Tokens form one of the many media of everyday life through which overlapping identities were created, consolidated and performed. An individual possessed multiple identities throughout their life course; someone might have identified with a particular group or been classified into a particular category by others. A person in the Roman world might possess overlapping identities related to class, geographic region, work, gender, family, the military, cult, communal associations, or another type of community. One or more of these identities might come to the fore at different moments in a person’s life – a sense of belonging to a particular group, after all, is actively constructed and contested over time.1

This book does not offer a linear history of Christianity during the first centuries ce but attempts to show how Christians met the expectations and challenges of their environments. I am perhaps exceedingly cautious in my analysis of the social history of Christians because the rather qualitative evidence of the sources on the individual actors does not seem to me to provide a sufficient basis for quantitative analyses. In addition, I do not give an explanation for the success of Christianity but offer many reasons why Christians were successful in certain contexts.

Cyprian of Carthage believed that Christian thought and practice must be formed by scripture. To this end, he compiled testimonia collections like Ad Quirinum, organising knowledge in culturally intelligible ways to assist its transmission by common cultural means—the memorisation of texts. Much of this training took place through the institution of the catechumenate, in which converts also began the process of embodying that knowledge, imitating Christ and other exemplary believers. Along with scripture, the other fundamental element of Christian life, according to Cyprian, is prayer, which cannot be separated from a life of harmony and generosity. Through these disciplines, the one in whom God dwells will be perfected.

One of the central issues to which the Cappadocian fathers frequently returned was the possibility of Christian paideia. It has been pointed out that the idea of morphosis, a never-ending process of giving shape to one’s life in imitation of Christ, is at the heart of Gregory of Nyssa’s educational thinking. What has been overlooked is the way Gregory’s awareness of paideia as an engagement of the subject with an object raises the methodological problem of how this relationship can be established. This chapter illuminates Gregory’s concept of self-formation by investigating the ways in which he theorises the acquisition and ordering of knowledge suited to the life of faith. A reading of his Life of Moses demonstrates that, drawing on the rhetoric of an opposition between Christianity and classical culture, Gregory re-evaluates this tension from a pedagogical perspective. His novel idea is that the negotiation of foreignness and kinship can be a catalyst for Christian self-perfection.

This introductory chapter provides an overview to the volume, arguing that early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge involved complex processes of appropriation, adaptation, reproduction, and reconfiguration of Jewish and classical epistemologies. This resulted in practices of knowing that established powerful ways of acting in the world and negotiating late-antique social structures. It shaped the behaviour of individuals and established norms for communal life. We argue that studying these phenomena requires consideration of intersections between a range of elite discourses, institutional forms, and the material world of the period. Foregrounding the myriad ways in which early Christian epistemology was embedded in earlier intellectual traditions and forms of life, we make a case that Christian theological commitments, in all their diversity, were an essential component in the development of distinctively Christian ways of knowing and ordering knowledge. Attention to theological assumptions and arguments is one essential element in understanding significant contours of late-antique life and society.

This chapter examines the different lenses through which Corippus represented the Moorish world. It looks first at the many terms the poet used to refer to all of the ‘Moorish’ groups within North Africa – ally or enemy alike. It then considers the specific ethnonyms within the Iohannis and addresses their value for our understanding of North Africa in this period. It notes that Corippus’ accounts of ‘Laguatan’ identity (an ethnonym preserved in many forms in the Iohannis, but unique to the poem) may well indicate forms of affiliation that were much more fluid than has previously been acknowledged, and incorporated a range of different groups, regardless of their origins.

The chapter closes with a discussion of the ‘catalogue of tribes’ in Iohannis Book II, which has been central to much modern scholarship. It argues that this catalogue was intended to evoke the final triumphal ceremony which marked the conclusion of John’s campaigns in 548. This has an important narrative function, but also reveals the cognitive assumptions which underpinned imperial views of the Moorish world from Carthage. This was not an ordered ‘map’ of tessellating tribal groups, but was instead an image of a diverse – but ultimately subjugated – world.

According to Augustine, the limits of human autopsy restricted certain modes of knowing which relied on detailed observations. This claim unites Augustine’s criticism of the power of daemons and of astrology to predict the future. The minute calculations that astrology requires are beyond human sense perception (Conf. 7.6.9–10; Doctr. chr. 2.23.34; Civ. 5.1–6), so are the tricks used by daemons which Augustine equates to abilities specific to animals, such as the olfactory skill of dogs (Div. 3.7; cf. Civ. 9.15). This chapter examines the influence of a variety of texts on Augustine’s thought, including Ambrose’s Hexaemeron, Cicero’s De divinatione, and Apuleius’ De deo Socratis. I argue that Augustine consistently focuses his rhetoric against pagan divination on the limits of human sense perception through a unique combination of criticisms, inspired by both the Christian and the classical canons.

This chapter examines the ways in which creeds have been collected in late sntiquity and in modern scholarship. Radde-Gallwitz first sketches the history of modern anthologies of creeds and argues that they have led to a conflation of distinct types of creeds, particularly in their portrait of a genealogical relation between creeds without anathemas and creeds containing anathemas. He argues that late-antique sources, by contrast, emphasise anathemas in their presentation of creeds. He examines sources such as canon collections and Athanasius’ De synodis and provides a new account of the afterlife of the anathema appended to the original Nicene Creed.

From the Socratics to Augustine, men used women’s voices in philosophical dialogues to speak as experts on the body, especially in three aspects: birth, the physical details of death, and erotic desire. These connections were inaugurated by Plato and Xenophon. However, a changing anthropology, and especially the belief that the body persisted after death, led certain Christian authors to increase the role given to female characters. When the body was revalued and brought into the centre of philosophical focus, women’s voices moved from reported speech into direct speech. Simultaneously, late ancient Christian authors reflected on the inherent connection between erotic desire and the genre of the dialogue itself, matching their subject to their form. Using female characters in their dialogues helped male authors come to know certain things that using male voices could not do as well, by thinking through specific topics ‘like a woman’; the female, with her culturally embodied nature, became a model of an ideal life which insisted on the persistence of the body, even in the afterlife.

In this study, Jeremy L. Williams interrogates the book of Acts in an effort to understand how early Christian texts provide glimpses of the legal processes by which Roman officials and militarized police criminalized, prosecuted, and incarcerated people in the first and second centuries CE. Williams investigates how individuals and groups have been, and still are, prosecuted for specious reasons – because of stories and myths written against them, perceptions of alterity that render them subhuman or nonhuman, the collision of officials, and financial incentives that foster injustices, among them. Through analysis of criminalization in Acts, he demonstrates how critical race theory, Black studies, and feminist rhetorical scholarship enable a reconstruction of ancient understandings of crime, judicial institutions, militarized police, punishment, and sociopolitical processes that criminalize. Williams’ study highlights how the criminalization of Jesus’ followers as depicted in Acts enables connections with contemporary movements. It also presents the ancient text as a critique against the shortcomings of some contemporary understandings of justice and human rights.

Scholars in late-antique Western Christendom relied both on ‘scientific’ knowledge and on theological interpretation of scripture to understand and explain the natural world. Previous scholarship discussing the process of seeking knowledge in general, and the investigation of science and theology in particular, has often centred on the issues of innovation and derivativeness. For centuries, following ideas developed during the Renaissance and ‘Enlightenment’, it was held that the fall of the Western Roman empire heralded a ‘Dark Age’ in which there was little intellectual development and scholarship was almost entirely derivative. More recently, scholars have argued instead that there was innovation in this period, at least to some degree. This chapter offers a preliminary examination of the methods and processes of inquiry used by late-antique scholars in their attempts to uncover knowledge, focusing on the topic of creation.

Chapter 3 considers the underlying narrative structures of Corippus’ epic and how the poet positions the campaigns of John Troglita in their wider context. The Iohannis surveys the events of circa 530–46 in a series of analeptic ‘flashbacks’. As a succinct verse history of North Africa between the late 520s and 546, these surveys differ wildly from contemporary imperial propaganda. This chapter argues that these accounts must be considered as meaningful responses to the recent past within Byzantine Africa and as functional parts of the Iohannis. It is argued that Corippus’ presentation of these counter-narratives created a space for the interrogation of a complex past which would otherwise have been unavailable to him.

The second part of the chapter looks at the prolepses in the Iohannis, where Corippus’ narrative moves from the narrated time of John’s campaigns to their anticipated resolution and the composition of the epic itself. This teleology is not only explored through many direct references to the coming Roman triumph, but also to the counterfactual ‘futures’ anticipated by the Moors. Corippus’ resolution of these accounts through authorial interjections help to underscore the inevitability of imperial victory while emphasizing the sense of crisis within the historical narrative.