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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Students of the cultural history of the late Roman and Byzantine periods sometimes speculate as to what may have been the ordinary daily intellectual interests—the private store of detached thought and emotion—of the average educated men of those times. To us, the literary activity of those centuries seems a barren skeleton, picked bare by the sophists, an abhorrent thing in which we can find no real interest. The formal philosophy of the schools was a wild business whose fantastic flights seem to many of us today to be quite incredible and absurd. We can perhaps understand a little better the intellectual and political interest which attached to the theological controversies, though these often went to lengths which seem to us to be excessive. Private religious experience there was, of course, and there was an emotional outlet in Christian art which we can understand quite well. But even the total of these things will not perhaps satisfy our curiosity; whether rightly or wrongly, we find it difficult to understand that a man's life can have been made up of these things alone, and we wonder what a mind of at least some independence and vigor can have found as a basis for its individual existence.
1 The mosaics have been published in Antioch-on-the-Orontes, I: The Excavations of 1932, ed. by Elderkin, G. W. (Princeton, 1934)Google Scholar, and in Antioch-on-the-Orontes, II: The Excavations, 1933–1936, ed. by R. Stillwell (Princeton, 1938)Google Scholar, and in Antioch-on-the-Orontes, III: The Excavations, 1937–1939, ed. by R. Stillwell (Princeton, 1941)Google Scholar. The historical background of the mosaics, and their place in the history of art, have been studied by Morey, C. R., The Mosaics of Antioch (New York, 1938)Google Scholar. For accounts of the history of the city, consult Müller, C. O., Antiquitates Antiochenae (Göttingen, 1839)Google Scholar; Bouchier, E. S., A Short History of Antioch (Oxford, 1921)Google Scholar; and Schulze, V., Antiocheia (Gütersloh, 1930).Google Scholar
2 See a paper by the writer, present, “Julian the Apostate at Antioch,” published in this journal, VIII (1939), 307–308.Google Scholar
3 Antioch I, 114ff.
4 In this paragraph I quote from an earlier article, “Personifications of Abstract Ideas in the Antioch Mosaics,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, LXIX (1938), 349–363.Google Scholar The reader may find there more detailed discussion, with the bibliography, of the views of various scholars which are presented here in brief.
5 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, 1123 b 1Google Scholar (IV, 3, 3,).
6 This was suggested to the writer by Professor Erwin Panofsky of the Institute for Advanced Study.
7 Diogenes Laertius, VII, 93; see also VII, 128. A similar view is expressed by Plotinus, Enneads, 1, 6, 6, and I, 4, 7.
8 Antioch II, Plates 71–73; catalogue of mosaics, 200–202.
9 Ibid., Plates 62–68; catalogue, 197–200.
10 On the meaning of ktisis, see a note by Kretschmer, P. in Glotta, III (1912), 316Google Scholar, and Downey, G., “Imperial Building Records in Malalas,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift, XXXVIII (1938), 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The stick which the figure of Ktisis in the mosaic is holding appears to be a weeder or hoe, which is an attribute of winter in a Roman mosaic found at St. Roman-en-Gal, near Vienne, in France, described by Webster, J. C., The Labors of the Months in Antique and Mediaeval Art (Princeton, 1938), 33Google Scholar. In a mosaic from Carthage, January bears a forked stick, and in a miniature in the Vatican, December holds the same emblem (Ibid., 22).
11 I, 93; I quote the translation of W. R. Paton in the Loeb Classical Library.
12 With the representations of the virtues and of the seasons, and their allegories, which are discussed here, it is of great interest to compare the similar representations in medieval art in the West, which are much more plentiful than those which have survived in the East. The western types have recently been made the subject of an important monograph by Katzenellenbogen, A., Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art (London, 1939.)Google Scholar There is a characteristic passage on the seasons of human life in Diogenes Laertius, VIII, 10.
13 Plotinus, , Enneads, IV, 3, 11–12, 30.Google Scholar See also Philo, , De virtutibus, 11–12.Google ScholarThe mosaic is illustrated in Antioch II, P1. 78, no. 100 B, and (in a larger plate) in Morey, , The Mosaics of Antioch, P1. XIIGoogle Scholar; it is now in Princetion.
14 “La mosaique du Phénix provenant des fouilles d'Antioche,” Monuments piot, XXXVI, 5 (1938), 24.Google Scholar The mosaic is illustrated in M. Lassus's article, in Antioch II, Pl. 43, and in Morey, , The Mosaics of Antioch, Pl. XXIV.Google Scholar
15 Boyce, G. C., “Medieval Intellectual History: Ecclesiastical or Secular!” in The Cultural Approach to History, ed. by Ware, Caroline F. (New York, 1940), 202–211.Google Scholar
16 I owe the phrase to Harold Mattingly in a recent letter.
17 An instructive study in this direction has lately been made by Nock, A. D., “Orphism or Popular Philosophy!” Harvard Theological Review, XXXIII (1940), 301–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A study of a somewhat similar topic by the present writer has appeared in a preceding issue of this journal, “The Pilgrim's Progress of the Byzantine Emperor,” Church History, IX (1940), 207–217.Google Scholar
18 Dixon, W. M., The Human Situation (New York, 1937), 389.Google Scholar
