[The following group of posts represents more of my Short Reads on Late Antiquity. As with the others, they originate as the scripts of short, 10-minute video-lectures given to my second-year students last term. As with the others I haveposted, the texts are as read - lightly modified to make them make more sense as blog posts - and are obviously simplified and introductory. If these are of use to anyone in teaching, please do feel free to use them.]
This [group of posts] once again starts from a basis set out in [an earlier video lecture] to explores late antique cosmology - how people organised the world, not primarily in terms of geography but in terms of what they regarded as the legitimate centre and the illegitimate outside. It considers shifts in the way in which the Romans thought about the difference between civilisation and barbarism, and (preparing the ground for [the lectures on ethnicity and race]) how they saw the world as made up of different peoples. It revisits the ideas of [a previous lecture]) and the way in which religious orthodoxy became central to politcs of the 5th century, before closing withy a discussion of the measurement of time and how late antique people saw themselves located within it.
Part 1: Classical Ethnography (1): The Binary
This [post] looks at classical Graeco-Roman ethnography and the way it conceived of the difference between civilisation and barbarism. It takes the story from the Greek city states of the 5th-4th centuries BC through to the late Roman period. This 'binary' was something that was really all about Romans and remained at the level of ideals
Part 2: Classical Ethnography (2): The Taxonomic
There was another element to classical ethnography, however, and that was what I call taxonomic. The world was made up of peoples (ethne in Greek; gentes in Latin) and these could be described in ways that didn't necessarily map on to the civilised:barbarian binary dichotomy. This dimension was much more historically situated.
Part 3: Fourth-Century Change
In this [post] I return to the creation of a martial model of masculinity within the late Roman army. This was based around conscious adoption of aspects that were opposed to classical civic masculinity, but it did not mean a rejection of Roman-ness. This new model of masculinity provided an important resource for navigating the dramas of the 5th century and became the basis for medieval warrior masculinity.
Part 4: Theological correctness gone mad: The fifth century
This [post] returns to the them of [a previous video lecture] by looking further at the ways in which fifth-century politics at local levels as well as higher political levels turned on issues of orthodoxy and heresy. The fifth-century grand narrative, as we have seen before, is about the Christianisation of politics. The legitimate centre changed from the good Roman to the good Christian.
Part 5: The measurement of time
In this [post] we move from the organisation of the world in terms of legitimate core and illegitimate periphery to the place of people in time. Christianity introduced a significantly different attitude to time, as it saw a linear sequence from Creation to the Last Judgement. After the conversion of Constantine, Christians became very concerned with inserting Christian history into the history of Rome and the Empire and establishing synchronicity between Roman and Christian history. The 6th Age of the World was thought to be coterminous with the Roman Empire.
Part 6: The End
This final short [post] lecture simply rounds off the previous one by looking how Christian measurement of time were linked to apocalyptical thinking. This became especially acute in the West after Justinian's wars and in the East after the Great Persian War and the Arab Conquests. If you were living after the Roman Empire (and thus the 6th Age) surely the end of time must be here. What effect did living after the end of linear time have on writers?