This volume brings together studies from diverse academic disciplines around a central, unifying question: how was the future of Rome, both near and distant in time, imagined by different populations living under the Roman Empire? The volume originates in a conference in Tel Aviv (2013), titled “The Future of Rome: Roman, Greek, Jewish and Christian Perspectives.” Scholars of Greek and Roman history and literature, Jewish history and thought, and early Christian history and thought, were asked the question about the future of Rome in relation to the people and texts they study; thus it was refracted through contemporary but disparate (and not perforce mutually informative or interactive) literary and religious traditions. One of the remarkable results of the conference was the realization that practically no one living under Rome’s rule, including the Romans themselves, did not think about the question in one form or another.

Romans, like ourselves, had many ways of imagining the future. They had premonitions and dreams, and sought foreknowledge from prophets, oracles and astrologers, and they tried to constrain the future with plans, precautions and restrictions. And like us too, they expressed many of their ideas about the future implicitly in habits and routines. In this chapter I aim to explore some ways in which ritual practice reveals Roman attitudes to the future, taking as its starting point the epigraphic records set up by the priestly college of the Arval Brothers during the first centuries CE.

R. Nachman opened [his homily, with the verse]: “therefore fear not, O Jacob my servant, says the Lord, neither be dismayed, O Israel; for I will save you from afar, and your seed from the land of their captivity. And Jacob shall again be quiet and at ease, and none shall make him afraid” (Jer. 30:10). This speaks of Jacob himself, [for it is written:] “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Gen. 28:12). R. Samuel b. Nachman said: do you think that these were angels? These were not angels, but rather the princes of the nations.

Reflections on empires among ancient writers can take different directions. Some focus on the succession of specific empires and speculate about the number of empires destined to rule the world, as does the author of the Book of Daniel, for example.1 Such writers are in various ways concerned with history and how it continues from the past, through the present, and into the future. In some cases, this leads them to speculate about the end of time.2 Other authors are interested in comparing the empires of the past to the one(s) of their own day. In the Roman period, for example, many orators praise the Romans for establishing an empire that has surpassed all others. This type of comparison is not restricted to orations and can be found in various literary genres. Finally, there are writers who are prone to more philosophical reflections on empires and what causes their rise or decline, their intrinsic instability, or the political factors that help certain ones endure.

This chapter measures the varied levels of hierarchy, as they developed over time, focused on South Etruria. These trends show an increase and then fluctuations in centralisation.A broader comparison is made with North Etruria and Umbria where quantification of these trends is more difficult to assess. The chapter ends with a more qualitative analysis of the levels of hierarchy more typically represented by South Etruria, covering primate centres, marginal centres, coastal emporia, internal emporium, politically dependent tertiary centres, boundary temples, villages, rural settlement

Most Christians in Late Antiquity understood imperially sanctioned violence against the earliest Christians as the unjustified persecution of martyrs by an empire that was at odds with God.1 Nevertheless, Christians in positions of power after the rise of the Emperor Constantine (306–37) often explained imperially sanctioned violence against their religious opponents as the justified suppression of heresy, a narrative that complicated the position of Christians who rejected imperial orthodoxy, such as those who denounced the legitimacy of the Council of Chalcedon after 451.

Late Antiquity, it has long been assumed, is the historical period in which we first observe the widespread rise of religious intolerance.1 Hand in hand with this view goes the premise that there is a direct causal relationship between religious intolerance and religious violence. That is, intolerance leads to conflict; conflict leads to violence.2 Late Antiquity, in which Constantine’s conversion to Christianity is viewed as a watershed moment,3 is thus the period to which scholars look to observe religious violence and its origins.4 In the past decade and a half there has been a move to unpack these entrenched ideas, with a growing number of scholars concluding that these assumed relationships – between the rise of Christianity and religious intolerance, and between religious intolerance and religious violence – are neither inevitable nor simple.

This chapter explores the role of violent pedagogic practices in the formation of elite males in the later Roman Empire. It draws on the work of the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein to inform an analysis of education’s key role in social and cultural reproduction. Focusing on selected writings of two late-fourth century contemporaries, Libanius and Basil of Caesarea, the chapter suggests that violence of various sorts played a pivotal role in the formation of elite male subjects, whether in the school of the teacher of rhetoric (Libanius) or in monastic training (Basil). Violence played a pivotal role in both the form and content of late Roman education – as well as suffering and inflicting violence on others, students read about and performed violent narratives. The considered cultivation of feelings of fear was viewed as maintaining the pedagogic order and helping to form ideal masculine subjects. Through such experiences and by reflecting on them in pedagogic contexts, students learnt to understand the parameters of legitimate and illegitimate violence, enabling them to protect themselves and their community in a competitive social context.

This chapter examines narrative representations of slavery in early monasticism. It then reads these accounts in light of extant material remains and in conversation with prescriptive regulatory precepts. Such contextualisation necessarily situates emergent communities within a late-Roman world where ‘attitudes of slaveholders [remained] constant’ and the ‘conditions in which slaves lived and worked persisted from generation to generation’ (Glancy). As the cracks and fissures routinely glossed over in more seamless depictions underscore the degree to which monastic ideals and ideologies, institutional and relational norms, remain inextricably intertwined with wider Greco-Roman practice, the chapter posits that emergent monastic mores may be best understood as at once dismantling and reinscribing the structural hierarchies of slavery. Against this landscape, where the jagged edges of lived experience remain patent, the chapter simultaneously premises reconceptualisations that effectively disrupt both static idealisation and wholesale denigration. Through engaging reading strategies that resist the limitations implicit to binaried definitions of practice, its aim is to breathe life into the larger than life.

This chapter asks what light the well-known but little understood story of Augustine’s relationship to the mother of his first child can shed on our understanding of marriage as an asymmetrical institution in the Roman period. Reviewing the evidence that both pagans and Christians in late antiquity expected a ‘double standard’ for men and women where marital fidelity was concerned, we suggest that Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage argued for a new marriage ethics based on sexual symmetry, capturing a new spirit of criticism for the double standard in fourth-century preaching, and that Augustine invoked his own experiences (as recounted in the Confessions) in order to drive home his argument.

The studies in Part III explore how the Christian preachers and writers of late antiquity used a wide range of pedagogical and literary techniques to evoke empathetic responses in their audiences. Deployed effectively, such techniques could prove pivotal in cultivating both empathy and an imaginative apparatus for thinking about the relationship between individuals and the community to which they belonged, at the same time establishing the authority of the teacher within their particular small worlds, from classroom to monastery and beyond. Yet, making a success of this intermediary position was not easy and, as we shall see, such victories were often hard won in the face of interference from superiors, competition from peers, and the recalcitrance of audiences.