Wartime rape in late antiquity: consecrated virgins and victim bias in the fifth‐century west

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulriika Vihervalli
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century

The Date and Circumstances of Olympiodorus of Thebes

Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gillett
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Western Half

Olympiodorus of Thebes is an important figure for the history of late antiquity. The few details of his life preserved as anecdotes in hisHistorygive glimpses of a career which embraced the skills of poet, philosopher, and diplomat. A native of Egypt, he had influence at the imperial court of Constantinople, among the sophists of Athens, and even outside the borders of the empire. HisHistory(more correctly, his “materials for history”) is lost, surviving only as fragments in the narratives of Zosimus, Sozomen, and Philostorgius, and in the rich summary given by the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch Photius. These remains comprise the most substantial narrative sources for events in the western Roman Empire in the early fifth century. Besides its value as a source, theHistoryis important as a monument to the vitality of the belief in the unity of the Roman Empire under the Theodosian dynasty. Olympiodorus wrote in Greek, and knowledge of his work is attested only in Constantinople, yet his political narrative, from 407 to 425, concerns only events in the western half of the empire. To understand the significance of these facts, it is necessary to set the composition of Olympiodorus's work in its proper context. Clarifying the date of publication is the first step toward this goal. Internal and external evidence suggests that the work was written in 440 or soon after, more than a decade later than the date of composition usually accepted. Taken with thematic emphases evident in the structure of theHistory, this revised dating explains why an eastern writer should have written a detailed account of western events in the early part of the century. Olympiodorus's account is a characteristic product of the highly literate class of eastern imperial civil servants, and of their genuine preoccupation with the relationship between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire at a time when both were threatened by the rise of the new Carthaginian power of the Vandals.

Leadership for the Christian Empire: Emperors and Bishops in theEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 684-717
Author(s):  
Anna Lankina
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Raw Data ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
The Relationship

The fifth-centuryEcclesiastical Historyof Philostorgius is an unusual example of a surviving minority source. Although scholars have mined his work for raw data on events between 320 and 425c.e., in contrast to other contemporary ecclesiastical historians, Philostorgius has received little attention. His work has suffered derision, being seen as nothing more than “Arian” polemic and thus as more partisan than its pro-Nicene counterparts. This essay analyzes Philostorgius's role as one of many competitive voices participating in the composition of historical works for the elite readership of Constantinople in the fifth century. Philostorgius'sEcclesiastical Historyconstituted an integral part of the historiography of late antiquity and early Christianity. His representation of the relationship between bishops and emperors reveals a distinctive theory of history which informs his entire work.

Divine Powers in Late Antiquity

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
Strong Claim

What are divine powers? What is their relation to divine nature? Is power the essence of divinity, or are divine powers distinct from divine essence? Are they divine hypostases or are they divine attributes? How are they manifested? In what do their differ from the physical powers we find instantiated in nature? In which way, if at all, can they be apprehended by our limited cognitive capacities? The twelve chapters in this volume examine the way in which such and suchlike questions were addressed in the philosophical and theological debates that took place in a broad geographical spectrum, extending from Syria to Italy and from Greece to Egypt and North Africa, over a span of four centuries, from the first down to the fifth century CE. The first part of the volume deals with the treatment of divine power in the work of the four major figures of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, as well as in the Orphic Rhapsodies, the Neoplatonic ‘Sacred Discourse’ par excellence. The second part of the volume investigates the Christian doctrines of divine power from the beginnings to the Cappadocian Fathers. Special importance is attached to the canonical texts of early Christianity. Thus, through the close and careful analysis of the shared but disputed notion of divine power, the volume as a whole makes a strong claim that pagan Platonic and Christian thought of that period should be examined comparatively.

scholarly journals Addressing Conflict in the Fifth Century: Rome and the Wider Church

Scrinium ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-114
Author(s):  
Bronwen Neil
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Social Resources ◽  
Conflict Theory ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Social Conflict Theory

Abstract In seeking to trace the escalation, avoidance or resolution of conflicts, contemporary social conflict theorists look for incompatible goals, differentials in power, access to social resources, the exercise of control, the expression of dissent, and the strategies employed in responding to disagreements. It is argued here that these concepts are just as applicable to the analysis of historical doctrinal conflicts in Late Antiquity as they are to understanding modern conflicts. In the following, I apply social conflict theory to three conflicts involving the late antique papacy to see what new insights it can proffer. The first is Zosimus's involvement in the dispute over the hierarchy of Gallic bishops at the beginning of the fifth century. The second and longest case-study is Leo I's intervention in the Chalcedonian conflict over the natures of Christ. The final brief study is the disputed election of Symmachus at the end of the fifth century.

Dirty Love in Late Antiquity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Positive Light

This chapter discusses Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, a classic (and highly influential) tale of out-of-place desire composed in the fifth century CE. It is an extraordinary witness, in an era of Christian moralism, to the persistence of the novelistic tendency to see illicit, ‘dirty’ love in a positive light.

Rome's Holy Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Moralee
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Remote Past

Rome’s Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire’s holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome’s most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This book follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill’s tonnage of marble- and gold-bedecked monuments but, rather, an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh century CE. During this time, the triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill’s different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill’s role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state’s disintegration in the fifth century were the hill’s associations with the raw power of Rome’s empire.

Considering Compulsion in Late Ancient Christianity

2019 ◽  
pp. 183-216
Author(s):  
Ellen Muehlberger
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
Made In

At the opening of the fifth century, Christian writers advocated explicitly for using force or the threat of force to produce allegiance among Christians. In this chapter the author disaggregates this act, compulsion, from the other kinds of violence in late antiquity that have drawn the attention of scholars. She then examines the most influential statements made in defense of compulsion, taking her bearings primarily from Augustine’s letters, to show how Christian reasoning about the propriety of compulsion depends directly on there being a vividly imagined and universally expected postmortal. In the latter part of the chapter, the author explains how the chronology for human life that includes the postmortal allowed Augustine to shift ethical questions about the act of compulsion onto more favorable ground. The shift to surrogated thinking persisted in Christian considerations of compulsion, and at the end of the chapter, the author reflects on the lasting effects of this approach.

Xenophanes, Aeschylus, and the doctrine of primeval brutishness

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Ancient Medicine

The belief that primitive men lived like beasts and that civilisation developed out of these brutal origins is found in numerous ancient authors, both Greek and Latin. It forms part of certain theories about the beginnings of culture current in late antiquity. These are notoriously difficult to trace to their sources, but they already existed in some form in the fifth century b.c. One idea common to these theories is that of progress, and for this reason a fragment of Xenophanes is sometimes cited as their remote prototype: ‘The gods did not reveal all things to men from the beginning; instead, by seeking, men discover what is better in time’. Mainly on the strength of this fragment, Ludwig Edelstein devoted the first chapter of his bookThe Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquityto Xenophanes, and W. K. C. Guthrie has even declared that there is good reason to attribute to him a fuller account of progress, one that would include details found in later authors who speak of the early life of mankind. One of these details is the statement that the life of primitive men was ‘brutal’ or ‘beastlike’ (θηριώδης). In these authors the implication of that term varies from ‘unschooled in the basic crafts’ to ‘inhumanly violent and bloodthirsty’. In one sense or the other it is repeatedly encountered in ancient references to this subject. Accounts of primitive brutishness which make use of the wordθηριώδης(orθηριωδ⋯ςcan be found in theSuppliantsof Euripides, in the Hippocratic treatiseOn Ancient Medicine, in three passages of Diodorus, one of which is thought by some to contain Democritean doctrine, in four passages of Isocrates, in a fragment from a satyr-playSisyphuswhich the ancient sources attribute variously to Euripides and to Critias, in a fragment of Athenion, in a second-century inscription, in Plutarch, in Tatian, in Themistius, and in a scholion to Euripides.

Asceticism and syneisaktism in Asterius’ Liber ad Renatum monachum

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hajnalka Tamás ◽  
Liesbeth Van der Sypt
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Depth Study

AbstractThis article offers an in-depth study of Asterius’ often neglected Liber ad Renatum monachum in relation to its compositional context and other similar writings from Late Antiquity. It starts with a thorough discussion about the possible date, author, and place of the Liber ad Renatum monachum. One will see that the context of the writing was the (early) fifth century, but also that the treatise cannot be connected to a place more precisely than the Latin West. In the second part of this article, a closer look is given to the ascetic content of the Liber ad Renatum monachum. Although the treatise has many topics worth discussing, the present authors have chosen to direct their attention to the rather unknown late antique ascetic practice of syneisaktism, a practice in which an ascetic man and a virgin lived together unmarried with the (unofficial) promise to remain chaste. For this reason the final part of this article is wholly dedicated to the question of how Asterius used and reworked a centuries-old tradition of arguments against syneisaktism. The analysis extends over a wide range of polemical writings, starting from Asterius’ proven sources (e.g., Jerome’s Epistulae and the anonymous De singularitate clericorum) to sources previously not connected with this work (e.g., John Chrysostom’s Adversus eos qui apud se habent subintroductas virgines and Quod regulares feminae viris cohabitare non debeant, and several works of the Cappadocians).

Late latin grammars in the early middle ages

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 365-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Law
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Subsistence Level ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Survival Pattern

Summary The popularity, and hence survival, of certain of the grammars of late Antiquity in the early Middle Ages can to a large extent be described in typological terms. The two principal ancient genres, the Schulgrammatik and the regulae type, were joined in the fifth century by a new genre, the grammatical commentary. The overwhelming importance of Donatus and commentaries on Donatus and the emergence of the elementary foreign-language grammar in the seventh and eighth centuries reveal the subsistence level of language study in early Christendom. The conceptually more challenging grammars of the regulae type, as well as shorter works of the Schulgrammatik type, suffered a temporary eclipse. The greater linguistic confidence of the Carolingian Renaissance shifted the balance toward works of a more varied and demanding nature. Priscian’s Partitiones and Institutiones grammaticae re-entered circulation and in the next few centuries were assiduously excerpted and glossed. Ancient Donatus commentaries were superseded by newly-written ones and were joined by Carolingian commentaries on the principal authors of the regulae type, Phocas and Eutyches. Shorter grammars of the Schulgrammatik type and minor regulae grammars enjoyed a brief return to favour in the first half of the ninth century but failed to establish themselves in the curriculum. Instead, Carolingian teachers devoted themselves to the development of another new genre, the parsing grammar, which was to survive well into the sixteenth century. The survival pattern of Late Latin grammars thus reflects the priorities of the early Middle Ages. In an environment in which the Latin language, and with it basic literacy, were barely established, the theoretical disquisitions of Varro and Priscian were irrelevant and unhelpful. Many ancient grammatical texts were undoubtedly lost at the end of Antiquity, during the transition from papyrus to parchment; others may well have disappeared in the pre-Carolingian period, when the demands of elementary language teaching were uppermost. This was the final hurdle: those ancient grammars which survived to the Carolingian Renaissance are virtually all available today.

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