Peter Van Nuffelen | Ghent University (original) (raw)

Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, 2010

This paper seeks to understand how coercion was conceptualised in Late Antiquity and to trace its... more This paper seeks to understand how coercion was conceptualised in Late Antiquity and to trace its origins. It argues that coercion and persuasion are part of a single system of thought, that is, the principles that underpin the choice for persuasion to solve religious conflict also produce the reasons to use coercion in particular circumstances. Such ideas can be found in pagan and Christian sources alike and represent the adoption by Christian authors of principles of classical philosophy. The paper devotes particular attention to Augustine's justification of the use of state coercion against the Donatists and argues that his thought is fundamentally coherent and in line with late ancient ideas about persuasion and coercion .

This chapter1 contributes only indirectly to the study of religious conflict in late antiquity. I... more This chapter1 contributes only indirectly to the study of religious conflict in late antiquity. It is concerned with a form of violence that is often studied under the label " religious violence, " namely riotous behaviour by crowds against buildings, symbols, and individuals of other religious groups. Instead of studying this as a separate form of violence, I seek to embed these phenomena in a wider study of crowd behaviour. The reason is that such " religious violence " assumes the same forms as violence directed against civic, imperial or economic targets. An understanding of crowd behaviour in general is thus an essential preliminary to the study of such phenomena. Besides offering a contextualisation for " religious violence, " I shall seek to analyse crowd behaviour with categories employed by late ancient authors themselves. Whereas modern sociology is commonly preferred as an explanatory framework (section 1), I argue in favour of a virtue-based model, which I briefly ground in the De officiis of Ambrose of Milan (section 2). After setting out how this model helps us to make sense of late ancient descriptions of crowd behaviour and violence (Section 3), I end by showing how such actions were profoundly meaningful, not just in the eyes of the beholders but also in their actual reality. In other words, crowd behaviour is shaped by the geographical and ceremonial contexts in which they took place, as well as by implicit assumptions about how social relations function.

Like most ancient authors, Procopius is mainly known to us through his own texts. 2 Somewhat para... more Like most ancient authors, Procopius is mainly known to us through his own texts. 2 Somewhat paradoxically, this may be the reason why Procopian scholarship rarely heeds the advice of literary theory that text and author are two related but distinct entities. Indeed, in our perception, Procopius does not seem to have a life outside of his texts that could be contrasted with these very texts. We therefore try to infer his opinions from the Wars, Anecdota and Buildings, so as to construct a historical person Procopius behind the author Procopius. The approach is not without its difficulties: as the recent review article by Geoffrey Greatrex illustrates, we rarely succeed in agreeing on the views of Procopius.3 We try nevertheless, because Procopius is our main source for events of the first decades of the reign of Justinian: his words project worlds, worlds that we then need to construct our own 'age of Justinian'.4 A sound idea of his opinions and passions may help us, so we hope, to filter out facts from the narrative. Not only is scholarship faced with the problematic transition from Procopius' words to Justinian's world, but Procopius had to meet a similar challenge: how to turn Justinian's world into words, or, in more general terms: how to represent reality in a historiographical narrative. His choice to write in a classicising style and to imitate episodes from classical authors has often been considered to impinge upon the representational value of his narrative, either in a negative way by introducing mere tales into what should be a narrative of facts,5 or in a positive way by having historiography convey an esoteric message of deeper and dangerous truths that cannot be stated directly.6 In either case, classicism does not seem to be an apt choice to represent reality truthfully. Such judgements are based on a modern, positivist and empiricist, presupposition according to which the function of the language of a scientific text is to represent the world by simply stating 'what is the case'. Literary features are deemed to distract from that aim. As a consequence, the narrative of Procopius is devaluated, either because it is reduced to mere tales that owe allegiance to literature and not to reality, or because it is a sign referring to other texts, where the real message resides. So far, Procopius has been the object of these debates. This chapter proposes, by contrast, that the problematic transition from world to word is an explicit theme of his narrative. Limiting myself to the Wars, I shall argue that this work reflects upon its own use of language and what it means to represent a shifting world with words that are themselves subject to change. This reflection is entangled in an even more fundamental discussion about language as man's medium to connect with reality and to exercise control over it, whilst man is, at the same time, essentially unable to fully grasp reality. Indeed, the Wars constantly highlight man's inability to really grasp what has happened and to foresee what will happen. We shall see that Procopius does not passively conform to classicism simply because it is the cultural habitus of his class and his genre, but that his text shows awareness of the tensions its espousal generates. I shall conclude by suggesting that, by engaging in such a reflection, Procopius bears witness to a general cultural dynamic driven by the Christianisation of his world during Late Antiquity.

Der folgende Beitrag legt dar, dass die Topoi der griechisch-römischen Exilliteratur in Philons D... more Der folgende Beitrag legt dar, dass die Topoi der griechisch-römischen Exilliteratur in Philons De migratione Abrahami aufgegriffen werden. Obwohl Abraham strenggenommen kein Exilant, sondern ein Migrant ist, war sein Aufbruch durch die göttliche Weisung unfreiwillig – ein Merkmal, das ein griechisches und römisches Publikum an das wenig beneidenswerte Schicksal eines Exilanten erinnert haben mag. Philon antwortet auf solch ein mögliches Verständnis von Abrahams Wanderung, indem er aufzeigt, wie die verschiedenen Gaben, die er von Gott erhält, die Sorgen und Nöte aufheben, die die antike Philosophie mit dem Exil assoziiert. Indem er die positive Natur von Abrahams Aufbruch betont und ihn als Reise der Seele hin zur Tugend allegorisiert, ergreift Philon auch Partei für die antike Idee vom Exil als privilegierter Gelegenheit, ein der Tugend gemäßes Leben zu beginnen oder zu führen, da der Betreffende der gesellschaftlichen Bindungen entledigt ist, die ihn zurückhalten könnten im Prozess, sich der Tugend zuzuwenden. Obwohl es sich bei De migratione Abrahami um einen exegetischen Traktat handelt, der sich primär an ein spezialisiertes, jüdisches Publikum richtet, lässt sich erkennen, dass Philon sich differenziert mit möglichen griechischen und römischen Lesarten befasst, was wiederum die eingehende Resonanz dieser Kultur bei Philon und seinem Publikum zeigt. Das Exil war eine gebräuchliche Strafe in der antiken Welt, die entweder als unabhängige Sanktion oder als Alternative zur Todesstrafe verhängt wurde. 2 In der Antike war (zumindest für die – meist männliche – Elite) die Konstante, die den Menschen in erster Linie ihre soziale Identität verlieh, der Bürgerstatus, d.h. Mitglied einer bestimmten Stadt zu sein. Verbannung wurde daher oft als Form des sozialen Todes verstanden, denn es bedeutete den Ausschluss aus der Gemeinschaft, die dem Leben des Einzelnen Sinn gab.3 Es überrascht nicht, dass das Exil eine intensive Trostliteratur hervorgebracht hat, die in der Regel von Philosophen verfasst wurde. Erhaltene Beispiele des Genres sind Senecas Consolatio ad Helviam, der seine Mutter über sein eigenes Exil tröstet (42 oder 43 n. Chr.), Diatribe IX von Musonius Rufus Dass das Exil kein Übel ist (62 n. Chr.), die dreizehnte Rede von Dion Chrysostomos (die zur Regierungszeit Kaiser Domitians 81–96 n. Chr. spielt), Favorinus' Rede De exilio (die während der Jahre 130–138 spielt), und Plutarchs Abhandlung mit demselben Titel (nach 96 n. Chr.). Alle diese Werke lassen sich ungefähr in die Periode 50–150 n. Chr. einordnen und nur eine einzige frühere Schrift ist erhalten, die Diatribe des Kynikers Teles, 4 die in das dritte vorchristliche Jahrhundert datiert.5 Diese Schriften sind die Überreste eines in der Antike weitverbreiteten Genres. Auch wenn die oben aufgelisteten Werke verschiedene literarische Formen umfassen, wie Briefe, Diatriben und Reden, hatte das Genre doch einen hohen Grad an Kohärenz was die verwendeten Topoi angeht, eine Tatsche, die bereits Cicero ausdrücklich festgestellt hat. 6 Dies macht es schwierig, präzise Berührungspunkte zwischen den verschiedenen Schriften auszumachen, aber es erlaubt uns die Annahme, dass sich die Topoi bereits zu der Zeit etabliert hatten, als Philon geschrieben hat. Tatsächlich datieren die meisten erhaltenen Werke nach Philon, und die Schrift von Teles ist die einzige, die er gekannt haben kann, denn er war wahrscheinlich nicht in der Lage, das lateinische Werk von Seneca zu lesen. Dennoch zeigen die klaren Übereinstimmungen zwischen der

This article presents a new interpretation of the historiographical production of Jordanes by sit... more This article presents a new interpretation of the historiographical production of Jordanes by situating it in the political and social environment of Constantinople of the years 550–552. It argues that these years were a period of crisis in Justinian's reign and that this is reected in the pessimistic view of Roman power and the critique of Justinian's military and religious policy we can see in Jordanes' Romana. If this prevents us from understanding Jordanes as a mouthpiece of the court, he cannot be reduced to a mere reproducer of Cassiodorus either: while there is more evidence for a close interaction between Jordanes and Cassiodorus (in particular the use of the Historia Tripartita in the Romana) than usually adduced, this is balanced by Jordanes' explicit attempts to keep his distance from the senator. If the latter can be explained by Jordanes' much lower social and literary status and his Moesian rather than Italian origin, which made him only a marginal member of Cassiodorus' circle in Constantinople, the agreement between both men is the result of a conuence of views caused by the turn of the Italian war in 540–550. Jordanes, then, appears as a unique voice in what must have been a polyphony of opinions in mid-sixth-century Constantinople.

The highs and lows of biography1 This paper seeks to situate the Historia Augusta in its literary... more The highs and lows of biography1 This paper seeks to situate the Historia Augusta in its literary context and to understand its imposture as a literary play with the value judgements on the reading and writing of biography that were current in the fourth century. Drawing on evidence from fragmentary historians, I shall, first, survey how political biography was perceived in this period. In particular, I shall draw attention to a recurring negative assessment of the genre as unsuited for an elite habitus. In the second section of this paper, I shall argue that the Historia Augusta plays on these value judgements by inviting its reader to become an 'over-reader' 2 who is aware of the distance between the'real author' of the work and the 'implied authors'.3 1. « They hate learning as poison »: biography and the elite habitus in the fourth century The field of biography in the fourth century was somewhat more crowded than we tend to assume. In this section I shall discuss some evidence which is rarely adduced in this context, with the aim of identifying a discourse on biography against which the Historia Augusta positions itself. The Historia Augusta seems to situate itself within the context of the confluence of historiography and biography which started in the Empire and was practised in the fourth century by the Ennmansche Kaisergeschichte, Eutropius, Aurelius Victor and the Epitome de Caesaribus.4 As the Historia Augusta has clear links with such works, often through their use as sources, this is an obvious way to understand the work. Yet, this is only part of the story. If we look at the reception of works of biography that were produced or used in this period, we notice that political biography did not have the sound reputation that its continuous history seems to suggest. (I restrict myself to biography of 'political figures', thus leaving out lives of saints, philosophers, and authors. This may generate issues about genre definition, but, as we shall see, political biography does seem to be identified as a particular type of literature.) I shall first illustrate the obvious fact that works of biography were a traditional tool in the literary training of the elite by the grammaticus and rhetor and that compendia collecting biographical material were produced for such a purpose. Then I shall argue that because of their association with basic training, works of biography tended to be judged rather negatively, but this was not the only reason: there was also the suspicion that biography was being read out of misplaced curiosity. Finally, because political biography, and in particular imperial biography, was a trite genre, we notice a tendency in the fourth century to engage with such traditional knowledge in a new, playful manner.