4.1 Officials (and Others) on Their Christian Governance

Part of why historians of late ancient religion have yet to pursue this question in a systematic fashion is a problem of evidence. It is rare that we find sources like Probus’ epitaph that allow us to see officials discussing the relationship between Christian piety and political service. The usual protagonists of the Christianisation of the Roman world are well studied for a reason. What individual bishops and ascetics thought about the connection between piety and authority is the central theme of an enormous literature, lovingly preserved in the Middle Ages as the writings of authoritative Church Fathers. Investigations of their authority can take as a point of departure one of the many surviving lives of saints, monastic rules, and treatises on the episcopate. There is no equivalent tradition of Christian biographies about officials, except when they went on to positions of episcopal or ascetic authority.Footnote ¹⁵ Likewise, when officials theorise about government in surviving texts, they tend not to discuss their religious commitments. It is easy to see why, when pursuing the transformation of Roman thought about public office within the predominantly Christian aristocracy of the late fourth to sixth centuries, historians have tended to think about the appropriation of such values by clerics and ascetics.

It is rare that we can catch current imperial or royal officials talking at any length about how their Christian identities related to their office-holding. A notable exception is Magnus Felix Cassiodorus Senator – Cassiodorus for short – whose twelve-book Variae compiles letters he sent while serving as quaestor (507–11) and magister officiorum (523–27) in Ravenna for the Ostrogothic king Theoderic and his successor Athalaric, and praetorian prefect (533–38(?)) for Athalaric, Amalasuintha, Theodahad, and Witigis.Footnote ¹⁶ As will be discussed in Chapter 5, the letters from his time as prefect include a notably Christian and even ascetic conception of his official practice. Cassiodorus repeatedly compared his role in government to that of the Jewish patriarch and pharaonic official Joseph, advertised how he would act as ‘such a judge as the Catholic Church would send out as its son’, and rooted his ethical formation in reading of Scripture.Footnote ¹⁷ These statements (spread across various letters) could be combined to generate a cohesive Christian ethic of office-holding, which inspired Cassiodorus as he conducted governmental business in Ostrogothic Ravenna. Yet this would be to misconstrue not only their original context within specific administrative letters but also their preponderance within this collection of bureaucratic verbiage. For the most part, the letters of the Variae present a traditional sense of virtuous governance marked by occasional reference to God’s overarching power; indeed, Cassiodorus has rightly been used as a witness to sixth-century classicising ideals of office-holding.Footnote ¹⁸ His invocations of Christian cultural resources remain specific and situational. They refer mostly to his own practice, and many of the most striking formulations appear in letters to bishops. In this sense, Cassiodorus is representative of the complex cultural makeup of Christians in office in late antiquity more broadly.

Cassiodorus’ differing portrayals of his own authority act as a reminder that Christian formation was just one influence even on those who sought explicitly to combine Christian commitment with political careers. These were not general autobiographical statements but rhetorical representations designed for particular audiences and purposes. This partiality and intermittency does not negate the significance of Christian cultural frameworks and resources for their political conduct.Footnote ¹⁹ Abandoning a quest for the (implausibly) unified and consistent individual allows us to exploit a wider set of texts and objects to, for, and about imperial and royal officials in which investment in a Christian understanding of their authority can be detected.Footnote ²⁰ Current office-holders were involved in letter exchanges with bishops and ascetics: a context in which they were likely to see their religious identities as a subject for reflection and self-justification. For the most part we only get one side of the discussion, preserved as part of the literary corpus of those bishops and ascetics.Footnote ²¹ But in some cases, the official half of the conversation does survive with indications of their (sometimes idiosyncratic) sense of what they were doing as Christian rulers.Footnote ²² Facets of this self-portrayal can be captured in various objects produced on their behalf (sometimes known only through literary descriptions).Footnote ²³ They can also be explored through speech recorded in various sorts of text. These reports can be placed on a sliding scale of likely faithfulness to ipsissima verba or ‘real’ antecedent events: from the (supposedly) verbatim transcripts of conciliar acts,Footnote ²⁴ through letters reporting face-to-face meetings, to write-ups and imaginings in various forms of narrative. For the most part, such accounts must be treated as what the author imagined was the sort of thing an official might say. In some contexts, the form of the text, the position of the author, and the nature of the intended audience make it more likely that reported speech resembled an actual statement. The surviving evidence thus affords glimpses of officials construing their authority in decidedly Christian terms, sometimes within sources that they wrote or commissioned and in statements designed for contexts in which such claims would be welcomed.

The self-presentation of late ancient authority figures was both intended for, and normally mediated through, the perspectives of their subjects.Footnote ²⁵ It is thus both necessary and fruitful to draw on the much greater volume of texts written to, for, and about specific imperial and royal office-holders by clerics and ascetics. Officials were the recipients of letters and petitions sent by ecclesiastical correspondents (Section 4.2) and sometimes the similarly explicit addressee (or target) of sermons preached in their presence (Section 4.3). They also featured, if less prominently, as supporting characters in church histories (Section 4.4) and saints’ lives (Section 4.5). All these genres and situations could encourage Christian writers to reflect on the connection between an official’s religious identity and their political conduct. One recourse for the ascetically minded was to set state service and the character of named officials in opposition to Christian virtue. It is also possible to trace more positive ways of construing the relationship between piety and political service in all these genres. In each case, distinctive demands of audience and literary form led them to articulate how pious Christians might take part in earthly government. In this way, these texts can take us beyond what churchmen thought about Christian officials and towards what officials thought about themselves. Numerous studies have shown how clerics and ascetics wrote advice letters and sermons to appeal to aristocratic audiences.Footnote ²⁶ This concern is particularly apparent in letters and petitions addressed to officials, which had to present their authority in a way which they could accept, both out of the politeness expected in letter writing and because it was the best way for the petitioner to achieve their goal. But the position of officials as potential patrons and explicit addressees led Christian authors in all these genres to finesse or even spurn oppositional frameworks. These presentations of the compatibility of pious commitment and political service were not (always) a matter of strategic pandering; they may also have been part of how these authors genuinely understood the place of earthly administrators within the church. The recurring tropes, cultural resources, and intellectual positions visible across these different genres – in texts written across the Roman world over a period of two and a half centuries – suggest a late ancient Christian discourse of political service.

4.2 Letters

Late ancient bishops and monks sent letters to imperial and royal administrators. Many connected the character and duties of these officials to their Christian identities.Footnote ²⁷ Discussions that combine religious identity and office are present within a string of letter collections from across the Roman world from the mid-fourth to the early seventh century: those of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, Paulinus of Nola, Synesius of Cyrene (c. 370–413), Isidore of Pelusium (fl. 390s to c. 435/40), Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Severus of Antioch (c. 456–538), Fulgentius of Ruspe (c. 468–533), Ruricius of Limoges (fl. 485–507), Avitus of Vienne (fl. 494–518), Ferrandus of Carthage (fl. mid-510s to 540s), and Gregory the Great.Footnote ²⁸ They also feature in letters preserved in documentary collections rooted in ecclesiastical controversies and church councils (and, indeed, these two categories overlap).Footnote ²⁹ The relevant missives range from short calling cards to extended treatises.Footnote ³⁰ They include various of the major categories of traditional and more distinctively ecclesiastical epistula identified in ancient and modern theoretical accounts: not least, friendship letters, letters of recommendation, requests for specific acts of patronage, letters of consolation, and advice letters on issues of doctrine and practice.Footnote ³¹

The basic situation of these exchanges makes their discussions of Christian governance particularly useful. Letters could not simply present eloquent grandstanding on the ideal (or less than ideal) exercise of worldly power for readers within the author’s echo chamber (though fellow clerics and ascetics were undoubtedly also a principal audience). Rather, they were texts designed, in the first place, to be delivered for representatives of the state and those within their circles to hear and read. Surviving letters thus provide valuable traces of the connections between clerical or ascetic epistolographers and imperial or royal officials. They stem from situations that forced these Christian intellectuals to ground their political theology in the business of government. Above all, the delivery of letters to specific named officials gives them purchase on what was said and done within late ancient political institutions. Norms of epistolary politeness made it necessary for all but the most adventurous to discuss their addressees in a manner acceptable to them.Footnote ³² The common cultural understanding of the letter as a representation of elite friendship and community made the recipient’s perspective crucial. Concerns to establish ‘common ground’Footnote ³³ played a particular role when a gulf in social status separated author and recipient. The asymmetrical relationship between putative Christian advisors and their aristocratic patrons has been stressed by important recent studies of asceticism and the household. Excellent treatments have used these adaptations to reconstruct how elite men and women might have navigated the competing demands of Christian piety and the maintenance of an aristocratic domus.Footnote ³⁴ Missives sent by clerics and monks to elite men offer similar possibilities for the identification of their attitudes towards public office.

Far from pursuing novel approaches to letter writing, most Christian writers continued long-standing traditions of the letter as an expression of amicitia/philia.Footnote ³⁵ Many of the letters that ascetics and bishops sent to officials thus adopt what Bradley Storin has called the ‘standard mode of epistolary interaction with a government official’.Footnote ³⁶ Episcopal and ascetic petitioners accorded their addressees their appropriate titulature and praised them for possession of time-honoured virtues, with a special focus on whatever ideal attribute they hoped an office-holder would show on that particular occasion.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, letters sent by late fourth- and fifth-century Greek bishops and ascetics often addressed imperial officials without invoking a specifically Christian frame of reference, or limited such remarks to their own positioning with respect to the Christian God without making assumptions about whether their addressee would want Him involved. Such absences contrast with the attitudes these authors express in other genres.Footnote ³⁸ This conservatism makes sense in terms of the fundamental purpose of these texts as ‘performances tailored to encourage generosity and secure social connections’.Footnote ³⁹ It also likely stems from the authors’ own understanding of the relationship between worldly service and Christian piety. When writing in other genres, authors like Gregory of Nazianzus and Theodoret of Cyrrhus used these same models to construct various ideal forms of Christian lifestyle.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this context, it is not always helpful to differentiate too sharply between the cultural assumptions of sender and recipient. These letters’ recourse to traditional notions of legitimate political behaviour could be seen as a concession to the likely values of a particular official; they might also stem from the author’s understanding of the most fitting way for a Christian administrator to pursue virtue and even to serve God.Footnote ⁴¹

Conventional accounts of political virtue thus represented a basic starting point for bishops and monks when writing to imperial and royal officials. These tropes continue to feature when the likes of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus ventured into more distinctly Christian territory.Footnote ⁴² They remained a point of departure even for those Christian letter writers who were happier to risk offence. Brent Shaw has recently stressed Augustine’s divergence from the norm when addressing ‘Roman men of imperial power’ with ‘forthright statements … on the basis of his Christian duties and convictions’.Footnote ⁴³ Similar combinations of episcopal intercessions, confrontational stances, and distinctly Christian ethical demands can be seen in the letters of Gregory the Great (in the West) and Severus of Antioch (in the East).Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet even as Augustine and Gregory (in particular) emphasised the need for officials to rule as Christians, what that meant in practice often diverged little from standard political behaviour, except insofar as the latter was construed polemically as a form of injustice.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rather, a distinction between ‘Christian’ and ‘secular’ modes of action tended to be deployed in particular situations to justify prioritising the interests of the church – qua the author and his allies – over other considerations. Even as they downplayed the significance of worldly honours and dignities for a true Christian, Augustine, Severus, and Gregory nevertheless paid lip service to the usual forms: praise for the well-earned attainment of earthly power and distinction and recognition of the noble character traits which allowed them to use it for the common good.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even for the most confrontational epistolographers, serving the state as a Christian did not mean a fundamental reorientation of traditional ethical strictures.

Those letters that did put forward more radical propositions represent an exception that proves the rule. Men engaged in political careers were, on occasion, recipients of exhortations to give up their secular ambitions. Basil, Paulinus, Isidore, Augustine, Severus, Fulgentius, and Gregory the Great each rehearsed familiar arguments about the basic incompatibility of ‘service’ to state and church.Footnote ⁴⁷ Paulinus articulated the issue in particularly sharp terms when writing to try to persuade one Crispinianus that a political career was a bad idea; he reminded him that ‘as Scripture says, no-one should serve two masters’.Footnote ⁴⁸ But bishops and ascetics did not go around telling every Christian official they met that they had to hand in their belts of office.Footnote ⁴⁹ Despite the universalising framing of this advice, such missives were sent to carefully selected recipients at suitable times. They encouraged correspondents to abandon political careers while between official postings or, as in the case of another of Paulinus’ advisees, a young senatorial aristocrat named Licentius, when he had yet to enter service.Footnote ⁵⁰ In some cases, these elite men had already signalled an intention to make their period of retirement permanent.Footnote ⁵¹ Specific letters of Basil, Paulinus, and Gregory the Great are exceptional in confronting current soldiers and political appointees with the stark necessity of serving their sole true master.Footnote ⁵² Yet even these admonitions were guided by indications of their potential receptivity. Paulinus’ letter to Licentius came at the prompting of Augustine and the urging of his father, Romanianus, both of whom thought he could be persuaded to greater Christian commitment. While Paulinus set out the incommensurability of earthly and heavenly militia, he prudently foreswore his capacity to convince Licentius, drew attention to the potential offence he might cause, and leant conspicuously on the teachings and example of his correspondent’s (spiritual) father.Footnote ⁵³ As Jonathan Warner has shrewdly noted, Paulinus’ was determinedly vague on what exactly he was encouraging Licentius to do instead. His ‘opportunistic critiques’ sought ‘a reordering of priorities, not necessarily a career change’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this regard, Paulinus’ missives are representative of the much wider body of advice letters sent to serving officials by bishops and ascetics. However strongly these authors might stress the superiority of those who (like them) had abandoned the world, their efforts to persuade careerists to join them are imbued with a deep caution. Indeed, bishops could also seek to dissuade administrators from giving up office because they were too useful to the church in their worldly posting.Footnote ⁵⁵ Exhortations towards ascetic renunciation show the same concerns for timeliness and receptivity on the part of their official addressees evident in more conventional patronage and networking letters.

Prior knowledge of and contact with an addressee made it more likely that letter writers would bring distinctly Christian cultural frameworks to bear on office-holding. It is easy to be cynical about the extent to which most imperial and royal officials would have been concerned about living up to Christian moral standards in their public careers. A more nuanced picture emerges from surviving letter collections, which show bishops and ascetics answering requests from named officials for guidance on correct doctrine, practice, biblical exegesis, and moral dilemmas in both public and domestic life.Footnote ⁵⁶ Most striking are letters written by Augustine, Isidore, and Ferrandus in response to queries about how to be a good Christian while serving the state.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even without antecedent questions of this sort, the tone and argumentation of certain requests for official intercession suggests that the author felt able to take greater liberties in deploying Scriptural allusions and Christian moral frameworks. Studies of particular Christian authority figures have used dossiers of letters to specific officials to track the cultivation of closer relationships of patronage and friendship; we can sometimes use these letters (and texts outside the collection) to trace the real-world contacts upon which their rhetoric leant.Footnote ⁵⁸ When writing to these correspondents, bishops and ascetics felt more confident in discussing the connection between Christian commitment and service to the state.

Relatively few extant letters stemmed from a demonstrably familiar relationship with their recipients (however often their rhetorical framing claimed an idealised mutual connection).Footnote ⁵⁹ The generically formalised prose of serial petitions rarely gives a modern reader purchase on what a particular official would have thought (since the late ancient author does not seem to have been sure, either).Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet in terms of understanding shared cultural assumptions around religious identity and political service, the frequently impersonal quality of this polite discourse is an advantage rather than a defect. The recurring deployment of standard tropes gives a sense of what an author thought was a safe rhetorical recourse when writing to a Christian in service of the state. Reference to a more decisively Christian conception of office-holding was not simply for trusted correspondents. As Seraina Ruprecht has noted, epistolographers could extend the mutually beneficial relationship of reciprocity assumed by the letter exchange to include the Christian God.Footnote ⁶¹ In this context, the official recipient’s ideal exercise of earthly authority was overlaid by the workings of divine providence. Addressees were still given appropriate praise for their nobility, virtuous character, and attainment of office but also reminded that these were gifts from God, who would reward them for displaying these virtues, undertaking righteous actions, and supporting the church and orthodoxy (i.e. granting the author’s petition).Footnote ⁶² A standard invitation for an official to demonstrate their legitimate exercise of authority through the granting of a request thus became a chance to do so on specifically Christian terms. In this sense, even highly formulaic letters can help to reveal aspects of Christian thought that had become a standard part of the political culture(s) in which officials operated.

4.3 Sermons

Letters were not the only genre in which reflections on Christian governance could be addressed to a current official in person. Sermons afforded a similar opportunity to bishops and clerics, at least when these men deigned to turn up to their churches.Footnote ⁶³ The collections of various late ancient preachers preserve the text of sermons delivered in the presence of Christians who served the state. Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom, and Shenoute of Atripe (c. 350–466?!) explicitly mention the presence of specific officials or groups of dignitaries during individual discourses; Maximus of Turin implies something similar in a sermon responding to complaints about soldiers and administrators within his community.Footnote ⁶⁴ In major political centres, such an audience was unlikely to be a one-off. Controversies around the episcopal tenures of John and Nestorius in Constantinople provoked contemporaries to write about responses to their preaching from members of the palace and Senate.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is plausible that longer runs of extant sermons delivered by preachers in imperial, royal, and provincial capitals were heard by current, former, or future officials.Footnote ⁶⁶ But given the vagaries of church attendance, we cannot assume this without explicit indications in the text itself. The extant sermons of Peter Chrysologus, bishop of Ravenna (c. 426–50) are a case in point. On particular occasions, Peter discussed the moral demands placed by Scripture on those who served the state and used militia as a metaphor for vigilant dedication to Christ.Footnote ⁶⁷ These were very suitable themes for an audience of courtiers and bureaucrats in the western imperial capital; we know that Galla Placidia (c. 390–450) and Valentinian III occasionally went to Peter’s church.Footnote ⁶⁸ Late ancient preachers were apt to use metaphors from their congregants’ ordinary lives; alongside apostrophes of specific groups, these images have been central to debates around who went to church in this period.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet these topics cannot be taken as proof of the presence of imperial administrators, given both the ubiquity of this analogy in Christian discourse and the similar discussions of the ethics of governance in sermons delivered in urban centres with less significant populations of state functionaries. When all attendees shared the universal (and sometimes invasive) experience of imperial governance,Footnote ⁷⁰ references to the moral duties and failings of governors, soldiers, and tax collectors did not necessarily indicate a specific audience. In any case, it is unlikely that the presence of officials provoked clerics to harp on this theme every time they ascended the bēma. As with letter collections, these texts preserve a particular rhetorical performance, which is often the only remaining trace of wider interactions between clerics and official(s), which must be combed for signs of the occasion of delivery and of interactions outside of this particular exchange.Footnote ⁷¹ In several surviving sermons, preachers show good reason to offer comments on the place of imperial governance within God’s providential ordering of the world. The theme was provoked by an incident that called into question the relationship between the cleric’s community and the imperial state.Footnote ⁷² Whether or not they were representative of what officials normally heard in church, the attested or likely presence of current, former, or future imperial or royal officials makes certain sermons particularly valuable. They provide indications of how the authority of state agents was represented to their Christian subjects, and those courtiers, governors, and administrators were provoked to think about their Christian identities and their conduct of office.

Whether or not officials were in the room, preserved sermons are remarkably consistent in arguing that those in imperial service could both govern well and demonstrate Christian piety. Gregory, Ambrose, Maximus, Augustine, Nestorius, Peter – and even John Chrysostom when the mood took him – all argued that officials could be pious Christians.Footnote ⁷³ When their sermons discuss the duties of those involved in secular government, these clerics developed similar themes to those in extant letters. They stress the necessity of basic principles of political virtue: not least, the avoidance of corruption and the prevention of injustice. At the same time, these transcripts show significant divergences from the polite and culturally sensitive approaches evident in epistolary exchanges. The essential purpose of the sermon genre and situation as a vehicle of instruction and biblical explanation led preachers to adopt a more consistently Christian and Scriptural frame of reference for the legitimate exercise of power.Footnote ⁷⁴ Surviving texts connect the good practice of state agents to biblical passages, images, and personalities and distinctively Christian doctrinal and ethical standards. Future salvation is presented as a prime consideration for these soldiers, tax collectors, judges, and courtiers. In their petitions, clerics and monks could suggest that the pursuit or attainment of Christian piety made officials better at ruling;Footnote ⁷⁵ here, political virtue is a means to be a better Christian. Above all, clerics diverge from their own epistolary practice by subjecting officials to moral admonition. This is not the panegyrical best of all possible worlds: the stereotypical ethical failings of state agents are frequently invoked. Such sermons portray virtue and piety not as a given but something that officials (like all Christians) had to strive to achieve.Footnote ⁷⁶ Preachers assume that the officials in their churches should accept the significance of a Christian cultural framework, membership of the church, and the pastoral authority of the cleric for their political conduct.

The portrayal of virtue as a possible, but not necessary, characteristic of Christian officials is a recurring feature. In articulating this position, preachers carved out a neat compromise between competing expectations. Normative aspects of the sermon as genre and event made demands for cultural common ground and polite deference less urgent (and potentially inappropriate). This was a form of rhetorical performance sharply distinguished from secular eloquence (at least in theory).Footnote ⁷⁷ Still, preachers could not ignore the preferences of the powerful when delivering sermons. Recent work on late fourth- and fifth-century Constantinople (in particular) has stressed the importance of the approval of the palace and patronage of the senatorial elite for bishops in a context of ecclesiastical competition. As Peter Van Nuffelen has persuasively argued, preaching was one way in which clerics in the Eastern imperial capital sought the favour of the powerful.Footnote ⁷⁸ John Chrysostom’s abrasive denunciations of the lifestyles of the elite in his sermons played a significant role in his eventual fall; one target of his admonition was the senatorial pursuit of honour and self-enrichment in office.Footnote ⁷⁹ At the same time, the pastoral grandstanding of other surviving texts may have seemed less confrontational to the audience in the room than it does on the page of a modern edition.Footnote ⁸⁰ The uncompromising tone of (for example) Gregory of Nazianzus’ remarks to Julian and Olympius in his church is misleading if, as Susan Holman and Neil McLynn have persuasively suggested, the tax adjuster and governor had worked with Gregory in advance to stage manage their visits.Footnote ⁸¹ When addressed to specific, named attendees, these admonitions can sometimes approach the panegyrical qualities evident in epistolary prose, as with Shenoute’s praise of the dux Thebaidis Flavianus during his visit to the White Monastery.Footnote ⁸² For all his self-portrayal as a fearless parrhesiast, Shenoute is remarkably conventional in his approach. Rather like the Gallic orators of the Panegyrici Latini, the abbot encouraged the military governor to show particular qualities and develop a specific sort of relationship with his provincial subjects by suggesting that he had already done so.Footnote ⁸³ Such praise is rare in extant sermons to officials; given the dangers of causing offence to the powerful, it may have been more prevalent than surviving collections suggest, not least in major political centres.

The sort of direct praise for innate virtue that Shenoute provided to Flavian may be underrepresented in surviving collections. Alternatively, officials may have learned not to expect outright deference in a public basilica. Preachers had to balance the interests of these powerful constituents against the expectations of the other Christians who turned up to their churches. Blatant kowtowing to visiting representatives of imperial power would undermine the image of searching moral scrutiny that many bishops sought to present in their preaching. It may also have sat uneasily with the views of worldly political institutions held by more regular attendees. When Maximus and Augustine discussed the potential for state agents to be good Christians, they did so in direct response to criticisms of secular authority that they attributed to their congregations.Footnote ⁸⁴ As Éric Rebillard has stressed, we cannot know if members of their churches really voiced such concerns, but they must, at the very least, have been plausible enough for the bishop to feel they required addressing.Footnote ⁸⁵ Both preachers give space to but ultimately reject the notion that the imperial state was inherently corrupt and political actors beyond redemption. For Augustine, challenging this cynicism was necessary as a response to subversive political acts: calls to destroy pagan statues, the murder of one imperial official, and demonstrations against another’s suspiciously timed conversion.Footnote ⁸⁶ Vindicating the legitimate authority and potential Christian piety of those who served the state was thus part of the bishop’s role as ‘controller of crowds’ (in the words of Peter Brown): an intermediary whose clout with the authorities rested on a capacity to keep a lid on the violent energies of the Christian ‘masses’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Bishops sought to direct enthusiasm for more radical features of the Christian cultural inheritance into less subversive channels.Footnote ⁸⁸ Given their own entanglement with worldly political institutions, networks, and processes, bishops were unlikely to amplify the view that (to borrow a contemporary phrase) all officials were bastards. At the same time, preserving their own authority over their communities may have required bishops not to let Christian officials off the hook.

Preachers frequently articulated an essentially pastoral view of the possibility that those who served the state could be good Christians. In this sense, sermons to and about imperial and royal officials reflect a central function of this genre. Recent studies have repeatedly (and rightly) emphasised that late ancient sermons show clerics trying to build communities out of the disparate people who happened to come to their church on a given day.Footnote ⁸⁹ Whether they were a named audience or an implicit presence, a specific individual or a generic point of reference, preachers attempted to integrate those who served the state into their church.Footnote ⁹⁰ They reminded named individuals that they, like the rest of those present, were members of the church, whether they belonged to that particular church or to the universal ecclesia of which it was a constituent part. Preachers were also apt to include officials within capacious visions of the various walks of life that made up the Christian community.Footnote ⁹¹ As Nestorius put it in a sermon whose favourable reception in the palace he himself trumpeted:

Courtiers, governors, tax collectors, and soldiers could be included amongst the social groups upon whom membership of the church placed distinct demands. All these sorts of people were called to do good; all had ways they could achieve piety; all had models in Scripture that they might follow. This sort of pastoral perspective features elsewhere – not least, in advice letters – but the communal context of the sermon makes it a marked feature of depictions of Christian officials in that genre. Even when officials were not (necessarily) listening in, these preachers had good reasons to stress both the ethical demands upon those who served the state and the potential that they could be good Christians.

4.4 Church Histories

Letters and orations were genres specifically directed to current officials. Other forms of late ancient Christian literature were less focused on their experiences and less likely to centre their perspectives. Church histories tended to close off the possibilities of pious governance highlighted in direct political communication.Footnote ⁹³ Imperial and royal officials were not the focus of the histories of Eusebius, Rufinus, Philostorgius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, Zachariah Rhetor, Theodore Lector, or Evagrius. They were not amongst the protagonists named in the prefaces and provided extended treatment within the text. Subordinate political actors were largely redundant in narratives of good (orthodox) or bad (pagan or heretical) emperors supporting or harming those bishops and monks who championed a predetermined orthodoxy.Footnote ⁹⁴ Under good Christian rulers, there was not much point including them, insofar as the decisions taken by Constantine, or Theodosius I, or Theodosius II to back the true church constituted sufficient narrative explanation; the reader did not need to see an imperial agent implementing these self-evidently positive orders. In fact, depictions of subordinates influencing or enforcing the decisions would obscure the historian’s efforts to delineate the correct relationship between emperor and priests. Church histories thus often cut out the middlemen to portray unmediated contact between churchmen and emperors.Footnote ⁹⁵ In any case, periods of good governance of the church under orthodox emperors were exceptional within texts that remained, to a remarkable degree, histories of persecution, even after Constantine.Footnote ⁹⁶ When officials appear, they are usually represented according to the classic tropes of the persecuting agent of the Roman state.Footnote ⁹⁷ Such a depiction was generally less about these individuals than it was an indictment of the emperors who appointed and commanded them.Footnote ⁹⁸ These histories’ sense of doctrinal and moral closure blocked off opportunities to depict the salutary agency of imperial officials. If orthodoxy was already decided – as, too, the position of rulers and key bishops with respect to it – there was no space for officials to intervene on its behalf.

Pious political servants did not have an obvious place in narratives driven by conflict between persecuting authorities and persecuted Christians.Footnote ⁹⁹ The imperial officials who become the centre of attention (and sometimes receive positive write-ups) in late ancient church histories are those who resist heretical or pagan rulers. The most straightforwardly praiseworthy were official martyrs and confessors. Church historians from Eusebius onwards portrayed (orthodox) Christians in service of pagan or heretical rulers giving up their belts of office and/or suffering torture and execution for their faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Such choices did not directly implicate their agency on behalf of the state; in fact, it involved them giving up that position (and, in some cases, incurring death) to prioritise their devotion to the Christian God. Church historians nevertheless often used such moments as an opportunity to suggest that these confessors and martyrs were especially effective and valued administrators.Footnote ¹⁰¹ More ambivalent praise was also directed to other individuals who refused to carry out orders by emperors viewed by the authors as heterodox tyrants: Julian, Valens, and Marcian. The value of these acts of insubordination was complicated by the fact that the conscientious objectors were often themselves pagans or heretics.Footnote ¹⁰² Their salutary refusal could likewise be portrayed as a form of confession; an act of parrhēsia before a violent tyrant.Footnote ¹⁰³ It could also simply be seen as a pragmatic prioritising of peace and order unrelated to religious identities or ethical scruples. Socrates, in particular, would emphasise the superficial benefits of this pragmatism: for example, orthodox clerics not punished in public but murdered in private or in exile.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Reluctance to punish could even be portrayed as a form of persecution in itself, as it denied Christians the chance to become martyrs.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Within the continuing oppositional model of church histories, imperial officials were for the most part good when they refused to do their jobs. The possibilities of being both a pious Christian and a good political servant were alluded to but fell outside the parameters of the narrative.

These portrayals of persecutors and refuseniks suggest the broad brushstrokes with which church historians generally depicted officials. Imperial or royal agents were normally introduced because they were useful for the stories the historian wanted to tell and the argument that he sought to advance. In that sense they are like the imperial women recently discussed by Julia Hillner: another group who were not the main characters of these church histories and thus cast light on the real protagonists.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The likes of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret do not give a sense of the collaboration between churchmen and the imperial administration in the definition of correct doctrine. These historians do not portray the role of officials within these intricate negotiations, nor do they reproduce the documentary evidence that substantiates their roles as mediators and targets of ecclesiastical lobbying.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Such omissions are most startling in the case of Theodoret, whose letters show him actively pursuing these strategies of persuasion in the very period in which he seems to have written his Church History.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ One exception to this rule is the history written by the anti-Chalcedonian lawyer Zachariah Rhetor in Constantinople c. 492–95.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Syriac epitome of this Greek text (known as Ps.-Zachariah for convenience) preserves a series of episodes where imperial agents were sent from Constantinople to Alexandria to try to reconcile its warring church factions. In these sections, the history takes the official mission as its basic narrative unit, recounting the work of John, Pergamius, Cosmas, and Arsenius from their departure from the imperial city, through meetings with key stakeholders, to their debrief on their return to the palace.Footnote ¹¹⁰ These accounts provide a vivid sense of their agency on the ground and praise for their ‘astute’ or ‘prudent’ arbitration of these church disputes.Footnote ¹¹¹ Zachariah’s willingness to show the work that went into securing consensus likely stemmed from his own support of a moderate anti-Chalcedonian interpretation of the Henotikon: a formulation of orthodoxy rooted in compromise. In a forthcoming paper, I argue that the likely sources for his accounts were the officials’ own reports on their missions.Footnote ¹¹² Zachariah recast their attention to bureaucratic procedure as an ideal form of official conduct in church politics.

It is not a coincidence that Zachariah’s Church History is the sole surviving example of the genre explicitly addressed to a current imperial official. The preface claims he wrote the history at the behest of Eupraxius, a chamberlain in the palace of Anastasius and prominent patron of the anti-Chalcedonian church faction.Footnote ¹¹³ Geoffrey Greatrex and Philippe Blaudeau have persuasively argued that the text was meant to convince the emperor and his functionaries that Zachariah’s favoured interpretation of the Henotikon should be orthodoxy.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Earlier church histories did not have such a direct official addressee. The likely or named dedicatees of Eusebius, Rufinus, Socrates, and Theodoret’s histories were all clerics.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Nevertheless, these previous texts were likely also read by former, current, or future officials. Sozomen’s (possibly unfinished) Church History was dedicated to the empress Pulcheria and likely intended to solicit imperial patronage and office; at the very least, it was meant to be read in the palace.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Other church histories indicate potential official sources and audiences. Rufinus and Socrates provide positive pen portraits of current and former officials: the former magister memoriae Benevolus and the comes domesticorum Bacurius (for Rufinus), and the former praetorian prefect Anthemius, his advisor Troilus, and the officials-turned-Nicene or Novatian bishops Nectarius, Chrysanthus, and Thalassius (for Socrates). Several of these individuals were within the social networks of the authors and thus plausibly amongst their intended readers.Footnote ¹¹⁷ If so, as with letters, this direct contact led to panegyrical prose, although one tending to a much more banal presentation of virtue – and one largely outside the flow of events in the history.Footnote ¹¹⁸ These character summaries suggest how the church historian might envisage the virtuous behaviour of committed Christians in government. So, when Rufinus refers to Bacurius as his source for the conversion of the Georgians, he describes him as ‘most faithful’ and an individual ‘whose greatest concern was religion and truth’; in his account of the Battle of the Frigidus, the comes domesticorum returns as ‘a man distinguished in faith, piety, and strength of mind and body, who deserved to be a companion and ally (comes et socius) of Theodosius’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This sense of Christian commitment as a qualification for office parallels Rufinus’ treatment of official martyrs. Socrates implies a similar perspective when ending his work on the decision of the former praetorian prefect of Illyricum Thalassius to spurn imperial employment to become bishop of Caesarea.Footnote ¹²⁰ In the age of Theodosius II, the traits required by imperial and ecclesiastical office-holders had apparently converged. Yet these are small glimpses of pious Christian governance. The contrast is most marked in Theodoret, whose History shows no trace of the rhetoric of providential service that shapes his letters to high officials. As Peter Van Nuffelen has recently stressed, it is important not to treat the narratives of church histories as straightforward indices of the ‘views’ of their authors.Footnote ¹²¹ The shape and purposes of these texts could only accommodate certain aspects of contemporary thought about Christianity and office-holding. Even within these narratives of conflict, there remain glimpses of their compatibility.

4.5 Saints’ Lives

The many forms of hagiographical literature produced in late antiquity tend to present a similarly oppositional model of the relationship between Christian piety and the imperial state. The purposes and audiences of these accounts of the lives of saints made them less than amenable to traditional claims of virtuous aristocratic behaviour, whether in household, city, or in service of the state.Footnote ¹²² This opposition begins early, with the hagiographers’ descriptions of the saint’s upbringing and activities prior to their adoption of an ascetic lifestyle or appointment to episcopal office. Again and again, these Lives start by airing (and dismissing) the worldly status and career of their subjects, which paled beside their dedication to Christ. Where appropriate, these recurrent plays on earthly and heavenly militia included the saint’s renunciation of imperial or royal office.Footnote ¹²³ This sense of the incompatibility of political service and Christian commitment is also evident in a standard episode repeated across numerous Lives. In these stories, the saint triumphs over violent, corrupt, or demonically inspired officials, whether through miraculous or more mundane means.Footnote ¹²⁴ As in contemporary ecclesiastical histories, the authors of saints’ lives moulded their representatives of imperial or royal authority to discourses of persecution, as ‘secular’ antagonists irrationally hostile to the sanctified power of the protagonist.Footnote ¹²⁵ These exemplars of the world rejected their intercessions, mocked their pretensions to holiness, and did violence to them, their monastic or ecclesiastical allies, and the subjects over whom they claimed the responsibility of protection. Of course, these chamberlains, governors, counts, and generals normally receive their comeuppance, often through a marvellous occurrence explicable only with recourse to the miraculous capabilities of the individual whom they had scorned. They are forced to recognise the power of the saint and, if they are lucky, show appropriate contrition before it is too late. The staging of episcopal and ascetic authority in these texts benefited from secular antagonists. Partly as a result, these Lives explored a spectrum of negative associations for the state: from an unsuitable place for a good Christian to a location of actively villainous and even demonic conduct.

This basic opposition between worldly and heavenly service permeates hagiographical literature. Yet it was not the only approach that these texts took to imperial or royal office-holding.Footnote ¹²⁶ Central concerns on the part of their authors also required more neutral and even positive presentations of administrative conduct and its potential compatibility with Christian piety. Biographers of holy people who had embarked upon asceticism from childhood or adolescence could straightforwardly dismiss the concerns of ‘the world’; the past careers of saints who had served the state required more finesse.Footnote ¹²⁷ Certain Lives come remarkably close to an apology for their conduct in office, whose significance in the evaluation of their character could not entirely be firewalled. It was not simply that these individuals were able to govern virtuously before the call of the desert or episcopate became too strong. The Lives of Martin of Tours, Ambrose of Milan, and Epiphanius of Pavia make the claim that their subjects were able to act like bishops or monks while governors or soldiers.Footnote ¹²⁸ This premise worked both ways: bishops and abbots could also be praised for bringing skill sets from their past career into the service of urban communities and monastic institutions.Footnote ¹²⁹ The past of their subjects and the character of their episcopal and ascetic duties meant that hagiographers could not entirely write off militia saeculi.

These saints were not the only individuals treated to more optimistic accounts of Christian political service. Similarly positive write-ups were accorded to the contingent of current and former officials who gain walk-on parts. These dignitaries appear in various capacities.Footnote ¹³⁰ When holy people seek to secure imperial or royal interventions, pious Christian officials appear as intermediaries who recognise their sanctity and help them to achieve their goals. It is in such moments that their combination of Christian piety and administrative acumen is most germane to the hagiographer’s discussion.Footnote ¹³¹ Such grandees also appear in a less public capacity, seeking the advice, blessings, and healing powers of holy people and giving them land and moveable wealth.Footnote ¹³² Even these more domestic scenarios can lead hagiographers to comment on the virtues of these individuals both as Christians and in their public careers.Footnote ¹³³

Such praise was, in part, an attempt to lend credence to their recognition of the remarkable virtues of the holy person: the central case that these texts sought to make.Footnote ¹³⁴ It was also a matter of polite discourse in the context of a (potentially ongoing) patronage relationship. Numerous studies have used these episodes to reconstruct the networks of aristocratic patrons upon whom these bishops and ascetics could draw during their lifetimes.Footnote ¹³⁵ In many cases, it seems plausible that these textual accounts were themselves an attempt to continue such relationships and encourage others to emulate them by supporting the communities and institutions that bishops and monastic founders had left behind. Certain hagiographical texts were written specifically for current officials, as with the Lausiac History of Palladius of Helenopolis (c. 362–420), dedicated to Lausus, the chamberlain of Theodosius II.Footnote ¹³⁶ In similar terms, Meaghan McEvoy has recently suggested that the Life of Daniel the Stylite was written, in part, to invite continued patronage for Daniel’s community from the Constantinopolitan power elite.Footnote ¹³⁷ Other Lives were likewise bound up in networks of current and former imperial officials and invested in the cultural capital of political institutions.Footnote ¹³⁸ The Life of Ambrose, Sulpicius Severus’ Dialogues, and the Life of Caesarius of Arles explicitly refer to particular officials as the eyewitnesses for specific stories; the Dialogues even included two senatorial aristocrats as characters who joined Severus and his companions to hear stories of Martin’s sanctity.Footnote ¹³⁹ It is plausible that other individuals listed as patrons, intermediaries, and recipients of healing in these lives were in fact the sources for these miraculous accounts and envisaged as potential audiences for these works. These continuing ties to the world of public power may have been part of what made some saints’ lives remarkably amenable to claims of Christian piety in government.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Conclusion

There is no one single genre of writing (or tradition of official biography) that allows us access to the religious identities of officials and contemporary thought about its implications for their governance. Those who served the state could not always count on the imaginative sympathy of their contemporaries; in some genres, they tend to have little more than walk-on parts. It is exceedingly rare that we can reconstruct the individual perspective of a single office-holder. Chapter 5 is necessarily based on brief references to specific individuals and comments on what represented virtuous practice and legitimate Christian exercise of office across disparate forms of literature and material culture. The fragmentary character of this evidence requires a wide-angle lens: an approach justified by indications of common ways of thinking and talking about the Christian identities of state actors throughout the late fourth to late sixth centuries and across the Roman world. It is my contention that these sources reflect, and can allow us to reconstruct, a late ancient discourse around Christian political service that had real purchase on the practice of governance and the culture of political institutions in this period. Some texts and objects provide us relatively unmediated evidence for how office-holders presented their religious identities (at least on specific occasions). Otherwise, we must (of necessity) work with literary depictions of officials and political service by other Christians: most notably, letter writers, preachers, ecclesiastical historians, and hagiographers. Their versions of imperial and royal officials of course stemmed, in the first place, from their own political thinking and, perhaps even before that, the rhetorical and literary needs of the text they were writing. Yet texts in all these genres show a significant and sometimes surprising need to appeal to the interests of those officials who represented their intended or potential audiences. Even when these writers are more divorced from their official subjects, such positive accounts of Christian governance can be useful, insofar as they suggest authorial assumptions regarding how those who served the state might wish their agency to be depicted. It is these common expectations regarding the character of Christian political service that Chapter 5 seeks to reconstruct.

5.1 ‘It Is Not a Sin to Be in Service’

At some point in the first decades of the fifth century, Maximus, bishop of Turin, had cause to rebuke certain members of his congregation.Footnote ²⁰ The Gospel reading that Sunday was a pointed choice: the baptism of tax collectors and soldiers by John the Baptist (Luke 3:12–14).Footnote ²¹ The opening words of this (characteristically punchy) homily got straight to business.Footnote ²²

Maximus went on to elaborate the sins committed by these soldiers and imperial officials. They engaged in murder and various methods of self-enrichment, which the preacher characterised as ‘pillaging’ (praeda): forced requisitioning, excessive tax collection, confiscation of bequests, exploitation of widows, and the sale of justice.Footnote ²⁴ These manifold forms of corruption were all, of course, classic criticisms of the practices of soldiers, tax collectors, and judges.Footnote ²⁵ They were also the types of activities cited by ascetic experts as examples of the sinful behaviour required of those who served the state. The normalisation of such sharp practice led these authors to stress the necessity of quitting that career path and provoked fourth-, fifth- and sixth-century church councils to disqualify former officials from the priesthood.Footnote ²⁶ This basic contrast between Christian morality and sharp official practice has been appealing to modern observers, too. For Ramsey MacMullen, Maximus’ sermon was a key proof text for the assertion that ‘in the eyes of the western church, militia and morality were radically incompatible’.Footnote ²⁷

Certainly, Maximus directs considerable opprobrium at these local ‘shake down’ artists (in MacMullen’s words), of a sort that might make us doubt whether they were present in the basilica or simply conjured by the brilliant rhetoric of the preacher.Footnote ²⁸ Yet the point that Maximus wished to make was diametrically opposed to that which MacMullen intuited. In his sermon, the bishop seeks precisely to defend the possibility that Christians could engage in political service on ethical terms, as against the laissez-faire nihilism of these unnamed congregants. ‘For serving is not a crime, but serving so you can pillage is a sin; nor is governing the commonwealth a criminal offence, but to administer the commonwealth so that you might increase your private property is considered worthy of condemnation.’Footnote ²⁹ If corruption was put aside, agents of empire could be good Christians (and vice versa). Indeed, Maximus explicitly rejects the notion of ‘two ethics’ that MacMullen read into his text, but which is in fact attributed by the preacher to the corrupt officials whom he critiqued.Footnote ³⁰ The bishop of Turin suggested that those accused of such crimes were accustomed to say, ‘what could I have done as a man of the world and a soldier (homo saecularis aut miles)? Did I make a vow as a monk or a cleric?’Footnote ³¹ This rather devious appropriation of ascetic norms of perfection is given short shrift. ‘A rule of life is prescribed by the Holy Scriptures for all positions, and every sex, age, and dignity is called to do good.’Footnote ³² Any imperial servants listening in the nave were pointed towards key New Testament passages on the ethics of governance. Contemporary Christian tax collectors were given divine sanction so long as they followed John the Baptist’s instruction to their Gospel predecessors: ‘exact no more than has been determined for you’ (Luke 3:13).Footnote ³³ The legitimacy of such demands could also be justified through Jesus’s own famous response regarding tax collection (more often taken as a wider statement on the appropriate position of his followers towards Roman rule in general): ‘render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s’ (Matt. 22:21; also Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25).Footnote ³⁴ Like the soldiers baptised by John the Baptist, Maximus’ targets were not to seek their own gain, nor employ violence to do so: ‘do not intimidate anyone, or injure anyone, but be content with your pay’ (Luke 3:14).Footnote ³⁵ The bishop of Turin makes the latter a ruling applicable to all who served in the world, including civil officials (and even clerics).Footnote ³⁶ Like many of his contemporaries, Maximus reproached what he saw as a cynical moral compartmentalisation amongst the laity who attended his church.Footnote ³⁷ That laxity compelled him to articulate the capacity – indeed, the necessity – for Christians in political service to conform to traditional norms of virtuous political behaviour.

Maximus was far from alone in seeking to establish the parameters of Christian political service. Numerous late ancient Christian writers pursued similar arguments, often in response to the questions, doubts, and critiques of current, former, and prospective imperial officials. These requests could come from a place of aspiration, as when the generals Boniface and Reginus received advice from Augustine of Hippo and Ferrandus of Carthage on how to be good Christians while occupied by military command.Footnote ³⁸ They could be the product of perplexity, as when the governors Macedonius and Ausonius Dionysius sought clarification on the import of particular moral imperatives and Scriptural passages for their official duties.Footnote ³⁹ They also resulted from less sympathetic inquiries, as when the former proconsul of Africa, Volusianus, posed to Augustine the problem of how the pacific ethical demands made in the New Testament could be squared with ‘the customs of the commonwealth’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Of course, late ancient clerics and ascetics did not require such invitations to assert and formulate the compatibility of Christianity and political service (and often in direct contact with those in imperial or royal administration). Their justifications deployed the same central strategies as Maximus in his shadow boxing with the bad actors apparently terrorising his community. They rooted their accounts of how good Christians could serve the state in the same accommodationist Scriptural passages used by Maximus (alongside other classic proof-texts).Footnote ⁴¹ They deployed a pastoral understanding of the different ‘gifts’ given to the various constituencies within the church. Above all, they tackled those aspects of contemporary governance that were seen as particularly problematic for a committed Christian: most notably, the use of violence and the potential to practise, or be complicit in, corruption. As in Maximus’ sermon, the Christian ethical orientation of the administrator was precisely what should ensure they avoided these excesses, suppressed their self-interest, and picked the most appropriate course of action in whatever situation they were placed.Footnote ⁴² The continuing pursuit of piety, far from requiring Christians to give up the state, could be seen as what would allow them both to overcome these threats to their self-control and ethical orientation, and to act as good rulers, colleagues, and subordinates.

These problematic practices were deflected in differing ways. Corruption was, at least discursively, the easier problem. Christian officials could simply be told to pass over opportunities for self-enrichment.Footnote ⁴³ A particularly neat example comes in the postscript to Quodvultdeus’ Book on the Promises and Predictions of God (c. 445–52), in which the exiled bishop of Carthage took it upon himself to counsel the elite Christian youth of Italy and North Africa.Footnote ⁴⁴ Quodvultdeus deprecates various traditional aristocratic pastimes, but the only group whom he does not suggest have to give up their favoured activity for the contemplation of Scripture are those who ‘play at governing the commonwealth in this age’. Instead, they were to ‘conquer the avarice which is the root of all evil (1 Tim 6:10)’, on the model of those proconsuls of Africa whose names were still cheered by the people when their names were read out from the diptychs each year in Carthage.Footnote ⁴⁵ The list of those reminded to be ‘content with your pay’ (in the words ascribed to John the Baptist) in late antiquity is an impressive one: the tax assessor Julian (by Gregory of Nazianus); the comes Africae Boniface (by Augustine of Hippo); the dux Reginus (by Ferrandus of Carthage); ‘the purse-watching set’ (to meros tōn balantioskopōn) amongst the Christian elite of Constantinople (by John Chrysostom); and the Ravenna congregation of Peter Chrysologus (potentially stacked with visitors from the imperial palace).Footnote ⁴⁶ These blanket admonitions against corruption and favouritism were likely easier to implement in theory than in practice, given the routine use of cash payments and patronage networks within the late Roman bureaucracy and even by bishops and ascetics seeking to secure favourable treatment.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is likely that some would have taken the invocation to ‘be content with your pay’ to include such sportulae.Footnote ⁴⁸ When justifying the capacity of good Christians to serve the state, Christian writers could align with wider societal critiques of these practices by detaching them from what was necessary (as opposed to simply prevalent) in administration.

The necessary role of violence in all aspects of imperial governance made it a trickier proposition.Footnote ⁴⁹ The commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ had been taken by Julian as just cause not to appoint Christians to governorships.Footnote ⁵⁰ Parallel injunctions set out by Paul in his Letter to the Romans and by John the Baptist (before he was approached by the tax collectors) were cited by Volusianus as cause for concern, in an objection passed on to Augustine by their mutual friend, the tribunus et notarius Fl. Marcellinus.

Marcellinus interpreted Volusianus’ qualms as part of a wider sense, common in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome of 410, that the abandonment of traditional religion and adoption of Christian observances had fatally weakened the Roman empire.Footnote ⁵² They could just as equally be taken as an indication that the former proconsul could not pursue Christian commitment (as Augustine wished),Footnote ⁵³ since good Christians could not be good Roman officials. The difficulties that this objection posed are obvious from Augustine’s lengthy and carefully argued rebuttal, which has been read closely and often, not least because it acts as a sneak preview of the City of God.Footnote ⁵⁴ The bishop of Hippo uses some nifty rhetorical footwork to domesticate Volusianus’ self-denying Christian mercy as a functional equivalent of classical clemency.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a passage much cited by modern theorists of just war, Augustine justifies a Christian recourse to violence by relating Volusianus’ pacific New Testament citations to an imperial official’s intentions and not his actions.Footnote ⁵⁶

This defence of the congruence of Christian ethics with the necessities of Roman imperialism salvages the possibility of a conscientious Christian acting as an effective administrator. At the same time, it lays bare the basic limitations on how far – at least to Augustine’s mind – virtuous Christians could be good officials (and vice versa).Footnote ⁵⁸ These limits are set out explicitly in an extended counterfactual in which Augustine imagined the conditions necessary for the empire to run on Scriptural lines.

Augustine could imagine a way to a society in which imperial officials governed in wholly Christian terms. But – like the interlocutor of the old joke about asking directions – he would not have advised starting from here.

In discussions of the Christian ethics of state violence in late antiquity (and modernity), Augustine’s thinking has tended to hold the field. But the rationales that the bishop of Hippo adopted have clear parallels in the texts written to and about imperial officials by other late ancient clerics and ascetics. These justifications have been the subject of numerous close readings as part of an overriding concern amongst scholars of late antiquity to understand a more sharply focused question: how the practitioners of a supposedly ‘tolerant’ religion legitimised religious coercion after the conversion of Constantine.Footnote ⁶⁰ Violence carried out by agents of the imperial state could be justified as an instrument of the divinely sanctioned ordering of society.Footnote ⁶¹ Augustine and Jerome went so far as to state explicitly that the sixth commandment did not apply to the execution of criminals.Footnote ⁶² Actions that involved inflicting physical harm on others could be couched in social metaphors (already present in Scripture), which transplanted them into safer discursive territory: a father’s discipline of his children, a teacher’s correction of his students, or a doctor healing his patient. As acute studies of Augustine’s writings have demonstrated, such metaphors shifted the moral focus of these scenarios from the violent act to the benefit it provided to society and even, in some cases, to those who received it.Footnote ⁶³ In this context, it was the responsibility of a judge to adopt an appropriate severity to deter criminal behaviour. Basil of Caesarea, Isidore of Pelusium, Shenoute of Atripe, and Dioscorus of Aphrodito each praised civilian and military governors for averting the oppression of the poor by striking fear into the hearts of potential wrongdoers.Footnote ⁶⁴ These authors could also lean on the same injunctions towards mercy and mildness whose precise application Augustine’s correspondents queried.Footnote ⁶⁵ But such virtues were not consistently prioritised by clerical and ascetic petitioners, for the simple reason that the path of forgiveness and leniency was not always the course that they wished their correspondents to pursue in a specific case.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even in generic advice, they were often balanced by reminders of the social utility of (the fear of) punishment.Footnote ⁶⁷ Recourse to violence could be cast in terms that made it part of an official’s service, not only to the commonwealth but also to God.

Augustine’s pragmatism regarding what could be achieved by Christian administrators operating ‘in this world’ was likewise shared by his contemporaries. Their sense of political service as a potential context for ethical conduct was rooted in a pastoral vision of what God required from Christians.Footnote ⁶⁸ On various occasions, bishops and monks told political servants seeking advice that they must simply serve God as much as they could while serving an earthly ruler.Footnote ⁶⁹ A neat example comes in the response that the bishop of Hippo sent in 417 when the comes Africae Boniface requested that he write something which might ‘edify [him] for eternal salvation’. Augustine provided a letter explicitly framed as a ‘mirror’ (speculum), which set out the possibility for one serving in the military to please God.Footnote ⁷⁰ His central justification was that of the different capacities of individuals to attain a properly Christian lifestyle given their place in a wider economy of divine providence. ‘Those who have abandoned all these worldly activities and also serve God with the perfect continence of chastity certainly have a greater place before God. But each person, as the apostle says, has his own gift from God, one this gift, another that (1 Cor 7:7).’Footnote ⁷¹ Shenoute gave a similar reply when the comes Thebaidis Caesarius and his legal advisers visited him at the White Monastery and apparently confessed, ‘“We want the things of God, but are overcome by weakness.”’Footnote ⁷² The abbot provided a series of parables and admonitions that repeated the same central message: ‘let us act according to our ability’.Footnote ⁷³ Likewise, when writing to the Senate of Constantinople during his stay at the capital prior to his episcopacy (508–11), Severus set out a capacious discussion of the pursuit of philosophy (that is, asceticism).

All these Christian authority figures applied to the imperial and royal officials to whom they wrote strategies familiar from their engagement with the laity in other contexts. As in their preaching, the likes of Augustine and Severus articulated high expectations while accepting greater latitude in practice.Footnote ⁷⁵ Officials, like any other kind of Christian, were supposed to strive to do what they could according to their individual capacities and their current circumstances.

For the most part, this pastoral latitude was (at least rhetorically) unnecessary. Though couched in terms of Scriptural injunctions, these visions of Christian administrative conduct largely chimed with what these bureaucrats, generals, and governors might read in treatises on good governance and critiques of malpractice formulated by more straightforwardly classically minded authors.Footnote ⁷⁶ As discussed in Chapter 4, even the most stridently oppositional or harshly ascetic writers did not fundamentally re-imagine how Christian men should conduct themselves in government. Saints’ lives premised on the necessity that holy people abandon the world also praised individuals for their administrative conduct. These high-ranking officials were noted as both pious Christians and virtuous office-holders.Footnote ⁷⁷ Likewise, ascetic impresarios and episcopal theorists like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Isidore of Pelusium, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus tended to adopt a largely or purely classical frame of reference when addressing official correspondents.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such strategies can partly be explained by the requirements of letters as a genre, where social distance led skilled rhetorical operators to retreat to the safe ground of a common political culture. But epistolographers also adopted this idiom when writing to closer contacts and even to those who otherwise received advice and admonition more explicitly rooted in a Scriptural ethics.Footnote ⁷⁹ The obvious implication is that these officials could pursue Christian and more traditionally aristocratic (or indeed bureaucratic) forms of virtue at the same time. Even those thinkers who were most keen to problematise these time-honoured notions of political morality tended to retool them to fit with a more distinctly Christian ethical framework, as Augustine did when harmonising Ciceronian clemency and Christian mercy. As Peter Chrysologus put it in his concise exegesis of Luke 3:14: ‘Blessed John taught divine things in a way that did not disturb human ones. He put the commonwealth in order, he did not tear it apart.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Christians serving the state were to keep doing largely the same things, only now as Christians.

Late ancient observers did not simply suggest that Christians could be virtuous political actors; they claimed that these officials should also be better at it because they were Christians. The moral superiority of Christians was the basic premise of various letters where clerics encouraged officials to greater commitment.Footnote ⁸¹ It could frame invitations for praiseworthy individuals to pursue further improvement, as when Theodoret wrote in praise of Sallustius, probably in the spring of 445. The bishop of Cyrrhus informed the recently reappointed governor of Euphratensis that his subjects were delighted at his return to office. Theodoret encouraged him towards an unspecified change in his religious outlook (conversion? baptism?), which would further improve the lot of the provincials. ‘But I pray that they will experience greater goods, and your illustriousness will have a share of greater glory: to add to your other goods also the head of those good things, piety.’Footnote ⁸² The moral superiority of a good Christian could also be used to challenge those whom more abrasive correspondents found wanting. Such was the case when Augustine wrote to chastise the imperial official and Christian catechumen Caecilian in 414.Footnote ⁸³ The bishop of Hippo for once had good reason to adopt his characteristically passive-aggressive tone: the letter none too subtly implies Caecilian’s complicity in the recent killing of two of Augustine’s imperial allies, the tribunus et notarius Marcellinus and his brother, the proconsul Apringius. The bishop suggested that a firmer Christian commitment might help to remedy his moral failings in government.

For a less critical observer, Caecilian’s delayed baptism may not have been as ‘troubling’ as Augustine presented it;Footnote ⁸⁵ as Matthieu Pignot’s recent study has stressed, a lengthy spell in the catechumenate was normal for adult Christians in early fifth-century North Africa.Footnote ⁸⁶ Men in political service – and especially those involved in (extra-)judicial violence – had particular reason to leave it late. Augustine brusquely draws the opposite conclusion: the moral demands placed upon Christians after baptism were all the more reason for an administrator like Caecilian to take up his position amongst ‘the faithful’.

Idealised Christians in political service were not simply good at what they did; their presence was understood to be beneficial for the whole state. In his preface to the Lausiac History, Palladius stressed the potential for the work’s dedicatee, the praepositus sacri cubiculi Lausus, to act as an example for his colleagues, subjects, and superiors. Palladius imagined a chain of imitation running from the ascetic superstars whose lives he recounted, through the conduct of the chamberlain who had (apparently) requested these biographies, to those around him in the Great Palace in Constantinople.Footnote ⁸⁷

Reflecting on the trials of these holy men and women would help Lausus – and anyone else who passed through the emperor’s bedchamber – to cultivate the self-control that they needed to uphold appropriate standards at the epicentre of imperial power. Ferrandus of Carthage envisaged a similar impact when he wrote a ‘spiritual rule’ for the East Roman dux Reginus in the mid-530s.Footnote ⁸⁹ The deacon opened this advice letter by contrasting the stereotypical abuses of state agents with the praiseworthy behaviour of clerics and ascetics (characterised as ‘worldly soldiers’ and ‘soldiers of God’, respectively). Yet Ferrandus also recognised that these were not mutually exclusive categories: those engaged in ‘spiritual service’ might pursue a career within the imperial state. Their involvement in government was part of a divine plan to limit such misconduct.

Divine providence brought it about that pious Christians were part of the machinery of government. The guiding principle for those exceptional individuals was to break with the customs of a flawed earthly institution. Like Lausus, Reginus was supposed to make his life ‘a mirror, where your soldiers see what they ought to do’ (rule 2): one that contained a ‘truthful display of faith, justice, mercy, patience, continence, and a prudent estimation of future events’.Footnote ⁹¹ For Palladius and Ferrandus, the pious conduct of individual Christian officials was necessary to inculcate higher standards of behaviour within earthly political institutions.

The latent superiority of their pious co-religionists was a recurring premise for late ancient authors when writing to or about Christian imperial officials. The position that Christian piety was a ‘crowning virtue’ (in the words of Theodoret) that made you a better administrator could – for some writers, in some circumstances – simply be taken for granted. Other attempts to read across from political to Christian virtue (and vice versa) show a greater concern to justify the fit between imperial service and Christian morality. There were limitations on the ability of pious Christians to be effective administrators, as too for agents of the state to pursue Christian perfection. Yet when writing to or about current officials, Christian authority figures did not make service to the state sinful; or, at least, no more sinful than they considered the rest of human existence. That is not to say that all would or could live up to those standards: in the terms of the City of God, not all Christian officials would prove to be ‘heavenly citizens’ in the final reckoning. But those defects could be attributed (as they were by Maximus of Turin) to the individual capabilities of officials as moral agents. The overarching impression of much surviving Christian literature from this period is of a profound investment in the possibility of the state as a context for Christian virtue. The basic rationale used to justify that possibility, to praise Christians in service, and to persuade the uncommitted or unconvinced, was the same as that which, in other contexts, led ascetic authors to recommend a career change. The moral probity required of pious Christians, if it did not make them give up political service, could make them better at it.

5.2 Serving Two Masters

Political service could be imagined as a neutral field of activity for Christians. It could also be presented as an occupation that they could and should use to serve God. Such providential rhetoric was a frequent recourse for late fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-century clerics and ascetics when addressing officials whose careers – as they portrayed it – were shaped by a divine line manager. This framework could be used to praise the conduct and legitimate the authority of imperial and royal officials. They had been appointed by God; he had shaped their character; if they performed well, he would reward them. These ‘God-loving’ and ‘Christ-loving’ officials could count on a divine helper in their official duties, whether during judicial deliberations or census calculations. As with the legitimation of emperors as divinely appointed, this providential account of office-holding had a hard edge. Officials were to ‘render an account’ for their actions at the Last Judgement; judges and tax collectors were to carry out their duties in the awareness that they, too, would be judged and assessed. This discursive framework was helpful for clerical and ascetic petitioners, who used it to cast their requests as a means to serve God and earn rewards from him (both now and in the life to come). These rhetorical appeals rested on a shared sense of the significance of church membership for the approach to governance taken by a representative of the state. Their ubiquitous use by clerics and ascetics when addressing current imperial and royal officials suggest that the former expected the latter wished to be seen as devoted servants of their heavenly ruler, as much as their earthly one.

Like emperors and kings, officials were individuals whose authority was seen as part of the Christian God’s ordering of the world. Clerics and ascetics stated straightforwardly that office-holders had received their power from God.Footnote ⁹² The divine source of an official’s power was a particularly suitable subject for letters of congratulation and introduction after the writer had heard news of a new appointment.Footnote ⁹³ As part of polite political discourse, the workings of divine providence could be portrayed as due recompense for an appointee’s good qualities and recommendations for government. The choice of such an excellent individual could be presented as a part of God’s providential care for those now subject to the appointee’s authority (including the author himself).Footnote ⁹⁴ These worldly virtues and honours could also themselves be presented as gifts of God: the fruits of his cultivation of their character and determination of their circumstances.Footnote ⁹⁵ The potential implications for their conduct in government were neatly encapsulated by Isidore in a letter sent to a dux with the apt name of Strategius.

Again and again, contemporaries asserted that office-holders were (or should be) aware that the power God had given them should be used to serve him. The pursuit of conduct befitting that realisation would secure future rewards, both in this life and in the next; most immediately, as Isidore indicated to Strategius, God might arrange a promotion.Footnote ⁹⁷ This framework was most famously articulated by Augustine as part of the schema of earthly and heavenly citizenship he deployed in his letters to imperial officials and developed at greater length in the City of God (and especially its programmatic book 19).Footnote ⁹⁸ The emperor’s subordinates were amongst those who, on the bishop of Hippo’s account, were supposed to value their membership of the church above their worldly position and use earthly goods for heavenly ends. As Augustine put it in a letter sent to Ravenna in 408 to congratulate the new magister officiorum Olympius (and seek tax relief for an episcopal colleague):

This doctrine of usus and fruitio was taken up by Ferrandus of Carthage and Gregory the Great when advising and petitioning political agents in sixth-century North Africa and Italy.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As Isidore’s letter to Strategius should already suggest, such an understanding of the providential and eschatological significance of political service was not limited to the bishop of Hippo and his acolytes in the Latin West. That numerous other episcopal and ascetic petitioners from the Greek East made recourse to the same equations of earthly and heavenly service and rewards suggest that these assumptions represented part of the common sense of late ancient political culture. Bureaucratic careers could be portrayed as dependent on an individual’s relationship to the Christian God, to the significant exclusion of more earthly processes of evaluation and appointment. In so doing, Christian authors infused the ideal administrative conduct of their addressees with cultural and institutional expectations tied to their membership of the church.

God was frequently portrayed as Christian officials’ ultimate supervisor. In this role, he could be remarkably hands-on. Divine help for those in government could be framed in generic terms, as when Theodoret of Cyrrhus, in a letter to the magister officiorum and consul Nomus in 445, conveyed his prayer to ‘the Master of the Universe to guide your life and always provide you with favourable winds, that we might all benefit from your providence’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It could also pertain to more specific aspects of their roles. When writing to Simplicius, the newly appointed corrector of Augustamnica, Isidore foresaw the divine aid he would receive as a judge. ‘We share the joy of the city regarding your office and are delighted to see justice now walking the main street and judging. For which you will have God as helper and ally, both indicating to you the bad ones, and showing to you the good ones.’Footnote ¹⁰² When announcing the governor’s appointment to the town council of Pelusium, Isidore similarly stressed that Simplicius was ‘strengthened by God, by whom the capacity to do good is granted to many’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Such divine collaboration could take remarkably specific forms, as in the sermon that Gregory of Nazianzus gave before the tax assessor Julian (with which this book begins). In working on ‘a benevolent and righteous assessment’ (that is, one that would remit taxes for Gregory’s ascetic friends in Nazianzus), Julian would have constant help from a divine micro-manager. ‘It is with Christ that you compile your accounts, with Christ that you form your appraisals; it is with him as your head that you make your scrutiny, with him as the Logos that you reconcile your logbook.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such portrayals of God as a bureaucratic supervisor – judging their cases and double checking their figures – were, of course, a way of recommending particular forms of conduct to these Christian officials. This metaphor made manifest the demands of conscience involved in the pursuit of effective governance as a Christian.

The conduct of Christians in government was overseen, not only by their earthly superiors but also their heavenly emperor. The accountability of officials to God was envisaged ultimately as a feature of the Last Judgement. As Augustine, Shenoute of Atripe, Peter Chrysologus, Agapetus, Gregory the Great, and the emperor Justinian noted, those who served the state would ‘render an account to God’ for their conduct in office.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The bishop of Ravenna set out a particularly detailed reckoning of the responsibilities upon which ‘the general, the soldier, the governors of provinces, and (those) of cities’ would have to report back.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Administrative liability could encompass an official’s subordinates. When Isidore petitioned Rufinus to seek the removal of Cyrenius, a corrupt governor of Augustamnica, he adverted the praetorian prefect of the East to the threat of future punishment for his complicity. ‘Either stop his power or know that you will share his rewards (sunapolausōn autō) before the judgement of God.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The terrifying prospect of divine judgement was a frequent recourse for those seeking to admonish officials to adopt particular courses of action, as too the possibilities it provided for bureaucratic analogies.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Judges were to judge knowing that they, too, would be judged; they were well advised to show the mercy and clemency they hoped to receive for their own sins.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Officials with fiscal responsibilities were to forgive debts as they hoped their own debts would be forgiven; they too would receive an exacting assessment at the End Times.Footnote ¹¹⁰ An appropriate fear of the Last Judgement was also portrayed as a general characteristic of pious Christians in government.Footnote ¹¹¹ As Theodoret put it when writing to his ally, the magister militum per Orientem Anatolius, after the Council of Ephesus (431):

The profound vulnerability of Christians at the Last Judgement – and even, perhaps especially, that of the powerful – was to shape the conduct of those in political service. Their heavenly accountability was supposed to make them bring Christian moral demands to bear in earthly administration.

Contemporaries set the conduct of individual officials within a wider economy of divine providence and portrayed political service as a way of serving God. This discursive framework was often used to encourage officials to undertake specific actions that were in the interests of the petitioner and those he claimed to represent. Fulfilling those requests would grant them future rewards (both on earth and in heaven).Footnote ¹¹³ Petitioners might even suggest that an official had been appointed by God, at least in part, to accomplish that specific task.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Such claims rested on the capacity of a cleric or ascetic to identify the benefit of his clients, congregants, and fellow citizens and provincials – as, too, his own interests – with the will of God. As might be expected, the possibility of heavenly rewards was often deployed when bishops sought the aid of imperial officials in defence of (what they considered to be) the true faith.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This theme appears with particular frequency in batches of letters sent by Theodoret of Cyrrhus to imperial grandees seeking to overturn first his confinement to his see (in 448) and then his proscription and the downfall of his ecclesiastical faction (at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449).Footnote ¹¹⁶ But the forms of conduct that could be portrayed as an act of service to God (and the petitioner) covered a much broader field of Christian and imperial piety. Theodoret had previously used the same theme to try to prevent an increase in his city’s tax assessment in 445/6. The batch of letters sent to his contacts in Constantinople included groan-worthy punning on the spiritual yield that these imperial grandees would receive. As he put it in a letter to another prime exponent of nominative determinism, the patricius Senator, ‘it is fitting for your magnitude, both to reap the harvest of this just action with the others, and to gather in prayers from the recipients of those good works, and to serve the God of all’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Theodoret was not the first episcopal petitioner to portray fiscal administration as a field in which Christians could fulfil their commitment to their God. Such generosity in the assessment and remittance of taxes sat alongside the forgiveness of debts, and care for widows, orphans, the poor and the oppressed as areas in which officials might use the power that God had given them to store up heavenly rewards.Footnote ¹¹⁸

When we can see this discourse of providential government and twinned forms of service, it is frequently filtered through the interests of the petitioner who deployed it. Claims regarding an official’s appointment by, service to, and rewards from God were useful ways for Christian authority figures to pursue their goals. Yet these tropes were more than simply rhetorical tools for ascetic and episcopal clients. The ubiquity of such claims across a wide swathe of letter collections suggests that imperial and royal officials might themselves feel this divine accountability in administration, or this would not have been perceived as an effective rhetorical strategy. At the very least, the frequent appearance of appeals to providential rewards and future judgement suggest that Christian piety was amongst the virtues that imperial and royal officials wished their subjects to ascribe to them. When writing about those who had given up ‘the world’ (or to those considering that step), ascetic experts liked to claim that Christians could not serve two masters. When writing to serving officials, those same authors stressed how those who held earthly office could use their power to serve God.

5.3 Fiery Furnaces: Monks and Martyrs in Service

At some point in his episcopate (c. 513–18 CE), Severus of Antioch sent a letter to Misael, a cubicularius in the palace of the emperor Anastasius.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The bishop had heard that his correspondent in the imperial bedchamber was considering giving up his post to pursue philosophia (that is, asceticism). Severus responded to this news, not with the congratulations we might expect but a rebuke.

Severus spent the rest of a long advice letter dissuading the cubicularius from his plan to quit imperial service. Part of the reasoning behind this counter-intuitive guidance is distilled by Severus’ later editor, who preserved this letter under the general rule, ‘That a man who can help or assist the right confession while engaged in state affairs must not become a monk.’Footnote ¹²¹ During the period of Severus’ episcopate, Anastasius was seeking to shift Eastern imperial orthodoxy from the wide-ranging consensus of the Henotikon towards the more hardline Miaphysite (and anti-Chalcedonian) position that the bishop of Antioch favoured. Yet both emperor and bishop faced large-scale opposition to these doctrinal initiatives on numerous fronts.Footnote ¹²² At this critical juncture, Severus and his Miaphysite ecclesiastical faction simply could not afford to lose an ally placed at the very centre of imperial power. The central argument that Severus used should be familiar from Section 5.2: Misael could provide valuable aid to the church and true faith and thus serve God through his political agency. The bishop’s justifications for telling a budding monk to give up his dreams of the desert suggest another conception of the pursuit of Christian piety in office. Ideals of martyrdom and ascetic progress could be used to portray the imperial state as a location where exceptionally pious Christians might test themselves. The state could be imagined as a context that Christians could and should use to serve God. For some overachievers, it could even be seen as a place where they could serve God by suffering.

Misael was not alone in experiencing this (peculiarly privileged) form of suffering: there were biblical precedents for his predicament. Severus pointed to Old Testament figures who had managed to serve God while serving earthly kings: Obadiah, Joseph, and, central to his case, an extended parallel with the story in the Book of Daniel regarding the Three Hebrew Boys, Mischach (Misael in Greek), Shadrach, and Abednego, thrown into the fiery furnace by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

By doing their pious duty, these three royal servants had gained promotions for themselves and protection for the Jews of Babylon. If those three could suffer in this way for their faith, Severus asked Misael, ‘how then can you, when the king is pious, flee from the contest with the heretics, when you are goaded by a God-loving thought, and will not endure their blasphemies?’Footnote ¹²⁴ Of course, as the bishop of Antioch himself recognised, there was a problem with these biblical analogies. Obadiah, Joseph, and Mischach, Shadrach, and Abednego served tyrannical rulers who sought to persecute the people of Israel; Misael’s ruler was both a ‘pious king’ (naturally) and a supporter of Severus’ anti-Chalcedonian church faction. The awkward fit of these Old Testament types for martyrdom with contemporary political circumstances makes most sense as a gesture towards the unsuitable nature of imperial service in general. The palace could be a ‘fiery furnace’ even when it was not ruled by a Nebuchadnezzar.

The potential hostility of this institutional context to Christian virtue was, paradoxically, an advantage. Severus did not tell Misael he had to give up his monastic ambitions to stay put. Rather, the bishop of Antioch offered a compelling account of how continued imperial service was the logical conclusion of the chamberlain’s pursuit of a virtuous Christian life. Severus stated that Misael was already ‘living in a philosophical manner’ within the imperial palace and thus did not need to leave it.Footnote ¹²⁵ The bishop told his correspondent a story of two anonymous solitaries who had been called back from the desert to fight heresy during the Arian controversy.Footnote ¹²⁶ They did not want to come back ‘because they clung to philosophy, and action seemed to them irksome’. One quickly gave up his solitude to answer the call; the other was more reluctant and ‘remained according to his pleasure in the desert, and the spirits of evil came and assailed him with greater vehemence, and he became possessed of the feeling that he had been stripped of God’s grace and help, and was in danger of being devoured by fiends as it were by lions’.Footnote ¹²⁷ These demonic trials led him to change his mind and join his colleague. Severus implies that Misael’s withdrawal from the imperial palace would be an act of disobedience to God comparable to the ascetic’s refusal to quit the desert. This inverted comparison nevertheless redounded considerably to the praise of the chamberlain. The story that Severus told resembles many other exemplary tales of desert fathers and other solitaries preserved in saints’ lives and apophthegmata. Through the pursuit of various forms of strict bodily and spiritual regimes in their isolation, exceptional holy people were able to reach such a level of self-control that they could return to the world. Indeed, this re-entry into normal human society was depicted as a necessary consequence of their desire to serve God, whether (as in this case) it involved them defending orthodoxy against heretics, or (in many others) taking on the role of a bishop.Footnote ¹²⁸ Severus invited Misael to see his continued imperial service in just these terms: as a duty of care that trumped his own individual desires for the solitary life. Unlike the poster children of late ancient asceticism, the chamberlain had not even had to go to the desert first to train himself.

For all its tone of rebuke, Severus’ letter presented Misael as an ideal ascetic: a figure with the exceptional self-control required to explore the outer reaches of his own pious capabilities while in the imperial palace. It seems plausible that the cubicularius did in fact adopt some form of ascetic praxis while serving Anastasius. Such is the implication of the dedication with which Misael and Severus’ mutual friend Zachariah Rhetor addressed Lives of Isaiah, Peter, and Theodore to the imperial chamberlain at around this time. Zachariah called upon these three saints to pray that ‘despite the government of the royal bedchamber, your life might be governed virtuously, and you might flee entirely from the temptation of the furnace which is this place’.Footnote ¹²⁹ This combination of spiritual government of self and worldly government of others marked the rest of Misael’s known career, which, at least in the long term, seems to have been surprisingly unaffected by his banishment to Serdica in 518 after participating in a coup against Justin I.Footnote ¹³⁰ What exactly happened next is complicated by divergent evidence.Footnote ¹³¹ At some point after 518 – and potentially quite soon after – Misael was ordained as a priest. Severus’ letters from exile to ‘Misael the deacon’ place him back in court circles at some point before 534 and later in service of Theodora (c. 537) with a role looking after the finances of an anti-Chalcedonian community, most likely those under the empress’ protection in the Palace of Hormisdas in Constantinople.Footnote ¹³² John of Ephesus in his Life of Theodore the Castrensis, by contrast, states that Misael was restored to his former position on his return to Constantinople (some years after 518), before a more permanent retirement.Footnote ¹³³ John nevertheless paints a familiar portrait of Misael’s conduct in the later years of his career in the palace of Justin or Justinian, even claiming that he inspired two other chamberlains (including the subject of the biography) to adopt an ascetic lifestyle. Various combinations of these biographical data are possible.Footnote ¹³⁴ However these references are reconciled, what is clear from all of them is Misael’s continued pursuit of Christian virtue while bound up in the political networks of the imperial court.

Severus presented Misael’s continued service in the imperial palace as a form of suffering for God. In so doing, he applied a powerful model of good Christian conduct to the context of the state. The figure of the martyr was a ubiquitous recourse for late ancient Christian authority figures when seeking to characterise how Christians should behave. More than that, the portrayal of martyrs as ideal administrators had long formed part of apologetic claims about the appropriate status of Christian communities within the empire. As James Corke-Webster has explored in a series of excellent studies, a powerful strand of early Christian discourse sought to portray Christians in the pre- (and immediately post-)Constantinian empire, not only as good Roman citizens but as superior on these terms to the ‘pagans’ amongst whom they lived.Footnote ¹³⁵ Amongst the martyrs whose noble suffering was recounted by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Church History, the bishop notably included two of Diocletian’s palace attendants, Dorotheus and Gorgonius. Eusebius described how, prior to the onset of the Great Persecution, these two Christians were not only permitted to serve but were ‘particularly and especially favoured among their fellow servants’.Footnote ¹³⁶ As previously discussed, late fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-century Christian historians ran even further with stories of confessors and martyrs whose service helped to show that their ecclesiastical factions and doctrinal formulae were wrongfully in political disfavour. Rufinus, Sozomen, Victor of Vita, and John of Ephesus suggested both that the exceptional qualities of confessors and martyrs made them excellent administrators and that these virtues were recognised by emperors and kings (at least until a change of political climate meant they were sacked, executed, or forced to resign).Footnote ¹³⁷ Rufinus’ expansion of Eusebius’ story of Dorotheus and Gorgonius is a case in point.Footnote ¹³⁸ Dorotheus ‘was considered to be most faithful in all things on account of his faith in the Lord, whence he deserved to be preferred to all others in honour and love’; his fellow Christians in the palace ‘deserved to be chosen before others to govern provinces on account of their contemplation of the faith’.Footnote ¹³⁹ The double fides of these office-holders – as pious Christians before God and loyal servants before the ruler – was redeployed by Rufinus and his successors to characterise the service of (orthodox) Christians under various persecuting emperors and kings. As Avitus of Vienne put it when praising the forthright Trinitarian discussions that the uir illustrissimus Heraclius had held with his ruler, the Burgundian king Gundobad: ‘the wisdom of those in power notes that those who put earthly before heavenly things easily change sides in human affairs’. By refusing to bend on what he (and Avitus) saw as the truth, this courtier had shown he could be trusted on other matters.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ To this mindset, the extraordinary moral qualities that led these men to stand up for their faith made them into exceptional administrators: or, at least, they did so until it meant they could not be administrators any longer.

It was not merely that the qualities of a martyr coincided with those of a faithful political servant. Readiness for martyrdom was portrayed by various sixth-century authors as a necessary state for pious Christians in administration. In his discussion of his fifth rule of Christian service, ‘place divine things before human ones’, Ferrandus instructs the dux Reginus to envisage just this possibility. ‘And as for those kings, by whose support you were made a commander, if perhaps they think some things contrary to the true faith, you will not concede, but fight back, and you should learn to be prepared for martyrdom.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ Gregory the Great gave a similar reminder to the Constantinopolitan comes Narses in June 597, in response to a letter in which his correspondent had complained about unspecified ‘spiritual afflictions and tribulations, and the opposition of evil men’. For Gregory, such machinations were simply the lot of a religious man (even in political service): ‘In all of this, recall to your mind what I believe also you will never forget, “all who want to live piously in Christ suffer persecution”. In this matter, I say confidently that you are living less religiously, if you suffer less persecution.’Footnote ¹⁴² Such strictures were taken to heart by a contemporary of Misael’s in Anastasius’ inner circle. In another letter, Severus reported on the discussions between Macedonius and a group of imperial dignitaries at the height of the crisis in the summer of 511, which resulted in the deposition of the bishop of Constantinople. In the surviving portion of direct speech preserved by Severus, the patrician Secundinus – the emperor’s brother-in-law and the Eastern consul for that year – responded to Macedonius’ accusations against the imperial house by stating that he did not fear the consequences of the course staked out by the emperor.

Ideas of martyrdom were sufficiently malleable that even a member of the imperial dynasty preparing the ground for the violent ejection of a bishop could claim readiness to suffer for the true faith.

As with Severus’ depiction of Misael, Secundinus staged his power in the terms of Daniel and the three Hebrew boys in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. These individuals represented a recurring biblical comparison for service in the palace. Isidore of Pelusium suggested that the eunuch and imperial powerbroker Antiochus should be reading the Book of Daniel as inspiration; Ferrandus cited Daniel’s words to Nebuchadnezzar as a model for Reginus’ treatment of the poor.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The Life of Peter the Iberian similarly uses them as a comparison for the Georgian prince (and Roman comes domesticorum) Bacurius under the Persian king; Peter the Iberian himself is said to have been inspired by their diet during his time in the palace of Constantinople.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Such allusions fitted neatly into a wider sense that the state and especially the imperial palace represented a hostile environment for those who pursued virtue (picking up earlier Stoic and continuing Neo-Platonic discourse about the dangers of the political life).Footnote ¹⁴⁶ These arguments could be used to claim that pious Christians had to give up office. Yet service amidst the dangers of the palace and the worldliness of its satellite political institutions could also be part of what forged these individuals as pious Christians. As Palladius put it in his concluding encomium for Lausus: ‘For one whose fear of God has not been lessened by such honour and wealth and such power, that man is devoted to the Christ who was told by the devil, “All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me”’ (Matt. 4:9).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Those who sought to be athletes of Christ while serving in the imperial palace tackled the virtuous life on a higher difficulty setting.

The problem of seeking a heavenly life despite the demands of human society was (of course) a basic premise of late ancient ascetic discourse. Recent work has explored how ascetic and monastic lifestyles rarely represented a total break with the ‘world’ but rather an attempt to negotiate an appropriate relationship with the necessities and obstacles thrown up by normal social existence.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Ascetic experts frequently counselled their disciples to pursue what Severus said Misael was doing: to ‘live philosophically’ while bound up by earthly ties. Indeed, saints’ lives, letters, and histories not infrequently recounted the attempts of their elite male protagonists to adopt exceptional Christian piety while serving the state. These narratives normally depicted this pursuit of asceticism in office as a transitional state before the saint decided to quit. Nevertheless, these authors ceded space in their accounts of holiness to the time before they realised they had to give up their belts of office. John Rufus and John of Ephesus portray Peter the Iberian and Misael’s disciple Theodore the castrensis (respectively) pursuing ascetic praxis in the palace in Constantinople. Theodore even stayed on for two more years under Justinian so that he could use the money he made in the palace for (financially unsustainable) levels of almsgiving.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Both eventually gave up their offices when their pious ambitions overtook the scope for such practices within the palace.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Others portray official asceticism as more of a sustainable project, while using ascetic discourse to conceive being Christian in government more generally.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Perhaps the neatest example of ascetic praxis combined with ongoing political service is provided by the early sixth-century Constantinopolitan church historian Theodore Lector. Theodore recounted how the former magister officiorum and consul John Vincomalus (supposedly) attended the palace of Marcian by day (in the guise of a senator) before returning to the monastery of Bassianus (where he changed into the habit of a monk).Footnote ¹⁵² Both the dangers and the onerous social expectations of the state suggested greater possibilities for Christian achievement.

Theodore Lector depicted Vincomalus on his return commute to a monastery where he could find an appropriate social and institutional context to perform his humility. Others were portrayed as seeking to establish forms of monastic community within political institutions. The palace was, above all, the site where such monastic experiments were envisaged. Whether it was Rufinus’ description of the pious community of Christians around Dorotheus and Gorgonius in Diocletian’s palace, Peter the Iberian’s followers in Theodosius II’s palace, or Misael’s disciples in Justinian’s bedchamber, church historians and hagiographers were keen to pursue the social implications of the trope of the palace as a monastery.Footnote ¹⁵³ Advice letters likewise imagined the possibility that exceptional Christian officials could act as models of piety for their superiors, colleagues, subordinates, and subjects, and thus bring something of the monastery into palace or praetorium.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ As Augustine put it in his advice to the (unusually receptive) vicar of Africa, Macedonius:

Part of the task of holy people was to lead others along the same path of (ongoing) conversion to a Christian life. A palace chamberlain, military commander, or provincial governor was, if anything, too well placed to ‘encourage’ such changes of belief, practice, and life course amongst those over whom they wielded authority.

Such stories of saints in government are not unfamiliar. They have been the subject of a recurring fascination amongst historians keen to chart the development of both episcopal and monastic authority. In these accounts, the preceding secular careers of bishops and abbots (amongst other holy men) have been used as part of an explanation for their increasing capacity to undertake roles of communal leadership in the late and post-Roman world.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Yet awareness of the potential significance of secular experience has not been matched by a corresponding exploration of the possibilities of asceticism – or, indeed, a quasi-episcopal ‘ministry’ – in government. The ascetic experiments of Misael and his spiritual colleagues in political service across the late fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries suggest a need to problematise this sense of an imperial or royal career as an inevitably transitional state for a pious Christian. The advice offered by the likes of Severus implies that such individuals were not set on an inevitable trajectory towards the renunciation of office. Indeed, some individuals may even have gone back and forth between these two ‘states’ (as Misael seems to have done).Footnote ¹⁵⁷ For some late ancient officials (and the bishops and monks who wrote to and about them), ascetic praxis was not only achievable in government but also a model for virtuous office-holding. The obstacles posed by the practices required of those who served in palace and administration may have incentivised pious retirement. But they could also be presented as an occasion for martyrdom for those who were willing to suffer, like the Three Hebrew Boys, in the fiery furnace of the state.

5.4 New Josephs

Cassiodorus’ Variae is a key text for our understanding of the ideas of office-holding and governance prevalent within late ancient political institutions. This twelve-book compilation of administrative letters, constructed by its author sometime between 538 and 554, includes two books of form letters for Ostrogothic kings’ appointments to specific administrative offices. Cassiodorus’ copy for the announcement of a new praetorian prefect contains a surprising indication of the post’s origins.

Most of the rest of this form letter contains a much more straightforwardly classicising account of the prefect’s character and duties, of the sort that the recurring cultural touchstones of the Variae would lead us to expect. Cassiodorus nevertheless comes back to Joseph in the last line of the letter. ‘For if that aforementioned, most holy founder is recalled, to perform the dignity of the praetorian prefecture competently is a sort of priesthood.’Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The ideal moral formation of the prefect may have been classical, but, for Cassiodorus, the best model for such excellence in government – the literal archetype of the praetorian prefect – was biblical.

The Variae represent, in the first place, Cassiodorus’ contribution to a sixth-century, pan-Mediterranean – and decidedly classical – discourse about bureaucracy and political service.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Yet this letter hints at the possibilities of a rather different conception of office-holding within earthly regimes. In characterising the ideal prefect, Cassiodorus conjures exactly the sort of Christian exemplary analogy so fundamental to modern accounts of the transformation of political leadership in late antiquity. For many recent commentators, this fusing of classical comparison and biblical typology was integral to how what might be called a Christian imaginary came to reshape political life in the late ancient Mediterranean. Perceptive studies have explored the use of Old Testament patriarchs as models for emperors, bishops, and monks.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In this formulary letter, Cassiodorus does something similar for officials. Moreover, in conceiving of that role as quoddam sacerdotium, Cassiodorus suggested that the job of a bureaucrat was comparable both to that of a bishop and, more subtly, that of an appropriately Christian emperor or king, who were also often praised for their priestly qualities.Footnote ¹⁶² Such an allusion was particularly apt in a letter portraying the praetorian prefect as the king’s alter ego.Footnote ¹⁶³ As Sam Barnish has observed, the precise implications are obscure. A maximal position might take Cassiodorus at his word and suggest the ceremonial of appointment involved acclamation of the appointee as Joseph’s successor.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ If so, it would suggest that the Ostrogothic regime cultivated an image of the prefecture that drew on this biblical model.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ While this is a tempting proposition, a more minimal interpretation would take this as part of the author’s own idiosyncratic take on an office that he himself held. In a series of letters sent while praetorian prefect from 533–37/8, Cassiodorus staged his own authority – and, in particular, his efforts to alleviate food shortages – as a reflection of the conduct of the Old Testament patriarch under Pharaoh. The same image of Joseph-as-prefect recurs in the Exposition of the Psalms (written at the same time as the Variae were compiled).Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Even in this more contained interpretation, Cassiodorus’ letter helps to show that Christian interpretations of office-holding were not simply the preserve of clerical or ascetic advice. This formula for the appointment of the Ostrogothic praetorian prefect in the 530s illustrates how those who held office could understand and present their political service according to the dense complex of biblical and ecclesiastical stories and figures that informed the late ancient Christian imagination.

The claim that Joseph was the first praetorian prefect may simply be Cassiodorus’ distinctive take on the office’s origins and a feature of his own self-presentation. In that case, the Italian senator would be one of many late ancient officials who we can see staging their own authority in Christian terms. For much of this period, recourse to these models and resources is most evident when officials communicated with clerics and ascetics. For the most part, only one half of these exchanges survives. An ecclesiastical authority figure models pious official conduct, and we are left to imagine how the recipient might have responded. But occasionally the letter collections of specific bishops reproduce the copy of the official’s letters preserved in their archives. These letters are sometimes startling for their authors’ willingness to take up distinctly biblical and ecclesiastical frameworks to define their own roles in government. These texts still (of course) situate such models and analogies in an ecclesiastical context. They suggest that self-presentation as a Christian political servant was a pose to adopt when dealing with churches and churchmen, as opposed to an overarching means to legitimate authority in service of the state. Yet various objects and images suggest that, by the middle decades of the sixth century, personal piety had become part of how officials presented and justified their rule more widely. These images, poems, names, and seals imply that Christian notions of political service had entered the mainstream of political discourse by the time Cassiodorus wrote his formula for the praetorian prefecture.

Various letter collections preserve missives sent from officials to clerics. Augustine’s letter collection offers four such exchanges. Two are less straightforwardly indicative of the possibilities of pious self-presentation: Volusianus’ arch scepticism about Christian imperialism (cited above) and the dismissive doctrinal polemic of the Homoian (‘Arian’) comes Pascentius.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The letters that the bishop received from the vicar Macedonius (discussed in Chapter 8) and the tribunus et notarius Darius are more illuminating on the positions that Christian officials might project. Darius offered a particularly expansive conception of his Christian political agency. The tribunus et notarius had probably come to the province of Africa from Ravenna in 428/9 to secure peace after a civil war provoked by the comes Africae Boniface.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ As part of his duties, he met with two of Augustine’s episcopal colleagues, who passed on some of the bishop of Hippo’s writings. Augustine also sent a letter asking Darius to write to him and reminding him of the superiority of peace over war: ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ (Matthew 5:9), after all.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In response, the tribunus et notarius went almost overboard in setting his mission in terms amenable to the pastoral authority of his correspondent. ‘May God bring it about that I measure up to your judgment, my father, and that I not be guilty in my conscience, since interiorly I do not see that I am such a man as you have imagined for yourself.’Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Darius’ success in securing a ceasefire was a result of the ‘help of God the ruler of all’.Footnote ¹⁷¹ This providential conception of his authority continued as the tribunus et notarius sought Augustine’s intercessory prayers on behalf, not only of himself but the imperial state as a whole – or, at least, those imperial agents of whose conduct the bishop of Hippo approved. ‘Father, continue to take up and express such prayers for Roman rule, for the Roman commonwealth, and also for those people who strike you as worthy.’Footnote ¹⁷² This request for Augustine’s aid in securing divine sanction for the empire was matched by an even more impressive claim regarding Darius’ own place within a providential economy. The tribunus et notarius recalled ‘a certain satrap or rather a king who entreated by letter Christ, the Lord God’ and received healing and the protection of his city in exchange. This is, of course, King Abgar V of Edessa.Footnote ¹⁷³ Invoking this legendary early Christian story allowed Darius to draw a parallel with his own situation. Just as that king had received the personal and political benefits of divine intervention, so ‘I, a humble slave of kings, beg from you my lord, that you do not hesitate to intercede daily for my sins before that Christ, the lord God and ruler of all, and that you pray for me unceasingly, and that you ask for whatever you will.’ Darius was a new Abgar; Augustine, perilously close to being his own, personal Jesus.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Through this letter to the bishop of Hippo, the tribunus et notarius presented himself as a conscientious Christian, cognisant of relevant models for pious government and concerned for continued divine support of his own agency alongside that of the empire as a whole. Other officials were similarly effusive in describing their relationships to specific bishops and seeking prayers for their political success.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ It is tempting to see these expansive (and often highly wrought) combinations of personal salvation and political service as an authentic expression of the individual experience of certain Christians in office. All that can be said for sure is that this was one way in which officials could present their authority and a schema particularly well suited to those occasions when they had to address an episcopal audience.

Late fourth-, fifth- and sixth-century imperial and royal officials could adopt Christian concepts and cultural reference points to characterise their authority in relation to the church, churchmen, and questions that touched ‘the religion of our souls’ (in the words of the early fifth-century magister militum Dionysius).Footnote ¹⁷⁶ At the time when Cassiodorus wrote the Variae, we can begin to see officials projecting images of pious governance on their own initiative (and not simply in response to the prompting of meddlesome clerics). These sixth-century efforts to cultivate a decisively Christian image of legitimate authority can be most neatly captured in objects and images produced for serving officials often only known from literary descriptions. The Palatine Anthology includes a poem inscribed on the sceptre of office of one Amantius, most likely the praepositus sacri cubiculi later executed for his attempt to usurp the authority of Justin I. ‘Worthy Amantius received this dignity because he was faithful to the emperor and delighted Christ by his fear of God.’Footnote ¹⁷⁷ This sceptre worked – like the letters of Augustine, Isidore, and others – to remind the praepositus and those in his presence that his power came, ultimately, from God.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Other intercessors were invoked by officials as the sources of their authority. The Palatine Anthology includes another poem describing an image commissioned by the two-time proconsul of Asia and newly appointed magister officiorum Theodorus, for the narthex of the Basilica of St John at Ephesus in 566.

Michael was closely associated with imperial power (and particularly favoured by the emperor Justinian).Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Since angels were also normally depicted in the garb of a late Roman emperor or official, an image of Michael would have represented a particularly nice referent for a divine bureaucratic appointment (although key studies have downplayed the likelihood of an actual depiction of the archangel giving Theodorus his belt of office).Footnote ¹⁸¹ Moreover, the archangel’s authority was frequently compared in early Christian discourse to that of a provincial governor, which is one of the reasons Michael and Gabriel were called upon as guarantors of the oath that the emperor Justinian assigned to gubernatorial appointees on 15 April 535.Footnote ¹⁸² For all these reasons, a two-time proconsul would have been primed to see his own authority as the result of Michael’s intercession with his heavenly emperor. Choricius of Gaza describes a similar image of Stephanus, proconsul of Palestine from 536, in the apse mosaic of a church he dedicated to St Sergius in the provincial capital of Caesarea. In this mosaic, the governor gave a miniaturised version of the church to Sergius, who presented him to the Virgin and Child.Footnote ¹⁸³ The bespoke objects and monuments commissioned by Amantius, Theodorus, and Stephanus depicted the place of their imperial authority within a wider scheme of providential government mediated by holy and supernatural intercessors. In so doing, they advertised the dependence of their legitimate authority on divine sanction and individual devotion, just as contemporary clerics and ascetics encouraged imperial and royal agents to do.

These juxtapositions of official authority with the approval of heavenly intercessors were not simply a recourse for those with the means and gumption to fund monumental building projects. They can be seen in the naming choices of various sixth-century Eastern officials. As Michael Wuk has recently shown, the epigraphic and papyrological record suggests a particular vogue for administrators to express their pious dedication through the adoption of ‘Marianus’, ‘Michaelius’, and ‘Gabrielius’ as cognomina. Given our ignorance of the full names of most sixth-century East Roman people, Wuk is right to be cautious about assuming that these praetorian prefects and governors adopted such names because of their bureaucratic careers.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ At the same time, another set of evidence suggests a similar connection of administrative probity to personal devotion. Perhaps the best indication of the spread of Christian modes of legitimation through the sixth-century Eastern imperial bureaucracy come in the form of the lead seals that officials used to authenticate documents. The dating of early examples of these objects is notoriously fraught.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Nevertheless, a substantial number of potentially sixth-century seals of imperial administrators include invocations of the help of God or that of the Theotokos.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ From the late sixth and seventh centuries – the point from which a much larger corpus of these objects survives – catalogues of surviving objects include vast numbers of depictions of the Virgin and saints commissioned by officials at all levels of the state.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Work on these seals across the Byzantine period has repeatedly argued against any sense of standardisation in these design choices; text and image reflected the self-presentation of the owner.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Various sixth-century Eastern officials made the choice to present their authority as defined by their pious dedication to God, the Virgin, and the saints.

These choices were not made in a vacuum. They were shaped by, and helped to encourage, developments in imperial ideology and political culture at Constantinople: not least, the integration of the cult of the Theotokos into the imperial image in the last decades of the sixth century.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In this context, Barnish’s suggestion regarding the actual ceremonial staging of the appointment of an Ostrogothic praetorian prefect fits nicely with wider developments in the culture of office-holding in the middle decades of the sixth century. Late fourth-, fifth-, and early sixth-century texts written by clerics and ascetics suggest the receptivity of individual office-holders to the presentation of their authority in Christian terms. But, as I discussed in Chapter 1, the moment when Cassiodorus wrote this formula is when we can first see ideas of service to God presented as an integral part of how regimes themselves understood what their appointees were doing. Before the 530s, late Roman and post-Roman laws suggest that appointing (orthodox) Christians was seen as necessary for dealings with churches and matters of religion. It is with the legislation of Justinian that a pious Christian mindset and a concern for divine sanction becomes part of what emperors required, not just in this subset of governance but across imperial administration.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ It is thus hardly surprising that it is in this period where we can see officials adopt a decisively Christian frame of reference to legitimate their authority, not only to clerics and ascetics but to their subjects in general. Cassiodorus’ use of a potent biblical exemplum fits with these wider changes in the culture of mid-sixth-century political institutions. We cannot know whether the populace of Ravenna chanted in celebration of the new Joseph who had come to help govern them. By the 530s, such a parallel had become enough of a commonplace part of administrative authority across the Mediterranean world for this to be a plausible scenario.

Conclusion

By the middle decades of the sixth century, Christian visions of good governance were part of the fabric of the Roman state. In at least one political environment, this was not simply a metaphor. Late twentieth-century excavators at Caesarea Maritima, the capital of the Roman province of Palestine, found the remains of an intriguing building abutting the governor’s palace, made up of seven rooms around a central courtyard.Footnote ¹⁹¹ A series of helpful surviving mosaic inscriptions spell out its purpose as a tax archive. The surviving fragments of the décor of this skrinion were revealing about the political business conducted in that building in other ways. On the floor as you enter the building, the excavators found the following Greek text: ‘If you would not fear authority, do good and you will receive praise from it (theleis mē phobeisthai tēn exousian; to agathon poiei, kai hexeis epainon ex autēs).’ This is Paul’s Letter to the Romans, chapter 13, verse 3. As they went about their business, tax officials and taxpayers alike would be reminded of Paul’s injunction to avoid corruption, taken from a biblical passage often cited by Christian writers in their advice to pious office-holders. Like countless previous imperial and royal administrators, the tax officials of mid-sixth-century Palestine were confronted with a biblical admonition regarding how they were supposed to do their administrative work. Only now this Christian model of government was not simply a subject of an episcopal petition or a sermon in church; it was on display in their own office (Figures 5.1–3).Footnote ¹⁹²

Figure 5.1

Reconstruction of the sixth-century skrinion abutting the governor’s praetorium at Caesarea Maritima.

Figure 5.2

The mosaic inscription of Romans 13:3 in situ in the skrinion at Caesarea Maritima.

Figure 5.3

Detailed image of Romans 13:3 inscription.

This extraordinary survival neatly exemplifies what this chapter is and is not trying to argue. It has sought to delineate the ways in which people in late antiquity could conceive of governance as a career for a pious Christian. In the pastoral overviews provided by late ancient bishops, service to the state was one of the ‘gifts’ that God might give to an individual Christian. While late ancient political institutions were not an ideal context for piety, Christian officials (like all those who lived in the world) were to do their best. What that meant in practice rarely diverged from traditional forms of virtuous administrative practice, except in the recasting of ideal political conduct as the particular preserve of Christians. The exceptional moral compass of pious Christians enabled them to act as models for their colleagues and subjects. Virtuous administrative conduct could also be seen, in providential terms, as a way to serve God as well as their emperor or king. Just as in their earthly bureaucratic context, the heavenly emperor had appointed them and would give them their just deserts for their performance (both on earth and at the Last Judgement). This sense of Christian officials doing double duty was equally used for praise, persuasion, and admonition depending on the political thinking of the author, the situation involved, and the moral status of the individual Christian to whom it was applied. Exceptional Christians might wish to flee the state; they also might seek to serve God by subjecting themselves to the necessities of rule. The difficulties posed by political institutions could be recast as the torments and trials of confessors, martyrs, and ascetics. Budding athletes of Christ are portrayed wearing a hairshirt under their chlamys, governing like a bishop, and facing down the wiles of the devil in the palace and praetorium. Such images of pious administrative conduct were not simply projected onto officials by bishops and clerics. Imperial and royal officials can also be seen portraying their own agency in this way. Most often, serving administrators deployed these providential tropes, ethical concepts, and biblical exempla when communicating with the episcopal and ascetic audiences who would most appreciate them. Yet, by the sixth century at the latest, we can also see these frameworks used to legitimate the authority of officials before their wider subjects.

This chapter has thus suggested that Christian ideas of office-holding were part of the mainstream of late ancient political culture. What it has not done (and cannot do) is say that specific officials thought this way about their own political service. For the most part, what we have in surviving evidence is clerics projecting ideal images onto those who served the state. Even where surviving texts preserve officials talking or writing about their own religious identities, these snapshots cannot sustain a holistic reconstruction of their views on governance. Such moments were generally calibrated for specific interactions and audiences and often mediated by the clerics and ascetics who reported them. To be clear: I am not saying that fifth- and sixth-century political institutions were populated by thousands of pious Christians who worried about the morality of governance. (I leave such banally improbable claims to those who take it upon themselves to justify the ‘ethics’ of empires closer to my own time and place in twenty-first century Liverpool.) What all these letters, sermons, church histories, and saints’ lives do tell us is that there were now distinctly Christian expectations of what made for legitimate governance of which those who served the state had to be cognisant. The desk jockeys in the tax office of sixth-century Caesarea might not have worried too much about what their calculation of estate sizes and agricultural yields meant for their salvation. Yet the siting of this passage from Romans on the way into their office encouraged them and, just as importantly, the imperial subjects who wanted to haggle over their liability, to think about their bureaucratic practice in terms of Scriptural demands and Christian ethics. More than that, this choice of décor implies that the governor or someone else on the staff wanted to present the authority of these officials and the work they were doing in those terms to legitimate their governance, or hold them accountable, according to distinctly Christian cultural resources. In that sense, to borrow a phrase from Gregory of Nazianzus, Christ the Logos was there when these officials tallied up their log book – whether they liked it or not.