This chapter is a case study of the Histories of Gregory of Tours (d. 594). Other case studies in this book focus on letters of one particular author who criticised a person in power. This chapter is the exception, in that it treats not letters but a historiographical narrative, to see how the author presents himself as a truth-telling actor in the historical events he describes. It examines the models that may have inspired Gregory to present himself as a fearless defender of truth, and analyses the ways in which he embeds criticism in the autobiographical parts of his narrative. Two well-known episodes that Gregory described in his Histories, in which he confronts a Merovingian king, is studied in more detail; one concerns a clash with Chilperic I (d.584), king of Neustria, and the other a brush with Guntram (d. 592), king of Burgundy. A question that is addressed towards the end of this chapter is that of how Gregory’s professed ideal of telling the truth frankly relates to the reports of rumours and gossip in his Histories.

On the north-east edge of Hyde Park in London, near Marble Arch and Oxford Street, is a designated site for public speeches and debates, known as Speaker’s Corner. Since the Act of Parliament of 1872, anyone who enters the Speaker’s Corner is allowed to speak freely on any topic he or she chooses, offence to the British royal family excepted. The institution of a free speech zone in a public place is not unique, since free speech zones can be found in many major cities across Europe and America. What is remarkable about Speaker’s Corner is its location: it was established on a previous site of execution. London tourist guides inform visitors that the Speaker’s Corner’s tradition of free speech took its beginning from the Tyburn gallows, which were located on this very spot. Prisoners who were sent to the Tyburn gallows were allowed to speak freely before they were executed.

This chapter discusses developments in the Christian rhetoric of free speech in the fourth century, after Christianity had become an accepted religion. A theological controversy arose, known as the Arian controversy, that pitched supporters of different interpretations of Christian doctrine against each other. Christians, who saw themselves as heirs of the martyrs, needed to find a new rhetoric of opposition that fitted the realities of the post-persecution era. Was it acceptable to inveigh against a Christian emperor because he subscribed to an alternative interpretation of Christ’s truth? This chapter focusses on the rhetoric of Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (d. 368) who came to be regarded as the head of the anti-Arian faction in the West and wrote an invective against Emperor Constantius II. In Hilary’s letters, we find a new vocabulary and rhetoric of free speech which covered a whole range from persuasion to criticism, from polite advice to outright abuse. The chapter shows how Hilary created a new, powerful image of a Christian truth-teller that was built on the cultivated memory of martyrs, apostles and prophets.

The introduction offers a brief history of free speech in Antiquity, which serves as a background for the chapters of this book. It starts with the emergence of free speech (parrhesia) as a civic and political virtue in the Greek world, in connection with the rise of democracy. It then continues with the Roman world, where free speech became embedded in Roman oratory and was included among the rhetorical figures in handbooks of rhetoric. It addresses the close connection between free speech and citizenship in Roman thought. In the second century AD, a Christian rhetoric of free speech came into being. The introduction shows how, over the course of the centuries, free speech spread from the political and the judicial to the moral and the religious sphere. In spite of these shifts, free speech retained its importance as a tool of political criticism.

This chapter investigates narrative representations of free speech in early Christian martyr acts written between c. 150 and the end of persecution in 313. It discusses both pagan and Christian models that inspired authors of early Christian martyr acts to represent the speech and behaviour of martyrs in a certain manner. One of the issues the authors addressed was how a Christian should behave when he or she stood trial before secular authorities, and what measure of frank speech was appropriate in this situation. Early Christian martyrs are often presented as respectful, polite and reticent towards authorities during interrogation. We also see a clear preference for plain speech over studied rhetoric. The chapter addresses the question of whether new interpretations of parrhesia that we find in these martyrdom narratives should be seen as indicative of a growing reluctance among Christians to criticise those in power, or as part of a process of acculturation.

This chapter discusses the lives and letters of saints and bishops who were considered truth-tellers by their contemporaries. The selected letters and saints’ lives were written in Francia between c. 550 and c. 750. In addition, two hagiographic texts and one letter from Italy and Visigothic Spain are included to compare developments in Merovingian Francia with other kingdoms and regions of the former Western Roman empire. In the selected sources we encounter Gallo-Roman, Frankish, Visigothic, Anglo-Saxon and Irish holy men who ventured to criticise those in power. Although the rhetoric of these truth-tellers and the vocabulary of their biographers do not conform to classical standards, this chapter demonstrates that their frank speech and behaviour was very much related to the late antique tradition of free speech.

This chapter discusses the lives and letters of saints and bishops who were considered truth-tellers by their contemporaries. The selected letters and saints’ lives were written in Francia between c. 550 and c. 750. In addition, two hagiographic texts and one letter from Italy and Visigothic Spain are included to compare developments in Merovingian Francia with other kingdoms and regions of the former Western Roman empire. In the selected sources we encounter Gallo-Roman, Frankish, Visigothic, Anglo-Saxon and Irish holy men who ventured to criticise those in power. Although the rhetoric of these truth-tellers and the vocabulary of their biographers do not conform to classical standards, this chapter demonstrates that their frank speech and behaviour was very much related to the late antique tradition of free speech.

By the end of the fourth century, Constantinople, New Rome, had been endowed with a constellation of monuments that collectively signified the City’s centrality in imperial space, in conceptions of time, and the very ordering of the physical world. The Milion, a tetrapylon (or quadrifrons) built by Constantine at the end of the Mese boulevard, stood as a symbolic “zero point” in the geography of empire, analogous to Elder Rome’s Miliarium Aureum.1 The Milion had a clock, called the “clock of the City,” attached to it, thus marking time in addition to space.2 Another massive tetrapylon stood between the fora of Constantine and Theodosius I, and was likely built by the latter: this one featured a huge bronze weathervane at the top of its pyramid in the form of a winged woman, and so was called Anemodoulion, or the “servant of the winds.” Its carvings included images of the personifications of the winds and the tamed natural world, which the monument mapped and measured.3

If, from its beginnings, historical writing in the Graeco-Roman world was bound up with choices about which spaces to include, this was no less true of the Christian varieties of historiography that emerged in late antiquity.1 Part of the challenge for Christian authors offering narratives of the intersections between the classical and the Christian pasts was deciding how to delineate the geographical spaces in which those histories took place. At the beginning of the fifth century, Paulus Orosius famously prefaced his Seven Books of Histories Against the Pagans with a description of the world based on Roman provinces – a choice that presented problems when he came to narrate the biblical past, at which point he was forced to offer various glosses to provide his readers with spatial orientation.2

Although time is crucial for historiography, space is another important dimension of historical writing. The kind of space that is relevant to authors and becomes visible in their works depends on their respective contexts and approaches. As regards church historiography, one major issue is the relationship between ecclesiastical and political space, which ideally should coincide, but never does. This becomes even more palpable in works that stem from the periphery of the empire. One case in point is the ecclesiastical history of John of Ephesus.

Dorothea Weltecke has remarked that we should not think of ecclesiastical history as a tree that grows from a single root in the Acts of the Apostles and Eusebius. As she argues, we may be better off thinking of churches as networks of individuals or as a bamboo forest, of distinct institutions planted in the same soil.1 However, as a historiography, ecclesiastical history does present itself as a single tree, to follow Weltecke’s analogy, some of whose branches withered away as they abandoned ‘orthodoxy’. Our challenge, therefore, is to write a history of the historians as image makers, emphasising their continuity with the past, while acknowledging that the raw material from which they constructed this image, often the events of their own times, forced innovation, some of it conscious and some of it unconscious.