Alan Cameron, who for over 30 years was Charles Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University, passed away in 2017. The present volume collects a series of papers to commemorate his life and work, building in part on presentations at a conference in his honour at Columbia in 2018. Cameron was not easily pigeon-holed: a classicist and historian, with an abiding interest in material culture and a mastery of the ancillary disciplines that make up the arsenal of the philologist and textual scholar. The range of Cameron's interests is reflected in the wide-ranging contributions to this volume, many of which address subjects of his publications or at least take off from topics or approaches he had pursued. This makes for a rather miscellaneous collection – the editors concede the lack of thematic unity – reflecting the diverse interests of its dedicatee.
One strand of Cameron's scholarship concerned Greek poetry of late antiquity. His early article on the ‘wandering poets’ of fourth- to sixth-century Egypt was highly influential, while an enthusiasm for the epigrams of the Greek Anthology, going back to his schooldays, culminated in a book on the Anthology published in 1993. Two contributors represent this strain of Cameronian scholarship: A. Gallo detects the influence of Hellenistic exegesis of rare or unusual Homeric usages on late antique poets from the Greek Anthology; J.-L. Fournet edits, with translation and commentary, papyrus fragments of three poems by one of Cameron's wandering poets, Dioscoros of Aphrodite, taking advantage of improvements in legibility made possible by infrared technology. Like Gallo's article, Fournet's witnesses to the centrality of the Homeric poems to the literature of the period. While the texts analysed by Gallo point to a high level of learning in the authors in question, Dioscoros’ less assured compositions serve, in Fournet's terms, to ‘illuminate the cultural profile of … village elites’ (p. 105).
The Greek Anthology also figured in another area of Cameronian scholarship, the circus games of Byzantine late antiquity, represented by two volumes, on the charioteer Porphyrius and on circus factions. In the latter he collected references to circus colours in the Greek East outside Constantinople. C. Roueché in her contribution lists a further 78 such items, with a brief characterisation of their salient and recurrent features. The two books on the circus games also figure prominently in Averil Cameron's chapter on Cameron's engagement with Byzantium. She characterises the Porphyrius volume as ‘a bravura combination of scholarship and ingenuity’ (p. 267). The chapter is particularly revealing on Cameron's working methods and idiosyncrasies as well as the genesis of his major works. She concludes that ‘he was a problem-solver, not a synthesizer’ (p. 275), who pursued subjects that interested him wherever they took him without overdue regard to disciplinary boundaries.
Many of Cameron's publications combine literary and historical dimensions. A number of contributors straddle the same line. E. Watts, for instance, writes on Themistius’ first oration, delivered before Constantius II in 348 ce. He argues that Themistius aimed to produce something quite different from the conventional imperial panegyric and in so doing looked to an untraditional source, imperial coinage, in particular an issue of Constantius and his brother Constans bearing the legend FEL TEMP REPARATIO (for Felicitatis Temporum Reparatio). Themistius’ speech frequently employs metaphors from coinage, a rarity elsewhere in his corpus. He also makes unusually frequent use of nautical imagery to communicate Constantius’ wise governance, picking up on the visual language of the coinage that represents the emperor on a galley – an image for the ship of state, as Watts takes it – holding an orb in one hand and a standard topped by the Chi-Rho symbol in the other, and flanked by Victory. In Watts's reading the speaker repackages this visual language to create his own version of the imperial image.
G. Kelly turns to poetry and the West, with Rutilius Namatianus’ elegiac De reditu suo. The poem notoriously contains two passages of invective against monks and one against Jews. Kelly studies the first of the monastic invectives, directed against a community on the island of Capraria, in which the poet compares the monks with the Homeric misanthrope Bellerophon. Rutilius attributes Bellerophon's conduct to an excess of bile (nimiae bilis) and to black poison (nigro … felle), an explanation for Bellerophon's state of mind that echoes that given in scholia on the Homeric passage, which speak of Bellerophon's melancholia (black bile). Although scholars have generally been sceptical about Rutilius’ direct knowledge of Homer, Kelly is inclined to believe that the Gallic poet read Homer in the original in a text with marginal scholia. He also ingeniously conjectures that Rutilius conceals in the passage a reference to Melania the Younger, in part because her name is encoded in the Greek for the symptoms the poet attributes to those he is criticising, melancholia.
Cameron had written an important article on Rutilius, arguing for a date of 417 for the piece's composition, later confirmed by the discovery of a new fragment of the poem. The Historia Augusta also had attracted his attention, in particular because it had been claimed to be a document of anti-Christian polemic. M. Kulikowski takes up the debate about the nature of the Historia with a Cameronian briskness, arguing for a minimalist position and insisting on rigorous argumentation. Following these criteria, the work must be dated sometime between 360, established by imitation of Aurelius Victor, and 392, the latest possible date for Jerome's Life of Hilarion, which imitates the Historia in its preface.
C.V. Franklin's contribution concerns a very different work of collective biography, the Liber pontificalis, in particular a lost manuscript of that work, the codex Farnesianus. Known to the German humanist Lucas Holste in the seventeenth century and in the following century to an Italian scholar, Francesco Bianchini, it has subsequently disappeared. Both scholars collated the manuscript, from which it appears that, had it survived, it would have been the oldest witness to the ninth-century recension of the Liber pontificalis. Franklin argues that the manuscript was produced in Rome in the middle of the ninth century. She musters an impressive array of supporting evidence, citing the content of the manuscript and its script, as seen in surviving engravings of five of its pages made by Bianchini and reproduced in this volume.
A number of contributions touch on topics of social history, broadly speaking. R. Cribiore discusses the practice of stenography in late antiquity, with special attention to the reliability of the transcribed text and its conformity to the original oral delivery. In particular stenographers (notarii) tasked with recording the proceedings of a church council were especially liable to accusations of inaccuracy or bias when disputes were heated. She examines, too, the evidence for the stenographic recording of extempore sermons, concluding that in general stenographers made only minimal interventions in the spoken text.
N. Lenski takes on the subject of slavery, as it appears in Ambrose of Milan. The picture he paints is a complicated one. Ambrose betrays the influence of the Stoic paradox that equated foolishness with slavery, but goes a step further, following Philo of Alexandria and Basil of Caesarea in arguing that enslavement to the wise actually benefited the foolish. Applied to Christian conduct, the argument presented the willing enslavement of the individual to God as beneficial. Elsewhere the Stoic paradox is reformulated to represent sin rather than folly as enslaving. On the other side of the ledger, Ambrose's protest against debt slavery of children, Lenski suggests, may have influenced imperial legislation.
Harris addresses a third topic in social history, the provision of hospitals in the ancient world. He establishes that hospitals, in the sense of institutions where the sick or injured could stay overnight and be treated by doctors, were provided for the army and for slaves on large slave-holding estates, if not for the civilian population. References to something like hospitals become more common in the Christian era, though Harris describes the evidence as somewhat meagre. Interpreting the references can be problematic as in some cases the institutions described may be places of shelter and refuge for the poor and suffering in general, rather than specifically for the sick, and there is no clear evidence that inmates received medical care.
M. Salzman tackles a subject that evoked both ecclesiastical and imperial legislation, the sale of church offices. She focuses on imperial legislation from the fifth and sixth centuries and the reaction of bishops of Rome to it, especially around the turn of the century. A recurrent theme is that, while such legislation was popular with non-clerical elites, ecclesiastical figures tended to view it as an unwelcome intrusion into church business. Salzman's narrative ends with an unexpected twist when the emperor Justinian legalised fees for office, while regularising the practice and stipulating the amount to be paid.
Cameron's interest in material culture finds its fullest reflection in Chen's chapter on imperial propaganda in the Sasanian East and Roman West. She argues that the two sides were aware of and influenced by each other's efforts in this regard. Specifically, she explores the representation of imperial women during the third century in the East, primarily on rock reliefs, as imitating the presence of women of the imperial families in western art. The Sasanian practice came to an end at the end of the third century, a development that she associates with the Sasanian defeat by the Romans at Satala in 298 and the appearance of recognisably eastern queens as prisoners on Roman coinage and relief sculpture.
The first chapter of the volume is the only one that deals directly with a subject that occupied Cameron throughout his career, the relationship between paganism and Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries, culminating in his magnum opus, The Last Pagans of Rome published in 2011. The work had a long period of gestation, and R. Lizzi Testa traces its development, focusing on the family of the Symmachi. Already in his Fondation Hardt paper, delivered in 1976, Cameron was critiquing the notion of a pagan revival, founded, it was supposed, on the promotion of classical texts. Despite what Lizzi Testa characterises as a somewhat over-zealous denial of paganism to certain figures, Cameron fundamentally realigned the way in which the religious-cultural climate of the fourth and fifth centuries was perceived.
The volume as a whole is a worthy testament to Cameron, bearing witness not only to the breadth of his own achievements, but also to the many scholars who have benefited from his encouragement and been inspired by his example.
