by Douglas Boin
14.1 Jerusalem and the Lure of the “Holy Cross”
Key Debates
1.1 Late Antiquity Found at the Start of the Twenty‐First Century
2.1 Are There Forgeries in Christian Scripture?
3.1 Can We Ever Really Know What Happened?
4.1 Was There a Third‐Century Crisis in Roman History?
5.1 When Did Christianity Split from Judaism?
6.1 Catastrophe or Continuity? Or a False Choice?
7.1 Being Christian in the Sasanian Zoroastrian State: A Case of “Persecution”?
8.1 Faith, Texts, Archaeology, and Today: The Example of St. Peter’s Basilica
9.1 Who Were the “Pagans,” and What Is the Origin of This Word?
10.1 A Marble Burial Box with a Heroic Tale: Signs of a “Middle Class”?
11.1 Can Texts About Women Help Us Recover the Voices of Real Women?
12.1 Why Should Historians Read Tales of Angels and Demons?
13.1 End‐Time Thinking and the Invention of the “a.d.” Calendar
14.1 Muhammad’s House and the Development of Early Mosque Architecture
Political Issues
1.1 “Are We Rome?” Apocalyptic Thinking, Then and Now
2.1 What Role Did Martyrdom Play in the Early Church?
3.1 Emperor Galerius’ Edict of Toleration, 311 CE
4.1 Stigmas, Stereotypes, and the Uglier Side of Imperialism
5.1 Are All Christian References to Jews “Rhetorical”?
6.1 Emperor Constantine in Jerusalem
7.1 Gladiators, Chariot Races, and the Laws of the Christian Emperor Constantine
8.1 Justinian’s Nea Church and the Architectural Audacity of Roman Emperors
9.1 Theological Creeds as Party Platforms
10.1 Cemetery Workers and a Guild Recruited for Mob Violence
11.1 Wealth, Patronage, and the Voice of Influential Women
12.1 The Value of Learning a Second Language in Changing Times
13.1 The Arab Client Kings of Sixth‐Century Persia and Rome
14.1 What Effect Did the Rise of Islam Have on Daily Life in the Christian Roman Empire?
Working With Sources
1.1 Writing History vs. Writing Church History
2.1 The “Lost” Syriac Chronicle of Theophilus of Edessa
3.1 Was There an Ancient Word for Our Idea of “Religion”?
4.1 A Cameo Glorifying the Sasanian King
5.1 Interpreting the Images on the Parabiago Plate
6.1 Descriptions of the City of Constantinople
7.1 The Talmud as Evidence for the History of the Jewish Community
8.1 Tableware and Kitchenware: From Artifact to Museum Exhibits and Private Collections
9.1 Buried Coptic Writings and “Gnostic” Gospels from Nag Hammadi, Egypt
10.1 Coins as Evidence for Ancient Inflation?
11.1 The Life of the Mathematician, Scientist, and Philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria
12.1 A Tombstone for Monica, Mother of Augustine
13.1 Graves in Turfan, Xinjiang, on the Northern Silk Roads
14.1 The Hunting Lodge at Qusayr ‘Amra, Jordan
Preface: The Magic of History
History can be wondrous to watch, like beholding the act of an entrancing magician. With the right story, a compelling drama, and a dash of showmanship, people and periods long removed from us can dance almost inexplicably before our eyes. History, after all, is a performance of the past, though not everyone tells it the same way. That’s why the discipline of history is still thriving. As specialists challenge each other with the discovery of new documents and overlooked clues force researchers to reassess the events that led to a war or an invasion, historians dust off material that can seem trite and familiar and dazzle audiences by turning it into something unexpected and new.
This book is a manual for teaching some of the basics of the craft of history. It’s also an extended investigation into the secret behind what I like to think of as one of the world’s most famous illusions: the “vanishing of Rome.” Since that pivotal moment in the late fifth century CE – 476 CE – when the city of Rome was cut off from its own empire, many amateurs and professionals have puzzled and argued over the details of what happened. Centuries later, they still don’t agree. Some say Rome’s civilization disappeared, that the empire “fell” at just that precise moment in time. Others insist that Rome was already slowly being transformed – a few would even try to claim on a deep, spiritual level – with regions of the old empire moving to a new “Byzantine” state in the years before, during, and after 476 CE. Whatever explanation one prefers, in books that tell the story of the ancient Mediterranean, there routinely comes a point where something once great and majestic, the awesome world of Rome, vanishes. This book shows how that trick is done.
The people of the ancient Mediterranean knew something about magic and illusions. Consider this story of a visit to Athens, written in ancient Greek. It’s dated to the end of the second century or the middle of the third century CE and alleges to be written by a farmer in Classical Greece. It’s a skilled literary act, crafted by a smart author during a time when Romans governed Greece, Latin was the language of the state, and many people still had a fondness for Pericles’ city.
In it, a farmer loads up his trusty donkey “with figs and fruit cakes” to join a dear friend in Athens. The two men are planning to go to the theater, and the thought of catching a show in the city, famous for its drama, excites the narrator:
Most of the shows I don’t recall, for I’m a poor hand at remembering and telling such things. But I can tell you that one thing I saw made me almost speechless with astonishment.
A man came forward and, setting down a three‐legged table, placed three little cups on it. Then under these cups he hid some little round white pebbles, such as we find on the banks of rapid streams. At one moment he would hide them one under each cup; and at another moment (I don’t know how) he would show them all under a single cup. Then he would make them entirely disappear from under the cups and exhibit them between his lips. Then he would swallow them, and, drawing forward the spectators who stood near him, would take one pebble from a man’s nose, another from a man’s ear, and the third from a man’s head! After picking them up, he would make them disappear from sight again. A very light‐fingered gentleman…!
I hope no creature like him ever gets on to my farm, though. No one would ever catch him. He would steal everything in the house and make off with all the goods.
(Alciphron, Letters 2.17, LCL trans. by A. Benner and F. Fobes [1949], pp. 110–112)
Alciphron, the author of this Greek text, is not a household name. In fact, historians know next to nothing about him. But do you recognize the act he’s describing? It’s a classic of magic, performed by almost every magician from Harry Houdini to David Copperfield.
One of the most recent teams to perform the cups and balls, as it is known, was the iconoclastic duo Penn and Teller. In their signature style, they used clear plastic cups. Members of their guild were not amused. Can you guess why? They broke one of the first rules of their trade: People on the other side of the curtain are not supposed to know how the magic works. But does knowing the moves really make an act any less enjoyable? I don’t think it does. Seeing an act for the first time, then taking it apart, dissecting the sleight of hand, is the first step in learning how to do it for yourself. The same is true for the practice of history. That’s why I wrote this book.
While it is undeniably entertaining to sit back and watch someone else put on a show, history as a discipline will only continue to grow and thrive when people in the audience realize it’s more than an act to cheer on, admire, and applaud. History is something people do, and that’s why, in addition to appreciating good stagecraft, I believe everyone should know how to do a simple trick or two. What better illusion to practice with than the “vanishing” of Rome?
The challenge is that many people, at the outset, will alr
eady think they know what happened to Rome in Late Antiquity. It seems to be a trick so basic anyone would be able to retell it, or at least parts of it, if they were asked. Here’s how one observer might describe it.
In the third century, the Roman Empire suffered a debilitating mix of political, military, economic, and spiritual crises that nearly tore its society apart. In the fourth century, its leaders managed to stabilize the state by embracing a new, spiritual faith, Christianity. By then, many Romans, itching for change, may even have been pushed in new pious directions by Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Soon, the emperor transferred the capital from Rome to Constantinople – a move that created the Byzantine Empire. A century later, when packs of frightening barbarians invaded western Europe, Rome finally crumbled. And although Byzantine emperors would belatedly strategize how to recapture parts of lost Europe and North Africa, their efforts would prove too late. The Roman Empire was gone.
This book takes its readers back stage to point out the strings, mirrors, and trapdoors that make this rather elegant historical illusion work. For even though the city of Rome did disappear from its own empire in 476 CE, at the time our book closes – in the eighth century CE – the Roman Empire itself will still, surprisingly, be standing. In order to understand how and why that happened, the pace with which history is performed has to be slowed down so that we can study each move, see every manipulation. That’s what we’ll do together in the next fourteen chapters.
A Note to Advanced Readers
This book is designed around case studies, questions, sources, and above all, problems of interpretation. But its structure largely unfolds in chronological order. This choice was deliberate. Some social and cultural histories become too muddled – overwhelming readers who have no prior familiarity with the subject matter – when they jump between times and places too casually. By trying to survey the entire history of a large topic in one small chapter – say, the history of cities, death, gender, or law – beginners are presented with a sweeping story that moves from one subject to the next without ever really being presented with a sequence of key events. This book takes a different approach.
Although structured around traditional social and cultural topics, like the household, law, and the family it starts at an earlier point in time and ends at a later one. Thus, the examples and case studies that appear in the earlier chapters are drawn from the third and fourth centuries CE whereas the material privileged in the latter chapters comes from the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries CE. In this way, my hope is that readers who pick up this book gain a deep, nuanced appreciation for how to think about complex historical topics. By choosing not to frame my discussion of topics in usual, or expected, ways – there are no chapters here on “Church and State,” “Byzantine Art and Architecture,” or even the intriguing cultural phenomenon called “Religion” – what I hope to accomplish is that readers, from beginners to specialists, will realize that complex topics from the pre‐modern world cannot and should not be shoehorned into artificial boxes.
One last note. Because this book lacks any formal conclusion, I would like to provide a commentary on one of the last lines of the book which a reader will encounter. It is the last of four questions in the final chapter, but it is the most important question that guided me as I was thinking about this subject matter. The question is this: “From a historical perspective, would you say that individuals and communities who hold monotheistic beliefs (‘belief in one God’) are fundamentally unable to live in a pluralistic society?” If there is one theme that unites the people and places of the proto‐global world of Late Antiquity and if there is one topic which can inspire and motivate our own interest in their past lives, I can think of no better one than that which lies at the heart of this question. For the study of how people of different faiths and backgrounds choose to live in the complicated, complex, diverse world around them is not academic; it is an urgent one with relevance for today. If readers close this book with the recognition that pre‐modern history still does have an urgency about it, then I will feel like I have done my job.
Late Antiquity is often imagined as a bridge, a welcome support that carries people from one side of a gap to another. In A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity, time does work that way – passing from the consular years of the old Roman Empire to the Christian hours of the Middle Ages – but place does not. For in crossing, we don’t arrive in another land; we come upon a mysterious row of doors, behind which several stories are playing out simultaneously, in many places and many times. The trick of doing Late Antique history is knowing that the end will always pull us in multiple directions.
Acknowledgments
Two years out of graduate school, before I taught my first college seminar on “The World of St. Augustine,” I suffered from that moment of crippling anxiety which young professors everywhere know first‐hand. What books do I assign? There were good source collections for this period, like Michael Maas’ outstanding Readings in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2000, now in its second edition). Still, in 2010, I struggled to find an appropriate narrative. I wanted my students to have a book that was sufficiently up‐to‐date, archaeologically, linguistically, theoretically, and methodologically; one that described events of the time from both the ground‐up and top‐down; and last, and most important of all, one that challenged them to think about this transformative time beyond the vantage of someone standing inside the Christian church. When Wiley contacted me to contribute a volume on Late Antiquity to this new series, I was nervous to think I could contribute anything on such a topic. Four anonymous readers thought otherwise. The result is this book.
I cannot express enough my gratitude to the following colleagues with whom I have been lucky enough to be able to think and talk about Late Antiquity over the past few years. In no particular order, I would like to thank: Lorenzo DiTommaso, for the invitation to participate in a panel discussion about apocalyptic worldviews in Vienna, Austria; Maijastina Kahlos, for her invitation to discuss work in with her colleagues in Helsinki, Finland; Michele Salzman, Marianne Sághy, and Rita Lizzi Testa, for inviting me to discuss the fourth and fifth centuries with an outstanding group of Late Antique scholars in Rome, including Nicola Denzey Lewis, Neil McLynn, and Dennis Trout; Morwenna Ludlow and Richard Flower, for convening a similar group of like‐minded researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, including Barbara Borg, Robin Jensen, Aaron Johnson, Gillian Clark, Mark Humphries, and Carlos Machado; to Jörg Rüpke, Anna‐Katharina Rieger, and Valentino Gasparini, for their organization of a panel on the archaeology of religion at La Sapienza, Rome; and their subsequent invitation to join an outstanding international community of scholars – funded by the European Research Council – investigating Lived Ancient Religion in Erfurt and Eisenach, Germany; to Philip Rousseau, Scott Johnson, and Wendy Meyer, for our conversations in Washington, DC; to Maria Doerfler, Elizabeth Clark, Annabel Wharton, James Rives, and Erin Walsh in North Carolina, for including me in their joint Duke/UNC Late Antiquity colloquium; to Sarah Bond for her kind invitation to participate in the biennial Late Antique conference in Iowa; to Gregor Kalas, Tina Shepardson, and Jacob Latham, for asking me to share ideas with their Late Antiquity group in Knoxville; and to the Classics and Religious Studies departments at the University of Missouri, Columbia, for their invitation to speak on Christianity before and after Constantine.
Over all these coffees and adjournments, I have learned much more from this team of talented scholars than I could ever have hoped to contribute at one time. This book tries to repay all my debts, even to the reviewers of this manuscript. They, too, had a “thankless task”; and I’m appreciative of the time they took, on behalf of the press, to type up their constructive critiques. To those whose names I have inadvertently omitted, the error is most certainly mine, and it is one of oversight – not judgment.
Finally, there are the people closer to home I need to acknowledge: to the Dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences at Saint Louis University, Chris Duncan; to the Provost, Nancy Brickhouse; and to the chairs of the History Department, Phil Gavitt and Charles Parker, I owe my debts for their intellectual encouragement and for the resources they provided for my work. In the History Department itself, Chris Pudlowski and Kelly Goersch were instrumental in helping me manage funding from a Mellon Faculty Grant which funded part of my travel. Among my colleagues in the Saint Louis University History Department, thank you to Luke Yarbrough, for help with the material on early Islam; Filippo Marsili, for his perspective on China and Central Asia; and to our library staff, especially Jamie Emery, without whose help I would not have been able to read and acquire so many necessary pieces of this puzzle; to my graduate research assistant, Robert Olsen, who, for nearly a year and a half, was stationed at the stacks, and helped immeasurably with the timeline; to his successor, Joel Cerimele, who carried the torch next. Special recognition is due to undergraduate Saint Louis University student Sophia Liu for kindly contacting museum officials in Urumqi on my behalf.
Last, to countless curious undergraduates at Saint Louis University who watched, semester after semester, as I stumbled through many of these tricks at the front of our classroom, please know that my family, especially Gardiner Rhoderick, thanks you for indulging me in this performance.
The inset plan of Rome used throughout the book was adapted by the author from the public domain work by A. Kuhn, Roma: Ancient, Subterranean, and Modern Rome (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1916), p. 70.
Annotated List of Abbreviations and a Note on Citations from Secondary Literature
Casual readers skip the abbreviations. They are conventional, didactic, and dull. The sooner a young historian learns them, however, the more quickly they will be able to start asking their own questions and designing their own projects to answer them. At the request of the series’ editors, I have tried to keep abbreviations to a minimum, but these are some resources a beginner should know.