War and community in late antiquity

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

In classical antiquity, war was proverbially “the father of all things”; in late antiquity, not so much. In a short introduction to this fine volume, Susanna Elm and Kristina Sessa address the long-term relative marginality of war within late antique scholarship, partly reflecting foundational socio-cultural priorities of the field. They further observe that “military historians” have primarily engaged with questions that “fail to resonate with most scholars of Late Antiquity”, even though an era marked by intensified and pervasive warfare and military violence. Accordingly, this book aims to promote and broaden interest in civilian dimensions of armed conflict. While the general diagnosis is valid, the current “nicheness” (and implied monolithism) of military studies may be somewhat overstated. Late antique scholars have long explored this military-civilian interactive zone via various outward-looking research frameworks, some inherited from Roman studies, others following fashions in military historiography: “soldier and civilian”, “army and society”, “military culture”, “cultures of violence”. Correspondingly, over three decades, late antique military scholarship has been transformed by the same literary and cultural “turns” that reshaped other historical subfields, diversifying approaches and enhancing connectivity to wider debates: literary production, social status, mobility, ethnicity, language, gender. It might be truer to say that “war”, broadly construed, remains peripheral to some versions of late antiquity, with perceived marginality/centrality largely a matter of subdisciplinary perspective. In any case, if the territory is not entirely uncharted, this exploration of “war and community” makes new and interesting discoveries. Immediately striking is a contributor-list that includes none of the “usual suspects”. The papers originated in a conference at UC Berkeley (2022), where experts in diverse fields, most with little or no prior claim to military interests, examined war and its consequences through their respective specialist lenses. The results are insightful, refreshing and as multifaceted as war itself.[1]

Part 1 addresses the nature and perception of war. Centred on late antique Italy, Kim Bowes’ fascinating chapter (1) asks what archaeology can reveal about the impact of warfare on the bodies and habitats of non-combatant populations. Affirming that inherent longue durée perspectives make archaeological data ill-suited to identifying event-specific slaughter or despoilment, Bowes shows that spatial dislocation is typically attributable to non-military processes, while even in larger non-elite skeletal quantitative datasets, effects of war cannot be isolated from routine labour-related trauma or quotidian interpersonal violence.

Kristina Sessa (2) re-evaluates descriptive formulism in late antique accounts of captured cities, or what classicists call “urbs capta” motifs. While initial remarks may unduly universalise tropes of destruction and captivity across distinct Latin and Greek historiographical genres, Sessa perceptively traces significant development in some fifth-century Christian Latin writers: Orosius,[2] Hydatius and Jerome, demonstrating thematic refocusing away from urban fabric and populace towards church spaces and communities. This motific reorientation, or “ecclesia capta”, variously combining classical and biblical intertexts, responds to a changing world in which Roman cities were primary targets and, increasingly, victim and aggressor were Christians. Sessa’s conclusions may elucidate other literary-linguistic traditions (e.g. Maccabees as a template for contemporary Armenian historiography).

Susanna Elm (3) examines Augustine’s reframing of urbs capta motifs as a structural device in City of God I. Addressing survivors of the recent sack of Rome (410), Augustine deploys a familiar catalogue of horrors – captivity, torture, looting, famine, unburied dead – in a formal consolatio, which rationalises one city’s fate as necessary divine correction rather than incipient end of the world. Elm’s nuanced analysis explicates Augustine’s focus on sexual violence against Rome’s women and especially men, where, rejecting classical exemplars of suicide, he urges endurance (patientia) of ineffable humiliation, refashioning traditional Roman virtue as true Christian response.

Ellen Muehlberger (4) considers what Synesius’ epistolary snapshots of nomadic incursions into Cyrenaica show about the expectations, attitudes and behaviour of civilian elites compelled to undertake local self-defence, focusing on his revelatory experiences of war as a “touchstone” of individual character.[3] Turning to Synesius’ On Kingship, commonly dated earlier, Muehlberger sets aside contextual specifics to explore underlying mentalité, especially how ingrained ethno-cultural sentiment shaped subjective arguments against employing non-Roman soldiers.

Part 2 concerns civilian agency in war. David Brakke (5) studies profuse evidence for individual and communal interactions between monks and soldiers in fourth-to-seventh-century Egypt and Palestine. Monastic communities in militarised limital zones were exposed to periodic warfare and lawlessness, necessitating protective structures and enhancing their societal prestige as refuges for displaced civilians. Brakke shows that proximity to military personnel entangled monastic leaders in disputes involving unruly soldiery, but also fostered mutually beneficial patronal relationships with senior officers and enabled monastic recruitment of ex-soldiers, motivated by analogous self-perceptions of spiritual/military service.

Tommaso Giuliodoro and Anna Leone (6) investigate the localised impact of warfare across late antique North Africa under successive regimes, especially how urban and rural communities adapted their built environments in response to shifting security threats, primarily plundering Mauri but also invasions and revolts. Combined analysis of textual and archaeological data permits case studies of diverse defensive installations: fortified villas/estates, towers/refuges,[4] forts and circuit walls, charting their differing chronologies and circumstances, and clarifying the interplay of civilian individual/communal initiatives and governmental interventions in reshaping settlements and militarising landscapes.

Sarah Bond (7) reviews the well-studied topic of military billeting and interpretative challenges posed by civilian complaints and remedial laws. Bond revisits (sometimes older) debates about frequency, scale and impact, and considers legislative documentation and domestic-level lived experience.[5]

Rita Lizzi Testa’s (8) insightful study of prisoners of war, mainly in the fourth-/fifth-century West, treats manifold aspects of ransom and return: legal definitions and procedures of redemptio; the varying fate of captives according to status, sex, age and circumstance; economics and geography of slave trading; inter-state negotiations and private initiative; and increasingly formalised roles of bishops and institutional charitable provision, including disposal of church assets[6] and extension of charity to barbarians captured by Romans.

In multipolar power politics of the fifth-/sixth-century West, Michele Renee Salzman (9) presents four studies of imperial/royal women, Augustae Iusta Grata Honoria and Licinia Eudoxia, and Amal queens Amalafrida and Amalasuintha, who, as Salzman argues from fragmentary and/or tendentious sources, sought to exploit new opportunities for elite female agency in interlinked contexts of war, marriage and diplomacy.

Part 3 combines the themes of civil war and Christian emperors. Diliana Angelova (10) re-examines the Arch of Constantine, completed in 315, celebrating his triumph over Maxentius (312) with unprecedented depictions of civil war. While scholarship has variously identified intended meaning and audience, Angelova infers that the viewer who mattered most was Constantine. Her holistic analysis of inscription, image and setting finds allusions to the language and iconography of Augustus’ triumphal monuments and overlooked novel Christian connotations, which collectively herald a new golden age and inaugurate a visual idiom of Christian imperial victory.

Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (11) also addresses Constantine’s use of imagery and rhetoric to convey religious justifications for civil wars. Noting long-recognised Christian commemorative motifs in his victory over Licinius (324), Digeser traces an evolving apocalyptic ideological framework in Constantine’s earlier dynastic messaging. In particular, connecting a recently discovered coin (2019) and biblical allusivity in Constantine’s Oration to the Saints, she detects efforts to equate his deliverance of Rome from Maxentius with the Archangel Michael’s explusion of Satan from Heaven, redefining imperial legitimacy as prophetic truth and heralding Christ’s millennial rule foretold in Revelation.

Flavio Santini’s (12) comprehensive re-reading of Ambrose’s funerary oration for Valentinian II (392), amid recent and impending civil war, identifies radical reformulation of sacralised imperial power. Ambrose converts the young emperor’s mysterious death, as an unbaptized “Arian”, into self-sacrificing martyrdom and heavenly reception, while symbolically transfiguring his decomposing remains into sumptuous relics. Addressing long-puzzling aspects, Santini explains Ambrose’s circumstantial vagueness as argumentative strategy and connects ostensibly incongruous biblical and erotic imagery to allegorical technique and evocations of same-sex desire in elite literary discourse.

Catherine Michael Chin’s epilogue is an emotive personal essay, which relates each paper to a timeless elemental vision of war as corporeal, moral and emotional rupture.

This is an exceptionally well-curated volume, in terms of concept, arrangement and cohesion. Collectively and individually, its varied studies assist in identifying and comprehending direct and indirect effects of war and military violence. Although tangential in a few cases, the thematic salience of war and community encourages inter-chapter editorial and authorial dialogue. The geo-cultural focus is predominantly (over three-quarters) western/Latinophone. Whether or not this sphere is representative of “late antiquity”, readers might miss engagement with scholarship on, for example, the especially rich Syriac source material or Balkan perspectives; a sense of different “late antiquities” lingers. Nonetheless, the case for further collaborative projects is compelling. Particularly impressive are achievements in more innovative approaches: philologically sensitive readings of gender (Elm, Santini), landscape-environmental studies (Giuliodoro/Leone), and integrative text-image-locational analysis of monuments (Angelova). The collection as a whole merits a wide readership, both those who think they know what war is and those who know they do not.

Authors and titles

Introduction: Looking for War in Late Antiquity – Susanna Elm and Kristina Sessa

Part I – What Is War?

1. Everyday Violence – Kim Bowes
2. From Urbs to Ecclesia Capta: Reimagining Urban Warfare in Late Antiquity – Kristina Sessa
3. The “Law of War”: Augustine on the Captured City (Urbs Capta) and Sexual Violence against Men and Women in the City of God (Book 1) – Susanna Elm
4. Wartime Effects: Synesius of Cyrene and the Sentiments of On Kingship – Ellen Muehlberger

Part II – War and Agency

5. Monks, Barbarians, and Soldiers: Monastic Communities and Armed Conflict in Late Ancient Egypt, Palestine, and the Sinai – David Brakke
6. Warfare, Communities, and Landscapes in Late Antique North Africa – Tommaso Giuliodoro and Anna Leone
7. “Feasts and Harlots, Baths and Idleness”: The Geography of Billeted Troops in Late Antiquity – Sarah E. Bond
8. Redemptio Captivorum: The Ransom of War Prisoners in Late Antiquity – Rita Lizzi Testa
9. Elite Women and War: New Opportunities for Agency in the Fifth- and Sixth-Century Western Empire – Michele Renee Salzman

Part III – Civil War and Christian Roman Emperors

10. “By Divine Inspiration and the Greatness of His Mind”: Augustan and Christian Messaging on Constantine’s Triumphal Arch – Diliana Angelova
11. Apocalyptic Ideology during Civil War: The Archangel Michael and Constantine’s Christian Subjects – Elizabeth DePalma Digeser
12. A Martyr of Civil Wars: Ambrose on the Death of Valentinian II – Flavio Santini

Epilogue: What Is an Enemy Made Of? – Catherine Michael Chin

Notes

[1] See similarly A. Balbo and N. Zugravu (eds.), La violenza militare nel mondo tardoantico. Atti del convegno di Torino 15-16 novembre 2021 (= Classica et Christiana 18/1 2023).

[2] See now S. Ulrich, Die ›Kriegshistoriographie‹ des Orosius (Göttingen 2025).

[3] See S. Janniard, ‘Le récits de ses «petites guerres» par Synésios de Cyrène (ca 405-413)’, in Le récit de guerre comme source d’histoire, de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Besançon 2022) 511-523.

[4] IRT 875 (cited p.154) is conventionally read Sebentius c(en)t(e)n(arius), a rank/title, rather than c(en)t(e)n(arium), a building.

[5] See A. Trisciuoglio, ‘Hospitalitas I: The Munus Hospitalitatis and Its Limits’, in L. Loschiavo (ed.), The Civilian Legacy of the Roman Army (Leiden/Boston 2024) 31-54.

[6] See additionally Just. Nov. 7.8 (535); 65 (538); 120.9 (544).