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 works 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).

Exploring Culture 12.1 The Mash‐Up Poem

Standout female writers did not emerge from the Greek and Latin literary scene. Sappho, who sang poignantly about the power of female love in the sixth century BCE, takes the lone prize of a woman who set down her vision in verse – and became famous in antiquity for it. Yet only two complete poems of hers survive.

In order to find another strong, female literary voice, we have to look ahead to the mid‐ to late fourth century CE when a poet known as “Proba” rocked audiences with an experiment that would win her literary acclaim throughout the Middle Ages. Following in the footsteps of a loose artistic movement that created new works by recycling old verses, line for line, from classic Latin and Greek poets, Proba set to work on composing a life of Jesus. Her artistic creation is one of the best examples of an ancient mash‐up text known as a “cento,” or “patchwork.” It is also the only full‐length poem authored by a Christian woman to outlive antiquity.

For her source material, Proba had used the iconic Latin text of the epic poet Virgil (d. 19 BCE). Other examples of the literary mash‐up, drawing upon Virgil, survive; Tertullian remarks that such chimerical works were common in his day, the turn of the third century CE (On the Prescription against Heretics 34.3–4). Poets working in Greek would use Homer as their starting point. In neither language, however, could the “patchwork” poem ever be called a specifically Christian practice. In fact, far from being the thoughtless exercise which some later commentators made it out to be – the Christian writer Jerome loathed the tediousness of the form, calling it “puerile” (Letter 53.7) – it demanded high linguistic creativity.

Proba’s talent cannot be dismissed. Latin, like Greek, is a language in which nouns and adjectives have specific genders (male or female) and number (singular or plural), and writers and speakers use word endings to specify the function of a noun within a sentence; there are distinct ways of identifying a subject and entirely different ways of identifying an object. Poets like Virgil, who wrote his Aeneid over the course of a decade, worked obsessively to make sure their sentences not only fit the meter of their poem but that the end product surprised their listeners.

By extracting these lines from their original context, Proba was skirting disaster. Subjects of classical sentences might need to be changed to fit the Christian plot, and each of Virgil’s carefully tooled lines might break if forced, against its will, into another rhythmic scheme. The fact she succeeded in combining them into something provocative and new speaks to her artistic prowess.

Her poetry made a forceful political statement. Consider the cento’s final lines, addressed to her husband: “… And if we are deserving because of our pietas,/then let our virtuous descendants continue worshipping in this way” (Proba, lines 693–694, borrowing Aeneid 2.690 and 3.409). Pietas is the central value of Virgil’s epic. It conveyed a Roman’s sense of duty towards his or her family, to the gods, and to the state. By appropriating these ideas for her life of Jesus, Proba showed her readers that being a Christian in fourth‐century Rome was entirely consistent with centuries of traditional Roman values.

Today, some scholars are intensely skeptical of “syncretism” as an idea, and historians of Late Antiquity need to be aware of their vocal displeasure with it. As Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart have reminded researchers in a volume of essays on the topic, Syncretism/Anti‐Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis (London: Routledge, 2014), not everyone at all times wants to blend their beliefs with others or find ways of mixing them into a shared, or common, value system. Oftentimes, individuals can be adamantly defensive about the details of their own beliefs, even a non‐Christian one. For people who fit this profile in the fourth‐, fifth‐ or sixth‐century Mediterranean, Plotinus’ ideas would not have been appealing at all. They probably would have been insulting.

12.2 Literature and Ideas after the “Vanishing” of Rome

For the Roman Empire of the sixth century CE, the geography of power was far reduced from memories of Trajan or Augustus. The people of the city of Rome, which had formerly controlled the entire Mediterranean basin – and then, by the Rule of Four, only one half of it –now lived as exiles from their own empire. The “Roman world,” as its citizens knew it, had been reduced to the territory of modern Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt. For the residents of this radically reduced Roman world, political life was now centered in Constantinople.

There were significant continuities, though. During the fifth and early sixth centuries CE, Latin would remain the language of government, just as it had been when the empire was based in Italy. Greek, a language traditionally spoken and used in the eastern Mediterranean, would come to be the official language only in the mid‐sixth century CE. The Roman government in Constantinople during this time also remained structured around an authority figure who ruled with prestige and consent. Called in Greek a basileios, the Latin equivalent of “emperor,” his position can also be translated as “king.” The Senate and people of Constantinople ruled with him, in effect preserving the kind of Republican‐model of government which Emperor Augustus had tried to institute in the aftermath of the divisiveness of Julius Caesar’s day.

For many reasons, however, some scholars prefer to use a new label, “Byzantine,” to distinguish this new political and cultural world in Constantinople from its predecessor. It is a word choice that must be justified, not assumed. The people of this metamorphosing Roman world, with their only capital Constantinople, conceived of themselves as “Romans,” regardless of the fact that many of them increasingly spoke and wrote only in ancient Greek. They also referred to their state as Romania, “the territory of Rome,” a label that played off many people’s understanding of their capital city, Constantinople, as a “New Rome.”

The reasons why many Christians had begun to conceive of this city as a replacement for Rome is a fascinating topic and one which we will treat in a moment. For now, it is important to note that this teleological belief – that the world of “Old Rome” would eventually come to end and a rising “New Rome” would replace it – has biblical roots. In the Book of Revelation, written at the time when Christians were a paltry minority, “Rome” is presented as a den of iniquity, the “whore of Babylon,” whose empire must be toppled before God returns to reign on earth. To Jesus’ followers of the late first century CE, that worldview may have offered a degree of comfort during a period when their own fate as citizens of the Roman Empire was precariously insecure.

Three centuries later, after Theodosius I had established Nicene Christianity as the official worship of the Roman Empire, that scriptural story about the “whore of Babylon” must have had a much different resonance. Christians were now politically in charge of this new “Rome,” a government entity which many within their community had been fulminating against since the first century. The invention of Constantinople as a “New,” which is to say now Christian “Rome,” may have helped ease many Christian anxieties about working with, and collaborating with, a state that had long been defamed as one of the beasts of Revelation.

It may also explain why some modern scholars, using a delicate sleight of hand, subtly change all references to “New Rome” and the “Eastern Roman Empire” to “Byzantium” and the “Byzantine Empire” at precisely this point in their stories. This casual switch wipes out all traces of the end‐time thinking, faith‐driven cultural anxiety, and apocalyptic preoccupations which were a significant aspect of Christian thought during the fourth through sixth centuries CE (Key Debates 12.1: Why Should Historians Read Tales of “Angels” and “Demons”?). Interestingly, however, these symptoms of an apocalyptic worldview would not be limited to the Christian communities of the Roman Empire. Other manifestations of them would soon be revealed elsewhere.

Key Debates 12.1 Why Should Historians Read Tales of Angels and Demons?

Evagrius, who grew up in the Roman territory of Pontus, needed a change of scenery. Born around 345 CE, having worked in Constantinople as an assistant to the bishop, he later moved to Jerusalem. There, he fell frustratingly in love with a married woman and suffered a devastating breakdown. When a Christian ascetic recommended he should self‐care by retreating to the desert, Evagrius left right away to confront his demons, literally.

In Egypt, Evagrius compiled a study guide for monks who were tormented with demons. In eight books, originally written in ancient Greek, he reflected on 498 Bible passages that could provide spiritual solace to tortured souls. Each was prefaced by a situation that might have been causing a monk some consternation. “Against the thoughts that taunt us because our parents have forsaken us and will not send us gold to meet our needs,” one begins, Evagrius recommends reading the Psalms: “‘For my father and mother have forsaken me, but the Lord has received me’” (Evagrius, Talking Back 3.3, trans. by D. Brakke [Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000]). The way Evagrius documents his demonic thoughts and imaginatively matches them with Bible passages illustrates how seriously he and Christians like him tried to ward off the chief demon – “Satan,” in Evagrius’ worldview – from their everyday life (Evagrius 3.19).

These are certainly not the kinds of protagonists one expects to see in a history book. “Angels” and “demons” are the sort of cast members you usually find in heady, spiritual dramas. They are also such a natural part of the story of religion, we might even be led to assume that all people, at all times throughout history, must have believed in these kinds of mystical beings – or at least some version of them. This is far from true, and it’s essential for social and cultural historians to recognize why.

The belief that “angels” and “demons” are waging a cosmic war on behalf of humanity is not found in the Psalms which Evagrius quotes, nor is it found in any of the Hebrew Scriptures written before the Hellenistic age. The origins of this potent pair of spiritual beings come later.

Many people will probably know the basic outline of Satan’s fall from heaven and how the good archangel Michael battled to defeat him. Tales of Satan and the archangel shaped later Jewish and Christian belief; they clearly influenced Evagrius. Yet the idea of angelic warriors battling Satan, who is equated with the Devil, does not exist in any piece of ancient literature before the third century BCE. The anonymous Jewish text known as 1 Enoch, written in the third century BCE and edited over time, is the source for this well‐known drama. 1 Enoch tells of angels who rebelled against God and were punished as a result. The writer presents this battle as a warning to his readers that the suffering of their present, evil times will be overcome and that hope will prevail.

As one of the first expressions of a dualistic worldview found in all of Jewish literature, 1 Enoch holds a privileged place in collections of apocalyptic writing. Even though it was excluded from Jewish and Christians Bibles, the author’s vision of angels fighting demons would also have far‐reaching impact, teaching many Jews and Christians to see the world around them in warlike, dualistic terms.

12.3 The Literary Culture of Justinian’s Roman Empire

Justinian’s Latin Laws

Emperor Justinian would leave his mark on the capital in many ideological ways. Under his reign, he used legal mechanisms to prop up Nicene Christianity. In a law of 544 CE, which forms part of the “new laws,” or novels, of the collection called the Justinianic Code, the emperor set forth the requirements for worship throughout the territory he controlled.

“We believe the first and greatest good for all men to be the right confession of the true and pure Christian faith,” Justinian explained, “so that it may be strengthened thereby in every respect and all holy priests may be joined in concord and with one accord profess and preach the right Christian faith.” The law continues on this theme, emphasizing Justinian’s strict sense of Christian identity and the need to quash all theological opposition: “Every pretext invented by heretics may be destroyed, as is shown by the books and the different edicts written by us.” It also attributes the belief of “heretics” to “the work of the Devil” and castigates these suspicious folks for holding assemblies “not in accord with the holy catholic and apostolic church of God” (The New Laws [Novels] of Justinian, no. 132, trans. by F. Blume and T. Kearley). This law was read to the people of Constantinople on April 4, 544 CE.

Justinian’s Constantinople, like the shrunken Roman Empire over which he ruled, was not a society that tolerated creative thinking about God. As this law makes clear, the emperor was determined to root out problematic beliefs and practices; the decree itself makes a mysterious reference to the threat of “secret baptism.” But policing the public meant having eyes and ears into people’s own houses.

“We want everyone to know,” the emperor continued, “that if hereafter there are found those who hold unlawful assemblies or come together therein, we shall not suffer that to be done in any manner. But the houses where anything of the kind takes place, shall be given to the holy church, and the penalties specified by law shall in every respect be inflicted upon those who hold unlawful assemblies or who come together therein.” Such behavior was deemed to be “heretical insanity” which could “destroy the souls of others,” translated by Blume and Kearley, whose work, The Annotated Justinian Code, is housed on‐line at the University of Wyoming Law Library, 2016.)

Justinian’s Greek‐speaking Christian state

Justinian’s ideological commitment to promote a Christian state can be put in a larger context if we look at the story of the empire’s Jewish communities – and the Jewish communities on the empire’s borders – during the same time. Inside Justinian’s empire, synagogue construction boomed, particularly in cities near the Sea of Galilee, a fact that attests to the vibrancy of Jewish communities in a state that was particularly concerned to legislate a Christian worldview. Many of these synagogues also preserve mosaic artwork and inscriptions written in the dominant language spoken by residents of the East Roman Empire: ancient Greek (Political Issues 12.1: The Value of Learning a Second Language in Changing Times).

Political Issues 12.1 The Value of Learning a Second Language in Changing Times

Emperor Majorian (r. 457–461 CE) was eager to reclaim territory in Roman Spain and Gaul that previous administrations had ceded to Goths and Germans. Ultimately, Majorian failed. But for his brave attempt, Sidonius Apollinaris would forever thank him.

A Roman, born c.430 CE at Lyon in southern Gaul, Sidonius Apollinaris had watched the world around the Rhône River valley change quite dramatically in the middle of the fifth century CE. Like Rutilius Namatianus before him, Sidonius had sought a career in Rome. After Emperor Majorian was murdered, in 461, Sidonius returned to his estate in Gaul. By 476 CE, the cities along the upper Rhône River had come under the control of Germanic kings, Burgundians.

Sidonius was at his writing desk during this time, composing Latin letters to family and friends, even if no one ever wrote back right away (or at all). “It was right that my loquacity should be checked by the revenge of silence on your part,” he bashfully begins one note to a relative (Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters 5.3, LCL trans. by W. Anderson [1965]). “The fact that I received no reply to the letter I sent you seems to be a discredit to your friendship,” he starts in another (Letters 5.4). Amusing as the apparent snubs and rejections may be, Sidonius’ writings, collected in nine books c.477 CE, provide some of the most intimate, important glimpses of life in late fifth‐century Gaul – as the Roman Empire vanished and as new opportunities appeared.

Sidonius’ letter to his friend Syagrius is one such document. In it, Sidonius marvels how nimbly Syagrius has adapted to the times. “I am … inexpressibly amazed that you have quickly acquired a knowledge of the German tongue with such ease,” he tells Syagrius. “I should like you to tell me how you have managed to absorb so swiftly into your inner being the exact sounds of an alien race” (Letters 5.5). The results of this new skill set were manifest immediately. “You are loved, your company is sought, you are much visited, you delight, you are picked out, you are invited, you decide issues and are listened to,” Sidonius writes. So impressed was he by Syagrius’ meteoric rise in the new court, he compared it to watching “a young falcon [bursting forth] from an old nest (ex harilao)” (Letters 5.5). With his vocabulary even Sidonius may have been trying to adapt.

Language scholars have long been puzzled by that last word. Translated into English as the word “nest,” it is wholly unknown in any Latin writings before Sidonius’ time. One social and linguistic hypothesis about its origins is that it may have been a bit of the language spoken by the Burgundians which Sidonius has recently picked up.

The fact that Syagrius was acquiring the language of the new government is revealing for a second reason, however. Not all the new kingdoms of the rapidly changing western Europe were rushing to eliminate Latin from their daily culture. Sixth‐century Italy, the kingdom founded by Theoderic, prided itself on its Latin heritage and its Roman traditions. Theoderic’s spokesman, the quaestor sacri palatini – the same office that had existed in Rome prior to the take‐over – was a Latin‐speaking official, Cassiodorus. In addition to communicating the king’s message, Cassiodorus wrote a history of the Goths in Latin, now lost. His knowledge of this “classical” language ensured that he became a valuable member of the new Ostrogothic government.

As it was for many minority groups throughout the empire, language was an important expression of cultural identity. For the Jewish community, the debate over whether to use the dominant language of their cities, Greek in the east or Latin in the west, was one that went back centuries and had little consistency. (Recall that the Jewish author of 2 Maccabees had vilified his fellow Jews for adopting Greek customs by writing a manifesto against them – in Greek.) Under Justinian’s reign, these kinds of internal debates continued to drive the community apart. Many bubbled to the surface of political life in Constantinople, demanding the emperor’s attention.

In 552 or 553 CE, the emperor was forced to respond to one petition, in particular. A question had arisen amongst the empire’s Jewish communities about whether Greek or Hebrew should be used in synagogue service for reading Jewish Scripture. Justinian answered with a law published February 8, 553. In it, he was forced to recognize and to take sides in a thorny internal conversation.

“From the reports made to us,” Justinian announced, “we have learned that some, knowing only the Hebrew language, want to use it in reading the Holy Scriptures. Others think that the Greek language also ought to be used, and they have for a long time disputed among each other.” The emperor then gave his opinion on the matter. “We, informed of this matter, think that those who also want to employ the Greek language in reading the Holy Scriptures are better” (The New Laws [Novels] of Justinian, no. 146, trans. adapted slightly from D. Miller and T. Kearley). Some will see this law as Christian meddling in a dispute that affected only a small fraction of the empire’s non‐Christian population, but Justinian’s belief – expressed in the law’s preface – helps explain why the emperor felt motivated to act on the issue of what language should be used.

“The Hebrews, hearing the sacred scriptures, should not indeed have adhered to the bare letter [of these texts] but should have considered the prophesies contained therein, by which these announce the great God and Jesus Christ the Savior of the human race,” the Christian emperor reasoned. Language, in short, was part of the reason the Jewish people had “given themselves over to foolish interpretations” and “wandered away from the correct meaning” of their own sacred texts, or so Justinian was trying to argue (The New Laws [Novels] of Justinian, no. 146, trans. by D. Miller and T. Kearley). The emperor’s words barely conceal a scathing indictment of the Jewish people’s inability to recognize that Jesus had been the Messiah.

12.4 Literature as a Source for the Study of Medicine and Disease

As we have seen so far, literature and the world of ideas have been important for many reasons. Poetry and prose give us access to people’s cultural values. Legal writing allows us to analyze the political priorities of emperors and their advisors. Literature also plays a key role in helping historians reconstruct significant moments of crisis. The plague that devastated much of the Mediterranean world in the middle of the sixth century CE is one of those events. Not described by any ancient medical writer (and thus, not known by any precise diagnosis), the plague is best known from writers who worked in a literary, not scientific, milieu. This fact doesn’t necessarily disqualify what they report about the plague, but it does limit the kinds of questions we can ask of them.

Procopius of Caesarea is one of the most important sources for the study of this sixth‐century plague. During the events of the year 542 CE, he reports:

During these times there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated. Now in the case of all other scourges sent from Heaven some explanation of a cause might be given by daring men, such as the many theories propounded by those who are clever in these matters; for they love to conjure up causes which are absolutely incomprehensible to man, and to fabricate outlandish theories of natural philosophy, knowing well that they are saying nothing sound, but considering it sufficient for them, if they completely deceive by their argument some of those whom they meet and persuade them to their view. But for this calamity it is quite impossible either to express in words or to conceive in thought any explanation, except indeed to refer it to God.

(Procopius, History of the Wars 2.22.1–3, LCL trans. by H. Dewing [1914])

Procopius’ testimony about the physical effects of the plague, which is among the most extensive of our ancient sources, will be summarized in a moment. As these prefatory remarks of the author show, however, trying to use a writer with literary predilections to reconstruct the history, spread, or pathology of an ancient pandemic is a journey that can face serious headwinds. Many of Procopius’ contemporaries freely speculated about the plague’s origins, and some of their explanations struck him as “absolutely incomprehensible,” filled with “outlandish theories of natural philosophy.” Procopius himself, a Christian writing in a Christian state, attributed the cause of events to God.

Historians, especially those who specialize in ancient medicine, do not need to accept all of Procopius’ claims or the claims of other literary documents to be able to reconstruct details of the pandemic. This way of approaching the sources – critically and with an eye to their literary audiences – is a slightly more nuanced method than trying to use these texts to make an accurate medical diagnosis fourteen centuries after the fact.

What we know based on the number of sources who make mention of the disease is that it arrived in the empire around 541 CE. Its scale was enormous. By the end of that decade, it was showing up in places as geographically removed as modern Azerbaijan, where it appears in 542 CE, and the island of Ireland, where it appears in 544 CE. Within two decades, it had also come to Constantinople. By the end of the sixth century CE, it was located in the Black Sea. (For the details behind this timeline, see Peregrine Horden’s essay, “Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian,” which she contributed to The Age of Justinian, a collection of essays edited by Michael Maas [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005], pp. 134–160.)

What was the plague’s genetic make‐up? DNA research into the matter is just beginning. But from the reports of ancient writers, it is difficult to say since none of our sources – including the Greek writer Procopius – was trained in medicine, nor did they specialize in writing medical treatises. Having said that, Procopius provides details about the plague’s symptoms and the extent of its devastation. It included a fever, which led to swelling of areas such as the stomach, armpit, next to the ears, and in the thighs. Some people went into a coma during this time or suffered delirium (Procopius, History of the Wars 2.22.6–39). When the epidemic reached Constantinople, bodies were being disposed of at the rate of five thousand a day. Later, the statistic rose to ten thousand a day (Procopius, History of the Wars 2.23.1–2).

This plague was more than a public health crisis. As Peregrine Horden has pointed out in her study of the material relating to this pandemic, “Any disease is at once a biological, a psychological, and a social phenomenon; and the biological must not be privileged in defining it” (2005, p. 143) – however much our scientifically trained minds want to recreate the circumstances of the pandemic and reconstruct the nature of the disease. That said, genetic studies of sixth‐century bodies may soon suggest that this plague was Yersinia pestis, the “bubonic plague” that struck Europe during the early modern period, the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries.

Whether such a clinical certainty will be established remains to be seen. For now, it might be better to conclude that our written evidence works best when it helps us explore the “psychological” and “social” aspects of this devastating pandemic.

12.5 The Rise of a Book Culture

Over the last few chapters, we have seen how things like ceramics, values, and now diseases could be shared over wide regions. Ideas and texts were spread this way, too. And by the fourth century CE, they were being traded in a form that looked much different than in earlier periods of Mediterranean history. They were being exchanged as bound books.

Books, a natural part of our cultural landscape, were uncommon in Julius Caesar’s Rome. For centuries, people had traditionally read on scrolls, pieces of a reedy plant that had been pounded together to form long sheets. These were stored in a rolled‐up manner. Books, on the other hand – manufactured from either leaves of papyrus or pages of dried animal skin, called parchment – were rare.

There is little evidence for their widespread use in the first through second centuries apart from the first‐century CE poet Martial (a non‐Christian). Martial wrote a series of poems, titled Epigrams, which he made available in book form (Martial, Epigrams 1.2.1–4). These books were later called in Latin codices (the singular form is codex). By the fourth century CE, books were one of the hottest advances in Rome’s technological landscape.

Many codices have survived from this time. A fourth‐century copy of Virgil’s poem the Aeneid, showing scenes of the hero Aeneas sailing away from Queen Dido, is preserved in the Vatican Library. In Vienna, there is a sixth‐century copy of a medicinal and pharmacological text. Called De materia medica, “On Matters Related to Healing,” the text was composed in the middle of the first century CE by a Greek scientist named Dioscurides. The book that exists in Vienna was copied in the early sixth century CE (Figure 12.1). It includes nearly five hundred pictures of plants, animals, and insects that illustrate the detailed points of Dioscurides’ text. In its opening pages, it also depicts several men important to the history of medicine, such as the second‐century doctor and philosopher, Galen.

Image described by caption. — **Figure 12.1** For avid readers, codices, or books, were much more than carefully sewn‐together pages of text. They were treasure chests, potentially filled with all sorts of captivating illustrations drawn from the subject matter – the poetry of Virgil, for example, or a famous scene from scripture. Sometimes, they could even include a portrait of the person who had commissioned such a laborious commodity. This portrait of Anicia Juliana appears in the opening pages of an early sixth‐century CE codex. The codex itself is a medical text, authored by first‐century CE writer Dioscurides. Anicia Juliana’s portrait was included here likely because she had paid to have the codex copied. The privileged daughter of a Roman emperor (462–527/528 CE), she was one of the most high‐profile patrons of the residents of Constantinople. Juliana is shown seated between the personifications of Generosity and Wisdom. From the so‐called “Vienna Dioscurides,” Nationalbibliothek, cod. med. gr.1., fol. 6v. Bildarchiv der Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

Books and patrons

The Vienna Dioscurides manuscript was dedicated to a wealthy Roman of Constantinople, Anicia Juliana (c.461–527 CE), an important patron of book culture and of the Christian community in sixth‐century Constantinople. Anicia Juliana appears in the opening pages. She is shown seated on a throne surrounded by personifications of Magnanimity (megalopseuchia, or “greatness of spirit,” in Greek) and Prudence (phronesis, “good sense”). These representation allude to Juliana’s status as a much loved contributor to life in the capital. Her most visible benefaction had come, in the years prior to 525 CE, when she had paid to construct a church, Saint Polyeuktos, in one of Constantinople’s aristocratic neighborhoods, out near the city walls.

Thanks to a few fragments of Greek inscriptions, combined with the preservation of a literary text in the Greek Anthology, we can say quite a bit more about Empress Anicia Juliana and the book culture of her day. The text which was erected to celebrate the construction of the church was itself composed as a poem. From it, we learn:

Juliana, the glory of her blessed parents, inheriting
their royal blood in the fourth generation, did not cheat the
hopes of that queen who gave birth to noble children, but raised
this from a small church to its present size and beauty, increasing
the glory of her many‐sceptered ancestors. For all that she
completed she made more excellent than her parents, keeping
the true faith of a mind devoted to Christ [the Messiah].
Who has not heard of Juliana, that in her care for piety
she glorified even her parents by finely labored works?

(Greek Anthology 1.10, lines 7–15, LCL trans. by W. Paton, rev. by M. Tueller [2014])

It becomes clear why the anonymous artist of the Vienna Dioscurides manuscript pages dedicated his book to this wealthy woman of Constantinople. At the time Anicia Juliana’s church of Saint Polyeuktos was built, it was the most glorious in the capital. Twelve years after its dedication, Emperor Justinian, perhaps feeling a sting of inadequacy, would start work on a building to surpass Anicia’s ambitions. Justinian’s church of Hagia Sophia, dedicated in 537 CE, would be the result.

Books and beliefs

We should be wary of making theological inferences from the beats and silences in this story, however. The fact that there is no literary and archaeological evidence for the widespread circulation of books during the “pagan” Roman Empire, followed by a rise in book popularity during the rise of the Christian state, does not mean that Christians popularized the book as a writing form. Nor does it mean that Christians of Late Antiquity only used books while non‐Christians, like Jews, used earlier, old‐fashioned technology, like scrolls.

When seen in its entirety, the evidence suggests that, throughout the fourth through sixth centuries CE, all kinds of faith communities used and passed down texts as codices. In the middle of the fourth century, around 354 CE, a wealthy senator in Rome commissioned a calendar of city festivals. Known as the “codex‐calendar” because it was bound in book form, this artifact is one of the most crucial pieces of evidence for the longevity and preservation of traditional Roman worship practices in the Roman Empire. It was hardly what Christians today would classify as a “Christian” object. Along similar lines, the codex known as the Ashburnham Pentateuch, today found in the collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, is an important book example of the Pentateuch, that is, the first five writings in the Hebrew Bible. Thought to have been produced in Italy around 500 CE, its surviving pages suggest that Jewish communities, too, recognized the value of the codex.

The “codex‐calendar” from Rome and the Ashburnham Pentateuch are two manifest examples which suggest that the rise of this new “book” technology had less to do with people’s faith identities than is sometimes assumed. Even examples from material culture, such as scenes on Christian sarcophagi, show that Christians themselves depicted each other reading and using scrolls, in addition to books, throughout the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Explanations for cultural change which depend primarily on the “religious identity” of book users, such as the assumption that a Christian preference for the book was somehow a feature unique to the Christian faith, fail to take into account this wider evidence. These theories should be treated suspiciously.

12.6 Latin Poetry and Christian Communities in Rome, c.366–600 CE

Throughout the Mediterranean, other poems, written in languages like Latin, would be erected for famous Christian men and women. A poem honoring Augustine’s mother would be set up at Ostia in the late sixth or early seventh century CE (Working With Sources 12.1: A Tombstone for Monica, Mother of Augustine). It was part of a long tradition of funerary poetry, erected in Latin in and around Rome, which went back to one of the most influential bishops of Rome, Damasus.

Working With Sources 12.1 A Tombstone for Monica, Mother of Augustine

In 387 CE, Augustine, fresh off visits to Milan and Rome, was waiting at the harbor with his Christian friends for a boat back home. “We sought for some place where we might be most useful in our service to you, God, and were going back together to Africa,” he recounts in his autobiography. “And when we were at Ostia on the Tiber, my mother died” (Augustine, Confessions 9.8.17, trans. in the NPNF series [1870]).

Monica and Augustine, mother and son, had bonded in the days before her unexpected death. Augustine would later remember how “she and I stood alone, leaning in a certain window, from which the garden of the house we occupied at Ostia could be seen; at which place, removed from the crowd, we were resting ourselves for the voyage, after the fatigues of a long journey. We then were conversing alone very pleasantly,” he remarks (Confessions 9.10.23). The scene has etched itself in many readers’ mind. Even scholars, when they write today about Ostia in the late fourth century, can’t avoid the trap of wanting to experience the city just as Augustine and Monica did – even though they were transients, even though they were just passersby.

Archaeology has contributed to these imaginative exercises. In 1945, kids were digging a hole near the basilica of Saint Aurea – the modest cathedral of modern Ostia – when they found the fragment of a tombstone. It had Augustine’s name on it. Damaged on the right side and missing half its text, these six lines of Latin became like the tantalizing clue in a hunt for ancient treasure. Scholars soon filled in the missing parts of the text with a poem known from a seventh‐century manuscript; someone around that time had seen the inscription and copied it down. What they soon recognized was the epitaph, or memorial, erected for Monica. The complete poem reads:

Here the most virtuous mother of a young man set her ashes, a second light to your merits, Augustine. As a priest, serving the heavenly laws of peace, you taught [or, you teach] the people entrusted to you with your character. A glory greater than the praise of your accomplishments crowns you both – Mother of the Virtues, more fortunate because of her offspring.

(Douglas Boin, Ostia in Late Antiquity [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013])

The discovery of Monica’s tombstone set off an explosion of interest in Augustine’s Ostia, as scholars vied with each other to deduce who had paid for the monument and when. The answer, it was thought, would bring us closer to that scene in the window and maybe even give us the name of the owner of the house who had hosted mother and son.

Potential candidates were soon lined up for vetting, with many scholars focusing on the pool of Ostia’s wealthier residents, men and women who were alive in the decades immediately after Monica’s death. In doing so, scholars may have made a fatal error: by overlooking the stone.

A new analysis of the inscription takes this story in a wholly different direction. “Mother of the Virtues” was a popular personification for the Christian virtue “Love” during the late sixth century and early seventh century CE. A funerary inscription written in a script similar to the one used on Monica’s has also been found at Ostia in a sixth‐ or seventh‐century CE context. The memorial for Augustine’s mom has now been dated to this time. The window has closed on finding “Augustine’s Ostia.”

During his tenure as bishop of the city, Damasus (c.304–384 CE; bishop of Rome, 366–384 CE) composed many verse epitaphs, or grave markers, for the city’s saints. He then commissioned a renowned fourth‐century calligrapher, Furius Dionysius Filocalus, to inscribe these poems on marble. All of these texts were erected at the cemeteries, catacombs, and churches where the saints were thought to be buried. Many of these survive, in whole or in fragments. The entire collection numbers nearly forty poems.

The poem which Bishop Damasus carved for Saint Agnes was erected at the church of the same name on Rome’s Via Nomentana. It was placed in front of Agnes’ alleged burial loculus in the catacombs underneath the basilica. This composition helped the bishop of Rome craft his own message about women in the early church and their rejection of Roman ideals and values in the age before Constantine: “Freely she trod under foot the threats and madness of the savage tyrant [the Roman emperor]/when he wished to burn her noble body with flames,” Damasus explained in his eulogy for Agnes (CIL 8.20753, lines 4–5, trans. by Dennis Trout in Being Christian in Late Antiquity, ed. by C. H. Harrison, C. Humfress, and I. Sandwell [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014], p. 224). Visitors to Agnes’ grave in the late fourth century CE would have come away with a mini‐history lesson, written by Bishop Damasus, about the events that had led to the rise of Christianity, as he understood them. Given the fact that Damasus had come to the role of bishop of Rome through a contested election – in fact, there were two bishops in the city until 378 CE – it is likely that this literary campaign also helped him win support from his political backers in Rome’s Christian community. (The story of this intra‐Christian conflict is recounted in a Latin text by the fourth‐century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus [Roman History 27.12–15].)

Damasus’ decision to produce Christian literature also had a second aim. It promoted Rome’s pious tourism industry, attracting devoted visitors to popular Christian burials throughout the city and suburbs. Two centuries later, a poem honoring Augustine’s mother would be set up at Ostia, whose death her son had memorialized in his Confessions, to capitalize on the same phenomenon.

12.7 Looking Ahead: “People of the Book”

“People of the Book” is a label many people today invoke when talking about Jews, Christians, and Muslims because all three faith groups revere a set of sacred texts. By emphasizing a common denominator – books – a cultural object that unites three world religions, we draw attention to their shared cultural heritage and, by extension, to some of the shared values of their believers. By emphasizing these connections and shifting the focus of religious history away from conflict‐driven narratives, many commentators are trying to knock down walls that might divide people of different faiths. It’s an admirable, ecumenical mission.

For all its modern power, however, “People of the Book” is actually an ancient phrase and one with a much more curious resonance. Drawn from a chapter, or sura, in the Qur’ān (Q 4: 171), the phrase was written in Arabic and displayed on the inside of the drum of a beautifully tiled building in Jerusalem known as the Dome of the Rock. This building – a Muslim shrine, not a mosque – sits atop the Herodian platform of the Second Jewish Temple. An octagonal building constructed at its base of gleaming white marble, it was erected in the late seventh century, on a site which had been left barren by non‐Christian and Christian Roman emperors alike, ever since the Jewish Temple had been destroyed in 70 CE (Figure 12.2). Begun in 688, finished in 691 CE by the Umayyad ruler ‘Abd al‐Malik, the Dome of the Rock glittered like a diamond, set into the void which loomed over the city.

The mosaic on the interior dome of the shrine is filled with swirling vines that evoke a garden in paradise. Amid the tendrils are the regal crowns of several Mediterranean rulers, such as the Sasanian Persian diadem. The Qur’ānic chapter from which the phrase “People of the Book” was drawn was spelled out in mosaic tiles that lined the dome’s inner ring. It instructs readers not to believe that God was originally a three‐person entity, an allusion to the Holy Trinity of Christian theology (God the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit). “O people of the book,” the Arabic inscription reads:

[D]o not exaggerate in your religion (din) and speak of God only the truth. The Messiah Jesus son of Mary was only the apostle (rasul) of God and His word, which he cast unto Mary, and a spirit from him. So believe in God and His apostles but do not say “three.” Desist! [It is] better for you. For indeed God is one God. (‘Abd al‐Malik’s mosaic inscription from the Dome of the Rock, trans. by F. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010], p. 234)

This artistic inscription and the Qur’anic quotations woven into it tell us something significant about the seventh‐century eastern Mediterranean. By 690–691 CE, the time when the phrase “People of the Book” was put on display inside this important Muslim shrine, it is clear that followers of Muhammad had learned quite a bit about the theological beliefs of followers of Jesus.

Yet as the building and the text show, cultural connections that may have bound Jews, Christians, and Muslims together – their love of books, for instance – did not necessarily create a social environment where everyone felt comfortable with sharing their ideas and beliefs. How and even whether individuals and communities in the past chose to find common ground with each other is more complicated than identifying the one or two aspects of culture they ostensibly shared, such as books.

Summary

The people of the Late Antique world spoke many languages: Syriac, Coptic, Greek, Latin, Armenian, Gothic, Nabatean, Pahlavi (Middle Persian), Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. As a result, the study of the period offers researchers many more voices and perspectives on the time than the classical history of Greece or Rome, which traditionally have been centered about Greek and Latin. What is also truly remarkable about Late Antique history, then, is that the sources preserved in these languages – especially from realms on the empire’s frontier, or in places where Roman power withdrew – are more numerous than in earlier periods. The abundance of these texts, in multiple languages, allows us to recalibrate our historical vision, focusing on local environments and creating a more kaleidoscopic view of history instead of one told through a restricted set of lenses.

The growing popularity and exchange of bound books broadened this world.

In this chapter, the sixth century CE, in particular, emerged as a key time period for analyzing literary and intellectual developments. Although Latin remained the language of law in Justinian’s Roman Empire, writers and intellectuals had been largely working in Greek throughout this time, as the works of Procopius of Caesarea and the inscription honoring the patronage of Emperor Anicia Juliana revealed. By the middle of the sixth century, however, Greek had become the official language of Constantinople. In the western Mediterranean, meanwhile, a Latin culture flourished. Bishop Damasus of Rome, in the late fourth century CE, is one person who gave this culture a Christian push. Books themselves were valued objects among non‐Christians, Christians, and Jews.

Finally, the inscription from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem confirms that, by the late seventh century CE, many faith communities throughout the Mediterranean, like Christians, were often identified with their books. The extent to which Christianity caused the rising popularity of books throughout the Roman Empire, however, is far from certain.

Study Questions

Name one Late Antiquity community formed around the life of the mind. What did they believe? Who were some of its members?
Who was Anicia Juliana? How did she contribute to the sixth‐century CE world of culture and ideas?
Explain the historical challenge of writing about the sixth‐century plague.
Was the Emperor Justinian right in trying to prevent Jews from reading their scriptures in Hebrew? If you support his policy, explain why. If you disagree with it, can you imagine what might have led him to this decision?