Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty. Ariel G. Lopez

would eventually become the new “senatorial” aristocracy of late antique Egypt—“senatorial” because the appointment to an imperial magistracy conferred on its holder a permanent official status in an empire-wide hierarchy centered in the senate of Constantinople. Their rise was a slow, long-term process that begins in earnest only toward the end of the fourth century. But by the end of the fifth century the outcome becomes clear: an imperial aristocracy organized into durable dynasties that had managed, in some areas at least, to push aside competitors and consolidate local authority. It has been argued, in fact, that this aristocracy built up huge landed estates based on wage labor and estate-owned settlements that profoundly transformed the face of the Egyptian countryside. By the sixth century, this theory implies, the economic and social conditions that had enabled many well-off farmers to behave “audaciously” toward their landowners were—at least in certain areas of Egypt—long gone. Villages were rapidly losing their autonomy to all-powerful landowners who had overcome the fragmentation of power by controlling, at the same time, key positions of the civic administration, the local imperial government, and even part of the military (through access to the so-called bucellarii, soldiers in private service), thereby ensuring an unchallenged authority over the countryside.²⁵

      The problem is that it is not easy to estimate the speed, scope, and ultimate consequences of this process. The fact that these senatorial estates eventually became the building blocks of a reorganized urban administration certainly points to their profound impact. And the mushroom growth of estate settlements in certain areas of fifth- and sixth-century Egypt also suggests that important transformations were taking place in the countryside. But it is by no means clear how large these “large estates” were, what their impact on rural society as a whole was, or whether their growth always curtailed the autonomy of village life or could simply provide villagers with new economic opportunities.²⁶ As we have seen, there is evidence for “rustic audacity” in some areas of Egypt even in the late sixth century.

      The same has to be said about the rapidly rising senatorial titles found in documents that have been used to argue for the equally rapid rise and overwhelming prominence of this new group of landowners. Given the high grade inflation evident throughout late antiquity, one needs to be very careful with the value attributed to these titles. Tracking the emergence of an aristocracy by taking these titles at their face value is like comparing fortunes today with those of a century ago without distinguishing real and nominal prices: by the late sixth century, even a village assistant was a clarissimus, that is, nominally a “senator” in Egypt!²⁷

      In any case, the real novelty in the Nile valley may not have been so much an unprecedented accumulation of wealth as the fact that these aristocrats now had local origins. In this they were very different from the greatest landowners of Egypt in the third and earlier centuries, Alexandrian councilors who owned large estates in the immense hinterland of Alexandria that was the whole Nile valley.²⁸ The emergence of a new “creole” aristocracy with local roots but wide social and cultural horizons—and whose estates seem in many ways to reproduce and expand the management methods practiced by their Alexandrian forerunners—is therefore another aspect of the relative progress of the Nile valley in respect to Alexandria in this period. This is a process that, as we shall see, is also apparent in the cultural sphere and that eventually found an administrative expression. After Justinian’s reforms in the sixth century, Egypt’s south came for the first time in a very long time under the rule of a governor who was no longer dependent on Alexandria, who held the same rank and titles as the governor stationed in Alexandria, and who finally became, in the late sixth century, a member of the local aristocracy.²⁹

      “Audacious” farmers and “senatorial” landowners: the very transformations that had allowed unprecedented village prosperity and autonomy paved the way, in the long term, for the emergence of a landowning class that threatened to do away with them. It is not surprising, therefore, that social and economic tensions were a structural feature of life in the countryside of the late antique Near East. The late fourth-century orations of Libanius of Antioch contain a firsthand account of such tensions. On the one hand, Libanius interprets the fragmentation of Antioch’s civic elite as an invasion of state-sponsored “strangers” who threaten to buy out traditional landowners such as himself. On the other, he complains about the “rustic audacity” now displayed by the rural population and in particular by a group of his own tenants, “some real, proper Jews” who “presumed to define how I should employ them.”³⁰ His description of the outrages suffered by the civic councilors in charge of tax collection is memorable: when taxes and rents are reasonably demanded—he claims—the villagers reveal their “armoury of stones” and the tax collectors end up collecting “wounds instead of tithes and make their way back to town, revealing what they have suffered by the blood on their clothes.”³¹ The problem, Libanius argued, was the obstruction of tax and rent collection by rural patrons, particularly the military authorities who protected the peasants in exchange for an illegal and private “tax.” Libanius’s text makes clear that this was by no means class warfare, as Rostovtzeff once believed: the late antique elite was as much the beneficiary as the victim of this process.

      

      Yet in these orations Libanius is profoundly misleading in one crucial respect. His description of the peasantry as “country bumpkins who have their oxen for company” does not do justice to the dynamic countryside of the late antique Near East.³² It implies a cultural distance between city and countryside that was quickly becoming an anachronism. For late antiquity witnessed the final and complete success of the process of Hellenization in the Near East. Graeco-Roman civilization sank its roots so deeply that its effects would be felt there for centuries after the Muslim conquest. One only needs to look at the architecture of late antique Syria, the sculpture and textiles of late antique Egypt (“Coptic art”), or the mosaics of late antique Palestine to be convinced of this. It is common to speak of these characteristic products of late antique art as expressions of “local cultures,” but their iconography—Dionysus, Aphrodite, Romulus, Aeneas …—derives almost entirely from Greek and Roman models. Far from representing the rebirth of ancient indigenous traditions, this Near Eastern art illustrates—to use the apt words of Peter Brown—how “Greece had gone native. The classical inheritance had become a form of folk art.”³³

      The triumphal march of Graeco-Roman culture did not stop at cities but reached far into the countryside, reducing thereby the stark contrasts that had characterized classical civilization and producing a “flatter” world. The changing relationship between Alexandria and the Nile valley illustrates this process very well. The Roman conquest had changed the relationship of Alexandria to Egypt “from the basic model of royal capital of the kingdom to, initially, that of city (polis) and administratively dependent territory (chōra).”³⁴ Alexandrian aristocrats owned large estates in what they called the chōra, the economic and cultural hinterland of their city, and took turns acting as governors (stratēgoi) of the nomes, small districts that were not deemed worthy or capable of self-government. In the Nile valley itself, Egyptian priests preserved and developed a native cultural tradition that claimed to be largely autonomous and prided itself on being untouched by Hellenism.³⁵ Graeco-Egyptian art, with its characteristically incongruous juxtaposition of purely Hellenistic and purely Egyptian elements, defines this period’s culture.

      This situation had already started to change gradually in the second century, when, for example, the position of stratēgos came to be filled more and more frequently by inhabitants of the towns of the Nile valley (although not in their own towns).³⁶ Further administrative and social transformations in the third century—in particular the introduction of city councils by the emperor Septimius Severus—helped to bridge the large gulf separating city and chōra. But it was only in the early fourth century that these transformations gathered a decisive momentum and resulted in a dramatic turnaround.

      To put it in a few words: Upper Egypt, a cultural backwater that had had a very limited participation in the intellectual life of the Graeco-Roman world,³⁷ became the center of Greek poetry in the later Roman Empire and produced teachers, grammarians, lawyers, and historians who pursued successful careers both in Egypt and in the empire as a whole.³⁸ Abundant literary and educational papyri, in both Greek