Although Roman criminal law differentiated between male and female offenders, women were not necessarily treated more leniently than men. Female sexual crime especially could be prosecuted in a visible manner and punished severely. This chapter discusses late antique families’ strategies for evading potentially humiliating public criminal process when it came to addressing the wrongdoing of female family members. Always a possibility in the accusatory criminal system of the Roman world, these strategies of evasion became increasingly formalised during late antiquity with the rise of ecclesiastical mediation. Such extrajudicial redress could result in women’s domestic seclusion. Towards the end of antiquity, female confinement was moved from the extrajudicial to the judicial sphere, with the introduction of the penalty of forced residence in a monastery. While forced residence in a monastery was seen as applicable to both male and female offenders, when applied to women it eased the pressures exerted by Roman law’s interference with intimate family affairs. In this way, the monastery became a locus of intersection between small-scale household-based and large-scale state acts of social control.

This study demonstrates how the macrocosm of slavery, along with its violent measures of discipline and punishment, was assimilated into and reproduced by Christian ascetic culture of late antique Syria, in both urban and rural spaces. After investigating the nature of slaveholding practices in the cities and outlying villages of the region, the study asks how the type of slavery that was characteristic of Syria may have affected the ascetic practices of fourth- and fifth-century monks who lived on the fringes of cities and villages. Finally, in order to understand the ascetic afterlife of slavery in Christian Syria and Mesopotamia, the study also explores the nature and ascetic function of slavery in some later sources of the sixth and even seventh centuries. This exploration into the later centuries gauges the potency of discourses and practices of slavery. It also serves to make us aware of just how powerful, pervasive, and persistent doulological discourse and discursive shifts were in late antiquity.

Part IV explores what Conrad Leyser has called a ‘rhetoric of vulnerability’ among the Christian writers of late antiquity, who saw personal vulnerability as a claim, under certain circumstances, to enhanced moral authority.1 The righteous suffering of martyrs2 and the fragile autonomy of virgins3 offered powerful new symbolic capital to the Christian imaginary.

This study seeks to analyse Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica in terms of a fourfold taxonomy of modes textual violence: the relationship of the text’s composition to historical acts of violence, its narration of acts of violence, its adoption of violent language for otherwise not (necessarily) violent actions or practices, and its violence against the integrity of its opponents’ identities, thought, and writings. While the first two modes are more limited, the latter two modes of textual violence are exquisitely expressed – and yet simultaneously deeply complicated – by Eusebius’ apologetic work. De Certeau’s notion of a tactics of textual poaching, in particular, prompts a cautious reconsideration of how quotation of one’s opponents might (or might not) work as a mode of textual violence.

The concept of asceticism is notoriously difficult to define, and we still cannot say that there is one ‘accepted’ definition. What we have are varying representations and propositions from ancient authors of the ascetic project, each with different emphases and goals in mind.1 Rather than straightjacketing an ancient author or literary work within a preconceived notion of asceticism, it should rather be asked how the author understands and utilises ascetic discourse and practice, and how this particular utilisation intersects with other related religious, cultural and political concepts and phenomena. One phenomenon with which asceticism has been shown to interact is that of violence. But the relationship between violence and ascetic discourse and practice has been shown to be quite complex.2 The notion that asceticism and acts of violence are not necessarily mutually exclusive has gained much ground in scholarly circles, and rightfully so.

Religious violence is usually taken to encompass clashes between religious groups and the destruction these caused, as well as violence organised by institutions, in particular state and Church, against religious minorities. Using a broader definition of violence than just physical violence,2 such institutional violence included measures used to coerce individuals to abandon certain practices and beliefs judged harmful to society and themselves. This conjures up the question as to what coercion actually meant in Late Antiquity.

In its early days, monasticism went hand in hand with several manifestations of violence. While it is true that the semantic scope of the word ‘violence’ and the concept that it evokes need to be defined,1 there is still a premise that we cannot afford to disregard: the literary sources contain a significant number of passages in which violence occurs in the literal sense, which will be taken here as ‘the use of physical force against an opponent’. In the accounts preserved about the first monks, this violence appears to have been used against adherents of other cults (in the context of an opposition between Christianity and paganism),2 or against people from Christian movements different from the one to which the protagonist belongs and vice versa (in cases where there was an intra-Christian conflict between Nicaeans and Arians, or between Chalcedonians and miaphysites);3 it may also be exerted on objects of worship or sacred buildings of non-Christians,4 which, as has recently been argued, may have acted as a safety valve against a more serious aggravation of hostilities.5 Finally, within the more restricted framework of monastic life, violence could be employed against those who disobeyed the precepts of the master or challenged his authority and, by doing so, adopted an attitude of religious dissent.6

This chapter analyses the little-known fifth-century Syriac romance Euphemia and the Goth, bringing out its narrative richness to allow it to become part of a wider discourse about identity, violence, and the role of women in the late antique eastern Empire. By employing a structuralist methodology, the story is viewed as containing highly developed and also subtle contrasts, ultimately used by the author to articulate a view of an ideal Edessa. Through the use of distance, dichotomies of barbarian and civilised are set and reinforced with the complimentary distinctions of legitimate and illegitimate violence. These contrasts also allow the primary benefit of Roman rule for Edessa to be made clear, namely the rule of law which ensures justice for vulnerable female-only households against outsiders who attempt to disrupt them, albeit with a strong Edessan identity retained. The analysis finishes by shedding light on the position of women within Edessa at the turn of the fifth century and concludes that options for female-only living were perhaps more positive than for women elsewhere in the Empire.

When is violence religious? Or, to put it more accurately, under what conditions can we appropriately characterise violence as religious? This is never an easy question to answer, as the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate. What qualifies as ‘violence’, although a question that is apparently straightforward enough, becomes more difficult to pin down the more closely one considers it, and several contributors to this volume are careful to distinguish physical violence, the sort of violence that probably springs to most people’s minds when they hear the term, from cultural violence and structural violence.1 What qualifies as ‘religious’ is even less obvious, especially in reference to the ancient Mediterranean world, from which several recent scholars have proposed we should exclude the term altogether.2 In this chapter I do not intend to provide an answer to the question posed above. Although broadly framed questions of that sort are invaluable and even unavoidable heuristic devices, they do not lend themselves to precise answers.

This chapter uses three stories of young women’s relationships with their parents to increase our understanding of Christianity’s impact on classic familial values in late antiquity. It is focused on the ways in which the famous second century story of the virgin Thecla, and her difficult relationship with her mother Theocleia, was read and reused in later Christian stories. In the Passion of Eugenia we see how Thecla’s story becomes a catalyst for the eponymous heroine to follow Thecla’s example and reject the marriage proposed for her. She does so, however, without creating the rift with her parents that Thecla’s departure necessitates. That careful reuse demonstrates the developing uncertainty over whether the rise of Christian asceticism necessitated the destruction of the traditional household. In Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, we see the Cappadocian bishop again using Thecla to think with, as he feels his way towards a new solution to this same problem. These case studies not only show us the changing landscape of Christian thinking on marriage, family, and asceticism, but also reveal the complex matrix of meanings latent in the original Acts of Paul and Thecla.

It should shock us – and it would have shocked a number of early fourth-century Christians – that the Emperor Constantine (306–37) continued a seventy-five-year long tradition of soldier-emperors’ militant piety from the time he took power,1 into the period of his conversion to Christianity, and up to the end of his reign. For the ease with which Constantine promoted the novel image of a Christian military commandant, I argue, we have Lactantius (fl. 299–315) to thank. In his Divine Institutes, this African professor of rhetoric set out the template for Constantine as the ideal Christian conqueror-emperor and violent avenger of evil. As Lactantius identified this ‘evil’ as the actions of polytheistic emperors who had persecuted Christians, his template envisions the emperor as an agent of religious violence in response to religious violence. However comprehensible Lactantius’ response, this image is wildly at odds with the previous conception of the Christian hero, that of the martyr, known for enduring, not promoting, violence. Taking inspiration from the circumstances of Constantine’s accession, Lactantius’ Divine Institutes sketched the outline of a Christian sovereign.

Recent debates on religious violence in the Roman empire have focused mainly on the change from a polytheistic to a monotheistic empire, ‘das Problem des Monotheismus’, as stated by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann.1 In the tradition of the Enlightenment, polytheism and traditional religious practices are depicted as tolerant, because their inclusive character allowed individuals to adhere freely to as many and whichever cults they desired.2 The associated belief-systems are generally considered to have been open and non-coercive. Even the very category of ‘belief’ has been called into question, since it was the adequate performance of the rites that mattered. New cults could always be adapted and reinterpreted in familiar terms.3 Since gods and spirits were conceived of mainly as local entities, the veneration of foreign gods and spirits in a foreign country would be nothing more than a polite act: when in Alexandria, do as the Alexandrians do. Finally, nothing prevented an individual with enough backers and financial means from founding his or her own shrine.