A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  The reconstruction of Shenoute’s literary corpus by Stephen Emmel (2004b) is one of the great achievements of Coptic literary history. The codices that contained Shenoute’s writings, nearly all of which were produced and transmitted in the White Monastery, suffered dismemberment and damage during the late Middle Ages, and in the early modern period the fragments were dispersed among libraries in Europe, North America, and Egypt. Emmel’s reconstruction of those codices revealed that most of Shenoute’s works were organized into two major collections. Shenoute himself created nine volumes of Canons, which contain works having to do with the monastery’s internal life. Because he continued to live as a hermit until nearly the end of his life and because he oversaw three federated monasteries (two for men and one for women), Shenoute exercised much of his leadership by letters, which he expected to be read aloud to gathered monks. These works have been described as “sermonizing diatribe and excited self‐presentation” that sometimes addressed specific problems or crises and that drew on the Bible and collections of rules (Layton 2014, p. 35). Most likely after his death, an editor or editors created eight volumes of Discourses, which contain works addressed to wider audiences, including sermons that Shenoute delivered to congregations of monks and lay people in the primary monastery’s church (Brakke and Crislip 2015). Additional works survive outside these two primary collections, including letters addressed to persons outside the monastery, such as bishops of Alexandria.

  Thanks to Shenoute’s dominant authorial voice, monastic legislation in the White Monastery took a literary path different from that of the Pachomian works. Layton (2009, 2014) has determined that Shenoute made use of one or more lists of already written rules that he inherited from the Pachomian federation, his predecessors as leaders of the White Monastery, and possibly other authoritative monks (all of whom he often referred to collectively as “our fathers”); he doubtless augmented and revised the rules that he had received. No such lists survive from the White Monastery, however; rather, Shenoute quotes and cites over 500 such rules in the Canons. Most of Shenoute’s rules follow the legislative form of Pachomius’s (“shall”/“shall not”), but a substantial group consists of curse formulas: “Cursed be anyone who …” or “Anyone who … shall be under a curse.” It seems likely that Shenoute or one of his predecessors derived this form from the legislation found in Deuteronomy 27:15–26. Although surely the lists of rules that Shenoute used and revised must have survived him to be used in later generations, it is his Canons that Shenoute ordered to be read to assemblies of monks and that were transmitted in the monastery into the medieval period.

  The brilliance of Shenoute’s style and rhetoric leaves other Coptic writers of the fourth and fifth centuries looking rather dull in comparison. For example, while Shenoute demonstrated a seemingly effortless ability to improvise on biblical vocabulary and diction, Besa, Shenoute’s successor as head of the White Monastery federation, relies more heavily on simple quotations from the Scriptures (as well as from monastic literature like Antony’s letters) (Kuhn 1956). In this respect, he resembles the Pachomian leader and author Horsiesius, whose letters and instructions quote extensively from the Bible (Veilleux 1980–1982, vol. 3). The author known as “Pseudo‐Shenoute” seems to have been content to replicate the work of the master to the best of his ability (Kuhn 1960). Although the sheer excellence of Shenoute’s intellect and literary talent cannot be discounted, scholars have yet to consider thoroughly the reasons for this decline in literary quality. A single answer is likely impossible, but it may lie in changing modes of education in monastic communities; the extent to which later authors sought the same public role that Shenoute played (even if he denied seeking it); and a conservative attitude that such great fathers as Athanasius, Cyril, and Shenoute had already said what Christians needed to know and believe.

  If one looks in vain for outstanding individual authors other than Shenoute, the vitality of Coptic literature can be found in the hagiography that flourished from the fourth through eighth centuries, whether translated from Greek or composed in Coptic (Papaconstantinou 2011). These works include lives of saints, acts of martyrs, collections of miracle stories, homilies, and encomia. Like letters and rules, lives of saints originated with monastic communities. The various Lives of Pachomius, which date to the decades before and after the turn of the fifth century, continued the didactic agenda of Athanasius of Alexandria’s Greek Life of Antony, while drawing upon it for literary motifs (Veilleux 1980–1982, vol.1; Rousseau 1985, pp. 38–48). Pachomius’s life provided a template for monks seeking to live out the values of the Pachomian federation. Recounting the story of Pachomius, however, also fostered a specific communal identity for the monks of the Koinonia. By extending their narratives to include the lives of Horsiesius and Theodore, Pachomius’s successors, the authors created a communal history for the federation with which the monks could identify, enhancing group solidarity (Watts 2010, pp. 99–107).

  Because these works belonged to the living literature of monastic life and liturgical celebration, they could be revised and circulate under different versions, as in fact the lives of Pachomius did. Similarly, the Life of Shenoute may survive as a complete work in Bohairic attributed to Besa, but it is unlikely to be the unified composition of a single author. Instead, various hagiographic vignettes about the archimandrite, some of which may date back to the decades after his death, appear in different such “lives” in Arabic as well as Coptic (Lubomierski 2007). Likewise, the well‐known Panegyric on Macarius of Tkôw, attributed to Dioscorus of Alexandria, survives in different recensions in Bohairic and Sahidic (Johnson 1980). The popularity of this literature motivated continual revision to speak to contemporary audiences.

  The Panegyric on Macarius reveals also one important source of the energy that motivated the production of hagiographical texts in the fifth and later centuries: the opposition to the Council of Chalcedon (451) and its “two‐nature” Christology. Its hero, Macarius, dies when he refuses to subscribe to the Tome of Leo and an imperial officer kills him. In other works martyrs may suffer for their Christian beliefs under pagan emperors, but their heroism served to encourage Egyptian Christians resisting Chalcedonian Christian emperors. The famously repetitive and grisly nature of Coptic martyr accounts fostered a martyrological self‐understanding among anti‐Chalcedonians and reflected this literature’s liturgical context, in which formulaic yet vivid narratives supplemented biblical readings.

  In the late fifth and sixth centuries, Coptic authors engaged the Egyptian church’s struggle to define its relationship with the Chalcedonian imperial Church. The Coptic History of the Church, probably first composed in the 470 s, survives only fragmentarily, much of it incorporated into the medieval Arabic History of the Patriarchs (of Alexandria) (Orlandi 2007). The History of the Church presented much of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History in Coptic and then continued the narrative by emphasizing heroes of Egyptian Christianity like Athanasius, Cyril, Shenoute and Dioscorus; the Egyptian church played a central role in defining orthodoxy for the imperial church, which had gone astray as the Copts remained faithful. Derived from this work is the Coptic Life of Athanasius, which became the central piece of a dossier of Coptic texts celebrating Athanasius or presenting homilies that he purportedly delivered (Orlandi 1968). By representing their past and especially their greatest theologians and leaders, Coptic authors began to create an identity for the Egyptian church that was related to but separate from that of imperial Chalcedonian Christianity. Already in Shenoute’s works the term hellēnes functioned negatively and flexibly to mean “pagan,” “obscenely rich,” “cultured in the wrong way,” and so on. It is unlikely, however, that anti‐Chalcedonianism motivated the use of Coptic rather than of Greek; the use of Greek declined as knowledge of it among the non‐elite Christians that writers hoped to reach declined and as, after the Arab conquest, elites turned to Arabic (Mikhail 2014, pp. 9–105).

  That project of literary self‐
definition reached a new peak during the patriarchate of Damian (578–607). Damian led a revival of the Egyptian church after a difficult period in which the anti‐Chalcedonians had to fend off the emperor Justinian’s more aggressive attempts to impose Chalcedonian doctrine, even as they struggled with their own theological and political divisions. For the first time since the days of Pachomius, Shenoute, Besa, and company, we have works from several named authors: Constantine of Siout (ca. 550–640), Pisentius of Koptos (569–632), John of Shmun (ca. 600), John of Parallos (ca. 600), and possibly (as we saw above) Rufus of Shotep (Orlandi 2006, 567–70). These authors wrote mostly homilies and encomia and demonstrated a level of rhetorical flair and an ability to exploit Coptic grammar and syntax that had not been seen since Shenoute, even if none can be placed on a par with him. Despite their literary quality and apparent engagement with Greek and Coptic literary traditions, however, these works rehearse traditional themes, and none of their authors developed a distinct literary voice as Shenoute did (Emmel 2007, p. 97).

  With only one outstanding native writer, Coptic literature may suffer in comparison with other “regional” literatures of late antiquity, especially Syriac. One looks in vain for a line of outstanding and innovative theologians like Aphrahat, Ephrem, and Philoxenus among the Syrians. Instead, most Coptic literature represents the collective voice of a religious community, one profoundly shaped, first, by monasticism and, then, by struggle with a “heretical” imperial church. Coptic served as a vehicle of translation and Christianization and later of Egyptian self‐definition vis‐à‐vis a Greek‐speaking Roman Empire. As such the literary heritage of the early Copts epitomizes many of the most important themes of late antiquity and its study, above all, what “Hellenism” meant in a bilingual society.

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  CHAPTER FIVE

  Armenian

  Robin Darling Young

  The Armenian language – Hayeren in the language itself – may date from about 1500 BCE, having been brought to the area of the southern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia by a group emigrating from the northeast and eventually replacing its predecessor Urartian culture. From north of the Black Sea, or possibly from northwestern Thrace, this group came to the mountainous region including the southern Caucasus, western Anatolia, and the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Thus the center of Armenian’s geographical spread was, in antiquity, the lands from Lake Van in the west to Urmia in the east; its modern varieties continue to be spoken in the modern Republic of Armenia and in the large international diaspora.

  Armenians are first described as Armin/Arminiya in an old Iranian Behistun inscription of about 520 BCE that commemorates Darius the Great. With the rise of the first (Achaemenid) Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great in the mid‐sixth century BCE, the region became a satrapy under the administration of a native governor and, apart from the brief interruption of Seleucid kings following the conquests of Alexander the Great, continued to exist as a distinctive region and culture under the cultural domination and political domination of the Arsacids (ca. 250 BCE–244 CE), a subgroup of which remained the dominant Arshakuni clan in Armenia even after the rise of the Sasanians (244‐651 CE). Yet Armenians also had contacts to the west (in Greek‐speaking Asia Minor and Greece) and south (Syriac‐speaking Mesopotamia and Syria), and these would become more important in late antiquity.