Ostia Antica-Rome's ancient harbor. Its houses and apartments, taverns and baths, warehouses, shops, and temples have long contributed to a picture of daily life in Rome. Recent investigations have revealed, however, that life in Ostia did not end with a bang but with a whimper. Only on the cusp of the Middle Ages did the town's residents entrench themselves in a smaller settlement outside the walls. What can this new evidence tell us about life in the later Roman Empire, as society navigated an increasingly Christian world? Ostia in Late Antiquity-the first academic study on Ostia to appear in English in almost twenty years and the first to treat the Late Antique period-tackles the dynamics of this transformative time. Drawing on new archaeological research, including the author's own, and incorporating both material and textual sources, it presents a social history of the town from the third through ninth centuries. Douglas Boin is an expert on the religious history of the Roman Empire, particularly as it pertains to the "pagan," Christian, and Jewish world of the ancient Mediterranean. Since 2010 he has taught in the Department of Classics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His scholarship has appeared in Journal of Roman Studies and American Journal of Archaeology, and he has authored entries on synagogues and church buildings for the multivolume reference work The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. For ten years, he worked as an archaeologist in Rome, studying the site of the synagogue at Ostia Antica.
Why did Latin writers label non-Christians with a word that evoked lack of culture ( paganus ) while their Greek brethren used a word ( Hellene ) that connoted the finest education around? This article proposes that Christians who used the latter adopted it from the world of the late Second Temple period. In 2 Maccabees “Hellenism” is a straw man, used to contrast “real Judaism” with other Jews who were looked down upon for acting “Greek.” This dynamic suggests a new model for understanding the rise of paganus . Living in the wake of the so-called Edict of Milan, some Christians believed that social separation and rejection of Rome were non-negotiable aspects of Christian identity. Seeing themselves as heirs of Jewish tradition, embracing the legacy of the Maccabean martyrs who rejected aspects of Hellenistic culture, and writing in Greek, they adopted the word Hellene to disparage their more accommodating Christian peers. In Latin, the force of this argument was lost in translation. Drawing instead upon a tradition that divided “true Christian soldiers” from their more “civilian Christian peers,” Latin writers used paganus as a substitute. Hellene and pagan were thus deployed for similar ideological reasons throughout the fourth century: to draw lines in the sand between Christians over the issue of assimilation and accommodation.
Ever since Augustine narrated an account of his mother's death at Ostia, social historians have tried to adduce the identity of the person who erected Monica's tombstone, a copy of which is preserved in a ninth-century codex. Three members of the gens Anicii, all of whom were Augustine's contemporaries, have become usual suspects in the secondary literature. Throughout these debates the epitaph itself, a fragment of which was found in 1945, is frequently cited but rarely treated as a primary text. This article presents a new study of that epigraph and proposes that it was erected much later than previously suspected.
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