‘Tantalus ever in Tears’: The Greek Anthology as a Source of Emotions in Late Antiquity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Herrin
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique

During the period of Late Antiquity (AD c. 300-600) few texts are preserved that were intended to make the reader laugh. The Greek Anthology, however, provides an unusually rich source for late antique attitudes to both laughter and tears. As Agathias, a lawyer and historian, explains when putting together his Garland of epigrams he followed and quoted the wise model of the ancients, and added sixth-century topics that illustrate ‘the devious paths of life’, ‘scurrilous rhyme’, ‘sweet love’ and ‘the joys of Bacchus’. He also describes the collection as a literary feast with different new flavourings, the kneading of fresh poetical dough by many skilled cooks. Their ‘dishes’, read aloud at real banquets, reveal a persistent devotion to Aphrodite/Cypris and all the passions that love brings. Yet the ancient gods and the wheel of Fortune that frustrates human endeavour appear side by side with Christian heroes, the martyrs of the early church, bishops and pious virgins, who overcame pagan disdain and persecution. The collection therefore captures the representation of emotions between two distinct worlds: the inheritance of Greek antiquity as it was being accommodated and restricted in the emergent world of Christian dominion.

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.

Religious Violence and Hagiography in Late Antiquity

Numen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 169-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mar Marcos
Keyword(s):  
Early Development ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Religious Violence ◽  
Conversion Process ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Form Part ◽  
The Subject

Sanctity is in many ways a social construct, and hence the profile of saints and the practices that qualify them as such change with the passing of time. The destruction of temples and idols as a way to signal sanctity is a good example of this. The subject came to form part of hagiography in the late fourth century, reached its peak in the Theodosian period, and fell off in the sixth century when Christianization was believed to be complete. Hagiography made iconoclasm one of the most extraordinary expressions of divine power, adding it to the saint’s repertoire of miracles and ascetic virtues. The aim of this article is to study the origins and early development of this motif, which legitimated — and subtly encouraged — the use of violence in the conversion process. It is within apologetic and polemical contexts that the episodes of the violent destruction of late antique paganism have to be assessed.

scholarly journals The rise and fall of viticulture in the Late Antique Negev Highlands reconstructed from archaeobotanical and ceramic data

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (33) ◽  
pp. 19780-19791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Fuks ◽  
Guy Bar-Oz ◽  
Yotam Tepper ◽  
Tali Erickson-Gini ◽  
Dafna Langgut ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Proximate Cause ◽  
International Scope ◽  
Common Era

The international scope of the Mediterranean wine trade in Late Antiquity raises important questions concerning sustainability in an ancient international economy and offers a valuable historical precedent to modern globalization. Such questions involve the role of intercontinental commerce in maintaining sustainable production within important supply regions and the vulnerability of peripheral regions believed to have been especially sensitive to environmental and political disturbances. We provide archaeobotanical evidence from trash mounds at three sites in the central Negev Desert, Israel, unraveling the rise and fall of viticulture over the second to eighth centuries of the common era (CE). Using quantitative ceramic data obtained in the same archaeological contexts, we further investigate connections between Negev viticulture and circum-Mediterranean trade. Our findings demonstrate interrelated growth in viticulture and involvement in Mediterranean trade reaching what appears to be a commercial scale in the fourth to mid-sixth centuries. Following a mid-sixth century peak, decline of this system is evident in the mid- to late sixth century, nearly a century before the Islamic conquest. These findings closely correspond with other archaeological evidence for social, economic, and urban growth in the fourth century and decline centered on the mid-sixth century. Contracting markets were a likely proximate cause for the decline; possible triggers include climate change, plague, and wider sociopolitical developments. In long-term historical perspective, the unprecedented commercial florescence of the Late Antique Negev appears to have been unsustainable, reverting to an age-old pattern of smaller-scale settlement and survival–subsistence strategies within a time frame of about two centuries.

Nicopolis ad Istrum: Backward and Balkan?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. WHITTOW
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

The story of Nicopolis ad Istrum and its citizens exemplifies much that is common to the urban history of the whole Roman Empire. This chapter reviews the history of Nicopolis and its transition into the small fortified site of the fifth to seventh centuries and compares it with the evidence from the Near East and Asia Minor. It argues that Nicopolis may not have experienced a cataclysm as has been suggested, and that, as in the fifth and sixth century west, where landowning elites showed a striking ability to adapt and survive, there was an important element of continuity on the lower Danube, which in turn may account for the distinctive ‘Roman’ element in the early medieval Bulgar state. It also suggests that the term ‘transition to Late Antiquity’ should be applied to what happened at Nicopolis in the third century: what happened there in the fifth was the transition to the middle ages. This chapter also describes late antique urbanism in the Balkans by focusing on the Justiniana Prima site.

Christians in Conversation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Rigolio
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Diverse World ◽  
Hellenistic Greece ◽  
Opening Up

Christians in Conversation: A Guide to Late Antique Dialogues in Greek and Syriac deals with a particular form of writing by Christians in late antiquity, the prose dialogue. To study late antique dialogues means to recognize that the dialogue form, notably employed by Plato and Aristotle, did not exhaust itself with the philosophical schools of Classical and Hellenistic Greece, but emerged transformed and reinvigorated in the religiously diverse world of late antiquity. The Christians’ use of the dialogue form within religious debate resulted in a burgeoning activity of composition of prose dialogues, which often opposed a Christian and a Jew, a Christian and a pagan, a Christian and a Manichaean, an Orthodox and a heretic, or, later, a Christian and a Muslim. The present work offers the first comprehensive analysis of Christian dialogues in Greek and in Syriac from the earliest examples in the second century up to the end of the sixth century. It shows that several Christian authors chose the dialogue form to convey fundamental theological views, and argues that dialogues were intended as tools of opinion formation in late antique society, thus opening up this vast strand of literature to the interests of the cultural and intellectual historians. Most Christian dialogues are little studied, and often in isolation, but they vividly evoke the religious debates of the time, and embody the cultural conventions and refinements that late antique men and women expected from such debates.

scholarly journals Imperial Women and Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-412
Author(s):  
Julia Hillner
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Social Network Analysis ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique

Late antique clerical exile is traditionally investigated from the perspective of banished cleric or banishing emperor and council. This article investigates the relationships between banished clerics and imperial women. Drawing on data collected by the Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity project, as well as quantitative methods such as social network analysis, I discuss how late antique authors exploited these (at times fabricated) relationships for their narrative agendas. Focussing on the case study of imperial women as patrons of banished clerics, I draw three conclusions: First, there was a constantly negative attitude towards involvement of imperial women in clerical exile throughout Late Antiquity. Second, there was, nonetheless, variation in this attitude across time and genres. Negative portrayal of imperial women engaged in cases of clerical exile peaked in the fifth century and in Nicene and Chalcedonian sources. Third, positive portrayal appears only towards the end of the period, and in sixth-century Miaphysite hagiography. I suggest that the identified differences were due to genre, but also responded to real changes in the institutional roles of imperial women over the course of late antiquity.

Rome and the Tzani in late antiquity: a historical and archaeological review

2018 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 131-150
Author(s):  
Emanuele E. Intagliata
Keyword(s):  
Black Sea ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Black Sea ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Black Sea Coast ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Sea Coast ◽  
Written Sources

AbstractCompared to other stretches of the eastern frontier, northeastern Anatolia has rarely attracted the attention of scholars of the Roman and late antique periods. The region is known, through late antique written sources, to have housed a belligerent confederation of tribes, the Tzani, who lived off raids conducted against their neighbours. Until the fifth century AD, the Roman approach to the Tzanic problem was one of quiet co-existence, but, in the early sixth century AD, after war broke out again with Persia, necessity moved the emperor Justinian (r. AD 527–565) to intervene more actively against the Tzani. According to the sixth-century historian Procopius, the Tzani were subdued and a chain of forts was constructed in their lands to protect access to the Black Sea coast. The remains of these forts, as well as those of other sixth-century AD infrastructure allegedly built under Justinian, are still elusive. Nonetheless, evidence on the ground and in the written sources can still help investigate the nature of the Justinianic frontier defensive system.

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.

Inventing Synagogue Conversion

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-416
Author(s):  
Shira L. Lander
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Building Structures ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Space Transformation

Historians of the ancient synagogue often use the term “conversion” to describe any kind of adaptation of a building once designated as a synagogue into a church. This label oversimplifies and misconstrues complex processes, both rhetorical and architectural, that were at work in transforming the landscape of the late antique Mediterranean. I explore the dynamic of this triumphalist rhetoric and architectural strategy, showing that Christian writers meant something very specific by the term “conversion,” and that they invented the paradigm of synagogue conversion in order to interpret the changing landscape to their readers. The architectural program of replacement as a strategy for converting subject populations to Christianity emerged in the sixth century. By characterizing changes made to building structures and changes in religious belief as “conversion,” imperial policy concretized the association of sacred space transformation with the victory of Christianity over Judaism and paganism.

Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ophir Münz-Manor
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Biblical Poetry ◽  
Contemporary View ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
The One

The article presents a contemporary view of the study of piyyut, demonstrating that Jewish poetry of late antiquity (in Hebrew and Aramaic) was closely related to Christian liturgical poetry (both Syriac and Greek) and Samaritan liturgy. These relations were expressed primarily by common poetic and prosodic characteristics, derived on the one hand from ancient Semitic poetry (mainly biblical poetry), and on the other from innovations of the period. The significant connections of content between the different genres of poetry reveal the importance of comparative study. Thus the poetry composed in late antiquity provides additional evidence for the lively cultural dialogue that took place at that time.

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