The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  This sort of interpenetration became steadily more common, in particular after a larger number of ‘barbarian’ groups invaded the empire in 405-6, probably as a result of the steady development of Hunnic power. This did not by any means have to be inimical to Roman power structures and in the East was not; but political errors in handling ‘barbarians’, like those of Valens, continued after his death, and these would be more problematic. We shall see in Chapter 4 how strategic ineptness in the face of a steadily changing political situation in the end helped to sink the western half of the empire. But the stability discussed in this chapter was not illusory, all the same, and many of the political and social patterns described here lasted long into the early medieval world.

  3

  Culture and Belief in the Christian Roman World

  In the late 460s, as Sidonius Apollinaris related to a friend, the bishops of Lyon and Autun had the task of choosing and consecrating a new bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône. There were three candidates, unnamed, one claiming the office because his family was old, one who had built up support in the city by feeding people, and one who promised church lands to supporters. The bishops instead chose the holy cleric John, who had slowly moved up the local church hierarchy, thus confounding local factions. Sidonius himself was not yet bishop of Clermont; when he became so, one of his first tasks was to hold a similar election at Bourges, in 470. Here, although there were again numerous candidates, many of the citizens wanted Simplicius, a local notable from a senatorial family. Sidonius, initially wary of their choice, warmed to him, and preserved his speech to the citizens on the subject, which said, in (considerably shortened) paraphrase: If I choose a monk, you will say he is too other-worldly; if I choose a cleric, many will think I should choose only by seniority [as had happened at Chalon, in effect]; if I choose a lay official, you will say I have chosen someone like myself. But I do have to make a choice; many of you may be episcopales, worthy of being bishop, but you cannot all be. So I choose Simplicius, a layman, but one whose family is full of both bishops and prefects - and so is his wife’s - and who has defended the city’s interests before both Roman and ‘barbarian’ leaders. So Sidonius did indeed, in this second election, choose someone just like himself, a local secular married aristocrat. The office of bishop in Gaul was becoming a standard part of a secular career progression for city notables, just as the pagan priesthood had been before; the traditional hierarchy of the Roman world had effectively absorbed the new power-structures of Christianity. And yet it was not universally so; Sidonius’ own enthusiastic support for the election of John of Chalon, in the teeth of local notables, shows that it did sometimes remain possible to use different criteria to those of wealth and birth in the church hierarchy. Christianity was substantially absorbed into traditional Roman values, but never entirely.

  A slightly more combative example of the same point is Synesios of Cyrene, who was recommended as bishop of neighbouring Ptolemais in 411 to Theophilos, patriarch of Alexandria. Synesios was another secular local notable, like both Sidonius and Simplicius; he both represented Cyrenaica in Constantinople, successfully seeking tax relief for the province, and organized local defence against Berbers; he was the kind of useful man who would be very valuable as bishop as well, and he was active in that role in the two years or so before his death, as we saw in Chapter 2. Synesios, however, was also a skilled Neoplatonist philosopher, with numerous writings to his credit, so steeped in the classical philosophical tradition that people have wondered if he was even Christian (though he surely was), and not only trained by the renowned pagan mathematician and Neoplatonist Hypatia in Alexandria, but a close personal friend of hers, as his letters show. Theophilos for his part was a hardliner, who had had Alexandria’s most famous pagan temple, the Sarapaion, destroyed in 391; his successor Cyril’s mob would indeed lynch Hypatia in 415. Synesios nonetheless wrote an extraordinary open letter before his ordination, stating his philosophical and moral values. He would not renounce his wife; they would continue to sleep together, hoping for children. ‘As for the Resurrection, an object of common belief, I consider it a sacred and mysterious concept, about which I do not at all agree with the views of the majority.’ The world was not due to end, either. Philosophy would remain his private calling if he was consecrated, whatever untruths he said in public, and Theophilos must know this. We are not here in the sometimes intellectually provincial world of Gaul, but in the harsh heartland of violent and uncompromising religious debate. Theophilos consecrated Synesios all the same. Local status and support counted in Alexandria as much as in central Gaul, if it was strong enough at any rate.

  The Roman empire was by no means fully Christian yet in 400. There were pagan aristocrats in Rome still, although perhaps not by 450; in Constantinople there were still some a century later. There were pagan teachers in Athens and Alexandria until the sixth century (Justinian closed the Athens school in 529), and some smaller cities, notably Baalbek and Harran in Syria, probably had pagan majorities. The countryside, that is, most of the population, was largely pagan everywhere except in Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Africa, and there were plenty of pagans in these provinces too. They continued for some time; we have an account by John of Ephesos of his active mission work in Anatolia in the mid-sixth century. There were also substantial Jewish communities in Galilee and Samaria in Palestine, in Syria and the Euphrates valley, in western Anatolia, in north-eastern Spain, in Alexandria, Rome, and in smaller groups in most cities of the empire; these were politically marginal, but less subject to official persecution in this period than later. But all the emperors, except Julian for three years, had been Christian since 324 (Constantine converted in 312, but he did not rule the whole empire for more than a decade). Steadily across the fourth century paganism had become separated from public life, and in 391-2 Theodosius I had banned the mainstays of much traditional paganism, public sacrifice and the private worship of images. This coercive legislation was further reinforced in the fifth century, and Justinian added the finishing touches, banning pagan cults and enforcing baptism on pain of confiscation and sometimes execution. As with laws on Christian heresy (see below), this was never more than partly effective - pagan festivals continued even in major Christian centres like Edessa in the late fifth century - but the exclusion of paganism from the official Roman world was by now complete.

  Christian vocabulary, imagery and public practice were thus politically dominant in the empire by 400, a dominance which would only increase thereafter; and in cities, which were the foci for almost all political activity, Christians were for the most part numerically dominant as well. But we must ask what sort of Christianity this was, what effective content it had: how much it absorbed traditional Roman values (and even religious practices), how far it changed them, and what its own fault-lines were, for there were many of these. The first part of this chapter will be concerned with these issues, essentially those of religious belief and practice; the second part will extend the frame more widely, and look at other rituals in the public sphere, and at more deep-seated values, including assumptions about gender roles.

  Christianity by 400 was on one level simply defined, as the religion of the New Testament; if one believed in the divine Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and if one believed that Jesus Christ, crucified in around AD 33, was the Son of God, and that no other gods existed, then one was Christian. These beliefs generally went together with an exaltation of poverty - for the good Christian ought to give everything to the poor - and a presumption that this world was only a brief testing ground before the eternal joys of heaven or the eternal tortures of hell, which meant that pleasure was risky, and that asceticism, sometimes self-mortification, was increasingly seen as virtuous. But it has never been the case that most Christians have taken the second of these sentences as seriously as the first; and this presents a problem for us. When looking at the question of what sort of Christianity we are dealing with, whether in this period or later, we immediately run into
the question of source material. The huge quantity of Christian writing after 350 or so substantially outweighs in quantity the work of late Roman secular élites (even though this survives quite generously from the fourth to the sixth centuries), but was almost entirely the work of men who were much more rigorist than their neighbours. The degree of rigour varied, from the relative pragmatism of an Augustine, through the more uncompromising denunciations of a Jerome or a Salvian, to the extreme purism, separated from the possibility of normal emulation, implied in the hagiographical accounts of ascetic saints, such as Antony or Simon the Stylite. All of these, nonetheless, were highly critical of the more easygoing but still Christian world around them; and the aim of all such writers was to reform by criticism, rather than to describe accurately. It is therefore not always easy to tell if people ever did the things that were criticized, let alone how common such actions were, or, least of all, what sense these actions made to the people who performed them. Between the comfortable assimilation of traditional hierarchies and values into Christianity by a secular-minded aristocracy, such as that of Sidonius, and the rigorism of a minority of more committed authors - not always a popular or influential minority, either - there was an ocean of different kinds of religious practice carried out by everyone else, whose meaning has to be guessed at through the accounts of hostile observers.

  Take festivals. Traditional Graeco-Roman religion had a year studded with major religious festivals, which Christians naturally opposed. An important one was the First of January, a three-day festival marking the changing of the year. The traditional sacrifices associated with this were banned, but did this make the festival religiously neutral, simply marking pleasure and civic solidarity, for Christians as well? It seems clear that people generally thought so, but a stream of Christian writers, including the authors of sermons preached in public, were violently opposed to it - not least because it was competition for Christmas (itself, ironically, the direct replacement of a pagan festival, the Winter Solstice), but also because it was irredeemably tainted with paganism in their minds. The First of January survived as a festival into the eighth century and later, but whether it was perceived by ordinary people as Christian, or secular, or pagan, and when and how much, we do not know. Bishops dealt with festivals of this kind above all by organizing their own, thus creating the Christian religious calendar, with its focus on Christmas, then Lent, then Easter and Pentecost, above all December to May, extended across the rest of the year by local saint’s-day celebrations. This did indeed in the end win out over the pagan calendar: Christian time replaced pagan time. A fierce stress on Sunday as an unbreakable day of rest, which by the sixth century was policed by miracles (according to Gregory of Tours (d. 594), Sunday agricultural workers became cripples, and the children of Sunday sexual intercourse were born crippled), also marked the definitive Christianization of time. But people still maintained the ‘wrong’ attitudes; they treated the new Christian feast-days in the same ways as they had treated the old pagan ones, as opportunities to get drunk and have a good time, as Augustine complained about a local martyrial feast-day. This way of understanding the Christian calendar, through public enjoyment rather than (as Augustine proposed) psalm-singing in church, was pagan in the eyes of most of our sources, but doubtless fully Christian in the eyes of celebrants; and this double vision would long remain.

  Much the same can be said about the Christianization of geographical space. Pagan cults had studded the landscape of the Roman empire, a sacred spring here, a hill-top temple there, each perhaps with its own god; indeed, the whole landscape had potential sacred elements. As these were slowly prohibited or destroyed, and new Christian cult-sites built, around the tombs of martyrs or rural saints by preference, there was a risk that the latter would simply give a new religious veneer to older traditions, as with the major rural cult-site of Saint-Julien at Brioude in central Gaul, located at a martyr’s tomb to be sure, but also in a place formerly known for an important sanctuary of Mars and Mercury; the changeover seems to have come in the mid-fifth century. People got drunk at martyrs’ tombs too, after all; who knows what they were really celebrating, the martyr or the traditional cult-site. Perhaps there were moments when rituals, even festivities, were so significantly inverted that the pilgrims who came to the same cult-site properly took on board that something major had changed, as Pope Gregory the Great intended when in 601 he proposed to the missionaries to Anglo-Saxon England that they should take over pagan temples, but force visiting worshippers to eat the animals they had brought for ritual sacrifice. But perhaps not; a Christian topography could look suspiciously like a pagan one.

  But in this case change was possible, all the same. For a start, whereas to pagan eyes an entire landscape could be numinous, to Christian eyes only specific cult-sites were so, points of light in an otherwise secular space. These were always, or soon became, churches, so they were highly visible. Few churches were ever built directly on or in temples, and those few were almost all urban. In cities, indeed, Christian topographies were in general rather more different from those of the pagans. Traditional public religion had been focused on the ceremonial buildings around the forum in the centre of the city, but churches for Christian worship were often on the edges of town, or outside, in cemetery areas. Urban religious activity became much more decentralized as a result, and cities even became spatially fragmented in some parts of the empire (in Gaul in particular), with little settlement nuclei around scattered churches, and in some cases a traditional city centre left in ruins. This was sometimes because city centres seemed just too pagan, or too secular; in Rome, major Christian capital though it became, no church was built in the wide forum area until 526. It was also linked to some real changes in ideas of the sacred, and of what caused spiritual pollution. Traditional Graeco-Roman religion regarded dead people as very dangerous and polluting; no adult could be buried inside city walls or in inhabited areas, and cemeteries were all beyond the edges of settlements. Martyrs and other saints were seen by Christians as different, however: not as sources of pollution, but the opposite, as people to venerate (in some cases, indeed, as not really dead). Relics of saints began to be associated with major churches as early as the fourth century; increasingly, these churches were inside city boundaries. And the positive power associated with these bodies meant that people increasingly wished to be buried beside them. The first burials of non-saints inside cities date from the late fifth or early sixth century in most parts of the empire; first bishops and local aristocrats, later ordinary citizens. By the seventh century urban cemeteries were increasingly common. The dead remained edgy, ‘liminal’, sometimes powerful - they still are - but the visceral fear of their polluting power had gone.

  The unseen world changed, too. To most pagans the air was full of powerful spiritual beings, daimones in Greek, who were sometimes beneficent, sometimes not, sometimes controllable by magic, but above all fairly neutral to the human race. To many Christians - including the authors of our sources, certainly, but also the ordinary people who appear in the stories of saints’ lives - this unseen world came to be seen as sharply divided into two, good angels and bad demons (the word daimones was still used); Christianity inherited this dualism from Judaism, which in turn may have been influenced by parallel beliefs in Zoroastrianism. We get to hear rather more about demons, too: they intervened more in daily life. Christianization thus developed the sense that this unseen world was more fraught with danger than it had previously been (this went for the afterlife, too, for the Christian hell expected to see far more sinners than the pagan Tartarus or the Jewish Gehenna). Demons in Christian eyes caused illness, ill-luck and ill-doing of all kinds, and demonic possession was commonly seen as the cause of mental disturbance. Demons lived among other places in pagan shrines and idols, in uncultivable areas such as deserts, and also in tombs (this latter belief was in part the heir of traditional beliefs about the pollution of the dead). They could be defeated by clerical exorcism, and many Christi
an ascetics gained a considerable reputation as demon-busters. Theodore of Sykeon (d. 613) was a particularly active example, performing exorcisms throughout central Anatolia, as demons disturbed village harmony or possessed the weak and ill, in some cases as a result of spell-casting, in some cases because the incautious had disturbed tombs, perhaps in a search for treasure. Christianity innovated in religious terms in giving more space to the interventions of human beings in supernatural affairs, if they had church authority or if they were themselves particularly holy. Although all such men and women would have said that they only channelled the heavenly power of God and the saints, they were treated by many less exceptional Christians as if these spiritual powers were wholly theirs, a product of their own charisma.