Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

INTRODUCTORY
between Ambrose and Symmachus over the altar of Victory in the senatehouse.
Roman society and Latin literature surmounted this conflict, and a
viable synthesis of classical and Christian tradition was in the end attained.
But it never had the easy and unstrained character of Christian classicism in
the Greek east. There was no Latin equivalent of Basil's address to the young
on how to read profane literature.
There is another general characteristic of literature and art, and indeed of all
aspects of public life, in late antiquity which is hard to define, but whose reality
is clear enough to all students of the period. Public deportment acquires a
theatrical character, public utterance a tone of declamatory exaggeration. At
the imperial court an elaborate ceremonial serves to isolate an emperor whose
public appearances, carefully stage-managed, have something of the character
of a theophany. Men admired Constantius II on his visit to Rome, recounts a
contemporary historian, because he held himself immobile in his carriage,
his eyes raised to heaven, looking neither to left nor to right. The same emperor
is depicted on a silver dish from Kerch, now in the Hermitage at Leningrad,
seated on his horse, larger than the other human figures, a nimbus round his
head, gazing through the spectator with huge, wide-open eyes. The sculptured
head of Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori at Rome and the colossal
statue of an unknown emperor at Barletta show this same hieratic remoteness
from ordinary people and everyday life. In the missorium of Theodosius, now
in the Academia de la Historia, Madrid, the emperor, nimbate and of superhuman
stature, wearing a jewelled diadem and a large jewelled clasp, stares
into space with the same unnaturally large eyes. Examples could be multiplied
indefinitely. Court officials and provincial governors affected the same style,
no longer walking through the streets but travelling in ornate carriages accompanied
by guards of honour. Modes of address became more complex and
honorific. An emperor spoke of himself as serenitas nostra and addressed a
Prefect of the City as tua celsitudo. Even Symmachus, the champion of ancient
senatorial usage, addresses his friend Ausonius in a letter as unanimitas tua.
Laws, proclamations, and official correspondence of all kinds are couched
in an inflated, circumlocutory, repetitious style with a plethora of abstract
expressions. This is as true of Greek as of Latin, and applies with equal
force to the decrees of an emperor and the letters of a minor tax official in
Egypt. Often the tone of such a document, with its repeated — and vague —
protestations and threats, suggests to the modern reader that the writer
was on the verge of hysteria. Naturally not all literature is equally affected
by this tendency to overstatement. But even those who swim against the
tide are carried with it. Everywhere the restraint and reserve which marked
much of classical culture give way to a more strident and declamatory
tone.
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