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This book is a very long answer to a very short question: How did literate Romans of the fourth and Wfth centuries come to the idea that there was such a thing as Christianity? On its face the question seems naïve. There was, in this period, a dramatic growth in the numbers of people, buildings, books, and public events that were called, at least in some contexts , Christian; historians now conventionally refer to this period as one in which the Roman Empire was Christianized. The question that this book attempts to answer, however, is not whether people or places called Christian existed in the later Roman Empire. Instead, the book addresses the question of how some later Roman readers and writers went about transforming those people, places, texts, and events into a generality, and how they summoned that generality into conceptual existence. My basic argument is that a movement from the description of various people or things as Christian to the concept of a free-standing religious and cultural entity that could be named Christianity did take place in this period, but took place in a series of quite tenuous intellectual movements, under very speciWc educational conditions, and with no immediate guarantee that the notion of Christianity would become an enduring component of the Western cultural imagination. Christianitas is a decidedly uncommon formulation in the early centuries of Christian history; its conceptual fragility is worth examining. Because this is a book about the conceptual consequences of names and naming, it is about language as much as it is about religion. SpeciWcally it is about how the teaching of language in late antiquity shaped the ability of late ancient readers and writers to have concepts that we call religious. This language teaching was primarily in the hands of grammarians, and so texts surrounding the discipline of grammar, in both Christian and traditional contexts, form the evidentiary core of this study. The modest premise 1 Introduction Toward Tyranny of this work is that the discipline of grammar, which in late antiquity encompassed both language analysis and literary criticism, had fundamental eVects in religious as well as literary discourse; less modestly, I argue that the conventions of the discipline of grammar transformed linguistic work into incipient religious practice. The conXation of literature and religion was not without precedent. The rise of formal grammatical study from the fourth century to the sixth coincides not only with the growth in numbers of identiWably Christian texts and people but also with a rich period of text-based magical practices, divination through books, and the like.1 While such practices are not directly the concern of this book, they testify in a particularly clear fashion to the numinous power that could at the time be attributed to linguistic acts. The licit religious ideations of grammar, I suggest, were more diVuse but no less potent. Since this book is about the potency of language in late antiquity, it is also very much about the texts in which such potent language was taken to reside, texts that we can still meaningfully describe under the disciplinary rubric of “classics.” The Latin grammarians of the fourth and Wfth centuries were among the most important agents who deWned the canon of Latin authors that would be studied, copied, imitated, and so passed on into the Middle Ages and up to our own time. Part of the imaginative work that grammarians accomplished, then, was the construction of an authoritative literary tradition whose strengths lay primarily in the language of the late republic and early empire. Henri-Irénée Marrou, in his magisterial Histoire de l’Education dans l’Antiquité, described this production as follows: On the whole, despite the new tendencies, grammar was still essentially theoretical, analytical, and, so to speak, contemplative. The grammarian did not teach people how to use a living language; he took stock of the material that had been used by the great classic writers, the language which in their masterpieces had been hallowed for all eternity. A tyrannical classical ideal dominated this teaching. . . . Latin was—it was there for all time in the great writers; the science of correct speaking—recte loquendi scientia—was based in the last analysis on auctoritas.2 Despite the appearance in recent years of revealing work on the status of grammarians in late antiquity, on the types and transmission of grammatical treatises, and on the material conditions of ancient education,3 the general picture of late ancient grammar and its tyrannical...

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