9 - Re-imagining Roman Persecution in the Visigothic Passions

Summary

Abstract

Despite the intervening centuries, the Iberian martyr passions show how important the later Roman world—especially its sites of judicial torture and spectacular punishment—was to the Visigothic Christian imaginary. For most Christians, the dominant notion of sanctity remained the urban martyr, who, more than the bloodless ‘confessor’, was commemorated in the liturgy, who attracted large-scale civic devotion, and whose cult sites underlay the spiritual topography of the kingdom's cities. I argue that the passions attempted to reinterpret the Roman city—to make its ancient physical vestiges legible within a Christian framework which served ideals of civic Christianity in the present. The Visigothic civic imaginary, therefore, was intimately tied into the memory of the Roman city.

Keywords: martyrdom; sanctity; urban history; memory; liturgy; popular religion; material religion; passions; Prudentius

Introduction: Martyrs and Confessors

No texts from the Visigothic period were more consistently engaged with the memory of the Roman past than the martyr passions. Though redacted mainly in the sixth and seventh centuries, the Iberian passions vividly evoked the world of the Roman persecutions over two centuries earlier. Modern historians put little faith in their historical veracity—only the Passio Fructuosi, Augurii et Eulogii, known to Augustine of Hippo, appears in corpora of ‘genuine’ ancient passions—but what they do reveal is the cultivation of a useful Roman past by post-Roman Christians. This past was presented to a wide audience through liturgical reading. In Robert Markus's words, ‘on a large number of the year's days, a Christian who attended a church service would be liturgically thrust back into the age of the martyrs’. Historians, however, have been more inclined to think about the other side of the equation—how the martyrs, in relics or legendary retellings, were brought into a new medieval world. Markus's insight has not been sufficiently appreciated.

It is frequently suggested that the figure of the bloody martyr was superseded by new modes of sanctity, particularly that of the ascetic ‘confessor’ saint. This assertion rests on a strand of argument advanced by late antique Christian authorities themselves. The idea of martyrdom and the genre of the martyr passion were deeply embedded in the violence of the Roman persecutions and the distinctive Roman cultural world of judicial tortures and spectacular entertainments.