Clifford Ando

Decline, Fall, and Transformation

The essay offers a series of perspectives on the historiography of Late Antiquity. It relates popular indices of continuity, change, and decline to particular systems of moral and aesthetic evaluation. Most pointedly, it asks what is bracketed, and what presumed, by cultural-historical study in this period, and suggests three failings in the literature: too much credence is often granted to interested ancient claims to innovation; modern analytic categories often are redescribed as the motivating polarities of ancient discourse; and ancient interests (for example, in ethnicity) are perforce remobilized in modern study. All three moves support particular, often dubious periodizations of the classical and late antique and require on-going interrogation.

Fact, Fiction, and Social Reality in Roman Law

Roman and civil law fictions were notorious among early modern critics for their variety and scope. The unborn are treated as living; the living are treated as dead; aliens are classified as citizens; clauses in legal instruments are assumed not to have been written. The essay surveys fictions in classical Roman law, both those the Romans themselves labeled fictions and others that functioned through similar linguistic operations. Particular attention is given to the use of fictions in practice, both in statute and surviving legal instruments. Finally, the essay explores the theoretical frameworks within which Romans understood the operation of fictions, especially the distinction between social and legal facts and the natural and the imaginary.

Public and private in ancient Mediterranean law and religion

The public/private distinction is fundamental to modern theories of the family, religion and religious freedom, and state power, yet it has different salience, and is understood differently, from place to place and time to time. The volume examines the public/private distinction in the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean, in the formative periods of Greece and Rome and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Religion and Violence in Late Roman North Africa

The articles in this special section had their origin in a seminar held at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Seattle in January 2013. The aim of the seminar was to pay homage to Brent Shaw’s Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, which had been published not long before.1 Shaw’s volume is more than a monumental study of the confl ict of Catholic and Donatist that came to a head during the episcopate of Augustine. It is a reminder that the literary and material evidence for North Africa between the Great Persecution and death of Augustine is more voluminous than that for any other region of the empire–save perhaps northern Syria–and a call, a summons, even, to use the massive corpus of North African Latin not just for biographies of Augustine, but for social historical inquiry.2 In that spirit, the contributors, all of whom publish their seminar papers here, were asked not to review or critique Shaw’s work but to evaluate and explore the social history of violence in late Roman North Africa in light of his achievement. Catherine Conybeare, Hal Drake, Cam Grey and Noel Lenski responded to this challenge by broaching topics and off ering theorizations that build upon Shaw’s work but also qualify it and in important ways assess and address some of its lacunae. Conybeare demands that we identify violence to bodies in particular as an ethical problem and observes the startling unwillingness of Augustine to describe such violence. She then takes up two features of his texts, his interest in the spaces where violence occurs and the power he seeks to assign to communal norms and public speech to constrain it, and fi nds echoes of this conjunction in Arendt’s concern for the geography and publicness of political action, articulated in Arendt’s work on the space of appearance. But while Conybeare’s close readings reveal how much profi t might still be gleaned by close attention to Augustine’s language, she ends, like Shaw, in ethical lament and epistemic aporia. For though Conybeare provides

Ancient Authorities Intertwined

The article surveys and interprets the works produced by Jose de Acosta during his years in the New World and his revisions of, and additions to, those works after his return to Europe. Elucidating Acosta’s engagements with both Scripture and classical literature, the essay urges respect for the various religious, intellectual, and metaphysical commitments that structured Acosta’s arguments. Particular attention is given to Acosta’s wrestling with the limits of ancient geographic knowledge, on the one hand, and to his efforts to understand religion in the New World in light of ancient evidence of knowledge of God before Christianity and patristic essays on the conversion of the ancient Mediterranean.

Marie Cabaud Meaney, Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretations of Ancient Greek Texts

In the summer and fall of 1938, during a leave from teaching due to severe headaches, Simone Weil was introduced to English metaphysical poetry and took to reciting George Herbert’s ‘‘Love’’ during bouts of particular distress. During one such episode, as she later recounted, ‘‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me’’ (Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu [Paris: Fayard, 1966], 44 –45). Her writings thereafter may be seen to display the characteristic zeal of the convert, if also an idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity. She herself described the purpose of her life after that moment as to proclaim that all that is true in the world is Christianity and that all the evils of the age (namely, those of Europe on the eve of World War II) were due to ‘‘le laı̈cisme . . . et l’humanisme’’ (Simone Weil, Oeuvres completes, vol. 6, pt. 3, Cahiers février 1942–juin 1942: La porte du transcendant, ed. Alyette Degrâces et al. [Paris: Gallimard, 2002], 201, 395). That said, Weil seems to have shown extraordinarily little interest in scripture and virtually no engagement with Christian doctrine of whatever stripe after this moment: on the contrary, on Marie Cabaud Meaney’s presentation, Weil went on reading the same works she had read before, but she now viewed them through what Meaney calls ‘‘a Christological lens’’ (16). It is Meaney’s object to assess the nature of those readings and to interpret Weil’s work on and in them in light of a reconstructed portrait of Weil’s apologetic project. Meaney’s monograph falls into two parts. Chapters 1–3 offer background studies of various kinds: some are rote and presented in highly schematic fashion, regarding Weil’s biography, earlier scholarship, and

A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (review)

Agnes represents submission to episcopal authority, but in the fi fth and sixth centuries, Agnes represents the civic virtue of a lay elite. Like Livy’s Verginia, her virginity upholds marriage, family, and tradition. Here, the senatorial aristocracy appears to have prevailed over the bishop, quite in keeping with the book’s thesis. In “Domestic Conversions: Household and Bishops in the Late Antique ‘Papal Legends,’” Kristina Sessa offers a glimpse of the household’s centrality in Christianization by contrasting the antagonistic model of the bishop’s coercive power within (and against) the household in the sixth-century Gesta de Xysti purgatione with a cooperative model appearing about the same time in the gesta martyrum, where the agency of the householder is preserved in the conversion and baptism of his household. Even though the bishop is elevated by his sacramental powers and exercises legal and liturgical authority, he does so in a layman’s house. Sessa concludes that the growth of papal power does not end the household’s importance, although titular churches are constructed over or related structurally to existing domus (83), as Conrad Leyser shows in “‘A Church in the House of the Saints’: Property and Power in the Passion of John and Paul.” Leyser explains how a house became a church and later the foundation of a basilica by unraveling connections between the Passion and other martyr legends, then correlating each layer of the narrative with stages of the church’s development. Leyser sees the fi nal text as refl ecting the monastic community of Corbie, where it was copied ca.600, and as such, it is about stability, which the house church fi ttingly represents. In the fi nal article, Marios Costambeys and Conrad Leyser use the gesta martyrum and the Liber pontifi calis to determine what it means “To Be the Neighbor of St. Stephen: Patronage, Martyr Cult, and Roman Monasteries, c.600c.900.” Because the protomartyr Stephen is virtually the patron saint of Roman monasticism (277), tracing his cult reveals how monastic identities emerge “associatively in patronage and the narrative of the martyr-cult” (263) rather than from rules and charters (which, in any event, do not appear until the tenth century). This ingenious strategy of linking monastic history to cult history yields new information, provoking a different understanding of events. The authors revise “the traditional picture of Rome as the passive recipient of reform from the north,” arguing that reform grew from two ancient communities dedicated to Stephen which had gained “the self-confi dence of Roman identity.” They reconsider the Formosan schism as an episode in the Roman renaissance at the courts of Nicholas I and John VIII (rather than the papacy’s nadir); and they recommend revisiting the (notorious) House of Theophylact (285). These are invigorating challenges. This ambitious and praiseworthy collection will inspire scholars to think more broadly and carefully about the process of Christianization and the transformation of Rome from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.