A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity

by Douglas Boin

  A hunting scene also appears at the fourth‐century burial for the Armenian royal family, at the nearby city of Aghstk. Hunting scenes were also popular in Sasanian and Roman material culture. The inclusion of a similar scene at Ptghni suggests that Christians in the kingdom were able to mold their local customs to their Christian beliefs. This process of cultural adaptation opens up new ways of thinking about King Tiridates’s conversion, suggesting that his decision to embrace Christianity did not necessarily usher in a period of rapid social change. “Just as it was to do in other societies, the success of Christianity in Armenia was to involve compromises and accommodations with traditional attitudes and behavior which compensated for the tensions between them” (Redgate 1998, p. 122).

  Emperor Justinian, 527–565 CE

  Justinian ruled from Constantinople, but many of his days were preoccupied with the fate of people and lands elsewhere. In particular, Justinian went to war to take the cities of Italy and North Africa back from Ostrogothic and Vandal control, respectively. He also met Sasanian forces in the military theaters of Mesopotamia to try to expand Roman power and limit the Persians’ westward advances. Justinian had a tactical mind. When he became emperor, in 527 CE, the Roman state was at one of its most diminished sizes in antiquity: only modern Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt lay within its political control. By the end of Justinian’s reign, his generals had successfully seized back several western lands that the empire had not controlled since the fifth century. The important harbor at Carthage, the cities of North Africa, and even the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula would be triumphantly reclaimed, as were the old imperial heartlands of Sicily, the Italian peninsula, and cities along the Adriatic Sea. To manage many these territories, the emperor installed an exarch, or governor from Constantinople, at Ravenna on the northeastern coast of the peninsula, near Venice.

  This shaky recovery would falter. By the late sixth to early seventh century CE, a newly organized group from northern Italy, called Lombards, succeeded in establishing their own state on lands they wrestled from Justinian’s empire. Control over Italy’s territories were then divided up yet again, this time between Lombard and Roman leadership.

  Justinian’s Christian architecture

  Justinian’s Christian convictions led the emperor on a quixotic campaign to enforce proper theological belief throughout the Roman Empire, and he used Constantinople to make powerful claims about his authority. One wondrous piece of architecture spoke to the emperor’s vision for the “holy catholic and apostolic church.” It is the church of Hagia Sophia, which exists today as a museum.

  Teams of brick‐layers and masonry men, as well as artists and artisans specializing in mosaic and stone: all began working on the site in 532 CE. Five years later, in 537, a building of domes and half‐domes had risen, like a web of delicate bubbles, on the seaside promontory of the Golden Horn. The church had been cleverly designed and engineered by two men steeped in the scientific knowledge of classical antiquity. Isidore and Anthemius, the architect and engineer, both hailed from Ionia in western Asia Minor, Isidore from Miletus and Anthemius from Tralles. Ionia’s cities had been producing some of the Mediterranean’s top‐tier scientists since the sixth century BCE when “wise men” – lovers of rational inquiry called philosophoi in Greek, like Anaximander, Thales, and Anaximenes – had set out to investigate the origins of the physical world. Like all rigorous, methodically minded thinkers who have ventured to explore the natural world, not all these men would always get it right. Anaximander (c.610–547 BCE) believed the world was shaped like a column drum, with a flat top. Still, seen as part of a demanding intellectual tradition, Ionian minds would come to shape the Mediterranean world in important ways. In the case of Hagia Sophia, it was literally so.

  Hagia Sophia, the church dedicated to “Holy Wisdom,” was born from both the imagination and careful planning of two wise men working in this same tradition (Figure 13.2), still flourishing in Ionia, almost one thousand years after Anaximander.

  Figure 13.2 In Constantinople, north of the palace and the popular hippodrome, Emperor Justinian would commission a magnificent urban church, Hagia Sophia (“Holy Wisdom”). Replacing an earlier church of the same name which had recently succumbed to fire, this new Hagia Sophia would be designed and built by two ambitious engineers and architects, both from Asia Minor: Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles. The building seen here is largely their vision, from 532 and 537 CE, with slight modification. After Turks seized control of Constantinople in 1453, four minarets were added to the corners – in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – for the Muslim call to prayer, transforming Hagia Sophia into a mosque. The building stayed a mosque until the twentieth century when, in 1935, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern state of Turkey, decided that this important treasure from Justinian’s time should become a symbol of Turkey’s secular ideals. The mosque was turned into a museum, which it remains today.

  Photo credit: Author’s photo, 2007.

  In many ways, then, Justinian’s world, a world in which only one, limited version of faith was considered politically acceptable and architectural daring was enlisted in the service of the emperor’s vision, was a land of puzzling social contradictions. The mathematical ingenuity and creative thinking that were needed to fashion the domes and half‐domes of Hagia Sophia had been cultivated since the creation of the Pantheon, in Rome’s Campus Martius. And yet this level of innovation was, paradoxically, encouraged at a time when a stricter vision of the Christian state was being promoted and policed, often with detrimental effects on society and daily life.

  13.2 Cosmas’ Christian World

  Cosmas the voyager to India (“Indicopleustes”) gives us another perspective. It is not just a view of someone standing outside Constantinople’s rarefied world of diplomatic dinners and policy debates. His writings transport us into a different kind of place, of classrooms and living rooms, church halls and taverns, where ordinary but educated citizens grappled with how to think about their role in the world. Cosmas shows us a sixth‐century Roman Empire where scripture governed many people’s lives, apocalyptic thinking was commonly accepted, and the day‐to‐day realities of being a minority were anything but easy.

  Geography

  As best as scholars can tell, Cosmas lived and worked in Alexandria, an important cultural capital since the Ptolemies. Science, math, medicine: Alexandria had specialized and excelled in them all. By Justinian’s time, it had also become renowned for its Christian thinkers, too. The voices of theological commentators like Origen or the bishop of Alexandria, Cyril, would earn an important place in Christian writing. Cyril’s influence, in particular – recall how he had believed the human and divine natures of Christ were united in one union (hypostasis) – had shaped the beliefs of Alexandria’s Christians throughout the fifth and sixth centuries.

  Cosmas grew up here, and Alexandria itself may have nudged him into the study of geography. Although it can be debated whether he traveled as far as his writings or his nickname imply, he left behind a book which describes a world far wider than the one which captivated his emperor. His writings, called the Christian Topography, survive in three illuminated manuscripts.

  Cosmas’ Christian Topography takes his readers south from the Mediterranean, through the Red Sea, to the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula (modern Yemen), to the Indian Ocean and the modern island of Sri Lanka. This “travelogue” shares many of the contradictory features of Justinian’s age. Aiming high, born of an honest desire for intellectual exploration, it is stuck in an unimaginatively literalist Christian worldview, one which keeps its readers bound to scripture.

  Here is how Cosmas explains and analyzes the shape of the physical world. He begins by citing a story from Jewish Scripture, specifically, from a passage in the first five books, the Pentateuch:

  [In the Book of Exodus] God [Yahweh] directs Moses to construct a Tabernacle [the dwelling place of Yahweh before th
e Temple in Jerusalem was built] according to the pattern which Moses had seen in the mountain – this Tabernacle being a pattern, so to say, of the whole world. Moses therefore … gave it a length of 30 cubits and a breadth of ten. Then … he divided it into two compartments. This outer space was patterned after the visible world.

  (Christian Topography 3.51, trans. by J. McCrindle [1897], modified)

  Cosmas’ literal reading of Jewish Scripture has led him to propose that the earth was shaped in the form of a two‐dimensional rectangular plane, like the Jewish tabernacle.

  Cosmas’ worldview is important not because this lone travel writer’s voice stands as an example of the Roman Empire’s ignorant multitude, all of whom presumed the earth was flat. As we have already seen, key scientific thinkers like Anaximander, in the sixth century BCE, had held similar views although Anaximander’s theories were based on rational inquiry and Cosmas’ were based on a literal reading of Jewish Scripture. What is remarkable, rather, is how different Cosmas’ ideas were from men and women of his own time.

  The centrality of scripture

  By the age of Justinian, the overwhelming opinion of classical scientists had moved towards the idea that the earth was round. Aristotle, in the fourth century BCE, had been one of the first to propose a spherical earth, but there were others who elaborated on this idea in crucial ways. The mathematician, astronomer, and observer of the natural world, Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in second‐century CE Alexandria, had been one of the first to describe it, in treatises specifically devoted to the topic. Several of his books, including his Guide to Mapping the World and the Almagest (Arabic for “the great book”), would remain popular in Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages, across faith communities and in various languages. Late Antique Christians – like Augustine, who admitted the possibility that the earth was spherical, not flat (Augustine, City of God 16.9) – likely inherited this idea from the mainstream, widespread popularity of earlier classical thinkers like Claudius Ptolemy.

  Cosmas may have been a lonely, idiosyncratic voice, but that does not make him an outlier in all respects. Many of his Christian friends, neighbors, and family would have accepted it unhesitatingly that scripture could and should provide the organizing basis for all intellectual endeavors. This deference to scripture’s unerring “truth” shows up in many corners of Late Antique society. Both Christians who read scripture literally and those who read it allegorically found ways to make biblical texts the basis for their ideas, opinions, and arguments.

  Augustine, one of the most famous Christian voices to encourage others how to read scripture allegorically, himself did so when he discussed the earth’s geography. Christians could embrace the notion that the earth was round, he argued, although there was no reason to “jump to the conclusion that [the other side of round earth] has human inhabitants” (Augustine, City of God 16.9, LCL trans. by E. Sanford and W. Green [1965]). Augustine’s wariness about populating another side of the planet was based on an assumption he shared with Cosmas: “There is absolutely no falsehood in scripture, which gains credence for its account of past events by the fact that its prophecies are fulfilled,” he explained (Augustine, City of God 16.9). For Augustine, the Christian Mediterranean was the entirety of his known world.

  Even though Cosmas Indicopleustes based his geography on a literal reading of Jewish Scripture and Augustine based his geography on the classical intellectual tradition, both appealed to the idea that scripture could not be wrong when it came to describing the world they lived in. For Christians who read works by both men or for other readers who took the time to compare their ideas, Christians must have seemed the practitioners of a curiously inconsistent faith.

  Apocalyptic thinking

  There is another, peculiar facet of Cosmas’ world which, until recently, scholars have been hesitant to discuss as a historical reality. The reasons for this reticence come from the rather embarrassing nature of the evidence. Some people in the sixth century CE – it is impossible to put demographic figures on this group – believed Jesus’ resurrection was near, that the Last Judgment was imminent, and the world would come to an end in the middle of Justinian’s reign.

  We can chart the level of this anxiety in a number of ways. First, there is testimony recorded by those who heard people fretting about the approaching end times. A lawyer who worked in Constantinople in the middle of the sixth century CE, Agathias (c.532–c.580), left behind one such record. He wrote an important text, in ancient Greek, called the Histories. It continued the narrative which Procopius of Caesarea had begun and describes Justinian’s wars in Italy. It also preserved an account of what happened when, in 557 CE, an earthquake shook Constantinople.

  According to Agathias, the emperor’s own carefully planned and costly church, Hagia Sophia, was damaged during this time; and many Christians throughout the city were fretful about how to interpret that event. Agathias’ description of the earthquake is important for several reason. First, he notes that the catastrophe happened during an ancient Roman civic festival, the Brumalia. Held over a series of weeks prior to the winter solstice (brumalis, in Latin, means “pertaining to the winter”), the festival lasted from the end of November to the middle of December and may have been dedicated to the god Dionysos. The evidence for this holiday, although seemingly tangential to the account of the earthquake, reveals that, even in the sixth century, the civic calendar of Christian Constantinople were not entirely consumed with Jesus’ life.

  Agathias also gives us some information about how certain Christians reacted to the cataclysmic event:

  The tremors continued for several days; and though they had lost most of their initial fury and were of much shorter duration, they were still sufficiently violent to disrupt any remaining semblance of order. Fantastic stories and extraordinary predictions to the effect that the end of the world was at hand began to circulate among the people. Charlatans and self‐appointed prophets roamed the streets prophesying whatever came into their heads and terrifying still more the majority of the people who were particularly impressionable because they had already become demoralized [by the natural disaster]. … Others, as might have been expected, pondering over the motions and aspects of the stars, hinted darkly at greater calamities and at what amounted almost to a cosmic disaster.

  (Histories 5.5, trans. by J. Frendo [Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975])

  Interestingly, although he never identifies them as Christians, Agathias does not hesitate from passing harsh judgment on these doomsday individuals and the “charlatans and self‐appointed prophets” who accompanied them on their ranting. Offering an interesting sociological comment on end‐time thinking, he concludes: “Society … never fails to throw up a bewildering variety of such persons in times of misfortune.”

  What is remarkable is that these undercurrents of end‐time thinking were not limited to Constantinople or the East Roman Empire. Visions of an unknown judgment, looming just off the horizon – perhaps tomorrow, perhaps hundreds of years from tomorrow – were part of the world familiar to many sixth‐century Christians. One bishop of Rome would famously drew upon these powerful beliefs to suggest that his flock urgently modify their ethical behavior, even if the second coming of the Messiah could not be predicted.

  “Our Lord … wants the final hour to be unknown to us,” Pope Gregory (c.540–604 CE) preached to his congregation in Rome, “so that it can always be suspected.” Gregory’s apocalyptic beliefs may not have been rooted in the same fixed certainty of the people Agathias refers to as “charlatans and self‐appointed prophets” of the end time. But his evocation of imagery associated with the last days did serve a useful purpose.

  As the pope explained, “while we cannot foresee [the end time], we might be prepared for it without pause. Therefore, my brothers, fix your mind’s eye on the mortal condition, prepare yourself for the coming Judgement with daily tears and laments!” (Pope Gregory, Homilies on the Gospels 1.13.6, trans. by J. Palmer, The Apocalypse in the E
arly Middle Ages [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014], p. 61). For many communities throughout the sixth‐century Mediterranean, whether in the capital of the old Roman Empire or the current one, a steady stream of apocalyptic thinking trickled through daily life.

  In fact, by the end of the century, one monk may have had enough with these doomsday scenarios (Key Debates 13.1: End‐Time Thinking and the Invention of the “A.D.” Calendar). Soon, the “A.D.” dating system would come to be the dominant way of recording time throughout medieval Europe. Widely adopted by the eighth century CE, it was first invented in Cosmas’ day to address the growing needs of a society that, from the top‐down, wanted to structure the whole calendar around the life and death of Jesus, promoting Christian ideals around the clock.

  Key Debates 13.1 End‐Time Thinking and the Invention of the “A.D.” Calendar

  Since the second century CE, some Christian writers had calculated that life on earth would last for six thousand years. At that point, the world would either come abruptly to an end or Jesus would return as the Messiah to preside over his kingdom. The number six thousand was not decided upon due to any careful, physical observation of the earth’s geology, however. It was arrived at through a selective literal and symbolic reading of Jewish Scripture.