Vandalising Epic

Ramus ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Malamud
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Building Materials ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Local Populations

William Levitan concluded a study of the fourth century poet Optatian with the sentence, ‘The marble bones of Rome itself were chopped for a thousand years to raise the buildings of Europe.’ The theatres, baths and other edifices constructed by the Romans never wholly perished; they served the local populations for centuries as quarries for building materials. The writers of late antiquity treated the Latin literary tradition the same way that later inhabitants treated the ruins of Roman buildings, as a source for appropriate building blocks. The dismemberment of magnificent structures, whether architectural or literary is, to be sure, a kind of vandalism, but perhaps in the post-modern, resource-hungry world of the mid-1990's we can bring ourselves to think of it as something more positive, as an attempt to salvage and recycle valuable material.

The Role of the City in Merovingian Francia

2020 ◽  
pp. 581-610
Author(s):  
S. T. Loseby
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Urban Network ◽  
City Councils ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Range Of Functions ◽  
Fierce Competition

The Merovingians inherited an urban network from the Roman Empire that remained substantially intact. Although Gallic cities had long been declining in extent and sophistication, during late antiquity their landscapes were adapted to contemporary priorities through the provision of walls and churches, and their politics was transformed by the emergence of bishops as leaders of urban communities. When the upper tiers of imperial administration disappeared, this equipped the vast majority of cities to survive as the basic building blocks of Merovingian kingdoms that were initially conceived as aggregations of city–territories. In ruling through their cities, the Merovingians expanded upon existing mechanisms for the extraction of taxes and services, while relying on centrally appointed bishops and counts rather than city councils for the projection of their authority. This generated fierce competition between kings for control of cities and among local elites for positions of power within them. In the later Merovingian period, however, the significance of cities diminished as stable territorial kingdoms emerged, political practice was centralized around the royal courts, and the Roman administrative legacy finally disintegrated. But the cities remained preeminent religious centers, and, with the beginnings of economic revival, continued to perform a range of functions unmatched by other categories of settlement.

The Fate of Small Towns, Hilltop Settlements, and Elite Residences in Merovingian-Period Gaul

2020 ◽  
pp. 610-640
Author(s):  
Luc Bourgeois
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Power Networks ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The Many

The study of places of power in the Merovingian realm has long been focused on cities, monasteries, and royal palaces. Recent archaeological research has led to the emergence of other categories. Four of them are addressed in this chapter. These include the capitals of fallen cities, which continue to mark the landscape in one way or another. Similarly, the fate of small Roman towns during the early Middle Ages shows that most of them continued to host a variety of secular and ecclesiastical powers. In addition, from the fourth century onward, large hilltop fortified settlements multiplied anew. They complemented earlier networks of authority, whether elite residences, artisan communities, or real towns. Finally, from the seventh century onward, the great aristocratic villas of late antiquity were transformed into settlements organized around one or more courtyards and supplemented by funerary and religious structures. The evolution of political spaces and lifestyles explains both the ruptures in power networks that occurred during the Merovingian epoch and the many continuities that can be seen in the four kinds of places studied in this chapter that were marked by these developments.

Amphilochius of Iconium and Lycaonian Asceticism

2011 ◽  
Vol 101 ◽  
pp. 185-205
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Ascetic Communities ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
First Time

AbstractNon-orthodox Christian asceticism in Late Antiquity is known to us largely through the distorting lens of orthodox heresiology. This paper aims to reassess the character of the ascetic communities of rural Lycaonia in the fourth century a.d. in the light of the surviving funerary and ecclesiastical epigraphy, including three inscriptions published here for the first time. We are fortunate to be able to read these texts in the light of a neglected work of orthodox polemic, Amphilochius’ Against False Asceticism, the work of an embattled orthodox bishop at Iconium in the late 370s a.d. This treatise formed part of a successful campaign to stigmatize the Lycaonian ascetics as heretics, a position which was enshrined in Theodosius’ anti-heretical legislation of a.d. 381–3.

The Rhetoric of Heresiological Prefaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-197
Author(s):  
Richard Flower
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Technical Literature ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Textual Authority ◽  
Literary Phenomenon ◽  
Ancient Texts

The genre of heresiology—catalogues of heretics and their supposed beliefs—flourished in late antiquity, especially from the late fourth century. This chapter forms part of a reappraisal of this underappreciated literary phenomenon by considering the rhetorical aspects of a number of heresiologies within the context of classical technical literature. Drawing on parallels from a range of ancient texts, especially medical and encyclopaedic writings, this chapter focuses on the prefaces of heresiologies by Epiphanius of Salamis, Filastrius of Brescia and Augustine of Hippo to illuminate how they employed recognized techniques for the construction of textual authority. Through such close analysis, it is possible to trace the development of heresiology as technē, with each author drawing on both established classical tropes and also the writings of their predecessors in the genre to create their own distinctive rhetoric that advertised the reliable orthodoxy and intellectual supremacy of both writer and text.

A Roman Vessel for Cosmetics: Form, Decoration, and Subjectivity in the Muse Casket

Vessels ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaś Elsner
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Surface Decoration ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Made In ◽  
Spiritual State

In 1793, laborers digging a well at the foot of the Esquiline hill in Rome came upon the ruins of an ancient house and buried therein what proved to be the largest and most spectacular silver treasure from antiquity discovered up to that time. The known surviving items of the so-called Esquiline Treasure—probably made in the second half of the fourth century CE and concealed by its last owners sometime in late antiquity to protect it from marauders or invading barbarians, but surely intended to have been recovered and reused by them—include some very famous pieces: the Projecta Casket, the Tyche statuettes of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, a number of dishes, spoons, and ewers (Figure 2.1). Among these is the Muse Casket, a circular vessel, just under 33 cm in diameter and a little less than 27 cm high when covered with its lid. It is made of sheet silver, shaped and decorated with repoussé and engraving. Its lid is a silver dome recessed from the edge of a flat rim and attached to the base by a soldered hinge, with a narrow tab opposite the hinge for raising and lowering the cover (Figure 2.2). Inside it has five smaller vessels for toiletries and cosmetics, so that the casket as a whole was made to be used as a container for unguents. The art of the toiletry box—as a vessel that contains other vessels—casts light onto a problem that is faced across cultures, namely, improving or elevating a person’s physical or spiritual state by operating a complex device—a container of containers—and using the contents stored therein. Different cultures may seek different symbolisms to structure the generation of meaning, based on their own specific traditions and ideologies. In the case of the Muse Casket, the artifactual logic—structured through the material invitation to open, close, and use a box, and to open, close, and use the containers within it—operates alongside an iconographic rhetoric of surface decoration that alludes to the divine, that is in this case, to the Muses and the Dionysiac sphere.

The Christianisation of Rural Palestine during Late Antiquity

2003 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
DORON BAR
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Archaeological Research

Focusing on the rural zones of Palestine and exploiting extensive archaeological research permits a re-examination of the traditional view that much of Palestine had been Christianised by the late fourth century. This article suggests that the process of adopting Christianity in the countryside was far more gradual than previously believed. While the map of holy sites in Palestine had largely taken shape by the end of the fourth century, the conversion of the population only achieved real momentum during the fifth and sixth centuries. Research on the community churches of Palestine, in particular on their location in the villages, reveals that Christian penetration into the countryside stemmed from internal social developments and was not institutional in inspiration.

The Bishop's Two Bodies: Ambrose and the Basilicas of Milan

2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Chin
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Organism ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Embodiment ◽  
Two Bodies

The late ancient body is a historiographical problem. In the combined lights of feminist, Foucaultian, and post-Foucaultian methodologies, much recent scholarship on bodies in late antiquity has focused on bodies as sites on which power relations are enacted and as discourses through which ideologies are materialized. Contemporary concern with definitions and representations of the posthuman, however—for example, in medical technologies that expand the capacities of particular human bodies, in speculative pursuit of the limits of avatars, or in the technological pursuit of artificial intelligence or artificial life—seem both to underline the fundamental lability of the body, and to require a broadening of scholarly focus beyond the traditional visible boundaries of the human organism. At the same time, scholarship on the posthuman emphasizes contemporaneity and futurity to an extent that may seem to preclude engagement with the premodern. I would like to suggest here that doubt about the boundaries of human embodiment is a useful lens through which to reconsider some very traditional questions in the history of Christianity, and that we may begin to think of bodies in Christian premodernity in terms of what we might call their pre-humanity, that is, as fundamentally open to extension, transformation, and multiple instantiation. The figure on whom I focus is Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, who, I argue, defined his own body in such a way that he was able to instantiate physically in dozens of living human bodies, at least two dead human bodies, thousands of angelic bodies, and four church buildings. Ambrose's dynamic conception of his episcopal body was formed within a complex political and theological situation, so questions concerning the political ideology of bodies remain very much at issue. I add to these questions a concern for premodern uncertainty about how to recognize a body, both when it is visible and, perhaps more importantly, when it is not.

Polymer Liquid Crystals and Their Blends: A Hierarchy of Structures

1991 ◽  
Vol 255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Witold Brostow ◽  
Michael Hess
Keyword(s):  
Liquid Crystals ◽  
Building Materials ◽  
Computer Modelling ◽  
Hierarchical Structures ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Molecular Structures ◽  
Polymer Liquid ◽  
Phase Structures ◽  
Smectic Phases ◽  
Polymer Liquid Crystals

AbstractHierarchical structures are possible in polymer liquid crystals (PLCs) since each molecule contains at least two kinds of building blocks that are not homeomorphic to each other. We discuss some examples of molecular structures and phase structures of monomer liquid crystals (MLCs) and PLCs: smectic phases formed by interdigitated MLC molecules; PLC molecule classification based on increasing complexity – and its consequences on properties of the materials; and formation and phase structures of LC-rich islands in PLCs and in PLC blends. Some rules pertaining to hierarchical structures are formulated. The knowledge of hierarchies is neccessary – but not sufficient – for intelligent procesing of PLCs and their blends and for achieving properties defined in advance. Computer modelling represents another important element of building materials to order.

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