Sidonius greets his dear Explicius

• 1. Since your justice has rightly become admirable to all through multiple experiences of your righteous behaviour, I therefore gladly and eagerly send any individual persons to your arbitration, when they demand this urgently themselves. I ask that as soon as possible you release me from the examination of their case and them from that of their enmity. And it will happen in this way, if as a modest censor you do not completely deny both parties’ complaints; though also the very fact that you do not want to offer your help easily for the disputants is a sign of your good judgement. After all, who would not seek to be elected arbitrator if he was willing to be compliant in exchange for money or other gratitude?

• 2. Therefore forgive those who are running hastily to the privilege of your sacred conscience, since neither do losers lament your verdict as if they have been foolish, nor do victors smile as if they have been clever. Because they respect truthfulness, the convicted have reverence for you and the exonerated express their gratitude. That is why I beg you urgently to settle the dispute coming to judgement between Alethius and Paulus, as soon as both plead their cases. I think I am right to believe that the moderation of your character will heal the sickness of this virtually interminable dispute better than the decisions of the decemviri and pontiffs, thanks to the habitual good sense of your judgement. Goodbye.

Introduction

Summary

Sidonius writes to Serranus that Marcellinus has shown him Serranus’ letter about the emperor, Petronius Maximus. Sidonius criticises Serranus’ very positive portrayal of Petronius Maximus and doubts that he was happy. In a comparison with the Roman general Sulla, who also claimed for himself the epithet felix, Sidonius shows that the greatest power does not mean the greatest happiness. In sections 3–5 Sidonius reviews the career of Petronius Maximus, which came to an ominous end. In sections 6–8 Sidonius analyses the lives of great men in power using the historical example of Damocles, who lived at the court of Dionysius I, a ruler of Syracuse in the fourth century bc. Being an obsequious courtier, Damocles praised his ruler as the happiest man on earth. To show him the negative aspects of power, Dionysius forced his admirer to enjoy a luxurious meal while a sword was hanging above his head, held up only by a horsehair. Damocles, paralysed by fear, was unable to enjoy the luxury and greatly relieved to be released back into his ordinary life.

Addressee

The addressee, Serranus, is otherwise unknown; PLRE 2, 996, PCBE 4, 1736, Kaufmann (1995) 347–8, Mathisen (2020a) 121.

Date

The terminus post quem for Ep. 2.13 is the death of the emperor Majorian in 461; see the commentary on Ep. 2.13.3 Hic si omittamus…. On the general difficulty of dating Sidonius’ letters, see the Introduction, ‘2. The date and order of letters in Book 2’.

Major themes and further reading

Structure

In the penultimate letter of his book on otium, Sidonius deals with the dangers of negotium. The letter, which Edward Gibbon praised for its elegant composition (van Waarden 2020c, 699), is a warning against the vicissitudes of politics and thus refers back to the closing letter of Book 1, Ep. 1.11, which shows Sidonius in the role of a politician. Ep. 2.13 belongs to the genre of reporting letters, since Sidonius gives a detailed account of the downfall of Petronius Maximus; Cain (2009) 212. Fernández López (1994) 170–7 treats Ep. 2.13 under ‘suasoria y controversia’. Through the theme of human happiness treated here there is also a connection to Ep. 2.3, which is dedicated to Felix; see the introduction to Ep. 2.3. Together with Ep. 2.2, 2.9 and 2.10, Ep. 2.13 is one of the longer letters of the second book.

This is not a book about Pontius Pilate. Not exactly.

The Roman figure who served as prefect of the province of Judaea from roughly 27 to 37 AD is known from numerous ancient works, and while his particular involvement with the Passion narrative is carefully observed, other details about his life remain shrouded in obscurity. The quest for the historical Pilate, like the quest for the historical Jesus, can be a frustrating experience. Although he played only a minor part in it, the story of the Passion occupies so central a role in the theology and history of Christianity that the figure of Pilate has come to take on a significance far exceeding his accomplishments. As the only mortal besides the Virgin Mary to be mentioned in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the prefect’s name has, since the fourth century AD, been uttered aloud more frequently than virtually any other from the Roman world, perhaps more often even than Julius or Augustus Caesar. Four of the earliest sources are located, of course, in the New Testament. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John offer a fairly, although not perfectly, consistent depiction of Pilate’s interactions with Jesus and the Jewish priests. Earlier still, Pilate had been a subject in the works of Flavius Josephus (Yosef ben Matityahu), the Romano-Jewish historian of the first century AD. In both his Jewish Antiquities and Jewish War, he discusses the administration of Judaea under Pontius Pilate. It is from Josephus, for instance, that we learn about the civil unrest provoked by Pilate’s introduction of Roman standards into Jerusalem and his use of Temple funds to construct an aqueduct – the latter the focus of much cinematic speculation (and the answer to the question asked in Monty Python’s Life of Brian by John Cleese’s Reg: ‘What have Romans ever done for us?’). The earliest work to deal with the prefect is On the Embassy to Gaius by the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who also recounted unrest over Pilate’s activities as prefect and referred to him as ‘a man of inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition’ (chapter 38).

Modern scholarship has devoted a great deal of attention to the research of collective identity and political ideology in the so-called Byzantine Empire. In the context of the revived scholarly dialogue on these topics in roughly the last two decades, a workshop that was organised at the University of Vienna in 2015 aimed to approach ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’ in the Byzantine world through a broader perspective. Our intention was to redirect the focus of the discussion on various kinds of identifications, the forms they took and the means through which they were articulated, as well as on the content and social function of various sets of ideas and beliefs in the medieval East Roman geopolitical sphere between roughly the sixth and fifteenth centuries. The current volume is the product of that discussion, which was enriched with additional contributions on the way. It represents what we believe to be the first effort to address a wide range of different aspects of the ways in which various groups or individuals in the geopolitical sphere of the medieval East Roman Empire perceived themselves and one another, as well as the world they lived in.

Our main goal was to broaden our knowledge about the nature of the different types of sources that throw light on ‘identities’, about how these ‘identities’ were ascribed and attributed or adopted and about the understandings and misunderstandings that different modes of identifying oneself, one's kith and kin and those outside these circles generated, while unravelling the potential interrelation between identification practices and various sets of ideas and beliefs. Moreover, we wanted to address the ways in which modern researchers have attempted to describe these phenomena and make sense of them and the dynamics of ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’ in a past culture. With respect to that, this introductory chapter will touch upon the central concepts of the discussion, namely ‘identity’ and ‘ideology’, whose content may vary according to author and whose analytical usefulness is still a focus for disagreement. By offering some insight into the definitional background and the various uses of these terms, we hope to provide readers with a conceptual framework that will allow them to better assess the individual contributions to the present volume.

The Athenian Reconciliation of 403 bce is one of the most complex and disputed episodes from Greek history. Contracted following a desultory civil war, when Athens had been split between supporters of democracy and oligarchy, the purpose of the Reconciliation Agreement was to rebuild the city and reunite the citizenry. To accomplish that end, legal measures needed to be put in place to guarantee peace. But how far it was effective, and what precisely it sought to achieve, are matters upon which modern scholarship remains sharply divided. Much of the difficulty lies in the source material, often contradictory and unreliable. Scholarship moreover has reached no consensus as to what democracy in ancient Athens was or why the legislators of 403 decided to revive democracy, when other forms of government were available. Besides reconciling the citizens, the commissioners of 403 redevised the democratic constitution. As the evidence for the Athenian Reconciliation Agreement of 403 is scattered, there is never going to be agreement over every one of its details. One of the chief objectives of this study is to show that the period of recovery from the brutal and divisive civil war which followed Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War (431–404) was expertly overseen and managed, resulting in a community which was coherent, workable, lawful and democratic. The revival of democracy in 403 was possible only because Athenians were willing to bury the past. This entailed more than a moral commitment: the pledge ‘not to revisit past grievance’, in Greek μὴ μνησικακεῖν, was a legal commitment not to prosecute in court crimes committed before 12 Boedromion 403, the date of the treaty to which both sides swore. Though a superficial reading of the orators might give rise to the impression that the Oath of Reconciliation was not adhered to in earnest, a more careful analysis will show that its terms were carefully laid out and strictly applied thereafter. Athens reconciled in 403, and the spectre of civil war which could have resurfaced in the years that followed never reared its head again until the Macedonian involvement towards the end of the fourth century when, in the wake of the Lamian War, Athens experienced revolutions and stasis owing to foreign intervention.

In the week prior to the March 1979 devolution referendum, the novelist William McIlvanney, a convinced supporter of a devolved assembly, offered a gloomy prediction of the likely outcome of the poll. Sensing a prevailing mood of ‘indifference’ and ‘virile apathy’ among the Scottish electorate, McIlvanney wondered whether this attitude of ‘hesitancy’ towards the constitutional question masked a deeper crisis of confidence, whether Scots were, in fact, too ‘feart’ to vote for devolution. McIlvanney concluded by confessing his own ‘wee fear’: ’what’, he speculated, ‘if we get a bare majority in favour of the assembly but fall well short of the 40% limit’? He accepted that such a result, which he likened to a ‘hung jury’, might ‘be a peculiarly Scottish response’; it was, all the same, one he hoped would be avoided. Of course, as we have seen in the previous chapter, McIlvanney’s forecast of the dread scenario of an inconclusive outcome came to pass, and the Labour government’s devolution proposals collapsed. Vindicated by subsequent events, McIlvanney’s evocation of the atmosphere surrounding the devolution referendum has been of lasting influence, not least because of the cartoon that accompanied it, drawn by James Turnbull and frequently referenced thereafter, which depicted a timid, thumb sucking, indecisive Scottish lion, chained to a ball marked ‘apathy’ and announcing bluntly ‘I’m feart’. The 1979 devolution referendum, and the ambiguous verdict it produced, has, as a consequence, come to symbolise the uncertainty and doubts of a Scottish public yet to be fully convinced that constitutional reform was worth the associated risks. It would, in this reading, require the experience of the lengthy period of Conservative government that followed the 1979 general election, and the unpopular economic policies imposed during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, to convince a decisive majority of Scottish voters of the merits of devolution. By early 1994, it was possible for John Smith, by then the leader of the Labour Party but a veteran of the constitutional debates of the 1970s, to describe devolution as ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. Smith’s assessment was seemingly confirmed by the overwhelming support recorded in a referendum for the devolved Scottish Parliament legislated for by Labour after the party’s return to office in 1997.

The 1997 referendum certainly revealed the extent to which devolution enjoyed a broader base of support across Scotland than had been the case in the 1970s.

How the Byzantines conceived of taxation, confiscation and the administration of public resources reflects the way they imagined the constitution of their polity and, in particular, the positions of the emperor and the people within it. In less abstract terms, these ideas also help explain imperial choices that shaped the society and the economy. The question of the emperor's relation to public wealth has usually been treated in the context of examining the ruler's position within the polity, notably by Hans-Georg Beck, Paul Magdalino and Anthony Kaldellis. This scholarship and the present chapter show that there existed among the Byzantines, including the emperor and his panegyrists, a consensus that the public resources, ta dēmosia or ta koina, while under the ruler's control, were not his property but, as their name indicated, that of all the people. The emperor was expected to administrate this wealth in the interests of the commonwealth (to koinon). Numerous texts can be invoked in support of this schema. One of the clearest statements is provided by a definition of the term basileia in the tenth-century Souda lexicon:

Although this definition reproduces notions from earlier periods, its inclusion in the Souda lexicon demonstrates that an interest in these ideas existed in the Middle Ages and suggests they were widely accepted. These shared concepts authorised all people to have an opinion regarding the management of the dēmosia and to criticise the emperor's fiscal policies. Indeed, there are a great number of statements regarding these matters in texts from the centuries discussed here, in particular historical works, speeches for the emperor, laws and official documents, and private letters. Using this material, this chapter attempts to identify the principal Byzantine ideas concerning taxation, confiscation and the use of public resources, topics that, overall, remain little studied.

In our postmodern world of deconstructed texts and textually absorbed contexts, the search for ‘text-based ideals and authorial identities’ has led to essentially two types of approaches to medieval textual products. On the one hand, texts are scrutinised as to the ideologies expressing an overarching worldview of a ruling class, while, on the other, texts are examined as to their intratextual strategies of authorial representation. My aim here is to examine the class ideology and social-ethnic identity of John Tzetzes (c. 1110–70), a well-known teacher of the Komnenian era, who was also a prolific and versatile writer. The case of Tzetzes is interesting for the purposes of the present volume, because he did not aestheticise himself as the object of his discourse in the manner that Michael Psellos did one century earlier, nor did he draw a clearly delineated high-style authorial portrait of himself, as his contemporary Eustathios of Thessaloniki had done. On the contrary, Tzetzes virulently attacked the capital's ‘ethereal rhetors’ (ῥήτορες αἰθέριοι, Hist. 9.659) for creating a false image of themselves by pretending to be learned and educated, while in reality they were ‘thievish, temple-robbing clerics’ (παπάδων … κλεπτῶν ἱεροσύλων, Hist. 9.658). At the same time, Tzetzes presented himself as something else. But what was this ‘something else’ that he projected in many of his writings? It has often been described as his cantankerous and quarrelsome personality, his pedantic approach to the classics, or, more recently, his ‘Roman’ national identity.

The chapter will take as its starting point Tzetzes’ letter collection in order to examine three broader areas of ideology and identity: (1) the approach of Tzetzes to the middle and lower strata of society, partly in relation to his own education and linguistic skills; (2) his understanding of social and ethnic identity in terms of his family lineage and professional lineage; (3) his use of vulgar humour and vituperation as a means of projecting a ‘conservative’ ideology.

It is well known that Byzantinists, when addressing a broader audience, often feel obliged to clarify that there never was a Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was the ancient name of the city of Constantinople before its refoundation by Constantine I, and it was only occasionally used by classicising Byzantine authors to refer to the imperial city. The terms mainly used by the people of the time to designate the medieval empire were Rhōmaiōn archē, Rhōmaiōn basileia, Rhōmaiōn politeia, Rhōmania and Rhōmaïs. This discrepancy between modern and historical terms and labels is in itself not a unique phenomenon confined to the Byzantine Empire. The problem in the Byzantine case, though, is related to the ideological connotations of relabelling and their interrelation with an established negative modern image of Byzantine culture.

Scholars have often raised this issue and sought to deconstruct Byzantium's negative image. Averil Cameron was among the first to point to Byzantium's essentialised identity and its orientalised image as in opposition to the ‘West’. Dimiter Angelov has provided a vigorous deconstruction of the notion of ‘Byzantinism’ as ‘an essentialist and negative understanding of a medieval civilisation that places it into rigorous analytical categories from a Western and modern view-point’. He argued that this essentialised, negative image of Byzantine culture needs to be deconstructed by examining its structures and usages while studying the Empire of Constantinople in its proper historical context without idealising it. In a similar vein, Przemysław Marciniak has recently pointed out the close relationship of ‘Byzantinism’ with Said's Orientalism, a relationship which Olof Heilo has addressed sceptically. While accepting the orientalising aspects of the image of Byzantium in the works of scholars of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, Montesquieu and Gibbon, Heilo argued that, contrary to the term ‘Oriental’, the term ‘Byzantine’ should be seen as having foremost a chronological instead of a spatial-cultural dimension, thus not presupposing or, for that matter, tacitly imposing a certain historical-cultural prejudice.

In the current chapter, I shall revisit the question of kinship between the concept of Orientalism and that of ‘Byzantinism’, which I define here as a historiographical discourse of negation.

In October 1967 John Mackintosh, the Labour MP for Berwick and East Lothian and a Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, reflected on the rise in popular support for the SNP that had taken place since the start of the decade. Published in the Political Quarterly, Mackintosh’s assessment arrived a month before the SNP’s landmark electoral victory at the Hamilton by-election, when Winnie Ewing famously overturned what had been the largest Labour majority in Scotland. If Ewing’s triumph has come to be remembered as a seminal moment in post-war Scottish politics, one which signalled the onset of a new period in which the constitutional question would become increasingly unavoidable, Mackintosh’s prescient consideration of the SNP’s appeal offers a reminder that contemporaries were becoming conscious of the growing political significance of the SNP even before Hamilton. Certainly, by the mid-1960s it was evident that the SNP could run credible, if not yet successful, by-election campaigns. Further, as party membership rose, from around 2,000 in 1962 to perhaps 42,000 by late 1966, it became financially and logistically feasible for the SNP to contest general elections on a broader basis. At the 1955 general election there were just two SNP candidates; four years later the party was still only able to contest five constituencies. By the time of the 1966 general election, there were SNP candidates in twenty-three seats, and the party received five per cent of the Scottish vote. While not yet a serious political force, by the second half of the 1960s the SNP clearly enjoyed a support that was larger and more secure than it had been at any time since the party’s foundation. That the new, still minor, influence enjoyed by the SNP might have wider political consequences had been apparent since the March 1967 Glasgow Pollok by-election, when the party’s candidate, George Leslie, had polled twenty-eight per cent of the vote, a performance that enabled the Conservatives to record a rare gain from Labour in Scotland.

For Mackintosh, the paradox that required explanation was that the rise in support for the SNP had occurred during a period in which Scotland had, in social and economic terms, become ever more like the rest of Britain.

In the middle of the ninth century, Adreas Agnellus wrote the history of Ravenna's bishops. This is a collection of biographies starting from the mythical Apolinaris and including George, who occupied Ravenna's see in Agnellus’ days. The book is a kaleidoscope of marvellous stories which are, however, often difficult to interpret. Among them, we find the narrative of Ravenna's darkest hour – the Adriatic town's humiliation at the hands of a wicked emperor – and of the final victory of the Ravennates against their tormentors on the Coriander Field. This narrative has gone somewhat unnoticed and, being a story of battle and lay heroism, unlocks a suggestive hidden textual layer which partially escapes the master narrative of Agnellus’ book. The account enables us to grasp a number of aspects regarding the troubled identity of the Ravennates in the decades preceding and following the fall of the exarchate in 751, along with the ideology that supported this identity. These are the years of Constantinople's loss of hegemony in the northern Adriatic and the transformation of Italian Romanness which triggered a profound identity crisis in Ravenna. The narrative is staged in the first years of Emperor Justinian II's second bloody reign (705–11), when the conflict with the emperor escalated, something which made it into one of the most dramatic accounts of the entire Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna.

An Odd Story for a Start

The whole incident has a loose chronology and is contextualised in the biographies of Felix, who was archbishop between 709 and 725, and his successor John, who ruled until 744. In the narrative, a number of citizens of Ravenna joined the imperial soldiers in the dethronement – by the mutilation of ears and nose and in aiding the exile – of an otherwise unknown emperor named Constantine. The incident closely resembles the dethronement of Emperor Justinian II, which occurred in 695 and was known to both the Patriarch Nikephoros and Theophanes the Confessor who wrote at the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century, respectively. Constantine, like Justinian II, was eventually able to regain the empire by viciously retaliating against his persecutors. As the story goes, having punished the inhabitants of Constantinople, the wicked emperor turned his dark thoughts to Ravenna.

Anthony Kaldellis has vigorously revived the debate about Byzantine identity and reproached historians for overusing the term ‘Byzantines’ instead of ‘Romans’. There is no doubt that the Byzantines considered themselves Romans and the heirs to Rome, since, despite all the changes endured by the empire during its thousand-year existence, the devolution of imperial power was never interrupted in the New Rome, with 1204 constituting a particular case. The population of the empire could have formed a community united by a feeling of affiliation to Rhōmania. The author insists on the traits of a premodern nation state, having at its disposal an administration that was effective and covered the whole empire, using the same money, weights and measures and so forth. It is a surprisingly Jacobin conception of the empire, and a very cosmopolitan point of view. Without question, imperial administration made available to the basileis certain means of doing things that we do not find in other Christian states before the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet, if we consider the measures, they sometimes differed, often under the same name, in the different provinces of the empire, and if we consider the law, the importance of local customs is well attested. But one cannot deny the existence of unifying factors, since, from the perspective of their neighbours, in particular the Islamic powers, the group of Rums is well distinguished from the Ifranj (the Latins), who, nevertheless, are also Christians.

In this short chapter, I will not seek to participate in the debate about what Byzantine identity might be – a very fashionable but quite ambitious subject – because the answer to the question of what it was to be Roman was surely not unanimous among the emperor's subjects. This would have depended on whether one was Greek or not, or from Constantinople or the provinces and, in the latter case, on whether one lived in a city or in the countryside. It is certain that the power of the ‘Romans’ extended over a specific territory, Asia Minor and Europe, since the Turks, who occupied Anatolia and settled there, founded the so-called Sultanate of Rum. This quickly turned into ‘Turchia’. Three centuries later, the Ottomans, who had established themselves in the west, named the entirety of the conquered lands ‘Rumelia’.

Regardless of time or place, the monotheisation process has occurred at the frontiers of each monotheistic empire (oikoumene/ummah) and involved top-down indoctrination and the imposition of monotheistic laws, through which norms and identities were later internalised. Understanding religious identity this way, as a base-layer of current national identity rather than a simple milestone in a national history, necessarily challenges the way history is typically understood – not as a national story, but as an ecumenical story, in which it is a given oikoumene, or monotheistic civilisation, that originates present identities, instead of primordial ethnicity. This requires the untying of the Gordian knot of tribalism, ethnicity and nationalism, which have been long conflated. In distinguishing between these perplexing categorisations (ethnicities, empires, civilisations), we will turn towards the dangers of separating the ‘ancient’ from the ‘medieval’, which have long perpetuated lazy assumptions about the tripartite division (ancient, medieval, modern) of history. Without these loaded terms, we can view Pontic-Caspian Eurasia as part of a template binding Western History to Global History.