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Self, Self-Fashioning, and Individuality in Late Antiquity

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Self, Self-Fashioning, and Individuality in Late Antiquity Culture, Religion, and Politics in the Greco-Roman World Editors Kendra Eshleman (Boston College), Teresa Morgan (University of Oxford), Laura Nasrallah (Yale University), Maren R. Niehoff (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Peter Van Nuffelen (Ghent University) Advisory Board Milette Gaifman (Yale University), Martha Himmelfarb (Princeton University), Hayim Lapin (University of Maryland), Duncan MacRae (University of California, Berkeley), Jörg Rüpke (Universität Erfurt), Lieve Van Hoof (Ghent University) 4 Self, Self-Fashioning, and Individuality in Late Antiquity New Perspectives Edited by Maren R. Niehoff and Joshua Levinson Mohr Siebeck ISBN 978-3-16-158990-4 / eISBN 978-3-16-158991-1 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-158991-1 ISSN 2510-0785 / eISSN 2568-6623 (Culture, Religion, and Politics in the Greco-Roman World) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to repro- ductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by epline in Böblingen using Minion typeface, printed on non-aging paper by Gulde-Druck in Tübingen, and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany. Acknowledgements It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the institutions and people without whom this volume would never have emerged. The essays collected here are the fruits of an international research group on “Contours of the Self in Ancient Mediter- ranean Cultures,” which worked during the academic year of 2017–18 at the Is- rael Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. The essays are largely based on the international conference concluding the year and the Yohanan Levy Lecture Series during the summer semester of 2018, both of which were superbly co- ordinated by Avigail Manekin-Bamberger. Two members of the group, Alfons Fürst and Gretchen Reydams-Schils, generously made available additional funds to support the conference, and thus enabled us to involve more scholars in our discussions than we had originally anticipated. We thus thank the project “The History of Human Freedom and Dignity in Western Civilization,” which oper- ates in the framework of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, and the Notre Dame Workshop on Ancient Philosophy. Moreover, we express our heart- felt thanks to the administrative team of the IIAS and the heads of the Institute, who provided ideal conditions for our cooperative endeavors. Both the outgoing director, Michal Lineal, and the incoming director, Yitzhak Hen, welcomed and supported our group well beyond the call of their duty, including support for the proceedings of the conference. This collection of essays can only be a small token of our gratitude. We also thank the Ministry of Science and Culture in Lower Saxony, Ger- many, which generously supported the copyediting of this volume, in connec- tion with a joint research project with Reinhard Feldmeier on “Journeys in the Roman East.” The copyediting of the volume was an exceptional pleasure: Sara Tropper worked with astonishing speed, returning the papers “even before the dust could settle,” as one of the contributors remarked, and significantly im- proved the style of the essays. The handsome and coherent appearance of this volume is to her credit. Her collaborator, Marc Sherman, checked all the bib- liographical references with utmost precision and prepared the index. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the different articles, who pro- vided detailed and thoughtful reports, thus considerably improving the overall quality of the book. Thanks also to the excellent editorial team of Mohr Siebeck, especially to Jana Trispel, Tobias Stäbler and Susanne Mang, who did much be- yond their duty to produce this volume. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................... V Maren R. Niehoff Fashioning this Volume ............................................ 1 Constructing the Self David Lambert “Desire” Enacted in the Wilderness: Problems in the History of the Self and Bible Translation .............................................. 25 Matthew Roller Selfhood, Exemplarity, and Cicero’s Four Personae: On Constructing Your Self after Your Model and Your Model after Your Self .............. 51 Margaret Graver Interiority and Freedom in Seneca’s De Beneficiis: Acts of Kindness and the Perfected Will ............................................. 71 Gretchen Reydams-Schils How to Become Like God and Remain Oneself ........................ 89 Karen L. King Becoming Fully Human: Contours and Expressions of the Self according to the Gospel of Mary .............................................. 105 Yair Furstenberg Rabbinic Responses to Greco-Roman Ethics of Self-Formation in Tractate Avot ................................................... 125 Charles M. Stang The Doubled Self and the Worship of the Gods ........................ 149 VIII Table of Contents Joshua Levinson The Divided Subject: Representing Modes of Consciousness in Rabbinic Midrash ............................................... 169 Laura Nasrallah The Worshipping Self, the Self in Light ............................... 187 Edward Watts The Senses, the Self, and the Christian Roman Imperial Subject: Hagia Sophia as a Space of Directed Interiority ........................ 213 Self-Fashioning Catharine Edwards The Epistolographic Self: The Role of the Individual in Seneca’s Letters ... 227 Eve-Marie Becker Paul’s Epistolary Self in and around Philippians ....................... 253 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli Autobiographical Self-Fashioning in Origen .......................... 273 Maren R. Niehoff A Hybrid Self: Rabbi Abbahu in Legal Debates in Caesarea ............. 293 Irmgard Männlein-Robert Move Your Self: Mobility and Migration of Greek Intellectuals to Rome ... 331 Reuven Kiperwasser Narrating the Self: Tales of Rabbi Zeira’s Arrival to the Land of Israel ..... 353 Self and Individual in Society Clifford Ando Self, Society, Individual, and Person in Roman Law .................... 375 Jörg Rüpke Urban Selves: Individualization in Roman Cities ....................... 393 Table of Contents IX Sarit Kattan Gribetz Constructions of the Self through Time: Gender, Text, Embodiment, Experience ....................................................... 419 Mira Balberg The Subject Supposed to Forget: Rabbinic Formations of the Legal Self ... 445 Ishay Rosen-Zvi Two Midrashic Selves: Between Origen and the Mekhilta . 471 Alfons Fürst Individuality and Self-Agency: The Self in Origen’s Metaphysics of Freedom ....................................................... 505 Tobias Nicklas Constructing Individual Selves within Social Hierarchies: The Letters of Copres and Synesios .................................. 523 List of Contributors ............................................... 537 Index of Names ................................................... 543 General Index .................................................... 549 Fashioning this Volume Maren R. Niehoff1 The roots of the Western (Christian) Self, with its emphasis on uniqueness and interiority, have fascinated scholars for several generations. Augustine usually plays a key role in narratives sketching a linear development from antiquity to modernity, and points to a clear progression from social forms of living with an outward orientation to the emergence of a robust Self turned inward.2 Given the prevalence of such a focus in modern scholarship, it may come as a surprise that the present volume contains no article on Augustine. This volume gathers the fruits of a conference and a lecture series in memory of Yohanan Levy, which took place in the summer of 2018 at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. Experts in different disciplines convened to discuss constructions of the Self, forms of self-fashioning, and conceptions of individuality in Late Antiq- uity. No teleology is constructed here, no climax envisioned towards which au- thors gravitate (or from which they deviate). Indeed, no claim is made about Late Antiquity as a time when the real individual Self was discovered, and the ground prepared for Medieval and Modern European notions.3 We instead offer horizontal perspectives on constructions of the Self and il- luminate them by comparison to processes of self-fashioning and forms of in- dividuality, highlighting the fluid boundaries between these notions. Committed to a rigorous interdisciplinary approach, we study philosophical, literary, his- torical, and material evidence, arguing that these different aspects should not be set apart, but rather appreciated as complementing each other. The Self, we suggest, is rarely completely isolated and exclusively turned inward, but usually shows some awareness of its environment and social embeddedness. Vice versa, self-fashioning and constructions of individuality often imply a dimension of in- trospection and self-awareness. The enormously complex relationship between 1 Thanks to Teresa Morgan for her extremely helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. 2 See esp. Misch 1907; Brown 1967; Taylor 1989; Stroumsa 1990; Koch 2008; Mar- ion 2012. Fuhrer 2008 offers a fresh literary analysis of the Confessions, taking Augustine’s political concerns into
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