For Late Antiquity, we need to understand both the role that the household played in the articulation of empire, and how the devolution of empire changed the terms of the household’s social function. Historians of Late Antiquity and the early medieval period have yet fully to absorb the results of new work on Roman public men (Lendon 1997; Ando 2000; Barton 2001) and Roman households (Saller 1988; Wallace-Hadrill 1988; Laurence and Wallace-Hadrill 1997), which has centered on the negotiation of authority. The position of the Roman male at every level of society was utterly perilous and needed to be repeatedly reconfirmed through a choreography of competition and alliance-building. This is something that military historians have always known; but social historians, and especially gender historians, have yet entirely to shake themselves free of a notion of male power as gratuitous and absolute.
It is worth refreshing our memory about Levi-Strauss’s idea of the fundamental mechanisms of kinship networks. Here again, the emphasis is on the continuous renegotiation of relationships, which must be reciprocally recognized. Kinship is governed by relations in three modes: of consanguinity, through marriage (affinity), and of cohabitation (contiguity) (Levi-Strauss 1969, 1987; Dumont 1980, 1983). What is critical to all three modes of relationship is the importance of symmetrical recognition - which is to say mutual acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the relationships of authority and accountability within the system (Gregory 1997). It is important that both sides of an alliance - or participants at all levels of a social subsystem - are included in the symmetry of mutual recognition, even if perfect consensus is elusive. Where asymmetrical recognition or rival cognitions are in play, the head of the hierarchy is perceived as less than fully successful in his or her role. Rival cognitions - alternative ‘‘readings’’ of events and alternative views of the motives and accountability of the key players - can undermine the legitimacy of the leadership to the point where the structure is untenable. (We shall return below to an idea of ‘‘rival cognitions’’ derived from Gregory’s use of the concept.)
With the early stages of Christianization, we witness among other things the ‘‘pull’’ of alternative affiliations on the part of subordinate members of the household. Here, we see the destabilizing force of rival cognitions perfectly illustrated: through religious conversion, the ‘‘deviant’’ member gains access to a wider community of discourse, which can confirm him or her in resisting the expectations of the dominant culture. A text from North Africa, The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, written at the turn of the second to third century, preserves the prison diary of the 22-year-old Christian martyr Vibia Perpetua. Included is an episode in which Perpetua attempts to explain to her father why she can no longer in honesty obey his paternal authority. What is important here is that both her status as a suspected criminal, and the equally serious matter of her repudiation of the bond of filial piety, were affirmed as acceptable and even exemplary by the Christian community of Carthage.
Christianity brought with it a distinctive new rhetoric of masculinity, and its initial diffusion among the Roman aristocracy in the fourth century had the effect of destabilizing the terms on which men of the ruling class could claim authority (Cooper 1992). Across our period, Romans and barbarians, pagans and Christians for the most part acknowledged a conceptual lingua franca of male prowess linking religion, sex, and gender to male military and political success. This culture of male prowess involved two principal modes of discerning the will and favor of the gods with regard to a man’s claim to authority. The first was military. It goes without saying that an ability to win battles was a sign that the gods smiled on a man, while Diocletian and Constantine both showed that a god’s power to grant victory would in turn govern his standing among mortals. The second sign of divine favor was a matter of fertility. To be survived by a hearty son, able to consolidate and perhaps extend one’s dominance, was the crown of male military achievement. That this depended on factors beyond a man’s own control, such as longevity and the right reproductive partner, made it all the more potent as a sign of divine favor.
The role of reproduction in this symbolic system was changing, however. Central here was the relative ranking of male ascetics and male householders. While men aspiring to public or military position continued to gamble on the production of healthy sons, the emerging ascetic establishment offered success in the discipline of sexual renunciation as an alternative token of divine favor (Cooper 1992). We still do not really know whether this third sign worked against the other two and contributed to the collapse of the symbolic system. An alternative structure such as the Church could strengthen or weaken a system depending on the other pressures bearing upon it.
Traditionally, both pagan and Christian communities had seen the biological household as a testing ground for male authority. The household was the key economic unit and, since the time of Plato, Greek thought had seen allegiance to the household as both a building block of civic identity and a source of temptation - the temptation to put the interests of one’s own kin ahead of the common good (Cooper 1996; Gaca 2003). The household was not only a microcosm of the city: it was a potential source of disloyalty to the city. This is why household governance was such an effective measure of a man’s abilities and accountability.
Christian attitudes to the biological family were ambivalent for entirely different reasons, however. A Christian tradition of tension between the biological family and the ‘‘family’’ of faith developed, and elaborated biblical hints that the end time would reverse or destroy the existing social order (Osiek 1996). The apostle Paul, it will be remembered, had expected the eschaton (the end of the world) to take place within his own lifetime, and had therefore discouraged his followers from making long-term plans for their private lives. In 1 Corinthians 7: 26-7, he says, ‘‘I think that, in view of the impending crisis, it is well for you to remain as you are. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife.’’ For Paul, to be ‘‘bound to a wife’’ is to embrace, along with the hoped-for pleasures of conjugal life, anxieties and responsibilities that are likely to aggravate the distress and confusion of the coming eschaton.
Later generations, however, remembered Paul as the founder of a radical view of virginity. It is not difficult to see why, if one looks ahead a few lines in the same letter to the Corinthians:
Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that.
I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning... For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord, but the married man is anxious about the affairs of the world, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. (1 Cor. 7: 28-30, 32-4)
In fact, Paul’s ideas here draw on a standard debate among pagan philosophers about whether a man committed to philosophy could afford to involve himself in the emotionally unbalancing business of raising children under social and medical conditions that forced even the rich to expect a low survival rate for their children in the face of infant and child mortality (Frier 1994). Clearly these words meant one thing in the context of an imminent end to the world, and another if those who embraced Paul’s message had to wait, generation after generation, for an end that never seemed to come.
A generation later, the author of the gospel of John remembered Jesus as having challenged the claims of biological kinship by offering what might be called elective kinship through the medium of the Christian ekklesia. This version of the passion narrative records Jesus speaking from the cross to his mother, who stood vigil with her sister and Mary Magdalene: calling out to her and pointing to the beloved disciple, ‘‘he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home’’ (John 19: 26-7). Though one can see here an incipient approach to communal care of women past child-bearing age, it must be remembered that Mary was understood by early Christian communities to be the mother of a surviving adult son, James.
Paul had also seen the Christian ekklesia as assuming responsibility for the widows and daughters who had no other protection. It was helpful if the moral standing of these women could be irreproachable, and it is very likely that the stringent disciplinary norms of these female communities were the basis for later ideals of the communal ascetic life. Our first evidence of a systematic approach to ascetic communities comes in a cluster of evidence from the second century. The most important sources are the Pastoral Epistles of the New Testament - a group of letters written in Paul’s name by an anonymous Greek writer in second-century Asia Minor - and the late second-century Latin writer Tertullian of Carthage in North Africa. Both of these sources refer to unmarried women - virgins and widows - who were supported by the churches financially, and who seem to have lived communally. The Pastoral Epistles refer to an official list of widows in the community (1 Timothy 3: 9-10), which probably reflects an attempt to keep track of who received financial support from the churches, along with an acknowledgment that the women enrolled on the list of widows represented those churches in the eyes both of their communities and of outsiders (D. R. MacDonald 1983; M. Y. MacDonald 1996). It is likely that a church community’s charitable foundations for unmarried women were the testing ground for its ideas about sexual renunciation. Communities of virgins seem to predate male monastic communities by at least a century (Lampe 1987; Elm 1994).
From as early as the second century, hagiographical sources began to link the idea of refusing marriage to the idea of withdrawing from the city in order to be tested; the composite would be central to ascetic literature. The Apocryphal Acts of Paul, for example, a novelistic second-century treatment of Paul’s preaching career, contains a series of episodes known to modern scholarship as the Acts of Paul and Thecla (Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1963). These tell the story of how in Iconium, one of the cities of Asia Minor, a young woman named Thecla heard Paul’s preaching and broke off her engagement to the eligible bachelor Thamyris, preferring instead to cut her hair short, disguise herself as a beardless young man, and follow Paul in his wanderings from city to city. This narrative tells us more about ancient Christian literature than it does about the women in Paul’s entourage; but withdrawal from the common life of the ancient city was central to the Christian ideal of asceticism, whether this meant a geographic removal to rural areas such as the Egyptian desert, or simply a refusal to produce children to stand as heirs of one’s name and fortune.
The theme of escape, so prevalent in early Christian literature cannot be understood, however, as an assertion of individualism per se, but rather as the election of a rival group as the vehicle for identity formation. Early Christian ideals of the relationship between the individual and his or her ‘‘relational matrix,’’ whether a biological or an otherworldly family, is understood by Philip Esler, Bruce Malina, and others in light of the honor-shame culture of the ancient Mediterranean (Malina 1993; Esler 1994). Common in these discussions is what may be called a ‘‘dyadic’’ or ‘‘relational’’ notion of the self. On this view, identity was defined through group membership, rather than independently of it. Opposition to one group inevitably meant adherence to another. Any attempt to extract the individual from the relational matrix was always a flight to as well as a flight from. Even the heroic solitary was bound, in identity terms, to a community of like-minded souls.
Gender influenced the terms on which the individual could or could not be separated from the group, and one relational matrix could be substituted for another. This is partly because women and men occupied different positions in the hierarchy of the household, and the social meaning of their actions varied accordingly. At the same time, women (whether as loving mothers or vulnerable wives and daughters) stood as the symbol of the sometimes unwelcome bonds and duties of the biological household. Within the socially visible cast of characters of the Roman family, the aristocratic laywoman occupied a central, iconic place. In dynasty-based societies, female kin of high-status families are often accorded considerable symbolic value. From the early empire through the Byzantine period, women appear on coins as a symbol of concord (Holum 1982; Brubaker and Tobler 2000). Their role as icons of the family meant that when they were praised or denigrated it was often a way of speaking about wider social issues (Cooper 1992).
World History
