Late Antique Letter Collections

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Letter Collection ◽  
Latin Letter

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

scholarly journals From the Tombs into the City: Grave Robbing and the Reuse of Funerary Spolia in Late Antique Italy

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Cristina Murer
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that funerary spoil (e.g. sarcophagus lids, funerary altars, epitaphs, reliefs, and statues) were frequently reused to decorate the interiors of public and private buildings from the third to the sixth century. Therefore, the marble revetments of high imperial tombs must have been spoliated. Imperial edicts, which tried to stamp part the overly common practice of tomb plundering, confirm that the social practice of tomb plundering must have been far more frequent in late antiquity than in previous periods. This paper discusses the reuse of funerary spoil in privet and public buildings from Latium and Campania and contextualizes them by examining legal sources addressing tomb violation. Furthermore, this study considers the extent to which the social practice of tomb plundering and the reuse of funerary material in late antiquity can be connected with larger urbanist, sociohistorical, and political transformations of Italian cityscapes from the third to the sixth century.

The Letter Collection of Libanius of Antioch

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lieve Van Hoof
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Original Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Literary Composition ◽  
Letter Collection

Libanius’s letter collection is the largest to survive from antiquity, and indeed it is one of the most important sources on the socio-cultural history of late antiquity. Nevertheless, it has been only partially translated and selectively studied; this chapter, by contrast, focuses on the collection as a whole. First, it analyzes the three most important manuscripts, which shows 300 roughly identical letters in varying order. Second, it examines the collection’s design and its effects on interpretation. Finally, it dives into the question of editorial origins: did Libanius or some posthumous admirer compile the collection? Thus this chapter will show that reading Libanius’ letters in their original order—not in the chronological order first proposed by Otto Seeck and adopted by most editors and translators—not only enriches our understanding of the individual letters, but also shows the value of the letter collection as a unified literary composition.

Islands in the stream

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 323-342
Author(s):  
Robert A. Kaster
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Do So

Summary The Latin grammarians of late antiquity seem to personify the cultural stagnation and decline that have commonly been thought to typify the age. Resting upon conceptual foundations that had been laid centuries earlier and repeating the same doctrine from generation to generation, their texts appear by and large to be wholly untouched by originality. This paper addresses the question: why was this so? To suggest one answer to this question, the argument begins from the premise that the tradition remained as stable as it did because it continued to satisfy certain needs; the paper then goes on to consider these needs and their interaction. First, there are the needs of the grammarians themselves. From the beginnings of the profession’s history in the first century B.C. and first century A.D., when the grammarians’ schools first emerged as distinct institutions at Rome, the grammarians’ doctrine, with its emphasis on the rational analysis of the language’s ‘nature’, provided them with the authority they needed to prescribe correct speech for the social and cultural elite that they served. Once this exercise of reason had made a place for the grammarians as relative newcomers to the world of liberal letters, the doctrine was something to be prized and defended: the vivid instruction of the late antique grammarian Pompeius shows us a man fortified and buoyed up by his profession’s tradition, eager to assert its soundness or to add an improving touch here or there – and without the least wish or incentive to attempt some fundamental innovation; for to do so would be to tamper with the honorable social position that the profession provided. At the same time, the mainstream of the educated elite – the second group whose needs must be considered – would themselves have had little reason to encourage innovation: since a liberal education, based of course on grammar, had come to be one of the most important marks of social – and even moral – status, the honorable position of the elite was as much tied as the grammarians’ to the maintenance of the traditional doctrine. As a result, when the interests of the grammarians and the educated elite met in the institution of patronage, on which all teachers depended, the stability of the tradition was reinforced: for patrons did not seek innovative brilliance in their dependents, nor did they even look primarily for technical competence; they rather looked first for traditionally valued personal qualities like modesty and diligence, and other such qualities that would tend to preserve the status quo.

scholarly journals Resurrections before the Resurrection in the Imaginaire of Late Antiquity

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-738
Author(s):  
Danuta Renu Shanzer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Christian Message ◽  
Urban Legend

This paper is a study of transformations and mutations of a natural human desire, to be buried in one grave with one’s beloved. Most partners don’t die simultaneously, and burial-practices needed to provide flexibility for the dead and for the living. At the same time, religions had Views about the grave and the afterlife, and about the survival of the individual. Judaism and especially Christianity featured an astonishing doctrine, the Resurrection of the Flesh. Starting from Roman antiquity and in its epitaphic practices, the paper analyzes an intriguing early 4th C. Gallic poem, the Carmen de Laudibus Domini and its account of how the corpse of a dead woman was momentarily reanimated to greet her husband’s corpse. The poem reworks the resurrection of Lazarus with a little help from Juvencus. But a crucial (and unrecognized) source is (perhaps indirectly) Tertullian’s De Anima. These texts somehow generated a Late Antique urban legend about the mini-Resurrections of lovers’ bodies than can be traced into the central Middle Ages and beyond. It proved astonishingly lively and adaptable—to mariages blancs, to homosocial monastic situations, and to grave robbery, to name a few. This deeply sentimental legend needed to elbow aside darker phenomena, charnel (and also erotic) horrors from the pagan past, including zombies, vampires, and revenants, in order to preach its Christian message and help lovers who had been separated by death. Such resurrections were a down-payments on The Resurrection.

scholarly journals Philanthropy and places of care (xenodochia) in the late Roman empire, 350-600 CE

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Júlio Matzenbacher Zampietro ◽  
Pedro Paulo Abreu Funari
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
General Population ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Good Tool ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Era

Hospitals and places of care in general are topics that have received little attention from historians of Late Antiquity. The scarcity of detailed studies, although explained by a proportional scarcity of primary sources, written or archaeological, seems unjustified. The study of places of care can be a good tool to assess changes in power relations in the Later Roman Empire, as well as a way of comprehending important features of the Late Antique landscape that affected the general population in a myriad of ways. Our research chiefly intends to learn how Byzantine places of care related to the social surroundigs from the fourth to the sixth centuries of the Common Era, while also aiming to understand internal aspects of these institutions, ranging from its healthcaring practices to the objectives of their members.

'Lock up your valuables': Perceptions of sailors and sea-merchants in port cities of late antiquity and early Byzantium

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 47-75
Author(s):  
Janet Wade
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Negative Perception ◽  
The Social ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
The Church ◽  
Maritime Community ◽  
Early Byzantine

The ongoing presence of sailors and sea-merchants in the major port cities of the late antique and early Byzantine periods made them an important and influential subculture. This paper looks at the range of perceptions of the maritime community that exist in late Roman and early Byzantine sources. Various secular and ecclesiastical attitudes are discussed and compared with relevant sections of the civil and maritime law codes. When sailors, sea-merchants, and other mariners are mentioned by their contemporaries, they are more often than not portrayed in an unfavourable light. The legislation suggests that the negative perception of these men does have some basis in reality, yet the traditional view of these men as unsavoury and dishonest characters needs to be questioned. This paper asks why the ancient sources perceived sailors and sea-merchants in the way that they did. It discusses the social stigma attached to these men, the potential moral threat that they posed, their superstitious nature, and their socially disruptive and subversive behaviour. This paper highlights the reasons why modern scholars have tended to overlook the presence of the maritime community and their sociological importance in major port cities of this period. It argues that the maritime crowd had an integral role in the shaping of the economy, society, and even the church during this period.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Social Function ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Holy Man ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Developments

This chapter introduces this book’s main issues and questions. How were hagiographic texts used in the discourse of creating or recreating monastic identities? Was there a change in the social function of monasteries, and how did this come about? What was innovative about Jonas’s Vita Columbani, and how did he seek to establish new concepts of sanctity based on the community rather than on the individual holy man? It broaches these questions while framing the principal characters and subjects of the book—the life and works of Jonas of Bobbio, Columbanus, and the Columbanian monastic network—within the wider context of the religious and cultural developments of Late Antiquity. It also provides a historiographical introduction to previous scholarship on Jonas and an overview of Jonas’s three saints’ Lives.

Latin Letter Collections before Late Antiquity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Renee Salzman
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Leaders ◽  
Latin Letter

This chapter considers the variety of Latin letter collections that the late antique reader would have inherited. These range from letters by scholars, poets, statesmen, philosophers, orators, military officials, and Christian leaders. The chapter also considers how these letter collections were formed and circulated among late antique readers.

Ireland in Late Antiquity

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elva Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
The Relationship

It is often assumed that Ireland entered recorded history with the emergence of organized Christianity on the island at some point in the fourth or fifth century C.E. This assumption has meant that the histories of late antique and early medieval Ireland are primarily viewed through the lens of conversion. Religious identities, frequently imagined as a binary opposition of “Christian” and “pagan,” have been a dominant historiographical focus. This essay argues that it is more fruitful to examine the relationship between Ireland and its neighbors from c. 150–c. 550 C.E. through a frontier dynamic, a dynamic in which religious identity was but one factor among many. By recasting the Irish experience in this way, it is possible to take a more comparative approach which cuts against the grain of Irish exceptionalism. Moreover, situating Ireland within the scholarly discourse of late antiquity allows for a new and nuanced understanding of the social and religious changes that characterized this period on the island.

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