Download PDF | Politics And Tradition Between Rome, Ravenna And Constantinople A Study Of Cassiodorus And The Variae , 527-554.
388 Pages
The Variae of Cassiodorus have long been valued asan epistolary collection offering a window into political and cultural life in a so-called barbarian successor state in sixth-century Italy. However, this study is the first to treat them as more than an assemblage of individual case studies and to analyse the collection’s wider historical context. M. Shane Bjornlie highlights the insights the Variae provide into early medieval political, ecclesiastical, fiscal and legal affairs and the influence of the political and military turbulence of Justinian’s reconquest of Italy, and of political and cultural exchanges between Italy and Constantinople.
The book also explores how Cassiodorus revised, updated and assembled the Variae for publication and what this reveals about his motives for publishing an epistolary record and for his own political life at a crucial period of transformation for the Roman world. m. shane bjornlie is Assistant Professor of Roman and Late Antique History at Claremont McKenna College. His research interests include ethnography, late antique letter collections, ancient political culture and the ‘decline and fall’ of the Roman Empire.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book began with an interest in explaining the dramatic departures of Cassiodorus’ epistolary collection, theVariae, from other paradigms for the publication of letter collections in ancient and late antique writing. Doing so has required questioning the validity of a number of trusted models for the political, literary and social context of the Variae. As a result, this book offers a substantial departure from the communis opinio concerning Cassiodorus, the Variae and sixth-century Italy. However, for all that is new in this book, much derives from steadily accumulated advances in the understanding of how the ancient literate elite wrote and read epistolary collections, the impact of literature on political culture and the sensitivity of communities to the transmission of political ideas and ideology. Even with the support of new scholarly approaches to old problems, suggesting a new model for understanding Cassiodorus and the Variae has required the interest, generous encouragement and frank criticisms of a good many people.
The many accumulated debts incurred while writing this book began with a doctoral thesis at Princeton University, where I benefited immeasurably from the mentorship of Peter Brown and Bob Kaster. Peter Brown combined scholarly wisdom with indefatigable patience in a manner worthy of the very best late antique bishops. Bob Kaster managed the difficult feat of clothing red ink with kindness and respect, and was always available to read Cassiodorus’ Latin with me. For their willingness to continue reading and commenting on the book manuscript, I owe a professional debt; for the humanitas and friendship, I am grateful at a more personal level. Others read and offered valuable comments on substantial portions of the dissertation, subsequent articles or the manuscript itself. Among these, I am especially grateful to Clifford Ando, Celia Chazelle, Gerda Heydemann, Bill Jordan, Michael Maas, Volker Menze, James O’Donnell, Ralph Mathisen, Michele Salzman, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Ian Wood. For conversations, comments on more specialized points and friendly encouragement, I should also like to thank Jonas Bjørnebye, Kim Bowes, Thomas Brown, Averil Cameron, Maurizio Campanelli, Alexandra Chavarr´ıa, Christopher Chinn, Kate Cooper, Damian Hernandez, Kristine Iara, Rita Lizzi, Barbara Naddeo, Manu Radhakrishnan, Andrew Riggsby, Carly Steinborn and Philipp von Rummel. The American Academy at Rome provided funding and incomparable hospitality during the last year in which I worked on the manuscript; the Arthur and Janet Ross Library at the Academy, and the many friendly denizens of that library, were particularly indispensable.
During the year in Rome I was also fortunate enough to benefit from audiences at a number of colloquia where I presented work from the manuscript. I should like to thank Bryan Ward-Perkins and Volker Menze for generous invitations to speak, respectively, at Trinity College, Oxford, and at the Central European University, Budapest. I am also especially grateful to Turid Seim and Katariina Mustakallio for organizing an excellent series of seminars at the Norwegian and Finnish Institutes of Rome, where I was able to present research. The completion of this book owes as much to the careful attention that it received in its final stages as it does to those who provided initial advice and inspiration: Rosamond McKitterick has been a tireless editor, an insightful commentator and, more importantly, a persuasive source of encouragement without whom this book would probably still languish under the tyranny of Horace’s dictum. Finally, I dedicate this book to my four Muses – my wife and our three daughters. There is no proper recompense for the time that they cheerfully sacrificed that I might write this book.
introduction
Sometime in the late 560s a group of artisans carefully removed, tessera by tessera, the portraits of more than a dozen people from the mosaics flanking the nave of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. These mosaics portray, on the south wall, the palace (palatium) of the Amal king Theoderic conflated with a profile of the urban landscape of Ravenna and, on the north wall, a profile of the nearby suburb of Classe. The figures removed from the two mosaics originally held ideologically key positions before the city gates of Ravenna and Classe and within the colonnaded arches of the palatium. In their stead, the mosaicists filled the vacancies of the portals and arches with mosaics portraying draperies and coloured brick. Only disembodied hands, extending beyond the altered zones, and palimpsest shadows of the former figures remained to remind the audience that earlier associations had been expunged from the church.1 These new empty spaces represent carefully arranged fields of rhetorical communication that have much to tell about the political, religious and cultural realities confronting their contemporary audience. Built and consecrated early in the reign of Theoderic (491–526), a so-called barbarian king of the Arian Christian sect, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo was a monumental public space that would accumulate contradictory associations over the course of the first half of the sixth century.2 Through its physical proximity to the palatium of Theoderic in the heart of Ravenna, the church in the first stage of its history contributed to the celebration of Amal governance in Italy.
The figures previously visible in the architectural spaces of the nave mosaics (including a portrait of Theoderic and a dedicatory inscription bearing his name) signified the close association between political and religious conceptions of the late antique state.3 After 540, when Justinian’s soldiers entered Ravenna and initiated what would become a long period of eastern imperial control of the city, it became necessary to detach the church from the obvious celebration of the political successes of the Amal dynasty. The need for this intervention in public memory did not become imperative until after 554, when Justinian’s Constitutio Pragmatica finally declared eastern imperial victory in what had been nearly two decades of war in Italy (the Gothic War). Thus, late in the 560s, the bishop of Ravenna, Agnellus, rededicated the church in the name of St Martin and systematically removed images identifiable with Amal rule.4 For those who might have remembered the significance of the original figures, such a damnatio memoriae served as a reminder that the Amals, despite their success under Theoderic, had ultimately failed as a political and dynastic regime. The erasure privileged a competing interpretation of the Amals by which they were understood as heterodox Christians who had subjected Italy to ‘barbarian’ rule.
The curtained empty zones of mosaic in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo illustrate how the clear stamp of Theoderic’s success as a ruler, visible elsewhere throughout the city in its architectural fabric, was reimpressed on Ravenna as the legacy of barbaric despotism that had been conquered by the eastern Roman Empire. The nave mosaics at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo testify to the ability of late antique media to present communicative silences. They offer an interesting analogue to the proper subject of this study – the collection of legal and administrative letters that Cassiodorus compiled as the Variae. The altered mosaics of Sant’Apollinare and the letters of the Variae have much in common as ‘windows onto painted curtains’. Each in its own way represents a response to the polemic surrounding the postwar reputation of Amal rule in Italy.
In fact, this study will argue that the Variae act as a piece of polemical literature in a manner comparable to that of the visual medium of the mosaics. Where the mosaics literally opened windows onto painted curtains to obscure a previous ideological message, the individual letters of the Variae operate as tesserae in the production of a composite image that also functions as an ideological curtain or screen. In the preface to his heavily abridged translation of the Variae, Thomas Hodgkin in 1886 vented his frustration at attempting to penetrate the opacity of the letters by stating, ‘The curtain is the picture.’5 This description characterized for Hodgkin the difficulty entailed in understanding, in its own terms, the performance of sixth-century history that he encountered in the Variae. What Hodgkin wanted in the Variae was a window into the day-to-day operation of the state in sixth-century Italy. What he found was a culturally specific performance. This study suggests that reading the Variae is considerably more complicated than translating the surface rhetoric and bureaucratic jargon of a late antique chancery. Rather, the collection represents Cassiodorus’ attempt to construct a composite image of Amal rule in Italy for a particular audience.
In this sense, the Variae are an attempt at literary portraiture which responds to events and conditions at a particular moment in Cassiodorus’ career. Much as the later artisans of Sant’Apollinare preserved some features of the original mosaic programme (the architecture of the palatium and urban profiles of Ravenna and Classe), introduced features to create a new programmatic statement (twin processions of martyrs and saints) and effaced other elements entirely (Theoderic and members of his court), Cassiodorus too engaged in a revisionist presentation of Italy under the Amals by selectively preserving, enhancing and deleting from the historical reality that the letters purport to represent. The Variae comprise 468 documents that Cassiodorus arranged in twelve books.6 As a collection of dispositive letters (legal judgments and administrative directives), the Variae treat an almost panoptic range of official activities: appointment to public offices, the collection of taxes and the management of state property, criminal cases and civil disputes, the maintenance of urban amenities, and the diplomatic correspondence of Amal rulers to eastern emperors and other so-called barbarian rulers.
Taken as a whole, the Variae span more than thirty years of Cassiodorus’ activities as an intimate member of the palatine service attached to the Amal court.7 The presumably official nature of the collection, its chronological breadth and the rich range of materials contained within the individual letters have made the Variae a prized source for scholars concerned with early sixth-century Italy. The Variae have been prominent in studies of political and ecclesiastical affairs, fiscal and legal administration, urban life and rural production, barbarian ethnogenesis and the transmission of classicism. Yet it must be emphasized that the Variae are also among the most idiosyncratic of late antique epistolary collections.8 Typical epistolary collections take the form of personal letters directed by asingle author to members of a wider community of correspondents. The Variae, however, contain presumably official governmental documents. The edicts, judicial responses, diplomatic letters and administrative formulae written in the names of various Ostrogothic rulers have the appearance of a r´esum´e of the Ravenna chancery. As an additional departure from the norm, Cassiodorus addressed two prefaces (opening Books 1 and 11) to the audience of the Variae and he attached to the collection a treatise on the soul (the De anima), the preface of which continues Cassiodorus’ previous address to the audience of the Variae. 9 This level of direct interaction with an intended audience is not found in earlier epistolary collections.
The combination of documentary material with what is essentially a philosophical inquiry into the source of wisdom (the De anima) similarly lacks a precedent. Furthermore, Cassiodorus embedded within the letters of the Variae an encyclopaedic range of digressive material. Individual letters contain excursuses pertaining to everything from the behaviour of animals, the motion of stars and the nature of music, to the origins of writing, the history of law and the accomplishments of engineering. In terms of their formal structure as a collection and the content of individual letters, the Variae are as unprecedented among epistolary collections as they are among bureaucratic writing and legal literature. Cassiodorus’ authorship is uncontested. What remains problematic and debatable is the extent to which the letters represent the mode of expression characteristic of the Ostrogothic chancery rather than Cassiodorus’ own agenda.10 This book suggests that the letters represent a documentary record of the Ravenna chancery which Cassiodorus later subjected to heavy revision reflecting the political exigencies that attended the fall of the Amal court during the Gothic War. In particular, this book suggests that Cassiodorus drew heavily upon themes of the political discourse of Constantinople at a time when it seemed that the eastern imperial control of Italy was imminent and his own social and political position had suddenly become quite precarious.11 From Cassiodorus’ perspective during the opening stages of the Gothic War, the protraction of the conflict to almost two decades (535–54) and the total fragmentation of political power in Italy in the aftermath could not have been foreseen. It was in this period, during the late 530s and early 540s, that the Variae were politically relevant, not during the preceding decades when Cassiodorus first penned the original letters in fulfilment of various public offices.
It was as a collection that the Variae had the potential to make an intervention in how eastern imperial victory in Italy might impose a reinterpretation of the previous fifty years of Ostrogothic governance. This book will suggest that the object of the Variae was the political rehabilitation of the Italian elite who had served as the palatine bureaucracy of the Amals. The book will claim that, in essence, the Variae are an apologetic work intended to counter the notion that the former palatine elite served a ‘barbarian’ regime. The collection aimed to demonstrate their suitability to return to a role in the government at Ravenna. This study examines how Cassiodorus positioned a number of ideologically charged themes in the letters of the Variae to demonstrate that suitability. These were themes deployed in a contemporary moral and legal discourse concerning proper governance at a time when it appeared that there was still a possibility of creating a political framework in Italy that would include the former bureaucratic elite of Ravenna. More importantly, this study will suggest that Cassiodorus’ portrayal of western palatine service in the Variae engaged in a debate about the proper definition of imperial rule emerging from the polemical discourse surrounding the reign of Justinian. The sources that Cassiodorus drew upon in order to construct an idealized persona of state service originated not only in Italy, but also in Constantinople. As we shall see, much of the digressive material that Cassiodorus included in the letters (for which the collection received its name) provided anchor points for the polemical themes of an apologetic project that was responsive to political conditions at the eastern capital.
Therefore, rather than a collection of entirely genuine artefacts from the Ostrogothic chancery, this book argues that the Variae represent a literary enterprise. At a point when it became clear that the Gothic War would irrevocably alter the terms by which the palatine elite of Ravenna enjoyed its status, Cassiodorus selected, edited and arranged letters from a pre-existing assemblage in order to represent his contribution to the government at Ravenna. He interpolated select letters with thematic digressions and, in some cases, even invented new letters. Thus, although much of the material in the collection does indeed correspond to the actual political and cultural conditions of Ostrogothic Italy, specific themes found in the collection represent Cassiodorus’ later intervention in the public record of the Ostrogothic regime and more properly correspond to the period when the Gothic War was drawing a new social, economic and political map for Italy.
Rather than a privileged window into the experiment of a post-Roman ‘barbarian’ regime, the Variae are, in fact, a window into the impressive range of cultural and political communication between the new sixth-century states of the western Mediterranean and the continued embodiment of the Roman Empire at Constantinople.12 The differences between Italy and the eastern empire (social, political, economic, religious) were substantial enough at the advent of the Gothic War that Cassiodorus could only offer a favourable portrayal of western palatine service by adapting that portrayal to certain norms of the eastern imperial capital, such as had not been current in Italy. Thus the Variae also offer a lens through which to observe the interaction of politics, religion, philosophy and literature between the eastern and western Mediterranean.
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