This volume reassesses the historical paradigm of relations between pagans and Christians by focusing on the evidence from fourth-century Rome. This topic has taken on new resonance due in large measure to the reinvigoration of the debate over historical models fueled by the 2011 publication of Alan Cameron's important book, The Last Pagans of Rome. Cameron has argued that the concept of pagan–Christian religious conflict in Rome is a pure historiographical construction – the remnants of the scholarship disseminated by Hungarian scholar András Alföldi, who presented a Christian Constantine in irreconcilable conflict with a pagan Rome. Inspired by long-standing traditions of the Hungarian nobility rebelling against Habsburg emperors, Alföldi's “conflict model” conveyed a significant political message in a time when a frightening “new paganism” seemed to be spreading from above. Two years later, in a seminar at the Warburg Institute in London, Herbert Bloch broadened the idea of pagan–Christian conflict and saw evidence for an aristocracy in Rome faced with a tightening of measures against traditional cults. Bloch proposed that there had been a “pagan revival” in which Rome's aristocrats led “the last pagan army of the ancient world” against the Christian emperor Theodosius I. His view became really influent only when his paper, in a shorter version, was published as a part of the seminar at the Warburg Institute in London.Alan Cameron has meticulously attacked this model in his book through a series of studies on a wide variety of texts associated with the last pagans of Rome, the powerful Roman aristocracy who allegedly spearheaded this resistance at the end of the fourth century.

Cameron's publication has aroused a strong response, especially on the part of European scholars. Some have taken the view advanced by Stéphane Ratti that the idea of pagan resistance provides a better method for explaining the literary texts of the fourth century as well as the world that produced these texts. In light of such work, the debate on the interpretation of the evidence from fourth-century Rome has gained a new effervescence.

The papers presented at the international conference held in September 2012 at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, and featured as chapters in this volume, attest to this. Their focus is on Rome in part because modern historiographic paradigms arose in relation to Rome, its aristocracy, and its Christian leaders.

Crowds are everywhere. In all stratified societies, past and present, crowds have appeared, and continue to appear, especially in urban contexts where crowds’ emergence can be regarded as a prominent expression of public life. Crowd behavior is closely connected to many social, political, cultural, economic, and religious phenomena within urban contexts, and is of great interest to society's leadership. Indeed, crowd management and control is of great importance to all authorities who deal with the organized or spontaneous activities of large gatherings of people.

This contribution examines crowd behavior in late antique Rome. With a particular focus on Christianity and its influence on crowd behavior, I offer an analysis of ways modern methodology could be valuable for our understanding of crowd behavior in the late Roman world. To many modern scholars, the emergence of Christianity and its ability to become the sole religion of the Roman Empire and subsequent developments within the religious life of the inhabitants around the Mediterranean should be seen as one of the most important characteristics of late antiquity. That does not mean, however, that all institutions and societal phenomena in the Roman Empire were entirely submerged into and defined by Christianity as if the Roman world was Christianized in all its aspects. This chapter demonstrates how crowd behavior lends itself well for an analysis of an urban phenomenon in late antiquity that was, on one hand, affected by Christianity, but that, on the other hand, was unaffected by religion, and in many instances even transcended religious influence.

Most previous scholarship on crowd behavior in the Roman world has dealt with ancient crowds in a stereotypical way: it tended to focus on the Populus Romanus as a powerful representative of Rome's population that was kept satisfied by “bread and circuses.” Roman authorities were sensitive toward the sentiments of the Roman people because, if the people were disgruntled, riots might break out that endangered the city's or even the empire's stability. Such a view of the Roman people, and thus of crowd behavior in the Roman world, is mainly based on fear of aggression and riots. In other words, it focuses on situations of potential crisis and on a relationship between rulers and subjects that was based on their polarization.

Puzur-Inshushinak's reign was followed by a period of renewed Mesopotamian control over Susa, this time by a dynasty established by Ur-Namma at Ur in southern Mesopotamia around 2100 BC which lasted for almost a century (the so-called Third Dynasty of Ur or Ur III empire). Apart from controlling Susa, the Ur III state entered into relations with other Iranian regions such as Anshan and its neighbours on the Iranian Plateau through a pattern of dynastic intermarriage with local elites.

But as texts from the mid to late Ur III period show, a new power identified with Shimashki was on the rise in western Iran, no doubt partly as a reaction against Ur's political imperialism. It is important therefore to investigate the role played by Elam in general and Shimashki in particular in the eventual downfall of the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2000 BC, particularly the contribution made by Kindattu, the sixth king mentioned in a list of the kings of Awan and Shimashki found at Susa. Shimashkian influence in the wake of Ur's collapse, while difficult to gauge accurately, clearly extended beyond the confines of Susiana. The difficulty of defining the boundaries of Shimashkian influence makes it awkward to point to specific archaeological assemblages from Fars and Khuzistan which can be associated with Shimashki, but it is important to keep the political history of the period in mind when assessing the material culture of the late third and early second millennium BC. It is also important to bear in mind what the relative contributions of the Iranian highlands and lowlands may have been in the often shadowy political processes which we seek to follow at this time.

Susa, Anshan and the Third Dynasty of Ur

As we have seen, Puzur-Inshushinak's westward expansion was checked by Ur-Namma, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur. His defeat signalled a loss of those east Tigridian and central Babylonian areas which he had formerly held and also marked Susa's loss of independence, opening the way for Mesopotamian attacks deep into Iranian territory and ushering in an era which would witness the vassaldom of Anshan.

Divine statues, as objects that were thought of very differently in terms of both their nature and their use, crystallized the tensions between pagans and Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries. The “graven image” as an emblem of pagan religions gradually became the preferred target of Christians. From the second half of the second century, ideas on the link between the god and its effigy, on the type of representation based on mimicry as well as on its actual power were put forward by both Christian authors and pagan philosophers, who reflected on their conception of piety and on the religious relationship between mankind and the divine. Some of the arguments Christian writers advanced on divine statues in fact came to be used as encouragement and justification for legal decisions that limited and then prohibited their use, occasionally with a concern for protecting the work nonetheless, but little is known about the efficacy of these measures or the precise nature of the objects involved. We do not know whether all kinds of divine effigy were affected, or if these attacks targeted only consecrated images. In any case, these struggles over the approach to divine statues gradually modified the role they played in the city. As Lepelley has shown, divine statues lost their primary purpose and became real “heritage” objects. In Rome, a fairly wide range of sources, comprising inscriptions, writings by Christian or pagan authors, and archeological and iconographical data, allows us to follow the main phases of this change of status. Statues became markers of a society in transition, and they allow us to observe their complex relationship with tradition and the past in the context of the diffusion of a new culture that weakened and called into question some of the structures underpinning society, in Rome more so than elsewhere.

I:Tradition and Initial Tensions Surrounding Images

In the fourth century, Christian reticence toward divine representations was above all evident in literature, with only rare material consequences, since the tradition of erecting images to the gods in fact remained a powerful one. Effigies were still very current, to the extent that from 331 a civil servant with responsibility for statues in the city of Rome was appointed, the curator statuarum.

“Alas, while seeking the honours of nobility by your magic arts / you are brought thus low, wretch, rewarded with a tiny tomb.” In this way, an unnamed pagan Roman senator is accused of practicing the magic arts (artis … magicis) in the anonymous pamphlet poem often called Carmen contra paganos. The same poem, near the end of the work, also mentions the “magic incantations” (carminibus magicis) of the widow of the wretched senator.

This is only one example of the many labels of magic attached either to religious rivals or to political opponents in the fourth century. This chapter aims to analyze and contextualize the category of magic pinned onto pagan cults and heresies in the fourth century. Magic has served as a resourceful and versatile word in interreligious and intra-religious disputes and conflicts. One of the easiest ways to produce differences and create boundaries between groups has been to label the practices and beliefs of a rival group as magic.

Defining Magic

In this chapter, magic is understood as a discursive category that depends on the perspective of the perceiver. Therefore, there is no such thing as magic in itself. Instead, we should speak of rituals, beliefs, and texts that receive, usually from those situated outside such a context, the label of being magical. In this delineation, magic is a socially constructed object of knowledge whose content and formulations vary according to different social contexts and circumstances.

If we need to define magic, phrases such as “unsanctioned religious activity,” “ritual power,” or “extra-cultic ritual practices” will be adequate. We can also refer to alternative, deviant, private, often unaccepted, forms of ritual behavior as some modern scholars have done. A number of researchers have ended up using the term magic as a heuristic tool, a comparative term applied in an etic perspective, that is, perceived from the outside. This is pragmatic indeed as long as one remembers one is using the term magic as a heuristic tool. However, this solution is problematic insofar as researchers run the risk of making more or less subjective distinctions between what they regard as magic and what they regard as religion. In the scholarship of the recent decades, the conventional distinction between religion and magic has increasingly been challenged as untenable.

It has become ever more clear that late ancient Rome's Christian writers were capable of sheer invention. Prudentius’ blood-drenched taurobolium has lately been forced to come clean as the fantasy it was: a burlesque of a far more sober rite still traceable in other sources. Similar, if less sensational, fictions surely underlie the outrage punctuating the roughly contemporary anti-pagan verse polemics considered in this chapter. Yet rather than quarantine these carmina contra paganos – or Prudentius’ lurid fantasy – simply because they bear the mark of deceit, the proper historical task entails their reintegration into a world where, as otherwise agreed, textual practices often had serious motivations and real consequences. The patent attraction of these verses to the tired clichés and vituperative zeal of pre-Constantinian apologetic, that is, should not be permitted to render this poetry irrelevant to the religious debates of the age. Indeed, that these broadsides – embedded in well-known poems or stranded among the manuscripts of other Christian authors – were ever intended to be taken for the kind of truth conceded to objective reportage or fair representation can hardly be the case. Truth, however, is manifold, an assertion whose validity crystalizes in the relentlessly satiric voices of this contra paganos poetry. What follows, then, is a bid for better understanding of how the “banal” fictions of this late fourth- and early fifth-century verse contributed to the work of forging Christian identity in a city where the problems well-heeled Christians faced had as much (or more) to do with resolving the issues dividing them than with fending off the challenges of pagan cult.

Ad Hominem?

Five texts will illustrate here the evidential value of a body of verse too often marginalized as either historically inconsequential or poetically second-rate. Best known of this group, perhaps, is the Contra Symmachum. Prudentius most likely assembled the final version of this two-book rebuttal of Symmachus’ defense of the altar of Victory in late 402, long after Symmachus had sent his famous relatio to Milan in 384. Yet, although Prudentius almost surely drafted parts of Contra Symmachum book one in the mid-390s, attention later in this chapter focuses on lines 42–407, a long section devoted to ridiculing the pagan gods and their myths, which could, in fact, have been composed almost any time during these years.

One of the most powerful and most beloved heroes of antiquity, Hercules, figures positively not only in pagan myth, but in its iconography where he was seen as civilizing the earth by saving humans from various monsters and evil forces. He was also positively represented in Christian contexts. As I will argue in this chapter, Hercules, man and god with superhuman abilities, was a heroic figure for late antique Christians too. The Christian predilection for Hercules was not an unproblematic interpretatio Christiana, but a complex conjunction of mythical and Christian models of virtue that offered a polyvalent religious experience for late antique Romans.

Hercules images abound in late antiquity. Fourth-century Constantinople boasted several statues of Hercules, and ivory reliefs, silverware, gold glass, contorniates, terra sigillata vessels, bronze plates, and casket mounts were equally decorated with the exploits of the demigod. Of these representations, two fourth-century Christian iconographical programs stand out that combine the myth of Hercules with biblical scenes: the frescoes of the cubiculum N of the Via Latina catacomb in Rome and the reliefs of a casket mount from Ulcisia in Pannonia (now Szentendre, Hungary). Common to these representations that differ so much in artistic ambition, media, and size, is the drive to “think with” Hercules when visualizing the Christian history of salvation.

Hercules in the Catacomb

The Hercules cycle in cubiculum N of the Via Latina catacomb (Via Dino Compagni) remains the most contested piece of mythological iconography in art history. Cubicula D–O were painted by a workshop of three painters in the last decades of the fourth century, heavily inspired by the former workshop of cubicula A–C active during the Constantinian period. Possibly commissioned by a married couple, cubiculum N has two arcosolia painted with scenes from the Alcestis myth (Figure 18.1) representing two labors of Hercules: killing the Hydra of Lerna and stealing the apples of the Hesperides. The lunette of the left-hand arcosolium shows the dying Admetus, King of Thessaly, surrounded by his family and Hercules and Minerva, the personification of Virtue. The next image shows Hercules, club in hand, killing an enemy, presumably Alcyoneus, Cacus, Antaeus, or Death itself. In the lunette of the right-hand arcosolium, Hercules leads Alcestis from the underworld to the doorstep of the house of Admetus. Adorned with halo, club, and lion skin, Hercules holds Cerberus on a leash.

The Neo-Elamite period (for the first use of this term in a linguistic sense, see Hüsing 1898: 1, 1908b: 3, 7) is dated from c. 1000 BC until the conquest of Babylonia in 539 BC by Cyrus the Great. For simplicity we have divided it into three phases. While the earliest phase (Neo-Elamite I, c. 1000–744 BC) is poorly known, the middle phase (Neo-Elamite II, 743–646 BC) is amply documented in Assyrian sources, for it was a period of intense conflict between the Assyrian kings and a series of Elamite rulers, often allied with insurrectionists in southern Babylonia. The inscriptions of Shutruk-Nahhunte II (c. 717–699 BC) from Susa reveal continuities with earlier periods in Elamite history, but much of the contemporary archaeological material from the site is badly disturbed. Similarly, it is impossible to correlate much of the military history of Assyria's aggression with Elamite archaeology for the simple reason that many of the towns in western Khuzistan which must have borne the brunt of Assyrian aggression have yet to be identified on the ground, let alone excavated (see in general Carter 2007; for the historical geography of this period see Parpola and Porter 2001). It is also likely that, under intense Assyrian pressure, Elam as it had existed in the Middle Elamite period was no longer a unified state comprising both the highlands of Fars and the lowlands of Khuzistan, and it is possible that individual cities, such as Hidalu or Madaktu, were not bound by the authority of a single Elamite king (but note the reservations of Henkelman 2003c: 253 on this point).

It is clear that, given the paucity of indigenous Elamite sources at this time, we are to some extent a prisoner of the Assyrian royal inscriptions and the Babylonian Chronicle which present us with a sequence of Elamite rulers through foreign eyes. In this regard it is important to note that the scarcity of references to Anshan at this time leaves us in the dark about contemporary historical events in the highlands. Rock reliefs at Kul-e Farah and Shikaft-e Salman seem to relate to petty kings in the highlands who wrote in Elamite but whose relationship to the Elamite kings mentioned in Assyrian and Babylonian texts is generally obscure.

A once popular game enjoying something of a revival of late is identifying covert anti-Christian polemic in pagan texts of late antiquity. The polemic is always covert because it is assumed that pagans were afraid to express pagan views openly. But this is pure assumption, for which no real evidence has ever been produced. Of course, direct attack or scurrilous abuse would have been imprudent, but up to the Theodosian age at any rate courteous debate and disagreement were certainly tolerated (for example, Volusianus's letter to Augustine questioning the virgin birth). A recent book by Stéphane Ratti is the first systematic attempt to document this supposed pagan fear, going so far as to maintain that already by the late fourth century pagans were afraid to reveal their paganism in their private letters. Because so many private letters survive from the fourth and fifth centuries, both pagan and Christian, this is a hypothesis that can be tested.

The letters of Q. Aurelius Symmachus cos. 391 might seem a promising target. A well-known pagan himself, Symmachus corresponded with Vettius Agorius Praetextatus and both the Nicomachi Flaviani, the most notorious pagans of the age. His more than 900 letters might be expected to contain a trove of information about the last days of Roman paganism. Yet if the 390s saw a pagan revival, Symmachus's letters reveal little hint of it.

Scholars used to assume that this is because they were edited after his death by his son Memmius Symmachus, to protect both himself and his father's reputation. Ratti has argued that the explanation for their lack of pagan content is self-censorship by Symmachus himself, afraid to speak his mind. Both explanations might seem reasonable but find little support in the letters themselves. The question has in fact been surprisingly little studied. What follows is an attempt to dig somewhat deeper than has been done hitherto.

II

It is true that, if Symmachus wrote to (or about) the supposedly pro-pagan Eugenius or Arbogast during the period of their rebellion against Theodosius, no such letters were included. But even if they had been pro-pagan, that would have been irrelevant to Symmachus's paganism. Anyone, pagan or Christian, who had written to (or about) a usurper would take care to destroy all such correspondence on the usurper's fall. There are no letters to the Christian usurper Magnus Maximus either.