Aristocratic authors, most of them clerics, controlled the written evidence for Gaul. Their sources projected visions for making and preserving a law and order, hierarchical Christian society. Meanwhile, makers of Salic law passed legislation that encouraged people of all ranks to look to the monarchy for privileges. Frankish kings sought to curtail establishment of a hereditary Gallic nobility, and toward this end, the Merovingians succeeded into the seventh century. Far from constituting a homogeneous group, Gallic aristocrats acted within multiple aristocracies distinguishable by region and behavior. Three important strategies by which aristocrats maintained and augmented local power were combining lands and resources through intermarrying with other elite families, acquiring high-level positions at court, and participating prominently at churches. Members of Gregory of Tours' family exemplify pursuit of each of these stratagems and reveal how the various aristocracies were not exclusive. The landed aristocrat Gregorius Attalus married the senatorial woman, Armentaria, by whom three children were born, and he acted as Count of Autun before becoming Bishop of Langres. Gallic nobles were not limited to social strategizing inside a single region or subkingdom. Thus Gregory himself was the product of an Auvergnian father and Burgundian mother, while it was an Austrasian king who selected him to preside as metropolitan over a westward lying province, Lugdunensis Tertia. Ecclesiastical aristocrats such as Gregory composed most of the surviving literature for the Barbarian era, and these productions betray their authors' hopes for a society in which people of all social ranks would heed Christian leaders.

The sixth century witnessed virtually complete assimilation of Gallic bishoprics by socially prominent persons. A few zealous, reform-minded prelates – for example, Caesarius of Arles – tried to curtail other bishops' overt worldly aristocratic behavior such as overindulging at banquets and hunting. Others, among them Gregory of Tours, eschewed the familial survival strategy of producing progeny. But none touted sweeping social changes such as leveling society or eradicating the institutions of imprisonment and slavery. Instead, high ecclesiastics defended hierarchical principles and used clerical resources such as the cult of saints to perpetuate hierarchy. The previous chapter revealed how prisoners constituted a group of passive miserabiles for whom ecclesiastics were willing to secure liberation in exchange for loyalty. By inviting them to participate in the ritual of miraculous release, clerics reintegrated inmates into community life at the cost of indebtedness to a church establishment.

Late Antiquity had no lack of people who claimed an ability to supernaturally secure health, wealth, love, revenge, and hidden knowledge. Such persons predicted future events, elucidated on the past, interpreted dreams, affected weather conditions, healed physical afflictions, caused afflictions, identified this-worldly evildoers, and got rid of otherworldly evildoers. Late ancient magicians were a varied lot: Christian and pagan, clergy and laity, male and female, bishop and slave, philosopher and athlete. While acquisition of wealth and local repute motivated some to contact the supernatural, as apparently was the case for the diviner of this chapter's introductory quote, others claimed such abilities in order to augment their control over society. Practitioners of esoteric arts chanced having to reckon with powerful secular officials and ecclesiastics, but ifthey fared as successfully as the prognosticator described here, then presumably their efforts will have been worth the risk.

Late Antiquity, stretching roughly from the late third through seventh centuries, was an age characterized by transition. In that period, Europe experienced dramatic political and social changes: Western imperial rule disappeared, replaced by smaller kingdoms, trade and taxation declined, aristocrats concentrated on more proximate interests, and Roman and indigenous cultures merged. Furthermore, Christian thought and practice increasingly infiltrated and influenced European politics, society, and culture. Inhabitants of Gaul were in theforefront in experiencing these important societal shifts. Gallic society forever changed with the introduction of peoples whom the sources label “barbarians.” Sizeable migrating groups passed through and/or settled in Gaul from the first decade of the fifth century. According to the chronicle tradition, bands of Vandals, Sueves, and Alans moved westward over the Rhine River from December 406. By 409, some had proceeded to Spain and North Africa, while others stayed. The Empire responded to these movements by expanding a policy of settling the “barbarians” as foederati, federate soldiers. In 413, the Western government settled Burgundians along the upper Rhine, and in 418 it placed Visigothic foederati in the province of Aquitania Secunda. By then, Franks had long been serving a similar purpose in northern Gaul.

Violence and crime were endemic in Barbarian Gaul. Gregory of Tours' Historiae include many episodes in which the powerful benefited from forceful, illicit activities. For example, in 584 after Count Innocentius of Javols failed to indict Abbot Lupentius for treason against Queen Brunhild, the count attacked as the abbot returned home and lopped off his head. Despite this callous action, Innocentius suffered no punishment; to the contrary, Brunhild helped him secure the bishopric of Rodez. It seems Innocentius presumed that because he was in good stead with the queen he needed not fear any reprisal such as imprisonment. Indeed, aristocrats likely assumed they would not be cast into prison, for sources suggest that lockups were reserved not for them but for the sociallydisadvantaged. In a society that already was sufficiently hostile, the downtrodden suffered one of the most horrid of possible environments in the carcer. The misery that traditionally accompanied imprisonment came to the attention of early Christian leaders, and so tending to inmates became an early hallmark of the religion.

This chapter will continue laying out a model for society in Barbarian Gaul. The previous chapter focused on participants within Gaul's multiple aristocracies, large landowners, prominent courtiers, and ecclesiastical aristocrats. Gallic authors characterized people who succeeded in their strategies of marrying with landed elites, acquiring high secular office and prominently patronizing churches as society's “best” (optimi). But, as the hopeful expression of a non-aristocratic father for his son to continue the family line, presented in this chapter's introductory quote, indicates, schemes for social improvement in fact might differ between nobles and non-elites only by a matter of degrees. This chapter concentrates on details of people from the lower social ranks as they sought social betterment through marriage, pursuit of secular office, and church affiliation. Analysis will progress according to descending rank, free to slave. Freepersons will be divided into two groups, ingenui and pauperes, according to terminology used by contemporary writers. But even this division cannot do justice to the variation, economic and otherwise, that existed within the large “middling” group of people that archaeologists and social historians are now realizing characterized late ancient societies.

The mid-fourth-century bishop Basil of Ancyra conceded in his treatise on virginity that goodness took many forms within the Church and that his readers could readily find works exalting different aspects of the good life. There were hymns on virginity, texts praising those who mortified the flesh by fasting and sleeping on the ground, and lengthy eulogies of those who sold their possessions for the sake of the Lord. The existence of this growing body of literature justified the bishop's decision to restrict his theme to consecrated virginity and the godlike freedom which it won from all that was corruptible. Basil offers us a glimpse into the sustained promotion of different practices we commonly term ‘ascetic’ and neatly raises numerous questions about those practices. While the bishop associated different practices with different lives, to what extent were these practices common elements to one and the same life of renunciation? What beliefs gave meaning to these practices? Did the beliefs and practices known to Basil in the fourth century differ from those familiar to Christians in earlier centuries and what was their relationship to the rise of monasticism? While the bishop wrote only of their value within the life of the Church, to what extent were these practices and beliefs common to Christians, pagans, and Jews? And what might be meant by terming them ‘ascetic’? These are the questions which this book aims to answer in its account of asceticism in the Graeco-Roman world.

MOSES – THE ASCETIC PHILOSOPHER-KING

In his Life of Moses, the Alexandrian Jewish exegete Philo (c. 15 BC– AD 50) related, in the absence of any biblical account of Moses' upbringing, how the future leader of the Ancient Israelites had been educated within the Egyptian royal household. The boy rapidly outstripped his Egyptian and Greek tutors to master mathematics, geometry, music, the language of the Assyrians, and the Chaldaeans' knowledge of the heavens. It was, in other words, an education to rival that of any Pythagoras. To match the knowledge of the Greek sages was not merely a feather in Moses' cap. Nor was it simply an opportunity to claim the superiority of Judaism over the dominant Hellenistic culture. Such wisdom was, as Philo conceived it, essential to Moses' inspired leadership: the Israelite was envisaged as a type of philosopher-king, one who excelled in the moral and intellectual virtues required of a just lawgiver. It was the philosopher's contemplative intimacy with God which allowed him to enshrine faithfully the divine wisdom in the timeless legislation of the Jewish Law (the Torah).

Moses, the uncrowned philosopher-king, was thus portrayed in terms drawn from the Greek philosophical tradition. The rule of others presupposed self-control; moral excellence lay in a Platonic subjection of the passions to reason, so that the ‘violent affections’ of his soul were reined in like a ‘restive horse’, an allusion to the famous description of the virtuous soul in Plato's Phaedrus.

THE OLYMPICS OF THE SOUL

Shortly after the death of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (C. ad 250–70), his pupil and literary executor Porphyry (AD 234–c.???) urged another member of the school, the wealthy Roman Castricius Firmus, to join him in renewed intellectual endeavour: they should together ‘go stripped, without tunics, to the stadium, to compete in the Olympics of the soul’. Porphyry understood the goal of philosophy as that contemplation in the soul of divine truth which was also an act of union with the divine. The athletic metaphor of his appeal to the dedicatee of On Abstinence, and through him to its readership, glorified both the goal and the philosopher who attained it; the image bestowed on the latter the prestige of victory in these most famous of all Greek games, and something of the victor's numinous power. The metaphor further located this goal as the fruit of a strict training (in Greek ascesis) comparable to the diet, sexual abstinence, and exercises of the naked Olympic athlete. It was an apt metaphor in as much as the philosopher had to divest his mind of the multiple concerns and passions which distracted it through its relationship to the body; such concentration could easily be envisaged as a stripping naked of the self, because Plato had long since characterized the body as clothing worn by the soul. The figure was all the more apt in so far as the disciplined training which Porphyry thought would facilitate contemplation involved, amongst other things, a daily practice of ascetic abstention in matters of diet, sexual activity, wealth, and wider social intercourse, all elements in a thoroughgoing detachment from the material and mortal.

Theodoret (b. c. 393), bishop of Cyrrhus from 423 to 446, looked back on a childhood in Antioch during which he was taken by his mother to be blessed by the renowned Persian monk Aphraate and sent each week to be blessed by another monk, Peter, who inhabited a tomb outside the city. His visits testify to the reputation monks could win for protecting Christians from the evils to which they believed themselves exposed. A monk could be recognized as a holy man through whom the saving power of God was manifested. Peter made a belt for Theodoret from his own, which was then used to heal the child, and others, of sickness. These connections with individuals and families in the cities from which the monks only partially distanced themselves, partly explain the value and thus the rise of much monastic life which emerged in the course of the fourth century. They also point to its variety.

Aphraate and Peter do not obviously belong in the Origenist tradition charted in the last chapter; nor were they the only monks around Antioch with its large Christian population. By ad 386 a ‘black-robed tribe’ of ‘cave-dwellers’ had incurred the deep hostility of Libanius (314c. 393), the pagan teacher of rhetoric, who decried their attacks on rural shrines, and their appearance each summer in the city. Already, in the late 369s, the young Chrysostom had persuaded two friends to join in him in learning the ascetic life from Carterius and Diodore, the heads of local monastic communities (askētēria).