Christian Responses to Roman Art and Architecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of the Empire (review)

Nasrallah emphatically states her purpose on the first page of this book's introduction: to "bring together literary texts and archaeological remains to help us to understand how religious discourse emerges not in some abstract zone, but in lived experiences and practices in the spaces of the world" (1). These days, such a goal should need no defense, much less elaboration. One hopes that most historians recognize the validity and benefits of considering material remains (archaeology, visual art) alongside of textual evidence. Sometimes, however, such efforts amount to little more than simply juxtaposing textual with material data for the sake of illustration. Occasionally, material remains are brought forth as a means of strengthening an argument, paying scant attention to objects as independent and potentially rich sources of knowledge. Rarely (as here), a scholar attempts to develop new and creative strategies for obtaining a more integrated view of the past by nuanced and balanced study of both physical and literary evidence. Even if one did not know that the author had herself traveled widely, her appreciation for contextualized knowledge demonstrates a spatially informed eye and brings a sensory richness and imaginative dimension to her prose.

Throughout, while she justifiably objects to those who tear literary works out of their material contexts, Nasrallah also acknowledges that she does not intend to recreate those contexts or even to suggest that the texts, geographical sites, or archaeological monuments she juxtaposes had actual, historical connections. Thus she argues that the imaginative aspect of her work aims rather at "bringing voices and spaces together so that we can overhear and glimpse the discursive world in which literature, images, and architecture were produced, and among which both Christians and non-Christians alike formulated their arguments" (12). At this point a critical reader might wonder whether such an enterprise is daringly creative or potentially deceptive. Should we worry a bit that this tantalizing cross-pollination is the result of an intellectual exercise that is, by design, rather artificial?

Nasrallah tests her method in seven chapters, in which she juxtaposes selected literary works with specific archaeological sites or works of art. Chapter One considers certain apologists' writings, comparing them with the great fountain of Regilla and Herodes Atticus at Olympia. Here she addresses the problem of genre, attempting to define the idiom of apology as the authors' effort to identify their place as pious and loyal citizens within their Greco-Roman culture. Revising the usual definition of apology as an argument "against" prevailing culture but rather an argument "within" the current intellectual environment, Nasrallah claims that the fountain had a similar purpose: to make a "pious address to the emperor." Both were rhetorical forms of defense that articulated common ideals though in different vocabularies: verbal and visual. Again, Nasrallah does not mean to suggest that the fountain was a setting for the apologist's performed text, but that these different monuments are related kinds of discourse, although in different modes.

In subsequent chapters, Nasrallah's project succeeds, more in some places than in others. Chapter Two draws heavily upon contemporary feminist and post-colonial ideas about landscape, mapping, bodies (in space), hybridity, gender, and race. Here, instead of suggesting that two disparate monuments have identical purposes or goals, Nasrallah juxtaposes the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias (dedicated by locals to the Julio-Claudian family and which associates Rome with the inhabited world) with the physical and intellectual border-crossers Justin, Tatian, and Lucian. Yet, despite the detailed description of the monument, it was not terribly clear to this reader just how the Sebasteion helped to "make sense of second-century provincial traveling men's rhetoric of the vulnerability-the feminization-of their bodies within the inhabited world" (83).

By contrast, Chapter Five, which considers the problem of blurring the boundaries of human and divine, pairs the portrait of Commodus as Hercules with Athenagoras's address to that...