Type of Media 1
Author 1
Date 7
Type of Media
Author
Persecution and Response in Late Paganism: The Evidence of Damascius, 1993
By: Athanasiadē, Polymnia Nik.
Title Persecution and Response in Late Paganism: The Evidence of Damascius
Type Article
Language English
Date 1993
Journal The Journal of Hellenic Studies
Volume 113
Pages 1-29
Categories no categories
Author(s) Athanasiadē, Polymnia Nik.
Editor(s)
Translator(s)
The theme of this paper is intolerance: its manifestation in late antiquity towards the pagans of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the immediate reactions and long-term attitudes that it provoked in them. The reasons why, in spite of copious evidence, the persecution of the traditional cults and their adepts in the Roman Empire has never been viewed as such are obvious: on the one hand, no pagan church emerged out of the turmoil to canonize its dead and expound a theology of martyrdom, and on the other, whatever their conscious religious beliefs, late antique scholars, in their overwhelming majority, were formed in societies whose ethical foundations and logic are irreversibly Christian. Admittedly, a few facets of this complex subject, such as the closing of the Athenian Academy and the demolition of temples or their conversion into churches, have occasionally been touched upon; but pagan persecution in itself, in all its physical, artistic, social, political, intellectual, and psychological dimensions, has not yet formed the object of scholarly research. To illustrate the pressures wrought by intolerance upon late antique society, I have chosen a period of one hundred years spanning the life, testimony, and initiatives of Damascius. In the 460s, Neoplatonism, as a fairly standardized expression of pagan piety, still formed—despite occasional persecution—a generally accepted way of thinking and living in the Eastern Mediterranean; moreover, as epitomized by Proclus and Athens, it was a recognizably Greek way. By 560, on the other hand, as a result of Justinian's decree prohibiting the official propagation of the doctrine in Athens, its exponents, after various vicissitudes, had ended up in a frontier town, where their philosophy had become contaminated by local forms of thought and worship and was on the way to losing its Graeco-Roman relevance. The interaction and the resulting changes in late antiquity of a sociological force—intolerance—and of a Weltanschauung—Neoplatonism—is a complex phenomenon in which causes and effects are never clearly defined. In an attempt at clarifying this development (which lies at the heart of the transformation of the ancient into the medieval world), I have in what follows set the focus of the action against two contrasting backgrounds. The first consists of a selective study of violence in Alexandria between the fourth and the sixth centuries; the second is represented by an equally impressionistic account of the evolution of Neoplatonism at Harran between the sixth and the tenth centuries and its increasing relevance to the world. [author's abstract]

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Persecution and Response in Late Paganism: The Evidence of Damascius, 1993
By: Athanasiadē, Polymnia Nik.
Title Persecution and Response in Late Paganism: The Evidence of Damascius
Type Article
Language English
Date 1993
Journal The Journal of Hellenic Studies
Volume 113
Pages 1-29
Categories no categories
Author(s) Athanasiadē, Polymnia Nik.
Editor(s)
Translator(s) 
The theme of this paper is intolerance: its manifestation in late antiquity towards the pagans of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the immediate reactions and long-term attitudes that it provoked in them. The reasons why, in spite of copious evidence, the persecution of the traditional cults and their adepts in the Roman Empire has never been viewed as such are obvious: on the one hand, no pagan church emerged out of the turmoil to canonize its dead and expound a theology of martyrdom, and on the other, whatever their conscious religious beliefs, late antique scholars, in their overwhelming majority, were formed in societies whose ethical foundations and logic are irreversibly Christian. Admittedly, a few facets of this complex subject, such as the closing of the Athenian Academy and the demolition of temples or their conversion into churches, have occasionally been touched upon; but pagan persecution in itself, in all its physical, artistic, social, political, intellectual, and psychological dimensions, has not yet formed the object of scholarly research.

To illustrate the pressures wrought by intolerance upon late antique society, I have chosen a period of one hundred years spanning the life, testimony, and initiatives of Damascius. In the 460s, Neoplatonism, as a fairly standardized expression of pagan piety, still formed—despite occasional persecution—a generally accepted way of thinking and living in the Eastern Mediterranean; moreover, as epitomized by Proclus and Athens, it was a recognizably Greek way. By 560, on the other hand, as a result of Justinian's decree prohibiting the official propagation of the doctrine in Athens, its exponents, after various vicissitudes, had ended up in a frontier town, where their philosophy had become contaminated by local forms of thought and worship and was on the way to losing its Graeco-Roman relevance. The interaction and the resulting changes in late antiquity of a sociological force—intolerance—and of a Weltanschauung—Neoplatonism—is a complex phenomenon in which causes and effects are never clearly defined.

In an attempt at clarifying this development (which lies at the heart of the transformation of the ancient into the medieval world), I have in what follows set the focus of the action against two contrasting backgrounds. The first consists of a selective study of violence in Alexandria between the fourth and the sixth centuries; the second is represented by an equally impressionistic account of the evolution of Neoplatonism at Harran between the sixth and the tenth centuries and its increasing relevance to the world. [author's abstract]

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