Late Antiquity: Before and After

We have lived now through a long generation of "late antique renaissance." I set for myself the task in this talk of trying to say concisely what difference that renaissance has made both for the field as narrowly constructed and for the wider field of "classics" itself.

Disciplines in Motion

Formally, the story of late antiquity in the last decades resembles that of other periods and cultures. Where we inherited what looked like fundamentally sound narratives, built up laboriously and even heroically over time but still requiring supplementation and correction, narratives deploying characters whose identities could be grasped unambiguously, what we have come away with is a new appreciation for the way in which this period especially has been interpreted through constructions of narrative and constructions of identity that are at sharp variance with what we know about the people to whom they apply. Moreover, the constructions that have been in long use are often ones that go back to the late antique period itself. Hence when we accept them, we essentially connive with one party or another of that period to tell a story their way about people seen through their eyes.

The late antiquity that I know best is the period that has loomed largest in the scholarly debates of the last generation, roughly from Diocletian and the tetrarchy to Heraclius and the first defeats suffered at Islamic hands. In that period we now see first and foremost a series of contests among self-justifying contemporary narratives, many of which have had their appeal into our own day.

Chief among those narratives is the invention of classical antiquity itself. Roman dominance had long been marked culturally by acceptance of the authority of Greek texts and with the prestige of Greek culture supereminent, but by the fourth century, with the rise of a new class of arriviste aristocrats (the creation of Constantine) and with the loss of widespread facility with Greek in the Latin provinces of the empire, a new narrative was needed. The revival of "classical Latin" texts and authors (Juvenal, for example, and Tacitus) in this period, and the elaboration of school texts and school curricula (e.g., the writings of Donatus and the so-called quadriga Messii —Cicero, Sallust, Terence, and Vergil), gave first coherent shape to the reading lists that still survive in graduate departments of classics. The Nicomachi who read and copied Livy¹ were acting a new classicizing role, as were Augustine and his students and family when they retired to a country villa outside Milan in the winter of 386/7 and began enacting their own version of Ciceronian dialogues from Tusculum—even to the point of having scribes take down everything they said in shorthand for Augustine to publish as a display of his fidelity to Cicero and to his newfound philosophical ideas. That self-conscious enactment of the past persisted well into the sixth century and was probably only finally ended when the brutal efforts of Justinian to re-establish "The Roman Empire" in the west led, naturally enough, to its eradication. The next new class had few pretensions.²

We should not belittle the seriousness of the enterprise these writers were engaged upon. Macrobius in the Saturnalia musters up his threadbare learning (borrowing from Aulus Gellius and others in ways we would never let our students get away with) to create a portrait of his elders and betters of the previous generation enacting their own Ciceronian dialogue—a calque, if so I may call it, on the De republica of Cicero, though at the same time perhaps a veiled reply to Augustine's attempt to appropriate the Platonic-Ciceronian lineage in his De civitate Dei. In so doing, Macrobius is saying something important to himself and to his contemporaries about who and what they were precisely by attaching themselves to that particular past in that particular way.³ The philosopher Boethius and...