A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity

by Douglas Boin

  In many ways, it is a people’s history of the time: a story of ambition and failure, of the daily grind around which people organized their hours and of their hopes and aspirations for change that sometimes materialized, sometimes did not. It is a picture not just of life in the Roman Empire’s capital, Romulus’ historic city, which Rutilius was fortunate to manage, or life in the empire’s second capital, Constantinople – although it certainly will paint an impressionistic picture of both. It takes readers, instead, on a tour: to the borderlands of the classical world to see what the people on the inside of the Mediterranean looked like to others who were looking in and then back again. In doing so, we have the opportunity to lay our eyes on a historical panorama that includes more than the isolated figures of emperors and kings.

  In the fourteen chapters of this book, we will pause to inspect where the people of Late Antiquity lived and how they worshipped. We will explore the family bonds that sustained them and the economic structures that underpinned their daily life. We will encounter the fascinating literature they produced in a positively astounding number of languages, visit major monuments they built, and pick up the objects they left behind. This book is not a plodding survey of literature or archaeology, however. It is a social and cultural history – a story at its core about people, about the things and ideas that occupied their imaginations and shaped their world.

  A reader could be forgiven for feeling enveloped, overwhelmed even, by such a broad, patchwork quilt of different cities, people, classes, and times. But there are recognizable faces here that are meant to comfort (and surprise, for those fortunate to meet them again for the first time). Augustine, the late fourth‐century Christian author of the now world‐famous spiritual autobiography called the Confessions, is but one of the familiar figures who hides in this landscape. Sometimes presumed to have dominated the period, Augustine will prove to be a much tougher person to hear than his later, saintly stature might imply, though. For the world we’re about to put under our microscope hardly belonged to him. Even the map that we’ll use to chart our journey will reveal itself to be more expansive and diverse than it sometimes appears in stories of Rome – with chapters featuring the history of South Asia, Central Asia, and the Arabian peninsula.

  That is part of what makes Late Antiquity so exciting. It demands a deep, empathetic desire to inquire into the lives of ancient people who have outgrown the traditional labels, “Greek” and “Roman,” with which the study of ancient Mediterranean history has traditionally been concerned. Their dramas played out on three continents – Europe, Africa, and Asia – and the richness of their experiences cannot be appreciated with the use of a simple, parochial lens like a focus on Christian theology or church history. In fact, a large number of its actors were not Christian at all: They were Jews shut out of their holiest site by an aggressive Christian take‐over of Jerusalem; Muslims who wrestled with the complicated legacy of what had been revealed to Muhammad; and followers of the Buddha who worshipped in monastic communities over the din of Chinese and Persian traders passing outside their caves (Exploring Culture 1.1: Late Antiquity Lost; Figure 1.1). And among them was also a nameless, faceless, but no less important host of traders, laborers, wives, husbands, daughters, and sons who never declared any religious preference.

  Exploring Culture 1.1 Late Antiquity Lost at the Start of the Twenty‐First Century

  It can be difficult to think about the ancient past, let alone study it. Buildings, statues, even pieces of old cookware can breathe a little bit of life into people long gone. They bridge the distance and lend the past a more tangible presence. For archaeologists and historians, they also inform us about aspects of life not preserved in documents.

  Stones and sherds are more than scientific artifacts, however. They are people’s cultural heritage, and the loss of objects and monuments – whether through natural disaster like the sudden rumbling of an earthquake or through more nefarious means, described below – can strike like a gut‐wrenching blow to communities who value the stories these precious pieces contain.

  The start of the twenty‐first century has witnessed some dramatic upheavals around the globe that have directly impacted how Late Antique scholars do their jobs. Regional conflicts, civil wars, international terrorism, and domestic disturbances have led, tragically, to the loss of many important examples of the historical and archaeological record. Two damaged sites, in particular, Bamiyan in Afghanistan and Palmyra in Syria, illustrate how truly expansive this period was and how interconnected its people were. Late Antiquity crossed many modern time zones.

  Bamiyan lies in the center of Afghanistan. Located about 150 miles west of the Afghan capital, it is nestled in the tail of a mountainous ridge, the Hindu Kush, which snakes across northeastern Afghanistan before it merges with the Himalayas in Pakistan. Starting in the sixth century CE, two monumental statues of the Buddha were carved from the rock face. These towering Bamiyan statues were examples of Gandhara material culture. An ancient kingdom of the Indus River valley and Hindu Kush, with roots dating back to 1500 BCE, the people and culture of Gandhara began to see many Mediterranean customs and ideas come through the mountains in the wake of Alexander the Great’s military excursions. Gandhara culture would flourish through the sixth century CE. A seventh‐century Chinese traveler, Xuanzang, reports how impressive the rock‐hewn Buddhas were.

  In March 2001, however, the authorities in Afghanistan, the Taliban, deemed the Bamiyan statues “idolatrous” to their version of Islam and had them detonated. Today, after a U.S.‐led invasion following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the people of Afghanistan are now picking up the pieces of their culture in more ways than one. There is a campaign to restore the Buddhas.

  The all‐too‐familiar story of modern people suffering a cultural loss through violent destruction can be told about Palmyra (also known as Tadmur), Syria. Located at the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass from China, Palmyra was an important trading oasis in classical antiquity. During Roman rule, the city’s temples, colonnades, and tombs reflected the cosmopolitan interests and personalities of its people.

  In August 2015, in the middle of a heart‐breaking civil war, the so‐called Islamic State lined two important ancient temples and several tombs with explosives and blew them up. The largest of these buildings, the Temple of Bel, was situated inside a sanctuary that measured almost two American football fields on each side. The destruction of Palmyra’s monuments was a heinous act of cultural cleansing intended to remove the pre‐Islamic past from memories of war‐torn Syria.

  Figure 1.1 The Buddhist caves at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, where two colossal images of the Buddha once stood. Carved from the sandstone cliffs by a community of Buddhist monks – the smaller one in the middle of the sixth century CE, and the larger one (seen here) in the early seventh century CE – they were destroyed by the order of the Taliban government of Afghanistan in March 2001. The issue of how people of different faiths or no faith interacted with each other and with the diverse world around them is one of the key topics that we will explore in this book. It is a story that crosses three continents, five centuries, and involves Jews, Christians, Muslims, believers in the Olympian gods, Buddhists, Hindus, and people who had no religious preference at all. Originally 55 meters tall (c.180 feet).

  Copyright © DPA Picture Alliance Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

  Their choices are the very things that make Late Antiquity so difficult to study. The question of why people at any time might choose to reveal meaningful things about themselves – in the imagery of a poem they composed or in the designs on a plate they commissioned or purchased in the market – is fundamentally connected with the power structures of the place and time around them. In short, although it’s admirable and indeed necessary for us to dig deeper into history to study the borders, beliefs, cities, families, economics, communities, literary culture, and material culture of the people who laid the foundation of this book, we cannot and must not leave
conversations about politics, law, and power so casually behind. This book introduces readers to both, and it suggests that even bottom‐up history must take account of people and events at the top of the social ladder.

  Precisely for that reason, the intersection of power, politics, and society is a topic that haunts many episodes in this book. In the fourth century, we will consider whether Rome would remain true to its pluralistic past with the legalization of Christianity. In the fifth century, we will look at the social status which religious minorities, like Jews, had as citizens in a Christian empire. And in the sixth century, we will see how a contemporary empire, like that of the Persians, conceived of their own political mandate as divinely given, too. Finally, in the seventh and eighth centuries, we will search for evidence to show us how the first Muslims interacted with their neighbors – diplomatically or militarily? – and try to determine what effect their choices had on the lives of the people they unexpectedly came to govern. These are some of the avenues and questions we will wander down together in this book (Key Debates 1.1: Late Antiquity Found). In doing so, our guiding principle will be to eavesdrop on as many voices as possible, not just the testimony of the people who shouted loudest.

  Key Debates 1.1 Late Antiquity Found at the Start of the Twenty‐First Century

  Was Jesus married? Did the Qur’ān exist prior to Muhammad? In the past decade, these two questions, which might scandalize some devout Christians or Muslims, have dominated the headlines. In each case, the news has been fueled by the discovery of new material culture.

  In September 2012, American researchers at an international conference in Rome announced that they had translated a scrap of papyrus with a sensational phrase on it: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife….’” Written in eight lines of Coptic, a language used in Late Antique Egypt, the papyrus fragment had been assigned a sensational name by the researchers who were working on it. They called it a fragment of The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. The tiny artifact, which at c.1.5 × 3.0 inches is smaller than an iPhone, quickly lit a fuse in the academic community. A series of startling revelations followed.

  Scientific tests used to determine the papyrus’ date revealed that it had come from the seventh to ninth century CE. Consequently, the text offers no evidence at all about whether Jesus was actually married. It does, however, have a place in a long and important intellectual conversation, dating back to the late second century CE, in which Christian writers speculated about Jesus’ marital status. The Late Antique Coptic fragment would fit within this vibrant tradition – if the text is authentic.

  As soon as the fragment was unveiled, other researchers detected problems. The Coptic text was written in a dialect that had long died out in seventh‐ to ninth‐century Egypt. In addition, the order of the words read less as fluent sentences and more as a series of patchwork phrases, cribbed from another source. One perceptive scholar identified a missing letter in the text’s first line. It replicated the same error that appeared in the same words in an online edition of the much more widely known Coptic document, the Gospel of Thomas. Details of the fragment’s exact collecting history, beyond a vague 1999 receipt and a few references to a mid‐twentieth‐century collector, were also never made public at the time. That point was particularly galling to the cultural heritage community, concerned with stopping the illicit trade of antiquities, which thrives on obscurity.

  An announcement coming out of the United Kingdom, reported widely by outlets such as BBC and the New York Times, was similarly exciting. Charles Cadbury, a famous chocolate maker, had funded the acquisition of several ancient manuscripts in the 1920s. Purchased by a priest from Iraq, these artifacts were then brought to Birmingham in England.

  In 2015, a graduate student made a stunning discovery. On two previously unidentified parchment folios, or individual leaves, she recognized the text of the Qur’ān. Muslims consider the Qur’ān to be the word of Allah revealed to Muhammad, starting in the 610s. No text of the Qur’ān has ever been dated to Muhammad’s lifetime, however. He died in 632. The text is said to have been standardized by the Muslim community’s third leader, Uthman, who ruled between 644 and 656 CE.

  Scientific testing has now confirmed that the Birmingham parchments date between 568 and 645 CE. Though imprecise, the range of dates for the Birmingham folios distinguishes them as two of the world’s oldest copies of the Qur’ān.

  That’s why, throughout this book, top‐down history is interwoven with history from the ground‐up. Famous names, momentous laws, and an emphasis on chronology: all these provide an essential ground line for registering the power dynamics within Late Antique society. When we pay attention to them, they can even help us see our sources in a higher relief – even “minor” poets like Rutilius Namatianus.

  A top‐down view of Rome in the fifth century CE

  Let’s consider an example of how to integrate top‐down history with a more individualistic, local approach. Just what was happening in the Roman Empire at the time Rutilius set out for Gaul? Political changes before, during, and after the fifth century CE were certainly dramatic and, in many cases, socially disruptive. In 476 CE, the empire would shed the form it had assumed for roughly five centuries. Roman provinces across the landscape of Europe and North Africa, including the crucial territory of Italy, would be cut loose from imperial control, and many people would gradually adapt to life under new management: Christian kings, not Christian emperors.

  To make matters more painful, at least for culturally conservative Romans, many of these new administrators were foreigners, and they had arrived in violent waves of migration. One group that rocked Rome into the fifth century CE were Vandals. A tribe from northern Europe, Vandals had crossed the Rhine River in the early fifth century CE. Later, they marched through modern Spain across to North Africa and, in 439 CE, eventually seized its cosmopolitan cultural capital, Carthage. The Rhine River wasn’t the only site of border problems for the Roman Empire, though.

  The Danube frontier was another. Since the mid‐third century CE, other foreign tribes had been testing the vigilance of Roman armies stationed along the empire’s northeastern frontier. These sporadic attacks began as third‐century headaches for the Roman cities of eastern Europe and the Balkans. By the fourth century, they had turned into a full‐blown, urgent political crisis. Athens was invaded in 267 CE. Areas of the historic city were torched. A century later, in 378 CE, the Emperor Valens would resolve to put an end to the confrontations. Backed by his powerful army and devoted soldiers, Valens met a band of Goths at Adrianople, outside modern Istanbul. The emperor may have been hoping for a swift victory. Instead, in a confrontation that left an open wound on the Roman state, Valens was killed in battle, his body never found. The emperor’s death stung, an indictment of Rome’s failed border policies. It was also a harbinger of more problems.

  At the turn of the fifth century CE, two Gothic tribes, the Tervingi and the Greuthungi, living on the western shores of the Black Sea, were driven from their home by an unexpected invasion of Huns from Central Asia. Rome was ill prepared to handle the effect of foreigners driven from their home by other foreigners. This tense situation reached a breaking point in the first decade of the fifth century when a savvy Gothic leader, Alaric, began demanding a land settlement with Roman authorities. The government balked at ceding anything to Alaric’s Goths.

  In 410 CE, to prove the seriousness of his demands and to get the Senate’s attention, Alaric attacked Rome. He and his army besieged the city to convince the empire’s stubborn bureaucrats that the Goths’ concerns could no longer be ignored. By holding the empire hostage, Goths won major territorial concessions, too. Around 413 CE, land was given to them in the province of Gaul, in the region of Aquitaine, settling them far from the empire’s capitals in Ravenna and Constantinople. Before the end of the decade, the capital of the Gothic settlement in Aquitaine would be based in the historical city of Roman Tolosa, modern Toulouse, France. From there, Gothic settlers would continue to
grow in power in Aquitaine and Spain and expand militarily.

  Rutilius Namatianus’ family home was in Toulouse. In 417 CE, as word reached Rome that the Goths had seized the city as their capital, the panic‐stricken, one‐time Prefect of the City – fearing the worst for his hometown – rushed through his farewells and arranged for passage on the next ship to Gaul. As historians, we don’t have to share Rutilius’ sense of nostalgia to recognize how thankful we should be that we have his poem. It allows us to experience a crucial transition in the story of the Roman Empire through the eyes of a person who called two places home, Italy and Gaul; but it also affords us a unique way of seeing the same period through several of Rutilius’ family and friends. Many of them were staking their hopes for the future by looking in the opposite direction: east.

  Rutilius’ poetry, in effect, offers an excellent case study at the outset of our book for observing how top‐down narratives can inform our more minor sources, and vice versa. Before starting, then, we should not push Rutilius off stage so quickly. We can learn quite a bit more about how to do Late Antique history by listening to his poem. This first chapter invites readers to join three figures, Rutilius’ friends, all of whom can help us put a human face on a pivotal age that is too often talked about in generic terms.

  1.2 Three Lives and the “Fall of Rome”

  Rutilius’ journey was delayed fifteen days on account of weather (On His Return to Gaul 1.205). It must have been an agonizing two‐week wait spent at the Roman harbor. Although only one complete book, or chapter, survives, along with fragments of a second, Rutilius’ poem On His Return to Gaul is our primary source for his life, his family, and his career during the early fifth century CE. The precarious circumstances under which he wrote peek through the lines of his text.