The creation of a new, martial model of masculinity in the fourth century was one way in which the mental world began to be reorganised in the late Roman period but it is very important to note that the Emperor still remained at the centre, legitimising both forms of masculinity. Nor, as I have said, did the new forms of barbarised military identity imply an actual rejection of Roman identity. As I also mentioned, and this is very important, this new martial form of Roman identity relied for its effectiveness on the continuing existence of traditional civic masculinity as the norm against which it was measured. You might, of course, what happened to that norm once the Roman Emperor declared that the whole western Empire had been lost to barbarians and needed reconquering, but we’ll leave that to one side for now.
What seems to me to be an even more important shift – in both halves of the fifth century Empire – was a radical thinking of how one envisaged the legitimate centre of the world. Even in the fourth century it was implicitly the case that the centre remained where it always had been: in the virtuous civic Roman male, personified in the Emperor, even if the debate about how one judged yourself in relationship to that might have shifted. One of the crucial things about the fourth century, as we have seen, was the increasing role of the Emperor in defining doctrinal correctness, or incorrectness. The fifth century continued to be an age when arguments about heresy dominated politics. Not only that, they became quite important in very local politics and identity. As I mentioned in the video lecture on the fifth-century crisis in week 2, the fifth century is really the period of the Christianisation of politics.
We can see this in many, many areas. I have already mentioned, more than once, the spatial transformation of the Roman city with the appearance of saints’ shrines in the peripheral cemeterial regions and the move out to those shrines of concentrations of social and political activity. In fact sometimes those peripheral foci began to move themselves towards the centre. The church of St Martin in Tours, built under Bishop Perpetuus in the third quarter of the fifth century was actually built on what had been part of the Roman city, in spite of being the new location for the saint’s tomb. This was quite a significant move, of the city of the dead into the city of the living, even if it was an abandoned part of the latter. The city of Aquileia in north-eastern Italy was sacked by Attila and his Huns in 452 but, when it was rebuilt afterwards, what is interesting is that the old urban centre, around the forum, was left entirely outside the new city walls. The new fortifications essentially protected the cathedral.
Probably more interesting and important still is what happened in Rome in the fifth century. In some ways, 4th-century Rome is paradigmatic of a city where the Christian presence was peripheral. The story of 5th-century Rome, though, is really of the take-over of the old centre by the Christian church, whether in the construction of new churches and monasteries or simply in the donation of lands to the church. The study of the archaeology of 5th-century Rome is in many ways a really good illustration of the historiography of the 5th century overall, and of the power of traditional narratives. In 2010 I attended a conference in Rome marking the anniversary of the Gothic sack of the city in 410. Most of the speakers were archaeologists who had been working on different areas of the city. Overwhelmingly, the papers they presented to the conference discussed the ‘problem’ that wherever one looked one simply could not find archaeological evidence of the barbarian sack of the city, whether in 410 or 455 (when the Vandals captured Rome and sacked it far more seriously than the Goths had). Yet their discussions of what excavations had turned up almost invariably concerned the construction of new church buildings of one sort or another. It was very clear to me that the archaeology of Rome simply could not be fit into the old grand narrative of the fifth-century barbarian invasions, largely because the real narrative of the fifth century was about something else: the Christianisation of Roman society and politics.
This is further illustrated in other aspects of fifth-century archaeology. We have already seen [in earier lectures] the abandonment of the villas that took place across the West in the fifth century. What happened on a lot of old villa sites, especially in Italy, Spain and the south of Gaul, was the construction of churches on those sites. For aristocrats it was considered a better use of their wealth and resources – for those who still had such wealth and resources, that is – to build a centre of Christian worship for their community than to keep in a good state of repair the classical locus for the manifestation of the traditional aristocratic culture of otium and paideia.
What is very interesting is how very little of the evidence from the fifth century wants to tell that story of barbarian invasion, so beloved of historians from Justinian’s time onwards. Whether one looks at archaeological or written sources – even basic chronicle sources – the evidence from the fifth century is much more concerned with Christianity and especially with the issues of heresy and orthodoxy.
I mentioned earlier that these issues had become important even at a very local level. There are a couple of very nice examples of this. One concerns the heresy of Priscillianism in Iberia and neighbouring areas. As I mentioned in [a previous lecture], Priscillian has the dubious distinction of being the first person handed over to the secular government to be executed for heresy. But no one really knows what was heretical about Priscillian. Some of his writings survive, largely because they were erroneously attributed to St Augustine of Hippo; no one has been able to find any doctrinally suspect statements in these. The charges levelled against him are reminiscent of those thrown at the Templars nearly a millennium later: of witchcraft, of strange ritual practices – or they are standard late antique accusations such as that he spent too much time with women. The main problem with Priscillian seems to have been the sort of thing that concerned the church about some holy men: that he didn’t do what bishops told him, and that he wandered around Iberia with a crowd of followers. Once Priscillian had been declared a heretic and executed, though, accusations of ‘Priscillianism', whatever that might in practice have been, began to appear in local Spanish politics. What seems to have been happening was that some groups accused their enemies of this in order to undermine their legitimacy.
My second example concerns Pelagianism in Britain. Pelagius was a Briton but all of the debate over his teachings was conducted in the Mediterranean regions, ending with the 1st Council of Ephesus in 431. After he was declared heretical, from the 2nd decade of the 5th century onwards, we start to find accusations of Pelagianism in Britain. As with Priscillianism in Spain, the origins of the heresiarch seem to have determined where accusations of the heresy were most believable. St Germanus of Auxerre travelled to Britain in 428 after an appeal was sent to the Gallic church asking for someone to resolve the dispute. The account in the Life of Germanus really suggests though that, as with Priscillianism in Spain, this was really a dispute over local authority in Verulamium (St Albans) rather than a serious theological dispute. What these stories illustrate was that a micro level, deviation from correct teaching (orthodoxy) had somehow come to replace deviation from the standards of civic masculinity as the way in which political illegitimacy was determined.
This was true at the highest levels too. If the emperor himself was a heretic, why ought anyone to take any notice of what he said? During the reign of Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic ruler of Italy, one reason why Goths and Romans came together, and why even Catholics and Arians seem to have been able to reach a modus vivendi was because the Emperors at the time, first Zeno and then, especially, Anastasius were considered to be miaphysite heretics. Both the Arians and the Catholics agreed that this was heresy. Once the Catholic Justin I came to the throne, the seeming truce between Arians and Catholics in Italy seems to have begun to crumble.
The Goths, in Gaul and Iberia, and in Italy, were Arians, as just mentioned. So were the Vandals in Africa. Quite apart from the fact that this heretical belief seems to have been used to create an identity for these groups, the Goths and Vandals appear to have stressed their doctrinal differences precisely when they were in political dispute with Rome – sometimes going as far as to persecute the Catholics – mainly in Vandal Africa. Again, though, the issue seems to have been that it was possible to try to discredit political rivals by portraying them as doctrinally in error.
In the fifth century it seems that claims to representing the legitimate centre in terms of traditional Roman notions of virtue became less and less secure as the century wore on, partly perhaps because of the changes mentioned in the previous lecture, as well as the end of the generally-recognised legitimate dynasty. If claims could not be made on these grounds they perhaps could by reference to more overarching notions of doctrinal, theological correctness. The good Christian replaced the good Roman at the centre of the world.
