by Douglas Boin
Bowls with similar scenes, showing gladiators, circus races, and even executions were common in the Roman world and remind us that Romans didn’t need to have a seat in their local amphitheater to be able to stare, face to face, at the performance of gruesome public spectacles.
One region of the city, near the Forum of Theodosius, was packed with warehouses and bakeries. According to the Notitia, it was also one of the least populated neighborhoods in town, maybe because the stiff smell of baking bread made it undesirable place to call home.
Summary
This chapter has used two of the empire’s capital cities, Rome and Constantinople, to develop snapshots of urban life in the fourth and early fifth centuries CE. In doing so, it has deliberately avoided narrating the history of these spaces through a dry, chronological account of building projects. In Rome and even in Constantinople, the new capital, older monuments could exist alongside new ones, and long‐held values and cultural traditions – like the ideologies associated with Hellenistic kings or deified Roman emperors – remained ever‐present in the atmosphere. All the residents of Rome and Constantinople, the emperor, Senate, and people, breathed this air.
Not everything about the past survived, of course. Buildings and whole neighborhoods could change, as we saw with the Forum of Peace in downtown Rome and in the example of the Mithraeum on the Aventine Hill, which was buried underneath a later Christian construction project. These instances of destruction cannot be written out of the history of any city. And yet, when trying to assign significance to them, caution is also warranted. Many times, as in the case of the Mithraeum under Saint Prisca, material culture does not tell us what we want to know: about how it was buried, by whom, and why.
Finally, by emphasizing the way that churches formed but one part of these multi‐layered cities, we have been able to capture a wide‐lens view of city life that was not centered around insular questions of Christian worship or the history of the Christian church. Constantine, for example, did sponsor new church building in both Rome and Constantinople. But the material culture of these cities, which includes baths, statues, and race tracks, shows that the development of Christian meeting spaces was not necessarily the most important aspect of life in the fourth‐century city.
Study Questions
When was the city of Constantinople dedicated? What was its administrative relationship to Rome?
Take your friends for a tour of the Aventine Hill in Rome in the early fifth century CE. What would you tell them about the history of the neighborhood?
Does it matter whether Saint Peter is really buried underneath the Vatican? Why or why not?
Using examples from Rome and Constantinople, illustrate how Roman politicians used building programs to promote their ideas and their visions for the empire.
Suggested Readings
Sarah Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Neil Christie, From Constantine to Charlemagne: An Archaeology of Italy, AD 300–800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly (eds.), Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Nicola Denzey Lewis, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
9
Community
The Mediterranean is a diverse place. Desert valleys unfold around the hills of Jerusalem. The lush, green carpet of Egypt welcomes people from the sandier parts of Africa. Olive groves in North Africa and Greece lend the land a silvery flicker, a kind not seen in colder northern regions, like Thrace, where olive trees don’t grow. Amid these geographic differences, however, common ideas could still take root in Late Antiquity. An almost countless number of cities watched as Christian churches were erected on their streets and neighborhoods during the political whirlwind of the fourth century. And yet the fact that churches sprung up virtually everywhere is not surprising. For a community that had been given legal permission to worship openly and the injunction to do so in a way that promoted “the well‐ordered state and the tranquillity [quies] of our times,” as the so‐called Edict of Milan had expressly stated it (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 48, trans. by W. Fletcher in the ANF series [1886]), Christian buildings gave the empire’s minority Christianity community an important opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance to Roman ideals.
In the early fourth century, Emperor Constantine himself had set the pace and shown the way. In Rome, a church for the city’s bishop would be built on the model of a classical law court, or basilica. Often erroneously described as a “secular” building, or described as a uniquely Christian house of worship uncontaminated by the legacy of Rome’s gods, a basilica, by contrast, had long been a symbolic site, a place where the divine authority underpinning the empire’s law and order was made manifest. Inscriptions found throughout the Roman world, inside non‐Christian basilicas, attest to the ways in which Romans associated their own gods and their own divine ideology with these civic buildings. According to a text from one city in Roman Gaul, a basilica was located within that town’s popular sanctuary (AE 2001, 1383). According to another inscription, we learn that a priestess of the imperial cult dedicated a statue for the emperor, which she set it up inside a basilica (AE 1982, 682).
Given the indissoluble nexus between religio and the management of the Roman government, it should not be surprising to learn that some of the first churches built in the post‐Edict of Milan political landscape were either modeled on Roman basilicas or were dedicated out of a concern for shared Roman values. In Rome, one important basilica was located in the capital’s eastern neighborhoods, the Esquiline, on land that had once belonged to the Lateranus family. This “Lateran basilica,” later known as the church of Saint John, would become the seat of the bishop of Rome. On the other side of the empire, in early fourth‐century Constantinople, on land located north of the palace and near the city’s hippodrome, a church would be dedicated to Holy Peace, in Greek Hagia Eirene. She was a divine quality that was revered by long lists of Roman and Hellenistic rulers. Statues of Eirene were popular in Hellenistic art. In Rome, her Latin equivalent, Pax, had been worshipped at an Altar of Peace since Augustus’ age.
Not all churches would follow the basilica model, however. Nor was every Christian individual and community ready, willing, and eager to participate in Constantine’s vision for a “well‐ordered state.” The movement led by followers of Bishop Donatus in North Africa suggests that some Christian communities remained committed to separating themselves socially, particularly from contact with other Christians who were judged to have made too many compromises with Roman culture. The remains of churches throughout the Roman world, even though they are found across the empire, thus reveals a level of diversity and experimentation that makes it difficult to generalize about Christian architecture or Christian communities.
The fourth‐century church of Saint Agnes in Rome, for instance, resembles a circus, or race track. Its main focus was probably a burial in the center of the building. We will look at the community who gathered there later in this book. At Tebessa, meanwhile, in Roman Algeria, the church there combined elements of a Roman basilica with a tri‐conch, or clover‐shaped, domed hall. These two distinct building types, although connected by their common origins in Christianity, created spaces that pulled worshippers and visitors in multiple directions, not just towards an altar at the front. The church at Tebessa was built in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE.
In brief, even as one set of Christian beliefs was established as the empire’s official worship and portions of Italy itself fell under the leadership of Ostrogothic kings like Theoderic, Christian communities never settled on one specific form for their community spaces. The church of Saint Vitalis in Ravenna, an Italian city that remained under the control of the sixth‐century Roman government in Constantinople, was octagonal. It was built in 526–549 CE.
As this overview of Christian architecture reveals, from the fourth century onward, we see many Christian communities designing and building worship spaces that were driven both by local, inward‐looking concerns – such as the need to construct an assembly space around the burial of an important local person, for example – and by the growing social pressure to articulate their Roman bona fides. All these new spaces helped Christians find their individual and communal voices (Exploring Culture 9.1: Shenoute’s Monastery in Egypt). But as we will explore throughout this chapter, their communities were not the only ones that enlivened the dynamic of a Roman city.
Exploring Culture 9.1 Shenoute’s Monastery in Egypt
Picture a desert landscape. At its center, the leader of a new, charismatic movement. He has just declaimed passionately against the customs of the people around him, even going to a nearby village “to throw down the idols which were there.” The oddly familiar elements of the scene may trick us into believing we know it. But the man at the center was not Jesus or Muhammad of Mecca (c.570–632). He was a monk, Shenoute (c.355–c.466), the head of a monastic community at Atripe.
Atripe was in southern Egypt, near the modern city of Sohag. Shenoute’s community worshipped at Deir Anba Shenouda, the “White Monastery,” called so today because of the hue of its walls. The village to which Shenoute had traveled was named Pleuit. It was on that journey, according to the monk’s biographer, Shenoute “entered the temple and destroyed the idols, smashing them one on top of the other” (Besa, Life of Shenoute 83–84, trans. by D. Bell [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1983]). Shenoute’s zealous acts helped him become leader of the community.
Shenoute had been drawn to the monastic life in his thirties. By then, c.380 CE, monasteries for both women and men, separated into different buildings, had been set up in every corner of the Roman world. Customs and practices inside these communities varied from region to region, but in principle, monasteries offered Christians a space set apart from the complicated outside world – a place where Jesus’ followers could dwell comfortably with like minds. The leader of the monastery was responsible for drafting a rule, or structure, for communal living. The Christian Pachomius (d. 346) had founded an important monastery in southern Egypt in the fourth century CE and authored one such “rule book.”
Shenoute did the same for Atripe’s monks, authoring letters, sermons, and guidelines (called “Canons”) – all written in Coptic, a local language of Roman Egypt. His earliest letters set a radical tone since Shenoute was neither the monastery’s founder nor its leader at the time he was writing them. In them, Shenoute disapproved of the current administration:
There is a great evil upon you, which is to say that not only did you – in your envy and your hatred and your disobedience and your pollution and your defilement which you committed – not fear God, but a group of evil people formed another gathering with each other among you. … They fled like dogs into the refectory in order to eat and drink on that day, even though it did not please [the father of the community].
(Shenoute, Canon 1.22–23, trans. by C. Schroeder, Monastic Bodies: Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007], p. 31)
It was quite challenging for a monk to live in these kinds of cloistered communities. Some monks had broken into the kitchen for an after‐hours drink and snack, against the rule of fasting. Shenoute uses this episode to insert a wedge between the monastery’s virtuous monks, monks of questionable mores, and the monastery’s leader, who seems to have little control over his community.
9.1 Mystery Cults
Nicagoras, a citizen of Roman Athens, was a man with a mission. In 326 CE, Emperor Constantine had sent him to Egypt to assemble an art collection that could be displayed in Constantine’s new capital. We know about Nicagoras’ business trip because he scratched two messages on the wall where he visited. What these texts record tells us about yet another important community in the fourth‐century Roman Empire.
The cult of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis
In the Valley of the Kings, near Thebes, Nicagoras proudly gave thanks to the Christian ruler who had tasked him with the important responsibility of coming to Egypt on official business. Passing the burial place of King Tutankhamun, Nicagoras took out a sharp stylus and used the opportunity to deface the tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI (r. 1145–1137 BCE). Among the details he scrawled on the wall, among all the accomplishments Nicagoras must have been proudest of, he took a brief moment to tell posterity, in Greek, that he had been “an office holder [specifically, a torch‐bearer] in the most sacred mysteries of Eleusis.” (For Nicagoras’ graffiti, see the two texts in the edition of Greek and Latin inscriptions from Thebes, ed. by J. Baillet, Inscriptions grecques et latines des Tombeaux des Rois ou Syringes à Thèbes [Cairo, 1920–1926], nos. 1265 and 1889.) Nicagoras of Athens had a good reason to want to tell people about his initiation into the mystery cult at Eleusis, outside his own hometown. He was a member of a historic club.
Since the seventh century BCE, people in the Greek world, Roman citizens and even emperors like Augustus had journeyed to the plain of Eleusis to be initiated into the cult of Demeter and Persephone. The rituals here were structured around the mythical story of these two Olympian goddesses. In this famous Greek myth, Persephone is abducted one day and taken to the underworld. Demeter grieves at her daughter’s loss and contrives a famine to punish all of humankind for not helping Demeter learn the whereabouts of her daughter. In the end, Persephone is recovered although she must spend a portion of every year in the underworld on account of the food she ate while there.
In the performance of the cult at Eleusis, initiates physically recreated this emotional journey. It began with a public procession that started amid the classical temples of Athens. Then, the future initiates would depart for Eleusis, where Demeter was believed to have founded a sanctuary to ensure that humans did not transgress her anymore. Once they arrived, initiates were then guided – under the cover of darkness – into the main hall of Demeter’s sanctuary. There, surrounded by torch‐bearers, they became initiates into the mysteries. These rituals proved so popular that they were performed for nearly eleven hundred years until, in the late fourth century CE, the sanctuary was forced to stop initiating people after the Edict of Thessaloniki.
Anthropological perspectives on initiation
What exactly happened to men like Nicagoras when they were initiated has proven hard to answer, but that doesn’t mean mystery cults like those of Demeter and Persephone, Isis or Mithras can be dismissed as tangential to Late Antique history. Earlier scholarly opinion once believed that the popularity of the “mysteries” laid the foundation for the rise of Christianity because they gave people a more “spiritual” outlook on life. Many scholars, especially churchmen, pointed to the story of Persephone’s “dying” and “rising,” and the experience of being “reborn” as crucial ingredients in this recipe for social and cultural change.
The research of anthropologist Victor Turner, who worked in the twentieth century, seriously undermined many of these straightforward, “spiritualizing” interpretations of the mystery cults. Turner set forth his research in an important book, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti‐Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966, pp. 96–97). In it, he collected case studies documenting how rites of initiation can be used to build and foster group identity. By being led away from the regimented structure associated with everyday society and passing through a state of disorientation, people can be gradually reoriented to a new way of seeing their relationships to each other.
Turner called this new way of being “communitas,” Latin for “community.” He himself preferred the Latin term because it spoke to the lasting social dimensions of the process he was studying. Indeed, to him, the more common word “community” suggested that these new bonds were too limited to a specific place when, in fact, one of the most important aspects of them was that they we
re portable. They created a sense of belonging which stayed with people after the initiation event had ended.
In essence, then, while it is true that mystery rituals like those at Eleusis were structured around a journey from darkness into light, in a story that paralleled the mythical exploits of gods who “died” and then “rose” again, Turner’s work cautions us that there is no necessary reason for concluding that initiates themselves were “spiritually reborn” as a result of this process. The larger point, for him, was that group initiation, when organized around powerful rites of passage, helped individuals build relationships that they could not make elsewhere. Most important of all, this urge for “communitas” did not overturn society’s traditional way of structuring relationships; it existed alongside it. In this way, Turner’s work helps us see why even smaller groups of Christians, like monastic communities, also may have become fashionable in the fourth and fifth centuries. These individuals were building new, like‐minded relationships for themselves in an ongoing dialogue with, not a dramatic break from, the Christian Roman society that was emerging around them.
Nicagoras, the fourth‐century traveler who carried with him the lasting memory of his initiation at Eleusis, all the way to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, helps us see the phenomenon that Turner was trying to capture.
9.2 Christian Communities and Christian Law
As churches began to appear in Mediterranean cities, it was a transformative time, in many cases radically so. By the fifth century CE, sites associated with mystery cults, like private Mithraea or the public sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis in Greece, would no longer be repaired. Roman cities themselves would witness a second round of Christian economic investment, as the construction of more prominent baptisteries began to appear. The fact that the overwhelming number of these large urban buildings appear for the first time in the fifth century, not the fourth century, is intriguing. These were places where the Christian rites of initiation took place, a necessary part of joining the Christian community. Built in the decades following the Edict of Thessaloniki, many of these showy new structures may have helped cement Christianity’s position as the official worship of the empire.
