293. The Gaza Erotic Literature Festival: Byzantine Gaza (Part 3)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnhem. And me, William Durrenpool. So as our series on the history of Gaza progresses, we're now going to look at one of the great golden ages of the area, and that is late antiquity. Now, that actually is a period when most of the Mediterranean world was experiencing a dark age of decline and disintegration. But conversely, in Gaza, this was a time of great prosperity and intellectual flourishing. For even as the Romans were abandoning Britain and the Western Empire bled under the assaults of the Goths and the Vandals and the Huns and all those sorts of peoples, Gaza probably perhaps found a new role for itself as the center of literary and intellectual achievement, as well as being a major port famous for the export of frankincense, perfume and sweet wine.

1:22This is going to be a very different episode from the succession of catastrophes, which we went through as the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks all came and smashed up Gaza, because this is going to be a period of stability, prosperity, and growth. And here to tell us about it is another great friend of the show and one of my favorite historians, Peter Saris, professor of late antique, medieval, and Byzantine studies at the University of Cambridge, and author of Justinian, emperor, soldier, and saint. Peter, so good to have you back. I mean, you were brilliant talking about Helena and Theodora, and I love, you know, very strong women, as anyone who listens to this podcast knows.

1:59We never, ever heard that before, Alita. This is a new revelation. It's a secret, but sometimes I feel I ought to share. So, Peter, when we're talking about Gaza during this period, tell us how exactly it slid into the Christian period. Well, the transition of Gaza into the era of the Christian Roman Empire is one that will lead to enormous cultural efflorescence in the city, but it is in itself initially quite a complicated and traumatic transition. The Christian empire is establishing itself over the course of the 4th century after the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the very early 4th century, his foundation of a new capital for the Roman Empire at Constantinople, and then by the end of the 4th century, the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Eastern Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, governing the lands of Anatolia, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.

3:00And when we're talking about the early Christians of Gaza, I mean, we're talking about converts, I guess. Converts from which parts and which backgrounds? Well, Christianity will take root in Gaza extremely slowly. So the sense one has is that until the late 4th century, the emergent Christian community of Gaza is a largely rural population. We know that the earliest bishops appointed to Gaza, so the leaders of the Christian community is charged with looking after the interests of the Christians, representing them to the emperors, are primarily operating in the area around Gaza rather than in the city of Gaza itself.

3:39That's already suggesting we're dealing with a predominantly rural population. But when a new bishop is appointed to the city of Gaza itself... St. Porphyrius, is this? St. Porphyrius. The Christian population of Gaza is estimated at only about 1%. Now, those Christians themselves will be individuals who have come to Christianity from a variety of backgrounds. Some of them will have adopted Christianity, made background in Judaism. Others in the city itself are more likely to be adopting Christianity from a background in traditional Greco-Roman paganism. And traditional Greco-Roman paganism is very strong in the city of Gaza.

4:17I think that whereas the elite of the empire at large is converted to Christianity quite rapidly over the course of the second half of the fourth century, Gaza really appears to be somewhere where the traditional paganism of the civic elite is much more resilient. Peter, just to clarify this so that everyone understands. What we're talking is another sort of Mediterranean port situation, much like anywhere else around the East Mediterranean, with a mix of different ethnic groups. Is that right? In Gaza, in the fourth century, you're going to be dealing with, in the city, the elite is going to be primarily Greek-speaking.

4:54The lower class population are going to be primarily speakers of Aramaic. But you will also have merchants and traders from all over the Mediterranean world there. We also know that in the countryside, as well as there being a Jewish community, there are Samaritans in the countryside as well. So very ancient, Near Eastern, indigenous, monotheistic community. So it's linguistically mixed, it's culturally mixed, but the elite has adopted the largely Greek-speaking culture of the Hellenistic East, which then the Romans have consolidated. So Peter, when we were talking to Jo Quinn in the last episode, she was saying how, despite all this history of conquests and so on, that actually the DNA shown by archaeology of the people who are living in this region today are much the same as the people that were living at her period.

5:43So do we imagine that there's a sort of broad continuities despite all these empires coming and going, Persian, Babylonian, Roman, and now Byzantine? Yes, one would expect a broad continuity, especially in the countryside, where one would find the same families over generations working the land effectively irrespective of which new masters they might be serving. You mentioned St. Porphyrios. Now, those of us who didn't have the Catholic upbringing of William, or indeed maybe William as well. Peter has an Orthodox upbringing. Yes, okay. Yes, that's right. I remember from last time. What do we know about St.

6:16Porphyrios? And also, I've seen many iterations of his name, St. Porphyry being another one. I mean, who was he and how should we address him? I think you could address him as you like, so you do so with sufficient reverence. So Porphyry is the anglicised version of the original Greek name Porphyrios, which is Latinised as Porphyrius. Porphyry or Porphyrius is from probably quite a posh background in Thessaloniki, where I have my second home. So he comes from quite an upper class family in Thessaloniki, and he inherits quite a lot of money, we're told, from his father. But he's already become quite a pious individual, and he decides to give his money to the church, and he goes off to Egypt, which is the emergent centre of the monastic movement in the Mediterranean world, and he becomes a monk.

7:03So he's clearly a man with a very strong spiritual calling. After training as a monk in Egypt, he then heads to Jerusalem, where he again lives a spiritual life, living off arms. He's given by Christian pilgrims and also, we're told, working as a cobbler. Now, at around this point, we're dealing now with the year 395, the bishopric, the Sea of Gaza, becomes vacant, and Porphyrios is appointed to the seas, made the new bishop of Gaza. Now, in many ways, he's not a very good candidate for it, in that coming from Thessaloniki, he doesn't really know, he's very unlikely to know the native language of much of the population, Aramaic.

7:45He'll have Greek. We assume he's got some decent Latin. There's a lot of Latin spoken in Thessaloniki. He's got no real previous experience of church leadership. And given how strong the pagan community is in Gaza, my suspicion is that he's sort of regarded as, you know, he's not really a high flyer. And I think they may as well give this very difficult task to someone who just to do their best, but they haven't really got many prospects of getting very far with it, given the strength of paganism there. From cobbler to rabble-rousing bishop in many respects, because he does manage to stir up a crowd.

8:20And there is a story about him leading a monastic mob to destroy the Temple of Zeus. Tell us a bit more about that. Well, when he turns up, I think he is struck by the intensity of the hostility he meets on the part of the pagan population of Gaza, not just in terms of the civic elite, but also the peasants of the surrounding countryside. So we're told, for example, in the biography, The Life of Him That Survives, when he lands at the nearby port town of Mayuma, which then feeds the city of Daza, that the local peasants have sort of strewn the road he has to follow to the city with thorns and brambles to make his arrival as unpleasant as possible.

8:58He then turns up and he has all sorts of rows with the civic elite when his steward, Barokhas, goes out to the countryside to collect rents from the peasant working church estate. He gets beaten up. So there's unremitting hostility from pagan high and low alike. To clarify, Peter, this is because everywhere else around the Mediterranean, temples are being knocked down and replaced by churches, and they don't want that to happen in their town. At around the time that Porphy has been appointed bishop, the emperor Theodosius has not only made now Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, but has also ordered the closing of temples.

9:35Now to what extent those temples are closed down on the ground will depend a lot on the relations between local governors and local elites and local power relations. But clearly the pagan elites of Gaza are anxious and treat the arrival of a new bishop with considerable hostility and suspicion. Now faced with that hostility, what Porphyry or Porphyrios does is he makes two embassies to Constantinople. And this is where we get to one of your powerful women. This is a very important figure here. So he makes two embassies to Constantinople, by which point the emperor in Constantinople is a rather lacklustre emperor called Arcadius.

10:16His brother, Honorius, ruling the western part of the Roman Empire, Arcadius ruling to the east. But Arcadius has married a woman called Eudoxia, who takes her Christianity extremely seriously, and who has got into a series of arguments, in fact, with the head of the church in Constantinople, the patriarch of Constantinople, the wonderfully named John Chrysostom, the Golden Mound. He and those around him like their high living too much. She's a much more puritanical, hardline Christian figure. And Porphyry manages to get access to the Empress via a Christian courtier and persuades her to persuade the emperor to issue an order insisting that the new anti-pagan legislation be applied in Gaza and agreeing to provide him with soldiers to close the temples down.

11:05So in Gaza, it's not just going to be with the help of aggressive monks that he will go around closing down the pagan temples. He's able to turn up with troops from Constantinople and also troops from the nearby capital of Maritime Caesarea. Peter, I think in Britain we have this idea of very cosy images of medieval monks as friar tuck figures with paunches and pottering around with beehives and that kind of thing. But these early Christian monks of this period are quite fundo thugs, aren't they? In Alexandria we've seen, is it Cyril, destroying places of learning and lynching lady philosophers in the streets and that kind of thing.

11:43They're militants. Yes, the early church is a fundamentally anti-establishment, anti-societal, anti-authority movement. That charismatic authority within the early church has really been inherited by the leaders of the monastic movement, who capture the popular imagination with the radicalism of their religious vision, and who also represent the most hardcore and aggressive elements in the church at this time. Gaza becomes then a magnet for the most zealous of the zealots, I suppose you could say. Another monk who is pretty hard course, now known as Saint Hilarion, he joins the fray in Gaza. Tell us about him.

12:24Is he a local lad, actually? Saint Hilarion has been active in Gaza slightly earlier than Porphyry. He's a local lad who, again, adopts Christianity and who will try to spread Christianity within the city somewhat earlier. There's a very interesting story, for example, we're told, as with all cities in the Roman East, the population of Gaza are obsessed with chariot racing. Yeah, chariot racing is the big sport everyone's obsessed with. It's the Premier League of its days. Yeah, exactly. And one of the teams in Gaza becomes associated with the Christians. And before one of the big races, Hilarion blesses the Christian chariot races with holy water, and they win.

13:05And this is a great sort of boost to the fortunes of Christianity in the city earlier on. But Hilarion is responsible for founding a very important monastery near the city. And after Porphyry has closed down the temples, there will be a monastic boom around Gaza. But what's really interesting with the closing down of the temples is that you have the premier temple in Gaza, the so-called Marnion. Initially, when Porphyry turns up with the soldiers, closing down the The seven other temples is relatively straightforward. The soldiers are happy to do that. There are attempts made to make sure that the temple treasures aren't just stolen by the Christian locals.

13:42It's rather like this establishment of the monasteries in Tudor England. It's relatively orderly. But the closing down of the Marnion, the premier temple, this is much more sensitive and it requires a lot more cajoling on the part of Bishop Porphyry to get the troops to do it. And then there's the issue of what you do with the temple itself. There's a remarkable story told in the saint's life. There's a debate about whether you just turned the temple into a Christian church, such as has happened elsewhere. And then in a church service, supposedly, a seven-year-old boy suddenly speaks as if the voice of God is coming through him, demanding that the temple be destroyed in its entirety as it is stained with the blood of sacrifices.

14:21The boy does this in the local language of Aramaic, and he's then summoned before the bishop who threatens to beat him if he's making this up, if someone's told him to say this. And the boy then supposedly miraculously speaks in Greek, which he's never been taught, once again demanding that the temple be destroyed in its entirety. And this miracle story, the speaking in tongues is reported, and it's that that then gives, as it were, Porphyry the license through the spreading of this story to obliterate the pagan temple and build the great cathedral there. Now, as well as building the cathedral, there'll be other churches built.

14:53Porphyry's very keen to win local hearts and minds by also building charitable institutions, hospice for local pilgrims to visit, giving money to the poor, building a new processional way, linking the cathedral to the other new Christian places of worship so that lavish Christian ceremonies and processions on the streets can replace the pagan ones that have been so important to the life of the city. So as well as the acts of destruction, he's also trying to win hearts and minds through these charitable endeavours. A lot of the charitable endeavours and the new church building is funded by the Empress Eudoxia, who has lent in the military support as well.

15:30So her support is absolutely crucial to this process of Christianisation of the landscape. Peter, just give us a very brief picture panning out, in a sense, from Gaza to the rest of Palestine. Suddenly now this land is filling with monks. The desert has become a city. That's the phrase that you see, isn't it? Yes, the area around Gaza will be one of the three greatest concentrations of monasticism in late Roman or Byzantine Palestine. You have the area around Gaza, where we know archaeologically of around 15 very substantial monasteries that are built across the 5th into the 6th centuries. We have a massive investment in monasteries in Jerusalem itself, and then increasingly in Judean desert as we're moving out.

16:13Now, whereas the monasteries of the Judean desert are isolated, they attract pilgrims, but they're sort of monasteries in the desert away from civilisation, centres of asceticism and withdrawal. The monasteries around Gaza are much more involved in the social and economic life of the region, much more involved with the life of both the peasantry and the urban elites. These monasteries around Gaza are very important centres for viticulture, for wine production. And we have a marvellous series of letters exchanged between monks from Gaza. This character, Barstinufius, and his correspondent, John of Gaza, who are referred to as the two old men of Gaza.

16:54Their letter correspondence helps us to establish there's a very interesting network between these different monasteries, discussing religious affairs, spiritual affairs, but also with members of local society, both high and low, approaching them for advice to do with the most rudimentary and day-to-day concerns. It's a a sort of self-help clinic as well as a place to go to for religious advice as well. Peter, in Egypt, the monks often have a reputation as being anti-scholarly. So Anthony has some quote about how you only need to read one book, the Bible, that you don't need to read anything else.

17:28But in Gaza, you get the impression that the monks are part of a new wave of learning that now takes over. And there's the school of rhetoric. There's this extraordinary growth of Gaza as a place you send your kids to be educated. suddenly becomes the Harvard or the Yale or the Oxford and Cambridge of the region. GARRETT GARRETT Gaza has clearly a very rich intellectual infrastructure, I think, fed partly by its very close proximity to Egypt and Alexandria. One of the great advantages of Gaza is that it's at the crossroads between Egypt, Syria and Palestine in an economic sense, but also in an intellectual sense.

18:05And Alexandria is one of the great centres of learning in the ancient world. Almost all of the figures we know to play an important part in the intellectual life of Gaza have been through or have associations with Alexandria. Now, in Alexandria, learning is very much associated with the old gods and paganism and attracts a great deal of hostility on the part of hardline elements in the Egyptian church, for whom even having statues of pagan gods in your garden because you think they look nice are regarded the signs of crypto-paganism. So even a sort of classicising taste is regarded with great suspicion by hardline Egyptian monks.

18:44In Gaza, as you say, a very different culture seems to be emerging, where some of the early monastic leaders are clearly men of considerable culture themselves, and we see them corresponding with teachers at the schools of Gaza. And also interestingly in Gaza, in a way that would have and inconceivable in some other parts of the empire by the time we reached the early 6th century, the leading intellectual figures who are teaching classical Greek texts, Greek rhetoric to the posh young men of the city, also seem to be instructing them in Christian scripture in a way that is very unusual. Now I think the way in which these teachers, we have this character, for example, Procopius of Gaza, who writes important biblical commentaries, as well as very classicising literary works depicting the world of the old gods.

19:33I think someone like Procopius of Gaza is able to get away with playing with so many pagan, classical, mythologising motifs because he has such good Christian credentials as well. And this is something that's very unusual in Gaza. So that is a different, the one that you've spoken of, the very learned Procopius, is a different Procopius to the one we spoke about in your last visit. Although it's not a terribly common name, also active in the 6th century, is one of the greatest historians to have written in the Greek language at any moment of its history, Procopius of Caesarea. Now, that Caesarea is up the coast and is the capital of the province of Palestina Prima, in which Gaza sits as well.

20:12And these worlds are very interconnected. Now, Procopius is a very classicising figure, very well educated in the world of classical Greek texts. His historical imagination is rooted in the writings of the likes of Thucydides and Herodotus. And it has been suggested by some that he may have received his rhetorical training, which is sort of the university element, as it were, of a young man's education in this period, in Gaza. We have no hard proof for that, but it is a plausible suggestion. And so, Peter, you've got in Gaza now an institution. What is it standing relative? I mean, we all know the Library of Alexandria down the coast.

20:48Where does it stand in the hierarchy of great classical places of education by the 6th century? Is it where everybody who's got a teenager seeks to send their teenager for an education, like the Oxbridge, if you like? Is that where they want to go? I think we need to think of the School of Gaza more as a sort of circle and collection of scholars who hang around there rather than an institution. It's a school in the same way as you can have a school of artists. Right, or the Bloomsbury Group. Yeah, exactly. So what you have is clearly the library infrastructure, the education infrastructure, the wealth of the local elite is sufficient in Gaza to attract lots of scholars who operate there, who take on private pupils.

21:31But there is also an established, governmentally funded professorship based in Gaza. And the person who is regarded as the leading scholar is in a pointed stat position and sort of presides over the broader intellectual community. Now, what's very important, I think, in terms of creating a sort of a hawk house environment intellectually in Gaza, I think partly because the city is so wealthy and is still doing so well from inter-regional trade and so on and so forth, is that a lot of the locally trained, as well, the locally educated, then remain in Gaza and forge their careers there. And then there's further investment in the cultural life of the city and its celebrations and its festivals than the both social and literary occasions as well.

22:12Well, I think we should delve into that because we have somebody here, William Durrenpull, who knows a thing or two about literary festivals, but Gaza had a doozy of a literary festival. Join us after the break and we'll talk about that.

22:28Welcome back. So Gaza, you mentioned just before the break, was a site of festivals of learning. And they had one in particular that I'm interested in, the Dionysian or Dionysian, am I saying it properly? Dionysus, I know how to say, but Dionysian Festival of Roses. So what was that about and what happened in that festival? It sounds quite saucy. I mean, it would be with Dionysus involved. I mean, is it sort of an erotic lit fest? Is that what we're talking about? The life of Gaza is punctuated by a whole series of festivals, all of which have pagan origins, but all of which seem to survive into the Christian era.

23:07The so-called Festival of the Roses, a spring festival, is one of the most richly recorded of these. Now, it is possible, not certain, but it is possible the festival of the roses that takes place in Gaza, which is associated with literary competitions, what have you, but also with lavish dining and parties, may be the same as a celebration referred to elsewhere in the empire as the Mayuma, which is a spring festival of Syrian origin associated with aquatic competitions, with naked dancing, with swimming, with feasting, and which becomes a byword for lasciviousness and immorality on the part of Christian moralists.

23:51The monks are not going to like this at all. What I was thinking, what was this going to blow their robes off, isn't it? Well, exactly. Around the same time as Porphyry is trying to spread Christianity in the city of Gaza, the imperial authorities are also trying to crack down on these Mayuma celebrations. Now, we know that these Mayuma celebrations are introduced, for example, in Italy to the city of Ostia, the port town of Ostia, by migrants from Gaza. This is why it has been argued that the spring ceremony, the ceremony of the roses in Gaza, is probably also including these rather orgiastic celebrations of the Mauma cult that we find described elsewhere in the empire.

24:31I love this. Then, of course, where you have orgiastic behaviour, you've got to have wine. One of the things we also read about at this period is Gaza wine. I went to the extraordinary Saved Treasures of Gaza exhibition in Paris last month. There you have this line of what they call torpedo amphorae or torpedo jars, which are these very distinctive jars with a kind of nipple at the bottom. Large, man-sized, six-foot long amphorae, which were full of sweet Gaza wine, which seems to have been highly celebrated. Yes, Gaza was famous in the ancient world and still in the Byzantine world as producing by far the best wine in the Mediterranean.

25:08The Chateau Ikem of its day. Exactly, or sort of Chateau Moussa. Given its suite, I like to think it's sort of the ancestor of the Cypriot dessert wine commanderia, which is then developed further by the Crusaders later on. We should stress your Cypriot background. Absolutely. Everything good has a Cypriot connection at some point. Now, what's interesting with the wine industry is not only the very high repute of Gazan wines, but also that as we see the growth of monasteries in the area, that the monasteries are very involved in wine production. A lot of our monasteries in this period, in the 5th, 6th, and early 7th centuries AD, are actually very highly commercialised enterprises.

25:46And so part of this tension between Christian elites and pagan elites during the period of Christianisation is actually probably the church taking over a lot of the really good vineyards. So we've got the wine, Peter, and if you want to drink wine, you want to know that it's wine o 'clock. Haha, that's a terrible segue, but I do want to talk about the wondrous clock of Gaza. Now, we talked about the two Procopiuses, and this is the brainchild of clever Procopius rather than smutty Procopius, the original Procopius, if you like. Tell me about this clock and why it was so wondrous and so famous in the ancient world.