Monograph by Jacob A Latham
The pompa circensis, the parade which preceded the chariot races in the arena, was a political pa... more The pompa circensis, the parade which preceded the chariot races in the arena, was a political pageant and a religious ritual that produced a republican, imperial, and even Christian image of the city. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity.
Articles by Jacob A Latham
Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods: Conversations in Theory and Method, Studies in Ancient Mediterranean Religions 3, edited by Sandra Blakely and Megan Daniels (Columbus, GA: Lockwood, 2023): 117-134, 2023
Ancient Roman civic religion’s well-known precision has often been dis- missed as fastidious ritu... more Ancient Roman civic religion’s well-known precision has often been dis- missed as fastidious ritualism or, less commonly, read as a form of spiritu- ality. What has been overlooked, however, is the work performed by such punctiliousness. In ancient Rome, exacting execution was a key strategy of ritualization—one way to differentiate ritual from other kinds of activi- ties, following Catherine Bell’s definition of ritualization as the process by which quotidian actions are made different by a variety of culturally spe- cific tactics. For example, Roman strategies of ritualization, which overlap significantly with Roy Rappaport’s definition of ritual, transformed a stroll through the center of Rome into the religious procession that kicked off the chariot races in the arena. Moreover, these forms of ritualization produced a dazzling performance in a full sense—the proper rite (correctly ritualized practice) performed at the right time in the proper way. In the end, an ex- amination of strategies of ritualization offers insights into what one might call the Romans’ tenets of ritual theology.
Ritual Movement in Antiquity (and Beyond), Supplement to Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 88, edited by Giorgio Ferri (2022), 326-337, 2022
In Late Antiquity, accounts of the initial outbreak of the first plague pandemic (ca. 541-543 CE)... more In Late Antiquity, accounts of the initial outbreak of the first plague pandemic (ca. 541-543 CE), the so-called Justinianic plague, a mass mortality event that jammed up social machinery and short-circuited institutions, traditions, and habits, regularly featured such popular leaders (typically stigmatized as «the people»). Emergent groups, improvisational leaders, and overwrought family members saw to the burial of the dead – with dignified honors if possible – and mobilized groups in (often creative) public rituals, a powerful technology of social formation. Though emperors and bishops did sometimes marshal their significant resources in the face of disaster, «the people» often took the lead, allowing a brief glimpse of local and neighborhood networks that typically remained below the radar of our sources. Joined in prayer, penance, or song, large groups of people forged themselves into a, perhaps temporary, group, who together faced divine wrath or demonic malevolence (the usual explanations for disaster). Unfortunately, the endur- ing impact of these popular leaders, emergent groups, and their improvised responses and unscripted rites cannot be traced. Even so, emperor Justinian did re-schedule and re-orient the Hypapante festival in 543, perhaps as a way to proclaim his piety and re-assert his authority, which suggests the potential power of these impromptu gestures.
Death and Rebirth in Late Antiquity, edited by Lee Jefferson (Lanham, MD:Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022): 159-196, 2022
In the ancient Mediterranean world (and elsewhere), care for the dead was a basic social act: an ... more In the ancient Mediterranean world (and elsewhere), care for the dead was a basic social act: an act that typically included, according to an ancient Mediterranean ritual koine, a corpse laid out for mourning, an escort to the tomb, and burial rites, followed by subsequent visits to the tomb. There were, of course, local dialects or regional inflections, as it were, of this shared ritual language—corpses were prepared (or not, if the deceased was indigent) and mourned in various ways (ideally) at home; the transport to the tomb (sometimes with stops along the way) ranged from purely functional to outright spectacular; and burial rites and subsequent celebrations at the tombs followed familial, local, or even Mediterranean-wide traditions.
By the mid-third century CE, Christian groups, many of which took special pride in their care of the dead, developed their own vernaculars, their own local variants of a widely shared cultural pattern that might differ from place to place (as well as over time). That is, within Christian practice, distinct local or regional funeral customs developed. Families, friends, collegia, and other social groups imagined and produced burial rites from the various scripts of little (or local) traditions, a bricolage of cultural memory, and ritual habitus, a situation which continued for centuries. There was no “Great Tradition,” no agency or institution which claimed the right to determine public funerary practices (apart from an occasional, typically ineffectual, sumptuary law)—there were only local (or regional) customs, which did, nonetheless, tend to conform to a broader pattern.
At Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, for example, public funerary rites in the street and at the tomb initially cleaved quite closely to the common tongue, though inflected by Christian phrases and vocabulary—hymns and psalms during the procession, a eucharist at the tomb before burial, and funerary banquets read as almsgiving. During the sixth and seventh centuries, a “Great Tradition”—the liturgy of the institutional church—sought to shape public funerary ceremony according to ecclesiastical norms and practices. Evidence for ecclesiastical funerary rites reveals the (attempted) clericalization of public mourning customs: clergy were to orchestrate the singing of antiphons and psalms (which had long been traditional) during the funeral procession; the procession was to culminated at a church for a vigil; followed by another procession to the burial ground for a mass with its prescribed prayers and more antiphons and psalms. In the end, collections of little funerary traditions that once made up an ancient Mediterranean koine eventually gave way to a stricter liturgical grammar of clerics and the institutional church. A Great Tradition came to dominate the little traditions—or, at least, that is the picture that our clerical sources paint—a seeming tectonic shift which amounted to the creation of a new ritual language.
Journal of Late Antiquity 15.1 (2022): 69-110, 2022
The late antique Kalends of January (Kalendae Ianuariae) are often labeled a “pagan survival.” Ho... more The late antique Kalends of January (Kalendae Ianuariae) are often labeled a “pagan survival.” However, the Kalends were neither solely “pagan” nor a “survival,” but rather a re-invented public festival between “pagans” and Christians (and others). “Survival” paints a triumphalist picture that mis- represents the historical situation, ignoring the stark differences between the homespun late republican, early imperial Kalends celebrated only at Rome and the rowdy, at times transgressive, empire-wide festival that emerged by the end of the fourth century CE. Re-invention, not survival, better captures the chasm between the two. Likewise, “pagan” misconstrues the late antique celebration, which may have offered an increasingly rare opportunity to be “pagan” in public. Still, Christians also exchanged New Year’s gifts and even masqueraded as traditional gods. In short, the Kalends was a collaborative venture—not a “pagan survival,” but a re-invented (unsanctioned or popular) public festival, whose production and practice crossed religious affiliations.
Future Thinking in Roman Culture: New Approaches to History, Memory, and Cognition, edited by Maggie Popkin and Diana Ng (New York: Routledge, 2022), 24-36, 2022
During the reign of Augustus, Dionysios of Halikarnassos penned a long description of the pompa c... more During the reign of Augustus, Dionysios of Halikarnassos penned a long description of the pompa circensis (a religious procession that preceded the chariot races), drawn from the late-third-century BCE work of Quintus Fabius Pictor. Fabius Pictor, in turn, seems to have offered a detailed account of an early—but not the earliest—republican procession in ca. 490 BCE, almost certainly with no archival foundation. Despite its dubious historicity, Fabius’ primordialist account and his annals more broadly found a place in the canon of Roman cultural memory—an authoritative simulation—or even simulacrum—of the past that subsequently enabled simulations of the future. To travel mentally into the past is strikingly similar to projecting oneself into the future. Indeed, both remembering the past and imagining the future rely on many of the same cognitive and neural processes.
Or, to put it another way, Fabius Pictor’s description primed responses to and remembrances of future processions for literate or learned audiences at least, encoding expectations, shaping experience, and molding memory. In fact, precisely because the passage was part of the canon of Roman cultural memory, it became a kind of prospective cultural memory resource. Fabius Pictor almost certainly did not describe an early pompa circensis, but still his narrative could have and probably did, I argue, shape the organization, performance, experience, and remembrance of future processions, even (other) textual ones, inspiring Vergil and Ovid, both near contemporaries of Dionysios, as well as Statius in the late first century CE. As a prospective cultural memory resource, Fabius’ past, even if a fabrication, structured possibilities for the future, much like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus—a structuring structure that conditions future perception, action, and affect in a nexus of text, memory, and performance.
Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome, edited by Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 109-147, 2021
The arrival ceremony (adventus) provides important insights into the social imaginary of late ant... more The arrival ceremony (adventus) provides important insights into the social imaginary of late antique Rome. On the one hand, the adventus visibly highlighted the power of those arriving. On the other hand, the city presented a version of itself in the form of the welcoming committee. How, for whom, and by whom these arrivals were staged reveals the changing ways that Rome was imagined. Though the ceremony remained deeply traditional for a very long time – emperors greeted by the senate and Roman people – over centuries, the ritual was slowly adapted to suit a Christianizing city. Bishops not only joined the welcoming committee, but they themselves were welcomed back into Rome in grand style.
Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 65 (2020): 261-306
Late antique Latin Christian verse invective has often been dismissed as derivative doggerel. By ... more Late antique Latin Christian verse invective has often been dismissed as derivative doggerel. By contrast, Dennis Trout has convincingly argued that these polemical poems worked to police the boundaries of “proper” Christianity. These same poems were, however, also part of a long-term campaign aimed at suppressing traditional religion, like the cult of Mater Magna. In this campaign, Christian verse invective worked to redefine aristocratic distinction to the detriment of aristocratic “pagans,” whose honor continued to depend on both the patronage of traditional religions and the cultivation of literary culture. Marshaling an arsenal of canonical poetry, these invectives attempted to drive a wedge precisely between traditional cult practices and classical literary education in the construction of honor, forcing aristocrats to choose between the Mater Magna and their own reputations.
Emperors in Images, Architecture, and Ritual: Augustus to Faustina, Selected Papers on Ancient Art and Architecture 5, edited by Francesco de Angelis (Boston, MA: Archaeological Institute of America, 2020): 1-16, 2020
A series of coins with enigmatic images of empty chariots were minted from Augusts to Titus. Who ... more A series of coins with enigmatic images of empty chariots were minted from Augusts to Titus. Who or what did these vehicles convey? And in what context? A careful and systematic comparison of these mysterious vehicles with other quadrigae that represent a triumph yields some clear and distinct iconographical differences. The evidence suggests that these obscure, empty chariots were in fact tensae, sacred chariots that carried the symbols of the gods to the circus, employed as a synecdoche for the pompa circensis and the circus games that followed.
The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual, edited by Risto Uro, Juliette Day, Richard DeMaris, and Rikard Roitto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 684-702, 2018
Most studies of the Christianization of cities focus on churches, conversion, or bishops. However... more Most studies of the Christianization of cities focus on churches, conversion, or bishops. However, to make cities ‘Christian’ in some way, Christian groups also had to re-frame how the city was conceived and to develop new urban practices. In sermons, Christian preachers attempted to re-conceptualize the city, while some Christian inscriptions attempted to write Christian history into the urban fabric. Newly developed Christian processions as well as Christianized public ceremonies similarly served to transform urban habits. Processional participants claimed to represent the city, even as the procession claimed the city itself. These ritual acts of place-making, whether rhetorical or performed, changed the city as much as church construction even though they did not (physically) change a thing. This ritual Christianization of cities began with Constantine, the first Christian emperor, but it continued for centuries after; if it ever ended.
Studia Patristica 92 (2017): 397-409
In the aftermath of his well-publicized vision (and eventual conversion), Constantine again made ... more In the aftermath of his well-publicized vision (and eventual conversion), Constantine again made history, though on a lesser scale, when he supposedly refused to ascend the Capitol to offer sacrifices as the culmination of what seems to have been an adventus (an arrival ceremony) at Rome. After Constantine, the adventus at Rome was ostensibly Christianized as offending religious elements were steadily removed and replaced by Christian equivalents – sacrifices were supplanted by prayer and the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol was replaced by St. Peter’s. If, however, one looks to the occursus, the assembly of Romans that greeted the arriving dignitary, a less radical story may be told. The composition of the welcoming party is especially revealing as ancient descriptions of adventus ceremonies construed the occursus as a civic self-presentation, as a kind of urban image whose transformations may also map other changes, even if only conceptually. That is to say, if the occursus represented the city, even if only in the imagination of the author, audience(s), and even readers, an examination of its gradual Christianization reveals something about the Christianization of Rome. From Constantine to Honorius, the occursus seems to have remained remarkably traditional: the senate and the Roman people (SPQR) sometimes accompanied by colorfully described others greeted arriving rulers. Descriptions of the occursus first changed only in 500 when bishop Symmachus joined SPQR to greet the Ostrogoth king Theodoric, after a disputed episcopal election resolved in favor of Symmachus by Theodoric. Moreover, in the near century between Honorius and Theodoric, Rome had changed: in particular, the bishop managed to achieve a measure parity with the extravagantly wealthy traditional aristocracy, and so his presence in the occursus would have been ‘natural’ or, at least, unsurprising. After Theodoric’s arrival, the increasingly scarce evidence reveals an increasingly Christianized occursus, culminating in the arrival of Constans II in 663, who was greeted by the pope and his clergy in place of the now defunct Senate. While Constantine may have abandoned the Capitol, much of the remaining ceremony remained deeply classical into the long Late Antiquity, revealing a conservative and extended process of Christianization, at least in the literary imagination if not also in ceremonial practice.
Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 59 (2014 [2016]): 51-80, 2016
Starting in the first century CE, devotees of Magna Mater commemorated themselves in some of the ... more Starting in the first century CE, devotees of Magna Mater commemorated themselves in some of the very ways that caught the attention (and eventually the ire) of Roman literary sources. At times, Metroac public display even seems to have exceeded the exaggerated Roman stereotypes by proudly displaying stereotypical signs of “effeminacy” or “Phrygian” degeneracy. Rather than adopting any of a host of identity management strategies to mitigate their supposed stigma, Metroac devotees seem to have flaunted their difference and deviation from elite Roman norms. To put it another way, some members of the Metroac cult seem to have toyed with, taken ownership of, or at least acknowledged their imagined alterity. Potential explanations for these practices of self (re)presentation are both numerous and varied. Metroac devotional practices could have been a source of difference and power.
The Art of Empire: Christian Art in its Imperial Context, ed. Robin Jensen and Lee Jefferson (Fortress Press, 2015), 197-224, 2015
According to Tertullian, the pompa circensis was fundamentally a procession of divine images (sim... more According to Tertullian, the pompa circensis was fundamentally a procession of divine images (simulacra) carried on litters (fercula) and sacred symbols or relics (exuviae) carried in processional chariots (tensae), which conducted the gods to the arena before the chariot races. Moreover, in Roman visual culture from the late republic through the high empire, imagery of the gods in procession could stand for the entire parade. During the course of the third century, however, imperial numismatic commemorations of the pompa circensis shifted focus from the gods (both traditional and especially imperial) to the imperial sponsor of the games. Instead of symbolizing the circus parade by means of representations of divi (deified emperors or empresses) on elephant carts or exuviae in tensae, imperial coin-types presented the living emperor as a consul leading the parade before the consular games. Drawing upon a pre-existing visual tradition that stretched back to the Flavians (a parallel but secondary mode of signifying the procession and the games), this shift seems to have responded to the reconfiguration of imperial power during and after the so-called third century crisis when the projection of imperial authority leaned more heavily on the figure of the living emperor than on dynastic linkages to deified predecessors.
This same attention to the game-giver could also insulate fourth- and fifth-century Christian emperors from the critiques of Christian authors, who coincidentally began to rail against the games in a systematic manner in the early third century. Turning attention to the sponsor of the games occluded the presence of the gods, which allowed the procession (and so also the games) to appear neutral. In other words, the games and the procession which preceded them were sanitized of their idolatrous taint and so could continue as secular and traditional amusements, at least in official imagery and also legal rhetoric. In a kind of historical irony, the so-called secularization of the pompa circensis not only allowed for its continuation rather than its elimination, but it may also have paved the way for its Christianization. In the early-fifth century, several coin-types depicted enthroned emperors holding mappae (napkins) in their right hand with which they would signal the start of the first race and a cruciform scepter or globe in their left. These emperors would have been already seated at the arena, but if the circus procession endured, a strong likelihood given the importance of public display in Roman political culture, then the Christian God might have been made present by Christian symbols would have been escorted to the circus with all due pomp.
Church History 84 (2015): 1-31
In modern scholarship, Pope Gregory I “the Great” (590-604) is often simultaneously considered th... more In modern scholarship, Pope Gregory I “the Great” (590-604) is often simultaneously considered the final scion of classical Rome and the first medieval pope. The letania septiformis, a procession organized into seven groups that Gregory instituted in 590 in the face of plague and disease (and performed only once thereafter in 603), has similarly been construed as the very moment when Antiquity died and the Middle Ages were born. However, his Roman contemporaries in the papal curia largely ignored Gregory and his purportedly epochal procession. In fact, memory of the procession languished in Italy until the late-eighth century when Paul the Deacon made it the center of his Life of Gregory. At Rome, remembrance of the procession lay dormant in the papal archives until John the Deacon dug it out in the late-ninth century. How then did the letania septiformis come to be judged so pivotal? Over the course of centuries, the letania septiformis was inventively re-elaborated in literature, liturgy, and legend as part of the re-fashioning of the memory of Gregory. Shorn of its context, the letania septiformis gained greater imaginative power, becoming the emblem of Gregory’s pontificate, if not also of an historical era.
History of Religions 54 (March 2015): 288-317
While Christianity is assuredly marked by its emphasis on the discursive articulation of belief (... more While Christianity is assuredly marked by its emphasis on the discursive articulation of belief (theology), the situation in classical Rome was rather different. As is commonly accepted, ancient Roman civic religion emphasized orthopraxy, the meticulously correct performance of ritual, at the expense of orthodoxy to such an extent that one could argue that the Romans could think whatever they wanted, so long as they did the right thing. The rules, meanings, and interpretations of Roman civic religion seem to have been primarily communicated in practice and performance, rather than a distinct, formal educational setting. Varro, a first-century BCE Roman polymath whose articulation of a threefold theology constitutes one of the most important sources on Roman religious thought, admitted the limited appeal of philosophical theology and the unreliability of poetic theology, whose authority was rather feeble in any case. Nevertheless, judgments about the divine world were formed andperformed to large audiences—not necessarily textually or discursively, but ritually, spatially, and visually, that is, in civic cult, Varro’s third and most important theological category. In other words, ancient Roman religion ritually constructed its theology. In particular, processions offered a kind of per- formed theology in which a select group of gods, represented or made present in a variety of ways and transported by various means, were organized hierarchically and relationally in arrangements that could vary depending upon occasion and context.
In the pompa circensis—a procession that conducted the gods from the Capitoline temple to the Circus Maximus before the extraordinarily popular chariot races—a presumably carefully orchestrated group of gods, “a taxonomy of divine representations,” appeared as anthropomorphic statues borne on fercula (litters) and as exuviae (symbols or attributes) conveyed in tensae (processional chariots). On the one hand, the statues presented the gods as fellow citizens who came to enjoy the races, while, on the other, the exuviae demonstrated divine alterity. In addition, the procession offered more theatri- cal modes of supernatural representation—large wooden effigies (puppets) of folkloric figures and stilt walkers imitating deities, both of which directly engaged the audience during the performance. Consequently, from this ritual procession, one can extract two different modes of divine representation, anthropomorphic statues and abstract symbols, each of which seemingly corre- sponded to a particular sort of divine-human relationship, in which the gods appeared as familiar in a human guise or as foreign represented by emblems of their power. Moreover, supernatural figures, the wooden puppets and stilt walkers, titillated and terrified the audience.
In short, the pompa circensis staged an implicit and embodied theology, an act of thinking and doing—a savoir-faire not simply a savoir-penser. In essence, much authoritative religious thought at Rome was performed. All ritual participants, including spectators, could gain a religious education by watching processions, in which divine images and symbols traversing an itinerary overwhelmed by cultural memory communicated something essential about the organization, activity, and meaning of the divine world. While writ-ten or even more broadly discursive theology seems to have been rather limited and isolated, nevertheless, in ritual, the image and imagination of the gods was as rich, complex, and paradoxical as anywhere—and, what is more, seemingly articulated theological categories which anticipated some of the standard concerns of Christian discursive theology.
N. DesRosiers, J. Rosenblum, and L. Vuong (eds.) Religious Competition in the Third Century CE: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 126-137
During the century after Constantine, Christian communities increasingly turned to processions an... more During the century after Constantine, Christian communities increasingly turned to processions and public ceremonies as a means to assert a claim on the city and to re-invent or “Christianise” civic identities. In addition to Constantinople and Carthage, Christian processions emerged all over the Roman world – from the deserts of Egypt to the small towns of northern Gaul. In many cases, intra-Christian competition spurred these symbolic contests for urban control. Occasionally public spectacle could displace violent conflict, even if such spectacles were also at times the occasion for violence.
As elsewhere, Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries witnessed its share of intra-Christian competition. However, some of the richest families in the Roman world publicly demonstrated their adherence to classical tradition by patronising a lavish calendar of civic ceremonies, which saturated the Roman public sphere, its streets and squares. For which reason, the institutional church, whose growing resources did not yet match that of an average elite family, could not convert its more limited economic capital into symbolic capital by means of public ceremony. Thwarted by enduring aristocratic habits of public display, an ecclesiastical public presence first emerged mainly on the margins of the city, where disorganised crowds gathered at martyr churches – which were often financed by Christian aristocrats, notably women, whose devotions did not always coincide with that of the bishop.
Faced with the aristocratic domination of the public sphere and internal divisions within the church, intra-Christian competition at Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege, occupation, and war. The institutional church could not contest the spaces of Rome symbolically or ritually, that is through its own processions or other public ceremonies, and so instead resorted to violence and bloodshed – until 556 when the gradual Christianisation of the aristocracy and the erosion of its wealth allowed the first Christian procession at Rome.
Journal of Religion 92 (2012) 84-122
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Church History 81 ( 2012) 298–327
There were at least five disputed episcopal elections in the fourth through the sixth centuries. ... more There were at least five disputed episcopal elections in the fourth through the sixth centuries. This intra-Christian competition did not, however, lead to the contestation of space in the form of processions as it did, for example, in Constantinople. At Rome, intra-Christian competition took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege and occupation. Instead of conquering urban space through processions—impossible as the Roman aristocracy and their patronage of traditional spectacles still dominated and defined the public sphere—Roman Christians resorted to warfare, until the mid- sixth century C.E. when an impoverished aristocracy ceased to lavish its diminished wealth on traditional forms of public display.
Throughout all of these electoral disputes a number of elements consistently emerge: one, the use of martial language to describe the events; two, the concentration on a few contested sites; and three, internal divisions among Roman Christians. A strategy of militaristic occupation of centrally important churches clearly marked these schisms, as each side marched upon and occupied the principal churches of Rome, invading and expelling their enemies from other principal churches when they could. The martial language in the descriptions of these conflicts often veered close to the religious, indicating, hinting, that the origins of Christian processions lie in conflict and battle. From the literal soldiers of Christ, armed with clubs, rocks, and swords, emerged spiritual soldiers bearing crosses and singing hymns.
in N. Lenski and A. Cain, (eds.), The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) 293-304
A kind of bricolage of classical and Christian cultures characterized the invention of Christian ... more A kind of bricolage of classical and Christian cultures characterized the invention of Christian Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, whereas the exercise of an increasingly centralized authority, including the institution of processions, marks the making of a papal Rome in the sixth and seventh centuries. Two spectacular penitential processions – letaniae septiformes, seven-fold processions, in which seven different groups gathered at seven different churches and marched to S. Maria Maggiore – stand near the beginning of this “second stage.” These litanies embraced almost the entire city by making use of churches that were distributed throughout Rome. As the participants traversed the city, they took possession of Rome, even as the procession wove together Roman institutions and spaces into a singular Christian entity. The letania septiformis equally invented a new social and topographical image of Rome. However, this invention, even though it made use of a very traditional ritual form, owes a great deal less to classical antiquity, and so heralds a new stage in the history of the Christianization of Rome: one that might be better called “papalization.”
Book Reviews by Jacob A Latham
Journal of Roman Studies 111 (2021): 322-323, 2021
Read this article for free How does Cambridge Core Share work? Cambridge Core Share allows author... more Read this article for free How does Cambridge Core Share work? Cambridge Core Share allows authors, readers and institutional subscribers to generate a URL for an online version of a journal article. Anyone who clicks on this link will be able to view a read-only, up-to-date copy of the published journal article.
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Monograph by Jacob A Latham
Articles by Jacob A Latham
By the mid-third century CE, Christian groups, many of which took special pride in their care of the dead, developed their own vernaculars, their own local variants of a widely shared cultural pattern that might differ from place to place (as well as over time). That is, within Christian practice, distinct local or regional funeral customs developed. Families, friends, collegia, and other social groups imagined and produced burial rites from the various scripts of little (or local) traditions, a bricolage of cultural memory, and ritual habitus, a situation which continued for centuries. There was no “Great Tradition,” no agency or institution which claimed the right to determine public funerary practices (apart from an occasional, typically ineffectual, sumptuary law)—there were only local (or regional) customs, which did, nonetheless, tend to conform to a broader pattern.
At Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, for example, public funerary rites in the street and at the tomb initially cleaved quite closely to the common tongue, though inflected by Christian phrases and vocabulary—hymns and psalms during the procession, a eucharist at the tomb before burial, and funerary banquets read as almsgiving. During the sixth and seventh centuries, a “Great Tradition”—the liturgy of the institutional church—sought to shape public funerary ceremony according to ecclesiastical norms and practices. Evidence for ecclesiastical funerary rites reveals the (attempted) clericalization of public mourning customs: clergy were to orchestrate the singing of antiphons and psalms (which had long been traditional) during the funeral procession; the procession was to culminated at a church for a vigil; followed by another procession to the burial ground for a mass with its prescribed prayers and more antiphons and psalms. In the end, collections of little funerary traditions that once made up an ancient Mediterranean koine eventually gave way to a stricter liturgical grammar of clerics and the institutional church. A Great Tradition came to dominate the little traditions—or, at least, that is the picture that our clerical sources paint—a seeming tectonic shift which amounted to the creation of a new ritual language.
Or, to put it another way, Fabius Pictor’s description primed responses to and remembrances of future processions for literate or learned audiences at least, encoding expectations, shaping experience, and molding memory. In fact, precisely because the passage was part of the canon of Roman cultural memory, it became a kind of prospective cultural memory resource. Fabius Pictor almost certainly did not describe an early pompa circensis, but still his narrative could have and probably did, I argue, shape the organization, performance, experience, and remembrance of future processions, even (other) textual ones, inspiring Vergil and Ovid, both near contemporaries of Dionysios, as well as Statius in the late first century CE. As a prospective cultural memory resource, Fabius’ past, even if a fabrication, structured possibilities for the future, much like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus—a structuring structure that conditions future perception, action, and affect in a nexus of text, memory, and performance.
This same attention to the game-giver could also insulate fourth- and fifth-century Christian emperors from the critiques of Christian authors, who coincidentally began to rail against the games in a systematic manner in the early third century. Turning attention to the sponsor of the games occluded the presence of the gods, which allowed the procession (and so also the games) to appear neutral. In other words, the games and the procession which preceded them were sanitized of their idolatrous taint and so could continue as secular and traditional amusements, at least in official imagery and also legal rhetoric. In a kind of historical irony, the so-called secularization of the pompa circensis not only allowed for its continuation rather than its elimination, but it may also have paved the way for its Christianization. In the early-fifth century, several coin-types depicted enthroned emperors holding mappae (napkins) in their right hand with which they would signal the start of the first race and a cruciform scepter or globe in their left. These emperors would have been already seated at the arena, but if the circus procession endured, a strong likelihood given the importance of public display in Roman political culture, then the Christian God might have been made present by Christian symbols would have been escorted to the circus with all due pomp.
In the pompa circensis—a procession that conducted the gods from the Capitoline temple to the Circus Maximus before the extraordinarily popular chariot races—a presumably carefully orchestrated group of gods, “a taxonomy of divine representations,” appeared as anthropomorphic statues borne on fercula (litters) and as exuviae (symbols or attributes) conveyed in tensae (processional chariots). On the one hand, the statues presented the gods as fellow citizens who came to enjoy the races, while, on the other, the exuviae demonstrated divine alterity. In addition, the procession offered more theatri- cal modes of supernatural representation—large wooden effigies (puppets) of folkloric figures and stilt walkers imitating deities, both of which directly engaged the audience during the performance. Consequently, from this ritual procession, one can extract two different modes of divine representation, anthropomorphic statues and abstract symbols, each of which seemingly corre- sponded to a particular sort of divine-human relationship, in which the gods appeared as familiar in a human guise or as foreign represented by emblems of their power. Moreover, supernatural figures, the wooden puppets and stilt walkers, titillated and terrified the audience.
In short, the pompa circensis staged an implicit and embodied theology, an act of thinking and doing—a savoir-faire not simply a savoir-penser. In essence, much authoritative religious thought at Rome was performed. All ritual participants, including spectators, could gain a religious education by watching processions, in which divine images and symbols traversing an itinerary overwhelmed by cultural memory communicated something essential about the organization, activity, and meaning of the divine world. While writ-ten or even more broadly discursive theology seems to have been rather limited and isolated, nevertheless, in ritual, the image and imagination of the gods was as rich, complex, and paradoxical as anywhere—and, what is more, seemingly articulated theological categories which anticipated some of the standard concerns of Christian discursive theology.
As elsewhere, Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries witnessed its share of intra-Christian competition. However, some of the richest families in the Roman world publicly demonstrated their adherence to classical tradition by patronising a lavish calendar of civic ceremonies, which saturated the Roman public sphere, its streets and squares. For which reason, the institutional church, whose growing resources did not yet match that of an average elite family, could not convert its more limited economic capital into symbolic capital by means of public ceremony. Thwarted by enduring aristocratic habits of public display, an ecclesiastical public presence first emerged mainly on the margins of the city, where disorganised crowds gathered at martyr churches – which were often financed by Christian aristocrats, notably women, whose devotions did not always coincide with that of the bishop.
Faced with the aristocratic domination of the public sphere and internal divisions within the church, intra-Christian competition at Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege, occupation, and war. The institutional church could not contest the spaces of Rome symbolically or ritually, that is through its own processions or other public ceremonies, and so instead resorted to violence and bloodshed – until 556 when the gradual Christianisation of the aristocracy and the erosion of its wealth allowed the first Christian procession at Rome.
Throughout all of these electoral disputes a number of elements consistently emerge: one, the use of martial language to describe the events; two, the concentration on a few contested sites; and three, internal divisions among Roman Christians. A strategy of militaristic occupation of centrally important churches clearly marked these schisms, as each side marched upon and occupied the principal churches of Rome, invading and expelling their enemies from other principal churches when they could. The martial language in the descriptions of these conflicts often veered close to the religious, indicating, hinting, that the origins of Christian processions lie in conflict and battle. From the literal soldiers of Christ, armed with clubs, rocks, and swords, emerged spiritual soldiers bearing crosses and singing hymns.
Book Reviews by Jacob A Latham
By the mid-third century CE, Christian groups, many of which took special pride in their care of the dead, developed their own vernaculars, their own local variants of a widely shared cultural pattern that might differ from place to place (as well as over time). That is, within Christian practice, distinct local or regional funeral customs developed. Families, friends, collegia, and other social groups imagined and produced burial rites from the various scripts of little (or local) traditions, a bricolage of cultural memory, and ritual habitus, a situation which continued for centuries. There was no “Great Tradition,” no agency or institution which claimed the right to determine public funerary practices (apart from an occasional, typically ineffectual, sumptuary law)—there were only local (or regional) customs, which did, nonetheless, tend to conform to a broader pattern.
At Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, for example, public funerary rites in the street and at the tomb initially cleaved quite closely to the common tongue, though inflected by Christian phrases and vocabulary—hymns and psalms during the procession, a eucharist at the tomb before burial, and funerary banquets read as almsgiving. During the sixth and seventh centuries, a “Great Tradition”—the liturgy of the institutional church—sought to shape public funerary ceremony according to ecclesiastical norms and practices. Evidence for ecclesiastical funerary rites reveals the (attempted) clericalization of public mourning customs: clergy were to orchestrate the singing of antiphons and psalms (which had long been traditional) during the funeral procession; the procession was to culminated at a church for a vigil; followed by another procession to the burial ground for a mass with its prescribed prayers and more antiphons and psalms. In the end, collections of little funerary traditions that once made up an ancient Mediterranean koine eventually gave way to a stricter liturgical grammar of clerics and the institutional church. A Great Tradition came to dominate the little traditions—or, at least, that is the picture that our clerical sources paint—a seeming tectonic shift which amounted to the creation of a new ritual language.
Or, to put it another way, Fabius Pictor’s description primed responses to and remembrances of future processions for literate or learned audiences at least, encoding expectations, shaping experience, and molding memory. In fact, precisely because the passage was part of the canon of Roman cultural memory, it became a kind of prospective cultural memory resource. Fabius Pictor almost certainly did not describe an early pompa circensis, but still his narrative could have and probably did, I argue, shape the organization, performance, experience, and remembrance of future processions, even (other) textual ones, inspiring Vergil and Ovid, both near contemporaries of Dionysios, as well as Statius in the late first century CE. As a prospective cultural memory resource, Fabius’ past, even if a fabrication, structured possibilities for the future, much like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus—a structuring structure that conditions future perception, action, and affect in a nexus of text, memory, and performance.
This same attention to the game-giver could also insulate fourth- and fifth-century Christian emperors from the critiques of Christian authors, who coincidentally began to rail against the games in a systematic manner in the early third century. Turning attention to the sponsor of the games occluded the presence of the gods, which allowed the procession (and so also the games) to appear neutral. In other words, the games and the procession which preceded them were sanitized of their idolatrous taint and so could continue as secular and traditional amusements, at least in official imagery and also legal rhetoric. In a kind of historical irony, the so-called secularization of the pompa circensis not only allowed for its continuation rather than its elimination, but it may also have paved the way for its Christianization. In the early-fifth century, several coin-types depicted enthroned emperors holding mappae (napkins) in their right hand with which they would signal the start of the first race and a cruciform scepter or globe in their left. These emperors would have been already seated at the arena, but if the circus procession endured, a strong likelihood given the importance of public display in Roman political culture, then the Christian God might have been made present by Christian symbols would have been escorted to the circus with all due pomp.
In the pompa circensis—a procession that conducted the gods from the Capitoline temple to the Circus Maximus before the extraordinarily popular chariot races—a presumably carefully orchestrated group of gods, “a taxonomy of divine representations,” appeared as anthropomorphic statues borne on fercula (litters) and as exuviae (symbols or attributes) conveyed in tensae (processional chariots). On the one hand, the statues presented the gods as fellow citizens who came to enjoy the races, while, on the other, the exuviae demonstrated divine alterity. In addition, the procession offered more theatri- cal modes of supernatural representation—large wooden effigies (puppets) of folkloric figures and stilt walkers imitating deities, both of which directly engaged the audience during the performance. Consequently, from this ritual procession, one can extract two different modes of divine representation, anthropomorphic statues and abstract symbols, each of which seemingly corre- sponded to a particular sort of divine-human relationship, in which the gods appeared as familiar in a human guise or as foreign represented by emblems of their power. Moreover, supernatural figures, the wooden puppets and stilt walkers, titillated and terrified the audience.
In short, the pompa circensis staged an implicit and embodied theology, an act of thinking and doing—a savoir-faire not simply a savoir-penser. In essence, much authoritative religious thought at Rome was performed. All ritual participants, including spectators, could gain a religious education by watching processions, in which divine images and symbols traversing an itinerary overwhelmed by cultural memory communicated something essential about the organization, activity, and meaning of the divine world. While writ-ten or even more broadly discursive theology seems to have been rather limited and isolated, nevertheless, in ritual, the image and imagination of the gods was as rich, complex, and paradoxical as anywhere—and, what is more, seemingly articulated theological categories which anticipated some of the standard concerns of Christian discursive theology.
As elsewhere, Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries witnessed its share of intra-Christian competition. However, some of the richest families in the Roman world publicly demonstrated their adherence to classical tradition by patronising a lavish calendar of civic ceremonies, which saturated the Roman public sphere, its streets and squares. For which reason, the institutional church, whose growing resources did not yet match that of an average elite family, could not convert its more limited economic capital into symbolic capital by means of public ceremony. Thwarted by enduring aristocratic habits of public display, an ecclesiastical public presence first emerged mainly on the margins of the city, where disorganised crowds gathered at martyr churches – which were often financed by Christian aristocrats, notably women, whose devotions did not always coincide with that of the bishop.
Faced with the aristocratic domination of the public sphere and internal divisions within the church, intra-Christian competition at Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries took the form, at least rhetorically, of siege, occupation, and war. The institutional church could not contest the spaces of Rome symbolically or ritually, that is through its own processions or other public ceremonies, and so instead resorted to violence and bloodshed – until 556 when the gradual Christianisation of the aristocracy and the erosion of its wealth allowed the first Christian procession at Rome.
Throughout all of these electoral disputes a number of elements consistently emerge: one, the use of martial language to describe the events; two, the concentration on a few contested sites; and three, internal divisions among Roman Christians. A strategy of militaristic occupation of centrally important churches clearly marked these schisms, as each side marched upon and occupied the principal churches of Rome, invading and expelling their enemies from other principal churches when they could. The martial language in the descriptions of these conflicts often veered close to the religious, indicating, hinting, that the origins of Christian processions lie in conflict and battle. From the literal soldiers of Christ, armed with clubs, rocks, and swords, emerged spiritual soldiers bearing crosses and singing hymns.