- Unclassical Traditions: Volume One: Alternatives to the Classical Past in Late Antiquity
This slim but well-executed volume is the first of two collections of essays on the nature and extent of the engagement with the classical past in late antiquity. Beginning from the premise that “carefully constructed negotiations between past and present are central to understanding late antiquity” (2), the essays explore how late antique intellectuals situated themselves in relation to the “authoritative inheritance” of the classical past (3). This flexible framework allows for the treatment of a wide range of authors and texts, mostly from the fourth century CE, including Eusebius’ Chronicle, pro-Nicene invectives against Constantius II, Ambrose’s De fide, an early Byzantine liturgy, Festus’ Breviarium, Ausonius’ poetry, Basil of Caesarea’s Address to Young Men, and the monastic origins of hagiography.
As one might expect from this list of texts, the “alternative” past often (but not always) turns out to be the biblical one. The introduction to the volume argues that the motive force driving these confrontations between past and present was the strengthening of Christianity, which heightened the sense of an increasing divergence between the Christian present and a non-Christian, classical past (2–3). This emphasis on Christianity and the distinctiveness of literary production in Late Antiquity positions the volume in the tradition associated with scholars such as Peter Brown and Averil Cameron, who are both invoked in the introduction. The individual essays, however, generally set the broader debates about Late Antiquity to one side; instead we are treated to a series of fresh, incisive, and usually persuasive readings of specific texts by leading scholars in the field.
One of the many stances available to Christian intellectuals in Late Antiquity was to advocate for the superiority of the Christian over the classical past. Christopher Kelly argues that the presentation of the past in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronological Tables was designed to highlight the unreliability and instability of the classical Greek past as against the clarity and certainty of the Christian past. While Greek religion was presented as a tangle of doubtful, contradictory, and undatable myths, discrepancies and variants in the Old Testament narrative were intentionally suppressed in order to create a “sharp apologetic contrast” (21) with the classical past. It could be argued, however, that because his treatment of Greek myths shares certain features with classical mythography, Eusebius’ engagement with the classical past was more subtle—simultaneously appropriating and subverting the classical tradition. The competition between classical and Christian culture is also taken up by Neil McLynn in a bold reinterpretation [End Page 371] of Basil of Caesarea’s Address to Young Men. This text was never meant, McLynn argues, to bear the weight it has often been assigned as a measured statement of accommodation between classical culture and Christian scripture. Rather, this was a light, occasional piece delivered by Basil before his nephews (109–11); the conspicuous “errors” of interpretation that dot the text were meant to provoke his nephews to interrupt and correct him, and in so doing to demonstrate the unsuitability of classical literature as a moral guide (112). Thus the text is best understood as an “experiment in self-fashioning” (110) dating from a time between Basil’s former life as a rhetor and his later career as a bishop.
The second and third essays in the volume both discuss writings by pro-Nicene bishops who found in the biblical past a template for understanding what was happening in their own time. In analyzing the invectives written by Athanasius, Hilary, and Lucifer of Cagliari, Richard Flower shows how Constantius II was turned into the antithesis of a Christian ruler by being portrayed as the successor of earlier enemies of God (33). These authors went beyond their contemporaries in their determination to “erase the classical past” by evaluating the emperor solely in terms of comparisons with biblical figures whose success or...