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  • Church, Cities, and People. A Study of the Plebs in the Church and Cities of Roman Africa in Late Antiquity
  • A. H. Merrills
Church, Cities, and People. A Study of the Plebs in the Church and Cities of Roman Africa in Late Antiquity. By Alexander Evers. [Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion, Vol 11.] (Leuven: Peeters. 2010. Pp. xiv, 367. €58,00 paperback. ISBN 978-9-042-92206-8.)

Late-antique North Africa was distinguished for its high level of urbanism and for the productivity of the land over which these many towns were scattered. As ships carried the African agricultural surplus away for consumption throughout the Mediterranean, others brought cultural and religious ideas back with them. As a consequence, Christianity took root early in the North African provinces and flourished there spectacularly. Tertullian, St. Cyprian of Carthage, and St. Augustine all expounded a Christian faith that was shaped by the rich towns in which they lived and represented the peak of late-Roman production in these important provinces. Alexander Evers’s intriguing Church, Cities, and People attempts to return Roman African Christianity to its urban context and to reclaim the writing of several of its most important champions as crucial sources for the understanding of the late-antique world. As such, it represents an important contribution to the understanding of a crucial period of early church history.

Evers’s principal concern is to demonstrate that the language in which African Christian writers described the demographic structures of their Church was influenced directly by the political realities of the world in which they lived. He argues that their sermons, letters, theological tracts, and polemics can tell us a great deal about the secular municipal politics of the period and should not be dismissed as examples of a rarefied Christian rhetoric with little wider relevance. To this end, he provides a careful assessment of the usage of the terms plebs and populus in the writing of Cyprian of Carthage. He successfully dismisses the view that these terms were essentially interchangeable at this time and shows that Cyprian’s plebes were the small, local congregations upon which the nascent church depended and the populus [End Page 567] the Christian community (or indeed the secular community) as a whole. Close reading of Cyprian shows that the plebes were the groups partly responsible for the election (and occasional rejection) of their bishops—through acclamation, if not through the familiar apparatus of the Roman Republican political system, as the traditional associations of the term might imply. This in itself is an important observation. It shows not only that Christian congregations were consciously integrated within the political and social systems of the late-Roman African towns but also that Cyprian and his successors were anxious to underscore this conceptual link. The Christians were not a world apart and did not develop an esoteric language of their own in speaking of themselves, but rather drew their inspiration from the political world around them.

Evers expands this observation in the remainder of his study to encompass, first, the writing of the fourth-century polemicist Optatus of Milevis, whose anti-Donatist writings provide a crucial source for the origins of that brutal schism, and then the greatest Roman African of them all, Augustine of Hippo. Of the two sections, the latter is the more successful—as Evers shows, both Optatus and the Donatist sources that he cites do not employ this political language with the same consistency as Cyprian or Augustine. To be sure, an appeal to the coherence of the Christian populus was a crucial rhetorical device within a dispute that placed the universality of the Church in opposition to the purity of the congregation, but the use of language is not completely consistent. In Augustine, by contrast, Evers notes a reversion to Cyprianic language. Again, plebs is used to refer to the congregation—a significant indication of continuity in language and (the author argues) in social institutions. The book concludes with a substantial discussion of the varied archaeological and literary evidence for urban life in Augustinian Africa.

This study has much to commend it. It makes a strong case for the value of African...

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