The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-700 AD

LATE ANTIQUE CULTURE AND PRIVATE LIFE

on the visual and the oral.^46 The increase in attention to Christian religious
images in the later part of our period (Chapter 9) has also been ascribed to the
infl uence of popular culture, and indeed one does at times fi nd references to
sacred pictures as a way of educating the illiterate. Thus Nilus of Sinai (fi fth
century), recommended decorating a new church with pictures from the Old
and New Testaments:

So that the illiterate who are unable to read the Holy Scriptures may, by

gazing at the pictures, become mindful of the manly deeds of those who

have genuinely served the true God and may be roused to emulate those

glorious and celebrated feats.^47

But Christian art and Christian writing alike were often as complex as secular,
and in practice, members of the educated upper class were just as enthusiastic
about icons, saints and holy men as ordinary people.^48 Even secular historians
from the late fi fth and sixth centuries, such as Zosimus (who was actually
pagan) and Procopius (certainly not a ‘popular’ writer), seem to show a greater
receptiveness to miracle and other religious factors as part of historical expla-
nation.^49

Family and personal life

Christianization brought with it the rise of monasticism and the ascetic life-
style (Chapter 3). Even if we take the fi gures given in contemporary monas-
tic sources for monks and ascetics in Egypt with a degree of scepticism, the
number of men and women in the empire as a whole who had dedicated
themselves to the Christian religious life must have amounted to thousands
by the fi fth century, and some monasteries were very large, with refectories
and accommodation for over 200 monks. The general principles of ascetic
life were also shared in some pagan circles, notably among Neoplatonists, but
they had no such monasteries, and belonged on the whole to elite groups in
society; their numbers were therefore in comparison very limited.^50 It is dif-
fi cult to know how widely the ideals of monastic and ascetic life were shared
in society generally, but many saints’ lives tell of families dedicating their chil-
dren to the ascetic life at an early age. Even if idealized and presented within
the framework of literary and religious cliché, saints’ lives also seem to signal
an increase in the attention given to individuals, and early Christianity has
been seen as indicative of a new emphasis in this direction. The advance of
Christianization also brought changes in attitudes to the dead, though in many
cases there was still little difference between Christian and pagan burials,^51 and
many monasteries, like that of Euthymius in the Judaean desert, incorporated
the tomb of their founder and a charnel house for the monks themselves.
Social and religious change also had implications for family life: under
Constantine the Augustan legislation which laid down penalties for members
of the upper class who did not marry was lifted and from then on celibacy