The period between the modern imperial scramble for Africa and the strongest phase of its decolonization spanned the lifetime of a single man: Winston Churchill (1874–1965).Footnote ¹ The greatest part of the European colonial enterprise, and the most thoroughgoing reaction against it, occurred in a period roughly the same duration as the Theodosian dynasty. Profound societal change in the modern era does not occur only in the longue durée, and late ancient life sometimes proceeded at a breakneck pace.

In February of 380 ce, the emperors Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius I decreed that “all peoples who are ruled by the administration of our forbearance shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans.”Footnote ² According to a constitution preserved in book 16 of the Theodosian Code, this “religion” was preached by the Pontifex Damasus and by Peter the Bishop of Alexandria, and the constitution stipulates that “we shall believe in the single Deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity.”Footnote ³ According to the emperors, this particular statement of was more than just something that “we must believe (credamus)”: it was a law (lex), and obedience to the law granted one the right to be called by “the name ‘Catholic Christian.’”Footnote ⁴ Dramatic and systemic changes characterize the Theodosian Age, beginning with the elevation of the Nicene confession of faith to the status of law.

Historians attempting to trace the rise of Christianity in the second and third centuries necessarily take a somewhat speculative approach to the evidence, given its relative scarcity and the inherent difficulty in relating fragmentary data to a political and social environment that was intermittently hostile. The late fourth-century revolution in governing ideology and in scholastic methodology, on the other hand, is well documented and was active throughout the period under discussion. New forms of knowledge production arose rapidly in the Theodosian dynasty, and scholars reacted and responded to these new forms of knowledge production in real time. In Chapters 3 and 4 I investigated literary sources in order to trace the proliferation of Nicene Christian methods through Theodosian Age scholarly productions. This chapter turns to the material evidence for many of those same literary sources: to manuscripts, and to the ways that norms, creeds, and laws were aggregated, distilled, and promulgated. By the time that scribes copied most of our earliest extant manuscript evidence – by the late Theodosian Age – new forms of argumentation and compilation had already suffused a scholastic landscape over which the predominance of codes cast a long shadow. This chapter picks up there, where I left off at the end of Chapter 5.

Gratian’s Talisman

In the summer of 378 the emperor Gratian was nineteen or twenty years old, and he was going to war. Gothic tribes had invaded Thrace, a “countless horde that had taken possession of the mountain heights as well as the plains,” and before leaving the Western court for the field of battle the young emperor requested a talisman in the form of a codex from Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.Footnote ⁵ Ambrose warned that the “book about the faith (fidei libellum)” which he delivered to the emperor would not be up to the task of “acting as an adjudication of the faith (de fidei disceptandi),” but rather was intended as a “collation of a multitude of opinions (de testimoniis plura contexam),”Footnote ⁶ and would satisfy the emperor’s needs for a talisman even though, he added, the Nicene Creed itself already was “just like a trophy (tropaeum), raised to proclaim victory over faithless ones throughout the world.”Footnote ⁷ As Ambrose well knew, Constantine himself marched to battle with a tropaeum – a “trophy of a cross in light (σταυροῦ τρόπαιον ἐκ φωτός)” that god revealed to Constantine before his battle at the Milvian Bridge, in Eusebius’s account.Footnote ⁸ Gratian did not request a gem for his dangerous journey, similar to what many Christians wore in this period for health and for safety,Footnote ⁹ nor did he order his soldiers to affix a Christian symbol to their shields to invoke divine power and protection, as Constantine had done some fifty years before.Footnote ¹⁰ The young emperor asked for a codex of scholastic opinions on a theological question that had been adjudicated thirty-four years before his birth.Footnote ¹¹

Gratian’s request for a book of opinions as a protective amulet is utterly bizarre from the point of view of even the earlier fourth century. Ambrose regarded the Nicene Creed itself as a “trophy,” but the young emperor requested a book – a book of scholarship – for his talisman instead. His request betrays the extent to which the aggregative codex had become a symbol of power and divine guidance for Nicene Christians who were, as I have argued, peculiarly bookish, and invested in the production of textualized, aggregative truth.

It is the historian’s good luck that two copies of Gratian’s talisman remain extant, both produced during the Theodosian Age. The literary qualities of this text are remarkable in and of themselves; in the earlier quotation Ambrose suggested that the collation of opinions was only the first step toward the production of universal truth. In other words, he takes part in a structure of knowledge known from a wide variety of other Theodosian Age productions that I detailed in Chapters 3 and 4.Footnote ¹² Yet the material qualities of these two manuscripts demonstrate most vividly the extraordinary coherence of the Theodosian structure of knowledge in which Ambrose’s book takes part. Ambrose indicated that aggregation was the first step toward the production of universal truth, but he was also concerned with the effects of such aggregation. We learn from these two manuscripts that his earliest readers held similar concerns about the effect of placing heretical and orthodox opinions side by side.

Ambrose: Concerning the Faith

In Concerning the Faith, Ambrose implements an aggregative structure of knowledge, but he also concerns himself with the problem that this manner of argumentation poses for a reader trying to extract truth from the fray; he concerns himself with what I call the “problem of discernment.” A structure of knowledge in which any truth claim must be based on an aggregation of the sources also must employ a manner of deciding between opposing sources. For Ambrose, this problem was acute. In Concerning the Faith he claims that his predecessors, and scripture itself, demanded that “impious doctrines should be included in the record of their decrees,” but Ambrose laments that a credulous reader may accidentally stumble into heresy on account of this requirement:

This passage immediately precedes Arius’s heretical statement of faith. Ambrose admits that the dominant scholarly method requires him to include heretical statements in his work, and that those who fail to say openly what they think thereby render their thoughts “deceitful” – playing in a particularly Ambrosian manner with the dual meaning of fucus, as both “red blush” and “deceit.” In order to expose heresies as such, and not to allow them to hide as if wearing makeup, Ambrose names and condemns heretical opinions even before they appear in his text “such that the curious person eager to hear won’t fall into error, because he knows already that it is condemned, before he hears” (1.18.119). Ambrose was willing to hew to the Nicene manner of argumentation but he wanted to save his reader from falling into the trap of heresy when they read impious doctrines as part of his text. In order to combat heresy, Ambrose amply warns the reader that what is to come should not be trusted.

The earliest known reader of Ambrose’s Concerning the Faith was a scribe working from Italy in early to mid-fifth century. The scribe must have found Ambrose’s warning compelling, and perhaps insufficient, because while copying this text the scribe employed another set of mechanisms to make abundantly clear to any reader that the text they were about to read was dangerous. Perhaps taking a cue from Ambrose’s warning that heresy is sometimes disguised “with red blush” (fucis), the scribe of Stiftsbibliothek Lavanttal 1 marked out the heresy that follows with the addition of two words in red ink: Expositio Arii – “Arius’s statement of faith” (Figure 6).

Stiftsbibliothek Lavanttal 1, 34r (TM 67637, CLA 1450). The scribal addition to Ambrose’s text, reading “Expositio Arii,” is rendered in red ink, different from the brown used for the base text.

Images graciously provided by the Stiftsbibliothek St. Paulus in Lavanttal, Austria.

This is the earliest extant manuscript of Ambrose’s Concerning the Faith, and aside from incipits and explicits, its scribe uses red ink only to mark off heresy. In other words, this deluxe Theodosian manuscript uses red ink to deal with the problem of discernment occasioned by an expectation of aggregation as the proper form of scholastic knowledge production. As in many other Theodosian Age manuscripts, the incipits of each section are written in three lines of red. Such use of red ink was well established by the fifth century, as we see in, for instance, a (palimpsested) scholion on Cicero for which the scribe used red for the first three lines of each book and for words rendered in Greek.Footnote ¹⁴ Red ink was commonly used for identifying to the reader something in the text requiring emphasis. In this fifth-century copy of Ambrose’s Concerning the Faith, it was used to mark off heresy. As is clear in Figure 6, a later corrector (likely Abbot Hartmut of St. Gall) crossed out the warning because, strictly speaking, it is not part of Ambrose’s text.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather, I argue that it is an addition made by this Theodosian scribe in response to the problem of discernment.

In this manuscript all heretical statements are indicated in a similar manner, with material included for the purpose of aggregation marked off on either side by red uncial lettering. See, for instance, Figure 7, where the scribe warns that the following statement comes from arch-heretic Arius by writing Expositio dogmatis Arriani in red ink. See also Figure 8, where the scribe ends another heretical statement with a red uncial title reading “On the Eternal Son of God (De Sempiterno d(e)i Filio),” indicating to the reader that each of the heretical statements in the previous section would be refuted thereafter.Footnote ¹⁶ Again, this title appears to be a scribal gloss and not part of Ambrose’s initial text. This scribe appears to have added these additional warnings for the same reason that Ambrose added the initial ones: to save the credulous reader from falling into heresy.

Stiftsbibliothek Lavanttal 1, 10v. The scribal gloss “Expositio dogmatis Arriani” appears in red ink, different from the brown used for the base text.

Stiftsbibliothek Lavanttal 1, 15r, with the scribal gloss “De Sempiterno d(e)i Filio” in red ink.

I have argued that across the scholarly landscape of the Theodosian Age we see a dominant method featuring arguments based on aggregation. This earliest manuscript of Ambrose shows that already in the Theodosian Age, concerns stemming from this method made the leap from text to paratext, and influenced the way that aggregative scholarship looked on a manuscript page. New readers make new texts; here we have one such new text. Throughout the fifth century, however, scholars and scribes continued to engage the problem of discernment, and scribes responded to the same problems in divergent ways. We can glimpse the variety of responses with high fidelity when contemporaneous manuscripts survive of the same text. In the case of Ambrose’s Concerning the Faith, we are lucky to have two manuscripts from the Theodosian Age, both produced in Italy, so far as paleography and codicology can attest.Footnote ¹⁷ It appears that both scribes were cognizant of the issues related to aggregation and discernment, but that each responded to the issue in a slightly different manner. While the scribe of the Lavanttal manuscript uses red uncial lettering only to mark off heresy, the scribe of Paris Latin 8907 supplemented Ambrose’s text in their own way, using red throughout the manuscript to mark off heretical and orthodox creeds alike.Footnote ¹⁸ For instance, in the transition between Ambrose’s preface and the Orthodox creed that follows, the scribe of the Paris manuscript added Expositio Fidei (“statement of faith”) in red letters, making it abundantly clear that what follows is an authorized creed (Figure 9). We can see the Paris scribe’s agency in this incursion into Ambrose’s text, and guess at their intention, by comparing it with the same passage in the Lavanttal copy. The Lavanttal manuscript witnesses the same base text as the Paris copy, but only the Paris scribe added Expositio Fidei in red ink to indicate that the pietatis exemplum which follows is an orthodox creed (Figure 10).

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 8907, 298v.

(source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF). The scribal gloss “Expositio Fidei” appears in red ink, different from the brown ink used for the base text

Stiftsbibliothek Lavanttal 1, 4r, which notes the coming pietatis exe(m)plum without recourse to red ink, which is reserved in this manuscript for heretical creeds and the incipits and explicits of books.

Look carefully at Figures 9 and 10. Notice in both manuscripts the rounded D of a single strike, the high hasta and closed eye of the E, the L that rises above the line, and the calligraphic, oversized A with a pointed bow. These two scribes received remarkably similar training, and the hands must be dated to the same paleographic period. The scribes received similar training, but each responded in a distinctive way to the problem of aggregation that placed orthodox and heretical statements side by side.

Between chapters 17 and 18, too, the scribe of the Paris manuscript has inserted Definitio patrum de fide in red uncial before the Orthodox statement of faith (Figure 11). On the other hand, the Lavanttal scribe left a blank space at the same point in the text (Figure 12). Perhaps the Lavanttal scribe left this gap so that a later reader could add the “Definitio patrum de fide” witnessed in the Paris copy if they so desired. The introduction of a space between these chapters in the Lavanttal manuscript suggests that the scribe knew of the clarifying addition but did not find it necessary to identify orthodox creeds with clarifying additions in red ink, as they did for heretical creeds.

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 8907, 315r.

(source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF)

Stiftsbibliothek Lavanttal 1, 33v. A corrector has struck out the M on the end of disimile in Lavanttal, and added an N at the end of lumen in what appears to be a contemporary half-uncial hand. The thinner brown lines filling the blank space are reminiscent of the strikethrough on 34r (Figure 6), and are likely the result of a ninth-century reader intending to clarify that the extra space should not be used for a clarifying insertion – perhaps precisely the clarifying insertion found at this point in BnF Lat. 8907, 315r reading definitio patrum de fide (Figure 11).

The scribes of Paris Latin 8907 and Stiftsbibliothek Lavanttal 1 both copied Ambrose’s Concerning the Decrees in Italy at about the same time,Footnote ¹⁹ and both scribes deal with the same problem: the problem of including heretical material in an orthodox production.Footnote ²⁰ Yet each arrived at a slightly different solution. The difference between these solutions suggests that these scribes were aware of the issue of discernment and that the issue remained unresolved in late ancient scriptoria, just as it was in scholarly salons of the Theodosian Age.

Hilary: Concerning the Synods

Hilary of Poitiers was exiled to Phrygia in 356. In 358 he wrote back to his colleagues in the West about the controversies embroiling the Greek-speaking empire and the creed that had been decided twenty years earlier as an attempt to settle the matter. Hilary’s letter is remarkable evidence that the Nicene Creed, a central focus of theological dispute in the Eastern empire almost since its creation in 325, was largely unknown in the West until at least the 360s. The earliest manuscript of Concerning the Synods was copied in 509. In this manuscript, too, scribes introduced paratextual solutions are introduced to deal with the problem of discernment.

Hilary presents a heretical creed in chapter 11 of Concerning the Synods with an explicit, textual notification: Exemplum blasphemiae apud Syrmium per Osium Potamium conscriptae (Figure 13). This part of the text is marked out with ekthesis, as is the heretical creed on the next page, beginning with Unum constat (Figure 14).

Vat. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.182, 303r, where a heretical creed is signaled with ekthesis and a textual note, reading Exemplum blasphemiae apud Syrmium per Osium Potamium conscriptae.

Vat. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.182, 303v, where a heretical creed is identified with ekthesis, an obelus in the upper left, and the text Exemp(lum) blasph(emiae).

The same scribe identified the end of the heretical creed with another paratextual feature, this time writing finit blasphemia in oversized capitals; the scribe changed scripts to clarify to the reader that what precedes is heretical and what follows is approved (Figure 15). A later reader (though likely one and the same scriptorium as the original scribe) added an arrow at the beginning of the heretical statement with a note reiterating that the following was an Exemp(lum) blasph(emiae): “a sample of heresy” which is present only for the purposes of aggregation. This marginal note transparently mirrors Finit blasphemia on the following page, and reiterates, yet again, that the intervening text should not be mistaken for truth.

Vat. Arch.Cap.S.Pietro.D.182, 304r. The end of a heretical creed, identified by the initial scribe with Finit blasphemia in oversized capitals, to which a later scribe added an obelus on the right, and the word pessima in the margin.

Apparently, however, even this much paratextual forewarning was eventually deemed insufficient, because a later reader added an obelus at the beginning and the end of the passage, in addition to the word pessima: “totally wicked.” This further addition apparently updated the manuscript for different conventions of notification, but it carried the same message: what is here is heresy.Footnote ²¹ Already during the Theodosian Age, the problem of discernment led writers and readers to take prophylactic steps to stem the effect of heresy that was present in orthodox manuscripts. This manuscript shows that the problem remained in the minds, and the marginalia, of later readers too.

Manuscripts from the fifth century show a variety of textual and paratextual solutions to the problem of discernment. There is another early manuscript of Hilary’s Concerning the Synods, copied likely during the Ostrogothic period and thus shortly after the end of the Theodosian Age (LDAB 7924). This manuscript shows a different method of dealing with the inclusion of heretical materials in Hilary’s text. According to Lowe, the manuscript was “written doubtless in Italy by a master scribe in a scriptorium maintaining high standards,”Footnote ²² and it marks out the heretical creed from Sirmium in 357 as we saw earlier: with ekthesis in addition to the text Exemplum blasphemiae apud Sirmium per Ossium et Putamium conscribtae, “a copy of the heresy of Sirmium written by Ossius and Potamius” (Figure 16).Footnote ²³

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 2630, 320r. Concerning the Synods 11.

(source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF)24

After this textual warning, the same scribe identifies heresy by indenting (eisthesis) heretical statements further than the rest of the text (Figure 17). Orthodox statements, on the other hand, are not indented in this manuscript. See, for instance, the orthodox statement given at Sirmium against the heresies of Photius. It is introduced as a statement of faith in the same way as the heretical ones (in this case, with Exemplum fidei Sirmio ab Orientalib(us) contra Fotinum scribtae), but it is not indented (Figure 18). In this manuscript, extra indentation is reserved for heresy, alerting the reader to the status of the text through the material form of its presentation.

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 2630, 322r. Concerning the Synods 15.

(source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF)

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 2630, 335r. Concerning the Synods 38.

(source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF)

Before the fourth century, paratextual intervention in Christian scholarship is vanishingly rare. The earliest Christian manuscripts have little by way of paratextual markup, and nearly all that do have paratexts indicating something about the status of the text date to the period after the Council of Nicaea. A curious exception is P.Oxy 3.405 , a late second- or early third-century copy of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies with “wedge-shaped signs in the margin similar to those employed for filling up short lines.”Footnote ²⁵ In this case, the scribe used wedges typically employed by Egyptian scholiasts on the right margin of the recto, which appear to indicate a quotation from the Gospel according to Matthew 3:16–17.Footnote ²⁶ The relative paucity of evidence means that it is hard to say anything conclusive about the extent of this particular paratextual feature in Christian theological scholarship before the fourth century. The scribe of this manuscript, however, found value in using small wedges to mark out at least this one quotation in Irenaeus’s text. We can presume that other places in this manuscript would have quotations similarly marked out, though it is impossible to say whether the motif was used for texts that were considered authoritative, for all quotations, or in some other capacity.

Already in the late second or early third century, Tertullian suggested paratextual solutions to problems occasioned by his own form of theological scholarship, particularly when discussing Greek cosmological texts and ideas in Latin. In Against the Valentinians, he notifies readers that “for some of the names, a translation from the Greek does not bring out the appropriate force of the name. For others, the gender of the word in the two languages does not match. Finally, we are more used to the citation of others untranslated.”Footnote ²⁷ Tertullian offers his solution in the next sentence: “For the most part, then, we shall use the Greek names; their meanings will be noted on the margins of the page. Nor will the Greek be unaccompanied by Latin equivalents. Rather, such will be marked with supralinear strokes – because explaining the personal names is made necessary by the ambiguities of some of them, which suggest some different meaning.”Footnote ²⁸ Because the earliest extant manuscript of Tertullian’s text is medieval, we do not know the precise form of that his paratextual markup took in third-century manuscripts, nor the extent to which ancient copies employed these tools.Footnote ²⁹ What is clear, however, is that he used paratextual solutions to engage a theological problem – in this case, the problem of explicating Greek cosmology in Latin. Apparently Tertullian did not expect his reader to recognize these paratextual features, or how they were employed, without some explanation. Without further manuscript evidence we cannot tell whether he was using common in-text signs to signify paratextual features (perhaps a generalized version of the Aristarchan system) or whether he invented a new group of signs himself. Tertullian’s use of paratextual features in Christian scholarship substantially predates the Theodosian Age, but his rationale for marking up his margins is dramatically different from what we see, for instance, in the work of Jerome, to which I now turn. Tertullian needed to clarify issues of translation. Jerome was concerned with discernment.

Jerome’s Obelus

Jerome was prolific. He wrote commentaries on nearly every part of the canonical bible and left a vast trove of letters and other theological works to set alongside his most enduring accomplishment: a full translation of his bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. He was intimately familiar with his sources, with the problem of textual variation within authoritative texts, and he was regularly in contact with Roman Traditionalists in the imperial capitols as well as Jewish teachers in Palestine. And yet, for all his learning and famed reclusive irascibility, Jerome possessed a single point of scholarly humility. Before offering the final word on any particular topic, he would first aggregate all of the relevant sources, regardless of whether they were capable of edification.

In the preface to his translation of the Book of Job, Jerome claims that aggregation is the proper form in which to present scholastic arguments, and also that paratextual accommodations can deal with problems of discernment. He undertook to study the various Greek translations included in Origen’s Hexapla and made a text critical investigation into the relationship between Hebrew and the Greek manuscripts, which differ by “almost seven hundred or eight hundred verses.”Footnote ³⁰ Confident in the quality of his work, Jerome went so far as to boast, “let whoever wishes keep the old books, either written on purple skins with gold and silver, or in uncial letters (as they commonly say: ‘loads of writing’ rather than books), while they leave me and mine to have poor little leaves, and not such beautiful books as correct ones (non tam pulchros codices, quam emendatos).”Footnote ³¹ The boast might seem hollow, or at least exaggerated, were it not for a manuscript of precisely this type and time period remaining extant: the so-called Codex Veronensis, a fifth-century codex that fits Jerome’s mocking description of the most gauche Theodosian Age bibles.Footnote ³² The fifth-century codex comprises 388 folia dyed purple, with Latin uncial of a Theodosian type written in silver and gold ink: silver for the text, gold for the first lines of each gospel, nomina sacra, and the Lord’s prayer.

Jerome offered a translation from the Septuagint and the Hebrew in his Old Testament, and from the Greek in the New. In his estimation the rendering was of the highest quality, yet his translation is not meant to stand alone, nor to be read exclusively at the expense of “loads of writing”: deluxe copies of lesser scholastic productions. Rather, Jerome purposefully left it to the studious reader to decide the best reading in each case: “Each edition – both the Septuagint according to the Greeks, and mine according to the Hebrews – has been translated into Latin by my labor. May each one choose what he will, and prove himself studious rather than malevolent.”Footnote ³³

His uncompromising text critical work brought Jerome into contact with Origen’s Hexapla, which offered two columns of Jewish scriptures in Hebrew and four in later Greek translations, including a second century translation by Theodotion.Footnote ³⁴ Origen and Theodotion both repurposed two Aristarchan signs – the asterisk and the obelus – to offer a transparent collation of translations, indicating places where the Hebrew base text did not match up with Greek translations. Jerome was familiar with Origen’s polyglot edition and explicitly claims to benefit from the addition of asterisks and obeli, which Sebastian Brock points out were not used in a precisely text critical sense.Footnote ³⁵ Origen was not concerned with establishing the “original text”; his interests were apologetic, “providing the Christian controversialist with a text that would be acceptable in the authoritative eyes of contemporary Jewish scholars.”Footnote ³⁶ For his own work, Jerome did not simply pick up the Aristarchan asterisk and obelus and employ them in his translation to clarify the text, either. Rather, he resuscitated generally disused tools that he knew from Greek and Latin poetry and repurposed them to apologetic ends – to deal with the problem of Christians entering into theological debates with other biblically minded communities whose texts differ from Jerome’s own, superior edition.Footnote ³⁷

Already in the early second century, Suetonius made clear that Roman scholars had employed the Aristarchan signs for quite some time and to various ends.Footnote ³⁸ Even in antiquity, the Aristarchan sigla were generalized tools without strictly circumscribed significations. As shown by Kathleen McNamee, “none of these sigla had a tightly restricted significance, and (outside Oxyrhynchus and the second and third centuries) the same jobs were also done by various other sigla. The most useful reminder, for editors, that the meaning of these signs did vary is inconsistent use by scribes of even the very specialized sigla of the system of Aristarchus – and the toleration of those inconsistencies by readers.”Footnote ³⁹ In the Herculaneum and Oxyrhynchus papyri, Aristarchan signs generally function as rudimentary hypertexts, pointing simply to the existence of a separate commentary or hupomnēma.Footnote ⁴⁰ Jerome, too, picked up old tools and employed them to solve new problems, motivated by a new focus on aggregation.Footnote ⁴¹

The Problem of Discernment in Nontheological Texts

The problem of discernment was not restricted to Christian scholastic productions during the Theodosian Age. The Theodosian Code was meant to be an aggregative work, bringing together both in-force laws and laws “which had fallen into disuse” as the basis for a future code that could serve as a “guide to life (magisterium vitae)” – one worthy to bear the name of the emperor from whose court it arose (1.1.5). Contemporary scholars of Roman law question whether the Theodosian Code as we have it – that is, roughly the project as proposed in CTh 1.1.6 – also includes disused laws, as the initial codification was intended to have. As promulgated, the Theodosian Code apparently did include disused laws, but a full discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter.Footnote ⁴² My interest is not in the precise legal force of the Code but in its stated intentions, framing, and reception. Early commentaries on the Theodosian Code clearly stress that the collection was intended as a scholarly resource, and explicitly included laws that were no longer in force: as I suggest, laws that were present for the scholastic purpose of aggregation.

The so-called Summaria antiqua codicis Theodosiani is a marginal commentary on the Theodosian Code, written sometime in the fifth century and extant in the margins of a sixth-century manuscript of the Code now housed at the Vatican Library.Footnote ⁴³ The semi-cursive uncial of the base text gives the impression that it was a private copy,Footnote ⁴⁴ and the presence of staurograms at the beginning of each fascicle, along with the Latin letters rendered in with a stylus cut for Greek, suggests strongly that the text was copied in the Eastern empire, likely Constantinople (Figure 19).Footnote ⁴⁵ The base text and the marginal commentary were copied in the early sixth century, but both are products of the fifth.Footnote ⁴⁶ The marginal commentary reflects an attempt to categorize and interpret the Theodosian Code, with over a thousand numbered and cross-referenced entries which have the effect of negotiating the fraught relationship between the base text as an imperially promulgated code of law alongside its creation in an aggregative format, as a scholarly resource for diligentiores: “more industrious people.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Vat. Reg. Lat. 886, 17r, with a staurogram at the upper left denoting the beginning of the fascicle and a marginal note on the right, appearing darker due to use of reagents to reveal the faint brown ink, likely by Angelo Mai. The base text is CTh 9.10.2–3. The strange appearance of the Latin text is due to the letters being rendered with a pen cut for Greek.Footnote ⁴⁹

Throughout Vat. Reg. Lat. 886, the only ancient copy of the Theodosian Code in books 9–16, a sixth-century scribe copied clarifying notes out of the fifth-century Summaria antiqua, over the entire length of the 448 folia noting important details such as: “this is no longer in force (haec inutilis est),” or “this is ancient, and does not hold in this [current] period (haec antiqua est et non tenet his temporibus)” (Figure 20). The most common type of marginal note in this manuscript indicates that the statute is no longer in use, that it is similar to another constitution (similis followed by the number of the note, or superiori similis), or that it contradicts another constitution (generally contaria superiori or contraria, followed by the number of the note). Of the 1,230 scholia on these 8 books of the Theodosian Code, fully 25 percent are of this final type, indicating a law in the collection supervened by another in the collection.Footnote ⁴⁸ For instance, the scholion on CTh 16.10.1 reads “this is no longer in force (haec inutilis est)” next to Constantine’s famous provision that in the event of lightning strikes on public buildings, “the observance of the ancient custom shall be retained,” namely that a haruspex should be consulted to interpret the portent. By the time of the Theodosian Code’s promulgation, this law, and its institutional support for Traditionalist haruspicy, had been long abrogated. This copy of the Code makes clear to a reader that the law is included in the collection for the purpose of aggregation, and not because it is still enforceable.

Vat. Reg. Lat. 886, 244r, note 90 on CTh 12.1, reading haec antiqua e(st) et n(on) tenet his temp[or]ib(us).

The fifth-century scholia on Vat. Reg. Lat. 886 are those of a scholar – likely a lawyer interested in clarifying which laws are in use, which are not, and what the relationship is between constitutions that have been aggregated for the use of “more industrious types” but which nevertheless present an authoritative promulgation of law.Footnote ⁵⁰ The centrality of aggregation as a practice in the Theodosian Age offered scholars in different disciplines the opportunity to innovate because it necessitated new tools of discernment. Jerome used the obelus and asterisk to offer insight into biblical variance. Scribes transmitting Hilary’s theological works employed ekthesis and indentation to warn readers when heresy was in their midst. The fifth-century scholiast responsible for the Summaria antiqua created a corpus of marginal notes, complete with idiosyncratic shorthand and cross references between notes to clarify the status of laws promulgated as authoritative, but unequally so. In these and other works of Theodosian era scholarship we see the downstream effects of aggregation as a central scholarly practice. We see fifth-century readers responding to a new environment, writing new texts.

New Texts

Kathleen McNamee undertook the most extensive study of the history of paratextual markup in ancient manuscripts. In a magnum opus of careful, detailed papyrological scholarship, McNamee demonstrates that the late fourth century was a seminal moment in book history. It was the reign of Theodosius I when “for the first time in the history of the book … books were regularly laid out with the intention that they should include extensive exegesis in the margins.”Footnote ⁵¹ McNamee demonstrates a clear link between the reforms of Theodosius and changing bookforms, and she specifically argues that the teaching of Latin legal texts in the Greek East after 395 ce necessitated wide margins which allow for glosses and commentary. “The fashion [of producing scholastic work with wide margins] quickly spread to literary productions … Like scholia – and unlike the ad hoc notes in other ancient books – the marginalia in these manuscripts were planned from the books’ inception.”Footnote ⁵² But the known scholia in the margins of juristic texts, beginning with the Summaria antiqua discussed earlier, all respond to the aggregative format. The Summaria antiqua presupposes an aggregative codex; its commentarial format cannot precede it.

Texts with an aggregative format, which “show signs of having been compiled from multiple commentaries,”Footnote ⁵³ appear only in the fifth century, and the paratextual features that I described earlier arise in nontheological works during this same period. McNamee argues persuasively that the Theodosian Age gave rise to an almost complete overhaul in bookforms across scholastic disciplines, because it was the Theodosian Age in which annotation and commentary on primary texts was so foundational as to precipitate a wholesale changeover in the format of books themselves. I argue, however, that the shift in format of Theodosian books did not begin in the law schools of Beirut and Constantinople, being quickly picked up in other scholastic domains. It was Nicene Christians, and not lawyers, who explicitly discuss aggregation, annotation, and commentary as central scholastic operations in the fourth century. And it was Nicene Christians who prized book formats such as the wide-margin codex which most readily invited commentarial intervention in the margins, such as the Codex Sinaiticus discussed earlier. Christians are the proximate source for this innovation, and not lawyers, who arrived at the aggregative party fashionably late.

I have argued that the focus on aggregative scholarship arose under the influence of a particular set of intra-Christian, theological arguments. These scholarly practices proliferated through other domains when Christians came to significant political power – only during the Theodosian Age. McNamee’s analysis already presupposes the cross-disciplinary interaction that I explore in Chapter 1:

The details of the origin of new practices of textual production, spurred on by new readers with new expectations, were perhaps of minimal importance in antiquity. But they are of great importance to contemporary historians trying to understand the central question that animates this book: what does it matter that Christianity came to Rome? McNamee’s analysis pinpointed the shift in bookforms, but she did not connect it to a previous shift in scholarly expectations among Christians. It is not surprising that McNamee did not notice that Christians came to the aggregative and commentarial format first, however, because her analysis explicitly excludes both Christian materials and literary sources: the two archives that might have suggested an underlying rationale for the Theodosian Age revolution in book forms.Footnote ⁵⁵

The look and layout of scholastic books changed in the late fourth century. Scholars have suggested a number of possible explanations for this shift. The new readers making new texts may have been jurists, as McNamee argued. They may have been scholiasts of the fourth or fifth century, interested in bringing together commentaries that were traditionally transmitted separately from the lemmatic text, as John Williams White argued.Footnote ⁵⁶ The problem with this theory is that it must be divined in the silence between the rather cursory marginalia on known ancient poetic texts and the full-blown scholiastic tradition received in medieval manuscripts.Footnote ⁵⁷

Günther Zuntz put forward an interesting proposal, namely that rabbis inspired the late ancient interest in wide-margin codices with paratextual markup:

It is hard to overstate the extent to which Zuntz’s proposal is misguided. There are no Talmud manuscripts from the fifth century, and his proposal for the similarity of fifth and eleventh century is based entirely on an unconsidered stereotype about Jewish tradents and their texts (“die Festigkeit jüdischer Tradition”). Beyond this, there is no reason to think that Talmudic material was committed to writing during the fifth century, or in any of the centuries immediately following. Add to this the fact that Zuntz explicitly writes of the Babylonian Talmud, which did not coalesce until around two centuries after period under discussion, and it is easy to put the suggestion aside on account of his failure to grasp basic facts about the tradition.Footnote ⁵⁹

Nevertheless, Zuntz’s proposal is not altogether mistaken. While there is no reason to think that any of the evidence that he offered bears on the question posed about the birth of the scholia/catenae tradition, Zuntz is nevertheless quite right to point out a set of coincidences in the fifth century which demand explanation. During the Theodosian Age a peculiar form of literary/commentarial production, based on the aggregation of sources, appeared in a wide variety of traditions. In the case of the Talmudic material that was beginning to coalesce in the late fourth century (which is to say the Palestinian rather than the Babylonian Talmud), there is no reason to think that the rabbis responsible explicitly modeled their work on biblical catenae or florilegia, nor vice versa. But the Palestinian Talmud nevertheless does model some of the features of the Theodosian Age structure of knowledge known from other sources, such as the Theodosian Code and the Christian theological scholarship discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. To the extent to which the Palestinian Talmud takes part in the Christianized structure of knowledge, it may be said to be influenced by Christian ways of knowing, even (and perhaps especially) when the scholars quoted in the Talmud reject the preceptual truths held by members of the Theodosian court. And, to the extent to which the Palestinian Talmud differs from the Sassanian recension of the tradition while correlating with features of Theodosian scholarly practices, we can perhaps further situate it as provincial Roman literature. I return to this argument in Chapter 8.

For the moment it is important simply to point out that the physical form of books, and the intellectual projects contained within their leaves, changed dramatically during the late fourth and fifth centuries. Scholars have proposed a wide variety of unsatisfactory solutions to a set of changes visible across the Roman scholastic spectrum, but all agree that the situation cannot be reduced to mere coincidence. In the Theodosian Age a variety of new readers made new texts. I have argued that the common denominator among these new readers is their individual reactions to Christian ascendance and to the centrality of new scholarly practices inflected by a century of doctrinal dispute. The intention and methods of jurists and scholiasts must be read from the details of their literary productions, and the reason that jurists in the fifth century, and scholiasts of Late Antiquity (perhaps) shifted to preferring wide-format books capable of receiving significant paratextual markup is far from clear.Footnote ⁶⁰ Nicene Christians, on the other hand, tell us explicitly why it is that such new book forms as define the Theodosian Age should arise, and their own internal shift began already during Constantine’s reign. Their changing scholarly predilections, I have argued, best explain those which followed in other scholarly domains.