booklet of abstracts - Oxford University Byzantine Society

Session Eight11:30 | Saturday 5 March 2011 | Rees Davies RoomChairCaterina Franchiexeter CollegeThe Politics of Memory andVisual Politics: Comparingthe Self-representation ofConstantine and AugustusMariana BodnarukCentral European University, BudapestExamining the imperial politics of memoryhelps elucidate the social, cultural and politicalchanges which occurred in the Roman world inLate Antiquity. The crisis of the third centuryAD accelerated processes of transformation thathad begun in the late Roman period, particularlyin the urban spaces of Rome. Especially inthe early fourth century, the conversion of theemperor Constantine to Christianity, as well asthe structural transformations of the Romanempire, which are revealed through an analysisof the politics of memory together withvisual politics, forced Roman society to cometo terms with the religious and political consequencesof the newly-Christian empire. TheEusebian model of emperor, state, and churchwhich emerged from the fourth century eventuallywon out and, though it was questionedin Late Antiquity, became the basic politicalmodel for Byzantium.This paper will focus on the followingquestion: What were the similaritiesand differences between Constantine’s andAugustus’ modes of self-representation?Structural analogies between Augustan andConstantinian exploitation of visual language,as well as Constantine’s own appropriationof a pre-existing imperial visual repertoirefor self-representation, explicate the waysin which emperors engaged in a politics ofmemory to relate to the past. Did Constantinerelate to the imperial past, the Tetrarchy inparticular, as Augustus did to the Republicanpast? Thus, a fundamental formulation follows:the study of the imperial politics ofmemory helps explain the massive changesto the Roman empire in Late Antiquity. Thispaper will specify necessary limits on this critiqueof political ideology.Mariana Bodnaruk is an MA studentspecialising in late antique, Byzantine, andEarly Ottoman Studies in the Medieval StudiesDepartment, Central European University.Her research interests cover Late Antiquity,early Byzantium and cultural and memorystudies. Her previous topics of focus wereissues of memory and forgetting, particularlymemory in imperial culture, which led her tothe broader field of late antique and Byzantinecultural and art history.Cities of God: Space and Memoryin Victor of Vita’s History of theVandal PersecutionLuke GardinerCorpus Christi College, CambridgeBeyond the Vandals’ conquest of Carthage,their progressive co-option of manyRomano- Africans profoundly shook theconfidence of certain leading Catholic clerics.This paper will show how one cleric,Victor of Vita, contested factors he perceivedas crucial to this co-option (and thewider project of the legitimation of Vandalrule), from Vandal appropriation of thesecular and religious loci, landscapes, andideology on which much North African(and) Catholic identity was predicated, to22 | Between Constantines