The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-700 AD

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITY

supposedly between Christians and Jews, had as their dramatic aim the dis-
comfi ture of the latter and their conversion to Christianity. But in Palestine
itself the Jewish population grew during late antiquity and was able to build
impressive synagogues with elaborate mosaic decoration.^70 Such was their
strength as an element in the population that they were popularly believed by
Christians to have assisted both the Persian army and the Arabs in the seventh
century (Chapter 9).

Monks, ascetics and holy men

This was the age of the holy man and the ascetic. It was now that the monastic
movement spread throughout the Mediterranean, fi rst with those who, such
as Antony and Pachomius in the late third and early fourth centuries, retired
to the Egyptian desert, then with a multitude of formal and informal religious
communities of all types. Some monasteries followed the eastern rule of St
Basil or, in the west, that of John Cassian, on which Cassiodorus’ monastery
at Squillace was based.^71 The numbers of monks could be very large, allegedly
amounting to many thousands in Egypt alone: to take a few examples from
the literary sources, in the early fi fth century Palladius tells us in his Lausiac
History that there were 2,000 monks at Alexandria, 5,600 male ascetics and
hermits at Nitria, and 1,200 monks and twelve women’s convents at Antinoe,
while at Tabennisi there were 7,000 monks, including 1,300 in the monastery
of Pachomius alone, as well as a women’s monastery of 400 nuns. The great
fi fth-century abbot Shenoute, one of the most important early writers in Cop-
tic, presided over several thousand monks and nuns at the White Monastery
in Upper Egypt. However, it is important to emphasize the actual variety of
the religious life at this period, which did not by any means always involve
living in communities like these. Many dedicated religious, especially women,
still lived in small groups or even in their own homes, while in the desert many
communities adopted the form of the laura, where individual monks lived in
their own cells around the central church, to which they typically returned
weekly for common worship.^72 By the fi fth century many who did not adopt
the religious life themselves were also deeply infl uenced both by the ideals of
asceticism and by the example of individual ascetics, or that they had taken
some of these ideals into their own lives and their own faith. Ascetic aims
were not limited to organized religious communities, nor indeed to Chris-
tianity; they were preached with equal fervour by the Neoplatonic philoso-
phers of the fourth and fi fth centuries, who advocated abstinence from sex,
rich food and luxury of all kinds (Chapter 6). There were many similarities
between pagan and Christian asceticism, especially at more intellectual lev-
els, and Neoplatonic teaching advocated a bodily regime based on prudent
restraint (askesis – ‘training’), including sexual continence, following the pre-
cepts of the early Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who had been revived as a
model, for instance, by the early fourth-century philosopher Iamblichus in
his treatise On the Pythagorean Life.^73 But some Christians went much further,