New Identities: Pagan and Christian Narratives from the Roman Empire

ROM A N IM PERI AL I DENTI TI ES I N THE EA RLY CHRI STI AN ERA

Through the close study of texts, Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era examines the overlapping emphases and themes of two cosmopolitan and multiethnic cultural identities emerging in the early centuries of the Common Era – a trans-empire alliance of the Elite and the “Christians.” Exploring the cultural representations of these social identities, Judith Perkins shows that they converge around an array of shared themes: violence, the body, prisons, courts, and time. Locating Christian representations within their historical context and in dialogue with other contemporary representations, it asks why do Christian representations share certain emphases? To what do they respond, and to whom might they appeal? For example, does the increasing Christian emphasis on a fully material human resurrection in the early centuries respond to the evolution of a harsher and more status based judicial system? Judith Perkins argues that Christians were so successful in suppressing their social identity as inhabitants of the Roman Empire, that historical documents and testimony have been sequestered as “Christian,” rather than recognized as evidence for the social dynamics enacted during the period. Her discussion offers a stimulating survey of interest to students of ancient narrative, cultural studies and gender. Judith Perkins is professor of Classics and Humanities at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut. She is the author of The Suffering Self (Routledge 1995).

ROMAN IMPERIAL IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA

Judith Perkins

First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 100016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Judith Perkins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perkins, Judith, 1944– Roman imperial identities in the early Christian era / Judith Perkins. p. cm. 1. Church history–Primitive and early church, ca. 30–600. 2. Rome–History–Empire, 30 B.C.–476 A.D. 3. Romans–Ethnic identity. 4. Rome–Ethnic relations. 5. Christians–Italy–Rome–History. 6. Identification (Religion) I. Title. BR170.P47 2009 937'.07–dc22 2008007757 ISBN 0-203-89236-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0-415-39744-8 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-89236-4 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-39744-5 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-89236-7 (ebk)

RIM A L. BRAUER M.D. PRO QUO PRIUS HABEAM GRATI AS ?

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Permissions

viii ix

Introduction

1

1

Cosmopolitan identities

17

2

False deaths and new bodies

45

3

Constructing a patriarchal elite

62

4

Resurrection and judicial bodies

90

5

Place, space and voice

107

6

Trimalchio: Transformations and possibilities

127

7

Resurrection and social perspectives

144

8

The rhetoric of the maternal body

159

9

Competing chronologies

172

Works cited Index

182 205

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank the people and institutions that helped me in this project. I am fortunate to belong to several communities of scholars who have supported, challenged, and enriched my work. For the past fifteen years, the Society for Biblical Literature’s Ancient Fiction and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative Group has provided an ideal forum for critique and stimulus. I am especially indebted to Richard Pervo, Jo-Ann Brant, Dennis MacDonald, Charles Hedrick, Ron Hock, and Christine Thomas for their ideas and perspectives, which continue to inform my writings. I also thank Gerhard van den Heever for inviting me to join the Redescribing Graeco-Roman Antiquity Project. The members of this project provide another energetic and enlivening community, and I am grateful to them. Also, special thanks to my colleagues at Saint Joseph College, Dennis Barone, Kerry Driscoll, Shyamala Raman, and Julius Rubin, whose collegiality has been an ongoing support. I also thank Saint Joseph College for granting me a sabbatical leave to work on this study. I have also benefited from opportunities to present my work. I thank the Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche for the invitation to speak at the conference, Il contributo delle Scienze Storiche allo studio del Nuovo Testamento. I am also grateful to Professors Michael Paschalis and Stavros A. Frangoulidis, University of Crete, for their hospitality when I participated in the 2003 Rethymno International Conference on the Ancient Novel. Thanks also to Ross Kramer for inviting me to the Culture and Religion of the Ancient Mediterranean (CRAM) seminar at Brown University and to the seminar participants for their valuable criticisms and suggestions. I owe a special debt of gratitude to those willing to read and comment on portions of my manuscript. I thank Dennis Barone, Richard Pervo, Kent Rigsby, Gerhard van den Heever. I am of course responsible for the errors and omissions that remain. I also thank Karen Schenkenfelder for her keen insight and editorial acumen. My student assistant, Praisely MacNamara, provided valuable assistance. I also thank the persons who buoyed me along the way: Dee Bailey, Louise Bailey, Sheila and Peter Gillin, Barbara Kennelly, Karen and Tim Largay, Bland Maloney, Edward Swain, Cathy and Greg Oneglia. My deepest debt of gratitude belongs to my sons, Alexander and Austin, my daughter, Laela, and most especially to my husband, Brewster, for their good will and encouragement when I was too often too busy. viii

PERMISSIONS

Portions of the book have been previously published and I thank those who gave permission for me to use them: A version of Chapter 2 was published in Religion and Theology 13 (2006) “Fictive Scheintod and Resurrection Discourse”, 396–418. (Copyright Brill, reprinted with permission). Material from Chapter 5 was published in Mimesis and Intertextuality in Early Christian Literature, ed. Dennis MacDonald, Trinity International Press (2001), 87–106. (Copyright Continuum Press, reprinted with permission); in Space in the Ancient Novel: Ancient Narrative: Supplementum 1, eds. Michael Pachalis Stavros Frangoulidis (2002), 118–131; in A People’s History of Christianity, Vol. 2, The Early Centuries (2005) eds. Virginia Burrus and Rebecca Lyman, Fortress Press, 47–69. (Copyright Fortress Press, reprinted with permission). A version of Chapter 6 was published in Metaphor and the Ancient Novel: Ancient Narrative: Supplementum 4, eds. Stephen Harrison, Michael Pachalis and Stavros Frangoulidis (2005), 132–168. Chapter 7 was published in Il Contributo Delle Scienze Storiche Allo Studio Del Nuovo Testamento (2005) eds. E. Dal Covolo, E., and R. Fusco. (Copyright Atti E Documenti Pontificio Comitato Di Scienze Storiche; 19. Città del Vaticano: Libreria editrice vaticana reprinted with permission) and in Ancient Novel, Jewish and Christian Fiction, eds. Jo-Ann Brant et al. (SBL 2005), 217–238. (Copyright the Society for Biblical Literatures, reprinted with permission). Chapter 8 was published in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, eds. Todd Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele (Brill 2007), 313–332. (Copyright Brill, reprinted with permission). I would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: Harvard University Press for: Dio Chrysostom Vol. III LCL 358, trans. J. W. Cohoon and H. Lamar Crosby, 1940; Chariton LCL 481, trans. G. P. Gould 1995; Plutarch: Moralia: Vol. X LCL 321, trans. H. N. Fowler 1936.

ix

PERMISSIONS

Oxford University Press for: The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (1972), ed. Herbert Murusillo; The Apocryphal New Testament In English translation (1993), ed. J.K. Elliott. University of California Press for Collected Ancient Greek Novels (1989), ed. B.P. Reardon. Thanks are due to Brigitte Egger, Saundra Schwartz and Akihiko Watanabe for permission to quote from their unpublished Ph.D. dissertations.

x

INTRODUCTION

Marc Angenot, an architect of contemporary discourse studies, calls himself “a memorialist, not a historian” (Barsky and Angenot 2004: 190). He prefers the title memorialist because, he explains, historiography tends to generate narratives that point toward a meaningful future. Angenot declines a role that suggests an intention to project answers for the future, but as a memorialist, he can look back on moments in history when groups of people “have been in the same position we are now, trying to make sense of a world” (Barsky and Angenot 2004: 190). In this study of the early Roman imperial period, I too consider myself a memorialist, looking back at a historical moment with similarities to our own. For all the many differences, the early centuries CE seem to offer a moment comparable to our contemporary situation. As we find ourselves attempting to adjust to new universalizing schemes of culture and power, to “globalization,” we share the position of Roman subjects as they learned to accommodate themselves to a new, larger world of empire. They also had to adjust to larger frames of reference and more extensive networks of relationships, and hone new identities and self-understandings suitable for a more expansive social, cultural, and political world. In an insightful exegesis, Sheldon Pollock reminds us that our modern, accustomed, local ways of making culture – what he calls the practices of our “vernacular millennium” – themselves replaced the cosmopolitan practices of the Roman Empire. Pollock suggests the relevance of remembering earlier transitions to cosmopolitanism:1 These great transformations in the course of the last two millennia – from the old cosmopolitan to the vernacular, and from the vernacular to the new and disquieting cosmopolitan of today – resulted from choices made by people at different times and places, for very complex reasons. Studying the history of such choices may have something important, perhaps even urgent, to tell us about choices available to us in the future. (2002: 15) With Angenot, I expect the future will have to sort itself out, but in this study I intend to look to the past to try to glimpse how different social constituencies reacted to 1

INTRODUCTION

the experience of moving from, in Pollock’s terms, the “smaller place” to the “larger world” of empire culture. Remembering their experiences and strategies in dealing with their new cosmopolitanism just might have some use for us as we reconceptualize ourselves and our polities in the wider frame of a global cosmopolitanism. My discussion will focus on two cosmopolitan trans-empire social entities that evolved synchronically with the consolidation of the Roman Empire and within the same geographical frame: a trans-empire coalition of elite joined by shared privilege and status and newly refined cultural and educational pursuits, and Christians connected by shared religious and moral beliefs and practices. In retrospect the emergence of Christianity looks more significant for the course of future history, but in the opening moments of the new cosmopolitanism, this significance was not apparent. In their early stages, in the opening moments of the new cosmopolitanism of empire, these cosmopolitan unities comprising elites and Christians were both evolving social configurations taking shape in the same cultural and social world and in the same time frame. And at this point, the elite alliance would have appeared to have much the edge. In choosing to examine the emergence of these two cosmopolitan cultural identities, I do not intend to imply that cultural identities are static and stable. Contemporary cultural theorists have persuasively demonstrated that “identities are not fixed a priori,” but emerge within the context of an individual’s multiple overlapping social relationships and locations (Hoy 2004: 203).2 A particular identity is always only a partial articulation of the many possible identity positions a subject holds in his or her ongoing social life. Gillian Rose explains that any notion of a unitary essential identity will be undercut by recognizing the “mobile, fusing axes of identity within which individuals are complexly, contingently, multiply and contradictorily positioned” in the course of their many and various social interactions (1997: 185). These commentators call attention to the inherent heterogeneity of subjects as part of their project to subvert and destabilize the binary logic that traditionally has been utilized in conceptualizing identity, such as male/female, barbarian/Greek, Christians/Romans, elite/non-elite. Such dualisms, based on a simple dichotomy of same/other, are perceived as belonging to the machinery of cultural domination. They police boundaries between artificially fixed identities and thereby structure power relations. This language of difference typically works as a language of power, as one side of the binary seeks to establish its right to privilege over the “other.” For dominance to be established through an us/them dichotomy, the inherently variegated and fragmented nature of human identity must be obscured and subordinated to power aspirations. In this context, then, to define someone as a “Christian” or an “elite Greek Roman” is to elide and occlude the many other components (sexual, ethnic, economic, political, religious) that contribute to and complicate the subject’s identity. I recognize that this is the case, and my discussion does not intend to reauthorize binary thinking, but rather to observe its effects. My discussion seeks to investigate the discursive processes used by conglomerates of people to fashion 2

INTRODUCTION

for themselves a cultural identity and thereby make for themselves a claim to social power and authority in the new times of empire. These identities do not denote a reality but are the product of a group of persons’ conviction that they share essential qualities that consolidate them as a community and distinguish them from non-members of that community. I understand that the group identities some groups were so assiduously working to construct misrepresent and cover over the reality of persons’ multidimensional and complex plurality of identity positions. Indeed, “Christians” were so successful in their project to suppress their multiple identities that even today their social identity as inhabitants of the Roman Empire is underplayed. In my discussion, I hope to destabilize this polarity between Christians and non-Christians, which has proved so enormously influential in structuring discussions of the early imperial period. It has allowed the interconnections between Christians and people contemporaneous with them in their social world to be obscured, with the result that historical testimony that could prove useful for understanding the social dynamics of the early imperial period has been sequestered as “Christian” rather than recognized and utilized as evidence for understanding the social and political negotiations being enacted during the period. As the Carthaginian Tertullian insists in his late-second-century Apology, Christians share in the life of their communities. They enjoy the same food, visit the same markets and baths, and engage in the same trades. Tertullian writes, perhaps ironically, “We are not Brahmins nor Indian gymnosophists, dwellers in the forests, and exiles from ordinary life” (1931: 42). A basic defining characteristic of the Christians surveyed in this study, one that is too often disregarded, is that they are inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Their writings need to be recognized as productions of that empire and as being in dialogue with other writings of this period adjusting to the enlarged perspective of cosmopolitanism. While not asserting the reality of the dichotomizing identities under construction in the period, my analysis does seek to examine how the emergence of these cultural identities refigured and realigned the period’s social and political power grid. As Jean Paul Nancy suggests, every myth of community is premised upon a claim for “essence,” a claim that is, in fact, a will for power, a will to acquire for that community a share in or realignment of power relations (1991: xi).3 The Christians and the imperial elite shared a social world at a time of social and political restructuring. With their group identities and community self-representations, they made a claim for their presence and position in their evolving social and political world. Their cultural representations sometimes will be seen to converge around an array of shared themes: status change, death, the body, courts, and time. By observing how these social constituencies manipulated these themes, I hope to achieve a clearer perspective on the dialectical connections contributing to the cultural forms and identities that were taking shape in the period. In my discussion, the term Christian will be used to refer to all those people who would have applied this self-designation to themselves. In the early imperial centuries, various versions of Christianity were circulating with diverging beliefs 3

INTRODUCTION

and practices. Some of these versions would later be rejected for doctrinal reasons, but this rejection does not affect the historical importance of their cultural texts for disclosing the positions and attitudes of Christians of the earlier period. My methodology takes its direction from Frederic Jameson’s dictum for the study of cultural representation: “Always historicize” (1981: 9). That is, cultural representations must be located in the specificity of their historical moment and its material conditions; there are no autonomous cultural productions. My examination will locate Christian representations within the historical circumstances of the first two and a half centuries CE and in dialogue with other contemporary representations. To this end, social and historical issues will be highlighted and transcendent concerns deemphasized.4 My questions will be these: Why do Christian representations share certain emphases? To whom do they respond, and to whom might they appeal? Whose interests are being served or interrupted by Christian representations? To a certain extent, these questions are obviously political, but to have acquired a place in history attests that a group has acted politically, has obtained and manipulated power. In its historical emergence, Christianity was not only a religious entity, but a political and social one as well. In the contemporary milieu, the interrelation of these aspects was taken for granted; the fact that these connections have since been disassociated testifies to the success of Christian categorizing. Within this historical paradigm, “Christians” will be used to connote all the people who claimed this self-understanding, notwithstanding doctrinal differences that would be seen as significant at a later period. At the same time as I attempt to dismantle the polarity between Christian and non-Christian inhabitants of the early empire, I may appear to create another between the elite and the non-elite. Commentators warn that dualistic terms like elite and non-elite help to reify these polarities as natural and fixed (Law 1997: 109). Recognizing that these are not natural categories, I shall nevertheless use the term elite to designate a group identity evolving across the empire that united persons from different geographical locations and ethnic backgrounds, with “power, status and wealth” (Garnsey 1970: 258). During the Late Hellenistic and early Roman period in the Greek east, a number of elite families had acquired immense wealth and power and as Otto van Nijf describes, “re-invented themselves as a separate status group, as an (ideally) hereditary ordo of honoratiores claiming to be the repositories in the community of genos, arete and chremata (pedigree, virtue and money)” (1997: 134).5 An increasing differentiation between the elite and the others in their social world was occurring in this period, and this dichotomy was in the process of being fixed in the Roman legal code through the juridical dichotomy between the humiliores and honestiores, the “more humble” and the “more honorable.”6 The latter designation encompassed Roman senators, knights, and municipal decurions from the provinces, as well as military veterans. Thus, with the possible exception of veterans, it was reserved for empire’s wealthy and prominent individuals. Humiliores was used to designate all those other free persons not 4

INTRODUCTION

included among the honestiores. In 212 CE, Caracalla extended Roman citizenship across the empire through the Constitutio Antoniniana, thereby increasing the numbers of people falling within these categories. However, long before this change, Roman legal procedures had been influencing provincial legal practices (Carrié 2005: 274).7 Walter Scheidel points out that the humiliores/honestiores binary did not strictly correlate with economic worth. Wealth could not have been completely monopolized by the honestiores, who, he argues, would have accounted for only about 1 percent of the imperial population. In Scheidel’s words, “In the eyes of the government, the other 99 percent of the population may have been ‘humble,’ but they can hardly all have been of modest means” (2006: 42). Scheidel proposes that a larger group must have occupied the economic midrange than is usually envisioned in historical discussions.8 He states, “It is perfectly possible to reconcile the dominance of a disproportionately affluent elite with the presence of a substantial ‘middle”’ (2006: 54). Scheidel makes a persuasive case for envisioning a substantial group of people with economic means who were not honestiores. As all dichotomizing binaries are, the humiliores/honestiores division would have been porous, and its primary use was in the sphere of criminal law. Nevertheless, I will argue that the polarity humiliores/honestiores discloses an ideological endeavor to institute a hierarchy dividing the most privileged people in terms of wealth and status from those below them9 – as Scheidel calculated, setting off the 1 percent of the population from the other 99 percent. Scheidel offers a definition that underscores the connection between the honestiores and the mechanics of empire: “Honestior was perhaps not so much a legal as a functional category that lumped together the (free-born) agents of the imperial center” (2006: 43). Scheidel’s point that it is “absurd” to classify all humiliores among the lower classes is important, but perhaps it is even more important to note that the state was categorizing all persons who were not its “agents,” usually its wealthy, even “disproportionately affluent” agents (senators, knights, municipal leaders), as humiliores, as “humble,” as tenuores, persons having less presence in society. The perspective embedded in the humiliores/honestiores polarity indicates that a new differential status-based identity system was taking shape during the period. Neither a rich freed man nor a wealthy trader nor a poor free citizen (except a poor veteran) would qualify among the honestiores. I will use “elite” to designate the trans-empire group identity evolving in the early empire of persons bound together by ties of privilege, education, culture, and connections with the imperial center and by the shared self-identity these ties constituted. It is the creation and dissemination of this ideological identity that I will focus on in my discussion of the elite. In the early imperial period across the empire ties of privilege were uniting persons from various geographical locations into a social unity with shared perspectives and goals. Some Christians may have qualified for inclusion. Martyr acts from the second and third centuries already describe individual martyrs as being of high status. And Eusebius describes whole cities in Asia Minor in the early fourth 5

INTRODUCTION

century as Christian. This would indicate that their magistrates were Christians and thus members of the honestiores (Euseb, Hist. eccl. 8.11; Rapp 2005: 183). Before Constantine, however, the number of Christians was still quite small, and it is likely that few of this number were elite (Hopkins 1998: 185–226).10 My examination proceeds on the premise that in the social and political environment of the early empire, both trans-empire collectivities, comprising on the one hand Christians and on the other the Greek imperial elite, should be recognized as affected by the same event: the move from the smaller world to the larger world of empire. What particularly interests me about this earlier historical moment of a transition to cosmopolitanism is the discursive transformation that accompanied it. Michel Foucault employs the terms discourse and discursive practices to refer to the historically situated frames of reference that in every historical epoch function to legitimate what counts as knowledge, as the “sayable” and “thinkable.” He uses discourse rather than ideology to differentiate his understanding from that offered, for example, in Althusser’s definition of ideology, as “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1972: 145). Foucault resists the implications that a “real” exists separable from the networks of power/knowledge operating through a historically situated set of discourses. Discursive networks may empower “different” conceptions for human existence in different historical moments, but no “real” conditions exist outside or beyond such discursive instantiations (Hoy 2004: 196–7). Individuals come to understand themselves and their worlds within the frames provided by their culture’s discursive paradigm, its cultural and social productions. Subjects do not exist apart from these discourses; rather, they come into being through them. In his studies of madness, prisons, and sexuality, Foucault practiced what he calls historical genealogy. He traced out the places where discursive regimes had changed and how these shifts affected notions of human identity and legitimate knowledge. By showing these transformations, Foucault intended to open up possibilities for “thinking otherwise.”11 He hoped that by showing the contingencies of previous human norms, his work would function to unsettle conceptions that there is any natural norm for human being – any single answer to the question of what it means to be a human (Hoy 2004: 90). In his genealogies, Foucault traced out the discursive disjunctions between historical moments. He points to moments when what had previously been unthinkable or unsayable became instead self-evident, universal, necessary, the natural way the world works. And this new knowledge produces new formations of knowledge and power, as one discursive frame replaces another. Foucault refused to speak of the “origins” of discursive formations, for this term might imply causes, and he held the beginnings of discursive transformations to be too volatile, diffuse, and multiform to be contained by causal language. Causal language is inadequate “to render apparent the polymorphous interweaving of correlations” that initiate discursive change (Foucault et al. 1991: 58).12 No person or single social formation is responsible for a discursive rupture or a new discursive emergence. As Foucault 6

INTRODUCTION

notes, “No one can glory in it [the emergence], since it always occurs in the interstice” (1984: 85), “Nothing is fundamental …. There are only reciprocal relations …” (1984: 247). Social power occurs in micropoints across the whole social system, and so does its shifts. Foucault’s conception of the ineluctable cycle of power’s reformulations has met with both skepticism and dejection, but it also has been recognized as a “source of optimism” (Khan 2004: para. 17). By showing how past discursive formations have changed, altered, been transformed, Foucault’s genealogies assert the potentiality for social change and reformed power relations. This recognition assuages the sense of inevitability and permanence that accompanies discursive formations while they are in operation. The good news of Foucauldian analysis is that every power formation can be interrupted and restyled. A discursive rupture, an epistemic break, accompanied the Roman Empire’s transition to cosmopolitanism. In this study, I shall try to glimpse in the interstices of the period’s cultural representations, some of the correlations, connections, and encounters that may have helped to shape this earlier discursive transformation and its restyled paradigms for human being. My examination has no pretensions of being comprehensive. Marc Angenot’s discursive analysis of a single year in French history, eighteen hundred and eighty-nine, exceeded eleven hundred pages.13 In the dense web of interwoven correlations and connections that constitute the discursive world of the early imperial period, I hope only to indicate some of the alignments and realignments, the associations and disconnections that hint at a cultural contestation and that “a different way of dividing true and false” was in the process of being constructed (Foucault 2000: 233). The traditional partitioning of Christian sources from imperial history has allowed even some of the most acute historical examinations of the early empire to underplay its discursive transformation. Seeing Christianity as one thing and imperial society as another misconstrues the dynamic of this period that experienced far-reaching discursive rearrangements. To better appreciate this dynamic, it will be necessary to re-weave the social and political fabric of the Roman imperial period to include Christianity more seamlessly within that fabric. In his meticulous and erudite study Provincial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Clifford Ando has argued that the Roman Empire managed to survive for such a long period of time, not by virtue of “Roman power alone” but by “a slowly realized consensus regarding Rome’s right to maintain social order and to establish a normative political culture” (2000: xi). Ando emphasizes how important the imperial cult was to achieving this consensus through its promulgation of the emperor’s charisma across the empire. He also delineates in compelling detail how Roman administrative practices using myriad nodes of entry insinuated Roman power into subjects’ daily lives. Through activities such as receiving judicial decisions, paying taxes, and registering for the census, individuals were continually reminded they were Roman subjects. Rome also employed multiple media to impress its presence, e.g. coins, months named for the imperial family inserted into 7

INTRODUCTION

local calendars, inscriptions of imperial proclamations, and the imperial milestones marking roads.14 Ando argues that all these practices accustomed individuals to recognize themselves as Roman subjects. Through such means, these “ideological state apparatuses” (using Althusser’s terms; Ando 2000: 41), Rome successfully projected itself as uniquely suited and divinely destined for rule, and its subjects came to appreciate the stability, benefits, and prosperity Rome provided. Ando explains: To the extent that the divine order sanctioned Roman conquest, so far might one proceed – from the premises that the strong shall rule over the weak and the Romans govern well – to a belief that the Roman empire as institution of government and instrument of providence had both the right and the responsibility to maintain social order. That ultimate belief collapsed and obscured the arbitrariness of Roman domination and urged, by daily exposure and converse, the slow acceptance of the mechanisms of Roman governance as objective and institutional. The bureaucracy of Rome, its demands, its symbols, and its taxes, thus acquired “the opacity and permanence of things and escaped the grasp of individual consciousness and power.” (2000: 67–8, quoting Bourdieu 1977: 184) Ando describes this relationship holding between Rome and its provincial subjects as a “unity of self-interest” (2000: 68). I would suggest this unity more specifically was one of elite self-interest primarily advancing the interests of Rome and those elite provincials it supported and who in turn helped Rome manage its territories. I intend in my study to locate places where this self-interest was being both constructed and deconstructed during the period. Ando successfully delineates the web of legitimating practices entangling Roman subjects within an imperial ideology, but ideology obscures that the interests of some groups in a society are better served than those of others. Ideology weaves its magic spell to disguise and legitimate inequalities, not only for those who suffer them, but also equally for those who benefit.15 Ando persuasively explicates how power was naturalized in the Roman Empire, but for what end and for whose interests are not questions central to his project (Rose 2006: 124). He appreciates that Rome’s self-interest was paramount; he points out, for example, that urban areas were refurbished “to promote the uninterrupted transfer of local wealth to Rome” (2000: 13). That this imperial “unity of self-interest” primarily incorporated the interests of the coalition of elite governing the empire is not a focus of his examination. Ando makes a compelling case for the role played by the ideological state apparatuses in legitimating and maintaining Roman rule. The significance in his approach is to show how this legitimation transpired apart from what Althusser calls the “repressive state apparatuses,” the courts, the armies, and civil policing activities (Althusser 1972: 142–3). When these ideological and repressive 8

INTRODUCTION

apparatuses were working in tandem, as they invariably do, their combination would impress even more strongly on Roman subjects the sheer indomitability of Rome’s presence and power. During the early empire, the state was displaying its repressive might through increasingly violent enactments. As Roman emperors were using powerful media to present the public humiliation, defeat, and death of society’s “others,” they authorized themselves and their authority (Frilingos 2004: 22–38). In his Res Gestae, for example, Augustus reports that during his rule 10,000 gladiators fought in his shows and 3,500 animals died in staged hunts (22). Hadrian is reported to have sent 300 convicts (noxii) to die in the arena at one time. He dressed these criminals in gold-embroidered cloaks, gifts of Pharasmanes, the king of Iberia, as an insult to the king (S.H.A. Hadr 17.12 ). Elizabeth Castelli interprets such spectacular violence as a public manifestation of imperial power: “Bloodshed in the Roman arena – implicated as it was in the judicial, military, political and religious institutions of the empire – must be read in terms of the logic of imperial interests” (2004: 111).16 Public violence and the killing and maiming associated with it asserted the emperor’s might and power. Roman subjects were positioned as viewers of power’s violent repertoire, not only at the public games, but also in the imperial iconography (Frilingos 2004: 23–7). The Sebasteion of Aphrodisias, for example, with its rows of statues depicting subjected peoples (ethne), provides an early visual promotion of imperial power. Its representations utilize the traditional language of power: a male’s violent subjection of a woman. A nude Claudius stands over a defeated female Britannia, and Nero over a dying Armenia (Smith 1988: 50–77).17 This violent representational language repeats on the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. Here barbarian women are portrayed being dragged by their hair and stabbed to death by Roman soldiers. Jon Coulston notes the gratuitous nature of the violence in these images: “The slaughter of barbarians is … depicted with a violence and detail bordering on relish” (2003: 410). Rome proclaimed its presence and rule not only through its insistent bureaucratic practices, but also through repeated shows of violent repressive power. The combined effect of this array of ideological and repressive mechanisms must have made imperial rule appear unassailable. What possible resistance could be mounted against such a juggernaut of power? Under these conditions, it is all the more unexpected that an alternative site of power was able to evolve and institutionalize during this period. Even if this power site, the Christian Church, eventually aligns with imperial interests, its emergence initiates a break in the imperial elites’ monopoly on power and authority and indicates a fracture in the consensus ceding sole hegemony to their interests.18 The imperial discourse that dismissed so many imperial subjects was interrupted and to some extent redirected. The empire, as Ando posits, did last for a long time (2000: xiii),19 but not with the same thought world. Theodosius’ empire was not that of Augustus. Indeed, over the course of these imperial centuries, a seismic change occurred in the mental maps of numbers of people throughout the empire. Numerous individuals in late antiquity experienced themselves differently, 9

INTRODUCTION

had different self-understandings and life-world perceptions than people in the preceding centuries. Ando writes, “The emperors and governing class at Rome did not have to provide their world with Scripture, but merely with a system of concepts that could shape, and in doing so slowly unite the cultural scripts of its subjects” (2000: 23). Was this process so seamless? Rome might not have needed a Scripture, but without any doubt, its subjects’ cultural scripts were affected during this period by the proponents of the Christian Scripture. Averil Cameron’s comment continues to resonate: “As it [Christianity] came to prevail it provided plots according to which the majority of the inhabitants of the empire, and after that of Byzantium and the medieval West, lived out their lives” (1991: 13). Foucault has described how different historical epochs have a particular discourse or regime of truth that influence how individuals come to constitute and understand themselves as subjects. Such an epoch change seems to have occurred between the early and later imperial centuries, as people began to conceive of themselves differently and ask different sorts of questions about themselves and their lives.20 In this study, I hope to indicate some of the nodal points that contributed to transforming the cultural scripts of imperial subjects during this earlier moment of emerging cosmopolitanism.21 My contribution will focus on some of the details that accompany every discursive beginning. It will pay particular attention to the representational interactions and negotiations that were going on around cultural identities. It is my contention that in the interstices of the social dynamic producing these new cultural identities, one a trans-empire alliance of wealthy and high status individuals, the other mostly non-elite persons calling themselves Christians, a shift in cultural perspective was occurring that would sharply realign traditional notions for human and social being. Achieving a better understanding of this shift’s content and direction requires that more attention be given to the interrelated cultural maneuverings, self-positionings and thematic correlations shaping these new identities evolving as part of the adjustment to cosmopolitanism. This study provides a series of sketches rather than a comprehensive examination. A particular focus will be the interplay of the Christian emphases on the material body and its resurrection in the context of the period’s increasing social differentiation between the elite and the non-elite and the effects of this differentiation on the justice system. Much of my discussion will be grounded in the ancient novel form. This choice to some extent limits the range of my discussion, but it is repaid by locating the investigation in a contemporary literary form that was central to the identity negotiations taking place in the period. The novel’s striking chronological symmetry with the emergence of the new cosmopolitan cultural identities is one more indication of the cultural rearrangements occurring in the period. All extant examples of the novel were produced in the first three centuries CE, although fragments, as well as some Jewish examples of the genre, suggest its beginnings belong to the late Hellenistic period (Thomas 2003: 76–8).22 The novel form seems intimately connected with the transition to cosmopolitanism. In a perceptive study, David Konstan proposes its self-valorization as a defining 10

INTRODUCTION

characteristic of the Greek novel. In his words, the Greek novels “tend to go beyond cultural referent, whether in historical memory, mythical tradition, of the local performance codes of personal poetry” (1998: 14). Konstan links the novel’s cultural autonomy to the “internationalization” of the empire and the need for “global dissemination” (1998: 14–15). Konstan’s case is persuasive. The novel, like the evolving cultural identities of the period, was a cosmopolitan formation designed for the larger world of empire. What especially interests me about this prose fiction form is that it was so short lived.23 No extant example appears later than the fourth century. And its disappearance appears related to the discursive shift taking place in the period. Commentators suggest that the popularity of martyrologies and saints’ lives displaced the novels (Reardon 1991: 167). The ancient novel thus provides an example of a cultural form deauthorized by the changed power/knowledge frames of the Christian empire. This deauthorization suggests that the novel can provide a privileged entry into some of the perspectives that lost ground in the cultural struggles for meaning going on in the period. Konstan has pointed to the relative autonomy of the prose fiction form. Unbounded by tradition or genre requirements, the novels were free to introduce new subject matter and themes. Literary works, as they attempt to produce coherent and unified representations from disparate social and cultural frames of reference, often reveal through “eloquent silences” the cultural desires or preoccupations of a period (Bender 1987). In this study I will utilize the imperial prose fictions to disclose, through both their emphases and their silences, some of the social, cultural, and political preoccupations and desires of the early empire. That Christians and Jews as well as the imperial elites employ prose fictions to construct, promote, and promulgate their cultural identities, confirms the importance of the genre for the identity-constructing activities of the new cosmopolitanism (Thomas 2003).24 Emphasizing the Greek novel and other productions of the Second Sophistic tilts my discussion toward the eastern Greek speaking areas of the Empire. In the early imperial centuries, however, a large proportion of Christians, even those located in different areas, had connections with the eastern portions of the empire. The letter describing the martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, written to Christian congregations in Asia and Phrygia, for example, shows not only the ties maintained between these geographically separated Christian groups, but also indicates that many of the martyrs in Gaul had come from the East (Euseb. His. 5.1.3–2.8). In Rome, eastern immigrants can be seen to dominate in Christian congregations in the early centuries (Lampe 2003:143). In discursive analyses the question of intentionality is often raised. In what sense do discursive shifts indicate people’s intentions or purpose? Or particularly in this study, can the cultural groups evolving in the early imperial period be understood to have “intended” the results of their actions? Did Christians, for example, intend to interrupt imperial power configurations with their articulation of the Christian message? Did the elite in the Roman east intend to form themselves into a ruling alliance through their involvement in a shared educational and cultural 11

INTRODUCTION

repertoire? Contemporary philosophical trajectories suggest that questions such as these need reframing as the Cartesian model of the human subject as a knowing mind and the Kantian conception of the rational, autonomous, thinking subject have lost ground (Hoy 2004: 165).25 The so-called philosophies of suspicion, emanating from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, have eroded the ideal of a subject who acts purposely on the basis of unfettered and rational reflection (Hoy 2004: 29). It is increasingly recognized that human subjectivity is a product of forces and effects that lie outside the control or even the consciousness of individual subjects. Subjects are not disembodied free-floating minds. Rather, human minds are always located in bodies and thus always implicated in historically situated social networks. The recognition of this embodied socialized subject provides the basis for Foucault’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s models of human agency that hold actions to be reasonable even if they are not the product of reasoned deliberation (Bourdieu 1990: 51; Foucault 1980: 94–5). Social groups do undertake reasonable actions, even if these actions are arrived at without specific deliberation or consultation. Bourdieu traces this ability to an inherent difference between “subjects” and “agents.” Subjects are those who supposedly know what they are doing, while agents act on the basis of what Bourdieu calls the habitus, a set of embodied socialized dispositions that provides agents with a logic of social practices and a feel for the social game that generates reasonable behavior in a given situation (1990: 52–5). This habitus is not “a state of mind … but rather a state of the body” (1990: 68). The habitus is inscribed in the body as “motor skills,” “bodily postures”; it is the complex of habitual ways of doing things and conducting oneself in a society (1990: 69–70). “The habitus is spontaneity without consciousness or will,” according to Bourdieu (1990: 56). And the practical sense engendered by the habitus is what causes practices, in and through what makes them obscure to the eyes of their producers, to be sensible, that is, informed by common sense. It is because agents never know completely what they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know. (1990: 69) Agents are not “subjects,” because they act without being fully cognizant of the premises and grounds for their actions, and that is precisely what makes these actions “have more sense than they know.” These actions are more sensible because they are not the cogitation of a single individual, but rather the product of the “whole social order” working through incorporated bodily dispositions (Bourdieu 1990: 75; Hoy 2004: 108–9). The agents’ actions are a social production, imbued with social meaning, even if agents lack full comprehension of this meaning. Foucault similarly insists on the possibility of “power relations that are both intentional and nonsubjective” (1980: 94). He writes, “There is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject” (1980: 95). 12

INTRODUCTION

As Bourdieu does, Foucault appears to locate intentionality in the complex interactions of the social order, at the level of “the entire network of power that functions in a society and makes it function” (1980: 95). The precise working out of this system may well be hidden from the individual agents contributing to its construction: “The logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them.” Foucault refers to the producers of a power emergence as “the great anonymous” (1980: 95). Within the cultural paradigms offered by Bourdieu and Foucault, cultural movements can be understood as intentional even when the individual agents generating the movement are neither cognizant of these intentions nor capable of articulating them. Cultural movements emanate from the web of interactions inscribed in myriad points across the social order and as such may escape the individual subject’s awareness. Nevertheless, that subject may act as an agent of that movement. Within these schematics for understanding human subjectivity and agency and social change and transformations, it is clearly beside the point to query individuals’ intentions with respect to the eventual social outcomes of their actions and choices. Even in the mundane world of ordinary decision-making, persons can never anticipate all the ends of particular actions. To act is always to be involved in an open-ended process. With respect to the intentionality of cultural formations, Paul Willis succinctly conveys their inherent intentionality: “Cultural forms may not say what they know, nor know what they say, but they mean what they do – at least in the logic of praxis” (1981: 124–5, qt. by Scott 1990: 183). This study proceeds upon the principle that in the last analysis, cultural movements mean what they do. I will argue that as a cultural movement what Christians did was to intervene and interrupt an evolving and totalizing elite imperial discourse that was increasingly hierarchical and dismissive of the non-elite and gain an institutional presence for itself. Through its institutionalization, Christianity bifurcated the monopoly on social power and authority between two separate social entities, itself and the state, and opened room for social actors from more diverse locations. In my discussion of this process I may seem to reify the Greek elite and the Christians, but what I intend is rather to point to some of the strategies through which groups of persons in the early empire reified themselves as distinct cultural identities and what effect this had for the social and political alignments of the period.26

Notes 1 Beck and Sznaider (2006: 6) note that cosmopolitanism is “a contested term,” but they offer as one commitment of contemporary “realistic cosmopolitanism” to recognize that the age of twenty-first century cosmopolitism “could and should be compared with other historical moments of cosmopolitanism” (2006: 3). In my use of cosmopolitanism, I mean merely to connote a sense of de-bordered political, cultural, and social interactions such as have occurred in other political configurations that encompass large areas and many peoples. I do not intend to invoke any sense of normative-philosophical

13

INTRODUCTION

2 3

4

5 6 7

8

9 10 11

12 13 14

cosmopolitanism, such as that proposed in Stoic notions of the term or other philosophic perspectives that idealize “the primary of world citizenship over all … parochial affiliations” (Beck and Sznaider). Hoy is discussing the perspective of Ernesto Laclau in this quotation. Rose (1997: 188) discusses Nancy’s position. She explains that he counters the myth of community with his “inoperative community” that would be “pure dialogicity itself” and where communication does not occur between preexisting subjects but is the origin of human being and “each becomes only in communication with the other.” See Lincoln (2005: 10) for the need for historians of religion to “insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual and divine.” Peter Lampe (2003: 411) describes how the “situation influences the way one relates to tradition” and calls for “more dynamic models … to help us discover the reciprocal relations between theology and social reality.” Transcendent causes for Christianity are not denied in this study, but what is investigated is how Christianity presented in a register that would have appealed in the particular historical and social moment of its emergence. Van Nijf bases his analysis on the analysis of Quass (1993). This process is described in Chapter Three. In his discussion of Roman law in provincial cities before Caracalla’s grant of citizenship (Constiutio Antoniniana) in 212 CE, Carrié offers that as long as the local laws did not contradict Roman laws, they had their place. He rejects the thesis that provincial cities lost their laws and constitution as a consequence of the Constiutio Antoniniana. Rather, these laws and constitutions had been lost at the time of the Roman conquest, “which ended the juridical independence of Hellenic cities and subjected what remained of their legislative activity to the approval of the provincial governor” (274). It was Roman dominance that reduced local laws “from nomoi (laws) to ethê (customs) – customs kept in force by the force of good will of the Roman authority” (275). Valerie Hope (2000: 135) describes the status alignment of the empire: “Yet throughout the imperial period, whether the terms honestiores and humiliores were employed or not, the Roman population was polarized into an upper and a lower strata …. A pyramid has been used as a graphic representation of the situation. The lower part of the pyramid was made up of the bulk of the population who might be differentiated by legal conditions such as slavery or citizenship, and even by social factors such as types of employment and income, but were united by their lack of rank, power and prestige. At the top of the pyramid was the emperor, surrounded and supported by the privileged classes who formed the upper strata of Roman society.” Rilinger (1988) argues that the humiliores/honestiores dichotomy was not fixed until the fourth century, but his position has been critiqued. See Pölönen (2004: 18 n. 3) for evidence of pre-Severan status differential in punishments. Hopkins suggests that Christians represented only between 5 and 10 per cent of the population before 300 CE. Stark (1996: 7) suggests for Christian numbers 1.9 percent c. 250 CE, 10.5 percent c. 300 CE and 56.5 percent c. 350 CE. Foucault describes his method of genealogical critique: “It will not deduce from the form of what we are and what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (Foucault 1984: 46). I draw upon Rimi Khan (2004) for this discussion. Her article situates Foucault in a cultural studies milieu. 1889: Un âetat du discours social (1989). Charisma (286–91), census (351–6), judicial decisions (380–2), coins (312–13; 323–7), calendars (162–3), and milestones (151–2).

14

INTRODUCTION

15 Jameson (1971: 380) offers this definition: “Ideology is designed to promote the human dignity and clear conscience of a given class at the same time that it discredits their adversaries; indeed, these two operations are one and the same.” See Rose (2006: 102) for a discussion of Ando’s ideological underpinnings; he references this quotation. 16 Castelli provides an excellent analysis of the spectacle of deaths enacted in the arena, as well as an overview and critique of the scholarship . See, for example, Beacham, (1999), Futrell, 1997), Kyle (1998), Plass (1995). 17 Friesen (2001: 91) points to the mythic invocations implicit in these representations: the defeat of Britannica is represented as an Amazonomachy and the depiction of Nero’s Armenian victory recalls Achilles and Penthesilea. 18 See Gaddis (2005: 21) for a comparison of the Christian and the imperial model of authority. He concludes, “Any church organization wishing to establish itself in a dominant position needed to co-opt the power of the state if its claims to exclusive legitimacy were to be realized in any meaningful way.” 19 Ando (2000: 343–51) recognizes Christianity as an alternative power structure, but in line with his thesis, his focus is more on Christians’ concurrence with the idea that divine providence accounts for Rome’s success. 20 Foucault discusses the epistemic shift of the early centuries CE in his Care of the Self and sees a new “turn toward the self” (1988: 40–2). I disagree with the particulars of Foucault’s characterization of this “turn,” but it is clear that an epochal shift did occur in this period. 21 The growth of Christianity is obviously one of the most trodden of scholarly ground. And one that David Hunt (1993: 143) suggests should be avoided as “to be all but beyond the control of the historian.” Hunt makes this observation in his own contribution on the topic. Denny Praet (1992–3) provides a bibliography on the Christianization of the Empire. 22 A more detailed discussion of the chronology of the ancient novel is offered in Chapter Two. 23 Some Christian manifestations of the form, such as the apocryphal Acts of Philip, continued to be written in later centuries, but polytheistic authors no longer contributed examples. 24 See Wills (1995) for the ancient Jewish novel. 25 Hoy (2004) has guided my discussion of agency in this section. 26 Ernest Gellner (1995: 58) suggests that the separation of religious and state power is a particular characteristic of the West and he posits that Western cultural achievements are related to this separation and to a rivalry between State and Church power. Gellner locates this separation to a later historical period. The evolution of Christianity as a site of authority in the imperial period, however, would seem to begin this process. Thereafter, two separate, if related, sites of authority would be available in civic communities.

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1 COSMOPOLITAN IDENTITIES

In the early third century, Hippolytus in his Commentary on Daniel charged the Roman Empire with imitating Christianity. Hippolytus pointed to the overlapping chronology and similar methodology of the two institutions: For as the Lord was born in the forty-second year of the emperor  Augustus … and as the Lord also called all nations (’ε) and tongues  by means of the apostles and fashioned a people (’εoς) of believing Christians, a people of the Lord and a new name, so all this was imitated ’ ´ (ε o) in every way by the empire ( 

ε´ ) that was ruling then through the work of Satan. For it also collected to itself the most ´ high-born (ε ooς) from every nation (ε’  ω) and naming them “Romans” prepared them for battle. (4.9.1–2) ˘

In this passage, Hippolytus gives Jesus credit for devising the notion of collecting a multicultural diversity of peoples and forming them into a new cosmopolitan social unity or “cultural identity”: “the people of believing Christians.” The Lord’s idea was then co-opted by the Roman Empire, which gathered the highborn from every nation and called them “Romans.” Hippolytus positions these two dichotomized groups as strictly opposed to one another. Hippolytus was obviously a partisan observer, but his observation that the group identity-making processes of Christianity and the imperial elite were related and intertwined deserves attention. In this chapter, I am going to examine some of the processes used to construct these cultural identities to understand how these emergences might overlap and relate to each other. In particular, I will follow up on Hippolytus’ suggestions. Early Christian writers reflect a spectrum of attitudes toward the empire. However, what is striking about Hippolytus’ statement, besides its demonstration of Christian aplomb, is its clear articulation of two factors that were crucial for the consolidation of the empire.1 Hippolytus recognizes first that, in the early imperial period, cultural identities premised on shared practices and common beliefs and incorporating a diversity of peoples were increasingly important. Second he targets the Roman state’s practice of recruiting and utilizing

17

ROMAN IMPERIAL IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA

elite provincials, “the highborn,” and using them as agents to help in governing the empire.

Constructing an imperial elite identity In the first centuries CE, as Hippolytus suggests, a network of the highborn was under construction that would join together elite from across the empire. Many of the provincial elite had Roman connections and were Roman citizens (Millar 1977: 477–9). By the middle of the second century, the eminent orator Aelius Aristides could claim for the elite of the Greek east “common ownership for the Roman name” (Or. 39.63). And he, like Hippolytus, emphasizes the high status of these provincials associated with Rome: “Many in each city are citizens of yours no less than of their fellow natives . . .. There is no need of garrisons holding acropolises, but the most important and powerful ( ´ε o ` ωo ) ´ in each place guard their countries for you” (Or. 26.64). Aristides and Hippolytus, for all their social and cultural differences, both perceive that in the early empire, a new alliance of “Romans” was being formed, comprising the “highborn” and “the most important and powerful” people from across the empire.2 Both writers recognize that shared high status provides the core of this alliance. Cultural identities are produced through difference; an “us” is created in terms of a “not them.” Numerous categories are available for differentiating one group from another – nationality, religion, gender, status, race, and geography to name some potential differentials. When amidst this array of choices, a group selects particular differences and stipulates that these are fundamental for establishing identity, this selection must be recognized as part of the group’s will to power, its strategy for acquiring and expanding its influence. In the early imperial period, a new cultural identity was under construction emphasizing high status as a crucial determinant; it was to be a trans-empire community of the elite. The focus on status in this cultural identity appeared in disguise; it presented as an emphasis on education and high culture.3 All the people who could exhibit their expertise in a shared education and cultural repertoire could claim membership in this group. The demands of this educational standard in a world of general illiteracy made it restrictive; few other than the elite had the leisure or opportunity to meet its requirements. But for all those who shared in this education and its refined interests, it provided the basis for a collective self-understanding and group identity. Hippolytus reports accurately when he describes the emergence of a new group in the early empire composed of the “highborn from every nation.” Common educational pursuits were unifying persons from diverse localities across the empire into a common social constituency. The educational and linguistic proficiency required for this group identity limited it primarily to those with high status. In recent years a number of sophisticated analyses have been devoted to the mechanics of cultural identity making in the early imperial period, particularly with regard to Greek identity as it accommodated to Roman rule.4 The Greeks 18

COSMOPOLITAN IDENTITIES

with their long history and wide geographical dispersion over time employed various differentiating polarities to forge a group identity out of their diversities. They emphasized their common descent from the original Hellenic tribes, for example (Hall 1997), and they highlighted the cultural differences separating “Greeks” from “barbarians” (Hall 1989). In the early imperial period, Greek cultural identity underwent another reconfiguration. Suzanne Saïd characterizes this new identity as a “cultural and elitist definition of Greekness” (2001: 291). Ruth Webb explicitly describes the reality behind the educational criteria that were being increasingly invoked to establish Greekness; they were based on “knowledge that took considerable amounts of time and money to acquire” (2006: 45). Genealogical definitions of Greekness never completely lost their valence in the imperial period. As Hadrian’s criteria for participation in the Panhellenic league attest, to belong cities were required to demonstrate their direct descent from the original Hellenes, the Ionians, the Dorians, and Aeolians (Romeo 2002: 21).5 But if genealogy was not erased in establishing claims to Hellenism, in the early empire, a turn toward criteria that were “more easily shared and transmitted than blood” occurred (Malkin 2001: 11). In the first three centuries CE, a new paideia, a new educational and cultural regimen, began to provide the basis for a cosmopolitan Greek identity. This paideia concentrated on the Greek past and its literary and political achievements. It required that the educated be able to employ (to imitate) an Attic form of Greek spoken and written centuries earlier, during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The educated were also expected to conform as strictly as possible to the rhetorical and literary forms, techniques, historical and mythological themes, and ethical stances of that earlier period (Anderson 1993). While Athenian writers of the classical period traditionally had provided a model for Greeks writing after them, the strict criteria for imitation promoted in this new paideia – adherence to the vocabulary, grammatical usage, and topics employed by Attic writers – were an innovation (Swain 1996: 20). In his Lives of the Sophists, Philostratus coined the name “Second Sophistic” to describe the rhetorical style of a group of orators renowned for their mastery of this new paideutic standard to emphasize its relation to the language and rhetorical practices of the early Sophists of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.6 These second sophists attracted and instructed students and showcased their rhetorical and linguistic abilities as they competed for honor and prestige in public orations. The term Second Sophistic has come to refer to the cultural movement associated with this imperial paideia and its adherents.7 An important result of sophistic paideia was that it allowed persons of diverse locations and ethnicities to acquire Greekness by virtue of their education. Philostratus describes the students coming to study with Scopelian in Smyrna in the late first century CE. He names first the ones from nearby cities and then continues his list: “But besides these he attracted also Cappadocians and Assyrians, he attracted also Egyptians and Phoenicians, the more illustrious of the Achaeans and all the youth of Athens” (Vit. soph. 518). These students form an eclectic group 19

ROMAN IMPERIAL IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA

from diverse points across the empire, but Philostratus uses the term the Hellenes to refer to all of them (Whitmarsh 2005: 14).8 Through their studies, the students attain a common cultural identity as Greeks.9 The literature of the early empire provided a privileged site for constructing and disseminating the identities necessary for the complex social and political realities of the new cosmopolitanism. Tim Whitmarsh, in his keen analyses of Plutarch, Dio, and Lucian, and other imperial writers has demonstrated how slippery and shifting the categories of identity were in this period (2001: 33). Cultural identities appear to morph as individuals accommodate themselves to their multiple and variegated social and political relationships (Goldhill 2001: 19).10 Men of varying ethnicities were becoming “Greeks” by virtue of their education, and many “Greek” writers, including most of Philostratus’ sophists, are “Romans” through citizenship (Whitmarsh 2005: 14). Christopher Jones argues that even the opposition Roman/Greek is too static for understanding the cultural dynamics of the period. He points to the multiple attachments, “civic, regional and sometimes ‘barbarian’ – that coexist within Hellenism in the selfconsciousness of even the most fully ‘Hellenic’ writers” (2004: 14). In the early empire, individuals immersed in their divergent cultural worlds, like chameleons, deployed their various cultural identities to achieve strategic ends (Whitmarsh 2001: 22, 216). The cultural productions of the early imperial period thus provided an important site for the Greek-speaking elite to negotiate and construct their cultural identities vis-à-vis each other and Roman power. Thomas Schmitz, in his study of the Second Sophistic, argues that the artificial diction and historicizing tendencies of these productions more sharply separated the educated elite from those who were socially, politically, culturally, and economically below them (1997: 95). In my examination of the subjectivity being scripted in the Greek romances and political writings of the period, I am going to treat the Greek-speaking elite as a single interest group. A major function of the practices of the Second Sophistic was to construct a sense of group identity among the elite across the empire. And although I subscribe to the views of scholars who describe the multiple and shifting subject positions held by members of the Greek-speaking elite during this period, my focus will be on this culturally constructed elite identity. I am less interested in the subtle interactions and competitions of the elites evidenced in the texts of the period and more in the divisions that the texts created between the elite and the non-elite (Schmitz 1997: 97–135). For all the supposedly close ties of kinship and patronage linking constituencies in the ancient cities, this period experienced an increasing disparity between the elite and the others in their communities. As civic leaders were pulled toward the imperial center, the civic model of shared political ties was eroded (Osborne 2006: 10). In an economic analysis of the early imperial centuries, Willem Jongman points to the processes that facilitated a major transfer of income and wealth from the periphery of the empire to its center. He notes the economic effect of this transfer: “The imperial elite [across the empire] grew increasingly rich and 20

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much of this wealth was due to Empire” (2002: 47 n. 59). Jongman’s comment supports Ramsay MacMullen’s blunt assessment of the socioeconomic trajectory of the empire’s first five centuries: “Fewer have more” (1974: 38). Brent Shaw summarizes the effect of the new imperial arrangements as “a more stable and efficient structure for the exploitation of inferiors” (2000: 372). Unlike the modern colonial empires organized around nation-states, Rome did not extract all the benefits of empire for itself, but recirculated them among the provincial elite as they assumed their roles in implementing empire. In the early empire, Rome’s presence abetted the elite’s interests, but the under stratum lost influence. In the face of this disparity, the differences between and among elite Greeks and Romans seem to flatten, and their agendas to align. In the cosmopolitan world of the second century, the most significant us-versus-them polarity was not that distinguishing elite Greeks from elite Romans, who to a significant extent shared a similar cultural world; rather, it was the polarity that set off elites from the non-elites in their own cities. And sophistic education, with its emphasis on recondite language and styles of speaking, only exacerbated this divide (Hingley 2005: 56–7). When Aelius Aristides says prominent men in the second century would be ashamed in front of a witness to speak in anything other than the Attic Greek of hundreds of years earlier, even if he exaggerates, one begins to sense the communication barriers being erected between the prominent and the others in their communities (Or. 1. 326).11 Aristides suggests a restricted definition of human when he declares that whole world believes Attic is “ the common speech of all humans” (Or. 1.324). Enforcing social divisions may have been a feature of the classicizing movement underlying Second Sophistic practices from its beginnings. An early endorsement of strict Attic standards already places the phenomenon within a nexus of Roman rule and the Greek elite’s superiority to the masses. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian and rhetorician writing in Rome at the end of the first century BC, begins his treatise on the best examples of Attic oratory for imitation by announcing how fortunate he feels to be alive in a period that has seen the end of a deficient rhetoric, one that was “shameless and histrionic, ill bred without a vestige either of ´ philosophy or of any other aspect of liberal education ( ε oς ε’ εε´ o) deceiving the mob and exploiting its ignorance” (Orat. Vett., trans. Usher 1.1.1). Dionysius uses the imagery of boorish, low-status, uneducated persons to describe this decadent “Asian” rhetoric. His language suggests that his rhetorical standard invokes social as well as literary distinctions.12 After castigating its decadent rival, Dionysius explains how the recovery and acceptance of a better oratorical practice has come about: I think that the cause and origin of this great change [in rhetoric] has been Rome’s conquest of everything, which forces all the cities to look to her for guidance, and those who rule her virtuously and administer the world in all good faith: they are well educated and noble in their judgments, and because they have honored the sensible element of each city this has 21

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gained even more strength, and the foolish (anoêton) element has been forced to be more rational. (Preface to Orat.Vett., 3.1 trans. Wisse 1995: 77).13 According to Dionysius, Rome deserves the credit for ending the sway of the decadent rhetoric that had been perverting the public life of Greek-speaking cities. This rhetorical transformation was possible thanks to Rome’s cultured and honorable leaders, good government, and ability to strengthen the position of the sensible over the foolish. As often, “the sensible” (´o ϕ´o o) here ’ oo) refers to the many, connotes those of elite status, and “the foolish” (`o ´ those not in the upper stratum. Dionysius explicitly claims that the renewal of the classical standard and the increased power of the elite in their cities are corresponding consequences of Roman sovereignty. With his dichotomy of sensible/foolish, Dionysius explicitly underlines the connection between status and correct rhetorical and civil decorum. According to this paradigm, the holding of power by the Greek elite guarantees a proper rhetorical standard and a proper standard of behavior. Emilio Gabba summarizes Dionysius’ position: “Asian eloquence conquers and gains support among the untutored masses; classical, prudent oratory belongs to the upper classes” (1982: 47). Dionysus ascribes the reinstatement of proper standards, both rhetorical and political, to Roman dominance. Dionysius had arrived in Rome after the fall of Alexandria. This was the period when the mechanisms of empire were being initiated and solidified. Is this particular historical moment connected to Dionysius’ advocacy of a cultural emphasis on the archaizing, classical Attic standard that was to prove so momentous for the cultural life of the empire over the next centuries? Some scholars suggest that the Latin writers of the Ciceronian period who show interest in “Attic” and “Asian” styles may have influenced Dionysius’ rhetorical views (Wisse 1995: 74–81).14 Another suggests that the Atticizing movement was in fact a “form of Romanization,” showing contemporary Greeks embracing the classical style and practices so admired by their Roman overlords (Spawforth 2001: 378). Other commentators regard the “Attic” movement as a Greek phenomenon originally generated in Greek cities (Gabba 1982: 48). This dispute is difficult to resolve definitively, but a crucial question at its center, as Clifford Ando suggests, is whether the strict Atticizing standards that were to become so important in certifying “Greekness” were decided on in Rome in the late republic and then “exported back” to the “cradles of Hellenism” (2003: 359). Did Rome inspire the rhetorical trajectory that resulted in the literary and cultural movement called the Second Sophistic? Given subsequent events, if the Romans did not provide this impetus, they should have. The new classicizing paideia contributed to forming precisely the “imperial” subject and the group identity that Rome would utilize for managing its eastern empire. Rome was an innately hierarchical society. Legal distinctions of status based on property qualifications secured its political system, and social 22

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conventions, including distinctive clothing and specified seating on public occasions, routinized and reinforced status differences in Romans’ daily lives (Hopkins 1965: 12). When the Romans began to extend their dominance, they also exported their bias for hierarchy in the arrangements they made for governing territories. As Dionysius of Halicarnassus noted, Roman conquest buttressed the power of the elite in the cities Rome subjugated. Evidence for the practice of turning local control over to the elite in communities emerges early. Pausanias, for example, reports that after Lucius Mummius razed Corinth and sold its women and children into slavery in 146 BCE, he “put an end to the democracies and established government by property qualification” (7.16.6; Ando 2000: 59). For all the Greek elite may have chafed under Roman dominance, they nevertheless benefited from it.15 Rome promoted practices favoring the power of the wealthy and limiting political participation by the lower orders. Under Rome, cities nominally democratic became in reality oligarchies (De Ste. Croix 1981: 515–37). The attitude supporting such changes can be glimpsed in the second-century letter from Pliny, imperial legate in Bithynia, to the emperor Trajan. Pliny writes, “It is better that persons of nobler birth be admitted into the curia than those of plebeian birth” (Ep. 10.79.3). Indeed, Rome’s promotion of Greek elite interests, which had begun in the republican period, helped build the fortunes of many of the wealthy Greek speakers described by Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists (Rostovtzeff 1941: 2.970). Philostratus, for example, heaps praise on the orator Polemo, not only for his extempore speeches, but also for his influence with emperors – from Hadrian, he obtained for his city a gift large enough to fund a corn market, a gymnasium, “the best in Asia,” and a temple (Vit. soph. 531). This extremely wealthy man was a descendent of the Polemo installed by Marcus Antonius as the king of Pontus. Rome actually did, as Aelius Aristides says, cause all the Greek cities to arise, both economically and architecturally (Or. 26.94; Ando 2000: 51). The early empire saw an efflorescence of Greek urban life, and the Greek elite were among the primary benefactors and beneficiaries of this boom. As previously cited, Aelius Aristides testifies to Rome’s utilization of and reliance on “the important and powerful” ( ´ε o ` ωo ) ´ for managing their territories (Or. 26.64).16 These prominent people might have had to govern their localities in accord with Roman interests, but they retained their civic power, position, privileges, and wealth. Also, Rome’s sovereignty helped check the elite infighting and the non-elites’ unrest, which so bedeviled the history of the Greek cities. Elites from across the eastern empire joined with Rome in the management of its empire, and in their turn received Rome’s support for their position and privileges, as long as they helped ensure their cities’ calm and avoid civic problems. As the empire expanded, the provincial elite were recruited into imperial service for posts across the empire. In the formation of Rome’s cosmopolitan empire, Greek and Roman elite interests interacted and were intertwined (Whitmarsh 2001: 23–6). Across the territories of the Greek east, the Greek elite shared educational and cultural 23

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interests that allowed them to cement their solidarity and to constitute a group identity of pepaideumenoi, the educated, of persons from divergent locales and different ethnicities. These educated persons also acquired, it seems, a system of allegiances and attitudes that constituted them not only as the educated, but also as an empire wide power elite, a ruling “class,” positioned to administer empire.17 Maud Gleason (1994) and Thomas Schmitz (1997) have utilized the work of Pierre Bourdieu to interpret the emphasis on education and rhetorical performance in the Second Sophistic. Both scholars question why individuals would place so much prestige and invest so much effort and training in studies seemingly so arcane and removed from the real world. Philostratus’ descriptions show that, for most Sophists, their wealth and political and social success did not result from their rhetorical endeavors. The Sophists’ high status already guaranteed their position (Bowie 1982: 37; Schmitz 1997: 21).18 Nor does the evidence suggest that paideia in itself without family and wealth provided much social mobility (Schmitz 1997: 50–4). If there was so little real payoff, what was the point of the Sophists’ exertions? Bourdieu suggests an answer to this paradox. He points to the many guises power can take in a society. He labels all manifestations of power “capital” (economic, social, cultural, symbolic capitals) and maintains that they all play a role in a society’s power games and in the perpetuation of established orders of domination.19 Symbolic capital is acquired when another capital, such as economic or cultural capital, is recognized and acknowledged as legitimate. This symbolic capital then functions to justify the exercise of power.20 Greek paideia appears arcane, remote from real issues and with little actual economic or political payoff (Schmitz 1997: 18–26). It presents itself as peripheral to the practices of power. In Bourdieu’s paradigm, this would be its point. Greek paideia inculcates and justifies the power of the dominant by legitimating it in the apparently independent realm of culture and education. Bourdieu argues that educational practices are at the very heart of a society’s power system.21 Dominant groups hold the position to impose their educational construct – one that is suited to their abilities, strengths, and opportunities – as the mark of true education. This educational standard then justifies and legitimates the dominant position of the elite in a disguised naturalized form.22 The elite are on top not because they control all the economic capital; their educational achievements testify to their real superiority. Similarly, non-elite are not disadvantaged simply because the elite control all the capital; rather, their lack of education and culture signify their real inferiority and failure to measure up to society’s standards. In the words of Jim Wolfreys, “Inequities of wealth and income appear in society to be not so much the products of economic injustice, as the natural consequence of disparities of ability, judgment and lifestyle” (2002: 1). Gleason (1994) and Schmitz (1997) offer that Bourdieu’s paradigm clarifies the dynamics working in the cities of the early empire, where so many influential and distinguished men devoted their energies to learning and exhibiting their expertise in what appear to be rather irrelevant pursuits. 24

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On the basis of their erudite learning, the elite accepted and asserted their superiority and their right to social and political position. The Sophists performed this superiority in their public declamations and rhetorical contests, but all the educated, the pepaideumenoi, could share vicariously in their glory. The elite proclaimed their superiority through their paideia and their civic benefactions, and the voice of the under strata was eroded in the Greek cities (Schmitz 1997: 95). Cultural and educational superiority naturalizes and legitimates political and economic dominance. In this period, high cultural interests were not only unifying the Greek-speaking elite in the eastern empire but were also providing a conduit for connecting them with the western elite. As Rome established its martial and political supremacy, its traditional ambivalence toward Hellenization as both a civilizing and enfeebling influence began to recede. Assured of their superiority and dominance, Romans drew on Greek culture for their own processes of elite self-fashioning. Tim Whitmarsh notes, “Greek paideia [was] resited in Rome’s agonistic market of elite ambitio” (Whitmarsh 2001: 14).23 To be versed in classical Greek culture and language began to be a component of elite identity in the West. There was a steady progression toward this standard. Cicero shows that already in his period, an elite Roman could be criticized for not knowing Greek (Verr. 4.127; Adams 2003a: 9–14).24 Suetonius describes Augustus’ interest in Greek studies but notes that his spoken Greek was not fluent, so if Augustus had to deliver a speech in Greek, he had someone translate it from his Latin (Aug. 89.1). Claudius, however, could give extended replies in the senate to Greek ambassadors in Greek and, according to Suetonius, wrote Greek histories of the Etruscans and the Carthaginians (Claud. 42.1). Adducing the florid rhetorical style of Nero’s speech “liberating” Achaea in 67 CE, Christopher Jones suggests that Nero might have actually studied with one of the founders of the Second Sophistic, Nicetes of Smyrna (Vit. soph 511; Jones 2000). Marcus Aurelius’ Greek learning is well documented and manifest in his choice to use Greek for writing his Meditations, which Simon Swain calls one of the “most striking surviving examples of Latin speakers making extensive use of Greek” (2004: 40). By the middle of the second century, some competency in Greek linguistic and cultural practices was expected of the elite in the western empire. This cultural reciprocity helped to cement social ties among the imperial trans-national elite. Elite Latin speakers showcase their biculturalism and expertise in Greek and expect their audiences to appreciate their productions.25 In a speech in Carthage, for example, the multitalented Apuleius, rhetor, philosopher and novelist, stages a debate between two speakers on the topic of “which one loves Carthage more.” The first speaker will speak in Latin, but the other, although a master of Latin, “today will speak to you in Attic” (atticissabit; Flor. 18.42; Swain 2004: 12–14).26 Apuleius’ proposed speech attests not only to his own bilingualism, but also to his expectation that his audience in Carthage (at least some of them) would appreciate his sophistic declamation. Being an elite Roman had come to entail a familiarity with Greek and its cultural particulars. This is the criterion that informs the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, a miscellany of readings and discussions. 25

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Gellius announces the purpose of his collection: to stimulate in his audience of busy, distinguished Romans “a desire for learning” and to save them from an “ignorance of words and learning that would be shameful and boorish” (turpe certe agrestique, Praef. 12). In his text, Gellius cites passages in Greek and frequently discusses Greek works. He explicitly positions his Latin readers as competent in both languages, and his choice of readings indicates that he expects them to follow and appreciate arcane discussions of linguistic, literary, and philosophical points. For example, Gellius offers a discussion on the difference between Greek and Latin geometrical terms, invoking the authority of Euclid and Pythagoras for the Greek terms and Varro for the Latin ones (Noct. Att 1.20). In another passage, he describes the learned conversation he and some Greek and Latin friends had as they whiled away time on a night sea voyage. They discuss the various Greek and Latin names for constellations, quoting Homer, as well as the opinions of Latin grammarians (Noct. Att 2.21). Gellius contends that an interest in discussions like these, with their citation of various Greek and Latin authorities, testifies to readers’ culture and even to their intrinsic humanity. Echoing Horace, Gellius relegates those who might not appreciate such learned dialogues to the profane and uncultivated crowd (profestum et profanum vulgus) that Aristophanes banished from the Frogs (Noct. Att, Praef. 20).27 Gellius expresses his contempt for people who do not converse, read, take notes, and devote their nights to study. He reproves their lack of culture with a disparaging adage: “The jackdaw knows nothing of the lyre, nor the hog of marjoram unguent” (Noct. Att, Praef. 19).28 Like animals, the unlearned cannot appreciate the good things of life. Gellius fashions his elite readers as knowledgeable in both Greek and Latin learning and makes clear that, for this elite circle, not knowing Greek is “not to belong” (Swain 2004: 39). In Gellius’ paradigm, to lack cultural expertise and appreciation is to be less than fully human. As the imperial Greek paideia does, this Roman ideal of humanitas (culture or civilization) inscribing Aulus Gellius’ perspective operates to discriminate. The shared cultural interests of elite Greeks and Romans functioned to align them more closely and to separate them more sharply from the others in their societies. By the end of the republic, the Romans were already co-opting Greek conceptions of humanitas to define the essence of Romanness. They made humanitas, in Greg Woolf’s words, “a thoroughly Roman concept, embodying concepts of culture and conduct that were regarded by Romans as the hallmarks of the aristocracy in particular, yet also appropriate for mankind in general” (1998: 55). Woolf argues that Rome used a sense of itself as the propagator of humanitas to authorize its territorial expansion (1998: 57) and points to the elder Pliny’s articulation of Rome’s sense of mission: “to gather together the scattered empires and to soften their customs … to give civilization (humanitatem) to humankind, in short to become throughout the world the sole fatherland of all races (una cunctarum in toto orbe patria)” (Nat. 3.5.39). The Romans understood that the ideals embodied in the concept of humanitas had been conceived in Greece, but they believed they had inherited the charge to disseminate them 26

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throughout the world. And this mandate underwrote Rome’s imperial endeavors (Woolf 1998: 57). These intersecting cosmopolitan Greek and Roman identities based on ties of high culture were very much elite productions. Aulus Gellius defines the symmetry between the Greek paideia and Roman humanitas and displays their inherent elitism. Gellius rejects out of hand the common people’s notion that humanitas carries a sense of the Greek word philanthropia, that is, “a friendly spirit and indiscriminate good-feeling towards all persons” (Noct. Att 13.17.1). Rather, Gellius explains, humanitas refers to what the “Greeks call paideia, and we call education and instruction in the liberal arts” (eruditionem institutionemque in bonas artis; Noct. Att 13.17.1). The very form of the word humanitas demonstrates that people who pursue such learning are the most highly humanized of all persons (maxime humanissimi): “For the pursuit of that kind of knowledge and the training given by it, have been granted to the human alone of all the animals, and for that reason it is called humanitas (Noct. Att, 13.17.1). Gellius identifies the congruence between Greek paideia and Latin humanitas and insinuates that to lack this type of education is to be deficiently human. When the imperial Greeks fashioned a cultural, less genealogical definition of Hellenic identity, one founded on a shared education, they crafted a cultural identity more compatible with Roman notions. From earliest times, Rome showed a willingness to incorporate deserving outsiders into its polity (Woolf 1998: 64; Tacitus Ann. 11.23–4). By defining Romanitas as an expression of humanitas, Rome provided a cultural identity that was open to anyone who could meet this standard (Asirvatham 2005: 114).29 In the new enlarged world of empire, the bases of cultural identities were being reshaped. Cultural identities defined by common geographical borders or blood were ceding ground to those based on shared education, cultural practices, and perspectives. The emphasis on education and culture, on paideia and humanitas, that inscribed the cultural identities of both elite Romans and Greeks, contributed to the formation of a trans-empire alliance, a cosmopolitan elite identity that incorporated the leading people across the empire. Commentators remind us not to be so taken in by the Romans’ promotion of and inclusion in Greek paideutic culture that we forget that Roman “state interest” likely played a role in their actions (Spawforth 2001: 375). Undoubtedly Rome’s interests were well served by having a loyal cosmopolitan elite available for governing their territories. That this group was more akin to other elite across the empire than to the less educated in their own communities also would serve imperial ends by defusing the likelihood for a unified response to Roman hegemony (Ando 2000: 374). Rome’s interests were ultimately served, but to a great extent so were those of the provincial elites, whose opportunities and resources also increased during the early imperial period. Upper Stratum persons across the empire were joined through their sense of themselves as cultured and educated people deserving of rule and privilege. Common interests, perspectives, and lifestyle transformed people from numerous geographical and ethnic positions into a unified sociopolitical constituency. 27

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Although this elite identity in both its Hellenic and Roman forms was nominally “learnable” and therefore potentially universal (Asirvatham 2005: 117), its demanding educational core put it beyond the reach of most inhabitants of the empire. Humanitas might connote the “quintessentially human,” but as Woolf notes, in its highest form it was reserved as “the exclusive property of a narrow elite of Roman citizens” (1998: 59).30 The basic “us/not us” polarity informing this elite cosmopolitan identity was that separating those with a cultural education from those without one. By describing this cosmopolitan elite identity, I am not suggesting that cultural identities are monolithic. I am proposing, however, that some aspects of identity are more deeply implicated in a person’s self-understanding than others and less readily relinquished. In the shifting matrix of identity positions available to elite persons in the early empire, one feature, I suggest, remains more secure than others: that of status. Depending on the circumstances, elite-Greek Roman citizens from Smyrna might at one moment experience themselves as provincial Greeks, at another as Roman citizens, and at a third as Lydians (Spawforth 2001). Among these shifting identity positions, however, one identity marker – their understanding of themselves as elite, high-status individuals – likely was seldom, if ever, relinquished. And status presented in the guise of culture and education provides the foundation for one of the trans-empire cosmopolitan identities under construction in the early imperial centuries.

Constructing a Christian identity When Hippolytus described the emergence of a trans-empire alliance of the “highborn” named the “Romans,” he appears to have been on the mark. Perhaps less cogent is his suggestion that the empire was imitating the Lord’s example when he called into being the “people of the Lord,” the “Christians,” those “bearing on their foreheads the sign of victory over death” (Comm. Dan. 4.9.3). These two trans-empire social constructions are rather synchronic and coordinate reactions accompanying the shift from a smaller world to the larger world of empire. This new cosmopolitan world both facilitated and necessitated more expansive group identities. As heterogeneous groups negotiated their places and interests in the imperial realignments of power and access, they accommodated their actions and claims to the larger arena of empire. In this context, both the trans-empire elite and the Christian cultural identities emerging in the same period and in an overlapping geography could be expected to share related modalities. In their excellent examinations of early Christian identity, Denise Buell (2005) and Judith Lieu (2004) recognize how intertwined Christian identity making was with the other contemporary identity projects going on during this period of social, cultural, and political change. Both scholars delineate the vital role that racial and ethnic models played in the conceptions of Christian identity. From early on, Christians utilized the language of race and ethnicity to define and differentiate themselves from other groupings in their social world with whom 28

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they intersected and overlapped – Jews, Greeks, and Romans.31 Buell describes the ubiquity of ethnic terms in Christian self-definitions; she notes, “The terms ethnos, laos, politeia (Greek), and genus and natio (Latin) pepper early Christian texts” (2005: 2). Buell and Lieu also point out the relation between Christians’ self-representations of themselves as a new race and the expanded reference for “Greekness” and “Romanness” evolving in the imperial period (Buell 2005: 37–40, 85–95, 153–4; Lieu 2004: 19–21). As Buell displays, early Christian texts consistently invoke ethnic language to convey their cultural identity.32 In the early-second-century Letter of Barnabas, for instance, Jesus explains that it is for his new people (ò ò ò  ò) that he offers his flesh.33 And the Epistle to Diognetus offers as its goal to explain this new race (´εoς) of Christians (1.1). Similarly, the Martyrdom of Polycarp refers to the bravery of the “pious race (´εoς) of Christians” (3.2). By repeatedly positioning themselves as a “people,” a “new race,” Christians made a claim for themselves as a new social grouping, coming from many places and ethnicities but subsumed into a single social identity. Just as the elite from across the eastern empire could become “Greeks” or “Romans” on the basis of their cultural or political achievements and educational practices, so people became members of the Christian “race” on the basis of their practices and beliefs. Buell displays that Christians were exploiting the potential in the contemporary fluid ethnographic categories to fashion for themselves a cosmopolitan trans-empire identity (2005: 38–40). And they employ the same “universalizing” (what I have called cosmopolitan) language of ethnicity that “Hellenism” and “Romanness” relied on to create unity (Buell 2005: 45–7, 152–4). Christians already were projecting themselves as a significant social presence, long before they had many adherents.34 In his early-second-century Apology, Aristides (2) equates Christians, a “third race,” with the two other groups making up the population of the empire: all the polytheists worshiping the emperor’s gods and the Jews.35 At this point, Christian numbers proportionately would have been a fraction of these other groups, but Aristides describes their parity. By the end of the second century, Tertullian would claim that Christians are a “race” that covers the whole world (totius orbis): “We are but of yesterday, yet we have filled every place among you” (Apol. 37.4).36 Christians constructed themselves as a cosmopolitan entity from their very beginnings. Even more than chronology, it is this mentality that marks Christianity as an imperial configuration. From the earliest stages, Christians also located themselves in the large rather than the local. They claimed no local place of their own, but almost immediately represented and projected themselves as a trans-empire enterprise “making disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28.19). And while the Christian writings of the second and third centuries testify to the various and conflicting notions of Christianity circulating in the period, each variety seems to share this same universalizing perspective. This universalizing language, in fact, often provides the weapon for one Christian group to position itself as the “real” Christianity and marginalize rivals (Buell 2005: 151). In spite of the reality of local divergences, 29

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early Christian identity constructions were founded on an assertion of an ideal unified Christian identity open to all people across the empire. Buell locates this Christian ethnic universalism within the contemporary negotiations around identity taking place in the imperial period, situating it within “the imperial discourse and practices of Romanness and the imperial redefinitions of Greekness” (2002: 462). And she suggests that Christians should be recognized as attempting “to negotiate alternative universalizing discourses” with respect to the other contemporary discourses of identity (2005: 154). She raises a critical question: “Can we view Christian universalism as a discourse that mimics and refracts imperial discourse and practices in seeking to produce a collective subject-position with alternative universal ideals?” (2005: 226, n. 39).37 Buell’s rhetorical question warrants an affirmative answer. Hippolytus perceived the inherent mimicry holding between these two imperial discourses of identity. Christian discourse parallels the elite discourse of identity formation and its strategies of defining people as “Greeks” or “Romans” on the basis of cultural practices rather than ties of location and lineage. Christians refracted this discourse by splintering its high cultural criteria into different directions. The use of the term mimicry recalls the post-colonialist theoretic paradigm of Homi Bhabha, one that may not entirely align with the specificities of this earlier imperial foundation. But Bhabha’s description of mimicry as “at once a mode of appropriation and resistance” helps to explain the entangled dialectic producing the cosmopolitan identities of the early imperial period (1994: 120). Even as Christians appropriate the imperial elites’ figuration of themselves as a cosmopolitan social constituency through the use of expanded ethnic designations, they resist the elite’s repetitious configuration of an authentic human identity as one defined by educational and cultural accomplishments. One method Christians used to resist the identity project of the trans-empire elite was to position themselves as “other,” as a discrete group, separate, distinct, and disconnected from their wider community and its ongoing social life. Christians were so successful in this self-fashioning, in fact, that an artificial partition separated Christian history from Roman imperial history for centuries. Lieu describes this “sense of separateness or otherness” as a persistent element in early Christian self-representations (2004: 311).38 Christian articulations of their estrangement from their social world permeate the texts of the early period and play an essential role in Christian strategies of identity formation. As Christians dis-identify with their local communities, they construct a new identity. They constitute themselves as “the Christians,” a trans-empire identity. This identity-making strategy can be seen at work in the Epistle to Diognetus.39 Both the date and author of this work are unknown, but the text is usually placed in the second century on the basis of its similarities to apologies from that period (Erhman 2003: 127). In the Diognetus, its author sets out to answer an essential question, “Why [did] this new race or way of life come into being now and not before?” (1.1). This question specifically constructs Christians as 30

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a new identity, “a new race,” ( `o ´εoς) as an empire production, and as distinct and different from other groups. Like apologetic writings, the Diognetus first emphasizes the Christians’ similarity to others in their community and their conventional lifestyle: “Christians are no different from other people in terms of their land, languages or customs; they don’t live in their own cities or speak a strange dialect. Christians live a normal life” (5.1–2). But, as the writer notes, this normality has a paradoxical quality. For although Christians live in their own native lands, they do so as sojourners, as resident aliens (´ ς o’ o  ’ ´ ς, ’ \ o o

´ 

’ ως (Dign. 5.5). The Diognetus describes Christians’ alienated and dislocated condition in their communities: “They participate in all things as citizens, and endure all things as foreigners. Every foreign land is a fatherland for them, every fatherland \ \ o  , ` ’ ´ ´ a foreign place” ( ε´εo ω ως o ´ εo  ’ ω, `  ` ς ´ε, 5.5). \ως ´εo ·  ´ε ´ ς ε’    This passage articulates a Christian sense of radical displacement in one’s own community. In their own cities, Christians live as strangers. Their true allegiance lies elsewhere; “they live on earth but are citizens in heaven” (5.9). Through its rhetoric of estrangement, the letter constructs Christians as alienated, rejecting of, and detached from, their communities. Through this text and others like it, Christians promulgate and offer for readers’ identification and appropriation a Christian cultural identity defined by social separation. They position themselves as paroikoi, sojourners in their home communities. Lieu (2004) suggests that iterations of this cultural self-representation appear to increase over the course of the early centuries. She notes that Paul addresses his letters to the Corinthian Christians with a simple “to the Church in Corinth,” but the author of the late-first-century 1 Clement utilizes sojourning language with its intimations of social disconnection. The author writes, “From the church sojourning (paroikousa) in Rome to the church sojourning in Corinth.” The letter describing Polycarp’s martyrdom similarly positions Christians as transients, even as it emphasizes their cosmopolitan presence. The letter’s salutation reads, “The church of God sojourning at Smyrna to the church of God sojourning in Philomelium and all the sojournings in every place of the holy and catholic church” (Lieu 2004: 232–3). The salutation foregrounds Christians’ transitory state, their impermanent and disaffiliated relation to their communities. They are simply passing through, putting their time in, until like Polycarp they can enter the everlasting kingdom (Mart. Poly. 20.1). At the same time, however, by proclaiming the existence of these disaffiliated Christian communities in every place, the letter asserts Christians’ omnipresence and cosmopolitan compass. Lieu proposes as a “particular success” of Christianity its ability to mask local situations and circumstances in favor of highlighting its universal presence throughout “every city and village” (2004: 238). Christian texts offer only sparse evidence for the mundane details of daily occupations or activities, concentrating instead on beliefs and their refigured worldview. They downplay the “local” in ˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

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order to fashion their trans-empire identity, and central to this identity is a sense of being estranged and disjunct even in their own home place, of having no patria, no homeland in this world. At the core of this early Christian self-representation is that Christians belong not to their local community, but to “the true life of heaven” (Diog. 10.7). This alienated posture is a persistent feature in Christian texts (Lieu 2004: 235–6).40 2 Clement describes Christians’ contemporary life as “nothing less than death” (I.6). Clement of Alexandria writes, “We have no patris on this earth” (Paed. 3.8.41). And Tertullian testifies to Christian detachment: “Nothing is important to us in this world except to leave it as quickly as possible” (Apol. 41.5). The reiteration of this self-presentation is salient. Narratives script reality for readers. And Christian texts were scripting their readers as people estranged from and displaced in their own communities. The function of this rhetoric of estrangement, however, is not to dissociate Christians from all communal social life, but rather to refigure and redirect their social commitment to the Christian community. The poignant portrayal of Christians in the Diognetus as those who are strangers everywhere and at home nowhere must be recognized as a strategic self-fashioning that promotes a particular cultural identity. As the author of this text recognizes, Christians ostensibly appear to be like everyone else, regular citizens, leading normal lives (5.1). Tertullian’s description of Christians’ integration in their civic milieu sounds plausible. He contends that Christians obviously share in, utilize, and rely on their city’s resources in their daily activities: “It is not without a forum, not without a meat market, not without baths, shops, factories, inns, market days and other places of business that we cohabitate with you in this world” (saeculo; Apol. 42.2).41 Ordinary demands of daily life would have necessitated that Christians mingle with their neighbors in day-to-day interactions. Christians’ social partition likely was less comprehensive than Christian sources assert. When Christians attest to their alienation and detachment, they do not describe necessarily a social reality as much as their persistent orientation toward their larger social community, their own self-positioning. Lieu writes, “Christians may not have been so sharply distinguished, or have distinguished themselves, from their neighbors” (2004: 207). The Christian difference, as the Diognetus acknowledges, is not in different clothes or radically different customs or language, but in their behavior and beliefs: “They marry like everyone else and have children, but do not expose them. They share their meals in common but not their beds” (5.6–7). 2 Clement acknowledges Christians’ integration with their community when it warns its readers to behave properly lest their neighbors “discover our behaviors do not match our words” (13.3). The perception of Christians as a distinctly separate group, as discrete and self-contained, is a function of Christian self-representations. In reality Christians would have lived and worked in mixed communities and likely exhibited little perceptual difference from their neighbors. Their salient distinction may well have been their own sense of detachment from the communal life of their localities and 32

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their commitment to the Christian community. That feelings of estrangement and displacement would accompany this historical moment of accelerating social and cultural change should not surprise. Geographical, political, and social boundaries were being refigured and rearranged, and perhaps more importantly, imperial subjects were learning to recalibrate their mental maps to their new political and social locations. Such circumstances might well produce vertiginous feelings of displacement and dislocation, especially for those actually losing ground through these imperial rearrangements, as the under stratum appears to have done as a result of the imperial elite’s consolidation of power. In his study of modern imperial relations, Homi Bhabha co-opted the term umheimlich, “unhomeliness,” to describe “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world” that accompanies the “condition of extra-territorial and cross cultural initiatives” (1994: 9). For Bhabha, to be “unhomed” does not mean to be homeless, but refers to the unnerving sense of being relocated into new and different configurations. Although the Roman Empire was a very different entity from the colonialist empires of the modern nation-states, Bhabha’s term unhomeliness seems to catch the tone of the Christian sojourning discourse with its emphasis on not feeling at home anywhere, of being displaced everywhere in this world. Bhabha locates feelings of unhomeliness in moments of territorial and social refigurations; the early centuries around the common era were such a moment. The Christian self-presentation of traumatic dislocation coupled to an anticipation of triumphant relocation might appeal to those inhabitants in the early Roman imperial period losing social position, power, and influence as the empire’s alliance of elite exerted their presence and control. That the Christian universalizing narratives may provide an alternative, as Buell suggests, to other contemporary universalizing discourses is a valuable observation (2005: 154). The focus on place and geography in the Christian social imaginary specifically intervenes in the related discourse around place and power taking place in the empire, seen, for example, in the elder Pliny’s claim that Rome would provide a common patria for the whole world (Nat. 3.5.39). Rome’s universal extent is as consistent a theme in imperial writings as is the sojourning theme in Christian texts. For example, Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes Rome as “the first and only city in all history that could limit her power by the rising and the setting of the sun” (Ant. rom. 1.3.3.). The Aeneid foresees Augustus’ power extending to the edges of the world, to a “land beyond the stars and the paths of the year and the sun” (6.795–6). And the introduction to Augustus’ record of accomplishments, his Res Gestae, announces that he had subjected the whole world (orbem terrarum) to the power of the Roman people. In the second century, Aristides could say that Rome provided a common city (astu koinin) for everyone (Or. 26.61).42 These texts, issuing from elite circles, witness how geographical expanse was used to assert authority and act as a metonymy for the empire’s overwhelming power and resources.43 This imperial geographical triumphalism beginning in the Augustan period supplies a context for the Christian sojourning language. Imperial power may 33

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encompass the whole world, but Christians repudiate this world in any case. As they proclaim, they are mere “sojourners,” passersby on their way to another place beyond and outside the control of the powers of this world. As a preacher in the middle of the second century reminds his congregation, “You should realize ˛ of the flesh is brief and short lived, brothers that our visit to this realm (´o ω) but the promise of Christ is great and astounding – namely rest in the coming kingdom and eternal life” (2 Clem. 5.5). Christians were hollowing out imperial pretensions to universal power and control. They were announcing a new space, a new kingdom outside the contemporary configurations of power, and through this discursive move, were creating a new place for social solidarity. Whatever else Christian discourse was doing, it was also forging the space for a new power site outside the oversight of the imperial gaze. The political implications of this construction cannot be avoided. Christian spatial discourse contests the imperial elite’s claims to universal control. The control of space and place is a constituent element of all forms of social authority. Very early in societies, people are taught to know their place. Christian practices and beliefs entailed that Christians would miss some of these social lessons. For Christians apparently did absent themselves from civic space during certain communal activities.44 In Minucius Felix’s Octavius, for example,the exasperated pagan interlocutor, Caecilius Natalis, rebukes Christians: “Worried and troubled you refrain from proper pleasures, you do not frequent the theaters; you do not take part in the processions, the public banquets are held without you … in your wretched folly, you neither rise for another life nor live this one” (12.5–6).45 Caecilius mocks Christians for allowing their focus on their next, resurrected life to cause them to miss out on the communal pleasures of their present existence. Christians’ refusal to participate in these communal occasions is usually traced to religious scruples. They were avoiding eating sacrificial meat at the banquets, walking with cult images in the civic processions, or seeing violent or vulgar enactments in the theaters. Although these explanations are to an extent valid, they underplay the inherent social message inscribed in this nonparticipation. Simon Price has established the importance of civic festivals for the psychic and social life of cities in the imperial period. Cities expected their inhabitants to participate in these festivals and “made prescriptions” that they do so (Price 1984: 121). Festivals and the banquets and processions associated with them were an integral part of a city’s machinery for establishing status and social hierarchy. In this context, Christians’ absence from public communal celebrations takes on more social valence. In a study of occupational associations in the Roman east during the imperial period, Otto van Nijf emphasizes the vital role played by just those activities avoided by Christians according to Caecilius (public banquets, processions, and the theater) for instituting social hierarchy. He notes that the elite classes of the Greek cities were “reinventing” themselves in the Roman period as a ruling class, civic rituals helped to advance this project (van Nijf 1997: 134). 34

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Civic ceremonies became more hierarchically structured during the imperial period, and this refiguration legitimated and naturalized the elite’s privileged position. As van Nijf explains: The members of the bouleutic class received preferential treatment at banquets and distributions, and had seats of honour reserved for them during the myriad theatrical, musical and athletic performances in the theatres and stadia. The positions of prominence that they occupied during the many civic processions also underlined their superior status in the local community. (1997: 136) Through these civic activities, the prominence and power of the elite were established and reestablished for all to see and thus became reified through their public enactment. The respective position of other groups in the civic hierarchy was also made manifest by the benefits or attention they received (or did not receive). Civic ceremonies were exercises for ranking a particular social world. With reference to the procession forming part of the well-documented festival instituted by C. Iulius Demosthenes in the Lycian city of Oenoanda in the early second century, van Nijf comments, “Ritual occasions are not only a model of society, they also set up a model for society” (2001: 332).46 And the society modeled in the Oenoandan procession is an eminently hierarchical one, as might be expected when its founder is described as “a friend of all the governors and personally known to the emperors” (Mitchell 1990: 187; SEG 38, 1462 L.104). The procession, which includes the agonothete (the overseer of the contests), priests and priestesses of the emperors, the priest of Zeus, together with assorted civic officials and magistrates, carries imperial images and an altar for sacrifices through the theater. Its composition showcases the distinction of imperial and civic leaders and reinforces their right to power, privilege, and position. Evidence shows that lengthy negotiations went into shaping the final form of Demosthenes’ festival. Their end result of these negotiations was to increase the imperial presence and incorporate surrounding towns into the festival. The emperors’ priestesses and priests were added to the procession, and the agonothete was given a gold crown inscribed with portraits of Hadrian and Apollo to wear. These changes effected a more seamless integration of the imperial and local hierarchies in the lineup (Rogers 1991: 96–8). The procession in its final form, this model for society, displays in miniature the cosmopolitan alliance of elite administering the empire. Van Nijf’s examination determines that, in general, civic processions featured socially and politically prominent groups. On occasion, however, trade and occupational associations could take part in civic processions (1997: 206). Commentators suggest that the social makeup of early Christian groups shares affinities with these associations. Many early Christians were likely themselves to have been “traders and artisans” (Meeks 2006: 157).47 In both Greek and Roman societies, persons involved in banausic occupations were traditionally devalued 35

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(Finley 1985). When the occupational associations appeared in processions, they acquired the opportunity to proclaim their part in society and make a “clear assertion regarding the association’s active participation within the webs of sociopolitical relations and hierarchies of the polis under Roman rule” (Harland 2003: 160).48 The associations’ recognition and integration into the civic community entailed a certain cost, however. By taking part in processions, participants showed their alignment with the social order being put on parade. Occupational associations apparently had restricted appearances; their participation is seldom noted in the official public epigraphical records such as the one establishing the festival in Oenoanda. Van Nijf deduces that associations took part in festive processions primarily on the basis of evidence supplied by the associations’ own inscriptional records and epigraphical testimony for the presence of “standard bearers” in these organizations (1997: 195– 200). Their absence from most official records of processions suggests that the associations were minor players in the processional hierarchy. When they did take part, the associations learned their place, and it was not at the front of the line. In the progressive oligarchization of the Greek cities, civic rituals established and solidified the elite’s superiority and positioned the “others” behind them. The occupational associations were heavily involved in another of the mechanisms for instituting the elite’s pre-eminence: the plethora of honorific statues thanking benefactors. As Demosthenes shows in Oenoanda, the civic elite were expected personally to fund many aspects of civic life. Public festivals, processions, banquets, food allotments, building projects were all underwritten by elite benefactors. Elite benefactors were generous to their cities and the recipients were appreciative. These benefactions, however, also provided an avenue for the elite to display their preeminence and they expected to be thanked for their largesse. The effect of the material array of testimonials thanking benefactors in the cities should not be underestimated: As van Nijf emphasizes, “the overwhelming visual impact of the city centers clogged with honorific monuments” would have persuaded viewers that the people awarded these honors must possess extraordinary merit and superiority (1997: 118). Memorials and statues honoring the imperial and civic elite played a key role in confirming the elite’s right to their prestige. The early imperial centuries experienced a sharp escalation in inscriptional activity. This increase has been connected to the attempt by individuals and groups across the empire to establish their social identity in the new circumstances and opportunities of imperial times (Woolf 1996: 27).49 The proliferation of honorific testimonials belongs to this context. The elite, through their control of the official civic institutions, were able to oversee the placement and composition of public honors, and most of these are tributes to the imperial family, magistrates, or local elite benefactors. The occupational associations, however, also could utilize these honorific practices to assert their social identity and presence in their cities. A second-century CE example from Termessos in Pisidia displays the process.50 An inscription describes how the council and the people of Termessos passed a 36

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decree to set up “a statue in a prominent position” honoring an elite benefactress, Atalante. This same decree awards the technitai (artisans) the right to erect another statue to the woman in the same place. The inscription on the artisans’ statue is extant and reads, “The technitai have honoured Atalante daughter of Piaterabis, daughter of Pillakoas … who has been the benefactress, in supplying grain in a generous manner to the entire plebs during a grain shortage” (trans. van Nijf 1997: 113). With their honorific gesture, the technitai manage to promote their own name in a prominent location on a permanent memorial. Monuments in choice public places were traditionally reserved for the elite. By honoring Atalante, the technitai ensure that their generosity, as well as hers, will live in civic memory. Moreover, they have had their social presence and respectability officially endorsed by a decree of the city (van Nijf 1997: 121). In this transaction, however, the technitai were not only staking out their own social claim, they also were confirming their allegiance with the “worldview” and political arrangements structuring their cities (van Nijf 1997: 128–9). By their participation in civic activities and rituals, occupational associations give their assent to the operating social order and their position in it. Indeed the associations show their support by imitating the more prestigious organizations in their own rules, terminology and practices. Van Nijf offers a persuasive case that civic festivals and public ceremonies had a role in creating the model of society evolving in the early imperial centuries, based on a “hierarchy of status groups, effectively and symbolically integrated into an imperial framework” (1997: 247). In this case, Christians’ representation of their nonparticipation in civic ceremonies and rituals has social implications. They avoid being defined within the elite classificatory system working through civic rituals. And they evade the implicit affirmation of the hierarchical system that participation would entail. As the elite constructed themselves as a new ruling ordo uniquely suited to high position and power, Christians were constructing themselves as uncooperative with this elite project.51 Phillip Harland takes a different position on the question of Christian participation in imperial honorific practices. In his study of associations, synagogues, and Christian congregations in Asia, Harland makes a case for the many similarities among these social organizations. His suggestion that an “analogical comparison” of the three would destabilize the view of Christianity as “unique” is salient (2003: 211–12). As the basis for his comparison, Harland first establishes that the associations were not, as has been argued, subversive or divisive elements in their cities, but except in unusual circumstances were fully integrated into the civic order. As evidence for this integration, he cites the numerous inscriptions erected by the associations to honor members of the civic and imperial elite. Harland writes that these testify to the groups’ integration “within the nexus of relations that linked inhabitants to the polis and the polis to the province and the empire” (2003: 159–73, quotation 159). Using associations as an analogy, Harland argues that the social dissidence of Christian congregations and Jewish synagogues has similarly been overemphasized. He rejects, as I do, the perception of Jewish and Christian groups as 37

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“sects” completely cut off from their larger community, and advocates for a more complex understanding of their relation, especially their positive interactions, with their cities. Harland is quite right to call attention to the multiplicity of positions and attitudes Jews and Christians likely presented toward their communities, but he seems to push the Christian evidence too far when he maintains that Christian assemblies “like associations could be involved in conventions of civic life relating to honors for emperors and imperial representatives, participating within relations that linked the polis to province to empire” (2003: 214). Harland cogently argues that Christians could, and did, take a more moderate stance toward Rome and the empire than the one appearing in John’s Apocalypse. However, his contention that the early Christians had a share in articulating the empire’s web of power through honorific testimonials seems questionable in the context of their self-representation in the early imperial centuries as passersby, people differentiated from the ongoing life of their communities. They were constructing themselves as people with little interest in their wider community on their way to their future home where their true allegiance belongs. There is inscriptional and literary support that synagogues erected honorific inscriptions for elite benefactors (Harland 2003: 226–8). Harland finds the absence of similar Christian evidence unsurprising, since there is no material testimony attesting to Christians’ presence until well into second century. Harland maintains that this lack of evidence does not imply that Christians were not involved in civic honorary practices in their cities (2003: 229). But even if Christian honorific inscriptions should appear, I would argue that Harland’s position that Christians used these to insert themselves into the hegemonic nexus of city, province, and empire would still need explanation concerning how this practice functions within the Christian worldview. Without this epigraphical testimony, it is difficult to accept that Christians in the early period participated in civic honorific practices on the evidence offered by Harland – that the Christian authors “encouraged their followers to adopt the common conventions of praying for and/or honoring civic or imperial authorities and emperors” (2003: 231). The elision created in Harland’s “and/or” between “praying for” and “honoring” (in the sense of civic testimonials in gratitude for benefits) covers up what seems to be a large gap between simply praying for an emperor and spending money to inscribe a testimony for him or negotiating the political processes necessary for a public inscription or monument. The earliest Christian documents already enjoin respect for civil officials, Paul, for example, writes, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” (Rom. 13.1).52 For Paul and other Christians, their eschatological hopes located them in a cosmic frame beyond the confines of this world. The world and its authorities are in their last days, and what ultimately matters is preparing for the end time. As Paul writes a few lines after urging obedience to authorities, “The night is far gone, the day is near” (Rom. 13.11). Tertullian also urges Christians to pray for the emperors and empire, precisely because he believes that the empire is the last political state before the end time and Rome delays the imminent threat hanging over the world and this age (Apol. 32.1).53 38

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Early Christian representations are inscribed with a future orientation; Christians look forward to a refigured world. It is there, in that future place, that they will be recognized and rewarded. So the author of the Barnabas writes: For the one who does these things will be glorified in the kingdom of God. The one who chooses those other things will be destroyed, along with his works. That is why there is resurrection and a recompense ’ (´ oo ) …. The day is near when all things will perish, along with the wicked one. The Lord is near, as is his reward ( `oς). (Erhman 2003: 21.1–3) The rulers of this world, this one that is about to pass away, were not a primary concern for many Christians. They accepted that authorities deserve respect because God has set them in their high positions. It seems unlikely, however, on the basis of their repeated emphasis on their estrangement from their communities, that Christian groups would erect honorific inscriptions or monuments, so that they might, as Harland says the associations do, “confirm their relationship with the polis, identifying with its interests” (2003: 107). Harland suggests that the exhortation in 1 Peter, “Honor the emperor” (`o 

´ε  ε; 2.17) should be interpreted more concretely. Possible meanings for the phrase could include “setting up an honorary inscription, dedicating a structure or building, and engaging in rituals and prayers that encompassed the emperor or other authorities in the setting of group worship” (2003: 235).54 This last suggestion appears realistic; the author may well be urging his community to include the emperor in their prayers during rituals. But there seems little warrant in the text to support the idea that the author is advocating a public honor, an inscription or building for the emperor. He had just employed the ´ ´ same verb, timao, in the phrase “honor everyone” (ς  ε, 2.17). In this use, the word carries the sense “to respect,” without any hint of paying either public or ritual honors. The verb likely has a similar force in the second phrase, “respect the emperor.” More tellingly, the larger context of 1 Peter makes it unlikely that the phrase alludes to offering public honors for the emperor.55 The epistle is addressed to the “sojourners,” the “exiles” of the diaspora of Pontus, Galatia, Cappodocia, Asia and Bithynia” (1.1), and it warns its readers that “the end of all things is near” (4.7) and counsels them to rejoice in sharing Christ’s suffering (4.13). The letter constructs its readers as exiles, sojourners, living at the end of time and suffering for their faith. This context tells against interpreting the direction to honor the emperor as calling on them to erect a public testimonial. The passage asks the Christians to bide their time and show good conduct, even when their neighbors malign them. They are after all a “chosen race, a royal people, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Peter 2.10). They wait for the Lord’s coming. It seems unlikely that the letter is urging these people in their “time of sojourning” (1 Peter 1.17) to erect public honors for the leaders of this passing world. ˘

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Polycarp’s respect for authorities takes a similar shape. In his Epistle to the Philippians, he urges his audience to pray for “kings and magistrates and rulers.” His request occurs in a general admonishment that Christians should put away all anger. Polycarp asks Christians “[to pray] as well as for those who persecute and hate you and for the enemies of the cross” (12.3). Christians’ prayers for rulers witness their forbearance and goodwill toward all persons. The major point of Polycarp’s letter is to urge his readers to emulate the example of the martyrs, “who are in the place they deserved, with the Lord with whom they also suffered. For they did not love the present age” (9.2). At his trial, Polycarp explains to the proconsul that Christians are taught to give honor ( `) to leaders and authorities (10.2). But when the proconsul threatens to burn him if he does not give up his faith, Polycarp’s reply displays his primary allegiance: “You threaten with a fire that burns for an hour … for you do not know of the fire of the coming judgment and eternal torment …. Bring on what you wish” (Mart. 10.2). When early Christians represented their loyalty to the rulers of the contemporary world, they often did so in the context of this world’s fleeting nature. This context mitigates against interpreting their statements as a Christian mandate for getting involved in the contemporary manipulations around power in which the honorific testimonials played a role. Even the most positive assessments of Christian and imperial interrelations in the early centuries construct Christians as alienated from their social surroundings. Eusbeius describes an apology offered to Marcus Aurelius by Melito of Sardis. In this, Melito depicts the relationship between Christianity and the empire as mutually beneficial. He explains that Christianity arising under the “great rule” of Augustus was an auspicious event for the empire. The empire has experienced only prosperity since Christianity’s appearance: “Everything has increased in splendor and fame” (Eusebius Hist. eccl. 4.26.7–8). Melito implies that Christianity deserves credit for the well–being of the empire and the pax Romana, and he argues that persecutions should cease on the grounds that Christians have sustained the empire. Melito seems to imply not that Christians should erect monuments to the emperor, but that perhaps the emperor should offer public thanks to Christians. Nevertheless, in Melito’s positive depiction of imperial and Christian interactions, Christians are still positioned as alienated from their communities, as a persecuted people awaiting relief. Early Christian texts repeatedly fashion Christians as “other.” They tend either to emphasize Christians’ own disconnection from their communities, their sense of themselves as sojourners focused on another future existence, or they emphasize Christians’ harassment and persecution by neighbors and civil authorities. Neither of these self-positionings indicates a group set on involving themselves in the public competition for social presence and prestige provided by contemporary honorific practices. Their claim for presence and power was being made in a different register. Christians could respect earthly leaders and contemporary practices. As Polycarp explains, Christians honor authorities as long as this obedience does not harm them (Mart. 10.2). In these Christian representations, 40

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this world, its leaders, and its power machinations are ultimately irrelevant. The world is in its end time, and Christians direct their energies toward this next life. It is there that their power and presence will be made manifest, not on an inscription in a city center. The early Christians do not advance a political agenda. Their projection of a new world, where the institutions of justice and power will be refigured and realigned does, however, carry social and political implications. Returning to the passage at the beginning of this chapter, in which Hippolytus describes the dialectic and mimetic evolution of two cosmopolitan social identities in the first century – highborn persons from every nation called “Romans” and those people from every nation called “Christians.” Hippolytus goes on to explain why Augustus held his census precisely “when the Lord was born in Bethlehem” (Comm. Dan. 4.9.5). The census was conducted to sort out these trans-empire groups. The “Romans” were those enrolling for the terrestrial king, and the “Christians” were those believing in the heavenly king whose foreheads bore “the sign (tropaion, monument) of their victory over death.” It is the premise of this chapter that Hippolytus’ description aptly articulates the respective selfrepresentations of two cosmopolitan cultural identities that were evolving in the early imperial period: the Romans, an alliance of cosmopolitan elites who managed the empire, and the Christians, a coalition of people anticipating a different life. This Christian self-definition as the people who triumphed over death allowed Christians to reframe the contemporary power games. All power ultimately is reduced to the vulnerability of the body to be hurt, destroyed, dissolved, and obliterated and the opportunity to coerce that this vulnerability cedes to the powers that be. By denying the vulnerability of their bodies to pain and death and looking forward to their coming life, Christians preempted contemporary structures of power and opened space for their new cosmopolitan identity to emerge and eventually to flourish.

Notes 1 Harnack (1904: 331) comments about Hippolytus’ statement, “This is the selfconsciousness of Christendom expressed perhaps in the most robust, as also in the most audacious form imaginable!” 2 Swain (1996: 279) notes that Aristides never refers to himself as a Roman or describes other Greeks with this term. 3 Whitmarsh (2001: 130) warns not “to reduce paideia to a front for stabilizing power.” To do so, he suggests, would be to miss its place in contemporary thought, which focuses on it as a “self making system.” Whitmarsh’s point is well taken for those who have the opportunity to enter this system, but may have appeared differently to those who were being figured as “other” by virtue of the paideutic system. 4 See Borg (2004), Goldhill (2001), Konstan and Saïd (2006), Saïd (1991), Spawforth (2001), Swain (1996), and Whitmarsh (2001). 5 See Romeo (2002) for her discussion of the personal rivalries that may have contributed to this emphasis on a genealogical conception of Greek identity in Hadrian’s criteria for the Panhellenic League. She suggests that these criteria may have emanated from the second sophist Polemo and his circle and have been directed at the understandings of

41

ROMAN IMPERIAL IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA

6 7

8 9

Greekness held by persons such as the Gallic Favorinus (Polemo’s rival), who insists he is Greek on the basis of his rhetorical achievements. Because of their artificiality, the rhetorical products of the second sophistic were quite different and used for different ends than those of Demosthenes and other classical orators. For the difficulty in defining the Second Sophistic, see Swain (1996: 1–6), Whitmarsh (2005: 13–15), and Goldhill (2001: 14–16). Not all educated writers adhered to the Attic standards; neither Galen (medical texts were typically in Ionic or koine) nor Artemidorus (Bowersock 2004), for example, were atticizers. Whitmarsh (2005: n. 35 14) lists the places where Philostratus refers to students of rhetoric as Greeks: Vit. soph. 531, 564, 567, 571, 574, 588–9, 590–1, 600, 605, 609, 613, 617, 627. Fergus Millar (1993: 455) describes the effect of the educational criteria for effacing cultural (ethnic) differences: We cannot in fact expect that a sophisticated Greek writer of the second century AD would ever offer us an analysis of the local culture of his home region. For precisely the nature (and, in a sense, the purpose) of the Greek culture of the period was that it was not regional; the style, vocabulary, literary forms and conventions of allusion (to the common stock of mythology, to Archaic and Classical literature and to Classical history) which defined it, made it a common, supra-regional culture.

10 Swain (1996), Goldhill (2001), and Whitmarsh (2001) provide sophisticated and nuanced readings of elite subjects’ self-representations during the period. 11 See Saïd (2001, 2006) on this oration. 12 See Swain (1996: 21–7) for Dionysius’ political agenda in this passage. Dionysius’ critique continues through a string of disparaging comparisons for the deficient rhetoric. Whitmarsh lists the polarities Dionysius employs to distinguish the opposing rhetorics: “eastern versus western; ignorant and theatrical versus philosophical; mad versus sane; anarchic (popular, tyrannical) versus traditional aristocratic; profligate versus thrifty; wanton whore versus chaste wife; arriviste versus indigenous; revolutionary versus established” (Whitmarsh 2005: 52). ’ ’  ς oς ´ ´ 13 ’ ´  ’ o 

` ` ε o ς ε’ ´εεo \ ω o  ’ ’ `   ´ ` ς \` ´ \Pω  ´ `o ς ε\   o  o ς ´o ε ς o ´ εε  ` ς ’ ’ o o ´ o   ’ ς o\ εoες ´ `  ` ` ` o   ` ’ ε  `ε  ’ εo  \ \ ´ ` ς ´ ε ς ε´o εo , ϕ’  o o ες, ε´ ` ε o   ω  

o ε’  ´εωε ` `o ´ o o εo ´o ε ϕ´o o ς ´o εως ´εoς ’ε

 ’ oo  ’ 

´ ´ o ’εε . 14 For discussions of this question, see Bowersock (1979: 57–78), Gabba (1982: 41–65), Spawforth (2001: 377–80), and Swain (1996: 22–7), and for commentary see Wisse (1995: 65–82 with bibliography) and Hidber (1996). 15 See Ando (2000) for a comprehensive analysis of how the consensus for Roman rule was created. 16 Aristides continues that the non-elite should also welcome Rome’s power, as it will protect them from the powerful in their own communities: “All of the masses have a sense of security against the powerful among them, provided by your wrath and vengeance which will immediately fall upon the powerful if they dare some lawless change” (Or. 26.65). Peter Brunt labels this statement that Rome protected the poor as “flagrantly false” (1990: 267 n. 1). Translations of Aristides’ orations are by Behr (1981); the text is that of Keil 1898). 17 See Bowersock (1969: 23), Bowie (1982), Flintermann (1995: 33–40), and Schmitz (1997: 50–63) for the wealth and social position of the Sophists. ˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

˘

42

COSMOPOLITAN IDENTITIES

18 Bowie (1982: 44) offers that not even in the case of the post of ab epistulis, where verbal expertise would be important, does being a sophist per se seem to make the difference. Anderson (1989: 148) disputes Bowie that Philostratus’ Sophists almost without exception were of high status. 19 My discussion of Bourdieu in these pages relies on Swartz’s exegesis (1997: 82–92 ). 20 “Dominant symbolic systems provide integration for dominant groups, distinctions and hierarchies for ranking groups, and legitimation for social ranking by encouraging the dominated to accept the existing hierarchies of social distinctions” (Swartz 1997: 83). 21 Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron 1997: 1) writes, “All pedagogic action (PA) is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power.” 22 “Every power to exert symbolic violence i.e. every power which manages to impose meanings and imposes them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to these power relations” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1997: 4). 23 See Whitmarsh (2001: 9–21) for a sophisticated analysis of the discourse around Greek culture and Roman power taking place in the sources of the late republic and early empire. 24 See Adams (2003a: 9–14) for a discussion of elite Romans’ bilingualism. Adams notes Romans’ varied attitudes about speaking Greek. Some speakers refused to use the language lest they seem too Greek. Holford-Strevens (1993: 203–13) suggests that few Greeks in the second century attempted to develop an expertise in Latin. See Rochette (1997) for the systematic examination of the use of Latin in the Greek east. 25 This section relies on Swain (2004: 3–40) in his study of the language of Apuleius and Aulus Gellius. 26 Stephen Harrison (2000) argues that Apuleius conforms with the Greek sophistic model. Swain (2004: 12 with n. 26) points out where Apuleius differs from this model. 27 Horace, Odes 3.1.1. 28 Nil cum fidibus graculost, nihil cum amaracino sui. Stephen Beall (2001: 94 with citations) warns that Gellius’ description of a “bi-lingual empire must be taken with a grain of salt.” 29 See Adams (2003b) for the rare use of the term Romanitas in Latin writing. 30 Woolf (1998: 59–60) discusses how barbarians lacking the qualities of humanitas were considered “imperfect humans, part way to beasts.” 31 Harnack (1972: 301–35) surveys references to Christians as a race, nation, people. 32 Buell’s insightful analysis has guided my discussion. 33 I am using the text and translation of Ehrman (2003) for the apostolic fathers: 1–2 Clement, Epistle of Barnabas, Epistle to Diognetus, Martyrdom of Polycarp, and Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians. 34 See Hopkins (1998) for the number of Christians in the “early period.” 35 The Syriac version of Aristides has four divisions: barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians. In my study I have not focused on Jewish identity processes. See Lieu (2004) and Berkowitz (2006); Berkowitz presents a persuasive case for the intersection of rabbinic and Christian martyr texts around the topics of judges and judicial executions in their identity narratives. 36 Buell (2005: 155) discusses Tertullian’s reasons for refusing non-Christians’ use of the term “third race” for Christians (Nat. 1.8). She argues that Tertullian anticipated “distinctiveness as a natio would put Christians at a disadvantage,” making them more vulnerable to persecution. 37 With “mimicry,” Buell invokes the language of Bhabha (1994: 85–96), likely following the reading of Andrew Jacobs (2004) cited in her passage.

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38 Lieu describes “perspectives that have continually re-emerged [in Christian identity], the sense of continuity through time, belonging to and being able to tell a story, and the sense of separateness and otherness” (2004: 311). 39 See Buell (2005: 29–33) and Lieu (2004: 234–5) for their discussion of this text. 40 Lieu suggests that in the Epistle to Diognetus, “There is no world wide church to claim allegiance, only others sharing the same ambivalence to daily life as they themselves” (2004: 235). This reading underplays the importance of this ambivalence in Christian notions of identity that Lieu establishes at other points in her study. 41 See the Apostolic Tradition (2002: 88–94) for a list of occupations that do not allow people to become catechumens. These involve licentious occupations (brothel keeper, prostitute, actor), or religiously related work (idol maker, magician, astrologer) or violence (soldier, gladiator). Civic leaders and teachers of children are also prohibited, likely on the basis of cult duties and need to teach mythological writings respectively. These prohibitions make it clear that most occupations were open to Christians. 42 See Ando (2000: 65–70, 325–35). 43 See Nicolet (1991) for an incisive study of the importance of geography and space in the imperial mentality of the Augustan age. 44 Tertullian, Spect.; Idol. 13–15, but Price (1984: 123 n. 134) notes, “Some Christians in Spain acted as imperial priests.” There is non-Christian corroboration of Christians’ alienation from civic duties. Celsus accuses Christians of not serving as soldiers or accepting public office (Origen C. Cels. 8.73; 75). The military service of Christians is a complex topic; see Helgeland et al. (1985). Pliny’s letter (Ep. 10.25) to Trajan suggests that the Christians in Bithynia were accused of not frequenting temples or solemn rites. The practice of individual Christians in these matters is difficult to establish definitely. 45 Nec resurgitis miseri nec interim vivitis! 46 See Mitchell (1990) and Rogers (1991) on Demosthenes’ festival. Rogers suggests that commentators should pay more attention to the contributions of the boulai and demoi in discussing and negotiating the terms of this wealthy benefactor’s foundation (97). 47 See Meeks (1983) for a more developed statement of this position. 48 Here, Harland is commenting on the associations’ involvement in erecting monuments, but his statement would be equally applicable to participation in processions. 49 See MacMullen (1982) for the “epigraphic habit.” Woolf (1996) traces this monumentalizing to the anxieties of individualism in the new empire setting. See Harland (2003: 158) for a critique of this position. I see the epigraphical habit as a claim for identity not from anxieties necessarily, but as a result of the refigurations of the new times, where all sorts of groups and people were taking the opportunity to fashion or refashion themselves. 50 Tituli Asiae Minoris 3.1.62. I am dependent on van Nijf (1997: 112–14). 51 Christian non-participation is a central element in Christian self-representation; lack of evidence leaves in question how strictly individual Christians observed these practices. 52 For prayers for ruler see also 1 Tim 2.1–2 and 2 Clem. 53 See Ritter (2006: 524–37) for a succinct review of this evidence for Christian attitudes to empire. Justin also advocates loyalty to authorities (1 Apol. 12). 54 See Harland (2003: 234–5) for relevant bibliography on this passage. 55 See Elliott (1981) and (2001) on the social setting of 1 Peter.

44

2 FALSE DEATHS AND NEW BODIES

That the cultural productions of contemporaneous social entities, the imperial elite and the Christians, share overlapping themes and emphases should not surprise. In a chapter titled “Resurrection,” Glen Bowersock (1994) examined the numerous examples of “apparent death” (Scheintod) in Greco-Roman narrative fictions. He concluded his analysis by questioning “whether the extraordinary growth in fictional writing, and its characteristic and concomitant fascination with resurrection” might be “some kind of reflection of the remarkable stories that were coming out of Palestine in the middle of the first century A.D.” (1994: 119).1 Rather than seeing a relation of influence between Christian discourse (especially Christian resurrection discourse) and the fictive prose narratives of the early centuries CE, I suggest these texts should be recognized as attempts by different social constituencies to address the same issue: negotiating notions of cultural and social identity in the matrix of early Roman imperialism. That these sets of texts share similar motifs and themes results not from influence, but that they both converge around the same problem, drawing from a common cultural environment, in the same historical context. Bowersock’s recognition of the overlapping chronology of the rise of Christianity and of the prose fiction genre is pertinent. Ewen Bowie has persuasively argued for placing the earlier Greek fictive romances in the mid-first century CE. He proposes that they all were likely written within a few decades of each other (2002: 57). If we place the earlier Greek novels in the mid-first century and accept a mid-third-century date as valid for Heliodorus, then all the Greek novels are products of the period between the mid-first and mid-third centuries CE.2 The Latin prose fictions, Petronius’ Satyrica and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, were also written in the first two centuries CE. In the second and early third century Christian discourse also began to show an intensified focus on resurrection, especially on the material nature of the human resurrected body. Caroline Bynum characterizes this shift in resurrection discourse:3 By the end of the second century, “Resurrection” was no longer simply a minor theme of discussion and apologetics; it became a major element in disputes among Christians and in Christian defenses against 45

ROMAN IMPERIAL IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA

pagan attacks. Entire treatises were devoted to the topic. Resurrection not of “the dead” or “the body” (soma or corpus) but of “the flesh” (sarx or caro) became a key element. (1995: 26) Many Christians were beginning to insist that the risen human body was nothing less than a fully material body, replicating the natural body of human existence. Bynum interprets this insistence as a reaction to the necessities of martyrdom; the promise of a restored material resurrected body reassured Christians threatened by “pain and mutilation but also from scattering, dishonor, even cannibalism after death” (1995: 58). Bynum’s point that a belief in the resurrection of a fully material body would help assuage concerns about martyrs’ bodies is surely correct. What she does not probe, however, is why Christian martyr texts place so much emphasis on pain, mutilation, and dismemberment and what role this representation plays in the wider cultural dialogue of the period. For Christian texts were not the only texts to feature bodily pain and mutilation; mutilated bodies permeate the cultural terrain of the period. As seen above, a focus on graphic and gruesome tortures, bodily mutilation, and cannibalism surfaces as a major preoccupation across a range of diverse cultural productions in the early empire. A preoccupation with violence appears in contemporary cultural productions. Studies have examined the increasing public violence enacted in the arenas during the period.4 Kathleen Coleman (1990) examines how civic spectacles began to stage particularly horrific ways of dying. To add to the spectators’ pleasure, condemned prisoners were coerced into taking parts in feigned historical or mythological tableaux enacted at civic games. Coleman’s findings (1990: 60–1) support Tertullian’s description of criminals being castrated during the games to reenact the castration of Attis or burned alive to replicate Hercules’ immolation on Mount Oeta (Apol. 15.4–5). Coleman notes that these “fatal charades” cluster in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, and she connects these harsh imperial punishments “with the absolutist trends in Roman government.” (1990: 72). She also reminds of the implicit message of such violence: “The disposal of lives as a public performance presupposes a category of people society regards as dispensable” (1990: 54). Violence similarly inflects the literature of the early imperial period.5 Catherine Edwards notes for example the brutal emphases of battle descriptions in Lucan’s Pharsalia, where the focus is “not on glory but on violation and dismemberment” (2007: 34). Edwards’ study of the depiction of death in Roman writers of the first century CE identifies their “fascination with death – often in its most gruesomely physical aspect” (2007: 220). Maud Gleason interprets the graphic representation of mutilated bodies in the texts of another first century writer, Josephus, as indicating their use as tokens in a cultural dialogue about power. Josephus’ descriptions include messengers wearing their own severed arms around their necks, crucified bodies being tossed over city walls to make a point, and a mother cooking and eating her own child so that the child might, in the words of his text, “become a story – the only one needed to complete the miseries of the Jews” (B.J. 6.207; Gleason 2001: 74). 46

F A L S E D E A T H S A N D N E W BODIES

Gleason suggests human bodies make good “semiotic instruments” because they may function cross-culturally to invoke the body politic. This analogy between the body and the body politic, Gleason offers, can elucidate some examples of the contemporary period’s represented violence. She posits that “dramatizing one’s ability to control individual bodies (both one’s own and those of others) was a vital point in making a claim to political power” (2001: 74). This brief survey testifies to a circulating cultural discourse around violent bodily treatment, dismemberment, and gruesome death in diverse but chronologically related cultural productions of the first centuries CE. This discourse provides the proper context for deciphering the relation between the apparent deaths of the ancient fictions and the contemporary Christian writings on resurrection. The relation is not one of influence, as Bowersock suggests, but both use a common language of the body, mutilation, and death to frame their particular responses to the changed social and political landscape of the period. Understanding the relation and differences between these responses may help to illumine the reception ultimately given to what Bowersock has described as those “remarkable stories coming out of Palestine” (1994: 119).

Fictive false deaths Four of the five extant Greek fictive narratives, the so-called “ideal” romances, are travel adventure narratives.6 These four – those of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, and Heliodorus – describe the disasters experienced by an elite couple, their separation, travels, hardships, tests of faithfulness, and near deaths before they are finally reunited. The Latin prose fictions, Petronius’ Satyrica and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, share some of these same motifs – sex, travels, ship wrecks, disasters – but from a much less “ideal” perspective. These Latin narratives have been described as “salacious, outrageous and teeming with low life” (Stephens and Winkler 1995: 5). Ancient summaries, epitomes, and papyri fragments substantiate the existence of non-ideal Greek prose fictions similar in theme and emphases to the Latin novels.7 All the extant adventure narratives with the exception of the Satyrica (whose text is fragmentary) offer examples of apparent deaths.8 In the Greek ideal adventure romances, only heroines appear actually to die.9 Chariton’s Callirhoe suffers one scheintod (1.4.12), as does Heliodorus’ Chariclea (2.3.3). Xenophon’s Anthia has one apparent, one near, and one threatened death (3.6.5; 2.13.3; 4.6.4). Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe apparently dies three times in the narrative (3.15.5; 5.7.4; 7.3.8). In Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, a young boy, supposedly dead from poison, rises up from his grave to provide evidence against his stepmother (10.12).10 The ubiquity of these apparent deaths supports Bowersock’s perception of their importance for the genre: “the appearance of this motif [Scheintod] concurrently with the development of the genre itself is not likely to be without significance” (1994: 100). The significance of these deaths, as I see it, is their unreality. What may look like a sure disaster turns out not to be one. Bowersock recognized that 47

ROMAN IMPERIAL IDENTITIES IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA

“resurrection” was, in fact, a misnomer for most examples of false deaths in the prose fictions. In the sense of a return to life from death, few characters are actually resurrected.11 Rather, as is the case for all the heroines’ false deaths in the ideal narratives, it turns out that the person had never really died in the first place. What the motif in these narratives connotes is not resurrection, but the illusory nature of the death, its misinterpretation as a death. Bad things may seem to happen to good (that is, wellborn) people in the world of the prose fictions, but they do not happen permanently. The figure of apparent death encapsulates in miniature the plot of all of the adventure novels, and it asserts and reinforces its message about the resiliency of its elite protagonists. The premise driving all the adventure narratives is that their heroes and heroines have suffered a “social death,” a loss of social identity. They become separated from the protection of their city, their social status, and their wealth; they fall into the hands of society’s others, the have-nots, hostile pirates, and bandits. The life of privilege they knew suddenly ends. By the narratives’ conclusion, however, the protagonists have all safely been socially resurrected and restored to their rightful social position and elite identities. The social death providing the plot of the novels also turns out to be a Scheintod. Within the paradigm of an assured happy ending, the motif of apparent death, along with the many near and threatened deaths in the narratives, allows the provincial elite – the likely readers and writers of the romances – an entrance into the contemporary cultural discourse around issues of identity and power that was being figured through mutilated and dead bodies. This culture-wide meditation on violence offers the context for understanding the novels’ false deaths. They (some of them)12 provide occasions for the provincial elite to represent graphic and gruesomely detailed violence. Leucippe’s first death provides an example. In Achilles Tatius’ romance, the elite couple, Clitophon and Leucippe, are shipwrecked off the coast of Egypt, where they are seized by brigands and separated. The bandits take Leucippe away to be a purificatory sacrifice for the robber band. Clitophon is rescued by a detachment of soldiers. Barred by an impassable trench, they all watch from a distance what they believe is Leucippe’s sacrifice. This involves an elaborate ritual. Leucippe is led around an altar to instrumental and vocal music until finally she is tied to stakes in the ground, and the bandits plunge a sword into her heart and down through her stomach, exposing her intestines. The narrative graphically records the rite’s finale: “Tearing them [the intestines] out with his hands and he placed them upon the altar. When they were roasted, each man cut off a portion and ate it” (3.15.5, trans. Whitmarsh). Helen Morales has described the gendered mechanics of this scene, where Leucippe, having already been displayed in the narrative as the object of the male “consumptive gaze,” is finally eaten while Clitophon looks on (2004: 165–8). Morales calls attention to the inherent misogyny in the scene’s voyeuristic, sexually inflected attention to Leucippe’s body.13 She may misconstrue, however, when she suggests that the episode’s hyperbolic “grotesquerie” defuses its horror for readers 48

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(2004: 168). Seeing another human being eaten without some frisson of shock seems unlikely, however unrealistic or camp the depiction.14 Cannibalism, the ultimate social insult, taps into an atavistic fear of being destroyed, devoured, and totally assimilated into another.15 Clitophon’s lament for Leucippe recognizes, even as it puns, the horror of becoming food: O pitiable Leucippe, unluckiest person in the whole world … your body is laid out here, but where are your innards? If fire had destroyed them, the disaster would be less. Now the burial (taphê) of your innards has ´ become the food (trophê) of bandits” (  `ε \  ω  ω o ´ 3.16.3–4).16 `   ω ´εoε o, ˘

˘

˘

The gruesome description, rather than defusing the scene’s horror, maximizes it, and has as its goal “to make the audience’s blood run cold” (Winkler 1980: 167). Despite its melodrama, this vision of a young and beautiful human body cut up and devoured seems to retain its horror. Indeed, the production of horror seems the whole point of the episode, for the reader soon discovers that nothing actually happened to Leucippe. The whole scene was stage-managed by Clitophon’s friends, who joined the robber band after the shipwreck and needed to prove their boldness by performing the sacrifice. They had found a theatrical trunk washed up on the beach with a trick sword, and they used the sword and a false stomach filled with animal entrails to fool the bandits. Leucippe was never eviscerated; her apparent death is simply a device for exciting readers’ suspense and horror and then their relief and joy when she survives the gruesome death. The depiction of Leucippe’s second death continues to allow the narrative to tap into the culture’s discursive fascination with violence and dismemberment. In this case, pirates abduct Leucippe, and as Clitophon again watches helplessly, he sees his beloved decapitated and her body tossed into the sea. The narrative emphasizes dismemberment’s inherent assault on bodily integrity and identity. Rescuing the headless trunk, Clitophon grieves: I am holding the leftovers of your body, but you yourself I have lost (`o  ’ ` ε´ o ’εω `ε  o o  ω oς, ´ o ω ε ´ `ε ´ε) … since Fortune denies me the chance to kiss your face, let me kiss your butchered ’ ´ neck (

’ ε’ ε´ o  ω ε’  ω oωω ´ 

 ω ε’ ´oε \ ´ ´ ` ). ´ T, ´εε o 

ω  (Whitmarsh 5.7.8–9) ˘

˘

˘

Clitophon’s overwrought rhetoric once more deflects readers from the tragic pathos of the maiden’s death. Nevertheless, the image of the no longer intact, damaged body retains some of its latent horror. Again it will turn out that this is a false death. Leucippe is uninjured. Clitophon actually embraces the body of a woman killed by the pirates in Leucippe’s clothes and in her place. 49

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Leucippe’s sacrifice is one of a recurrent pattern in the prose narratives depicting persons facing grisly deaths (Winkler 1980: 167–9).17 This pattern offers readers both thrills and fulfilled desires when the victim inevitably survives the terrifying situation. One subset of this pattern, “victim eaten by wild animals or wild humans”(Winkler 1980: 168), seems particularly relevant to my reading of the narratives as proclamations of the resilient identity of the Greek elite in the context of Roman hegemony.18 Besides Leucippe’s sacrifice, the fictive narratives represent only one other cannibalistic act. A pais (a boy or slave) is sacrificed in the fragmentary Phoinikika of Lollianos. The pais is described as first being thrown on his back and cut up. Then his heart is torn out, cooked, seasoned, and served to a group of men who appear to swear an oath “on the blood of the heart” (P. Colon. 3328. B.1 Recto 8–17; Stephens and Winkler 1995: 338). The episode shares obvious similarities with Leucippe’s sacrifice, but the text is too fragmentary to determine whether this sacrifice is real or also a Scheintod (Winkler 1980: 173–5). In the other episodes in the novels that focus on humans being eaten, the victims, all women, face being devoured by animals. As was the case in Leucippe’s false sacrifice, all the scenes project a subtext of voyeuristic violence.19 Both Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (6.31–2) and the related Greek Onos (25) offer parallel descriptions of the gruesome punishments proposed for a maiden threatened with being eaten alive. She is being punished for attempting to escape from a bandit gang by riding off on Lucius in his ass metamorphosis. The bandits deliberate in sadistic detail over possible torturous deaths for the girl. The proposed punishments are enumerated in Apuleius’ version: “The first man proposed the girl be burnt alive, the second recommended she be thrown to the beasts, the third urged that she be nailed to a gibbet, and the fourth recommended that her body be mangled by torture” (Met. 6.31, trans. Walsh). The bandits finally decide on a method combining all the proposals into the most hideous death possible. They will kill the ass, slit open its stomach, and sew the girl in his belly with only her face exposed. The girl will experience the whole gamut of the proposed torments: [She] will endure the teeth of wild animals as the worms mangle her limbs, the scorching of fire when the sun heats the ass’s belly with its excessive rays, and the agony of the gibbet when the dogs and vultures draw out her intestines. (Met. 6.32)20 By devoting so much space and such graphic detail to the descriptions of the girl eaten by worms, dogs, and vultures, the narrative foregrounds the horror and revulsion invoked by the consumed human body – a horror that never occurs, because the maiden is rescued before her punishment (7.12).21 Xenophon’s romance repeats this motif. After Anthia kills one of the bandits for trying to rape her, her captors decide her death ought to correspond with the atrocity of her act. They too take the pleasure of considering possible punishments but finally decide to feed Anthia to two savage dogs. The narrative describes 50

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the scene: The leader “gave orders to dig a large deep trench and throw Anthia in it with two dogs as atonement for her boldness … They shut the trench with large planks and piled earth on top” (X. 4.6.4–5, trans. Anderson). The two large and ´ fearsome dogs ( ε o

` ϕo εo` ), however, never do eat the heroine. Rather, the bandit appointed to guard her falls in love, feeds the dogs, and eventually frees and protects Anthia (X. 5.2.4–5). Photius’ synopsis suggests that Iamblichus’ Babyloniaca, represents the actual devouring of a woman’s body.22 The father of the female protagonist, Sinonis, discovers a dog eating a maiden’s body and, believing the body to be his daughter’s, immediately slaughters the dog and buries the body with an inscription written in the dog’s blood. He then hangs himself. A little later Rhodanes, the male protagonist, comes upon the scene and is about to kill himself believing that Sinonis has died. He is saved in the nick of time by the news that she still lives. (Bibl. 94.77a29). The revulsion associated with the threat of being consumed, eaten, absorbed into another body underlies all of these scenarios and adds to the effect of their horror for readers. Invariably, in all these cases, the wellborn characters avoid these horrible deaths. Just as the heroines never actually die, they are never actually eaten, never incorporated into another’s body. They survive intact. Indeed, the heroines’ success in not being devoured, in maintaining their body’s integrity, repeats in a related metaphor their success in repelling the many challenges to their chastity, which supplies so much of the plot of the “ideal” narratives.23 As Maggie Kilgour explains, sex and eating are related images. They both act as figures for incorporation: “A less totalizing [than eating] but still bodily image for incorporation is that of sexual intercourse. In French, to consume and to consummate are the same word … Like eating, intercourse makes two bodies one” (1990: 7).24 The heroines of the prose narratives successfully resist both sex and consumption and, through their resistance, proclaim their invulnerability to any forced incorporation into another’s body. Commentators have recognized the inherent social and political message in the romance heroines’ defended chastity. Katherine Haynes notes, “The heroines resist violation, and so the borders of Greek cultural integrity remain uncontested” (2003: 161). Catherine Connors explicitly links the motif to Roman imperialism: But the ancient Greek novels too invite the reader to see connections between bodily integrity and the territorial and political integrity of a region and culture. The heroines’ process of preserving physical and psychological integrity in the Greek novels can be read as a metaphor for the experience of continuing to be (or enact being) Greek in the Roman empire. That is to say, the ways the novels – and elite Greek culture in general – position themselves as impervious to Rome find a metaphorical equivalent in the way the heroines are impervious to the villains who threaten them. (Connors 2005: 246) 51

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These insights may be extended. Through their image of their heroines’ imperviousness to consumption, both sexual and ingestible, the narratives figure the invulnerability of their protagonists, representatives of the Greek elites. The narrative plot that displays rape, consumption, even death as always avoided or “really” happening to someone else, some social “other” affirms the elite’s ability to avoid being swallowed up and to preserve their identity and position as partners in the new regime of Roman imperialism.

Christian new bodies The “false deaths” of the narratives are miniature enactments of the adventure romance plot that depicts an elite couple suffering but eventually prevailing over a social death and the inherent social and political message conveyed by these motifs. Where does this leave Bowersock’s suggestion of a relation between the false-death motif and Christian resurrection discourse? It supports his recognition of the connection between the two themes but questions whether the relation can be as uncomplicated as one of influence. In her nuanced examination of the metaphoric language used in resurrection discourse, Caroline Bynum points out that secondcentury Christians writing on material resurrection often express “a rather crude material continuity.” She explains: Such continuity … is both a defense against and an articulation of the threat of decay, which is understood as absorption or digestion. Nutrition (eating or being eaten – especially cannibalism) is the basic image of positive change and the basic threat to identity. (Bynum 1995: 27) Bynum offers as a context for the new Christian emphasis on the material continuity of the body and its inherent denial of decay and absorption, “persecution and an attendant concern for the cadavers of the martyred” (Bynum 1995: 27).25 Bynum’s point is valid. But that the contemporary prose fictions also deploy a range of images for resisting incorporation suggests that this Christian emphasis on material indestructibility also intervenes in a wider context and cultural dialogue. Christian texts that resist the bodily threats of digestion, incorporation, and assimilation resonate with the same semiotic potential that Gleason describes in the cultural discourse of the period: “Dramatizing one’s ability to control individual bodies (both one’s own and those of others) was a vital part in making a claim to political power.” (2001: 74). It deserves notice that the texts of the provincial elite represent being devoured, either by being eaten or through unwilling sex, as a terrible threat – one horrible to anticipate, but always avoided. In contrast, Christian discourse – written by people who in realistic terms face such threats – treats being devoured or assimilated into another body as no threat at all. 52

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Ignatius of Antioch, in his letter on his way to Rome to be martyred, employs an extraordinarily exultant rhetoric to proclaim his desire to be eaten. He writes to Christians in Rome to persuade them not to attempt to save him: Allow me to be the bread for the wild beasts; through them I am able to attain to God. I am the wheat of God and am ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found to be the pure bread of Christ. Rather, coax the wild animals, that they may become a tomb for me. (Rom. 4.1–2, trans. Ehrman)26 Later, in this same letter, Ignatius prays that the beasts will devour him quickly, but if they do not, he asserts, he will force them (5.2). Ignatius disclaims the horror of being eaten alive, entombed, and incorporated into an animal’s body, horror that the fictive prose narratives assume. Rather, he focuses on his body after his ’ ´ sufferings: “I will rise up” ( o  , Rom. 4.3).27 Ignatius’s insouciance about being eaten repeats as a motif in the early martyr acts. The Martyrdom of Polycarp, dated to the midsecond century, describes a martyr, Germanicus, inspiring his companions as he fights with the beasts. When the proconsul tries to persuade him to relent, Germanicus instead drags an animal on top of himself (3.1). In the Passion of Perpetua, being attacked and bitten by one kind of animal rather than another is described as an answer to prayer (no one prays to avoid being eaten). The narrator explains: But he who said, “Ask and you shall receive,” answered their prayer by giving each one the death, each desired. For whenever they would discuss among themselves their desire for martyrdom, Saturninus … insisted that he wanted to be exposed to all the different beasts … and so at the outset of the contest he and Revocatus were matched with a leopard, and then on the platform they were attacked by a bear. Saturus, on the other hand, hated nothing more than a bear, and he anticipated being killed by one bite of a leopard. Then he was matched with a wild boar … [but] only dragged around. Then when he was bound in the stocks awaiting the bear, the bear refused to come out of the cages, so for a second time Saturus was called back unhurt. (19.2–6 trans. Musurillo)28 Later in the narrative, a leopard does attack Saturus, and covered in blood, he reassures the prison overseer, Pudens – who, according to the narrator, had come to recognize the Christians’ worth (magnam virtutem 9.1) – “These things should not disturb you but rather strengthen you” (21.4). This description of martyrs sitting in prison debating preferable methods for dying supports contemporary scholarship, positing that “Christians expected it [martyrdom] and trained for it in the communities where it occurred” (Young 2001: 11). The discussion by martyrs of the hideous deaths facing them would play 53

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a part in such training. The martyrs both steel themselves and construct a sense of their own control by anticipating and choosing one death rather than another.29 They work to reframe their martyrdom from an exercise of power upon them to one highlighting their own volition. In Saturus’ instruction to the prison official, the narrative directs the proper response by Christian readers to such deaths. Seeing the martyrs, these Christian “overachievers” mauled by beasts, ought to strengthen faith. They are living out their community’s faith and hope. As Saturus proclaims to Pudens, “It is exactly as I foretold and predicted. So far, not one animal has touched me. So now you may believe me with all your heart. I shall be finished off with one bite of a leopard” (21.1). Martyr texts offer consumption by beasts as of little consequence, indeed a desired conclusion. Martyrs themselves locate their punishment within the spectrum of cannibalism.30 In the report of the martyrs in Lyons in the late 170s, Attalus, identified as a Latin speaker, admonishes the crowd that it is they who eat humans, not ’ ˜ o ε’    the Christians whom they accuse of such crimes (’ o` o´ ωoς ´ ’ε´ ε, \´o o ε ε  ε \ ς.  ε \ ς `ε o’` ’ ’ ε ωoς ´ ε´ o ε…; Eusb., Eccl. Hist. 5.1.52). This narrative, however, refigures this cannibalism and its horror through the martyrs’ reaction to it. They refuse its effects. They understand themselves as immune to consumption, assimilation, and destruction. The Acts of Lyons explains why the Christians are able to advance “cheerfully” to punishment, unlike others who had denied their faith.31 The faithful were comforted by “the joy of witnessing, their hope of what was promised (ε’ ε ´εω), and their love for Christ and the spirit of the Father” (Eusb., Eccl. Hist. 5.1.34). One promise in particular – that of a material resurrection – likely supported the martyrs and allowed them to assuage their fear of lasting consumption or destruction. In the fictive narratives, the elite protagonists escape threats of being eaten alive or killed. In the Christian texts, where such threats are carried out, they have no lasting effect. Christian narratives, as the prose fictions did, fashion the threat of being destroyed or assimilated as a false threat. For their bodies will rise again intact. The treatment of the bodies of the martyrs of Lyons suggests that the Christians must have boasted of the inviolability of their bodies. The narrative describes how the bodies of martyrs killed in prison were thrown to the dogs to eat, and then the dismembered bodies were left unburied and under guard; after six days, they were burned and thrown into the Rhone (Eusb., Eccl. Hist. 5.1.59). The narrative describes the reasons behind these actions “to stop Christians from ‘being born again’ and so “that they might have no hope in the resurrection in which they put their trust … walking readily and joyfully to their death” (5.1.63). The fictive prose narratives proclaim that the bodies of their protagonists are immune from lasting harm. The Christian narratives assert an equivalent claim. For although Christian bodies may appear wounded, mutilated, eaten, or even destroyed, they are nevertheless inviolable. In her discussion of the language of the mutilated body in Josephus, Maud Gleason discusses the “role played in the negotiation of power by the spectacle of the body in pain.” Gleason writes, “Sometimes this spectacle is self-dramatizing, ˘

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enacted by the agent with his own body, at other times coercive, enacted by the agent upon the bodies of others” (2001: 52). Christian martyr discourse changes this dynamic of power by encoding other agents’ coercive violence into their own self-dramatizations of power. Christians were promulgating a powerful social message in these texts. Not even the most egregious operations of civic violence can have a lasting effect on their bodies. Martyrs were the star performers of the Christian message.32 Relatively few Christians experienced martyrdom, but seeing martyrs perform their belief in a body immune to consumption and destruction made this body and the sense of identity that went with it available for all adherents (Perkins 1995). Bynum describes the Christian emphasis on material resurrection as a reaction to martyrdom and the eaten, maimed, and mutilated bodies of martyrs. Believing in their material body’s immunity to destruction, martyrs enacted for all to see their faith in a material resurrection, their belief that death and destruction were only “apparent” and offered no threat to their secure bodily identity. Resurrection promised a body resistant to every sort of destruction or incorporation. The martyrs at Lyons testify to the power in this promise as they face up to every challenge to their commitment. This hope of resurrection was extended to all members of the Christian community, even to the most socially marginalized. The Acts of Lyons, for example, gives prominence to the heroics of the slave woman, Blandina, who, the narrative notes, imaged the Lord in her sufferings (Eusb., Eccl. Hist. 5.1.41). The prose fictions on the other hand display the social mechanics of assigning some bodies more value than others in a society. If the elite protagonists’ recovery from apparent deaths and multiple threats trumpets their good fortune and endurance, it also points up the invisibility of others in this narrative world. Several of the so-called apparent deaths in the romances are very real deaths, just not for the people who “count” (Morales 2004: 216). People die, but these individuals fall so far below the threshold of social regard that they and their deaths hardly register with the protagonists. Social nobodies, they live dismissible lives. Leucippe’s second false death provides a vivid example. When Clitophon receives a letter from Leucippe in Ephesus, he is shocked to find his beloved is still alive. He thought he had witnessed her beheading. Although overjoyed, he pauses a moment to wonder, “Whose body is it that we buried?” (5.20.1). That question is not answered until the couple’s reunion, when Leucippe explains how the pirates tricked an “unfortunate” (o´ o) woman, a prostitute, to board the ship with the hope of making some money (8.16.1).33 This was the woman Clitophon saw killed and thrown overboard. Leucippe is quite explicit about why this unlucky woman had to die instead of herself – she was worth less: “They thought they would make more by selling me than her” (8.16.3). Leucippe is self-described as “the daughter of a Byzantine general and an important Tyrian” (6.16.5). Her background and breeding make her more valuable than the woman who died in her place. Maud Gleason has noted how a person’s “social and occupational status” operated in this period very like fate, determining a person’s life (1999: 299).34 The prose fictive narratives inculcate this social message. They pronounce that 55

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certain people, like Leucippe, even when faced with every kind of threat, always survive, but the opposite is true for others, like the poor prostitute, whose very death no one grieves. Heliodorus’ narrative offers another example of the joy at a heroine’s return from an apparent death coming at the expense of another woman’s real death. When Theagenes searches for his beloved Charicleia in a dark cave, he suddenly stumbles over a woman’s dead body and is distraught, believing it to be Charicleia. [He] sank sobbing to his knees, his hands clasped over his eyes. As if pushed from behind, Theagenes sprawled over the body of the dead woman and lay pressing her to his bosom in a long, clinging embrace … Theagenes cried out aloud in tragic sorrow, “pain beyond enduring, disaster sent by a God.” (2.3.3–4.1, trans. Morgan) When Cnemon, Theagenes’ companion, turns over the body, he discovers it belongs not to Charicleia, but to Thisbe, a slave woman and the cause of all his troubles (1.9–2.18). Theagenes, overjoyed to discover that Charicleia is not dead, experiences his own sort of rebirth: “He came to life and felt hopeful” (2.6.1). Thisbe’s death, however, evokes little grief or empathy. Charicleia even ’ ω) because Theagenes kissed callously calls the dead woman “fortunate” (ε´ 35 and grieved for her (2.8.2). Thisbe’s death, unlike Charicleia’s, is not apparent, but very real. The narrative emphasizes its reality, pressing it home a second time. A little later, Cnemon comes to believe that Thisbe is still alive even though he had buried her with his own hands (5.22.3). However, once again it is not Thisbe, but Charicleia, who lives. Charicleia had assumed Thisbe’s identity to escape the Great King’s troops (5.8). Thisbe is not back from the dead. Unlike the desires of the elite protagonists, the desires of a slave woman are not realized in these narratives. In Iamblichus’ narrative, again the “false” death of the heroine involves the real death of another woman. It is the body of this other woman that a dog devours “bit by bit” making her face unidentifiable (94. 77a29). Photius’ summary describes the woman as an “unfortunate” girl, killed by a slave, “her lover and murderer” (76b10). The romance hero and heroine may never experience real deaths and lasting disasters in the narrative world of the prose fictions, but others do. Christians likely came from many social strata, but few of the elite were members in the early centuries, as Christian writers note (Origen, Contra Celsum. 1.27; 3.44, 55; Tertullian Adv. Praxean 3).36 The doctrine of the material resurrection could offer to these non-elite their own form of “apparent” deaths. What Christian proponents of a material resurrection did was to firmly ground their identity in its bodily reality and insist that they and their bodies were immune to any lasting violence. Appearances to the contrary, their bodies could not be destroyed, consumed, or assimilated into nothingness. Gleason’s suggestion 56

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that mutilated bodies function as part of the discourse of power in the early centuries appears cogent. A mutilated body seems the consummate image to instantiate both the brutal possibilities inherent in power and the “fragility of human personhood” and its vulnerability. The provincial elite and Christians both use the language of mutilated body to construct their particular responses to Roman hegemony and to the essential question posed by power: who counts as fully human, “whose lives count as lives” (Butler 2004: 20).37 Through the motifs of apparent deaths and happy endings, the provincial elite asserted their luck and resiliency and their ability to survive as Rome’s partners in power. Each time a supposedly dead person reappears unscathed; it confirms those narratives’ primary message that no real harm can come to these privileged people. This must have been a powerful message to the elites of the various cities across the empire as they jockeyed for position and power as Roman rule evolved. Christians trumped this message. They insisted on their bodies’ resilience through the doctrine of material resurrection. Their bodies would endure. This also was a potent political statement as well as a religious one. The relationship between false deaths and Christian resurrection is likely not one of influence, but rather the responses of two different social constituencies using a closely related register of themes (mutilation, consumption, death, and survival) to address the changing political and social landscape of empire. This context challenges Bowersock’s intriguing suggestion regarding the portrayal by Petronius of the poet Eumolpus writing a will (diathekê, testament) stipulating that the Croton legacy hunters must first cut up and eat his body, if they wish to inherit his money. According to Bowersock, this portrayal references the statement of Jesus in that his followers should eat his body (Sat. 141.3–4; Bowersock 1994: 134–8).38 Bowersock argues that even the wording of Eumolpus’ will – “eat my body (corpus) with the same enthusiasm with which they cursed my spirit (spiritum)” – echoes the familiar distinction made in the Gospels between flesh and spirit. Bowersock’s argument is learned and ingenious but he seems to underplay the constitutive role that images of consuming, eating, and cannibalism play in Petronius’ narrative.39 As one commentator notes, “In the Satyricon, everything lives and breathes, and the entire text grows out of the mischievous Latin pun of eating as being (est = he eats/he is)” (Rimell 2002: 9). Eumolpus’ charge to his legatees that they must eat his body is only the last in a series of cannibalistic references that function to structure the text. As Victoria Rimell notes, the very first scene of the narrative introduces this theme: In chapter one with the opening speeches outside the rhetorical school, where the environments of learning and the relationship between teacher and pupil, poet and patron/audience, were imagined in terms of eating and cannibalisation … everyone is part of a food chain, unable to ultimately to escape their corporeality. (2002: 176) 57

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Eumolpus’ desire to be eaten, the last act in Petronius’ incomplete text, grows too organically out of the narrative plot to be a simple reference to a Christian text. Rather, like the other works discussed in this paper, both the Satyrica and the Gospels testify to ongoing culturewide deliberations on community and identity that were taking place in the early empire, using the imagery of consumption, incorporation, assimilation, and annihilation. Jesus’ charge to eat his body invokes the positive aspects of consumption – complete communion with another, a unity that would in time produce the corporation known as “the body of Christ,” the Christian church. The next chapters will extend this examination into the social dynamics being enacted in and through the chronologically related narratives on Christian resurrection and fictive adventures.

Notes 1 The use of “dead” as a descriptor is rather slippery in antiquity. Ancient Hebrews for example used “death” metaphorically of human beings to connote great distress. Jonah, for example, when he is in the belly of the whale, says he is in sheol (i.e., dead; Jonah 2.2–6). This use can also be seen in the ancient novels. Apuleius tells the story of a young boy believed poisoned but actually he was given a sleeping potion. His revival is offered as a return from the dead (Met.10.12). The vagueness of the term is especially noticeable in the resurrections described in the more Gnostic tinged Apocryphal Acts (Pervo 2006: 17–20). 2 Bowersock (1994: 149) argues for a fourth century date for Heliodorus; Lightfoot (1988) offers an earlier date. Simon Swain (1999: 25) writes, “The age of the novel is the High Roman Empire.” See Anderson (1984: 1–25) for early Near Eastern influence on the story line. 3 Bynum’s quotation continues this change of emphasis and connects it to the struggle with docetic and gnostic tendencies. For the lack of interest in the life of Jesus in the second century, see Lieu (2004: 89). For recent discussions of the resurrection, see Setzer (2004); Segal (2004); and Wright (2003). 4 See note 16 of the Introduction for this topic. 5 On Lucan’s fascination with lacerated bodies, see Bartsch (1997: 10–48). 6 See Burrus (2005) for a salutary reminder that commentators should resist essentializing their readings of either Greek or Christian texts in the complex cultural and social interactions of the early empire. I recognize that by discussing the prose romances as a group, I neglect their individually different perspectives (especially their constructed ethnicities). Nevertheless, their related plot structures, themes, and characterization suggest they are involved in a joint intervention in the period’s “heat of competing hegemonic ambitions” (Burrus 2005: 85). Tomas Hägg (2007) emphasizes the large number of dissimilarities in the plots of the novels. 7 For non-ideal Greek prose fictions, see Stephens and Winkler (1995); Winkler (1980); and Jones (1980). For the relation between the Onos of Pseudo-Lucius and the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, see Mason (1994). 8 For Petronius’ play with the false-death convention in his representation of the “resurrection” of Eucolpius’ impotent member (140.12), see Bowersock (1994: 113). 9 Suzanne MacAlister (1996: 196 n. 20) points out there are false reports of heroes’ deaths and many threats to their lives, but no hero is represented as dying. 10 For a perceptive analysis of this scene, see Gleason (1999). Stephens and Winkler note that the summary of Iamblichus’ Babylonica suggests its first six episodes offer “variations on near-death or apparent death experiences” (1995: 186).

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11 Bowersock (1994: 100) notes that Photius’ summary of Antonius Diogenes’ Incredible Things beyond Thule (Bibl. 166, 109 a–b) suggests this narrative displays actual returns from death to life. 12 Anthia’s poison-induced false death, for example, is not violent (3.6.5). 13 For discussion of the scene’s voyeurism, see Konstan (1993: 60–4). Morales reacts to commentators’ description of the parody or “kitsch” of the scene: “Cultures where violence against women is an amusement – in the arena, in mime and in the novel – are cultures that foster violence against women” (2004: 169). Morales offers a persuasive demonstration in her study of how Achilles Tatius inscribes violence against women into his narrative through his use of mythology, ecphrases, and sententiae. Morales’s point is persuasive and coheres with my position that the novels are pervasively patriarchal (see Chapter 4). 14 See Bartsch (1997: 39) for the reader’s double reaction – “distance” and “embeddedness” – to Lucan’s grotesque passages. Hannibal Lecter’s characterization as a cultured gourmand in the film Silence of the Lambs, offers a contemporary analogy. His sophisticated “tastes” make him no less a monster and his cannibalism no less horrifying. 15 See Doody (1996: 421–5) on cannibalism in novels. 16 For translating this pun, see Trzaskoma (2002). He compares the versions of Whitmarsh (2001) and Winkler (1989). Whitmarsh’s version reads, “But, as it is, your innards’ inhumation has become these robbers’ alimentation,” and Winkler’s says, “Your insides are inside the outlaws, victuals in the vitals of bandits.” 17 Winkler’s point in establishing the conventional nature of such scenes is to dispute the contention made by Henrichs (1972: n. 6) that the evisceration and consumption of the victim in Lollianos’ Phoinikika necessarily provides evidence for ancient mystery rituals. Winkler offers that the episode provides, rather, the melodramatic thrill of popular entertainment. My cultural reading aims at locating this emphasis on evisceration and consumption within the wider contemporary dialogue that includes both the mystery religions and the prose fictions. See van den Heever (2005). 18 Winkler points to the motif at Lollianos, P. Colon. 3328. B.1 Recto; Achilles Tatius, 3.15; Xenophon of Ephesus, 4.5; Apuleius, 6.31; Onos 25; Iamblichus, in Photius, Bibl. 94. 77a29. Bowersock notes that cannibalism plays “a conspicuous role in imperial fiction” (1994: 132). 19 Photius (Bibl. 94. 77a29) mentions a dog eating a male slave in Iamblichus’ Babyloniaca. 20 et illa morsus ferarum, cum vermes membra laniabunt, et ignis flagrantiam, cum sol nimiis/caloribus inflammarit uterum, et patibuli cruciatum, cum canes et vultures intima protrahent viscera. 21 In both Apuleius and the Onos, this maiden eventually dies, a death that reflects a social vision that diverges somewhat from that in the Greek ideal romances. Cf. Perkins (1997). 22 This example from Iamblichus deviates from Winkler’s (1980: 166–70) discussion of the elements of these shocking episodes in that this death does not involve a bandit group. The scene does, however, represent a lower-status male (a slave) killing the girl. 23 Anthia supplies a list of all those who did not succeed in violating her chastity: “Not Moeris in Syria, Perilaus in Cilicia, Psammis or Polyidus in Egypt, not Anchialus in Ethiopia, not my master in Tarentum” (Xen. 5.14.2). 24 The prose fictions themselves suggest an equivalency between being eaten and sex. Morales (2004: 165–77) examines the complex interconnections between the scene showing Leucippe cut open with a knife, disemboweled, and eaten and her mother’s dream where a brigand “carrying a naked blade” cuts Leucippe open, starting from “her most intimate parts” (2.23.4–5). In its context, this dream clearly figures sexual violation and proleptically colors the scene of Leucippe’s sacrifice with sexual implications.

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The bandits’ judgment that being eaten alive is the most suitable punishment for Anthia’s killing a rapist may also indicate a relation between rape and consumption. 25 Cf. Bynum for a review of other causes for this shift in emphasis toward the resurrection of a “palpable fleshy body”: First, the model of Jesus’s own resurrection; second, the impact of millenarianism (which assumes reanimation, at least of the righteous); third, the conflict with Gnosticism (which saw flesh as evil and therefore Christ’s body as in some sense unreal); fourth, Christian adoption of Hellenistic dualist anthropology (which assumes an opposition of soul and body and therefore forces the question “what survives?”); fifth, the emerging governmental structure of the third-century church (which was enhanced by the stress on difference or hierarchy entailed in the stress on body). None of these arguments is wrong. (1995: 26) But Bynum comments that the first four are tautological.  ’ ’Aϕε´ε ε ´ ω ε 

\ ’εε  ´  ’ ω εo ε’  ε .  ´oς ε’

o,  ’ o  , ’ \ \  ´ εo `  ’ o’ ´oω ´ ω  `oς oς εε ω o  ´ ´ X o. 

o o εε ` ´ ,\  o ϕoς ´εω . For this Christian discourse, see Bynum (1995: 27–58). Bastiaensen et al. (1987) provides texts for the martyr acts and translations are from Musurillo (1972). See Boyarin (1999) on Martyrdom. Kelley (2006: 728), in her discussion of the martyr acts as spiritual exercises, reminds that martyr acts at different times were read for different purposes and performed different functions. For a list of Christian charges of pagans’ cannibalism, see Bynum (1995: 41 n. 83). Later in this document, the narrative comments on the martyrs’ joy that many of those who had at first recanted returned to the faith and suffered martyrdom The martyrs are said to rejoice that they had forced the “beast” to vomit forth (exemesê) alive all those he thought he had gulped down” (Eusb., Eccl. Hist. 5.2.6). In the usual inverted language of the Acts, those described as “alive” are those who would die as martyrs. Note the language of consumption: the about-to-be martyrs avoid being “consumed” by the devil. Christopher A. Frilingos (2004), in his argument for Christians as “viewing selves,” makes the analogy that the martyrs were to the majority of Christians as television stars are to their viewers. Morales suggests that Leucippe’s reference to the prostitute as “the poor woman” (talaipôrou 8.16.2) reflects some sympathy for her. If so, it is fleeting. Gleason refers specifically to the judicial system. Cnemon gloats at Thisbe’s death because of the harm she caused him, but it was her mistress, Cnemon’s stepmother, who orchestrated the plot against him. The prose fictions represent slaves as guilty of crimes with no reference to how much actual moral volition they have. Petronius’ Trimalchio, an ex-slave, reminds, “Nothing is wrong that the master orders.” Modern commentators have also given Thisbe little sympathy and much blame for her actions. Ken Dowden (1996: 275) states she got the death she deserved, for example. John R. Morgan (1989) sees Cnemon and Thisbe as examples of “perverted immoral, simply bad love,” but Thisbe only follows her mistress’s orders to entice Cnemon sexually (1.11.3). Nor does the highborn Cnemon receive any punishment in the novel for his “bad love” as Thisbe does; rather, the rich merchant, Nausikles, gives him his daughter to marry, a girl Cnemon desired and who can be expected to have a significant dowry (H. 6.8.1). Hunter (1998: 43) shows sympathy for Thisbe’s situation. An episode in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses shows the same sort of blame assigned a slave acting under orders. Here a slave involved in a ˘

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plot with his mistress to poison her stepson is described as the wickedest of slaves (nequissimi 10.12). He is sentenced to crucifixion for his role, while his mistress is exiled. Status, not the level of guilt, determines punishment. See Hopkins (1998) for the interesting suggestion that Christian emphasis on poverty continued even as Christianity went “socially up-market” because of the very steepness of the Roman social pyramid and “its world of deference and condescension” that could make even a lower-level senator “imagine himself to be poor.” Butler poses these questions and another: “And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (2004: 20, Butler’s emphasis). For Bowersock’s discussion in favor of retaining the reading devoverint, see 135, n. 37. See Ramelli (2001; 2005) for references to Christianity in the novels.

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In the changing matrix of emerging empire, signs of political and social adjustments also appeared in the cultural realm. The ancient novel offers an example of a genre that took shape as part of the move toward the larger world of empire (Whitmarsh 1998: 16). And in its hero, the Greek romance, a subgenre of the novel, was generating a new subjectivity, a particular self-understanding, for elite Greek males of this period. The emerging consensus on the chronology of the Greek romance allows it to be more definitively positioned as a production of the late republic and early imperial period.1 This dating closely aligns the novel with the period of the Second Sophistic. All the orators surveyed in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists lived between CE 50 and 250. And Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Orat,Vett., 3.1) credits the reinstitution of classical rhetorical standards to Rome’s influence in the Hellenic cities in the late Republican period. Both the novel and the new aesthetic of scrupulous mimesis appear to be literary effects coincident with Rome’s trajectory toward empire. The Greek romance and the rhetorical writings of the Second Sophistic also share stylistic and thematic commonalities. The historical emphases and themes, as well as, to some extent, the language of the romances, correspond with Second Sophistic practices. The earlier romances – those of Chariton and Xenophon – have been described as “presophistic,” but recent studies of Chariton’s language and style have placed him within the sophistic trajectory (Reardon 1996: 317–25; Ruiz-Montero 1991: 484–9), so it has become “increasingly untenable to divide the novels into a ‘presophistic’ Chariton and Xenophon and a ‘sophistic’ Achilles Tatius, Longus and Heliodorus” (Swain 1999: 27–8). The readers and authors of the romances likely coincide with those who studied with or appreciated the performances of the contemporary sophists or their students. In this paradigm, the Second Sophistic texts and the Greek romances – sharing chronology, style, and audience – can be seen as contributors to and the products of (in the dialectic dance typical of cultural change) a new epoch in which inhabitants of the eastern empire were coming to recognize, in Ewen Bowie’s words, that “Roman dominance was there to stay” (2002: 62). By dating the novel to the period of emerging empire, we can see the romances, in Bryan Reardon’s words, “as Rohde did not see them, and given his chronology could not see them – in the context of contemporary writers: Lucian notably, 62

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Plutarch, Philostratus, Aelius Aristides, and others” (Reardon 2006: 230). Utilizing these writers as context will permit a better understanding of the characterization of the much-maligned romance hero. In this hero, the Greek-speaking elite can be seen to script a subject particularly calibrated for imperial conditions – and closely aligned with the values expressed by contemporary writers such as Plutarch, Dio, and Aelius Aristides.

Co-workers in empire As outlined above the Second Sophistic educational regimen contributed to forming a cosmopolitan Greek elite identity utilized by Rome in managing the “larger world” of empire. In the Roman context, the Greek elite were not powerless. They were subordinate to Rome, but in the formation of Roman hegemony in the east, Greek and Roman elites shared mutual and interrelated interests. Aristides testifies to Rome’s utilization and reliance on “the important and powerful” of localities for managing their territories throughout the empire. In the early third century CE, the historian Cassius Dio provides a rationale for this practice in a debate he invents between Maecenas and Agrippa, supposedly offered to Octavian in 29 BCE, on whether or not he should continue to retain his power. Maecenas speaks for autocracy and sets out specific recommendations for managing this form of government. He advises that the power of popular assemblies be restricted and ´ ε ε ooς ´ advocates that “the noblest, the best and the richest men” (oς ’ oς oς ` ´ ´ ε  o ωoς) ´ ` oς throughout the provinces should be enrolled in the Senate so that, “you will have many co-workers (assistants, εo ς) for yourself … and the leading men among each group will love you because they have been made sharers (o ωo´ ) in your empire” (Hist. 52.19.2–3). Dio’s reconstruction of the philosophy of the architects of empire discloses pragmatic motives for including local elites in the enterprise of empire. Without sufficient manpower to manage its expansive territories, Rome would recruit assistants (collaborators) from the “the noblest, the best and the richest” people under its power. Local elites would retain much of their power and privileges in their cities and could attain Roman citizenship and senatorial status. The provincial elite may not have fully accepted the Romans, but they could well have appreciated Rome’s support for their position. As we have seen in the case of Polemo, some of the eastern elite had long standing ties with Rome. As time passed the elite were further integrated into the Roman system. Dio himself provides an example. Born in Nicaea in Bithynia, he was the son of a senator and entered the senate himself under Commodus. He was curator of Smyrna, a Roman consul, and governor of Africa and of Pannoia Superior (Millar 1964: 6–27). In previous discussions of the romance, I suggested that the novels disclose signs of the violence informing the Roman imperial enterprise (Perkins 1999). Such readings, I believe, have merit, but in the social realignments of the imperial period, the imperial elite had much to gain as co-workers in empire and their ˘

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working out of this role in the political writings of the period as well as in the romances is the focus of this chapter.

The “passive” hero The political writings of Plutarch, Dio, and Aristides provide a context for the Greek adventure romances, and these novels in turn contribute to shaping and fashioning the political and cultural context. In particular, male protagonists in the romances hold a particular subject position, crafted for advancing and retaining the Greek-speaking elite’s prerogatives and privileges in the contemporary power configurations.2 The romance genre’s construction of masculinity has been a focus of critical depreciation since Rohde censured the “weakness” of its weepy, suicidal heroes (Rohde 1914: 356; Haynes 2003: 81). Scholars have faulted and sometimes have even been outraged at the romance heroes’ passivity, general lack of initiative, and failure to initiate rescue of their beloved. Tomas Hägg describes the heroes as “pale marionettes tossed about by fortune” (1983: 210). Rohde criticizes Clitophon’s refusal to respond with anything but words when he is viciously attacked by his beloved’s would-be rapist (AT 8.1.1–2; 1914: 511). Schmeling deems as “unmitigated pusillanimity” Habrocomes and Anthia’s quick submission to their pirate captor, especially as some of their companions died defending themselves (1.13.5–6; 1980: 39). Brigitte Egger sums up the traditional perspective on the romance heroes: “lack[ing] courage and manliness: a genre full of ‘sissies’ who refuse to meet challenges head on” (1990: 184).3 Scholars have suggested grounds for the heroes’ passivity. David Konstan argues that the romances construct a new version of sexual passion (eros) based on the lovers’ erotic symmetry and replacing the traditional active/passive, dominant/submissive sexual paradigm (1994: 7). The lovers’ erotic mutuality explains the hero’s passivity. If the hero were to rescue the heroine valiantly, this “would upset the symmetry of their positions in the narrative” (1994: 8). Konstan’s recognition of an intrinsic similarity between the erotic characterization of the hero and heroine of the romances is important, but he is less persuasive in suggesting that this representation of mutual passion as the basis for marriage displaced the traditional social and civic understanding of the marriage alliance. He explains the shift to the personal and private that he sees imaged in the couple’s devotion as part of a more general cultural redirection during the period away from civic and social concerns, caused by the eclipse of the city-state within the new internationalzation of empire society (1994: 230–1). Katherine Haynes, following Konstan, also reads in the romance a new emphasis on the personal over the social. She wonders whether the powerlessness of the hero in the genre “was attractive to men who felt politically marginalised by the imposition of a new power structure” (2003: 99).4 Like Konstan and Haynes, I will suggest a cultural and ideological interpretation for the romance hero’s characterization and the romance plot. In my reading, however, the adventure romance heroes’ non-aggressive, non-competitive commitment to obtaining their goals represents precisely the sort of behavior valorized 64

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in contemporary political writings and contributes to the contemporary political and social discourse on power.5 The romance couple’s sexual symmetry does not project an “image of personal relations independent of patriarchal and civic interests” (Konstan 1994: 23). This conclusion underplays the care taken by all the romances to highlight the couple’s marriage unions as entirely patriarchal productions.6 On her wedding day, Chariton’s Callirhoe is unsure whom her father has chosen for her to marry (1.1.14). Xenophon’s romance depicts a marriage arranged by the fathers, advised by an oracle (1.7.1). In Achilles Tatius’ narrative, Leucippe’s father arrives in Ephesus just in time to witness his daughter’s chastity test and offer the couple a patriarchal homily before accompanying them to Byzantium for their marriage (8.17–19). Heliodorus’ narrative culminates in Charicleia’s discovery of her real identity and her real father, who himself performs her marriage to Theagenes with her foster father Charicles also in attendance (10.41.1–2).7 The romance couple’s symmetrical passion may be an innovation, but it ends in a traditional place, patriarchal marriage. Marriage is the original social bond, and the patriarchal form that the novels celebrate has provided the model for all subsequent forms of domination and subordination in social relations. Recent studies by Helen Morales (2004: 152–226) and Sophie Lalanne (2006:184–92, 255–74) exhibit the inherent, hierarchical, and often violent patriarchy invoked in the romance plot. As Lalanne writes, “L’action romanesque se situe en effet dans un univers patriarcal fortement hiérarchisé où sont figées les identités, tant individuelles que collectives” (2006: 189). The romance does not renounce patriarchy but celebrates it, projecting the union exemplified in patriarchal marriage as the goal, the telos of the romance plot. This very focus on patriarchal marriage connects the romance with contemporary political writings and helps to explicate the characterization of the romance hero. Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, and Aelius Aristides, contemporaries of the romance writers, vigorously promote the importance of and the necessity for civic homonoia, concordia.8 These words for civic harmony appear on coins and in the inscriptional record of the period. The emblem used to reify this concept was the married couple and its harmonious household.9 Simon Swain maintains that “a whole ideological industry was established around the word [homonoia]” during the early empire (1996: 181).10 The romance belongs to this industry. In telling of a couple’s absolute commitment to achieving and maintaining their social union, the adventure romance projects a model for the civic harmony that orators were advocating in the Greek cities. The romance does not indicate a cultural shift to the personal and the private; rather, it plays a part in the elite repertoire promoting political homonoia. In his study of the Second Sophistic, Thomas Schmitz chose not to include the Greek romances because they were written for private rather than public consumption (1997: 35). However, all the cultural productions of a period contribute to producing its thought world. Individuals learn how to conceive of themselves and their social roles from the whole range of their society’s signification. The personal 65

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and the public, the private and the political – all forms of discourse contribute to forming the social subject. In the east, the romance as a genre that evolved just as Rome was systematizing its governing practices was fashioning a subject similar to that constructed in the more overtly political writings of the period: a subject appropriate for the emerging power dynamics of the period, a subject suited to be a coworker (ε´oς), an assistant in the implementation of empire.

A model of civic harmony When Dio and Aelius Aristides urge cities to end their internal strife and embrace homonoia, they present the patriarchal household as a model for a harmonious community. In his oration to the Nicomedians (Or. 38), Dio offers traditional analogies for harmony.11 The city is like a ship that everyone knows can be safe (ω´ ) only if the sailors work in harmony and obey (ε´ ε ) the skipper (38.14). Or the city is like a household whose safety depends on the likemindedness of the master and mistress and the obedience (ε ´ ) of the servants (38.15). When Aelius Aristides advises the city of Rhodes to reconcile its social factionalism, he offers a similar – and similarly hierarchical – image for harmony: “In sum imitate the form and fashion of a household. What is this? There are rulers in a household, the fathers of the sons, and the masters of the slaves” (Or. 24.32–3).12 Both Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom appear to recognize, as had Dionysius of Halicarnassus a century earlier, that the stability of their cities and the elite’s position in them depend upon a foundation of Roman power (Jones 1971: 117–19).13 Both agree that a major duty of a civic leader is to insure the community’s harmony by restricting social factions and destructive elite rivalries and thus to avoid Roman intervention. Both share the same hierarchical notion of civic harmony; harmony exists when the leaders agree and those below them follow. Both writers convey vividly the subtle calibrations of subordination and authority that are demanded by those acting as “sharers” in empire and both recognize political subordination as the price of economic and social security. In the context of these contemporary Greek texts advocating homonoia, the romance hero does not appear unmanly, but normative. In Political Precepts (Praecepta gerendae reipublicae), Plutarch, prominent in his local city of Chaeroneia and a Roman citizen (Jones 1971, 20–38), articulates his views on the mechanics and goals of elite civic rule in the context of Roman hegemony.14 He addresses his treatise to Menenachus, a wellborn man from Sardis, who has asked for advice on how to conduct his political career. Plutarch writes as one member of the elite to another. The overarching theme of the text is that the statesman’s most important task is to preserve the harmony of his community by keeping the lower classes in check and ensuring the unity of the elite, convincing them to contain their competitiveness and factionalism (Sheppard 1984–86: 242). According to Plutarch, the greatest achievement of the political art is to restrain civil strife (824C), and the statesman’s primary charge is to end discord in his community and to promote concord and friendship (824D). 66

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Plutarch insists that elite cooperation is necessary for creating civic harmony and controlling the people. His treatise rests upon a belief in the natural right of the elite to rule. The statesman is like the chief bee that rules by nature and keeps important affairs under his control (813C).15 Plutarch’s view of the people’s role emerges in his extension of this analogy when he compares bee communities to human ones. Beekeepers believe that a thriving hive should be filled with noise and buzzing, but Plutarch describes the ideal human “hive” as inverting this model. The leader of the human “swarm” will judge its prosperity on the basis of its people’s quiet and mildness. (823F).16 Cities have been ravaged by civil strife. Plutarch twice mentions the destructive quarrels during the late republic ot Pardalas and Tyrrhenus in Sardis, Menemachus’ home city (813F, 825D).17 Plutarch’s treatise explains how to avert this sort of conflict and promote harmonious relations among the upper classes in order to preserve the status quo and the elite power dependent on it. To assure such concord, statesmen must persuade the elite in their cities to put aside competition and aggression. They must learn to moderate their ambition (philotimia 819F), which is harmful to the state.18 They must not allow small quarrels to escalate, and they must be taught “that those who let wrongs go unheeded are superior to those who are quarrelsome and try to compel and overcome others … that by yielding in a small thing they gain their points in the best and most important matters” (824D–E). Plutarch here advocates a kind of passivity. Statesmen must dissuade people from using force and trying to compel others to their position. They will gain by giving way.

Practical subordination Plutarch invokes Greek subordination to Rome as a crucial component of his argument. He emphasizes the folly of elite competition in the contemporary ’ εε , 824E). People should be conditions of the Greeks’ loss of power (´ wise enough to recognize and appreciate what the times have to offer: “to live in peace and harmony” (824E). “Why compete?” Plutarch asks. What sort of real power is there when a proconsul’s decree can annul it (824E–F)? The good leader’s duty is to persuade his fellow elite to recognize their position and that their jealous rivalries are pointless and dangerous in the contemporary reality of Roman power. Plutarch makes every effort to convey to his readers the reality of their specific situation: they govern in the context of Roman supremacy. His advice reveals the delicate calibrations of power that civic elites need as they perform their role as assistants in empire. The statesman must be aware of the limits of his power. When entering office, a statesman can recall Pericles’ words on becoming general: “Watch out, Pericles, you command free men, Greeks, Athenian citizens.” But he will also need to remember something more – his constrained position. He must say to himself, “You rule, but you are ruled, in a city subordinated to proconsuls, and to the procurators of Caesar” (813E). The Greek leader must recognize his subordination and not allow himself to get carried 67

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away by the trappings of his office: “Don’t put too much pride in your crown when you see the shoes above your head” (813E). The shoes he sees are those of the Roman authorities, and Plutarch’s image vividly conveys Rome’s superior power (Jones 1971: 133). Plutarch uses another analogy to underline the limits on the prerogatives of civic leaders. He compares their position to that of an actor who at one level can throw himself totally into his part, putting all “his passion, character and reputation” into the role (813F). At the same time, however, the actor must heed the prompter and \ o  ω not deviate from rhythms and meters permitted “by those with power” (` ´ oω 813F). Plutarch’s analogy acknowledges both the Greek statesman’s freedom to act (he can put everything into his role) and the inherent limits on his acting (he may not exceed what is scripted). A chilling warning concludes the analogy. The errors of civic leaders are not punished in the same way as those of actors in the theater (with hissing, jeering, or clucking); rather, they can lose their heads (813F). Plutarch recalls that Pardalas and his followers in Sardis were executed because they forgot their limit (ε’  o ´εo ς  ω \` oω 813F). In the context of Roman rule, Greek statesmen must recognize the inherent boundaries of their power and freedom of action. Plutarch also discusses the folly of Greek leaders who try to garner popular support by inciting the people with stories of the Greeks’ former prowess. These leaders are out of touch with the political reality and may suffer for their ignorance. Plutarch explains, “What they do is laughable, what is done to them is no laughing matter, unless they are merely treated with contempt” (814A). He compares such leaders to children who try on their father’s clothes and play being grown-ups (814A). As Simon Swain notes, Plutarch’s image suggests these leaders “are not only small in relation to their own forefathers; their powerlessness is also measured against Rome’s real paternal power” (1996: 166). This is an important point. Seen in the paradigm of patriarchy, Greek subordination can be naturalized. Subordinates must recognize their limits. Everyone has a place, but not everyone has the highest place. Patriarchy offers the Greek elite a legitimizing schema for understanding their subordination. Civic leaders do have power and prerogatives. Plutarch complains about the statesman who humbles his city by referring everything, “large and small,” to the Roman leaders. Nor does Rome want this oversight. It is the competitive local elite who run to “the more powerful” for decisions as part of their jealous infighting (815A). For Plutarch, the role of a good statesman is to work things out, doing everything possible to preserve the city’s rights, even if it means his own loss of position. A good statesman must attempt to control or at least hide local problems and unrest so there may be “as little need for outside doctors or medicine” (815B). The thrust of Plutarch’s advice is to retain and reserve as much power, privilege, and autonomy as possible for the Greek notables. To achieve this end, the elite must end their aggressive competition.19 The very intensity with which Plutarch repeats his message that the elite must desist from competition and aggression against one another betrays his concern ˘

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that it may go unheeded. When Plutarch comments on liberty (ε’ εε´ ) in his discussion of a city’s greatest blessings, he writes, “Our people have as much [liberty] as those in control allow them, and more would perhaps not be better” (824C; Swain 1996: 180–1).20 His words intimate his concern that without some outside check on their ambitions and hostilities, the Greeks could not avoid the internal strife so destructive to the community’s harmony. His words hint that Rome’s shadow helps to ensure the precarious balance in the Greek cities and the elite’s position in them.21 The contemporary statesman’s greatest achievement is to instill concord in his city and put an end to dangerous competition and strife.

The price of peace and prosperity Dio Chrysostom, unlike Plutarch, did not write a unified treatise devoted to governing, and the shifting self-positioning and often ironic self-presentation in his works make it difficult to fix his perspective (Whitmarsh 2001: 214). In his orations on concord, however, Dio seems to share Plutarch’s appreciation that the elite’s power and privileges depend on their maintaining the harmony of their cities. In several of his orations, Dio advocates for civic concord, although his own actions may not always conform to his words (Ors. 32, 34, 38–41).22 Dio emphasizes that civic safety and prosperity are assured only when those in charge agree and are obeyed by those beneath them. His orations disclose that conditions in the contemporary cities departed markedly from this ideal. His speeches on concord repeat the same theme: cities must foster internal solidarity and renounce their traditional competitiveness. In a speech at Tarsus (Or. 34), for example, Dio rebukes the city for its lack of civic harmony. He doubts that even two people could be found to agree in this city; rather, divisiveness like a disease infects the whole civic body (34.20). Dio urges the city to end its factions and achieve true social unity (34.24). Dio ridicules the Tarsians, calling their conflict with the city of Mallus “laughable,” and indicts such competition in general as ridiculous. When cities quarrel, he says, “They quarrel over an ass’s shadow, as the saying is, since leadership and power belong to others” (34.48).23 Like Plutarch, Dio offers the subordination of Greek cities to Roman power as a reason for the Tarsians to abandon their traditional civic rivalries. What is the point of wrangling over prerogatives, when in the last analysis others are on top and will make the final decisions? Dio argues that the reality of Rome’s domination should persuade the Greeks to put aside their destructive and now patently silly competition for preeminence. Dio hammers on the dangers of jealous rivalries by recalling the jealousy ( o´ ) between Sparta and Athens. He points out that, although these cities’ arrogance eventually resulted in the subjection of both, when they competed their competition had real stakes (Or. 34.51). Dio suggests that the reality of Rome’s power creates a very different situation, one that should put an end to such strife. Now, Dio insists, quarrels over glory and primacy are like the 69

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\ ´ quarrels of “fellow slaves” (o oo  ω, 34.51). Real primacy and power belong to others who ultimately will award the prizes. Dio reiterates that destructive rivalries are a travesty given Roman preeminence.24 The emphasis on the dangers of jealousy in the Greek romances emphasize this same theme in a different genre. Commentators have read Dio’s comparison of the Greeks to slaves in this image as an indictment of Roman control.25 Some critique is possible, but this does not seem to be the primary thrust of the image. Rather, Dio employs the term fellow-slaves in an anti-euphemistic move: he uses the starkest term possible to emphasize the provincials’ situation. The image signals Dio’s resolve to impress on his audience the realities of Roman rule and the folly of their rivalries. In context, the image has a positive rhetorical function: it buttresses Dio’s position that Tarsus ought not get into pointless squabbles with other cities. Dio uses the slave image for its rhetorical power, to bring home his point that destructive competition and contentiousness between cities should end. The crux of his argument is the reality of the city’s subordination; if the Tarsians would only acknowledge their position, they would cease their pointless and destructive competition for primacy. After his comparison of civic rivalries to the wrangling of fellow slaves, Dio introduces his concluding remarks with a rhetorical question: “What then? Is there nothing noble in our time that one can pursue?” (34.51). Dio’s answer is that the cessation of strife he advocates would offer individuals and cities an opportunity to pursue greater ends, those things that can never be conferred or taken away by someone else but always remain in one’s own power (34.51). Here Dio frames subordination to Rome as propitious; it offers the opportunity to pursue the good life.26 Half a century after Dio’s plea to the Tarsians,27 Aelius Aristides makes a similar argument in his speech on concord for Rhodes; his speech shows that factionalism between social groups continued in Rhodes into his period. Aristides praises Rome for putting an end to civic discord. He asks, “But now what cause is there for faction, or what lack of opportunity for a pleasant life? Is not all the earth united, is there not one emperor and common laws for all, and is there not as much freedom as one wishes, to engage in politics or keep silent?” (24.31). Dio and Aristides both propose that in the context of Roman rule, factions are senseless and only distract from taking advantage of the benefits that Roman control may offer the elite. Aristides intimates that a certain diminution in full freedom may accompany these opportunities. His phrase “as much freedom as one wishes” has overtones of Plutarch’s observation that more freedom might not be good for his fellow citizens. Both Plutarch and Aristides acknowledge that, in the context of empire, Greek freedom is no longer total. Dio with his image of wrangling slaves makes the same point more bluntly: full Greek autonomy has been eroded. The oration’s positive conclusion, however, seems an attempt to minimize this deprivation by emphasizing the benefits that accrue when strife and senseless competition are eliminated. 70

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Protection of privilege In his speech to the Nicomedians advocating concord with their neighbor city Nicaea (Or. 38) Dio refers to the ideal of a Greek unity based on shared “ancestors, gods, culture, festivals,” but the oration’s primary perspective is utilitarian. Dio admonishes his audience to embrace concord, if for no other reason than for the benefits it brings in resources and wealth, advantages and pleasures – the most important considerations. In the summary before his conclusion, Dio emphasizes these pragmatic ends: ´ That the reconciliation will be profitable (  ε ε ) to the cities when ’ it is achieved, and that the strife still going on has not been profitable (o ε’  ´ε ε) for you down to the present, that so many good things will be yours as a result of harmony, and that so many bad things now are yours because of enmity – I have said all this sufficiently (38.48–49). Dio’s program is to protect the prosperity of the city through concord and to avoid “bad things.” Plutarch and Dio appear to articulate a similar agenda, the agenda of a Greek leader intent on maintaining the cities’ harmony and prosperity and the good things that can result. To this end, civic strife must cease. At one point, Dio muses whether even Athens’ and Sparta’s struggles may have been inconsequential (38.38). He decides faction and war were not profitable (ε’  ´ε ε) for them either: “In struggling with one another for primacy, they both lost it” (38.25). In this speech, although Dio indicates egregious abuses of power by Roman governors, his primary criticism is directed toward the behavior of the Nicomedians and Nicaeans because their lack of concord permits the governors’ actions.28 The Nicomedians should face reality and cease their pointless and aggressive competition, or else discord may spiral out of control and destroy the benefits and pleasures of city life for those with the status to enjoy them. Dio’s main target in his speech is the infighting of the civic elite. His major emphasis is that the civic elite must eliminate the things that hurt them: envy, contentious rivalry (philoneikia), and the discord these cause (38.43). In his plea for civic harmony in Rhodes disturbed by social divisiveness, Aelius Aristides in the mid-second century repeats similar themes. He urges his audience to locate their actions within a historical perspective and recalls that in the common history of the Greeks, great changes in status resulted not from armed attacks or other terrifying events, but from internal factions, distrust, and general disharmony (24.29–30). He offers as an indisputable argument against factions that their nature “is ever to deprive people of their existing advantages” (24.30). Stressing that stasis, discord, always unsettles the status quo, Aristides argues Rome has created an environment that makes such discord unwarrantable (24.31). Aristides’ oration is a paean to enjoying the status quo and the advantages it offers. 71

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Plutarch, Dio, and Aristides all appear to agree on the disadvantages of aggression and competitive rivalry for maintaining the benefits of contemporary life: prosperity, privilege, and power. They also appear to agree that Rome’s obvious supremacy should act as a check on traditional Greek contentiousness. They all advocate the sort of homonoia found in a well-run ship or a patriarchal family where everyone knows and accepts their place without rancor or jealousy. In advocating for civic harmony, Plutarch and Dio lecture the civic elite on the need to cease their aggressive behavior and adjust to their place in the contemporary political configurations. They can maintain their status, prestige, and power by playing their role as co-workers in empire and by managing their cities to avoid discord, whether from social unrest or elite competition. Aristides emphasizes the painful wages of disharmony: loss of status and its pleasures.

Adventure romances as social allegories The Greek adventure romances share these themes in their construction of their so-called passive heroes and in their monitory depictions of sudden and shocking status reversal. The romance genre and the civic texts on homonoia contribute to a similar ideological project. The adventure hero presents for cultural consumption and appropriation precisely the kind of self-construction necessary for the Greek elite as they take up their positions as collaborators in Rome’s imperial enterprises. The hero’s non-aggressive, uncompetitive commitment to obtaining his goal represents precisely the sort of behavior valorized in the political writings. To demonstrate that the adventure romances construct in their hero a subject similar to the one promoted in the political writings, my analysis will be limited to the bare bones of the skeleton plot that underpins all four.29 This collective approach necessarily minimizes the particular nuances and development of their plots and flattens out the range of artistry that differentiates the different iterations of their formulaic script,30 but stripping the narratives of their individuality will reveal more starkly some of the cultural concerns that their repetitions suggest the genre is addressing. The use of character in the romances supports a synthetic reading of the form. Helen Morales counters critics of the genre’s deficient characterization. She argues that readers should not search the romance for the complex characters of modern realistic fiction. Instead, they should “be open to seeing the characters … as embodiments of social and moral values” (2004: 94).31 Morales’s observation is important; she recognizes that the genre’s objective is not realistic description; rather, it offers models or types of social actors for cultural reflection and inspection.32 Morales’s understanding of the romance as a “site” for cultural and social debate is persuasive (2004: 94–5). To use Levi-Strauss’s famous phrase, the adventure romance and its characters were “good to think” (1963: 89). They provided the Greek-speaking elite with a stimulus for social and cultural speculation as their 72

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culture attempted to understand and adjust to political realities. The adventure romance provided an arena to work out an elite male social identity and the consequences of that identity. As we saw in chapter two, the adventure novels share a similar plot. Two highborn, wealthy, and beautiful young people meet and fall passionately in love. Soon after this meeting, the couple (already married in Chariton and Xenophon’s romances) are separated and suffer terrible hardships. Through all their disasters, the couple constantly reflect upon their desire for and attachment to one another, even as they fend off multiple advances from others.33 The romances end with the couple’s marriage or reunion and their recovery of their privileged lives and elite status. Charicleia, the heroine of Heliodorus’ romance, experiences increased status, discovering right before her marriage that she is the princess of Ethiopia. This précis supports Simon Goldhill’s recognition that desire generates the romance (1995: 7–11). Its heroes and heroines are characterized primarily as desiring subjects. At first sight, the members of the couples are immediately overcome by desire for one another, and from that first moment until the narrative’s conclusion, their desire provides a constant motif (Bakhtin 1981: 86–110). The précis also accentuates a second point. The romance comprises not only a narrative about a beautiful couple’s interrupted desire and its triumphant consummation and perpetuation in marriage. Beneath this romantic cover plot, a concomitant story focuses on loss of status and its recovery. In fact, the adversities and hardships caused by the protagonists’ sudden loss of status take up most of the narrative. The couple’s meeting and falling in love and their marriage or reunion occupies only two short sections at the beginnings and ends of the narrative. The bulk of the romance offers a meditation on what might happen if a person should suddenly lose his or her privileged position and become liable to the hardships, punishments, and lack of autonomy of those without privilege. By intertwining the two narrative lines treating desire and status so tightly, the romances fuse them together in the logic of the narrative pattern. The lovers lose each other and their status almost simultaneously. Through its association with the beloved, status becomes merged into the object of desire. The hero and heroine repeatedly emphasize that life without the other is simply not worth living. The beloved embodies all that makes life viable, and in the calculus of the romance, the possession of the beloved transmutes into the possession of all that originally attended the desired other: beauty, status, position, and privilege. The romance tells a story as much about status threatened and recovered as about the longed-for union of separated lovers. Morales’s point that a realistic reading misunderstands the function of characters in the romances seems particularly apropos here. In representing their heroes and heroines as desired objects, the adventure romances create not realistic characters but metonymies for the good life, for the wealth, high station, and social esteem the couple possess at their first meeting and regain at the plot’s conclusion. The couple serve as “embodiments” for social privilege (Morales 2004: 94). 73

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A closer look at the dynamics of the lovers’ first meeting in the narratives of Chariton and Heliodorus supports this metonymic reading of the romance plot and its hero and heroine. In what is likely the earliest fully extant romance, Chariton already scripts the typical scenario of desire and love at first sight. He opens his narrative with a comment on the heroine’s beauty and high station: “Hermocrates, ruler of Syracuse, victor over the Athenians, had a daughter named Callirhoe,  a marvel of a girl and the idol (’ ) of all Syracuse. In fact her beauty ´ (`o 

oς) was not so much human as divine” (C. 1.1.1–2).34 Chaereas is introduced in analogous terms: “Now there was a certain youth, Chaereas, whose ’ surpassed all, resembling the statues and pictures of handsomeness (ε oϕo) Achilles and Nireus, Hippolytus and Alcibiades. His father was Ariston, second only to Hermocrates in Syracuse” (C.1.1.3). The narrative tells what happens when these two beautiful people encounter each other at a festival: “They fell in love at first sight: … beauty had been matched with nobility” (1.1.6). Incorporating a traditional ideal, the narrative makes an explicit and emphatic elision of desire, beauty, and status in this opening scene. Heliodorus invokes this same nexus of beauty, impassioned desire at first sight, and status in his description of his couple’s first meeting. Again the narrative focuses on the couple’s extraordinarily beauty. When Theagenes enters the festival at Delphi, the crowd determines that “nothing in the world could ´ surpass the beauty (`o 

oς) of Theagenes” (3.3.8).35 But this standard lasts only until Charicleia enters: “Then we saw Charicleia and we realized that even Theagenes could be eclipsed, eclipsed only in such measure as perfect female ´ beauty (

oς) is lovelier than the fairest of men” (3.4.1). In this philosophically tinged scene, the young people are immediately drawn to each other: “When they set eyes on one another, the young pair fell in love, as if the soul recognized its kin at the very first encounter and sped to meet that which was worthily its own” (3.5.5). Again a privileged and beautiful young couple’s immediate connection and passionate desire provide the impetus for the romance’s narrative action. The narratives emphasize that the lovers were captivated by each other’s beauty. In his study of the modern novel, Lennard Davis observes that character descriptions are never innocent in fictions; qualities and traits are described for a reason. The focus on characters’ physical beauty has a particularly long narrative history; it is “often a sign of their social status” (1987: 123). In traditional narratives, “beautiful” provides the descriptor for the sort of appearance that can only result from a life with adequate nutrition and freedom from onerous toil. Beauty thus signifies the look of an elite person. Davis explains, “The privilege of the gentleman or woman is the concealed message of physical beauty” (1987: 123). The romances, with their emphasis on the protagonists’ extraordinary beauty, share this code. Beauty is the mark of a life without toil and deprivation and, as such, it signals the beautiful person’s high social position. The desire for the beautiful “other” in the adventure romances thus reifies a more comprehensive desire for the life that makes such beauty possible. 74

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The narratives are explicit about the connection between beauty and status. The narratives suggest changed status can have drastic and immediate effects on people’s appearances (and indeed their identities) to the point that they become virtually unrecognizable even to those closest to them. This motif is as old as Homer, where Odysseus goes unrecognized in his own land and home. The romances, however, give no indication, as the epic does, that time or divine intervention has any role in obscuring a person’s identity. Rather, it seems signs of lowered status alone can make someone unrecognizable. In Achilles Tatius’ romance, for example, Clitophon unexpectedly encounters his beloved and much sought-after Leucippe, but he fails to recognize her. Clitophon describes the woman who throws herself at his feet: “She was bound in heavy irons, carrying a mattock, her head was shaved, and her body filthy, girt with an extremely shoddy tunic” (5.17.3). He is momentarily shaken by the woman’s resemblance to Leucippe, but he does not realize that she actually is Leucippe (5.17.7). Her appearance as a laborer literally hides her identity. Leucippe has to write a letter to Clitophon to identify herself.36 As Davis suggests, beauty works as a covert reference to high status. The adventure romances inculcate the lesson that loss of status means the loss not only of beauty but of identity itself. The romances are narratives of desire, but the desire they proclaim is not simply desire for the beautiful beloved, but for the entire style of life that the beloved’s beauty symbolizes. The plot construction suggests that the object of the protagonists’ desire, what they wish to obtain and retain, is as much their privilege as their beloved. In the adventure romances, the Greek elite were telling themselves stories about how much their status meant to them and what needed to be done to maintain it. In the plot of the adventure romance, the beloved and high status are fused together into one amalgam of desire. And the hero and heroine as desiring subjects are represented as absolutely committed to one goal: possessing their object of desire. Xenophon’s narrative captures the intensity of the couple’s commitment in the vows they offer to each other early in the narrative: I swear to you by the goddess of our fathers, the great Artemis of the Ephesians, and this sea we are crossing, and the god who has driven us mad with this exquisite passion for each other, that I will not live or look upon the sun if I am separated from you for even a short time. That was Anthia’s oath; Habrocomes swore too (1.11.5–6).37 This strength of mutual devotion animates all the romances and is rewarded when the couple are finally joined together at the narratives’ conclusion (Konstan 1994: 45–8). By the end of each of the romances, the couples are reunited, married, and reinstated in their privileged positions. These novels tell a story about surviving disasters and realizing desires. The outcomes emphatically valorize the protagonists’ “passive” conduct and call into question modern commentators’ deprecation of such successful heroes.38 75

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Status and courage Critics primarily fault the romance heroes for their lack of expected heroics; their passivity, their failure to act aggressively or fight for what they desire. Rushing in and wresting away beloveds from rivals is not the romance heroes’ mode of operation. As stated above, the couple’s final union seems to result more from combination of lucky happenstance or divine providence than from any decisive or aggressive act on the part of the hero.39 The heroes simply are not, by modern standards, sufficiently aggressive or competitive. When faced with affliction, especially the loss of their beloved, the heroes tend to lament, wish for death, even attempt suicide, rather than act aggressively. These non-aggressive behaviors (except the suicidal propensities, which will be addressed later) seem to be just those advocated by Plutarch and Dio. Both authors urged contemporaries to rein in their aggression and competitive rivalries if they wished to retain and increase their privilege, civic power, and style of life. The supposedly passive romance hero enacts the political and social values endorsed in the writings on homonoia by Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, and Aelius Aristides. Schmeling, for example, faults Habrocomes for his lack of courage when he and Anthia throw themselves at the knees of the pirate captain and beg him to spare them: “Spare our lives and cease killing those who have become your willing subjects . . . take us where you will; sell us as your slaves; only pity us and sell us to the same master” (X. 1.13.6; 1980: 39). This narrative, however, makes clear that the pirates immediately killed all the people trying to defend themselves (1.13.5). In this instance, the hero chooses survival over last-ditch defiance; he chooses to stay alive and maintain his devotion to his Anthia in the reality of the pirates’ superior power. Habrocomes’ actions may lack typical male aggression, but his eventual triumph and happy reunion appears to validate his choice. The hero’s actions in this case conform to Plutarch’s thesis that the Greek leader should recognize his position and adjust to it if he wishes to protect and maintain his privileges and prerogatives (813). Erwin Rohde (1914: 511) found Clitophon’s passivity when he was violently assaulted by Thersander, Melite’s husband and Leucippe’s supposed master, particularly reprehensible. Thersander attacks Clitophon on two occasions: first when he discovers him in his house with Melite (5.23.5–7) and again at Artemis’ temple, where Leucippe and Clitophon have been reunited. Both times Achilles Tatius ostentatiously underlines Clitophon’s astounding restraint and lack of resistance. The second episode is the more dramatic and hyperbolic.40 Thersander rushes into Artemis’ temple and identifies Leucippe as his slave and a “man-crazy” ’ ε’   , 8.1.2).41 Clitophon objects to these insults and woman” (`oς ς turns them back on Thersander, calling him a lewd, mad triple-slave (´ o oς ` `  oς. ´ ` ε’  ς At this, Thersander attacks him: ˘

He punched me in the face with extreme violence, and then brought down a second blow. Fountains of blood spurted from my nostrils, since all his 76

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fury had gone into the blow. As he punched me unthinkingly a third time, he accidentally landed his hand in my mouth and against my teeth. He injured his fingers, and with a scream, he withdrew his hand in pain. My  teeth avenged the assault (’  ) on my nose (Whitmarsh, trans., 8.1.4). His wounded hand stops Thersander’s attack, and Clitophon begins, as he says, “to declaim tragically” (ε’  o) about Thersander’s tyrannical actions. Clitophon inflates the incident. Thersander has not just punched him but, as if on a battlefield, has drawn blood. “His man-slaying, blood-stained right hand” has done the work of a sword and “is guilty of murder” (8.2.4). Clitophon’s speech has the desired result, and Thersander is dragged from the temple, still shouting insults against Leucippe (cf. Morales 2004: 199–220). Clitophon’s actions in both these scenes are not heroic; nevertheless, the hero suffers few consequences for his lack of aggressiveness. Indeed, soon after the first beating, when Thersander hears Leucippe expressing her love for her Clitophon, he exclaims, “By Zeus, I wish I were Clitophon.” Thersander is rebuked by his slave for this comment: “This is no time for effeminacy” (   ´εo, 6.17.2). However, as events will demonstrate in this narrative, the mild hero wins the girl; aggression is a losing strategy. Achilles Tatius’ penchant for playing with romance conventions is well established.42 Although Rohde did not see any parody in this scene (1914: 511, n. 3), its parodic nature seems patent. The extremity of Clitophon’s forbearance, his supine posture, allowing himself to be pummeled at will, not even putting up his hands to defend his face, takes the ideal of non-aggression to a ludicrous point. Achilles Tatius, by endowing this rather minor punch-up with tragic coloring and using the mock-heroic imagery of avenging teeth and a bloody sword, indicates some sort of irony in these descriptions – an irony that depends on readers’ recognition that the romance narratives valorize a specific sort of subject: a nonaggressive, “passive” male subject. By spoofing this convention, Achilles Tatius underlines it. The passive hero of the adventure romance is not some sort of artistic mistake, a failure of imagination, but a subjectivity that is being actively fabricated from a number of different sites in the early empire: in the romances and the Greek political writings and refigured in the Christian movement (Shaw 1996: 269–312). It should be noted that Clitophon’s restraint extends only to those of his own status. He has no scruples about attacking the non-elite. Immediately before his submission to Thersander’s swordlike hand, he had defended himself ably against the prison guards delaying his reunion with Leucippe (7.15.4). Nor does he hesitate to attack pirates who abduct Leucippe in Alexandria (5.7.2). The elite hero has no trouble roughing-up the under stratum.43 He is only passive toward other elite; he embodies the non-aggression endorsed in the political writings. Modern criticism of the romance heroes’ passivity misconstrues the ideological work being done in these representations. The projection of this particular subjectivity from different cultural points offered the Greek elite a subject position that would allow them to 77

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adapt and flourish in the new circumstances of Roman hegemony. A subjectivity crafted to adjust to the realities of the new times and to retain the “good things” of life, possessions, privileges, and power.

Courage and hope In the view of modern commentators, the adventure romance heroes’ most egregious failing, and the clearest sign of their deficient manliness, was their propensity to lament and wish to die when faced with calamities. However, this behavior deserves not dismissal but explication. The frequency and elaboration of the scenes featuring suicide testify to their significance for the genre. And it is salient that while moderns fault these suicidal behaviors, the romance narratives, as Katherine Haynes points out, never censure their heroes’ conduct or imply that the men act at all inappropriately.44 A valuable foundation for interpreting the romance suicide discourse is available in the discussion of Suzanne MacAlister (1996: 19–83).45 MacAlister notes that while the romance protagonists frequently talk of or wish for suicide, they act to kill themselves only when they believe they have lost all hope of attaining their beloved, the object of their desire (1996: 28–9). For actual suicide attempts, “The determining factor is the character’s sense of certainty: the certain sense that hope is lost and cannot be retrieved” (1996: 49–50). In the conceptual system of the romance, suicide is an action of last resort. All the romances offer support for MacAlister’s observation. Chariton’s romance contains nearly twenty suicide episodes.46 The hero considers suicide often, but he acts only when he believes he has no chance to regain Callirhoe. Chaereas willingly endures his onerous existence as an imprisoned slave in Caria: “Though he longed for death, a slight hope that he would see Callirhoe again kept him alive” (4.2.1), but when he believes that the Great King of Persia has determined that Callirhoe belongs to Dionysius as his legal wife, he decides to kill himself. Chaereas insists that the couple simply cannot survive deprived of each other: “Why do I hesitate and not cut my throat in front of the palace and pour forth my blood at the very gates of the judge?” (7.1.6). Chaereas opts for suicide because he has lost his hope of regaining Callirhoe, of realizing his desire. The suicide discourse in the adventure romances articulates clearly what is necessary to sustain a viable existence: some expectation of obtaining one’s desire. This is the message the romance repeatedly impresses on its readers (MacAlister 1996: 47–52). Its very redundancy, as seen in the following sample, testifies to its importance in the genre. Habrocomes, for example, hears a false report that his Anthia has died and her tomb has been robbed, and he anguishes, “So I am absolutely determined to die. But first I will go on until I find your body, embrace it and bury myself with you” (3.10.3). If Anthia is really dead, Habrocomes will die also, but as long as some connection to her survives, even the need to bury her body, he will endure. Clitophon in Achilles Tatius’ narrative shares the same attitude. When he thinks he has seen his Leucippe sacrificed in a bandit rite, he 78

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immediately chooses death: “‘So, Leucippe, accept the only fitting libation I can offer you.’ With these words I lifted my sword intending to plunge it into my throat” (3.16.5–17.1). Heliodorus’ Theagenes reprises this scenario. Believing his Charicleia has burnt to death, he exclaims, “Let my life end today …. Charicleia is dead and Theagenes is done for …. I do not want to live, now that you are dead.”  Theagenes explains that while she was alive, he played the coward (’o), protecting himself for her sake (2.1.2–3). Theagenes recognizes that enjoying one’s desire makes one more careful about engaging in dangerous heroics. The suicidal hero is such a stock figure of romance that Petronius in the Satyrica, a work likely sharing chronology with Charition’s, appears to invoke (or parody) it in his depiction of Encolpus’ farcical suicide attempts when he believes he has again lost his boy lover, Giton (Sat. 94.23; Toohey 2004: 174–5). The romance heroes’ penchant for suicide has been a source of disapprobation, even consternation for modern commentators. An approach for understanding the romance emphasis on the heroes’ suicidal behavior emerges from a comparison of the very different responses commentators give to suicidal laments and gestures depending on the subject’s gender. While the romance heroes’ propensity for threatening or welcoming death has earned so much critical castigation, the heroines’ similar actions have elicited almost no reaction.47 Yet the heroines are just as set on death when they believe they have lost their beloveds. In a very short span of time, for example, Anthia twice attempts her own death. She convinces a doctor to supply her with poison so she can avoid marrying a wealthy official who has rescued her from a band of brigands. She takes the poison, only to wake up in her tomb (because the doctor supplied sleeping potion instead of poison). Her lament displays her commitment to Habrocomes and her refusal to endure life without him: “‘The poison has played me false,’ she exclaims. ‘It has barred the way of happiness back to Habrocomes. My misery is total; I have been cheated even of my desired death. But by remaining in the tomb I can still complete the work of the drug by starving”’ (3.8.2). Again her desire is thwarted. Pirate tomb robbers break in, carry her off, and sell her to slave dealers (3.11.1). In Heliodorus’ romance, the very first words spoken by Charicleia announce her intention to die. This romance opens dramatically with two people in a scene of carnage and destruction, a beautiful armed woman looking down at a terribly wounded, semiconscious young man (1.2.3). The first words in the romance belong to the young man. He asks the woman if she is really alive or a victim of the battle who remains with him after death, “Does your ghost or your soul still care about my misfortunes?” The woman answers, “‘It depends on you … whether I live or die. Do you see this?’ She indicated a sword that lay on her knees. ‘Till now it has been idle, stayed so long as you draw breath”’ (1.2.4). The adventure romance heroines are just as prone to opt for death as the heroes, yet the women’s actions elicit no critical comment. They are apparently accepted as more “natural.” The “passive” suicidal, lamenting female subject is a stock figure of patriarchy. I shall argue that the novels’ emphasis on the hero’s desire 79

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for suicide defines the passivity of the romance hero as a patriarchal construction and naturalizes his characterization within the traditional, hierarchical patterns of patriarchy.

Validation of patriarchy Passive subjects have traditionally validated patriarchy. In the patriarchal scheme, males possess more power and are of greater worth than females. A woman’s decision to die (even if only a social death) at the loss of her spouse testifies to the reality of this hierarchy. Hindu suttee provides an extreme example of this attitude.48 In the Greek mythological tradition, Evadne’s and Laodamia’s decisions to die on their husbands’ pyres and Alcestis’ deciding to die in her husband’s place manifest a similar perspective. The most common reason given for female suicide in Greek mythology is the loss of an important male figure: husband, brother, or father (Garrison 2000: n.p.). These suicides articulate and validate the asymmetries of patriarchal relations. Males are more important. Suicide is a passive-aggressive rather than an active-aggressive reaction to loss. In the normative patriarchal scheme, a woman’s determination to die at losing her beloved is naturalized and unremarkable, and thus modern commentators do not react to it. Likewise, a patriarchal pattern explains the behavior of the suicidal romance hero. His suicidal laments mark his subordinate position in a patriarchal hierarchy. He plays the role of a subordinate male, a position analogous to that of a son. The patriarchal family is the archetypal image for normalizing hierarchy in social relations. As we have seen, writers contemporary with the romances were offering this model for emulation in civic life. When Aelius Aristides tries to persuade the people of Rhodes to give up their social factionalism, he admonishes them to recognize the true nature of things: “There is a natural law which has truly been promulgated by the gods, our superiors, that inferior obey the superior” (Or. 24.35). As he explains, they should “imitate the form and fashion of the household […] There are rulers in a household, the fathers of sons, and the masters of slaves” (Or. 24.32–3).49 Clifford Ando has described the importance that the image of the emperor as father played in helping Rome achieve a consensus on its right to rule (2000: 398–405). He notes how the use of pater patriae in the titulature of Augustus and later emperors was translated over time from a title to a role. To the point that Cassius Dio could believe that the emperor’s title was originally pater. Dio writes, “The name father gives to them certain power over us all, like that which fathers have over children” (Dio 53.18.3). The paradigm of patriarchy could allow male imperial subjects to understand their subordination within the naturalized schema of father and son. The romances in their passive heroes promulgate this model and gave Greek-speaking notables a way to accommodate to their role as assistants in empire. These novels inculcate patriarchy’s schematized hierarchy; they indicate that not every male gets to exhibit unrestrained aggression but nevertheless may achieve his goals. The romances do not subvert patriarchy or suggest that the 80

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heroes will not function as patriarchs in their own sphere. In fact, each of the heroes appears about to enter this role at the conclusion of the narrative (Lalanne 2006). The romances are very much patriarchal narratives and in their subtexts often invoke the traditional patriarchal underpinning of violence toward women. Helen Morales describes how Leucippe’s “body – or mythological analogues of it (Daphne, Andromeda, Philomela, and Syrinx) – is displayed for assault repeatedly throughout the narrative” (2003: 182). Also, too many readings minimize that the action of Chariton’s plot proceeds from the angry jealous hero kicking his innocent wife. Sophie Lalanne provides a survey of the incidents that make the romances effectively an education in patriarchy (2006: 184–92, 255–74). Emphasis on male bonding in the narratives also stresses their inherently patriarchal ideology. Akihiko Watanabe sees evidence for the narratives’ patriarchal nature in the heroes’ reliance on the help of a close male friend. This friend’s role is often to save the hero from suicide (2003a: 186–920. Polycharmus frequently stops Chaereas’ suicide attempts (1.5.2, 1.6.1–2, 6.2.9–11, among others), and Menelaus saves Clitophon (3.17.1, 5.8.1). In Heliodorus’ narrative, Cnemon plays this part, twice preventing Theagenes from killing himself (2.2.1, 2.5.1). The women lack such friends in the narratives: “Men are still able to club together to protect their positions as patriarchs, while the women are left to fend for themselves” (Watanabe 2003a: 190; cf. Egger 1990: 199–213). The romance world is the traditionally patriarchal one and as such is informed by an inherent hierarchy. The so-called passive hero of the romance constructs and models for social appropriation the role of a junior male in a patriarchal pattern. He is not unaggressive or non-violent; rather, his aggression and violence are exercised in a hierarchical schema, just as Plutarch and Dio reminded the Greek civic leaders their power was. Chariton most overtly delineates the romance hero’s circumscribed power. He displays Chaereas’ valor and bravery in war but emphasizes that the hero always fights in the service of a higher commander.50 When Chaereas believes the Great King of Persia has permanently deprived him of Callirhoe, he determines to die. This time Polycharmus does not deter him but agrees to die with him, suggesting they both join the forces of the Egyptian pharaoh in his revolt against the Great King and at least gain some revenge from their death (7.1.9). They report to the Egyptian king, announcing themselves as Greeks and wellborn ’ (ε  ω, 7.2.3). The Pharaoh welcomes them and soon makes Chaereas his friend and adviser, recognizing his worth: “He displayed intelligence and courage and trustworthiness besides, for he was not without a noble character and education” (7.2.5). Immediately Chaereas shows his exceptional martial skills collecting a band of Greeks from the Egyptian forces and capturing Tyre. The men choose Chaereas as their general, although he, exhibiting his non-competitiveness, announced that he was willing to follow anyone since he desired glory not for himself, but for all in common (7.3.10). In a remarkable transformation, Chaereas goes from love-sick hero to able Alexandrian Greek commander. ˘

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Later the Egyptian king offers Chaereas the opportunity to be an admiral, commenting that this will allow him to imitate the naval prowess of his father-inlaw. Chaereas shows himself equal to the patriarchal challenge and is as successful on sea as he was on land. He captures the island of Aradus and with it the Great King’s wife and Callirhoe herself. The couple are finally reunited (8.1.10). What Chaereas does not know is that while he has been successful on the sea, the Great King has been victorious on land, and the Egyptians have been defeated. In fact, Dionysius, Callirhoe’s cultured Greek second husband, has also performed valiantly in war. He led the attack on the Egyptians, slaughtering many of them and capturing their king, who kills himself. Dionysius then delivers the pharaoh’s head to the Great King (7.5.14–15). In their exploits, both Chaereas and Dionysius prove themselves to be brave and fierce warriors, although both sought to die earlier in the narrative when they were faced with the loss of Callirhoe. The narrative underlines, however, that the men’s aggressive actions are performed in the service of a superior: Dionysius serves the Great King, and Chaereas the Egyptian pharaoh. By having the Great King prevail in the end, Chariton takes care not to suggest that Greek aggression undermines the stability of an empire. In the Greek novel, Persia, the archetypal foreign empire in Hellenic tradition, can supply a trope for Rome, and the Great King figure the Roman emperor (Schwartz 2003: 377).51 Chariton’s narrative attests to the courage and aggression of the Greek combatants, but the author takes care to locate the Greeks’ actions within the larger triumph of a foreign empire and its leader. On his return to Syracuse, Chaereas, after turning over his rich booty to his father and fatherin-law as a good son should (8.6.11), announces that he has made the Great King his friend by returning his wife (8.8.10). Chaereas is shown to recognize and value the Great King’s good will. Chariton’s romance constructs brave Greek leaders who display their courage in support of superior leaders. In the historical context of the narrative’s writing, as Plutarch and Dio make clear, this is the sensible posture, as Greek-speaking leaders learn to adjust to the limits of their power. Chariton shows himself to be a worthy successor to his eminent father-inlaw, renowned for his naval defeat of the Athenians. By the conclusions of the romances, all the heroes have acquired a status making them equal to their fathers or fathers-in-law.52 At this point, the heroines retreat from center stage. The ending of the Aithiopika is emblematic of the genre. Sophie Lalanne points to Heliodorus’ description of the parade into Meroe after Theagenes and Charicleia are married. Theagenes rides with his father-in-law Hydaspes in the first carriage, and Persinna and Charicleia follow behind in a second: “Théagène prend la place qui semble lui revenir de droit” (10.41.3; Lalanne 2006: 178). Theagenes had just demonstrated his masculinity in front of his royal father-in-law by wrestling a ferocious bull (10.30.1–5) and defeating an Ethiopian strong man (10.31.3–32.4). The adventure romances project a powerfully patriarchal plot whose respect given the father figures, Hydaspes, Hermocrates, and Sostratos (Leucippe’s father, who arrives in Ephesus just in time to see her chastity test and agree to her 82

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marriage, 8.5.8), serves as a reminder that in patriarchies, some males outrank others: “sons have fathers” and fathers-in-law. This patriarchal scheme offered the Greek elite a naturalized model for understanding their subordinate position under Rome. The passivity of the heroes in the adventure romances testifies not to their weakness or their turn toward the private sphere, but to their enactment of the kind of non-competitive elite behavior encouraged in the political writings of the day to preserve civic harmony and the elites’ privileges and position in their cities. Their behavior could be justified within the innately hierarchical pattern of patriarchy that provided one strand of Rome’s rhetorical web. In a speech given in his own Prusa, Dio vividly conveys his recognition of the patriarchal alliance holding between Greek civic leaders and Roman authorities. In this speech he also evinces his sense of his right to privilege and his invocation of Rome to support his prerogatives. An angry crowd’s attempted attack on his house prompts Dio’s speech.53 The crowd was reacting to a rise in grain prices that had made it difficult for them to buy food (Or. 46.2, 11).54 Dio scolds the people for using the power of brigands and madmen and offers that his house should never have been attacked given his own and his family’s generosity toward the city (Or. 46. 4–6). Throughout the speech, Dio minimizes the people’s grievance. He notes that the price of grain may be higher than usual, but it should not overwhelm them. Other cities pay such prices. Dio asserts further that honorable citizens, even with just cause, should never become the target of popular anger. He next alleges that crowd’s actions “do not appear those of people in need, lacking the necessities of life, for want develops self-control” (Or. 46.11). Dio’s callousness here displays his empathic disengagement from the people whom he expects “to be submissive to their superiors even in time of hunger” (Jones 1978: 24).55 Dio concludes his speech by threatening the people with the consequences of their unruly actions. He warns them that persons like himself, those of good standing, those who provide for the city, will abandon it, taking with them their civic largesse rather than face such attacks (Or. 46.2). Dio then adds a more powerful warning; he says that he is afraid the people will be accused of violence and lawlessness: Nothing that happens in the cities goes unnoticed by the leaders (hegemonas). I mean the leaders superior to the ones here; just as the families of little children who are naughty at home report them to their teachers, so the misdeeds of the people are reported to them. (Or. 46.14) In this statement, Dio blatantly invokes the threat of Roman reprisals to restrain the people’s unrest. His analogy comparing the people to unruly children in need of correction by those who know better, their families and teachers, confirms the alliance between a Greek civic elite and the Romans and characterizes the people as childish and foolish and their grievances as inconsequential. Dio’s imagery sets up an us/them 83

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patriarchal dichotomy. The parents, the persons with authority at home, join with the persons with authority outside, the teachers, to discipline their children’s behavior.56 Dionysius of Halicarnassus credited Rome for supporting the power of the “sensible” segments of the populace over that of the “foolish” in the Greek cities. Dio shows the Greek elite still looking to this support. He warns the people, like naughty children, to anticipate Roman discipline if they continue to act up.

Suicide as power In his discussion of the suicidal romance hero, Peter Toohey suggests an additional function for the narratives’ emphasis on suicide. Toohey places the romances within a wider frame that includes the writings of Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius and suggests the period was experiencing a “literary epidemic of suicide” (2004: 193).57 Noting the “theatricality” of the suicide attempts in Chariton, Toohey suggests these are indications of “self-display,” not desperation (2004: 170, 334, n. 7). He reads the suicide attempts as assertions of “volitional independence.” They make a claim that in the last analysis the individual determines what he or she will allow (2004: 170). In this paradigm, suicide becomes a show of power; it proclaims an individual’s capacity to refuse to submit to what he will not endure. Toohey recognizes suicide as the ultimate refusal of control.58 In their own suicides, Seneca, Lucan and Petronius enacted this refusal, and contemporary martyrs’ deaths exhibit a similar display of this sort of refusal (Droge and Tabor 1992). Toohey recognizes that the suicides and their focus on control point to a “crisis” in the way persons were viewing authority in the period (2004: 193). His point is persuasive. Suicide inherently raises questions of control, and the prevalence of literary suicide indicates that power and control were on the cultural mind during this period of emerging empire. Toohey traces this crisis over authority to a number of factors: “urbanization, the centralization of control structures, the multicultural nature of the large Mediterranean cities, the eroding of the traditional class structures, and so forth” (2004: 193). All the factors he lists might be linked at least partially to changes associated with the reality of Roman hegemony. The prevalence of the literary theme of suicide, like the passive romance hero, are signs of the culture-wide refiguring of authority that Roman imperialism was effecting. The romance emphasis on suicide represents the efforts of the Greek elite to refigure their stance toward authority and power in the realities of their subordination to Rome. Plutarch and Dio stress the necessity for Greek statesmen to acknowledge their position and its ramifications; they have others over them with controlling power (Prae. ger. 813E; Or. 34.48). Nevertheless, as Dio and Plutarch indicate, the Greeks have their own prerogatives, positions, and opportunities to maintain and expand. They must learn, however, to maneuver within the new perimeters of power (without forgetting their limits, Prae. ger. 813F). One of the tactics the romances advance for operating within the new configurations of 84

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power is precisely the behavior of the “passive,” non-confrontational hero of the romances and his enactment of the non-competitive stance championed in the texts of Plutarch and Dio. This characterization in the fictions demonstrates that a non-aggressive self can still achieve all essential goals. The “passive” hero survives his ordeals and obtains the object of his desire, his beloved (and the style of life she concretizes). The frequent suicide invocations enact a parallel tactic. The protagonists proclaim their “volitional independence”; through their emphasis on suicide, they claim the power to refuse to accept some circumstances. As Dio reassures the Tarsians, they do not have to act like total slaves (34.38–9). The suicide discourse allows the male romance protagonists to express limits on their non-aggression. It lasts only as long as they can recognize the possibility of obtaining their desires. An elite provincial audience could read this scenario figuratively and understand their own compliance with Roman authority as similarly situated, lasting only as long as they continue to benefit from it. In this reading, the adventure romances offer the Greek-speaking elite a heuristic for locating their political subordination within a patriarchal hierarchy and reassuring themselves that their accommodation had limits.

Notes 1 See “Introduction” 18 with n. 22. 2 My focus on elite subjectivity closes off a number of important lines of inquiry. That the novels focus on Greek-speaking Phoenicians (Achilles Tatius) and Ethiopians (Heliodorus), for example, points to a cultural self-awareness that its subjects occupy multiple and perhaps conflicting identity positions. I neglect this topic and its postcolonial implications in favor of highlighting the status concerns in the narratives. The telling absence of Rome from the representations of the Greek romances also opens questions about the romance writers’ and readers’ attitude toward Roman rule. 3 Egger points out that the romances all offer a favorable assessment of the heroes’ strength and beauty. Chaereas, Clitophon, and Theagenes are all explicitly compared with Achilles, a paragon of masculine beauty and martial prowess. Chaereas gleams like a star (1.1.5). Theagenes is “strong and tall” (7.10.4.), “broad in chest and shoulders,” and a victor in the Pythian games (4.4; Egger 1990: 175–86). Habrocomes is recruited for a brigand band when its leader recognizes him as handsome and manly (2.14.2), and a pirate similarly comments favorably on Theagenes’ manliness (5.26.4). The romances represent their heroes, at least in appearance, as pre-eminent examples of young manhood. 4 Haynes notes that her question is limited, as “This theory implicitly postulates a simple reader identification along gender lines, that does not encompass all the possible permutations of text reader-dynamics” (2003: 99). 5 The emphasis in early Christian writers on Jesus’ admonition from the Sermon on the Mount to love one’s enemies (Matt. 5.44) shares this perspective. See, for example, Tertullian Apol. 37; Polycarp, Phil. 2. 6 Cf. Cameron (1998: 153) who comments that romance “lovers do little or nothing to advance their own marriages …. In every one of the extent novels, it is taken for granted that parents alone have the power to decide who their children marry.”

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7 The whole plot of Heliodorus’ romance rests on the mechanics of marriage, legitimate birth, and true paternity. 8 See Dio’s orations on concord (32, 34, 38–41), Aelius Aristides (23, 24 Behr’s numbering) and Plutarch’s Political Precepts. Ramsay MacMullen comments, “It [concord] was incessantly urged, often proclaimed, seldom lasting” (1966: 187). He reviews evidence for urban competition (1996: 347, n. 25). 9 This traditional image provides the plot of the Odyssey. 10 This industry concerned civic “ unanimity.” Swain gives as the date for the appearance of homonoia, primarily celebrating homonoia between cities, on coins to the reign of Vespasian (1996: 120, n. 126 with reference to Pera 1994: 120). As Dio (Or. 38.14–5) shows, the image of the harmonious family was invoked in the context of civic harmonia and so the ideal of marital harmony would have been available for use in the Greek romances as a reference to political unity. See Kantorowicz (1960) for images of the imperial couple with joined hands and reference to concordia. The earliest example depicts Antoninus Pius and the elder Faustina. Kantorowitz (1960: 5) suggest that in the evolution of the image’s use, the couple began to stand as embodiment of the Stoic notion of cosmic harmony. Swain reminds that the goal of homonoia already was featured in the Athenian state (1996: 294). 11 On Oration 38, see Jones (1978: 84–9) and Swain (1996: 219–25). 12 Aristides makes this comment in the context of reconciling social factionalism, “ Now let each side dispense with envy and greed. I speak of envy felt by poor for rich and the greed of the rich against the poor. In sum imitate the form and fashion of a household…” (Or. 24.32). 13 Moles (1995) detects anti-Roman undertones in Dio’s Orations 7,12,36. 14 Plutarch belongs chronologically to the second sophistic period. For Plutarch’s style and its relation to Attic norms, see Russell (1973: 18–41). My examination of this treatise utilizes Jones (1971: 111–21), Gabba (1982), Swain (1996: 161–83), Salmeri (2000), and Beck (2004). 15 The bee leader’s gender was a disputed (and complicated) question in antiquity. See Mayhew (1999). 16 Plutarch’s remark pertains not only to the quiet of the people but also suggests an end to elite fractiousness. 17 Jones (1971: 117) and Sheppard (1984–86: 243) note the references to strife involving all segments of the population in Sardis in the Letters of Apollonius of Tyana (Ep. 38–41, 56, 75–6; ed. Penella 1973). 18 Like homonoia, philotimia, love of honor, has historical roots in earlier Greek political thinking. For Aristotle’s discussion of it as a vice, see Nicomachean Ethics 1.1–25. 19 Plutarch’s comments may not suggest an aversion to Romans. In fact, he advises a statesman to make Roman friends as a support for his administration. Romans, in Plutarch’s estimation, are “eager to promote the political interests of their friends” (814C). Roman friendships can reap benefits for the city, and to benefit his city is what Plutarch expects of a statesman.   ´ o\ oες ´ε o o ς  o ς ´εε , ` `o  ´εo ’ ως 20 ε’ εε´ ς ’\oo  ’ ’ ε o (824C). o 21 Jones rejects any “undertone of resignation” in the lessons Plutarch inculcates: “friendly relations with Rome, avoidance of discord, gentle but firm control of the populace.” Jones suggests, “As a member of a class whose position depended on external support, he had no reason to welcome the removal of Roman control” (1971: 119–20). Plutarch’s tone sounds more ambivalent to me. He may well accept and appreciate Rome’s protection of elite privilege at one level while, at the same time, regretting the resulting lack of autonomy. ˘

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22 For discussions of homonoia in Dio and fuller accounts of the political situations underlying the orations on concord discussed in this section, see Jones (1978: 76–82, 83–94), Swain (1996: 206–25), Salmeri (2000), and Bost Pouderon (2006: 123–9). Bost Pouderon (n. 28, 123) gives a list of the occurrences of the term in Dio. For a general treatment of homonoia during the period, see Sheppard (1984: 229–52). 23 Dio agrees with Plutarch that the city’s problems should not be brought to Roman authorities (34.46; Swain 1996: 219). 24 The letters exchanged between the younger Pliny and Trajan during his service in Pontus and Bithynia testifies to ongoing civic frictions in the area (Ep.10.34). 25 Jones (1978: 78) sees “no slight to Rome” in this reference to the cities as slaves. Swain does not focus on the subordination implicit in the reference, but disputes “fellow slaves” can indicate a unity and consent in running the empire (1996: 219). Reacting to another reference of Dio’s to the Greeks’ slavery (31.125), Swain (1996: 209) comments that it is not “very flattering” but notes that Dio also recognized that many cities had “a fair amount of autonomy under Rome” and that he attempted to obtain autonomy for his Prusa. 26 This emphasis on pursuing only those things that are in one’s own power reflects Stoic maxims. Compare Epictetus’ statement that the goal of education is “learning what is up to us and what is not” (Diatr. 1.22.10) and pursuing the former. 27 Jones (1978: 136) dates this speech to about 100 C.E. or later, noting that Dio twice refers to himself as philosopher (34.3, 52). 28 Brunt (1961: 189–227) discusses the reality of provincial governors’ abuses. 29 Tomas Hägg (2006) offers a discussion of the considerable dissimilarity among the romances. His perspective is important, but the novels do cohere at many points. 30 Bakhtin (1981: 110) calls attention to the inherent abstraction of the Greek romance. He writes that the homogenization of the Greek romance “is achieved only at the cost of the most extreme abstraction, schematization and a denuding of all that is concrete and merely local.” Cf. also Dowden (2005) for the allegorical nature of the romance. 31 In a discussion of connections between the love narratives of Cnemon and Calasiris in Heliodorus, Richard Hunter (1998: 46) writes that some romance material is “held in common” and its characters invoke conventional archetypes found in “popular storytelling,” forensic oratory, and New Comedy. 32 Romance characters in this way are similar to the characters of new comedy. 33 Only Chariton’s Chaereas escapes unwanted advances in the romances (Egger 1990: 187). In Heliodorus’ narrative, the hero and heroine are physically separated for a brief time and suffer only two major challenges to their chastity from Thyamis and Arsake, respectively. This narrative emphasizes the couple’s struggle to restrain their own desires for each other. 34 Reardon (2004) supplies the text and Gould (1995) the translation of Chariton. Elsom notes how this introduction locates Callirhoe within kinship relations and the traffic in women (1992: 22). 35 Rattenbury and Lumb (1994) supply the text for Heliodorus, and John Morgan the translation (in Reardon 1989: 349–588). 36 Melite, on the other hand, in the same scene, does notice that the woman’s beauty testifies to her noble birth (5.15.4). 37 See Muchow (1988, 140–81) for a survey of vows in the romance. 38 Weeping heroes similarly are a staple of the Homeric epics. The characterization of Jason in Apollonius of Rhodes’ epic has also been depreciated for reasons similar to the romance hero – his lamenting and weakness. His depiction suggests that the initial stages of this subjectivity of the non-aggressive imperial elite Greek subject occur in the Hellenistic period. See Jackson (1992) for the practicality of his stance for Jason’s

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45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55

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44

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40 41 42 43

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success. That by the middle of the first century both Chariton and Petronius already depict fully drawn passive and suicidal heroes show that this figure likely was under construction by the late republic. In his letter to the Great King Artaxerxes, announcing his possession of Callirhoe as well as the king’s wife, Chaereas claims that his reunion with Callirhoe results from his prowess in battle: “War is the best arbiter between stronger and weaker. It has awarded me my wife and yours too” (8.4.2). However, Chaereas did not even realize the women were part of the booty that he recovered at Aradus. See Goldhill (1995: 94–5). Whitmarsh (2002) provides the translations for Achilles Tatius. See Durham (1938, 1–19; Goldhill 1995: 67–102); Fusillo (1996: 279) and Chew 2000. Watanabe (2003b: 27) notes, “ Friendship in the novel never crosses the line that separates the elite from the rest.” Haynes (2003: 93) following Birchell (1996: 2) suggests that romance laments gave readers who were trained in composing rhetorical exercises featuring laments an opportunity to appreciate the authors’ technical virtuosity. This explanation, while valid, neglects the references to self-killing in these laments. For references to suicides, see MacAlister (1996: 46–50, 194 n. 10, 200 n. 2); and Perkins (1995: 221 n. 15). Toohey (2004; 165 with n. 8, 334) writes that more than twenty suicide attempts occur in Chariton. His note lists fifteen; I include additions: 1.2, 1.6.1, 2.11.1–2, 3.3.1, 3.3.6, 3.5.6, 3.7.6, 4.2.1, 4.3.6, 4.3.9, 5.10.6, 6.2.8, 6.6.5, 7.1.6, 7.5.14, 1.3.16, 3.1.1. Leucippe does not participate in the suicide discourse. Perhaps her apparent deaths make these unnecessary: 3.15.2–6; 5.7.4; 7.4.1ff (MacAlister 1996: 29–30). See Fisch (2005) for a historical overview of suttee. He notes the polarization between the sexes inherent in the practice and its basis in gender “asymmetry and inequality.” As he comments, “Widower burning is absolutely inconceivable” (328). ´ ´ ε ´o ’ ε’ ε  o´ ´ ς   ` o  . ´ ´ o’ ε’ ´ ; ’ ´ ε’ ´  oες ε’  o’ ´ ˛ ´εες ´ ω ´ o ω ε´o . Aristides’ quotation (24.32–3) continues and suggests that patriarchal households work best when those in charge give up voluntarily some of their authority, and when the others accept as authoritative whatever the superiors decide. Lelanne discusses the andreia, manliness, bravery of the heroes. She notes that Chaereas is so described (7.5.11, 7.6.7), as is Dionysius (5.9.8; 2006: 184–5). There is perhaps some irony here, as the Romans’ chief enemies in the contemporary period were from the east – Parthians. See Elsom (1992) for a feminist reading of patriarchal exchanges occurring at the end of Chariton’s narrative. This is likely an early speech as Dio mentions his baby. Cf. Sherk (1969: 67). This is an inscribed letter from Augustus to Cnidus around 5 BCE describing another house attack. Philotimia can work to redistribute resources. This largesse softens the disparity between the elite and others in the cities. The Prusan people appear to be pressing for some sort of food distribution. For famines and status-differential foods, see Garnsey (1988, 1999). See Erdkamp (2002: 113) for the inherent “moral economy” inscribed in food riots. He explains, “By explicitly and publicly making the food supply their obligation, the urban and imperial elites also made themselves the natural target of the discontented populace.” Kleinman (2000: 238) discusses how the “everyday” violence of poverty, hunger and lack of education is normalized and naturalized in societies through the mechanisms of hierarchy and inequality that function so seamlessly as to make them invisible. The crowd’s reactions to their deprivations, however, are labeled violence.

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56 Severe punishments were standard in ancient pedagogy. See Marrou (1948: 158–9 and 272–3) for examples of paideutic beatings, and compare Augustine’s description of his terror of being beaten at school (Conf. 1.9.14–15). 57 More attention needs be paid to the differences between Roman and Greek renditions of the suicide motif with respect to their different political positioning. 58 In a previous examination of suicide in the romances, I (1995: 77–103) connected its frequency to Stoicism. See Morales (2004: 57–9) for a critique of my reading of Stoicism in the novel.

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The abject body The human body, Mary Douglas writes, “is a model which can stand for any bounded system” (1966: 115). As her comment reflects, a society’s perceptions of bodily space play a key role in its spatial perceptions generally and in the social constructions metaphorically erected upon such perceptions. The human body has traditionally functioned as a paradigmatic metaphor for society, for the body social.1 This usage is problematic, however, because the human body in reality is not a body; it is not securely contained or sealed off; its boundaries do not hold. Julia Kristeva’s study of the horror associated with “the abject” – all that issues, leaks and flows out from the body – focuses on this reality and its subversion for symbolic uses of the body to denote bounded systems (Kristeva 1982: 102). Working from Mary Douglas’ premise that disgust is caused by “matter out of context” (Douglas 1966: 36), Kristeva offers that nothing about the body is intrinsically dirty or defiling. What causes humans to react with horror at the abject is not its inherent filth, “but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 1982: 4). As Douglas suggests, we are disgusted by food caught in a mustache or shoes on a table, but food and shoes are innocuous in their proper place, in a dish or on the floor. Disgust is a reaction to disrupted boundaries. What is horrifying about the abject is the evidence that ultimately no amount of surveillance or policing can secure the boundaries of a “clean and proper body,” personally or socially. The boundaries of bodies are porous, as Kristeva points out: These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There I am at the border of my condition as a living person. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver. (1982: 3)2

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For Kristeva, the excremental leaking from the body rehearses the corpse with its final liquefaction into rot, and both prefigure the ultimate fragility of any symbolic system (Kristeva 1982: 70). For if the body is not solid, if it is, in fact, oozing steadily away into the fluidity of the “cesspool” that Kristeva calls the corpse, this inherent fluidity, this leakage challenges the very notion of a “body” as solid, self-identical, whole, bounded, as this and not that, as here and not there. The excremental and the putrefying corpse unsettle any notion of a securely bounded body, a clean and proper body, and the loss of this prototypic body confounds and infracts the basis for the exclusions and sorting that go into shaping the social body. If margins do not hold, if boundaries do not seal off and separate, if in every system there is always a residue, then the artificiality and vulnerability of any ordered entity, of all our self-representations and understanding of a body, individual and social, are exposed (Grosz 1994: 195). The corpse, with its slimy indeterminacy, offers the original deconstructive marker. It is, as Kristeva recognizes, an inherent affront to metaphysical notions of being as presence or essence. The material body’s impermanence, its susceptibility to change, also provided an “ontological” affront to Greek philosophers (Bynum 1995: 56). Parmenides, for example, forecloses the reality of change by defining Being as “what is.” This “what is” is ungenerated, indestructible and unchangeable and allows for no coming into being or passing away ( fr. B8 Diels and Kranz 1954). Mortals believe change occurs, because they are misled by their faulty sense perceptions. Plato’s Socrates similarly dismisses the mutable. If all things were in flux, he maintains, there could be no knowledge (Plato, Crat. 439–40). For just as someone made an attempt to know or speak about a mutable object, it could change into something else. As Socrates asks rhetorically: “How then can that which is never in the same state be anything?” (Crat. 439C). Knowledge and real being are possible only in the ideal realm of the changeless and the immutable – in the realm of the Forms, for ˜ example, where absolute Beauty is “always such as it is” (Crat. 439D: o oo ’ ε’   o ´˜o´  ε’  ). The body caught up in the flagrant changes of its natural ε´ processes provides the inverse of such stability. Marked by the natural flux and inherent change of the material world, the body is relegated to being an incidental appendage to the self/soul destined to decay and drop away at death. Socrates advocates that those who seek knowledge should remove themselves from the “eyes and the ears, in a word from the whole body … because it disturbs their soul and hinders it from attaining truth and wisdom” (Phaedo 66A). In this paradigm, the body impedes the human person, and the soul fares better once free of its material and unstable existence (Phaedo 80C). The body functions as the paradigmatic example for something “which is never in the same state,” for the not “anything.” This stance toward the body and its flux had a long life in philosophic thinking. In the first century CE, Philo depreciates the body’s relation to the soul: “The body is wicked and a plotter against the soul, and is always a corpse and a dead thing” (Leg. 3.69). In the second century CE, Numenius of Apamea dismisses the body on the basis of its mutability: “And if body (ω ) ˜ flows and is carried along by immediate change, it flees and does 91

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not exist” ( fr. 8 Des Places).3 In this philosophical thought world, the body with its constantly changing, mutable materiality was understood to be a hindrance to the attainment of the divine. The degradation of the material body holds implications for the body social. The body traditionally has provided an essential symbolic domain for mapping social hierarchies. Societies regularly associate the upper body with the upper social stratum and the lower body with the underclass (Pile 1996: 175).4 Through this symbolic move, societies code lower social groups as “dirty,” “soiled” and “contaminated” and invest them with the same disgust as the abject. This type of social coding can be seen to operate in Greek and Roman culture. Both societies held that certain kinds of work were debasing in themselves and prevented people from living a virtuous life. Cicero and Seneca, following Greek models, provide lists of occupations that mark people as either respectable (liberales) or base (sordidi). Hired laborers, retailers and artisans (opifices) fall into in the sordid category (Cicero, De off. 1.150–2; Seneca, Epist. 88.21).5 Such language metaphorically fashions laborers, wage earners and trades people as tainted and even soiled by their work (Joshel 1992: 68–9). Using derogatory and filth-related language for the non-elite was not uncommon. Cicero, for example, refers to the Roman plebs as “the filth and dregs of the city” (Cicero, Att. 1.16.1: sordem urbis et faecem); sordidus and related terms recur in references to the under stratum.6 Through such language, the elite project onto the lower stratum the disgusting and shame-laden aspects of the material body and position themselves as different and better than these others associated with their animal body (Nussbaum 2004: 97).

Resurrection of the flesh In the second century CE, as we have seen, some strands of Christian discourse began to challenge this cultural inscription of the body as base by insisting that Jesus’ assumption of a material fleshly body erased the shame associated with the body and that his resurrection in a flesh-and-blood body guaranteed the resurrection of the human material body and its immortality. Central to these Christian arguments on the resurrection of the flesh was the contention that the essential human person was not the soul alone, but a composite of both body and soul. Justin,7 in his treatise On the Resurrection (2000), emphasizes that the resurrection pertains to both material body and soul (Res. fr. 107.8): “He has even called the flesh to the resurrection and promises to it everlasting life. For where he promises to save man, there he gives the promise to the flesh. For what is the human but the reasonable animal ( ωo o ´o) composed of body and soul?” Justin urges Christians to reject arguments that the mortal material body will not be revived; if that were the case, the Savior would have added nothing to what Pythagoras and Plato offer. Justin insists that the Savior brings “the glad tidings of a new and strange hope for men … to make corruption incorruption” (Res. Frag 109.10). Immortality for the physical body would be “strange and ˘

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new” within the prevailing philosphical paradigm that saw the mortal body as transitory appendage. Tertullian similarly emphasizes the novelty of an immortal material body; no philosophy ever offered a resurrection of the flesh (Tertullian, Marc. 5.19.7). In the second and early third century CE, Christian writers began to insist on a conception of bodily resurrection based on the immortality of a composite self, both body and soul or spirit. And it will be this composite self that will be raised. This “raising” is necessary because, as Christians recognized, the flesh, as anyone might observe, does change, dissolve and melt away. Justin, rather than being horrified by the abject, reads the dissolution of the flesh as evidence that the promise of the resurrection could only have been made to the material body: “The resurrection concerns the flesh that has fallen (o˜ εω´ooς ´ o), for ˜ the spirit (ε ) does not fall” (Justin, Res. fr. 109.10). Kristeva (1982) holds that the body falling away into the cadaver offers a horrifying spectacle. But Justin and other Christians were using the oozing demise of the body as proof that this material body is precisely what the Lord promises to raise up, since the soul needs no raising. Tertullian echoes this argument: “Nothing will expect to rise again, except that which has previously fallen” (Res. 18.5: succiderit).8 The dead body must be raised, Tertullian continues, for only it has fallen, as its very name testifies (Res. 18.8: a cadendo cadaver). In their advocacy of a material resurrection, Christians write with dispassion about the most ignoble aspects of bodily dissolution. Tertullian, unlike Kristeva, shows no horror at an etymology promising the decomposition and dissolution of every human body. And Athenagoras calmly reviews the most macabre details of the human body’s disintegration as he proves that it would be no more difficult for God to reconstitute bodies at their resurrection than it was to create them. Athenagoras describes the process of reuniting the parts of the body (Res. 3.3): To separate out that which has been torn apart and devoured by numerous of animals of every kind which are accustomed to attack bodies like our own and satisfy their wants with them; and he can reunite the fragments with their own parts and members whether they have gone into one such animal or into many, or whether they have passed in turn from them into others and after decomposition been resolved along with their destroyers into their principal constituents and so followed the natural course of dissolution back into them.9 Athenagoras concludes his passage by questioning how intelligent people can entertain doubts about God’s ability to reunite the bits and pieces of the human body at the resurrection (Res. 3.3). Any sense of ignominy associated with this devoured, digested and dissolved human body or any revulsion at donning it again is missing from Athenagoras’ account. He offers this abject body as completely worthy of reconstitution and immortality. 93

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Christian proponents of the resurrection of the flesh founded their belief on Jesus’ assumption of a fully human material body. His material resurrection supplies the template for the risen human body. The incarnation sanctions the resurrection of the flesh;10 Irenaeus explains (Adv. haer. 5.14.1): “For if the flesh were not in a ` position to be saved, the Word of God would in no wise have become flesh ().” This insistence that both Christ and the resurrected human had fully material bodies polarized the Christian community. Strict boundaries began to be drawn. On one side of this boundary were those who believed Jesus’ body was fully material and that the resurrected body was precisely the same body as that worn in life, and on the other side were those who denied a fully material body for Jesus and for resurrected humans. Justin articulates this orthodoxy in his Dialogue with Trypho; he warns against people who are called Christians but “say there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken up to heaven; do not imagine that they are Christians” (80.3). Second- and early-third-century Christians who believed in a resurrection of the flesh solidified their position by rejecting those who held a different position as heretics. Anything less than total support for Jesus’ fully material human body, a body vulnerable to suffering and experiencing natural bodily processes, was rejected. Irenaeus, for example, indicts the teaching of Basilides, who held: This Christ did not suffer, but a certain Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry the cross for him. Through ignorance and error this Simon was crucified, having been transformed by Christ so that he was believed to be Jesus; while Jesus himself assumed the form of Simon and, standing by, ridiculed them. (Adv. haer. 1.24.4) Basilides denies that Jesus suffered and that the corruptible body would experience salvation (Adv. haer. 1.24.5). Irenaeus similarly criticizes the Valentinians for denying the materiality of Jesus’ body. They hold, he says, that Christ was the son of the Demiurge and “passed through Mary as water passes through a tube” (Adv. haer. 1.7.2).11 In the second century CE, belief in the full humanity and materiality of Jesus’ body and its mandate for a material human resurrection was becoming a determinate in establishing Christian identity. As we have seen, Caroline Bynum poses the crucial question about this turn toward an emphasis on materiality: “Why not Docetism? Why did powerful voices among Christians of the later second century reject more spiritual or Gnostic interpretations of the resurrection body?” (Bynum 1995: 27). Bynum reminds that in the early centuries, the materiality of Jesus and of the resurrected body were still open questions. When Paul includes himself among the number of those who saw Jesus after his resurrection (1 Cor. 15.5–8), he allows that these may have been spiritual appearances, for his experience of the risen Lord had been a spiritual one (Acts 22.6–11). Paul’s treatment of the resurrected human body also complicates any understanding of it as a simple material replication of the living body (1 Cor. 15.21–54). Paul compares this human body to a seed: “What you 94

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sow cannot come to life until it dies.” He enumerates the differences between the dead and the risen body, including the difference between a natural and a spiritual body (1 Cor. 15.37–43). And Paul continues, “I declare to you that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor the perishable inherit the imperishable. … For the trumpet shall sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed” (15.50–3). Emphasizing images of transformation and continuity, Paul leaves the precise nature of the resurrected body unresolved in this passage (Bynum 1995: 6). In the second and third centuries, proponents of the resurrection of the flesh would subject Paul’s denial of the kingdom of God to flesh and blood to extensive interpretation.12 In the early centuries, Christians did not appear to find it difficult to entertain divergence and ambiguity around the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body and the resurrected human body. Bynum’s question “Why not Docetism?” is a real one. What changed that made a spiritual understanding untenable? What transpired in the second century CE that prompted some Christians to polarize their community with their vigorous rejection of anything less than a fully material understanding of Jesus’ body and the human resurrected body? Bynum (1995: 43) offers martyrs as a factor, but the doctrine of material resurrection must be recognized as more than a simple reaction to martyrs. It would also encourage martyrdom and contribute to creating a culture of martyrdom.13 Christian proponents of material resurrection criticize Christian opponents for their paucity of martyrs (Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 4.33.9; Tertullian, Scorp. 1.5).14 Believing one will rise again forever in the very same body makes the fear and terror of violent death more bearable. Another version of Bynum’s question “Why not Docetism?” might read “Why martyrs?” Why in the second century did some Christians begin to insist on a particular understanding of resurrection – one that would encourage martyrdom?15

Judicial bodies I suggest that the critique of the contemporary justice system inherent in both the martyr acts and in the discourse around material resurrection points toward an answer to this question. Christian texts that feature courageous Christians rebuffing the demands of Roman judicial officials and projecting a future court righting earthly wrongs register a discontent with contemporary legal arrangements. Basic to both sets of Christian texts is the premise that the justice system and its courts and procedures are flawed and unjust. By staking out this position, these Christian texts intervene in a larger social discourse around courts and justice that was going on in the period. In the early imperial centuries, the Roman criminal justice system experienced major restructuring to the detriment of many free subjects, with the exception of the imperial elite. A Christian discourse challenging the courts and justice system might have had particular resonance during a period when many imperial subjects were seeing an erosion of judicial rights. This contemporary judicial environment helps to contextualize the emphasis on the resurrection of the fleshly body in Christian texts. The nexus connecting 95

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material resurrection to judgment deserves attention. The author of 2 Clement conveys the importance of the flesh to the judgment by repeating the word (sarx), as Claudia Setzer notes, seven times in five lines in a passage that begins “And none of you should say that the flesh is neither judged nor raised” (2 Clement 9.1–5; see Setzer 2004: 72).16 By repetition Clement stresses the novelty that it is the flesh that is raised, judged and rewarded or punished.17 The connection of resurrection with judgment is so fundamental that Athenagoras feels he must rebut ˜ the many (o

o` ) who hold that judgment is the whole cause ( ’ ´ ) for resurrection.18 Athenagoras argues that what demands the resurrection is not the judgment alone, but the nature of the human person, a being composed of a body and soul that must live forever (Res. 15.6). Rather, the judgment is necessary so that humans can experience equitable justice. Athenagoras recognizes that earthly justice is intrinsically unfair: “For neither do the good in this life obtain the rewards of virtue nor the bad the wages of their wrongs” (Res. 19.5). The fleshly body must be raised up, Athenagoras holds, because the laws were given to the complete  human person (’ωoς) and not only to the soul. It is this complete person, body and soul, who must pay the recompense for faults (Res. 23.1–2). This concept that the whole person, body and soul, must be present for judgment, for reward and punishment, is the foundation of the second century’s emphasis on a material resurrection. Athenagoras summarizes (Res. 18.5): “So that when the dead are revivified through the resurrection, and what has been separated or entirely dissolved is reunited, each one may receive his just recompense for what he did in the body, whether good or evil.” At the last judgment, the human body, and not only the soul, must be produced for judgment. This same premise supports Tertullian’s arguments. He writes that the reason (ratio) for the restitution of the dead body is judgment. The body with the soul must stand in judgment (Apol. 48). Minucius Felix suggests that some persons might even wish that their bodies would be annihilated after death, so they could avoid giving an account of themselves. But Christian proponents of the material body denied the body’s annihilation at death. Instead, they held “that resurrection is necessary in order to make possible divine recompensation to the body. Evil deeds must be punished and good ones rewarded” (Hällström 1988: 93).19 And the body will share in this recompense. This intense focus in Christian texts on the necessity that the body be physically present in court interests because it can be read as an indictment of judicial procedures that exempt certain bodies from judicial punishment. In the early imperial centuries, numbers of imperial subjects were finding their bodies newly liable to physical punishment. An effect of the legal divisions being instituted between the humiliores and honestiores, the “more humble” and the “more honorable,” was to erode the free non-elites’ judicial equality. By the beginning of the third century CE, Roman law regularly allotted different punishments for the same crime to individuals according to their status. The initial phases of this system probably occurred during the first century CE, as it already shows considerable development by the Hadrianic period (Garnsey 1970: 170).20 96

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As is the case for so many imperial initiatives, Augustus likely launched the process that eventually inscribed a systemic inequality into Roman criminal law, when he revived the office of urban prefect. Tacitus writes that Augustus said he appointed the prefect “to coerce the slaves and that part of the free population (civium) whose boldness makes it unruly, unless it fears force” (nisi vim metuat) (Tacitus, Ann. 6.11.3; see Garnsey 1970: 91–2).21 Two assumptions appearing in this account prove decisive for the direction of criminal law over the next centuries: first, that free low-status citizens and slaves form a single social aggregate, and second, that this group must be controlled through fear. By assimilating slaves and lower status citizens, Augustus depreciates the legal differences between these groups. In the Roman Republic, citizens, in contrast to slaves, were not liable to violent treatment. Augustus divides the civic community along a new boundary line based on status rather than the possession or lack of possession of civil privileges. In this opening move, Augustus already forecasts the shape of the legal system that by the early third century CE would be firmly in place, status based and permitting violence against free persons.22 Richard Bauman describes the import of Augustus’ action as follows: “Roman society was always elitist … but Augustus took the first step in institutionalizing elitism” (Bauman 1996: 199, n. 43).

Differential justice In this first step, as Tacitus’ report displays, Augustus utilizes a conventional maneuver for instituting hierarchy: he conflates the urban crowd with an unruly animal, both controllable only by fear and force. In ancient societies, slaves were regularly assimilated to the animal, and like animals, they were vulnerable to beatings and violent treatment (Bradley 1994: 110). By destabilizing the boundary line between slaves and other non-elite, Augustus opened new categories of people to the same social disregard as animals. Augustus’ imagery comparing the urban population to an uncontrollable beast invokes the elite’s traditional perception of the urban mass as the sordid, unruly “other,” tainted by association with the lower body.23 Augustus’ innovations enabled the institution of more fearsome judicial punishments. By empowering the judicial hearing (cognitio) system, where a single delegate of the state, the emperor himself, the urban prefect, the praetorian prefect, the provincial governor heard and decided cases, Augustus uncoupled these courts from the standing juries (quaestiones perpetuae) of the republic and their statutes (leges) prescribing specific crimes and punishments. In the cognitio system, judges had the autonomy to recognize and define crimes and set punishments for them (Robinson 1995: 10). The system contributed to the proliferation of the new crimes (crimina extraordinaria) and savage punishments appearing in the early empire. It also played an essential role in establishing the differential punishment system based on status (Garnsey 1970: 171). The criminal laws of the early empire make terrifying reading, with their prescriptions of horrific punishments – the convicted being crucified, burned alive, 97

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thrown to the beasts.24 What strikes a modern reader about these extreme penalties is that not all offenders are equally liable to them. The laws clearly articulate a differential standard. Law after law exhibits the same discriminatory stance. They exempt the elite from the most terrible penalties. Poisoners, for example, must suffer a capital punishment, unless exempted by status, as “regard must be given their rank” (dignitatis respectum); if exempt from capital punishment, they will be deported (Dig. 48.19.28.9). Those who cause sedition and disturbance are sentenced “according to their social standing” (pro qualitate dignitatis); accordingly, they are “either hanged from the furca, thrown to the beasts or deported to an island” (Dig. 48.19.38.2). For those who intentionally and maliciously forge a will, the penalties are for more elite criminals (honestiores) to be deported to an island or for the non-elite (humiliores) to be sent to the mines or crucified (Sententiae Pauli 5.25.1). All these examples are from the writings of Severan jurists or later, but testimony places the initial stages of the differential penalty system earlier (Bauman 1996: 125). The advice the younger Pliny gives to a friend on administering provincial justice shows that the principles underlying differential punishment were already present in his period: “You should maintain the distinctions between ranks and degrees of dignity” (Epist. 9.5; see Garnsey 1970: 78). A rescript attributed to Hadrian on moving boundary stones also reveals the operation of the differential perspective (Bauman 1996: 126–8). The rescript directs the judge to take into consideration “the status (condicione) of the offender and his intention (mente).” It then sets out different penalties for the high–status perpetrators (splendidiores), as opposed to “the others” (Dig. 47.21.2). This passage lacks only the stable vocabulary (honestiores vs. humiliores) of the developed differential system. By the early second century CE, it would seem free imperial subjects were experiencing a differential penalty system calibrated to their status. Richard Bauman notes that exemption from the harsher bodily penalties “virtually acted as a certificate of status,” especially for decurions and veterans (Bauman 1996: 129). Bauman cites Callistratus’ pronouncement: Generally speaking all those whom it is not permissible to beat with rods should be shown the same respect for their rank as decurions are shown. It is inconsistent to say that anyone exempted from the rods by imperial rescripts can be sent to the mines. (Dig. 48.19.28.5). This passage testifies to the establishment of a legal hierarchy linking people’s social position to their body’s liability to or exemption from physical punishment. This same situation had held in Republican Rome, but then the partition separated free from slave. In the early imperial period, a process began to shift this boundary. Callistratus observes that imperial rescripts had specified: “It is not the custom for all people to be beaten with rods, but only freemen of less substance (tenuiores homines), men of higher rank (honestiores) are not to be beaten with rods” (Dig. 48.19.28.2). Not only slaves, but all persons who were not honestiores were 98

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becoming eligible for beatings. And this eligibility, this legal vulnerability to bodily humiliation, provides the warrant for every other degrading legal penalty. Callistratus’ pronouncement articulates this logic. If persons could not be struck, then they could not be sentenced to hard labor in the mines; no beating, then no crucifixion, no burning alive, no beasts. In the early empire, numbers of free people were newly being taught their lack of social position and worth by their body’s vulnerability to the legal imposition of pain. Commentators have suggested that these brutal punishments were part of the state’s effort to inhibit crime and repress criminal activity (Pölönen 2004: 229–30). Support for this attitude appears in the law codes. The third century jurist Callistratus mentions, for example, that bandits should be hanged near where they committed their crimes, as a warning to others (Dig. 48.119.28.15). And Claudius Saturninus describes how punishments were sometimes made more severe (exacerbentur) to deter criminals, for example, “whenever the excessive numbers of persons engaged in highway robbery need a lesson” (Dig. 48.19.16.10). The laws, however, intimate another and perhaps a primary goal for the new savage punishments: to intimidate the non-elite segment of the population. The laws regularly reserve the most fearful punishments specifically for the under stratum, those who were not connected to the imperial center, who were not senators, equestrians, decurions, veterans or their families. The empire’s proliferating crimes and harsher punishments seem to actualize the Augustan theme that fear and power must be utilized to keep the non-elite in check. In her examination of the social message that beating inscribed on beaten bodies in the first century CE, Jennifer Glancy submits that the beaten body invariably acts as a “token of … dishonor, abasement, and servility” (Glancy 2004: 134). In the Roman context, she argues, the circumstances of the beating matter very little; every beating degrades, humiliates and marks the body as servile: “Citizen or not, free or slave, a beaten body was a dishonored body” (Glancy 2004: 124). And the subjects of a beating were rendered “morally degraded” and tainted by their subjection and submission to violent treatment (Glancy 2004: 111).25 That persons were legally vulnerable to beatings and violence already contributed to their social debasement. Across the empire in the imperial period, a judicial perspective was evolving that branded all the people without sufficient status, wealth or position to belong to the honestiores as dishonored and debased on the basis of their body’s potential for humiliating treatment. The honestiores, the more honorable, the elite and their agents, were identified by their bodies’ freedom from degrading punishments. As the trans-empire alliance of elite administering the empire solidified its power, the elite initiated judicial changes that resulted in rendering new groups of persons contemptible and disgusting. As Kristeva (1982) outlines, disgust is intrinsically about defining and identifying boundaries; in the early imperial period, the elite were drawing stricter boundaries between themselves and the others in their society. 99

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In his book on disgust, William Miller (1997: 195) describes the close correlation between disgust and cruelty. Disgust leaves little room for sympathy or fellow feeling; it engenders cruelty. As Miller describes: “Disgust is less benign for the lower in the pecking order. It works to prevent concern, care, pity and love” (Miller 1997: 251). Disgusting persons repulse, so they deserve elimination, even eradication. Miller maintains: “Hierarchies maintained by disgust cannot be benign” (1997: 251). The proliferation of savage and brutal judicial penalties during the first three centuries seems to attest to the operation of disgust. By losing their immunity from violent treatment, free subjects were debased by their assimilation to the slave and the animal and became objects of disdain to the elite. This context points to an increasing lack of reciprocity between the elite and the others in their communities during the imperial period.26 Bound to each by ties of education and privilege, the imperial elite were separating themselves from the others in their own communities. The legal system, with its differential punishment setting off the elite from the under stratum, facilitated the construction and the display of this new transempire imperial identity. Across the empire, numbers of people were learning their place by being made newly liable to brutal treatment and horrific deaths, and their “betters” were largely unaffected by the changed legal system. One can imagine that the free lower stratum resented the assault on their persons and their judicial position that these legal changes effected. In the ancient Mediterranean, non-elite people were not unused to being treated badly by their social superiors, but traditionally in Rome and other cities incorporated into the empire, there had been a semblance of shared civic rights across status lines. The legal system evolving in the early empire destabilized this equilibrium. Its savagery directed at citizens and free people were innovations. Its grievances therefore were new and lacked the camouflage of traditional wrongs. It is reasonable to think the humiliores must have felt resentment.

Resurrection discourse as social statement Forty years ago, Ramsay MacMullen referred to the resentment that the poor “must have” felt in the early empire as a result of the alliance forged between Rome and provincial elites. He observed: “The poor then must have looked on Romans as accomplices to the rich, and must at times have cursed them both in the same breath – must have, according to speculation, nothing more” (1966: 189). MacMullen relied on speculation because he found little testimony to this resentment in the historical record. The situation may be different for the differential justice system; testimony may survive. It is my contention that resentment of the evolving differential penalty system and the status realignments it tokens contributes to the thematic emphases of second-century Christian resurrection discourse and to their appeal. Two motifs prominent in Christian writings on the resurrections – the emphasis on the Last Judgment and the refusal of any disgust for the material body, 100

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no matter how abject – seem to challenge the social perspective supporting the contemporary legal restructuring. This perspective enables the social hierarchy by first fashioning some persons in the society as more associated with the body and its disgusting aspects than others on the basis of their work, status or gender, and then denigrating these people as tainted, disgusting and unworthy of regard or respect and available for animal-like treatment. Christian texts contest this perspective. Their contestation carries, I suggest, social as well as religious ramifications. The insistence of the Christian judgment discourse that every person is equally a body and a soul and that body and soul alike must be judged after death seems to have particular pertinence. Brent Shaw has pointed out that the theme of an individual judgment at a final court is a Christian innovation: “the conception of a ‘last’ or ‘final’ court … is singularly absent from the central Jewish inheritance [of resurrection discourse]” (2003: 555 with notes). In their representations of this last court, I suggest, Christians voiced their dissent from the contemporary legal system, where some people were not being required to bring their bodies to court to the same extent that others were. As we have seen, elite bodies might appear in court, but they were not presented for physical punishment. As the laws demonstrate, the elite’s dignity and status regularly exempt their bodies from the brutal physical punishment of the under stratum. On the basis of their status, their bodies are excused from any humiliating treatment. Christian writings on the resurrection, in contrast, emphasize that everyone’s body must appear in court for punishment or reward. This necessity to produce the material body for judgment, as previously noted, provides a major motivation for raising the flesh. Christian texts stipulate that the same bodies worn during life must pay the penalty or reap the reward for their earthly activities. They insist that there are no exceptions. All persons will present their bodies for judgment and physical punishment, regardless of rank or position. Justin, for example, warns the emperor Antoninus Pius that he “will not escape the coming judgment of God” (1 Apol. 68). Martyrs remind their Roman judges that their day of judgment will come. (Passio Perp. 18.8). When the proconsul threatens to burn Polycarp, he dismisses the threat of a fire that “burns for an hour” and warns the proconsul of the eternal fire of the coming judgment (Mart. 11.2). Tertullian envisions emperors, magistrates and philosophers all suffering grievous penalties after their judgment (Spect. 30.3–4). While the martyrs’ focus on future punishments suggests a certain desire for revenge, the overall emphasis in the resurrection discourse seems to be on equitable justice more than payback. This equity will occur only when every person is present, body and soul, to be judged. This repeated refrain that everyone’s body must be produced for judgment would seem in this historical moment, when only some bodies were experiencing harsh physical punishment, to have social as well as religious relevance. Christian resurrection discourse seems to challenge the juridical fictions and symbolic networks that position the upper stratum, those identified with the soul/mind, as superior and too refined for harsh physical punishment. Christian texts stress that there are no exceptions; everyone’s body 101

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must be presented at court and, if guilty, endure equal penalties. By resisting contemporary practices that exempted some bodies from punishment, the Christian texts refigure this contemporary paradigm and undermine its social implications. No group is allowed to deny its members’ embodiment or to foist the body onto an “other.” To achieve this end, Christians refigured prevailing notions of the human person and the unworthiness of the material body. Every human person is held to be equally an amalgam of body and soul. The body is a full partner in human being. And every person as an immortal body and soul will experience equitable judgment.27 Christian refusal to find the material body disgusting was the key to the challenge of the operating hierarchical social paradigm supporting differential legal penalties. If bodies are not disgusting, then there is little basis to disparage those associated with bodies. The dispassionate acceptance given in resurrection texts to the most abject scattered, devoured and dissolved bodies subverts their repulsiveness. Christians reinscribe the material body; Jesus’ incarnation has trans-valued it. Irenaeus emphasizes Jesus’ fully physical and emotional humanity in his rebuttal to the charge that Jesus simply passed through Mary like water through a pipe. If that were the case, Irenaeus argues, Jesus would not have eaten, hungered, wept over Lazarus, sweated blood, or poured out blood and water when he was stabbed, as he has been described. These actions testify to Christ’s real flesh-and-blood humanity (Adv. haer. 3.22.2). Irenaeus’ description emphasizes the body’s fluid boundaries – eating, weeping, sweating and bleeding. By accepting a human fleshly body, Irenaeus teaches, Christ reconciled the flesh that had been alienated from God since Adam’s disobedience and perfected and saved it. This process of salvation will be complete in the resurrected body and its eternal life (Unger and Dillon 1992: 185 n. 11).28 By destabilizing the premises for debasing the body, its mutability and mortality, Christians destabilized the grounds for the hierarchical configurations symbolically erected upon that body that demeaned those associated with the body.

Reactions to the resurrection In his Contra Celsum, Origen preserves the horrified reaction of a philosophically inclined contemporary to these Christian teachings on the resurrection and the incarnation.29 In his True Doctrine, likely written near the end of the second century CE, Celsus offers a critique of Christianity, portions of which have been preserved in Origen’s response. In one passage, Celsus calls the Christian hope in a material resurrection “the hope of worms” and asks: “What sort of human soul would have any desire for a body that is rotted?” The soul might expect everlasting life, but Celsus quotes Heraclitus on the body’s worth: “Corpses ought to be thrown away as worse than dung.” And he describes the “flesh as full of things not even nice to mention” (Contra Cels. 5.14). Celsus cites the intra-Christian disagreement on material resurrection to support his perspective. He argues that the fact that some 102

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Christians cannot accept the flesh’s resurrection “shows its utter repulsiveness, and that it is both revolting and impossible” (Contra Cels. 5.14). What Celsus finds disgusting is the body’s abject nature, its propensity to rot and seep away. How could such a body merit resurrection?30 The idea that a god, a divine being, would take on a mutable body also repulses Celsus. He writes: “A god would not have a body such as yours,” nor would a god be born or eat the foods that Jesus is described as eating (Contra Cels. 1.69). Celsus’ revulsion at the conjoining of divine and material emerges in his rejection of Jesus’ birth: “Why did he [God] have to breathe into the womb of a woman? He already knew how to make men. He could have formed a body for this one also without having to thrust his own spirit into such pollution” (Contra Cels. 6.73). Celsus sees the human body as miasmatic, contaminating, disgusting and unworthy of a god. Celsus sums up his time-honored perspective: God is good and beautiful and happy, and exists in the most beautiful state. If then he comes down to men, He must undergo change, a change from good to bad, from beautiful to shameful … it is the nature only of a mortal being to undergo change and remoulding, whereas it is the nature of the immortal being to remain the same without alteration. God could not be capable of this change. (Contra Cels. 4.14)31 Celsus affirms the traditional conception that change is negative and detrimental and abhorrent to true being and that the material body is the very epitome of change and its inherent shame. In terms similar to those of Irenaeus, Origen defends the incarnation. Jesus assumed a human soul and body and combined this with his divine characteristics to bring salvation to human beings (Contra Cels. 3.28). By becoming human, by assuming a material body, Jesus transformed that body and erased the shame associated with it. Like Celsus, Christian opponents of the material resurrection were unable to accept a blatantly material body for the divine. Tertullian reports that Marcion also rejected the flesh “as full of dung” (Marc. 3.10: stercoribus infersam). And he accuses Apelles and Valentinus of devising something other than human flesh for Jesus (Res. 5.2; Carn. Chr. 15.1). These reactions demonstrate how, in the early imperial centuries, some persons held the material body in so much contempt that it was simply impossible to imagine its connection with the divine. This contempt for the body then spilled over onto the people culturally associated with their bodies and rendered them contemptible. And this contempt justified the social and legal structures that discriminated against the under stratum. Christian resurrection discourse interrupted the basis for bodily contempt. Jesus’ human body had refigured the human material body. It was no more the “servant and the handmaid” to the soul; it was the soul’s “consort and coheir,” a full partner in human being (Tertullian, Res. 7.13), to be accepted, rather than dismissed as repulsive. And the body’s rehabilitation had relevance for the people associated with it. 103

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The abject body was paradigmatic, not abhorrent for Christians. Tertullian offers Lazarus’ body, which had lain in the tomb for three days, as the very model for the resurrected body (praecipuo exemplo). To emphasize the abject condition of this body, Tertullian uses repetition (Res. 53.3): “The flesh lay prostrate in weakness, the flesh was almost putrid in its dishonor, the flesh stank in corruption, and yet it was as flesh that Lazarus rose again – with his soul no doubt. But that soul was incorrupt” (trans. Evans). Tertullian dismisses the survival of Lazarus’ soul as incidental – it is immortal and has no need to be raised – and directs attention instead to that other half of the human person: its putrid, stinking, rotting flesh. Lazarus’ body is precisely the sort of abject body with its rotted, oozing, indistinct margins that horrified both Kristeva and Platonic thinkers. Tertullian’s representation of Lazarus’ body challenges any notion of the human body as solid and bounded; he offers, rather, a viscous body, mutable, in the process of becoming other. Embedded in this description is a social message. The dominant philosophic thinking of the period was premised upon an ideology that defines stability, fixity and immutability as the only “real” and ultimate good. This perspective denigrates the material for its constant change and flux. Such a perspective, disallowing change could collude in maintaining the social position of the elite especially in a society as hierarchical as that of the early centuries CE. Christianity, with its concept that change – even the utterly devastating change of bodily dissolution – does not destroy, opens conceptual space for societal change. And if the cultural body has implications for the body social, Christian resurrection discourse projects a social body with porous boundaries.32 And with this paradigmatic open body, it can be seen to contest the increasing hierarchization of imperial society reflected in the evolving boundaries between honestiores and humiliores.

Notes 1 Brown (1988) is fundamental for reading the relation between the body and society in early Christianity. 2 Bodel (1986: 34–5) adduces a passage from Papinian’s monograph on the care of cities directing city managers to prohibit the dumping of dung or corpses in city streets (Dig. 43.10.5). The ancients had more experience that we in seeing the overlap in these signs of human “waste.” See Kyle (1998: 128–54) for problems with disposal of corpses from the arenas. 3 See Dillon (1977: 361–79) for Numenius’ Platonism. 4 Pile (1996) draws for his discussion from Stallybrass and White (1986). For this kind of social coding, see Plato (1929), Tim. 69E–70A, 90A. 5 Cicero refers to Panaetius and Seneca to Posidonius as sources; see Treggiari (1980: 48–51). Meijer and van Nijf (1992) review attitudes toward trade and traders. 6 See Yavetz (1969: Appendix 1) for a listing of adjectives for the under stratum and MacMullen (1974: 138–41) for a “lexicon of prejudice.” 7 Justin’s authorship for this treatise on resurrection is not established. Prigent (1964: 50–61), Bynum (1995: 28–9) and van Eijk (1971) favor his authorship. I follow Setzer (2004: 78) in referring to the author as Justin without taking a stand on the issue. The text is that of Marcovich, included as an appendix to his edition of Athenagoras (2000).

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8 van Eijk (1971) discusses the Christian formula that may underlie the similarity in these passages. See Grant on the resurrection (1948a; 1948b). 9 Translations of Athenagoras are from Schoedel (1972). 10 Cf. 1 Clem 49:6; 2 Clem. 9:5; Barn 5: 6. 11 Since the discovery of Nag Hammadi documents there has been considerable discussion of how fairly the Christian heresiologists reflect their opponents’ views. See Le Boulluec (1985) for a review of this topic. On individual “heretics”, see Marjanen and Luomanen (2005). My interest is not in the reality of the Christians’ charges but in how they use the “heretics” to construct their own position. 12 Cf., for example Tertullian Res. 45.6; 46.1; 51.1. Irenaeus (Adv. haer. 5.9.1) says that all the heretics quote this passage of Paul. The third century 3 Corinthians, revises Paul showing his preaching the resurrection of the “flesh:” “For by his own body Jesus Christ saved all flesh (4.16; Pervo 2006). The Gospels also allow for diverse interpretations for the precise nature of Jesus’ resurrected body. See Chilton (2000) and Fitzmyer (1981: 1535–93) on Jesus’ resurrection appearances. Fitzmyer includes extensive bibliographies. 13 Ignatius of Antioch reflects the importance of Christ’s material body for martyrdom: “For if these things were accomplished by our Lord only in appearance … But why have I handed myself over to death, to fire, to the sword, to wild beasts?” (Syrm. 4.2). 14 Clement of Alexander (Strom. 4.17.1), however, notes the number of martyrs from those “not really of our number but sharing the name.” Eusebius (5.16.21) writes that the Marcionites are attested to have many martyrs. 15 Selzer (2004: 144) connects resurrection discourse to martyrdom in Jewish texts: “Belief in the body being raised up appears explicitly as a response to its destruction in 2 Maccabees 7 and 12.” 16 Setzer (2004: 72) refers to Pheme Perkins’ statement that the period saw “a general shift to the incarnation as the central image of salvation” (Perkins 1984: 337). 17 Justin (1 Apol. 8) emphasizes this difference between Christ’s judgment and the one that Plato describes being delivered by Rhadamanthus and Minos (Plato, Gorg. 523E–524A). In the Christian judgment, punishment will be given “to the same bodies, united with their souls”, not as in the Platonic paradigm to souls alone, and not just for a thousand years, but for eternity. 18 Athenagoras (Res. 14.6) holds that the resurrection of infants proves resurrection could not be for judgment alone. 19 Hällström makes this comment about Athenagoras, Justin and Tertullian specifically, but it applies to other proponents of the material resurrection as well. 20 Rilinger (1988) in his thorough study of the honestiores/humiliores division has argued on the basis of his dating of the Pauli Sententiae that the honestiores/humiliores system was not in place until the fourth century. Others suggest an earlier date for the Pauli Sententiae (Robinson 1997: 113). Pölönen (2004: 218, n. 3) suggests that “the principle of status differentiation in punishment is pre-Severan, although it was not systematically expressed in terms of the humiliores-honestiores dichotomy.” Rilinger (1988: 274–9) offers his social interpretation for the legal alterations. 21 In 26 BC, Augustus appointed Valerius Messala Corvinus urban prefect, but he resigned almost immediately. Leaving Rome in 16 BC, Augustus appointed Titus Statilius Taurus to this same office. Some time after this, Augustus appointed Lucius Calpurnius Piso, and the position then became standard. See Tacitus, Ann. 6.11. 22 That is not to say that slaves did not still experience harsher treatments than free persons (Aubert 2002: 129–30). As the laws demonstrate, the so-called dual-penalty system was in actuality a tri-penalty system with different penalties for slaves, humiliores and honestiores. On the supposed equalization of slave and free penalties,

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23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Bauman (1996: 135) concludes: “The evidence for equalization … does not come anywhere near a general assimilation of the slave and the humilior.” Plutarch, for example, notes that managing the civic population is like managing an unruly and suspicious beast (thêrion; 800C). The XII tables (8.10) permitted persons to be bound, beaten and burned alive for treachery and arson (Kyle 1998: 73, n. 129). Nippel (1995: 25–6) locates the use of extreme punishments of the free lower stratum to deter crime in the empire and not the republic. For the severity of these punishments, see MacMullen [1986] 1990b: 209–13), Millar (1984) and Grodzynski (1984). Glancy (2004: 111) adduces Matthew Roller’s statement: “Physical and legal degradation corresponded in Roman society to moral degradation” (Roller 2001: 226). De Ste. Croix (1981: 465) notes that, during the early imperial period, “the propertied classes tightened their grip on those below them and placed themselves in even a more commanding position than they had previously.” Stroumsa (1990: 42) offers that the conception of the human identity as a composite of body and soul is a Christian innovation. ’ See Osborn (2001: 97–140) for the centrality of recapitulation (ε ´

ω ς), the idea that Jesus “sums up” everything in Irenaeus’ thought. On this particular passage, see Osborn (2001: 97–107). I use Chadwick’s translations in this section (Origen, Contra Cels. (1965)). See Frede (1994: 5208) for Celsus’ metaphysics and theology. Celsus holds that only immortal beings are made by God, and that eliminates the body (Origen, Contra Cels. 4.52). Origen (Contra Cels. 1965: 192) offers that Celsus here draws on Plato’s Republic (381B–C) and Phaedrus (246D). That Athenagoras and Minucius Felix emphasize material resurrection but never mention Jesus suggests the importance of resurrection in the promulgation of the Christian message in the period. Lieu (2004: 89) notes that Theophilus and Tatian also do not mention Jesus and comments that “the Apostolic Fathers and Apologists are striking for their relative lack of interest in the life of Jesus.” The message of the final court and last judgment may have been recognized as having more appeal in contemporary circumstances. In her survey of early Christian art, Jensen (2000: 69) notes that depictions of Lazarus along with the baptism of Jesus are two of the most popular representations (six each). The Jonah cycle with its resurrections connotations (cf. Matt.17.39, 16.4) is also popular. This perhaps also speaks to a focus on resurrection.

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In the last chapter, I suggested that Christian emphasis on material resurrection and a final court might appeal to the non-elite persons in the early empire experiencing a new exposure to harsh and demeaning judicial treatment. A definitive chronology for the implementation of the differential penalty system would strengthen this argument.1 The attribution of laws, however, is too historically unreliable to be relied upon for secure dating. In this chapter I will offer that the prominence of trials and punishment in the cultural productions of the early imperial period suggests that changes to the justice system were already having an effect and making judicial matters a culture wide focus. And I will suggest that both the Greek elite and Christians utilized this topic to articulate their distinct social identities and that a culture wide concern with judicial penalties facilitated Christianity’s entrance into the historical record. Brent Shaw draws attention to the importance of Christian representations for their evidence of judicial practices and proceedings (2003: 533–63).2 This Christian testimony supplements the lack of other detailed data in the historical record: Shaw notes that the only other sources to represent courts, trials, and punishment with the same level of detail as Christian texts are the ancient novels (2003: 553). That Christian texts and the novel genre, both early imperial forms, prominently feature trials and penalties indicate that judicial proceedings were a particular concern in the period. The writings of another social production of the early centuries CE confirm this position. In a persuasive study, Beth Berkowitz points to the prevalence of “death penalty discourse” and the focus on criminal executions in second century rabbinic texts. She suggests that this emphasis on courts and penalties was an important part of the rabbinic identity making strategies of the period.3 She argues that the Rabbis shaped their execution discourse to figure their communities’ position vis-à-vis the Roman Empire and Christians. The Rabbis display their ambivalence toward Roman authority and its judicial penalties in their discussions of rabbinic executions (2006: 177). This focus on courts and death sentences, when there is little likelihood that Rabbis actually enacted criminal law, also shows that these topics perform a metaphoric role in the cultural dynamics of the period and were available for manipulation by different cultural groups. Berkowitz makes the case that both 107

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the Rabbis and the Christians as minority groups in the Empire utilize death penalty discourse, although in opposite ways, to make their claims for authority (2006: 23). The emphatic attention on judicial practices, particularly the inherent terror of judicial punishments, in such divergent cultural texts attests that judicial penalties were already affecting contemporary psyches by the second century. Not only martyrs like the young mother Perpetua in Carthage report dreaming of the court’s torture equipage, the “swords, lances, hooks, daggers and spikes” (Pass. Perpet. 4.3). Artemidorus implies that nightmares involving dying painful judicial deaths were not uncommon in the second century. His Oneirocritica offers interpretations for dreams of death “resulting from a judge’s verdict” (2.49), those dealing with “beheading” (1.35), “being burned alive” (2.52), “being crucified” (2.53), and “fighting with wild beasts” (2.54; Shaw 2003: 537). Courts and their savage punishments were troubling imperial subjects in the early imperial centuries, appearing in their dreams and their cultural representations. How many people actually suffered such extreme judicial punishments is unclear, but their very institution and promulgation was provoking enough anxiety to give judicial punishments prominence in the cultural discourse. The difference in their framing of judicial events attests to a crucial asymmetry between the social perspectives and worldviews of Christians and the Greek elite. By offering scenarios describing the terrible experiences accompanying a loss of social position, the plots of the adventure romances confirm their readers’ accommodation to Roman hegemony and its protection of their position and privilege. Prominent among the novels’ “what if ” scenarios is “what if ” the elite hero or heroine becomes liable to servile or lower stratum punishments? All the romances protagonists except Clitophon are reduced to slavery at some point in the novels (Schwartz (1998: 378), and all the male protagonists suffer harsh punishments. Chaereas (4.3.6) and Habrocomes (4.2) barely escape crucifixion; Clitophon (7.12.2) and Theagenes (8.4.5–6) are tortured. By all the novels’ conclusions, however, the protagonists are restored to their privileged status. The romances convey that the elite’s good fortune has restored them to their rightful place where their status protects them from such perils. The Christian documents frame such ordeals very differently, as opportunities to exhibit their courage and commitment to their beliefs and a future life.

Focus on judicial penalties The overlap in the depictions of the punishments endured by martyrs and romance protagonists is striking and indicative of the focus on the subject. In Xenophon’s romance, for example, a rejected lover accuses Habrocomes of murdering her husband, and the prefect of Egypt orders him to be crucified. Habrocomes is led away and tied to his cross. Habrocomes prays for help, and the Sun God sends a gust of wind to topple his cross into the Nile. When he washes ashore, Habrocomes is again sentenced to death, this time by fire, but again he is saved. The Nile rises and sends a wave of water to put out the fire. The prefect grants him a reprieve 108

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until he can find out, as the narrative notes, “why the gods were taking such care for this man” (4. 2.10). Christian martyrs are depicted sharing a similar experience. A letter sent by a group of Carthaginian martyrs offers another account of an angry governor and a reprieve from death by fire.4 The martyrs learn from their guards that they are to be burned alive, and as happened to Habrocomes, their prayers gain them a reprieve: But the Lord alone can rescue his servants from fire … he it was who averted from us the insane savagery of the governor. Earnestly devoting ourselves to constant prayer with all our faith, we obtained directly what we had asked for: no sooner had the flame been lit to devour our bodies when it went out again: the fire of the overheated ovens was lulled by the Lord’s dew. (Acta Mont. et Luc. 3.3–4) These similar scenarios differ mainly in their endings: Habrocomes survives, but the martyrs do not. The martyr narratives and the romances also emphasize their subjects’ vulnerability to judicial torture. When Clitophon is falsely convicted of killing Leucippe and imprisoned, the narrative describes him about to be questioned about his accomplices and positioned for torture: “My arms had been tied and the clothes had been stripped from my body and I was hanging in the air on ropes and the torturers were bringing on the whips and fire and rack” (7.12.2). Watching the romance hero escape the threat of servile or under-stratum treatment provides much of the thrill of the romance plot. In this episode, the fortuitous arrival of a priest of Artemis interrupts Clitophon’s torture. Marian, a mid-third-century African martyr, is not so lucky; he must endure his torture. Like Clitophon’s ordeal, his includes suspension: As he hung, the thongs that bore his weight were bound not about his hands but the joints of his thumbs, so that these because of their slightness and weakness might suffer all the more in supporting the rest of his body. Moreover, unequal weights were fastened to his legs, so that the whole structure of his body, torn as it was two ways at once by unequal pain and weakened by the wrenching of his viscera, thus hung supported by his muscles. (Acta Mar. et Iacob. 5.6–7)5 Surviving this round of torture, Marian returns to his cell and, using the jubilant language typical to martyr texts, rejoices over his triumph (triumpho) and celebrates with his fellow prisoners the Lord’s victory (victorae). Representations of tortured and imprisoned bodies intersect in the romances and martyr literature. This recurrent motif with its focus on imprisonment and punishments testifies to a cultural concern with judicial practices and the violence 109

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of the civic regime they manifest. That this new emphasis emerges in the early imperial centuries suggests that judicial changes were already infiltrating the cultural consciousness in this period.

Romance justice The social perspective supporting differential judicial practices is evident in two trial scenes in Chariton’s Callirhoe. Chariton sets his romance in the classical past, in fifth-century Syracuse, but as the secretary to a lawyer in Aphrodisias (1.1), he would have had an insider’s knowledge of the contemporary legal situation of Roman Asia Minor. Chariton’s fictive trials present an asymmetrical and statusbased approach to matters of justice. Soon after the novel’s two elite protagonists marry, jealous rivals persuade Chaereas that Callirhoe is being unfaithful to him. In a fit of jealous passion, he kicks the innocent Callirhoe in the stomach and apparently kills her (1.5.1). A trial is quickly arranged. Chaereas appears in the assembly, overcome with remorse and grief, and begs to be stoned to death immediately. The crowd is overcome with sorrow for the man. Then his father-in-law, the famous general Hermocrates, speaks in favor of Chaereas: “I have often heard her [Callirhoe] say that she would rather have Chaereas live than herself. Let us stop this futile trial and get on with the necessary funeral” (1.5.7). The jury then votes to acquit Chaereas. The elite protagonist pays no penalty, not even criticism, for his murder of his wife. The situation is very different for Theron, the man who robs Callirhoe’s tomb. In ˜ his very first appearance, the narrative defines Theron as a “rogue” (ooς, 1.7.1). However, as commentators have noted, he is also shown to be a man of energy, resourcefulness, and organizational abilities (Kasprzyk 2001: 49–52; Schemling 1974: 156). Seeing Callirhoe’s lavish funeral, Theron has a brainstorm: why should he risk his life being a pirate when he could become “rich from one corpse” (1.7.1)? Theron plans his tomb robbery meticulously. Going over in his mind the strengths and weaknesses of possible recruits, he finally gathers a band of roustabouts and enters the tomb. There they discover that Callirhoe has recovered and is alive. She beseeches the robbers to show her more mercy than her husband and parents have (1.9.5). The robbers debate what to do with the girl. One suggests they return her and claim a reward. Another immediately mocks him for trying to act like a philosopher (ϕ

ooε˜ ). If they return the girl, the city officials, if not her family, will certainly prosecute them. This bandit articulates their social ´ people in the position. Even doing good will not turn them into decent (oς) city’s eyes (1.10.5). Finally, after much debate, they sail away and sell Callirhoe in Ionia. Later, searching for Callirhoe’s body, Chaereas happens upon the bandits’ becalmed ship. Only Theron remains alive because, as the narrative explains, “the  ˜ oo´ ς ’εo) design of Providence (`o ς was preserving him for torture and the cross” (3.3.12). This is the first of four times in this section that the role of Providence in bringing Theron to justice is emphasized (3.4.7; 3.4.10 twice; 110

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Schwartz 1998: 47). Theron is taken back to Syracuse for trial. His presentation in court differs markedly from that of Chaereas. Saundra Schwartz explains, “Theron’s low status is accentuated … he wears chains and is escorted by the public slaves into the theater. The torture equipment – the wheel, the catapult, fire and whip – follows him” (1998: 55). Theron professes his innocence. During his questioning, he is whipped and cut and burned, but he manages to hold out for a long time and almost overcomes the torturers (3.4.11), but, the narrative explains, “Conscience (ε `oς) is powerful in everyone and truth prevails in the end,” and he confesses (3.4.12). Neither conscience nor deficient resolve are the likely causes of Theron’s confession; rather, the torture so relentlessly applied until he confesses finally achieves its goal. Theron’s torture testifies to another judicial alteration occurring in the early centuries CE: the lower stratum acquired a new liability to brutal inquisitional torture. In the traditional judicial system, slaves had been subject to torture during judicial interrogations, but the torture of citizens was prohibited, except in cases of treason (Garnsey 1970: 139). By the Severan period, however, torture had become permissible in eliciting the testimony of the free non-elite, as both defendants and witnesses. Evidence shows that Hadrian was still enforcing the prohibition against torturing free persons (Dig. 48.18.12; Pölönen 2004: 231). One of his rescripts, however, suggests that this policy already was under pressure; it decrees, “No one should be condemned for the purpose of putting him to the torture” (quaestionis habendae causa Dig. 48.18.21). It was common practice to torture persons after they were convicted of capital crimes (and thus had lost their civil rights) in order to make them reveal their accomplices or their other criminal activities (Pölönen 2004: 218–19). Hadrian’s rescript affirms that free persons should not be tortured before they are convicted, but it suggests that some judges were finding ways to subvert this prohibition. People were being condemned in order to justify putting them under torture during interrogation. Hadrian’s successor Antoninus Pius forecloses this temptation at least for the civic elite. He issued a rescript forbidding the torture of decurions even after they had been condemned (Dig. 50.2.14). By not exempting the nonelite, however, his rescript confirms their vulnerability to torture. The temptation to blur the distinction between torturing condemned criminals about their activities and accomplices and torturing defendants or witnesses for information was strong (Pölönen 2004: 233, 256). And it did not last. By the early third century, inquisitional torture for the under stratum becomes the norm; Theron’s torture displays its utilization even earlier. What is striking in the two trials opening Chariton’s novel is the stark difference between the treatment given Chaereas and Theron. Both are accused of serious crimes: Chaereas of murdering his wife, and Theron of tomb robbing, kidnapping, and selling a free person. Because of their status difference, however, they have very different trial experiences. Theron is likely a free Syracusean, but he is chained and brutalized by the court machinery even in the questioning phase. Chaereas is acquitted though he has admitted his guilt, and the narrative insinuates that his 111

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grief is sufficient punishment. Theron’s punishment is to be impaled on a stake and hung from a cross in front of Callirhoe’s tomb (3.4.18). The disparate justice experienced by the two defendants is striking. This is not to say that Theron is not guilty; he is, but at the time of his trial, so is Chaereas. He had kicked his wife, and everyone believed she was dead. The narrative gives no indication that Chaereas was saved by Providence because Callirhoe was actually alive. No, he is acquitted, it seems, because he is highborn and handsome and the general Hermocrates speaks for him. Theron, however, for all his energy, inventiveness, and careful planning, is a lowborn roustabout and is hounded down by Providence to pay for his crimes. Romance discourse in fact typically overlooks the criminal activity of its highstatus individuals. Xenophon’s Hippothous and Heliodorus’ Thyamis provide other examples (Watanabe 2003b: 19–25). What marks this practice as ideological is the narratives’ seeming unawareness of any disparate treatment. From the perspective taken in Chariton’s narrative, Chaereas deserves his acquittal. In the same fashion, the elite bandit Hippothous in Xenophon’s romance is neither condemned nor made to pay any penalty for his numerous crimes. Watanabe provides an accurate description of Hippothous’ character: “a leader in command of hundreds of cut-throat criminals. He and his band leave a trail of destruction thorough several provinces in the southeastern Mediterranean, eradicating entire villages and massacring their inhabitants” (2003b: 15). There is, however, no criticism of this elite Greek male (3.2.1) in Xenophon’s romance. Rather, as Watanabe describes, Hippothous is presented as “ ‘one of us’ for the cultured Second Sophistic reader” (2003b: 5). At the romance’s conclusion, a prosperous Hippothous is living happily in Ephesus with Habrocomes and Anthia.6 The romances’ failure to see or judge the criminal activities of their highborn characters testifies to the ideological nature of this blindness.7 Within ideology, there are ideas that do not come to mind and contradictory views that aren’t recognized as contradictory. In the ideological world of Second Sophistic productions, contradictions between the treatment of elite and non-elite in matters of justice and the judicial system go unrecognized and uncommented upon. The perspective that creates this misrecognition (“This is just the way things are”) signals the presence of the ideological. Ideology allows social injustice to go unseen, even by – or especially by – its perpetrators.

Representational power Chariton’s fictive representation of the workings of justice has historical verisimilitude. Philostratus describes one of his wealthiest and most talented second sophists, Herodes Atticus, in the mid-second century, in a situation close to that of Chaereas. Herodes was charged with the murder of his Roman wife, Regilla, by her brother. Supposedly he had ordered his freedman to beat Regilla, who was eight months pregnant, and she died (Vit. soph. 555).8 That Herodes was volatile and capable of violence is suggested in a number of sources. When, for example, Herodes and 112

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Fronto the eminent Latin orator were to be opposing advocates in a legal case, the future Marcus Aurelius wrote to Fronto, asking him to restrain his attack on Herodes in the case (Ad M. Caes. 3.2). In Fronto’s reply, he asks Marcus how then he should handle certain shocking facts concerning Herodes – that he had cruelly beaten, robbed, and even killed freedmen (Ad M. Caes. 3.3). Regilla and her brother, Bradua, shared a distinguished Roman lineage. Like Herodes, Bradua was of consular rank, and the trial was conducted in the Roman senate. From Philostratus’ description, it appears that Herodes primarily defended himself by mocking his accuser’s pretensions of family and financial worth when he (Herodes) so far surpassed him in both. Philostratus clearly supports Herodes and explains that two things helped his case: the fact that he had not ordered so great a punishment for his wife and his extraordinary grief (Vit. soph. 556). Herodes was acquitted of the charges. His freedman may have been held responsible for the act but seems to have suffered no penalty (Pomeroy 2007: 125). Indeed, Herodes retained the man in his service and raised his daughters in his home “as his own” (Phil. Vit. soph. 560). Philostratus lists some of the many memorials to Herodes’ grief, including the theater he funded and dedicated to Regilla on the Acropolis.9 Herodes’ heartache at the loss of his wife, like that of Chaereas, is accepted as a mitigating circumstance. Establishing Herodes’ guilt or innocence in this case is impossible, but the difficulty in prosecuting this wealthy, important, and well-connected man, given his support at the imperial level, is obvious. The taken-for-granted nature of the asymmetrical judicial treatment of the fictive Theron and Chaereas and the real trial of Herodes Atticus indicate a social reality – that not all groups in a society share equal access to articulating their perspective. Where one speaks from and whose voices are sanctioned have important ramifications for having a social presence. Chariton’s romance, with its blindness to the inequality in the judicial treatment given Theron and Chaereas, offers an example of the elite’s position to define the social landscape. Because the elite control much of the representational media, their perspective gets inscribed onto social actions and social realities. The socially dominant are in the position to perpetuate their perspective. Economic, political, status, and gender locations affect groups’ opportunities and possibilities for social enunciation. And discursive silence creates political and cultural exclusion. As the imperial elite constituted themselves as a cosmopolitan identity, they employed every representational opportunity to promote their own social presence and to restrain social interventions by the under stratum. As described in chapter one, the Second Sophistic trajectory worked to silence the public voice of the non-elite in the Greek cities by rendering those without the requisite educational background as unfit to speak. The elite’s oversight of epigraphic testimonials further ensured that their names would emblazon the representational landscape of the period. The extensive building projects being undertaken across the empire similarly functioned to enhance the imperial elite’s position and authority. The early 113

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imperial period saw a boom in new constructions financed by the municipal elite and by the emperors, who brokered their largesse through these same elites (Boatwright 2000).10 And these imperial buildings project a powerful social message. Contemporary commentators recognize the importance of space for articulating relationships of power. In the words of Edward Soja, space is never just an innocent backdrop, but “it is filled with ideology and politics” (1989: 6). Space plays a central role in every society’s imagining of itself, and through the covert mechanisms of social spatialities, asymmetrical relations of power get inscribed in societies: things and people have places where they do and do not belong. In his seminal work on space, Henri Lefebvre writes that space speaks, but “above all, it prohibits” (1991: 142). Monumentality, according to Lefebvre, articulates a particularly clear message, although in a disguised form: “Monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought” (1991: 143). Monuments may purport to create spaces for civic unity and communal celebrations, places for worship, entertainment, statecraft, but in fact they create places to manifest hierarchy and the representation of power (Pile 1996: 212–13). Lefebvre argues that the bulk and height of monuments convey to viewers both the power of those whose authority they exhibit and its violent potentialities. Monuments act as a “spatial analogue of masculine brutality” and connote arrogance and aggression (Lefebvre 1991: 144). The burgeoning building projects going on in cities across the empire supply one more medium for the elite to assert their presence and authority.

New representational space Yet it was precisely in the midst of the most prosperous and architecturally adorned imperial cites that an opening was created for the enunciation of a divergent social perspective. In the same cities where Sophists enacted their learning and cultural superiority, Christians were usurping the spectacle culture of the empire to perform the reality of their identity as sojourners, people committed to another place outside of and beyond the powers of this world. The early acts of the martyrs issue out of some of the most prosperous cities of the empire: Rome, Pergamum, Smyrna, Caesarea, Carthage, Lyons, and Alexandria (Bowersock 1995: 41). When the romances describe the social spaces of their protagonists’ home cities, they concentrate on places that foster social identity and cohesion. Chaereas and Callirhoe, Habrocomes and Anthia, Theagenes and Chariclea all first see each other at civic festivals.11 It is in temples that the heroes marry or reunite in the novels of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and Xenophon. The romances commend the same places mentioned by the Greek Sophists in their encomia of the cities: the temples, squares, streets, and houses (Saïd 1993: 219).12 In contrast, Christian representation, not only in the martyr acts but also in the apologies petitioning for an end to unjust persecution, aggressively open a new social space for social praxis and enunciation: the prison, the very epitome of bad social space.13 If identity is knowing where one 114

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stands, Christian representations frequently position Christians in prisons, spaces antithetical to civic communal life. Christian writings describe Christians performing their refusal to accept the larger society’s inscription of them as criminals or humiliated and vanquished victims. Christians are shown to “disidentify” with the interpellation (the ideological hail) that theorists suggest constitute individuals as social subjects (Althusser 1972: 174).14 Michel Pêcheux (1982: 156–9) describes three possible positions for subjects with respect to an operating ideology: “identification” (the good subject), “counter-identification” (the bad subject – simple opposition to the dominant ideology), and “disidentification” (transformative of the dominant ideology and its cultural logic and power alignments). Christian martyr literature displays Christians’ consistent disidentification with the dominant culture’s figuration of their social identity. When they are judicially condemned and die horrible and painful deaths, Christians project themselves and are recognized by their communities as triumphant and victorious champions. They transform the dominant culture’s identification and redirect it to their own ends. If “the central strategy of authority is to force people to play its game and play by the rules” (Pile 1997: 15), then Christians undermine this strategy. They refuse to play by rules that hold that civic agony and death constitute defeat and humiliation. They refuse definitions that figure their bodies as something vulnerable to earthly power. Christians were inaugurating a new game with different rules, a new cultural logic – one that opened space for voices customarily absent from the dominant discourse, the voices of those who, in de Certeau’s words, “live ‘down below’ the thresholds at which [social] visibility begins” (1984: 93). Christian writings, featuring courts, prisons, and judicial punishments, were introducing new voices from new social locations into the cultural record.15 That these topics provide the literary vehicle for Christians’ entrance into cultural visibility confirms an audience for them, an audience for whom the romances’ message that privileged and fortunate people always escape punishments intact and seemingly unscathed did not sufficiently appeal. Christian texts inculcate a different message: that judicial punishments, for all their horror, are inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. This stance opened cultural space for new speakers. In the middle of the third century, for example, a group of otherwise unknown men proclaimed their identity, naming themselves in their group letter sent from prison to the Church at Carthage: Lucius, Montanus, Flavian, Julian, Victoricus, Primolus, Renus, and Donatianus (Dolbeau 1983). Their experiences in prison empower these martyrs to write. As prisoners enduring judicial torture for their beliefs, they understand themselves to have earned a place in history, a place on the cultural map. They assert the importance of their testimony for Christian solidarity: For to servants of God … there is no other duty than to think of the multitude of the brethren. It is by force of this reasoning that love and a sense of obligation have urged us to write this account, that we might 115

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leave to all future brethren … a historical record of our labors and our suffering for the Lord. (Acta Mon et Luc. 1.1) These martyrs exhibit the conventional enthusiasm for their judicial hardships. They describe the day they are brought before the procurator: “Oh, what a happy day. Oh, the glory of being in bonds. Oh the chains that were the object of our prayers” (Mon. et Luc 6.2). That these voices did attain a place in the historical record suggests that their discounting of judicial penalties resonate in this period of increasing judicial intimidation. If prisons were a focus only in the martyr acts, they might simply be read as realistic reporting, but the frequency of prisons in Christian fictional narratives, where they again provide the site for community, confirms the significance of prisons for the Christian spatial imaginary. “ [Space] tells you where you are and puts you there” (Keith and Pile 1993: 37), and prisons are the paradigmatic place of social prohibition, of using spatial boundaries to exclude and contain social actors. In their focus on prisons and boundaries, early Christian fictive narratives, like the martyr acts, can be seen to rethink and recode some of the spatialities of their contemporary society and to introduce new locations for social identification. The elite of the Greek East were not alone in their use of the fictive prose form to promote their cultural identity and position. Other “subcultures within the Roman empire,” including Christians and Jews, also employed this genre to tell their stories of identity (Thomas 2003: 104). Early Christian fictions, stories about the apostles Peter, Paul, John, Andrew, and Thomas, traditionally referred to as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, provide valuable sources to view how Christians understood and positioned themselves vis-à-vis and in dialogue with other members of their complex and highly mobile society.16 Like the Greek romances, the Apocryphal Acts at a certain level are formula stories.17 All share a number of plot and thematic similarities. Each of the Acts describes an apostle’s arrival in a city, his preaching and making converts. Each emphasizes the apostle’s conversion of a woman connected to one of the city’s important men. In all but one of the Acts, this woman’s embrace of the apostle’s call to renounce all sexual unions so infuriates her husband or lover that he has the apostle sentenced to death. Only the Acts of John ends with the apostle’s natural death, although this narrative also presents John’s preaching as disruptive of sexual relations. That the Apocryphal Acts were rejected eventually as heretical does not subvert the value of their testimony for presenting the kinds of selfunderstandings, beliefs, and attitudes motivating Christians in the early period. François Bovon points out that texts were declared “legitimate more for doctrinal than historical reasons,” and a “more comprehensive historical understanding of the beginnings of Christianity” would need to utilize evidence such as that provided by the Apocryphal Acts (Bovon 2003: 194). Both the persons who wrote the Acts and the people for whom they wrote considered themselves Christians. 116

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Challenge to the spatial bases of social boundaries is a central theme in the Acts, and shows up prominently in their repeated emphasis on the permeability of prison space. The Apocryphal Acts, by emphasizing how easy it is to penetrate and/or escape from prisons, interrogates the authority of contemporary social arrangements.18 By representing the breakdown of prison boundaries, the Acts metaphorically work to challenge boundaries that exclude certain groups from influence in the public sphere. The scenario of broken boundaries repeats in the Acts of Andrew. When Maximilla, the governor’s wife, is converted to Christianity by Andrew, she embraces his teaching on sexual abstinence.19 Her husband, Aegeates, is so angered by his wife’s rejection of his sexual advances that he orders Andrew imprisoned. Maximilla immediately determines to visit the apostle. She sends her maidservant, Iphidama, to find out where the prison is. Iphidama finds the prison, and Andrew assures her that the prison doors will be opened when the women come to visit him that night. Iphidama returns to Maximilla, and the theme of breakable boundaries continues as Maximilla exults, “I am about to see your apostle … even if an entire legion kept me locked up; it would not be strong enough to keep me from [him]” (Andr. 30). Aegeates tries mightily to confine his wife. He orders four guards to go to the prison and tell the jailer to secure the prison doors and let no one in under any circumstances, not even himself, or he would have that person’s head. He orders four more guards to stand outside his wife’s bedroom (Andr. 31). It is all to no effect; that night, the women visit the prison and find the doors open for them and a beautiful young boy (the Lord?) waiting to lead them to Andrew (Andr. 32). Until Andrew’s execution, Maximilla, Iphidama, and other Christians continue to gather together at the prison guarded by the “Lord’s grace and protection” (Andr. 34). When the powerful control space, resistance can be no more than acting out of place (Pile 1997: 16). The Acts of Andrew, with its depiction of elite women in prisons, can be read as a text resisting and reframing prevailing spatial configurations. The motif of the subversion of normative spatial practice is prevalent throughout the Apocryphal Acts. The Acts of Thomas also represents the upper stratum forsaking their own places and entering the prison to be instructed by the apostle. In this text, Misdaeus, a king, and another noble, Charsius, both lock up their wives to keep them away from the apostle. But Thomas’s twin, the Lord, frees the women and leads them to the prison (Thom. 153). There the women bribe the guards and enter to find the apostle instructing Vazan, the king’s son, and his family, along with the other prisoners. When the jailer orders the group to put out their lamps lest they give themselves away, Thomas prays, and the Lord illumines the whole prison. Later the prince wishes to leave and finds the doors locked. Thomas reassures him, “Believe in Jesus, and you shall find the gates open” (Thom. 154). Thomas is represented as coming and going from the prison at will. In the Acts of Paul, not only Thecla (18), but also the wife of the governor of Ephesus, Artemilla, visit Paul in prison. Paul greets her, invoking a rhetoric of 117

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spatial displacement: “Woman, ruler of the world, mistress of much gold, citizen of great luxury … sit down on the floor and forget your riches and your beauty and your finery.” Artemilla wishes to get a smith to remove Paul’s fetters, but Paul refuses, trusting, he says, in God who delivered the “whole world from its bonds,” and a young man appears and frees him. After Paul baptizes Artemilla, he freely returns to the prison past the sleeping guards. If boundaries are emblematic of power, the depiction of prisons unable to confine their prisoners would seem to be an assault on the contemporary institutions of social segregation. Richard Pervo has shown that prison escapes were a favorite literary topos of the period (1987: 377). What is distinctive in the Apocryphal Acts, however, is that, while the narratives consistently represent that neither bonds nor doors have the power to confine, nevertheless the prison ultimately is not escaped, but becomes a space of instruction and community building. Recoding the prison from a place of social confinement to one of community is an example of the Christian agenda to create alternative spatialities from those defined through the hierarchical practices operating in the contemporary society. In the context of the status-based legal divisions, the prison is quite emphatically not the space of the elite, and to make it the center of community is to imagine a community where the elite are patently “out of place.” Only in exceptional circumstances would a member of the honestiores be found in a prison.20 Christians, by redefining the prison, the public space of social containment, manifest a desire to “break out” of the order of things, to destabilize and displace social boundaries. The prison (and who is liable to it) is a striking example of how social space can be used to tell people who they are and to inscribe asymmetrical relations of power onto shared social life. Ramsay MacMullen has described the mechanics of the very public display of power in the Roman Empire and how such practices taught people from childhood to know their place (1988: 58–84).21 In the public spaces of the ancient cities, the powerful ostentatiously displayed their rank through retinues and insignia and arrogance. In the Acts of Thomas, for example, Mygdonia’s actions before her conversion can be considered typical of her rank (the wife of a near relative of the king): “And she was carried by her slaves, but could not be brought to him [Thomas] on account of the great crowd and the narrow space. So she sent to her husband for more servants. They came and went before her pushing and beating the people” (Thom. 82).22 By focusing on the prison, the Acts look away from the public spaces, where the elite manifested their power and the non-elite learned their place. Instead, they focus on a civic space that is outside the order of privilege – in fact, legally the place of the unprivileged – and they recode this space as their place of instruction and community building. In its focus on the prison, Christian narrative opens new space, undeniably civic space (apostles are always consigned to prison by a ruler or high magistrate), but at the same time an anti-civic space, the space reserved for those without honor. By reinscribing the prison as a place for community and instruction, Christian narrative metaphorically rejects the social structures that 118

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confine all except the connected few to the position of the “more low.” If the first step in reconstituting social relations is to reorganize their spatial bases, coding prison as “good space” is just such a maneuver; it opens a new public space for a new kind of actor. Moreover, the descriptions of prisons as spaces that can be entered and exited at will rejects any notion of space that keeps you in your place. The prison was a place of social exclusion, “bad space” par excellence,23 but the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, like the martyr acts, makes it the space of the Christian community. In the Acts of John, for example, the Lord’s particular focus on prisoners and the spaces associated with them is noted: “He keeps watch even now over prisons for our sakes, and in tombs, in bonds and dungeons, in shame and reproaches … at scourgings, condemnations, conspiracies, plots and punishments … as he is the God of those imprisoned” (103). The fact that the Lord himself in both the Acts of Andrew and Thomas conduct elite visitors to the prison shows his approbation of the site. Repeatedly in the various Acts, an apostle is described as instructing not only the elite who visit him in the prison, but also the other prisoners. In the Acts of Thomas, Thomas prays with the prisoners, and when he is taken from the prison, the narrative describes their reaction: “All the prisoners were sad because the apostle went away from them, for they all loved him very much and said: ‘even this consolation which we had is taken from us”’ (125). Andrew also associates with the other prisoners: “speaking with his fellow inmates, whom he had already strengthened by encouraging them to believe in the Lord” (28). The apostles in the Acts are represented as allying themselves with the other prisoners. This differs from the depiction in the Greek novel, where, for example, Chariton shows Chaereas imprisoned in Caria, segregating himself from the other prisoners because of their laziness (4.2).24 When at the last moment Chaereas is saved from crucifixion, neither he not the narrator show any sign of sympathy for his sixteen fellow prisoners whose crucifixions are carried out. But Chaereas is himself an elite person socially displaced in imprisonment, and the Apocrphal Acts show clearly that this is not true of the apostles, nor of their Lord. All of them are clearly represented in the Acts as belonging socially to the under stratum. A demon explains in the Acts of Thomas how Jesus was able to overpower them: “He … left us under his power, because we knew him not. He deceived us by his unattractive form and his poverty and his want” (45).25 In the contemporary society, good looks, good breeding, and wealth all are understood to entail each other, to denote status, and to keep one out of prison. Like their Lord, the apostles display none of these signs of social authority. Thus, in the Acts of Andrew, a group of slaves unfamiliar with Andrew’s appearance take him for “a mean and paltry person” (3). When Aegeates first meets Andrew, he comments on his appearance: “You appear in this manner like a poor, simple old man” (26). Similarly, in the Acts of Thomas, Charisius is incredulous that his wife could prefer a man like Thomas: “Look at me. I am far more handsome than that sorcerer. I have riches and honor, and everybody knows that none has such a family as mine” (116). Charisius lists all the qualities of high status: good looks, wealth, elite family. 119

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When Thomas describes himself to Tertia, the king’s wife, it is plain how far he falls from this standard: “What have you come to see? A stranger, poor and despised and beggarly, who has neither riches nor possessions” (136). In the Acts of John, the apostle rejects a portrait of himself, requiring instead another palette of colors for the soul “which cure your bruises and heal your wounds and arrange your tangled hair and wash your face” (29).26 This depiction specifically images that of a prisoner, whose filthy condition and matted hair are often referred to in contemporary testimony.27 By offering the prison as the center of community and the apostles as the sort of people who socially might find themselves in prison, the Apocryphal Acts create, I suggest, a countersite to the public spaces where the elite of the period forged their community. In their attempt to rearrange the spatial bases of community, The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles may be seen as engaged in a struggle to reconstitute social relations. The imaginary offered in the Apocryphal Acts was in reality enacted in the Martyr Acts. Both sets of texts opened new social space, and both with their representation of the prison resisted the contemporary celebration of civic institutions and revealed the existence of those excluded from its ideal harmony. This new social space in turn empowered new voices to enter the cultural dialogue of the period.

Empowering new voices and community Narrative patterns script humans as certain kinds of subjects. Christian texts repeatedly script Christian subjects as prisoners or condemned criminals and valorize the voices of these prisoners. Many martyr texts purport to be first-person narratives written by the martyrs themselves. Ignatius, Perpetua, Pisonius, and Phileas, as well as the Carthaginian martyrs named above, all leave supposedly first-person accounts of their imprisonments and trials. These texts, as the writings of martyrs, prisoners awaiting death, are preserved and cherished by the Christian community. They gain authority, not from the status or education of their authors, but from their exhibition of fearlessness in the face of judicial penalties. These autobiographical writings are templates for Christian identity; they proclaim, “This is who we are. We are, among other things, those who dismiss judicial power and its fearsomeness.” If Roman judicial practices were intended to intimidate the under stratum, in their writings Christians promulgate an immunity from this sort of intimidation. Violence ultimately rests upon the body’s susceptibility to hurt, to being wounded: “Wounding, the penetration of the skin, is the baseline, the reference point, of all violence and of all relationships sustained by violence” (Culberson 1995: 172). The Christian rhetoric of victory in the face of hideous wounds rebuffs and co-opts this Roman language of power for its own empowerment. Brent Shaw in a valuable article traced the cultural shift occurring in the centuries around the Common Era that made the body’s ability to endure violence, its \ o o ´ or patientia, a virtue rather than a mark of ignominy (1996: 278). 120

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He saw this changed view of the body as an adjustment to its new circumstances: “a civil body under trial and test in a civic régime of power” (1996: 311). Shaw recognizes the importance of this change, the valorazation of bodily endurance, “the quintessential weapon of the weak,” for the institutional formation of Christianity. Nevertheless he describes it as a “terrible hypocrisy” for the individual body: But those bodies were still finite, mortal, isolated and weak; and they faced the long-term durability of institutional power …. The residual problem was that … it [the body] alone could not subvert institutions or corporate bodies which had their own, much greater endurance. Only new incorporations could do that. (1996: 312) Shaw here seems to underplay the importance for the growth of institutional Christianity of the public performances by individual Christians that their bodies, despite all appearances, were not finite, weak, and isolated, even in the face of imperial power. Christian practice was not hypocritical if, as in all corporate endeavors, Christian social identity was never to be viewed from the perspective of the individual human body but in the enlarged perspective of the body social. On the basis of their martyrs, Christians claimed their identity as sufferers and persecuted persons and used this identification as a foundation for their growth (Perkins 1995). Christianity redirected the contemporary cultural discourse around violence to its own ends: the defining and strengthening of a new corporate body, the Christian community. Christians cherished and circulated texts that depicted their martyrs. It was through such circulating texts and through the public performance of their Christian identity in their public trials and deaths that the corporate Christian community manifested its social presence and staked out its ideological territory. Martyrdom was constitutive not only for the individual Christian subject but for the incorporation of the Christian Church. Like the Apocryphal Acts, martyr texts demonstrate that martyrdom was much more of a corporate enterprise than moderns may assume, and that martyrs themselves can be seen to consciously invest it with a corporate purpose. Ancient prisons did not employ the segregating practices of modern prisons. Martyrs typically experienced prison as part of a group and used the time of imprisonment to strengthen their group solidarity. Perpetua refers to the group prayers in prison (Pass. 7.1). The Acts of Pionius depict the martyrs strengthening one another with psalms and prayers and notes: “They were at liberty to discourse and to pray night and day” (18.12; 11.7.) Lucian portrays Peregrinus in his Christian phase bolstered in prison by the reading aloud of sacred books (Peregr. 12). Not even torture interrupted this group participation. When the African martyr Marian returns to the prison after being grievously tortured, he celebrates the Lord’s victory (won by his bodily suffering) in “repeated prayer” with the rest of his group of martyrs (Acta Mar. et Jacob. 5.10). 121

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In the prisons, martyrs appear in multiple group activities: praying together, reading, encouraging each other, listening to sermons by fellow martyrs, sharing their dreams. Martyrdom was a corporate activity and was enmeshed with the larger community. Ignatius’ Epistles depict the extensive efforts of the wider Christian community to bolster martyrs. Cities along the martyrs’ route sent representatives to honor, encourage, and help them along their way. Perpetua mentions that many visitors were allowed in their prison “so that we might be mutually comforted” (9.1). These visits were important; as one martyr testifies: “For a few days we were comforted by the visits of our brethren. The consolation and the joy of the day removed all the agony we endured at night” (Acta Mont. et Luci. 4.7). This same text that describes the prisoners longing for death also notes their joy at being brought the Eucharist in prison (9.2). Martyrs clearly remained part of their larger community; their suffering was supported and embraced by that community. Martyrs were the ultimate performers of the community’s self-understanding of themselves as “victors over death,” unintimidated by any earthly power. The example of the individual martyr does not do justice to the communal character of martyrdom and its representation in the early centuries. Moreover, martyr acts clearly indicate that both the martyrs themselves and their communities understood martyrdom to have specifically corporate objectives. In many cases, martyrs facing death frame their martyrdom to empower their community’s unity and internal concord. Martyr acts quite specifically link the martyrs’ deaths to the ongoing life and unity of the Christian community. In the Acts of Montanus and Lucius, the narrator records the martyr Flavian’s last words: “Dearest brothers,” he said, “you will keep peace with me, if you acknowledge the peace of the Church and preserve the bond of love. Do not think that what I have said is insignificant. Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, when he was close to death, left us these last words: ‘This is my commandment,’ he said, that you ‘love one another as I have loved you.’” (23.3) These may not have been Jesus’ last words, but that Christians should love each other is the theme of many of the martyrs’ last words. They offered their deaths as a mandate to strengthen the incorporation of their communities. The letter describing the deaths of the martyrs of Lyons similarly frames the martyrs’ deaths as promoting stronger corporate bonds: “Peace they had always loved, and it was peace which they commended to us for ever. In peace they departed to God, leaving no pain for their Mother [Church], no strife or conflict for their brothers, but rather joy, peace, harmony, and love” (Eus. Eccl. Hist. 5.2.7). This narrative, like others, promotes the martyrs’ deaths as a warrant for Christian harmony. Martyr texts and the martyrs themselves articulate the close relation between a martyr’s death and Christian social unity. Martyrs faced death not as individuals but as members of an incorporation that was strengthened and 122

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substantiated by their deaths. Ignatius is especially articulate about the relation of martyrdom to church order (Berkowitz 2006: 198–201) He writes, “I give my life as a sacrifice (poor as it is) for those who are obedient to the bishop, the presbyters, and the deacons” (Poly. 6.1) In this paradigm, the martyr’s body was never alone but woven into a web of signification that heralded a revised language of power. Christians rewrote the script that was intended to inscribe their defeat onto their destroyed bodies. Martyrs’ performance of their own and their bodies’ invulnerability contributed to the evolving incorporation of the Christian community. Even if this incorporation could not actually subvert the imperial “civic regime of power,” it could and did open space for divergent social and political interventions. In the same cities where Sophists showcased their learning and rhetorical pyrotechnics in public performances, martyrs performed their commitment and victory over death. Both sets of performers provided the exemplary model for the new identities evolving in the early empire. The so-called pepaideumenoi, the cultured class, could embrace the identity of gifted and educated persons as for them, without necessarily achieving the rhetorical or linguistic levels of the sophists (Schmitz 1997). And Christians could embrace the identity of persons fearless of judicial torment and death and committed to another life without ever suffering in a court or arena.

Thwarted desire In chapter two we read the Greek adventure romances at one level as allegories for the Greek male elite’s drive to possess the object of his desire, his beloved and the life of beauty, privilege, and position she images. The narrative world of the romance, just as the social world it endorses, privileges elite desire and its consummation as natural and inevitable. In this context, the Apocryphal Acts’ treatment of elite males takes on resonance. For they quite blatantly subvert the romance’s message that elites get what they want and deserve. A constitutive feature of the Apocyrphal Acts is their repeated thwarting of elite male desire. Each of the Acts presents a scenario that would be highly unlikely in this historical period founded on hierarchy and elite privilege: an elite male, often a leader of his city, persistently being denied what he wants. In the Acts of Andrew, for example, Aegeates, the proconsul – that is, the representative of Roman rule – is depicted as a loving husband. Returning from a trip, he rushes in to embrace and kiss his wife, Maximilla, but she denies him, saying, “After prayer, a woman’s mouth should never touch a man’s” (15). Aegeates sustains his loving attitude, even after his wife tricks him by sending a substitute to sleep with him (22). Weeping, he begs her to return to him: “I cling to your feet, I who have been your husband now for twelve years, who always revered you as a goddess and still do” (23). His devotion is all in vain. The narrative offers a denouement very different from that of the romance: not the elite’s desire finally realized, but rather his destruction. After the apostle Andrew’s death, Maximilla chooses to live chastely among her 123

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Christian community, even as Aegeates continues to implore her to return. In the end, brokenhearted, he “threw himself from a great height and died” (64). This narrative emphasizes its attitude toward elite privilege, not only through this high-status male’s ignominious death, but perhaps even more tellingly by making Aegeates appear ridiculous throughout the narrative. On one occasion, he is delighted when he overhears his wife mentioning his name and thinks she is praying for him, but the narrative supplies her actual thoughts: “Rescue me at last from Aegeates’ filthy intercourse” (14). The narrative mocks his self-delusions of his importance. In another episode, Aegeates returns home unexpectedly and almost discovers a Christian meeting going on in his house, but the apostle prays that the Christians may escape undetected, and the Lord answers his prayer: “As the governor came in, he was troubled by his stomach, asked for a chamber pot, and spent a long time sitting, attending to himself. He did not notice all the brethren exit in front of him” (13). The scene’s reminder that all humans are the same, subject to the “ call of nature” cannot be unintentional; the narrative, by including it, reveals as one of its targets the pretensions of high-status males. The Acts target the hierarchical social structures operating in their contemporary society by repeatedly demonstrating that elite males, even Roman proconsuls, cannot necessarily have things the way they want them. The highborn Charisius, in the Acts of Thomas, correctly interprets this message in his lament that his wife Mygodonia no longer loves him: “Who can bear it when his treasure is taken from him? … All my glory has been taken away” (115). Charisius specifically reads Mygdonia’s rejection as an assault upon his honor, his authority, and his power. Mygdonia’s reply confirms a power realignment: “He whom I love is better than you and your possessions” (117). In the paradigm provided in the Apocryphal Acts, Christians’ espousal of Christianity functions as a denial of the contemporary structures of elite privilege figuratively played out in the female convert’s refusal to satisfy the high-status male’s desire. Through their depiction of the remarkably unsympathetic attitude of wives to their devoted husbands, the Acts also challenge the romance’s representation of the shared mutuality binding the loving couple and, by analogy, their community. After Charisius, for example, finishes professing his love to his wife, he piteously begs her to return to married life with him. The narrative records her response: “She sat like a stone. She prayed, however, for daylight, that she might go to the apostle of Christ” (97). Mygdonia’s unfeeling rejection perhaps replays Christian attitudes toward the pretense of social harmony in the civic social structures of the period that were becoming progressively more hierarchical. The legal differentiation between humiliores and honorestiores, as well as the harsher punishments for the under stratum this entailed is one sign of the increasing social asymmetry of the civic communities. The emphasis on prisons and judicial punishments in both the romances and Christian texts suggests that the effects of judicial changes and punishments were already affecting cultural representation in early centuries CE. Christian representation with its transformation of prisons into spaces 124

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of community and social empowerment constructs counter sites to the civic centers burgeoning with buildings inscribed with the names and achievement of the elite. Some of those excluded from the alliance of elite may have been attracted to this community.

Notes 1 Pölönen (2004: 218, n. 3) allows that an explicit legal division between humilores/honestiores may have not developed until the late third century, but sees the operation of a differential system by the pre-Serveran period. 2 See Castelli (2004) for her explication of the processes placing martyrs at the center of Christian collective memory. 3 Berkowitz offers a brilliant comparison of the identity strategies of rabbinic and Christian cultures (she refers to these as “fellow travelers”). She sees both these cultural groups as appropriating narratives of criminal execution to creatively generate “claims to truth and public authority” (2006: 184). Berkowitz shows that, although Christian texts identify with the executed and rabbinic texts with the judge, Christian and rabbinic narratives are not as far apart as they might at first appear: “ Both produce new sites of authority for their respective audiences” (2006: 23). I regret that I did not have Berkowitz’s study until the last stages of putting this book together. 4 See J. Trigg (1984). 5 Musurillo (1972) provides the translation. 6 Alvares (1995) suggests that Hippothous learns to give up his aggressive behavior and to become the right sort of romance “passive” hero. 7 The leniency shown toward high-status bandits in the romances is replicated in the laws, as Ulpian demonstrates in his discussion of appropriate penalties for the more savage kind (atrociores) of robbers. These are sentenced to hard labor for either life or another period of time. However, if these dangerous robbers are of high status (honestiores), then they are removed from their civic rank (ordine) for a time or exiled. The elite criminal receives a less physically punishing sentence than the non-elite one. In fact, the high-status robber may get off even more lightly. Ulpian explains that the penalties are actually up to the person conducting the cognitio (Dig. 47.18.1.1). It is easy to imagine a high-status judge simply passing over the actions of another high-status individual, just as Hippothous’ violent banditry is overlooked in Xenophon’s romance. 8 See Pomeroy (2007: 122). The theme of tyrants killing their wives is a traditional one. Richard Hunter (1994: 1080) notes in his study of the historicity of Chariton’s novel that kicking one’s wife is a stock element in the representation of tyrants. Periander, Cambyses, and Nero (Suet., Ner. 35) are charged. See Kennel (1997) for his discussion of Marcus Aurelius’ interventions on Herodes behalf in the mid-170s after the Athenians charged Herodes with tyranny. 9 Tobin (1997) discusses these memorials. 10 For an overview of monumental building in the Antonine period and its function, see Thomas (2007). 11 1.14; 1.1.2; 2.34.1–3. 12 Saïd (1993: 219) provides citations. 13 See Rapske (1994) and Wansick (1996) for nonlegal testimony to prisons. 14 Althusser (1972) compares ideological “hailing” (or interpellation) to “the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ ” When individuals respond as the addressees to such a hail, they accept the assigned identification as for them: “Oh, I must be this who was called; it is me.” The response thus makes individuals at once into particular subjects (the ones hailed) and subjected, in this example, to the state (the police).

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15 Non-Christian references to Christians also tend to place Christians in a judicial or criminal punishment context. See Suet., Vita Claudii (25 uncertain), Vita Neronis 16; Tac. Ann. 15.44; Pliny, Ep. 96; Epic., Diatr. 4.7.6; M. Aur. 11.3; Cf. Praet (1992–3: 2, n. 2). 16 See Rhee ( 2005: 171–9; 125–58) for her valuable survey of the political and social aspects of the Apocryphal Acts. 17 Treating the Acts together, in what they share, mutes their individual witness. Each of the Acts has its own agenda, and they often differ in their doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and social perspectives. Bremmer (1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001a) and Bovon et al. (1999) provide valuable collections of studies on the Acts. See Bremmer (2001b) for a review of the authors, places, and date of the Apocryphal of Acts of the Apostles. 18 In Jewish and Christian writings, prison and bonds can also act as an image for death. See Jonah 2.6: “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God.” Cf. Isa. 24: 22; 1 Peter 3: 9; Jude 1: 6; Rev. 20: 1–3. 19 For the Acts of the Apostles, the following editions are used: for Andrew, MacDonald (1990); for John, Junod and Kaestli (1983); for Peter, Paul, and Thomas, Lipsius and Bonnet (repr. 1959) and Schmidt and Schubert (1936). Translations are based on Elliott and James (1993) and, for Andrew, on MacDonald (1990). 20 Garnsey (1970: 147–8) suggests honestiores were usually only imprisoned for capital crimes, not lesser offenses. 21 MacMullen (1988: 70) describes how people learned their social place early: “Indeed a great deal of the arrogant behavior [of the elite] had the more or less conscious intent of instructing other people, even causal observers, in the responses that would be expected of them. Those who had wealth, esteem and influence secured these things ever more completely by asserting them; those who lacked them understood how they must conduct themselves; and their education of the one or the other sort was no doubt well begun while they were still children.” 22 MacMullen (1974) also provides many examples of the methods the elite had for publicly inscribing their authority. For the hierarchical ordering of theatrical space, see Kolendo (1981: 301–15). For the hierarchy of dining, see D’Arms (1990: 308–20). For the relation of status to food choices, see Garnsey (1999: 113–47). 23 Rapske (1994: 288–98) cites examples. Apollonius of Tyana’s followers abandoned him on account of their fear of imprisonment (Vit. Apoll. 4.37). Ignatius of Antioch writes to the Smyrneans to thank them for treating him, in bonds, without the expected haughtiness (Smyrn. 10.2). In Achilles Tatius’ romance, the epithet “prisoner” is one of contempt (8.1.3). 24 It is Chaereas, ironically, who is too lovesick to work. In Achilles Tatius, Cleitophon is also represented as ignoring the overtures of other prisoners until he overhears the name of Milite (7.2–3). 25 Constas (2004) surveys the development of this notion that Jesus used the incarnation to deceive Satan as part of the plan of salvation. 26 Junod and Kaestli (1983: 452–6) provide a discussion of this portrait with a bibliography. 27 For the filthy condition of prisoners, see Wansink (1996: 33–8) and Rapske (1994: 216–19).

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Introduction In the last chapter I argued that Christians, through their public performances and narratives, opened representational space for voices from non-elite social locations to enter the cultural record. The paucity of other non-elite voices in the tradition makes it difficult to determine if Christians were articulating general attitudes, positions and perspectives shared by other members of the under stratum in this period. One non-Christian source, however, suggests that the Christian emphasis on change, open boundaries, and material being would resonate with members of the under stratum. In his mid-first century prose fiction, the Satyrica, Petronius provides a vivid portrayal of a wealthy freedman Trimalchio and his freedmen friends. These characters exhibit some of the same openness to transformation and to the material body as Christians do, while displaying a more overt antagonism toward the status quo and the pretensions of the educated class. These freedmen appear in an episode, often referred to as the Cena Trimalchionis, featuring an elaborate dinner party where Trimalchio entertains a group of rhetorically trained declaimers (scholastici 60.4). How realistic are the concerns and attitudes voiced by the freedmen in the Cena? To determine whether Petronius simply satirizes his characters as he reports their opinions or also reflects attitudes perhaps representative of freedmen of the period, considering an analogy may help. Petronius’ efforts to provide his readers with a rare opportunity to experience non-elite, popular Latin in the Cena are well attested (Boyce 1991: 9–36). By analogy, in the freedmen’s perspectives expressed in the Cena, Petronius might also have sought to express subjects and themes as typical of the non-elite as their language. To demonstrate this contention conclusively, to distinguish between the actual attitudes of the non-elite and those Petronius may have projected upon them is not possible, since so little evidence for non-elite perspectives survives in the cultural record, but Petronius’ experiment with language is suggestive. Although he may be mocking speakers’ usage when he introduces “vulgar” Latin forms into his text, his examples nevertheless do mimic actual popular usages, as inscriptional and linguistic evidence has corroborated (Boyce 1991: 36–75).

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On this model, when Petronius describes the views and concerns of the characters in the Cena, he may have a satirical aim, but at the same time, these views may also reflect the attitudes, feelings, and judgments of persons in this status position. Studies by Whitehead, Donahue, and Rowe confirm that Trimalchio’s attitudes and claims coincide with those inscribed by freedmen in their inscriptions and funerary monuments, and Bodel has provided valuable evidence for the typicality of Trimalchio’s freedmen guests.1 This confirmation, joined to Petronius’ practice of reproducing plausible non-elite language, indicates that the Cena might offer one of the few cultural entrances into the thought world of the non-elite in this period.2

Naming: propriety and power What does the narrative depict when it offers the attitudes of the non-elite? One attitude it reflects is a bias against philosophy. Near the end of his lavish party, Trimalchio describes the grave monument he has commissioned. He recites its short epitaph (71.12). It will begin with his name, C. Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus, and conclude just before its final valediction with the proud assertion that the deceased left thirty million and never listened to a philosopher (sestertim reliquit trecenties, nec umquam philosophum audivit).3 What does Trimalchio have against philosophers? We can find clues to his attitude in the traditional aversion of philosophers to change, alteration and movement. Trimalchio seems particularly interested in the transformations of word meanings. There was a continuing attention among the ancients on the nature of the relationship between words and to what they refer. At the heart of this discussion was the question on the relation between a word and the purported essence of its referent. Was there a “natural” correctness of names/words in accordance with the nature of things, or was a name merely a matter of convention and agreement? In Plato’s Cratylus, for example, Socrates first shows sympathy for the conventionalist position4 but ultimately rejects this for not sufficiently conforming to his belief that, since things “must be supposed to have their own permanent essences” (Crat. 386D), names had to be fashioned to capture this essence (Williams 1994: 36). And Aristotle, although generally a conventionalist, reflects in his formulation of metaphor a similar presumption that things have permanent essences that a shift in language does not affect.5 Aristotle defines metaphor as part of his general discussion of words (onoma). He divides words into proper (kupion) or other kinds. Metaphor, explained as “the transfer (epiphora) to one thing of a name (onoma) that belongs to something else,” is in this second category (Poetics 21: 1457B 8–9).6 Modern theorists have faulted Aristotle’s definition for reasons Trimalchio might share: for its complicity with metaphysical notions of being.7 First, by assuming a standard of “proper” naming, the definition projects a sense of structured and bounded categories, effacing gradation or overlap. The construction of such oppositions as proper/improper, rational/irrational, and spiritual/material, where one of the two 128

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terms is privileged, has been recognized as a fundamental maneuver of Western philosophical thought and the foundation of some of its basic inequities. A second critique is leveled against Aristotle’s assumption that some “sense” exists to be transported by metaphor “that remains rigorously independent of that which transports it.”8 In this model, labels (e.g. names, words) can be exchanged without affecting an underlying essence that constitutes the meaning of the word. Meanings are fixed and essential.

Trimalchio’s puns: the power of naming This cultural attention to the relation of words to essential being provides a context for appreciating the significance of Trimalchio’s puns on naming in the Cena. His puns on the names Carpus (36.6), Liber (41.7), and Corinthus (50.4) have often been dismissed as examples of Trimalchio’s “feebleness,” of Petronius “poking fun at Trimalchio’s fondness for the over obvious.”9 However, as seen in Aristotle’s use of onoma (literally, “names”) to refer to words in general, naming was a serious topic in this period. It was understood to be the “basic function of words” (Atherton 1993: 156). Rather than obvious, the relation of names, or labels, to the object represented by them is the crux of any theory of meaning. In his series of puns, Trimalchio challenges the basic assumption that meanings are stable and refer to some ontological essence behind language. Trimalchio’s puns instead function to expose the power dynamics inherent in language and naming. Trimalchio first signals his interest in naming in a scene where he orders his meat cutter to slice up an entree: Carpe, inquit (36.6). Encolpius comments on Trimalchio’s strange behavior following this order. Trimalchio keeps whispering, Carpe, Carpe. Encolpius asks another guest the reason for Trimalchio’s mutterings. The guest explains that the meat cutter’s name constitutes an implicit pun (36.8): “You see the one carving the food: he is called Carpus. So whenever Trimalchio says ‘Carpe,’ with the same word he both names (vocat) him and orders (imperat) him” (36.8).10 Trimalchio’s musing on Carpe indicates his fascination with this word that both names and orders, both denotes a subject and subjects him to his role.11 The effect of Trimalchio’s pun is to detach naming from a metaphysical or linguistic context and locate it explicitly in the realm of power. In this pun, words not only signify persons, but also insert them into social positions. The pun in Carpe does not connect names to people’s essences but, as the coincidence of vocative and imperative denotes, to the social and cultural power exerted over individuals in their material being. The second pun also emphasizes the inherent power in designations. A beautiful slave boy enters the dining room, carrying grapes and decked in vine leaves and ivy, imitating the god Dionysus. Trimalchio addresses the boy: Dionyse … Liber esto (41.7). This phrase is ambiguous. It can mean either “Dionysus, be free,” or “Dionysus, be (i.e. imitate) Liber.” The boy immediately signals his interpretation of the phrase in the former sense by snatching the pilleus, the cap 129

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of freedom, worn by the roast boar served for dinner and putting it on his own head.12 Trimalchio continues his punning and the episode’s focus on the slippage between words and meanings in his next statement: Non negabitis me, inquit habere liberum patrem (41.8). This phrase means either “You won’t deny that I have a free father” or “You won’t deny that I have Father Liber,” i.e. this slave acting the part of the god Liber. A third pun will help explicate the dynamics of this example. In the third case, Trimalchio sees Agamemnon eyeing his Corinthian bronze plate, and he announces that he is the only one who has real Corinthian plate (50.3). Encopius surmises that Trimalchio will begin his usual boasting, claiming that his Corinthian plate was imported directly from Corinth. Instead, as he says, Trimalchio goes one better (sed ille melius, 50.4). Trimalchio explains, “Perhaps you wonder why I alone have true Corinthian ware” (50.4). The answer is obvious, he says; his Corinthian is real because “the smith I bought it from was named Corinthus and what is real Corinthian, unless someone has a Corinthus” (quia scilicet aerarius, a quo emo, Corinthus vocatur. quid est autem Corintheum, nisi Corinthum habet? 50.4). This pun stresses the inherently arbitrary nature of any distinction between proper and improper naming. His merchant may not be the usual reference of “Corinthian” but is nevertheless a valid one. This last pun clarifies the previous one. Trimalchio’s statement that to have real Corinthian plate one must have (habet) a Corinthus echoes his claim that he has (habere) Father Liber. Trimalchio does indeed possess the slave taking the part of Father Liber, so with this pun, he stresses his right to call himself free (liber), just as having a Corinthus guarantees real Corinthian bronze. Either reading of his pun on liber (“I have a free father”; “I have Father Liber”) emphasizes his claim to free status. Trimalchio clearly recognizes that many might not consider him a real (verus) Roman. That his slave boy has gained his free status through a pun involving a name inversion emphasizes both how much difference names can make, and how much power inheres in them. Trimalchio in his own life has experienced the power of designations in a momentous renaming. He transferred his name from that of a slave to the tripartite name of a Roman citizen. That this is his “real” name is reflected in his pun that “real” (vera) Corinthian ware is that bought from a person named Corinthus. Likewise, he, Gaius Pompeius Trimalchio, as his very name declares, was once owned by a Gaius Pompeius. Trimalchio explains in the narrative that he was his master’s heir, but many slaves purchased their own freedom.13 On the basis of the logic of his Corinthian pun, Trimalchio, formerly owned by a Pompeius, is by definition a uniquely “real” Pompeius. Although an ex-slave, this Pompey is just as “proper” a reference for the name as any other ever named by it, however illustrious. Contradicting Aristotle’s definition of metaphor, names do not change without effect.14 The Carpus pun calls attention to the power of words to name and order at the same time. In his slave name, Trimalchio had experienced one aspect of society’s 130

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coercive power; his Roman name changed that status.15 This connection between civil status and names helps explain Trimalchio’s punning focus on names in the Cena and also his distrust of philosophical discussions of naming premised on specious distinctions between proper and improper naming, and on the connection of names to unchanging essences. Trimalchio’s delight in his new name, as testament to his changed state, is on display in the Cena. He not only imagines it carved on his grave monument (71.12); his name also appears twice on the doorposts of his dining room (30.2, 30.4), and engraved on his dishes (31.10). The sound of it resounds in his house. His slaves approve his culinary marvels by shouting his Roman praenomen, “Gaio feliciter” (50.1), and shifts of slaves leave and enter the dining room with this name on their lips: “vale Gai … ave Gai” (74.8). Even his old friends carefully use his new praenomen, Gaius, when addressing him.16 This transfer of name has obviously been significant for Trimalchio; it has not, as metaphor would have it, left his “being” unchanged.17 His own life explodes the notion that only certain references are proper. Rather, as his puns insist, names, labels, and the identities they refer to are in flux, open to change, filled with potential.

Unheard voices By having Trimalchio dwell on slave names, Petronius may also signal his intention to display in his narrative a perspective seldom heard in the contemporary culture: the views of the non-elite. In his musings over slaves’ names, Trimalchio enters a public conversation that had been conducted for centuries without the participation of those who were its object. The naming of slaves had long been a staple of philosophical discussions around words and their meanings. In the Cratylus, for example, Hermogenes buttresses his conventionalist position by invoking the naming of slaves: “Any name you give, in my opinion, is correct, and if you change that and give another one, then that name is no less correct than the other one, just as we change the names of our slaves” (384D).18 Diodorus Cronus in the Hellenistic period is reported to have used the names of his slaves to demonstrate his contention that all words can signify. He named one of his slaves, “However” (alla mên) and others after connectives.19 Varro continues this use of slaves’ names to support linguistic arguments in the Roman period.20 To exemplify the distinction between the voluntary and natural derivation of words, for example, Varro explains, “So when three men have bought a slave apiece at Ephesus, sometimes one derives his name from that of the seller, Artemidorus, and calls him Artemis; another names his slave Ion, from Ionia, the district; the third calls his slave Ephesus, because he has bought him at Ephesus. In this way each derived the name from a different source as he preferred” (De Lingua Latina, 8.21). Beyond their philosophic or linguistic points, all these examples imply the stark powerlessness of slaves, their inherent lack of volition and voice. 131

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By representing Trimalchio’s focus on naming, Petronius inverts this traditional perspective and provides a new voice on slaves, one seldom heard in elite circles – not quite the voice of the slave himself, but at least that of the ex-slave. Indeed, the Cena as a whole centers on the voices and views of such ex-slaves. In this section, Petronius keeps Encolpius’ comments to a minimum, allowing the non-elite characters to present themselves without the filter of the first-person narrator’s perspective.21 The narrative effect is what Plaza has described as the “general nature of the inversion of Trimalchio’s universe” (Plaza 2000: 101: 137) or the Cena’s “Saturnalian nature,” in Rankin’s phrase (1962: 136). By expressing non-elite views, the Cena inverts the usual cultural perspective. But from the perspective of the ex-slaves, whose opinions dominate the Cena, it is the elite who live in the upside-down world. As Ganymede comments (44.3), “For those rich jaws it’s always the Saturnalia.”

Open body, open meanings When the text presents its “arguments for the other side” (Richlin 1983: 212), what does it offer? Principally a focus on the body, its margins and its material reality. One of the first glimpses of Trimalchio shows him urinating, and food, eating, and drinking are the central focus of the Cena. This emphasis on bodily materiality undoubtedly plays a part in the text’s inversion of elite values, for as we have seen Greco-Roman hierarchy was erected upon and maintained through a sustained privileging of the mind/soul/spirit and a rejection of the material stratum. This cultural privileging of the soul/mind/spirit helps to explain the Cena’s invocation of Plato’s Symposium. Petronius appears to have constructed this freedmen’s banquet to oppose the Symposium, the arch-text for the privileging of the mind/soul/spirit. The Cena and the Symposium share structural similarities: a series of five speeches, followed by a culminating speech, and then the entrance of a late-arriving guest. In Diotima’s speech, number six in the Symposium, a series of ascending analogies provides the rationale for the valorization of the soul. Diotima explicates how the physical must be steadily moved away from until, finally, the transcendent, the one, unchanging Being is attained. Diotima’s “Beautiful” is itself a metaphor constructed from a series of other analogies;22 metaphors work by invoking the similarities between different things and by ignoring differences. In the Symposium what is ignored and left behind in the ascent toward the unchanging is the body, as demonstrated by Diotima’s list of what the Beautiful is not. The Beautiful is pure presence; it does not come into being, perish, grow bigger, or waste away (211E); it is not infected with the flesh and its mortality (211e). It is not, to make the point, the body. In the Cena, Trimalchio’s speech on his return from the latrine occurs in the same position as Diotima’s (last in a series of six speeches), and it can be read as a refutation of her case for the metaphorical ideal of an abstract immutable self-presence.23 Rather than disavowing the body, with its open margins and 132

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changing nature, Trimalchio proclaims it. As he says, “None of us are born quite solid.”24 Trimalchio’s complaint is rather that he is not fluid enough; he suffers from constipation. He urges his guests to pass wind or relieve themselves; the greatest torture is to be constricted, bound up. Not even Jove, he says, can hold it in.25 The topic of this speech has earned Trimalchio reproach and comparison with Theophrastus’ characterization of the “disgusting” man. According to Kristeva, what is disgusting about excrement and urination is the challenge they offer to any notion of a body as self-identical, whole, bounded, contained and to notions like the Platonic ideal of self-presence, essence, and Being that are metaphorically premised upon a bounded body. Victoria Rimell has demonstrated in compelling detail how the Satyrica, by its encompassing focus on the body and its flux, upsets dichotomies founded on bounded categories like proper/improper, intellectual/physical, and high/low (Rimell 2002: 12). Traditional social hierarchies are premised upon such strict boundaries, but Trimalchio with his speech on the dangers of constriction offers the basis for a different social model. Trimalchio presents a politics of the open end, of porous margins, of flux, change, and eventual running out. His embrace of the bodily in all its abjection refuses his culture’s contempt for the material body and those associated with it. His consideration for his slaves and his inclusion of them in the party is testament to his lived sense of this open society.26 Trimalchio’s affirmation of change and flux is a challenge not only to the Symposium but to a range of contemporary philosophies. As Long has noted, Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic philosophers shared certain common ground: “All of them accept the legitimacy of making a distinction between body and soul such that the soul is the cause of intelligent life occurring within that part of space which is bounded by the normal human body …. What today would be called mental and moral attributes are universally regarded as attributes of the psyche as distinct from the body associated with the psyche.” (Long 1982: 226–7). All the philosophic systems contemporary with Trimalchio subordinated the material, physical human body to something other than the body. Even the Stoics and Epicureans, who proposed a corporeal soul, nevertheless held that the human body was made of a different and lesser stuff. Trimalchio’s exuberant materiality would have received little affirmation from contemporary philosophers. Nor would Trimalchio’s stance on naming shown in his pun on Corinthian have won approval. The “conventionalist” idea that words can mean whatever their speakers intend specifically challenged the contemporary Epicurean, Stoic, and Platonic consensus on the naturalism of names. Trimalchio’s conventionalism can be read as resistant to contemporary philosophical authority. As Catherine Atherton explains, the Stoics had opposed Diodorus Cronus because his thesis would have left “no place for the description and prescription of meanings which is central to the Stoic philosophical project” (Atherton 1993: 162). Trimalchio’s embrace of the open body and open meanings testifies to his openness to change and evolution and his resistance to contemporary philosophic thinking. 133

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Status and the power to name The focus on learning and education in the Cena may provide another example of the non-elite’s attitude toward an important contemporary institution. Trimalchio has been ridiculed for his farrago of false mythologies and confused history. Most commentators interpret these as comic vehicles for exposing the ignorance and pretensions of this boorish parvenu. On one level – from the perspective of the elite – this is likely true; however these “errors,” as well as the explicit comments in the text about education, may also offer evidence for the reactions of people like the freedmen guests to their culture’s veneration of paideia. Trimalchio’s confused learning may be his assertion of the absurdity that a society would structure its hierarchies and allot its social rewards on the basis of people’s ability to get the facts of fictive stories right. After his pun on the meaning of Corinthian, Trimalchio reassures his educated guests, Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Agamemnon, “Don’t think me stupid. I know very well how Corinthian came into being” (50.5). He then describes how Hannibal, at the fall of Troy, collected all the bronze and gold and silver statues into one heap and melted them, and it was from this mixture that Corinthian ware was derived (51.6–7). Describing his silver cups, Trimalchio continues his gaffes. One, he says, shows “Cassandra killing her sons, and the boys lying there dead and so that you would think they were alive” (52.1). On another cup he describes Daedalus shutting up Niobe in the Trojan horse (52.2–3). Trimalchio, as has often been pointed out, here jumbles his stories. It was Medea who killed her sons, and Daedalus and Niobe were not associated with each other or with Troy. The story that Trimalchio places between these two instances of mangled learning, however, destabilizes the conventional reading of these confusions – that they are meant to ridicule Trimalchio’s pretensions. His story about a glassmaker explicitly focuses on how categories of value are maintained in a society. Education (in part the correct knowledge of mythology and history) was a value particularly important for establishing hierarchy in both the Satyrica and its contemporary society. As he talks about his silver cups, Trimalchio remembers a story about a glassmaker who invented unbreakable glass and brought his discovery to the emperor. The emperor asked him if he had shared his knowledge with anyone else. When the glassmaker answered in the negative, the emperor ordered him executed because, Trimalchio explains, “if his invention became known, we would treat gold like mud” (aurum pro luto haberemus, 51.6–52.1).27 The moral of this story is the drive of the powerful to maintain the status quo. The point it stresses is that those with power do not welcome the transformation of something cheap or common (vilia), like glass, into a valuable substance.28 That lutum is a word used like sordes (dirt) as a derogatory social reference is germane here.29 Recognition that the powerful would not appreciate being treated like the lower classes (gold like mud) is inherent in this analogy, and their power to enforce their wishes is made visible in the emperor’s action. 134

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In Petronius’ society, cultural knowledge and skill in speaking well were determining factors in establishing social worth. Paidea was a means of expressing social distance (Brown 1992: 39). Plaza has pointed out how the freedmen in the Cena both recognize and react to their society’s dismissal of them based on their lack of culture. The rag dealer Echion, for example, accuses Agamemnon of mocking him as he speaks, mocking, as he says, “the words of poor men” ( pauperorum verba derides, 46.1). But Echion dismisses this mockery and rejects the education it is founded on. He asserts, “We know that you are crazy ( fatuum) on account of your education” (46.1–2).30 Hermeros similarly reacts aggressively to what he takes to be the elite guests’ contempt for Trimalchio’s etymologies and calls their education worthless: “I haven’t learned your geometries, criticisms, or trivialities, but I know capital letters and how to do percentages …. Now I will show you your father wasted his fees even though you are a rhetorician” (58.7–8).31 Another freedman guest Niceros goes further, simply dismissing out of hand the pretensions of the educated. Urged by Trimalchio to tell his ghost story, he at first demurs: “I fear that those scholars (scholasticos) will laugh at me. They’d better watch it. I’ll tell my story anyway. What does it matter to me who laughs?” (61.4).32 Plaza sees this statement as decisive because Niceros “does not even bother to argue against their laughter, but bluntly states it cannot hurt him” (2000: 144). She reads the freedmen’s rejection of elite education (except for the “bread” it can provide) as part of the Cena’s overall effort to construct an inverse hierarchy that reflects freedmen’s perspectives and values.33 Niceros’ statement, in Plaza’s opinion, is the boldest rejection of elite values in the Cena, for the supreme rejection is not to care: “What does it matter to me who laughs?”. The inserted story of the emperor and the unbreakable glass, along with the ex-slaves’ explicit refusal of the elite’s right to deride others on the basis of their education, supplies a context for Trimalchio’s mythological gaffes. They may function to suggest the absurdity of investing so much in empty signifiers. The text itself signals this reading in its ironic comment on Cassandra’s slain sons, looking so really dead that you would think they lived (52.1).34 This witticism may mock the pretensions of realistic art, as commentators suggest (Smith 1975: 139), but it also foregrounds the reader’s recognition that these boys, no matter whose sons they are said to be, never existed, either dead or alive. Why then should getting their mother right matter so much in estimating an individual’s worth? The story of the emperor and the glassmaker proposes an explanation for why value systems are maintained: to protect the position of the powerful from encroachment from below, “lest we should hold gold as dirt” (52.1). In the early empire, getting myth histories right operated as a part of the contemporary system of values based on abstruse education that helped to set off the elite and secure their position. As Greenblatt has said, “the quintessential sign” of power is “to impose one’s fictions upon the world” (1981: 13). Trimalchio’s stories challenge this power. That his stories have met with ridicule may have more to do with his status than with their accuracy. By their nature, myths are additive, open to alteration, responsive 135

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to cultural changes and needs. So Euripides may have added Medea’s murder of her sons to the myth, and Smith cites Pausanias’ story that Cassandra was indeed the mother of two sons by Agamemnon.35 The difference between a mistake and an alternative emerges as, at least at one level, a matter of the speaker’s status. Pausanias’ version is an alternative; Trimalchio’s a blunder. In his description of Agamemnon as one “who has power to speak” (tu, quis potes loquere, 46.1),36 Echion marks his recognition that only some voices can speak and be taken seriously in a society. Trimalchio challenges these strictures in his idiosyncratic myth histories, and like his friend Niceros, he may not care who laughs at him.

Change: the challenge of the possible As his opinions on naming and the body demonstrate, Trimalchio accepts and affirms flux, motion, and change.37 Indeed, Trimalchio memorializes the changes he himself has experienced.38 He is the hero of his own life; he has no famous antecedents. A mural on the wall of his foyer depicts with epic overtones his metamorphosis from a boy sold at a slave market to a member of the Augustales, honored with a privileged seat in the amphitheater.39 By portraying Mercury in this last scene in his role as psychopompus and invoking the language of spiritual ascent (rapiebat 29.6), Bodel explains, “Trimalchio represents his elevation from slavery to freedom as an apotheosis.”40 His mural commemorates growth and progress through time. It figures identity not as a static essence, but as a trajectory. Change is a major focus in the freedmen’s self-representation. So Trimalchio metaphorically offers himself as a frog who became a king (77.6).41 His gravestone proclaims that he “grew from very little” (ex parvo crevit, 1.12). Variations of this phrase epitomizing the freedmen’s success in overcoming their slave origins repeat in the Cena, often coupled with an allusion to the stark harshness of these beginnings. Diogenes, another of the freed guests, is described as “growing from nothing” (de nihilo crevit); it is explained that not so long ago “he carried loads of wood on his back” (38.8). Similarly, the recently departed Chrysanthus is said to have grown from “small change” (ab asse crevit 43.1). A vivid verbal figure conveys the indignities he tolerated to make his new life: “He was always ready to snatch a coin out of the dung with his teeth.”42 Recollections of the humiliations inherent in the former slave life of the freedmen subtly pervade the revelry of the Cena. One can hear behind Trimalchio’s justification “that nothing is base (turpe) which the master orders,” the indignity of being his master’s sexual plaything (75.11). The characterizations of both Trimalchio’s and Hermeros’ wives allude to their sexual vulnerability before their husbands bought them out of slavery (37.3, 74.13, 57.6). Freedom changed these women’s situations, just as it did their husbands’ lives. For ex-slaves, change is not the scandal it is for metaphysicians. Trimalchio focuses on how high the stakes are in the change from slave to free, when he warns Fortunata not to forget the life he rescued her from. He has made her a “man among men,” a human being equal to any other (hominem inter 136

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homines feci, 74.13). This phrase encapsulates freedom’s defining difference; in Roman culture and law, the slave was assimilated to the animal.43 In the Cena, the freedmen testify to how this transformation to full humanity informs their sense of themselves. Thus, when Hermeros reacts angrily to Ascyltos’ disrespect for Trimalchio, he proudly announces himself to be a “man among men” (57.5). Scorning the ease of free birth, he lists his achievements: he owes nobody, he owns land, he supports twenty people and a dog, and he bought his wife’s freedom. He claims that his accomplishments are “true contests” (vera athla, 57.11) and displays his contempt for the easy victories of the freeborn. “Being born free is as easy as ‘come here,”’ he says (57.11).44 For the freeborn, the good life is there for the asking; for the ex-slave, it is evidence for the struggle that he has won. On this basis, as Hermeros intimates, the freedman is superior to the freeborn. Trimalchio exhibits a very similar sense of self.45 He shares a similar pride in his successes, achieved, as he says, by his own power (virtute mea ad hoc perveni, 75.8). Trimalchio presents himself as a man of energy, confident and resilient, even in the face of disaster. He describes his reaction when his first commercial venture failed and all his ships sank: “Do you think I panicked? No, by God, I was no more licked by my losses than if nothing had happened. I built others, bigger, better and luckier, so that no one could say I wasn’t brave” (76.5). Brave ( fortis, 71.12) is one of the adjectives Trimalchio wants carved on his grave monument. His self-presentation confirms his claim to this designation. The picture on his mural of the little boy leaving the slave market and entering Rome all alone, except for the goddess Minerva, testifies to the courage and drive it took for Trimalchio to achieve his present fortune.46 Trimalchio’s sense of self and his conception, as displayed in his mural, that life is a becoming, a progress question the conventional reading of the repeated references to time and death in the Cena. Arrowsmith, for example, notes that Trimalchio is “a man obsessed with death” (1966: 306) and Bodel suggests, “Thoughts of it [death] … hang like a shroud over the banquet.”47 Rimell describes Trimalchio as having “an obsession with time … haunted by his past … petrified of death”(2002: 184–5). However, these perspectives do not do justice to the framing of the references to death in the Cena and Trimalchio’s comments on the topic. Themes of time and death do certainly permeate the narrative; the very first information about Trimalchio in the text refers to his wealth and that he has in his dining room a clock and a trumpeter to tell him how much time he has lost from his life (sciat quantum de vita perdiderit, 26.9). Funerals are a particular focus; two of the guests are in the funeral business: an undertaker and a grave monument maker (38.14; 78.6; 71.5), and twice the dinner conversation turns to recently attended funeral celebrations. Trimalchio not only has his will read out and the instructions for his grave monument specified, he insists that his guests pretend they are at his funeral (78.4): “Pretend I’m dead, he said” (78.5). Of course, he is not dead, and that’s the point. One cannot enjoy one’s own funeral. But Trimalchio enjoys this mock one. He anoints his guests with the nard intended for his final rites and jokes 137

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that he hopes he will enjoy this as much when he is dead as he does alive (78.3). It is not that Trimalchio fails to recognize the inherent poignancy of death; joined by his wife, friends, and slaves, he breaks into tears after describing his grave (72.1). But he quickly dismisses this reaction – “Since we know we must die, why don’t we live?” – and suggests a bath.48 References to death in the Cena function as a recall to life. They signal that time “when nothing else will be possible” (Lingis 2000: 106). In this scheme, thoughts of death are not morbid but are prompts to live, calls to action. Trimalchio accepts the inherent flux of his material body; he says, “None of us are born quite solid” (47.4), and with this he accepts its mortality. The silver skeleton, introduced at the beginning of the meal, reifies this theme (34.8). Skeletons, a conventional motif at Roman meals, figured the end point implicit in the body’s material cycle that begins with the consumption of food: consuming, digesting, absorbing, excreting, making tissue, growing older, rotting in the tomb, flowing away until nothing but bones remains. This continual vulnerability of the material body to flux and change is specifically what metaphysical notions of being reject, but Trimalchio, with his emphasis on the materiality of the body and its open margins, understands the limits set upon lives, that humans eventually “die of their own nature (Lingis 2000: 106). His declarations of this fact have often been dismissed as trite, but that is a value judgment, not an argument against a perspective. This theme of death is the topic of his first poem, where he laments that once death bears us away, we will all be nothing. Here again he reads this inevitability that life will end as a challenge to live: “So now let us live, while we can live well” (ergo vivamus, dum licet esse bene 34.10).49 The most telling indication that Trimalchio is not petrified by death in the Cena is his knowledge that he is in no danger for a very long time. He knows that he has thirty years, four months, two days left to live (77.2). He learned the date of his death, he says, from a seer who “knew my intestines; he told me everything except what I had eaten the day before” (76.11). Trimalchio’s death, as it is for all humans, is inscribed on his very body and in its material nature. Trimalchio knows he will die, but this is no cause for despair, as his statements make clear. To live in the anticipation of death is “to live in the future and the possible, to set goals and advance toward them” (Lingis 2000: 107). In that way, Trimalchio shows himself determined to live, as he declares immediately following the revelation of his remaining life span: “If I could only expand my boundaries to Apulia, I shall have gone far enough in my lifetime.” This is why his trumpeter blows the hours – not to lament the passing of time, but to tell Trimalchio how much time he has to achieve his goals.50 Critics who describe Trimalchio’s home as exclusively “a house of the dead” do a disservice to the host’s commitment to life and the future. The place may indeed be a social underworld, a world below and unknown to denizens of a more elite upper world, but this does not make it an underworld for those who inhabit it. Bodel has made a case that the correspondence between the descriptions in Trimalchio’s autobiographical mural and contemporary funerary monuments 138

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allows readers to recognize one aspect of Trimalchio’s house as a house of the dead. These correspondences might, however, also remind that not all groups in societies have equal access to enunciating their perspectives. Trimalchio’s views may reflect the discourse of freedmen’s tombs, not because Petronius wishes to call attention to death, but because he articulates a freedman’s perspective that finds few opportunities for cultural expression, except on tombs commissioned and planned by their freedman owners, just as is Trimalchio’s. Some have read the image of the Sibyl with her wish to die (48.8) as another indication that Trimalchio’s house figures a living death, but in the context of Trimalchio’s knowledge of the very date of his death and his energy and drive to complete his goals before that ending, the Sybil only confirms the tragedy of living forever. In the Cena, Trimalchio takes every opportunity to express his desire to live as fully as possible in the time allotted: “If we must die, why don’t we live?” He thrusts his life forward with all his energy toward its end. He wants to leave his mark on time, as the image of the clock on his tomb declares. Bodel has suggested that the freedmen “live against the clock” in the unredeemed half-life of their freed status (1994: 253). Trimalchio’s instructions about his tomb suggest a different attitude. He wants a clock placed in the middle so that “anyone who looks at the time will read my name whether they like it or not” (71.11).51 Trimalchio has no illusions about how his society views him. Some may not like it, but nevertheless, his tomb will emblazon his mark on time, his name, his citizen name, a final testament to the progress of becoming that his life has been. The Cena is not, as some would have it, Trimalchio’s underworld; it is rather the “Undertakers’ Ball,” where those who recognize and accept the material basis of life and its inherent limits, celebrate. The reference to the labyrinth (73.1) does not refer to Trimalchio’s “mongrel” status, half slave, half free, as Bodel suggests (1994: 253), but rather to the evidence metaphysicians try to keep from sight: that all humans, as the Minotaur metaphorizes, are equal in their shared animal, material, and physical being. In this episode Petronius, even as he satirizes their gaucherie, conveys the desire and energy of these self-made freedmen who have created new lives for themselves in spite of their dismissal by the upper stratum. Trimalchio’s comfort with change and the porous materiality of the human body coincides with attitudes seen in the Christian sources. Neither he nor the other freedmen exhibit any of the asceticism so often seen in Christian sources, but they express a drive and openness to changing the status quo and creating a social place for themselves that may also have motivated other persons in their society calling themselves Christians to foresee a new heaven and a new earth.

Notes 1 Whitehead 1993; Rowe 2001; Donahue 1999; Bodel 1984: 72ff. 2 See McCarthy (2000) for social reading of the slave voices in Plautus.

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3 See Schmeling (1994: 164) for Trimalchio’s good life without the benefit of philosophers. 4 Keller 2000: 304. Bibliography on naming in the Cratylus is extensive; see Everson 1994b, 245–6 for a sample. 5 See Charles (1994: 37–73) for Aristotle’s theory of signification. For an overview of Aristotle on metaphor, see Kirby (1997). 6 This follows Derrida’s translation In White Mythology (1982: 231). In this text, Derrida makes his case that the central concepts underlying metaphysics are always themselves metaphorical. See Harrison (1999) on “White Mythology.” 7 See Derrida (1982), Harrison (1999), and Stellardi (2000) for the relation of Aristotle’s discussion of metaphor to contemporary metaphysical thinking. 8 The quoted words are again those of Derrida (1982) who is referring to philosophic metaphors at this point in his discussion. For the essentialist aspects of Aristotle’s theory of naming, see David Charles (1994: 61–73 with bibliography). Catherine Atherton (1993: 24) points out that this was a widely shared attitude in antiquity: “What these very different groups [ancient theorists, critics, and teachers of style] had in common was a basic conception of language as a conduit for or means of transferal between minds of a single, detachable, preselected message or meaning.” 9 Smith (1975: 135, 193). Sullivan (1968: 226) calls these puns “childishly naïve or ponderously artificial” and used “to satirize Trimalchio’s deficiencies in wit.” Dupont (1977: 96) suggests that Trimalchio’s puns serve to emphasize the inherent ambiguity and polysemy of language. 10 Dupont (1977: 99) has an interesting discussion of this scene. She suggests it exhibits the inherent instability of language in a deconstructive move. 11 This pun appears as almost a foreshadowing of Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation: “By addressing the individual as a unified and coherent person who is the sovereign author of his acts, the dominant social order recruits her and assigns her a place in the labor scheme” (Morton and Zavarzadeh 1991: 6). 12 Encolpius is puzzled when a large wild boar wearing a cap denoting freed status is served. A fellow diner explains that on the previous day, this same boar had been presented but was sent back by the diners (dimissus, 41.4). So it returns to this meal as already freed (tamquam libertus, 41.5). Cf. Slater (1990: 63–4) on this passage. 13 See Watson (1987) for varieties of manumission procedures and benefits. 14 Dupont (1977: 101) sees Trimalchio’s names as a sign of his impossible situation and his reification of the ambivalence of the social code. 15 See Quintilian (7.3.27) for how the three-part name defines “the free.” 16 See Adams (1978: 150) for the use of the praenomen as a gesture of intimacy and Smith (1975: 63). Smith refers to Horace’s mockery of freedmen’s emphasis on their praenomen (Hor. Sat. 2.5.32). 17 Bodel (1984: 185), in his analysis of the pilleus-wearing pork in the Liber pun, depreciates this change between slave and freed: “Petronius points out how easy it is for a slave to become a freedman, and how little the promotion in civil status improves the actual ‘status’ of the new citizen. The boar is ‘liberated’ by a simple ritual, and remains what he was, a pig; the transformation is purely superficial. Similarly the boy Dionysus is informally manumitted, but in essence he remains unchanged. The transition from slavery to freedom is easy; the transition from freedman status to free born status is impossible.” However, the freedmen in the Cena do not seem to experience their change in status as insignificant. Rather than demonstrating the inadequacy of manumission to effect change (the boar remains a pig), this visual pun (the status sign worn by a dead pig) may remind of the arbitrariness of status designations in face of the shared physical basis of material being. All humans are equal in their shared bodily nature.

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18 Trimalchio also changes slaves’ names; he tells us that in a stroke of genius, he changed his cook’s name to Daedalus to reflect the cook’s exceptional talent (70.3). Critics have ascribed this renaming to Petronius’ parodic effort to convey a fallen social world when the name of a great artisan is given to a cook. But what needs noticing is the interpretive movement at the heart of metaphor. Metaphor functions by invoking similarities between different things and ignoring the differences. With his new name, Trimalchio has constructed a metaphor: the cook is a Daedalus. Trimalchio notices the similarity in the shared talent of his cook and Daedalus. Those who read the metaphor as debasing reveal how the overriding difference in status makes it impossible for them to recognize the relevant similarities between these two cunning workers. This confirms how powerful differences in status are for occluding the recognition of similarities. 19 Aulus Gellius 11.12.1–3; Ammonius, On Aristotle’s De Interpretatione 38.17–20, in Long and Sedley (1987, 1.227). 20 Varro, De Lingua Latina 8.6, 8.10, 8.21, 9.22. See Atherton 1993: 154–60. 21 Point of view in the Satyrica is a particularly vexed topic; see Conte (1996). In the Cena, however, as both Beck (1973: 272) and Laird (1999: 209–28) note, the narrator is in the background, and the characters appear to be allowed to display their own perspectives. 22 All concepts are on this basis metaphors. As Sarah Kofman 1993: 37) says, “The concept is a transition from the analogous to the identical, from diversity to unity.” 23 For the influence of the Symposium on the Cena, see Cameron (1969); Dupont (1977: 61–90); and Bodel (1999, 40–1). 24 Nemo nostrum solide natus est (47.4). Connors (1994: 229) notes that Tacitus’ description of Petronius’ death suggests that he, unlike Seneca and the tradition of Plato’s Apology, did not have his mind on the soul but on frivolous verses. She suggests the connection to Trimalchio’s claim that he never listened to a philosopher. 25 Hoc solum vetare ne Iovis potest (47.4). Smith notes the suggestion to delete vetare here and give a “racier sense as well as improving the rhythm” (1975: 127). 26 See D’Arms (1991) for the bad treatment (including death) that slaves staffing dinner parties might experience. Seneca (Ep. 47.3) notes that slaves were made to stand around all night hungry. This contrasts with Trimalchio’s inviting his slaves to join the party (70.10) and later dismissing slaves so they may eat (74.6). He has, however, put up a notice that his slaves will be whipped if they leave the house without permission (28.7), and the daily record of his affairs notes that a slave was crucified for “cursing the genius of our Gaius” (53.3). The punishment may be another reminder of how much Trimalchio valued his freed status – which bestowed both praenomen and genius. 27 This same point, that categories of value are arbitrary, is made later in the Cena in almost the same words. Habinnas comments on the cost of his wife’s jewelry. He explains, “If it were not for women, we would treat all such gems as dirt” (Mulieres si non essent, omnia pro luto haberemus, 67.10). Here also, worth is arbitrarily assigned. 28 Bloomer (1997: 299, n. 56) links this story of the glass to Echion and Habinnas’ comments and suggests that together these offer that “The dirt cheap economy is prevented by corrupt magistrates, the emperor, and women.” The story of the unbreakable glass is referred to by Pliny (Nat. Hist. 36.195) and Cassius Dio (57.21.5ff). On this episode, see Anderson (1999) and Santini (1986). 29 Catullus 42.13; Persius 3.23. 30 See Boyce (1991: 81–4) and Plaza (2000: 115–19) on Echion’s speech and its excessive deviations from educated standards of language. Echion still wants his boy to get an education, but for all the wrong reasons from an elite perspective; see Bloomer (1997: 196–241) and Laird (1999). Bloomer points out that the ambitions of the Cena’s freedmen are reflected in the funerary monuments of the period (197). Laird reminds

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31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

44

that the standards of value inherent in the labeling of so-called proper and improper speech belong to the false metaphysical dichotomies that underwrite social power. Plaza (2000: 133–42) suggests this scene is a “touchstone” for scholars in determining whether they side with the scornful guests or the freedmen (138). Bloomer (1997: 210) notes, “The threatening, often sexually aggressive language constitutes a speech characteristic shared among the freedmen as much as any phonological, morphological, lexical or syntactic items.” Hermeros’ speech seems especially abusive and aggressive. Etsi timeo istos scholasticos, ne me [de] rideant. Viderint: narrabo tamen; quid enim mihi aufert qui ridet? (61.4). (Contra Conte 1996: 127). Plaza (2000: 145) notes that Niceros’ werewolf tale is an example of social inversion, for it is the scholastici who “are demonized into the frightening figure of the werewolf …. The slaves are the norm, i.e. real human beings of flesh and blood, while the non-slave represents another type of being, which is incomprehensible, unpredictable, and dangerous.” Smith (1975) reads sic ut vivere as Heinsius offered for the sicuti vere in H. Rabinowitz (1993: 146); Pausanias 2.16.7. Ironically using an incorrect verb form, the active infinitive loquere for the correct deponent loqui. This challenges the Platonic view. Sedley (1998) suggests that in the Cratylus, Socrates attempts to show the illusion in the seeming consistency of the etymologies suggesting that all things are in flux. Trimalchio’s depiction of his life on the mural and in the autobiographical statement at the end of the Cena (75–7) have been faulted as examples of his egotism. However, Whitehead (1993: 319) explains that this autobiographical drive was in fact typical of freedmen: “That the preference for biography was a trait of freedmen can be seen in all the genres of funerary art freedmen commonly commissioned.” Their monuments offer them the opportunity to mark their identity. Bodel (1994: 240) notes the implicit comparison drawn between Encolpius examining Trimalchio’s mural and Aeneas examining the scenes on the temple doors in Cumae (Aen. 6.20–34). Bodel offers an excellent discussion of this scene (1994: 243–8; 1984: 54–61). He suggests that Trimalchio’s entrance into Rome led by Minerva suggests both a triumphal adventus and the epic theme of a young man “escorted by a female protector into a city.” The motifs also recall funeral reliefs: “Trimalchio’s identification with Mercury would have reminded Petronius’ contemporaries unmistakably of the type of sculpted relief that had recently begun to appear in the funerary monuments of slaves and freedmen with backgrounds very similar to that of Trimalchio” (246). Jane Whitehead also traces the similarity between the themes of the Cena and actual freedmen’s tombs. Cf. Marchesi (2005) on the use of zoomorphic language as a mark of the freedmen’s former status and their reduction as slaves to animals. Et paratus fuit quadrantem de stercore mordicus tollere (43.1). Keith Bradley 2000) reviews the cultural and legal associations between animals and slaves and uses this association as a lens for an important reading of Apuleius’ Metamorphosis. Bradley suggests Lucius’ change into an ass ought to be read as metaphorically replicating the experiences of a human’s fall into slavery. Haec sunt vera athla; nam [in] ingenuum nasci tam facile est quam “accede istoc” (57.11) The phrase hominem inter homines is also used of Trimalchio (39.4). Bodel offers Hermeros as “a remarkably consistent portrait of a successful independent freedman” (1984: 144; for a full discussion of Hermeros, 111–79). The only element he finds inconsistent in Hermeros’ depiction is exactly the one under discussion: Hermeros’ self-esteem. Bodel reports, “Further evidence that freedmen felt proud of their status as ex-slaves is hard to find” (1984: 151). He cites Lily Ross Taylor (1961) as evidence that

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45 46 47 48 49

50 51

“freedmen attempted to hide their libertine status on their epitaphs with increasing regularity throughout the first and second centuries AD by omitting the freedman designation (l.) from their nomenclature” (Bodel 1984: 153). I am not persuaded that the omission of the freedman status marker can be interpreted necessarily as an indication of low selfesteem. See Joshel (1992: 76–91) for signs of self esteem on freedman and even slave tombs. Boyce (1991: 90–4) treats Hermeros’ language. It is worth noting that the answers to the riddles that Hermeros uses to try to show up the scholastici all refer to the body. The body as a mark of the inherent equality between humans challenges social hierarchy. Bodel (1984) notes that Hermeros and Trimalchio have the only autobiographical statements in the Cena, and both display a similar sense of pride in their status. He believes Petronius intended to show by this similarity that there is no way to transcend freed status. See Bodel (1994: 245) for a different interpretation. Bodel (1999: 44) explains that this death imagery helps to convey the reality of the freedman’s status: “He lives in a particular social limbo, like the disembodied spirits of the underworld, who have the form but not the substance of real men” (1999: 47). Cum scimus nos morituros esse, quare non vivamus (72.2). Connors (1998: 52) points out how the frame of this poem plays on aufero: “Death is figured (in the verb auferet) as Orcus carrying one away, while in a punning reversal, a new dish ( ferculum, from the same root as aufero) is literally carried in as the poem on being carried off ends.” She also notes the pun in esse: either sum (to be) or edo (to eat). These figures contribute to the understanding of material life based on the inherent fluidity of consuming and digesting body that I see as the foundation for Trimalchio’s perspective on existence. See Toohey (1997: 53–4) for an interpretation of time in the Cena. Horologium in medio, ut quisquis horas inspiciet, velit nolit, nomen meum legat (71.11).

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Introduction In Minucius Felix’s Octavius, the pagan opponent of Christianity is most outraged by two aspects of the sect. First is the effrontery that such low-status people are offering opinions on “heavenly things” (16.5). The other cause of outrage is Christians’ belief in a bodily resurrection: “They say they are reborn after death from the cinders and the ashes” (11.2).1 Caecilius Natalis, this pagan spokesman, mocks Christians on both counts: “Let your present life, O miserable people, be your gauge of what happens after death. See how some part of you, the greater and better part as you say, experiences want, cold, labor and hunger” (12.2). Caecilius derides Christians’ menial status and their belief that the body is a vital part of their personhood – indeed, “the greater and better part” (ecce pars vestrum maior, melior, ut dicitis). Caecilius is a fictional opponent, but Celsus similarly associates and scorns these same features – Christians’ low status and their belief in an immortal body (Contra Cels.7.45, 8.49). This association of low status and belief in the resurrected body offers one context for understanding the charged polemic around the nature of the resurrected body in the second century. As we have argued, some Christians, by promoting the material body as immortal, were refusing the traditional inscription of the body and those associated with it as base and ignoble. Indeed, Christianity ought to be recognized as the institutionalization of this refusal. I have suggested that the body was key to Christianity’s growth as an institution – one that gained strength around the care of bodily needs of the poor, the sick, the orphaned and widowed (Perkins 1995: 8–12, 212–14). For this to occur, however, the cultural devaluation of the physical and the people constrained by its needs had to be mitigated. In the doctrine of the physical resurrection of an immortal body, some Christians in the second century were insisting, in opposition to contemporary ideology, that the material body is an integral and enduring part of the human “self.” As the Christians in the Octavius were said to believe, the body was “the greater and better part” of themselves. In this paradigm, the debate over the nature of the resurrected body had important social implications. The Christians advocating for a fully material,

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physical resurrection worked to counteract the traditional social depreciation of groups marked by the body, its labor, or its needs. Similarly, groups minimizing physical resurrection were less resistant to the traditional social hierarchies based on the dichotomy of mind-soul and body. Evidence in support of this hypothesis appears in two closely related texts, the Apocryphal Acts of Peter and the Acts of John.2 Both the Acts of John and Acts of Peter are considered heterodox, but in the second and early third century, terms such as heterodox and orthodox must still be considered anachronistic. The Acts of John, according to its most recent editors, Eric Junod and Jean-Daniel Kaestli, is an example of popular Christianity on the frontier between gnosticism and “vulgar” Christianity (1983: 2.686). Junod and Kaestli describe chapters 94–102 and 109 as an “unorthodox” interpolation but date the entire Acts to the second century.3 J. K. Elliott describes the Acts of Peter also as a second-century text, a “product of popular piety,” and “not a gnostic work” but “influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the unorthodox teachings of the day” (1993: 392). Despite their heterodoxy, these Acts can provide evidence for the relation between resurrection beliefs and social thinking. For the Acts of John and the Acts of Peter, while sharing close similarities, differ markedly in their attitudes toward the nature of Jesus’ physical body and toward material resurrection (through analogy with their representations of raised human bodies). On these points, the Acts of Peter, with its claim for the reality of Jesus’ body and its emphasis on the material significance of the raised body, takes an essentially protoorthodox position. The Acts of John, however, with its consistent de-emphasis of a material interpretation for either the body of Jesus or the raised body, is far from the perspective that will become orthodox. These differences correlate with a contrast in social perspectives. The Acts of John displays for the most part the same normative hierarchical assumptions of the surrounding society. But the Acts of Peter exhibits a more egalitarian and inclusive focus than the Acts of John and offers a stronger affirmation of groups traditionally devalued in the society.

Views of the incarnation The Acts of John consistently denies Jesus a human body. Junod and Kaestli have argued that the text is not specifically docetic, since the incarnation and the birth and the passion of Jesus are simply ignored without comment (1983: 2.493), but Pieter Lalleman has countered this argument: The familiarity of the author [of the Acts of John] … with the canonical Gospels means that when he is silent about the human quality of Christ, he implicitly denies it. Likewise, the explicit identification of Christ and God is an implicit statement of a docetic position if – as is the case here – it is not counterbalanced by statements regarding Jesus’ humanity (Lalleman 1998a: 210).4 145

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The Acts of John stresses the nonhuman nature of Jesus’ presence on earth. Polymorphy – Jesus’ ability to appear in different forms, sometimes at the same time – is, for example, a feature of a number of the apocryphal Acts, but only the Acts of John describes a polymorphous Jesus before his resurrection, thereby emphasizing a consistent and continuous unreality for Jesus’ human body during his time in this world.5 When John describes Jesus’ call to him and his brother, he tells how his brother saw a child beckoning, but he saw a young man. Later when he saw an old bald-headed man, his brother saw a young man (88–9).6 In John’s account, Jesus presents almost as a mirage, appearing at the same time in different physical manifestations to different perceivers. John also emphasizes the ephemeral nature of Jesus’ material body at the  Transfiguration. He describes Jesus as absolutely “not like a man” ( ’ωo `ε  ’ \ oε o ως). His feet lit up the ground and his head reached to heaven” (90.10–11). This whole section of the Acts accentuates Jesus’ immateriality. John recounts how Jesus’ eyes never closed and how, when he reclined upon Jesus’ breast at table, it sometimes felt “smooth and tender, and sometimes hard, like stone” (89.12–13; cf. 93.2–4). Jesus also levitated off the ground, leaving no footprints (93.11–12). Jesus’ post-resurrection body is not a focus in the Acts of John, for Jesus never had a stable material body, never died, and so was never resurrected. The “interpolated” section of the Acts makes this point explicitly: “neither am I he who is upon the cross” (99.4); “therefore I suffered none of the things that they will say of me” (101.1).7 Jesus is no human with a body in these Acts. John emphasizes, “That is no man I preach to you to worship, but God unchangeable, God invincible …. If then you abide in him, you shall possess your soul invincible” (104.1–7).8 While the Acts of Peter shares with the Acts of John a belief in the oneness of Jesus and God, it offsets this by asserting the reality of Jesus’ human being, by insisting that Jesus had a human body, was born of a woman, ate and drank, suffered, died, and was resurrected. The Acts of Peter alludes even to Jesus’ second coming and final judgment of the dead (28). In what sounds like a creedal formula, Peter stresses Jesus’ physical reality: “He ate and drank for our sake,9 although he was neither hungry nor thirsty. He also endured and suffered shameful things for us. He died and rose again because of us” (20). In his first address to the Roman converts, Peter proclaims Jesus’ real birth, death, and resurrection: “God sent his son into the world … brought forth by the Virgin Mary” (7)10 and warns his listeners “not to look for another besides … this crucified Nazarene who died and rose again on the third day” (7). The Acts of Peter depicts Jesus with a specific human identity, a Nazarene, who was truly born and truly died (23; 71.24–5). Indeed, it is just on these points that Simon Magus will attack Peter: that he believes in “a human being, a Jew and a carpenter’s son” (14).11 This taunt does not trouble Peter; he accepts it as factual. The Acts of Peter explicitly represents Jesus as having a human body, a human identity, even a human occupation. 146

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Attitudes to human resurrection The Acts’ sharply different conceptions of Jesus’ bodily nature correspond with a contrast in their attitudes toward the resurrected human body. In the early Christian centuries, the risen body of Christ offered a prototype for the resurrected human body. It is therefore not surprising that such sharply different conceptions of Jesus’ bodily nature in the two Acts would coincide with divergent attitudes toward the resurrected human body. Although the Acts of John offers repeated examples of resurrections, of people raised from the dead, its focus is not on their resuscitated bodies, but on their new spiritual lives.12 John demonstrates this perspective when the dead priest of Artemis is raised to show, as he says, “the power of Jesus Christ.” John addresses the resurrected priest: “You have been raised but are indeed not ’ ’ ` o’ ς oως) really living ( ς …. Will you belong to him by whose name and power you have been raised?” (47.11–12). This resurrection is depicted clearly as only a preliminary to the conversion that must follow it (Lalleman 1998a: 165). The priest’s new life begins not with his physical resuscitation, but only when he comes to the faith. This spiritual emphasis is also explicit in the episode describing the raising of a man killed by his son. When this father is raised, he complains to John that he had already suffered so much from his son, and now “you have called me back to what purpose?” (52.8). John agrees that physical resurrection is not the goal: “If you rise up to the same life, you would be better to remain dead. But rise up to a better life” (52.9–10). In the Acts of John, resurrection functions as the symbol for the call to a new life. As Eugene Gallagher notes, the change from death to new life acts as a metaphor. It expresses “an understanding of the powerful changes wrought by conversion” (1991: 24)13 In Paul Schneider’s words, “Life after death for the Acts of John is the Christian community” (1994: 256, n. 13). Resurrection acts as a trope for conversion. This image of conversion is not new; Paul and Justin both called baptism a new birth (Rom 6:3–11; 2 Cor 5:17; 1 Apol. 61). But in the Acts of John, this emphatic metaphoric use of resurrection detaches it from the material realm of physical life and death and imbues it with a primarily spiritual and “realized” meaning. In contrast, the Acts of Peter’s representations of resurrection emphasize its physical and social aspects. To see their very different attitudes on resurrection, we can compare the two scenes in the Acts that represent multiple resurrections. ˘

Resurrection in the Acts of John Both Acts offer an episode with three resurrections. In the Acts of John, the action begins when Callimachus, a wellborn Ephesian (73.10), becomes consumed with desire for Drusiana, the ascetic wife of Andronicus. Learning of his passion, Drusiana is so distraught at being the cause of another’s sin that she sickens and dies. Callimachus’ desire, however, does not abate, and after her burial he 147

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bribes Fortunatus, Andronicus’ steward, to open Drusiana’s tomb so that he can defile her. On the third day after her death, John and Andronicus come to the tomb and find a strange sight: Callimachus lying with a huge snake sleeping upon him, and next to him, Fortunatus dead (73). Believing he understands what has happened, Andronicus asks John to raise Callimachus so that he can confess. John orders the snake off the man and prays, and Callimachus rises up. He confirms Andronicus’ story and describes how he was undressing Drusiana when a beautiful youth covered her with his cloak and said, “Callimachus, die, that you may live” (76.19–20). Then the snake killed Fortunatus and terrified Callimachus into a lifeless state. Callimachus himself interprets his resurrection from the dead as a conversion. He tells John that the command he heard (that he must die to live) is already fulfilled: “For that unbeliever, godless, lawless man is dead; I am raised ´ (ε’ ε  ) by you as a believer, faithful and godly” (76.37–9). Next, Drusiana is raised up, and pitying Fortunatus, she asks that he also be raised. But once raised, Fortunatus runs off, complaining of the Christians’ power: “O how far the power of these awful people has spread! I wished I were not raised but remained dead, so as not to see them” (83.7–9). John, declaring that neither Fortunatus’ soul nor his nature is changed, begins an extended anathema of Satan and all his issue. John concludes by foretelling a second death for Fortunatus, a death that, the reader soon discovers, has already occurred (86.4–9). These resurrections all underscore that there are two kinds of resurrections: spiritual and physical. And it is the spiritual that has primary significance.14 In this narrative, what matters is not Callimachus’ physical resuscitation, but his change from a godless man to a believer. Similarly, Fortunatus’ physical resurrection, without a spiritual change, is meaningless. It lasts but a few hours. This narrative shares the traditional cultural bias in favor of the mind/spirit over an interest in the body’s condition. How little the reality of physical death matters in the perspective of the Acts of John is evidenced by the narrative’s indeterminacy about the actual physical condition of some of the characters resurrected. Although Callimachus is referred to at one point as a corpse (75.1), it is never clear whether he was actually dead. The serpent never bit him but simply sat on him and terrified him. Since death in this text is never more than a figure, the narrative has little reason to clarify whether Callimachus was dead or simply in a petrified stupor. This same indifference to a character’s physical state occurs in the earlier account of John’s raising of Lycomedes and his wife, Cleopatra. Lycomedes’ precise condition also is left ambiguous. At his wife’s death, he is represented as so overcome with grief that he falls to the ground lamenting. A few sentences ’ later, John describes him as “lifeless” or perhaps “fainted (oς, 21.18).15 The narrative’s imprecision is indicative. Lycomedes’ specific state is not the point in this text, as Cleopatra’s response to her resurrection makes clear. Touched by John and bidden to rise, Cleopatra responds, “I will rise master, save your Cleopatra” (23.9–10). As her comment implies, her physical rising is almost irrelevant; her salvation is the new spiritual life she embraces. In the resurrection stories of the 148

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Acts of John, physical death functions primarily as a symbol of the life before conversion. The materiality of real death barely intrudes into this text. In the Acts of John, “being raised up” is a spiritual marker, a term for spiritual conversion, rather than for a physical transformation (Schäferdiek 1983: 247–67). When the worshippers of Ephesus, for example, recognize God’s power after the destruction of Artemis’ temple, they prostrate themselves before John. He instructs ’ ε, ´ them to rise up (  43.4). Similarly, when he gathers the widows into the Ephesian theater to heal them and show Christ’s power, John says he will be ’ “raising them up” (   ω, 33.11). Converts in this text are not shown being baptized, but rather being raised up, resurrected. Paul Schneider suggests that “resurrection” may have a sacramental connotation in the Acts of John. He points out that when John cursed Satan and instructed him to keep away from Christian life, he included in his list of Christian practices, such as fastings, prayers, baptism, and eucharist, “their resurrection to God” (84.13–14; Schneider 1994: 249). This spiritual, metaphorical understanding for resurrection reflected in the Acts of John is not exceptional in the spectrum of beliefs that existed in the period.16 Numerous commentators have pointed out its correspondence with Tertullian’s description of his adversaries: ˘

They say that which is commonly supposed to be death is not really so, namely, the separation of body and soul: it is rather the ignorance of God, by reason of which man is dead to God, and is no less buried in error than he would be in the grave. Wherefore that also must be held to be the resurrection, when a man is reanimated by access to the truth, and having dispersed the death of ignorance, and being endowed with new life by God, has burst forth from the sepulcher. (Res. 19). In this paradigm, resurrection is not a future event, a return to life in a reconstituted body, but an event realized in the present by spiritual change, by recognizing Jesus’ call. This conception of resurrection is eminently spiritual; it is very far from a concept of a raised material body.

Resurrection in the Acts of Peter The case is very different in the Acts of Peter, as its scene featuring multiple resurrections evidences.17 Here Peter and Simon Magus enter into a contest in miracle working. Again three resurrections occur in quick succession. In this narrative, however, the material reality of death and its loss is much more starkly conveyed than was the case in the Acts of John. To begin the contest, the prefect orders Simon to cause a slave, a favorite of the emperor, to die and then orders Peter to raise him. Simon speaks a word into the boy’s ear, and he dies. Before Peter can resurrect him, a poor widow comes forward, telling of her dead son. She laments the loss this death has meant for her: “I had only one son, by the labor of his hands he provided for me; he lifted me up; he carried me. Now he is dead, 149

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who will give me a hand?” (25). The mother emphasizes the real material difference her son made in her life. Peter agrees to help her, and thirty young men volunteer to carry her back to get her son. This text eliminates the vagueness around death seen in the Acts of John. It explicitly authenticates the youth’s death: “And the young men who had come examined the nose of the boy to see if he were really dead. When they perceived he was dead they comforted the mother” (25). This story precisely and carefully establishes the reality of death, expressly conveying its somber consequences, a mother’s sorrow and material loss. The widow’s son is carried back to the forum, where meanwhile Peter has empowered Agrippa to raise up the dead slave. Peter then raises the widow’s son, emphasizing the tangible benefits his renewed life will bring to his mother and the community: “Young man arise and walk with your mother as long as you can be of use to her. Afterward you shall be available to me … and serve as a deacon and bishop” (27). Spiritual change is not the primary focus here, but rather the substantive difference a physical resurrection can make: a mother no longer in need, a community with secured leadership. This resurrection may have spiritual implications, but its material effects are equally important. At this point in the scene (28), another mother of a dead son (in this case, a senator) arrives and begs Peter to raise her son. Peter agrees, but when the body, preceded by its burial riches, arrives, Peter first challenges Simon to raise it. Simon has some success; the body lifts its head, opens its eyes, and bows to Simon. The crowd is swayed by Simon’s accomplishment, but Peter chastises them for being foolish, “since you seemingly believe that a dead man rose who has not risen.” For, as Peter contends, real life is manifested in the physical and the social: “Let the dead man speak, let him rise, let him untie the grave band from his chin, let him call to his mother” (28). When Simon is forced to move away from the corpse, it falls back into death. Peter then raises the young senator into full physical being: walking, talking, and donating to the church community (29). Again the narrative takes care to corroborate the body’s dead state. Simon’s ability magically to manipulate the corpse underlines its state as simply that of a lifeless object, a thing, open to exploitation. In both examples of the raised sons in the Acts of Peter, the focus is not on spiritual change alone, but on a return to full physical, bodily, and social activity. In this text, resurrection never slights the body, its ability to function as body, to labor and to serve. Resurrection may carry metaphorical implications in the Acts of Peter, but in contrast to the Acts of John, death’s material reality and significance are a parallel concern throughout the narrative.

Correlation of incarnation and resurrection beliefs with social attitudes I have proposed that the Christians in the second century who advocated for a material Jesus and a material resurrection worked to resist the operating social hierarchy that depreciated persons identified with the material body. 150

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In this paradigm, the Acts of Peter should show more concern than the Acts of John for people who were traditionally demeaned on the basis of their association with the body – the non-elite. The Acts of Peter should also contest the ingrained social attitudes structuring Greco-Roman society and manifest a less hierarchical and more inclusive conception of community. In fact, a reading of the two texts supports the view that incarnation and resurrection beliefs are correlated with social attitudes.

Treatment of the nonelite As János Bolyki has observed, the ambience of the Acts of John is expressly the world of the upper class: “Wealthy men and their wives – even the leaders of the city – dominate the scene” (1995: 35). Bolyki notes that even the one servant featured in the text, Fortunatus, is specifically designated a steward (ε’ ´ oo, 70.5); he is not a simple house servant, but an overseer. In the Acts of John, the only episode with an explicit social component is the healing of the widows at Ephesus? (30–6).18 In this scene, John reproaches the Ephesians for the sorry state of their poor widows; he has found that only four out of sixty are healthy (30.4–5). John then offers a homily on charity, reminding them that even kings, rulers, and tyrants go naked from this world, liable to everlasting punishment (36.11–13). Beyond this episode, social issues receive scant attention in the Acts of John. In this text that denies Jesus a body and regards resurrection as a spiritual event, the physical situation and needs of believers are not a focus. The Acts of Peter provides a striking contrast; social concerns permeate the text.19 Junod and Kaestli, for example, provide a list of just the instances in the Acts of Peter that correspond with the single scene in the Acts of John showing John ministering to the widows. (1983: 2. 45, n. 1). In the Acts of Peter, Marcellus, the senator, is described as having ministered to the orphans and widowed of Rome and is shown opening his house to strangers and the poor (8). Later, after Peter has driven Simon from his house, Marcellus gathers the widows and elderly in his home and gives each a gold piece (19). In another scene, Marcellus, Peter, and the other Christians minister to the widows, offering them refreshment and a place to stay (22). Peter also asks the wealthy mother of the risen senator to give money to the widows (29). The necessity to care for and support the have-nots is a theme repeatedly returned to in the Acts of Peter. The narrative also offers an antithetical social comment: those without the faith are depicted as more prone to mistreat those of low status. After Simon subverts Marcellus, for example, Marcellus no longer welcomes strangers, but beats them away from his door (8). Simon himself apparently mistreats slaves. When Simon leaves Marcellus’ house, Marcellus’ slaves attack Simon because of the distress he caused them. They beat and stone him and even pour chamber pots over his head (vasa stericoribus plena 14; 61.20). The narrative notes that the slaves justified their revenge as both worthy and the will of God (14). This reference to the slaves’ opinions and the indication of God’s specific approval 151

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of their actions are both signs of this narrative’s uncommon attentiveness to the attitudes of slaves.20

Diversity and superiority The Acts of Peter explicitly notes the diversity and inclusiveness of the Christian community. It carefully itemizes its multistatus composition: “The whole crowd of the brethren came together, rich and poor, orphans and widows, the powerful and the weak” (36). The Acts of John, however, intimates a community with an implicit hierarchy. The treatment of the Lord’s polymorphy in each narrative manifests these different perspectives. As David Cartledge has suggested, polymorphy in the Acts of John projects a hierarchy, while in the Acts of Peter it fosters inclusiveness (1986: 66). John and his brother James, for example, experience seeing Jesus in different forms at the same time. In each case, the Lord presents as a more mature figure to John. Paul Schneider has read these different manifestations as indications of John’s special and greater capacity to receive the Lord and his superior understanding.21 John himself alludes to his superiority when he explains his need to adapt his knowledge to his listeners’ capacities: “I indeed am able neither to set forth to you nor to write the things which I saw and heard. Now I must adapt them to your hearing and in accordance with everyone’s capabilities” (88.3–5). The apostle has special knowledge and must condescend to his listeners so that they may glimpse the Lord’s glory (´o, 88.7). John continues to emphasize his special status, as he relates how James and Peter became angry with him at the Transfiguration because he had spoken with the Lord and how he refused to answer their questions, saying only, “This you shall learn if you ask him” (91.7–8). Peter also has occasion to describe his experience at the Transfiguration when he comes upon a Gospel passage being read on the topic at Marcellus’s house. He immediately rolls up the Gospel and begins to discourse upon it (20; 66.30). He explains that Jesus had taken on human form out of his compassion for humankind (misericordia 20; 67.6).22 The incarnation (absent in the Acts of John) is a sign of God’s mercy, so that humans might be saved despite their limited vision, as “each saw as his capacity permitted” (20: 67.9–10).23 In the Acts of Peter, it is not the apostle with his special knowledge who condescends to his listeners but, rather, the Lord who condescends to all humans and takes on human form out of his desire to be present for all. Peter does not appropriate any superior insight for himself; rather, he emphasizes everyone’s limits before the Lord’s being. Unlike John, who is depicted at the Transfiguration as able to see and hear more than his companions, Peter describes himself as falling down, struck blind by Jesus’ brilliance. But the Lord helps him up, appearing in a form he can bear (20). Just as John is portrayed as superior to his companions at the Transfiguration, the Acts of John appears to share its society’s hierarchical conviction that some persons are inherently more worthy than others. This hierarchical stance is particularly evident in what have been called the interpolated chapters (94–102, 109), 152

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but this attitude occurs throughout the narrative.24 In these chapters, the Lord himself instructs John in hierarchy when, supposedly hanging on the cross, he appears to him in a cave on the Mount of Olives. The Lord indicates John’s privileged knowledge compared with that of the crowd: “John, to the crowd below I am being crucified … but to you I am speaking” (97.8–10). The Lord explains he, Jesus, is not what they call him: “which is lowly (ε `o) and not worthy of me” (99.6–7). This lowly and unworthy term appears to be human body. Jesus explains that the crowd around the cross below is of a lower nature (\ ω ` ´ ϕ ς, 100.1–2) and tells John to ignore “the many” and disdain those outside the mystery (100.10–11). The Lord’s words mark John’s superior insight and position and imply a hierarchical community structure; some are by nature lower than others.25 The Lord explains that those who would know him, know him as a kinsman ` 101.6). His words suggest that believers should recognize a spiritual (ες, affinity with the Lord.26 They are related to the Divine and thus have a special position. John later describes himself laughing at the multitude because of what the Lord has told him about them (Luttikhuizen 1995). It is well known that some in the second century called themselves Christians, and like John in the Acts, held themselves as superior to the general Christian community.27 With this attitude, John and these Gnostic Christians would seem simply to remap upon the Christian community the traditional hierarchal assumptions about social hierarchy. In contrast, the Acts of Peter features not the kinship of some humans with the Divine, but rather the universal and inherent weakness of the human condition. Peter explicitly defines himself to ensure that the Romans do not mistake him for a divine figure. Before his contest in the forum, Peter asserts both his humanity and his failures: “Romans, I am one of you, I have human flesh and am a sinner” (carnem portans humanam sed peccator, 28; 74.29–30). Peter emphasizes his material being (carnem) and his sins. Sins and their forgiveness provide a major theme in this narrative.28 The plot develops from Peter’s mission to come to Rome to win back to the faith the Pauline Christians who have apostatized because of Simon’s inducements. When he first addresses these Christians, Peter reminds them of God’s mercy. He had sent his son into the world, moved by his compassion for humankind (7; 53.28). Peter also reminds them of his own failures. Although he himself had witnessed miracles, he denied the Lord, not once but three times (et non tantum semel, sed et ter 7; 54.3). He reassures them: “But the Lord did not blame me, he turned to me and had mercy on the infirmity of my flesh” (infirmitatem carnis 7). Peter’s vision of God’s compassion comforts these fallen Christians, and they repent. In his address, Peter also recalls his own miracle experience of walking upon the water. Later Marcellus mentions that Simon had used this very episode and Peter’s doubt upon the water to challenge his faith. Such reiterated references to Peter’s failings permeate the narrative and present him as a model for God’s persistent compassion. Marcellus, the senator, offers another example of human failing. He had supported the Christian community until 153

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Simon perverted him. A talking dog Peter sent to castigate Simon persuades Marcellus of the apostle’s power, and he begs for forgiveness (9–10). Peter forgives and embraces Marcellus (11). But almost immediately, Marcellus again fails in his faith, fearful of reprisals after a demon breaks a statue of the Caesar. Peter rebukes him: “I see you are not the man you were a few minutes ago when you said you were ready to spend everything for the salvation of your soul” (11). Nevertheless, Peter allows Marcellus to reform the statue.

Worthiness and forgiveness The liberality of the Lord’s and Peter’s forgiveness and compassion for human weakness are touchstones in the Acts of Peter. No one is exempt; there is no hierarchical ordering. The apostle and the senator are as vulnerable to failure as others. The Acts of John offers that some Christians are superior to others on the basis of their heightened spirituality, but in the Acts of Peter, all are equalized in their common fallibility. The message of these Acts is not the divine kinship of humans, but their collective infirmity. The Acts of John in general reflects a less generous attitude toward human failing. At the Transfiguration, for example, when John disturbs the Lord at prayer, Jesus turns on John in the appearance of a small man and pulls his beard. John describes how he was in pain for thirty days. When he questions what a beating would feel like, if such a slight tug could hurt so much, the Lord warns him in the future “not to tempt him who is not to be tempted” (90.21–2). The Lord in this narrative is quick to punish and seemingly not forbearing of offense, although John praises his “patience” (77.18). The scene in Drusiana’s tomb may even intimate that repentance and salvation are not an option for all. At Drusiana’s tomb, recall that two men were resurrected, Callimachus and Fortunatus, but only one is saved. Both men were clearly sinners. Callimachus, described as one of the most prominent young men of Ephesus (73.10), had desired necrophilia with Drusiana, and Fortunatus, “the steward,” had abetted him. After Callimachus is raised, he tells about the voice he heard declaring his resurrection to a new life, and then he repents, falls at John’s feet, and is embraced by the apostle (76–8). The case is quite different for the second sinner.29 When Drusiana first proposes that that Fortunatus be raised, Callimachus objects, as the voice he heard did not mention Fortunatus. Callimachus concludes, ’ “If he were good ( ` oς), God out of mercy would have certainly raised him through the blessed John. He knew that the man should have a bad death” (81.7–9). Fortunatus is raised, but he wishes he were still dead and runs away. John announces that Fortunatus has not changed for the good (84.2) and condemns him as Satan’s offspring. His words suggest that Fortunatus by his very nature was never capable ’  oς ´ ´ of repentance: “O nature, naturally unsuited for the better” ( ’  ϕ ς ϕ `oς `o ε o, 84.2–3; see Bolyki (1995: 32). In John’s view, Fortunatus is from another root; he has another nature, as Satan’s issue (84.10), and John asks Christ to remove all such issue from the Christian community. The message in this ˘

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vignette appears to be that some humans by their very nature are prohibited from repentance and salvation. This explains why, as Callimachus said, the voice he heard during his death experience never mentioned Fortunatus. Resurrection from physical death would be wasted upon Fortunatus, as he is incapable of spiritual life. As the narrative comments, “[God] knew that the man should have a bad death” (81.8–9). In contrast, Peter lays a much less adamant denunciation upon Simon, another who is called a child of the devil (28). Peter hopes that he will repent, “for God does not remember evil deeds” (28). When Simon continues to threaten the faith of the Roman converts by flying over the city, Peter appeals to the Lord to stop him. In his prayer, Peter carefully specifies that he does not want Simon killed but simply disabled. Peter’s attitude toward Simon keeps open the possibility of his repentance. Neither Peter’s words nor his actions suggest he believes that Simon is incapable of salvation. By describing Fortunatus as, by his very nature, unsuited for becoming better (84.2–3), the Acts of John again reinscribes the hierarchical thinking of the contemporary society that restricted some people from a full moral life. In fact, the scene at Drusiana’s tomb can be read as one more refiguration of the most conventional of the elitist social paradigms of imperial society. Two sinners are represented as raised; one proves worthy of salvation, one does not. The worthy man, Callimachus, also happens to be wellborn, one of the most prominent men of his city. The unworthy man, Fortunatus, is a servant, most likely a slave. This episode not only does nothing to challenge the society’s traditional hierarchical assumptions, it actively reinforces them. Characters assume their traditional social roles. The wellborn turn out to be naturally more suited to be better than their social inferiors. So Callimachus is able to use his second chance, but Fortunatus is proved to be naturally unsuited for a better life. This episode, in fact, could be read to imply that favor and kindness are wasted on the nonelite; Fortunatus just throws away his second chance. On the basis of this episode, the Acts of John appears almost reactionary, as if written to counter more egalitarian models of Christianity.

Conclusion The scenes with multiple resurrections in each of the Acts display their different social perspectives. The Acts of Peter includes resurrections from diverse status positions; a slave, a poor youth, and a rich one are raised up. In the Acts of John, in contrast, two of the three raised are wealthy, and the other, a servant, proves unworthy of his resurrection. The two texts reflect inherently different positions toward inclusiveness and hierarchy. The Acts of John displays the bias for hierarchical thinking innate in the society as a whole, and again a servant turns out to be inherently less worthy than an elite person. The Acts of Peter, in comparison, moves toward a more inclusive perspective. These respective social attitudes, moreover, appear to correlate with the texts’ different beliefs about the 155

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nature of Jesus’ body and of human resurrection. The Acts of John represents a Jesus without a stable, material human body and uses human resurrection primarily as a trope for spiritual change. This text offers little challenge to traditional social assumptions about status and community. The Acts of Peter, in contrast, represents a human, material Jesus. It testifies to his birth, death, and resurrection, his eating and drinking, and his suffering. This narrative also focuses on the physical and social aspects of human resurrections. The Acts of Peter, in turn, subverts traditional hierarchies based on status and offers a more inclusive and egalitarian notion of community through its focus of the equality of all humans in their shared dependence on the Lord’s mercy. In summation, Christians advocating for a material resurrection seem to more sharply challenge the hierarchical ideology operating in their contemporary society than those Christians adhering to a more spiritual understanding of Jesus’ body and the human resurrected body.

Notes 1 Minucius’ text included in Tertullian (196), Apology; De Spectaculis, trans. T. R. Glover et al.; LCL 250; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. 2 For the relationship among the various Acts, see Jones (1993) with its lists of parallels. For the relationship between the Acts of John and the Acts of Peter, see MacDonald (1993), Perkins (1993), Pervo (1997), MacDonald (1997), and Lalleman (1998a) (with list of parallel passages). 3 Lalleman (1998a) presents an excellent overview of the structure of the Acts of John. Lalleman reviews the debate around the “Gnosticism” of the Acts of John (1998a: 30–9). See Schneider 1991b and 1994 for his discussion of the relationship between the third section and the rest of the Acts. The Acts of Peter seems to know the Acts of John in its full version; see Lalleman (1995: 111, n. 52). 4 Lalleman (1998a: 206, citing Weigandt (1961: 39), notes Peter Weigandt’s argument that the Acts of John is the “classic docetic text.” 5 For discussions of polymorphy, see Cartledge (1986: 53–66); Lalleman (1995: 97–118). Origen also refers to a preresurrection polymorphy; he says that Jesus’ propensity to appear differently explains why Judas had to kiss him in order to identify him (Contra Cels. 2.64). 6 References to chapters in the Acts of John and Peter will appear in the text. References to the Acts of John are to the chapter and line number in the Junod and Kaestli edition. References to the Acts of Peter are to the chapter number (Lipsius and Bonnet 1959). The translations of Acts of John and of Peter are based on Elliott and James (1993) and Stoops (forthcoming). Schneider (1991a: 59–62) suggests the different ages of Jesus seen by perceivers reflect the spiritual maturity of the viewers. John is more spiritually mature, so he sees an older Jesus. Lalleman (1995: 105) contests this suggestion on the grounds that Jesus in fact appears in multiple forms to John, first as a youth and next as an old man: “Judged from that point of view, John’s faith can only be said to be unstable.” 7 Lalleman (1998a: 193) offers an interesting interpretation of what Christ means when he says he did not suffer and he suffered in the Acts of John. Lalleman explains this suffering: “He has come to share man’s instability and errantry (96.4–6) …. Specific qualities of the Lord’s suffering are his descent from heaven and his incompleteness as a result of his members not being unified.”

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8 All the sections of the Acts of John exhibit the same Christomonism; there is no distinction drawn between Christ and God. Christ’s humanity is downplayed. The Acts of Peter is less consistent in its Christology, but see chapter 39 for a similar assimilation of Christ and God. 9 In the Acts of Peter, to demonstrate the reality of a dried fish brought back to life (a resurrection), the narrative notes that the fish not only swam, but also ate bread thrown to it (13). Eating seems to be considered a persuasive proof of life. Schoedel (1985) notes that the description of Jesus in the Epistle of Ignatius to the Trallians, “who was truly born, both ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was truly crucified and died” (9.1) appears quasi-credal. 10 The Acts of John does not use the Hebrew Scriptures, but the Acts of Peter references their prophecy of the birth of Jesus: “His birth who can declare it” (Isa 53.8). “Behold a Virgin shall conceive in her womb” (Isa. 7.13–14). See Stoops (1997: 57–86) for a discussion of these texts and other Biblical citations in the Acts of Peter. 11 For the absence of references in the Acts of John to the life and death of Jesus, see Lalleman 1998: 163–4 . 12 For resurrections in the Acts of John, see Bolyki (1995: 15–35); Gallagher (1991); Lalleman (1998: 162–5 and passim). 13 Gallagher (1991: 18) claims that “the passage from death to life is the leitmotiv of the Acts of John and the clearest understanding of conversion” (18). 14 See Bolyki (1995: 30) and Lalleman (1998: 163–5). 15 These deaths appear to relate to the scheintod motif in the Greek romance. Junod and Kaestli (1983: 547–51) discuss the connections between the Acts of John and the romance genre. 16 Whether this position is “gnostic” or not is not important to my discussion. See Williams (1996: 29–51 for the problems with the designation “gnostic.” In the second century, many who are considered gnostic defined themselves as Christians. My interest is in the connection of a belief in material resurrection with more egalitarian social attitudes. 17 See Thomas (1998) for the narrative construction of this scene. 18 Cf. Junod and Kaestli (1983, 2.456–65.) 19 See Perkins (1995: 121–41); Stoops (1986: 91–100). 20 Most studies of slavery (cf. Bradley 1984, 1994 and Glancy 2002) judge Christianity’s effects on the institution of slavery as minimal. Slavery was most often used as a metaphor for sin (Martin: 1990). This passage discussing the revenge of Marcellus’ slaves on Simon is certainly not radical; it notes that the slaves had permission for their attack on Simon (accepta potestate), but it does show an unusual concern for a slave perspective. Eubola’s slaves also are shown to incur torture because of Simon’s actions (17). 21 Lalleman (1998a: 105) contests Schneider’s point, but since so much else in this text supports its innate hierarchy and John’s superiority, the fact that John always sees the more mature vision of Jesus suggests that again he is being depicted as more spiritually capacious than others. 22 Vouaux (1922: 341, n. 3) recognizes that the text’s statement here that Jesus took on a “another form,” “an image of man” (effigie hominis videri 20) might indicate doceticism, but he suggests the phrase reflects the imprecision of Christological terms of this period. 23 Pervo (1997: 50) sums up that in the Acts of Peter, “Incarnation was but condescension to human weakness.” 24 See Schneider (1994: 241–69). This section has often been termed gnostic, and it does show similarities with attested gnostic themes, especially Valentinian themes. For gnostic correspondences, see Junod and Kaestli (1983: 2: 581–632; 660–8; Luttikhuizen 1995; and Lalleman 1998a, 30–8, 199–215. While this section of the Acts of John does seem to include more overtly gnostic themes, the text throughout reflects a spiritual understanding for Jesus’ body and for human resurrection.

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25 Some Valentinian sources reflect a hierarchical ranking of humans, divided into hylics, psychics, and pneumatics. In line with our observations about the material body, note that the lowest and unredeemable category is the material. 26 This perhaps explains the Lord’s comment about some of the chosen who have not understood him: “they are still men” (92.8). It is only when people come to realize their real spiritual nature, that they are divine, that they will understand the Lord. This notion is the foundation of many of the historical gnostic systems; see Rudolph (1983: 92–110). 27 Some of the so called Gnostics are said to take this position. See, for example, Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 1.8.3. 28 Poupon (1988) has suggested that this emphasis on the multiple opportunities for repentance is the work of a later redactor in the context of the controversy over the treatment of lapsi. I am not persuaded of this argument. The theme of failings in faith is too central to Peter’s representation to need to be explained as the work of a redactor; moreover the theme structures the entire work in too constitutive a manner to be read as a late addition. Stoop (1997: 70) and Luttikhuizen (1998: 40), “I doubt these are late or about lapsi,” also disagree with Poupon’s position. 29 Poupon (1988: 4376) points out the similarities in the depictions of Marcellus and Callimachus in the respective Acts. Cf. Lallemann (1998b) for a critique of my comparison of Marcellus, Callimachus, and Fortunatus because they the latter two were not lapsi; his point has merit. I submit, however, that about the point of the generosity of repentance for sinners in the Acts of Peter, the comparison still holds.

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If Christian texts emphasizing a material resurrection promote social inclusiveness, do they also provide a disturbing precedent? The account of the Passion of Perpetua, in which a young woman, a new mother, a beloved daughter, gives no heed to her father’s pleas or her child’s needs but instead asserts that her commitment to Christianity requires her to die, gives one pause. Does valorization of this text and similar examples of a willing witness unto death lead toward the slippery slope that ends with the aggressive acts of witnessing that trouble contemporary times?1 This chapter suggests the contrary: the Passion of Perpetua, along with the Christian discourse providing its context, offers an opening that, if it had been pursued, would have gone far to assuage the violence that many maintain is the “real,” the recurring traumatic kernel, at the center of every historical society.2

A real universal Through its representation of martyrs – two of them women: Perpetua, a lactating mother, and Felicitas, pregnant and giving birth in prison – the Passion of Perpetua offers an opposing universal. This narrative, with its focus on birth, nurture, torture and death, proclaims and reminds us that the vulnerable body is the real universal shared by all humans in all historical periods. As Judith Butler explains, to have a body is to be vulnerable “to a range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other” (2004: 31)3 For Butler, the recognition that we live “in a world of beings who are by definition physically dependent on one another, physically vulnerable to one another,” should “provide the basis for a re-imagining of community, one based on interdependence and the acceptance of shared human vulnerability”(Butler 2004: 27, 43). Yet, obvious as it is, human communities traditionally have rejected this shared vulnerability as a universal. Rather than viewing the body as a basis for community, as we have seen, societies instead have employed the body to justify and commodify their stratified hierarchies and to legitimate unequal rankings of the worth and value of various groups. 159

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Cultures reflect their deep anxiety about humans’ essential animalistic nature by engaging in the “shady social practice” of disavowing their own embodiment and displacing the body onto others, who then become defined as dirty, defiled, and disgusting. (Nussbaum 2003: 74). This displacement has profound effects for sustaining violence. Projection of the body onto others causes these other people to be viewed as less fully human, more animal, than the privileged group and thus opens these others to the same disregard and susceptibility to violence that animals experience (Asad 1997: 287) Disgust creates categories of “humans not regarded as humans” and thus restricts the very conception of the human (Butler: 2004: 33–7). The perpetration of violence relies precisely on this “derealization” (Butler’s term) of the full humanity of others. They are not human, but scum; not victims, but criminals or enemies. By allowing some in a society to “de-realize” the full humanity of others, disgust represses the recognition that the body instantiates: the common vulnerability all humans share. Before any community based on interdependence and the acceptance of shared vulnerability can be created, then, all members of a society must acknowledge their own vulnerable bodies and accept the universality of this common state.

The worth of the body On the basis of its ascetic trajectory, early Christianity has been critiqued for its “hatred” of the body (Armstrong 1986: 20–4). In their claim for the inherently bodily nature of every person, some groups of Christians, however, as we have seen, were involved rather in the project of valorizing the body, of refusing to find it intrinsically shameful, or allowing it to be used as the basis for shaming others in their society. The Passion of Perpetua provides an example of how the polemic of certain Christians of the second and early third centuries precisely confronts the shame associated with the natural body.4 The writings of Tertullian, close in both chronology and geography to the Passion of Perpetua, provide a context for elucidating the Passion’s focus on the maternal body and for demonstrating the importance of this maternal body in the period’s polemics of disgust. In this chapter I argue that the centrality of the female body and human birth processes in the debates of the time calls into question the historical veracity of the Passion’s emphasis on lactation and parturition in its portraits of the two women martyrs.5 Their depictions are so rhetorically pertinent to the discourse of the period in Carthage as evidenced by Tertullian as to make suspect the women’s authenticity as real persons. Their representations seem to coincide too closely with the theological polemics of the period not to have been crafted to fit a specific historical argument. When cultures disavow their vulnerable bodies and project them onto less dominant groups, women’s bodies have been a favorite target. Butler describes how the transcendent male subject traditionally referenced in cultures “disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as feminine” 160

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(Butler 1999: 16). Societies traditionally have read the female body as the most physical (i.e. animalistic), hence shameful, body. Tertullian provides evidence that those opposing a human body for Christ took special aim at the female body and its processes, especially birth and lactation. Birth processes and infant caretaking, for example, appear to have been a staple of Marcion’s argument against a material Christ.6 Tertullian insists, however, that Christ needed a real birth as a guarantee of his real flesh and that Christ’s birth and material nature revoked any shame associated with the material body. Tertullian’s defense of Christ’s human body thus explicitly challenges his culture’s association of the body with shame and contempt.7 In this context, Tertullian can accuse Marcion of “halving human salvation” (dimidiatio salutis) by denying the resurrection of the flesh (Marc. 1.24).8 Tertullian acknowledges the repulsion that maternal birth processes could evoke; indeed, he uses this common reaction to dispute the legitimacy of Marcion’s Christ. Tertullian insists that Marcion’s Christ cannot be the one referred to in the scriptural citation “Whoso shall be ashamed of me, of him also shall I be ashamed” (Luke 9.26), for Marcion’s Christ had experienced nothing anyone could find shameful. Tertullian proclaims that it is his Christ, rather, who has cause for shame, “as the heretics themselves attest with their continual taunts about the squalor of his birth and babyhood and the indignity of his flesh” (Marc. 4.21.10). Using images that likely reflect Marcion’s jibes about Jesus’ shameful birth, Tertullian enumerates the indignities that Marcion’s Christ did not undergo. He never was conceived in a womb, never was called flesh or fetus, never spilled on the ground through the sewer (cloacam) of a body with all the uncleanness of the months in the womb, never had his cord cut, never made a mess on his mother’s lap or nuzzled her breasts (Marc. 4.21.11).9 Tertullian thus finally asks, “What of all this applies to your Christ, Marcion, as a thing deserving of shame (confusionis)?” (Marc. 4.21.11). Marcion, according to Tertullian, disdains everything associated with birth processes: “revile that in which flesh and soul begin to be: characterize as a sewer the womb … continue your attack on the unclean and shameful torments of child bearing, and after that on the dirty, troublesome, and ridiculous management of the new born child” (Marc. 3.11.7).10 In his treatise on Christ’s flesh, Tertullian suggests that Marcion rejects the incarnation as shameful (indignam; Carn. Chr. 4.1): “Attack the nastiness (spurcitias) of the genital elements in the womb, the filthy curdling of moisture and blood, and of the flesh to be nourished for nine months in the same mire (caeno) … You shudder, of course, at the child poured out with its afterbirth and smeared with it” (Carn. Chr. 4.1–2). Tertullian concludes his inventory of Marcion’s castigations of birth and its processes by asking Marcion, “Yet how were you born? You hate a human being born: how can you love anyone?” (Odisti nascentem hominem, et quomodo diligis aliquem?; 4.2). With this question, Tertullian challenges the foundation of all the mechanisms of disgust and shame for the body that work to divide humans. Only by repressing one’s own bodily nature can one despise others on its basis. 161

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The shared human body, if accepted rather than projected outward, provides the basis for a community of vulnerability and interdependence. Tertullian’s question “How were you born?” recalls that no human escapes either the physicality or the dependency of birth and infanthood. Tertullian explains that Christ, through his unqualified acceptance of materiality and human physical processes, annulled all the shame associated with the body. Unlike Marcion, Tertullian’s Christ did love the human who “was curdled in uncleanness in the womb, who was brought forward through shameful organs, who took nourishment through organs of ridicule” (Certe Christus dilexit hominem illum inmuditiis in utero coagulatum, illum pudenda prolatum, illum per ludibria nutritum; Carn. Chr. 4.3). In fact, Christ loved humans enough to come down and redeem them at great price (4.4) and, loving them, he also had to value their “nativity and flesh” (4.3). Tertullian reprimands Marcion, “If these [nativity and flesh] are the human whom God has redeemed, who are you to make them a cause of shame (erubescenda) to him who redeemed them or to make them beneath his dignity, when he would not have redeemed them unless he loved them?” (4.4). Tertullian explains that Christ has reformed nativity from death by a heavenly regeneration and he has succored flesh from every distress, leprosy, blindness, palsy, demon possession, even death: “So why would he be ashamed to be born in it?” (nasci in illam erubescit; 4.4). These passages resonate with the language of shame traditionally evoked in Greco-Roman ideology used for the material body. Tertullian, however, announces that the physical realities of Christ’s incarnation have revoked such shame. God, as Tertullian insists, underwent the insults of nature (contumelias), “was born, born, moreover, of a virgin, born with a body of flesh” (Carn. Chr. 4.6), so no one any longer has any reason to be ashamed of the body.11 To prove that Christ had received real flesh from a real womb, Tertullian takes no discomfort in citing the most explicit physical evidence in support of his position. To demonstrate that Scripture foretold Christ’s fleshly body, Tertullian cites Psalm 22: “And my hope is from my mother’s breast. I have been cast upon thee out of the womb” (Et spes mea ab uberibus matris meae, super te sum proiectus ex vulva; 20.4). This mention of breasts is cited to support the claim that Christ’s flesh was the product of a real pregnancy; otherwise, how could his mother’s body have been able to produce milk? Tertullian invokes experts to support his case: “physicians, biologists bear witness concerning the nature of breasts.” The breasts flow only when menstrual blood has been distilled into milk: “That is why, during lactation, the monthly periods cease” (20.6).12 Tertullian shows no contempt for processes of the feminine body; nursing and the biology of lactation are not, as they were for Marcion, offered as disgusting features, as too obvious a sign of humans’ animal nature and therefore beneath a deity. Tertullian in fact suggests that the body’s very vulnerability is what endears it to Christ: “He loves the flesh, which in so many ways is his neighbor … weak (infirmam), feeble (inbecillam), uncomely (inhonestam)” (Res. 9.3–4).13 162

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Without these vulnerabilities there would have been no occasion for God’s kindness and Tertullian thus rebukes his opponents for their castigation of the flesh: “Why do you reprove the flesh for those attributes which look to God? … I can boldly say if the flesh had not these disabilities, God’s kindness, grace, mercy, every beneficent function of God’s would have remained inoperative” (Quid ea exprobras carni, quaedeum expectant, quae in deum sperant? … Ausim dicere: si haec carni non accidissent, benignitas gratia misericordia omnis vis dei benefica, vacuisset; Res. 9.5). Tertullian here undercuts the prevailing denigration for the body by representing the body neither as a reproach nor as disgusting. Instead, the body – and in particular the vulnerable body – is offered as an object for compassion and an opportunity for succor. The example of Jesus’ real birth in an actual human body unequivocally establishes that to be human is to have a vulnerable body. His acceptance of a body throws into relief the futility of those humans who attempt to disavow their own embodiment and project the body onto some denigrated “others.” Christ’s body is the proof that there are no exceptions. In being born human, even a god had to assume a human body with all the vulnerability to suffering and death that this body implies. Tertullian thus insists that Christ’s body re-inscribes the human body and any shame associated with it. It thus would function also to deconstruct the social hierarchies erected upon the shame associated with body that prevailed in the period. Tertullian’s demonstration of universal bodily vulnerability provides the very foundation that Butler suggests is necessary for a new kind of community, one based on interdependence and the acceptance of shared human vulnerability. Recognition of the vulnerability shared by all humans would destabilize that category so necessary for the perpetration of violence – “humans not regarded as human” (Butler 2004: 33). These writings by Tertullian, especially The Flesh of Christ, The Resurrection of the Dead and Against Marcion, which focus on the nature of Christ’s birth, have been dated to around 208–212 CE.14 The Passion of Perpetua was written around that same time as well, with an accepted date of 203 CE (Amat 1996: 20). Tertullian’s writings therefore testify to a contemporary debate surrounding birth and its processes, thus providing a context for reading the Passion of Perpetua.15 Moreover, although the Passion does not specify the precise location for Perpetua and her companion martyrs’ deaths, the references to a large amphitheater with attached soldiers’ quarters make Carthage the most likely site (Amat 1996: 22–3). This coincidence of date and place suggests that the Passion’s pronounced physical representation of its two women martyrs, one a lactating mother and the other a pregnant woman giving birth in prison, shares an agenda similar to that reflected in some of Tertullian’s writings. The Passion, like the works of Tertullian, affirms the material body even in its most flagrant animal manifestations – giving birth and nursing. The descriptions of Perpetua and Felicitas are indeed so pertinent to the discussions around the body during this period as to intimate that rhetoric rather than historical veracity may underlie the emphasis on nursing and birth in their depictions. 163

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Ideology of martyrdom The importance of martyr texts in the processes of Christian identity formation and self-fashioning are well attested. Reports of martyrdom provided key documents for constructing and promulgating Christian identity. Christian ideology was thus heavily invested in martyr texts and their representations. In this broader discursive context, the authors or editors of such texts might be motivated to shape and to sharpen their narratives to convey more emphatically their fundamental concepts. In this light it is noteworthy that several commentators have raised doubts about the Passion’s authenticity. Thomas Heffernan, on the basis of a careful analysis of tense use in the section purported to be written by Perpetua herself, has challenged this section’s genuineness (1995).16 For instance, the narrative shows obvious signs of having been constructed after the events it records. Possibilities that allow Perpetua herself in a moment of respite to compose a short narrative on the events of her imprisonment can be imagined (Dolbeau 1996). Nevertheless, Heffernan’s analysis provides support for a different interpretation. He concludes that “[t]he character of Perpetua in the Passio is not the ‘authentic’ person, but rather a self that has been deliberately constructed, and one in the process of being mediated by an editor” (Heffernan 1995: 324). The editor’s claim, moreover, that the text was written in Perpetua’s own hand, carries little weight in this historical period of burgeoning pseudepigraphy (Kramer and Lander (2000: 1056))17 . I offer that the emphatic focus on maternity in the representations of Perpetua and Felicitas raises further suspicions regarding the narrative’s historical veracity. This narrative’s enactment of the worth of the birthing body, a topic so significant for the theological debates of the period, suggests that ideology rather than historical events drives this story. One goal of the Christian ideology of the period was to reframe and revalue martyrdoms as exemplary of Christian achievements and perspectives. The Passion’s close correspondence to Tertullian’s recommendations for how “paltry and squalid flesh” (substantiae frivolae ac sordidae; Res. 8.1) comes to win God’s favor suggests that the Passion functions to enact the merit of even the culturally most material and squalid of bodies, the maternal body. The flesh shows its worth, Tertullian proclaims, when “for the faith of the name it is dragged into public and fights it out exposed to public hatred, when it is tormented in prison by darkness and squalor, filth, and rotten food …and finally is executed” (Res. 8.5). Perpetua locates herself in just such a situation: “We were lodged in the prison; I was terrified, as I had never before been in such darkness. Oh what a terrible day! On account of the crowd, the heat was terrible” (Post paucos dies recipimur in carcerem; et expaui, quia numquam experta eram tales tenebras. O diem asperum! Aestus ualidus turbarum beneficio; Pass. 3.5–6). The introduction immediately frames Perpetua in terms of her maternal body: she has a son at the breast (et filium infantem ad ubera; Pass. 2.2).18 Felicitas’s physical state is similarly a focus: “She had been pregnant when she was arrested, and now was in her eighth month” (15.2). Marcion’s description of the maternal 164

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body, as a “sewer” filthy with nastiness and muck, attests to the contempt this body could engender. The Passion, however, featuring two mothers witnessing to their faith and enduring martyrdom, reframes the maternal body and its regard. The focus on Perpetua’s maternity continues in the narrative. She describes herself as tormented with concern for her infant (macerabar; 3.6) and recounts her relief when she is finally able to nurse him (3.7). She gives the baby to her mother and her brother so they will care for him but she suffers until he is returned. Once she receives him back into her care, she rejoices: “Immediately I recovered and was relieved of my worry and concern for the baby. My prison had suddenly become a palace” (3.9). Opponents of a flesh and blood body for Jesus, like Marcion, had mocked the mechanics of infant caretaking as embarrassing, but the Passion portrays Perpetua, this Christian hero, as a mother, carefully supplying physical sustenance to her baby, even as she herself endures hardships and is rushed to court and sentenced to death. The narrative’s focus on Perpetua’s maternity continues as a central motif. Both her father (5.3) and the governor (6.3) beg Perpetua to pity her son and renounce Christianity, but she refuses. Her father takes her baby, but she asks for him back, explaining, “He had gotten used to being nursed at the breast” (Quia consueuerat a me infans mammas accipere; 6.7). Refused the baby, Perpetua describes God’s intervention to avert the problems of such an abrupt weaning: “But as God willed the baby had no further desire for the breast, nor did I suffer any inflammation; and so I was relieved of any anxiety for my child and of any discomfort in my breasts.”19 Commentators have read Perpetua’s self-representation in this section as a renunciation of her motherhood and a move away from her female role toward an embrace of male identity and the spiritual strength it tokens (Miles 1989: 60–63; Castelli 1991). The metaphor of holy women “becoming male” does become an important topos in Christian discourse, signifying women’s spiritual growth and achievement. And Perpetua does envision herself transformed into a man in her final dream, where she sees herself in the arena fighting against a “hideous” Egyptian.20 Yet this single dream apparition ought not overwhelm the primary focus of this narrative, where a mother’s, not a man’s body is central.21 As the narrative demonstrates, Perpetua does not abandon her baby; rather, he is taken from her. His loss is part of the suffering she endures for her confession of faith. Tertullian would read it as one more item in his list, along with imprisonment, torture and death, which shows the flesh publicly exhibiting its worthiness in the face of suffering. Perpetua emphasizes her anxiety (sollicitudine, macerarer) about her baby; she needs God’s intervention in order to assuage her pain, both psychic and physical, and she receives it (God sees to it that her baby no longer needs her breasts and that she suffers no inflammation). The narrative finds nothing shameful about a woman’s physical processes. Rather, it offers baby, mother and breasts, even their potential pain, as objects of God’s attentive care. This section is steeped in a rhetoric of nurture. It depicts Perpetua sentenced to death, in dreadful conditions, yet nevertheless worried about the proper nourishment of her child. In its double depiction of Perpetua as mother and victim, 165

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the narrative offers a stark reminder that, as Butler points out, the body makes humans “physically dependent on one another and physically vulnerable to one another” (2004: 27). Perpetua’s dependent baby receives the appropriate nurture, while Perpetua herself faces violence and death. The narrative instantiates for its readers the violation, the rupture (that violence always brings), of the reality of human interdependence that the maternal-infant bond here images. God himself provides the model of proper nurture, as he exhibits his concern and succor for Perpetua’s loss of her child and her premature weaning. Perpetua’s first dream affirms this image of divine nurture; God is represented in terms that specifically recall the female body and its modality. In her dream, Perpetua climbs a ladder to heaven and reaches a garden to find a tall white-haired man dressed like a shepherd, milking sheep (4.8). He calls her “child” (´εo) and gives her a mouthful of the cheese he milked (de caseo quod mulgebat dedit mihi quasi bucellam; 4.9). Here God’s invocation of her as “child” and the offering of milk evoke the mother-child bond together.22 Again, the narrative stresses that human physical dependency calls for nurture. The vulnerable body’s claim is for sustenance, not violence.23

Focus on the physical The narrative of Perpetua exploits her maternity to emphasize the interdependence and call to nurture that the maternal body signals. In a similar vein, the text then turns to Felicitas’s body, which redirects attention to the physical processes of birth. Felicitas is introduced rather abruptly and again maternity is the focus. The editor reports that Felicitas was concerned that, because of the law against executing pregnant women, she would have to wait and be executed with regular criminals (sceleratos; 15.2) rather than with her Christian companions. Her community, however, offers prayers that are answered by the onset of Felicitas’s birth pains. The narrator notes the difficulty of Felicitas’s premature labor and records the taunts of one of the guards: “You suffer so much now – what will you do when you are tossed to the beasts?” (15.5). Felicitas answers him, “What I am suffering now … I suffer by myself. But then another will be inside me who will suffer for me, just as I will be suffering for him” (15.6). This vignette endorses Christians’ understanding of martyrdom as predicated upon and joined to Christ’s sacrificial death. Robin Darling Young has described how martyrs understood martyrdom as a “highly public sacrificial liturgy,” which offered “a recapitulation of the sacrifice of Christ” (2001: 24, 59) In this light the dismay of Felicitas and her community that she would be executed separately is understandable. Dying alone, deprived of group support and shared experience, Felicitas would lack the ritual and communal liturgical understanding of her death that would have made it bearable. Felicitas’s reply to the jailer exhibits this special nature of the martyr’s death, one that might be especially cherished by women whose childbearing made them so vulnerable to premature natural death. Not by accident, then, Tertullian’s exhortation appears specifically aimed 166

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at women: “Seek not to die in bridal beds, or in miscarriages, or from gentle fevers, but die as a martyr that he may be glorified who suffered for you” (Nolite in lectulis nec in aborsibus et febribus mollibus optare exire, sed in martyriis, uti glorificetur, qui est passus pro vobis; Fug. 9.4). After giving birth, Felicitas relinquishes her baby over to the care of another Christian, who, the narrative notes, “brought her up as her own daughter” (Pass. 15.7), which again evidences concern with proper nurture. In its depiction of Felicitas as a mother who has just newly delivered a child, the narrative continues its emphasis on the merit and glory achieved by this material body in its most flagrantly physical condition. As the group of martyrs marches toward the arena, the two women are described first. The narrative offers Perpetua as the wife of Christ, the cherished daughter of God (ut matrona Christi, ut Dei delicate; Pass. 18.2), but its description of Felicitas’s body vividly insists on her messy corporeal nature: “With them went Felicitas rejoicing that she had safely given birth so that she could fight the beasts, going from blood bath to blood bath, from the midwife to the net fighter, ready to wash after child birth in a second baptism” (18.3).24 With its references to blood and washing, this description taps into the traditional register of disgust associated with the female body only to reject it. It fixes the narrative gaze on the female body marked by all the detritus of the afterbirth, only to see the worth of this body affirmed in the blood of martyrdom, its second baptism.25 This public reinscription of the birthing body presents a compelling affirmation of Christianity’s acceptance of the value of the material body and elucidates its effort to extricate this body from traditional, more negative philosophical constructions. The narrative appeals to the maternal body one final time when it describes the audience’s shock at seeing Perpetua and Felicitas dragged into the arena, in nets, naked: “The crowd shuddered (horruit) to see that one was a delicate girl and the other fresh from child birth with her breasts still dripping milk” (20.2). The narrative presents the crowd’s horror as both a recognition of and a recoiling from the claim that these women’s bodies makes upon them.26 Perpetua’s fragile delicacy displays for all to see the inherent vulnerability of the human body; juxtaposed, Felicitas’s body with its seeping breasts proclaims the bonds of human interdependence that make human bodily life possible.27 By representing the bodies of two women martyrs about to undergo torture and death even as one of them leaks milk, the narrative enacts for its readers, even if the observation was lost on the crowd in the arena, the recognition that “violence is always exploitation of the primary tie,” the tie between infant and nurturer (Butler 2004: 27).28

Conclusions With its physical and redundant portrayal of the merit and honor of these two maternal martyrs, the Passion reflects issues central to the contemporary debates around Christ’s real flesh and his real birth. This correlation raises suspicions that the representation of one or both of the women has been constructed in order to valorize the maternal body featured in these debates. This correlation alone does not allow 167

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a definitive decision regarding the reality reflected in Perpetua’s and Felicitas’ depictions, but it does make this reality less likely. I suspect both descriptions are rhetorical rather than realistic, but Felicitas’ is the more questionable. First, the Perpetua section does not refer to her and, second, a feature of texts with a message is that they make their points redundantly (Suleiman 1983: 159–71). This text’s use of two characters to manifest the same qualities is an example of such redundancy and, since Felicitas is the less developed character, her representation is more likely to result from the exigencies of the narrative’s message. The Christian discourse of some Christians of the early centuries CE represents in unflinching terms the body in its most physical aspects, arguing that God loved this body enough to accept it for himself with all its natural vulnerability. With this move, these Christians undercut one of the most divisive tactics of every society; dominant groups disavow their socially marked bodies and the project this disavowed and disparaged embodiment on the more vulnerable groups in their society29 – women, the lower classes, foreigners or people with different values or behaviors, all the while exempting themselves from that same bodily vulnerability. This tactic allows dominant groups to de-realize the true situation of others suffering in their midst and to refuse the shared vulnerability of the body as a source of community. Some strands of early Christian discourse, however, offer this vulnerability to suffering as the distinguishing mark of its concept of humanity. In his debate with Apelles over Jesus’ real birth, Tertullian repeatedly stresses this point about the human condition. Apelles apparently conceded that Christ did have flesh but nonetheless maintained Christ had not been born. Rather, Christ’s flesh was like that of the angels in the Scriptures when they appeared to humans; it came from some celestial source. Tertullian rejects this idea, for, he suggests, to accept it would be to deny that Christ had truly entered into the human condition and shared in its vulnerability. Apelles’ position would eliminate Christ as a model. For, as Tertullian insists, to be human is to share humanity’s vulnerability and mortality. Tertullian asserts that the difference between these angels and Christ is that they, unlike Christ, had not come to suffer and die: “Never did any angel descend for the purpose of being crucified, of tasting death, and of rising again from the dead … They had not come to die, therefore [they] had no need to be born. Christ, however, having been sent to die, had of necessity also to be born, that he might die. For customarily nothing dies but that which is born. Between nativity and mortality there is a mutual debt. The project of dying is the reason for being born” (Carn. Chr. 6.5–6; cf. Marc. 3.9). With his statement that “the project of dying is the reason for being born” (forma moriendi causa nascendi est), Tertullian emphasizes the inherent vulnerability of every human body. The difference between Jesus’ two natures confirms this universal vulnerability: “The powers of the spirit of God proved him God, the sufferings proved his human flesh” (virtutes spiritus dei deum, passiones carnem hominis probaverunt; Carn. Chr. 5.7). This demonstration of universal vulnerability is precisely what Butler suggested “should provide the basis for 168

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a re-imagining of community, one based on interdependence and the acceptance of shared human vulnerability” (2004: 43). It also corresponds to the Dalai Lama’s definition of the beginning of wisdom: “to realize that all living beings are equal in not wanting unhappiness and suffering and equal in the right to rid themselves of suffering.”30 Recognition of this equality premised on shared vulnerability might mitigate, Butler suggests, the violence that often results from the “derealization” of others’ full humanity. With his emphasis on Jesus’ material body, Tertullian proclaimed this equality in his writings. Moreover, the representation of the death of the mother martyrs – Perpetua and Felicitas – in the arena actualized the vulnerability of all bodies “to a range of touch, a range that includes the eradication of our being at the one end, and the physical support for our lives at the other” (Butler 2004: 31). Known for his rigorous ascetic perspective, Tertullian, nevertheless, conveys not a hatred for the body and its flesh, but a love for and valorization of the fleshly body.31 He insists that Christ loves the flesh and loves it because it is weak, feeble and uncomely (Res. 9.3–4). In a crescendo of approbation, Tertullian conveys how God could never permit the eternal destruction of the flesh, “the work of his own hands, the product of his own skill, the receptacle of his own breath, the queen of his own creation, the heir of his generosity, the priest of his cult, the warrior of his testimony, the sister of his Christ” (Res. 9.2). Tertullian challenges Paul’s supposed stigmatizing of the body (Rom. 7.18), by reminding that Paul also calls members of the community to uplift and magnify God in their bodies (1 Cor. 6.20; Res. 10.4). The Christians in the second and third century who were insisting on the inherent bodily nature of every human person and the resurrection of that body were refiguring the shame traditionally associated with the body. Tertullian’s discussion demonstrates that other Christians, followers of Valentinus and Marcion, for example, held divergent views, more in line with traditional philosophic denigrations of the body and its material nature. Those Christians endorsing the worth of the fleshly body empowered people to demonstrate their commitment and dedication to their Christian identity through bodily expression, ranging from martyrdom to gradations of ascetic practices, Christians were not reflecting a hatred of the body, but introducing an avenue, the body, shared by every person, for enacting their sanctity and showing their prowess and achieving prestige. In the Passion of Perpetua, the free, well-born Perpetua and the slave Felicitas equally win glory and renown in their communities through their heroic bodily witness. As Christianity gained social respectability and persecutions ceased, ascetic practices continue to allow persons, including those without education, position or wealth to claim a social presence on the basis of their bodily discipline.

Notes 1 See Bremmer (2004), Castelli (2004) and Salisbury (2004) for discussions of the relation of early martyr texts to contemporary violent acts of witnessing.

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2 If is italicized because obviously this discourse did not assuage violence; the Passion itself displays the Carthaginian martyrs’ desire for retribution for their suffering (Pass. 18.8–9), but they defer this to God and the last judgment. See Gaddis (2005) for Christian violence. 3 Grace Jantzen (2004: 35–43) makes a related case that the Western tradition with its focus on mortality must shift to a new focus on natality, rejecting our long history of gendered death and violence to embrace a natality that implies embodiment, beauty and creativity, including the “web of relations” that being natal implies: no one is born alone. 4 See Marshall (2005) for a postcolonial interpretation of the relation between the two women martyrs. 5 The loss of Perpetua’s testimony as a historical figure will diminish women’s history. Her function in this narrative, however, which is to figure the imperative of the vulnerable body’s call to interdependence and ethical responsibility, has important implications for the lives of both men and women. Cf. Matthews (2001). 6 Marcion (Carn. Chr. 3.1) claimed that for many people a nativity for a god was either impossible (impossibilem) or unbefitting (inconvenientem). 7 Markus Vinzent (1995, 1997) emphasizes the prominent place of Christ’s resurrection in Marcion’s theology and its implication for humans’ bodily resurrection. 8 Tertullian further asserts that there is no Christian who denies the resurrection (Res. 3.20). English translations of the Resurrection of the Dead, the Flesh of Christ and the Against Marcion are based on E. Evans (Tertullian 1956, 1969, 1972). Texts of Tertullian’s works are taken from CCSL, except Tertullian (1990–2001) and Tertullian (1986). 9 Non vulva licet virginis, tamen feminae, coagulatus … non caro habitus ante formam, non pecus dictus post figuram, non decem mensium cruciatu deliberatus, non subita dolorum concussione cum tanti temporis coeno per corporis cloacam effusus ad terram, nec statim lucem lacrimis auspicatus ex primo retinaculi sui vulnere, nec multum ablutus, nec sale ac melle medicatus, nec pannis iam sepulturae involucrum initiatus, nec exinde per immunditias inter sinus volutatus, molestus uberibus. 10 Tertullian questions how these supposed indignities of birth can be worse than the indignities of death: “Nativity cannot be more undignified than death, infancy than a cross, or [human] nature than scourging or [human] flesh than condemnation” (Marc. 3.11.7). 11 This passage leads into Tertullian’s famous set of paradoxes, which show that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to oppose the wisdom of the world (Carn. Chr. 5.4). 12 For the ancient understandings of the mechanics of lactation, see Flemming (2000: 311–12). 13 Cf. inhonestam with honestiores. 14 Adversus Marcionem likely incorporates even earlier work. Cf. Marc. 4.17. 15 See J. N. Bremmer (2002) for discussion of Perpetua’s diary (with bibliographic survey). 16 Augustine already expressed some suspicions regarding Perpetua’s authorship of the materials attributed to her: Nec illa sic scripsit vel quicumque illud scripsit (Nat. Org. 4.10.12; CSEL 60.1.10). 17 I do not share Kramer and Lander’s skepticism regarding the dating of the Passion. The concern for Christ’s maternity and the debate it engendered in the second and third centuries support dating the narrative to this period. 18 See Castelli (2004: 59–68) on gender implications. See Salisbury (2004: 115–29) on mothers and martyrdom. 19 Et quomodo Deus uoluit, neque ille amplius mammas desiderauit, neque mihi feruorem fecerunt, ne sollicitudine infantis et dolore mammarum macerarer; 6.8. 20 On the Egyptian, see Thompson (1989: 110–13).

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21 Robert (1982: 256–8) suggests that Perpetua’s transformation into a man reflects the necessity of her being male in order to participate in the contest. 22 Bremmer (2002: 103) notes that, when non-parents use the Greek ´εo, they normally stand in a loco parentis role to the addressee …. He also points out the Eucharistic overtone of the dream (104). 23 As described in the Passion, the dream of Saturus, the leader of the group of martyrs, similarly depicts a gesture evoking God’s paternal care. When the martyrs reach heaven, angels lift them up to kiss God, who touches their faces with his hand (Pass. 12.5). Bremmer (2003: 65) notes that “[t]he touching of the faces suggests intimacy, but the absence of reciprocity in kissing also indicates a certain distance between God and the martyrs” See also Amat (1996: 63; 237–8). 24 Item Felicitas, saluam se peperisse gaudens ut ad bestias pugnaret, a sanguine ad sanguinem, ab obstetrice ad retiarium, lotura post partum baptismo secundo. 25 Saturus’s bleeding caused by a leopard’s bite is also noted and called a second baptism (Pass. 21.2). Cf. Tertullian, Bapt. 1.16.1. 26 Castelli (2004: 123) suggests that the narrator in this scene places the reader in the “role of a voyeuristic spectator.” In my reading, the narrator rather seems intent to drain these naked bodies of sexual valence with his characterization of even the crowd’s reaction as one of “shuddering” at the sight. Delicata can certainly carry sexual overtones, but it does not seem to do so here. 27 Amat (1996: 225) suggests that black humor inflects the choice of a cow for the animal that attacks Perpetua. Her suggestion that the reference to a “heifer” in the Greek text is a better choice than “cow” (vacca) understates the prevalence of the theme of lactation in the narrative. 28 I owe to Todd Penner the suggestion that this reference to milk, with its invocation of the maternal bond and the interdependence it connotes, may have a symbolic resonance here. Through this reference the corporate liturgical nature of martyrdom is tied to the visceral (primal/primary) corporality evident in the narrative itself. 29 Butler (1999: 11). This sentence is almost a direct quotation from Butler. Her reference, however, was specifically to males’ projection of the body onto the feminine sphere; yet this tactic is used against many vulnerable groups in societies. 30 Cited by Žižek (2003: 23). 31 See Shaw (1998) for a thorough and nuanced exegesis of the underlying perspectives of Christian asceticism’s relation to the body.

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The way that different social groups were positioning themselves in the early imperial period can be seen in terms of a crucial asymmetry. The “Second Sophistic” as a cultural/social phenomenon was very much invested in the past, whereas those Christians looking forward to their material resurrection were adamantly focused on a utopian future where they would find justice. The futurity and utopianism of Christian apocalyptic discourse is well known and much studied, but positioning this discourse in a cultural frame with the Second Sophistic’s valorization of the past historicizes these aspects and intimates a contemporary debate taking place through competing chronologies.1 This different orientation highlights the importance of chronology in the negotiations around identity that were taking place in this period of emerging empire. The contrast between these two chronological perspectives may help explicate the appeal of Christian visions to others in this historical context.

Imagining a better future In the conclusion of his De Spectaculis (On the Shows), a condemnation of civic performances, Tertullian rapturously envisions the spectacle of the Lord’s arrival (adventus) for the Last Judgment: What a show is near at hand, the return of our Lord, now no object of doubt, now exalted, now triumphant! … Oh the glory of the saints rising again! Oh the kingdom of the just thereafter! What a city, the new Jerusalem! … How vast a spectacle then! What sight shall I wonder at? What will I laugh at? What will I rejoice and exult at? – as I see all those kings whose reception into the heavens was announced, groaning in the lowest darkness … with great Jove himself. (30.1–3). Tertullian goes on to describe his joy, not only at the emperors’ punishments but also at the sight of other political and cultural luminaries – magistrates, philosophers, poets, actors, charioteers, and athletes – all liquefying in flames. Tertullian proclaims the superiority of his spectacles to the contemporary shows 172

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funded by civic beneficence: “What praetor, consul, questor, priest will ever provide such as these out of his liberality?” (30.7). Nietzsche and Gibbon fault this scene for its perceived hypocrisy – a Christian called to a message of love gloating at the sight of adversaries enduring horrific and violent punishments.2 But would Tertullian see himself as gloating over these scenes he describes as “represented through faith in the spirit’s imaginings” (habemus per fidem spiritu imaginante repraesentata (Spect. 30.7). Tertullian ends his treatise with this final comment: “But what are those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor ever entered into the heart of man? I believe things of greater joy than circus, theater or amphitheater” (30). With their quotation of Paul (1 Cor. 2.9), these lines show Tertullian locating his imaginings in the realm of the visionary, “these things revealed to us through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2.10). They signify that Tertullian understood his imaginings as the Spirit’s work, as a vision given to him of the coming age of a reordered world. The Passion of Perpetua provides the context for Tertullian’s perspective. The preface to the Passion, a text filled with representations of Christian dreams and visions, cites the importance of this text for the witness it provides of the continuing activity of the Spirit into contemporary times.3 The preface’s narrator suggests in fact that the power of the Spirit may be stronger now than in the past, since the “last times” are ever closer. Scriptural authority is adduced for this position: “For in the last days, says the Lord, ‘I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh … and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’ ” (Joel 2: 28–9; Pass. Perp 1.4). Tertullian’s reference to Paul’s spiritual language indicates that he locates his violent imaginings within this visionary frame; his visions are not his own but the products of the continuing work of the Spirit in his community.4 Christians situated, as they thought, in the end times were awaiting the coming of the Lord and his justice. It was not their doing or their responsibility that the guilty would be punished. Some of the Passion’s martyrs share Tertullian’s vision and his perspective on a future judgment. The Passion describes three male martyrs using gestures to signal the governor, “You judge us, but God will judge you” (6.1). A salient feature of both Tertullian and the African martyrs’ perspective is its emphatic futurity. Tertullian projects his violent visions into the future, where he firmly sets his hope. As he proclaims earlier in his treatise, “What is our prayer but that of the apostle ‘to leave the world and be at home with the Lord’ ” (Spect. 28; Phil. 1.23).

Recalling an ideal past Although commentators warn that the use of the collective term Second Sophistic must not be taken to imply that the pepaideumenoi, the educated and cultured Greek elite, adhered to some single homogeneous perspective on the past, the determining feature of this movement always remained a “constant pull backwards” to an earlier 173

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historical period (Goldhill 2001: 14). Philostratus shows how often his orators adopt historical persona for their rhetorical performances. Polemo, for example, is described as giving one speech titled “Xenophon thinks he should die with Socrates” and another called “Solon asks his laws to be rescinded after Peisistratus takes a bodyguard” (Vit. soph. 542). This pull of the past draws Polemo, speaking in the first century CE, to assume the role of famous Greeks living many centuries earlier and to use their language and themes. In his two extant speeches, Polemo also takes on a historical role. These exceptionally gory narratives purport to be the speeches of two fathers competing with each other to win civic honors for a son who has died at the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE (Reader 1996). Philostratus explicitly defines his Sophists’ focus on the past; he describes their subject matter as “themes relating to named individuals, which derive from history” (481D; Webb 2006: 44).5 The Second Sophistic with its turn to past events, past linguistic forms and themes, as I have suggested, was instrumental in the formation of a trans-empire ruling elite. And its erudite emphasis on the past provided a standard for setting this elite off from the others in their social world.

Contrasting chronologies Juxtaposing Tertullian and his community’s vision of a future place and the Second Sophistic’s intense re-creation of a past language and milieu highlights the primacy of time manipulations in the imaginaries of these new social constituencies, both cosmopolitan enterprises. For two such very different social constituencies as the Christians and the community of educated, sophistically trained, Greekspeaking elite to be so invested in alternative chronological imaginaries raises questions about the consensus supporting contemporary social and political relations. Their stance recalls the slogan from the May 1968 French uprisings, “Be a realist. Demand the impossible,” invoked by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek as the appropriate response to the seeming invincibility of a contemporary power complex, global capitalism. In this slogan, Žižek reads a rejection of the obligation to be resigned “when one can not even imagine an alternative” (Butler et al. 2000: 321, emphasis in the text). This slogan urges action when there is no clear picture of the ends of action. It declares that the very act of refusal, particularly the refusal of resignation, constitutes a resistance. By refusing to be resigned, “actors find out what is possible by seeing what their resistance opens up” (Hoy 2004: 9–11).6 In their temporal and social imaginaries, both Christians and those educated in sophistic practice appear to be demanding the impossible. They both refuse the figuration of the present and look away, but they look in opposite directions. Comparing these imaginaries may help to illume some aspects of the ideological shifts taking place in this period that prepared the way for the institutionalization of Christianity as a political and social entity.

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The Second Sophistic’s orientation toward the past suggests the limitations of its imaginary: it is locked into the possibilities of the tradition. Its “thinking otherwise” must be restricted to the inspiration of past status quos.7 This imaginary by its very nature provides little space for a significantly refigured future. However manipulated or redeployed, replication remains the heart of the elite Greek imaginary. Elites seldom relish real constitutive change or transformation.8 In contrast, Tertullian offers exultant visions of a new age of the Lord’s return, the resurrection of the saints, the kingdom of the Just, the New Jerusalem, the Day of Judgment, and the punishment of the deserving.9 Tertullian’s projection into the future marks his visions as both a critique of the present and a utopian creation. Despite its violent projections, the Christian imaginary takes a more productive and positive stance. The utopian is always located beyond the horizon of the present. Using Ernst Bloch’s terms, it resides in the “new,” the “Not-Yet,” the “Not-Yet Being,” because “the future is the object of hope, of our deepest and most radical longings – longings that can never be satisfied by the fulfillment of any individual wish … but rather demand a radical reconfiguration of the world as a totality” (Freedman 2001: 74).10 Utopias belong to the future because all societies (up to and including the present), while they may satisfy the longings of various social segments, have not yet achieved a true unalienated collectivity (Jameson 1981: 291).11 The operations of exclusion and inclusion informing all human communities continually defer the creation of such a unity. The very dream of a true totality, however, may be more important than its realization, for universality, like the future, is perpetually deferred.12 Grounded in time, in particular historical and discursive environments, societies repeatedly mistake the dominant group’s standard as the universal, and in every historical society, this affects who counts as human, who gets to speak (Butler et al. 2000: 177–79).13 The power of the utopian statement thus resides not in its particular message or social structures, but in the act of speaking the utopian vision itself (Moylan 1986: 27). For the utopian holds out a promise that the future could be configured differently, and it opens ideas of new possibilities and new inclusions of people and groups whose humanity has gone “unrealized” and whose voices have been unheard (Butler et al. 2000: 39). The very conception of a different future destabilizes the present and the status quo and thus provides a powerful ideological and political message. It proclaims that another world is possible, that changes can occur. In her discussion of Roman executions staged as parts of mythological or historical pageants, Katherine Coleman recognizes that the deposal of people’s lives as entertainment figured these people “as dispensable” (1990: 54), that is, as a category of people excluded from the human community. Tertullian, by his very action of envisioning a reordered world, can be seen to make a claim for people excluded from the present’s dominant paradigm. He speaks for the people like the martyrs in his own city of Carthage, who were pressured at their executions to dress up as priests of Saturn and priestesses of Ceres for the audience’s entertainment

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(Pass Perp. 18.4). Tertullian foresees a future inclusion and vindication for these dispensable people. As the utopian vision attempts to construct a space radically different from the present, the dialectic of identity and difference is fundamental. This future must differ from the present. Yet as this imagined world is created, the categories and constructs of the here and now cannot be evaded. As Frederic Jameson points out, a utopia attempting to fashion its new society is constrained to use the idioms of its own social system to articulate its new world (Jameson 2005: xiii). This constraint helps to explain the violence in Tertullian’s and other apocalyptic visions. In representing their new order, they appropriate the contemporary culture’s language of power and justice. If utopias did not invoke contemporary categories, they would become, in Jameson’s words, “not merely unrealizable, but, what is worse, unimaginable” (2005: xv). Contemporary scripts of power explain both the harsh punishments Tertullian envisions and his joyous reaction to these. Again futurity is crucial. Earlier in his treatise, Tertullian reminds his audience that God enjoins Christians to love their enemies (Spect. 16.6). Tertullian condemns the executions at the games for their cruelty (saevitiam, Spect. 19.1). He imagines someone objecting to his perspective and questioning, “Isn’t it good when the guilty are punished?” Tertullian agrees that it is good but emphasizes the need for sorrow when another suffers: “But the innocent should not take pleasure in the punishment, but rather lament that a man like himself has become so guilty that a punishment so cruel must be awarded him” (Spect. 19.2).14 Tertullian rejoices at the vision of harsh punishments concluding his treatise because these events belong to the reordered and refashioned world brought about by God’s action, not human action. Richard Bauckham explains that the essential motive behind the scenes of harsh punishments so prevalent in apocalyptic narratives is “the wish to see God’s justice done” (1998: 136). To convey this, Christian writers appropriate the contemporary language of justice written in pain on the bodies of the guilty (Frilingos 2004: 80–1). Earlier in his treatise, Tertullian writes, “Would that God looked at no sins of men, that we might all escape judgment” (Spect. 20.3). But God does look, and in Tertullian’s pronouncement, “Nowhere and never (nusquam et numquam) is what God condemns justified …. In God’s truth all things are fixed” (20.5–21.1). Tertullian’s joy at the end of his treatise marks his elation at witnessing the arrival of a new world with a reformed justice system, not necessarily his gloating over the sufferings of the punished.

A Christian response to judicial changes As the Christian inroads into the culture suggest, Christianity’s forward-oriented imaginary tapped into some cultural desire. Frederic Jameson maintains that the “themes and social diagnoses” underlying utopias are seldom random; rather, “it is precisely the Utopian’s obsession which serves as a registering apparatus for a given social reality, whose identification hopefully meets with collective 176

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recognition” (2005: 13). The obsession that Tertullian and other apocalyptic and material resurrection writings seem to identify is the necessity for reconfigured courts, for reordered paradigms of justice. If a utopia’s obsession registers and reacts to a contemporary social reality, this reality during the first three imperial centuries might well have been the slow erosion of the under stratum’s civic influence and judicial equality. The legal system operating in the imperial centuries appears inflected with a judicial savagery meant to intimidate and so subdue its subjects – or at least the non-elite subjects toward whom it was primarily directed. The non-elite’s liability to harsh and unequal legal penalties likely contributed to the collective recognition given the Christian utopian visions of a new court and a judge not swayed by status. If the romances are any indication, the trans-empire elite classes were pursuing their own agenda, and the asymmetrical justice system only confirmed their self-understanding of themselves as fortunate and superior people, who escape such punishments. The Christian imaginary with its future orientation and promise of refashioned courts may have tapped into a general and unaddressed cultural dissatisfaction. It interests that rabbinic discourse in its focus on courts and execution also fosters a utopian perspective looking forward to the future of the restored state of Israel. (Berkowitz 2006: 17).15 Certainly its emphasis on the future and re-ordered justice does not explain the success of Christianity in rewriting the cultural scripts of the early centuries CE. Discursive transformations result from multiple interchanges and interconnections; nothing is fundamental. Nevertheless, that courts and punishment were on the cultural mind seems clear from their prominence in the cultural productions of the period and the Christian emphasis on reordered justice and courts may have appealed to those who were losing position and legal privileges during the early imperial centuries. The Christian emphasis on futurity, on new possibilities and reordered realities, could appeal to the people left out of the alliance of elite, people with energy, drive, and a focus on the future, people perhaps like the freed persons featured in the Trimalchio episode of the Satyrica.

Did Christianity make a difference? In a classic article titled “What Difference Did Christianity Make?” Ramsay MacMullen (1986) offers two egregious examples where he suggests Christianity failed to make much difference at all: slavery and savage judicial penalties. As I have suggested, the primary difference Christianity made was itself, its institutionalization, its emergence as a social and political entity and a corporate site of power (1995: 9). Beyond that momentous difference, however, as Christianity gained social and political ground, modifications in judicial practices and penalties did occur, even if the elimination of savage punishments was not one of them. Specific death penalties, for example, seem to have been affected: crucifixion and sentencing to the beasts disappear in legislation after Constantine.16 Their use may have continued until a later period (Grodzynski 1984: 397–403). It appears, 177

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however, that Christian abhorrence of a penalty suffered by their Lord contributed to the demise of crucifixion as a penalty (Harries 1999: 139). More specific evidence for a change affecting the differential-penalty system comes from the erosion of the elite’s immunities from judicial torture and death penalties in the Christian empire. From the fourth century on, the protections offered honestiores against torture and death penalties began to be rolled back: The main preoccupation of the sections in the Theodosian and Justinianic codes, De Questionibus, is with defining the charges, which could provoke investigation by torture of the hitherto exempt. By assimilating lesser offenses to more serious crimes, emperors could entangle even the great in the more painful snares of the law. (Harries 1999: 128) Jill Harries traces this impulse to torture the elite to the insecurity of fourthcentury emperors, but its result was an implicit equalizing in judicial interrogations (Harries 1999: 129–30). Through these changes, more honestiores became liable to interrogation under torture. The period saw a corresponding reduction in the elites’ immunity from the death penalty. In her examination of the laws of the later empire, Harries is careful to emphasize that the elite’s increased vulnerability to death sentences did not totally eliminate the status-based penalty system. She points to the places in the laws where evidence for discrimination based on status continues; in fact, for noncapital crimes, differential punishment remains standard. Nevertheless, after these exclusions, Harries concludes, “On many other occasions, however, emperors appear to impose a capital penalty for criminal wrong-doing regardless of rank” (1999: 140). For a number of serious crimes, in the Christian empire, elites were to be sentenced to the same penalty or its equivalent as those below them in status (Harries 1999: 141). Savage punishments were not eliminated, but more high-status people became liable to such punishments in the Christian empire. For people seeking a different judicial system, perhaps these changes were enough. Christians did not condemn harsh punishments for criminals and evildoers. As Tertullian testifies, “it is good” that the guilty are punished harshly, simply sad that they have acted to merit such punishment (Spect. 19.1).17 For those who may have responded to Christianity’s utopian promise for refashioned courts, it may not necessarily have been the severity of the punishments that offended as much as their inequality. This inequality did not disappear in the Christian empire, but it was mitigated as the elite lost some of their immunities to judicial torture and death. Constantine’s grant of judicial power to bishops in 318 CE suggests his recognition of the Christian ideological investment in a reordered judiciary.18 Although the ramifications and difficulties associated with Constantine’s law and subsequent changes in episcopal jurisdiction and oversight exceed the limits of this discussion, it is clear that that Constantine’s initial grant gave bishops 178

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judicial oversight equal to secular judges and specified that their decisions “are to be treated as if they are handed down by the emperor himself” (CT 1.27.1; Lamoreaux 1995: 147).19 These judicial prerogatives were progressively curtailed by Constantine’s successors until, by the late fourth century, bishops were prohibited from hearing criminal cases (CT 16.2.23). In the fifth century, Honorius specifically limited bishops’ oversight to religious matters. This limitation did not, however, completely curtail the bishops’ jurisdiction, for Honorius allowed bishops to continue acting as arbitrators in cases if both parties agreed to this arrangement. In these cases, the bishops’ decisions would carry as much weight as those of the praetorian prefect; that is, they could not be appealed and would be backed by official power (CT 1.127,2; 1952, I; Lamoreaux Pharr 1995: 145). The historical record shows bishops across the empire testifying to the amount of time they spend discharging their judicial duties (Lamoreaux 1995: 143–6). Although bishops repeatedly decry the violence of the secular courts, corporal punishment at times had a place in their proceedings. One of the charges brought against Basil of Ancyra by the mid-fourth-century Council of Constantinople was that he had a slave woman tortured to get her to testify against her mistress (Sozomen Hist. Eccl. 4.24.5; Barnes 1996: 551). In his review of such incidents, however, John Lamoreaux concludes that the violence in episcopal courts never approached that of the secular courts (1995: 163). In distinction from a secular judge, a bishop’s judicial activities were supposed to proceed, as Ambrose advises in his On the Duties of Clergy, from his overall duty to care for others in a context of “impartiality, compassion and charity” (On Duties 2.24.124–5; Rapp 2005: 249). Ambrose directs clerics, “In giving judgment let us have no respect for persons. Favor must be put out of sight,” in effect rescinding the premises that had supported the differential-penalty system (2.24.125). The Court of Heaven provides the precedent. Ambrose’s advice explicitly inverts Pliny’s recommendation that, in administering justice, judges ought to observe distinctions in rank and status. That numbers of people had recourse to an episcopal hearing indicates that its methods of arbitration did meet a need and provide an alternative. Christianity made a difference in the imperial judicial environment. Although savagery did not abate – as Michael Gaddis delineates, Christians were frequently its agents in pursuit of their aims of making persons more holy20 – one change was that the honestiores became more liable to the savage penalties. The important difference Christianity made in its social and political context was its intervention in the trans-empire elite’s monopoly on power and authority. By constituting itself as alternative site of authority, the Christian Church became a player in the earthly realm. As Jill Harries describes, “At no point prior to the fourth century were iudices in the Roman Empire liable to face concerted pressure from individuals with a strong and permanent power base, whose duty was to enjoin mercy on their rulers” (1999: 151). Tony Honoré similarly argues that while Christianity may have had little impact on the content of laws except for the legislation against heretics, “this should not blind us to the fact that it 179

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institutionalized criticism of officials and members of the imperial family” (Honoré 2004: 123). As Harris and Honoré recognize, the Christian Church provided an alternative power base in imperial communities. By breaking the elite’s monopoly, Christianity splintered the ideological consensus that erased the non-elite from cultural consciousness. Peter Brown has written of the significance of the “fragmentation of the traditional upper class” in the later Empire (2002: 84). As members of the elite became Christian leaders, the divergent perspectives of Christian and civic leadership, with their competing priorities, fragmented any easy alliance of elite interests. Rome had achieved a consensus on its right to rule, a consensus growing out of a unity of self-interest based on the shared agenda of Rome and the elite it relied upon across the empire (Ando 2000: 1–70). As the romances and the differential penalty system evolving during this period indicate, the members of this unity had little regard for those in their communities not embraced by it. One goal of the differential justice system was to intimidate and control the humiliores, those without high position or status. By the fifth century, as a result of Christians’ refusing to accept this status quo, refusing to be intimidated, an alternate power complex, the Christian Church, had acquired authority.21 Because of its roots in a vision of change, this new power structure opened a crack in the unity of elite self-interest that informed the early empire.

Notes 1 For utopian readings of the Greek sophistic romances, see Alvares (2002) and Futre Pinheiro (2006). Alvares situates the romances within Bloch’s perspective and suggests that utopian themes in the romances work to defuse social problems (2002: 10). He offers a social reading, suggesting as one basis of their utopian impulse the elite Greeks’ desire for more power. While he recognizes Bloch’s emphases on the revolutionary and eschatological implications of the utopian, Alvares is more interested in the inclusive, harmonious, and festal aspects of the romances. Futre Pinheiro provides a valuable discussion focused primarily on questions relating to the utopian genre. 2 Nietzsche (1967: 49–53) quotes Gibbon’s position in The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Ch. 15). Simon Goldhill criticizes its “violent self-contradiction” (2001: 183). 3 On the basis of this perspective, commentators have suggested the Passion exhibits a Montanist perspective (Trevett 1996: 178). 4 Amat provides the text of the Passio; the translation is based on Musurillo (1972). 5 See Webb (2006: 45) for her discussion of the intricacies of taking on a past role in the present and her reminder that even in this pull to the past, “the past is reshaped according to the needs of the present.” I argue only that the focus on the past necessarily constrains the range of vision for imaging different futures. 6 Hoy’s theoretical explication of resistance has been crucial for my understanding here. The quotation is on page 11. 7 Whitmarsh (2001a: 47) argues that mimesis necessarily marks the difference between present and past: “The assertion of continuity with the past indicates (by simultaneously asserting the need to assert) the presence of discontinuity.” I question whether this discontinuity can constitute a break with the past.

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8 Ewan Bowie (1974) describes this turn toward the past as in some sense an escape from the reality of Roman hegemony in the present. This may be a factor; signs of Rome are markedly missing in the romances. Spawforth (2001: 378) suggests alternatively that the Greeks embraced this earlier period to curry favor with the Romans, who admired classical Greek cultural productions. In my view, the Greek elite, whatever their personal feelings, accommodated to Rome and its support of their position. 9 The millenarian content of Tertullian’s vision is not pertinent to my discussion. Nonmillenarian Christians equally place their confidence in a future collective space of hope. 10 My discussion in this section is indebted to Freedman (2001: 72–97). 11 Jameson extrapolates that all ideology is by nature utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity, but this utopian component is refashioned to co-opt the interests of some members of the society to the advantage of others (1981: 289–91). 12 As Judith Butler writes, “The ‘not yet’ is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains ‘unrealized’ by the universal constitutes it essentially” (Butler et al. 2000: 39). 13 This cycle does not cease, according to Butler; the “unrealized” inhabit all historically constituted societies (Butler et al. 2000: 101). 14 Et tamen innocentes de supplicio alterius laetari non oportet, cum magis competat innocenti dolere, quod homo, par eius, tam nocens factus est, ut tam crudeliter impendatur. Berkowitz (2006: 204 and n. 150 at 304) sees Justin as holding a similar attitude on the necessity for punishment in his first Apology. 15 As Berkowitz’s study notes, the Rabbis also looked backwards to the pre-exilic period. 16 Aurelius Victor offers, seemingly incorrectly, that Constantine abolished crucifixion out of piety (Caes. 41.4), but CT 9.5.11 a. 318 gives evidence of its continued use. Grodzynski (1984) sees crucifixion extending into a later period on the basis of the testimony of Firmius Maternus. 17 Tertullian is a severe judge. He rails against a decree that Christians could by repentance be absolved of their sins of fornication and adultery (Pud. 1.6). 18 There are various interpretation of Constantine’s action. Rapp suggests that the grant of judicial powers to bishops is a sort of “touchstone in the evaluation of relation between emperor and church” in its early stages. Some see it as “a conscious effort to lay the foundations of the caesaropapism that has traditionally been associated with the Byzantine Empire” (2005: 242–3). 19 For episcopal courts, see Hunt (1993); Lamoreaux (1995); Harries (1999: 191–211); and Rapp (2005: 242–51). 20 Gaddis offers a discussion of Christian violence, a switch from “dying for God to killing for God” (2005: xi). On Christian state violence, Gaddis notes, “The tragedy of state violence lay in the fact that its perpetrators all too often believed themselves to be acting with the best of intentions: charity, didactic responsibility, and an authoritarian paternalism that allowed them to justify a ‘disciplinary’ coercion they knew was in their subjects’ own best interests” (2005: 65). 21 Berkowitz (2006: 212) also cites the importance of judicial topics for the growth of both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, “ both rabbinic and Christian discourses of criminal execution, in their different ways, worked to expand the communities of Rabbis and Christians beyond what they could have imagined.”

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204

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Achilles Tatius 47–50, 55–6, 62, 65, 75–9, 109, 114 Acts of Lyons 54–5, 122 Acts of Montanus and Lucius 122 adventure narratives 47–52, 55–6; as social allegories 72–5; imprisonment as a theme 119; punishment as a theme 107–13; see also heroes; individual authors Aeneid 33 Althusser, L. 6, 8 Ambrose, On the Duties of Clergy 179 Ando, Clifford: 2003 22; Provincial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (2000) 7–10, 80 Angenot, Marc 1, 7 Antoninus Pius 111 appearance and status 74–5 Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles 116–20, 123–4; Acts of Andrew 117, 119, 123–4; Acts of John 116, 119–20, 145–56; Acts of Paul 117–18; Acts of Peter 145–7, 149–56; Acts of Thomas 117–19, 124 Apollo 35 Apuleius 25; Metamorphoses 45, 47, 50 arena, Roman 9, 46, 167, 172–3, 175–6 Aristides, Aelius 18, 21, 23, 63–6, 70, 76 Aristides, Apology 29 Aristotle 128–9 Arrowsmith, W. 137 Asian rhetorical style 21–2 Athenagoras 93, 96 Atherton, Catherine 133 Attic 21–2, 25 Augustus 25, 40; census 41; criminal law 97; Res Gestae 9, 33

Barnabas see Letter of Barnabas Basilides 94 Bauckham, Richard 176 Bauman, Richard 97–8 beauty 74–5 benefactors 36–8 Berkowitz, B.A. 107–8 Bhabha, Homi 30; “unhomeliness” 33 Bodel, J. 128, 137, 139 body, material: abject body 90–2, 100–2, 104, 160; body politic and 47; fearlessness and perspective of the body social 120–3; justice system and 95–102; rejection of material body as divine 102–4; resurrection and 10, 46, 55, 57, 92–7, 100–4, 144–50, 156, 169; Trimalchio’s body (Petronius) 132–3 see also body, maternal; eating (being eaten), images of; violence body, maternal 159–69 Bolyki, János 151 Bourdieu, Pierre 12–13, 24 Bovon, François 116 Bowersock, Glen 45, 47, 52, 57 Bowie, Ewen 45, 62 Brown, Peter 180 Buell, Denise 28–30, 33 Butler, Judith 159–60, 166, 168–9 Bynum, Caroline 45–6, 52, 94–5 Caecilius Natalis 34 Callistratus 98–9 Cameron, Averil 10 cannibalism 46, 48– 50, 52, 54, 57 Cartlidge David 152 Castelli, Elizabeth 9 Celsus, True Doctrine 102–3

205

INDEX

Chariton 47, 62, 65, 73–4, 78–9, 81–2, 84, 110–14 Christian identity: constructing a 17, 28–4; context of definition of a Christian 2–4; fearlessness and perspective of the body social 120–3; focus on place 33–4; integration 32; judicial change and Christianity 176–80; relevance of social space 114–20; role of fictional narratives 116–20; sense of separateness 3, 30–3, 40; thwarting desire of elite males as subversion and empowerment 123–4; view of the future 172–7 see also Apocryphal Acts; martyrdom; resurrection; visions Cicero 25, 92 cities: building projects 113–14; civic harmony 65–72, 76; civic rituals 34–9, 114; eclipse of city-state 64; honorific practices 36–9; kinship and patronage 20; power of elites in 23, 35, 113–14, 180; universality of city of Rome 33; urban community compared to uncontrollable beast 97 Claudius 25 Claudius Saturninus 99 Clement, first epistle 31 Clement, second epistle 32, 95–6 Clement of Alexandria 32 Coleman, Kathleen 46, 175 Constantine 177–8 Constitutio Antoniniana 5 cosmopolitanism 17–44; use of term 1; transition to 6, 10 courage: hope and 78–80; status and 76–8 crucifixion, demise of 177 Dalai Lama 169 Davis, Lennard 74 death, depictions of 45–58; apparent death (scheintod) 47–52, 55–6; social death 48, 52; violent death 46–58 see also martyrdom; punishment democracy, end of 23 Descartes 11–12 Dio, Cassius 63, 80 Dio Chrysostum 62, 64; advocacy of concord 65–6, 69–72, 76, 85; recognition of patriarchal alliance between Greek civic leaders and Roman authorities 83–4 Diodorus Cronus 131, 133

Dionysius of Halicarnassus 21–2, 33, 62, 66, 84 Donahue, J.F. 128 Douglas, Mary 90 eating (being eaten), images of: animals eating humans 50–1, 53–4; cannibalism 46, 48–50, 52, 54, 57; distinction in Gospels between flesh and spirit 57–8; martyrdom and images of being eaten 52–5; relevance of images of incorporation 51–2, 58 education, role of 18–21; dominance and 24–5; elite identity and adoption of paideia 25, 113, 123, 134–5 Edwards, Catherine 46 elites: constructing an imperial elite identity 18–28, 63; context of definition of 2–5; increasing differentiation between non-elite and elite groups 10, 20–1; justice, changes to 176–80; justice, differential 10, 97–100, 109–10, 112–13; justice, inequality of, as portrayed in romances 112–13; loss of status 73, 75; power of elites in cities 23, 35, 113–14; suicide as power 84–5; treatment of inclusiveness in Acts of Peter and John 151–6; use of term 4–6; women in prison 117–18 see also beauty; Christian identity; education; heroes; heroines; humiliores/honestiores; language; protection of privilege; words Elliott, J.K. 145 Epistle to Diognetus 29–32 Euripides 136 Eusebius 5, 40 fathers/fathers-in-law 82–3 festivals 34–9, 114 Foucault, Michel: discourse 6; epochal change 10; historical genealogy 6–7; power relations and subjectivity 12–13; reasonable actions 12 Freud 12 Gabba, Emilio 22 Gaddis, Michael 179 Gallagher, Eugene 147 Gellius, Aulus: Attic Nights 25–6; humanitas and paideia 27

206

INDEX

genealogy, role of: definition of Greekness 19; Foucault 6–7 gladiators 9 Glancy, Jennifer 99 Gleason, Maud 24, 46–7, 52, 54–7 Goldhill, Simon 73 Greeks: Attic 21–2, 25; Dio’s view of Greek relationship to Rome 69–72; identity of 18–20; importance of Greek language 25–6, 174; Plutarch’s view of Greek relationship to Rome 67–72; standards of rhetoric 21–2, 24 see also adventure narratives; Hellenism; heroes; individual authors; Second Sophistic Greenblatt, S.J. 135 Hadrian 35, 98, 111; criteria for participation in Panhellenic league 19 Hägg, Tomas 64 Harland, Phillip 37–9 Harries, Jill 178–80 Haynes, Katherine 51, 64 Heffernan, Thomas 164 Heliodorus 47, 56, 62, 65, 73–4, 79, 81–2 Hellenism19–20, 22, 25, 27–8 heroes, passive 64–6, 72–3, 76–85; Christian thwarting desire of elite males 123–4 heroines: being eaten 48–9, 50–2, suicide and 79–80 see also beauty; marriage Hippolytus 30, 41; Commentary on Daniel 17–18, 28 Homer 26, 75 Honoré, Tony 179–80 honorific practices 36–9 Honorius 179 Horace 26 humanitas, ideal of 26–8 humiliores/honestiores 4–5, 96, 98–100, 104, 118, 124, 178, 180

Jews 7–8, 11, 46, 101, 107–8, 116 John, Apocalypse 38 Jones, Christopher 25 Jongman, Willem, 20–1 Josephus 46, 54–5 Junod, Eric 145, 151 justice system: differential 10, 97–100, 109–10, 112–13; changes to 176–80; Last Judgement 100–2; resurrection and 95–7 see also prisons; punishment Justin 101, 147; Dialogue with Trypho 94; On the Resurrection 92–3 Kaestli, Jean-Daniel 145, 151 Kant 12 Kilgour, Maggie 51 Konstan, David 10–11, 64 Kristeva, Julia 90–1, 93, 99, 133 Lalanne, Sophie 65, 81 Lalleman, Pieter 145 Lamoreaux, John 179 language: Attic 21–2, 25; Asian language style 21–2; Christian ethnic 28–9; filth-related, for non-elite 92; importance of Greek 21–2, 25–6, 174; standards of rhetoric 21–2, 24, 62; use of non-elite popular Latin by Petronius 127 see also words Last Judgement 100–2, 172–3, 175 Lazarus 104 Letter of Barnabas 29, 36–8 Levi-Strauss 72 Lieu, Judith 28–32 Lollianos, Phoinikika 50 Long, A.A. 133 Longus 62 Lucan 84; Pharsalia 46

Ignatius 53, 122 intentionality 11–12 Irenaeus 94, 102 Jameson, Frederic 4, 176 Jesus: birth of 161–3, 167–9; Celsus’ rejection of 103; charge to eat his body 57–8; incarnation of 102, 145–6; resurrection of 92–5, 145–7, 156; role in collective identity of Christians (Hippolytus) 17; transfiguration of 146, 152, 154

MacAlister, Suzanne 78 MacMullen, Ramsay 21, 100, 118, 177 Marcion 161–2, 164–5, 169 Marcus Aurelius 112–13; apology to 40; Column of 9; Meditations 25 marriage 64–5, 73 martyrdom 5, 11, 46, 52–5, 101, 108–9, 114–16, 175–6; group solidarity and fearlessness 120–3; first person narratives 120; resurrection and 55–7, 95 see also Passion of Perpetua Martyrdom of Polycarp 29, 31, 40, 53 Marx 12

207

INDEX

Plaza, M. 129, 135 Pliny (maior) 26, 33 Pliny (minor) 23, 98, 179 Plutarch 62–5, 76, 85; Greek relationship to Rome 67–72; Political Precepts 66–7 Polemo 174 Pollock, Sheldon 1 Polycarp 40; Epistle to the Philippians 40; martyrdom of 29, 31, 40, 53, 101 Price, Simon 34 prisons, Christians in 114–20; elite women in prison 117–18; fearlessness and perspective of the body social 120–3 see also Passion of Perpetua processions, civic 35–6 property status 22–3 protection of privilege 71–2 punishment: justice system 97–100, 107–13, 172–3, 175–9; romances 107, 108–13 puns 129–31

masculinity see heroes Melito of Sardis 40 memorialist approach, definition of 1 Miller, William 100 mimicry, use of term to describe discourse of identity 30 Minucius Felix: Octavius 34, 144; on death 96 monuments 36–8 Morales, Helen 48, 65, 72–3, 81 Nancy, Jean Paul 3 Nero 25 Nietzsche 12 Nijf, Otto van 34–7 novels 10–11, commonalities with rhetorical writings 62; dating 62–3; “ideal” romances 47; Latin and Greek novels, comparisons between 45, 47 for Greek literature see adventure narratives; heroes; for Latin literature see Apuleius; Petronius see also individual authors Numenius of Apamea 91–2

Questionibus, De 178

occupational associations 35–6 Oenoanda, procession 35–6 Origen, Contra Ceslum 102 paideia 19, 22, 24–5, 123, 134–5, 173; humanitas and 27 Parmenides 91 Passion of Perpetua 53–4, 122, 159, 160, 163–9, 173 patriarchy 62–85 marriage 65; validation of 80–4 Paul: letter to the Romans 38; letters to the Corinthians 31; stigmatizing of the body 169; treatment of resurrection 94–5; view of baptism 147, 173 Pausanias 23, 136 peace and prosperity, price of 69–70 Pervo, Richard 118 Peter, first epistle 39 Petronius 84; Satyrica 45, 47, 57–8, 79; Trimalchio 127–39; use of non-elite popular Latin 127 Philo 91 Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 19–20, 23–4, 62, 112–13, 174 Photius 51 Plato 91; Cratylus 128, 131; Symposium 132–3

Reardon, Bryan 62–3 resentment of poor 100 resurrection 10, 34, 41, 45–7, 92–5, 169; apparent death and 47–8, 52, 56–7; correlation of incarnation, resurrection beliefs and social attitudes 150–1; justice system and 95–7; martyrdom and 55–7, 95; reaction to 102–4; social perspectives and 100–2, 104, 144–56 rhetoric, standards of 21–2, 24, 62 Rhodes 66, 70–1 Rimell, Victoria 133, 137 Rohde, Erwin 64, 76–7 romances see novels Rome: attaining citizenship 63; Dio’s view of Greek relationship to 69–72; exercise of power over individual identity 7–10; expansion of power 17–18, 23–4; Plutarch’ s view of Greek relationship to 67–72; recirculation of benefits of empire 21; social conventions 22–3; unity of self interest 8, 180; universality of city of 33 Rose, Gillian 2 Rowe, G. 128 Ruiz-Montero, C. 62

208

INDEX

Saïd, Suzanne 19 saints, lives of 11 scheintod (apparent death) 47–52 Scheidel, Walter 5 Schmeling, G.L. 64, 76 Schneider, Paul 147, 149 Schmitz, Thomas 20, 24, 65 Schwartz, Saundra 111 Scripture, Christian 10 Sebasteion of Aphrodisias 9 Second Sophistic: construct of group identity 20; definition of term 19; importance of the past 172–5 self-interest, unity of 8, 180 Seneca 84, 92 Setzer, Claudia 96 sexuality: Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (thwarted desire) 116–17, 123–4; eating of humans and, relevance of images of 51–2; desire 73–4; symmetry 64–5 Shaw, Brent 22, 101, 107, 120–1 Simon Magus 146, 149–51, 153–4 slavery 23, 177; overcoming slave origins 136–7, 139; slave names 131–2 Smith, R.R.R. 136 Soja, Edward 114 Suetonius 25 suicide discourse 78–80; as power 84–5; patriarchy and 80 Swain, Simon 25, 68

176–8; on resurrection 92–3, 96, 103–4, 149; on the arena 46, 172–3; visions of the future 172–3, 175–6 time: comparison of attitude to past and future 172–7; dating novel 62–3; death and 137–9 Toohey, Peter 84 travel adventure narratives see adventure narratives

Tacitus 97 Termessos 36–7 Tertullian: Apology 3, 29, 32, 38; on birth of Christ, maternity and the material body 161–9; on Last Judgement 101, 172–3; on need for reordered justice

Xenophon of Ephesus 47, 50–1, 62, 65, 73, 75–6, 78, 108–9, 112, 114, 174

utopias 175–7 Valentinians 94, 169 Varro 131 violence: arena 9, 46, 167, 172–3, 175–6; depictions of 46–58, 63, 107–12; male subjection of women 9, 81; punishment 97–100, 107–12, 172–3, 175–9 visions, Christian 172–3, 175–6 Watanabe, Akihiko 81 wealth: distribution of 20–1; power of 23–4 Webb, Ruth 19 Whitehead, J. 128 Whitmarsh, Tim 20, 25 Wolfreys, Jim 24 Woolf, Greg 26–8 words, relationship between meaning and 128–9; puns 129–31; slave names 131–2 see also language

Young, Robin Darling 166 Žižek, Slavoj 74

209

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