The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-700 AD

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITY

training in the classical rhetoric that still formed the main content of higher
education. In the confused conditions of the fi fth-century west they often saw
themselves as the upholders of civilized values; some bishops, such as Martin
of Tours, became the objects of cult themselves soon after their deaths.^31 By
the sixth century many were adapting successfully to the needs of the new rul-
ers, such as Venantius Fortunatus, panegyrist of the Merovingian dynasty and
friend of Queen (later St) Radegund, who had retired to a convent at Poitiers,
and to whom Venantius wrote courtly poems, like this one on her return from
a journey:

Whence has this countenance returned to me with its radiant light? What

delay held you, too long absent? You had taken away my happiness with

you, with your return you restore it, and you make Easter doubly a day for

celebration. Though the seed just now begins to rise in the furrows, I, in

seeing you this day, already reap the harvest.

(Poem 8.10, trans. George, Venantius Fortunatus, 197)^32

Paulinus, bishop of Nola, is an early fi fth-century example of someone from
an upper-class background who renounced much of his wealth to settle down
at Nola in Campania, where he adopted the role of religious patron and built
an ecclesiastical complex celebrating his patron St Felix, just as his friend
Sulpicius Severus did in honour of St Martin at Primuliacum in Gaul.^33
The enhanced importance of the papacy, which is especially apparent
under Gregory the Great (590–604), was another product not only of the
contemporary fragmentation of Italy in the late sixth century but also of the
kind of personal ability and energy which a good many other bishops also
showed. Clearly the see of Rome was likely to occupy a special position, in
terms of both secular authority and religious prestige; similarly, the patriarch
of Constantinople, though not technically superior to the other eastern patri-
archs (of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem) despite being declared second
in precedence to that of Rome in 381, was liable to be both more person-
ally involved in state politics, and more closely connected with the emperor.
Emperors indeed might often intervene in appointing or exiling the patriarch.
In 553, when the existing patriarch died just as the Fifth Ecumenical Council
was beginning, the Emperor Justinian took care to promote a monk called
Eutychius, a candidate whom he rightly believed would help to get the impe-
rial view accepted. Having changed his own doctrinal views in 565, however,
he deposed the same man when this time he refused to go along with them.
Eutychius spent years in exile but was restored when his successor died, late
in the reign of Justinian’s successor Justin II (565–78). However, the relation
between church and state was not so black and white as this might suggest;
high-handed actions such as these were not in practice the norm, and theories
of so-called ‘Caesaropapism’, i.e., the supposed control of the church by the
ruler, go much too far.^34