24 | CHAPTER 2
had a rather restrictive view of its own intellectual formation, which most
held to have been completed by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. So there
was, in reality, little motivation coming from this quarter to paint late Antiq-
uity on a broader canvas.
The emergence, in the mid- nineteenth century, of more secular ap-
proaches did not necessarily open up broader chronological horizons. If one
lacked the believing scholar’s conviction that the formation of Christianity
was a development with living significance down to one’s own day, one might
find oneself composing a lament for another ideal—lost or corrupted Classi-
cism. In fact, the first emergence of the precise expression “late Antiquity” is
linked with the work of an historian who, far more than Gibbon, took liter-
ally late pagan and early Christian writers’ harping on the old age and de-
cline—explicitly conceived in biological terms—of the Roman world, espe-
cially in the fourth century.^20 When Jakob Burckhardt’s Die Zeit Constantins
des Grossen (translated into English as The age of Constantine the Great) ap-
peared in 1853, his readers encountered a much more calculating, political
figure than the Christian hero many were accustomed to; and this unvar-
nished portrait was accompanied by a consistently deflationary view of the
period generally, explicitly presented in the famous central chapters (5–7) as
Antiquity’s senescence (“Alterung”). Not only does Burckhardt appear to
have been the first to make explicit use of the concept “late Antiquity,”^21 but
his generally pessimistic evaluation was to exercise notable influence, as we
shall see at the end of this chapter.
Burckhardt showed considerable interest in such material evidence as was
available at the time in the form of architecture, sculpture, and painting, seen
as symptomatic of decline. Another generation was to pass before archaeolo-
gists began to uncover large quantities of new material and change the way
late Antiquity was understood. Whole new areas of late antique experi-
ence—besides its aesthetics—were revealed for the first time: the fate of cit-
ies, the countryside, and the economy through—to single out one major dis-
covery—the papyri from Oxyrhynchus; or the widespread and popular cult
of the Iranian god Mithras, barely mentioned in literary sources. Chance
played a part too. Until the American excavation of the Athens agora started
20 Cf. A. Demandt, “Das Ende des Altertums in metaphorischer Deutung,” Gymnasium 87 (1980)
178–204.
21 Mazza, Tra Roma e Costantinopoli [2:19] 8–16. G. W. Bowersock, From Gibbon to Auden (New
york 2009) 109–22, presents Burckhardt as a forerunner of the cultural- historical approach to late Antiq-
uity popular from the 1970s onward, except of course in his emphasis on its decline (though that too is
now coming back). On interest in late Antiquity during the decades before Burckhardt’s book, see R.
Herzog, “Wir leben in der Spätantike”: Eine Zeiterfahrung und ihre Impulse für die Forschung (Bamberg
1987) 8–16 (the Oxford Movement, Chateaubriand, the decadent aesthetic); id., “Epochenerlebnis ‘Rev-
olution’ und Epochenbewusstsein ‘Spätantike’: Zur Genese einer historischen Epoche bei Chateaubri-
and’, in id. and R. Koselleck (eds), Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewusstsein (Munich 1987) 195–219.