A Greek Roman Empire; Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408/450) (review)

Fergus Millar is one of the great names in contemporary Roman imperial scholarship. Since the 1977 publication of his comprehensive synthesis The Emperor in the Roman World (31 b.c.–337 a.d.), he has been one of the leading English language lights in the field of imperial administration and presentation. Now Millar ventures well beyond Constantine into the time of that emperor's less dynamic epigone, Theodosius II and the politico-religious culture of the fifth century. His topic is the relationship between politics and religion in the reign of Theodosius II, specifically the struggles over Nestorius and his condemnation. His project is to "[form] a bridge between the governmental and administrative history practiced by A. H. M. Jones and the style of cultural history exemplified by Peter Brown and Averil Cameron" (xiv). As a practitioner of the former, Millar brings his own methodological apparatus to his book, and for the latter, he modestly (and accurately) concedes his methodological debt.

The book is divided roughly into two parts. In the first Millar sets out to fulfill the promise of his title by explaining the cultural and, more particularly, administrative implications of a Greek empire. Although local languages like Syriac and Coptic played a role in the literary and cultural dynamic of the mid-fifth century, ultimately the language of imperial and ecclesiastical administration and communication was Greek. Even Latin, the nominal tongue of the "Romans," was likely not that common in the central administrative apparatus. The rhetoric of this Greek language culture constructed an empire at once Roman and Christian and in Millar's view a tension between these identities. Millar posits that an ideological dialect arose from "the competing pressures, of legality on the one side and Christian conviction on the other, to which the emperor was exposed" (128) that led Theodosius to follow the dictates of faith rather than imperial duty. However, it is arguable that rather than a dialectical opposition, Theodosius illustrates the continuity of imperial piety that had moved emperors since Augustus to placate divine powers and that panegyricists from Pliny to Panegyrici Latini had praised. At the beginning of the third century, for example, Caracalla was moved to reverse a legal decision when an appeal was made to him as "most pious judge and king" because, as Millar himself once wrote, "the dispensation of [imperial] justice would extend to temples, cults and priesthoods" (The Emperor in the Roman World, 455).

Exactly how the linguistic dominance of Greek affected the theological debates and ecclesiastical conflicts that occupy the second half of the book, however, is far from clear. Millar does not address how Greek specifically framed the religious or political discourse, e.g., how the loan word "Augustus," the most common chancery title of the period, related to basileus, the far more common title for the emperor in histories and council records and what that implies about the Hellenicity of the fifth-century imperial construct. In the field of theological discourse, the complex relationship between proso\pon, hypostasis, and persona could be said to be one of the philological difficulties that plagued Leo's tome and made its Latin formulation so problematic to a Greek audience. But one waits in vain for an explanation of how the use of Greek defined or created a particular intellectual framework in which the political events or intellectual discourse of the second half of the book developed. In short, the linguistic analysis of the first half of the book disappears in the second half.

What does carry over from the first half to the second half of the book is Millar's ideological construction of state and church, or Empire and Christianity: one that posits tension between them and a fundamental discontinuity with the traditions of imperial piety and religious authority. Of course, what creates this discontinuity is implied by Millar to be Christianity itself. Introducing the controversy over Nestorius, he explains that "to...