Conclusion

We return finally to the question, was Gibbon right to see a connection between the rise of Christianity and the fall of the empire? Did Christianity function as an escape valve that in fact fostered the values of Roman society by channeling nonparticipation into harmless channels, or did it sap the strength of Roman ideology by making nonparticipation seem less than an unthinkable crime?

A satisfying answer to the question is probably beyond reach, but a final fifth-century fertility episode offers an orientation. Shortly before the sack of Rome, the senatorial heiress Melania the Younger visited the augusta Serena to claim protection against relatives who wished to deprive her and her husband of their inheritance. Our source, Gerontius’ Life of Melania (Gorce 1962; Elizabeth Clark 1984; Patrick Laurence 2002), is understandably impressionistic about why the relatives believed they had a legitimate claim. It is likely that they had called the urban prefect’s attention to the fact that under Roman law, a parental gift could be revoked if the child heir failed in the duties of pietas with regard to the donor (Arjava 1996: 85). (That the urban prefect, who handled such cases, was involved seems to be implied by another somewhat confused reference in the Life to his persecution of Melania.) One of the specified offices of filial piety was of course the production of grandchildren. The vow of continence taken by both Melania and her husband Pinianus could thus disqualify them as heirs to their respective fortunes (Cooper 2005a). By closely associating Melania’s renunciations with the devastation caused by Alaric - indeed, during the sack, his armies burned a Roman palace that she had not yet managed to sell off - the author of the Life wished to offer his readers a compelling sign of the transience of earthly fortunes and of the need to place one’s hope in heaven. What is truly alarming in the story, from the perspective of traditional Roman values, is the idea that a member of the imperial family, the niece of Theodosius the Great, could be expected to obstruct the urban prefect in his attempt to exact the offices of piety from a Roman heir and to insure the production of a new generation of senators.

Serena’s own daughters Maria and Thermantia were famously either unable or unwilling to bear sons. The consequences of this failure were far-reaching, since each sister in turn was married to the young emperor Honorius - Maria in ad 398 and Thermantia after the death of her sister. Each of the sisters having failed to provide a son, Honorius died childless in ad 423 and the succession passed to the 4-year-old Flavius Placidus Valentinianus, son of Serena’s cousin Galla Placidia. More than one fifth-century author suspected Honorius of having taken a vow of continence (Holum 1982: 49). Whether his childlessness reflected the divine anathema of infertility or merely Christian eccentricity, it was equally devastating for the western empire. Like the apocryphal tale of the matrona opening the gates of Rome, or the episode of Serena’s protection of Melania’s vow of continence, the accusation against Honorius has the sound of a story designed to shock. A Roman emperor so far divorced from the values of Roman masculinity as to desire neither victories nor sons was unthinkable, and yet the unthinkable had seemingly come to pass.

If we can accept for the sake of argument that Christian communities played a socially destabilizing role by serving as a breeding ground for rival cognitions, we have yet to understand whether ascetic ideas in fact served to erode Roman ideas of legitimate male authority. In both the west and Byzantium, the Church reestablished itself during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries as the guardian of the Roman legacy, an institution in the service of legitimate public authority, whose critique of the ruling males was perceived as strengthening, rather than weakening, the social order. It goes without saying that gender ideas played a part in this process as well. But why were Frankish and Byzantine dynasties able to harness the power of Church as an instrument of legitimacy, where their predecessors in the West Roman Empire had not? Of course, Christian ideas and institutions were never monolithic, so the comparison is in some sense a false one. But we may also ask whether these more successful Christian empires tolerated rulers who underperformed as egregiously at their basic tasks of victory and succession as did those of the fifth-century west. Ultimately, rival cognitions were far less disturbing when God was smiling on the ruling house, the men were winning battles, and the women were producing an army of healthy sons.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The cluster of topics from gender and sexuality to women and family have been unusually well served in recent scholarship. Stafford 1978, Holum 1982, Cameron 1989a, Elizabeth Clark 1990, and Nelson 1990 laid the methodological foundations for work in these fields, often responding explicitly to work on the construction of gender by scholars of other periods. Cameron 1989a, Cooper 1992, Elizabeth Clark 1998, Burrus 2001, and Brubaker 2004 offer a spectrum of strategies for coopting literary and critical theory into a ‘‘rhetoric of gender’’ approach to late antique texts. Smith 2000a, Bitel 2002, Halsall 2004, and Cooper 2005b offer recent historiographical overviews of different aspects of gender in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.