Bread and Circuses

Eutropius and Asterius of Amasea

Following on from yesterday's post, another homily on Eutropius, this time from Chrysostom's contemporary Asterius of Amasea (4).

And that other, so much discussed by both men and women! how last year he planned greater things than the giants! Escaping his masters’ rods, he aspired to the rods of a consul. He acquired land to an amount not easy to describe; but he was buried in only as much as the pitiful gave him. Are not all such things then, according to the wise Preacher, vanity of vanities? And are not these political eminences like visions of baseless dreams, delighting for a little, then fleeting away; blooming and withering? Let us therefore end our discourse at this point, and render glory to the Saviour.

The "vanity of vanities" theme was clearly the one to use. 

Eutropius and John Chrysostom

Eutropius is my current winner of the most maligned man in the later Roman empire. The two invectives against him by Claudian (Part 1 and part 2) have to be read to be believed. Anyway, Eutropius was sacrificed to political necessity in August 399. After his fall from favour, John Chrysostom delivered the mother of all "I told you so" homilies.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” – it is always seasonable to utter this but more especially at the present time. Where are now the brilliant surroundings of your consulship? Where are the gleaming torches? Where is the dancing, and the noise of dancers’ feet, and the banquets and the festivals? Where are the garlands and the curtains of the theatre? Where is the applause which greeted you in the city, where the acclamation in the hippodrome and the flatteries of spectators? They are gone – all gone: a wind has blown upon the tree shattering down all its leaves, and showing it to us quite bare, and shaken from its very root; for so great has been the violence of the blast, that it has given a shock to all these fibres of the tree and threatens to tear it up from the roots. Where now are your feigned friends? where are your drinking parties, and your suppers? where is the swarm of parasites, and the wine which used to be poured forth all day long, and the manifold dainties invented by your cooks? where are they who courted your power and did and said everything to win your favour? They were all mere visions of the night, and dreams which have vanished with the dawn of day: they were spring flowers, and when the spring was over they all withered: they were a shadow which has passed away – they were a smoke which has dispersed, bubbles which have burst, cobwebs which have been rent in pieces. Therefore we chant continually this spiritual song – “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

Just feel that knife being twisted by a professional.

Leo II in Anon Val

Here is what Anon Val had to say about the youthful emperor (9.39):

Then, after Zeno was made emperor by his son Leo, who was the offspring of the daughter of Leo the Great, Ariadne by name, he reigned for a year with his son Leo, and it was through Leo’s merit that Zeno retained his power. But after sharing the rule with his son for one year, Zeno was emperor for fourteen years more; he was an Isaurian of high rank, trained to arms, and worthy to receive an emperor’s daughter in marriage.

Ergo postquam factus est imperator Zeno a filio suo Leone, qui natus fuerat de filia Leone Ariagne nomine, regnat cum filio suo anno uno, et merito Leonis regnum remansit apud Zenonem. Zeno vero cum filio iam regnans anno uno, imperavit annos XIIII, Isauriae nobilissimus, qui dignus esset filiam imperatoris accipere, exercitus in arma. Perhibent de eo, quia patellas in genucula non habuisset, sed mobiles fuissent, ut etiam cursum velocissimum ultra modum hominum haberet. In re publica omnino providentissimus, favens genti suae.

The Age of Justinian: Renaissance or Ruin

In the March/April issue of Minerva, a review of The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian edited by Michael Maas.
Download AgeofJustinian.pdf

Romulus Augustulus: Rome's last emperor

In the March/April issue of Minerva, a feature on Romulus Augustulus.

Download LastRomanEmperor.pdf

Teutoburg and the Great Depression

Woo-hoo. It is a novelty to be cited at all, let alone to be used as an exemplum. Rome's Greatest Defeat and I make an appearance in a review of Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's book about the Great Depression:

In order for Mr. Bernanke's line of inquiry to hold logically, it must be that the law of economic science that states that a falling price leads to a greater demand (and a rising price to lower demand) is not a law of our science any longer, else his argument against gold-based money falls apart.

If the law does hold, then the gold standard's causing the Great Contraction (which it did) was not a cause of the Great Depression (which it wasn't) because it could not be the cause of a fall in aggregate demand since the falling price level it caused triggers higher demand.

"And here at Wal-Mart we're raising prices to serve you better!" — Consumer ad you will never see

In Rome's Greatest Defeat, the historian Adrian Murdoch chides the archaeologists of Germany for their "precedence of methodology over analysis, and of description over interpretation." Much the same accusation can be leveled at this essay. Despite the cascade of numbers, it leaves the reader as bereft of any answer to the question tackled as when he started, because we have forgotten that the science of economics was born of philosophy, not mathematics.

Leo II – introduction

The start of an occasional series on Leo II, probably the shadowiest of the fifth century emperors. He was crowned Augustus on 16 November 473 and died in November the following year.

First off, a very odd and garbled fragment of text: Cod. Paris gr. 1447, fols. 257-258, transcribed Wenger, “Notes inédites sur les empereurs Théodose I, Arcadius, Théodose II, Léon I,” REByz 10 (1952), 47-59.

After the demise of these men, the said emperor Leo and his most pious wife Veronica [sic] honoured in a fitting manner the holy garment of Our Lady the Mother of God by dedicating to her a church with all glory and veneration and depositing in it the previously mentioned casked which was made of pure gold and precious stones... together with the glorious and most holy treasure [in it]. On the lid of the reliquary they placed this inscription, that: "Having offered this honour to the Mother of God, they have secured the might of the empire."

The same emperors, beloved of God and Christ set up in the ciborium of the reliquary and image, all of gold and precious stones. The image presents Our Lady the immaculate Mother of God seated on a throne and on either side of her Leo and Veronica, the latter holding her own son, the young emperor Leo [sic], as she falls before our Lady the Mother of God , and also their daughter Ariade. This image has stood from that time onwards above the bema of the reliquary.

Sam Leith on 300

Sam Leith is lit editor of the Telegraph and the paper's latest blogger. He was interviewed yesterday by Ceri Radford. One of the questions was about the worst film adaptation of a great book.

The new film of 300, by Frank Miller. I love Miller’s comics, but this film (out soon) of his story about the battle of Thermopylae stinks like a pile of rotting corpses. Hilarious, at least, because it’s so camp. Hollywood is generally profoundly homophobic; but the moment it gets the chance to look at ancient Greece, it all pours out. On the Spartan side, leather pants, abdominal *eight*-packs and jiggling disco-tits. On the Persian side, multiple piercings, painted eyebrows, polymorphous perversity, and (from Xerxes) pouts like Terence Stamp in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Also, oddly and ahistorically, orcs. “For Spartaaaaa!” Get knotted, ye bampot.

So, not a fan then.

Siliqua of Arcadius

I haven't posted a coin for a while. Here is a silver silqua of Arcadius issued in Milan.

WH Auden and late antiquity

It would be remiss of me not to celebrate the centenary of WH Auden's birth. There is a lovely leader in today's Guardian and today's life at the DNB.

Auden was drawn to the later Roman empire on several occasions: from Roman Wall Blues, one of his most anthologised poems, the song of a miserable soldier on Hadrian’s Wall written in 1937 to his 1968 poem Rois Fainéants where Auden satirises the impotent grandeur of the Merovingian kings.

But the fifth century kept drawing him back. An Encounter, imagines the meeting between Attila and Pope Leo, and his 1947 poem, The Fall of Rome is full of glorious images. “Fantastic grow the evening gowns,” as tax collectors chase defaulters through “the sewers of provincial towns”.

My favourite, however, is his 1959 poem Secondary Epic.  A riff on Virgil's own ekphrasis on the Shield of Achilles (itself both the subject of a poem by Auden and, of course, based on Homer's original), Auden imagines a Gothic poet giving Virgil grief for getting the future of Rome on the shield completely wrong.

He mocks Virgil for missing “so clear a proof of Providence” that the names of “the Catholic boy/ whom the Arian Odovacer will depose” hark back both to Romulus and to Augustus.

Also any poem that begins “No, Virgil, no!” has to be read.