by Douglas Boin
Raised by a father named Patricius and by his mother, Monica, in modern Souk Ahras (Algeria), Augustine pursued a Roman education in Madauros, about fifteen miles away. By around seventeen, he had wound up in Carthage, where he finished his studies and became a teacher. It was after several years of teaching in Carthage that he decided to leave his family’s roots in North Africa for Rome. Augustine was not, however, leaving his family. Although his father had died, sometime before Augustine’s departure in 383 CE, Augustine left North Africa with the help of a financially well‐placed supporter and accompanied by his mom. Two years later, by 385 CE, mother and son had traveled to Milan, then the resident city of the emperor.
The story of Augustine’s journey from North Africa to Rome, Milan, and eventually back again shows us a late fourth‐century family on the move. In many ways, however, this family was missing one of its most defining members. The male head of the household, or paterfamilias, traditionally exercised authority over all members of his estate, including slaves, and oversight over all its financial dealings. In this way, the management of a domus, as Roman writers referred to the household in Latin, was one that came with both social and economic responsibilities. During the fourth through sixth centuries, this domestic world and the values it was built on would be passed down, renegotiated, and changed as Christianity became the official identity of the state.
The values associated with running a Roman household would also provide much inspiration to bishops in Rome, who used its ethical framework to grow their authority over other Christian leaders. By the middle of the fifth century CE, the bishop of Rome – once an equal among the emerging church hierarchy – had acquired a new identity: pope. Understanding how the Roman household works and the gender roles it assumed is integral to understanding the rise of a Christian authority structure outside of it. These are the topics of this chapter (Exploring Culture 11.1: The “Third Gender”).
Exploring Culture 11.1 The “Third Gender”
In antiquity, gender identity was defined in binary terms: male in one category, female in another. There was one group, however, that challenged such neat and tidy polarities. They belonged to a “third gender” (tertium genus, in Latin). Although it does not appear to be a term with which they self‐identified, its use by ancient writers gives us a chance to look more closely at the phenomenon behind it.
According to the anonymous Writers of the Imperial History [SHA], Emperor Severus Alexander (r. 222–235 CE) used the term to denigrate members of his imperial staff, the palace eunuchs. Eunuchs were self‐castrated men who had entered into government service; their lack of a family or any sexual partner gave them a higher‐level security clearance. The benefit of having a staff of eunuchs had been recognized as far back as the Persian Empire of the fifth century BCE. Three hundred years later, eunuchs were employed throughout Roman cities as family guardians (Terence, The Eunuch). That did not keep Emperor Alexander from despising them.
[The emperor] used to say that eunuchs were a third sex of the human race, one not to be seen or employed by men and scarcely even by women of noble birth. He removed all eunuchs from his service and gave orders that they should serve his wife as slaves. And whereas Elagabalus [the previous emperor] had been the slave of his eunuchs, Alexander reduced them to a limited number and removed them from all duties in the Palace except the care of the women’s baths.
(SHA, Life of Alexander Severus 23.5–7, LCL trans. by D. Magie [1924])
By the time of Diocletian’s constitutional reforms a century later, one writer considered eunuchs to be among those who “had chief authority at court and with the emperor” (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 15, trans. from the ANF series). They would hold this important power in the eastern Roman Empire, too. Narses, a Christian from Armenia, would serve Emperor Justinian as a court eunuch in Constantinople in the mid‐sixth century CE (Procopius, History of the Wars 1.25).
Palace eunuchs were not the only ones pushing the boundaries of gender expression. The priests of a popular Roman cult, the cult of the goddess Magna Mater, were included in this group, too. Known as Galli, they embraced a style of dress that conservative Romans deemed much too effeminate (Apuleius, Golden Ass 8.27–28). In this case, however, gender transgression likely worked as a positive feature of the cult; it marked the priests as patently different yet bestowed on them an elevated status that was closer to the Great Mother (Magna Mater) than ordinary worshippers.
Anthropologists and sociologists have studied how gender transgression can often work in this dual way: causing fear and promoting awe, simultaneously. An appreciation for the role of gender expression in ancient cults may even explain why some fourth‐, fifth‐, and sixth‐century Christians began depicting Jesus in an androgynous way. Scholar Thomas Mathews has given the most provocative presentation of this material in The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
11.1 Home as a Place
Where people called home obviously varied depending on their wealth, their aesthetic preferences, and their taste. Several cities have provided evidence for the kind of spaces people lived in. These examples will not only help us see the domestic sphere in concrete terms. They will provide a good starting point for helping us imagine the way a Roman home worked as a social space.
Apartments
Many families of modest means lived in an apartment complex. Cities like Ostia, Ephesos, Alexandria, or Jeme – in Middle Egypt – have all revealed these structures. These cities’ apartments share certain features but also have significant differences.
In Jeme, a city in the Egyptian hills of Thebes, on the west bank of the Nile opposite the ancient dynastic site of Luxor, archaeologists revealed traces of two‐ to three‐story buildings in the cubic shape of a tower. These tower houses had long been popular in Middle Egypt as residential units for middle‐ and lower‐class residents of the city. Their living area was arranged vertically. A view from the street through the door rarely offered a glimpse of the inside.
A shared entry space here also does not seem to have been a priority for the residents. Families or individuals who occupied the flat lived on the upper floors so that smoke from their cooking could be easily vented to the sky. Lower floors were largely uninhabited. The cooler spaces within the apartment complex were largely set aside for storage. On the first floor at Jeme, for example, water jugs might be sunken into the cavernous floors so that refreshment could be offered to passersby. (The apartment towers at Jeme are also fascinating because of where they were constructed. They were built both within and on top of the walls of one of Jeme’s ancient Egyptian sanctuaries; the evidence is discussed in EBW [2007], at pp. 130–131.)
Even within a region like Roman Egypt, however, there could be diversity. At Karanis in the Fayyum, apartment units are also structured vertically. But there, the upper stories, not the lower ones, were designated as storage space. They were called in Greek kella (Latin, cella). At Alexandria, meanwhile, a city whose apartments provide a third contrast to the tower homes at Jeme, the ground floor of residences had much more of a social function. In the quarter of modern Alexandria known as Kom el‐Dikka, archaeologists discovered a whole block of residences. Each unit was organized around a central courtyard. Some of these courtyards were occupied by a latrine, shared by everyone in the complex. From the courtyard a set of stairs provided access to the upper stories, where there were one‐ or two‐room units for families or individuals to share (EBW [2007], pp. 131–132, 231).
Alexandria’s open‐layout apartments, structured around a common courtyard, are identical to the form of apartments in Ostia. These “islands,” as the blocks were called in Latin (insulae; Latin singular is insula) were built around a shared central courtyard with an open sky. Stairs, usually in a hallway off this courtyard, led to modest apartments on the upper floors. At Ostia, although the evidence is slim, it appears people lived in apartments alongside their fancier,
wealthy neighbors through at least the sixth century.
Houses
Like apartments, houses varied widely based on regional architectural styles, customs, and wealth, but – as with apartments – nowhere is the idea of the family as a social space more visible than in the study of a Roman home. With spaces set aside for cooking and for studying, as well as rooms for banqueting and hosting guests or patrons, houses in the Mediterranean were stages for a dizzying area of performances. Some of these activities were public, like the entertainment of friends and professional contacts. Some were private and took place in the bedrooms or personal quarters (Key Debates 11.1: Can Texts About Women Help Us Recover the Voices of Real Women?).
Key Debates 11.1 Can Texts About Women Help Us Recover the Voices of Real Women?
Women made up roughly half the ancient Mediterranean population. When one considers the paltry number of surviving texts written by women, however, that population balance explains why ancient history may have been written by, for, and about men.
Specialists in ancient historians are not the only ones grappling with how to right this gender imbalance. Since the 1970s, many other fields have tried to find a way to address it, too. Joan Wallach Scott, author of a widely influential volume, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), played a leading role in these efforts. Wallach Scott challenged researchers in all disciplines to uncover stories about the lives of women who had been ignored. With a memorable play on words, she advocated for adding “her‐story” to history.
In the field of ancient history, this mandate was easier read than done. Some scholars – many of them female – pushed back against the idea that any text written about women by men could ever be trusted. The characters who appeared in these male‐authored sources, although they may have really existed, functioned more like literary inventions. This way of reading the ancient sources was frustrating and chilling. Women’s real day‐to‐day actions – their own voices, the complexity of their choices – seemed doomed to obscurity all over again.
Recent years have seen welcome new directions, as scholars turn to contemporary and comparative examples of feminist histories, such as the meaning of Islamic headscarves, to consider the lives of ancient women in thought‐provoking ways. One tool is to look at ancient women’s clothing choices as complex and, above all, creative social performances (Kate Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015]).
Demetrias, the Christian granddaughter of a wealthy Roman matriarch, Faltonia Anicia Proba, can help us see the potential of this new approach. After fleeing Rome in 410 or 411 CE with her Christian mother and grandmother, Demetrias chose to live as an ascetic. It was a radical decision, breaking three generations of family tradition. One male writer describes Demetrias’ modesty in the following way:
Her precious necklaces, costly pearls, and glowing gems she put back in their cases. Then dressing herself in a coarse tunic and throwing over herself a still coarser cloak she came in at an unlooked for moment, threw herself down suddenly at her grandmother’s knees, and with tears and sobs showed her who she really was.
(Jerome, Letter 130.5, trans. by W. Fremantle et al. in the NPNF series [1893])
Demetrias’ decision may seem like a highly conservative one to us, a way of unconsciously upholding male power by downplaying her own wealth, jewelry, and glamor – the very things that would have made her stand apart as a powerful woman. If we think about “the creative work of modesty” (Wilkinson 2015, p. 3), however, we can see Demetrias’ choices in a more subtle way. She was making a powerful statement about what it meant for her to be part of an ascetic community.
Looking at female clothing as an expression of community formation can help historians break out of the box of debating whether Demetrias’ behavior was an act of resistance or a highly traditional decision. In this approach, Demetrias’ fashion choice speaks to “who she really was.”
For these reasons, throughout much of the Roman Empire, whatever the precise architectural plan of the property being investigated, it is nearly impossible to identify public and private rooms. Social life in the house followed different patterns depending on the time of day and depending on a visitor’s degree of access to power. Even the exact function of a room might have changed throughout the day. This level of activity can often be detected through careful excavation and recording of the artifacts found in a specific space.
One third‐century CE house at the harbor city of Ephesos in Roman Asia Minor, for example, has been particularly well studied. Known as Hanghaus 2.4 (“Slope 2, House 4”) because it is part of a series of residences built into a gradually rising hill on the southwestern part of the city, it was a two‐level house in which excavators found a motley assemblage of artifacts (Figure 11.1). On its first floor, a collection of lamps, weights, and cooking pots was found in the spacious interior courtyard, a place where any guest would have stumbled over them on their way to visit the owner. Against the walls of the entry vestibule, by contrast, several shipping containers, or amphorae, had been propped up. The scattered location of the tools and the piles of quotidian junk undercut the image of an ancient home as having rooms that were always neatly separated by social function (see K. Bowes at the end of this chapter).
Figure 11.1 One of the most important harbors of the Roman East, the streets and houses of Ephesos provided the backdrop for uproarious comedies, such as those written by the Roman playwright Plautus. They had also been the stage for serious personal dramas. Paul, a Hellenistic Jew, had passed through here during his first‐century CE travels. Ephesos itself has been extraordinarily well excavated, with much material dating to Late Antiquity. These six houses were built into a terrace on the south side of one of the main city streets. Called by excavators the “Slope Houses” because of where they were built, they reveal, among other things, how modern notions of “public” and “private” living don’t map onto ancient households. In Slope House 2.4 (on plan, at the middle right) several tools and ceramic shipping containers were found on the ground floor; some were even stored upstairs. The courtyard, meanwhile, which would appear to be one of the most utilitarian spaces in a house, was known to have been used for elegant summer dining. At the end of the third century CE, an earthquake damaged this entire block.
Plan adapted from Norbert Zimmermann and Sabine Ladstätter, Wall Painting in Ephesos from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Period (Istanbul: Ege Yayinlari, 2011), p. 43.
Meanwhile, upstairs – in a room with a nice mosaic floor, the kind that would have spoken to the wealth and status ambitions of its owner – archaeologists discovered a hoe for gardening or farming, more lamps, and even fragments of sculpture. All of it was strewn on the room’s mosaic, as if the space were being used as a convenient storage closet. The lesson from Slope House 2.4 at Ephesos is not to be foolhardy when trying to determine the function of domestic rooms on an archaeological plan. The dangers are confirmed by additional evidence from the center of the house, where the chance discovery of a graffito showed that the owner’s well‐trafficked courtyard – not his formal dining room – was one of the most popular places for hosting his summer dinner parties.
When studying Roman houses, one other consideration is important to keep in mind: people’s ever‐changing moods and aesthetic preferences. Some residences in a city like Ostia were built in the second century CE but remained occupied by families and were consistently repaired over time, with trendy new features. The House of the Fortuna Annonaria (named for the discovery of a statue possibly dedicated to the goddess Fortuna, associated with the state food supply) was largely a second‐century residence that was occupied well throughout the fifth century CE. By the fourth century CE, owners had added a nymphaeum, or fountain wall, to the house. Lined with marble, a private fountain was a popular architectural feature in Ostia’s fourth‐ and fifth‐century homes. Not every aspect of Late Antique living was done in new, contemporary
construction.
11.2 House‐Churches in the Long History of Christianity
The fact that Roman houses were social spaces is an essential starting point when discussing the history of Christianity. Wealthy home‐owners had played a crucial role in providing meeting spaces for many of Jesus’ earliest followers. The money that came for transforming, adapting, and renovating these spaces, such as seen in the archaeological evidence at Dura Europos, shows us that, by the middle of the third century CE, many of Jesus’ followers had made important social connections in the cities where they lived.
These small communities may have grown more visible because of the way they reached out to Romans of means and used their wealth in creative ways. Many of these home‐owners may have directly influenced the rites practiced on their property or the beliefs held by the community meeting in the home. This long backstory in domestic living and private worship is important because not all Christians migrated from “private” houses to “public” churches in the years after the Edict of Milan. Material and textual evidence from across the Mediterranean confirms that many wealthy Christians in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries CE continued to worship in their houses.
Tituli and the transformation of the Caelian Hill, Rome
The best way to study this phenomenon involves looking at the history of the Christian tituli, twenty‐two of which are known from Rome. The tituli of Rome have often been conceived of as forerunners of Catholic parishes, which is to say, they were once believed to have functioned as their local neighborhood church. The Latin word titulus (plural tituli) from which these worship spaces take their name, however, was a legal term meaning “inscription” or “title.” And it is now thought that the word titulus was used to signify how the property had been acquired and from whom; a titulus was thus not necessarily the same as a basilica or church. According to Roman law, it simply designated the land or property which had been donated for someone else’s use. The name of the benefactor was given after the “title” (Political Issues 11.1: Wealth, Patronage, and the Voice of Influential Women; Figure 11.2).