Late Antique Textualities

Late antique Christian polemic against Roman traditional religions has typically been construed as “shadow-boxing” against a defunct enemy or “trivial doggerel” re-mixing classical phrases, badly (Markus, 7-8; Cameron, 273). Not so. Targeting traditional religions performed crucial boundary work, distinguishing so-called “proper Christianity” and so also proper Christians from a “paganism [made] silly, stupid, and alien,” as Dennis Trout has argued (Trout, 225).

Varro is everywhere in Augustine’s City of God. Two full books (6 and 7) are devoted to poking holes in Varro’s Divine Antiquities, and Augustine cites or engages with Varro in many other places in the work (Civ. 3.4, 3.17, 4.1, 4.9, 4.22, 4.27, 4.31-32, 8.1, 8.5, 8.26, 18.5, 18.9-10, 18.16-17, 18.23, 19.1-4, 19.22, 21.6, 21.8, 22.11). There are, of course, obvious reasons for Varro’s prominence. In the first place, Varro was the textbook for Roman religion.

Since at least the sixth century, Gennadius of Marseilles' continuation of Jerome's De viris illustribus was transmitted with its literary predecessor (Feder, 1933). Sharing a common format and lacking an authorial preface of its own, Gennadius' catalog of Christian authors (c. 468) has generally been read as a simple extension of Jerome's (392/3) rather than a work in its own right. This paper examines Gennadius' portrayal of Jerome in De viris illustribus by interrogating instances where he is mentioned either directly by name or indirectly by allusion.

This paper examines how Libanius of Antioch strove to condition and manipulate an early readership for the corpus of texts written by emperor Julian “the Apostate”. In so doing, it makes the case for the application of paratextual theory to investigate the relationships between texts in order to overcome some shortcomings in traditional intertextual theory.