Book Review: Violence in Late Antiquity. Perceptions and Practices

Bryn Mawr Classics (Reviewed by Paul Stephenson, University of Durham)

H. A. Drake (ed.), Violence in Late Antiquity. Perceptions and Practices. Burlington, VT and Aldershot: Ahsgate, 2006.

This book has three papers related to Egypt:

- Violence and Living Conditions in Prisons of Late Antique Egypt 101 by Sofia Torallas Tovar
- Embodied Theologies: Popular Mobilization and Violence in Alexandria in the Early Arian Controversy by Carlos Galvao-Sobrinho
- The Murder of Hypatia: Acceptable or Unacceptable Violence? by Edward Watts

The rest of the Table of Contents is available here.

The review begins as follows:

In his clever introduction H. A. Drake offers an extended meditation on an image of violence, part of the opus sectile pavement in the basilica of Junius Bassus, which portrays a tiger munching on the neck of a rather shocked calf. This, we are encouraged to believe, provoked the editor to divide the essays into four categories: 'real' violence, committed by 'barbarians' and others; 'legitimate' violence, committed by those who claimed a state monopoly; rhetorical violence; and religious violence. If we were credulous, this would explain the odd placement of some of the papers (for example, Sizgorich's would surely better be read alongside McDonough's, Clark's would complement that by Torallas Tovar).

But the proffered framework is evidently a conceit, which creaks ('it is, therefore, not unimportant that the tigress-calf mosaic comes from a type of setting [where] ... men like Junius Bassus heard cases ... associated with the administration of Roman law') and groans ('Radical rethinking such as that exhibited in the fifth-century Church historians ... calls us back once again to Junius Bassus's mosaic. The structure that it was housed in was adapted by Christians a century later ...') as it changes gears. This is a shame, as the ubiquity of the image that Drake discusses does invite further reflection, not only on the consonant ubiquity of violence in late antiquity.

See the above page for the entire review.