As noted in Chapter 15, villas become increasingly common in the Aegean countryside from Early Roman through Middle Roman into Late Roman in most regions, although some peak in Early Roman while others are essentially Late Roman in the dating of their main occupation.
(p. 371a) Since wealthy individuals were commonly donors of churches, their private villa decoration taste could intrude into Christian basilica floors, and similar scenes are often found there
In the city of Thebes the famous Mosaic of the Months and a hunt scene, the former till recently displayed in the Thebes museum courtyard, probably came from a religious building in the Late Roman city (Sodini 1970).
(p. 371b) Those statues which are erected are often to the new power foci, the governors and other imperial officials
Poulter (2007) notes that honorific statues in the cities of Western Anatolia also seem dominated by imperial officials rather than local councillors.
(p. 371c) The first Christian communities in their necessarily private religious art in house-churches and foci of worship in communal underground cemeteries (catacombs)
The most extensive Aegean Roman catacombs are on the Cycladic island of Melos, where they have been followed some 180 m into the rock. In Late Roman times Christian burials took place there and an early mortuary chapel was constructed within the complex (Renfrew and Wagstaff 1982). Evidence of use for worship and burial by Christians while still under persecution makes this site perhaps the earliest and largest Early Christian cemetery in the Aegean. The art and inscriptions merge pagan, Christian, and Jewish imagery and texts and point to considerable cultural intermixing on the island. Christianity spread preferentially through Jewish minority settlements abroad and it was probably the island's flourishing mineral exploitation in this period which brought this community into being.
(p. 371d) Basilicas often possessed an apse for the presiding magistrate or envoy of the state to be seated in a dominating location
We can note that there should also be a link to the great apsed assembly rooms which we have already observed to form a characteristic feature of elite mansions in this period.
(p. 371e) The altar and seats for the clergy and bishop (replacing the pagan judge and administrators), were located in the apse, often on a raised platform, with the congregation facing them in a clearly subordinate position
In some Christian basilicas a pillared arch created a division between the apse and the nave, emphasizing the restricted access to the former for the clergy as well as their special ritual activity in preparing the mass there. This architectural framework was in use earlier in palatial contexts, such as the entrance to Diocletian's private apartments in his retirement palace at Split, and is often shown as a backdrop to artistic representations of the emperor, for example with the silver plate or missorium of Theodosius.
(p. 373a) A rarer Middle Roman-Late Roman building type was a round, domed construction (rotunda), also of pagan origin. This had earlier served as a monumental tomb design or an imperial showpiece temple
Early examples include the Pantheon temple at Rome and, in the same city, the tombs of the Julio-Claudian emperors and the mausoleum of Hadrian and the Antonine emperors (later converted to the papal fortress now called the Castel d'Angelo).
(p. 373b) The gigantic palatial complex of the emperor Galerius at Thessaloniki included a colossal domed temple-mausoleum
Actually Galerius' mausoleum was never used for that purpose, as the emperor was buried in another great tomb in his home town of Romuliana in modern Bulgaria. The just visible Ottoman minaret which one sees today accompanying the monument of ca. AD 1590 marks the Rotunda's later use as a mosque.
A very full and insightful analysis of the Rotunda has been offered by Nasrallah (2005). She thinks that the building, which may be an imitation of the Pantheon in Rome, may have been a temple dedicated to Jupiter, despite other opinions that Galerius intended it to be his mausoleum. In any case, it was connected to the giant imperial palace complex nearby by a processional way. In the late fourth or early fifth century AD, probably under the emperor Theodosius the Great or his immediate successors, it became a church, and was at once embellished with a spectacular series of mosaics. Nasrallah argues that the mosaic program represented a symbolic presentation of a new Christian-ordered Roman Empire, where the Rotunda featured as an intimate part of an imperial palace but also as a center of the new establishment religion. In its original setting the palace was associated with Galerius' triumphal arch and the Rotunda temple as the setting for imperial pomp and ceremony, which with the nearby Hippodrome were all connected by formal processional routes.
The Rotunda's art, focused on Christ dominating powerful military saints and ecclesiastical figures, was thus a shift from the imagery on Galerius' arch, with warring soldiers and emperors, to the soldiers of God and his representatives on earth. Architectural backgrounds in the mosaics also echoed palatial architecture. The designers of the Rotunda mosaic thus cleverly adopted and then transformed the pagan symbolism of the arch and the palace, and of imperial propaganda, to announce a new Christian-focused imperial imagery.
(p. 373c) Aghia Sophia church, the cathedral of the Eastern Empire, combines a giant basilica adorned with naves and galleries, with a vast 30 m wide dome soaring 55 m over its heart
The vaulted space thus created was unparalleled in Mediterranean antiquity and the Middle Ages. Clearly designed to awe both urban worshippers and visitors from the Roman and "barbarian" world, the engineers who experimented innovatively with Aghia Sophia's dimensions created a vast upper space symbolizing the heavens. This was so cleverly supported by pendentives, then arches and giant piers, that contemporaries commented that the dome seemed to float above the great imperial congregations. In AD 987 the embassy of Prince Vladimir of Kiev was conducted personally by the emperor Basil II to Agia Sophia, and the effect of the interior atmosphere and the service was overwhelming, according to the Russian chronicles. However, like Justinian's Western conquests, the great cathedral was also a giant leap of ambition with a high risk of failure. The church had to be repaired and buttressed on several occasions from the mid-sixth century onward sometimes owing to severe structural failures.
(p. 373d) Late Antique churches were decorated primarily with abstract surface ornament: intricate pillar capitals, columns and screens of marble and other bright stones, veneers of colored stone on the walls (cleverly covering the rubble and spolia, brick, and concrete construction of the basic church structure)
Surviving ruined Late Roman churches often appear scruffy, with their decayed walls of unattractive building material littered with recycled stones from older monuments. Almost all have lost their original surfaces of well-designed veneers which once made them appear splendid to the viewer and worshipper.
(p. 373e) Rome's effective replacement capital Constantinople
Although it is commonly assumed that Constantine the Great refounded Byzantium as Constantinople to take the place of Rome as the true capital of the empire, this was not his stated intention. In reality, however, the decline of Italy and the contemporary rise of the Roman East from the third century onward sealed the fate of Rome, and over the following centuries Constantinople inevitably became the effective capital of the empire in all but name. The deposing of the last
Western emperor in AD 476 merely formalized any secular claim for Rome to remain the seat of empire.
(p. 374) Thessaloniki: the palatial complex and associated art represent a mini-Rome in the East, a precedent followed by the emperor Constantine the Great a mere decade or so later, when he took the momentous step of founding a "New Rome "in an Eastern city
With the Tetrarchs, the geographical division of power and the need for the rulers to reside near to military action stimulated the elevation of a select number of cities to imperial courts, among them Trier, Milan, and Thessaloniki.
(pp. 374-375a) The third-century crisis of the empire and the sustained pressures that did not disappear in the entire Late Roman era to the seventh century are considered to be a potent force in the creation of these new, expressionist tendencies in the art of that era
However, recent research, including the redating of works, has shown that there existed alongside this style a continuing taste among the elite for naturalistic sculpture in Classical or Hellenistic revival styles (Niels Hannestad, pers. comm.). Increasingly the excavation of urban mansions and grander rural villas throughout the empire has revealed large-scale sculpture collections often of remarkable quality in this Classicizing tradition, associated with the elite's desire to exhibit their appreciation of the Classical tradition in art and literature. For Middle Roman examples in Corinth see Stirling (2008). For the wider phenomenon of Late Roman elite villas full of deliberate references to the appreciation of Classical culture (mosaic floors and sculpture) see Uytterhoeven in van Luffelen (ed.) (2009).
(p. 375b) New, expressionist tendencies in the art of the Late Roman era
Some of the artistic features of Late Antique sculpture may owe as much if not more to economizing measures by patrons and artists. Prusac (2011) argues from close study of a large corpus of Late Roman sculpture that by the fourth century AD most were reworked older portraits which had the effect of producing heads with an upward gaze and large eyes, which were previously seen as a deliberate choice for religious or ideological effect.
(p. 375c) After Diocletian, emperors became more secluded from the public and cultivated a mystique of remote, awe-inspiring power through elaborate court ceremonial and dress codes
Gregory (2006) suggests this was in imitation of the court of the empire's great Late Roman rival, the Sassanian Empire in the Middle East. In any case, he emphasizes the staged appearances in palaces and also in public processions of the complex hierarchy of officials, which were carefully choreographed and enriched with extraordinarily glitzy bejeweled garments that we can still see in contemporary mosaics, coins, seals, and wall-paintings.
(p. 375d) There are pagan examples within the Roman Empire of the private ownership of small images of divinities painted on wood. Christians appear to have borrowed these customs for early representations of saints
This origin of icons is attested by the Apocryphal Acts of John. It met with official church disapproval, voiced as early as the reign of Constantine the Great.
(p. 376) It is an extraordinary age of dramatic contrasts
In a recent paper (Bintliff, in press ), I have further analyzed this situation. From the third century AD the Roman Empire as a whole began a progressive decline, its weakness marked and partly hastened by the raids and later colonization of barbarian peoples. In this paper I try to resolve the paradox, which marks the Late Roman era apart from many other historic periods. This is the curious contrast that is characteristic of Late Antiquity between the third and early seventh centuries, where we can observe both prosperity and decline, wealth and poverty, urban decay and a building boom. Utilizing the insights of Chaos-Complexity theory, I point out that non-linear dynamics teaches us that universal decline is not the only option for systems which are running down so dramatically. The remaining energy can form new patterns, often of considerable internal sophistication, through concentrating the constantly dissipating resources of the system into new constellations of highpoints surrounded by increasing zones of minimal energy.
Thus I think we can explain the polarization of visible phenomena in Late Antiquity: giant new buildings in shrinking towns being transformed into kastra (small fortified settlements) or villages; empty or half-empty landscapes bordered by well-populated and "busy countrysides" (Pettegrew 2007); extraordinary elite wealth and low living standards of a largely dependent peasantry. In reality, the declining energy in the empire was being channeled into smaller but effective achievements.
World History
