Late Antiquity

Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae (ca. 390 CE) is nominally a continuation of Tacitus’ historiographical oeuvre. Like Tacitus, Ammianus employs allusions to, and exempla of, early Rome and its original kings. As Timothy Joseph, Thomas Strunk, and others have shown, Tacitus’ regal references allow readers familiar with canonical authors such as Livy and Ovid to evaluate emperors such as Augustus and Tiberius by the precedents and standards set by kings such as Romulus and Numa.

After the twenty-year Gothic War ended in 554 CE, senatorial aristocrats were eager to recover their estates in Italy. Those who were in exile in Constantinople petitioned the emperor Justinian (527-565) for assistance.  In response to their request and those of their aristocratic bishop, Vigilius, the emperor issued 27 constitutions, today known as the Pragmatic Sanction.

The goal of this paper is to show that merit had a prominent place in Libanius’ argumentation to justify hiring a candidate for a position in the Roman imperial administration during the fourth century AD. Despite the vast number of extant letters of recommendation from late antique authors such as Libanius, these texts have received relatively little scholarly attention. As a genre, Roman letters of recommendation can appear quite impenetrable.

This paper investigates the creation and promulgation of forged correspondence amidst the court factionalism of the reign of Constantius II. Interest in ancient literary fakes and religious forgeries has had a recent renaissance (Peirano, Ehrman, Hopkins and McGill), but less attention has been granted to the creation, promulgation, or consequences of documentary forgeries (i.e. wills, diplomas, loan agreements, and correspondence).

While the origins of the Stoic principle of προπάθεια (propatheia) remain mysterious, the concept was much more popular in certain philosophical and religious debates of late antiquity. προπάθεια essentially softened the almost impossible ideal of the Stoic sage who does not feel passions by conceding that the initial impression of a passion is not a willful action, and therefore does not vitiate the individual. The most prolific user of the concept was not a Stoic philosopher at all, but rather Didymus the Blind (313–398), the patristic commentator and instructor.

This paper examines the interpretative methods of the Greek Physiologos (ca. 2^nd-4^th c. CE), arguing that the text’s allegoresis of creatures generates a conception of nature as fantastical. The Physiologos, an anonymous early Christian Greek compendium of animal lore, has traditionally been viewed in the scholarship as marking an abrupt break from the Aristotelian tradition of zoological inquiry, with disdain directed at its “credulity” towards the marvellous content in its pages (e.g., Wellmann 1930, Perry 1941, Festugière 1944).

A hazy image of the life of Jerome of Stridon can be glimpsed through his letters. These letters paint a portrait of the man as he wished to be seen and remembered for posterity, but they also expose paradoxical interplay between the author’s intellect and his emotions, between his rhetoric and his reality. This paper examines a specific rhetorical strategy used by Jerome to praise his elite friends at the expense of the indigent poor.

In the late 360s CE, Optatus, bishop of Milevis in Numidia, told a story about the origin of the Donatist schism that had divided Christian communities throughout Africa since the end of Diocletian’s Persecution. This paper argues that the story, found at De schismate Donatistarum 1.16-20, is a popular legend that preserves the earliest extant play by Christians. Accordingly, it asks that we reconsider Christian condemnation of theatre in Africa.

This paper considers the relationship of Roman exemplary discourse and Christian typological discourse in Ambrose of Milan’s De Abraham. Ambrose of Milan, as a provincial governor turned Christian bishop was a member of the rhetorically-trained late antique elite and thus familiar with Roman exemplary discourse. Both exemplum and figura create communities by creating links between the past (historical or legendary) and the present.

Since Julian (r. 361-363) was both a Roman emperor and Hellenic philosopher, scholars have long explored how he put Neoplatonic theory, theology, and theurgy into the practice of imperial ideology and statecraft (e.g. Smith 1995, Bregman 1998, Greenwood 2014).