire, the region attested as Phrygian had shrunk.28 Dorylaeum (Eskişehir) was Phrygian, and Bithynia began further north. Proceeding anticlockwise on the map in Figure 1, the upper Hermus valley was Phrygian, with Lydia lying downstream and to the west; ‘Phrygia on the Hellespont’ was an antiquarian memory.29 Further south, Colossae and Laodicea,

26

27

28

29

Calder renders this phrase as ‘the territory which was both Phrygia and Galatia’ (MAMA 7. xii), and glosses, ‘that part of Galatic Phrygia which ran along the Pisidian border’ – meaning by ‘Galatic Phrygia’ the part of Phrygia which was in the province of Galatia (see Figure 1). Hornblower and Spawforth, Oxford Classical Dictionary4, 1142: this entry is drawn on throughout the following paragraph. Roller, ‘Legend of Midas’, 299–301. Roller, following M.J. Mellink, argues that the Mushki (in south-eastern Anatolia) and the Phrygians (in central Anatolia) were two different peoples, both of whom Midas controlled. Accordingly, he infers that the Phrygian inscription naming Midas at Tyana in Cappadocia (Friedrich, Kleinasiatische Sprachdenkmäler, 127–8, no. 19) was in Mushki territory, and so is not evidence that Phrygian was spoken as far south-east as Tyana. ‘they use the term Phrygia for the Troad because, after Troy was sacked, the Phrygians, whose territory bordered on the Troad, got the mastery over it’: Strabo Geography 10.3.22. Translation from Jones, The Geography of Strabo vol. 5.

Introduction

7

Figure 1 Roman provinces in Western Asia before and after Diocletian. Map drawn by Jenni Irving

17 kilometres apart on the Lycus river, were Phrygian; but Laodicea could from time to time be said to belong to Caria or Lydia.30 To the south-east, Xenophon once wrote that Iconium (Konya) was the ‘last [i.e. southeasternmost] city of Phrygia’:31 ‘on a natural and cultural frontier’ (as Mitchell says32), its identity was complex. References relevant to the Roman period describe it as belonging to Lycaonia or even Pisidia,33 but in 256 Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea Mazaca (Kayseri), in his letter to Cyprian, wrote of Iconium as ‘a place in Phrygia’ (Phrygiae locus).34 Antioch of Pisidia (Yalvaç), 124 kilometres west-north-west of Iconium, was clearly within the Phrygian Kulturkreis. The eastern end of Phrygia stretched as far as the Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü).

30

31 32 33

34

Laodicea on the Lycus in Caria: Philostr. VS 1.530.5; in Lydia: Herodian General Prosody 3,1.275.1. Xenophon Anabasis 1.2.19. Translation adapted from Brownson, Xenophon III rev. edn. Mitchell, ‘Iconium and Ninica’, 411. Iconium ‘a city of Lycaonia’: Herodian General Prosody 3, 1.363.27; Pisidia: Basil of Caesarea Epistles 138.2.21. Cyprian Epistles 75.7.5.

8

Christianizing Asia Minor

The poet Claudian, writing in the early fifth century and telling the story of the revolt (399–400) of Tribigild and his Ostrogoths, defines in ten brisk lines the land where they had been settled before the conflict:35 That part of Phrygia which lies towards the north beneath the cold constellation of the Wain borders on Bithynia; that towards the sunset on Ionia, and that towards the sunrise on Galatia. On two sides are the Lydians with oblique boundaries while the fierce Pisidians hem it in to the south. All these peoples once formed one nation and had one name: they were of old called the Phrygians, but (what changes does time not bring about?) after the reign of a king Maeon, were known as Maeones. Then the Greeks settled on the shores of the Aegean, and the Thyni from Thrace, cultivated the region now called Bithynia.

These lines give late antique Phrygia a shape essentially the same as that described above for the days of the high empire. Lydia’s shape, its eastern border first running north-west to south-east, then turning south-west, is alluded to with the phrase utrimque propinqui finibus obliquis Lydi (‘On two sides are the Lydians with oblique boundaries’).36 The boundaries are indeed ‘oblique’ (see Figure 1), whether or not Claudian understood with precision that a bird could fly due north from Laodicea and cross into Lydia, but continue in the same direction and be back in Phrygia further on.37 The Phrygian language, which the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus (664–610 bc) believed to be the language of the most ancient people in the world (or so the priests of Ptah at Memphis told Herodotus),38 was an Indo-European language closely related to Greek, and was used in Phrygia alongside Greek until the third century and later.39 Prehistorically, as Claude Brixhe says, ‘the Phrygians belonged to a single population-group out of which ultimately emerged the Greek, Thracian and Phrygian languages’40 – and Phrygian people had migrated west to east, from Macedonia and Thrace into Asia, via Hellespontine Phrygia and to the Sangarios river basin, and then further, to the Anatolian plateau.41 In the second and third centuries, Phrygian-language curse formulae directed against anyone who might damage a tombstone or burial place

35 36 39

40

Claud. In Eutropium 2.238–47; translation from Platnauer, Claudian vol. 1 (adapted). 37 38 Lines 240–1. Cf. Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 52. Herodotus 2.2.1–5. Documentary evidence for the Phrygian language (collected in Orel, Language of Phrygians) consists of epigraphical texts from the eighth and seventh centuries bc (‘paleo-Phrygian’) and epigraphical texts from the second and third centuries ad (‘neoPhrygian’) – the latter body of material produced almost a thousand years after the former. 41 Brixhe, ‘Personal Onomastics’, 55. Brixhe, ‘Personal Onomastics’, 55–7.

Introduction

9

were carved as part of grave inscriptions whose texts were mostly in Greek (there are also a few extant gravestones carved wholly in Phrygian).42 These inscriptions are found in eastern Phrygia and not in the central or western areas. It is difficult, nevertheless, to gauge what the difference was, linguistically, between areas where Phrygian was used in grave inscriptions and where it was not: its absence does not amount to proof that people were not speaking Phrygian in everyday life. Rick Strelan, following Brixhe, argued persuasively in 2011 that in the Lycus valley (in south-west Phrygia, at some distance from places where neoPhrygian inscriptions have been found) it is probable that Phrygian was spoken43 – and that ‘for the majority in the Lycus Valley Greek was a second language’.44 Members of a Christian sect in Phrygia whose distinctive mark was praying with a forefinger placed against the nostril to show the depth of a devotee’s penitence were called Tascodrugites,45 for the following reason. Their word for ‘peg’ is ‘tascus’, and ‘drungus’ is their word for ‘nostril’ or ‘snout’. And since they put their licking-finger, as we call it, on their nostril when they pray, for dejection, if you please, and would-be righteousness, some people have given them the name of Tascodrugians, or ‘nose-pickers’.

These Tascodrugites formed part of the complex of sects connected with the New Prophecy (Montanism),46 a Christian movement which will be discussed from Chapter 4 onwards, and which came into existence in the second half of the second century. Their Phrygian-derived name, even though probably given to them by others rather than by themselves, points towards the indigenous language being still spoken, at least by some people some of the time. Greek, however, was the most widely spoken language in Roman Asia, and was used in nearly all educational and governmental contexts –

42 43

44 45

46

The principal collection of neo-Phrygian texts is Haas, Phrygische Sprachdenkmäler. Strelan, ‘Languages of the Lycus Valley’, 97, citing Brixhe, who in 2002 argued (‘Interactions’, 254–5) that monolingual Phrygian speakers must have existed. In 1978, Elsa Gibson alluded to ‘the erroneous view that Phrygian was revived and widely spoken in this period’ [sc. the third century]: but in view of more recent work her stance on this point is no longer credible. Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’ Inscriptions of Phrygia, 96. Strelan, ‘Languages of the Lycus Valley’, 101. Epiphanius Panarion 48.14.4. Translation from Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. ‘Nose-peggers’ (cf. Trevett, Montanism, 259–60) is without the invective force of Williams’s ‘nose-pickers’.

10

Christianizing Asia Minor

except the context of the army, whose language was Latin. And yet community languages might remain important – and not only in Phrygia, as is clear from the incident at Lystra where local people came to think Paul and Barnabas were Hermes and Zeus, and (speaking Lycaonian) began preparations for a sacrifice to them.47 In the case of Phrygian, William M. Calder argues that in some areas, the Celtic language spoken by Galatians drove it out. From the third century BC, Galatians had settled north-eastern Phrygia, he notes, and48 The Galatian squirearchy and settlers maintained the use of Celtic and also of course, like all Anatolians, found it necessary to use Greek. But there was no place in Galatia for a third language, and Greek became the medium of intercourse first between the Galatians and their Phrygian subjects, and finally among the Phrygians themselves.

Calder’s schematic pronouncement goes too far in positing ‘no place . . . for a third language’, but hints usefully at the importance of relationships of power and land ownership in the way language use had been shaped before the Roman imperial period. In 295, Diocletian and the other emperors who made up the Tetrarchy reorganized the provinces of their empire. In western Asia, in the diocese of Asiana, they created eleven smaller-size provinces, seven of which had territory belonging to the old province of Asia.49 Among them were Phrygia I, also known as Phrygia Pacatiana, with its capital at Laodicea on the Lycus (Denizli), and Phrygia II, also known as Phrygia Salutaris, whose capital was Synnada (Şuhut). Nevertheless, even after Phrygia had become politically visible enough to supply the names of two Roman provinces, not all Phrygian communities were inside those provinces. So it was, in the reign of Constantine, that the people of Orcistus came to petition the emperor to allow their town city status, and to sever it from the control of Nacolea, the city to which it had previously been subordinate. Orcistus, a Phrygian town, was in Galatia II,50 but near its western border, while Nacolea was some 50 kilometres north-west, within Phrygia II Salutaris. An inscription preserves the exchange of correspondence between the local council of Orcistus, the Emperor Constantine, and Flavius Ablabius, a highly placed and still rising imperial official.51 In 47 49

50

48 Acts 14.11–14. MAMA 7. xv. Within the diocese of Asiana, Insulae, Hellespontus, Asia, Lydia, and Caria, besides the Phrygias, came out of the old province of Asia; and besides, some territory from old Asia was reassigned to Bithynia, and some to Galatia Salutaris, both in the diocese of Pontica. 51 Latitude: 39 13’ 18” N; Longitude: 31 14’ 34” E. MAMA 7.305 (ICG 1292).

Introduction

11

the 320s Ablabius was vicar of Asiana, and from 329 until 337 he was praetorian prefect of the East:52 after Constantine’s death he was killed in the ‘promiscuous massacre’ with which Constantius II began his reign.53 Constantine’s trust in Ablabius while he lived, however, is evident in that Ablabius’ daughter Olympias was betrothed to Constantine’s youngest son Constans, who was fourteen when Constantine died.54 The Orcistans presented their petition in Latin,55 and had a subtle advocate. The petition said that the town was ‘in the middle of the borderland of Galatia [and] Phrygia’ (sounding better than ‘right at the edge of Galatia’), and that ‘it offer[ed] passage on four roads’ (avoiding spelling out that Orcistus’ claim rested on it being a crossroads in the middle of nowhere). At a past date, Orcistus, small as it was, had become part of the territory of Nacolea. The councillors in their letter asserted that Orcistus had once been a city: Frank Kolb, however, concludes that they cannot have been candid with the emperor,56 and independent confirmation of the councillors’ claim is lacking. The imperial reasoning for granting the petition, beyond echoing the councillors’ claim that their facilities justify city status, focuses on the idea that it is unjust for Nacolea to have control, and adds as a ‘culminating [characteristic]’57 that ‘all are said to reside there [sc. at Orcistus] as supporters of the most holy religion’. In the 330s, therefore, this small Phrygian community relied on the Christian commitment of its people in order to gain favour from the first Christian emperor. Constantine granted city status to Orcistus, partly because the councillors claimed that the people of Orcistus were all Christians. On the phrase ‘supporters of the most holy religion’, 52 53

54

55

56

57

Ablabius is listed in PLRE (1.3–4) as ‘Fl. Ablabius 4’. Killing of Ablabius: Eunapius Lives of the Sophists 6.3.10–11, Zosimus Historia nova 2.40.3. Reasons: possibly his being associated with the policy of involving Constantine’s nephews Dalmatius and Hannibalianus in government (Lieu and Montserrat, Constantine to Julian, 148); possibly his Nicene orthodoxy and friendship with Athanasius (DiMaio and Arnold, ‘Per Vim, Per Caedem, Per Bellum’, 184–7); possibly simply his and his daughter’s links with the imperial family (164). Ammianus Marcellinus 20.11.3. After her father was put to death, Olympias was given in marriage instead to Arsaces, king of Armenia 350–68. Cf. Van Dam, Roman Revolution of Constantine, 13, noting that in recent times there had been some reason to think that correspondence in Latin would be more favourably received at court than in Greek – but doubting if, at the date of writing, using Latin would have delivered an advantage. Kolb, ‘Bemerkungen zur urbanen Ausstattung’, 338: ‘Es bleibt daher nur eine Möglichkeit: Die Orkistener schwindeln.’ ‘quasi quidam cumulus’: MAMA 7.305 (ICG 1292) Panel 1 lines 39–40.

12

Christianizing Asia Minor

Raymond Van Dam comments that the ‘description was obviously rather vague’. He speculates that in particular circumstances, ‘if the salutations were lost and the letters and petition were anonymous’, it would be ‘possible to interpret this description of the people of Orcistus in terms of a general affiliation to . . . something other than Christianity’.58 But uncertainty is misplaced, and idea that ‘the most holy religion’ might be read as referring to a pagan cult is particularly vulnerable. Constantine himself had written that ‘in [Tiberius’] time . . . the presence of the Saviour shone forth, and the mystery of the most holy religion prevailed’59 – clearly not intending to create ambiguity. When they called themselves sectatores sanctissimae religionis, the Orcistans may have known that they were echoing the emperor’s words – the subtle advocate who drafted their petition may have known the Speech to the Assembly of the Saints. Or perhaps their choice of words was merely lucky; but Van Dam’s idea that they were being ‘coy’ bespeaks obtuseness. When Constantine wrote, at the beginning of the letter to Ablabius, that his ‘desire [was] either to found new cities or to revive lifeless cities’, this was a routine statement of imperial ideology (since a good emperor builds monuments and founds cities); and yet the cliché comes to life when one remembers that the decree in favour of Orcistus was issued during the building of Constantinople itself. Byzantium, the previous city on the site, had been demolished; and on 8 November 324 a consecration ceremony was held.60 Almost six years later, the dedication ceremony for Constantinople was held, on 11 May 33061 – at a cost to other places, as Jerome-Eusebius’ Chronicle makes clear, when it notes against the year 330, ‘Constantinople dedicated, by denuding nearly every other city.’62 Orcistus, with little to offer beyond some statues of old emperors, probably escaped the attention of the officers collecting objets d’art for New Rome; but the fact that another Christian city had brought its existence to the emperor’s attention may have reinforced Constantine’s certainty that he had done the right thing. Constantinople was an object lesson: it was created to model the change to the Roman sacred canopy which Constantine, after defeating Licinius at Chrysopolis, intended to bring about. As Ramsay MacMullen 58 59

60 61 62

Van Dam, Roman Revolution of Constantine, 163. Constantine Speech to the Assembly of the Saints 19 (I am inclined to accept Easter 315 as the date of this speech: cf. Mark Edwards, Constantine and Christendom, xxix). Evidence summarized at Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power, 111–12. Evidence summarized at Barnes, Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power, 126–7. Dedicatur Constantinopolis omnium paene urbium nuditate: Jer. Chron. Ol. 277.

Introduction

13

observes in his book about the persistence of paganism from the fourth to eighth centuries, the aim was for that change to make its impact everywhere.63 Everywhere included the vanishingly obscure city of Orcistus; and therefore its councillors’ claim to be followers of ‘the most holy religion’ unlocked imperial patronage. What happened in cities was key (as the founder of Constantinople perceived) to the prospect of success for Constantine’s plan to advance Christianity; and, as Peter L. Berger writes, ‘The Greek city continued to be legitimated in religious terms’ in the Roman era, because of the way religion can ‘locate human phenomena within a cosmic frame of reference’.64 In Byzantium’s case, demolition and starting again were what it took to have a capital where the Christian cosmic frame of reference held sway. This book draws on this insight of Berger’s in important ways. Although The Sacred Canopy was published as long ago as 1966, Vivien Burr in her book on social constructionism (the stance which Berger espouses) treats social constructionism as a lively current of thought, and comments on the interface between it and the more recent critical realist school, whereby critical realists ‘acknowledge that the social world is not independent and separate from people’.65 The heart of the somewhat more radical position expounded by Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality is that ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ are, in a thoroughgoing way, socially relative66 – or that (in Burr’s words) ‘human beings continually construct the social world, which then becomes a reality to which they must respond’.67 At the heart of the agenda of this study as a whole, therefore, is a question about how in the longue durée represented by the years from the first to the third centuries, people in Phrygia and inland Asia Minor moved away from the (to them) objective reality of the social world left them by their predecessors, and constructed and sustained a new social world – as at Orcistus. If the people of Orcistus really were all ‘followers of the most holy religion’, they had become so over time, back in the 250 years or so during which Christianity was illegal in the Roman empire. The effects of illegality across the Roman empire are hard to gauge, but cities were in many cases the operative units for the retention of religious allegiance or

63 65 66 67

64 MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 3. Berger, Sacred Canopy, 35. Burr, Social Constructionism3, 109. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 13–15. Burr, Social Constructionism3, 210.

14

Christianizing Asia Minor

(as time went on) for change in it – as well as being before Constantine (as G.W. Bowersock observed) an ‘urban stage’ for religious conflict.68 So, to consider another example, Neocaesarea, home city of Gregory (with whom this chapter began), shows how a civic community might seize the opportunity to set its own terms for the religious legitimation of its social order.69 There, Gregory – now known by his baptismal name, but originally called Theodorus – returned home, apparently unharmed by any robbers, from theological studies at Caesarea, and legal studies at Berytus (Beirut).70 Gregory of Nyssa gives an account of Gregory’s life, and at its heart is the story of Gregory (Theodorus) reluctantly agreeing to take pastoral responsibility for Neocaesarea, as its bishop, at a time when only seventeen persons there were Christians. But, Gregory of Nyssa writes, there were only seventeen persons in Neocaesarea who were not Christians when Gregory (Theodorus) died.71 The dates of his service as bishop approximate to 240 to 270.72 He gained a reputation as a miracle worker. In hindsight, however, his most impressive episcopal achievement consisted in helping his hometown towards a new ‘solidarity in the face of chaos’ – to draw on Berger again, who argues that ‘the power of religion depends on the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death’.73 As to the numbers, Gregory of Nyssa spoke the language of hagiography; but in the broader perspective it may not matter exactly how small Gregory’s flock was when he was consecrated as bishop,74 or exactly how many Neocaesareans later held back from wanting to stand beneath their community’s new banners. A proportion of them must have held on to private worship of the older kind – the domestic religion whose persistence in later centuries MacMullen traces as ‘turning up in the record now and again by inadvertence’,75 and which he calls ‘a substratum of rites addressing life’s hopes and fears without appeal to any one 68 70

71 72

73 74

75

69 Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome, 41–57. Cf. Berger, Sacred Canopy, 41. Graham Davis Lovell, Gregory of Neocaesarea, 65–91, drawing on Gregory Thaumaturgus Panegyric on Origen. Gregory of Nyssa Life of Gregory 3.27 and 15.97. Mitchell, ‘The Life and Lives of Gregory Thaumaturgus’, 99. Lovell, ‘Gregory of Neocaesarea’s Theology and Statement of Faith’, 26, dates Gregory’s tenure as bishop a little later, from c.251. Berger, Sacred Canopy, 51. Mitchell (‘Life and Lives of Gregory Thaumaturgus’, 122) calls the claim that there were only seventeen ‘an obvious fiction’. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 61.

Introduction

15

being in particular’.76 MacMullen draws attention (in another book) to John Chrysostom’s claim in a homily given at Antioch in Syria in the 370s that ‘by the grace of God they that assemble themselves here amount to the number of one hundred thousand’:77 100,000 Christians, that is, in a city then of perhaps a quarter of a million78 – where the largest church, the building in which this homily was preached, is likely to have accommodated only 500 people, or 600 at most. More than 99,000 of the Christians, therefore, were not in church listening to John Chrysostom on a given occasion in the 370s. Taking Chrysostom at his word that his hundred thousand were Christians, one must retain some reservation about how operative Christian teaching was in shaping the life of the ordinary believer in a newly Christian city in the Roman East. Even so, it ought to be clear (pace Robinson) that to an important degree ‘the city’ (as opposed to ‘the province’ or ‘the empire’) was at the centre of religious change or religious conservatism – particularly because a city could have a distinctive sacred canopy, and a given city did not have to be merely Roman, or Pontic, or Cappadocian, or Phrygian – as Orcistus was, at the heart of the area where the Phrygian language was the most vigorous. The Orcistans’ embrace of Christianity was part of a tide which began to rise in Phrygia as early as the New Testament period, and certain features of that rising tide made Phrygia distinctive. One local characteristic was that, besides Rome (but not the rest of Italy), Phrygia, together with neighbouring Pisidia and Lycaonia, was part of the only region in the Roman empire where inscriptions on stone which bear explicit witness to the Christianity of the people who set them up are preserved from before the time of Constantine. In Rome, from the reign of Septimius Severus onwards, several gravestones of members of the familia Caesaris (the imperial household) are preserved, which record, sometimes unobtrusively, that those commemorated were Christians.79 It seems that the reason why families and friends of the deceased could carve in stone that their dead had been members of an illegal religious group was that they had little fear of adverse consequences. Behind that would be the fact that they were slaves or freed slaves of the emperor. It was up to a master to discipline his own slaves – and so the prefect of the City was unlikely to risk infringing the emperor’s 76 77 79

MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 69. 78 John Chrysostom Homilies on Matthew 85.4. MacMullen, Second Church, 12. McKechnie, ‘Christian Grave-Inscriptions from the Familia Caesaris’.

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Christianizing Asia Minor

right to discipline his own servants by taking action against anyone who belonged to the emperor; emperors in general did not care to discourage their own servants from Christianity.80 The making of these few gravestones would hardly seem like a dramatic step out of the closet for Roman Christians, except that it was being done nowhere else in the Roman empire. Nowhere, that is, with very few and scattered exceptions, except the Phrygian–Pisidian–Lycaonian region. Thus, an odd parallel between Rome and a remote area.81 There, perhaps shortly before 200, Aberkios, bishop of Hierapolis, died, and his family or friends dedicated a gravestone containing a twenty-two-line poem about his life and his commitment to Christianity.82 It was a locally prominent monument, though not the earliest of its kind.83 Subsequently, through the third century, a good many gravestones were made which identify the deceased as Christian. Elsa Gibson in 1978 published her book about the ‘Christians for Christians’ inscriptions which are characteristic of the upper Tembris valley;84 and in 1995 Gary J. Johnson published his EarlyChristian Epitaphs from Anatolia, reprinting eighty-one inscriptions – not all of which, however, are actually Christian. Both these books include fourth-century as well as third-century material, and there is no reliable count of how many inscriptions extant today are both clearly Christian and datable before 313.85 Phrygia’s special features, its ordinariness in some respects and its distinctiveness in others, make it clear how much interest a local study of the growth of Christianity there has for the enterprise of early Christian history in Asia and beyond. This book, therefore, is about how Phrygian communities, mixed urban–rural communities, began the lengthy and radical task of changing their sacred canopy though the years before sanction was given to such a change by the emperors of Rome. It is not

80

81

82 83 84 85

Maximinus Thrax, according to Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History 6.28) started a persecution ‘on account of his hatred of the household of [Severus] Alexander [222–235], which contained many believers’; but his approach to managing the imperial palace was not the usual one. Remoteness: ‘about as far as one can get from major centres of population’, as Simon Price wrote (‘Religious Mobility in the Roman Empire’, 8). Johnson, Early-Christian Epitaphs from Anatolia, no. 2.15 (ICG 1597). The question of the earliest (known today) will be addressed in Chapter 6. Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’ Inscriptions of Phrygia. MacMullen (Second Church, 145 n.20) counts the relevant epitaphs conservatively, concluding that ‘patterns of density of Christian population are a local matter’, and that there was a small minority of Christians before 310, and a strong increase only post-350.

Introduction

17

focused on rivalry between Christian sects and Christian leaders, even though Phrygia was unusually prolific in producing both; and still less is it about Christian theology, or about individual devotion. Those factors will be mentioned where relevant, but the intention throughout is to be sensitive to how the changes which were happening would have struck a Phrygian observer in the first three centuries of the Christian era – whether that observer was in the agora (market-place) of Laodicea or Synnada, or some less brilliant city, or in a farmhouse, or whether he or she was in a house church, or maybe a leather shop, or one of the similar places which Christians frequented in order to attain to perfection.86 While keeping the Phrygian region front and centre, straying to other parts of the Roman empire only in order to return to inland Asia Minor with a better-honed sense of its particularity, this study will ask persistently how different conditions were there from elsewhere, in relation to the growth of Christianity. The discussion of Neocaesarea in this Introduction intentionally implies that the initial hypothesis is that with care, relevant comparisons can be informative about how matters were likely to play out. Difference, however, is as compelling as similarity, and there will be ample occasion to draw distinctions. This book ranges from the time of the initial encounters between Phrygians and Christian missionaries, referred to in Acts, to the time of the Great Persecution (303–312) and the astonishing reversal which followed and made Christianity the favoured religion of the Roman emperors from 313. Only a few summary observations are made about the fourth-century years when Constantine and his successors began to impose a Christian sacred canopy, both on the grand scale (as at Constantinople) and in local microcosm (as at Orcistus).

86

Origen C. Cels. 3.55.

1 Phrygia in the New Testament

The references in Acts to the route the Apostle Paul took through Asia Minor, and his own statement in Galatians (not reflected in Acts) that ‘it was because of a physical infirmity that [he] first announced the gospel to [the Galatians]’,1 have combined to provoke the recalcitrant question alluded to in the Introduction: Was Galatians written to the ‘South Galatian’ peoples of Antioch of Pisidia, Derbe, and Lystra, whom Paul had visited;2 or was it directed to Christians in the (ethnically Celtic) North Galatian area around Ancyra, Tavium, and Pessinus? Frank J. Matera in 1992 summed up the debate, delivering a complex verdict on the scholarship to date: ‘the majority of scholars’, he noted, ‘lean in the direction of the North Galatian hypothesis’; but he himself adopted the view that ‘the balance of probability . . . weighs ever so slightly in favour of the South Galatian hypothesis’.3 This unresolved enigma bears on the issue of Phrygia in the New Testament because it involves contrasting understandings of Acts 16.6 (‘They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia’) and 18.23 (‘he departed and went from place to place through the region of Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening all the disciples’). Acts 16.6 in particular is read by North Galatianists as referring to two (distinct) districts, Phrygia and Galatia, while South Galatianists read it as meaning ‘the region of Phrygia

1 3

2 Galatians 4.13. Acts 13.14–14.23. Matera, Galatians, 24. After Matera, the North and South Galatian debate as it stood in 2010 was summarized in Schreiner, Galatians, 22–9.

18

Phrygia in the New Testament

19

that was in the province of Galatia’.4 The latter reading would carry the implication that Antioch of Pisidia, Derbe, Lystra, and Iconium – all outside the province of Asia – constituted the region to whose churches Paul wrote Galatians. In 2012, Clare K. Rothschild reopened the North versus South debate, with the intention of resolving it once and for all in favour of the northern hypothesis. Her 2012 argument proceeds on lines envisaged in her Luke– Acts and the Rhetoric of History (2004), where she observes that for commentators since the days of the Tübingen school, writing history while also setting forth theology has led, in the dominant hermeneutical model, to ‘separate strands connected and spiralling inward around each other’ like a DNA double helix.5 She herself intends to situate Acts (which is a text on a small scale) against the background of Hellenistic historiography as a persuasive genre – and this stance leads her in effect to give unconditional priority to the rhetorical imperatives to which the writer of Acts responded, ‘five or more decades after Paul’s death’,6 while shrinking almost to vanishing point any historical, as distinct from the rhetorical, element in the text. Rothschild’s case in relation to North and South Galatia is to the effect that the writer of Acts for rhetorical reasons has constructed a narrative in which Paul on his ‘so-called first journey’7 travels to Antioch of Pisidia and nearby cities – but has done so on the basis of little knowledge of the places themselves and not on the basis of a visit to that area which Paul actually made. Galatians (along with other Pauline texts) was in front of the writer, who was composing a quasi-factual narrative to create a backstory and account inter alia for the existence of a letter from the apostle to Galatians, living in otherwise unidentified places.8 South Galatia, then, on the Rothschild view, ‘is based on nothing more than a blank mandate to get Paul to Galatia and a literary advantage of placing him in the South’.9 It remains to be seen whether Rothschild’s argument will gain wide acceptance. It meshes well with Richard I. Pervo’s view of Acts, expounded with great thoroughness in his 2009 Commentary and also in his 2006 monograph on the dating of Acts.10 Some may, however, see

4 6

7 9

5 Matera, Galatians, 23. Rothschild, Luke–Acts, 27. On the date, Rothschild, ‘Pisidian Antioch’, 353 n.73; dating in the region of the second decade of the second century is in line with Pervo’s view in Dating Acts. 8 Rothschild, ‘Pisidian Antioch’, 341. Rothschild, ‘Pisidian Antioch’, 339. 10 Rothschild, ‘Pisidian Antioch’, 353. Pervo, Acts: A Commentary and Dating Acts.

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Christianizing Asia Minor

Rothschild’s disproof of the South Galatian hypothesis as representing the pinnacle of an edifice built on several suppositions: late date of Luke– Acts, availability to the Luke–Acts writer of a mixed corpus of influential Pauline and pseudo-Pauline texts, but non-availability of institutional memory which could have told a factual story of the course of Paul’s life after his Damascus road experience. Chris Forbes’s less radical approach to Acts as a historical source retains sensitivity to it being a text whose purpose is persuasive, while giving more weight to the idea that the author may have been well informed in factual terms.11 This is a line of argument against which the Rothschild and Pervo view, and radical views of Acts as far back as Franz Overbeck’s ‘strong asseveration against “history” and for “theology”’,12 are vulnerable. Paul did, one way or another, as Luke tells the story in Acts, preach the gospel in Phrygia, along with Galatia, and made more than one visit to (some of ) the churches there. He left behind no letter called ‘Phrygians’, and so spared scholars a second North–South debate. Acts, however, is not the beginning and end of the biblical evidence for the Phrygian churches, since both the Johannine and the Pauline groups of New Testament texts reflect the Phrygian experience of first-century Christianity. In the Pauline group, the central text is Colossians – but a web of connections spreads out from that text. In the Johannine group, the one Phrygian moment comes in the letter to the angel of the church at Laodicea in Revelation. In this chapter, first, the New Testament texts will be interrogated for what they show about how Christianity developed in the Phrygian area during the first century ad, and secondly, the world of synagogues and Jewish communities in Phrygia will be examined, since it is the indispensable backdrop to the unfolding drama of Christianity’s expansion.

colossae and colossians The necessary point of departure is Colossians. Colossae, in the Lycus valley, was a small city, and the Pauline epistle – itself a short text by New Testament standards – raises historical and theological issues absorbing enough to have prompted a great deal of scholarly comment, even against the background of the New Testament as a whole being an intensively studied and commented text. The insights it provides into the 11

Forbes, ‘Acts of the Apostles as a Source’.

12

Cf. Rothschild, Luke–Acts, 25.

Phrygia in the New Testament

21

early decades of Christianity in Colossae’s small corner of Phrygia are informative – and would be even more so if there were greater certainty over when Colossians was written, and by whom; and over what degree of first-hand knowledge the writer had of church life in Colossae. Colossians is professedly a prison epistle,13 as are Philippians, Ephesians, and Philemon.14 Colossians and Ephesians were delivered (they say) by Tychicus;15 and Paul appeals on behalf of Onesimus, one of the Colossians,16 in the letter to Philemon.17 Philippians was delivered to a different continent; however, internal evidence gives rise to a case, which some accept and some reject, for Colossians and Ephesians having been composed at the same time and delivered by the same person on the same journey. In this book, the cases for pseudepigraphical Colossians and pseudepigraphical Ephesians will not be given a full re-examination, since the argument here does not depend on acceptance of a particular theory of authorship of those texts (there is scholarly consensus, asymptotically close to unanimity, on Philemon having been written by Paul18), but recent discussion will be outlined in a diachronic way. If a follower of Paul wrote Colossians after Paul’s death (and so at a later date than the early sixties, at which later date the ideas Colossians adumbrates about Christology, ecclesiology, and eschatology might, as some see it, more credibly be seen as likely to have taken shape in the Christian community’s consciousness), then that follower created an impressive sense of verisimilitude: one which was ‘no casual matter’.19 As well as Tychicus and Onesimus, he names six persons who join him in greeting the Colossians,20 and evokes a lively reciprocity between churches at Colossae and Laodicea;21 he then replicates Paul’s practice of adding a greeting at the end of a letter in his own handwriting.22

13 14 15 16 17

18

19 21 22

Colossians 4.18, ‘Remember my chains’. Philippians 1.7; Ephesians 3.1; Philemon 1. Colossians 4.7–9; Ephesians 6.21. Philemon was written and delivered earlier. Colossians 4.9. Philemon 10; and it seems from Philemon 17 (‘welcome him as you would welcome me’) that Onesimus has brought the letter to Philemon, or arrived when someone else (Tychicus?) brought it. Moo (Colossians and Philemon, 361) notes that F.C. Baur and a few others have questioned Pauline authorship, but sums up these doubts as ‘no serious challenge’. 20 See Moo, Colossians and Philemon, 28. Colossians 4.7–15. Colossians 4.15–16. Colossians 4.18, cf. 1 Corinthians 16.21 (an epistle almost never considered pseudepigraphical).

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Christianizing Asia Minor

Arguments of considerable sophistication continue to be deployed, as they have been for decades, to associate or dissociate in terms of authorship and date Colossians and Ephesians, the two epistles which were (or, conversely, were not) in Tychicus’ luggage when he arrived in Asia. J.B. Lightfoot elided any question of Paul not having written Colossians,23 sweeping aside the arguments on authorship which E.T. Mayerhoff had raised in 1838.24 A century after Mayerhoff, John Knox accepted a genuine Philemon and a pseudepigraphical Ephesians,25 before arguing that the connection with Onesimus guaranteed the authenticity of Colossians, because the circumstance of returning Onesimus to his master prompted Paul to ‘establish contact with the church to which Onesimus’ master belonged’.26 The Colossian Haustafel, concentrating on relations between masters and slaves, underlines this consideration, in Knox’s view.27 Mark Kiley in 1986, by contrast, while placing Ephesians in the category of ‘canonical Pauline pseudepigraphy’,28 argued in detail for Colossians as a pseudepigraphical text which uses Philippians and Philemon (‘genuine prison letters of Paul’) as its ‘primary models of construction’.29 In 1994, sensing a shift in favour of pseudonymity in the authorship debate, Richard DeMaris resolved in his book to refer to the Colossians author as ‘the letter writer’30 – without himself re-examining the question. But in 1976, G.B. Caird had stated the considerations applying to authorship lucidly, observing that difference in style from Romans and Galatians is ‘the only valid argument against . . . Pauline authorship’, while insisting on stylistic similarity between Colossians and Ephesians. He drew the inference that if ‘the author of Ephesians had any hand in the writing of Colossians, there is no serious reason for denying that that author was Paul himself’.31 The view that Colossians and Ephesians in some way stand together (whether as Pauline or deutero-Pauline texts) is compelling; yet on authorship, the fact that diametrically opposed views continue to be put forward

23 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

24 Lightfoot, Colossians and Philemon, 6. Mayerhoff, Brief an die Kolosser. Knox, ‘Philemon and the Authenticity of Colossians’, 145–6. Knox, ‘Philemon and the Authenticity of Colossians’, 151. Knox, ‘Philemon and the Authenticity of Colossians’, 156–7. Kiley, Colossians as Pseudepigraphy, 25. Kiley, Colossians as Pseudepigraphy, 75–91 (quotations from 75). DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 11–12. Caird, Paul’s Letters from Prison, 156–7 – not omitting to allude (157 n.2) to ‘resemblances of language, style, and thought to Philippians’.

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on the basis of identical evidence points to a real difficulty in achieving certainty.32 Take the matter of local knowledge (given that Paul never visited Colossae): Alastair Kirkland argued in his 1995 article that Colossians, if not written by Paul, was written by someone with knowledge of the Lycus valley and the churches there;33 while Angela Standhartinger, in her article published in 2001, argued that the authors (plural) of Colossians not only had never been there, but used names from Philemon to ‘create an ideal community’, in a text written on the basis of ‘no more than general knowledge about this small town in Asia Minor’34 – and that accordingly Colossians was probably not written for the Christian congregation at Colossae.35 Ulrich Huttner, by contrast, makes a very earnest study of the prosopography of Philemon and Colossians,36 with a focus on Epaphras, who was (Huttner argues) from Colossae, but was also ‘in at the creation’ of the Christian community across the Lycus valley as a whole.37 A variant on this theme had been scouted by Kiley in 1986, when he wrote that he was ‘attracted to the possibility’ that before the writing of Colossians, the city of Colossae had been destroyed by the earthquake which occurred in the seventh year of Nero;38 but Kiley’s inference that Colossae may not have recovered (as Laodicea did, from the effects of the same earthquake39), already – at the time of Kiley’s book – weakened by the existence of second- and third-century coins from Colossae, is now disproved by Alan H. Cadwallader’s re-examination of the question – and

32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39

Dunn in 1996 suggested that Colossians was written by Timothy ‘for Paul at Paul’s behest’ (Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, 38), a suggestion cited approvingly by Trebilco in 2011 (‘Christians in the Lycus Valley’, 180). Huttner argues for Colossians as a pseudepigraphical text, but places it early, insisting that it cannot have been delivered to Colossae after the time when Paul’s death became known there (Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 110–14). Kirkland, ‘Beginnings of Christianity in the Lycus Valley’, 111 and 115. Standhartinger, ‘Origin and Intention of the Household Code’, 124 n.30. Standhartinger, ‘Origin and Intention of the Household Code’, 124: ‘It remains questionable whether the authors have in view a particular church in the city of Colossae’; see also Standhartinger, Kolosserbrief, 13–16. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 87–92. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 89. Kiley, Colossians as Pseudepigraphy, 104. Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colossae were destroyed by the same earthquake: Orosius 7.7.12; this earthquake occurred in the seventh year of Nero (ad 61/62): Tacitus Annals 14.27, where Tacitus adds that Laodicea ‘recovered by its own resources, without assistance from ourselves [= the Romans]’.

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above all by the inscription honouring Korumbos for repairing the baths at Colossae.40 Standhartinger’s view, first expounded at book length in 1999, of Colossians as a text created committee-style in the crisis after Paul’s death,41 is problematic. She asserts in relation to the household code (Colossians 3.18–4.1), that the ‘church life depicted in Colossians is not that of a congregation structured according to the oikos-model’, but what this assertion relies on is the fact that nothing in the epistle deals with life in an oikos (household) – except the part which does.42 Other recent studies, although directed to distinct conclusions, have had in common an approach based on viewing Colossians as a coherent text from which detailed inferences can be drawn about life in the church at Colossae. The plausibility of this outlook is validated by the text’s brevity and the intertextual relations between it, Philemon, and Ephesians. All three, it seems correct to infer, are relevant to understanding how Christianity developed in its earliest years in Phrygia. New York and Chicago in the 1990s were the backdrop, respectively, to two contrasting projects in which Colossians was expounded as evidence of an encounter between the Christian teaching of Paul’s generation and Greek philosophy. At Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in New York,43 Richard E. DeMaris first developed as a PhD dissertation (1990) the study published in 1994 as The Colossian Controversy: Wisdom in Dispute at Colossae, in which he argues that the letter turns on a dispute internal to Middle Platonic philosophy: the author expressing a Pythagorean-Eudorian perspective, over against a philosophy current in Colossae which belonged to the Stoic-Antiochian wing of the Platonic school.44 Troy W. Martin, however, who first presented his ideas to the Chicago Society of Biblical Research in 1993,45 in 1996 published

40

41

42

43 45

Cadwallader and Trainor, Colossae in Space and Time, 159–75; the Korumbos inscription: 170–174. Standhartinger argues (Kolosserbrief, 195) that the reason for the letter was the ‘pessimism and insecurity’ (Pessimismus und Verunsicherung) consequent on the death of Paul. Standhartinger, ‘Origin and Intention of the Household Code’, 125. Note (same page) that ‘apart from the household code, everyday life and the oikos model are not mentioned at all in Colossians’. But Colossians is a short book, 1,684 words of Greek text, 116 of which form the household code. Saying that the rest of the text is not about the things dealt with from 3.18–4.1 proves nothing. 44 DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 7. DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 143. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 7.

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By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, in which he argues (in the words of the subtitle) that Colossians is a ‘response to a Cynic critique’. Martin envisages a scenario whereby Cynic philosophers were present at Christian worship in Colossae and confronted the Christians with a critique of their system of religion,46 including of the Eucharist,47 the Christian religious calendar,48 their understanding and practise of humility,49 and their acceptance of a kind of worship (taught them by human messengers of the gospel50) which involved baptism, prayer, and singing.51 In the epistle, therefore, the author gives readers theological and ethical responses which they are intended to deploy, responding to tenets of Cynic philosophy,52 and defending the Christian lifestyle.53 Martin’s argument that the Colossian opponents were Cynic philosophers is developed inferentially and elaborated with detailed reference to Cynic literature, including the letters of pseudo-Diogenes and pseudoHeraclitus. Among Martin’s stronger points is his insistence, following J. Blinzler and E. Schweitzer, that the phrase τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου (Colossians 2.8) denotes the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) and not (as the NRSV translates the phrase) ‘the elemental spirits of the universe’.54 Martin’s discussion of the Cynics’ use of a theory of elements as a basis for their ethics appears to mesh well with the way the text of Colossians links ‘philosophy and empty deceit’ to ‘the elements of the universe’.55 Cynic philosophy, indeed, was increasingly successful during the first and second centuries, as Martin observes,56 with the result that after 165 Lucian wrote of ‘every city’ being full of the laziness (ῥᾳδιουργία) of (fake) philosophers, especially Cynics.57 Accordingly, the hypothesis that there were Cynics at Colossae a century before, disputing against Christians, is credible in principle.

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 104–5 and 109–11. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 116–23. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 124–34. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 135–48. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 159, such being Martin’s exegesis of the phrase θρησκείᾳ τῶν ἀγγέλων (Colossians 2.18) – the angels (on his view) being ‘human instead of heavenly messengers’. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 149–67. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 170. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 191. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 154. Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 99–104. 57 Martin, By Philosophy and Empty Deceit, 109. Lucian Fugitivi 16.

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A difficulty lies, however, in the great gulf fixed between ‘credible in principle’ and ‘compelling’. If Cynic philosophy, why not (as DeMaris argued two years before) Platonism? DeMaris, after giving an exemplary état de question in his first two chapters,58 comments on the polemical parts of Colossians 2 and argues for the inadequacy of past explanations of the Colossian philosophy;59 then the exposition which follows of the controversy at the heart of the epistle leads DeMaris to posit significant correspondence between Middle Platonism and the Colossian philosophy,60 and to look to Philo of Alexandria as a key ‘example of how Jewish and pagan philosophical traditions combined’.61 DeMaris has to concede that ‘the Jewish practices of the Colossian philosophy distinguish it from all other known types of Middle Platonism’,62 but he argues that the critical mass of Jews in Phrygia (settled there since the third century bc 63) created conditions in which ‘philosophically-inclined pagans entering the Christian congregation maintained and advocated Jewish practices’.64 He stops short of concluding that ‘a group of Middle Platonists had found their way into the Christian congregation and were advocating their ideas to others’;65 but he sees the author of Colossians as expressing the Pythagorean-Eudorian perspective,66 which is to say that if the Colossian philosophers somehow were not quite Middle Platonists, at any rate their antagonist was, although one who had a broad stripe of apocalyptic thinking as part of his mentality.67 DeMaris, Martin, Standhartinger, and others, have expounded Colossians with an erudition which almost swamps the modest quantum of data existing in the text. The subtlety and beauty of the schemes elaborated by twentieth-century scholars is problematic in itself – because the city of Colossae, although as a whole ‘a major resource which remains largely uninvestigated’ (as Rosalinde A. Kearsley wrote in 201168), was small, and not high on the philosophical food chain. DeMaris in his analysis writes of Antiochus of Ascalon,69 who in the first century bc

58 59 61 63 65

66 68

69

DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 11–40. 60 DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 41–97. DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 112. 62 DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 114. DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 118. 64 DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 123. DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 125. Quotation from DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 131 – prefixed by, ‘It would go beyond the meagre evidence to conclude . . .’ 67 DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 143. DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 143–5. Kearsley, ‘Epigraphic Evidence for the Social Impact of Roman Government in Laodicea and Hierapolis’, 148. DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 115–17.

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led Plato’s Academy in rejecting scepticism in favour of dogmatism, and discusses Philo,70 an affluent Roman citizen from a Jewish family. Both these two were based in Alexandria – but it is improbable that any such high-octane philosophers ever taught at Colossae. It was lesser lights who kept the flame of Greek philosophy burning in that kind of small centre (but who could in the second century be accused of ῥᾳδιουργία by Lucian). To what degree they were au courant with recent discussion at the top level remains unclear: and the more provincial the quality of philosophy teaching in Colossae,71 the less plausible the modern arguments which rest on placing Colossian philosophy in the context of discourse at the Greek world’s most refined level. Against that background, two Bible scholars stand out (in differing ways) from the press of fin de siècle speculation, on account of their realistic treatment of conditions in Colossae: James D.G. Dunn, and Clinton E. Arnold. Arnold in The Colossian Syncretism examines veneration of angels in Judaism and in pagan texts from Asia Minor, reconstructing the Colossian philosophy with substantial reference to local religious conditions;72 while Dunn in ‘The Colossian Philosophy: A Confident Jewish Apologia’ argues that the Colossian philosophy should be understood as ‘a kind of Jewish mysticism’.73 Dunn’s sense that the ‘philosophy’ mentioned at Colossians 2.8 was something characteristically Jewish may gain some plausibility in view of the incident he cites from Cicero,74 in which twenty pounds of gold were seized from Jews at Laodicea in 62 bc by Lucius Peducaeus:75 a sum (accumulated from the half-shekel contribution to the Temple which every Jew aged twenty and over had to pay76) which (so Dunn argues, at least) would imply that ‘as many as two or three thousand Jews may 70 71

72

73 75

DeMaris, Colossian Controversy, 112–13. Data by which to quantify the difference in quality of philosophy teaching between metropolis and periphery are not easily to hand; but Thonemann’s observations on the differences between village and city poetry teachers (γραμματικοί) may be relevant, and applicable with due caution. The village teachers, whom Thonemann identifies as the composers of (epigraphically extant) metrical epitaphs in the east Phrygian Axylon district, west of the Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü), knew Homer and drew on Homeric epic in their compositions (‘virtually every line of every epitaph contains a quotation, a halfquotation, or a pastiche of something from the Iliad or Odyssey’), but do not show familiarity with Hesiod, Menander, or Callimachus – still widely read at the same period in the cities and larger towns (Thonemann, ‘Poets of the Axylon’, 192–4). Angels: Arnold, Colossian Syncretism, 8–102; local cults, 104–57; Stoicheia (as hostile angelic powers), 158–94. 74 Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 154. Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 157. 76 Cicero Pro Flacco 28.68. Exodus 30.11–16.

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have lived in Colossae’.77 Caution is in order, however, because Colossae (although it is an unexcavated site) has been studied carefully and so far no direct evidence of a Jewish community has been found.78 If Jews were not settled at Colossae the situation would be in powerful contrast to the situation in Hierapolis and Laodicea – so Dunn is premature in attempting to calculate how many Jews there must have been in the city. The heart of Dunn’s case is his argument that the controversy in Colossians revolves around the Christians’ claim to ‘share in the inheritance of the saints in the light’:79 on the other side (he writes) was ‘Jewish denigration of the Colossian Christians’ claim to participate in Israel’s heritage’.80 He points to the importance of circumcision as an idea in the epistle,81 to references to festivals, new moons, Sabbaths, and purity concerns to do with food.82 All these issues relate to the controversy as Dunn hypothesizes it, and support his dismissal of the idea that the Colossian opponents were advocating a ‘syncretistic religious philosophy with only some Jewish elements’.83 As for Colossians 2.8, Dunn notes Philo’s awareness that some Gentiles understand the four elements as spirits;84 he suggests that because of their proximity to the Anatolian hinterland, synagogues in Colossae (and Galatia) directed their apologia in opposition to that understanding, commending observance of the Mosaic law, the Sabbath, and the festivals as ‘a way of living free of the malevolent influence of the στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου’.85

77

78

79

80 82 84 85

Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 155 (cf. van der Horst, ‘Jews of Ancient Phrygia’, 284, who does not speculate as to exact population size). Paul Trebilco argues (Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 14–15) that the money seized probably related to more than one year’s payment to the Temple, because conditions in the Holy Land in the years immediately before 62 bc had been too unstable for it to be wise to convey a large cash sum to Jerusalem. Anthony J. Marshall (‘Flaccus and the Jews of Asia’, 147) raises the possibility that the confiscation might have ‘extended to the entire common funds of the Jewish communities in the four cities’. Antiochus III (cf. below) brought Jews into Phrygia to defend strongpoints which were important to his kingdom, and settled them in newly founded communities: if Colossae did not receive such a settler community whereas Laodicea and Hierapolis did, this would account for there being abundant evidence of Jews living at Laodicea and Hierapolis, but such evidence not being paralleled at Colossae. I owe this point to Dr Alan Cadwallader. Colossians 1.12, where (as at 3.12), Dunn argues, ‘the language of Jewish self-identity would be unmistakable for anyone familiar with the Jewish scriptures’ (‘Colossian Philosophy’, 153). 81 Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 180. Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 160–2. 83 Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 162–4. Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 167. Philo De vita contemplativa 3; De decalogo 53. Dunn, ‘Colossian Philosophy’, 170.

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Dunn’s sensitivity to the Anatolian, and specifically Phrygian, context in which Colossae and the substantial Jewish share of its population (as he argues) lived, is a strength of his work; Arnold’s book, published in the same year as Dunn’s article, embodies a similar response to context, while examining relevant data in greater depth. The examination of pagan, Jewish, and Christian epigraphical texts relating to angels and veneration of angels gives a securer context for understanding the phrase θρησκείᾳ τῶν ἀγγέλων (‘worship of angels’)86 than previous commentators had established; and Rangar Cline in 2011 advanced understanding of angels in Colossians further.87 Inscriptions attest angel-cult in Asia Minor in pagan, Jewish, and Christian contexts. G.H.R. Horsley and Jean M. Luxford in a 2016 article bring together twelve Asian monuments and groups of monuments referring to angels, from ‘a region scarcely touched’ by Franz Cumont in ‘Les anges du paganisme’, the 1915 article in which he laid out what it was then possible to know about angels outside the Jewish and Christian tradition of religious ideas in the ancient world.88 Horsley’s and Luxford’s observation is that there is ‘a confusing variety of notions about angeloi in the Eastern Roman Empire’.89 The monuments in the Horsley and Luxford article link the notion of angels across a range of religious ideas. At Didyma in Ionia there is a female angelos who may be ‘a merging of Artemis and Hekate’.90 In Lydia, within the corpus of Beichtinschriften, angels reveal the will of the deities Men Axiottenos and Men Petraeites Axettenos.91 In Caria, at Kidrama, there are angels of fire.92 At Stratonicea and Lagina, also in Caria, six inscriptions referring to the θεὸς ὕψιστος cult also mention angels,93 while another θεὸς ὕψιστος text, this time from (modern) Kalecik

86 88

89 90

91

92

93

87 Colossians 2.18. Cline, Ancient Angels, 139–46. Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’; cf. Cumont, ‘Anges du paganisme’. Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 142. Rehm, Didyma II, no. 406, an inscription which Horsley and Luxford tentatively place in the first century (‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 144–5). Petzl, Beichtinschriften Westkleinasiens, 3 and 38: Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 145–52. Robert, ‘Reliefs votifs et cultes d’Anatolie’, no. 191 fragment A: Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 145. Şahin, Inschriften von Stratonikeia I, nos. 1117, 1118, 1119, 1120; Inschriften von Stratonikeia II, nos. 1307, 1308: Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 152–5.

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in the territory of Ancyra in Galatia, mentions a προσευχή (place of prayer).94 The last of these, on the grounds of several features of wording, Horsley and Luxford concur with Mitchell in ascribing to a Jewish context,95 but the rest they read as clearly pagan. Dedications to the god(s) Hosios and Dikaios (Holy and Just) from Bozan Köyü in Phrygia and from Temrek, south-west of Saittai in Lydia, make him/them an angel/angels – in the Phrygian case, of Apollo.96 And at Oenoanda in Lycia, in a text inscribed on the east wall of the city, angels speak of God:97 Self-existent, untaught, lacking any mother, unshaken, though a name does not contain him, [yet] with many names, dwelling in fire: this is God, and we angeloi are a small portion of God. To those making this enquiry about God, what his identity is, he [Klarian Apollo] said that, ‘God is Aither who perceives everything: looking towards him, you should pray at dawn as you gaze eastward.’

As Horsley and Luxford observe, the oracle quoted in the first half of this inscription may have featured in Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles, and is quoted by Lactantius.98 The other inscriptions which Horsley and Luxford discuss have in most cases a Christian connection: at Thera, in particular, there are fifty-one brief angelos inscriptions, which in Horsley’s and Luxford’s view have no Jewish background. Horsley and Luxford are also sceptical of the theory that the Christian community behind them could not be ‘marked by orthodox beliefs’.99 After eliminating double negatives, what they cautiously commend is the view that the Theran angelos inscriptions

94

95

96

97

98

99

Mitchell, Inscriptions of North Galatia, 209b (= SEG 31.1080): Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 155–6. As well as observing that the ‘Jewish God was named Theos Hypsistos as early as the third century bc’ (‘Cult of Theos Hypsistos, 110), Mitchell has argued that ‘Godfearers’ (θεοσεβεῖς), as attested in sources from a wide range of place in the Roman world, should be identified with the Godfearers attested in the New Testament (‘Cult of Theos Hypsistos’, 115–21, and ‘Further Thoughts’, 190–6). Ricl, ‘HOSIOS KAI DIKAIOS. 2’, 95 no.1 (= SEG 41.1185) and Ricl, ‘HOSIOS KAI DIKAIOS. 1’, no. 1 (cf. SEG 41.1010): Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 157–9, noting (158) that Holy and Just are in some places referred to as one deity, elsewhere as two. Bean, Journeys in Northern Lycia 1965–1967, no. 37 (= SEG 27.933): Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 159–60. Translation by Horsley and Luxford. Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 159: cf. Lactantius Divine Institutes 1.7. Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 161.

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may belong to a Great Church Christian community; they relate an inscription from Eumeneia in Phrygia, which will be discussed below, to the context of these Theran monuments. Most of the inscriptions in Horsley and Luxford’s complex study date from the second and third centuries or later, but the ideas about angels within pagan religious thought for which they provide evidence are likely to have been endemic in Asia Minor at the time when Colossians was written100 – and people at Colossae are likely to have been aware of them, even if there was no significant Jewish community at Colossae. Against this background it is both correct and relevant to point out, as Arnold does, that there were Gentile converts in the Colossian church, who had in the past participated in some of the cults attested at Colossae.101 That the pressures these Christians were under came from people familiar with a mystery cult or cults appears probable from the obscure phrase ἃ ἑόρακεν ἐμβατεύων:102 Arnold discusses ἐμβατεύων (‘entering’) at length and demonstrates that the word, a technical term relating to mystery initiation, places the imagined Colossian interlocutor to whom it is applied in a pagan, rather than a Jewish, context.103 Arnold’s overall conception of the situation at Colossae is one within which the Colossian philosophy is in effect not a variety or in any simple way a derivative of Greek philosophy of the elite sort, whether Platonist, Cynic, or anything else taught in the traditions of thought which drew their original inspiration from Socrates, but a concoction formed out of folk belief – drawing on (what Arnold calls) the ‘Phrygian spirit’.104 He identifies six themes which characterize this folk belief: a tendency towards henotheism, an emphasis on divine intermediaries, a strong belief in dangerous spirits and powers, an appeal to intermediaries for protection and deliverance, a prominent role for magic, and ecstatic forms of worship.105

100 101

102

103 104

105

Here cf. Cline, Ancient Angels, 19–134. Arnold (Colossian Syncretism, 107–8) lists seventeen deities represented on coins from Colossae, counting avatars as distinct (e.g. Ephesian Artemis and Artemis the huntress). Colossians 2.18, translated in the NRSV as ‘dwelling on visions’ (with a footnote saying, ‘meaning of Greek uncertain’). A literal rendering would be ‘entering into things which he has seen’ – but what is meant by this is not self-evident. Arnold, Colossian Syncretism, 109–31. ‘Phrygian spirit’: Arnold, Colossian Syncretism, 236; ‘Lydian-Phrygian spirit’, 237–8. Note the reservations expressed in the Introduction in relation to ‘Phrygianism’. Arnold, Colossian Syncretism, 236–8.

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Placing the Colossian philosophy in the non-elite sphere is a considerable merit of Arnold’s approach, and avoids making the improbable connections with the highest Greek high culture which others have put at the heart of their reading of Colossians. His conception of the Gentile community from which the Christian church drew converts in Colossae might be combined with evidence for substantial Jewish communities elsewhere in the Lycus valley to yield a sense of the social situation behind Colossians, written to a Christian church formed at the interface of the Jewish-Phrygian and Gentile-Phrygian worlds. Huttner, in his brief discussion of philosophy in Colossians, argues for a similar view, observing that ‘[t]he knowledge and revelation of the mystery . . . which the author so emphasizes in Colossians . . . comport with a common image of contemporary popular philosophy’.106

laodicea Communication was easy between Colossae, destination of the central texts (Colossians, Philemon) providing evidence for Phrygia in the New Testament, and Laodicea on the Lycus, a larger city, 17 kilometres downstream and west; and so the Lycus valley links Pauline New Testament texts to a text from the Johannine group. Laodicea (to look forward as far as the nineties) is addressed in Revelation, in the last of seven letters,107 and as the only Phrygian church among the seven churches to which John was commanded to write: 14

‘And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation: 15 ‘I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. 16So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. 19 I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. 20 Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. 21To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. 22Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.’ 106

Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 123.

107

Revelation 3.14–22.

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Craig R. Koester in 2003 published an energetic argument against the long-held view that this letter draws on local conditions in the rhetorical shaping of the advice given to the Laodiceans, finding that ‘connections between the imagery in Rev 2–3 and the characteristics of the Asian cities remain problematic’.108 He argues that the reference to gold may not be topical, since Laodicea’s status as a financial centre in the first century is unclear;109 and similarly that the reference to eye salve may not have a local resonance, because ‘evidence for linking Laodicea to eye salve is circumstantial and inconclusive’.110 On the matter of the advice to ‘buy from me . . . white robes to clothe you’, Koester deploys the same argument: ‘neither the economic benefits from textiles nor the prospect of obtaining white robes was limited to Laodicea’.111 This argument, however, is weakened, not strengthened, by reuse: the multiple features mentioned in the letter converge to give an increasingly clear echo of the city for which they are meant. They are expounded item by item by Hemer and by Huttner.112 The Laodicean Christians, whatever their weaknesses as Christian disciples at the time when Revelation was written, had a generation earlier been on the mind of the Pauline writer of Colossians.113 He asked the Colossian Christians to greet them for him:114 the Colossians are to cause their letter to be read in church at Laodicea, and they themselves are to ‘see that [they] also read the letter from Laodicea’.115 Laodicea, then, belonged in the Pauline as well as the Johannine orbit. But in the New Testament, as well as there being no such book as ‘Phrygians’, there is no ‘Laodiceans’; whatever is being referred to at Colossians 4.16, it is not the extant but apocryphal ‘Epistle to the Laodiceans’: a third-rate text, of which Wilhelm Schneemelcher wrote ‘we are amazed that it ever found a place in Bible manuscripts’.116 What ‘the letter from Laodicea’ referred to in Colossians actually is has long been discussed, but recently Huttner has described the extant ‘Epistle to the Laodiceans’ as ‘an artificial construct,

108 109 110 111

112

113 116

Koester, ‘Message to Laodicea’, 408. Revelation 3.18, Koester, ‘Message to Laodicea’, 418. Revelation 3.18, Koester, ‘Message to Laodicea’, 419. Revelation 3.18, Koester, ‘Message to Laodicea’, 420. Thonemann views it as ‘likely enough’ that the references to gold, and white raiment, reflect the textile wealth of Laodicea: Meander Valley, 187. Hemer, Letters to the Seven Churches, 196–201; Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 158–83. 114 115 Colossians 2.1. Colossians 4.15. Colossians 4.16. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha vol. 2, 43.

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put together from a series of clichés, mostly from Philippians, intended to provide a face for the Epistle to the Laodiceans presupposed in Colossians’.117 That apocryphal text, then, need not be accorded any weight in the discussion. On the other hand, and especially if Colossians and Ephesians were delivered on the same journey by Tychicus, the suspicion that Ephesians is ‘the letter from Laodicea’ must arise powerfully. Ephesus is mentioned at Ephesians 1.1, but there the phrase ἐν Ἐφέσῳ is bracketed in the Greek text because it is not present in the earliest manuscripts;118 and Ephesians lacks the personal references and greetings which link some other New Testament epistles to particular places. Ernest Best accounts ingeniously for the condition of the text at 1.1,119 while speculating less convincingly about the wording of a possible label on the outside of the rolled-up letter.120 The argument that Ephesians was intended for circulation between churches rather than being directed to one church is persuasive, and might account for the phrase ‘letter from Laodicea’ (if Ephesians were not addressed to Laodicea, but was circulated there before Colossae – which might be expected, considering that Colossae was inland and upstream from Laodicea). M.D. Goulder argues that if Ephesians were written by Paul (rather than being a deutero-Pauline letter), then ‘the community addressed cannot have been at Ephesus, and the only practical alternative is Laodicea’.121 Huttner notes that ‘the dependence of Ephesians on Colossians has . . . been demonstrated by numerous other points of agreement’,122 but he finds difficulty in providing a historical background for the mention of Tychicus in Ephesians.123 By contrast, the explanation offered here that Tychicus arrived in Asia carrying both Colossians and Ephesians (‘the letter from Laodicea’) would seem to resolve Huttner’s difficulty. The concerns in evidence in Ephesians, assuming that it is ‘the letter from Laodicea’, are not identical to those of Colossians. The epistle is 117 118

119 120 121

122

Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 94. Cf. Goulder, ‘Visionaries of Laodicea’, 16 n.1, where Goulder observes that Tertullian recorded (and rejected) Marcion’s claim that Ephesians was originally addressed to the Laodiceans (Against Marcion 5.17.1). See recent detailed discussion in Thielman, Ephesians, 12–16. Best, ‘Ephesians 1.1 Again’, 274–7. Best, ‘Ephesians 1.1 Again’, 273–4 and 277–8. Goulder, ‘Visionaries of Laodicea’, 15–16; on similar lines, Thielman (Ephesians, 15) argues that ‘if the reading with the place name is correct, then it is difficult to explain the nature of the letter, especially if it is an authentic letter of Paul’. 123 Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 91. Ephesians 6.21–2.

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directed to Gentile readers,124 ‘called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”’,125 and they are assured that Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles.126 Laodicea had a Jewish community, which at a hard-to-determine date (perhaps at the time of Julius Caesar) had gained Roman permission to observe Sabbaths and sacred rites.127 The expected audience for the epistle is different from the audience expected at Colossae, and the concerns enunciated are different.

jews in phrygia An issue which arises insistently from the discussion above of Colossae and the epistle to the Colossians, Laodicea, Revelation, and the epistle to the Ephesians, is that of the interface of the Jewish-Phrygian and GentilePhrygian worlds. It was that interface, to an important degree, at which the early churches in Phrygia came into existence – and Jews, and the Godfearers and Gentiles who worshipped in the synagogues or had other links with Jews in Phrygia, were among the most likely people to encounter Christian preaching in the first century. It is relevant at this point, therefore, to bring in a summary of what is known about the substantial Jewish community of Phrygia, descended from settlers who had been placed in the territory as long ago as the third century bc. Jews in Phrygia in the Roman imperial period, as elsewhere in Asia Minor, were a long-established and successful minority. Antiochus III (222–187 bc) had commanded Zeuxis, his governor of Lydia, to resettle 2,000 Jewish families from Mesopotamia and Babylon in Lydia and Phrygia, ‘into the fortresses and the most important places’ to shore up Seleucid control of a rebellious territory.128 As Paul Trebilco argues, migrating 2,000 Jewish families probably meant bringing more than

124 126 127

128

125 ‘You Gentiles’: Ephesians 2.11 and 3.1. Ephesians 2.11. Ephesians 2.14. Josephus AJ 14.241–2; Tessa Rajak places the letter which Josephus quotes (from the city council of Laodicea to a consul named as C. Rabellius) in the context of the 40s bc and the activity of Julius Caesar. But she notes the difficulties thrown up by the names of Roman officials in this and other documents which Josephus quotes as part of the Hyrcanus dossier in AJ 14: ‘There is no apparent way of dating this document’ (Rajak, ‘Roman Charter for the Jews’, 119 n.44). Josephus AJ 12.148–9. Translation from Marcus, Josephus VII: Jewish Antiquities, Books XII–XIV.

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10,000 individuals to live in Antiochus’ dominions in western Asia Minor.129 They were communities which began well, being allocated land, tax exemption for ten years, and grain until they had supplies from their own harvests.130 Antiochus specifies, in the letter quoted by Josephus,131 that the Jews are to have land for vines (in addition to houses, and land for (other) agriculture);132 and the way the Jews were steered towards viticulture would seem consistent with the much later idea evidenced in the Talmud that Jewish Phrygia was famous for its wine:133 R. Ḥelbo said: The wine of Perugitha and the water of Diomsith cut off the Ten Tribes from Israel. R. Eleazar b. ῾Arak visited that place. He was attracted to them, and [in consequence] his learning vanished. When he returned, he arose to read in the Scroll [of the Torah]. He wished to read, Haḥodesh hazeh lakem [This month shall be unto you, etc.134], [instead of which] he read ḥaḥaresh hayah libbam. But the scholars prayed for him, and his learning returned. And it is thus that we learnt, R. Nehorai said: Be exiled to a place of Torah, and say not that it will follow thee, for thy companions will establish it in thy possession; and do not rely on thine own understanding.

A.R.R. Sheppard, following Adolf Neubauer,135 identifies Perugitha with Phrygia, and argues against the view that it is the name of an obscure place in the land of Israel by observing that the anecdote as a whole ‘is appropriate to an area of non-Semitic speech outside Palestine’.136 The mention of the Ten

129

130

131

132 133

134 135

136

Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 6. On why 2,000 families might plausibly imply 10,000 people see note 130. Josephus AJ 12.151–2; the letter to Zeuxis refers to the migrants’ servants, and the idea is that they are to cultivate the land which is allocated to the migrants – the assumption evidently being that the male heads of households will be occupied with their military duties. Trebilco argues (Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 5–6) for the authenticity of this letter: ‘the letter is in keeping with the conventional Hellenistic form employed by a king writing to an individual and conforms stylistically to Seleucid documents of the period’. Josephus AJ 12.151. b. Shabbath 147B. Translation by H. Freedman in Epstein, The Babylonian Talmud, Seder Mo̒ed vol. 1. Exodus 12.5. Neubauer, Géographie du Talmud, 315. Neubauer renders R. Ḥelbo’s observation as, ‘Le vin phrygien et les bains (de ce pays) ont séparé les dix tribus de leurs frères.’ The ideas found in some commentary on the Talmud that Perugitha was ‘a place in northern Israel famous for its wine’ (H. Freedman’s footnote to his translation of b. Shabbath, p. 750 n.3), and that Diomsith is another name for Emmaus (rejected by Neubauer in Géographie du Talmud, 100–1) are unfounded, yet ‘water of Diomsith’ remains a difficult phrase to explain. As Neubauer notes, there were famous baths in Phrygia, at Hierapolis, and elsewhere (Géographie du Talmud, 315). Sheppard, ‘Jews, Christians and Heretics’, 169.

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Tribes, exiled to Assyria and Media in the eighth century bc, is also more consistent with a reference to the community brought to Phrygia by Antiochus III than with the theory that ‘Perugitha’ was some place in Palestine, where the Ten Tribes had not lived for many centuries past. This brief passage in the Babylonian Talmud makes it possible partially to gauge what Phrygian Judaism was about.137 Jews spoke Greek, and the result (allegedly) was that R. Eleazar b. ῾Arak forgot his Hebrew – if temporarily. In the pages about Acmonia below it will be observed that the Jews of that city alluded to the Bible in the epitaphs they put up over the graves of their dead – and their Bible, in the third century, was the Septuagint. R. Eleazar was attracted to the diaspora community in Perugitha (= Phrygia), which may be understandable in view of its prosperity; but in the terms which made sense to other rabbis it was not ‘a place of Torah’. The scholarly community which could have kept R. Eleazar’s Hebrew up to scratch was a long way away. The difference from life in the land of Israel is clear, then; yet it is difficult to measure how distinctive the Phrygian Jewish community may have been as compared to Jewish communities in other parts of Roman Asia. Synagogues are attested in several cities. Of the three Asian synagogues mentioned in Acts, one was 'one was in disputably-Phrygian Iconium'. The point is that Iconium has an ethnically mixed population but was sometimes viewed as being Phrygian Iconium;138 and as noted above, the Laodicean Jews had long before been granted the right to observe the Sabbath.139 At Synnada (Şuhut), future capital of Phrygia II Salutaris, a fragmentary first- or second-century inscription appears to

137

138

‘Your father fled to Asia . . . do you flee to Laodicea!’ (b. Baba Mezi̒a 84a, translation by H. Freedman in Epstein, The Babylonian Talmud, Seder Neẓikin vol. 1, is taken by Hemer (Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 183) as directed to suggesting that the Jews of Laodicea displayed the most extreme case of ‘the . . . ease and laxity of the Diaspora’. But this Talmudic text has its complexities: R. Ishmael, son of R. Jose, is a government informer, and Elijah (the prophet) meets him and asks, ‘How long will you deliver the people of our God to execution?’ When R. Ishmael answers, ‘What can I do? It is the royal decree’, Elijah replies commanding him to flee to Laodicea. R. Ishmael’s father R. Jose had left the Holy Land when commanded to do so by R. Judah b. Baba, who had been discovered by the Romans (illegally) ordaining Jose and four others: R. Judah, too old to make a run for it, was killed by the soldiers (b. Sanhedrin 14a) and so became one of the Ten Martyrs. Therefore, R. Jose’s escape to Asia was nothing to do with laxity; and Elijah’s advice to R. Ishmael conveys contempt for Laodicea, indeed – but R. Ishmael’s sin is worse than a matter of ease and laxity. 139 Acts 14.1. Josephus AJ 14.241–2.

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refer to a ruler of the synagogue (ἀ]ρχισυν[άγωγος),140 so that a synagogue in the city can be inferred. Further west, a third-century sarcophagus at Hierapolis (Pamukkale) records that a fine is payable to the holy synagogue by anyone who buries a dead body without authorization in the grave plot of Aurelius Heortasios Ioulianos.141 The best-attested Phrygian synagogue, however, is the synagogue of Acmonia (Ahat). In the reign of Nero, Ioulia Severa, chief priestess of the imperial cult at Acmonia,142 funded the building of this synagogue.143 Descended from Galatian royalty,144 Ioulia Severa held municipal office at Acmonia three times together with her husband Servenius Capito,145 and at another time together with Tyrronios Rapon;146 in the inscription which commemorates repairs to the synagogue which she built, Tyrronios Klados, presumably either related to Rapon or a freedman, is referred to as ‘ruler of the synagogue for life’.147 Therefore, complex family and official connections were behind Ioulia Severa’s patronage of the synagogue;148 that patronage need not imply that she was personally sympathetic towards Judaism. The same family and official connections remained relevant a generation or so later when the repairs recorded in the inscription were made. Klados, as ruler of the synagogue, had responsibility for the Jewish congregation’s public worship,149 so that the repairs inscription reflects

140

141

142 143 144 145

146 147

148

149

IJudO 2.214 (= MAMA 4.90); cf. Runesson, Binder, and Olsson, Ancient Synagogue, 148, no.116. SEG 49.1827B (IHierapMir 14 side b); cf. van der Horst, ‘Jews of Ancient Phrygia’, 285, where it is observed that the name Heortasios is a Greek equivalent of Haggai. MAMA 6.263; reign of Nero: Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 35. MAMA 6.264 (= IJudO 168). See Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 9, and Mitchell, ‘Plancii in Asia Minor’, 38. In three years, c.55, c.62, and c.65: Burnett, Amandry, and Ripollès, Roman Provincial Coinage vol. 1 part 1, pp. 512–3, nos. 3170–7. MAMA 6.265. MAMA 6.264 (= IJudO 168): ὁ διὰ βίου ἀρχισυνάγωγος. Van der Horst, when he infers that Klados ‘must have been a proselyte’ (‘Jews of Ancient Phrygia’, 287), seems to overlook the possibility that he was a freedman rather than being born into the Tyrronios family, as does Borgen (‘“Yes”, “No”, “How Far?”’, 37). Klados’ fellow office-holders in the synagogue at the time of the repairs were Loukios son of Loukios (ruler of the synagogue, but not ‘for life’) and Popilios Zotikos (archon) [ruler]. Ramsay’s supposition (Cities and Bishoprics, 639) that Ioulia Severa and her colleague Tyrronios Rapon must have been married (639 n.2: ‘It seems hardly in accordance with ancient custom to associate a man and a woman so markedly as is done in this document unless they were married’) has not been followed by more recent scholars, for example Trebilco (Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 59: ‘nothing indicates they were married’). On the duties of an ἀρχισυνάγωγος see Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ vol. 2, 434–6.

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close alignment between the leadership of the city and the leadership of the synagogue. Trebilco says it is ‘significant that the Jewish community was able to attract [Ioulia Severa’s] support’,150 but if anything his wording understates the importance of the link: as Mitchell comments, ‘closely related persons associated with [Ioulia Severa] held and advertised positions, on the one hand in the synagogue, on the other in the hierarchy of emperor worship’.151 Things had come a long way at Acmonia in a little over a century since the spate of decrees in favour of Asian Jewish communities in Julius Caesar’s time, evidenced in Josephus’ dossier.152 The Acmonian slave market built in the seventies or sixties bc by C. Sornatios Barba, Lucullus’ legate,153 was still in operation, newly decorated in 68 by Demades son of Dionysogenes with a statue of Hermes154 – which shows that the city’s economy remained on the same trajectory; as for the Jews, so far from being recipients of a possibly grudging concession, they had the support of the most powerful people in town. Even Paul, travelling in Phrygia in the late forties, might still have found no synagogue at Acmonia; but then Ioulia Severa, mother of a man who was soon to be a Roman senator,155 caused it to be built. Apart, however, from some architectural elements,156 which may be from the synagogue which Klados, Loukios, and Zotikos repaired, the Ioulia Severa stone is the only extant relic of the Jewish community at Acmonia until the third century.157 This makes it 150 152

153 154

155

156 157

151 Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 60. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 9. Josephus AJ 14.185–267, documents from the years 49–43 bc: see Rajak, ‘Roman Charter for the Jews’, 110. MAMA 6.260. Année épigraphique 2006.1426 lines 10–13: cf. Thonemann, ‘Women of Akmoneia’, 172–3. L. Servenius Cornutus (Halfmann, Senatoren, 102 n.5), who was to reach the praetorship, and serve as legate in the province of Asia during the governorship of M. Aponius Saturninus (cf. IJudO 352). See IJudO 345; cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 60. Two second-century grave inscriptions (MAMA 6 List 150, 176 (= Waelkens, Türsteine, 435) and MAMA 6 List 150, 180 (= Waelkens, Türsteine, 425)) curse violators of the tombs by wishing that an iron broom (σάρον σιδαροῦν) may go into their house and do damage. Trebilco (Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 76) argues for understanding the iron broom in these texts as a substitute for the flying sickle (LXX Zechariah 5.2) mentioned in a number of third-century epitaphs from Acmonia (see below); Ameling, however, notes that there is no iron broom in the Septuagint, and cites approvingly (IJudO 346 n.15) Strubbe’s observation (‘Curses against Violation of the Grave’, 122) is that ‘there is a strong suspicion that the inscription is pagan’. A.J. Bij de Vaate and J.W. van Henten concur, arguing that the ‘iron broom’ may be a Roman instrument of torture (‘Jewish or Non-Jewish?’, 19–20). Accordingly Strubbe does not include the ‘iron

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hard to gauge whether the good conditions which the Jews experienced in Ioulia Severa’s day went ahead unbroken over the following decades. In the third century, however, comes a remarkable efflorescence of evidence relevant to Jews at Acmonia. Gravestones, some of them dated, invoke ‘the curses written in Deuteronomy’ (or ‘the curses which are written’, meaning the same curses, in Deuteronomy 27–9): the gravestone of the parents of Domne and Alexandria;158 the gravestone of Makaria and Alexandria, mother and daughter of Aurelius Phrougianos, son of Menokritos, and Aurelia Iouliane his wife159 – a stone dated 248/9, which lists Phrougianos’ city-council offices (‘clerkship of the market, office of corn-buyer, office of police chief, . . . all offices and liturgies, . . . chief magistrate’); the gravestone of T. Flavius Alexander and Gaiane his wife160 – dated 243/4, which lists Alexander’s offices (‘office of eirenarch, office of corn-buyer, presidency of the council, clerkship of the market, office of chief magistrate, office of corn-buyer’). The allusion to Deuteronomy shows that the people named in the epitaphs are Jews, and the full sets of local offices held imply that members of their community at Acmonia ranked with the most powerful people in the city. Other gravestones invoked the ‘children’s children’ curse against violators of graves, eight from Acmonia and four from nearby.161 The reference seems to be to Exodus 34.6–7, where the Lord passes before Moses and proclaims his name: ‘the Lord . . . by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation’. Trebilco argues that ‘the Jewish people of Acmonia . . . adopted this passage as a part of its liturgy and thereby proclaimed the mercy and the justice of God’,162 and that the familiarity with the biblical verses which liturgical usage had created brought the ‘children’s children’ curse to mind when a suitable imprecation was called for to deter mistreatment of graves. Walter Ameling, more cautiously, argues against understanding the ‘children’s

158 159 160

161

162

broom’ epitaphs in IJudO; without these, there are no identifiably Jewish inscriptions from Acmonia of second-century date. MAMA 6.335 (= IJudO 174), cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 62. MAMA 6.335a (= IJudO 173), cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 61. MAMA 6 List 149, 174 (= IJudO 172), cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 62. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 69. Strubbe’s full list of attestations comprises sixteen inscriptions (‘Curses against Violation of the Grave’, 74–8). Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 72.

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children’ curse texts as Jewish.163 For the most part local to Acmonia, the ‘children’s children’ curse is found once elsewhere, in Lydia, on a pagan gravestone commemorating Stratoneikianos,164 whose grieving wife and children call on Apollo and Anaitis to deal with anyone who desecrates the tomb. This pagan adoption of something usually Jewish raises a question: How close was the Bible, the Septuagint, to being an exclusive possession of the Jewish community?165 The threat against the tomb violators’ children’s children may have struck pagans as an appropriately potent wording, Trebilco argues.166 In an article engaging with Trebilco’s book, however, A.J. Bij de Vaate and J.W. van Henten draw attention to the second-century epitaph from the area of Chalkis in Euboea commemorating T. Flavius Amphikles,167 a clearly non-Jewish and polytheistic text which invokes the Erinyes, Charis, and Hygeia – but which quotes Deuteronomy 28.22 and 28 in the course of heaping curses on wrongdoers who may fail to treat Amphikles’ monument respectfully.168 Use of wording from the Septuagint may in some cases imply sympathy with Judaism on someone’s part, but does not prove that the user of such wording was a Jew. In the case of the children’s children formula, Bij de Vaate and van Henten argue that it ‘may have been a common phrase, used by Jews as well as non-Jews’.169 Others besides Jews, and Christians in particular, were familiar with the Septuagint, which is quoted or alluded to on almost every page of the New Testament. Therefore, the possibility of a Christian quoting the Septuagint ought not to be discounted.170 This fact complicates any attempt to view Acmonia as if it afforded a uniquely clear insight into how Jewish communities could take an honoured place in the social mix

163 164 165

166 168 169 170

IJudO 346–7, citing Strubbe, ‘Curses against Violation of the Grave’, 82. TAM V,1 213. By the third century, the Septuagint was falling out of favour as a translation among Jewish Bible scholars; they came to prefer Aquila’s translation, which Origen incorporated in the Hexapla; but at Acmonia, Septuagint use was still strong: cf. IJudO 373–4. 167 Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 73. IG XII, 9 1179. Bij de Vaate and van Henten, ‘Jewish or Non-Jewish?’, 21 n. 25. Bij de Vaate and van Henten, ‘Jewish or Non-Jewish?’, 23. Accordingly, it seems unwise to be certain that ‘we have only one pre-Constantinian inscription from Acmonia which may be Christian’ (Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 77, referring to MAMA 6.336).

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of Roman Asia from the New Testament period onwards. Elsewhere I have argued for caution over inferring that two gravestones from Acmonia,171 on which the Eumeneian formula is used,172 must be of Jewish origin, in one case because of a Semitic name,173 in the other because the ‘sickle of the curse’ is referred to.174 In the first case, of the inscription naming Markos son of Math(i)as, modern scholars have taken opposing views, with no reference to each other’s work. Philip A. Harland in 2003 wrote of the text as ‘a Christian epitaph’ without mention of any possibility that it could be Jewish;175 whereas in the following year Ameling included the inscription in IJudO, mentioning that scholars as long ago as William M. Ramsay and as recently as Harland had categorized it as Christian.176 Semitic names were not usual in the Jewish community at Acmonia, as A.T. Kraabel pointed out,177 although Louis Robert noted a second-century gravestone from 30 kilometres away which names a Mathias;178 but Ameling argues that in that case Mathias is an indigenous name, and the epitaph ‘wohl nicht jüdisch’.179 In the second case, the biblical ‘sickle of the curse’ comes from Zechariah 5.2 (LXX), where the prophet sees a flying sickle (δρέπανον) instead of a flying scroll (as in the Masoretic text) – apparently because the Hebrew Vorlage used by the Septuagint translator read maggal (‘sickle’) instead of megillah (‘scroll’).180 There is another (and less fragmentary) Acmonian epitaph which references the flying sickle:181 there, the curse against a possible tomb violator calls for the same fate to come upon him as has come upon Amerimnos (the deceased) – to wit, death;182 but if anyone is not afraid of that curse, ‘then may the sickle of the curse come into their dwelling-places and leave no one [alive]’.183 Ameling’s 171

172

173 174 175

176

177 178 180 181 183

McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, 5–6; inference drawn by Trebilco in ‘Christian and Jewish Eumeneian Formula’, 70–1, as well as in Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 74–5. A form of words cursing tomb violators, associated particularly with the city of Eumeneia in Phrygia; this will be discussed below. MAMA 6 List 151, 208 (= IJudO 171). Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 652, no. 563 (= IJudO 176). Harland, Associations, Synagogues and Congregations, 37. It is hard not to have some sympathy with the idea that ‘Mark son of Matthew’ might have been a Christian. IJudO 359. Mitchell (Anatolia vol. 2, 35) refers to Marcus son of Mathias as ‘a Jewish neighbour’, with no more discussion than Harland devotes to the opposite conclusion. Kraabel, Judaism in Western Asia Minor, 111. 179 MAMA 10.197, cf. IJudO 359 n.61. IJudO 386 and n.123. Cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 75–6, and IJudO 373 and n.89. 182 IJudO 175, cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 74. IJudO 373. IJudO 175 B lines 1–12.

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argument is that because the evidence for a Jewish community at Acmonia is stronger than the evidence for a Christian community, it is more likely, there, that the text from Zechariah would be used by Jews than people of any other religion.184 Bij de Vaate and van Henten, however, cite Revelation 14.16 (‘the one who sat on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was reaped’) as an allusion to the sickle in LXX Zechariah, and observe that ‘Zech. 5.1–5 may have been an inspiration to Christians as well’.185 There are a number of other finds to attest the strength of the synagogue and Jewish community at Acmonia from the first century onward, including a seven-branched candlestick incised beneath an inscription recording a prayer for the fatherland;186 furthermore, from a fourthcentury or later date a fragmentary block with moulding above and below is preserved with bilingual Greek and Hebrew text inscribed,187 the Hebrew reading ‘Peace be upon Israel and Jerusalem and this place . . .’. This block may (Ameling infers) have come from the synagogue.188 If so, the synagogue at Acmonia was doing well at the beginning and the end of the period this book deals with, from close to the days when Paul was travelling in Phrygia; and several pieces of evidence tend to show that (some) Jews could hold Roman citizenship, some could hold civic office, and the community was well networked in relation to power-holders in non-Jewish Acmonia.189 Paul, as the author of Philemon (and even more so if he was the Pauline author of Colossians and Ephesians), wrote to places in Phrygia he did not go to and went to places he did not write to. By travelling into Phrygia to preach Christianity he went to a place where Greek was spoken in the synagogues, and where Jewish communities were well networked with the polytheist Phrygians, Greeks, and Romans whom they saw and had dealings with every day. Ideas clashed and cross-fertilized, as Colossians shows, but not as they did in the places where intellectual endeavour was centred. A small-town Greek philosopher could be charged with idleness (ῥᾳδιουργία) by Lucian, that facile over-achiever; a Jewish rabbi might find that the Phrygian experience made his Hebrew rusty.

184 186 187 188 189

185 IJudO 374. Bij de Vaate and van Henten, ‘Jewish or Non-Jewish?’, 19. IJudO 169, ὑπὲρ εὐχῆ πάσῃ τῇ πατρίδι, undatable (356). MAMA 6.334, IJudO 170; photograph at Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 34. IJudO 357; cf. also van der Horst ‘Jews of Ancient Phrygia’, 287. Cf. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor, 83.

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But the business of the Roman empire went on every day in Phrygia. In Laodicea, prosperity made Christians lukewarm. Ephesians urged them that they ‘must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of [their] minds’,190 but it was not so easy. There was a long way to go. And yet Acmonia, if the place was in some way typical rather than being a unique Jewish mecca at the provincial level, shows that from the beginning there was potential in Phrygia for Christianity to grow, with a segment of the population consisting of Greek-speaking Jews and their friends, including Godfearers. The next chapter will introduce Hierapolis (Pamukkale), another Lycus valley city, not far from Laodicea and Colossae.

190

Ephesians 4.17.

2 Hierapolis (Pamukkale)

The third of the Lycus valley cities was Hierapolis, and its part in the early growth of Christianity in Phrygia was no less important than that of Colossae or Laodicea. It was the home city of Papias, a pivotal figure for modern understanding of early Christianity, not only in Phrygia and Asia, but also more generally. Some books draw a distinction in spelling between Hierapolis and Hieropolis,1 and use one for Hierapolis (Koçhisar) but the other for Hierapolis (Pamukkale);2 however, the distinction is not observed closely enough in ancient texts for it to be helpful in the modern record.3 In this book modern place names are used in brackets where they are needed for clarity. Aberkios, referred to in the Introduction, was bishop of Hierapolis (Koçhisar), but this chapter focuses on the larger settlement of the same name, in the Lycus valley to the north of the river – a city which in the second century ad ‘ought to be listed as one of those in Asia which were doing well’, according to Philostratus, who introduces Hierapolis (Pamukkale) as the hometown of Antipater the sophist.4

1 2

3

4

For example, Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 10. In Barr, Hierapolis (Pamukkale) is on Map 65 at B2, whereas Hierapolis (Koçhisar) is on Map 62 at D5. Two other cities with the name of Hierapolis are listed (the variant spelling Hieropolis is not used in Barr): Hierapolis in Syria (= Bambyke), on Map 67 F3, and Hierapolis in the Antitaurus range (= Comana), on Map 64 C4. Consider, for instance, the note in pseudo-Herodianus Περὶ ὀρθογραφίας (Grammatici Graeci 3.2 p. 524 line 11): Ἱεράπολις πόλις Συρίας, ἣ καὶ Ἱερόπολις διὰ τοῦ ο (‘Hierapolis, a city in Syria; also [spelt as] Hieropolis with an o’). Philostr. VS 2.606: Antipater’s students hailed him as ‘teacher of gods’ when they applauded his lectures, because the Emperor Septimius Severus had appointed him as his

45

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Figure 2 Western Asia and the Lycus Valley Cities. Map drawn by Jenni Irving

philip Hierapolis comes into Colossians,5 where the author testifies that Epaphras has worked hard for the Colossians and those in Laodicea and Hierapolis. This seems to confirm what would be expected, that all three cities had a Christian church from more or less the same time. But Hierapolis has a second and less direct New Testament connection. Philip the evangelist, one of the seven deacons appointed in Jerusalem by the Twelve,6 was visited by Paul and his company at Caesarea during their journey from Miletus to Jerusalem;7 they stayed at Philip’s house, and he had four unmarried daughters who had the gift of prophecy.8 It seems, however, that Hierapolis, not Caesarea, was where Philip and at least two of his daughters died. Eusebius, quoting a letter written to Victor, bishop of Rome, by Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, in the late second century, writes of the great luminaries who have fallen asleep in Asia, and says, ‘Among these are Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis, and his two aged virgin daughters, and another

5

children’s tutor; at the peak of his career he was raised to consular rank and made governor of Bithynia (Lives of the Sophists 2.607). 6 7 8 Colossians 4.13. Acts 6.1–6. Acts 20.17–21.17. Acts 21.8–9.

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daughter who lived in the Holy Spirit and now rests at Ephesus.’9 As for the fourth daughter, Proclus, a Montanist writer also quoted by Eusebius, seems to have thought all four were buried together with their father: ‘there were four prophetesses,’ he writes, ‘the daughters of Philip, at Hierapolis in Asia. Their tomb is there and the tomb of their father.’10 Polycrates, evidently, thought the Philip who died at Hierapolis was Philip of Bethsaida, the Philip who was one of the Twelve.11 But Richard Bauckham argues that his inference was mistaken,12 and attributes the mistake to Polycrates being ‘dependent on local tradition about the daughters rather than on Acts 21: 8–9’.13 More recently, Dennis R. MacDonald has revived the supposition that Philip of Bethsaida went to Hierapolis, saying, ‘Insofar as the other Papian fragments are silent about deacons, one must assume that the Philip whom the historian has in mind was one of the Twelve.’14 MacDonald’s argument from silence – the few fragments of Papias’ five books not managing to define Philip the deacon to MacDonald’s satisfaction – is weak in itself, but there is another point to consider. Bauckham’s analysis of Papias’ method in his work includes a powerful positive argument for understanding the Hierapolis Philip as the deacon. Bauckham draws attention to the programmatic claim made by Papias of Hierapolis, as recorded by Eusebius:15 [I]f by chance anyone who had been in attendance on (parekolouthos tis) the elders should come my way, I inquired about the words of the elders – [that is,] what [according to the elders] Andrew or Peter said (eipen), or Philip, or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and the elder John, the Lord’s disciples, were saying (legousin). For I did not think that information from books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice.

He observes that ‘Had Philip the Apostle lived in Hierapolis, Papias would not have had to ask people visiting Hierapolis what he had said’,16 which is to say that the way Papias refers to Philip the Apostle excludes

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.31.2–3. Translation by Arthur Cushman McGiffert in Schaff and Wace, Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.31.4. Matthew 10.3, Mark 3.18, Luke 6.14, John 1.44 (Bethsaida), Acts 1.13. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 13 and n.5. Bauckham, ‘Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel’, 30. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 39. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 15–16 (quoting Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.3–4). Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 18 n.28.

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the possibility that he was the Philip who lived in Hierapolis. This argument seems to me to be conclusive. And yet the idea that Philip the Apostle lived at Hierapolis was a local tradition, or had become one by the late second century when Polycrates was writing. And it was a tradition which had a great future ahead of it: it lies behind the story of Philip and Bartholomew at Hierapolis in the fourth-century Acts of Philip, and behind the popularity Hierapolis had as a place of pilgrimage in late antiquity. Huttner writes that ‘the tomb of the apostle Philip in Hierapolis was considered one of the central memorial sites of the Christians in the province of Asia’17 – and alludes to Polycrates’ letter. He argues that the tomb of Philip in Hierapolis and the tomb of John in Ephesus ‘constitute the counterweight to the authority of Peter and Paul in Rome’:18 ‘counterweight’, that is, in the context of the Quartodeciman dispute. Francesco D’Andria reported in 2011 on excavations of a large martyr shrine at Hierapolis,19 and in early 2012 in the same journal the discovery by D’Andria of the apostle’s tomb was reported (D’Andria seems not to contemplate any Philip other than Philip of Bethsaida as the tomb’s erstwhile occupant), a first-century Roman tomb at the centre of a fourthor fifth-century church forty yards away from the martyr shrine.20 The site as a whole is expounded more fully in D’Andria’s 2014 book.21 Sadly, if the remains of the apostle, or of the evangelist, ever were there, they had been translated to Constantinople long before D’Andria’s excavation; but his identification of the martyr shrine tends to justify Huttner’s inclusion of the tomb of Philip among the central memorial sites of Asian Christianity. Bauckham’s inference that Polycrates’ idea about Philip at Hierapolis came from local tradition and was unconnected with the story told in Acts is probably correct – but raises questions. The Philip who reached Hierapolis, with however many of his daughters, must have arrived in the early years of the existence of a Christian church there – or else he began that church himself. In Acts 8 he appears as an energetic preacher, first at Samaria,22 then in all the towns between Azotus and Caesarea.23 His zeal for missionary travel might encourage guesses along the lines of Philip’s 17 18 19 20 21 22

Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 192. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 192. D’Andria, ‘Conversion, Crucifixion and Celebration’, 34–46. Pharr, ‘Philip’s Tomb Discovered – But Not Where Expected’, 18. D’Andria, ‘Havarı Philippus’un Hierapolis’inde Yer Alan Kutsal Alanı ve Mezarı’. 23 Acts 8.5. Acts 8.40.

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later having made a journey in Asia – inland, not along the coast, but in other ways similar to his journey from Azotus to Caesarea. Those 119 kilometres in the province of Judaea were a journey not so different in length from the 160 or so from Ephesus to Hierapolis.24 But one cannot insist on any such guess, because a century and a half later (as noted above), local tradition was identifying the Hierapolis church’s founding figure with Philip of Bethsaida. The explanation is perhaps that Philip came to Hierapolis late in life. When he lived in Caesarea in the second half of the fifties it seems that at least some of his four daughters (θυγατέρες τέσσαρες παρθένοι25) had already reached marriageable age, since if they were children it would hardly seem worth saying that they were unmarried. Therefore, Philip was in middle age, at least,26 before his move to Asia. The daughter who lived in the Holy Spirit, and was known to Polycrates to be buried at Ephesus,27 may have married there and never accompanied her father to Hierapolis. Once at Hierapolis, Philip and his daughters were acquainted with Papias, the most important figure in the second-century Hierapolitan church from posterity’s viewpoint.

papias When Eusebius wrote of the miracle stories Papias heard from Philip’s daughters, he referred to them as contemporaries:28 That Philip the apostle dwelt at Hierapolis with his daughters has been already stated. But it must be noted here that Papias, their contemporary, says that he heard a wonderful tale from the daughters of Philip. For he relates that in his time one [person] rose from the dead. And he tells another wonderful story of Justus, surnamed Barsabbas: that he drank a deadly poison, and yet, by the grace of the Lord, suffered no harm.

One would, however, have to rely on the gender of τοὺς αὐτοὺς in the phrase κατὰ τοὺς αὐτοὺς ὁ Παπίας γενόμενος (Papias, their contemporary) in order to be certain that Papias was a contemporary of the father as well as the daughters. If he were contemporary with the daughters only, the author might have been expected to make the phrase feminine, τὰς αὐτάς. The use of a masculine ought to imply that the set of people with whom

24 25 27

Distances from Scheidel and Meeks’ ORBIS website, http://orbis.stanford.edu. 26 Acts 21.9. Cf. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 193–4. 28 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.31.3. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.9.

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Papias was contemporary included a man (Philip). Huttner mentions this argument from the gender of αὐτοὺς and seems favourable to it,29 but he remains tentative, citing Enrico Norelli who argues that κατὰ τοὺς αὐτοὺς ὁ Παπίας γενόμενος ought to be read as if χρόνους were there after αὐτοὺς: ‘Papias, who was there at the same [time]’, not ‘Papias, who was there in the context of the same people.’30 It seems in this case to be uncertain whether Eusebius meant (or drew on sources which proved) more than that Papias was contemporary with the general era in which Philip and his daughters lived. Bauckham writes ‘[p]erhaps Papias knew Philip himself in his childhood’; but he notes that the daughters were Papias’ informants.31 Doyen of Asian patristic writers and bishop of Hierapolis, a man (Huttner argues) with roots indigenous to the Lycus valley region,32 Papias set himself the task of writing a work called Account of Logia about the Lord,33 which consisted of five books. Irenaeus of Lyon called them books compiled (συντεταγμένα) by Papias,34 a description which, from the surviving fragments, seems to reflect Papias’ technique well. The testimonia relevant to when Papias wrote his books are complex. Fragment 12, drawn from the mostly lost Church History of Philip of Side (Manavgat), says that Papias recorded that the people who were raised from the dead by Jesus lived into the reign of Hadrian (117–138).35 If Papias wrote this, he was still alive and writing in Hadrian’s reign; but the idea of those raised from the dead by Jesus living into Hadrian’s reign is mentioned by Eusebius and attributed by him to Quadratus, a Christian apologist who made a speech in support of Christianity to Hadrian during the latter’s visit to Athens in 124–125.36 It is not impossible that more than one Christian in the 120s was saying that people raised from the dead ninety-five years before were still alive, but it is hard to be sure that what is quoted in Fragment 12 really came from Papias’ book.37 29 30 32 33

34

35 36 37

Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 191 n.33. 31 Norelli, Papias di Hierapolis, 287. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 13. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 216. Title at Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.1; English translation of it following Bauckham, ‘Did Papias Write History or Exegesis?’ Papias Fragment 1, Irenaeus Against Heresies 5.33.4. The numbering of the fragments in Ehrman’s Loeb Apostolic Fathers vol. 2 will be followed, and Norelli’s numbering added where necessary. Papias Fragment 12 (Ehrman), which is Fragment 10 (Norelli). Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.3.2. Norelli is hesitant in ascribing the fragment to Philip of Side (Papias di Hierapolis, 38); ‘very unreliable evidence’, Bauckham calls it (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 13), noting that

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The fragments of Papias mention the gospels of Mark and Matthew,38 and also 1 John and 1 Peter.39 Norelli points out that this fact places Papias’ work later than those four texts, which he then pigeonholes by decade: Mark about 70, Matthew about 80, 1 John about 100, 1 Peter about 90.40 But this is too neat to carry conviction: trying to date Papias by referring back to dates of New Testament books is really explaining an unknown through something yet more unknown. More helpfully, the Jerome/Eusebius Chronicle records for the third year of Trajan (101) that41 Bishop Irenaeus writes that John the apostle survived all the way to the time of Trajan: after whom his notable disciples were Papias, bishop of Hieropolis, Polycarp of Smyrna, and Ignatius of Antioch.

In his Church History, too, Eusebius links Papias chronologically with Polycarp and Ignatius.42 Perhaps more importantly, the account of Papias’ work fits into Eusebius’ history at the end of Book Three, after the death of Clement of Rome, in the third year of Trajan (100);43 Book Four then begins with the death of Cerdon, bishop of Alexandria, in the twelfth year of Trajan (110).44 Recent authors accordingly are dating Papias’ work in the vicinity of 110, and expressing doubts over Fragment 12 and the idea that Papias wrote under Hadrian. Norelli notes that Vernon Bartlet (in 1933), Ulrich H.J. Körtner (in 1983), and William R. Schoedel (in 1993) all argued on these grounds in favour of a date close to 110;45 Bauckham, writing after Norelli, proceeds on the assumption that Papias’ work ‘could be as early as the turn of the century’,46 while MacDonald, without discussing Papias’ date at full length, refers to his having written about 110.47 Consensus, therefore, or something close to consensus, has emerged over

38 39 41 43 44 45

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it lies behind 130 being the date commonly given for Papias’ work. Schoedel is just as negative: ‘the notice is suspect on many grounds and inspires little confidence’, he comments (‘Papias’, 214). Huttner gives a judicious verdict, preferring the view that Philip confused Papias and Quadratus, but leaving open the door to the possibility that Papias was still writing under Hadrian (Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 214–15). Papias Fragment 3, Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.15 (Mark) and 16 (Matthew). 40 Papias Fragment 3, Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.17. Norelli, Papias di Hierapolis, 49. 42 Translation from Pearse The Chronicle of St. Jerome. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.36.1–2. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.34.1. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.1.1 (cf. 3.21.1, where Cerdon becomes bishop of Alexandria in 98). Bartlet, ‘Papias’s “Exposition”’, 21–2; Körtner, Papias von Hierapolis, 93–4; Schoedel, ‘Papias’, 237. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 14. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 23 n.43.

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when to place Papias’ Account of Logia about the Lord, and a majority rejects Fragment 12 and its implication of a date under Hadrian. Some caution may, however, still be appropriate: an author might write over a span of years. Thucydides in Book Five of his eight says that the Peloponnesian War lasted twenty-seven years, and that he himself ‘lived through the whole of it, being of an age to understand what was happening, and . . . put [his] mind to the subject so as to get an accurate view of it’.48 Even so, his last extant book breaks off in the middle of 411 bc, almost seven years before the end of the war – a fact which is usually interpreted as meaning that he died before he could finish writing. His project, which remained on his mind through twenty years in exile from Athens at Sparta and elsewhere, was in some respects not unlike what Papias undertook, except that Thucydides wrote a contemporary history, dealing with events in his own lifetime, whereas Papias says in his programmatic statement that he interviewed people older than himself to find out about things which happened before he was born.49 Given that reference to gathering information ‘if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders should come my way’, it seems improbable that Papias’ work was written in a short time – so that dating it to 110, or even to the decade leading up to 110, may not capture the whole story. When Papias was born is even more uncertain than when he wrote, and Bartlet, who wrote of his birth ‘not later than a.d. 60, and possibly even earlier’,50 was estimating on the basis of Papias being older than Polycarp (who died aged eighty-six in 15551).52 But if Bartlet is right, then Papias might have been active as an author anywhere in the reigns of Domitian (81–96), Nerva (96–98), Trajan (98–117), or Hadrian (117–138). MacDonald’s suggestion that the structure of Papias’ five books followed the order of Matthew’s narrative of the story of Jesus is professedly speculative in part,53 but forms a good fit with the data in those of 48 49 51

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Thuc. 5.26.5. Translation from Warner, Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. 50 See above, and Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.4. Bartlet, ‘Papias’s “Exposition”’, 17. Polycarp’s age: Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.15.20; some scholars place his martyrdom a decade or so later than 155–156 (e.g. Frend, Rise of Christianity, 181–3), because Eusebius places it under Marcus Aurelius (Hist. Eccl. 4.14.10–15.1). Cf. Bauckham, who places Papias’ date of birth effectively anywhere between 50 and 80: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 18. Hill looks at the relative ages of Papias and Polycarp another way, writing of ‘the world of the young Polycarp, and the even younger Papias’ (‘Cerinthus, Gnostic or Chiliast?’, 135). MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 4–6.

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the fragments which are linked to particular books. Papias Book One contained the idea that ‘they used to call those who were trained in divine innocence “children”’,54 which MacDonald, drawing on Schoedel, links with Matthew 3.9: Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

After Papias’ preface, MacDonald argues, Book One covered the story from Jesus’ birth to his baptism by John (Matthew 1.1–4.11). In Book Two, Papias wrote that John and James, the sons of Zebedee, were killed by the Jews,55 a comment which seems to relate to Matthew 20.22–3, where Jesus tells James and John that they will indeed drink the cup he is about to drink. None of the extant fragments is described as coming from Book Three. Book Four is referred to as the source for four fragments, one of which briefly quotes another: in this fragment, Irenaeus says that ‘the elders’ heard John, a disciple of the Lord (Ioannem discipulum domini), preaching about the fruitfulness of vines and grains, and peaceable subjection of animals to human beings, in the times of the kingdom after the resurrection of the just: sentiments which came from the fourth of Papias’ five books.56 The text in Matthew which may have been behind John’s sermon is Matthew 26.29:57 I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.

This same text may have prompted Papias to reflect on food and drink: and a reminiscence of this reflection seems to appear when Maximus the Confessor says that ‘Papias, in his fourth book . . . spoke about the pleasures of food in the resurrection.’58 The fourth fragment from Book Four is an account of the death of Judas Iscariot59 – one which differs

54

55 56

57

58 59

Papias Fragment 6, Maximus the Confessor, Scholia on Dionysius the Areopagite On the Heavenly Hierarchy 2. Papias Fragment 12, Philip of Side Church History. Papias Fragment 3.1, Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.1; Fragment 1.4, Irenaeus Against Heresies 5.33.3–4. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for reminding me that the earthly eschatological millennium prophesied in Isaiah 65 may also have been in mind (‘They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit’, 65.21). Papias Fragment 7, Maximus the Confessor On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 7. Papias Fragment 4.1–2, Apollinaris of Laodicea.

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from both the (notoriously discrepant) biblical accounts:60 MacDonald argues that Papias wrote this as a polemic against the account at Matthew 27.3–10.61 As for Book Five, none of the fragments mentions it. To sum up the inferences drawn so far: Papias, born close to the time when Paul of Tarsus died, knew Philip the evangelist’s daughters at Hierapolis when he was young, and possibly Philip himself; and then, at some date, he became bishop of Hierapolis. He wrote his Account of Logia about the Lord on a plan which probably involved following the structure of Matthew’s gospel, but which may have allowed some dissent (as in the Judas story) from the way Matthew saw things. The sixteen fragments of the Account in Ehrman’s Apostolic Fathers come from twelve patristic writers, and this gives some idea of the book’s impact over a number of centuries. Papias’ method in the Account led him to seek information when he could (as noted above) from anyone who came (to Hierapolis? – a question to which I will return below) and who had been in attendance on the elders (παρηκολουθηκώς τις τοῖς πρεσβυτέροις).62 This strategy, Papias claimed, put him in touch with what certain elders used to say: Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, James, John, Matthew – or Aristion, or John the elder. In this connection, Bauckham notes that ‘the order of the list is strikingly Johannine, reflecting the order in John 1.40–44 and 21.2’.63 But here, MacDonald resists the claim that any inference can be drawn from the selection of names and the order in which they are given,64 and this resistance is consistent with his concern to show that Papias did not know the gospels of Luke and John.65 A difference of opinion persists over this in the scholarship, particularly on whether Papias knew John’s gospel at the time of writing the Account. Charles E. Hill in 1998 reasserted the view that he did, restating

60 62

63 64

65

61 Matthew 27.3–10 and Acts 1.18–19. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 5. Papias Fragment 3.4, Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.4. Better translated as ‘been in attendance on’ than ‘been a follower of’: Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 16. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 20. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 17 n.26. Red herrings in this footnote include the objection that other names from the central chapters of John are omitted (but Bauckham’s point is that lists from the first and last chapters of John are selected, and selectivity is implicit in giving a list of only seven elders), and the objection that MacDonald sees no reason why Papias would have needed to consult a text to compose his list of seven disciples (relevant names were evidently familiar to Papias – MacDonald appears unreceptive, however, to the thought that precedence or position within a selective list might be of importance). MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 14.

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the position adopted by H.J. Lawlor, who argued that the written record drawn on by Eusebius in Church History 3.24.5–13 was in fact Papias’ Account.66 Hill’s case, however, falls short of being conclusive; and Bauckham raises important reservations in an appendix to his chapter about Papias on John: Eusebius may have been paraphrasing rather than quoting, and his source may not even have been Papias.67 Bauckham himself, on different grounds from Hill’s, takes the opposite view to MacDonald’s: ‘There should be no doubt’, he writes, ‘that Papias knew John’s Gospel.’68 A point in his favour is that the fragments of Papias are insistent that Papias knew John – John the man, rather than necessarily John the text. Three fragments refer to Papias as a ‘hearer’ (ἀκουστής/auditor, depending on language) of John,69 while another calls him his eyewitness,70 and the anti-Marcionite prologue to John’s gospel calls Papias a ‘dear disciple’ of John.71 But MacDonald insists ‘that Papias was not aware of the existence of the Fourth Gospel, which was composed later’.72 Conservatively, Bauckham declines to base his assertion that Papias knew John’s gospel either on the allusion to the aloes which Nicodemus brought for Jesus’ burial (John 19.39) attributed to Papias in Vardan’s Goldmine, a non-extant Armenian book,73 or on Irenaeus’ ascription to ‘the elders’ of a passage which quotes ‘in my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places’ (John 14.2).74 His argument is more broadly based: the difficulty addressed by Papias’ Account as a whole, Bauckham contends, is that the gospels of Matthew and Mark ‘lacked the kind of order to be expected in a work deriving from an eyewitness’.75 Bauckham sees Papias’ sense of Matthew’s and Mark’s deficiency in this point as having arisen because Papias knew the gospel of John, which dealt with the chronology of Jesus’ life and ministry very differently. ‘[W]e find’, he 66 67 68

69

70 71 72 73

74

Hill, ‘What Papias Said about John (and Luke)’, 588–92. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 433–7. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 225. In 2014 Bauckham restated this position (‘Did Papias Write History or Exegesis?’, 72–3), and referred to other studies reaching the same view, published since Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (463 n.1). Papias Fragment 1.4, Irenaeus Against Heresies 5.33.4/Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.1; Papias Fragment 5, Jer. De vir. ill. 18; Papias Fragment 12, Philip of Side Church History. Papias Fragment 13, George the Sinner Chronicle. Papias Fragment 16, Codex Vaticanus Alexandrinus 14. MacDonald, Two Shipwrecked Gospels, 11 n.5. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 226, cf. Siegert, ‘Unbeachtete Papiaszitate’, 607–9 (= Papias Fragment 24 in Kürzinger, Papias von Hierapolis, 132–5). 75 Irenaeus Against Heresies 5.36.1–2. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 226.

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summarizes, ‘that Papias was contrasting the lack of order in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew with the order to be found in John.’76 MacDonald’s observations about the arrangement of Papias’ material on the framework of Matthew’s treatment of the story of Jesus, although implicitly directed towards understanding the gospel of John as a secondcentury text, are in fact compatible with Bauckham’s version of why the book was written. It would be plausible, Bauckham argues, to suppose that when the gospel of John was first circulated, Papias came to think that ‘some comment’ was required ‘on the most obvious difference’ (i.e. chronology) ‘between this Gospel and those of Mark and Matthew’.77 Papias’ project was innovative in that it aimed to bring Jesus home to Asia, home to Phrygia. It was not intended to replace the gospels, but it did seek to demonstrate the rootedness of the Christian message in the testimony and lives of people who were local and recent. It was a bid to tie a universal faith to people who lived in the here and now, or in recent memory. The implications of this for the Christian aspiration to shift the sacred canopy are clear – the aim was to lay the foundations of a plausibility structure which would be for the whole (Roman Asian) world. In view of this, it makes sense to return to the question of when Papias’ Account was written. It was noted above that the recent scholarly preference for dating the work in the region of 110 is less than compelling, and that any of the reigns of Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian could be contemplated. If Papias was born in the early sixties, and lived to an old age, the dating of 1 John to about 100 would be the strongest objection against the idea that Papias wrote as a young man, sometime about 90. Perhaps that objection is not compelling. Note that Bauckham, who adopts the view that John’s gospel was written by John the elder (not John the son of Zebedee),78 makes 90 more or less the latest date at which John the elder, as a personal disciple of Jesus (the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’) could have been writing his version of the sequence of events in Jesus’ lifetime.79 Therefore, with regret at making things less certain than perhaps they seemed before, I must conclude that Papias may have written his Account of Logia about the Lord any time after about 90, 76 77 78 79

Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 227. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 229. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 423. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 229. Irenaeus, however, says that John survived till the reign of Trajan (Against Heresies 2.22.5). Assuming he was born about 10, this would imply he lived to be ninety or thereabouts.

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not excluding the possibility that he wrote as late as the third decade of the second century.

hierapolis and asia Of the three Lycus valley cities, Laodicea, which under Diocletian would be made a provincial capital, was the one destined for administrative greatness; but Hierapolis was at least the real centre of Lycus valley textile production, even though the local woollen garments were called ‘Laodicean’.80 And Hierapolis’ importance, even if secondary (relative to the greater scheme of things in Roman Asia), is worth further consideration. Hierapolis and Laodicea derived their prosperity from production of luxury goods, so that H.W. Pleket saw them as the best examples under the Roman empire of ‘production cities’, where (in contrast to almost everywhere else) land was not the principal source of a city’s wealth.81 Textile production and dyeing, using wool from flocks kept in the Lycus and Kogamos valleys, were the heart of industry at Hierapolis.82 The city’s water resources were a key advantage to dyers, but also mattered in other activities: in 2007, Tullia Ritti, Klaus Grewe, and H. Paul M. Kessener showed, on the basis of a grave relief of a water-driven saw mill, that ‘the Romans knew and applied the crank and connecting rod as early as the third century’.83 The building of this machine, which could saw stones into blocks or veneer slabs and must have reduced production costs as compared with doing the work by hand, was some decades in the future at the time of Papias (although the local existence of earlier devices could not be ruled out); but together with the textile and dyeing industry, it shows that Papias’ Hierapolis was successful and innovative – soon to be (literally) a cutting-edge location. Pleket observes that a Hierapolitan gravestone attests the existence of a guild of millers (συντεχνίᾳ τῶν ὑδραλετῶν),84 which implies that there were more 80 81 82 83

84

Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 187–8. Pleket, ‘Greek Epigraphy and Comparative Ancient History’, 33–5. Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 186–90; cf. Magie, Roman Rule in Asia Minor, 128. Ritti, Grewe, and Kessener, ‘A Relief of a Water-Powered Stone Saw Mill’, 156. This finding dispels any suspicion that the lines describing waterwheel, crank, and connecting rod in Ausonius (Mosella 359–64) are a medieval interpolation (Ritti, Grewe, and Kessener, ‘A Relief of a Water-Powered Stone Saw Mill’, 154 and n.64). Pennacchietti, ‘Nuove inscrizioni di Hierapolis Frigia’, no. 7 (pp. 297–8): note comment by Robert in Bulletin épigraphique 1971 (Revue des études grecques 84: 397–540 at 514) and Pleket, ‘Greek Epigraphy and Comparative Ancient History’, 27.

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watermills than one in Hierapolis.85 Thonemann notes ‘the pride with which wealthy citizens advertised their involvement in manufacture and commerce’, contrasting local conditions in Hierapolis with ‘the effort which civic elites under the Roman empire usually dedicated to concealing the origins of their wealth’:86 it was more respectable in Hierapolis than elsewhere to be a dyer, a purple-seller, or a trader. Given this background, Papias’ success in gathering materials and writing his Account poses its own question. Papias sought information from anyone who came – and when I reproduced this datum above I put a question mark after ‘to Hierapolis’. This question mark cannot simply be dismissed, but at least the intention to interrogate can be followed through. Is there any chance that Papias went to a greater city than Hierapolis, presumably Ephesus, to find the data used in his book? And then came home up the river Lycus to embody his findings in five volumes, while serving the people of his familiar home city as their bishop? Johannes Munck suggested in 1959 that Papias had travelled in his youth;87 and Huttner takes a step further, suggesting that Papias may have travelled precisely in order ‘to discover the most authentic information about Jesus’.88 Given the slenderness of the sources, this remains no more than a possibility. Members of the educated class would, however, travel in their youth to obtain higher education, as Gregory of Neocaesarea did in the third century; some would return home, while others would find their lives taking them in different directions. Accordingly, it may not be necessary to supply ‘to Hierapolis’ and think of Papias as a man who did not leave his hometown. He might have been sent to Ephesus as a young man and there gained the kind of expertise in rhetoric and literary criticism which he evidently applies to the logia about Jesus,89 while also encountering the elders whose ‘living and surviving voice’ he drew on in the Account. There are considerations, however, which would point in the other direction. In the early churches, people seem not to have hesitated to

85 86 87 88 89

Pleket, ‘Greek Epigraphy and Comparative Ancient History’, 27–8. Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 189. Munck, ‘Presbyters and Disciples of the Lord’, 229. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 222–3. Cf. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 214–21, for discussion of Papias’ application of technical terms belonging to literary criticism to Peter’s anecdotes and the narrative Mark turned them into: Papias was equipped to discuss literature using the language and concepts which formed the curriculum taught by teachers within the mainstream tradition of Greek literary learning.

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travel, as the elders of the church at Ephesus travelled to Miletus to hear Paul speak,90 on his way to Jerusalem. As for Ignatius of Antioch in the first decade of the second century (a figure to whom I will return), he was brought to Asia under guard rather than of his own accord, but on his way to Italy he stopped at Smyrna and Troas. At Smyrna he seems to have had five visitors from the Ephesian church,91 four from the Magnesian church,92 and from Tralles perhaps only Bishop Polybius;93 the unnamed bishop of Philadelphia is praised for his meekness and silence, which may mean that he spoke less than others during the meeting at Smyrna,94 but Ignatius asks the Philadelphians to send a deacon to visit the church at Antioch, and his own companions Philo the deacon, of Cilicia, and Rheus Agathopus from Syria have apparently visited Philadelphia during Ignatius’ sojourn at Smyrna.95 Later, when Ignatius is writing at Troas, the Smyrnaeans to whom he writes have apparently sent Burrhus there with him, ‘together with the Ephesians, [their] brethren’.96 About to depart for Italy, Ignatius asks Polycarp (as he has asked the Philadelphians) to send a suitable person to Antioch to join in celebrating the end of the persecution – and to help organize official visitors from other churches to the Antioch church. Given all this travel for church purposes, it is perhaps not difficult to imagine important figures in the Christian churches taking the trouble to come to the Lycus valley during the first century. But the habit of travel was not all: Hierapolis had special claims, and claims which seem to have gone beyond its being the dwelling place of Philip and his unmarried daughters. This will become clear from a new examination of the letter from Polycrates to Victor, referred to briefly above. Bauckham, in ‘Papias and Polycrates’, expounds this letter in a way which places Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus during Victor’s tenure of the bishopric of Rome (c.189–198), as the latest in a line of clergy who were members of the same family. He writes:97

90 91 92

93 95 96

97

Acts 20.17–38. Ignatius Ephesians 1–2: Bishop Onesimus, Burrhus the deacon, Crocus, Euplus, Fronto. Ignatius Magnesians 2: Bishop Damas, presbyters Bassus and Apollonius, Sotion the deacon. 94 Ignatius Trallians 1. Ignatius Philadelphians 1. Ignatius Philadelphians 10–11. ‘Burrhus, whom you sent with me’ (Ignatius Smyrnaeans 12) tactfully avoids reminding people from Smyrna that the people from Ephesus have taken charge of accompanying Ignatius on his voyage. Bauckham, ‘Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel’, 29.

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Discussions of this passage have usually failed to appreciate its careful artistry. Polycrates adduces seven great luminaries of Asia who practised the quartodeciman observance. As the number of completeness, seven indicates the sufficiency of their evidence. When Polycrates subsequently refers to his seven relatives, who were bishops and to some of whom he had been a disciple . . ., he is not adducing a second, unnecessary set of witnesses, but claiming the seven great luminaries themselves as his relatives. In the interests of modesty, he does not claim them as his relatives until he has first named them all and then introduced himself, ‘the least of you all’, as a supernumerary eighth, whose witness is therefore strictly superfluous. In this way he is able to add his own testimony to that of his illustrious relatives in a suitably modest way.

Bauckham’s inference that the seven bishops to whom Polycrates was related are intended to be the same as the seven persons named seems much more likely than not,98 and the consequences if it is correct merit further examination. The last five of the seven people named had died within the past generation, at the time when Polycrates wrote. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna and martyr, died in 155 or possibly a decade later, and Papirius was his successor at Smyrna;99 Thraseas, bishop of Eumeneia (according to Apollonius, quoted by Eusebius) was one of the martyrs of the forty years after the time when Montanus began to prophesy;100 Huttner links the death of Sagaris at Laodicea with persecution under Marcus Aurelius (161–180),101 and Melito of Sardis wrote an apologia directed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius,102 perhaps dying before the end of his reign. Therefore, between 155 and the 190s the bishops of Ephesus, Smyrna, Eumeneia, Laodicea, and Sardis were members of one family. The first two names on Polycrates’ list, however, are still to be considered: Philip and John. The list is not chronologically structured – there is a vacuum for the generation before 155, while Philip and John are figures from the founding generation. Assuming that Polycrates indeed intended to claim both of them as relatives of his, the explanation of that claim is likely to lie in a connection formed in Asia (since New Testament texts do not hint

98

99

100

101

Kendra Eshleman (Social World of Intellectuals, 240) concurs with Bauckham in the view that Polycrates’ seven relatives who were bishops are (also) the seven persons named in his letter. [Pionius] Vita Sancti Polycarpi 27; but Eshleman (Social World of Intellectuals, 240) writes of Papirius as ‘otherwise unknown’. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.12–13. The possibilities for the beginning of Montanus’ prophesying are either the mid-150s or a time around 170. In Chapter 4, reasons are given for preferring the later date. 102 Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 335. Melito Fragments 1–2.

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that they were related). The supposition, for example, that John the elder was Philip’s son-in-law and had married the daughter of Philip who later died in Ephesus (see above and Euseb. Hist. 3.31.2–3) would account for John and Philip both being relatives of Polycrates.103 The other five whom Polycrates lists were probably recent enough for him to have met all of them, as well as saying that he was a follower of (παρηκολούθησα) some of them. Family sources, however, evidently were not clear enough to prevent Polycrates from misidentifying Philip with Philip of Bethsaida (see above). How five relatives came to be bishops in different western Asian cities within a narrow timespan deserves consideration in relation to how a Christian network was formed in Asia. By the latter half of the second century it would no longer be plausible to suggest that Christians were such a small social group that the leadership pool was inevitably narrow. Four of the five churches concerned are mentioned in Revelation,104 and therefore had existed for a century or so, rather than being the fruit of recent mission. In the fourth century, comparably, Basil was bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia,105 his brother Peter bishop of Sebastea in Lesser Armenia in the diocese of Pontus,106 their brother Gregory bishop of Nyssa in Cappadocia,107 while their sister Macrina the younger led an ascetic community for men and women at their family estate in Pontus.108 Naucratius, fifth of the siblings, became a hermit at the age of twenty-one, but died young five years later.109 Their uncle Gregory was also a bishop, and Basil, during his term of office at Caesarea, appointed an unnamed distant relative (a childhood friend of his own) as bishop of Satala in Pontus.110 If anything, Philip Rousseau understates the case when he writes that ‘family life could play an important part in the religious

103

104

105 107 108 109 110

And if John the elder was Philip’s son-in-law, as hinted above, visiting relatives would supply additional motivation (besides church reasons) for him to travel up to Hierapolis and happen to meet Papias. Bauckham writes that ‘John the Elder, who was still teaching when the young Papias was gathering his traditions, lived near enough to Hierapolis for Papias to have heard him in person on occasion’ (‘Papias and Polycrates on the Origin of the Fourth Gospel’, 44): but in all the circumstances, perhaps Ephesus was near enough. Ephesus: Revelation 2.1–7; Smyrna: Revelation 2.8–11; Smyrna: Revelation 3.1–6; Laodicea: Revelation 3.14–22. 106 Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 133–44. Gregory of Nyssa Epistles 29 and 30. May, ‘Chronologie des Lebens und der Werke des Gregor von Nyssa’, 53. Gregory of Nyssa Vita Macrinae iunioris 10–11. Gregory of Nyssa Vita Macrinae iunioris 8–9. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 6–7; ‘our right reverend uncle the bishop’, Basil Epistles 58; Satala, Basil Epistles 102.

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Figure 3 The Asian/Syrian World of Basil of Caesarea. Map drawn by Jenni Irving, after Jonette Surridge

formation of Christians, just as it did in the formation of other attitudes, and in the choice of careers’.111 In view of this fourth-century comparison, it is plausible to think that in the second century a single family could have the breadth of responsibility and influence of which Polycrates writes. And yet the web of family connections spreads still further. Jesus’ own family made a distinctive contribution to leadership and the growth of Christianity. Bauckham traces from a range of sources how relatives of Jesus, based in the Galilean villages of Nazareth and Kokhaba,112 ‘travelled around the rest of the land’ (meaning Judaea and neighbouring provinces) preaching the gospel,113 as well as being represented in the Jerusalem bishops lists (in Eusebius and Epiphanius).114 He argues also that Abris, Abraham, and Ya῾qub, second to fourth bishops of Seleucia on the Tigris (Ctesiphon), 111 113 114

112 Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, 3. Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives, 60–5. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 1.7.14, quoting Julius Africanus. Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives, 70–9.

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were members of Jesus’ family.115 The geographical spread covered by this family’s endeavours, from Jerusalem to Ctesiphon (35 kilometres south of Baghdad),116 puts in context the diaspora of the Basil family through Pontus and Cappadocia, and the scattering of Polycrates’ relatives through the province of Asia. And yet the succession Polycrates wrote of was not a kind of Christian caliphate: although family relationships were involved, its importance was more comparable to the philosophical successions studied by Kendra Eshleman in The Social World of Intellectuals. She observes that ‘the idea that succession guarantees continuity and legitimacy is so pervasive in ancient Mediterranean thought that it makes little sense to speak of the idea’s entering Christianity at all’.117 As to Papias, although not a member of the Philip/John/Polycrates family, he nevertheless emphatically was in the business of building succession in Eshleman’s sense, his book about the teachings of the elders acting (as Polycrates’ ancestors were later to be cited as acting)118 as ‘a potent witness to the antiquity and “orthodoxy” of the Christianity . . . dominant in Asia’.119

apollinarius Later in the second century, in the days of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180), the bishop of Hierapolis was Claudius Apollinarius.120 Apollinarius was an active bishop,121 particularly in literary terms, since he

115 116

117 118 119 121

Bauckham, Jude and the Relatives, 68–70. The view that Conon the gardener, martyred at Magydos in Pamphylia in the Decian persecution, meant it in a literal (rather than spiritual) sense when he said, ‘I am of the city of Nazareth in Galilee, I am of the family of Christ, whose worship I have inherited from my ancestors’ (Martyrdom of Conon 4.2) ought to be treated with reserve, even though Bauckham (Jude and the Relatives, 121–5) makes an energetic case for it. As Origen said about the Bible, ‘the design . . . is, that we should not receive what is presented by the letter alone’ (De principiis 4.18, translation by Frederick Crombie in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 4. Rife cuts the Gordian knot by writing of ‘the fictional account of Conon’s martyrdom’ (‘Officials of the Roman Provinces in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca’, 98), but does not state a case for viewing it as fictional. Eshleman, Social World of Intellectuals, 215. Cf. Eshleman, Social World of Intellectuals, 243. 120 Eshleman, Social World of Intellectuals, 240. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.19.2. With Huttner (Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 233), I take the identification of Apollinarius the author with Apollinarius the bishop to be certain. Although LGPN has forty-five holders of the name Apollinarius (and another thirty-seven of the name Apollinaris: LGPN does not distinguish between these spellings), the point which

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wrote an Apologia (speech in defence of Christians and their way of life) and delivered it in front of the emperor (or possibly did not actually deliver it122). These included five books under the title of In Reply to the Hellenes,123 two books On Truth, two books In Reply to the Jews, and a work Against the Heresy of the Phrygians.124 Evidently an energetic controversialist, his name implies that he was a Roman citizen and therefore places him within a narrow band of the highest-status people in Hierapolis, since in the second century Roman citizenship was not widespread among provincials in Greek-speaking provinces. Apollinarius’ work as an author shows that he had received (and succeeded in) the kind of rhetorical education which a member of the upper class would typically receive – and that he used that advantage to follow a path similar in some respects to the path Papias had followed approximately two generations previously. He was about a generation older than his fellow-Hierapolitan Antipater the sophist (see above). Apollinarius has the distinction of having been the first author to write into Christian literature the story of the rain miracle: Marcus Aurelius’ Melitenean legion, ‘tormented by thirst’ and about to face the Germans and Sarmatians in battle, knelt to pray to God – and the prayer was answered with a thunderstorm which caused the enemy to flee.125 As Huttner notes, the story told by Apollinarius is full of mistakes (for example, he gives the legion’s name in Greek as Κεραυνοβόλος, whereas inscriptions attest it as Κεραυνoφόρος126); Eusebius, quoting it, does not specify which of Apollinarius’ books it came from, but one might infer

122

123

124 126

Huttner makes – that Eusebius does not identify a second Apollinarius, other than the bishop of Hierapolis, in the early books of the Church History – is enough to establish that he knew of only one relevant Apollinarius. Huttner discusses this (Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 239–41), noting that Marcus Aurelius probably travelled through the Lycus valley on the way to Smyrna in 176 as he returned from defeating Avidius Cassius’ revolt: but he questions whether the emperor would have found time to meet and listen to representatives of the churches and draws attention to the ‘precarious legal situation’ (240) which a speaker in favour of Christianity would have been in. The argument that speeches of Christian apologetic were not delivered in front of emperors to whom they are ostensibly addressed has often been put forward, including by Millar (Emperor in the Roman World2, 561). Πρὸς Ἕλληνας: ‘In reply to . . .’ is the most precise translation of πρὸς in the title of a speech (or a book), the imagined context being that of a law court or a deliberative meeting – although πρὸς does not always imply the real-world existence of a speech from the other side to which a reply is being given. Huttner renders Πρὸς Ἕλληνας as ‘Against [or: to] the Hellenes’ (Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 238), but this fails to capture the metaphorical freight of the title. 125 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.27. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.5.1–4. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 235.

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that he cannot have told the tale in the form he has it in the Apologia, least of all if the emperor (who had been at the battle) did hear him speak. More likely, Huttner argues, it was in In Reply to the Hellenes.127 Melito, bishop of Sardis, Apollinarius’ contemporary, wrote a work In Reply to the Jews, as Apollinarius did, and as Tertullian was to do in Latin not many years later.128 But Apollinarius’ book is lost, so that any supposition about the contents would be speculative. Huttner’s inference that it led to ‘many respected citizens of his native city [feeling] aggrieved’ is open to question, because it is unlikely that Hierapolitan Jews were the book’s target audience: a Christian readership was probably sought, although a Jewish Christian may have been (to Apollinarius) the ideal imagined reader.

jews at hierapolis Twenty-three of the forty-eight Phrygian Jewish inscriptions in IJudO come from Hierapolis,129 mostly from the mid-second to third centuries.130 P. Aelius Glykon was part of the purple industry;131 and van der Horst argues from a gravestone referring to a settlement (κατοικία) of Jews that there was a Jewish quarter in the city.132 Jews were members of the trade guilds,133 and there is even a memorial to a Jew who was a ‘frequent winner in the holy games’134 – a kind of participation in Hellenistic life which some Jews would have found troubling to the conscience.135 Elena Miranda discusses troublesome features, from the perspective of Jewish propriety, in the texts of other Hierapolitan epitaphs, including, and in particular, the epitaph of Glykon. Glykon left two hundred denarii to the presidency of the purple-dyers’ guild to fund (from the interest) a 127 128 129

130 132 133 135

Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 235–7. Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 244–7. Van der Horst, ‘Jews of Ancient Phrygia’, 285 and 283 n.4; cf. Harland, ‘Acculturation and Identity in the Diaspora’, 223. 131 Harland, ‘Acculturation and Identity in the Diaspora’, 224. IJudO II 196. Van der Horst, ‘Jews of Ancient Phrygia’, 286 and n.17; cf. IJudO II 205. 134 Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 189. IJudO II 189. Philo of Alexandria, for example, advises avoiding participation in athletic competitions: ‘Do you, therefore, my friend, never enter into a contest of evil, and never contend for the pre-eminence in such practices, but rather exert yourself with all your might to escape from them. And if ever, being under the compulsion of some power which is mightier than yourself, you are compelled to engage in such a strife, take care to be without delay defeated’ (De agricultura 25.111: translation from Yonge, The Works of Philo Judaeus vol. 1.

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distribution to members (at a grave-crowning ceremony) on the feast of unleavened bread (Passover), and a hundred and fifty denarii to the association of carpet-weavers (ἀκαιροδαπισταί), with the intention that the proceeds of interest would be distributed, half during the festival of the Kalends on the eighth day of the fourth month, and half during the festival of Pentecost. Glykon has mixed up Jewish festivals with the festival of the Kalends, that is, the Roman new year on 1 January. As Miranda says, observing the festival of the Kalends would scarcely be acceptable behaviour for an observant Jew.136 She suggests tentatively that he was a Godfearer;137 Harland, similarly, remains uncertain whether Glykon and his family were descendants of immigrants from Judaea, or ‘non-Judaeans who adopted Judaean cultural practices’.138 Miranda in 1999 was first to publish side b of the inscription, side a of which had been published before as IJudO 191.139 On side b Aurelius Heortasios is commemorated: a citizen of Tripolis (at the junction of the Maeander and Lycus valleys) who lived in Hierapolis. The text states that his wife and their children, and no one else, are allowed to be buried in the same grave site; anyone who contravenes the ban on further burials is to be fined two pounds (ἀργύρου λείτρας δύο), payable to the ‘most holy synagogue’.140 In Diocletian’s Price Edict (301) the price of silver is fixed at 6,000 denarii a pound, so that the fine works out at 12,000 denarii, which is not disproportionate to similar fines threatened elsewhere. Fines were expressed in weights of gold or silver in documents of the fourth and fifth centuries.141 This inscription is the earliest text which mentions a synagogue at Hierapolis – whose existence would have to be inferred even if chance had deprived posterity of textual evidence, because of the numerous grave monuments for Jews in the necropolis. The synagogue is likely to have existed before the Heortasios gravestone was made. Papias and the early Christians of Hierapolis therefore lived in one of the best-established centres of Jewish community in western Asia, where Jews, who probably had their synagogue by Papias’ time, were part of productive activities, sports, and civic life. From the Christian viewpoint, as argued above, this was an indispensable backdrop; it is clear from the evidence about Papias that the Christian church by the early second century had become locally established, with connections throughout

136 138 139 141

137 IHierapMir, p. 141. IHierapMir, p. 145. Harland, Greco-Roman Associations II, 173. Cf. Harland, ‘Acculturation and Identity in the Diaspora’, 226. Robert, Hellenica vol. 3, 96–7.

140

IHierapMir 14b.

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the more important cities of Roman Asia. Hierapolis fits the profile Stark delineates in Cities of God when he discusses the selection of communities by Christian missionaries and stresses that it was social networks which led them to Hellenized Jews in the diaspora.142 Although outside the thirty-one large cities empire-wide which Stark examines in his book, Hierapolis (on a smaller scale) exemplifies very well Stark’s point that ‘both Hellenism and the Diaspora had strong, significant, independent effects on Christianization’.143

142

Stark, Cities of God, 133.

143

Stark, Cities of God, 135.

3 Teachers of Asia: Ignatius, Polycarp, Paul and Thecla

Papias, as was argued in Chapter 2, ‘brought Jesus home to Phrygia’ at some point within a hard-to-define chronological space at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second. But now the narrative must open out beyond Phrygia – in this case into the domain of events and personalities in the greater Asia Minor world, which must have had their impact on the smaller cities and smaller Christian churches in the Phrygian region. Ignatius and Polycarp in particular, and the questions which the evidence about them gives rise to, have been viewed for decades as core issues for the patristic field – and it will become clear that the better modern knowledge of them can become, the more it will be possible to understand about the historical development of the Christian sacred canopy both on the small scale and the large. Paul and Thecla, dealt with towards the end of this chapter, is an Asian, perhaps Phrygian, secondcentury text – and one which gained a Christian currency well beyond the Asian continent. Christianity is a universal faith,1 and the tradition of Christian preaching deals principally with the universal plane. Canonically, then, Paul’s sermon in Athens speaks of the times of ignorance being at an end, so that ‘[God] commands all people everywhere to repent’.2 Similarly, disciples were sent into the world by Jesus after his resurrection ‘to proclaim the good news to the whole creation’.3 Therefore, although

1

2

In the present context, universal in the pre-Constantine sense referred to by Brown (Through the Eye of a Needle, 34): ‘by “universal” they meant that anyone anywhere could become a Christian’. 3 Acts 17.30. Mark 16.15.

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events in this chapter belong to western Asia as a whole (Smyrna has a large part to play), they link as intimately to Phrygia and inland Asia Minor as they do to the seaboard, with ripples later spreading throughout the known world. At Smyrna at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, Scopelian of Clazomenae, the sophist, was teaching people from all over Roman Asia: ‘Ionians, Carians, Maeonians, Aeolians and Hellenes from Mysia and Phrygia flocked . . . to his school’; however, his students were not all from the province of Asia – there were also Cappadocians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Achaeans, Athenians.4 In the wider world, as well as in the Christian microcosm, Smyrna was an influential city.

ignatius of antioch To Ignatius of Antioch, Smyrna was a destination, though an interim one. Ignatius, according to Eusebius, was bishop of Syrian Antioch in the time of Trajan (98–117);5 another Eusebian chapter tells the story of Ignatius’ journey through Asia accompanied by Roman soldiers on his way to his death in a wild-beast show at Rome.6 On this journey, Ignatius wrote seven letters to churches and individuals, mostly in Asia. Modern scholars, however, are far from unanimous in believing that the journey happened as early as the reign of Trajan, even if Ignatius had become a bishop by then. Schoedel placed the letters anywhere between 105 and 135,7 while Charles Munier, writing elsewhere in ANRW, is close to agreement with Schoedel and puts them between 110 and 135.8 It has been conventional to date the letters within Trajan’s reign on the basis of Eusebius, who in his Chronicon places Ignatius’ martyrdom in 107/8,9 Trajan’s tenth year; however, Eusebius’ account in his Church History at the relevant point draws Polycarp, Papias, and Ignatius together in a way which, while showing that the time in question is after the beginning of the second century, is not specific on how long after.10 4

5 7 8 9

10

Philostr. VS 1.518. Translation from Wright, Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists. 6 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.22. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.36.2–15. Schoedel, ‘Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch’, 347–9. Munier, ‘Où en est la question d’Ignace d’Antioche?’, 380. Jer. Chron. Ol. 221.4: ‘Ignatius also, bishop of the church of Antioch, sent to Rome, is given to the beasts’. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.36.1–3: ‘At that time [cf. 3.34.1 ‘In the third year of the reign of the emperor mentioned above (Trajan, 98–117)’] Polycarp, a disciple of the apostles, was a

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In 2009, Otto Zwierlein, in Petrus in Rom, a book directed towards demonstrating (despite the title) that Peter never lived in Rome, opens out the discussion and interrogates a wide range of Christian texts (and events inferred from them) conventionally ascribed to the first half of the second century. In the course of his treatment he deals with the letters of Ignatius: ‘das fictive Briefkorpus des “Ignatius von Antiochien”’, as he calls it.11 The ‘genuine’ letters, he argues, ought to be dated in the 170s not the 100s or 110s, principally because they are aimed against particular kinds of Gnostics (Docetists and Valentinians) whose influence is not traceable as early as then.12 He argues that ‘martyrdom’ (μαρτύριον, cf. Ignatius Ephesians 1.2) was incapable of being used as a technical term as early as the first decade of the second century, and that what Ignatius writes about ‘silence’ (Magnesians 8.2) was not pertinent until the idea of ‘Silence’ (σιγή) became a matter of concern because of Valentinian ideas, well into the second century. On silence, Zwierlein’s argument turns on his acceptance that the reading λόγος ἀίδιος, οὐκ ἀπὸ σιγῆς προελθών (‘eternal Word, not proceeding . . . from silence’13), which is in the one preserved Greek codex containing Ignatius’ letters, is the Vorlage of the Latin translation and the form of the phrase in its earliest citation by Timotheus Aelurus, and also appears in the longer (interpolated) Greek text. The shorter reading λόγος, ἀπὸ σιγῆς προελθών (‘Word, proceeding from silence’) comes in the Armenian translation of the Greek and in a late citation by Severus of Antioch.14 The longer reading seems to demonstrate a concern to refute the Valentinian theory whereby Silence was the counterpart of Depth (βυθός), the beginning of all things, who after long contemplation brought into existence the thirty aeons who made up the invisible world. Christ coming forth from silence, then, would be consistent with a Valentinian understanding of the heavenly order. If the text stressed that Christ did not come forth from silence, it might be inferred that it was written by

11 13

14

man of eminence in Asia, having been entrusted with the episcopate of the church of Smyrna by those who had seen and heard the Lord. And at the same time Papias, bishop of the parish of Hierapolis, became well known, as did also Ignatius, who was chosen bishop of Antioch, second in succession to Peter, and whose fame is still celebrated by a great many. Report says that he was sent from Syria to Rome, and became food for wild beasts on account of his testimony to Christ.’ 12 Zwierlein, Petrus in Rom, 183. Zwierlein, Petrus in Rom, 184. Ignatius Magnesians 8.2. Translation from Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3. Zwierlein, Petrus in Rom, 187.

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someone who knew of Valentinus’ theory, and therefore that it was not written until the later second century at the earliest. Zwierlein’s explanation of the shorter text, following the arguments of R. Joly, is that it more likely came from the words ἀίδιος and οὐκ dropping out accidentally in the process of copying, or translating into Armenian. The difficulty for Zwierlein’s argument, however, is that neither reading gives rise to a sentiment which is unacceptable from the view of Christian orthodoxy: the idea that God’s Word came forth from silence constitutes quite an ordinary reflection on ‘Let there be light’ and so on in Genesis 1,15 but the wish to stress that God’s Word is eternal (if necessary, by denying ‘from silence’) need not necessarily have been a move prompted by the need to discredit Valentinian’s teaching – so that the phrase in the longer form could plausibly have been written before Valentinus’ preaching became influential. As Markus Bockmuehl argues (agreeing with Ernst Dassmann) in his review of S. Heid’s 2010 volume of studies interrogating Zwierlein’s conclusions about Peter in Rome and related matters, both Zwierlein and his interlocutors are engaging in a scholarly debate which, over the past 150 years, has come to appear as a draw.16 Zwierlein, in his strenuous and detailed examination of dating points in Ignatius (and across the other texts he deals with), falls short of finding something new which would be conclusive for a late date or for the view that Ignatius’ letters were composed long after the lifetime of the (probably fictional) character ‘Ignatius’, in order to commend the principle of monepiscopacy and contend against second-century forms of Gnostic theorizing. The view adopted in this book, then, is that (as Bockmuehl comments on Rainer Riesner’s argument in favour of accepting the tradition that Peter travelled to Rome), ‘the complex but pluriform aggregate of . . . sources does leave positions of thoroughgoing scepticism in danger of appearing superficial and historically facile’.17 Accordingly, Ignatius’ letters will be read here as texts produced by a historical, not fictive, Ignatius during a journey in Asia in the early second century. Ignatius and his ‘ten leopards’ (the Roman soldiers who escorted him) travelled ‘both by land and sea’18 to Alexandria Troas, before sailing from there to Philippi on the way to Rome.19 Ignatius’ letters and Eusebius’s brief account both fail to detail the route taken. The analogy 15 17 18

16 Genesis 1.3. Bockmuehl, review of Heid (ed.), Petrus und Paulus in Rom, 2. Bockmuehl, review of Heid (ed.), Petrus und Paulus in Rom, 7. 19 Ignatius Romans 5. Ignatius Polycarp 8.1.

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of Paul’s travels in Acts hints that there were several possibilities: starting from Antioch on the first missionary journey Paul and Barnabas sailed from Seleucia in Pieria to Salamis, then from Paphos at the other end of Cyprus to Perga in Pamphylia;20 later, they sailed back from Attalia to Antioch.21 On the second journey, Paul and Silas started via Syria and Cilicia, that is, over land, and on to Derbe and Lystra;22 Paul’s eventual return began in Corinth, from where he sailed via Cenchreae and Ephesus, travelling to Antioch only after first visiting Caesarea Maritima and Jerusalem.23 In the case of the third missionary journey, Acts is not explicit about what route was taken from Antioch to Galatia and Phrygia.24 Four of Ignatius’ letters were written at Smyrna (Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans), and the rest at Troas (Philadelphians, Smyrnaeans, Polycarp).25 Therefore, his movements across Asia before arrival in Smyrna are unattested – except that at Troas he was still accompanied by Philo ‘the deacon from Cilicia’.26 It may be that Ignatius and his ‘ten leopards’ sailed from Antioch as far as a port in Cilicia, possibly heading up the river Cydnus to Tarsus as Cleopatra once did,27 before continuing their journey by road. In the early second century, Tarsus seems the likeliest place in Cilicia to find a deacon, that is, Philo, who accompanied Ignatius from then on.28 After an earlier, and important, book-length exposition of Ignatius’ letters as an ‘attempt at cultural transformation through cultural engagement’,29 Allen Brent in 2007 put Ignatius’ journey itself at the heart of an innovative study.30 Not only did Ignatius ‘play the martyr card to a T, and with considerable eloquence’, Brent argues, but ‘he was able to choreograph his journey to Rome as a spectacular procession’.31

20 24 25

26 28

29 30 31

21 22 23 Acts 13.4–13. Acts 14.25–6. Acts 15.41–16.1. Acts 18.18–22. Acts 18.23. Written from Smyrna: Magnesians 15, Trallians 12, Romans 10. Eusebius list Romans together with the letters written from Smyrna: Church History 3.36.6. Written from Troas: Philadelphians 11, Smyrnaeans 12, Polycarp 8. 27 Ignatius Philadelphians 11. Plutarch Antony 26.1–3. Ten Cilician cities had bishops present at the Council of Nicaea (Adana, Aigaiai, Alexandria ad Issum, Anazarbus, Epiphaneia, Flavias, Hierapolis (Kastabala), Mopsuestia, Neronias, Tarsus: cf. Mullen, Expansion of Christianity, 76–82), but Ignatius’ reference to Philo the deacon is the earliest extant reference to a Cilician clergyman. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch and the Second Sophistic, 4. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 45.

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Foundational to his interpretation of Ignatius is Brent’s conception of Ignatius himself as a scapegoat, in effect driven out by an Antioch church whose divisions he had, in substance, caused. Brent follows P.N. Harrison’s view that in Ignatius’ case there was no persecution of the Antioch church by the government, but that Ignatius himself had caused so much strife inside the Christian community that ‘the civil power had to intervene to restore public order’32 (by sending Ignatius to Rome to be put to death). This analysis of the situation is a radicalization of the idea (traceable to Walter Bauer33) that Ignatius in Antioch was the leader of a minority faction within the Christ-believing community: C.P. Hammond Bammel goes a step beyond Bauer when she is convinced by the ‘hypothesis that the disturbances at Antioch to which Ignatius refers in his letters were caused by internal disputes and not by general persecution’34 – a view that has become virtually a consensus35 – but where Brent has gone further than previous scholars is in reducing the holders of governmental power in Antioch to a Captain Renault role (‘Round up the usual suspects!’).36 Brent’s rendering of the key word περίψημα as ‘scapegoat sacrifice’37 (making it sound as if it were a technical term in the Bible) is misleading because the word’s only use in the Septuagint is at Tobit 5.19, where Anna advises Tobit, ‘Do not heap money upon money, but let it be a ransom (περίψημα) for our child.’ The single New Testament use of the word at 1 Corinthians 4.13 is even less helpful to Brent’s case: ‘We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things (πάντων περίψημα), to this very day.’ In the account of the scapegoat ceremony in Leviticus the word is not used – and the scapegoat not sacrificed, but driven out into the wilderness after Aaron has laid his hands on it and confessed all the sins of the people of Israel.38 The scapegoat conception which Brent draws on arises from the work of René Girard, who writes of a ‘victimization mechanism’ in primitive religion,39 whereby reconciliation is brought about in human societies through the unanimous and collective expulsion of a victim whom all 32

33 35 37 38 39

Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 21, cf. Harrison, Polycarp’s Two Epistles to the Philippians, 85–8. 34 Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy, 64–9. Bammel, ‘Ignatian Problems’, 88. 36 Lieu, Image and Reality, 25 n.9. Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 48, cf. Ignatius Ephesians 8.1. Leviticus 16.7–10 and 20–2. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 96. I wish to thank the anonymous referee who drew the pertinence of Girard’s work to my attention.

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sides in a crisis can agree on.40 An example Girard uses is that of Oedipus, whose expulsion from Thebes lifts divine punishment from the city;41 but the claim that Oedipus’ mythical misfortunes are a valid analogy to Ignatius’ removal from the Antioch church is difficult to sustain. As Joseph Azize observes, even Brent notes that Ignatius’ letters fail to make clear whether the action against him was put in motion by the state or resulted from a private prosecution42 – so unanimity against Ignatius as scapegoat is not at all well established. Azize goes on to raise other difficulties with Brent’s methodology.43 Observing that Ignatius ‘gives us no details of his trial or the precise offence for which he was convicted’,44 Brent uses differences of emphasis in ideas about church life between Matthew and the Didache to argue for (what he infers were) the cardinal difficulties of church government in Antioch, which (he argues) Ignatius had sought to solve by creating a system in which as bishop he himself would seek to create concord (ὁμόνοια) of the kind characteristically praised by the Greek rhetorical authors of the second sophistic.45 Division resulted, although (perhaps oddly) Brent seems to blame the division partly on Ignatius’ defective social skills: he was (so Brent says) ‘not the sort of bishop with whom people would be comfortable at a Buckingham Palace garden party’.46 Matthew, the Didache, and Ignatius’ letters, mixed in the blender of Brent’s hermeneutic of suspicion, create an Antioch church where the majority of members, ‘motivated by envy’, were against Ignatius, ‘wanted nothing of a single bishop around whom . . . unity might be achieved’, and were ‘not impressed with [his] claim to be a single bishop . . .’47 There is, then, much to be dissatisfied with in Brent’s explanation of how Ignatius came to be in Asia Minor. And yet his book is useful, because of the way it brings into focus Ignatius’ journey, his ‘martyr procession’ though Asia. He argues persuasively that Lucian, satirist and author of The Passing of Peregrinus, ‘has heard of Ignatius’

40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 197, cf. Hunsinger, ‘Politics of the Nonviolent God’, 62–5. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 77–8. Azize, ‘Ignatius of Antioch on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’, 111. Azize, ‘Ignatius of Antioch on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’, 134. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 19. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 23–37. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 40. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 41–2.

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choreographing of this martyr procession’,48 and that he draws from the Ignatius incident his idea of Peregrinus sending ‘letters to all the glorious cities that were Last Wills and Testaments in their exhortation and the laws they gave’.49 Brent observes also that Ignatius calls the representatives, whom he asks the Smyrnaeans and Polycarp to send to Antioch, ‘divine messengers’ (θεοδρόμους),50 whereas Lucian’s Peregrinus appoints ‘speed-runners to the underworld’ (νερτεροδρόμους) to carry the letters he writes.51 Echoing Lightfoot’s idea that ‘the Christian career of Peregrinus was an embroidered parody of the Acts of Ignatius’,52 Brent posits that the impression Ignatius made with his progress through Asia lasted some decades and was notorious enough, as Lucian saw it in the 160s, to be worth mixing into the Peregrinus story. Zwierlein’s attempt to resuscitate the theory that the story of Ignatius was (later than and) based on the story of Peregrinus brings nothing new to the table,53 and remains vulnerable to Christine Trevett’s dismissal of earlier scholarship which demanded re-dating/reattribution of the letters of Ignatius on the ground of their (supposedly) drawing on Lucian’s Peregrinus: critics arguing for this ‘did not convince’.54 There is another hint that Ignatius caused a sensation, and it comes at the end of the letter to Polycarp, where Ignatius writes ‘I salute all by name, and in particular the wife of the procurator, with all her house and children.’55 Some translators say ‘the wife of Epitropus’,56 and Epitropus is a possible (though uncommon) personal name, attested just twice in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names;57 but ἐπίτροπος is the routine Greek word for (Latin) procurator, so that it is better to render ἀσπάζομαι . . . τὴν τοῦ ἐπιτρόπου as ‘I salute . . . the [wife] of the procurator’, as Kirsopp Lake did in the older Loeb Apostolic Fathers, and as Trevett does in her book

48 50 51

52

53 55 56

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49 Brent, Ignatius of Antioch: a Martyr Bishop, 54. Lucian Peregrinus 41. Ignatius Smyrnaeans 2, cf. Polycarp 7. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch, 54; νερτεροδρόμους: Lucian Peregrinus 41. Brent also (54–5) sees Lucian’s νεκραγγέλους as the counterpart of Ignatius’ θεοπρεσβύτην (Smyrnaeans 11) – a correspondence perhaps close enough for satirical purposes. As Edwards phrased it (‘Satire and Verisimilitude: Christianity in Lucian’s “Peregrinus”’, 96 n.21); cf. Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp, 438: ‘the heathen satirist Lucian, . . . writing soon after ad 165 caricatures the progress of Ignatius through Asia Minor in his death of Peregrinus’. 54 Zwierlein, Petrus in Rom, 194–201. Trevett, Christian Women, 215. Ignatius Polycarp 8.2. Holmes, Apostolic Fathers; Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch; Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers vol. 1. Osborne and Byrne, LGPN 2A: these two persons are from Attica.

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about Christian women between 80 and 160.58 What the greeting shows is that Ignatius at Smyrna had been in contact with the wife of a Roman high official, and that Polycarp could be expected afterwards to pass greetings to her and her household. Contact at that social level is not implausible. Joanna, one of the women who ‘provided for [Jesus] out of their resources’, was the wife of Chuza, an ἐπίτροπος – though in the service of Herod Antipas and therefore technically not a Roman procurator.59 Later, in Cyprus, Sergius Paullus, the proconsul, called Paul and Barnabas in, in order to hear the word of God,60 and (as Mitchell has inferred) encouraged Paul to travel on from Cyprus up the via Sebaste from Perge to Sergius Paullus’ home city of Antioch of Pisidia.61 At Rome, Paul greeted ‘those in the Lord who belong[ed] to the family of Narcissus’:62 there is no proof that the householder referred to was Ti. Claudius Narcissus, ab epistulis (= Minister of the Provinces) to the Emperor Claudius,63 but no reason why he might not have been, especially given that ‘those of the emperor’s household’ are sent greetings in another Pauline letter.64 In sum, and contra Brent’s idea of Ignatius as someone whose social skills would have been unequal to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, Ignatius made his journey across Asia into a drama which commanded elite attention and won friends for him in high places. Phrygian cities must have been on Ignatius’ route, whatever exact road his escort decided to follow. In some of them there were churches which probably sent people to meet Ignatius on his journey, as the churches further west later did. Brent infers, probably correctly, that some place on the road between Laodicea on the Lycus and Smyrna was where Onesimus, bishop of Ephesus, together with Burrhus the deacon and Crocus, Euplus, and Fronto, met Ignatius; it was Crocus, Ignatius says, who ‘refreshed me in every way’ (κατὰ πάντα με ἀνέπαυσεν):65 this would mean material support, as well as friendly greetings.66 Probably churches along the way had supplied similar support when they were able. As for Ignatius, his preaching and advice on his journey through Asia had probably already gelled around the themes which were to concern him when he wrote to the churches near the end of his road: correct

58 59 60 62 65

Trevett, Christian Women, 221–2. Luke 8.3 (NRSV translates: ‘Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza . . .’). 61 Acts 13.7. Mitchell, ‘Geographical and Historical Introduction’, 12. 63 64 Romans 16.11. Suetonius Divus Claudius 28. Philippians 4.22. 66 Ignatius Ephesians 2.1. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch, 13.

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teaching, unity, and loyalty in each church to one bishop. To the church at Tralles, he gave a warning against persons with a level of apparent credibility (καταξιοπιστευόμενοι) who would ‘mix Jesus Christ with themselves’ and so offer not ‘Christian food’ but the strange plant of heresy.67 His answer for Christians was loyalty to the bishop, and the body of presbyters, and the deacons, as he said at Philadelphia;68 that was how to keep pure, by remaining ‘inside the altar’ (ἐντὸς θυσιαστηρίου).69 Guarding the boundaries of the community in a situation in which there were preachers with divergent theories looking for an audience was Ignatius’ theme. As Paul J. Donahue argues, it is likely that the letters are evidence more for conditions in the Antioch church than in the Asia Minor churches which Ignatius visited briefly or (in most cases) not at all. ‘[H]is responses to various problems are too consistent,’ Donahue writes, ‘too much a part of his own theological outlook, to have arisen on the spot, under such trying conditions. Ignatius applies his Antiochean experience to the not dissimilar problems which he encounters in Asia Minor.’70 Shaye J.D. Cohen discusses Ignatius’ exhortation against listening to teachers of Judaism:71 But if any one preach the Jewish law unto you, listen not to him. For it is better to hearken to Christian doctrine from a man who has been circumcised, than to Judaism from one uncircumcised. But if either of such persons do not speak concerning Jesus Christ, they are in my judgment but as monuments and sepulchres of the dead, upon which are written only the names of men . . .

Cohen argues powerfully in favour of the view that ‘[t]his “Judaism” is the “Judaism” of Christians within the Christian community, not the “Judaism” of Jews “out there” beyond it’.72 He makes the observation that ‘Long-Ignatius’, the collection of the Ignatian letters which includes the spurious interpolated letters created at a late stage in the manuscript tradition, ‘assumes that when Ignatius refers to “Judaism” he is speaking not about a social entity outside the communal limits of Christianity, but about theological error within the church’.73 Cohen’s logic, however, is, if anything, too sharp. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, Justin Martyr was to say that there were more Gentile Christians than Jewish and Samaritan 67 69 70 71 73

68 Ignatius Trallians 6.1–2. Ignatius Philadelphians 7.1. Ignatius Trallians 7.2. Donahue, ‘Jewish Christianity in the Letters of Ignatius’, 82. 72 Ignatius Philadelphians 6.1–2. Cohen, ‘Judaism without Circumcision’, 398. Cohen, ‘Judaism without Circumcision’, 400–1.

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Christians,74 but before the Third Jewish War it is far from clear that Gentiles would have outnumbered Jews across the churches in the Roman empire as a whole. In Roman Asia, both in Phrygia and in the coastal districts of the province, it is probable that Christian churches in many cities would have been composed partly of Jewish and partly of Gentile believers: the bright line Cohen wants to draw between Jews and Christians seems implausible in view of the overall complexity of the situation. Ignatius was in Asia Minor a short time, then sailed away from Troas, having been assured that peace had returned to the church in Antioch. It seems on balance to be satisfactory to read Ignatius’ statements on the subject at face value (‘it is reported to me that the church which is at Antioch in Syria possesses peace’;75 ‘the church which is at Antioch in Syria is, as report has informed me, at peace, through your prayers’;76 ‘your Church should elect some worthy delegate; so that he, journeying into Syria, may congratulate them that they are [now] at peace’77), as meaning that government action against Christians had come to an end and they were able to resume their ordinary church life. Brent advocates a theory (earlier espoused by J.M. Lieu78) whereby ‘peace’ would represent Ignatius’ side having prevailed in the internal struggle within Antiochene Christianity (as a result of a current of feeling which began to run in Ignatius’ favour after he had been taken away to Rome to die). Brent’s, however, seems to be a low-probability interpretation of the data,79 requiring a special and counter-intuitive way of reading Ignatius’ letters.

polycarp of smyrna Before he left Asia for Philippi and Rome, Ignatius made friends with Polycarp of Smyrna, associating him with his own greeting to the Magnesians,80 and saying in his Ephesians that he loves Polycarp as he loves his addressees, the Christians of Ephesus.81 Not only that: he wrote a separate letter to Polycarp, preserved along with the others which are directed to churches. It is clear that Polycarp made an impression on Ignatiu: Polycarp’s Philippians, his letter to Philippi encouraging the Christians there and enquiring whether they have heard anything further

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75 Justin Martyr First Apology 53.3. Ignatius Philippians 10. 77 78 Ignatius Polycarp 7. Ignatius Smyrnaeans 11. Lieu, Image and Reality, 25. Here cf. Azize, ‘Ignatius of Antioch on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’, 134–6. 81 Ignatius Magnesians 15. Ignatius Ephesians 21.1: ἀγαπῶν Πολύκαρπον ὡς καὶ ὑμᾶς.

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of Ignatius since he passed through their city,82 demonstrates Polycarp’s concern in return. Polycarp himself was not only a bishop but a prophet: ‘an apostolic and prophetic teacher in our times and bishop of the catholic church in Smyrna’.83 His contacts reached far beyond Smyrna: as the summary at the end of the Martyrdom of Polycarp says, he was ‘discussed even by the Gentiles in every place’.84 Irenaeus summarized Polycarp’s long life and eventual martyrdom and added, ‘to these things all the Asiatic Churches testify’.85 In the same chapter he goes on to write of Polycarp’s journey to Rome late in life, in the time when Anicetus was bishop (154/5–166), and says that there he was influential in causing people to turn away from Valentinus and Marcion and back to the Church of God. So, Ignatius matters for Phrygia because of his procession across Asia, which stayed in shared memory until mythologized by Lucian, an Epicurean; but Polycarp matters because of the impact he made during his long life across the province of Asia and beyond. When the account of his martyrdom was written, it was sent (or at least, the copy from which the manuscript tradition stems was sent) into Phrygia, to Philomelium, north-east of Antioch of Pisidia.86 The people in the church at Philomelium, it says at the end of the tale, had asked for the events of Polycarp’s martyrdom to be ‘revealed . . . at length’ – but the writer says, ‘we, for the present, have reported in summary’: a shorter account, therefore, than the writer believed was wanted. However, the writer tells the people at

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Polycarp Philippians 13.2; although at the same time he knows that Ignatius is as dead as Queen Anne (Philippians 9.1–2: ‘I exhort you . . . to hold out all endurance, which also you saw . . . in . . . the blessed Ignatius and Zosimus and Rufus . . . Be persuaded that all these did not run in vain . . .’: translation from Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, AnteNicene Fathers vol. 3). Harrison, pointing out that Ignatius could not be both dead and alive at the same time, argued that the extant text came from a conflation of two separate letters (Harrison, Polycarp’s Two Epistles) written at different times, one before Polycarp was certain that Ignatius was dead, and one after. Hartog’s observation that Harrison’s focus on actual events in Rome rather than on the world as Polycarp could perceive it a short time after Ignatius’ departure clarifies why Harrison’s dilemma is a false one (Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 159), and supports Hartog’s sense that Philippians is not an interpolated text (cf. 28–9). Martyrdom of Polycarp 16.2. Translation from Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, AnteNicene Fathers vol. 3. Martyrdom of Polycarp 19.1. Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.3.4. Translation from Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, AnteNicene Fathers vol. 3. Martyrdom of Polycarp, inscription. Philomelium (Akşehir) was and is 24 km north-east of Antioch of Pisidia (Yalvaç): cf. Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 167.

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Philomelium to ‘send the letter to the brothers further on’ (τοῖς ἐπέκεινα ἀδελφοῖς);87 the hope is for the story of Polycarp’s martyrdom to spread along the church network as far as possible into Phrygia. Philomelium was, in Candida R. Moss’s words, ‘a small, unremarkable town that had little to recommend it’.88 She notes that its second-century obscurity is part of Silvia Ronchey’s justification for dating the Martyrdom of Polycarp to the third century.89 Ronchey’s argument is weak because Philomelium did not somehow become more important in the third century – even though there is one early third-century Christian inscription from there, as Moss observes in the same footnote. Perhaps more importantly, there is no reason not to suppose that copies of the Martyrdom of Polycarp were distributed to a dozen other places at the same time, with wording adapted as appropriate to churches in different districts. If this were so, the inference would be that the Philomelium copy became the archetype for the manuscript tradition, while others were lost, as most ancient manuscripts (from our modern viewpoint) were.90 The unimportance of Philomelium is neither here nor there as to date – but the mention of the place is a little window on the Phrygian church. In the Martyrdom, Polycarp appears as a harmless man who surprises the officers sent to arrest him with how old he is,91 who comes back into Smyrna riding a donkey,92 and who hurts himself stumbling down from the carriage at the stadium.93 But when he has been questioned by the proconsul in front of the crowd, the assembled people of Smyrna call out in uncontrollable rage (ἀκατασχέτῳ θυμῷ), ‘This . . . is the teacher of Asia, the father of the Christians, the destroyer of our gods, the one teaching many neither to sacrifice nor to worship!’94 Here there are two possible readings: ‘the teacher of impiety’ (ὁ τῆς ἀσεβίας διδάσκαλος) is the phrase,

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88 Martyrdom of Polycarp 20.1. Moss, ‘Dating of Polycarp’, 545. Moss, ‘Dating of Polycarp’, 545 n.17: cf. Ronchey, Indagine sul martirio, 67–70. On a variety of less than satisfactory grounds, Ronchey argues for a date for the Martyrdom of Polycarp between the reigns of Gallienus and Probus (i.e. 260–282): Indagine del martirio, 221. And the Martyrdom of Polycarp would have been lost, too, if Irenaeus’ personal copy had not been copied by Gaius. The copy made by Gaius was recopied at Corinth by Socrates, whose copy Pionius found and copied (Martyrdom of Polycarp 22.2–3). Even Moss (‘Dating of Polycarp’, 569) is prepared to identify this Pionius with Pionius the Decian persecution martyr (250), except that (strangely) she infers from the use of his name that ‘the textual history of the account is fabricated’. 92 Martyrdom of Polycarp 7.2. Martyrdom of Polycarp 8.1. 94 Martyrdom of Polycarp 8.3. Martyrdom of Polycarp 12.2.

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instead of ‘the teacher of Asia’ (ὁ τῆς Ἀσίας διδάσκαλος), in the majority of manuscripts of the Martyrdom. Eusebius, however, in the almost identical version of the Martyrdom which he quotes in his Church History,95 says ‘the teacher of Asia’. Schoedel and J.M. Lieu argue that ‘teacher of Asia’ was probably original, on the ground that the text of the Martyrdom encapsulates a Christian view of Polycarp;96 but Hartog argues (Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 304) that ‘teacher of impiety’ fits the context better and is parallel to the other derogatory things which the crowd says about Polycarp, while Bart D. Ehrman prefers ‘teacher of impiety’ in his 2004 translation.97 Recently John Behr has argued that ‘the balance of this acclamation requires that the first title, as the second and third, be positive praise’98 – his point being that the composer of the Martyrdom has put into the mouth of the crowd a chant which accuses Polycarp of things of which Christians would be proud. Even if ‘teacher of impiety’ happened to be the original reading, it would still be worth considering the implications of the things the Smyrnaeans were angry about when they were confronted with Polycarp and his record. That he would advocate against sacrificing was to be expected, and in 112 in Bithynia (if Pliny was not exaggerating in his letter to the Emperor Trajan) Christian influence had depressed the market for sacrificial animals until Pliny’s anti-Christian persecution brought things back to normal. He wrote:99 [T]his contagious superstition is not confined to the cities only, but has spread its infection among the neighbouring villages and country. Nevertheless, it still seems possible to restrain its progress. The temples, at least, which were once almost deserted, begin now to be frequented; and the sacred rites, after a long intermission, are again revived; while there is a general demand for the victims, which till lately found very few purchasers.

The complaints against Polycarp (‘the one teaching many neither to sacrifice nor to worship’) seem to be evidence of the same kind of effect; and Polycarp, assuming that he first became a locally influential figure about the time of the Ignatius letters, subsequently had forty years and more to speak against sacrificial worship and the gods of the polytheists.

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97 99

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.5.26. Schoedel, ‘Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch’, 67–8; Lieu, Image and Reality, 59–60. 98 Ehrman, Apostolic Fathers vol. 1, 383. Behr, Irenaeus, 61 n.138. Pliny Epistles 10.96.

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The date of Polycarp’s martyrdom remains controverted.100 His visit to Rome came in or after 154, when Anicetus took over as bishop. If he died in Smyrna in 155 aged eighty-six,101 he would have been born, presumably to Christian parents, in 69 – but this straightforward calculation presents some difficulties.102 Among them is that since L. Statius Quadratus was ordinary consul in 142, his holding the post of proconsul of Asia in 155103 would represent an untypically swift career progression.104 Hartog discusses the date of Polycarp’s death at ten pages’ length, preferring the view that it occurred under Antoninus Pius rather than Marcus Aurelius (even though Eusebius in the Church History lists the event after the accession of Marcus105), and concluding that ‘a placement between 155 and 161 appears most likely’.106 Therefore, what Polycarp had been doing for forty or fifty years until he was put to death was challenging the sacred canopy under which not only Smyrna but Roman Asia in general existed. As Trevett observes, Ignatius on his journey through Asia had put forward ‘Christianism’107 as ‘the alternative to the world of imperial rule and cult’;108 and Polycarp

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Radically controverted in 2010 by Moss: she finds it likely that ‘the extant version was composed in the early third century’ (‘Dating of Polycarp’, 540), but in her article she essentially brings no new evidence to bear. So, for example, she finds it ‘[d]ifficult to believe . . . that the “trial” in the stadium bears any relationship to historical events’ (549), because in her view a Roman trial cannot have happened that way. She acutely observes features of the text which make it ‘a deeply theological . . . version of events’ (573); but I part company with her when she argues (574) that the third century is a more likely period than the second century for the composition of a text with the elements and qualities which she describes. Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3. Attempts to analyse ‘For eighty-six years I have been serving him’ as referring to some period other than Polycarp’s whole lifetime are implausible: cf. e.g. Moss, ‘Dating of Polycarp’, 545: ‘The statement is ambiguous: does Polycarp mean that he has served Christ since birth or since his baptism? If the latter, when was Polycarp baptized? As an infant or young man?’ This takes quibbling too far: the supposed ambiguity perceived by Moss is either trivial or purely imaginary. 103 Cf. Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 9. Martyrdom of Polycarp 21. Barnes, ‘Note on Polycarp’, 436: ‘there is no example known in the Antonine age of a man holding one of the senior proconsulates only twelve years after being consul; an interval of thirteen years is not unknown, while fourteen years is common and consequently ought perhaps to be postulated as the normal minimum’. If Polycarp died in 155, Quadratus had (it seems) advanced to the proconsulate of Asia in thirteen years. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.14–15. Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 191–200. Trevett’s preferred rendering of Ignatius’ χριστιανισμός (Magnesians 10, Romans 3), a word first attested in Ignatius’ letters (and usually given in English as ‘Christianity’). Trevett, Christian Women, 168.

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afterwards had decades to continue the endeavour which Ignatius had had to fit into a few weeks and not many pages. Hans von Campenhausen even went out on a limb by speculating that Polycarp was responsible for the Pastoral Epistles, which (he said) ‘at the very least must have been written under his influence’109 – but few have followed him there; and the proposal made by Pier Franco Beatrice that in the course of his lengthy career Polycarp may have written the Epistle to Diognetus is more attractive.110 Trevett, having noted how Ammia of Philadelphia was a prophet in Asia, later ‘honoured by catholic and New Prophet Christians alike’,111 observes that the probable timespan when she was active (c.110–140)112 coincided with the years of Polycarp’s church career – and she places them both in the context of Christian prophets having been ‘the first Christian theologians’.113 The picture emerges of Polycarp as a Christian teacher who became influential well beyond Smyrna. If theorizing that he wrote the Pastoral Epistles takes speculation too far, at least there is nothing speculative in the observation, expounded in detail by Kenneth Berding, that Polycarp was an attentive and systematic user of Paul’s writing.114 And in Polycarp’s Philippians, he tackles the evidently sensitive matter (at Philippi) of Valens, ‘who at one time was made an elder among you’,115 and his wife. His or their wrongdoing may have been to do with money, although Polycarp forbears to specify;116 he also encourages the thought that, with genuine repentance, Valens and his wife ought not to be seen as enemies by the Christians at Philippi – they should be restored ‘as ailing and wandering members, in order that you may heal your entire body’.117 Polycarp is tactful and does not tell the recipients of his letter what to do, but he is giving unambiguous guidance, and although there is no direct data to show whether that guidance was followed, the preservation of the letter makes it seem more likely than not that Polycarp’s advice was positively received. That is a case of Polycarp’s influence reaching north into Europe, and the composition of the Martyrdom to be sent to Philomelium implies that his 109 110

111 113 115 116 117

Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power, 119. Beatrice, ‘Presbyter des Irenäus’, 191–202; cf. Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 17. 112 Trevett, Christian Women, 243. Trevett, Christian Women, 240–1. 114 Trevett, Christian Women, 236. Berding, Polycarp and Paul. Polycarp Philippians 11.1. Cf. Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 141–2. Polycarp Philippians 11.4, cf. Hartog, Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, 148.

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influence also reached east into Phrygia. At home, furthermore, in Smyrna, or in ‘Lower Asia’, as Irenaeus puts it (ἐν τῇ κάτω Ἀσίᾳ) in Eusebius’ extract from Irenaeus’ letter to Florinus,118 Polycarp had pupils who became important: he taught not only Irenaeus, who was ‘still a boy’ at the time, but also Florinus, who must have been older and was ‘doing outstandingly well in the royal palace’ (λαμπρῶς πράσσοντα ἐν τῇ βασιλικῇ αὐλῇ). Behr notes correctly that this phrase refers to ‘employment by the emperor in some capacity’,119 but his point bears a little expansion: Florinus was a slave or freedman of Caesar, one of thousands in important centres around the empire (as well as in Rome) whose job was to administer (as P.R.C. Weaver says) ‘all aspects of the receipt and payment of funds under the emperor’s control, as well as many concerned with public services’.120 There was a wide range of statuses within the emperor’s household, but given that Florinus was ‘doing exceptionally well’, it may be right to surmise that he had a responsible and wellrewarded job. As well as out-of-town contacts, and able and high-status pupils within Smyrna, Polycarp had links to governing circles. Alce, greeted by Ignatius,121 is mentioned (perhaps as much as fifty years later) in the Martyrdom: she is the aunt of Herodes, the chief of police (εἰρήναρχος) at Smyrna,122 who arrested Polycarp, and the sister of Herodes’ father Nicetes, who asked the governor not to hand over Polycarp’s dead body to the Christians for burial.123 This is a ‘house divided against itself’, like the procurator’s house;124 but the significance and the reach of Polycarp’s elite contacts are not negated by the success Nicetes and Herodes had, after a long delay, in getting government action taken against him. Polycarp had top-level skills as a controversialist, not only in the rhetoric of routine debate but also in the poetic register, if the lines against Marcus the heretic quoted by Irenaeus from ‘the divinely inspired elder and preacher of the truth’ were written by him:125

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119 Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 5.20.5. Behr, Irenaeus, 51. Weaver, Familia Caesaris, 7: ‘such as aqueducts, libraries, the post, roads, public works and buildings, and Imperial enterprises such as mines, marble quarries, and the mint’. 122 Ignatius Polycarp 8.2 and Smyrnaeans 13.2. Martyrdom of Polycarp 6. Martyrdom of Polycarp 17. With Alce perhaps a woman ‘caught between two worlds and in danger of public scrutiny’, as Trevett says (Christian Women, 222); even so, for Nicetes and Herodes it appears to be easier to get Polycarp put to death than to control Alce’s behaviour. Irenaeus Against Heresies 1.8.17 (translation from Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3.

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Marcus, thou former of idols, inspector of portents, Skill’d in consulting the stars, and deep in the black arts of magic, Ever by tricks such as these confirming the doctrines of error, Furnishing signs unto those involved by thee in deception, Wonders of power that is utterly severed from God and apostate, Which Satan, thy true father, enables thee still to accomplish, By means of Azazel, that fallen and yet mighty angel – Thus making thee the precursor of his own impious actions.

And in connection with preaching and teaching against heretics, Hill, in From the Lost Teaching of Polycarp, identifies Polycarp, surely correctly, with the ‘presbyter, who had heard it from those who had seen the apostles’ and who argued against the Marcionites in Irenaeus’ Against Heresies 4.27–32.126 Accepting this identification, Behr argues for a key role for Polycarp as a source for the case Irenaeus builds up against Marcionism,127 and comments on the sophistication shown in Polycarp’s apologetic and scriptural hermeneutic.128 These credentials support the view of Polycarp as a ‘teacher of Asia’: ‘a figure of towering importance for second-century Christianity’, as James Carleton Paget says.129 In the third century, a similar level of cultural competence and familiarity with the norms of elite discourse would propel Origen into the stratosphere of intellectual superstardom – causing him to be brought into the presence of very powerful Romans indeed, to state the case for Christianity: first, in 215, the governor of Arabia,130 and a decade later Julia Mamaea,131 mother of the reigning emperor Severus Alexander. In the Roman empire of the second and third centuries, the leading intellectuals could expect to perform in front of the masters and mistresses of the world. Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists is full of anecdotes of emperors going to hear sophists speak,132 sophists serving on diplomatic missions to emperors,133 sophists even quarrelling with emperors and 126

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Hill, Lost Teaching, 8–24. James Carleton Paget in his review of Hill’s Lost Teaching agrees (295) that Hill ‘has certainly made as good a case as anyone for extending the Polycarpian corpus’. Although Marcionism survived in Smyrna despite Polycarp’s opposition to it, to judge from the claim in the Martyrdom of Pionius that ‘Metrodorus, a presbyter of the heresy of the Marcionites’ was crucified in Smyrna together with Pionius, in the Decian persecution in the following century (Martyrdom of Pionius 21.5). 129 Behr, Irenaeus, 61–6. Carleton Paget, review of Hill, Lost Teaching, 294. 131 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 6.19.15. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 6.21.3–4. As Marcus Aurelius did at Athens, to make sure that Hadrian of Tyre, whom he had appointed, was worthy of his chair (Philostr. VS 2.588–9). As Alexander of Seleucia (Alexander the Clay-Plato) did: when he thought Antoninus Pius was not listening, he told him to pay attention. Antoninus said, ‘I am paying

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living to tell the tale.134 That world of the sophists had its heart at Smyrna. ‘While all Ionia is, as it were, an established seat of the Muses,’ Philostratus opined,135 ‘Smyrna holds the most important position.’ Scopelian, who kept the school referred to near the beginning of this chapter, lived in Smyrna and preferred it as a theatre for his talents to his hometown of Clazomenae (‘The nightingale does not sing in a cage’136). Eventually, when too old to travel, he asked Polemo of Laodicea to go on diplomatic missions instead of him;137 and then, after Polemo’s days, Aelius Aristides spoke up for Smyrna and talked Marcus Aurelius into rebuilding the city.138 Polycarp, in that he was a Christian, spoke from outside the dominant culture at Smyrna; however, his contacts (Florinus the imperial official, the procurator’s wife, Alce the police chief’s mother) reached into the social group who were in the audience when Scopelian or Polemo or Aristides spoke. They might have sent their children to Scopelian’s school. In the arena, Polycarp called out the governor’s disingenuous pretence at not knowing him: ‘If you vainly suppose that I will swear by the genius of Caesar, as you say, feigning to be ignorant who I am, hear plainly: I am a Christian.’139 Ari Bryen’s 2014 article expounds with a new clarity the nature of the performance staged by the governor: ‘the crowd [had] already come to a conclusion about the vileness and guilt of Polycarp. They simply [know] Polycarp’s guilt when they see it.’140 The stance the governor enacts is one of siding with the crowd, and not countenancing a hearing in a courtroom – ‘a place of free speech and . . . a place that hosts a contest’.141 There was to be no compromise with the ‘journey into darkness’ (Berger’s phrase) which listening to Polycarp (an unlicensed sophist) implied.142 Away from the arena, people at the very top of Smyrnaean society (even though they had in their city the sophists who were the greatest

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attention, and I know you well. You are the fellow who is always arranging his hair, cleaning his teeth, and polishing his nails, and always smells of myrrh’ (Philostr. VS 2.570–1). As Favorinus of Arles did, with Hadrian (Philostr. VS 1.489). 136 137 Philostr. VS 1.516. Philostr. VS 1.516. Philostr. VS 1.521. 139 After the earthquake of 178: Philostr. VS 2.583. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.15.21. Bryen, ‘Martyrdom, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Procedure’, 258. Bryen, ‘Martyrdom, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Procedure’, 259. On journeys into darkness see Berger, Sacred Canopy, 50: a matter (metaphorically, since it all happened in Smyrna) of stepping outside the social context within which the Greek/Roman religious world retained its plausibility – ‘threatening an anomic disintegration of the only conceivable “correct” way of living’.

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masters of the dominant culture) had already been on the ‘journey into darkness’ implicit in listening to Polycarp. But the question which arises – even though he had people who would listen to him – is how Polycarp, at the age of eighty-six, could be seen as a threat to the normal way of doing things in Smyrna. He had been speaking in public, indeed, but he could still make a joke by waving an arm to indicate the audience and saying ‘Away with the atheists!’143 So on the debit side, his teaching cut directly at the structure of the sacred canopy of Smyrna; but his enemies might have noted in his favour that at least he had not gained the support of a majority. Why, then, not leave him to live out his few remaining days? Two answers can be proposed. First, that in general the urgency of answering Christian preaching was becoming greater in Polycarp’s day. Christian apologetic – Christian literature directed towards non-Christians – is in evidence from relatively early in the Christian church’s lifetime, but not until the second half of the second century did Celsus write the True Word – a fully developed anti-Christian treatise. In, say, 110, that kind of attack on Christianity had not been needed, because (best efforts of Papias notwithstanding) Greek and Roman polytheism had barely got a hair out of place. But ‘the development of complex legitimations takes place in situations where plausibility structures are threatened in one way or another’.144 From this viewpoint the True Word is of more interest than the works of Christian apologists, because they were proposing change, while Celsus was developing the complex legitimation which Berger refers to and trying to present a conservative case. Polycarp in his old age was living in Celsus’ world. But there may have been a more pressing factor. Timothy D. Barnes in 1967 wrote a brief article defending 155 as the date of Polycarp’s martyrdom,145 and his case is poorly answered by Moss in the course of her argument for downdating.146 If Barnes is right, Nicetes and Herodes, who as local officials had no right to impose the death penalty, had a new argument to put before Governor Quadratus when he came to Smyrna that year: Polycarp, just the year before, had been to Rome, and if Behr is right, his arrival 143 145 146

144 Martyrdom of Polycarp 9. Berger, Sacred Canopy, 47. Barnes, ‘Note on Polycarp’, 433–7. Moss, ‘Dating of Polycarp’, 550, where she seems to miss Barnes’s point (‘Note on Polycarp’, 434) that C. Julius Philippus of Tralles, High Priest of Asia 149/50 (cf. Martyrdom of Polycarp 21), retained after his year of office the title of Asiarch (cf. Martyrdom of Polycarp 12.2). Accordingly, Martyrdom of Polycarp 21, naming the persons in office when Polycarp was put to death, is not as incoherent as Moss says it is.

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there ‘was a major event, paving the way for his disciple Irenaeus to intervene in Roman affairs in subsequent decades’.147 If Ignatius’ journey across Asia Minor could be remembered for decades by non-Christians, it is probable that Polycarp’s arrival in Rome had also made a stir outside the Christian circle. An ordinary arrest does not require the police chief’s presence, but Herodes did not only take a ride out of Smyrna to bring Polycarp in – he even took his father-in-law with him. Presumably they thought it unlikely that Polycarp would take an oath in Caesar’s name and offer a sacrifice, as they advised;148 however, their presence must indicate that they had Governor Quadratus’ agreement in advance that he would examine Polycarp in the stadium and (failing compliance with his demands) put him to death. This agreement implies that something was different from how it had been for the past fifty years – and the fallout from Polycarp’s journey to Rome the year before seems more likely than other factors to account for what had changed. Nicetes’ request of Quadratus that he should refuse to release Polycarp’s body for burial to the Christians was directed towards preventing Christians from obtaining, in effect, relics:149 although J.M. Lieu questions ‘whether possession of the body of the martyr . . . would be seen by the Jews, even in Christian imagination, as constituting an unfair advantage and posthumous victory for the Christians’.150 Nicetes, making his request, saw Polycarp as the problem, although (in the same chapter) the writer of the Martyrdom ridicules the idea that the Christians could have forsaken Christ and worshipped Polycarp instead. Berger in The Sacred Canopy comments on Pizarro killing Atahualpa (1533): ‘[b]y his act, he shattered a world, redefined reality, and consequently redefined the existence of those who had been “inhabitants” of this world’.151 The Martyrdom of Polycarp, however, is (metaphorically) a case of Atahualpa killing Pizarro – violence employed in the cause of preventing change to the sacred canopy.

paul and thecla The tide of enthusiastic commendation and exposition of the Pauline writings which runs through Polycarp’s Philippians may have been deeply

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148 Behr, Irenaeus, 47. Martyrdom of Polycarp 9. 150 Martyrdom of Polycarp 17. Lieu, Image and Reality, 93. Berger, Sacred Canopy, 46.

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characteristic of Asian Christian communities if the Acts of Paul and Thecla are any guide to the direction the Christian imagination was running in. Paul and Thecla, part of a larger corpus of Acts of Paul consisting of works of differing dates and authorship, can be dated with more confidence than most apocryphal acts of apostles, because somewhere between 196 and 206 Tertullian,152 writing in Latin in Carthage, took the trouble to comment (adversely) on the work. Having said that lay Christians may if necessary baptize (although ordinarily baptisms should be done by bishops or other clergy), he pauses to make explicit that this does not mean Christian women may baptize, even if some people think this is possible. He says:153 [I]f certain Acts of Paul, which are falsely so named, claim the example of Thecla for allowing women to teach and to baptize, let men know that in Asia the presbyter who compiled that document (qui eam scripturam construxit), thinking to add of his own to Paul’s reputation, was found out, and though he professed he had done it for love of Paul, was deposed from his position.

This shows that Paul and Thecla was written in the second century, long enough before Tertullian’s De baptismo to have become well enough known to be worth writing against. The story of Paul and Thecla is set at first in Iconium, ‘the last city in Phrygia’,154 where Paul arrives ‘after the flight from Antioch’.155 The question of which Antioch arises. Note Galatians 2.11–14 for the well-known disagreement at Syrian Antioch between Paul and Cephas (Peter). Galatians does not, however, say that Paul fled from Antioch after this incident. In Acts, Paul travels to Iconium from Antioch of Pisidia after being persecuted,156 and to Iconium from Syrian Antioch (via intermediate places) after being sent off in peace by the believers.157 Because it is set in Iconium, Paul and Thecla is a Phrygian story, at least to a degree – though in its latter part it is also set in Antioch. Jeremy W. Barrier argues that the first word of Paul and Thecla, ἀναβαίνοντος, from the verb ἀναβαίνω (‘go up’), is more consistent with the idea of travelling from (coastal) Syrian Antioch to Iconium than from Antioch

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Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 23. Tert. De bapt. 17. Translation from Evans, Tertullian’s Homily on Baptism. Cf. above and Xenophon Anabasis 1.2.19. Paul and Thecla 3.1: apparently recalling 2 Timothy 3.10–11, ‘you have observed . . . my suffering the things that happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra. What persecutions I endured!’ (cf. Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 67). 157 Acts 13.50–1. Acts 15.33–16.2.

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of Pisidia, which (like Iconium) is on the central Anatolian plateau;158 although he also notes recent arguments in favour of Antioch of Pisidia.159 Richard Pervo opines that the place in Paul and Thecla is ‘evidently Pisidian Antioch, confused with the larger Syrian city’.160 The decisive consideration in favour of Syrian Antioch as the imagined setting for the later part of Paul and Thecla, however, is the fact that the villain Alexander is called a συριάρχης (Syriarch).161 As Barrier notes, the Coptic text at this point only calls Alexander ‘a Syrian’ – but συριάρχης is a superior reading and likely to be original.162 Bauckham adopts an elegant solution whereby (he argues) the sequence within Paul’s itinerary is Pisidian Antioch – Iconium – [Syrian] Antioch – Myra – Sidon – Tyre,163 although it seems questionable whether the sequence which he proposes is adequately marked in the text as it stands. Tertullian writes of the presbyter who was deposed for writing Paul and Thecla being in Asia, which presumably excludes the possibility that the story was made up in Syrian Antioch; however, it is harder to gauge whether it would be better to guess that the text originated in Iconium, or in one of the centres of gravity of Asian Christianity on the west coast, such as Smyrna or Ephesus. Jerome, in De viris illustribus, writes of (canonical) Acts being composed by Luke in Rome in the fourth year of Nero (58), and says that the story of Paul and Thecla, along with the story of the lion baptized by Paul,164 should be counted as apocryphal because Luke (‘inseparable companion of the apostle in his other affairs’) evidently knew nothing of them. He adds that Tertullian mentions a certain presbyter in Asia, an adherent of the apostle Paul, who was convicted by John of having been the author of the book, and who, confessing that he did this for love of Paul, resigned his office of presbyter.165

The addition here is the idea that John was involved in the end of the career of the writer of Paul and Thecla as a presbyter. Writing two hundred years after Tertullian and probably citing him from memory, it

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159 Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 66–7. Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 137. Pervo, ‘Ancient Novel Becomes Christian’, 700 n.30. Paul and Thecla 4.1: ‘president of the provincial council of Syria’ cf. CTh 15.9.2. 163 Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 137. Bauckham, ‘Acts of Paul as Sequel’, 108. On the lion, who (as regards manuscripts preserved to the modern world) features only in the Ethiopic text of the Acts of Paul, see Adamik, ‘The Baptized Lion’. Jer. De vir. ill. 7. Translation by Ernest Cushing Richardson in Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers vol. 3.

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seems probable on the face of it that Jerome added John into his account without consulting any separate source (or any variant text of Tertullian); but A. Hilhorst in 1996 not only thought otherwise but also asserted that the John concerned ‘must be the apostle and evangelist of that name’.166 He expresses sympathy for Franciscus Junius the elder’s move to emend the text of Tertullian at this point from Jerome in his 1597 edition,167 importing the reference to John. There are complex questions surrounding persons called John active in Asian Christianity in the second half of the first century, alluded to above in the discussion of Papias – questions which Hilhorst has not taken into account. Instead, he infers that according to Jerome, the Acts of Paul and Thecla were written between 68 and 98 – and concludes that the possibility that Tertullian wrote the phrase about John ought to be left open.168 As to date, however, Barrier presents a set of detailed arguments in favour of the second century, not the first, being when Paul and Thecla was written: as a novel (and one not peripheral in comparison with other texts in the ancient novel genre169) it belonged to a category of literature which was at its apogee in terms of popularity in the late second century.170 Barrier’s conclusion is that the text may have been compiled over a period as long as 100 years, but that ‘the final compilation would have come toward the last 30–40 years of the second century’.171 Bauckham’s viewpoint is different, in that he insists that ‘the Acts of Paul is not a novel’,172 while (by contrast) he regards the story of Thecla as ‘a deliberate small-scale equivalent to . . . a novel’ – the only part of the Acts of Paul in which someone else takes centre stage, a story with a close thematic relationship to the love stories told in Greek novels.173 Its status as a special case might seem to imply the possibility of a compiler who put the Acts of Paul together from disparate elements, but Bauckham does not raise such a possibility, writing firmly of the (singular) author of the narrative,174 and classifying the Acts of Paul as a whole as a ‘novelistic biography’.175 166 167 168 169 171

172 173 174 175

Hilhorst, ‘Tertullian on the Acts of Paul’, 158–60. Hilhorst, ‘Tertullian on the Acts of Paul’, 160. Hilhorst, ‘Tertullian on the Acts of Paul’, 161. 170 Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 2–7. Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 14. Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 24; cf. Pervo, who sees it as a little earlier, writing (‘Ancient Novel Becomes Christian’, 700) that it was ‘probably composed in Asia Minor in the third quarter of the second century’. Bauckham, ‘Acts of Paul as Sequel’, 144. Bauckham, ‘Acts of Paul as Sequel’, 135. Bauckham, ‘Acts of Paul as Sequel’, 107. Bauckham, ‘Acts of Paul as Sequel’, 150.

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The idea of a compilation, in any case, does not (despite Tertullian’s phrase qui eam scripturam construxit176) fit the evidence from Tertullian very well; what fits better is Ewen Bowie’s finding of a strong association of the roots of the novelistic genre with the cities of western Asia Minor.177 ‘All these cities about which we know anything, large and small,’ he comments, ‘seem . . . to have elaborated traditions which authorised that identity.’178 On this view, Iconium would seem a likelier place of composition for Paul and Thecla, at least than Syrian Antioch; and, as Mitchell observes, the text of Paul and Thecla implies that Iconium was a conventus centre, where the governor of Asia would preside in court179 – a snippet of local knowledge which might hint that the writer was well informed, at least about Iconium, and therefore perhaps based there. Barrier seems unrealistically sanguine, however, about the possibility of Queen Tryphaena having lived in Iconium.180 The character of Queen Tryphaena, who features in the Antioch scenes of the story and not in Iconium,181 is based on a real person, Antonia Tryphaena. She was descended from Mark Antony and was a relative of the imperial family, as well as herself having been married to King Cotys VIII of Thrace, and being the mother of Rhoemetalces II, last king of Thrace, and of Polemon

176

177 178 179

180

181

Compiling, in the sense of editing or redacting a text, or combining texts, is not implied by the use of construxit. construo and cognates as grammatical terms refer to how words are combined to form phrases and sentences in Latin, as in Priscian’s explanation of the ablative absolute at Inst. 5.80: ‘We use this construction [hac . . . constructione] when we wish to show that something stated by the verb follows on from what is meant by the participle . . .’ Bowie, ‘Readership of Greek Novels’, 90–1. Bowie, ‘Readership of Greek Novels’, 91. Paul and Thecla 15–16: ‘Thamyris . . . [said], “You have corrupted the city of the Iconians, and her that was betrothed to me, so that she will not have me: let us go to the governor Castelios” . . . and Thamyris, standing before the tribunal, said with a great shout: “O proconsul, this man, who he is we know not, makes virgins averse to marriage; let him say before you on what account he teaches these things . . .”’ Translation by Alexander Walker in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe (1886c). Cf. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 60 n.51. Barrier, Acts of Paul and Thecla, 23: ‘Tryphaena . . . has been proven to have existed (possibly having lived in Iconium) . . .’ Rordorf in 1985 said she could have dwelt at Iconium at the period when the events of the Thecla story were set (‘Tradition et composition’, 276): this supposition is essentially speculative, although Rordorf does cite von Gutschmid, whose view in 1864 was actually that Tryphaena resided at Antioch of Pisidia (‘Die Königsnamen’, 177–8). Paul and Thecla 4.2–16.

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II of Pontus and Cotys IX of Lesser Armenia.182 After the death of her husband, Queen Tryphaena did live in Asia, but at Cyzicus not Iconium. She lived at about the right time, a hundred years or so before the time of writing Paul and Thecla, to be a suitable peg to hang a fictional character on, but it is extremely improbable that there is any documentary element in the account of Tryphaena in the text. The furthest one can go is to concur with Bauckham, who writes that ‘The . . . circles in which the story takes place, including the historical figure of the emperor’s relative Tryphaena, are . . . consonant with the character of the Greek novels.’183 At Iconium, as B. Diane Lipsett comments, Thecla is ‘presented as a desirous subject in search of Paul’.184 She ‘trades markers of her social identity for access to Paul’185 in the scene where she uses her bracelets to pay the gatekeeper to let her out of her house, and uses her silver mirror to pay the jailer to let her into the jail.186 But in Antioch, as a ‘resistant object of male sexual aggression’,187 she insists, ‘I am a leading woman of the Iconians’ (Ἰκονιέων εἰμὶ πρώτη)188 – reasserting the social identity which she had seemed ready to compromise while still in her home city.189 What this novel shows, however, is not something historical about life in Iconium or about the characters named in it, even though some of the atmosphere of the life of the upper classes in the Roman empire is conveyed, but some sense of what being an admirer of Paul amounted to in the second century. Not for Thecla, who surfs the surging waves of the text, rejecting fiancé and social position (when it suits her), enrolling a lioness to fight for her in the arena, baptizing herself (a move fatal to the deadly seals), and standing in a shower of spices and perfumes from the crowd, while the scariest wild animals Antioch can furnish drift away to sleep instead of attacking her.190 The inference which can really be drawn concerns priorities and feelings about the Christian message in Asia in the second half of the second century. Pervo, who asserts that between 150 and 200 the Acts of Paul was ‘more popular among Christian readers than the Acts that eventually entered the Christian canon’,191 locates the text by analogy with the 182 183 185 187 189

190

Evidence about Antonia Tryphaena is set out in Sullivan, ‘Dynasts in Pontus’, 922–3. 184 Bauckham, ‘Acts of Paul as Sequel’, 136. Lipsett, Desiring Conversion, 76. 186 Lipsett, Desiring Conversion, 69. Paul and Thecla 3.18. 188 Lipsett, Desiring Conversion, 76. Paul and Thecla 4.1. Although, as Lipsett notes (Desiring Conversion, 76), the factors that actually protected her against the threat to her purity represented by Alexander were ‘her own agency, . . . female allies, and . . . God’. 191 Paul and Thecla 4.8–12. Pervo, ‘Ancient Novel Becomes Christian’, 700.

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Assemblée nationale and post-French Revolution politics, as a left-wing document – at ‘one pole in controversies about the life and teaching of Paul, with the canonical Acts somewhat right of center, and the Pastoral Epistles . . . at the far right’.192 Whether this view really squares with features of Paul and Thecla such as the encratite beatitudes,193 which Paul pronounces at Onesiphorus’ house, seems open to debate. Readings of the tendency of the text have varied. Pervo sees the spiritual milieu of Paul and Thecla as ‘an early phase of the intensely apocalyptic and charismatic movement that would explode in rural Asia Minor and be known as Montanism’.194 The enthusiasm on show is unmistakable, but the very high value placed on sexual continence is perhaps more reminiscent of Marcionism – a kind of Christianity which Polycarp did much to oppose – than of Montanism, a community in which marriage was permitted. Rordorf, in his état de question article in 1985, wrote of ‘un auteur qui appartenait à la “Grande Eglise”, donc l’Eglise majoritaire, en Asie’,195 and barely commented on whether Paul and Thecla might be redolent of Montanist or pre-Montanist thinking. To sum this chapter up: Ignatius may have moved briskly through Phrygian territory, but his westward journey made an impact which was noticed through the province of Asia and beyond: he addressed issues which mattered in Phrygia (as they mattered elsewhere), including the dialectic between Christianity and Judaism, and he made contacts in high places. But if Ignatius was a swift-passing meteor, Polycarp, for something like fifty years, was almost a fixed star in the firmament of Asian 192 193

194 195

Pervo, ‘Ancient Novel Becomes Christian’, 702. Paul and Thecla 3.5–6: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are those who have kept the flesh chaste, for they will be a temple of God. Blessed are the self-controlled (οἱ ἐγκρατεῖς), for God will speak to them. Blessed are they who are set apart from this world, for they will be well-pleasing to God. Blessed are they who though having a wife, are as those not having a wife, for they will inherit God. Blessed are they who have a fear of God, for they will be angels of God. Blessed are those who tremble over the words of the Lord, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who receive the wisdom of Jesus Christ, for they shall be called sons of the Most High. Blessed are those who have kept their baptism, for they shall be refreshed by the Father and the Son. Blessed are those who have taken hold of the knowledge of Jesus Christ, for they shall be in the light. Blessed are they who have come out of the image of this world through the love of God, for they will judge angels, and they will be blessed on the right hand of God and will not see a bitter day of judgment. Blessed are the bodies of the virgins, for they shall be well-pleasing to God and they will not lose the rewards of their purity, because the word of the Father shall be to them a work of salvation in the day of his Son, and they shall have rest forever.’ Pervo, ‘Ancient Novel Becomes Christian’, 702. Rordorf, ‘Tradition et composition’, 274.

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Christianity: Phrygians must have gone to Smyrna to listen to him, as other Phrygians in those same years went there to listen to Scopelian; and Polycarp, too, made contacts in high places – until the profile he gained by visiting Rome precipitated government action against him. Up in Iconium, perhaps soon after Polycarp’s death, a clergyman who dreamt of sexual continence and triumph over the forces of persecution put his hopes of help from God in the form of a multifaceted, paradoxical story of a girl smitten at the same time with a preacher of sexual renunciation and with sexual renunciation itself.196

196

Cf. Lipsett, Desiring Conversion, 55.

4 Montanism Part 1: The Origins of the New Prophecy

philadelphia In Revelation 3, the letter to the angel of the church at Philadelphia praises the church (‘you have kept my word and have not denied my name’1) and makes a number of promises, including this:2 If you conquer, I will make you a pillar in the temple of my God; you will never go out of it. I will write on you the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem that comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name.

It takes only a little ingenuity in biblical interpretation to read this as a promise that the new Jerusalem,3 which the seer in Revelation saw ‘coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’,4 was destined to descend to earth near Philadelphia. The same kind of thinking is in evidence, privileging the interpreter’s favoured locality, in a fourth-century African reading of a biblical text: where the Bride in the Song of Songs asks,5

1 3

4 5

2 Revelation 3.8. Revelation 3.12. Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland find that in its reception over time the new Jerusalem image in Revelation has for the most part not prompted ‘the kind of historical actualizing . . . found in the interpretations of the earlier chapters’ (Revelation: The Apocalypse, 222) – though the violent establishment of the New Jerusalem by Anabaptists in Münster in 1534/5, which they discuss (226–7), might be seen as an exception to their generalization. Revelation 21.2. Song of Songs 1.7, in the NRSV translation. Old Latin Annuntia mihi, quem dilexit anima mea, ubi pascas, ubi cubes in meridie.

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Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you pasture your flock, where you make it lie down at noon . . .

The Donatists understood this text as meaning ‘make [it] lie down in the south’ rather than ‘lie down at noon’. The word meridies, literally meaning ‘midday’, which they read in the Old Latin Bible, does also mean ‘south’, because in the Northern Hemisphere the sun at noon shines from the south. As Michael Cameron explains, ‘figurative interpretation became sensitive in the dispute over locating the true church’.6 Donatists understood the text as showing that the Lord’s true flock was in the south, that is to say, among them, while the antagonistic church to the north of them in the coastal cities of Roman Africa, and for that matter in Rome, was not (as they interpreted the Bible) the church whose shepherd was the Lord. Augustine was scornful of the Donatists’ theory, and argued against it by using texts mentioning the north and the west.7 The angel of the Philadelphian church was told, ‘I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut.’8 Hemer in his book about the letters to the seven churches of Asia, is prepared to agree that the ‘open door’ might mean an evangelistic opportunity (cf. 1 Corinthians 16.9, ‘[in Ephesus] a wide door for effective work has opened to me’).9 Montanus, founder of the Montanist church, was an ingenious interpreter. In the second century he drew the inference from the letter to the angel of the church at Philadelphia that the new Jerusalem must come to earth close to routes leading further inland, in the region of Philadelphia.10 And then in 2000, William Tabbernee experienced a mountain-top moment when he comprehended – or at least formed a view of – where and why Montanus came to think he knew the exact place where the heavenly city must descend. The moment came when he had reached the summit of Mount Ömerçalı, 5 kilometres south-west of the site he has identified as Pepuza, and 12 kilometres south of the site of Tymion:11 the imperial letter whose

6 7 9 10

11

Cameron, ‘Augustine’s Use of the Song of Songs against the Donatists’, 109. 8 Augustine Epistula ad catholicos 24.69. Revelation 3.8. Hemer, Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 155. As Hemer observes, ‘the places mentioned in the second-century stage of the controversy are all around the great routes running eastward from Philadelphia into Phrygia’ (Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 171). Tabbernee, ‘Portals of the Montanist New Jerusalem’, 87.

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Figure 4 Philadelphia, the Gate to Phrygia. Map drawn by Jenni Irving

discovery enabled Tymion to be located will be discussed in Chapter 5. As Tabbernee explains:12 [I]t was obvious why Montanus had believed this to be the location of the ‘Jerusalem from above’. Topographically, this vast agricultural tableland, which in Montanus’ day was an imperial estate, was the ideal ‘landing place’ for the New Jerusalem. It was flat enough, level enough, and large enough to accommodate the dimensions of the New Jerusalem as described in Revelation 21. 12

Tabbernee, ‘Portals of the Montanist New Jerusalem’, 92–3.

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montanus, pepuza, and tymion Montanus, believing that it had been revealed to him that Pepuza, or rather, Pepuza and Tymion, were the place(s) where the new Jerusalem was to be,13 had a considerable impact on the development of the churches in Phrygia and beyond: but he himself remains an obscure figure. The anonymous anti-Montanist writer whose work Eusebius reports in his Church History14 is brief and cryptic: 15 There is said to be a village called Ardabau in Phrygian Mysia (ἐν τῇ κατὰ τὴν Φρυγίαν Μυσίᾳ). There, they say, first, when Gratus was proconsul of Asia, a recent convert to the faith named Montanus, in his soul’s immense ambitious desire, gave the adversary access to himself and was carried away as by the Spirit, and suddenly experiencing some kind of possession and spurious ecstasy, he was inspired and began to speak and say strange things, prophesying, as he pretended, contrary to the custom related to the tradition and succession of the Church from the beginning.

Not everything the anonymous writer says can be elucidated. ‘Phrygian Mysia’ is an unusual term and presumably refers to somewhere on the Phrygian side of Mysian territory: Trevett says that the phrase ‘could indicate a site anywhere between Philadelphia and Dorylaeum (Eskişehir) in the Tembris region’.16 Tabbernee takes a different view, and places Ardabau south of the Maeander river – in the Phrygia/Lydia borderland, to the north of Hierapolis (Pamukkale) – and argues that any trace of Ardabau which otherwise might have been identifiable is probably today submerged beneath the waters of the reservoir behind the Adıgüzel Dam.17 Mitchell comments on the almost proverbial difficulty of establishing the boundaries between Mysia, Phrygia, Lydia, and Caria,18 and

13 15 16

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18

14 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.2. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.2–17.5. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.7 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 23, pp. 15–16). Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 21; Hemer, Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 171. See map in Tabbernee, Prophets and Gravestones, 42 – where Ardabau is marked with a question mark. Note also Tabbernee’s other works: Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 5 n.5, and IMont, 18. Cf. Strobel, review of Montanist Inscriptions and Testimonia, 199–200, where Strobel notes that the land area no longer accessible for investigation because of the reservoir, is 22 km2. Strabo 13.4.12: ‘the parts situated next to this region towards the south as far as the Tauros are so inwoven with one another that the Phrygian and the Carian and the Lydian parts, as also those of the Mysians, since they merge into one another, are hard to distinguish’. Translation from Jones, The Geography of Strabo vol. 6. Claudius Ptolemy, writing in the second century, placed Trajanopolis (which is a long way up the Hermus river from Philadelphia, and clearly Phrygian) in the interior of Greater Mysia (Geography 5.2).

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concludes that ‘It is plausible that Ardabau was located a little to the west or north-west of . . . Uşak.’19 While it is impossible to discount entirely the idea sometimes put forward that ‘Ardabau’ has a spiritual meaning rather than being a place in this world, that idea seems improbable given that Pepuza and Tymion are both actual physical places. Trevett argues in favour of linking Ardabau with Ardath in 4 Ezra (‘I went my way into the field which is called Ardath, like as he commanded me; and there I sat among the flowers, and did eat of the herbs of the field, and the meat of the same satisfied me’20), because the apocalyptic vision in 4 Ezra involved a ‘city . . . builded, and set upon a broad field, and . . . full of all good things’21 – but the Ardath– Ardabau theory is intriguing rather than compelling.22 If ‘Phrygian Mysia’ and ‘Ardabau’ are obscure in the anonymous antiMontanist writer’s text, then the proconsulate of Gratus in Asia Minor is barely any clearer. Gratus is not known as a proconsul of Asia from other sources. Barnes examines the evidence for when Montanus began to prophesy: Eusebius’ Chronicle gives the twelfth or eleventh year of Marcus Aurelius (172/3 or 171/2), depending on whether the Armenian translation is used or Jerome’s Latin adaptation;23 Epiphanius writes of the nineteenth year of Antoninus Pius (156/7).24 They cannot both be right, and, as Barnes argues, Epiphanius’ understanding of the chronology of second-century heresies is unsatisfactory at a number of points.25 Barnes notes that Tertullian added a seventh book to his (now lost) De ecstasi in order to answer Apollonius’ arguments against Montanus,26

19 20

21 22

23 24

25 26

Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 169–70. 2 Esdras/4 Ezra 9.26. Translations have Ardap (Syriac) or Ardab (Latin, Armenian), cf. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 238 n.78. 2 Esdras/4 Ezra 7.6. Cf. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 23–6. Tabbernee (‘Appearance of the New Jerusalem’, 661) writes, ‘I now believe that it is . . . possible that “Ardab” may have been Montanus’ (and the Montanists’) name for the field or plain on which the expected new Jerusalem was to descend’, namely the plain between Pepuza and Tymion, an idea first enunciated by Preuschen (‘Ardaf IV Ezra 9.26 und der Montanismus’, 265–6). Barnes, ‘Chronology of Montanism’, 403–4. Epiphanius Panarion 48.1.2, ‘the Montanists had their beginning about the nineteenth year of Hadrian’s successor Antoninus Pius’. Barnes, ‘Chronology of Montanism’, 405–6. Barnes, ‘Chronology of Montanism’, 406; cf. Jer. De vir. ill. 40: ‘Tertullian added to the six volumes which he wrote On ecstasy against the church a seventh, directed especially against Apollonius, in which he attempts to defend all which Apollonius refuted. Apollonius flourished in the reigns of Commodus and Severus.’

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and he dates that seventh book approximately 213, inferring that Apollonius might have written his book about 210; furthermore, Eusebius quotes Apollonius as having said that ‘at the time of his writing, it was the fortieth year since Montanus had begun his pretended prophecy’.27 This, Barnes writes, supports a date about 170 for the beginning of Montanus’ prophecies.28 This dating is followed by more recent scholars including Laura Nasrallah,29 and will be accepted here. Once it is granted, then, that Montanus’ prophesying probably began in Ardabau (whether that was a geographical or a spiritual location) about 170, the non-attestation of Gratus as proconsul of Asia in other sources apart from Eusebius need not be too great a difficulty, since (as Barnes shows) the years 168/9 and 171/2 both have a gap in the list of known proconsuls.30 Note also, however, what the anonymous writer quoted by Eusebius does not say in the ‘Phrygian Mysia’ paragraph. He does not claim that Ardabau was Montanus’ home village and he does not say that Montanus was a Mysian or a Phrygian.31 It may be worth noting that his name seems to be much commoner in Asia than elsewhere:32 in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names Montanus is attested as the name of just eight individuals in volumes 1 to 4, covering Greek-speaking areas in Europe and Africa, but for thirty-four individuals in the so-far published Asian volumes 5A and 5B.33 Half a dozen of these cases might conceivably relate to individuals named after the Montanus who founded the New Prophecy, in which case they would count as propter hoc rather than merely post hoc. Of the others, however, ten are attested as having the tria nomina characteristic of a Roman citizen.34 This hints, though it is not

27 29 31

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28 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.12. Barnes, ‘Chronology of Montanism’, 406. 30 Nasrallah, Ecstasy of Folly, 158 n.9. Barnes, ‘Chronology of Montanism’, 406–8. Pace Hirschmann, who gets from Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.7 that Montanus was ‘ein Mann phrygischer Herkunft’ and that ‘er stamme aus dem Dorf Ardabau’ (Horrenda Secta, 50), neither of which the text says. Trevett writes that ‘Montanus has a native Phrygian name’ (Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 77): this is an odd way to put it, given the Latin etymology of ‘Montanus’. The volume covering Phrygia has not yet appeared. In LGPN 5A: from Bithynia, Kointos Gallios Montanos, IPrusa 1067; from Ionia: – alios Mountanos, IEph 20B; Titos Flavios Montanos, IEph 2037; Titos Flavios [M]ontan[os], IEph 498; Markos Ougellios Montanos, IEph 1029; from Mysia: Markos Terentios Montanos, CIG 3662; from Pontus: Tiberios Klaudios Montanos IG 5 (1) 504; Titus Junius Montanus, IAlex 37. In LGPN 5B: from Cilicia, Caius Marius Montanus, CIL 10.3605; from Cilicia Pedias, Gaios Atinnios Montanos Valentinianos, IAnazarbos 639.

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enough to prove, that Montanus, like Paul of Tarsus before him, may have been a Roman citizen. The anonymous writer does say that Montanus was a recent convert to Christianity, but does not refer to his being a priest of Apollo (as the fourth-century Debate of a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian says he was35) or a priest of Cybele (as could be inferred if Jerome was right, in a letter, to call him ‘the mutilated and emasculate Montanus’36). Most of the rest of the paragraph quoted by Eusebius is hard to accept as if it were unbiased commentary: ‘his soul’s immense ambitious desire’ and ‘contrary to the custom’. Given that Montanus was a recent convert, he might be expected not to know what would be customary; but a question arises over that, which will be discussed below. As for what actually was customary, Celsus, writing the True Word in the 170s, commented on wandering prophets in Phoenicia and Palestine, who ‘are accustomed to say, each for himself, “I am God; I am the Son of God; or, I am the Divine Spirit; I have come because the world is perishing, and you, O men, are perishing for your iniquities. But I wish to save you . . .”’37 Montanus was not too different from these prophets known to Celsus. In rural Phrygia, there were also non-Christian prophets, whose audience was formed of people who lacked the means to go to the shrines at Claros or Didyma.38 Against this background, as well as the situation in Phoenicia and Palestine as Celsus describes it, Montanus’ style of prophesying does not seem so unprecedented. David E. Aune, too, analyses ‘all of the major features of early Montanism, including the behaviour associated with the possession trance’, as being derived from early Christianity rather than coming from any non-Christian root.39 Therefore, the anti-Montanist writer was giving vent in large part to a manufactured outrage.

35

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Debate of a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 89, p. 123). Jer. Ep. 41.4: Frend (‘Montanism: A Movement of Prophecy and Regional Identity’, 27) accepts that Montanus had been a priest of Cybele. Origen C. Cels. 7.9. Origen writes of Celsus ‘speaking as though it were a matter with which he had a full and personal acquaintance’ (translation by Frederick Crombie in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 4) (insinuating that he did not), but most likely Celsus, who probably wrote the True Word in Alexandria, was well informed about conditions in Phoenicia and Palestine – in the same decade when Montanus began prophesying in another province. Ronald E. Heine lists this passage from Origen as a ‘questionable oracle’ of Montanus (Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 18, p. 9), implicitly assuming that Celsus has got his provinces wrong, but this seems to draw a long bow. 39 Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 46. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 313.

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Among the oracles spoken by Montanus which Ronald E. Heine lists as authentic are, ‘I am the Lord God, the Almighty dwelling in man’,40 and ‘Neither angel nor spirit, but I, the Lord God the Father, have come.’41 In Prophets and Gravestones, his ‘imaginative history’, Tabbernee writes of a meeting, or anyway an incident, at Ardabau, where Montanus astonishes listeners by saying,42 Behold! A human being is like a lyre and I hover like a plectrum. The human being sleeps but I remain awake. Behold! The Lord is the one who stirs up the hearts of human beings and the one who strikes the heart in human beings.

This sounds similar to the kind of prophecy Celsus and Origen discussed – and a similar musical analogy is used by half a dozen other early Christian authors.43 Against this background, Heine’s judgement that ‘I am the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit’,44 attested in the Debate of a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian, is a questionable oracle, is not necessarily compelling. The oracle is similar to the ones quoted by Epiphanius, who did not necessarily write at an earlier date or have better sources. To return to what was customary in the way of prophesying, it is worth noting that Montanus began to prophesy exactly where he did, to the east of Philadelphia, because (as W.H.C. Frend observes) ‘eschatological hope and a strong tradition of prophecy had continued throughout the second century’ in Phrygia.45 At Philadelphia in the years after Ignatius’ journey, during the time while Polycarp was the teacher of Asia, Ammia had been prophesying;46 Quadratus, however, named as a prophet in the same sections, is less clearly tied to a date and locality. Ammia and Quadratus in later times had reputations as authentic prophets, but Miltiades, another anti-Montanist writer quoted by 40 41 42

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Epiphanius Panarion 48.11 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 1, p. 3). Epiphanius Panarion 48.11 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 2, p. 3). Tabbernee, Prophets and Gravestones, 11, quoting from Epiphanius Panarion 48.4 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 3, p. 3). Listed at Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 94: Justin Martyr Dialogus 7; Athenagoras Legatio 9; Odes of Solomon 6.1–2; Pseudo-Justin Cohortatio ad Graecos 8; Hippolytus Antichrist 2; Clement of Alexandria Protrepticus 1. Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 15, pp. 7–9, paralleled at [Didymus] On the Trinity 3.41.1 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 16, p. 9), a late fifthcentury work. Frend, ‘Montanism: A Movement of Prophecy and Regional Identity’, 26. As Tabbernee notes (IMont, 34), Eusebius at Church History 5.17.3–4 links only Ammia to Philadelphia. His phrases are οὔτε τὴν ἐν Φιλαδελφίᾳ Ἀμμίαν οὔτε Κοδρᾶτον and μετὰ Κοδρᾶτον καὶ τὴν ἐν Φιλαδελφίᾳ Ἀμμίαν.

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Eusebius, seeks to show that Montanus and the prophetesses who prophesied with him (Prisca and Maximilla) were not true successors of Ammia and Quadratus, and themselves did not pass on their prophetic gift in the approved way:47 [I]f after Quadratus, and Ammia in Philadelphia, as they assert, the women with Montanus received the prophetic gift, let them show who among them received it from Montanus and the women! For the apostle thought it necessary that the prophetic gift should continue in all the Church until the final coming. But they cannot show it, though this is the fourteenth year since the death of Maximilla.

Miltiades, writing about 192,48 was trying to draw a bright line between prophesying without and with the ecstatic experience described by Montanus’ oracle which says ‘the human being is like a lyre and I hover like a plectrum’. This is dangerously close to being a distinction without a difference. At any rate, Origen’s line of argument against Celsus’ similar objection to ecstatic prophecies (‘strange, fanatical, and quite unintelligible words, of which no rational person can find the meaning’49) was to insist that Celsus had shirked the close reading necessary to comprehend what was being said:50 [H]e ought to have given the exact terms of the prophecies, whether those in which the speaker is introduced as claiming to be God Almighty, or those in which the Son of God speaks, or finally those under the name of the Holy Spirit . . . The prophets have . . . as God commanded them, declared with all plainness those things which it was desirable that the hearers should understand at once for the regulation of their conduct; while in regard to deeper and more mysterious subjects, which lay beyond the reach of the common understanding, they set them forth in the form of enigmas and allegories, or of what are called dark sayings, parables, or similitudes.

Perhaps this kind of argument might be expected from a literature teacher, which Origen was; yet the difference between his and Miltiades’ responses points up the weakness of the claim that Montanus prophesied in the wrong way as compared to earlier Christian prophets. In a number of respects, therefore, Montanus was, at the beginning of his prophetic career, an ordinary figure in the context of Phrygian Christianity. He came from, or came to,51 the district par excellence where the

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Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.17.4. 49 Cf. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 5–7. Origen C. Cels. 7.9. Origen C. Cels. 7.10. Tabbernee (Prophets and Gravestones, 11) sees Montanus as a ‘respected, leading citizen’ of the village of Ardabau, but this is not proven.

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prophetic tradition was lively. By giving his prophecies in direct speech as spoken by the Deity (as for example in ‘I am the Lord God, the Almighty dwelling in man’), he was not doing something which was in itself objectionable to a Christian audience at the time when he prophesied – even though fault was found with it later. Then, like the presbyter whose devotion to Paul prompted him to write the story of Thecla, Montanus created a campaign to attract disciples: when he designated Pepuza and Tymion as Jerusalem, he did so ‘wishing to gather people to them from all directions’.52 And again like the author of Paul and Thecla, he moved from the beginning to include women in the New Prophecy, as (both sides agree in the Debate of a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian) they had been included in prophesying, both biblically and in the Christian church.53

prisca and maximilla So the anonymous writer quoted by Eusebius wrote that Montanus ‘also raised up two others, women, and filled them with the spurious spirit, so that . . . they spoke in a frenzied manner, unsuitably, and abnormally’.54 From this it seems to be clear that Prisca/Priscilla and Maximilla were brought in by Montanus and that the New Prophecy began on his initiative – although this scenario has been viewed with suspicion. Trevett queries Anne Jensen’s argument (following Albert Schwegler55) that for heresiological purposes, the New Prophecy’s opponents needed to be able to picture it as having a nameable and male head.56 Jensen in 1996 had concluded that Prisca was the most significant figure of the New Prophecy, and that Montanus was ‘not a leading prophet in the “Montanist”

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Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.2. The Montanist takes the Orthodox Christian to task for saying that it is not permissible for a woman to prophesy, saying that Philip’s four daughters prophesied and Deborah (Judges 4.4) was a prophetess. The Orthodox answer is that women may and do prophesy, but ‘we do not permit them to speak in churches or to have authority over men’ (cf. 1 Timothy 2.12) (Debate of a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian, Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 89, p. 125). Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.9 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 23, p. 17). As might be expected of one of the leading lights of the Tübingen school, Schwegler calls into question ‘the historical existence of this apocryphal man’ (Montanismus und die christliche Kirche, 243). Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 159.

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movement’: Maximilla, too, delivered oracles which were ‘more moderate in language, and at least one [was] attested early’.57 Prisca and Maximilla have more oracles attributed to them by the sources than does Montanus, but a simple count would be misleading. Eusebius quotes one Maximilla oracle, again drawing on the anonymous anti-Montanist writer, who had been reading a book by Asterius Urbanus:58 [L]et not the spirit, in the same work of Asterius Urbanus, say through Maximilla, ‘I am driven away from the sheep like a wolf. I am not a wolf. I am word and spirit and power.’ But let him show clearly and prove the power in the spirit . . .

The remaining three oracles which are attributed to Maximilla are quoted by Epiphanius.59 From Priscilla, Epiphanius manages half a quotation: that is, he is unsure whether to ascribe to her or to Quintilla the testimony of Christ coming to her and sleeping with her:60 For these Quintillians, or Priscillians, say that in Pepuza either Quintilla or Priscilla, I cannot say precisely, but one of them, as I said before, had been asleep in Pepuza and the Christ came to her and slept with her in the following manner, as that deluded woman described it. ‘Having assumed the form of a woman,’ she says, ‘Christ came to me in a bright robe and put wisdom in me, and revealed that this place is holy, and that it is here that Jerusalem will descend from heaven.’

Quintilla was a later prophetess than Prisca and Maximilla61 – decades later, Trevett argues,62 though her argument rests partly on the negative ground that in his extant work Tertullian does not mention the expectation of the New Jerusalem being established on earth at Pepuza.63

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Jensen, God’s Self-Confident Daughters, 167. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.17 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 5, p. 3). ‘After me there will no longer be a prophetess, but the end’ (Epiphanius Panarion 48.2.4 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 6, p. 3)); ‘Hear not me, but hear Christ’ (Epiphanius Panarion 48.12.4 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 7, p. 5)); ‘The Lord has sent me as partisan, revealer, and interpreter of this suffering, covenant, and promise. I am compelled to come to understand the knowledge of God whether I want to or not’ (Epiphanius Panarion 48.13.1 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 8, p. 5)). Epiphanius Panarion 49.1 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 11, p. 5). Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 117. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 167–71. Indeed, Tertullian seems to have expected the New Jerusalem to descend to earth in Judaea. He retells a story backed up by ‘even heathen witnesses’, in which ‘in Judaea there was suspended in the sky a city early every morning for forty days’ (Tert. Against Marcion, 3.24). But this is not enough to show with certainty that there was no

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Prisca, on the other hand, seems to be Tertullian’s prophetess of choice. He quotes two oracles of hers, and three more Montanist oracles which he does not ascribe to a named prophet or prophetess. Writing in his Montanist period, against Christian heretics who deny a physical resurrection, in On the Resurrection of the Body (datable between 208 and 212) he says, ‘The Paraclete has also said well of them through the prophetess Prisca, “They are flesh, and they hate the flesh.”’64 In the Exhortation to Chastity, he argues that a man will lose valuable spiritual advantages if he remarries after the death of his wife:65 Likewise the holy prophetess Prisca preaches that the holy minister should know how to administer purity of life. ‘For purification produces harmony,’ she says, ‘and they see visions, and when they turn their faces downward they also hear salutary voices, as clear as they are secret.’

Of the other oracles Tertullian quotes, two are about martyrdom – not avoiding it, aspiring to it66 – and one is about absolution, or rather, the desirability of not giving it, in order to motivate sinners not to sin.67 The odd lack of balance in the extant sources, such that Tertullian writes about Prisca and Epiphanius writes about Maximilla, makes it hard to gauge the impact each of the prophetesses had in the first Montanist generation. Trevett responds to Jensen’s argument to the effect that Montanus was of lesser importance from the prophetic viewpoint and Prisca ‘the most significant figure of the New Prophecy’,68 by observing that Montanus organized the activities which got the New Prophecy off the ground as a movement: he started people assembling at Pepuza, he

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Montanist expectation by 208 (approximate date of Against Marcion) of the New Jerusalem descending to earth at Pepuza. Tert. On the Resurrection of the Body 11.2 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 9, p. 5). Tertullian Exhortation to Chastity 10.5 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 10, p. 5). ‘[N]early all [the Spirit’s] words exhort to martyrdom, not to flight, as we are reminded by his saying, “It is good for you to be publicly exposed. For he who is not exposed among men is exposed in the Lord. Do not be disturbed; righteousness brings you before the public. Why are you disturbed when you are receiving praise? There is opportunity when you are observed by men.”’ Tert. On Flight in Persecution 9.4 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 13, p. 7). ‘If you should die for God, as the Paraclete instructs, [do so] not in mild fevers and on your beds, but in martyrdoms; if you take up your cross and follow the Lord as he commands, your blood is the complete key of Paradise.’ Tert. De anim. 55.5 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 14, p. 7). Jensen, God’s Self-Confident Daughters, 167.

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arranged collections of money and organized payment of salaries.69 Trevett insists that Montanus was a prophet and teacher, not merely an advocate whose role would have been to publicize Prisca’s and Maximilla’s gifts.70 And yet even though there are these impediments to reaching an evaluation of who played what role in the early years of the New Prophecy, there are two striking observations about Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla which have attracted less attention than might have been expected. The first is that they all have Roman names:71 Montanus, as noted above, is fairly likely to have been a Roman citizen, while Jerome calls Prisca and Maximilla ‘two rich and high-born ladies’.72 The sources do not seem to hint that any of them was in any way foreign in relation to their Asian and Phrygian context; nevertheless, in the second century Roman citizenship was still relatively uncommon in Asia Minor, and possession of it marked its holder as belonging to a high social stratum.73 Montanus’ priesthood, if he once held one, and of whichever deity, would point in the same direction. The second observation, consonant with the first, is that all three were authors of books: countless books, if Hippolytus, writing in the early third century, was not exaggerating.74

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Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 160. The anonymous writer says, ‘[Montanus] is he who . . . named Pepuza and Tymion, small towns in Phrygia, Jerusalem, wishing to gather people to them from all directions; who appointed collectors of money; who contrived the receiving of gifts under the name of offerings; who provided salaries for those who preached his doctrine, that its teaching might prevail through gluttony’ (Euseb. Hist. Eccl., 5.18.2). Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 160–1. The cumulative force of several Roman names is the point here, but consider the note on nomenclature in MAMA 9.lix–lx: the same family might have three children, one with a name of Greek derivation, another with an indigenous Phrygian Lallname, and yet another with a name of Roman derivation. The etymology of one person’s name meant little in Phrygia in the days of the Roman empire. Jer. Ep. 133.4: nobiles et opulentes feminas. Mitchell observes the similarity between the Roman naming of Montanus and the prophetesses and the members of the Zeuxis/ Skopelianos family who were buried at Temenothyrae with monuments made at the same date as and similar in style to those of Bishops Artemidorus and Diogas (see Chapter 5), and comments on the ‘Romanized cultural norms which were now widespread in the Greek cities of Asia’ (‘Epigraphic Probe’, 190). He mentions, for comparison, Apollonius’ polemic, quoted at Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.11, attacking Prisca and Maximilla for upper-class behaviours: ‘Does a prophet dye his hair? Or stain her eyelids with antimony? Are prophets adorned with fine clothing and precious stones? Does a prophet play with a gaming-board and dice? Does he lend money at interest?’ See Chapter 6 for Poplis Silikis Olpianos and his foster-family. Hippol. Refutation 8.19 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 32, p. 57).

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the ‘countless books’ Apparently only two of these countless books are known by name. Eusebius writes of ‘a certain work of theirs in opposition to the work of brother Alcibiades’,75 which (provisionally) might be assigned the name of In Reply to Alcibiades; like Hippolytus, Eusebius does not seem concerned to assign authorship of it to a particular individual: ‘theirs’ refers back to ‘Montanus and the women’.76 But it seems that Montanus was responsible for a book of Odes: or at least, a fragment survives which is identified as being ‘From Montanus’ Odes’:77 The Christ has one nature and energy before and after the flesh, that he be not different when he does dissimilar and different things.

This is perhaps not quite enough to prove that there was once a book by Montanus called Odes, but in the context of there having been ‘countless books’ written by him and the two prophetesses, the hypothesis that there was might seem possible. This fragment, however, is listed as one of the ‘questionable oracles’ by Heine and the difficulties connected with it are considerable.78 In its favour is the fact that collections of psalms and odes were being composed and used in and around the second century: the Odes of Solomon,79 for example, and Valentinus’

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76 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.17.1. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.22. Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 17, p. 9. The fragment comes from a seventh- or early eighth-century manuscript florilegium called Doctrina patrum de incarnatione verbi, first studied in the Vatican by Angelo Mai, but not published in full until 1907, by Diekamp. Bonwetsch in 1881 listed the fragment among other Montanist testimonia, but commented ‘A real word of Montanus cannot possibly be present here’ (Die Geschichte des Montanismus, 197). As de Labriolle explains, however, the reason why a heretical pronouncement was recorded in a selection of statements about the incarnation would be to allow a medieval theological disputant who had studied the Doctrina patrum de incarnatione verbi to compromise an adversary’s position ‘en décelant les affinités de sa doctrine avec les doctrines suspectes ou condamnées’ (La crise montaniste, 61). De Labriolle, like Bonwetsch and Heine, considers the fragment apocryphal (Sources de l’histoire du montanisme, 3). There is, however, reason not to be so sure: the Doctrina patrum de incarnatione verbi was written some time about 700, whereas Pepuza had been destroyed by John of Ephesus on the Emperor Justinian’s orders in 550 (Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 278–80). At any time up to 550, copies of Montanus’ Odes may well have existed, so that the stretch of time in which there was no possible Montanist source for a snippet to put in a collection was relatively short. ‘Theories about the origin and nature of this document have risen and fallen in such rapid succession as to reduce it to an enigma’, said J.H. Charlesworth in 1973, claiming the

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Psalms,80 and Basilides’ Odes.81 Against this background it seems credible on balance that Montanus would have written Odes, which, presumably, were sung in church by the Montanists. As for Priscilla and Maximilla, in the Debate of a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian, when the Montanist asks if the Virgin Mary was not praying or prophesying with an uncovered head when she spoke the Magnificat in the gospel,82 the Orthodox speaker says that ‘She has the evangelist as her veil, for the gospel has not been written under her name.’ Soon after, the Montanist asks, ‘Is it because Priscilla and Maximilla composed books that you do not receive them?’ and the answer is, ‘It is not only for this, but also because they were false prophetesses . . .’83 Therefore not only were there books written by Priscilla and Maximilla (in addition to the book referred to above in which Asterius Urbanus quoted the oracle in which she said ‘I am word and spirit and power’84), but those books might be viewed by non-Montanist Christians as contravening the Pauline principle that ‘any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head’85 – a verse which could be interpreted metaphorically and so applied to book-writing, at least in the Debate. Nicola Denzey, in an article, draws on a source-critical method to examine whether the extant evidence points to Montanist prophets having drawn on ideas attested in Nag Hammadi texts, especially Thunder: Perfect Mind and Trimorphic Protennoia. On thematic grounds, she argues that these texts ‘may have been attractive to early adherents of the New Prophecy’.86 Denzey argues that a two-way process of absorbing and reinscribing was under way in the Montanist community, although ‘[t]he voluminous Montanist canon was committed to the fire of the postConstantinian era, sealing forever our knowledge of what was vibrant to their community’.87

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Odes as the earliest Christian hymnbook (Odes of Solomon, vii). It was F.C. Conybeare, in 1911, who had argued for the Odes as a Montanist work (‘Odes of Solomon Montanist’, 70–5). Tert. De carne Christi 17 and 20; Origen Homilies on Job PG 17.80. 82 Origen Homilies on Job PG 17.80. Luke 1.46–55. Debate of a Montanist and an Orthodox Christian (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 89, pp. 125–7). 85 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.17. 1 Corinthians 11.5. Denzey, ‘What Did the Montanists Read?’, 428. Denzey, ‘What Did the Montanists Read?’, 447.

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That none of the Montanists’ ‘countless books’ has survived to the modern world is not surprising, even though Denzey’s reliance on the account of destruction of books in Eusebius’ Life of Constantine as sufficient explanation of their non-existence may attach more weight to the incidents reflected in that chapter than they can bear.88 The survival rate of books from antiquity was low at best; those which did survive were the books needed above all for educational use, and, from the Christian era onwards, for church use. As is evident from Eusebius, there was an outpouring of anti-Montanist books, from some of which he quoted (and if he had not, they too would be unknown to the modern world); but in the Great Church reading heretical works was discouraged. In the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, the author advises ‘that you may not receive those books which obtain in our name, but are written by the ungodly’; even though this principally concerns pseudepigraphical works, the same principle also applied to works whose real author was known, when the content included teaching which was disapproved of. After outlining how apocryphal books have been produced for centuries past, the author continues:89 The same things even now have the wicked heretics done, reproaching the creation, marriage, providence, the begetting of children, the law, and the prophets; inscribing certain barbarous names, and, as they think, of angels, but, to speak the truth, of demons, which suggest things to them: whose doctrine eschew, that you may not be partakers of the punishment due to those that write such things for the seduction and perdition of the faithful and unblameable disciples of the Lord Jesus.

This accounts for the long-term non-survival of Montanist literature, and for the fact that the ghost of the Great Church side of the pamphlet war lives on while the countless Montanist books are gone for ever – except that some of Tertullian’s Montanist works survive.90 These were spared and used in the Latin-speaking churches because of a critical mass of

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Denzey, ‘What Did the Montanists Read?’, 447 n.83, citing Eusebius Life of Constantine 3.66. Apostolic Constitutions 6.16.Translation by James Donaldson in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 7. With Barnes (Tertullian, 43–8) I take Tertullian’s Montanist works to be the following: Adversus Marcionem, Adversus Praxean, Adversus Valentinianos, De anima, De corona militis, De exhortatione castitatis, De fuga in persecutione, De ieiunio, De monogamia, De pudicitia, De resurrectione mortuorum, De virginibus velandis.

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non-Montanist treatises Tertullian had written before his lapse (Jerome’s word91) into Montanism, and probably also because the unimpeachable Bishop Cyprian of Carthage in the next generation made a point of reading from Tertullian every day – as in an anecdote which Jerome relates:92 I myself have seen a certain Paul, an old man of Concordia, a town of Italy, who, while he himself was a very young man had been secretary to the blessed Cyprian who was already advanced in age. He said that he himself had seen how Cyprian was accustomed never to pass a day without reading Tertullian, and that he frequently said to him, ‘Give me the master’, meaning by this, Tertullian.

Opinions differ about Tertullian’s own place in church life in his Montanist years. David Rankin commits to the view that he ‘probably never broke away from the Catholic church’,93 and the survival of Tertullian’s work is a point in favour of that view, since it is hard to think that even Cyprian’s example would have sufficed to keep Christians reading Tertullian’s works had he (in the third century) been seen as ‘lapsed’ in the way he was seen by Jerome – and Augustine94 – in the fourth century. The existence in the second-century world (and down to the sixth century) of multiple books written by Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla, begins to explain the impact Montanism made in the short time when all its founding prophetic figures were still alive. Assuming that the calculation which places the beginning of Montanus’ prophesying at Ardabau soon before or after 170 is correct (and that Epiphanius’ reference to the ‘nineteenth year of Antoninus Pius’, i.e. 156/7, is wrong), then Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla had less than a decade in which to

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Jer. De vir. ill. 53.4. Translation by Ernest Cushing Richardson in Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers vol. 3. 93 Jer. De vir. ill. 53.3. Rankin, Tertullian and the Church, 41. After explaining some complex ideas of Tertullian’s about the soul, Augustine says, ‘That, however, was not why Tertullian became a heretic, but because he went over to the Cataphrygians, whom he had earlier demolished, and began (contrary to the apostolic doctrine) to condemn second marriages as if they were fornication, and afterwards he split off from them, too, and set up his own meetings’ (De haeresibus ad Quodvultdeum 86). Recent scholarship has been sceptical about the Tertullianists, the subject of section 86 of De haeresibus ad Quodvultdeum: Augustine says that while he himself was at Carthage (371–373 and 375–383) their numbers were reduced to the point where they went over to the Catholic church, and also handed over their basilica. Wilhite (Tertullian the African, 24–5) does not accept that Tertullian was a schismatic and rejects the supposition that the later existence of the Tertullianists might show that he was; Trevett (Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 74) argues that ‘in his day he neither regarded himself, nor was branded formally by the catholics, as anything so harsh as a “heretic”’.

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make their mark. Maximilla, probably the last of the three to die,95 came to the end of her life in or about 179,96 after delivering the oracle in which she said ‘After me there will no longer be a prophetess, but the end.’97

prophetic tendencies This single decade for the beginning of the New Prophecy has implications for what was happening before, during, and after. Trevett writes that the ‘seeds of the Prophecy had been semi-dormant in the East for decades before the Prophecy emerged’,98 and this claim needs to be taken seriously even though it has problematic features. The difficulties lie, first, in the othering of the East, which is not fair comment and does not sit well with the style of analysis which Trevett adopts in her works as a whole; and, second, in the conception of dormancy, which is a strange word to use to reflect on church life in Asia, which was in fact more of an open book than a sleeping giant. Prophecy we know of: Philip’s daughters, the old ladies whom Papias knew when he was young; ‘Jezebel’ at Thyatira, disapproved of by the writer of Revelation;99 Ammia in Philadelphia; and Quadratus. Helpfully, however, Trevett refers back to Philadelphia as the place where Ignatius had met the most opposition,100 and the text of Ignatius’ Philadelphians bears this out – Philadelphia was where Ignatius spoke out and said ‘with a loud voice: Give heed to the bishop, and to the presbytery and deacons!’101 This pronouncement caused some who were present to suspect that he had known in advance of the division which existed in the church at Philadelphia – but Ignatius insisted that what he said was prompted from above, and ‘the Spirit proclaimed these words: Do nothing without the bishop; keep your bodies as the temples of God; love unity; avoid divisions; be the followers of Jesus Christ, even as He is of His Father’.102 Prophecy, then, already in Ignatius’ day, was a bone of contention at Philadelphia – not that Ignatius sought to suppress it: with whatever degree either of awareness or innocence of the situation he was speaking

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Frend, ‘Montanism: A Movement of Prophecy and Regional Identity’, 29. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 13. Epiphanius Panarion 48.2.4 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 6, p. 3). Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 38. Revelation 2.20; cf. Hemer, Letters to the Seven Churches in Asia, 12. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 39. 102 Ignatius Philadelphians 7.1. Ignatius Philadelphians 7.2.

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into, Ignatius adopted the prophetic vein. Aune comments on this incident, noting that Ignatius’ first oracle is short and in poetic form (‘Give heed to the bishop, and to the presbytery and deacons!’): ‘features which some regard as essential characteristics of poetic speech’; he adds that the loud voice is also ‘a frequent accompaniment of oracular speech’.103 Against this background, Trevett must be right to say that ‘Montanus’ bid for the public sphere came in relation to something which already existed.’ She favours the view that Montanus before his bid for the public sphere had been part of a ‘tolerated prophetic conventicle’.104 Relevant at this point is the reference to Quintus in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. At an early point in the narrative, before Polycarp has even fled from Smyrna, the writer mentions to the Phrygian addressees of the Martyrdom what happened to Quintus:105 Now one named Quintus, a Phrygian, who was but lately come from Phrygia, when he saw the wild beasts, became afraid. This was the man who forced himself and some others to come forward voluntarily [for trial]. Him the proconsul, after many entreaties, persuaded to swear and to offer sacrifice. Wherefore, brethren, we do not commend those who give themselves up [to suffering], seeing the Gospel does not teach so to do.

This pericope has provoked lengthy discussion. It is the first of Heine’s testimonia concerning Montanism in Phrygia,106 and as Tabbernee notes, the later designation of Montanism as ‘the Phrygian heresy’ has prompted some scholars to deduce that Quintus was a Montanist.107 Tabbernee himself concludes that this cannot have been so, because the dates do not permit it: he is not convinced by late dates for the martyrdom of Polycarp or early dates for the origin of Montanism.108 Certainly Silvia Ronchey’s principal argument in favour of dating the Martyrdom of Polycarp to the third century is that the author has brought Quintus in anachronistically to make a polemical point,109 and rather than live with the circularity of

103 104 105 106 107

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Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 292. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 39. Martyrdom of Polycarp 4. Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 10, p. 13. Tabbernee (Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 227 n.83) lists with references ten scholars whose work, published between 1909 and 2002, advocates the view that Quintus was a Montanist. To these A.R. Birley may be added: in 2006 he adopted the same view, arguing for an origin for Montanism in the 150s (‘Voluntary Martyrs’, 110–11 and 118). Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 228–9. Ronchey, Indagine sul martiro di San Policarpo, 36, 48–53, 69–78.

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that it would be preferable to agree with von Campenhausen’s view that the Quintus chapter is a ‘tendentious anti-Montanist interpolation’ added to the Martyrdom of Polycarp in the third or later second century, after Montanism had become controversial.110 Trevett and Hirschmann both argue that Quintus represents Montanism avant la lettre – an anticipation of the sensibility which would reach a fuller stage of development in the Montanist movement;111 this would be consistent with the idea of Montanus as having been part of a ‘tolerated prophetic conventicle’ before 170. For Montanus, going to Ardabau and beginning to prophesy may not have been a strategically planned move and might perhaps be understood with regard to the analogy of George Fox’s visit to Lichfield after being released from prison at Derby in 1651 – an incident most familiar in recent decades from William James’s citing of it in The Varieties of Religious Experience.112 Fox in his journal wrote:113 [A]s I was one time walkinge . . . I lift up my heade & I espyed three steeplehouse spires . . . & I askt ffreindes what they was & they saide Lichfeilde & soe the worde of ye Lord came to mee thither I might goe . . . ye worde of ye Lorde was like a fire in mee . . . & soe I went about a mile till I came Into ye townde & assoone as I came within ye townde ye worde of ye Lorde came unto mee againe to cry: Woe unto ye bloody citty of Lichfeilde: so I went uppe & doune ye streets crying Woe unto ye bloody citty of Lichfeilde & beinge markett day I went Into ye markett place & went uppe & doune in several places of it & made stands cryinge Woe unto ye bloody citty of Lichfeilde & noe one touched mee nor layde hands off mee . . .

This happened to the young Fox (born 1624), whose journal shows him travelling widely in England and Wales over several years. By contrast, there may be some reason to suspect that Montanus and the prophetesses were no longer young in the 170s, but it is not impossible that the sense of 110 111

112

113

Campenhausen, ‘Bearbeitung und Interpolationen’, 20. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 41, hinting that Quintus may have been from Philomelium, and his inclusion in the account of the martyrdom may have been an implicit reproach to a ‘hardline faction’ in Philomelium which had set him on the unwise path he followed. Hirschmann (Horrenda Secta, 25–7) draws the inference from the inclusion of the Quintus story that ‘the appearance of Montanism seems not to be sudden’. On Quintus see also Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 332–6. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 7–9. James comments, ‘No one can pretend that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound . . . Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or détraqué of the deepest dye.’ Penney (ed.), Journal of George Fox, 15.

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compulsion to act and to prophesy which they experienced was analogous to his. Even if a religious experience of this nature was behind the change from what happened before the Ardabau incident to what came in the decade of the 170s, there is evidence to suggest that the spread of the New Prophecy was planned and systematic. Frend observes that Prisca ‘found a ready hearing in communities as far afield as the Black Sea part of the province of Thrace’,114 and Maximilla must have travelled to the south and east of Phrygia, with the result that Bishop Zoticus of Comana (Göner) and Bishop Julian of Apamea (Dinar) came to Pepuza to attempt to exorcise demons from her.115 The church at Thyatira (Akhisar) went over wholesale to the Montanists, as Epiphanius says while discussing another heresy: ‘After these Phrygians had settled there and like wolves seized the minds of these simple believers,’ he writes, ‘they converted the whole town [= Thyatira] to their sect.’116 The argument for dating the change at Thyatira to 172 is complex: Epiphanius says that ‘Now in our time the church is there and is growing, 112 years after [its restoration]’,117 which (given that Epiphanius was writing in 375) places the church’s return from Montanism to the Great Church in 263. He goes on to write of the church falling into error for ninety-three years:118 this, Trevett argues, takes the time of the Thyatirans’ adherence to Montanism back to 172.119 The countless books, too, 114

115

116 118 119

Frend, ‘Montanism: A Movement of Prophecy and Regional Identity’, 27, drawing on Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.19.3, where Aelius Publius Julius, bishop of Debeltum, says that Sotas of Anchialus tried to cast the demon out of Priscilla, ‘but the hypocrites’ (sc. Priscilla’s followers) ‘did not permit him’. Trevett (Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 51) discusses this passage and sounds less certain about itinerant activity by the prophetesses, but does not rule it out. Tabbernee (Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 22–3) favours the view that Sotas travelled to Phrygia to attempt to exorcise Priscilla’s demons, rather than Priscilla having travelled to Thrace, but his argument for this view is inconclusive. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.17: ‘those eminent men and bishops, Zoticus, from the village Comana, and Julian, from Apamea, whose mouths the followers of Themiso muzzled, refusing to permit the false and seductive spirit to be refuted by them’; however, Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.13 clarifies where the exorcism incident took place: ‘Zoticus, who was mentioned by the former writer, when Maximilla was pretending to prophesy in Pepuza, resisted her and endeavored to refute the spirit that was working in her; but was prevented by those who agreed with her’: cf. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 8. 117 Epiphanius Panarion 51.33.3. Epiphanius Panarion 51.33.4. Epiphanius Panarion 51.33.5. Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 29; Hirschmann, Horrenda Secta, 43–6.

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must have been part of the strategy for expansion: they would explain why overseas contacts grew so promptly, at Lyon and in Rome. Contemporary anti-Montanist literature, as for example written by Apollinarius, bishop of Hierapolis (Chapter 2), was naturally aimed at counteracting the impact the Montanists hoped to make.

lyon and the spread of montanism When persecution had resulted in the martyrdom of Blandina and others at Lyon in 177, a letter – incorporated into his Church History by Eusebius – was sent out from Lyon to publicize what had happened. It began as follows:120 The servants of Christ residing at Vienne and Lyons, in Gaul, to the brethren throughout Asia and Phrygia, who hold the same faith and hope of redemption, peace and grace and glory from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord . . .

So the Phrygian churches in particular were on the mind of the survivors in Lyon after the persecution – and there were probably two reasons why this was so. As Tabbernee points out, it is certain that Phrygians were among the migrants who had come to Lyon, travelling across the sea to Marseille then up the river Rhône to Lyon, as the city and its secondcentury prosperity grew.121 Irenaeus, presbyter then bishop at Lyon, was someone who had moved along this path in life, starting out in Asia and learning from Polycarp (see above) before later living and working in Gaul, while one of the Lyon martyrs, Alexander, was ‘a Phrygian by race’.122 The second reason, however, went beyond the places people came from: it is certain that Montanist ideas were influential at Lyon. Vettius Epagathus, ‘one of the brethren, and a man filled with love for God and his neighbour’,123 came to the tribunal when the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis was in town, asking to speak up in favour of those Christians who had been imprisoned, but124 the governor refused to grant his just request, and merely asked if he also were a Christian. And he, confessing this with a loud voice, was himself taken into the order of the witnesses (εἰς τὸν κλῆρον τῶν μαρτύρων), being called the advocate of 120 121 122 124

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.1.3. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 29. 123 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.1.49. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.1.9. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.1.10.

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the Christians, but having the Advocate in himself (παράκλητος Χριστιανῶν χρηματίσας, ἔχων δὲ τὸν παράκλητον ἐν ἑαυτῷ), the Spirit more abundantly than Zacharias. He showed this by the fullness of his love, being well pleased even to lay down his life in defense of the brethren.

The use of the word παράκλητος, Paraclete,125 seems to point towards a connection between Epagathus in particular and Montanist teaching or prophecy, although this point of vocabulary may not be conclusive.126 Leaving aside Epagathus’ personal commitments, however, there is evidence that formal discussion of the merits or otherwise of Montanism had begun in Lyon even before the persecution, as Eusebius says:127 The followers of Montanus, Alcibiades and Theodotus in Phrygia were now first giving wide circulation to their assumption in regard to prophecy – for the many other miracles that, through the gift of God, were still wrought in the different churches caused their prophesying to be readily credited by many – and as dissension arose concerning them, the brethren in Gaul set forth their own prudent and most orthodox judgment in the matter, and published also several epistles from the witnesses that had been put to death among them. These they sent, while they were still in prison, to the brethren throughout Asia and Phrygia, and also to Eleutherus, who was then bishop of Rome, negotiating for the peace of the churches . . .

The phrase ‘prudent and most orthodox judgment’ has prompted some disagreement in the modern world over what Eusebius, almost a century and a half later, took to be ‘prudent and most orthodox’ in this instance. Operatively, was the judgement favourable or unfavourable to Montanism or what the Lyonnais knew of it? Tabbernee lists five modern scholars who argue that the judgement was against the Montanist interest and eleven who infer that it was favourable to it.128 It may be that the phrase ‘negotiating for the peace of the churches’ implies that the letter from Lyon advised no action against the Montanists.

125

126 127 128

παράκλητος is a Johannine synonym for ‘Holy Spirit’ (John 14.16 and 26, 15.26, 16.17; 1 John 2.1), and a word much used in Montanist prophecy – for example, ‘This I recognise and will more than you, for I have the Paraclete himself who says in the new prophets: “The church can pardon sin, but I will not do it, lest they also commit other offences”’ (Tert. De pudicitia 21.7 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 12, p. 7)). Trevett says that the word was used of Epagathus ‘perhaps deliberately and in the context of a wider debate’ (Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 53). Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 30–1. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.3.4. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 33 and nn. 133 and 134.

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Irenaeus, then a presbyter, was sent to carry the letter to Rome and bring it to Bishop Eleutherus.129 It is probable that one reason behind taking the trouble to communicate with Eleutherus on the question was that there were Montanists in Rome as well as in Lyon.130 Certainly if some Phrygians were travelling to Lyon, others were travelling to Rome, which was much larger. What happened in Rome is obscure: some bishop at some point ‘acknowledged the prophecies of Montanus, Prisca and Maximilla’, but Eleutherus (174–189) may not have been that bishop, since Tertullian at a later date wrote that his opponent Praxeas caused a bishop of Rome to ‘recall . . . letters of peace already issued’, achieving this result ‘by false assertions concerning the prophets themselves and their churches, and by insistence on the decisions of the bishop’s predecessors’.131 If the ‘letters of peace already issued’ were sent by the same bishop who recalled them, then there was a bishop of Rome who was persuaded to change his mind and rule against Montanism, partly on the basis of the unfavourable views of his predecessors in the same office. The earliest bishop, then, who could be identified as a possible recaller of his own pro-Montanist ‘letter of peace’ would be Victor (189–198), and that identification would depend on supposing that both Eleutherus (174–189) and Soter (166–174) knew of Montanism and took a stand against it.132 Lyon and Rome represent a big and early move west for Montanism, but the contact is paralleled by the contact Polycarp had made earlier by travelling to Rome in 154, a visit which seems to have strengthened contacts between Asian and Roman Christianity, without yet precipitating the crisis of the paschal controversy. So the first decade of the New Prophecy manifested energy and clear similarities with the way Christianity was growing in other parts of Asia and Phrygia: writing and circulating books, travelling to preach and prophesy, building contacts overseas as well as nearer home. In Cities of God, Stark (drawing on Tabbernee and Trevett) maps twenty-two non-Phrygian cities with Montanist congregations, so illustrating the appeal of the Montanist message in larger cities empire-wide (see Figure 5).133

129 130 131

132 133

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.4.1–2. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 35. Tert. Against Praxeas 1.5. Translation from Evans, Adversus Praxean liber: Tertullian’s Treatise against Praxeas. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 36–7. Stark, Cities of God, 172–5.

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Figure 5 Montanist Congregations. From Stark, Cities of God, 176. Copyright © 2006 by Rodney Stark. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers

There is no evidence to show how it came about that Montanus and the two prophetesses died as relatively soon after the beginning of their prophetic movement as they did. The Antonine plague, which will be discussed in Chapter 5, may have been the cause. Anti-Montanist Christians claimed that no Montanists had ever suffered martyrdom or other kinds of anti-Christian violence:134 Who is there, O friends, of these who began to talk, from Montanus and the women down, that was persecuted by the Jews, or slain by lawless men? None. Or has any of them been seized and crucified for the Name? Truly not. Or has one of these women ever been scourged in the synagogues of the Jews, or stoned? No; never anywhere . . .

But the anonymous writer, quoted by Eusebius, whose work this comes from, is not credible at this point: he goes on to claim that Montanus and Maximilla committed suicide,135 an uncorroborated claim which the writer introduces with ‘the report is that’, so that it seems less than guaranteed, even by a hostile author. 134 135

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.12 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 15, p. 17). Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.13 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 15, pp. 17–19).

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john of ephesus A confusing entry in Michael Syrus’s Chronicle tells the story of John of Ephesus attacking Pepuza in the 550s, and says that John burnt the Montanists’ assembly place. In the building John’s people found ‘a large shrine of marble which was sealed with lead and girded with plates of iron. There was written upon it, “Of Montanus and the women.”’ Inside the monument were found the bones of Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla, ‘with thin plates of gold placed upon their mouths’. This easyto-follow account is supplemented by another story, which involves Montanus, when about to die, asking the gravediggers to bury him fifty cubits deep, ‘because fire will come and consume all the face of the earth’. When his bones were dug up in the reign of ‘Justinian the First’ (= Justin I, 519–527?), the Chronicle says, the Montanists bribed the (Orthodox) bishop to burn other bones instead, ‘as if they were those of Montanus and of Qryṭys his associate’, with the result that the original bones were still there to find when John of Ephesus came to Pepuza.136 A possibly relevant find during archaeological surface survey at Pepuza in 2001 is a hypogeum in the southern slope under the ‘basilica terrace’ in the centre of the area of settlement. Peter Lampe reports that this underground space, which was only partly explored in 2001 owing to the danger of collapse, is ‘mostly filled with ancient rubbish’ and was evidently demolished and filled in, in antiquity.137 He raises the possible identification of this hypogeum with the burial place of Montanus and the prophetesses, and claims that ‘the archaeological findings fit well with the literary sources’.138 Tabbernee argues persuasively that the second story in Michael Syrus’s Chronicle is ‘a collection or rumors which circulated at the time of (or later than) the destruction of the relics’.139 The first story, however, seems plausible, all the more so because the Chronicle goes on to say that ‘when the abominable books, which were theirs, were also found, they burned (them)’.140 Tabbernee agrees that ‘even the detail that the mouths of the deceased had been covered with plates of gold may be accurate’.141 The

136

137 138 140

141

Michael Syrus Chronicle 9.33, undated entry placed between years 27 and 29 of Justinian (554/5 and 556/7) (= IMont, no. 2, pp. 35–9). Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 165. 139 Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 165–7. IMont, 42. Michael Syrus Chronicle 9.33, undated entry placed between years 27 and 29 of Justinian (554/5 and 556/7) (= IMont, no. 2, pp. 35–9). IMont, 44.

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burial of Montanus and the two prophetesses in the same monument at Pepuza tends to confirm that the three died within a relatively short time of one another. The identity of Qryṭys, who is also mentioned (but spelt differently in Syriac) in the Zuqnin Chronicle, and who was evidently a person of importance, if buried next to Montanus and the prophetesses, remains unclear.142

142

Zuqnin Chronicle for Year 861 (Seleucid Era) (i.e. ad 550) (= IMont, no. 1, pp. 28–35): ‘But now by the encouragement of the holy John, bishop of Asia, there were found the bones of Montanus, that one who was saying concerning himself that he was the Spirit, the Paraclete, and of Qr᾿ṭys and Maximilla and Priscilla his prophetical (agents). And he burned them with fire, and he uprooted their temples unto the foundations.’ Assemani in 1721 (Bibliotheca orientalis clementino-vaticana vol. 2, 88 n.1) suggested that Qr᾿ṭys was Quintilla, who was an important figure (but later): the difficulty is that Qr᾿ṭys is not a likely Syriac spelling of Κυΐντιλλα. Gero (‘Montanus and Montanism’, 524) said that ‘a suggestion – and nothing more – is that we have here a deformation of the name of Quadratus, a Christian prophet to whose example the Montanists appealed’. Agreeing with Gero, Trevett (Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 36) stresses in italics, ‘It must be Quadratus’; but Tabbernee (IMont, 42–4) finds κριτής (= ‘judge’) the most satisfactory Greek transcription, and argues that Qr᾿ṭys is not intended as a name, but that the ‘associate’ buried with Montanus and the prophetesses (perhaps later than them) had functioned as a judge or arbitrator – and was perhaps Theodotus or Themiso (on whom see Chapter 5). Κρίτης may also be a personal name, though it is attested only once, in LGPN 1; Κράτης (a more probable Greek equivalent, in view of the ᾿alaph in the Zuqnin Chronicle) occurs 120 times in the LGPN. Perhaps Gero and Trevett are right about Quadratus, but the possibility that there was an associate of Montanus, otherwise unknown to the sources, whose name was Krates (or Krites), cannot be excluded.

5 Montanism Part 2: Pepuza and Tymion

the antonine plague When Melito of Sardis, friend of Apollinarius of Hierapolis, somewhere in the years from 175 to 177 wrote To Antoninus, his apologetic address to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius,1 he complained that persecution against Christians was getting worse:2 For, what never before happened, the race of the pious is now suffering persecution, being driven about in Asia by new decrees. For the shameless informers and coveters of the property of others, taking occasion from the decrees, openly carry on robbery night and day, despoiling those who are guilty of no wrong.

He goes on to query whether the new anti-Christian decrees really represent Marcus’ intentions. Modern scholars have gone to surprising lengths to acquit Marcus.3 But political conditions were pressing: substitute entertainers had to be provided instead of gladiators, in circumstances 1

2

3

Keresztes (‘Marcus Aurelius a Persecutor?’, 333) argues for this date, probably rightly, on the basis of Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.26.7 (quoting Melito of Sardis), which says, ‘To [Augustus’ imperial] power you have succeeded, as the desired possessor, and such shall you continue with your son . . .’ Commodus, born 31 August 161, assumed the toga virilis on 7 July 175, and was made consul for 177 (SHA Marc. 23.12): in the middle of 177 he was made Augustus (= joint emperor with his father). Melito’s phrasing implies that Marcus’ intentions over Commodus’ succession were officially announced, but not yet implemented, at the time of writing. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.26.5. But a decade and a half before, Marcus’ reign had also been inaugurated with intensified persecutions in Asia: Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.15.1. For example, Keresztes, ‘Marcus Aurelius a Persecutor?’, 340–1: ‘Marcus Aurelius was, basically and legally, innocent of Christian blood.’

123

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where slaves and gladiators were being recruited to the Roman army.4 There is reason to think that the army suffered worse losses than the general population in the Antonine plague, which was communicated into the Roman empire in 165 as Lucius Verus’ army retreated from Seleucia/ Ctesiphon on the Tigris. The plague was smallpox, making its first appearance in the Roman empire as ‘part of the initial emergence of smallpox into the world’.5 As Ammianus Marcellinus was later to write,6 [T]hat pestilence burst forth, which, after generating the virulence of incurable diseases, in the time of . . . Verus and of Marcus Antoninus polluted everything with contagion and death, from the frontiers of Persia all the way to the Rhine and to Gaul.

Yan Zelener shows that the plague reduced the population of the Roman empire in the twenty years following its introduction by approximately 25 per cent. His graph assumes a baseline population of 60 million, reduced to around 45 million by the 180s; however, if a high-end population estimate of 100 to 120 million were correct, the percentage drop would still be similar.7 Andrzej Wypustek and Izabella Donkow observe how epidemics, including this one, provoked fears and accusations of malevolent magic – including accusations against Christians8 –although they are not prepared to identify the ‘new decrees’ against Christians of which Melito of Sardis wrote in the 170s9 with decrees summarized by Modestinus in the Digest and Paul in his Sentences.10 The priority given to army recruitment depleted the numbers of unlucky persons available for gladiator training; none the less, the value in terms of popularity which other office-holders and the emperor himself could gain from providing entertainment in the form of gladiator shows remained high. Therefore, in 177 or 178, prompted by Marcus Aurelius,

4 5

6

7 8 9 10

SHA Marc. 21.6–7. Zelener, ‘Genetic Evidence’, 169. Zelener (168–9) established in 2012, to a higher standard of certainty than earlier studies, the case for smallpox being the infection concerned. But Littman and Littman in 1973 had supported ‘a firm diagnosis of smallpox’ (‘Galen and the Antonine Plague’, 245), while Christer Bruun in 2002 remained uncertain as to what disease was involved (‘The Antonine Plague’, 201). Ammianus Marcellinus 33.6.24. Translation from Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus History vol. 2. Zelener, ‘Genetic Evidence’, 172–5. Wypustek and Donkow, ‘Christians and the Plague’, 127–32. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.26.5. Wypustek and Donkow, ‘Christians and the Plague’, 131 n.27.

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the Roman Senate passed the SC de pretiis gladiatorum minuendis,11 intending to reduce the cost of gladiators to the funders of gladiator shows, partly by sanctioning alternative violent performances which would take the place of the usual gladiator fights. So it was that in 177 the Lyon martyrs ‘were at last sacrificed, having been made a spectacle to the world throughout that day as a substitute for all the variations of gladiatorial contests’;12 as well as providing entertainment, James H. Oliver and Robert E.A. Palmer show, their deaths counted as a kind of sacrifice.13 To Marcus, who was selling the furniture from his palace in the Forum of Trajan to keep the Marcomannic Wars funded,14 Christians evidently did not seem to have much claim to consideration. He found their motivation in the face of death inauthentic and lacking in Stoic unostentatiousness.15 In these circumstances of disease and population decline, Montanus and the prophetesses began the New Prophecy in the 170s. Phrygia was affected by smallpox: R.P. Duncan-Jones documents how the imperial marble quarries at Docimium ceased to operate in 166 and work did not recommence until 173.16 According to Tertullian, the Paraclete (therefore, in human terms, a Montanist prophet or prophetess) said, ‘Wish not to . . . die in your bed, nor in miscarriages and mild fevers, but in martyrdoms . . .’17 Whatever end the life of the speaker of that oracle came to, before 180 the Montanists were led by others and no longer by Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla. Themiso, who was released from custody after confessing his Christian faith,18 was a leading figure even

11

12

13 15

16 17 18

The date comes between the promotion of Commodus to the rank of Augustus in mid177 and the departure of Marcus and Commodus from Rome on 3 August 178 (Oliver and Palmer, ‘Minutes of an Act’, 324). Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.1.40, ἀντὶ πάσης τῆς ἐν τοῖς μονομαχίοις ποικιλίας. Cf. Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 248–51. 14 Oliver and Palmer, ‘Minutes of an Act’, 325. SHA Marc. 17.4 and 21.9. Marcus Aurelius Meditations 11.3: ‘What a soul is that which is ready to be released from the body at any requisite moment, and be quenched or dissipated or hold together! But the readiness must spring from a man’s inner judgement, and not be the result of mere opposition [as is the case with the Christians]. It must be associated with deliberation and dignity and, if others too are to be convinced, with nothing like stage-heroics.’ Translation from Haines, The Communings with himself of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Emperor of Rome. Duncan-Jones, ‘Impact of the Antonine Plague’, 129. Tert. On Flight in Persecution 9.4. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.5: but allegedly he got out of prison by bribery, cf. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 217.

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in the lifetime of Maximilla, and his followers were credited with muzzling the two bishops who tried to prove her wrong.19 In the same generation, according to the anonymous writer whom Eusebius quotes, the ‘Phrygian heresy’ was equivalent to ‘the heresy of those who are called after Miltiades’.20 Little else is known of Miltiades (who, as happenstance would have it, shared a name with an author who wrote against Montanism), except if he is somehow the same person as the ‘Alcibiades’ mentioned by Eusebius in his account of the Lyon martyrdoms. Having written of a Lyonnais Alcibiades, who ‘led a very austere life, partaking of nothing whatever but bread and water’ until advised by Attalus in the prison to moderate his ascetic ways,21 Eusebius goes on to say,22 The followers of Montanus, Alcibiades and Theodotus, in Phrygia were now first giving wide circulation to their assumption in regard to prophecy – for the many other miracles that, through the gift of God, were still wrought in the different churches caused their prophesying to be readily credited by many – and as dissension arose concerning them, the brethren in Gaul set forth their own prudent and most orthodox judgment in the matter . . .

This makes this other, Phrygian, ‘Alcibiades’ look like a lapsus calami (for ‘Miltiades’), brought on by the Lyonnais Alcibiades’ name lingering at the top level of Eusebius’ short-term memory as he began his new paragraph. Theodotus, however, the third name mentioned in this paragraph in Eusebius, is referred to in the material which Eusebius got from his anonymous source as ‘that remarkable person, the first steward, as it were, of their so-called prophecy’.23 If Theodotus had been a ‘steward’ (ἐπίτροπος) in the worldly sense, he would have been a procurator, so that one might guess that his responsibilities included the finances of the Montanist church: Montanus himself had ‘appointed collectors of money; who contrived the receiving of gifts under the name of offerings, [and] provided salaries for those who preached his doctrine’.24 Someone must have been keeping the accounts.25

19 21

22 23

24 25

20 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.17, τὰ στόματα φιμώσαντες. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.3. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.3.2–3, ending with ‘Let this suffice for these matters’, which marks an end to what Eusebius has to say about Lyonnais prisoner Alcibiades. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.3.4. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.14: τὸν πρῶτον τῆς κατ’ αὐτοὺς λεγομένης προφητείας οἷον ἐπίτροπόν τινα Θεόδοτον . . . Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.2. Frend (‘Montanism: A Movement of Prophecy and Regional Identity’, 29) says that ‘By 190 [the New Prophecy] had become a well-organized church, with a notably efficient financial system.’

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the second montanist generation Among the second-generation leaders in Phrygia, therefore, were Themiso, Miltiades (but not Alcibiades), and Theodotus. Quintilla probably came on to the scene later. Eusebius’ anonymous source wrote a book against the Montanists at the request of Avircius Marcellus, i.e. Aberkios the bishop of Hierapolis (Koçhisar), and after saying that he has hesitated (he does not say how long) to write, he begins his account with the incident which (he says) caused him eventually to begin on his text:26 [B]eing recently in Ancyra in Galatia, I found the church there greatly agitated by this novelty, not prophecy, as they call it, but rather false prophecy, as will be shown. Therefore, to the best of our ability, with the Lord’s help, we disputed in the church many days concerning these and other matters separately brought forward by them, so that the church rejoiced and was strengthened in the truth, and those of the opposite side were for the time confounded, and the adversaries were grieved. The presbyters in the place, our fellow presbyter Zoticus of Otrous also being present, requested us to leave a record of what had been said against the opposers of the truth. We did not do this, but we promised to write it out as soon as the Lord permitted us, and to send it to them speedily.

His scruples over writing had concerned his fear that he would seem ‘to be making additions to the doctrines or precepts of the Gospel of the New Testament’,27 which is to say that the risk he perceived was that of doing himself what he objected to the New Prophets doing – purporting to add to the divine revelation. This implies that the Orthodox claim that the Montanists were representing their books as scripture on a level in terms of authoritativeness with the New Testament was first made much earlier than the fourthcentury date when Theodoret of Cyrrhus and pseudo-Gelasius incorporated that claim in their books. Theodoret said that Montanus ‘procured two prophetesses for himself, Priscilla and Maximilla, and called what they wrote prophetic books’.28 Pseudo-Gelasius incorporated the writings of Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla in a list of books which are not received as scripture.29 The Muratorian fragment, not mentioning

26 28

29

27 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.4–5. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.3. Theodoret Compendium of Heretical Falsehood 3.1 (PG 83.401–4) (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 136, p. 169). Pseudo-Gelasius List of Apocryphal Books which Are Not Received (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 141, p. 175): ‘The little works [opuscula] of Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilla are apocryphal . . . We make known that these . . . are to be condemned under anathemas with an indissoluble bond forever.’

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Montanus or the prophetesses, rejected Miltiades’ writings,30 while Themiso, according to Apollonius, who wrote in the early third century, ‘wrote a certain catholic epistle, to instruct those whose faith was better than his own’.31 Frend, in his article about Montanism as a movement of prophecy and regional identity, observes that the Montanists’ early conflicts with the Orthodox had come in cities, and that these conflicts were about the place the New Prophecy was to have in those cities’ churches. At Thyatira (Akhisar), the Montanists took over (see above), but at Ancyra (Ankara) things were not easy for them: the anonymous author spent ‘many days’ arguing against their way of doing things and apparently imposed a setback on their cause. And yet the Montanists’ strategy in mission continued to be focused on capturing commanding heights, in line with the way they had been making contacts in Lyon and Rome. Frend drew the inference that the Montanists were unsuccessful in their struggle to gain a place in the sun in the urban context32 – Thyatira being the evident exception and Ancyra, a provincial capital, being a city where stakes were higher. This is how he explains Montanism’s rural character and the way Montanist bishops were in effect village priests.33 On the contrary, however, Montanism built up an impressive record of successes outside Phrygia, considering how shallowly rooted it was in the area in its earliest years. Montanus, who (I have argued) was probably not a Phrygian villager, started to prophesy in Ardabau and then made Pepuza and Tymion, ‘Jerusalem’, into the headquarters of his sect; but some clergy in and even beyond Phrygia started opposing him and his style of prophesying long before others were certain that they disapproved of what the Montanists were doing.34 30

31 32 33

34

Muratorian Fragment 81: ‘we accept nothing whatever of Arsinous or Valentinus or Miltiades . . .’. Translation from Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.5. Frend, ‘Montanism: A Movement of Prophecy and Regional Identity’, 32. Sozom. Hist. Eccl. 7.19.2: ‘There are, for instance, many cities in Scythia, and yet they all have but one bishop; whereas, in other nations a bishop serves as priest even over a village (καὶ ἐν κώμαις ἐπίσκοποι ἱερῶνται), as I have myself observed in Arabia, and in Cyprus, and among the Novatians and Montanists of Phrygia.’ Translation from Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers vol. 2. Prophecy as such was not subject to general Christian disapproval; note that Irenaeus (opposing the Montanists) writes of ‘Wretched men indeed! who wish to be pseudoprophets, forsooth, but who set aside the gift of prophecy from the Church . . .’ (Against Heresies 3.11.9). Considering the longer term, however, Hvidt argues that ‘authentic prophetic charisms suffered tremendously through the church’s negative experiences with Montanism’ (Christian Prophecy, 88).

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So it was that in Rome for a period of time, probably while Victor was bishop, Montanism was officially unproblematic. However, as Tertullian wrote (telling the story from the Montanist point of view):35 [A]t that time the bishop of Rome was on the point of recognising the prophecies of Montanus and Prisca and Maximilla, and as a result of that recognition was offering peace to the churches of Asia and Phrygia; but this man [= Praxeas], by false assertions concerning the prophets themselves and their churches, and by insistence on the decisions of the bishop’s predecessors, forced him both to recall the letters of peace already issued and to desist from his project of receiving the spiritual gifts. Thus Praxeas at Rome managed two pieces of the devil’s business: he drove out prophecy and introduced heresy: he put to flight the Paraclete and crucified the Father.

Tabbernee argues, perhaps correctly, that ‘the churches of Asia and Phrygia’ referred to here are the (migrant) Asian and Phrygian churches in Rome, and that Victor (assuming that it was he) had not actually sent letters to Asia.36 The difficulties of communication are evident: Praxeas came from Asia with information which was new to Victor about how the New Prophecy was regarded by the Asian churches, but if Victor’s only source had been the Asian and Phrygian churches at Rome, it would presumably have looked to him as if the New Prophecy was the way things were moving in Asia. What Victor decided, however, was enforceable only in Rome. In Africa events took a different course. The Martyrdom of the Scillitans (17 July 180) is the earliest datable evidence of Christianity in the province of Africa, so that the African and Carthaginian church may have been relatively recently established in 203 when Perpetua, Felicitas, and other catechumens were arrested,37 tried, and put to death in a military gladiator show. The preface of the Martyrdom of Perpetua begins with an apologia for adding to the canon of Christian literature:38 If the ancient examples of faith bore witness to God’s grace and brought about man’s edification, and if the reason why they were put in writing was that the reading of them should be a sort of re-enactment of the events, for the purposes of honouring God and of comforting people, then why should not new proofs of faith – which are just as suited to both those purposes – also be put in writing? 35 36 37

38

Tert. Against Praxeas 1.5. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 39. Shaw, ‘Passion of Perpetua’, 10–11; at Carthage, not Thuburbo Minus: Tabbernee, ‘Perpetua, Montanism and Christian Ministry in Carthage’, 424–7 (cf. Butler, New Prophecy and ‘New Visions’, 134). Martyrdom of Perpetua 1.1.

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The key phrase ‘new prophecy’ comes in not long after, in the plural:39 So we recognise and honour new prophecies, and also new visions which were likewise promised . . .

So that although Perpetua and the others were afterwards commemorated as Catholic martyrs, it is clear that the teaching they were receiving as catechumens was informed by Montanist ideas. The martyr-act contains more: in Saturus’ vision, he foresees and describes a time after their martyrdom, when the martyrs are brought into the divine presence.40 Then, when the martyrs are told to go away and play,41 we went out, and saw outside the gates Bishop Optatus on the right hand and Aspasius the presbyter and teacher on the left, separated and sorrowing. And they threw themselves down at our feet and said, ‘Mediate between us, for you have passed away and left us like this!’ And we said to them, ‘Aren’t you our father? And aren’t you our presbyter? So how is it that you’re throwing yourselves at our feet?’ And we were moved with emotion and we embraced them. Perpetua began to talk with them in Greek, and we took them aside into the garden beneath a rose tree. While we were talking to them, the angels said to them, ‘Let them take their ease, and if you have any disagreements between you, settle them between yourselves.’ And they put them to confusion. They said to Optatus, ‘Correct your people, since they gather to you just as if they were coming back from the racetrack arguing about the teams.’

This text envisages both that the martyrs would have the authority to put an end to an earthly dispute within the church and (paradoxically) that once they have passed to their reward it is no longer their duty to concern themselves with such things. As Tabbernee notes (though with reservations), it is possible that the difference was over the New Prophecy and that Aspasius (who, as the teacher, was presumably teaching the catechumens who were arrested and martyred), ‘may have been the leader of a pro-New Prophecy faction’.42 In Africa in 203, then, the New Prophecy was something Christians were allowed to disagree about, although that disagreement had been resolved a decade before as far as Christians in Rome were concerned. If Tertullian in his lifetime was never formally treated as a heretic by the Carthaginian church, then the ambiguous situation must have continued in Carthage till at least the second decade of the third century. 39 41 42

40 Martyrdom of Perpetua 1.5. Martyrdom of Perpetua 11.1–12.7. Martyrdom of Perpetua 13.1–6. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 63.

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In Asia the Great Church did not settle down to live with ambiguity over whether it was possible to live with Montanism in the way Catholic and Protestant churches in the twentieth century lived with the charismatic renewal movement – an analogy, perhaps an imperfect one, which Rankin draws.43 On the contrary, as Eusebius’ detailed account shows, there was a constellation of powerful figures, mostly bishops, who came down against the New Prophecy. In addition to Eusebius’ anonymous source, there was Apollinarius, bishop of Hierapolis (Pamukkale);44 Apollonius, ‘an ecclesiastical writer’,45 not certainly Phrygian,46 who probably wrote in the first decade of the third century;47 Miltiades;48 Bishop Aberkios of Hierapolis (Koçhisar), for whom the anonymous source wrote; Bishops Zoticus of Comana and Julian of Apamea (Dinar), who tried to prove Maximillla wrong. In probably the first decade of the third century, Serapion, bishop of Antioch, wrote a letter to Caricus and Pontius (otherwise unknown), warning against the New Prophecy:49 although called a ‘private letter’ (ἰδίᾳ ἐπιστολῇ), this text collected signatures from ‘several bishops’,50 including Aurelius Kyrenios (Quirinius), a martyr, and Aelius Publius Julius, bishop of Debeltum, who in his subscription refers to the blessed (i.e. the late) Bishop Sotas of Anchialus, who tried to cast the demon out of Priscilla.51 Not only that, but Serapion attached to his letter Apollinarius’ anti-Montanist text, which (Tabbernee argues) was itself an episcopal letter rather than a treatise.52 When Serapion adopted and publicized Apollinarius’ letter, that text was twenty or even thirty years old, depending on the exact dates when each wrote. But Apollinarius had been a pioneer in opposing Montanism in the lifetime of Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla and (in Tabbernee’s words) ‘at a time when . . . they had not yet begun to move outside the parameters of what was deemed acceptable by “mainstream” Christianity’.53 It is impossible to tell how many people had read it between the 43 44 45 46

47 48

49 51 52 53

Rankin, Tertullian and the Church, 41 n.1. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.1: ‘and with him many other men of ability’, Eusebius continues. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.1. Although as my colleague Dr Bernard Doherty points out to me, with a name like Apollonius, why not? An extremely common name in Phrygia. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 45–9. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.17.1–5, cf. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 12–15. 50 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.19.1–2. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.19.3. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.19.3. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 17–20. Tabbernee, Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 16.

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time it was written and the time Serapion packaged a copy of it together with his own anti-Montanist letter; but afterwards, Serapion’s letter, too, continued attracting episcopal subscribers for some time. Serapion himself was succeeded as bishop of Antioch by Asclepiades in the first decade of the third century,54 but Aurelius Kyrenios (Quirinius), who subscribed to Serapion’s letter, must have done so after the constitutio Antoniniana gave him the name of Aurelius in 212. The numerous signatories, mostly episcopal, and the critical mass of opponents of Montanism, give some idea of the density of the churches on the ground, in Phrygia in particular, and speak somewhat in favour of Calder’s argument to the effect that the area between the Maeander and the Hermus valleys ‘was largely Christian in the third century’.55 Nor are the great routes inland via Phrygia the only districts where there is evidence of an increased Christian presence in the generation after Montanus.

clergy at temenothyrae From the district of Temenothyrae (Uşak) there is a group of gravestones, mostly now in the Uşak Archaeological Museum and mostly commemorating clergy, which must be Montanist. In Tabbernee’s Montanist Inscriptions and Testimonia (IMont) they are numbers 3 to 8, and the diagnostic point connecting them to the New Prophecy is in IMont 4,56 which (as misfortune will have it) is the one of the group which is no longer extant. Discovered by Karl Buresch in the ruins of the Church of Constantine and Helena at Uşak in 1895, it was published in 1902 by Alfred Körte,57 without any drawings or photographs. The text, however, is Διογᾶς ἐβίσκο- | πος Ἀμμίῳ πρεσ- | βυτέρᾳ μνήμης | χάριν. 4| Diogas, bishop, (set up this memorial) for Ammion, presbytera, in memoriam.

A distinctive feature of the Montanist churches vis-à-vis the Great Church was that they had female clergy,58 and therefore any chance that the epitaph might come from a non-Montanist context is ruled out. Tabbernee discusses the terminology and argues that ‘it is impossible to consider

54 56 58

55 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 6.11.4. Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 316. 57 ICG 1372. IMont, 66–72. Körte, Inscriptiones bureschianae, 31 no. 55. Trevett assembles the multiple literary sources and discusses clericalization of women in Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy, 185–97.

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πρεσβυτέρα here as simply indicating an elderly lady’;59 but the date of the stone makes it too early for πρεσβυτέρα to refer to the superior of a monastic community of women. Diogas, dedicator of Ammion’s gravestone, was also the dedicator, at a similar date, of IMont 3,60 the gravestone of Bishop Artemidorus: Δειογᾶς Ἀρτεμιδώρῳ ἐβισκόπῳ | ἐκ{κ} τοῦ κυριακοῦ μνήμης χάριν. Diogas (set up this memorial) for Artemidorus, bishop, out of church funds, in memoriam.

The great difference is that this gravestone still exists: a Type F Uşak doorstone,61 with the text carved above, and in the transom over the door a circular ‘wreath shaped symbol’62 surrounding a cross, all above a three-legged table. This, as Elsa Gibson notes, is a feature shared by three inscriptions in this group: ‘a cross or communion paten within a circular wreath’.63 While much of the decoration consists of ordinary images and symbols which might have been carved into the gravestone at the workshop where it was made, and before there was a buyer for the stone, the communion paten (as Tabbernee argues, following Gibson and I. Ševčenko) shows that the deceased was ‘a member of the clergy authorized to celebrate the Eucharist’.64 I doubt, pace Gibson, if the funding of the memorial ἐκ{κ} τοῦ κυριακοῦ is enough to prove that Artemidorus personally was a poor man,65 even though comparable epitaphs do not have the phrase. Gibson translates the phrase as ‘“from ecclesiastical money”, or more properly, “from the Lord’s money”’ and adds that ‘a number of substantives can be understood. I do not believe that the word itself is a substantive, κυριακόν, “church.”’66 Tabbernee translates ἐκ{κ} τοῦ κυριακοῦ as ‘from church funds’ without comment.67 A relevant parallel might be the passage in Origen’s Excerpts on the Psalms where (prompted by ‘The wicked borrow, and do not pay back, but the righteous are generous and keep giving’68) Origen falls to discussing the parable of the talents and the

59 60

61 62 64 65 66

IMont, 68. ICG 1371. IMont, 62–6. There is a small difference in spelling, which is of no importance – it is certain that the same person is referred to (see Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 437). Following the typology in Waelkens, Die kleinasiatischen Türsteine, 3–20 and Plate 107. 63 IMont, 62. Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 433. IMont, 64; cf. Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 437. Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 436. 67 68 Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 436. IMont, 62. Psalm 37[36].21.

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servant who says, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’69 He comments,70 One should repay the principal with interest from one’s administration and business activity. Otherwise, it is better not to borrow in the first place, especially from the Lord’s treasury (τὰ τοῦ ταμείου τοῦ Κυριακοῦ), rather than to lose the king’s money.

Here the noun involved is ταμεῖον, ‘treasury’. Figurative language is involved, so that Origen’s advice concerns gifts or advantages one is given in life, rather than an actual loan from church funds; even so, it would be possible to supplement ἐκ τοῦ κυριακοῦ and make it into ἐκ τοῦ κυριακοῦ [ταμείου] without changing the meaning.71 Tabbernee assigns the memorials for Ammion and for Artemidorus to the first decade of the third century, more or less when Serapion was penning his not-so-private letter to Caricus and Pontius advising them against the New Prophecy, and when the writer of the frame narrative of the Martyrdom of Perpetua was saying ‘we recognise and honour new prophecies’. At Temenothyrae, the Montanists had a bishop, they had enough in the church treasury to give him a very decent monument, and they also had a suitable person lined up to succeed him. The date when the mantle of Artemidorus fell on Diogas,72 however, was almost certainly earlier than the date Tabbernee gives. In a new study of the Uşak clergy inscriptions, Mitchell re-examines the monuments, and argues on stylistic grounds and on the grounds of the use of the pseudo-praenomen Aurelius/Aurelia that the Artemidorus gravestone was made about 180 and that Bishop Diogas was in office from then on for about thirty years.73 Diogas, whose name appears in three of these texts and links the group together, in the fullness of time went the way of all flesh. His own memorial is IMont 5,74 dated by Tabbernee to the second quarter of the third century, but by Mitchell to the vicinity of 212 or 215.75 It is a Type G Uşak 1 doorstone with two doors, and its iconography shows that

69 70

71

72 74

Matthew 25.20. Origen Excerpta in Psalmos PG 17 p.132 line 34: Εἰ δὲ μὴ, κρεῖττόν ἐστι τὴν ἀρχὴν μὴ δανείσασθαι, μάλιστα τὰ τοῦ ταμείου τοῦ Κυριακοῦ, ἢ ἀπολέσαι τὰ τοῦ βασιλέως χρήματα. Mitchell notes (‘Epigraphic Probe’, 182 n.26) a reference to the κυριακὸν ταμεῖον, meaning ‘imperial treasury’, in SEG 35.1355, from Pontus – a parallel which elucidates Origen’s imagery. 73 Cf. 2 Kings 2.13. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 185–7. 75 ICG 1373. IMont, 72–6. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 186.

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Diogas was a married man: in the left-hand door a lady’s accoutrements are depicted: hand mirror, comb, basket, and jar; but in the right-hand door there is a large wreath-shaped symbol with a cross near its centre, above a two-legged table.76 Gibson calls this item symbol a ‘cross or communion paten’,77 but Tabbernee discusses it at greater length and raises the suggestion that the circular design as a whole is the communion paten, with a panis quadratus in the middle78 – a panis quadratus as represented elsewhere on Phrygian gravestones being a circular loaf of bread ‘marked with a deep cross, presumably with a bread stamp’.79 Diogas’ wife survived him and dedicated the memorial: Αὐρ[ηλία] Τατιανὴ ἑαυτῇ ζῶσα σεαυτῇ καὶ Διογᾷ συνβ[ί]ῳ | ἐβισκόπῳ μνήμης χάριν. Aur[elia] Tatiane, while living, (set up this memorial) for herself and for Bishop Diogas, her husband, in memoriam.

The majority of free people in the Roman empire were non-citizens until the Emperor Caracalla enacted citizenship in 212; those who received citizenship at that time often added ‘Aurelia’ (or in a man’s case ‘Aurelius’), borrowed from the emperor’s family name, to their names. This is why Tatiane was Aurelia Tatiane: and therefore the form of her name dates the gravestone after 212.80 The substantial-sized memorial she set up for her husband situates Christianity solidly within the local context: it is a familiar-looking doorstone, an appropriate tribute to a Phrygian Roman couple from the better-off social strata, but also an assertive reminder of Diogas’ Christian priesthood. Three more gravestones, dated by Mitchell before 212, but by Tabbernee to the second quarter of the third century, belong to the group. IMont 6,81 a Type F Uşak 1 doorstone commemorating Loukios and his wife Tatia, is only just over half the size of the Diogas memorial (0.8 metres wide as against 1.46 metres), but is similar in having two doors: one to the left with ladies’ accoutrements and one to the right with a cross

76 79

80

81

77 78 IMont, 73. Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 438. IMont, 75. Cf. IMont, 65. A Byzantine circular bread stamp was found in the surface survey at Pepuza in 2002, 7.5 cm across, with a design which divides the circular loaf into four segments, each marked with a Byzantine cross (Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 188–9 and Fig. 10.39). Tabbernee and Lampe draw attention (188) to the correspondence with the design carved on some of the Uşak clergy inscriptions. Cf. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 186; Mitchell argues that the Uşak clergy inscriptions (and the parallels which he cites) should be dated before 212, except those which use the Aurelius/Aurelia name. ICG 1374. IMont, 76–9.

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within a wreath above a three-legged (communion) table. The stone was dedicated by Loukios’ aunt (or possibly cousin82), which presumably means that it was set up after both Loukios and Tatia were dead. She writes, Μαρκία Λουκίῳ ἀδελφ[ο]τέκνῳ καὶ Τατίᾳ τῇ γ[υ]- | ναικὶ αὐτοῦ μνήμης χάριν. Markia (set up this memorial) for Loukios her brother’s son and for Tatia his wife, in memoriam.

Note that this one does not say that Loukios was a clergyman: the point will be discussed below. IMont 7 is a Type G Uşak 1 doorstone with two doors, like the Diogas stone and the Loukios stone in that it has ladies’ accoutrements in the lefthand door and a two-legged (communion) table in the right-hand door with the communion paten/Eucharistic bread symbol above it. The text is Ἀσκληπιάδης Μέλτης καὶ σεαυτῷ μνήμης χάριν. Asklepiades (set up this memorial) for Melte and for himself, in memoriam.

Marc Waelkens suggested that the communion paten/Eucharistic bread symbol might merely be a sign of Montanism and might not show that the deceased was a clergyman,83 but both Gibson and Tabbernee argue that the way the doorstones represent accoutrements relating to the deceased’s activities in life suggests strongly that the communion table and Eucharistic bread point to a priest and not a layman.84 The last of the group, IMont 8, is a Type G Uşak 1 doorstone,85 but does not have any names preserved, and the remaining text is only | ἀνέτ- | ησεν | | μνήμης χ- |άριν | [N or M] set up (this memorial), in memoriam.

On this one, the ladies’ accoutrements in the left-hand door (comb, mirror, jar) are supplemented at the bottom with a pruning hook and a hatchet, while on the right the two-legged (communion) table with communion paten/Eucharistic bread symbol above is supplemented with a wool-bow (the tool used to separate shorn wool) below. Gibson suggested that the multiple representations indicated that the gravestone had been

82 84

83 IMont, 78. ICG 1375. Waelkens, Die kleinasiatischen Türsteine, 149. 85 Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 437; IMont, 81. ICG 1376. IMont, 82–6.

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for three deceased persons,86 but Tabbernee is surely right to find this unconvincing:87 he posits that the husband concerned was involved in both viticulture and the wool industry,88 as well as being a clergyman. Mitchell discusses the Uşak clergy inscriptions together with some comparable local gravestones which he classifies as non-Christian;89 in his treatment of IMont 6, 7, and 8 (which he numbers as 7, 8, and 9 in his article) he expresses a different view about the imagery which here has been referred to in Tabbernee’s terms as representing a communion table and a paten with Eucharistic bread. His view is that IMont 6, 7, and 8 ‘were not made for members of the clergy, unless their titles were omitted’.90 This is true, and Mitchell’s analysis is to the effect that it means that Loukios, Asclepiades, and the deceased of IMont 8 were Christians but not clergy. I myself find his argument from silence weak, especially since Aberkios in his epitaph (see Chapter 6) does not state that he was a bishop, even though he was. Later practice ran very much towards recording episcopal status in epitaphs; but at this early date no convention existed yet, so that Aberkios’ omitting to mention that he was a bishop would not have provoked any surprise. The factors which were relevant in the cases of the memorials of Loukios, Asclepiades, and the deceased of IMont 8 may be thought to have been similar. But the argument from silence is not Mitchell’s only point in favour of his theory: he reads the circular symbol not as a paten with Eucharistic bread but ‘less literally, as a representation of the triumph of Christianity, the cross within a wreath, combined . . . with a design of the sun’s rays . . . transforming a simple wreath into a resplendent crown’. The table he thinks ‘intended to evoke the commemorative meals . . . to honour the dead’. Following Thonemann, he notes that elaborate tables were ‘a universally recognised status symbol’ in funerary art from the Hellenistic world and the eastern Roman provinces.91 Mitchell’s description of his reading of the images as ‘less literal’ than the interpretation which sees them as combining to form a symbol for Christian priesthood is surprising, in view of his reductive response to the table as (only) a status symbol and essentially unconnected with the circular image above it, which he does recognize as having a Christian

86 88

89 91

87 Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, 438. IMont, 84–5. On the iconographic attributes relevant to different occupations in Roman Phrygia see Waelkens, ‘Phrygian Votive and Tombstones’, 277–88. 90 Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 188. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 183. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 183–4.

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import. On the Loukios gravestone, IMont 6, the circular symbol overlaps the tabletop and appears to invite the viewer to see the images as linked in meaning, while on the Artemidorus gravestone, IMont 3, the table is a squat shape beneath the (larger) circular image, the two representations surrounded above and below by foliage and geometric designs: the circular symbol and the table are the only objects implicitly reflecting the life of the deceased in the world. This, like the overlap on the Loukios gravestone, appears to invite the viewer to consider a link in meaning between the two images. Accordingly, Mitchell’s attempt to decouple the table from the communion paten and Eucharistic bread is not persuasive. There are a good many more inscriptions from Phrygia commemorating Christians, and in many cases there has been discussion in the modern literature over whether they ought to be linked to the Montanist or non-Montanist Christian communities. Take, for example, IMont 9, a Type F (or J) Uşak 2 doorstone preserved at Çarıkköy, about 10 kilometres east of Uşak, in the territory of Trajanopolis,92 and ascribed by Tabbernee to the first quarter of the third century. The text is Θεοδώρου | χρειστιανοῦ | μνήμης χάριν [Tomb] of Theodoros, a Christian, in memoriam.

This stone, from a similar place and time, is not necessarily associated with the Montanist community. Its appearance, in any case, is in some ways dissimilar to the Uşak clergy inscriptions, which may all have been manufactured in the same workshop – a workshop which may, if Waelkens is right, have had a strong Montanist connection.93 Most Christian gravestones from Phrygia, however, lack the kind of point of distinction which the Uşak clergy inscriptions have – that is, the clear Montanist inference which must be drawn from Ammion’s rank as a female presbyter. It would not be legitimate to suppose that a particular one or a particular group must be Montanist only because Montanism was the Phrygian heresy and was important in Phrygia for centuries: after all, 92 93

ICG 1287. IMont, 89. Waelkens, Die kleinasiatischen Türsteine, 145: Waelkens argues that the workshop moved from Trajanopolis to Temenothyrae in the early third century and served a local (Montanist) community (cf. also MAMA 10.xxxvii). Tabbernee (IMont, 85) expresses reservations, based on the fact it was unlikely that the workshop could produce work exclusively for one group of customers. Mitchell (‘Epigraphic Probe’, 172–3) is cautious over the idea of a move for the workshop, noting that ‘the natural headquarters for such a workshop would be close to the quarry itself’ and that finished or half-finished items could be moved from there and completed at their eventual destinations.

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Aberkios, with his anti-Montanist track record, was buried at the same date or a little earlier, with a gravestone which bears a lengthy poetic epitaph of his own composition, which will be discussed below. Both sides in that dispute, then, were beginning to make their mark on the landscape as the second century ended.

tymion and pepuza Montanus, during the decennium mirabile between the beginning of his prophecies in Ardabau and his death, fixed on Pepuza and Tymion as the new Jerusalem.94 The location of Tymion and Pepuza was unknown until 2000, but in that year the location of Tymion was inferred from an inscription bought by the Uşak Archaeological Museum from Murat Altıner, who had transported the item from his grandfather’s house at Susuzören (18 kilometres south of Uşak) in 1998.95A site near Karayakuplu was identified a little later by Tabbernee and Lampe as Pepuza, and this site is now regarded by well-qualified critics as much more likely to be Pepuza than not.96 The Tymion inscription is a copy of an imperial rescript to the tenant farmers (coloni) of Tymion and Simoe, in Latin, with heading in Greek:97 Ἐγγεγραμένον | καὶ ἀντιβεβλημένον ἐκ τεύχους | [βιβλιδί]ω̣ν ἐπιδοθέντων τοῖς κυρίοις αὐτοκρά- | [τορσι καὶ] π̣ροτεθέντων ἐν περιστόῳ ̣ Θερμῶν Τρα- 4| ϊανῶν ἀντιγραφῆς καθὼς ὑπογέγραπται· [- - - - - - -] Aug(ustas) ADPEDIPATA dominis nn (= nostris) Antonino Pio | [Aug(usto) et Sep(timio)] Geta Caesare co(n)s(ulibus) Imp(erator) Caesar | L (ucius) Septimius | [Severus P]ius Pertinax Augustus Arabicus Adiabenicus 8| [Parthic]us Maximus et Imp(erator) Caesar M(arcus) Aurelius Anto- | [ninus Pi]us Augustus colonis Tymiorum et Simoen- | [sium] Proc(urator) noster i [nte]rponet se adversum in- |[licitas] exactiones et ad[ver]sum perseverantes ut 94

95 96

97

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.2; Hvidt argues that ‘when the Montanists appointed Pepuza in Phrygia to be the new Jerusalem, they challenged the authority of all governing ecclesial seats’ (Christian Prophecy, 89). This challenge is indeed implicit in the language of the ‘new Jerusalem’, although it may be doubted whether throwing out a challenge in those terms was altogether intentional. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 69. Gnoli, in his review of Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, writes of ‘a reliable identification of the very important site of Pepouza’, while Mitchell, in his review of the book, writes of the location being ‘a highly plausible site for Pepuza itself’ (490). Elsewhere, he phrases his assessment by writing of ‘a strong, but not definitive, case for identifying this [site] as Pepouza’ (‘Epigraphic Probe’, 169). Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 58.

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Figure 6 West-Central Phrygia. © William Tabbernee. Reprinted by permission

e[xi]- 12| [gant i]nstanti[ssime muner?]ạ. Aut si res ma«i»orem v[i]- | [gorem]desider[abit non cu]nctabitur at praesidem | [provi]nciae [Asiae? defender]e eas personas adver- | [sum i]nlic[ite munera? exigentes? in] officii sui modum. 16| Greek Recorded and verified, out of a volume [of petiti]ons presented to the Lords Emper [ors] and displayed in the colonnade of the Baths of Tra[jan], (the text) of a rescript (is) as it is written below: Latin [(Issued) on the . . .] of the month . . ., when our Lords Antoninus Pius [Augustus, and Septimius] Geta Caesar were consuls. Emperor Caesar Lucius Septimius [Severus P]ius Pertinax Augustus Arabicus Adiabenicus [Parthic]us Maximus and Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Anto[ninus Pi]us Augustus to the tenant farmers among the Tymians and the Simoen[sians]: ‘Our procurator will s[e]t himself against un[lawful] exactions and ag[ain]st those who continue to a[sk in a very d]emand[ing way for due]s. If, however, the matter requi[res] a higher a

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[uthority], he (i.e. the procurator), [in] the manner of his office, will [not he]sitate to [defen]d these persons (i.e. the tenant farmers) before the governor [of the provi]nce [of Asia] again[st those who in an u]nlaw[ful way ask for dues].’

The year was 205 (or 208),98 and the situation was that tenants on an estate owned by the emperor, which included the villages of Tymion and Simoe, had presented a petition to the emperors, in which they complained of having to face demands for some kind of exactions or dues (exactiones, line 12). It is not clear who had succeeded (in the past) in collecting what kind of exactiones from the emperors’ tenants. Tabbernee argues that the exactiones cannot have been imperial taxes collected by the procurator, since the emperors’ officials, drafting the rescript in Rome, would hardly have described imperial taxes as ‘un[lawful]’;99 but on the analogy of an inscription put up in the reign of the Emperor Philip (244–249) on an imperial estate at Yapılcan in the upper Tembris valley, some 100 kilometres north-east of Uşak, he suggests that the tenants’ complaint to the emperors may have concerned persons who should have been protecting the tenants but were in fact extorting money – such as officers, soldiers, city magistrates, subordinate imperial agents.100 Other parallel instances are collected in Tor Hauken’s Petition and Response. At Ağa Bey Köyü, in Lydia, a petition to two or more emperors from tenants on an imperial estate in the Severan (197–211) or the Philippian (244–249) period complains of actions by frumentarii (army supply agents/secret policemen) and soldiers who have accompanied them on to the estate.101 Another petition, from Kemaliye in the territory of Philadelphia, complains of a military unit which has trespassed on an imperial estate.102 Apparently the incidents which had taken place were similar.103 Pepuza, about 10 kilometres south of Tymion, was not (as far as one can tell) part of the same imperial estate, although Eusebius’ source

98 99 100 101

102 103

Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 74. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 61. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 62 and n.49. Hauken 3 (= Keil and Premerstein 55); frumentarii (φρομεν[ταρι]-), line 1. ‘Secret police’ and related terms are used in this book with due regard to the caution expressed by Christopher J. Fuhrmann in Policing the Roman Empire, 151–5 – especially at 151 (‘The emperors never established a formal, specialized secret service . . .’). Hauken 4 (= Keil and Premerstein 28). Hauken comments (43) on frumentarii causing trouble at Kemaliye, Kavacık, Kasar, and Demirci. Some of the petitions include reference to ordinary dispute-resolution procedures (i.e. within the relevant province) having failed.

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Apollonius did refer to both Pepuza and Tymion as ‘small cities of Phrygia’ (πόλεις . . . μικραὶ τῆς Φρυγίας).104 A settlement on an imperial estate was not technically speaking a ‘city’ (πόλις), but Apollonius was probably not interested in the exact statuses of the communities. The site of Pepuza is in the Ulubey canyon at a point south-west of Karayakuplu, where it widens out, and there is surface evidence of a sizeable ancient settlement.105 There is a rock-cut monastery 1.2 kilometres west of the settlement, which Tabbernee identifies as the monastery of Euthymius, who was at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and signed as ‘Euthymius, hegumenus Pepuzentium’ (‘superior of the Pepuzans’).106 Mitchell, in his review of Tabbernee’s and Lampe’s Pepouza and Tymion, observes that although the monastery is discussed in detail, ‘no dating evidence is provided’. His suggestion, based on parallels from elsewhere in Phrygia and from Cappadocia, is that the monastery should be dated after the extirpation of Montanism in the sixth century (by John of Ephesus).107 Therefore, although the monastery is a prepossessing feature of the site identified in 2000, it probably should be eliminated from consideration for the purposes of reflecting on what Pepuza was in the days of Montanus and the prophetesses, and in the following decades. There was an aqueduct, of unknown date, which has been observed in part and whose plan is not yet fully understood, which brought water into Pepuza.108 There was a bridge, at the point where the Roman road which ran south–north through the site crossed the river:109 remains of the middle pier of the bridge survive, but the idea that it is ‘probably of the Severan period’ seems to be attributable to Gnoli110 – I fail to find it in the work by Lampe which Gnoli was reviewing. If Gnoli’s date were correct it would mesh well with the theory that Pepuza was growing and developing at or near the time when Montanus and the prophetesses made it their headquarters. In the centre of the settlement area on a terrace above 104 105 106 107 108

109 110

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.2. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 95–102. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 97–100. Mitchell, review of Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 492. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 163–6; and note in relation to the rock-cut passages which they identify as a ‘donkey-path’, that Mitchell describes them as ‘certainly, and interestingly, remains of an aqueduct system’ (review of Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 491). Tabbernee and Lampe, too, have identified water pipes, but further investigation would be needed to make the design of the water-supply system clear. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 165. Gnoli, review of Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion.

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the river there are traces of a large public building, of more than 35 metres by c.23 metres, aligned west–east. This building had Byzantine substructural walls, and its alignment makes it a candidate for identification as a basilica.111 There was a monumental west entrance. This building was destroyed and another building constructed on the site: Tabbernee and Lampe argue that this may be why no apse can be observed in the remains so far identified of the public building.112 The hypogeum mentioned briefly in Chapter 4 (which Tabbernee and Lampe think of as possibly being where the shrine of Montanus and the prophetesses once was) is underneath the ‘basilica terrace’, as they call it, and may have extended under the public building. Excavation would be required to investigate effectively whether the public building might ever have been a church. Hierocles’ Synekdemos (‘Travelling-Companion’), a fifth–sixthcentury guidebook, lists Pepuza in its section recording the cities and bishoprics of Phrygia Pacatiana.113 This indicates that at some date it gained city status, which it seems Tymion never did. Only further excavation, of which I understand there is no prospect in the near future, will determine when the road and bridge through Pepuza were built, and what the basilica building and the site as a whole amounted to; however, it is clear that by moving their endeavours there, Montanus and the prophetesses were deliberately moving away from the position in provincial society which they were used to and had been born into. What Mitchell observes in the case of Bishops Artemidorus and Diogas is that they set up burial monuments appropriate to their status and similar to monuments made for the curial class at Temenothyrae: ‘they belonged to a religious movement that emerged from the mainstream of provincial society’.114 Montanus and the prophetesses, by contrast, had moved away from a similar social group, or, indeed, from exactly the same social group: having argued for a location of Ardabau in the territory of Temenothyrae,115 Mitchell also argues that Artemidorus and Diogas, whose memorials he has persuasively dated earlier than previous scholars, must have been personally acquainted with Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla.116 Going to Pepuza, Mitchell argues, was a rejection of the element of society which they had once enjoyed, as ‘relatively wealthy inhabitants of the region’.117

111 112 113 114 116

Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 165–7. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 248–9. Hierocles Synekdemos 667.2–10; cf. Tabbernee and Lampe, Pepouza and Tymion, 17. 115 Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 193. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 170. 117 Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 193. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 194.

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Mitchell goes on to draw the inference that the persons commemorated in the Uşak clergy inscriptions were not Montanists, but were actually the opponents of the new prophets who went to Pepuza. His argument is in effect that the Uşak clergy affirmed Roman provincial society, to the degree of remaining as part of it, while the Montanus faction rejected it. Two of the points he makes in favour of this interpretation of the data seem to favour his views equivocally, if at all: he notes how ‘desire for leadership’, φιλοπρωτεία,118 was (according to Eusebius’ anonymous source) one of the things which caused Montanus to begin prophesying, and he reflects on how important competitiveness was in the political life of cities in Roman Asia; he then portrays Montanus and his followers as making no accommodation with that competitiveness.119 This lacks cogency: if Montanus was ambitious, as the anonymous anti-Montanist thought, why reject ambition by going to Pepuza? But if moving to Pepuza indicated renunciation of worldly competition, how did the anonymous anti-Montanist’s theory of Montanus’ motive (φιλοπρωτεία) appear credible? Mitchell’s second point is that the way the view (arising from a particular reading of Revelation) of Pepuza and Tymion as the place where the new Jerusalem will descend to earth entails an ‘uncompromising and rejectionist stance’ towards the strategies which enabled Artemidorus and Diogas to continue as part of the provincial curial class at Temenothyrae.120 But this kind of literal biblical interpretation is only a matter of degree and is not necessarily diagnostic of an uncompromising and rejectionist stance: take Papias’ views on the millennium, in particular ‘his statement that there will be a period of some thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, and that the kingdom of Christ will be set up in material form on this very earth’. This claim, Eusebius says, came ‘through a misunderstanding of the apostolic accounts’,121 but he does not link it to any idea of Papias’ being anything other than a wellintegrated Christian writer. In fact, given the multiplicity of accounts of the early Montanists preserved in Eusebius, Epiphanius, and elsewhere, the absence of any mention of Artemidorus and Diogas in the literary sources must count as a point against the claim that they were opponents of the Montanists. A number of figures of only modest importance are mentioned by name in the tradition, so why would Artemidorus and Diogas go unmentioned, if 118 120

119 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.7. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 195. 121 Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 194–5. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 3.39.12.

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they were against the New Prophecy? A weightier point against Mitchell’s theory of the Uşak clergy as non-Montanist, however, is the clear reference to Ammion as a female presbyter. Mitchell puts some effort into accounting for her on the supposition that she was a Great Church presbyter,122 but he seems to draw a long bow when he cites Canon 11 of the Council of Phrygian Laodicea, datable in the 360s, to the effect that ‘so-called “female elders” or “female presidents” should not be established in the church’123 – Mitchell understands Ammion as a ‘female elder’ of the kind legislated against. This Canon was discussed in 2000 by Ute E. Eisen in Women Officeholders, and she makes a case for the view that ‘female elders’ (πρεσβυτίδες) presided over Christian congregations. She argues that Epiphanius’ claim that πρεσβυτίδες were the same as widows,124 and not analogous to priests [πρεσβύτεροι], is conditioned by his wish to misrepresent, by minimizing, the function women had in church life at or not long before his time about 375.125 She adds that women presided over church congregations in the Great Church and not only in schismatic groups: ‘until some time in the fourth century there were women presbyters, also called πρεσβυτίδες, active in the Church in Asia Minor’.126 The difficulty with Eisen’s supposition that women priests were relatively widespread in Asia Minor, but their existence downplayed to vanishing point by Epiphanius and others, is that it is a low-probability explanation of the extant data. Some ecclesiastical writers lacked the motives which Eisen ascribes to Epiphanius for writing women out of the priesthood – and yet the Council of Laodicea reference to female elders is isolated. It is likely, therefore, that Laodicea Canon 11 came into existence as a response to a particular incident. Accordingly, the Canon implies that some church somewhere in Asia 150 years after Ammion had one or more ‘female elders’ or ‘female presidents’ (whose office the Canon sought to eliminate). It is unlikely that it proves more than that: using it as if it implied that the difference in clericalization of women between Montanists and other Christians had been negligible at the end of the second century is far from satisfactory.

122 123

124 126

Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 196–7. Mitchell, ‘Epigraphic Probe’, 196 n.11. Laodicea Canon 11 (Joannou, 135): μὴ δεῖν τὰς λεγομένας πρεσβυτίδας ἤτοι προκαθημένας ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ καθίστασθαι. 125 Epiphanius Panarion 79. Eisen, Women Officeholders, 118–22. Eisen, Women Officeholders, 123.

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Peter Brown in Through the Eye of a Needle offers a nuanced commentary on countercultural living and (what he calls) ‘escape hatches’, writing of Christianity as an escape hatch of the kind Roman society had always provided ‘as places of consolation and as safety-valves for well-to-do persons who found the pace of life too fast and too expensive’. This analysis shows more sensitivity to social conditions than Mitchell’s claim that Montanus and the Pepuza faction must have been on the other side of a sectarian divide from the clergy commemorated at Uşak. For some Romans, Brown argues, philosophical sects had long provided spaces where moral rigour was combined with ‘a sense of deliverance from many of the burdens associated with the normal world’; and then, under the Christian empire (Brown’s focus is in the fourth century, but the social situation he describes is relevant in the second–third-century context of both Temenothyrae and Pepuza), the Christian churches were ‘the largest escape hatches that had ever been opened in the ancient world’.127 On this analysis, both Montanus’ disciples at Pepuza and the Christians at Temenothyrae were living counterculturally, while maintaining strong links with the secular world – Montanus and the prophetesses by touring, by discussing their views with sceptical voices in other cities (as at Ancyra), and by writing and circulating their countless books.

127

Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 47.

6 Aberkios of Hierapolis (Koçhisar) and His Gravestone

In the second half of the second century, the dialectic between Christianity as counterculture and Christianity as institutionally linked with the secular world had had a century and more to take shape. In Phrygia, in the first generation after Montanus’ death, his associates were awaiting the coming of the new Jerusalem in Pepuza, while Diogas and other Montanist clergy in Temenothyrae were being commemorated with fine doorstones. At this time, Aberkios,1 bishop of Hierapolis (Koçhisar) died at the age of seventy-one and left in his hometown a gravestone of an unusually interesting kind: the ‘queen of Christian inscriptions’.2 Now displayed in the Museo Pio Cristiano in the Vatican, this gravestone, and Aberkios himself, who wrote the text on it, form the subject of this chapter, while Chapter 7 will deal with the Life of Abercius, a related literary text from a later date. In 1881, Ramsay, travelling in Phrygia, in what used to be the territory of Hierapolis (Koçhisar), found at Kelendres (now Karadirek3) the dated

1

2

3

Thonemann notes that the correct Latin orthography of this Roman name must be Avircius, but that Abercius as a rendering into the Latin alphabet of Ἀβέρκιος has by now been ‘canonized in modern usage’ (‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 257 n.1). In this book I will spell the name as Aberkios, except when quoting. Eusebius writes ἀγαπητὲ Ἀυίρκιε Μάρκελλε (‘beloved Avircius Marcellus’, Church History 5.16.3). ICG 1597. So called for the first time in 1894 by de Rossi (‘Cippo sepolcrale di Abercio’, 65). 19.5 km north of Koçhisar.

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Figure 7 Alexander, Son of Antonios, Monument. Drawn by Jenni Irving

Aberkios of Hierapolis (Koçhisar) and His Gravestone

Figure 8 Aberkios Monument: Reconstruction in Museo Pio Cristiano. Photograph copyright © Brent Nongbri. Used by permission

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gravestone of Alexander son of Antonios, which was put up in 216.4 Wording from the epitaph of Aberkios as quoted in the Life of Abercius (which had been preserved for the modern world in the manuscript tradition) was incorporated in the text of the Alexander epitaph.5 Two years later, however, in 1883, on a visit to Koçhisar, Ramsay and J.R.S. Sterrett found two fragments of the Aberkios epitaph itself, from which Alexander, son of Antonios, had quoted.6 One fragment Ramsay gave to Sultan Abdul Hamid II, while keeping the other himself; in 1892, however, both parts were given to Pope Leo XIII and subsequently displayed in Rome in the Lateran Museum.7 The correspondence between the text on the stone and the text as handed down in the manuscript tradition of the Life of Abercius is exact, so that the Life can be used to supplement the letters on the stone and yield a full text of the epitaph:8 [ἐ]κλεκτῆς πόλεως ὁ πολεί[της] τοῦτ’ ἐποίη̣[σα] (1) [ζῶν, ἵ]ν’̣ ἔχω φανερ̣[ὴν] σώματος ἔνθα θέσιν· οὔνομ’ μαθητὴς ποιμένος ἁγνοῦ, [ὃς βόσκει προβάτων ἀγέλας ὄρεσιν πεδίοις τε,] (4) [ὀφθαλμοὺς ὃς ἔχει μεγάλους πάντῃ καθορῶντας.] [οὗτος γάρ μ’ ἐδίδαξε - - γράμματα πιστά
] εἰς Ῥώμη[ν ὃς ἔπεμψεν] ἐμὲν βασ̣ιλ̣̣ [ηΐδ’ ἀθρῆσαι] καὶ βασίλισσ̣[αν ἰδεῖν χρυσό]στολον χρυ̣[σοπέδιλον.] (8) λαὸν δ’ εἶδον ̣ ἐ̣[κεῖ λαμπρὰν] σφραγεῖδαν ἔ[χοντα], καὶ Συρίης πέ[δον εἶδα] καὶ ἄστεα πάν[τα, Νισῖβιν]

4

ICG 1598. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 720, 656: [ἐ]κ̣λεκτῆς πό|[λ]ε̣ως ὁ πολεί|[της] τοῦτ’ ̣ ἐποίη̣[σα] / [ζῶν, ἵ]ν’ ἔχω φανερ̣[ῶς]|σώματος ἔνθα|θέσιν. / οὔνομα| Ἀλέξανδρος Ἀντω|νίου, μαθητὴς| ποιμένος ἁγνοῦ. / οὐ μέντοι τύμβῳ|τις ἐμῷ ἕτερόν τι|να θήσει· / εἰ δ’ οὖν, Ῥω|μαίων τα[μ]είῳ θήσε[ι]|δισχείλια [χ]ρυσᾶ / καὶ [χ]ρηστῇ πατρίδ[ι]|Ἱεροπόλει χείλια|χρυσᾶ. / ἐγράφη ἔτει τʹ |μηνὶ ϛʹ, ζόντος.|εἰρήνη παράγουσιν καὶ| μν[η]σκομένοις περὶ ἡμ̣ῶν. ‘Citizen of a chosen city, I constructed this tomb while still living, in order that I might have here a splendid resting-place for my body. My name is Alexander son of Antonios, disciple of the holy shepherd. No one shall bury another in my grave; if he does, he shall pay 2000 denarii in gold to the Roman fisc and 1000 denarii in gold to my good homeland of Hierapolis. Written in year 300 [= 216], month 6, while I was still alive. Peace to those who pass by and remember me.’

5 6 7 8

Life of Abercius 77. First published in Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 425–7, no. 36. Mitchell, ‘Looking for Abercius’, 309. Text and translation here as in Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 258–9.

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Εὐφράτην διαβ̣[άς· πάν]τῃ δ’ ἔσχον συνο̣[μαίμους,] Π̣αῦ̣̣ λ̣ο̣ν ̣ ἔ̣χ̣ω̣ν ̣ ἐ̣π̣’ ὄ̣[χῳ]· Πίστις π̣[άντῃ δὲ προῆγε] (12) καὶ παρέθηκε̣ [τροφὴν] πάντῃ ἰχθὺν ἀ[πὸ πηγῆς] πανμεγέθη καθ[αρόν, οὗ] ἐδράξατο παρθέ[νος ἁγνή,] καὶ τοῦτον ἐπέ[δωκε φί]λ̣ιο̣̣ ις̣̣ ἐ̣σ̣θ̣ε̣[ῖν διὰ παντός,] [οἶνον χρηστὸν ἔχουσα κέρασμα διδοῦσα μετ’ ἄρτου.] (16) [ταῦτα παρεστὼς εἶπον Ἀβέρκιος ὧδε γραφῆναι,] [ἑβδομηκοστὸν ἔτος καὶ δεύτερον ἦγον ἀληθῶς.] [ταῦθ’ ὁ νοῶν εὔξαιτο ὑπὲρ Ἀβερκίου πᾶς ὁ συνῳδός.] οὐ μέντοι τύμβῳ τις ἐμῷ ἕτερόν τινα θήσει. (20) εἰ δ’ οὖν, Ῥωμαίων ταμείῳ θήσε[ι] δισχείλια [χ]ρῦσα καὶ χ̣ρηστῇ πατρίδι Ἱεροπόλει χείλια χρυσά. Citizen of a chosen city, I constructed this tomb while still living, in order that I might have here a splendid resting-place for my body. My name is Abercius, disciple of the holy shepherd, who pastures his flock of sheep on the mountains and plains, and whose eyes are great and all-seeing. It was he who taught me trustworthy knowledge, and it was he who sent me to Rome, to see the queen of cities, and to see a Queen with golden robes and golden shoes. And I saw there a people with a shining seal; I saw, too, the plain of Syria and all its cities, even Nisibis, beyond the Euphrates. I found brothers everywhere, with Paul beside me on my wagon, Everywhere Faith led the way; everywhere it nourished me with the fish from the spring, great and pure, caught by a holy maiden. Everywhere she gave the fish to her dear ones to eat, with good wine, handing it to us mixed with bread. I, Abercius, stood by and dictated this, having reached my seventy-second year in all truth. Let all who understand and approve these words pray for Abercius. No one shall bury another in my grave; if he does, he shall pay 2000 denarii in gold to the Roman fisc and 1000 denarii in gold to my good homeland of Hierapolis.

This much-studied inscription is a very different matter in terms of length and detail from the briefer inscriptions commemorating Montanist clergy which were displayed at and around Temenothyrae across the generation following.9 In the years after the finding of the inscription, a small number of German Protestant scholars argued against identifying it as Christian;10 but scholars elsewhere found less difficulty in identifying its Christian references, even though in the nineteenth century fewer comparable ancient inscriptions were known than today. 9

10

Thonemann (‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 257) says that ‘[t]he bibliography . . . is vast’. Wischmeyer in 1980 estimated the number of relevant publications at 300 (‘Aberkiosinschrift als Grabepigramm’, 22), and there have been additions since. Ficker, ‘Heidnische Charakter’; Harnack, ‘Zur Aberkios-Inschrift’; Dieterich, Grabschrift des Aberkios. Dieterich, whose expertise was in Orphism and magical papyri, had perhaps a better excuse for deafness to the text’s plenteous biblical resonance than the other two.

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biblical and ecclesiastical echoes Biblical allusions run through the text, from the first word onwards. [ἐ]κλεκτῆς πόλεως echoes Sirach 49.6, where Jerusalem is called ‘the elect city of the sanctuary’.11 By using this phrase, Aberkios compliments little Hierapolis (his ‘good homeland’), but more importantly calls to mind biblical discourse about cities and citizenship: the Pauline exhortation that ‘our citizenship is in heaven’,12 and the idea in Hebrews that the heroes of faith have no permanent home in this world, but that God ‘has prepared a city for them’ in the next.13 With ‘disciple of the holy shepherd’ in line 3, Aberkios recalls ‘I am the good shepherd’,14 and perhaps also ‘He will feed his flock like a shepherd.’15 Then with ‘whose eyes are great and all-seeing’, in line 5, it may be that the sentiment in 2 Chronicles that ‘the eyes of the Lord range throughout the entire earth, to strengthen those whose heart is true to him’ is recalled.16 ‘He . . . taught me trustworthy knowledge’ (γράμματα πιστά) does not echo exact wording from the Bible, but the phrase should be compared with ‘the saying is sure’ in 1 Timothy17 – a second allusion to the Pauline corpus. In lines 7 and 8, Thonemann’s conjecture βασ̣ιλ̣̣ [ηΐδ’ must be right,18 and the idea that Rome is the Queen City is combined with a reference to the phrase ‘at your right hand stands the queen (βασίλισσα) in golden raiment’ in Psalm 45.19 But there is an added layer of complexity: the golden shoes are not mentioned in the Bible,

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The phrase [ἐκλ]εκτῆς [π]ό̣λ̣ε̣[ως . . . πολίτην] (‘a citizen . . . of an elect city’) is restored by the editors in line 11 of IMT Gran/Pariane 1103, the epitaph, from Çançavuş and perhaps dating to the first century ad, of an unnamed person who died in a fall while chasing a horse. The restoration is less than certain, but it is not impossible to infer that the phrase had a pedigree in the non-Christian Greek poetic tradition. Philippians 3.20. Hebrews 11.16: ‘as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them’ (νῦν δὲ κρείττονος [πατρίδος] ὀρέγονται, τοῦτ’ ἔστιν ἐπουρανίου. διὸ οὐκ ἐπαισχύνεται αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς θεὸς ἐπικαλεῖσθαι αὐτῶν, ἡτοίμασεν γὰρ αὐτοῖς πόλιν). 15 16 John 10.11. Isaiah 40.11. 2 Chronicles 16.9. ‘The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’, 1 Timothy 1.15. The exact biblical phrase (πιστὸς ὁ λόγος) cannot be made to fit into a hexameter, while γράμματα πιστά (dactyl, spondee) fits perfectly. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 258 n.6, improving on Wischmeyer, ‘Aberkiosinschrift als Grabepigramm’, 26, by observing that ‘in Anatolian verseinscriptions the usual form of the adjective in this metrical position is not βασιλίς but βασιληΐς’. Psalm 45 (44).9: παρέστη ἡ βασίλισσα ἐκ δεξιῶν σου ἐν ἱματισμῷ διαχρύσῳ.

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but they do feature in Sibylline Oracle 5, where the Sibyl inveighs against Babylon:20 αἰαῖ σοι, Βαβυλὼν χρυσόθρονε, χρυσοπέδιλε, πουλυετὴς βασίλεια μόνη κόσμοιο κρατοῦσα, ἡ τὸ πάλαι μεγάλη καὶ πάμπολις, οὐκέτι κείσῃ οὔρεσιν ἐν χρυσέοις καὶ νάμασιν Εὐφρήταο
Alas, alas for thee, O Babylon, For golden throne and golden sandal famed, Kingdom of many years and of the world Sole ruler, who wast great in olden time And city of all cities, thou no more Shalt lie in golden mountains and by streams Of the Euphrates . . .

‘Golden-throned’ (χρυσόθρονε) in the Sibylline Oracle, then, has become ‘golden-robed’ ([. . . χρυσό]στολον) in the epitaph, but ‘golden-sandalled’ (χρυσοπέδιλε) has remained the same except for a change to the case ending. Commenting on the echo of the Sibylline Oracle, Vera Hirschmann notes that when the holy shepherd brought Aberkios to Rome, he saw there the ‘new Babylon, which was like the old Babylon in its godlessness and hybris’.21 Psalm 45 (44).9 is quoted in Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 63, as Margherita Guarducci notes, arguing that the biblical queen dressed in gold is treated by Justin as a type of the church.22 If Guarducci’s reading is taken to be correct (as it probably should be), then Aberkios in the text of his epitaph is making the point that in the city which is the queen of the world, he came across the church, which in spiritual terms is a queen. When he writes of the ‘people with a shining seal’23 (line 9), Aberkios refers to the angel setting a seal on the servants of God in Revelation.24 The idea of ‘brothers everywhere’ (line 1125) draws on the

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Sibylline Oracle 5.434–7. Translation from Terry, The Sibylline Oracles. Hirschmann, ‘Untersuchungen zur Grabschrift des Aberkios’, 115: ‘das “neue Babylon”, das in seiner Gottlosigkeit und Hybris dem alten Babylon gleicht’. Guarducci, Epigrafia greca vol. 4, 384. λαὸν, and not δῆμον – in line with usage in the Septuagint: cf. Wirbelauer, ‘Aberkios, der Schüler des reinen Hirten’, 372. Revelation 7.2–3: ‘I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God, and he called with a loud voice . . . saying, “Do not damage the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have marked the servants of our God with a seal on their foreheads.”’ Using συνο̣[μαίμους] (literally, ‘blood-relatives’) as a poetic variation, instead of ἀδελφούς.

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characteristically Christian idea of fellow Christians as brothers26 – an idea with a Pauline track record,27 consistent with Aberkios’ reference in the same sentence (line 12) to Paul being in the carriage with him – and (same line) Faith leading the way.28 Next come ‘the fish from the spring’ (line 13) and the ‘holy maiden’ (line 14): that the fish indicates Jesus is clear,29 but some modern scholars have argued (counter-intuitively?) that the holy maiden is the church rather than the Virgin Mary.30 The wine mixed with bread (line 16) is a Eucharistic reference, while the combination of fish and bread may recall the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand.31 As Thonemann sums the matter up, ‘almost every phrase of the epigram is so chosen as to carry symbolic meaning for a Christian reader: the “holy shepherd”, the “people with a shining seal”, the “fish from the spring”’.32 Until recently, some scholars were describing this confection of biblical and theological reminiscence as the oldest surviving Christian inscription.33 H. Gregory Snyder in 2011, however, discussing NCE 156, a Valentinian inscription from Rome, argues that that item, which he dates

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Compare CIL 6.8987, together with McKechnie, ‘Christian Grave-Inscriptions from the Familia Caesaris’, 432. For instance in Paul’s wish to see the Thessalonian Christians again (2 Thessalonians 2.17: ‘As for us, brothers and sisters, when, for a short time, we were made orphans by being separated from you – in person, not in heart – we longed with great eagerness to see you face to face’). There are almost too many references to faith in the Pauline letters for it to be worth citing one, but 1 Corinthians 13.13 is as good as any: ‘And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three . . .’ The ΙΧΘΥΣ acrostic was known by Tertullian’s time at the turn of the second and third centuries: Tert. De bapt. 1.2: nos pisciculi secundum ΙΧΘΥΝ nostrum Iesum Christum in aqua nascimur (‘we, being little fishes, as Jesus Christ is our great Fish, begin our life in the water’). Dölger devotes a lengthy section of his book about the holy fish in the ancient world to the Aberkios inscription (Der heilige Fisch, 486–507). For instance, Ferrua and Balboni in ‘Epitaphium Abercii’, 157, who say that ipsa Virgo Maria perpetuo panem et vinum manducandum tradere nequiret (‘the Virgin Mary herself would be unable eternally to hand out bread and wine to eat’). Here the literal and the metaphorical seem to be mixed in an idiosyncratic way, particularly because the fish has been forgotten. Merkelbach reasons in two stages: Faith (line 12) equals the church, and the holy maiden equals Faith (‘Grabepigramm und Vita’, 127–8). Dölger, who once thought the church was meant, turned in 1922 to the view that the Virgin Mary was the ‘pure maiden’ referred to in the inscription (Der heilige Fisch, 487–8). Guarducci (Epigrafia greca vol. 4, 385) insists on Mary, not the church. Luke 9.16: ‘taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd’. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 260. For example, in 1992, Kearsley, in ‘Epitaph of Aberkios’, 181.

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in the Antonine period (138–192), is a better candidate to be described as the earliest.34 NCE 156, too, although the atmosphere is not identical, contains a farrago of references suited to a Christian context,35 including images with a biblical resonance and a selection of characteristically Johannine vocabulary.36 It would be better, however, to take the burden of ‘earliest’ off the shoulders of both these intriguing Christian texts.37 Calder in 1955 published a gravestone from Çeltikçi, in the Gediz district of Kütahya province, dated to 180 (Year 264 of the Sullan era):38 the deceased, Eutyches, is represented on the front of the stele in an aedicula (a representation of a pillared structure), facing the viewer, with a rounded object marked with a cross in his right hand. Behind his left hand is a bunch of grapes suspended from a horizontal bar; as Calder comments, ‘The bar and the stem, arranged in this pattern, necessarily form a Tau cross, the earliest form of the Christian symbol.’39 [ἔτους] σξδ μη(νὸς) Πανήμου [ ... ] | [Πό]πλις Σιλίκις Ὀλπιανὸς | [ὁ σύ]ντροφος ̣ αὐτοῦ κὲ Εὐτύ- | [χης κὲ] Ζωτικὴς οἱ γονεῖς αὐ- 4| [τοῦ κὲ] Ἀντίπατρος ὁ ἀδελ- | [φὸς] αὐτοῦ Εὐτύχη γλυκυ- | τάτῳ μνήμης χάριν. Year 264, in the month of Panemos. Poplis Silikis Olpianos his foster-brother, and Eutyches and Zotikes his parents, and Antipatros his brother, to most sweet Eutyches, in memoriam.

The object in Eutyches’ right hand is very similar to the panis quadratus carved on the Diogas doorstone from Uşak (see Chapter 5), and although the wording of the epitaph is neutral, not implying anything about the deceased’s having been a Christian, I take it that Calder is right to identify the Eutyches stone as ‘the earliest dated tombstone in the history of

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Snyder, ‘Second-Century Christian Inscription’, 194 and n.129, cf. Snyder, ‘Bed, Bath and Burial’, 305. Snyder, ‘Second-Century Christian Inscription’, 171–3. Snyder, ‘Second-Century Christian Inscription’, 173. Some of the angelos inscriptions from Thera may also be as early as the second century, and opinions differ on how many and which of these inscriptions were set up by Christians: the debate is summed up by Horsley and Luxford, who favour a Christian interpretation of the inscriptions and a late second- to early third-century dating (‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 160–9 and 177). ICG 1224. Calder, ‘Early-Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia’, no. 2, pp. 33–4, with Plate 2 (b) no. 2 (= MAMA 10 App. I, 181, 13). See also Mitchell, review of Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 202. Note the order of precedence, which results in the Roman citizen foster-brother being named in the epitaph before the parents of the deceased. Calder, ‘Early-Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia’, 34.

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Christianity’.40 He himself observed that ‘its Christian character [wa]s certain to be challenged’,41 but in view of the now greater number of known parallels, there is less cause to be anxious over the challenges Calder thought inevitable. He does not take the further step of identifying Eutyches as a clergyman, but the inference seems plausible. The Eutyches gravestone would have as good a claim as NCE 156 does to be thought ‘earliest’, if ‘earliest’ were still a crown which judges could award with confidence, but matters have moved forward. Calder’s caution in noting the inevitability of doubt over the Eutyches stone’s being Christian was appropriate in 1955, but there are important recent advances in knowledge in the field. On 9 May 2013, Mitchell gave, at the British Academy in London, a British Institute at Ankara lecture about Rome’s frontier with Isauria.42 A section of the lecture (‘an interlude’ in Mitchell’s words) deals with a number of early Christian inscriptions from the Çarşamba valley (south of Iconium (Konya)),43 which he assigns to a much earlier date than they have hitherto been believed to be from. His case is to the effect that they are from the second century, and were made by Christians from churches first established at the time of Paul. Mitchell’s arguments are persuasive, and mesh well with Calder’s view about the Eutyches stone. The time has come, therefore, to revise the view that Christians did not and could not disclose their existence in funerary monuments throughout all the sixteen or seventeen decades between Jesus’ death and the death of Aberkios. Sufficient evidence exists from Isauria and Phrygia to show that, locally, it was sometimes possible to display monuments which made the Christian identity of the deceased clear.

familia caesaris In this context I must revise some conclusions which I reached in 1999 about Roman Christian gravestones associated with the familia Caesaris (imperial household). In an article published in that year, I re-examined seven monuments, dating none earlier than 193 and none 40 41

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Calder, ‘Early-Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia’, 34. Calder, ‘Early-Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia’, 33. Bradley Hudson McLean in 2002, however, agreed with Calder (Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, 280). Mitchell, ‘Enemy Within’. Inscriptions discussed in the lecture include MAMA 8.164 (ICG 815); KILyk I 410 (= JHS 24.1904.272,5; ICG 813); MAMA 8.88 (=KILyk I 280; ICG 753); MAMA 8.63 (=KILyk I 249; ICG 747); ICG 752; KILyk I 282 (ICG 755); JHS 11 (1890) 162,12; MAMA 8.200 (=KILyk I 10; ICG 644).

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later than 234.44 When I wrote that ‘very early dates [could] be excluded with confidence’ in the case of the monument to Lucretia Hilara, wife of Viator,45 my confidence was misplaced, and (contrary to what I then wrote) it was not necessarily implausible to think that Hilara could have died as early as the reign of Antoninus Pius (136–161). And indeed, years of single rule after the death of Lucius Verus (169–177, 180–197) can also come into consideration as possible dates for Hilara’s death (which in 1999 I placed in 212 or later).46 Similarly, the monument to Callidromus/Leucas might be from a date before 197.47 The Prosenes sarcophagus, which is dated (217),48 is not an exact enough parallel to the more modest Christian gravestones examined in my article to make it axiomatic that they must belong, as it does, to the first third of the third century. Regrettably, therefore, there is even less certainty to be had in this connection than in 1999 I thought there was: some of the Christian familia Caesaris gravestones from Rome may be as early as NCE 156 and as the Eutyches stone from Çeltikçi and the Isaurian inscriptions studied by Mitchell. The Aberkios stone, however, with all its elaboration and complexity, and without its erstwhile designation as ‘earliest’, still represents an intriguing bridge between Eutyches and the Çarşamba valley monuments on the one hand and the situation in Rome on the other, because Aberkios travelled to Rome, and to Mesopotamia, and then returned to Phrygia where he ended his life. He, if anyone, would have been well placed to make comparisons between church life in the metropolis and in his own remote province. Evidently he was a patriot, in the sense of being an enthusiast for Rome: not only imaged as the ‘Queen City’ in the esoteric lines of his epitaph,49 but also designated as the recipient of 2,000 denarii in gold from anyone convicted of burying another corpse in Aberkios’ grave. 44 45 46

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McKechnie, ‘Christian Grave-Inscriptions from the Familia Caesaris’, 439. ILCV 348 (= CIL 6.9077). McKechnie, ‘Christian Grave-Inscriptions from the Familia Caesaris’, 436. 212 or later for the Hilara epitaph: 439. ILCV 575 (= CIL 14.1877); McKechnie, ‘Christian Grave-Inscriptions from the Familia Caesaris’, 437. ILCV 3332; cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian Grave-Inscriptions from the Familia Caesaris’, 433–5. Note line 19, ‘Let all who understand and approve these words pray for Aberkios.’ The obscurities of the text are genuine. Lines 7 and 8 (‘it was he who sent me to Rome, to see the queen of cities, and to see a Queen with golden robes and golden shoes’) were not expounded with complete accuracy until Thonemann studied them. He, however, was in substance following Wischmeyer, whose translation of εἰς Ῥώμη[ν ὃς ἔπεμψεν] ἐμὲν βασ̣ιλ̣̣ [ηΐδ’ ἀθρῆσαι] is ‘der mich nach Rom schickte, die Hauptstadt zu sehen’ (‘Die Aberkios-Inschrift’, 69).

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at the museum Margaret M. Mitchell, in her 2008 article, discusses how the Aberkios inscription is displayed in Rome, where (as noted above) it has been housed since 1892.50 Compared to some items in the Museo Pio Cristiano it is a relatively unassuming artefact: the preserved part of the stone is displayed on a plinth which describes it (in Latin), together with the circumstances in which it came to the Museum. Nearby there is a twothirds scale reconstruction (see Figure 8 above), made in line with the wishes of Giovanni Battista de Rossi at the time when the Aberkios inscription came to Rome,51 intended to display the Aberkios epitaph as a whole. Because most of the text as we have it is from the Life of Abercius and the preserved part of the monument is relatively small, the reconstruction has the lettering from the preserved fragments in red and the remainder, added from the Life of Abercius, in black. The plinth under the preserved fragments of the stone reads:52 Fragment of a grave-inscription brought from Asia, in which Abercius, bishop of Hieropolis in the second century, bears witness to the consensus of the whole Church on one faith. Abdul Hamid, emperor of the Turks, sent this as a gift to Pope Leo XIII in the year 1892.

Thus a modern and Roman Catholic view of the didactic value of the stone is laid out. Its point is to bear witness to the unity of the faith, and (since it is displayed in the Vatican) the idea is evidently to imply that Leo XIII, and Roman Catholics in general, are the heirs of Aberkios, and the nineteenth-century representatives of the faith which led him on his journey. Not that Aberkios himself was less of a propagandist for the kind of Christianity he favoured than were de Rossi and the lesser lights in Leo XIII’s service: the epitaph can indeed be read as bearing witness to the unity of the faith. But in the second century, as also much later, what that faith amounted to was contested – and Aberkios was profoundly engaged in that contest, having encouraged the anonymous anti-Montanist author to write his treatise.53

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51 Mitchell, ‘Looking for Abercius’, 317–34. Mitchell, ‘Looking for Abercius’, 318. Fragmentum tituli sepulcralis ex Asia advectum in quo Abercius Hieropol[itanus] episc [opus] saec[ulo] II universae ecclesiae consensum in unam fidem testatur. Abdul Hamid imperator Turcarum dono misit Leoni XIII p[ontifici] m[aximo] anno MDCCCXCII. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.3.

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The reconstruction of the monument sites the preserved portion, beginning with ‘To Rome . . .’ (εἰς Ῥώμη[ν . . .), between text above and below: a grave altar with the whole text presented frontally. Margaret M. Mitchell discusses other possible layouts for the monument,54 and argues (as did some important earlier scholars including Ramsay, de Rossi, Anton de Waal, Joseph Wilpert, and Carl Robert) that the original monument was laid out on three sides of the stone. The right-hand side of the preserved fragment has a wreath set in a panel: the inference (fortified by parallel cases) that other panels may have displayed text is persuasive. Indeed, even Orazio Marucchi, who directed the making of the Vatican reconstruction of the monument, thought the original was displayed on three sides. He saw the object which he was responsible for creating as a way of giving the museum visitor the chance to see the text in a single glance.55 Margaret M. Mitchell succeeds in establishing her point that the text was part of a ‘complex semiological message’, and that, accordingly, verbal and visual exegeses ought to be integrated.56 Remaining uncertainty over exactly how Aberkios’ monument looked when it was new (even though it is possible to say that it did not look like the reconstruction existing in the museum today) constitutes a difficulty for how to use this insight. Similarly, Hirschmann, while seeing the epitaph’s existence and wording as evidence of an ‘unproblematic shared life between Christians and adherents of Graeco-Roman religion’, still cautions that the lack of sources pointing in a comparable direction means that any interpretation of the epitaph lacks conclusive proof.57 And yet the Aberkios monument did make an impact on viewers, as Chapter 7 (about the Life of Abercius) will show. In retrospect it appears as a focal point both of remembering and of forgetting, for the Christian church at Hierapolis (Koçhisar). The situation is not unlike what was observed in relation to Philip the evangelist in Chapter 2: at Hierapolis (Pamukkale) there was a monument commemorating him and yet important detail was forgotten, with the result that in the late second century, Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus and a member of Philip’s family, confused him with Philip of Bethsaida. Aberkios himself commenced his epitaph by calling himself a citizen of the elect city ([ἐ]κλεκτῆς πόλεως ὁ πολεί[της]). As noted above, that formulation enshrined a compliment to his own tiny Hierapolis, but to Aberkios 54 56 57

55 Mitchell, ‘Looking for Abercius’, 321–8. Mitchell, ‘Looking for Abercius’, 33. Mitchell, ‘Looking for Abercius’, 335. Hirschmann, ‘Ungelöste Rätsel? Nochmals zur Grabschrift’, 134.

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it was more important that he was asserting his citizenship of the heavenly Jerusalem – and he did so while (a little over 100 kilometres away in Pepuza) the Montanists believed they were awaiting that new Jerusalem on earth. One might put that down to mere synchronicity, if it were not known from another source that Aberkios was a sponsor of antiMontanist literature. But as it is, the first line of the epitaph stands as a distinct assertion that the builders of Pepuza have misunderstood the new Jerusalem: a (Christian) citizen of a tiny city in this world is also a citizen of the elect city, a city which exists in a spiritual sense and cannot be confined to a location on the map of Phrygia. The Aberkios inscription as a whole, however, is not only about controversy against the Montanists. Its central theme is Aberkios’ journey. After calling himself a ‘disciple of the holy shepherd’, Aberkios continues by writing of the journey – and the way is prepared for this theme by sentiments about the mountains and plains where the holy shepherd pastures his flocks and about his eyes being ‘great and allseeing’. Assuming the correctness of the link made above to the biblical verse which says ‘the eyes of the Lord range throughout the entire earth’,58 this reference is a deliberate introduction to the story of the journey. It should be inferred that the journey was made in the last years of Aberkios’ life (since reminiscing about something from long ago would raise a question about why that particular sequence of events should be selected to be retold in the epitaph), and that its inclusion in the epitaph constitutes a sermon in stone.

a journey across the world Aberkios, in the epitaph, travels to Rome, and then to ‘the plain of Syria and all its cities’, and ‘even Nisibis, beyond the Euphrates’. It is a journey to the furthest place in the west which seemed important in the Christian context (since Paul himself failed to reach Spain59), and then to the furthest place in the east which belonged to the Romans (since the short-lived province of Assyria, east of the Euphrates, had been abandoned in 118). He wrote of the Roman Church as exemplary: to him it was the psalmist’s queen in the golden raiment, the bride of the Davidic

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2 Chronicles 16.9. He once intended to (Romans 15.24): my assertion here that he did not succeed falls short of certainty.

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king (a king who would symbolize Christ, on a Christian interpretation of the Old Testament). The Roman Church as a whole, that is, was the queen, and its people the servants of God marked with a seal by the angel. But the visit to Rome did not by itself complete Aberkios’ journey. The project of travelling across Syria and to Nisibis (as far as anyone could go in the Roman world), which on a naive reading could appear as an unnecessary prolongation of the travel tale which Aberkios tells, was integral to the meaning of his enterprise as a whole. East and west, the poles of Aberkios’ journey, have a biblical resonance as such, for instance in Matthew’s apocalyptic discourse: ‘as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man’.60 Elsewhere in the Bible, the distance from the east to the west might be a metaphor for the distance God places between his people and their sins (‘as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us’61). But in view of Aberkios’ use of line 1 of his epitaph ([ἐ]κλεκτῆς πόλεως . . .) in controversy against Montanist eschatology (as enacted in the figuring of Pepuza as the new Jerusalem), it seems consistent to read Aberkios’ journey as directed towards asserting the version of Christian values to which he was committed. His expedition to each end of the Roman empire, then back to the middle of it in Phrygia, relates to the Matthaean prophecy about the coming of the Son of Man. Aberkios made this journey at an advanced age (and wrote of it in his epitaph) as a symbolic action signifying the Christian expectation of the coming of the Son of Man, and completing it was a substantial undertaking. Taking Apamea (Dinar) for purposes of calculation as the starting point,62 a journey via Ephesus to Rome,63 then to Nisibis, and then back to Apamea via Attalia, starting in March and returning in August, would have cost 3,322 denarii in transport costs for a passenger in a carriage, plus food, lodging, and incidentals.64 Eighty-eight days’ travelling time would have been involved, not counting any days spent (for example) waiting for a carriage to be available or a ship to be ready to

60 62

63

64

61 Matthew 24.27. Psalm 103.12. A distance of 55 km from Koçhisar, a fact which I have treated as insignificant in the context of this long journey. Life of Abercius 57, which I take not to be reflection of how the journey was actually made, says that Aberkios went to Rome via Attalia, not via Ephesus. Assuming Aberkios travelled alone, which might have been imprudent even in the Antonine age: more likely perhaps that he had a companion or an attendant (whose presence would double the ship and carriage fares).

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depart; time spent at the destinations (Rome and Nisibis) also needs to be added.65 Perhaps the journey was not completed in a single year: indeed, perhaps separate journeys were made, although in the epitaph the travels are remembered in one breath, as it were. Aberkios ‘found brothers everywhere’ (line 11) on his way across the plain of Syria to Nisibis. At the Council of Nicaea (325) a total of fortyfive bishops attended from Syria, Syria Phoenice, and Mesopotamia (the provinces relevant to Aberkios’ journey, after Diocletian’s reorganization of the provinces in the 290s), but only seventeen of the sees are attested as having had bishops before Nicaea.66 The visitors from Asian churches to Syria in Ignatius’ day seem to have gone to the Antioch church and not necessarily elsewhere in Syria (Chapter 2), but Aberkios’ phrase ‘brothers everywhere’ seems to imply that Christianity was more widespread in Syria two generations after Ignatius. Aberkios’ route would have taken him (after the Euphrates crossing at Zeugma) through Edessa, where in the 190s Bardaisan, philosopher and Christian apologist,67 was a courtier at the court of Abgar VIII:68 in the Life of Abercius an encounter with Bardaisan (under the inaccurately recalled name of ‘Barchasanes’) is confected.69 There, in November 202, floodwaters destroyed the church of the Christians:70 its existence (till the flood) seems to prove that in Abgar’s client kingdom the Christians were able to build a church in a way which is not paralleled in the Roman empire at that date. The little enclave of Osrhoene, however, cannot have been much more than an incident on the journey; as the epitaph’s text says, ‘Everywhere Faith led the way’ (line 12). This tends to confirm the view that the whole enterprise, sitting next to Paul in the carriage, was conceived and carried out as a symbolic action. Using the word

65

66 68

69

70

Estimates of travelling time and costs from Scheidel and Meeks, ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, based on fastest travelling time for a passenger in a carriage (Aberkios writes of Paul (i.e. his writings) being next to him in the carriage). The distance covered would be 7,357 km. 67 Mullen, Expansion of Christianity, 35–59. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.30. Sex. Julius Africanus Kestoi 1.20.39–56; Epiphanius Panarion 56.1.3; cf. Adler, ‘Sextus Julius Africanus and the Roman Near East’, 532–7. Life of Aberkios 70. Barchasanes in this chapter says (about Aberkios), ‘we know of no one else, after the original apostles, who has travelled further across land and sea for the salvation of the brethren’. This represents Aberkios’ journey as being conducive to the salvation of Christians; however, it should be read as editorializing by the author of the Life of Abercius, and not as evidence for anything which the historical Bardaisan ever said. Chronicle of Edessa 8.

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‘pilgrimage’ may risk applying to too early a period a conception which became commonplace in later Christian devotion. The quasi-personified view of Faith (Πίστις) which lies behind the image of her leading the way (and behind the modern editors’ use of the uppercase letter) does not feature in Teresa Morgan’s exhaustive exposition of πίστις/fides in the Graeco-Roman world, Hellenistic Judaism, and the early churches. In her conclusion, she opines that ‘Christian pistis operates in a cascade: God places pistis in Christ, Paul and other community leaders; they channel it to other community members, who pisteuein in God, in Christ, and in those entrusted with authority over them by God and Christ.’71 But the idea, elsewhere little attested, of a personified Faith, recalls in a general way the personified Wisdom in Proverbs;72 since Wisdom can be personified, why not other positive qualities? In Sirach there are verses which might come close to justifying a reading in which Faith would appear as personified: ‘the fear of the Lord is wisdom and discipline, fidelity (πίστις) and humility are his delight’73 and ‘good faith (πίστις) will last for ever’.74 At the end of the narrative of Aberkios’ journey, he comes to the fish – Christ – and the holy maiden – Mary or the church, see above – and then continues by writing of the Eucharist (lines 15–16): ‘Everywhere she gave the fish to her dear ones to eat, with good wine, handing it to us mixed with bread.’ Aberkios crystallizes the meaning of his odyssey at this point, writing of the Eucharist as a universal ritual, enacted from west to east and back again. To summarize: as the citizen of an elect city, Aberkios is a disciple of the holy shepherd and has been taught trustworthy knowledge. His citizenship and education cause him to make a journey which signifies the expectation of the coming of the Son of Man, and which bears witness to the Eucharist linking Christian people together from end to end of the Roman world. The reference to the Eucharist being everywhere is reminiscent of Tertullian’s claim, in the Apologeticum (written in Carthage in 197, in the same decade as Aberkios’ epitaph) about the pervasive presence of Christians in the empire:75 We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you – cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum – we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods.

71 73 74 75

72 Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith, 504. Proverbs 8.1–36. Sirach 1.27: σοφία γὰρ καὶ παιδεία φόβος κυρίου, καὶ ἡ εὐδοκία αὐτοῦ πίστις καὶ πραότης. Sirach 40.12: πίστις εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα στήσεται. Tert. Apol. 37. Translation by S. Thelwall in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, AnteNicene Fathers vol. 3.

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In the remaining lines of the epitaph Aberkios signs off with his name and age (‘I, Abercius, stood by and dictated this, having reached my seventysecond year’, lines 17–18) and asks for prayers from Christian readers (‘Let all who understand and approve these words pray for Aberkios’: line 19). The ban against burying another dead body in the grave is routine, and the threat of a fine for contravening that ban is usual in Phrygian gravestones.76 Aberkios’ journey across the empire can be likened to Paul’s journeys as described in Acts and reflected in the Pauline epistles: Aberkios himself calls attention to the parallel when he writes of Paul being next to him in the carriage (line 12). It is not enough to gloss this only as meaning that Aberkios had Paul’s writings with him and was referring to them: evidently the Pauline epistles were not the only part of the Bible Aberkios read, and his scripture reading came from across a spectrum of biblical texts. Therefore, the idea of Paul sitting next to him must speak to Aberkios’ deliberate intention of comparing his journey with Paul’s travels. Although he frames his purpose as being broad, there is no reason at any point to think that controversy against the Montanists has faded into the background. They dreamt of their elect city at Pepuza while writing their countless books and building the networks which gave them adherents in Africa and brought them to notice in Rome. Their opponent Aberkios is not explicit about his journey as a preaching tour or a missionary journey, instead picturing himself as travelling across a world where ‘there were brothers everywhere’; however, it is clear from the way the Eucharist is brought in at the end that he conceived his travels as having a religious purpose. From the beginning of Christianity in Asia Minor and Phrygia there is ample evidence of activity which built interlocal networks: this is why it would be impractical and not at all desirable to restrict the discussion in this book to evidence from Phrygia alone. Paul travelled in Phrygia and later wrote to (a different part of ) Phrygia. Philip brought his daughters (or some of them) to Phrygia, and they took part in building a kind of dynasty which held a clutch of bishoprics across Asia Minor. Papias, who 76

For example, in the following generation at Koçhisar, in 236, someone (name not preserved) put up a gravestone imposing on anyone who buried another body in the grave fines of 1,000 denarii (payable to the fiscus) and 750 denarii (payable to Hierapolis): MAMA 11.143. How often such fines were collected is an imponderable question: the people most likely to dig up an existing grave and attempt to bury another dead body would seem to be those unable to afford a burial plot, who would also not be able to afford the fine.

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heard miracle stories from Philip’s daughters, gained information about Jesus from multiple visitors to Hierapolis (Pamukkale) and wrote his Account of Logia about the Lord. Ignatius, although not travelling of his own accord, improvised a kind of procession and took advantage of multiple opportunities for contact with people who came to meet him. Polycarp, whether he was in the general habit of travel or not, had been to Rome and was known to the crowd in the Smyrnaean arena as ‘the Teacher of Asia’. All this is the background against which Aberkios, at an advanced age, planned and executed his journey to the ends of the known world. The journey, I argue, was acted out as part of a campaign of controversy against the Montanist church; but whether or not this view is correct, it was in any case of a piece with substantial precedent in the growth of Phrygian Christianity. The physical evidence, the gravestone, soon had an echo locally in the Alexander, son of Antonios, gravestone; yet the bulk of the text as it is known to the modern world comes from the Life of Abercius, written more or less 200 years after Aberkios’ death. That Life is the subject of Chapter 7 and is a very rich source of information about the growth of Christianity in Phrygia; but what is most distinctive about the Life, as examination of it will show, is the breadth of forgotten information in it.

7 Aberkios and the Vita Abercii

In the late fourth century or the fifth century, someone wrote a biography, a hagiography, of Aberkios, which has been preserved to the modern world as the Life of Abercius. On this subject, Ramsay, finder of the Aberkios inscription, brooked no nonsense: he wrote that ‘in the Acta’ (meaning the Life of Abercius), ‘the historical Avircius Marcellus is transformed into the legendary St. Abercius’.1 The first published English translation of the Life appears as Appendix 1 in this book. It tells the story of Aberkios, bishop of Hierapolis, and in the text the interface between memory and forgetting is intriguing. Aberkios in the short run was well remembered. The Alexander, son of Antonios, inscription is evidence that he was remembered in 216, and knowledge of his legacy was not confined to that individual. In Prymnessos (Sülün), some 45 kilometres or so from Hierapolis, a thirdcentury deacon called Abirkios son of Porphyrios left a gravestone for himself and his wife.2 Relatively close, at Afyonkarahisar, Ramsay recorded the gravestone of Aurelius Dorotheos son of Abirkios. The date of this stone, which the publication places between 330 and 350, must be early not mid-fourth century, because of the use of the Aurelius name, which was standard for about a century after the constitutio Antoniniana (212), but unusual in later fourth-century epitaphs.3 If Aurelius Dorotheos died aged seventy in 320, and therefore had been born in 250,

1 2 3

Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 713. ICG 1365. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 736, no. 672. ICG 1551. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 736, no. 673: the chi-rho monogram on the stone suggests a Constantinian date.

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his father Abirkios might have been born some thirty years before that: within a generation after the death of the Aberkios who composed the famous epitaph. A later Aberkios was commemorated on a marble slab built (about 380) into the threshold of the central doorway of the Basilica of St Paul at Antioch of Pisidia.4 The Life of Abercius says that Aberkios’ successor as bishop of Hierapolis was also called Aberkios.5 Difficulties supervene: the author of the Life refers to the second Aberkios as the archpriest (ἀρχιπρεσβύτερον), a clerical rank otherwise first attested in Sozomen’s account of a dispute between Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, and Isidore, whom in 397 Theophilus had unsuccessfully put up as a candidate to succeed Nectarius as bishop of Constantinople. Theophilus, in the first decade of the fifth century, alleged that Peter the archpriest had admitted to communion a woman who had converted from Manichaeism, but done so before she had repudiated her Manichaean heresy; Isidore, however, Theophilus’ former friend, supported Archpriest Peter by bearing witness that he admitted the woman to communion following the laws of the church.6 The apparently anachronistic reference to an archpriest may seem to be a fictional element in the Life; yet in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, the bishop of Hierapolis was another Aberkios.7 Aberkios’ Roman name (Avircius) may imply, but does not show with certainty, that (like Apollinarius of the other Hierapolis, and like some of the early leading lights of the Montanist sect) the original Aberkios was a Roman citizen. In 2012 Thonemann brought a new clarity to discussion of the Life of Abercius by elucidating the sources of most of the text – and showing more conclusively than earlier scholars that little or nothing in the Life,

4

5 7

SEG 52.1383: Εὐχὴ Ἀβερκίου κόμητος καὶ οἰκονόμου (‘Prayer of Aberkios, comes and steward’). On the local popularity of the name cf. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 277 and n.49. 6 Life of Abercius 78–80. Sozom. Hist. Eccl. 8.12.3. Acts of the Council of Chalcedon Session I.3 lists the 343 bishops and other clergy present: Aberkios of Hierapolis is no. 283. See Price and Gaddis, Acts of the Council of Chalcedon vol. 3, p. 236 for the index entry listing this reference and the nine other places where contributions by him to debate are minuted or his signature is recorded. There was a bishop of Hierapolis at Nicaea, whose name was Flaccus; but Huttner argues (Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 285) that he belonged to Hierapolis (Pamukkale), on the ground that the bishop of the greater Hierapolis outranked the bishop of Hierapolis (Koçhisar), which no doubt he did.

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except the full text of the Aberkios epitaph, is of value as a source for the historical Aberkios.8 He ascribes the Life in its earliest version9 version to ‘an anonymous native of Hierapolis in the late fourth century’,10 a finding which is persuasive, if partly inferential. Sources drawn on included the gravestone itself, displayed near the south gate of the city;11 the Acts of Peter (in a Greek antecedent of the version now known as the Actus Vercellenses); an imperial letter from Marcus Aurelius to Euxeinianos Pollio,12 not now extant but displayed on stone at Hierapolis and thus accessible to the composer of the Life;13 a dedicatory inscription recording the Empress Faustina as the benefactress who built the public baths at Agros Thermon, a short way outside Hierapolis;14 and perhaps another inscription on view in or near Hierapolis, from 43 bc, including the names of both Publius Dolabella and Lentulus Spinther.15 The Life of Abercius (referred to by section number only in this chapter) begins with an empire-wide imperial command to sacrifice to the gods of the polytheists (1–2),16 and with Aberkios’ defiance against it (3–7). Aberkios goes at night to the temple of Apollo (3) and smashes statues of Apollo and other deities with a piece of wood. It is hard to parallel this account of Christian violence against idols in a secondcentury context. On the contrary, at the Council of Elvira (305/6) it would be laid down that if someone smashed an idol and then was punished with death, that person should not be listed as a martyr (‘since such action is not sanctioned by the Scriptures or by the apostles’).17 There are, however, intriguing similarities between the story in the Life of Abercius and Socrates Hist. Eccl. 3.15.1–7,18 where the story of

8 9 10 12 14 15 16

17 18

Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 260. Nissen, in his Teubner edition, reprints two later paraphrases in addition to this version. 11 Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 257–8. Life of Abercius 63. 13 Life of Abercius 48–9. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 272–3. Faustina the Younger, wife of Marcus Aurelius, Augusta 161–175. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 275. Barnes, noting that the content of this decree is ‘copied from the persecuting edicts of Decius and Diocletian’, sees its promulgation as ‘an imitation of the decree of Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed’ (Luke 2.1). He argues that the sacrificing decree in the Life is spurious and does not reflect anything which really occurred (‘Legislation against the Christians’, 39). Thonemann echoes without evident enthusiasm the suggestion that the sacrificing decree might have some historical basis in the sacrifices which were carried out empire-wide in 167 at the time of the smallpox epidemic (‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 264); Keresztes (‘Marcus Aurelius a Persecutor?’, 27–32) saw the decree as historical. Council of Elvira, Canon 60. This story also appears at Suda s.v. Amachios (Adler number alpha, 1513).

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Amachios, governor of Phrygia, in Meros, a city in Phrygia, is told. During the reign of Julian (361–3) he had a disused temple opened up and cleaned out (preparatory to beginning polytheistic worship there again). Christians named Makedonios, Theodoulos, and Tatianos responded by bursting into the temple at night and breaking the statues, much as Aberkios does in this chapter. Unlike Aberkios, however, Makedonios, Theodoulos, and Tatianos fall into Amachios’ hands and are tortured to death. It might be possible to speculate that this Phrygian story of an attack on idols attached itself (in part) to Aberkios after the late persecution under Julian. Caution on the part of ‘those of [the people of Hierapolis] who had more ability to calculate’ (6) led, in the Life, to Aberkios’ not being lynched by the angry crowd after his attack on the idols. Aberkios soon afterwards faced up to his fellow citizens by appearing ‘in the city centre in a place which is called by them Phrougis’ (8). If Thonemann’s inference that the Life was written by a native of Hierapolis is correct, this may be a genuine reminiscence of a place name in the tiny city of Hierapolis. The crowd, still angry about the attack on the idols, finds him there and is won over when Aberkios heals three demon-possessed men (9–12).19 His sermon, delivered to the repentant crowd, is based on the sermon put in the mouth of St Paul (in Latin) in Acts of Peter (Actus Vercellenses) 2. Paul’s first words (‘Men and brethren, you who now have begun to believe in Christ’) are similar to ‘Men who have now believed and wish to join Christ’s army’ in Life of Abercius 13. Matthew Baldwin, in his book about the Acts of Peter, discusses the correspondence between Actus Vercellenses 2 and Life of Abercius 12–13 in detail,20 noting that the Latin text ‘has an effectively different discourse about vices and virtues than did its Greek source’.21 He argues convincingly that the Actus Vercellenses were written no earlier than the late fourth century and drew in part on sources about Peter written in Greek later than the time of Decius (249–251).22 In reaching this conclusion, he rejects an earlier near consensus which would have posited that Greek Acts of Peter (not now extant) were being written as early as the 180s or 190s.23 As long ago as 1908, Theodor Nissen had observed that the writer of the Life of 19

20 22

Similarly, at 26–30 Aberkios heals three old ladies who are blind. The sets of three in the Life function on the age-old ‘what I tell you three times is true’ principle: thus it is extremely improbable that Bundy is right to say that ‘the three women in the narrative may signify the three Montanist prophetesses of Phrygia’ (‘The Life of Abercius’, 173). 21 Baldwin, Whose Acts of Peter?, 200–7. Baldwin, Whose Acts of Peter?, 204. 23 Baldwin, Whose Acts of Peter?, 302–3. Baldwin, Whose Acts of Peter?, 1–4.

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Abercius made use of the Greek source drawn on by the Latin writer of the Actus Vercellenses;24 Baldwin’s work, however, makes it clear that the preaching in the Life of Abercius, which in modern terms one would describe as ‘plagiarized content’,25 is not borrowed from a source written even close to the time when Aberkios lived. At 19, Aberkios appears in ‘teacher of Asia’ guise, people travelling to hear his preaching ‘not only from the neighbouring country of Greater Phrygia, but also from the provinces of Asia, Lydia and Caria’. Since Ramsay in 1882, commentators have sought to draw inferences about the date of the Life from the naming of Roman provinces in it. Ramsay comments on Phrygia being divided into two provinces in the 290s, and brings in the first attested dates of Phrygia II becoming Salutaris (385) and Phrygia I becoming Pacatiana (405).26 ‘Greater’ Phrygia here is Phrygia I, Hierapolis (Koçhisar) being in Phrygia II. The two themes in the Life of being (implicitly) a ‘teacher of Asia’,27 and (earlier) an overthrower of (the polytheists’) gods, are calculated to present Aberkios as similar in stature to Polycarp, a well-known and respected Asian saint. Next, Phrygella, mother of the important Euxeinianos Pollio, comes into the story (20–3). Her unusual name is not attested in the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, but in volume 5A (Coastal Asia Minor, Pontos to Ionia) the name Phrougilla is attested five times.28 This name may be similar enough for ‘Phrygella’ to be regarded as a variant spelling of it, perhaps influenced by a false etymology which would connect the name to Phrygia (Φρυγία) instead of to the Roman personal name Frugi. There is no second source for the name of Euxeinianos’ mother, and accordingly it may be suspected that the writer of the Acts chose Phrygella as her name 24 25

26 27 28

Nissen, ‘Die Petrusakten’. There is a degree of reprocessing: for instance, the list of good qualities in Life 13 consists of twelve items (instead of fourteen, as listed in the Actus Vercellenses): of the nine commended at Galatians 5.22–3, χαρὰ (joy) and ἀγαθωσύνη (generosity) are not included, but the other seven are; the five listed here but not mentioned in Galatians are γνῶσιν (knowledge), σοφίαν (wisdom), φιλοξενίαν (hospitality), εὐσπλαγχνίαν (sympathy), and δικαιοσύνην (righteousness). Meeks argues that the earliest lists of virtues and vices were not intended to list all possible vices, or all possible virtues, nor yet to suggest a ‘rationale of interconnectedness’ among virtues and vices – the logic of the lists was asyndetic (Origins of Christian Morality, 69). Given this, it may not be possible to draw any worthwhile inference from the selection of virtues made by the writer of the Life. Ramsay, ‘Tale of Saint Abercius’, 343; cf. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 264. Cf. Martyrdom of Polycarp 12. See www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/database/lgpn.php. Volume 5C (Inland Asia Minor) is apparently not expected to be published soon: ‘LGPN coverage of these areas is slight’ (www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/publications/stateprep.html#4prep).

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for the sake of local colour, in a similar way to how Phrougis, the place name for the area in the city centre where Aberkios sat and taught, contributes Phrygian local colour to the tale. After another sermon (24–5), Aberkios repeats his miracle, this time healing three old ladies (26–30): again, of blindness, of which he healed Phrygella. Then her son Euxeinianos, ‘the greatest person in the city’ (20), is introduced to the narrative. Thonemann observes, certainly correctly, that Euxeinianos Pollio must be identified with Quintus Claudius Pollio, son of Tiberius Claudius Euxenos, the recipient of a statue at Acmonia (Ahat), the base of which survived, built into a school garden wall.29 The name Euxeinianos is ‘a patronymic adjective representing “son of Euxe(i) nos”’ – a feature in naming which is ‘fairly common in Roman Asia Minor’.30 Claudius Pollio minted Hierapolitan bronze coins between 161 and 169 showing images of Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, and Faustina II:31 the occasion of the issue of the coins was Pollio’s Asiarchate; he was the only magistrate ever to have his name on the coinage at Hierapolis (Koçhisar).32 Euxeinianos comes to Aberkios’ house early in the morning to thank him for helping his mother (31). After the two of them agree that a money reward would be unseemly, Euxeinianos raises with Aberkios some points for discussion which have struck him in what he has heard from his mother of Aberkios’ teachings. In the dialogue which follows, the writer of the Life uses ideas and arguments from Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of Countries (32–8).33 Aberkios advises Euxeinianos to convert to Christianity, and Euxeinianos raises a difficulty (32): Aberkios has said that the same God is ‘at one time good and benevolent, and at another time fearsome and just’. How can the same God be both good and just? This relatively easy question elicits a straightforward answer. God is good when he forgives sins and just when he judges each human being. But this is only the beginning, and the Book of the Laws of Countries does 29

30 31

32 33

MAMA 11.100. Accordingly, David Bundy’s argument that Euxeinianos’ views as enunciated in the Life are Marcionite, and Euxeinianos’ name itself ‘an allusion to Marcion, who came from Sinope on the Pontus Euxeinos’ (‘The Life of Abercius’, 173–4) is disproved. Thonemann, Monumenta Asiae Minoris antiqua vol. 11, 96. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 168–9 and Fig. 12.1 (showing Faustina, with Cybele on the reverse and the wording ‘Hierapolis: in the time of Claudius Pollio, Asiarch’). Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 170–1. Translations from the Book of the Laws of Countries by B.P. Pratten in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 8.

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not have an equivalent for it. There, Avida (a young and modest interlocutor) commences by asking Bardaisan (the great mind) why God did not create the human being unable to do wrong: ‘For in this way his will would have been accomplished.’ When Bardaisan recapitulates the query, preparatory to answering, he adds the thought that inability to sin would have the benefit of causing the human being not to incur condemnation. Euxeinianos in Life of Abercius 33 enunciates the question in its developed form: if God rejoices in those who do fine deeds, why did he not create the human being from the beginning in such a way that he or she would not be able to do evil, but only good? For if that were so, his will would be put into action, and human beings would not be punished.

Aberkios’ answer, to the effect that if we were unable to do evil then the good things we did would not be to our moral credit, mirrors Bardaisan’s answer to Avida; however, the argument supporting the answer is different. Bardaisan makes the point that entities which have no freedom (such as the sun, which has to rise at a set time, or the winds or the earth, which are ‘instruments of the wisdom of God’) exist to minister to the human being, who has freedom in a greater measure. But Aberkios’ argument focuses instead on how no moral credit accrues from not committing sins which one is unable to commit. Genocidal destruction of the city of Laodicea, razing it to the ground and leaving no one alive, not even women or old men, would be an evil action; but Aridaios, the lame leather-worker from Laodicea, does not deserve praise for not committing this sin (33). He is a poor man, and alone, and he has a physical disability – and as a result of all these disadvantages, he cannot destroy his home city, from which he was driven out by a malicious prosecution. But he never stops cursing it. Aridaios is a character who appears in the Life of Abercius and has no counterpart in the Book of the Laws of Countries. He is a case in point in relation to the observation that the writer of the Life has drawn liberally on Platonic precedent in creating this small-scale dialogue.34 Leatherworkers are mentioned by Plato in ten dialogues,35 and other dialogues

34

35

Making Aberkios into a character whom Bundy finds implausibly philosophical (‘The Life of Abercius’, 170). Plato Theaetetus 180d4; Symposium 191a2 and 221e5; First Alcibiades 125a8 and 14, 129c7, d4, 9 and 13; Second Alcibiades 140b7 and c2; Theages 126d3; Charmides 161e12, 163b7; Protagoras 319d3, 324c6; Gorgias 447d4, 490e1, 491a8, 517e1; Meno 90c4 and 5; Republic 369d8, 370d3 and e3, 374b6, b8 and c5, 397e5 and 6, 434a3 and 4, 443c5, 456d10, 466b1, 598b9, 600e7, 610a1, a8 and c8.

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speak of σκυτοτομική, the art of leather-working, although not the leatherworker himself. The leather-worker, then, is a stock example, familiar to anyone with a classical education – and this was as true in (say) 410 as it is today. What Plato’s Socrates does not do, however, is to turn the leather-worker into a character, as here, with a name, a hometown, a history, and a disability. Other things add to the Platonic flavour of the dialogue: συζητήσωμεν, ‘let’s examine [this matter] together’ (32) comes from συζητέω, a verb which is used in the Cratylus, Meno, and Hippias major.36 ὦ βέλτιστε, ‘most esteemed sir’, and ὦ φίλτατε, ‘my very dear sir’ (32) are everywhere in Plato, and they perhaps reflect the proprieties of courteous debate in Greek in a way analogous to the way a language of family does in the Book of the Laws of Countries, where the author writes of ‘our brother Shemashgram’, and Bardaisan addresses Avida as ‘my son Avida’. After noting the limitations on Aridaios’ experience of free will, Aberkios in the Life continues by saying that one should give thanks to God ‘who made us in his image and gave us the faculty of free will’ (34). This opens the way to theosis, with the result that ‘we can be deified by establishing our souls through good deeds’. One follows that path by keeping God’s commandments. Here, too, the train of thought differs from that in the Book of the Laws of Countries, where deification as such is not mentioned. There, the human being has received freedom ‘in order that by this freedom he may justify himself, and order his conduct in a godlike manner, and be co-partner with angels’.37 But in both texts the interlocutor follows up with a similar objection: ‘The commandments’, Avida says, ‘which have been given to men are severe, and they cannot perform them.’ Euxeinianos seems less certain, and says, ‘But perhaps these commandments which you say he has given are burdensome, so that one cannot bear them.’ In both cases, the answer given is that the interlocutor’s question is evidence of weakness. ‘They are burdensome’, says Aberkios, ‘to one who does not want to bear them of his own free will.’ Bardaisan, on the other hand, says that ‘men have not been commanded to do anything but that which they are able to do’. He summarizes God’s commandments as being

36 37

Plato Cratylus 384c2; Meno 80d4 and 90b5; Hippias major 295b3. 37B. Book of the Laws of Countries [italic] 16.

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1. ‘to refrain from everything which is wrong, and which we should not like to have done to ourselves’, and 2. ‘that we should do that which is right, and which we love and are pleased to have done to us likewise’, and no more. ‘The commandments set before us are only two.’ This statement alludes to the Golden Rule (Matthew 7.12), and Bardaisan says little by way of elaboration, only, ‘Who, then, is the man who is too weak to avoid stealing, or to avoid acts of profligacy, or to avoid hatred and deception? For lo! All these things are under the control of the mind of man.’ Life of Abercius 35 takes a similar tack in arguing for the notion that it is really not hard to obey God’s commandments: ‘Who is there who is unable to keep away from every wicked deed – the kind of deed which we ourselves hate and do not want to be done to us by another, and particularly the kind which, when we have done it, we deny that we have done?’ Here a thought about things which people would deny having done is added to what the source says. But the idea of two commandments is there in the Life, as in the Book of the Laws of Countries: ‘Another commandment’, Aberkios adds, ‘is to apply ourselves to every good deed, which we love and would want to be done to us by everyone.’ The same examples follow: What sane person is unable to speak the truth rather than omit to do so, or not to desire another’s goods, and not to seduce someone else’s wife, and not shed the blood of the just, and not slander a person, and not take part in bribery out of the possessions he has got?

Both texts, then, use a paragraph explaining that obeying God’s commands is not heavy work, not a monumental project, and (Bardaisan adds, but Aberkios does not) not an undertaking for which professional knowledge is needed, like navigating a ship or surveying land. Next, the interlocutor puts forward a query about avoiding evil versus doing good. ‘Possibly’, Avida says, ‘a man may be able to abstain from the things that are bad; but as for doing the things that are good, what man is capable of this?’ Euxeinianos, similarly, says, ‘Perhaps with great effort someone would turn himself away from doing evil deeds; but who that is human can do good deeds?’ The answer in both cases is that doing good is a pleasure and a natural thing for a human being – but doing evil comes from the devil. ‘The good’, Bardaisan says, ‘comes from the man himself, and therefore he rejoices whenever he does good.’ Aberkios puts it only a little differently: ‘doing good things belongs to the human being himself, because he takes pleasure in doing them’ (37). Along the same

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lines, Aristotle used to teach that the virtuous person takes pleasure in acting in accordance with virtue.38 The implied allusion to Aristotle brings back into focus the unusual character of this dialogue as a part of a fourth- or fifth-century Life of a second-century saint. That it has been plagiarized (with adaptations) is noted, but it would not be satisfactory to conclude simply that around 400 philosophical dialectic had to be borrowed wholesale out of a Syriac book, as if Edessa were the only place the Christian world could look to for an application of the consequences of free will. The writer of the Life did not necessarily read Bardaisan in Syriac: Eusebius says that Bardaisan’s disciples translated his works into Greek.39 Eusebius had to hand a Greek translation of Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of Countries and quoted from it at length in the Praeparatio Evangelica:40 this translation could be posited as the probable source of the knowledge which the writer of the Life had of Bardaisan’s work. However, that writer was familiar enough with Plato to echo words characteristic of the dialogues and to co-opt the stock example of the leather-worker, while bringing Aridaios to life in a manner for which Plato had set no precedent. This writer was, in short, familiar with Plato. Should it be inferred that, in the fourth or fifth century, he had had an Academic education? Plutarchus son of Nestorius, also known as Plutarch of Athens, born about 350, was scholarch (principal) of what is sometimes called the Neoplatonic Academy. This school, with premises in the Agora of Athens, lasted through the fifth century and well into the sixth and was a centre of long-lasting resistance to the Christianization of the Greek world: on the face of it an unlikely background for a Christian hagiographical author. Plutarchus taught that to understand Plato one had to begin from Aristotle, and no doubt he was familiar with the principle of the virtuous person taking pleasure in virtuous action. On the other hand, the debate in the Life of Abercius is not in all respects Platonic in tone. For one thing, it envisages (as a corollary of the argument for free will) that the human being may do wrong by choice, which is to say that implicitly it rejects the ‘Socratic paradox’ to the effect that no one sins willingly. To a fourth- or fifth-century Christian, Origen was a more credible interpreter of Plato. Origen’s work was at the heart of the Platonic

38 40

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1120a. Euseb. Praep. evang. 6.9–10.

39

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.30.

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thinking which in the fourth century informed Cappadocian theology.41 Origen insists in De principiis that the human being has the power to keep God’s commandments.42 As Ute Possekel observes, Origen and Bardaisan agree in affirming ‘that human beings were created free, so that they may justify themselves by keeping the commandments’.43 It seems likely, therefore, that a Greek literary education combined with familiarity with Origen would have given the author of the Life of Abercius the knowledge of Plato’s dialogues which he used as a lens to bring Bardaisan’s argument for free will into focus. After the conclusion of Aberkios’ disquisition to Euxeinianos on free will, the Life narrates a journey the saint made into countryside and villages near Hierapolis. This is an aetiological story, making Aberkios responsible for the creation of the hot springs 4 kilometres south of Koçhisar, which are (in Thonemann’s words) ‘the most notable natural wonder of the Pentapolitan plain’.44 Site in the twenty-first century of the Hüdaî Kaplıcaları thermal resort, this is where (Thonemann speculates plausibly) the inscription attributing a bathhouse to Faustina II once existed.45 The link which the Life makes between Aberkios and the hot spring is a symptom of the process of change in southern Phrygia from the pre-Christian days to the era of Christian dominance. It was a matter, in the process of myth-making, two to two-and-a-half centuries after the saint’s death, of ‘controlling the hydrographic landscape’.46 As Thonemann puts it,47 ‘The petrifying streams, hot springs and supernatural gorges of southern Phrygia were undeniable geological facts; in many cases, they were the focus of unacceptable pagan myths and dangerous pagan cults. Natural wonders of this kind urgently required an alternative, Christian explanation.’ After Aberkios bowed the knee in prayer, a spring of water sprang up in the place (40), and Aberkios told the local people, hitherto ‘held fast by various diseases’ (39) and in bad condition because they had nowhere to take a bath, to dig pools for the warm water

41

42 44 46

Gregory of Nazianzus (c.329–390) and Basil of Caesarea (c.329–379) both studied at Athens before the time of Plutarchus, in the days of the Neoplatonic Academy, as antiChristian as it was: as Frantz comments, ‘Christian doctrine as formulated in the early Church Councils owed a great deal to the solid foundation of classical Greek literature and thought that these men acquired in Athens’ (‘Pagan Philosophers in Christian Athens’, 31). 43 Origen De principiis 3.6. Possekel, ‘Bardaisan and Origen on Fate’, 539. 45 Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 86. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 273. 47 Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 75. Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 84.

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and bathe in them. More sophisticated facilities had to await the outcome of the next part of the story. After an encounter with the devil (41–2), who threatens to force Aberkios to travel to Rome, the saint is reassured in a dream (43) that it is the Lord’s will that he should make the journey. The devil goes to Rome and drives Lucilla, daughter of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (and tallest and most beautiful girl in the world), insane, so that she is ‘tearing her hair, and chewing her hands’ (44). Finding a cure for her demonpossession is urgent for her father, because she is betrothed to marry his joint emperor, Lucius Verus (44) (a marriage which took place at Ephesus in 164). But Italian and Etruscan priests and augurs prove helpless, and the devil boasts (in Lucilla’s voice) that he will never come out of her unless Aberkios, bishop of Hierapolis, is brought to Rome (46) – a hint which is followed up. This is the background to the letter Marcus Aurelius sends to Euxeinianos (48–9). Cornelianus, in the Life a prefect (ἔπαρχος) but in real life ab epistulis Graecis between 177 and 180,48 advises the emperor on whom to contact at Hierapolis (47). Thonemann’s Quellenkritik isolates two sources within the letter as given in the Life: first an imperial letter (where Cornelianus’ name might have been found) from 177 or 178,49 displayed at Hierapolis; and secondly a section fabricated in the fourth century, datable by the use of the term μαγιστριανοί (secret policemen50), a term which came into use in the reign of Constantine, and the use of τῇ σῇ στερρότητι (‘your fortitude’) to address Euxeinianos.51 The secret policemen’s journey to Phrygia via Byzantium (50–1) would have been possible but highly unlikely in the second century, and Ramsay argued that before the foundation of Constantinople they surely would have sailed to Ephesus and travelled up the Lycus valley.52 Thonemann explains the selection of names for characters in the fictionalized section of the imperial letter and in the Life as a whole. Caecilius, ‘Our procurator’ (48) gets his name from M. Caecilius Numa, procurator Augusti on the Ionian coast in the second half of the second century.53 Valerius and Bassianus (49) get their names (one each) from

48 49 51 53

Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 268. 50 Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 272. Latin: agentes in rebus. 52 Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 273. Ramsay, ‘Tale of Abercius’, 345–7. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 268; IEph 1799 and 3157 refer to Caecilius Numa as procurator Augusti.

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Valerius Bassianus, a consul put to death by the Emperor Commodus.54 Dolabella, governor of Phrygia Salutaris (1) and Spinther, Dolabella’s successor in that job (51), get their names from P. Cornelius Dolabella and P. Cornelius Lentulus Spinther; the latter took over from Dolabella as ruler of Asia in 43 bc.55 When the secret policemen, on arrival at Hierapolis, make the mistake of attempting violence against Aberkios, Valerius’ hand withers up in the act of striking the saint with his whip (52). Aberkios then heals the hand (53), working a miracle comparable to Jesus’ healing of the man with the withered hand, in all three synoptic gospels.56 Aberkios agrees to go to Rome, but does not travel with the secret policemen: he arranges to meet them at Portus and go into the city with them. His journey, too, has its gospel echo, with the saint riding on ‘the foal of an ass’ (55).57 The miraculous wineskin (56) may recall the gospel principle of matching new wine with new wineskins,58 but a reservation should be noted because a wineskin was a routine item of equipment for an ancient journey. At Portus, relieved at finding Aberkios and not having to report to the emperor that they have failed to bring him in, Valerius and Bassianus say, ‘We name you Father of the Christians!’ (58) – here again echoing the Martyrdom of Polycarp,59 as with the reference earlier to people coming from neighbouring provinces to hear Aberkios preach, which made him by implication a ‘teacher of Asia’ like Polycarp. The story which follows, of the empress appealing to Aberkios, and him delivering her daughter from demon-possession, shows how, by the time of the writing of the Life, the Aberkios inscription was being misread (creatively, but perhaps not deliberately) and treated as if it referred to Aberkios’ having met a princess and a queen at Rome. The operative passage is at lines 7 and 8: εἰς Ῥώμη[ν ὃς ἔπεμψεν] ἐμὲν βασ̣ιλ̣̣ [ηΐδ’ ἀθρῆσαι] καὶ βασίλισσ̣[αν ἰδεῖν χρυσό]στολον χρυ̣[σοπέδιλον.]

54

55

56 57

58

Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 268; SHA Comm. 7.6, and cf. Merkelbach, ‘Grabepigramm und Vita’, 136. Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 274; On Dolabella’s takeover in Asia, Cicero Ad familiares 12.14–15. Mark 3.1–6kLuke 6.6–11kMatthew 12.9–13. Matthew 21.5; the Life simplifies the gospel’s πῶλον υἱὸν ὑποζυγίου down to πῶλον ὄνου. The Septuagint source text (Zacharias 9.9) says ὑποζύγιον καὶ πῶλον νέον. 59 Mark 2.22ǁLuke 5.37kMatthew 9.17. Martyrdom of Polycarp 12.

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‘who sent me to Rome to behold a princess and to see a queen with golden robe and golden shoes’.60

This mandates and makes plausible the tale of Lucilla and Faustina.61 The emperor’s absence from Rome is explained by the crisis on the Rhine– Danube frontier in the 160s (59). Aberkios demurs at a possible reward (61). Attended by a military escort (62), the saint and the empress take the demon-possessed princess to the hippodrome. An hours-long drama follows, in which the key moments are the saint’s prayers and his addresses to the demon, who is obliged to come out of the girl and depart to the place where he ‘dwelt from the beginning’ (63);62 however, before going there, he must pick up and carry a marble altar out of the hippodrome and set it up near the south gate of Hierapolis. Thus the Life explains the existence of the Aberkios stone, which is a grave altar of a kind quite ordinary in the second century, but which must have seemed unusual (for a bishop’s gravestone), and even altogether unchristian, to people who saw it in the fourth and fifth centuries. Margaret M. Mitchell’s comment is that ‘in order for the vita to work, Abercius’ actual monument, as it looked to fourth- or fifth-century eyes, must have been a conspicuously “pagan-looking” one, one that could be supposed

60

61

62

Italicized because this is a wrong translation, which misses the fact that βασ̣ιλ̣̣ [ηΐδ’ is an adjective qualifying ‘Rome’, and that the translation should really be (as per Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 258–9) ‘sent me to Rome, to see the queen of cities, and to see a Queen with golden robes and golden shoes’. Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 86: ‘it is likely enough that the whole story of Lucilla’s demon-possession originated in attempts to explain the mysterious reference in Abercius’ funerary inscription to a “Queen with golden robes and golden shoes”’. Thonemann, however, seems not to register the ancient misreading (cf. previous note) which brings two royal ladies into the story. Margaret M. Mitchell (‘Looking for Abercius’, 313) glosses this as ‘i.e. Hieropolis’, but her inference is not compelling. The demon’s plea not to be sent to a wild mountain (63) indicates that the writer of the Life was influenced by the idea that demons, when cast out of people, went to the desert (as at Luke 11.24 (kMatthew 12.43): ‘When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a restingplace . . .’ (cf. Tobit 8.3, where Tobias burns the dried liver and gall of a fish in order to banish Asmodeus, with the result that ‘The odour of the fish so repelled the demon that he fled to the remotest parts of Egypt’). The wild mountain, therefore, to a writer who shared the assumptions of biblical authors, would be a normal place of exile for a demon. Where a demon ‘dwelt from the beginning’ is a different question and less easy to resolve on the basis of the biblical text: but Hierapolis, being a city, seems an implausible answer. The assumption might be that the demon was being sent to dwell in the air, consistent with Ephesians 2.2 (where the devil is described as ‘the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient’).

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to have come from the most archetypal site of idolatry imaginable in the empire – a hippodrome in Rome’.63 Afterwards, Aberkios, instead of a reward for himself, asks Faustina to fund building a bathhouse at Agros,64 where he had caused hot springs to well up, and to set up a charitable foundation which would supply 3,000 modii (26,190 litres) a year of food to the poor of Hierapolis (66). The foundation, the text says, continued in operation until the time of the Emperor Julian. Julian made no secret of his outrage at how Christians provided social aid to Christians and non-Christians, but ‘our people’ (Roman polytheists) did not;65 he did fear that non-Christian men’s wives were giving to Christian charity,66 but even so, the Life’s link between Julian’s reign and the end of Faustina’s charitable foundation lacks plausibility. An imperial gift could not have qualified as an instance of Christian-sponsored poor relief. The agenda pursued by the writer of the Life here is one of casting Julian as an enemy of all charitable endeavour. It is not out of the question that there might have been a charitable foundation at Hierapolis established by Faustina II, although it is more likely that there was not – Thonemann does not include a charity inscription in his list of probable sources of the Life.67 Faustina’s mother Faustina I, in the days of Antoninus Pius, was the named sponsor of the alimentary scheme which funded the puellae Faustinianae commemorated on coins,68 so that the idea of a charitable endeavour by Faustina II had context and was credible in principle. The details of the supposed gifts, however, pose difficulties. The gift of baths is the more plausible. A.R. Hands calculated from inscriptions that in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire 12 per cent

63 64

65

66

67

Mitchell, ‘Looking for Abercius’, 315–16. An explanation calculated to domesticate an otherwise potentially troubling public building. As Thonemann writes, ‘Understandably, the Christian inhabitants of late antique Hierapolis wished to continue using the hot springs and bath-house at Agros Thermon. However, it was all too obvious that the bath-house was a product of a preChristian era; there was, most probably, a large inscription on the façade proclaiming it to be a gift of the empress Faustina’ (Maeander Valley, 86). Julian Letters 84 lines 32–5: ‘It is disgraceful that none of the Jews is a beggar, and the irreligious Galileans support their own people and also ours, but our people seem to lack any provision from us.’ Julian Misopogon 363a: ‘every one of you allows his wife to carry everything out of his house to the Galilaeans, and when your wives feed the poor at your expense they inspire a great admiration for godlessness in those who are in need of such bounty’. 68 Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, 275. Hands, Charities and Social Aid, 110.

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of benefactors’ funds for building went on baths.69 As for a food scheme, although such things existed in the second century, the principal difficulty is that almost all epigraphical records of government alimentary schemes relate to Italy,70 although there had been similar public schemes in the Greek world in the remote past.71 In the Latin-speaking provinces of the empire, there were many private charitable schemes alongside the government alimenta; but in the Greek East only two private schemes are known – one of them established personally by the Emperor Hadrian,72 and therefore only in a dubious sense ‘private’. Hadrian’s charity was for legitimate children of citizens of Antinoopolis in Egypt, registered within thirty days of birth, who were to be maintained with the proceeds of funds invested for the purpose.73 Therefore, if Faustina II’s foundation at Hierapolis had existed, a monetary investment would (on the analogy of Hadrian’s scheme at Antinoopolis) have been a more likely mechanism than direct supply of food from an imperial estate.74 In consequence, the investment would more likely have ceased to exist because of the long-term inflationary conditions of the third century, which destroyed interest-bearing investments, rather than at the time of Julian. The inference must be that the writer of the Life may have seen Faustina’s name on an inscription at the baths in Agros, but that Faustina’s charitable foundation for the poor of Hierapolis is no more than an elaboration based on a (Rome-focused) general knowledge of the charitable foundations of the past. With Faustina’s support and a ship supplied by Cornelianus, Aberkios sails on from Rome to Syria (68–9) and meets Barchasanes at Nisibis;75

69

70 72 73

74

75

Hands, Charities and Social Aid, 144; cf. Duncan-Jones, ‘Epigraphic Survey of Costs’, 195, who notes that Antoninus Pius’ baths at Ostia cost over 2 million sesterces to build, but that a set of baths at Teanum was purchased for as little as 60,000 sesterces. 71 Hands, Charities and Social Aid, 112. Hands, Charities and Social Aid, 97–100. Hands, Charities and Social Aid, 110. Hands, Charities and Social Aid, 186 (document D22), i.e. Bell, ‘Diplomata Antinoitica’, 518–20 (= P. Lond. Inv. 1905, 9 February 151). In the Life (66) the governor of the province is commanded to provide the food, but this idea does not mesh at all either with how charitable foundations really paid for food (using cash) or with where food was practically available (imperial estates). Since he (Governor Spinther) was the fictional governor of a province (Phrygia Salutaris) which did not exist in the second century, it is not worth attaching much weight to how the Life says the foundation was going to operate. ‘Une faute qui provient d’un archétype en onciale’, Grégoire argues (‘Bardesane et S. Abercius’, 364), perhaps correctly – not that uncial letters (as opposed to minuscule) affect the question. At all events, someone somewhere replaced a Δ with a Χ.

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his counterpart in real life was Bardesanes (Bardaisan) at Edessa.76 Nisibis comes from the inscription (line 10). Han J.W. Drijvers ploughed a lone furrow by arguing that ‘there would seem to be no reason to doubt the historicity’ of the passage about Aberkios and Barchasanes in Nisibis;77 in 1983 he argued that it showed that Aberkios spoke Syriac (and Bardaisan knew Greek).78 This view is not persuasive, and the fact that Aberkios went to Rome in the Life does not prove that he knew Latin either. An intriguing detail, after Aberkios refuses a cash contribution at Nisibis (69), is the vote proposed by Barchasanes (and passed by the Christians of Nisibis) to confer on Aberkios the title of ‘Equal of the Apostles’ (ἰσαπόστολος, 70). Henri Grégoire, in his discussion, argues that only later did the word ἰσαπόστολος become, in effect, reserved for Constantine.79 On Bollandist advice, Grégoire argues that the term must have been applied to Aberkios’ name well before the period when it was applied to Constantine’s name.80 The force of this argument is reduced by the account in Eusebius of the building of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, where Constantine in his lifetime ‘caused twelve coffins to be set up . . . like sacred pillars in honor and memory of the apostolic number, in the center of which his own was placed, having six of theirs on either side of it’.81 There, Eusebius says in the same chapter, Constantine ‘anticipat[ed] . . . that his body would share their title with the apostles themselves’ (τῆς τῶν ἀποστόλων προσρήσεως κοινωνὸν τὸ ἑαυτοῦ σκῆνος . . . γεγενῆσθαι). The word ἰσαπόστολος is not used, and perhaps the title Constantine implicitly coveted was just ‘apostle’; however, it is hard even so to imagine a late fourth-century or fifth-century Christian writer being unaware of a link between Constantine and the title ἰσαπόστολος. Earlier in the Life the author has portrayed Aberkios as a new Polycarp (teacher of Asia, ‘father of the Christians’) and a Christian Socrates (questioning and answering Euxeinianos); in this context it is not altogether surprising that he would position him as the real Equal of the 76

77 79

80

A distance of 226 km, 3.4 days’ travel by carriage (distance and estimate of travelling time from Scheidel and Meeks, ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World) – so that Nisibis and Edessa are not close enough to be regarded as interchangeable, except by someone with a very poor knowledge of Mesopotamia. 78 Drijvers, Bardaisan of Edessa, 170–1. Drijvers, ‘East of Antioch’, 5–6. Grégoire, (‘Bardesane et S. Abercius’, 365): ‘On sait que ce titre est réservé par l’Église grecque, mais à une époque tardive, à l’empereur Constantin.’ 81 Grégoire, ‘Bardesane et S. Abercius’, 365. Euseb. Vit. Const. 4.60.

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Apostles – even in implicit contrast to Constantine. After all, ‘we know of no one else, after the original apostles, who has travelled further across land and sea for the salvation of the brethren’ (70). On his journey home, Aberkios is welcomed by Christians in ‘both provinces of Cilicia, and Lycaonia and Pisidia’ (71), and then in Synnada (Şuhut), provincial capital of Lesser Phrygia (= Phrygia Salutaris). On his way home from Synnada via Aulon, in the countryside he walks into another opportunity for an aetiological story: peasants (ἄγροικοι) are threshing their crops on a windy day and the chaff blows into the saint’s eyes as he sits on a rock (72). They decline his request to stop threshing, but his subsequent prayer is answered and the wind ceases, with the result that threshing is called off for a meal break. A second request to the farmers (γεωργούς), this time for water, is rebuffed, and this time Aberkios ‘pray[s] to God that ravenous hunger should be granted to them’. ‘And it is said’, the chapter concludes, ‘that it has stayed with them up to this very day.’ Food shortage in rural areas in the ancient world needed no elaborate explanation. Subsistence producers, on whom the economy of the ancient world was based, were always at risk of food shortage, and within an economic system which remained broadly stable over many centuries, small proprietors, tenants, and free labourers (since the labour force was normally free rather than enslaved),82 employed low-risk production strategies with a view to survival.83 Conditions outside the urban world, and the lives of small farmers, were relatively seldom a matter of interest in antiquity to the social and cultural elite who produced literature84 – hunger in rural districts was normal, and as far as the writer of the Life was concerned, the peasants of Aulon got no more than they deserved for being repeatedly rude to the saint. In the last chapters of the Life Aberkios is welcomed home (73); he writes a book, heals the sick, and casts out demons (74); and at Lysias he brings forth another spring of water (75). All that is left is to design his memorial: ‘he prepared a tomb for himself, an equal-sided square, and he placed the altar, which the demon had brought from Rome at his command, above the tomb, engraving on it a divinely-inspired epitaph, informative and helpful to those who are worthy of Christ, but not understandable by the faithless’ (76). At 77 the text of the epitaph is given, and then at 78 the new bishop is chosen – the younger Aberkios. At 82 84

Garnsey, Famine and Food-Supply, 44. Garnsey, Famine and Food-Supply, 45.

83

Garnsey, Famine and Food-Supply, 43.

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79 the saint prays and hands his spirit over to the angels, his death supervening on 22 October (80).

the miracle of st michael A text which is a vital extant comparator to the Life of Abercius, and which has if anything an even more complex story behind its preservation and adaptation from antiquity to the modern world, is the Miracle of St Michael, a narrative about what the archangel Michael did for the Christians near Colossae. An aetiological account of a water source coming into existence is at its heart, as it is at the heart of the Life. But while examination of the Life of Abercius suggests an origin for the text in the work of a learned compiler in the fifth century, the earliest surviving text of the Miracle of St Michael can be dated no earlier than the late eighth century.85 In the Miracle of St Michael, translated into English by Alan Cadwallader in Colossae in Space and Time,86 the apostles Philip and John, after expelling the pre-Christian deities Artemis, Echidna, and Cybele from Hierapolis,87 visit Chairotopa, where they pray, and predict miracles which will occur there.88 After their departure, ‘water that could effect healings gushed forth in that spot’.89 The parallel with the Life of Abercius is clear but imperfect. In the Life, the hot spring at Agros appears miraculously, and yet a naturalistic cause is suggested, as well as a miraculous cause, for its beneficial effects: the local people were in bad physical condition because they had no bathing facilities;90 the saint prayed ‘that all who bathe in [the hot spring] may receive healing of all disease and infirmity’, but also told the people to dig pools and get in the habit of taking baths.91 The divergence between these complex and layered texts goes beyond the matter of their replacing pre-Christian explanations for hydrographical features in the landscape: explanations which became an embarrassment as the days of polytheism receded into the past. Thonemann is 85 86

87 88

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Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 77. Cadwallader, Colossae in Space and Time, 323–30: this is the translation which will be used here. ‘the female anti-Trinity’: so Cadwallader (‘St Michael of Chonai’, 50). This narrative is noted by Johannes Peter Rohland as one which brings together the warrior aspect of the early Byzantine understanding of Michael and the healing aspect: Der Erzengel Michael, 114–15. 90 91 Miracle of St Michael 2.2. Life of Abercius 39. Life of Abercius 40.

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detailed and persuasive when he relates the archangel Michael story to the Ak Su petrifying spring and the Cürük Su (Lycus) gorge, in the region where the Church of St Michael at Colossae/Chonai used to stand:92 ‘Natural wonders of this kind urgently required an alternative, Christian explanation’ (cf. above), in contrast (for example) to the polytheists’ story of Endymion at Hierapolis; nevertheless, (he argues) both narratives were ‘independent manifestations of a characteristic local style of interpreting, and domesticating, the hydrographic landscape of the Lycus valley’.93 The later text, the Miracle of St Michael, as well as offering the comfort of a Christian account of phenomena in the local landscape, is structured to carry forward an ecclesiastical controversy. Canon 35 of the Synod of Laodicea (early 360s) says:94 Christians must not forsake the Church of God, and go away and invoke angels and gather assemblies, which things are forbidden. If, therefore, any one shall be found engaged in this covert idolatry, let him be anathema; for he has forsaken our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and has gone over to idolatry.

This canon, aimed at the church in Colossae and the habit Christians had there of invoking Michael,95 provoked resistance against the Laodiceans as local rivals, which is in evidence in the Miracle of St Michael.96 Its narrative casts the people of Laodicea as the real idolaters (in resistance against the suspicion cast on the church at Colossae over its devotion to Michael), although at the same time (Cadwallader argues), Michael in the story uses (of himself ) ‘language that evokes divinity’, borrowing wording that shows ‘the survival . . . of a pagan oath formula invoking a god or the gods’.97 Centuries after the polytheist Cheshire cat officially vanished both from Laodicea and from Colossae, then, its smile lingers on in the Miracle of St Michael. The Life of Abercius, however, is a hagiographical story of another flavour. Its aetiological elements reflect local concerns, both with landscape and with relics of the human past (gravestone, baths), while the Roman adventure story and the overlay of Christian learning (Actus 92 93

94

95 96 97

Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 77–84. Thonemann, Maeander Valley, 84; cf. Cadwallader: ‘Christianization of local heroes, sites and cults was critical to the establishment of a measure of unity and continuity’ (‘St Michael of Chonai’, 39). Canons of the Synod of Laodicea 35, translation by Henry Percival in Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers vol. 14. Cadwallader, ‘St Michael of Chonai’, 41. Cadwallader, ‘St Michael of Chonai’, 42. Cadwallader, ‘St Michael of Chonai’, 45–6.

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Vercellenses, Book of the Laws of Countries, Plato seen through Origen’s filter), seek to take the whole story out of the domain of controversy. Even the Montanists, the target of the book the historical Avircius Marcellus wanted written,98 are not attacked. The Life’s blend of metropolitan and Phrygian viewpoints suits it to a broad audience, and although it has some language directed against Laodicea – a wicked city, which disabled Aridaios dreams ineffectively of destroying – that language remains at the level of casual libel and does not show symptoms of odium theologicum.

98

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.16.3, and cf. Chapter 5.

8 Apollonia (Uluborlu): Curiales and Their Families

The account in the Life of Abercius of the Aulon incident reflects the great gulf which was fixed in the ancient world between city and country, πόλις and χώρα;* that gulf took a distinctive shape in Roman Phrygia, where urbanization was recent (by comparison with coastal Asia Minor) and relatively superficial – a settler society built up from the Hellenistic period onwards and laid over a longer-established pattern of upland settlement.1 About 80 kilometres south-east of Aulon and Hierapolis (Koçhisar) lay Apollonia (Uluborlu), once known as Mordiaeum and also called ‘Apollonia by Pisidia’ to reflect its contested character. Antipater of Derbe, local dynast at the time when Cicero was governor of Cilicia (51–50 bc), and personal friend of Cicero’s,2 in his day controlled Antioch of Pisidia and territory ‘as far as the Apollonias near Apameia Cibotus’. Antipater was trying ‘to exterminate the Cilicians and the Pisidians, who from the Taurus were overrunning this country, which belonged to the Phrygians and the Cilicians’.3 Cicero’s letter (n.2 above) refers to Q. Marcius Philippus, governor of Asia and addressee of the letter, being angry with Antipater, but regardless of Philippus’ feelings, there were limits on what the Romans could do to discourage small wars outside their provinces, in the backblocks of Asia Minor, in the first century bc. * Parts of this chapter appeared in McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’ and in McKechnie, ‘Diogenes the Christian’. Such parts are reprinted with permission. Not every sentence or phrase reprinted from these articles will be separately referenced below. 1 2 Cf. Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 1–4. Cicero Ad familiares 13.73. 3 Strabo Geography 12.6.4.

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monumentum apolloniense By the time of Augustus, and after the creation of the province of Galatia in 25 bc – a province which included Apollonia (Uluborlu) – the leading people of this modest-sized city were ready to demonstrate their loyalty to Rome and the imperial family in tangible form. At Ancyra, capital of the province, a temple of Augustus and Rome was built between 25 and 20 bc; there, after Augustus was dead, the full text of the Res gestae was inscribed4 – inside the pronaos (vestibule) in Latin and on an exterior wall of the cella (inner chamber) in Greek. Copies were also inscribed in lesser Galatian cities: Apamea (in Latin) and Apollonia (in Greek).5 ‘We need not ask’, E.A. Judge writes, ‘why the text has survived only in Galatia, and not at any other of the sixty-eight identified cult sites of Augustus.’6 Thonemann has argued that a small epigraphical fragment from Sardis7 is evidence of a Greek copy of the Res gestae having been displayed in the city of Sardis in the province of Asia8 but Judge draws attention to the difficulty implied in Thonemann’s supposition that a different Greek translation of the Latin of the Res gestae must have been used at Sardis – a supposition made necessary to account for variations between the twenty-nine letters visible in the Sardis fragment and the places in Res gestae 21 and 22 to which (on the Thonemann theory) they correspond.9 In the Galatian context, someone at Apollonia made the decision to create a monument incorporating the Greek text, carving it on a pedestal which supported statues of Augustus, Tiberius, Livia, Germanicus, and Drusus. The project was carried out in the quinquennium following Augustus’ death, that is, between 14 and 19. In 18, when Germanicus, nephew of the Emperor Tiberius and grandson of Livia, led a military expedition to Asia, Apollonios, son of Olympichos, grandson of Artemon, travelled and represented his home city of Apollonia in an embassy to Germanicus, a popular figure who in that year would

4

5 6 8 9

The ‘account of what he had accomplished, which he desired to have cut upon bronze tablets and set up at the entrance to the Mausoleum’ (Suetonius Augustus 101.4), which Augustus had left with the Vestal Virgins before his death. The display at Ancyra, Mitchell argues, was created immediately after Augustus’ death, in late 14 or early 15 (Mitchell, Greek and Latin Inscriptions of Ankara I, 10–14, 27–31, 66–70, 138–50). Gordon, ‘Notes on the Res Gestae’, 128. 7 Judge, ‘Was a Greek Res Gestae Authorised for Sardis?’, 133. Sardis 7.1, 200. Thonemann, ‘Copy of Augustus’ Res gestae at Sardis’, 283–8. Thonemann, ‘Copy of Augustus’ Res gestae at Sardis’, 286–7; Judge, ‘Was a Greek Res Gestae Authorised for Sardis?’, 136–40.

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establish the Roman provinces of Cappadocia and Commagene. This is Apollonios’ epitaph:10 [ἡ βουλὴ καὶ ὁ δῆμος] | ἐτείμησεν Ἀ̣[πολλώνι]- | ον Ὀλυμπίχ[ου τοῦ Ἀρ]- | τέμωνος φι[λοσέβασ]- 4| τον καὶ φιλό[πατριν, ἀ]- | ναστήσαντ[α εἰκόνας ἐφίπ]- | πους τρεῖς ἐ[ν τῶ τεμένει] | τῶν Σεβαστῶ[ν, καὶ πρὸς τὴν] 8| πόλιν ἐκ προγ[όνων κατὰ βίον ὅ] | λον εὐεργετικῶ[ς διακείμενον] | καὶ πρεσβεύσαν[τα πρὸς Γερμα]- | νικὸν Καίσαρα κ[αὶ γυμνασιαρ]- 12| χήσαντα λαμπρ[ῶς καὶ ἱερέα θε]- | ᾶς Ῥώμης γενόμ[ενον καὶ ἐπι]- | δόσεις δόντα [καὶ ἑστιάσεις] | πολυτελεῖς π[αρασχόμενον] 16| καὶ συμφερόντ ̣[ως ἀναστρε]- | [φόμενον . . . .]. [The council and the people] honoured A[pollonius] son of Olympichos [grandson of Ar]temon, lover [of Augus]tus and lover of his [fatherland], who set up three eques[trian statues] in the enclosure of the August[i] and who together with his ances[tors has all his life] been disposed to be a benefactor [towards the] city, who went on a diplomatic missio[n to Germa]nicus Caesar, and [who served as gymnasi]arch with distincti[on, and was priest of the god]dess Rome, and gave [voluntary] contributions and provided costly [entertainments], and who [conducted himself] appropriately . . .

It is certain that the ambassadors from Apollonia must have spoken in their address to Germanicus about progress on the monumentum Apolloniense;11 perhaps they also spoke about the three equestrian statues which Apollonios, son of Olympichos, set up in the enclosure of the Augusti – particularly if one of those three represented Germanicus himself. People still alive in Apollonia when Apollonios went to meet Germanicus could remember the bad old days, seven decades before, when Cicero’s friend Antipater was calling the shots from Derbe, trying to wipe out the Cilicians and Pisidians who were coming down from the Taurus mountains and threatening the pocket kingdom Antipater was trying to hold on to – mayhem which continued even while Philippus, governor of Asia, held Antipater’s sons as hostages.12 A Roman province of Galatia and a governor in Ancyra endowed with the might of Rome (who might listen if their enjoyment of property and local eminence were disturbed) amounted to nothing less than a dream come true for landowners and local notables like Artemon, grandfather of ambassador Apollonios.13 A risk register was a management tool not known to Asian city governments in the first centuries bc and ad,14 but if such a register had been reviewed after the foundation of the province of Galatia, risks such as ‘loss 10 12 14

11 MAMA 4.142. McKechnie, ‘Apollonia: An Early Testimony’, 143. 13 Cicero Ad familiares 13.73. MAMA 4.142. See e.g. Kendrick, Identifying and Managing Project Risk.

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of fixed capital on farms by enemy action’ or ‘enemy occupation of Apolloniate territory’ could at last have been assessed as ‘low’, instead of the ‘medium’ or ‘high’, which would have been the honest assessment in the days of Antipater of Derbe. Property owners, with a lot to lose, had solid reason to be glad of Roman rule. Apollonia, which in the early third century ad was to claim to have been founded by Alexander the Great,15 was in fact established in the third century bc as one of a number of Seleucid cities set up in southern Phrygia following the late fourth-century foundation of Docimium (İscehisar) by Dokimos, an officer who at the end of a chequered career found himself in the service of Lysimachus.16 The much later formal description of the Apollonian state as ‘the council and people of the Apolloniate Lycian Thracian colonists’17 may hark back to an origin for the settlement at the time of Lysimachus’ kingship in Thrace (306–281), as well as to the city’s connections southwards into Lycia in the time of Seleucid control after 281.18 However, in the following century, Apollonia was ceded to the kingdom of Pergamum in the treaty of Apamea in 187; then Apollonia, and Pisidia as a whole, were handed to the Cappadocian kingdom after the death of Attalus III in 133.19 Years of uncertainty followed: it is impossible to tell what difference Roman operations against Cilicia and piracy in the second and first centuries may have made as far inland as the Phrygian/Pisidian borderland. By the time of Cicero’s governorship of Cilicia, Apollonia had, for over eighty years, been outside the effective control and protection of any imperial power. The risk register for a landowner at Apollonia in those years, therefore, would have featured ‘loss of labour force to slave raids’ and ‘loss of social position owing to circumstances of crisis’. As Thonemann comments, the 15

16 17

18

19

In a bronze coin (30 x 31 mm, 18.32 g), SNG von Aulock 2988, which on the obverse shows Alexander in Heracles’ lion-skin headdress with the legend AΛEΞA KTIC AΠOΛΛΩNIATΩN (‘Alexa[nder] fou[nder] of Apollonia’). Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 17. Use of the Latin-derived word κολώνων (‘colonists’) shows that this phrase in its exact form cannot have been in use as early as the Seleucid period. The word κολωνεία (= Latin colonia) was, however, familiar in Asia in the first century BC if not earlier: IEph 223, a senatusconsultum in granting tax exemption to teachers and doctors, imposes restrictions (line 16) on actions to be taken by ‘duoviri or quattuorviri or those who have any kind of jurisdiction in any city, place, people, colony or settlement . . .’ ( δύ]ο ἀνδρῶν ἢ τεσσάρων ἀνδρῶν ἢ τῶν ὁποίποτε [δικαιο]δοτούντων ἀρχόντων ἐν πόλει χρείῳ δήμῳ κολω[νεί]ᾳ ἀποικίᾳ . . .). ἡ βουλὴ καὶ ὁ δῆμος Ἀπολλωνιατῶν Λυκίων Θρακῶν κολώνων (MAMA 4.147, from Apollonia (Uluborlu), on the base of a statue of Caracalla, dated 198; cf. SEG 37.1100, dated 134/5). Apollonia, although Phrygian, was not within Phrygia as incorporated between 122 and 116 into the province of Asia (Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 29).

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Phrygians, ‘lacking any collective means of self-protection, became a particularly vulnerable part of the slave-raiding periphery of the developed states the Mediterranean basin’.20 Roman and Italian negotiatores (‘businessmen’, many of whose business was substantially in slave-trading), moved in and drew on less well-protected areas to find the people they enslaved.21 Artemon and the other ancestors of Apollonios the ambassador, who, like him (if the inscription can be taken at face value) were always ‘disposed to be . . . benefactor[s] towards the city’,22 would have been secure enough not to be at much risk of enslavement themselves; after 25, however, any prospect of big change at Rome would have been enough to make a family like theirs apprehensive about the future. The religious activities carried out in the civic context by the Apollonios family in the first centuries bc and ad reflect the sources of the hopes they had for social stability. Apollonios’ grandfather, Artemon, son of Olympichos, was honoured by the people in the first century bc as priest of Zeus;23 but Apollonios himself moved with the times, and as well as setting up statues in the enclosure of the Augusti, he served as priest of the goddess Rome – as did his elder brother D[emetri]os,24 who (before 19 August 14) had twice served on diplomatic missions to Augustus himself.25 Cults of the power of Rome (some but not all of them involving worship of the goddess Rome) had grown in Asia during the century after Rome’s takeover of the Pergamene kingdom,26 while at Apollonia religion was developing along the same lines as in comparable communities. The death of Augustus may, therefore, have appeared as a potential moment of crisis to civic leaders in the backblocks who had come to rely on the stability he had brought to the whole Roman world. Therefore, at Apollonia, the continuance of peaceful conditions into the reign of Tiberius may well have seemed to justify the resources invested in the enclosure of the Augusti and the monumentum Apolloniense.

the apollonios/olympichos family The Apollonios family is of particular interest not only because it was a leading local family, but because in the days of Tiberius it had, besides its 20 21 23 24 25

Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 15. 22 Thonemann, ‘Phrygia: An Anarchist History’, 29–30. MAMA 4.142 lines 8–10. MAMA 4.141: ὁ δῆμο[ς] [Ἀρτέ]μωνα Ὀλυ[μπίχου] [ἱερ]έα Διός. Apollonios: MAMA 4.142 lines 13–14; D[emetri]os IGRRP 3.320 lines 3–4. 26 IGRRP 3.320 lines 5–7. Price, Rituals and Power, 41–2.

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generations-long record of achievement in local politics at Apollonia, also a future. A third-century inscription commemorates Alexandros, also known as Artemon, a descendant (four generations later) of Apollonios, son of Olympichos:27 Αὐρ. Ἀσκληπιάδης Ἀλε- | ξάνδρου τοῦ καὶ Ἀρ- | τέμωνος δʹ Ὀλυνπίχου | καὶ Αὐρ. Κοσμία Ἀσκληπι- 4| δου βʹ Μεννέου τῷ ἰδίῳ | ἀνδρί, καὶ Αὐρ. τεμωνὶς | πατρὶ Ἀλεξάνδρῳ | μνήμης χάριν. 8| Aurelius Asclepiades, son of Alexandros also known as Artemon, grandson of Alexandros, great-grandson of Alexandros, great-great-grandson of Alexandros, great-great-great grandson of Olympichos, and Aurelia Kosmia, daughter of Asclepiades, granddaughter of Asclepiades, great-granddaughter of Menneas, (set up this memorial) to her own husband, and so did Aurelia Artemonis to her father Alexandros, in memoriam.

The connection between the personnel of MAMA 4.142 and MAMA 4.222 (and several other inscriptions from Apollonia28) was made by W.H. Buckler, W.M. Calder, and W.K.C. Guthrie in MAMA 4. I treated it as firm in an article in 2008;29 but Christopher P. Jones is sceptical, noting that Buckler, Calder, and Guthrie ‘did not . . . insist on’ the correctness of the stemma which they published at MAMA 4.49.30 The uncertain matter would be the identification of Olympichos, great-great-great-grandfather of Alexandros known as Artemon (from MAMA 4.222) with Gaios Ioulios Olympichos, attested in MAMA 4.161 and 162. Olympichos is not an uncommon name,31 particularly at Apollonia,32 and Jones cites Christian Habicht on how many cases there are at Athens of the same combination of name-of-father plus name-of-son in different demes: Habicht warns that the same thing can happen anywhere in the Greek world.33 Jones’s inference is that Olympichos the ancestor of the deceased in MAMA 4.222 might be someone unconnected with the Apollonios who went on the diplomatic mission to Germanicus.

27 28 29 30 31

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MAMA 4.222 (ICG 1136). MAMA 4.141, 160, 161, 162, 171, 172 and IGRRP 3.320 (MAMA 4.48). McKechnie, ‘Apollonia: An Early Testimony’. Jones, ‘Christianity at Apollonia of Pisidia?’, 143. A total of 171 instances in a 2015 search of the LGPN database (www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/ database/lgpn.php). Jones, ‘Christianity at Apollonia of Pisidia?’, 143. Jones, ‘Christianity at Apollonia of Pisidia?’, 143–4 and n.6, citing Habicht, ‘Notes on Attic Prosopography’ and ‘Namensgleiche Athener’.

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Figure 9 Olympichos Family Stemma. Drawn by Jenni Irving

This argument is the same in principle as the arguments for two Origens,34 and two Tertullians:35 names are not unique, so one should be on the lookout for cases where one name conceals multiple persons. But in this instance the background is not Alexandria, second largest city in the world, and still less is it the whole domain in which Roman law held sway. Apollonia was a small city, and even Jones, while stating that Buckler, Calder, and Guthrie ‘made some arbitrary decisions about identities and interrelationships’, says that the other Olympichoi were ‘from the same city and probably from the same family’.36 A corollary of this is that even if the identification of Olympichos, son of Olympichos, son of Artemon, with Gaios Ioulios Olympichos was not correct,37 they would still probably be close relatives. Jones’s attack on Buckler, Calder, and Guthrie’s stemma for the Olympichos family, however, is subservient to a greater concern in his article. His aim is to counteract my suggestion that when MAMA 4.222 was set up as a memorial to a member of the same family, the dedicators caused a cross to be carved in its pediment as a reference to the family’s adherence 34

35 36

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Edwards in 2015 argued that those who argue for only one Origen, recently the more fashionable view, have serious questions to answer (‘One Origen or Two?’, 16–17); but in his examination of the status quaestionis he stops short of claiming to have proved that there must have been two. Barnes, Tertullian, 22–9. Jones, ‘Christianity at Apollonia of Pisidia?’, 143: ‘arbitrary decisions’, in my view, is not fair comment. ‘Judgements based on probability rather than certainty’, as I see it, would catch what Buckler, Calder, and Guthrie were doing with more sensitivity. In my view it is much more likely correct than not.

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to Christianity.38 This poorly centred cross is far from impressive in appearance, but is not out of keeping with the standard to which the gravestone as a whole is carved. Shabby as it may look, the gravestone is remarkable, commemorating Alexandros, also known as Artemon,39 and linking the deceased back across four generations to Olympichos, brother of the Apollonios who represented the city of Apollonia on the embassy to Germanicus in 18. Theirs was not merely a prominent local family, serving as gymnasiarchs and such,40 but probably the grandest family in the small city to which they had directed their beneficence (or such was the official record) for centuries.41 Whereas the first-century family members were serving as priest of Zeus,42 or priest of the goddess Rome, and funding the making and display of statues of members of the imperial family,43 as well as reporting to Germanicus on how the construction of the monumentum Apolloniense was progressing, by the third century their descendants – still proud of their lineage, still people of local importance – had begun to orient their religious loyalty in a Christian direction. I argued some time ago that this monument was erected in the early third century. Jones, taking a different view, is right to note that the cross in the pediment is not an infallible sign of Christianity;44 he is, however, on shaky ground in defending Buckler, Calder, and Guthrie’s dating of MAMA 4.222 to the late third century. Rejecting my calculation based on generation-lengths,45

38 39

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McKechnie, ‘Apollonia: An Early Testimony’, 145–6. MAMA 4.222: ‘Aurelius Asclepiades, son of Alexandros also known as Artemon, grandson of Alexandros, great-grandson of Alexandros, great-great-grandson of Alexandros, great-great-great- grandson of Olympichos, and Aurelia Kosmia, daughter of Asclepiades, granddaughter of Asclepiades, great-granddaughter of Menneas, (set up this memorial) to her own husband, and so did Aurelia Artemonis to her father Alexandros, in memoriam’ (cf. McKechnie, ‘Apollonia: An Early Testimony’, 141). For example, Apollonios, son of Olympichos, son of Artemon, who also went on the embassy to Germanicus: MAMA 4.142 lines 11–12. MAMA 4.142 line 9: Apollonios and his ancestors inclined to be benefactors of the city. Any incidents displaying other than public-spirited qualities over the centuries, however, would have no chance of being recorded on stone. Artemon, son of Olympichos, MAMA 4.141. Apollonios, son of Olympichos, son of Artemon, MAMA 4.142: statues in the sacred enclosure of the Augusti, lines 4–7; priest of goddess Rome, lines 12–13. Note also Gaios Ioulios Olympichos, described as a ‘lover of Augustus’ (φιλο[σέβασ]|[το]ν ̣) on account of his religious sentiment ([ε]ὐσεβείαι) towards the imperial family (MAMA 4.161 lines 1–3). Jones, ‘Christianity at Apollonia of Pisidia?’, 144. Note also that it is not impossible that the cross was added to the pediment at a date after the gravestone was originally carved (cf. McKechnie, ‘Apollonia: An Early Testimony’, 145). McKechnie, ‘Apollonia: An Early Testimony’, 144–5, following a study by Marc Tremblay and Hélène Vézina of generation-lengths in twentieth-century Quebec,

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he says that ‘The only safe guide to the date of the present stone comes from the criteria that the MAMA editors presumably used when dating it to the latter part of the third century, the script and the cross inscribed on the pediment.’46 This is problematic: Buckler, Calder, and Guthrie did not claim that their dating was based on script (Jones has to say that they ‘presumably’ used this criterion because there is no evidence that they did),47 and an argument dating the stone from the presence of the cross is circular (‘A gravestone with a cross carved on it cannot be early, because gravestones with crosses carved on them are late’). My broader argument is that the change in religious allegiance of a key local family at Apollonia is an early symptom of the kind of shift which Berger (cf. above) would describe in terms of a shift in the sacred canopy. In the Augustan period it is clear, in the Galatian context, how the Apollonios/Olympichos family sheltered under (and did all it could to bring the city of Apollonia under) a sacred canopy described in terms of what Augustus and his family, together with the goddess Rome, had to offer the city community. But times change, and in the early third century Christianity was where this family was turning for reassurance. They may have been early adopters – the unconscionably early cross on Artemon’s tombstone hints at this – but there were semi-official straws in the wind which favoured the move. The Emperor Severus Alexander (222–235) had statuettes of Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonios of Tyana in his lararium, although he also kept statuettes of deified emperors there (‘of whom, however, only the best had been selected’).48 A contemporary writer, the unreliable Historia Augusta says, recorded the data about Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus being in the emperor’s lararium,49 so that some people in the reading public may have drawn their own conclusions. A cross carved on a gravestone at Apollonia would be a slender base of evidence on which to build a case for the view that the curial class, the

46 47

48 49

according to which a mean value for father–son intergenerational time intervals would be thirty-five years. Jones, ‘Christianity at Apollonia of Pisidia?’, 144. Differences in features of script such as size and shape of lettering, or choice between kinds of sigma (Σ, С) omega (Ω, ω), and xi (Ξ, or three horizontal lines with a vertical line down the middle), are not consistent enough in third-century inscriptions from Asia to allow inferences to be drawn about whether particular inscriptions were carved in particular decades, or even early or late in the century: this may be why Jones does not present a detailed argument based on script for MAMA 4.222 as being from the late third century. SHA Alex. Sev. 29.2; Alexander the Great, too, merited shelf space (31.5). SHA Alex. Sev. 29.2.

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families which supplied the members of city councils, took a leading role in the shift from the sacred canopy of polytheist and imperial religion to the Christian sacred canopy. But the Apollonios/Olympichos family and their city of Apollonia are not an isolated example. As is so often true, it is possible to gain a hint about what was happening from what an author says was not happening. Origen, in his book Against Celsus (in the 240s), explained why Christians ‘decline public offices’ and prefer to serve the church, as clergy, instead of joining city councils:50 [I]f those who govern in the church, and are called rulers of the divine nation – that is, the church – rule well, they rule in accordance with the divine commands, and never suffer themselves to be led astray by worldly policy. And it is not for the purpose of escaping public duties that Christians decline public offices, but that they may reserve themselves for a diviner and more necessary service in the church of God – for the salvation of men. And this service is at once necessary and right . . .

Here Origen was answering Celsus’ claim that Christians ought to ‘take office in the government of the country, if that is required for the maintenance of the laws and the support of religion’. Celsus, perhaps in the 170s, had written the True Word, to which Origen was replying – this indicates that non-participation in government was something which anti-Christian voices felt able to find fault with, long before Origen wrote, and even some time before Asclepiades had a cross carved on his father’s tombstone at Apollonia.

local government Declining public office was not always feasible. City council membership (the most widespread form of public office in the Roman empire) was not a matter of free choice. For those nominated to vacancies, membership was compulsory. Few exemptions existed. As A.H.M. Jones wrote,51 ‘In the third century we find cities hunting in the highways and byways to fill their magistracies.’ Office-holding meant expenses borne by the holder. A gymnasiarch (to choose an office held by Apollonios, son of Olympichos, son of Artemon, see above) had to pay the costs of operating the city’s gymnasium during his term of office: the oil the gym users rubbed on their bodies, the firewood used to heat the water if there were baths – and if there was an admission charge, that charge would offset only part of the cost of the service. The situation was similar for other posts on the 50

Origen C. Cels. 8.75.

51

Jones, The Greek City, 190.

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city council; these costs were the reason why council membership was compulsory for citizens who could afford to meet the obligations, and the reason for all the hunting in highways and byways. From the Christian side there was ambivalence over whether it was right to serve on a city council. Not only for Origen’s reason, because governing the church was better; there was also, in some church quarters, a sense that being so close to the ‘cosmic powers of this present darkness’52 must in itself imply an unrighteous life. At the other end of the Mediterranean in 306, at the Council of Elvira, the nineteen bishops and twenty-six presbyters present sought to occupy a space between pragmatic acceptance that Christians were on city councils and Origen’s idealistic view that they should decline to serve. Elvira Canon 56 provides that ‘Magistrates are not to enter the church during the year in which they serve as duumvir [mayor].’53 This indicates disapproval, albeit a milder form than that attaching to jockeys and actors, who had to give up their occupations before being allowed to convert to Christianity (Canon 62: ‘Chariot racers or pantomimes must first renounce their profession and promise not to resume it before they may become Christians. If they fail to keep this promise, they shall be expelled from the church’). There is no evidence to hand as to whether city councillors were allowed to go to church in Asia and Phrygia during their term of office. There are, however, comparatively good data on who the Christian city councillors were, and where they served. ‘Comparatively good’, that is, in the context of a microscopically low preservation rate for gravestones, which are by far the most useful source of data for the question ‘How many city councillors were Christians before Constantine came and made being a Christian legal?’ Of the Christian city councillors now documented, over half are Phrygian and known from inscriptions on stone.54 But the closest known Christian city councillor in chronological terms to MAMA 4.222 is not a Phrygian: he was a councillor at Cirta in Numidia, and Minucius Felix wrote a book about his conversion. His name was M. Caecilius Natalis. 52 53 54

Ephesians 6.12. Translation of Elvira canons by Kenneth Pennington in Laeuchli, Power and Sexuality. To the list of fifteen which I published in 2009 (McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’), three should now be added. M. Caecilius Natalis is listed by Alexander Weiss at Soziale Elite und Christentum, 206–7; the gravestone of Aur(elius) Alexandros, son of Gaius of Eukarpia (MAMA 11.139 (ICG 1448), from Emirhisar, on which see Appendix 2) was not yet published when I was assembling my list of councillors; and I failed to note Dorymedon of Synnada, on whom see below.

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Alexander Weiss in Soziale Elite und Christentum shows that Caecilius Natalis, the man converted to Christianity by Octavius’ arguments in Minucius Felix’s Octavius,55 should be identified with the triumvir (mayor) from Cirta (Constantine) in Numidia identified on a statue base from 210.56 He is described as triumvir quinquennalis on inscriptions from a triumphal arch built at Cirta during the reign of Caracalla (211–217).57 Natalis was a prominent member of the city council in an important city, although Minucius Felix, who created his literary monument,58 did not think to record his place in official life. This is a worthwhile reminder that there may be other Christians from the ancient world whose names are known but whose position in the community remains a closed book. What remains unknown is how Natalis’ peers as council members at Cirta reacted to his conversion. The premise of Minucius Felix’s Octavius, written as a memoir of Octavius after his death, is that when the author thinks back on Octavius and his friendship with him, the moment he thinks of most of all is the time when Octavius persuaded Natalis to convert to Christianity.59 This idea, brought in at the beginning, provides a motivation for the apologetic discourse which follows; yet, given that Natalis and the others in the dialogue are (in the manner of Plato) real people, there must have been real-world events which followed the change in Natalis’ religious allegiance. A similar case is that of Ambrosius, a Greek attested only in a Syriac source. In the Greek manuscript tradition, To Greeks is of unknown authorship and usually listed as belonging to pseudo-Justin;60 however, in the sixth- or seventh-century Syriac manuscript (British Museum MS. Add. 14,658) which William Cureton used as his source in his Spicilegium Syriacum (1855), the author ascription of To Greeks is given as ‘Ambrosius, a chief man of Greece, who became a Christian, and all his fellow-councillors raised a clamour against him’. Since city councils were the only organ of government in the

55

56 58 59 60

There called, on different occasions, Caecilius (Minucius Felix Octavius 1 and throughout), Marcus (Minucius Felix Octavius 3), and Natalis (Minucius Felix Octavius 16). His conversion: Minucius Felix Octavius 40–1. 57 CIL 8.6996. CIL 8.7094, 7095, 7096, 7097, and 7098. Cf. Weiss, Soziale Elite und Christentum, 207: ‘ein literarisches Denkmal’. Minucius Felix Octavius 1. Meecham, Epistle to Diognetus, 68, and McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, 16–17; cf. Brock, ‘Earliest Syriac Literature’, 169. Marcovich (Pseudo-Iustinus, 104) credits Ambrosius with ‘an excerpted considerably expanded and obviously vulgarized version’ of To Greeks.

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Roman imperial period in Greece which would make someone a ‘chief man of Greece’,61 the inference must be that Ambrosius was a councillor. His unpopularity – the ‘clamour against him’ – would be accounted for by the illegality of Christianity. The attested Christian city councillors in Phrygia in the third century are (1) Aurelius Alexandros, son of Epigonos of Eumeneia;62 (2) Aurelius Gemellos, son of Menas, of Eumeneia; (3) Aurelius Menas, son of Menas, of Eumeneia, councillor and civic elder, father of (2);63 (4) Aurelius Eutyches, son of Hermos, aka Helix, of Eumeneia, councillor and civic elder;64 (5) Aurelius Zotikos, son of Praxias, of Eumeneia;65 (6) Aurelius Menophilos, son of Menophilos, of Eumeneia;66 (7) Aurelius Messalas, son of Messalas, of Sebaste (Sivaslı);67 (8) Anonymous, husband of Non(n)a, and (9) his brother Trophimos, ‘rulers of the homeland of the people’;68 (10) Aur(elius) Alexandros, son of Gaios, of Eukarpia;69 (11) Dorymedon of Synnada.70 Eleven third-century Phrygian councillors in total, only one of them dated to a particular year of death. It will be observed that six are from Eumeneia (Işıklı); Eumeneia will be discussed in Chapter 9. The last councillor mentioned on this list, Dorymedon of Synnada, features as a supporting player in the Acts of St Trophimus. His cameo role is informative and adds to what the cases of Natalis and Ambrosius reveal about Christian city councillors and their non-Christian peers in the third century. The martyr-act begins, unexpectedly, by summarizing an otherwise unattested law issued by the Emperor Probus (276–282),71 61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69 71

That is, some place which a Syriac writer called ‘Greece’, which does not prove that somewhere in a European province was meant. ICG 1057. Johnson, Early-Christian Epitaphs, 3.2 (= Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, no. 359); cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors, no. 1 (p. 6). ICG 1025. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, no. 361; cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, no. 2 (pp. 6–7). ICG 1050. Johnson, Early-Christian Epitaphs, 3.4 (= Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, no. 364); cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, no. 3 (pp. 7–8). ICG 1029. Johnson, Early-Christian Epitaphs, 3.3 (= Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, no. 368); cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, no. 4 (p. 8). ICG 1062. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, no. 371; cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, no. 5 (pp. 8–9). Johnson, Early-Christian Epitaphs, 3.6 (Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, no. 451); not in ICG; cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, no. 5 (pp. 9–10). Gibson, ‘Montanist Epitaphs at Uşak’, no. 27; cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, no. 5 (pp. 10–11). 70 MAMA 11.139 (ICG 1448): died 255/6. Acts of St Trophimus 2.10–15. Probus is not noted anywhere as a persecutor: cf. e.g. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 7.30.22, where his reign passes without comment. He is also not in Lactant. De mort. pers. The Historia Augusta writer, at the beginning of a brief but encomiastic account (SHA Prob. 1.3),

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commanding governors of provinces, city councils, and others whom the proclamation of the law reached, ‘Take a serious stance against the religion of the Christians!’ (σπουδαῖοι γίνεσθε κατὰ τῆς θρησκείας τῶν Χριστιανῶν).72 It goes on to describe the arrest of Trophimus and Sabbatius, visitors coming into Antioch of Pisidia from somewhere beyond the borders.73 Sabbatius is tortured to death,74 but Trophimus is sent from Antioch, where the official who has dealt with Trophimus and Sabbatius is a vicarius (βικάριος), to Synnada, where he will be brought before a provincial governor (ἡγεμών).75 There, he is visited in the prison by Dorymedon, ‘the first man of the council-chamber’ (πρῶτος τοῦ βουλευτηρίου), who a few days later attracts the governor’s unfavourable notice by failing to attend when summoned to a sacrifice ceremony on the birthday of the Dioscuri.76 The martyr-act has a number of features which demonstrate that it was not written in the third century. Atticus Heliodorus, vicarius at Antioch of Pisidia, sends Trophimus to Erinius Dionysius, who is governor of Phrygia Salutaris;77 but there was no province of Phrygia Salutaris until Diocletian’s changes to provincial organization in the 290s. Dionysius, demanding compliance from Dorymedon, oscillates between speaking of the emperor (singular) and the emperors (plural):78 in the time of Probus, the most recent joint emperors were Valerian and Gallienus (253–260), but joint emperorship was to return soon after Probus’ time, with Diocletian and Maximian, and in the fourth century there were only eight years of sole emperorship. The compiler, however, displays no consistent preference – such small details are a background wash. And yet after Diocletian’s changes to the provinces, sending a prisoner from Antioch

72 73

74 76 77

78

wrote: ‘Probus, an emperor whose rule restored to perfect safety the east, the west, the south, and the north, indeed all parts of the world, is now, by reason of a lack of writers, almost unknown to us.’ Acts of St Trophimus 1.1. Acts of St Trophimus 1.2. They hail from an undefined place outside Antioch of Pisidia: ἀπὸ ξένης. 75 Acts of St Trophimus 1.5. Acts of St Trophimus 1.6. Acts of St Trophimus 1.8. Acts of St Trophimus 1.3. The Acta Sanctorum text is ἐρινίῳ Διονύσῳ [sic], and Stiltingus in a note says that he did not wish to correct the manuscript’s reading at this point: elsewhere in the text (e.g. at 1.7) the second iota in Διονύσιος does appear. [V]erinius would be a better-attested Roman nomen than Erinius. Acts of St Trophimus 1.10: ‘the command of the emperor’ (πρόσταγμα τοῦ βασιλέως), but, a few lines further on, ‘the command of the emperors’ (πρόσταγμα τῶν αὐτοκρατόρων); cf. 1.12: ‘the emperors gave him this honour’ (οἱ αὐτοκράτορες ἐτίμησαν), but ‘the commands of the emperor’ (τοῖς προστάγμασι τοῦ βασιλέως).

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of Pisidia to Synnada would have been unnecessary, since the new province of Pisidia had its own governor who could inflict the death penalty. The journey makes sense only in the context of the time when Synnada was still an assize centre in the (old) province of Asia.79 The Acts of St Trophimus, unsatisfactory as they are some ways – the supposed law of Probus failing to resemble authentic Roman laws of the period, and so on – find corroboration in an ossuary which came to the Museum of Bursa in 1907 from Synnada (Şuhut). This is a white marble chest, inscribed on the front of the chest and on the lid as follows:80 Front of chest ὧδε
ἔνα
Τρο | φί
μου
τοῦ
μ | άρτυ
ρος
ὀσ
τέ |
α
4| Herein are the bones of Trophimus the martyr. Lid of chest τίς
ἂν
δὲ
ταῦ
| τα
τὰ
ὀστέα
| ἐκ
βά
λῃ
πο
τὲ | ἔσται
αὐτῷ 4| πρὸς
τ[ὸ (ν)] Θεό
| ν. Anyone who ever throws these bones out, it shall be a matter between him and God.

Gustave Mendel, in his discussion, argues on the ground of the style of lettering in favour of a date for the ossuary before the end of the persecutions.81 Other opinions have been divided: Mendel cites correspondence with Louis Duchesne in which Duchesne favoured a date after the end of the fourth century; however, he also quotes a letter from Grégoire in which Grégoire favours a third-century date.82 Tabbernee agrees that the ossuary was made in the late third century.83 But (to anticipate something which will be discussed more fully in Chapter 9), epigraphical attestations of the formula ‘it shall be a matter between him and God’ – that is, the Eumeneian formula – are strongly associated with the period between the 240s and the 270s. It is credible that it would be

79 80

81 82

83

Synnada was already known as a conventus centre to Pliny the Elder: NH 5.105. ICG 1378 (SEG 30.1494). Mendel, ‘Catalogue des monuments grecs’, no. 102, pp. 342–8. IMont 35; Mendel, ‘Catalogue des monuments grecs’, 345–6. ‘j’incline à croire que l’inscription est bien du IIIe siècle’: Grégoire quoted in Mendel, ‘Catalogue des monuments grecs’, 347. His argument is based on where the wording of the inscription would place it, chronologically, within the context of the development of the cult of the martyrs. Tabbernee, Early Christianity in Contexts, 276.

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carved on a martyr’s ossuary 75 kilometres or so away from Eumeneia at Synnada in the reign of Probus, and later dates are much less likely. Trophimus, then, should be accepted as a martyr killed at Synnada between 276 and 282; as Duchesne observed, the local martyr cult there was of three martyrs, not one:84 there is adequate reason to ascribe the story of Dorymedon of Synnada to the same time – even though in the text of the martyr-act the link is comparatively weak.85 Dorymedon visits Trophimus in the prison once, and afterwards his story proceeds separately until the moment when both martyrs are brought into the arena to face some spiritless and ineffective wild beasts.86 When Dorymedon fails to present himself at the governor’s sacrifice ceremony, he is the only member of the city council who is not there. The governor sends a runner (κούρσωρα) to reiterate the summons, and Dorymedon sends the runner back with a forthright message:87 ‘Go and say to the governor, “This is what Dorymedon says: I am a Christian, and a city councillor of Christ’s city, in which all worth and nobility subsists. Therefore I cannot abandon him, the chairman of the council (ἄρχοντα τῆς βουλῆς), and obey the commands of human beings. For it is not just or holy to leave behind the living God and worship dead demons.”’

Dionysius reacts by sending singularii, who bring Dorymedon into custody. Before questioning him on the following day, he sends the other councillors to him to urge him in the direction of compliance. As a young man who was already ‘the first man of the council-chamber’,88 Dorymedon must have been wealthy, and the kind of person who might have aspired to the tres militiae and an official career in equestrian grades;

84

85

86 87

88

‘II n’est pas possible de mettre en doute l’existence et le culte des trois martyrs de Synnada. Quelque artificielle que soit leur légende, leurs noms figurent dans le calendrier nicomédien du IVe siècle qui forme la base du martyrologe hiéronymien’: Grégoire quoted in Mendel, ‘Catalogue des monuments grecs’, 347. Tabbernee’s view is that the ossuary ‘may be the basis of the spurious Acta Sancti Trophimi’ (Early Christianity in Contexts, 276); however, ‘spurious’ exaggerates the strength of the case against the martyr-act as a historical source. The compiler has got a chronological feature right, and recorded that a suspect was brought from Antioch to Synnada (not normal practice at the time of writing), while mixing in anachronisms including the reference to Phrygia Salutaris, and elaborations including the putative imperial law. Acts of St Trophimus 1.15. Acts of St Trophimus 1.10. Translations from this text by McKechnie, from the text in Stiltingus et al., Acta Sanctorum vol. 6. Acts of St Trophimus 1.11.

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however, his fellow councillors see risk for their community in his adherence to Christianity:89 They . . . began to say to him, ‘What kind of madness have the gods made you drink, that you would get involved with this foolishness? Now take an oath by the gods not to go near anything that will do harm, but go from here in a dignified way and sacrifice, so that we do not become a laughing-stock for the other cities.’

This is an interesting and credible testimony to the likely response of the non-Christian majority to a Christian being part of the city council. It is consistent with what happened to Ambrosius (‘all his fellow-councillors raised a clamour against him’: see above). Dorymedon gives his fellow councillors just as negative an answer as he gave the governor. When Dionysius hears this answer, he commands that the minute book be brought (ἐξενεχθήτω τὸ βουλογράφιον Συνναδέων) and Dorymedon be expelled from the council (γενέσθω . . . ἀπόβουλος).90 A dialogue, punctuated with torture, follows,91 before Dorymedon is returned to the prison to await the wild-beast show and eventual beheading.92 At Senirkent, in Apollonian territory but 10 kilometres from the urban centre of Apollonia at modern Uluborlu, another gravestone was found in 1884 by Sterrett. The deceased was a city councillor, but is not explicitly identified as Christian (and hence is not listed above), although one might choose to make the inference that he was. A complex epitaph, it may include text from an earlier gravestone:93 Αὐρ. Ἀρτέμων Αὐξά- | νοντος τρὶς Δομετίου τῷ | πατρὶ Αὐρ. Αὐξάνοντι τρὶς Δο- | [μ]ετίου βουλευτῇ καὶ τῇ μ- 4| ητρὶ Αὐρ. Δόμνῃ Εὑρήμονο[ς] | Λικινίου· οἱ υἱοὶ αὐτοῦ Αὐ[ρ.] | Ζωτικὸς καὶ Αὐξάνων | [κ]αὶ Αὐρ. Ἀρτέμων ἔγονος [ἐ]- 8| ποίησαν· καὶ ἡ γυνὴ αὐτοῦ | ὑστέρα Αὐρ. Ἀμμία Νανιτ[η]- | νὴ Βράδωνος Αὐρ. Αὐξάνον- | τι Ζουλακίῳ βουλεύτῃ δὶς 12| Δομετίου καὶ τῇ γυνεκὶ αὐτο- | ῦ τῇ πρώτῃ Αὐρ. Δόμνῃ Δο- | ύλου Διογένου Χρηστια- | νοῦ τοῖς γλυκυτάτοις 16| γονῖσιν μνήμης χάριν. Aurelius Artemon son of Auxanon, son of Auxanon, son of Auxanon, son of Dometios, for his father Aurelius Auxanon son of Auxanon, son of Auxanon, son of Dometios, councillor, and his mother Aurelia Domne daughter of Heuremon son of Likinios. His sons Aurelii Zoticus and Auxanon, and Aurelius Artemon his grandson, made (this gravestone), and so did his later wife Aurelia Ammia Nanitene daughter of Bradon, for Aurelius Auxanon Zoulakios, councillor, son of

89 91 93

90 Acts of St Trophimus 1.11. Acts of St Trophimus 1.12. 92 Acts of St Trophimus 1.13. Acts of St Trophimus 1.15. ICG 1135. MAMA 4.221; cf. McKechnie, ‘Diogenes the Christian’, on which the discussion here draws.

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Auxanon son of Dometios, and his first wife Aurelia Domne daughter of Doulos son of Diogenes, a Christian, for their most sweet parents, in memoriam.

The first six lines of the epitaph adopt the point of view of Artemon, who cites his ancestry as far back as his great-grandfather Dometios: he has buried his father Auxanon and his mother Aurelia Domne. But from line 6 onwards it seems the text is borrowed, presumably from an earlier gravestone, which was perhaps dismantled at the time of the extant stone’s dedication: there Artemon is referred to as the grandson of the (earlier) deceased, Auxanon, also known as Zoulakios, who was buried together with his first wife, also called Aurelia Domne. Tabbernee in 1997 included this gravestone in his Montanist Inscriptions and Testimonia,94 although he concluded that it could not be classified as Montanist. Tabbernee’s summary of Artemon’s family tree appears to be correct and is followed here,95 as does his dating of the stone c.280.96

diogenes, a christian A puzzling feature of the epitaph is its mention of ‘Diogenes, a Christian’. The third letter of the word χρηστιανοῦ is an eta,97 and a flaw in the stone makes the remaining iota look like an omega. In 1884, Sterrett read χρηστωανοῦ.98 A squeeze taken in 1930 showed Calder that there was an iota carved over the omega-shaped flaw in the stone.99 So the grandfather of Aurelia Domne, first wife of Auxanon Zoulakios, was certainly ‘Diogenes, a Christian’. But the reference to Diogenes as ‘a Christian’ is highly unusual. Being a Christian was not a distinction, or an honour conferred by superiors, like being a councillor (as Auxanon Zoulakios and his son Auxanon were). Furthermore, the reminiscence concerns Grandma’s grandfather, whom possibly no living family member had met at the time when the gravestone was set up, about 280. Calder found that the context of the epitaph as a whole made him hesitate to accept the phrase ‘Diogenes, a Christian’ at all. ‘The difficulty of taking Χρηστιανός in the sense of “Christian” is obvious’, he wrote. ‘An epitaph in which the

94 97

98

95 96 IMont, 234. IMont, 232. IMont, 229 and 234. A normal spelling in papyrus documents: Judge and Pickering, ‘Papyrus Documentation’, 59, 67–8, with n.78. 99 Sterrett, Wolfe Expedition, 555. Calder, ‘New Jerusalem’, 422.

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Figure 10 Artemon Family Stemma. Drawn by Jenni Irving Note: After IMont, 232, fig. 35

grandfather of one of the dead is singled out as “a Christian” is not only unique: it comes close to being absurd.’100 Sensitivity to the difficulty Calder perceived is in order, except at the point where that difficulty causes him to reject the evidence in front of him. Accordingly, I propose that the phrase ‘Diogenes, a Christian’ was included in the text because Diogenes was a memorable or important Christian – perhaps one of whom readers of this gravestone at Senirkent would have heard. Here dates become important. Tabbernee proposed that Zoulakios and his first wife Domne were ‘probably born no later than the last decade of II’, i.e. the 190s.101 He argued from the possession by the family members of the Aurelius name, positing that Zoulakios and Domne would have received it as adults, in the second decade of the third century. Domne’s personal name is a pointer in the same direction. Septimius Severus married Julia Domna in 187, but at the time he was not yet emperor. In 193, the first year of Severus’ reign, Julia Domna received the title of Augusta; then, in 195, she was given the additional title of Mother of the Camp. The name Domne/Domna became a popular choice. It is probable that a great many more girls empire-wide were named Domna after 193 – and accordingly it is likeliest that Aurelia Domne, daughter of Doulos, son of Diogenes, was born after 193. Diogenes, then, grandfather of Aurelia Domne, would be a memorable or important Christian born probably before the middle of the second century.

100

Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 349.

101

IMont, 234.

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A learned referee has rightly cautioned me to signal that the account which I am giving becomes more speculative at this point. There is a suitable Diogenes who might be seen as a candidate for identification as ‘Diogenes the Christian’. He has been discussed above, and his name is epigraphically attested in the shortened form of ‘Diogas’ – but the use of a shortened form in the gravestones preserved at Uşak does not imply that a fuller spelling could not be used elsewhere. Apollonia/Uluborlu is some 120 kilometres away from Temenothyrai/Uşak, in a south-easterly direction. The suggestion that Domne’s grandfather was Diogenes/Diogas, the Montanist bishop of Temenothyrai, involves supposing it to be probable that he, or his son Doulos, made that journey, possibly in order to preach the gospel of Jesus – and the New Prophecy – and then that Doulos married and (in the 190s or later) fathered Domne. If Diogas came to Apollonia from out of town late in the second century – for example in the 170s – and made a strong impression with his preaching, the otherwise cryptic reference to Diogenes the Christian is accounted for. He would have been a local celebrity for decades afterwards, at least in Christian eyes – or, more precisely, Montanist eyes – since the Diogenes = Diogas hypothesis would make Tabbernee’s caution over classifying this epitaph as Montanist unnecessary. Diogas, as discussed above, was part of the educated and landowning stratum of society, and it would be easily explicable if at Apollonia his son were to marry into a city-councillor family, as Doulos, son of Diogenes the Christian, did. If Mitchell is correct (cf. above) in thinking that Diogas dedicated Bishop Artemidorus’ church-funded gravestone in Temenothyrae about 180, and if Diogas = Diogenes, the sequence of events might hypothetically involve his having returned to Temenothyrae after travelling to Apollonia in the 170s.102 On this view, his son Doulos would have come (again?) to Apollonia later, in due course to settle and father Aurelia Domne. This could be understood very well in the context of Montanus’ and his followers’ intentional planning and funding of missionary efforts, Prisca going to Thrace and Maximilla to south-eastern Phrygia (cf.

102

I wish to thank Dr William Tabbernee for discussing Diogas and Diogenes the Christian with me per litteras. He writes that ‘Such a scenario would have been perfect for my imaginary history of Montanism’ (meaning Prophets and Gravestones), ‘but perhaps it is not too far-fetched a possibility’. That the hypothesis is unprovable, partly because Diogenes is a common name, I admit.

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Chapter 4). Like them, Diogenes/Diogas may have had a salary paid out of the offerings Montanus collected.103 Knowledge that people in the stratum of society which city councillors were drawn from were becoming Christians, and that Christians were taking on civic responsibilities as city councillors, adds depth of field to the picture which can be formed today of the changing religious situation in third-century Phrygia. Such Christians are, among other things, the background to Origen’s rejection of Celsus’ claims about Christians making their anti-intellectual appeal to the dregs of society, in his oftenquoted caricature:104 ‘Let no one come to us who has been instructed, or who is wise or prudent (for such qualifications are deemed evil by us); but if there be any ignorant, or unintelligent, or uninstructed, or foolish persons, let them come with confidence. By which words, acknowledging that such individuals are worthy of their God, they manifestly show that they desire and are able to gain over only the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children.’

As Origen says in the same chapter, leading up to this place, Celsus here is quoting ‘some objections against the doctrine of Jesus, made by a very few individuals who are considered Christians, not of the more intelligent, as he supposes, but of the more ignorant class’. The Christians, as Celsus will not admit, do (also) count in their number persons who have had the advantages of education – people who would bear comparison with the elite, as well as the ‘workers in wool and leather, and fullers, and persons of the most uninstructed and rustic character’ whom Celsus writes of elsewhere.105 Perspective is added, also, to the picture of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla building up their church at Pepuza where they expected the new Jerusalem to descend to earth, and to the picture of Aberkios describing himself on his gravestone as a ‘citizen of an elect city’. Although some of the first Montanists withdrew from the competition typical of their social group, they remained as part of a stratum of society whose names would be in the city council minute book (like Dorymedon’s). People of this sort (along with the partly fictional Aberkios of the Life of Abercius) could ordinarily expect deference from rustics and farmers if they asked them to stop work or to give them water.106

103 105

104 Cf. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.18.2. Origen C. Cels. 3.44. 106 Origen C. Cels. 3.55. Life of Abercius 72.

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At Apollonia, Asclepiades, son of Alexander, also known as Artemon, whether he was himself a city councillor or not, had grown up with the certainty of this kind of social position, as had his ancestors for generations before. Others on the list of Christian city councillors may have achieved greatness – for example Eutyches, also known as Helix107 – or had greatness thrust upon them through the system of nominating to the city council any local landowner who could afford to take on the costs of the job. Under Roman civil law all these councillors were honestiores, with legal privileges which included more lenient punishments if found guilty of offences. This is why, in 303, when Diocletian began his persecution, he provided in his first persecution edict (as Valerian had before him) that ‘those who had honourable positions should be deprived of them’ (τοὺς μὲν τιμῆς ἐπειλημμένους ἀτίμους [εἶναι]).108 It is hard to tell how far ahead of the curve Phrygia was in the number of Christian city councillors it had in the third century. Some were commemorated with gravestones which show that they were Christians and fewer are evidenced through this channel outside Phrygia, although the random operation of literature has provided evidence of a very few people involved in local government, including Natalis and Ambrosius. But as Weiss observes, in the period before Constantine a language of Christian commemoration remained to be developed.109 Some inferences can be drawn from the anxieties echoed in the canons of Elvira: a flamen (priest in a provincial cult, a religious duty which went to city councillors) who was a catechumen might be allowed to be baptized after three years – provided that he had only held the title of flamen and not actually carried out a sacrifice;110 but a flamen who was a baptized Christian already rather than a catechumen had to do penance and be excluded from communion until he was about to die – and that was if he had funded the games but not sacrificed.111 If in his capacity as a flamen he had actually offered a sacrifice he had to be excluded from communion even at the last,112 that is, treated as an apostate. These determinations at Elvira respond to features of the role a city councillor took in social life: duties 107

108 110

111

No. 3 (Johnson, Early-Christian Epitaphs, 3.4 (= Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, no. 364)): winner of three agonistic crowns (crowns awarded in athletic games), and rewarded for his athletic victories with citizenships of other cities besides Eumeneia. 109 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 8.2.4. Weiss, Soziale Elite und Christentum, 208. Council of Elvira, Canon 4; but continuing to wear the secular wreath, which identified one as a former flamen – while not making sacrifices or offerings to idols – attracted only two years’ exclusion from communion (Canon 55). 112 Council of Elvira, Canon 3. Council of Elvira, Canon 2.

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which were difficult to avoid (holding the priesthoods) and tasks which in some cases might be circumvented (actually sacrificing). Councillors were the ‘chief men’ (as Ambrosius), the ‘rulers of the homeland of the people’ (as Trophimos and his brother). They had substantial scope to do things their way if not faced with an officious governor, as Dorymedon apparently was, and indeed, some of them, such as Apollonios, son of Olympichos, at Apollonia, were from families which had been doing things their way, locally, for centuries.

9 Eumeneia (Işıklı) and the Eumeneian Formula

The city council of Eumeneia (Işıklı) is over-represented in the list of known Christian city councillors. This fact is not problematic in itself and may be attributable to a mix of the random way evidence from the ancient world has been preserved across the centuries and the slow development of a distinctively Christian language of commemorating the dead. In the fourth century and even beyond, Latin gravestones of Christians might commence with the abbreviation DM, standing for dis manibus and originally meaning ‘(dedicated) to the gods who are ghosts of the dead . . .’. Convention has its own momentum, and accordingly the conventional (and non-Christian) abbreviation continued for decades to be used in inscriptions commemorating individuals who were clearly Christians.1

eumeneian formula At Eumeneia, however, a wording was developed and put into use before the middle of the third century which put the graves of Christians ‘under the protection of their own God’,2 to borrow Calder’s phrase. Calder observes that the epitaphs of Aberkios and of Alexander, son of Antonios,

1

2

In ILCV, the section from 3884 to 3957B contains identifiably Christian gravestones with DM and DMS (dis manibus sacer), plus θκ (θεοῖς καταχθονίοις). 3889C, from Rome, is a good example: d☧m | Tutie Caste vere | caste, que vixit | annos XXXVII, mesis | [. . .] (To the gods, the ghosts of the dead [chi-rho monogram], of Tutia Casta, genuinely chaste, who lived thirty-seven years, [. . .] months . . .). Calder, ‘Eumeneian Formula’, 16.

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before and after the turn of the second and third centuries, bear wording imposing a fine on anyone who mistreats the grave, but he also traces how it became usual at a slightly later date to include at the end of an epitaph a reference to God and the expectation that he will in future punish sins, including those against graves and gravestones.3 Phrases constitutive of the ‘Eumeneian formula’ were most often simple (‘[it] will be a matter between him and God’, or, ‘he will have dealings with God’),4 but might be lengthened (e.g. ‘[it] will be a matter between him and the living God’5) or made more fearsome with additional phrasing (e.g. ‘he will be accursed before God for ever’6). As Calder notes, non-Christians at Eumeneia did not usually call down divine punishment on violators of tombs. He cites the metrical gravestone of a person who had citizenship both of Acmonia and Eumeneia:7 Ἑρμῆς Ἀκμονεὺς καὶ Εὐμενεὺς | τῷ υἱῷ μου Εὐκάρπῳ καὶ ἑα[υ]- | τῷ καὶ τῇ γυναικὶ Ἀφροδισεί. | ἐμοῦ θανόντος καὶ υναι- 4| κὸς καὶ τέκνων, / ὃς ἂν ἀνύ- | ξει τύμβον ἢ βλάψει τάφον / | πόων ἀώρων περιπέο[ι]- | το υνφοραῖ. / ὁ δ’ ἐπιχειρ- 8| ἐοίσει τῷ φίσκῳ (δην.) ͵βφ. Hermes, a citizen of Akmonia and of Eumeneia, for my son Eukarpos and for instead of to myself and for my wife Aphrodisia. When I and wife and sons are dead, Whoever opens my tomb or damages my grave, May he fall victim to an untimely lot.8 The intruder shall pay to the fiscus 2500 (denarii).

Thirty-seven of ninety-two pagan epitaphs from Eumeneia which Calder observed, and which belonged in his judgement to the period between 150 and 250, contained a fine-formula,9 but the appeal to supernatural punishment in Hermes’ epitaph is unusual – Calder explains it by noting the deceased’s origin in Acmonia: ‘[a]t and near Akmonia the formula of

3

4

5 6 7

8

Disposal of dead bodies might be a difficult matter for those too poor to afford to buy a burial plot. Threats against those mistreating graves were directed towards people tempted to go to a graveyard (at night) and dig up an existing grave in order to bury another dead body. ἔσται αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν θεόν, SEG 15.811 (ICG 1364), or ἕξει πρὸς τὸν θεόν, SEG 6.418 (ICG 314). ἔστε αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν ζῶντα θεόν, MAMA 4.357 (ICG 1072). ἔστε ἐπικατάρατος παρὰ θεῷ ἰς τὸν ἐῶναν MAMA 4.354 (ICG 1069). Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 389, no. 238: translation by Calder, ‘The Eumeneian Formula’, 17–18. 9 These lines are in iambic trimeters. Calder, ‘Eumeneian Formula’, 17.

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which these imprecatory verses are a variety occurs in many epitaphs’.10 But in Eumeneia and Apamea during the third century, Calder observes (following Ramsay), epitaphs calling on God (singular) began to be written. Eumeneia and Apamea lay outside the area to their north and north-east where doorstones were the usual form of monument in the third century,11 and many monuments are referred to, in the texts inscribed on them, as ἡρῷα, literally, ‘hero-shrines’. There is a case, not necessarily overwhelming,12 for thinking that some Eumeneian formula gravestones belong to Jewish burials, but the great majority constitute evidence that the deceased were Christians.13 They were a local feature, whereas just one inscription from Acmonia (Ahat), about 75 kilometres north of Eumeneia (Işıklı), is definitely Christian in the opinion of Sheppard.14 There is some polytheist precedent in the Asian context for the kind of phrasing used in Eumeneian formula texts, although Calder stresses how slight it is.15 Strubbe cites two Pisidian texts which call on Greek deities, 10 11 12

13

14

15

Calder, ‘Eumeneian Formula’, 18. Kelp, ‘Grave Monuments and Local Identities’, 85. Trebilco argued in 2004 (‘The Christian and Jewish Eumeneian Formula’, 88) that ‘the religious provenance of the vast majority of [Eumeneian formula] inscriptions cannot be decided’. A section in Trebilco’s chapter is called ‘Jewish Use of the Eumeneian Formula’. He discusses two Eumeneian formula inscriptions that he regards as the best candidates for ascription to a Jewish context. The first (Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 562–4, nos. 455–7; CIJ 1275) is the Aristeas gravestone from Keramon Agora (Acmonia), in which the point on which he relies is that Aristeas bought the grave plot from Mathios, ‘a Semitic rather than an indigenous name’ (‘The Christian and Jewish Eumeneian Formula’, 71). Trebilco’s second candidate (Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 652–3, no. 563; CIJ 769), also from Acmonia, is a fragmentary inscription that lacks the name of the deceased but includes an elaborated Eumeneian formula, in which the Deity is referred to as θεὸς ὕψιστος, and ‘the sickle of the curse’ (LXX Zechariah 5.2) is invoked against those who bury someone in the burial place without authority. The difficulties are, in the first case, that the names of Mathios and Aristeas do not prove that they were Jewish in religion and not Christian, and, in the second case, that Christians as well as Jews are capable of reading and quoting the Bible. Arguments for the Christian character of Eumeneian formula monuments can be found in Calder, ‘Eumeneian Formula’, 19–26. Sheppard, ‘R.E.C.A.M. Notes and Studies No. 6’, 174, referring to MAMA 6.336 (ICG 993); however, it may be a matter of how flexible the criteria applied can be: the (Acmonia Jewish?) gravestone of Aurelius Aristeas, son of Apollonios and his wife Aurelia, which seeks to establish a perpetuity whereby the neighbourhood association of First-Gaters are to decorate the grave of Aurelia with roses every year, ends by providing that if the First-Gaters choose not to perform this duty, ‘it will be a matter between them and the justice of God’ ([ἔσ]ται αὐτοῖς πρὸ[ς] [τὴ]ν δικαιοσύ[νην] τοῦ θεοῦ): SEG 27.893 (ICG 1001). Calder, ‘Eumeneian Formula’, 20.

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one naming Helios and Selene, the other Zeus Solymeus and the deceased,16 and traces the widespread pre-Christian and non-Christian practice in Asia of recording funerary imprecations on gravestones.17 Calder, however, observes that Eumeneian formula texts do not include ‘traces, however slight, of pagan religious feeling or practice’.18 A line can be drawn. Unlike the DM gravestones referred to in footnote 1 above, Eumeneian formula gravestones appear to form a distinctive and local artefact used by the Christian community – and possibly by Jews – but not by polytheists. Tidy explanations are elusive. To a degree, it is puzzling that before Constantine – indeed, even before Gallienus’ cryptic 260 Edict of Toleration19 – it became conventional in this locality for Christians to mark their burial places with text which would identify them and their living relatives as being connected with an illegal sect. A generation earlier in the province of Africa, while Hilarianus was governor,20 the unpopularity of Christians had been at a level which led to public controversy over an attempt by Christians to have their own burial grounds: ‘they shouted, “No graveyards!”’ says Tertullian.21 Perhaps this kind of feeling in the community had melted away by the 240s, or perhaps it never existed in Asia; indeed, the degree to which it existed anywhere is a matter of debate: as Moss observes, some modern work has employed a rhetoric of suspicion against the sense which early Christians had of being persecuted.22 Yet even assuming that in some districts authorities were not 16 17

18 19

20

21 22

Strubbe, ‘Cursed be he that Moves my Bones’, 34–5. He draws on a corpus of over 350 texts: Strubbe, ‘Cursed be he that Moves my Bones’, 36. Calder, ‘Eumeneian Formula’, 23. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 7.13.2: ‘The Emperor Caesar Publius Licinius Gallienus, Pius, Felix, Augustus, to Dionysius, Pinnas, Demetrius, and the other bishops. I have ordered the bounty of my gift to be declared through all the world, that they may depart from the places of religious worship. And for this purpose you may use this copy of my rescript, that no one may molest you. And this which you are now enabled lawfully to do, has already for a long time been conceded by me. Therefore Aurelius Cyrenius, who is the chief administrator of affairs, will observe this ordinance which I have given.’ In 203, when Perpetua and Felicitas were put to death, Hilarianus the procurator had received the ius gladii (the right to inflict capital punishment) in place of Minucius Timinianus, the proconsul, who had died in office (Martyrdom of Perpetua 2.2); at Ad Scapulam 3.1, Tertullian writes sub Hilariano praeside (‘under Governor Hilarianus’), not referring to him as proconsul. Tert. Ad Scapulam 3.1: Areae non sint! Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 13, speaks of ‘a general sense among scholars that early Christians such as the authors of 1 Peter and Revelation may in historical reality have suffered more from paranoia than from actual persecution’.

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systematically on the alert for evidence of Christian activity and did not (most of the time) perceive it as a threat, ‘the unpredictability of persecution’, as Moss writes,23 ‘was itself destabilizing’, even if there was little to stop Christians from displaying their Christian commitment in the text of gravestones. Or even if, as the Emperor Gallienus would have said, ‘this which you are now enabled lawfully to do, has already for a long time been conceded . . .’. Persecution need not have been predictable to be real; sometimes, as Barnes argued in his article about legislation against the Christians,24 ‘A provincial governor was predisposed to punish those who attacked the established religions, and would do so without waiting for a legal enactment by the Senate or the emperor.’ As well as having to fear the risk of unpopularity along ‘No graveyards’ lines, then, it remained rational in the churches to fear official action – certainly in an empire where it was known that the secret police kept lists of Christians along with their lists of ‘hucksters, and pickpockets, and bath-thieves, and gamesters, and pimps’.25 Fabian, bishop of Rome, was put to death on 19 January 250 at the beginning of Decius’ persecution;26 Babylas, bishop of Antioch, was also arrested, and died soon after; Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, was imprisoned and brought to trial at Caesarea, then afterwards died in prison.27 An attempt to capture the bishop of Carthage (Cyprian) failed, and he went into exile;28 and as for Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, he in a letter tells the story of how the authorities failed to arrest him:29 [W]hen the persecution under Decius was determined upon, Sabinus at that very hour sent a certain frumentarius to make search for me. And I remained in the house for four days, expecting the arrival of this frumentarius. But he went about examining all other places, the roads, the rivers, the fields, where he suspected that I should either conceal myself or travel. And he was smitten with a kind of blindness, and never lighted on the house; for he never supposed that I should

23 24 25

26 27 29

Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 12. Barnes, ‘Legislation against the Christians’, 50. Tert. De fuga in persecutione 13.5 (inter tabernarios et ianeos et fures balnearum et aleones et lenones Christiani quoque vectigales continentur): such persons could be sources of income for the secret police, hence the lists. Tertullian says that ‘I know not whether it is matter for grief or shame’ that Christians are on these lists, given the company they are keeping. Liber Pontificalis 21.3a; cf. Calder, ‘Some Monuments of the Great Persecution’, 353. 28 Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 6.39.1–4. Pontius Life of Cyprian 7–12. Dionysius of Alexandria Letters 10.1. Translation by S.D.F. Salmond in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 6.

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tarry at home when under pursuit. Then, barely after the lapse of four days, God giving me instruction to remove, and opening the way for me in a manner beyond all expectation, my domestics and I, and a considerable number of the brethren, effected an exit together.

Frend in lectures used to describe the early moves of the Decian persecution as a secret police operation designed to get the bishops of the main cities of the empire into custody. In print he did not quite commit himself to that theory,30 but the frumentarius (army supply agent/secret policeman) who failed to find Dionysius’ house points in the direction favoured by the less official Frend. The success of Dionysius’ double bluff, if such it was, remains hard to account for. Even outside the great cities, bishops were going into exile: Gregory of Neocaesarea saved lives by counselling his flock to follow his example and take flight.31 And yet in the Eumeneian district there is no evidence of the Decian persecution having any impact on Christian burials. Appendix 2 contains nineteen gravestones, those of the hundred or so stones preserved in the Eumeneian formula corpus which are dated, usually with a date carved in the epitaph itself, although in one case with reference to a public official named in the epitaph whose career is known from another source.32 These nineteen gravestones will be discussed as a kind of representative sample in this chapter: the date constitutes an important element of context and in other respects the dedicators’ use of a date seems not to correlate with any kind of unrepresentative quality in each epitaph as a whole.

30

31 32

Frend, Rise of Christianity, 319–20. An anonymous referee asks, ‘Might Frend’s reticence in print be indicative of the quality of the argument?’ Apparently the answer, for Frend, was yes: lecture quality, but not publishable quality. Note, however, that Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Carthage were the largest cities in the empire: immediately arresting the bishops of those four plus Jerusalem represented a coherent tactic for antiChristian action. In my judgement it is not necessary to have the minutes of a briefing in the Castra Peregrinorum before inferring that central government, through the secret police, was behind it. (On the Rome headquarters of the secret police see Baillie Reynolds, ‘Troops Quartered in the Castra Peregrinorum’.) Gregory of Nyssa Life of Gregory the Wonderworker 47. Waelkens once dated a doorstone (Waelkens, Die kleinasiatischen Türsteine, 480 (= MAMA 4.31/ICG 1086), not listed in Appendix 2) which has a Eumeneian formula epitaph carved on it, placing it between 215 and 220 on art historical grounds. This dating is too early, pace Mitchell, who accepts it as the ‘earliest attestation of the Eumeneian formula’ (Anatolia vol. 2, 41 n. 244). Note that doorstones were not in common use in the Eumeneian district, and the stone to which Waelkens assigned the date is from Akroinos/Prymnessos (Afyonkarahisar).

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A gravestone from Apamea/Dinar (Appendix 2, no. 4) is from month seven (Artemisios/April) of year 334 (ad 250) – after the secret police swoop on Christian bishops in the great cities and before the Decian libelli published by John R. Knipfing, the dated ones of which belong between 13 June and 14 July 250.33 There are none from 258, the key year of Valerian’s persecution, though there is one from 257,34 before Valerian’s second anti-Christian edict,35 and one from 259.36 Overall, there is no suggestion that the persecutions of the 250s had any impact on how the Christians of the Eumeneian district buried their dead, even though down on the coast in Smyrna, Pionius the presbyter, after taking careful precautions to avoid being hastily seized and forced through a sacrifice ceremony,37 was put to death on 12 March 250.38 The inconsistency may be to do with Caria and Phrygia becoming a province separate from Asia – although the date when that happened is far from agreed, and Sviatoslav Dmitriev argues persuasively that the division was an emergency measure, the evidence for which is confined to the period from c.249 to the 260s,39 and the need for which disappeared once the stress of Gothic invasions was past.40 It is, accordingly, possible but not certain that Apamea and Phrygia were under a different governor from Asia and Smyrna in 250, one who had more urgent matters to deal with than how to put the Decian persecution into effect. As compared with greater places, therefore – even as compared with Neocaesarea, not a provincial capital but still a larger and more important city – Eumeneia flew under the radar. It was more like the places where Dionysius of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, and Gregory of Neocaesarea went into hiding, than the kind of community they each came from. This fact compels a new understanding of the principle (from

33

34 35

36 37

38 39

40

Knipfing, ‘Libelli of the Decian Persecution’: no. 38 dates to 13 June 250, and no. 20 to 14 July. Appendix 2, no. 11, dated Year 343, month 3, day 10 (December 257). Issued mid-summer 258: Cyprian Letters 80 and Keresztes, ‘Two Edicts of Valerian’, 84–5. Appendix 2, no. 12, dated Year 345, month 3 (December 257). Putting a halter round his and his companions’ necks, to signify the intention of getting arrested: Martyrdom of Pionius 2.3–4 and 6.3. Martyrdom of Pionius 23. Dmitriev, ‘End of “Provincia Asia”’, 473. Christol and Drew-Bear favour a slightly later date, at the beginning of the reign of Valerian and Gallienus (253–260), for the inauguration of the province of Phrygia and Caria (‘Une délimitation de territoire en Phrygie-Carie’, 35). Dmitriev, ‘End of “Provincia Asia”’, 476–8.

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Stark) referred to at the beginning of this book, namely that ‘all ambitious missionary movements are, or soon become, urban’.41 The process of change in the sacred canopy – a switch to Christian legitimation of the social order – at Eumeneia is visible to a degree not paralleled elsewhere in the growth of Christianity in the Roman empire. This raises a question about how distinct the Eumeneia phenomenon actually was from anything which went on anywhere else. There is an incident reported by both Eusebius and Lactantius, whereby during the Great Persecution (commenced 303) the Roman army went into action in Phrygia. Eusebius says that a little town (πολίχνη) was ‘inhabited solely by Christians’, and that the army burnt the place down.42 Lactantius, who because of connections at Diocletian’s imperial court may have been nearer to knowing exactly what happened, does not corroborate Eusebius’ claim about a city where everyone was Christian, but seems to describe something resembling burning down a church (conventiculum) with the congregation in it.43 This is more likely to be an accurate understanding of what occurred (see Chapter 11). Ramsay argued that Eumeneia was the city concerned, noting that the lack of fourth-century finds there (compared with the relative abundance of third-century material) spoke in favour of a catastrophic event having happened there about the time of the Great Persecution.44 André Chastagnol, however (echoed by A.D. Lee), has supposed that Orcistus (see Introduction) was Eusebius’ city ‘inhabited solely by Christians’.45 Pepuza is another candidate, put forward in 1924 by Calder.46 Mitchell says that the story should not be taken literally (which might bring him closer to Lactantius’ outlook on the incident than Eusebius’) but notes that Orcistus’ petition to Constantine and Constantine’s rescript make no mention of a massacre.47 The profound unimportance of Eumeneia, or Pepuza, or Orcistus, as measured by the scale of events on which Eusebius and Lactantius were reflecting, would have justified, in these authors’ minds, their decisions

41 43 44

45

46 47

42 Stark, Cities of God, 25. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 8.11. Lactantius Div. inst. 5.11.10–11. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 505–9. Lane Fox argues against this (Pagans and Christians, 771 n.4). Tabbernee favours Eumeneia: Early Christianity in Contexts, 272. Chastagnol, ‘Inscription constantinienne d’Orcistus’, 410–11; Lee, Pagans and Christians, 90. Calder, ‘Some Monuments of the Great Persecution’, 362–3. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 57. In a petition to an emperor, however, it might be shrewder not to refer to unfavourable action taken by a former emperor: this could account for the silence.

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not to name the place they were writing about. There seems to be no additional evidence which can be brought to bear in order to adjudicate between Ramsay, Calder, and Chastagnol. And yet the matter at issue, given Diocletian’s anxieties over the fire at his palace in February 303 – which Galerius said was started by Christians48 – and over his wife’s and his daughter’s attitude to religion,49 was not without importance. It was in Diocletian’s interest to resist a current of change which tended towards Christian legitimation of the social order. Not only was this so, but he had observed (or been led to think) that people in his own family as well as officials who worked in his palace and soldiers who fought for him were part of a constituency which would find that change congenial. Sending the army to resist change of that kind in a city in Phrygia, however insignificant that city otherwise was, was consistent with his policy of supporting conventional religion by upgrading and reinvigorating the imperial cult.50 Graeme Clarke in the Cambridge Ancient History was prepared to put a figure on the implications of the Christian monuments preserved from some Phrygian districts: claiming 20–30 per cent of the population were Christian.51 This is hard to substantiate, but seems proportionate on an impressionistic basis. As far as the nineteen dated inscriptions themselves (Appendix 2) are concerned, the earliest of them is from month two of Sullan Year 331 (= 246). The latest of the Eumeneian formula inscriptions which has a date written on it is from Sullan Year 358 (= 274); then no. 19 in Appendix 2, commemorating Aur[elius] Neikeros, son of Neikeros, should be dated after 282 on the basis that Castrius Constans’ governorship was probably held after that year, although there is some uncertainty over this, and the question is treated more fully in Appendix 2.

a single generation This is a narrow chronological window. It is not out of the question that some of the undated texts in the Eumeneian formula corpus might be from earlier or later, but the concentration of eighteen inscriptions within twenty-eight years hints at a convention established a little before the middle of the third century and maintained for about a generation. The 48 50

51

49 Lactant. De mort. pers. 14. Lactant. De mort. pers. 15. On the idea behind Diocletian’s and Galerius’ titles of Jovius and Herculius see Fowden, ‘Public Religion’, 558. Clarke, ‘Third-Century Christianity’, 614.

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earliest gravestone (Appendix 2, no. 1), dated to month 2 of Year 331 (= 246), from Emircik in Eumeneian territory and inscribed on two sides by the same mason,52 with epitaphs apparently relating to different families – anyway, with no individual mentioned in both texts – uses the key Eumeneian formula phrase (‘it will be a matter between him and God’) in both epitaphs, and in both epitaphs also invokes a curse on the desecrator of the grave (‘may he not attain the promise of God’). The next dated stone (Appendix 2, no. 2), from Year 332 (= 248) is from Apamea, and commemorates Auxanon, also known as Helladios, who was the business agent for Ailios Tryphon, three times Asiarch (high priest of Asia). It is only by extension a Eumeneian formula stone: Auxanon says that anyone who buries another body in the grave ‘will have God angered against him’ (τὸ[ν θν] κεχολωμένον ἕξει): at Saittai in Lydia a gravestone from Year 375 (= 291) says that if anyone sins against the monument, he will have the (plural) gods angered against him (τῶν θεῶν κεχολωμένων τεύξεται).53 Ailios Tryphon, evidently the grandest man in Apamea, is recorded on an Apamean coin as Asiarch as early as the reign of Severus Alexander (222–235),54 and still named on coins of Valerian (253–260) and Gallienus (253–268) held in the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) at Boston:55 that is, assuming that Ailios Tryphon is the same person as Proklianos Tryphon. Ramsay studied the family to which Tryphon belonged and reached the view that the Ailios Tryphon named as Auxanon’s employer was the son of Proklianos Tryphon56 – a third son, not named in the text on the base of the statue of Proklianos Tryphon, where M. Aurelius Antonios, son of Tryphon, Reginos, and M. Aurelius Antonios Tryphonianos are named as ‘sons of the high priestess’ (i.e. of Proklianos’ wife).57 In Ramsay’s reconstruction, Ailios 52

53 54 55

56 57

Thonemann’s note to MAMA 11.36A (http://mama.csad.ox.ac.uk/monuments/MAMAXI-036.html#edition). SEG 34.1233. Imhoof-Blumer, Zur griechischen und römischen Münzkunde, Apameia no. 6 (on p. 33). The Valerian coin is SNG 3514, and its accession number at the MFA is 1977.605 (www .mfa.org/collections/object/coin-of-apamea-with-bust-of-valerian-i-struck-under-proclianustryphon-263091): reverse wording παρὰ Προκλιανοῦ Τρύφωνος. Ἀπαμέων ([Issued] by Proklianos Tryphon. Of the Apameans). The accession number of the Gallienus coin is 63.798 (www.mfa.org/collections/object/coin-of-apamea-with-bust-of-gallienus-struckunder-proclianus-tryphon-259549): reverse wording ἐπὶ Προκλιανοῦ Τρύφωνος. Ἀπαμέων (In the time of Proklianos Tryphon. Of the Apameans). Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 467–8. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 467, no. 304, and Doublet, ‘Inscriptions de Dinair (Apamée)’, 19, no. 10. The reference to them as ‘sons of the high priestess’ is explained by Proklianos’ having been previously married: his first wife was Kekillia Ammia, and his

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Tryphon might have been born a decade after Proklianos’ eldest son; however, the dissimilar names involved seem to make the scenario improbable. The coins now in Boston were unknown to Ramsay, and they show that Proklianos Tryphon was issuing coins at Apamea in the reign following Auxanon’s death in 248. It is possible for ‘Ailios Tryphon’ and ‘Proklianos Tryphon’ both to be correct as versions of the same person’s name, and this seems to be the most probable explanation of Proklianos Tryphon and Ailios Tryphon both holding the Asiarchate and both being from Apamea. With appropriate modesty, Auxanon sets the fine for disturbing his grave at 1,000 denarii: the same sin against his employer’s grave would have attracted a fine of 2,500 denarii.58 Both specify that the fine is to be paid to the Roman fiscus,59 not the treasury of the city of Apamea. Proklianos’ leading role in public religion in the province of Asia evidently did not lead him to think it inappropriate to make a Christian responsible for his business affairs. Being an employee rather than a landowner put Auxanon outside the circles the city council was drawn from, but his duties would have brought him into regular contact with the Apamean elite. In Year 333 (= 249), Aurelius Alexandros, son of Menekrates (Appendix 2, no. 3) died with arrangements for his hero-shrine incomplete; however, in his will he made his son Aurelius Moschas responsible for constructing it. A good proportion of Eumeneian formula gravestones say that the deceased constructed the tomb in his or her lifetime, but Alexandros evidently was not spared long enough to make that arrangement. Evidence that he was a genuine Roman is shown by the fact he left a will. No fine is imposed for damage to the grave, but a copy of the epitaph has been placed in the city archives. When a fine is threatened, it makes evident sense to have a copy of the epitaph on file, otherwise, damaging the gravestone (in addition to burying an extra body in the grave) would be an advantageous precaution for the criminal to take, for the sake of destroying the evidence that a fine was payable – or that burying an extra body was banned at all. It should be inferred that depositing a copy of an epitaph in the archive was a

58 59

second wife, who became high priestess of Asia by virtue of Proklianos’ being high priest (= Asiarch), was Ailiane Regine (Ramsay, ‘Inscriptions inedites d’Asie Mineure’, 308, no. 30). Ramsay, ‘Inscriptions inedites d’Asie Mineure’, 308, no. 30. Proklianos using the term ἱερώτατον ταμεῖον, Auxanon preferring φίσκον.

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matter of routine at Eumeneia, whether or not the fact of its having been deposited was recorded on the gravestone. Appendix 2, no. 4, from Year 334 (= 250), the year of Decius’ persecution (as mentioned above), comes from Apamea, and commemorates the intriguingly named Loukilla. In 164, the Emperor Lucius Verus had married Lucilla, daughter of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at Ephesus. Loukilla, Hermes’ wife on the gravestone, would have had to be unusually long-lived, well into her eighties in 250, to have been named in the immediate wake of the royal wedding, but Loukilla is an uncommon name, instanced only five times in LGPN 5A (coastal Asia Minor).60 It is also a name with a link to Aberkios of Hierapolis, because in the Life of Abercius, Lucilla, the princess out of whom Aberkios casts the demon, appears as a girl who ‘excelled all the maidens of her day in beauty and height’.61 If the Loukilla buried at Apamea died in her forties rather than her eighties, she might have been young enough to have been named after Lucilla as remembered in the legend of Aberkios, rather than after Lucilla as remembered from the royal wedding of the early 160s. Her and Hermes’ gravestone has its last two lines chiselled out; in Appendix 2 I have retained the two full lines with every letter dotted as Buckler and Calder printed them in MAMA 6, but I have viewed the stone myself and cannot vouch for any of the letter shapes in those lines. Accordingly, to me it is an open question whether this gravestone establishes a fine of 1,000 denarii for mistreatment of the grave. It is clear that the erasure is deliberate, but the reason for it is not self-evident. Aurelia Dionysis, constructor of Appendix 2, no. 5 (Year 337 (= 253)), from Sebaste, wished to provide burial places for several relatives: her husband, her son Tatianos, her brother Eutropos, his son, and his wife Roupheine. At Sırıklı, about 35 kilometres west of the urban centre of Eumeneia at Işıklı, in the following year, another woman, Aurelia Apphia, daughter of Phrougios, in month 1 of Year 338 (= 253), constructed Appendix 2, no. 6. There was space for herself, her husband Diodotos, three children (Phrougios, Tatia, Rhodope – the last of these a foster-daughter (θρεπτῇ)), and then one more (Tata): the idea seems to be that Tata will need to be buried in future, but the first three have already died and been entombed in the burial plot. This inscription and Appendix 2, no. 9, are a pair: 60

61

See www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/database/lgpn.php. Paralleled also in an epitaph from Year 326 (= 242) at Acmonia, MAMA 6.319. Life of Abercius 44.

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MAMA 4, Plate 70 contains photographs of both, showing the prominent wreaths with a fish carved above the wreath which decorates each one. No. 6 (MAMA 4.354) in 1933 was supporting the west pillar of the mosque veranda at Sırıklı, while no. 9 (MAMA 4.355) was supporting the east pillar of the same veranda. The latter inscription refers to two more persons with the name of Phrougios, in addition to the two named in no. 6 – unless, that is, there is an overlap between the persons listed in the two epitaphs. No. 9 is from two years after no. 6 (Year 340 (= 255)): Aurelius Kerinthos,62 son of Dionysios, lays down that his mother Meltine and her second husband Phrougios are to be buried in the plot, as well as Phrougios, son of Loukiane, and his wife Tatiane, and also Kerinthos’ foster-daughter Basse. The reason for allowing space in the burial plot for Phrougios, son of Loukiane, and his wife is not stated, but it may be that they are the birth parents of Basse. Kerinthos does not say that he himself is to be buried in the plot: possibly space is already reserved for him in his father Dionysios’ plot. In no. 6, Aurelia Apphia does not provide that her father Phrougios is to be buried in her plot: he may be Phrougios, the husband of Meltine, as Buckler, Calder, and Cox Guthrie argue,63 or he may be Phrougios, son of Loukiane (but he cannot be both). The near-identical appearance of the gravestones makes it more than probable that these two Christian families are linked to each other. No. 6 is the earliest dated inscription that uses the term κοιμητήριον (burial place64) in preference to the locally common term ἡρῷον (hero-shrine65), although the Christian preference for the word κοιμητήριον was not exclusive from that date onwards. Appendix 2, no. 7, first published in 2005 and less well provenanced than most of the gravestones in Appendix 2, appears to be from a city

62

63 64

65

As the name of a notorious heretic (Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.3.4, Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.14.3–8), Kerinthos might be thought an odd choice of name, at least for a son of Christian parents (if they were); but the name occurs six times in LGPN 5A (coastal Asia Minor) and therefore seems to be no more uncommon than Loukilla. MAMA 4.131: ‘The Φρούγιος of 354.2 probably recurs, [355] l[ine] 9.’ Originally ‘sleeping place’, as in IG 7.235 line 43 (387–377 bc), regulating where men and women may sleep in the sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Oropos. On Christian usage as ‘burial-place’ see Drew-Bear, ‘Some Greek Words Part II’, 203, citing John Chrysostom De coemeterio et de cruce PG 49 p. 393 lines 35–8: Διὰ τοῦτο . . . αὐτὸς ὁ τόπος κοιμητήριον ὠνόμασται, ἵνα μάθῃς ὅτι οἱ τετελευτηκότες καὶ ἐνταῦθα κείμενοι οὐ τεθνήκασιν, ἀλλὰ κοιμῶνται καὶ καθεύδουσι (‘This is why the place itself is called a κοιμητήριον [sleeping place], so that you may learn that those who have departed and lie there have not died, but are slumbering and sleeping’). Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 719.

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where the era of Actium (Year 1, 31 bc) was in use, and dates from 253. Aurelius Artemidoros, son of Eiason, instructs that no one is to be buried after him in his burial place (κο[ι]μητήριον), ‘except if any of my relatives believes’. A divided family seems to be in question; the incoherence into which the inscription descends near the end may hint that in the workshop where the gravestone was carved, text based on the Eumeneian formula was less familiar to the stonecutter than it would have been at Eumeneia or Apamea. Four of the inscriptions in Appendix 2 are from Apamea, and the third of these is Appendix 2, no. 8, dated to Year 338 (= 254). Ailios Pancharios and his wife Atalante share the Ailia nomen. This is not an unusual name in Asia Minor, but it remains possible that the name hints that Pancharios and Atalante were former slaves, freed by the same Roman citizen. If so, one would think of a member of the family of Ailios Tryphon, the Asiarch. Auxanon (Appendix 2, no. 2), Tryphon’s business agent, does not list a nomen gentilicium, thus not revealing whether he was a freedman of his employer, but starting out as a slave was a normal route into a job like his. Pancharios, on the other hand, sets a fine of just 500 denarii for damage to his grave, not challenging Auxanon in terms of rank. In the case of Appendix 2, no. 10, from Sebaste in Year 340 (= 256), I have translated Antonios Pollion’s description of himself (παντοπώλης) as ‘wholesale dealer’, on the analogy of the customs law displayed at Kaunos in the reign of Hadrian, in which it is provided that ‘They shall exact the duty on materials relating to pitch and resin being imported, if the παντοπώλης brings them in and [someone] else sells [them].’66 ‘Huckster’, the LSJ definition, may give an unrealistically small-scale impression of the kind of business Pollion carried on in his lifetime. Appendix 2, no. 11, dated to Year 340 (= 256) and from Emirhisar in the territory of Eukarpia, is the gravestone of Aurelius Alexandros, son of Gaios, the councillor mentioned in Chapter 8 (and listed as no. 17 on the McKechnie list of Christian city councillors). Alexandros and his wife, Aurelia Zotike, daughter of Damas, make it explicit that even members of their family are forbidden to reuse their monument (μνημεῖον); unusually, they end the epitaph by offering peace to passers-by, the ever-present implicit readers of gravestones.

66

IKaunos 35, block F1, lines 10–13.

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The only person identified as a clergyman in the dated Eumeneian formula collection comes from Beyköy, to the south of Eumeneia and across the lake (Işıklı Gölü) – or perhaps only across the river – in the third century. The name of the dedicator is missing from Appendix 2, no. 12 (dated to Year 342 (= 258)), but he is referred to (with a stray upsilon) as πρε{υ}σβύτερος.67 He was a married priest, since the epitaph refers to burial space for his wife and children. Appendix 2, nos. 13 and 18, are another closely related pair, probably from the territory of Dionysopolis not Eumeneia. The two limestone stelai with pediments which resemble sarcophagus lids were brought to the village of Dumanlı (which is not an ancient site), Buckler, Calder, and Guthrie report,68 from a site about a mile south-east of the village. In no. 13, from Year 343 (= 258), Aurelius Ariston has constructed a burial place (κοιμητήριον) for himself, his wife Paula, and five others who may be their children – the youngest of whom is named after Ariston. And then in no. 18, in Year 358 (= 274), Aurelius Ariston has constructed a burial place for his grandfather Ariston and for his wife Dionysis, as well as ‘those mentioned before’ (meaning the list in no. 13 – the two stelai must have been displayed close enough together for the construction which they were part to count in the viewer’s eyes as one monument). Buckler, Calder, and Cox suppose that the Aurelius Ariston of no. 18 is the Ariston in line 12 of no. 13, that is, the (presumed) son of the Aurelius Ariston who dedicated no. 13. The reference in the later inscription to the second Ariston’s grandfather (also Ariston) being placed in the burial place makes it seem likely that this is right. The last epitaph from Apamea, Appendix 2, no. 14, is dated to Year 343 (= 259), month 9, day 20. Aurelius Artemas says ‘I made’ (ἐποίησα) the hero-shrine instead of the usual ‘I constructed’ (κατεσκεύασα). Appendix 2, no. 15, dated in Year 345 month 3 (= December 260) is from Yanıkören, in the territory of Lysias or Otrous, about 35 kilometres north-north-east of Eumeneia. In this gravestone Aurelia Asclepiodora constructs a hero-shrine (ἡρῷον) for her husband Aurelius Gaios, son of Eutyches, and her son Kouartos (Quartus). Appendix 2, no. 16, however, a brief epitaph from Yeşilyaka in Eumeneian territory, dated in Year 345 (= 261) without indication of month, uses the more up-to-date word

67

68

Drew-Bear argues that ‘la forme πρευσβύτερος à la ligne 2 n’est pas une erreur du graveur mais plutôt un témoignage de la pronunciation de l’époque’ (Nouvelles inscriptions de Phrygie, 109). MAMA 4.132.

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κοιμητήριον (burial place): Aurelius Symphoros does not add the names of his wife and son, who are to be buried together with him. The feature of greatest interest in Appendix 2, no. 17, dated to Year 348 (= 264) and originating from Yakasimak in Eumeneian territory, is the addition of a line (carved in the wrong place) permitting the burial of Zenodotos’ daughter Maria in the hero-shrine, alongside Zenodotos, his wife Tatia, and his son Zenon. Biblical names, even Maria, were uncommon in the Christian community at this date.69 No. 19, the final epitaph in Appendix 2, from the heart of Eumeneian territory at Işıklı, commemorates (in addition to Aurelius Neikeros and his wife and children, who are put in the shade by the accomplishments of the other occupant of Neikeros’ hero-shrine) Aurelius Mannos, a Roman soldier with a Gothic-sounding name, who in his life was a cavalryman and horse-archer, and the bearer of the dragon standard in the retinue of Castrius Constans. I am inclined to think Dmitriev is right to argue that the province of Phrygia and Caria established in the mid-third century was an emergency measure. If so, Phrygia and Caria may have once more been part of the province of Asia in the 280s and 290s, until Diocletian’s reorganization of the provinces, which began in the late 290s. Accordingly, given that Castrius Constans was a governor of an imperial province (ἡγεμών), whereas Asia was a senatorial province, I would think the Aurelius Mannos gravestone probably should not be dated before the 290s. The alternative, which cannot be excluded, is that Mitchell is right, Castrius Constans was governor of Phrygia and Caria and the gravestone of Aurelius Mannos belongs to the 250s or 260s.70 The dated gravestones sample displays a partial cross-section of the Christian community at Eumeneia and Apamea in the generation following 246. Better-off Christians make up the stratum through which the cross-section runs: included in the Christian community are a city councillor, an Asiarch’s business agent, a clergyman, a wholesale dealer, and the soldier who carried the dragon standard in the governor’s entourage. The context of some of the finds suggests that owners of land created the memorials: the Phrougios family, for example, whose two strikingly similar monuments had, by the 1930s, been built into the veranda of the mosque at Sırıklı; and the Ariston family, whose property

69

70

Adolf Harnack observed how few Christian names were taken from the Bible in the first three centuries, and discussed choices made in naming children: Mission and Expansion, 424–30. Cf. note to Appendix 2, no. 19.

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was close to modern Dumanlı, their newer gravestone referencing the older one – a family graveyard on the family farm. These Christians worried over whether their relatives would be converted to Christianity, as Aurelius Artemidoros, son of Eiason, did, although they only occasionally gave a child a biblical name, such as Maria. Poorer Christians, however, did not inherit or buy the burial plots or commission the inscriptions with which their more affluent co-religionists furnished themselves – in fact, they would have been the people who were at risk of feeling compelled to bury a relative unofficially, in ground which did not belong to them. Another business agent (π[ρ]αγματικός71) dwelt in the city of Eumeneia and was buried at Emircik. He did not pause to add the date to his epitaph, prosaic move as that was, for his mind was in the poetic ether. The part of the epitaph in the panel on the front of his grave altar reads (in elegiac couplets):72 Who made this tomb for himself while still alive? I, Gaios, business agent and cultivator of the Muses, (made it, for myself ) and my dear wife Tatia and my beloved children, that they may have this as their eternal home, together with Roubes the servant of the great God Christ (?).73

71

72

73

Buckler, Calder, and Cox profess uncertainty over the meaning of this word (‘Asia Minor, 1924: III. Monuments from Central Phrygia’, 63), on the supposition that there must be a difference in meaning between it and πραγματευτής (business agent). But the cretic in πραγματευτής makes it impossible to use the word in iambic verse, so that a poet must prefer π[ρ]αγματικός, which is perfect for the end of a pentameter. ICG 1031 lines 5–14. SEG 6.210; Ramsay Cities and Bishoprics, 386, 232 (2); Buckler, Calder, and Cox, ‘Asia Minor, 1924: III. Monuments from Central Phrygia’, p. 61, no. 183; Robert, Hellenica vol. 10, 414; Peek, Griechische Versinschriften aus Kleinasien, 581–2, no. 1905. Illustration: Buckler, Calder, and Cox, ‘Asia Minor, 1924: III. Monuments from Central Phrygia’, 61, Fig. 12. The question mark after ‘the Great God Christ’ is necessary because of wear and tear to the last line of Face A of the inscription (ICG 1031). The first letter of the line is a clear theta, with a partial upsilon above indicating an abbreviation for θ[εο]ῦ; however, it is unclear what was carved in the next space. The remains may be consistent with a damaged or erased chi-rho ligature, but certainty is impossible. If the text was chi-rho, it would be right to read it as the nomen sacrum Χρ[ιστοῦ]. Huttner in ICG comments that this reading would correspond with the metre.

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Gaios continues the poem and expands on his enthusiasm for literature: in life he never had much money, but he worked at poetical literature and used it to help his friends as far as he was able. No one should be proud, ‘for there is one Hades for all, and an equal end’. No one ends up with more than the measure of land needed to bury him, so that one had better enjoy life while one can. But in a final stanza, mostly obliterated, Gaios writes of God and resurrection. The idea behind the reference to Roubes seems to be that the burial place is near where Roubes – whoever he was – lies buried. The name, which is neither Greek nor Phrygian, seems to be an adaptation of the name of Reuben, in the Bible the first son of Jacob (= Israel).74 One might suppose he had been a Christian of Jewish family,75 but speculation would be involved. A less speculative inference would be that he had been a person of memorable character in the Christian community at Eumeneia.76 A second gravestone, 2 kilometres away,77 refers to him, and unlike the Gaios stone, the epitaph is an undated Eumeneian formula text, though in modified form:78 Αὐρ. [Ζ]ωτι[κ]ὸ[ς] | Λυκίδας μάρ- | τυρα τὸν | θεὸν δίδω 4| ὅτι κατεσ- | κεύασα τὸ ἡ- | ρῷον, νω- | θρῶς ἔχον- 8| τος Ἀμιανοῦ | τοῦ ἀδεφοῦ | μου, ἀπὸ τῶν | ἐμῶν καμάτων 12| καὶ ἐντέλλομε | Φρονίμη καὶ Μά- | ξιμαν τὰς ἀδελ- | φάς μου τεθῆνε 16| μνας. εἴ τις δὲ | ἕτερον θήσει, ἔσ- | τε αὐτῷ πρὸς | τὸν θεὸν καὶ 20| τὸν ἄνγελον | τὸν Ῥουβῆ- | δος. I, Aur(elius) [Z]oti[k]o[s] Lykidas, call God to witness that I constructed this hero-shrine, by my own efforts, while my brother Amianos remained idle. And I direct that my sisters Phronime and Maxima shall be the only ones placed here. And if anyone places another (dead body here), it shall be a matter between him and God and the angel of Roubes.

74

75

76

77 78

Genesis 29.31–2. The Septuagint spelling of Reuben is Ρουβην (indeclinable), but in this inscription Roubes features in a first-declension dative (Ῥούβῃ), and in SEG 29.1400 (below) as a third-declension genitive (Ῥουβῆδος), so the adaptation is both radical and inconsistent. To Mitchell, Roubes was ‘a prominent member of the Jewish community’ (Anatolia vol. 2, 41) – an inference which cannot be disproved, but which seems to be based only on Roubes’ name and the fact (after he was dead) that he mattered enough for others to be invoking his angel. See Chapter 4 on the Roman names of Montanus and the prophetesses, however: ‘The etymology of one person’s name meant little in Phrygia in the days of the Roman empire.’ Sheppard, ‘R.E.C.A.M. Notes and Studies No. 6’, 176: ‘Clearly Roubes is now dead, but had been a figure greatly respected by the Christians of Eumeneia and its territory.’ Sheppard, ‘R.E.C.A.M. Notes and Studies No. 6’, 176. SEG 29.1400 (ICG 1031); Robert, Hellenica vol. 10, 429–35; Sheppard, ‘R.E.C.A.M. Notes and Studies No. 6’, 175–6. Eskihaydan (territory of Eumeneia).

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The angel of Roubes is listed after God as a second personage with whom anyone who buries a body other than those for whom the hero-shrine is reserved must expect to deal. As Sheppard observes, the context of the Lykidas epitaph is a family divided, at least to the degree of Amianos avoiding taking responsibility along with Lykidas for providing burial places for two female relatives who appear not to be either Lykidas’ mother or his wife.79 A comparison with Hierapolis and Aberkios is possible: there is no evidence of his guardian angel being invoked to protect the burial places of Christians, but (thanks partly to the prominent presence of his grave altar at Hierapolis) he was well remembered locally, and two hundred years or more after his death, someone wrote his life story. Roubes lacked the biographer (and did not come to Eusebius’ attention), but he, too, was remembered by some people in the church community he was part of. Horsley and Luxford, in their article about pagan angels in Asia Minor, discuss the two ‘angel of Roubes’ inscriptions from Eumeneia and observe that the ‘Theran wording is quite distinctive’. They favour the hypothesis that Roubes (or someone else) had travelled from Thera to Eumeneia and imported a characteristic idea from Thera about angels and what they have to do with burial places.80 The ‘angel of Roubes’ inscriptions are pivotal to the Horsley/Luxford interpretation of the corpus of Theran texts, because the Gaios and Lykidas epitaphs at Eumeneia are of third-century date and demonstrably Christian: Horsley and Luxford argue that this circumstance makes it certain that the Theran ‘angel of X’ epitaphs also ought to be read as Christian.81 The living do not as a matter of daily reality pay much attention to funerary monuments, although they may have been more inclined to in the ancient world than they are today; for that reason it would be better not to build too great an edifice on the Eumeneian formula – a phenomenon which lasted a generation or so. It was, however, both distinctive and deliberate: Christians used it to protect the tombs of the dead, while it remained equally possible to create a memorial without it: with every other then-conventional element of local phrasing, but without the reference to the sinner having to face God himself (implicitly on the Day of Judgement). So, for example, at Çivril in 254, this epitaph:82

79 80 81 82

Sheppard, ‘R.E.C.A.M. Notes and Studies No. 6’, 176. Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 168. Horsley and Luxford, ‘Pagan Angels in Roman Asia Minor’, 168–9. MAMA 11.38, Çivril (territory of Eumeneia).

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ἔτους τλη´, μη(νὸς) [- - -] | Α⟨ὐ⟩ρ(ήλιος) Θρέπτος | Νικομήδους | Εὐμενεὺς κα ̣- 4| τε⟨σ⟩κεύασεν ̣ | τὸ ἡρῷον ἑαυ[τῷ] | καὶ Ἀμμίᾳ | τῇ γλυκυτάτ ̣[ῃ] 8| γυναικὶ | καὶ Αὐρ(ηλίᾳ) Ἀγριπ- | πίνῃ τῇ μητρ[ὶ]
| οὐδενὶ δὲ ἐξὸν 12| ἔστε ἐνβαλεῖν | πτῶμα
ἢν οὖν, | δ⟨ώ⟩σι προστεί- | μου ἰς τὸ ταμῖ- 16| ον (δηνάρια) ͵αφ´. Year 338, month [—]. Ar(elius) Threptos son of Nicomedes, Eumeneian, constructed this hero-shrine for himse[lf] and for Ammia, his most sweet wife, and for Aur(elia) Agrippina his mother. It shall not be permitted for anyone to place [another] corpse [here]. So if [someone does], he will pay a fine to the treasury of 1,500 (denarii).

Evidence is to hand at Eumeneia, therefore, but remains in key respects unquantifiable, for what Ramsay called ‘the greatest political fact of the third century, the war between the State and the Christian faith’.83

the tekmoreian guest-friends To the east of Eumeneia, Apamea, and Apollonia, in the Phrygian– Pisidian borderland as far as Iconium and beyond, in the same years when Eumeneian and Apamean Christians were commemorating their dead with Eumeneian formula gravestones, life on the great imperial estates was different in important ways from the life of the small cities of Phrygia. In 1906 and 1912, Ramsay published a chapter and an article based on a series of inscriptions from this region near Antioch of Pisidia, which provide evidence of the membership and activities of a cult-based association whose purpose was to enact and express loyalty to the emperor and the existing order of society, property, and religion. The members of the association called themselves the Ξένοι Τεκμορεῖοι,84 Tekmoreian Guest-Friends. Much of the space on the monuments of the Tekmoreian Guest-Friends is occupied with lists of how much was subscribed by whom. So Aurelius Loukios, son of Loukios of Giza, subscribed 301 denarii: Αὐρ. Λούκιος Λουκίου Γιζηνὸς τεκμορεύσας δίς (δην.) ταʹ.85 He made his subscription τεκμορεύσας δίς, ‘after twice carrying out the action of the verb τεκμορεύειν’. 83

84 85

Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 347. My choice of phrasing would be different in places, but this book as a whole seeks to meet the challenge thrown out in Ramsay’s footnote on this page: ‘The history of the Roman Empire urgently requires to be rewritten from a more statesman-like point of view, viz., how the great struggle of religions and the social systems which they implied was fought out on the field of the Empire.’ Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 329, no. 3. Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 329, no. 4, line 35.

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‘The character of the inscriptions as a whole’, Ramsay comments, ‘shows emphatically that [this] was some religious act.’ He argues that this otherwise unattested verb is formed from (Homeric) τέκμωρ, which in the Iliad and Odyssey means ‘pledge’ or ‘sign’.86 When Zeus nods, it is ἐξ ἐμέθεν μέγιστον τέκμωρ,87 ‘the highest pledge from me’. Therefore, τεκμορεύειν must mean ‘give a pledge’, or rather, ‘give the special pledge (of the Tekmoreian Guest-Friends)’, and τεκμορεῖοι must be ‘pledge-takers’. ‘In other words,’ Ramsay adds, ‘the Tekmor was some solemn sign and pledge of the loyalty of the celebrant to the Emperor and his service.’88 Ramsay’s analysis is weaker, however, at the point where he draws two inferences: first, that on the imperial estates near Antioch of Pisidia the ‘alliance between the State and the old pagan worship was made in order to strengthen resistance to the new faith’, and, second, that it is ‘permissible to regard the excitement and the revival [of non-Christian religion, implicitly in every case across the empire including this] as engineered by the government to some extent’.89 He seems to be right in identifying the Tekmoreian pledge as a religious innovation (though one which drew on centuries of conventional religious observance, which had surely not come to an end when ‘those sent as the inheritors of [Amyntas90]’ destroyed the priesthood of Men Askaenos outside Pisidian Antioch91), and it is not impossible that the ritual of the Tekmoreians borrowed some Christian ideas (though the example Ramsay cites does not prove that this was so in the days of the pre-Christian empire92), but he is clearly wrong in referring to the Tekmor as a ‘secret symbolic act’.93 His supposition of a migration back to the land from the cities (and back, in a religious sense, to orientalism), is poorly founded: some Tekmoreians had city ethnics (and therefore had not been dwellers on an imperial estate 86 87 88 89 90 91

92

93

Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 346. Hom. Il. 1.526. Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 347. Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 347. King of Galatia, 36–25 BC: after his death, Galatia became a Roman province. Strabo 12.8.14 (= 577): ‘Here there was also a priesthood of Mên Arcaeus, which had a number of temple-slaves and sacred places, but the priesthood was destroyed after the death of Amyntas by those who were sent thither as his inheritors.’ By ‘inheritors’ Strabo would mean the Romans who came to take control of the god’s estates (and the temple) – Amyntas’ sons did not succeed in inheriting his kingship or his property. Because it comes from Lystra, and is of fourth-century date. KILyk 1.293: ‘Ma, daughter of Pappas and hereditary priestess of the goddess and the saints (τῆς θεοῦ κὲ τῶν ἁγίων), restored and tiled the temple’ (Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 348). Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 347.

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all their lives), and there was even a Eumeneian Tekmoreian,94 but the evidence is not sufficient to support a theory of large-scale movement of non-Christians out of Eumeneia to a place where the latest version of conventional religion was practised. The Tekmoreian Guest-Friends inscriptions, with their lengthy lists of loyal contributors, then, prove the liveliness (and the adaptive success) of polytheist religion at or near the time when the Eumeneian formula phenomenon was in full swing. The growth of Christianity was patchy, and the cities were a more favourable environment for it in third-century Phrygia: there, the sacred canopy was shifting, but in the rural districts the pattern was one of cumulative change within an older religious system.

94

Orestes, son of Andron: Ramsay, ‘Tekmoreian Guest-Friends: An Anti-Christian Society’, 335, no. 15, line 24.

10 Christians for Christians

Eumeneia is close to the headwaters of the Maeander river (Büyük Menderes), but in the upper Tembris (Porsuk) valley, part of another river system (the Tembris being a tributary of the Sangarius (Sakarya) river), there is another concentration of Christian gravestones which supplies evidence of the Christian community which was behind it. Calder published and discussed many of the stones, some in 1923 in ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’ and others afterwards (with Buckler and Cox) in his five-part article series under the title of ‘Asia Minor, 1924’; then in 1978, Gibson added eight more inscriptions, publishing and discussing the ‘Christians for Christians’ corpus as it was then known.1 As Edouard Chiricat observes, Christianity in Asia Minor was a matter of isolated communities: he comments on how geography separated them and funerary practices were distinctive.2 He cites Mitchell on the ‘discrete cellular structure . . . implied by the letters of the apostolic and post-apostolic age’.3 Christoph Markschies, in an agenda report in 2011 for the relevant subgroup of the Berlin-based Topoi research project, which is focused on the ‘formation and transformation of space and knowledge in ancient civilizations’, wrote of the ‘Christians for Christians’ formula being

1

2 3

Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 3. An epitaph was added in 1990 (SEG 40.1249 (ICG 1156), read from a photograph in Sotheby’s Catalogue London, Antiquities, Thursday 13 and Friday 14 December 1990, 236/7 no. 425), and two more in 1993 with the publication of Monumenta Asiae Minoris antiqua vol. 10: MAMA 10.245 (ICG 1200) and 10.275 (ICG 1206). Chiricat, ‘“Crypto-Christian” Inscriptions’, 199. Chiricat, ‘“Crypto-Christian” Inscriptions’, 199, and Mitchell, Anatolia, vol. 2, 41.

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‘designed to distinguish [the epitaphs which include this phrase] from adjacent pagan inscriptions’, adding that ‘this practice delimited a specific space within a necropolis where a social network, one transcending the boundaries of family and patronage, would have been preserved spatially even after their deaths’.4 However, Markschies’ surmise ignores important data, above all the fact that the relatively few extant ‘Christians for Christians’ inscriptions come from a scattering of places and that there is no grouping of them which could be identified as having originally been from a specific space within a necropolis in the way Markschies supposes to have been characteristic. In the Eumeneian case I have argued for a family graveyard belonging to the Ariston family on the family farm near Dumanlı;5 the smallness of the cities of Phrygia, with smaller settlements still across the χώρα of each, must have led to burial grounds being small. Gibson 2, the monument of Zotikos Markianos, dated by Tabbernee to the second or third quarter of the third century,6 points to the context: the grave altar in the 1970s stood covered in lichens in a field outside the village of Pınarcık (formerly Abiye).7 This village’s up-to-date name is unrelated to the name of ancient Appia, a place large enough in the Roman imperial period to have minted some coins, although, even then, the burial ground must have been outside the city. Gibson 1, also from Pınarcık, and dated to the first decade of the fourth century by Tabbernee,8 was some distance away from Gibson 2 in the 1970s, in a fountain called Türkmencik çeşmesi, on the road to Akça Köyü (just under 3 kilometres from Abiye (Pınarcık)).9 Gibson 17, the third from Pınarcık and dated by Tabbernee to the third quarter of the third century,10 was at İstanbul in the 1970s, in the collection of Rahmi Koç.11 A fragmentary inscription from nearby Nuhören, MAMA 10.245 (ICG 1200), should

4 5 7

8 11

Markschies, ‘Plenary Agenda Report for Research Group B-III-2’, 5. 6 Cf. Chapter 9 for both of these. IMont, 181. ICG 1152. Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 11, no. 2. Αὐρ. Ζωτικὸς Μαρκι | ανὸς τοῖς ἑαυτοῦ γο | νεῦσιν ἔτι ζῶν Μαρκίνι | κὲ Ἄππῃ κὲ ἀδελφῷ Ἀρτε 4| μᾷ μνήμης χάριν | Χρειστιανοὶ Χρειστιανοῖς (Aurelius Zotikos Markianos, still living, [set up this monument] for his parents, Markin and Appe, and his brother Artemas, in memoriam, Christians for Christians). As Gibson notes, Ramsay and Anderson both read the first letter of line 2 as ‘angular omega’, which would make the dedicator’s name ‘Aurelius Zotikos son of Markion’, a more ordinary name, and one which would be consistent with the reference later in the epitaph to Zotikos’ father’s name being Markin. 9 10 IMont, 277. ICG 1255. Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 9. IMont, 190. ICG 1260. Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 46.

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also be associated with Appia: Tabbernee dates it to the last decade and a half of the third century,12 but Huttner in ICG is unwilling to commit to anything more precise than ‘200–350’. The north Phrygian context of the ‘Christians for Christians’ inscriptions is different in important ways from the south Phrygian region which is home to the Eumeneian formula. An untypical gravestone in the Afyonkarahisar Museum, said to be from Abiye (Pınarcık), which Gibson in 1975 called ‘unique’, has a modified Eumeneian formula wording, about 175 kilometres away from the text’s original home in Eumeneia;13 however, in the region of Soa (Altıntaş) and Cotiaeum (Kütahya) it is a fish out of water. The surrounding district, however, was even more predominantly rural than the area of Eumeneia and Apamea, and the Tembris valley estate, a large imperial property, was closer than the Antioch of Pisidia imperial estates were to Eumeneia. There are far fewer ‘Christians for Christians’ inscriptions than the hundred or so which bear Eumeneian formula wording. Only two of the ‘Christians for Christians’ corpus as published by Gibson are dated. The inference must be that the (in retrospect) virtuous habit of dating grave inscriptions was less common in this region. The earlier dated one, from 249, is Gibson 22, from Soa (Altıntaş). It reads:14

12 13

14

IMont, 288. ICG 1268. Gibson, ‘Unique Christian Epitaph’: Α[ὐ]ρ[ηλίου] | μνῆμα Εὐστ | αθιαν | οῦ μακελάρει 4| ως κὲ εἴ τι | ς εἰπιβουλε | ύσι ἔστη αὐ | τοῦ πὸς τὼν 8|παντωκράτ | ωρα θεόν (‘Memorial of Aurelius Eustathianos, butcher, and if anyone plots (against it), it shall be a matter between him and God, the ruler of all’). Gibson (156–7) argues for an early fourthcentury date, and sees the inscription as ‘a late survival of the Eumeneian Formula, which here has found its way north’; Huttner in ICG goes even further than Gibson, and writes, ‘Auch eine spätere Datierung scheint mir möglich’, assigning the stone to ‘300–450’. I cannot, however, agree with Gibson that the cross carved at the beginning is ‘an early appearance of the cross on an orthodox monument, doubtless affected by preConstantinian Montanist use of the cross in northern Phrygia’ and therefore diagnostic of relatively late date. Note the discussion of MAMA 4.222 (ICG 1136) in Chapter 8, an early third-century gravestone with a cross. Gibson’s point that παντοκράτωρ is used more often in Christian epigraphy in the fourth century is well made, but of limited force because there is so much more fourth-century Christian epigraphy than earlier material – and the word is familiar from the Bible (e.g. LXX 2 Kingdoms 5.10: ‘David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts [παντοκράτωρ], was with him’). On balance I find a third-century date for the Eustathianos stone more probable than the supposition that it was made in the Upper Tembris Valley decades after the Eumeneian formula had gone out of fashion back in Eumeneia. ICG 1264. Also published as IGRRP 4.609, and Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 337, no. 2. On the numeral, Calder writes, ‘The date, though partly restored, is certain.’

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[τ]λγ | Χρειστιανοὶ | Χρειστιανο̣[ῖς] | Αὐρ. Ἀμμεία 4| σὺν τῷ γαμβρ[ῷ] | αὐτῶν Ζωτι- | κῷ κὲ σὺν το̣ῖ[ς] | ἐγόνοις αὐτῶ[ν] 8| Ἀλλεξανδρείᾳ | κὲ Τελεσφόρῳ | {κὲ} Ἀλλεξάνδρῳ | συνβίῳ ἐποίη- 12| σαν. (Year) 333. Christians for Christian[s]. Aur(elia) Ammeia with their brotherin-law Zotikos and with their grandchildren Allexandreia and Telesphoros Allexandros her husband made (this).

The confessional element is at the front, and is actually confessional, rather than merely diagnosable as Christian in the manner of the Eumeneian formula. The concern to display, to enact, the identity of the deceased and the dedicator is evidently a high priority. And yet insofar as the gravestone aspires to participate in elite discourse its success is partial: a singular was expected where the plural αὐτῶν comes in line 6, and a stray κὲ in line 11 threatens to obscure the fact that Allexandros, husband of Aur(elia) Ammeia, is the deceased. By the standards of other gravestones of the period, the quality of the monument is not first-rate. The later of the two relevant dated texts is Gibson 16, which Mitchell (drawing on the register of the Kütahya Museum) says comes from Çömlekçi Köy,15 and which belongs to 305:16 ἔτους | τπθ | Αὐρ. Μαρκειανὸς Μάρκου κὲ Δόμνα τέκνῳ Λεοντίῳ | γλυκυτάτῳ ἀωροθανῇ ἐτῶν θ κὲ ἑαυτοῖς ζῶντες 4| κὲ τὰ τέκνα αὐτῶν | Ἀμμίαντος κὲ Διομή- | δης κὲ Εὔμηλος πατρ- | ὶ ζῶντι κὲ μητρὶ ζώσῃ 8| κὲ ἀδελφῷ θεθνῶτι | γλυκυτάτοις μνή| μης ☩άριν.| τίσς ἂν 12| προσάξι ☩ῖρ- | α τὴν βαρύχθ- | ονον ὀρφαν- | ὰ τέκνα λίποι16 | το οἶκον ☩ῆ- | ρον βίον ἔρη- | μον. Year 389. Aur(elius) Markeianos son of Markos, and Domna, for their most sweet child Leontios, who died before his time aged nine, and for themselves. While they still lived, they and their children Ammiantos and Diomedes and Eumelos (made this grave) for their father, still living, and their mother, still living, and for their dead brother, (all three) most sweet, in memoriam. Anyone who brings the heavy hand against (this tomb), may he leave his children orphans, his house bereft, and his life empty.

Included by Gibson in the ‘Christians for Christians’ corpus, this epitaph is not there by virtue of the wording on the stone, since ‘Christians for Christians’ does not appear. The use of a cross instead of the letter chi in three places makes it clear that the gravestone comes from a Christian context, but the comparisons which can be made with an important subset of the ‘Christians for Christians’ corpus are broad-ranging: Gibson 15 16

Mitchell, review of Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 201. ICG 1283. Text of this inscription emended to take into account Mitchell’s readings (review of Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 201).

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nos. 3–16 are similar in several elements of technique and appearance. Some are grave altars and others are stelai, but (Gibson writes),17 Each type is very distinct and instantly recognizable, the altars by wreath and cross, garlands, arrangement into registers, and oxen. The stelai . . . are distinguished by their shape, their ‘akroteria’, wreath, cross, surface for inscription beside the wreath, frames and their decoration, and the area thus framed left for inscription or reliefs, and the distinctive oxen at the bottom of the stelai.

Plates V to XVII in Gibson’s book illustrate how marked the resemblances are. Gibson’s case for the view that the gravestones come from the same workshop is persuasive,18 and before she links some stones in pairs and triplets and argues for their attribution to particular sculptors at that workshop. Gibson 16 (ICG 1283) she links with Gibson 11 (ICG 1257), also in the Kütahya Museum, but (unlike no. 16) linked to a particular provenance at Üçhüyük. This epitaph reads: Αὐρ. Κύριλα ἀν[δ]- | ρὶ Εὐτύ☩ῳ Δευκω- | μήτῃ κὲ ἑαυτῇ ζῶσ- | α κὲ τὰ τέκνα αὐτ- 4| ῶν Ἐπιτύνχανο- | κὲ Κύ ριλος ς | Χρηστ- | ιανο̣- 8| ῖς | μνήμ- | ης χάριν. | Νικη- 12| φόρος | κὲ Ἀλέ | ξανδ- | ρος 16| ἀδ- | ελ- | φῷ. Aur(elia) Kyrila (set up this monument) for her husband Eutychos, of Deukome, and for herself, while still living; and so did her children Epitynchanos and Kyrilos, for Christians, in memoriam. Nikephoros and Alexandros (set up this monument) for their brother.

This epitaph is interesting because it identifies the deceased, Eutychos, as a villager (from Deukome19) and not a city-dweller. If the village had been within a city’s territory, Eutychos would probably have identified himself as a citizen of the city concerned. Zotikos Markianos, of Gibson 16, may be thought to have been a citizen of Appia – from the find-spot of Gibson 2, although the city is not mentioned in the text – but Eutychos and other members of the family associated with Gibson 11 were from outside the charmed circle of elect cities, their Christian community belonging to the rural world which formed the majority of Phrygia. 17 19

18 Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 41. Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 42. As Gibson notes (‘Christians for Christians’, 27), Deukome may be the same place as Daoukome, a village listed in the Tekmoreian Guest-Friends inscriptions (see Chapter 9). Gibson seems to be right to resist Ramsay’s argument in favour of Daoukome being close to Antioch of Pisidia (Yalvaç), some 50 km away. People who took the Tekmoreian pledge in some cases had come to the estates near Antioch of Pisidia from relatively distant places, and accordingly it seems more probable that Deukome was somewhere nearer Kütahya, where the stone is, and Üçhüyük, where it may have been found. Although there is no way to confirm an association with the Tembris valley estate, it does seem the most probable context for the gravestone.

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Assuming that Gibson is correct to identify nos. 11 and 16 as the work of the same sculptor, they must belong within the small number of decades around 305, which are the most that can have comprised the sculptor’s career. More broadly, the workshop where this sculptor worked, together with the others who made Gibson nos. 3–16, produced fourteen of the thirty-two extant ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones,20 and must be identified as a key node around which this cluster of evidence has formed.

network formation Johnson identifies the workshop as ‘one of the earliest known Christian businesses’,21 not specifying what comparators he has in mind when he says ‘one of’. He argues that the predominantly Christian known output of the workshop suggests that the business sold primarily to Christian customers.22 The exception which he identifies is Gibson 15, an epitaph without the ‘Christians for Christians’ wording, dated either 10 November 278 or 2 January 279.23 Gibson and Johnson both note that in the upper register of that stone the wreath has had a cross erased from the middle of it,24 but only Johnson explicitly draws the inference that ‘the stone may have been pre-fabricated for Christian use and altered subsequently for sale to a non-Christian customer’.25 He argues that the workshop did not restrict its services only to Christians, but expected more Christian than non-Christian customers.

20

21 22 23 24

25

Depending on what exactly is counted in and out. One of the 3–16 group (no. 4 (ICG 1375)) has no text, while nos. 15 (ICG1205) and 16 are classified in the ‘Christians for Christians’ corpus because they have crosses carved on them (but not the ‘Christians for Christians’ phrase) – see the next paragraph in main text on no. 15. I have counted the corpus (see above) as comprising Gibson nos. 1–29 plus SEG 40.1249 (ICG 1156), MAMA 10.245 (ICG 1200), and MAMA 10.275 (ICG 1206): I have deferred to Gibson’s judgement on Gibson 25 (ICG 1265), which has a cross but not the ‘Christians for Christians’ phrase, and Gibson 26 (ICG 1266), which has neither, and is included on grounds of generally similar language. Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 341. Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 344. IMont, 241 and 246–7. Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 36 (ICG 1288); Johnson (‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 363 n. 5) relies on Gibson’s observation of the photograph which they both print. Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 350.

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This circumstance has given rise to some discussion around what it might show about the proportion of the local population which was Christian. MacMullen is sceptical about high estimates, both generally and here. He rejects Frend’s arguments for regions of the empire being more than 50 per cent Christian before Constantine, and he queries Mitchell’s view that the Christian proportion of the population in the region of Appia (Pınarcık) and Cotiaeum (Kütahya) was especially high. He counts 43 identifiably Christian inscriptions out of 312 published from the region, but sees some 200 as relevant (after discounting milestones and suchlike) and so argues for a Christian population of 20 per cent.26 This procedure is hardly rigorous, notwithstanding that the supposition against which it is directed is unsatisfactory: even given that they are gravestones, 40 or so Christian gravestones out of some 200 do not necessarily equate to a 20 per cent Christian population. And yet although MacMullen’s alternative figure for the Christian population is not validly derived, his more general point that ‘the indication is of a minority of Christians in an untrustworthy corpus, but an increase after the persecutions’ is well made.27 It intersects well with Johnson’s suggestion that choices made at the workshop where Gibson nos. 3–16 were made (his inference is that the stonecutters were responsible for these choices) were behind the identification of the relevant gravestones as belonging to Christians. He notes that gravestones were prefabricated with a range of decorative schemes and often assigned to a customer at a time when only lettering remained to be done – hence the reprocessing of some stones, together with what Johnson calls ‘transvestite or hermaphrodite stones’, whose decorative schemes appear poorly suited to the gender of the deceased.28 The outcome on some stones is

26 28

27 MacMullen, Second Church, 145 n. 20. MacMullen, Second Church, 145 n. 20. For instance, Gibson 10 (ICG 1256), dated by Tabbernee between 290 and 300 (IMont, 271), and ‘apparently . . . pre-fabricated for male use and provided with images of a whip and writing tablets. These subsequently were erased and replaced with combs, basket, spindle, and distaff, although the outlines of the original male paraphernalia remain visible beneath the alterations’; and Gibson 13 (ICG 1259), dated by Tabbernee to the following decade (IMont, 281), and ‘dedicated to a single male individual by his mother, his wife, and his son. The tombstone (intended apparently for a married couple) is ornamented with the typically male whip and writing tablet, but also with comb, distaff, and spindle. Perhaps the monument was intended implicitly to honor the two women dedicants also, but the epitaph does not say so directly’ (Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 345).

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overlong text, crammed round decorative elements.29 These features of the groups of gravestones, Johnson argues, ‘demonstrate that the stonecutter(s) tended to play a far more significant role in the design of the monuments than did the individual purchaser’, and he writes of a ‘creative control’ in the stonecutters’ hands which extended as far as the formulation of the epitaphs.30 I am less confident than Johnson is that the wording of these gravestones, and the market towards which they were directed, are sufficient to reveal the Christian convictions of the stonecutters themselves. It is unlikely that the enterprise was a cooperative whose values and business plan were agreed among its skilled workers. But whoever owned the capital and directed the labour involved may have originated, or agreed to, the design ideas which are evident in Gibson nos. 3–16. Johnson is correct in noting that elements of these design ideas were unusual in Phrygia (and everywhere else) in the third century when the ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones began to be made,31 although what was being done was not necessarily an absolute novelty, since other ‘Christians for Christians’ epitaphs exist which were probably not inscribed in this one workshop. He is probably right, also, to think that ‘the innovation should be attributed to the particular tastes of the workshop rather than to the demands of the local Christian community’.32 His conclusion that ‘the notion that the “Christians for Christians” formula was an officially sanctioned motto of a strong regional Church seems unlikely to be true’33 is persuasive. In the past, a good deal of attention was paid to the puzzling question of whether the people who commissioned ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones and used them to commemorate their dead were Montanists or adherents of the Great Church. The feature which prompted all this careful consideration was explained in 1923 by Calder:34

29

30 31

32 33 34

So Gibson 8 (ICG 1254), dated by Tabbernee between 305 and 310 (IMont, 261), and Gibson 11 (ICG 1257; Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 345) – similarly dated by Tabbernee (IMont, 271). Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 350. Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 351: ‘In Roman imperial Anatolia, tombstones/epitaphs normally did not function as a medium to express religious affiliation.’ On the other hand, pruning hooks, whips, and writing tablets (for men), and baskets, combs, distaffs, and spindles (for women) are thoroughly conventional decorative features (cf. Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian SelfIdentity’, 344). Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 352. Johnson, ‘A Christian Business and Christian Self-Identity’, 357. Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 319.

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[T]he carving of the formula ‘Christians for Christians’ openly on gravestones contradicts . . . the universal practice of the Church in the period before Constantine. The Christians who dedicated these tombstones were evidently in fundamental disagreement with their co-religionaries of Central Phrygia, and we may add, of the Roman Empire generally, on the question of profession.

And yet Calder’s premise is more open to question now than it was in 1923. For instance, the gravestone of Eutyches from Çeltikçi,35 published in 1955 and dated to 180 (discussed in Chapter 6) has in the relief on the stone ‘two inconspicuous but not disguised crosses’,36 as Mitchell says. The tau cross from which the bunch of grapes hangs might defeat a casual observer’s powers of interpretation,37 but the panis quadratus in the clergyman’s right hand is much easier to read. And this Çeltikçi gravestone comes from the upper Tembris valley, about 70 kilometres away from Appia (Pınarcık), so that Calder’s premise to the effect that Christians in the third century would (as a principle of general application) not make their identity evident in gravestones is subject to serious question. Calder’s argument for the Montanist commitment of the community behind the ‘Christians for Christians’ epitaphs was that ‘So long as we treat [them] as orthodox, we are at a loss to explain why they should differ so radically from all known orthodox epitaphs.’38 This may be considered an odd argument, coming from someone who knew the Aberkios gravestone and accepted that it commemorated Avircius Marcellus, notorious for his anti-Montanist stance.39 The differences are not as significant as Calder thought, given that Christian imagery and phraseology were far from unprecedented in third-century Phrygia and manifested themselves in ways distinctive to relatively small localities. A more satisfactory approach is outlined by Edouard Chiricat, who cautions against the modern vision of ‘a Christianity clearly divided between orthodox and heretic . . .’ and rejects any idea that the aim of a funerary inscription was ‘primarily to inform the reader of the doctrines adhered to by the owner of the grave’.40 In any case, most of the ‘known orthodox epitaphs’ – known to posterity, that is – had not been composed

35 36 37

38 39 40

Calder, ‘Early-Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia’, 33, no. 2 (ICG 1224). Mitchell, review of Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 202. ‘I am the true vine’ (John 15.1) would be the gloss a Christian viewer would draw on, and would be unlikely to occur to the non-Christian viewer. Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 321. Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 312. Chiricat, ‘ Crypto-Christian” Inscriptions’, 213–14.

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when the ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones were made, so that they ought not to be cited as if they represented a precedent. More plausible than the inference from the zeal of the community in identifying itself as Christian might be the idea that the churches of the upper Tembris valley must have been Montanist because (at the beginning of the third century) they were within the zone of influence of the known Montanist community at Temenothyrae (Uşak). The distance involved would be 100 kilometres or so, depending on what point in the upper Tembris valley should be considered.41 This is by no means too far for a missionary to travel – see above on Philip at Hierapolis (Pamukkale), for example, or on Diogenes the Christian at Apollonia (Uluborlu).42 But the difficulty with inferring sectarian allegiance on this kind of calculation is that Christian preachers of other sorts were just as able to travel. This difficulty calls into question the link Calder made between Philadelphian Christianity and Montanism. Even if in a spiritual sense he is correct in arguing that the door set before the Philadelphian church43 ‘is clearly to be interpreted as the route of missionary enterprise leading up into Phrygia opposite the gates of the city’,44 it is excessively speculative to infer that Christianity in the space to the east of Philadelphia thenceforth and enduringly took on a Philadelphian character, whose logical outgrowth was Montanism.45 Two ‘Christians for Christians’ verse inscriptions in the Bursa Museum, both originating from Aykırıkçı, mention clergy. The first, Gibson 28 (ICG 1269), is a broken stele commemorating Sosthenes,46 who died at the age of thirty; his father-in-law Alexandros, a presbyter, and the other surviving relatives, are named as the dedicators of the gravestone. The second, Gibson 29 (ICG 1270), which Gibson identifies

41

42 43 44 45

46

The distance from Pınarcık (Appia) to Uşak (Temenothyrae) via modern roads is 103.82 km. Philip, Chapter 2; Diogenes (and his son Doulos), Chapter 8. ‘I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut’, Revelation 3.8. Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 327. There is equally little to be said for the idea of ‘the methods of compromise and accommodation by which the Christianity of Laodicea and the other South-Asian churches gained a footing in central Phrygia’ (Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 327): too much weight attached to inferences from the New Testament about the longue durée. Described by Gibson as a grave altar (‘Christians for Christians’, 76); but in view of the photograph (Plate XXIII), Calder’s description as a stele (‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 339) seems better suited to the artefact.

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as possibly the work of the same mason,47 is a longer and more complex epitaph. Domnos, a ‘great soldier’ (μέγαν ἰστρατιώτην), who lived to be sixty, is commemorated; his wife Kyrilla and his son Kyrillos, who died at the age of thirty, are commemorated together with him. Next, Kyrillos’ deceased children are listed (Chrysos and Alexandros); then Domnos’ sister Kyrilla. Afterwards comes the listing of the dedicators of the gravestone: two sons of Domnos who were Christian presbyters: ‘leaders of the people, administering justice under law, virtuous men, great-hearted’ (λαοῦ πρεστά|μενοι νόμῳ δίκεα φρονοῦντε|ς ἄνδρες ἀριστῆες μεγαλήτο|ρες);48 Chrysos, son of Domnos, together with his wife Tatianes and five children, then Alexandros, son of Domnos, together with his wife Appe and ten children. Calder argues that the description of Domnos as ‘a great soldier’ is intended in a spiritual sense and hence does not mean that he was anything to do with the Roman army. The word ‘soldier’, on his view,49 is used as Montanists would use it – the Christian soldier being a metaphor used by Tertullian (‘And are we not soldiers . . .?’50) – although not in a clearly Montanist text. This, however, is an argument to which Occam’s razor should be applied: the inference that Domnos was not a soldier in the Roman army is neither compelling nor necessary. The epitaph as a whole is not cryptic, so that singling out the mention of being a soldier as metaphorical, in a way the rest of the text is not, seems to be unwarranted. Mitchell sees Gibson 28 and 29 (along with others in the corpus) as ‘clearly fourth century in date’. Tabbernee, similarly, dates both Gibson 28 and Gibson 29 to the second or third quarter of the fourth century.51 There is something to be said in favour of this dating, particularly in view of the absence of the Aurelius/Aurelia name, which is usually a marker of third-century date. And yet a question mark remains: Mitchell’s broader conclusion on date is that ‘The chronological span of the whole collection . . . runs from the third century probably to the later fourth century, covering the Constantinian age, which does not appear to mark any important division in the style and content of the epitaphs.’52 Mitchell 47 49

50 51

48 Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 93. Gibson 29, lines 16–19. Calder, ‘Philadelphia and Montanism’, 344: ‘the exultant phrases μέγαν ἰστρατιώτην and ἐνδοξότατον μέγαν ἰστρατιώτην sound extravagant on this view’ [sc. the view that Domnos was a soldier in the worldly sense]. He seems to allow insufficient weight to the fact that the epitaph is in verse: heightened language is to be expected. Tert. De exhortatione castitatis 12: Non enim nos et milites sumus . . .? 52 IMont, 394 and 371. Mitchell, review of Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 202.

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is perhaps influenced by the rarity of dated ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones into attaching no weight to the dating of the later dated one, the Leontios stone from Çömlekçi Köy, to 305; however, the weakness of his supposition that nothing important changed, in terms of style and context of these gravestones, for a century or a century and a half – many decades past 305 – is clear: the Eumeneian formula remained in use for a relatively short time and there is little reason to suppose that the ‘Christians for Christians’ formula, much less widespread, was in use for much longer. More cautiously, Gibson writes of Gibson 28 and 29 as ‘the survival of a type into a period when its raison d’être no longer existed’,53 accepting a fourth-century date while alluding to the assumption that the aetiology of the invention of ‘Christians for Christians’ inscriptions was as a channel for Christian self-assertion against hostile surroundings. On this analysis there would scarcely be a credible motive (except some kind of ossifying convention) for writing ‘Christians for Christians’ after the Edict of Milan in 313, when Christians were approved of and the government’s methods were promoting mass conversion and making adherence to Christianity the rule and not the exception in life in the Roman world. This sort of inference risks producing a caricature of the whole period after 313; yet Gibson’s implicit view that the early fourth century might be in question, but not the fourth century’s later decades,54 is more persuasive than Mitchell’s capitulation to any decade that might be thought of up to the late fourth century.55 The difficulty of delimiting the chronological range in which the ‘Christians for Christians’ epitaphs fall, in the small and remote district where the phrasing was employed, raises questions about what inferences can legitimately be drawn. As argued above, it is not necessary to place the community behind these epitaphs in the Montanist sphere: arguments 53 54

55

Gibson, ‘Christians for Christians’, 98. A reservation which Gibson raises involves wondering momentarily if Gibson 28 and 29 could be associated with the reign of Julian the Apostate (‘Christians for Christians’, 98). She raises no positive consideration in favour of this guess, and the scenario seems to be a low-probability one. Gibson 27 (ICG 1267), also from Aykırıkçı, commemorates (I argued in 2009) a councillor, not a clergyman: ‘leader of the congregation of the people’ Gibson (‘Christians for Christians’, 73) is incorrect as a translation of ἄρχοντα πατρίδος λαοῦ, which should be translated as ‘[two] rulers of the homeland of the people’ (cf. McKechnie, ‘Christian City Councillors’, 10). I was mistaken to refer to this epitaph (same page) as ‘an early example of the “Christians for Christians” gravestones’, but it remains improbable that it belongs after 313.

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based on the supposition that Montanists were more prepared than others to display their Christian commitment in monumental form are not sufficient to exclude the possibility that the ‘Christians for Christians’ community had loyalties in some other direction. If Epiphanius (who wrote around 375) is any kind of guide, Montanism itself was a movement which incorporated a complex of sects;56 on the other hand, if Colossians is any kind of guide, a tiny Phrygian church might have within it people with highly distinctive ideas about Christian theology – without the church in the long run attracting Epiphanius’ attention as the home of a heresy. The first-century Colossian church may in fact be as good a comparator as any to place beside the ‘Christians for Christians’ community. Paul, or the Pauline author, advises the Colossians to ‘Conduct [them]selves wisely towards outsiders’:57 the ‘Christians for Christians’ community displays in monumental masonry its self-definition vis-à-vis outsiders, over at least six decades and on a micro scale. In the latter case there is no evidence of a hint being picked up elsewhere, as there is with the Alexandros, son of Antonios, stone and its emulation of the Aberkios stone; or with the spread of the Eumeneian formula beyond the immediate vicinity of Eumeneia and Apamea – including to the upper Tembris valley, in the ‘fish out of water’ epitaph of Eustathianos, discussed above.58 Across Phrygia, and throughout the period from the New Testament days to the late third century, there is evidence of a network which was intentionally formed and maintained, partly by Christian preachers travelling, to preach and to maintain contact, and partly through circulation of letters and books. Although reservations were expressed above (on grounds of inadequate data about how burial grounds were laid out) about Markschies’ idea of the ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones having operated to delimit specific space within a necropolis, it must be concluded that ‘a social network . . . transcending the boundaries of family and patronage’ (as Markschies puts it59) is attested by the stones – but on a grander scale than he envisaged: a social network which doubled as a knowledge network and in which not all nodes were equally influential. 56

57 59

On this see the Introduction. Note Epiphanius Panarion 4.5 (= vol. 2, p. 158): ‘The twenty-eighth [sect], Phrygians, also known as Montanists and Tascodrugites. But again, these Tascodrugites are differentiated as a group in themselves. The twenty-ninth, Pepuzians, also known as Priscillians and Quintillians, with whom Artotyrites are associated’ (cf. also Panarion 48–9 (= vol. 2, p. 239)). 58 Colossians 4.5. Gibson, ‘Unique Christian Epitaph’ (ICG 1268). Markschies, ‘Plenary Agenda Report for Research Group B-III-2’, 5.

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The overlap into the fourth century which is evident in the use of the ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones points conveniently towards the theme of Chapter 11, the last in this book, in which the persecution of 303–312, also known as the Great Persecution, will be considered, together with the legalization of Christianity under Constantine and the changes which the fourth century brought to the Phrygian churches.

11 The Great Persecution and the Phrygian Fourth Century

In this chapter the fourth century will be reached, and with it the limit of the period examined in this book. After the Great Persecution, which ended in Phrygia in 312, official attempts to suppress Christianity came to an end – except for a brief and doomed attempt by the Emperor Julian to turn the tide back five decades later. No more can be attempted here than an impressionistic sketch of how conditions began to change throughout Phrygia as the fourth century progressed. The petition, dating to the 330s, from Orcistus to Constantine for a grant of city status, on the ground (among others) of everyone in the town being adherents of the ‘most holy religion’, has been discussed in the Introduction, and illustrates how the sacred canopy had shifted by that date (at least in parts of Phrygia).

institution-building In the Introduction it was noted (following Berger) that ‘The Greek city . . . continued to be legitimated in religious terms’, in the Roman era;1 an examination of the evidence for the growth of Christianity in Phrygia has gone some way to put meat on the bones of this assertion. The Polycrates family (Chapter 2) linked the Lycus valley cities, with larger cities on the Mediterranean seaboard, with a missionary operation which continued across three generations or longer; in the backblocks of Philadelphia the Montanists based their church in the city of Pepuza (Chapter 5); and in Hierapolis (Koçhisar) Bishop Aberkios filled his 1

Berger, Sacred Canopy, 35.

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own epitaph with the language of citizenship both earthly and heavenly (Chapter 6). As Christian worship and Christian ministry became habitual across Phrygia, the ‘reciprocal typification of habitualized actions’ (as Berger and Luckmann would have said2) crystallized in the form of institutions. Insisting that ‘any such typification is an institution’, Berger and Luckmann continue by arguing that3 Institutions . . . imply historicity and control. Reciprocal typifications of actions are built up in the course of a shared history. They cannot be created instantaneously. Institutions always have a history, of which they are the products. It is impossible to understand an institution adequately without an understanding of the historical process by which it was produced. Institutions also . . . control human conduct by setting up predefined patterns of conduct, which channel it in one direction as against the many other directions that would theoretically be possible.

Against this background it becomes clear how, by the late third century, Christian communities in Phrygia were looking back on a solid shared history. Institution-builders included Ignatius of Antioch (Chapter 3), architect of ‘cultural transformation through cultural engagement’ (as Brent put it4); Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla (Chapter 4), writers of ‘countless books’;5 and in a small way Alexander son of Antonios – he of the ersatz Aberkios epitaph at Karadirek6 – and the earnest parents who gave Aberkios’ name to their sons (Chapters 6 and 7). As churches developed in the institutional dimension, the personnel involved developed as mediators of ‘specific sectors of the common stock of knowledge’7 within the communities in which they existed. Hence the importance of tracing the (changing) roles adopted by clergy, whose duties included preaching; and hence, from the viewpoint of social change, the importance of the way participation in church life grew among city council members and others of equivalent social position in the cities of Phrygia. The success of Montanism in Phrygia was built in part on the creation of Pepuza – a new Jerusalem not only in a spiritual sense, but in that (along with other nodes in the Montanist network,

2 3 4 5 6 7

Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 72. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 72. Brent, Ignatius of Antioch and the Second Sophistic, 4. Hippol. Refutation 8.19 (= Heine, Montanist Oracles and Testimonia, no. 32, p. 57). ICG 1598. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 720, 656. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 94.

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Temenothyrae (Chapter 5), Thyatira8) it gave institutional heft to the Montanist manifestation of the Christian gospel. Early in Book Eight of his Church History, Eusebius writes of the happy conditions – as he saw them with hindsight – under which the Christian church had lived, in the years when he himself was growing up in the province of Palestine and before he became bishop of Caesarea:9 [O]ne could see the rulers in every church accorded the greatest favor by all officers and governors. But how can anyone describe those vast assemblies, and the multitude that crowded together in every city, and the famous gatherings in the houses of prayer; on whose account not being satisfied with the ancient buildings they erected from the foundation large churches in all the cities? No envy hindered the progress of these affairs which advanced gradually, and grew and increased day by day. Nor could any evil demon slander them or hinder them through human counsels, so long as the divine and heavenly hand watched over and guarded his own people as worthy.

‘Institutions . . . imply historicity and control’, so large church buildings were symbolically important. In Eusebius’ youth (the last four decades of the third century), therefore, the prosperous and advancing churches on the one hand, and the non-Christian majority communities in ‘every city’ on the other, constituted ‘socially segregated sub-universes of meaning’,10 which might to a degree be submerged from one another’s view. However, conflict was implicit in the situation as a whole, and was not to be suppressed for ever.

the great persecution gets under way The peace which Eusebius remembered, therefore, was a phoney peace. A generation older than Eusebius, Porphyry had been born in Tyre in 234 and named Malchus: his better-known name he gained from Longinus, his teacher in Athens. Ahead on points in a struggle for philosophical pre-eminence with Iamblichus of Chalcis at the turn of the third and fourth centuries,11 Porphyry wrote his fifteen books Against the Christians about 300 (as Barnes showed in 1994).12 Afterwards, he was

8 10 11 12

9 Epiphanius Panarion 51.33.3–4. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 8.1.5–6. Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 102. DePalma Digeser, Threat to Public Piety, 6–9. Barnes, ‘Scholarship or Propaganda’, 65; Barnes argues that the burden of Porphyry’s message was that ‘it was just to subject Christians to any conceivable punishment for their beliefs’.

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at Nicomedia advising the Emperor Diocletian (so Elizabeth DePalma Digeser argues)13 by 303 – and presenting his three books of Philosophy from Oracles at literary occasions where Lactantius and fellow Christians at the court had to keep silent and stifle their contempt.14 The ‘bounty of [Gallienus’] gift’,15 with the loosening of governmental control which it implied, was no longer effectively in force, and Diocletian, who in the past had given Christians important appointments at court, took a new policy direction and was ready to make anti-Christian moves as drastic as any Porphyry could recommend. DePalma Digeser’s account of the background is plausible: she argues that Lactantius’ narrative of divination from sacrifices being frustrated by the presence of Christians at a ceremony in Nicomedia may be reconciled with the story in Constantine’s edict to the people of the eastern provinces (recorded in Eusebius) of Apollo speaking ‘from a deep and gloomy cavern, and through the medium of no human voice, and declar[ing] that the righteous men on earth were a bar to his speaking the truth, and accordingly that the oracles from the tripod were fallacious’.16 Her reconstruction is to the effect that near the palace in Antioch in 299, Diocletian sacrificed some cattle in the presence of courtiers (some Christian, some not) and of Galerius Caesar. Christians present crossed themselves, and the haruspices were unable to find in the slaughtered animals the signs which would have enabled them to make their predictions.17 The oracle of Apollo at Daphne was consulted; following its response, Diocletian identified the Christians present at the sacrifice as having been 13 14

15

16 17

DePalma Digeser, ‘Lactantius, Porphyry and Religious Toleration’, 145. Lactantius Div. Inst. 5.2 (translation from Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 7): ‘if any of our religion were present, although they were silent on account of the time, nevertheless in their mind they derided him; since they saw a man professing that he would enlighten others, when he himself was blind; that he would recall others from error, when he himself was ignorant where to plant his feet; that he would instruct others to the truth, of which he himself had never seen even a spark at any time; inasmuch as he who was a professor of wisdom, endeavoured to overthrow wisdom. All, however, censured this, that he undertook this work at that time in particular, in which odious cruelty raged.’ Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 7.13.2, cf. Chapter 9. The ‘bounty of [Gallienus’] gift’ had also turned out not to be applicable to Trophimos, Sabbatius, nor Dorymedon at Synnada, barely twenty years after it was announced (cf. Chapter 8). Even at its best, then, the peace had been a phoney peace. Lactant. De mort. pers. 10; Euseb. Vit. Const. 50. Lactant. Div. inst. 4.27.4: ‘when some of their attendants who were of our religion were standing by their masters as they sacrificed, having the sign placed on their foreheads, they caused the gods of their masters to flee, that they might not be able to observe future events in the entrails of the victims . . .’.

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responsible for the failure of divination.18 This inference was consistent with Porphyry’s argument in De abstinentia to the effect that ‘polluted people could disrupt divination and civic rituals’.19 So it was that on the festival of the Terminalia, 23 February 303, the government made its move ‘to terminate, as it were, the Christian religion’.20 In Nicomedia, the church – visible from the palace – was raided and the scriptures found there burnt: but when Diocletian and Galerius decided not to risk the whole city by burning the church, the Praetorian Guard was sent in to demolish the building ‘with axes and other iron instruments’.21 As DePalma Digeser sums the matter up, ‘the empire began its last and longest campaign compelling Christians to uphold traditional religious norms’.22 Sossianus Hierocles, who had served as vicarius (overall governor of a group of provinces), was brought in as governor of Bithynia. This was a downward move (formally speaking) in career terms, but one which brought him into the vicinity of the imperial presence and the court at Nicomedia: Hierocles, Barnes explains, ‘was transferred to Bithynia because of his known religious prejudices, in order to enforce antiChristian policies in the imperial capital’.23 Action proceeded methodically. The first persecution edict, issued in March 303, deprived Christians of any social position and legal privileges they had,24 but also (as Eusebius says, and Lactantius omits to say) ordered ‘the razing of the churches to the ground and the destruction by fire of the Scriptures’.25 The story, referred to above in Chapter 9, of military action against Christians in Phrygia, appears to fit in here.

military action in phrygia Galerius was at Nicomedia in the winter of 302/3 and participated in the incidents relating to Diocletian’s failure to get results in the way of divination from the victims he sacrificed, and relating to obtaining oracular advice at Daphne; then in May 305 when Diocletian abdicated the throne and made Galerius Augustus, he was at the Nicomedia court

18 19 20 21 22 24

Cf. DePalma Digeser, ‘An Oracle of Apollo’, 75. DePalma Digeser, Threat to Public Piety, 21–2. Lactant. De mort. Pers. 12.1: ut quasi terminus imponeretur huic religioni. Lactant. De mort. Pers. 12.5: securibus et aliis ferramentis. 23 DePalma Digeser, Threat to Public Piety, 2. Barnes, ‘Sossianus Hierocles’, 243. 25 Lactant. De mort. pers. 13.1. Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 8.2.4.

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again. In the years after the favourable Peace of Nisibis with the Persians (299), assuming governmental control of conquered territories was the chief political business in hand in the eastern sector of the Roman empire and there were no pressing military emergencies: some units could be spared to enforce in local hot spots the policy laid out in the persecution edict. This is the background to there being Roman soldiers in a small town in Phrygia, and it is also why the incident should be understood as involving a church (conventiculum) being burnt down. Even Eusebius’ account, misleading as it is, carries traces which hint that the story has been developed in the wrong direction by him:26 [A]rmed soldiers surrounded a little town in Phrygia, of which the inhabitants were all Christians, every man of them, and setting fire to it burnt them, along with young children and women as they were calling upon the God who is over all. The reason of this was, that all the inhabitants of the town to a man, the curator himself and the duumvirs with all the officials and the whole assembly, confessed themselves Christians and refused to give the least heed to those who bade them commit idolatry.

‘Setting fire to it’ suits a building better than a town, however diminutive a small town (πολίχνη) one might think of; and ‘calling upon . . . God’ is what one would expect in a church. Burning a church down matches exactly the actions envisaged in the first persecution edict. It was what Diocletian had found an alternative to at Nicomedia, to avoid burning down the whole city. Christian local officials in Phrygia are a familiar idea (the curator, better ‘auditor’ (λογιστής) and the duoviri (στρατηγοί), plus the rest of the council (σὺν τοῖς ἐν τέλει πᾶσιν)): the departure here is their all being Christians. These councillors, as events proved, had paid insufficient heed to Plutarch’s warning (two centuries before, to local politicians in the Greek world) not to have too much confidence in their crowns, but to see the boots above their heads.27 There may be another trace of this police action against church buildings in Phrygia, but assigning events to dates is difficult. At Burnt Laodicea (Ladik, in Konya province) about 340, a sarcophagus was commissioned for Markos Ioulios Eugenios, who had been bishop for twenty-five years. In the inscription on the sarcophagus, Eugenios describes how he (somehow) got a discharge from the army after Maximinus Daia’s order that soldiers must sacrifice and must not be 26 27

Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 8.11. Plutarch Precepts of Statecraft 813e: ὁρῶντα τοὺς καλτίους ἐπάνω τῆς κεφαλῆς. The boots of Roman soldiers, that is.

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discharged – although he ceased to be a Roman soldier only after being tortured.28 Afterwards, he had been just a short time in Laodicea before (he says) he became bishop, by the will of Almighty God.29 As bishop from about 315 onwards, he ‘rebuilt the entire church from its foundations’, and he describes what features he gave the church:30 [A]dornment of the whole including the surroundings, i.e., cloisters, antechambers, murals, mosaics, water-fountain, an entrance-porch with all the attendant masonry work, and everything else . . .

Tabbernee raises the possibility that the restoration was needed because the church had been damaged during the Great Persecution – but then retreats and gives it as his opinion that all the work Eugenios did ‘was simply motivated by a desire to beautify the building’.31 Tabbernee’s analysis is weakened by the fact that Eugenios writes of having ‘rebuilt the whole church from the foundations’ (πᾶσαν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἀνοικοδμήσας ἀπὸ θεμελίων).32 By his account, it was not a simple matter of beautifying the building. Tabbernee’s way of understanding the situation cannot be ruled out absolutely, but in the circumstances of recovery from persecution in the second decade of the fourth century, it amounts to a low-probability scenario. It is much more likely that Eugenios began with a church which had been destroyed or severely damaged, and devoted his time as bishop to working towards the elaborate building he was able to describe on his sarcophagus. The Eugenios epitaph is the only explicit evidence for an order by Maximinus that soldiers must sacrifice and not be permitted to be discharged from the army. The demand is of a piece with Maximinus’ active measures in the diocese of Oriens, soon after he was made Caesar, to enforce sacrifice by requiring city magistrates to obtain compliance from everyone in their respective cities; however, the two actions may not have been taken at the same time.33 As for Eugenios, he was tortured while

28 29 30 32

33

MAMA 1.170/IMont, 69 (ICG 371), lines 5–9. MAMA 1.170/IMont, 69 (ICG 371), lines 10–12. 31 MAMA 1.170/IMont, 69 (ICG 371), lines 14–17. IMont, 435. MAMA 1.170/IMont, 69, lines 13–14. Calder in 1924 observed the importance of this: ‘One detail recorded by Eugenius is very significant; his main concern during his episcopate was to rebuild the church of Laodicea from its foundations. This is the first direct information which has come down to us regarding the sufferings of the Christians of Laodicea in the Great Persecution. The church had been destroyed in the Persecution . . .’ (‘Some Monuments’, 355). Eusebius Martyrs of Palestine 4.8; Mitchell, ‘Maximinus and the Christians’, 112.

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Valerius Diogenes was governor of the newly created province of Pisidia,34 and discharged, still during Diogenes’ term of office, between 311 and 313.35 But the church of which he was to be bishop may have been destroyed or damaged either then, or earlier, near the beginning of the Great Persecution. Valerius Diogenes was an energetic official with a zealous approach to the task which Maximinus Daia had made him governor to carry out. His priorities were aligned with central government’s latest policy initiatives. In 312, the city councillors of Kolbasa petitioned Maximinus to be allowed to banish from their territory those Christians who had persisted in their religion,36 and persevered in influencing the people of Kolbasa to follow ‘aimless and obstinate sidetracks’.37 Votes like this had been passed against Christians ‘in all the provinces’ and rescripts were sent from the imperial palace on the pattern of an imperial edict (διάταξις), which Eusebius saw carved on a pillar in Tyre.38 The version inscribed at Kolbasa allowed the Christians to be banished and kept out, and rewarded the councillors by inviting them to request ‘any act of generosity [they] want[ed]’.39 Horsley suggests that it was expected that relief from the poll tax imposed by Galerius in 306 would be requested.40 In Antioch, his provincial capital, Valerius Diogenes oversaw the construction of public buildings whose purpose was both to accommodate the activities of government and to celebrate the cult of the emperors.41 His inscription on the arch of the theatre ends with the claim that ‘Val (erius) Diogenes, vir perfectissimus, governor, on his own initiative caused (this arch) to be built, devoted as he was to the divine power and majesty

34 35 36

37

38 39

40 41

MAMA 1.170/IMont, 69 (ICG 371), line 8. See IMont, 434 for evidence on the date of Diogenes’ governorship of Pisidia. In the same year, 180 km southwards in Arycanda, the province of Lycia and Pamphylia sent a similar request to the emperors. The petition suggested that it would be best ‘if . . . it were securely established that the evildoing of the hateful worship of the atheists [= Christians] were forbidden and prevented, and it were commanded that all must devote themselves to the service of the gods who are your kinsfolk, for the sake of your eternal and indestructible kingship . . .’ (IK Arykanda 12, lines 20–4). Horsley, Greek and Latin Inscriptions in the Burdur Archaeological Museum, no. 338 (pp. 240–2), lines 1–2: [ill]ịs caeciṣ [et du]ṛis ambagibus . . . Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 9.7.1–15. Horsley, Greek and Latin Inscriptions in the Burdur Archaeological Museum, no. 338 (pp. 240–2), lines 10–11: permittimus ut qualemcumque [munificentia]m volueritis . . . petere. A similarly positive answer was received, and displayed on stone in Latin. Horsley, ‘Early Christianity in Pisidia’, 217. Christol and Drew-Bear, ‘Antioche de Pisidie capitale provinciale’, 39–71.

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of [the emperors].’42 He dedicated an altar to ‘the pietas of our emperors’.43 Other inscriptions were displayed in praise and homage to Galerius, Maximinus Daia, Constantine.44 Antioch, Christol and DrewBear conclude in their article, became in Diogenes’ days ‘the principal shrine for expression of paganism and official loyalty, for the whole surrounding country’.45 Afterwards, and some 150 kilometres away from Diogenes’ tour de force of polytheist monumentality, Eugenios commenced a building project which carried a meaning counter to the meaning his torturer had intended to communicate – a physical manifestation of the success of the Christian institution, which was beginning its transition to a position where it would have control. Near the Eugenios sarcophagus was found at Halıcı a limestone plaque identifying a monument which once contained the remains both of Eugenios and his episcopal predecessor Severos. Severos is called ‘overall bishop of cities and leader of the folk who wear sackcloth’,46 and Eugenios is called ‘godlike Eugenios, whom he left behind, the worthy driver of a spiritual flock’.47 Severos and Eugenios both ‘during their lifetime . . . held a hallowed name because of their stripes’,48 although the word ‘martyr’ is not used. Mitchell in his discussion accepts that the Eugenios mentioned in the Severos plaque is the same person as the Markos Ioulios Eugenios who was buried in the nearby sarcophagus, and interprets the circumstances behind the texts as involving Severos’ having stepped aside as bishop when Eugenios was available to take over, and then ‘assumed the monkish pose of a cleric in retirement’.49 Mitchell’s explanation of ‘the folk who wear sackcloth’ ([λ]αοῦ σακκοφόρου50) is that instead of being an obscure sect, they were ‘an early monastic group, although one that kept close contact with its mother church’.51 Decades later, in 374/5, Basil of Caesarea regarded

42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49 51

Christol and Drew-Bear, ‘Antioche de Pisidie capitale provinciale’, 53. Christol and Drew-Bear, ‘Antioche de Pisidie capitale provinciale’, 59. Christol and Drew-Bear, ‘Antioche de Pisidie capitale provinciale’, 61 (Maximinus Daia, name later erased); 62 and 63 (Constantine); 65 (Galerius). Christol and Drew-Bear, ‘Antioche de Pisidie capitale provinciale’, 71: ‘pour tout le pays d’alentour le haut-lieu de l’expression du paganisme et du loyalisme officiel’. Translation from Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, 2 vols, 102. MAMA 1.171/IMont, 70 (ICG 372), lines 3–6. MAMA 1.171/IMont, 70 (ICG 372), line 7, translation from Tabbernee at IMont, 438. 50 Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 102. MAMA 1.171/IMont, 70 (ICG 372), line 4. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 102.

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Saccophori as heretics who had to be rebaptized if they came to an orthodox church:52 Encratitae, Saccophori, and Apotactitae are not regarded in the same manner as Novatians, since in their case a canon has been pronounced, although different; while of the former nothing has been said. All these I re-baptize on the same principle. If among you their re-baptism is forbidden, for the sake of some arrangement, nevertheless let my principle prevail. Their heresy is, as it were, an offshoot of the Marcionites, abominating, as they do, marriage, refusing wine, and calling God’s creature polluted. We do not therefore receive them into the Church, unless they be baptized into our baptism.

As Mitchell points out, an earlier letter by Basil lists ‘Cathari, Encratites, and Hydroparastatae’53 as schismatic groups instead of ‘Encratitae, Saccophori, and Apotactitae’. The Cathari referred to are Novatians, and all the groups listed here fit into the Novatian complex of communities. Mitchell draws the inference that Severos was ‘originally a member of the Novatian church’,54 and that he and Eugenios were bishops of the principal church of Burnt Laodicea, which was therefore Novatian. The Saccophori and Hydroparastatae, closely related or identical groups, were distinguished, he argues, in that they used water instead of wine in the Holy Communion. Montanists and Novatians were linked in Phrygia in the fourth century. Novatian himself, a Roman priest who made an unsuccessful bid to be recognized as bishop of Rome after the Decian persecution, established before his death in 258 a sect with rigorous practices, which gained a following both in Phrygia and in a range of other places, mostly across the eastern provinces of the Roman empire.55 The chronology of mergers between Montanists and Novatians in Phrygia is unclear, but Tabbernee argues that some Novatians, suspicious of lax tendencies in their own movement, may have been collaborating with Montanists in Phrygia before 375.56 About that time, a synod of Novatian bishops which met at the village of Pazum near the source of the Sangarius (Sakarya) river decided to use a Quartodeciman calculation to establish the date of Easter (celebrating it on the day of the Jewish Passover, 14 Nisan, whether that 52

53 55

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Basil Canonical Letter 2 (= Epistles 199), 47. Translation from Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers vol. 8. 54 Basil Epistles 188.1. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 102. Socrates Hist. Eccl. 4.28; and Novatians existed in Italy, Africa, Spain, Gaul, Egypt, Syria, and (outside the Roman empire) in Scythia (Gregory, ‘Novatianism: A Rigorist Sect’, 4). Tabbernee at IMont, 347–9.

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day was a Sunday or another day of the week). But (according to Sozomen) bishops of more important Novatian sees were not part of this decision and did not follow it.57 Socrates’ and Sozomen’s brief account of the synod at Pazum is a glimpse of a story whose details remain hidden. Phrygia and Paphlagonia from the third century on had been the places where the Novatian churches had been the most successful,58 and in the fifth century Philostorgius would write that Novatian himself had been a Phrygian.59 As noted above, he was in fact a Roman priest,60 though Rome was a magnet for people from all over the empire, and a priest at Rome might have come from somewhere quite distant, including Phrygia. The longstanding reputation of Phrygia as a hotbed of heresy, together with the observation that the Novatians had done particularly well in Phrygia, probably provided Philostorgius with all the grounds he felt he needed for the inference that Novatian was a Phrygian. Timothy E. Gregory, while thinking Novatianism ‘perfectly understandable’ as a third-century movement, puzzles over its place in the Roman empire post-Constantine.61 But Eugenios, in Burnt Laodicea after the Great Persecution, and the synod of bishops of smaller Phrygian cities two generations later, may have had substantially the same needs and hopes, which by the 370s were diverging from the needs of the bishops of Novatian congregations in richer and more metropolitan centres.

two laodiceas, two churches At Burnt Laodicea, a group of gravestones exists for followers of the church of the Novatians (Cathari). Three presbyters and a deacon are commemorated,62 another man who may not have been a cleric,63 and 57

58 60

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Socrates Hist. Eccl. 4.28, and Sozomen Hist. Eccl. 6.24: ‘Agelius, the bishop of the Novatians at Constantinople, and the bishops of the Novatians at Nicaea, Nicomedia, and Cotyaeum, a noted city of Phrygia, did not take part in this Synod.’ 59 Gregory, ‘Novatianism: A Rigorist Sect’, 8. Philostorgius Church History 8.15. Socrates Hist. Eccl. 4.28; Daly, ‘Novatian and Tertullian’, 33–4; Gregory, ‘Novatianism: A Rigorist Sect’, 3. Gregory, ‘Novatianism: A Rigorist Sect’, 4. Abras, presbyter, inscription found in Kadınhanı, MAMA 1.172 (ICG 205); Markos, presbyter, inscription found in Sarayönü, MAMA 1.227 (ICG 501); Alphios, presbyter, inscription found in Sarayönü, ICG 520; Tieos, deacon, inscription found at Kınık, ICG 254. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 100–1. Diomedes, son of Tieos (possibly the Tieos commemorated by ICG 254), inscription found at Kınık, ICG 256.

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two women, one of whom was a nun.64 The gravestones are not dated, so that it is not clear if all the deceased lived in the days of Bishop Severos and Eugenios his successor; however, they testify to the local preeminence of the Novatian church – the ‘holy pure [= Cathar] church of God’ (as the epitaph of Doudousa phrases it).65 Mitchell argues that although the majority of Christian gravestones from the Burnt Laodicea area make no mention of the church to which the deceased belonged, the inference should be that the ‘silent majority’ were Novatian or Encratite, like those who did name a church. From Düğer, by contrast, 37 kilometres north-west of Ladik, comes the late fourth-century gravestone of Germanos, ‘most reverent presbyter of the holy church of the Orthodox’: Mitchell’s view on this is that ‘the Orthodox were as rare as the solitary gravestone of Germanos suggests they were’.66 At Burnt Laodicea, then, it is possible to trace the outcomes of change after the Great Persecution: new church and martyr shrine, emergence of a Novatian/Montanist community with links to groups who identified as Encratites, Saccophori, and Apotactites.67 At the other Laodicea, in the Lycus valley (now in the suburbs of Denizli68), the principal church of the city, a three-aisled basilica uncovered by archaeological excavations in 2010, is interpreted by its excavators as having stood at the heart of a growing Christian district within the city, while in the fourth century ‘the nucleus of pagan neighbourhoods was around the North (Sacred) Agora’.69 The excavators observe that ‘In time Christian neighbourhoods proliferated while the pagan ones shrank.’70 Fourteen coins from the reign of Constantius II (337–361) were found in this church excavation, as compared to two from the reign of

64

65 66 67

68 70

Doudousa, daughter of Menneas, inscription found in Sarayönü, MAMA 7.92 (ICG 492); Melanippe, nun (ἀσκήτρια), inscription found at Ladik, MAMA 1.174 (ICG 373). MAMA 7.92 (ICG 492): τῆς ἁγείας καθαρᾶς τοῦ θ(εο)ῦ ἐκλησείας. ICG 115. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 103. The links explored at Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 102–3: the gravestone of Primos (?), set up by Gaios and fellow priests, and found at Bedel Kale by Buckler, Calder, and Cox in 1924, refers to a monastery of Apotactites (MAMA 7.88 (ICG 235); cf. Calder, ‘Leaves from an Anatolian Notebook’, 265–6); in another gravestone, from Sarayönü, Aniketos, priest of the Apotactites, is commemorated by his two successors Eugraphios and his brother Diophantos, both also priests (MAMA 1.173 (ICG 508)). In this connection note Mitchell’s observation that clergy make up an ‘extraordinarily high percentage’ of the Christian gravestones of Burnt Laodicea and the surrounding countryside (Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 103). 69 Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 7. Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 21. Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 21.

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Constantine (307–337).71 The excavators infer that the building dates to the end of the first quarter of the fourth century – with the corollary that it is the ‘earliest and best-preserved monument of Christendom, built after the Edict of Milan issued by Constantine the Great in 313’.72 But the cluster of coins of Constantius II would imply that the decades of the 330s and 340s are a better timeframe for the building of the church.73 Square in shape and occupying a full insula,74 the fit-out of the building included frescoes,75 fountains,76 fine mosaic and opus sectile floors,77 ambo at the centre,78 and a bema at the east end – equipped with water pipes to a basin under the altar,79 to facilitate distribution of holy water. This building was where the Council of Laodicea was held in the 360s, and ruled on a range of matters: legislating, for example, against clergy – or ecclesiastics of any kind – going into taverns.80 These years, between the baptism of Constantine by Eusebius of Nicomedia in 337 and the death of Valens at Adrianople in 378, were years of Arian ascendancy at the imperial level, and it should be inferred that the fine new-built church at Laodicea was then administered by and in the interest of an Arian bishop and clergy. The Laodicea on the Lycus church is powerful evidence of the speed and decisiveness of the switch to a Christian sacred canopy in Phrygia after the Edict of Milan. This is true especially if the excavators are right to link the creation of the basilica with the beginning of a social change within Laodicea whereby Christian districts within the city were the growth areas from the early fourth century onwards. Most Phrygian cities were smaller and less prosperous than Laodicea, the capital of the province of Phrygia Pacatiana. The construction of this Laodicea church 71

72 73

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75 77 78 79 80

Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 84–5; eighteen coins were found from reigns before Constantine and hundreds from reigns after Constantius II and up to the early seventh century. Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 84. Construction of Constantinople commenced in 324, and the new capital was dedicated on 11 May 330. Artisans capable of work of the quality in evidence in the Laodicea church may have been in short supply outside Constantinople in the late 320s. Dimensions 40.85–40.95 m east–west, 37.5–37.9 m north–south (Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 21). 76 Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 61–6. Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 60–1. Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 67–82. Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 44–5 and Fig. 58. Şimşek, Church of Laodikeia, 33–7 and Fig. 48. Council of Laodicea Canon 24: ‘No one of the priesthood, from presbyters to deacons, and so on in the ecclesiastical order to subdeacons, readers, singers, exorcists, doorkeepers, or any of the class of the Ascetics, ought to enter a tavern.’

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should be associated with Constantine’s expansion of church-building to provincial capitals after 330, about which Eusebius writes:81 Having . . . embellished the city which bore his name, [Constantine] next distinguished the capital of Bithynia [sc. Nicomedia] by the erection of a stately and magnificent church . . . He also decorated the principal cities of the other provinces with sacred edifices of great beauty . . .

A brief Indian summer for anti-Christian persecution came in the reign of Julian (361–363). At the time of his takeover, Julian, ‘by plain and formal decrees ordered the temples to be opened, victims brought to the altars, and the worship of the gods restored’;82 in Amachios (cf. Chapter 7) he had a governor of Phrygia who was ready to implement imperial commands with enthusiasm. At Meros, after Makedonios, Theodoulos, and Tatianos broke into a newly rehabilitated temple and smashed the statues of the gods to pieces, they were tortured to death by the authorities.83 But the Emperor Julian died of a wound received in a skirmish in June 363, and his attempt to turn back the clock ended before it had progressed very far.

change ahead for phrygia Church-building and the concomitant redundancy of temples form only one aspect of the change which impacted upon Phrygia between the third and fourth centuries. The third century had been a turbulent time in Asia Minor – so much so that new city walls were built for multiple cities, to defend against possible invaders:84 Pergamum, Ephesus, Sardis, Nicaea, Prusias ad Hypium, Ancyra, Dorylaeum. The Goths were in mind, and invaded the territory for which Gregory of Neocaesarea was responsible as bishop between about 240 and 270. In his Canonical Epistle he writes of the ‘havoc of war’ which ‘Boradi and Goths’ have brought:85 of how to deal with women who were raped by the barbarians, or with anyone who, while held captive, ate meat which the barbarians gave them;86 and of how to treat people who gained something because of the invasion,87 or who had gone over to the barbarian side.88 81 83 85 86 87 88

82 Euseb. Vit. Const. 3.50. Ammianus Marcellinus 22.5.2. 84 Socrates Hist. Eccl. 3.15, with gruesome details. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 1, 235–6. Gregory Thaumaturgus Canonical Epistle Canon 5. Gregory Thaumaturgus Canonical Epistle Canon 1. Gregory Thaumaturgus Canonical Epistle Canons 2–5. Gregory Thaumaturgus Canonical Epistle Canon 7.

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This poorly attested invasion is referred to by Philostorgius, at the point where he explains the family background of Ulfila (Urphilas), first bishop of the Goths:89 While Valerian and Gallienus were administering the empire, a large multitude of Scythians, who lived north of the Ister, made an incursion into the Roman territory, and laid waste a great part of Europe by their predatory excursions and afterwards having crossed over into Asia, invaded Cappadocia and Galatia. Here they took a large quantity of prisoners, among whom were not a few ecclesiastics; and they returned to their own country laden with spoils and booty. These pious captives, by their intercourse with the barbarians, brought over a great number of the latter to the true faith, and persuaded them to embrace the Christian religion in the place of heathen superstitions. Of the number of these captives were the ancestors of Urphilas himself, who were of Cappadocian descent, deriving their origin from a village called Sadagolthina, near the city of Parnassus. This Urphilas, then, was the leader of this pious band which came out from among the Goths, and became eventually their first bishop.

Sadagolthina was on the Cappadocian side of the Cappadocia/Galatia border, but Gothic attacks also took place much further west. In 268 or 269 a Gothic fleet ransacked the temple of Artemis90 outside Ephesus – one of the seven wonders of the world. The city itself, with newly strengthened walls, was too well defended to be sacked, but this incursion was only a foretaste of the impact the Goths were to make in the fourth century. In 332, after Constantine II’s victory beyond the Danube, Taifalian captives were settled in Phrygia.91 The father of Selenas, second bishop of the Goths, was probably among these Gothic settlers: Selenas, who succeeded Ulfila in 383, was of mixed parentage – his father a Goth, his mother a Phrygian – and therefore (Socrates the church historian writes) ‘he readily taught in church in both languages’.92 A question arises: Did Socrates mean Gothic and Phrygian, or Gothic and Greek? Emilie Haspels and (earlier) Karl Holl treated this reference without reservation as evidence for the survival of Phrygian,93 but Sozomen, whose Church History consists mainly of reprocessed material from Socrates, apparently read Socrates’ phrase as

89 91

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90 Philostorgius Church History 2.5. Jord. Get. 20. Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, 61. Further Goths settled in Phrygia by Theodosius in 386: Wolfram, History of the Goths, 135. Socrates Hist. Eccl. 5.23 (Γότθος μὲν ἦν ἐκ πατρὸς, Φρὺξ δὲ κατὰ μητέρα, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ἀμφοτέραις ταῖς διαλέκτοις ἑτοίμως κατὰ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἐδίδασκεν). Haspels, Highlands of Phrygia vol. 1, 199 n.160; Holl, ‘Fortleben der Volkssprachen in Kleinasien’, 248.

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meaning ‘Gothic and Greek’.94 If Socrates, writing in Constantinople after 400, thought of Phrygians as an ethnic group (like Macedonians or Cretans) who were self-evidently Greek-speakers, then Sozomen may have glossed his source document accurately. But the balance of probabilities, in my view, favours the belief that Sozomen was wrong, and Socrates meant that Selenas could preach in Phrygian. In the fourth century, community languages were prospering in many parts of the Roman empire (Egypt and Syria, for example), and in that context it would seem likely that Phrygian continued as strong as in the third century. Migration was a two-way street, however: Goths came to Phrygia and others left. Socrates tells a story of the Emperor Valens plotting the death of eighty clergy who had displeased him. He told them they were being condemned to exile, but then Domitius Modestus, praetorian prefect of the East (369–377), sent them to sea in a ship, as if they were going to their places of exile – and he had instructed the sailors to set the ship on fire and escape in another vessel, leaving the passengers to their fates. After this, and (Socrates implies) as divine punishment for it, ‘there immediately . . . arose so great a famine throughout all Phrygia, that a large proportion of the inhabitants were obliged to abandon their country for a time, and betake themselves some to Constantinople and some to other provinces’.95 It may seem unclear why a famine in Phrygia would count as divine punishment against Valens, who was born at Cibalae (Vinkovci) in Pannonia Secunda. The link may be that he had previously won the Battle of Nacolea (366), against the dangerous usurper Procopius.96 Phrygia had accordingly become a significant place for Valens early in his reign. Therefore, it may be that (to Socrates’ way of thinking) when refugees from Phrygia began to arrive in Constantinople and to explain their exile by speaking of famine at home, the circumstance looked as if it signified a punishment inflicted on Valens. Notwithstanding its instrumentality in demonstrating divine anger at Valens’ misdeeds, Phrygia in the fourth century – especially the Phrygian highlands – remained more remote from the metropolitan milieu than might have been predicted on the ground of distance alone. The territory’s church life had distinctive features which included large numbers of

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Sozomen at Hist. Eccl. 7.17 reprocesses the key part as ἐπὶ ἐκκλησίας ἱκανῷ διδάσκειν, οὐ μόνον κατὰ τὴν πάτριον αὐτῶν φωνήν, ἀλλὰ γὰρ καὶ τὴν Ἑλλήνων (‘[that] he taught effectively in church, not only in his father’s language, but also in Greek’). 96 Socrates Hist. Eccl. 4.16. Socrates Hist. Eccl. 4.5.

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clergy, at least as far as one can judge from the number of clergy gravestones relative to the overall number of Christian gravestones found;97 and it had (in Mitchell’s words) ‘an artless individuality quite different from the dragooned Orthodoxy of Basil’s Cappadocia’.98 In the cities of Phrygia from the end of Constantine’s reign and on through the fourth century, infrastructure was commissioned to reflect and enforce change in accordance with Constantine’s agenda. Laodicea was not alone in receiving a church: an imperial letter asked Eusebius of Caesarea to encourage other clergy to build: ‘to be diligent about the sacred edifices, either by repairing those which remain standing, or enlarging them, or by erecting new ones wherever it may be requisite’.99 Bishops in every province received the same direction, and were told to turn to governors of provinces and officers of the praetorian prefecture for supplies. Complex as fourth-century change was to prove to be throughout Phrygia, it moved decisively during that century beneath a Christian and Byzantine sacred canopy.

97 99

Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 107. Socrates Eccl. Hist. 1.9.

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Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 107.

Appendix 1 Vita Abercii The Life Story and Way of Life of our Father St Aberkios, the Equal of the Apostles

1 In those days,1 when St Aberkios had the presidency and the bishopric of the Christians of the city of Hierapolis, a decree of the emperors Marcus Antoninus and Lucius Verus circulated through the whole Roman empire, which prescribed that publicly funded sacrifices and drink-offerings to the gods should be performed. So such a decree was sent also to Publius Dolabella, the governor of the people of Phrygia Salutaris. And he, when he received it, gave orders to all the cities in the province under him that they should carry out the commands of the emperors. And all the cities were filled with sacrifices and feasting. This being so, the council and the people of Hierapolis, fearing the decrees of the emperors and the directions of the governor, were performing sacrifices and feasts and drinkofferings to the gods. 2 So when St Aberkios saw that people throughout the city were wearing white and feasting, and the idols were being honoured, he groaned at the prevailing error, and he was stricken in his soul; he retreated to his house, fell to his knees, and prayed with tears, saying: 3 ‘O God, master of the ages, who established the heaven and the earth by your word, who thought it right to make your beloved child into a human being for the 1

Translated by Paul McKechnie using the text in Theodor Nissen’s 1912 Teubner edition of the S. Abercii Vita; the translation of chapter 77, however, is from Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis: Christianization and Social Memory’, 258–9. New Testament phrases are given as in NRSV; Septuagint phrases are given as in Pietersma, New English Translation of the Septuagint.

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salvation of the human race, release from the present error your world which you made, and this wretched city in which you have thought it right that I, unworthy as I am, should be the bishop of the people who believe in the name of your onlybegotten son.’

And after he had finished his prayer, he took no food, and went to sleep, and saw a handsome young man giving him a stick and saying, 4 ‘Go, Aberkios, and in my name, and with this staff, break those who are responsible for the error!’

So he woke up, and understood that it was the Lord who had appeared to him. He rose up out of bed, took absolutely the most enormous piece of wood he could carry, and went in anger to the temple of Apollo, where the most sacrifices and drink-offerings were happening. It was about the ninth hour of the night. And, empowered by the Holy Spirit, he forced open with his hands the doors of the shrine, and when the fastenings were broken, all the doors were opened to him. He ran into the middle of the shrine, and first broke the statue of Apollo himself, which stood in the middle, with his piece of wood, then he broke the remaining statues: of Herakles, of Artemis, of Aphrodite, and of the other gods. And the priests and the attendants of the temple, when they saw what was happening, were struck with amazement and dare not intervene in the things which were being done. 5 So Aberkios turned and saw them, and said in anger, ‘Go away and tell the councillors and the people that your gods became drunk from the sacrifices and all the jollification you had yesterday, and broke themselves. But if you have any sense, cast them into a furnace: for they can be useful to you towards not a little protection from burning.’ And having done this, he turned back again to his house, sat down, and began to teach the brethren. But the priests and the attendants, while it was still night, informed the most important members of the city council of what had happened. And after dawn the news passed through all of them that Aberkios had committed sacrilege, and that he deserved punishment not only from the gods, but also from the emperors and the city. Gathering in the temple, they took counsel. 6 And the leading men among the citizens said, ‘Let us send the public slaves, bring Aberkios, and put him on trial, [and ask] for what purpose and with whose help he has dared to do these things: for it is not credible

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that he has undertaken such great things by himself and does not have other persons as accomplices. And when we have found out, let us arrest his fellow-workers and send them, too, in chains to the governor, together with him, so that they may suffer a well-deserved punishment for the offences of sacrilege which they have committed against the gods and the emperors.’ And the people, seeing that the hands and the feet and the faces of their gods had been cast down to the ground, were incensed and went wild, and (as a crowd loves to) went mad, and with no kind of planning the people seized pieces of wood and torches and began to shout, ‘Let’s go to the house where Aberkios is, and burn it down, that he and those who agree with him may all die!’ 7 But those of them who had more ability to calculate were scared, in case the crowd, in its state of insanity, should reach the house where Aberkios stayed, and set it on fire, and destroy with fire not only that house, but the neighbouring houses, and people who were not responsible would lose their lives along with those who were responsible – and in case they themselves should be at risk from the governor in relation to this matter. So they mingled into the crowd and began influencing people and telling them what was for the best. Since a little delay resulted from this, some of the people who had been taught the word of truth saw the disturbance and came running to the house of St Aberkios. They found him teaching the brethren with a serene face, as if he had nothing to worry about, and they explained to him the uprising which had occurred in the city, and said that the people were about to set upon him with pieces of wood and torches. They urged him to leave the city quietly, and said that his withdrawal would be beneficial in two particularly important ways: that the people would not be borne on by the power of its anger and fulfil its madness against him and everyone with him, and that by carrying on living he would strengthen the brethren, and in particular those who had only recently received the word of life from him – besides which, he would give instruction to many others. 8 St Aberkios said to them, ‘We are quitters, brethren, when we run away. For our Lord, when he sent out his apostles to the Gentiles, commanded them to proclaim the word of truth with boldness.’ Saying this, he left the building with the brethren and went to the market-place, and sat down in the city centre in a place which is called by them Phrougis, and he conversed

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with the brethren, teaching them the proclamation of truth and saying that believers must receive the seal of baptism, and disregard the pleasure which is at hand in life, but reach out instead for the eternal life, which God prepared for those who love him. 9 And while he was in conversation, the crowd, realizing that he was sitting down in public and teaching, no longer maintained its restraint, and the best of the citizens did not succeed in suppressing its madness, but it ran out, shouting that it ought to tear St Aberkios and those who were with him apart with its bare hands. And as it drew near and was just about to get its hands on him, behold, three young men who were afflicted by unclean spirits suddenly pulled their clothes off and ran out of the crowd, and began to cry out and bite their own hands. They ran up to St Aberkios and shouted with a loud voice, saying: 10 ‘We appeal to you to take an oath, by the one true God whom you proclaim! Do not torture us, and for the time being do not drive us out from among the created human beings where it has been permitted that we should dwell!’

The crowd, seeing this unexpected event, was stricken with sudden amazement, and restrained its hands. Its frenzy was happily cast aside, and it stood there, and dare not say a word. Just as children let out of school all together run in a disorganized way and fight one another and make a ruckus – but if their teacher appears from somewhere where he was not expected, they see him suddenly and are completely muzzled, and look down at the ground: just so at that moment most of them left off from their disorder and quietly looked up into St Aberkios’ face, waiting to see what he was going to do about the demon-possessed men. 11 St Aberkios did not delay, but raised his voice and prayed, saying: ‘O father of your holy son Jesus Christ, we call on you to save and establish the souls which you have thought worthy to believe in your name and that of your son, that they and all the crowd standing by may know perfectly that there is no other God but you; and drive out the unclean spirits from these young men.’

12 Having made this prayer he looked upon the demon-possessed men, knocked them on their heads with his stick, and said: ‘In the name of Jesus Christ the living God, go out of these young men, O unclean spirits, doing them no harm, and begone to a wild mountain!’

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At once the demons cried out, cast the men to the ground, and were gone from them. And the young men, having been healed, fell on their faces at the feet of St Aberkios for many hours and were speechless, so that many people thought they had expired. But St Aberkios looked down and took their hands in his right hand and caused them to stand: and the young men stood up, in good health and in their right mind, so that they started looking for their clothes and getting dressed; and from then on they were followers of the saint. And the crowd, seeing these things, all shouted as if from one mouth, saying, ‘You are the only true God, the one proclaimed by Aberkios, who is worthy of you!’ And many of them did believe in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and groaned, and began to say to the saint: 13 ‘Servant of the God of heaven, tell us if we can repent and be saved: for we have done many bad things. Tell us if God will be gracious to us by tolerating the things which in ignorance we have done sinfully.’

St Aberkios motioned with his hand, and when silence fell for him, he raised his voice as loud as possible, so that his words would be audible to the crowd, and said: 14 ‘Men who have now believed and wish to join Christ’s army, if you no longer remain in your old deeds and your ancestral traditions, and if you abandon all deceit and anger and envy and adultery and boastfulness and violence and pride and covetousness and enmity, then the God of all things forgives you, through his holy son, in whom you now believe, for the things which you unwittingly did against him. Servants of Christ, each of you arm the inner man, that you may have patience towards others, peace, mildness, faith, love, knowledge, wisdom, hospitality, sympathy, goodness, righteousness, self-control, and you will have as your general the generous God, merciful and easily conciliated, the firstborn of all creation and might, Jesus Christ our Lord.’

When they had heard this, some of them replied: ‘Servant of Christ, we have done terrible things. We have murdered, we have committed adultery, we have been covetous, we have been slaves to anger and dishonourable desire. Is there any hope of salvation for us with God?’

15 And St Aberkios said, ‘Yes, if you are not caught in similar things, but turn to God, he will forgive your sins through his holy baptism, with which those who believe are baptized into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. For in the gospel which he shared with us, our Lord Jesus Christ says, “Come to me, all you that are weary

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and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”2 So hold on to many examples of his compassion, hope in him, believe in him, dedicate yourselves to him. For, first, you must understand God’s compassion and benevolence, in that when much error had been poured out in life, and when human beings were heading for destruction, he had compassion and came down from heaven, became flesh and became a human being, and suffered and was buried, and on the third day rose, as the prophets wrote about him, that he might save all those who believed in him. So be fortified, brethren, and established in his name, because he is the son of God; he himself became a human being for our sakes, for our sakes he ate and drank, for our sakes he endured everything, being benevolent, and good, he who establishes me in his greatness and in the knowledge of him when I am in need of him in all things and long for him.

16 So also he encourages you to know him and love him and fear him – he who is little to those who do not know him, but great to those who know him; who is well-shaped to those who know him and unshaped to those who know him not; he who is old and new – who appeared in time and who always was; he who is everywhere, and who is not in anyone who is unworthy of him; he whom the human hand does not grasp, but who himself grasps everything; he whom flesh has not seen until now, but who is seen with the eyes of the soul by those who are worthy of him; he who was announced by prophets as word and who has now been manifested; he who never was seized by sins, and who was handed over to principalities and powers; he who always knew us in advance, and all those who love him: him we call Jesus and Door and Light and Way and Bread and Water and Life; him we also call Rest and Vine and Grace and Word of the Father. He has many names – but he is the one only-begotten son of God.’

17 When the ninth hour [of the day] was completed, he rose to give thanks, and laid his hands on those who were sick, and prayed for them; he blessed them all, took his leave, and went back to his own house with the brethren. The crowd followed him, asking to be baptized by him. St Aberkios accepted their eagerness and their faith with joy, but because the late hour did not permit it, he promised that on the following day he would provide the grace of holy baptism to those who wished it and who believed. So some of them did not even go away, but spent the night in front of St Aberkios’ gateway. 18 He arose early, as he normally did, finished his prayers, and then went out of his house and saw the crowd standing waiting for him, to receive 2

Matthew 11.28.

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the grace of holy baptism. He looked up to heaven, held out his hands, and said, 19 ‘I thank you, holy Jesus Christ of God, that you have had mercy on so great a multitude of human beings who were in error, and have thought it right that they should set their desire on being baptized into your name, and that of your blessed Father, and that of your Holy Spirit,’

and he told the crowd to follow him to the church. And when they went there, he taught them, and baptized them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, into a full forgiveness and ransom from sins, men to the number of about five hundred. And from that point on, many of them hurried to him every day to be taught the word of truth by him, not only from the neighbouring country of Greater Phrygia, but also from the provinces of Asia, Lydia, and Caria. For the word of him was spread abroad, as a wondrous man and one who performed healings. And it was not only those needing to be taught the word of truth by him who hurried to him, but also a multitude of beggars and sick persons – for he provided unstintingly for those who were in need, and he healed the sick. 20 When a few days had passed, he went again with his presbyters and deacons and the other brethren, sat in his usual place, and began to teach those who were standing by. So one rich woman who was without her eyes and unable to see came forward with a guide. Her name was Phrygella. And she, when she learnt that St Aberkios was sitting and teaching, came forward to him, fell at his knees, and cried out, 21 ‘Have mercy on me, Aberkios, saint of God, and give me the grace of being able to see!’

And the woman was no obscure person, but the mother of Euxeinianos Pollio, who was the greatest person in the city and was in power, in that he was known and very much honoured by the emperor, so that the kings wrote to him in particular, on necessary subjects. So St Aberkios said to her, ‘I too am a man, a sinner, wretched and in need of mercy. But if you believe in Jesus Christ, who is proclaimed by me, he is able to provide for you, also, as he graciously gave the power of seeing to the man born blind.’ 22 And Phrygella shouted even more, with tears, ‘I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ our God. Have mercy on me and touch my eyes, and let me

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by all means see!’ And St Aberkios’ heart went out to her because of her faith, and he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Come, O true light, Jesus Christ, and open up her eyes.’

And the saint looked down and lifted the woman up, touched her eyes, and said, ‘If Phrygella has truly believed in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, let her at once be able to see!’ And immediately her eyes were opened, and she saw the light, and said, 23 ‘I thank you, my Lord Jesus Christ, because you did not only open these, the eyes of your servant, through which I see the light which can be sensed, but you also enlightened the eyes of my heart, so that I turned round and believed the truth.’ And looking at St Aberkios, she said, ‘Behold, O saint of the only God, by all means I allocate half my property to provide for the poor.’

And the crowd, seeing the unexpected miracle, together with the goodwill and joy which it felt for Euxeinianos, because his mother who was blind could now see again, shouted out and said, ‘Great are you, God of the Christians, because you provide such healings for those who are worthy of you and who call on your name!’ 24 And St Aberkios said to the woman, ‘Behold, my daughter, you have been tested and found out how many things the Lord has provided for you. Go in peace.’ And for the present she went away, but from then on she was inseparable from the saint. He himself turned back towards the people who were standing by, began to teach, and said, 25 ‘Men who have hoped in Christ, know for what reason God through the holy virgin Mary brought forth his son and sent him out into the world: [what was it] but that he was bringing to pass a specific gracious plan, wanting to destroy every stumbling-block, and all ignorance, and error, and every demon, and to make weak every authority and proud power, which was strong among the people of old, and those before us, before our Lord Jesus shone forth in his world? Therefore God took compassion and sent out his own son into the world, he who achieved many things in signs and wonders, and who became the doer of all those mysteries through the holy gospels. For the evangelists wrote up as many things as they could – not being able to commemorate everything, because of the multitude of the miracles which came from him. And that is why he also chose twelve apostles, whom he sent into the world to make disciples of [and baptize] all the Gentiles, and to baptize those who believed in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.’

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26 And as he was teaching these things, behold, suddenly three old ladies, who were also deprived of their sight, having learned that he had cured Phrygella, approached him and entreated him, shouting aloud together, ‘Aberkios, saint of God, we have come to hope and believe in Christ. So, as you made Phrygella see again, we too ask our Master and Lord Jesus Christ to show his compassion, through you, towards us also.’ 27 St Aberkios answered them, ‘If, as you say, your faith in him is strong, look on him with the eyes of your heart, and if these actions fill your physical eyes, those of your soul shall be opened. And if now these eyes of yours are opened, they shall be closed again, and when they see once more, they shall see only things which can be sensed, that is, people and oxen and other animals, and stones and wood – but these eyes are not of a nature to see Jesus, who is God.’

28 And having said this to them, he lifted up his eyes and prayed, saying, ‘My holy Jesus Christ, son of God, I beseech you, only touch also the eyes of these women, and let them thoroughly be able to see.’

And as he prayed, lightning blazed out around the place – not the ordinary kind which, as it is said, comes from the clouds, and nor did the ordinary light which comes through fire appear, shining in the lightning and running through the eyes of people, but it was a great and pure light. I know not how to say it, or what bodily organ I might use to enunciate that light, which enlightened all those who were standing by, so that their power of reasoning was removed from them, and they fell on their faces; but St Aberkios himself cried out, 29 ‘Have mercy on your servants, O Lord; share with us the things which we have room for, Jesus Christ, and which you know we can endure. For we are weak. Therefore yourself grant us the power to see your light.’

So, since they had all been thrown to the ground, and only the old ladies were standing, the encompassing light fell on them on to their eyes and made them see again. And St Aberkios said to them, 30 ‘What do you see, now that you can see again?’

And the first of them said to him, ‘I saw an old man, of unutterable beauty.’

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The second said, ‘I saw a beardless youth.’ The third said, ‘A little child touched my eyes softly and gently.’ So St Aberkios glorified Christ and proceeded to say, ‘Holy Jesus Christ, I give you thanks because you are the only-begotten son of our God, in our time of need administering to each of us what we need.’

And to the crowd he said, ‘Do you remember, brethren, what I used to say to you in the past, that God is greater than our perceptions? So it is that in the case of these old ladies you saw that each one spoke differently of what happened to them.’ And, urging all the brethren to think of God as is right, he blessed the crowd and sent them away. He himself, with his usual companions, went back to his house and prayed, and when it got to the ninth hour he shared bread with them as he was accustomed to. But because of the miracle which had happened, people congregated to him even more, from the whole surrounding district, and he was baptizing many believers every day into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and from then on he was proclaiming the word with boldness. 31 Euxeinianos, learning of the miracle which had happened to his mother, performed by St Aberkios, when he opened her eyes, one day went to the house of St Aberkios while it was still night, greeted him with a loud voice, and said, ‘Worthy servant of God, if I knew that you would accept money, I would have given you a share of my property in return for the gracious act you performed towards my mother in giving her the gift of sight. But because along with the other things which God has given you, he has also made you superior to money, I bring you what is left instead of a great gift: that is, my thanks. For an always-remembered gratitude towards you will remain in my house.’ And as he said this, he took hold of his [Aberkios’] knees with his hand. 32 But the saint was quick to take hold of his right hand, clasp it tight, and say, ‘But, most esteemed sir, I’d wish that a gentleman like you, being a man of understanding, should be a man of faith and poor, rather than rich and a senator on account of pleasure in this temporary and extremely short life.’ Euxeinianos answered, ‘If you are agreeable, let’s examine this matter together. For I have heard my mother say that she has been excellently taught by you: that you say that the same God is at one time good and benevolent, and at another time fearsome and just; and at one time, as being good, he rewards and does good to those who do good deeds, and

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at another time, as being just, he defends against and punishes those who do wicked deeds. How is it possible to believe, my very dear sir, in the same God being both good and just?’ 33 And the saint replied, ‘God is good to those who repent and believe in him, and remits their sins; but the same God is just, when he judges and allots to each person according to that person’s worth.’ Euxeinianos said, ‘You have resolved that point correctly and concisely. But answer me this: if God rejoices in those who do fine deeds, why did he not create the human being from the beginning in such a way that he or she would not be able to do evil, but only good? For if that were so, his will would be put into action, and human beings would not be punished.’ 34 St Aberkios said, ‘If we were unable to do evil, most esteemed sir, neither could the good things which we do belong to us, particularly because we would not be worthy either of praise or reward for not doing evil things, being unable to do them. For the action of razing a city to the ground, sparing no one, neither old men nor women, is an evil action; and yet, I take it, we do not praise Aridaios, the lame cobbler from Laodicea, who is standing by here, for being a good man, in that he has not destroyed Laodicea utterly and made it desolate on account of his being driven from there (as he says) by a malicious prosecution, and losing all his possessions – for he could not do so, being a poor man, and alone, and having a physical disability. But although he is unable to get his revenge, he never stops cursing the city. On the other hand, a king or another ruler, if he were wronged by a city and were able to overthrow it but spared it – that person would be worthy of praise. For from being able to do evil, the goodness of the person who does not do it is recognized. Similarly, in being able to do good, those who do not do it come under accusation as being evil; but neither praise nor blame follows those who are unable. So let’s stop being contentious, and rather give thanks to God who made us in his image and gave us the faculty of free will. Through this, we can be deified by establishing our souls through good deeds. For the holy scripture says, Wish it and “Gods you are, and sons of the Most High” you shall be called.3 For in the faculty of free will we have both praise and judgement. For this reason, God made the human mind 3

Phrase quoted from LXX Psalms 81.6 (Θεοί ἐστε καὶ υἱοὶ ὑψίστου πάντες) translated in Pietersma, New English Translation of the Septuagint.

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capable of receiving knowledge, so that by recognising fine things and evil things it might choose what pleases him; and he has given us commandments, which we ought to keep, and through which we can be saved.’ 35 Euxeinianos said, ‘But perhaps these commandments which you say he has given are burdensome, so that one cannot bear them.’ 36 St Aberkios answered him, ‘They are burdensome, to one who does not want to bear them of his own free will. For who is there who is unable to keep away from every wicked deed – the kind of deed which we ourselves hate and do not want to be done to us by another, and particularly the kind which, when we have done it, we deny that we have done? Another commandment is to apply ourselves to every good deed, which we love and would want to be done to us by everyone. And I think the human being is weak about anything else rather than this: for it is light and easy and cannot be an obstacle, provided that free will consents to it. For what sane person is unable to speak the truth rather than omit to do so, or not to desire another’s goods, and not seduce someone else’s wife, and not shed the blood of the just, and not slander a person, and not take part in bribery out of the possessions he has got – and in summary to purify his soul from ill-will and plotting and all wickedness, and his body from all lack of self-control?’ Euxeinianos answered, ‘So, bishop, are you saying that these things are easy and no obstacle?’ 37 And the saint said, ‘I say that they are easy for someone who wants to do them. For this is the way of life of a soul which is free and has its hopes fixed on the truth. For the works of the body sometimes are an obstacle, particularly because of old age, sickness and poverty. But we were not told by our saviour Jesus Christ to bear some heavy load of stones and timbers, which only the young and strong could carry, nor to found cities and raise up shrines, which kings and rulers are the only ones strong enough to do, nor to do anything else which can be done only with skill and bodily power, or through money: for such things belong not to all, but to some. But the works which can save the soul require only the choice to do them. For whether someone is young or old, whether strong or weak, whether poor or rich, whether male or female, whether under condemnation or in power, one is able not to commit adultery, not to fornicate, not to steal, not to murder, not to lie, to fear God, to honour one’s father and mother, and in summary to do all the things which the Lord Jesus Christ preached.’

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Euxeinianos said, ‘Perhaps with great effort someone would turn himself away from doing evil deeds; but who that is human can do good deeds?’ 38 St Aberkios smiled and said, ‘I’m surprised at you, Euxeinianos, a man of understanding with so much experience of reasoning, because it has escaped you how much easier it is to do good things than not to do evil. For doing good things belongs to the human being himself, because he takes pleasure in doing them. But evil things belong to the enemy who works within. For example, praising a friend is easy, but not blaming an enemy is hard – though not impossible. And doing good happens with pleasure and a smile, but doing wrong and being vexatious and being covetous is normally carried out with passion and anger and suffering of the soul and body: the one with praise and eulogy, the other with blame and ill-will.’ 39 Euxeinianos said, ‘It seems to me, most honoured Aberkios, that you have taught all these things well; and yet we find that the human being for the most part does not sin according to his inclination, but according to nature: if he were not able by nature to do wicked things, he never would do them out of inclination.’ St Aberkios answered him, ‘Nor yet does he do good things according to nature. Even so, we do see the human being doing them. But if the human being is the doer of things of opposite kinds, that is, evil things and fine things, then he is by nature possessed of free will, as I said, and furthermore he does by inclination the things which he wants. For it is of his nature to do by inclination fine things or bad things.’ Euxeinianos said, ‘Now you truly have persuaded me that the human being is possessed of free will, and sins by inclination.’ And then, as the ninth hour came on, again St Aberkios took his leave, blessed all those who were standing by, and dismissed them, together with Euxeinianos. Again, after a few days, St Aberkios with the brethren went to the villages and countryside round about, especially those which were close to his city, because he had heard that there were many people sick in bed, held fast by various diseases. He went and cured them, and found that they had no bath-house, and were in bad condition for that reason. So he came to a place called Agros, beside a river, bowed his knees, and prayed, saying, 40 ‘O Lord God of mercies, who commanded us to ask you, and who gives generously to those who ask the things which they desire, now listen to me your servant

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and grant grace to this place, and let a spring of warm water well up here, that all who bathe in it may receive healing of all disease and infirmity.’

And after he finished this prayer, immediately and suddenly thunder rang out, although the air was unclouded, so that those who stood by were terrified; and after the thunder, the spring of warm water sprang up in the place where St Aberkios bowed the knee. And all those who stood by blessed and glorified God at the thing which had happened. And St Aberkios told the people of Agros to dig deeper pools to collect the warm water, and to take baths in them. 41 So he began to return to his own city. And behold, the devil, thinking to test him, adopted the appearance and clothing of a young woman and approached St Aberkios, as if asking the grace of being blessed by him. St Aberkios looked into her face; and, wanting to turn round, he struck his right foot on a stone, so that he hit his ankle-joint, and in pain he bent down and held with his hand the place that was hit. The devil laughed, turned back to his own appearance, and said to St Aberkios, 42 ‘Don’t think that I’m one of those wretched demons which you excellently sent into exile: for I am the centurion of the demons. Behold, you have experience of me! You cured others of their pains, but behold, pain has been inflicted on you by me!’

Saying this, he went into one of the young men who were standing nearby, and began to get the better of him and convulse him. But St Aberkios prayed and exorcised the demon, and drove him out of the young man. He came back, raised his voice louder, and shouted, 43 ‘Soon, Aberkios, I’ll make you go to the city of the Romans, unwilling and against your wishes!’ With this threat, the demon vanished. The saint at the time was amazed at the demon’s boldness in speech. He went back to his house and remained there seven days and nights with the brethren, fasting and praying that the devil might not gain this authority over him. And on the seventh night the Lord stood by him, and said, 44 ‘Aberkios, this too is a dispensation, so that you may also strengthen the brethren in Rome in my faith. So be of good cheer: for my grace is with you.’

St Aberkios awoke from sleep, blessed God, and said,

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‘Your will be done, O Lord.’4

He explained the vision to all the brethren, that he must also go to Rome, and afterwards he went on teaching and baptizing those who believed in our Lord Jesus Christ. But the devil did not draw back, and on the same day he went to Rome and came to the daughter of the Emperor Antoninus, whose name was Lucilla. She was about sixteen years old, and excelled all the maidens of her day in beauty and height. 45 And the girl at once began to go crazy, being demon-possessed, tearing her hair, and chewing her hands. And as this happened to her very many times, the emperor, and the Empress Faustina were in great tribulation, and thought the matter a great disaster, not only for their daughter’s sake, because she was suffering and they were in torment because of her, but because the girl was engaged to be married to Lucius Verus, Antoninus’ joint emperor, whom Antoninus had sent out a little while before with an army to eastern parts to fight a war against the Parthians and Vologesus their king. The two of them had agreed on an appointment, that Lucius would come from the east and Antoninus from Rome with his daughter to the city of Ephesus, and that in the temple of Artemis the latter would hand over, and the former would receive, the maiden. So because the time of the appointment was drawing near, Antoninus was in despair and at a loss over the girl. Therefore he was forced to write to Lucius and make an excuse, that the German nation had crossed the river Rhine and was ravaging the cities and villages of the empire of the Romans, and that for that reason he was unable for the time being to be present with his daughter in Ephesus for the purpose which had been decided. But he promised that he would bring his daughter during the forthcoming year. 46 And Lucius, since he himself was sailing from the East towards Ephesus for the appointment, met the rescript which had been sent to him by Antoninus in the middle of the sea. He took it badly, and turned back to Antioch by Daphne, and there spent the winter, considering matters to do with the war.

4

Matthew 6.10.

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And Antoninus, being also very much under pressure from Queen Faustina about his daughter, gathered together all the priests not only of Rome, but also from all Italy, and the augurs from Etruria. They plotted many subtle ideas and exorcisms directed towards the girl, but they made no progress, and rather did her harm, as the demon cast the maiden down and shouted aloud through her: ‘If Aberkios, the bishop of the Christians of the city of Hierapolis in Lesser Phrygia, as it is called, does not come, I will never come out of this created being!’ 47 And when the demon remained for many days and kept on shouting the same things through the girl, the emperor called for Cornelianus the prefect, and enquired of him if he knew of a city called Hierapolis in the area of Lesser Phrygia. He said he certainly did know of it, and that Euxeinianos Pollio, a very fine man, came from there, ‘a man with whom your Majesty corresponds on important business connected with your empire’. Reminded of the name, the emperor was very glad, and commanded that secret policemen should be made ready; and he composed a letter to Euxeinianos, as follows: 48 ‘The Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus Germanicus Sarmaticus, to Euxeinianos Pollio, greeting.

49 Having gained practical experience of your sagacity in the matters which you have administered while taking responsibility devolved from Us in the city of Smyrna, with the effect of easing for those who dwell there the disaster which had occurred caused by the earth-tremor, We were impressed by your tireless effort and care, especially since Our procurator Caecilius reported clearly to Us on this matter. And on this account you sent from you to Us [news of] the recovery of the things which were under your supervision there; for which reason We also agree to extend the greatest thanks to you over this business. And at the present time it has come to Our attention that Aberkios, the bishop of the form of worship of the Christians of your city of Hierapolis, is a man who is reverent towards God, with the result that he drives out demons and performs other healings. We have need of this man for a necessary purpose, and We command your fortitude to bid the man come to us. For this reason, we have dispatched Valerius and Bassianus, magistriani of Our divine offices, to bring the man before Us, treating him in every honourable way. You, therefore, should do without hesitation this which We command, in the knowledge that We will be obliged to you to no ordinary degree. Farewell, Our dear Euxeinianos.’

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50 The magistriani took this letter from the emperor. Having been ordered to prosecute their journey with great haste, they left Rome, drove for two days, and reached Brundisium. There, they found a ship ready for them, especially prepared, since Cornelianus the legate had sent ahead. They boarded, and with a following wind they got across the Ionian Gulf, as it is called, and on the seventh day reached the Peloponnese. From there they used public horses and got to Byzantium in fifteen days in all. 51 There, they crossed the strait on the same day and sailed to the city of Nicomedia. Again they used post-horses for another two days and reached Synnada, the metropolis of Phrygia, as it is called. They handed over the document written by Cornelianus in reference to the matter at hand to Spinther the governor, for Dolabella’s term had expired and he had already laid down his office. Receiving guides from the governor and getting fresh horses, they got to the city of Hierapolis at the ninth hour of that very day. 52 And it happened that as they came to the city gate they fell in with St Aberkios, whose habit was to go back to his house about the ninth hour. So the post-riders began to ask him about Euxeinianos: did he live in the city, and where was his dwelling? The saint asked them in return for what cause they were seeking him: for he was afraid on his behalf, as being a friend, in case something bad was going to happen to him, when he saw post-riders asking zealously after him. One of them, by the name of Valerius, was annoyed that he had asked a question in return and not given him an answer at once. He was a quick-tempered man, and he stretched out his hand to strike the saint with his whip – and at once his hand withered up. 53 So when they saw the unexpected event, they were afraid, and at once they dismounted from their horses and fell at the saint’s feet, begging him to heal Valerius’ right hand. And the saint touched his right hand and made it well again. And when he learnt that they had letters from the emperor to Euxeinianos, he went with them to his house. He, when he had received the letter from the emperor and understood the sense of it, showed it to St Aberkios and called on him not to delay, but to agree to the journey at once and go to Rome. 54 And the latter promised right gladly, saying,

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55 ‘This is exactly what my Lord revealed to his servant.’

So they entertained the post-riders for two days and heard from them of their sea-voyage, and every road they had travelled, and on the third day they sent them off, St Aberkios having made an appointment with them to meet them after forty days at Portus, as it is called, near Rome, and to go with them to Rome from there. The post-riders were reluctant, but they agreed, being afraid on account of the sign which was done before to the right hand of one of them. So they took the return letter from Euxeinianos and went away, again using the public horses. And St Aberkios discussed with the brethren how he was about to set out for Rome. Seeing that they were all perturbed and took his absence from town badly, he encouraged them to be of good cheer and to pray for him to the Lord Jesus Christ, to show his compassion and power in Rome through his servant. He made preparations and took a wineskin, into which he put wine and oil and vinegar, mixing them all up; and he carried a few loaves of bread and sat on a foal of an ass, and left the city. 56 When he had travelled a little way, he saw a man by the name of Trophimion digging his vines. He called him by name and said, 57 ‘Come here, Trophimion, and come a little way with me, as far as Rome.’

He obeyed, left his mattock, put his cloak on, and followed St Aberkios. And as often as they wanted to share in bread and wine, Trophimion would untie the wineskin at the saint’s prompting, and readily what they wanted would come out of it, unmixed. But if ever Trophimion was thirsty and wanted to untie the wineskin on his own account and pour some wine, oil and vinegar would come out with it, and altogether the opposite of what he wanted would happen, so that he no longer dared to touch the vessel without the saint’s permission. Since the Lord laboured with them in their journeying, they easily and promptly reached Attalia in Pamphylia, and found a ship ready to set sail for Rome. They embarked in it for the appointment which had been made with the post-riders, and Aberkios arrived at Portus, as it is called, a day early, and began to wait for the magistriani. They reached there two days later: for they had been extremely sick on the voyage. For the crossing was stormy, and they had been constrained by great despair and difficulty, and had been debating between themselves the plan of ending their own

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lives, if they did not find Aberkios at Portus on the day agreed, rather than appearing without him, to be tortured and killed by the emperor. 58 So when they came to Portus, in agony of mind, and were looking around the inns, the saint met and greeted them, held out his right hand, and reproached them for their lateness. And they, the moment they saw him, were at first incredulous for joy, and then when they were sure they recognized him, they fell at his feet and said, 59 ‘We name you Father of the Christians!’ – than which they had no title more honourable – ‘for when we were among them [the Christians], we were senseless, but we are saved by you and we are sensible of it; for today, if we had not found you, we intended to end our lives’.

The saint raised them from the ground, encouraged them to take heart, and went with them to Rome. And they brought him to Cornelianus the prefect. At that time, it so happened that the Emperor Antoninus was not in Rome. For the barbarians had learnt that the greater part of the Roman army was occupied in eastern parts with the other emperor, Lucius Verus, so that they (the barbarians) thought nothing of crossing the river Rhine in their tens of thousands and ravaging the empire of the Romans, so that Antoninus had been forced to go out with whatever kind of army he was able to put together, and ward off the encroachments of the barbarians. Cornelianus, therefore, brought St Aberkios to the Empress Faustina, the mother of the girl. 60 The empress saw him, a man worthy of respect for his age and understanding. For there was something impressive about him, even at first glance. She greeted him, and said to him, 61 ‘It is clear, from what the post-riders have told Us, that you are a worthy servant of a good and powerful god’ – for Faustina had learnt all the details from them. So she said to him, ‘I urge you not to be nervous, and to become an attendant of kings by saving and curing my poor little daughter. Worthy gifts shall be given you from Us.’

St Aberkios said to the empress, 62 ‘I welcome your urging; but those who hope in Christ do not desire a gift of money. For not so did we receive from our Lord Jesus Christ, that we should give

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to people in return for money things which were given as gifts from him. For he says, “Freely you have received, freely give.”5 So bring your daughter here, and you shall see the power of God.’

The empress ran into the inner room, brought her daughter, and led her to St Aberkios. Before the girl saw the saint’s face, she began to convulse herself and shout, through the demon who possessed her, ‘Behold, Aberkios, as I promised, I made you go even to Rome!’

And the saint replied, ‘Yes, but you shall have no joy of it,’ and he commanded that the girl should be brought to an outdoor place. Then the empress gave orders that a military escort should be assembled, and the girl was carried to the uncovered hippodrome, and for many hours the demon troubled her, and did nothing but shout, as if he were proud of it, that because of him the saint had travelled so far over land and sea, and convulse the girl. The saint looked to heaven and prayed, saying, 63 ‘You are the hope of all who trust in you, Jesus Christ: for you even made the legion of demons powerless by commanding them to go into the pigs. Therefore, in your holy name, let this demon, also, be driven out of the girl, and do her no harm, that this empress and all who are standing by may know that there is no other God but you, and your blessed Father.’

Having said this, he looked piercingly at the girl and said, 64 ‘Jesus says to you, “Come out of the girl, and do her no harm!”’

Hearing this, the demon answered, ‘I too appeal to you to swear by Jesus, do not send me to a wild mountain or to any other place except where I dwelt from the beginning. If you agree to this, I will come out of the girl and not harm her.’

The saint said to him, ‘Through Jesus, I send you not to a wild mountain: you are to go to your ancestral place. But in return for daring to bring me to Rome, I also command you in the name of Jesus to carry this altar’ (and he pointed to a marble altar which stood close by him), ‘bring it safely to my city of Hierapolis, and set it up near the South Gate.’

The demon promptly obeyed, came out of the girl without harming her, and in the sight of them all went into the altar, and, groaning, carried 5

Matthew 10.8.

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it out of the hippodrome, as he was commanded by the saint, and brought it and set it up in the place where he had been commanded to. Paying no attention, the girl fell at the feet of St Aberkios for many hours, unable to speak; which put her mother Faustina and the people who were standing by into an agony of mind, fearing that she had even died. And the empress said to the saint, 65 ‘Man, I think that together with the demon, you have deprived my daughter of her life.’

But the saint understood the empress’s difficulty: he looked down, gave his hand to the girl, and stood her up – healthy and in her right mind – and said to the empress: ‘Behold, you have your daughter: she is rid of the demon, but she has not lost her life. There is nothing to worry about.’

With great joy and weeping, she received her daughter. Several hours later, when she was satisfied [with weeping], she handed her over to the chambermaids to bring her safe to her bedroom, and she herself bowed down to the saint and begged him, asking him to accept worthy gifts from her. But the saint refused even to listen to her about money; he asked what need one had of money when one had sufficient supply of bread and water for one’s meal. But he asked that she might send an architect so that a bath-house might be built in Agros, as it is called, next to the river, where he had knelt down and prayed, and the springs of warm water welled up, and that she might allocate a food-allowance for the beggars of his city, to an amount of 3,000 modii. 66 The empress eagerly sent to Cornelianus the prefect and ordered him to put into action with all immediacy the things asked for by St Aberkios. He did not delay, but at once sent the architect with this commission to Spinther, who was the governor of Lesser Phrygia at that time, instructing him to give for the foundation of the bath-house as much money as the architect asked for, and to allocate 3,000 modii of food-allowance for the beggars of the city of the Hierapolitans. 67 And when the bath-house had been built at Agros, as it is called, the place was no longer called ‘Agros by the River’, but ‘Agros of the Baths’. The food-allowance went on being supplied until the times of Julian the Transgressor: but when he began not only to persecute the Christians but also to be jealous of such gifts, he ordered that however they were being

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provided to them, they should be revoked. From that time, therefore, the gift was taken away. St Aberkios himself remained in Rome for a sufficient time, and visited the churches of the Christians, with boldness as a great teacher, and he reconciled all those who were at variance, and sowed concord. When spring began, he saw once more in a dream our Lord Jesus Christ, saying to him, 68 ‘Aberkios, you must also take thought for the parts of my body in Syria and the East.’

So he awoke, and was overjoyed at the sight of the Lord. He asked the empress to let him go. For she was particularly keen on keeping him, because she had it at the back of her mind that if he left, the demon would recover his boldness and come back to her daughter. But the saint told her to be of good courage on this matter, and not even think it might be possible for the demon to oppose our Lord Jesus Christ. He asked her for a ship to be provided for him, so that he might sail to Syria. 69 The empress was persuaded, and with great eagerness she again ordered Cornelianus the prefect that the ship and all else which he needed should be made ready for him. So St Aberkios embarked, and sailed for a full seven days, and landed in Syria. And first he visited the city of Antioch, which is called ‘by Daphne’, and Apamea, and Seleucia, and all the other cities of Syria, and he reconciled to one another almost all the churches, which were at variance, by advising and teaching [them]. For at that time the heresy of Marcion was disturbing the churches of the Christians very much. And he crossed the river Euphrates and visited the city of Nisibis, and all the [churches] which dwelt in Mesopotamia, as it is called – and there he did exactly the same things. For all the churches received him as really being an apostle of Christ, and they gave large sums of money; and when he was unwilling to accept it, they were pressing him still more and were forcing him to take it. But he said that if he attached any value to money, the empress would have given him more, and his reasoning for not accepting it now would be that much more compelling. He very firmly warded off the temptation to take it. 70 And when they were all amazed at how he despised money, one of them, whose name was Barchasanes, stood up. He excelled all the rest in terms of family and wealth, and he said,

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71 ‘Brethren, we cannot force someone who is unwilling to accept money; but let us give something which it is not possible for him to reject when it is given, and let us vote to call the man “Equal of the Apostles”. But really, it is his actions which give this to the man – for we know of no one else, after the original apostles, who has travelled further across land and sea for the salvation of the brethren.’ And as they all praised this speech, they at once voted for the saint to be called ‘Equal of the Apostles’ – and from that time forward, he had that surname. So he returned again by the same route and came to both provinces of Cilicia, and Lycaonia and Pisidia, and there he was similarly received as an apostle of Christ by those who had the things of Christ at heart – and so he came to Synnada, metropolis of Lesser Phrygia, as it is called. There he took a rest and was entertained for a good many days by those there who had their hope in Christ. And so he set out for his own city. 72 As he travelled through a place called Aulon, he sat down on a rock, near that same place. It was harvest time and a favourable breeze was blowing. The peasants were threshing their crops, and the wind was fresh, so that the chaff from the crops blew into St Aberkios’ eyes. He asked the farmers to stop for a little while, but in their discourtesy they took no notice of him, but made use of the opportune wind and applied themselves to their work even more energetically. The saint prayed, and the wind stopped; the peasants turned to having their lunch. The saint was thirsty and asked them to let him have some water. But they, adding hatred of strangers to their discourtesy, answered that they did not have time to do so: for they said that they could not leave their meal table for the sake of one old man. The saint, condemning their obstructiveness for being so great, prayed to God that ravenous hunger should be granted to them. And it is said that it has stayed with them up to this very day. 73 Standing up from the rock and continuing his journey, he reached his own city. The brethren, learning of his presence, gathered quickly, wanting to see his face and hear his voice. So when a great crowd had formed, he greeted them all and blessed them. And with joy, and with a shout as from one mouth, they glorified our Lord Jesus Christ, who had granted that they might see the sight of him; and so they escorted him to his house. 74 And from then on he continued to teach with great boldness and to baptize those who came to Christ, in the name of the Father and the Son

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and the Holy Spirit. And he compiled a book of his teaching, which was very helpful to those who came across it; and this he gave to his presbyters and deacons. So he travelled round the whole district healing the sick and casting demons out of those who were afflicted by them. 75 And it came about that one day he was on a high mountain, the one which is opposite the city of Lysias, and since he and those who were with him were thirsty, he fell on his knees and prayed. And a spring of pure water welled up, and all those who drank from it were satisfied. And from that time, the place gained the name of Gonyklisia (‘Kneeling’). 76 When he returned to his house not many days later, he again saw the Lord, saying to him, 77 ‘Aberkios, the time has drawn near for you to rest from your many labours.’

He awoke and explained to the brethren what had been in his vision. Realizing that the Lord had informed him of his own [coming] death, he prepared a tomb for himself, an equal-sided square, and he placed the altar, which the demon had brought from Rome at his command, above the tomb, engraving on it a divinely inspired epitaph, informative and helpful to those who are worthy of Christ, but not understandable by the faithless; and, word for word, it went as follows: ‘Citizen of a chosen city, I constructed this tomb while still living, in order that I might have here a splendid resting-place for my body. My name is Abercius, disciple of the holy shepherd, who pastures his flock of sheep on the mountains and plains, and whose eyes are great and all-seeing. It was he who taught me trustworthy knowledge, and it was he who sent me to Rome, to see the queen of cities, and to see a Queen with golden robes and golden shoes. And I saw there a people with a shining seal; I saw, too, the plain of Syria and all its cities, even Nisibis, beyond the Euphrates. I found brothers everywhere, with Paul beside me on my wagon. Everywhere Faith led the way; everywhere it nourished me with the fish from the spring, great and pure, caught by a holy maiden. Everywhere she gave the fish to her dear ones to eat, with good wine, handing it to us mixed with bread. I, Abercius, stood by and dictated this, having reached my seventy-second year in all truth. Let all who understand and approve these words pray for Abercius. No one shall bury another in my grave; if he does, he shall pay 2000 denarii in gold to the Roman fisc and 1000 denarii in gold to my good homeland of Hierapolis.’

78 Having done this, he gathered together the presbyters and deacons of the church, and some of the brethren, and said to them,

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79 ‘My little children, I am leaving here, as the Lord commanded. You should take counsel about [appointing] a bishop.’

The presbyters and deacons and the brethren spoke among themselves for a short time, and selected the archpriest, himself also named Aberkios. The saint praised their nomination, and laid his hands on him, prayed, and blessed him. Not many hours later, as they were all sitting around him, he looked up to heaven, lifted up his hands, and said, ‘I thank you, my Lord Jesus Christ, you who have guarded your servant up to this very day, and thought me worthy to be bishop of this city of yours, that you are taking me away from this temporary life: blessed be your name for ever and ever.’

80 And all those who were present appropriately said, ‘Amen,’ and he handed over his spirit to the angels who were standing by. Those who were present took care of his body as they could, and buried it in the tomb which he had prepared for himself, as was said before. St Aberkios died on the twenty-second day of October, on the Roman reckoning. And the brethren returned and brought him for whom they had voted as bishop, himself (as has been said) called Aberkios, to the church, and set him on the throne of the episcopal see of St Aberkios, the Equal of the Apostles, glorifying and praising the kindly God, and our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, to whom be glory and power for ever and ever.

Appendix 2 Dated Eumeneian Formula Gravestones

All found in Phrygia1 A note on dates Barbara Levick and co-editors explain in MAMA 9 the way dating eras were used in the cities of the Roman province of Asia,2 and this paragraph draws on their findings.3 Some communities (including most but not all of those which produced the dated inscriptions given in this appendix) counted their years from Cornelius Sulla’s reconquest of the province of Asia, when he defeated Mithridates of Pontus. This era began in September 85 bc. Other communities counted their years from the victory of Octavian (later called Augustus) over Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium: this era began in September 31 bc. To the Roman proconsuls who governed Asia from their capital at Ephesus, the Roman method of dating years by the names of the two ordinary consuls was more important than the differing methods of counting years in the cities of the province. It is unusual to find an inscription dated on two systems, but one exists and fixes the consular date against the Sullan date in a Phrygian community.4 In an epigraphically preserved letter of 9 bc from Paulus Fabius Maximus, proconsul of Asia, to the Assembly of Asia, it was suggested that Augustus’ birthday should be New Year’s Day in the province of Asia, 1

2

3

Boundaries of ancient city territories in this region are not all well known (cf. Mitchell, Anatolia vol. 2, 40 n.243), so that allocations of inscriptions to cities in this Appendix are in some cases uncertain. I wish to thank my colleague Associate Professor Tom Hillard for discussing these calendrical matters with me. 4 MAMA 9.liv–lvi. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 432, no. 2.

288

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‘that our thoughtful consideration for the honour of Augustus [might] remain forever’.5 Augustus’ birthday was 23 September, which therefore was New Year’s Day in the province of Asia from then onwards. Thus, each Sullan or Actian year stretches across two years in Romanbased calendars, including the Gregorian calendar now in use. In the inscriptions below, I have given the earlier of the two years in the case of each inscription dated to the first three months of the year, but the later of the two in the case of any inscription dated in months four to twelve. Where the stone gives the year but not a month, I have assigned it to the later year because the later year will be correct almost three-quarters of the time.

1 eumeneia (em i_ rc i_ k) MAMA 11.36A and B 2466 Left side [ἔ]τους τλαʹ μ(ηνὸς) βʹ. | Αὐρ. Ἀλέξανδρος | Σηΐου φ(υλῆς) Ἀπολλων- | [ί]δος καὶ Αὐρ. Ζηνω- 4| νὶς ἡ γυνὴ αὐτοῦ κα- | τεσκεύασαν τὸ ἡρῷ- | ον ἑαυτοῖς καὶ τοῖς | τέκνοις αὐτῶν Ἀμμ- 8| ίᾳ καὶ Μεσσαλείνῃ καὶ | Ζηνωνίδι καὶ Ἀλε- | ξανδρείᾳ, ἣ ἂν ἄτε- | κ̣νος ἐξ αὐτῶν τελε[υ]- 12| τήσῃ. εἰ δέ τις ἕτερον ἐπε- | νένκῃ πτῶμα, ἔστα[ι] | [α]ὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν θε- | ὸν καὶ νῦν καὶ τῷ π- 16| [α]ντὶ αἰῶνι, καὶ μὴ τύ- | [χ]υτο τῆς τοῦ θεοῦ̣ [ἐ]- | π̣ανγελίας, καὶ ὃς̣ [ἂν] | [κ]ωλύσει αὐτῶν [τεθῆ]- 20| ναί τινα, τῇ προ̣[κιμέ]- | [νῃ] αἱρέσι ἐ[νέχοιτο]. Right side Αὐρ. Ζωτικὸς Γαΐ- | ου κατεσκεύασεν τὸ | ἡρῷον τὸ ἀπὸ βορέ̣- | ου ἑαυτῷ καὶ τῇ γυ- 4| νεκὶ αὐτοῦ Αὐρ. Κό- | μψῃ· μετὰ δὲ αὐτοὺ[ς] | κηδευθῆναι, οὐδε- | νὶ ἑτέρῳ ἐξὸν ἔται θ[εῖ]- 8| ναι ἰς αὐτό, εἰ μὴ τιν- | α αὐτοὶ θέλουσιν ̣ | ἰς αὐτὸ κηδεῦσα[ί] | τινα μέχρι ζῶσιν· με- 12| τὰ δὲ ταῦτα εἴ τις ἕτε- | ρον ἐπιχειρήσει θεῖνα[ι], | ἐ̣σ(ται) αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν θε- | ὸν καὶ μὴ τύχυτο τ- 16| [ῆς] τ ̣οῦ θεοῦ ἐπανγ[ε]- | [λίας – – – ]. Left side Year 331, month 2. Aur(elius) Alexandros son of Seios, of the Apollonian tribe, and Aur(elia) Zenonis his wife constructed this hero-shrine for themselves and their children Ammia and Messalina and Zenonis and Alexandria, any of them who dies childless. If anyone brings in another dead body, it will be a matter between him and God, now and through all ages, and may he not attain the promise of God, and whoever prevents any of them from being deposited, may he meet with the aforementioned disposition [sc. the curse].7 5 7

6 OGI 2.458. SEG 15.811 A1 (ICG 1364). Calder, ‘Early-Christian Epitaphs from Phrygia’, 38.

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290

Right side Aur(elius) Zotikos son of Gaios constructed the hero-shrine to the north for himself and for his wife Aur(elia) Kompse; but after they die, let it not be permitted for anyone to be placed in it, unless they themselves wished someone to be buried there. And afterwards if anyone tries to place another there, it will be a matter between him and God, and may he not attain the promise of God . . .

2 apamea (d i_ nar) MAMA 6.222 248

8

ἔτους τλβʹ. | τοῦτο τὸ ἡρῷόν | ἐστιν Αὐξάνοντος | τοῦ καὶ Ἑλλαδίου, 4| πραγματευτοῦ | Αἰλ[ίου] Τρύφωνος | ἀσιάρχου τρίς, | ὃ ἐποίησεν ζῶν 8| ἑαυτῷ τε καὶ τῇ | γυναικὶ αὐτοῦ | Ἀπάμῃ καὶ τῇ | μητρὶ αὐτῆς Ἀμμίᾳ
12| εἰ δὲ ἐπιτηδεύσει | ἕτερος νεκρὸν | ἐνθάδε θάψαι, | δώσει εἰς τὸν φίσκον 16| δηνάρια χείλια, | κὲ χωρὶς τούτων τὸ[ν θν] | κεχολωμένον ἕ̣[ξει.] | ζῶμεν. 20| Year 332. This hero-shrine belongs to Auxanon, also known as Helladios, business agent of Aelios Tryphon, thrice Asiarch, which he made while living for himself and for his wife Apame and for her mother Ammia. But if another person undertakes to bury a dead body here, he shall give 1000 denarii to the fiscus, and besides this he will have [God] angered against him. May we live!

3 eumeneia (c¸ i_ vr i_ l) SEG 6.219 2499 ἔτους τλγʹ, μη(νὸς) ιʹ, εʹ. Αὐρ(ήλιος) | Μοσχᾶς Ἀλεξάν- | δρου ἐπεσκεύασα | τὸ ἡ [ρῷο]ν Αὐρ(ηλίῳ) Ἀλε- 4| ξάνδρῳ Μενεκρά- | τους, καθὼς ἐνετ- | είλατο ἐν τῇ δια- | θήκῃ· εἴ τις δὲ ἕτε- 8| ρον ἐμβαλεῖ, ἔσται | αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν θεόν· | τούτου ἀντίγραφον ἀ- | πετέθη ἰς τὰ ἀρχῖα. 12| Year 333, month 10, day 5. I, Aur(elius) Moschas son of Alexandros, have constructed this hero-shrine for Aur(elius) Alexandros son of Menekrates, as he instructed in his will. If anyone buries another here, it will be a matter between him and God. A copy of this has been placed in the archives.

8 9

Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 471, no. 312 (ICG 960). Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 533, no. 385 (ICG 1048).

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291

4 apamea (d i_ nar) MAMA 6.226 250

10

Ἔτους τλδ΄ ̣ μη[νὸς] ζ΄ | Ἑρμῆς ἐποίησεν τὸ μνη- | μεῖον ἐμαυτῷ καὶ τῇ συμ- | βίῳ μου Αἰλ(ίᾳ) Λουκίλλῃ, ἰς ὃ 4| ἕτερος οὐ τεθήσετε. εἰ | δέ τις ἐπιτηδεύσει, ἔστε | αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν θεόν, κὲ | θ̣ή̣σ̣ε̣ι ̣[ἰς] τ ̣ὸ̣ τ ̣αμ̣̣ ε̣ῖ̣ο̣ν ̣ 8| δ̣η̣νά̣̣ ρ̣ια̣ ̣ χ̣ε̣ί̣λ̣ια̣ .̣ Year 334 (?), month 7. Hermes made this monument for myself and for my wife Ail(ia) Loukilla. No other person shall be laid in it. If anyone ventures [to bury someone else], it will be a matter between him and God, and he will place in the treasury 1000 denarii.

5 sebaste (s i_ vasl i_ ) Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 560, no. 448 25311 ἔτους τλζʹ, μη(νὸς) εʹ, δʹ. Αὐρ. Διονυσὶς [. . .]ονε[. . .] | [ζ]ῶσα κατεσκεύασεν τὸ ἡρῷον τῷ ἀνδρὶ αὐτῆς Εὐ[. . ..] | κὲ τῷ υἱῷ μου Τατιανῷ κὲ τῷ ἀδελφῷ μου Εὐτρόπῳ [κὲ] | τῷ υἱῷ Εὐτρόπου κὲ τῇ γυναικὶ αὐτοῦ Ῥουφείνῃ μνή- 4| μης χάριν. εἰ δέ τις ἕτερον ἐπισενένκει ἰς τοῦτο | τὸ ἡρῷον, ἔστε αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. | Year 337, month 5, day 4. Aur(elia) Dionysis [---] [w]hile still living constructed this hero-shrine for her husband Eu[---] and for my son Tatianos and for my brother Eutropos [and] for Eutropos’ son, and for his wife Roupheine, in memoriam. If anyone brings another [dead body] into this hero-shrine, it shall be a matter between him and God.

6 eumeneia (sirikli) MAMA 4.354 253

12

ἔτους τληʹ, μη(νὸς) αʹ. | [Α]ὐρ. Ἀφφια Φρουγίου κα[τεσ]-| κεύασεν τὸ κοιμητή- | ριον 4| ἑαυτῇ | καὶ τῷ ἀνδρὶ αὐτῆς | Διοδότῳ κὲ τοῖς | γλυκυτάτοις τέ- 8| κνοις αὐτῆς Φρου- | γίῳ κὲ Τατίᾳ καὶ | τῇ θρεπτῇ Ῥοδό- | πῃ· μέχι δὲ ζῶ ὃν 12| ἂν θελήσω θήσω, | μετὰ δὲ τὴν ἐμὴν | τελευτὴν οὐδινὶ ἐ- | ξὸν ἔστε ἑτέρῳ τεθῆνε 16| μόνον τῇ θυγατρί μου Τα- | τα· εἴ τις δὲ ἕτερον ἐπισενέ[ν]- | κει, ἔστε ἐπικατάρατος παρὰ | θεῷ ἰς τὸν ἐῶναν. 20| 10

11

Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 538, no. 399 (ICG 964). In 2011 this gravestone was on display in the garden of the Afyonkarahisar Archaeological Museum. 12 ICG 1609. ICG 1069.

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Dated Eumeneian Formula Gravestones

Year 338, month 1. [A]ur(elia) Apphia daughter of Phrougios co[ns]tructed this burial-place for herself and for her husband Diodotos, and for her most sweet children Phrougios and Tatia and for her foster-daughter Rhodope. As long as I live I will place (here) anyone I wish to, but after my death it shall not be permitted for anyone to be placed (here), (but) only my daughter Tata. If anyone brings in another, he shall be accursed before God for ever.

7 somewhere in phrygia? Petzl, ‘Neue Inschriften aus Lydien (V)’, no. 11 25313 Ἔτους σπ̣γʹ, μηνὸς [. . .]. | Αὐρηλίου Ἀρτεμιδώ[ρου] | Εἰάσονος ἐγένετο κο[ι]μ- | ητήριον. μηδένα τίθ[εσ]- 4| θαι βούλομαι μετὰ ἐμο[ῦ] | ἐνταῦθα ἐκτὸς εἴ {σι} τίς μο- | υ τῶν οἰκείων πιστεύ- | σει. ὃς ἂν δὲ παρὰ τὴν 8| ἐντολήν μου ποι[ήσ]- | ει, ἔσται αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸ- | ν θεόν ΚΘΙΑΦΛΥΚΕΤΟΝ [.] | αὐτοῦ τὸ μέρος τὸ | ἐπουράνιον [. . .]. Year 283,14 month [. . .]. This is the burial-place of Aurelius Artemido[ros] son of Eiason. I wish no one to be placed here with me, except if any of my relatives believes. Whoever acts contrary to my command, it will be a matter between him and God . . . his heavenly share . . .

8 apamea (d i_ nar) MAMA 6 List 148,147 25415 ἔτους τληʹ. Αἴλιος | Πανχάριος ὁ καὶ | Ζωτικὸς κατεσκε- | ύασεν τὸ ἡρῷον ζῶν 4| ἑαυτῷ καὶ τῇ | γυνεκὶ αὐτοῦ Αἰλίᾳ | Ἀταλάντῃ καὶ τέ | κνοις· εἰ δέ τις 8| ἐπιτηδεύσει ἕτερος, | ἔσται αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸ̣ν ̣| θεόν, καὶ δώσει ἰς τὸ | ταμεῖον (δην.) φʹ 12| δηνάρια πεντακόσια. Year 338. Ailios Pancharios also known as Zotikos constructed this heroshrine in his lifetime for himself and for his wife Ailia Atalante and for their children. But if anyone else undertakes [to bury a body here] it will be a matter between him and God, and he will give to the treasury five hundred (500) denarii.

13

14

15

In 2005 this inscription was in the collection of E.U. Walther, in Leutwitz, Germany (Petzl, ‘Neue Inschriften’, 31). Petzl (‘Neue Inschriften’, 21) argues, surely correctly, that the dating in this case must be of the era of Actium (in which Year 1 is 31 BC). He mentions the possibility that the π̣ on the stone may be a ξ̣: if so, the date would be ‘Year 263’ (AD 233): (31). Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 528, no. 372 (ICG 981).

Dated Eumeneian Formula Gravestones

293

9 eumeneia (s i_ r i_ kl i_ ) MAMA 4 355 255

16

ἔτους τμʹ, | μη(νὸς) γʹ, ιʹ. Αὐρ. Κή- | ρ̣ινθος Διονυσί- | ου κατεσκεύα- 4| σεν τὸ κυμητή| ριον τῇ γλυκυ- | τάτῃ | μητρὶ αὐτοῦ 8| Μελτίνῃ κὲ Φρου- | γίῳ τῷ ἀνδρὶ αὐ- | τῆς κὲ Φρουγίῳ | Λουκιανῆς καὶ τῇ 12| θρεπτῇ μου | [Β]άσσῃ, ἐν ᾧ κηδευ- | θήσετε κὲ ἡ νύμ- | φη τοῦ Φρουγίου 16| Τατιανή, οὐδινὶ δὲ ἐ- | ξὸ̣ν ̣ [ἑτ]έρῳ τεθῆν[αι], | [ἐπεὶ ἔστε] αὐτῶ̣̣ π̣[ρὸς] | [τὸν θεόν]. 20| Year 340, month 3, day 10. Aur(elius) Kerinthos, son of Dionysios, constructed this burial-place for his most sweet mother Meltine, and Phrougios her husband, and for Phrougios son of Loukiane, and for my foster-daughter [B]asse; and in it shall be buried also Tatiane, but it shall not be permitted for [an]yone else to be placed here, [since, if so, it shall be] a matter be[tween] him [and God].

10 sebaste (selc¸ i_ kler) Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 560, no. 449 25617 [Ἀ]ντ(ώνιος) Πολλίων | παντοπώλης | αὐτῷ καὶ τῇ γυναι- | κὶ Αὐρ. Ἀμμίᾳ Ζην- 4| οδότου καὶ τοῖς τέ- | κνοις αὐτοῦ κατεσ- | κεύασεν τὸ ἡρ- | ῷον. εἰ δέ τις ἕτερον 8| ἐπισενένκῃ τινα, ἔσ- | τε αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. | ἔτους τμʹ, μη(νὸς) θʹ, κʹ. [A]nt(onios) Pollion, wholesale dealer, for himself and for his wife Ammia daughter of Zenodotos, and for their children, constructed this hero-shrine. But if anyone brings in another [dead body], it shall be a matter between him and God. Year 340, month 9, day 20.

11 eukarpia (em i_ rh i_ sar) MAMA 11.139 25618 [vac. ἔτο]υς
τμ´
Αὐρ(ήλιος)
Ἀλ̣έξανδρος
Γαΐ̣ου Εὐκαρπεὺ[ς] | [β]ο̣υλευτὴς καὶ ἡ γυνὴ αὐτοῦ ⟨Α⟩ὐρηλία Ζωτικὴ | Δ̣αμᾶ κατεσκεύασαν τὸ μνημεῖον ζῶντες ἑαυ- | τοῖς καὶ τοῖς τέκνοις αὐτῶν· εἴ τις δὲ ἢ ἐκ τῆς 4| συνγενείας ἢ ἕτερον θάψει ἢ κακῶς ποιήσει τῷ | μνημείῳ τούτῳ, ἔσται αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν Θεόν· εἰρή[νη] | τοῖς παροδείταις. Year 340. Aur(elius) Alexandros son of Gaios, of Eukarpia, councillor, and his wife Aurelia Zotike daughter of Damas, while living, constructed this 16

ICG 1070.

17

ICG 1610.

18

ICG 1448.

Dated Eumeneian Formula Gravestones

294

monument for themselves and for their children. If anyone even from their family buries another or does harm to this monument, it will be a matter between him and God. Peace to passers-by.

12 eumeneia (beyko¨ y) SEG 28.1144 258

19

ἔ̣τους τμβʹ, μ̣[η(νὸς) – – – {ὁ δεῖνα}] | πρε{υ}σβύτερος κατεσ- | [κ]εύασεν τὸ κοιμητήριον ̣ | ἑαυτῷ καὶ τῇ γυνεκί μου 4| καὶ τοῖς πεδίοις μου· εἴ | τεις δὲ ἕτερον ἐπενβά- | λει, ἔστε αὐτῷ πὸς τὸν ̣ | ζῶντα θεόν. 8| Year 342, m[onth . . . N,] priest, constructed this burial-place for himself and for my wife and for my children. If anyone places another (here), it will be a matter between him and the living God.

13 dionysupolis? (dumanlı) MAMA 4.356 25820 ἔτους τμγʹ, μη(νὸς) γʹ, ιʹ. | Αὐρ. Ἀρίστων κατεσκε[ύ]- | ασεν τὸ κοιμητήρι- | ον ἑαυτῷ καὶ τῇ 4| γυνεκὶ αὐτοῦ Παῦ- | λᾳ, ἐν ᾧ τε- | θήσετε κοιμητη- | ρίῳ Αὐρ. Ἀλέξαν- 8| δρος καὶ Αὐρ. Αὐχέ- | νις καὶ Αὐρ. Δημήτρι- | ος καὶ Καλλικληὶς | καὶ Ἀρίτων{ι}· εἴ τις δ’ 12 | ἕτερος ἐπισενένκει, | ἔστε ἐπικατάρα- | τος ἰς τὸν ἐῶνα | παρὰ θε- 16| ῷ. Year 343, month 3, day 10. Aur(elius) Ariston constru[c]ted this burial-place for himself and for his wife Paula, and in this burial-place shall be placed Aur (elius) Alexandros and Aur(elia) Auchenis and Aur(elius) Demetrios and Kallikleis and Ariston. But if another person brings in [another dead body], he shall be accursed for ever before God.

14 apamea (d i_ nar) MAMA 6 List 148,146 25921 ἔτους τμγʹ, μ(ηνὸς) θʹ κʹ. Αὐρ. Ἀρτέμα[ς Ἀρτεμᾶ(?)] | ἐποίησα τὸ ἡρῷον ἐμαυτῷ [καὶ τῇ γυναικί] | μου Τατίᾳ κὲ τοῖς τέκνοις μ[ου, εἰς ὃ ἕτερος] | οὐ τεθήσεται· εἰ δέ τις ἐπι[τηδεύσει, ἔσ]- 4| ται αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν ἀθάνα[τον θεόν]. 19 21

Drew-Bear, Nouvelles inscriptions de Phrygie, 109, no. 48 (ICG 1038). ICG 980.

20

ICG 1071.

Dated Eumeneian Formula Gravestones

295

Year 343, month 9, day 20. I, Aur(elius) Artema[s son of Artemas (?)], made this hero-shrine for myself [and for my wife] Tatia and for m[y] children, and no [other person] shall be placed here. If anyone under[takes (to do so), it wi]ll be a matter between him and the immort[al God].

15 lysias or otrous (c¸ evrep i_ nar, brought from yanıko¨ ren) MAMA 11.144 26022 ἔτους τμεʹ, μ(ηνὸς) γʹ. | Αὐρ. Ἀσκληπιοδ- | ώρα κατεσκεύ- | ασεν τὸ ἡρῷον 4| [ἑ]αυτῇ καὶ τῷ γλυ- | κυτάτῳ μου ἀ- | νδρὶ Αὐρ. Γαίῳ | Εὐτχου καὶ τῷ 8| γλυκυτάτῳ | μου τέκνῳ | Αὐρ. Κουάρτῳ | μνήμης χάριν. 12| ε̣ἰ δ’ ἕτερ̣όν τις ἐπ|ισεν̳έ̳γκει εἰ⟨ς⟩ τ|ὸ μνη̣̣ μ̣ε̣ῖον, ἔ̣σ̣τε τῳ|πρὸς 16|[τὸν Θεόν.] Year 345, month 3. Aur(elia) Asclepiodora constructed this hero-shrine for herself and for my most sweet husband Aur(elius) Gaios son of Eutches, and for my most sweet child Aur(elius) Kouartos, in memoriam. But if someone brings another [dead body] into the monument, it shall be a matter between him and [God].

16 eumeneia (haydan) Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 530, no. 375 261

23

ἔτου(ς) τμεʹ. | Αὐρ. Σύ[μ]φορος | κατεσκεύασεν τὸ | κοιμητήριον ἑαυ- 4| τῷ καὶ τῇ γυνεκί | μου καὶ τῷ ὑ μου· | εἴ τις δὲ ἕτερος | ἐπιτηδεύσει, ἔσ[ται] 8| αὐτῷ πρὸς τὸν | θεόν. Year 345. Aur(elius) Sy[m]phoros constructed this burial-place for himself and for my wife and for my s. If anyone else undertakes (to bury a body here) it sh[all] be a matter between him and God.

17 eumeneia (yakasimak) Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 523, nos. 365–6 26424 [ἔτ]ους τμηʹ, μη(νὸς) [ – ʹ]. | καὶ τῇ θυγατρὶ Μαρίᾳ | Ζηνόδοτος Ζή- | νωνος κατεσκε- 4| ασεν τὸ ἡρῷ- | ον ἑαυτῷ καὶ | τῷ υἱῷ Ζήνω- | νι καὶ τῇ νύμ- 8| φῃ Τατίᾳ εἴ τις | δὲ ἕτερος ἐπι- | χειρήσι, ἔστε | αὐτῷ πρὸς 12| τὸν θεόν. 22

ICG 1472.

23

ICG 1064.

24

ICG 1060.

Dated Eumeneian Formula Gravestones

296

Year 348, month [-]. Zenodotos son of Zenon construted this hero-shrine for himself and his son Zenon and his bride Tatia .25 If anyone else attempts (to bury another), it shall be a matter between him and God.

18 dionysupolis? (dumanlı) MAMA 4.357 274

26

ἔτους τνηʹ, μ(ηνὸς) [.ʹ]. | Αὐρ. Ἀρίστων | κατεσκεύα- | σα τὸ κυμη- 4| τήρι- | ον {vac.} τῷ̣ | πάππῳ μου Ἀ- | ρίστωνι κα[ὶ] 8| τοῖς προκι- | μένοις καὶ | τῇ συμβίῳ | μου Διονυ- 12| σίδι μνήμης | χάριν· εἴ τις | δὲ ἕτερος | ἐπισενένκι τι- 16| να, ἔστε αὐτῷ | πρὸς τὸν ζῶν- | τα θεόν. Year 358, month [.]. I, Aur(elius) Ariston, have constructed this burial-place for my grandfather Ariston and those mentioned before and for my wife Dionysis, in memoriam. But if any other person brings anyone else in, it will be a matter between him and the living God.

19 eumeneia (dedemko¨ y) Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics, 529, no. 373 After 282?

27

Αὐρ. Νεικέρως βʹ κατεσ- | κεύασεν τὸ ἡρῷον | αὑτῷ καὶ γυναικαὶ | τέκνοις· ἔθηκα δὲ 4| φίλον. ἐνθάδε | κεκήδευτε Αὐρ. | Μάννος στρατιώτης | ἱππεὺς σαγιττάρις 8| δρακωνάρις ἐξ ὀφικ[ί]- | ου τοῦ λαμπροτάτου | ἡγεμόνος Καστρίο[υ] | Κώνσταντος. 12| ὃς ἂν δ’ ἐπιτηδεύ- | σει ἕτερος, ἔστε αὐ- | [τῷ πρὸς τὸν θεόν]. Aur(elius) Neikeros son of Neikeros constructed this hero-shrine for himself and his wife and children. And I have buried my friend. Here lies Aur(elius) Mannos, soldier, cavalryman, archer, dragon-bearer, from the officium of the most brilliant governor Castrius Constans. Whoever else undertakes [to bury a dead body here], it shall be a matter [between him and God]. 25

26 27

On the stone this wording appears as line 2; but this part of the text seems to fit in after τῇ νύμφῃ Τατίᾳ (‘his bride Tatia’). ICG 1072. ILS 8881 (ICG 1063). Charlotte Roueché, in the revised edition of Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity, tentatively dates Constans’ governorship after 282, but notes the possibility of an earlier date, under Valerian and Gallienus (i.e. in the years between 253 and 268), on the ground that Mannos may first have joined this gubernatorial officium in the days of his namesake and Castrius Constans’ predecessor P. Aelius Septimius Mannus, who received an honorific inscription at Aphrodisias in 253. If Castrius Constans’ term of office was as early as the 250s or 260s, Mannos may have been buried at Eumeneia much earlier than Ramsay’s estimate of the last decade of the third century: Mitchell dates this inscription c.250 (Anatolia vol. 2, 40 n.243).

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Index

1 1 1 4

John, New Testament epistle, 51, 56, 118 Peter, New Testament epistle, 51, 213 Timothy, New Testament epistle, 152 Ezra, 100

ab epistulis, 76, 177 Abdul Hamid, 150, 158 Aberkios stone, 157, 179 Aberkios, bishop of Hierapolis, 16, 45, 127, 131, 137, 139, 147–65, 207, 210, 221, 228, 240, 244, 246–7, 263–87 Abgar VIII, 162 Abraham, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 62 Abras, presbyter, 256 Abris, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 62 Achaean/s, 69 Acts of St Trophimus, 199 Adana, 72 Adıgüzel Dam, 99 Adrianople, 258 aedicula, 155 Aegean, 8 Aelius Aristides, 86 Aelius Glykon, 65 Aelius Publius Julius, 116, 131 aeons, 70 Africa, 97, 101, 129–30, 164, 213, 255 Afyonkarahisar, 166, 215, 234, 291 Ağa Bey Köyü, 141 Agelius, 256 Aither, 30 Alexander of Seleucia (Alexander the ClayPlato), 85

Alexander son of Antonios, 148, 150, 165–6, 210, 247 Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, 214 Alexander, martyr, 117 Alexandria, 27, 51, 167, 193, 214, 216 Alexandros aka Artemon, 192 Alexandros son of Domnos, 242 Alexandros son of Epigonos, 199 Alexandros son of Gaios, 199, 223, 293 Alexandros son of Menekrates, 220, 290 alimentary schemes, 180 Allexandreia, 235 Allexandros, 235 aloes, 55 Alphios, presbyter, 256 Anaitis, 41 Ancyra, 18, 30, 127–8, 146, 188–9, 259, 308 angel/s, 4, 20, 25, 31–2, 85, 94, 96–7, 103, 111, 130, 153, 155, 161, 173, 184–5, 227–8, 287 Anicetus, bishop of Rome, 79, 82 Aniketos, 257 Anne, Queen, 79 anonymous anti-Montanist writer, 100–2, 106, 108, 120, 126, 128, 131, 144, 158 anti-Marcionite prologue, 55 antimony, 108 Antinoopolis, 181 Antioch in Syria, 15, 69, 78, 89–90, 92 Antioch of Pisidia, 7, 18–19, 76, 79, 89–90, 92, 167, 187, 200, 229–30, 234, 236 Antiochene Christianity, 78

317

318

Index

Antiochus III, 35, 37 Antiochus of Ascalon, 26 Antipater of Derbe, 187, 190 Antonia Tryphaena, 92 Antonine age, 1, 161 Antoninus Pius Augustus (= Caracalla), Roman emperor, 140 Antoninus Pius, Roman emperor, 77, 82, 85, 100, 112, 157, 181 Antonios Pollion, 223 Antonios Tryphonianos, M. Aurelius, 219 Apameia Cibotus (= Dinar), 116, 131, 161, 187, 215 Aphrodisia, 211 apocalyptic thinking, 26, 94, 100, 161 Apollinaris of Laodicea, 53 Apollinarius, bishop of Hierapolis, 63–4 Apollo, 41, 102, 168, 249, 264 Apollo Lairbenos, 4 Apollo, Klarian, 30 Apollonia by Pisidia, 187–96 Apollonios of Tyana, 195 Apollonios son of Olympichos, 188–9, 194, 196 Apollonios/Olympichos family, 191, 195–6 Apollonius, 59–60, 100, 108, 128, 131, 142 apologetic, 64, 85, 123, 198 Aponius Saturninus, 39 apostate, 85, 208 Apostolic Constitutions, 111 Apotactites, 257 Appe, 242 Apphia, daughter of Phrougios, Aurelia, 222, 292 Appia, 234, 236, 238 aqueducts, 84, 142 Aquila, Bible translator, 41 archives, 220 archpriest/s, 167, 287 Ardabau, 103–4, 112, 116, 128, 139 Ardath, Ardab, Ardap, 100 Arian/s, 258 Aridaios, fictional shoemaker, 173, 175, 186, 273 Aristeas son of Apollonios, 212 Aristeas, from Acmonia, 212 Ariston, Aurelius, 224–5, 233, 294–6 Aristotle, 174–5 Armenia, 11, 55, 61, 70–1, 93, 100 army, 10, 124, 141, 169, 215, 217–18, 242, 251–2, 267, 277, 281

Arsaces, king of Armenia, 11 Arsinous, 128 Artemas, Aurelius, 224, 295 Artemidoros, son of Eiason, Aurelius, 223, 226 Artemidorus, 138, 206 Artemidorus, bishop of Temenothyrae, 108, 143–4 Artemis, 29, 31, 184, 260, 277 Artemon, 196, 203–5, 208 Artemon, son of Auxanon, Aurelius, 203–5 Artemon, son of Olympichos, 188–91 Artemonis, Aurelia, 192, 194 Arycanda, 253 ascetic/s, 61, 126, 258 Asclepiades, bishop of Antioch, 132 Asclepiades, clergyman of Temenothyrae, 137 Asclepiades, son of Alexandros, Aurelius, 194 Asclepiodora, Aurelia, 224, 295 Asia, Lower, 84 Asia, province of, 2, 10, 19, 48, 63, 69, 79, 188, 190, 201, 216, 220, 225, 288–9 Asiana, civil diocese, 11 Asiarch/s, 87, 171, 219–20, 225, 290 Aspasius, presbyter, 130 assize-centre/s, 201 Assyria, 37, 160 Assyrian/s, 6, 69 Asterius Urbanus, 106, 110 Atahualpa, 88 Atalante, Aelia, 223, 292 atheist/s, 87, 253 Athenian/s, 69 Athens, 50, 52, 68, 85, 175–6, 192, 248, 303 atonement, 5 Attalia, 72, 161, 280 Attalus, 126 Attalus III, king of Pergamum, 190 Attica, 75 Atticus Heliodorus, 200 Attis, 5 augurs, 177, 278 Augustine, bishop of Hippo, 97, 112 Augustus (= Caesar Augustus, Roman emperor), 188, 191, 288 Aulon, 183, 187, 285 Aurelius Ariston, 224 autonomy, 3

Index Auxanon son of Dometios, 204 Auxanon Zoulakios, Aurelius, 204 Auxanon, also known as Helladios, 219 Auxanon, son of Auxanon, Aurelius, 203 Avida, 172–4 Avidius Cassius, 64 Avircius Marcellus (= Aberkios, bishop of Hierapolis), 127, 147, 166, 185, 240 Axylon district, 27 Babylas, bishop of Antioch, 214 Babylon, 35, 153 Baghdad, 63 baptism, 25, 53, 82, 94, 255, 258, 266–7, 269 barbarian/s, 259–60, 281 Barchasanes, 162, 181, 284 Bardaisan, 162, 181–2 Barnabas, 10, 72, 76 Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, 61–2, 254, 262 Basilica of St. Paul at Antioch of Pisidia, 167 basilica/s, 112, 121, 143, 167, 257–8 Basse, 222, 293 Bassianus, 177–8 bath/s, 23, 36, 140, 168, 176–7, 184–5, 196, 214, 275–6, 283 beheading, 203 Beichtinschrift/en, 4–5, 29 Berger, Peter L., 13–14, 86–8, 195, 246–8 Berytus, 14 Bible, 27, 33, 37, 41, 73, 97, 152, 164, 227 biography, 91, 166 Bithynia, 6–8, 10, 46, 81, 101, 250, 259 Black Sea, 116, 305 Blandina, 117 Bollandist/s, 182 Book of the Laws of Countries, 171–5, 186 Boradi, 259 Bozan Köyü, 30 Bradon, 203 British Academy, 156 Buckingham Palace, 74, 76 burial, 8, 55, 66, 84, 88, 121–2, 143, 164, 212–13, 215–29, 233, 244, 288–96 Burrhus, deacon, 59, 76 Bursa Museum, 241 business agent, 219, 223, 225–6 Byzantium, 12–13, 177, 279 Caecilius Natalis, M, 197 Caecilius Numa, M., 177

319

Caesar, 35, 84, 86, 88, 140, 168, 189, 213, 249, 278 Caesarea, 49 Caesarea Maritima, 1, 14, 46, 48, 72, 214, 262 Caesarea Mazaca, 7, 61, 254 Callidromus (= Leucas), 157 Callimachus, 27 Çançavuş, 152 candlestick, seven-branched, 43 Cappadocia, Cappadocian/s, 3, 6, 15, 61–3, 69, 142, 176, 189–90, 262 Caracalla, Roman emperor, 135, 140, 190, 198 Caria, Carian/s, 7, 10, 29, 99, 170, 216, 225, 269, 297 Caricus, 131, 134 carpet-weavers, 66 carriage/s, 80, 154, 161–2, 182 Çarşamba, 156–7 Carthage, 89, 112, 129–30, 163, 214, 216, 301, 315 Castelios, 92 Castrius Constans, 218, 225, 296 Cataphrygian/s, 112 catechumen/s, 208 Cathari, 255–6 catholic, 79, 83, 128 Celsus, 87, 102–4, 196, 207 Celtic language, 10 Çeltikçi, 155, 157, 240 Cenchreae, 72 Cephas, 89 Cerdon, bishop of Alexandria, 51 Chairotopa, 184 Chalcedon, Council of, 167, 311 Chalkis (Euboea), 41 Charis, deity, 41 charismatic renewal movement, 131 charitable foundation/s, 180–1 Cheshire cat, 185 Chicago, 24–5 chicken/s, 5 chief magistrate, 40 children’s children curse, 40–1 Chonai, 185 Christ, 35, 77, 82, 106, 109, 117, 144, 152, 154, 226, 267, 269, 272, 274–5, 285 Christianization, 67, 175 Christians for Christians, 16, 232–45, 233 Christology, 21

320

Index

chronology, 55–6, 100, 255 Chrysopolis, 12 Chrysos son of Domnos, 242 Chrysos son of Kyrillos, 242 church of Constantine and Helena, Uşak, 132 church of St Michael, Colossae/Chonai, 185 Church of the Holy Apostles, Constantinople, 182 Chuza, procurator, 76 Cibalae (Vinkovci), 261 Cicero, 27, 187–90 Cilicia, 59, 72, 101, 183, 187–90, 285 Cilician/s, 187–9 circumcision, 28, 35 Cirta, 197–8 citizenship, 43, 64, 108, 135, 152, 160, 163, 211, 247 city council/s, 35, 196, 203, 207–10, 220, 247, 264 civic institutions, 2–3 Claros, 102 Claudian, 8 Claudius Euxenos, Ti., 171 Claudius Pollio, Q. (= Euxeinianos), 171 Claudius Ptolemy, 99 Claudius, Roman emperor, 76 Clazomenae, 69, 86 Clement of Rome, 51 Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, 72 clergy, 59, 72, 89, 95, 128, 132–8, 144–6, 151, 156, 167, 196, 224–5, 240–1, 243, 247, 257, 261–2 clerkship of the market, 40 coin/s, 23, 31, 171, 180, 190, 219–20, 233, 257 coinage, 3, 171 coloni, 139, 190 Colossae, 6, 20–32, 34–5, 44, 184–5 Colossians (New Testament epistle), 20–35, 43, 46 Commagene, 188 commandment/s, 176, 274 Commodus, Roman emperor, 100, 123, 125, 178 communion, 133–6, 167, 208, 255 concord (ὁμόνοια), 74, 284 confession, 4, 235 Conon, gardener, 63 Constans, Roman emperor, 11 Constantine II, Roman emperor, 260

Constantine, Roman emperor, 208, 213, 217, 238, 240, 245, 249, 254, 256–9, 262 Constantinian age, 242 Constantinople, 12–13, 17, 167, 182, 256, 258, 261 Constantius II, Roman emperor, 11, 258 constitutio Antoniniana, 132, 166 continuity, 63, 185 conventus-centre/s, 92, 201 convert/s, 31–2, 99, 102 Coptic, 90 Corinth, 72, 80 corn-buyer/s, 40 Cornelianus, 177, 181, 264–78, 281, 283–4 Cornelius Dolabella, P, 178 Cornelius Lentulus Spinther, P., 178 cosmic frame of reference, 13 Cotiaeum, 234, 238, 256 Cotys IX, king of Lesser Armenia, 93 Cotys VIII, king of Thrace, 92 council membership, 196–7 Council of Phrygian Laodicea, 145 councillor/s, 11–13, 197–9, 202–9, 223, 225, 243, 251–3, 264, 288–96 counterculture, 147 country, 2, 81, 170, 176, 183, 187, 254, 260, 269, 275 crank and connecting rod, 57 Cretan/s, 261 critical realism, 13 Crocus, 59, 76 cross/es, 133, 135, 137, 155, 193–6, 235–40, 249 crown/s, 137, 156, 208, 251 cultural transformation, 72, 247 curiales, 187–209 curse/s, 39–42, 212, 219, 289 curse-formulae, 8 curses written in Deuteronomy, 40 Cürük Su, 185 Cybele, 5, 102, 171, 184, 316 Cydnus river, 72 Cynic/s, 25–6, 31 Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, 7, 112, 214 Cyprus, 72, 76 Cyrenius (= Quirinius), Aurelius, 213 Cyzicus, 93 Dalmatius, Roman emperor, 11 Danube river, 179, 260

Index Daoukome, 236 Daphne, 249–50, 284 Day of Judgement, 228 deacon/s, 46–8, 59, 72, 113, 166, 256, 258, 269, 286–7 Deborah, 105 decennium mirabile, 139 Decian persecution, 63, 80, 85, 215–16, 255 Decius, Roman emperor, 168–9, 214, 221 Deity/deities, 30, 105, 108, 212 Demades son of Dionysogenes, 39 Demetrios, Aurelius, 294 Demetrius, bishop, 213 demon/s, 111, 116, 131, 169, 177–9, 183, 202, 221, 248, 266–7, 270, 276–84, 286 Depth (βυθός), the beginning of all things, 70 Derbe, 18–19, 72, 187, 189–90 Derby, 115 Deukome, 236 deutero-Pauline texts, 22, 34 devil, the, 129, 174, 177, 179, 276 dialogue/s, 171–6, 198, 203 diaspora, Jewish, 37, 66 dice, 108 Didache, 74 Didyma, 29, 102, 312 Diocletian, Roman emperor, 10, 57, 66, 162, 168, 200, 208, 217–18, 225, 249–51 Diodotos, 221, 292 Diogas, bishop of Temenothyrae, 108, 132–6, 143–4, 147, 155, 206–7 Diogenes the Christian, 205–6, 241 Diomedes son of Markeianos, 235 Diomedes son of Tieos, 256 Diomsith, 36 Dionysios, 222, 293 Dionysis, Aurelia, 221, 224, 291, 296 Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, 214–16 Dionysopolis, 224 Diophantos, priest, 257 Dioscuri, 200 dis manibus, 210 disciple whom Jesus loved, 56 disciple/s, 53, 55–6, 60, 69, 88, 150–2, 160, 163, 286 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 19 Docetist/s, 70 Docimium, 125, 190 Dokimos, 190

321

Dolabella, P., fictional governor of Phrygia Salutaris, 168, 263, 279 Dometios, 203–4 Domitian, Roman emperor, 52, 56 Domitius Modestus, praetorian prefect of the East, 261 Domna, 205, 235 Domna, Julia, Augusta, 205 Domne, 40 Domne, daughter of Doulos, Aurelia, 204–6 Domne, daughter of Heuremon, Aurelia, 203 Domnos, 242 Donatist/s, 97 door-keeper/s, 258 doorstone/s, 133–6, 138, 147, 155, 215 Dorotheos, son of Abirkios, Aurelius, 166 Dorylaeum, 6, 99, 259 Dorymedon, 197, 199–203, 209, 249 Doudousa, daughter of Menneas, 257 Doulos, son of Diogenes, 204–6, 241 dregs of all things, 73 Drusus Caesar, 188 duoviri, 190, 251 duumvir, 197, 251 dyeing, 57 dyer/s, 57–8, 65 earthquake of 178, 86 earthquake of 60, 23–4 eastern provinces, 180, 255 ecclesiastic/s, 258, 260 ecclesiology, 21 Echidna, deity, 184 Edessa, 162, 175, 182, 301–2, 312 Edict of Milan, 243 education, 9, 58, 64, 111, 163, 173, 176, 207 Egyptian/s, 8, 69 eirenarch/s, 40 Eleazar b. ‘Arak, rabbi, 36–7 elemental spirits, 25 elements (earth, water, air, fire), 25, 28 Eleutherus, bishop of Rome, 118–19 Elijah, prophet, 37 Elvira, Council of, 168, 197, 208 Emircik, 219, 226, 289 Emmaus, 36 encratite/s, 94 Endymion, 185 England, 115

322

Index

entertainment, 124–5, 189 Epaphras, 23, 46 Ephesians (New Testament epistle), 21–4, 34–5, 43–4 Ephesus, 2, 34, 46–9, 58–61, 72, 76, 78, 90, 97, 161, 177, 221, 259–60, 277, 288 Epicurean/s, 79 epidemic/s, 124, 168 epigraphy/ical, 4, 8, 27, 29, 181, 188, 201, 206 Epiphaneia, 72 Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, 62, 100, 103, 106–7, 112, 116, 144 episcopate, 70, 252 Epistle to Diognetus, 83 Epitropus, 75 Epitynchanos, 236 Equal of the Apostles (ἰσαπόστολος), 182, 263, 285, 287 equestrian/s, 202 Erinius Dionysius (= [V]erinius?), 200 Erinyes, 41 escape hatch/es, 146 eschatology, 21, 161 estate/s, 3, 61, 98, 141–2, 181, 229–30, 234 ethics, 25 Ethiopic language, 90 Etruscan/s, 177 Eucharist, 25, 133, 136, 154, 163–4 Eugenios, M. Ioulios, bishop of Burnt Laodicea, 251–7 Eugraphios, 257 Eukarpos, son of Hermes, 211 Eumelos son of Markeianos, Aurelius, 235 Eumeneia, 31, 60, 199, 202, 210–31, 234, 244, 289–91, 293–6 Eumeneian formula, 42, 201, 210–31, 234–5, 243–4, 288–96 Euphrates river, 151, 153, 160–2, 284, 286 Euplus, 59, 76 Eusebius of Caesarea, 46–7, 49–51, 55, 60, 62, 64, 69, 71, 81–2, 84, 99–102, 104–6, 109, 111, 117–18, 120, 126–7, 131, 141, 144, 175, 182, 217, 228, 248–51, 253, 259, 262 Eusebius of Nicomedia, 258 Euthymius, hegumenus Pepuzentium, 142 Eutropos, 221, 291 Eutyches, 155–7, 208, 224, 240 Eutyches, son of Hermos, Aurelius (aka Helix), 199

Eutychos, 236 Euxeinianos (Pollio), 168, 170–7, 182, 269–80 exorcism, 116, 278 exorcist/s, 258 eye salve, 33 Fabian, bishop of Rome, 214 faith, 56, 68, 99, 117, 125, 128–9, 151–4, 158, 162–3, 229–30, 260, 267–72, 276, 286 familia Caesaris, 15, 157 father of the Christians, 80, 182 Faustina I, Augusta, 180 Faustina II, Augusta, 168, 171, 176, 181, 277, 281–3 Favorinus of Arles, 86 Felicitas, 213 female elder/s, 145 festival/s, 28, 66 fine/s, 38, 66, 164, 211, 220–1, 223, 229 firewood, 196 First-Gaters, 212 fisc/fiscus (Roman state treasury), 151, 164, 211, 220, 286 fish, 5, 151, 154, 163, 179, 222, 234, 244, 286 Flaccus, bishop of Hierapolis, 167 flamen/flamines, 208 Flavias, 72 Flavius Alexander, T., 40 Flavius Amphikles, T., 41 Florinus, 84–6 folk belief, 31 food, 28, 53, 77, 161, 180–1, 183, 264, 283–4 fortress/es, 35, 163 Fox, George, 115 Franciscus Junius the elder, 91 free will, 173–6, 273–5 frontier/s, 7, 124, 156, 179 Fronto, 76 Frugi, 170 frumentarii, 141 fuller/s, 207 funerary practice/s, 232 Gaiane, wife of T. Flavius Alexander, 40 Gaios, business agent, 226–8 Gaios, son of Eutyches, Aurelius, 224, 295 Gaius, copyist, 80

Index Galatia, 6–8, 10–11, 18–20, 28–30, 72, 127, 188–9, 260 Galatian/s, 6, 18–20, 38, 188, 195 Galatians (New Testament epistle), 6, 18–19, 89 Galerius, Roman emperor, 218, 249–50, 253–4 Galileans, 180 Gallia Lugdunensis, 117 Gallienus, Roman emperor, 80, 200, 213–14, 216, 219, 249, 260, 296 games, 65, 208 gamester/s, 214 gaming-board/s, 108 Gaul, 117–18, 124, 126, 255 Gediz, 155 Gemellos son of Menas, Aurelius, 199 generation-lengths, 194 Gentile/s, 28, 31–2, 35, 44, 77–9, 265, 270 George the Sinner, 55 German/s, 64, 151, 277 Germanicus Caesar, 188–9, 192–4 Germanos, 257 Geta Caesar, Roman emperor, 139 Gibbon, Edward, 1 gladiator/s, 123–5, 129 Gnostic/s, 70–1 Godfearers, 30, 35, 44 godlessness, 153, 180 gold, 27, 32–3, 66, 121, 151, 153, 157, 286 Golden Rule, 174 good news, 68 Gordian knot, 63 gospel, 6, 18, 20, 25, 51, 54–6, 62, 110, 114, 127, 178, 206, 248, 267, 270 Goth/s, 8, 216, 225, 259–61 govenor/s, 187 governor/s, 35, 84–8, 92, 117, 141, 169, 189, 200–3, 209, 213–14, 216, 218, 225, 248, 250, 253, 259, 262, 265, 279, 283, 296 Gratus, 99–101 grave-altar/s, 159, 179, 226, 228, 233, 236, 241 grave-crowning, 66 grave-site/s, 66 gravestone/s, 9, 40–2, 57, 65–6, 132–9, 147–66, 168, 179, 185, 194–5, 197, 203–8, 210–15, 219–27, 229, 232–45, 256–7, 262, 288–96 Great Church, 31, 111, 116, 131–2, 145, 239

323

Great Persecution, ix, 17, 217, 245, 256–7 Greek language, 10, 34, 37, 43, 64, 70, 75, 101, 130, 139, 168–70, 173, 175–6, 182, 188, 198, 260 greetings, 34, 76 Gregory, bishop of Neocaesarea, aka Theodorus, 1–2, 14, 58, 215–16, 259 Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, 14, 61 Gregory, uncle of Basil, bishop of Caesarea, 61 guilt, 4, 86 gymnasiarch/s, 194, 196 gymnasium, 196 Hades, 227 Hadrian, Roman emperor, 50–2, 56, 86, 100, 181, 223 Haggai, 38 hagiography, 14, 166 Hannibalianus, 11 haruspices, 249 Haustafel/n, 22 Hebrew language, 37, 42–3 Hebrews (New Testament epistle), 152 Hekate, 29 Ḥelbo (rabbi), 36 Helios, 213 Helix, 199, 208 Helladios, 219, 290 Hellene/s, 69 Hellenistic, 3, 19, 36, 65, 137, 163, 187, 299, 308 Hellespont, 6 henotheism, 31 Heortasios Ioulianos, Aurelius, 38, 66 heresiology/ical, 105 heresy, 77, 114, 116, 126, 129, 138, 167, 244, 255–6, 284 heretic/s, 84–5, 107, 111, 130, 240, 255 Hermes, 10, 39, 211, 221, 291 Hermus valley, 6, 132 Herod Antipas, 76 Herodes, 84–8 Herodotus, 8 hero-shrine/s, 212, 220, 222, 224–9, 289–96 Hesiod, 27 Heuremon, son of Likinios, 203 Hexapla, 41 Hierapolis (Kastabala), 72 Hierapolis (Koçhisar), 45, 127, 131, 147–65, 170–1, 176, 187, 246

324

Index

Hierapolis (Pamukkale), 4, 38, 44, 99, 131, 159, 165, 241 high culture, 32 highlands, 3, 261 Hilarianus, 213 hippodrome/s, 179–80, 282–3 Hippolytus, 108 Historia Augusta, 195 historicity, 182, 247–8 historiography, 19 Holy and Just (the god Hosios kai Dikaios), 30 Holy Land, 28, 37 Holy Spirit, 18, 47, 49, 103–4, 118, 264, 267, 269–70, 272, 286–7 Homer, 27 honestiores, 208 horse, 152 horse/s, 225, 279–80 hot spring/s, 176, 180, 184 household/s, 15, 24, 36, 76, 84, 156 huckster/s, 214, 223 humility, 25, 163 hydrography/ic/al, 176, 184–5 Hydroparastatae, 255 Hygeia, 41 Iamblichus of Chalcis, 248 Iconian/s, 93 Iconium, 19, 37, 89–94 Iconium (Konya), 7, 156, 229 identity/ies, 7, 28, 30, 92–3, 121, 128, 156, 193, 235, 240 idolater/s, 185 idolatry, 180, 185, 251 Ignatius, 59 Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, 51, 68–79, 81–4, 88, 94, 103, 113–14, 162, 165, 247 inheritors of Amyntas, 230 initiation, 31 institution/s, 2–3, 246–8, 254 institutional, 20, 247 intermediaries, 31 intertextual relations, 24 Ionia, 8, 29, 86, 170 Ionian/s, 69, 177, 279 Ioulia Severa, 38–40 Iouliane, Aurelia, 40 Ioulios Eugenios, M., bishop of Burnt Laodicea, 251, 254 Ioulios Olympichos, C., 192–4

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, 50–3, 55, 79–80, 84–5, 88, 117, 119 iron broom, 39 Isauria, 156–7 Ishmael, rabbi, 37 Isidore, 167 Israel, 28, 36–7, 43, 73, 227 İstanbul, 233 Ister river (= Danube), 260 Italy, 15, 59, 112, 181, 255, 278 Jacob, patriarch, 227 James son of Zebedee, 47, 53–4 James, William, 115 Jerome, 12, 51, 90–1, 100, 102, 108, 112 Jerusalem, 43, 46, 59, 62–3, 72, 96–9, 105–6, 128, 139, 144, 147, 152, 160–1, 207, 214, 247 Jesus Christ, 6, 50, 52–3, 55–6, 58, 62–3, 68, 76–7, 111, 113, 117, 154, 156, 165, 178, 185, 206–7, 266–72, 274, 277, 280–2, 284–5, 287 Jew/s, 26–32, 35–44, 53, 65–7, 77–8, 88, 120, 212–13, 227, 255 Jewish War, 78 Jezebel, 113 Joanna, 76 jockey/s, 197 Johannine group/s, 20, 33 Johannine texts, 32, 54, 155 John of Ephesus, 121–2 John Chrysostom, 15 John of Ephesus, 109, 142 John son of Zebedee, 47, 53–4, 56 Jose, rabbi, 37 journey/s into darkness, 87 Judaea, 49, 62, 66, 106 Judah, rabbi, 37 Judaism, 27, 37–8, 41, 77, 94, 163 Judas Iscariot, 53–4 Julia Domna, Augusta, 205 Julia Mamaea, consors imperii, 85 Julian, bishop of Apamea (Dinar), 116, 131 Julian, Roman emperor, 169, 180–1, 246, 259, 283 Julius Caesar, 35, 39 Justin I, Roman emperor, 121 Justin Martyr, 77, 153 Justinian, Roman emperor, 109, 121

Index Kalecik, 29 Kalends, festival of, 66 Karadirek (formerly Kelendres), 147, 247 Karayakuplu, 139, 142 Kaunos, 223 Kemaliye, 141 Keramon Agora, 212 Kerinthos, son of Dionysios, Aurelius, 222, 293 Kidrama, 29 king/s, 6, 8, 92, 161, 269, 273–4, 277, 281 Kogamos valley, 57 Kokhaba, 62 Kolbasa, 253 Korumbos inscription, 24 Kosmia, Aurelia, 192, 194 Kouartos (Quartus), 224, 295 Krates, 122 Krites, 122 Kütahya, 155, 234–8 Kütahya Museum, 235–6 Kyrenios [= Quirinius], Aurelius, martyr, 132 Kyrila, Aurelia, 236 Kyrilla, 242 Kyrillos, 242 Kyrilos, 236 Lactantius, 30, 217, 249–50 Lagina, 29 Lallname/n, 108 Laodicea Katakekaumene (= Burnt Laodicea), 251–7 Laodicea on the Lycus, 7, 10, 32, 76, 258 Laodicea, letter from, 33–4 Laodiceans, epistle, 33–4 Lateran Museum, 150 Latin language, 158, 169, 181–2, 188, 210 leather-work, 17, 172–5, 207 legal privileges, 208, 250 legitimacy, 63 legitimation, 14, 87, 217–18 Leo XIII, bishop of Rome, 150, 158 Leontios, 235, 243 leopards, 71–2 Lichfield, 115 Licinius, Roman emperor, 12 Life of Abercius, 147, 150, 158–9, 162, 166–86, 207 Likinios, 203 lion/s, 90, 93, 190

325

liturgy, 40 Livia, Augusta, 188 local government, 196–204 Long-Ignatius, 77 Longinus, 248 longue durée, 13, 241 Loukilla, 221, 291 Loukios son of Loukios, 38–9 Loukios son of Loukios, Aurelius, of Giza, 229 Loukios, clergyman, 135–8 Lucian of Samosata, 25–7, 43, 74–5, 79 Lucilla, Augusta, 177–9, 221, 277 Lucius Verus, Roman emperor, 124, 157, 171, 177, 221, 263, 277, 281 Lucretia Hilara, 157 Lucullus, 39 Luke, gospel according to, 54–5 Luke, New Testament writer, 20, 90 Luke-Acts, 20 luxury goods, 57 Lycaonia, 7, 15–16, 183, 285 Lycaonian language, 10 Lycia, 30, 190, 253 Lycian/s, 190 Lycus Valley, 4, 9, 20, 23, 32, 44, 50, 57, 59, 66, 177, 185, 246, 257 Lydia, 4, 6–8, 29–30, 35, 41, 99, 141, 170, 219, 269 Lykidas, 227–8 Lyon, 50, 117–20, 125–6, 128 Lyonnais, 118, 126 Lysias, 183, 224, 286, 295 Lysimachus, 190 Lystra, 10, 18–19, 72, 89, 230 Ma, daughter of Pappas, 230 Macedonians, 3, 261 Macrina the younger, 61 Maeander river, 99, 232 Maeander valley, 66, 132 Maeon, Maeones, 8, 69 magic, 31, 85, 124, 151 magistracies, 196 Magnesia on the Maeander, 4, 59, 78 Magnificat, 110 Magydos, 63 maiden/s, 151, 154, 163, 221, 277–8, 286 Makaria, 40 Makedonios, 169, 259 Malchus (= Porphyry), 248

326

Index

Manichaeism, 167 Mannos, Aurelius, 225, 296 manumission, 4 Marcion, 34, 79, 171, 284 Marcionism, 85, 94 Marcionite/s, 85, 171, 255 Marcius Philippus, Q., 187 Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, 60, 63–4, 82, 100, 123–4, 140, 168, 171, 177, 221, 278 Marcus the heretic, 84 Maria, daughter of Zenodotos, 225 Mark, 55–6 Mark Antony, 92, 288 Mark, gospel according to, 51 Markeianos son of Markos, Aurelius, 235 Markia, 136 Markos son of Math[i]as, 42 Markos, presbyter, 256 Marseille, 117 martyr procession, 74 martyr/s, 37, 60, 72, 88, 117, 125, 130–1, 168, 201–2, 254 martyr-act/s, 130, 199–202 martyrdom, 69–70, 79–82, 87, 107, 114, 117, 120, 125–6, 130 Martyrdom of Perpetua, 129 Martyrdom of Polycarp, 79–81, 88, 114–15, 178 Martyrdom of the Scillitans, 129 martyr-shrine, 48, 257 Marucchi, Orazio, 159 Mary, Virgin, 110, 154, 270 Mathias, 42 Mathios, 212 Matthew, gospel according to, 51–6, 74, 161, 178 Maxima, 227 Maximian, Roman emperor, 200 Maximilla, 104–8, 110–13, 116, 119–22, 126–31, 207, 247 Maximinus Daia, Roman emperor, 251–4 Maximinus Thrax, Roman emperor, 16 Maximus the Confessor, 53 Media, 37 Mediterranean, 63, 191, 197, 246, 297–8, 300, 305, 308 Meidon, son of Menander, 4–5 Melanippe, nun, 257 Melitenean legion, 64 Melito, bishop of Sardis, 60, 65, 123–4

Melte, 136 Meltine, 222, 293 Memphis, 8 Mên Arcaeus, 230 Men Askaenos, 230 Men Axiottenos, 29 Men Petraeites Axettenos, 29 Menander, 27 Menas son of Menas, Aurelius, 199 Menneas, 192, 194 Menophilos son of Menophilos, Aurelius, 199 Meros, 169, 259 Mesopotamia, 35, 157, 162, 182, 284 Messalas, son of Messalas, Aurelius, 199 Metrodorus, Marcionite presbyter and martyr, 85 Michael Syrus, 121 Michael, archangel, 184–6 Midas (= Mita, king of the Mushki), 3, 6 Middle Platonism, 26 millennium, 53, 144 millers, guild of, 57 Miltiades anti-Montanist writer, 104 Miltiades, anti-Montanist writer, 103–4, 131 Miltiades, Montanist leader, 126–8 Minucius Felix, 197–8 Minucius Timinianus, 213 minute-book/s, 203, 207 Miracle of St Michael, 184–5 miracle/s, 14, 49, 64, 118, 154, 165, 171, 178, 270, 272 missionaries, 6, 17, 48, 66, 72, 164, 206, 217, 241, 246 Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, 288 mole/s, 5 monastery/ies, 142, 257 monepiscopacy, 71 money, 28, 73, 83, 108, 126, 133–4, 141, 171, 227, 272, 274, 281, 283–4 Montanism, 9, 94–5, 232, 241, 244, 247 Montanus, 60, 97–115, 125–9, 131–2, 139, 142–7, 206–7, 247 Monumentum Apolloniense, 188–91, 194 Mopsuestia, 72 Mordiaeum (= Apollonia by Pisidia), 187 Moschas, Aurelius, 220, 290 mosque/s, 222, 225 Münster, 96 Museo Pio Cristiano, 147, 158

Index Museum of Bursa, 201 Myra, 90 Mysia, Mysian/s, 4, 69, 99–101 mystery cult/s, 31 mysticism, 27 Nacolea, 10–11, 261 Nag Hammadi, 110 Narcissus, Ti. Claudius, 76 Naucratius, hermit, 61 navigation, 174 Nazareth, 62 necropolis, 66, 233, 244 Nectarius, bishop of Constantinople, 167 Nehorai, rabbi, 36 Neikeros son of Neikeros, Aurelius, 218, 225, 296 Neocaesarea, 14–17, 216 Nero, Roman emperor, 23, 38, 90 Neronias, 72 Nerva, Roman emperor, 52, 56 network/s, 43, 61, 66, 80, 164, 233, 247 network-formation, 164 new moon/s, 28 New Prophecy (= Montanism), 96–122, 126, 206 New Prophet/s, 83, 118, 127, 144 New Testament, 15, 18–44, 46, 51, 60, 73, 127, 244 New York, 24 Nicaea, 142, 256, 259 Nicaea, Council of, 72, 162, 167 Nicetes, 84–8 Nicomedia, 249–51, 256, 259, 279 Nikephoros, 236 Nisibis, 151, 160–2, 181–2, 251, 284, 286 node/s, 237, 244, 247 nomen, 200, 223, 226 nomen gentilicium, 223 nomenclature, 108 North Galatian hypothesis, 18 nose-peggers, 9 Novatian/s, 255–7 novel/s, 91–3 Numidia, 197–8 oath-breaking, 4 Occam’s razor, 242 Octavius, 198 Odes, 109–10 Odes of Solomon, 109

327

odium theologicum, 186 Oedipus, 74 Oenoanda, 30 oikos (= household), 24 Old Latin Bible, 97 Olympias, daughter of Ablabius, 11 Olympichos family, 188–96 Ömerçalı, Mount, 97 Onesimus, 21–2 Onesimus, bishop of Ephesus, 59, 76 Onesiphorus, 94 Optatus, bishop of Carthage, 130 oracle/s, 30, 103–13, 125, 249 Orcistan/s, 11–15 Orcistus, 10–17, 217, 246 Orestes son of Andron, 231 Oriens, 252 Orientalism, 230 Origen, 1, 85, 103–4, 133–4, 175–6, 186, 193, 196–7, 207 Orpheus, 195 Orphism, 151 orthodox, 30, 118, 126, 234, 240, 255 orthodoxy, 11, 63, 71 Osrhoene, 162 ossuary/ies, 202 Ostia, 181 Ostrogoths, 8 Otrous, 127, 224, 295 Palestine, 36, 102, 248, 252 Pamphylia, 63, 72, 253, 280 Pancharios, Ailios, 223, 292 panis quadratus, 135, 155, 240 Pannonia Secunda, 261 Paphos, 72 Papirius, bishop of Smyrna, 60 papyri, 151, 204 Paraclete, 107, 118, 122, 125, 129 Paradise, 107 parish, 70 Parnassus, 260 partridge/s, 5 paschal controversy, 119 Passover, 66, 255 Pastoral Epistles, 94 Pastoral Epistles (New Testament epistles), 83 paten/s, 135–8 patristic, 50, 54, 68 patronage, 13, 38, 233, 244

328

Index

Paul (the apostle = Paul of Tarsus), 6, 10, 18–24, 34, 39, 43, 46, 48, 54, 59, 68, 72, 76, 83, 88–95, 102, 105, 151, 154, 156, 160, 162, 164, 169, 244, 286 Paul and Thecla, 88–95, 105 Paula, 224, 294 Pauline authorship, 21–2 Pauline epistles, 164 Pazum, 255–6 peasant/s, 183, 285 Peducaeus, Lucius, 27 Peloponnesian War, 52 Pentapolitan plain, 176 Pentecost, 66 Pepuza, 97–109, 116, 121, 123–47, 160–1, 164, 207, 217, 246–7 Peregrinus, 75 Perga, 72 Pergamene kingdom, 191 Pergamum, 190, 259 periphery/peripheral, 2–3, 27, 91, 191 Perpetua, 129–30, 213 persecution, 59–60, 73, 81, 95, 117–18, 123, 169, 201, 208, 214–17, 221, 238, 245 Persia, Persian/s, 3, 124, 251 Perugitha, 36–7 Pessinus, 18 Peter, archpriest, 167 Peter, bishop of Sebastea, 61 petrifying stream/s, 176, 185 Philadelphia, 59, 77, 96–9, 103–4, 141, 232, 241, 246 Philaldelphia, 113 Philemon (New Testament epistle), 21–4, 32, 43 Philippi, 71, 78, 83 Philippians (New Testament epistle), 21–2, 34 Philippians, letter by Polycarp, 78, 83, 88 Philo of Alexandria (= Philo Judaeus), 26, 65 Philo, deacon, 59, 72 Philomelium, 79–80, 83, 115 philosopher/s, 25–6, 43, 162 philosophical tradition, Jewish, 26 philosophical tradition, pagan, 26, 63, 146, 248 philosophy, 24–8, 31–2 Philostorgius, 256, 260 Philostratus, 45, 85, 316

Phoenician/s, 69 phoney peace, 248–9 Phronime, 227 Phrougianos, son of Menokritos, Aurelius, 40 Phrougilla, 170 Phrougios, 221–2, 225, 292–3 Phrougis, 169–71, 265 Phrygella, 170–1, 269–71 Phrygia Pacatiana (= Phrygia I), 10, 143, 258 Phrygia Salutaris (= Phrygia II), 10, 178, 181, 183, 200, 202 Phrygian language, 8 Phrygian spirit, 31 Phrygianism, 5, 31 pickpocket/s, 214 pigeon/s, 5 piglet/s, 5 pimp/s, 214 Pinnas, bishop, 213 Pionius, presbyter, 80, 85, 216 Pisidia, 7–8, 15–16, 18–19, 76, 79, 89, 183, 190, 253, 285 Pisidian/s, 187, 189, 212, 229 Pizarro, 88 plague, 120, 123–6 Plato, 172–5, 186 Platonism, 26 plausibility structure/s, 56, 87 pleasure, 53, 174–5, 266, 272, 275 pledge-takers, 230 Pliny, 81 Plutarchus son of Nestorius (= Plutarch of Athens), 175–6 Polemo of Laodicea, 86 Polemon II, king of Pontus, 93 poll tax, 253 Polybius, bishop of Tralles, 59 Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, 51–2, 59–60, 68–9, 75–6, 78–88, 94–5, 103, 114–15, 117, 119, 165, 170, 178, 182 Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, 63, 159, 246 polytheism, 231, 254 polytheist/s, 41, 43, 81, 168–70, 180, 185, 196, 212–13 Pontius, 131, 134, 214 Pontus, 1, 61–3, 93, 288 Popilios Zotikos, 38 population, 2, 8, 29, 44, 124–5, 218, 238 Porphyry of Tyre, 30, 248–50

Index Portus, 178, 280–1 possession trance, 102 post-state zone/s, 3 Praetorian Guard, 250 praetorian prefect/s, 11, 261–2 Praxeas, 119, 129 prayer, 25, 30, 43, 64, 176, 183, 248, 264, 266, 276 preaching, 6, 35, 53, 62, 68, 71, 76, 85, 87, 164, 170, 206, 247 Prefect of the City (= Rome), 15 presbyter/s, 77 presbytery, 113–14 presidency of the council, 40 Price Edict of Diocletian, 66 priesthood/s, 108 Primos, 257 princess/es, 178–9, 221 Prisca, 105–8 Prisca/Priscilla, 104, 116, 119, 125, 129, 206–7, 247 Priscillian/s, 106 prison, 21, 115, 126, 200–2 Probus, Roman emperor, 80, 199–202 Procopius, usurper, 261 procurator/s, 75–6, 84, 86, 126, 140–1, 177, 278 production cities, 57 Proklianos Tryphon, 219–20 prophecy, 5, 46, 101, 103, 113, 118–19, 126–30, 134, 139, 161 prophet/s, 42, 79, 83, 102–5, 107–8, 110–11, 119, 125, 129, 144, 268 prophetess/es, 47, 104–10, 113, 115, 120–2, 125–8, 142–3, 146 proselyte/s, 38 Prosenes, M. Aurelius, 157 proseuche (place of prayer), 30 prosopography, 23 Protestant/s, 131, 151 Prusias ad Hypium, 259 Prymnessos, 166 psalm/s, 109, 152, 160 Psammetichus (= Psamtik I, Egyptian pharaoh), 8 pseudepigraphical texts, 21–2, 111 pseudo-Diogenes, 25 pseudo-Gelasius, 127 pseudo-Heraclitus, 25 pseudo-Justin, 103, 198 pseudo-Pauline texts, 20

329

Ptah, 8 public office/s, 196 puellae Faustinianae, 180 purity, ritual, 28, 93–4, 107 purple-dyers, guild of, 65 purple-seller/s, 58 Pythagorean-Eudorian perspective, 24–6 Qryṭys/Qr᾿ṭys, 121–2 Quadratus, apologist, 50 Quadratus, L. Statius, 82, 103–4 Quadratus, prophet, 103–4, 113, 122 quattuorviri, 190 Quebec, 194 queen of Christian inscriptions, 147 queen/s, 92–3, 151–3, 157, 160, 178–9, 278, 286 Quellenkritik, 177 Quintilla, 106, 122, 127 Quintillian/s, 106, 244 Quintus, 114–15 Rabellius, C., 35 rain miracle, 64 Ramsay, W.M., 42, 147–50, 159, 166, 170, 177, 212, 217–20, 229–31, 233, 236, 296 ransom, 73, 269 reader/s, 4, 25, 35, 65, 93, 154, 164, 205, 223, 240, 258 reconciliation, 5, 73 recruitment, 124 Reginos, 219 relic/s, 39, 88, 121, 185 religion, domestic, 14 religious calendar, Christian, 25 religious conflict, 14 religious thought, 31 Renault, Captain, 73 repent/ance, 5, 32, 68, 83, 169, 267, 273 Res gestae, 188 rescript/s, 139–41, 213, 217, 253, 277 resurrection, 53, 107, 144, 227 Reuben, patriarch, 227 Revelation, 2, 20, 32–3, 35, 43, 61, 96–8, 113, 144, 153 Rheus Agathopus, 59 Rhine-Danube frontier, 179 Rhodope, 221, 292 Rhoemetalces II, king of Thrace, 92 Rhône river, 117

330

Index

risk register/s, 189–90 Roman period, 3, 7 Rossi, Giovanni Battista de, 147, 158–9 Roubes, 226–8 Roupheine, 221, 291 Rufus, 79 Sabbath/s, 28, 35, 37 Sabbatius, 200, 249 Sabinus, 214 Saccophori, 254–7 sacred canopy, 12–17, 56, 68, 82, 87–8, 195–6, 217, 231, 246, 258, 262 sacrifice/s, 5, 10, 73, 80–1, 88, 114, 125, 168, 200, 202–3, 208, 216, 249–52, 263–4 Sadagolthina, 260 Sagaris, bishop of Laodicea, 60 Saittai, 30, 219 Salamis, 72 salary/ies, 108, 126, 206 Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü), 7, 27 Samaritan/s, 77 Sangarios river, 8, 232, 255 sarcophagus/i, 38, 157, 224, 251–2, 254 Sardis, 60, 65, 123–4, 188, 259 Sarmatians, 64 Satala, 61 Saturus, 130 scapegoat sacrifice (περίψημα), 73 Scopelian of Clazomenae, 69, 86, 94 scripture, 28, 127, 164, 168, 250, 273 Scythian/s, 260 seal/s (aquatic carnivorous mammals), 93 seal/s (device/s attached as evidence of authenticity), 121, 151, 153, 161, 266, 286 Sebaste (Selçikler), 223 Sebaste (Sivaslı), 199, 221 second sophistic, 74 secret police, 141, 177–8, 214–16, 278 secular world, 146 Selenas, bishop of the Goths, 260–1 Selene, 213 Seleucia in Pieria, 72 Seleucid/s, 35, 190 senate, 125, 163, 214 senatusconsultum, 190 Senirkent, 203, 205 Septimius Severus, Roman emperor, 15, 45, 139, 205 Septuagint, ix, 37, 39, 41–2, 73, 153, 178, 227, 263, 273

Serapion, bishop of Antioch, 131–2, 134 Sergius Paullus, 76 Servenius Capito, 38 Servenius Cornutus, L., 39 settler society, 187 Severan period, 142 Severos, bishop of Burnt Laodicea, 254–7 Severus Alexander, Roman emperor, 85, 195, 219 sheep, 5, 106, 151, 286 Shemashgram, 173 shepherd/s, 97, 150–4, 160, 163, 286 shoes, golden, 152, 157, 179, 286 sickle of the curse, 39, 42–3, 212 Sidon, 90 Silas, 72 Silence (σιγή), 70 Silikis Olpianos, Poplis, 108, 155 silver, 66, 93 Simoe, Simoen[sians], 139–40 sin, 4–5, 37, 73, 161, 172, 175, 211, 219–20, 267–9, 273, 275 singer/s, 258 singing, 25 singularii, 202 sinner/s, 107, 152, 228, 269 Skopelianos, 108 slave/s, 3–4, 15, 22, 84, 124, 223, 230, 264, 267 slave-market/s, 39 slave-raiding, 3, 191 smallpox, 124–5, 168 Smyrnaean/s, 59, 75, 86, 165 Soa (Altıntaş), 234 social aid, 180 social constructionism, 13 social institution/s, 3 social stability, 191 social world, 13 Socrates, 31, 173, 182 Socrates Scholasticus (church historian), 168, 256, 260–1 Socratic paradox, 175 soldier/s, 69, 71, 141, 218, 225, 242, 251–2, 296 solidarity in the face of chaos, 14 Song of Songs (= Canticles), 96 Sornatios Barba, C., 39 Sossianus Hierocles, 250 Sosthenes, 241 Sotas, bishop of Anchialus, 116, 131 Soter, bishop of Rome, 119 South Galatian hypothesis, 18

Index Sozomen, 167, 256, 260–1 Spain, 160, 255 sparrow/s, 5 Sparta, 52 Speech to the Assembly of the Saints, 12 spirit/s, 25, 28, 31, 103, 105–6, 110, 184, 266, 287 sport/s, 66 Stoic/s, 125 Stoic-Antiochian Platonist/s, 24 stonecutter/s, 223, 238–9 stratification, 3 Stratoneikianos, 41 Stratonicea, 29 subdeacon/s, 258 succession, 63, 70, 99, 109, 123 Sulla, L. Cornelius, 288 surveying, 174 Susuzören, 139 Symphoros, Aurelius, 225 synagogue/s, 20, 28, 35, 37–9, 43, 66, 120 synchronicity, 160 Synnada (Şuhut), 10, 17, 37, 183, 197, 199–202, 249, 279, 285 Syria Phoenice, 162 Syriac language, 100, 121, 175, 182, 198 Syriarch/s, 90 Taifalian/s, 260 Talmud, 36–7 Tarsus, 72 Tascodrugites, 9, 244 Tata, 221, 292 Tatia, 135–6, 221, 225, 292, 295–6 Tatiane, 222, 293 Tatiane, Aurelia, 135 Tatianes, 242 Tatianos, 169, 221, 259, 291 Taurus (range), 99, 187, 189 Tavium, 18 tax, 3, 36, 141, 168, 190, 253 teacher of Asia, 80–1, 85, 103, 165, 170, 178, 182 teacher of impiety, 81 Teanum, 181 Tekmor, 229–31 Tekmoreian Guest-Friends, 229–31, 236 Telesphoros, 235 Tembris region, 99 Tembris valley, 141, 236, 240–1, 244 Tembris Valley, 16 Temenothyrae, 108, 132–9, 143–6, 151, 206, 241, 248

331

temple, 4 Temple (at Jerusalem), 27 temple/s, 81, 96, 113, 122, 163, 168–9, 188, 230, 259–60, 264, 277 Temrek, 30 Ten Martyrs, 37 Ten tribes (of Israel, exiled to Assyria), 36–7 tenant/s, 139–41, 183 Tertullian, 65, 89–92, 100, 106–7, 111–12, 119, 125, 129–30, 163, 193, 213–14, 242 Tetrarchy, 10 textile production, 57 Thamyris, 92 Thecla, 88–95, 105 Themiso, 116, 122, 125, 127–8 Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, 127 Theodoros, 138 Theodorus, 5 Theodorus, aka Gregory, bishop of Neocaesarea, 14 Theodosius I, Roman emperor, 260 Theodotus, 118, 122, 126–7 Theodoulos, 169, 259 theology, 17, 19–20, 176, 244 Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, 167 Theos Hypsistos, 30 theosis, 173 Thera, 30–1, 155, 228 Thessalonian/s, 154 Thrace, 8, 92, 116, 190, 206 Thracian language, 8 Thracian/s, 190 Thraseas, bishop of Eumeneia, 60 Threptos son of Nicomedes, Aurelius, 229 Thuburbo Minus, 129 Thucydides, 52 Thunder: Perfect Mind, 110. Thyatira, 113, 116, 128, 248 Thyni, 8 Tiberius, Roman emperor, 12, 188, 191 Tieos, deacon, 256 Timotheus Aelurus, 70 Timothy, 23 tomb-violator/s, 39, 41–2, 211 tomb-violators, 40 Topoi research project, 232 Torah, 36–7 trade guild/s, 65 trader/s, 58 Trajan, Roman emperor, 51–2, 56, 69, 81, 125 Trajanopolis, 99, 138 Tralles, 59, 77 transgression/s, 4–5, 161

332

Index

tres militiae, 202 tria nomina, 101 Tribigild, 8 Trimorphic Protennoia, 110 Tripolis, 66 triumvir, 198 Troad, 6 Troas (= Alexandria Troas), 59, 71–2, 78 Trophimos, 199, 208, 249 Troy, 6 True Word, 87, 102, 196 Tübingen school, 19, 105 tuna-fish, 5 Tyana, 6, 195 Tychicus, 21–2, 34 Tymion, 97–100, 105, 108, 128, 139–46 Tyre, 90, 248, 253 Tyrronios Klados, 38 Tyrronios Rapon, 38 Ulfila (Urphilas), bishop of the Goths, 260 Ulubey canyon, 142 uncircumcision, 35 urban thesis, 2 urbanization, 2–3, 187 Uşak, 100, 132–41, 144–6, 155, 206, 241 Valens, former elder, 83 Valens, Roman emperor, 258, 261 Valentinian/s, 70–1, 154 Valentinus, 71, 79, 109, 128 Valerian, 260 Valerian, Roman emperor, 200, 208, 216, 219, 296 Valerius, 177–8, 278–9 Valerius Diogenes, 252–3 values, 161, 239 Vatican, 109, 147, 158–9 Vettius Epagathus, 117 via Sebaste, 76 Viator, 157 victimization mechanism, 73 Victor, bishop of Rome, 46, 59, 119, 129 Vienne, 117 vine/s, 36, 53, 240, 268, 280 virtue, 175, 220, 235 vision/s, 31, 100, 107, 130, 240, 277 viticulture, 36, 137

Wales, 115 water-mill/s, 58 water-pipe/s, 142 water-wheel/s, 57 wheat, 5 white robes, 32–3 wholesale dealer/s, 223–5, 293 widow/s, 145 wild-beast show/s, 69–70, 93, 114, 202–3 wine, 5, 36, 151, 163, 178, 255, 280, 286 wineskin/s, 178, 280 Wisdom, 163 woman/women, 38, 61, 76, 84, 89, 93, 104–10, 120–1, 132–3, 138, 145, 167, 169, 172, 207, 221–2, 238–9, 251, 257, 259, 270–1, 273, 276 wool, 57, 136–7, 207 worship, 4–5, 14, 25, 29, 31, 35, 38–9, 63, 80–1, 88, 169, 191, 202, 213, 230, 247, 253, 259, 278 Ya῾qub, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 62 Zenodotos, 225, 293, 296 Zenon, 225, 296 Zenonis, Aurelia, 289 Zeugma, 162 Zeus, 10, 191, 194, 230 Zeus Solymeus, 213 Zeus Trosou, 5 Zeuxis, 35, 108 Zosimus, 79 Zoticus of Otrous, presbyter, 127 Zoticus, Aurelius, 203 Zoticus, bishop of Comana, 116, 131 Zotike daughter of Damas, Aurelia, 223, 293 Zotikes, 155 Zotikos, 39, 235 Zotikos Lykidas, Aurelius, 227–8 Zotikos Markianos, 233, 236 Zotikos Markianos, Aurelius, 233 Zotikos son of Gaios, Aurelius, 290 Zotikos son of Markion, Aurelius, 233 Zotikos son of Praxias, Aurelius, 199 Zotikos, aka Ailios Pancharios, 292 Zuqnin Chronicle, 121