Papers by Mariana Bodnaruk
Journal of Late Antiquity 17.2, 2024
An ambiguity lays at the heart of late antique religious literature, and in particular trans sain... more An ambiguity lays at the heart of late antique religious literature, and in particular trans saints' lives: the celebration of what is ordinarily prohibited in both canon law and imperial legislation. These popular late-antique narratives include the anonymous Life and Passion of Susanna, which depicts a literary character of a trans monk, virgin, and martyr in the mid-fourthcentury Palestinian setting. Such texts and images mediate social identities, albeit their treatment is constrained due to the ramifications of the literary genre and iconographic traditions. Examining this rarely discussed vita, which has not yet been translated in full into any modern language, and the concomitant hagiographic iconography, this article investigates late antique social and religious identities at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. It begins with critical historiography of scholarly accounts of the late antique "trans saint" that drew on methodological paradigms of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and poststructuralism, often interpreting these saintly figures as transhistorical and literary constructions. The article argues for an intersectional-materialist transfeminist analysis of these texts as a heuristic approach to the historical record attentive to material life after the end of the linguistic turn in the humanities.
Phoenix, Mar 1, 2023
The article aims at dispelling the repeatedly expressed assumption that two late Roman sarcophagi... more The article aims at dispelling the repeatedly expressed assumption that two late Roman sarcophagi formerly in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and now in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem are forgeries. It analyses their epigraphy and iconography based on autopsy of the monuments and assesses arguments brought forward in the scholarly controversy regarding the authenticity, provenance, and dating of the two coffins.
Phoenix 77.1, 2023
The article aims at dispelling the repeatedly expressed assumption that two late Roman sarcophagi... more The article aims at dispelling the repeatedly expressed assumption that two late Roman sarcophagi formerly in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and now in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem are forgeries. It analyses their epigraphy and iconography based on autopsy of the monuments and assesses arguments brought forward in the scholarly controversy regarding the authenticity, provenance, and dating of the two coffins.
Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity: Essays on Embodiment and Disembodiment, eds. S. Panayotov et al. London: Routledge, 2023
The scholarship on late antique trans saints since its inception has been revolving around two co... more The scholarship on late antique trans saints since its inception has been revolving around two conflicting interpretations of the vitae of sex-gender crossing ascetics. While the emphasis in the previous decades was on assimilation of masculinity and masculine piety by the “female” saints, recent transfeminist focus is on the forms of their agency in ascetic and monastic contexts. Various theoretical frameworks have been set out to recover agency of the protagonists in these texts. I explore how in the Life of Pelagia gender was conceptualized as a site of struggle in a specific historical setting. Yet it is only then possible to recognize an active role of the marginalized subjects when it is not transformed into its opposite, when what the scholars recover as agency are not in fact instances of acquiescence to circumstances that are intrinsically hostile to the genderized and sexualized figures of these vitae. Alongside the critical historiographical reading, this chapter views the Life of Pelagia not only as “symbolic literature” but also as a historical source. I argue that the Life of Pelagia is not merely a fictional text with gendered and erotic intertexts, or literary motifs, but a story with clear ideological aims and agenda.
CAS Working Paper Series. Vol. 13. (Sofia: Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS), 2023
This paper reexamines feminist and transgender theory’s concepts of agency and resistance by anal... more This paper reexamines feminist and transgender theory’s concepts of agency and resistance by analyzing three late antique Lives of gender-crossing saints from the Holy Land: Pelagia the Harlot, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis. It investigates the possibilities for agency and resistance of the fictional protagonists of these hagiographic narratives against the forms of domination and the encroachments of power in the Byzantine social and religious contexts. This study contends that, despite the constraints of their situation, the subjugated individuals were capable of exercising their agency and were not passive victims of the existing social system. Even if the gender-crossing acts themselves did not undermine the conditions of oppression, albeit discursively destabilizing the societal norms of gender and sexuality, the small-scale forms of resistance of the dominated can be recovered in these accounts, notwithstanding the fragmentary and transient character of these efforts.
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1124460
New Europe College Yearbook
The role of senatorial elites under the tetrarchic and Maxentian rule has received modest attenti... more The role of senatorial elites under the tetrarchic and Maxentian rule has received modest attention from historians. The exclusion from military service and government of provinces and the abandonment by emperors of the ideology of ‘republican monarchy’ destabilized the place of the senate in the structures of the empire. This article aims to investigate aristocratic involvement in the political change in Rome under Maxentius. It assesses the self-image of the senatorial aristocracy juxtaposed with that of the emperor in honorific inscriptions which reveal the shifting role of leading resident families of Rome in imperial power structures, challenged by the rapid advancement and consolidation of equestrian imperial elites. This article seeks to engage aristocratic self-representation together with the imperial one reinstated in the same historical context.
Journal of Epigraphic Studies 6, 2023
In this article, I publish two Latin funerary inscriptions from late antique Roman sarcophagi, wh... more In this article, I publish two Latin funerary inscriptions from late antique Roman sarcophagi, which are now in the collection of the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. The inscriptions have not been subject to scholarly examination by epigraphists. I oπer an account of their genuineness, provenance, and dating, and editions of the two fourth-century epitaphs of late Roman senatorial women: one is a sepulchral inscription of Iulia Latronilla; the other is that of Octavia Baebiana. I argue that both inscriptions are genuine, originate from Rome, and date to the second quarter of the fourth century AD.
De Gruyter, 2022
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Damnatio Memoriae of the High-ranking Senatorial Office-holders in the Later ... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Damnatio Memoriae of the High-ranking Senatorial Office-holders in the Later Roman Empire, 337-415.” In: Fragmented Memory: Omission, Selection, and Loss in Ancient and Medieval Literature and History. Eds. Nicoletta Bruno, Martina Filosa, and Giulia Marinelli (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022), 185-214.
Unlike damnatio memoriae of the emperors/usurpers, the memory sanctions against the senatorial elite in the later Roman Empire have received modest attention of historians. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the empire’s memory politics in the time of the administrative and cultural change accelerated by the Constantinian reforms. With damnatio memoriae defined as the act of publically erasing a person’s memory, I assess the late Roman practice through honorific sculpture and written sources as well as rarely studied impact on their audience. This paper intends to go beyond the specialized compartments of the disciplines (epigraphy, art history, philology) and to make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life mediated by honorific monuments and literature.
Review of Ecumenical Studies Sibiu, 2021
Repentant harlots who became trans saints presented Byzantine hagiographers with a challenge. Tho... more Repentant harlots who became trans saints presented Byzantine hagiographers with a challenge. Thought to exhibit a lack of self-control and the excessive sexuality, associated with women, and sex workers in particular, – a subject of great concern for monastic authors – how could members of this stigmatized group achieve the standards of Christian piety, let alone saintly behavior? In portraying its fictional protagonist as an exemplum of masculine virtues in the context of nascent Palestinian monasticism, the anonymous Life of Pelagia highlights the non-binariness of social identities in early Byzantium, unsettling fixed gender categorization. Conceiving of a trans figure of an ascetic subverting conventional binaries, the Life creates a model for incorporating non-conforming masculinities of Byzantine society within the normative hagiographic genre.
Routledge , Oct 21, 2022
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Participants in the Emperor’s Glory: The Late-antique Statues for Military Ho... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Participants in the Emperor’s Glory: The Late-antique Statues for Military Honorands in Rome.” In: Military Diasporas: Defending, Shaping, and Connecting Power in the Euromediterranean from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. Eds. Georg Christ, Patrick Sänger, and Mike Carr (London: Routledge, 2022), 106-131.
In the first half of the fifth century CE in the late Roman west the empire’s generals were heavily reliant on federates (foederati) – forces recruited and mobilized beyond the imperial frontiers – and military diasporas in general. This chapter explores the honorific epigraphy of statue bases in Rome dedicated to high ranked military commanders, whose actual power relied on their ability to raise a large army from among their federates. It was this primary power base that allowed Roman military elite to swiftly accumulate social prestige and highest imperial honors. Honorific statuary and inscriptions in the Forum Romanum celebrate a political and social capital monopolized by senior military officers and articulate the changing relationship between the emperor and high army command. These forms of representation provide an image of the social hierarchy and indirect evidence for the political importance of military diasporas. It will be argued that successful military leaders of the western empire who distinguished themselves in the service of the ruling regimes could not have reached their political status without securing personal loyalty of the Roman army and ‘barbarian’ federates alike. Late Roman magistri militum Stilicho, Flavius Constantius, and Aetius provide three case studies of such careers.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Late Antique Slavery in Epigraphic Evidence.” In: Slavery in the Late Antique... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Late Antique Slavery in Epigraphic Evidence.” In: Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150–700 CE. Eds. Chris L. de Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 224-248.
While slavery was entrenched in the tributary mode of production of the late
empire, the vitality of the fourth-century Roman slave system witnessed a decline in
the next two centuries. Imperial pronouncements inscribed in stone and set up in
public and monumental contexts throughout the empire refer to slaves, both urban and
rural. From the fourth to sixth centuries the state legislation dealt repeatedly with
servitude even when commanding slave-like treatment for runaway tenants. While
some economic historians discount its significance by misidentifying rural slaves as
coloni, others recognize that landowners still made use of slavery even if increasingly
preferring to combine different categories of labour. With the scholarly focus on
narrative sources, late antique inscriptions recording commodified humans have
received less scholarly attention. This article engages in an analysis of the late Roman
epigraphic practice documenting slaves in the imperial centres and rural periphery as
well as on the frontiers of the empire. The study of the epigraphic representation of
Roman slavery from 260 to 600 comprises census inscriptions and civic tariffs,
manumission documents, records of public municipal servitude, epitaphs mentioning
slaves and freedmen, and identification tags. It examines what the epigraphic
monuments and concomitant imagery reveal about the late antique slavery
highlighting intersecting oppressions. It argues that the Roman habit of inscribing
inequality underscores the materiality of late Roman slavery. This article focuses on
both Latin and Greek epigraphic evidence that, although relatively meagre compared
to earlier centuries, provides insights into the persistence of slavery in late antiquity.
Agora 8, 2011
The article explores Deir el-Qalaa, an archeological site situated on the highest hill in Beit Ma... more The article explores Deir el-Qalaa, an archeological site situated on the highest hill in Beit Mary (Lebanon), which preserves monuments from the Roman and early Byzantine era. The Roman architectural ensemble was identified as comprising three temples. The three-aisled basilica of the sixth century shows a Christianization of the Roman site.
Routledge, 2017
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Administering the Empire: The Unmaking of an Equestrian Elite in the 4th Cent... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Administering the Empire: The Unmaking of an Equestrian Elite in the 4th Century CE.” In: Official Power and Local Elites in the Roman Provinces, eds. Rada Varga and Viorica Rusu-Bolindeţ (London: Routledge, 2017), 145-167.
Accounts of a disappearance of the ordo equitum romanorum in the later Roman Empire start from an implicit assumption. According to this assumption in the course of the fourth-century imperial reforms the senatorial order steadily expanded becoming in fact the sole aristocracy of the Empire and thus the equestrian order was effectively abolished. Scholars have tended to conclude that by the fourth century the ordo equester had ceased to exist as the second order of the Empire under the impact of Constantine's general fusion of the senatorial and equestrian orders. For that reason, the role of the equestrian aristocracy at the provincial level from the age of Constantine to the age of Theodosius has received less attention on its own. The self-representation of the equestrian provincial élite has not, with a few notable exceptions, received close scrutiny and the primary evidence has in many cases been neglected. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the political and cultural change in the fourth century concentrating on epigraphic sources, and argues that the focus on the equestrians and their ideological representation suggests a more complex view on the integration of the imperial élites. Unfortunately, no more than a few equestrian standing statues can be securely attributed to the period under discussion. The limited evidentiary base, uncertain identification, and floating dating of these statue portraits pose a serious challenge for reading equestrian representation in late Roman art.
A.H.M. Jones was the first scholar to emphasize the continuing importance of the equestrian order well into the fourth century. The equestrian order was neither subsumed wholesale into the senatorial class, nor did it come to an end with Constantine’s reforms, as the emperor granted senatorial status only to high equestrian prefects. The ordo senatorius absorbed only the higher levels of the equestrian order, yet the process was not completed even until the last years of the fourth century. Moreover, by the middle of the fourth century, generously disseminated imperial grants caused the equestrian order to grow to such an extent that it began to lose its distinction with an inflation of honors. My paper focuses on the relationship between the emperor and his élites and the honorific language by which the ruler and the equestrian aristocracy articulated their interaction in the fourth century Roman Empire. A redefinition of the political and social status of élites within the imperial system was manifested most clearly in the imperial honorifics as applied to equestrian officials. I address the cultural dimension of social and political integration examining honorific practice exposed by the late Roman inscriptions of the last equestrians in antiquity.
Set up in a public and monumental context, as dedicated by the local men, honorific inscriptions were open to a throng of potential readers in the prime sites in the cities of the later Roman Empire. Given the perspective of the members of the elite at a provincial level, for local aristocrats as well for cities a posture of deference towards the equestrian officials had become an effective means of acquiring access to imperial resources and favors. Honorific inscriptions give a chance to grasp the two-way communication between the equestrian elite as one of the ‘power elites’ of the Empire and the municipal leadership, i.e., the communication on which the equilibrium between the imperial government and the provincial society rested on.
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Producing Distinction: Aristocratic and Imperial Representation in the Consta... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Producing Distinction: Aristocratic and Imperial Representation in the Constantinian Age.” In: Shifting Genres in Late Antiquity, eds. Geoffrey Greatrex and Hugh Elton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 135-155.
Scholars have viewed the relations between the emperor and the senatorial aristocracy in late antique Rome assuming that the senatorial elite and the emperor with his entourage form two discrete groups which, although interacting with each other in various ways, exist as two separate and often antagonistic “phenomena”. Scholars have tended to treat the Constantinian change as a single defining moment in a religious conflict between Christians and pagans. For that reason, the role of the imperial aristocracy in the age of Constantine has received less attention on its own. Early fourth-century aristocratic self-representation has not, with a few notable exceptions, received close scrutiny and the primary evidence has in many cases been neglected. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the political and cultural change in the Constantinian period concentrating on visual sources, and argues that the shift of focus to the senatorial class suggests a more complex intersection between the imperial and aristocratic ideological representation.
The first part of the paper presents the evidence for the political background to the aristocratic self-representation. Honorary statues, an exceptionally conservative medium of self-expression of the social elite, underwent conspicuous change. While the most closely dated portrait statues of the early fourth century, examples both of the fashion of the last decade of Constantinian rule and the constraints of re-use, show a lack of influence of the image of Constantine, they suggest the continued significance of the traditional Roman toga and demonstrate great continuity with the past. The iconography and chronology of the late antique togate statue will be explained from the sociological, political, and administrative changes that re-structured the elites of the Roman Empire after the reforms of the tetrarchy and Constantine, a process that made the development of new representational patterns possible.
The second part of the paper analyzes the imperial representation in light of the new visual language that came into being during the period. A radically new image conceived for Constantine, that of a beardless Augustus-like figure, has been recognized and held up as an important turning point in late Roman art. While it has been acknowledged that the Constantinian innovative image represents the end of the military tradition of the short-haired and short-bearded imperial likeness which culminated in the anonymous and effectively interchangeable portraits of tetrarchs, it is a much under-emphasized fact that the traditional elite did not embrace the Constantinian look, but continued to represent themselves in the established manner of the third century within the previous honorific statue tradition, in contrast to the new and widespread emperor’s image.
With this reassessment of a more complex political landscape of the Constantinian age than has been recognized, involving aristocratic representation together with imperial self-portrayal, which my paper reinstates to the same context, one witnesses the dynamic social world of the time, in both Rome and the provinces, and an approach that calls into question the “pagan/Christian” model and invites a new interpretation that is not based on religious categories.
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Beyond a Landscape of Conflict: The Occursus in Adventus Ceremonies in Fourth... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Beyond a Landscape of Conflict: The Occursus in Adventus Ceremonies in Fourth-century Rome.” In: Landscapes of Power: Selected Papers from the XV Oxford University Byzantine Society International Graduate Conference, eds. M. DiRodi, C. Franchi, and M. Lau (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 31-54.
The occursus – one of the main ritual elements of the adventus ceremony when the assembly of Roman senators as a conspicuous part of the delegation‟s composition greeted the arriving emperor in ritualized distance at the city gate – reveals the importance of an overlooked aspect of the imperial political ceremony, namely the aristocrats‟ role in it. This paper situates the occursus component of the ritual within the larger corpus of evidence on late antique adventus, and, in contrast to previous studies, argues that the ritual suggests a more complex intersection between politics and imperial ceremonies in fourth-century Rome than it has been previously acknowledged. It explores one particular sub-set of adventus ceremonies related to imperial arrivals in Rome. It argues that this set of ceremonies is not a variation upon the standard adventus theme in which city magistrates elsewhere would perform a parallel function, but a
radically different ritual, reflecting the peculiar status of both senate and emperor in the city of Rome. Did the body of citizens, headed by dignitaries, express the consensus universorum fundamental to classical and late antique theories of legitimate government, as Sabine MacCormack assumed? Were the „pagan‟ elements of the ritual „neutralized‟ before their gradual Christianization in the process of making of the Christian empire, as Michael McCormick argued? Rather than a landscape of conflict, the imperial ceremonial of the adventus and the occursus in it presents significant continuities and an extended process of Christianization.
Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 19, 2013
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “The Politics of Memory and Visual Politics: Comparing the Self-representation... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “The Politics of Memory and Visual Politics: Comparing the Self-representations of Constantine and Augustus.” In: Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU. Vol. 19. Eds. Judith Rasson and Marianne Sághy (Budapest: Central European University, 2013), 9-32.
Bodnaruk, Mariana. “The Politics of Art: Constantine and Augustus.” In: Saint Emperor Constantine... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. “The Politics of Art: Constantine and Augustus.” In: Saint Emperor Constantine and Christianity. Vol. 2. Ed. Dragiša Bojović (Niš, 2013), 229-250.
Conferences by Mariana Bodnaruk
In his book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity,... more In his book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, Kyle Harper emphasizes that Christianity had made an enormous difference in how late ancient men and women conceptualized their passions and sexual activities. Also, feminist critics of ancient philosophical theories have focused on theories of matter. Fascinated by Aristotle’s identification of matter with privation, ugliness and femininity, they often tend to consider mainstream philosophies as sexist and the positive evaluation of matter and body as the gauge of the liberation of the female gender. Moreover, there is a tendency to link the Christian dichotomy of spirit and flesh to these philosophical theories. On the other hand, Late Antique scholars, following the lead of Peter Brown, have pointed to the function of sexual renunciation in early Christianity in liberating women from their traditional roles played in the Roman society. Yet, rarely if ever do scholars who are engaged in gender and sexuality studies attempt to conduct a comprehensive and in-depth study into these interrelated phenomena, while mainstream scholarship on these often turns a blind eye to the gendered perspective.
Thesis Chapters by Mariana Bodnaruk
CEU, 2019
Bodnaruk, Mariana. Production of Distinction: The Representation of the Senatorial Elites in the... more Bodnaruk, Mariana. Production of Distinction: The Representation of the Senatorial Elites in the Later Roman Empire, 306–395. PhD Dissertation. Central European University, 2019.
My doctoral dissertation set out to investigate the effects of the transformation of the institutions of the imperial state in the fourth century on the self-representation of the senatorial aristocracy as integrated into the imperial system. For the first time, aristocracies from throughout the Mediterranean world were amalgamated in one centralized structure. Viewing the Mediterranean world in the period covered by this thesis – from the accession of Constantine I to the death of Theodosius I – as characterized by the same political, economic and institutional factors, the period, whose end, by contrast, marks the beginnings of a divergence between the West and the East, I explore the cultural impacts of the creation of a new governing class of the fourth-century Roman Empire.
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Papers by Mariana Bodnaruk
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1124460
Unlike damnatio memoriae of the emperors/usurpers, the memory sanctions against the senatorial elite in the later Roman Empire have received modest attention of historians. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the empire’s memory politics in the time of the administrative and cultural change accelerated by the Constantinian reforms. With damnatio memoriae defined as the act of publically erasing a person’s memory, I assess the late Roman practice through honorific sculpture and written sources as well as rarely studied impact on their audience. This paper intends to go beyond the specialized compartments of the disciplines (epigraphy, art history, philology) and to make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life mediated by honorific monuments and literature.
In the first half of the fifth century CE in the late Roman west the empire’s generals were heavily reliant on federates (foederati) – forces recruited and mobilized beyond the imperial frontiers – and military diasporas in general. This chapter explores the honorific epigraphy of statue bases in Rome dedicated to high ranked military commanders, whose actual power relied on their ability to raise a large army from among their federates. It was this primary power base that allowed Roman military elite to swiftly accumulate social prestige and highest imperial honors. Honorific statuary and inscriptions in the Forum Romanum celebrate a political and social capital monopolized by senior military officers and articulate the changing relationship between the emperor and high army command. These forms of representation provide an image of the social hierarchy and indirect evidence for the political importance of military diasporas. It will be argued that successful military leaders of the western empire who distinguished themselves in the service of the ruling regimes could not have reached their political status without securing personal loyalty of the Roman army and ‘barbarian’ federates alike. Late Roman magistri militum Stilicho, Flavius Constantius, and Aetius provide three case studies of such careers.
While slavery was entrenched in the tributary mode of production of the late
empire, the vitality of the fourth-century Roman slave system witnessed a decline in
the next two centuries. Imperial pronouncements inscribed in stone and set up in
public and monumental contexts throughout the empire refer to slaves, both urban and
rural. From the fourth to sixth centuries the state legislation dealt repeatedly with
servitude even when commanding slave-like treatment for runaway tenants. While
some economic historians discount its significance by misidentifying rural slaves as
coloni, others recognize that landowners still made use of slavery even if increasingly
preferring to combine different categories of labour. With the scholarly focus on
narrative sources, late antique inscriptions recording commodified humans have
received less scholarly attention. This article engages in an analysis of the late Roman
epigraphic practice documenting slaves in the imperial centres and rural periphery as
well as on the frontiers of the empire. The study of the epigraphic representation of
Roman slavery from 260 to 600 comprises census inscriptions and civic tariffs,
manumission documents, records of public municipal servitude, epitaphs mentioning
slaves and freedmen, and identification tags. It examines what the epigraphic
monuments and concomitant imagery reveal about the late antique slavery
highlighting intersecting oppressions. It argues that the Roman habit of inscribing
inequality underscores the materiality of late Roman slavery. This article focuses on
both Latin and Greek epigraphic evidence that, although relatively meagre compared
to earlier centuries, provides insights into the persistence of slavery in late antiquity.
Accounts of a disappearance of the ordo equitum romanorum in the later Roman Empire start from an implicit assumption. According to this assumption in the course of the fourth-century imperial reforms the senatorial order steadily expanded becoming in fact the sole aristocracy of the Empire and thus the equestrian order was effectively abolished. Scholars have tended to conclude that by the fourth century the ordo equester had ceased to exist as the second order of the Empire under the impact of Constantine's general fusion of the senatorial and equestrian orders. For that reason, the role of the equestrian aristocracy at the provincial level from the age of Constantine to the age of Theodosius has received less attention on its own. The self-representation of the equestrian provincial élite has not, with a few notable exceptions, received close scrutiny and the primary evidence has in many cases been neglected. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the political and cultural change in the fourth century concentrating on epigraphic sources, and argues that the focus on the equestrians and their ideological representation suggests a more complex view on the integration of the imperial élites. Unfortunately, no more than a few equestrian standing statues can be securely attributed to the period under discussion. The limited evidentiary base, uncertain identification, and floating dating of these statue portraits pose a serious challenge for reading equestrian representation in late Roman art.
A.H.M. Jones was the first scholar to emphasize the continuing importance of the equestrian order well into the fourth century. The equestrian order was neither subsumed wholesale into the senatorial class, nor did it come to an end with Constantine’s reforms, as the emperor granted senatorial status only to high equestrian prefects. The ordo senatorius absorbed only the higher levels of the equestrian order, yet the process was not completed even until the last years of the fourth century. Moreover, by the middle of the fourth century, generously disseminated imperial grants caused the equestrian order to grow to such an extent that it began to lose its distinction with an inflation of honors. My paper focuses on the relationship between the emperor and his élites and the honorific language by which the ruler and the equestrian aristocracy articulated their interaction in the fourth century Roman Empire. A redefinition of the political and social status of élites within the imperial system was manifested most clearly in the imperial honorifics as applied to equestrian officials. I address the cultural dimension of social and political integration examining honorific practice exposed by the late Roman inscriptions of the last equestrians in antiquity.
Set up in a public and monumental context, as dedicated by the local men, honorific inscriptions were open to a throng of potential readers in the prime sites in the cities of the later Roman Empire. Given the perspective of the members of the elite at a provincial level, for local aristocrats as well for cities a posture of deference towards the equestrian officials had become an effective means of acquiring access to imperial resources and favors. Honorific inscriptions give a chance to grasp the two-way communication between the equestrian elite as one of the ‘power elites’ of the Empire and the municipal leadership, i.e., the communication on which the equilibrium between the imperial government and the provincial society rested on.
Scholars have viewed the relations between the emperor and the senatorial aristocracy in late antique Rome assuming that the senatorial elite and the emperor with his entourage form two discrete groups which, although interacting with each other in various ways, exist as two separate and often antagonistic “phenomena”. Scholars have tended to treat the Constantinian change as a single defining moment in a religious conflict between Christians and pagans. For that reason, the role of the imperial aristocracy in the age of Constantine has received less attention on its own. Early fourth-century aristocratic self-representation has not, with a few notable exceptions, received close scrutiny and the primary evidence has in many cases been neglected. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the political and cultural change in the Constantinian period concentrating on visual sources, and argues that the shift of focus to the senatorial class suggests a more complex intersection between the imperial and aristocratic ideological representation.
The first part of the paper presents the evidence for the political background to the aristocratic self-representation. Honorary statues, an exceptionally conservative medium of self-expression of the social elite, underwent conspicuous change. While the most closely dated portrait statues of the early fourth century, examples both of the fashion of the last decade of Constantinian rule and the constraints of re-use, show a lack of influence of the image of Constantine, they suggest the continued significance of the traditional Roman toga and demonstrate great continuity with the past. The iconography and chronology of the late antique togate statue will be explained from the sociological, political, and administrative changes that re-structured the elites of the Roman Empire after the reforms of the tetrarchy and Constantine, a process that made the development of new representational patterns possible.
The second part of the paper analyzes the imperial representation in light of the new visual language that came into being during the period. A radically new image conceived for Constantine, that of a beardless Augustus-like figure, has been recognized and held up as an important turning point in late Roman art. While it has been acknowledged that the Constantinian innovative image represents the end of the military tradition of the short-haired and short-bearded imperial likeness which culminated in the anonymous and effectively interchangeable portraits of tetrarchs, it is a much under-emphasized fact that the traditional elite did not embrace the Constantinian look, but continued to represent themselves in the established manner of the third century within the previous honorific statue tradition, in contrast to the new and widespread emperor’s image.
With this reassessment of a more complex political landscape of the Constantinian age than has been recognized, involving aristocratic representation together with imperial self-portrayal, which my paper reinstates to the same context, one witnesses the dynamic social world of the time, in both Rome and the provinces, and an approach that calls into question the “pagan/Christian” model and invites a new interpretation that is not based on religious categories.
The occursus – one of the main ritual elements of the adventus ceremony when the assembly of Roman senators as a conspicuous part of the delegation‟s composition greeted the arriving emperor in ritualized distance at the city gate – reveals the importance of an overlooked aspect of the imperial political ceremony, namely the aristocrats‟ role in it. This paper situates the occursus component of the ritual within the larger corpus of evidence on late antique adventus, and, in contrast to previous studies, argues that the ritual suggests a more complex intersection between politics and imperial ceremonies in fourth-century Rome than it has been previously acknowledged. It explores one particular sub-set of adventus ceremonies related to imperial arrivals in Rome. It argues that this set of ceremonies is not a variation upon the standard adventus theme in which city magistrates elsewhere would perform a parallel function, but a
radically different ritual, reflecting the peculiar status of both senate and emperor in the city of Rome. Did the body of citizens, headed by dignitaries, express the consensus universorum fundamental to classical and late antique theories of legitimate government, as Sabine MacCormack assumed? Were the „pagan‟ elements of the ritual „neutralized‟ before their gradual Christianization in the process of making of the Christian empire, as Michael McCormick argued? Rather than a landscape of conflict, the imperial ceremonial of the adventus and the occursus in it presents significant continuities and an extended process of Christianization.
Conferences by Mariana Bodnaruk
Thesis Chapters by Mariana Bodnaruk
My doctoral dissertation set out to investigate the effects of the transformation of the institutions of the imperial state in the fourth century on the self-representation of the senatorial aristocracy as integrated into the imperial system. For the first time, aristocracies from throughout the Mediterranean world were amalgamated in one centralized structure. Viewing the Mediterranean world in the period covered by this thesis – from the accession of Constantine I to the death of Theodosius I – as characterized by the same political, economic and institutional factors, the period, whose end, by contrast, marks the beginnings of a divergence between the West and the East, I explore the cultural impacts of the creation of a new governing class of the fourth-century Roman Empire.
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1124460
Unlike damnatio memoriae of the emperors/usurpers, the memory sanctions against the senatorial elite in the later Roman Empire have received modest attention of historians. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the empire’s memory politics in the time of the administrative and cultural change accelerated by the Constantinian reforms. With damnatio memoriae defined as the act of publically erasing a person’s memory, I assess the late Roman practice through honorific sculpture and written sources as well as rarely studied impact on their audience. This paper intends to go beyond the specialized compartments of the disciplines (epigraphy, art history, philology) and to make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life mediated by honorific monuments and literature.
In the first half of the fifth century CE in the late Roman west the empire’s generals were heavily reliant on federates (foederati) – forces recruited and mobilized beyond the imperial frontiers – and military diasporas in general. This chapter explores the honorific epigraphy of statue bases in Rome dedicated to high ranked military commanders, whose actual power relied on their ability to raise a large army from among their federates. It was this primary power base that allowed Roman military elite to swiftly accumulate social prestige and highest imperial honors. Honorific statuary and inscriptions in the Forum Romanum celebrate a political and social capital monopolized by senior military officers and articulate the changing relationship between the emperor and high army command. These forms of representation provide an image of the social hierarchy and indirect evidence for the political importance of military diasporas. It will be argued that successful military leaders of the western empire who distinguished themselves in the service of the ruling regimes could not have reached their political status without securing personal loyalty of the Roman army and ‘barbarian’ federates alike. Late Roman magistri militum Stilicho, Flavius Constantius, and Aetius provide three case studies of such careers.
While slavery was entrenched in the tributary mode of production of the late
empire, the vitality of the fourth-century Roman slave system witnessed a decline in
the next two centuries. Imperial pronouncements inscribed in stone and set up in
public and monumental contexts throughout the empire refer to slaves, both urban and
rural. From the fourth to sixth centuries the state legislation dealt repeatedly with
servitude even when commanding slave-like treatment for runaway tenants. While
some economic historians discount its significance by misidentifying rural slaves as
coloni, others recognize that landowners still made use of slavery even if increasingly
preferring to combine different categories of labour. With the scholarly focus on
narrative sources, late antique inscriptions recording commodified humans have
received less scholarly attention. This article engages in an analysis of the late Roman
epigraphic practice documenting slaves in the imperial centres and rural periphery as
well as on the frontiers of the empire. The study of the epigraphic representation of
Roman slavery from 260 to 600 comprises census inscriptions and civic tariffs,
manumission documents, records of public municipal servitude, epitaphs mentioning
slaves and freedmen, and identification tags. It examines what the epigraphic
monuments and concomitant imagery reveal about the late antique slavery
highlighting intersecting oppressions. It argues that the Roman habit of inscribing
inequality underscores the materiality of late Roman slavery. This article focuses on
both Latin and Greek epigraphic evidence that, although relatively meagre compared
to earlier centuries, provides insights into the persistence of slavery in late antiquity.
Accounts of a disappearance of the ordo equitum romanorum in the later Roman Empire start from an implicit assumption. According to this assumption in the course of the fourth-century imperial reforms the senatorial order steadily expanded becoming in fact the sole aristocracy of the Empire and thus the equestrian order was effectively abolished. Scholars have tended to conclude that by the fourth century the ordo equester had ceased to exist as the second order of the Empire under the impact of Constantine's general fusion of the senatorial and equestrian orders. For that reason, the role of the equestrian aristocracy at the provincial level from the age of Constantine to the age of Theodosius has received less attention on its own. The self-representation of the equestrian provincial élite has not, with a few notable exceptions, received close scrutiny and the primary evidence has in many cases been neglected. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the political and cultural change in the fourth century concentrating on epigraphic sources, and argues that the focus on the equestrians and their ideological representation suggests a more complex view on the integration of the imperial élites. Unfortunately, no more than a few equestrian standing statues can be securely attributed to the period under discussion. The limited evidentiary base, uncertain identification, and floating dating of these statue portraits pose a serious challenge for reading equestrian representation in late Roman art.
A.H.M. Jones was the first scholar to emphasize the continuing importance of the equestrian order well into the fourth century. The equestrian order was neither subsumed wholesale into the senatorial class, nor did it come to an end with Constantine’s reforms, as the emperor granted senatorial status only to high equestrian prefects. The ordo senatorius absorbed only the higher levels of the equestrian order, yet the process was not completed even until the last years of the fourth century. Moreover, by the middle of the fourth century, generously disseminated imperial grants caused the equestrian order to grow to such an extent that it began to lose its distinction with an inflation of honors. My paper focuses on the relationship between the emperor and his élites and the honorific language by which the ruler and the equestrian aristocracy articulated their interaction in the fourth century Roman Empire. A redefinition of the political and social status of élites within the imperial system was manifested most clearly in the imperial honorifics as applied to equestrian officials. I address the cultural dimension of social and political integration examining honorific practice exposed by the late Roman inscriptions of the last equestrians in antiquity.
Set up in a public and monumental context, as dedicated by the local men, honorific inscriptions were open to a throng of potential readers in the prime sites in the cities of the later Roman Empire. Given the perspective of the members of the elite at a provincial level, for local aristocrats as well for cities a posture of deference towards the equestrian officials had become an effective means of acquiring access to imperial resources and favors. Honorific inscriptions give a chance to grasp the two-way communication between the equestrian elite as one of the ‘power elites’ of the Empire and the municipal leadership, i.e., the communication on which the equilibrium between the imperial government and the provincial society rested on.
Scholars have viewed the relations between the emperor and the senatorial aristocracy in late antique Rome assuming that the senatorial elite and the emperor with his entourage form two discrete groups which, although interacting with each other in various ways, exist as two separate and often antagonistic “phenomena”. Scholars have tended to treat the Constantinian change as a single defining moment in a religious conflict between Christians and pagans. For that reason, the role of the imperial aristocracy in the age of Constantine has received less attention on its own. Early fourth-century aristocratic self-representation has not, with a few notable exceptions, received close scrutiny and the primary evidence has in many cases been neglected. This paper seeks to reconstruct aristocratic involvement in the political and cultural change in the Constantinian period concentrating on visual sources, and argues that the shift of focus to the senatorial class suggests a more complex intersection between the imperial and aristocratic ideological representation.
The first part of the paper presents the evidence for the political background to the aristocratic self-representation. Honorary statues, an exceptionally conservative medium of self-expression of the social elite, underwent conspicuous change. While the most closely dated portrait statues of the early fourth century, examples both of the fashion of the last decade of Constantinian rule and the constraints of re-use, show a lack of influence of the image of Constantine, they suggest the continued significance of the traditional Roman toga and demonstrate great continuity with the past. The iconography and chronology of the late antique togate statue will be explained from the sociological, political, and administrative changes that re-structured the elites of the Roman Empire after the reforms of the tetrarchy and Constantine, a process that made the development of new representational patterns possible.
The second part of the paper analyzes the imperial representation in light of the new visual language that came into being during the period. A radically new image conceived for Constantine, that of a beardless Augustus-like figure, has been recognized and held up as an important turning point in late Roman art. While it has been acknowledged that the Constantinian innovative image represents the end of the military tradition of the short-haired and short-bearded imperial likeness which culminated in the anonymous and effectively interchangeable portraits of tetrarchs, it is a much under-emphasized fact that the traditional elite did not embrace the Constantinian look, but continued to represent themselves in the established manner of the third century within the previous honorific statue tradition, in contrast to the new and widespread emperor’s image.
With this reassessment of a more complex political landscape of the Constantinian age than has been recognized, involving aristocratic representation together with imperial self-portrayal, which my paper reinstates to the same context, one witnesses the dynamic social world of the time, in both Rome and the provinces, and an approach that calls into question the “pagan/Christian” model and invites a new interpretation that is not based on religious categories.
The occursus – one of the main ritual elements of the adventus ceremony when the assembly of Roman senators as a conspicuous part of the delegation‟s composition greeted the arriving emperor in ritualized distance at the city gate – reveals the importance of an overlooked aspect of the imperial political ceremony, namely the aristocrats‟ role in it. This paper situates the occursus component of the ritual within the larger corpus of evidence on late antique adventus, and, in contrast to previous studies, argues that the ritual suggests a more complex intersection between politics and imperial ceremonies in fourth-century Rome than it has been previously acknowledged. It explores one particular sub-set of adventus ceremonies related to imperial arrivals in Rome. It argues that this set of ceremonies is not a variation upon the standard adventus theme in which city magistrates elsewhere would perform a parallel function, but a
radically different ritual, reflecting the peculiar status of both senate and emperor in the city of Rome. Did the body of citizens, headed by dignitaries, express the consensus universorum fundamental to classical and late antique theories of legitimate government, as Sabine MacCormack assumed? Were the „pagan‟ elements of the ritual „neutralized‟ before their gradual Christianization in the process of making of the Christian empire, as Michael McCormick argued? Rather than a landscape of conflict, the imperial ceremonial of the adventus and the occursus in it presents significant continuities and an extended process of Christianization.
My doctoral dissertation set out to investigate the effects of the transformation of the institutions of the imperial state in the fourth century on the self-representation of the senatorial aristocracy as integrated into the imperial system. For the first time, aristocracies from throughout the Mediterranean world were amalgamated in one centralized structure. Viewing the Mediterranean world in the period covered by this thesis – from the accession of Constantine I to the death of Theodosius I – as characterized by the same political, economic and institutional factors, the period, whose end, by contrast, marks the beginnings of a divergence between the West and the East, I explore the cultural impacts of the creation of a new governing class of the fourth-century Roman Empire.