Travel, Travelers and Traveling in Late Antique Literary Culture

In this paper I will explore the social and political meanings of two travels described in Victricius of Rouen’s (d. 404 CE) ‘De laude Sanctorum’.

Travel is not always voluntary, and it is worth examining the consequences of involuntary travel – in this case, the exiles of Nicene bishops of western sees in the 350s under Constantius II to Oxyrhynchus, Eleutheropolis in Palestine, and other eastern locations. One major consequence of their exiles and returns westward (following the leniency of the Council of Alexandria in 362), was the hardening of attitudes among more rigorist factions within the broader Nicene community.

Synesius of Cyrene (ca. 370-414) is the author of two of the most famous travel accounts from the Late Roman East, both appearing in his Epistles. Recent work on Synesius’s letters has drawn attention to the status of the corpus as a unified literary artifact (Hose 2001, 2003; Harich-Schwarzbauer 2012, cf Gibson 2012).