Unclassical Traditions. Volume II: Perspectives from East and West in Late Antiquity (review)

Continuity and Discontinuity . . . Transformation . . . Shifting Frontiers . . . Decline and Fall. These interpretive themes continue to loom large in the scholarship of the late ancient Mediterranean, and each has played a role in shaping our understanding of late antiquity. Nevertheless the age ever faces the risk of losing its place as a distinctive period in it own right, pressured by the tensions of looking backward to the vestiges of the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean or forward to medieval Europe and Byzantium. Thus the study of late antiquity can always benefit from further interpretive nuance, and the contributors to the volume under review offer this with “unclassical traditions,” a theme that attempts to find in late antiquity a simultaneously retrospective and progressive orientation. The editors’ goal is “to offer a vision of late antiquity characterized by a complex engagement with the negotiable authority of the classical past” (1), and they proceed with confidence in the assertion that late antiquity is indeed a distinctive period.

This volume is the second of a pair resulting from a 2007 conference held in Cambridge. The eight essays in this collection explore perspectives from the margins entertained by contemporary authors who engaged with the “classical past” but were situated in peripheral geographic, cultural, and political circumstances that encouraged varied responses. Re-imagination and reinvention are key concepts, and the volume’s authors eschew simply casting these examples of engagement as “bleached classicism” or “straightforward rejection” (2–3). The contributions offer thoughtful and suggestive reflections and arguments and together present an interesting set of case studies of “unclassical traditions.”

John Curran argues that the rise of the Jewish Patriarchate offers an opportunity to witness “Rome negotiating its relationship with the Jews” (18). He finds within several stories drawn from rabbinic sources a consistent pattern of Roman interaction, even at the highest levels, with senior rabbis, such that a picture of a clear break and cessation of contact between Rome and the Jews following the two Jewish wars proves untenable. Rather, the imaginative stories reveal a continuing interest on the part of the Romans to negotiate with leaders of a subject people and of the Patriarchs to engage with and even embrace aspects of the dominate culture. As the Patriarchs moved steadily from the cultural and political margins to the center, however, they alienated themselves from their own people, which ultimately led to their demise.

Fotini Hadjittofi’s examines the Dionysiaca, one of the last manifestly “pagan” poems of late antiquity, in which the Egyptian Nonnus attempted to compose a coherent narrative that reconciled the variant classical Dionysus myths. Hadjittofi focuses on the “cosmopolitan” view of the poem’s world, which on the one hand was situated in a Hellenocentric universe but on the other hand served to upend the very classical notion of Greece as epicenter. Greece became the periphery, as Nonnus elevated Asia Minor and the Near East as the true center, while the very regions that from a classical perspective appeared barbaric became the source of all major cultural contributions. In Hadjittofi’s study, we find a good example of an “unclassical” reimagination, in this case, of traditional conceptions of cultural geography.

David Gwynn studies those Coptic, Armenian, and Syriac versions of the life of Athanasius that created a late antique figure who became a “classical” tradition in his own right. Gwynn observes in these hagiographical narratives a shared enthusiasm for the image of Athanasius as champion of Nicene orthodoxy (thus the established tradition), but he also demonstrates how each account constructed an Athanasius that squared with its own doctrinal convictions. Continuing in the Egyptian milieu, Sergio Knipe discusses Zosimus, an alchemist who wrote several cryptic treatises filled with sacrificial imagery. Knipe says that these texts should be understood as essentially religious and part of a broader cultural debate about the nature and purpose of...