Studies in Late Antiquity, volume 4, issue I (Spring 2020).

CONTENTS INCLUDE

A Viewpoint on Eastern Mediterranean Villages in Late Antiquity: Applying the Lens of Community Resilience Theory
Tamara Lewit 

The 4th to 6th centuries CE were a time of natural disasters including plague, earthquakes, and climatic instability, as well as warfare and invasions. Yet archaeological evidence demonstrates that in this period rural village communities in the eastern Mediterranean flourished, with new building, settlement of marginal land, high levels of agricultural production, and wide export of their products. In seeking to explain the vitality of the Eastern Mediterranean countryside in spite of manifold shocks, this article applies Community Resilience Theory, a body of research on the internal socio-economic capacities that have enabled communities in the contemporary world to successfully bounce back from crisis. By examining the archaeological remains of late antique eastern Mediterranean rural communities, we can see beyond the constraints of elite textual accounts to the lives of ordinary people in these flourishing villages. Material remains which attest a high volume and diversity of economic activities, a degree of equitable distribution of income, effective routes of communication, the existence of social capital, and capacity for cooperation and technological innovation reveal how the people of these communities might have acted as historical agents in determining their own fate.

Religion and the Construction of a Christian Roman Polity: Insanity, Identity, and Exclusion in the Religious Legislation of the Theodosian Code
Francesco Rotiroti

This article seeks to define a theoretical framework for the study of the relation between religion and the political community in the Roman world and to analyze a particular case in point. The first part reviews two prominent theories of religion developed in the last fifty years through the combined efforts of anthropologists and classicists, arguing for their complementary contribution to the understanding of religion's political dimension. It also provides an overview of the approaches of recent scholarship to the relation between religion and the Roman polity, contextualizing the efforts of this article toward a theoretical reframing of the political and institutional elements of ancient Christianity. The second part focuses on the religious legislation of the Theodosian Code, with particular emphasis on the laws against the heretics and their performance in the construction of the political community. With their characteristic language of exclusion, these laws signal the persisting overlap between the borders of the political community and the borders of religion, in a manner that one would expect from pre-Christian civic religions. Nevertheless, the political essence of religion did also adapt to the ecumenical dimension of the empire. Indeed, the religious norms of the Code appear to structure a community whose borders tend to be identical to the borders of the whole inhabited world, within which there is no longer room for alternative affiliations; the only possible identity outside this community is that of the insane, not belonging to any political entity and thus unable to possess any right.