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The Study of Elites in Late Antiquity

2000; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/are.2000.0017

1080-6504

Peter Brown,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Travelling in Italy in 1929, the famous Irish author George Bernard Shaw once came from Venice to Ravenna. Confronted by the sixth-century mosaics of San Vitale and Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, he was studiously unimpressed. As he wrote to a friend: 1 The famous mosaics are very smart indeed, but soul-less after Torcello . . . There is not a scrap of magic about the Ravenna stuff . . . The figures are obviously fashionable relatives of Pontius Pilate doing their best to look like good Christians. As copied . . . later in St. Mark's in Venice they have become real saints. When I first heard of this remark some forty years ago, in the late 1950s, I realized that, once again, I disagreed with my great compatriot. Coming, as Shaw had, from the ethereal, high Byzantine mosaics of Venice, I was stunned by the sheer sparkling color and the classical solidity of what I saw at Ravenna. The mosaics were delightfully different, in reality, from the impression of opulent, somewhat sinister gloom communicated by the black and white plates of the mosaics which served at that time to illustrate standard histories of the early middle ages. From then onwards, "fashionable relatives of Pontius Pilate doing their best to look like Christians" were to be my way into late antiquity. My first major article on "Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman [End Page 321] Aristocracy" (Brown 1961) was, in many ways, my answer to Shaw. It was an attempt to explain, through a study of the process of Christianization in the fourth and early fifth centuries, how, after a further century and a half of Christianity and two generations of barbarian rule, these mosaics could still look so impenitently Roman. In this, of course, I was not alone. At that time, the study of elites in late antiquity was effectively limited to the study of the senatorial aristocracy of the west. It was closely linked to what the Germans called the Kontinuitätsproblem: the problem of the continuity between the ancient and the medieval world in western Europe. It was the senatorial aristocracy that stood for the principle of continuity. Forms of Roman aristocratic dominance ensured the survival of a recognizably Roman social order for over a century after the fall of the Roman empire in the west. Christian members of that aristocracy (most notably Boethius and Cassiodorus) ensured the survival of much of classical, Roman culture for centuries to come in the "barbarian west." Such concerns were close to the heart of my mentor, Arnaldo Momigliano, whom I first met in 1957. I noticed with pleasure that he began his memorable Italian Lecture for the British Academy (Momigliano 1955), on "Cassiodorus and the Italian Culture of His Time," by recommending a visit to Ravenna. His subsequent essay, in Italian, on the cultural activities associated with the Roman Anicii in the sixth century, a tentacular family group with representatives in both the eastern and western parts of the Roman world, was a model study of the tenacity and the wide horizons of an ancient gens that functioned as a true "multi-national company" in the culture and politics of a troubled age (Momigliano 1956). The study spoke with peculiar poignancy to Momigliano's own generation, recently dislocated by war and now condemned to watch in eastern Europe the systematic destruction of the pre-war social order. It was with Momigliano that I learned to live among those great lords and ladies, "who [so he wrote] moved with relative security in a world so far from secure" (Momigliano 1957.282). But, like any student of ancient, medieval, or modern history who grew up in the Britain of the 1950s, I had, in any case, developed a sharp taste for elites. Whether it was Ronald Syme for Roman history, Bruce MacFarlane for the nobility of the later middle ages, or Sir Lewis Namier for the eighteenth century, the study of elites was in the air. It offered a way of understanding politics and society...