Kate Cooper

Ancient historians record that, during the long siege of Rome by Alaric’s Goths in AD 410, a lady of the highest Roman nobility finally opened the gates and simply invited the barbarians in. Whether she was moved by pity for the sufferers of famine and plague within the walls or by some more suspicious motive is unclear. In fact, historians were uncertain about the identity of the lady. Procopius (Wars 1. 2. 27) asserted that it was Anicia Faltonia Proba, while Zosimus (5. 38) suggested that the augusta Serena, widow of the generalissimo Stilicho, had intended to do so in AD 408, before she was executed by order of the Senate.

Though the status of the apocryphal story is dubious, it is almost certainly significant that, despite their many differences, Serena and Proba shared a number of characteristics. Both were matriarchs of dynasties at the pinnacle of Roman society, members of the group standing guard over the mores and values that defined what it was to be Roman. Serena was the niece and adopted daughter of Theodosius the Great, while Proba was the matriarch of the Senate’s most distinguished dynasty. An inscription made by Proba’s son and daughter-in-law celebrated her as ‘‘Anicia Faltonia Proba, trustee of the ancient nobilitas, pride of the Anician family, a model of the preservation and teaching of wifely virtue, descendant of consuls, mother of consuls’’ (CIL 6. 1. 1755, tr. Croke and Harries 1982: 116, amended). But, at the same time, both women were Christian, and both were known to be patronesses of the radical ascetic ‘‘fringe’’ in Rome, with Proba the grandmother of the celebrated virgin Demetrias, and Serena the protector of the wealthy eccentric Melania the Younger. Whether or not the story was true, it was alarming enough that it was thinkable. It was no small matter to suggest that a noble Roman matrona could be moved to undertake an act so contrary to the Roman values of solidarity, ferocity, and Stoic honor. The story reflects at worst a sense that these values were no longer held dear, and at best a suspicion of deviance among the class of women whose principal duty was to raise invincible and politically indispensable sons.

A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1

Gibbon famously argued that the Roman Empire fell because Christian ideas had compromised Roman manliness, and there is still life in the question implied. If one looks for ancient evidence to support Gibbon’s hypothesis, one will certainly find it, not least because on this point Gibbon was merely a popularizer. The originator of the ‘‘Gibbon hypothesis’’ was none other than the eighteenth-century historian’s preferred late Roman source, Zosimus, continuator of the New History of Eunapius of Sardis. Zosimus was no fan of Christianity in general, or of the empress Serena in particular. Writing during the reign of Anastasius (ad 498-518), he was the last of the great pagan historians. His view of Christianity, that it privileged the eccentricities of monks and women at a time when men of iron were called for, was the last in a long line of similar criticisms by pagan writers. There is no way of knowing how much this strategy of ‘‘blaming the Christians’’ was simply a continuation of an old theme, reaching back to Tacitus’ account of the Roman fire of ad 64. In any event, the grand narratives of decline and fall on the one hand, and on the other of the rise of Christianity with its distinctive mores, have from the beginning been intertwined. For the historian of gender and the family, it is urgently necessary to understand how changing religious and gender ideals influenced the Roman ability to cope with challenging political and military circumstances.

After the death of Theodosius the Great in ad 395, both Roman and barbarian elites continued, for the most part, to marry and to reproduce as numerously as possible, even while a vocal minority began to live in ascetic communities. Scholars no longer accept a characterization of male ascetics as weak or neurotic. Ascetic virtue constituted a claim to authority (Rousseau 1978) recognizably couched in the language of Roman manliness (Leyser 1999), even if its terms were not acceptable to all parties (Francis 1995). If it was dangerous, it was dangerous because of the ferocious single-mindedness of ascetic practitioners, not because they were effeminate.

We can tell, from the fact that there was so much experimentation, that at least some influential late Romans were ready to identify and celebrate ascetic achievement as a third token of male prowess, alongside the winning of battles and the siring of vigorous sons. Some clearly perceived it as a means to enrich Roman men’s collective ability to harness a godly impetus, while others saw the sometimes fiercely disruptive monks as a threat either to social order (McLynn 1992; Gaddis 2005) or to the recognition and encouragement of traditional Roman masculinity.

The present contribution will consider the rise of Christian ideas about gender, sexuality, and the family up to the death of Theodosius, and will then seek to reframe Gibbon’s question, with specific reference to the fifth - and sixth-century crisis of the western empire. Both halves of the empire were affected by changing gender ideals, but the question has a particular urgency for the west in Late Antiquity since the west ‘‘fell’’ nearly a thousand years before the east - though ad 476 and 553, the ‘‘standard’’ dates for the ‘‘fall’’ of the western empire, are both problematic: the process they exemplify clearly happened in the fifth or sixth century (Croke 1983). We will suggest that ascetic virtue, in the west at least, seems to have pulled against the ideals of victorious and fertile Roman manliness as an invisible but powerful undertow, although the precise nature of its erosive influence is not yet known.