A ‘‘Long’’ Late Antiquity

In 1901, the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905) published his Spatromische Kunstindustrie, a work in which he first harnessed the aesthetics of the fin de si'cle to the historical understanding of early Christian and late antique art. The distinction between prosperity and decline, between the beautiful and the hideous, was abolished; the artistic style of the epoch was understood not as the product of a universal culture but as an autonomous phenomenon. Riegl did not regard the architecture and sculpture, painting and craftwork of the late empire as evidence for a barbaric style or a cultural decline, but as proof of a specific ‘‘artistic will.’’ This artistic will, which constituted a separate epochal style that continued to reflect its classical legacy, originated from a conviction directed toward the afterlife, and manifested itself in Christianity (Elsner 2002). Riegl defined Late Antiquity as an epoch delimited by the Edict of Milan (ad 313) and the accession of Charles the Great (ad 768). Students of the Later Roman Empire now began to adopt this periodization from art history. Seeck had thought of antiquity as ending with the political demise of the Western Roman Empire in ad 476. Eduard Meyer (1855-1930), however, defined Late Antiquity (in the second edition of his magnum opus, the Geschichte des Altertums) in a manner comparable to that of Riegl: as the transitional period between Diocletian and Charles the Great (Meyer 1910: 249). Similarly, Matthias Gelzer (1886-1974) described Late Antiquity in his programmatic lecture on ‘‘Classical Studies and Late Antiquity’’ (1926) as reaching from the third to the sixth centuries (Gelzer 1963: 387-400). Thus the notion of a ‘‘long’’ Late Antiquity had come into being, and the term ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ entered other European languages (‘‘bas-empire,’’ ‘‘antiquite tardive,’’ ‘‘basso impero,’’ and ‘‘bajo imperio’’).

From the turn of the century, representatives of the so-called ‘‘school of religious history’’ (religionsgeschichtliche Schule) consistently divorced ancient Christianity from the Christianity of other periods and described in more particular terms first the interaction of various forms of religious belief and practice in the ancient Mediterranean world, and second the earliest phases of the dissemination of the Christian message. Hermann Usener (1834-1905) had already recognized the significance of late classical lives of the saints for the study of both Christian and pagan antiquity. Shortly afterward, the so-called ‘‘Cambridge Ritualists’’ investigated (partly under the influence of Sir James Frazer, 1854-1941) the social function of religious rituals and their significance for the formation of group cohesion and group identity. The circle included Francis Cornford (1874-1943, married to Charles Darwin’s granddaughter) and Arthur B. Cook (1868-1952, author of Zeus: A Study of Ancient Religion, 1914-40), together with the Oxford scholar Gilbert Murray (1866-1957). Similar lines of inquiry had been pursued in France by 12mile Durkheim (1858-1917). The Belgian Franz Cumont (1868-1947) and, slightly later, the English scholar Arthur Darby Nock (1902-63) contributed with exceptional distinction to the study of late antique religion (Bonnet 2005). One cannot overestimate the extent to which this research into religious history helped to overcome traditional denominational notions of ancient religions in general and of Christianity in particular (Graf 2002).