Sage, Saint and Sophist

Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire

Graham Anderson

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317799665
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Altertum

Very broad range of texts and examples - draws on extensive scholarship Embraces both Christian and Pagan `Holy Men' Combines social context/history with literary analysis Entertaining portraits of individual men

1

CONCEPTS

The holy man and his milieux

Four years before the Jewish War, according to Josephus,

A man by the name of Jeshua son of Ananias, an ordinary rustic fellow, came to the feast at which all Jews are accustomed to set up tabernacles to God. And in the Temple he suddenly began to shout ‘A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the sanctuary, a voice against bridegrooms and brides, a voice against the whole people!’. Day and night he would wander all the alleyways with this cry. Some of the leading citizens took exception to these words of ill-omen, seized hold of the fellow and gave him a savage beating. But he did not say a word to defend himself, nor did he divulge anything in private to his persecutors; he just kept shouting the same tirade as before. The Jewish authorities, concluding that some more supernatural force had incited him – as was indeed the case – brought him before the Roman procurator. There, though flogged till his flesh was torn to ribbons, he neither begged for mercy nor shed tears, but lowering his voice to its most mournful register responded to every blow with ‘Woe to Jerusalem’.

The procurator, Albinus, actually had Jeshua acquitted as manic but harmless; he had no sooner pronounced woe to himself when he was killed during the siege.¹ The brief adventure of Jeshua is a useful starting-point, since he illustrates in short compass so many of the typical features of an early Imperial holy man. He has access to some information, supernaturally inspired according to Josephus, and arguably fulfilled. He delivers his message in a prominent time and place. He engenders opposition (and belated interest and support, since he is regarded as right); he engages the attention of the authorities in an indecisive way, and he has a spectacular death. If Jeshua was unfortunately deranged and insignificant, at least he is intelligible in the context in which Josephus presents him: we expect prophets of doom in a context of national emergency. But a century and a half later the curious inhabitants of Moesia and Thrace could not so easily have expected the following:

A little before this same daimōn, declaring himself to be Alexander of Macedon, and like him in appearance and accoutrement, set off from the Danube region, after somehow or other making his appearance there, and made his way though Moesia and Thrace performing Bacchic rites; he was accompanied by four hundred men equipped with Bacchic wands and faunskins, but they did no harm. All in Thrace at the time agreed that bed and board were laid on for him at public expense. And no one – no governor, soldier, procurator or local magistrate – dared to confront or contradict him, and he travelled as far as Byzantium as if in some solemn procession, travelling by day, as announced in advance. From there he made his way over to the Chalcedon region, carried out some rites at night, buried a wooden horse, and disappeared.²

In the end one might feel disappointment that this exotic traveller did not claim to be the transmigration of Achilles or Odysseus for good measure. But Dio Cassius’ sketch, while not explaining the phenomenon he sets out to describe, at least gives us a portrait which raises the typical questions we shall want to ask about any given holy man, ancient or modern. The first such question is ‘Who do you think you are?’. This particular holy man might have answered ‘I am Dionysus, and/or Alexander the Great; and I am a daimōn’. He would certainly have had to have been a supernatural superman at the least to be a return version of Alexander, dead for nearly five-and-a-half centuries. Next we must ask what would have been the effect on his audience. Alexander, a world-conqueror, might have been expected to worry the secular powers; he would have been someone likely to say ‘my kingdom is of this world, and I am going to claim it back’. But the claim to be the god Dionysus would have been more subtle and compelling. Educated rulers in antiquity knew only too well what had happened to King Pentheus when he had opposed the will of Dionysus and tried to imprison the god: he had gone mad and was torn limb from limb. Passing through Thrace, the stamping-ground of Dionysus, this new daimōn might not have been unduly surprised to find no further opposition. We might also be tempted to ask how anyone could have ‘pulled off a stunt’ on anything like this scale. Obviously with such an entourage he would have had the opportunity for some forward planning of his campaign, and we are not surprised to find him duly announced in advance; thus is raised the question of how holy men conduct their day-to-day operations. We then have to ask what was the point of the whole exercise: the wooden horse seems to evoke some reference to Troy – until we reflect that this rite does not seem actually to have taken place at Troy, and that Plato’s myth of Gyges knows of a buried horse in a quite different context.³ In the end we seem none the wiser, and not untypically either: holy men have the capacity to arouse expectation, but to keep even their closest followers guessing.

In the period we are dealing with, the early Roman Empire, we expect to find a large number of figures whose activities can be related to those of Jeshua or the pseudo-Alexander: figures who may not always fit readily into the framework of established religions, but who have some distinctive contribution to offer. It is a measure of the controversy they engender that the term ‘holy man’ itself may not always be the most readily applied to all of them. There is an obvious overlap between the alliterating labels ‘sage’ ‘saint’ and ‘sophist’ in our title: ‘sages’ include a variety of wise men, from Persian magi, through Greek philosophers of any sect who claim interest or expertise in the divine, down to the local village wise man;⁴ ‘saint’ in turn need not be an exclusively Christian term, and the concept readily includes pagan holy men; ‘sophist’ is a still more treacherous term, most commonly applied in our period to rhetorical virtuosi; but in its connotation ‘expert’, usually with a high media profile, it can be applied to a religious expert or virtuoso as well. Lucian, a satirist both fascinated and repelled by the activities of holy men, can use it both of Jesus Christ and of a mercenary Palestinian exorcist.⁵

In general I have sought for the broadest possible framework and the most flexible kind of label. This has led me to regard as a holy man anyone who can reasonably be called ‘a virtuoso religious activist’. Even in such an attempt at definition it is well to recognise that all three terms are contestable. Many men one would wish to include fall short of complete virtuosity, from Simon Magus, reputed to have had a bad fall when he tried to fly,⁶ to humble priests of Atargatis struggling for a dishonest subsistence in rural Greece with a one-line oracle.⁷ And ‘religious’ covers a broad spectrum which may well include those who criticise or even deny the gods, as well as figures normally regarded as philosophers who propagate views about them;⁸ while ‘activist’ is not perhaps the right word for a hypochondriac who proclaims the virtues of Asclepius from a litter in a temple-precinct for more than a decade.⁹ Our sub-title ‘and their associates’ is equally flexible, and is intended to cover the social context – imitators, rivals, clients, patrons, and any other associates who can throw light on what holy men did. By nature such a formulation will embrace self-seeking villains as well as those who are perceived as sincerely and divinely motivated, and there is likely to be no consensus ancient or modern as to how to separate them in a historically conclusive way.

THE RELIGIOUS ENVIRONMENT

The religious frameworks we are dealing with are not always easily characterised either. ‘Paganism’ as it comes to be regarded from the perspective of emergent Christianity embraces any number of cults of deities, with any number of priests and religious functionaries.¹⁰ Judaism in turn is the exclusive cult of one such deity, Yahweh, again with his priesthoods, prophets, and a wide variety of religious sects and political pressure groups;¹¹ and Christianity with its gradually developing heresies centres on a figure who might originally have been perceived as a single holy man operating in a Jewish context.¹² The term ‘holy man’ can be reasonably applied to any ‘cult worker’ in all three contexts: it could be applied to those who held priesthoods of, say, the Imperial cult, or to those who belonged to a strongly committed Jewish sect such as the Pharisees, or indeed to the initiator of some new but influential Christian heresy. But in practice the restrictions of the evidence tend to force us to concentrate on those who attain special prominence either through their own efforts or those of others. One tends to think of late antique holy men as Syrian or Egyptian monks practising ascetic virtuosity in their respective deserts; but at least some pagan holy men had already achieved substantial recognition also. And the Jewish Jeshua for his part might be said to have attained the most poignant prominence with the least real effort. In fact there had been nothing specifically ‘religious’ about his message ‘Woe to Jerusalem!’, though any wider perspective of the tradition of Hebrew prophecy would easily accommodate him in the ranks of ‘apocalyptic prophets’.¹³ With modern perceptions of mental illness it is easy to dismiss him as the village idiot in an urban context, whose message is so vague as to be easily construed as fulfilled by the siege of Jerusalem. But any number of other such figures elude identification: the silent figures who played their part in the operations of the oracle of Abonouteichos;¹⁴ the now silent proto-Christian opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians;¹⁵ or at the other end of the scale the anonymous and often unwitting con-men who might sell dream-interpretations in any market-place.¹⁶ Nor can any categories be confined to the silent and socially déclassés. It would be impossible to talk of holy men without recognising that a distinguished religious antiquarian such as Plutarch himself held a priesthood and was seriously concerned with the justification of oracles, or that a philosophical sophist such as Dio of Prusa could disseminate what he describes as a Persian conception of divinity to a remote Greek community on the Black Sea Coast.

Traditional paganism is not easy to characterise: it is accommodating to anything but the most exclusively monotheist divine manifestation, and to any means of coming to terms with it. Cults had their priests, and by no means all cults had professional priesthoods, so that the phenomenon of the lay priest was commonplace and easily allowed the concept of the religious freelance.¹⁷ So did the standard institutions for consultation of the gods: if a god’s wish was not immediately intelligible through prayer or oracle, one would consult anyone competent to interpret – or trust the person who could supply a satisfactory answer.¹⁸ Moreover, the traditional modes of communication by the gods – visions, dreams, or oracles – allowed any individual to experience a call to worship the gods in his own way and encourage others to follow.¹⁹ The proliferating mystery cults of the Early Empire offered initiations, discipleships, priesthoods and further knowledge, protection and even identification with the divine.²⁰

The nature of the philosophical schools offered a further context for the operations of holy men, and an often quite substantial area of overlap. A life professionally devoted to philosophy found room for a wisdom devoted to the gods, and a capacity to give advice about them. This is especially and indeed increasingly true of the Platonism which came to dominate the schools from the second century AD onwards.²¹ Most major schools found no difficulty in accommodating the concept of the holy or divine man: even Epicureans could see a divinity in their founder, while Stoic, Cynic or Pythagorean²² versions of the species are readily encountered. In practice Stoicism was able to accommodate divine beliefs as diverse as monotheism, the traditional Graeco-Roman pantheon, and astrological determinism; and to relate all of them to the concept of an active life of civic concern.²³ Cynicism on the other hand operated at a more popular and predominantly anti-intellectual level, but a Cynic would have had Heracles as his model, and his basic practical ideals of self-sufficiency and independence would have fitted him for a life of roving iconoclasm which could have claimed in turn to be a different sort of holiness.²⁴ In practice the Kynikos tropos allowed a life little different from that of the Christian disciples in the Synoptic Gospels.²⁵ As to Pythagoreanism, it was able to satisfy the dual appetite for mystical discipleship and an ascetic regime, with its abstinence from animal products and sacrifices, and a pure worship of a still traditional pantheon.²⁶ It is unsurprising that it should have been the sect associated with that archetypal holy man, Apollonius of Tyana, whatever he was really like.²⁷

The two linked monotheisti...