Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Matthew Dal Santo - Debating the Saints' Cults in the Age of Gregory the Great-Oxford University Press (2012).
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Acknowledgements
This study is intended as a contribution to the history of the Christian saints’ cult—and of patristic Christianity more generally—in the Mediterranean world during the final, post-Justinianic phase of late antiquity. In many ways, it should never have been written. Lured away during my undergraduate days from torts and contracts by Peter Brown’s spellbinding evocation of the world of late antiquity, I devoted myself late to the learning of ancient languages. True classicists will doubtless judge that the success of that enterprise remains open to question. A Travelling Scholarship from the University of Sydney, a bursary from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and, slightly later, an Overseas Research Studentship from Her Majesty’s Government allowed me the extraordinary privilege of pursuing the study of late antiquity in one of the world’s truly great academic institutions.
At Cambridge I incurred debts of gratitude almost too many to remember. I owe the greatest thanks to Peter Sarris, my longsuffering supervisor who had the distinct misfortune of having a student metamorphose into a colleague, with the incumbent duty of parlour small talk. At the Faculty of History, Rosamond McKitterick exercised a guiding hand. The doctoral dissertation that stands behind this study benefited from the learned criticism both she and Averil Cameron brought to bear as examiners. Naturally, all remaining imperfections and outright errors of fact or interpretation remain wholly my (obstinate) own.
I must also thank the late Robert Markus for his constant, warm encouragement, and Kate Cooper, Conrad Leyser, Erica Hunter, Elina Screen, Robert Coates-Stephens, Nick Denyer, John Marenbon, Chip Coakley, Richard Payne, and James Howard-Johnston for commenting on various stages of my work. A generous package of offprints from Peter Brown offered at the most preliminary stage has continued to yield a rich harvest of insights and questions. At the University of Sydney, Lyn Olsen, Peter Brennan, Frances Clark, Frangoise Grauby, and Liz Rechniewski taught me history and French before leaving Australian shores, and shouldered the burden of writing numerous academic references. And I am profoundly grateful to my secondary teachers (especially Frank MacDonald, Elaine Balderston, and Stephen Wile) at Kirrawee High School, whose expertise and intellectual rigour pushed me to think critically at a formative stage.
My enjoyment and, I hope, the quality of my PhD were immensely enriched through a Rome Award from the British School at Rome and travel grants from the British Institute in Ankara and University of Cambridge. These enabled me to engage in a way that was deeply inspiring with the material remains of the world this study evokes. (The first also allowed me to meet my wife, but that is another story.) A summer at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library allowed me to hone my Greek in the most congenial setting. Above all, election to the fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge, brought with it opportunities and privileges that I once couldn’t have imagined. I owe the Master and Fellows of that college immense thanks for their confidence in my project and for putting at my disposal the resources and tranquillity to pursue it as far as this publication.
In turning a rather unruly dissertation into a somewhat more coherent book, I thank Elizabeth Jeffreys and the anonymous readers at Oxford University Press. I am also grateful to Hilary O’Shea, Cathryn Steele, Desirée Kellerman, and Catherine Macduff for their help and patience. In the matter of obtaining photographic permissions, I thank Anne-Laure Ranoux, Chef du Service Images et Ressources documentaires, Musée du Louvre; Katerina Biliouri, Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki; Father Justin, St Catherine’s Monastery; and the Museum and Treasury of Monza Cathedral.
Finally, I thank my family and friends without whom I would have given up long ago. My mother and father provided unstinting moral support when it was tempting to pack it all up and go home. Phil Booth and Peter Turner, the best of friends and intellectual sparring partners, made a solitary task into a shared endeavour. Other friends, whether at Cambridge or in Australia, were also an invaluable support. I only hope I have remembered to give something in return! Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to my wife, Gitte Lonstrup Dal Santo, an accomplished historian in her own right, who has encouraged and challenged me in every way since that first autumn in Rome. I thank her with all my heart.
It remains only to note that the grandes lignes of the first chapter first appeared in the Journal of Early Christian Studies 17 (2009) 421-57, and Chapter Three’s discussion of saints’ images appears in a fuller version in the Journal of Late Antiquity 4 (2011) 31-54. The conclusion builds on my article published in Age of Saints? Conflict, Power and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
MJD June 2011 Canberra, Australia
Introduction
Gregory the Great and the saints’ cult in late antiquity
Around the year 700 Anastasius of Sinai, one of the most venerable ascetics of his age, put down in writing his belief that God had created human beings out of the four elements—air, water, fire, and earth.’ So much had been confirmed by his own observations during a lifetime’s travel across many of the territories of the old Roman Near East:
I went not long ago to the Dead Sea [...] where the air is deadly, illness-laden, burning and liable to generate corruption, just like the air in Cyprus. I found there that all their captives and slaves who were most proficient in the cultivating of the fields were Cypriot; and since I was amazed and desired to know the cause of this, they who were in charge replied that the air of this place was not different from the air of Cyprus. They also said that often those captives sent there from other regions died within a short space of time.”
Because the balance between the four elements played an important role in human health, Anastasius was not embarrassed (unlike other but by no means all Christians of his age) to record his confidence in the skills of contemporary practitioners of the medical profession. On the contrary, it was Anastasius’s firm belief that Hippocratic remedies could be successfully applied to many of the sufferers who sought relief at the saints’ shrines that lay scattered across the Mediterranean world. The truth of this had been confirmed on a visit to a shrine on Cyprus dedicated to St Epiphanius. Anastasius wrote:
A little before the capture of Cyprus, a certain philosopher skilled in medicine (ris diAdcodos Kai iatpocogiorys) came to the shrine of Saint Epiphanius and saw the multitude of sick people. He said that many could be cured with the help of God through a correct diet, purgations and the letting of blood. When this was done by order of the archbishop, it healed many.’
Anastasius’s pointed attribution of these healings not to the ministrations of Epiphanius, the shrine’s sainted patron, but to ‘secular’ physicians has raised the eyebrows of modern scholars before.*
For Anastasius’s accommodating attitude stands in marked contrast to the anti-Hippocratic, ‘faith-based’ pronouncements on healing which the partisans of saints’ shrines often offered at this time. Not so far from Sinai, Sophronius, later patriarch of Jerusalem, shrilly decried the kind of remedies Anastasius so warmly embraced.” Sophronius was thoroughly unconvinced of the Hippocratic treatments he received for an eye problem he developed after his arrival in Egypt circa 610. He inveighed in particular against a diagnosis that saw his malady as the harmful result of a change in the quality of the air.° When the corresponding treatment proved ineffective, the physicians then explained the disease as an imbalance in his body’s humours.
But Sophronius could only look with scorn on such changing diagnoses.’ Ultimately deemed beyond cure, Sophronius did what we intuitively imagine any early Byzantine would have done: he sought out the shrine of some famous saints, in this case, Sts Cyrus and John whose complex stood on the bay at Aboukir outside Alexandria. Thanks to the saints’ ministrations, he was healed. But Sophronius lost none of his disdain for the physicians and their ‘climates’ and ‘humours’. Indeed, he later satirized the unsuccessful efforts of Gesius, a famous Alexandrian doctor, to cure himself of a disorder in his back, neck, and shoulders. His attempted remedies rehearse the repertoire of contemporary Hippocratic medicine, and the story concludes with Sophronius proving that Cyrus and John alone could dispense true healing.® When on another occasion the shrine attendants sent for a physician to treat a man who had cut his throat in an attempted suicide, Sophronius, with evident satisfaction, reported that the saints castigated them for their temerity.’
The diagnoses that the doctors applied to Sophronius’s own eyes reflect the medical remedies with which Anastasius of Sinai was familiar and which he recommended so serenely in his own writings. Anastasius followed the same essentially Hippocratic and empirical rationale to explain why children sometimes died young, why some women were barren, why plague struck some cities but not others, and even why some people were more disposed to certain moral failings than others.'° The cause lay generally in the laws of nature and the properties that governed the elements from which man was made. God the Creator had instilled certain properties in the various elements and assigned the laws by which they would operate; and, having established the physical laws of his Creation, God generally refrained from interfering with them.’’
This had certain consequences for Anastasius’s theory of miracles. In Anastasius’s view, there was no question that miracles could in theory take place; but if they did, they were relatively rare ‘additions and subtractions’ to and from the natural order and, in the case of illness, a rationalistic remedy was normally to be preferred whenever possible:
[...] God has given men the knowledge of medicine, and has prepared herbs and all kinds of things suitable for healing, so that, I believe, in God’s providence, doctors often save man from death [...]. By every means, wise slave-traders of old besought learned philosophers and medical teachers to explain to them as accurately as possible what were the qualities of the air and elements of every land [...].'”
Anastasius’s aetiology thus neatly reversed the paradigm Sophronius constructed in his record of the miracles performed by Sts Cyrus and John, wherein those who sought Hippocratic medicine were consistently viewed as unwise, while the truly wise were the pious who sought healing from the saints. In other collections of saintly miracles from the period under review in this study a more conciliatory attitude towards Hippocratic medicine can sometimes be found.”* Yet however much contemporaries had in practice recourse to both saintly and other more mundane forms of healing,'* Anastasius of Sinai’s account of the activities of the wise physician-philosopher who successfully applied the skills of his profession at the shrine of St Epiphanius stands out from the corpus of early Byzantine literature connected with the saints’ cult as strikingly and almost uniquely rationalistic in tone. But was Anastasius really alone in giving the saints a back seat in this way?
Part of our surprise when we encounter a voice like Anastasius’s from late antiquity derives from the abundant evidence, literary and archaeological, for the widespread patronage of saints’ shrines across the Mediterranean world that has come down to us from the period.'” But it is also intimately bound up with the way that evidence has been interpreted and the signal importance which the historiography of late antiquity has attributed to the Christian cult of saints. Since its appearance in 1971, Peter Brown’s brilliant and deservedly famous article on the Christian holy man or saint in late antiquity has animated a major part of the study of the religious and cultural history of the Mediterranean world between circa 300 and 800.'° A social figure who apparently aroused the admiration of his peers, the late antique Christian holy man revealed, in Brown’s view, the secrets of the society that nursed him.’” The choice then made to invest human beings (and, particularly, men) with special sacred authority, which Brown evoked with such sensitive artistry in his World of Late Antiquity, transformed modern interpretations of the religious landscape of the late ancient world.'®
For nearly four decades Brown’s thesis that the rise of the holy man in the later Roman Empire—and particularly the Christian monk or ascetic from the middle of the fourth century—reflected a watershed in religious history, that the veneration of living human beings constituted a realignment of the meaning of sanctity (‘the holy’ in Brown’s terminology) and of access to the power and social authority which such sanctity conferred, has nourished a rich literature on the Christian saints’ cult in late antiquity. For many historians, as for Brown himself, the Christian saint—more especially, perhaps, the willingness of late antique persons to believe in the Christian saint—has represented the key to understanding the nature of human life in the late Roman Mediterranean and its successor states, whether on an individual or a collective level. As Brown put it succinctly, ‘[t]he rise of the holy man is the Leitmotiv of the religious revolution of late antiquity’.
It is well known that Brown’s approach challenged a tradition of interpreting the very visible role which saints’ cults played in the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire that reached back to Gibbon and the rationalist prejudices of Enlightenment Europe and beyond. This tradition was essentially negative and dismissive. Far from representing the vulgarization of classical Greco-Roman religious culture through the infiltration of popular superstition, however, Brown argued that the rise of the holy man and Christian saints’ cult displayed remarkable continuities with many of the long-standing values the Mediterranean world’s social elite (notably an emphasis on living paideia) as well as striking parallels with the shifts taking place in the wider religious mood of late antiquity even outside the confines of the Christian church (especially the intense Neoplatonist search for personal communion with the One).”°
The rise of the saints’ cult was radical and far-reaching, and Christianity did in a sense turn the Roman religious world ‘upside-down’,”’ but not in a way that implied the superior ‘rationality’ or sophistication of the classical over the Christian late antique, nor the disappearance with Christianity’s rise to predominance of many patterns of behaviour traditional to Mediterranean societies. The holy man could be modelled on the late Roman patron and his function in society explained by analogy with the political transformations taking place in the Empire from the time of the third century, particularly the hierarchical system of government established by Diocletian.” The saints could be understood as Christ-bearing figures, missionaries and ‘negotiators of the demise of the ancient gods’ (often on the latter’s own terms).”> And the devotion they stirred in men and women’s hearts has been viewed as the embodiment of a distinctly late antique ideal of friendship.** Despite the resistance of a few sceptics,” it is difficult now to conceive of late antiquity without reference to the rise of the holy man, the veneration of deceased saints or the social influence of Christian monasticism—although we have learnt that these are not by any means all the same thing; indeed, that each one of these components of the ‘saints’ cult’ could mean different things in different parts of the late antique and early medieval world at different times.”°
Even when his confidence in the social functionalist models he applied to the study of religious history was challenged, Brown reserved a privileged place for the rise of the Christian saint or holy man in the mutual histories of the Christian church and Mediterranean society in late antiquity. Commenting on the alarming tendency for communities to abandon the saints (and the Christian church) in moments of crisis, Brown noted,
how little [. . .] of the public space of late Roman society had come to be occupied by Christian holy persons. The solid gold of demonstrative Christian sanctity was spectacular; but it circulated in strictly delimited channels, in what had remained, to an overwhelming extent, a supernatural ‘subsistence economy’, accustomed to handling life’s doubts and cares according to more old-fashioned and low-key methods.””
When he reviewed the copious Lives of the saints handed down to posterity from the late Roman and early medieval periods, Brown admitted that ‘the society that turned to Christian holy persons was more niggardly than our hagiographic sources might lead us, at first sight, to suppose, in lavishing credulity upon them’.** The holy men of late antiquity were, then, but one part of a more variegated web that interwove Christianity, traditional Mediterranean religion, and complex social networks. But there is a sense in which, according to Brown’s view, however hard the Christian saints (and their hagiographers) had to work to earn the admiration of their contemporaries, they always got there in the end.
It is in this spirit that Brown concluded his retractio in Authority and the Sacred, affirming that ‘[b]y playing a role in the emergence of an imaginative model of the world that had a place for such wide-arching prayers, the Christian saints in late antiquity helped to make Christianity at last, for a short moment, before the rise of Islam, the one truly universal religion of much of Europe and the Middle East’.”” And later: ‘The cult of the saints may mean nothing to us. But we have to understand how much it did mean, and had meant for so long, to late antique Christians. It was part of the religious common sense of the age’.”” But to what extent is this really true?
This study revisits the Christian saints’ apparently unstoppable and meteoric rise in significance in the Mediterranean world between 300 and 700, but with a focus on the end rather than the beginning of this period, when, if anything, the public standing of the saints’ cult had been consolidated. Focusing on the later sixth and seventh centuries, it re-examines some of the period’s the hagiographical sources to take account of the significant and too often overlooked expressions of resistance to it that were voiced during this period.*’
This is not an entirely untrodden path. Gilbert Dagron has highlighted the doubt and scepticism that attended the cult of saints in late antique and medieval society: “Les Byzantins’, Dagron asked in a seminal discussion, ‘croyaient-ils 4 tous ces saints qui avaient pris possession [.. . ] de l’espace cultuel, du calendrier liturgique, des livres, des images, des imaginations?’ His answer was clearly no, ‘[c]ar les Byzantins n’oubliaient pas [...] de quelle stratégie de pouvoir et de quels enjeux économiques Phagiographie était l’instrument.’** The general validity of the veneration of the saints and their relics has emerged in recent years as less a consensus among late antique and early medieval Christians than once acknowledged. In the early fifth century, for example, Vigilantius of Calagurris apparently opposed the cult of relics and even monasticism in toto.*?
From a different but surely related perspective, the polemical function of many saints’ Lives has been widely and repeatedly underlined; it is clear that many individual cults began life passionately contested and many others simply failed to take root.** Nonetheless, the scepticism or doubt with which late antique audiences may have greeted the claims of hagiographers on behalf of their sainted subjects remains a field largely overlooked by historians of the period who still, by and large, follow a ‘triumphalist’ model of the role of the Christian saints in late antique society.
For the purposes of this study, we may define scepticism as the inclination to question the truth or soundness of given reports of saintly activity, especially miracles, on the grounds of their improbability for whatever reason.*° I do not imply any connection between the attitudes investigated in this study and Scepticism (ancient or modern) as an approach to philosophy.*° This is true even if, in antiquity, sceptical Pyrrhonism was occasionally associated with the practice of medicine based on the principles of empirical observation (as opposed to more abstract theorizing), and despite the fact that rationalist empiricism forms (as it does) a frequent standpoint from which criticism of the saints’ miracles was made in early Byzantium, as we shall see. A connection between Scepticism and an empiricist approach to medicine may have existed in the third century, but there is no evidence that it still did so in the sixth.*’
Rather, in dealing with the kind of scepticism preserved in sixth- and seventh-century hagiography, we have ultimately to deal with the question of how we construe the nature and response of the audiences of Christian hagiography in this period.** It is often simply assumed that the audiences of early Byzantine saints’ Lives and miracle collection subscribed to the world view of such texts’ authors. Yet the texts themselves suggest the auditors of the saints’ alleged miracles were a critical body and we should be cautious of attributing widespread credulity to the claims of hagiographers on the part of their intended audiences. Indeed, when we look closely at saints’ Lives and miracles collections, doubt and even hostility towards the saints’ miracles is almost symptomatic of those texts that record the activity of saints— especially those from ‘beyond the grave’.
With this in view, the present study aims to trace a debate concerning the saints and their miracles which, if it did not rage across the Christian world, certainly simmered in the minds of many from its first clear appearance at Constantinople during the last quarter of the sixth century, until its resolution with the development of various hagiological ‘orthodoxies’ between Rome and Baghdad by the late 790s. The texts under discussion in this study mostly derive from Italy and the eastern Mediterranean from the second half of the sixth down to the later seventh centuries.
The study begins with a detailed, contextual investigation of an important hagiographical text from early Byzantine Italy—the Dialogues on the Miracles of the Italian Fathers by Gregory the Great (pope, 590-604).°” Composed at Rome between July 593 and November 594 (dates which a detailed study of the text’s internal evidence supports),*” Gregory’s Dialogues occupy a special position in the history of Latin hagiography, containing not only the Life of St Benedict (the second dialogue) but also the most significant discussion of ‘Purgatory’ from the Latin patristic period.’ For reasons that will be given below, this investigation into Gregory’s Dialogues takes its primary point of reference from a still relatively little known treatise from late sixth-century Constantinople, the presbyter Eustratius’s ({ after 602) On the State of Souls after Death.”
As Gilbert Dagron has demonstrated, this text is of crucial importance for re-adjusting our expectations regarding the universality of subscription to the saints’ cult in early Byzantium.”
Most traditional studies have presented the Dialogues as an unproblematic contribution to the late antique saints’ cult. This study argues, however, that Gregory’s text was not merely intended to add to the saints’ cult, but to reflect discursively upon it and on its ramifications for corollary aspects of Christian belief and practice. Gregory meant to offer a gloss on why and how the saints should be venerated, one that responded to contemporary anxieties and uncertainties on both of these fronts which were clearly articulated and rebutted (not necessarily effectively) at Constantinople.**
Gregory offered a strong defence of the relationship between God and the saints, one that seemingly reflected genuine disquiet about the legitimacy of saintly veneration and the precise nature of the operation of saintly miracles. It will be argued that these concerns dovetail compellingly with explicit questioning of the saints’ cult at Constantinople and the assertion there of the implausibility of the saints’ activity post mortem, one which a certain revival of Aristotelian psychology may have propelled.
The second chapter then addresses the way these attacks on the verisimilitude of the saints’ imagined functions encouraged the defenders of the saints’ cult to engage with the Christian theory of the afterlife more generally. The increasing effort, visible in Latin and Greek authors from the end of the sixth century, to offer a coherent account of the soul’s fate before the Resurrection and Final Judgement can be seen as stemming from a concern among church leaders to develop an eschatological meta-structure that fully integrated the implications of saintly veneration in order to render this practice impervious to sceptical ridicule or attack. While Thomas Noble is right to point out that Gregory the Great never presented himself as an intellectual, this chapter will argue that he, like other defenders of the saints’ miracles in early Byzantium, nevertheless engaged at close quarters with a range of philosophical positions—including Aristotelianism—that appeared to curtail drastically the saints’ activity beyond the grave.*” Indeed, it is Aristotle not Hippocrates who will emerge as the principal foil of the saints’ cult in this chapter and, to a large extent, this study more generally.
The third chapter returns to the original early Byzantine controversy over the saints’ post-mortem miracles, examining a selection of Greek hagiographical literature from the later sixth and seventh centuries. It argues that the hagiological and eschatological issues addressed in Gregory and Eustratius’s texts are also reflected in hagiographers’ representations of the saints’ activity at a range of early Byzantine cult centres from across the empire’s eastern provinces from Thessalonica to Antioch and Alexandria, including the anonymous Miracles of Cosmas and Damian, Sophronius of Jerusalem’s Miracles of Cyrus and John, John of Thessalonica’s Miracles of Demetrius, and the anonymous Miracles of St Symeon the Younger. The chapter reiterates the debated nature of saintly miracles in early Byzantine society, with a particular focus on the period between circa 575 and circa 625. Two mid-century Lives, that of the Anatolian monk and bishop Theodore of Sykeon and Leontius of Neapolis’s Life of John the Almsgiver, also furnish important evidence.
The final chapter shifts focus from the early Byzantine debate to the growth of a differently calibrated hagiology in the Syriac-speaking Church of the East. It traces the origins of the official promulgation under the eighth-century Catholicos-Patriarch Timothy I of Baghdad (780-823) of a doctrine of ‘soul sleep’ that included the post-mortem inactivity of the saints’ souls prior to the Resurrection. Although this process largely took place outside the empire’s frontiers, I shall argue that the hagiology that emerged in the East Syrian Church was comparable to the vision of the saints rebutted at Rome and Constantinople. The chapter then explores why this more ‘minimalist’ view of the saints’ ministrations post mortem was not equally problematic in the East Syriac tradition. The chapter also points to hesitation towards saintly veneration in late eighth-century Abbasid Iraq.
Of course, the study of late antique hagiography presented here has been shaped by many earlier studies, particularly those concerning the literary conventions of saintly literature.*° Constantly reiterated topoi may suggest an underlying generic unity among hagiographical texts, but this is often a facade; each needs to be carefully considered in the historical circumstances that surrounded its production.*” Hagiographers frequently invoked literary convention to dispel doubt and opposition to their project of canonizing a controversial figure or cult.**
Finally, a word should perhaps be offered on the inclusion in a series on Byzantium of a study that devotes so much space to the writings of a Roman pontiff. Certainly, Pope Gregory I, ‘the Great’, needs no introduction. Gregory is among the best known figures of the second half of the sixth century and exerted a decisive influence over the Latin middle ages, particularly. Unusually if not uniquely among Roman pontiffs, Gregory also secured for himself a lasting, favourable memory in the eastern churches.*” Gregory’s famous Rule of Pastoral Care was translated into Greek during his lifetime at the command of the emperor (although the translation has not survived),”° and during the eighth century, Pope Zacharias (741-52), last of the so-called ‘Greek popes’, himself translated the Dialogues into Greek.°! Thanks to this translation, Gregory succeeded in attaining a certain degree of fame in the medieval Greek church and segments from Zacharias’s version of the Dialogues were regularly incorporated into Greek collections of tales concerning the afterlife.”* What deserves to be emphasized against allegations of the text’s lack of sophistication is that it is on the foundation of the Dialogues, rather than any of his other writings, that Gregory’s renown in Greek was built and that he earned his common Greek epithet, Gregory ‘the Dialogist’.
Of comparable significance for Gregory’s memory in the Greek church was the esteem in which a number of eastern visitors to Rome in the years immediately following his death came to hold him, among them two undisputedly ‘early Byzantine’ churchmen, John Moschus and his friend Sophronius (the latter being the defender of the honour of Sts Cyrus and John and future patriarch of Jerusalem with which this introduction began).*? Gregory’s enthusiasm for asceticism seems to have condemned him to a period of posthumous opprobrium among his Roman confréres at the Lateran.**
Yet stories of Gregory’s charity and humility commended him warmly to the ascetically minded easterners who arrived at Rome in search of refuge (and patronage) amidst the confusion caused by the Persian invasion of the empire’s near eastern provinces; the links between Moschus and the surviving circle of Gregory’s supporters in seventh-century Rome thus appear to have been very close.°” Indeed, Alan Thacker has shown that Moschus’s stories concerning Gregory (subsequently translated into both Georgian and Arabic) must derive from oral conversations between Moschus and his group of easterners, on the one hand, and Gregory’s friends at Rome, on the other. Moreover, the stories which Moschus’s circle conserved about Gregory (one clearly reflects a story also preserved by Gregory himself in the Dialogues) provide important affirmative evidence in the recently renewed discussion concerning Gregory’s authorship of the Dialogues.*° For both of these reasons, Gregory was a thoroughly ‘Byzantine’ pope.
But there is a deeper and more compelling reason why Gregory and later sixth-century Rome and Italy should be included under the rubric ‘early Byzantine’. As pope, Gregory was head of an institution, the papacy, which was thoroughly rooted in the structures of empire throughout this period.*’ To an exceedingly large degree, Gregory’s wider world remained that created by the Emperor Justinian’s (527-65) attempt to restore imperial domination over the western Mediterranean, shaped by the problems and opportunities that the only partial realization of Justinian’s ambitions had created.”* Before his election as pope, Gregory spent a lengthy spell at Constantinople where he made a range of friendships and acquaintances, ecclesiastical and secular, which remained important throughout his life. Naturally, this raises the question of Gregory's competence in Greek, which he routinely downplayed.”
This competence can almost certainly be revised upwards: despite claiming an ignorance of that language, it is highly likely that Gregory knew a lot more than he admitted.°° Even if he did not possess the level of proficiency necessary to compose literary Greek or read the classical language with ease, Gregory’s friendship with and real affection for several Greekspeaking correspondents—notably Domitian of Melitene, Eulogius of Alexandria, and Anastasius of Antioch—suggest a degree of ability that enabled Gregory to speak, understand, and read to a certain level in the language.°’ A sign of his interest in contemporary Greek theology, Gregory was the first ‘westerner’ to refer to the ideas of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.” Gregory need not have read Pseudo-Dionysius for himself, but he may have heard of his ideas from his Greek-speaking friends who had.
Gregory’s life and times enjoy excellent recent accounts in several languages and, while there is no need to repeat all their findings here, it may be worth recapitulating the major stages of his curriculum vitae.°° It is generally assumed that Gregory was born into an aristocratic family at Rome in around 540. By Gregory’s own statement, his great-grandfather (avatus meus) was Pope Felix III (483-92), a figure sometimes linked to the powerful gens Anicia.* In 573 Gregory himself served as Urban Prefect of Rome, the highest post in the civilian government of the city.°° After becoming a monk in 575, Gregory was ordained by Pope Pelagius II (579-90) and sent, in 579, to act as papal responsary, or apocrisarius, at the court in Constantinople.®° That Gregory enjoyed the confidence of the imperial family was clearly displayed in 584 when the Emperor Maurice (582-602) chose Gregory to act as godfather to his son, Theodosius, the first imperial prince born to a reigning emperor since the early fifth century.”
Returning to Italy in 585/6, Gregory was made a deacon of the Roman Church, a position that included him within the inner circle of Rome’s ecclesiastical administrators.°* Following the death of his predecessor and patron during an outbreak of the plague in 590, Gregory was elected, apparently unanimously, to the pontificate.” It is said that Gregory endeavoured (in vain) to resist his election and the prologue to the Dialogues resonates with his other writings that lament the lost tranquillity of the monastery that his election brought about.’° Nevertheless, between 590 and his death in 604 Gregory held the ecclesiastical office of highest honour in the empire—that of bishop of ‘Old Rome’—during a distinctly difficult period in the history of the city of Rome, Italy, and the empire.”
It was once argued that, desirous of escaping imperial meddling in papal affairs, Gregory forged a new papal Aufsenpolitik focused on the future medieval west, but Robert Markus above all has demonstrated that Gregory never questioned the emperor’s sovereignty in Italy, nor envisaged Rome as part of a political community other than the ‘most holy Christian empire’ (sanctissima res publica Christiana) to which he was implicitly committed.”
Not until the eighth century would Gregory’s papal successors seriously begin to contemplate life outside the framework of the empire. In Gregory’s day, the imperial presence at Rome was embodied above all in the figure of the city’s military governor resident on the Palatine.” Indeed, it has recently been argued that this presence was a much more significant factor in the city’s life in the aftermath of the imperial re-conquest than the western-orientated historians of the city have normally allowed.”
Certainly, this study implicitly offers a view of Gregory’s Rome— and perhaps early Byzantine Italy more generally—that challenges the traditional portrayal of the city and peninsula as a backwater under the firm thumb of the ‘Catholic Church’, largely disconnected in this period from the cultural transformations taking place elsewhere in the Mediterranean world.”” By stressing the ongoing presence of religious dissent in the city that had not yet spawned the medieval ‘Republic of St Peter’, I shall endeavour to demonstrate both the debt and contribution of early Byzantine Rome to the intellectual culture of what are conventionally represented as the more dynamic societies and cultures of the eastern Mediterranean.”°
In the 1990s, excavations at Pescara (Aternum), on Italy’s Adriatic coast, unearthed a cache of locally made fineware pottery dating from between the final decades of the sixth century and the early decades of the seventh.” Known as ‘Crecchio ware’, the pottery indicated the existence of direct imperial (‘Byzantine’) control over a swathe of Italy, hitherto unknown to historians and archaeologists alike.”* What makes the late sixth-century pottery of the Abruzzi so distinctive, however, is its striking resemblance to the ceramic styles of contemporary Egypt.
It has been postulated that this reflects both the area’s garrisoning by a regiment raised in that province and, in a wider perspective, the effective drawing of those parts of Italy under imperial authority into the empire’s commercial networks in the eastern Mediterranean.” On one level, the economic exchange between Byzantine Italy and Egypt which the Crecchio ware points to exemplifies an access to eastern markets and fashions that the inhabitants of other parts of Italy appear not to have enjoyed.*° On another level, however, the Crecchio ware of Byzantine Abruzzo seemingly offers a tangible, material instantiation of the interplay of cultures that was the direct consequence of the incorporation of the Italian peninsula into a Roman empire now ruled from Constantinople.*'
This is because the ceramics producers of Byzantine Abruzzo did not merely import Egyptian pottery but copied its designs in the production of local Abruzzese wares, giving rise, it has been argued, to a domestic style that wed ‘Coptic’ and Italian elements. While it would be easy to overstate the significance of such evidence for the cultural history of late sixth-century Italy as a whole, it can alert the historian to the potential discovery of similar exchanges in other regions and even, perhaps, on cultural registers other than the ceramic.*” It is thus a secondary aim of the current study to throw into relief how far Gregory’s Dialogues were, integrally, a product of the world of the inter-regional exchanges between Italy and the eastern Mediterranean that Justinian’s reconquest promoted; that is to say, a Latin text whose historical raison d’étre largely lay nevertheless in the ideas and anxieties of contemporary East Roman (‘Byzantine’) society, focalized at Constantinople.**
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