The controversy surrounding the removal and attempted restoration of the altar of Victory to the Curia in Rome is one of the most notorious episodes in late Roman history. It has customarily been treated as a defining moment in a longer conflict between paganism and Christianity, symbolized by a dramatic “debate” in 384 CE between the pagan prefect of Rome, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, and bishop Ambrose of Milan. Sourcebooks have contributed to this impression by (understandably) continuing to print the texts of Symmachus and Ambrose together. Only recently have scholars recognized that framing the issue in this way reproduces the perspective imposed on it by Ambrose himself, who purposefully published a copy of Symmachus's Third Relatio in his own collection of letters, “disadvantageously sandwiched” between his rebuttals. Ambrose's misleading presentation of the “debate” was quickly taken up and elaborated by his admirers, notably Prudentius in his poem Against Symmachus and Paulinus of Milan in his biography of Ambrose.

In contrast to the focus on the protagonists Symmachus and Ambrose, the role of Damasus in the affair has received much less attention; this, too, reflects Ambrose's presentation of the episode, for he accorded Damasus only a passing mention in his first letter to Valentinian II. A deeper investigation of Damasus's actions in the controversy, however, reveals an inconsistency in the Roman bishop's response to the Senate's attempts to restore the altar to its traditional place in the Curia. This chapter argues that the apparent inconsistency in Damasus's approach should be seen in the context of conflict not between pagans and Christians, but within the Christian community of Rome. While there is ample evidence for intra-Christian conflict during Damasus's episcopate, stemming initially from his contested election as bishop in 366 and subsequently from heated doctrinal debates over marriage and celibacy in the Roman Church, the dispute surrounding the altar has not figured in discussions of intra-Christian conflict at Rome. This chapter proposes to revisit the familiar problem of the altar by situating it in the context of ongoing intra-Christian strife; it argues that Damasus's actions in the affair were conditioned by his need to respond to internal challenges from schismatic rivals who threatened his position as leader of the Roman Church.

Bishop Damasus of Rome (366–384) was called many names by many people, but nobody tagged him a ‘Romanizer’ despite his zeal in promoting both Christianity and the myth of Rome. The Liber pontifi calis dubbed him a Hispanic, and historians explored this path along with Damasus’ possible or symbolic associations with another great Spaniard of the time, Emperor Theodosius. Only recently did scholars turn to evaluating the bishop's achievement in a Roman context. Damasus’ struggles and programs – from primatus Petri to cultus martyru m – are indeed best explained as a creative recycling of Romanitas.In competition with passing time, with clerical and aristocratic rivals, the bishop sought to anchor his Church and his authority in distinctly Roman ‘national’ traditions.

Damasus’ exploitation of Rome 's non-Christian cultural capital in his epigram s exalting the martyrs was far from being an unthinking interpretatio christiana.The bishop adopted the aura of eternity derived from classical poetry to express the eternal glory of the Christian martyrs. His recourse to Roman models, however, stood for a sophisticated and subversive referencing of the past of the Vrbs that preserved as well as transcended Roman traditions. This paper proposes to examine Damasus’ carmina in the context of the late antique cultural revolution set into motion by Christian intellectuals. It focuses on a single but salient aspect of the Romanization of the martyrs by Damasus: their naturalization as Roman citizens. Concomitantly, the bishop literally tied the martyrs to the soil of Rome, thus inaugurating the catacombs as the distinctly Roman headquarters of the cult of the saints. The appropriation of the voice of Vergil in celebrating Christian heroes was Damasus’ ‘Ich bin ein Roman’-speech to his clergy, his fl ock and to the pilgrims, broadcasting in stereo that Roma aeterna was the Holy City of Christendom.

I. Christians and Classics

Damasus’ poetry constitutes a unique chapter in the history of Christian epigraphy. The bishop commemorated the martyrs in heroic hexameters carved with exquisite letters on marble plaques displayed in all over the catacombs of Rome. As a result of Damasus’ multi-media enterprise involving archaeological research, architectural renovation and artistic decoration, the Christian martyrs got to be exalted like classical heroes.

The emergence of the Persians as a major power in western Iran must have been aided by the sustained Assyrian assault on Elam in the seventh century BC. But it is important to stress that, notwithstanding the severity of Assyrian aggression against Elam, the Elamites were neither annihilated nor reduced to a state of utter insignificance. Although historians and archaeologists long ignored the role of Elam and the Elamite population in the emergence of the better known Achaemenid Persian empire (539–331 BC), this has changed in recent years. The very facts that Cyrus the Great established his capital in the heartland of what had been Anshan (Potts 2011a), that Elamite was the language of the earliest Achaemenid inscriptions and the language of the thousands of administrative texts found at Darius’ city of Persepolis, that a number of Elamite rulers tried to rebel against Persian authority and that Elamite deities continued to be worshipped in the Persian-controlled cities point to the continuation of an Elamite tradition in southwestern Iran long after Cyrus came to power (for overviews of southwestern Iran in the Achaemenid period see e.g. Henkelman 2012a and Boucharlat 2013). Nor was Susa, an important city throughout all earlier periods of Elamite history, neglected by the Achaemenids (see Briant 2010 for an overview), and it is from Susa that much of the archaeological evidence of the period comes (Ghirshman 1954b; Perrot 1981, 1985, 2010, 2013). The survival of Neo-Elamite iconography on cylinder seals used in the Achaemenid period is another phenomenon which attests to the survival and transformation of Elamite identity in the Persian period, as does the use of military equipment specifically designated ‘Elamite’ or ‘Susian’ at this time. In the late Achaemenid period, at the time of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian empire, we see that the highlands of southwestern Iran were inhabited by a tribal group known as the Uxians, who may well mask the Elamites by another name.

Introduction

The so-called Dynastic Prophecy (II 17–21) made the following prediction concerning the fall of the Neo-Babylonian state: ‘A king of Elam will arise, the sceptre … [he will take?]. He will remove him (the preceding king) from his throne and […].

The subject of this chapter is a poem transmitted only under a cumbersomely descriptive title, the Carmen ad quendam senatorem ex christiana religione ad idolorum seruitutem conuersum (henceforth, Carmen). At eighty-five hexameter verses, it is the shortest of the three closely but indirectly related Latin hexameter satires on paganism to survive from late antiquity, and has been the least studied of the three, having neither the reflective expansiveness of the Poema Ultimum (which is three times its length) to commend it nor the exhilarating nastiness that drives the Carmen Contra Paganos. Like the latter's withering attack on a recently dead prefect, it too is addressed to a Roman aristocrat identified by an office rather than a name: “Who will not mock you,” the poet asks, “who have been consul, that you are now a servant of Isis?” However, his mockery is fitful, and between and beyond his bursts of abuse he offers extensive passages of earnestly platitudinous concern. But throughout, and in contrast to the other two poems, he presents himself engaging with his interlocutor and seeking to make him change his ways. He introduces himself at the outset as a long-standing acquaintance of the senator, shocked at the latter's defection but eager to offer salutary correction; he confronts him with his delinquencies and berates him for his stupidity; and he signs off apparently satisfied that he has achieved his purpose. It is this sustained engagement that will be the principal theme of this chapter, which will suggest a social and cultural context for the exercise; the method will be one of close reading of the poem, and an attempt to identify the poet's argumentative strategy.

The poem survives in four independent manuscripts, two poetic miscellanies and two collections of works by Cyprian. Cyprian is credited with authorship in all three of the manuscripts to offer an ascription, but a recent attempt to claim it for the martyr-bishop of Carthage fails to convince. Christianity is comfortably in the ascendant in the poet's world, where a former consul's natural home is within the Christian community, and his defection is an embarrassment rather than a catastrophe; nor is there any hint that in apostatizing he is allying himself to persecutors.

The period of the sukkalmahs was followed by the Middle Elamite period. While details of the transition between these two eras are lacking, the onset of the Middle Elamite period is usually put at c. 1500 BC, its end at c. 1100 BC. Three phases have been distinguished, each marked by a different dynasty named after its founder or most significant early leader (thus the Kidinuids, Igihalkids and Shutrukids). This is the period when the title ‘king of Susa and Anshan’, as it is expressed in Akkadian texts, or ‘king of Anshan and Susa’, according to the usage of the Elamite sources, is attested.

The first phase of this period (Middle Elamite I, c. 1500–1400 BC) is notable not only for the wealth of evidence from Susa but for the expansion of an important site at Haft Tepe by a king named Tepti-ahar (De Graef 2011g). The second phase (Middle Elamite II, c. 1400–1200 BC) is characterized by intermarriage with the royal family of the contemporary Kassite dynasty in Babylonia. This was also the time when one of the Middle Elamite II period's most important rulers, Untash-Napirisha, founded a monumental new site at Choga Zanbil, ancient Al Untash-Napirisha, complete with a stepped temple tower or ziggurat, where the deities of the highlands were worshipped alongside those of the lowlands. Susa, too, provides abundant evidence of occupation at this time. The third phase (Middle Elamite III, c. 1200–1100 BC) saw the overthrow of the Kassites by one of the most belligerent figures in Elamite history, Shutruk-Nahhunte. It was he, following his conquest of southern Mesopotamia, who brought to Susa such significant monuments as the stele bearing the inscribed law code of Hammurabi, the victory stele of the Old Akkadian king Naram-Sin, and many other pieces of Mesopotamian statuary, booty taken during his victorious campaign in 1158 BC. Shutruk-Nahhunte's son and successor, Kutir-Nahhunte, meted out even more punishment to his western neighbours, removing the all-important cult statue of Marduk from his temple at Babylon. Likewise Kutir-Nahhunte's successor, Shilhak-Inshushinak, campaigned widely, particularly in eastern and northeastern Mesopotamia.

Important archaeological finds from this latest phase of the Middle Elamite era have been recovered at Tal-i Malyan in Fars, and rock reliefs near Izeh add yet another dimension to our understanding of political fragmentation and religious practice in this period.

One of the basic assumptions of Mithraic studies has, since the inception of the discipline, been that the cult of Mithras in late antique Rome represented at the very least a break with traditional cult practices of the preceding two centuries, and in the most radical interpretation a contaminated and devolved version of the original ideology and practice struggling to maintain its identity in a religious landscape where Christianity was in ascendancy. However, late antique Mithraism has not, with a few notable exceptions, received much serious attention from scholars of ancient religion. Mithraism in Rome in this period is still often described as essentially the subject of a failed, politically motivated resurrection of long-dead cult practices in the last decades of the fourth century by a segment of the senatorial elite. Mithraic cult rooms have been described as long-abandoned spaces, mostly destroyed by Christian mobs as a result of fierce competition and religiously motivated violence, before eventually every last vestige of the cult was annihilated. This turn of events has little, if anything, to do with the actual source material, and when this evidence is reexamined and analyzed in its proper context, a very different view of the late antique cult in Rome emerges.

Over the past decade or so, however, new archaeological finds as well as several new studies of previously understudied categories of Mithraic remains carry great potential for new chronological and contextual studies of the cult. Access to new evidence as well as a critical reevaluation of both primary and secondary sources clearly shows a picture of continuity rather than decline, and it is clear that an empire-wide reinterpretation of the cult of Mithras in late antiquity is in order. In this chapter, however, I will limit myself to discussing the Mithraic communities in Rome in this period, and my contention is that these communities grew rather than declined, and that Mithraism survived as much the same coherent religious system until the first half of the fifth century. When this evidence is reevaluated within its proper contexts, preliminary results indicate that rather than being revived by a group of senators as part of the so-called pagan revival, the cult of Mithras survived relatively unchanged in Rome in this period.

Should one, in a work devoted to an ancient state such as Elam, review the entire record of human settlement prior to the earliest unambiguous appearance of that state in the historical record? The answer to a question such as this depends in large part on whether one believes there was or was not a connection between the earliest Palaeolithic or Neolithic inhabitants of the region and the later Elamites. In general, the position adopted here is that while, for example, the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers of the Zagros may have been related, either biologically or culturally, to the later Elamites, we have at present no way of determining that this was the case. As this is a book devoted to Elam and not to Iranian prehistory, therefore, most of the archaeological cultures which preceded the Elamites in southwestern Iran will not be discussed. Having said this, how far back in time should we look if our aim is to understand the genesis (or ethnogenesis) of Elam?

The approach taken in this book has been to look at two of the core areas of later Elamite activity – central Fars and Khuzistan, particularly the sites of Tal-i Bakun, Tal-i Malyan and Susa – beginning in the later fifth millennium BC. The justification for this is not a firm belief that the peoples of these areas can be justifiably considered ancestors of the Elamites. Rather, it is because questions which arise in the study of Elam when it first emerges in the historical record of the third millennium BC need to be addressed in the context of arguments made concerning, for instance, the original peopling of the site of Susa, or the derivation of the earliest writing system used in the region and its relationship to so-called Linear Elamite. And because of the existence of a considerable body of literature devoted to the ‘Proto-Elamites’ (see the review in Abdi 2003), even if it will be argued later that this is a misnomer, it is necessary to look at certain aspects of the late fourth millennium in Fars and Khuzistan. Since the broad conclusion is that we are not justified in assuming a link between Proto-Elamite and later Elamite culture, it is unnecessary to review everything we know about the late fourth millennium at Susa, for example.

One of the most important aspects of late antique paganism is the shifting involvement of the state and imperial courts in public religion. The elimination of state subsidies and evanescent imperial interest in the traditional public cults had a profound impact on the sacred landscape. The present chapter focuses on one such change, privatization of previously public cults, and in particular whether this phenomenon can be archaeologically observed in Rome. After a brief discussion of privatization in the sacred landscape, I will discuss the case of the Iseum from the Church of S. Martino ai Monti in Rome.

For the Romans, public religion was part of the complex system of government and delegated to the same people who actually ran the state. This rule was the norm both in theory and in practice until late antiquity. What happened when the state was actually no longer interested in performing its religious duties? At first view, this would lead to a cessation of cultic rites performed pro populo Romano. According to the traditional definition of Festus, public cults had to be financed from public funds, performed on behalf of the people and in a space consecrated publicly according to the customs and traditions of the state. The lack of state involvement involved at least the lack of public funding of state officials who would supervise the rites and, at least in the light of imperial legislation, the lack of suitable public spaces. Yet in practice several attempts were made to fill the gap left by the state. They all shared the desire to replace the void, or at least part of it, through private actions. They can be seen as a process of privatization of public religion. Behind this general common goal, the solutions found were diverse, and this diversity is the key to understanding changes in the late antique pagan landscape. Individuals and groups interested in pagan cults adopted their own solutions and reacted to particular circumstances. Symmachus writes in one case that the “religious authorities” have decided to convey the cult of the gods, “for a public homage” to the citizens. This decision can only be understood if one considers the particular role and function of Roman magistracies. In the Greek East, where priesthoods were often not specialized, leading citizens took the initiative directly to perform public rites, even when not acting as magistrates.

The conference on which this volume is based is a significant contribution – albeit not the last in the view of the editors – to the debate on relations between Christians and pagans, which subject has been recently revived in a series of publications. In 2007, the conflict between pagans and Christians in the fourth century was one of the issues on which the organizers of the International Congress, promoted by the Associazione di Studi Tardoantichi in Naples, invited scholars to make a critical assessment. The following year, in the Monastery of Bose, on the pre-Alps around Biella, where the dialog between religions in the contemporary world is a subject of daily engagement, a new international conference (supported by the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII in Bologna) gathered scholars of at least three different generations, and from various nations of the world, to discuss this topic. Favoring a historiographical approach, the scholars at this conference traced the directions of historical research since the publication in Oxford in 1963 (and in Turin in 1968) of Arnaldo Momigliano's The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century. That book has had an almost paradoxical destiny. As Peter Brown noted as a young listener of the Warburg Lectures and as the first reviewer of the volume's English edition, almost all of its collected essays showed how the Christianization of the empire passed through a process of transformation and transition, rather than competition, struggle, or conflict. In one essay, however, the idea of conflict stood out in a specific way and it was from that essay – which had been conceived more than a decade before – that Momigliano drew inspiration for the title of the volume. He found in Bloch's chapter, which he included as the epilogue to this miscellaneous work, a satisfactory answer to his own view that religious factors were an inseparable part of historical processes, and hence they played a decisive role in the fall of the western empire. Bloch's response was also consistent with the interpretation of the end of Roman paganism that Alföldi had advanced in his interpretation of the contorniates – bronze medallions, produced in Rome from the mid-fourth to the late fifth century, and whose legends were mostly inspired by traditional gods and heroes – as part of a concerted campaign of pagan propaganda sponsored by the aristocracy of Rome.

The great Christian catacombs of Rome – Commodilla, Priscilla, Domitilla, Sebastian, Callixtus, to name only the largest complexes – have been since the Renaissance the chief data set for discovering the nature of emergent Christianity “on the ground,” or better, underground. Here, frescoed on the walls of plastered tufa and traced along the ancient routes of the pious, one can witness the rise of a new yet robust Christian identity, already coalesced in the third century. The catacombs reveal a large and protected ancient community of ordinary humble citizens of Rome, united in their vision of an eternal refrigerium that awaited them. Unlike their pagan adversaries, Christians created vast networks of subterranean eschatological hope, clustered together against the pressures of superstition and the sham religions of pagan imitators, against those who believed that death was the end and who abandoned their dead in the cold, dark ground.

Given the potential usefulness of the catacombs as a data set for recovering emergent Christianity, it seems important to consider them as we determine to what degree the terms pagan and Christian are useful or accurate to describe religious identities in late antique Rome. Surely Christians distinguished themselves from pagans in their chosen mode of burial, such that we might be able to discern difference, if not actual conflict, from their archaeological remains. Indeed, the very phenomenon of “Christian catacombs” presupposes difference – a distinct Christian community, united in doctrine and praxis, living in the broader environment of the late Roman city. There are no “pagan catacombs,” only the scant remains of pagan hypogea and necropoleis. Yet this supposition – that Christian catacombs reflect the sturdiness, differentiation, and united front of emergent Christianity against paganism – while not incorrect, is fraught with interpretive pitfalls. The picture painted in the opening paragraph of this chapter – often found with only slight variations in scholarship – is entirely wrong. It has emerged, not from the astonishing 170 kilometers of catacombs that are indeed critical sources for uncovering late antique Christianity, but from a way of reading them that has remained dominant and authoritative until very recently.

The centrality of the Roman catacombs to Catholic self-identity began with their “rediscovery” fortuitously one day in 1578, when workers laboring at the Vigna Sanchez off the Via Salaria punctured the soft tuff to discover a vast labyrinth of graves below.