THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYto the local church, and these themselves could be on a lavish scale. Perhaps
more important than the practical results of these ideas in individual cases
was the degree of moral and social control which the church now claimed
over individual lives, and which can be seen, for example, in restrictions on
marriage within permitted degrees.^61 Justinian legislated on matters such as
divorce and the legal position of women in ways that offered a greater degree
of protection (see below), but while Christianization may not have changed
the hearts of individuals as much as has often been thought, there were impor-
tant ways in which it did claim to control the outward pattern of their lives.
Women and menChristianity did, however, have the effect of bringing women into the public
sphere.^62 Rich women, at any rate, could now travel to the Holy Land, found
monasteries, learn Hebrew, choose not to marry or to become celibate, dedi-
cate themselves to the religious life and form friendships with men outside
their own family circle, all things which would scarcely have been possible
before. In contrast, we might remember, nearly all Christian slaves and coloni
remain among the great mass of unknown ancient people, whom nobody
wrote about. When the alternative was probably a life of drudgery or bore-
dom, asceticism offered at least the illusion of personal choice. Women were
also seen in Christian writing as the repository of sexual temptation, and much
of the theological literature of the period has a distinctly misogynistic tone,
but at least no attempt was made to deny women’s equal access to holiness,
and, in some circles, close male–female friendships became possible in ways
only paralleled in a few recherché Neoplatonist circles.^63 It is a notable feature
of late antique Christian literature that it began to give attention to women in a
way that would have been hard to imagine in the classical past. Like the poor,
women became a subject of attention. Inevitably, we know most about upper-
class Christian ladies such as Melania the Younger, Jerome’s friend Paula and
her daughters, or the deaconess Olympias, the friend of John Chrysostom.
In view of Jerome’s awkward temperament, it is touching to see that Paula,
Fabiola and Eustochium were buried alongside him at Bethlehem, for it had
been foretold that
the lady Paula, who looks after him, will die fi rst and be set free at last
from his meanness. [For] because of him no holy person will live in those
parts. His bad temper would drive out even his own brother.^64Women such as these were of course not typical; for most, it was not a mat-
ter of real change in lifestyle, and the range of possibilities was still defi ned in
an extremely narrow way. Against the apparent broadening of opportunities
ran the fact that precisely during this period the Virgin Mary emerged as a
major fi gure of cult and worship. Much of the direct reason may have been
christological, connected with the doctrinal issues debated at the councils of