Not everyone trusted the bishop in household matters. Resistance to his claims of domestic expertise took various forms, from foot-dragging and public censure to organized schism. A more positive and cooperative perspective on the relationship between the household and the bishop was also possible, however. In the gesta martyrum, a body of popular martyr narratives independently written between ca. 450 and 600, householders and bishops join forces to preserve the integrity of the domus and the spiritual imperatives of its lordly overseer. Here Rome's early bishops play integral roles in the transformation of an elite “pagan” household into a pious and productive Christian domus, in which the householder's authority is oriented around the ethics of stewardship and robust religious oversight. Roman bishops of the gesta martyrum inhabit a distinct and durable place within the households of other men; their presence both strengthens the paterfamilias’ power and reveals its dependence on the bishop's assistance. Yet the gesta martyrum also draw the clearest line yet between the bishop's authority in the church and his reach into the domestic sphere.

Following a discussion of the texts’ dating, authorship, and audiences, this chapter examines the cultural and religious meaning of a recurring “tale type” in the gesta: the conversion of a prosperous aristocratic pagan household through the spiritual and ritual interventions of a Christian holy man, who is often (but not always) a bishop. The first part of the analysis establishes how the domestic conversion episode turns on a dynamic of social and ritual exchange, wherein bishops and householders cooperate not only to convert a pagan household but also to define the householder's social identity as “elite.” Close attention is paid to the bishop's role in the process as a healer and ritual celebrant and to how his exercise of charismatic power establishes his authority within certain spaces of the domestic sphere. This section focuses on six versions of the domestic conversion episode that foreground episcopal characters: the passions of Clement (c. 95), Alexander (c. 110), Callistus (217–222), Cornelius (251–253), Stephen (254–257), and Marcellus (305/6–306/7). The second section examines how episcopal authority is circumscribed within the imagined households of the gesta. This section also analyzes variants of the domestic conversion episode that depict nonepiscopal holy men and that underline spaces within the household that were off limits to the bishop. The demarcation of the household and the emphasis on spiritual competitors in these other narratives present a counterpoint to the strongly episcopal vision of the household conveyed elsewhere in the gesta.

The clergy of sardinia had long posed challenges to rome's leadership, but the decision of their bishop, Januarius of Cagliari, to place the administration of his church's patrimony in the hands of thieving local landowners was the last straw. Writing to Januarius in July of 599, Gregory sternly directed his suffragan to use only clerics as overseers in the future. Unlike “secular men,” he explained, the clergy are “approved by your office” and thus can be more easily punished. Similar to other crises explored in this book, this incident boldly underlines two facts about households and bishops in late antique Italy: the line between domus and ecclesia was never firmly drawn, and Rome's prelates viewed the breaching of the boundary as an opportunity for intervention in domestic matters. Gregory's solution, to separate the interests of individual households from those of the church by having Januarius manage his see's property directly, was intelligent but probably ineffective. Although clergy might be disciplined more efficiently than lay conductores, they were hardly impervious to the constant pressure of personal domestic allegiances. This was as true in the earliest moments of ecclesiastical history, when households literally provided the space, resources, and possibly even the leadership for Christian communities, as it was in the late sixth century, when the bishop of Rome struggled to govern an institution with its own nominally distinct personnel and legal property.

The very nature of Gregory's advice to Januarius, however, speaks to a more historically contingent development: the adaptation of household management as a model of government by late antique Roman bishops. Although oikonomia had oriented discussions of episcopal leadership since the early second century, it did not define the Roman bishop's identity and actions until the later fourth century, that is, well after Constantine's conversion and at the precise moment when Western senatorial aristocrats began to embrace Christianity in larger numbers. More exactly, the period from ca. 440 to 600 was the most fruitful time for the recalibration of household management as a discourse of Roman episcopal authority. While earlier prelates such as Siricius and Innocent made important inroads, it was their successors – Leo, Gelasius, Symmachus, Pelagius I, and Gregory – who articulated their influence and power more systematically in terms of domestic expertise. Rather than always being an important facet of the bishop's influence and identity, estate management became increasingly central over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. Certainly the existing state of the evidence potentially mitigates this argument (i.e., the fact that medieval collection makers selectively preserved the letters of Rome's bishops); there might have once been hundreds of documents attesting to the interests of third- and fourth-century Roman prelates in oikonomia. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that we are witnessing historical change.

Roman bishops faced an impasse when they tried to exercise influence over the lay household. They and other authorities encouraged traditional domini to take a leading role in the religious life of their homes. For centuries, ancient householders had recognized their responsibility to ensure that the gods were properly cultivated and worshipped in perpetuity, duties that they solemnly fulfilled even if they did not personally execute every rite. Christianity did little to alter this dynamic, although it did foreground the centrality of religious observance for oikonomia in an unprecedented fashion. The inscription on the bronze boat-shaped lamp created for Valerius Severus illustrates this new emphasis. The epigraph proclaimed that Valerius received “the law” from God and with it the obligation to oversee its proper observance in his home. Rather than situate Severus’ duties within an ecclesiastical framework, however, the lamp mentions no church officials. Severus’ name appears with figurines of Peter and Paul, founding fathers of the Roman church to be sure, but hardly “papal” signatures, as some have concluded. In fact, Severus’ lamp underlines the challenges that Roman bishops faced when they tried to establish their presence within traditional elite homes. If householders were the original experts and divinely appointed stewards of the domestic sphere, then what role remained for bishops to play in the governing of a lay Christian domus? On what grounds might they claim authority to oversee the overseer?

This chapter examines the efforts of Roman bishops to develop expertise in certain areas of domestic life. It explores how they involved themselves in the resolution of highly ambiguous legal and ethical matters in the lay home. To be clear, Rome's bishops did not replace the dominus as the primary “decider” of difficult household questions. Lay householders remained powerful ethical authorities as well as crucial overseers of religious activities in their homes. Bishops, however, could offer the family something that lay patresfamilias could not: a reputation for spiritual discernment and a perceived familiarity with both religious ethics and civil law. As Kevin Uhalde has shown, late Roman bishops endeavored to be seen as “exceptional judges,” who were especially adept at discerning certain spiritual and secular obscurities. We suggest that Roman prelates wanted to appear not as exceptional judges but as exceptional domestic counselors or “troubleshooters,” who offered advice on seemingly intractable problems involving the intersection of civil law, Christian ethics, and the domestic sphere. In this respect, bishops might play a domestic role that largely complemented the lay paterfamilias’ traditional obligations to order and discipline his domus.

In the spring of 593, gregory received some disturbing news about the church of Sipontum, an important see located in the fertile southeastern region of Apulia. The bishop's grandson had seduced the unmarried daughter of a local deacon, and Gregory had been summoned to straighten out what was by all accounts a messy situation. The same deacon had also raised questions about the bishop's financial administration. The deacon had been kidnapped not long before, and expected his local church to repay his ransom. Thus far, his bishop had not provided any funds. Incensed by the local prelate's failure to manage his household and church responsibly, Gregory took action. He ordered the bishop to present an inventory of his church's property and to resolve the domestic crisis according to Gregory's terms: his grandson must either marry the girl or submit to a beating and spend the remainder of his life in a monastery.

It is an obvious but often overlooked fact that many late antique clergy were married and had their own households. Scholars commonly characterize clerical identity in terms of membership in distinct ecclesiastical orders: the episcopate, priesthood, deaconate, subdeaconate, and so on. As Gregory's interactions with the clergy of Sipontum reveal, this presentation is at best a half-truth. Although an ecclesiastical cursus defined an ideal system of advancement, it did not yet translate into corporate clerical identities, nor did it universally order clerics in a lockstep hierarchy. In Rome, for instance, deacons occupied a more powerful and perhaps an even more distinguished status than presbyters, despite their technically subordinate position in the church. An ecclesiastical office certainly was a badge of honor as well as a specific religious duty, but it did not exclusively define a cleric's position or role in the church, let alone in society at large. Many clergy, probably the majority, had households of their own. Their domestic obligations and ties were not simply incidental. They constituted an important facet of a cleric's life and identity.

Roman episcopal leadership in late antiquity has typically been studied as a public or civic phenomenon, and as a chapter in the inexorable “rise of the papacy.” This book presents a new approach. Instead of charting the growth of an exceptional ecclesiastical government or the popes’ efforts to remake Rome into a Christian city, it examines the attempts of Roman bishops to anchor their authority in domestic life. During late antiquity, the popes faced a fundamental and daunting task: to persuade an exceptionally rich and high-status community of Italian Christians to trust their judgment in some of the most central matters of the household, from marriage, sexual relations, and slavery to property administration. To establish their reputations as strong spiritual leaders, Roman bishops had to convince their congregants, including their own clergy, that they possessed a special expertise in the art and science of household management. Domestic life and models of governing, this book argues, were central to the formation of papal authority in late Roman Italy.

Elite households offered the Roman church a variety of resources – material, political, and social – that gave new meaning to the power and stature of its bishops, as Charles Pietri and others have shown. The household, however, also played a formative cultural role in the making of episcopal authority. The ancient household was not a marginal female space only obliquely relevant to the governing of city and state. It was a highly masculine institution, the empire's primary unit of production and wealth, and the most morally revealing realm with respect to the character and capacities of its leaders. In antiquity, estate management (oikonomia) was a discourse, a system of ideas and practices associated with the running of a large aristocratic household. The system encompassed everything from administering property and disciplining dependents to the oversight of justice and religious order within the home. Oikonomia was also a dynamic discourse that underwent revision in the hands of Christian moralists. The following chapters show how late ancient discourses of household management shaped not only the rhetorical presentation of Roman episcopal authority but also its concrete practice.

In late antiquity, excellence in household management was construed as a mark of holiness in a bishop. Nowhere is this axiom more apparent than in Gregory's Dialogues, the late sixth-century bishop's account of sanctity and the miraculous in contemporary Italy. In the Dialogues, we meet saints such as Boniface of Ferentino, who produced enough wine for the poor and the bishop's household from a lean harvest of grapes picked from his church's small vineyard. Boniface's supernatural estate management evidently also included pest control. When the garden was infested with caterpillars, the bishop commanded the bugs to “stop eating these vegetables!” and they obeyed. Elsewhere, Gregory extolled Frigdianus of Lucca and Sabinus of Piacenza for redirecting the swollen rivers of their dioceses away from the church's fields. The presence of episcopal householders in the Dialogues with ascetic superstars such as Benedict of Nursia and the bearded widow Galla was not accidental. For Gregory and his predecessors, acts of domestic administration could signal saintliness in a bishop.

Roman bishops regarded the elite domus as a model of good government. To lead the church, they had to be seen as expert estate managers, men who could be trusted with the orderly and ethical oversight of property and people. The fact that bishops were religious leaders, men associated with heightened spiritual (even miraculous) authority, does not mean that they were not also masters of oikonomia. Household management offered prelates a system of ethical and practical knowledge applicable to the mundane tasks of running a major ecclesiastical institution and to the harder job of forging moral preeminence. Its historical significance equals (and perhaps even surpasses) more familiar paradigms of Roman episcopal authority, like Petrine primacy and apostolic succession. In late Roman Italy, Peter was not only the princeps apostolorum but also the primus cultor, God's “first caretaker,” who solicitously cultivated the Lord's lands and souls.

The domestic sphere was central to ancient conceptions of power and authority. Classical thinkers stressed the inextricable connections between a man's ability to conduct his household affairs and his capacities as a public leader. In Tacitus’ words, keeping a household ordered and its members well behaved was “a task often found as difficult as the governing of a province.” Householders were expected to master four principal domains of estate management: property administration, the social ordering of dependents, their family members’ ethical instruction and oversight, and the ritual cultivation of the gods. Those who succeeded were lauded by their peers and revered by their subordinates; those who failed were ridiculed in letters between friends, critiqued in moral treatises, and accused of nefarious crimes in public courts. The aristocratic household was simply too central an institution in Roman society to leave unexamined.

As a system of ideas and practices that defined domestic and civic expertise, household management was a pervasive and enduring discourse. Management of one's household remained part of an imperial language of power and governed thinking about elite authority well into the sixth century. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, Julian (361–363) exercised good oikonomia at a politically sensitive moment during the initial days of his reign. Requiring a “legitimacy boost” following Constantius’ death, Julian showcased his moral rectitude by reordering the imperial palace at Constantinople. He rid the court of excessive luxuries and ejected corrupt staff, from the eunuch praepositus sacri cubiculi down to the barbers and cooks. Elsewhere, Ammianus presented stinging critiques of the Roman senatorial aristocracy that foregrounded their failures in the realm of estate management. He caricatured their dinner parties as immoderate, their litters as too laden with gold, their reading choices as banal, their treatment of clients as fickle, their clients as greedy and obsequious, and their control over household slaves as extreme. He also belittled their oversight of land and claimed that Rome's noblemen greatly exaggerated their wealth.

During late antiquity, christian householders in italy were asked to reconceive their authority. Authors such as the anonymous writer of the Ad Gregoriam in palatio, a late fifth- or early sixth-century Christian conduct manual for matronae, exhorted householders to envision their administration in terms of dispensation rather than dominion. They were to behave not as earthly lords and property owners but as God's most trusted earthly agents. As stewards placed by God in supervisory roles over his property and people, they were to undertake household tasks with a view toward final judgment.

Many Christian thinkers understood oikonomia as a form of stewardship, that is, as a discourse of salvation oriented around the earthly householder's temporary and solicitous oversight of God's land and people. Scholars have long discussed stewardship as a distinctly Judeo-Christian conception of wealth management that posited material property as God's possessions. The focus on material wealth is certainly warranted by the sources. As this passage from the Ad Gregoriam shows, Christian moralists emphasized the financial component of stewardship, especially regarding the use of riches to care for the poor. Stewardship and assistance to the socially dislocated (e.g., the poor, orphans, widows) were closely intertwined in late antique religious thought on oikonomia.