2021 The two justices. Moral limits to state power in Late Antiquity, in Classica e Christiana 16, 2021, 572-585. (original) (raw)
Related papers
in: Christopher Heath/Robert Houghton (Eds.), Conflict and Violence in Medieval Italy 568-1154, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (Italy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages), chapter 5, pp. 149-183, 2022
Based on selected Latin sources, this chapter focusses on physical violence between Christians and Muslims in ninth-century southern Italy analyses its actors, dimensions, circumstances, and consequences. Despite rhetorical exaggerations and the victim's perspective, the sources provide evidence for a decade-long state of armed conflicts, of sustained threats, far-reaching devastations, and a significant number of victims among the Christian populations. The Muslim presence influenced new dimensions of violence, with consequences for demographic, economic, and political structures in the affected regions. Several factors work together to characterise southern Italy as an 'area permeated with violence' (gewaltoffener Raum) and as a border region where several 'violent communities' were continuously competing for resources and power, also leaving, however, room for non-violent options.
The social background of Donatist sectarian violence in the long fourth century Roman north Africa
2019
The northwestern Roman provinces of Africa were a religious workshop and spiritual battlefield in the aftermath of the ‘great’ persecution. Cramped between desert and sea African Christianity was divided not on terms of doctrine, but of devotion and zeal during perilous times. The polarized debate which occurred between Christians who handed over their scriptures as a token repudiation of faith during the ‘great’ persecution (303-305) and those who actively resisted, divided the population in social and cultural terms. Donatists saw themselves as the ‘true’ Church with valid sacraments emphatically refusing communion to the traditores, their former fellow clerics who actively cooperated with the pagan authorities. What initially seemed to be an issue of succession gradually evolved into an open in the African countryside. The image, however, was far more complicated. Beyond the ‘Church of martyrs’ and the traditores of faith lays an antithesis between the classical heritage of a ‘world of cities’ and the cultural otherness of the Phoenician/Berber countryside which gained a voice of its own through Donatism.
A penal code is one of the most sensitive points of interaction between the political system, legal system, and mentality of a society. 1 Its catalogue of punishable offenses, the character of the punishments to be imposed, and not least the textual legitimation strategies of this sphere of state authority give us insight into the self-understanding of a society and its prevailing anxieties and traumas. Thanks to comparatively good source material, this is also true for the Imperium Romanum in the fourth century after Christ, the penal legislation of which can be traced under the relevant tituli of the late-antique law codes-in particular, Book IX of the Codex Theodosianus. It is more difficult, however, to penetrate through the normative rhetoric in which the subject matter is typically embedded to an empirical understanding of the actual degree and frequency of violence in late-antique society. We often lack reliable evidence for the nature and the prevalence of criminal activity in this period, as well as for actual penal practice, while such evidence as we do possess is extremely difficult to interpret: the res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus with their vivid scenes of torture and executions stand at the center of attention in this context. Yet Ammianus, like the imperial historians in general, 2 was more interested in scenes of exceptional violence committed by individual governors or at politically motivated trials than in the everyday business of the courts. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the second important group of literary sources, namely, Christian authors, who tend to emphasize the brutality of the persecutions and the heroic suffering of the martyrs. 3 This chapter is not about quantifying levels of criminality and the measures taken to combat it. 4 I propose rather in this chapter to view late-antique penal 1
Religious Violence in Late Antiquity: Current Approaches, Trends and Issues
In: Jitse Dijkstra and Christian Raschle, eds, Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 251-265.
One of the few points on which the multitude of debates that have occurred across the disciplines in recent years agree is that, whether addressing the late ancient past or the global present, the phenomenon we label religious violence is far from simple. The paper outlines some of the current debates and trends with regard to the world of Late Antiquity and introduces a variety of challenges posed by them. A key question these pose is not just whether there is a causal relationship between religion and violence, but whether in trying to unpack religious violence as a perceived phenomenon we are asking the wrong question about, among other things, the relationship between narratives of violence (which in Late Antiquity were prolific) and actual violent action.
A Polite Conversation, an Edict, and a Sword: A Look at the Martyrdom of Julius the Veteran
Journal of Theological Studies, 2019
This article offers a fresh analysis of the Martyrdom of Julius the Veteran, a martyr act narrating the trial and execution of a Christian military veteran of the legio XI Claudia stationed at Durostorum in Moesia Minor in 304 CE. The article establishes a literary tendency in the martyr acta whereby a correlation is made between increasing or decreasing descriptions of violence and increasing or decreasing demonization of the persecutors. A close analysis of the exchange between Julius and the legatus Augustalis Maximus, specifically of the modifiers Satanae and subdolus in Julius' rejection of Maximus' attempt to resolve the case without Julius dying or losing honour, results in a more nuanced look at the concept of Romanitas and Christian-Roman identity boundaries than has previously been attempted for this military martyr act.
Violence and Episcopal Elections in Late Antique Rome, AD 300–500 (preview)
Late Roman Italy: Imperium to Regnum. Edited by Jeroen Wijnendaele, 2023
This chapter reconsiders the violence associated with the contested elections of three Roman bishops: Damasus (366–84), Boniface (418–22) and Symmachus (498–514). My focus on the Roman church is a consequence of the availability of evidence, but I will also consider how contested episcopal elections elsewhere in Italy compare to those at Rome. As we shall see, personal ambition, the size and complexity of the Roman church, the lack of clear procedures for episcopal elections, and the diminution of the coercive power of the state in the city from the late third century onwards increased the potential for intra-Christian conflict following the death of a bishop. These conflicts focused especially on controlling (or attempting to control) specific buildings and areas of the city. The descriptions of the resulting violence, which featured club- and sword-wielding thugs, massacres in churches and attacks against rival candidates in the streets, still shock with their apparent callous brutality. This has occasionally led to the mischaracterising of these episodes as riots or examples of mob violence, expressions that implicitly lay the blame upon the faceless, fanatical multitude. However, as I will argue below, the violence associated with contested Roman episcopal elections was intentional, carefully coordinated and deployed from the top down as part of deliberate strategy to gain control of the see of St Peter.