This chapter examines the early development of Constantine’s religious imagery following his victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 ce. It argues that Constantine’s administration swiftly began portraying the civil war against Maxentius as a religious conflict, with Constantine defeating Satan through the aid of the archangel Michael. The chapter highlights the apocalyptic nature of this imagery, emphasizing Michael’s role not only as a heavenly warrior but also as a herald of the end times and Christ’s millennial reign. Scholars have overlooked both the early emergence of this imagery and Michael’s significance within it. While the imperial court may have believed in this narrative, its promotion in the aftermath of civil war suggests that not all Christians in Constantine’s new territories necessarily welcomed their new emperor.

Synesius of Cyrene (b. ca. 373–d. ca. 410) was trained in the classical literature that depicted war as an event with armies opposing one another in battle, but he experienced a different kind of conflict in his own life – namely, the periodic and unpredictable raiding that troubled late ancient Libya. Synesius’ letters and his treatise On Kingship show that these conflicts brought sentiment to the surface as a kind of evidence about people that could be implicitly trusted; Synesius’ sentiment was palpably xenophobic, aligned against both “barbarians” and “Scythians,” and so strong as to circumvent rational examinations of the evidence around him. This essay examines the scaffolded construction of stereotype, built in Synesius’ advice to a hypothetical ruler, and demonstrates how knowledge, even knowledge that seems intimate and trustworthy, can be bent through engagements with violence.

This chapter argues that Augustine structured book 1 of the City of God according to the urbs capta motives. Urbs capta narratives (such as Livy’s), offer consolation for civilian populations that had suffered the sack of their city. They address captivity, looting, starvation, mass burials, but also sexual violence. In book 1, Augustine calls these afflictions (that is, the urbs capta motives) “law of war” (ius belli). Once recognized as the structuring device of book 1, it becomes evident that Augustine addresses sexual violence against women through the well-known case of Lucretian, but also against (elite) men. Augustine then uses the laws of war, and in particular sexual violence against men, to reframe traditional Roman virtues, especially pudicitia (modesty) and patientia (edurance) as Christian. As a result, patientia and humilitas (humility) become essential responses to war’s devastation, and Rome’s sack a sign of divine correction, while the urbs capta motives are Christianized.

This chapter calls attention to the violence of everyday life in the Roman world as the backdrop to the more extraordinary violence of war. Drawing specifically on archaeology, which is poorly equipped, it is argued, to reveal war violence but well situated to reveal the unusual volatility of living in the Roman world, it describes the ordinary upheavals of daily life. In particular, it examines the archaeological evidence for volatility in domestic circumstances, in how one made a living, and the physical trauma experienced by working bodies.

“War,” writes military historian Alexander Sarantis, “is largely a niche area rather than a mainstream concern of late antique and Byzantine studies, which tend to be dominated by theological, literary, artistic, and socio-economic themes.” The fact that war and warfare now occupy a “relatively marginal position in modern scholarship” reflects a number of shifts in the academic landscape, from the reframing of Late Antiquity as a period of change and continuity (rather than an epoch of decline) to the entrenchment of cultural history as the dominant approach in history departments across North America and Europe. And yet, even as military historians have dismantled stale theses about “military decay” as the root cause of the empire’s geopolitical fragmentation and show the late Roman army to have been a source of Rome’s extraordinary resilience, “their” topics of war, warfare, and the army nonetheless fail to resonate with most scholars of Late Antiquity. As Bryan Ward-Perkins wryly notes in his controversial 2005 book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, “banishing catastrophe” has become a mainstream response to late antique narrative history. Where has war gone?

Ambrose of Milan’s funerary oration for Valentinian II (392 ce) confronts violence, civil war, and imperial authority, ultimately redefining the emperor’s body as a collection of relics. The oration’s ambiguity regarding the circumstances of Valentinian II’s premature and violent death was not merely a matter of political expediency; it also served as a rhetorical strategy to support Ambrose’s innovative treatment of the emperor’s corpse. By weaving passages from the Song of Songs into his oration, Ambrose evoked imagery resonant with same-sex desire, while presenting himself as the emperor’s guarantor – but in his very own way: as a “womanly” father and a lover mourning his beloved. In portraying Valentinian II as a selfless soldier-martyr, Ambrose rehabilitated an emperor who may have died by suicide and without the sacrament of baptism, while also redefining key imperial virtues at a time when they – and the empire – faced mounting challenges from both internal and external forces.

Roman imperial and non-Roman royal women seized the opportunities provided by frequent warfare and by the politics of court society to advance their interests and goals in novel ways in the fifth and sixth centuries. Admittedly, not all of their efforts succeeded. Nonetheless, some Roman imperial women did realize some of their goals, providing models for royal women in the wars that unfolded in the post-Roman Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy. This chapter discusses four women as case studies: two fifth-century imperial women, Justa Grata Honoria and Licinia Eudoxia, and two Ostrogothic royal women, Amalasuintha and Amalafrida. These women used the opportunities presented to them by war and the negotiations that precipitated fighting to assert political influence, demonstrating womanly agency in Late Antiquity.

This chapter demonstrates the enduring vitality and importance of the trope of the captive city (urbs capta) for late antique authors. Narratives of captured ancient cities follow a set pattern often modeled on the destruction of Troy but also, in Jewish and Christian contexts, on the sieges of Jerusalem. While these highly formulaic narratives are of little use to modern scholars interested in reconstructing specific acts of siege warfare, they provide historians with invaluable evidence for ways in which late Romans reckoned with the impact of war on civilian populations, which assumed a new urgency in the later empire when the sacked cities were increasingly Roman, and when both victim and aggressor were Christians. By tracing the use of the captive city trope from the late fourth to the sixth century, the chapter explains how Christian authors reframed the urbs capta motif by shifting the focus from the city to the church as the locus of suffering.

This chapter explores the written and material evidence for civilian quartering of Roman troops in late antiquity. The civic duties to extend hospitium or hospitalitas are reconstructed from the Republic until the late Roman Empire, focusing on the period between the fourth century ce and mid-sixth century ce. By looking at the literary evidence for housing troops in civilian homes penned in the Republic and early Principate, the convention of using moralizing rhetoric to describe soldiers quartered in cities is established. This classicizing rhetoric is then used to reframe later allegations concerning the effects of Constantine’s alleged movement of frontier troops into cities. This reconsideration of the extant evidence for Roman troop quartering questions and amends how we should write the lived experiences of civilians living in late Roman cities.