The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-700 AD

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITY

major churches were those of the Holy Apostles, the fi rst church of St Sophia
and that of St Irene, and during the fourth century other major churches were
dedicated in important city centres such as Antioch, Nicomedia, Milan and
Aquileia, some receiving imperial sponsorship and refl ecting the new phe-
nomenon of emperors as patrons of Christian buildings. The large numbers
of bishops attested in the records of church councils are in themselves some
guide to the spread of church building in the empire generally, for each bishop
will have required his own. In some cases, existing buildings were turned into
churches. Constantine made over a secular building for this purpose to the
catholic Christians of Cirta in North Africa when theirs had been seized by
the rival Donatist party. Christians used the secular architectural styles that
already existed, especially the three-aisled basilica, with its long naves leading
to an apse; this was to become one of the dominant forms of church archi-
tecture for many centuries. The larger and more prestigious of these churches
rivalled earlier public buildings in size and splendour and were often com-
memorated in contemporary sermons or in rhetorical descriptions, known
in Greek as ekphraseis.^15 This account of the building (under the patronage
of the Empress Eudoxia) of the cathedral at Gaza which replaced the Mar-
neion, the great pagan temple, conveys something of the excitement felt by
contemporaries, and also the extravagance of their claims to have rooted out
all polytheist remains:

The holy bishop had engaged the architect Rufi nus from Antioch, a

dependable and expert man, and it was he who completed the entire con-

struction. He took some chalk and marked the outline of the holy church

according to the form of the plan that had been sent by the most pious

Eudoxia. And as for the holy bishop, he made a prayer and a genufl exion,

and commanded the people to dig. Straightaway all of them, in unison of

spirit and zeal, began to dig, crying out, ‘Christ has won!’ ... and so in a

few days all the places of the foundations were dug out and cleared.

(Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry, 78, trans. Mango, Art, 31).^16

Not all church building was imperial or undertaken by bishops; by the middle
of the fourth century for example, a Syrian monk called Julian Saba had built
a Christian chapel on the summit of Jabal Musa (Mt Sinai), a feat that was
lauded by Ephraem the Syrian:

The circumcised boast of Mount Sinai

but you humiliated them down to the ground.

This proclamation is great

For now the church of the Son is on the Father’s mountain.^17

The decoration of these new churches took time to evolve, and we have no
surviving examples earlier than the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries
of the striking figural mosaic decoration familiar from such churches as