Organising the Late Antique World (6): The End

There was of course an important reason for such calculation. Could you calculate when the world would end? Many theologians said no. Mankind couldn’t try to second-guess the Almighty’s divine plan. St Augustine was one who forcefully said that you should stop your counting. Some people thought that the world would last 6,000 years, so when 6,000 years since Creation were up the world would end. Or maybe 600 years since Christ’s passion. This, as various writers said, was all theologically dubious but it didn’t stop people thinking that way.

Indeed, as long as the Roman Empire was standing and secure then there was no reason to worry that the 6th age was ending. Of course in the 5th century some people did start to worry. The chronicler Hydatius, writing in north-west Iberia in the 460s, was sure the world was ending. But not everyone thought like that and by the end of the fifth century such apocalyptic thinking had faded. The world hadn’t ended just because there was no western Emperor.

As ever, what really made a difference was Justinian declaring the western Empire to have been lost. People in the West now were living after the Roman Empire. Had, therefore, the 6th age ended? For a short period in the late sixth century it does seem that people thought the end of times was near: the fact that, as Gregory of Tours calculated, it was about 6,000 years since creation (and also about 600 years since Christ’s birth or passion) didn’t help matters. Apocalyptic thinking is very common in late 6th-century western thought. You can see it very clearly in the writings of the two Gregories: Gregory of Tours and Gregory the Great (more or less exact contemporaries). With the Great Persian War and then the Arabs this sort of idea, of living after the Empire, became common in the East as well. It is very likely that these ideas played a big part in the ascetic invasion mentioned in [a previous packge of lectures].

What if you were living at a moment beyond linear time, after the end of the last of the 6 ages of the world, when the last days were about to begin? One effect of this was probably the increase in ‘typological’ thinking. Typological thinking saw everything in the world as a ‘type’ of something from the Bible or Christian history. A prince who rebelled against his father – a new Absalom. A wise king: a new Solomon. A sinful man? A new Herod. And so on. This went beyond mere simile. It meant that particular actions or sets of actions could be expected to bring a particular outcome, based upon biblical precedent. Causation no longer worked horizontally, as the sequence of causes and effects of mankind’s actions. It came vertically, direct from God, according to the type of situation. You can see this very clearly in Gregory of Tours’ Histories, which, infamously, are a jumble of short stories with little attempt to follow a narrative thread. Gregory sees things as self-contained units where people do something and there is a consequence in terms of reward or punishment – miracles and anti-miracles if you like – and then moves on to the next story, all for the education and instruction of his readers. The moment passed, of course. These worries are not so clear in the next generation, but nonetheless the fact that one was living after the end of Rome was in place. One was now living in a time when, even if you couldn’t calculate the timing of its arrival, the apocalypse could come at any time, maybe soon but maybe not. This remained a fixture for the rest of the Middle Ages.

Organising the Late Antique World (5): The Measurement of Time

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.

Augustine of Hippo’s famous comment on time from Book 11 of his Confessions. The nature of time has remained the subject of philosophical and scientific discussion ever since. How do with think of time? As a sequence with a beginning, middle and end? Or as a cycle, with things coming around again and again – as with the seasons? Augustine was concerned with these questions and more: could time really meaningfully exist if, as he put it the past was gone, the present fleeting and the future not yet arrived?

Obviously, how you measure time and how you see yourself in it is crucial to world views. Think of the French Revolution and its complete reinvention of the calendar, days and months, and its restarting the clock with L’An Un (Year I) in 1792, or even more bloodily – if less logically – the Khmer Rouge resetting the clock at Year Zero in 1975. During the Paris Commune of 1871 there were moves to rename the Year L’An 80 – year 80 of the Revolutionary Era. Nothing came of it; it was yet another tragi-comic aspect of the Commune. Why do Young Earth Creationists find the Darwinian revolution and the 20th advances in scientific chronology so upsetting? Not because of their belief in God – it’s perfectly possible to be a devout Christian and believe in divine creation without believing that the earth is only 8,000 years old. It’s because it takes man away from being at the centre of history and moves mankind effectively to a recent, fleeting moment, and that unpicks the hierarchical creationism that underpins their whole world-view. Time can be central to identity.

These ideas were not alien to the Roman world. Various Roman provinces had their own provincial chronology. There was, for example, the Spanish Era which continued be used throughout our period. It began in the year we think of as 38BC and appears to have been considered to represent the foundation of the Roman Provinces of Hispania. Nothing significant in that regard appears to have happened in that year, which to me at least makes it more likely that the system was set up in that year rather than retrospectively. In North Africa there was a similar Mauretanian era, which started in the year we count as 39AD. In the same part of the world the Vandals established their era, beginning in 439, in other words counting from the date of their capture of Carthage and conveniently permitting the correction of Mauretanian Era dates simply by erasing the initial CD (400). Some Romans counted the years since the Foundation of the City (Ab Urbe Condita) in 753 BC, a system popularised by Livy whose History, written up to 9BC, had that title. In the 6th century, the Gallic cities of Lyon and Vienne had competing ways of counting the years, starting with a different consul.

These weren’t the only ways in which the reckoning of time was politicised. Obviously the Republican calendar had been repoliticised at the very start of the Roman Empire with the renaming of the fifth and sixth months of the calendar after Julius Caesar and Augustus (July and August). The Romans associated each year with the names of the Ordinary consuls whose tenure began the year: Thus for example the year 428, when Germanus visited Britain as mentioned in the [previous post], was the Year of the Consulship of Felix and Taurus. Most late antique Chronicles use this as the means of identifying a year. There is no single numerical system. Otherwise probably the most common means of numbering the years was by regnal year – in other words, the Nth year of the reign of Emperor, or King, so-and-so. Another classical system counted the Olympiads, the cycles of 4 years between the Olympic Games. With all of these and the provincial eras running currently it’s not especially surprising that people often didn’t know how old they were. Regnal years began on the day when a ruler started to reign, which need not be on the day the previous ruler died. To know how old you were, you didn’t just need to know what the current regnal year was, and what the one was when you were born, but how many kings there’d been in between and how long they’d ruled for.

Time was one area where Christianity did make quite a difference. Christianity, like Judaism, believed that time began at the beginning when God created the world. So it had a fixed point at the start. More importantly, though, Christians believed that it would have a fixed point at the end, with the Day of Judgement. That was an idea not much found – or not given the same prominence – in other religions. So Christians very much saw their place in the world as on a very specific time-line, between Creation and the Apocalypse.

Basing themselves on various Old Testament and other texts, Christian thinkers thought in terms of the six ages of the world. These were:

• The First Age: Adam to Noah i.e the Antediluvian period

• The Second Age: The Flood to Abraham, ‘the father of all nations’

• The Third Age: Abraham to King David

• The Fourth Age: David to the Babylonian captivity

• The Fifth Age: The Babylonian captivity to Christ.

• The Sixth Age: Christ onwards

The seventh age would come after the Day of Judgement and would be the eternal Kingdom of God. The schema was mapped on to the Creation, with 6 days followed by the day of rest: six ages followed by the eternal rest. Roman Christians were very keen to note that the birth of Christ had taken place during the reign of the first Emperor, Augustus. Gregory of Tours an avid devotee of the cult of St Martin as we’ve seen, thought it was additionally significant that St Martin was born in the reign of the first Christian Emperor. The interest in synchronicity went back to Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea who, in addition to his Ecclesiastical History also wrote a Universal Chronicle in which the histories of different civilisations: Egypt, Greece, Rome and so on were put in separate columns alongside Judaeo-Christian History so one could see what was happening in the history of Greece and Rome at the same time as events recorded in the Bible – you could see which Old Testament Prophet was active at the time of the Trojan War, for example. This was an important way of inscribing Christian history into the history of the Empire. So there was a common idea that the Sixth Age of the World was coterminous with the Roman Empire.

At the same time, Christian thinkers were more interested than their predecessors in a single linear chronology, from Creation. From the Old Testament it was possible to calculate the number of years between the Beginning and now. Gregory of Tours thought that when he finished his Ten Books of Histories 6063 years had passed since Creation. There were other systems too. Most common in our period was the Anno Passionis, years since the Passion or Crucifixion of Christ (Anno Domini dating was invented in the early sixth century but not popularised until the eighth, largely by Bede). Unfortunately there were two systems of Anno Passionis (or AP) dating which worked out as four years apart... Sometimes in 5th-century history you get what looks like the same event repeated after a 4-year interval – largely because historians haven’t bothered to check the chronographical system being used by the different chroniclers.

It’s also, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, important to note that Late Antique people calculated things differently from us. If we are asked how many years between 2016 and 2020 we would say 4; late antique people would say five, because you’d count from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2020. Similarly with days, which is why, as mentioned in [a previous lecture], the 4th day before 7 March is 4 March rather than 3 March (you count in this case from the end of the 7th backwards to the start of the 4th). Historians often forget this too.

Organising the Late Antique World (4): Theological Correctness gone mad: the 5th-Century World

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.

Organising the Late Antique World (3): Fourth-Century Changes

In [a previous lecture], I mentioned how a new martial model of masculinity appeared in the 4th century. I alluded to it again the first element of the previous lecture package, too. This doesn’t seem to me to have had the recognition it deserves, as this was a development with really profound long-term effects.

I want to go back to this issue and discuss it in a little more detail. The barbarisation of the fourth-century Roman army has a long historiography but it has usually been discussed in terms of the numbers of actual barbarians enrolled into the army. People at the time thought that there were more barbarians in the army and it’s likely that there were. First, the army was bigger than that of the early Empire, though by how much is unknown, but the Empire’s population was not growing, so logically there was probably more need for non-Roman recruitment. Secondly, as we’ve seen, the much enlarged civil service was separated from the military, reducing a pool of 25-35,000 men or more from eligibility for recruitment. Third, the recruitment of barbarians made a lot of sense; barbarians warriors actively wanted to join up, for the rewards of serving in the Roman army and were probably better than unwilling conscripts, and every barbarian in the army was a barbarian not raiding the frontier provinces. Even so, it still seems that the great bulk of the Roman army was not made up of non-Romans.

Nonetheless, the barbarisation of the army – as we can see it in the sources - wasn’t just down to the numbers of barbarians in the ranks. An obvious point, perhaps, is that barbarian recruitment need not necessarily mean the barbarisation of the army, its practices and culture. The large numbers of non-Romans in Republican and early imperial forces had not had that sort of effect. One way forward involves returning to a list that we still have of the units in the late Roman army, called the Notitia Dignitatum. It is a sort of window (even if a rather cloudy one) on to the army at the end of the fourth century and in the early fifth. We can look at the titles of army units.

Numerous such units have ‘ethnic’ names, like Franks, Alamans, Saxons, and so on. However, two points can be made. First, they only make up a fraction of the whole and even then you’d need to ask how many were still recruited from the peoples in question by the time that the Notitia was compiled. Second, more interestingly, the barbarian ethnic names used are not limited to those of the fourth century. As well as Salii (Franks), Vesi and Tervingi (both Goths), there are Celts, Sabines, Parthians, and possibly Arcadians: non-Roman peoples from the remote and even legendary past. If the Legion of Scythae was recruited from barbarians (possibly Danubian Goths, often called Scythians by the Romans) it is interesting that it was nonetheless given a classicising name. Choosing a barbarian ethnonym for a regiment was clearly more than a simple bureaucratic record of its soldiers’ origins.

But these units have other types of name, too. More numerous than the ‘ethnic’ names are what I call ‘boasting names’: Feroces, Victores, Invicti, Felices (the ferocious ones, the victorious ones, the undefeated, the lucky ones – the last especially common), to which one might add units whose titles appear to claim their status in the front rank. Then there are some units with animal names: the Leones (the Lions), the Cornuti (the Horned Beasts). In the prestigious field army, units clearly participated in a competitive culture. Their men were boastful of their fierceness, they were like animals, they were like barbarians, ancient or modern.

This is the context in which the phenomenon of the Roman army’s ‘barbarisation’ should be viewed. The appearance of the late army looked, by classical standards, very barbarian: trousers (above all), thick cloaks, broad belts, and an emphasis on jewellery and adornment. Compare depictions of late imperial soldiers with those of barbarians on early imperial monuments like Trajan’s or Marcus Aurelius’ columns or the arch of Septimius Severus. The workshops that gilded officers’ armour were called barbaricaria, one meaning of the unit name brachiati is ‘the bracelet-wearers’, and we can see torques (barbarian adornment par excellence) in the costume of imperial guardsmen. The army’s weaponry had also shifted and now included weapons, like long slashing swords (spathae), that had traditionally been associated with barbarians. It bore draco (dragon) ‘windsock’ standards, again associated with barbarians in early Roman literature and art. Vegetius adds other supposedly barbarian items to the list, such as whips carried by officers to ‘encourage’ their troops. The Roman army’s war-cry, the barritus (a cheer that started low and swelled to a discordant climax) seems to me more likely to have modelled on the trumpeting of a barrus (elephant), but it is interesting that Roman writers thought it was barbarian in origin. Late Roman soldiers had adopted what I have called ‘barbarian chic’. What is interesting is its mix of elements from the ‘binary’ and the ‘taxonomic’ registers of Roman ethnography.

I don’t really see this as even being authentically ‘barbarian’; it is a hotch-potch of stereotypical features of the ‘non-Roman’ thrown together regardless of context or of historical veracity. One way of thinking of it would be as an equivalent of the Hollywood ‘Red Indian’ of classic westerns of the third quarter of the last century: bits and pieces of native American culture from different peoples thrown together willy-nilly and with an admixture of myth and stereotype: to make a recognisable ‘sign’ with a particular signified. A more recherché military historical example would be the ‘zouave’ regiments of the 19th-century French army. Originally recruited from Algerians they very rapidly were made up of white Frenchmen, wearing a French colonial version of what they thought North African costume was. But the zouaves themselves adopted lots of bits and pieces of North African culture and the whole gave them a very particular esprit de corps and this self-consciously created ‘otherness’ could be deployed competitively with the more traditional elite units of the French army.

Cut off from the civilian branch of service, which valorised the traditional civic masculine virtues, paideia and the aristocratic culture of otium and negotium, late Roman elite regiments (especially) constructed new identities. Braggart, barbarous, ferocious, and animal-like, they were unabashedly masculine and represented the antithesis of the civic masculine ideal with its stress on modesty and moderation. Their costume was designed to underline this. It is difficult, in my view, to underestimate the significance of this development. It created an alternative form of Roman-ness, a sort of anti-Roman-ness – in the sense that it stood in a relationship to traditional Romanitas that is similar to that (in literature) between the anti-hero and the traditional hero. Not opposed to Rome, or non-Roman, it was Roman in an untraditional and possibly jarring way. Thought about as a competing form of masculinity, it needed the original civic form in order to make its point; its rebellious stress on ferocity and martial boastfulness only makes sense against a backdrop where moderation, discipline and so on are the norm. What is valorised and what isn’t constantly flips from one to the other. Again, what we have is a form of deconstruction of the old certainties of Roman life. The space between the two is the space of contested masculinity in late Roman politics. (You could make the same point about the space between traditional civic virtue and Christian asceticism, discussed in the previous [package of lectures].)

This shift matters quite a lot. What it meant was that there was a tradition within Roman society by the fifth century of people serving in the Roman army consciously adopting a supposedly non-Roman culture and identity, strutting about in their ‘barbarian’ costume, speaking their army slang, which contained a number of words of Germanic origin, claiming a certain status within society – but without actually ceasing to see themselves as Romans. Consequently in the fifth-century crisis it was possible to navigate what would earlier have been very tricky political decisions – to make common cause with barbarian soldiers, or to serve with them in their forces. In, say, the second or third century, this would have been to turn your back not simply on Romanness but also on your masculinity and any claim to legitimate political authority. The shifts of the fourth century had made things much easier. After all, the barbarian or barbarised soldier still stood in a chain of command and legitimate authority that went up to the Emperor himself who – as we have seen – personified both forms of masculinity. We’ll come back to some of these points next week when we look at ethnicity and ethnic identity in late antiquity. Of course, in the fullness of time, the ‘barbarised’ late Roman martial model of masculinity became the root of the classic medieval form of warrior masculinity.

Organising the Late Antique world (2): Classical Ethnography (2) – the taxonomic

In the previous [post]I discussed what I called the binary aspect of Graeco-Roman ethnography, in other words, the distinction between Roman-ness and barbarism. As we saw, this was really a pretty abstract element of thinking about the world and its organisation. In this area of thought the barbarian and the Roman were both ideals, and the barbarian ‘other’ largely existed as a counter to the ideal Roman. As we saw in an earlier lecture Roman men whose behaviour did not live up to the ideals of civic masculinity could be described as barbarous, but also as feminine, or childlike, or as animal, as all of these categories orbited the masculine ideal at the centre and shared various non-Roman traits: ferocity, emotionality, irrationality. As I said in that earlier lecture, the barbarian could be rendered feminine or child-like.

It is worth remembering, however, that because the Roman-Barbarian ethnographic binary operated in a rhetorical field, it could be played with. One of the great rhetorical tropes in writing critically about the Empire was to say that even the barbarians do things better than we do. Because of the historical dimension to the Romans’ own views of their civilisation, the barbarian could be presented as a sort of noble savage, retaining pristine things which perhaps the Romans had lost on their road to the present. It could be used ironically: barbarians can have speeches put into their mouths in which they say things or voice opinions which barbarians shouldn’t have said or held.

There was, however, another element of Roman ethnographic thinking, which I call the taxonomic. In Graeco-Roman thought the world was a world of peoples: ethne in Greek; gentes in Latin. This patchwork of peoples did not start at the imperial frontier, even if, when the Romans called an emperor a domitor gentium – pacifier of the nations – what they meant was pacifier of the foreign nations. After all, the vast bulk of the Roman Empire was made up of areas that had been inhabited by peoples who had at one point been non-Roman: at one level, the Gauls, the Britons, the Spaniards, the Celtiberians and so on in the West, the Libyans and Egyptians in North Africa, the Greeks, Syrians, Judaeans, Lycians and so on in the East. Such peoples might now be incorporated in the Empire and be counted as Romans but at the same time they could be believed to retain at least some of the other characteristics that had defined them before the Roman conquest.

Here again the frontier was important. For the Romans, the frontier, the limes didn’t mark the end of the Roman world, just the end of the part that the Romans had organised and cultivated. The rest of the world was also part of the Roman world; it was just that they hadn’t got around to sorting it out yet. It was the equivalent of the line between your ploughed and fertilised fields and the bits of your land that were wild forest, pasture, moorland and so on. So the frontier was not something that the Romans felt constrained by. It was like a membrane which they could pass through but which outsiders couldn’t move in the opposite direction. So, historically, the movement of that always provisional frontier had meant that peoples who had once been barbarians were now civilised and that could happen again.

This kind of ethnography was much more descriptive and focused on things such as the physical appearance of people, the colour of eyes and hair, the way they did their hair, their costume, the ways in which they waged war, their favourite weapons and so on. It also addressed political constitutions to some extent, interesting features of diet or cuisine or particular features of family life. Some of this could be mapped onto the binary Roman-barbarian dichotomy, but the great bulk of it couldn’t. It worked in a different register; the bulk of it did not necessarily have any sort of moral content. This sort of ethnography was much more about showing a knowledge of the world.

Perhaps the best illustration of this is the work the Germania which the great early Roman writer Tacitus wrote at the end of the first century AD – so about 200 years before the start of our period. The Germania has two halves. The first half is really all about the Germani (the term ‘German’ is really anachronistic) in abstract terms, as a figure of the barbarian. In much of this, Tacitus uses the barbarian as a sort of noble savage, but really none of it is about real Germani; it is a critique of the Roman Empire using the notion that the barbarians do things better than the Romans. Tacitus was a conservative who didn’t really approve of the Empire and wanted to return to the Republic. So Tacitus says the Germani choose their kings according to their nobility, and their generals according to their virtus or power -the implication is that the Romans don’t. The rulers of the Germani listen to the advice of their council of elders – for which read ‘the senate’ – unlike the Roman Emperors. And so on.

But in the second half of the work Tacitus goes on to catalogue the different peoples who live in Germania, in a way that has barely any points of contact with the first half of his text but seems instead to be making a claim to know loads about these people, but also perhaps to demonstrate that, contrary to what the emperor Domitian had said about having conquered Germania, these people remained very much unsubdued.

Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest of the fourth-century Roman historians, and a self-proclaimed continuator of Tacitus, has several ethnographic excursuses in his work. Sometimes these concern the peoples beyond the frontiers. Probably his best-known excursus is at the start of the final book of his Res Gestae (a difficult title to translate; basically it means ‘Deeds Done’, ‘Past Happenings’, something like that) where he talks about the people who live beyond the Danube frontier, culminating in his account of the Huns. His account of the Huns is very famous but historians have generally not paid enough attention to the fact that Ammianus places the Huns at the ends of human society and thus they share all of the stock features of extreme barbarians: they have no government, no houses, barely any clothes, and so on. But Ammianus also discusses areas within the Roman Empire in ethnographic terms. A classic instance is where he talks about the Gauls and compares them with the Italians. Much of what Ammianus has to say about the Gauls is ultimately derived from early Roman accounts of the Gauls, say from the days of Caesar. They are fierce and brave and happy to serve in the army. Their women are also brave. All this, in Ammianus’ view, presented the Gauls in a favourable light compared with the Italians, who he saw as idle and cowardly – although largely because Ammianus, himself a Syrian, had journeyed to Rome but hadn’t been able to find the favour he had hoped and indeed had been turfed out of the city during a food shortage even though, as he complained, dancing girls had been allowed to remain.

In the early third century, the Roman historian Cassius Dio described the Emperor Caracalla, whom we’ve met before, and related all of his bad points to the various parts of the Empire that his family hailed from. Ausonius, the Bordeaux professor who was important at the court of Emperor Gratian, - he was a professor of rhetoric, but is best known as a poet – Ausonius mocked a Briton apparently called Silvius Bonus. Bonus is a name but it also means ‘good’ a fact that Ausonius harps on about...:

“This is Silvius Bonus.’” “Who is Silvius?” “He is a Briton.” “Either this Silvius is no Briton, or he is Silvius malus [Silvius Bad].’”

Silvius is called Good and called a Briton: who would believe a good citizen had sunk so low?

No good man is a Briton. If he should begin to be plain Silvius, let the plain man cease to be good.

This is Silvius Good, but the same Silvius is a Briton: a plainer thing—believe me—is a bad Briton.

Thou Silvius art Good, a Briton: yet ’tis said thou art no good man, nor can a Briton link himself with Good.

Hilarious.

None of this is about Romans and Barbarians, though: it is Gauls being prejudiced against Britons. What’s crucial here is that when a Roman talks about someone as a Briton, say, or an Italian, or a Gaul, that is not necessarily radically different from when a Roman talks about someone as a Vandal or a Goth or a Frank. The latter peoples might currently be regarded as barbarian and the former as groups within the civilised Roman empire, but then that had once been true of Britons Gauls and even some Italians too.

It is really important to remember these two types of Roman ethnography: the binary and the taxonomic. Historians generally don’t and map the attitudes involved in rhetoric about ‘the barbarian’ onto Roman discussions about people described simply as belonging to a particular people. Sometimes that might indeed be implicit; sometimes inter-regional rivalry or chauvinism might be because some regions thought they were inherently more civilised and thus better Romans than others. But in my view it is usually operating in a quite different register. It may indeed be prejudiced, like Ausonius’ side-splittingly funny comments about Silvius the Briton, or it might not; but it’s a different sort of chauvinism or relationship. The confusion of the two types of ethnography really causes a lot of misunderstanding of Roman sources.

Organising the Late Antique world (1): Classical Ethnography (1) – the binary

In [these blog posts] I want to talk about cosmologies – how people thought about the world, not so much in terms of geography – or not only in those terms – but more conceptually in terms of cores and peripheries; legitimate centres and illegitimate outliers; and eventually about time and their place within it. What we’ll see, I think, is that things had changed significantly by the close of our ‘short late antiquity’

In this first lecture I want to return, not for the first time, to the concepts I discussed in [a previous lecture], on the notions of civic masculinity. There we saw that the virtuous Roman male occupied the centre of the conceptual universe. This was a very gendered structure, as mentioned, but it also mapped onto political geography. In ethnography – writing about peoples (ethne in Greek) the Romans had two ways of thinking about the world. I call the first of these ways the binary. In other words, it was based upon the opposition between civilisation and barbarism.

The notion of the barbarian had a long history, going went right back into classical Greek times. The word has a Greek origin, barbaros, which is actually onomatopoeic: the barbaroi – the barbarians -were people who burbled, people who just went bar bar bar. In other words, people who didn’t speak Greek. The development of the idea of the Barbarian in classical Athens was of course directly related to the idea of what made a good Hellene (Greek). The figure of the barbarian in Greek drama – usually either a Skythian from the steppe lands to the north or a Persian from the east – was there to represent all the things a good Greek was supposed not to be. There was a geographical element to Greek thought about barbarians. The Persians lived in a land, they said, where things were just too easy and as a result got fat and lazy and allowed themselves to become subject to tyrannous governments. What the Greeks thought made them superior was their mixture of opposites: the harsh mountains and the fertile plains, for instance. This meant they could take the best of both worlds: accept hardship but also exploit the fruits of the fertile lands, and so on.

In the Hellenistic period – that of the successors of Alexander the Great – when Greek governments ruled what had been the Persian world, Egypt and even parts of south Asia, these ideas possibly changed somewhat, although since key influential works from this period have been lost it is not easy to trace the details. Italy during the rise of Rome contained a lot of Greek or Greek-influenced states and the political vocabulary of barbarism was important in claims for legitimacy or illegitimacy. Rome, obviously was not Greek-speaking and was still conscious of the fact that that made her barbarian in Greek terms, so there was some subtle re-jigging of the terms of the debate, especially once the Republic had conquered most of the Hellenistic states around the eastern Mediterranean.

In Roman ethnography, language was replaced by conduct, morals and living by the law as the key determinants of civilisation. As we saw in [a previous set of lectures], the key definition of the civilised man (and as we saw then, it was essentially a question of men) was moderation, the ability to keep one’s bodily appetites under control (without going to the opposite extreme of complete renunciation), the capacity to keep your emotions in check; to be able to see both sides of things and make a reasoned choice. The issue of self-control was what enabled the law to reign; subscription to the law was an extension of self-control.

In Roman thinking, there were geographical and biological reasons why the Romans had managed to become more civilised than anyone else. The Romans stressed their being in the middle, between extremes, rather than having a mix of both. This extended to their place in the world. Roman writers believed that the ability to behave in a civilised fashion was the result of a happy balance of the body’s humours. If you lived too close to the sun, like the Africans, the moisture of the body was drawn up to the head, which was why Africans were very clever and cunning, but not very brave (as far as the Romans thought, anyway). If, on the other hand, you lived too far away from the sun, to the north, like the pale-skinned barbarians, the moisture of the body was drawn down towards the legs. This made these people very big and strong, and very fertile, but also a bit stupid. Of course, where the Romans lived happened to be just the right distance from the sun and so the Romans had the correct balance of humours, allowing them to be clever and brave. This is how Pliny the Elder (who died during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD) put it in his Natural History:

In the middle of the earth, owing to a healthy blending of both elements [fire and moisture], there are tracts that are fertile for all sorts of produce, and men are of medium bodily stature, with a marked blending even in the matter of complexion; customs are gentle, senses clear, intellects fertile and able to grasp the whole of nature; and they also have governments, which the outer races never have possessed, any more than they have ever been subject to the central races, being quite detached and solitary on account of the savagery of the nature which broods over those regions.

You can find these ideas in a string of Roman writers, stretching from Pliny through Vitruvius, the writer on architecture, and the medical writer Galen, and on to Vegetius, who wrote about military matters in the fifth century.

The way the Romans saw the whole world was largely coloured by this set of beliefs. If you read the Roman ethnographers and geographers, the further you went from the centre of the world, the more weird and wonderful things became. The people just over the border were barbarians, sure, but nothing compared to the people beyond them, and just wait til you hear about the people who live beyond them. And so on.

The further one progressed from the Mediterranean – the sea ‘in the middle of the earth, remember – the more wildly people didn’t live according to what Romans thought were the correct mores. In whatever direction you went, at the edge of the world of men, you find people who are cannibals, sleep with their mothers, sisters, fathers, pretty much anything with two legs or fewer, don’t bother with proper houses or with cooking stuff and don’t have any kind of government. The Romans thought the Irish were like this; the people in the outer islands off Scotland; people in the north of Germania, on the edges of Scythia to the North-East, and people to the south of the Sahara desert – or some of them anyway.

Beyond that there were people who were half human, half animal; people in Africa called Sciapodes who had one massive foot, under the shadow of which they slept all day, and then hopped about in the night.

As I mentioned in [an earlier lecture], though, the Romans also saw a historical dimension to all of this. Earlier Roman writers such as Propertius and Martial thought the Romans had also been barbarians once, but that they had surpassed this stage. What is interesting is that they saw that stage as happening when they discovered the law, and what that involved in particular was the limitation of sex to marriage. Marriage, the family unit, self-control and the law; this was crucial to Roman self-definition. This was the ideal that every Roman male had to set themselves against- which simultaneously meant comparing themselves to the barbarians. Just as with the Christian debate about women, this was not a two-way discussion; it rarely if ever involved any actual barbarians. This was a dialogue between Romans and Romans: we are (or ought to be) like this because they are like that. The ‘they’ are essentially a fiction – an ‘other’ – to set against the ideal ‘us’. In some ways this gave the frontiers of the Roman Empire a very particular form. When you were looking across the Rhine, as in this picture (below), you weren’t as you would be today, simply looking across from Alsace, in France, to the hills of Baden-Württemberg in Germany – you were looking from the world of civilisation – barbaricum – where the wild people were.

The Rhine Valley in Alsace, looking from the Vosges towards the Schwarzwald

Organising the Late Antique World: Introduction

[The following group of posts represents more of my Short Reads on Late Antiquity. As with the others, they originate as the scripts of short, 10-minute video-lectures given to my second-year students last term. As with the others I haveposted, the texts are as read - lightly modified to make them make more sense as blog posts - and are obviously simplified and introductory. If these are of use to anyone in teaching, please do feel free to use them.]

This [group of posts] once again starts from a basis set out in [an earlier video lecture] to explores late antique cosmology - how people organised the world, not primarily in terms of geography but in terms of what they regarded as the legitimate centre and the illegitimate outside. It considers shifts in the way in which the Romans thought about the difference between civilisation and barbarism, and (preparing the ground for [the lectures on ethnicity and race]) how they saw the world as made up of different peoples. It revisits the ideas of [a previous lecture]) and the way in which religious orthodoxy became central to politcs of the 5th century, before closing withy a discussion of the measurement of time and how late antique people saw themselves located within it.  

Part 1: Classical Ethnography (1): The Binary

This [post] looks at classical Graeco-Roman ethnography and the way it conceived of the difference between civilisation and barbarism. It takes the story from the Greek city states of the 5th-4th centuries BC through to the late Roman period. This 'binary' was something that was really all about Romans and remained at the level of ideals

Part 2: Classical Ethnography (2): The Taxonomic

There was another element to classical ethnography, however, and that was what I call taxonomic. The world was made up of peoples (ethne in Greek; gentes in Latin) and these could be described in ways that didn't necessarily map on to the civilised:barbarian binary dichotomy. This dimension was much more historically situated.

Part 3: Fourth-Century Change

In this [post] I return to the creation of a martial model of masculinity within the late Roman army.  This was based around conscious adoption of aspects that were opposed to classical civic masculinity, but it did not mean a rejection of Roman-ness. This new model of masculinity provided an important resource for navigating the dramas of the 5th century and became the basis for medieval warrior masculinity. 

Part 4: Theological correctness gone mad: The fifth century

This [post] returns to the them of [a previous video lecture] by looking further at the ways in which fifth-century politics at local levels as well as higher political levels turned on issues of orthodoxy and heresy. The fifth-century grand narrative, as we have seen before, is about the Christianisation of politics. The legitimate centre changed from the good Roman to the good Christian. 

Part 5: The measurement of time

In this [post] we move from the organisation of the world in terms of legitimate core and illegitimate periphery to the place of people in time. Christianity introduced a significantly different attitude to time, as it saw a linear sequence from Creation to the Last Judgement. After the conversion of Constantine, Christians became very concerned with inserting Christian history into the history of Rome and the Empire and establishing synchronicity between Roman and Christian history.  The 6th Age of the World was thought to be coterminous with the Roman Empire.

Part 6: The End

This final short [post] lecture simply rounds off the previous one by looking how Christian measurement of time were linked to apocalyptical thinking. This became especially acute in the West after Justinian's wars and in the East after the Great Persian War and the Arab Conquests. If you were living after the Roman Empire (and thus the 6th Age) surely the end of time must be here. What effect did living after the end of linear time have on writers?

The Not-so-natural world of Late Antiquity (5): Queer Late Antiquity?

 The final element of this [group of posts] takes up the strands of the argument in the previous to underline how sexual categories in late antiquity were very different in late antiquity not only from those of today but also from what one might initially have expected.

Sex between men (typically, as across many historical periods, sex between women receives very little discussion) is seen in some sources – like some of the penitentials – as something a young man might experiment with. One of the penitentials only starts to penalise such activity (among monks) once a man had turned twenty. In late antiquity men spent a long period of socialisation between legally coming age and being considered fully adult. In Merovingian Gaul, this was a process that might take fifteen years or more. This was quite different from the socialisation of women, which generally came about all at once, at puberty. A woman had her first period, got married (she might well have been betrothed long before – we know that girls could be betrothed as a young as eight) – married to a man probably considerably older than her – and started having sex and having children. Pretty brutal stuff really. There were, of course variations on this pattern across time and space but the general pattern was pretty consistent.

Anyway, during that long period of socialisation, a man typically spent a great deal of time in the household of another man and, at least among certain social strata in a retinue or following, with other young men. There is evidence indeed of gangs of young men not in the service of an older man. It is well attested across society that in those contexts, homosociality can blur into homosexuality and same-sex love, though it’s worth remembering that the latter two categories aren’t necessarily coextensive. None of that necessarily meant the existence of what we might recognise as a gay identity. There’s been debate since Foucault’s day about his suggestion that gay identity was a modern creation; it’s probably a lot more complex than that – as ever. The point I want to make is that same sex sexual activity was not always automatically thought of as wrong or deviant. It’s worth making the point that the term sodomy did not acquire its narrow meaning of anal sex until much later, in the twelfth century. In our period, the church described as sodomy any sex, basically that wasn’t between man and wife, for the purpose of having children, and in the missionary position (hence the name) – as in Brundage’s diagram. Anyway, it seems to have been accepted that a man might experiment sexually with male partners but that he ought to grow out of this. Some thinkers have called this sort of attitude teleological heterosexuality: ‘normal’ heterosexuality will inevitably be the outcome in the end.

At this point I want to mention what is known as Queer Theory, something to some extent associated with Judith Butler, whom I mentioned [in the last blog post]. Again I am going to have to be brief. What queer theory is – extremely basically – is a theory that seeks to challenge the automatic assumptions of heteronormativity in order to flag up instances where such norms are troubled or subverted, where they don’t fit into the usual narratives of love, sex, marriage, reproduction and the family. Some thinkers have pointed out the knots that scholars – especially medievalists – have tied themselves in to deny that the evidence really suggests same-sex love or desire. Some people have extended the notion of queerness far beyond that; others say that that’s not really queer theory. I am going to use it in quite the narrow sense.

I want now to talk through some cases, which are all from sixth-century Merovingian Gaul, that might make the theory just discussed a little more concrete, in a late antique context.

My first example takes us back to the issue of young men and concerns graves 6 and 8 of the sixth-century cemetery of Ennery in modern Lorrain, just north of Metz. This was a double-burial (in spite of the separate grave numbers) containing one skeleton accompanied by some weapons and costume accessories – a belt set – and one without but with some other objects. The two bodies had been placed with the arm of one resting on the arm of the other. The initial excavator thought it was a burial of man and wife, but in fact it is the grave of two young men, one around 20 and one in his late teens. Their different grave goods reflect that; Frankish men weren’t generally buried with weapons until they were 20. Artefactually both are masculine, though, nonetheless. So what did the double burial mean, with the linked arms? There is a huge range of possible answers and there’s no time to go through them all. Ultimately, we don’t know – although there are a number of burials like this, of two men known from Frankish Gaul. The linked arms surely represent some sort of bond, possibly familial but also very likely emotional. We’ve seen that the bonds between young men in a household could be very close, emotional, loving, sexual. More interestingly, perhaps, though, is the possibility that even if this meant something quite different, it might have nevertheless been read like that by the people watching at the funeral, opening a different reading, perhaps a subversive reading, by people excluded from the world of warriors. We’ve seen that the likelihood of sexual relationships between young men was well known and apparently generally tolerated. Even if the ritual was meant to say something quite different, it might be read a different way, and the space between those readings – the space of deconstruction – would be the space of discourse about masculinity and male sexuality.

Developing that, we might note the story of the feud of Sichar and Chramnesind, recounted by Gregory of Tours in his Histories. It’s a story well-known to students of medieval violence but at one point Gregory says that Sichar and Chramnesind became great friends, so close that they often dined together and shared a bed. Now there’s a raft of po-faced medieval scholarship that argues that men sharing beds in the middle ages was perfectly normal and there was nothing funny going on there. No siree. They were all men. Well ... yes. But at the same time, maybe no. As we have seen, sexual relations need not define an identity; there was a huge flexibility in the interactions between sex, sexuality and gender.

My second example concerns a holy woman called Monegund, whose life is also told by Gregory of Tours. Monegund lived an enclosed life but she had a little garden that she used to attend. One day while she was there, says Gregory,  a woman was able to watch her from a neighbouring rooftop: “she gazed upon her importunely, filled with worldly desires”, and consequently went blind until Monegund healed her. It was interesting when I discussed this at a conference, to see how determined people were to dismiss any suggestion that there was anything Lesbian going on here. Oh no. They didn’t do that sort of thing back then. Maybe there wasn’t, but also, maybe there was. That reading of the text was surely as available to Gregory’s readers as it is to us. The other interesting thing about that story is its implication that women shouldn’t be doing the looking and desiring. As we’ve seen, the emphasis on female clothing in Monegund’s day seems to suggest that they were supposed to be the people being looked at.

Another interesting story, also from Gregory of Tours’ work, this time from his Histories relates to the tribunal that was held at the suppression of the Revolt of the Nuns of Poitiers – an interesting tragicomic story but one which I will have to leave to one side. Several bishops, including Gregory, tried the leaders of the rebellious nuns who levelled various charges against their abbess. One was that she kept a man in the cloister, dressed up as a woman, so she could have sex with him when she wanted. Then one of the rebels’ leaders says ‘there he is’ whereupon, says Gregory, a man stepped forward, dressed in women’s clothing. He said, though, that he only wore women’s clothing because he couldn’t do man’s work, and had never even met the abbess. The bishops accept his story and move on to the next charge. This is strange story and I have written about in three articles, because I keep changing my mind about it. What do we make of it? Bishop Gregory makes no comment on the man’s choices; how significant is that? What did he mean when he said he couldn’t do manly work? Did he mean that he was impotent, which is how the modern translator understands it? Or something more general? The term he uses, opus virile, usually means men’s work in the fields. But it has to be interesting that a man who thought he couldn’t live up to some sort of masculine standard – that might very well not have been sexual, felt he had to dress up as a woman. And people seem to have been fine with that. And that’s suggested by a burial (no.32) from the Frankish cemetery of Ennery, of someone in their 40s, with the sorts of grave-goods that would be typical for a woman in her 40s, but who, according to the skeletal data, was a man. Again, what do we make of that? The person was buried in the communal cemetery just like everyone else suggesting that if she had been a biological male who lived their life as a woman, people were happy enough to recognise that in her funeral.

What I hope I have demonstrated in this [blog post], as in the others in this [group of posts], is that a lot of what you might think of as natural categories or ways of categorising didn’t always apply in late antiquity. The late antique world can be very unexpected.

The Not-so-Natural World of Late Antiquity (4): Sex and society

 In the remainder of this [cluster of posts] I am going to talk about another way in which people divide up the world, which might seem natural but which isn’t on closer inspection, and that is sex, gender and sexuality.

It is still commonly believed that gender is the social construction placed upon the biological binary of sex. Indeed this lies at the heart of one of the most current and most heated political issues. This is much more complicated, however, than the idea of a natural sexual binary will allow and, as we’ll see, issues that are nowadays often presented as natural and eternal, often with some sort of vague reference back to our historical heritage, were actually seen in very different ways in the past. Again, a closer investigation of how the people of late antiquity thought about the sexual categories of their world permits a different view on the modern world.

The first, preliminary point that must be made concerns gender. It is still often thought that gender history means the history of women; it doesn’t, even though I have made this week’s discussion group about women. Women’s history and gender history are quite different. If you have never had cause yet to read it, then I recommend you read Joan Scott’s classic article on ‘gender as a useful category of historical analysis’, even though it has nothing to say about our period. Gender history is about the construction of the categories of masculine and feminine; it’s relational; it allows us to see masculinity, as in the Roman world, constructed not simply against femininity but also – and sometimes perhaps more importantly – against lesser forms of masculinity. Sometimes, as we’ve seen the construction of gender is not a binary, with a separate feminine and masculine poles, but what one might call monopolar, with a single focus: the masculine. We can see this in the classical Roman world. The creation of new models of masculinity in the fourth century – martial and then ascetic -  shook this up in such a way, I have argued, that in the sixth century, as the classical civic masculine ideal faded, it left separate feminine and masculine ideals – a more binary system. In turn, I have suggested, in the seventh century there was a return to something more like the monopolar Roman system but with the crucial difference that the dominant form of masculinity was martial – warrior masculinity – rather than civic. This is manifest in some of the things that I have mentioned already, such as the shift in the focus of investment in decoration and adornment from items of female dress to elements of male costume. There were shifts in the gendering of religious identity too. It’s possible that, as I have argued in an article that has appeared very recently, that gendered ideals in the Christian sphere moved in different directions from those in the secular sphere, so that for example, female and male religious ideals were described in essentially similar terms in 6^th-century western hagiography, at a time when there was more of a binary separation in secular terms, and then separated out into distinct male and female ideals in the seventh century, as secular gender norms were returning to a more monopolar set of ideas. There were all sorts of shifts, and regional variations, in the way that power was gendered.

The most important thinker to challenge the traditional ideas of the separation of sex and gender as ‘natural’ and ‘social’ respectively, was the American philosopher Judith Butler, who I think is a really interesting and important thinker. Her classic works on this topic were Gender Trouble, published in around 1990, followed by Bodies that Matter a few years later. There’s no time in a ten-minute or so lecture like this to do anything like justice to this work so I will have to simplify; I do recommend Butler’s work to you; it’s not easy if you’re not used to reading philosophy (well, it wasn’t to me when I first read her, when I hadn’t read much if any philosophy) but it’s a lot easier than some, and she does tend to make the same point several different ways, so if you just persist it will become clear.

One of the key points that Butler made was that while biological sex might, in some ways, be seen as a binary or at least as having two opposing poles, the ways in which human bodies possess the physical or genetic features of the male or female sex are very much messier than that. It’s not the case that all males possess each and every one of a range of features and that all females possess each and every one of an entirely discrete set of scientifically-observable features. That is probably only true in a relative minority of cases. There is a whole gamut of combinations between those extremes and in the middle things can be very mixed indeed. There were two points that Butler made to develop this. One was that the science of sex was sometimes every bit as socially contingent as the science of race, or that it was enormously influenced by the gendered norms of the societies in which the scientists worked. This has been shown to be the case over and over, in all sorts of cases. Sometimes there have been absolutely horrible cases where people have had intrusive surgery to make them conform to the sex that they were declared to be at birth.

Butler’s other point was that, since sex was not – in every single case – something that emerged clearly, naturally, independently, from the physical body and manifested as the simple membership of one of two categories, the sexing of people was as much assigned as anything else. She cites the example of the midwife holding up the new baby and saying, ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’, arguing that in a sense this is a performative: a statement that creates what it describes. After that, we all experience our bodies via a set of social norms and expectations; there’s no point where we can go back and experience our lives as pre-sexed. So in that sense, sex was very much like gender, rather than being the natural, scientific rock on which the latter was founded. A lot of people still don’t want to accept this but the case doesn’t seem to me to be contestable.

Sex, sexuality and gender interact with each other in an enormously wide range of ways, in Late Antiquity as well as today. We might actually be surprised – given what are regarded as supposedly ‘medieval’ attitudes, let alone those which we are sometimes told are normal or natural about the wide breadth of the things which late antique and early medieval people appear not to have regarded as ‘wrong’, let alone ‘unnatural’. Some of these I will come back to in the next [blog post]. For now I want only to think about sex and sexuality.

The ways in which sexuality, in the sense of one’s choice of sexual partners, related to other aspects of late antique identity was quite different from now. As with race, some of the modern ideas about sexuality, norms and deviations, rather than being age-old, are quite recent and, in particular, many belong to the modern period’s obsession with supposedly scientific organising and categorising.

One of the problems with late antique and medieval sex is the nature of the evidence. On the one hand there are Christian treatises on the topic, which as we have seen, by the end of the fifth century were stressing virginity and abstinence over chastity and restraint; we’ve also seen that in ascetic thinking, sex was seen as a temptation but not simply in itself but as part of a wider range of issues of bodily self-control. We have also seen how by 600 these sorts of ascetic ideas were coming to be applied to secular society. On the other hand, and this is truer for the periods before and after late antiquity there is evidence for dirty jokes, bawdy songs and the rest, or in our period a sort of reverse interpretation of the penitentials’ obsession with sex which saw it as evidence that all this was going on all the time. As one scholar has said, one has the impression on the one hand that ‘medieval people’ were incredibly frustrated and hung up about sex, or on the other hand that they were obsessed with it; that everyone was constantly at it. The problem is that it’s like what judging modern sex would be like if the only evidence we had were the sermons of southern US fire-and-brimstone evangelists on the one hand and hard-core porn on the other. I don’t think medieval people were either incredibly frustrated and sex-starved or that they were incredibly sexed up; boringly perhaps, I think they had an incredibly average amount of sex.

One way in which the post-enlightenment mania for scientific (or pseudo-scientific) categorisation impacts upon our ways of seeing is in the way that heterosexuality has been established as a norm and homosexuality as a deviation. In fact heterosexuality and homosexuality were defined and classified at the same time. Then a whole set of ideas about psychiatry and identity were built on that.

Things were much more complex in late antiquity and the early middle ages and I will develop this point in the next video lecture. In the meantime I will leave you with this diagram from James Brundage’s Law, Sex and Christian Society which illustrates the thinking about sex that is manifested by the penitentials. There are some superficially curious aspects about the penitentials’ attitudes to sex. It took me many years, as a godless social historian, to figure out why oral sex earned a higher penitence than sex with, say, a goat. The answer is that a goat (in early medieval thought) didn’t have an immortal soul that you could corrupt with your disgusting sexual practices. The penitentials, by the way, don’t specify what the penalty was for having oral sex with a goat; perhaps that was considered to be its own punishment.

The Not-so-natural world of Late Antiquity (3): Late Antiquity was not white

 The Romans did not assign any paramount importance to obvious bodily – somatic – features in the way they drew up the world. Yet they were every bit as racist and prejudiced, and every bit as murderously nasty, to the people they did define as inferior. What we might identify as their racial schema was very different from that of the modern world. Two things can, I think, emerge from that, which I call hope and vigilance. There is an element of hope, in that it shows that the world is not somehow naturally divided up into races on the basis of skin colour; in other words, there is nothing eternal or essential about modern racial categories, which in turn means there’s absolutely no reason that we have to continue to live with them, or why they can’t be abolished. That’s one half of why I call this [group of blog posts] the not-so-natural world of Late Antiquity. But the other point is vigilance. The Romans might not have been especially interested in skin-colour or other somatic ways of dividing the world but they had their own prejudices and racial schemas which could be every bit as bad. In other words, it’s not very much use abolishing one form of prejudice if you’re just going to replace it with another.

This raises an important issue which we have to discuss. There has been much debate about how the issues of race, and of racism, are to be confronted in responsible or committed scholarship. In Europe and North America, the early middle ages in north-west Europe, and elements of its culture, have been appropriated by Far-Right nationalists and white supremacists.  Indeed they have been for over a century.  Some have suggested that the correct response is to point out the fact that there were people whom we might now consider as 'black' or as People of Colour active in places like Britain and elsewhere.  This is certainly true – and it is certainly a valid, pragmatic response in the modern context – but it is also problematic and, in my view, it isn’t historically or politically radical enough. It’s been argued that the way to deal with western racism is to abolish whiteness. This has been wilfully misread as calling for some sort of race war or extermination of ‘the white race’; it doesn’t mean that. It means you can only abolish a categorisation by abolishing the notions that have been placed at its hierarchical centre, against which everything else is judged. When did the Roman way of organising the world come to an end? Essentially when the concept of the civic male was removed from its centre, or abolished if you like.

It is not difficult to populate the northern shores of the Roman Mediterranean as far as Hadrian’s Wall or the Rhine-Danube frontier with what modern people might classify as people of colour. People from North Africa moved all over the Roman World. What’s now Tunisia was one of the most important and central parts of the Roman world; it was rich and productive; North African products like the – to late Romanists at least – famous African Red Slip Ware are found all across the Mediterranean, east to west, round the coasts of Spain and France and as far as the Irish Sea. The African church was an intellectual power-house. Saint Augustine of Hippo was a North African. North Africa and Egypt were the bread-baskets which provided Rome and Constantinople with most of the grain to feed their huge populations. Carthage and Alexandria were possibly the next two biggest cities of the Empire. There were contacts with sub-Saharan Africa, mostly to East Africa via the Nile valley but also in the West – even if the latter contacts were not as great as later. You can quibble about minor issues. Were the numerous late Roman regiments of cavalry called mauri or Moors really recruited from North African Moors? In my view mostly not, at least by the fourth century, but this doesn’t affect the main point. Africans were everywhere in the Roman Empire, and important within it.

There is no doubt that the general public ought to be made more aware of this. Not just to stop people claiming or accepting that the Roman Empire was only made up of ‘white’ people but as a way of stopping people from thinking that Roman history is only for white people. Historically, western Europe and Africa have not always stood as opposed continents divided by a great sea, but have, for centuries, perhaps millennia, also been part of a shared world linked by the Mediterranean. [Indeed before the seventh or eighth century, the Maghreb was much more a part of a shared world with Iberia, Italy and the south of France than part of the same world as sub-Saharan Africa.] This was never truer than during the Roman Empire. This is important.

Nonetheless, were one to do this, one would still be left – no matter how hard one tried – with the inescapable fact that the great bulk of the inhabitants of the Empire’s European provinces were not, by modern European standards, people of colour. They would, in modern European terms, be white. People of colour would still be a minority. The current binary – and that sense of majority and minority – would be eternalised

Now, the Romans themselves didn’t see the inhabitants of North Africa as different from themselves in any significant somatic sense. They didn’t see North Africans as Aethiopes - dark-skinned Africans. When they commented on the appearance of the North African Moors, the Mauri, the ancestors of the modern Berbers, it was their curly hair that they commented on. Some people have tried to argue that North Africans like Augustine were ’black’ and other people (with rather less justification) have tried to deny this and claim that he was ‘white’. The truth of the matter is that we have no idea what he looked like; it’s reasonable to suppose that a modern American would see him as a person of colour. But it’s also reasonable to suppose that a modern inhabitant of the Mediterranean regions, especially in North Africa, wouldn’t. Many, maybe most, modern Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Libyans and Egyptians do not regard themselves as 'black' and can react quite angrily to the suggestion that they might be – even if this attitude can sometimes be grounded in their own, differently racist, attitudes towards sub-Saharan Africa/ns. Anyone who has visited North Africa knows that, in terms of actual skin colour there is a range of skin-tones from very dark to very pale (as there always has been). That spectrum continues, without a break, on the other side of the sea. People in Spain, Sicily and Italy might now make what they see as a colour-based distinction between them and their North African neighbours but this is entirely cultural.

This is the heart of the issue. If one takes a colour chart and defines people within a certain part of that spectrum as ‘people of colour’ according to modern, especially according to modern American, categories, you are naturalising, eternalising and essentialising a categorisation that is social and contingent. Because not everyone sees the world now – let alone in the past – according to that schema, you are colonising the past every bit as much as old Europeans did when they made everyone in antiquity white, and scrubbed statues and so on to prove their point. You’re still imposing a modern, western view (even if it’s a different one from before) on the Mediterranean as a whole and North Africa in particular. This isn’t decolonising the past. We need a more radical solution. The issue is not about who was white and who was black or ‘of colour’; these are all modern categories that didn’t apply in the Roman world. I don’t want to use that point just to sweep the issue under the carpet, though. We can use it much more creatively.

Here I return to phenomenology and my critique of materialisms. People don’t engage with other people in their unmediated materiality, any more than they interact with anything else like that. People are categorised, as we’ve seen, in all sorts of ways, and categories work as signs. When a modern racist sees a black person, he sees a sign with a particular signified; when he sees a white person, he sees a different one. A Roman presented with people who looked exactly like both of those people didn’t see either of those things. A Roman saw a pale-skinned northerner and a North African with, perhaps, a slightly darker skin than his or her own as signifying very different things. Very different indeed, and with very different relationships to his or her way of ordering the world, its cultural capital and its power relations. They saw people differently; in phenomenological terms, people were presented in entirely different form. Recognising that the northern half of the Empire contained many people who wouldn’t now be seen as ‘white’ doesn’t change – in a way – the balance of power or the fact that people are still implicitly being contrasted with ‘whiteness’. But ‘whiteness’ can safely be abolished from the Roman world. The Romans didn’t see themselves as white (certainly not as ‘pale-skinned’). How Romans saw self and other was entirely different: if you went back in time and showed a Roman man a picture of, say, David Lammy in a toga, or Naga Munchetty in traditional Roman dress, and me with a top-knot wearing trousers and asked who he thought looked the most different or ‘other’, compared to himself, he’d say me, and if he said Naga it would be because she’s a woman. When Hadrian, an African abbot who lived in southern Italy, accompanied the new Archbishop Theodore (who himself came from Tarsus in modern Turkey) to Canterbury about a generation after the close of our period (it was Hadrian’s 3^rd trip to England, by the way) no one remarked upon their skin colour. Whatever it might have looked like to us, they didn’t see it. It was much more a sign of worrying otherness that Theodore spoke Greek and might introduce Greek church customs!

Late Antique people didn’t look like us in either sense – in the way they looked out and saw their fellow people, or in the way they looked to the people looking at them. We need to embrace the radical possibilities that this permits. What kinds of modern people portray the people of late antiquity can’t be a question of historical accuracy. The past is other. As I said it looked different, and it looked differently. If I were casting a film set in the late Antique west I would like to have all sorts of people play the parts in a way that underlined the difference, but also the categories that late antique people have – have Gauls played by south Asians, Spaniards by East Asians, Barbarians by white people, Italians by African-Caribbean actors. It’d possibly make the Daily Mail self-combust but that’d only be a side-benefit. It’d bring home the idea that the late antique European/Mediterranean past doesn’t belong to any modern group any more than any other. It’s open to everyone. I’d really like to see that one day.

The Not-so-natural world of late antiquity (2): Race in Antiquity

As argued in the previous lecture, we can think of race as a sub-category of the general phenomenon of ethnicity. In racial theory the ‘other’ is conceived of as inferior on scientific or natural grounds, which go beyond the simple rivalry or chauvinism of neighbouring ethnic groups – however nasty and murderous the latter might be. We have seen that in the Roman world view, discussed in Lecture Package 4, element B – which has been the spring-board for many subsequent lecture package elements since – the Roman male’s distinction from and superiority from the barbarian was based around a pseudo-biological set of ideas that argued that the geographical location of the Roman meant that his bodily make-up enabled him to be a superior human to the barbarians who lived round about. As we saw, the latter was assimilated with the feminine – subdued barbarian populations were represented as a woman – and as we saw the feminine in Roman thought was simply a lesser or incomplete version of the male. Or they could be likened to children – in other words people who had simply not reached a stage of maturity or education. The parallels between this and 19th-20th-century European and American imperial attitudes are pretty clear.

The barbarian was, however, not only equated with the sub-masculine but with the sub-human, likened to animals. As we saw in [the last lecture package], at the extremes of the world, the Romans indeed thought that barbarians began to shade into animals. If you went too far south of the imperial frontier in Africa, for instance, you would encounter the Blemmyes who according to Pliny the Elder had no heads, just a face in the middle of their chest, satyrs (half man, half goat) and the Sciapodes with one big foot that I mentioned before; far north of the northern frontiers there were supposedly people with dogs’ heads. Some of these ideas had a very long life. The Blemmyes were still thought to be like that by thirteenth-century English map-makers, despite the fact that by then the Blemmye kingdom had been a dangerous enemy bordering Roman Egypt and its citizens well known to have proper heads just like everyone else.

These attitudes could become absolutely horrific in practice. Because the barbarians were thought to be wild and akin to animals, it was considered appropriate to throw captured barbarians – of whatever rank – to be publicly torn to pieces by wild beasts in the arena. Periodically, if it was deemed that a group of barbarians on the frontier needed to be taught a lesson then the army would be unleashed upon them with orders to attack their settlements and leave nothing they found there alive: everything – men, women, children, livestock, poultry, dogs, cats, whatever – was to be killed. No distinction was drawn between the barbarians and their animals. The Roman’s construction of the difference between the civilised Roman and the barbarian was entirely socially constructed – had no actual basis in reality – but it could nevertheless be turned into a terrifying reality for the people that one Roman writer described as ‘having nothing human but their limbs and faces’.

This is a very important point. I argued that race, like ethnicity, is a social construction; that it has no actual scientific basis; that whatever scientific or pseudoscientific arguments are adduced are there to justify the a priori categorisation. That is absolutely indisputable. But the important point is that that does not stop racial or ethnic conflict being among the most vicious; more importantly it does not stop people defined as inferior according to some sort of somatic (i.e. bodily/corporeal) feature from living every day of their lives with the very real weight of oppression. They experience it day in and day out in their very inhabitation of their bodies, no matter how high they rise in society. To those people, the essentially fictive nature of race is small comfort.

I would like to explore two points in this [post]. The first is to ask how the Romans – and indeed their non-Roman soldiers – could treat non-Romans in this brutal, even genocidal fashion and yet at the same time have non-Romans reach the very highest ranks in society and have Romans happily serving under them, or joining army units with self-consciously barbarian identities or cultures. Closely related to that is my second question: can we make a distinction between the racialised and non-racialised elements of Roman attitudes towards non-Romans. Partly this is because, as I made clear in the previous lecture, I think it is important not simply to replace ‘ethnic’ with ‘racial’, to fold all sorts of chauvinism or prejudice into the category of the racial, which has been done in some recent work on our period (which isn’t to say that the latter isn’t interesting and thought-provoking: quite the opposite). There is, in my view, an important qualitative difference between the two, as I argued in the [last blog post]. I won’t necessarily have a clear or coherent answer.

To answer the first, I am going to refer to Slavoj Žižek’s first (and best) book, The Sublime Object of Ideology. Žižek points out that racist thinking lies entirely in the order or register of the Imaginary: this is one of Lacan’s three registers and is the one that concerns ideals about how the world really is or should be. This in a sense is why it can be entirely incoherent. It’s also why ‘the other’ can be seen as good at some things while being represented as generally inferior. The inferior other can be viewed as what Žižek (again following Lacan) calls ‘the subject presumed to enjoy’; in other words, the other is somehow good at all the things the person wishes they were good at, or is allowed to do things which the person thinks they are themselves barred or prevented from doing. Now, the vast bulk of Roman ‘binary’ ethnography, discussed in [a previous video lecture] can be seen in this light. Indeed I argued in a conference paper that a lot of modern thinking about the late antique barbarian can also be seen in that light too.

The thing is, though, that the order of the imaginary doesn’t deal with everyday lived realities, even if it reflects upon them. That is the business of the order of the symbolic: the world of language, signs and symbols, social structures and so on. Now, in Žižek’s view, and I find this compelling, the reason why, on the one hand, an individual can hold violently racist views about a group of people and yet at the same time have friends from that group, even be married to one – why the famous line that ‘I can’t be racist; I have black friends’ is possible – is precisely because these two aspects of their lives operate in different psychoanalytical registers. In a way, the taxonomic level of Roman ethnography is that which operates in the sphere of the Symbolic. The ‘other’ is a figure of the Imaginary; it doesn’t actually exist as a real person. As we saw, it’s really there as a yardstick against which to judge Romans; or it is a constitutive outside, to use the phrase I used in the last lecture package. If compelled to deal with barbarians as actual people, Romans had to switch to the Symbolic register – unless, and we can see this in all sorts of persecutions – those people can somehow be prevented from being seen as actual other people. Actual barbarians, even actual barbarian groups can be grasped within the taxonomic level, like peoples within the Empire: I hate barbarians but you/your people aren’t really barbarians, not like that other lot. You have doubtless heard of the equivalents of this... So, eminent non-Romans are often never mentioned as having barbarian roots. There are, for example, no references to the Vandal parentage of the general Stilicho until after his fall from power in 408. At that point, all the usual anti-barbarian rhetoric was wheeled out to damn him as a public enemy. As one historian said, had he died of natural causes in around 406 he would have gone down in history simply as a Roman general with a funny name.

The second question is more difficult to answer. Did barbarians experience life within the Roman Empire as racialised minorities? Part of the issue here is the extent to which one might instantly be recognised as a non-Roman. It’s difficult to see somatic features like skin or hair colour as determinant in Roman ethnography. Sub-Saharan Africans – Ethiopians as the Romans called them – would probably usually be visibly different, but so too would people from the far north: the people the Romans considered to be pale-skinned and fair-haired. If anything, in most of the Empire there was possibly more prejudice (as far as I can see) towards the latter than the former. Things were possibly very different in Egypt, where there was a long history of chauvinistic treatment of the peoples of the upper Nile: Nubia - Sudan. There is an important discussion in Black Skin, White Masks, by the great Francophone, Martiniquais psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, where he talks about how the black man feels himself in the gaze of the white man all the time and internalises all the white man’s expectations of what black people are supposed to be like; feels he has to behave in a particular way. Did non-Romans experience something like this inside the Empire? It’s something to think about and probably deserves much closer attention.