by Douglas Boin
Figure 11.2 Although far removed from the grandiose cityscape of Rome, the cities of the Roman provinces were places of architectural innovation and experimentation. Gerasa (Jerash, modern Jordan) illustrates that point nicely. This photograph is a view, seen facing north, of Jerash’s marketplace, a distinctive oval forum. The idea of having a circular city center, although not popular in the wider Roman empire at the time, would, nevertheless, be adapted to cities like Ostia and Constantinople by the fourth century CE. Jerash itself would remain a place where local citizens used architecture to advertise their own status and ambitions. In the early sixth century CE, a wealthy couple donated money for a local church to be dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian. The names of the husband and wife were set into tiles on the church floor so that worshippers would know it was the laity – not the priests – who had provided such an expensive gift for the community.
Photo credit: Ann Morgan, with permission.
Political Issues 11.1 Wealth, Patronage, and the Voice of Influential Women
Georgia was a resident of Jerash (in modern Jordan). As with so many other women who called the ancient Mediterranean their home, details about her life – beyond the name of her nearest male family member, Theodorus, her husband – are scant. We do have an important piece of material culture that gives her a concrete social presence. As it turns out, Georgia was a Christian with a sizable fortune.
In 533 CE, she and her husband donated money to build a local church, dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian. To make sure people knew where the project’s funds had come from, the couple had their portraits and names put on display. In two separate panels set into the floor near the front of the church, “Georgia, wife of Theodore” and Theodore greet the members of the congregation. The mosaic is still in situ, or on site, in the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian.
Georgia’s display of wealth wasn’t unique for her day, nor is it unique in the annals of Christianity. Since the time of the very first documents left behind by the followers of Jesus, in the middle of the first century CE, women of means were providing financial or logistical resources for the early community. In fact, they can be found in almost every generation of early Christian history.
The apostle Paul’s letter to the people of Rome is one of the earliest documents attesting to this fact, written around 56–58 CE. At the time it was composed, Paul was staying in Corinth, Greece – specifically at its harbor city, Cenchreae, waiting for a journey to Rome. In his letter to the community at Rome, in advance of his arrival, Paul asks that they extend every hospitality to the advance members of his team. He also thanks several women for being “patrons,” or “benefactors,” of the Jesus movement. Asking for help from the community, Paul says:
I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon (or “minister”) of the church in Cenchreae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me.
(Paul, Letter to the Romans 16.1 [NRSV])
Elsewhere in the same letter, Paul mentions a husband and wife team, Priscilla and Aquila (Romans 16.3) who provided similar resources to him in his preaching. This arrangement for private funds was quite common in antiquity. Personal patronage and social connections paid for many of the amenities that individuals, communities, and even cities took for granted.
In Ostia, outside Rome, Faltonia Betitia Proba and her husband paid for the water supply to their local neighborhood bath complex. Archaeologists discovered their names stamped on a lead pipe, dated to the mid‐ to late fourth century CE, when Anicia Faltonia Proba’s husband was Prefect of the City of Rome.
The titulus Pammachius, located on Rome’s Caelian Hill overlooking the Flavian Amphitheater, is one of the twenty‐two titulus properties known from the city. Although the identity of Pammachius is not certain, the archaeological evidence from the site shows how a traditionally residential neighborhood of upper‐class houses and perhaps middle‐ to lower‐class apartments and shops could be gradually transformed over time to become a large Christian worship center.
By the late second century CE, there were two buildings in this neighborhood: an apartment, or insula, with shops and, across a small garden to the north, a large two‐storied house. By the third century CE, the residents of the house had acquired the apartment complex and used it to pursue an expansive renovation of their home. During this time, a household shrine was installed in the garden courtyard at the base of a stairway which led to the home’s upper stories. Based on traces of the wall paintings which survive, this shrine was dedicated to Venus or Isis.
A century later, in the middle of the fourth century CE, the owners added a new painted landing at the top of their courtyard stairway. Now, instead of leading to the upper stories of the home, it terminated in a small enclosure, like a closet, which was transformed into a chapel for the home‐owners. Frescos painted on the wall show scenes of martyrdom and Christian prayer. It was built above the first‐floor household shrine to Venus or Isis.
The final stage in the neighborhood’s transformation occurred in the first decades of the fifth century CE. At that time, the whole area – old apartments, garden courtyard, fancy multi‐story house – was given to the church as a titulus. The house was then partly demolished and buried. A church dedicated to Saints John and Paul would be built on the site. This church would be called a titulus in subsequent Christian documents.
House‐churches and church leadership
The issue of who controlled or managed these kinds of worship spaces once they were donated to the church is not entirely clear, and that is ultimately why they are both historically puzzling and so significant. In fact, it is very likely that the owners of the house underneath the fifth‐century church of Saints John and Paul retained, not forfeited, their leadership role in the church community when they donated it. This arrangement, although beneficial from a property standpoint to the church as an institution, could have also caused countless headaches for church leadership if the patrons of the property did not share the bishop’s vision for the spiritual direction of the Christian community.
Thus, although the role that patrons played in the construction of Christian churches was entirely consistent with practices going back to the time of Jesus’ followers, by Late Antiquity the logistics of this continuing partnership were gradually beginning to frustrate many bishops. As leaders of the church, in the age after Constantine, many bishops felt empowered to assert their own control over the extended Christian family. Heated debates soon arose between the bishops and the wealthy financiers, conversations which became particularly acute in the fourth and fifth centuries. One result of this dynamic was that many bishops themselves began hunting for sympathetic donors so that they could finance their own church communities, no strings attached.
Consequently, although it is tempting to read this period as one in which the powerless Christian laity began clashing with an increasingly powerful Christian hierarchy, all parties involved – the home‐owners, the property donors, and the bishops – were awash in money. And all parties were mindful of the ways that patronage could grease a palm or unlock a door. Continued church attendance at home after the age of Constantine gave rise to an intense Christian conversation about whose money should speak more loudly within the institution of the church.
11.3 Family and Household Relations, c.405–551 CE
Among the cacophony of a Roman home, run by its paterfamilias, it can be hard to hear other voices. This situation is especially true given the gender ideologies which dominated Roman society. The voices of women, for example, although the wealthier ones could manage their own inheritances and make a powerful contribution to the life of a city, can be difficult to hear in their own terms. Material culture can help. One female mummy from the city of Antinoöpolis in Egypt has become known as “The Embroiderer” because she was buried with the tools of her craft (EBW [2007], pp. 173–175). Althou
gh anonymous, she speaks beyond the grave through the love of her work.
Other women were not so fortunate. They passed through history silently or entered the history books because men spoke about them and for them. Two examples from the early fifth and early sixth centuries CE show us how the ideologies of the household were built around properly defined gender roles. Here, two male writers, Jerome and Procopius, describe women who threatened or subverted those roles.
Jerome and the lives of two Christian women in Gaul: c.405 CE
In the early fifth century CE, the Christian writer Jerome (c.437–420 CE) was based in Bethlehem. He had been working on new Latin translations of selected Jewish and Christian scriptures by drawing upon his knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. Even if Jerome felt separated from his old friends and family in the western Mediterranean – he had been born on the Adriatic in modern Croatia – geographic distance was not going to keep him from intervening in their affairs if the case demanded it. In 405 CE, a Christian monk came to him with one such concern:
A certain brother from Gaul told me that his virgin sister and widowed mother, though living in the same city, had separate apartments and have taken to themselves clerical protectors either as guests or as (financial) stewards; and that by associating with strangers in this way, they have caused more scandal than by living apart.
(Jerome, Letter 117.1, trans. by W. Fremantle et al. in the NPNF series [1893], slightly modified)
This letter reveals the circumstances under which the monk felt compelled to reach out for Jerome’s help. The monk’s sister and mother had taken advantage of the death of the family’s male authority figure, the paterfamilias, to move out of the family home and take up residence in two separate properties. As a result, neither woman was any longer under the constant supervision of a male, apart from the relationship which each had with their Christian “clerical directors” (clericus, meaning “clergy”). The fact that these clergy “managed [both the mother’s and daughter’s] small properties” suggests that they may have been associated with a household‐church, or titulus, in Gaul.
Whatever the exact circumstances of the mother and daughter’s daily routine in their own apartments, their unnamed brother‐son was scandalized by their relative freedom. He asked Jerome to write a letter to them to rebuke them for their decisions, as if the choice of mother and daughter to live alone threatened to undermine his social status as the male member of their family. Jerome took up the case willingly. To the daughter he wrote that her status as an unmarried young Christian woman – living outside the protection of a monastic community, although with a male Christian friend – was exposing her to dangerous forces that might derail her vow of chastity:
At dinner whether you like it or not, you will be forced to eat meat (and that of different kinds). To make you drink wine, they will praise it as a creature of God. To induce you to go with them to the baths, they will speak of dirt with disgust… . Meanwhile, some singer will perform for the company a selection of softly flowing airs; and as he will not venture to look at other men’s wives, he will constantly fix his eyes on you who have no protector.
(Jerome, Letter 117.6, trans. by Fremantle et al. [1893], slightly modified)
To the mother, Jerome crafted a message that appealed to her status as a respectable woman of means. “You have a son and a daughter,” Jerome pleaded with her, mentioning her two Christian children. “[But you also have] a son‐in‐law – or at least one who is your daughter’s partner,” he added, trying to shame her to put an end to the fact that her Christian daughter, although chaste, was sharing an apartment with an unmarried Christian man (Jerome, Letter 117.6, trans. by Fremantle et al. [1893], slightly modified).
Although Jerome’s letter to the two women in Gaul gives us his perspective on these matters, not theirs, the document does raise questions about the social expectations and burdens placed upon Christian women by Christian male friends and family. As is clear here, many of these expectations conflicted with how Christian women themselves conceived of the social options open to them. Many women, that is, following the customs of the wider Roman world, did not see their personal decisions as a problem affecting anyone else – until they looked through their mail and found a letter from Jerome.
Procopius tells of a scandalous Christian empress, c.550–551 CE
Three generations after the imperial settlement with the Ostrogothic kings, during which parts of the Italian peninsula had been erased from the map of the Roman Empire, similar expectations for proper female behavior at home and in public can be found in Procopius. His target was the Roman empress. A Christian living in a Christian Roman Empire, Procopius was scathing in his indictment of the Emperor Justinian and his wife. He clearly found the emperor’s policies of political intolerance – by which different faith traditions, even different Christian theological beliefs, were deemed heretical and outlawed – appalling. Empress Theodora was not immune to Procopius’ criticism, either. In a text published c.550–551 called The Secret History (called in Greek the Anecdota), he casts the sixth‐century empress as a woman of loose morals, degenerate behavior, and as a sex addict who, “though she was pregnant many times, yet practically always she was able to contrive to bring about an abortion immediately” (Procopius, The Secret History 9.19, LCL trans. by H. Dewing [1935]).
The intent behind Procopius’ scandalous portrayal was not to question the legitimacy of the female leader, however. In his discussion of the Ostrogothic Queen Amalasountha, daughter of King Theoderic (r. 489–526 CE), Procopius showed that he could respect a female politician when she displayed “the dignity befitting a queen” (History of the Wars 5.2.21, LCL trans. by H. Dewing [1916]). The acerbic, almost slanderous comments about Empress Theodora, by contrast, suggest that Procopius was not impressed by the emperor’s life partner, a female whom he caricatured as breaking all social conventions. Bringing Theodora into the ring helped Procopius land a powerful punch. If Emperor Justinian was struggling to manage his own household, how could he be trusted to govern the Christian Roman state? (Working With Sources 11.1: The Dramatic Life of the Mathematician, Scientist, and Philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria.)
Working With Sources 11.1 The Life of the Mathematician, Scientist, and Philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria
She helped her friend design an astrolabe, a device that measured the height of stars. Her father, a famous mathematician, trained her in the sciences. By the time she was an adult, she had taken her love of inquiry and transformed it into a career as a teacher and philosopher. Her name was Hypatia (c.355–415 CE), and she was one of the most accomplished mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers of antiquity. She also happened to be a woman.
Tragically, nothing that Hypatia wrote or made has come down to us, but countless others memorialized the story of her life and dramatic death. The first substantial account appeared in the middle of the fifth century CE. A Christian writer named Socrates of Constantinople, also known as Socrates Scholasticus, included her biography in his lengthy Church History. In the male‐dominated world of the Roman Empire, Socrates admired the way she held her own:
On account of the self‐possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.
(Church History 7.15, trans. by A. Zenos in the NPNF series [1890])
Hypatia’s outspokenness also may have led, in this male‐dominated Mediterranean, to her undoing. When conversations between the leading government official of Alexandria, Orestes, and the bishop of the city, Cyril, broke down – the issue seems to have focused on whether Orestes had been acting “Christian enough” – Hypatia was pegged as the source of the problem because “she had frequent interviews with Orestes” (Church History 7.15).
Whoever undertook this libelous
campaign against her, we cannot say. But the rhetoric did succeed in lighting the passions of Christians who believed that Orestes was not the “real Christian” he claimed he was. Soon, a Christian mob, stoked by a “fierce and bigoted zeal,” took their anger out on Hypatia. Meeting her in the street, they dragged her from her carriage, stripped her, and murdered her (Church History 7.15).
How much of this story is true? Did Socrates get the basic outline correct, or does another source challenge his version of the story? Unfortunately, no one after him showed any interest in the facts of the case. Many writers did the opposite. From the mid‐fifth century CE to the age of the Enlightenment, people expanded, elaborated, and embellished the story of Hypatia’s life and murder for their own purposes. One of the most distorted retellings comes from a Christian writing in the seventh century CE named John. John looked back on Hypatia’s death as if it were the final victory in a long set of Late Antique “cultural wars” that had been fought between Christians and non‐Christians. In John’s retelling, Alexandria’s bishop at the time, Cyril, was the one who won the day for, under his opposition, “the last remains of idolatry in the city” were destroyed (John of Nikiu, Chronicle 84.103, trans. by R. Charles [1916]).