Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

conclusion 977
Sasanian Persia, and that impressive mosaic floors with mythological or
classicizing themes were being laid across the empire, from Spain in the
west to Cyprus, Antioch and Apamea in Syria, and in many places in
Palestine and modern Jordan. We now know that some Christian communities
in the eastern provinces were building large new churches and laying
elaborate mosaic floors even long after the establishment of Umayyad
rule. 16
It is possible to see in recent scholarship evidence of a breaking down
of barriers between traditionally distinct disciplines and their perceived
bodies of evidence. Historians of institutions are more ready to admit the
relevance of the visual, to realize the power of rhetoric or to draw on literary
texts and documents from unexpected sources; religious history is no
longer necessarily treated as separate from other sorts of history. This
trend indeed seems to reflect the juxtapositions in late antiquity itself, a
matter not just of literary or artistic style but of the possibilities offered to
and seized by individual people. Thus a rich woman might pretend that she
was a beggar and dress in rags; one of the wealthiest couples in the Roman
world enrolled on the register of the poor at Jerusalem; a professor from
Bordeaux might become praetorian prefect; a former teacher of rhetoric
devoted his attention to the art of communicating to the uneducated.
Christianization in particular turned things upside down. Surprising juxtapositions
give the period life and vigour: a man of senatorial rank hiding
away in the desert; an obscure Cretan who became consul; a holy man in a
loincloth who thought it clever to humiliate a religious woman by asking
her to remove all her clothes in public. Rioting over religious issues coexisted
in late-fourth-century Rome with the traditional life of the Roman
senate, while in contrast at Constantinople the court in the early fifth
century could be described as being like a nunnery. Men and women were
segregated, as at the funeral of Macrina, yet could become lifelong friends,
like Jerome and the loyal Paula, of whom Palladius quotes Posidonius as
remarking that, if she were to die first, at least she would be spared Jerome’s
bad temper. 17
It is deceptively easy in the face of such abundant evidence to think of
the period as characterized above all by the progress of Christianization.
Yet the life and vigour of late antique paganism – or, as some historians
prefer, polytheism – is one of the striking discoveries of recent scholarship.
The great oracular shrines which Eusebius tried so hard to pretend were
dead and silent still attracted visitors in the fourth century. The emperor
Julian may have been the only pagan emperor after Constantine (and was
vilified by the church for it), but the Neoplatonist Academy at Athens
entered one of its most brilliant phases in the fifth and early sixth century,
16 Piccirillo (1993). 17 Pall. Hist. Laus. 36.
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