A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  Six historians have left accounts of the events of Armenian society in late antiquity: Agat’angelos, the author of the Buzandaran (Pseudo‐Faustus of Byzantium), Elishe, Lazar of Parp’, and Sebeos all date from the period of the fourth through the seventh centuries, while Movses Khorenat’si pretends to be an eyewitness to events of the fifth century but in actuality dates from the eighth century. Two historians – Agat’angelos and the author of the Buzandaran – wrote in the late fifth century but claimed to write in the fourth. Elishe and Lazar wrote in the late fifth century about the struggle between Armenians loyal to Persia and Zoroastrianism and those who had become Christianized; Sebeos wrote in the seventh century and is an important source for the final period of Sassanid reign.

  Agat’angelos claimed to be a scribe in the court of Trdat’, the Armenian king who converted to Christianity as the result of the mission of Gregory the Illuminator in the early fourth century. Agat’angelos’s History of Trdat and Saint Gregory survives in numerous languages and in varying editions: It tells the dramatic story of Gregory’s conversion to Christianity; his alliance with the See of Caesarea and his long imprisonment by the pagan Trdat’; the arrival of Christian virgins fleeing from the emperor Diocletian’s sexual predations; their martyrdom under Trdat’; Trdat’s transformation into a boar; his subsequent repentance and acceptance of Christianity; and his alliance with Constantine and Christianity. Known as the “received history,” it has had a long and continuing influence in Armenian Christianity, similar to that of Eusebius in the Greek and Latin west and the Syriac‐speaking south. Yet it was composed to celebrate the Arshakuni dynasty of Armenian kings and reflects just one perspective on the coming of Christianity to the region.

  Garsoian’s recently translated, richly annotated publication of the Buzandaran (also known, inaccurately, as “Faustus of Byzantium”) has allowed for a differing, complementary account of the arrival of Christianity that highlights the strong resistance to it among the Armenian clans, with their ongoing cultural and religious connections to Sassanid‐ruled Persia. Reflecting the history of the southern district of Taron, the Buzandaran also recounts the missionary efforts of Syrian monks from the south among the successors of the house of Gregory the Illuminator. Instead of a clear transition from paganism to Christianity, the Buzandaran shows the persistence of Zoroastrian and native religious traditions among Armenian ruling families and the celebration of warfare and epic tradition.

  The two historians of the fifth century, writing in the sixth, tell the story of the war between the Armenian Christian lords and Persians and Armenians loyal to them as a history of a “nation” struggling against a powerful overlord. Both celebrate the deeds of the Mamikonian clan and, in particular, of Vardan Mamikonian, the hero of the war. Yeghishe’s History of Vardan and the Armenian War is devoted to the period of 449–451, concluding with the defeat of Vardan and the Christian Armenians at the battle of Avarayr. It is a combination of battle accounts and martyrology centering on the “deeds of heavenly valor” of Vardan and his companions. These figures accommodated the pagan Persian’s insistence on Zoroastrian observance only to repent and die defending Christianity, thus leading ultimately to the Persians granting Armenians the freedom to practice Christianity.

  Lazar of Parp’, educated in the fifth century in Armenia and Constantinople, wrote his History of Armenia at the behest of Vardan’s heir, Vahan Mamikonian. He gives a much longer account of Armenian history, beginning in the fourth century and culminating in the war of 449–451. An example of a wider set of contacts among Armenians, he returned to Siunik’, where he worked for the Kamsarakan clan, until Vahan Mamikonian noticed his talents and brought him to Vagharshapat. Finally, suffering from opposition from the anti‐Byzantine side of Armenian church life, he moved to the city of Amida (current Diyarbakr, Turkey) and completed his history.

  A historian writing in the seventh century has been traditionally named Sebeos; he chronicles the sixth and seventh centuries – the period of the emperor Heraclius and his war against the Persians up to the first Islamic civil war. His title, “Bishop of the Bagratunis,” also points to the remarkable Armenian practice in which bishops and priests were attached to ruling families instead of presiding over urban Sees. One of few sources for the campaigns of Heraclius, he was also one of the earliest Western writers on early Islam, and he signals the end of Armenian connection with both Byzantium – from whose form of Christianity Armenians had already broken – and Sasanian Persia, the culture and religion of which would be replaced by Islam. The new Islamic reign would lead to further Armenian independence, with the diminution of the two great empires of late antiquity. Armenian literature continued, its histories sponsored by aristocratic families and its religious literature by large monastic establishments that appeared in the post‐ancient period.

  In sum, Armenian literature before the Arab conquest was largely the creation of the Armenian clergy, and through the ancient and medieval periods, it remained largely the province of that class. Whether they were historians in the service of one or another ruling house or were clerics or monks, they represented and served the church and its projects, refracted through the dominant themes of Armenian religious culture. In this way, Armenian literature was like that of the Syriac‐speaking populations to the south and east: it was a creation of Christian institutions established in the fourth century, in the wake of Constantine and Theodosius’s gradual establishment of Christianity. Nonclerical Armenian stories were not literature, because they were not recorded until the nineteenth century, at which point their form and contents had developed, but they also reflected ancient compositions. When the epic stories (Sasnadzrer) of the heroes of Sasun (Sanasar, Balthasar, Mher the Great, and David of Sasun) were recorded in the nineteenth century, they provided a distant reflection of the Armenian oral culture that had been sidelined since the fifth century.

  REFERENCES

  Blanchard, Monica and Darling Young, Robin. (trans.) (1998). A Treatise on God Written by Eznik of Kolb (fl. c. 430–c. 450). Leuven: Peeters.

  Bournoutian, George A. (1993). A History of the Armenian People. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.

  Garsoian, Nina. (1985). Armenia between Byzantium and the Sasanians. London: Variorum.

  Garsoian, Nina. (1989). The Epic Histories Attributed to P’awstos Buzand (Buzandaran Patmut’iwnk’). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

  Inglisian, Vahan. (1963). Die armenische Literatur. In: Armenisch und kaukasische Sprachen (ed. Gerhard Deeters). Handbuch der Orientalistik, 1.7. Leiden: Brill.

  Jensen, Hans, 1939. Altarmenische Grammatik. Heidelberg: C. Winter Universitätsverlag.

  Maranci, Christina. (Forthcoming). The Art of Armenia: A Critical Art History of Ancient and Medieval Armenia, With a Concluding Chapter on Cultural Heritage. New York and London: Oxford University Press.

  Meillet, Antoine. (1936). Esquisse d’une grammaire comparée de l’armenien classique. 2nd ed. Vienna: Imprimerie des pp. Mékhitharistes.

  Néve, Félix. (1886). L'Arménie chrétienne et sa littérature. Louvain.

  Schmitt, Rüdiger. (1981). Grammatik des Klassisch‐Armenischen. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beitrage zur Sprachwissenschaft.

  Stone, Michael. (1982). The Armenian Inscriptions from the Sinai with Appendixes on the Georgian and Latin Inscriptions by Michel van Esbroeck and W. Adler. Harvard Armenian Texts and Studies, 6 (ed. R.W. Thomson). Cambridge: Harvard University.

  Stone, Michael. (1992). The Rock Inscriptions and Graffiti Project, Catalogue of Inscriptions. Vols. 1–2: Inscriptions 1–6000. Society of Biblical Literature Resources for Biblical Study, 28–29, Atlanta: Scholars Press.

  Stone, Michael. 1993. The Rock Inscriptions and Graffiti Project, Catalogue of Inscriptions. Vol. 3: Inscriptions 6000–8500. Society of Biblical Literature Resources for Biblical Study. Atlanta: Scholars Press.

  Thomson, Robert W. (1981). Armenian literary culture through the eleventh century. In: The Armenian People from Ancie
nt to Modern Times, v.1, The Dynastic Periods: From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century (ed. Richard G. Hovannisian), 199–240. New York: St. Martin's Press.

  Van Lint, Theo. (2014). Medieval poetic texts. In: Armenian Philology in the Modern Era. From Manuscript to Digital Text (ed. Valentina Calzolari with the collaboration of Michael E. Stone), 377–413. Leiden‐Boston: Brill.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Georgian

  Stephen H. Rapp, Jr.

  Since the pioneering work of Peter Brown of the 1970s, the Christianizing Roman Empire has been touted as the bedrock of late antiquity. Nevertheless, ensuing scholarship has enlarged the social, cultural, and imperial horizons of that cross‐cultural enterprise. Thus a growing cadre of specialists reject the persistent image of Iran and the expansive Iranic (Persianate) world as hostile interlopers and instead envision them as fundamental and contributory components of late antiquity from its beginning (Canepa 2009; cf. Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar 1999). The push beyond the Graceo‐Roman Mediterranean has sparked interest in zones of sustained cross‐cultural encounter: the Horn of Africa, Central Eurasia, and, the subject of this essay, Caucasia (on these Eurasian perspectives, see Johnson 2012). In late antiquity, Christian and Iranian/Iranic threads were entwined in a cohesive “Christian Caucasian civilization” stretching from the Black to the Caspian Seas (Toumanoff 1963). Bolstered by three of the world’s earliest royal conversions, the Christian faith achieved dominance across the isthmus named for the Caucasus Mountains in the fourth and fifth centuries. Significantly, all three royal houses – and some of their leading aristocrats – were descended from prominent Parthian families, including the Arsacids. And although Christianity successfully dislodged several polytheisms, vestiges of these earlier religions persisted for centuries to come. Substantial remnants of the hybrid Zoroastrianisms that had prevailed since the Iron and Hellenistic Ages continued deep into the medieval period (Russell 1987).

  Caucasia’s Christianization owed little to the direct intervention of the Roman imperial core. Rather, it was chiefly the result of holy women and men associated with Syria, Cappadocia, and Pontus. Late antique Caucasia has no equivalent of the imperially sanctioned mission of Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs in the ninth century. Yet we observe a fascinating parallel: The triumph of Christianity among the Slavs and the peoples of southern Caucasia was enhanced by the formulation of alphabetic scripts. In the latter case, scripts for the Armenian, Georgian, and Albanian languages were created toward the end of the fourth century (Gamqreliże 1989). The Armenian monk Maštocʻ (Mesrop) played a pivotal role in this cross‐cultural endeavor, though his received memory is conditioned by subsequent ecclesiastical and political rivalries. The internal, pan‐Caucasian project to promote Christianity through local tongues equipped with their own scripts triggered the formation of new literary societies that, despite their sharp individuality and clashing agendas in later epochs, were tightly interlocked in their infancy.

  6.1 Earliest Original Georgian Literature: Hagiography

  The genesis of Georgian literature is typically connected to the inland hub of Kʻartʻli, which commanded the central basin of the Kura/Mtkuari River; this realm, which was established at the collapse of the Achaemenid Empire, roughly corresponds to Greco‐Latin Iberia (for an accessible overview of Georgian literature, see Rayfield 1994). From their beginning the dynastic monarchs of Kʻartʻli were based at Mcʻxetʻa/Mtskheta and its citadel, Armazis‐cʻixe, both located at the strategic confluence of the Mtkuari and Aragwi Rivers. Not only did Mcʻxetʻa occupy the political, religious, economic, and agricultural epicenter of the Georgian lands, but it was also the gateway to one of the principal passes through the Caucasus Mountains, the Darial Gate. In the sixth century the royal seat was transferred just downriver on the Kura to Tpʻilisi, “Tʻbilisi” according to modern orthography.

  Under the impulse of Christianity, literary centers arose throughout eastern Georgia and in adjacent areas to the south cohabited by Kʻartʻvelians and Armenians. Outstanding among the latter is Somxitʻi/Gugarkʻ, the Armeno‐Kʻartʻvelian marchlands governed by dynastic border lords brandishing the Middle Persian title bidaxš, rendered pitiaxši in Georgian and bdeašx in Armenian (Rapp 2014a, pp. 62–75). Major scriptoria later operated to Kʻartʻli’s southwest in the Armeno‐Kʻartʻvelian lands of Tao/Taykʻ and Klarjetʻi/Kłar�ˇkʻ (Childers 2013, p. 296). Christian activity here reached its apex in the early medieval period. The locus of the initial phases of Georgian literary production was by no means restricted to Caucasia. In late antiquity, Jerusalem and Palestine were anchors of Georgian and Armenian literature. Already by the fifth century, eastern Georgian ascetics were established at monasteries in the Holy Land, including Mar Saba. Procopius mentions a monastery of the Iberians in Jerusalem and another of the western Georgian Laz in the desert nearby (Buildings 5.9.6–7). It is conceivable, though not definitively proven, that the Georgian script was invented in the Levant. In subsequent centuries, Georgian scriptoria operated elsewhere in the Byzantine and Islamic spheres, including the Black Mountain in Syria, Mount Sinai, and Mount Athos (Menabde 1961 and 1980).

  The Gospels and other primary religious texts were the first works set into Georgian. Original Georgian compositions followed soon thereafter, but the identity and date of the first homegrown source remains uncertain because of the relatively late and incomplete nature of surviving manuscripts. Among known narratives, the place of honor is usually afforded to The Passion of Šušanik, a concise hagiography ascribed to the priest Iakob Cʻurtaveli/Jacob of Tsurtavi. According to this text, the pious Armenian noblewoman Šušanik, daughter of the famous Vardan Mamikonean, was martyred by her Zoroastrianizing husband, Va[r]skʻen, the bidaxš of Somxitʻi‐Gugarkʻ. Varskʻen had renounced his familial Christianity as he aligned himself with the Sasanian šāhan šāh in a bid to minimize the interference of the kings of Kʻartʻli and Armenia Major. Šušanik’s steadfast refusal to apostatize brought incarceration and brutal torture. Šušanik’s vita appears to have been composed shortly after her death in the late fifth century. Although the narrative shows signs of later adjustment, its basic structure belongs to the decades immediately after Šušanik’s martyrdom.

  In the same period a short Georgian vita was composed that commemorates the martyrdom of nine newly converted children from Kolay/Kola. The anonymous author recounts the children’s clandestine baptism and subsequent murder by their enraged “pagan” parents. This hagiography is devoid of explicit chronological and geographical markers: Other than a bald reference to Kolay in eastern Anatolia, the generic story might have been set anywhere Christians commingled with polytheists. Its apparent sixth‐century date has been determined by language and syntax.

  The Martyrdom of Evstatʻi Mcʻxetʻeli is the latest surviving Georgian vita from late antiquity. Its Iranian hero, born Gwrobandak, spent his early years in Ganzak, a city in northwestern Iran near a prominent Zoroastrian shrine. In Ganzak the young Gwrobandak abandoned his ancestral training as a Zoroastrian mowbed and seems to have joined a Manichaean congregation (Mgaloblishvili and Rapp 2011). Only after migrating to the Kʻartʻvelian capital, the reason for which is not revealed, Gwrobandak received Christian baptism and took a Christian name and wife. Complaints lodged by Mcʻxetʻa’s community of Iranian émigrés compelled the local Sasanian official to interrogate the renamed Evstatʻi (< Gk. Eustathius) about his renunciation of Zoroastrianism. Evstatʻi refused to return to the Zoroastrian fold and was executed at the marzbān’s order, thus securing his place among Iranian martyrs. The date of Evstatʻi’s death is contested: While most scholars advocate the mid‐sixth century under the Sasanian Šāhan šāh Xusrō I, the correct date is probably ca. 600 under Xusrō II (Rapp 2014a, pp. 80–87). Assuming a composition shortly after his martyrdom, Evstatʻi’s vita derives from the early seventh century.

  A small number of Georgian hagiographies were consigned to writing as late antiquity dissolved into the medieval age, most notably Iovane Sabanis‐że�
�s Passion of Habo and Giorgi Mercˇʻule’s lengthy Deeds of Grigol Xanżtʻeli. Habo was an Arab perfumer who migrated to eastern Georgia, where he was martyred by the Arab administrator of eastern Georgia in 786. By contrast, Grigol Xanżtʻeli/Gregory of Khandzta was not a martyr. He founded several monastic complexes in Tao‐Klarjetʻi in the eighth and ninth centuries. The contents of a few other surviving Georgian vitae are chronologically situated in late antiquity, but these were comprehensively reworked by medieval scribes and are therefore more valuable for later periods. For example, the Georgian Life of Peter the Iberian diverges substantially from the Syriac vita by John Rufus and exhibits signs of thorough rewriting (for a recent study of Peter, see Horn 2006). The extant Georgian recension conveys nothing about Peter’s challenge to dyophyistism. Likewise, hagiographies celebrating the martyr Ražden, a fifth‐century Iranian convert from Zoroastrianism, as well as the pious Thirteen Syrian Fathers were comprehensively rewritten in later times. The substantially revised vita of Davitʻ and Kostantine has been connected to a hypothesized Georgian‐language chronicle of the sixth century, though this is far from certain (Sanaże and Araxamia 2013).

  Thus, the earliest works of original Georgian literature were compact hagiographies whose basic purpose was the expansion and solidification of Christianity in Caucasia’s cosmopolitan and cross‐cultural atmosphere (translations in Lang 1976). The oldest were devoted to martyrs. In the medieval period, the focus shifted to prominent monks and other holy men. The religious nature of these initial specimens of Georgian literature is to be expected given the fourth‐/fifth‐century Christian provenance of asomtʻavruli, the first dedicated Georgian script. The hagiographies celebrating Šušanik, Evstatʻi, and the children of Kolay display no textual interdependence and concentrate narrowly upon their devout subjects. Collectively, they project a basic image of early Christian Kʻartʻli and its neighbors. These sources embody a nonethnocentric Christianity untouched by later obsessions with orthodoxy, heresy, and institutional autonomy. Hardened ethnolinguistic and confessional positions – which reinforced one another – are evident only from the seventh century, when autocephalous “national” churches began to crystallize among the Armenians, eastern Georgians, and Caucasian Albanians (for the period, see the magnum opus of Garsoïan 1999). As is exemplified in Gwrobandak’s trek from Zoroastrian priest‐in‐waiting to Manichaean convert and then to expatriate Christian, the religious milieu of late antique Caucasia was plural, heterodox, and syncretic.