This substantial volume contains a collection of articles offered as a Festschrift to the historian Averil Cameron. ‘Our debt to A. Cameron’ is summarised by Peter Brown in his introduction in which he points out that Cameron will always be remembered as the scholar who ‘made Byzantine history interesting’. The five subsections of the book are entitled ‘Historiography and rhetoric’, ‘Christianity in its social contexts’, ‘Art and representation’, ‘Byzantium and the workings of empire’ and ‘Late antiquity in retrospect’.
Cameron's interest in ancient historiography is taken up in Jan Willem Drijvers's ‘Eusebius’ Vita Constantini and the construction of the image of Maxentius' (pp. 11–27). Drijvers's well-written contribution analyses how Eusebius' portrait of Maxentius serves the cause of Christianity by painting a favourable picture of Constantine, but also how unreliable this is with regard to Maxentius since Eusebius simply conforms to Constantine's anti-Maxentian propaganda. Drijvers correctly draws attention to Maxentius' pro-Christian policies which might have served as an example for Constantine, a thesis brought forward by the largely forgotten – due to his early death in the Second World War – archaeologist Hans von Schoenebeck in 1939 (Beiträge zur Religionspolitik des Maxentius und Constantin). Drijvers's essay shows how an awareness for rhetoric and literary genre lends well-founded support to these otherwise well matured insights (considering that Gottfried Arnold, in his Impartial history, held similar views as early as 1699).
More original, perhaps, is Peter Garnsey's view on ‘The originality and origins of Anonymus, De divitiis’ (pp. 29–45) which is really answering more than promised by the title: Garnsey identifies the Sitz-im-Leben of treatises on wealth such as De divitiis and Clement of Alexandria's Quis dives salvetur as the course of instruction imposed on apprentice Christians (p. 45) which, according to this stimulating essay, turned into a battlefield of pagan and Christian ideas. Scott Johnson's review article (‘Apocrypha and the literary past in late antiquity’, pp. 47–66) also looks into the issue of literary genre by discussing three recent publications which have attempted to contribute to a literary history of Christian antiquity by describing the dichotomous relationship between the ‘low literature’ of early Christian apocryphal and canonic writings and the late antique Christian ‘high’ literature created by leading Christian thinkers (Christine M. Thomas, The Acts of Peter, gospel literature, and the ancient novel, Oxford 2003; Glenn W. Most, Doubting Thomas, Cambridge, Ma 2005; Frances Young, Lewis Ayres and Andrew Louth, The Cambridge history of early Christian literature, Cambridge 2004). In the light of Cameron's older views on the topic, Thomas and Most receive praise for their attempt to open up new ways of Rezeptionsästhetik and thus also new ways of developing a more unifying approach to several centuries of Christian literature, whereas the Cambridge history of early Christian literature is more critically portrayed as being rather firmly stuck in the diachronic trap of the said dichotomy.
When Michael Maas on ‘Strabo and Procopius’ (pp. 67–83) ventures into the realm of geography, one is faced with a different kind of reception of first-century literature (Strabo) by a Byzantine author (Procopius of Caesarea) who employed geography in the service of imperial history and panegyric. Maas convincingly shows how cultural change and intercultural conflict were very much on the minds of both of these authors, though several centuries apart. Hagit Amirav (‘Ammianus Stoicus?’, pp. 85–104) concentrates on Ammianus Marcellinus' Res gestae in which he finds traces of the stoic theory of emotions, but most importantly reveals Ammianus' historiographical art in his sensory style and pictorial imagery, and thus effectively makes similar connections between first- (Tacitus) and fourth-century literature.
Fergus Millar tries to uncover Theodoret of Cyrrhus' – predominantly Greek – cultural identity (‘A Syrian in Greek dress?’, pp. 105–25). Similarly, Alan Dearn (‘Persecution and Donatist identity in the Liber genealogus’, pp. 127–35) uses the terminology of (Donatist) ‘identity’ in order to explain the maverick character of the fifth-century chronicle known as the Liber genealogus (edited by Mommsen in MGH in 1892), whereas Bas ter Haar Romeny asks related questions with regard to ‘Procopius of Gaza and his library’ (pp. 173–90).
Pauline Allen's journey through Augustine's commentaries on the Old Testament disusses results from the pre-431 Mariology project (pp. 137–51; cf. her similar essay on Augustine's letters, published in VigChr lx), and thus picks up Cameron's interest in Mariology (cf. Leslie Brubaker and Mary Cunningham on ‘Byzantine veneration of the Theotokos: icons, relics, and eighth-century homilies’, pp. 235–50), whereas Gillian Clark (‘Do try this at home: the domestic philosopher in late antiquity’, pp. 153–72) probes Augustine and Porphyry for their views on family life. Alan Cameron opens the floor to a consideration of material sources such as inscriptions and artefacts (‘The Probus diptych’, pp. 190–202; Gilbert Dagron, ‘From the mappa to the akakia’, pp. 203–19; Charlotte Roueche, ‘Interpreting the signs: anonymity and concealment in late antique inscriptions’, pp. 220–34), before the volume turns to later Byzantine topics such as the eighth-century emperor Philippikos (Judith Herrin, pp. 251–62), the Laudatio Therapontis (John Haldon, pp. 263–78) or John Malalas and the Paschal Chronicle (Mary Whitby, pp. 279–302). All of these are, interestingly, presented as representative for their time which is univocally portrayed as a time of conflict between different cultural and literary identities.
The last section deals with the reception of these issues in Italian art and culture of the Renaissance (Rita Lizzi Testa, pp. 303–40) and modern America (Elizabeth Clark, pp. 357–75), but also includes a Traditionskern-apology by Wolf Liebeschuetz, commenting on the debate about the ethnogenesis of the Germanic tribes (pp. 341–55).
This brief overview of the rich collection under review reveals the key to the success of Cameron's approach to which most of the essays refer frequently and which is also illustrated in her accompanying bibliography (pp. 377–94): Cameron always strove to discover fissures, points of conflict and tension in historical developments and, more important, asked not only how they came about, but also which strategies were employed in order to bridge and to resolve them, and how these strategies should be categorised. Accordingly, the contributions in this volume deal with antagonisms of Christian piety and classical elitism, ritual practice and philosophical reflection, rhetoric and worship, the rational and the irrational, oriental and Greek civilisation, or elite identities and popular culture. As the ancient handbooks of rhetoric will tell one, this is the stuff which makes any speech or read appealing – and this book certainly represents a success in terms of ‘making history interesting’.
