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Late antiquity and Byzantium: an identity problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2016

Averil Cameron
Averil Cameron*
Affiliation:
Keble College Oxfordaveril.cameron@keble.ox.ac.uk
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Extract

1975 seems light years away. In parts of the field of Byzantine studies, at any rate, the world has shifted, and perhaps most of all in that contested territory of early Byzantium, otherwise known as late antiquity. The first issue of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies was published only four years after Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity,1 and before the ‘explosion’ of late antiquity.2 This was also the start of another explosion: the emergence of late antique archaeology as a discipline, leading to its vast expansion and the enormous and ever-growing amount of material available today. For the first time, John Hayes's Late Roman Pottery (1972) enabled reliable dating criteria for the ceramic evidence that became the foundation of a new understanding of trade and economic life.3 The UNESCO Save Carthage campaign, a landmark in the reliable recording of excavations of the late antique period, began in the following year, and since then the growth in data has been exponential.

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Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 27 - 37
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Copyright © Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 2016 

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References

1 Brown, Peter, The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750. From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London 1971)Google Scholar.

2 Giardina, A., ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi Storici 40.1 (1999) 157–80Google Scholar, with discussion by Bowersock, G.W. and others at Studi Storici 45 (2004) 5–46Google Scholar; see also Brown, Peteret al., ‘The world of late antiquity revisited’, Symbolae Osloenses 72 (1997) 5–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reactions to Giardina by Bowersock, G. W. and others in E. Lo Cascio (ed.) Studi Storici 45.1 (2004) 5–46Google Scholar.

3 See Wickham, Chris, ‘Marx, Sherlock Holmes and late Roman commerce’, Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988) 183–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar (review discussion of Carandini, A. (ed.), Società Romana e Impero Tardoantico III. Le Merci, Gli Insediamenti (Rome and Bari 1986)Google Scholar.

4 See among many publications the group of articles in Journal of Late Antiquity 1 (2008), with A. Marcone, ‘La tarda antichità o della difficoltà delle periodizzazioni,’ Studi Storici (2004) 25–36; Cameron, Averil, ‘The ‘long’ late antiquity. A late-twentieth century model?’ in Wiseman, T. P. (ed), Classics in Progress, British Academy Centenary volume (Oxford 2002) 165–91Google Scholar.

5 See Allen, P. and Jeffreys, E. (eds), The Sixth Century: End or Beginning? (Brisbane 1996)Google ScholarPubMed; Maas, M. (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge 2005) is designed to supply an overview rather than pose questions of periodizationCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Cameron, Averil, ‘Gibbon and Justinian’, in McKitterick, R. and Quinault, R. (eds), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge 1997) 34–52Google Scholar.

7 Cameron, Averil, Ward-Perkins, B. and Whitby, Michael (eds), Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, AD 425–600, Cambridge Ancient History XIV (Cambridge 2000)Google Scholar; Jones, A. H. M., The Later Roman Empire, 284–602. A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vols. (Oxford 1964)Google Scholar.

8 The nearest, though not on the same scale, is perhaps Leppin, H., Justinian. Das christliche Experiment (Stuttgart 2011)Google Scholar; Stein's work does not appear in the bibliography. Of course Justinian and the sixth century make an appearance in works of wider scale, for instance Cameron, Averil, Ward-Perkins, B. and Whitby, M. (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History XIV (Cambridge 2000)Google Scholar; Wickham, C., The Inheritance of Rome. A History of Europe from 400 to 1000(London 2009)Google Scholar or Sarris, P., Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam (Oxford 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or Cameron, Averil, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, c. 395–700, 2nd rev. ed. (London 2011)Google Scholar, and in introductions to Byzantium, for example Cameron, Averil, The Byzantines (Oxford 2006)Google Scholar; Stathakopoulos, D., A Short History of the Byzantine Empire (London 2014)Google Scholar; Harris, J., The Lost World of Byzantium (New Haven 2016)Google Scholar. Meier, M., Das andere Zeitalter Justinians. Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung im 6. Jh. n. Chr., Hypomnemata 147, 2nd ed. (Göttingen 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar deals in detail with the sixth century but from the angle of catastrophes and contingencies.

9 See n. 24 below. In an interesting recent discussion Anthony Kaldellis argues against the current emphasis on discourse analysis: ‘Late antiquity dissolves’, in a Marginalia Forum on Late Antiquity and the Humanities (http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/late-antiquity-and-the-new-humanities-an-open-forum/ Sept. 18, 2015). It is worth noting that Brown's World of Late Antiquity is very much a work of social history rather than discourse analysis.

10 Though see Kelly, C., Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass. 2004)Google Scholar. In contrast the nature of the late antique and early Byzantine economy has been well represented, for instance by Banaji, J., Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity. Gold, Labour and Aristocratic Dominance (Oxford 2007)Google Scholar and Sarris, P., Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for social and economic issues under Justinian see Bell, P. N., Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian. Its Nature, Management and Mediation (Oxford 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Below, n. 28.

12 Honoré, T., Tribonian (London 1978)Google Scholar.

13 Arnold, J. J., Theoderic and The Imperial Roman Restoration (Cambridge 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Though see Athanassiadi, P., Vers la pensée unique. La montée de l’intolérance dans l’Antiquité tardive (Paris 2010)Google Scholar, for whom Justinian's reign was a ‘Rubicon’ leading to Byzantine bigotry.

15 Especially in Kaldellis, A., Hellenism in Byzantium. The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and see Kaldellis, , Ethnography after Antiquity. Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature (Philadelphia 2013)Google Scholar. Kaldellis, , The Byzantine Republic. People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, Mass. 2016)Google Scholar puts a sustained argument for Byzantium as Roman, with a further volume promised, but Kaldellis nevertheless also floats the idea of an ‘early Byzantium’ starting in the second century AD (204, n. 15).

16 Cf. Cameron, Averil, Agathias (Oxford 1970)Google Scholar; ‘Early Byzantine Kaiserkritik: two case histories’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 3 (1977) 1–17.

17 On which see Macrides, R., ed., History as Literature in Byzantium, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications 15 (Farnham 2010)Google Scholar; Wolf Liebeschuetz argues for a qualitative decline in sixth-century literature, which he ascribes not least to the influence of Christianity: Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G., The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford 2001)Google Scholar.

18 For which see Nilsson, I., ‘To narrate the events of the past. Byzantine historians, and historians on Byzantium’, in Burke, J. (ed.), Byzantine Narrative. Papers in Honour of Roger Scott (Melbourne 2006) 47–58Google Scholar.

19 See the collection of papers in Antiquité tardive 8 (2000); views of the Buildings now have to be revised in the light of work by F. Montinaro on the two editions of the text, for which see Montinaro, Études sur l’évergétisme impérial à Byzance (Diss. École Pratique des Hautes Études-Sorbonne, 2013), and further discussion in Montinaro, ‘Power, taste and the outsider: Procopius and the Buildings revisited’, in Greatrex, G. and Elton, H. (eds), Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity (Farnham 2016) 191–206Google Scholar, in a section consisting of four papers under the title ‘Procopius and literature in the sixth-century eastern empire’.

20 Expected: a Brill Companion to Procopius and the papers from a conference on Procopius held in Oxford in January, 2014, in press as C. Lillington-Martin and E. Turquois (eds), Procopius: (New) Interpretations and Methodologies (Ashgate), with several papers on literary approaches and a particularly relevant contribution by P. van Nuffelen, ‘The wor(l)ds of Procopius’.

21 Many interesting papers in Greatrex and Elton (eds), Shifting Genres; a major research project led by Peter Van Nuffelen is directed at the subject of historiography in this period, and see Van Nuffelen, , ‘Greek secular historians in late antiquity’, review-discussion, Histos 9 (2016), ix-xv (online)Google Scholar.

22 Kaldellis, A., Procopius of Caesarea. Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity (Philadelphia 2004)Google Scholar, discussed by Averil Cameron, ‘Writing about Procopius then and now’, in Lillington-Martin and Turquois (eds), Procopius: (New) Interpretations and Methodologies, with R. Scott, ‘The literature of sixth-century Byzantium’, in D. Sakel (ed.), Byzantine Culture, Papers from the Conference, Byzantine Days of Istanbul, May 21–23, 2010 (Ankara 2014) 45–57; see also Nilsson, I. and Scott, R., ‘Towards a new history of Byzantine literature: the case of historiography’, Classica et Mediaevalia 58 (2007) 319–32Google Scholar.

23 See Formisano, M., ‘Towards an aesthetic paradigm of late antiquity’, Antiquité Tardive 15 (2007) 277–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with Formisano, , ‘Late antiquity: new departures’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature, ed. Hexter, R. J. and Townsend, D. (Oxford 2012) 509–34Google Scholar and cf. Formisano, M. and Führer, T., with Stock, A.-L. (eds), Décadence. ‘Decline and Fall’ or ‘Other Antiquity’? (Heidelberg 2014)Google Scholar, though see Van Nuffelen, ‘The wor(l)ds of Procopius’.

24 See e.g. Clark, E. A., ‘From patristics to early Christian studies,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, (ed.) Harvey, S. A. and Hunter, D. G. (Oxford 2008) 8–41Google Scholar; M. Vessey, ‘Literature, patristics, early Christian writing,’ The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, 55–58; Martin, D. B. and Miller, P. Cox (eds), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies. Gender, Asceticism and Historiography (Durham, NC 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Vessey, M., in Burrus, V., Haines-Eitzen, K., Lim, R., Vessey, M. and Clark, E. A., review-discussion of E. A. Clark, History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass. 2004) 812–36, at 826–30, refers to ‘the new intellectual history’Google Scholar.

25 M. Humphries, with D. M. Gwynn, ‘The sacred and the secular: the presence or absence of Christian religious thought in secular writing in the late antique west’, and Jeffreys, E., ‘Literary genre or religious apathy? The presence or absence of theology and religious thought in secular writing in the late antique east’, both in Gwynn, D. M. and Bangert, S. (eds), Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity, Late Antique Archaeology 6 (Leiden 2010) 493–509 and 511–22Google Scholar. Scepticism: Sarris, P., Santo, M. Dal and Booth, P., eds., An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity(Leiden 2011)Google Scholar; Santo, M. Dal, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great (Oxford 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaldellis, A., ‘The hagiography of doubt and scepticism’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography II: Genres and Contexts, ed. Efthymiades, S. (Farnham 2014) 453–77Google Scholar. Kaldellis’ many publications also seek to identify dissidence, following his penchant for the Straussian dissident philosopher and intellectual (Cameron, ‘Writing about Procopius then and now’). Atheism in the classical world: Whitmarsh, T., Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (London 2016)Google Scholar.

26 Against: Cameron, Averil, Byzantine Matters (Princeton 2014) chap. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic.

27 ‘Euphemism and discursive amelioration will never fully occlude the fact that the later Roman Empire (sic) was the site of tremendous and unparalleled religious conflict’: in Kaldellis, ‘Late antiquity dissolves’ (as cited in n. 9 above).

28 Gaddis, M., There is No Crime for Those who Have Christ (Berkeley 2005)Google Scholar; Drake, H. A. (ed.), Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices (Aldershot 2006)Google Scholar; Hahn, J., Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt : Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II.) (Berlin 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Hahn, S. Emmel and U. Gotter (eds), From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (2008); Sizgorich, T., Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia 2009)Google Scholar.

29 Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians; stress on the role of apocalypticism in late antiquity points in the same direction: e.g. Brandes, W., ‘Anastasios ho dikoros. Endzeiterwartung und Kaiserkritik in Byzanz um 500 n. Chr.‘, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 90 (1997) 24–63Google Scholar.

30 Indicative of this development is the fact that the work of such a leading Roman historian as Fergus Millar has focused for the last ten years on the themes of identity and community in the Near East in the period from the fifth to the seventh centuries, and especially the interplay of Greek and Syriac: his many essays on the subject are now collected in Millar, F., Empire, Church and Society in the Late Roman Near East: Greeks, Jews, Syrians and Saracens, Late Antique History and Religion 10 (Leuven 2015)Google Scholar, and see Millar, , A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408–450) (Berkeley 2006)Google Scholar. Also indicative, and with longer chronological span, is Borrut, A.et al. (ed), Le Proche-Orient de Justinien aux Abassides : peuplement et dynamiques spatiales, Actes du colloque ‘Continuités de l’occupation entre les périodes byzantine et abbasside au Proche-Orient, VIIe-IXe siècles,’ Paris, 18–20 octobre 2007 (Turnhout 2011)Google Scholar.

31 On which see Silverstein, A. and Stroumsa, G. G. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions (Oxford 2016)Google Scholar, with Stroumsa, G. G., The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford 2016)Google Scholar; this growing subject is supported by newly funded chairs at both Oxford and Cambridge.

32 The general case is set out very clearly by Hoyland, R. G., ‘Islam as a late antique religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Johnson, S. F., (Oxford 2012), 1053–77Google Scholar; in terms of Qur’anic analysis a key scholar in this regard is Angelika Neuwirth, for instance see her Der Koran als Text der Spätantike: ein europäischer Zugang, 3rd ed. (Berlin 2013). For a different take on Islam as late antique see al-Azmeh, A., The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and his People (Cambridge 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Key publications include Flusin, B., Saint Anastase le Perse et l’histoire de la Palestine au début du VIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris 1992)Google Scholar and more recently Howard-Johnston, J., Witnesses to a World Crisis. Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford 2010)Google Scholar, and see Dagron, G. and Déroche, V., ‘Juifs et chrétiens dans l’Orient du VIIe siècle’, Travaux et Mémoires 11 (1991) 17–273Google Scholar and Cameron, Averil, ‘Blaming the Jews: the seventh-century invasions of Palestine in context’, Travaux et Mémoires 14 (Mélanges Gilbert Dagron) (2002) 57–78Google Scholar.

34 Thus Sarris, P., Empires of Faith. The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500–700 (Oxford 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, combines a Mediterranean-wide perspective, discussion of the fall of the Roman empire in the west and a periodization of 500–700, which includes the rise of Islam.

35 Brown, P., The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200–1000 (Oxford 1996, 2nd ed. 2003)Google Scholar.

36 Fowden, G., Before and After Muhammad. The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Philip Rousseau notes other examples of this periodization in Can ‘late antiquity’ be saved?’, his contribution to the Marginalia Open Forum (as cited in n. 9 above), albeit without the determinedly eastern focus.

37 http://www.mizanproject.org, accessed 29.9.15, citing Fowden's book with approval as a way of combating the ‘clash of civilizations’ approach. The contrary impulse can also be found in some recent publications on late antiquity which lay stress on violence. Given the fraught nature of the subject of Islamic origins, not to mention that of the date of the Qur’an, it is hardly surprising if late antiquity is pressed into service for other ends.

38 For this tendency in general, see Averil Cameron, ‘The absence of Byzantium’, Nea Hestia, Jan. 2008, 4–59 (English and Greek).

39 See Haldon, J. F., The Empire that Would Not Die. The Paradox of East Roman Survival, c. 640–740 CE, The Carl Newell Jackson Lectures at Harvard, 2014, (Cambridge Mass. 2016)Google Scholar, in comparison with Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century. The Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge 1990, rev. ed. 1997).

40 See especially Menze, V.-L., Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Christians in the Sasanian empire: Becker, A. H., Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: the School of Nisibis and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, P., ‘We have no King but Christ’: Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c.400–585) (Oxford 2011)Google Scholar; Wood, , The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq (Oxford 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Chalcedon (AD 451): R. Price and M. Gaddis, trans. with introduction, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols., Translated Texts for Historians 45 (Liverpool 2005); Constantinople II (553): R. Price, trans. with notes and an introduction, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553: with Related Texts on the Three Chapters Controversy, 2 vols., Translated Texts for Historians 51 (Liverpool 2009); Sixth Council (681): M. Jankowiak and R. Price, trans. with notes, The Acts of the Third Council of Constantinople (681), Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, in press); for sixth-century ecclesiastical issues see also Chazelle, C. and Cubitt, C. (eds), The Crisis of the Oikoumene : the Three Chapters and the Failed Quest for Unity in the Sixth-Century Mediterranean (Turnhout 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Lateran council: Concilium Lateranense a. 649 celebratum, ed. Riedinger, Rudolf, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum 2.1 (Berlin 1984)Google Scholar; Price, R., with Booth, P. and Cubitt, C., trans. with notes, The Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649, Translated Texts for Historians 61 (Liverpool 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Syriac Life of Maximus: Brock, S. P., ‘An early Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor’, Analecta Bollandiana 91 (1973), 299–346CrossRefGoogle Scholar (though not accepted by all); see also Allen, P. and Neil, B. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor (Oxford 2016)Google Scholar, containing in particular an important new chronology of the many works of Maximus and of his own movements, drawing on the Syriac Life, by M. Jankowiack and P. Booth, ‘A new date-list of the works of Maximus the Confessor’, The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, 19–83; Booth, P., Crisis of Empire. Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Antiquity(Berkeley 2014)Google Scholar (a book by a historian which takes full account of the theological issues of the period); redating of the Monothelite controversy: see Jankowiack, M., ‘The invention of Dyothelitism’, Studia Patristica 63 (2013) 335–42Google Scholar.

44 Theology is played down by Brubaker, L. and Haldon, J. F., Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850. A History (Cambridge 2011), especially 782–87Google Scholar, and compare also the headings and arrangement of material in their earlier presentation of the sources: Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: The Sources, an Annotated Survey (Aldershot 2001); both books are written from a historical-materialist perspective.

45 It should be pointed out that in many archaeological publications about the Near East, especially by Israeli scholars, the term ‘Byzantine’ is used descriptively to refer to the chronological period supposedly ending with the advent of Islamic rule, in a periodization that makes a sharp break with the Arab conquests; however recent research emphasizes continuity into the Islamic period: see Walmsley, A., Early Islamic Syria. An Archaeological Assessment (London 2007)Google Scholar.