By the early fifth century, Ammianus, Symmachus, and Libanius were all dead, and with them ends a historiographical era. No subsequent pagan generation will seem fully alive or three-dimensional, a fact that has helped sustain the appearance of a decisive change with Theodosius I. But our perspectives are illusory. The vibrantly interconnected world that our three fourth-century witnesses inhabit is preserved for us only through the most fortunate of chances, with each of the texts upon which we depend preserved by only a handful of manuscripts (Vera 1977: 1003-6; Martin and Petit 1979: 36-92; Matthews 1989b: 477-8).
In fact, our three pagan exemplars each had his heirs, whom we glimpse navigating the challenges presented by the fifth century. The histories of Ammianus’ fifth-century ‘‘classicizing’’ successors survive only in fragments, but Olympiodorus of Thebes would dedicate his overtly paganizing interpretation of his age to the pious Theodosius II, while a generation later Priscus of Panium and Malchus of Philadelphia apparently offered no clues to their allegiance (Blockley 1981: 59-60, 77). The current fashion is to accept both the latter as Christians, but their apparently deliberate refusal to present a now unequivocally Christian empire in its own Christian terms is significant. We have become accustomed to demanding solid proof of anti-Christianity from prospective pagans, while assuming unproblematic Christianity otherwise; of the various constraints that such a scheme imposes, perhaps the most insidious is the exclusion of any possibility that a minimal Christianity could be absorbed into a basically pagan outlook. Yet this was exactly the prospect that alarmed contemporary Christian leaders like Augustine (Ep. 232. 1; De catechizandis rudibus 7. 11). Our reluctance to accept pagan sympathies in historians like Priscus or Malchus, moreover, is conditioned largely by the exemplar of explicitly pagan historiography that we possess in one of their younger contemporaries, a public servant who produced in his retirement a history full of uninhibitedly vehement venom directed at the whole Christian project. But Zosimus’ eccentricity arguably resides in his polemical tone rather than in his outlook - and he also represents continuity, a milieu where Eunapius (the fourth-century sophist who had pioneered the art of polemically anti-Christian historiography) and Olym-piodorus were still available. Interesting questions remain concerning the religious implications of the secular literary tradition. Recent revisionist reinterpretation of the sixth-century historian Procopius as a cunningly coded pagan critic (Kaldellis 2004) unduly minimizes the abundant evidence for Procopius’ comfortable accommodation to the Christian mainstream (Cameron 1985: 113-33), but it nevertheless suggests the potential for subversively unchristian currents to operate within this stream.
Symmachus’ heirs in Rome also weathered the consolidation of Christianity peacefully - and the Roman aristocrats of the fifth century, although many of them accepted initiation into the Christian cult, remained much closer to Symmachus culturally than they ever came to Ambrose. This was the milieu that nurtured Macrobius, whose Saturnalia lovingly recreates the learned religiosity of Praetexta-tus, Symmachus, and their friends (Matthews 1975: 369-72). A century after the Altar of Victory controversy, a famous exchange between the pope of Rome and the Christian senator Andromachus illustrates the tenacity of the pagan past - and the dexterity of the Roman elite in maintaining its claim upon it. Our text, an open letter, dissects pitilessly these senators’ possible excuses for their involvement in the Luper-calia, the venerable mid-February fertility festival whose central rite, a carnival of naked runners, was now performed by proxy, with ‘‘mean and ordinary’’ substitutes for the young nobles (Adv. Andromachum 16-17). This has been seen as a new stage of papal activism, a concerted campaign to eliminate anomalies (Markus 1990: 131-4; see Duval 1977); but the implied context deserves consideration. We have only one side of the argument, and the letter begins defensively - Andromachus has been complaining of a failure to police clerical wrongdoing (Adv. Andromachum 1-2); the Lupercalia thus serve rhetorically as a convenient glass house within which to confine this troublemaker. Did the ploy succeed? Most modern readers, concentrating on the stark choice with which the patrons of the Lupercalia are confronted - either to abandon their festival or face excommunication - have assumed a grudging surrender; but an intermediate outcome seems just as likely. Nor, just because Andromachus was a baptized Christian, need we assume that his patronage of the ceremonies (which of course had important social implications) was devoid of any religious significance. Rather, we might see the fifth-century Lupercalia as a descendant of the fourth-century taurobolium, another adaptation of traditional religiosity to suit the changing exigencies of the laws; the nobles of Rome were able to accept Christianity on their own terms, and exported their own values even into the ecclesiastical establishment (Salzman 2002: 200-19).
Here, once again, we fall easily into traps created by our own categories. It was easier to combine Christianity with other, apparently contradictory, allegiances than the ecclesiastical spokesmen from whom we tend to take our cues would wish, and disciplinary sanctions were in practice limited by the social power of the elite. Boethius’ Lady Philosophy thus seems, a generation after the Lupercal controversy, to belong more to the salon of Macrobius’ Praetextatus than to an Ambrosian church, but although a medieval monk might deplore the senator’s refusal to seek consolation in his Christian faith, no contemporary pope could do so (Chadwick 1981: 247-53). Nor did papal authority extend to the Lady’s less austerely cerebral cousins, the statues from the pagan past that continued to decorate senatorial palaces. Although recent commentators tend to present these as the safely desacralized objects of purely aesthetic appreciation (Stirling 2004: 22-8), this risks imposing an artificial boundary between two categories that had traditionally overlapped, and such judgments have depended heavily upon assumptions about the impact of anti-pagan legislation. Having overcome earlier tendencies to see all pagan images as symbols of antiChristian defiance, we have perhaps become overhasty in denying them any numinous qualities. The serious archaeological investigation of domestic cult is still in its infancy (see Bakker 1994 for a painstaking analysis of the Ostian evidence); in general, the sphere of private worship - which includes the care of the dead, where, it is now emerging, the scope of institutional Christianity was far more limited than was previously thought (Rebillard 2003) - requires much fuller exploration than it has hitherto received (see MacMullen 1997: 61-5).
Meanwhile, Libanius’ successors continued to inculcate the same classical texts, infused with the old gods, into each new generation of the elite. From some irresistibly vivid vignettes of clashes between pagan and Christian students in the classroom, where the Christians invariably not only prevail physically but also expose the emptiness of their opponents’ claims (Zacharias of Mitylene, Vit. Severi 14-27; Chuvin 1990: 105-11), a Christian educational mainstream is easily inferred, one thoroughly inoculated against pagan textbooks by Basil of Caesarea’s prescriptions. Much like pagan statuary, for example, that quintessential product of the late antique schoolroom, the vast Dionysiac epic by Nonnus of Panopolis has been stripped of any religious overtones by recent commentators (Liebeschuetz 1996). But there were teachers who continued to take their literary gods seriously, and it would be dangerous (given the intimacy of the ancient classroom) to deny them any influence over their pupils. We glimpse such teachers only fleetingly. Only after his promotion to court office, for example, did the Antiochene sophist Isocasius (to whom Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, had cheerfully recommended pupils) face trial for his ‘‘Hellenism’’ (a trial occasioned, significantly, by an unrelated outbreak of rioting); his dignified bearing before his prosecutors earned him the sympathy of the crowd, who hauled him to the cathedral for instant catechesis and baptism (Chron. Pasch. s. a. 467). Only on the most mechanistic interpretation can this count as conversion. Isocasius’ experience instead recalls the many narrow escapes of Liba-nius’ career. Here again, then, a continuity can be observed from the fourth century to the fifth, despite the changed circumstances and the uncertainties that our fragmentary evidence creates: we do not know, for example, whether Isocasius was accused under a sorcery charge, as in the earlier period, or under a newly comprehensive formulation.
World History
