This chapter evaluates the links between the power balance in household relationships and Chrysostom’s preaching on pistis (normally translated as ‘faith’). It argues that, for Chrysostom, pistis is closer to faithful obedience than cognitive belief and analyses how Chrysostom used the expected norms of faithful obedience in household relationships to reinforce congregational faithful obedience to God. The chapter uses this preaching to expose the unequal, reciprocal, and sometimes violent nature of the relationships in the late antique household. It also demonstrates how Chrysostom attempted to regulate the household through reinforcing existing power imbalances in relationships, benefiting the paterfamilias as husband, father, or master. Faithfulness to God and the paterfamilias are intertwined. Wives are exhorted to be faithful to and obey their husbands. Sons are expected to obey their fathers. Slaves are encouraged to be loyal and obedient. Masters are encouraged to treat slaves as if they were their own children – fictive kinship – but in practice this amounted to little change. Chrysostom preached a potentially revolutionary message about faithful obedience to God, but recast it into safe exhortations and a defence of existing societal structures.

Let us now fast forward. On 12 February 2015, Islamic State released a video showing the beheading of twenty Egyptian Coptic Christians and one Ghanaian – all migrant workers – who had been kidnapped in the city of Sirte, in Libya, to ‘avenge the [alleged] kidnapping of Muslim women by the Egyptian Coptic Church’. Less than a week later, on 21 February 2015, Pope Tawadros III, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, announced that the twenty-one murdered Copts would be commemorated as martyr saints on 8 Amshir of the Coptic calendar, which is 15 February of the Gregorian calendar.2

It was Jan Assmann, with his background in the history of ancient religion, who undertook to clarify the relationship between monotheism and violence.1 He interpreted the remarkable link between Moses and Egypt in the Bible as the faded memory of a reform that was carried out by Pharaoh Akhenaten, who wanted to replace the Egyptian deities with the sun god Ra. Assmann drew a distinction between this exclusive monotheism, which disputed the right of all other gods to exist, and another type of belief in one god, ‘cosmotheism’, which postulated a cosmic ordering as the dwelling place of the gods and goddesses who were worshipped.2 The attempt to permanently replace this type by an exclusive monotheism failed in Egypt; it succeeded only in Israel. The ‘counter-religion’ of Moses was the true religion, in contradistinction to the false worship of gods, and in Israel it was only through violent means that it could be enforced.

In recent years a new debate has appeared in scholarship over the value of ‘religion’ as a category for studying the ancient Mediterranean world before its Christianisation. Although I have unwittingly become involved at the margins, I confess not to understand what is at stake for all participants. Whereas the debate usually proceeds on a theoretical or at least abstract level, a volume on ‘religious violence’ in Antiquity invites us to get down to cases. This chapter examines a pair of extremely violent incidents reported by Josephus for the year 66 ce, in Jerusalem and Caesarea, to ask what if anything makes them instances of religious violence, or how we might better understand what happened if we called it ‘religious’ behaviour. Before turning to the double episode in Josephus’ War, I would like to spell out my limited understanding of the stakes in using or declining religion language for the first century.

In thinking about how social control was reproduced over time and space, the problem of agency comes into focus – especially when we consider the position of women. Women had distinctive problems of access to rights and resources in the late ancient world. The constraints imposed on wives and daughters meant that their autonomy in domestic environments was compromised both domestically and in the public sphere. Women had distinctive problems of access to rights and resources, and yet it was a well-known fact that they had their own way of seeing things, and sometimes of helping each other behind the scenes.

This chapter explores the literary use to which the bishop Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) put two of his female relatives: his sister Marcellina, who was a consecrated virgin in Rome, and their ancestor the martyr Sotheris. I will argue that Ambrose exploited the meanings conveyed by these two women to justify his past as an imperial officer, strengthen his legitimacy as bishop, and depoliticise his interventions in imperial politics. Ambrose’s discourse relied on long-established Roman and Christian notions of femininity that depicted women as domestic and vulnerable objects of pity. At delicate moments during his episcopate, however, Ambrose reinterpreted these traditional images and narratives in original ways and used the symbol of his female relatives to foreground a distinctively Christian model of authority, which differed from aristocratic rule and imperial bureaucratic structures.

It is often stated that religious violence in Roman Antiquity did not pre-date the third century, barring such exceptional cases as the three Jewish rebellions against Rome (66–70, 115–17 and 132–35). By comparison with the cataclysmic, if intermittent, physical violence since 249–51 (the rule of Decius), which is often believed to have arisen in part from religious motivations, earlier incidents of violence against dissident religious groups seem to pale into insignificance. A causal link has therefore been established between the rise of religious violence and the emergence in later Antiquity of increasingly discordant and monothetic religious world views, Christian monotheism being one salient representative.1

This chapter contrasts two parallel views of demons and their disruption of the ascetic life which coexisted in fourth-century Egypt. It rests on the hypothesis that we can read discussion of the nature, mode, and location of demons and the violence they work upon the ascetic as a medium for creating religious subjectivities in relation to a non-human adversary. Examination of each ascetic teacher’s demonology therefore reveals their vision for the ascetic life, its urgency and potentials, as well as the precarity and vulnerability an ascetic could expect to experience. The demons in the Letters of Antony manipulate the thoughts, impulses, and emotions of the individual. Their work occurs inside the person and exploits the weakness of the human mind and body. For Athanasius, in contrast, demons function primarily in an external, corporeal, and physically violent mode. Athanasius locates the ascetic life in a large-scale conflict with demons who do not merely corrupt the monk’s perceptions and emotions, as in the Letters, but also turn out in gangs and beat him senseless. This introduction of physicalised and externalised violence into the ascetic work of Antony moves the readers far away from the process of careful reflection and discernment of one’s emotions and thoughts which the Antony of the Letters had encouraged as a defence against internally located demons. This project of comparative reading shows that Antony and Athanasius have diverging and partially incompatible notions of the human predicament and therefore also of the ethical urgencies to which a human being is subject, suggesting that there is substantial diversity within early Christian ascetic thinking which goes far beyond any issue of doctrine. By focusing on each teacher’s account of demonic violence, we can see how violence interacts with the ethical imagination, bodies, and monastic pedagogy.

Conflict and Social Control in Late Antiquity examines how the cultivation and application of violence across a range of ‘small worlds’ contributed to the making of society in the late Roman period. From households and families to schoolrooms and monasteries, chapters address the different roles that violence played in maintaining and reinforcing the social order, even during a period of intense religious and political change. Elites adopted a range of approaches – formal and informal, legal and illegal, private and public – to keep subordinates in their place. Especially important were the efforts of social elites to inculcate in their followers the idea that the social order was natural rather than contingent, and therefore should not be challenged but rather perpetuated. Chapters focus on written sources from the fourth and fifth centuries, mainly on Christian authors. Collectively, they show that rather than seeking to transform the fortunes of those who were most vulnerable in society (slaves, women, children), such writers drew creatively on pre-existing discursive traditions, in the process reproducing and (occasionally) attempting to mitigate the plight of the downtrodden.

The chapter analyses the presence of children in Byzantine Egyptian monasteries. It attempts to reconcile the seeming tension between the constant prohibition of and evidence for the ongoing presence of children in monasteries for an extended period. Ancient monastic and canonical norms provide vital information on this topic: most of them forbade any children in monasteries, even for a short period (e.g. to attend liturgies). However, some monastic sources confirm the presence of children in Byzantine-era Egyptian monasteries due to a variety of different circumstances, These varied from temporary to permanent residence, from children brought for education to those who were abandoned, traded, or donated to monasteries (because of social and economic hardships or medical conditions). For children facing such difficulties, the monastery was an opportunity to improve their quality of life, but, unfortunately, the monastic residence often became a place of violence and insecurity. Monastic obedience and submission to authority, alongside bodily punishments, were often and excessively applied in their education and formation as subjects of the monastic community and as future monastic members.

As the anthropologist Michael Taussig argued, in discussion of Roger Casement’s Putumayo report, ‘To an important extent all societies live by fictions taken as reality’.1 His was a paper that explored ‘the mediation of the culture of terror through narration’,2 exploring specifically how everyday narratives of different kinds are woven together to create the mundane reality of violent ideologies. In this chapter, I will follow his lead by tracing the evidence for a culture of terror in ancient Greek, especially Athenian, society, as expressed in specific fragmentary narratives of magic and law, or, more specifically, of legal and magical violence. My argument will focus on the violence against the individual depicted in binding spells (or katadesmoi), examining the cultural significance of the spectacle of the body depicted in parts.3 I will be focusing, where possible, on spells found in Attica, using further material, including literary, archaeological and visual evidence, that sets it in its socio-political context.4

Part II considers how Christian authors addressed the issue of slavery. In the late Roman world, slavery functioned as a fundamental socio-economic framework around which contemporaries organised their lives, conceptually and practically.1 Just as Jonathan Tallon’s chapter in Part I shows how slavery within the household found acceptance, albeit sometimes grudgingly, in the writings of John Chrysostom, so the following chapters demonstrate how slavery was woven into the fabric of Christian society in later antiquity. Christian writers and preachers used metaphors of slavery in order to communicate with their audiences, while slaves were ever-present, if not always recorded, in Christian communities.

The riotous behaviour by crowds towards other crowds, individuals, buildings or objects is considered in many studies to be a main component of ‘religious violence’ in Late Antiquity.2 Yet these studies often fail sufficiently to take into account three, interrelated points. The first is that the, mostly Christian, sources typically describe the incidents in stark antithetical terms depending on the author’s agenda (‘pagan’–Christian, Arian–‘orthodox’, miaphysite–Chalcedonian and so on). The resulting black-and-white picture tends towards exaggeration and overemphasises the religious antithesis.3 A second point is that despite the focus in the sources on religious differences in reality – as with religious violence in general – almost always other factors were in play.