Abstract:
In the city of Antioch-on-the-Orontes in 387 c.e., statues of the emperor Theodosius I and his family were destroyed by a crowd angered by a recent tax increase, resulting in a series of imperial punishments enacted upon the city. In the months after the event, two prominent residents, the pagan author Libanius and the Christian priest John Chrysostom, wrote (in the case of Libanius) and preached (in the case of Chrysostom) in response to the destruction of the statues and the ensuing punishments. This article focuses on the varied understandings of the power and presence of imperial portraits written into Libanius's and Chrysostom's texts. In contrast with Libanius's traditional understanding of the statue as a surrogate for the venerable subject it represented, Chrysostom instead argues that the living human is superior to the lifeless statue, as we are created "in the image of God" by the supreme artist himself. By marshaling Neoplatonic ideas and pagan critiques of statuary, as well as Christian doctrine, Chrysostom seeks to convince his congregants and later readers still attached to the imperial statue cult that the faithful, rather than graven images, are what matter. Writing in a period in which Christianity was ascendant, and in which some cult statues of the pagan gods were targeted for destruction, Chrysostom's homilies provide a unique window into late fourth-century conceptions of portrait statues, which though different from statues of divine subjects were potentially problematic sites of animation and veneration. Read closely against each other, Libanius's and Chrysostom's texts supplement our understanding of the factors behind the subsequent decline in the production and display of portrait statues, as well as changing ideas about three-dimensional representation in a Christian empire.
Abstract:
Previous scholarly consensus held that the text preserved in the Latin Actus Vercellenses was a relatively faithful translation of a second-century Greek Acts of Peter. In partial support of this date was the posited intertextual relationship with the Acts of Paul, with particular attention given to the so-called "quo vadis" scenes related in both apocryphal acts. More recent scholarship has cast doubt on this, thus removing the terminus ad quem of a late second-century date that this posited relationship provided. Taking this as his starting point, Matthew Baldwin's work constitutes a formidable challenge to previous consensus of both the date and the faithfulness of the Latin translation. He argues that the Vercelli Acts should be understood as a fourth-century product in its own right and of no value for recovering an earlier Acts of Peter. While some brief counterarguments to this have been offered, to the best of my knowledge none have yet incorporated the fourth-century Syriac History of Simon Cephas, Chief of the Apostles, which has extensive parallels with the Vercelli Acts. Doing so lends additional evidence to the priority of the Acts of Peter, as well as potentially verifies scholarly argument regarding a redactional history of the Acts of Peter in the second century. As a fourth-century composition itself that includes material reflecting this date, it is also useful in comparison with details preserved in the Vercelli Acts that scholars have suggested attest to the preservation of earlier material. Taken together, these three avenues of discussion can potentially reinstate the consensus regarding the existence of a second-century Acts of Peter that is more or less faithfully preserved in the Vercelli Acts.
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