scholarly journals From the Tombs into the City: Grave Robbing and the Reuse of Funerary Spolia in Late Antique Italy

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Cristina Murer
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that funerary spoil (e.g. sarcophagus lids, funerary altars, epitaphs, reliefs, and statues) were frequently reused to decorate the interiors of public and private buildings from the third to the sixth century. Therefore, the marble revetments of high imperial tombs must have been spoliated. Imperial edicts, which tried to stamp part the overly common practice of tomb plundering, confirm that the social practice of tomb plundering must have been far more frequent in late antiquity than in previous periods. This paper discusses the reuse of funerary spoil in privet and public buildings from Latium and Campania and contextualizes them by examining legal sources addressing tomb violation. Furthermore, this study considers the extent to which the social practice of tomb plundering and the reuse of funerary material in late antiquity can be connected with larger urbanist, sociohistorical, and political transformations of Italian cityscapes from the third to the sixth century.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The Third ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The City

Scholars have traditionally approached the history of Rome in late antiquity as a metaphor for the fate of the empire and the ancient world, focusing on the distancing of the imperial court or on the growing importance of the Christian church. However, as this introduction argues, it is by focusing on the Roman aristocracy and its relationship with the city and its spaces that we can form a comprehensive understanding of the physical and historical developments that redefined Rome during this period. After providing a brief overview of the developments that shaped the city and its elite, between the end of the third and the beginning of the sixth century, the introduction discusses the nature of the evidence available, as well as the approach adopted in the book.

scholarly journals How Numerous and How Busy were Late-Antique Presbyters?

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-37
Author(s):  
Robert Wiśniewski
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Third ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This article seeks to count late-antique clergy and assess their workload. It estimates the number of clerics, and particularly presbyters, in Christian communities of various sizes, and investigates how and why the ratio of clerics to laypersons changed over time. First, by examining the situation in the city of Rome, it demonstrates that the growth in the ranks of the presbyters from the third to the fifth century was slow, and argues that this resulted from the competing interests of the bishops, lay congregation, rich donors, and above all the middle clergy. It is the last group who were reluctant to raise their number as this had a negative impact on their income. The results of this phenomenon can also be seen in other big sees of Christendom, in which, in Late Antiquity, there was one presbyter per several thousand laypersons. Interestingly, in smaller towns, this ratio was significantly lower, and in the countryside, it remained in the lower hundreds. Second, this article shows how the changing ratio of clerics to laypersons affected the level of professionalization of the former. In the big cities, the ecclesiastical duties of presbyters who served in a growing community were getting heavier. This turned the presbyters into full-time religious ministers, at the same time making them even more dependent on ecclesiastical income. In the towns and villages, however, the pattern was different. In the places in which one presbyter served a very small community, his job was less time-consuming but also brought him less income. In consequence, rural presbyters had to support their families through craft work, commerce, or farming, and they had time for this.

Living and Working on the Capitoline Hill

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Moralee
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Hill

Chapter 2 surveys the evidence for the maintenance of the Capitoline Hill’s temples, statues, festivals, and administrative uses into the sixth century. While imperial rites celebrated at the Capitol faded in significance by the end of the third century, the hill was at the heart of the social and administrative worlds of late antique Rome. The chapter thus turns to the ways in which the hill was embedded in multiple late Roman neighborhoods and used for administrative purposes. Even as Rome’s urban environment was undergoing serious transformations in the use of public spaces, archaeology, epigraphy, and literary sources demonstrate that the Capitoline Hill was surrounded by neighborhoods displaying a high degree of sociability and commerce throughout this period.

Nicopolis ad Istrum: Backward and Balkan?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. WHITTOW
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

The story of Nicopolis ad Istrum and its citizens exemplifies much that is common to the urban history of the whole Roman Empire. This chapter reviews the history of Nicopolis and its transition into the small fortified site of the fifth to seventh centuries and compares it with the evidence from the Near East and Asia Minor. It argues that Nicopolis may not have experienced a cataclysm as has been suggested, and that, as in the fifth and sixth century west, where landowning elites showed a striking ability to adapt and survive, there was an important element of continuity on the lower Danube, which in turn may account for the distinctive ‘Roman’ element in the early medieval Bulgar state. It also suggests that the term ‘transition to Late Antiquity’ should be applied to what happened at Nicopolis in the third century: what happened there in the fifth was the transition to the middle ages. This chapter also describes late antique urbanism in the Balkans by focusing on the Justiniana Prima site.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDING ACTIVITY IN LATE ANTIQUE ROME

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 435-449
Author(s):  
Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Residential Architecture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Inferior Class

This article charts the transformation of the organisation of building work at Rome during Late Antiquity and the social changes that underlay it. In Late Antiquity, the reduction and total cessation of brick manufacture, and the use instead of recycled materials, made it much harder to maintain the standardised, large-scale building methods of the Early Roman period. The scarcity of good-quality materials led to a growing discrepancy between monumental public works, sponsored by imperial and ecclesiastical authorities, and private and residential architecture. Such a development was not merely a sign of ‘decadence’ or ‘decline’, but resulted from the emergence of a society rigidly divided between a ruling class that controlled the means of production and an oppressed inferior class, responsible for production activity.

Late Antique Letter Collections

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Letter Collection ◽  
Latin Letter

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.

Ildar Garipzanov, Caroline Goodson, and Henry Maguire, ed., Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Cursor Mundi, 27, Turnhout: Brepols, 2017, xviii, 392 p., 141 ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 377-379
Author(s):  
Kriszta Kotsis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cursor Mundi ◽  
Definition Of

Late antique and early medieval graphic signs have traditionally been studied by narrowly focused specialists leading to the fragmentation and decontextualization of this important body of material. Therefore, the volume aims “to deepen interdisciplinary research on graphic signs” (7) of the third through tenth centuries, with contributions from archaeologists, historians, art historians, a philologist, and a paleographer. Ildar Garipzanov’s introduction defines the central terms (sign, symbol, graphicacy), calls for supplanting the text-image binary with “the concept of the visual-written continuum” (15), and argues that graphicacy was central to visual communication in this period. He emphasizes the agency of graphic signs and notes that their study can amplify our understanding of the definition of personal and group identity, the articulation of power, authority, and religious affiliation, and communication with the supernatural sphere.

Environmental Change, the Acts of John, and Shifting Cultic Landscapes in Late Antique Ephesus

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-215
Author(s):  
Travis Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Deep Water ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The City

The city of Ephesus experienced a marked civic transformation in Late Antiquity. After having centered its settlements and economic fortunes on its proximity to a deep-water harbor for over a millenium, late antique Ephesus gradually shifted to an inland, fortified settlement on Ayasoluk Hill. While several factors undoubtedly informed this civic reorientation, the most commonly cited impetus for Ephesus’s late antique reorientation was the infilling of its deep-water harbor. This article argues that, in addition to this environmental cause, an important cultural shift correspondingly informed Ephesus’s late antique reconfigurations. Namely, the emergence and development of the tomb of John on Ayasoluk Hill, informed by an array of literary legends associating the apostle with the city, increasingly positioned this site as a cultic and economic focal point in Late Antiquity. This article argues that an important early strand in this cultural fabric was the Acts of John, a collection of apocryphal tales that narrate John’s exploits in Ephesus. Significantly, the Acts of John articulates a “counter-cartography” that disassociates Christian identity from prominent Ephesian cultic sites and accentuates the importance of spaces “outside the city” of Ephesus, including and especially the tomb of John. Through its own circulation as well as its influence on later Johannine narratives, the early Acts of John helped inform a shift in the cultural cartographies of Ephesus, where Greco-Roman polytheistic spaces were gradually devalued in favor of Christian sites, the tomb of John on Ayasoluk chief among them.

Grafinscripties

Lampas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Onno van Nijf
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Frequent Type ◽  
The Social ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This article offers a brief introduction to the most frequent type of inscription: funerary inscriptions or epitaphs. The article offers a chronological overview from the Archaic period to late Antiquity, with an emphasis on Athens. It opens with a brief discussion of the archaeological and ritual contexts in which funerary inscriptions were set up, followed by a discussion of archaic epigrams and the social strategies that lay behind them. This is followed by a discussion of public and private graves that shows how epigraphic habits changed over time. The article continues with a discussion of funerary epigraphic habits outside Athens and closes with a few examples of Christian epitaphs.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document