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Spelunca pravitatis hereticae: Gregory I and the Rededication of “Arian” Church Buildings in Late Antique . Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 30.2.*

SAMUEL COHEN

This article considers the rededication of two formerly “Arian” churches, S. Severinus and S. Agata de’ Goti, by Gregory I, of Rome from 590 until 604. These rededications are investigated from three perspectives. First, I examine the historical and topographical context of the buildings. Part II considers Gregory’s motives. Without denying the practical benefits of church restorations, I argue that rededication was an inexpensive way for Gregory to display papal authority during a time of diminished resources and an opportunity to publicly perform and reinforce Rome’s orthodox Christian identity. Third, I discuss the rhetorical strategies employed by Gregory to describe the rededication of S. Agata in the Dialogues. Importantly, the story of S. Agata is part of a series of vignettes illustrating the victory of Christian orthodoxy over heresy, especially . This narrative took on added significance in the early as the threatened the city of Rome. The chosen by Gregory to rededicate S. Agata and S. Severinus may have been intended to evoke both the Arian past and the orthodox present of these churches. And although the rituals used to make S. Agata fit for Catholic worship were not significantly different from those used to dedicate any church in late antique Rome, Gregory transformed the rededication ceremony into a dramatic story of the triumph of the city’s orthodox community, its church, and its bishop.

Early in the final decade of the sixth century, a crowd gathered on the southern-most slope of the Quirinale at the edge of Subura in Rome.1 The city in this period was dramatically different than it had been even a century before. Floods, plague, and war had in recent years reduced the already shrinking population to as few as 50,000, leaving areas of the city largely abandoned.2

*This article was greatly improved thanks to the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers, as well as those of Michele Salzman, Fred Astren, Latham, Andrew Lawless, Julie Anderson, and A.P. Anderson-Cohen. The final version was prepared during my time as a 2019 research fellow at the DFG-Kollegforschergruppe, Migration und Mobilität in Spätantike und Frühmittelalter at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. I would like to thank the DFG, as well as Mischa Meier, Steffen Patzold, and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner for inviting me to participate, in addition to Fabian Völzing for helping me navigate an unfamiliar library system, and the other fellows for their insights and guidance. Finally, this research was generously supported by a RSCAP fellowship from Sonoma State University. 1 This took place in 591 or 592. 2 The population declined from approximately 800,000 around 400 C.E., to perhaps 500,000 in the fifth century, to no more than 100,000 and perhaps as few as 50,000 during Gregory’s pontificate. For population estimates, see Richard Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals: Topography and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 109; Richard Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 65; Jean Durliat, “De La Ville Antique À La Ville Byzantine. Le Problème Des Subsistances,” Collection de l'École française de Rome 136 (1990): 159–60. On the situation in Rome more generally, see Charles Pietri, “La Rome De Grégoire,”

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And now the Lombards, first Ariulf, , and subsequently King coming from the north, threatened to sever the lines of communications linking Rome with the imperial government in . But on this day the people had assembled for a celebration: the reconciliation of an Arianorum ecclesia. The church, known today as S. Agata dei Goti, was likely constructed in the first half of fifth century for the city’s non-Nicene (“Arian”) Christian community and may have been dedicated to Christ the Savior or perhaps Christ and the Apostles.3 Under the watchful eye of Rome’s new bishop, Gregory I (590–604), this spelunca pravitatis hereticae was rededicated to Sebastian and Agatha and thereby transformed into a space fit for orthodox Christian worship.4 To the modern visitor, Roman churches such as S. Agata appear static, almost eternal. But like all buildings, churches were repaired, renovated, expanded (or contracted), and generally adapted to changing patterns of usage over decades and centuries. It was not just the physical buildings that changed; so too did their status in the imagination of believers. Despite a hesitancy amongst early Christian authors to ascribe sacrality to particular locations, placeness was nonetheless important and became increasingly so in late antiquity.5 Worship sacralized place through prayer and ritual, and the bond between building and community was made more intimate by church names, which sometimes referred to a nebulous spiritual idea (Holy Wisdom or the Anastasis), but more typically a local or supra-local (the Church of S. Martin or of S. ).6 Church space was framed not only by the saint’s name, but also by their story, inscribed in word and in art on the building itself, and increasingly in the late ancient period, by their in Christiana Respublica. Éléments D’une Enquête Sur Le Christianisme Antique (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1997), 80–82, and Roberto Meneghini and Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, Roma nell’Altomedioevo: topografia e urbanistica della citta dal Val X secolo (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2004), 21– 28. For the changing nature of the late Roman aristocracy in this period, see, for instance, Edward M. Schoolman, “Aristocracies in Early Medieval , ca. 500–1000 CE.” History Compass 16, no. 11 (2018). Scholars sometimes describe Gregory’s Rome in apocalyptic terms: a “world of wars, famine, and plague,” according to Carole Straw, Gregory the Great. Authors of the 12. Historical and Religious Writers of the West (Aldershot: Variorum/Ashgate, 1996), 1. However, without denying the suffering experienced by late sixth-century Romans, our understanding of the city in this period depends largely on Gregory’s own characterization of the early 590s, which was at least in part rhetorical. The archeological evidence suggests a more nuanced picture of habitation, and indeed, of economic and social life. See, for instance, Robert Coates-Stephens, “Housing in Early Medieval Rome, 500–1000 AD,” PBSR 64 (1996). 3 Ralph W. Mathisen, “Ricimer's Church in Rome: How an Arian Barbarian Prospered in a Nicene World,” in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, ed. Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 310–11. 4 Gregory I, Ep. 4.19, Registrum Epistularum, ed. Dag Norberg, CCL 140 (Turnhout: Brepols: 1982), 237: spelunca pravitatis hereticae. 5 On the (often conflicted) attitudes of early Christian attitudes towards sacred space, see Harold W Turner, From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology and Theology of Places of Worship, vol. 16 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), 114-130; P. W. L. Walker, Holy City Holy Places?: Christian Attitudes to and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 67–70. 6 In this context, it is useful to think of late antique churches as lieux de mémoire, in the well-known phrase of French Pierre Nola, whose purpose was to “stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to material the immaterial. See Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire," Representations, no. 26 (1989): 19.

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physical remains or non-corporeal relics.7 It therefore follows that when a church like S. Agata was renamed and rededicated, there have been something peculiar about the circumstances that necessitated the elision of its previous history and/or the imposition of a new identity. This occurred in a variety of circumstances. Some churches slowly assumed new appellations over a period of decades or centuries. The shifting names of Rome’s tituli are examples of this phenomenon.8 Churches that underwent substantial rebuilding or renovation could also be renamed, providing benefactors and ecclesiastical authorities an opportunity to rebrand the building for a new context.9 And churches were generally given new names when they were reconciled from heretical or sectarian Christians, as was the case with S. Agata. In late antique Italy, the heretics in question were the Ostrogoths and during Gregory I’s pontificate, the Lombards, who were both associated with “Arianism.”10

7 Ann Marie Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces in the late antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 189–208. The prohibition of burial within the city walls was observed, with the odd exception for extraordinary persons, well into Late antiquity. See J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 48–49. On the development of relics and its relationship to altars, see Robin M. Jensen, "Saints’ Relics and the Consecration of Church Buildings in Rome," Studia Patristica LXXI (2014): 155 and n5 with references; Gillian Vallance Mackie, Early Christian Chapels in the West: Decoration, Function and Patronage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 6; John Crook, Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West, c. 300–1200 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 12–13. 8 Especially between the fourth and sixth centuries these buildings, which are generally thought to have been originally named for their founders using the formula titulus of X, took on saintly appellations. For example, the church known today as S. Maria in was known in the time of Symmachus (495–514) as the titulus Iuli (Acta Synhodorum Habitarum Romae I [Acta Synhodi a. 499], MGH AA 12:399–415). It then appears in the acta of the Roman of 595 (Gregorii I papae Registrum epistolarum 1, MGH Epistolae 1:362–7) as the titulus S Iulii et Callisti. Later still, the vita of Hadrian I (778-795) in the , ed. Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis: Texte, introduction et commentaire, 2 vols. (: Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1886– 92), 1:509, refers to this same building as the titulus sanctae Dei genetricis semperque virginis Mariae quae vocatur Calisti trans Tiberim. On this church, see Richard Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae, (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1967), 3:65–71; John Moorhead, The and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2015), 156–7; Hugo Brandenburg, Ancient Churches of Rome from the Fourth to the Seventh Century: The Dawn of Christian Architecture in the West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 112–3. On the titular churches in general, see Julia Hillner, “Clerics, Property and Patronage: The Case of the Roman Titular Churches,” Antiquité Tardive 14, no. 1 (2006); Julia Hillner, “Familes, Patronage, and the Titular Churches,” in Religion, Dynasty and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300–900, ed. Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kristina Sessa, “Domus Ecclesiae: Rethinking a Category of Ante-Pacem Christian Space,” JTS (ns) 60, no. 1 (2009); Michele Renee Salzman, “Leo's Liturgical Topography: Contestations for Space in Fifth-Century Rome,” JRS 103 (2013): 229. 9 In a slightly different context, the refurbishment of Roman churches following the Vandal sack of 455 necessitated the replacement of many gold and silver liturgical vessels—an expensive proposition, which could be understood as a second foundation under the patronage and authority of the city’s current bishop. See Michele Renee Salzman, The Religious Economics of Crisis: The Papal Use of Liturgical Vessels as Symbolic Capital in Late Antiquity [forthcoming]. Thanks to the author for sharing this paper with me before publication. 10 As I and others have argued elsewhere, “Arianism” was a heresiological construct rather than an accurate descriptor of belief. On the polemical nature of “Arianism,” especially as it applies to the Ostrogoths, see for instance, Cohen, “Religious Diversity,” in A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy, eds. M. Shane Bjornlie, Kristina Sessa, and Jonathan J. Arnold (Leiden: Brill, 2016), passim but esp. 510–521 with references. There are too many excellent works the so-called “Arian controversy” and barbarian “Arianism” to cite here. On the latter, see the collection of

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Focusing on the last of these circumstances, this article considers the rededication of two formerly “Arian” churches by Gregory: the aforementioned S. Agata dei Goti, which will receive the bulk of our attention, and the less documented S. Severinus, an enigmatic church referred to in a single Gregorian letter. In what follows, I examine the history of these buildings from three perspectives. First, I survey the evidence and history of S. Agata and S. Severinus and attempt to situate them within the sacred landscape of late antique Rome. As we shall see, the general area, which encompasses both buildings had contained non-Nicene and orthodox churches since at least the fifth century, although it was not in all likelihood an especially “Arian” or barbarian neighbourhood as has been previously argued. In part two, I examine Gregory’s interventions in and around the Subura and suggest possible reasons why he may have targeted S. Agata and S. Severinus. Gregory viewed the maintenance of ecclesiastical buildings as an important aspect of his episcopal responsibilities. But his interest was also ideologically. The reactivation of unused churches was an inexpensive way for Gregory to display his authority in the context of diminished resources for new ecclesiastical construction. And importantly, the processes used by Gregory echoed other examples of public religious display intended to promote unity amongst Rome’s local neighbourhood churches. Gregory’s rededications may have been intended to serve the same purpose. In the third and final part of this article, I consider the discursive strategies employed by Gregory in his description of the rededication of S. Agata in book III of the Dialogues to appropriate the histories of this building and shape how it was understood by contemporary Romans and by later readers of Gregorian texts.11 The story of S. Agata is part of a series of vignettes illustrating the triumph of Christian orthodoxy over heresy, especially Arianism. This narrative took on added significance in the early 590s as the Lombards threatened the city of Rome. In this context, the saints chosen by Gregory to rededicate S. Agata and S. Severinus may have been intended to evoke both the Arian past and the orthodox present of these churches. And although the rituals used to make S. Agata fit for Catholic worship were not significantly different from those used to dedicate any church in late antique Rome, Gregory transformed the

essays, Guido M. Berndt and Roland Steinacher (eds.), Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). On Lombard “Arianism,” see below. 11 Shira Lander, Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) 26–28, distinguishes between “architectural dispossession,” the actual processes used in the takeover of ecclesiastical buildings, and “spatial suppression,” which describes rhetorical strategies that interpreted the occupation or appropriation of the sacred space belonging to a competing sect as “the first group’s loss of power and the dominance of the second group.” This distinction is a useful one and will be employed in this article. See also Christine C. Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 3–29, esp. 8–10; in the context of the Christian takeover of Greco-Roman religious sites, see esp. Claire Sotinel, “La disparition des lieux de culte païens en Occident. Enjeux et méthode,” in Hellénisme et Christianisme, eds. Éric Rebillard and Michel Narcy (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004), 37–42, 49–55; Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter, ““From Temples to Church”: Analyzing a Late Antique Phenomenon of Transformation,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 5–6.

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rededication ceremony into a dramatic story of the triumph of the city’s orthodox community, its church, and its bishop. LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION? S. SEVERINUS AND S. AGATA IN CONTEXT Of the two churches under consideration, S. Severinus is the more mysterious and its rededication can only be partially reconstructed. In January of 593, Gregory wrote to his friend and frequent correspondent Peter, then sub- of Campania, to inform him of his desire to “dedicate [dedicare] in reverence of the Catholic religion, places formerly associated with detestable errors.” He continues, Since, therefore, we desire to consecrate [consecrare], in honor of Saint Severinus, a church located next to the Merulanian house in the third region, which has been held for a long time by the Arian superstition, would your Experience please send over the relics [reliquiae] of Saint Severinus, with the reverence which is highly deserved, so that we can implement what we have decided in our mind should be carried out, with the support and grace of almighty God.12 Unfortunately, other than this brief mention there is no evidence for this church or its rededication. Peter’s response, if he wrote one, does not survive. Nor is there any record that Severinus’s relics, which had been brought from Noricum to Italy and deposited at the at Castellum Lucullanum (Pizzofalcone, ) during the pontificate of Gelasius (492–496), were translated to Rome,13 although the reliquiae requested by Gregory likely refer to contact rather than corporeal relics, which could have been sent without fanfare.14 From our available evidence, it is not even possible to say definitively whether Gregory successfully rededicated the

12 Gregory, Ep. 3.19 (CSL 140:165); trans. (with modifications), John R. C. Martyn, The Letters of Gregory the Great (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2004), 1:248. 13 Eugippius, Vita Sancti Severini 46, ed. H. Sauppe, MGH AA 1.2 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877), 30, describes the deposition of Severinus’ relics at the monastery at Lucullanum. 14 On the definition of reliquia in late antiquity, see John M. McCulloh, “The Cult of Relics in the Letters and ‘Dialogues’ of Gregory the Great: A Lexicographical Study,” Traditio 32 (1976): 153–5nn33 and 34, 161; Caroline Goodson, "Building for bodies: the architecture of saint veneration in early medieval Rome," in Felix Roma: The Production, Experience and Reflection of Medieval Rome, edited by Ó. Éamonn, Carragain and Carol Neuman de Vegvar, (Farnham: Ashgate 2008), 55, 67–68. McCulloh argues persuasively that in Gregory’s writing reliquiae have two sub-categories: corporeal relics—in Rome, typically the whole body of the saint in this period—and contact relics, which could be referred to as either brandea or sanctuaria, both of which were fully reliquiae. Gregory and the Roman church did not make a distinction between the power of corporeal and contact relics or their efficacy for consecrating sacred space. Gregory requested the relics of Severinus on at least two other occasions. In 599, he wrote to the bishop of Naples, Fortunatus, asking that relics (sanctuaria) of Severinus and Juliana the be dispatched to Sicily for the consecration of an oratory founded by the Januaria. And in January 601, he again wrote to the bishop of Naples, this time Pascasius, asking that relics (sanctuaria) of Severinus be sent for the dedication of an oratory at the request of the patricius Venantius of Syracuse. See Gregory, Ep. 9.181, to Fortunatus of Naples and Ep. 9.180 to Benenatus, bishop of Tyndari in Sicily; Ep. 11.19, to Pascasius of Naples. Vanantius = PLRE 3, Venantius 2.

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church, although his letter to Peter indicates that it was his intention to do so. Nor has the building been conclusively identified.15 Gregory’s letter states that it was located “iuxta domum Merulanam regione tertia,” a reference to the domus Merulana, a large property possibly dating to the early empire located directly east and slightly south of the Subura near the modern Piazza Dante (perhaps on or near the ancient Via Merulana, the north/south road linking S. Maria Maggiore, also in regio III, with S. John Lateran to the south in regio II).16 The Liber Pontificalis’s vita of Hadrian (772–795) mentions a location “in Merulanam” near an arcus depictus, almost certainly the arcus Iohannis Basilii (or Basilidis, also called the arcus Formae), the medieval name for an arcade in the to the north-west of the Lateran.17 The late seventh-century Ordo primus also mentions a location “dicitur Merolanas” where the regionary notary was to greet the bishop as he processed to . This likewise suggests a location between the Lateran and S. Maria Maggiore.18 “In Merulana” was used to describe the general area north of the Lateran into the ninth century, and the church in question should be located in this part of the city.19 If this analysis is correct, S. Severinus and S. Agata were in the same general area, but they were not exactly close.20 We are better informed about S. Agata dei Goti, the only identifiable former non-Nicene church building still standing in Rome.21 Located on a promontory of the Quirinale, it bordered

15 S. Matteo, a church demolished in the early nineteenth century, is sometimes claimed to have been the Arian foundation posta iuxta domum Merulanam mentioned by Gregory. For instance, see Bockmann, “The Non- Archeology of Arianism,” 202–3n6. This conclusion is not supported by the evidence. See Christian Hülsen, Le Chiese Di Roma Nel Medio Evo: Cataloghi ed Appunti (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1927 [1975]), 386–7; Zeiller, “Les Églises ariennes,” 23–24; and Margherita Cecchelli, “Spazio Cristiano E Monumenti Eretici in Roma,” in Atti Del Vi Congresso Nazionale Di Archeologia Cristiana (1986), 294–5. 16 Gregory, Ep. 3.19 (CSL 140: 165). 17 Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:489, describing Hadrian, who sent men to investigate the murder of the secundicerius Sergius: Et properantes venerunt usque in Merulanam, ad arcum depictum qui est secus viam quae ducit ad, ad arcum depictum qui est secus viam quae ducit ad ecclesiam sanctae Dei genetricis ad Praesepe. On the Arcus Iohannis Basilii (sometimes Basilidis) see Lawrence Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 24. In genreal on this area of the city in the early medieval period, see, Ingo Herklotz, “Der Campus Lateranensis im Mittelalter,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 22 (1985), 1–43. 18 Ordo Romanus Primus [OR I:15], ed. Michel Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen-âge, 5 vols., (Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1931-1961), 2:71-72: Die autem resurrectionis ominicae, procedente eo ad sanctam Mariam, stat in loco qui dicitur Merolanas, et salutato pontifice dicit . . .. See now the new presentation, commentary and translation of the first Roman ordo in John F. Romano, Liturgy and Society in Early Medieval Rome (London: Routledge, 2014), 229-248, at 231. Thanks to Jacob Latham for pointing out this reference. 19 See the comments in Ewald and Hartmann’s edition of Gregory’s registrum epistolarum, 177n1; Jacques Zeiller, “Les Églises Ariennes De Rome À L'époque De La Domination Gothique,” Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire 24, no. 1 (1904): 23–24; Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, 131. Compare with the analysis of Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:515n11, who dates the domus Merulana to the sixth century. On this church and its location, see also Coates-Stephens, “Housing in Early Medieval Rome, 500–1000 AD,” 246. 20 Today, Piazza Dante is approximately 1.7 km or about a 20-minute walk from S. Agata de’ Goti. 21 Christian Hülsen, Le Chiese Di Roma, 166–7; Carlo Cecchelli. “Notizie Storiche Della Basilica,” in S. Agata Dei Goti: Monografie Sulle Chiese Di Roma, edited by Christian Hülsen, Carlo Cecchelli, Gustavo Giovannoni, Ugo Monneret de Villard, and Antonio Muñoz (Sansaini, 1924), 13, 26–27; Walther Buchowiecki, Handbuch der Kirchen Roms - der

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the Subura, the densely populated area in and around the valley between the Quirinal to the north, the Viminal, and various spurs of the western end of the Esquiline.22 The church was patronized by the magister utriusque militiae Ricimer, who sponsored an apse sometime between 459 and 47123 and may have been the seat of the papa et episcopus Gothorum as late as the 490s.24 Then in approximately 591 or 592, it was reconciled to “the worship of the Catholic faith” as Gregory reported in a letter to the Leo.25 The Liber Pontificalis likewise asserts that Gregory “dedicated the ecclesia gothorum, which was in the Subura, in the name of Saint Agatha the martyr.”26 But the fullest account of S. Agata’s rededication is found in the Dialogues. According to this text, an arrianorum ecclesia in the Subura had been closed for two years when it was decided that it should be rededicated to the Catholic faith with the relics of the martyr- saints Sebastian and Agatha.27 As Gregory describes it, the event was a boisterous affair. Together with their bishop, “great multitude of people,” processed into the church, “singing the praises to God.”28 So many faithful packed into the church that they jostled with each other and some even

Römische Sakralbau in Geschichte und Kunst von der Altchristlichen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart vol. 1 (Vienna: Brüder Hollinek, 1967), 279–84. Subura is also spelled , Sibura, Subora. LTUR IV, 379–85. 22 Richardson, Topographical Dictionary, 373; Margaret M. Andrews, “A Domus in the Subura of Rome from the Republic through Late Antiquity,” American Journal of Archaeology, 118/1 (2014), 61–62. 23 The inscription is preserved in ILS 1294 = ILCV 1637 = Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores (ICUR) (Rome: Officina Libraria Pontificia, 1861–1888), 2:438 no. 127: Fl. Ricimer v.i. magister utriusque militae patricius et ex cons. ord. pro voto suo adornavit. Bryan Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Urban Public Building in Northern and Central Italy Ad 300–850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), appendix 2, 240, states that Ricimer not only decorated but actually built “the Arian church of S. Agata dei Goti (459/70).” Louis Reekmans, "L'implantation monumentale chrétienne dans le paysage urbain de Rome de 300 à 850," in Actes du XIe congrès international d'archéologie chrétienne. Lyon, Vienne, Grenoble, Genève, Aoste, 21–28 Septembre 1986, (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1989), 868–869, agrees. But compare with Marco Aimone, ““Spelunca Aliquando Pravitatis Hereticae.” Ricerche sulla Basilica Romana di Sant'Agata dei Goti,” Reti Medievali Rivista 17, no. 2 (2016): 38–40, who suggests that the chuch pre-dates the decorations of Ricimer. While it is possible that mosaic program usually ascribed to Ricimer may have been put up by Gregory to commemorate the re-dedication of the church, I am persuaded by Ralph Mathisen’s view that Ricimer was indeed responsible. See his, “Ricimer's Church in Rome,” passim, but esp. 310–311. 24 P.Ital. II 49, ed. Jan-Olof Tjäder, Die Nichtliterarischen Lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit 445–700, (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1982), 198, testifies to the presence of a papa et episcopus Gothorum at Rome at the end of the fifth century. See Cecchelli, “Notizie Storiche della Basilica,” 26, but especially Ralph W. Mathisen, “Barbarian “Arian” , Church Organization, and Church Practices,” in Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed, edited by Guido M Berndt and Roland Steinacher (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 167–8 and n120. 25 Gregory Ep. 4.19 (CSL 140: 237). This letter dates to March 594. 26 Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:312: Eodem tempore dedicavit ecclesiam Gothrum quae fuit in Subora, in nominee beatea Agathae martyris. 27 Gregory I, Dial. 3.30.2, ed., Adalbert de Vogüé; French translation, Antin, SC 260 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf: 2011), 380. The Dialogues are usually dated to late 593 or early 594, or roughly the same time that Gregory wrote his letter to Leo, noted above. Two years earlier would date the rededication of S. Agata to 591 or 592. 28 Gregory, Dial. 3.30.2 (SC 260:380): Nam cum magna populi multitudine uenientes atque omnipotenti Domino laudes canentes, eandem ecclesiam ingress summus. In a letter written in July 591 to the bishop of Sorrento, Gregory indicates that the relics of Agatha were then on Capri and were to be installed in the monastery of S. Stephen on that island. See Gregory, Ep. 1.52 (CSL 140:65). As in the case of the rededication of S. Severinus, the relics used to rededicate S. Agata were likely contact relics.

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spilled out beyond the sanctuary. As the was being celebrated, those outside the sanctuary felt the presence of an invisible pig running between their legs and eventually out through the door. The departure of this spectral porker, Gregory claimed, signified that the inmundus habitator, who had previously controlled this place, had finally departed the church.29 Having completed the mass, Gregory and the congregants departed. For the two nights, frightening noises could be heard. But then, silence returned, signalling that the church had been cleansed and that the antiquus hostis would no longer trouble it.30 A few days later, a cloud appeared and miraculously descended upon the and filled the church with a sweet smell, and no one, not even the priest of the church, dared enter the building.31 Other miracles soon followed: the lamps of the church were repeatedly relit by a heavenly fire. The meaning of this miracle was clear to all: the building had been brought from the darkness of heresy into the light of orthodoxy.32 In contrast to S. Severinus, the survival of S. Agata makes it far easier to situate in the city’s ecclesiastical topography. Moving from the into the Subura eastwards along the , the Clivus Suburanus, and the vicus Patricius, one can find a number of nearby important churches including SS. Cosma e Damiano in the Forum Romanum, S. Prassede, S. Martino ai , and ultimately S. Maria Maggiore.33 The extended area around S. Agata also contained numerous important fourth- and fifth-century foundations including S. Vitale,34 the titulus Equitii et Silvestri (or more likely the titulus Equitii and a second titulus Silvestri) on the

29 Gregory, Dial. 3.30.3 (SC 260:380): Quod idcirco diuina pietas ostendit, ut cunctis patesceret, quia de loco eodem inmundus habitator exiret. 30 Gregory, Dial. 3.30.4 (SC 260:380-2). 31 Although not explicit, the emphasis on the altar in the story has led Robin Jensen to suggest that this account may represent the earliest described ritual for the insertion of relics into an altar for the purposes of consecration. See Jensen, “Saints’ Relics,” 154. 32 Gregory, Dial. 3.30.6 (SC 260:380-2): . . . quia locus ille de tenebris ad lucem uenissent. 33 Reekmans, “L'implantation monumentale,” 869; On this area of the city in the ninth century, see Caroline Goodson, The Rome of Pope Paschal I: Papal Power, Urban Renovation, Church Rebuilding and Relic Translation, 817–824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 101–102. On S. Maria Maggiore, see Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum, 3:1–60. 34 It is at least possible that S. Vitale acquired this name during Gregory’s pontificate. Located north of S. Agata along the Vicus Longus, this building was a fourth-century foundation bequeathed to the church in the will of a certain inlustris femina Vestina and dedicated by Innocent as the basilica sanctorum Gervasi et Protasi. See Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:220. See also 222n4. By 499, it became the titulus Vestinae, and in the subscriptions of the Roman synod of 595 is called the titulus sancti Vitalis. See Gregorii I papae Registrum epistolarum 1, MGH Epistolae 1:367. Today, the church is named for Vitalis’ whole family: Basilica SS. Vitalis, Valeriae, Gervasii et Protasii. See Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum, 4:299–313. This was also part of a more general trend in Rome to move away from referring to these churches as the titulus of X towards saintly dedications. See Alan Thacker, “Martyr Cult within the Walls: Saints and Relics in the Roman Tituli of the Fourth to Seventh Centuries,” in Text, Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honour of Éamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts (2007), 37.

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Oppian Hill,35 the titulus Aemilianus (SS. Quattro Coronati) on the slope of the ,36 S. Pudenziana,37 Santa Lucia, ,38 and San Clemente.39 Many of these churches, including S. Agata, were on the hills surrounding the Subura in part because they were built on property originally owned by elites who preferred the heights. Here, at least, Rome’s sacred topography mirrored its physical topography, which itself reflected the city’s social hierarchy.40 In addition to S. Agata and S. Severinus, a number of studies have pointed to patchy evidence for at least two other non-Nicene churches in this general area of the city. The first, likely situated north and slightly west of the domus Merulana, is S. Agata in Esquilino. This church, which appears in the Einsiedeln Itinerary, a late eighth-century pilgrim’s guide, has not been positively identified but may be the fourth- or fifth-century oratory or chapel of the church of Monte di Giustizia discovered during the construction of Termini station in 1876.41 Although not always clearly articulated, the identification of S. Agata in Esquilino as “Arian” in modern scholarship seems to be based on the assumption that Agatha was a particularly Gothic or Arian saint—an inference, which in turn is apparently founded on the fact that S. Agata dei Goti was an

35 Reported in the vita of Silvester, Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:187: Hisdem temporibus constituit beatus Silvester in urbe Roma titulum suum in regione III iuxta thermas Domitianas qui cognominatur Traianas, titulum Silvestri . . .. This may be the same church identified earlier in the same vita, Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:170–171: Hic fecit in urbe Roma ecclesiam in praedium cuiusdam presbiteri sui, qui cognominabatur Equitius, quem titulum Romanum constituit, iuxta termas Domitianas, qui usque in hodiernum diem appellatur titulus Equitii . . .. See Lucrezia Spera, “Il vescovo di Roma e la città: regioni ecclesiastiche, tituli e cimiteri. Ridefinizione di un problema amministrativo e territoriale,” in in Atti del XV Congreso Internacional de Arqueologia Cristiana (Toledo, 8–12 septiembre 2008) (Città del Vaticano 2013), 172–3, with nn. 58 and 59; Hugo Brandenburg, Ancient Churches of Rome, 111. On the confusion over whether this represents one foundation or two, see Samuel Cohen, “ and the Polemic of Heresy: Manichaeism and the Representation of Papal Authority in the Liber Pontificalis,” Journal of Late Antiquity, 8/1 (2015), 204n44; Mulryan, Spatial 'Christianisation' in Context: Strategic Intramural Building in Rome from the 4th-7th C. AD (Archaeopress, 2014) at 71–85. This/these buildings are now below the ninth-century S. Martino ai Monti. 36 Hugo Brandenburg, Ancient Churches of Rome, 195–6. This church is attested as the titulus Aemilianae in the acta of the Roman synod of 499, cited above, n8. It was renovated (or possibly entirely rebuilt) during the pontificate of Honorius I (625–638). 37 Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum, 3:277–302. 38 Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum, 3:178–231. 39 Hülsen, Le chiese di Roma 386–7; Reekmans, “L'implantation monumentale,” 869; Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum, 3:232–59. The titulus Nicomedis/titulus Marcellini et Petri has been tentatively identified as a structure immediately southwest of the current SS. Marcellino e Pietro. See Feyo L. Schuddeboom, “The Conversion of Temples in Rome,” Journal of Late Antiquity 10/1 (2017): 169n12. 40 Andrews, “A Domus in the Subura of Rome,” 62–63. 41 P. Testini, “L'oratorio scoperto al “Monte della Giustizia” presso la porta viminale a Roma,” Revista di Archeologia Cristiana 44 (1968): 219–26; Rabun M. Taylor, Katherine Rinne, and Spiro Kostof, Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 174; Bockmann, “The Non-Archeology of Arianism — What Comparing Cases in , Haïdra and Ravenna Can Tell Us about “Arian” Churches,” 203n6; Gillian Vallance Mackie, Early Christian Chapels in the West: Decoration, Function and Patronage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 31. On the Einsiedeln itinerary, see Gerold Walser, ed. Die Einsiedler Inschriftensammlung und der Pilgerführer durch Rom (Codex Einsidlensis 326): Facsimile, Umschrift, Übersetzung und Kommentar (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1987); Richardson, Topographical Dictionary, xxi; Rosamond McKitterick, “The pleasures of the past: history and identity in the ,” Early Medieval Europe 22, no. 4 (2014): 396.

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Arian church.42 However, if Ralph Mathisen is correct and this church was not dedicated to Agatha under Ricimer and subsequently during the Ostrogothic period, this explanation becomes nonsensical.43 A second church, Sant’Andrea Catabarbara, founded as a secular basilica by Junius Bassus in 311, is also sometimes associated with Arianism due to its connection to a Goth named Valila in the late fifth century.44 But neither Valila, a Nicene Christian and a member of the senatorial aristocracy, nor his church, were Arian.45 Despite the uncertain nature of this evidence, various studies have claimed that churches like S. Agata and S. Severinus must have served the spiritual needs of a large number of barbarian soldiers who had settled in the Esquiline and Caelian regions of Rome since at least the fourth century.46 However, as the case of Valila demonstrates, we should be wary of conflating barbari and Gothi with Arriani.47 Moreover, as we have seen, this same zone contained numerous firmly attested fourth- and fifth-century Nicene churches. Perhaps the safest conclusion is that the area around S. Agata and S. Severinus including the Subura was historically mixed, at least up to the end of the Gothic War.

LOCORUM UENERABILIUM CURA: GREGORY’S INTERVENTION IN THE SUBURA Unlike previous examples of contestation over sacred spaces in Italy such as the reconciliation of Gothic churches in Ravenna and in earlier centuries ’s struggle against the expropriation of Milanese churches for “Arian” usage, Gregory’s rededication of S. Severinus (assuming it occurred) and S. Agata took place long after the supposed suppression of Arianism. We are therefore left to ask: what was it about Gregory’s circumstances in the early 590s that prompted his concern for these particular buildings? Given the fragmentary nature of our evidence, any hypotheses must necessarily be speculative. However, it is doubtful that S. Agata and S. Severinus were in use but outside the authority of the Roman church. And it would be strange if Gregory omitted a battle to control these buildings—a battle which he won—from his description of his role in their reconciliation. Moreover, Gregory explicitly states, at least in the case of S. Agata,

42 Tentatively, Bockmann, “The Non-Archeology of Arianism,” 202–3n6; Taylor, Rinne, and Kostof, Rome: An Urban History, 174. Cecchelli, “Spazio Cristiano E Monumenti Eretici in Roma,” 294, specifcally suggests that the building was Arian on account of its name (S. Agata) and decoration. 43 See above, n3. Note also various orthodox foundations dedicated to Agata that predate Gregory’s rededication. Symmachus (498-514), for instance, is reported to have founded a basilica S. martyris Agathae on the Via Aurelia, outside the walls of the city. See Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:262. 44 Taylor, Rinne, and Kostof, Rome: An Urban History, 174. 45 Gregor Kalas, “Architecture and Élite Identity in Late Antique Rome: Appropriating the Past at Sant'andrea Catabarbara.” PBSR 81 (2013): 279–302. 46 Cecchelli, “Notizie Storiche della Basilica,” 26–27; Zeiller, “Les Églises ariennes,” 24–27; Neil Christie, From Constantine to : an Archaeology of Italy, AD 300–800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 139–140; Taylor, Rinne, and Kostof, Rome, 174; Letizia Pani Ermini, “Lo spazio cristiano nella Roma del primo millennio,” in Christiana loca: lo spazio cristiano nella Roma del primo millennio, ed. Letizia Pani Ermini (Roma: Palombi, 2000), 28; Mackie, Early Christian Chapels, 61. See also the more cautious assessments of Cecchelli, “Spazio cristiano e monumenti eretici in Roma,” 294 and Mathisen, “Ricimer's Church in Rome,” 319. 47 Cohen, “Religious Diversity,” 519–520.

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that the building had been closed for several years.48 Perhaps this statement was part of a rhetorical strategy intended to suggest to Gregory’s readers that the city had been emptied of heretics, cleansed of impure religious communities. With no additional evidence, it is impossible to say for certain. But the reality was likely more mundane: S. Agata was abandoned as a result of the suppression of non-Nicene in Italy in the and/or the collapse of Homoian patronage following the defeat of the Ostrogoths. At some later point, the building came under the control of the Roman church, possibly through a legal sale or transfer of the building and its patrimony as had occurred in Ravenna.49 Significantly, the rededication of S. Agata and S. Severinus took place against the backdrop of decreased Roman church construction in the decades to Gregory’s pontificate; the familiar phrase hic fecit basilicam, which can so often be found in the Liber Pontificalis’s fourth- and fifth-century biographies, appears only rarely in the sixth-century vitae. Instead, we read about the intermittent repair of existing buildings.50 A partial exception is the vita of Felix IV (526– 530), who is credited with the construction of the relatively diminutive basilica of Cosma e Damiano.51 However, this church was adapted from a pre-existing apsidal hall and secular basilica.52 No new churches are attributed to any of Felix’s successors until the construction of the basilica apostolorum Philippi et Iacobi, dedicated by John III (561–574).53 And Gregory’s

48 Gregory, Dial. 3.30.2 (SC 260:380). Gregory provides no details other than noting that S. Agata had remained closed up until two years ago (clausa usque ante biennium). 49 On the suppression of the non–Nicene churches, which occurred as early as 561 and certainly before 570, see Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 146; Cohen, “Religious Diversity,” 518–21. After the seventh century, many of Rome’s public buildings, many of which were in states of serious disrepair, likely passed into the control of the Roman church, together with the city’s acquaducts and walls. See Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 205. It is possible that abandoned non-Nicene churches, like temples and other public buildings, came under the bishop’s control in a similar way. 50 For instance, Symmachus (Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:262), who is credited with various building projects, is also said to have restored (renouavit) the apses of S. Paul and S. Agnes. The vita of (523–526, Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:276) states that the pontiff rebuilt (refecit) the cemetery of the of Nereius and Achilleius on the Via Ardeantian and restored (renovavit) the cemeteries of Felix and Adcutus, and of Priscilla. Felix IV (Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:279) rebuilt (refecit) the basilica of the martyr Saturninus on the Via Salaria, which burned down. 51 Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:279. Churches built between the sixth and ninth centuries in Rome tended to be much smaller than their earlier counterparts and/or were repurposed classical buildings. See Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 52. 52 Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City, 312–1308, 71; G. Kalas, “Conservation, Erasure, and Intervention: Rome’s Ancient Heritage and the History of SS. Cosma e Damiano,” Arris 16 (2005):1–11. As Kalas notes, Roman aristocrats of earlier generations gained political benefit from presenting renovations as ex novo construction in inscriptions, as Felix had done. 53 The church, today known as Santi Apostoli, was begun (initiata est) during the pontificate of Pelagius I (556–561) and completed (perfecit) during that of John. Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:303 (Pelagius I) and 1:305 (John III). The lack of episcopal patronage for new church construction in the Liber Pontificalis is confirmed by other evidence, including archeological. For an overview of episcopal sponsored church building in Rome from the fourth to the ninth centuries, see Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, 237–9; Robert Coates-Stephens, “Dark Age Architecture in Rome.” Papers of the British School at Rome 65 (1997), 226–7.

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immediate predecessor Pelagius II (579–590) is said to have built the basilica of S. Laurence (S. Lorenzo fuori le mura) a fundamento.54 Like the rest of the city, the Subura and environs saw only limited ecclesiastical building in the sixth century, generally during the pontificate of Symmachus (498–514), who is reported in the Liber Pontificalis to have built a fundamento a basilica dedicated to Silvester and Martin next to the to the east of S. Agata.55 This church may have replaced the above- mentioned fourth-century titulus Equitii.56 A diaconia, which admittedly appears only in later textual sources, may have also been built in the area around this time.57 This relative lack of building activity was a consequence of diminished resources in the aftermath of the Gothic War and the subsequent invasion of the Lombards.58 The disruptions of the period and the resulting contraction of the city’s population precipitated the partial abandonment of houses in the Subura, altering the patterns that had regulated urban life in this part of the city in previous centuries.59 If Rome—and the Subura in particular—was as badly neglected and its populations as low as is generally assumed by modern scholars, there would have been no pressing need for more places of worship. If this analysis is correct, a pragmatic desire to revitalize abandoned churches for use by Rome’s Christian community cannot fully explain Gregory’s interest in S. Agata and S. Severinus. Instead, these buildings were targeted for ideological as well as practical reasons. Importantly, Gregory understood the repair, renovation, and maintenance of ecclesiastical buildings as a central responsibility for leaders of the church. As he explained in a letter written to Maurus regarding the upkeep of S. Pancras in the , concern for churches (ecclesiarum cura) obliged Gregory to ensure that the city’s ecclesiastical infrastructure was not

54 Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:309: Hic fecit supra corpus beati Laurenti martyris basilicam a fundamento constructam et tabulis argenteis exornavit sepulchrum eius. 55 Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:262. See also Krautheimer, Corpus Basilicarum, 3:87–108. Symmachus is also credited with various repairs of existing churches, as well the consturction of S. Pancras and a church dedicated to S. Agata, noted above, n43, both of which were outside the walls of the city. 56 For Symmachus’ church foundations, see Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:46. There is some confusion as to whether the titulus Equitii et Silvestri represents one church, which could be referred to by the names of either or both saints, or two separate churches: the titulus Equitii and the titulus Silvestri. Laurentian Fragment, an alternative set of papal biographies hostile to Symmachus, claims that Symmachus built the church of S. Martin next to the church of S. Silvester, thereby asserting that these were two separate churches where the Liber Pontificalis had only one. Mulryan, Spatial 'Christianisation' in Context, 74, argues convincingly from both textual and archeological evidence, for two separate buildings. He further claims that the Symmachian church dedicated to Martin of replaced the titulus Equitii. The Laurentian Fragment is edited by Duchesne in his edition of the Liber Pontificalis, 1886–92, 1:44– 46. On the discrepancy between the Liber Pontificalis and the Laurentian Fragment, see Cohen, “Schism and the Polemic of Heresy,” 203–4 57 Mulryan, Spatial 'Christianisation' in Context, 72; 78–79. 58 Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City, 70–71. 59 Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City, 311–26, Andrews, “A Domus in the Subura of Rome,” 84. Mulryan, Spatial 'Christianisation' in Context, 80.

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undermined by neglect.60 Gregory similarly explained his intervention at S. Agata as having been prompted by a “concern for venerable locations (locorum uenerabilium cura),” an interesting phrase suggesting that the building, even as a heretical church, was as worthy of reverence as the neglected S. Pancras.61 Gregory’s cura related to the physical wellbeing of churches, but also to their ability to service their communities. In the case of S. Pancras, the church had been so mismanaged by its priests that there was often no one available to celebrate Mass on Sundays. To remedy this problem, Gregory turned control of the church over to Maurus and his . Gregory expressed a similar concern in a letter to the bishop of Nomentum northeast of Rome, in which the pontiff lamented both the physical damage to churches and the death of priests who ministered to a community inflicted by “hostilis impietas,” certainly a reference to the Lombards.62 To ensure the viability of churches in and around Rome, Gregory worked to place them on a secure financial footing. The second part of Gregory’s letter to Leo describing the rededication of S. Agata discussed above, claims that a year or two after its reconciliation in 594, S. Agata still required extensive restoration and repair as well as lamps and other basics. Gregory carefully instructed Leo to rents (pensiones) under papal authority “on all the houses built in this city that the aforesaid church [S. Agata] is agreed to have possessed in the time of the .”63 From this money, Gregory ordered Leo to pay in full for whatever restorations were necessary, crediting whatever leftover funds back to the church. Gregory’s efforts to reactivate the church’s patrimony saw to S. Agata’s immediate needs—the miraculous lighting of the lamps would not have been possible had the bishop not paid for them in the first place—and gave it the financial means to survive in the long term. At S. Pancras, Gregory similarly reorganized its patronage to ensure that the building was kept in good repair and that priests were available to serve its community.64 The renovation and restoration of existing ecclesiastical buildings was also a comparatively inexpensive way for Gregory to present himself as an active patron during a period when it was economically difficult and demographically unnecessary to build new churches. Caroline Goodson has demonstrated how in the ninth century, Paschal I (817–824) rebuilt, restored, and repaired churches throughout the city, paying particular attention to aggrandize

60 Gregory, Ep. 4.18. (CSL 140:236): Ecclesiarum cura, quae sacerdotalibus officiis evidenter infixa est, ita nos cogit esse sollicitos, ut nulla in eis culpa neglectus appareat. Sacerdotalis here refers to the episcopal office or perhaps generically to priesthood, rather than to priests, which are called presbyteri, in distinction to monachi, later in this same letter. 61 Gregory Ep. 4.19 (CSL 140:237): Locorum uenerabilium cura nos admonet de eorum utilitate per omnia cogitare. 62 Gregory Ep. 3.20 (CSL 140:165–6). 63 Gregory Ep. 4.19 (CSL 140:237); trans (with modifications), Martyn, The Letters of Gregory the Great, 1:302. It is noteworthy that S. Agata had a patrimony of rental houses before its reconciliation to orthodoxy, which Gregory thought could be reactivated with relative ease. This suggests that this non-Nicene church was very much a part of the urban landscape of the city as a landlord (presumably of Nicene Christians?) for generations. 64 Gregory Ep. 4.18 (CSL 140:236).

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modest or previously unimportant ecclesiastical structures in important neighbourhoods and/or along important thoroughfares. Once completed, these buildings, adorned with the papal insignia, “spoke of the grandeur of the papacy, the prestige of tradition and the redemption offered through the liturgy, through Christ and his agent on earth, Paschal.”65 Gregory’s rededications may have served an analogous purpose in the late sixth- and early seventh-century Subura. Indeed, the rededication of S. Agata was only a part of a limited but pronounced renewal of ecclesiastical and monastic activity in this part of the city during Gregory’s pontificate and especially afterwards.66 The monastery founded by Gregory in honor of on his family estate on the Caelian hill shortly after 573 was nearby.67 And Gregory donated a house located iuxta locum qui appellatur Gallinas albas—that is, on the southern edge of the Viminal just to the east of S. Agata—for use as a convent, one of a number of monastic foundations that would develop in this area.68 The factionalism that characterized ecclesiastical politics of previous generations are less obvious during Gregory’s pontificate, at least in our surviving sources. However, a number of scholars have argued that Gregory may have triggered dissension among the city’s clerical establishment, who resented what appeared to be a monastic takeover of the church at their expense. This precipitated a power struggle between Gregory and his supporters, and the Roman clergy that would last well into the seventh century.69 George Demacopoulos has recently challenged some of these conclusions.70 But the general point remains valid: late antique Roman had at best irregular control over the various religious sites inside the walls and in the suburbium, and the church was often divided by bitter debate, which concerned, or perhaps was expressed as, questions of jurisdiction over particular church buildings. In this sense, the Roman church and indeed the city itself can be understood as a contested space.71 In this context, it is suggestive that many elements of the rededication ceremony described by Gregory in his Dialogues mirror other late antique public religious displays such as funerals, which were intended to unite the community thorough the signing of hymns, culminating in celebration of

65 Goodson, The Rome of Pope Paschal I, passim, but esp. 81–159, quoted at 159. 66 Reekmans, “L'implantation monumentale,” 886–91. According to Reekmans, “Du VIe au VIIIe siècle, la plus forte concentration d'établissements chrétiens à l'intérieur de la ville s'étendait en une large bande, à l'est des forums impériaux, à travers la vallée de Subure, avait le Cispius comme centre, et se prolongeait vers la porte Tiburtine, ayant le sanctuaire de Saint-Laurent h.l.m. dans le fond.” 67 R. A. Markus, Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9–10; Conrad Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 131– 2. 68 Gregory Ep. 3.17 (CSL 140:163–4). 69 Conrad Leyser, "The temptations of cult: Roman martyr piety in the age of Gregory the Great," Early Medieval Europe 9, no. 3 (2000), 292; Authority and Asceticism, 146–50; Peter AB Llewellyn, “The Roman church in the seventh century: the legacy of Gregory I,” JEH 25, no. 4 (1974). See also Jeffrey Richards, Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great (London: Routledge, 1980), 80–81. 70 George E. Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great: Ascetic, , and First Man of Rome (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 120–4, downplays the struggle between ascetics and their clerical opponents. 71 The Roman church as “contested space” see Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great, 114–5.

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the , the church’s central ritual act.72 This was, according to Ann Marie Yasin, “an opportunity for the dramatic outpouring of collective energy and the reinforcement of shared identity among a local community of coreligionists.”73 The tradition of sending the fermentum— a host consecrated by the Bishop of Rome for use in the mass celebrated in the intra-mural churches and the system of stational services and associated processions, which emerged in its fully developed form possibly in the fifth and certainly by the late sixth century—also sacralised the city’s topography and directly inserted the bishop into the ritual lives of more and more Roman Christians.74 This period also saw the growing prominence of religious processions such as the letaniae septiformis, penetential processions organized by Gregory in 590 and again in 604 in response to flooding and plague.75 According to ’s description of the 590 letania, the procession departed from seven Roman churches, converging on the Clivus Suburanus and the Via Merulana, before moving to S. Maria Maggiore just to the east of S. Agata and near the likely location of S. Severinus, where Gregory conducted a mass.76 The letaniae brought together men and women from across the city, sublimating social and economic hierarchies in favor of a universal Christian community under the watchful eye of its bishop.77 The result, “constructed an image of Rome that made the city legible, understandable, and meaningful in Christian, ecclesiastical, and even papal terms,” in the analysis of Jacob Latham.78 This was particularly important in the area around S. Maria Maggiore, which had been the site of

72 Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval (Cornell University Press, 1994), 28. 73 Yasin, Saints and Church Spaces, 62–63. 74 Victor Saxer, “L'utilisation par la liturgie de l'espace urbain et suburbain,” in Actes du XIe Congrés International d’Archéologie Chrétienne, vol. 2 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989), 951; John F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship. The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy, (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1987), 105–66; Antoine Chavasse, La liturgie de la ville de Rome du Ve au VIIIe siècle. Une liturgie conditionée par l’organisation de la vie in urbe et extra muros, (Rome: Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, 1993), 231–46. The fermentum and stational services were just some of the ways Roman bishops inserted “themselves visually into the ritual life” of Rome’s churches, according to Salzman, “Leo's Liturgical Topography,” passim, quoted at 230. 75 For an overview of the two letaniae and what follows, see Jacob A. Latham, “The Making of Papal Rome: Gregory I and the Letania Septiformis,” in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity, ed. Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski (Farhnam: Ashgate, 2009), 301; “Inventing Gregory “the Great”: Memory, Authority, and the Afterlives of the Letania Septiformis,” CH 84 (2015): 1–31; Saxer, “L'utilisation par la liturgie de l'espace urbain et suburbain,” 960–4; Giulia Barone, “Gregorio Magno e la vita religiosa della Roma del suo tempo” in Scritti per Isa: Raccolta di studi offerti a Isa Lori Sanfilippo, ed. Antonella Mazzon (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per Medio Evo, 2008), 19–25; Margaret M. Andrews, “The Laetaniae Septiformes of Gregory I, S. Maria Maggiore and Early Marian Cult in Rome,” in The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome, eds. Ida Ostenberg, Simon Malmberg and Jonas Bjørnebye (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 155–64. See also Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places, 165–6 and passim, which discusses religious procession in ’s Antioch. 76 Gregory of Tours, Historiae 10.1 (MGH SRM 1:479–81). The seven churches from which the 590 letania departed - many of which were in the general area of the Subura - were: SS. Cosma e Damiano, S. Vitale, S. Eufemia, S. Clemente, SS. Marcellino e Pietro, SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and S. Stefano Rotondo. A reconstructed map of the likely route of the 590 letania can be found in Andrews, “The Laetaniae Septiformes,” 156. 77 Latham, “The Making of Papal Rome,” 297–8. 78 Latham, “The Making of Papal Rome,” 301.

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numerous, often bloody struggles over the papal succession. And a number of bishops and their challengers had utilized processions to stake their claim to and control over specific sites and areas of the city.79 Like funeral processions, the fermentum, stational services, and the letaniae, Gregory’s rededication of S. Agata (and possibly of S. Severinus) publicly inscribed orthodoxy upon the landscape of the city and proclaimed the power and authority of its bishop. Each aspect of the process described by Gregory in the Dialogues serves this purpose: a procession of the Christian faithful, led by the bishop, carried the relics through the streets of the city before finally entering the church. Gathered together in prayer, the bishop and his community drove out the invisible Arian pig; the mass, presided over by the bishop, then purified and sacralized the church for orthodoxy. The newly renamed church now represented the special dead—the martyrs Sebastian and Agatha—and the connection these martyrs had to their orthodox community, mediated once again through Gregory’s episcopal leadership. The miracles, many of which centred on the altar (the presumed location of the relics) signaled the saints’ approval of this transfer of jurisdiction from heresy to orthodoxy, and from Arian barbarians to the Roman church.

THE DISCOURSE OF RECONCILATION: LOMBARDS AND THE TEXTUAL MEMORY OF S. AGATA IN THE DIALOGUES Even if, as we have seen, the late antique Subura and nearby neighborhoods were not hotbeds of Arian barbarians, the lingering memory of a heretical presence in this area of the city would have made the rededication of S. Agata and S. Severinus ideologically potent symbols of the victory of Christian orthodoxy. Gregory’s interest in this symbolism was likely given added urgency by the political and military danger posed by the Lombards.80 As early as the fall of 590, Gregory fretted that he was surrounded by hostiles gladii.81 Early the following year, Gregory famously quipped that he had been “made bishop not of the Romans, but of the Lombards,

79 Andrews, “The Laetaniae Septiformes,” 159. Examples of papal processions related to ecclesiastical factionalism in Rome include those such as the Felix in his struggle against Liberius (352–366), Boniface (418–422) against Eulalius, and even Pelagius I (556–561), who, according the Liber Pontificalis (Duchesne, Lib. Pont., 1:303), with the connivance of Narses, organized a procession (laetenia) from S. Pancras to S. Peter’s, complete with hymns and chants (cum hymnis et canticis spiritalibus) as a means of demonstrating his innocence in the death of his predecessor, Vigilius. 80 On Gregory’s relationship with the Lombards and generally for what follows, see Richards, Consul of God, 181–94; Claudio Azzara, “Gregorio, i longobardi e l’occidente barbarico. Costanti e peculiarità di un rapporto,” Bollettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 97 (1991), 1–74; Markus, Gregory the Great, 99–107; Barbara Müller, Führung im Denken und Handeln Gregors des Grossen (Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 182–4); Cristina Ricci, “Gregory’s Missions to the Barbarians,” in A Companion to Gregory the Great, eds. Bronwen Neil and Matthew Dal Santo (Brill, 2013), 32–42; Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great, 107–11; Leyser, Authority and Asceticism, 131–2. 81 Gregory, Ep. 1.3 (CSL 140:3–4, quoted at 4): . . . quia hostilibus gladiis foris sine cessation confodimur, sed seditione militum interno periculo grauius urguemur. Gregory also expressed his concern about the loyalty of the unpaid soldiers tasked with the defense of the city.

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whose treaties are swords (spatae) and whose gratitude is revenge.”82 The main danger to Rome during the early years of Gregory’s pontificate came from Ariulf, duke of Spoleto.83 In the summer of 592, the political situation in central Italy threatened to collapse entirely as several Lombard commanders in the employ of the Empire defected to Ariulf after failing to receive backpay from Ravenna.84 Ariulf quickly captured several cities around Spoleto and cut the lines of communication between Ravenna and Rome. He then marched on Rome and placed the city under .85 Worse was to come. Arichis, duke of Benevento, who had, according to Gregory, “broken faith with the Republic” and “sided with Ariulf,” launched a simultaneous campaign into Campania. Soon, Arichis had devastated the region and Naples was under siege.86 At the end of that summer, Gregory reported to the sub-deacon Peter—the same man who had been tasked to send relics of Severinus to Rome—that a serious famine loomed.87 Abandoned by the imperial forces at Ravenna, Gregory organized the defense of the city. Eventually, and without consulting the Romanus, he negotiated an end to the siege and agreed to pay Ariulf a substantial .88 Romanus then counterattacked, which provoked the intervention of the Lombard king Agilulf, whose forces besieged Rome for a second time at the end of 593 and into 594. Arichis too renewed his attack against Campania. How the siege ended is unclear.89 However, Gregory reported to Emperor that in its aftermath, the city starved as “Romans bound with ropes around their necks like dogs” were deported to Gaul for sale as slaves.90 The threat posed by the Lombards was, according to Gregory, not merely physical, but also spiritual. In a letter to the bishops of Italy written in January of 591, the pontiff claims that “the most wicked (nefandissimus) ,” king of the Lombards, had barred Lombard children from receiving as Catholics. For this, we are told, Authari had been killed by divine retribution. As a result, Gregory instructs the bishops to work diligently to reconcile the children “who were baptized in the Arian heresy, to the Catholic faith, so as to placate the anger of our almighty Lord,” the latter, a reference to an outbreak of plague that was then ravaging Italy.91

82 February, 591. Gregory, Ep. 1.30 (CSL 140:37); trans. (with modifications), Martyn, The Letters of Gregory the Great, 1:150–1: sicut peccata mea merebantur, non Romanorum sed Langobardorum episcopus factus sum, quorum sinthichiae spatae sunt et gratia poena. Gregory does not specifically mention Ariulf, although he, along with Arichis of Benevento, were almost certainly the subjects of this letter. See Richards, Consul of God, 182. 83 Gregory Ep. 2.4 (CSL 140: 92–93). Gregory calls Ariulf nec dicendum Ariulfum, unspeakable Ariulf. 84 Richards, Consul of God, 184. 85 Gregory, Ep. 2.27 (CSL 140:113–4); Ep. 2.38 (CSL 140:122–5); Homiliae in Hiezechielem 2, praef., ed. and French trans., Charles Morel, SC 360 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf: 1990), 42–44. 86 Gregory, Ep. 2.38 (CSL 140:124): Quia Arogis [sc. Arichis], ut cognouimus, cum Ariulfo se fecit, et reipublicae contra fidem uenit, et ualde insidiatur eidem ciuitati [Naples]. 87 Gregory, ep 1.70 (CCL 140:78–79) 88 As Gregory reports to Emperor Maurice in a letter of 595: Ep. 3.36 (CCL 140:181–2): sine ullu reipublicae dispendio. 89 Gregory may have once again agreed to pay off the Lombards. See Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great, 205n32.; Ricci, “Gregory’s Missions to the Barbarians,” 38. 90 Gregory, Ep. 5.36 (CCL 140:304–7, quoted at 306): Post hoc plaga gravior fuit adventus Agilulfi, ita ut oculis meis cernerem Romanos more canum in collis funibus ligatos, qui ad Franciam ducebantur venales. 91 Gregory, Ep. 1.17 (CCSL 140:16–17); trans., Martyn, the Letters of Gregory the Great, 1:132.

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From these and other accounts in Gregory’s writing, it is easy to imagine Italy as “miserable and unhappy,” Rome as a beleaguered outpost of civilization surrounded by the “swords of the Lombards,” and Gregory the unyielding but isolated opponent of heretical barbarians.92 Representing the views of generations of , R. A. Markus succinctly stated, “Gregory did not like the Lombards.”93 But the most doleful laments of Roman suffering and the most vitriolic condemnations of the Lombards, including many of those cited above, are found principally in Gregory’s letters to imperial . This was intentional. Demacopoulos has argued convincingly that Gregory’s emphasis on Lombard otherness in these letters, especially their supposed Arianism, paganism, and/or barbarity, was a deliberate strategy intended to encourage a more rigorous imperial defense of Rome.94 Whereas his anti-Lombard polemic was typically directed at authorities in Ravenna and , Gregory’s rededication of S. Agata and the church dedicated to S. Severinus may likewise have been intended as a message, only for a local audience. As the threat from Ariulf, Arichis, and ultimately Agilulf hung over the city in the early 590s, the Roman church’s takeover of formerly “Arian” ecclesiastical buildings was an act of resistance, a demonstration of the bishop’s authority, and a manifestation of the inevitable victory of orthodox Christianity over heretical barbarians. Of course, modern scholars acknowledge that Lombard religiosity cannot be accurately described using heresiological labels such as ‘Arian.’95 Elsewhere, Gregory himself recognized that while some Lombards were non- Nicene Christians, others were Catholic, while others still were pagan.96 But historical accuracy was not the point of heresiology. For Gregory’s Italian audience, Arianism was shorthand for Lombard otherness and a widely recognized shibboleth, which evoked the threatening presence of religiously problematic barbarians beyond the city’s walls. In this context, imposition of new identities upon formerly heretical, barbarian churches may not have been intended to entirely erase the memory of their problematic histories, but paradoxically to highlight them. Arthur Urbano’s insightful study of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna suggested that the modifications made to the mosaic cycle originally created for the non-Nicene Ostrogothic King Theoderic following the building’s reconciliation to orthodoxy, was a kind of damnatio memoriae; the famous hands of Theoderic’s courtiers, left visible on the columns of the palatium mosaic, were paradoxically intended to remind the people of Ravenna

92 Gregory, Ep. 9.240, Registrum Epistularum, ed. Dag Norberg, CCL 140a (Turnhout: Brepols: 1982), 823–4, quoted at 823: . . . qui uos miseram et deiectam diligere fecit Italiam; Ep. 7.23 (CCL 140: 474–8, quoted at 477): “. . . inter Langobardorum gladios. 93 Markus, Gregory the Great and his World, 99. 94 Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great, 46, 94–95. 95 Steven C. Fanning, “Lombard Arianism Reconsidered,” Speculum 56, no. 2 (1981): 241–58. 96 See, for instance, Dial. 3.28. (SC 260: 374), in which Gregory describes Lombard jailors who sacrifice the head of a goat to the devil. Indeed, Gregory himself may not have radically distinguished Arians and pagans. He uses the same word—error—to describe both. Compare, for instance, Gregory, Dial. 3.28.1 (SC 260:374) and Dial. 3.29.2 (SC 260:376), noted in Ricci, “Gregory’s Missions to the Barbarians,”, 34 and n23.

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to forget the heretical regime of the Ostrogoths.97 This is a useful observation. As Charles Hedrick has argued, unlike the modern totalitarian regime, which seeks to deny the reality of history altogether, the damnatio memoriae “was understood by Roman critics…as a confirmation of memory, not the destruction of it.” The erasure of the past “asserts the historicity of what it eradicates, even as it eradicates it.”98 Like the vestigial hands in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Gregory’s choice of Agatha, Sebastian, and Severinus, reminded Romans of the buildings’ problematic past and also of their Catholic present. Agatha was a Sicilian who died in the Decian persecutions of the third century, and she was closely associated with Peter who, according to legend, appeared to her in her cell and healed her after her torture. Sebastian too was purportedly healed by Irene of Rome after being shot with multiple arrows.99 Gregory’s choice of both Agatha and Sebastian evoked their association with early Christian Rome, their association with the city’s bishop, and the healing of the church—its return to orthodoxy from heresy.100 More obviously, Severinus of Noricum (ca. 410–482) was celebrated not only for his asceticism but also for his protection of Christian displaced by barbarian incursions, especially along the . His relics were eventually moved to a monastery near Naples, where Eugippius (ca. 465–after 533), likewise a from Noricum Ripense and abbot of the community founded in the honor of the saint, wrote the Vita S. Severini.101 The vita describes the ascetically-minded Severinus ransoming captives, cleansing lepers, establishing small monastic communities, and performing various miracles as Noricum slipped permanently out of Roman control.102 Eugippius’s depiction of Severinus as a man who was so holy that even the heretical barbarians, the “ecclesiae hostes haeretici,” were forced to honor him, may well have resonated for Gregory and the late sixth- and early seventh-century Roman audience, who were also

97 Arthur Urbano, “Donation, Dedication, and Damnatio Memoriae: The Catholic Reconciliation of Ravenna and the Church of Sant'apollinare Nuovo,” JECS 13 (2005): 96–98. 98 Charles W. Hedrick, History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 242. See also Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting : Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1: “Any recalling or recording of the past involves selection, both deliberate and unintended. Choosing what to remember must entail also the choice of what to forget, what to pass over in silence, and what to obscure.” 99 Sebastian’s healer was supposedly Irene of Rome, widow of Castulus. She went to Sebastian after he had been pierced by arrows, found him alive, and tried to heal his wounds. She was not successful. 100 For the suggestion that Sebastian’s relics were used against plague in Rome (particularly at the church of San Pietro in Vincoli): Paul the Deacon, HL, VI.166. 101 Friedrich Lotter, Severinus von Noricum: Legende Und Historische Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1976), 22– 32. See also Andreas Schwarcz, “Severinus of Noricum: Between Fact and Fiction,” in Eugippius Und Severin: Der Autor, Der Text Und Der Heilige, ed. Walter Pohl and Maximilian Diesenberger (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001). 102 For an overview of Severinus’ life, see, Friedrich Lotter, Severinus von Noricum, 246–7; Veit Rosenberger, “The Saint and the Bishop: Severinus of Noricum,” in Episcopal Elections in Late Antiquity, ed. Johan Leemans, et al. (De Gruyter, 2011), 203 and n1.

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worried about a group of barbarians of dubious orthodoxy.103 Indeed, given Arichis’s designs on Naples in the early 590s—the home of Severinus’s monastery—and Gregory’s concern to baptize children of Lombards mentioned above, the fact that Severinus’s holiness transcended divisions between orthodox and heretic may have meant that in Gregory’s mind, this saint could uniquely appeal even to the Lombards. After all, the Rugian king Flaccitheus had sought advice from Severinus, as did .104 The holy man had also enjoyed friendly relations with the Alaman Gibuldus and had barbarians amongst his monks.105 But while the vita is not unambiguously “anti- Arian” in its sentiment, Severinus’s relations with barbarian non-Nicene Christians were, in the words of Walter Goffart, “inimical or tend in that direction.”106 Read by audiences in Italy after the end of the Gothic Wars, it is likely that the vita, but more generally the memory of Severinus’s name, would have evoked the conflict between ‘barbarian Arianism’ and Roman orthodoxy. The historicity of the vita was less important than its symbolic value and what the saint represented for Gregory and his congregants. And Severinus was a particularly fitting model for Gregory’s own authority. Both men were ascetic -bishops confronting heterodox barbarians in the context of dwindling imperial authority. If the act of rededicating churches to Agatha, Sebastian, and Severinus was in part intended to reinforce Roman/Italian collective identity in the face of barbarian violence, the stories Gregory told about these rededications served a similar function. Significantly, S. Agata’s rededication appears in Book Three of the Dialogues amongst a series of vignettes describing the triumph of orthodoxy over Arianism, often mediated through the actions of bishops.107 For instance, immediately following the rededication of S. Agata, Gregory narrates the martyrdom of Hermenegild, the son of the Visigothic king Leovigild.108 Hermenegild had been converted to Catholicism by bishop Leander of and when Hermenegild refused to recant, Leovigild ordered his murder. Various miracles were soon reported including the faint sound of

103 Eugippius, Vita Sancti Severini 4 (MGH AA 1.2:10): Haec et his similia solebat proferre cum fletibus, erudiens homines humilitatis exemple, cuius virtutis fundamento munitus tanta diviui muueris claritate fulgebat, ut ipsi quoque ecclesiae hostes haeretici revereutissimis eum officiis honorarent. 104 Flaccitheus: Eugippius, Vita Sancti Severini 5 (MGH AA 1.2:10); Odoacer: Vita Sancti Severini 7 (MGH AA 1.2:11) 105 Eugippius, Vita Sancti Severini 19 (MGH AA 1.2:16–17); Bonosus, the monachus barbarus: Vita Sancti Severini 35 (MGH AA 1.2:24). 106 Walter Goffart, “Does the Vita S. Severini Have an Underside?,” in Eugippius Und Severin: Der Autor, Der Text Und Der Heilige, ed. Walter Pohl and Maximilian Diesenberger (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001), 37. 107 Gregory ends the section between Diaglogues 3.29 and 3.32 with the statement, “Sed haec nos pro arrianae hereseos damnatione dixesse sufficiat” (SC 260:392).” Other themes in this section include ascetic renunciation as a kind of martyrdom and the interpretation of miracles. Leyser, Authority and Asceticism, 137, refers to Greogry’s stress on the ascetic life in Diaglogues 3 as “peace-time martyrdom”—that is, martyrdom available to pious Christians who did not live during periods of outright persecution. 108 Gregory’s account completely ignores the political dimension of the conflict between Hermenegild and Leovigild including an outright revolt by Hermenegild against his father in 580. For an overview, see Jamie Wood, The Politics of Identity in Visigothic : Religion and Power in the Histories of (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 45–46 and notes.

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around Hermenegild’s body and some claimed that lamps inexplicably ignited during the night.109 Hermenegild’s death, according to Gregory, paved the way for the conversion of the Visigoths to orthodoxy under Leovigild’s successor, Reccared, aided, of course, by Leander.110 Next, Gregory relates the story of African bishops who had their tongues cut out by the Vandals when they refused to stop condemning Arianism, and yet they were still able to speak perfectly.111 Most striking is the account, which immediately precedes that of S. Agata: the attempted rededication of the church of S. Paul in Spoleto—the home of Ariulf—by a Lombard Arian bishop.112 According to Gregory, the Catholic custos of the church, who had learned of the plan, barricaded himself inside and extinguished the lamps. The next morning, the Lombard bishop and a mob of his coreligionists arrived to expropriate the church. Suddenly, a miraculous divine force shook the building’s doors, hurling them open with a great sound. Then, a light descended from above, igniting all of the church’s lamps. But it was the final miracle that proved decisive: the Arian bishop was struck blind and had to be led home by the hand. After this, according to Gregory, the Lombard heretics no longer bothered the Catholics in Spoleto.113 The failed Arian takeover of the church in Spoleto functions as a heretical inversion of the narrative of S. Agata. In Spoleto, the illegitimate authority of the heretical bishop was divinely punished with blindness, whereas at Rome, Gregory’s actions were rewarded with signs of heavenly approval. Both stories also emphasise miracles announced by loud noises. The magnus strepitus on the first night, and the grauior sontitus on the second night following the rededication of S. Agata—noises so terrifying that it seemed as if the whole church had been upended a fundamentis—were evidence of an arduous struggle against demonic power; the return of silence indicated that it had successfully been forced from the building that it had long occupied.114 In contrast at Spoleto, S. Paul’s was protected by a divine force signified cum magno sonitu, which miraculously blew open the doors of the building.115 In addition to sound, Gregory uses light to illustrate the inevitable victory of Christian orthodoxy. Following S. Agata’s rededication, the lamps were kindled by a divine light (diuinitus lux) on multiple occasions.116 In

109 Gregory, Dial. 3.31.1–5 (SC 260:384–6, quoted at 386): Quidam edam ferunt quod illic nocturno tempore accensae lampades apparebant. 110 Gregory, Dial. 3.31.6–8 SC 260:388–90). 111 Gregory, Dial. 3.32.1–4 (SC 260:390–93). 112 The bishop is described as a Longobardorum episcopus, scilicet Arianus . . .. Gregory, Dial. 3.29.2 (SC 260:376). 113 Gregory I, Dial. 3.29.4 (SC 260:378): Quod dum Langobardi in eadem regione positi omnes agnoscerent, nequaquam ulterius praesumpserunt catholica loca temerare. 114 Gregory I, Dial. 3.30.4 (SC 260:380): Sed adhuc nocte eadem magnus in eiusdem ecclesiae tectis strepitus factus est ac si in haec aliquis errando discurreret. Sequenti autem nocte grauior sonitus excreuit. Cum subito tanto terrore insonuit, ac si omnis illa ecclesia a fundamentis fuisset euersa, et protinus recessit, ac nulla illic ulterius inquietudo antiqui hostis apparuit, sed per terroris sonitum quem fecit innotuit, a loco quem diu tenuerat quam coactus exiebat. 115 Gregory I, Dial. 3.29.3 (SC 260:378): Sed repente cunctae simul regiae diuinitus concussae, abiectis longius seris, apertae sunt, atque cum magno sonitu omnia ecclesiae claustra patuerunt. 116 Gregory I, Dial. 3.30.6 (SC 260:382): Die uero alio, cum in ea lampades sine lumine dependerent, emisso diuinitus lumine sunt accensae, atque post paucos iterum dies, cum expletis missarum sollemniis, extinctis lam- padibus, custos ex eadem ecclesia egressus fuisset, post paululum intrauit et lampades quas extinxerat lucentes repperit.

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case his readers missed the less-than-subtle metaphor, Gregory describes the confused custos of the church, who repeatedly extinguished the building’s lamps only to return to find them burning. As Gregory explained, “it was clear that this place [S. Agata] had moved from the darkness to the light,” with tenebra representing Arianism, and lux Catholic orthodoxy.117 Lamps also magically ignited following Hermenegild’s martyrdom.118 And at S. Paul’s in Spoleto, Gregory states that the church’s lights had been initially extinguished because of the presence of the Arian bishop; when the lamps were miraculously relit, that same bishop lost his sight.119 The symbolism is the same: the lamps represented the light of orthodoxy, which served as an obvious contrast to the darkness of heresy embodied in the blind Arian bishop.

CONCLUSIONS Given the framework in which the story appears, the rededication of S. Agata de’ Goti in the Dialogues should be understood not as a strictly historical account but rather as didactic literature meant to emphasize the role of the bishop, his congregation, and saintly relics, in the defeat of heresy, the overthrow of the heretical past of the church, and its purification and rebirth as a fitting place for orthodox worship. However, while Gregory sought to highlight the radical difference between Arianism and orthodoxy for his readers, the Dialogues’s lengthy and dramatic description of the rededication of S. Agata paradoxically suggests that it was actually quite easy to make this church appropriate for Catholic worship. There was no (reported) need to reconfigure the space of the building to make it suitable for orthodox liturgical use, which suggests not only that there was no significant architectural difference between “Arian” and orthodox church construction, but also that the rituals practiced in these spaces were likely very similar.120 No special purificatory ceremonies were employed. All that was required was a simple mass by a legitimate (orthodox) bishop and the deposition of relics.121 Although there were no

117 Gregory I, Dial. 3.30.6 (SC 260:382): . . . ut uidelicet ex ipso lumine aperte claresceret quia locus ille de tenebris ad lucem uenisset. 118 Gregory, Dial. 3.31.1–5 (SC 260:384–6). 119 Gregory, Dial. 3.29.4 (SC 260:378): Miro etenim modo res gesta est ut, quia eiusdem arriani causa lampades in ecclesia beati Pauli fuerant ex tinctae, uno eodemque tempore et ipse lumen perderet et in ecclesia lumen redirect. 120 In the Ostrogothic context, see Cohen, “Religious Diversity,” 519; Bryan Ward–Perkins, “Where Is the Archaeology and Iconography of Germanic Arianism?,” in Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity, ed. Gwynn and Susanne Bangert (2010), 267; Ralf Bockmann, “The Non-Archeology of Arianism — What Comparing Cases in Carthage, Haïdra and Ravenna Can Tell Us About “Arian” Churches,” in Arianism: Roman Heresy and Barbarian Creed, ed. Guido M Berndt and Roland Steinacher (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 217; Deliyannis, Ravenna, 178–9. 121 This is all the more striking when compared to the approach taken by the sectarian circumcellions in North , who, when they took over a , ritually cleansed the building. The floors were scoured with salt, the walls whitewashed, and the curtains and even the codices were cleaned in order to remove the contaminating stain of the Catholics who had previously occupied the building. See Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 693–4; Lander, Ritual Sites and Religious Rivalries, 112–4; Maureen A. Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 165–6.

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universally accepted liturgical rituals for dedicating ecclesiastical buildings in late antiquity,122 Roman bishops typically required these same elements for the dedication of new churches and the rededication of renovated or repaired buildings. For example, Gregory, responding to Leontius of Ariminum’s () request to rededicate a church in that city to Stephen, which had been rebuilt after the original building was destroyed by fire (incendio concremata), instructs the bishop to collect Stephen’s relics (reliquiarum sanctuaria) and to solemnly dedicate the rebuilt church and its altar.123 Earlier in the sixth century, relics were not always explicitly required for rededication. In a letter written in 538, the Roman Bishop Vigilius (537–555) stated that the consecration of a church that had been entirely rebuilt after having fallen into ruin (si diruta fuerit) could be accomplished with a simple mass and by sprinkling on the church’s altar. This was also true in the case of a basilica that was completely rebuilt from the ground up (a fundamentis) if it already contained the relics of a saint. According to Vigilius’s directions, the sanctification of such a church is complete once a mass has been performed.124 Gregory’s rededications of heretical spaces were no different than other more typical ceremonies used to make a space available for Christian worship.125 But while the rituals Gregory used to rededicate heretical churches were not exceptional, they took on new significance in the context of the early 590s. The ascent of the Lombards in Italy challenged any narrative of Christian triumphalism tied to the continued dominance of the , while their association with paganism and especially with Arianism meant that the danger they posed was existential, not only political and military. In response to the Lombards and possibly to other internal challenges, Gregory’s rehabilitation of abandoned, formerly heretical spaces was an eminently practical and economical demonstration of his commitment to the upkeep of the physical churches under his jurisdiction and the unity of Rome’s Christian community. His discourse of reconciliation, especially in the Dialogues, transformed what was in reality a quite mundane act into a powerful statement of episcopal authority, which enacted the ultimate victory of orthodoxy over heresy. Both his actions and the representation of these actions in text told the story of a bishop imposing the authority of the church over contested

122 Brian V. Repsher, The Rite of Church Dedication in the Early Medieval Era (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 18–19; Sessa, “Domus Ecclesiae,” 98. For Rome, see L. Duchesne, Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution. A Study of the Latin Liturgy up to the Time of Charlemagne, (London: S.P.C.K., 1912), 404. Repsher, The Rite of Church Dedication, 21 claims (although the evidence is not entirely clear) that in the late sixth century, there were two Roman rites for dedicating a church: one which required only a mass, and one which also required relics. 123 Gregory Ep. 6.43 (CCL 140:415–6). 124 Vigilius, Ep. 1 (PL 69:18). This letter survives only in a heavily interpolated form. 125 Even the rituals used to convert pagan shrines (fana idolorum) in into Christian churches was similar. Any idols housed in the shrines were to be destroyed, but the shrines themselves were transformed into churches with a simple aspersion of holy water and presumably, the celebration of Mass by a bishop. In this case, Gregory adds that altars containing relics (reliquiae) should also be placed in these buildings. Gregory, Ep. 11.56 (CSL 140a:961– 2).

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spaces and by doing so, rallying Rome’s Christians, reaffirming their sense of a common identity and solidarity in the face of the Lombard threat (real and imagined).

Samuel Cohen is an Assistant Professor of History at Sonoma State University.

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