In choosing “Leadership and Community” as the title of this volume of essays dedicated to Raymond Van Dam, the editors set a high bar for themselves as well as for the students, friends, and colleagues who contributed to it. For this is the title Van Dam chose for his eye-opening first book, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (University of California Press, 1985). Since then, Van Dam has extended his reach both geographically and methodologically, and the essays in this volume mirror that change.
Contributors make use of a broad range of methodologies. Adam Schor uses abstract social networking theory (complete with graphs that diagram the social networks revealed in the letters of Polycarp and Ignatius, among others) to show how bishops became the “unequaled social hub” of their communities (31). Virginia Burrus looks at the way memory shaped knowledge of Constantine's daughter, Constantina, and her relationship to the tomb of Saint Agnes, pointing out that “buildings need humans to give their memories voice” (177). And Dennis Trout applies the technique he perfected when studying Damasus's epigrams in Rome to poems that celebrated Peter's ties to Spoleto and Ravenna in order to demonstrate the portability of Rome's quintessential saint.
Other authors demonstrate the geographical span of Van Dam's work while adding their own innovations. Lisa Bailey's study of Poitiers is closest to Van Dam's starting point, but she takes a gendered approach to the story of Queen Radegund's conflict with her bishop to demonstrate how one well-connected woman could be perceived as a threat. Jacyln Maxwell shifts attention to the eastern end of the empire, using Antioch's two most famous orators—Libanius and John Chrysostom—to show that Christianity did not represent a complete break from classical standards of charity and education. But Garrett Ryan draws a very different conclusion from his study of the complex interplay of local and imperial concerns in restoration projects in Ephesus and Aphrodisias. In a brief but tantalizing epilogue, Ryan explains the impact of Christianity on the criteria for building projects: “These spaces, progressively stripped of all but the most general associations with authority and tradition, were little more than exercises in a dead language” (134).
Another way the authors paid tribute was through the originality of their topic. Anthony Kaldellis did it with a question that seemed to need no answer: Why was it so easy to transfer the attributes of Rome to Constantine's new capital on the Bosphorus? Our modern familiarity with the practice (“New York,” “New England”) masks the novelty of such an occurrence, which he ultimately attributes to the same talent that led Romans to draw general legal principles out of specific cases. In the same way, “Rome” changed from being a specific site on the Tiber to an idea that could be transferred to New Rome on the Bosphorus. For North Africa, Brent D. Shaw draws on a range of sources, from sermons to pottery designs, to uncover a means of exegesis unique to this region that used an agricultural (rather than military) image to account for the oversight authority of the Catholic bishop. Quite possibly the most original chapter is Benjamin Graham and Paolo Squatriti's study on “Roofing Rome,” which examines the vulnerability of wooden church roofs to fire (“basilica roofs were time bombs,” 192) and the control Roman pontiffs had over the scarce beams needed to replace them to demonstrate how popes used this timber to extend their influence across the Mediterranean.
The volume is set up so that each entry can be used as a standalone piece—even to the extent that it does not use numbers for the individual chapters, each of which comes with an extensive bibliography. But, as the editors observe, what holds them together is their concentration on the “variety of roles and relational nodes” that reflect different types of leadership in late antiquity (7).
Two chapters that go particularly well together deal with the memory of Rome's fall. Placed (appropriately) at the end of these contributions, Shane Bjornlie and Jonathan Arnold's pieces are both concerned with memory, but where Bjornlie looks expansively at the process by which successive generations “engaged in the manufacture of discrete historical truths” (251), Arnold focuses on two late fifth-century hagiographies to gauge how the fall was remembered during one particular time (Ostrogothic Italy). Intriguingly, both call attention to the non-Roman origins of the concept. Despite the “sheer variety” of sources that deal with the sack of Rome in 410, Bjornlie observes that there is scarcely a peep from Roman sources—a silence that speaks volumes (258). Similarly, Arnold notes that, although both of the hagiographies he studies (the Life of Epiphanius of Pavia and the Life of Severinus of Noricum) depict widespread devastation, neither seems to think that the Roman Empire had ceased to exist in the fifth century. Both chapters have a decidedly post-modern approach, with Bjornlie advocating that the “grand narrative” of Rome's fall be replaced by “a mosaic of highly individualized human narratives” (274) and Arnold concerned with “representations of the past” (281).
In a concluding chapter, Noel Lenski reflects on the contribution of each chapter and poses questions to promote future research. Van Dam, he notes, stands out as an “early leader in the application of sociological and anthropological theory to the history of Late Antiquity” (301). The thoughtfulness of the authors and the range of their contributions testify to the enduring impact of Van Dam's scholarship.
