by Douglas Boin
Even Socrates of Constantinople may have used Hypatia to serve his own needs. Socrates was writing at a time when the bishops of Constantinople and Alexandria had parted ways over how to describe the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and divinity. In Socrates’ presentation of these events, Alexandria and its people do not exactly come across as models of civic behavior.
11.4 Slaves and Slavery
The emperor and his estate managers were the most prominent of the landholders throughout the Mediterranean, but one didn’t have to be a member of the imperial house to sell, trade, and manage a portfolio of farms and properties. Nor did one have to be male. All farms, estates, and households – from the houses of Rome’s Caelian and Aventine Hills to the villas of Spain and the emperor’s palace in Constantinople – ran on slaves. Moreover, no faith community in Late Antiquity, regardless of the moral leadership which many faith communities did provide in support of the abolitionist causes during the modern era, would ever advocate to break, disrupt, or shut down this entrenched system of slave labor. Between the third and eighth centuries CE, Christians and, later, Muslims never led an organized intellectual, social, or cultural revolution to challenge the fundamental existence of a slave‐owning society. (A helpful guide to the Islamic material is Mohammed Ennaji’s Slavery, the State, and Islam, trans. from the French by Teresa Fagan [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013].)
The practice of slavery had a long precedent in the Greek and Roman worlds, in both agricultural contexts and in household management. Taken as prisoners in war, slaves could be drawn from any region of the known world; in this way, ancient slavery was not based on race. Many males and females had to endure lives of servitude as a result. They could also be educated and might work as tutors in Greek and Roman households, teaching students their own native language. Many paid for their freedom based on the savings they earned and set aside, called their peculium. Others were beaten by farmers or worked long, hard hours in Rome’s mines. Still others, as property of the imperial house, managed the infrastructure of the capitals, like the slaves who were tasked with inspecting the aqueducts.
The ubiquity, even the necessity of slaves in the Roman world, may explain why many of Jesus’ followers never tried to replace this system. In fact, it was through a process of conforming to Roman cultural values that many of Jesus’ followers taught others to perpetuate the injustice of robbing another human of their liberty. These early Christian compromises with Roman culture are preserved in Christian Scripture in several passages which scholars refer to as the “household duty codes” (in Colossians 3.18–4.1, in Ephesians 5.22–6.9, and in 1 Peter 2.18–3.7). These exhortations compelled all of Jesus’ followers to conform to mainstream values: Women were told to obey their husbands; children, their parents; and slaves, their masters.
Even in the time of the Christian Emperor Justinian, the division between free and un‐free was still being articulated in Roman law. Justinian’s Institutes set forth the working legal definitions for who constituted a free citizen, a freedman, or a slave:
The chief division in the rights of persons is this: men are all either free or slaves. Freedom, from which men are said to be free, is the natural power of doing what we each please, unless prevented by force or by law. Slavery is an institution of the law of nations, by which one man is made the property of another, contrary to natural right… .Slaves either are born or become so. They are born so when their mother is a slave; they become so either by the law of nations, that is, by captivity, or by the civil law, as when a free person, above the age of twenty, suffers himself to be sold, that he may share the price given for him.
(Justinian, Institutes 1.3, trans. by O. Thatcher [ed.], The Library of Original Sources: The Roman World [Milwaukee: University Research Extension, 1907])
Emperor Justinian’s matter‐of‐fact presentation and acceptance of a society built upon the concept of slavery underlines a key point. In the sixth century CE, even the most zealous advocate for a Christian state never questioned the moral foundations of a world in which some men were free and others were not.
And yet, the most historically empathetic explanation as to why an ancient abolition movement never grew perhaps lies in the fact that, in antiquity, slaves were not existentially or economically bound to a lower social status. With the right patron and the right funds, any slave could potentially become free. Justinian’s own policies towards freedmen show that he saw manumission as an important mechanism for sustaining a degree of social mobility in the state. “We have made all freedmen whatsoever Roman citizens,” the emperor decreed:
without any distinction as to the age of the slave or the interest of the manumittor, or the mode of manumission. We have also introduced many new methods by which slaves may become Roman citizens, the only kind of liberty that now exists.
(Justinian, Institutes 5.3)
The rate and extent to which Romans freed their slaves over the course of the third through sixth centuries is unknown, unfortunately, as it is for earlier periods of Roman history. These social demographics were not the sorts of details the state ever kept records or numbers on, at least as far as have been preserved for us. Nevertheless, selected documents can give a human face to Justinian’s impersonal laws.
The most famous is the example of the wealthy husband and wife, Valerius Pinianus and Valeria Melania (383–439 CE). Before moving to Jerusalem to build a Christian monastic community, the couple liquidated their household properties in, among other places, Roman Spain and Gaul. Eight thousand slaves were freed during this sale (Palladius, Historia Lausiaca [Life of Melania, in Greek] 61.3). With significant landholdings elsewhere, in Roman Italy and North Africa, the couple was not exactly bankrupting themselves by cutting these men and women loose (Palladius, Historia Lausiaca 61.5). In fact, in the Roman world, a patron’s generosity could and often did establish a long‐lasting connection between freedmen, freedwomen, and their former owners. These tight bonds often paid dividends as freedmen and freedwomen began their own careers outside the estate and further elevated the stature of their patrons. In short, even the reasons that may have motivated Christians like Pinianus and Melania to free their slaves need not have been exclusively attributed to their Christian faith.
11.5 Households and the Emergence of the Papacy in Rome
Because the proper management of one’s household was central to Roman life, many Christians in the age after Constantine looked to Roman models to help articulate their vision for the Christian church. In Rome itself, this conversation played out in a complicated social setting. Wealthy Christians were continuing to worship in their own homes, as we saw from the archaeological evidence underneath the fifth‐century church of Saints John and Paul, while at the same time wealthy bishops were trying to attract all of the city’s Christian community to new worship spaces, the city’s basilicas.
During the fifth and sixth centuries, in particular, bishops would make a gambit to steer more Christians in their direction. They did so by pitching a message with three carefully crafted components. First, they claimed to be true and legitimate heirs of Saint Peter, whose tomb was believed to be located underneath the basilica at the Vatican. Second, they began to use the title “Summus Pontifex,” or Highest Priest, to emphasize their authority in divine matters, particularly when engaging in theological conversations with Christians in the eastern empire. Leo, the bishop of Rome in the middle of the fifth century (b. 400; bishop 440–461 CE), was the first to have the audacity to appropriate this role, which directly challenged the authority of Roman emperors to act in their government capacity as Pontifex Maximus. (It is during Leo’s reign that the bishop of Rome will first be called “Papa,” or “Pope,” a title that was intended to assert his leadership over the wider Mediterranean Christian community.)
The third way the bishops of Rome sought to increase their power over Christian communities, both in the city and beyond it, was by asking congregations to think of them as househol
d managers of God’s estate. That is, the bishops of Rome began to refer to themselves as if they were the people to whom God had entrusted the running of the entire Christian family.
Bishop Gregory (540–604; r. 590–604 CE) preached this idea to his congregation in a homily, telling them, “I am the servant [slave] of the supreme paterfamilias” (Gregory, Homily on the Gospels 36.2). In this metaphor, borrowed from Roman culture, Gregory was but a lowly slave who had been entrusted with the oversight of the estate. And God, he argued, was the highest authority whom Gregory served. This self‐presentation would have sounded paradoxical to many Christians. Was Gregory trying to be a slave, or a powerful leader? But through his rhetoric Gregory was effectively molding the Christian community into one which looked to the bishop of Rome as a leading authority. By identifying with the slave’s role, spiritually, Gregory could simultaneously claim a greater right to intervene in the temporal, spatial, and political affairs of every Christian household, whether a resident of Rome or someplace else.
This imagery, in which the bishop of Rome became the chief servant who oversaw the management of God’s household, became widespread throughout the fifth and sixth centuries CE. It was an important part of how the bishop of Rome emerged as a trans‐regional authority figure.
Summary
The story that Augustine tells of leaving home in North Africa with his mother provided a point of departure for us to explore the place and meaning of home in society. In this chapter, we looked at examples of domestic spaces, from the lower‐ to middle‐class apartments of Egypt and Ostia to the upper‐class houses of Ephesos and Rome. Although archaeological plans can be helpful for discussing life in a Roman home, we also saw that, when done carefully, excavations show us that rooms in a Roman house were also much more multifunctional than we might assume. The Slope House at Ephesos, with its garden tools upstairs and shipping containers by the front door, brought the messy realities of day‐to‐day living back to the fore. The concepts of public and private were also especially hard to apply to these spaces.
The physical world of where people lived was important for a second reason. From evidence within the city of Rome, we saw that many wealthy Christians chose to continue to worship at home in the centuries after Constantine legalized Christianity. The archaeological and textual sources which attest to tituli churches were significant in this regard because the legal context of this language suggests that property donors may have remained financially or even spiritually invested in the community which they had funded. This world of churches, ostensibly owned by the bishop but in effect managed by others, gave birth to a competitive environment, where many Christian voices fought for the ear of the larger community. By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bishops of Rome were appropriating the power and imagery associated with the Roman house to suggest that they, not anyone else, were the most effective managers of God’s family.
Study Questions
What is a Roman paterfamilias?
In what ways were Roman apartments and houses similar to or different from your apartment or your family’s house?
By the fifth century CE, Christians had a long history of having met and worshipped in homes. Retell that history. How does it change over time? How does it stay the same?
Why do you think the bishops of Rome invoked the values of the Roman household to assert their authority over other Christian communities in the fifth century CE?
Suggested Readings
Kim Bowes, Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire (London: Duckworth, 2010).
Kate Cooper, The Fall of the Roman Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
James O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: Ecco Press, 2005).
Kristina Sessa, The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antique Italy: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
12
Ideas and Literary Culture
A few famous race drivers, some scandalous burial workers, and the details of the ceramic industry have helped us see how people occupied their time through work and trade between the third and sixth centuries. In this context, we also indirectly glimpsed the ways in which people of all classes passed their leisure hours: cheering for their favorite chariot team or enjoying a dramatic performance. As we begin this chapter, which looks at the wide‐ranging literary culture of the Mediterranean, we should start with one community of the Roman world for whom the life of the mind – not necessarily sport or spectacle – was one of their most pressing concerns. These men and women valued deep intellectual inquiry and a rigorous, rational pursuit of the origins of the known world. They were philosophers, but they weren’t opposed to attracting an audience and growing their own brand, either.
Starting in the age of Archaic Greece, thinkers in Asia Minor began pursuing a “love of wisdom” (philos [love] + sophia [wisdom]), which they used to build their own intellectual reputations and recruit like‐minded followers. Competition was important, as different thinkers began suggesting competing ideas for what might explain the workings of the physical universe. By Classical Greece, two of these intellectual communities had become famous in Athens. They were organized around the teachings of Aristotle and Plato. Plato’s Academy, as his school was called, would remain a vital center for those wishing to pursue the life of the mind up until the early sixth centuries CE.
Then, both schools faced an existential threat. We know what happened because of the report of a Greek lawyer named John (c.480–c.570 CE; his nickname, “Malalas,” is the Syriac word for “lawyer”). John the lawyer wrote an eighteen‐volume history of the world from the birth of Jesus to the age of Justinian, called the Chronicle [Chronographia]. In it, under an entry for the year 529 CE, he records that the Roman Emperor Justinian ordered the philosophy schools of Athens to be shuttered (Chronicle 18.47). One of the classical world’s most fiercely intellectual communities, groups which had thrived for the last two hundred years under Christian rulers of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, was now forced to disband.
12.1 The “One” and the Many: Philosophical and Anthropological Perspectives
Those who cultivated a passion for wisdom had never been compelled to study in Athens. Alexandria was famous for thinkers like Hypatia, who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE. Almost a hundred years before her time, however, the halls and classrooms of Alexandria had educated one of the most influential thought‐leaders of the Late Antique world, Plotinus (205–270 CE). Born in Egypt, a student in Alexandria, Plotinus later moved to Rome, where he published his ideas and built his own philosophical community. Almost single‐handedly Plotinus reinvigorated the study of Plato. In doing so, he laid the groundwork for an explosion of interest in Plato’s teachings and Plotinus’ elaborations of them during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries and beyond. We call this movement Neoplatonism.
Much of what we know about Plotinus comes from one of his students, Porphyry of Tyre, who edited Plotinus’ writings, the Enneads, and released a biography, the Life of Plotinus. Plotinus’ own intellectual pursuits were motivated by the desire to explain the underlying metaphysical unity of the dizzyingly diverse natural world in which he lived. He did so by taking Plato’s idea of non‐material forms and positing that everything we see around us is an illustration of one unitary principle. Plotinus called this principle the “One”:
[I]f people are going to say that nothing prevents one and the same thing from being many, there will be a one underlying these many; for there can be no many if there is not a one from which or in which these are, or in general a one, and a one which is counted first before the others, which must be taken alone, itself by itself.
(Plotinus, Enneads 5.6.3, LCL trans. by A. Armstrong [1984])
Plotinus’ challenging ideas would provoke many conversations and literary w
orks in the decades and centuries after his death. Next‐generation thinkers like Proclus (c.410–485 CE) would pick up the baton and explore the ramifications of Plotinus’ teachings. Others, like Augustine, writing in his early fifth‐century CE work City of God, would claim that “Plotinus, whose memory is quite recent, enjoys the reputation of having understood Plato better than any other of his disciples” (City of God 9.10, trans. by M. Dods in the series NPNF [1887]).
Loyal followers aside, we should remember that not everyone in the Mediterranean would have necessarily subscribed to Plotinus’ ideas. Historians themselves need to be wary of letting their own intellectual preferences guide their interpretation of what evidence has been left behind. One case study from Late Antique material culture, from a burial context, will demonstrate why.
Scenes of the hero Hercules’ returning from the underworld are well known from the Roman catacombs. Sometimes, these illustrated tales often appear next to specifically Christian scenes. Does that mean that the deceased – or perhaps the people who visited the grave – were questing after the one, unified spiritual reality which lay behind their complicated lives? (In this interpretation, Hercules’ return from the dead is seen as a Neoplatonic allegory for the hope of Jesus’ resurrection.) This rather specialized way of understanding Late Antique material culture became popular in the twentieth century because it gave scholars a way to explain the rise of Christianity in peaceful, non‐violent, terms. As more Romans came to embrace a Neoplatonic worldview, people began embracing the more culturally appealing elements of Christianity by adding them to their own belief systems. Later, when they reached a higher level of philosophical sophistication – recognizing the true “one” behind Rome’s many gods and heroes – they converted to Christianity. Or so the story goes. These feel‐good theories grew out of a scholarly fascination with the concept of “syncretism,” a word that describes the blending of different beliefs (Exploring Culture 12.1: The Mash‐Up Poem).