From the Later Roman Empire to Late Antiquity and Beyond [1 ed.] 1032133449, 9781032133447, 2022056473, 2022056474, 9781032133478, 9781003228813

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Gibbon and Justinian
2 Bury, Baynes and Toynbee
3 Samuel Dill, the End of the Roman Empire, and the Uses of History
4 Henri Pirenne
5 A.H.M. Jones and the End of the Ancient World
6 Robert Browning
7 Thoughts on the Introduction to The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century
8 Momigliano and Christianity
9 Late Antiquity: The Total View
10 Redrawing the Map: Christian Territory After Foucault
11 The World of Late Antiquity
12 Ascetic Closure and the End of Antiquity
13 On Defining the Holy Man
14 The Perception of Crisis
Index

Citation preview

From the Later Roman Empire to Late Antiquity and Beyond

Averil Cameron is one of the leading historians of late antiquity and Byzantium. This collection (Cameron’s third in the Variorum series) discusses the changing approach among historians of the later Roman empire from the 1960s to the present and the articles reproduced have been chosen to reflect both these wider changes in treatments of the subject as well as Cameron’s own development as a historian over many decades. It provides a revealing and important survey of some profound historiographical changes. Her volume contains fundamental papers and reviews that tell a story in which she has played a leading part. They move from her early days as an ancient historian to her important contribution in the establishment of the field of late antiquity and point to her later work as a Byzantinist, a trajectory rivalled by few other scholars. The book will be important for scholars and students of the later Roman empire and late antiquity, and for anyone interested in the inheritance of Edward Gibbon, the perennial questions about the end of the Roman empire and its supposed decline, or the emergence of Islam in the early seventh century and its relation to the late antique world. Averil Cameron is the author of two previous Variorum volumes and many books and articles about late antiquity and Byzantium. In her long career she has been professor of Byzantine studies at King’s College London and of Byzantine history at the University of Oxford, where she was also Warden of Keble College from 1994 to 2010. Her most recent books include Byzantine Matters (2014), Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (2014), Arguing It Out (2016) and Byzantine Christianity (2017).

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TERENCE O’REILLY Humanism and Religion in Early Modern Spain John of the Cross, Francisco de Aldana, Luis de León (CS1102) For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Variorum-Collected-Studies/book-series/VARIORUM

From the Later Roman Empire to Late Antiquity and Beyond

Averil Cameron

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Averil Cameron The right of Averil Cameron to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cameron, Averil, author. Title: From the later Roman Empire to late antiquity and beyond / Averil Cameron. Description: New York: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Variorum collected studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022056473 (print) | LCCN 2022056474 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032133447 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032133478 (library binding) | ISBN 9781003228813 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Rome—History—Empire, 284–476—Historiography. | Byzantine Empire—Civilization—527–1081—Historiography. | Islam—Historiography. | Cameron, Averil. | Gibbon, Edward, 1737–1794—Influence. Classification: LCC DG311 .C358 2023 (print) | LCC DG311 (ebook) | DDC 937/.06—dc23/eng/20230111 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056473 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056474 ISBN: 978-1-032-13344-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-13347-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-22881-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1113

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Abbreviations

viii x

Introduction

1

1 Gibbon and Justinian

4

In Edward Gibbon and Empire, edited by Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault, 34–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 2 Bury, Baynes and Toynbee

21

In Through the Looking Glass. Byzantium through British Eyes, edited by Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys, 163–76. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 3 Samuel Dill, the End of the Roman Empire, and the Uses of History

34

Unpublished, given as The Samuel Dill Lecture, Queen’s University, Belfast, 2016. 4 Henri Pirenne

45

Introduction, Mohammed and Charlemagne. London: The Folio Society, 2016. 5 A.H.M. Jones and the End of the Ancient World In A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire, edited by D.H. Gwynn, 231–49. Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages (BSEMA) 15. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008. v

52

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6 Robert Browning

69

PBA 105: 289–306. 2000. Reproduced by Permission of the British Academy and Oxford University Press. 7 Thoughts on the Introduction to The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century

85

In Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire: The Breaking of a Dialogue (IVth–VIth Century A.D.), edited by Peter Brown and Rita Lizzi Testa, 39–54, Proceedings of the International Conference at the Monastery of Bose (October 2008). Münster: Lit Verlag, 2011. 8 Momigliano and Christianity

100

In The Legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano, edited by Tim Cornell and Oswyn Murray, 107–27. London: The Warburg Institute, 2014. 9 Late Antiquity: The Total View

125

P&P 88: 129–35. 1980. Reproduced by Permission of Oxford University Press. 10 Redrawing the Map: Christian Territory After Foucault

133

JRS 76: 266–71. 1986. 11 The World of Late Antiquity

145

EHR 88, No. 346 (Jan.): 116–11. 1973. Reproduced by Permission of Oxford University Press. 12 Ascetic Closure and the End of Antiquity

149

In Asceticism, edited by Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis, 147–61. New York: Oxford University Press. Reproduced by Permission of Oxford University Press. 13 On Defining the Holy Man

167

In The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, edited by James Howard-Johnston and Paul Antony Hayward, 27–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999. Reproduced by Permission of Oxford University Press. vi

CONTENTS

14 The Perception of Crisis

184

In Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e alto medioevo, 3–9 aprile 1997, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 45, 9–34. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo. 1998. Index

201

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For a number of reasons getting this collection together has been a slower process than I would have liked, not least during a pandemic, and I would like to thank the people who in different ways helped it along its way. One of the first was Brian Croke, a very old friend, who generously shared with me the text of his own Variorum volume before its publication and discussed our different approaches. We both address issues about the later Roman empire, but in different ways, and I hope our volumes will be seen as complementary. I owe a great deal to John Smedley, formerly of Ashgate, for his help with my two previous Variorum volumes, and Michael Greenwood of Routledge has been encouraging, enthusiastic and patient with this one and from Routledge, I also wish to thank Marie Roberts and Louis Nicholson-Pallet. Unlike its predecessors, which were based on scans of the originals, this volume has allowed for some editing and introductions, and I am deeply grateful to all the original publishers of the articles for allowing them to be included on that basis. Evelyne Patlagean was a good friend and host in Paris from the time of her major book (see chapter 9 below) until her untimely death in 2008 and I remember her with gratitude and admiration. I thank Rita Lizzi Testa and Peter Brown for the memorable conference at the monastery at Bose on which chapter 7 below is based, and Rita gave me valuable help in relation to this and chapter 14 below, the lecture I gave at the annual conference of medievalists in Spoleto. I also owe thanks to friends and fellow historians, especially Peter Brown, the doyen of late antique studies with whom my name is often linked, and the late Elizabeth A. Clark, a dear friend whose work was very important for me and who is sadly missed. John Curran of the Queen’s University, Belfast, not only invited me to Belfast but also nobly read out the lecture on which chapter 3 below is based when I was unable to give it myself. Finally, Tim Cornell and Oswyn Murray were extremely helpful in relation to chapter 8 below, and Oswyn Murray generously gave me access to important material of his before publication. The late Guido Clemente was another with whom I discussed late antique matters, as indeed was the late Wolfgang Liebeschuetz despite the major differences in our approach. A number of these articles stem from my time at King’s College London, where I was employed in different capacities from 1965 to 1994 and where my focus viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

developed from the Roman empire to late antiquity and thence eventually to Byzantium. Others date from my move to Oxford and period as Warden of Keble College from 1994 to 2010, during which I was still able to devote some time to research and publication on late antiquity and Byzantium. Retirement in 2010 gave me more opportunity to enjoy the exceptionally lively activity and incomparable resources of Oxford in Byzantine studies, and I am grateful to Peter Frankopan, with whom I founded the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research in the year of my official retirement from Keble College, and to many other colleagues and graduate students. The Faculty of Theology and Religion gave me a home when I held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship and thus enabled my later work on dialogues, and Phil Booth very kindly housed my extensive offprint collection in his office. This volume does not include my later work on Byzantium but the publication of a jointly edited volume with Niels Gaul in 2017 on dialogues from late antiquity to Byzantium demonstrated the advantages of the broad chronological sweep from late antiquity to Byzantium that underlies my work while at the same time drawing attention to the many and important changes that took place. This volume shows my abiding interest in the history and development of scholarship, which is a legacy of my early encounters with Arnaldo Momigliano, and constitutes a personal history and the story of an intellectual journey over many decades. My son and daughter Daniel and Sophie have patiently tolerated my preoccupations and the many books and papers that accumulated over the years everywhere we have lived. They much deserve my heartfelt thanks for this, as well as for all the times when I was distracted or travelling to conferences, which must have been quite a trial in a parent.

ix

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

AB ANSP BMGS CQ HER HThR JECS JHS JLA JRA JRS JThS NYRB P&P PBA PCPS RSI T&M TLS

Analecta Bollandiana Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Classical Quarterly English Historical Review Harvard Theological Review Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Late Antiquity Journal of Roman Archaeology Journal of Roman Studies Journal of Theological Studies New York Review of Books Past and Present Proceedings of the British Academy Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Rivista storica italiana Travaux et Ménoires Times Literary Supplement

x

INTRODUCTION

These papers, hitherto not republished and including previously unpublished material, have been chosen to tell a story, or indeed several stories. The main story is that of one scholar’s journey from the late Roman empire through its transformation into the field of late antiquity and then on to Byzantine studies.1 The items included are not in date order of publication but arranged by subject logic, with details of the original publication given in the Table of Contents, and while there is a concentration on London and Oxford reflecting my own history they also go beyond the personal and tell a broader story of reception. They also point ahead (especially chapter 14 below) to a change in perceptions of Byzantium and to the logic of my own later move from late antiquity and Byzantium. Some are very much of their time and will demonstrate some of the key issues current when they were originally published. Each item included is preceded by a short introduction, and while I have very lightly edited them (again, especially chapter 14 below) I have kept the original note numbering as far as possible, indicating any additions by square brackets. Most of the items included are still mainly in their original form, and such vast amounts have been published now on all these subjects and bibliographical updates would simply not have been practical so I have only rarely added references to later items. In this way I hope to avoid some of the irritation caused by republishing under the same title articles that are in fact substantially different from the originals. As well as reflecting my own trajectory there are some clear themes running through the volume, starting with the way in which what we used to call the fall of the Roman empire (a major topic when I was lecturing on the Roman empire in the 1970s). It has returned in recent years in publications by Peter Heather and especially Bryan Ward-Perkins who lay stress of the collapse of Roman society in the western empire,2 and the nature of the continuing empire in the east has

1 They can be read together with Cameron, Averil 2021. Croke, Brian 2023 provides a companion volume to the present one. 2 Heather 2005; Ward-Perkins 2005.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-1

1

INTRODUCTION

accordingly had to be explained.3 But this volume does not cover the copious revisionist scholarship on the ‘barbarians’ in the west or the pros and cons of using ancient DNA because these developments came later than the items included.4 The so-called linguistic turn lies behind chapter 14 below; it was prominent in the work of Elizabeth A. Clark and the JECS of which she was a co-founder in 1993. A different story can be told of the awkward relation between the terms late antique and patristic though this does not feature here, but the same chapter hints at an abiding interest of mine at least since the late 1980s, namely how to write about orthodoxy and heresy, with the related issues of toleration and intolerance. The same applies to Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam and the ‘turn to the east’ and incorporation of Islam within late antiquity characteristic of recent scholarship,5 but the structuralism of the Annales school features in chapter 9 below, on Patlagean, and chapters 7 and especially 8 below deal with the impact and scholarship of Arnaldo Momigliano, supervisor for a time of Peter Brown, and of myself in the period 1964–66, but with an influence that continued long afterwards. We disagreed about his deep hostility to the emphasis on rhetoric in historiography represented by the publications of Hayden White and expressed in his reaction to the way in which I wrote about Procopius in the 1980s but I decided not to follow the advice he gave me and also made rhetoric in a broad sense the subject of my Sather Classical Lectures at Berkeley delivered in 1986.6 Chapter 14 ends with brief reflections on the relation of late antiquity and Byzantium and the utility for late antique historians of looking ahead to Byzantium, which few currently do. A single historian’s development and interests will of course be limited and will not reflect the entire range of relevant scholarship over a long period. I have stressed elsewhere my strong belief that history is always in the end subjective, in that what is written depends on the conscious or unconscious input of the individual historian.7 Historians are also influenced by the trends around them and by factors external to themselves. This tension is reflected in this volume and to me it is one of the most interesting issues in historical analysis and historiography even though it is rarely made explicit. It does not mean, as some mistakenly claim, that I believe that all history is necessarily relative, for which see chapter 14 below, but it is usually ignored or denied by those who defend an ideal of positivist history.

3 Anthony Kaldellis insists that it was Roman, especially in Kaldellis 2019; others, like Haldon 2016, call it ‘a rump state’ or stress the many different stages in the long period from Constantine to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. 4 The theme of late Roman/late antique is central in Ando and Formisano 2021 and foreshadowed in Cameron, Averil, Ward-Perkins, Bryan and Whitby, L. Michael eds. 2001. 5 The series Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (1991–95), edited by Conrad, Lawrence I., Cameron, Averil and King, Geoffrey R.D., conceived in 1984 and published from 1991, has since been greatly expanded and is now re-issued by Gerlach Press, Berlin. 6 Published as Cameron 1991. 7 See Cameron 2004.

2

INTRODUCTION

I have described the excitement and importance of the advent of late antique archaeology in the 1970s, though it took some time to filter through into the Byzantine period. But interdisciplinarity was only just beginning and these papers were written without the benefit of historical geography, as in the Tabula Imperii Byzantini or the developments in environmental studies and climate in the twentyfirst century, or the possibility of studying ancient DNA. These have offered new possibilities for the old questions of decline and fall, even since the books of Heather and Ward-Perkins in 2005. There have been many other developments in the scholarship on the topics presented in this volume during the decades covered by the items that are included. But the history of scholarship remains important, especially on a subject like the later Roman empire which is the subject of constant pronouncements in the media, by politicians and in the popular mind. One historian’s trajectory does not and of course cannot reflect all the changes even in the period covered by these papers, but I firmly believe that all of us are subject to our own assumptions – not always conscious – and to the influence of the time of writing and that this needs to be more fully recognised and indeed admitted. Averil Cameron Oxford, October 2022

Bibliography Ando, Clifford and Formisano, Marco eds. 2021. The New Late Antiquity: A Gallery of Intellectual Portraits. Heidelberg: Winter. Cameron, Averil 1991. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cameron, Averil 2004. ‘History and the Individuality of the Historian’. In The Past before Us: The Challenges of Historiographies of Late Antiquity, edited by Carole Straw and Richard Lim, 23–31. Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Antiquité tardive. Cameron, Averil 2021. ‘An Accidental Scholar’. Catholic Historical Review 107.1: 1–27. Croke, Brian 2023. Engaging with the Past, c. 250–c.650. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge. Haldon, John F. 2016. The Empire that Would Not Die. The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640–740. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Heather, Peter 2005. The Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Macmillan. Kaldellis, Anthony 2019. Romanland. Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ward-Perkins, Bryan 2005. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

3

1

GIBBON AND JUSTINIAN

I was invited to contribute this paper to a volume published in the years after the two hundredth anniversary of The Decline and Fall in 1987, an event I celebrated together with John Matthews, then a Fellow of Queen’s College Oxford and later professor at Yale, holding a joint garden party at Queen’s College with strawberries picked by our daughters and a recitation by a friend in costume of Gibbon’s famous description of how he felt when he completed his work. The influence of Gibbon is still strong. David Womersley’s The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Womersley 1988) and his three-volume critical edition of the Decline and Fall (Womersley 1994, 2000, 2015) are now central (my original paper reproduced here used that of J.B. Bury, fourth edition) and since the publication of my paper there has been a major study in six volumes (Pocock 1999–2015). Gibbon famously laid the blame for Roman imperial decline on Constantine and the baleful influence of Christianity, and following Constantine on Justinian, and he is even today constantly cited for his venomous and sly depiction of the Empress Theodora; to whom much appeal is made by gender historians, and Gibbon’s portrayal has stimulated a whole genre of novels about her. Gibbon was as artful a reporter as his major source, Procopius, and the current revival of interest in Procopius has directed attention to Gibbon again, while his presentation of Justinian as an autocrat has appealed to many of those currently writing on the sixth century who present the emperor as a dictator who suppressed dissent, a view that also lies behind Anthony Kaldellis’s claim in numerous publications that Procopius was a secret discontent, although Gibbon would have been surprised to learn from Kaldellis that he was also a Neoplatonist. Gibbon is also often cited in discussions of subjects including masculinity and military history and on Belisarius. His account of the circus factions in the reign of Justinian laid the foundation for many modern assumptions including that of Alan Cameron (Cameron 1976) until superseded by more sociological and ceremonial emphases, as for instance in Dagron 2011. Much current scholarship on Constantine and Constantine’s religion concurs with Gibbon’s hostile view but while Justinian too is commonly depicted as a tyrant, recent work on his Code and Novels now reveals much greater complexity (Frier 2016; Sarris and Miller 2018) 4

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-2

GIBBON AND JUSTINIAN

Gibbon’s importance for the theme of decline and fall is also evident from chapter 5 below below on A.H.M. Jones, and from the date of the paper in the current chapter onwards to Gibbon’s issue of periodization (did Justinian’s reign mark the end of the Roman empire or the beginning of the centuries of weak ‘Greek’, i.e. Byzantine, rule?) has been and still is a major theme, while the emphasis he placed on AD 476 has been both downplayed and revived, (downplayed: Bowersock 1996, with Momigliano 1973; revived: see Introduction above). Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is a classic and a great work of literature, but it also posed fundamental questions about the later Roman empire and late antiquity. Budding late antique historians still need to start from him today. ––––––––

The portrayal of the reign of Justinian in Gibbon’s History has not up to now received the attention it deserves, whether in terms of its presentation of one of the most brilliant periods covered in the work, or in relation to its function within the structure of the Decline and Fall in its final form. Did Gibbon consider Justinian to be as ‘Roman’ as the emperor himself claimed to be? How did he make the narrative of the reconquest of the west fit his own account of the end of the western empire which precedes it? Where did Gibbon find his material, and how far was it possible for him to escape from the influence of Procopius, the contemporary historian who was at once Justinian’s eulogist and his most savage critic? Many such questions suggest themselves. But while Gibbon’s interest in Belisarius, Justinian’s general and Procopius’s hero, has been well noted, as has his fascination with the flamboyant empress Theodora, neither his use of Procopius as a main source nor the structural importance of this part of the Decline and Fall has been fully explored. Two features of Gibbon’s method in the History that have received a good deal of scholarly attention1 are highly relevant here too: these are his focus on certain individual characters – Julian the Apostate is one – and his use of ancient writers as major influences, Tacitus for the early Empire and Ammianus Marcellinus for the fourth century. When Gibbon can follow a full and detailed account he does so, while always interposing his own judgements based on other reading or critical perception. As for the characters, Gibbon will, when he can, hang his narrative around a focal point – Augustus, say, or Constantine. This partly depended on his own reading: he emphasizes himself how important had been his early reading of a life of the emperor Julian, even though he later prepared more systematically for the History by reading or rereading the Greek and Latin historians ‘from the reign of Trajan to the last of the western Caesars’, and mostly in the original.2 These aspects, both of his preparation and of his narrative technique, are significant for the present subject too. What does Gibbon do in his History, we shall ask, with the figure of Justinian, and how did he exploit the works of Procopius for the task?

1 See on Tacitus and Ammianus (Womersley 1998, chapters 6 and 11). 2 Hill 1900, 181–2.

5

GIBBON AND JUSTINIAN

It is a matter of some interest to know at what stage Gibbon was first introduced to the age of Justinian. In 1753, after the lonely youth had succumbed, as he describes it, to Roman Catholicism and had had to leave Oxford, his father decided to remove him from further dangerous influences and put him in the hands of a sober Protestant, indeed Calvinist, instructor at Lausanne. The sixteenyear-old Gibbon, whose five-year stay in Lausanne had little of the comfort and social advantages enjoyed by such sons of the English aristocracy as travelled on the Continent, or even of his own later Grand Tour, was brought back within eighteen months to suitable Protestantism (his Catholic opinions ‘disappeared like a dream’).3 Equally important, however, was the return and development of his love of reading after the sloth of Oxford; he returned, at the age of nineteen, to serious study of Greek, including Homer, Xenophon and Herodotus, though he confesses that having to look up so many words in the dictionary was something of a strain, and that he found it a relief to return to Latin.4 In fact, Gibbon had already been initiated into the age of Justinian when he was very young. Even before he went up to Oxford at the age of fourteen he had been reading Procopius – ‘greedily devouring a ragged Procopius of the last century’.5 This was a translation, presumably of the Wars: Gibbon did not absorb much Greek at school, and defended his reliance on translations at this stage on the grounds that his own would have been far inferior to those already published by experts. He turned back deliberately to Procopius when he came to write the History: ‘Procopius and Agathias (this time in the original Greek) supplied the events and even the characters’ for the reign of Justinian.6 This was in fact the last part in the History for which he could follow [followed] an ancient source in such detail. His relation to Procopius, and the methods which he followed in his use of the latter’s material, are essential elements in his presentation of Justinian. First, however, the sections on this period need to be placed in their context in the composition of the work as a whole. Again, Gibbon himself is our guide. When he began his account of ‘Roman decay’, he tells us, he had no very clear idea of its contents, structure or chronological scope; although his first reading took him as far as the Theodosian Code, he did not yet think in terms of twenty years’ work or of what he calls ‘six quartos’. Both the title of the work and the date at which the Empire ‘fell’ were as yet unclear to him, as was the proper literary style for such a history, defined by him later as ‘the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation’.7 In the event three volumes had been published by 1781, covering the first thirty-eight chapters and concluding with the ‘General

3 Hill 1900, 90. 4 Hill 1900, 94–5; he returned to Greek, neglected since leaving Lausanne, while at Buriton in the summer of 1762, where he finished the Iliad and read other works, including some Strabo, Hill 1900, 141–2). 5 Hill 1900, 41. 6 Hill 1900, 213. 7 Hill 1900, 181, 189.

6

GIBBON AND JUSTINIAN

Observations on the fall of the Roman Empire in the west’;8 the chronological divide came after accounts of the invasions in Gaul, Spain and Britain, and before he would have reached the reign of Zeno in the east. He had finished his fourth volume, containing his account of Justinian’s reign, before returning to Lausanne in 1783, and the rest followed, after a year’s interruption, in the years up to 1787, when the last words were written there on 27 June of that year. At Lausanne he had a library of more than two thousand volumes in addition to what he could find in other nearby libraries, and while there he worked solidly at the History every day. The narrative of Justinian’s age was continued as far as the reign of Heraclius, after which he inserted a chapter on the history of Christological controversy and the divisions of the eastern church (chapter 47). Only then did he reach the Byzantine section proper, with the famous chapter on Muhammad and Arabia and with the whole remaining history of Byzantium compressed into a rapid survey, written on a vastly more compressed scale than the earlier Roman chapters.9 Gibbon explains his reasons: the patient reader would find intolerable a detailed narrative of the remaining eight hundred years of decline, with their uniform and dreary history. It would be more profitable and more interesting to present in turn each of the new peoples to whom the torch was to pass, finally returning to the siege and capture of Constantinople by Mehmet II and to the ruins of Rome in the fifteenth century.10 He claims that he had seriously considered ending the work with the General Observations, that is, with the fall of the western Empire. What induced him to continue and when did he make the decision? The motivating factor was less, perhaps, a clear view or overall concept of ‘fall’ or ‘decline’ than it was a natural inclination, fed by a return to reading Greek authors in the summer following the publication of volumes 2 and 3 in 1781. The intention to continue was announced in the preface to a new edition published in 1782, and he now set to in earnest to read Procopius and Agathias and the other sources for Justinian.11 The overall structure of the History was more the product, therefore, of an organic growth than of a preconceived scheme, and some of its features are perhaps to be explained more easily in relation to what materials were to hand than to serious planning. Nevertheless, the arrangement of the later parts as a series of portraits of ‘nations’ exterior to Byzantium, rather than as a continuous chronological narrative, was deliberate and considered. We can see something of this episodic and sequential treatment also in the arrangement of the Justinianic material.

8 The composition of the ‘General Observations’ is dated by Gibbon in the Memoirs to before 1774, though the accuracy of his statement has been challenged; such an early date would of course be important for the understanding of the genesis of the History. For discussion see Ghosh 1983, 1991. 9 For the difference of coverage see Ghosh 1991, 145. 10 Bury 1896–1900, 5, chapter 48; cf. Hill 1900, 151. 11 Hill 1900, 214, though see Ghosh 1991, 155, note 167; the first aim of the work may have been focused on Rome and the city of Rome itself rather than on Constantinople and Byzantium.

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Justinian’s reign posed something of a difficulty for Gibbon, coming as it did at a point in the narrative so soon after the ‘General Observations’. He had already acknowledged that Justinian ‘subverted’ the Gothic and Vandal kingdoms of Italy and Africa, and that a long series of emperors was to continue on the Byzantine throne.12 Yet the ‘General Observations’ which follow refer disparagingly to the ‘tardy, doubtful and ineffectual’ aid given by the ‘Oriental Romans’ after the fall of the west, and place Justinian by implication in the list of ‘Greek’ emperors whose interest for the historian Gibbon only very grudgingly acknowledged. Moreover, immediately before the ‘General Observations’ Gibbon had written of the ‘total extinction’ of the Roman Empire in the west.13 He was already obliged therefore to see Justinian’s reconquest as marking at best only a temporary recovery, worthy of some admiration but not in itself sufficient to stem the course of decline. This of course chimed in very well with what he had read in Procopius, whose account confirmed, and partly no doubt dictated, his own inclinations. In Procopius he found, as he did also in Tacitus and Ammianus, an historian congenial to his own ideas, and even a stylist like himself. Procopius’ ‘style’, Gibbon writes, ‘continually aspires, and often attains, to the merit of strength and elegance’; ‘his reflections . . . . contain a rich fund of political knowledge’. So great was Gibbon’s admiration that he was prepared to overlook the sycophancy which he elsewhere detected in Procopius’ Buildings, or ‘Edifices’, in order to emphasize his standing as a critic: ‘the historian, excited by the generous ambition of pleasing and instructing posterity, appears to disdain the prejudices of the people and the flattery of courts’.14 All three major historians followed by Gibbon in the History – Tacitus, Ammianus and Procopius – were in different ways prototypes for himself, sly in their criticism, loud in the role as upholders of ancient morals, passionate in their attachment to the Roman tradition and good models for a philosophy of decline. In approaching his account of the reign of Justinian, therefore, Gibbon had to fit this episode of military and imperial recovery into his general picture of decline and was in so doing able to turn to a major contemporary writer whose strong opinions have dominated every account of the reign before and since Gibbon himself.15 He prefaces his account of Justinian directly with an introduction to Procopius. It suited him to see in the latter a senator and a prefect of the city of Constantinople (an identification which now seems unlikely), for he could then describe him as ‘a soldier, a statesman and a traveller’ and reinforce his high opinion of Procopius’ Wars as being based on ‘personal experience and free conversation’. The character of Belisarius, Justinian’s general, is central to Gibbon’s portrayal of the age.16

12 13 14 15 16

Bury 1896–1900, 4, chapter 38, 159. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 162. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 210. Cameron 1985. Gossman 1981, 61–3 (Justinian as the authoritarian father and Belisarius as the pious son); reading Gibbon at the age of sixteen, Disraeli felt that Gibbon had not made the most of the character of Belisarius, Moneypenny and Buckle 1929, 1, 33 (I owe this reference to Roland Quinault).

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Acceptance of Procopius’ high opinion of his patron, Belisarius (in the early stages at least), enables Gibbon to glide smoothly over Procopius’ Buildings, a eulogistic account of Justinian’s fortifications and other imperial building, despite the fact that he recognised its flattery to be something of an embarrassment in view of his emphasis on Procopius as a critical historian. He could thus explain the flattery to himself as a necessary bow to the emperor who was jealous of the praise given to Belisarius in Procopius’s other work. Later, in the same vein, he suggests that the retired general Belisarius would have viewed the success of his rival Narses with some chagrin: ‘I desire to believe, but I cannot affirm, that Belisarius sincerely rejoiced in the success of Narses’. Both generals were in fact suspected by the jealous emperor, but as Gibbon points out, ‘the favoured eunuch’, Narses, held his confidence for longer than did Belisarius, and the story of the wars of Justinian culminated, for Gibbon, in ‘the simple and genuine [my italics] narrative of the fall of Belisarius and the ingratitude of Justinian.17 Gibbon frames his whole narrative round these suggestions as to the personal motives of Justinian; the history of Justinian is treated as a moral tale. At the beginning, in his section on Procopius as an historian, he alleges that the jealousy of Justinian towards Belisarius coloured the emperor’s reception of Procopius’ history of the Wars: ‘although he laid them respectfully at the foot of the throne, the pride of Justinian must have been wounded by the praise of an hero who perpetually eclipses the glory of his inactive sovereign’.18 The term ‘inactive sovereign’ looks like a comment of his own; in fact it echoes Procopius’ explicit critique, just as the characterization of Belisarius accepts Procopius’ own valuation in parts of the Wars, while ignoring the more negative picture given by Procopius elsewhere. The most notorious of Procopius’ works was the Secret History, or in Gibbon’s parlance the ‘Anecdotes’, and despite its lack of fit with the Wars Gibbon relished it greatly. It amused him that the circumstances of its late discovery in the Vatican library cast some discredit on Cardinal Baronius, and he could not resist making it into a major source for his own work.19 He allows (necessarily) that its sensationalism casts some doubt on the reliability of Procopius as an historian (‘such base inconsistency must doubtless sully the reputation, and detract from the credit, of Procopius’), but defends the latter by claiming that the evidence of the Secret History is supported by internal evidence from the Wars and by other contemporary sources (which he does not cite). If we look more closely we will find that even though he sometimes acknowledges Procopius’ exaggerations,20 it is in fact the Secret History rather than the Wars which has provided his explanatory structure and general view of the reign. It has also provided his characters. Gibbon constantly refers in his footnotes to the 1623 editio princeps of the work by Alemannus, which he possessed, and 17 18 19 20

Bury 1896–1900, 4, 423–25, 429. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 210. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 211, n. 17. Compare Bury 1896–1900, 4, 368, note 72: ‘We may Reasonably Shut our Ears Against the Malevolent Whisper of the Anecdotes’.

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which was an important guide while he was writing this section, although it omitted the offending chapter about the early exploits of Theodora.21 Of the strange account in the Secret History of Belisarius’ wife Antonina and her passion for the young man Theodosius, Gibbon writes: ‘the diligence of Alemannus could add but little to the four first and most curious chapters of the Anecdotes. Of these strange Anecdotes, a part may be true, because probable, and part true, because improbable. Procopius must have known the former, and the latter he could hardly invent’.22 The reputation of Procopius is saved. Gibbon obviously enjoyed the Secret History. He recounts the whole story of Belisarius’ wife in some detail, while admitting that it detracts from Belisarius’ reputation (‘the hero deserved the appellation which may not drop from the pen of the decent historian’), and that it reveals Procopius in the role of the slave at an antique Roman triumph who reminds the victor that he has feet of clay.23 David Womersley has shown how Gibbon enhanced the already sensational narrative of the Secret History with details of his own.24 It is of Theodora that he makes the notorious statement that ‘her murmurings, her pleasures and her arts must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language’, quoting the offending lines in Greek in his note, adding his own comments and comparing her with courtesans in Roman poetry: ‘her charity was universal’. Four highly wrought footnotes make sure that the reader has got the most out of this carefully written passage.25 It is less often noted, however, that he has chosen to begin his own account of Justinian’s reign with a long section of Theodora (seven pages in Bury’s edition), within which he gives pride of place to her performances in the Hippodrome. ‘The prostitute, who had polluted the theatre of Constantinople, was adored as a queen in the same city.’.26 Gibbon makes a show of looking for extenuating factors; these are, however, limited. Theodora is allowed the virtues of courage (in the Nika revolt) and mercy (to repentant prostitutes), and even chastity after her marriage (though based on the silence of the sources rather than on positive evidence), and even Gibbon can allow some indulgence to her regrettable tendency towards Monophysitism, though he did not have the benefit of the very favourable picture of her given by eastern Monophysite sources.27 He did not see her as the protectress of persecuted clergy and mons, but instead accepted

21 In contrast there is no mention of a copy of the Buildings in the card copy of his Lausanne library: Keynes 1980. 22 Bury 1896–1900, 335, n. 128. 23 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 335, 334. 24 Womersley 1988, 284–5. 25 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 213. At note 23 Gibbon makes it clear that he had consulted a number of other editions and gone to considerable trouble in order to make good Alemannus’s omission of chap. 9 (‘somewhat too naked’). Note 24 contains his famous remark that ‘I have heard that a learned prelate, now deceased, was fond of quoting this passage in conversation’; it has been suggested that the learned prelate was Bishop Warburton (Hill 1900, 178, note 1). 26 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 242. 27 Notably John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, for which see Harvey 1990.

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Procopius’ version of her vindictiveness: her spies were everywhere, ‘her prisons, a labyrinth, a Tartarus, were under the palace’.28 After such a beginning, in which modern readers may well detect a high degree of gender prejudice,29 any account of Justinian himself will inevitably come as an anticlimax. Indeed, until we come much later in the narrative to his legislation and his religious policy, topics which Gibbon treats separately, Justinian is the absent figure from the account of his reign, just as he is also in the Wars of Procopius. Gibbon was aware of the problem himself: he admits that his source, Procopius, ‘represents only the vices of Justinian, and that these vices are darkened by his malevolent pencil’, but he points out that later historians such as Evagrius and Zonaras were equally critical.30 Not even Justinian’s churches and fortifications are allowed to cast credit on him: ‘cemented with the blood and treasure of his people’,31 they are notable in Gibbon’s view not for any vision on the part of the emperor but chiefly for what they show about the skills of contemporary architects. Gibbon’s final verdict on Justinian is negative. The military successes in the west receive only half a sentence (‘the design of the African and Italian wars was boldly conceived and executed’), to be eclipsed by criticism of an emperor who did not go to war himself.32 Justinian’s equestrian statue, ‘melted into cannon by the victorious Turks’, ironically ends the account.33 It was bad enough that the emperor, who, like Philip II, ‘declines the dangers of the field’, should be depicted as a warrior at all, and suitably ironic that the statue itself, which had been erected in the place occupied by the pillar of Theodosius and which weighed, according to Gibbon, 7,400 pounds of silver, had been ignominiously destroyed. In this concluding section the reader’s attention is mischievously directed away from the character or achievements of the emperor to the fate of his statue. The account begins and ends with carefully chosen sidelights with wholly negative implications. We have been told, in Gibbon’s ‘obituary’ of Justinian, that he was ‘neither beloved in his life nor regretted at his death’.34 We have been reminded immediately before of the superior qualities of Belisarius and of the ‘envy and ingratitude of his sovereign’.35 Now we have still further traducing of Justinian. Compared to Philip II for unwarlikeness, his statue, which had displaced a silver column of extraordinary weight and size, to be erected in stone and brass, had been melted down by the conquerors of Byzantium, and 28 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 216, note 31. 29 Gibbon was well aware that he was using Theodora as a female exemplar: Bury 1896–1900, 4, 216. She is one of the ‘unnatural women’ who recur in the Secret History, a theme that is associated with the weak and ‘feminine’ qualities which he sees at work in Christianity and in the ‘Greek’ emperors: see Gossman 1981, 43–7. 30 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 236 and note 82. 31 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 242. 32 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 431–2. 33 For this statue and its fate see Mango 1993, chapters X and XI. 34 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 431. 35 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 4, 431–2.

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even its earlier restoration by Andronicus I is ascribed merely to ‘the indulgence of a future prince’, to Justinian’s memory. Not surprisingly, Belisarius emerges as the hero of the narrative. Again, Gibbon is aware of defects, but chooses to excuse them in the interests of narrative construction. ‘The name of Belisarius can never die’; Gibbon does not believe the slander that he was guilty of plotting against Justinian in his last days – ‘his innocence was acknowledged’, though he died not long after, his death perhaps ‘hastened by resentment and grief’.36 A long footnote denies credence to the medieval legends of his being reduced to blindness and beggary – a scene depicted as recently as 1781 by the French painter David. Earlier, Belisarius’ ignominious recall by Justinian from the Gothic war has called forth an extended eulogy by Gibbon in which he accepts without question the enthusiasm of Procopius, and the general’s inglorious performance in the second Italian expedition (about which Procopius is in fact highly critical) is excused by comments inserted by Gibbon himself.37 Similarly, his disappointing campaign against the Persians in the early 540s is narrated in a way that covers the unimpressive reality with flat assertions of the moral dignity of Belisarius the man. So sure is Gibbon of this that he can detect it even behind Procopius’ rhetoric: of the letter allegedly sent by Belisarius to Justinian complaining of being kept short of troops and supplies, Gibbon notes that ‘the soul of an hero is deeply impressed on the letter, now can we confound such genuine and original acts with the elaborate and often empty speeches of the Byzantine historians’.38 Procopius, it seems, is elevated to ‘Roman’ status, and Belisarius stands for the fearless uprightness which Gibbon so much admired. Before Gibbon, Montesquieu had already found in Belisarius matter for admiration, but Gibbon had more difficulty in reconciling the man and his reputation.39 However, he is unwilling to do more than register the counterarguments, and certainly unwilling to follow Procopius into complete disillusionment, preferring to find reasons of his own for his hero’s lapses. Not surprisingly, he found the admiring portrayal by Agathias of the aging Belisarius, called from retirement to defeat the Cotrigurs, congenial, despite its ‘imperfect representation’ and ‘prolix declamation’.40 In Belisarius, as presented by Gibbon, David Womersley has detected a character which the historian has found difficult to understand, ‘opaque where others are transparent’.41 Gibbon has chosen to defend Belisarius against himself and inserts his own surmises about Belisarius’ state of mind in a clear attempt to show the latter’s heroic nature at points where it seems to be endangered by Procopius’ narrative. He has deliberately enhanced the contrast between Belisarius and Justinian that is inherent in the earlier parts of Procopius’ work, while glossing over the

36 37 38 39 40 41

Bury 1896–1900, 4, 429–30. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 32–4, 406–7, and cf. 294. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 399, note 29. Womersley 1988, 235. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 425–6. Womersley 1988, 235.

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very different picture which emerges in Procopius’ later writing. This has allowed him consistency of characterization: Justinian remains the ‘sluggish the inactive emperor’, who was nevertheless also a capricious tyrant. It also better suits Gibbon’s positioning of Justinian within the long Greek decline which in his view followed the fall of the Roman Empire in the west in AD 476, as represented in his ‘General Observations’; as elsewhere, Gibbon is ready at every moment to undercut the impression that Justinian may have been a successful emperor in order to preserve the integrity of his own conception of decline. The very shape of Gibbon’s narrative may therefore have been dictated, as he admits himself, by the works of Procopius. He describes his plan: to begin with Theodora, the Blues and Greens and Justinian’s administration, then to describe the wars, and only later the ‘jurisprudence and theology of the emperor’.42 He has thus given most prominence to the very sections of the Secret History which have always been the most notorious, namely those on Theodora and on the Nika revolt, and has devoted the greatest part of his narrative to military history. A clutch of modern novels about Justinian and Theodora do the same.43 We must therefore inquire why, when he does describe Justinian’s internal government Gibbon begins with a statement about the prosperity of the east that is at first sight memorable, especially after his account of the fall of the west. Gibbon presents the sixth-century east as prospering from trade and industry: society was enriched by the division of labour and the facility of exchanges, and ‘every Roman was lodged clothed and subsisted by the industry of a thousand hands’.44 What may appear to be a departure from his sources in this remarkable judgement is explained by the fact that Gibbon has found the essence of the account of the silk industry which follows in Procopius and other contemporary writers.45 Characteristically, the idealized tone of the opening description gives way abruptly to a much blacker picture once he reaches the subject of Justinian himself;46 again dictated by the Secret History, Gibbon’s assessment of the emperor’s administration, deliberately placed before the narrative of his military successes, is only marginally less hostile than Procopius’ own. Likewise, the account of Justinian’s buildings follows closely that of Procopius, even to the order in which they are mentioned.47 But while his description of St Sophia in Constantinople occupies four pages in Bury’s edition, it is undercut by Gibbon’s own memorable concluding remarks: A magnificent temple is a laudable monument to national taste and religion, and the enthusiast who entered the dome of St Sophia might be 42 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 211. 43 Cameron 1985, 67. 44 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 227. The tone here as elsewhere in chapter 40 represents Gibbon’s style at its most vigorous: ‘his language . . . has a Miltonic splendour’: Burrow 1985, 96–7. 45 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 233–44. 46 The indictment begins at 234 and extends to 240, to be followed by a more detailed narrative, again with hostile intent. 47 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 244–5.

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tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship, of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artificer, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls on the surface of the temple!48 Gibbon hints that he found the list of Justinian’s building works tedious to repeat and draws from them a lesson of weakness, not strength.49 Here his scepticism served him well. He was not taken in by Procopius’ claims as to the size or strength of fortifications, or the reality of urban creations: ‘the new foundations of Justinian acquired, perhaps too hastily, the epithets of impregnable and populous’, and of the forts ‘it seems reasonable to believe that the far greater part consisted only of a stone or brick tower . . . which was surrounded by a wall or a ditch, and afforded in a moment of danger some protection to the peasants and cattle of the neighbouring villages’.50 Interestingly, while J.B. Bury interposed in his edition a defence of Justinian’s fortifications, Gibbon was more right than he knew; he could not draw on modern archaeology,51 and he could add only limited details from other ancient sources, but his interest was aroused and he was alert to geography and to the geopolitics of empire. The section broadens out into a bridge to the narrative of the Persian war. So much for Justinian’s internal policies, which have been described for the most part only in the light of the extremely hostile Secret History, and even then not fully. Constantinople itself has been described much earlier in the History;52 and Gibbon does not need to repeat the description here. But with the sharp eye that we have already noted, he makes an observation on the city’s strategic vulnerability that is again negative in tone: the rich gardens and villas or its territory, he says, attracted barbarian attacks, and the emperor Anastasius was forced to erect a long wall, a ‘last frontier’, which in fact ‘proclaimed the impotence of his arms’, and which Justinian had to supplement.53 The central narrative part of Gibbon’s presentation of Justinian therefore owes a great deal to his reading of Procopius, and if anything he has enhanced its implications by downplaying the contradictory elements. Just as Procopius does in his History of the Wars, Gibbon keeps religion for separate treatment. To find

48 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 248, see further. The exemplary quality of insects is a theme also used by Hume. Gibbon alludes here to the comparison between a great church and a mere fly, drawn by Berkeley, and found after him in Thomson’s Seasons; the moral he draws, however, favours the fly and disparages the grandiosity of the building (Womersley 1988, 272–5). 49 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 250. 50 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 250. 51 The claims made in Procopius’ Buildings, a formal panegyric of the emperor, need to be treated with caution, even if sometimes they are confirmed by a remarkable discovery, as in the case of the Nea church in Jerusalem: see Cameron 1985, chapter 6 and cf. 95. 52 Bury 1896–1900, 2, 40–57. 53 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 253. For the vulnerability of Constantinople in relation to resources and defence see Mango and Dagron 1995.

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his account of Justinian’s Fifth Ecumenical Council, held in AD 553–4, we have to turn ahead to chapter 47, where he begins with a warning that a study of Justinian’s religious policies will only add to the negative picture already formed, while confirming the impression given in Procopius’ Secret History. Gibbons explicitly affirms his debt to Procopius, defending him (against Alemannus) for his ‘wise and moderate sentiments’, in judging dogmatic speculation to be folly, and deeming it sufficient to ‘know that power and benevolence are the perfect attributes of the Deity’.54 Predictably, Gibbon chooses to follow the ‘rational’ critic and in so doing implicitly to reject the earlier view of Justinian as model Catholic emperor and legislator.55 He shared Procopius’ disapproval of Justinian as a persecutor and a participant in religious controversy.56 Like Procopius, Gibbon pours scorn on the emperor’s theological pretensions,57 and is delighted when in old age Justinian himself lapses from orthodoxy: the ‘Jacobites (the object of Gibbon’s most withering scorn) no less than the Catholics were scandalized’.58 The prospect of an ecclesiastical history to be written by Procopius, as is hinted at in the Secret History, struck him with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation.59 Gibbon had much to say about eastern Christianity despite his air of fastidious disdain, and owed a great deal to the tenth-century Annals of the Alexandrian patriarch Eutychius, which he had read in the Latin translation by Pocock.60 But so far as Justinian was concerned, he was content to take the hostile Procopius at face value. What of Justinian as legislator and codifier of Roman law? Again, Gibbon separates the discussion from the historical narrative, and puts it in the context of a discussion of Roman law since the Republic. Here too while Justinian’s contribution, in the Digest, the Institutes and the Code, is recognized and defended, the emperor meets with criticism. Gibbon goes about his task somewhat obliquely, by first setting up the expectation that one might have hoped for a restoration of genuine ancient Roman law, the law of the Republic and early Empire, the law, that is, of the days of freedom and relative freedom before autocracy set in.61 By this standard Justinian must fail. Gibbon affects to recognize that time has moved on, nor can Justinian be accused of deliberate suppression. But this is faint praise: Justinian has restored, not the genuine Roman law of ancient times, but the jurisprudence of the middle Empire, an achievement, it is true, but only second best. In his own legislation the emperor has shown traits which Gibbon 54 Bury 1896–1900, 5, 133. 55 The view which had led to an outraged reaction to the publication of the Secret History in 1623 by Alemannus and to attacks on its authenticity. For a recent discussion of Justinian’s religious policies see Capizzi 1994, and for his ‘catholicism’ Biondi 1936. 56 Cf. Bury 1896–1900, 5, 134: ‘toleration was not the virtue of the times’. 57 As he does on the ‘cowardice’ of Pope Vigilius, 5, 137. 58 Bury 1896–1900, 5, 153–5, with note 139. 59 ‘It would have been curious and impartial’, Bury 1906, 5, 139, note 139. 60 Bury 1896–1900, 5, 155, note 136. 61 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 466.

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deplores: Christian severity, harsh laws on divorce and homosexuality, the latter, Gibbon, notes with a degree of pleasure, resulting in the punishment of two bishops.62 Though there were favourable as well as unfavourable portrayals of the emperor in the sources he has read, Gibbon prefers to dwell on the negative. He does not even do justice to the contradictory nature of the contemporary sources themselves.63 Here Justinian the emperor is all but lost in Gibbon’s own musings on Roman law;64 when he does re-emerge, it is as the descendant of Constantine and the Christian emperors, the mouthpiece of religious bigotry masquerading as Roman restoration. The crafting of this section is as deliberate as that of the historical narrative and it ends on the expected negative note: over the many centuries of Roman legal history (he counts from the Twelve Tables), confusion and contradiction had set in, and were only partly removed by Justinian. The new codification could not be maintained intact; only six years later Justinian issued a new edition of the Code, and ‘every year, or, according to Procopius, each day of his long reign was marked by some legal innovation’.65 The emperor was only partly successful even in what he did achieve; and even then, he removed a confusion which had acted as a measure of protection to the general population. In reality, Justinian was a capricious tyrant; the chapter concludes with the words: ‘the Romans were oppressed at the same time by the multiplicity of their laws and the arbitrary will of their master’.66 The chapter as a whole is artful to a degree: it defends Justinian only to condemn him, and to leave the reader with the picture of an emperor who, far from being the Catholic legislator and bringer of order, is the instigator of change for change’s sake; who is, in other words, still the Justinian of Procopius’ Secret History who is the bringer of disorder.67 The portrayal is worth comparing with the extremely hostile presentation of Constantine in chapter 18 of the History. There too jealousy and suspicion are highlighted;68 much space is given to the episodes in his family history which cast discredit on the emperor,69 and while (despite Gibbon’s remarks on his later degeneration) Constantine himself is praised for firmness or moral character, he is implicitly condemned for his inability to guide the moral development of his sons.70 No credit is given in this section to Constantine the Christian emperor, any more than it is to Justinian; that

62 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 505; for an extremely hostile modern account of Justinian see Honoré 1978, chap. 1. 63 For which see Cameron 1985, chapters 2 and 14. 64 On Gibbon’s views see further Hoeflich 1991, 803–18. 65 Gossman 1981, 38–9, with 34–40 on Gibbon’s discussion in general. 66 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 510. 67 Cameron 1985, 59–60; Carile 1978, 49–61. 68 Bury 1896–1900, 2, 204–12. 69 Especially the mysterious death of his son Crispus (206–12), firmly attributed by Gibbon to Constantine; Gibbon elaborately dismisses the attempts of the ‘modern Greeks, who adore the memory of their founder’, to excuse their emperor (210). 70 Bury 1896–1900, 2, 213.

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topic is reserved for chapter 20, and while Gibbon grudgingly gives Constantine the benefit of the doubt in relation to the sincerity or otherwise of his religious policy, he leaves many hints with the reader that an alternative explanation is possible. He embeds the judgement, furthermore, within the much longer and famously critical account of the development of the church from the time of Constantine onwards, in which Constantine’s active involvement in religious matters is explicitly termed ‘despotism’.71 Positioning of individual sections within or in relation to the broader narrative is a technique used to great effect both here and in the Justinianic section. Gibbon’s use of visual evidence in the section on Justinian is also determined by his reading of Procopius. He repeats and enlarges on the latter’s sly comparison of Justinian’s appearance with that of Domitian, while admitting to Procopius’ malice in including it.72 So far as Theodora is concerned he can supplement Procopius’ description of the empress in the Secret History by referring to ‘a mosaic at Ravenna’, of which he had read in Alemannus’ edition.73 Justinian’s equestrian statue gave him occasion for ironic comment. To St Sophia, as we have seen, he gives a long description, based in the first place on Procopius but also drawing on other contemporary or near-contemporary authors (Paul the Silentiary, Agathias, Evagrius) as well as the travellers Gyllius and Grelot.74 He can therefore comment in the face of Procopius’ eulogy on the fact that ‘the spectator is disappointed by an irregular prospect of half domes and shelving roofs’, and that ‘the scale of dimensions has been much surpassed by several of the Latin cathedrals’.75 Procopius’ description of the palaces on the Bosphorus is adorned with further reference to Alemannus’ edition.76 In general, Gibbon, has little visual material on which to draw for this part of the History. In contrast to his treatment of Arabia later,77 he is not tempted into an account of Athens in his own day by the story of the closing of the Academy. Francis Haskell has written recently of Gibbon’s reluctance to use visual evidence except when his knowledge is derived from literary sources,78 and his use of Procopius’ Buildings and concentration on topography and construction rather than visual details bears that out. All in all, then, Gibbon presents a dark picture of Justinian and his age, and especially of the vaunted recovery of the west. Belisarius is praised as being ‘above the heroes of the ancient republics’; ‘under his command, the subjects of Justinian

71 Bury 1896–1900, 2, chapter 21, especially 354. 72 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 230 note 109. 73 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 202 note 10. This is the famous mosaic of Theodora and her retinue, matched by another of Justinian, in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna (AD 547). 74 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 244–8. Gibbon lists his sources at 245, not 103, ‘among the crowd of ancients and moderns who have celebrated the edifice’. 75 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 246. 76 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 249 note 108. 77 Ibid., 4, chapter 50. 78 Haskell 1993, 187.

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often deserved to be called Romans’.79 But Belisarius’ victories and those of Narses were nonetheless ‘encompassed with the darkest shades of disgrace and calamity’.80 The emperor undermined his generals; and even the Gothic victories, by denuding defences, allowed new barbarian invaders to cross the Danube. By a forced turn, the invasions of Gepids, Lombards and Slavs were made contingent on the victories over the Goths; moreover, they were followed by the immediate appearance of the Turks. Gibbon found in Justinian’s major historian, Procopius, a critical view which allowed him to preserve the closure laid down in his account of the fall of the western Empire, and to give a detailed account of Justinian’s conquests without having to admit that they had significantly reversed the course of history. His references to the personal grievances of Procopius and to the bias of the Secret History look like objective criticism and obscure the true extent of his own collusion with the general interpretation which he found there. Something of the contradictions in Gibbon’s account, as well as in that of his model, can be seen from his various attempts to position the reign of Justinian in the general context of Roman rule and Greek decline. He can write that by the end of the sixth century Rome ‘had reached the lowest point of her depression’.81 Yet a further peak in the narrative is reached with the reign of Heraclius, ‘of the characters conspicuous in history . . . one of the most extraordinary and inconsistent’, and from whose reign ‘Byzantine’ history was to be reckoned, in eight hundred years from the reign of Heraclius to the Turkish conquest.82 Gibbon’s dilemma is apparent. The implication is that Justinian was still regarded as ‘Roman’,83 whereas his earlier narrative of Justinian’s reign had implied, or even stated, the opposite. Justinian, he says there,84 denied to Belisarius the chance to restore the Roman name and confirmed the rule of ‘the Greeks’: ‘the appellation of Greeks was imposed as a term of reproach by the haughty Goths’. In the same passage, Justinian’s armies are assigned to the enervated and unwarlike climate of ‘Asia’, rather than the manly air of ‘Europe’. A Janus-like figure in many accounts, not least that of Procopius, Gibbon’s Justinian has not escaped the same fate. Challenged to write an account of the sixth century, Gibbon found himself faced by problems both of organization and of interpretation. In his general picture Justinian belonged within the rhythm of decline which he ascribed to the Christian emperors from Constantine onwards, and to the line of so-called Greeks whose history Gibbon found so depressing. Yet there was also a sense in which

79 80 81 82 83

Bury 1896–1900, 4, 340–1. Bury 1896–1900, 4, 342. Bury 1896–1900, 5, 31. Bury 1896–1900, 5, 169, but see 170, where he seems to count from the reign of Maurice. ‘The line of empire, which had been defined by the laws of Justinian and the arms of Belisarius, recedes on all sides from our view: the Roman name, the proper subject of our inquiries, is reduced to a narrow corner of Europe’ (169). 84 Bury 1896–1900, 4, 341.

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the reconquest, like Justinian’s codification of Roman law, interrupted Gibbon’s narrative and interposed a ‘Roman’ rather than a ‘Greek’ interpretation. The work of Procopius, in which such contradictions were resolved by reducing them to personal moral character, provided Gibbon with a way out of the dilemma, which he thankfully adopted, the more so since many aspects of Procopius’ historical approach – notably his religious detachment, his seeming rationalism and his distrust of autocracy – corresponded with his own, Having not only accepted but even accentuated Procopius’ categories of analysis, Gibbon also accepted Procopius’ limitations. He produced a Justinian who could only be explained in the cardboard terms of tyrannical autocrat and religious bigot. It is not to be wondered at then if he did not succeed in forging out of his narrative of this period a wholly convincing bridge between the view expressed in the ‘General Observations’ and the long narrative of Greek decline found in the remaining part of the Decline and Fall.

Bibliography Biondi, Biondo 1936. Giustiniano primo, principe a legislatore cattolico. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. Bowersock, Glen W. 1996. ‘The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 40.8: 29–43. Burrow, John 1985. Gibbon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bury, John B. ed. 1896–1900. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols. Cameron, Alan 1976. Circus Factions: Blues and Greens in Rome and Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil 1985. Procopius and the Sixth Century. London: Duckworth. Capizzi, Carmelo 1994. Giustiniano primo tra politica e religione. Messina: Rubbettino. Carile, Antonio 1978. ‘Consenso e dissenso fra propaganda a fronda nelle fonti narrative dell’età Giustinianea’. In L’imperatore Giustiniano. Storia e mita. Giornati di studio a Ravenna, 14–16 ottobre 1976, edited by G.G. Archi, 37–93. Milan: A. Giuffrè. Dagron, Gilbert 2011. Hippodrome de Constantinople. Jeux, peuple et politique, Bibliothèque des histoires. Paris: Gallimard. Frier, Bruce W. ed. 2016. The Codex of Justinian: A New Annotated Translation with Parallel Latin and Greek Text, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghosh, Peter R. 1983. ‘Gibbon’s Dark Ages; Some Remarks on the Genesis of the Decline and Fall’, JRS 73: 1–23 Ghosh, Peter R. 1991. ‘Gibbon Observed’, JRS 81: 132–56. Gossman, Lionel 1981. An Empire Unposses’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, Susan Ashbrook 1990. Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the “Lives of the Eastern Saints”. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Haskell, Francis 1993. History and Its Images. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hill, George B. ed. 1900. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings. London: Methuen. Hoeflich, Michael H. 1991. ‘Edward Gibbon, Roman Lawyer’, The American Journal of Comparative Law 39: 803–18.

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Honoré, Tony 1978. Tribonian. London: Duckworth. Keynes, Geoffrey 1980. The Library of Edward Gibbon: A Catalogue, 2nd ed. Godalming: St Paul’s Bibliographies. Mango, Cyril 1993a. Studies on Constantinople, 10. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mango, Cyril 1993b. Studies on Constantinople, 11. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mango, Cyril and Dagron, Gilbert eds. 1995. Constantinople and Its Hinterland. Aldershot: Ashgate. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1973. ‘La caduta senza rumore di un impero nel 476 d.C.’, RSI 85: 5–21. Moneypenny, William and Buckle, George E. eds. 1929. The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 1, 33. New and revised edition. London: John Murray. Pocock, John 1999–2015. Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sarris, Peter and Miller, David 2018. The Novels of Justinian: A Complete Annotated English Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Womersley, David. 1988. The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Womersley, David. 1994. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols, abridged edition 2000, revised 2015. London: Penguin.

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I was invited to speak on these three very different historians in one of the annual symposia of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies and in some ways they do not fit well together except that as the title of the ensuing volume suggests all three represent stages in the reception of Byzantium in Britain (Bury moved from Ireland to Cambridge in 1902). It was an instructive experience to compare them. Bury, whose books were still standard when I started on my career, was extraordinarily wide-ranging and would not readily have called himself a Byzantinist, or not only that; he was also a rationalist and a freethinker, whereas Baynes, who did hold a chair of Byzantine studies, was deeply interested in religious questions. Toynbee was different again, highly controversial in his earlier career and while publishing the successive parts of his Study of History, in which he argued for an ‘Orthodox sphere’ [something that resurfaced following the end of the Soviet Union], turned to Byzantium with his sprawling Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World, his last book (Toynbee 1973). Together they reflect the slow development of Byzantine studies as an academic discipline in Britain, as well as its deep association with Classics. In the past most British Byzantinists had received a classical education and several scholars who later occupied chairs in the subject, including Romilly Jenkins and Donald Nicol, were openly disparaging of it in comparison with classical Greece. Jenkins was an honorary lecturer in classical Greek archaeology while holding the Koraes chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, the very chair of which Toynbee was the first holder and that he had to vacate in 1924. The comparison with the early development of Byzantine studies in for instance France and Germany is striking, even though continental scholars from the nineteenth century onwards designated their subject variously between late Roman, late antique and Byzantine, the French term Bas-Empire carrying with it shades of Gibbonian decline. It was his immensely wide range that struck me most about Bury, as well as the strong contrast with Baynes, who rose to become professor of Byzantine studies at University College London, interpreting his subject widely but with a focus on religion and spirituality from Constantine and Christianity to the meaning of Byzantine icons. Toynbee was in a different category altogether with his vast and DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-3

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very influential Study of History following Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West in asserting an organic rise and fall of civilizations but turning to Byzantium in his last book. Bury remained standard reading for students long after I began to publish and teach from the 1960s and especially the 1970s onwards even if the opening sentence of this chapter is no longer true, and I was much influenced by the writings of Baynes (also influential on the young Peter Brown and much respected by Joan Hussey, the doyenne of Byzantine history in the University of London, his former pupil), but did not feel I had to engage with Toynbee. Stitching the three together in one chapter was not an obvious task and some edits have been made here to the section on Toynbee. I can point readers also to Dimitri Obolensky’s essay of 1999 on Toynbee and Byzantium in the volume of studies in honour of Cyril Mango and indeed Toynbee’s Gifford Lectures of 1956 now seem less clearly out of date than they did when I wrote this chapter. –––––––––––––

If you go into a classical and Byzantine bookshop today, one of the books you will almost certainly find there will be Bury’s History of the Later Roman Empire. Like his History of Greece, later revised by Russell Meiggs and commonly used as a textbook until very recently, Bury’s Later Roman Empire has served generations as a guide and an introduction to the period from the death of Theodosius I to that of Justinian; it is even now in many ways the most detailed narrative of the period [perhaps a surprising comment in 2000, given the publication of A.H.M Jones’s Later Roman Empire in 1964, on which see chapter 5 below]. It is less easy to find his History of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Death of Irene to the Accession of Basil I (802–867), but if you can, it is worth having. Bury’s annotated edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is still the edition of choice for any Byzantinist reading Gibbon [even if now superseded by Womersley 1995]. Bury planned the massive Cambridge Medieval History and his introduction to the original fourth volume of 1923 was reprinted out of pietas in the revised version of 1967, which kept to the same effective starting date of 717. Where are they now, the polymaths like Bury? It was Norman Baynes, who followed so much in Bury’s footsteps, who wrote the standard memoir of his predecessor.1 Bury was only some sixteen years older than Baynes himself – they were born in 1861 and 1877 respectively – but he died in 1927 at the relatively early age of sixty-five, whereas Baynes lived on until 1961 and there are still people who knew and remember him.2 Joan Hussey has written of the difference between them that while Baynes had a deep appreciation of his predecessor, he felt that in Bury critical analysis at times impeded creative vision, whereas, she writes, Baynes himself ‘was never afraid to combine critical and exacting scholarship with imaginative reconstruction’ . . . ‘it was Baynes, his 1 Baynes 1929. 2 I am indebted to the appreciation by Joan Hussey [his former pupil], written for the British Academy (Hussey 1965); and see also her contribution for the opening of the Norman Baynes Byzantine Collection at Dr Williams’s Library, 1967).

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follower and successor, who was able to bring to life the civilization of Byzantium for an immeasurably wider audience than that commanded by Bury’.3 I shall return later to this question of audience. They had met by 1903 and corresponded thereafter; Bury asked Baynes to contribute to the Cambridge Medieval History (though not to volume 4), which indeed Baynes later criticised in a review in the Times Literary Supplement.4 At that time Bury was already Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, whereas Baynes only went down from Oxford in 1903 and then went to the Bar; he was not appointed Assistant Lecturer at University College London until 1913 or Reader until after the First World War. Baynes’s life and career were less varied than was the case with Bury. He never married and spent all his academic career at University College London.5 His mother continued to be an important force in his life for many years, and he was supported by a deep religious sense derived from his Baptist background. Baynes gave much of himself to evening teaching of ancient history to the wider public and is remembered for his thrilling voice and his talent for companionship among colleagues and pupils. He was known more widely to historians in the University College London Ancient History Circle and at the annual Baynes Weekend at Wellingborough, a place chosen because it was said to be equidistant from Oxford, Cambridge and London. Hugh Last, Frank Adcock (Professor of Ancient History at Oxford and Cambridge) and Norman Baynes were the triumvirate who dominated it for years (I am glad to have been one of the first women to have been invited to attend, though that was not until after Baynes’s death). He also shared with Last and Adcock an attachment to the Roman Society, for which he served as president and which honoured him with a special issue of the Journal of Roman Studies in 1947. Baynes’s interests and the circumstances of his life led him to publish, in addition to what he wrote on Byzantium and the later Roman empire, bibliographies on classics for the wider public, on the Old Testament and, during the Second World War, on Hitler and National Socialism.6 Bury’s range and output were even wider, and differently focused.7 At Trinity College Dublin he held the chair of Greek simultaneously with that of Modern History. He was an expert on Robert Browning and had published editions of the poems of Pindar. While holding the Regius chair of Modern History at Cambridge from 1902 onwards he published on the ancient Greek historians and St Patrick and supplemented his large academic output with a stream of literary pieces, Latin and Greek verses and translations.

3 Hussey 1965, 372. 4 Hussey 1967, 4–5. 5 As Professor of Byzantine History from 1931 until his retirement in 1942. In 1937 he was relieved of his duties in teaching ancient history and made Honorary Professor of Byzantine History and Institutions. 6 See the bibliography included in JRS 37 (1947): 3–9 [in a volume dedicated to him], also with prefatory note by Joan Hussey. 7 Very useful also is Huxley 1976.

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He wrote on ancient women, praising Christianity for the many ‘fine women’ it had produced, who might act as models and prototypes for the modern emancipated woman, and eliciting an appreciative response from Mrs. Fawcett.8 Though a classicist by training and one who won a fellowship at Trinity College Dublin by examination, he also studied Sanskrit, Syriac and Hebrew at Göttingen for six months during his undergraduate career and later also Russian. Steven Runciman remembered that Bury was only willing to take him seriously as a prospective Byzantinist on learning that he too knew some Russian. This Bury took as a good sign and promptly sent the young Runciman away, telling him to review two articles in Bulgarian.9 The third and youngest of the scholars considered here is Arnold Toynbee. Born in 1889, Toynbee was also a classicist by training who had won scholarships to Winchester and Balliol, and was elected a fellow of Balliol as soon as he graduated; he then married into what was in effect the British classical aristocracy, choosing as his wife the daughter of Gilbert Murray.10 Neither Baynes nor Toynbee were directly pupils of Bury. Although Baynes met Bury in 1903 and had written his Lothian prize essay on Heraclius by then, he left academic life in favour of law for some years after taking Oxford Greats, while Toynbee’s period as a fellow of Balliol was cut short by the start of the First World War. Yet in the preface to his late book, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World, Toynbee states that he owed his inspiration and his enthusiasm for Constantine Porphyrogenitus to Bury: ‘my mother had been giving me the volumes of Bury’s edition of Gibbon in instalments and it was Bury’s appendix to volume 6, published in 1902, that had set me off’.11 He dedicated this book, in effect, to Bury: ‘I publish this book as a small tribute to Bury, who, besides being a very great historian, was also a masterly editor of Greek texts’.12 The three men were very different. In his memoir of Bury, Baynes has left a sympathetic and scrupulous discussion of one whose views did not in some important matters coincide with his own. After an extended treatment of Bury’s rationalism, for instance, he writes that ‘perhaps’ one thing is clear: ‘the discreet student will not go to Bury’s books for his church history’.13 Toynbee in turn was very unlike Baynes, yet he was among the many signatories to the admiring address presented to Baynes in 1942, the year of his retirement, in which he gave the Romanes lecture in Oxford and received an honorary D.Litt. In the preface to this address, incidentally, Bury is described as Baynes’s ‘friend and master’, and Baynes himself as ‘universally recognized as Bury’s successor’.14 The list of names reads

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

See Baynes 1929, 71. Runciman 1991, 15. For Toynbee’s life see McNeill 1990, with Martel 1990 [and cf. McNeill 1993]. Toynbee 1973, vi. Toynbee 1973, viii. Baynes 1929, 88. Address 1942, 20.

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like a litany of the great and good. Joan Hussey has already commented on the remarkable warmth of affection expressed towards Baynes – amicus carissimus – by his academic colleagues in Britain and elsewhere.15 Toynbee continued to be a friend of Baynes and to urge him to write the larger studies of Byzantium which sadly never came.16 These personal connections are important and they are still very relevant to the Byzantinists of today. The world of Byzantine scholarship is not very large even now; moreover, Toynbee’s career after leaving the Koraes chair at King’s College London in 1924 continued to lie in London. I know that there were people who knew Toynbee present at the Symposium in 1995 at which this paper was delivered, and one – Steven Runciman – who must have known all three. They differed markedly, however, in their teaching and influence. Runciman writes of Bury that he was a ‘frail, shy man’, who may have had a few pupils in Dublin, but who, after he moved into Byzantine studies, ‘neither had nor wished to have more’.17 Toynbee spent little time or effort on regular teaching at King’s during his tenure of the chair there, giving on average only seventeen lectures a year to few students, and with few other duties. His appointment had been conditional on his brushing up his Modern Greek in order to be able to teach it, and his failure to teach played a significant part alongside the political complaints that were eventually made against him.18 After leaving King’s he had no further teaching duties.19 The trajectory of Baynes was very different. He took his responsibilities very seriously. Arnaldo Momigliano, Professor of Ancient History at University College from 1951 to 1975 [on whom see chapters 7 and 8], said of him in his Inaugural Lecture of 1952 that ‘to teach ancient history in the college of George Grote and Norman Baynes must have seemed a severe responsibility to my predecessors Professor Cary and Professor Jones’.20 Baynes was as interested in introducing teachers to ancient history as in writing books on Byzantium and taught for many years in both day and evening schools for the purpose; he also made regular broadcasts, including broadcasting to schoolchildren, and produced bibliographies for those without Latin or Greek. He is still (just) remembered for his voice and powers of explanation, and again, Joan Hussey cites examples from surviving letters of appreciation, which were evidently many. He was proud to see himself first and foremost as a teacher, and a teacher who valued pupils from every kind of background. This surely had much to do with the sense of mission inculcated in his early years at home, but like the Ancient History Circle it also showed

15 Cf the concluding reference (21) in the Address to the ‘kindnesses which Baynes has shown to a variety of causes and to all sorts and conditions of men’; cf. Hussey 1967, 9–11. 16 Hussey 1967, 6. 17 Hussey 1967, 6. 18 Clogg 1986, 62–6; Beaton 1991. 19 Martel 1990, 348, is particularly scathing on his failure to teach. 20 Momigliano 1952, 1966.

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his talents for friendship and the lively part he took in meetings and theatricals.21 He was evidently also a performer in his teaching: he gave a memorable rendering of the chorus of frogs in Aristophanes’ Frogs22 – the precursor of a similar performance which I well remember given by Eduard Fraenkel when I was a student at Oxford. This personal involvement is one of the things most remarked about him, and is difficult for those of a younger generation to recapture: he was, for instance, ‘best friends’ with Hugh Last, the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, who was by all accounts an unusually austere and reserved person. They wrote to each other as often as we would phone [or email or text] our friends nowadays. But for a long period at the end of his life, from 1953 onwards, Baynes’s activity was severely curtailed by ill health and he was unable to write the books his friends so wanted him to write, or to reply to his many correspondents from all walks of life. An obvious difference between the three lay in their personal ideas and beliefs. Bury’s late-nineteenth-century rationalism is discussed by Baynes in his Memoir, as I have already said (‘the disciple of Gibbon was, like his master, a Rationalist’).23 It was a high-minded late Victorian rationalism which, at that date, still required its upholder to debate seriously and form a view on the role of religion in history. Bury’s conclusion was that Christianity was in no way miraculous and that any argument from its success must be discarded; however, if ‘viewed modestly as a great social phenomenon, Christianity has had a distinguished and instructive history’. But its days were over: ‘it began to decline when it ceased to be fully adequate to the needs of the time and to correspond to all the needs of progress. The decomposition, like the growth, can be traced step by step.’ He took this belief to the logical limit and excluded any kind of dilute theism: ‘There is nothing for it but to trust the light of our reason. Its candle power may be low but it is the only light we have’.24 Bury, the historian of the idea of progress and advocate of freedom of thought,25 believed in contingency rather than in laws of history. Yet his inaugural lecture at Cambridge set out his belief that history was a science – no more and no less.26 Articles he produced during the First World War, setting out his rationalist principles and his views on causation and contingency in history, are, as Baynes rightly says, a necessary background for understanding Bury’s work, not simply explaining why he came to write on freedom of thought, but also why he wrote his history as he did. Indeed, Bury’s views and his approach to history led him in Baynes’s view to omit a whole dimension from his understanding of the early Byzantine state. When later Peter Brown was to praise the use made of the vast Christian literature of the early Byzantine empire by A.H.M. Jones, he cited Baynes as an example of a historian who had the kind of empathy which

21 22 23 24 25 26

For example as Burglar Bill and (very differently!) the voice of God: Hussey 1967, 8, 10. See Hussey 1965, 370. Baynes 1929, 76 f. Baynes 1929, 81. Bury 1913, 1921. Bury 1903.

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these sources would make possible.27 But for Bury, belief in human progress, a belief which he retained despite the experience of the war, was to be the nearest he came to an act of faith, and indeed he described it as such himself.28 That particular kind of rationalism, combined with a liberal view of progress, now seems very much in period. Others, for instance Anthony Bryer, have shown how crucial were the years from 1908, the date of the foundation of the Bywater and Sotheby chair at Oxford, to the early 1920s for the development of the academic study of Byzantine studies and modern Greek in the UK,29 and comment is necessary on the importance of the First World War and its aftermath on each of my subjects. During the war the young Toynbee was writing official propaganda and Baynes worked on intelligence while lecturing on ancient history to the University College Evening School, though he was still a law tutor until 1916. Baynes’s background and inclinations were quite different from those of Bury. Baynes was not simply a Protestant but had been brought up a Baptist. Both his parents were closely connected with the Baptist Missionary Society and Baynes himself was deeply religious: when he wrote to his father about his plans for a subject for the Lothian Prize Essay he used revealing language: ‘the wars of Heraclius are really a crusade before the time and the victory of the Holy Mother was that of truth over error’.30 His essay on icons, ‘The Supernatural Defenders of Constantinople’ and his 1947 lecture, ‘The Thought-world of East Rome’, display the kind of empathy characteristic of Peter Brown. It is no surprise that Brown frequently referred to them and made much use in his earlier writings of the saints’ lives translated in Dawes and Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints, a modest publication which like Baynes’s own co-edited volume of essays on Byzantium became a basic tool for students.31 A review by him of Ernst Stein’s history of the later Roman empire published in the Journal of Roman Studies for 1928 made his own approach very clear: he took Stein gently to task for his limited and largely political focus: ‘there is no attempt to initiate the reader into the thought-world of the fourth and fifth centuries – the conflict between the adherents of the classical tradition with those who were for ever pouring new wine into the old bottles’. In the pages on monasticism ‘Dr Stein has but little interest for a great religious movement . . . we are not helped to look upon the world as a Byzantine saw it’.32 Two other subjects dear to Baynes – Augustine and Constantine – demonstrate his emotional involvement with Christianity; the first links him again to Peter Brown, and of the second, Brown himself wrote that Baynes’s Raleigh lecture on Constantine33 ‘saved’ us in

27 Brown 1972, 50. ‘Brilliant’ is used more than once by Brown when writing of Baynes, e.g., 50, note 3; 334. 28 Baynes 1929, 87–8. 29 See Bryer 1988. 30 Cited by Hussey 1967, 4. 31 Dawes and Baynes 1948; Baynes and Moss 1948. 32 Baynes 1928, 217. 33 Baynes 1929, 1972.

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England from the extreme scepticism with which Constantine’s Christianity has been viewed by continental scholars.34 With all due allowance for the passage of time and the large recent bibliography on Constantine, that essay still stands as the best refutation of the sceptics, and is a basis, for example, of T.D. Barnes’s presentation of Constantine as a committed Christian. Though Peter Brown was for a time a pupil of Momigliano, as I was, the creative and empathetic dimension of Baynes’s work, together with his feel for eastern Christianity, were clearly strong influences. Brown learned from Momigliano to develop further both his emphasis on creativity and imagination and the deep interest in the working of religion, and from others the benefits of approaching religious history from the context of social anthropology.35 But the distinctive approach of Baynes was one of the clear influences in the conception of late antiquity so characteristic of Brown and his successors. Toynbee’s religious stance changed more than once during his writing career. During and after the First World War he took the view that religion was an illusion, but in 1930, through what he claimed as a mystical experience, he again became convinced of the existence of God, and eventually became a Roman Catholic, claiming now that Christianity was the highest of the religions and made western civilization worth saving; by the 1960s, however, he had fallen back on a kind of universal pantheism with no one supreme religion.36 The Study of History, which comprises twelve volumes in all including the last, a Reconsideration, published over the period from 1934 to 1961, embraced many twists and turns of the author’s mind, just as it includes a bewildering juxtaposition of examples to illustrate its sprawling argument.37 But such a shifting position as to the force of religion in history did not stand in Toynbee’s way or undermine other certainties as to the ‘essence’ or ‘character’ of alleged civilizations any more than it restrained him from repetition, lack of organization or the replacing of argument by categorical statement. The same mixture of undigested elements can be seen in his two late works, Hannibal’s Legacy (1965), which deals with the Roman republic, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World (1973). The successive volumes of The Study of History sold in enormous numbers in their day. Yet reading even a part of this vast work today is an uncomfortable experience, so unwilling are we to accept such grand generalizations and so repelled, if that is not putting it too strongly, by the crudity of Toynbee’s views on race and ethnicity. The constant resort in a work on what we would now best consider societies or cultures rather than civilizations to metaphors of sickness and health,38 youth and age, family relationships or

34 35 36 37

Brown 1972, 256. See e.g. Cracco Ruggini 1988, 741; Rousselle 1985. Martel 1990, 342–43. Toynbee 1934–61, I-II (1934); IV–VI (1939); IV–VI (1939); VII–X (maps and gazetteer; 1959); XII (1961). 38 For metaphors of decay see also Spengler 1918, 1923; see Tainter 1988, 77–9, and on Toynbee 79–80.

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moral weakness or vigour is so out of place in a postmodern age that one can hardly read Toynbee without feeling an almost physical discomfort. Unlike Bury or Baynes, Toynbee has attracted violent criticism from Hugh Trevor-Roper and others, partly in reaction to the adulation which he had attracted during his lifetime.39 As with Hannibal’s Legacy and begun, as Toynbee tells us, in 1966, late in his life, the eight hundred pages of Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World present an extraordinarily broad sweep, ‘amply documented by references to ancient sources and modern scholarship’, as one reviewer put it, ‘and written apparently without regard for cramping restrictions which publishers are wont to impose on scholars of lesser stature’.40 Both books are sprawling and undisciplined though both contain some sections memorable as pieces of historical writing. Toynbee tells us that he had not been able to take advantage of Dimitri Obolensky’s book, The Byzantine Commonwealth (published in 1971), and he has little to say in his section about foreign relations about Byzantium and eastern Europe except for Bulgaria. In general, in that scholars are even now trying to free themselves from the old idea of Byzantium as a static and authoritarian state, it must be said that reading Toynbee does not represent a helpful enterprise. [The original text referred to ‘the present generation’; twenty years later the effort is still going on.] He insists on the contrast between Hellenic civilization on the one hand, characterized by secularization, hatred of autocracy and love of freedom, and ‘Byzantine’ civilization. He sees the latter’s essence as encapsulated in the act of proskynesis in which a subject expressed his servility to the emperor and the state.41 In this he claims a break with the past, even ‘an eager receptiveness, not continuity’.42 Toynbee himself wrote to Baynes to encourage him to give a complete expression to the dualism in Byzantine culture between Hellenism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition which Baynes had set out in his essays,43 a dualism restated with reference to Toynbee by Speros Vryonis.44 The history of academic posts in Byzantine and modern Greek in British universities has not been an easy one. Questions of range and theological stance have too often been left unresolved, with difficult consequences. For Bury this did not seem to pose any difficulties. Bury believed in cultural continuity between the

39 [Notably in Trevor-Roper 1957; see also Martel 1990; McIntyre and Perry 1989; Obolensky 1998, which appeared three years after this paper.] 40 Staveley 1967. 41 Toynbee 1973, 526f.; see Kazhdan and Constable 1982, 117–20. 42 Kazhdan and Constable 1982, 5. [The question of continuity between the ancient world and Byzantium was seen for other reasons as a problem by Kazhdan, who had spent his formative years in the Soviet Union, and has resurfaced in the current insistence by Anthony Kaldellis and others that Byzantium was Roman and again in the description of Byzantium after the seventh century as a ‘rump state’.] 43 See Hussey 1947, 4. 44 Vryonis 1994, citing Toynbee at 19–20. Toynbee saw the contrast he asserts as a matter of essence and ethos, between the Hellenic spirit and the Byzantine spirit.

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ancient Greek world and that of Byzantium,45 even asserting that ‘the civilization of the later Roman empire was the continuation of that of ancient Greece’.46 There was no incompatibility for him between this and his expressed view that no ‘Byzantine empire’ ever began to exist; the Roman empire did not come to an end until 1453.47 He showed an early interest in the later Greek language and became a serious traveller in Greece; he picked up languages with ease. As George Huxley noticed, he expressed the view in 1919 that Greece had the best claim to Constantinople.48 Bury held chairs of Greek and Modern History simultaneously and Baynes taught ancient history while occupying a chair of Byzantine history; apparently no one found this odd. Baynes retained his fascination with Augustine while writing on Byzantine topics, though he was never to write about him at full length – a topic for retirement, he thought. Toynbee had been a student at the British School at Athens in 1911 and learned fluent modern Greek, although he confessed to Principal Burrows of King’s College that by 1919 it had become rusty and promised on appointment to polish it up; nor did he show any interest in modern Greek literature, a fact which the electors also had to take into account. But as a young fellow and tutor in ancient history at Balliol, and while working on intelligence during the war, he was already interested in later Greek history, and published on Greece since 1882 and on the Armenians in the Ottoman empire.49 His main rival candidate for the Koraes chair, A.W. Gomme, himself an excellent classicist, was also competent and interested in modern Greek language and literature.50 Bury, by far the oldest of the three historians, spent the First World War in Cambridge, where he wrote a series of articles in the R.P.A. Annual in which he set out some of his ideas about history. He also defended the views about the supremacy of free expression of thought upheld at the beginning of the war in his History of Freedom of Thought, and his book The Idea of Progress appeared in 1920. He believed that progress, like history, was contingent and not guaranteed, and clung to the idea even through the experience of war.51 For Baynes the war years represented the time of his move from law to scholarship; he had already published a set of articles on Theophylact Simocatta, Heraclius and the Persian campaigns, which remained basic for a very long time. But like Toynbee he also worked in intelligence. As for Toynbee himself, the foundations were laid during these years for his later involvement with current affairs and international history. Greece, Toynbee said in his inaugural lecture in 1919, was about to take the place of the 45 46 47 48 49

See Huxley 1976, 101f. See Baynes 1929, 17. See Baynes 1929, 64. Huxley 1976, 103; Baynes 1929, 166. Clogg 1986, 35–6. [Toynbee states in the preface to Toynbee 1973, v–vi that he had conceived the idea of editing the works of the emperor while in his last year at Oxford in 1910–11, and that had he not been appointed to the Koraes chair that is what he might have set out to do.] 50 Clogg 1986, 36. 51 Baynes 1929, 81–8, cf. 88: ‘The Idea of Progress was his working faith’; see also 78.

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Ottoman empire as the bridge between Europe and the east.52 If Greece could not have Constantinople, Bury had written to The Times in February of the same year, then it should be placed under the League of Nations. There is not the space here to consider the relationship of this range of works by British – or better, English and Irish, scholars – with broader trends in European scholarship. They were far from being influenced by Marxist or economic explanations and seem equally far from either M.I. Rostovzeff or Max Weber. The emphasis on continuity on the part of both Bury and Baynes also set them apart from such historians as Ernst Stein or Ferdinand Lot, with their conceptions of decline, and from the preoccupation of so many others with finding an explanation for the fall of the Roman empire and the end of classical antiquity.53 Their connection with European scholarship was rather a connection with Byzantinists like Georg Ostrogorsky, Henri Grégoire and Franz Dölger, and with the east European academies. Of the three historians, if we consider students and university syllabuses, Bury must be the one who has been most read. Toynbee was for a time immensely popular, but not, surely, in academic teaching. It was however an important achievement that he should have placed Byzantium within the context of world history, something most Byzantinists have failed to do. His flaws are obvious, and indeed the sprawling breadth of his interests make even his more specialised works like the book on Constantine Porphyrogenitus appear eccentric. Nevertheless, Byzantium does need – even more so today – to be considered against the broad context and the longue durée of European and Mediterranean history. Few other scholars have attempted as broad a view as Toynbee. Perhaps there is now a need to return – not, certainly, to his notions of affiliations and parentage – but to a real ‘long view’. Though Toynbee’s grand scheme of the decline and fall of cultures is unlikely to be revived it has resonances in later work on culture and imperialism, the supposed decline (or ‘triumph’) of the west, and Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, as it does also in the attention to complex societies and their collapse. Especially since 1989, Byzantium still has many aspects to be explored by a historian prepared to risk that long (or indeed broad) comparative view [and still more in the context of global history]. As for Bury’s histories, while they have been much read, they would perhaps, as Baynes implies, have been more appreciated if they had brought the subject more to life. Yet it was Bury, as well as Rostovtzeff, whose example lay behind A.H.M. Jones and the solid school of late Roman history he inspired.54 His attention to detail, his pragmatism and his interest in constitutional and administrative history (as also in the Kletorologion of Philotheos) have left very recognisable traces in others. But it is Baynes who provided a model and example for those who have 52 Clogg 1986, 43–4. 53 See Patlagean 1980. [The topic is now (2021) well and truly back at the top of the historical agenda.] 54 See Liebeschuetz 1993.

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been more attuned to the emotive and the spiritual. Baynes’s article, brilliantly titled ‘The Supernatural Defenders of Constantinople’,55 lies behind much later writing on images, relics and holy men. In ‘The Icons Before Iconoclasm’56 he outlines the arguments in the Christian anti-Jewish dialogues that have received so much attention since. His work on Constantine came to represent a new orthodoxy. And his attention to ‘the man in the East Roman Street’ (even if not to the woman) foreshadowed by more than a generation the approach of Alexander Kazhdan and the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium of 1991. I can see some merits in Toynbee despite his many defects and I owe a great debt to Bury. But if I had to choose one of the three, I would choose Baynes.

Bibliography Address 1942. An Address Presented to Norman Hepburn Baynes with a Bibliography of His Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baynes, Norman H. 1928. ‘Review of Stein, Ernst, Geschichte des spâtrônischen Reiches’, JRS 18: 217–28. Baynes, Norman H. 1929. A Bibliography of the Works of J.B. Bury, Compiled with a Memoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baynes, Norman H. 1929, 1972. ‘Constantine the Great and the Christian Church’, PBA 15: 341–442, reprinted with preface by H. Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baynes, Norman H. 1947. ‘The Supernatural Defenders of Constantinople’, AB 87: 165–77. Baynes, Norman H. 1951. ‘The Icons before Iconoclasm’, HThR 44: 93–106. Baynes, Norman H. and Moss, H. St. L. B. eds. 1948. Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beaton, Roderick 1991. ‘Koraes, Toynbee and the Modern Greek Heritage’, BMGS 15: 1–18. Brown, Peter 1972. ‘The Later Roman Empire’, in Brown, Peter, Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine, 50. London: Harper and Row. Bryer, Anthony A.M. 1988. ‘Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies: aAPartial View’, BMGS 12: 1–26. Bury, John B. ed. 1896–1900. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 7 vols. London: Methuen & Co. Bury, John B. 1900. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Bury, John B. 1903. Inaugural Lecture, 26 January 1903. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bury, John B. 1912. History of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Death of Irene to the Accession of Basil I (802–867). London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Bury, John B. 1913. A History of the Freedom of Thought. London: Henry Holt and Co. Bury, John B. 1921. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Bury, John B. 1923a. History of the Later Roman Empire. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. Bury, John B. ed. 1923b. The Eastern Roman Empire 717–1923. Cambridge Medieval History, 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clogg, Richard 1986. Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair. London: Routledge. Cracco Ruggini, Lellia 1988. ‘All’ombra di Momigliano: Peter Brown e la mutazione del tardoantico’, RSI 100: 739–67.

55 Baynes 1947. 56 Baynes 1951.

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B U R Y, B A Y N E S A N D T O Y N B E E Dawes. Elizabeth A.S. and Baynes, Norman H. 1948. Three Byzantine Saints. Oxford: Blackwell. Hussey, Joan M. 1947. ‘Bibliography of the Published Works of Norman H. Baynes’ with Prefatory Note by J.M. Hussey’, JRS 37: 3–9. Hussey, Joan M. 1965. ‘Norman Hepburn Baynes, 1877–1961’, PBA 49: 365–73. Hussey, Joan M. 1967. ‘Bibliography of the Works of Norman H. Baynes’, Bulletin of Dr Williams’s Library 72. Huxley, George 1976. ‘The Historical Scholarship of John Bagnall Bury’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 17: 81–104. Kazhdan, Alexander and Constable Giles1982. People and Power in Byzantium. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 1993. ‘A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire’. In The Later Roman Empire Today: Papers Given in Honour of Professor John Mann, edited by D.F. Clark, Margaret M. Roxan and John J. Wilkes, 1–8. London: Routledge. Martel, Gordon 1990. ‘Toynbee, McNeill and the Myth of History’. The International History Review 12.2: 330–48. McIntyre, C.T. and Perry, Marvin eds. 1989. Toynbee: Reappraisals. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McNeill, William H. 1990. Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press., McNeill, William H. 1993. Toynbee Revisited. Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1952, 1966. ‘George Grote and the Study of Greek History’, Inaugural Lecture at University College London, 19 February, reprinted in Momigliano 1966. Studies in Historiography, chapter 3. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1977. ‘After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’, lecture given at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1977, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo, Sesto Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico I, 265–84. Rome: Storia della Letteratura. Obolensky, Dimitri 1998. ‘Toynbee and Byzantium’. In AETOS: Studies in Honour of Cyril Mango, edited by Irmgard Hutter and Ihor Sevcenko, 243–56. Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner. Patlagean, Evelyne 1980. ‘Dans le miroir, à travers le miroir: un siècle de déclin du monde antique’, in Les études classiques aux XIXe et XXe siècle: leur place dans l’histoire des idées, Entretiens Hardt 26, 209–40. Vandoeuvres-Genève: Fondation Hardt. Rousselle, Aline 1985. ‘Jeunesse de l’antiquité tardive: les leçons de Peter Brown’, Annales E.S.C. 3: 521–28. Runciman, Steven 1991. A Traveller’s Alphabet: A Partial Memoir. London: Thames and Hudson. Spengler, Oswald 1918, 1923. The Decline of the West, 2 vols. Munich: Oskar Beck. Staveley, Eric S. 1967. ‘Review of Toynbee 1965’, JRS 57: 244–46 [on the book see Obolensky, ‘Toynbee and Byzantium’, 254–56]. Tainter, Joseph A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toynbee, Arnold 1934,1939, 1959, 1961. A Study of History, I–II (1934); IV–VI (1939) VII–X (maps and gazetteer; 1959); XII (1961). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toynbee, Arnold 1956. An Historian’s Approach to the History of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Toynbee, Arnold 1965. Hannibal’s Legacy: The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toynbee, Arnold 1973. Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World. New York: Oxford University Press. Trevor-Roper, Hugh 1957. ‘Toynbee’s Millennium’, Encounter, June 1957. Vryonis, Speros 1994. ‘Byzantine Civilization: A World Civilization. In Byzantium: A World Civilization, edited by Angeliki E. Laiou and Henry Maguire, 19–35. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks.

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3 SAMUEL DILL, THE END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, AND T H E U S E S O F H I S TO RY

I am extremely grateful to John Curran of the Queen’s University, Belfast, for delivering this lecture when I was prevented from attending in person. Samuel Dill was another Irishman (like Bury and E.R. Dodds) whose works were influential in my early development. Moralising explanations for the decline of Rome were still current, as were lists of possible causes for its fall (both ascribed to the fifth century), including lead poisoning. The attempt to evaluate these theories led me to consider whether any lessons can be drawn from history, and why certain themes acquire topical status. Many people have believed that they could learn from history, and they still do. This chapter represents the situation prevailing in 2016, the time of writing, but it would be easy to extend the inquiry into what has happened since then, including Erdogan’s change of St Sophia and other churches to mosques and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the bibliography on the main topic has grown exponentially. The appeal to historical precedent is standard in modern political life and includes Boris Johnson’s deliberate evocation of Churchill and his appropriation of Pericles and Pericles’ funeral speech. It is of course highly selective. These are examples of the deliberate use of history to justify present actions. But we might also cite attempts by historians to derive lessons about the sixthcentury Justinianic plague from Thucydides’ description of the plague that struck classical Athens, link the Justinianic plague with the Black Death centuries later and make assumptions about the death toll based on such an equation. History does not repeat itself and cannot do so. But the instinct to draw lessons from it is very strong, and it may be hard to resist. This is a subject I have addressed in other papers and at least we can be aware of the dangers. –––––––––––

I well remember reading Samuel Dill’s Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire when I was starting to teach Roman history, and now I find myself returning to it many decades on. It is a book couched in moral terms, and back in the 1970s we had not entirely given up on moral explanations for the decline and fall of the Roman empire. I remember giving lectures in which I ran through a list of alternative explanations for the end of the empire, ranging from 34

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the barbarian invasions through the longterm effects of plague to lead poisoning (seriously debated at the time). Moral decline was not absent even then and I blush when I think of all this now. But the question of whether the Roman empire fell because of external or internal factors – whether it ‘fell’ or whether it was pushed, whether what mattered most were barbarians invading from outside or processes of decline from within – these were serious questions that are still being discussed today even if the terms are different. Indeed they have had a considerable new lease on life in the last few years. Why that should be is a question that takes us straight to the issue of whether history is useful. The rise and fall of empires is being played out in our own world. Is the American empire in decline, while the Russian empire and China are on the rise? What factors cause empires to decline and fall? Not only is the rise and fall of empires a current theme; so is the utility of history. American military cadets at West Point learn about strategy from Thucydides. The Greek crisis of recent years was widely cast in terms of the Melian dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians in the fifth century BC, again recounted by Thucydides, with the players now being Greece and the European Union. (It was less often pointed out that in Thucydides’ version it was Athens that was the tyrannical imperialist state arguing that might is right, and the islanders of Melos in the position of Greece in the recent Greek crisis faced with German pressure via the EU). Thucydides’ subject was the war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC, and its inevitability [the so-called Thucydides trap]. His deeper concern, as he tells us, was with the gradual development of Athens into an imperial power dominating other Greek cities and islands, and with the Athenians’ behaviour once the gloves were off. He was famously devoid of sentiment and told the story of events that were often tragic with a cold-eyed rationality, as he recorded and commented on the ruthless motivations of power politics. Before we tell ourselves that this is not very relevant to today, I would draw attention to an online (‘virtual’) roundtable on Thucydides that took place from October to December in 2016, with discussions of each of the eight books of Thucydides’ history. The participants are described as ‘active and retired military officers, philosophers and scientists, scholars of war and strategy and “policy wonks”’,1 seemingly all or most from the US, and including representatives of the Marine Corps, experts on strategy and political scientists. The introduction warns us that ‘Thucydides does not spell out his lessons for you. Instead he invites you to follow along with him and find what lessons history allows by yourself’. But he thought of his history as written for posterity, and certainly thought it could be useful. When Barack Obama met with the Chinese President Xi Jinping in September 2015, both presidents cited Thucydides’ discussion of the origins of the Peloponnesian war in the context of American and Chinese relations. Thucydides

1 See The Thucydides Roundtable, www.zenpundit.com, accessed 7.6.2022; on Thucydides see also https://thesphinxblog.com/ with Morley 2014 and Lee and Morley 2014.

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thought that eventual war between Athens and Sparta was inevitable, whatever the proximate cause. President Xi denied that this applied to China and the US in the present day: ‘there is no so-called Thucydides trap in the world’. President Obama agreed. All the same, Xi added that ‘major countries’ could create such traps for themselves by strategic miscalculation. The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is only one of the participants in a Thucydides Project to track such instances, and in an exercise in applied history it has identified 16 such cases over the past 500 years.2 Thucydides famously intended his work to be useful for posterity, and he has clearly been taken up on it. I will return later to the Roman empire and the question of how much we can learn from history. But in the meantime what of Samuel Dill? Dill was born a son of the manse at Hillsborough, County Down, in the midnineteenth century, and after graduating from the then Queen’s College in Belfast he went to Oxford, read Greats and became a fellow of Corpus Christi College. But then he left to become a reforming and modernizing headmaster of Manchester Grammar School. He became Professor of Greek at Queen’s in 1890 and was a member of the commission that led to Queen’s becoming a university in 1909. He was more than an academic historian; he also involved himself with primary education and was knighted for all he had done for educational provision. Dill wrote three books, each with a title beginning with the words Roman Society – Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius and finally, Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age. Although his interest was in how society worked and how people thought and behaved, he now seems a figure from another age. His Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire was the first of the three, published in 1898, while he was Professor of Greek at Queen’s. It mainly deals with the fourth century AD and focuses only on the west; it assumes that the Roman empire ended, or ‘fell’, in the fifth century, and asks questions about moral decline, and about why societies fail – the latter indeed a rather modern-sounding topic. Dill was not an economic historian or a military one. His focus was on individuals, literature and intellectual processes, and, it must be said, on the elite. Spiritual crisis is another theme, as the paganism of the Roman upper classes gradually gave way to Christianity – which however did not save them. Dill saw this in terms of a ‘determined religious struggle’, again a view that Roman historians still debate. Indeed, some, like A.H.M. Jones, have argued that Christianity itself contributed to the crumbling of the empire, because it deflected some of the best people into the church, thereby leading to too many ‘idle mouths’, and had a negative effect on productive capacity. In J.H. Wolfgang G. Liebeschuetz’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman City the influence of Christianity features as being a significant factor in cultural decline. Nobody would write history like Dill today. We would not now use the language Dill uses about the late empire: ‘poverty of imagination’, ‘pale silent shades’,

2 Jaffe 2015.

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‘now-forgotten pedants’, with ‘no real history’ and ‘no serious philosophy’. Dill believed that ‘there was darkness descending on the west’. But given the narrow focus of classics at the time it is interesting that his first book should have dealt with a far later period than usually appeared in syllabuses, and with a big historical theme. Returning later to write about an earlier stage in the development of the empire was a natural thing to do, but then to tackle the post-Roman west in his last book was remarkable. So was his wider commitment to education in the broadest sense. Though he was Professor of Greek, he did not publish on classical Greek literature or classical authors, but on big historical subjects, and on the Latinspeaking world of the Roman empire. He was also in some ways a typical man of letters and public figures. Connecting the different sides of his own thinking was no doubt more natural to him than it would be to the more specialized and driven academics of today. Whatever might be said about the moral approach he takes towards the Roman empire, it clearly derived from a deep feeling that understanding human nature as revealed in history was important. Another Irish classicist and historian immediately springs to mind, this time from County Monaghan, who went to school in Derry and then to Trinity College Dublin. This was John Bagnall Bury, a younger contemporary of Samuel Dill.3 Bury was also a classicist and won many prizes and awards; he published highly scholarly articles and editions of classical Greek texts. But he had also studied in Germany, read oriental languages, traveled to ancient sites and used this experience to work on ancient geography; and he was interested in philosophy. Bury’s academic posts are surprising: he was simultaneously professor of modern (sic) history and Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and his published works spanned the whole of this chronological range. Bury wrote a history of Greece that remained standard for years, but like (or rather unlike) Dill, he was drawn not only to later periods of the Roman empire, but also to the eastern empire and to periods later than Dill had tackled. Unlike Dill, Bury did not see Roman history as ending in the fifth century AD but as continuing. The later centuries of Roman rule in the east – even up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 – were also for him continuations of classical Greek history. Bury’s approach was different from Dill’s. He did not see it as his duty to provide a moral, let alone a spiritual, analysis. He was a rationalist who gave his inaugural lecture in Cambridge on the theme of ‘scientific history’. When he turned later to the subject of St Patrick, he approached him from the perspective of a classicist rather than as the bringer of Christianity to Ireland. His History of Freedom of Thought set out a rationalist trajectory leading from classical Greece, through the Middle Ages to the modern world. As well as all of this he wrote on early modern Russia and is said to have been planning a biography of Catherine the Great. Bury’s conception of the ancient world and the Roman empire was thus

3 See chapter 2 above.

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incredibly wide-ranging, in a way that can hardly be imagined now. It has been said that his history was devoid of personal judgments, in line with his view of history as scientific. But he too was committed to the view that history mattered and that the analysis of the past was not an academic pursuit for the ivory tower, but had important things to tell us. Samuel Dill and J.B. Bury represent two very different approaches to history, but they both identified the later Roman empire as a key phase. Bury focused on the eastern empire, and saw it as a continuity, Dill on the west and its ‘fall’, but Bury also chose to devote himself to a magisterial annotated edition of the classic work on decline and fall by Edward Gibbon.4 We might remember that Gibbon himself carried the narrative in this work many centuries later than the fifth-century west. The exact date of the ‘fall’ perhaps does not matter as much as the importance the concept has had and manifestly still has for the imagination and for the sense of the past. But neither Dill nor Bury turned the history of the later Roman empire directly to political ends, or read back contemporary history into it, except insofar as they brought to it their own personal concerns. A common reading of the transition from the Roman empire to the successor kingdoms in the west has been to see it in terms of a European trajectory leading through the Middle Ages through to the Enlightenment and on to modernity. This is a western Christian narrative and often goes under such terms as ‘the birth of Europe’. In this scenario, the east, Byzantium and the eastern Mediterranean world are left out or relegated, rather in the manner of Gibbon, to ‘seven centuries of feebleness and decline’; the world of Islam is equally absent.5 Even without such negativity towards the east, this has been a standard western medieval approach, enshrined in decades of books and still perpetuated today. How we see the ‘barbarian invaders’, as Samuel Dill characterized them, becomes a critical political issue: perhaps they were settlers rather than brutal invaders, but were they proto-Germans, as older German scholarship claimed, or, as historians writing in French countered, were the so-called invasions of the fifth century a kind of irrelevance, the real break in Mediterranean continuity coming only with the Arab conquests two centuries later, and making Charlemagne, not the early Germans, the real father of Europe? The first of two eminent French-language historians in this Eurocentric approach, Fustel de Coulanges, wrote in the context of the Franco-Prussian war of the early 1870s, while the second, Henri Pirenne, was a Belgian who lost a son in the First World War, and was himself interned by the Germans.6 The language question, tied in with national identities, was a very live issue at Ghent University where Pirenne was a professor. The original language of teaching in the university was French, and that was the language in which Pirenne wrote his historical works, but the shift to Flemish was promoted 4 See chapter 1 above. 5 On this absence see Cameron 2014. Recent versions of the ‘western’ story of Europe can be found in Scheidel 2019 (without the Christianity) and in a different mode Siedentop 2014. 6 For Pirenne see chapter 4 below.

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by the German occupiers during the First World War. The classic debates about the ‘barbarians’ in past generations were therefore deeply embedded in issues of French (or in Pirenne’s case, Belgian) and German national identity.7 The questions are no less contested today, even if the terrain has moved from national identity to post-colonialism and ethno-history. The nature of ‘Europe’ remains central and national narratives on the Slavs and the successor states in the former communist bloc are highly emotive; the ‘barbarian invasions’ (or however they are now termed) remain one of the hottest topics in current history-writing. In recent examples of the western approach and elsewhere too,8 the sixthcentury eastern emperor Justinian, ruling from Constantinople, is the villain, for his misguided invasion of Italy and his attempt to reunite the western and eastern halves of the empire. Justinian gets the blame for his religious obsession and his unnecessary and destructive wars; in sharp contrast, the barbarian Theodoric the Ostrogoth emerges as the unexpected hero and real heir to Roman values.9 It is assumed that Roman values were thus passed to the western medieval successor states, while the east is already doomed to failure. Among other issues, such a view requires an investigation of the fifth and sixth centuries in terms of ethnic identity – the opposite of Dill’s focus on the late Roman elites. The sixth century is pivotal – whether it is seen as following the fall of the western empire, according to Dill, or in its ambiguous treatment by Edward Gibbon,10 or as pointing ahead to continued rule based on Constantinople according to Bury (though as Dill might have added, also towards confrontation with the Persians and the Arabs). Neither of our two Irish historians addresses this directly, but it is central in current historical writing. Yet in contrast with older ideas about urbanism in the eastern Mediterranean, many, if not all, scholars would now argue that urban civilization and production were still flourishing up to and indeed after the Arab conquests.11 And ‘decline’ is itself an emotive term, even though those who use it now tend to look for it in terms of material evidence. Rather than Gibbon’s or Dill’s moral and spiritual decline a mass of scholars now ascribe climatic and environmental factors and the impact of plague as main factors causing a massive downturn in the sixth century,12 while others have approached the late Roman empire on the basis of neo-Darwinian biological models. Samuel Dill applied his own moral categories to the fifth century, the last century of the western empire, but some of the modern uses of the model of decline are more political, and Rome is invariably the starting point of contemporary discussions about states and empires. A book published in 2007 by the editor at

7 8 9 10 11 12

Some discussion in Wood 2013, with reservations expressed by Vincent 2014. Hostile views of Justinian: 2013; Bell 2013); Athanassiadi 2010); and see chapter 1. Arnold 2014; O’Donnell 2008. Chapter 1 above. Avni 2014; Magness 2003. The literature is now massive and includes many specialist scientific studies; against ‘maximalist’ interpretations see Eisenberg and Mordechai 2019.

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large of Vanity Fair had the bold title Are We Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America.13 It was certainly not the first in this vein: the idea recurs again and again – in journalism, in serious political discussion and in popular discourse. Some prominent historians have cashed in on the idea, seeing the fall of the western empire as a model for a new decline of the west. It is interesting to find that among those who argue against such an idea is none other than Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, writing approvingly of another writer, an economist this time, who wrote ‘more than 1500 years separate our current era from Roman times, [when] people had barely enough to sustain them. Human and animal muscle power comprised virtually the entire kinetic energy source. Life expectancy was between 20 and 30 years. Income levels were a fraction of what we have today. So the dynamics of surviving were completely different then’. A sobering example of such use of history can also be drawn from the case of ISIS and the great emphasis it placed on events of the seventh century AD in its glossy magazine Dabiq. The title is important: Dabiq, a village north of Aleppo in Syria, featured in a hadith as a key site in Islamic apocalyptic, where a final defeat will be inflicted on the ‘Romans’ by the forces of Islam. The failure of the Emperor Heraclius to resist the Arab armies in the seventh century featured very large in the magazine, as did the early caliphate, or rather one interpretation of it. This is a case where a very direct and categorical (and mistaken) appeal to history was made to justify the actions of a very dangerous organization. One may feel that it would be no use trying to persuade people who believe this that they are wrong. But only an alternative and better-founded historical analysis of those seventh-century sources and events can help to counter their mistakes. It is not at all surprising that historians of the rise of Islam are currently so occupied with these very questions. Was early Islam somehow essentially violent?14 Was military jihad its main message? How should one interpret the Qur’an? These are not ‘academic’ questions; they are questions with direct and urgent applications, and they are questions about history. Lessons from history in relation to the Roman empire and Byzantium are also directly drawn by the American defence analyst Edward Luttwak. A new edition of his very influential Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, originally published in 1976, was the subject of a long review in the Times Literary Supplement,15 and the first edition was much debated in the 1970s and 1980s. It argued that Rome had a ‘grand strategy’ for the defence of its empire. At the time Roman historians argued that there was never in fact such a worked-out scheme; the Roman empire did not have a ‘grand strategy’. This did not stop political commentators, as well as serious strategists, taking Luttwak very seriously. It is less well known that Luttwak has also argued for a grand strategy in the case of Byzantium, 13 Murphy 2007; it was published in England (Murphy 2008) under the title The New Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Cf. also Goldsworthy 2009. 14 As argued by Holland 2012. 15 Thonemann 2016.

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and expressly derives lessons for American policy from the Byzantine case.16 He argues that when possible Byzantium avoided war in favour of diplomacy and that America should do the same. According to Luttwak all states necessarily have a ‘grand strategy’ – they cannot help but have one, even if it is not consciously articulated, and accordingly he has also written in the past on the grand strategy of the Soviet Union. His commitment to scholarship is impressive, but it is scholarship put to a purpose. He has written on the rise of China, and the title of another of his many books, published in 1993, is The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third-World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy (New York: Touchstone, 1993). Luttwak is taken extremely seriously in government and military spheres and in international relations, mainly, but not only, in the US. Not only is the Roman empire taken widely as proxy for any modern imperial system: there is evidently also wide acceptance for a utilitarian view of reading the past. As a historical theme, the end of the Roman empire has taken on a new salience. It seemed to have been sidelined with the rethinking and benign interpretation since the 1970s of the period ranging roughly from the fourth to the seventh or eighth centuries as ‘late antiquity’ and with the threat posed to old certainties by Hayden White and others, but it is clearly always there in people’s minds. When circumstances change in the modern world, and in people’s own experience, the fall of the Roman empire recurs as a potential precedent. The lure of using the past to justify the present never fails. Why, for instance, have almost all the post-communist countries of eastern Europe embarked on an exercise of rewriting their school history textbooks? They reject the ideological narrative of their own past imposed during the Soviet era but have been in danger of replacing it with a narrative asserting their own claims to a seamless national history. Most obviously, this consists of playing down ethnic mixture and tracing their own ethnic origins back to the distant past. Why, again, in Erdogan’s Turkey, is such prominence given to reviving the sense of Ottoman greatness? A TV series on the Ottomans was met with wild enthusiasm not long ago. The period of Turkish history that the Turkish Republic of Ataturk sought to efface is now back as a model for modern Turkey. In Putin’s Russia likewise, the idea of Russia as the heir of Byzantium has received strong official and religious backing. Again, television can play its part, as in a series shown in 2008, made with Putin’s evident support and greeted with acclaim. It was called Destruction of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium, and its message was that Russia must take steps to avoid the baleful effects of western hostility to Byzantium; the west is the major danger to Russia, too [something on which Vladimir Putin also relied as a justification for his invasion of Ukraine in 2022]. In both these cases religion plays an important part. Both Turkey and Russia look back on decades of secularist, or in the case of Russia, atheistic rule. But the

16 Luttwak 1976, 2016, 2009a, 2009b.

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Muslim Ottomans provide fit models for an Islamic state like modern Turkey, and they also ruled a huge empire. In Putin’s Russia Orthodox Byzantium is a powerful model for the revived Russian church, and the Russian church led by the patriarch of Moscow is again a close ally of the government. Nevertheless what links both these examples is less religious than historical: it is a selective approach to history, in order to justify modern agendas. Learning from history cannot be neutral, because it involves deciding which parts of history to use and what lessons are important; conversely, to return to the example of Samuel Dill, it involves viewing history through the lens of modern preoccupations. Many questions in the modern world have made the late antique and early medieval period seem particularly relevant, especially as they affect the Middle East, where so many agendas relating to the role of religion in history and politics are currently being played out, including issues about Christianity and Islam, identity and community, violence and intolerance. Was it the state institutionalization of Christianity in the period covered by Samuel Dill, after the reign of Constantine, that enshrined religious intolerance and legitimate religious violence? Did the hate speech found in many late antique Christian writings condemning those whom the writer wants to attack (including Jews and ‘heresies’), lead, however remotely, to what we nowadays call radicalisation? Can it be argued that the Arab invasions of Syria, Palestine and Egypt in the early seventh century, together with selected passages from the Qur’an and Arabic sources, show that Islam was intrinsically violent and did early Islam grow out of the sixth- and seventh-century religious and cultural environment of late antiquity, rather than being a wholly new and unique phenomenon?17 And were the Arab conquests in fact as violent and destructive as the common narrative would have it? All these are questions with which historians are urgently grappling in both individual and collective research contexts. The only answer to some of the common but very dangerous assumptions that are currently held is to apply the most rigorous historical analysis to the available source material. Let me try to sum up. The uses to which history are put can be highly deceptive. Nor does history ever ‘repeat itself’. Nor, again, does it proceed according to inexorable laws, as many have thought. It has been claimed by some that history is a kind of science, or that they themselves were proceeding along objective and scientific lines. Perhaps Thucydides himself thought that; at least, he tried to lay down procedures for attaining objectivity. Some historians currently addressing the comparative history of Rome and China argue that history is to be explained along quasi-biological lines, in a neo-Darwinian appeal to evolutionary biology. But it seems to me obvious that the kind of history we write is deeply influenced by our own personal subjectivity. It is this that determines what questions we ask, what themes we emphasize, and which points of comparison we single out. Which means, finally, that the study and especially the writing of history needs to be recognized as ethical endeavours. The historian has a responsibility not

17 For the theme of Islam and late antiquity see Hoyland 2012.

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merely to reveal the past as it really was to the best of his or her knowledge, but also to approach history-writing in a responsible way, since, like it or not, people are going to draw conclusions from it for the present and even for the future. It can be argued that the new availability of more and more data – amounting to the so-called big data – makes this responsibility even more acute.18 Even if it cannot directly predict the future, history can help us to understand contemporary issues and problems and to avoid falling into the traps of, for example, economic determinism. To quote from a recent contribution, ‘History is a critical science for questioning short-term views, complicating simple stories about causes and consequences, and discovering roads not taken’.19 We have all too many such simple stories today. Samuel Dill’s particular way of using history to work through the issues he thought most important is not one that would find much support now. But returning to his book on the last centuries of the western empire is an exercise in reflection on just why and in what ways history is still so crucially important.

Bibliography Armitage, David 2014. ‘Why Politicians Need Historians’, The Guardian, 7 October. Arnold, Jonathan J. 2014. Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Athanassiadi, Polymnia 2010. Vers la pensée unique. La montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Avni, Gideon 2014. The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Assessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Peter N. 2013. Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian. Its Nature, Management and Mediation. New York: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil 2014. Byzantine Matters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dill, Samuel 1898 Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Dill, Samuel 1904. Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Dill, Samuel 1926. Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Eisenberg, Merle and Mordechai, Lee. 2019. ‘The Justinianic Plague: An Interdisciplinary Review’, BMGS 43.2: 156–80. Goldsworthy, Adrian 2008. The Fall of the West. The Death of the Roman Superpower. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009. Guldi, Jo and Armitage, David 2014. The History Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holland, Tom 2012. In the shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World. London: Little, Brown. Hoyland, Robert 2012. ‘Islam as a Late Antique Religion’. In The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, edited by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, 1063–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaffe, Seth N. 2015. ‘America vs. China: Is War Simply Inevitable?’ https://nationalinterest.org/ feature/america-vs-china-war-simply-inevitable-14114, accessed 26.8.2022.

18 Cf. Guldi and Armitage 2014, calling for a reframing of the research university by the critical application of big data in an ethical direction. 19 Armitage 2014.

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DILL, THE END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Lee, Christine M. and Morley, Neville eds. 2014. A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2001. The Decline and Fall of the Roman City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luttwak, Edward 1976, 2016. The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Luttwak, Edward 2009a. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press. Luttwak, Edward 2009b. The Virtual American Empire: War, Faith and Power. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Magness, Jodi 2003. The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Morley, Neville 2014. Thucydides and the Idea of History. London: Bloomsbury. Murphy, Cullen 2007. Are We Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Murphy, Cullen 2008. The New Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. London: Scribe Publications. O’Donnell, James J. 2008. The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History. London: Ecco Books. Scheidel, Walter 2019. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Siedentop, Larry 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. London: Allen Lane. Smil, Vaclav 2010. Why America Is Not a New Rome. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Thonemann, Peter 2016. TLS, 14 October: 25–6. Vincent, Nicholas 2014. TLS, 4 July: 11–2. Wood, Ian 2013. The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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This short essay was written as the introduction to a Folio Society publication of Mohammed and Charlemagne that appeared in 2016, and I reproduce it (with the addition of a very few references) since it belongs very much in the overall context of the transition from the late Roman empire to late antiquity and because the personal story of Henri Pirenne is highly relevant to my overall theme of the nature of history-writing. Many others have written about Pirenne and the argument of Mohammed and Charlemagne, including Peter Brown in a memorable paper,1 but I felt that the circumstances of its composition and publication, and its place in the development of historiography on the fall of the Roman empire and the origin of the Middle Ages made the genesis of Pirenne’s classic book an important story for Folio Society readers to hear. Written in the early 1970s, Peter Brown’s essay still (against Pirenne) envisaged decline from the third century onwards and questioned the level of cross-Mediterranean connections Pirenne claimed. It rightly questioned the significance of the small amount of evidence for ‘Syrian merchants’ on which Pirenne relied, but it did not have the advantage of the later ground breaking work of Italian scholars on the mass of archaeological and especially pottery evidence that was the catalyst for a fundamental shift in the understanding of the Mediterranean economy in the sixth century and indeed underlay the development of the positive view of late antiquity associated with the influence of Brown himself. To the long-distance exchange revealed in this way must be added the role played by the vast quantities of grain and oil shipped from Roman North Africa to Constantinople until the grain distribution established by the Emperor Constantine was stopped in the early seventh century by Heraclius, the key importance of which is underlined by Chris Wickham in Framing the Middle Ages.2 The nature and date of the transition that was Pirenne’s subject have been the subjects of many publications since Pirenne’s book, including McCormick, The

1 Brown 1974 (three years after Brown’s own influential The World of Late Antiquity). Pirenne is missing from Ando and Formisano 2021. See for bibliography on Pirenne’s book Effros 2017. 2 Wickham 2005.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-5

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Origins of the European Economy3 and Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome.4 Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome (2005) and others argued for the end of the Roman Empire in the west in the fifth century,5 while Garth Fowden puts the end of late antiquity as late as the close of the first millennium in Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused.6 But until the development of late Roman archaeology from the 1970s historians like myself still had to reckon with ‘the Pirenne thesis’, something that now seems an age away. ––––––––––––

Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne was published posthumously in French in 1937 and quickly translated into English, appearing in 1939.7 It is a book extraordinary both for its own history and for the history of reception. Far more people have heard of what came to be known as ‘the Pirenne thesis’ than have read, or even heard of, the book itself. While its main ideas were generated during the First World War, Mahomet et Charlemagne was published only after the author’s death [in 1935] by his son Jacques, who found among his late father’s papers a preliminary draft dated 4 May 1935, which Jacques describes as expressing Pirenne’s ‘most vital, boldest and most recent’ ideas. Between 1918 and 1935 Pirenne had published two articles, in 1922 and 1923, in which he set out the ideas that were to be expressed in the book, though his argument had also featured in some lectures including his address at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo in 1928, and in the last course he taught, in Brussels in 1930. The argument expressed in Mohammed and Charlemagne became known as ‘the Pirenne thesis’ and was closely connected with Pirenne’s economic history of Europe, also published posthumously, which he had decided to undertake in February, 1917.8 In order to understand Mohammed and Charlemagne it is important to know about the circumstances in which it took shape. At the time of the outbreak of the First World War Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), the son of a Walloon industrialist, was already a distinguished professor at the University of Gand (Ghent) in Belgium, where he had taught since his appointment at the early age of twentyfour in 1886. It is an indicator of his standing that the twenty-fifth anniversary of his appointment in 1912 was celebrated by the establishment of a Fondation Pirenne. His publications already covered an enormous range, including local history, and in 1914 he was busy with his multi-volume history of Belgium, the first four volumes of which had already been published and which gave him the status of a national symbol. Everything changed for him in 1914 when Belgium was occupied. By the end of the year Belgian anti-German feeling intensified, and

3 4 5 6 7 8

McCormick 2001. Wickham 2009. Chapter 3 above. Fowden 2013. Pirenne 1937, 1939. Pirenne 1936b; the introduction outlines the thesis of Mohammed and Charlemagne.

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Pirenne’s youngest son, Pierre, was killed in the conflict. The German authorities sought to take advantage of the language divide in Belgium, and to extend their influence with the Flemish-speaking population; they therefore proposed in February 1916 to re-establish the University of Gand as entirely Flemish-speaking, claiming that as a result Flanders was freed from ‘Roman tyranny’. The great majority of its professors were willing to comply but a handful refused, Pirenne and his colleague Paul Fredericq among them. In March they were both arrested on grounds of fomenting agitation and deported to Germany, where Pirenne was to remain until the end of hostilities. International protests were of no avail, although the intervention of the eminent German church historian Adolf Harnack was successful in having Pirenne moved from camp conditions to the city of Jena, where he had much more personal freedom; he was however relegated early in 1917 to the small and less congenial village of Kreuzburg. During his time in Germany Pirenne reflected on wider historical issues, including the origins of the Middle Ages; he also wrote a daily journal of his experiences. On his return late in 1918 he was greeted as a hero of Belgian resistance and received an honorary doctorate at Oxford in 1919 together with such figures as Hoover, Beatty, Jellicoe, Joffre and Pershing. In 1920, speaking again at the University of Gand, he criticised German scholarship on the origins of medieval Europe, which idealized the Germanic invaders of the western Roman empire, attributing new ideas, new vigour and a new spirit to their arrival. Before Pirenne it had been generally assumed that the Roman empire was in decline and unable to resist invasions by the ‘virile’ and innovative Germanic barbarians. Despite Roman ‘survivals’, the origins of medieval Europe were thus seen as Germanic, not Roman. We can see from the official German justification for making the university entirely Flemish just how political and emotive these issues were,9 and how closely the positive view of the barbarian invasions was linked to German nationalism. The view that Pirenne formulated during his confinement in Germany and which he expressed in the manuscript found when he died was quite different. He reinforced the Romanness of the early Middle Ages, argued that the impact of the invasions was much less catastrophic than supposed, and dated real German influence much later, when the shape of western Europe had already been set by Charlemagne. The fifth-century invasions had not broken the ancient unity of the Mediterranean: that happened only as a result of Arab sea power and the western thrust of the Arab conquests (by the end of the eighth century the western Mediterranean had according to him become a ‘Musulman lake’), while the Germans, he argued, were in contrast slow to transcend their barbarian origins. Whatever intellectual developments happened under the Carolingians were attributable to AngloSaxon influence. Europe was made not by Germans but by the Carolingians, under 9 Pirenne also composed a record of the German occupation and its effect on the university (Pirenne 1928), in which he discussed the Flemish question at 216–20. He moved to Brussels in 1930, when the university did in fact become Flemish.

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the impact of the Arab invasions, or, in the famous phrase, ‘without Mohammed, no Charlemagne’. Contained within this overall reading was a direct challenge to the hitherto deeply entrenched Gibbonian view of the decline of the Roman empire at the time of the invasions. It presented an equal if implicit challenge to ideas expressed in traditional Marxist historiography of a gradual move from a slave-owning society to tied labour and thence to a feudal economy. Pirenne bolstered the main thesis expressed in Mohammed and Charlemagne with a number of supporting arguments, not all of which found favour, even before the major change that occurred with the availability of archaeological evidence from the 1970s onwards. In particular, he supported his view that the unity of the Mediterranean remained intact in the fifth and sixth centuries by assembling textual evidence for the presence in the west of Jews and Syrians, whom he saw, in what was often little more than an assumption, as merchants and traders engaged in cross-Mediterranean enterprises. He also laid great emphasis on the continuing role of the late Roman state, now recognisably Byzantine and ruled from Constantinople. In his view the cultural and intellectual production of the west continued to be Roman in character, while the success of the Arab invasions was owed to a lack of readiness or preparation by the Byzantines. His picture of what was ‘medieval’ in contrast with the legacy of ‘Romania’, relies on the concept of simplification – thus he writes of ‘a civilization which had retrogressed . . . which no longer needed commerce’ and of ‘a complete break’ with the Mediterranean economy. In relation to the emergence of Islam and the success of the Arab conquests, while Pirenne blames Byzantium for lack of concern about threats from the east, he barely mentions the invasion and conquest of the Byzantine provinces in the eastern Mediterranean by Sasanian Iran or the exhausting war between Byzantium and Persia (the two ‘great powers’) which took place during the lifetime of Muhammad. Far from the Roman empire in the east having practically no dealings with the Arabian peninsula, as Pirenne asserts, we now know that Byzantium was active in extending its influence there in the sixth century, if mainly by proxy, and that Christianity as well as Judaism had penetrated the peninsula by the same period. Pirenne’s conception (widely shared until recently) of the rise of Islam in terms of the sudden emergence of a new religion and a new enemy from the sands of the desert no longer stands up to scrutiny. Pirenne’s is a vision of the west from the fifth to the eighth centuries AD cast in terms of trade, money and sea-transport; it has also been criticized for insufficient focus on agrarian relations and the peasantry. Nevertheless, a discussion of his views in the early 1970s could still conclude that while of course there had been necessary revisions, his ‘grand tableau of the early Middle Ages’ had in fact been little changed.10 The ideas behind Mohammed and Charlemagne were part of a large and varied historical output for which Pirenne was greatly respected during his lifetime, as can be seen from the distinguished historians and medievalists

10 Lyon 1982, 82.

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from many countries who contributed to volumes in his honour. But however hard it may seem now to appreciate the national feelings aroused in Pirenne’s day by the topics of the barbarian invasions, the end of the Roman empire, the beginnings of the Middle Ages and the origins of Europe, the circumstances of Pirenne’s resistance to German demands and his subsequent deportation gave him a prominent place both in Belgian national mythology and among historians in many other countries. However, developments in scholarship from the 1970s onwards began to make Pirenne’s picture look very different. Until then, archaeologists working in Mediterranean countries had focused chiefly on classical remains, but now a new interest in later periods became apparent, together with the development of scientifically based archaeological techniques. As a result the existence of the longdistance Mediterranean sea-trade which is so central to Pirenne’s ideas could be traced through material evidence, in particular the vast quantity of fragments from the late Roman storage jars known as amphorae, the containers of the ancient world. Historians no longer had to rely, as Pirenne did, on literary references.11 This new evidence (which is constantly increasing) also continues to give rise to many disagreements. North Africa, lost by the Roman empire to the Vandals in AD 430, has played a major role in these debates, both for the important results carried out in the 1970s in Carthage (now a suburb of Tunis) under the auspices of UNESCO, and as the origin of one of the main types of late Roman amphorae and the exporter of vast amounts of grain and oil. It was believed until long after Pirenne that Vandal rule implied a huge decline in long-distance traffic to and from North Africa. This picture has also changed, and now in a way that supports Pirenne’s general view of economic continuity. The changes taking place in late Roman towns in the western empire were also now a central topic for archaeologists and historians. Even more striking is the vast amount of evidence that now exists for the archaeology and economy of the eastern Mediterranean in the preIslamic and early Islamic periods. Debates continue about ‘decline’ and how to measure it, and some historians have reacted against what they see as an exaggerated view of continuing eastern prosperity; however the latest research suggests that neither the Persian nor the Arab invasions brought drastic or sudden change and that there was indeed considerable continuity in urban life and activity until end of the Umayyad period in the eighth century. Pirenne was ahead of his time in placing the Germanic invasions within a context that embraced the whole of the Mediterranean, and in so doing he set out an alternative view of the origins of western Europe. Historians now grapple with exactly similar issues, even if they do so on the basis of different kinds of evidence. The 11 McCormick 2001 fills out Pirenne’s picture of cross-Mediterranean communications but argues for an earlier reduction. McCormick traces the book’s gestation to his time at Dumbarton Oaks and acknowledges the influence of Alexander Kazhdan, but as he also states (2), Pirenne continued to inform the discussion as it took shape. [For archaeology and the Pirenne thesis see also Hodges and Whitehouse 1983.]

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importance of long-distance trade across the Mediterranean has been questioned by Peregrine Hordern and Nicholas Purcell, who have emphasised Mediterranean continuities over much longer periods and put in place different models of smallscale coastal trading and cabotage. Yet recent work by archaeologists of the early medieval west indicates the development of new or transformed ports, changes in settlement patterns and new ways of trading in and after the seventh century.12 One also sees an increasing tendency to see the rise of Islam in the existing context of the religious, cultural and economic patterns of the eastern Mediterranean, strengthening Pirenne’s view that the real end of antiquity and break with east and west came only with the western expansion of Arab armies and the growth of Arab sea-power in the seventh and eighth centuries. Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne belongs in a period when nationalist agendas (not only German) were deeply implicated in accounts of the history of the early Middle Ages. This was especially true of the views held about the barbarian invasions or migrations that were held to have swept away the ancient world, the world of Rome. The Germanic model stood in contrast with the Roman continuity model, which was of course that of Pirenne. Revisionist scholarship in the late twentieth century has done its best to do away with both extremes and in so doing to deconstruct ‘barbarian’ identity, a pejorative rather than ethnic term used to denote less civilised ‘others’. In the later Roman empire neither Roman nor barbarian were ethnic terms and the German identity of the incomers taken for granted in earlier scholarship now seems far from certain. Moreover the idealisation of ‘Germanic’ barbarians whose impact Pirenne sought to play down owes much to the narrative of decline attached to the idea of the Roman empire in the west, which Pirenne also resisted: blaming the barbarians provided an easy way of explaining imperial collapse. The great historian of the later Roman empire, A.H.M. Jones, was far from alone in debating whether the empire fell because of internal decline or as a result of the invasions.13 The decline and fall of the Roman empire continues to constitute an iconic paradigm for the end of empires, evoked in many different contexts including those of Britain and America. [14] One of Pirenne’s great achievements lay in his resistance to this assumption. Conceptions of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the way the origins of Europe are conceptualised, are as ideologically freighted today as they were for Pirenne. The question of Mediterranean unity and the role played by the east in the development of western Europe – whether Byzantium or the Arabs – remains at the heart of the matter. For all his emphasis on the Mediterranean, Pirenne was a historian of western Europe. Current scholarship has sought to deconstruct the national identities of the ‘barbarian invaders’, who were Pirenne’s starting point. But Pirenne also had the vision to see that medieval Europe depended on the east. As for the Arab conquests as marking the end of antiquity, some historians now argue that 12 Hordern and Purcell 2010; Augenti 2010. 13 Chapter 5 below. 14 Chapter 3 above.

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Islam itself belonged to a late antiquity that extended to the end of the first millennium.15 Reading Pirenne today reminds us that history is written by human beings. It warns against the danger of nationalist interpretations and brings home the part played by personal and subjective issues in formulating historical ideas. But it also reminds us that Pirenne’s questions about west versus east, antiquity versus the Middle Ages, the origin and definition of Europe, and the role of economic factors in history are issues that historians have been addressing for centuries and which are still among the great issues of today.

Bibliography Ando, Clifford and Formisano, Marco eds. 2021. The New Late Antiquity: A Gallery of Intellectual Portraits. Heidelberg: Winter. Augenti, Andrea 2010. Città e porti dall’antichità al Medioevo. Rome: Carocci. Brown, Peter 1974. ‘“Mohammed and Charlemagne” by Henri Pirenne’, Daedalus 103.1: 25–33. McCormick, Michael 2001. The Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Effros, Bonnie 2017. ‘The Enduring Attraction of the Pirenne Thesis’, Speculum 92.1: 184–208. Fowden, Garth 2013. Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hodges, Richard and Whitehouse, David 1983. Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hordern, Peregrine and Purcell, Nicholas 2010. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2000. Lyon, Bruce 1982. The Origins of the Middle Ages: Pirenne’s Challenge to Gibbon. New York: Norton. Pirenne, Henri 1928. La Belgique et la guerre mondiale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pirenne, Henri 1936a. Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. Translated by I.E. Glegg. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pirenne, Henri 1936b. Histoire économique et sociale de l’Europe. Brussels: Nouvelle Société des Éditions. Pirenne, Henri 1937. Mahomet et Charlemagne. Brussels: Nouvelle Société des Éditions; Paris: Alcan. Pirenne, Henri 1939. Mohammed and Charlemagne. English Translation by Bernard Miall. London: Unwin. Ward-Perkins, Bryan 2005. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wickham, Chris 2005. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800. Oxford:Oxford University Press. Wickham, Chris 2009. The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. London: Allen Lane.

15 Fowden 2013.

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A.H.M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire was the fundamental study for Englishspeaking historians, published as I was finishing my PhD thesis on Agathias’s Histories and would soon embark on other work on the period. Its idiosyncratic approach and its dismissal of ecclesiastical sources, especially hagiography, did not stand in the way of its sheer monumentality as a source of evidence, its rigorous use of evidence or its detailed narrative chapters. When I gave a version of this chapter to an Italian audience I sensed a distinct lack of sympathy and the sense that it was very unlike their own ways of approaching the period (and there is no chapter on Jones in Ando and Formisano, eds. The New Late Antiquity, although E.A. Thompson, a Marxist historian teaching at King’s College London while Jones was at UCL, is included); but for late Roman historians in Britain its prestige and influence were very strong, as is clear from the lengthy review of The Later Roman Empire published by Peter Brown in 1967 (below, note 1). This was despite the presence in London of Arnaldo Momigliano and his editing of The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century in 1963. Momigliano succeeded Jones in the chair at University College London in 1951 but the influence of Jones continued to be felt. It was especially strong on those like J.H. Wolfgang G. Liebeschuetz and Geoffrey de Ste Croix, as well as the Roman archaeologist John Wilkes who had been taught by him at UCL, but it went much further. Marxism was alive and well among the ancient historians at UCL in the 1940s (John Morris too), though not with Liebeschuetz, and Jones himself was not a Marxist. Jones’s belief in ‘over-taxation’ and a ‘caste system’ in the later empire were also challenged in many later publications questioning his assumptions about Roman coloni and the ‘third-century crisis’. And the usefulness and validity of Christian and other religious sources for the history of the period, dismissed by him, became a fundamental characteristic of later writing on late antiquity, especially under the influence of Elizabeth A. Clark and her many pupils. This chapter was written by invitation for a volume published in 2008, which itself indicates the enduring importance attached to Jones among British historians. It provided an opportunity to apply to Jones’s work some of the questions about the Roman empire that were then current and which had also arisen in my 52

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earlier teaching and research. David Gwynn, the editor of the volume, had been an Oxford doctoral student but by then taught at Royal Holloway College London and wrote about the fourth century. He too felt the continuing influence of Jones, especially in the London context. –––––––––

Some autobiographical information is a prerequisite for contributors to this collection, and so I will begin by admitting that I never met A.H.M. Jones. I started teaching the Roman empire at King’s College London in 1970, the year Jones died; furthermore I was based in London and he was in Cambridge, which was not part of my life at the time. On the other hand he had been Professor of Ancient History at University College London before Arnaldo Momigliano, and the chronological period I had to teach was presumably one Jones had influenced and which he probably inherited from Norman Baynes. At any rate, the Roman empire as defined in the London ancient history syllabus in 1970 covered the period from Augustus to AD 641, the death of Heraclius – the same end date as that of Jones’s British Academy project, the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire. Soon afterwards the end of the period was cut back in the syllabus to AD 400, which did not make much historiographical sense, though it presumably seemed somehow more convenient; short-lived though the experience may have been, having to teach the Jonesian ‘long Roman empire’ was in retrospect very important in my own formation. Another piece of autobiography: I came to this long period cold, from having read Greats at Oxford, where the latest Roman history I had studied was the reign of Nero. I left Oxford after ‘Schools’ (the final examination) in 1962 and did not therefore have the experience of those who [like Peter Brown] read ‘Modern History’ at Oxford of covering later Roman history from the reign of Diocletian onwards. My experience of Jones was therefore a London experience, and I will say something later about Jones against that London background.

1. Context Looking back at Jones’s LRE today, and at its very curious last chapter, I believe it is important to put Jones back into the context in which he wrote. In Peter Brown’s masterly review of The Later Roman Empire we read of Jones’s ‘splendid isolation’,1 and indeed no-one can deny Jones’s incredible achievement in producing the LRE. All the same, when the book appeared in 1964, there had already been a surprisingly large amount of writing in recent years on the subject of the end or decline of the Roman empire, and the change from Principate and High Empire to the Late Empire; indeed, this is amply demonstrated in the footnotes to Brown’s review (Jones rarely mentioned modern authors in his own notes to the LRE),

1 Brown 1967; citations here and below are from the reprint in Brown 1972, 46–73.

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which also reveal how far the scholarship of the day revolved around certain wellworn themes. In his inimitable style, Brown wrote that Jones’s book ‘is like the arrival of a steel-plant in a region that has, of late, been given over to light industries’.2 All the same, it is worth remembering what those light industries were. It is very clear in retrospect that the LRE was published against a context in which the problems surrounding the end of the Roman empire were attracting a good deal of attention. Only the previous year, Momigliano’s collected volume had been published, with the title The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (see chapter 7 below); this contained a contribution by Jones on ‘The Social Background of the Struggle Between Paganism and Christianity’. Other contributors included H.-I. Marrou, P. Courcelle, E.A. Thompson, Herbert Bloch and Momigliano himself. E.R. Dodds’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, which characterised the rise of Christian asceticism as ‘madness’, and saw the transition from early to late empire in terms of ‘anxiety’, originated as the Wiles lectures in 1963.3 A few years before, in 1959, Santo Mazzarino had published the original Italian version of The End of the Ancient World, and this came out in English translation in 1966. The first part surveys the historiography since the antiquity and the Renaissance on the reasons for the end of the Roman empire in the west, while the second part discusses the theories of others, such as Otto Seeck’s contention that the later Roman empire represented the ‘elimination of the best’;4 it is interesting that the topic of elites in this period is again at the top of scholarly agendas.5 In the same year as Jones’s LRE there appeared a small volume of extracts edited by André Piganiol, with the title La chute de l’empire romain, which focused on the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410.6 This now seems a very French book in flavour, with its references to la gloire and to the ‘flood’ (inondation) of barbarians. Piganiol wrote of an absence of ‘esprit militaire’ and ended his own essay with the statement that the lesson to be drawn was that the Roman empire in the west existed at all times under the constant threat of invasion. Not long before Jones’s LRE and rather in the manner of its final chapter, Donald Kagan had brought out a student book of excerpts from earlier publications,7 including A.E.R. Boak’s Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West.8 Jones himself was included, on ‘the pressure of the barbarians’. A similar collection had appeared in 1963 edited by Mortimer Chambers, The Fall of the Roman Empire – Can It Be Explained?9 This included Tenney Frank on race 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Brown 1972, 49. Dodds 1965. Mazzarino 1966; Seeck 1897–1920. Salzman and Rapp eds. 2000; Haldon and Conrad eds. 2004; Lizzi Testa ed. 2006; see also Carrié and Wataghin eds. 2001. Piganiol 1964. Kagan 1962, 1978, 1992. Reviewed by Moses Finley, JRS 48 (1958): 156–64. Chambers 1963.

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mixture and Ellsworth Huntington on climatic change. J.B. Bury and Max Cary also debated the subject, and so did Norman Baynes, who had taught at University College until 1946: the latter similarly surveyed a series of current theories only to reject them and opt for the barbarian invasions as the cause.10 The end of the Roman empire was a classic problem on which every ancient historian had to have a view. Jones’s rather dated (to us now) complaints about a lack of public spirit11 may have seemed to Momigliano like the English public schoolboy speaking [although Momigliano himself had argued in his Cambridge lectures of 1940 that the late Roman senatorial class had failed morally and spiritually, for which see chapter 8 below], but they are also to be understood in the context of the time, against the background of the theories of those who, like Otto Seeck, not to mention Spengler or Toynbee,12 argued for moral or qualitative decline in the upper classes themselves. It is consonant with this approach that Jones also believed in corruption as a major fault in the late Roman bureaucratic system, a view taken up after him by Ramsay MacMullen.13 Jones does not venture much in the LRE into literary matters, but the inferior quality of late Latin literature had been a theme in the argument about whether the ‘Bas-Empire’ represented décadence.14 Wolfgang Liebeschuetz dared to return to the theme of literary quality in The Decline and Fall of the Roman City.15 By the time the LRE was published Marrou had famously recanted,16 and his essay on Synesius in Momigliano’s Conflict Between Christianity and Paganism of 1963 (based on a conference held several years before), may have been an influence in the development of Peter Brown’s positive view of late antiquity.17 Jones however was not impressed. He writes in his chapter in LRE on education and culture that ‘the literary output of the age was large, but on the whole not distinguished’ (1008), and a little earlier on the same page that the educational system provided in sum merely ‘a jumble of miscellaneous lore’. Other terms he applied to late Roman literature include ‘vapid and turgid’, ‘very jejune and artificial’ (1009) and ‘repetitive and derivative’ (1011). This is interesting, since while admittedly in 1940 in The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian he had also written of ‘mediocrity’ (284), he writes favourably of the Greek culture of the age for its diffusion over a remarkably wide area (284–85). Moreover while he believed that ‘Byzantine’ literature was even less often read (he seems to call anything

10 Baynes 1943; cf. Cary 1935, 771–89. 11 Jones 1964, 1058, ‘The most depressing feature of the later empire is the apparent absence of public spirit’. 12 Spengler 1926–29. [For Toynbee, see chapter 2 above.] 13 Jones 1964, 1053; MacMullen 1988. 14 Marrou 1938. 15 Liebeschuetz 2001a, 223–48, 318–41. 16 Marrou 1949. 17 Vessey 1988.

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from the later fourth century onwards Byzantine), ‘it does not entirely deserve its ill repute’ (284), even though theology is ‘not congenial to the modern mind’.18 In answer to the question ‘why did Rome fall?’ the last chapter of the LRE plumps for the external explanation, blaming the barbarian invasions. In effect Jones denies decline, even while calling his last chapter ‘the decline of the empire’ and giving to his abridgement of the LRE the title The Decline of the Ancient World.19 Blaming the barbarians had also been the strategy of Piganiol, who famously stated that ‘the empire did not die a natural death, it was assassinated’. J.B. Bury, in contrast, in his History of the Later Roman Empire, denied both assassination and inevitability, and argued for contingency, or a series of accidents. Others had focused on a supposed internal collapse, for instance the Marxist historian Frank Walbank, in a small book first published 1946 as The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, and in 1969 with the title The Awful Revolution (Gibbon’s phrase): this gave a prominent role to slavery, and the internal contradictions and conflict it caused, and traced the beginnings of its bad effects to the fifth century BC. According to Walbank’s preface, dated 1944, one of his expressed objects was to consider whether a similar collapse was inevitable for the civilisation of his own day. He termed the ‘bureaucratic’ late Roman state a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, and equated what he called the ‘corporative state’ of the late empire, which he believed came into being between AD 270 and 337, with modern-day fascism.20 The flight of industry from towns to the estates of the rich, and a conception of the peasantry as ‘virtually enslaved’ were important themes, as was the assumed decline of Roman literature and the overall ‘mental atmosphere’.21 Jones’s pupil, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, also a lifelong Marxist, returned to the theme of the decline of the Roman empire in 1981 in The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, which consists partly of didactic sections on Marx and Marxism and their importance for ancient history; like Walbank, de Ste Croix saw the corrosive effects of slavery as continuing from classical Greek polis up to the end of the later Roman empire, to a date not far removed from Jones’s own stopping point of AD 602. Croix explains that his own book goes up to the Arab conquests, ‘not much later than the great book of my revered teacher’.22 In contrast with Jones, however, de Ste Croix’s main argument is that the Roman empire (or rather, ‘the ancient Greek world’) came to an end through its own internal contradictions, above all its internal class struggle. 18 Johnson ed. 2006; Cameron 1997, for the need to include theological writing when considering late antique literary output. Hagiography continues to pose problems for some scholars, but no-one now would exclude hagiographical texts as completely irrelevant to history. 19 Jones 1966; the choice seems odd, given that the LRE itself is called a ‘survey’. The preface to the shorter volume states that the LRE is ‘a very long book (three volumes) and correspondingly dear (14 guineas’). 20 Walbank 1946, 46, 76. [On Walbank see now Zuchetti 2021.] 21 Walbank 1946, 58, 62. 22 De Ste Croix 1981, 8; see also the essays by de Ste Croix published in Whitby and Streeter eds. 2006.

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Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire also belongs to this background, even though the original had come out as early as 1926. SEHRE was heavily influenced by the author’s Russian origins; in 1919, having left revolutionary Russia, he published a pamphlet on ‘proletarian culture’, and one of the main arguments of SEHRE was the thesis that the bourgeois elite of the high empire was destroyed in the third century by the rise of the peasant element. As Liebeschuetz has pointed out, the influence of Rostovtzeff on Jones seems to have begun early. 1926 was the year in which Jones took Greats at Oxford, and the habit which Jones later developed of writing long books dealing with the provinces and with cities and administration surely had much to do with Rostovtzeff’s example. The second English edition of Rostovtzeff’s SEHRE revised by Peter M. Fraser came out in 1957, not so long before Jones’s LRE. It does not cover the period Jones tackled, but Rostovtzeff makes his negative view of the late empire clear enough, and his theme that the successful bourgeoisie of the High Empire was destroyed by the rise of the masses in the third century ‘crisis’ brings us back to the ‘internal’ explanation and the notion of the failure of the élites. Jones’s debt to Rostovtzeff was selective. He did not echo Rostovtzeff’s view of the Roman empire as succumbing to ‘Oriental’ influences which brought it ‘nearer to the masses’ and ‘accelerated barbarization’, but he was not himself very impressed by it. Decline and fall were therefore in the air while Jones was writing, and so were competing explanations. Jones seems to have felt it incumbent on him to pay lip service to this ‘problem’ in his final chapter, and like Kagan and Chambers, he runs through one ‘explanation’ after another, if only to reject them. The explanations thus listed do indeed seem limited or unconvincing and by adopting this approach Jones rather surprisingly also located himself in this final chapter within this rather sterile contemporary way of thinking. The two modern works he mentions in the footnotes to chapter 25 (in each case to disagree with them) are Walbank’s Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, whose contention that there was a reduction in trade in the late empire he rejects as an explanation of economic decline, and Boak’s Manpower Shortage, on which he cites the critical review by Moses Finley. It is interesting to note that Jones might have found already in Walbank a version of the theory of an excess of ‘idle mouths’ which in his view were choking the late Roman economic system.23 Despite naming only Walbank and Boak, Jones’s chapter reads like a survey of the range of current explanations. It is curious then that it rejects nearly all of them, and particularly so as Jones did not leave it there. Later essays like that on ancient empires of 1965,24 repeat the theme from the LRE of the burden of a top-heavy superstructure and use phrases 23 ‘Too few producers supported too many idle mouths’ (Jones 1964, 1045–8). Like Jones, Walbank argued that the late Roman state suffered from a decline in productivity; Jones criticises his contention that trade and industry had declined (Jones 1964, 1038–9), and argues for structural and religious factors, with too many Christian ascetics and others living off the rest of the population. 24 Jones 1965.

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such as ‘contributing to decline’. In the 1965 essay we read that ‘the crushing burden of taxation was probably also the main cause of the progressive abandonment of cultivated land’ (133), and ‘the heavy weight of taxation may also have contributed to the depopulation of the empire’ (134); the words ‘probably’ and ‘may have’ introduce a note of uncertainty, but the prevalence of agri deserti is taken as given, and Jones accepts that there must have been depopulation, even if Boak’s argumentation is defective.25 Jones’s paper on ‘Over-taxation and the Decline of the Roman Empire’ was published in 1959; he concludes there that high taxation ‘was [probably] a major factor in reducing the man-power of the empire, and thereby contributed directly to its military collapse’. It is as though he could not make up his mind: his 1970 paper on the ‘caste-system’ of the later empire argues against excessive rigidity and for social mobility.26 But this is contrasted with his stress on the size of the army and the weight of taxation. He accepted a figure of 650,000 for the army by the end of the fourth century in ‘Ancient Empires’,27 and talks of a massive increase in the army and the civil service, which he maintained in turn led to the crushing weight of taxation.

2. Jones in London We also need to put Jones back into his London context. Jones was Professor of Ancient History at University College London after the war until 1951 when he moved to Cambridge. When did he start writing the LRE? Or have the idea of writing it? As has been noted, he was suspicious of ideology (though he was a Labour supporter). But the ancient historians in London in the post-war years were an interesting group. They included John Morris, for one. E.A. Thompson left King’s College London for a chair at Nottingham in 1948 but had already published his book on the late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus the year before. These were years when the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party flourished; one member of it was Robert Browning (see chapter 6 below), also at University College London in that period. Browning and others had become Marxists before the war at Balliol, and several of them including Browning had been in Cairo in intelligence during the war and then (in Browning’s case) in Yugoslavia. In contrast Jones had also spent some time in Cairo in the 1930s but in a teaching post at the university, and spent the war as a civil servant in the Ministry of Labour.

25 Jones 1964, 1042. 26 Jones 1970. The theme of social mobility in the later empire was current in the 1960s: cf. Macmullen 1964; Hopkins 1961, 1965. 27 Jones 1965, 129; cf. Jones 1964, 60 ‘Diocletian certainly increased the size of the army so substantially as to put a strain on the manpower of the empire’, with 683–84. The paper figure of 645,000 is given by Agathias, Hist. V.7–8; the large size and effectiveness of the late Roman army is argued by some, e.g., though with caution, Whitby 1995, at 73–75, but it is not easy to square this with the retreat from forts on the eastern frontier, or the very small numbers fielded during the Gothic war in Italy under Justinian, for which see Liebeschuetz 1996, reprinted in Liebeschuetz 2006, XI.

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Like Browning and Frank Walbank Edward A. Thompson was a member of the Communist Party and his later books on the later empire showed his Marxist perspective. Geoffrey de Ste Croix was a solicitor who had come to ancient history through Jones; he had been a member of the Communist Party before the war, though he had difficulties with it in 1939. To quote the editors of Crux,28 the volume presented to him by his pupils, ‘[I]t has been aptly observed that Ste. Croix is in a way almost as much a Jonesian as he is a Marxist, and some might say he has been a more orthodox follower of Jones than of Marx’. Still, his brand of Marxism found its full expression when he turned to the late empire in his Class Struggle, where, as we saw, Croix referred to Jones as his ‘revered teacher’; he had also dedicated The Origins of the Peloponnesian War to him in 1972. Browning and de Ste Croix stayed in the party even after the events of 1956 in Hungary. All these were much further to the left than Jones. The end of the Roman empire, and the collapse of Greco-Roman antiquity as a slave-owning society, were key elements in the Marxist view of history as the publications of Walbank and de Ste Croix strikingly demonstrated. Jones explicitly rejects Walbank in his chapter 25, and puts the blame on the barbarian outsiders, not on inevitable internal collapse. But his interaction with these colleagues and pupils must have been crucial to his thinking, even though he is said to have avoided engaging with political argument. Among the students who encountered Jones in London were also the Roman archaeologists John Mann and John Wilkes, and in particular J.H. Wolfgang G. Liebeschuetz, who has also written about the genesis of the LRE.29 While Liebeschuetz is the very opposite of a Marxist the influence of Jones is clearly visible in his writing, not least in the extent to which he has continued to be occupied with Jones’s problems, and he later put back decline (the ‘internal explanation’) onto the academic agenda.30 Marxist views of the end of the Roman empire were alive and well in Britain when I started teaching it in 1970; for instance, Perry Anderson’s influential Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism came out in 1974.31 Such British Marxist views differed from the more nuanced and theoretical Italian versions, with their archaeological emphasis;32 they focused on internal decline, and interestingly, Perry Anderson says of Jones’s conclusion in LRE chapter 25 that ‘the belief that “the internal weaknesses of the empire cannot have been a major factor in its decline” is clearly untenable’ (p. 97). In a perspicacious note Anderson adds, in a reference to the ‘greatness and the narrowness of Jones as a historian’ that this last sentence of Jones’s LRE is ‘contradicted by the burden of his own evidence’.

28 29 30 31 32

Cartledge and Harvey 1985. Liebeschuetz 1992. Liebeschuetz 2001a, 2006b. Anderson 1974. For which see Wickham 1988.

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3. London in the 1970s, Post-Jones The influence of Jones’s LRE, especially his model of an increased bureaucracy and army, was very strong on anyone teaching the later Roman empire in the 1970s. Jones starts the LRE with a chapter which covers the period from the Antonines to the late third century, seeming to take the third century as the hinge for granted, and what was in those years routinely referred to as the ‘third-century crisis’ continued to loom very large. Interestingly, the collection by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards returned in 2004 to this third-century ‘hinge’, as had Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress in the previous year.33 Swain and Edwards define their period as ‘approximately AD 200 to AD 400’, and do not engage with the issue of why the eastern empire survived. The earlier and negative picture of tied coloni and agri deserti in the third century depended to a large extent on the interpretation of legal evidence, which has since been challenged, and is still under discussion.34 Jones himself saw that Roman legislation often had little effect in practice, but only gradually was the model challenged, as the complexities of the codes as evidence were realised; characteristically, Jones called his chapter on law simply ‘Justice’, whereas in fact it deals mainly with organization.35 Few can match Jones’s amazing grasp of the legal evidence, but this is an area where scholarship has moved on since he wrote. Estimates of the size of the late Roman army are still disputed today. But in the decade after the publication of the LRE came Moses Finley’s The Ancient Economy, and in London Finley’s pupil Keith Hopkins was introducing quantitative methods and sociological models which were a long way away from the massiveness of Jones’s LRE.36 As Liebeschuetz notes,37 Finley’s model of the ancient city as consumer was similar to that of Jones but had been reached by a very different route. An emphasis on the role of trade crept back as time went on, and Finley himself modified his position, but this was very different from the early Rostovtzeffian approach which Jones had rejected.38 These were also the years following Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity of 1971. The Jones model was being challenged from several directions, including the impact of the enormous boom in late antique archaeology from the 1970s on, and the debates about late antique urbanism which followed. Women’s studies, deconstruction, rhetorical criticism and the discovery of Christian texts by ancient historians and

33 Swain and Edwards 2006; Garnsey and Humfress 2003. 34 See especially Carrié 1982, arguing for the primacy of fiscal motivation behind the legislation; Sarris 2006, 131–48. [More recent work on the Theodosian Code includes publications by John Matthews, Jill Harries and Caroline Humfress.] 35 For a survey, Honoré 2006, which begins with a section tracing the demise of the idea of ‘decline’ as applied to late Roman law. [The Code of Justinian is exhaustively treated in Frier and Blume 2016]. 36 Finley 1973; Hopkins 1978, 1983; cf. Runciman 1986. 37 Liebeschuetz 1992. 38 Garnsey, Hopkins and Whittaker 1985, with Finley 1985.

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classicists also followed, and it was soon clear that however fundamental, Jones’s LRE would not be enough.

4. East and West Chapter 25 of the LRE seems all the stranger because while it is really about the fall of the western empire in the fifth century, the subject of many of the publications which preceded it, Jones in fact chose to end the work at AD 602, and points out that the east survived, even though many of the same conditions applied there too. The LRE ends before the reign of Heraclius (610–641) and before the Arab conquests. Jones’s source book of 1970, A History of Rome Through the Fifth Century, ended earlier. His Greek City, published in 1940, ended with the reign of Justinian. But the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, on which John Martindale began work as Jones’s assistant in 1960,39 takes the later Roman empire to AD 641, the end of Heraclius’s reign, the end-date of the London syllabus until the 1970s. There was thus some fluidity. The Prosopography was originally planned to start at 284, the same starting date as the LRE. But Jones and John Morris, who was also closely involved in the planning, decided that it had to start in AD 260. Jones’s pupil de Ste Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is subtitled From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, though it does not in fact cover the conquests; de Ste Croix justified this departure from Jones’s model by saying that that was as far as his knowledge went. ‘Late antiquity’, for instance in the volume edited by Peter Brown, Glen Bowersock and Oleg Grabar, takes in the first century or so of Islam, up to the end of the Umayyads.40 Jones does not have much to say about the connection between or separation of east and west in the reign of Justinian or later, though in the chapter on the latter’s successors he talks about ‘collapse’ and of the ‘calamitous years’ (p. 317) of the Arab conquests. Apart from these brief sentences he avoided writing about the Arab conquests in the LRE but had provocatively ended The Greek City with these words: ‘The east received a new lease of life only when the onslaught of Islam infused into Christianity a fighting spirit and thus gave the empire in its religion a principle of unity and a motive for survival’.41 He did not follow up this opinion in more detail. But he already thought in 1940 that the church not only produced ‘idle mouths’ but also (p. 304) that ‘it had no positive political doctrine to offer and propounded no ideal of civic duty. Rather it despaired of the republic’. This opinion was reinforced in 1955 when Edwin Judge was applying to be a doctoral student at Jesus College Cambridge, and told Jones he wanted to find out what difference Christianity had

39 For the genesis of the Prosopography (PLRE) see Martindale 2003. 40 Bowersock, Brown and Grabar eds. 1999. There is a very large recent bibliography about this periodization: for the ‘long’ view Cameron, Averil 2002 [and now Fowden 2014]. Wickham 2005 identifies a series of trends which can be seen across the whole Mediterranean world, without the need to postulate a break between ‘ancient’ and ‘medieval’. 41 Jones 1940, 304.

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made in the empire. Jones said he already knew the answer: ‘none’. Judge wrote about this himself, and Ramsay Macmullen cited the story42 and made it the opening question of his article ‘What Difference Did Christianity Make?’43 While a chapter of the LRE is devoted to the church, the following chapter, headed ‘Religion and Morals’, concludes with a section headed ‘The Church’s Failure’, in which Jones expresses the view that the church was entirely unsuccessful in its aim of raising the general standards of morality.44 This dismissive view was in sharp contrast to the opinions of Momigliano expressed in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, who asserted in his introduction ‘the decisive role of religious factors in the fall of the Western Empire’, and showed according to Peter Brown that ‘the argument cannot be so easily avoided’.45 [It contrasted even more strongly with the positive view of the political importance of Christianity in the empire expressed earlier by Momigliano in his Cambridge lectures of 1940, on which see chapter 8 below]. Like the LRE, The Decline of the Ancient World ends with the question of why the empire fell. However, the question posed is ‘why did the western empire fall?’ The theme of inertia is as strongly emphasised: ‘this apathy was not peculiar to the western part; instances of self-help are as rare in the east’ (p. 368). Nevertheless, the eastern empire ‘survived for centuries as a great power’ (p. 370). Jones did not seriously address the issue of why the eastern empire continued and in what form, and he seems unsure what he thought about it. If his choice of end-date varied in his different works, I think this had less to do with any ideological notion of when the ancient world ended than with the pragmatic question of where his preferred evidence lay.

5. Jones and Today Whatever answers we may now give, Jones’s questions must still be tackled. As I have argued, he has very little to say on why the east was richer than the west and thus better able to support his ‘idle mouths’ and fend off barbarians; in contrast the material resources and urban life of the eastern Mediterranean are a major theme in current publications. Jones’s interest in and experience of archaeology did not (and could not at that time) lead him to the kind of argument with which we are now familiar, or to the amassing of quantitative and comparative evidence on a modern scale. Nor is it only archaeology that is missed: the LRE has no

42 Judge 1980, 10; MacMullen 1984, 154 note 25. 43 MacMullen 1986, reprinted in MacMullen 1990. 44 Jones 1964, 979–85; in contrast the much-discussed book by the sociologist Rodney Stark. Stark 1996, makes the opposite assumption that one can assume that the church’s moral teachings had a direct effect on the general behaviour of Christians. [See Cameron 2015.] 45 See Brown 1972, 148; for the importance of Christianity also for Marrou see Liebeschuetz 2006a, 477. Liebeschuetz’s own view follows that of Jones, tending to the negative: Liebeschuetz 1990, 236–52.

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illustrations. There are not very many illustrations in the Swain and Edwards volume either, except in an important chapter by Jas Elsner on late antique art which also deals with models of decline.46 Visual art was not part of Jones’s conception of what to include. The use now made by virtually all late antique historians of archaeological and artistic evidence marks a vast change even from when I started teaching the Roman empire, and one that happened in parallel with the development of the Brownian model of ‘late antiquity’. Brown’s World of Late Antiquity of 1971 was remarkable for its illustrations and was published by a publisher specialising in art history; indeed it has been argued that the ‘Brownian model’ and the concept of late antiquity began with discussion from within the field of art history.47 Similarly, Jones’s model of Romans and ‘barbarians’ contrasts with more recent scholarship that prefers terms like change, transformation, ethnogenesis and hybridity. Significantly, he places his discussion in a chapter headed ‘The Fall of the Western Empire and the Barbarian Kingdoms’. He does not resort to the rhetoric of exaggeration used, for instance, by Perry Anderson, who writes of ‘the collapse of the whole imperial system’ in the west ‘before barbarian invaders’ and of a ‘darkening world of sybaritic oligarchs, dismantled defences and desperate rural masses’ encountered by the Germanic barbarians when they crossed the Rhine in 406.48 Again, Peter Brown already saw the one-sidedness of Jones’ model, and its acceptance of the attitudes expressed in the late Roman sources. Perhaps unexpectedly, he also saw that for all its exhaustiveness, Jones’s piling up of evidence did not allow for regional variation or the economic micro-histories of different areas;49 it is a narrow sort of economic history in comparison with later historiography in this field. Brown quite rightly made the point in his review that not even Jones could encompass all the available evidence, and that for all its massive size, the evidence he does amass is not necessarily going to tell the whole story.50 In a way then, the conclusion Jones reaches follows from his choice of evidence. Other kinds of material might have led to different kinds of conclusions. As Brown also rightly says, Jones’ conclusions can seem over-simple.51 Brown’s footnotes give a very good indication of how scholars other than Jones were looking at the period and the problem in the 1960s and show that the ‘fall of the western empire’ was one of the major contemporary issues at the time. The case was argued not just by the historians mentioned but also in terms of a culture of ‘pagan reaction’ among the Roman senatorial class, and their historiography,

46 Elsner 2006. 47 Specifically from Riegl 1901, see Elsner 2006, 275–6; Mazzarino 1966, 183 for Riegl on late Roman aesthetic values; see also Liebeschuetz 2004 (reprinted in Liebeschuetz 2006a), XV. 48 Anderson 1974, 96, 107. 49 Brown 1972, 70. 50 Brown 1972, 51–2. 51 Brown 1972, 56.

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for instance in the problem of the supposed senatorial reaction to Christianity, and in M. Wes’s book on the historiography of the end of the western empire.52 This is an issue to which Alan Cameron was to return in relation to the question of the literary culture of the late fourth century [and since made the subject of his massive The Last Pagans of Rome, 2011]. For all his phenomenal grasp of detail, Jones emerged from Brown’s review as a kind of early Byzantine historian, ‘viewing Roman society from the standpoint of the central government, like the great historians of the early Byzantine period’.53 It is an authoritative – and authoritarian – view from which it was very hard to escape. There is far less theorizing in Jones’s LRE than other historians were prone to at the time, but his set of possible reasons for internal decline now seems very much of its day. Listing and dismissing in turn possible monocausal explanations is a way of understanding historical process which I doubt would now appeal. Nor would Jones’s use of the legal evidence, impressive though it is. It was indeed his acceptance of the evidence of the codes largely at face value, and, I would say, his computations about army size based on figures in the sources, that led directly to the Jonesian model of a top-heavy late Roman state which then in turn suggested the internal explanation which Jones paradoxically rejects.

6. Jones and Empire Jones does not concern himself with current issues of imperialism and identity. His was a top-down view of the late Roman state when contrasted with attempts to understand colonialism and empire, to hear the voices of the ruled or to understand how much the ethnogenesis of barbarian peoples depended on their interaction with the rulers. To dismiss the influence of Christianity as he does, even while contributing such a detailed analysis of the organisation of the church,54 sets the Jones of the early 1960s far apart from historians of the present day trying to understand the development of Islam in the context of the Christian [and late antique] world of the eastern Mediterranean. Such questions cannot be answered if one follows Jones’s precedent and reads only those parts of the religious sources which are deemed to contain ‘nuggets’ of historical detail. The LRE also seems a very English book for its time in its overtly non-theoretical approach (as was indeed noted by Momigliano), when compared with works by continental scholars writing about the period such as Marrou, Momigliano and Lellia Cracco Ruggini. He even chose to divide the chapters into two parts – narrative and ‘descriptive’55 – and he was much less good when he tried to argue a case, as opposed to when he was indeed describing. 52 53 54 55

Wes 1967. Brown 1972, 73. For his interest in ecclesiastical matters see also Jones 1960, 339–50. A division also followed in the fourteen volumes of the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History.

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Finally, Jones does after all seem to have believed in decline. He did not accept the logic of his own arguments in the LRE, but if they are put together with statements in his other writings, and indeed with other passages in the LRE, they point clearly in that direction. It is certainly not easy to isolate causal factors; for instance, Simon Swain says both that ‘failures to repel incursions by Sassanians or northern barbarians are in the end about internal weaknesses’ and that ‘the collapse of the (western) Empire was ultimately a military matter’.56 Why was change not allowed for? Why did Jones not expand on his views about the east in contrast to the west? And why did he feel he had to opt for one or the other and not some combination of both? I have tried to argue that giant though he was, Jones was also a historian who belonged to a particular time. The LRE must also be set in the context of Jones’s other works, and it should not seem surprising that some uncertainty emerges on the key questions of decline and causation within Jones’s own corpus. Like all of us, Jones belonged to a specific time and context, and this is reflected in his work and in his ideas. But at the same time, Jones’s LRE was a huge milestone in the rehabilitation of the later Roman empire as a major field of study. Its sheer power and monumentality gave it a fundamental role in the formation and thinking of the generation which followed. Historians of the later Roman empire and late antiquity generally must still use Jones’s LRE even while they may react against it, and that is the measure of its greatness.

Bibliography Anderson, Perry I. 1974. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: New Left Books. Baynes, Norman H. 1943. ‘The Decline of the Roman Power in Western Europe: Some Modern Explanations’, JRS 33: 29–35. Boak, Arthur E.R. 1955. Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bowersock, Glen W., Brown, Peter and Grabar, Oleg eds. 1999. Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Peter 1963. ‘Review of The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century’, edited by Arnaldo Momigliano, Oxford Magazine, 16 May: 300–1. Brown, Peter 1967. ‘The Later Roman Empire’, reprinted in Brown, Peter 1972, 46–73. Brown, Peter 1972. Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine. London: Harper and Row. Brunt, Peter 1974. The Ancient Economy: Studies in Ancient Economic and Administrative History. Oxford: Blackwell. Bury, John B. 1923. History of the Later Roman Empire. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. Cameron, Averil ed. 1995. The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East III: States, Resources and Armies, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Princeton: Darwin Press. Cameron, Averil 1997. ‘Education and Literary Culture, AD 337–425’. In The Late Empire, 337–425, edited by Cameron, Averil and Garnsey, Peter D. Cambridge Ancient History XIII, 665–707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Averil 2002. ‘The ‘Long’Late Antiquity: ATwentieth-Century Model?’. In Classics in Progress, edited by Peter Wiseman, 165–91. British Academy Centenary Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

56 Swain and Edwards 2006, 2, 8.

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A.H.M. JONES AND THE END OF THE ANCIENT WORLD Cameron, Averil ed. 2003. Fifty Years of Prosopography: Rome, Byzantium and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil 2015. ‘Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity: Some Issues’. In Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam and Beyond, edited by Arietta Papaconstantinou and Neil McLynn, with Daniel Schwartz, 3–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carrié, Jean-Michel 1982. ‘Le colonat du Bas-Empire; un mythe historiographique?’, Opus 1: 351–70. Carrié, Jean-Michel and Wataghin, Gisella C. eds. 2001. La “démocratisation de la culture” dans l’antiquite tardive. Turnhout: Brepols. Cartledge, Paul and Harvey, F. David eds. 1985. Crux: Essays in Greek History Presented to G.EM. de Ste Croix on his 75th Birthday. London: Duckworth. Cary, Max 1935. History of Rome. London: Macmillan. Chambers, Mortimer 1963. The Fall of the Roman Empire: Can It Be Explained? European Problem Studies. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. De Ste. Croix, Geofrey E.M. 1972. The Origins of the Pelopennesian War. London: Duckworth. De Ste. Croix, Geoffrey E.M. 1981. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. London: Duckworth. Dodds, Eric R. 1965. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elsner, Jas 2006. ‘Late Antique Art: The Problem of the Concept and the Cumulative Aesthetic’. In Simon Swain and Mark Edwards eds. 271–309. Finley, Moses 1973, 1985. The Ancient Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fowden, Garth 2014. Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frier, Bruce W and Blume, Fred H. 2016. The Codex of Justinian: A New Annotated Translation with Parallel Latin and Greek Text, Based on a Translation by Justice Fred H. Blume, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garnsey, Peter D., Hopkins, M. Keith and Whittaker, Charles R. eds. 1985. Trade in the Ancient Economy. London: Chatto and Windus. Garnsey, Peter D. and Humfress, Caroline 2003. The Evolution of Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haldon, John F. and Conrad, Lawrence I. eds. 2004. The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East VI. Elites Old and New in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Princeton: Darwin Press. Honoré, Tony 2006. ‘Roman Law AD 200–400: From Cosmopolis to Reichstaatt?’. In Swain and Edwards eds. 2006, 109–32. Hopkins, M. Keith 1961. ‘Social Mobility in the LRE: The Evidence of Ausonius’. CQ n.s. 11: 239–48. Hopkins, M. Keith 1965. ‘Elite Mobility in the Roman Empire’, Past and Present 32. 1, December: 12–28. Hopkins, M. Keith 1978. Conquerors and Slaves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, M. Keith 1983. Death and Renewal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald ed. 2006. Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1940. The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1959. ‘Over-Taxation and the Decline of the Roman Empire’, Antiquity 33.129, March: 39–43. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1960. ‘Church Finances in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries’. In Brunt, ed. 1974, 339–50. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1966. The Decline of the Ancient World. London: Longman. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1970. ‘The Caste-System in the Later Roman Empire’. In Brunt, ed. 1974, 114–39. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1965. ‘Ancient Empires and the Economy’. In Brunt, ed. 1974, 396–418. Judge, Edwin R. 1980. The Conversion of Rome: Ancient Sources of Modern Social Tensions. North Ryde and Sydney: The Macquarie History Association and Macquarie.

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A.H.M. JONES AND THE END OF THE ANCIENT WORLD Kagan, Donald 1962, 1978, 1992. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Why Did It Collapse?, Problems in European Civilization. Boston, MA: D.C. Heath & Co. Lavan, Luke ed. 2001. Recent Research in Late-Antique Urbanism. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 1990. Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 1992. ‘A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire’, Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology, London 29: 1–8, reprinted in Liebeschuetz, 2006, XVI. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 1996. ‘The Romans Demilitarised: The Evidence of Procopius’, Scripta Classica Israelica 15.1: 230–39, reprinted in Decline and Change in Late Antiquity: Religion, Barbarians and their Historiography, edited by J.H. Wolfgang G., XII. Aldershot: Ashgate 2006. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2001a. The Decline and Fall of the Roman City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2001b. ‘Late Antiquity and the Concept of Decline’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 45: 1–11. Liebechuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2001c. ‘The Uses and Abuses of “Decline” in Later Roman History’. In Recent Research in Late Antique Urbanism, edited by Luke Lavan, 233–38. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2006a. Decline and Change in Late Antiquity: Religion, Barbarians and Their Historiography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2006b. ‘Transformation and Decline: Are the Two Really Incompatible?’. In Die Stadt in der Spätantike: Niedergang oder Wandel?, edited by Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel. Akten des internationalen Kolloquiums in Münich am 30 und 31 Mai 2003, Historia-Einzelschrift 190, 463–83. Stuttgart: Steiner. Lizzi Testa, Rita ed. 2006. Le trasformazioni delle Élites in età tardoantica. Atti del convegno internationale, Perugia, 15–16 marzo, 2004. Rome: ‘L’ Erma’ di Bretschneider. MacMullen, Ramsay 1964. ‘Social Mobility and the Theodosian Code’, JRS 54: 49–53. MacMullen, Ramsay 1984. Christianizing the Roman Empire (AD 100–400). New Haven: Yale University Press. MacMullen, Ramsay 1986. ‘What Difference Did Christianity Make?’, Historia 35: 322–43. MacMullen Ramsay 1988. Corruption and the Decline of Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press. MacMullen, Ramsay 1990. Change in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marrou, Henri-Irénée 1938. Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique. Paris: E. de Boccard. Marrou, Henri-Irénée 1949. Saint Augustine et la fun de la culture antique 2, Retractatio. Paris: E. de Boccard. Martindale, John P. 2003. ‘The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, volume I: a Memoir of the Era of A.H.M. Jones’. In Fifty Years of Prosopography, edited by Averil Cameron, 231–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazzarino, Santo 1966. The End of the Ancient World. London: Faber. Piganiol, André 1947. L’Empire chrétien. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Piganiol, André 1964. La chute de l’empire romain. Paris: Marabout. Riegl, Alois 1901. Spätrömische Kunstindustrie. Nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn. Wien: Ôsterreichisches archäeologisches Institut. Rostovtzeff, Mikhail 1926. Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rostovtzeff, Mikhail I. 1957. Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Revised by Peter M. Fraser. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Runciman, W. Gary 1986. ‘The Sociologist and the Historian’. JRS 76: 259–65. Salzman, Michele R. and Rapp, Claudia eds. 2000. Elites in Late Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sarris, Peter 2006. Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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A.H.M. JONES AND THE END OF THE ANCIENT WORLD Seeck, Otto. 1897–1920. Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, 6 vols. Berlin: Siemenroth & Troschel. Spengler, Oswald 1926–29. The Decline of the West. English Translation. London: G. Allen and Unwin. Stark, Rodney 1996. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Swain, Simon and Edwards, Mark eds. 2006. Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Early to Late Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vessey, Mark 1988. ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of Late Antiquity, from Marrou’s Saint Augustin (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1968)’, JECS 6: 377–411. Walbank, Frank W. 1946. The Decline of the Roman Empire in the West. Past and Present. Studies in the History of Civilization. London: Cobbett Press. Walbank, Frank W. 1969. The Awful Revolution. Liverpool University Press. Wes, Marinus A. 1967. Das Ende des Kaisertums im Westen des Römischen Reichs. ‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsdrukkerijen Uitgeverijbedrijf. Whitby, L. Michael 1992. ‘Recruitment in Roman Armies from Justinian to Heraclius (ca. 565–615)’. In Cameron, Averil ed. 1995, 61–108. Whitby, L. Michael and Streeter, Joseph eds. 2006. Christian Persecution, Martyrdom and Orthodoxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wickham, Chris 1988. ‘Marx, Sherlock Holmes and Late Roman Commerce’. JRS 78: 183–93. Wickham, Chris 2005. Framing the Early Middle Ages, 400–900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zuchetti, Emilio 2021. ‘Frank William Walbank’s Archive at the University of Liverpool’, Quaderni di Storia 47.93: 203–24.

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Robert Browning belongs in this collection as another of those in Jones’s department at UCL and a lifelong Marxist, although it remains a puzzle why he expressed so little of this in his historical works. He was a prize-winning classicist from Glasgow and Balliol College Oxford but he was later regarded as a Byzantinist and became an international figure in the field with many honours and appointments, despite the fact that the chair he went on to hold at Birkbeck College in London being a chair of classics and ancient history in the department of classics (and he did sometimes publish on classical subjects). Some of his postgraduate students went on to hold distinguished posts in Byzantine studies. He was also a polymath, famous as a prodigious linguist, publishing on language and literature as well as history and on many historical periods. All this was combined with regular speaking, publishing and activism in the Communist Party, which was rarely revealed in his academic publications or in his conversations with people like myself. Despite the ample records on which I was able to draw Robert Browning remains a mystery and contrasts strongly with other British Marxists at UCL in the 1940s, for instance Geoffrey de Ste Croix. More could no doubt be said now about his time in Cairo during WWII when he rose to become Major Browning and met his third wife, Ruth, than I was able to include in this memoir, written in the British Academy series of memoirs of deceased fellows. I was not entirely satisfied with the memoir at the time of writing even though it was based on a large amount of family and other material then available to me. Perhaps those with more knowledge of subsequent publications on the SOE in the Balkans will be able to explain better how Browning came to be in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and why as he later claimed he had to leave a remote island in a hurry by submarine. His stay in the Balkans was short and he quickly returned to the UK to begin his academic career, but it was long enough to marry a Bulgarian who became the mother of his two daughters. It was Robert Browning, as a friend of my ancient history tutor Isobel Henderson, who suggested to me that I start work on Agathias. He could not be my supervisor for my PhD at Glasgow and when I had to transfer to University College London in 1964 he gently yielded the role to Arnaldo Momigliano. That seemed entirely typical of his modest personality and it set me on a different intellectual DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-7

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course (chapter 7 below). But years later Angeliki Laiou, then Director of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, encountered a different Robert, keen to retain his visiting role there, and appealed to me to help her persuade him to retire. That was another aspect of the enigma that Browning presented and there is no doubt that he enjoyed the many honours that were heaped on him. Browning was a central and much fêted figure in the world of Byzantinists and philhellenes but I hope that others may be able to fill out the gaps I had to leave. I have added some references in the Bibliography, also taking the opportunity to correct some publication dates. –––––––––––

Robert Browning, FBA, who died on 11 March 1997 at the age of 83, was an indefatigable scholar and at the same time something of an enigma. His retirement in 1981 as Professor of Classics and Ancient History from Birkbeck College, University of London, a post he had held since 1965, caused hardly any hiatus in his scholarly activity as one of the leading international Byzantine scholars for he then took up a regular visiting appointment at the Centre for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, and continued to hold a series of offices including the chairmanship since its inception of the British Academy Research Project on the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire [PBE]. He had been chairman of what was then the British National Byzantine Committee from 1974 to 1983, and a vice-president of the International Association for Byzantine Studies since 1981. His long career and scholarly contribution in the fields of classics, Byzantine studies and modern Greek and in particular his later role as chair of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles led to his receiving a remarkable number of honours from Greece, including honorary doctorates from the Universities of Athens and Ioannina, gold medals from the Onassis Foundation and the city of Athens, membership of the Academy of Athens and appointment as Commander of the Order of the Phoenix. He was elected as an honorary citizen of Mystra, in the Peloponnese on 29 May 1996. His election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1978 was complemented by that to a Corresponding Fellowship of the Academy of Athens in 1981 and he had received an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham in 1980. He was in later years a deeply committed member of the board of the new University of Cyprus. So great was the esteem in which he was held as a modern philhellene that he was granted the high honour of a funeral at the expense of the Greek state. Robert Browning was a genuine polymath. He was born in Glasgow in 1914 and remained all his life a reserved and quietly spoken Scot. In his later years his rapid movement and quick speech were still characteristic and according to a contemporary he had altered little in appearance and manner since 1938. It was the same with his intellectual energy and appetite for learning: in 1996 his stamina in attending lectures at the International Byzantine Congress in Copenhagen left younger scholars far behind – it is claimed that some of his younger colleagues tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to slow down a little. He had shown the same eager 70

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curiosity at the earlier International Congress held in Moscow in 1991 at the time of the attempted coup against Gorbachev, when he listened with the greatest interest to the exchanges between civilians between soldiers in tanks [though seemingly without making his own political views public]. This intellectual curiosity together with his encyclopaedic knowledge of his field found expression in long service as the compiler of the British entries for the bibliographies of scholarly work in Byzantine studies appearing year by year in the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift. Official retirement from Birkbeck in 1981 represented no more than a slight blip in his continuing writing and lecturing or above all in his contacts with younger scholars. Indeed, many of those who later regarded themselves as his pupils and protégés never had an institutional connection with him, and during his career he helped a wide range of now well-established scholars to get a start in their academic careers by telling them what jobs might be coming up and offering advice at the right time. It is not surprising then that his years as Visiting Professor at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington should have given him such great pleasure, for they allowed him to continue to hold seminars and direct the research of the young. Real retirement was not in his nature. He gently complained that now he had to type all his own letters and pay for his own postage but he greatly valued and used the opportunities which came his way to continue his scholarly life much as before. It would have been hard to imagine him leading a quiet life in the country: he belonged in the urban, and especially the London world of libraries and friends and colleagues. Pupils and colleagues alike were struck by the wide range of his knowledge, especially of languages. One of his later Australian graduate students says of him: ‘One of my vivid memories is of having a supervision session when the phone would ring. With extraordinary facility he would switch to Greek, any Slavic language you could name, and back again. Sometimes in about half an hour you would hear half a dozen languages.’ Stories of this kind abound. Costas Constantinides remembers Robert while on a bus from Ioannina to Metsovo going over to a group of old men and talking to them in Vlach. When asked how he knew the language so well he replied: ‘My Latin used to be quite good’.’ On one occasion he became quite excited after dreaming that he found a Hungarian grammar in a second hand bookshop and equally disappointed to discover that it was only a dream. Just as he picked up languages for the sheer pleasure of it so he seemed to have read everything and to have the whole of Greek literature from the ancient world to the end of the Byzantine empire at his fingertips. Some found this rather daunting but Robert did not use his encyclopaedic knowledge to score points; his intellectual curiosity was entirely genuine and he loved to share his knowledge with others. As he grew older his quickfire lecturing style speeded up if anything. This was apparent in the major public lectures which he gave in later years including the Runciman Lecture at King’s College London in 1994 which was subsequently published in Dialogos. His rapid delivery combined with a throwaway manner had been a subject for comment even in his early days as a lecturer, and his soft Glaswegian voice and accent were not always easy to follow. But Robert enjoyed the sense of sharing his knowledge with others less learned, and while 71

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the many honours he received in later life undoubtedly gave him great pleasure he was always too modest to be a performer. There was nothing of the show-off about him and he never wanted to pontificate. But as a result not everyone knew how remarkable or how learned he actually was. Until the end of his life Browning would go out of his way to advise and help younger scholars. More than one senior academic remembers being sent to him as a young student for a first research topic. A typical comment is: ‘he was not my supervisor but he was as helpful as if he had been’. He had friends and pupils all over the world, notably in Australia, where a Festschrift edited by Ann Moffatt under the title Maistor with bibliography to date was published in 1984 to celebrate his seventieth birthday. A second Festschrift, edited under the Greek title Philhellene by his Cypriot pupil and colleague Costas Constantinides with Nikolaos Panagiotakis, Elizabeth Jeffreys and Athanasios Angelou was published in Venice in 1996. It contains a bibliography of the writings of Browning since Maistor, compiled like the first by Ian Martin, formerly Classics librarian at University College London and a student there during Browning’s time. Martin has written of how Robert took the trouble to write to him about the recent Menander discoveries (Menander being the subject of Martin’s thesis) when he was a serving soldier and a student of modern Greek in Cyprus in the 1950s. Robert’s list of publications in his later years ranged as widely as ever and includes many entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, which was edited and inspired by his colleague Alexander Kazhdan at Dumbarton Oaks and produced during his time there. When he died after only a short illness which he thought at the time was a slight attack of flu, Robert had been looking forward with anticipation to his annual visit to Washington and had his air ticket already booked. Robert Browning was the eldest of the three sons of Alexander M. Browning, owner of a small cardboard box factory founded by his father, and his wife Jean Miller, a primary school teacher. On his father’s side he was descended from a family of handloom weavers from the village of Eaglesham, Lanarkshire, while his mother’s parents had come to Glasgow from the north of Scotland and Perthshire. His maternal grandfather became an inspector of postmen and on retirement took the job of pier-master at Keppel Pier on the island of Cumbrae in the Firth of Clyde to which Robert often went on visits as a child. On one of these visits during the First World War, when he was very small Robert was shown a big ship passing by and told by his grandfather that it was carrying American soldiers coming to fight the Kaiser. Other Brownings in Glasgow also followed academic careers: Andrew and Carl Browning, assumed to be of the same family, became professors of history and bacteriology in Glasgow University respectively; a cousin, also Robert Browning, became professor of accountancy there and yet another held a chair in surgery at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Schooldays began in a local dame school kept by Miss MacFarlane and Mrs Miller and continued after a short spell at Glasgow High School at Kelvinside Academy which Robert later described as having only modest intellectual pretensions at the time; it was enlivened for him by the presence of the Rector, D.H. Low, and his tales of student life in Paris and 72

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Marburg and his years spent teaching English in the University of Belgrade and as tutor to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia.1 Low had published a book on the Serbian oral ballads about Marko Kraljevic and Robert retained his copy throughout his life. For the first time Robert met a man who had a study lined with books from floor to ceiling and who was ready to lend them. His own study was later to seem to his children a kind of hallowed sanctuary, enlivened by the offer of a piece of the dark chocolate which he kept there or the chance to help in rolling an afterdinner cigarette. When he was faced with a choice between science or Greek Robert’s parents decreed that he must learn science. It was the wrong choice, and he joined the Greek class three years later after working on the language during a wet summer holiday. He came top, or ‘dux’ in every subject while at the school and top in the open bursary competition to Glasgow University, which provided a scholarship of some £40 a year. The four years spent studying classics there were happy and successful ones under the guidance of A.W. Gomme, H.D.F. Kitto, R.G. Austin, William Rennie and C.J. Fordyce. Robert was a lively participator in student causes such as Charities Day for which he was Publicity Convenor and was an elected member throughout his undergraduate years of the Student Representative Council. In that role he wrote to a number of famous people including George Bernard Shaw asking for their support, but Shaw brusquely refused on the grounds that the institutions which Robert had mentioned as possible recipients of funds raised by the Charities Day collections ought to be financed by the government. Robert considered publishing this letter in the local press over the signature ‘George Bernard Pshaw’. He edited the Student Handbook and took part in a student charity revue with a passable impersonation of Noël Coward. He was also a regular at Saturday night dances in the Students’ Union. The Snell Exhibition to Balliol, which permitted one graduate of Glasgow University per year to go on to Balliol College Oxford [therefore at the time and for long afterwards only a male], entailed a further competitive examination, sat and passed at the end of 1934, some nine months or so before the final honours examinations themselves. Robert was trained as a classicist in the best tradition at Kelvinside Academy and the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford. He won all the important classical prizes at Oxford – the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin Prose (with a Latin version of Hume’s Essay on Avarice), the Ireland, Craven and de Paravicini scholarships, the Jenkyns Prize and the Derby – an achievement of which he was justifiably proud. Browning arrived at Balliol as a Snell Exhibitioner in 1935 only a week or two after graduating with a first in classics from Glasgow, and proceeded to read for a second degree in classics (in Oxford terms Literae Humaniores), achieving firsts in both Mods and Greats and being viva’d for the latter in 1939 by A.H.M. Jones.

1 In 1929 Low produced an edition of Gibbon’s Journal and later a biography of Gibbon and an abridged edition of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; he went on to join the Classics department at King’s College London.

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At Balliol Robert had among his contemporaries Denis Healey, Edward Heath, Kenneth Garlick, Nigel Nicolson and Rodney Hilton, with whom he was later to collaborate on Past and Present. The Snell Exhibitioners made a distinctive contribution to the social and regional mix represented among the undergraduates and when Robert won the Ireland in 1937 a Glasgow paper printed his photograph under the headline ‘Glasgow man wins Blue Riband of classical scholarship’. He had among his tutors at Balliol Cyril Bailey and Roger Mynors, as well as Donald Allen (later to become Professor of Greek at Glasgow) in philosophy and Russell Meiggs in ancient history. He was soon renowned as someone who could pick up a language almost without effort; he would later occasionally show surprise if his young protégés were less fluent in Bulgarian, Georgian, or Albanian, say, than he was himself. After he left Balliol it was noticed with admiration that he chose to occupy himself by learning Georgian when sailing in a wartime convoy to the Middle East via Cape Town on the Oreades. Browning had been introduced to eastern Europe in Glasgow through his teacher David Low, whose Serbian father-in-law when on a visit would switch easily in family conversation from English, French and German to Serbo-Croat and Russian. He himself made several visits to eastern Europe before the war and was in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss when his arrival coincided with that of Hitler; he later expressed the relief he had felt when he boarded a train leaving Austria for Hungary. This was the start of Browning’s fascination with Byzantium. Robert’s eastern European interests coincided with his classical ones, and he already saw the interest and significance of Greek history as extending far beyond the classical period. The Second World War broke out immediately after he had taken Greats, and he volunteered for service in October 1939, joined the Royal Artillery and as a linguist was soon recruited to work for Intelligence in Cairo, reaching the rank of Major. Before going to Egypt the recruits were mustered in Oxford with Oriel College Library as a meeting place and parades on the Meadows. Robert’s quick step on the walks which were taken for recreation was remembered, and the same characteristic walk was noted later in Cairo. The Oreades was provided with a year’s supply of food and Robert and his three cabin-mates had free run of the first-class lounge and the ship’s library.2 Once arrived in Cairo he found Enoch Powell and Rodney Hilton already there and moved in what has been described as an exciting entourage of local left-wing activists. Egypt was followed in 1944 by Italy, Bulgaria and Belgrade where he was assistant to the Military Attaché in the period 1945–46. In 1946 he married a Bulgarian, Galina Chichekova; the marriage ended in divorce but produced two daughters, one of whom tragically died as a young adult. His widow, Ruth, who survived him, herself shared his background in Cairo. His travel and experiences during the war years further stimulated his interest in Byzantium, and his later book Byzantium and Bulgaria drew directly on

2 One of the three was Eric Dallibar, who provided these comments.

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the interests of these years. Robert’s lifelong attachment to Greece, as he later recalled, was a facet of the early and very broad curiosity about eastern Europe which went back to his wartime service in the Middle East and his introduction to the Balkans via Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. He did not often talk of these experiences, but one day many years later when the name of a remote island came up in conversation he quietly remarked, ‘The last time I was there I had to leave rather fast and by submarine’.3 Unlike a number of classicists of his generation, several of whom have subsequently written their memoirs, Robert was not part of SOE in Greece and was not dropped in Crete or Epirus to aid the resistance against the Germans. Nor did he himself record his wartime experiences or try to put his case. But some of his feelings about Greece come out in a memoir he wrote about Constantine Trypanis in 1995. He began with Trypanis’s famous predecessors who had claim to be natives of Chios, from Homer, Ion and Theopompus to Adamantios Koraes, and quoted Trypanis as remembering with emotion his feelings when he found himself briefly at Marathon during the retreat before the Germans during the Second World War. The same memoir demonstrates the breadth and historical understanding of Robert’s philhellenism, for he commends Trypanis for his lack of national chauvinism and for his interest in Greece when it was part of the Roman empire, which led to his founding a Greek Society for Roman Studies and promoting research on Latin. As Greek Minister of Culture it was Trypanis who launched the project for the restoration of the Acropolis and its monuments which was carried on by his successor Melina Mercouri, and which Robert warmly endorsed, often speaking at meetings about a return of the Parthenon marbles, serving as chairman of the British Committee and contributing an essay to the book on the subject published by Christopher Hitchens in 1987. He also served for many years as chairman of the National Trust for Greece. These services to Greece were recognised in his many awards and in the addresses delivered at his funeral. There is no doubt that the war years were exciting and critical ones in Robert’s development. He enjoyed being an officer (and listed his military appointments in the Balliol College Register) and in Belgrade, especially, he was able to enjoy what may have seemed a rather glamorous lifestyle. An early family photograph which shows him smartly dressed in a double-breasted suit with a carnation in his buttonhole reveals a different Browning from the one most people knew in later years and permits a rare glimpse of a more carefree and even a dashing personality. A brief first marriage in 1940 to a former Glasgow student who was by then an aspiring actress had encouraged this, and perhaps reflected a side of Robert that was rarely to be seen after the war, when as a young academic in post-war Britain money was tight and living necessarily frugal. In his case, after his two first degrees and then the intervention of the war years, the beginning of his university career and his return to civilian life took place at a later age than would otherwise

3 Professor Eric Handley, FBA, personal communication.

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have been normal and the transition to an existence as a married postgraduate student in Oxford cannot have been easy. Life as a junior lecturer in London in the late 1940s also had its strains and Robert clearly felt he had to work very hard and maintain a high output of publications. His intellectual direction was not yet fully clear: he wrote his first article on a Byzantine subject in Bulgarian in 1950, but he was already publishing on classical literature and indeed continued throughout his life to publish on a very wide range of periods and to address both philological and historical problems. He did so out of a sense of responsibility to his subject as well as from wide-ranging interest, and in this connection his input to the Mycenaean seminar newly set up at University College London in 1954 was long remembered; he shared fully in the excitement of the new discoveries and published The Linear B Texts from Knossos in 1955, and he also introduced the newly deciphered Linear B to Soviet scholars in a lecture which he delivered in Russian in Moscow when he was part of a delegation of British Marxist historians. He made an unsuccessful attempt to return to Balliol as classical tutor in the early 1950s when Gordon Williams, a more mainstream Latinist, was appointed. However he was made a Reader at University College London in 1955 and after he moved to his chair at Birkbeck in 1965 and especially after his marriage to Ruth Gresh in 1972 Robert became noticeably more relaxed; while his work rate did not diminish, in later life he was able to enjoy the many honours that came his way with unaffected pleasure, and a University College colleague who met him in America in later years described him as having become ‘much easier to talk to’. At University College Browning was one of a remarkable group of staff and students many of whom had shared interests in the later Roman empire from a social and economic, or in some cases Marxist, point of view. These were crucial years for Browning. Shared political interests and allegiance led him to the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party during the years 1946 and 1956 and supported him in friendships with historians such as his colleague at Birkbeck Eric Hobsbawm, and Christopher Hill, former Master of Balliol. He was not one of the founders of Past and Present, however, joining the board only in 1965.4 He remained a member of the Communist Party through the crisis of 1956 and never lost his commitment to it. There is some uncertainty about when he was drawn to communism. Robert himself typically says nothing of the matter in the notes which he provided for the Academy, and while some Balliol contemporaries remember it differently, his brother Martin doubts that it happened before he went to Oxford in 1935; he remembers Robert up to that time as a not very active member of the Glasgow University Liberal Club. During the Munich crisis and later, however, his linguistic skills allowed him to tune in to news from an impressive range of foreign stations, and he was an active supporter of A.D. Lindsay, then Master of Balliol, when he stood as an independent Popular Front candidate in the

4 See the short memoir by Judith Herrin in P&P 156, 1997: 3–6.

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Oxford by-election against Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham. Like many others at the time, not least at Balliol, he saw in communism the most effective force against Nazism, and his experiences during and at the end of the war led him to believe that it offered the best hope of reconstruction and stability. He maintained contacts over many years with Byzantinists in the Soviet bloc who were themselves Party members, sometimes to the surprise or disapproval of colleagues in the west and indeed of some in eastern Europe. Perhaps this loyalty should be ascribed more to his own non-judgemental personality than to ideological reasons; a certain personal naivety may have been involved, and it certainly also reflects the importance he attached to loyalty in friendship. Even his Party loyalty was perhaps mainly pragmatic in character. This may be why in practice the sustained commitment which was cemented during his war service (for years he wrote regularly for the Daily Worker, Labour Monthly and other Party publications) rarely showed itself in his historical writings, although in 1961 he contributed an article on the historical stages of social development to Marxism Today and in 1964 published on problems in slave societies in Our History, a pamphlet published by the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It cannot have been easy to bring these two sides together after 1956 and had he done so he may have anticipated a critical reaction. The disjuncture noticed by his colleagues did not strike him as a problem. He did however review The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World for Past and Present, an explicitly Marxist work by Geoffrey de Ste Croix, who as a mature student had worked with A.H.M. Jones at University College when Robert was a lecturer there [see chapter 5 above], stating that it was likely to become one of the most important works of our generation. He showed an interest in the subject of popular uprisings and protest in his paper of 1950 in Bulgarian on the zealots at Thessaloniki in the fourteenth century as well as in a significant article of 1952 in JRS on the riots at Antioch in AD 387. But he rarely published in Russian Byzantine journals and only once in a British academic journal, ‘Enlightenment and Repression in Byzantium in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, published in P&P in 1975, did he attempt a critical analysis of Byzantine society based on his socialist principles. In it he expressed the view that Byzantine culture, dominated by the church, was sterile and empty, a view [shared by Alexander Kazhdan but] now rejected among Byzantinists. Browning himself continued to stress the repetitiveness of Byzantine education, for example in his contribution to an introductory volume edited by G. Cavallo in 1992, though he now allowed for the freedom of an individual teacher to vary the context, and for the possibility that such studies might still be useful.5 Browning will be remembered most as a Byzantinist. Yet he began as a classicist and his interest in Byzantium – which distinguished him from many of 5 See Browning 1992; for change and development in Byzantine education, notably in the eleventh century, see Agapitos 1998. [The literary and educational culture of Middle Byzantium has more recently undergone a fundamental process of rethinking, emerging as highly complex and highly dynamic.]

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his classical colleagues – was not owed to his institutional background or the demands of syllabuses but rather to his wide conception of scholarship and to the love of modern Greece which found its fullest expression in his later years. His title at Birkbeck was and remained Professor of Classics and Ancient History and he belonged to the classical tradition in the University of London. Though his graduate students worked on a wide range of topics, it was not in his nature to want to overturn what was well established, and he did not seek to influence the undergraduate teaching of Byzantine history in London, which in any case fell under the Board of Studies in History and was very much the province of Professor Joan Hussey at Royal Holloway College and Professor Donald Nicol at Kings. He was a lifelong supporter of the Institute of Classical Studies and the Joint Library (where, incidentally, in its former home in Gordon Square he was given a memorable eightieth-birthday party – Robert is in every one of the photographs from that day, looking very much as if he was enjoying being at the centre of things, though he felt himself that he was upstaged by Sir Steven Runciman). Browning was also President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies from 1974 to 1977 and for ten years before that he had served as Reviews Editor of JHS, both offices bringing him into close and intimate connection with the institute. He was punctilious about university committees and never revealed whether he found them boring (some of them certainly were). He was a particularly valued colleague in the matter of library ordering, whether in connection with the Joint Library of the Institute of Classical Studies or the sub-committee which existed to coordinate Byzantine accessions across the university, for he invariably knew the latest books over the entire range of classical to modern and had probably already reviewed most of them. When he joined the Classics department at UCL in 1947 much of the College was still in ruins after an air raid in 1940 and part of the library had been burnt. In the words of a colleague, ‘Many people, like Robert, had had a long war and were rebuilding their lives and careers; many of their students were similarly placed’. More anecdotally, ‘Robert is remembered as one of a party [charged with] sorting library books damaged by fire and water. He picked one up, apparently at random, opened it at the end, and began to make the most convincing Oriental noises. “Good heavens”, said someone, “do you read Arabic as well?” “Not really”, he replied, “it’s the Koran.”’6 Another colleague shared a small office with him while the rebuilding was still going on. ‘He seemed to know everything about the Greek and Latin languages. From time to time he had a domestic conversation on the phone with his wife, in totally fluent French, and I knew that he spoke many other languages as well (Greek, Bulgarian?). He spoke so fast that I had trouble understanding even his English’.7 At UCL he was one of a remarkable collection of scholars. A.H.M. Jones, the great historian of the later Roman empire [see chapter

6 Professor Eric Handley, personal communication. 7 Professor David Finley, personal communication.

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5 above], had succeeded Norman Baynes as Professor of Ancient History and John Morris and Edward A. Thompson, the author of a classic study of Ammianus Marcellinus published in 1949, were two of those who could sympathise with Robert’s political leaning. Characteristically he is remembered by some students of ancient history at UCL through the class he took for them in Greek; others remembered his proficiency in Latin, which extended to late Latin and the development of the Romance languages. He would see some ten people individually for tutorials in each week of term and would before long know everyone in the department by name and interests. He was to remember them, and they him, for years afterwards. Although David Furley remembers Robert once trying to recruit him for a Party meeting, most of those who knew him as students in those days say that they never remember him expressing left-wing or communist principles even in relation to such obviously relevant historical topics such as the fall of the Roman empire. This is the more remarkable in view of his continued writing in the socialist press, a part of his activity which remained mysterious to most of his academic colleagues and pupils. This reserve was entirely in line with the mildness that was so much part of his character. Robert had strong views which he retained but they were balanced by Scottish circumspection and toleration for others, and indeed his dealings with others were sometimes mild to a fault. Of Browning’s books on Byzantine history, Byzantium and Bulgaria, written for a series on comparative history, clearly grew from his own knowledge of the region from 1944 onwards when he was in Bulgaria as an officer in the Allied Control Commission. It is more revealing than some of his other works, in the first place for its demonstration of his close familiarity with Russian and Bulgarian academic writing, which is cited in the original with no concession to the less well-equipped reader, and in the second for its comparison between Bulgaria and Byzantium in the ninth and tenth centuries, which works to the detriment of the latter as a totalitarian state and claims that the apparent backwardness of the former is to be explained by its Slavic egalitarianism and the sense of independence of its citizens as the ‘underdog of the feudal world’. Not long after the period which he discusses the Byzantines, under the Emperor Basil II, later known as ‘the Bulgarslayer’, conquered Bulgaria and reduced it to the status of a Byzantine province, but Browning passes this over in a few lines as resulting from ‘the logic of history and the traditions of the Roman empire’. He emphasises the number and vigour of the revolts with which the Byzantine rulers were faced but leaves the long submergence of Bulgaria within the Ottoman empire as something to be explained by others. It is interesting in the light of his later connections with Dumbarton Oaks to see the number of citations of the Soviet Byzantinist Alexander Kazhdan, who left Moscow not long after the publication of Byzantium and Bulgaria as a Jewish émigré and spent the rest of his career at Dumbarton Oaks. The view of Byzantium as a state in which the citizen was atomised and alienated, hinted at in Byzantium and Bulgaria, was to be a feature of the first of the books published in English by Kazhdan with the collaboration of a western scholar, People and Power in Byzantium, published by Dumbarton Oaks in 1982 with Giles Constable. 79

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It is legitimate to ask why Robert chose to write about Byzantine issues when he was apparently unsympathetic to Byzantium as a society. Much of his interest lay in fact in the direction of Byzantine scholarship and in intellectual rather than social or economic issues. One of the clearest strands in his scholarship was his interest in Byzantine education, high culture and literacy, all subjects on which he frequently published, and Judith Herrin has seen this as an identification with his deepest concerns.8 Indeed this may have led him to over-emphasise to some degree the spread of literacy and higher education in Byzantium.9 Disappointingly, it did not find fulfilment in the book-length treatment of the topic which had seemed to some a natural outcome. But perhaps another reason for Robert’s continued fascination with Byzantium is to be found in his sense of the continuity, or least the resilience, of Greek civilisation, and in his admiration for the scholarly writers who kept classical culture alive. Yet Browning did not go on to develop his views about Byzantine history in more detail. Among his more notable articles on Byzantine topics mention must however be made for instance of his papers of 1962 and 1963 on the patriarchal school in Constantinople, that on an unpublished funeral oration on Anna Comnena in PCPS, also in 1962, his papers on Cyprus in the dark ages in 1977–78 and literacy in Byzantium in BMGS in 1978, his lecture to the Friends of Dr Williams’s Library published in 1981 and his paper on ‘The “Low-level” Saint’s Life in the Early Byzantine World’, published in the same year.10 All these became standard and are still regularly cited. But his historical books on Byzantium are for the most part useful introductions rather than new analyses; they do not reveal much of the personal views of the author. He preferred to keep his deeper views for a different audience and reading these books alone one would not have thought to associate Browning with historians of the Later Roman empire such as F.W. Walbank, John Morris, E.A. Thompon or Geoffrey de Ste Croix. Browning’s Justinian and Theodora as an attractive presentation for general readers of the world of sixth-century Byzantium as seen through the personalities of the emperor and empress reflected in contemporary texts [but did not go deeper]. With The Emperor Julian Browning directly addressed the later Roman empire and a subject much discussed by its historians but he did so in a book that is brief and without footnotes, and while he devotes some pages to the rise of Christianity and imagines Julian pondering the ills of his time he does not offer any ideological critique as such. His aim was to present Julian as a man of his time, ‘conscious of being an outsider with a mission to heal a sick society’, but not as the demon seen by Christian contemporaries nor yet readily explicable in psychological terms as the product of a lonely boyhood. The book took shape when he was a Visiting Scholar at Dumbarton Oaks and he refers to American students who compared Julian to President Kennedy; he must have liked the comparison for it appears 8 Herrin, P&P 156, 1997: 4–5. 9 Though this is partly a matter of changing definitions of literacy: see Mullett 1990. 10 Browning, 1962a, 1962a, 1978, 1977–78, 1981a, 1981b.

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both in the preface and at the end of the book. But his Julian is straightforwardly treated and he does not discuss in any detail Julian’s own very interesting writings or the important and in some ways mixed account given of the emperor by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Browning’s History of the Byzantine Empire came out just before his retirement and takes the form of a chronological account, also without annotation. It is much less idiosyncratic than Cyril Mango’s Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome, which was published in the same year. Browning saw Byzantium here as a society in which there was a great gap between the elitist culture of the few and the experience of the many, and the later Byzantine period as one of inexorable decline. Not much is said about the role of religion in this society, except in terms of church institutions or, in the case of hesychasm, as a displacement activity when times were hard, and again we look in vain for overt Marxist analysis. It was the book Browning edited under the title The Greek World: Classical, Byzantine and Modern (Browning ed. 1985), for which he wrote an introduction entitled ‘Land and People’, that expressed most clearly his deep sense of the whole sweep of Hellenic history and the importance of connecting the world of classical Greece to its modern successors. Here one sees something of the man who had been a tireless worker for the anti-dictatorship committee in the days of the junta, when it was said that he would also take on and coach Greek PhD students personally to provide them with an excuse for not returning to Greece at that difficult time. Over his long career his academic writings covered a chronological span from Linear B to modern Greece, and a range that included an article on the date of Petronius (he also expressed an ambition to write a commentary on the Satyricon, though this was an aim he did not fulfil). But this did not lead him, as has often been the case with others, to see Byzantium only through the eyes of a classicist, except in the important sense of his deep knowledge of palaeography and the history of the Greek language. Among his articles a number presented hitherto Byzantine literary works and his great learning in this field at last found a worthy subject in the magisterial catalogue of dated manuscripts from Cyprus to AD 1570 published jointly by Dumbarton Oaks and the Cyprus Research Centre in Nicosia, an undertaking on which he collaborated with his former pupil Costas Constantinides of the University of Ioannina. This catalogue is a considerable achievement; it involved years of long and hard work and its publication, which was itself a landmark in the study of Byzantine Cyprus, was a fine result of Robert’s close association with Cyprus in his later years. It breaks new ground in assembling material about all manuscripts known to have been copied in Cyprus or by Cypriot copyists between the tenth century and 1570, the date of the Ottoman occupation. It therefore allows users to get something of an idea of the extent of Cypriot activity in this field and of its subsequent spread and dispersal. The introductory chapters are an important contribution to the intellectual history of Cyprus and the history of literary and church patronage. According to a typical statement in the preface, written by Robert, much of the necessary work in a wide range of European libraries as well as the initial drafting of the introductory 81

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chapters, was done by Constantinides, but ‘every word of this book’, as well as its general principles, was agreed by both the two authors over their many years of labour (the project was agreed by Dumbarton Oaks and the Cyprus Research Centre in 1983 and completed in 1993). Engagingly, they themselves adopted the practice of many of the copyists whose work they include by appending a colophon in Byzantine twelve-syllable, giving their names and the date of completing the work, and taking over lines used in similar contexts in some of the manuscripts in the catalogue. A work of this kind takes time to be appreciated fully. It is very different from his Medieval and Modern Greek, which he had published years before and which quickly became one of his best-known contributions to scholarship; this is a brief but incisive treatment of the development of the Greek language from the late classical period to modern days. It can genuinely be called a classic, and it is sometimes hard to remember now what a huge gap it filled at the time. Both its precision and its depth of scholarship are typical of its author. His other great passion was the history of education, again from classical times right through the Byzantine period, and one of the last things he wrote was a substantial chapter on education in the fifth and sixth centuries AD for volume XIV of the new Cambridge Ancient History. Characteristically the delivery of the chapter and its coverage were exemplary, even though done on the familiar typewriter with additions in Robert’s recognisable hand, for one thing he never achieved was the leap into modern technology. Among those who knew him best Robert is generally remembered as quiet and reserved, but at Dumbarton Oaks he liked to be the first into the swimming pool at the start of the season and regularly outwalked younger friends when in his seventies and eighties. He was a particularly energetic and devoted grandfather to two young granddaughters from whom he was at that time mostly separated by the Atlantic. Browning’s academic strengths showed most clearly in his near encyclopaedic knowledge of literary texts and the history of scholarship, and this was perhaps related to other traits of character, for instance his love of browsing in second-hand bookshops (a habit he had acquired when visiting the ‘barras’ in Glasgow) and his taste for conversations about etymology. The lively and gregarious character exhibited in the Glasgow years came into its own again in later life. Robert much enjoyed not only the incomparable library and beautiful setting of Dumbarton Oaks and the chance to continue holding seminars and acting as mentor to new generations of young scholars, but also the opportunities for new friendships. He was an appreciative guest, always arriving with flowers or a bottle of wine, and his friendship extended to the sons and daughters [of these friends] when they in turn would invite him to dinner in student accommodation in prestigious universities. When in Washington in his later years he still prided himself on walking and would never take a taxi unless in extreme circumstances, even if it meant a metro journey and two buses. Retirement from the ‘retirement’ post was something he did not wish to contemplate and from which he was in the event happily spared. 82

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Robert was cremated in a strictly secular ceremony presided over by Christopher Hill, at which a series of tributes was delivered by his daughter Tamara and his friend Eric Hobsbawm among others; there were also tributes from Greece including a message read by the Greek Ambassador. Besides the national dailies, obituaries appeared in the Athens newspaper To Vima, the Glasgow Herald and in Paroikiake, the newspaper of the Greek Cypriot community in London, both the last two written by Ian Martin. A year later a memorial meeting with the title ‘Mnemosyne for Robert Browning’ was held at Birkbeck College. He left many books and articles so that we can remember him, but the most vivid memories must surely be those of his friends. Note: For help and information in compiling this memoir I should like to thank Professors Costas N. Constantinides, Eric Handley, David Furley, Eric Hobsbawm and Wolf Liebeschuetz, as well as Ruth and Tamara Browning, Nancy Matthews, the late Ian Martin, and Robert’s brother Martin Browning. I have also consulted the notes which Browning himself provided to the British Academy and had access to correspondence dating from the preparation of his first Festschrift in 1984, as well as to personal comments from many of Robert’s friends and former pupils.

Bibliography Agapitos, Panagiotis 1998. In Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, edited by Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, 170–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Browning, Robert 1955. The Linear B Texts from Knossos. London: Institute of Classical Studies. Browning, Robert 1962a. ‘The Patriarchal School at Constantinople in the Twelfth Century’, Byzantion 32:167–202. Browning, Robert 1962b. ‘An Unpublished Funeral Oration on Anna Comnena’, PCPS 188.8: 1–12. Browning, Robert 1963. ‘The Patriarchal School at Constantinople in the Twelfth Century (Continued)’, Byzantion 33: 11–40. Browning, Robert 1969, 1983. Medieval and Modern Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Browning, Robert 1973. ‘Enlightenment and Repression in Byzantium in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, P&P 69: 3–23. Browning, Robert 1975a. Byzantium and Bulgaria: A Comparative Study Across the Byzantine and Balkan Frontier. London: Temple Books. Browning, Robert 1975b. The Emperor Julian. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Browning, Robert 1977–78. ‘Byzantium and Islam in Cyprus in the Early Middle Ages’, Epeteris Kentrou Epistemonikon Ereunon 9: 101–16. Browning, Robert 1978. ‘Literacy in the Byzantine World’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 4: 30–54. Browning, Robert 1980, 1992. History of the Byzantine Empire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Browning, Robert 1981a. Church, State and Learning in Twelfth Century Byzantium. Dr Williams’s Library Trust. Browning, Robert 1981b. ‘The “Low-Level” Saint’s Life in the Early Byzantine World’. In The Byzantine Saint, edited by Serge Hackel, 117–27. London: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. Browning, Robert 1992. ‘Teachers’. In The Byzantines, edited by Guglielmo Cavallo, English Translation, 95–115. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Browning, Robert 2001. ‘Education in the Roman Empire’. In Late Antiquity: Empire and Its Successors, AD 425 to 600, edited by Cameron, Averil, Ward-Perkins, Bryan and Whitby, Michael, Cambridge Ancient History XIV, 855–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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R O B E RT B R O W N I N G Browning, Robert ed. 1985. The Greek World: Classical, Byzantine and Modern, London: Thames and Hudson. Browning, Robert and Constantinides, Costas N. 1993. Dated Greek Manuscripts from Cyprus to AD 1570. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 30; Texts and Studies of the Cyprus Research Centre 18. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection; Nicosia: Cyprus Research Collection. Constantinides, Costas N. et al. ed. 1996. Philhellene: Studies in Honour of Robert Browning. Venice: Istituto ellenico di studi bizantini e postbizantini di Venezia. Low, David M. 1929. Gibbon’s Journal to 1763. London: Chatto and Windus. Low, David M. 1937. Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794. London: Chatto and Windus. Low, David M. 1960. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall: A One-Volume Abridgement. London: Chatto and Windus. Moffatt, Ann ed. 1984. Maistor: Classical, Byzantine and Renaissance Studies in Honour of Robert Browning. Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. Mullett, Margaret 1990. ‘Writing in Early Medieval Byzantium’. In The Use of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, edited by Rosamond McKitterick, 156–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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7 THOUGHTS ON THE INTRODUCTION TO THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PA G A N I S M A N D C H R I S T I A N I T Y IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

This chapter and the next reflect in different ways the impact of Arnaldo Momigliano in London and on my own development as a scholar. It is interesting to note that this influence has not continued among historians in the UK today, except among those who were close to him during the years of his Warburg seminars after his retirement, although it is alive and well in Italy, where historians are also more concerned with fourth-century issues. Momigliano was one of the refugee scholars who had escaped from European Fascism and his thinking must understood in that context. Neither their reception among British scholars or their own transition were always easy. That said, the important conference held at the monastery of Bose in northern Italy for which this lecture was written is testimony to the significance of the volume edited by Arnaldo Momigliano on behalf of the Warburg Institute in London and published in 1963; it is fair to regard that volume as marking a sharp contrast with the legacy of Jones in London and making available to British scholars the continental scholarship of the day on Christianity and the Roman empire, at least as far as the fourth century was concerned. For me the presence of Momigliano in London and the fact that he took over as my PhD supervisor just a year after the volume appeared opened doors to very different ways of doing ancient history and to a friendship during which we did not always agree but which lasted until his death in 1987. Just as Isobel Henderson had sent me to talk to Robert Browning, now Momigliano sent me to talk to Henry Chadwick, as the beginning of this lecture records. He remained a strong influence and a loyal and attentive friend until the end of his life, something that I now feel I did not appreciate sufficiently at the time and now regret very much. The fact that the volume was published in 1963, even before I moved to London and while I was trying to write a PhD in Glasgow meant that once I became an assistant lecturer in Classics at King’s College London and subsequently began teaching Greek and Roman history there as Reader in Ancient History in 1970 I DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-8

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was familiar with the differing views expressed by the contributors. It provided an important insight on the fourth century, at a time when the Roman empire period in the London ancient history syllabus was cut back from AD 641 to AD 400, though it did not prevent me from adopting in the intercollegiate (that is, university-wide) lectures I was required to give at Senate House the approach to the Roman empire already current, as I explained in the Introduction to chapter 5 above. Only much later and having been a regular attender at the seminars Momigliano gave at the Warburg Institute after his retirement from his chair at University College London in 1975 did I fully absorb his characteristic approach and even dare to disagree with him. After his death I was forcibly struck by the degree of personal loss that I felt, and there is no doubt of the lasting influence on me not only of his work and his way of working but also of his loyalty and attachment. I now believe that it was because of the shock I felt at his death that I was not among the contributors to the early tribute volumes to him and did not travel to Italy as others did; unlike others, again, I did not write about him directly until much later. But this was yet another case of my not quite believing that my views were important enough. –––––––––

Not long ago I was at a memorial service for an archetypal English patristic scholar, Henry Chadwick, quintessentially Oxbridge, Regius Professor of Divinity, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, spokesman for the Anglican church in its conversations with Roman Catholicism.1 One can hardly think of anyone less likely than Arnaldo Momigliano, Italian Jew and passionately serious historian of the ancient world. And yet their friendship was mentioned in the address at the service, and when I first came into contact with him in 1964 Momigliano sent me to Oxford to meet Henry Chadwick and ask for his advice. That is a measure of the breadth of approach which is illustrated in the volume which is the starting point of this collection. I want in this short contribution to draw attention to Momigliano’s Introduction, a part of the book that is often overlooked. The seminar which formed the basis of the eventual volume entitled The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century2 took place in London during the academic year 1958–59. It was held at the Warburg Institute, an institution which, having been forced to move from Hamburg in the 1930s, continued the European tradition of scholarship in England and which naturally attracted refugee scholars. Here Momigliano found a home in his post-war years in London, both before and after his retirement from the chair of ancient history at University College, and it was a natural place for an invitation to the European 1 The Very Revd Henry Chadwick (1920–2008), was the author of many books including Origen, Contra Celsum, The Sentences of Sextus, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition, The Early Church, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great and East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church. 2 Momigliano ed.1963.

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scholars whose lectures are included in the published volume.3 We know now much more clearly from Momigliano’s Cambridge lectures of spring 1940 on the subject of peace and liberty, published by Riccardo Di Donato in Italian in 1996 and in English in 2012,4 about his interest in and indeed respect for, Christianity. He went so far in the last lecture in the series as to tie in the western concept of liberty to the ideals of Christianity, contrasted with the decadence of the Roman state. According to these lectures, the Christian ideal of peace was new and comprehensive. It opposed itself to what was offered by the state, and Momigliano believed that the contrast could not persist indefinitely. Either one of the two bodies must destroy the other or state and church must recognize each other. Such a dramatic formulation makes striking reading now, and an understanding of the earlier history of Momigliano’s thinking about Christianity is essential in order to explain the nature of the volume under discussion. It is against this background that we can understand what may otherwise seem surprising in the Introduction. Momigliano referred at the end of his life to his triple heritage – Jewish, classical and Christian – as a Jew and an Italian,5 and expressed a passionate belief elsewhere that the ancient world could only be understood in terms of the successive impacts of Judaism and Christianity. ‘Peace and liberty’ made a poignant choice of theme for the series of eight lectures given at Cambridge in the early months of World War II, when he had lost the chair he had briefly held at Turin because of the race laws, and been forced to move to the unfamiliar circumstances of England and of Oxford. However, it was a theme on which he had already reflected for some time, and it took up again the subject of peace which had been the subject of his unpublished inaugural lecture given in Turin in 1936.6 Guido Clemente has brilliantly shown how this complex of ideas had its roots in Momigliano’s exposure in his youth to the thinking on the topic by other scholars in his circle, including Croce and De Sanctis.7 In the early 1950s in London Momigliano had continued these themes in lectures at the Warburg Institute on impiety and heresy and at the Institute of Classical Studies on parrhesia and isegoria as aspects of freedom of speech in the ancient world.8 The problem of freedom in relation to ancient history occupied him from an early stage and continued to do so. He was to come to the view, which lies behind the Introduction that we are considering and which had already been expressed in his inaugural lecture at Turin and his Cambridge lectures, that Christianity, developing out of Judaism and impacting on the Roman empire, offered the freedom of the

3 It was also at the Warburg Institute that he later held his own regular seminar: Crawford 1989; Di Donato 2006; Grafton 2009a. 4 For the Italian version see Di Donato 1996, cf. Di Donato 1995, 2006. [The original English version as given can be found at Momigliano 2012, 1, 3–105.] 5 Preface to Momigliano 1987, dated December 1986. 6 For this period see Cracco Ruggini 2006. 7 Clemente 2014 [see chapter 8 below]. 8 Di Donato 2006, 130.

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individual conscience that could not be provided by the imperial Roman state. If the Introduction seems in some ways to put forward a rather stark and even schematized view of the relation of Christianity to that of the fate of the Roman empire, it is because behind it lay many years of developing and complex reflection on the topic, of which only a part had at the time been published.9 The original Warburg seminar in 1958–59 assembled a group of scholars including H.-I. Marrou, for whom Momigliano already had a high respect, having known him since the early 1930s.10 As Marcone has pointed out, Marrou’s St Augustin et la fin de la culture antique had appeared in 1938, only two years after Momigliano’s papers of 1936, but at the most difficult period in the latter’s life; Marrou’s famous Retractatio, in which he set the agenda for a reversal of his earlier emphasis on decline, came out in 1949, thus ten years before the Warburg seminar.11 Having been cut off from continental scholarship during the war years Momigliano was now in a position from the security of his chair at University College in which he might look forward to visits from Marrou and other continental scholars, although it is interesting that Marrou is not included in his list in the Introduction of ‘the most recent contributions’ on the later Roman empire, and he does not point out the difference between Marrou’s original book and his later comments.12 Although he had felt earlier that he himself still lacked the deep acquaintance with Christian writings that he would have liked, Momigliano’s exposure to and engagement with the historical role played by Christianity in the Roman empire went back to his youth. More recently, he had recognized the fundamental importance for the understanding of Constantine, and therefore of relations between church and state in the fourth century, of a papyrus in the British Museum discussed by A.H.M. Jones that seemed to confirm the authenticity of Eusebius’s reporting of one of Constantine’s most important documents, and thereby undermined Burckhardt’s highly sceptical view of both Constantine and Eusebius.13 Contrary to what might have been the impression given in the volume, it was not Momigliano who invited the speakers, at least officially, but his friend Gertrud Bing, the director of the Warburg Institute. In a letter dated 10 June 1959, she invited him to edit the lectures for publication (for a fee), and to add a short Introduction; she had already discussed this with Colin Roberts [of Oxford University Press] and had suggested Momigliano’s name.14 In his reply, dated 15 9 Clemente 2014. 10 For the high estimation with which Momigliano regarded Marrou see Cracco Ruggini 1989a, 162; see also Marcone 2006, 227 and below. Peter Brown has also paid tribute to the influence he himself owed to Marrou. 11 Marcone 2006, 229–30. 12 Momigliano ed. 1963, 6, note 1. 13 Momigliano 1960a. It is worth noting that this wide-ranging bibliographical paper includes recent works on Christianity in the Roman empire. The article in question was by A.H.M. Jones, with an appendix by T.C. Skeat, not by Jones and C.E. Stevens, as Momigliano has it: Jones 1954. 14 I owe this vital point to my friend Professor John North; the letters are held in the Warburg Institute Archive.

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June, Momigliano said that he agreed in general, despite having a great deal of other work, but about the proposed Introduction he wrote: As for the short Introduction, it raises problems; it is easy to run against the intentions and convictions of the individual authors. However the first thing I want to do is read the lectures! Three of them I do not know. Then we must discuss the subject together, and even may think of the fee. Not only had he not himself decided whom to invite for the seminar in 1958–59, though he had given some advice on this point; he had not even attended all the papers. Nevertheless, as Oswyn Murray and Anthony Grafton have shown, the Warburg Institute had been familiar to him since the 1930s; he had had dealings with it in its first London home in the 1940s, published in its journal and lectured there in 1949.15 Momigliano is explicit in his Introduction about the fact that the thinking about Christianity expressed here was not new: in a footnote he refers to his contribution on ‘Roma: impero’ in the Enciclopedia Italiana 29 of 1936, and to an article published in Rivista Storica Italiana in same year,16 reprinted in 1955 in the first volume of the Contributi, and states clearly that ‘my point of view was already formulated’;17 the ‘more recent contributions’ he mentions had not therefore caused him to change his approach. In agreeing to write the article on the Roman empire in the Enciclopedia Italiana he had resisted the temptation to focus on classical Greek city-states and insisted on the transforming effect of Christianity in the Roman empire. Likewise he saw his early focus on the history of liberty in the ancient world as necessarily leading to the attempt to understand the effect on the ideal of liberty associated with the Greek city-states of the impact of universalism, Judaism and Christianity.18 The relation between liberty and empire was a tense subject in Fascist Italy, and Lellia Cracco Ruggini has described the hesitation that Momigliano’s recent articles had produced in the minds of the jury in the Concorso for the chair at Turin in 1936.19 The 1940 lectures, as yet still unpublished when Momigliano wrote the Introduction in 1959, had developed the theme of the relation of Christianity to the history of the Roman empire, and the commission for the Introduction caused him to return to it, although in the intervening period he had famously turned his attention in a different direction, towards the history of historiography, in itself a topic influenced by his contacts with the Warburg Institute and the scholars connected with it.20

15 16 17 18

Grafton 2009a, 246–51. Momigliano 1955a. Momigliano ed. 1963, 6, n. 1. As early as 1931 he had reviewed Croce’s Constant e Jellinek, Momigliano 1931; see Crawford 1989; Cracco Ruggini 1989a, 177. 19 Cracco Ruggini 2006, 108–9. 20 See Grafton 2009a, 246; Murray 1991, 53–54.

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The Introduction to The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century begins with an elegance that is highly characteristic (one of the most extraordinary things about Momigliano was his combination of a beautiful English style with a heavy Italian accent): ‘I may perhaps begin with a piece of good news. In this year 1959 it can still be considered an historical truth that the Roman empire declined and fell. Nobody as yet is prepared to deny that the Roman empire has disappeared’.21 As Arnaldo Marcone has pointed out,22 this famous assertion was directly challenged in a well-known paper by Glen Bowersock, whose position is shared by the many other scholars who have followed Momigliano’s pupil Peter Brown, in extending the coverage of late antiquity up to the eighth century or even longer. But an emphasis on ‘fall’, now receiving approval from revisionist historians (see below), is crucial for the argument of the Introduction and for the whole conception of the Warburg seminar of 1958–59 and the volume that ensued. For Momigliano it is very clear that the rise of Christianity, or what we now tend to call ‘Christianization’, was connected with the fate of the Roman empire, and specifically with its decline, and that the fourth century was a crucial phase in this process. We may compare the last of his Sather lectures, delivered in 1962, a year before the publication of the Conflict volume [but only published many years later],23 and thus between the seminar held in 1958–59 and its publication in 1963. The last Sather lecture dealt with the origins of ecclesiastical historiography, a theme related to his own contribution to The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century.24 It credits Eusebius, ‘simple and majestic’, with being the real founder of the genre, but ranges much more widely; we also find here references to the church under Constantine as ‘victorious’, and as ‘a separate body within the Roman Empire’.25 The last sentence of the concluding Sather lecture commends the comparison made in 1834 between Eusebius and Herodotus by F.C. Baur: ‘We can accept this comparison and meditate on his remark that both Herodotus and Eusebius wrote under the inspiration of a newly established freedom’.26 When he returned to the subject much later, for instance in his paper ‘After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’, published in 1978,27 it was to insist again that while by then the question of why Rome fell had seemed to have lost its urgency, a nuanced return to Gibbon’s themes was needed, including the role which the latter attributed to Christianity. Here again 21 Contrast Momigliano 1973. 22 Marcone 2008, 4, with 8, note 13; see Bowersock 1996. 23 Published posthumously as Momigliano 1990; Di Donato 2006, 128, points to the coherence of Momigliano’s thinking in the period 1962–64. 24 Momigliano ed. 1963, 79–99. 25 Momigliano 1990, 138, 141. 26 Momigliano 1990, 152. His turn to ecclesiastical history, and especially to Eusebius’s place in its development, grew out of a magisterial series of papers dealing with ancient historiography published in the years 1944 to 1957, many of which can be found in Momigliano 1955 (see Grafton 2009a, 234–5). 27 Momigliano 1978.

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Momigliano discusses the various theories put forward for the fall of the empire and concludes with the observation that the Church had become ‘state within a state’, as he had earlier predicted, after which the empire could not be the same as before; ‘anything which happened in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. had to be fitted into a new frame’. The entire first section of the Introduction is concerned with the debate about the decline and fall of the Roman empire. Various explanations and dates are majestically surveyed, with the history of debates about decline, from the time of the Romans onwards. It is intriguing to see that, 20 years or more before the publication of Geoffrey de Ste Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981), Momigliano regarded as discredited even in the Soviet Union the idea that decline started with the Peloponnesian war and a dependence on slavery in classical Greece.28 He surveys the theories of Dopsch and Pirenne, and acknowledges as signs of a move away from the concentration on the end of the Roman empire the vitality of Byzantium, referring to the work of Norman Baynes, a predecessor at University College London, and to the impact of Islam on society on Baynes [see chapter 2].29 In this he admitted that the older debates on the fall of the Roman empire were being modified. Nevertheless, for him the missing element was a full realization of the role played by Christianity, even if not ‘a simple return to Gibbon’. The section ends with a resounding affirmation: while Harnack and Troeltsch had written about early Christianity as a social phenomenon, they remained theologians. It was now for historians to give Christianity its due as the ‘most important social change of all’. Christianity must be understood on its own terms as a dynamic force and not merely as a destructive one in relation to the empire. Momigliano’s own aim is stated with uncompromising clarity, and in stating it he reiterates the notion of decline: ‘it is the modest purpose of this paper to reassert the view that there is a direct relation between the triumph (sic) of Christianity and the decline of the Roman empire’.30 He also employs another characteristic and very recognizable stylistic trope: ‘So far nobody has written a realistic evaluation of the impact of Christianity on the structure of pagan society. I shall not attempt such a task here. I shall confine myself to a few elementary remarks on the impact of Christianity on political life between the fourth and sixth centuries A.D. We all know the basic facts.’31 Momigliano’s elegant English style is one of his more remarkable features, and has often received comment,32 but I suspect that a study of the structures of his arguments in his published papers in terms of the impact of rhetoric (especially their opening remarks and their conclusions) would also be

28 29 30 31 32

Momigliano ed. 1963, 2, 4. Momigliano ed. 1963, 4, 5. On this issue see also Marcone 2006, 227–9. Marcone 2006, 6. Grafton 2009, 237, remarks on his characteristic openings but suggests that his rhetorical flights were rare; all the same, the lucidity of his arguments and the care which he gave to style are remarkable, given the well-known difficulties he had had with English in his early years in the country.

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revealing. The extract just quoted ends a section rather than the whole Introduction, but the phraseology of the disclaimer, and the use he makes of such formulations in general, would be well worth considering further. Section two presents a very recognizable picture of third-century crisis and fourth-century structural and economic problems, reminiscent of both Rostovtzeff and Jones. As we have seen, and as Arnaldo Marcone remarks, Momigliano had predictably observed the changes in attitudes to the later Roman empire that were taking place after World War II; I will argue however that his thought on the relation between Christianity and the end of the empire remained consistent. It is also instructive to place the Introduction and the seminar series more fully in their historical context.33 In his Cambridge lectures of 1940 Momigliano had spoken of Christianity as offering a relief from the difficulties of the third century. He referred to the dry spiritual life of the Empire and the new content of Christianity. We might remind ourselves that 1963, the year of publication of the Conflict volume, was also the publication year of E.R. Dodds’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, with a similar psychological message. In the following year A.H.M. Jones published his Later Roman Empire [see chapter 5 above],34 which acknowledged the appeal of Christianity to able minds and the drain this represented on the bureaucratic and official classes of the empire. Indeed we find a similar argument in Momigliano’s Introduction, where the argument is traced back to the influence of Edward Gibbon and before him to Voltaire and Montesquieu: ‘the . . . equilibrium changed . . . to the disadvantage of the ancient institutions of the empire’.35 Christians were simply ‘superior’ to pagans in dynamism and efficiency, better able to adapt to the new political and social situation and to deal with barbarians.36 It was a formulation which owed much to Rostovtzeff’s insistence on the chaos of the third century (the English revised edition of Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire had been published in 1957)37 even while contrasting this Christian dynamism with Rostovtzeff’s static and rigid Dominate. I was still an undergraduate in Oxford at the time of the original Warburg seminar in 1958–59, but this section reminds me vividly of the way such questions were formulated when I started teaching the history of the Roman empire in London in 1970. This was also before the rise of late antique archaeology as a discipline; no-one could write today, as Momigliano does here [following Pirenne], that ‘one has the impression that long-distance trade was increasingly in the hands of small minorities of Syrians and Jews’,38 a remark prefaced by reference to a supposed decline of the bourgeoisie and lack of prosperous traders in the fourth century. It

33 Marcone 2008, 13; cf. Marcone 2006, 219–33 (on the Introduction to The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity see 222). 34 Jones 1964. 35 Momigliano ed. 1963, 9. 36 Momigliano ed. 1963, 15. 37 Rostovzeff 1957. 38 Momigliano ed. 1963, 8.

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was a formulation which not only antedated Jones’s Later Roman Empire, but also Peter Brown’s seminal World of Late Antiquity. One could carry this contextualization further, and I believe it is important. I will mention now only Santo Mazzarino’s La fine del mondo antico of 1959 (cited in the Introduction) and Marrou’s Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, which had appeared in its fourth edition containing Marrou’s Rectractatio in the previous year.39 As Momigliano rightly remarks,40 even leaving out the Romans themselves, ‘since Flavio Biondo each generation has produced its own theory or theories on the decline and fall of Rome’. This is in part what the original 1959 seminar was about. In some ways it seems like a modern discussion. The questions are about culture wars and conversion, and these continue. But seen from a twenty-first-century perspective, why only pagans? Where is the vibrant Judaism of late antiquity, and where are the Arabs, pre-Islamic or otherwise? Where are the questions about heresy, orthodoxy and identity, not to mention constructivism or symbolic power, in which the pages of journals on late antiquity and early Christianity now abound? Or church councils, and hagiography? Again, the model is in essence that of a conflict of religions, at least in ideological terms, in contrast with many, if certainly not all, formulations prevailing today. Momigliano’s own paper in the volume applies to the Christians of the era of Constantine and Eusebius terms such as ‘fierceness’, ‘determination’, ‘resentment’ and aggressiveness’.41 We may also now be tempted to ask, why only the fourth century? For a generation or more, ‘late antiquity’ in its later formulation by Brown and others has embraced a far longer stretch and admits of regional studies and a far wider range of subjects than are covered in Momigliano’s volume. Yet despite Marrou, despite Riegl and others, and despite a mass of discussion about the origins of the concept,42 in 1959 ‘late antiquity’ as we have known it since the work of Momigliano’s onetime student Peter Brown had not yet been invented. Momigliano’s own periodization is still the periodization of Dopsch versus Pirenne. It is all the same surprising to a modern reader to find such confident references to the ‘dying State’ and the declining empire.43 Compare also ‘the superiority of Christianity over paganism in dynamism and efficiency was already evident in the fourth century’.44 It is not just that the vocabulary is that of decline, but that Monigliano assumed that the decline set in so early and was so incontrovertible. The next section of the Introduction45 is also striking, given the emphasis which Jones’s Later Roman Empire was to place so soon afterwards on the

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Mazzarino 1959, 1966; Marrou 1958. Momigliano ed. 1963, 3. Momigliano 1963, 80, 94. On which see Marcone 2008, 11–13. Momigliano ed. 1963, 15, 16. Momigliano ed. 1963, 15. Momigliano ed. 1963, 9–12.

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theory of ‘idle mouths’ as a factor in the decline of the empire [see chapter 5 above]. Momigliano puts it rather differently; he offers a social and religious explanation instead of an economic one, and the army does not come into the equation. Moreover he puts forward a very positive assessment of the impact of Christianity in terms of ‘creativity’, energy, and local pride. Not only did the ‘best men’46 look to the Church rather than the state; the new churches and new structures also gave ordinary people something to be proud of,47 even though that meant diverting money away from necessary projects like building aqueducts. Many were attracted to the ascetic movement, which is described here in terms of ‘monasticism’ and ‘hermits’, but not yet the ‘holy man’ of Peter Brown. Momigliano admits that hermits (that is, as we might now say, ascetics) could be a nuisance, and were a kind of diversion from the state, but he answers this potential objection to his thesis with what would now seem too blanket an appeal to the influence of organized monastic structures and rules; most scholars would now argue that ‘monasticism’ in late antiquity was a far more varied phenomenon, and that the development of some kinds of ‘monastic’ rules by no means controlled this variety. The actual violence in which some monks were to be involved and the trouble they were to cause is also passed over.48 Momigliano admits that monks were a subversive force, ‘but they provided an alternative to pagan city life’;49 and above all they too represented a set of new and attractive personal aspirations. Even in the last section, which has barbarian invasions as its starting point, the emphasis is on the Church’s capacity to offer psychological help, whether through conversion of barbarians, or to the existing Roman populations that were threatened. The figure of St Severinus, whose activities in Noricum are chronicled by Eugippius, is made to stand for the capacity of the Church to negotiate a way through the new situations and offer something to all sides.50 The argument is not quite put in terms of democratization in the formulation of Santo Mazzarino, but Momigliano is concerned, like Mazzarino, with ‘ordinary people’, and with the idea of a preservation of Roman civilization at ground level by the very fact that barbarians lived side by side with and rubbed along with the ordinary citizens of the Roman empire.51 It is easy enough to point out the various agendas which have changed the picture since the early 1960s, in particular the debate between ‘catastrophists’ and continuists’ which is still very much in progress. Yet this would not be fair to Momigliano. What is more intriguing is how positive (and perhaps how optimistic) is the view he presents here of the advantages of Christianity; he even refers to the

46 47 48 49 50 51

Momigliano ed. 1963, 11 [and see chapter 8]. Momigliano ed. 1963, 9. For this theme see for instance Gaddis 2005; Drake 2006; Shaw 1999. Momigliano ed. 1963, 11. For the figure of Severinus see O’Donnell 2009, 101–4. Momigliano ed. 1963, 13.

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‘triumph of Christianity’,52 a term which would give many scholars pause today. It is less surprising in the light of his Cambridge lectures of 1940, published in Italian only in 1996,53 but only in the sense that the lectures confirm his own reference in the Introduction to the continuity of his thinking since 1936. In the remaining section I would like briefly to make a few further general observations about this extremely interesting Introduction. The first is to repeat that the model implicit in it, as in the very title of the volume, is one of conflict. Christians and pagans are envisaged as being in competition, with the Christians being better poised to emerge on top. Several of the individual papers in the volume, including that by Jones, adopt the same kind of approach. It is not one adopted by most historians of late antiquity since the 1970s.54 Nor, though much of the volume is in fact about social and cultural issues rather than economic, military or administrative, is Momigliano’s approach one of cultural history, a term now used explicitly by many historians of late antiquity, especially historians of religion. The latter is a tendency which Momigliano would probably have rejected, and indeed, it is a common criticism of cultural history that it finds it difficult to accommodate or explain change, let alone conflict. Momigliano in contrast apparently had no qualms about accepting the conflict model, or even, it seems, in assuming the inevitability of conflict between Christians and pagans. Again, the chronological range covered by the essays in the volume is restricted by today’s standards. Although Momigliano says in the Introduction that he intends to consider the period from the fourth to the sixth century, the thrust of the volume is actually about the fourth century, and as such, it places a heavy weight of explanation on that early phase of what many now refer to as ‘late antiquity’. One might perhaps argue that the original seminar was not about Christianization as such, but rather about the conflict situation in the fourth century itself – were it not that in suggesting a tie between Christianity and the end of the Roman empire, the Introduction seems to imply a wider scope. But even within the chronological range of the fourth century one might have expected a wider net to be cast, to include Jews and Judaism, ‘heretics’, and even Arabs, or at least ‘Saracens’. The field has broadened, even exploded,55 since the early 1960s, not least because many more young scholars have entered it. Judaism, and the literary presentation of Jews in Christian texts, are major subjects;56 so, certainly, is the whole huge arena of orthodoxy and heresy and the wider but related question of ‘identity’; so too is the search for pre-Islamic Arabs amid the references in the sparse but tantalizing literary and

52 53 54 55

Momigliano ed. 1963, 4. Di Donato 1996. Though see Hahn 2004 and below. For the idea of a religious ‘marketplace’ see Stark 1996. See Giardina 1999, 157–80. [It has gone on exploding ever since; the references here indicate the situation as it was in the 2000s.] 56 E.g. Schwarz 2001; Jacobs 2004; Boyarin 2004.

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epigraphic record.57 It is difficult today, with an enormously increased interest in Islam, not to read back, or at least to have in mind, what we know was to come. Some scholars have particular reasons to want to argue that Islam was a religion rooted in Hellenism and in late antiquity.58 It seems somewhat ironic now that the 1960s, when Momigliano’s collection was published, also saw the beginnings of a vast expansion of range among late antique historians, both geographically and chronologically, into the Near East and well into the Islamic period.59 To return then to this question of period. Late antiquity as defined by Peter Brown and others in the generation after Momigliano is much longer than Momigliano allowed for, extending in many central works as late as the fall of the Umayyads, or as late as AD 800 [or even 1000].60 In response, some have reacted to what they see as an excessive emphasis on the cultural sphere by re-emphasizing the importance of violence and catastrophe and by returning to the theme of the fall of empires.61 A further charge made against the idea of a ‘long’ late antiquity by its critics is that while it may fill a cultural space it does not help us understand real historical change.62 But it is a fallacy to imagine that culture can be so easily separated from political and economic structures, and I would counter with some words from Aziz al-Azmeh, one of those who are quite specifically ‘writing backwards’, looking back from the vantage point of knowing what came next, in fact writing Islam into late antiquity; in this he differs fundamentally from Momigliano. ‘My approach backwards in time’, al-Azmeh says, ‘goes beyond culture, for culture overall is premised on empire, the substratum of late antiquity’.63 That brings us back to Momigliano’s Introduction, with its confident assumption that the story of Christianization and the role of Christianity in the postConstantinian world are quite simply connected with the fate of the empire itself. In a way it is of its time. But for Momigliano it was a view formed in his early years, and one that he was to maintain throughout his life.

57 All three issues are reflected in papers by Fergus Millar, for example Millar 2005, 2007, 2009. They have been the subject of several edited volumes, including Miles ed. 1999 and Elm, Rebillard and Romano eds. 2000. For the re-interpretation of ethnicity in recent writing about barbarians in the later Roman empire see Halsall 2007, 35–62. 58 Al-Azmeh 2008; an emphasis on late antique monotheism helps support such a view. In contrast Shahid, Irfan 1984–95 seeks to emphasize a non-Islamic Arab identity as an important component of Roman history from the third century to the beginning of the seventh. 59 There is a large bibliography discussing this periodization: see Cameron 2002; Marcone 2008; Ando 2008; also Al-Azmeh 2008, especially 58–61. 60 See especially Bowersock, Brown and Grabar eds. 1999; Marcone 2008, 17–19; Fowden 2014. 61 For instance Ward-Perkins 2005 with Fowden 2006; Heather 2005; Goldsworthy 2009; O’Donnell 2009. 62 See the opening remarks directed at the alleged inability of cultural history to deal with ‘big topics with intellectual coherence’ in Whittow 2007, 697–704. 63 Al-Azmeh 2008, 68.

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Bibliography Al-Azmeh, Aziz 2008. Rom, das Neue Rom und Bagdad. Pfade der Spätantike. Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. EUME Texts Bd. 2. Ando, Clifford 2008. ‘Decline, Fall and Transformation’, JLA 1.1: 30–60. Bowersock, Glen W. 1996. ‘The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49: 29–43. Bowersock, Glen W., Brown, Peter and Grabar, Oleg eds. 1999. Late Antiquity: A Guide to the PostClassical World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyarin, Daniel 2004. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cameron, Averil 2002. ‘The ‘Long’ Late Antiquity: A Late Twentieth-Century Model’. In Wiseman ed. 2002, 165–91. Clemente, Guido 2014. ‘Between Hellenism and the Roman Empire’. In Cornell and Murray eds. 2014, 13–27. Cornell, Tim and Murray, Oswyn eds. 2014. The Legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano. London: The Warburg Institute. Cracco Ruggini, Lellia 1989a. ‘Arnaldo Momigliano e il tardoantico’. In Cracco Ruggini 1989, 159–84. Cracco Ruggini, Lellia ed. 1989b. Omaggio ad Arnaldo Momigliano, Storia e storiografia sul mondo antico. Bibliotheca di Athenaeum, 11. Como: New Press. Cracco Ruggini, Lellia 2006. ‘Gli anni di insegnamento a Torino’. In Polverini ed. 2006, 77–123. Crawford, Michael 1989. ‘L’insegnamento di Arnaldo Momigliano in Gran Bretagna’. In Cracco Ruggini ed. 1989, 27–41. Croce, Benedetto 1930. Constant e Jellinek intorno alla differenza tra la libertà degli antichi e quella dei moderni. Naples: Accademia di scienze morali e politiche della Societå Reale di Napoli. Di Donato, Riccardo 1995. ‘Materiali per una biografia intellettuale di Arnaldo Momigliano I. Libertà e pace bel mondo antico’. Athenaeum n.s. 83: 213–44. Di Donato, Riccardo ed.1996. Pace e libertà nel mondo antico. Lezioni a Cambridge: gennaio-marzo 1940, con un’appendice documentaria e ventuno lettere a Ernesto Codignola. Scandicci and Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Di Donato, Riccardo 2006. ‘Gli anni di Londra’. In Arnaldo Momigliano nella Storiografia del Novecento, edited by Leandro Polverini, 25–36. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Drake, Harold A. ed. 2006. Violence in Late Antiquity. Aldershot: Ashgate. Elm, Susanna, Rebillard, Eric and Romano, Antonella eds. 2000. Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire. Rome: École française de Rome. Fowden, Garth 2006. ‘410 and All That’. JRA 19: 706–8. Fowden, Garth 2014. Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gaddis, Michael 2005. There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giardina, Andrea 1999. ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’. Studi Storici 40: 157–80. Goldsworthy, Adrian 2009. The Fall of the West: The Slow Death of the Roman Superpower. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Grafton, Anthony 2009. Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gruen, Erich ed. 2005. Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Hahn, Johannes 2004. Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt. Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

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T H E C O N F L I C T B E T W E E N PA G A N I S M A N D C H R I S T I A N I T Y Halsall, Guy 2007. Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376–568. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heather, Peter 2005. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History. London: Macmillan. Jacobs, Andrew S. 2004. Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1954. ‘Notes on the Genuineness of the Constantinian Elements in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 5: 196–200, with an Appendix by Theodore C. Skeat. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1964. The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Administrative, and Economic Survey, 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell. Marcone, Arnaldo 2006. ‘Un treno per Ravenna. Riflessioni sulla tarda antichità.’ In Polverini ed. 2006, 219–33. Marcone, Arnaldo 2008. ‘A Long Late Antiquity? Considerations on a Controversial Periodization’, JLA 1.1: 4–19. Marrou, Henru-Irénée 1958. Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4th ed., containing Marrou’s Retractatio of 1949. Paris: E. de Boccard. Mazzarino, Santo 1959. La fine del mondo antico. Milan: Garzanti. Mazzarino, Santo 1966. The End of the Ancient World. London: Faber. Miles, Richard ed. 1999. Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity. London: Routledge. Millar, Fergus 2005. ‘The Theodosian Empire (408–450) and the Arabs: Saracens or Ishmaelites? In Gruen ed. 2005, 297–314. Millar, Fergus 2007. ‘Libanius and the Near East’, Scripta Classica Israelica 26: 155–80. Millar, Fergus 2009. ‘The Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesus (449)’. In Price and Whitby eds. 2009, 45–69. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1931. ‘Review of Croce 1930’, Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione classica 59: 262–64, reprinted in Momigliano 1975, 2, 906–7. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1955. Contributo alla storia degli studi classici. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1955a. ‘La formazione della moderna storiografia sull’impero romano’. In Momigliano 1955, 107–64. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1960. Secondo Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1960a. ‘Sulla stato presente degli studi di storia antica (1946–54)’. In Momigliano, Arnaldo 1960, 319–53 (= Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche, Rome, 4–11 Nov. 1955, VI: Relazioni generali e supplementari, 3–40). Momigliano, Arnaldo ed. 1963. The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century. Oxford. Clarendon Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1963. ‘Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D’. In Momiglianio ed. 1963, 79–99. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1973. ‘La caduta senza rumore di un impero nel 476 d. C.’, ANSP, ser III.3: 397–418. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1975. Quinto Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici. 2 vols. Rome: Edizioni Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1978. ‘After Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”’, ANSP, ser 3.8: 435–54. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987. On Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1990. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1997. On Pagans, Jews and Christians. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 2012. Decimo Contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Murray, Oswyn 1991. ‘Arnaldo Momigliano in England’. In Steinberg, Michael P. ed., s49–64. O’Donnell, James 2009. The Ruin of the Roman Empire. London: Profile.

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T H E C O N F L I C T B E T W E E N PA G A N I S M A N D C H R I S T I A N I T Y Price, Richard and Whitby, Mary eds. 2009. Chalcedon in Context. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Polverini, Leandro ed. 2006. Arnaldo Momigliano nella Storiografia del Novecento. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Rostovzeff, Mikhail I. 1957. Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. Revised by Peter M. Fraser. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwarz, Seth 2001. Imperialism and Roman Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shahid, Irfan 1984–1995. Byzantium and the Arabs, 6 vols. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Shaw, Brent 1999. ‘War and Violence’. In Bowersock, Glen W, Brown, Peter and Grabar, Oleg eds. 1999, 130–69. Stark, Rodney 1996. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steinberg, Michael P. ed. 1991. The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano. History and Theory, Beiheft, 30. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Ward-Perkins, Bryan 2005. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whittow, Mark 2007. ‘Beyond the Cultural Turn: Economic History Revived?’, JRA 20: 697–704. Wiseman, Peter ed. 2002. Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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8 MOMIGLIANO AND C H R I S T I A N I T Y*

Momigliano delivered a series of eight lectures in Cambridge in 1940 when he had only recently arrived in England as one of a number of refugee scholars of classical antiquity and related fields after his enforced flight from Fascist Italy. I felt that they had been overlooked in previous discussions of his work and overshadowed especially in later years by a concentration on his writings on Judaism; His views on Christianity were relatively neglected even in his own collection with the title On Pagans, Jews and Christians and the lectures themselves, both in Italian translation and in the original English, were only published many years, indeed decades, later by Riccardo Di Donato. Meanwhile interest in Momigliano’s Judaism was such that I found some resistance to my contention that he retained some at least of the views on Christianity expressed in the lectures of 1940 until much later in his life. The Cambridge lectures need to be read in their original context. Momigliano had arrived in Oxford only months before as a refugee scholar. Among the ancient historians at Oxford he had encountered an intellectual world very different from his own idealist formation as a student of Benedetto Croce, and he had reacted strongly and with some puzzlement against the arguments of Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution. The view expressed in the Cambridge lectures and the manner in which they were expressed could not have different more from the prosopographical approach of Syme or the kind of ancient history represented by Hugh Last, the Camden Professor of Roman History. Adjustment to this different world was difficult, and the kind of war work at Bletchley or in intelligence in the UK or Europe undertaken by Last and many British classicists was not open to Momigliano, who indeed suffered a period of internment as a potentially enemy alien. Without an academic position he and his family had to endure a hand-to-mouth existence for the duration of the war, helped by a few sympathetic academics, before he was appointed in 1947 to a lectureship at Bristol University. The Cambridge lectures themselves were delivered very soon after his arrival in England and at the invitation of the group set up to facilitate rescue and help for the academic refugees from Fascism. The case of a scholar like Momigliano who placed an exceptional emphasis on the biographies * I wish to record my debt to Oswyn Murray, John North and Guido Clemente, and my gratitude for the comments of lecture audiences at the Warburg Institute and Duke University.

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of those he wrote about is crucial to locate these surprising lectures in the context in which they were written, including the trauma he had experienced at losing his hard-won chair in Turin, in his native Piedmont. The evidence for Momigliano’s later views on Christianity is less striking but he accepted the invitation to edit the Warburg lectures (chapter 7 above) and late in life he published a rather weak paper on the Life of Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa. He was also very interested in Eusebius as a historian, but did not discuss his own Cambridge lectures in print. Momigliano’s view of Christianity in the Roman empire is very far from what prevails today. He had no time for literary analysis or for theology, and his chronological approach to late antiquity was by modern standards truncated. That is all the more reason for exploring now what lay behind the heartfelt way in which he expressed himself. The lack of such a discussion is a major gap amid all the mass of publication about him and about his historical method. ––––––––

Arnaldo Momigliano became my supervisor after I enrolled at University College London in 1964 to complete a doctorate begun in the unlikely surroundings (for a student of late antiquity in those days) of the University of Glasgow. He was also, as was still possible then, one of my two examiners; the other was Momigliano’s former student Peter Brown.1 The subject, the late Greek historian Agathias, had been suggested to me by Robert Browning, and the thesis – the product of untaught but diligent work in an environment where there was no-one else interested – was nearly complete. When my husband Alan Cameron and I moved to London in 1964 I still assumed that this would be a Glasgow doctorate, but the University of Glasgow thought otherwise and so I found myself registering at University College where they said I would have to wait a minimum of two more years before submission. As I remember it, Momigliano expressed interest in supervising me and Robert Browning retreated. I had been the student of Momigliano’s friend and supporter, Isobel Henderson, tutor in ancient history at Somerville College, and I had talked to her while I was still at Oxford about the possibility of working on a ‘late’ author; I only realised later that she was one of Momigliano’s important Oxford allies during those difficult first years in England.2 The supervision was technical not only in that I needed a supervisor mainly for bureaucratic reasons, as most of the writing had already been done while I was still at Glasgow, but also in that I hardly remember any ‘supervision’ as such. We would have lunch in the University College cafeteria, and I would have an orange or a yogurt pressed on me. I did in a sense receive the reaction of a supervisor from Momigliano twenty years later when I showed him the typescript of my book

1 On Peter Brown and Momigliano see Cracco Ruggini 1988; Marcone 2006, 230–1. [Brown himself wrote movingly of Momigliano soon after the latter’s death: Brown 1988.] 2 See Murray 1988, 1991.

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on Procopius published in 1985.3 By this time I was interested in the new literary theory and one of my aims in writing about Procopius was to subvert the previously standard approach which started with the Wars, Procopius’ most serious work of ‘real’ history, and consigned the Buildings to the lesser field of panegyric while regarding The Secret History as a somewhat embarrassing scandal sheet. Momigliano read the typescript on one of his many plane journeys to or from Chicago and subsequently sent me two closely written pages explaining why I was wrong and why a serious historian must start with the Wars. He began characteristically: ‘the importance of your book is obvious, and there is nothing in its general approach I should like to contest’, but then his critique followed, beginning with the sentence ‘the main weakness of the book seems to me in the present order of chapters with the implied structure imposed on the book as a whole’. His tone throughout a page and a half of argument was firm, but then he ended My preference for the former approach is only due to cowardice – it is the easier! . . . I feel that a re-organisation of the order of chapters – with some pruning of repetitions and a stronger emphasis on the situation of a non-theologian in a theological age (with all the advantages and disadvantages for us of such a witness) – would help the reader. It will be – it is almost impertinent to say so – a basic book.4 Needless to say I thought about this extremely carefully but in the end decided not to follow his advice. Given who he was that was a difficult decision. It was only later that I fully realised the passion behind his resistance to any suggestion that history-writing was ‘only’ a form of rhetoric. To separate history from the quest for truth was anathema to him. But I felt equally strongly and still believe that in order to understand Procopius it is first necessary to understand that those three apparently contradictory works needed to be taken together and, in a sense, taken apart. [Recent work on Procopius by Anthony Kaldellis again ignores the Buildings but takes the Wars and The Secret History seriously, while yet more recently the Buildings is being subjected to a new and detailed close analysis.] Like many others, what I learned from Momigliano I learned above all by a kind of osmosis, through listening to him, watching him in action at his Warburg seminar and through conversations, telephone calls and letters. In the English way, I did not think in the terminology he himself often used, according to which he should undoubtedly have been recognised as the ‘master’, but that was in fact how he was regarded in his Warburg circle. I was still an undergraduate when the original Warburg lectures later published as The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century were given, and preoccupied with trying to grapple with the Oxford Greats syllabus. When I knew Momigliano I did not 3 Cameron 1985. 4 Letter to Averil Cameron, March 1983. [For a reaction to recent scholarship on Procopius see Cameron 2017.]

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know about the extraordinarily important lectures on peace and liberty given in Cambridge in the early months of 1940. I now realise that I was lamentably incurious. But in 1982, when I had reviewed Geoffrey de Ste Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (earning the considerable wrath of the author),5 he wrote: I liked your review of de Ste Croix very much: taking him seriously, as we must, and discussing him freely – I thought that his main weakness is now (in contrast with some earlier pieces by him) the inability . . . to see that the Christian society is an attempt to correct (and later to control) the situation of slaves, women, elderly people and altogether lower members of the society we call [the] Roman Empire.6 A few years later, in 1985, I was pleased to be able to invite him to lecture at King’s College London, where he gave his paper on Macrina, the sister of Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea known to us through the hagiographical Life written by her brother Gregory. He was clearly drawn to the topic by his interest in biography and by the intriguing question of women’s roles in the Christian life of the period. Yet his earlier ideas remained strong. He did not pursue the topic of Christian asceticism in any detail and this late paper makes it clear that he retained his essentially social view of the rise of Christianity.7 He placed the Life in the context of the other works of Gregory of Nyssa (he found it ‘eccentric’) and took the opportunity to reflect on the role of the aristocracy in the process of Christianization. In the early 1940s Momigliano had written of himself that ‘for the history of Christian thought in the third century AD the writer has not yet had sufficient preparation. He intends to reach it’, and ‘I have not yet sufficient acquaintance with the Greek Fathers of the third and fourth centuries AD’.8 He did not in fact write a great deal that was about Christianity.9 The preface to On Pagans, Jews and Christians, dated December 1986 [and therefore not long before his death], refers to the treble tradition which he had inherited as an Italian – Judaism, Hellenism and Christianity10 – but it is striking that the collection itself contains far more about both pagans and Jews than it does about Christians. The Warburg lectures of 1958–59 on which The Conflict Between Christianity and Paganism

5 Cameron 1982. 6 Letter to Averil Cameron, 1 March 1982. 7 Momigliano 1985, 1987; see Cracco Ruggini 1989, 181; Marcone 2006, 231. Momigliano also lectured at Chicago in 1985 on ‘Men and Women in Roman Religion’. He had more than once in earlier writings likened Christians to Cynics, in the context of resistance to authority. 8 Di Donato 1995, 223. 9 Marcone 2006, 225, also remarks that he did not address directly the great Christian figures of late antiquity. His interest in the apocryphal correspondence between Seneca and St Paul (Momigliano 1950, 1985) reflected a long interest in Seneca, on whom he had originally planned a book for Oxford University Press: see Murray 1988, 427; Di Donato 2007. His interest in late antiquity as such was similarly slow to develop: Cracco Ruggini 1989 (on Seneca, 167–68). 10 Momigliano 1987, ix; see Clemente 2009.

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was based [chapter 7 above] had brought to London an array of European scholars including H.-I. Marrou, who were already occupied with what we now call late antiquity,11 and inevitably therefore with what it meant that the empire became Christian. The lectures were not Momigliano’s own initiative; he had not even heard them all, and while he quickly accepted the invitation of his friend the director, Gertrud Bing, to edit them, John North and the publication of the letters between Momigliano and Bing warn us against laying too much emphasis on the 1963 volume as such. Nevertheless, pace Tessa Rajak, who sees Momigliano’s ‘devotion to his Jewish past of and for itself’ as an obstacle to believing in his continuing to hold the views presented in the Cambridge lectures, the fact that the role of Christianity was not as central in his later period does not necessarily mean that he entirely gave up the framework he had adopted previously. Rather, his interests and the questions that concerned him had shifted. The 1970s saw the publication both of The Development of Greek Biography and Alien Wisdom, while towards the end of his life, as is well known, he had certainly become more preoccupied with Judaism and his own relation to it. At the same time, certain questions stayed with him, among them the issue of universal history and, increasingly, of biography. Momigliano’s own contribution to the volume he edited in 1963 dealt with ecclesiastical history, a theme also taken up in the last of his Sather Lectures given in1961–62 and thus explored by him shortly before the publication of The Conflict Between Christianity and Paganism (though published posthumously only in 1990).12 How Christians wrote history or reinterpreted the history of Rome to provide a Christian narrative was an obvious subject for him. The last of his Sather Lectures begins in characteristically oblique mode with the seventeenth-century Italian Benedetto Bacchini and the ninth-century Latin chronicler Agnellus of Ravenna and moves effortlessly backwards to Eusebius of Caesarea, whose terminology he seems to accept: ‘Eusebius knew that the Christians were a nation, and a victorious nation at that’.13 Most of the issues that are even now producing an immense literature on Eusebius are already here,14 treated with confident brevity. But Momigliano had a strong and distinctive view. He directly addresses the question of church and state after Constantine, another theme on which a vast amount of scholarly effort is still expended.15 For him the church was ‘a separate body within the Roman empire’ and this was bound to cause problems.16 It is much to be regretted that he did not consider 11 12 13 14

Marcone 2006, 227; see North 2014, with Rajak 2014. Momigliano ed. 1963a, 6, note 1. Momigliano 1990, 139. See Grafton 2014. Grafton stresses the importance for Momigliano of Eusebius’ incorporation of documentary material, which was also a natural emphasis for someone as concerned as Momigliano with historical evidence and truth; see also Grafton and Williams eds. 2006, 6–7, 200. 15 For the eastern empire and against the old idea of ‘Caesaropapism’ see Dagron 2003. [In 2022 the amount of literature shows no sign of diminishing even if the formulation may differ.] 16 Momigliano 1990, 141–2.

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the reign of Justinian in detail, when such issues were acute; instead of doing so, he went on to state that ‘after Justinian it became impossible in the west and difficult in the east to think historically in terms of a universal church’.17 Thus his underlying theme and abiding preoccupation becomes clear: universal, or ‘oecumenical’, i.e. world history.18 The continuation of this passage moves to medieval, that is western, historiography, though with an acute if brief section on the intellectual connections between east and west from Cassiodorus in the sixth century to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, the translator of important Greek works into Latin in the ninth.19 The concluding section moves swiftly to the Reformation, but the lecture ends with a return to Eusebius and a formulation which is at once a typically elegant Momigliano trope and a statement of great interest in relation to the theme of this paper. After referring to a comparison between Eusebius and Herodotus made by F.C. Bauer in 1834, the final words of the lecture are these: ‘We can accept this comparison and meditate on his remark that both Herodotus and Eusebius wrote under the inspiration of a newly established freedom’.20 It will become clear later why he placed such an emphasis on the relation between Christianity and freedom – an emphasis which may strike an odd chord now given today’s heightened awareness of the enormous effort expended by the early church to condemn heresy and shut down discussion.21 In setting out the reasoning behind the six Sather lectures given in 1961–62 Momigliano said that he intended them to be part one of a trilogy, the second and third parts of which would deal with the conflict between Greek and Jewish views of the world in the Hellenistic period and with ‘certain aspects of modern historical research’.22 While there was apparently not to be a volume specifically devoted to the influence of Christianity it is clear enough that he regarded it as fundamental. Equally striking is Momigliano’s Introduction to The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity [chapter 7 above]. It was published in 1963 but is dated 1959 and incorporated part (‘a few pages’) of the Taft lectures given in that year in Cincinnati, in which he explicitly took up Gibbon’s theme of Christianity’s implication in the decline of the empire. The christianization of the empire, he said, was

17 Momigliano 1990, 145. 18 On the place of Christianity in the framework of universal history, especially Momigliano’s insistence on the development of Christianity from Judaism, see also Hughes 1988, 419–20; there are hints in his Creighton Lecture of 1981,‘The Origins of Universal History’ (Momigliano 1984, 77–103) but Eusebius is not taken up there. 19 Momigliano 1990, 147. 20 Momigliano 1990, 152. 21 Eusebius’ works, including the Ecclesiastical History, are also important in this regard: see Willing 2008. Momigliano’s focus is firmly on historiography; he connects the methodology of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History with the latter’s interest in chronography but did not explore its relation to the wider philosophical and apologetic approach of the Praeparatio and Demonstratio Evangelica. 22 Momigliano 1990, 153.

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the most important social change of all, and must be tackled by historians, not just by theologians.23 It is the modest purpose of this paper to reassert the view that there is a direct relation between the triumph of Christianity and the decline of the Roman empire. . . . So far nobody has written a realistic evaluation of the impact of Christianity on the structure of pagan society. I shall not attempt such a task here.24 [While so typical of Momigliano’s habitual style of writing,] these are extraordinarily strong statements and it is not surprising if John North, for example, finds such apparent endorsement of Christianity hard to accept. Momigliano goes on in a way which almost reminds us of A.H.M. Jones, his predecessor in the chair of ancient history at University College, whose great work on the later Roman empire was published just a year later [chapter 5 above]. According to Momigliano, the ‘best men’ chose Christianity because of its energy and creativity, while the newly built churches gave ordinary people something to be proud about, and the church could offer psychological help in difficult times (note also E.R. Dodds’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety,25 based on lectures given in the same year as Momigliano’s Warburg volume). As the title of the 1963 volume implies, Momigliano was ready to see the process of Christianization as a conflict, and he describes it as a ‘revolution,’26 for which the spadework had already been done through the ‘clearsighted determination’ of the Christians;27 this ‘revolution’ did not originate, but merely became apparent, after AD 312, the year of Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. Christian chronology was also a ‘philosophy of history’, because it entailed writing the history of Judaism into the Greek and Roman story and producing a historical narrative that started with the creation of the world. Like Eusebius, Momigliano himself was insistent on the development of Christianity from Judaism, though less intent on demonstrating their differences. Eusebius of Caesarea was of great importance in the development of Christian chronology, even if he did not initiate it.28 Moreover Christian history had to be about values, and for the purpose of educating Christians, or at least confirming the truth of the religion. Momigliano could have said much more, in particular about the apologetic 23 Compare his paper ‘Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late Ancient Historians’ (Momigliano 1972, 1975), important for its emphasis on the capacity of Christianity to appeal to all social classes [and for its conclusion: ‘the historians of the fourth and fifth centuries never treated any belief as characteristic of the masses and consequently discredited among the élite . . . . Lectures on popular religious beliefs and the late Roman historians should be severely discouraged.’] 24 Momigliano ed. 1963 6, with Marcone 2006, 222. 25 Dodds 1965, based on the Wiles lectures given in 1963. 26 Momigliano 1963, 80. 27 Momigliano 1963, 82. 28 Momigliano 1963, 83.

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nature of Christian historical writing,29 but he was concerned to make a series of important points about the differences between pagan and Christian attitudes to history-writing. His views are indeed clear: the Christians needed to invent new kinds of history, namely ecclesiastical history and hagiography.30 They did not feel the need to produce a Christian version of traditional classical historiography.31 Thus ‘the models for political and military history remained irretrievably pagan’.32 Such Christianization did eventually happen but it happened much later, well after the fourth century [and in far more complex ways and less completely than he supposed]. Until the end of the sixth century the genre of ecclesiastical history begun [or continued] by Eusebius flourished and the situation changed only when secular historians could no longer realistically fail to incorporate Christian thinking into their works and with the caesura of the seventh century in the east in secular and ecclesiastical [Greek] historiography alike. Today’s emphasis on the explosion of Christian historical writing in Syriac was not part of Momigliano’s scope; despite his respectful references to the Byzantine period his overall framework was one that saw the end of ancient history coinciding with the fall of the western empire,33 and the problems of the transformation from classical to medieval as inherently concerned with the history of western Europe. It is important here that he always wrote as an Italian – indeed it would not be too much to say that his lifelong subject was the understanding of the history of Italy and above all the role played in it by Judaism. Eusebius of Caesarea played a major role in Momigliano’s thinking. He realized that Eusebius did more than unite Jewish-Hellenistic historiography with philosophic historiography. He produced a history of the Christian church based on the idea of orthodoxy, and of the church’s relations with a persecuting power; it was based on authority, not on free historical judgement,34 and his famous incorporation of documents was not done out of any dispassionate desire to cite the available evidence but to prove the rightness of his case. These are important issues, but a greater emphasis on these points would not have helped Momigliano’s insistence elsewhere on the role played by Christianity as the bringer of personal liberty. Instead he goes on to say that Eusebius ‘made history positively and negatively by creating an ecclesiastical history and by leaving political history alone’.35 That left Christian biography, the lives of saints. In this connection Momigliano’s remarks on Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, a work whose hybrid form still gives rise to disagreement, are worth quoting for the sharpness of their observation:

29 For which see Edwards, Goodman and Price eds. 1999, especially 223–50. 30 The same two categories are still asserted in his 1987 contribution to the Encyclopaedia of Religion 6: Momigliano 1987a, reprinted in Momigliano 1998, 34. 31 Momigliano 1963, 88–9. 32 Momigliano 1963, 89. 33 See Cracco Ruggini 1989, 182–3 for his conceptual focus on the third to fifth centuries. 34 Momigliano 1963, 91. 35 Momigliano 1963, 92.

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The difficulty of writing a Christian biography of a king as distinct from the life of a saint is already apparent in the life of Constantine by Eusebius . . . Eusebius had no other choice but to present the life of Constantine as a model of a pious life. . . . The task was certainly not beyond Eusebius’ ingenuity but it flouted anybody’s respect for truth. . . . No wonder that this life of Constantine was never a success.36 This is not a comprehensive discussion of Christian literature. The conclusion of Momigliano’s introduction to The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity seems to be that Christian and pagan historiography in the fourth century were not in serious conflict, because this was not the ground on which the Christians presented their challenge. Near the end of his life Momigliano returned to the idea of persecution and therefore opposition to the Roman state in an article of 1986, ‘The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State’,37 and there expressed the view that by the end of the fourth century AD ‘it was no longer so evident that the survival of Christianity would depend on the survival of the Roman empire’. Eusebius’ optimism now seemed overdone. In 1957 Momigliano had become [for a time] the supervisor of Peter Brown, whose classic work on Augustine was published in 1967 and who by the 1980s was the acknowledged doyen of the religious history of late antiquity. Momigliano did not engage directly in his later work with Brown’s ideas or with the general literary culture of late antiquity; his focus remained narrower. He regarded himself in any case as an ancient, not a medieval historian (Brown by contrast belonged to what was then called the Faculty of Modern [sic] History in Oxford).38 In his essay in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity Momigliano maintained that pagan, or traditional, historiography did not have to worry about Christianity or change its essence and that Augustine was right to see the real threat to the new Christian values elsewhere, in antiquarian classicism. This allowed Momigliano to end his contribution with another typically elegant trope: Though we may have learnt to check our references from Eusebius – and this was no small gain – we are still the disciples of Herodotus and Thucydides: we still learn our history of the late empire from Ammianus Marcellinus.39 This is a judgement which perhaps still works for the fourth century, but not for the longer period we now know, especially since the work of Peter Brown, as ‘late antiquity’. 36 Momigliano 1963a, 93–4. 37 Momigliano 1986, 1998. 38 Momigliano’s chair at University College London was also in ancient history, and the teaching of late antiquity in London was a later development. 39 Momigliano 1963, 99; Stroumsa 2007, 298–9.

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Thus the impact of Christianization and of new Christian expressions of history were problems that went together for Momigliano in this elegant if perhaps now over-rigid presentation. In 1977 he returned to the question of Christianity’s involvement in the decline of Rome in a well-known essay on Gibbon.40 We now hear of the ‘ambivalence’ of Christian attitudes to the empire. The problem cannot be put in a simple fashion and the historians who search for causes are now said to be in danger of becoming comic.41 He nevertheless wished to restate what he had said in the Introduction of 1963, as well, indeed, as long before that in his article on the Roman empire in the Enciclopedia Italiana of 1936.42 Gibbon’s formulation can stand, because he did not make Christianity a direct cause; rather, he understood a situation, one in which ‘Constantine recognized the power of an organization controlling the life and thought of the most assertive and expansive group of Roman citizens, the Christians’. Like Gibbon, Momigliano recognized that nothing could be the same after that. It is true that Momigliano did not go on to make the nature of Christian thought or writing a central focus in his later historical work. This is at first sight somewhat surprising in view of the very high valuation he placed on Christianity in his 1940 lectures. Indeed, in one of three Conversazioni sul nazismo broadcast by Radio London in August 1943,43 he referred to the classical and Christian heritage of Europe, which was how he defined what was at stake in the war against Nazism. Furthermore, he had taken care to point out in his Introduction to the Conflict volume that his emphasis on the importance of the role of Christianity in the Roman empire had already been stated in 1936 in his contribution to the Enciclopedia Italiana and in a further paper of the same year.44 The influence of Christianity had been felt by Momigliano from a very early date and was part of his deep sense of his own heritage both as an Italian and a member of a distinguished and intellectual Jewish family. He wrote movingly about his family and his background near the end of his life in ‘The Jews of Italy’ (Momigliano 1985b), published in the New York Review of Books, and even later in words written from the University of Chicago Hospital in 1987.45 He acknowledged the debt he owed to his distant relative Arturo Carlo Jemolo, ‘a devoted and open friend in religious matters’, to whom he attributed much of his understanding of Italian Catholicism.46 Jemolo, the historian of church and state in the modern period, was also an important influence in causing him to reflect on Christianity as a historical phenomenon. One of Momigliano’s 40 41 42 43 44 45

Momigliano 1978, 1980. Momigliano 1978, 452. Momigliano 1936, 1980. Momigliano 1987b, 671. Momigliano 1936b, 1979. Momigliano 1985a, especially 124–7. Momigliano 1987, also demonstrates Momigliano’s early sense of resistance in the cause of intellectual freedom. Clemente 2009, note 1, comments on the autobiographical nature of these late contributions. 46 Momigliano 1994, xxvii.

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father’s sisters had made a mixed marriage and despite his deep immersion in Jewish scholarship during his private education in the home, there was no bar to reading or discussion of Christian material; he was reading Renan at the age of eleven, influenced by his father’s cousin Felice Momigliano, who had a profound respect for Jesus as ethical teacher and from whom he also derived his early introduction to Spinoza.47 Momigliano was still only in his twenties when he wrote the striking words quoted by Peter Brown in his British Academy memoir: No fully self-aware historian of the ancient world, that is, no person conscious of the fact of living in a civilization of Christian origin, can get away with the refusal to recognize that ancient history makes sense only when it is seen to evolve in such a way as to end naturally in the rise of Christianity.48 Even earlier, his surviving letters to Gaetano De Sanctis starting in 1930 reveal his thinking, which he himself later described as not exactly orthodox. In the 1930s the school of De Sanctis was debating about liberty and peace in the ancient world and Momigliano was exploring the history of Hellenism in the light of Judaism and Christianity; at the precocious age of 22 he wrote to the Catholic De Sanctis: ‘I am more Christian than you because modern thought vindicates Christianity!’49 To a post-deconstruction generation brought up to be sceptical this is a a breathtaking assertion. Peter Brown has placed it in the context of Momigliano’s very early commitment to universal history; to quote Brown, not only did ancient history for Momigliano ‘stretch without a break from the age of Demosthenes, through the confrontation of Judaism with Greek culture in the Hellenistic kingdoms, to the birth of Christianity and the rise of a universal, Catholic church within the framework of the universal Roman empire’, but also, Momigliano’s equally early focus on the history of liberty in the ancient world was seen by him as necessarily leading to his attempt to understand how the liberty of Greek city-states was transformed through the impact of Judaism, Christianity and the Roman empire into a notion of universal freedom.50 In his later years he referred to the intense discussion going on in his youth among ancient historians including himself, following the inspiration of Croce, about Greek liberty, and claimed some

47 Momigliano 1994, xxvi, 1994a. with 1994b, 144–7. 48 Momigliano 1935. 49 Polverini 2006, 18; Clemente 2009, 628; for Momigliano’s later thoughts see Momigliano 1988, 88–9 (a lecture given in Chicago in 1985). 50 Brown 1988, 411. As early as 1931 Momigliano reviewed Croce’s Constant e Jellinek intorno alla differenza tra la libertà degli antichi e quella dei moderni (1930) (Momigliano 1931, reprinted in Momigliano 1975, 2, 906–7; Crawford 1989, 20; Cracco Ruggini 1989, 177.

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originality for himself in emphasizing the relevance of Christianity and the Roman empire to this discussion.51 In agreeing to write the article on the Roman empire in the Enciclopedia Italiana he had resisted the temptation to focus on classical Greek city-states and dealt instead with the Roman empire including the role of Christianity. Themes already apparent include those of Christian universalism, peace as a spiritual value, the comparison of the pax Romana and the pax Christiana, the relation of church and state and the way in which Christianity in the Roman empire absorbed the best energies and intellects of the age and its importance for the human condition.52 We already find him writing that it was the fact that the crisis of empire in the third century coincided with the crisis of the whole of antiquity that demonstrated the significance of the history of the Roman empire for human history.53 A spiritual universalism took the place of political universalism, with a deeper conception of the human condition.54 For anyone from his background Christianity was inevitably associated with the Catholic Church, and as he looked back to this period in 1985 he contemplated the latter’s role in Italy in the 1930s.55 De Sanctis had already lost his position for refusing allegiance to the Fascist state, but in 1936 Momigliano was appointed after a tense concorso to the chair of ancient history at Turin which De Sanctis had occupied,56 and gave his inaugural lecture on the subject of peace in the ancient world – Koine Eirene, pax Romana, pax christiana.57 The section on Christianity came at the end, and Momigliano’s delivery must have conveyed the deep feeling which is evident in the language of the concluding paragraph. According to him, there were three ways in which Christian peace could confront the Roman state: by denial, only possible while the empire was still pagan; by asserting two separate ‘cities’ as Augustine did; or if the church subsumed classical civilization and thus took over the work of the Roman empire, a view he associated with Pope Leo I.58 The pax christiana differed from the pax romana in being active, and in offering a solution to the political problem of how men live their lives together; Momigliano even quoted from the New Testament (John 16:33 and Eph. 2:14–22). The lecture was not published until after his death, and in the notebook containing it he had written in 1982 the words ‘da pubblicarsi solo con avvertenza sulla situazione politica e personale di chi ebreo non fascista si trovava a parlare’.59 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Momigliano 1998, 88–9. Clemente 2009, 629. Momigliano 1980, 2, 625. Momigliano 1980, 2, 671. Momigliano 1988, 86–8. Dionisotti 1989, 243–4; Cracco Ruggini 2006, 113–15. See Dionisotti 1989; also Momigliano 1992, 409–23, with minor changes; Cracco Ruggini 2006, 114; Gabba 1999. 58 Momigliano 1992, 423. 59 ‘To be published only with an accompanying notice on the personal and political situation of one who was speaking as a non-Fascist Jew’: Momigliano 1992, 409.

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Nineteen thirty-six was a fateful year to be speaking on such a topic. Turin was the centre of a large and well-established Jewish community and had had a history of anti-Fascism. But the new Italian empire was proclaimed by Mussolini in May after the conquest of Ethiopia, with an even heavier emphasis on the revival of Roman imperial themes than before, clearly evident at the Milan Triennale of the same year; in August came the Berlin Olympics. Following the example set by Germany, the Italian race laws were passed in 1938. Momigliano’s position now became impossible and he lost the chair he had won amid such controversy. What followed has been well documented. Exile was a profound shock and Oxford a strange and difficult new environment, but Momigliano somehow managed to maintain his engagement with the history of the Roman empire. His encounter with Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution, published in 1939, represented a major challenge for him (see below) and when he was invited to give a series of eight lectures in Cambridge in the early months of 1940 at the instigation of Ernest Barker,60 he returned at greater length to the theme of his inaugural lecture at Turin and asserted even more emphatically the connection of Christianity with peace and liberty. He was able in these lectures, and in the context of England rather than Italy, to state his views on the incompatibility of a common peace with a coercive state much more clearly. Lellia Cracco Ruggini and Emilio Gabba, and now Guido Clemente, have documented the development of these ideas from the early 1930s and their evolution into the Cambridge lectures.61 Transplanted from his early idealist and Crocean philosophical influences in Italy, which were directly challenged by the growing pressure of the Fascist regime and reflected in the debates about liberty in which he himself took part, he could now use the opportunity to develop for a tiny and no doubt surprised audience in Cambridge ideas that had been with him for several years, even though his approach was so completely different from those his small English audiences were used to. How utterly different was the atmosphere in his new country is revealed when in 1945, reflecting on Italy as then seen ‘from Oxford’ he briefly described the effects of Fascism in Italy in the 1930s and seriously thought that civil war or a return to Fascism were both possibilities.62 In 1939 Momigliano found himself in an Oxford where there was little regard for Vico, Hegel, Croce or the other philosophical influences that had featured in his development. An exception was R.G. Collingwood (d.1943), Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics since 1935, archaeologist, philosopher of history and

60 That such an invitation came from the author of many books on ancient political theory seems extraordinarily prescient, given Momigliano’s intention to write a history of ancient political thought as well as a book on liberty in the ancient world; it also came from someone involved in assisting scholars like Momigliano who had been made into refugees by Fascism. 61 Cracco Ruggini 2006, 114–15, with note 61; Clemente 2009, 628–31; see Momigliano 1966, 2, 393–419; 421–55; 457–87; 489–97 (articles on koine eirene from 1933–36). 62 Momigliano 1992, 1, 523, 529.

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translator of Croce,63 but the logical positivist A.J. Ayer and the linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin, a colleague of Collingwood’s at Magdalen College, were better indicators of the style of philosophy that was to prevail in the Oxford of the time. Momigliano’s Cambridge lectures were delivered only a few months after the publication of Syme’s Roman Revolution, which Momigliano had already read and to which he reacted in a famous review published in JRS for 1940.64 This book could hardly have been further in tone or approach from Momigliano’s article on the Roman empire in the Enciclopedia Italiana, his inaugural lecture at Turin or his Cambridge lectures of 1940. In 1936 he had given a very different account of the end of the Republic and the transition to empire and in his review of Syme one of the objections he voiced was to what he saw as the book’s lack of consideration of spiritual life.65 Nevertheless Momigliano immediately recognised the importance of Syme’s book, as indeed his Cambridge lectures reveal, and both Momigliano and Syme in their very different ways reflected the political realities of the late 1930s while reacting against the ideological stance of some other contemporary works. When he wrote his deeply felt review Momigliano had already made a conscious choice to focus on the Roman empire rather than the late Republic (which he assessed in relation to the history of liberty) and he had observed the contemporary political and ideological issues that surrounded the subject of Julius Caesar.66 Some of the themes evident in his Cambridge lectures underlie his review of Syme’s book, whose detail belies his characteristic disclaimer. Although he had reason to be grateful for the support of Hugh Last [Camden Professor of Ancient History] and others, the English mood of the late 1930s seemed to him to be embodied in the field of ancient history by Syme, whose adherence to the prosopographical method he thought failed to do justice to the complexities of the late Republic as they had been discussed in

63 Croce wrote to Collingwood in 1938 drawing the latter’s attention to the situation of Momigliano: Gigante 2006, 44, 64–5, cf. 55. Collngwood had replied, assuring Croce that he would gain the support of Hugh Last. In 1945 Momigliano commented on Collingwood in an essay on ancient history in England, written for Italian readers (Momigliano 1980, 2, 761–8) and in 1950 he referred to him as ‘the most intelligent of [Croce’s] pupils’ and called for a careful comparison of the two (Momigliano 1992a, 531–41, 541), but writing of him later in the context of the Oxford Momigliano found in 1939 he said that he was ‘ill, isolated and discredited . . . and soon disappeared’ (Momigliano 1972). 64 He had written to De Sanctis in 1939 telling him of the review: Polverini 2006, 25; Bandelli 2006. 65 Bandelli 2006, 209–11; cf. ‘the non-political State had found an insidious enemy in the Church’ (Momigliano 1960, 415). Momigliano had read the book and written the review ‘a few weeks’ after its publication and in a copy sent to him by the author shortly after war was declared; his later introduction to the Italian edition of The Roman Revolution, published in 1962 and dated 1961, puts his review in context (Momigliano 1966, 2, 729–37). Syme had completed the book in 1938, the year of appeasement, but it was published in the different atmosphere of 1939 and Momigliano saw it as inextricably bound up with the outbreak of the Second World War. He also confessed that he found Syme’s intellectual development difficult to understand and personal communication with him not easy in the Oxford of 1939 and 1940. 66 Bandelli 2006, 199–200, 206–10.

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Momigliano’s circles in Italy.67 Syme’s assessment of Augustan literature also struck him as being very different from the previous rather benign Oxford view expressed in the Cambridge Ancient History earlier in the decade. Momigliano’s painful arrival in Oxford thus presented him with a powerful and unexpected rival account of the genesis of the Roman empire and one with which he immediately had to engage. The experience also underlined the need to find his way in an academic atmosphere very different from what he had been used to. The concreteness of Syme’s writing and its contrast with the philosophical and idealist tone of Momigliano’s Cambridge lectures of 1940 constituted an acute example of the difference, and the Oxford conventions, new to him, show in a lecture he gave to the Oxford Philological Society in May 1940, soon after the Cambridge lectures had been delivered, which he began with the memorable words ‘Like Mr Syme, I am not a special admirer of Augustus’.68 Momigliano wrote in 1957 about the influence of his teacher De Sanctis, for whom the nature of peace in the circumstances of Roman imperialism was a subject which arose in the context of the third volume of the Storia di Roma of which he was the editor, and through whom Momigliano had contributed to the Enciclopedia Italiana. It is very striking to find that references to Christianity, made naturally and in the context of discussion of the Roman empire or in personal contexts, had appeared in Momigliano’s letters to De Sanctis even in the early 1930s. It is clear that he was already trying to come to terms not only with the problems of the Roman empire but also with the roles of Judaism and Christianity in contemporary Italian culture,69 and these emphases continued to preoccupy him for some years after he had come to England. In 1944 he wrote to De Sanctis of an intended book on the history of political thought from Homer to Augustine with a special emphasis on the problems of peace and liberty,70 and the citation for his Oxford MA, conferred in 1945, referred to him as a brilliant ancient historian, who is ‘now appropriately engaged on a work on the history of freedom in the ancient world’.71 The eight Cambridge lectures were given in English. They were first published only much later in an Italian translation by Riccardo Di Donato in 1996, the original

67 Momigliano 1972a, 333. 68 Momigliano 1992c; see Di Donato 1995, tracing though the material now available for the years 1939 onwards the complex development of Momigliano’s various attempts to deal with the problem of freedom in the ancient world both before and after the Cambridge lectures. The lecture to the Oxford Philological Society discussed Constant and Jellinek quoted Eph. 4:3 and argued that Christianity in the Roman empire established a higher authority than the state and subsumed it (485); a note stated that ‘full discussion of texts and modern bibliography will be found in the volume that should follow’, that is, in the publication of the Cambridge lectures. 69 Momigliano 1994b; for the history of the fourth volume of the Storia di Romani see 68–69. Momigliano memorably emphasizes De Sanctis’s austere and distant personality, infused by his devout Catholicism. For the correspondence see Polverini 2006a. 70 Polverini 2006a, 26. 71 Polverini 2006a, 31, 73.

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English version appearing only in 2012.72 Oswyn Murray’s formulation of the theme of the lectures is ‘the unity of Greek and Roman history as an expression of the fundamental truths of western society’.73 As for liberty, we have seen that the history of liberty was a theme for which Momigliano was indebted to Croce and De Sanctis,74 and the fundamental questions of the nature of peace and liberty were the very issues that faced his own civilization. In relation to the ancient world, Momigliano’s argument, striking for an Italian Jew, was that the two ideals of peace and liberty could only be reconciled by Christianity, which alone could reconcile the peace of God with the freedom of the individual. The language used in the Cambridge lectures is passionate and sometimes even violent. The ideas of the peace of Christianity and the revolution brought about by Constantine appear early on, but the fullest treatment of Christianity is to be found in the fourth lecture and the eighth. The fourth lecture dealt with peace in the Roman empire. Momigliano’s language is strikingly emotive: the Roman peace (the famous pax Augusta), was bankrupt, and despite the extravagant claims made by the poets it ‘imposed a slavish obedience on the members of the Roman State and gave a free hand to the ruling class in dealing with the poor’. It was not a real peace but a ‘peace close to death’ based on a superficial and dry spiritual life and an absence of serious moral life; Christian peace, in contrast, was ‘active’, a better peace, ‘the very condition of a life of God’. The ‘third-century crisis’, apparently about economic issues, ‘disclosed the internal deficiency of this world’.75 The end of the lecture reiterates this conclusion after a discussion of what Momigliano understands by Christian peace. For Momigliano the Christian idea of peace was both a development from Judaism (a theme to which he often returned) and a reaction against what he saw as the dry spiritual life of the empire. The crisis of the third century (which he does not question) was an expression of this deep tension: ‘hearts failed’ and the crisis resulted in the discovery of a new religion, ‘the triumph of the religious man’. In the struggle between church and state, one must win. The idea of a state within a state reappears much later in his essay ‘After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,’ when he reflected again on earlier views of the role of Christianity in the fall of the Roman empire.76 The Cambridge lectures are full of allusions – to the Old and New Testaments, Dante, Hegel, Constant, Jellinek, Croce, Collingwood, Acton, Toqueville and many others, and to ‘liberal historiography’; they are redolent of the thinking of Momigliano’s last years in Italy. Their tone is not one in which many historians would now write. Its sweeping confidence is extraordinary [as, one might add, is Momigliano’s mastery of written English]. So is the section in the fourth lecture

72 Di Donato 1996; cf. Di Donato 1995. For the original English text see Momigliano 2012a. 73 Murray 2010; Murray 2010 (2011), 85; I am also grateful to Oswyn Murray for access to the text of his Gilbert Murray lectures on the same theme given in Oxford in December 2008. 74 On the evolution of his ideas see Bandelli 2006. 75 Di Donato 1995, 236. 76 See note 40.

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on Christian peace, which despite Momigliano’s protestations mentioned earlier is based on New Testament and Old Testament citations, a broad awareness of patristic texts and a discussion of the respective views of the Christian church and state held by Augustine and Leo I, recalling his inaugural lecture in Turin. Momigliano saw the Christian idea of peace as a continuation of Judaism and as one which offered a ‘new peace’ which was also ‘true peace’, but he also realized that this Christian peace would depend on obedience to the church, or as we might now say, to the ideal of orthodoxy. He did not press this, though he might have compared it with his view of the pax romana. But he saw the church as a direct challenge to the state: ‘either one of the two bodies ought to destroy the other or State and Church had to recognize each other’. His Introduction to the Conflict volume seems to offer an answer. Christianity provided the alternative which in the end undermined Roman society as it had been. In the Cambridge lectures he identifies the end of the Principate with Constantine and Christianity, ‘the liberty of the soul separate from political liberty’, but seems to opt for Augustine’s separation of the earthly city and the city of God. But the topic of the lectures was not simply peace, but peace and liberty. Momigliano realized that there was a link between the rise of Christianity and the rise of intolerance,77 but at this point Christianity was more intimately linked for him with the history of liberty and he did not fully resolve this tension. The eighth and final lecture links the early Christians in the age of persecution with the Cynics. Stoics in the early Roman empire demonstrated their freedom by being willing to die if necessary. Cynics also demonstrated their sense of freedom by choosing to reject contemporary society. Christians for their part achieved a new kind of freedom through suffering – a more profound liberty than political freedom, the perfect freedom of doing God’s will. Christendom ‘reacted to the suppression of political freedom in the Roman empire in the most total way: by indicating a freedom which had nothing to do with politics, that is, personal and spiritual freedom. ‘The End of the Roman Principate is not the beginning of a political liberty but the beginning of a theocracy’. Brief allusions to the third-century crisis (‘increasing movement of able people towards religious activity’) and the Christianization of the empire which followed lead into a striking concluding sentence: ‘it is obvious, as we have already said, that without the idea of the Commonwealth of God, as Christendom conceived it, modern liberty would be unthinkable’. In these lectures Momigliano attempted to unite two great issues: that of peace and that of the history of liberty. He wanted to explain, as he saw it, how political liberty in the ancient world was transformed into ‘modern’, that is, personal

77 See Momigliano 1971; for hints on this in his earlier work see Di Donato 1996, xxviii–xix; he lectured at the Warburg in 1951 on ‘From Impiety to Heresy’ and he proposed in 1940 to conclude his book on liberty and peace with a chapter on the problem of religious tolerance in the Roman empire (Di Donato 1995, 232). Cf. also Momigliano 1972a, 335: ‘the appearance of the notion of heresy in early Christianity and late Judaism means a caesura in patterns of thought and social organization’.

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liberty; it is for this reason that he puts such weight on Christianity as bringing about the change from the political to the individual. True freedom lay in the spiritual life of the individual, ‘which combines both liberty and peace’.78 It was the failure of the ancient world to achieve this that caused the victory of Christianity. The intended book on liberty, which by 1945 until at least 1950 he thought would not be finished was in the end abandoned,79 but his contribution to the 1958–59 seminar on which the Conflict volume was based, and his Introduction to the published volume, show that he continued to place a great weight on Christianity in explaining the late empire. Lellia Cracco Ruggini has analysed many reviews written by him in the 1940s and 1950s and later in which he reflected on contemporary accounts of the end of the Roman empire, including the work of historians as different as F.W. Walbank and M.I. Rostovtzeff, some of whom also placed considerable emphasis on the impact of Christianity.80 The question of the end of the Roman empire was thus also in Momigliano’s mind connected with religious issues. But here too there were some problems. His paper of 1973, ‘La caduta senza rumore di un impero nel 476 D.C.’,81 with evidence of his reading on eastern as well as western Christianity, places more stress on Christianity as integrative in Italian society after 476 and on the church’s role with the ‘barbarian’ successors than it does on conflict, and related themes such as ancient biography, ancient liberty and the idea of the individual stayed with him. He wrote again on freedom of speech in the ancient world, for instance, in 1971.82 In a paper of some twentyfive pages covering the Hittites, Jews, Greeks, Romans and Persians, and dealing with the concept of parrhesia, Christianity is given just one paragraph immediately before the conclusion. From the second century AD, he argues, freedom of speech ceased to be an important issue in the Roman empire. No one presented the problem of Christianity within the Roman empire as a problem of freedom of speech but rather one of toleration; on the other hand, it is the Christian appropriation of the word parrhesia that merits his attention, in yet another borrowing from Jewish antecedents through the medium of the Septuagint. Christians, he says, not only had freedom to speak in the name of God, but to address God Himself, and this idea was to persist throughout the medieval world. It is a short paragraph, citing only the Life of Antony out of the huge mass of post-Constantinian Christian 78 Murray 2010 (2011), 23. 79 Di Donato 1995, 239–40; during the war years Momigliano published mainly reviews. Anthony Grafton discusses the gradual shift of emphasis in Momigliano’s work during the years after he came to England: Grafton 2009: ‘by the late 1940s he had told Dan Davin of the Oxford University Press that he intended henceforth to concentrate on the history of historiography: Murray 1991, 53–4; Di Donato 1995, 228–9. 80 Cracco Ruggini 1989a, 168–9, 177. 81 Momigliano 1973, 1980. 82 Momigliano 1971a, 1980, especially 522–23. The second part was on heresy and impiety in the ancient world (the Italian version of the first part of the Jerome Lectures given at the University of Michigan in 1971 and 1972).

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literature apart from a fleeting reference to the Apophthegmata Patrum, but it returns to the argument (and the conclusion) of the 1940 lectures: the political freedom of speech of the Athenians was transformed through the parrhesia of the martyr and the saint into the idea of the freedom of the individual conscience. Peace and liberty must have seemed acutely appropriate topics for lectures given in England in the early months of 1940 by a refugee from Fascism. In 1942 Norman Baynes, Professor of Byzantine History at University College London until that year, whose war work consisted of editing the speeches of Adolf Hitler, gave the Romanes lecture in Oxford on intellectual liberty and totalitarianism.83 J.B. Bury, an earlier historian writing in English on the later Roman empire and Byzantium, had also written on the history of freedom of thought and the history of progress.84 But the sources of Momigliano’s preoccupations were more personal and very different, and even if he later moved away in general from direct confrontation of the grand themes of ancient history to the detailed consideration of how and why ancient writers wrote as they did and how they have been understood by later generations, the twin themes of historicism and Judaism remained at the core.85 The later Momigliano’s attention moved from Christianity and the end of the Roman empire towards a deep preoccupation with Jewish scholarship and the history of intellectual life in Italy, but he reflected throughout his life on the connections between Judaism and Christianity. His interest in Christianity always arose from his efforts to understand the processes by which both Judaism and Christianity affected the ancient world. Why did Momigliano lay such emphasis on Christianity, even if he did not devote himself to a fuller study of Christianity as such? Silvia Berti has cited Momigliano’s statement that ‘the fusion of Greek, Latin and Jewish tradition is Christian’.86 Christianity, it would seem, provided the answer at some periods of his life, to his attempts to understand the historical problems he had set himself since his youth. But despite his remarks in the Cambridge lectures his sense of Christianity was essentially social and philosophical rather than spiritual. He always tended to see religion as an intellectual matter,87 and thus often had cause to reflect on the fundamental problem of the relation between faith and reason, and on the tension between such a view of the history of religion and any attempt to write the history of Christianity from a specifically Christian point of view. He 83 Cameron, Averil 2000 [chapter 2 above]. Momigliano referred to Baynes in his Oxford lecture in 1940 (Momigliano 1992a, 499) and paid tribute to him in his inaugural lecture on George Grote at University College in 1952 (Momigliano 1966a). In 1955 he was one of the editors of Baynes’s collected papers, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays, demonstrating his esteem for Baynes in the preface, dated 1954. 84 Bury 1913, 1920, though Momigliano pointed out that ‘the great Bury’ devoted only a few unimportant pages to the ancient world, which he took as typical of the ‘isolation of Ancient History from the most important currents of European thought (Momigliano 1992c, 487). 85 Patlagean 1982. 86 Momigliano 1975a [cited from Momigliano 1980, 518]. 87 See also Bowersock 2007 (originally published as Bowersock 1989).

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was equally distant from any approach to the history of religion which removed it from a historical context.88 His own approach was deeply influenced by his early reading of authors such as Renan, Harnack and Troeltsch, and his concentration on Judaism towards the end of his life meant that while he had some sympathy for the contemporary interest in Christian women he did not (and given his hostility to historical relativism would not have) become involved with the very different kind of writing about Christians in late antiquity in terms of textual practices and discourse that has now become current.89 Textual analysis and literary theory, and an insistence on rhetoric as fundamental to the understanding of late antique Christian culture are poles apart from the concerns of a historian for whom understanding history was and remained a deeply moral and spiritual matter involving the philosophical understanding of the human past and its relation to the concerns of the present. But if the focus of Momigliano’s attention had increasingly shifted towards the history of Judaism and specifically of Jewish thought and scholarship,90 in these later years it was impossible for him to separate his understanding of Christianity from this context.91 When he returned to the theme of Christianity it was often as constituting a development of Judaism and sharing much with it. Above all, he saw Christianity as conveying the values of Judaism to both classical and western culture.92 The later Momigliano constantly reflected on Christianity and Judaism in the context of the history of Italy. As he looked back on his own time he also reflected on his own development and those who like Croce had been important to him.93 His concluding words in ‘Jewish Stories and Memoirs of Our Times’, reflecting on the Holocaust, are striking. In the case of Italy, he now hoped, historians of the future, ‘a better-informed generation’, would ‘consider the problem of debts and credits between Jews and Christians in a land where we have coexisted since the beginning of Christianity and even earlier’.94 In the last year of his life he expressed the view that it was ‘the hostility of the churches, which viewed “conversion” as the only solution to the Jewish problem’, that had led to a centuries-old indifference in Italy, France and Germany towards their Jewish citizens.95 Tessa Rajak sees his view of

88 89 90 91

92 93

94 95

See Stroumsa 2007. On Momigliano’s later writings on religion see Bowersock 2007. See Clemente 2009, 636–67. The subject of the Sibylline oracles offered just such an opportunity: Momigliano 1987d, 1988a, 1998; in other late papers he takes Jews and Christians together as a starting point: Momigliano 1987e, 1986a, 1998, 193–210. Among Christian material the latter paper confines itself to a brief allusion to Gregory of Nyssa and contains the statement that ‘we know little of how an individual behaved during his life in relation to the religious community to which he belonged’. Cracco Ruggini 1989a, 178. See Gigante 2006, 61–2; cf. also Momigliano 1998a, 531–41, discussing Croce’s later attitude to Hegel, and Momigliano’s emphasis on the complexity of Croce’s life and thought in ‘Reconsidering B. Croce (1866–1952)’, a lecture given at Durham University in 1966. Momigliano 1994, 43. Momigliano 1994, xxvii.

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Christianity in his final years, after more and deeper reflection on the history of Judaism, as having become much more negative; Christian teleology no longer sat well with Jewish apocalypticism. His conception of history as deeply moral and concerned with truth never left him, but as he grew older he was more ready to express his deepest beliefs in personal terms. Himself no Zionist, he had great respect for Gershom Scholem (though also disagreement) and for S.D. Goitein, as well as a deep engagement with other historians of Judaism such as Leo Strauss and Elias Bickerman, Jewish historians including Moses Finley and Jewish intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin.96 This was now revealed in a series of essays, obituaries and retrospectives. He often returned to the theme of how individual Jewish and Christian scholars had dealt with the political and cultural problems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reflected on the choices with which Jewish intellectuals had been faced in Germany and Italy, though he did not directly address the dilemmas and problems experienced during the difficult years he had himself lived through. In 1984 he protested at a statement made by Croce in 1947 suggesting that Jews should assimilate, a reaction which stemmed from long reflection on the dilemmas in which Jews and Jewish scholars had found themselves since the nineteenth century, especially in Germany.97 There is more than a hint in some of his essays that the proper subject of a Jewish historian is the history of Judaism. It is therefore especially poignant that in 1987, the year of his death, he should have written that ‘I solemnly repeat that Jews have a right to their religion, the first monotheistic and ethical religion in history. To this day, our morality depends on it’.98 The trajectory of a scholar such as Momigliano cannot be thought of in simple linear terms. He often revealed his deepest thoughts in brief asides in the context of a different argument. One can attempt to distinguish broad phases in his work when he dealt with the issues of peace and freedom, the relation of religion and empire, the complexities of Hellenistic Judaism, the rise of biography, early Rome, or the history of Jewish scholarship. But especially given the way he worked, wrote and thought, he continued to reflect on the same set of central issues throughout his life, each of them coming to the fore in turn as he addressed himself to the challenge of a lecture, a seminar or an essay. His life was one of continuous reading, reflection and discussion, and his characteristic method of working, of which interchanges with others in seminars and conversation were an integral feature, ensured that his published work arose naturally from his own personal concerns. But however much he might express it at different times, for this non-religious Jew the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire could never be detached from the broader history of the ancient world, or, above all, from the subject to which he devoted his life, the impact of Judaism and its interplay with that of Hellenism in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. 96 See also Stroumsa 2007, 293–4; Clemente 2009, 635–66; Momigliano 1980, 1994a, 1980a, 1984, 509–13, 1994, 349–58. 97 Gigante 2006, 47; cf. Momigliano’s remarks on Mommsen in his essay on Bernays. 98 Momigliano 1994, xxvii–xxviii.

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MOMIGLIANO AND CHRISTIANITY Grafton, Anthony and Williams, Megan eds. 2006. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius and the Library of Caesarea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hughes, Stuart H. 1988. ‘Arnaldo Momigliano: La storia universale, la civiltà ellenistica e gli Ebrei’, RSI 100.2: 414–21. Marcone, Arnaldo 2006. ‘Un treno per Ravenna. Riflessioni sulla tarda antichità.’ In Polverini ed. 2006, 219–33. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1931. ‘Review of Benedetto Croce, Constant e Jellinek intorno alla differenza tra la libertà degli antichi e quella dei moderni. Naples, 1930’, Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classico 9: 262–64, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1975, 906–907. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1935. Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, ser. 2, 16.3: 10–37. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1936. ‘Roma in età imperiale’, Enciclopedia Italiana 29, 628–54, reprinted in Momiglano, Arnaldo 1980, 2, 591–84. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1936b. ‘La formazione della moderna storiografia sull’ impero romano’, RSI 5.1: 35–60, 5.2, 19=48, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1955, 107–64. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1950. ‘Note sulla leggenda del cristianesimo di Seneca’, RSI 62: 325–44, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1979, 13–22. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1955. Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1960. Secondo Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1960a. ‘Sulla stato presente degli studi di storia antica (1946–1954)’, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1960, 319–54. Momigliano, Arnaldo ed. 1963. The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, Oxford-Warburg Studies. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1963. ‘Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century AD’, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo ed. 1963, 79–99. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1966. Terzo Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1966a.‘George Grote and the Study of Greek History’, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1966, 56–74. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1969. Quarto Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1969a. ‘Reconsidering B. Croce (1866–1952)’, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1969, 95–113. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1971a. ‘Empietà e eresia nel mondo antico’, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1980, 2, 437–58. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1971b. ‘La libertà di parola nel mondo antico’, RSI 83.3: 499–524, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1980, 2, 403–36. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1972. ‘Popular Religious Beliefs and the Late Ancient Historians’. In Popular Belief and Practice, edited by W.R. Ward and Derek Baker, Studies in Church History 8, 1–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1975. 1, 73–92. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1972a. ‘A Piedmontese View of the History of Ideas’, TLS, 24 November: 1417–18, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1980, 1, 329–35. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1973. ‘La caduta senza rumore di un impero nel 476 D.C.’, ASNP, ser. 3, 3.2: 397–418, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1980, 1, 159–79. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1975. Quinto Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1975a. ‘The Fault of the Greeks’, Daedalus 104.2: 9–19. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1978. ‘After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’, ASNP ser. 3, 8.2: 435–54, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1980, 1, 265–84. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1980. Sesto Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni d Storia e Letteratura.

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MOMIGLIANO AND CHRISTIANITY Momigliano, Arnaldo 1980a. ‘Gershom Scholem’s Autobiography’, NYRB 27.20, 18 December: 37–39, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1984, 509–13, Momigliano, Arnaldo 1994, 349–58. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1984. Settimo Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1985. ‘The Life of St Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa’. In The Craft of the Ancient Historian. Essays in Honor of Chester G. Starr, edited by John W. Eadie and Josiah Ober, 443–58. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Reprinted. in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987, 333–47; Italian ‘Macrina: una santa aristocratica vista dal fratello’. In Le donne in Grecia, edited by Giampera Arrigoni, 331–44. Bari: Laterza, 1985. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1985a. ‘The New Letter by “Anna” to “Seneca”’, Athenaeum n.s. 63: 217–19, reprinted in Momigliano 1998, 329–32. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1985b. ‘The Jews of Italy’, NYRB 32.16: 22–26, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987; Momigliano 1998. English translation in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1994, xxv–xxvii. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1986. ‘The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State’, Classical Philology 81: 285–97, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1998, 313–28. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1986a. ‘Ancient Biography and the Study of Religion’, ASNP, ser. 3, 16.1: 25–44, 159–77, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1998, 193–210. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987. On Pagans, Jews and Christians. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987a. Pagine ebraiche, 121–34. Turin: Einaudi. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987b. Encyclopaedia of Religion 6, 383–90. New York: Macmillan, 1987, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo1998, 27–44. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987c. Conversazioni sul nazismo’, Belfagor 42.6: 669–73. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987d. ‘Sibylline Oracles’, Encyclopaedia of Religion 13, 305–307. New York: Gale, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1998, 349–54. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987e. ‘Some Preliminary Remarks on the “Religious Opposition” to the Roman Empire’. In Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987, 120–41. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1988. ‘Classical Scholarship for a Classical Country; the Case of Italy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, The American Scholar 57.1: 119–28. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1988a. ‘From the Pagan to the Christian Sibyl: Prophecy as History of Religion’. In The Uses of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, edited by Carlotta Dionisotti, Anthony Grafton and Jill Kraye, 3–18. London: Warburg Institute, reprinted in Momigliano, Arnaldo 1992a, 725–44. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1990. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1992. ‘Men and Women in Roman Religion’. In Momigliano, Arnaldo1992, 577–92. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1992a. Nono Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1992b. ‘Benedetto Croce (1950)’. In Momigliano, Arnaldo 1992a, 531–41. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1992c. ‘Liberty and Peace in the Ancient World’. In Momigliano, Arnaldo 1992a, 483–501. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1994. Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, edited by Silvia Berti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1994a. ‘Felice Momigliano (1866–1924)’. In Momigliano, Arnaldo 1994, 144–47. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1994b. ‘In Memory of Gaetano De Sanctis (1870–1957)’. In A.D. Momigliano, Studies on Modern Scholarship, edited by Glen W. Bowersock and Tim Cornell, 54–71. Berkeley: University of California Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1998. Ottavo Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Momigliano, Arnaldo 2012. Decimo Contributo. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

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MOMIGLIANO AND CHRISTIANITY Momigliano, Arnaldo 2012a. ‘Peace and Liberty in the Ancient World’. In Momigliano, Arnaldo 2012, 1, 3–105. Murray, Oswyn 1988. ‘Momigliano e la cultura inglese’, RSI 100.2: 422–39. Murray, Oswyn 1991. ‘Arnaldo Momigliano in England’. In The Presence of the Historian: Essays in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano, edited by Michael P. Steinberg, History and Theory, Beiheft 30, 49–64. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Murray, Oswyn 2010 (2011). ‘Momigliano on Peace and Liberty (1940)’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Philologica 1, Graecolatina Pragensia 23: 81–96. North, John A. 2014. ‘Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Thinking of Arnaldo Momigliano’. In Cornell, Tim and Murray, Oswyn eds. 2014, 129–45. Patlagean, Evelyne 1982. ‘Les Contributi d’Arnaldo Momigliano: Portrait d’un historien dans ses paysages’, Annales ESC 5–6: 1004–13. Polverini, Leandro ed. 2006. Arnaldo Momigliano nella Storiografia del Novecento. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letterature. Polverini, Leandro 2006a. ‘Momigliano e de Sanctis’ In Polverini ed. 2006, 11–35. Rajak, Tessa 2014. ‘Momigliano and Judaism’. In Cornell, Tim and Murray, Oswyn eds. 2014, 89–106. Stroumsa, Guy G. 2007. ‘Arnaldo Momigliano and the History of Religions’. In Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundation of the Modern Cultural Sciences, edited by Peter N. Miller, 286–311. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Willing, Meike 2008. Eusebius von Cäsarea als Häresiograph. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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A very different view of late antiquity was proposed by the historians of the ‘Annales school’ and especially Ferdinand Braudel, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, by whom Evelyne Patlagean was influenced (although she studied for her thesis with André Chastagnol). She indicated her debts to Marc Bloch and Georges Duby in the preface of her last book, Un moyen Âge grec. In a letter to me written in English and dated 1996, when she was delivering lectures on Byzantium in the seventh to mid-ninth centuries, she observed that she had come to realise that the eighth century and Palestine were not only the turning point but ‘a matrix for major trends in the ensuing period’. Patlagean’s ground-breaking book on poverty saw Islam in contrast as marking a profound break, as did most historians then, unlike today’s insistence on seeing it as integral to late antiquity. The available evidence was already changing in 1977 with the beginnings of late antique archaeology when Patlagean’s book on poverty came out, and I was very conscious of this in my review, published in 1980, just as I was preparing my article of 1982 on North Africa drawing on the early results of the UNESCO Save Carthage campaign. Understandably for the time Patlagean accepted the early seventh century as her endpoint as well as other assumptions then current (as a historian trained in France she assumed that Byzantium began in the fourth century) but her book was unlike any other on the period and opened new vistas of social history. She made family patterns central, a theme that was soon followed by others including Peter Brown and Paul Veyne, and she set a precedent for the use of quantitative history in relation to late antiquity. But Veyne’s very different La famille et l’amour sous l’Haut Empire romain of the following year already indicated a move towards interiority not found in Patlagean, and Elizabeth A. Clark’s first two books on women and asceticism in the early church were published in 1979 and 1983; although gender had not yet become a major theme for late antique historians in general. Christian charity was to become a central theme and has since been treated by Peter Brown in Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire and many others, as have the ambiguities of Christian attitudes to wealth in Brown’s Ransom of the Soul and Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. Both my review (as the footnotes indicate) and the book belong in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-10

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the context of the late 1970s and do not have the advantage of later developments in the historiography of the period. Nevertheless, Patlagean’s book was highly original for its time and it opened up the possibility of a very different kind of social history. She herself remained on the edge of the Byzantine studies world in Paris and her work, especially her last book, was not always appreciated. Yet she deserves to be recognized as a real pioneer. Far too much has been published since this review on the questions it raised for it to be practical to add references here; the paper therefore reflects the situation in the late 1970s, with only a few indications of subsequent scholarship. ––––––––––––

The period we know as ‘late antiquity’ is currently stimulating a ferment of activity, especially among younger scholars. Yet major generalizing works are still lacking, most particularly in the field of social history, and again, especially for the eastern empire.1 It is not from English-speaking Byzantinists but from the French that one such work has appeared, Evelyne Patlagean’s Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles.2 This book marks an event in Byzantine studies and the study of late antiquity. It is both ambitious and scholarly; it applies new techniques to late antiquit and [early] Byzantine history and asks questions not in themselves new – for they are familiar to historians of other periods – but certainly new to this field. It is a book refreshing in its exuberance, even though that very exuberance has caused the author to produce a child which she cannot quite control. The subject-matter spills over all the time, and the detail and vigour of individual discussions often make the main themes hard to grasp. Yet Patlagean’s approach is exciting both methodologically and in terms of what she has to say about late antiquity. Byzantine histories tend to be devoid of theory; this cannot be said of Patlagean, and that in itself in some quarters at least, may be a welcome change. Patlagean’s book comes from the French stable of histoire totale.3 She has been a contributor to M. Mollat’s collective work on poverty,4 and professes a special debt to Le Goff.5 Much of the ‘archaeology’ of her book finds close parallels in the work of Le Roy Ladurie,6 and will be so immediately recognizable now to most people that it might require something of an effort to realize how new it is to apply these concepts and methods of history to this particular period. Yet the works on the eastern empire which show consciousness of the methods and concerns of

1 Peter Brown has been the major influence, most of all with Brown 1971a [chapter 11 below]. But there has been little else on social or economic issues in early Byzantium. 2 Patlagean 1977. 3 See Le Goff and Chartier 1978. 4 Mollat 1974. 5 Patlagean 1977, preface. 6 Especially Le Roy Ladurie 1975.

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western medieval history are still so few that it could be argued that this is one of the main needs in the subject.7 If traditionalists need reassurance, Patlagean also comes with an impeccable grounding in such respectable disciplines as epigraphy, papyrology and the close interpretation of texts; in fact the sheer grasp of the technical data is remarkably impressive. What she has done at one level is to answer a well-known current debate about the methods appropriate to ancient and non-quantitative history by deploying both a vast mass of source material and a bold capacity for hypothesizing. It is not the author’s fault if she has been impeded through having to do so much of the groundwork herself. Even so, she has laid down a framework for the period ending with the early seventh century which must be very seriously considered. Basic is the delineation of period. Like most other historians Patlagean sees the early seventh century as marking a break. To some extent this can be challenged. There was perhaps not the total cut-off in urban life that is so often implied.8 On the other hand the later sixth century offers many signs of a deep structural change in society over and above the population decline which Patlagean sees as crucial to the ending of antiquity.9 But most historians would agree that with the reign of Heraclius the recognizably antique basis of early Byzantine society is well on the way out. How does Patlagean define her period? Very much along economic lines. For her, the late antique economy was essentially static. Production was too low to permit much accumulation of wealth; when there was a surplus it was usually immediately redistributed, in outwardly different forms, it is true, from those prevailing in the classical world, but essentially in similar ways, through ostentatious expenditure, especially on building. Integral to this view is Patlagean’s conception of coinage in the late antique world as still having a strongly social and political function. The only real variable, then, in this very traditional society, will be population size. And even if population increase does occur, it will not call forth transformation in the basic economic pattern, only in the volume of production or building. The pedigree of Patlagean’s economic interpretation and its classical roots will be obvious to most ancient historians, and it will, or should, call forth the same kind of criticism in detail as Finley’s The Ancient Economy.10 Fortunately her own analyses in other parts of the book often give the lie to her theoretical statements. However, this underpinning is basic for one of her chief emphases – the association of late antique poverty with the story of the late antique city.11 A central hypothesis is that of an increase in the absolute number of the urban poor;

7 Though there is nothing on Byzantium in, for instance, Le Goff and Nora eds. 1974, and no Byzantine contribution to the special Annales volume of 1972 on the family: ‘Famille et société’, Annales E.S.C. 27.4–5. On the latter subject Patlagean’s own earlier paper, Patlagean 1973, broke new ground. 8 See Cameron 1979, 1981. 9 Cameron 1979; Brown 1973. 10 Finley 1973; see Frederiksen 1975. 11 Patlagean 1977, 156–235.

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conversely the end of the classical city, which also marks the end of late antiquity as such, spelled the end of this species of poverty. Thus urbanism is the central and defining problem of the period. Again Patlagean is not alone in making this the key.12 But again it is not the whole story, as Patlagean also knows.13 What makes this book difficult to follow is its duality of purpose, the desire both to analyse and describe poverty in its economic (objective) and social (perceived) forms and to provide an interpretation of the essential characteristics of a whole defined ‘period’. Much more than this, though. Patlagean is by all normal criteria trying to do far more than is in fact possible either in terms of the material available or within the scope of one book. Thus the hypotheses which I have outlined do not exactly run through or work themselves out in the course of the book itself, but rather emerge from it in the author’s own conclusions. Most of the body of the book is devoted to analyses of poverty in different aspects – as perceived in the texts of the period, in the objective terms of living conditions, life expectancy and susceptibility to illness and the contemporary social ideas underlying people’s objective situations. It moves on to a more general analysis of the economic and social composition of late antique towns, from there to rural production and society, and only then, in a topsy-turvy way, it might seem, to consider the financial mechanisms of early Byzantine society, wages and prices, and to offer an objective estimation of late antique poverty in these terms. The logic of this arrangement can be questioned, the more so since much of the earlier part assumes the latter; again it is all very well to insist on using contemporary conceptualizations, but what we really want for this elusive period are the hard data. Mollat’s preoccupation with the two sorts of poverty, social (in Patlagean’s sense of perceived) and economic (that is, in real terms), has not as applied here resulted in a clear and helpful general view, partly because the contemporary perceptions of poverty are far fewer and far less interesting than the quantitative data, for all the difficulties which such material presents. Histoire totale demands a close attention to mentalité.14 But here the ancient historian finds himself [sic] in the usual difficulty, illustrated by Patlagean’s excellent discussion on fourth-century ascetic attitudes and their relation to marriage and procreativity.15 For our insight into the mentalité of such a period can only be selective, and it comes as no surprise that Christian homiletic, addressed as it was largely to an educated urban audience and hostile to procreation over and above the level essential to maintain the stock, conflicts with archaeological arguments also used by Patlagean which indicate population growth both urban and rural. On the other hand Patlagean’s discussion of the development of late antique marriage patterns which is also based on sources concerning the better-off, and is therefore strictly secondary to her main subject, is probably the most valuable attempted to 12 13 14 15

See the works cited in Cameron 1979, with Kurbatov 1974 and note 20 below. Patlagean 1977, 236–340. Patlagean 1977, 3–5. Patlagean 1977, 128–45.

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date.16 In general however it is the quantitative evidence, for all its deficiencies,17 that is most welcome, and this book richly supplies it, from the diet of the poor18 to the demographical effects of the growth of monasteries in the Holy Land.19 And despite the concern with method and the overt ‘archaeology’ of the book it is reassuring – or disappointing, depending on one’s point of view – to find that the technique is after all what it always was, namely the judicious combination of generalization and ‘evidence’. The totality of total history lies not in its methods as much as in its range, its definition of what is relevant. In this case the range is so wide as to be exciting, and if some of the quantitative data turn out on inspection to depend like so much in ancient history on individual references painstakingly gleaned from literary sources, that is the cross that we must all bear. But what is covered by ‘late antiquity’? The subject has a spatial as well as a temporal dimension, and Patlagean has limited herself strictly to the eastern Mediterranean in an attempt to impose at least some discipline on her material. This is a pity; more than that, it raises serious questions about the viability of ‘late antiquity’ as a useful concept. To exclude Egypt, though it cuts off a body of evidence, is perhaps understandable in view of its special characteristics, but to exclude the Balkans, and still more Italy and north Africa, gives a peculiarly distorted picture and propagates the false (at this date) equation of ‘Byzantine’ and ‘eastern’. In choosing this particular limitation, largely to Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, has the author made a statement about the Byzantine poor as distinct from the poor in, say, Gaul or Spain? Or if not, are not her generalizations and especially her treatment of urban poverty as particularly characteristic of the period likely to be misleading through being based on only part of the evidence? It is certainly arguable that too much attention is currently being paid to the decline of the ancient cities, not unnaturally when the bias of the archaeological evidence now coming out in increasing quantities is firmly towards urban centres.20 If it is true that there was an absolute increase in the numbers of the urban poor, as suggested by, among others, the high level of public building, it does indeed become easier to understand urban violence in a setting where surplus labour could not be absorbed in increased production.21 The riots of the Blues and Greens that reached a peak in the early sixth century must have a functional explanation and Patlagean well shows how earlier theories about the affiliations of the factions, where they 16 Apart from her own earlier paper, Patlagean 1973. 17 Patlagean 1977, 6–7. 18 Patlagean 1977, 36–53, a careful division of all source references to food into Levi-Straussian categories of gathered and cultivate, raw and cooked; for the influence of Claude Levi-Strauss see Patlagean 1977, 4. 19 Patlagean 1977, 324–5. 20 See especially the works of Foss, beginning with Foss 1975; see also Cameron 1979. [The decline of cities was also a given in Soviet historiography as part of its schematic view of the transition from the ancient world; see note 23 below.] 21 For the low production level of late antique towns see Patlagean 1977, 156–81; overall population growth: Patlagean 1977, conclusion.

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were not simply an error, failed because they did not relate the factions to a comprehensible social background.22 It is no accident that factional violence comes to an end with the decline of the late antique city and was at its height during a period of urban ‘renaissance’.23 Again the interconnection between urban social structure and urban topography well recognised for later periods of history is also fundamental here: a growing and volatile urban population needs meeting-places, no longer the informal baths or the open spaces of classical cities, but the hippodrome and the church, settings for organized assemblies and for the ceremonial which was the typically late antique means of controlling the urban masses.24 These ways of looking at the city in this period are full of possibilities and Patlagean is particularly good on Christian charity.25 Yet it is a mistake to put the city too firmly in the centre of the picture. Typically Patlagean also provides much material (and here she is more original) for the understanding of late antique villages and the countryside. The Nessana papyri afford a new possibility for studying the economic relationships between the villagers themselves and suggest continuity and strength, even the opportunity for growth.26 Even holy men are not exempt from economic analysis, as an ‘artisanat érémitique’ or ‘artisanat jardinier’27 – picturesque, perhaps, but useful concepts all the same. The economic organization of monasteries, especially [treated in 1992 in relation to Judaea by Y. Hirschfeld], is a promising field of inquiry in relation to the countryside, since by their landowning and land use they could substantially affect historical geography and demography, while at the same time offering in Patlagean’s terms an alternative social pattern to the family. This too is difficult to interpret on other than a strictly regional basis. Patlagean leans heavily on the work of Georges Tchalenko on northern Syria, yet it is extremely uncertain whether or not his results can apply to any other regions.28 When we come to the central question of population, both in town and countryside, many more problems naturally arise, since with the best will in the world one cannot pretend that the evidence for the crucial late-sixth-century decline is other than frustratingly slight, aside from the descriptions of plague in literary sources.29 Neither Patlagean nor anyone else has yet fully explained what happened in the towns at the end of the century and it 22 Patlagean 1977, 223f; see also Cameron, Alan1976 [though denying a social explanation]. 23 So Kurbatov 1974, distinguishing a distinct phase in the history of Byzantine cities as marked by factional violence and ending with the end of classical antiquity. For the sixth-century efflorescence of cities see Claude 1969. 24 Not that the evidence is easy to interpret: at Sbeitla (Sufetula), for instance, as elsewhere in modern Tunisia, the sixth-century Byzantine reconquest saw the building and remodelling of basilicas on a scale hardly to be explained by population growth; at that time or not much later the town’s inhabitants were building right over the main thoroughfare of the Roman city: see Duval 1964, 1972. 25 Patlagean 1977, 197f., improving on Constantelos 1968. 26 Patlagean 1977, 309f. 27 Patlagean 1977, 315f. 28 Tchalenko 1953–58, arguing for prosperity in certain areas of north Syria closely linked with local olive culture. 29 For the plague, see Allen 1979 [a vast literature now exists given new archaeological and environmental evidence and the possibility of DNA analysis].

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is not good enough to fall back on the old bogey of the seventh-century invasions to explain the decline of classical urbanism.30 Here above all we need a more differentiated regional treatment, as Patlagean’s own discussion amply shows.31 After all, both Egypt and north Africa were still comparatively flourishing at the end of the sixth century and any generalizing account that leaves them out (as well as the western possessions) will only be telling half the story. Finally, homiletic sources on sex and marriage and an awareness of the urban role of Christian charity, or the economic effects of rural monasteries, do not tell the story which Patlagean admits is at the very roots of the evolution she is trying to describe – the Christianization of Roman society.32 The social composition of the church, its perception of its role in society, its financial base – all these and many other aspects need to be considered, and the fact that they are not is all the more surprising in one so conscious of the importance of mentalités. Despite her sympathy and skill in handling Christian sources33 Patlagean’s book suffers from a strange lack of internalization. It seems that we have yet to find a way of writing about late antiquity that would give full attention both to the interior features of Christianization and to its exterior effects. For if there is anything that gives shape and identity to this span of time it is the establishment of Christianity as part of the political order in every part of the Mediterranean world. To regard late antiquity too persistently as continuing along classical lines is to obscure the ways in which it was essentially different. And if there is indeed a cut-off point, perhaps it is after all not the demise of towns, variable and uncertain as that is in some areas at least, but the rolling out of Islam like a great carpet over tracts of Christian soil. And in the centuries to come it will be the village roots of Christianity that even in the most Islamicized of provinces will keep it falteringly or doggedly alive.34

Bibliography Allen, Pauline 1979. ‘The “Justinianic Plague”’, Byzantion 49: 5–20. Brown, Peter 1971. The World of Late Antiquity from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad. London: Thames and Hudson. Brown, Peter 1971a. ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, JRS 61: 80–101.

30 As Patlagean does: Patlagean 1977, 428, 431. 31 Especially Patlagean 1977, 420–1, where in discussing coinage she admits quite considerable variation in distribution on late-sixth-century sites. 32 Patlagean 1977, 430. 33 Shown in her valuable paper on Byzantine hagiography, Patlagean 1968 [again, a picture that has changed]. 34 Even in north Africa, which fell so completely to the Arabs, a few [sic] Christians were able to hang on: Seston 1936; Dufourcq 1968. As usual the evidence is weighted towards towns but for town and country in sixth-century Africa see Markus 1979 [the survival of Christianity in North Africa is also subject to very recent reassessment].

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Brown, Peter 1973. ‘A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy’, EHR 88: 1–34. Cameron, Alan 1976. Circus Factions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil 1979. ‘Images of Authority: Elites and Icons in Late Sixth-Century Byzantium’, P&P 84: 3–35, reprinted in Cameron, Averil 1981. Continuity and Change in Sixth Century Byzantium. London: Variorum, XVIII. Cameron, Averil 1981. Continuity and Change in Byzantium. London: Variorum. Cameron, Averil 1982. ‘Byzantine Africa: The Literary Evidence’. In Excavations at Carthage VII, edited by John Humphrey, 29–62. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Claude, Dietrich 1969. Die byzantinische Stadt im 6. Jahrhundert. Byzantinisches Archiv 13. Munich: Beck. Constantelos, Demetrios 1968. Byzantine Philanthropy and Social Welfare. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dufourcq, Charles-Emmanuel 1968. ‘Berbérie et Ibérie médiévales: un problème de rupture’, Revue historique 240: 293–324. Duval, Noel 1964. ‘Observations sur l’urbanisme tardif de Sufetula, Tunisie’, Cahiers de Tunisie 12: 88–103. Duval, Noel 1972. ‘Études d’architecture chrétienne nord-africaine’, Mélanges École Française de Rome 84: 1132. Finley, Moses I. 1973. The Ancient Economy. London: Chatto and Windus. Foss, Clive 1975. ‘The Persians in Asia Minor and the End of Antiquity’, HER 90: 721–47. Frederiksen, Martin W. 1975. ‘Theory, Evidence and the Ancient Economy’, JRS 65: 164–71. Hirschfeld, Yizhar 1992. The Judaean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period. New Brunswick: Yale University Press. Kurbatov, Georgiy L. 1974. ‘K problemy tipologii gorodskikh dvizhenii v Vizantii’, Problemy sozial’noi struktury I ideologii srednevekovogo obsjchestva 1: 44–61. Le Goff, Jacques and Chartier, Roger 1978. La nouvelle histoire. Paris: Retz – C.E.P.L. Le Goff, Jacques and Nora, Pierre eds. 1974. Faire de l’histoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 1975. Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324. Paris: Gallimard. Markus, Robert A. 1979. ‘Country Bishops in Byzantine Africa’. In The Church in Town and Countryside, edited by Derek Baker, Studies in Church History 16, 1–15. Oxford: Blackwell. Mollat, Michel ed. 1974. Études sur l’histoire de la pauvreté, moyen âge – XVIe siècles, 2 vols. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Patlagean, Evelyne 1968. ‘Ancienne hagiographie byzantine et histoire sociale’, Annales ESC 23: 106–26. Patlagean, Evelyne 1973. ‘L’enfant et son avenir dans la famille byzantine, IVe-XIIe siècles’, Annales de démographie historique 9: 85–93. Patlagean, Evelyne 1977. Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles. École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Civilisations et sociétés 48. Paris: Mouton, La Haye. Patlagean, Evelyne 2007. Un moyen Âge grec: Byzance IVe – XVe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel. Seston, William 1936. ‘Sur les derniers temps de christianisme en Afrique’, Mélanges École Française de Rome 53: 101–24. Tchalenko, Georges 1953–1958. Villages antiques de la Syrie du nord: Le massif de Bélus à l’époque romaine. 3 vols. Paris: P. Geuthner.

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Michel Foucault died in 1984 with the final volume of The History of Sexuality unpublished, and this review came out soon after I gave my Sather lectures at Berkeley on Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. I felt the need to justify my argument, especially to ancient historians and historians of early Christianity, about the importance of discourse and even about making Christianity my topic. I had read The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge as well as Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish and now I wanted to bring to the attention of ancient historians The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, published in French in 1984 and translated into English in 1985 and 1986. As I was editor of JRS at the time, I had the opportunity of publishing it there, and perhaps surprised the members of the Editorial Committee in doing so (the Journal has since broadened its scope and changed its practices). The publication of Foucault’s fourth and final volume in French in 2018 and English in 2022 has attracted a great deal of comment internationally, with seminars dedicated to it in the US and UK and a conference and many publications in France. Foucault’s voluminous archive has also become available, revealing the twists and turns of his thinking, and throwing some light on the encounter of Peter Brown and Foucault in Berkeley in 1980, and his influence on Brown, which Brown himself has somewhat played down. I had read earlier works by Foucault while a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the period 1977–78, but Le volonté de savoir, L’usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi connected with my own work on late antiquity in a different way. I took from them a welcome endorsement of my developing approach, not something with which Momigliano agreed; his deep conviction that history was about establishing the truth meant that he was passionately opposed to any idea that that discourse mattered in itself or that history could be a form of rhetoric. The disagreement between us had recently been made apparent in his reaction before publication to the text of my book on Procopius (1985). As for Foucault, the limitations of his thinking about early Christianity have become much more apparent with the publication of his fourth volume, completed but not published in 1982 and later often revised; it is now clear that his primary focus was on governance and truth-telling, in the form of the confessional DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-11

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practices adopted in late antique monastic circles. In 1981 he had delivered a course of lectures in Louvain with the title ‘Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonctions de l’aveu’ (‘Doing Wrong and Speaking the Truth: Functions of Confession’) and his work on sexuality was in fact part of a history of truth. He had written in his first volume of ‘the will to knowledge . . . constituting a science of sexuality’. He also described his work as ‘a philosophical exercise’. In his fourth volume he generalised from the case of John Cassian at the expense of eastern examples. John Cassian was the subject of his conversation with Peter Brown in Berkeley in 1980 and he approached early Christianity through the lens of French Catholicism. As has often been pointed out he gave little if any attention to the role of women, seeming to take Methodius’s very untypical Symposium at face value, or indeed to many practical aspects of early Christian asceticism, including the use and renunciation of wealth, despite his being a close associate and colleague in Paris of Paul Veyne, whose edited first volume of the Histoire de la vie privée was published in French in 1985. Feminist approaches to early Christianity were equally foreign to him. Western Catholicism and what he saw as its repressive teaching lay behind Foucault’s approach, which he saw as fundamental to the history of surveillance and repression in the pre-modern and modern world (thus developing the theme he had treated in Discipline and Punish). Looking at the bibliography in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self as an ancient historian (and in the review below) is like taking a step backward, and as the fourth volume shows Foucault did not engage significantly with late antique scholarship. His focus lay elsewhere, in early Christianity as a ‘regime of truth’, something very different from a body of doctrines, a cultural phenomenon or a social movement. This was not apparent to me when I wrote the review published here, and lateantique historians were themselves already beginning to approach the theme of asceticism, but in a very different way. Were I writing now I would have much more to say on that topic, but some of my early thoughts are reflected in chapter 13 below. In many other ways too an assessment of Foucault now would look entirely different. But Elizabeth A. Clark was already employing literary analysis (something completely foreign to Foucault) [and was subsequently influential in bringing about a major shift in this direction among scholars of late antiquity]. But the excitement I felt when encountering these volumes in the 1980s is vividly shown here. ––––––––

According to Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘no interpretation of the decline of the Roman empire can be declared satisfactory if it does not also account for the triumph of Christianity’ (Momigliano 1963, 6). He continued, ‘of course it will not be a simple return to Gibbon’. Yet it is notable that until recently the rationalist tradition of Gibbon and the philosophes has indeed continued to make its influence felt, at least among English-speaking scholars. In contrast Geoffrey de Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, reviewed by Brunt 1982, presents 134

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us with a sharply drawn Marxist explanation of the late empire and the end of antiquity, in which Christianity plays a predictably subservient and unflattering supporting role (De Ste Croix 1981, 445 ‘in the short run, religion may play a decisive role in influencing men’s actions and the nature of the groups into which they divide’ with 447, ‘it is difficult for most people nowadays to understand the great importance attached to religion in the ancient world, above all in the Christian period’ and 452 ‘we may reflect . . . upon the good fortune of the mass of Greeks in the classical period, who had no such beliefs instilled into them’). Yet Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire [MacMullen 1984], though written from a quite different perspective, finds it equally hard to take Christianity seriously, and still appeals to a Gibbonian conception of the late empire as the home of superstition and credulity. On this view, if a respectable explanation is to be found at all for the spread of Christianity, it will have to be sought elsewhere than in its ‘purely religious’ component. It seems to be more acceptable at present for an ancient historian to appeal to social or economic factors than to the realm of ideas. In any case the notion of religious faith as a product of ‘anxiety’ in its manifestation in the Christian empire had already been undermined by Peter Brown and others [Brown 1978; Smith and Lounibos eds. 1984] when Michel Foucault’s two volumes L’usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi appeared in 1984 (Foucault 1984a, 1984b). According to Bregman (Smith and Lounibos 1984, 228–29), Dodds’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety was ‘one of the last books that will be written in the old framework of the decline of Roman civilization . . . for only in recent years have scholars acquired sufficient critical distance from the great ancient (and modern!) dialogue between Christianity and paganism’. Certainly, as is obvious from Dodds’s Missing Persons [Dodds 1977], Dodds’s approach was shaped by his own early renunciation of Christianity and his subsequent attempt to combine a determined rationalism with a lifelong interest in what he termed ‘the irrational’. Hugh Lloyd-Jones has recently shown how much this owed to the idea that man’s irrational side could be tamed and controlled through a Freudian methodology. Peter Brown has recently used a more sociological explanation of religious development, appealing rather to a loosening of traditional group ties and a turn towards individual fulfilment as factors influential in promoting a more intensely personal religious life by the fourth century. Now in these two volumes, which begin with the fourth century BC (for L’usage des plaisirs see Lloyd 1986), Foucault traces the development of the idea of the person as subject and shows that attention to the individual, which is surely an important part of Christianity (e.g. Dumont, Essais sur l’individualisme, Dumont 1983) had begun well before the Roman empire and was part of a discourse concerned with the regulation of the subject in ways both physical and mental. Les aveux de la chair [the fourth and final volume], promising coverage of early Christianity, has not yet been published, yet it is clear in what direction it would or will go. The emphasis on the subject in antiquity was a late concern in the context of Foucault’s overall project on sexuality, which began by postulating a major break in sexual 135

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consciousness as late as the nineteenth century; but when it came it necessarily involved him in considering early Christianity and its discourses on the individual and on sexuality (see his own remarks in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 208f.). His attitude is not particularly sympathetic: he was interested above all in power, and in Christianity as the provider of a totalizing and therefore repressive discourse which spread a different kind of power relations. It had a particular strength, however, in that it was both totalizing and individualist. Foucault’s emphasis is quite different from that of either de Ste Croix, for whom Christian ideology, while certainly repressive, is merely a justification of the status quo, not a dynamic in itself, or MacMullen, for whom Christian discourse is simply irrelevant as a factor in Christianization [MacMullen 1984, 20–21]. In total contrast, Foucault’s interest centres upon speech and writing, the practice of discourse, and as G.E.R. Lloyd notes, he hardly concerns himself with the ‘real’ world in which this development took place. The disjunctions in history are disjunctions in the prevailing discourse (compare his earlier books Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish). Yet Foucault can also allow for development and overlap, though the distinction may not be clear cut (cf. e.g. Kurzweil 1980, 223). The Roman empire, then, and one assumes especially the ‘late’ or Christian empire, can be seen as a time of such development proceeding in a certain direction, which (for reasons which demand explanation) was also the direction of Christian discourse. There is an interesting nexus here. Foucault acknowledges an explicit debt to an imaginative article by Paul Veyne (Veyne 1978), in which Veyne argued for a domestication of morals in the early empire independent of Christian teaching. Key authors are Plutarch, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, all of whom also appear frequently in the footnotes of Le souci de soi. Another recent French collective work edited by Paul Veyne (Veyne 1985), dedicated to Foucault and with a chapter by Peter Brown, also concerns itself with this set of ideas; moreover the personal connections between Foucault and Brown, as well as being based on place (Berkeley, Paris), have been documented by Foucault himself [and described by Brown]. Perhaps an indicator of how scholarship works in practice, this seems to have been one of those cases where a number of scholars found, rather suddenly, that their thoughts were converging. It is worth reflecting that it will be a challenge for future generations to plot the ways in which our ideas have been formed – infinitely more difficult than was the case with the kinds of histories of scholarship we have been used to, given both the ease of academic travel and the speed at which ideas are now diffused. The connections traced here will soon no doubt seem crude and slow, given the possibility already existing of transferring large or small quantities of material between scholars almost instantaneously over electronic lines. To return to Foucault, therefore (to whom this explosion of communication would have provided a perfect demonstration of the validity of his own scholarly concerns): the notion of the privatization of public life in the Hellenistic and early imperial periods, crucial to his argument, is already familiar from Veyne’s earlier book, Le pain et le cirque. That development made marriage into a subject of considerable attention (for instance for Plutarch and Musonius 136

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Rufus) and produced a literature directed towards the management of the self. Christianity, then, would merely sharpen and develop these existing trends and eventually institutionalise them. Another recent book, Aline Rousselle’s Porneia (Rousselle 1983) traces much more fully than Foucault the extent to which this development and its accompanying discourse was common to both paganism and Christianity, both in the early stages of the imperial period and after Constantine (cf. also Rousselle 1985 on Brown 1982, recently translated into French). Whereas however Veyne’s article ties the change very much to the political and social conditions of the early empire (cf. Veyne 1978, 39, ‘la morale sexuelle qu’avait inventée l’aristocratite de service sous le Haut Empire’, and 38, the Antonines were ‘les veritable inventeurs’ of ‘la morale sexuelle dite chrétienne’), Foucault and Rousselle have traced its origins further back; it is indeed, as Foucault explains himself (e.g. ‘Afterword’, 266), as if having begun confidently in the modern period, he found it necessary to backtrack further and further in the search for what he calls the ‘technology of the self’. That is not to say that he dd not see a great difference between classical Greek and Christian ideas. He identifies the specifically Christian concern as being with ‘desire’, whereas the Greek formula is directed towards action. But he is far less concerned with a political or social explanation like Veyne’s, in term of a particular historical situation, than with an explanation internal to the discourse itself. One of the concerns of L’usage des plaisirs, for instance, is the role of writing in the formation of the idea of self. Thus it is understandable but from Foucault’s point of view irrelevant to complain as Geoffrey Lloyd does that he confines himself to texts, even to literary texts, or that he fails to locate his argument in the real world of political change. Foucault is conducting a discourse about discourse – he is more interested in representation itself than in any specific instances of historical change, which he leaves for others to catalogue. The related criticism, equally understandable from our point of view, in Lefkowitz 1985, that his choice of texts is limited and selective. On this point she would have failed to impress him; indeed, he chooses quite deliberately to distance himself from ‘historical method’ – ‘this is not a history – it is a philosophy’. He had qualifications in philosophy, psychology and psychopathology and his primary interest lay in the philosophical and moral texts on which he concentrates here. Anyone familiar with his work will know of the number of printed pages that have accordingly been devoted to trying to classify it (historical? philosophical? structuralist?); but in the face of this [academic] industry it is worth remembering that Foucault himself always preferred to blur the distinctions and elude categorization. By such evasion Foucault not only deflects criticism but also makes it easier for more conventional scholars to ignore his work. They may well argue that the range of texts used in Le souci de soi is limited; it asks, certainly, for fuller documentation from both literary and non-literary sources. The general direction of the argument may also have been traced out by Veyne and others. Roman historians, for instance, have a lot to learn from the sophisticated work already being done by some [scholars of the early church]. The similarities between Plutarch 137

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and early Christian literature, to take one example, have been the subject of two articles by Kathleen O’Brien Wicker (Wicker 1975, 1978). On another front, the body symbolism in early Christian texts, obviously important to Foucault and Rousselle, has been the subject of a large literature, while a prominent strain in current publications seems to be an emphasis on the literary analysis of the texts themselves – an aspect of discourse with which Foucault does not concern himself but which must affect the status of the early Christian texts, in particular as witnesses for the development he claims to see. The history of Christianity is inseparable from hermeneutic, as for instance can be seen from the current intensity of debate among theologians on methodology, the place of historical method, the subjectivity of history etc. (for example, Ricoeur 1965, 1980). Foucault’s thesis needs the final early Christian volume to convince (indeed, to separate it from the material in Le souci de soi is already to risk giving a false impression), and even then it needs a far fuller documentation to satisfy any normal (i.e. conventional) historical standards. Its value for us is rather its enormous suggestiveness and the way in which it both complements and draws together tendencies in so much other contemporary work. After all, the discourse of sexuality is only part of the formation of self, which is itself only part of the story as far as Christianity is concerned. The many other aspects of the early Christian texts, from the Gospels to the orations and treatises of the fourth-century Fathers, place them in a far more complex relation to pagan writing than Foucault would so far seem to allow. Veyne’s article, then (and cf. Veyne 1985) puts Christianity into closer contact with the ‘real’ world and offers a ‘historical’ explanation. The competitiveness of the Republic is said to yield to the mentality appropriate for fonctionnaires, to a way of dealing with one’s situation by emphasizing the domestic virtues; bourgeois marriage is therefore a symbol of this ‘gymnastique interne’ which for Veyne as for Foucault precedes the Christian mentality. ‘Toutes les transformations de la sexualité et de la conjugalité sont antérieures au christianisme’ (Veyne 1985, 39). The salon culture of the Julio-Claudians gives way to the Plutarchan ideal of affective marriage, which was accompanied by an increasingly prescriptive set of rules in medical and philosophical writings, condemning abortion, advocating breastfeeding, controlling unbridled passion and so on, with the object of regulating the self (le souci de soi), or, as Veyne puts it, ‘la conservation du Moi’ (40), in other words, objectification. At the same time Veyne sees the discourse of sexuality that accompanies and underlies all of this, with an explicit reference to Foucault (52), as a discourse of repression, part of which is the repression of women and its accompaniment, the denigration or ignoring of their sexual pleasure, in contrast to today, when an ‘orthodoxy of the orgasm’ declares the sexual act a failure unless the woman climaxes as well as the man. The history of sexuality is therefore explicitly associated with the history of Christianization; a change from public morality to private, internalized virtue, can even be said to ‘explain’ the triumph of Christianity (56). People did not adopt a new religion in, say, the third century, and subsequently change their habits: rather, countless subtle changes in the moral 138

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climate preceded and prepared the way for Christianity, which itself adopted and intensified the moral ordinances in the society around it. Thus, though by its general limitation of citations to pagan authors, Foucault’s third volume gives at first sight the impression that Christianization post-dated a transformation of morals, and while Veyne too emphasizes (for his own reasons) Christianity’s debt to pagan society, each sets out a scenario for Christianization which in fact demands a consolidated treatment of the kind that Aline Rousselle gives in her Porneia. It is not so much a question of ‘what is the early Christian view of women?’ as of how women came to attract a restrictive discourse from pagans and Christians alike simultaneously with the bourgeoization of marriage. That would be the context for the work of feminist theologians, for instance Fiorenza 1983, who wish to recapture a primeval Christian feminism which, if it was ever there, soon gave way before the advance of a discourse in which women stood all too easily for one pole of a continuum of restriction. Against the background of the disciplining of women implied in the precepts of, say, Plutarch, Tertullian can the more easily take that further step and represent them as intrinsically sinful; perfect virtue will therefore obviously consist in the denial of sexual relations, and the rhetoric of this development will include a rhetoric of misogyny. The trouble for feminist theologians is that far more than anything to be found in paganism, Christianity centres on particular texts which demand and attract a hermeneutical process of such intensity that it tends to become an end in itself and thus to separate Christian texts and Christian practice from the pagan context in which they developed. The question of the instrumentality of Christianity in bringing about such basic change in the empire is also at issue in Goody 1983, in which Constantine’s legislation allowing the church to inherit is made a fundamental turning point in ‘European patterns of marriage and kinship’. Once this step had been taken, Goody argues, the church was able to secure the limitation of close-kin marriage characteristic of the early medieval period and which permitted the acquisition of vast wealth in ecclesiastical hands. Certainly the break as presented by Goody is far too clean and the few pages devoted to discussing the question of the specific contribution of Christianity to initiating change in family patterns beg many difficult questions. For instance it is not just a matter of doubts about dating (cf. the remarks of C.R. Whittaker quoted in Goody’s own preface), but also that this enactment by Constantine was part of a large body of legislation by him on the family, inheritance and related matters, in which the specifically Christian content is far from easy to establish. Goody is content to write of a ‘radical change in the ideology of marriage’ brought about in the fourth century by Christianity and to reject with very little discussion the arguments of Gaudemet and others suggesting that the matter is less clear-cut [and see now the work of Judith Evans Grubbs], without attempting to set the enactment in its very complicated context. Even the law removing the penalties for celibacy, which at first sight (following the tendentious account in Eusebius, Vita Constantini IV.26) seems obviously Christian in inspiration and which surely calls for discussion by Goody, has to be set against a 139

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background of family legislation which taken as a whole is far less clearly either Christian or novel; see e.g. Gaudemet 1958, 29–30. Other reviewers have regretted Goody’s failure to take the Veyne thesis into account, and his over-simplified treatment of Constantine may well obscure the force of Goody’s general argument in the minds of Roman historians. Goody is of course painting on a broad canvas. Yet he evidently feels some unease himself, taking pains as he does to argue that in the long run intention is not the point; it does not affect his argument if the church never consciously had had the idea of maximising its wealth by restricting the rules of kinship in marriage. All the same the claim is vast – from the changes in the law under Constantine, ‘the accumulation that it (i.e. Constantine’s law) made possible embodied the whole shift from sect to church, the routinization of the charisma, the adoption of orthodoxy, the loss of the millenarian character, now to be abandoned to ‘heresies’ (102). Goody characterizes the late empire as a society ‘ever more sharply contoured by religious belief’. This is hardly less than to make post-Constantinian Christianity the key to the whole of late antiquity and after that the western Middle Ages, while at the same time obscuring the shakiness of the promises on which the argument is based. Nevertheless Goody’s aim was never to argue each point in scholarly detail and his standing and influence are such that this little book and the few pages in it headed ‘From Sect to Church’ are far more significant than they might appear. They also call to mind the current tendency among some ancient historians to adopt broadly anthropological or sociological approaches, carrying with them certain key subjects of study – the history of the family, the impact of religion on social practice, marriage, patterns in relation to the distribution of property, demographic trends (reproduction, replacement, contraception, infanticide, celibacy, incest taboos or the lack of them). In the case of late antiquity the effects of Christianization on family life offer a perfect field for these methods, which in Goody’s terms look at the data from the outside rather than in the light of the expressed views of contemporaries – turning Foucault’s approach upside down. Scholars approach these subjects in different ways. Peter Brown, for instance, cited by Goody for the ‘sharp contours’ of religion in late antiquity, uses the deductive arguments advocated by Goody in his classic article on the holy man [chapter 13 below] but more often relies on an intuitive understanding of the texts and a capacity for imaginative recreation of the period. It does not seem accidental, though, that he addresses himself to the same problems even if he would define them differently, as do Foucault, Veyne and Goody; they are also problems that have been long apparent in the work of Keith Hopkins, whom Goody explicitly mentions in his preface, and they have found yet another treatment in David Herlihy, Medieval Households, which is in some respects critical of Goody’s arguments, as Saller and Shaw also are of Veyne’s. In a sense the fact that these scholars are all, though in differing ways, addressing themselves to questions of family patterns, demography and sexuality in the Roman empire is as important in itself as their actual arguments; they are combining to put early Christianity back into the picture as a respectable subject for an 140

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ancient historian, a state of affairs all the more likely to persuade if Christianity can be represented as a major factor (whether leader or follower) in social change; then at least it can seem possible to study it without risk of the taint of confessional commitment. If Christianization can be studied in the terms of a social science, in other words, the residual difficulty which many historians still feel, as evinced by their proneness to the rationalizing assumption, can effectively be neutralized. On the other hand a different kind of concern also seems to be operative in determining this choice of subject, namely attention to language, whether as textuality or in Foucault’s wider sense, discourse. That history can never be entirely objective has become a commonplace; that we write our own texts is simply a slightly more sophisticated statement of the same idea. That the texts we write, and the texts we interpret, are subject to change according to the context within which the writing is done is yet another current idea from literary criticism which has implications for the writing of history. And if these assumptions are made, at least in some quarters, it is easy to see why early Christianity, with its focus on texts and its self-conscious tradition of hermeneutics should come back, if in a newer way, as a main centre of interest. The social origins of Christianity have had a long run and it is time for the return of interpretation. And if the confidence of the rationalizing approach no longer seems appropriate in the light of the well-documented doubts already expressed for some time past by anthropologists and theologians, it will be necessary to look more earnestly at the texts and decide what meaning we can assign to them. The texts of early Christianity offer particularly rich material for anyone interested in the place of words or discourse in history. It is not accidental that a primary emphasis among historians of the early church is [now] given to the literarycritical approach, any more than it is accidental that Foucault, having located the prime disjuncture in the history of sexuality in the nineteenth century, should then have realized that the roots of the modern discourse had to be sought in the discourse of Christianity itself in its formative period. In 1981, in the course of an instructive dialogue with Richard Sennett in which he devotes much space to the discussion by Augustine on erection and orgasm more recently expounded by Peter Brown, Foucault wrote: ‘Recently, Professor Peter Brown stated to me that what we have to understand is why it is that sexuality became, in Christian cultures, the seismograph of our subjectivity’ (Sennett 1981, 5). And in an interview given in 1982 (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982), he contrasts the Greek conception of the self with the ‘Californian cult of the self’: ‘what happened in between is precisely an overturning of the classical culture of the self. This took place when Christianity substituted the idea of a self which one had to renounce because clinging to the self was opposed to God’s will for the idea of a self which should be created as a work of art’. Intriguing as it is to speculate about the sources of Foucault’s ideas, or at least of Foucault’s material (and we know from our own experience how often ideas do take shape through proximity, talk, personal exchange, thinking the same thing at the same time), the point is rather that in this complex of writings (which must 141

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include Brown 1988, still in press), Christianization in the Roman empire is associated with sexuality, which necessarily entails consideration of marriage, family practice (and renunciation), as it does also the language in which Christian and pagan ideas about gender and sexual practice are expressed: that is (but not only) the Christian ‘attitude to women’, the misogynistic discourse of writers like Tertullian and Jerome, and the rhetoric of virginity in the shape of the treatises on the subject written by most of the more prominent and active Fathers, especially in the fourth century (and well discussed by Rousselle 1983, 171f.). The development of a rhetorical discourse about the Virgin Mary comes rather late in the day (except for the apocryphal Protevangelium whose focus is rather different), but when it does, from the late fourth century onwards, it belongs in the tradition hinted at or described in different ways by Veyne, Foucault and Rousselle. The other side of a repressive discourse about women and a limitation on and heightened selfconsciousness about one’s own sexual practice, is to glorify a female figure who can be made to represent the ultimate in submission and denial of sexuality; and the ironic outcome of a misogynistic rhetorical tradition in its transformation into an affective discourse in which a woman, perceived in the most paradoxical terms, nevertheless becomes the subject of personal and intimate devotion. All this suggests that the feminist approach to early Christianity that is extremely strong in current theological scholarship may be placing its emphasis in the wrong place, at least when seen in the wider context. Understandably committed feminist Christians writing within the context of ‘contemporary women’s struggle’ (Fiorenza’s phrase, cf. also the term ‘woman church’ and see Collins ed. 1985, especially the paper by Bernadette J. Brooten) wish to recapture from the early Christian texts a women’s history which has been obscured in the tradition and which is placing obstacles which in some cases seem insurmountable before women in the church today. Nevertheless the discourse about women in early Christianity is part of a much more complex whole. It cannot be detached from the very nature of Christian discourse by the reinterpretation of certain texts but must be seen as rooted deep in the symbolic universe of Christianity – indeed we may have to accept that it was part of the reason for the acceptability of the Christian ideology in ways far less palatable than some feminists would like to envisage. Some of these remarks may have to be modified if Foucault’s fourth volume does indeed appear. They are not written as the final word on the subject but rather to alert readers to an interesting and I think important change of perspective at which Foucault’s volumes published so far may seem only to hint yet which they do in fact imply, and which we may yet find influencing our thinking despite the flaws and difficulties which historians of the period are all too likely to uncover in L’usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi, in profound and multiple ways over the next generation.

Bibliography Betz, Hans Dieter ed. 1978. Plutarch’s Ethical Writings and Early Christian Literature. Leiden: Brill.

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Brown, Peter 1971. ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, JRS 61: 80–101. Brown, Peter 1978. The Making of Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Peter 1982. Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity. London: Faber & Faber. Brown, Peter 1983. ‘Sexuality and Society in the Fifth Century A.D. Augustine and Julian of Eclanum’. In Gabba, Emilio ed. 1983, 49–70. Brown, Peter 1988. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in the Early Church. New York: Columbia University Press. Brunt, Peter 1982. ‘Review of de Ste Croix 1981’, JRS 72: 158–63. Cameron, Averil 1985. Procopius and the Sixth Century. London: Duckworth. Cameron, Averil 1991. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse. Sather Classical Lectures 55. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Adele Yarbro ed. 1985. Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship. Chico and California: Scholars Press. De Ste Croix, Geoffrey E.M. 1981. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. London: Duckworth. Dodds, Eric R. 1965. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Exoerience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dodds, Eric R. 1977. Missing Persons: An Autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester. Dumont, Louis 1983. Essais sur l’individualisme: Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne. Paris: Éditions Seuil. Evans-Grubbs, Judith 1995. Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine’s Marriage Legislation. New York: Oxford University Press. Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler 1983. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad. Flanagan, John L. and Robinson, Anita W. eds. 1975. No Famine in the Land. Missoula: Scholars Press. Foucault, Michel 1976. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Foucault, Michel 1984a. L’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Foucault, Michel 1984b. Le souci de soi. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Gabba, Emilio ed. 1983. Tria Corda: Scritti in onore di Arnaldo Momigliano. Como: New Press. Gaudemet, Jean 1958. L’Église dans l’empire romain (IVe-Ve siècles). Paris: Sirey. Goody, Jack 1983. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herlihy, David 1985. Medieval Households. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Horden, Peregrine ed. 1985. Freud and the Humanities. London: Duckworth. Kurzweil, Edith 1980. The Age of Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss to Foucault. New York: Columbia University Press. Lefkowitz, Mary 1985. ‘Sex and Civilization’, Partisan Review 52: 460–66. Lloyd, Geoffrey E.R. 1986. ‘Review of Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs’, New York Review of Books, 13 March: 42–28. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh 1985. ‘Psychoanalysis and the Study of the Ancient World’. In Hordern ed. 1985, 152–80.

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MacMullen, Ramsay 1984. Christianizing the Roman Empire (AD 100–400). New Haven: Yale University Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo ed. 1963. The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, Oxford-Warburg Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ricoeur, Paul 1965. History and Truth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul 1980. Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Rousselle, Aline 1983. Porneia: De la maîtrise du corps à la privation sensorielle, IIe-IVe siècles de l’ère chrétienne. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Rousselle, Aline 1985. ‘Review of Brown 1982’, Annales ESC 40.3: 521–28. Saller, Richard P. and Shaw, Brent D. 1984. ‘Tombstones and Family Relations in the Principate: Civilians, Soldiers and Slaves’, JRS 74: 24–156. Sennett, Richard 1981. ‘Sexuality and Solitude’, London Review of Books, 21 May: 3–7. Smith, Robert C. and Lounibos, John eds. 1984. Pagan and Christian Anxiety: A Response to E.R. Dodds. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Veyne, Paul 1976. Le pain et le cirque: Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique. Paris: Éditions Seuil. Veyne, Paul 1978. ‘La famille et l’amour dans le haut empire romain’, Annales ESC 33.1: 35–63. Veyne, Paul ed. 1985. Histoire de la vie privée, 1. Paris: Éditions Seuil. Wicker, Kathleen O’Brien 1975. ‘First Century Marriage Ethics’. In Flanagan and Robinson eds. 1975, 141–53. Wicker, Kathleen O’Brien 1978. ‘Mulierum virtutes (Moralia 242E–263C)’. In Betz 1978, 106–34.

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The enormous future importance of Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity, a short book published by an art history publisher and abounding in illustrations, was not immediately apparent when it came out. I wrote this brief review at the time and it brings out the surprise with which I greeted it, as well as some of my doubts about the methods used. I did not realise at the time why Sasanian Iran featured so large in the illustrations. It would not be clear until later just how much influence the book has had and it is often credited as initiating the field of late antiquity, although Brown himself has paid tribute to the influence of others, and Ando and Formisano 2021 makes clear how many and for how long historians had been thinking about the later Roman empire, sometimes defining the period as ‘die Spätantike’ (or ‘le Bas-Empire’). Against this background Alois Riegl, often cited in this connection, seems much less exceptional. Keith Hopkins described Brown’s method as one of vivid evocation (rather than argument) and his book did not change the picture immediately. But it set out a view of the period as one of multiple changes and transformations in contrast with the prevailing picture of decline and with the idea that the Arab conquests constituted a total separation. It already signalled the turn to the east and the need to incorporate Islam in late antiquity which is now so familiar. Moses Finley reviewed the book in The Times, declaring that it was a disappointment, dealt in vague generalisations and contradicted itself, and it was criticised sharply by the Italian scholar Andrea Giardina (Giardina 1999). In contrast Giardina 2021 is much more sympathetic. He draws attention to the power of Brown’s literary style, one of the most striking features of the book and one that I later felt had gone too far when I reviewed Brown’s Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Brown 1992). Some of my bewilderment on first reading The World of Late Antiquity can be explained as a reaction to Brown’s prose style. Brown set out his methodology in a round table in Symbolae Osloenses and had argued earlier against the idea of anxiety arising from a third-century crisis in Brown 1978; he also engaged with such historians as Santo Mazzarino and as several times later he softened some of the claims made in The World of Late Antiquity. The World of Late Antiquity was very different from Brown’s first book, Augustine of Hippo (Brown 1967) and few books and especially books of such slender DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-12

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length have received such a continuing impact or been credited with such a huge influence. However it did not significantly change my teaching of the Roman empire partly because I was not able to teach the period of late antiquity until many years later. Many readers including today’s ever-increasing number of late antique historians will find these early reactions surprising, but I believe it is important that The World of Late Antiquity is read in its context, when it struck myself and others as so unexpected and even bewildering. ––––––––––

The world which Mr Brown describes, within the wide limits of his sub-title, is one of restless and perpetual change. His book is no conventional history centred on Rome or Constantinople; the narrative flashes with rare brilliance from Italy to Visigothic Spain, from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and embraces the lives of every kind of ‘late antique man’ (to use Mr Brown’s phrase), from peasant to senator, from soldier to ascetic. The effect is both stimulating and startling, enhanced as it is by the author’s vivid style and bold imagery. Whatever reservations one might feel, one can hardly fail to admire a work which makes the late classical world such a fascinating place. In a short compass Mr Brown has attempted a huge subject; obviously his treatment must be idiosyncratic, and in fact this is a deeply personal book. It is not a political, social or economic history but a panorama of intellectual life over a wide chronological and geographic area. With confidence and élan the author has absorbed quantities of information collected in drier works and transformed it into an imaginative construction of great power. But sometimes his method, while understandable, calls for a little more caution. The fact is that by and large our knowledge of the ancient, even of the late antique world, is still a knowledge of individuals. The mass of information which the modern historian takes for granted is simply not there. This is less of a handicap for Peter Brown than for some other historians of the period, for his forte is precisely in the sensitive handling of isolated scraps of evidence, often relating to individuals, whether obscure or famous, and in the analysis of the relatively ample documents left by notable personalities. His history, whether here or in his splendid biography of St Augustine, is very much a history of people. Names like Plotinus or Athanasius recur from page to page until they acquire an evocative aura of their own, and the book is full of such curiosities as the pagan gentlemen of Harran who worshipped Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as late as the tenth century. It makes for absorbing reading, but a warning bell would sometimes be welcome when such aberrations are treated as types. The basis for a general statement is all too often a single reference, and a mass of such general statements might well add up to a very mistaken impression. The method, then, is seductive but risky, especially when used in conjunction with a literary style of such gloss; imaginative and emotional, abounding in modern analogies and daring metaphor, the narrative sweeps the reader along in a rush of admiration – until he [sic] stops to wonder for a moment whether all things are 146

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really as they seem. There is even danger in the beautiful illustrations and their interesting captions; to point out an argument in the text, for instance, Khusro I of Iran is shown in military guise on a sixth-century cup and the caption draws attention to the difference between his appearance and that of the ‘civilian’ Justinian. But Justinian too was often portrayed in military dress, not least in the equestrian statue which was among the most striking of the monuments of Constantinople. What price then the contrast between Justinian and Khusro? I make these points mainly because this book will surely from now on provide many people with their first taste of this fascinating period and because they are likely to be carried away unsuspecting by the panache of the subject and the writing. For this is indeed a highly original book, full of new interpretations and ideas. It has something to say on each of a vast range of specialized topics, and its faults, when they occur, are of the kind that stem from sheer exuberance, or from the problems inherent in the task undertaken. Few people would have been capable of such a tour de force, but the verve and learning of Peter Brown’s earlier works (many important papers collected in Brown 1972) have shown us that he is indeed uniquely qualified to do it. There is not the space to enter into detailed comments, but two features of the book deserve special attention. The first is the admirable and sensitive way in which the Christian and the pagan worlds are often seen to coalesce: classical culture is not seen, as it often has been, in isolation from the pervasive influence of Christianity. Those same men who tried to preserve Hellenism or the tradition of Latin letters lived surrounded by Christian art, exposed to popular faith and to hagiography; often enough they themselves shared the beliefs of their humbler neighbours. The second aspect which calls for special attention is the manner in which the coming of Islam is rendered intelligible and indeed almost inevitable. Peter Brown’s horizons extend not merely as far as late Sassanian Iran but into the Arab world itself. He draws together the threads of the struggles between Byzantium and Iran from Justinian and Khusro I to Heraclius and Khusro II and makes us see, perhaps for the first time, that here lay the causes of that detachment of the provinces from Constantinople which made the onslaught of Islam possible. The emphasis had shifted eastwards before Muhammad. The validity of this exposition does not completely depend on the highly original account of Justinian which the author uses to explain the changes in the state. Justinian the opportunist, deliberately turning himself into a hard-headed autocrat when a traditionalist policy collapses, is not a conception which all will accept, but it is a welcome blast against the conventional image of the emperor as a failed romantic. As the author explains in his preface, the emphasis of this book is towards the east. Perhaps some might feel an imbalance; but Peter Brown has seen where the need lies. There are many introductions to the western Middle Ages, and many distinguished ones, but the eastern empire has all too often been dismissed even as early as this as a monolith hardly susceptible of explanation. Yet here too, in the eastern provinces, in Iran and on the borders, crucial and as yet still mysterious 147

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change was taking place. The end of this book rightly focuses on that change and does much towards our understanding of it. Any reader who follows Mr Brown along this brief but strenuous track will surely learn much, find great enjoyment and emerge, if a trifle breathless, certainly excited and ready for more. Over-excitement may not always be good for the patient but it is a tonic for ancient history.

Bibliography Ando, Clifford and Formisano, Marco eds. 2021. The New Late Antiquity. A Gallery of Intellectual Portraits. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag. Brown, Peter 1967. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. London: Faber & Faber. Brown, Peter 1971. The World of Late Antiquity from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, c. 250–750. London: Thames and Hudson. Brown, Peter 1972. Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine. London: Faber & Faber. Brown, Peter 1978. The Making of Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Peter 1992. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. Madison and Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press. Brown, Peter et al., 1997. ‘SO Debate: The World of Antiquity Revisited’, Symbolae Osloenses 72.1: 5–89. Giardina, Andrea 1999. ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi Storici 40.1: 157–80. Giardina, Andrea 2021. ‘“Tutto il vigore è negli occhi.” Peter Brown e la nascita della New Late Antiquity’. In Ando and Formisano eds. 2021, 183–235.

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This paper was published in the volume deriving from a major conference on asceticism in New York in 1995 organized by Vincent Wimbush and Richard Valantasis and it conveys very well my reaction to some recent books, my move away from social explanations of Christianization and my engagement with the theoretical aspects of discourse analysis. By the time I wrote it I was teaching the history of Byzantium and the paper looks forward to Byzantium and to the issues of orthodoxy, heresy and intolerance on which my thinking became increasingly focused. I have dealt since then in many later publications with the preoccupation with orthodoxy in Byzantium and the question of whether Byzantium was a repressive or ‘totalitarian’ society, as many have argued, and contended especially in Byzantine Christianity, published in 2017, that while the reach of the emperors and their decrees about orthodoxy were limited the symbolic value of orthodoxy was central. Discourse, in the shape of treatises, conciliar acts and especially florilegia or collections of citations and Scripture and the Fathers, was an integral part of efforts to control where the practical means of enforcement were weak. My paper ‘Texts as Weapons: Polemic in the Byzantine Dark Ages’ was published in the year before the volume on asceticism and I also became aware of the importance of the issue in the context of work on the texts relating to the Persian and Arab conquests of Palestine. I was working out in this paper themes that would become central in many later publications as I learned and thought more about the nature of Byzantium and the Byzantine state. It is still necessary to repeat that the history of Byzantium cannot be tackled in positivist terms and even that Byzantine iconography must be read for its meanings and not just admired for its aesthetic quality, as I argued for in ‘Seeing Byzantium: A Personal Response’ and in other publications. In more recent work I have sought to emphasise the degree of change and uncertainty that in fact prevailed. As I have argued in Cameron 2023, the discipline of Byzantine studies has grown up since this paper was written, but it is not yet fully adult. –––––––––

I wish to explore in this paper the idea of an ‘ascetic closure’ – in historical terms, the notion of a closing in of possibilities, a contraction of horizons,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-13

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somehow to be connected with the predominance of asceticism. Four recent books [at the time of writing], in all of which early Christian asceticism plays a large role, have each emphasized this notion of closure, a narrowing of the horizons of society at large. Thus the complex of ideas and practices labeled asceticism can be transferred to considerations of broader historical change.1 The language used is instructive: ‘silence’; ‘icy overtones’; ‘frailty’; ‘bizarre, postclassical shapes’. Ascetic thought and practice are, it seems, identified as dominating the movement from antiquity to the Middle Ages, from an open society to a closed one. Peter Brown uses such expressions as ‘the draining away of secularity’ and writes of a very different world coming into being. Robert Markus speaks of epistemological excision;2 the concept of closure is contained in the title of his book, The End of Ancient Christianity, and, as if to reinforce the point, the last chapter is itself entitled ‘Within Sight of the End’. Markus further associates this closure with the pervasion of lay society (he writes mainly of the west) by the image of the monastic community and the ascetic ideal. Brown, too, agreeing with Jacques Le Goff, writes of a very different sense of community and of the human person within it, which he located in the late fifth and sixth centuries and identified with the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages. We are thus presented with a major challenge of historical explanation. Is asceticism itself to be regarded as a constituting a major factor in such broad processes of historical change? Peter Brown’s most recent judgment is that an unequivocally Christian empire, which he identifies with Byzantium, was already in existence in the later fifth century.3 That this narrowing process is somehow related to Christianization is a theme evident in the books by Brown and Markus. Indeed, Brown aligns it with what he sees as a simultaneous retreat of possible alternatives; according to this view, pagans, or ‘Hellenes’, as the Christians called them, were demoralized, left only with the possibility of quiet courage, not real resistance; resigned to an old-fashioned and studiously non-abrasive world and able to hope for no more than a moral survival kit,4 in contrast to the strident and aggressive attitudes taken up by some contemporary Christians. It is equally clear that both Brown and Markus believe that the process had something to do with asceticism. Markus’s penultimate chapter is entitled ‘The Ascetic Invasion’ and the chapter before it ends with the following claim about the diffusion of ascetic ideals: The boundary between desert and city was being blurred, and the distance between the monastic life and the life of the parishes diminished. The image of the monastic community was becoming adapted to serving as a model for the Christian community in the world, while the ascetic

1 2 3 4

Brown 1988, 1992; Cameron 1991. Markus 1990, 224–5. Brown 1992, 134, 142, 143, 157. Brown 1992, 142–6.

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ideal it proposed to its members was becoming adapted to serve as the model for bishops and clergy, Petermen.5 At the end of The Body and Society, Peter Brown, too, explicitly links change in historical periods with the advance of asceticism: When in the course of the late fifth and sixth centuries profound changes sapped the political and economic structure of the cities of the Mediterranean, the Christian notions we have just described came to the fore. They ratified a very different sense of the community and of the human person within it from that current in the age of Marcus Aurelius. They made plain what Jacques le Goff has described, in a memorable phrase, as la déroute du corporel, the definitive “rout of the body”, that marked the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages.6 This formulation juxtaposes the influence of asceticism with other kinds of historical change rather than ascribing the transition directly to it. But Power and Persuasion is, if anything, more explicit in its association of ascetic ideals with historical change and just as uncomplimentary about their effects. By using such words as ‘melodramatic’; ‘deadly’; ‘confrontational’; ‘overpowering’; and ‘vertiginous’.7 Brown suggests both an immense vertical stratification of society and a narrow and uncompromising quality in the messages coming from Christian ascetic literature and from Christian ascetics in action.8 The fifth-century Egyptian abbot Shenoute of Atripe, not perhaps the most typical representative of Christian ascetic thought, though indeed a great leader, can be made to stand here for the contemporary recognition of actual ‘crushing asymmetries of power’; ‘townsmen and peasants alike learned to approach the great on bended knee before the emperor, as before God, all subjects were poor’.9 I shall do no more than suggest here that the question of date [at least] remains open. More central to my present purpose is to give further examination to the contention that the growth of asceticism can itself be a dynamic factor in historical change. In order to establish the thesis, it would be necessary to argue that ascetic thought, expressed in ascetic language, was not simply the domain of the few, but rather the experience of society at large. Such seepage from the theological and the ascetic

5 Markus 1990, 197. 6 Brown 1988, 441. 7 Brown 1992, 156, 144, 154, 153. The whole section from 142 to 158, the end of the book, illustrates the importance of such metaphorical language in the author’s own technique of persuasion; the careful choice of such terms is itself a major element in Brown’s scholarship. 8 Though not, significantly, from their pagan counterparts, who are presented instead, as we have already observed, in terms of melancholy resignation. 9 Brown 1992, 154; a slightly different view at 140f.

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spheres had already been a central theme of my book Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. And while it is not so easy to demonstrate for the fourth century, this does, I think, become progressively more apparent in the succeeding period. Nevertheless, it is worth returning to the issue. My own recent approach has been through cognitive change and focuses upon the use of language. The last chapter of Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire may itself seem to point to closure, ending as it does with the reign of Justinian and its well-known attempts at state regimentation [an impression I later came to regret]. Indeed, the discourses of authority and resistance are very prominent in early Byzantine literature, not least in its major historian, Procopius, just as they are embedded in the emperor’s own official pronouncements. At first sight asceticism does not seem to fit well into this context, for, as has often been pointed out, the ascetic discourse of hagiography is itself implicated in a dynamic of resistance to social norms: the ascetic rejects conventional authority in his dress, behaviour and rejection of culture, the holy fool representing the furthermost step in this direction. But even the latter rejects culture only in order to prescribe higher rules; in its broader sense, ascetic discourse, too, is predicated on regulation; and is thus in its very nature authoritarian.10 The tension between the model of the ascetic as ‘holy man’ and that of the ascetic as monastic leader, bishop or patriarch is an interesting product of this duality. In addition, when considering the relation between asceticism and authority, one needs to recognize the inherently hierarchical and inclusive aspects of Christian discourse, the impulse towards coherence,11 pushed to logical conclusions by the official rhetoric of Justinian and others. Such coherence is not hierarchical only in the political sense. Nor is all Christian discourse ascetic, at any rate in the commonly accepted sense. A more inclusive discourse can embrace an altogether more humane way of thinking, from Mary miracles to the piety of icons. Nor was the transference of the undoubtedly hierarchical and coherence-seeking side of Christian discourse to the political sphere unambiguously successful in historical terms. Rather, as I now want to stress, it gave rise to, and in a sense even depended on, the other side of Christian thought, which in my book I term paradox, but which also stands for resistance to – and escape from – its more public and integrated aspects. The concluding paragraph of the chapter on the sixth century hints at future tensions without spelling them out (for this is not a book about Byzantium).12 We are left, therefore, to question both the nature of the Byzantine dark ages and the actual degree of continuance thereafter – and, indeed, throughout Byzantine history – of this thrust toward orthodoxy. Those attempts were in practice exposed to continual challenge. Despite appearances, despite the repeated claims of emperors, patriarchs, and councils 10 As is implied by Rousseau 1978; for this aspect, exemplified in conciliar acts, see also Burrus 1992. 11 For cognitive dissonance and for the systematizing aspect of early Christian thought see Versnel 1990, 1993, 102. 12 Cameron 1991, 221.

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given expression in official policy; in the liturgy; and in the material culture of church and state; and despite the substantial elements of historical continuity in its cultural tradition, Byzantium was far from being the stable and unchanging society it has sometimes seemed.13 More particularly, it was subject to a long series of divisive struggles, as whoever was in power attempted to enforce views (far from always consistent) of what was to be considered orthodox.14 The long and bitter struggle over images in the eighth and ninth centuries, the condemnation of John Italos in the late eleventh century, and the hesychast crisis in the fourteenth are merely high spots in a long history of attempts to define heresy, in a society where church and state were as often in conflict as they were in harmony, and where both ‘church’ and ‘state’ are terms disguising dramatic fluctuations of interest, personnel, and politics. One of the most striking products of this tendency is the so-called Synodikon of Orthodoxy, a lengthy statement of condemnation of error which gradually evolved, with many later additions, after the formal ending of the iconoclastic controversy in 843 CE. As an unequivocal demonstration of that closing of intellectual horizons to which I have referred, it was read out each year on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, a feast still observed today. It formally condemns not just Christian heresies, but also Platonism, Hellenic philosophy, and all dangerous doctrines leading to pluralism and secular thinking.15 It is thus a symbolic statement of closure of the clearest possible kind. In the last phase of this development, represented by the vindication of Gregory Palamas against his opponents in the fourteenth century, official Byzantium also resoundingly vindicated the ascetic legacy of early Christianity.16 But the Synodikon is simultaneously a demonstration of the possibility and the actuality of division. The unity it proclaims was more actual than real. For all its claims of order and harmony17 official Byzantium did not hesitate when driven by adversity to resort to whatever ideological or political steps seemed expedient, including that of seeking reunion with Rome; indeed, the emperor was still officially in union with Rome when the city fell to Mehmet II in 1453 CE.18 Can it be possible that apparent systematization did not merely conceal, but also consistently provoked dissonance? What has this to do with asceticism? We must return to the role of language in determining culture. In the rest of this paper I want to examine more closely the question of what an ascetic discourse might have been in the context of the transition from late antique to Byzantine society, how such a discourse might affect society at large, and whether it necessarily implied a closure in the sense which seems to be suggested in the works mentioned above. In view of the questions of divisions of historical period which have been raised, and since the

13 14 15 16 17 18

Kazhdan and Constable 1982. Ducellier 1990. Gouillard 1967; see also Cameron 1994. See especially Meyendorff 1964. Cameron 1987. See Nicol 1992.

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early Byzantine period is my current area of concern, most of my examples will be taken from that chronological range, and from the Greek east. Nevertheless, I am interested here in methodology and principles more than in the specifics of place or period; as I hope to demonstrate, this may be one of the areas in which history can benefit from the methods and questions of literary criticism. Should that prove to be the case, an important result, I believe, will have been established.

What Is Ascetic Discourse? By ‘discourse’19 I mean the typical ways of expressing ascetic ideas, including the vocabulary used; the discourse may be oral or written, and, if the latter, literary or nonliterary. It may seem odd to suggest that the term can also refer to visual material,20 though the related term ‘rhetoric’ has become accepted in its broader sense; as it happens, however, my remarks here relate more to the former categories.21 It is less easy to decide where ascetic discourse stops. Certain genres, such as that of the Apophthegmata patrum and related collections like the Pratum spirituale of John Moschus clearly fall squarely within the definition, as do works specifically written to advocate ascetic practice, such as the Ladder of Divine Ascent of John Climacus. Such non-Christian works as Porphyry’s De abstinentia must naturally also be included. It is somewhat less clear, however, whether all hagiography constitutes ascetic discourse by its very definition, still less so whether all theological writing is necessarily ascetic, and less so again what other kinds of text can be brought into this category. First, then, let us address the limited sense of the term. An ascetic discourse is one which explicitly advocates asceticism. Much monastic literature, and much hagiography, falls into this category, as do those non-Christian texts of our period which deal with similar issues – for example, Iamblichus’s On the Pythagorean Life, Porphyry’s Letter to Marcella and Life of Plotinus, Marinus’s Life of Proclus. The Life of Antony has long been rightly regarded as a work of seminal importance, both for the pattern which it lays down, including its typology of demonic temptation, and its agenda of physical privation, and for its diffusion and subsequent influence. In the Greek Christian east in later periods, works such as John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent are central, as are the monastic-ascetic collections of extracts made by individual monasteries for their own use throughout the Byzantine period and thereafter. The eleventh-century monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis in Constantinople, the subject of study by an interdisciplinary

19 I am mainly confining myself to ascetic discourses within Christianity: the ascetic discourse of contemporary Neoplatonism and others is different in degree and diffusion but had its share in wider effects. 20 Some ways of reading Byzantine art: Cameron 1992, 1996a, XII. 21 ‘Rhetoric’ is used in the broad sense of linguistic expression by Paul de Man and others.

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group of specialists,22 was only one of many such establishments that possessed its own such collection – a handbook of extracts from earlier ascetic writers for use within the monastery. Certain works and writers are favourites, among them the Apophthegmata patrum, Ephrem the Syrian in Greek translation, Isaac the Syrian, Maximus Confessor, Diadochos of Photike, and others. Likewise, manuscript traditions from the ninth century onwards attest to the wide and complex diffusion of a whole range of ascetic tales from the earlier period throughout the Byzantine world.23 We are dealing with a living and persistent tradition which managed to gain a strong hold over orthodox thinking and spirituality and to retain it until modern times. It is clearly a mistake to regard this tradition as historically marginal. One instance in which the connection is demonstrable is that of the controversy surrounding Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century: for while the spirituality of Palamas was deeply dependent upon the ascetic tradition established in late antiquity, the controversy surrounding hesychast teaching in the fourteenth century in the course of which Palamas emerged triumphant, had all the aspects of deep intellectual, political, and social division; it was no simple matter of a marginalized dispute between monks and clerics. An ascetic discourse, in early Christian terms, can also evidently be identified where certain key terms and concepts are present, even when the text as a whole may not be directly concerned with advocating asceticism. Thus, the complex of ideas clustering round the themes of renunciation, temptation, denial or spiritual progress or ascent in the spiritual life, and the specialized use of Greek terms such as porneia, eros, logismoi, aktemosyne would be a fair indicator. The many commentaries on the Song of Songs by Christian writers from Origen onwards, can fairly be assigned to the genre of ascetic discourse.24 Similarly, the theory of demons, worked out, for instance, by Evagrius of Pontus or in the Macarian homilies, is an integral part of the ascetic complex as it finds expression in the early monastic literature and the presence of similar ideas about demons elsewhere is another indicator of ascetic thinking. It ought to be possible to define an ascetic vocabulary in Greek (as presumably also in Syriac), and then to see how often and in what contexts it is used by writers outside of explicitly ascetic writings, or to what extent it is used in their other writings by writers who combine, as many did in late antiquity, ascetic writings with a wide range of other types of works. Writers like Basil or John Chrysostom, for example, or Augustine, Ambrose, or Jerome in Latin, are remarkable as much for the range of their works as for their quantity, a feature which continues to impress in the case of such later figures as Maximus Confessor or John of Damascus.25

22 Led by Margaret Mullett at Queen’s University, Belfast [with a series of publication appearing from 1994 onwards]. The ascetic collection of this monastery, known in more than fifty manuscripts, was reprinted seven times after its first publication in the eighteenth century. 23 For an idea of the wide diffusion of such material see Wortley 1988. 24 On the early, ascetic literature see Louth 1981. 25 On the range and volume of writing by such authors as Maximus and John see Cameron 1992a.

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Peter Brown has studied in detail ideas of ascetic renunciation in late antique society at large up to the time of Augustine but now, I believe, we must carry the search further chronologically, and look specifically at language use as an indicator of diffusion. How far were Greek terms carried over into Latin, for example? But broadly too ascetic terminology and ascetic ideas were not confined to a specialized discourse. Many of its most prominent exponents were deeply involved in lay society at large, whether locally or centrally, and often at very high levels. Emperors were drawn in, whether as writers, like Justinian, or as participants and protagonists in religious controversy. A closer definition of ascetic discourse is essential before we can really begin to assess its influence. Yet the prominence of ascetic literature and ascetic themes in my own book, and in that of Robert Markus, neither of which is about asceticism as such, prompts one to ask more directly about the role played by ascetic discourse both in Christianization and in broader historical developments in late antiquity.

Asceticism and Christianization In assessing the effects and extent of Christianization, some scholars have looked for signs of improvement in moral behaviour, only to find them wanting.26 Such changes would, in any case be hard to trace, given the nature of our evidence. But the project itself seems misguided. A different approach starts from the investigation of the actual discourses by which late antique society may have been shaped. A good case can be made for thinking that the ascetic strand was one of the most important. However, we soon come up against the question of whether the theme of asceticism should be disentangled from that of Christianization. There is certainly a danger of falling into the trap of too easily equating the two, especially as we are ourselves so much conditioned to assume the eventual triumph of Christianity. Yet just as Byzantium, as I have already suggested, was, in practice, far from being the monolithically Christian society it is usually assumed to have been, so also the culture of late antiquity was a shifting mix of many different elements, not merely the Christian ones. Indeed, recent scholarship lays emphasis on the continued vitality and variety of non-Christian traditions and practice.27 Seen against this background study of the process of Christianization must be put into more subtle perspective. We can save the contention that ascetic discourses had a profound effect on late antique and Byzantine society by incorporating into that view the ascetic discourses which lay outside Christianity. If this paper focuses mainly on Christian ascetic discourse, therefore, that leaves open a further and perhaps equally important area of investigation; namely, whether Peter Brown 26 MacMullen 1986 [a sceptical view. I have written about Christian conversion in Cameron 2015; other recent approaches [from the perspectives of sociology or anthropology] include quantitative history and biological determinism]. 27 Bowersock 1990; Chuvin 1991; Tardieu 1990; Trombley 1993.

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is right in suggesting that pagan ascetics from Eunapius onwards were saddened and in retreat and therefore, by definition, without major influence. Perhaps we should still be looking, as in earlier periods, for the influence of asceticism in a much broader sense, drawing not only on Christian examples, but on pagan, Jewish, Manichaean, or other components.

Asceticism and Literary Expression In his book The Ascetic lmperative, still in press when I was writing Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Geoffrey Harpham made the interesting move of extending the term ‘ascetic’ into the fields of literary criticism and iconography.28 The book moves from the late antique classics of asceticism – the Life of Antony and Augustine’s Confessions – to much later works of art inspired by the early ascetic ideal, the so-called Thebaid paintings of the Reformation period, depicting ascetics and hermits in the Egyptian desert, and the well-known Isenheim Altarpiece attributed to Grunewald. No doubt for similar reasons, though as it happens independently of Harpham’s book, some of the same images also found their way into the illustrations of Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. As his introduction makes clear, Harpham is concerned with the legacy of ascetic ideals to the medieval and postmedieval west. Indeed, he terms the Life of Antony ‘the master text of western asceticism’.29 Instead of focusing on other works of art as examples of borrowing, namely the use of this model by the French writers and painters of the nineteenth century, not least Flaubert,30 he turns instead to the ascetic imperative of modern literary criticism and argues for the practice of hermeneutics and criticism as essentially a modern ascetic activity. Asceticism has become not merely a force in history but a universal impulse. This broadening of the term asceticism obviously merits further discussion. I should like, however, to stress some features of late antique ascetic discourse that Harpham has singled out for comment. He points first to the integral and selfconscious connection between asceticism and texts: the ascetic drive is closely, indeed, explicitly, bound to linguistic expression. I draw attention in my book to the ways in which the (deeply ascetic) Apocryphal Acts, for instance, frequently halt the narrative and discuss words, writing and speech. The self-consciousness of asceticism itself embodies an act of self-creation that possesses its own aesthetics; it transcends the natural and resembles an act of literary or artistic creation.31 The internal contradictions of such a strategy are apparent: while Antony is the figure who rejects culture for the desert, he is also the embodiment of logos; and while the secular learning of Evagrius of Pontus is to be discounted once he enters the desert, his talents are nevertheless utilized in symbolic debates with 28 29 30 31

Harpham 1987. Harpham 1987, 3. See Cameron, Averil 1992b (reprinted in Cameron 1996, XIII). Harpham 1987, 24f.

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pagan philosophers. Augustine, the most self-conscious of the ascetics, was also the greatest linguistic philosopher since Plato. Not only the writings which deal directly with words and meanings, such as the De doctrina and the De magistro, but also the Confessions (in Harpham’s phrase ‘an ascetic’s success story’) are permeated by Augustine’s heightened awareness of words, and of God as the Word.32 Harpham also points to the exploitation by late antique asceticism of the concept of desire, one of the features that make it highly congenial to modern critics. As late antique asceticism defined itself by means of the notion of temptation, it also focused on desire, in such a way that the ascetic was said to transcend desire while at the same time exercising the freest form of desire in his or her individual relation with God.33 Christian asceticism was not merely self-conscious, but deeply implicated in textual hermeneutics; it is therefore doubly close to modern criticism, which sees itself as an activity characterized by desire and proceeding through exegesis.34 Ascetic discourse in late antiquity frequently implied narrative, very often in the form of biography.35 To that extent it imposed limits, implied an ending, and imposed closure on the way in which a life was to be lived and understood. These biographies, embedded, as the Christian examples were, in the broader scheme of Christian creation and salvation history, also implied a sense of narrative time.36 Moreover, the biographies implied a relation between the texts and real life. Real lives, it was hinted, should follow the pattern set in the texts, themselves accounts of exemplary lives.37 Thus, this kind of late antique ascetic discourse was profoundly mimetic. Integral to it is the implication that texts and real life – social behaviour – are in fact closely linked.38 While appearing to be the discourse of retreat, and thus of the marginalized, it calls for an audience. Its object and its raison d’être are in fact advertisement, even pleasure.39 Late antique ascetic discourse was, paradoxically, predicated on being known by the outside world; in just this way the power of the stylite saint, the ascetic star, displayed itself most 32 Harpham 1987, 91f., and see 130, with Cameron 1991, 157. 33 Cameron 1991, 51f.; Cameron, Averil 1994b, 2011. reprinted with an afterword in North and Price 2011, 505–30. 34 Wyschogrod 1995. 35 Cameron 1991, 72f. 36 See Ricoeur 1981. In the same volume Frank Kermode brings out the intimate relation between narrative and secrets, or to put it differently, with unfolding or disclosure (Kermode 1981). In relation to this we should also point to the metaphorical or figural quality of Christian discourse emphasised in Cameron 1991, especially chapter 2, and its exegetical focus on surprise [see also Cameron 1997]. 37 Cameron 1991, chapter 3; Brown 1983; Wyschgorod 1990, especially chapter 1, proposing saints’ lives as the basis for a postmodern moral philosophy. Wyschgorod also sees Christian saints’ lives as essentially demonstrative of altruism, saintly dissolution of self-interest (perhaps a modernising view). All saints are ascetics, but not all ascetics are saints: what are the distinguishing factors? 38 Harpham 1987, 24, citing Brown 1971. 39 Harpham 1992, 144f.

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fully exactly at the point when he stepped down from his column and confronted his audience.

The Impact of Ascetic Discourse The notion of ascetic closure, in the sense described at the beginning of this paper, presupposes the diffusion of ascetic values and ideas to the public at large. Clearly we are not talking about a modern society, where ideas, fashions, and the like can spread with real speed. Many or most of the means of such communication were lacking; not only had no basic changes taken place in technology or communication, but the political and territorial disturbances of the period must, in some cases, have actually made such communication more difficult. It is all the more striking, therefore, when we do find widespread evidence of the transplantation of ideas, social practice, or literary and artistic themes and styles. A few brief examples must suffice. Ramsay MacMullen has argued that the audiences of preachers such as John Chrysostom were less socially mixed than is sometimes assumed and consisted primarily of the middle class and the well-to-do.40 But we would not necessarily have expected anything different. And, in this highly stratified society, they were the ones who had the opportunity and the influence. I turn now to dissemination. The social range of this ascetic discourse was wide. Elizabeth Clark’s study of the Origenist controversy illustrates one way in which upper-class social networks could spread ideas and arguments with great speed over distances which, in view of the difficulty of travel in the ancient world, can now only seem surprising.41 Letter writing flourished among groups of ascetics and individuals. Bishops also crossed social and intellectual boundaries. Still largely drawn from the well-to-do who could afford a standard classical education, they might well have sat in mixed classes with pagans, but once they became bishops they had to deal not only with the local governors, but also with the ordinary people in their dioceses, or on the poor registers – not to mention the rather ordinary clergy beneath them. Pilgrims, too, have left their traces all over the late antique world; they ranged from very ordinary people to those who came from the highest strata in the empire. Thousands of pilgrim tokens were manufactured for them to take home as souvenirs,42 and elaborate buildings constructed to house them near this or that shrine. As nearly as one can use the term in this period pilgrimage became big business. Somehow, people knew where to go, just as they knew, apparently, where monasteries were, and what they were for. A certain minimizing tendency is observable in some recent scholarship as to the spread of Christian art or the evidence for the social diffusion of Christian ideas, and clearly one must not be tempted to overstate the case. But the stories of urban disturbances over religious grievances are very frequent; a considerable 40 MacMullen 1989. 41 Clark 1992, chapter 1. 42 Introduction to this material: Vikan 1982.

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volume of saints’ lives, homiletic, and miracle stories was being produced by, say, the sixth century (and a considerable number and variety of translations of popular works, especially of apocrypha). In addition, there is evidence for the pilgrim trade and the spread of monastic sites (over sixty in the Judaean desert on the most recent figures). The foregoing indicates a diffusion of ascetic discourse at social levels other than that of the literate upper classes. It should be noted that literacy as such is not necessarily a requirement for such diffusion in a society in which oral communication and visual influences are equally important. Finally, the religious and political history of the period, especially in its later phases, demonstrates the actual contact and involvement between secular and ecclesiastical leaders, and between political and religious issues. When emperors and courtiers implicated themselves in doctrinal controversy; participated in councils, dealt with bishops; listened to homilies; and sponsored public religious debate, it would be hard to maintain that ascetic discourse was confined only to the strictly ascetic/monastic sphere. Ascetic discourse affected society at large in multiple ways: through personal contact; through oral communication; by example; through travel and contact with travellers; through exposure to visual images; as well as – no doubt in a much more limited way – by the actual reading of texts. Late antique society was not like the modern world; yet a case can be made for regarding it as a time when social jux taposition became possible on a wider scale than before, and when the crossing of social boundaries in unexpected ways was even at times elevated to the realm of the desirable. Indeed, part of the very attraction of asceticism lay precisely in this overturning of social norms. Through the influence of this very ascetic discourse, the poor became for the first time an object of intense interest and attention among the more favoured members of society.43 Women, another problematic group in Greco-Roman culture, did not of course achieve anything approximating liberation or equality. Yet they, too, gained from the spread of ascetic discourse; for while on the one hand they tended to be assigned the symbolic role of temptress and were tainted with the inheritance of Eve, they too could become ascetics, retiring to the desert, or practising the religious life at home. They could go on pilgrimage, found monasteries, read and commission religious books, learn Hebrew, reject arranged marriage, dress as they liked [if in ascetic garb], and debate with men; ascetic friendships might replace human desire.44 Constantine put Christianity onto the public agenda and licensed the entry of himself and his successors into the politics of the Christian church. This much is clear; in addition, he opened even the imperial court to ascetic influence, personally preaching, sending letters to St. Antony in Egypt (if we can believe the Life

43 And, one may add, the objects of new forms of exploitation by them: see Brown 1992, chapter 3 [and see chapter 10]. 44 Militello 1992; Clark 1993.

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of Antony), and ordering copies of the Scriptures for Constantinople.45 By the fifth century, Theodosius II’s court was allegedly run like a religious house; by the sixth, Justinian and Theodora had a whole flock of eastern monks and clergy living in the palace. There was little sense of a separation of church and state, and despite the persistence of classicizing education, much less of a practical division between secular and religious discourse than one might imagine. Ascetics and others did not live in the separate worlds that the literature leads us to expect.

Implications for Historical Change All this seems to suggest a degree of novelty and variety of choice. Yet the books I mentioned earlier in this paper emphasize a narrowing down of ascetic discourse and Harpham’s view presents it as the discourse of negation, of limit, of denial. We must, therefore, now ask what the broader implications may have been of the permutation of contemporaneous textuality by the ascetic discourse. There were interesting developments in late antiquity in relation to textual politics. The rise to prominence of the highly self-conscious narratives of asceticism; the intense preoccupation with words and meaning and the resort to metaphor; the constant (indeed relentless) attempts to define the essentially indefinable; the obsession with hermeneutics; the technologizing of denunciation in the form of condemnation of heresy all made late antiquity a questing, restless, and energetic period. Certain of these characteristics are also the mechanisms to which other societies have resorted in order to construct new systems of knowledge – that process which is the very opposite of what Markus sees happening in late antiquity. Metaphor, imagination, narrative and categorization (here seen in the systematized lists of heresies and the schematization of correct belief around approved texts and authorities) are all key methodologies in such a process.46 What was taking place in late antiquity in intellectual and imaginative terms was surely a competitive process of system construction, a persistent impulse towards definition. The ascetic discourse was very much part of that process.

An Ascetic State? Many elements in Christian discourse as it developed during late antiquity pointed in the direction of hierarchy and systematization. It was more comforting to have a sense of completeness, of all-enveloping explanation: a theory of everything.47 The arm of authority represented by the state or the official church did its best to enforce uniformity. Words and actions went together; sanctions were imposed for 45 Preaching: Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.9; Scriptures for Constantinople: ibid., 4.36–37; letter to Antony: Life of Antony, 81. 46 Johnson 1987, 17f. 47 See also Cameron 1993.

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wrong belief [and sometimes implemented]. The ascetic discourse was well suited to such a trend, since its very nature implied discipline as well as certainty; it allowed no overt challenge, no possibility of tolerance, no uncertainty. Refusal to conform could only be condemned: it is no surprise, therefore, that a sophisticated heresiology ran parallel with asceticism; or that the monks themselves were often claimed by their apologists to have been particularly violently opposed to the slightest whiff of error while clearly being powerfully drawn to it in practice. The construction of the ascetic body also had implications for the body politic. We can now perhaps begin to see perhaps why Christian ascetic discourse was more likely to prevail than other kinds, furthered as it was both by a machinery of enforcement [even if imperfect] and a much more enveloping discourse of inclusion and exclusion. Its boundaries were indeed clearly, even luridly, drawn. Peter Brown is right to draw attention to the confrontational quality of Christian hagiography, a feature still more overtly expressed in Christian heresiology.48 The authoritarian stance continued into Byzantium, where it was essential to the official persona of a Byzantine emperor. The preoccupation of the early Byzantine state with heresy and the intensification of its polemics against Jews and its prolonged internal struggle over the authority of religious images, moved the debate from the individual ascetic to the state. Iconoclastic emperors attacked monks as well as images. Yet the effect of the imperial stance of authoritarianism may have been precisely the opposite of what was intended. Instead of calming and stabilizing society, the much-vaunted serenity of the Christian emperors, often expressing itself in practice in religious intolerance, in actuality stimulated division. The constant and public search for certainty generated its own resistance. ‘Heresy’ was never successfully suppressed. It reappeared incessantly in different forms, only to be formally condemned yet again. In structural terms, the orthodox emperor required resistance in order to be able to assert his orthodoxy, just as he required enemies on whom to trample in endless triumphal iconography in order to assert his eternal victory.49 In the same way ascetic discourse required an audience, just as it required its demons.50 Without an audience, the self-consciousness of the ascetic would lead only to silence. Like Christian authoritarianism, asceticism is of its nature combative; it defines itself through negation and exclusion. Similarly, Christian imperial authority implied not tranquillity but resistance, whether defined as heresy or in the form of the less tractable kinds of religious understanding.51 The canons of the Quinisext Council in 691–692 CE; the long struggle of the iconoclasts; and the successive stages [of revision] in the Byzantine Synodikon of Orthodoxy show us an ever-present tension between authority and resistance. It is hard at times to know how far this is symbolic, at the level of the text, and how far it represents real 48 49 50 51

Brown 1992, 144. For imperial triumph in Byzantium see McCormick 1986. Harpham 1987, 54. Cameron 1991, chapter 5.

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diversity.52 Yet the level of the text is enough; the symbolism was all. By a seemingly paradoxical though in fact predictable turn Byzantine monasteries themselves became players in the game of power and authority, even while retaining their hold on the ascetic ideals of renunciation from which they originally grew. The story of ascetic closure is thus an interesting and a complex one. In late antiquity, I would like to suggest, Christian ascetic discourse lent itself well to the broader ecclesiastical discourse of authority and exclusion, to which it contributed the primary notions of limit, hierarchy, and struggle against opponents. In time the very practice of asceticism became identified with the politics of the Byzantine state. In its puritanism, its insistence on strong boundaries and its polemical stance, it led in due course to the dialectic of iconoclasm.53 And just as the ascetic discourse called for a developed demonology against which to define itself and over which to assert its repeated victories, so the discourse of religious and state authority required a perpetual supply of real or alleged opponents in order to maintain its continued credibility. Heretics and secularists (those tempted by ‘Hellenic wisdom’) were the state’s demons, and heresiology the state’s ascetic discourse. The nature of ‘the unambiguously Christian empire that we associate with Byzantium’54 is still largely to be assessed. Perhaps the phrase denotes the hopes of the Byzantine emperors themselves rather than their actual achievement. I would suggest that their enterprise very much resembled that of the ascetics of late antiquity. They too needed an audience and their role was as much symbolic as practical. They needed an audience to maintain credibility in what they represented, their place within the world order, and their capacity to overcome resistance. Doubtless they also needed an audience to convince themselves. Both the discourses, the ascetic and the imperial, were self-perpetuating and self-sustaining. The objective of asceticism, and of ascetic discourse, is necessarily mastery, and thus is highly likely to be intolerant.55 Yet that mastery is achievable only if there is resistance to be overcome. The same is true of the authoritarian Christian state. The Byzantine state itself replicated the ascetic subject.

Bibliography Bowersock, Glen W. 1990. Hellenism in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Peter 1971. ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61: 80–101. Brown, Peter 1983. ‘The Saint as Exemplar in in Late Antiquity’, Representations 1: 1–25. Brown, Peter 1988. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. 52 Gouillard 1965 [is classic. I went on to write about heresiology as a specific type of writing: Cameron 2003, also in Martin and Miller 2005, 193–212]. 53 Mitchell 1986, especially 160–208. 54 Brown 1992, 146. 55 That is, Brown’s confrontation rather than Wyschgorod’s altruism.

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Brown, Peter 1992. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Burrus, Virginia 1992. ‘Ascesis, Authority and Text: The Acts of the Council of Saragossa’, Semeia 58: 85–108. Cameron, Averil 1985. Procopius and the Sixth Century. London: Duckworth. Cameron, Averil 1987. ‘The Construction of Court Ritual: The Byzantine Book of Ceremonies’. In Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, edited by Simon R.F. Price and David Cannadine, 106–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Averil 1991. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse. Sather Classical Lectures 55. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cameron, Averil 1992. ‘The Language of Images: Icons and Christian Representation’. In The Church and the Arts, Studies in Church History 28, edited by Diana Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, reprinted in Cameron, Averil 1996a, XII. Cameron, Averil 1992a. ‘Byzantium and the Past in the Seventh Century: The Search for Redefinition’. In The Seventh Century: Change and Continuity, edited by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth and Jacques Fontaine, 250–76. London: Warburg Institute. Cameron, Averil 1992b. The Use and Abuse of Byzantium. Inaugural lecture, King’s College London, reprinted in Cameron, Averil 1996, XIII. Cameron, Averil 1993. ‘Divine Providence in Late Antiquity’. In Predicting the Future, The Darwin College Lectures, edited by Leo Howe and Alan Wain, 118–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Averil 1994. ‘Texts as Weapons: Polemic in the Byzantine Dark Ages’. In Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, edited by Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf, 198–215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Averil 1994a. ‘The Jews in Seventh-Century Palestine’, Scripta Classica Israelica 13: 75–93. Cameron, Averil 1994b. ‘Early Christianity and the Discourse of Female Desire’. In Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Nigh, edited by Susan Fischler, Leonie Archer and Maria Wyke, 152–68. London: Macmillan, reprinted with an afterword in North, John A. and Price, Simon R.F. eds. 2011, 505–30. Cameron, Averil 1996. ‘Byzantines and Jews: Some Recent Work on Early Byzantium’, BMGS 20: 249–74. Cameron, Averil 1996a. Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium. Aldershot: Variorum. Cameron, Averil 1997. ‘Eusebius’s Vita Constantini and the Construction of Constantine’. In Portraits: The Biographical in the Literature of the Empire, edited by Simon Swain and Mark Edwards, 245–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil 2003. ‘How to Read Heresiology’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.3: 471–92, also in Martin, Dale and Miller, Cox eds. 2005, 193–212. Cameron, Averil 2013. ‘Seeing Byzantium: A Personal Response’. In Wonderful Things: Byzantium Through Its Art, edited by Liz James and Antony Eastmond. Papers from the Forty-first Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Courtauld Institute of Art and King’s College, London, March 2009, 311–18. Farnham: Ashgate. Cameron, Averil 2015. ‘Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity: Some Issues’. In Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam and Beyond, edited by Arietta Papaconstantinou and Neil McLynn, with Daniel Schwartz, 3–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil 2017. Byzantine Christianity: A Very Short History. London: SPCK.

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Cameron, Averil 2023. ‘Byzantine Studies - a Field Ripe for Disruption?’ In Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline? Towards a Critical Historiography, edited bu Benjamin Anderson and Mirela Ivanove,1-7. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Clark, Elizabeth A. 1992. The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clark, Gillian 1993. Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chuvin, Pierre 1991. Chronique des dernier païens. Paris: Les belles lettres. Ducellier, Alain 1990. L’Église byzantine: Entre pouvoir et esprit, 313–1204. Paris: Desclée. Gouillard, Jean 1965. ‘L’hérésie dans l’empire byzantine des origines au XIIe siècle’, Travaux et Mémoires 1: 299–324. Gouillard, Jean 1967. ‘Le Synodikon de l’Orthodoxie. Édition et commentaire’. Travaux et mémoires 2: 1–136. Harpham, Geoffrey 1987. The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harpham, Geoffrey 1992. ‘Old Water in New Bottles: The Contemporary Prospects for the Study of Asceticism’, Semeia 58: 134–48. Honoré, Tony 1978. Tribonian. London: Duckworth. Johnson, Mark 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kazhdan, Alexander and Constable, Giles 1982. People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Kermode, Frank 1981. ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’. In On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, 79–97. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Louth, Andrew 1981. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacMullen, Ramsay 1986. ‘What Difference Did Christianity Make?’, Historia 35: 322–43. MacMullen, Ramsay 1989. ‘The Preacher’s Audience (AD 350–400)’, JThS 40: 503–11. Markus, Robert A. 1990. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Dale and Miller, Patricia Cox eds. 2005. The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism and Historiography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCormick, Michael 1986. Eternal Victory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyendorff, John 1964. A Study of Gregory Palamas. London: Faith Press. Militello, Cettina 1992. ‘Amicizia tra asceti e ascete’. In La donna nel pensiero cristiano antico, edited by Claudio Anselmetto and Umberto Mattioli, 279–303. Genoa: Marietti. Mitchell, William J.T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text and Ideology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Nicol, Donald M. 1992. The Immortal Emperor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, John A. and Price, Simon R.F. eds. 2011. The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews and Christians. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul 1981. ‘Narrative Time’. In On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, 165–81. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rousseau, Philip 1978. Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian. Oxford; Oxford University Press.

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Tardieu, Michel 1990. Les paysages reliques: Routes et haltes syriennes d’Isidore à Simplicius. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Trombley, Frank R. 1993. Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370–529, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Versnel, Henk 1990, 1993. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion. Leiden: Brill. Vikan, Gary 1982. Byzantine Pilgrimage Art. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Wortley, John R. 1988. ‘Paul of Monemvasia and His Stories’. In Kathegetria: Essays Presented to Joan Hussey for her 80th Birthday, edited by Julian Chrysostomides, 303–16. Camberley: Porphyrogenitus. Wyschgorod, Edith 1990. Saints and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wyschogrod, Edith 1995. ‘The Howl of Ethics, the Cry of Héloïse: From Asceticism to Postmodern Ethics’. In Asceticism, edited by Vincent Wimbush and Richard Valantasis, 16–32. New York: Oxford University Press.

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This article was written for a volume discussing the afterlife of Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints, which bore the subtitle Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. I was therefore (as often) in the company of western medievalists. Brown himself had recently published The Rise of Western Christendom, explicitly addressed to the history of western Christianity and with a much longer timespan than was usual in his work. His early collection, Society and the Holy demonstrated his turn to spirituality, his collaborations with Sabine McCormack and the influence of Gervase Mathew, author of Byzantine Aesthetics. ‘The Saint as Exemplar’, on which Brown was to reflect twenty-five years later in JECS, also differed from the anthropological approach of his seminal essay, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antique Society’ of 1971 (on which he reflected himself in Brown 1998). By 1998 the ground had shifted and this paper reflects themes that had become current by then, including questions about violence and the role of elites, though not the focus on gender that was equally evident, though women were conspicuously absent from Brown’s ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, and historians including myself used the masculine gender. Biography was by now a major theme, and with it the nature of hagiographical texts, and asceticism was now a subject, rather than the role of holy men as patrons, rural or urban. Nevertheless a wider move towards social history was apparent. Why is it worth tracking the development of Peter Brown’s thought over the long period since Brown 1971 and 1971a? One reason is that Brown is so central a figure in the field of late antiquity and has himself frequently indicated this in updated and further editions of his works. Several of his books also arose from lecture series, a genre which despite the opportunities it offers for moving on also tends to invite a degree of revisionism. He was thus confronted with the need to review and revise his own earlier work in the light of the scholarship of others as well as his own later thoughts. It is of intrinsic interest to follow such shifts and turns over a period of more than fifty years, and to reflect on why ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antique Society’ made such an impact and remains a topic of discussion. The development of scholarship over so long a period

DOI: 10.4324/9781003228813-14

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is an important topic in its own right and the shifts in the thinking of a great scholar even more so. As this paper makes clear I had myself by then moved to an emphasis on discourse, and that was to continue in later publications, especially publications on Byzantium. I have also addressed the themes of orthodoxy and heresy in numerous later publications. And the chronological slipperiness of the term ‘Byzantine’ meant that what is otherwise termed ‘late antiquity’ continues to be relevant. ––––––––––

It falls to few of us to write an article that justifies the epithet ‘seminal’, but Peter Brown’s ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’ was certainly that. Appearing in 1971, the year of The World of Late Antiquity, it represented a major change of direction from Augustine of Hippo, published in 1967, the importance of which is evident for Peter Brown himself as well as his readers. The World of Late Antiquity [chapter 11 above] moved away from the close textual analysis and psychological interpretations which are the marks of the book on Augustine towards a broader sweep, even if covering the same chronological period. Its horizons were vast, its energy enviable. Brown was staking out a new field. With the article on the holy man he could be seen stepping more confidently into the territory of social anthropology, using a wide range of data to construct a social definition, not of a saint, but of the ‘holy man’ in late antiquity as a typical interstitionary figure exerting a patronage role based on the symbolic capital of his perceived authority. Such figures were presented – based on eastern, and especially Syrian sources – as rural patrons, able to mediate between town and country and between the powerful and the poor. There was more to say.1 Rightly avoiding the term ‘saint’, for in this early period there were no formal processes of sanctification and no official bestowal of sainthood, Brown was drawn to explore instead what was meant by the more amorphous and more spiritual concept of ‘the holy’. This resulted in a group of articles published together in Brown’s Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, a book very different from his first collection. The latter consists of studies for the most part closely associated with his work on Augustine which give little hint of what was to come, except perhaps in the matter of literary style. In contrast Society and the Holy, no longer published in London by Faber & Faber but by the University of California Press at Berkeley [where Brown had moved in 1978] marked both a personal and an intellectual break with the past. Like the earlier collection it contains reviews and pieces on the history of scholarship, but also his article on the holy man and associated papers such as that on ‘Town, Village and Holy Man: The Case of Syria’.2 ‘Relics 1 As Brown well knew: the first footnote of ‘The World of Late Antiquity’ speaks of ‘problems worth following through for many years to come’. The paper below partly draws on material presented to a seminar at the University of Oslo, and I should like to thank Hugo Montgomery and Halvor Moxnes in particular for their hospitality on that occasion. 2 Brown 1976.

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and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours’3 was in turn related to The Cult of the Saints and continued the socio-anthropological approach announced by the original ‘Holy Man’ paper. There was also a concern about the relation between the eastern and western Mediterranean, reflective of the fact that Brown largely deals with the west.4 But Brown’s inaugural lecture at Royal Holloway College, London of 1977, and his remarks on icons written in collaboration with Sabine MacCormack,5 seem to point away from the functional and towards a more ‘spiritual’ view of religious history. The model proposed in ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ was immediately influential, as can be seen from the number of references to it in the edited proceedings of the Fourteenth Symposium of Byzantine Studies at Birmingham, whose subject was the cult of saints in Byzantium.6 Scholars soon pointed out that holy men operated in urban as well as rural contexts, that there were pagan holy men too,7 and that the Brownian definition did not exhaust the possible way of understanding the phenomenon. But the model was so powerfully expressed that it set a pattern which many followed. Meanwhile Brown himself had become interested in asceticism. Stimulated by meeting Michel Foucault, who was giving lectures at Berkeley, Brown was drawn into the Parisian world of Paul Veyne and the Collège de France and entered a phase which resulted in his contribution to the History of Private Life 1, edited by Paul Veyne,8 and the publication of his book The Body and Society (1988). The Body and Society ranges in a confident sweep from the first century to the fifth, ending in the west with Augustine and, in words taken from Jacques le Goff, with ‘the definitive “rout of the body” that marked the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the middle ages’.9 It addresses one of the most characteristic marks of Christian holiness in late antiquity (though Christians did not have a monopoly of it), namely sexual abstinence, which frequently went together with other kinds of renunciation, for instance of bodily pleasure and comfort. The Body and Society constitutes a bravura display of empathy with the abundant source material; yet the index does not have entries for holy man or even for monks and monasticism. If we now turn back to ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ we shall find that asceticism is taken for granted,10 but that sexual abstinence is not discussed as such and that the emphasis is rather on social power, and, moreover, that this is a kind of power based on ‘achieved status’.11 Brown is already inter3 Brown 1977, a lecture given at the University of Reading in 1976. 4 Brown 1977, 1982. 5 Brown 1982, 3–21 and 207–21. But Brown 1973 retained the functionalist approach; it is interesting to compare it with the chapter on Byzantine iconoclasm in Brown 1996. 6 Hackel 1981. 7 Fowden 1982. 8 Brown 1985. 9 Brown 1988, 441. 10 Brown 1971, 114, 131. 11 Brown 1971, 138.

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ested, as he continued to be, in ‘ascetic stars’;12 their asceticism is ‘histrionic’,13 their power ‘supernatural’ and ‘palpable’.14 But his interest at this point lay not in asking ‘why?’, but ‘what did it do?’ or ‘what was it for?’ In The Body and Society he gives us an abundance of material relevant to the former question, but remains sparing with answers to the latter. Sexuality was a natural topic for one so steeped in the thought of Augustine, but in The Body and Society Brown veers away from proposing or revising the kind of social model offered in the holy man article. The canvas was now bigger: high society as well as rural economies, the west as well as the east, the educated as well as the general populace. While the book’s theme is closely connected to the definition of holiness or sainthood, Brown is now looking for something much more general – religious change itself, perhaps, or the interplay of the intellectual and the popular in Christianization. The opening section focuses on topics familiar from Paul Veyne – the deportment of Roman upper-class males, the bourgeoisification of Roman upper-class marriage in the age of Plutarch and Musonius Rufus – and the book deals with literary sources as much as with social history. Three other books by Brown, all arising from lecture series – Brown 1978, 1992, 1995 – carry forward similar themes, though in differing ways. In the first, changes in the role of the Roman aristocracy between the high empire and late antiquity provide an explanatory device for social and religious change. In the other two, published later, while we still encounter the ascetic stars in all their exoticism, there is an increasing emphasis on the evolution of a Christian paideia which could replace the classical model, even if it did so partly by absorbing it. Paideia had already emerged as a powerful theme as early as his essay ‘The Saint as Exemplar’, where it is linked with an emphasis on the saint as the imitator of Christ,15 in an article in which Brown’s anthropological mentors are Edward Shils and Clifford Geertz rather than Mary Douglas and Evans-Pritchard. Brown is already conscious of the need to revise his earlier model, referring to his article of 1971 as having been painted ‘in more grisaille tones’.16 The rural patrons of ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ had already by 1983, as he admitted, yielded up the centre of the stage, based as they were on ‘a specific tradition of anthropological work available to me at that time’.17 It nevertheless took time for this strand to develop in Brown’s work. When it did, having located holy men in ‘The Saint as Exemplar’ in what he recognized as ‘a thoroughly unsystematic

12 13 14 15 16

Brown 1971, 109. Brown 1971, 131. Brown 1971, 121. Brown 1983, 1, 7f. Brown 1983, 10–11, cf. 12: ‘if that tradition did have a limitation . . . it was the tendency to isolate the holy man yet further from the world of shared values in which he operated as an exemplar’. At 14 Brown depicts his shift as a shift from ‘a largely British tradition of social anthropology to a largely American tradition of cultural anthropology’. 17 Brown 1983.

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evolution’,18 he was to present them in Brown 1992, 1995 in the context of an altogether more kaleidoscopic and certainly more comprehensive picture of late antiquity than that originally depicted in ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’.19 Brown has always been highly aware of his own development as a historian, and several of his later writings serve almost as commentaries on ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, which, as he himself points out, sprang from a relatively early stage in his remarkable trajectory when he was still unaware of some of the influences that later lay strongest upon him.20 The sources on which ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ was mainly based are listed in the first footnote of the article and consist entirely of what we generally call saints’ lives, with the addition of some compendia – the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Lausiac History and Theodoret’s Historia Religiosa. The first page of the article refers to traditional scholarship in the field and proposes no challenge in terms of method: ‘the intention of this paper is to follow well-known paths of scholarship on all these topics’.21 Brown did not offer a new interpretation so much as a new means of exploitation of the rich vein of material offered by hagiography. In The Body and Society, too, the focus is always on the subjects and their doings and thought – the proper stuff of history, some might think – rather than on the articulation of the texts which describe them. Brown is a historian through and through. He wants to understand how things came about as they did; so when in Power and Persuasion the theme of paideia again became important to him, it was in the context of the social power enjoyed by the educated élites of late antiquity, whose members displayed their standing like their predecessors of the high empire by adopting particular models of decorum and deportment.22 The emphasis in Power and Persuasion is again on social mechanisms but the functionalism of ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ has been dispersed or at least tempered by a more glittering surface and a wider cast of characters. The last chapter of the book is entitled ‘Towards a Christian Empire’. As in The Body and Society the story ends with the move into the fifth century and the emphasis is less on the rural than on the gradual absorption of the old élites into a more generally Christian society. Shared paideia, not excluding the habits of mind and behaviour that went with it, becomes a key to the process. Even now I suspect that Brown has not yet given us his complete view of the process of Christianization in late antiquity. In Brown 1995 he returned to themes expressed in Power and Persuasion by arguing again against an excessive emphasis on violence and intolerance (even if based on contemporary sources) and too black-and-white a view of the process of Christianization. Contemporaries had 18 19 20 21 22

Brown 1983, 15. This is also true of Brown 1996. Brown 1983, 10–15, and for example 11, with note 57. Brown 1971, 105. Brown 1992, chapter 2, entitled ‘Paideia and Power’.

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their own reasons for presenting the age in terms of conflict between Christians and others and it has suited modern scholars to follow them. But ‘beyond the vivid flashes of pagan indignation and Christian self-justification that light up for us the incidents of violence which occurred in the late fourth and early fifth centuries it is possible to detect a solid fog-bank of tacit disapproval’.23 After all, power was at stake and the élites would make sure that if change came it was properly controlled: ‘all over the Mediterranean world profound religious changes, heavy with potential for violence, were channelled into the more predictable, but no less overbearing “gentle violence” of a stable social order’.24 In this history of social power the role of élites was crucial, but. it turns out, the holy man less so. The third chapter of Authority and the Sacredreturns consciously to the theme of Brown’s original article: ‘I am far less certain than I once was – now over twenty years ago – when I first wrote on ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, as to how exactly to fit the holy man into the wider picture of the religious world of late antiquity’.25 Brown goes on to explain that the view expressed in the original article was too limited, too much influenced, perhaps, by the ‘vivid’ (a word used twice on this page as well as in the passage quoted above) ‘Lives of individual holy men, usually written by their disciples after their death’. A thicker context was needed in the Geertzian sense. The scope was broader now; for example, it embraced holy women and spread over the whole topography of the Mediterranean. Then Brown returned to the Lives; it is these texts which for their own purposes presented the holy man in a patronage role in what Brown now terms ‘a carefully censored language of “clean” patronage’.26 The role of hagiography was, it now seemed to him, ‘to bring order to a supernatural world shot through with acute ambiguity, characterized by uncertainty as to the meaning of so many manifestations of the holy and, as a result, inhabited by religious entrepreneurs of all faiths’.27 It was a recognition of the gap between the narratives and ‘what really may have happened’, the latter now more elusive than ever. The holy man is still interstitial,28 but he has now become less a patron than a facilitator,29 and his territory less that of social difference between town and country than that of the imaginative landscape of the spirit. Ambiguous himself, he is well placed to channel the uncertainties of others. He has also become less powerful. ‘In times of acute crisis, Christian explanatory systems collapsed like a house of cards . . .’ The influence of Christian holy persons was extremely limited, ‘in what had remained, to an overwhelming extent, a supernatural “subsistence economy”, accustomed

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Brown 1995, 50. Brown 1995, 53. Brown 1995, 59. Brown 1995, 64. Brown 1995, 68. Brown 1995, 70. Brown 1995, 64.

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to handling life’s doubts and cares according to more old-fashioned and low-key methods’.30 Read in conjunction with Brown’s earlier writings, not least ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, the last pages of Authority and the Sacred are extremely interesting. Brown is less sure now about Christianization itself: indeed, mankind had lapsed into ‘a perpetual twilight’, almost reminiscent of the superstitious world evoked by Ramsay MacMullen.31 The confident narratives of Christian hagiography, he wrote, were far from telling the whole story of late antique religion. But it was a new imaginative model of the world that was in point, and holy men were even more likely to be effective in facilitating the acquisition of this for other people than in fulfilling the role of social patron assigned to them in Brown’s original article. They were now seen as easing the passage to the uncertain world of the future, in which prayers were a real necessity and whose start was placed, as in The Body and Society, at some time in the fifth century. I have dwelt so far on the afterlife of ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ in Brown’s own work, which is fascinating enough. Since its publication we can perhaps say that the horizon has expanded for him and the material come to seem more complex, the answers less sure. Only a history of late antiquity on a large scale would give us Brown’s final balancing of the factors given differing amounts of emphasis in his various writings The Rise of Western Christendom was not on that scale; its sweep was wider, but the effect of that, together with the book’s brevity, was to add even more to the mix. Now however I want to turn to as aspect of the afterlife of ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ which Brown himself has not directly explored, though indeed Authority and the Sacred showed him to have become increasingly aware of the traps laid by the ancient narratives. Brown’s original article proposed a model for understanding the role of the holy man, but it was a model for our understanding of the phenomena. It did not address the extent to which the phenomena themselves (recorded in the Lives and other stories of holy men) are models constructed by the writers. Brown did not try to analyse or define what constitutes a holy man, or, to put it differently, how a holy man [or woman] is constructed in the sources. Still less did he address the question of how much the holy man and the ascetic have in common: are all ascetics holy, for example? Is asceticism a necessary qualification for holiness? How do the narratives differentiate between the two concepts? Since 1971 these questions have intrigued those who have written on the subject as much as the social issues surrounding the late antique holy man. I would like to focus on three particularly prominent themes: first, the nature of asceticism itself; second, mimesis, in the sense in which ascetics and holy men are themselves models; and third, the Lives of holy men and their relation to biography in general in the period.

30 Brown 1995, 72. 31 Brown 1995, 71; cf. MacMullen 1997, chapter 3.

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First then, asceticism. This has attracted the attentions of many recent scholars, including some from disciplines quite other than that of the history of late antiquity or early Christianity. One can point first to the two collections edited by Vincent Wimbush, the first by himself and the second with Richard Valantasis, which give a very good introduction to the many different types of asceticism and their cross-cultural implications.32 Geoffrey Harpham’s The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism and Wyschogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism broaden the topic into the realms of aesthetics, morals and literary criticism [chapter 12 above]. In thinking about asceticism, it seems to me that we are confronted with a tangle of problems which may or may not be connected and that we need to start by separating out some of the strands. Asceticism (askesis, discipline) can perhaps best be defined as a term used of a specific set of attitudes and practices. These involve the choice of discipline as a means to virtue, purity and enlightenment. Such a cast of mind became more and more important in Christian antiquity. Since it mainly involved individuals, it affected their own lives and the role models they offered to others: it also affected how they were depicted in literature (and later, in visual art). It is clearly closely related to the monastic movement and to types of monasticism, although as Peter Brown shows in The Body and Society asceticism was well established before monasticism began. It may also spring from a Platonic separation of soul and body and it is inherent in classical Greek thought, for instance in the Pythagorean precepts. It also features in pagan lives of holy men in the Christian period – thus the writings of Porphyry, his Lives of Plotinus and Pythagoras, his Letter to Marcella and others.33 We might therefore suspect that asceticism’s roots are essentially Platonizing and that its appearance among early Christians is connected with a Hellenizing tendency. This however is far too simple, and early Christians had other models too, the Qumran community and the Essenes among them. Asceticism also seems to be a fundamental religious phenomenon, shared by other religions and cultures including Hinduism and Buddhism, as some of the papers in Wimbush and Valantasis eds. 1995 indicate. The first and fundamental question, then, is posed in The Body and Society: in what specific ways did early Christians relate to this basic religious phenomenon and why did they take it up with such profound consequences? Peter Brown’s book confines itself to sexual renunciation without considering in detail its relation to other forms of asceticism, but the wider phenomenon has occupied other scholars including those who have contributed to the recent and large literature on the body.34 The comparison between pagan and Christian ascetics and holy men has also been a major theme. Tellingly, the social explanation offered by ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ is not to the fore; rather, the comparison is 32 Wimbush 1990; Wimbush and Valantasis 1995. 33 Brown 1988, 180f.; cf. also Clark 1989; Dillon 1995. 34 Recent examples: Clark 1996; Rousselle 1992; Cox Miller 1993, 1994; Bynum 1995; Montserrat 1998. Note also the recent conference entitled ‘After the Body’, organized by Elaine Graham and Kate Cooper at the University of Manchester.

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on the literary or ideological level. Brown himself was well aware, for example, of philosophical or Manichaean asceticism,35 but these cases serve to vary the already dense texture of his writing rather than to contextualize Christian practice. I would suggest in contrast that exploring the connection between the broader issues of asceticism and the concept of the Christian holy man is one of the more necessary desiderata suggested by the reception of the original article. It is also desirable to carry further Brown’s exploration of the likenesses and differences between east and west, for although Brown was indeed sensitive to Byzantium he did not take this topic further in that direction any more than Robert Markus in The End of Ancient Christianity. The amount of influence exerted by Foucault and other theorists during these years is an interesting question [chapter 10 above].36 Certainly sexuality and abstinence have become major topics. So has the body, both as symbol and reality. Equally, one can point to questions of personhood and the development of the concept of the individual.37 It would have to be admitted I think, that during the past generation the socio-anthropological approach of ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ has yielded in the work of very many scholars of religion in late antiquity to a more structural and literary analysis; social power is seen to rest, as Peter Brown himself saw in Authority and the Sacred, on a wider nexus than functionalism would allow. But Brown himself has avoided the deconstructive turn even in its milder forms. Brown questions whether the Lives of holy man, the ‘ascetic stars’, do in fact present us with the neutral historical data which they appear to convey. Without devaluing the editorial and critical work of traditional scholars of hagiography such as the Bollandists whom Brown praises at the beginning of ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’, one of the most notable developments in this generation’s scholarship has been directed to this very issue and to the narratological and literary-critical analysis of the hagiographic genres. Here I will pick out only two of the issues. First, following Brown’s remarks in Authority and the Sacred, the extent to which Lives from the early Christian period are model lives, portrayals of heroic individuals who are carefully presented to others for their imitation.38 This is spectacularly the case with the Life of Antony, and of the Emperor Constantine in Eusebius’ Life of Constantine.39 It is true of the Gospel narratives and equally true of the lives of sages and holy men which may or may not be prototypes for Christian saints’ lives, for example the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus, which Eusebius knew well, and the Lives of

35 36 37 38

For the latter, see Brown 1988, 197f. Cameron 1986 and see Goldhill 1995, introduction. Cf. Misch 1951. See Cameron 1991, chapters 2 and 3. [I would now add the relevance of the purpose behind the composition, for instance to promote the claim of a particular shrine or church.] 39 Cameron 2000; Cameron and Hall 1999.

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Plotinus and Pythagoras by Porphyry.40 Equally it applies to earlier texts such as the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, for instance the narrative of Thecla in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and the related Ps. Clementine Recognitiones.41 Those who hear or read these texts read them in this way themselves. The holy man was indeed an exemplar, to use Brown’s terms, not only in his actions but also for the mind and imagination of others through the stories that grew up about him. He needed an audience: doing good by stealth was not enough and many hagiographical tales turn on recognition and revelation. The writing of a Life recognizes this explicitly by making his deeds known to the world and to posterity. Lives are self-consciously composed: they make frequent reference to audiences, to the projected readership and to the reasons for writing. They are not works of introspection. Nor are they biographies in our present sense of the term. They tell of the great or heroic deeds of their hero and fit them into recognisable categories. The Lives are also closely related to rhetorical encomia, a genre in which all ancient schoolboys were well trained and which enjoyed a renewed importance in the urban culture of the empire. In origin these Lives, including the Christian ones, were implicated in the literary history of the Second Sophistic, though it remains to be clarified exactly in what manner. They also had an intellectual and a rhetorical context: the early subjects are often ‘sages’ or philosophers; formal debate in which the hero triumphs over false philosophers as St Paul did over Simon Magus, is a common feature;42 the hero may be pitted against worldly wisdom but his skill with words prevails. All this is apparent in the Life of Antony, by common consent the first real saint’s life, where Antony is described debating with ‘Greek’ philosophers.43 Even the action of the Lives expresses these ideological confrontations between true and false knowledge and between town and country. Antony goes into the desert, but never loses contact altogether with the outside; his greatest gesture is to go himself to face the crowds in Alexandria, just as the great stylite saints sometimes come down from their column to give advice to the powerful. The holy man talks to visitors or gives advice by other means. He needs an audience, whether the audience bestowed by the texts themselves or that encountered during the occasional public appearances which feature in the Lives. Finally the Lives also have to do with accounts of martyrdom, though it is too simple to suppose as has often been thought that the Lives are their direct replacement. It is no surprise that Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, which sets out the exemplary deaths of martyrs, also provides a proto-saint’s Life, the life of Origen in book 6. Early Christian martyrdom also demanded an audience: its hallmark

40 On the general topic and on specific examples see Edwards and Swain 1997. 41 Cameron 1991, chapter 3; Perkins 1995; Anderson 1994; Morgan and Stoneman 1994; on ‘acts’, Mortley 1996 [with Davies 1980]. 42 See Edwards 1997. [A similar feature characterized the Adversus Iudaeos texts, literary debates against Jews and the dialogue form used by Christian writers throughout the Byzantine period, on which see Cameron and Gaul 2017.] 43 V. Ant. 72–80.

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was public show.44 These late antique Lives are not modern biographies but exemplars of virtue and heroism [and sometimes they had other agendas too.] There is no psychological fascination with the individual and little attempt to delineate character. As a rule only those aspects of the hero’s private life are recounted that have a bearing on the narrative or which fit the preconceived categories of heroicization. These remarks lead us to my final section, and here we can return to Brown. Scholars have wondered whether there was a growing interest in biography in early Christianity and late antiquity going hand in hand with a new sense of personhood and the individual. Augustine’s Confessions, which Brown expounded so sensitively in Augustine of Hippo, has often been cited as an example of a real spiritual autobiography, apparently the first such to be written in antiquity. But others emphasize the ruthlessness with which Augustine concentrates on a limited range of themes, most of all his own dialogue with God, which makes the puzzling last three books explicable as part of a long and continuous sequence of thought.45 Much is left out that would have been included in a modern biography. A modern work whose author no doubt had Augustine in mind is Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua (1875), in which virtually nothing is said in its austere pages about Newman’s personal or private life, only about his spiritual development; his many surviving letters show that it gives a very incomplete picture of Newman as a man, or even of the events of his life. The same is true of Augustine’s Confessions. Brown lent himself to the enterprise of exploring the history of the individual in late antiquity when he agreed to take part in the French enterprise of writing about ‘private life’ in the early Christian and late antique periods. But problems remain, not least the looseness of the term ‘private life’. Is it about the ordinary details of living, housing, domestic equipment, utensils and so on? This is indeed part of what contributors to the Veyne volume have written about. Is it about interior consciousness? There is little direct evidence to use. Or was it in fact seen by the editor and participants in a more limited way, in terms of sexual attitudes? Foucault wrote of the self in the context of a history of sexuality, and so essentially did Brown, while Veyne’s own influential, if now somewhat controversial, paper was focused on marriage.46 In practice the constraints imposed on attempts to write about private feelings, emotions or sexuality in late antiquity when so many of the texts themselves are so highly artful and self-conscious render these projects

44 On the connection of martyr accounts with the literary production of second-century Asia Minor see Bowersock 1995, especially chapter 3; Perkins 1995. 45 See Clark 1993 and cf. Brown 1967, 167: ‘The Confessions are a masterpiece of strictly intellectual autobiography. Augustine communicates such a sense of intense personal involvement in the ideas he is handling that we are made to forget that it is an exceptionally difficult book’. [A newer edition with an epilogue appeared in 2000, also published by Faber, but references and quotations are taken from the original publication.] 46 Veyne 1978.

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perilous from the start. Among the literary texts collections of letters seem the most promising material, but these too are deeply conditioned by rhetorical tropes [and tend to be preserved in collections with agendas of their own]; certainly the mass of literature about the desert fathers on which Brown partly draws in ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ is so shot through and through with ideological, romantic and literary themes that its purpose must be seriously questioned before any attempt to use it ‘straight’.47 It is a remarkable feature of the period that individual women should also have become the subjects of Lives. Arnaldo Momigliano’s late paper on the Life of Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa reminds us how remarkable it was that an educated bishop from the upper class chose to write about his sister.48 There were soon other Lives of women, like the Life of Melania and many more.49 Gregory of Nazianzus wrote about his mother, and an autobiographical poem about himself. Perhaps the most famous of all are Augustine’s words about his mother, Monica, in the Confessions.50 Some of these texts bear the mark of real feeling and the phenomenon must surely be seen as connected with Christianization and with the construction of the person. But women also featured in the pagan ascetic writings, for instance the wives and female relatives of philosophers like Porphyry’s wife Marcella, who form a topic of attention rivalling the Christian ones, and whose stories like theirs exemplify the intellectual context of this apparently ‘personal’ literature. Yet while some real and indeed forceful women become highly visible in late antiquity (Olympias, the Elder and Younger Melanias, Jerome’s female friends, and even the mysterious Egeria) the ground is often unsafe. Despite the fact that Palladius’ Lausiac History has a whole section on holy women, in the Sayings and Lives of the desert fathers for every female ‘desert mother’ like Syncletica (who is incidentally almost entirely a mouthpiece for philosophical sayings)51 there are dozens of gender-bound desert fathers. The reformed prostitutes and fallen women who feature in the early Byzantine texts, like Pelagia or Mary of Egypt, are almost entirely rhetorical constructions composed of clichés of the gender discourse that was a central phenomenon in late antiquity.52 Thecla herself, one of the major female role models for real women in late antiquity, is after all a wholly fictional character.

47 See Cameron 1993. 48 Momigliano 1985 [see chapter 8 above]. 49 Including striking, if sometimes fictionalized, examples from the Syriac material on which Brown drew in ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’; cf. Theodoret, Historia Religiosa, Peterosa (one of Brown’s texts) and Brock and Harvey 1987. On Melania see Clark 1984 [and Clark 2021]. 50 Cf. Brown 1967, 29: ‘Few mothers can survive being presented to us exclusively in terms of what they have come to mean to their sons, much less to a son as complicated as Augustine’. 51 The fifth-century Vita S. Syncleticae (BHG 1694) attributed to Athanasius is translated by Elizabeth Castelli in Wimbush 1990, 265–311. 52 See e.g. Cameron 1994 [reprinted with an afterword, in North and Price 2011, 505–30]. In general, Clark 1993a.

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The ‘real’ woman of early Christian and late antique texts is an elusive creature. She is even more constructed than the men.53 For late antiquity, at least, the focus has moved from the anthropological approach of ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ to the study of discourse. I have been intrigued by the question of whether the ascetic urge could also be seen to extend to culture and society at large.54 This is the premise of Harpham’s book and it is assumed, though in unexplained ways, by Brown and Markus, the latter in the argument of Markus’s The End of Ancient Christianity and the former in the concluding pages of Authority and the Sacred. Yet this is a very large assumption. It begs the question of how far the asceticism we see in the texts of late antiquity really did operate in society at large. Might it not be primarily a textual matter, internal to writing? As I have suggested, the process of Christianization is one of Brown’s main themes. Yet determining the markers of Christianization in late antiquity is very difficult. Much of the disagreement between those who have written about it recently is not a real disagreement55 but arises from the fact that scholars are using different markers, different diagnostic tools. This is as true for judgements on the fourth century, as it is for later periods. According to Brown and Markus asceticism brought a kind of ‘closing-in’ of society, a narrowing of possibilities, a shrinkage of horizons. The closure is identified with a Christian society, but in the relevant passages both write primarily of the west.56 That is something to remember. In my own paper, as in the last chapter of Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire,57 I was interested in arguing for the steady development of a Christian authoritarian discourse – rule-bound – and I saw asceticism and its rhetorical expression as contributing towards that. In the paper I was interested in applying this to Byzantium, both because I was dissatisfied with Brown and Markus’s failure to deal with the eastern empire, or rather, with the assumption on Brown’s part that everything had already ‘closed in’, and because I was already thinking about the question of heresy and heresiology in the early Byzantine period, for Byzantium is certainly marked in various stages of its history by a strong sense of defending orthodoxy against heresy. There is a danger in these arguments. It is that of going along unwittingly with the stereotype of Byzantium as an unchanging, theocratic and ‘closed’ society. That is a view against which I have argued and which has been challenged by 53 Clark 1994. [Of course Christian women were real enough in themselves, and included for instance the large numbers in the female monastery under the leadership of the fifth-century Shenoute of Atripe; on the other hand the female characters in Methodius’ Symposium (early fourth century) are literary and philosophical.] 54 Cameron 1995 [chapter 12 above]. 55 For example, MacMullen 1986 starts from a completely different idea of what constitutes Christianity than, say, Barnes 1995 [to which one must now add Cameron 2011]. 56 See Markus 1990, chapter 14, ‘Within Sight of the End’; cf. 225, referring to ‘epistemological excision’. 57 Cameron 1991, chapter 6.

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others, though it is still very persistent.58 But I believe that Byzantinists like scholars of early Christianity and late antiquity should be trying to understand discourse, the rhetorical strategies which combine to produce sets of ideas and practice which in turn determine the nature of culture. This is the element which I find most wanting in the otherwise enormously stimulating work of Peter Brown. Recently I have been trying to use the insights from sociology of knowledge to understand the very difficult question of the Byzantine ‘dark ages’, a period from which (contrary to common views) there is a very large amount of surviving literature, even if it is a type of literature which is usually written off as theological. But that is quite another story. Meanwhile we need to understand to what extent the apparent focus on the person in the early Christian period is in fact a matter of texts, and why they lead in such a direction. Some of the contributions to the collections edited by Wimbush make this point very clearly. A final question: in what way should we now approach the issue of the holy man? As religious history, as social anthropology, or as a literary project? Are they compatible? But if not, can they be separated, and should they be?

Bibliography Anderson, Graham 1994. Sage, Saint and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire. London: Routledge. Barnes, Timothy D. 1995. ‘Statistics and the Conversion of the Roman Aristocracy’, JRS 85: 135–47. Bowersock, Glen W. 1995. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brock, Sebastian and Harvey, Susan Ashbrook eds. 1987. Holy Women of the Syrian Orient. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Brown, Peter 1967. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. London: Faber & Faber. Brown, Peter 1971. ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antique Society’, JRS 61: 80–101. Brown, Peter 1971a. The World of Late Antiquity, from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, AD 250–750. London: Thames and Hudson. Brown, Peter 1972. Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine. London: Faber & Faber. Brown, Peter 1973. ‘A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy’, EHR 346: 1–34. Brown, Peter 1976. ‘Town, Village and Holy Man: The Case of Syria’. In Assimilation et résistance à la culture gréco-romaine dans le monde ancien, edited by Dionysie M. PIppidi, 213–30. Paris: Editura Academiei 1976, reprinted in Brown, Peter 1982, 173–65. Brown, Peter 1976a. ‘Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity: A Parting of the Ways’. In The Orthodox Churches and the West, Studies in Church History 13, edited by Derek Baker, 1–24. Oxford: Blackwell, reprinted in Brown, Peter 1982, 166–206.

58 Cameron 1992 [and Cameron 2014 and elsewhere]; Kazhdan and Constable 1982.

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Brown, Peter 1977. Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours. The Stenton Lecture, University of Reading 1976. Reading: University of Reading Press, reprinted in Brown, Peter 1982, 222–50. Brown, Peter 1978. The Making of Late Antiquity. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Brown, Peter 1981. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Peter 1982. Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Peter 1983. ‘The Saint as Exemplar’, Representations 2: 1–25. Brown, Peter 1985. ‘Antiquité tardive’. In De l’empire romain à l’an mil, vol. 1 of Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby eds., Histoire de la vie privée, edited by Paul Veyne, 226–99. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. English Translation Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Brown, Peter 1988. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, Peter 1992. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. The Curti Lectures. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, Peter 1995. Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Peter 1996. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200– 1000. Oxford: Blackwell. Brown, Peter 1998. ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antique Society. 1971–1997’, JECS 6.1: 353–76. Bynum, Caroline Walker 1995. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200– 1336. New York: Columbia University Press. Cameron, Alan 2011. The Last Pagans of Rome. New York: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil 1986. ‘Redrawing the Map: Early Christian Territory after Foucault’, JRS 76: 266–71. Cameron, Averil 1991. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cameron, Averil 1992. The Use and Abuse of Byzantium. Inaugural Lecture, King’s College London. Cameron, Averil 1993. ‘Desert Mothers: Women Ascetics in Early Christian Egypt’. In Women as Teachers and Disciples in Traditional and New Religions, edited by Elizabeth Puttick and Peter B. Clarke, 11–24. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Cameron, Averil 1994. ‘Early Christianity and the Discourse of Female Desire’. In Women in Ancient Society: An Illusion of the Night, edited by Susan Fischler, Leonie J. Archer and Maria Wyke, 152–68. London: Macmillan, reprinted in North, John A and Price, Simon R.F. eds. 2011. Cameron, Averil 1995. ‘Ascetic Closure and the End of Antiquity’. In Wimbush, Vincent L. and Valantasis, Richard eds. 1995, 147–61. Cameron, Averil 2000. ‘Form and Meaning: The Vita Constantini and the Vita Antonii’. In Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, edited by Tomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau, 72–88. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cameron, Averil 2014. Byzantine Matters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cameron, Averil and Gaul, Niels eds. 2017. Dialogues and Debate from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium. Abingdon: Routledge. Cameron, Averil and Hall, Stuart G. 1999. Eusebius, Life of Constantine. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

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Clark, Elizabeth A. 1984. The Life of Melania the Younger: Introduction, Translation and Commentary. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Clark, Elizabeth A. 1994. ‘Ideology, History and the Construction of “Woman” in Late Ancient Christianity’, JECS 2: 155–68. Clark, Elizabeth A. 2021. Melania the Younger: From Rome to Jerusalem. New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, Gillian 1989. Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life. Translated Texts for Historians 8. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Clark, Gillian 1993. Augustine: The Confessions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Gillian 1993a. Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Gillian 1996. ‘“The Bright Frontier of Friendship”. Augustine and the Christian Body as Frontier’. In Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, edited by Ralph W. Mathisen and Hagit S. Sivan, 217–29. Aldershot: Ashgate. Davies, Stevan L. 1980. The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts. London: Feffer and Simons. Dillon, John. 1995. ‘Rejecting the Body, Refining the Body: Some Remarks on the Development of Platonist Asceticism’. In Wimbush, Vincent L. and Valantasis, Richard eds. 1995, 80–87. Edwards, Mark 1997. ‘Simon Magus, the Bad Samaritan’. In Edwards, Mark and Swain, Simon eds. 1997, 69–91. Edwards, Mark J. and Swain, Simon eds. 1997. Portraits: Biographical Representation in the Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fowden, Garth 1982. ‘The Pagan Holy Man in Late Antique Society’, JHS 102: 33–59. Goldhill, Simon 1995. Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hackel, Serge ed. 1981. The Byzantine Saint. London: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. Kazhdan, Alexander and Constable, Giles 1982. People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. MacMullen, Ramsay 1986. ‘What Difference Did Christianity Make?’, Historia 15: 322–43. MacMullen, Ramsay 1997. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Markus, Robert A. 1990. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mathew, Gervase 1963. Byzantine Aesthetics. London: John Murray. Miller, Patricia Cox 1993. ‘“The Blazing Body”: Ascetic Desire in Jerome’s Letter to Eustochium’, JECS 1: 21–45. Miller, Patricia Cox 1994. ‘Desert Asceticism and “the Body from Nowhere”’, JECS 2: 137–53. Misch, Georg 1951. A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. English Translation, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1985. ‘The Life of St Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa’. In The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in Honor of Chester G. Star, edited by Josiah Ober and John W. Eadie, 443–58. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Montserrat, Dominic ed. 1998. Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity. London: Routledge. Morgan, John R. and Stoneman, Richard eds. 1994. Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context London: Routledge.

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Mortley, Raoul 1996. The Idea of Universal History: From Hellenistic Philosophy to Early Christian Historiography. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. North, John A. and Price, Simon R.F. eds. 2011. The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews and Christians, Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perkins, Judith 1995. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. London: Routledge. Rousselle, Aline 1992. ‘Body Politics in Ancient Rome’. In A History of Women in the West 1: From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints, edited by Pauline Pantel, 296–337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Veyne, Paul 1978. ‘La famille et l’amour sous le haut empire romain’, Annales 33.1: 35–63. Wimbush, Vincent L. ed. 1990. Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Wimbush, Vincent L. and Valantasis, Richard eds. 1995. Asceticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

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I felt honoured when I was invited to give the discorso inaugurale or opening lecture at the annual gathering of medievalists in Spoleto in 1997, the theme of which was social and cultural change in Europe from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, picking up the similar theme treated at Spoleto in 1962. It was an experience in itself to be there and it brought home to me some profound differences between Italian academic life and what I was used to. The conference was run on strictly hierarchical lines and dominated by senior professors, the pezzi grossi, as Chris Wickham called them, and they regarded my lecture as being very Anglo-Saxon, not least because I stood up to deliver it instead of sitting and being inaudible. Although I was the prestigious opening speaker no seat was reserved for me at the front of the audience, all being destined for the pezzi grossi, and no attempt was made to reach out to me or include me in the various lunches and dinners. My lack of Italian did not help, and I was glad that my friends Chris Wickham and Leslie Brubaker were also there. They took me out in their car for instance to the Deruta ceramics workshop where we all bought items; later Rita Lizzi Testa when visiting in the UK brought a fine large Deruta platter as a present, which I still have and value very much. This was 1997 and I chose in my lecture to return to and revise a subject I had treated earlier, change in the seventh century, which I now interpreted differently, having given up not only the negativity about the seventh century but also the functionalism I had taken especially from John Haldon’s book, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, published in 1990, whose subtitle was The Transformation of a Culture (and which defined its coverage as beginning in AD 610, accepting the idea of a major break in the early seventh century and stressing the seventh century’s many negative features). Haldon himself published a revision of that book, The Empire That Would Not Die, published in 2016 and based on a lecture series given at Harvard but not going later than the eighth century. My lecture at Spoleto was broader and chimed in with Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, edited by Bowersock, Brown and Grabar. It was an optimistic statement about late antiquity that reflected the situation in 1998. [It may now even seem something of a period piece, and indeed] not many years later I addressed similar issues somewhat differently and less enthusiastically in 184

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‘The Long Late Antiquity’ and there have been many changes since, including a redefinition of ‘crisis’ and the ‘linguistic turn’ now well established and exemplified especially in the work of Elizabeth A. Clark and in JECS. Given more recent historical events the post–Cold War optimism of the 1990s now seems very far away. My Spoleto paper is included here both because it is hard to access and because it illustrates how the field has developed and is a very clear example of that post–Cold War optimism – an optimism that now feels very far away. It was aimed at an audience that probably still thought in more traditional terms, and indeed at the time it was something of a manifesto. Wolfgang Liebeschuetz, a staunch defender of the decline hypothesis, took me to task for it in 2001 and 2003, claiming that I was a relativist, a proponent of the ‘third way’ and a ‘Blairite’, that is, adopting the agendas of the Labour government in the UK that was in power from 1997 to 2007, and representing an ‘Anglo-American model of late antique studies’; according to him it was my paper that inspired the Italian scholar Andrea Giardina in 1999 to write his classic rebuttal. I also looked forward to Byzantium as a continuation of late antiquity, as I have argued since, though I was perhaps too optimistic in its claims about changes of approach in the wider discipline of Byzantine studies. Much in my lecture could now be modified in the light of subsequent scholarship and no doubt my optimism went too far even at the time. My paper was published in the volume that resulted from the congress even though the audience at Spoleto found it unfamiliar and probably over-stated. Its concluding sentence expresses very well the extent to which I had embraced the philosophy of The World of Late Antiquity. I have not attempted to refer to the massive later literature (which would hardly have been possible) and I have done so only very sparingly. I have edited the text somewhat to remove verbosities of style but without modifying the content. –––––––––

This congress is about social and cultural change from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. The object of our attention is a period of crisis, or rather, a series of crises. What those crises were is variously given, with answers ranging from the ‘fall’ of the Roman empire in the west in AD 476 to the Arab conquests of the early seventh century and the supposed dark ages. The coronation of Charlemagne in AD 800 has also been seen as a defining moment, even if not exactly a crisis. And there are many other candidates. The decline and fall of empires is one of the great themes of history, and the decline and fall of the Roman empire has been defined for us since the Enlightenment as one of the greatest topics on which a historian might write. And if there is change, we might assume, surely there must be crisis? Does not significant social and cultural change require some kind of crisis or deficiency as the driving factor? A functional view of social and cultural change seems to demand just such a stimulus as an explanatory tool and explanation is what historians are trained to attempt. It seems necessary therefore first to diagnose crisis in the late Roman 185

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state, whether external, in the shape of invasion, or internal, in the shape of political and economic weakness and eventual collapse, in order to be able to explain the changes that were to produce the medieval world. We may debate whether the internal or external factors were the most serious, but can we do without the crisis diagnosis altogether? [The question is still open following Mischa Meier’s strong statement about sixth-century crisis and the heavy emphasis now laid on environmental change and the effects of the Justinianic plague.] Already in a famous article published many years ago, Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out that contemporaries were strangely silent about this supposedly great event, the fall of the western empire in AD 476.1 There is a kind of consensus today that the concept of crisis is no longer appropriate and that instead we should use terms which are relatively value-free, such as ‘change’ and ‘transformation’. Accordingly the title of the recent European Science Foundation project involving historians from a wide range of countries and dealing exactly with our period is in fact The Transformation of the Roman World.2 It seems to suggest that change was not so dramatic as the ‘crisis’ framework implies; rather, it was in fact slow and involved multiple smaller changes at all levels of society. On this model assimilation and acculturation are more appealing ways of reading cultural change than imperial decrees or military conquest. It is a model which implies continuities as well as change and a model which invites historians to look across cultural boundaries rather than accept traditional categories. It is subversive of political and chronological divisions and even of geographical ones [indeed the ESF project was explicitly intended to bring historians with differing traditions together].3 Why then is such a model now appropriate? It seems to me that there is an obvious correlation between the experience of the late twentieth century and the interpretation of this earlier transition.4 Centralised power is no longer to our taste. Indeed, our generation has, even if only temporarily, lost faith in empires and even in political structures. Grand theory has for the moment been ousted from its former supremacy. It does not any longer seem appropriate, therefore, to pose our problem in terms of dramatic political changes or the fall of an empire. Or to put 1 Momigliano 1973. 2 The full title of the project, which ran from 1992 to 1997 under the direction of Javier Arce, Evangelos Chrysos and Ian Wood, was The Transformation of the Roman World, AD 400–900. See for further definition Webster and Brown 1997, the catalogue of five linked exhibitions in different European venues. The organisers did not see it as their task to impose a particular view, but rather to encourage participants in their various groups to generate their own focus and methodology. 3 A longterm and panoramic view of this series of changes is also found in Brown 1996. Bois 1992 argues for a continuity of the ‘ancient’ model until the rise of trade after AD 1000 carried with it the transition to feudalism, but Bois has not taken into account the revisionism of ancient historians on such matters, or even of Finley 1985, with Garnsey, Hopkins and Whittaker 1983. 4 Major enterprises lacking the old emphasis on grand theory are vols. XIII and XIV of the new Cambridge Ancient History [1998 and 2000], covering the period from AD 337 to 600. Cf. also Giardina 1986, especially vol. IV, Tradizioni dei classici. Trasformazioni della cultura; Schiavone 1993. Lefort, Morrisson and Abadie-Reynal 1989 considers historical change in a comparable way while also moving the focus towards the east.

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it another way, the fall of empires has been seen in our own recent experience to consist in a combination of disintegration and the spontaneous seizing of autonomy from below. Power has shifted. The absence of power has been revealed. Where it exists it is diffused throughout society in multiple places and multiple ways. No-one can predict how this will turn out. In the same way the process of ‘transition’ from late antiquity to the Middle Ages can be seen in terms of a multitude of diverse changes, small and large, conscious and unconscious. In such conditions, to study the actual spread of ideas and social practices becomes the most pressing need for us as historians in order to understand how these changes came about, especially in a society still traditional and without modern means of communication.5 Even if not postmodernism, then certainly cultural pluralism is a dominant influence on current historical thinking. Accustomed in our own society to the idea and increasingly to the ‘political correctness’ of such an approach (as Liebeschuetz was to term it), it is natural to bring the same thoughts to bear on late antique and medieval culture. Seen through the prism of Brown 1971, for example, late antiquity can be viewed as a kaleidoscope, composed of ever-shifting pieces. In the same way the transition to the medieval has been presented in terms of upsetting the traditional norms and viewing things differently. Many historians have been writing recently about the seventh century in the east, which emerges from this scrutiny no longer as a dark age but as another time of multiple kinds of activity, of changes at local level and in the centre.6 Even the sixth century, in which the reign of Justinian has over several centuries provided the materials for students of autocracy, Catholic orthodoxy and imperial control of the church, is beginning to dissolve into contradiction.7 Indeed, its leading historian, Procopius, if read in this way, can be seen to offer a complex and contradictory discourse whereby the overt message is constantly subverted by different views.8 Meanwhile the once despised Chronicle of John Malalas, apparently the very opposite of the high imperial ideology of Procopius’s Wars, is revealed as at once complex and nearer in many respects to the realities of sixth-century life.9 Other examples easily rise to mind. Henri Pirenne taught us to replace the ‘fall’ of the western empire in AD 476 as our conception of the key moment in the break between east and west in the Mediterranean world with that of the Arab conquest, and especially with the halting of the Arab advance in the west and the rise of Charlemagne.10 Now that familiar and useful heuristic model must be given up

5 Communication is a theme worth studying: Cameron 1997. 6 See the essays in Cameron 1996 but contrast Haldon 1990. 7 Allen and Jeffreys 1996 [as I write in 2022 the view of Justinian in the eyes of many historians is very negative]. 8 Cameron 1985. 9 For this see Jeffreys, Jeffreys and Scott et al. 1986; Jeffreys, Elizabeth with Croke and Scott 1990. 10 Pirenne 1939 [chapter 4 above], on which see Brown 1974; Hodges and Whitehouse 1983; Barnish 1989.

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[although the key importance of Charlemagne is stressed again by Judith Herrin in 2020]. All across the Mediterranean world in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries we can see, instead of linear change, a mesh of continuities and similarities. Artefacts and ideas recur in places far apart, as is spectacularly revealed in connection with the European Science Foundation Project.11 Another major theme is the demonstration of the interconnection of the emerging Islamic culture and existing forces in the eastern provinces. On this view there was no dramatic break: rather, Islam grew slowly, and was much influenced by Hellenic and Judaic elements [indeed, grew from them], while the social and cultural milieu of the Umayyads relied upon the existing social and cultural texture of the Byzantine provinces.12 A series of spectacular discoveries in recent years including the mosaics of Cyprus and Apamea and most especially the late antique and Umayyad period mosaics of Jordan also show the vitality of existing cultural life and its persistence long after the establishment of Umayyad rule and the conventional break in historical continuity in the eastern provinces.13 There were of course great local variations. North Africa after the late seventh century remains a mystery for historians of Rome and Byzantium through lack of direct evidence [an impression which is at last being challenged].14 But the idea that in general the first wave of the Arab conquests marked a great divide is no longer tenable. Even while the political system changed, archaeology and other evidence shows a tenacity and a continuity of cultural forms in many parts of the Mediterranean world until a much later period, and some historians, not without plausibility [and even more so now], present Islamic culture not as the destroyer but as the culmination of that of late antiquity.15 Cultural pluralism also leads historians to consider places and topics outside the traditional canon. Our studies now include Scandinavia and the Low Countries, and in the east, not just Syria and Mesopotamia but also the Yemen, Axum, Nubia.16 In the past generation archaeology has revolutionized the study of this period. It is as central to understanding the processes of settlement and acculturation as the transformation of the city in late antiquity. It is no longer possible to study the city solely or chiefly as an administrative unit. Instead, consciousness of the topography, artefacts and visual appearance of late antique and early medieval cities now pervades everything written about them. There are few fields left where specialists can remain immune to the power of the material evidence, or now to 11 See above. 12 This view is inherent in Bowersock 1990 and Fowden 1993. See also the essays in Cameron, King and Conrad 1992–95. 13 For these see Bowersock 1990, with Piccirillo 1992; Schick 1996; continuity and vitality in economic and cultural life in the Near East in the sixth and into the seventh century are emphasised by Whittow 1990 and by Cameron 1993, 152–200 [rev. ed. 2011]; see Walmsley 1996; cf. WardPerkins 1996. 14 See Cameron 1996, VII and VIII; Mattingly and Hitchner 1995. 15 So e.g. Fowden 1993 [with Fowden 2013]. 16 Strikingly exemplified in Brown 1996.

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the equally powerful influence of symbolic capital as a dynamic factor in bring about change. Topics such as the history of women, or the study of rhetoric and communication, are now central. So too in even the field of literary evidence – the standard texts are not displaced but they have been joined by a plethora of others previously given less attention. These include apocryphal texts, pseudepigrapha and the vast range of religious literature produced for edification and instruction – questions and answers, catecheses, florilegia and so on. The growth of legend and the circulation of popular ideas have been particularly fruitful, and imaginatively studied by historians such as Gilbert Dagron.17 Overall indeed the subversion of the canon is as evident in the study of our period as it is to literary studies [for which see further Cameron 2002]. One of the casualties of this process must surely be the view of Byzantium as a monolithic and theocratic state. Most of us have had built into our education the concept of a fragmented west and a unified and static eastern empire preserving its culture to the end, while the world changed around it. Histories of Byzantium now challenge this view, and Philip Rousseau has recently argued that the division between the fragmented west and this unchanging east is itself an illusion.18 Byzantinists are currently addressing issues such as originality and change and bringing into the centre of attention aspects of Byzantine culture which used to be left aside for specialist theologians or liturgists or musicologists. There can be few historical disciplines, moreover, where the importance of visual art is more urgently realised than Byzantium. Byzantine studies, a discipline until recently relatively undeveloped in comparison with the study of the medieval west, has become a locus of sophisticated methodology and innovative and uncanonical work. The American-based Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium,19 an encyclopaedia of Byzantine culture with emphases on material life and the everyday and very different in scope and tone from the traditional focus on emperors, Church and administration, was a true product of the democratization of a field of study. Much of this work, especially the interpretation of archaeological evidence including ceramics and seals, is still very much under way. In such circumstances we can only be open-ended in our judgements. The new multi-author histories will not impose grand schemes of historical explanation but rather allow for new thoughts and new evidence. They are influenced by such endeavours as The History of Private Life edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby,20 and couched in terms of the probable and the possible, not the certain. Against these new perceptions stand the old themes of decline and fall, the monolithic Byzantium, the dark ages, the identity of the invading peoples and the centrality of events, political narrative and war. Now in contrast the chronology of events is no longer of such central interest unless as part of our understanding of 17 18 19 20

Dagron 1981, 1984, 1984a, IV. Rousseau 1996. Kazhdan and Talbot et al. 1991. Ariès and Duby 1985–87.

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the way in which contemporaries themselves expressed their thinking about historical time. Chronicle and chronography alike have emerged as means to be used in the interest of evolving ideologies. Ethnic identity is not fixed and determined; indeed the historians of the peoples new to written history – Jordanes, Gregory of Tours – helped to create it.21 They ‘invented’ a history, using methods including genealogy, like the similar ‘invention of traditions’ in other periods including our own.22 To look eastward, Syrian Monophysites also reinvented themselves and gave themselves an identity as Jacobites from the middle of the sixth century after Justinian’s unsuccessful attempt to court them by forcing imperial policies on an unwilling church. Most successful of all these new groups were the Arabs who followed Muhammad and gave themselves a new religion capable of lasting until the present day. One of the key achievements of recent scholarship has been to produce a far more grounded and nuanced picture of the social and cultural situation in Syria and Palestine after the first Arab incursions of the seventh century. Whereas for example standard histories of Palestine would regularly begin or end with AD 634 or 640, coinciding with the Arab invasions,23 it can now be seen that for much of the population life went on in much the same way as before. Both the material evidence and the textual records show continuity and interaction between the local population and the newcomers. There was no dramatic change, and while there was of course a degree of uncertainty and disruption individuals like the writer Anastasius of Sinai were still able to travel widely and to pay more attention in their writings to combating the errors of Monophysite Christianity than of Islam. Anastasius was aware of a few specific Islamic precepts but did not as far as we know think it worthwhile to refute them in detail. And when John of Damascus went further in that direction in the next century it was to present Islam in the guise of a Christian heresy.24 Contemporary perceptions of crisis varied. Some from the old landowning classes in the west complained about the newcomers; others adapted to new systems and served new masters. Unlike some others of the western aristocrats who fled to Constantinople from the Gothic war, Cassiodorus was willing to return to war-torn Italy and establish his monastery there.25 He evidently believed that this would still be possible, and it was. There were naturally lamentations about the fall of Jerusalem to the Persians in AD 614 and the Persian occupation of the eastern provinces.26 When Constantinople was under siege in AD 626 it looked as though the city’s fate was sealed, but it survived; anxiety gave way to triumph.

21 22 23 24 25 26

Goffart 1988; Heather 1991. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983. So e.g. Alon 1981, 1984; Gil 1992. See e.g. Cameron 1997a. O’Donnell 1979. Memorably expressed by Sophronius, the future patriarch of Jerusalem, and well captured in Wilken 1992, 216–32.

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There was no expectation that the emperor Heraclius, newly victorious over the Persians, would soon be faced with another invader from the east. Many [especially monks and clerics] migrated from Egypt and Palestine in the face of the Persian attacks to Sicily and Italy and were able to settle there and establish an important Greek presence for some centuries. When the Arabs did overrun Syria and Palestine Maximus Confessor, writing from Carthage, thought that the end was near,27 but a closer look shows that travel was still possible in Umayyad Syria and mosaics continued to be laid down and repaired in Christian churches;28 it took fifty years or more before awareness of Islamic teaching began to percolate into the minds of Christian theological writers. Some thought that the end of the world was coming and wrote works of apocalyptic predicting a last emperor who would be a new Constantine.29 Apocryphal texts were produced and circulated widely, asserting Christian triumph over the Jews or justifying the primacy of Rome through the legend of the baptism of Constantine by Sylvester.30 It was possible even after Jerusalem was in Arab hands for Christian apologists to claim that Christianity held sway from the east to the far west, from the eastern desert to Britain. Strange things happened. Also in the seventh century, the eastern emperor Constans II made a visit to Rome, where in the name of east-west concord he plundered its treasures and established his court in Sicily; according to the Liber Pontificalis further depredations took place there. But cultural links were maintained. Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury in England, a Greek-speaker from Tarsus who had received the best education in Constantinople, established a scriptorium, and through his own efforts and those of others made works of Greek learning known in Britain.31 Imaginative texts proliferated and were translated and circulated during the period over a wide area of the Mediterranean. Many of the apocryphal and legendary narratives, as well as hagiographic literature, exist in numerous versions in different languages and quite often not in the original form. The processes by which this happened, which have to do with the reading practices of monks and lay people, are still somewhat mysterious. But just as Paul Peeters long ago demonstrated, the interplay and the diffusion of Greek and ‘oriental’ legends, so recently Gilbert Dagron has pointed to the existence of an important stratum of imagination and belief which can be traced especially in the later part of our period, as people no longer educated in the classics or having access to books equipped themselves with new histories.32 Collections of miracle stories grew up around shrines, tales of holy men and women abounded, and edifying literature was produced. Extracts from the fathers and sets of questions and answers filled

27 28 29 30 31 32

See Dagron and Déroche 1990. For examples see Piccirillo in Bienkowski 1996, 110–32. Magdalino 1993. For an introduction to the Constantine legends see Lieu in Lieu and Montserrat 1996, 97–146. On Theodore, Lapidge 1995. Peeters 1950.

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some of the needs of people dislocated and unsure in new social conditions. Contemporaries in our world of transition were wonderfully resourceful. They used their energies to adapt, to establish new centres of religious devotion, to make sense of their world in new ways. They wrote new histories to establish their own past, histories of the Goths, or of Britain, chronicles of Spain or Syria, handbooks to the antiquities of Constantinople. In the present congress we returned deliberately to a theme last treated thirtyfive years ago in the congress of 1961, whose proceedings were published in these Settimane in the following year under the title Il passaggio dall’antichità al Medievo in Occidente. How have perceptions of the subject changed since then? It is worth reminding ourselves that Santo Mazzarino’s The End of the Ancient World had appeared in Italian only three years earlier, and that neither Momigliano’s edited collection of essays The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century nor Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity had yet been published.33 Not only our perception of the topic but also the available evidence has changed. For example, when A.H.M. Jones published his Later Roman Empire in 1994 he did so with little recourse to archaeological material, even though he had travelled and taken part in such investigations himself.34 This would not be possible today; indeed, the growth and study of archaeological evidence, particularly ceramic evidence, is the biggest single contributor to our changed view. Again, new critical editions of hitherto unsatisfactory texts have made available some fields of study to entirely new perceptions; one such field is seventh-century Palestine, the understanding of which is being transformed by such work;35 another is religious history, where new editions of the acts of ecumenical councils have made possible wholly new interpretations. We are far more conscious now than in 1962 of the bordering areas of the Roman empire and those beyond its borders. As I have already said, frontiers have dissolved or become metaphorical subjects themselves,36 while it would now be considered defective in the extreme to fail to draw on literature in languages other than Greek and Latin – Syriac for instance. We have also moved from the theme of the western Mediterranean versus the eastern to a consideration of the genesis of Europe.37 And as geographical and cultural barriers have broken down in the face of a broader understanding of our topic, so have chronological divisions. Perhaps one of the most significant changes since 1962, certainly in Anglo-Saxon scholarship, has been the admission of Byzantium as a legitimate component in the topic of the transition from late Antiquity to the medieval world. In Peter Brown’s seminal World of Late Antiquity late antiquity ended in the mid-eighth century. According to the European Science Foundation

33 34 35 36 37

Mazzarino 1959; Momigliano 1963 [chapter 7 above]; Brown 1971 [chapter 11 above]. Jones 1964 [chapter 5 above]; Brown 1972, 46–73. See Flusin 1992. See Rousselle 1995; Mathisen and Sivan 1996. From many broad surveys see Davies 1996; Roberts 1997. [However, recent publications about the history of Europe in relation to late antiquity and Byzantium read very differently.]

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project the period of transition lasts until AD 900. It includes the critical period of Byzantine Iconoclasm, during which the popes in Rome were still deeply involved with the affairs of the east and considered themselves part of the universal church and continues well beyond the canonical date of AD 800, the coronation of Charlemagne. Since 1962 the discipline of Byzantine studies has become established in places where it hardly existed before and democratized in the sense that it is no longer the preserve of the practitioners of this or that specialization, and especially not of ecclesiastics. The place now given to Byzantium, that is to the eastern empire, in our present subject can be illustrated from the very lively attention given to the general topic of iconoclasm, and from the move of art history and considerations of visual representation from the periphery to the centre of concern.38 In all these ways the very nature of the activity in which we are engaged in studying this transitional period has changed since 1962. There has perhaps been a shift from a situation in which, with Momigliano’s edited volume published in 1963 in particular, attention focused very significantly on religious change to one which lays more stress on social, material and cultural factors. In all these ways the very nature of the activity in which we are engaged in studying this transitional period has indeed changed since 1962. The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity focused attention very significantly on religious change [see chapter 7 above].39 Peter Brown’s work may be said to have consistently contained the religious emphasis. But publications such as the Storia di Roma and the new Cambridge Ancient History lay much more stress on the debate about the late Roman economy and in general on the analysis of material evidence. The way was shown by Evelyne Patlagean in Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale.40 There have been attempts to reassess elements such as the taxation system or the role played by coinage.41 But what has not yet happened is any wholesale reassessment of the administrative history of the late Roman and early Byzantine state; when it comes this is likely to take the shape of allowing for cultural factors such as display and spectacle, or require a reinterpretation of evaluative terms like ‘corruption’ or ‘bureaucracy’. One of the liveliest of current debates concerning the history and transformation of this period concerns the history and transformation of cities.42 Indeed the city stands in itself for all the separate aspects of our subject. Its study requires archaeological as well as art-historical evidence; it is truly interdisciplinary. It presents problems of definition and ideology, for the city in the ancient world was the repository of culture. In our period not only were cities transformed but there was also a shift of emphasis towards rural life. The late antique holy man is often,

38 39 40 41 42

See the two volumes of Testi e Imaggine nell’alto medioevo 1994. Consolino 1995. Patlagean 1977 [chapter 9 above]. Hendy 1985. Out of an enormous recent bibliography one might cite Christie and Loseby 1996 [since when the bibliography has exploded].

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but need not be, a rural phenomenon but Christian sources across their wide range give attention both to villages and the rural population and to urban elites [chapter 13]. And the urban elites themselves move to or spring up in new sites where new cities grew. Faced with the dissolution of geographical and chronological markers recent research can be seen to have been searching for its own moments of change. Philip Rousseau has denied that the fifth century really saw either a divide between east and west or a momentous change in historical development. Among the current candidates for periods that may well be seen in that light, however, we find each of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. For the sixth century we can say that Edward Gibbon already saw Justinian as a kind of Janus figure, a contradiction whose reign saw or even helped to cause the end of one system and the beginning of another.43 An Australian collection has posed the question, ‘the sixth century – end or beginning?’. The contributors provide different answers. But they are not in doubt that in some way the sixth century and the reign of Justinian marked a significant moment in historical change. In turn the seventh century has been rescued from the dark ages and emerged as a critical time. It saw, besides the obvious warfare and political change, Archbishop Theodore’s British synod and a great deal of intense, even frenzied, activity between east and west. The roots of the iconoclast controversy can also be clearly traced in this century.44 As for the eighth century such is the present interest in issues of representation that the issue of iconoclasm has again become central. Again this makes for a chronologically longer period and a greater connection at this stage between Rome and Constantinople. In The Rise of Western Christendom Peter Brown sees the rise of western Christendom as spanning the period from Constantine to AD 1000 and involving historical development in places as far apart as Ireland, Scandinavia, Mesopotamia and Iran. Not only are Roman historians and medievalists brought together but also Byzantinists and orientalists. As for the date of AD 1000, this too is becoming familiar, for instance from the work of the Danish archaeologist Klaus Randsborg, who also places the shift here;45 it is equally implied in the study by Robert Bartlett of western expansion towards the east.46 This shift has to do with population growth and economic expansion, the effects of which can be clearly seen in provinces hitherto undeveloped such as mainland Greece.47 The Middle Ages have been pushed back; they no longer start either with the Germanic invasions or the Arab conquest and on this scenario even Islam becomes part of and integral to late antiquity. We are asked by the organizers of this congress to consider whether the models of ‘passage’ or ‘transition’ are appropriate, in that they necessarily imply movement 43 44 45 46 47

Cameron 1997b [chapter 1 above]. Cameron 1992, 1996, XII. Randsborg 1991 [and see now Fowden 2014]. Bartlett 1993. Harvey 1989.

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from one fixed point to another. Since 1962 one of the most fundamental developments in our field has been the increased awareness of the question of representation. One does not need to be a structuralist or postmodernist to see that the question of how we view things and how they appear to us is one of the major historical issues of today. We are all now attuned to the ambiguities and subtleties of textual and visual rhetoric and correspondingly cautious about any suspicion of essentialism. This may seem to some to amount to a loss of confidence, but the contrary is true. It has given historians a far greater sublety and a greater openness to alternative possibilities. Texts, evidence, artefacts, visual art – none of these now seem simple or straightforward. The text does not speak for itself. Nor do the picture, the statue or the image. We are the ones who make them speak.48 This new consciousness has transformed our ways of working and made us see some old problems in new ways. I am especially struck – though in this context not surprised – by the amount of attention given in recent years to the problem of Byzantine iconoclasm, on which indeed the nature of images and the status of texts were explicitly debated in contemporary sources. I was still a student in 1962 and brought up in a highly positivist tradition of ancient history. Thirty-five years later those methods I learned so well in the Oxford school of ancient history will no longer serve us. Since 1962 historians have become far more aware of the importance of visual art, not merely as ‘evidence’ but as an essential part of the cultural formation that is our subject and a particularly telling one, for here we inescapably confront issues of representation. Some recent work, such as that by Hans Belting, has wanted to contrast ancient and medieval images with the functioning of ‘art’ in modern times.49 Other art historians however, including Jas Elsner, have indirectly addressed the old questions of transition from the classical to the medieval. Elsner also explicitly addresses the question of the transformation of art from pagan to Christian,50 while the idea that Christian, and especially Byzantine, art became more ‘spiritual’ has been deconstructed by showing that Roman art is susceptible to a far more complex reading. The question is how contemporaries viewed their visual environment: the ‘spiritual’ icons of Byzantium are now seen to be highly intellectual. Not only does an icon like the famous Christ Antiphonetes speak but icons are to be read like texts. In the period of Byzantine iconoclasm writing becomes as charged for contemporaries as depiction and the unwritten tradition – memory – was given by iconophiles the same or superior status to the written. For the cultural historian texts and images must go together, as contemporaries occasionally saw: unusually if not uniquely the seventh-century writer Anastasius of Sinai included pictures 48 For an example of changing textual and visual representation see Cameron 1998. 49 Belting 1994. 50 Elsner 1996. [Elsner’s recent work replaces the chronological approach with one that recognises the continuing juxtaposition and spread of artistic themes across different cultures, and with issues of visual art, text and representation.]

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in his written works and discussed their status as a form of representation against that of his text. The interpretation of visual images was seen therefore as a delicate matter of reading. It is no longer clear that images functioned differently in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages; nor did Christians have a monopoly of meaning in Roman art, for Roman art was by no means straightforwardly mimetic. The interpretation of images was not a theme in 1962 but should be at the heart of the present congress. Religious change is also seen differently now, with a greater willingness to see its complexity, understand developing identities and allow for a wider range of factors. In the period covered by our congress, contemporaries lived in a world of choice; rarely did one system prevail, even in the Byzantine period. The work of the same Anastasius of Sinai reflects a world in which Jews, Christians and Muslims lived at close quarters with each other and Christians were divided among themselves, bewildered as to how to make their way through the thicket of possibilities. It was a world recognizably like our own. We need therefore to understand the processes by which religious identities were created: memory, tradition, ritual, myth, living and dynamic forces on which contemporaries drew in different ways. If I were to sum up the difference of perspective overall, I think it would be in terms of reception. Classical antiquity and the world of late antiquity look different now from the way they appeared in 1962, because we see them with different eyes. The idea of a chronological passage or transition from one period to the next has not altogether lost its force but it has certainly become more problematic. Historians now focus their gaze on different objects. The history of women, for example, gender, and still more the subtle and not so subtle effects of male writing and male gaze were subjects yet to be addressed in 1962. Historians are open to images, art historians to texts; material culture can no longer be ignored. Perhaps we are trying to do too much. Perhaps we have dissolved our very subject. That is the prerogative of the late twentieth century and the prerogative of history, to address and re-address the fundamental issues of our past and to do so in a way meaningful to our own generation and our own experience. Each age remembers the past and recreates the past in its own way. Our past is not the past of thirty-five years ago, and rightly so. For a historian as for any other individual the task of recreating the past is a matter of the functioning of memory, and memory is of its nature selective. Memory does not simply reproduce what is already known, but also uncovers what has been hidden. What drives the memory is mysterious and subjective, like history itself. The remembered and imagined past is the stuff of history and what makes history important for the present. To return finally to my title, the notion of crisis has chronological connotations. A crisis is a moment of intense danger after which comes either collapse or recovery. Some contemporaries in any age tend to see their own times in such terms. But when historians do it they need to be very sure of their ground. The days to follow in this congress, I suggest, will not be concerned with crisis but rather with the myriad changes on the ground that coincide with the passing of centuries. 196

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Bibliography Allen, Pauline and Jeffreys, Elizabeth eds. 1996. The Sixth Century: End or Beginning? Brisbane: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. Alon, Gedaliah 1981, 1984. The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (70–640 CE), 2 vols. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. Ariès, Philippe and Duby, Georges eds. 1985–1987. Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols. Paris: Éditions de Seuil. Barnish, Sam 1989. ‘The Transformation of Classical Cities and the Pirenne Thesis’, JRA 2: 385–400. Bartlett, Robert 1993. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350, 2nd ed. London: Penguin. Belting, Hans 1994. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art. English translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bienkowski, Piotr ed. 1996. The Art of Jordan. Stroud: Alan Sutton. Bois, Guy 1992. The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism. English translation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bowersock, Glen W. 1990. Hellenism in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowersock, Glen W., Brown, Peter and Grabar, Oleg eds. 1999. Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Peter 1971. The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, AD 250 to 750. London: Thames and Hudson. Brown, Peter 1972. Religion and Society in the Age of St Augustine. London: Faber & Faber. Brown, Peter 1974. ‘Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne’, Daedalus 103.1: 25–33. Brown, Peter 1996. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200– 1000. Oxford: Blackwell. Cameron, Averil 1985. Procopius and the Sixth Century. London: Duckworth. Cameron, Averil 1992. ‘The Language of Images: The Rise of Icon and Christian Representation’. In The Church and the Arts, edited by Diana Wood, 1–42. Studies in Church History 28, Oxford: Blackwell. Reprinted in Cameron. Averil 1996, XII. Cameron, Averil 1993. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity. London: Routledge; Revised edition to AD 700, 2011. Cameron, Averil 1996. Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium. Aldershot: Variorum. Cameron, Averil 1997. ‘Christianity and Communication in the Fourth Century: The Problem of Diffusion’. In Aspects of the Fourth Century AD, edited by Henri W. Pleket and A.M.F.W. Verhoogt, 23–42. Leiden: AGAPE. Cameron, Averil 1997a. ‘Hellenism and the Emergence of Islam’, Dialogos, Hellenic Studies Review 4: 4–18. Cameron, Averil 1997b. ‘Gibbon and Justinian’. In Gibbon and Empire, edited by Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault, 34–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Averil 1998. ‘The Mandylion and Byzantine Iconoclasm’. In The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, edited by Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, 33–54. Papers from a Colloquium held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome and the Villa Spelman, Florence, Villa Spelman Colloquia 6. Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale.

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Cameron, Averil 1998. ‘The Perception of Crisis’. In Morfologie sociali e culturale in Europa fra tarda antichitå e alto medioevo, 3-9 aprile 1997, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 45. 9-34. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo. Cameron, Averil 2002. ‘The “Long” Late Antiquity: A Late-Twentieth Century Model?’. In Classics in Progress, edited by Peter Wiseman, 165–91. British Academy Centenary Volume. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, Averil, King, Geoffrey R.D. and Conrad, Lawrence I. eds. 1992–1995. The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, vols. 1–3. Princeton: Darwin Press. Christie, Neil and Loseby, Simon eds. 1996. Towns in Transition: Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Consolino, Franca Ela ed. 1995. Pagani e cristiani da Giuliano l’Apostata al sacco di Roma. Messina: Severia Manneli. Dagron, Gilbert 1981. ‘Le saint, le savant et l’astrologue. Étude de thèmes hagiographiques à travers quelques recueils de ‘Questions et réponses’ des Ve-VIIe siècle’. In Hagiographie, cultures et sociétés (IVe–VIIe s). Paris: Études Augustiniennes. Dagron, Gilbert 1984. Constantinople Imaginaire. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Dagron, Gilbert 1984a. La romanité chrétienne en Orient: Héritages et mutations. London: Variorum. Dagron, Gilbert and Déroche, Vincent 1990. ‘Juifs et chrétiens dans l’Orient du VIIe siècle’, T&M 11: 17–27. Davies, Norman 1996. Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elsner, Jas 1996. Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finley, Moses I. 1985. The Ancient Economy, 2nd ed. London: Hogarth. Flusin, Bernard 1992. Saint Anastase le Perse et l’histoire de la Palestine au début du VIIe siècle, 2 vols. Paris: Éditions du CNRS. Fowden, Garth 1993. Empire to Commonwealth: The Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fowden, Garth 2014. Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Garnsey, Peter, Hopkins, Keith and Whittaker, Charles R. 1983. Trade in the Ancient Economy. London: Chatto and Windus. Giardina, Andrea ed. 1986. Società romana e impero tardoantico, 1–5. Rome: Istituto Gramsci. Giardina, Andrea 1999. ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi Storici 40.1: 157–80. Gil, Moshe 1992. A History of Palestine, 634–1099. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffart, Walter 1988. Narrators of Barbarian History (AD 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haldon, John F. 1990. Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformaton of a Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haldon, John F. 2016. The Empire that Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640–740. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, Alan 1989. Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heather, Peter 1991. Goths and Romans 332–489. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hendy, Michael 1985. Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c.300–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Herrin, Judith 2020. Ravenna, Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe. London: Allen Lane. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodges, Richard and Whitehouse, David 1983. Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis. London: Duckworth. Jeffreys, Elizabeth with Croke, Brian and Scott, Roger eds. 1990. Studies in John Malalas. Sydney: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. Jeffreys, Elizabeth, Jeffreys, Michael, Scott, Roger et al. eds. 1986. The Chronicle of John Malalas, Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies. Jones, Arnold H.M. 1994. The Later Roman Empire: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey, 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell. Kazhdan, Alexander and Talbot, Alice-Mary et al. eds. 1991. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press. Lapidge, Michael ed. 1995. Archbishop Theodore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lefort, Jacques, Morrisson, Cécile and Abadie-Reynal, Catherine eds. 1989. Hommes et richesses dans l’Empire byzantin I. IV-VIIe siècle. Paris: Lethielleux. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2001a. ‘Late Antiquity and the Concept of Decline’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 45: 1–11. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2001b. ‘The Uses and Abuses of the Concept of ‘Decline’ in Later Roman History’, or, Was Gibbon Politically Incorrect?’. In Recent Research in Late Antique Urbanism, edited by Luke Lavan, 235–38. JRA Supplementary Series 42. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 2003. ‘Late Antiquity: The Rejection of “Decline”, and Multiculturalism’. In Atti dell’Academia Romanistica Costatiniana, XIV Convegno internazionale in memoria di Guglielmo Nocera, edited by G. Crifo and S. Giglio, 639–57. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane. Reprinted in Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. Decline and Change in Late Antiquity. Religion, Barbarians and Their Historiography. Aldershot: Ashgate, XVII. Lieu, Samuel N.C. and Montserrat, Dominic eds. 1996. From Constantine to Julian, Pagan and Byzantine Views: A Source History. London: Routledge. Magdalino, Paul 1993. ‘The History of the Future and Its Uses: Prophecy, Policy and Propaganda’. In The Making of Byzantine History: Studies Dedicated to Donald Nicol, edited by Roderick Beaton and Charlotte Roueché, 3–34. Aldershot: Variorum. Mathisen, Ralph and Sivan, Hagit eds. 1996. Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity. Aldershot: Variorum. Mattingly, David and Hitchner, R. Bruce 1995. ‘Roman Africa: An Archaeological Survey’, JRS 85: 165–213. Mazzarino, Santo 1959. La fine del mondo antico. Milan: Garzanti. English translation, The End of the Ancient World. London: Faber & Faber 1996. Meier, Mischa 2004. Das andere Zeitalter Justinians: Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung im 6. Jahrhundert n. Chr. Hypomnemata 147. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Momigliano, Arnaldo ed. 1963. The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1973. ‘La caduta senza rumore di un impero ne; 476 d.C.’, ASNP ser 3.3: 397–418. O’Donnell, James J. 1979. Cassiodorus. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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200

INDEX

Acts of Paul and Thecla 176 Acts of the Apostles 176 Adcock, Frank 23 Agathias 6, 12, 101 Agnellus of Ravenna 104 Alemannus 9–10, 17 Allen, Donald 74 Ambrose 155 Ammianus Marcellinus 5, 58, 81, 108 amphorae 49 Anastasius 14 Anastasius Bibliothecarius 105 Anastasius of Sinai 190, 195–6 Ancient Economy, The (Finley) 60, 127 Anderson, Perry 59, 63 Ando, Clifford 2n4, 145 Anecdotes see Secret History (Procopius) Angelou, Athanasios 72 Annales school 2, 125 anthropology 168, 170–1 Apocryphal Acts 157 Apologia pro vita sua (Newman) 177 Apophthegmata Patrum 171 archaeology: and cultural pluralism 188–9; focus of 49–50; and historical evidence 45, 62–3, 192; late antique 3, 92, 125; Roman 46 Are We Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America (Murphy) 40 Ariès, Philippe 189 art 63, 195–6 Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, The (Harpham) 174 Ascetic Imperative, The (Harpham) 157 asceticism: attitudes toward 128–9; and Christianization 156–7; closure 149–50; definition 174; discourse 154–6, 158–61; and government 161–3;

and historical change 151–4, 161; and literary expression 157–9; as madness 54; Momigliano on 94; scholarship on 169, 173–9; see also Christianity Augustine 111, 116, 155, 157–8, 177, 178 Augustine of Hippo (Brown) 145–6, 168, 177 Augustus (Emperor) 114 Austin, J.L. 113 Austin, R.G. 73 Authority and the Sacred (Brown) 173, 175 Awful Revolution, The (Walbank) 56 Ayer, A.J. 113 al-Azmeh, Aziz 96 Bailey, Cyril 74 Barker, Ernest 112 Barnes, T.D. 28 Basil II (Emperor) 79 Basil of Caesarea 103, 155 Baur, F.C. 90, 105 Baynes, Norman H. 21–2, 53, 55, 79, 91, 118 Before and After Muhammad (Fowden) 46 Belfast 34, 36 Belisarius 5, 8–10, 12–13, 17–18 Belting, Hans 195 Benjamin, Walter 120 Berti, Silvia 118 Bickerman, Elias 120 Bing, Gertrud 88–9, 104 Biondo, Flavio 93 Bloch, Herbert 54 Bloch, Marc 125 Boak, A.E.R. 54, 57–8 Body and Society, The (Brown) 151, 169–70, 171, 173, 174

201

INDEX

Bowersock, Glen 61, 90, 184 Braudel, Ferdinand 125 Brooten, Bernadette J. 142 Brown, Peter: and asceticism 94, 150–1, 156–7, 169, 173–9; career 101; and Cassian 134; and Christendom 194; and Christian hagiography 162; critique of Jones 52–4, 63; influence of 60, 192, 193; and late antiquity 55, 61, 90, 93, 96, 108, 125–6, 145–8, 171–2, 184, 187; and Momigliano 62, 110; and Pirenne 45; and religion 135, 140; scholarship of 26–8, 167–9, 170–1; and sexuality 141 Brownian model 63 Browning, Robert: biography 58–9, 70–5; career 69–70, 75–83, 101; legacy of 85 Browning, Ruth see Gresh, Ruth Brubaker, Leslie 184 Bryer, Anthony 27 Buildings (Procopius) 9 Bulgaria 79 Bury, J.B. 4, 14, 21–32, 37–8, 55, 56, 118 Byzantine Aesthetics (Mathew) 167 Byzantine Christianity (Cameron) 149 Byzantine Commonwealth, The (Obolensky) 29 Byzantine Congress, International 70 Byzantine scholarship: academic posts 29–30; authoritarian view of 64; in Britain 21, 23; and Christianity 27–8; and cultural analysis 28–9; development of 149, 192–3; and historical context 31; iconoclasm 195; and languages 24, 30; prevalence of 25; strands of 80 Byzantinische Zeitschrift 71 Byzantium: and authoritarianism 179; beginnings of 125; in Christian historical narrative 38; Christian literature in 26–7; Christianity in 150; context of 31; defence of 40–1, 48; economics 128–30; and fall of Roman empire 91; in Gibbon 7; and late antiquity 192–3; literature of 55–6; Russia as heir to 41; saints in 169; society 149, 152–3, 156, 162, 184, 189 Byzantium and Bulgaria (Browning) 74–5, 79 Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Haldon) 184 Byzantium. The Empire of New Rome (Mango) 81

Cambridge Ancient History 193 Cameron, Alan 64, 101 Cameron, Averil 2n4, 101–3, 179, 184–5 Carolingians 47–8 Carthage 49, 125, 191 Cary, Max 55 Cassian, John 134 Cassiodorus 105 Chadwick, Henry 85–6 Chairs, academic: Bywater and Sotheby 27; in conflicting fields 30; held by Browning 69, 70; held by Momigliano 88, 111; Koraes 25, 30; at Turin 89 Chambers, Mortimer 54, 57 Charlemagne 38, 47, 185, 187–8, 193 Chastagnol, André 125 Chichekova, Galina 74 China 35–6, 41–2 Christ Antiphonetes 195 Christendom 194 Christianity: anti-Jewish dialogues in 32; and art 195–6; and authoritarianism 162–3, 179; and Byzantine scholarship 27–8; and charity 125–6, 130–1; and classical culture 147; discourse of 136–7, 161–2; Foucault’s view of 133–4; hagiography 173; and Hellenism 110; and historical narratives 38, 93, 104–9; and historical sources 52; influence of 61–2, 64, 92, 94–5; and Islam 190–1; and late antiquity 119, 135, 140, 171–2; and liberty 87–8, 105, 115–17; literature of 117–18, 137–8, 154; martyrdom 176–7; Momigliano’s view of 101, 103, 106–7, 109–10; and morality 139; and peace 115–16; and power 136; and rationalism 26–7; in Roman empire 4, 36, 89–92, 104–6, 111, 117–18; and scholarship 140–1; state institutionalization of 42; Toynbee’s view of 28; women in 24, 134, 139, 142; see also asceticism Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Cameron) 133, 152, 157, 179 Christianizing the Roman Empire (MacMullen) 135 Churchill, Winston 34 chute de l’empire romain, La (Piganiol) 54 Clark, Elizabeth A. 2, 52, 125, 134, 159, 185 Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, The (de Ste Croix) 56, 61, 77, 91, 103, 134–5 Clemente, Guido 87, 112

202

INDEX

Collingwood, R.G. 112–13 Collins, Adele Yarbro 142 communism 59, 69, 77, 79; see also Marxism Comnena, Anna 80 Confessions (Augustine) 157–8, 177, 178 Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, The (Momigliano ed.) 52, 54, 55, 62, 86–96, 102–5, 108, 192, 193 Constable, Giles 79 Constans II (Emperor) 191 Constantine (Emperor): and asceticism 175; and Christianity 28, 42, 160–1; documentation 88; and fall of Roman empire 4; Gibbon’s depiction of 16–17; legislation by 139–40; victory of 106 Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World (Toynbee) 21, 24, 28–9, 31 Constantinides, Costas 71, 72, 81–2 Constantinople 190–1 Courcelle, P. 54 Cracco Ruggini, Lellia 64, 89, 112, 117 Croce, Benedetto 87, 100, 110, 115, 119 Cult of the Saints, The (Brown) 167, 169 cultural pluralism 187–9 Curran, John 34 Cyprus 81–2 Dabiq 40 Dagron, Gilbert 189, 191 Dallibar, Eric 74n2 Dawes, Elizabeth A.S. 27 De abstinentia (Porphyry) 154 Decline and Fall of the Roman City, The (Liebeschuetz) 36, 55 Decline of the Ancient World, The (Jones) 56, 62 Decline of the Roman Empire in the West, The (Walbank) 56, 57 Decline of the West, The (Spengler) 22 De Sanctis, Gaetano 87, 110, 111, 114–15 de Ste Croix, Geoffrey 52, 56, 59, 61, 69, 77, 80, 91, 103, 134–6 Di Donato, Riccardo 87, 100 Dill, Samuel 34, 36–9, 42–3 discourse: ascetic 154–6, 158–61; Christian 136–7, 161–2; importance of 133; rhetorical 142, 152; study of 179 DNA 3 Dodds, E.R. 54, 92, 106, 135 Dölger, Franz 31

Dopsch, Alfons 91, 93 Douglas, Mary 170 Dublin 23, 24, 25, 37 Duby, Georges 125, 189 Dumbarton Oaks 71–2, 79, 80, 82 economics 127–8, 193 Edwards, Mark 60, 63 Elsner, Jas 63, 195 Emperor Julian, The (Browning) 80–1 End of Ancient Christianity, The (Markus) 150, 175, 179 End of the Ancient World, The (Mazzarino) 54, 192 Endangered American Dream, The (Luttwak) 41 Eugippius 94 Eurocentrism 38–9 European Science Foundation 186, 188, 192–3 Eusebius 88, 90, 101, 104, 106–8, 175, 176 Evagrius of Pontus 11, 155, 157–8 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 170 Fall of Rome, The (Ward-Perkins) 46 Fall of the Roman Empire – Can It Be Explained? The (Chambers) 54 famille et l’amour sous l’Haut Empire romain, ’La (Veyne) 125 Fascism 100–1, 112 Febvre, Lucien 125 fine del mondo antico, La (Mazzarino) 93 Finley, Moses 57, 60, 120, 127, 145 Fordyce, C.J. 73 Formisano, Marco 2n4, 145 Foucault, Michel 133–42, 169, 175 Fowden, Garth 46 Fraenkel, Eduard 26 Framing the Middle Ages (Wickham) 45 Frank, Tenney 54–5 Fredericq, Paul 47 Furley, David 79 Fustel de Coulanges 38 Gabba, Emilio 112 Garlick, Kenneth 74 Garnsey, Peter 60 Gates, Bill 40 Geertz, Clifford 170 Ghent University 38–9, 46 Giardina, Andrea 145, 185

203

INDEX

Gibbon, Edward: approach to history 38–9; biography 6–7; depiction of Belisarius 12–13, 17–18; depiction of Constantine 16–17; depiction of Justinian 4–5, 8, 11, 13–19, 194; depiction of Theodora 4, 10–11; influence of 4–5, 92; influenced by Procopius 4–6, 8–10, 13–14, 17–19; Momigliano on 109; and rationalism 134; and Secret History 10–11; themes 90–1 Gifford Lectures 22 Goitein, S.D. 120 Gomme, A.W. 30, 73 Goody, Jack 139–40 Grabar, Oleg 61, 184 Grafton, Anthony 89 Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, The (Luttwak) 40–1 Greek City from Alexander to Justinian, The (Jones) 55, 61 Greek World, The (Browning ed.) 81 Grégoire, Henri 31 Gregory of Nazianzus 178 Gregory of Nyssa 101, 103, 178 Gregory Palamas 155 Gresh, Ruth 74, 76 Gwynn, David 53 Haldon, John F. 2n3, 184 Hannibal’s Legacy (Toynbee) 28–9 Harnack, Adolf 47, 91 Harpham, Geoffrey 157, 158, 174, 179 Haskell, Francis 17 Healey, Denis 74 Heath, Edward 74 Heather, Peter 1, 3 Henderson, Isobel 69, 85, 101 Heraclius (Emperor) 7, 40, 45, 61, 127, 191 Herlihy, David 140 Herodotus 90, 105, 108 Herrin, Judith 80, 188 Hill, Christopher 76, 83 Hilton, Rodney 74 Histoire de la vie privée 1 (Veyne) 134 Historia Religiosa 171 historiography: Christian 108; ecclesiastical 90; and end of Roman empire 54, 63–4; Greek 107; liberal 115; pagan 108; rhetoric in 2 history: approaches to 37–9, 52; and archaeology 49–50; art 195–6; Byzantine 12, 18; cultural influence on 55–7, 65, 75; and cultural pluralism 187;

ecclesiastical 107; histoire totale 128; learning from 34; revision of 41, 47, 50; subjectivity of 2; use of 35, 39–42; writing of 36–7, 42–3 History of Greece, A. (Bury) 22 History of Private Life, The (Ariès and Duby eds.) 189 History of Rome Through the Fifth Century, A (Jones) 61 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 133–4 History of the Byzantine Empire, The (Browning) 81 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon) 4–7, 22 History of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Death of Irene to the Accession of Basil I (802–867) (Bury) 22 History of the Freedom of Thought, A (Bury) 30 History of the Later Roman Empire, A (Bury) 22, 56 History of the Wars (Procopius) 9, 11, 14, 102 Hitchens, Christopher 75 Hobsbawm, Eric 76, 83 Hogg, Quintin 77 holiness 168–70, 193–4 Hopkins, Keith 60, 140, 145 Hordern, Peregrine 50 Humfress, Caroline 60 Huntington, Ellsworth 55 Hussey, Joan 22–3, 25, 78 Huxley, George 30 Iamblichus 154 icons 195 Idea of Progress, The (Bury) 30 Inheritance of Rome, The (Wickham) 46 interdisciplinarity 3 Ireland 21, 37, 73, 74, 194 ISIS 40 Islam: in Christian historical narrative 38; and Christianity 190–1; development of 64, 188; and government 41–2; and historical narratives 93, 95–6; history of 40, 42; influence on Christianity 61; and late antiquity 51, 125, 145; scholarship on 2 Italy 107, 111–12, 114 Jeffreys, Elizabeth 72 Jemolo, Arturo Carlo 109–10 Jenkins, Romilly 21

204

INDEX

Jerome 142, 155 John Chrysostom 155, 159 John Climacus 154 John Italos 153 John Moschus 154 John of Damascus 155, 190 Johnson, Boris 34 Jones, A.H.M.: and Browning 73, 77; career 78–9; and Christian literature 26; context of 31, 53–7; and decline of Roman empire 5, 36, 50; and Eusebius 88; influence of 52–3, 60–5, 92–4; legacy of 85; in London 58–9; and Momigliano 106; scholarship of 192; style of 92 Journal of Early Christian Studies (JECS) 2, 167, 185 Journal of Hellenic Studies (JHS) 78 Journal of Roman Studies (JRS) 23, 77, 133 Judaism: anti-Jewish dialogues 32; and Christianity 106; and Hellenism 110; and historical narratives 93, 95, 118; in Italy 107; in Mediterranean 48; and Momigliano 100, 104, 119–20 Judge, Edwin 61–2 Julian (Emperor) 5 Julius Caesar 113 Justinian: Brown’s depiction of 147; and Christianity 161; Gibbon’s depiction of 4–5, 11, 13–19, 194; plague of 34; Procopius’s depiction of 9; reign of 6–8, 61; and western approach to history 39 Justinian and Theodora (Browning) 80 Kagan, Donald 54, 57 Kaldellis, Anthony 2n3, 4, 102 Kazhdan, Alexander 32, 72, 79 Kennedy School of Government 36 Khusro I 147 King’s College London: Cameron at 85–6; Momigliano at 103; syllabus at 53, 86; Toynbee at 25 Kitto, H.D.F. 73 Kraljevic, Marko 73 Laiou, Angeliki 70 languages: Browning’s fluency in 71, 73, 74, 76–9; and Byzantine scholarship 24, 30; Greek 82; and national identities 38–9, 47 Last, Hugh 23, 26, 100, 113 late antiquity: archaeology 3, 92; and asceticism 158; and Byzantium 192–3;

and Christianity 119, 135, 140, 171–2, 179; conceptions of 50; dates of 61, 90; defence of 108; definition 41, 46, 96; discourse 179; holiness in 169–70, 193–4; and Islam 51; society 170, 185–96; study of 93, 167, 177–8, 187, 196; term 2; total view of 125–31 Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World (Bowersock, Brown and Grabar eds.) 184 Later Roman Empire, The (Jones) 52–7, 60–5, 92–4, 192 Lausiac History (Palladius) 171, 178 Le Goff, Jacques 150–1 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 126 lectures: by Brown 170; by Cameron 184–5; by Foucault 134; Gifford 22; by Momigliano 102–4, 111–17; on peace and liberty 118; Runciman 71; Sather 2, 90, 104, 105, 133; Taft 105–6 Lefkowitz, Mary 137 Leo I (Pope) 111 Liber Pontificalis 191 Liebeschuetz, J.H. Wolfgang G. 36, 52, 55, 59, 60, 185 Life of Antony (Athanasius) 154, 157, 160–1, 175, 176 Life of Apollonius of Tyana (Philostratus) 175–6 Life of Constantine (Eusebius) 107–8, 175 Life of Macrina (Gregory of Nyssa) 101, 178 Life of Melania 178 Lindsay, A.D. 76–7 Linear B Texts from Knossos, The (Browning) 76 Lives 175–7, 178 Lloyd, G.E.R. 136, 137 Lot, Ferdinand 31 Low, D.H. 72–3, 74 LRE see Later Roman Empire, The (Jones) Luttwak, Edward 40–1 MacCormack, Sabine 167, 169 MacMullen, Ramsay 55, 62, 135, 136, 159, 173 Macrina 103 Malalas, John 187 Mango, Cyril 22, 81 Mann, John 59 Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West (Boak) 54, 57 Marcella 178

205

INDEX

Marcone, Arnaldo 88, 90, 92 Markus, Robert 150, 156, 161, 175, 179 marriage 138 Marrou, H.-I. 54, 55, 64, 88, 93, 104 Martin, Ian 72, 83 Martindale, John 61 Marxism 52, 56, 58, 81, 134–5; see also communism Mary of Egypt 178 Mathew, Gervase 167 Matthews, John 4 Maxentius (Emperor) 106 Maximus Confessor 155, 191 Mazzarino, Santo 54, 93, 94, 145, 192 McCormick, Michael 45–6 Medieval and Modern Greek (Browning) 82 Medieval Households (Herlihy) 140 Mediterranean 48–50, 62, 64, 169, 188 Meier, Mischa 186 Meiggs, Russell 22, 74 Melian dialogue 35 Mercouri, Melina 75 Methodius 134 Missing Persons (Dodds) 135 Moffatt, Ann 72 Mohammed 48 Mohammed and Charlemagne (Pirenne) 45–51 Mollat, M. 126 Momigliano, Arnaldo: on Baynes 25; biography 86–8; at Cambridge 92, 95; career 52, 54, 64, 69, 100–1, 111–13; and Chadwick 86; on Christianity 101, 103, 106–8, 118–20, 134; on de Ste Croix 103; and discourse 133; and fall of Roman empire 186; on Gibbon 109; on Gregory of Nyssa 178; as teacher 102–3; and Judaism 100, 104, 109–10; legacy of 85–6, 192, 193; on liberty 115–17; on religion 62, 87, 89, 114; scholarship of 2; view of Jones 55; at the Warburg Institute 87–96 Monophysitism 10 Montesquieu 12, 92 Morris, John 58, 61, 79, 80 moyen Âge grec, Un (Patlagean) 125 Murray, Oswyn 89 Musonius Rufus 170 Mynors, Roger 74 Narses 9, 18 nationalism 50 Newman, John Henry 177

Nicol, Donald 21, 78 Nicolson, Nigel 74 North Africa 49 North, John 104, 106 Obama, Barack 35–6 Obolensky, Dimitri 22, 29 On Pagans, Jews and Christians (Momigliano) 100, 103–4 Origen 176 Origins of the European Economy, The (McCormick) 46 Origins of the Peloponnesian War, The (de Ste Croix) 59 Ostrogorsky, Georg 31 Ottoman empire 79, 81 Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, The 32, 72, 189 Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Dodds) 54, 92, 106, 135 paganism 93, 95, 108, 139, 147, 150 paideia 170–1 pain et le cirque, Le (Veyne) 136–7 Palestine 190–1, 192 Palladius 178 Panagiotakis, Nikolaos 72 Paris 73, 126, 134 Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (Anderson) 59 Past and Present 74, 76 Patlagean, Evelyne 125–31 patristics 2 Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles (Patlagean) 126–31 Peeters, Paul 191 People and Power in Byzantium (Kazhdan and Constable) 79 Pericles 34 periodization 5 philhellenism 75 Philostratus 175–6 Piganiol, André 54 Pirenne thesis 46 Pirenne, Henri 38, 45–51, 91, 93, 187–8 Pirenne, Jacques 46 plague 34 Plutarch 137–8, 139, 170 Porneia (Rousselle) 137, 139 Porphyry 154, 174, 175–6, 178 Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Brown) 125

206

INDEX

Powell, Enoch 74 Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Brown) 145, 151, 171–2 Pratum spirituale (John Moschus) 154 Procopius: Cameron’s writing on 101–2; depiction of Belisarius 12–13; depiction of Justinian 11, 14–15; and discourse 152; influence on Gibbon 4–6, 8–9, 13–14, 17–19; scholarship of 9, 187 Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire (Martindale ed.) Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (Jones ed.) 53, 61 Purcell, Nicholas 50 Queen’s College (Belfast) 36 Rajak, Tessa 104, 119–20 Randsborg, Klaus 194 Ransom of the Soul, The (Brown) 125 rationalism: and Dodds 135; and Gibbon 134; and history 37–8; and religion 26–7, 141 Recognitiones 176 religion: and anxiety 135; and government 41–2; Momigliano’s view of 114; and rationalism 26–7; scholarship of 120; view of 196; and violence 42; see also specific religions Rennie, William 73 Retractatio (Marrou) 88 rhetoric 2, 142, 152 Riegl, Alois 145 ’Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, The’ (Brown) 168–75, 178 Rise of Western Christendom, The (Brown) 167, 173, 194 Roberts, Colin 88 Roman empire: bordering areas 192; Byzantine 48; Christianity in 89, 104–5, 108–9, 111, 117–18; crisis in 185–6; dates of 60; defence of 40–1, 65; economy 193; pax romana 115–16; scholarship on 1–2 Roman empire, decline of: beginnings of 91; causes of 4, 34–5, 50, 56–8; and Christianity 36, 90–2, 105–6, 109; dates of 46; evidence for 62–3; in fifth century 61; and German scholarship 47; Gibbonian view of 48; as historical example 39–41, 186–8; as historical truth 90; historiography on 54; study of 53–7; and successor kingdoms 38–9

Roman Revolution, The (Syme) 112–14 Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (Dill) 34–5, 36 Rostovtzeff, M.I. 31, 57, 92, 117 Rousseau, Philip 189, 194 Rousselle, Aline 137–9, 142 Runciman Lecture 71 Runciman, Steven 24, 25, 78 Russia 35, 41–2 Saints and Postmodernism (Wyschogrod) 174 Saller, Richard P. 140 Satyricon 81 Scholem, Gershom 120 Secret History (Procopius) 9–11, 13–15, 16–17, 102 Seeck, Otto 54, 55 Sennett, Richard 141 Severinus (Saint) 94 sexuality 134, 135–6, 138–9, 141–2, 175 Shaw, Brent D. 140 Shaw, George Bernard 73 Shenoute of Atripe 151 Shils, Edward 170 Snell Exhibition 73–4 Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, The (Rostovtzeff) 57, 92 Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Brown) 167–8 Song of Songs 155 Spengler, Oswald 22, 55 Spoleto 184–5 St Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Marrou) 88, 93 Stein, Ernst 31 Storia di Roma 193 Strauss, Leo 120 Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 2 Study of History, A (Toynbee) 21–2, 28 Swain, Simon 60, 63, 65 Symbolae Osloenses 145 Syme, Ronald 112–14 Syncletica 178 Synodikon of Orthodoxy 153 Syria and Syrians 48, 190–1 Tabula Imperii Byzantini 3 Tacitus 5 taxation 58 Tchalenko, Georges 130 terminology 2, 39, 156

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INDEX

Tertullian 142 Thecla 176, 178 Theodora (Empress) 4, 10–11, 17, 161 Theodore of Tarsus 191, 194 Theodoret 171 Theodoric the Ostrogoth 39 Theodosian Code 6 Theodosius II (Emperor) 161 Theotokos Evergetis 154–5 Thompson, E.A. 54, 58–9, 79, 80 Thucydides 34, 35–6, 42, 108 Thucydides trap 35–6 Toynbee, Arnold 21–2, 24–32, 55 trade 92–3 Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Womersley) 4 Transformation of the Roman World, The 186 Treasure in Heaven (Brown) 125 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 29 Troeltsch, Ernst 91 Trypanis, Constantine 75 Turkey 41–2 Umayyads 96, 188, 191 universalism 111 University College London: Baynes at 21–2, 23, 27; Browning at 76; Jones at 58–9; Momigliano at 52

Valantasis, Richard 149, 174 Veyne, Paul 125, 134, 136–8, 140, 142, 169–70, 177 Voltaire 92 Vryonis, Speros 29 Walbank, Frank 56, 57, 59, 80, 117 Warburg Institute 85–6, 88–9, 102, 103–4 Ward-Perkins, Bryan 2n4, 3, 46 wars 35–6, 40–1 Weber, Max 31 Wes, M. 64 Whitby, L. Michael 2n4 White, Hayden 2, 41 Whittaker, C.R. 139 Wicker, Kathleen O’Brien 138 Wickham, Chris 45, 184 Wilkes, John 52, 59 Williams, Gordon 76 Wimbush, Vincent 149, 174, 180 Womersley, David 4, 10, 12–13 World of Late Antiquity, The (Brown) 60, 93, 145–8, 168, 185, 192 Wyschogrod, Edith 174 Xi Jinping 35–6 Zonaras 11

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