From Rome to Constantinople : antiquarian echoes of cultural trauma in the sixth century

The subject of this dissertation was the assessment of the cultural meaning of antiquarianism in the sixth century AD. Once subjected to a reasoned re-definition, the concept of antiquarianism appeared as a useful tool for the study of the attitude towards the distant past in late antiquity. During the sixth century, antiquarianism was a textual attitude towards the distant past which was marshalled for debating and coming to terms with several uneasy societal changes, such as the transfer of power and prestige from Rome to Constantinople. This transfer was discussed in sixth-century Constantinople by an extended network of educated bureaucrats, which partly transcended the political, social and linguistic barriers of the period. Antiquarianism was part and parcel of the shared repertoire of this network for debating each other and the imperial government implicitly on the role of Rome and Constantinople. The shared antiquarian lore was used by these educated bureaucrats differently in order to take different stands in this contemporary debate. The antiquarian authors tried to replace Rome partially as the framework for historical meaning by focusing on their own home region, by their own administrative department and by a focus on their personal life.Deze dissertatie handelt over de culturele betekenis van het fenomeen antiquarianisme in de zesde eeuw n.C. Het fenomeen antiquarianisme bleek, mits een beredeneerde herdefinitie, een nuttig instrument voor de analyse van de omgang met het verleden in de late oudheid. In de zesde eeuw n.C. wordt antiquarianisme als een tekstuele houding ten opzichte van het verre verleden actief aangewend om te debatteren over en in het reine te komen met ongemakkelijke maatschappelijke veranderingen, zoals de transfer van macht en prestige van Rome naar Constantinopel. Deze transfer was in zesde-eeuws Constantinopel het onderwerp van een debat waaraan een omvangrijk netwerk van geschoolde bureaucraten deelnam. Dit netwerk oversteeg deels de politieke, sociale en linguïstische barrières van de periode. Antiquarianisme behoorde tot het gedeelde instrumentarium van dit netwerk om impliciet met elkaar en met de keizerlijke overheid in debat te gaan over de rol van Rome en Constantinopel. Het gemeenschappelijke antiquarisch materiaal werd door zesde-eeuwse auteurs teven gebruikt om verschillende standpunten in te nemen in dit debat. De antiquarische auteurs trachtten Rome als zingevend kader voor historiografie deels te vervangen door de eigen thuisregio, het eigen administratief departement, en de persoonlijke levenssfeer

The Throne of the King: The Throne Room in Minas Tirith and Late Antique Ruler Ideology

A conspicuous feature of Tolkien’s description of the city of Minas Tirith in The Return of The King is the depiction of two thrones in the Great Hall; one empty throne reserved for the king, and one seat for the steward of Gondor. This paper aims to ascertain the late antique and mediaeval sources of inspiration behind Tolkien’s creation of the throne room in Minas Tirith. As a starting point, we shall compare the setting of the two thrones in Minas Tirith with a motive in Christian iconography, the hetoimasia, and its architectural expression in the Chrysotriklinos, the throne room in the Byzantine Great Palace in Constantinople. Next, we shall show that Tolkien intentionally obscured his appropriation of the Byzantine throne room to create a multi-layered image of rulership, in accordance with his aesthetics of applicability and allegory. In conclusion, we shall formulate some remarks on the interpretation of the association between the Byzantine Chrysotriklinos and the Gondorian Great Hall. As a form of Tolkien’s literary process of sub-creation, the description of the throne room in Minas Tirith serves to emphasise the significance of The Return of the King as a retelling of Christ’s restoration of the fallen world, placing the work of Tolkien in the context of a strong personal Catholic piety

Re-anchoring Rome’s protection in Constantinople : the pignora imperii in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

This paper uses the conceptual framework of “Anchoring Innovation”, which is being developed by OIKOS, the Dutch National Research School in Classical Studies, in order to assess matters of religious continuity and change in the late antique and Byzantine attitudes towards the pignora imperii, or talismans which vouched for the safety of the Roman Empire. Notable pignora are the Palladium, the ancilia, and the stone of Cybele. The paper focuses on two periods. In the first section, a close reading of a passage of Servius from the early fifth century AD discloses how the author re-anchored the pignora in the contemporary context of anxieties over the preservation of pagan heritage and the imminent shift of power and prestige from Rome to Constantinople. The second section focuses on the works of John Malalas and John of Lydia in order to trace the vicissitudes of the pignora in sixth century Constantinople. Servius’ pignora are re-anchored in the context of an Empire which saw itself increasingly as Christian and centred on Constantinople. Also new pignora, such as the Latin language and statues in Constantinople are being construed in the sixth century. The paper concludes with a short sketch of a field which merits further research; the continuity in religious attitudes towards pignora between late antiquity and the Byzantine period. It will be argued that icons of the Theotokos or Virgin Mary in Byzantium gradually usurp the role and function of the antique pignora. The paper has in two appendices 1) a list of testimonies to the Palladium, and 2) a list of transfers of Hero remains in antiquity.This paper uses the conceptual framework of “Anchoring Innovation”, which is being developed by OIKOS, the Dutch National Research School in Classical Studies, in order to assess matters of religious continuity and change in the late antique and Byzantine attitudes towards the pignora imperii, or talismans which vouched for the safety of the Roman Empire. Notable pignora are the Palladium, the ancilia, and the stone of Cybele. The paper focuses on two periods. In the first section, a close reading of a passage of Servius from the early fifth century AD discloses how the author re-anchored the pignora in the contemporary context of anxieties over the preservation of pagan heritage and the imminent shift of power and prestige from Rome to Constantinople. The second section focuses on the works of John Malalas and John of Lydia in order to trace the vicissitudes of the pignora in sixth century Constantinople. Servius’ pignora are re-anchored in the context of an Empire which saw itself increasingly as Christian and centred on Constantinople. Also new pignora, such as the Latin language and statues in Constantinople are being construed in the sixth century. The paper concludes with a short sketch of a field which merits further research; the continuity in religious attitudes towards pignora between late antiquity and the Byzantine period. It will be argued that icons of the Theotokos or Virgin Mary in Byzantium gradually usurp the role and function of the antique pignora. The paper has in two appendices 1) a list of testimonies to the Palladium, and 2) a list of transfers of Hero remains in antiquity.A

John Lydus, Helvius Vindicianus, and the circulation of Latin gynaecological texts in Sixth-Century Constantinople

This paper focuses on the sixth-century historian John Lydus, who, next to an interest in Latin, exhibited a great interest in and knowledge of gynaecological texts. Almost all of his sources on gynaecology are Greek. However, in Mens. IV.26, Lydus vaguely mentions his use of Latin sources. We shall compare this passage to the works of the fourth-century Latin physician Helvius Vindicianus, hypothesising that he was one of Lydus’ sources. A readership of Vindicianus in Constantinople in the sixth century sheds light on the exchange of medical texts between the “Latin” West and the “Greek” East in late antiquity

From the womb to the page : gynaecology and history in John of Lydia

This paper aims to contribute to the cultural history of late antique embryology and gynaecology, by focusing on the historian John Lydus (ca. AD 490 - ca. 565). In an overview of his numerous passages on gynaecology, we show that he had a coherent view on these sciences. We shall contextualise the interest of John of Lydia in a subject matter which is ostensibly far removed from his historical interests, by taking into consideration three factors: 1) the legal context of imperial policy, 2) the function of gynaecology in John's historical thinking, and 3) the personal concerns of the author

Antiquarianism in the sixth century AD: Easing The shift from Rome to Constantinople

One of the fundamental sources of cultural unease in late antiquity was the fall of the western Roman Empire and the transmission of imperial power and prestige from Rome to Constantinople. Through a close reading of the antiquarianism of three authors – John Lydus (c. AD 490 – c. 565), Cassiodorus (c. AD 485 – c. 585) and John Malalas (c. AD 490 – c. 570) – this paper analyses how the distant past is used in sixth century sources as a platform to compare and discuss the moral legitimacy of Rome and Constantinople as capitals of the Roman Empire. The paper shall present two case studies ; the antiquarian scrutiny of the questionable character of Romulus, who founded Rome on the blood of his brother Remus, and the antiquarian analyses of the fate of the statues in Rome and Constantinople.Une source fondamentale du malaise culturel de l’Antiquité tardive fut la chute de l’Empire romain et la transmission du pouvoir et du prestige impérial de Rome à Constantinople. Cet article analyse, à travers une lecture attentive des textes antiquaires de trois auteurs – Jean le Lydien (c. 490 – c. 565 ap. J.-C.), Cassiodore (c. 485 – c. 585 ap. J.-C.) et Jean Malalas (c. 490 – c. 570 ap. J.-C.) – comment le passé lointain est utilisé dans les sources du sixième siècle comme une plateforme pour comparer et discuter la légitimité morale de Rome et de Constantinople comme les capitales de l’Empire romain. La contribution présentera deux études de cas ; l’examen antiquaire du caractère douteux de Romulus, qui a fondé Rome sur le sang de son frère Remus, et les analyses antiquaires du sort des statues à Rome et à Constantinople.De val van het West-romeinse rijk was, samen met de overdracht van keizerlijke macht en prestige van Rome naar Constantinopel, een fundamentele bron van cultureel ongenoegen in de late oudheid. Deze bijdrage zal, door middel van een detaillezing van de antiquarische teksten van drie auteurs (Johannes van Lydië (ca. 490 – ca. 565 n. C.), Cassiodorus (ca. 485 – ca. 585 n. C.) en Johannes Malalas (c. 490 – c. 570 n. C.)) analyseren hoe het verre verleden in zesde-eeuwse historische bronnen werd gebruikt als een arena waarin de morele legitimiteit van Rome en Constantinopel werden vergeleken en bediscussieerd. Deze bijdrage zal deze analyse maken door middel van twee casussen : de antiquarische bevraging van het twijfelachtig personage Romulus, dat Rome stichtte in het bloed van zijn broer Remus, en de antiquarische analyses van de lotsbestemming van de standbeelden van Rome en Constantinopel.Praet Raf. Antiquarianism in the sixth century AD: Easing The shift from Rome to Constantinople. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 96, fasc. 3, 2018. Antiquité - Ouheid. pp. 1011-1031

Rethinking intertextuality through a word-space and social network approach – the case of Cassiodorus

Continuous space representations of words are currently at the core of many state-of-the-art approaches in computational linguistics. The distributional hypothesis, summarised as: 'You shall know a word by the company it keeps' [Firth, 1957] is the basis of many such methods. In this paper we use this type of representation, which has seen little to no use in digital humanities, to rethink the concept of intertextuality. We present and use an alternative conceptual concept of intertextuality to ascertain how different persons are portrayed in a late antique letter collection, the Variae of Cassiodorus (ca. 485–585 AD). We combine this approach with the well-explored method of network analysis. 'The study of intertextuality is the study of a certain kind of relation between texts: One text quotes another or others.' [Edmunds, 2001]. Until recently, intertextuality has been pictured as an interaction between different texts, which has been restricted to the surface forms. We want to transcend this rather limited, one-dimensional concept of intertextuality by using high-dimensional word representations which effectively abstract away from such surface forms. Instead of conceptualising, e.g. Vergil, as the sum of his transmitted oeuvre, we represent him both as a node in a network, and a vector in high-dimensional space. In this way we overcome the border between text and historical person; a border which impedes the ascertaining of the intertextual impact of authors which are partially or not at all preserved. We create word-space representations based on the letters in the Variae, using methods based on distributional semantics [Mikolov et al., 2013a, Levy et al., 2015]. In antiquity, the editing and publication of letter collections was a fundamental tool for literary and cultural self-representation. Late antiquity witnessed the zenith of this practice with the publication of several such collections, both in Latin and in Greek. The Variae of Cassiodorus are an excellent example of this practice of self-representation [Bjornlie, 2012, Gillett, 1998]. In this paper, we will represent Cassiodorus, his contemporaries, and influential authors of the literary canon, such as Vergil, in one and the same network. This form of visualisation can generate a more nuanced view on how Cassiodorus constructs a cultural profile for himself and his peers. Indeed, the letters of Cassiodorus act as a meeting ground in which both the contemporaries of Cassiodorus, as well as the authors who shaped the intellectual outlook of Cassiodorus and his peers, interact with each other