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Late Antiquity is a rough periodization (c. AD 300 - 600) used by historians and other scholars to describe the interval between Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages in both mainland Europe and the Mediterranean world: generally between the decline of the western Roman Empire from the 3rd century AD onward, to the Islamic conquests, and the re-forming of Eastern Europe under the Byzantine Empire. The term Spätantike, literally "late antiquity", has been used by German-language historians since its popularization by Alois Riegl in the early Twentieth Century.^[1] It was given currency in English partly by the writings of Peter Brown, whose survey The World of Late Antiquity (1971) revised the post-Gibbon view of an arid, stale and ossified Classical culture, in favour of a vibrant time of renewals and beginnings, and whose The Making of Late Antiquity offered a new paradigm of the climacteric sea-change in Western culture, to confront Sir Richard Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages.^[2]

The continuities between imperial Rome, as it was reorganized by Diocletian, and the Early Middle Ages are stressed by writers who wish to emphasize that the seeds of medieval culture were already developing in the Christianized empire, and that they continued to do so in the Eastern, or "Byzantine" Empire. Concurrently, some migrating Germanic tribes such as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths saw themselves as perpetuating the "Roman" tradition. While the usage "Late Antiquity" suggests that the social and cultural priorities of Classical Antiquity endured throughout Europe into the Middle Ages, the usage of "Early Middle Ages" emphasizes a break with the classical past, and the term "Migrations Period" emphasizes the disruptions in the same period of time. |

Religion

If there was a singular important transformation in Late Antiquity, it was the formation and evolution of the Abrahamic religions: Christianity, post-diaspora Judaism, and eventually Islam; the latter marking a decisive end to Late Antiquity wherever it reached.

The rise of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire, starting with the conversion of Emperor Constantine the Great in 312, clearly marked an end to the Classical world. By the late 4th century, the "Christian revolution" had almost completely supplanted over a millennium of Graeco-Roman religious culture, transforming the Classical Roman world "rustling with the presence of many divine spirits" (Brown, Authority and the Sacred).

The birth of Christian monasticism in the deserts of Egypt in 4th century, which initially operated outside the authority of the main Church, would become so successful that by the 8th century it penetrated the Church and became the primary Christian rule within. Monasticism was not the only new Christian movement to appear in Late Antiquity. Christian movements notable for their unconventional practices include the Grazers, holy men who ate only grass and chained themselves up like barnyard animals; the Holy Fool movement, in which acting like a fool was considered more divine than folly; and the Stylites movement, where one practitioner lived atop a 50-foot pole for 40-years.

Islam appeared in the 7th century and the Muslim conquests fundamentally changed both the Eastern and Western empires in different ways. See also Pirenne Thesis.

Late Antiquity marks the decline of Roman state religion, circumscribed in degrees by edicts inspired by Christian advisers to 4th century emperors, and a period of dynamic religious experimentation and spirituality with many syncretic sects, some formed centuries earlier, such as Gnosticism or Neoplatonism and the Chaldaean oracles, some novel, such as hermeticism.

Many of the new religions relied on the emergence of the parchment codex (bound book) over the papyrus volumen (scroll), the former allowing for quicker access to key materials and easier portability than the fragile scroll, thus fueling the rise of synoptic exegesis.

Laity vs clerical

Within the recently legitimized Christian community of the 4th century, a division could be seen between the laity and a celibate male leadership, who were removed from the traditional Roman motivations of public and private life marked by pride, ambition and kinship solidarity, and who were wholly unlike the married pagan leadership. Unlike later strictures on priestly celibacy, celibacy in Late Antique Christianity tended to take the form of abstinence from sexual relations after marriage, and it came to be the expected norm for urban clergy. Celibate and detached, the upper clergy became an elite equal in prestige, to their admirers, to the traditional prestige of urban notables, the potentes (Brown 1987 p 270).

Political transformation

The Late Antique period also saw a wholesale transformation of the political and social basis of life in and around the Roman Empire.

The Roman citizen elite in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, under the pressure of taxation and the ruinous cost of presenting spectacular public entertainments in the traditional cursus honorum, had found under the Antonines that security could only be obtained by combining their established roles in the local town with new worldly ones, as servants and representatives of a geographically distant Emperor. After Constantine centralized affairs in Constantinople in the early 4th century, the Late Antique upper class was divided among those who had access to the far-away centralized administration (in concert with the great landowners), and those who did not—though they were well-born and thoroughly educated, a classical education was no longer the path to success, rather it was one of access, privileged and often corruption in the centralized and bureaucratic state. Room at the top of Late Antique society was smaller and more status competitive, the plain toga that had identified all members of the ruling class indifferently was replaced with silk gowns, court vestments and massive jewelry.

Cities

This period saw the decline of the Western Roman empire into city-states (Rome, Ravenna, Trier, etc) and independent units (Francia, Britannia, Hispania). Concurrently, the continuity of the eastern Roman empire at Constantinople meant that the turning-point for the Greek East came later, as the Byzantine Empire focused on the Balkans. In Europe there was also a general decline in urban populations. Rome went from a population of 800,000 in the beginning of the period to a population of 30,000 by the end of the period. A similar though less marked decline in urban population occurred in Constantinople. As a whole, the period of late antiquity was accompanied by an overall population decline in Western Europe, and a reversion to a more subsistence economy. Markets disappeared, and there was a reversion to a greater degree of domestic production and consumption.

Public building

In the cities the strained economics of Roman over-expansion stopped growth. New public building in Late Antiquity came directly or indirectly from the emperors and their representatives, and the privileged supplies of grain and oil, available only to the citizen class, needy or not, was unbroken until the 5th century. But the elite appeared less often in the forums; they withdrew in the cities to an opulent domus but more frequently to the private luxuries of the villa. The basilica of the great man, from Africa to Britannia, functioned in the 4th century as a substitute for the stoas and public basilicas associated with forums and traditional outdoor public life. In the Christianized basilica, the bishop took the chair in the apse reserved in secular structures for the magistrate—or the Emperor himself— as the representative here and now of Christ Pantocrator, the Ruler of All, his characteristic Late Antique icon.

Sculpture and art

Main articles: Medieval art and Byzantine art

Roman art during Late Antiquity served as a monumental transition from classical idealized realism introduced by the Greeks to the more iconic, stylized art of the Middle Ages. Unlike classical art, Late Antique art does not emphasize the beauty and movement of the body, but rather, hints at the spiritual reality behind its subjects. Additionally, mirroring the rise of Christianity and the collapse of the western Roman Empire, painting and freestanding sculpture gradually fell from favor in the artistic community. Replacing them were greater interests in mosaics, architecture, and relief sculpture.

As military heroes and emperors emerged from the Roman provinces in the 3rd century, they brought with them their own regional influences and artistic tastes. For example, artists jettisoned the classical portrayal of the human body for one that was more rigid and frontal. This is markedly evident in the combined porphyry portraits of the four Roman tetrarchs. With these stubby figures clutching each other and their swords, all individualism, naturalism, and idealism are lost. In nearly all artistic media, simpler shapes were adopted and once natural designs were abstracted. Additionally hierarchy of scale overtook the preeminence of perspective and other classical models for representing spatial organization.



Nearly all of these more abstracted conventions could be observed in the glittering mosaics of the era. Although the pebble mosaics had been used for centuries in Asia Minor, a new technique employing tesserae rose as the method of choice by Christians. The glazed surfaces of the tesserae sparkled in the light and illuminated the basilica churches. Unlike their fresco predecessors, much more emphasis was placed on demonstrating a symbolic fact rather than on rendering a realistic scene. It is important to mention that as time progressed during the late antiquity period, art become more Christian themed. Within this Christian subcategory of Roman art, dramatic changes were also taking place. Jesus Christ was more commonly depicted as a teacher or as the “good Shepherd”. Moreover, Jesus was given Roman elite status, and shroud in purple robes like the emperors.

As for luxury arts, manuscript illumination on vellum and parchment emerged in the late sixth century as a spiritually overwhelming display of Christian scripture in text. Also, ivory carvings were greatly desired by Roman generals (for illustrating their victories in processions) and the Church (usually for creating religious imagery on diptyches and triptyches).

• Arch of Constantine
• Spolia

Literature

In the field of literature, Late Antiquity is known for the declining use of classical Greek and Latin, and the rise of literary cultures in Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Coptic, vulgar Latin and, in some cases, Romance dialects. It also marks a shift in literary style, with a preference for encyclopedic works in a dense and allusive style, consisting of summaries of earlier works often dressed up in elaborate allegorical garb (e.g. De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae (The Marriage of Mercury and Philology) of Martianus Capella, and the De Arithmetica, De Musica, and Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius—both later key works in Medieval education).

Notes

References

• Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity Ad 150-750, 1989, ISBN 0-393-95803-5
• Peter Brown, 1987. "The World of Late Antiquity Ad 150-750" in A History of Private Life: 1. from Pagan Antiquity to Byzantium, Paul Veyne, editor, ISBN 0-393-95803-5
• Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred : Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0-521-59557-6
• Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity 200-1000 AD, Blackwell, 2003, ISBN 0-631-22138-7
• Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire: Ad 284-430, Harvard University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-674-51194-8
• Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity Ad 395-600 (Routledge History of the Ancient World), 1993, ISBN 0-415-01421-2
• Averil Cameron et al. (editors), The Cambridge Ancient History, vols. 12-14, Cambridge 1997ff.
• Fred Kleiner, Christin Mamiya, & Richard Tansey, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 11th edition, Harcourt Publishers, New York, 2001, p. 292- 323
• Bertrand Lancon, Rome in Late Antiquity : AD 313 - 604, Routledge, 2001
• Stephen Mitchell, A history of the Later Roman Empire. AD 284-641, Blackwell, London 2006.
• Barbara Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages, 2nd edition, Broadview Press, New York, 2004, p. 30-39

External links

• Worlds of Late Antiquity, from the University of Pennsylvania
• Mosaic, source documents and key themes in Late Antiquity.
• The End of the Classical World, source documents from the Internet Medieval Sourcebook
• Overview of Late Antiquity, from ORB http://the-orb.net/
• ORB Encyclopedia's section on Late Antiquity in the Mediterranean from ORB http://the-orb.net/

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