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Introduction

“Rustic Audacity”

This book studies the public life of an extraordinary Egyptian monk, Shenoute of Atripe, and the discourse on poverty that he put forward to promote and legitimize his active role in society. Shenoute was abbot of a group of three monasteries located near the city of Panopolis, in southern Egypt, during the first half of the fifth century.¹ By this time, monasticism in Egypt already had a long and vigorous tradition behind it. Pachomius had founded coenobitic monasticism in the early fourth century. Saint Antony’s instantly famous biography was written not long after, around 360. Even before the end of the fourth century, the monks of Egypt had acquired celebrity status in the Mediterranean world. Pilgrims from all over the Roman Empire now invaded Egypt in search of the “Desert Fathers,” supreme exemplars of Christian piety.

The monastic tradition encountered by these pilgrims is well known because it quickly became canonical and has had an enduring influence throughout the Christian world. Monks were deemed to belong to a special, separate world, the “desert”—in Egypt itself a stark-enough reality. They were expected to spend life in their cells (either a natural cave or a man-made hermitage) practicing asceticism, paying attention to themselves, and steering clear of any disturbing involvement in the world. The values of work, humility, and obedience were assigned paramount importance. In southern Egypt, where the coenobitic system was particularly influential, most monks gathered around charismatic holy men in unusually large monasteries. Written rules regulated their life in painful detail.

Shenoute’s monasticism belongs in this prestigious tradition in its southern, coenobitic variant. Though living in a desert cave, he kept a firm grip on three large monasteries—two for men and one for women—through occasional visits, harsh letters, and innumerable written regulations. The organization of these three communities clearly imitates the monastic system of Pachomius, who is explicitly recognized by Shenoute among the founding fathers of monasticism. The economic interdependence of several monasteries, the internal division into so-called houses, the hierarchy of authorities in each monastery, all this and much more make Shenoute a faithful exponent of the Egyptian tradition of coenobitic monasticism.

Yet unlike his celebrated countrymen, Shenoute has had a bad reputation in modern scholarship. It has been traditional to portray him as an enfant terrible whose unseemly behavior deviates from what is otherwise an admirable pattern of religious life. A version of his biography has been published in English but only to be read as “a warning sign for everything that can go wrong with monasticism.” His name evokes associations of violence, intolerance, tyranny, and a disturbing fanaticism that knows no bounds. His temperament has been described as “an erupting volcano: an impressive sight, though not necessarily a pretty one” An embarrassing aberration, in short, that needs to be explained away.²

This bad reputation stems not only from Shenoute’s supposedly cruel treatment of his own monks and nuns, but above all from his energetic interventions in the world at large. For Shenoute may have been a cave-dwelling inhabitant of the desert, but the affairs of the world were still very much his concern. Many other Egyptian monks are known to have been involved in the world that they had supposedly renounced, yet few if any seem to have played a role in society comparable to Shenoute’s. Public preaching, a care of the poor on a monumental scale, large building projects, loud denunciations of social injustice, criticism of imperial authorities, and an aggressive struggle against paganism were beyond their means if not intentions. Yet, as we shall see, all these are defining aspects of Shenoute’s public life, and he was unashamedly proud of them.³ The desert, for Shenoute, was not only a refuge from a sinful world. It was a platform from which the powers of the world could be challenged and confronted with irrefutable evidence of their injustice. He was at once Desert Father and biblical prophet.

Derwas Chitty once defined the late fourth century, when pilgrims invaded the Egyptian desert in order to witness the spectacle of humanity at its best, as a moment when “the world breaks in.”⁴ What we witness with Shenoute in the first half of the fifth century is quite the opposite: monasticism breaking into the world at large and claiming a position of political, economic, and religious leadership that nobody was willing to give up without a fight. Shenoute was no longer content to be the spiritual leader of a private religious institution, as Pachomius and many other monks had been. Prepared for the first time to occupy the high ground of society, holy men like Shenoute had to carve out for themselves a place in public life that was by no means guaranteed beforehand. The monastery therefore could no longer be simply an interesting prospect for religious overachievers. It had to be a public institution recognized by the state and respected by the local elite. This book is a study of this restless struggle for leadership and public recognition—a study, in other words, of an abbot’s public career.

Shenoute’s remarkably active role in society has been noted by scholars before, but this aspect of his life has been usually subsumed either under the issue of his extraordinary character or under that of his prophetic self-understanding. The first, traditional option—widely discredited nowadays—simply turns him into a negative stereotype that is self-explanatory, an object of moral condemnation and not of historical understanding. However remarkable Shenoute’s character may have been, it cannot—in any case—explain by itself his rise to public prominence. More recent studies, on the other hand, have paid closer attention to Shenoute’s prophetic language and self-presentation as instruments of religious authority.⁵ But they have done so from a purely religious perspective, and they have focused on Shenoute’s relations to his own monks and nuns, and not the world at large. Such an approach, although responsible for the very best work on Shenoute done so far, leaves many of the issues discussed in this book unaddressed, and it tends to isolate Shenoute from his political, economic, and social background no less than traditional opinions. Shenoute’s “prophetic” life did not take place in a social vacuum, but against the background of major social and cultural transformations in late antique Egypt. These transformations need to be spelled out clearly if we are to understand the significance of Shenoute’s actions and what made them possible in the first place. Let us take a moment, then, to look at the rural world of late antique Egypt and the Near East, the world that produced both Shenoute and his admirers.

A fourth-century document written by a certain Papnuthis may be a good starting point. Papnuthis was the agent of an urban landowner in Oxyrhynchus, a city in the middle Nile valley. Sometime between the years 359 and 365, he wrote a letter full of frustration to his employer. People like Papnuthis, usually called pronoētēs in the papyri, played a key role in the rural economy of the ancient world. His job was to collect from the villages around Oxyrhynchus the rents owed by his employer’s tenants, and the taxes for which this landowner, as a member of the civic elite of Oxyrhynchus, was responsible. In the southern village of Berky, however, the local inhabitants did not have a friendly welcome for Papnuthis. The wheat they were supposed to pay was mixed with cheaper barley, and their intention was to measure it using their own measure, which they claimed was equivalent to the standard public one. One of the two villagers who were supposed to help him collect what was due disrespectfully replied, “I don’t have any time,” while the other excused himself simply by saying, “It’s none of my business.” Papnuthis’s letter demanded further instructions from his employer, but he also suggested the use of soldiers, following the example set by another urban magistrate who—with the help of soldiers—“collects from them as he pleases.”⁶

No reply to this letter has been preserved, but any sensible landowner would have told Papnuthis that having recourse to soldiers was a risky strategy. Soldiers would want their own share, and, more importantly, they were not under the direct control of civic magistrates. Once they were involved in the process of tax or rent collection, there was little stopping them from engaging in this activity for their own benefit. A new, unpredictable interest group standing between urban landowners and rural tenants and taxpayers was the last thing any civic magistrate wanted.

Papnuthis’s troubles were no isolated incident. Fourth-century documents from Egypt contain many such complaints against “rustic audacity” (komētikē authadeia). Stubborn villagers were accused of refusing to pay rents and taxes, and of failing to show deference to their natural superiors. Outside Egypt, too, many late antique landowners expressed a similar sense of outrage. In Gaza, for example, a group of villagers was said to have refused to pay the rents on land owned by the church and to have beaten the church’s steward with clubs. In late sixth-century Asia Minor, the villages belonging to the church were considered to be “a source of constant trouble” for their manager. In Syria, the pagan sophist Libanius of Antioch complained that the peasants had turned into brigands sheltered by powerful military protectors—the very group whose intervention Papnuthis had called for. Tax collectors were welcomed in the same way as bishops intending to convert those villages to “orthodox” Christianity: with rocks.⁷

It is important to identify precisely what lies behind all these complaints of “rustic audacity.” They do not need to be the symptom of a new communal village identity or of a general, collective peasant resistance. If anything, the case seems to have been the opposite. Numerous documentary and literary sources show that villagers were displaying a remarkable “audacity” not only in their dealings with urban landowners but even more so in their dealings with each other. We have a significant amount of evidence, in this period, for conflicts between villagers and in particular between villages.⁸ Roger Bagnall has described the Egyptian villages of the fourth century as “rudderless and captainless vessels.” They have few public structures—a characteristic they share with the late antique villages of Syria—and no clearly defined authorities.⁹ The overwhelming concern with solidarity in Egyptian monastic literature reflects the breakdown of village solidarities that most monks had witnessed earlier in life. Mediating in these conflicts quickly became one of the traditional functions of Egyptian and Syrian holy men such as Shenoute.¹⁰

Conflicts between villagers and struggles against the payment of taxes and rents are of course a perennial aspect of rural life in Egypt and elsewhere.¹¹ In late antiquity, however, these issues were magnified by a fundamental and well-known process: the fragmentation of the ruling class and the resulting development of rural patronage. These had been among the unintended consequences of the “Late Roman Revolution.”¹² Following the third-century crisis, the Roman Empire reinvented itself in the late third and early fourth centuries and redoubled its efforts to become an effective presence in the life of every one of its inhabitants.¹³ The roots of this revolution go much further back in time, to the age of the Antonines, but it was only in the late third century that, through the establishment of a “New Deal,” the state took advantage of irreversible social and cultural changes instead of trying to contain them.¹⁴ The result, in Egypt and elsewhere, was a dramatic acceleration of some of the historical processes that had been slowly advancing during the previous three centuries of imperial rule.

The Roman state expanded, diversified, and developed a stronger presence at the local level. As a consequence, urban control over the countryside splintered. The collection of rural rents and taxes, the lifeline of an ancient city, came to depend on the cooperation of multiple groups with different and potentially conflicting interests: the civic councilors themselves, the military hierarchy, the provincial governor and members of his staff (officium), former magistrates (honorati), administrators of imperial land (domus divina), and eventually the clergy and monks. The institutional pluralism that is so characteristic of late Roman society supplied the rural population with a large pool of enterprising would-be patrons. As a result, competing patronage networks flourished in the countryside in this period and gave villagers unprecedented room to play patron against patron and thus to acquire the “audacity” that troubled landowners so much.¹⁵ These vertical relations of rural patronage threatened not only other patrons and landowners, but also the always-fragile horizontal solidarity of the rural population. They did this, above all, by offering new, disruptive opportunities: the opportunity to abandon one’s village and settle at a more attractive estate settlement; the opportunity to enjoy differential protection; the opportunity to evade taxes; the opportunity to lease vineyards, which required large investments beyond the reach of most peasants; the opportunity to become a monk.

Moreover, the capillary presence of the state in rural areas threatened to bypass cities and to deprive them of their traditional control of the surrounding countryside. The juridical and economic unity between city and its dependent rural hinterland, so defining for the classical city, can no longer be taken for granted in late antiquity.¹⁶ Many cities, in particular those that did not become capitals of the new, smaller provinces, had a hard time adjusting to the new situation.¹⁷ The well-known case of the struggle between the large village of Aphrodito and the town of Antaeopolis—both located not far from Shenoute’s monastery—shows what might be at stake for the city in such a situation. In the fifth century Aphrodito had gained the right to pay much of its taxes directly to the imperial government by delivering them to the provincial capital, Antinoe, instead of having them collected by magistrates of the nearby city of Antaeopolis.¹⁸ The domus divina, one of the many new branches of the central government with a local presence, had apparently become Aphrodito’s patron and protector.¹⁹ This was unacceptable for the elite of Antaeopolis: it threatened to curtail its influence in the countryside and to reduce the profits brought by tax collection. It threatened, in other words, to reduce the city to the status of a simple village to the advantage of the provincial capital.²⁰ The result was a prolonged conflict in which the village elite of Aphrodito appealed constantly to the provincial governors and even directly to the emperor against the encroachment of the local civic authorities, who must have regarded Aphrodito’s ambitions as nothing more than another case of “rustic audacity.” A member of this village elite, the notary and poetaster Dioscorus, eventually moved to the provincial capital, where he made a living as a notary drafting petitions on behalf of members of his village and other provincials. In the end, the village lost its privilege, but the fact that it could put up such a long and tenacious fight is revealing.²¹

A corollary of this partial weakening of urban control over the Near Eastern countryside may have been that, at least in some areas and during specific periods, more wealth stayed in the countryside than ever before. The spectacular ruins of late antique villages preserved from southeastern Turkey to the Negev in Palestine are palpable evidence that for many villagers this was a truly prosperous age. And this was not an exceptional development restricted to marginal areas of the countryside. Innumerable late antique synagogues and churches all over Palestine show what a vibrant rural world awaits the spade of archaeologists elsewhere, once they abandon the traditional civic centers.²² Little excavation has been undertaken in the villages of the Nile valley, yet recent surveys in Middle Egypt also suggest that the late antique period may have been the most prosperous era in this area until the nineteenth century.²³

The developments in the countryside of the late antique Near East were thus a direct consequence of transformations in the structure of the urban landowning elites. It was the fragmentation of these elites that gave many villagers the means to challenge the urban landowners’ formerly unquestioned control over them. Yet the “Late Roman Revolution” had some positive implications for the lives of these elites as well. An expanded state apparatus—including a new senate drawing its members from all over the Eastern Empire—and a wider recruitment pool meant new opportunities for social and economic advancement. This development is particularly visible in Egypt, where it represented a radical departure from the previous situation. After more than three centuries of imperial rule, the elites of the Nile valley finally gained access to the prestigious and profitable offices of the Roman administration, an administration that—from an Egyptian perspective at least—had suddenly become an “equal opportunity employer.” This is part of a wider development that includes the complete assimilation of the legal, administrative, and monetary systems of Egypt to those prevailing elsewhere. As the empire’s center of gravity moved to the east and therefore much closer, Egypt was drawn fully and inexorably into late Roman civilization.

What is important here is that this unprecedented opening up of opportunities unleashed, both in Egypt and elsewhere, a process of competition and internal differentiation among the traditional civic elites. As a consequence, the elites of the fourth century were, as we have seen, fragmented and divided against themselves, but what they lost in unity and homogeneity they gained in dynamism. Many landowners must have surely experienced a relative degradation in their status and must have suffered the “audacity” of tenants protected by more powerful patrons. But a few managed, through an opportunistic combination of imperial officeholding and local landowning, to achieve a degree of economic growth and stability that had been beyond the reach of the traditional elites of the Nile valley.²⁴

These successful officers cum landowners 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 and Latin, show how eagerly the inhabitants of the Nile valley were making Graeco-Roman literary culture their own. Recent discoveries in the isolated villages of the southwestern oases of Egypt—almost two hundred miles from the Nile valley—have drawn attention to this extraordinary diffusion of Greek education: classrooms with rhetorical examples written on the walls, a codex of wooden tablets containing three orations of Isocrates, and—to take just one example—a letter from a mother demanding to be sent, from the Nile valley, “a well-proportioned and nicely executed ten-page notebook” for her son, “for he has become a speaker of pure Greek (hellēnistēs) and an accomplished reader.”³⁹

It is important to stress two crucial aspects of this development. In the first place, it was not an exclusively urban phenomenon. The distinctive products of late antique religion, literature, art, and architecture have been found in villages as much as in cities. All the Manichaean texts found in Egypt, for example, have been discovered in villages.⁴⁰ In the second place, this development has to be seen in the context of a new relationship between state and society in southern Egypt and elsewhere. The reason late antique Egyptians were so enthusiastic about learning Greek and Latin literature is that this traditional education was the door to a host of new opportunities that had opened up. To take, once again, the well-known example of Dioscorus of Aphrodito: Jean-Luc Fournet has shown that Disocorus was not simply an amateur, self-taught poet who attempted hopelessly to master Greek poetry for fun. For Dioscorus, poetry was above all a vehicle to communicate with the state. Every one of his petitions to the imperial governors and to the courtiers of Constantinople was accompanied by a poetical version of the text.⁴¹ The reason the case of Dioscorus is so significant is precisely the fact that he was so mediocre and average. He stands for thousands of little poetasters all over the Near East who now felt—to the dismay of classical scholars—that they had the capacity to express themselves in the language of Homer, to speak as if they belonged.

The ever-increasing role of Roman law in provincial life points in the same direction. The legal documents that have survived in Egyptian papyri are eloquent evidence for this process of cultural integration and for the state’s role in it. We know now that no such thing as “Coptic law” ever existed. The law in use in late antique Egypt was Roman imperial law, and it became more and more Roman throughout late antiquity.⁴² A vivid example of this is a document from as late as 646, in which an illiterate peasant from the deep south of Egypt, “not versed in legal matters” (so he claims), rejects a document presented by his opponent, an urban deacon from the town of Edfu. The document, he argues, does not follow the rules set up in the laws of Justinian for legal documents, rules that he quotes and claims to have learned from “those who know.”⁴³

Many of the farmers met by an urban notable around Antioch—or anywhere in Palestine or in the Nile valley—were therefore far from being savage rustics who had never had any contact with Graeco-Roman civilization. What the urban landowner or tax collector faced in these recalcitrant, “audacious” farmers were individuals who were far more similar to himself than he would have liked to admit: people who knew how to write petitions, how to appeal to different and competing instances of power, even how to use Roman law to their benefit. And this must have been all the more obnoxious.⁴⁴

Set against this historical background, the figure of Shenoute of Atripe takes on more familiar contours. For Shenoute may have been an otherworldly prophet with the fiery temperament of an “erupting volcano.” But he is also a particularly well-documented example of late antique “rustic audacity.” Shenoute’s “audacity,” which his enemies denounced as violence, but he called parrhēsia—that is, fearless and truthful speech on behalf of the poor—is proudly displayed and magnified throughout his works. As we shall see, he liked to define his role in society in terms of a principled opposition to the city of Panopolis and its civic elite. As patron of the countryside against the interests of this urban elite, he complained about urban tax-collectors,⁴⁵ relentlessly defied and denounced urban landowners and their oppressive practices, and—if we believe in his enemies’ complaints—even intercepted and appropriated some of the surplus that these landowners extracted from the countryside around their city. We have unfortunately no contemporary records for the opinions and attitudes of the elite of Panopolis, but Shenoute’s replies leave no doubt that some of them must have felt about him the same way Libanius felt about those military men who protected and fostered the “audacity” of the rural population.

Like the village of Aphrodito in respect to Antaeopolis, Shenoute’s “audacity” threatened the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the elite of Panopolis over the political, economic, and cultural life of its region. He usurped traditional civic functions: he intruded on the relationship between urban landowner and rural tenant; he preached like a bishop to monks and laity alike—something not common for monks in Egypt; he built, spent, and gave like a civic benefactor, but on his own monastery and for the “poor.” Like Dioscorus of Aphrodito (whose father founded a monastery, just like Shenoute’s uncle), he interacted constantly with the imperial governors and claimed a privileged relationship to them, arousing, thereby, the suspicions and jealousy of the local elite; again, like Dioscorus and his father, he traveled all the way to Constantinople to complain about the poverty of the “poor” and about the “violence” they suffered. Last but not least, he took the law into his own hands, in particular against paganism, both urban and rural.

Hence the importance of Gesios of Panopolis, Shenoute’s great rival and bête noire. Gesios was the social and economic counterpart to Shenoute’s “rustic audacity.” A former imperial governor and great landowner based in Panopolis, he seems to have been a fairly typical representative of the new aristocracy emerging in fifth-century Egypt. His rivalry with Shenoute is an exceptionally well-documented example of the chronic tensions that pervaded rural society in the late antique Near East. Yet this rivalry also had a religious dimension, for Gesios was a pagan with no taste for intolerant Christian monks: Panopolis’s own Libanius. The result was a bitter and protracted conflict between monk and landowner that has, in its viciousness, no parallel in the late antique world. This conflict is one of the leitmotifs of this study, and many of the most important sources I have used deal more or less explicitly with it.

Gesios was in fact more to Shenoute than a political, economic, and religious rival. He was an antitype, unnameable and omnipresent at the same time.⁴⁶ It was always in contrast to Gesios that Shenoute defined his own public role. A compelling narrative needs two characters: while Shenoute builds a church and monasteries to honor God, Gesios builds mansions, baths, and boats to honor himself. If Shenoute is warmly received by the provincial governors and is their favorite friend, Gesios is rebuffed by them when he denounces Shenoute’s supposed crimes. When Shenoute denounces the hypocrisy of a superficially Christian society, which tolerates paganism in its midst, Gesios himself turns out to be a cryptopagan who worships his “gods” in secret at home. If Shenoute’s monastery receives thankful offerings from the population of the countryside (in fact, from Gesios’s own estate administrators), Gesios extracts this wealth with violence and deceit, a violence that Shenoute never tires of denouncing. Even after Gesios’s death, when Jesus had “scattered” his wealth, when nobody recalled his memory or mourned him anymore, Shenoute cannot stop talking about him and holding him up as a negative example.⁴⁷ It is clear that he positively needed an enemy. As a result of this obsession, Gesios is scarcely less important for this book than Shenoute himself.

A study of this kind is made possible by the survival of a substantial if fragmentary part of Shenoute’s literary corpus. This corpus was originally divided by Shenoute himself into two parts. The “Canons” contain exhortations and a set of five hundred rules addressed to the monks and nuns at Shenoute’s three monastic communities. The “Discourses,” on the other hand, include sermons, treatises, and open letters that show an all-too-human holy man constantly interacting with the society that he had supposedly renounced.⁴⁸ Together with a few fragmentary letters, the “Discourses” will be the main body of evidence used throughout this work.⁴⁹

Much has been traditionally made of the fact that these texts are in Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language. The nineteenth-century equation of language with culture has led many scholars to see in Shenoute a “native,” a “Copt.” His works have been read with an Orientalist mind-set: in search of the unique, the alien, and with an overriding concern for philological issues. More has been written on Shenoute’s use of specific verbal tenses or on the structure of his literary corpus than on his historical significance. This emphasis on Shenoute’s supposed “Copticism” is misleading. Shenoute was bilingual and—like Dioscorus of Aphrodito, for example—could write in both Greek and Coptic. He must have often preached in Greek, and I suspect that many of the letters and sermons contained in his corpus were originally written or delivered in Greek. Only one papyrus (fragments of a sermon) and one inscription related to Shenoute have survived from the fifth century, and both are in Greek.⁵⁰ And several of his (Coptic) sermons, as preserved in his corpus, are actually “first-person reports” to his monastic audience of sermons and dialogues with the Roman authorities that can only have been held in Greek.⁵¹

Furthermore, the equation of language with “national” culture is particularly inappropriate to Coptic. Far from being the product of a native priestly literary tradition or of the reemergence of an ancient underground culture, Coptic was biblical Greek gone native: the linguistic equivalent, in fact, of the Greek mythology one finds in Palestinian mosaics and in Egyptian textiles.⁵² The Coptic writing system, which includes the Greek alphabet plus a few consonants taken over from Demotic, was invented in the early Roman period by Egyptian priests for whom linguistic virtuosity was a source of professional pride.⁵³ Yet the Coptic language as it emerged in the late third century was a Christian, quasi-biblical language deeply influenced by Greek. And not just Greek: one-third of all the non-Greek words in Coptic have no attested Egyptian etymology, “including some of the most common vocabulary in Sahidic [the principal southern dialect of Coptic].”⁵⁴

From this point of view, Coptic is not comparable to Syriac, that other late antique language with which it is usually grouped. Syriac was an older language with its own literary traditions, writing system, and educational institutions, and it did not experience a comparable influence from Greek until later. Egypt never had a counterpart to Edessa/Nisibis, their Syriac schools and partially autonomous literary culture. Coptic was used at schools in Egypt—it may have been Christian teachers who created it in the first place as a literary language to translate the Bible—but it was always limited to a primary education that focused on simple reading, writing, and practical skills, such as the writing of letters.⁵⁵ In late antique Egypt, true literature—that is, the use of language as an art—was with very few exceptions Greek literature.

Shenoute’s Coptic does have a unique flavor and deserves the philological and literary study that it has always received. But the real value of his writings lies less in their literary qualities than in their importance as a historical source.⁵⁶ For even in their present fragmentary state, these texts are crucial evidence for the more prosaic aspects of the life of a holy man, that religious virtuoso who embodied the ultimate ideals of late antique society. Like few other sources, these documents allow us to follow an abbot’s activities “on the ground” and to set them against a concrete social, economic, and cultural context. An entire history of the relation of a major monastery to the society and economy of the Nile valley can thus be written from them.

Admittedly, if there is one aspect of late Roman religion for which we have plenty of evidence, it is certainly that of holy men. Yet holy men like Shenoute are usually written about by others; they rarely speak directly to us in their own words. The filter of hagiography tends to turn these holy men into stereotypes: they are too holy to be men at all. With Shenoute, in contrast, we have the unique opportunity of comparing and contrasting the devout portrait painted by his disciple and biographer Besa with the real, day-to-day abbot as he dealt with the issues of his time.⁵⁷

These issues were neither particular to Egypt nor to Shenoute himself. They are, rather, crucial to the interpretation of late antiquity as a historical period and to the problem of the so-called end of the ancient world. Studying the public career of Shenoute involves dealing with some of the distinctive concerns of late antique society: rural patronage, religious violence, Christian and non-Christian systems of gift giving, and the changing relationships between city and countryside and between state and local society. This fundamental fact has been obscured by his monotonous rhetoric on behalf of the “poor,” which transforms these concerns and distorts them so as to fit them into a simplistic paradigm of social relations, the Christian “care of the poor,” in which he and his monastery claimed a primordial role.

Hence the title of this book. By claiming to act and speak on behalf of the “poor” even in the most unexpected contexts, Shenoute could always identify his own interests with those of society at large and thus legitimize his unwelcome emergence as a player in local politics. This constant appeal to poverty, both his own and that of the people he claimed to represent, sets Shenoute firmly in the context of contemporary late Roman politics. It is a somewhat paradoxical aspect of this period that the “audacity” and, in some cases, even the prosperity of new groups and institutions had come to be asserted and defended in terms of the need to protect an ill-defined, helpless, and passive poverty. Christian bishops all over the Roman Empire had been developing, from the middle of the fourth century onward, a distinctive discourse on poverty that explained and justified the public role they now claimed to play in society.⁵⁸ The representation of social reality that they put forward was nothing less than revolutionary. A society used to glossing over or euphemizing stark disparities in wealth and power was confronted with a discourse that claimed to lay bare those very disparities with brutal honesty.

The vision was as simple as it was powerful: a society divided along purely economic lines into two opposite and complementary groups, the few rich and the many poor. The rich were pictured as if standing on a high peak of infinitely concentrated wealth, only to be urged to stare down at a vast ocean of poverty. This was of course a drastic simplification of social reality. As depicted by Christian preachers, the rich and the poor were simply stereotypes defined against each other. The poor and their poverty, above all, their overwhelming numbers and utter helplessness, were always the main emphasis. For their very existence was a call to action, to charity and condescension. The love of the poor had always been a duty inside the Christian community, but now it was pushed to the fore and advocated as a public virtue that the state was expected to recognize and reward. As such it was embodied above all in the person of the bishop, professional spokesman and protector of the poor and role model for the rich and powerful.

This Christian discourse on poverty should not be taken at face value. The ubiquitousness of poverty in the rhetoric of this period does not reflect the impoverishment of late Roman society but rather a specific political situation: the rise to prominence of the representatives of the Christian church. The reason for the quick success of this discourse was, in no small degree, that it lent to these new participants in late Roman politics the legitimacy to challenge the establishment and to make a name for themselves. By stressing their relationship with a group that had no place in the traditional model of urban society—the “poor”—the bishops projected a form of authority within the city that outflanked the traditional leadership of urban notables.⁵⁹ Moreover, the fact that this discourse ignored the hierarchical distinction between city and countryside, so dear to the political ideology of the classical world, had important implications. It meant that even villagers or a rural abbot could now use this language to express their growing sense of entitlement.

Hence the significance of this development for Shenoute’s self-presentation. That what was true about Christian bishops was also true about him, that his discourse on the care of the poor explained and legitimized the prominent role he aspired to play in local society, will be shown in detail in the next four chapters. My conclusions can be summed up here in a few words. As analyzed in this book, Shenoute’s discourse on poverty is structured around three parallel antitheses—political, economic, and religious—which tend to be confused and ultimately overlap:

The first, friend/enemy antithesis, “the ultimate distinction to which all action with specifically political meaning can be traced,” will be at the center of the political analysis of the first chapter.⁶⁰ I will argue that Shenoute’s universal application of the friend/enemy distinction to local and imperial elites betrays his aspiration to be part of these elites. The active political involvement of a Christian abbot was highly controversial and demanded a continuous effort of self-presentation. Shenoute’s uncompromising and critical attitude toward both “friends” and “enemies” legitimized his public role by marking him out as the emperor’s “loyal opposition.”

The second, economic antithesis will be analyzed in chapters 2 and 3, the center of this book. Shenoute’s own monastery was the ultimate example of the generous love of the poor. Its welfare activities and its miraculous wealth will be analyzed in chapter 2. It will be shown that his discourse of endless abundance and generosity legitimized—in terms reminiscent of a “Christian euergetism”—the receipt of unprecedented amounts of lay gifts. Furthermore, Shenoute’s tireless denunciation of the violence of the rich—who loved wealth more than their own souls and oppressed the poor without mercy—will be discussed in chapter 3. It will be shown there that Shenoute’s discourse of economic inequality betrays his active involvement in a conflict of rural patronage. The third and last antithesis, that between Christians and pagans, will be analyzed in the fourth chapter. My analysis will show that Shenoute’s discourse in favor of intolerance and his attempts to justify his controversial actions against paganism by deliberately confusing religious with economic issues reveal his powerlessness to put a definite end to the old religions.

This reading of Shenoute’s literary corpus, I would like to stress, is anything but straightforward. It demands a constant and often difficult distinction between representation and reality. Many of the fundamental issues addressed in this study can be identified, in the first place, only by comparing and contrasting Shenoute with his better-known contemporaries. It is crucial, therefore, to read these texts in the right context. But this has seldom been done. Modern scholarship has tended to confine Shenoute within the narrow boundaries of Coptic literature and has thus isolated him from the wider late antique world in which he truly belongs. The result has been an undue emphasis on his uniqueness. For it has to be admitted that, when confined to Egypt, Shenoute seems indeed incomparable and larger than life. After all, how do we explain the emergence of a public preacher who thrives on controversy and factionalism within a monastic tradition characterized by an inward-looking mentality, an emphasis on social peace and noninvolvement, stability, and humility? Even in the sixth century—when monasticism had become very much part of the fabric of daily life—it is hard to find any parallels for Shenoute’s public role among Egyptian monks. This may be simply due to the scarcity of monastic sources for the sixth century, yet even Shenoute’s own disciple Besa seems, in comparison, to have had a low profile in society. Among his surviving writings, we find no equivalent to Shenoute’s “discourses” aimed at society in general, nor any attacks on the corruption and sinfulness of the world at large.

In any case, to decide whether Shenoute was unique or exceptional we first need to look outside Egypt and set him in a wider context. We need to abandon, therefore, a “Coptological” perspective. I do not like the idea of Coptology. It encourages narrow-mindedness and ahistorical thinking. Shenoute may be the only really good example of the development of the care of the poor in Egypt,⁶¹ but he seems unique only when seen in isolation from his eastern Mediterranean background. A purely Egyptian perspective is not enough. Particularly so when a rich literary documentation originating in Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor is available for comparison. There is, as a matter of fact, no better introduction to Shenoute’s world than the famous speeches of Libanius of Antioch—although from a point of view diametrically opposed to that of Shenoute. And there are no better historical parallels for his role in society than the archimandrites of fifth-century Syria and Constantinople, many of whom were his exact contemporaries. Like Shenoute, fifth-century holy men such as Hypatius, Alexander, and Marcellus the Sleepless or Symeon the Stylite—all of them Syrian—were very much involved in the world that they had given up. Far from rendering them indifferent to the concerns and controversies of their age, their asceticism had given them the capacity and the will to impinge upon society with unlimited self-confidence and determination. Their unavoidable and disturbing public prominence, their denunciations of social injustice, their advocacy on behalf of the poor, their criticisms of Christian hypocrisy, and their hostility toward paganism: all this shows that Shenoute was not an aberrant character but rather a faithful exponent of his age.⁶²

Let us take the case of Hypatius, for example, one of the many holy men who pursued a career in the area around Constantinople. When Thrace was devastated by the Goths at the end of the fourth century, he protected the poor at his monastery and interceded on their behalf before the imperial authorities. Shenoute did exactly the same thing some time later when Upper Egypt was invaded by Nubian tribes. While Shenoute attacked private pagan shrines, village temples, and the secular traditions of the city (baths, theaters, poetry, etc.), Hypatius attacked the sacred trees of Bithynia and threatened violence when a prefect intended to celebrate the Olympic games at Chalcedon. Hypatius also became the head of a rapidly growing monastery outside this city, but that did not stop him from preaching in public. Every feast day, he would leave the monastery and go to a large church (originally built by the praetorian prefect Rufinus for his suburban villa) to celebrate Mass there.⁶³ As I have already noted, Shenoute also preached regularly to nonmonastic audiences. Finally, both holy men constantly interacted with the authorities, provincial in Shenoute’s case, imperial in Hypatius’s case, and derived important material benefits from this interaction.

One crucial obstacle in any attempt to set Shenoute’s “career” against a specific historical background can unfortunately not be definitely solved: the chronology of his life and activities. We know for certain that, in general terms, his activities have to be located in what has been called the “classical period” of preaching on poverty, that is, the years 370–450.⁶⁴ Given our circumstantial evidence, more precision can be achieved only tentatively. This issue requires a long and technical discussion, and I have therefore relegated it to an appendix. What is important here is that, regardless of when Shenoute was born or died, the few unambiguous pieces of evidence we have point to the years 420–460 as his floruit as a prominent abbot. It was in this period that Shenoute communicated with the archbishops of Alexandria, that he attended the council(s) of Ephesus, that he received the frequent visits of imperial governors, that he built a grandiose monastic church, and that he attacked a pagan village nearby.

It has been suggested, on the other hand, that the beginning of Shenoute’s public life should be pushed much further back in time. The claim in his biography that he lived for no less than 118 years; his own statements that he had spent, at some point in his life, “more than a hundred years in the desert” and that he had been “reading the Gospels for more than sixty years” when attending a council at Ephesus (but which one?); the possible identity of his enemy Gesios with an imperial governor of southern Egypt who ruled in the years 376–378, that is, more than forty years before the floruit I propose: all this has made scholars seriously consider the possibility that Shenoute had a preternatural life span, that he accomplished some of his greatest deeds—like the building of his church—when he was in his hundreds.

Though not impossible, this claim seems improbable to me.⁶⁵ As long as we have no clear evidence to the contrary, I think we should stick to the few certainties we have and see in Shenoute essentially a fifth-century character, an inhabitant of the “Greek Roman Empire” of Theodosius II recently described by Fergus Millar.⁶⁶ Shenoute’s contemporaries are, therefore, men such as Rabbula of Edessa, Symeon the Stylite, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, not the Cappadocian Fathers. This is important, among other things, because the fifth century is a poorly documented period but one in which critical transformations are thought to have taken place in the Near Eastern countryside. The importance of Shenoute’s writings as a historical source lies not least in their capacity to illuminate the social and economic history of this dark but crucial period.