The Idea of Rome in Late Antiquity Ioannis Papadopoulos Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of History December 2018 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Ioannis Papadopoulos to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2018 The University of Leeds and Ioannis Papadopoulos 3 4 I N M E M O R I A M This Thesis is dedicated to the loving memory of my grandfather Constantine Nicolaou (1920-2011) and of my father Chris Papadopoulos (1953-2017) who departed too early to see this work complete, marking the beginning and the end of this research. ‘‘Ἀθάνατος ψυχὴ κοὐ χρῆμα σόν, ἀλλὰ προνοίας, ἣ μετὰ σῶμα μαρανθέν, ἅτ’ ἐκ δεσμῶν θοὸς ἵππος, ῥηιδίως προθοροῦσα κεράννυται ἠέρι κούφῳ δεινὴν καὶ πολύτλητον ἀποστέρξασα λατρείην· σοι δὲ τι τῶνδ’ ὄφελος, ὅ ποτ’ οὐκετ’ ἐὼν τότε δόξεις; ἢ τι μετὰ ζῳοῖσιν ἐὼν περὶ τῶνδε ματεύεις;’’ Philostratus, Τὰ ἐς τὸν Τυανέα Ἀπολλώνιον, IX, 31 5 Abstract The aim of this research is to approach and analyse the manifestation and evolution of the idea of Rome as an expression of Roman patriotism and as an (urban) archetype of utopia in late Roman thought in a period extending from AD 357 to 417. Within this period of about a human lifetime, the concept of Rome and Romanitas was reshaped and used for various ideological causes. This research is unfolding through a selection of sources that represent the patterns and diversity of this ideological process. The theme of Rome as a personified and anthropomorphic figure and as an epitomized notion ‘applied’ on the urban landscape of the city would become part of the identity of the Romans of Rome highlighting a sense of cultural uniqueness in comparison to the inhabitants of other cities. Towards the end of the chronological limits set in this thesis various versions of Romanitas would emerge indicating new physical and spiritual potentials. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN A PHYSICAL AND AN IMAGINARY CITY 8 i. Deconstructing an idea 8 ii. Rome: The global capital on the mental map of the Empire 13 iii. Defining Romanitas 19 iv. Planet Augustus 22 v. Rome personified: The Dea Roma figure as an ideogram in late Roman literature 29 vi. A Rome too much: The uncomfortable relationship between Rome and Constantinople in the fourth century AD 34 vii. Conceptualization and contextualization of terms 44 viii. Methodological approaches, selection of sources, limitations and current status of research on the topic 59 I. THE ADVENTUS OF CONSTANTIUS 65 II. BETWEEN ROME AND ATHENS: THE ARTIFICIAL ROMANITAS OF JULIAN 87 III. BETWEEN THE ALTAR AND THE COURT: ROMANITAS IN THE WORLD OF SYMMACHUS 110 IV. CLAUDIAN'S ORNAMENTA PATRIAE 138 V. BETWEEN CHRIST AND A ROMAN PLACE: THE EMERGENCE OF CHRISTIAN ROME IN TIME AND SPACE 161 VI. BETWEEN JERUSALEM AND BABYLON: THE ARCHETYPE OF ROME IN THE CITY OF GOD 189 VII. TOWARDS A RESTORED WORLD: ORDO RENASCENDI 213 7 CONCLUSION: FROM ROME TO ETERNITY 225 Table 1 232 Table 2 233 Appendix of inscriptions 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY 236 8 Introduction: Between a Physical and an Imaginary City i) Rome: Deconstructing an Idea In our days there has been a rising interest and multiple publications regarding the role of cities as habitats, theater of events and ideological workshops, hosts of forces of change in contemporary history and survivors against all odds in a post-industrial world, that often exceed the norms of the established field of Urban Studies.1 Various works such as P. Virilio’s City of Panic (2007), the World City by D. Masses (2007) and S. Graham’s Cities under Siege (2011) are just samples of a constantly expanding bibliography on the subject.2 In pre-modern Europe the cities also played a crucial role in reflecting and epitomizing human culture and ideas. The Sovereign-City in the form of city-state, head of confederate league or imperial capital has been dominating the Mediterranean landscapes for millennia.3 In a sense, the old Brownian maxim which describes Greco-Roman civilization as ‘a world of cities’ maybe sounds generalizing but is not entirely wrong in summarizing their function as the core of classical culture and institutions.4 Within the frame of this complicated relationship between the cities and their inhabitants, a bond of dependence that has been studied and celebrated for so long in social sciences and literature from G. Simmel’s Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (1903), L. Mumford’s The City in History (1961) to I. Calvino’s Città Invisibili (1972), P. Manent’s Les Métamorphoses de la cité (2010) and T. Fuhrer’s, F. Mundt and J. Stenger’s (eds.) Cityscaping (2015) one must consider how ideas represent cities and vice versa, interconnecting, interrelating and finally contributing to the 1 See R. Paddison, "Studying Cities", R. Paddison (ed.) Handbook of Urban Studies (London: SAGE, 2001), pp. 1- 10. Also L. Hunt, T. R. Martin, B. H. Rosenwein, R. P. Hsia, B. G. Smith, The Challenge of the West (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1995), pp. 752-754. 2 See P. Virilio, City of Panic (Oxford: Berg, 2007), D. Masses, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), S. Graham, Cities under Siege: The New military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2011). 3 See G. Parker, The Sovereign City: The City-State through History (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), pp. 7-27, 57-77. Also M. Hammond, City-state and World State in Greek and Roman political theory until Augustus (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1951) and R. S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe (London: Phoenix, 1966), pp. 14-15. 4 See P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 11-13. Also P. Grimal, The Civilization of Rome (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963), p. 252. 9 shaping of new mentalities by adapting and adjusting to changing physical and spiritual needs.5 From that point of view, the city of Rome during late antiquity appeared to have a unique cultural and ideological importance regarding the abstract and complex relationship which was developed between the urban landscape, its inhabitants and their identity and feelings as Romans of Rome. The eternal city was embodying and reflecting different ideas to various audiences yet the symbolism and cultural burden of Rome as patria communis was omnipresent in late Roman thought. This tension was rapidly evolving and becoming constantly more complex as we move towards late antiquity. We will observe how Rome as archetype of the ideal/utopian city by the fourth century AD would be difficult to be distinguished from the concept of Romanitas since by then both were evolving side by side to follow each other to new ideological pathways. Approaching the subject of this thesis one must consider the idea of Rome and its context in general before focusing on its evolution in late antiquity thought and for that purpose we need to analyze what Romanitas came to mean before the fourth century AD. By the beginning of the 350s which is the terminus postquem of the period covered in this work, Romanitas was already a multidimensional and ambiguous concept, open to multiple interpretations and at least for the Romans of the eternal city bound to its symbolic geography. Therefore we first need to clarify the context that we give in that term when it appears in the pages of this thesis. Right from the start we ought to address that the manifestation of this dual concept was rather invisible to the eyes of the ordinary Roman. On the contrary it appears as an intellectual process with all its debates and potentials destined for the selected few, limited audiences and most of time even among them was nothing more but a literary topos. Despite its limited scale in quantity however, it developed qualities that contributed to some extent to what Rome came to mean as the cradle of the Empire in 5 See G. Simmel, ‘Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung’, T. Peterman (ed.) Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiƒtung Dresden, vol. 9 (Dresden, 1903), p. 185-206. L. Mumford, The City in History: Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1961), I. Calvino, Le Città Invisibili (Turin: Einaudi, 1972). P. Manent, Les Métamorphoses de la cité: Essai sur la dynamique de l’ Occident (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), T. Fuhrer, F. Mundt, J. Stenger (eds.) Cityscaping: Constructing and Modeling Images of the City (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015). 10 the ages to come, something of course not monolithic and always open to multiple interpretations according to the needs and standards of certain circumstances. The evolution of Romanitas as well as Rome as its urban archetype is something far bigger than the inevitable chronological limits of this thesis (both backwards and forwards) but the study of the manifestation of those ideas over the period covered here is a snapshot of this process in a very crucial period, a momentum of change and of potentials when it seemed that each possible orientation was plausible; a time when Roman society was on the crossroads of a quest for new self-perceptions and all the ideological paths were still laying open. During the early imperial period, Rome had, by definition, the symbolic primacy over the empire it had created.